by Mick Farren
The irony in all this was that the freebies made not the slightest difference to what we wrote. That’s the trick of the inveterate renegade. Take the bribe, but never deliver. I don’t believe that Kent, Murray, Chris Salewicz, Max Bell or I ever wrote a good piece about a lousy band because we’d been pimp-stroked by a publicist. Indeed, sometimes quite the reverse. If a company steamed in too hard with the gifts and junkets, it created suspicion. Why was the hype so desperate? Was someone up there less than confident?
The further I penetrated NME, the more freedom Nick Logan seemed willing to offer me, to the point that he asked if I wanted to edit a new front section of pictures, gossip and fast-punch short items. The name of this short-attention-span section was ‘Thrills’ – and I went for it. I never could resist playing newspapers, and this gave me a chance to continue the kind of pre-USA Today stuff we’d tried at IT. I also negotiated a fairly attractive rate for these short items, and very quickly a number of the writers – Max Bell, Chris Salewicz, Angie Errigo, Julie Webb, even Charlie, all rowed in with the kind of stuff I needed. Chrissie Hynde cut her journalistic teeth on ‘Thrills’, Bob Geldof sent items from Dublin and Lisa Robinson filed a regular report on the latest from Manhattan in general and Max’s Kansas City in particular. Photographers Pennie Smith and Joe Stevens, both graduates of IT and Frendz, knew I’d always run a picture of a superstar looking inane or witless.
The great advantage of the ‘Thrills’ section was that it gave everyone the chance to write about subjects other than music. In addition to rock-world gossip – like Cher’s plastic surgery, Keith Richards’ Swiss blood changes, and speculation about what the hell might be wrong with Elvis Presley as he grew visibly fatter and madder – I also ran TV-related stories, bits on movies and comic books, and fashion in extremis. Old underground press contacts came up with stories on bizarre media events, weird performance art, animal rights, the environment, recreational drugs and drug enforcement. I was also able to run cartoons on a regular basis, recruit Edward and other former Nasty Tales contributors, and include a weekly contribution by Ray Lowry, possibly the greatest rock ’n’ roll single-frame cartoonist of all time. Beyond that it came down to anything that took my fancy. Logan might look wearily askance when I added a story about zoo-bound penguins incinerated in a cargo-plane disaster, but he’d let it run. Later in the game, after Logan had recruited a frightened and occasionally frightening young writer by the name of
Julie Burchill, the eccentric grew sickly weird. Julie Burchill claimed that she had tried for the job on NME because, as a bi-sexual fan, she wanted to meet Patti Smith. She had apparently swung Nick Logan to her side by a brilliant self-serving instinct to drop names heavy with mod cachet, like the Isley Brothers, Arthur Coney and Eddie Kendricks. She was comprehensively uneducated, but learning at an alarming rate, and she had a facility with words that I, at least, recognised as outstanding. I was certain Burchill would turn out to be a fearsomely self-promoting talent, but after a couple of juvenile indiscretions on her part, Logan bowed to record-company pressure not to let her loose on their artists. She was seconded to ‘Thrills’ for Lois Lane duty, and every morning she took an expense-account cab to the cosmopolitan newsagents on Old Compton Street to grab all the magazines that took her fancy and then comb them for the peculiar, the bizarre and the fatuous. A waste in that she really needed to write, but at least she could be moderately happy looking through magazines and sharpening her nails, while pulling me the most twisted stories she could find. Hideous death in the Philippines. Virgin Mary frenzy in Guatemala. Frustration builds motivation.
Moving in the ‘Thrills’ pages away from strict rock coverage was, however, sowing the seeds of a definite identity crisis at the paper. The circulation climbed like a Titan missile. We topped Melody Maker, the previous market leader, and strutted round like high roosters on the dung-heap. I might be working for the Man, but at least I had hundreds of thousands of young minds to deprave and corrupt. Winning a circulation war may be the ultimate glory, but it doesn’t always make for a happy ship. NME editorial was seriously divided. On one side, the underground-press vets, and those who’d come after – Chris Salewicz, Pete Erskine, Max Bell – all considered ourselves the agents of glory. Across the schism, the original staff, from the days when rock criticism was little more than the rewriting of press releases, felt eclipsed and threatened by this flashy clique. Traditionally NME was – by very definition – a music paper pure and simple; for music, by music and of music. We radicals argued that the paper must grow to be more than that; establishing a cultural connection with a young and significant audience, now that reader estimates had exceeded one million. Why not have an editorial policy that accepted the readership was united by rock & roll but didn’t end there? The related, but non-musical, was also needed. The Seventies were hopping, and we needed to report how high.
Cinema, as one example, was in a golden age. In 1971 Stanley Kubrick showed, if not the shape of youth to come, then at least its attitudes in A Clockwork Orange. In 1973 The Exorcist triggered incidents of infanticide and baby roasting by religious psychotics across the planet. In 1976 Taxi Driver had as much to say about pressure psychosis and moral bankruptcy as Patti Smith’s ‘Piss Factory’, and even gave Joe Strummer the idea for a new haircut. The Curtis Mayfield score for Superfly, or the Jimmy Cliff soundtrack for The Harder They Come, simply couldn’t be divorced from the films (or the coke and the ganja for that matter). Followings formed around actors like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Pierre Clementi, Susan Sarandon, Brad Dourif, Michael Moriarty, Harvey Keitel and John Hurt. Directors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, John Carpenter, Lindsay Anderson and Werner Herzog were in the same firmament as rock stars. The 1976 Rocky Horror Picture Show, with its midnight matinées and costumed, participating audience, was a rock phenomenon all by itself. The decade even ended with the 1979 release of Apocalypse Now, which, among all its other achievements, provided the Clash with the phrase ‘Charlie don’t surf’.
The obvious question was how the hell could we ignore all this? Previously films were ignored unless directly rock-related, like Woodstock, The Song Remains the Same or Gimme Shelter. If we were really pop-comprehensive, what rationale could there be for running a lead story on some mediocre rock band the week that The Godfather Part II was released? It wasn’t just a question of movies, even though our readers might latch on to anything from Mean Streets to Isla She-Wolf of the SS. When Charlie Murray coined the term ‘trash aesthetic’, he was talking in terms of a spectrum of entertainment media – from the writing of Iceberg Slim and the comic books of Howard Chaykin to the comedy of Billy Connolly or Richard Pryor, or the latest in Harley Davidsons. With so much of Seventies rock rooted in flash, style and display, how could the hair, make-up and costumes be ignored? How could one talk to Malcolm McLaren and not Vivienne Westwood?
Rock stars were highly public about subjects other than music. When Pete Towshend embraced Meher Baba, Jimmy Page expressed a fascination with Aleister Crowley, or Bob Marley sang about the ‘politics of Trenchtown’ might it not be incumbent upon NME to provide nutshell synopses of any of the above? As it turned out, reggae would force the paper to run quite a bit on West Indian politics, and the politics of West Indians in the UK, and shortly after Page declared himself a devotee of Crowley, I interviewed filmmaker Kenneth Anger about Crowley and his beliefs. The counter-argument was that Murray, myself and the rest constituted a fifth column subverting a respectable music paper into a post-underground tabloid rag. And of course they were right.
Corporate skirmishing ground the soul. Had I been to the Old Bailey and back just to countenance this volume of blather? The drinking increased. I was over at the pub a lot, and now and then a half-bottle could be found in the desk drawer. I’d hit the record companies for marathon martini-to-cognac, expense-account lunches, and the more I drank, the more I pitied myself. Poor fucking me. The Seventies may have been the sell-out decade, but my mother had raised me at le
ast to try for the ethical high ground, and here I was deep in the salient and all but out of moral ammunition.
When the inevitable counterstrike came, it was swift, without warning and literally hit us where we lived. When I’d first gone to work for Logan, the paper’s home had been in an anonymous office on Long Acre in Covent Garden, shared with the New Scientist. It was funky, ugly and rarely visited by management, and our New Scientist neighbours were as much a thorn in the IPC side as we were. They were always blowing whistles on environmental cover-ups and nasty government-weapons projects, and bringing the wrath of the City and Downing Street down on IPC. At NME, on the other hand, we took drugs. In our maze of Kafkaesque corridors, an archaically soundproofed record-review room, like something out of Broadcasting House, was ideal for smoking joints and listening to Tappa Zukie or Big Youth. It was an environment in which you could make believe you were working on a small independent publication. (Yeah, and Bambi’s mum was only wounded.)
Then we were evicted. They moved us out. In the name of property rationalisation – whatever that was – we were winkled out of our comfy nook in the near-West End and transported to King’s Reach Tower, south of the Thames, hard by Waterloo Bridge, where the IPC board of directors wanted all its magazines stacked like utensils, handy to keep an eye on. King’s Reach Tower was – and I presume still is – a hideous example of the Sixties Piece-of-Crap School of corporate architecture and cowboy construction, externally thirty storeys of ugly glass and internally open-plan with cubicle partitions. Weird things happened when the wind rose. King’s Reach undulated, smelled of chemicals and an eerie harmonic whistling echoed up the lift shafts whenever the wind gusted off the Thames. A few windows had popped, in the early days, and the helipad was never used. Strike action for relocation was mooted, but we couldn’t raise a majority vote and the cultural schism turned bitter. Neither IPC nor NME, though, realised that the problems of format changes or the move to King’s Reach would prove minor compared with what was to come. The early recognition and the fast and wholehearted embrace of punk by the paper proved a nose-ringed Pandora’s box that we’d gleefully upend.
Rodney Biggenheimer’s English Disco
The tall fourteen-year-old redhead in the blue-velvet hotpants was a mess of streaked mascara, as if she’d recently been crying. Her nose was red, one false eyelash was coming off and she was tottering slightly on her silver platforms. A friend explained, ‘She’s not in a very good mood, she got raped last night by (insert name of member of seventies English megaband).’
Another warm, deceptive, smog and jasmine night in Los Angeles, another NME junket, and I’d wandered away from whatever act or artist the record company was trying to promote to check out the tall tales coming back to London about a joint where the very young and very extreme groupies gathered. Shall we really talk Caligula-decadent? Rodney Biggenheimer’s English Disco features in the more sanitised histories of rock ’n’ roll as the hub of LA Glitter, where scenester and KROQ DJ Rodney promoted Slade, Sweet, Queen, Bowie and Bolan, and where Joan Jett and Lita Ford got their start with the Runaways. But, as far as I could see, it was also an overt meat market where big-name stars from big-name bands, especially big-name English stars, could pick up, exploit and humiliate exceedingly and illegally young girls and boys. And forget discreet. This was coke in the lav and blowjobs not even under cover of the tablecloth, because they didn’t have any, probably because Rodney wasn’t smart enough to have a mob connection for linen.
The stars took tables, and the little ladies and the scattering of young boys clustered in skittish groups for a strong shot of peer pressure before braving the unknown, or even the known. They looked so like underdeveloped, teenybopper-garbed junior versions of the blank-eyed whores on Sunset that it was both sad and alarming. Sequinned hotpants and halters, platform shoes, feather boas and far too much baby make-up, over-nervous, loud as drag queens – they were but children, trying to cultivate the boredom of the utterly jaded and unequivocally pliant. At Rodney’s I sensed corruption. Sexual free expression? I don’t think so. It was nothing but a whorehouse where the coin of the realm was fame, and like everything else in the mid-Seventies fame was well out of control.
These were days of yore before Michael Jackson, or even Roman Polanski, when everything was legal as long as you didn’t get caught, and the maxim of the famous was ‘It don’t apply to me’. Take what you want but grab it fast. HIV was loose back then, only the incubation period was so damned long that nobody knew about it. And ultimately, early in the Reagan era, even the baby demimondaines on the Strip would wise up to the concept of material girlhood, and the ethos of Sable Starr, Cyrinda Fox, Miss Pamela and the GTOs would be replaced by that of Vicki Morgan and Heidi Fleiss.
Carnival
Although I missed the big outbreak of violence in 1976, Carnival one year earlier had clearly demonstrated the direction in which the hard wind was blowing. The weight of matters was clear as early as Friday night. Traditionally Carnival started there. As soon as it was dark, the sound systems would crank up in the big echoing bays under the Westway. Scratch, dub and talkover, Red Stripe by the case and chalices fit for the Palace were making the rounds. Pass the kutchie to the left-hand side. Of all the nights of Carnival, Friday was my favourite. It was a little tentative, mostly local, mostly natty dread, and comparatively free of tourists from other parts of the city. Maybe a spot of crime, but nothing to concern the self-confident. From the get-go, though, this night had a different vibe. Even at home, when I declared my desire to take a stroll and see what was what, Ingrid declined, and I figured later she’d already sensed something I had yet to discover, on the tube or maybe coming back from the shops. Undaunted, I wandered out and very soon ran into I-Mac, also checking it out. Together we followed the path on the north side of the Westway, heading east from Portobello, infiltrating the barn-sized concrete bays, with a sound system doing business in each of them. State-of-the-art speakers were mixed in with boomers from old radiograms, and equally weird selections of amps were wired in impossible series, but all functioned by the grace of Jah-Electric, and played a selection as eclectic as the gear, from the Melodians and the Skatalites to U-Roy, King Tubby and Max Romeo.
I think the hairs on I-Mac’s neck started twitching first, and I put it down to his being a somewhat more timid soul than I; but, in a short while, the bad feeling was on me, too. We were becoming invisible. Writers from James Baldwin to Malcolm X describe the sensation of the ‘invisible nigger’, when no one looks at you or even acknowledges that you exist. Now it was our turn. The musicians, street dreads and quid-deal boys we knew from around the pubs greeted us cordially enough, but it didn’t overcome a general vibe of too many pork-pie-hat-and-raincoat rudies, probably up from Brixton, on the razzle in another manor, and in that early lurking phase of sussing out the lay I was seeing the whites of too many eyes. The guys we knew from the Sixties were now old gangsters. New youth was abroad and feisty; too many five-oh incidents tolerated, too much shit eaten and now too much to prove. They didn’t give a rat’s arse about recent local history, how (along with the talkover DJs) it was the Pink Fairies and Hawkwind who had first opened up the underside of the Westway to live music, by the simple process of setting up the gear, rocking out and being dragged off to the nick, if push came to shove, which it often did.
You couldn’t blame the youth. From our point of view, the coppers working out of Ladbroke Grove and Harrow Road nicks had been behaving like confrontation bastards, without diplomacy or common sense. The most farcical piece of law enforcement came when some rookie cop searched Bob Marley for dope outside Island Studios on Basing Street; an affront to Rastafari on a par with busting the Pope. Such petty harassment was routine in All Saints Road and the nearby streets, where the Mangrove Restaurant had always been the hub of local militancy. Paranoia began to set in: rumours circulated of officers with covert ties to the National Front, who gave the tacit nod to any skinhead moonstomp. More rumours told o
f an armed heavy mob with 9mms. The police were apparently going to pour on the pressure until a fuse blew. The first white Special Patrol Group Ford Transit vans began appearing on the streets, and the only real question was how high the amperage of the fuse.
Pretty much the same was happening to white freaks as to the dreads and rudies. Lemmy couldn’t walk a block without being stopped and frisked. Shirley Divers and I were tossed in the drunk tank on a Saturday night for walking out of the Hammersmith Odeon with champagne glasses in our hands during a party. What the hell did they think they were doing? Nit-picking us to death? Part of the reason we moved from Henekey’s to the Princess Alex was that the plods had decided the interior of Henekey’s saloon bar was part of their assigned beat. As many white doors were being kicked in at unreasonable times in the morning, afternoon and evening as West Indian ones; the police, intent on enforcing the letter of the law, were stoking the pressure cooker.
Media clowning also exacerbated the tension. David Bowie made what was possibly the dumbest and most overweening error of his entire career when he announced that ‘Britain could benefit from a fascist leader’, and supposedly indicated he was the boy for the job by posing for pictures at Victoria Station in an open-topped black Mercedes, giving what looked uncomfortably like a Nazi salute. A couple of months later Eric Clapton – the man who learned everything he knew from Elmore James and B. B. King – added his dash of own madness by endorsing Enoch Powell’s racism live onstage. Margaret Thatcher locked down the leadership of the Tory party and, with Labour disintegrating like the Pequod after the final headbutt from Moby-Dick, it was only a matter of time before she swept to power and that chalk-on-a-blackboard voice would be berating us daily from the TV.
