by Mick Farren
Lost in the Supermarket
Interviewed by Legs McNeil for his 1996 book Please Kill Me – The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, I find myself quoted in a mood of high judgemental dudgeon, but, of course, we’d been sitting on the patio of a pub called the Cat & Fiddle on Sunset Boulevard and he’d been feeding me Bud and Jack Daniels while I talked into the microphone.
‘Well, it broke up, didn’t it? It was the Eighties. And there was cocaine. Shovels full of cocaine. And ingesting drugs doesn’t require a lot of talent, and that’s why I think we brought ourselves down to Sid, who, it could be said, was the ultimate product of the entire punk movement. I mean Sid was completely worthless, ha, ha, ha.
‘So drugs brought money back and Ronald Reagan was elected president, and, you know, shit went on. In fact, that’s the sad part; hippies survived Nixon, but punk caved in to Ronald Reagan, know what I’m saying? Punk couldn’t actually take a good challenge.’
Legs and I have grown old playing snotty punk v. grizzled old hippie routine since he first licked my Bettie Page T-shirt in CBGBs and, two decades later, the exchange was being continued for publication. This was not to say that punk wasn’t, or isn’t, a fascinating phenomenon. If punk died almost as soon as it was born, it was only on one specific level. On another, it so totally perpetuated itself that it continues to this day, and shows no sign of departing. It took twenty years for rock & roll to advance from Little Richard to the Damned, but another twenty years to move from the Ramones to Green Day. For a movement that rejected the future as a concept, it has proved itself uncommonly resilient. In the year 2001 we even find it cross-fertilising with rap in the form of Kid Rock.
The major resentment I had towards punks was that it was bloody easy when everyone was doing it. Ten years earlier I’d been on my own, with only Iggy and the MC5 3,000 miles away. The punks even had the supporting players and extras in place, but still they didn’t seem to be capable of making the potency last. We’d kept the hippie counterculture viable for five, if not six, years and punk wilted after scarcely three. The front on which they attacked society was narrowly limited and I believe that was one cause of their relatively fast neutralisation. They used rock ’n’ roll as a spearhead, just as we had ten years earlier, but they skimped on the peripherals. Like Ney at Waterloo, throwing in his cavalry without infantry support, punk went for the single, impossible coup de grâce, and when that achieved only a brief and chimerical shock, they had no fallback.
Punk created its magazines, its comic books, its clothing designers, a graphic style, filmmakers, mass events and an absurd theatre of drugged outrage, but with nothing like the creator-to-punter ratio of the Sixties counterculture. Punk also had its wheeler-dealers – although McLaren and Bernie Rhodes did turn out to be little more than short-order scam artists, ultimately outmogulled by the likes of Seymour Stein and his discovery of Madonna. Punk’s main oversight was an anti-romantic acceptance of all reality at its most negative. I’ll go to my grave believing that all revolutionary aspirations inevitably come with a high degree of unreality and seductive self-deception. A golden dream of perfection, no matter how immediately unworkable, must be the moonlight in the murk. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, if you’re lying in the gutter, you might as well be looking at the stars, rather than a lighted second-floor window. Trite but true, the hippies had too many dreams and the punks too few. Ugliness as a shock tactic, and that widespread promotion of mindless anger as a weapon of agitprop had their uses, but they hardly led to either the Palaces of Wisdom or even the gates of Eden. The other question that remained determinedly unanswered was: if mindlessness becomes all-consumingly chic, who the hell is going to do the thinking?
Through no fault of their own, the punks also found themselves punching shadows. For protest to run amok, it requires an ancien régime with the heft of true danger. The overt madness of Nixon, Kissinger, LBJ and Wilson bore little resemblance to the contemptibly limited lunacy of Reagan and Thatcher, or even the mendacious Jeane Kirkpatrick. Thank God Wilson was hammerlocked by the Labour Left to keep us out of Vietnam, but the grunts, the gunships and the B52s were there on TV. In the new era the B52s were a band. To hit the streets in opposition to something as tangible as a brutal and immoral war was far easier than to pit your energy against the nebulous smoke and mirrors behind which the New Right would attempt to obliterate the last vestiges of socialism, and the voodoo economics that would enable the super-rich to inherit what was left of the Earth. With the experience of the wild upheavals of the Sixties behind them, those in authority were also far more skilled at dissipating the energy of the mob by pitting street crews one against the other – punks against skinheads, blacks against the SPG. (Yes, I still think of the police as a street gang, the biggest gang in town.) The centres of power have traditionally protected themselves by sparking pointless buffer conflicts, and having the young and disaffected square off against each, rather than identifying the true tyrant.
Hindsight has made me a little kinder to the original punks. Like the hippies, they were just another uprising. The second I’d experienced, and I still hope for more to come. In our naivety we’d thought we were fighting the class war to end class wars and the Age of Aquarius was only a day away. Typical zealot error. All we had going was a major skirmish. Youth revolts may have little sense of history, but that doesn’t mean they are devoid of it. They have a noble, if disgruntled, pedigree of churls and malcontents, a continuous guerrilla Bohemia, an endless Children’s Crusade, Peasants’ Revolt and Beggar’s Opera winding down the centuries on a trail of chaos and disorder, through Nihilists and Anarchists, Pre-Raphaelites and Romantics, all the way back to twelfth- and thirteenth-century troublemakers like the Cathars and Adamites, Robin Hood and Merlin, the interdicted Dionysians and the persecuted Bacchae. The historical linkage goes by no single name, just a charged mission to resist for ever any and all means by which an authoritarian elite seeks the eradication of free will, free thought and individualism. If I believe in anything, besides a shared sense of absurdity, it has to be this thread of creative resistance, and both the trick and the moral responsibility are to make sure it extends ever into the future, and generations yet to come are made well aware that you have to keep a close eye on the bastards.
We tend to think of mass mind control and mass manipulation as something new, but it’s quite as old as the first leader’s will to power. The enemy is any regime that keeps its peasantry in the grip of perpetual superstitious fear, strives for the lockstep proletariat of Metropolis or an underclass reduced to belligerent stupidity. The tools of control and manipulation are simple to spot – the Roman spectacle of bread and circuses; the desensitisation in a culture collapsing under the maintenance of an imperial war machine; Christian cathedrals that awed the peons and instilled in them the fear of God and his appointed clergy; the soulless diversion of bad television; military hysteria, Inquisitions, witch hunts and Cold Wars; some future culture of mindless happy-face obedience, and a daily dose of some fifth-generation Prozac; or a population dumbed down by a constant hosing with brain-frequency microwaves.
The fight between freedom and control, between conformity and dissent, swings backwards and forwards, in all manner of guises and forms and under cover of a hundred deceptions. Sometimes the hero is Jimi Hendrix, sometimes George Jacques Danton, Vincent Van Gogh or Lenny Bruce, a self-immolating Buddhist monk or the Mahatma. In communist Albania, one needed a licence to own a typewriter. In the post-industrial data age, would-be censors attempt to deny large sections of the internet to children who understand the technology better than they do. Yes, my friends, they really do need to be watched constantly.
Redemption? I Don’t Think So
We were circling Parliament Square, past Big Ben, the statues of Winston Churchill and Richard I – the famous homicidal gay psychopath king – and drummer Al Powell announced that he was going to vote for Thatcher. ‘Someone’s gotta be in charge here.’
‘Are you kidding me?’
Was he winding me up? Apparently not. I think that was actually the moment I decided I wanted out, that it was time metaphorically to take ship and seek adventures elsewhere. If Al from Hawkwind could make such a statement, Britain as a nation had surely become so demoralised and collectively depressed that it would run, lemming-like, to any self-proclaimed authoritarian who promised an illusion of strength, order and a return to some greetings-card past that had never really existed. England wanted its nanny. It wanted to delegate adult thought and will to an implausible matriarch, whom they believed would soundly spank and send to bed with no supper all those perceived as troublemakers, and this list plainly included the unions, the young, minorities and probably dissidents like myself.
I’d already been spending so much time in the USA that it was the obvious alternative. Except that America also wanted its daddy and a return to the days of Eisenhower, before Elvis Presley, drugs, protest and sexual revolution, when all was right with the world, they knew the enemy and it was definitely not them. In the run-up to Reagan’s bid for the presidency, I watched in awe as a woman in her fifties, a clerk or maybe a secretary, was asked why she was intending to vote for Reagan. ‘He’ll make it like I was young . . .’ She swiftly corrected the Freudian give-away. ‘He’ll make it like when I was young.’
A mess? Certainly. As bad as it was in the UK? Probably not, but I was by no means sure. Nixon had dubbed them the Silent Majority, but, by the end of the Seventies, they were far from silent and rapidly forming ranks behind the ageing actor with Alzheimer’s, who had already made his bones as the ultra-conservative Governor of California during the protest years. The Reagan faithful – an unholy coalition of arch-conservatism, the Christian Right, big money and the military industrial complex – had been mobilising since 1976, when they’d failed to unseat Gerald Ford at that year’s Republican convention. That Reagan intended to play high-stakes, shit-or-bust poker with the USSR, while Thatcher dismantled the British Revolution of 1945 and showed him the way to privatise the New Deal, was no secret. Indeed, it was central to both their election platforms.
I guess I knew in my heart I’d opt for America in the end. How in the name of all that was holy could I remain in a country where the Prime Minister could command such heights of bourgeois ignorance that she felt able to refer to Francis Bacon as ‘that awful artist who paints those horrible pictures’. That hideous voice was like chalk on a blackboard, enough on its own to make me flee. Some wag had coined the nickname Attila the Hen, but I wanted no part of the woman, even as an adversary. I figured that after a few months of TV exposure to the blue suits, the impossible platinum coif and the stench-under-the-nose expression, I might be forced to strap dynamite all over my body and walk into Parliament with the Zen-violent intention of ‘taking some of the bastards with me’.
I’d be misstating the case if I left you with the idea that my sole motivation was to flee what I considered would be, for me, a highly inclement political climate. The course of the Seventies – although not without its share of alarms and adventures – demonstrated a visible narrowing of creative options. Money was tight. Music seemed to be increasingly defined by costume and haircut, and publishers were hinting that I should give up the Burroughsian aspirations I had reconnoitred in The DNA Cowboys trilogy and consolidate my position. Star Wars had managed to set the science-fiction genre back a good twenty years and, until the coming of cyberpunk, the demand was, if not for actual Dan Dare spaceships and rayguns, then something very close. Conservatism wasn’t concentrated in Westminster. My growing inclination was to turn my face to the west wind and embark for the Americas without further ado. Not to re-create myself like Bowie, and not to knock the Merrie UK, either. I felt enough like a rat leaving the ship of fools. I was going to the big American playground to test my strength.
Of course, when I say the Americas, I actually mean New York City, and, as any New Yorker will tell you, ‘New York ain’t America.’ New York is a city from Victorian science fiction where zeppelins should have moored at the needle of the Chrysler Building. Fortunately it all went horribly and humanly wrong, so the Bowery became strewn with bums scrabbling for a pint of Night Train as the thorazine wore off, drag-queen whores defended their turf with stiletto heels, and a documented species of Mole People lived in the abandoned tunnels under Grand Central Station. I could find bars with Hank Williams and Louis Jordan on the jukebox that served booze till four in the morning.
I also estimated that New York would be the ideal place to weather out the Eighties. Ron didn’t share Maggie’s narrow, shopkeeper’s-daughter concept of how things should be in a well-regulated nation state. He might borrow the awful woman’s rhetoric, but he was only there to let the greed rip. Tom Wolfe’s Masters of the Universe were just waiting for Reagan to let slip their leashes, to light the Bonfire of the Vanities. The military industrial complex, with an Evil Empire to huff and puff about, was poised for a convulsion of gluttony equal to a Stephen King pie-eating contest. It would be an era of robber barons in the USA, and New York was a city built by robber barons, but instantly subverted by the poor, into a wild and exotic melting pot of ethnicity that refused to melt. What better place to observe the new face of fascism, that which would soon be known as yuppie? In my estimation, New York was also well defended on a cultural level. Reagan might let the Moral Majority have its way in middle America, gutting school libraries, teaching creationism as science and attacking everything from abortion rights to topless donut shops. But they’d keep it in Ohio. What the hell were the Christian Right going to do when confronted with Holly Woodlawn or Karen Findlay? Throw them into camps? Even to go near that idea would be to court a bloody city-wide Stonewall II. This was the city that had been home to Lucky Luciano and Mad magazine. The Gotham of Batman. Its sin looked impregnable.
Besides, I was in love again, as much as two drunks can be in love until one sobers up and starts smelling that metaphorical coffee. I had met Betsy when she was a Director of Publicity at Arista Records, working for the unpredictable Clive Davis, with responsibility for the notarisation of Lou Reed, Iggy and Patti Smith. I had admired her Veronica Lake hair, sunglasses and fast verbals on an earlier visit and, when she, I and Lester Bangs had lunch together, it extended into an epic drinking bout that concluded with the two of us losing Lester somewhere along the way and repairing to the George Washington Hotel, where we had amazing sex that was primarily amazing in that it happened at all, considering the quantities of Dewars-on-the-rocks and Jack-with-a-beer that we’d put away respectively. After a few days, infatuation set in, to the point that it seemed out of the question simply to return to London and think no more about it.
Do other women sense, even if you don’t tell them, when all is not well back at hearth and home? In London I had found myself walking round in a complete state of self-denial, telling myself: okay, so things with Ingrid were a bit rocky, we’ll get over it. Meanwhile, the other side of my brain was kicking down the barn door, writing graphic fictional suicides in The Feelies and lyric lines like ‘living in a phone booth with a vampire bat’ and ‘maybe you really wanted to be used’, and pretending that it was just my imagination. It probably also didn’t help that I managed to burn down the apartment at Chesterton Road. The last thing I wanted to do was to cause Ingrid pain, but I had decided that my future lay in New York rather than London. To stack the deck a little more, Betsy and I were in the magical getting-to-know-you, wonder-of-us phase, and how could a nine-year-old rocky relationship compete with that?
As always, as soon as I’d privately made the decision to leave London, everything began happening. A new fiction deal came down the pike. It would turn out to be The Song of Phaid the Gambler, but the parameters of the deal made clear that it was definitely a setback in the direction of rayguns. At the same time I found myself becoming involved in a sudden influx of music projects. Although we had completed Vampires Stole My Lunch Money, that was far from the end of it. I was no longer writing songs with Lemmy, but h
ad started working regularly with Andy Colquhoun on material for his new band Warsaw Pakt. In the process I commenced a solid friendship and creative partnership with Andy – and Helga, his feisty Bavarian girlfriend, soon to be his wife – that has functioned until this day and produced a canon of songs that must now number close to fifty. In addition to the Warsaw Pakt work, Andy and I finished up mixing the single ‘Broken Statue’ that followed Vampires Stole My Lunch Money when Larry, the designated producer, lost his mind, broke his phone and barricaded himself in his apartment with multiple bottles of Johnny Walker Red, some grams of cocaine and a young woman called Vashta.
The ties that bind are hard to sever, and to wrench yourself away from the place where you were, at least figuratively, born and raised is never easy, but equally difficult is to halt a process once it’s in motion. I’d filled out all the forms, I’d disposed of my extraneous stuff. I’d turned in my British Relay TV set and started the process of giving up my flat. The final hurdle was surmounted when John Dean at the US Embassy – the individual we met all the way back in the prologue – could find no legal grounds to exclude me from becoming a Resident Alien. All that remained was to endure being X-rayed, checked for literacy and blood-tested, just to see if I was sufficiently fit and smart to take my life in my hands on Avenue D. I had become the traditional folk figure, the immigrant headed for the new world, only I wasn’t travelling steerage in some disgusting Victorian steamship, I was flying in one of Freddie Laker’s DC10s. (Remember Laker? A fifty-quid fare from Heathrow to JFK until Mrs Thatcher put a stop to it.) I was not fleeing poverty, religious persecution or seeking redemption. I was no huddled mass. I was merely on the brink of a new and limitless terrain of adventure, and I was pledged to embrace it as fully as I’d embraced the last one.
