by Mick Farren
I have no idea how many the book sold. I had to be content with no money, but a truly fabulous insider reaction. Maximalist guitar virtuoso and cyberpunk critic Glenn Branca hailed The Feelies one of the definite forerunners of the hot genre of the Eighties and Nineties. And that was the way of it with Dempsey. The primary objective might not be achieved, but the collateral conquests could be unexpected pleasures. He had the knack of making me feel like the hot young literary star-boy, and I basked shamelessly in the heat. Ingrid and I went to parties in places we hadn’t been to before and, in some cases, places we didn’t even know existed. I recall a high-ceilinged gentlemen’s club on Piccadilly where Michael Moorcock beamed like a huge affable Viking, while Harlan Ellison, overwarm in leather jeans and hyperactivity, complimented me on my style and called me ‘kid’, which did great things for my ego considering that I was now in my early thirties.
I met Anthony Burgess, who was drunk and talkative, and Jim Ballard, who never really seemed to have escaped from that Japanese internment camp. I encountered Michael Herr, who had covered the war in Vietnam for Rolling Stone and would later write the voiceover parts for Apocalypse Now. I went on a whisky-sampling pub crawl with Ralph Steadman and Dempsey, which ended in yet another weird after-hours criminal shebeen in Earls Court. All in all, it’s a miracle any of us came out it alive, and of course poor Dempsey didn’t. In the early Eighties, after a hard night’s drinking, he attempted to change a light bulb at the top of the stairs in his flat and tumbled to his death. God rest him.
Dancehall Style
When I wasn’t writing or posing as the literary hepcat, many midnights would find me in Dingwall’s Dancehall, a nightclub in what came to be called Camden Lock, but until Dingwall’s opened was nothing more than a mysterious opening at the end of the formidable British Rail wall that ran down Chalk Farm Road, east from the Roundhouse. Dingwall’s was where I ruined my liver for most of the Seventies, and a lot of my more flamboyant memories are entwined around the long, narrow, live-music and drinking joint. I watched Richard Nixon resign in Dingwall’s – raising our glasses and screaming, ‘Gotcha, you fucking bastard!’ as though his downfall had been part of some huge group effort. I saw Wilko Johnson with Dr Feelgood for the first time there, and Eric Clapton sitting in with Buddy Guy. I saw Bo Diddley. I saw Country Joe McDonald, and Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, Kilburn and the High Roads, Blondie, and Mick Green and the Pirates, and I played there myself once or twice. My face was once slashed with broken glass, but I escaped with only a small scar on my upper lip. Injury was not without compensation, however. I was immediately tended like a fallen hero, for an entire weekend, by a dark-haired Swede called Asa. If you want to get the girl, kid, lose the fight.
The overall impression was not unlike a long, narrow barn or maybe a western saloon with a slick coat of polymer on all the woodwork. In terms of ambience and attitude, H could have designed Dingwall’s with me in mind. He’d taken everything he’d learned at the Speakeasy and improved it, refined the assets and eliminated the majority of the drawbacks. The sum total was a long bar, away from the music, with a sufficiency of bar tenders. The noisy end of the club had enough lines of sight to see the bands if you really desired. The DJ booth was manned by Boss on many of the more epic nights. H – and then Boss, when he took over as manager – maintained a booking policy that never quite allowed a mosh pit to form. Although punk was coming in, it wasn’t permitted to take over. Punks gobbed, fought, stole, made a mess and didn’t spend money. Dingwall’s was our joint, the freaks who’d made it through and had at least the price of a Jack Daniels, a Red Stripe and maybe a half-gram of coke.
Dingwall’s was elitist enough for Frank Zappa to dine in peace, but with no who’s-cute-and-who-isn’t door policy. Everyone knew and everyone, for the most part, respected how it was. Billy Idol and Mick Jones would drink there, but they never played at Dingwall’s. The punks showed up for reggae acts like U-Roy, Burning Spear and Clint Eastwood, but they were expected to behave. I assume that both the Camden Town gangsters and the local scuffers had been paid off to their satisfaction. Certainly the police took a reasonably laissez-faire attitude towards the milling drunks who fumbled from the premises around 2.10 a.m. groping for cabs, and about the only serious underworld incident was when a crazy Greek bouncer – who’d seemingly been hired as a favour to some minor Kentish Town Godfather – went berserk with a machete and almost killed a guitar player. (I think Martin Stone, although I wouldn’t swear to it.)
As a regular at Dingwall’s, I found myself living the pretensions of the drunken scribe with no quarter. I may not yet have been writing as well as Dylan Thomas, Tennessee Williams or Dorothy Parker, but I was starting to match their drinking. And was I having a good time? Truthfully? Yes, I think I was. Drunks are always sorry for themselves, and I was definitely no exception – poor me, poor me, now pour me another. All aspirations to literature have to come with a full load of communicable torture and angst. On the other hand, life had become pretty comfortable. Friendships felt as solid as I’d ever known them. Some of us had now been in the fray for a full decade and I pretty much knew who I could count on in times of stress.
Amazingly, although much of the outside world appeared to be in a hopeless downhill slide, a number of the other old-timers were doing pretty well for themselves. The biggest surprise in the neighbourhood was the sudden rise to fame of Hawkwind. After labouring long and hard in the raw, solar wind, they had scored a completely unforeseen top-ten hit with the uncharacteristically short and radio-friendly ‘Silver Machine’. Mercifully the band appeared little affected, either in lifestyle or attitude, by having their pictures in the papers or being on Top of the Pops. Certainly chart success didn’t allay Lemmy’s constant need to borrow money from all and sundry. (A T-shirt was commissioned that read ‘LEMMY A QUID ’TIL FRIDAY’.) The Hawk Lords continued to dine on the grease and flypaper at the Mountain Grill, and their only concession to pop stardom was going to gigs in a Mercedes bus. Manager Douglas Smith looked more stressed-out and Bill-Graham haggard than ever, but began drinking a much better brand of Scotch. The overall outcome of Hawkwind having a hit was that their lightshow, designed and furiously operated by Jonathan Smeaton, the ramrod of Liquid Len and the Lensmen, became truly stunning. Sadly, the Pink Fairies couldn’t emulate their old running buddies’ sudden jump in record sales, and continued to stumble on, doing some memorable shows to baying yahoo mobs, but all too frequently snatching defeat from the jaws of victory at crucial moments, and sending themselves back to the salt mines without passing Go or collecting their £200. The yahoos loved them well enough, however, for Sandy and Larry to be found propping up the bar at Dingwall’s on any given night.
As well as the old lags, Dingwall’s served as a catalyst for new faces and new encounters, and, of those new faces, by far the most outwardly psychopathic was that of Wilko Johnson. Like the Who, Dr Feelgood drew a furious energy from the mutual enmity of the two front men, and their best shows always teetered on the edge of violence. Wilko and the late Lee Brilleaux had exactly the same guitarist/singer animosity that had made Townshend and Daltrey so formidable and dangerous. The only real difference was that Townshend and Daltrey evolved some Marquess of Queensberry system that allowed them to continue all the way to infinity, while Wilko and Brilleaux hit critical mass after just three albums. While they lasted, though, the original Feelgoods were something, and I’ll never forget them doing ‘Riot in Cell Block Number Nine’ at the Hammersmith Odeon. Amid whirling, film noir spotlights, Brilleaux and Wilko advanced on the footlights with all the menace of an authentic breakout at the Big House, and I continue to rate the album Stupidity, recorded on that tour, as one of the greatest all-time live recordings.
I think one of the reasons Wilko and I got along was that he needed someone with whom he could have an intelligent conversation. The other original Feelgoods embraced the thug culture of Canvey Island villains, especially Brilleaux, who, while an outstanding
performer and always courteous to me, could be scary in the extremity of his right-wing politics and flares of Ronnie Kray temper. Wilko was educated and highly literate, as obsessed with the writing and performances of Bill Burroughs as I was, but also a fan of the romantic poets and their opium intake. For Wilko, life with the other Feelgoods, aside from when they were playing, was a wasteland arid of intellect.
Wilko was, to say the least, an oddity. In terms of guitarist presentation, he was the total anti-Keith. No mascara and scarves for this boy. With eyes that turned psychotic at will, and the pudding-bowl haircut of a homicidal schoolboy in the movie . . . If, Wilko, in his shabby black pinstripe suit, black shirt buttoned to the neck, would clutch his black telecaster like an AK-47 and execute full stage-width slides and shuffles not unlike the ones the young Wayne Kramer stole from James Brown. Jagged, staccato and minimal, Wilko was about as antithetical – both in shape and sound – to the self-indulgent shag-haircut breed of guitar heroes as it was possible to be and remain on the same planet. In that, he provided the template for generations of punk guitar stranglers as yet unborn.
Although Wilko was smart and funny as hell, he appeared to like his private life complicated in the extreme, and as we came to know and trust each other, these complications often showed up at the door of Chesterton Road. With a wife and child out in Southend, a stripper mistress in the big bad city, and little truck with either discretion or deception, his options for rock-star soap opera were unlimited, particularly when the ever-popular sulphate served as emotional rocket fuel. The doorbell would ring and there would be a wide-eyed Wilko, often with girlfriend Maria, or now and again with Lemmy. (When it came to the sulphate, Lemmy and Wilk could match each other nostril to nostril, hour by hour and day by day, if need be.) Most times he was simply looking for a convivial place to pass the seemingly eternal night of the men who never sleep. On other occasions, though, epic drama would be in progress, triggered by some skirmish in his endless domestic trench warfare, and he’d be issuing speed-freak ultimatums that pendulumed between murder and suicide – the weapon of fantasy invariably being a serrated bread knife. Mercifully, the deathwish was never realised and everyone remained, if not happy, then at least unsliced. (Or as Ian Dury, who had Wilko as a Blockhead for a while after his departure from Dr Feelgood, commented, ‘At times Mr Johnson could be a bit of a ballerina.’)
Being a regular at Dingwall’s also caused resumptions of contact with characters whom I hadn’t seen in a very long time. Guy Stevens, usually drunk, late and abusive, was on his way to produce the Clash’s masterpiece ‘London Calling’ and then drop dead. To see Guy in his last hurrah was, to put it charitably, educational, but another unexpected reunion with Tony Secunda proved far more momentarily beneficial. Since I’d last seen him with the Move, he’d had a hand in the rising fortunes of Marc Bolan. He’d managed the folk ensemble Steeleye Span, and had kept Steve Took alive by going in to bat for a fairly large accrual of royalties that Took had earned on the back of Bolan’s success. At Dingwall’s, Secunda was in the phase of never meeting a bag of cocaine he didn’t like. Frequently Tony would give me a ride back to Chesterton Road, and then come in and start doing up the eight-ball he seemed invariably to have with him as a chemical security blanket. Cokeheads aren’t usually Mother Theresa when it comes to altruism, and I could only assume that Tony needed someone with whom he could argue, on and around the paranoid nuances of the Great Global Conspiracy to Control Everything. I learned early in the game that being up for such discussion could garner a bonanza of free nose-candy. We often went at it until ten or eleven in the morning, when Tony would decide that he should look in at his office, and I’d take a couple of Ingrid’s Valium and collapse. One fateful night, however, we didn’t make it to Chesterton Road at all, and went through that unique bonding experience of guys who get thrown in the drunk-tank together.
The combination of cocaine and alcohol is a circus unto itself. The booze makes you act stupid, while the coke energises you to continue the stupidity almost indefinitely. On the night in question our condition by closing time was such that Tony shouldn’t have been driving, and I’m not sure if I was even truly capable of being a passenger. Ingrid was with us, but I don’t know where she positioned herself in this unsteady equation. Even before we’d reached Edgware Road, Tony and I were engaged in a pointless argument about God knows what, and, by the time we made the turn onto the iron railway bridge at the end of Golborne Road, in the shadow of Trellick Tower, the debate had reached such a crescendo that he braked in the middle of the bridge. Leaving the car – doors open, lights on and engine running – Tony grabbed an aerosol paint can and sprang out to consolidate whatever point he was making by writing it in letters three feet high on the grey Victorian iron.
That Tony had a spray can so readily to hand was a product of an obsession with graffiti that he was espousing at the time. If he’d ever fallen in with the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, who came to fame under the tagger pseudonym ‘Samo’, they might have formed an unholy alliance. By this time Tony was managing Lemmy’s first version of Motorhead and had decided a graffiti campaign was a perfect adjunct to their uncompromising, down-with-the-street image. Every time he spotted a suitable wall, he’d spray the word ‘Motorhead’ on it, and I believe one or two of his efforts survive to this day.
On the bridge Tony was swaying a little, and instead of inscribing a stunning riposte, he’d only managed a couple of abstract curves when a blue light flashed behind us. A half-dozen coppers poured from the back of a Black Maria, laid their meaty hands on Tony and me and hustled us to the van. We went quietly, taken completely by surprise. One problem had been overlooked, however. In their eagerness to apprehend us, the law had entirely failed to notice Ingrid sitting in Tony’s car, engine still idling, lights blazing and doors gaping. They quite literally drove past it without comment as they hauled us off to Ladbroke Grove nick.
Ingrid had never driven in her life and was at something of a loss as she saw us carried off. I don’t think Tony or I would have blamed her had she stormed angrily out of the car, left it exactly where it was and walked home, at that point little more than 300 yards away. Ingrid, though, with her Scandinavian sense of civic responsibility, at least felt obligated to move the car over to the curb. As she told it, she was just wondering how to accomplish this when an amiable hippie wandered down the road. She asked him if he knew how to park a car. He not only did, but turned it off, locked it and then walked her to the end of the street.
It was fortunate that Tony and I had gone quietly. We were simply assumed to be drunk. At about eight in the morning we were charged with defacing public property and being drunk and disorderly, and were released to get cleaned up before appearing at Marylebone Magistrates Court an hour and half later. Back at Chesterton Road, Ingrid said nothing to me, just gave Tony his keys, informed him of the whereabouts of his car and went back to bed. In court, feeling like shit, we took the easy way out. We pleased guilty, apologised to the magistrate for wasting his time and accepted a five-pound fine on each count.
I suppose I really should have felt content in this period. I was still living from project to project, and from pay cheque to pay cheque, but the cheques were sufficiently large to have a little fun. I had a home with a rent pegged to 1969 prices. I had an attractive blonde girlfriend who seemed infinitely tolerant of my antics. I had a growing reputation as a writer, and I was allowed to retreat into my fictional fantasy worlds any time I wanted. I had both a bar and a nightclub where everyone knew my name and the bar tenders would cash my cheques. I had even got thrown into jail for the night just to keep my credibility up to snuff. What more did I need?’
If I dug deep enough I could find something. In this case, it was how the fun didn’t come without high levels of self-deception. As we’ve already seen, the Grove – nay, the whole post-industrial, post-imperial, fucked-up country-in-denial – seemed to be losing its sanity as it slid closer to the abyss of ugliness. Outside
the cosy groove I’d ground for myself, much was unwell in Old England. Few were getting much satisfaction, but I’d had my fill of tag-team street politics. I tried to tell myself ‘Fuck it’. We had a new generation on the rise to do the street fighting, didn’t we? It was their turn to incite the riots and play the rama-lama. I pretended I wanted nothing but the part of a venerable observer. I was chronically burned out on the prophet-of-doom shtick. Hey, guys, I’m too young to be Howard Beale. (Maybe now, but not then.) I’ve done my tour of duty. I have my Purple Heart for brain trauma, yo. What I didn’t have was the knowledge that the rama-lama, like the Corleone family, doesn’t let you go that easily.
Chapter Ten
The Titanic Sails at Dawn
IT’S 19 JUNE 1976, and in three months I’ll be thirty-two. I’m already old by contemporary standards, but I’m not in the least happy. In another year I’ll be thirty-three, the age at which John Reed died and Jesus Christ was nailed on the cross, sucking vinegar. Worse than that, my first love – rock & roll – seems to be going to hell in a hand-basket.
