Stardust Memories

by Ray Connolly

  Farlowe, whose real name is John Henry Deighton … he’s a nephew of novelist Len Deighton (although he’s never met him), runs his stall with the help of a man called Jimmy. Jimmy gets a wage and a commission on profits.

  ‘He’s the real expert, and he does all the buying. We usually pick up stuff from ex-servicemen, but he’s just come back from Germany with a full general’s uniform.’

  My undisguised distaste for his ghoulish wares disturbed them. ‘You know, two thirds of the people who buy this stuff are Jewish,’ said Jimmy. ‘We had two women in here who had been in a concentration camp. They had no condemnation of the stuff we are selling. Of the Nazis … yes, but not the actual stuff.’

  And they both ran their eyes over the macabre black SS uniform, the cuff titles, collar patches, gilt gorgets, high leader’s dagger and station-master’s dagger (why would a station master want a dagger?).

  Says Farlowe: “It’s just a business and a hobby.”

  POSTSCRIPT Sixteen years on, and thirty eight years after the end of World War II, Chris Farlowe still has a thriving business peddling Nazi memorabilia from his shop in Islington, as well as running a somewhat patchy career as a rock star who never really followed up his first hit record.

  December 1967

  Mick Jagger

  For three years he’s been a kaleidoscope personality, and the best feed-man for tired comics in the business.

  Two years ago Maureen Cleave worried about whether you’d let your daughter marry him — although there’s such a thing as chance. Last summer he was Mick the Martyr, when Judge Block sent him down for three months for possessing cannabis — and then Mick the Championed when the Lord Chief Justice brought him back up again.

  And in between, he’s been variously Mick the Dirty, Mick the Dandy, always Mick the Sexy—and mainly Mick the Provocative.

  He’s now twenty-four, and as uncompromising and arrogant as ever. His hair, always the arch-provocation, hangs ironically like a judge’s wig on to his shoulders, so that he looks rather like a camped-up Robespierre.

  This week, when two of the national daily newspapers were discovering for the twenty-third time since 1962 that the old moral order is taking a knocking from Britain’s 4,000,000 or so teenagers, I visited him at his vast fourth-floor Marylebone Road flat.

  Actually, it isn’t so much a flat as an Indian bazaar, with a very good line in numdah rugs and French wood-wormed eighteenth century high chairs. He lives there alone, apart from when his younger brother, Chris, goes to stay. (’I don’t think he resents me, although it may get to be a bit of a drag sometimes.’) And he has a Spanish maid who goes in to look after him every day.

  We sit on an island of violently coloured Dunlopillo cushions. Mick, when he isn’t fidgeting and wriggling, is cross-legged and shoeless.

  He is in his knocking-about-the-house gear — puce pants with clown’s cravat to match, and a cosmic cotton shirt with stars and moons and other celestial objects printed on it. Round his waist is a sequined, tasselled belt which he bought in the King’s Road. He bought his socks at Marks and Spencer.

  So far there are no signs that he is thinking about marrying anybody’s daughter. He believes, in fact, that marriage is becoming outdated, and, in Western society, is going into a gradual decline. He says: ‘It’s just one form of social behaviour. We’re all animals really. And marriage is just a primitive institution which we still have. Personally, I like the idea of two people living together. It’s better than ten people living together.

  ‘I can understand women wanting to get married, because they know that their man can always run off with another woman. And, as they’re dependent on him, they have to make it that bit harder for him to get out of his obligations. But I don’t really see why men want to get married. I don’t fancy getting married at all, but I can see that I would if I ever met anyone that I really loved and who wanted to marry me. Marianne? Well, she doesn’t want to get married, and anyway she’s already married to someone else. So she doesn’t come into it.’

  He’s confident that society in general will eventually catch up with him, and that his mode of behaviour will become the norm. It will, however, be a slow process. ‘We can only go as fast as the slowest member of society, so there’ll be no moral chaos, but a gradual breaking down of traditions.

  ‘In a small society the pressures to conform are immense, but in a big city like this, and especially when you’re mixing with people who don’t care, it’s very easy to do exactly as you like. In the year 2000, no one will be arrested for drugs and that sort of thing. It will be laughable, just like it would be laughable if people were still hung for stealing sheep. These things have to be changed, but it takes maniacs obsessed with individual microcosmic issues to bring it about. I could get ever so obsessed about the drugs thing, and if I really worked hard at it I might speed up the process of reform by perhaps ten years, or five years, or perhaps only six months. But I don’t feel that it’s important enough.’

  At the moment the most important thing to him is the success of his new album — perversely titled ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’. Presumably ‘Their Satanic Majesties’ are you and me and all the people who buy Rolling Stones records.

  In three-and-a-half years the Rolling Stones have sold over forty-two million pounds’ worth of records, but this is the first one they’ve produced entirely by themselves since parting from their ‘creative manager’, Andrew Oldham. And neither McCartney nor Lennon is on it either.

  On the cover, which is reputed to have cost over £10,000 for the design by Sergeant Pepper man, Michael Cooper, is a 3-D photograph of Mick and friends in pantomime outfits. Mick is wearing a wizard’s hat. Apart from a couple of ominous death-rattles which sound as though someone had passed away on the session, there’s nothing on the record to which anyone could take exception — unless of course you find it pretentious. Said Mick, ‘I don’t think we’re becoming alienated from the fans. In America, over half our fans are between the ages twenty and thirty.’

  What about moral responsibility to fans? I asked. ‘If any moral responsibility exists at all for the artist, it is to turn everybody on to what he thinks and what he’s doing. When judges talk about moral responsibility they mean “Be cool. Don’t say anything.” In America they told us, “Don’t tell people to take LSD, and don’t tell people not to go to Vietnam!” That’s what they think moral responsibility is — kow-towing to their scene. But it’s really the complete opposite. What this country needs now is a new moral direction. If we had that the economic thing would follow automatically. Britain just doesn’t know where her moral destiny lies any more. All we hear is compromise and mismanagement — because a socialist government can’t work in a capitalist system.

  ‘They should really lay it down instead of grovelling at the feet of de Gaulle and Johnson. They keep coming out with moral justifications for their actions, when everybody knows that the real reasons are economic.

  ‘What use is Britain to mankind today? The only role she can play is that of a moral leader.’

  He has no regrets about leaving university to become a rock and roll singer — ‘Well that’s what I used to be, didn’t I?’ He says the question should be: ‘Have I any regrets about ever going to the London School of Economics? But, you know, I often wonder what all the other people who were there with me are doing now. I haven’t seen any of them for years.’

  He didn’t even remember me.

  POSTSCRIPT The success of the Rolling Stones over the past twenty years owes much to Mick Jagger’s energy and ambitions. In 1967 they were very much in the shadow of the Beatles, but by the mid-seventies they were being billed as the ‘greatest rock and roll band’ in the world. Whether they are is a matter of debate, but they are certainly the most successful financially. Jagger, married and divorced once and apparently not likely to make the same mistake again, lives much of the time in New York. Always a fitness fanatic, he runs several miles a day during Rolling Stones tour
s. A regular figure in the world’s gossip columns he is (at the time of writing) still living with top American model Jerry Hall.

  December 1967

  Pete Townshend

  The Who are the group who smash up their guitars at the end of their act. They’re the boys who pick their noses (only their own) during Top Of The Pops, and they’re the group who tattoo their umbilici and bosoms with bullseyes and girls’ eyes and appear at gigs wearing only half a shirt each and no vests.

  When they perform, they somehow manage to make a noise with their ultra-amplified guitars which sounds like a jet raid on Haiphong, their arms go whirling round like windmills out of control, and they sing songs like ‘My Generation’, which explains itself, ‘Pictures of Lily’, which doesn’t but which is actually about sexual fantasy, and ‘Happy Jack’ which is about a donkey on the Isle of Man.

  When Radio London first started plugging their records they were mods, which, you’ll remember, were a new kind of rocker two or three years ago. They wore Union Jack jackets and pretty painted T-shirts and were managed by those colour supplement favourites Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp.

  Last week their latest album was released. It is called ‘The Who Sell Out’ and is remarkable because they are still unashamedly playing rock and roll music. (Rock and roll is a dirty word among this year’s golliwogged pop sophisticates.)

  It is also a remarkable album because it is made up of a selection of songs naming branded goods like Heinz, Medac and Odorono, all tied together with a collection of nostalgic station identification jingles from Radio London. The effect is that the album sounds rather like a pirate radio programme.

  There are four Who: Keith Moon, who clouts his drums like a man deranged, John Entwhistle who is married, Pete Townshend who is the clever one and does most of the composing, and Roger Daltrey who has orange hair and who caught mild pneumonia after sitting in a bath full of frozen baked beans during the photo session for the album cover.

  If The Who have an architect or prime mover it is Townshend, twenty-two-year-old ex-Ealing Art College student. ‘It’s all because of me hooter,’ says Townshend, who reckons that he earns about £20,000 a year as a composer and £500 a week as a Who.

  ‘When I was a kid I had this enormous great hooter’ (now it’s only a mere shade grander than the average English nose) ‘and I was always being baited about it. So I used to think “I’ll bloody well show them. I’ll push me huge hooter out at them from every newspaper in England, then they won’t laugh at me.”

  ‘And when I first started singing with a group I used to go up on stage and forget that I was Pete Townshend who wasn’t a success with the ladies, and all of a sudden I’d become aware that there were little girls giggling and pointing at me nose. And I’d think “Sod ’em, they’re not gonna laugh at me!” And I’d get angrier still.

  ‘My whole absurdly demonstrative stage act was worked out to turn myself into a body instead of a face. Most pop singers were pretty, but I wanted people to look at my body, and not to have to bother looking at my head if they didn’t like the look of it.’

  It was Townshend’s idea to make an album of commercials. They’d produced an advertisement for Coca Cola in America and the idea to make an LP of them ‘sort of grew’.

  There’s one very poignant little song, about a girl who goes for an audition but doesn’t get the part because she smells of perspiration. The song finishes with the line ‘she should have used Odorono’. Apparently Odorono weren’t too happy when they first heard it, because they didn’t want their brand name to be associated with bad smells!

  ‘We wanted to lighten the load of the pressures which are facing people,’ explains Townshend. ‘On the one side there’s the psychedelia and on the other there’s the boredom of the ballad singers. So we came out with an absurd album of melody and humour. Pop music should, we think, be understandable and entertaining.’

  By the pretentious pop standards of 1967 The Who are, I suppose, old fashioned. The flowers may have wilted but it’s the luvvy-dovey lot who are still in vogue, not the blatantly aggressive, destructive mob who took to the August Bank Holiday beaches. And when I met Townshend, his fawn linen suit with turn-ups owed more to Brighton 1965 than Chicago 1932.

  ‘I sometimes feel incredibly out of date, but it’s because the ideas we have are so powerful that they outlive the group. Like pop and op art. Kit Lambert invented the term pop art music for us, but when we were getting sick of it people were only just beginning to wear pop art T-shirts.’

  The Who are, says Townshend, a pantomime — but not one you’d take your children to knowingly, and showmanship is what the smashing up of instruments and equipment is all about.

  ‘It’s traumatic, melodramatic, theatrical — pure basic emotion. We couldn’t get the same crescendo any other way. God knows we’ve tried. We don’t like to smash all the gear up — it costs money. But there really isn’t any other way.

  ‘It’s like an auto-destructive ballet, as though every performance we do will be our last, and every audience thinks they’ve seen the last. They can’t believe that it happened the night before and will happen again the night after. When we do an American tour I smash up a $200 guitar during our finale every night. And Keith gets through sets of drums worth about £2000 on every tour. We’re good circus entertainment.

  ‘I suppose in a way we’re making a gesture to the audience and trying to communicate with them.’

  Communication is, in fact, his obsession, but instead of giving dahlias to those with whom he doesn’t see eye to eye, he gets into a right old-fashioned barney.

  ‘“My Generation” (that’s the one where Roger Daltrey stutters “why don’t you all f-f-fade away”) was originally about anger and communication, but by the time we got it on record it came out as the pilled up kid who for the first time in his life becomes aware of things, but unfortunately the sheer process of taking purple hearts has incapacitated him and he can hardly speak.

  ‘He wants to say things but he can’t. It’s like having a big nose. You can’t communicate because of it. That’s what the stutter means.’

  POSTSCRIPT The Who kept touring and recording together right until 1982. Their greatest days were in the early seventies when Townshend’s rock musical ‘Tommy’ was filmed by Ken Russell, but they suffered a not altogether unexpected tragedy with the accidental death from drink and drugs of their drummer Keith Moon. Now Pete Townshend’s daughter plays in a rock band at St Paul’s Girls School.

  December 1967

  Paul Mccartney

  Paul McCartney is beginning to look very much like his father. His cheeks have thinned and his nose is sharper and almost lop-sided. He’s much less the baby-face.

  When I visited him a couple of days before he went to meditate in India with the Maharishi it was lunchtime (mine) and breakfast time (his). His chin and neck were blue and rough, and his open pink shirt showed the freckles on his chest. He looked pale.

  He’s the only Beatle who lives in London. He had to, he says. He’s the social Beatle. The one who never misses the best films or theatre, who turns up at the most first nights, who goes to the most fashionable clubs, who gets the most invitations to parties, and who accepts the most.

  He lives in St John’s Wood, behind a ten-foot-high wall, and gates controlled by an electronic impulse from the house. There’s a gas lamp with an electric bulb in the front garden.

  ‘Living here is a necessity, because it’s handy but quiet,’ says Paul McCartney.

  At the same time it makes him dangerously vulnerable. The day after Brian Epstein’s death the house was besieged with onlookers. When he finally went out to ask them to go away, copies of newspapers with Epstein’s picture on them were thrust into his hands. ‘Sign your autograph here, Paul, over the picture,’ he was asked.

  And when he answers the telephone (he has two separate lines and has the numbers changed frequently) it can be in any one of a bewildering variety of voices, until he discovers the
identity of the caller.

  ‘It’s like Casey’s Court at Paul’s,’ his father complained while in London for a weekend. ‘The phone never stops and half of the calls are from fans. I can’t get any rest. I’m going back to Liverpool.’

  McCartney is the urbane Beatle. The polished one. The obvious culture chaser … (’but don’t call me a cultural Pied Piper — I’m not.’) He has his hair done regularly by a young man from Vidal Sassoon who goes round to his house in the evenings, and he’s even got round to buying Savile Row suits. ‘It’s the first time he’s ever done that,’ says girl friend Jane Asher, with a hint of self-satisfaction.

  ‘I’ve always been the spokesman for the group to a certain extent,’ he says. ‘That’s my job — chatting up the press and all that. And if the other three were to go freaky looking and wear ridiculous things, I’d be the one to stay unfreaky just to reassure everyone.’

  His house is an enormous grey cube built in 1830 — a marriage of Beardsley originals, surrealist apples or fish and video tape machines. There’s a chrome Paolozzi piece called Solo which looks like a bed-head. (‘I didn’t used to like sculpture but this is groovy … it’s a robot, a mantlepiece and an altar, if you like’), pictures of the family, of the horse he bought for his father, Drake’s Drum, winning at Aintree, a Druid’s certificate which he found in a junk shop and disco awards. (Most of his gold records are climbing his father’s staircase like bluebirds at the family home in Cheshire.)

  Then there’s his music … a celeste in the living room, various sitars and guitars in a little studio at the top of the house and a deck-chair-painted piano.