by Mick Farren
The phone call came at about the point when we were going to do something gauche and stupid, like vanishing into the stripjoints of Pigalle. The only other alternative was to troop out to Père Lachaise cemetery and light a candle on Jim Morrison’s grave. John Fenton was on the phone. He was at ‘this place in Odeon’ where we ‘wouldn’t believe what was going down’. Fenton was a longtime rock & roll hustler who had come into the business as a very young man, working on Beatlemania merchandising. He won his spurs in the era of the wild and crazy rock & roll managers like Andrew Loog Oldham and Tony Secunda, but had, I think, knocked a few synapses out of whack during the psychedelic finale to the Sixties. He had then decided – Ken Kesey notwithstanding – that electric-shock therapy was the answer and, after a protracted treatment of voltage jolts, he recommended the juice to all and sundry for everything that might mentally ail them. (I’ll pass, thank you, John.) In the wake of the ECT, John had embraced the idea of rock & roll revolution, and had taken on the management of a band called Third World War. This was a quartet of pre-punk, semi-skinheads, whose songs like ‘Ascension Day’, ‘Teddy Teeth Goes Sailing’ and ‘Preaching Violence’ advocated an armed, working-class uprising as Britain’s only salvation. In many ways they were a near-precursor of the Clash.
At ‘this place in Odeon’, the excursion decisively shifted gear. I don’t know what you call a service flat in Paris. With decor as impersonal as my hotel suite, the moderately large apartment was designed for a more protracted but equally anonymous stay. Although solid background facts were, even then, as blurred as our brains, the place appeared to belong to a character called Marie-France, a preoperative transsexual who, at the moment we arrived, was testing the homophobic limits of Third World War by parading around stark naked, apart from red high heels, lipstick and mascara. Marie-France had clearly been taking killer hormones, which had made her almost all woman, from her blonde perm to her feminine hips and Playboy Playmate breasts that I could only imagine had come courtesy of a fine plastic surgeon. A tiny set of genitals were all that remained of her former masculinity, presumably shrunk by the medication. Third World War seemed uncomfortable, but were trying to act sophisticated. Fenton was enjoying the joke, and H was grinning broadly, taking all at face value, having probably witnessed weirder things in his times with Zappa and Hendrix.
I think Fenton had half-expected us to freak out at the unexpected nude apparition, but we’d really come too far to be shocked by mere sexual oddities. It would surely take plague or mass murder to upset us now. Marie-France also had a friend, whose name I think was René, but I wouldn’t bet money on it. He was an equally attractive and feminine young man, but more in a Françoise Hardy mode, a definite counterpoint to Marie-France’s Marilyn impersonation, and, for the moment, he was keeping his frock on. I guess the moment of truth came when Marie-France climbed onto Larry’s lap, and Larry had to make the decision for all of us. The situation, as I read it, was pretty much thus: Mick Farren and the Pink Fairies, both collectively and singly might have been essentially heterosexual, but had fostered a reputation – a notoriety even – as supposed connoisseurs of the bizarre, and the bizarre was now squirming on the guitarist’s lap. He could figuratively and actually drop Marie-France on his bare arse, or enter one more of those portals of excess that we still fondly believed led to the Palace of Wisdom. Larry, God bless him, made the correct choice for any seeker after truth. He started playfully necking with Marie-France, although he hedged his bets by changing her name, right there and then, to ‘Murray French’, using a broad South London pronunciation.
‘Okay, Murray French, so where are we going?’
Marie-France seemed a little mystified, so Larry amplified. ‘I mean, we’re in Paris. We don’t want to sit around here all night, do we?’
It wasn’t only a matter of insatiable bi-curiosity. The vanguard theorem of rock ’n’ roll had been ‘deliberate gender confusion is a body blow to the system’ for the previous eighteen months. Indeed, Larry had even written a song, ‘I Wish I Was a Girl’. Honour dictated that we must pursue this line of investigation without fear or favour to wherever it might take us. Although he may not always have adhered to its edicts, Larry Wallis has a very well-developed sense of honour. Out on a spree or damned to eternity, we were in for the penny, and the pound was somewhere in front of us. We weren’t needed for anything until a two o’clock sound-check the next afternoon. At something around nine in the evening, we had some seventeen hours to quest into the unknown and clearly it was time to get questing.
Out on the streets we were treated to a new and unknown Paris. In this magical time, before HIV was gene-spliced at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Paris had seemingly become the transvestite capital of the planet, and we were getting the grand tour of this very Parisian velvet underground. We club-hopped and took cabs to scarlet streets of shame. The very chicest of the transgender chic had flocked to Paris in their tens of thousands. In addition to the domestic royales, crops of Spanish boys flourished, having fled Franco and never gone home. (Let’s not forget that the Generalissimo, the last of the classic Euro-fascists, only died in 1975.) Arab and Afro exotics from former French colonies were already on the run from rock-throwing Muslim fundamentalists, while a large contingent of Brazilians flashed and glittered, but I never did find out what their story might be. Social research was all too quickly drowned in a near-overdose of Pernod and glamour. Marie-France was welcomed by sisters every place we went, and I suspect she may well have scored beaucoup brownie points for bringing along this hard-drinking, rough-trade rock band, all lace, leather, butch poses and unkempt hair. Maybe these were the new gender-revolt groupies. We did find ourselves arriving at one place as Brian Eno and other members of Roxy Music were leaving.
In an interlude in Les Halles, we stopped for oysters at a market stall, where one was supposed to shuck open the molluscs with a very sharp dagger-like implement. (In Paris, people do things like stop for oysters.) At the oyster stand all I succeeded in achieving was to stab myself in the fleshy part of my left hand and bleed copiously. It hurt, but it certainly got René’s attention. (Or maybe it wasn’t René, but someone exactly like him. Being drunk in a place you don’t speak the language can be exceedingly dislocating.) He bound up my wound and generally comforted me, and somehow we found our way into two cabs, which Marie-France instructed to take us all back to our hotel. The party was being taken off the streets to relocate behind closed doors. The numbers, however, had been whittled down to just Marie-France, René, the Pink Fairies and me. We had mislaid Fenton, Third World War and, unfortunately, H along the way.
Needless to say, we walked into the hotel lobby as if we owned the place, which, to our mind we did. It was our hotel and what we did there was nobody’s business but our own. (Unless, of course, the gendarmerie came into the picture.) The night clerk didn’t exactly see it that way. At the sight of Marie-France and René, he bounded out from behind his desk, arms spread, barring our passage. After a great deal of verbal confusion, Sandy (the only one of us who spoke French) informed the rest of us that we were not allowed to take women to our rooms. It was hard to know where to direct our fury. The night clerk either needed bribing or punching, but the French Maoists were also targets of wrath. What was it with these lame bastards? First they expected us to pay for our own welcome-to-Paris dinner party, and now they’d booked us into a hotel where the night clerk was also the custodian of morality. (And anyway, you bloody fool, they aren’t girls at all!) Cursing the Maoists and railing at the night clerk didn’t get us anywhere except to set the clerk rumbling something about the aforementioned gendarmerie. Marie-France and René had a fast discussion in French, and then Larry and I were pulled out into yet another cab. Russell started to follow us, but the cab driver objected to taking five. Marie-France yelled an address at Russell, but he looked baffled.
A half-hour later Larry and I found ourselves swilling warm and naked gin while our every need was ministered to by these adoring cr
eations of the Paris night, without a qualm or backward glance, and with an almost total lack of conversation. The wisdom was confirmed. Sexual deviance is actually very simple. You just don’t think about it. Turn off your mind and your arse will float downstream. Or, as Obi Won Kenobi would put it, ‘Put your trust in the Force, Luke.’
We must have slept/passed out for a few hours, because the next thing I knew it was one-fifteen, just forty-five minutes to the soundcheck, and I was only starting to face the day and the hangover. The other three looked as bad as I felt; plus Marie-France and René, considerably less adoring now, wanted us the fuck out of there. They were already putting on their make-up, preparing to go about their transvestite day business. Larry and I regarded an inch of gin left in a bottle on the kitchen table. Would we sink that low? Of course we would. We both took a swig and headed out to get a cab to the Palais des Sports, and the sound-check for which we were already unforgivably late. Arriving at the gig, we discovered the stadium was in a state of siege. The anti-Maoists were picketing violently and the riot squad had resorted to gas. Fortunately the pig-headedness and cop-hate of the Parisian cab driver worked for us this time, and ultimately we made it to the artists’ entrance and found our way to the stage, looking bleary and tousled, only to discover that we were the lead subject of the day’s backstage gossip. The story had already made the rounds that Farren and Wallis had vanished into the night with a gang of hot and heavy drag queens. A writer from Sounds had been along for the ride. I think the intention was that he should write nice things about Third World War; instead, he led with the tale of Mick ’n’ Larry’s cross-gender vanishing act.
The show was uneventful, apart from the odd catch of old teargas in the throat. We weren’t great, but we weren’t terrible, and we did have a huge stadium stage to ponce around on. When we weren’t playing, Daevid Allen and the rest of Gong took us under their wing and introduced us to Monsieur Le Dealer, and smoking hash became the order of the rest of the day. Marie-France turned up looking heavily drugged and oddly unkempt. The magic had gone, and Larry and Sandy were now busy trying to pick some real girls. The next morning we found ourselves forced to do a runner from the hotel when it turned out that the Maoists weren’t able to pay the bill. We arrived at the airport just as a massive thunderstorm blew up out of nowhere and all planes were grounded. Even when the storm passed and take-offs were resumed, an Air France official brought us the news that our plane wouldn’t leave for a few more hours, but drinks and dinner were on the airline. The free stuff failed to mollify us. After all we’d been through, we turned ugly. We demanded to know the nature of the fucking problem, except for Sandy, who had wisely ingested all the drugs on his person so that he’d be clean going through Heathrow Customs and was now hard-pressed to do anything but stand and sway.
‘Your plane has unfortunately been struck by lightning.’
‘Our plane has been struck by lightning?’
‘Exactement.’
Our plane had been struck by lightning. Find that in your phrasebook.
Chapter Nine
Settle Down and Write a Book
HAVE YOU EVER noticed how few directors can make a convincing movie about a novelist at work? Usually the actor playing the novelist hammers away on a manual typewriter until he has a pile of paper about half an inch thick and then declares it a novel. Oddly enough, that’s about the thickness of a short movie script. Even a modest novel is at least two inches thick, and the manuscript of a real epic takes both hands to lift. The two movies that, for me, most accurately reflect how it feels to wrestle with the problem of writing fiction are The Shining and Misery, and both, of course, are based on the work of Stephen King. You see where I’m going with this? The act of writing may contain a definite element of horror.
In The Shining Jack Nicholson explains to wife Shelley Duvall how he isn’t writing just when she hears his typewriter clacking. He’s writing when he isn’t typing; he’s writing when he’s just staring into space; he’s even writing when he’s stretched out on the couch with his eyes closed. He makes it clear that writing is a continuous and neverending process. Of course, Jack is wrestling with both alcoholism and paranormal demons, but what’s new about that in the writing game? Misery is far more allegorical. The demented Angel of Death, serial-killer nurse and number-one-fan, played by Kathy Bates, forces the injured James Caan to write one more of the romance novels he’s so come to loathe, going all the way to smashing his ankles with a sledgehammer to keep him focused. The Kathy Bates character is, of course, another kind of demon, the muse grown psychotic, the demands of editors and agents, the public who can make or break you. All the combined factors that simply will not allow the writer to halt the process are embodied in one horrendous personality.
The joke about the writer’s primary function being to avoid writing is, at best, a very marginal one. In the new life I was constructing for myself after the Nasty Tales trial and the gradual collapse of the underground press, I discovered plenty of ways to delay the inevitable. I would get up at around noon, and go down to a pub called the Princess Alexandra where I could expect to find a quorum of a drinking crew that included Edward, Boss, Roger Hutchinson, John Manly, a friend of John’s with the impossible name of Andy Colquhoun, Lemmy and Dikmik from Hawkwind, and maybe Russell or Sandy from the Pink Fairies. The Princess Alexandra (the Alex) was diagonally across Portobello Road from Henekey’s, the prime freak pub of the time. We had moved across the street, almost in protest, when the carriage trade in Henekey’s grew too intrusive and we started feeling like a collective tourist attraction. The Alex had nothing going for it except that no one went there, and it had a pool table in the back. The pub would cover me until after three, but then I had to get down to the dreaded process of writing.
Ingrid and I had moved back into the Grove. After a couple of loud parties, the raid by Special Branch and a low-key feud between Boss and Ingrid over conduct in the kitchen, we had worn out our welcome at Clifton Gardens. But by a unique rental synchronicity. Joy and Jamie moved out of Chesterton Road to share an expensively large flat off the Old Brompton Road with publisher William Bloom, whom Jamie had persuaded to publish his first novel; there they would remain until the end of their relationship. (As, indeed, Ingrid and I would remain at Chesterton Road until the end of ours.) Although the top-floor flat at 56 Chesterton Road was not as spacious as Clifton Gardens, it had the feel of a protective eyrie in which I could hole up and get on with the next phase of my life.
The underground press had gone down with a certain slow dignity. OZ had been put to sleep in the wake of the trial, with the mutual consent of Jim, Felix and Richard. Friends (later known as Frendz after a debt-dodging legal restructure) hung on for as long as it could, but the debts rapidly returned, as formidable as ever. Roger, Caroline and Edward kept IT rolling for the longest, but they too were unable to solve the constant financial problems. It wasn’t so much that the underground papers had run their course. Corporate publishing now moved in on the more viable areas of the underground press and co-opted them.
The first publications that invaded what had previously been our turf were the four national weekly music papers – Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Disc and Sounds. Already engaged in their own war of attrition, they leeched away the advertising and, with their large circulation and real national distribution, got preferential treatment from artists and publicists. In many respects the music papers had no choice. With a rock culture growing freakier by the minute, they were compelled to get freaky themselves. Nick Logan, the bright ex-mod who ran NME, seemed best equipped to make the transition and keep up with the speed of change. Where the other editors had neither the courage nor the knowledge to go for it, and constantly hesitated on the brink, fearful that every trend was a just a nine-day wonder, Logan appeared to have a similar bellwether instinct to David Bowie. He was also able to delegate and was the first to make the radical, but wholly obvious, move of actually hiring some writers who had cut the
ir teeth, won their spurs, made their bones – whatever rite-of-passage cliché you might favour – in the underground. The first and, in my opinion, the best were Charles Shaar Murray, an early protégé of Felix and one of the Schoolkid’s OZ collective, and Nick Kent, who had started to build a rep for himself as a rock correspondent-in-the-field at Frendz.
Logan was also keeping a firm eye on a magazine coming out of Detroit called Creem. Where Rolling Stone had become pious and patronising, and was close to being in the pockets of the big record companies, Creem was wild and reckless. Best of all, the formula was working. As the anti-Rolling Stone mag, Creem was building itself a readership that outstripped that of any underground paper and put it on the way to being a US national magazine. In a strictly rock & roll context, Creem was actually achieving the over-under crossover, and publisher Barry Kramer was doing it out of a commune in Walled Lake, Michigan, still with enough of a foot in the counterculture for the FBI to have the magazine under surveillance for a while, as a possible safe-house for the revolutionary bombers of the Weather Underground. Creem, however, wasn’t looking back at the Sixties, or attempting to gene-slice rock ’n’ roll into some James Taylor orthodoxy. Creem was a magazine of the raw, urban and teenage. Creem liked the dumb. Its logo was an anthropomorphic cartoon beer can that greeted readers with the cheery slogan ‘Boy howdy!’ It championed the likes of Alice Cooper, Bowie, Roxy Music, the Stooges, Lou Reed, the New York Dolls and the MC5. Kramer also had two powerful writing machines. Dave Marsh may well have been the best-informed rock critic on the planet, and Lester Bangs – poor dead-before-his-time Lester – was the passionate and unrivalled gonzo stylist. Logan was buying reprints of Bangs and Marsh, plus other Creem luminaries like Ben Edmunds and Jaan Uhelszki, and running them in NME. He was one of the few who knew in his gut that punk was coming.
