by Mick Farren
As if in confirmation of Bowie’s confidence, Lou and Iggy had done a killer show at the King’s Cross Cinema, at which Lou had looked a little portly in his black velvet, but Iggy (never previously experienced in the UK) stripped to his narcissistic waist in silver leather jeans and did everything for which he was famous, except throwing peanut butter and walking on the crowd. I was gratified that Iggy showed up at the first Nasty Ball in the same silver jeans, proving that he was doing the ultra-degenerate Morrison trick of wearing them all the time.
This is not to say that the other old lags were lagging, hopelessly mired in flower power, or about to make their exits. Hawkwind played at the Nasty Balls, as did the MC4 – singer Rob Tyner having fallen out with his bandmates and winged it back to Motown – but, like I said earlier, the Pink Fairies showed up with pigs’ heads on poles. (A pink cartoon pig with wings was the logo that Edward had assigned to the band, like their heraldic colours.) Such an act would have been unthinkable a couple of years earlier, and even then it was still fairly outrageous. Grinning and grisly, those pigs’ heads were definitely a summation of the times and the attitude. ‘Alternative society’ had given way to a surly ‘fuck you’. We’d lost this round of the cultural revolution, and losers should expect payback.
This new attitude, however, wasn’t wholly negative. Aside from the triumvirate of Iggy, Bowie and Lou, Alice Cooper was among us, and very shortly the New York Dolls would come to town. They were being brought over for an incredibly implausible benefit at Wembley Pool that featured them, the Pink Fairies and the Faces. The Fairies played one of the most god-awful sets of their entire career. Paul Rudolph had left the band to play with Sparks and Brian Eno, and Russell and Sandy were discovering that new guitarist Mick Wayne was not the boy for them. The Dolls’ set was interesting in so far as bass player Arthur Kane was dressed as a ballerina, but they had very obviously never played to an audience of more than 300 and were lost in front of 13,000 Faces fans in the cavernous and echoing auditorium.
The Dolls made a great deal more sense a few days later amid the elitist art deco of the Rainbow Room at the top of Biba’s new department store on Kensington High Street. On this closer inspection their supposed androgyny, with the possible exception of Arthur, was revealed as a cultivated pose, but they’d learned to cultivate it from the best – Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling and all the other legendary denizens of Max’s Kansas City. Even though the women of the Angry Brigade had, I believe, at one point plotted to blow up Biba as a gross example of counter-revolutionary consumerism, most of the old underground and the new glitterati turned out to see them. Many were dismissive, discounting the Dolls as nothing more than an absurdist parody of some of the worst aspects of the Rolling Stones, but at Biba they made me very happy. They had clearly returned to the Deviants’ ethic that rock & roll should not be the exclusive preserve of virtuoso players. David Johansen told the old tale:
We were very raw, we were into confronting the audience. People who saw the Dolls said ‘Hell, anyone can do this’ . . . basically we were these kids from New York who would spit and fart in public. It was just so obvious what we were doing in rock ’n’ roll – we were bringing it back to the street.
Backstage with the booze, I discovered the NY Dolls were less of an art-school project than either the Deviants or the Stooges. ‘There wasn’t a lot of intellectualising going on when we started the New York Dolls.’ Dumb was also coming back. I liked that.
To say that our humble Nasty Balls played any part in this process of evolution from the old and strange to the new and strange would be an inaccurate conceit, but they were where I was able to witness it going on, from the supreme vantage point of host and momentary centre of attention. We had expected events to be a little out of the ordinary, but the reality was considerably more bizarre that we’d dared hope. We found ourselves presiding over a disco-lit, near-pagan debauch featuring leftover drag queens from the Roundhouse production of Andy Warhol’s Pork cheek-by-jowl with the local Hell’s Angels, Iggy Pop getting stoned with Wayne Kramer, and Magic Michael, an aggressively bi-sexual singer-songwriter and possible psychopath, who would perform backed by future pub-rockers Brinsley Schwarz, to the amusement of some and the consternation of many. Most of the chemically enhanced from the West End and Ladbroke Grove, not to mention points north and south, turned up both to demonstrate their solidarity and to interface with the first scattering of embryonic glitterites of the new decadence.
In Days in the Life Jonathon Green recalls:
Buttons [the president of the Hell’s Angels] is sitting there, legs spread, a dyed blonde head bobbing up and down over his cock. He sees me, grasps this hapless head and drags the girl off his cock. ‘Hey, man, want some of this?’ Great moments in underground etiquette: do I join Buttons and this not wholly appetising Mama, or do I reveal my utter wimpishness, not to mention that my girlfriend is standing ten yards away and staring? Fortunately my saviour arrives: William Bloom, the publisher, appears, says he has some cocaine and suggests we vanish into the toilets to consume it.
Not everyone was so discreet. As the night wore on, lines were being razored out on tables with no attempt at concealment and joints were openly smoked. Dealers suddenly became magnanimous, and strange women who had spent too long maintaining the cat’s cradle equilibrium of coke, vodka and mandies gave up the effort and collapsed in corners. If Edward and I did end the movie on our way to jail, at least we’d conjured up a few shining memories to sustain us.
We Fought the Law and, For Once, We Won
It was the morning of 25 January 1973, the day when, if everything went according to plan, we would hear the verdict, but the subject under discussion was the Ali/Foreman heavyweight title fight. The Jamaican mini-cab driver, Edward and I were of one uniform opinion. George Foreman was a huge pig-ignorant slugger with nothing going for him but brute brawn and a long reach. Ali would blind him with science, finesse and tactics, and that would be all she wrote. The routine was to ride to court talking about anything but the trial. This major disruption of our life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness intruded on most of the rest of our waking hours, and invaded at least my sleep as anxiety nightmares, so we used the forty minutes it took to get from Ladbroke Grove to the Old Bailey to sham apparent normality.
This particular morning it was more of a pretence than usual. That we wouldn’t come home that night loomed large in our fearful imaginations. The previous evening had been a quiet horror of preparation for the worst. In the final weeks before the trial Edward and I were drinking a lot. The previous night, though, I’d stuck to beer and, while the telly prattled on banal and incongruous, I’d signed a whole bookful of cheques for various eventualities. I’d squared away all that could be squared. With preparations for the worst-case scenario complete, Ingrid and I tried for some sleep before the cab came to get us. I recall lying awake as the pendulum swung from anxiety to total fucking unreality that this shit was happening to me.
For the duration of the trial we’d travelled to court in a car from the same mini-cab firm. In a flash of inspiration, Edward had opened an account that wouldn’t be presented for payment until after the trial. I found this an old-world criminal fraternity trust that could almost move me to tears when the night and the Jameson’s grew late. Everyone in the mini-cab depot on All Saints Road, from the dispatcher down, knew that we were going to court every day. The mini-cab world was populated by aspiring quasi-gangsters, and its business methods leaned to the rough and ready. The penalty for non-payment could be a medium duffing over rather than any protracted legal process, and yet, here they were trusting us with credit, when gamblers’ logic dictated that we might not be paying them for a couple of years or more. Asking later, when we settled up, yielded nothing. Just a wink and a grin. ‘We knew you’d get off.’ I still like to think the blind-eye credit with the cab company amounted to a potential gift to those who faced being banged up. ‘Go in peace, lads, and be lucky. We bless you wit
h untroubled transportation, and we’ll sort it out later.’
The absolute unreality of getting out of a mini-cab in front of the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey every morning at nine-thirty – as if I was going to work, with my briefcase stuffed with legal papers like Horace bloody Rumpole – is actually too extreme to describe. Sartorially we’d gone for Mick-Jagger-at-a-business meeting, but we still stood out in the august building’s cathedral corridors, like whores in a nunnery. It’s the Old Bailey, goddamn it. It was real, and I suppose it had to be a kind of career high point. Above us was that dome we’d seen in so many movies, with its dominating golden statue of Blind Justice. Echoes of the voice of Edgar Lustgarten, and those cheap, second-feature Scales of Justice movies, which used a slowed-down version of the Shadows’ ‘Man of Mystery’ as a theme tune. These were the courtrooms in which the elite of evil had met their fate – Crippen, the Kray Twins, John Christie, Neville Heath, George ‘brides in the bath’ Smith, Christopher Craig and Derek Bentley, Lord Haw-Haw, Ruth Ellis, Roger Casement, all the great stranglers, arsonists, poisoners, thieves and embezzlers, the anarchists and IRA men. This was the criminal equivalent of batting at Lord’s, or playing the Albert Hall, except that it went on and on. Although fleetingly brief compared with modern American trials, thirteen days at the Old Bailey can seem like a way of life.
The court itself provided a perfect insight into the bifurcated nature of law and order. In the courtroom all was calm and genteel courtesy, in which, as my own counsel, I was provisionally part of the gentlemen’s club. My only disappointment was that we’d drawn one of the courts in the modern extension, streamlined and Euro, and not one of the magnificent older venues that you see in Charles Laughton movies. I could interpose, or object, or, after all my reading, I could even at times offer clarification, as when no one else could remember the details of The Crown v. Acme Chewing Gum.
(The Acme Chewing Gum case was a bizarre Obscene Publications prosecution, in that the offending material had absolutely no sexual content. In the early Fifties Acme had marketed a line of bubble gum called (I think) Atom Horror, which included a series of fifty cards showing black-and-white photos from Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bomb. Many were exceedingly grisly and, needless to say, were snatched up by nasty schoolboys right across the country. This was back in the days when the government was very reluctant to let the proles know just how fucking nasty a nuclear attack could be. The DPP, supposedly after the usual complaints from outraged parents, brought the Act to bear on Acme. I never did find out if the Acme bubble-gum guys were clever pacifists or just sick fucks making a buck.)
The Old Bailey also had its hidden Morlock side. Beneath the robes, the precedents, the wigs and the watchchains lay the subterranean labyrinth that was the opposite pan on Justice’s scale, the grim-tiled dungeon of slops and shouting, of cops and screws, heavy intimidation and sub-standard TV dinners. We visited it every morning when we surrendered to bail, and each night when bail was continued. I was even banged up in it for two unfortunate lunchtimes while on the stand giving evidence under oath. Doing my best to mind my own business, I found myself the recipient of furtive whispers. ‘’Ere, John, are you going back to Brixton tonight?’
An old mod fallen on hard times was talking to me out of the corner of his mouth as we waited for something. Furtively I shook my head. ‘I got bail.’
‘Pity, I hoped you’d take something to this mate of mine.’
Right. I was about to smuggle mysterious somethings into the nick. Up the steps and back into the courtroom charm, but after the labyrinth you know it’s only a shell, the mask of institutional brutality.
Judge King-Hamilton wasn’t a bad man, merely a pillar of the establishment at its most established, with a Victorian sense of absolute patrician rectitude. He was perfectly well aware that we were vermin, something of the order of the deathwatch beetle, gnawing at the very foundations of the venerable constitutional monarchy. Within the confines of his perspective, I had absolutely to agree with him. He knew troublemakers when he saw them. The mutual recognition and dislike were instant. I’m not at all sure that art cannot serve as an instruction to depravity, and to be truthful I don’t care. One person’s depravity is another’s freedom and, beyond the semantics, the judge was fundamentally correct: we were seriously seeking to deprave and corrupt everything he held dear. By the same token, everything King-Hamilton held dear was anathema to me. We were joining battle in a war of cultures.
A trial is a slow waltz on a single axis. The law specifically required the prosecution to prove that Nasty Tales intended to deprave and corrupt. Our basic defence was simple. Since all properly conducted scientific studies tended to prove that no graphic representation was in fact capable of depraving or corrupting a mature human, we could not be guilty. We were playing according to their terminology, but our interpretation. The prosecution’s position, a considerable fallback since the Lady Chatterley case, and even the OZ trial, was to define a comic as a publication for children; thus we were not dealing with mature minds, but with the unformed and highly impressionable. We countered with the long and noble tradition of adult strip-cartoons all the way back to Hogarth and beyond. They responded that they had a seven-year-old in North London who’d purchased a copy of Nasty Tales no. 1 in the local newsagents and taken it home to his mom. We were not overjoyed by the prospect of mother and child giving evidence, but then, by some bureaucratic fuck-up or police malfeasance, the cops couldn’t come up with either. We thought we’d won. One of our barristers attempted to bring the proceedings to a halt.
‘We would submit, my Lord, that if the actual complainant, the original accuser, cannot appear, no evidence exists of a crime committed, and there can be no case to answer.’ We held our breath, but King-Hamilton didn’t agree and ruled that, since Nasty Tales was on general sale, such a scenario could have occurred and he would continue.
‘Can he do that?’
In the pub, over Scotch and dry sherry, the professionals of the defence team shrugged. It was something to argue at appeal. I didn’t want to think about an appeal, but they took the longer view. Once the barristers had taught me not to confuse logic and the law, the combined defence team was formidable. We’d all get a go at each witness, and our hammering of the lead cop on the matter of selective prosecution – and how he would have had to push his way past half the porno stores of darkest Soho, passing everything from pony bondage to Dalmatian fellatio, in order to make the raid on our offices – was a joy to behold. Although porn videos were still a few years in the future, by the early Seventies, if you could imagine it, someone in Holland or Denmark had photographed it. The theme of selective prosecution was harped on constantly, in an attempt to ease the jury into wondering why, when the world was so awash with commercial porn, the authorities were picking on a bunch of obviously weird, but well-meaning, hippies? Implications of hidden agendas, social control and plain, old-fashioned vindictiveness were laid on with a trowel.
Although lay-ignorant of the law in general, I discovered that I knew a lot more about the actual subject at hand than pretty much anyone else in the courtroom. I’d done more homework. I discovered, however, that I knew almost nothing about juries. I had castigated myself without mercy after feeling I’d completely fucked up my closing speech. I had started with the casual remark that, down in the labyrinth, a prison-officer had laughingly remarked how we should have put ‘adults only’ on the front of the magazine and we wouldn’t have been in this mess. King-Hamilton took immediate exception. ‘No, no, no, no, we can’t have that. The jury will ignore that remark. Please start again, Mr Farren.’
‘Yes, my Lord.’ But he’d blind-sided me like a rocket from Krypton, and my mind went blank. As I understood it, for a judge to interrupt a closing speech was almost unheard of, and I stared at the jury in confusion. ‘I’m sorry. Please bear with me for a moment, I have completely lost my train of thought.’ I believed that I’d completely lost the jury, and essentia
lly torpedoed my own defence.
From a faltering start, I strengthened as I went along. One of the defence lawyers had stated that ‘You might think Nasty Tales was the least offensive magazine ever to be prosecuted.’ Another had pointed out that the comic ‘no more encourages drug taking than Andy Capp encourages the consumption of alcohol and wife-beating.’ I could only add a counterpoint to the same refrain.
‘We are all-aware that society is burdened with problems. The question is whether these problems can be solved by forbidding the discussion of them. It is my opinion, and the opinion of many of our readers, that the use of marijuana is a matter for the individual, not a matter for the law. Nasty Tales, I think, carries through this ideology. It makes a number of jokes about the failings and weaknesses of soft-drug users. They are similar to the kind of joke that has been made about drunkards from time immemorial. We have not presented the glamorous, attractive view of sex, so common in advertising, glamour magazines or pornography. We have presented sex warts and all. The prosecution has put forward the idea that Nasty Tales supports a plea for disobedience and a lack of respect for law and order. If this is grounds for prosecution, we would find ourselves still in a world where slavery and the hanging of children were common events. It is only the questioning of the current state of authority and the law that can lead to any type of reform. The jokes in Nasty Tales took a robust view of our society. It poked fun at some of the authority, at the hypocrisy, at the failings of many sections of our society. If you, gentlemen, feel this is contrary to the good health of our society, then I suggest you convict myself and my friends.’
