“I’ve always worked with similar ideas – going from music to writing and back again – so nothing was difficult in that respect. A Hawkwind idea could develop into a story idea and the other way round. If Hawkwind or Blue Öyster Cult (the people I most often worked with) wanted some lyrics they’d usually emerge from whatever was obsessing me at the time… I was perfectly happy for Dave Brock, say, or Eric Bloom, to change the tunes I’d done or alter the lyrics to fit new music. None of that bothered me.”
Being a generous collaborator isn’t the same as not caring. Moorcock professes himself frustrated that New Worlds Fair “could all be much better” despite featuring contributions from, no surprise, members of Hawkwind and guitarist Snowy White (who toured with Pink Floyd). Does Moorcock have any particular memories of recording the album? “Um, you mean clearer than the usual drug-addled memories of the day?”
Moving on, he’s more forthcoming about working on a Robert Calvert project, Lucky Leif And The Longships. Recorded in 1975, with the benefit of hindsight the high-water mark for Moorcock’s musical career, this was another concept album, about Vikings in North America. Brian Eno produced the sessions.
“Eno was very articulate and quick-witted,” Moorcock remembers. “He could ask for what he wanted and usually got it from the guys he worked with precisely because he knew what he was doing, or at least where he wanted to go. It was wonderful working with someone who worked, if you like, as fast as I did. I wanted him to produce my next album but Calvert talked me out of it. In the end the ‘next’ UA album never appeared because I fell out with the A&R people there. But I always had this desire to work with him. I’d still do it if I had the chance.”
He regrets too not hooking up with Joy Division, an idea that came about because Ian Curtis was a regular visitor to publisher and bookseller Dave Britton’s shop, where the singer would buy old copies of New Worlds. “There was some talk of us working together,” Moorcock has posted at the Moorcock’s Miscellany website. “Shame it never came off. Poor lad. I liked JD a fair bit… At one point we discussed JD doing a version of Brothel In Rosenstrasse [title of both a Moorcock novel and a track on a re-release of New Worlds Fair].”
Both comments suggest Moorcock, now in his seventh decade, still has a sense of unfinished business over his musical adventures. Indeed, in an email sent in late 2012, he told Adventure Rocketship! he was working with Martin Stone, ex-guitarist with The Action (a richly talented mod band signed to EMI by George Martin, whose 1960s career serves as a near-textbook tale of how bad luck can scupper hopes of stardom), and longtime collaborator Pete Pavli.
On the other hand, if Moorcock the musician had found more fame in this universe, we may never have got Mother London or the Pyatt Quartet, extraordinary slipstream novels. Besides, it’s not all bad being a writer. “I was always sort of torn from an early age as to whether I enjoyed writing, music or acting the most,” says Moorcock. “I enjoyed them all. I always felt if one career stopped working I’d have another. But writing was the least uncomfortable – didn’t involved touring or crap dressing rooms…”
Mick Farren: Still Raging Against the Machine
- Sam Jordison -
“Don’t worry, I’m not dying,” says Mick Farren and starts coughing again.
A few hours before meeting Farren, I’d been watching YouTube footage of the singer/writer and his proto-punk band, The Deviants. One of the best clips is a grainy black-and-white film of a free concert in Hyde Park in 1969. Farren is lithe, amphetamine skinny, prowling the stage under a giant white man’s Afro, bellowing and howling into the microphone. When a scantily clad woman jumps on stage from the crowd, he writhes around her. For a wonderful few minutes, he looks exactly like all The Man’s worst fears in one slender body.
But that same frame is now showing the effects of time. The Afro has flattened out. The stomach’s bigger. His feet are swollen. I know because he isn’t wearing socks. He also has that terrible cough. He might not be dying, but it doesn’t sound great in there. It sounds, in fact, like an electric kettle with a stuck switch that has kept on bubbling, long after the water has boiled.
Yet the contrast between the man on this cold January afternoon in Brighton in 2013 and the man on that summer stage at the end of the 1960s isn’t as stark as you might think. He might need a stool to rest on when he gets on stage nowadays, but it doesn’t take long in his company to realise that he must be an overwhelming presence when he’s up there. He’s still got that spark. And there’s no stemming his flow, even if he is talking to me through a respirator. (A recent bout of flu has exacerbated his COPD.) Crucially, there is nothing wrong with his brain. Nothing that he hasn’t already used to great advantage, anyway, in producing all The Deviants’ surreal lyrics – not to mention great screeds of free-wheeling journalism on the legendary counterculture paper, the International Times, and on the NME during its 1970s glory years.
Farren, who once had a considerable reputation for failing to suffer fools at all, also remains adept at telling you who wears the trousers, even if he’s had to swap skinny-fit flares for tracksuit bottoms.
“Johnny Cash once helped me check my tape recorder was working,” he tells me as I fiddle around with my microphone before we kicked off the interview. “It’s good when the interview subject worries about your technology.”
It’s also good when your interview subject is the kind of journalist who got to interview Johnny Cash – if a little overwhelming. Where do you go after that?
Remembering that I am representing Adventure Rocketship! I decide to blast straight off into space. Because alongside more than 40 years in journalism and on stage, Mick Farren is also a prolific author of science fiction, with a good 20 books to his name. So how did a rock and roller get so involved in fantasy?
“Well, it’s an escape. Without getting too Freudian about this, I had a rotten childhood. It made life more bearable to be off in my mind with John Carter on Mars rather than in Worthing with me dad – or my stepfather, actually. I used to live in a fantasy world where I couldn’t get on a train without thinking I was James Bond in From Russia With Love. It just made life more interesting. I was constantly playing fantasy games. I grew up on Dan Dare and The Eagle and Flash Gordon, and Journey Into Space on the radio. Almost before I could read I was fascinated by science fiction of one kind or another. So I was just kind of naturally following along.”
But even if he’d always harboured a passion for the form, it took Farren a while to get started.
“When I left school, I told everyone I wanted a career in advertising – but of course I spent most of my time trying to get a band together. Round about the mid 60s I dived into rock and roll and then into the counterculture and worked for International Times and eventually edited it. And then we got busted...”
International Times was actually busted more than once. In 1967, they were raided under the premise of the Obscene Publications Act and Farren (backed up by a legendary fundraising gig, the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream, headlined by Pink Floyd) helped take over the editorial, and put out a paper even though the police had taken away most of their equipment. After that, there was a long round of litigation and reprisal. At one stage the magazine even pulled off their own ‘raid’ on Scotland Yard and published details of its floorplan and the locks on its doors. Eventually, in 1972, the magazine was convicted for publishing contact ads for gay men. But the authorities weren’t so lucky the year before, when they tried to nail the magazine for publishing Nasty Tales, an underground comic book featuring artists such as Robert Crumb. Farren and three others found themselves up before the judge. He chose to defend himself in court. He won. But, Farren tells me, “I started to feel I was burning out. After being at the Old Bailey for two weeks... I felt it was time to do something else. So I began on The Texts Of Festival, which was trying to integrate a dystopian future with a leftover rock-and-roll quasi-religion. That enabled me to bring my interests together.”
If this sounds
unusual, it has nothing on Farren’s most enduring work, the DNA Cowboys trilogy. This is a series of novels initially published from 1976-77 loosely following (and I use ‘loosely’ in the loosest possible sense of the word) the adventures of two drug-snaffling, free-loving hippies. They meander through a world where reality has to be maintained with stasis generators, backed up by a religious order of assassins, where material goods are all delivered by computer (think of an early version of a 3D printer – but one that happens to be insane and intent on destroying the world) and where one AA Catto, a female dictator in a permanently 13-year-old body, reanimates Elvis and embarks on a murder spree that would make Attila the Hun go weak at the knees. Like I say, it’s an odd book. But it makes a curious kind of sense too, a reflection of the counterculture in which it was written.
“I was,” Farren says, “trying to make a logical linear scenario out of the kind of imagery that was being tossed around by Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. Plus, in science fiction I’ve always had a fascination with wanting to write about the low lives. I like an evil dictator of the universe – but I’m much more interested in who were the conmen and bank robbers and drug dealers on Mongo. I wanted to take a street hipster concept and push it into a fictional world.”
So do you think SF gives you an outlet to launch things that you wouldn’t normally be able to go for in other kinds of novels?
“Yes, absolutely. Especially ideas. I have all these politico friends who say, ‘I don’t read fiction.’ And okay, you can read Marx, you can read Mao – but nothing had a bigger political impact on me than Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or in a very different way, Bill Burroughs. I do see fiction as a propaganda machine. I don’t mean that fiction is written according to the dictates of a party. It’s my own personal propaganda – but I wanted it to have some more lasting effect than merely being decorating entertainment. And that was very easy, growing up in the era of Dylan and The Doors, when rock and roll was really a means of communication. And that was the other beautiful relationship between the sort of fiction I was writing, what rock and roll was doing and the world in general. Plus simultaneously, we were taking an awful lot of psychedelics, which wasn’t exactly science fiction. But Sun Ra sure made a hell of a lot more sense on acid than he did without. Plus, psychedelics seemed to contribute to an appreciation of a much larger universe. Where you end up with Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun or Interstellar Overdrive, or various bits of Grateful Dead, or Jefferson Airplane. That was all science fiction. Once you’ve started expanding the imagination, you’re going to be converted into, if not speculative fiction, at least a speculative state of mind. That was the big link for me.”
Did you feel you were part of a new wave or out on your own?
“I sort of missed the bus on the actual 1960s New Wave. Michael Moorcock and I are good friends. He was putting out New Worlds with Ballard – and everybody. They were sort of the SF version of the underground press when I was at International Times doing a bi-weekly tabloid. We were on the same train, but not in the same carriage. I hadn’t really started writing fiction then.”
And what about William Burroughs? Would you call him speculative fiction?
“Oh definitely. It’s the Burroughs brothers. William and Edgar Rice – you know, the Mugwump. There’s that great still from the Cronenberg Naked Lunch of Burroughs and the Mugwump sitting in the bar together. The distance between that and the barroom scene in Star Wars is not very big. It’s a jump of philosophy, not of visual impact, or imagery.
“The time when I discovered Bill Burroughs, I was coming out of Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke, and suddenly, I’m in the interzone – which is just as fantastic. And in many ways much more appealing. I think once again, it goes back to the fact that it’s picaresque – it’s a lowlife story. It’s not kings and emperors. Frodo does not have to go to the mountain to save the Earth. I was much more interested in trying to write Micky Spillane novels in the future.
“That’s the other great influence on my work. When I was a kid I was reading Micky Spillane and Jim Thompson and Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Spillane, well put it this way, I got to the cheap pulp ones before the classy ones. It was Spillane and Thompson rather than Chandler that I read first. Which also brought in a much more street language. They used shorter sentences – punchy stuff. And even various kinds of slang and whatever.”
That pulp influence can also be seen in a marked penchant for sleaze in Farren’s novels. There’s drink and drugs. There are pimps and prostitutes. There are whips and all kind of cross-gender swinging. Most disturbingly, in the DNA Cowboys, there is AA Catto. She may have the mind of a fully functioning adult, but she remains locked inside a 13-year-old body – and has a lot of sex. It isn’t any more unsettling than, say, Lolita, and there’s nothing in the book that doesn’t get published by the truckload every week in Japanese Hentai. Even so, I was reading the novels when the story about Jimmy Savile’s depravity first broke and it made me feel squeamish. I eventually decided that Catto was social commentary, more deliberately freaky than creepy. Farren certainly wasn’t condoning abuse. I was also reassured when I read Farren’s autobiography Give The Anarchist A Cigarette (which, incidentally, is superb). There he devotes considerable space to condemning the way certain (unnamed) 1970s rock stars took advantage of underage groupies. Even so I can’t avoid the question. I start off by mentioning Savile – and Farren groans.
“Savile was just creepy! But had the power to carry you along. He was very touchy-feely. If you were walking with him, he would take your arm.”
You met him?
“Quite a few times. Just wandering around the BBC and stuff. Ugh.”
In Give The Anarchist A Cigarette you talk about rock groups and underage girls. And there’s AA Catto in the DNA Cowboys…
“I’m more talking about Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco [Los Angeles nightclub] and 13-year-olds being served up to [mentions famous Brit rock band]. And there’s other people still alive who liked young girls. And I’d probably get sued if I mention them, so I won’t… You know, some of the worst pervs are the violently angry moralists. There was a woman busted last week in New Hampshire…”
This is Lisa Biron, who was charged for involving her own 14-year-old daughter in sex acts – and then filming them.
“…She was making kiddie porn while she was also a pro-bono lawyer for anti-abortion, anti-gay groups. It’s a strange, huge self-hating thing.”
And what about AA Catto?
“I guess I was just being perverse. It’s not paedophilia as much of the idea of an incredibly powerful and sinister little girl. It made a change from the Mekon. It’s difficult… Incredibly scary little girls are a factor in everything. Modern Japanese horror. Alice In Wonderland.”
We fall silent. Until I remind Mick that he also once said that in creating AA Catto he had unwittingly predicted Julie Burchill.
“Yeah... Oh God. This is going to get me into trouble...”
As ill-luck has it, the very day that I’m talking to Mick about her, Burchill was writing a piece for the Observer that would express such negative attitudes towards trans-women that the paper would be forced to apologise and withdraw it. Making Farren’s eventual judgement on her all the more pertinent: “She gets the wrong end of the stick and then buries it up to its hilt... One day she’ll be liking Thatcher and the next she’ll be a Stalinist. The trouble with Julie is that she has no education except what she’s gleaned from the street and the Groucho Club. She really doesn’t know her political ass from her elbow – except in terms of shock. She’s a self-promoting egomaniac.”
As well as apparently predicting Burchill in the DNA Cowboys, it’s also a novel notable for the way Farren gives a surprisingly accurate description of drone warfare, three decades before it first arrived:
“What in the hell was that?”
“Quin plane autopilot.”
“What?”
“It’s some little gizmo th
ey dreamed up in Dur Shanzag a while back. Automatic killers. They let em loose and ever since they’ve been buzzing around looking for live targets.”
But when I ask about this excellent augury, he shrugs it off: “Yeah, that wasn’t too hard. Nobody ever predicted the fax machine.”
Actually, some say Jules Verne did, but is there anything Farren is surprised hasn’t happened?
“Oh, all of it! Although I’m not so much surprised as disappointed. Just about everything we hoped for has failed. Kubrick said we’d be on Mars by now. The Jetsons told me I’d have a private plane. Dan Dare said nuclear weapons would be outlawed in 1965. But we didn’t get any of this shit! If Victorian technology had continued on, if steampunk was real, you’d go to the kitchen and find the six taps that were giving you Coca Cola, and beer as well as hot and cold water… That’s one of the fascinations of steampunk. The tech. I don’t know if you ever saw those things – or you’re too young – those wonderful things in department stores where you’d put the money into a tube. I loved all that shit. It was an interesting mass-distribution technology. Now we’ve come down to so much individual isolation. There are at least three replicated computers in this room. Why?! On the other hand we’re not a nuclear wasteland. Total dystopia has not taken over.”
We move on to talk about Elvis, Dylan, Paul Krugman, the new horrors the Tories are inflicting on us, the even worse horrors of the American right, and the fact that the baby boomers are coming to the end of their time. “Death,” says Farren, “is going to be a growth industry. I think the angel business will see quite an upturn by the end of the decade. Get into the angel business! And morticians and tombstones.” At one point, when we’re talking about ebooks and the financial problems of modern publishing and the unfathomable popularity of 50 Shades Of Grey, Farren laments: “I don’t know. It’s not my world anymore.”
Adventure Rocketship! Let's All Go To The Science Fiction Disco Page 2
