Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  Being part of an Arts Lab was a social activity as much as it was about producing finished work. It encouraged people to be jacks of all trades, rather than concentrating on just painting or poetry or playing an instrument. Or, as Alan Moore put it, the ‘ethos of the Arts Lab was that you could do whatever you wanted, that you didn’t have to limit yourself to one particular medium, that you could jump about, you could blend media together and come up with new hybrids. This was of course all mixed in with the general soup of sensations that was the 1960s.’ There was no formal network of Arts Labs or central leadership. The only things linking them were a newsletter that went to every group and the occasional conference. Some Arts Labs managed to get funding from local government, and applied for grants from the Arts Council, but most were self-funding.

  The Northampton Arts Lab was small and particularly ramshackle, consisting at its height of no more than a couple of dozen people, with more men than women. They met every Tuesday evening at 8 p.m. in a hired room at the Becket and Sargeant Youth Centre, and put on poetry readings, light shows and dramatic performances at various other venues. They produced roughly bi-monthly magazines, Rovel and Clit Bits, which were electrostencilled, hand-stapled, and looked a lot like Embryo, the zine Moore put together himself at school. Moore was part of the Northampton Arts Lab for two or three years and – as well as producing three issues of Embryo under its aegis – contributed at least one illustration and two-page comic strip to the third issue of Rovel. He did learn some of his craft at the Arts Lab: ‘That was where I first started writing songs, or song lyrics at least, working with musicians, which gives you a certain sense of the dynamic of words that you don’t get from any other field of endeavour. It was where I started writing short sketches and plays, which, again, is very, very useful. It teaches you about the dynamics of setting scenes up, resolutions, stuff like that. All of these things – poetry teaches you something about words and narrative; performing plays: creating different characters, different voices; writing songs … although they seem miles away from comics, all of them taught me things that have been incredibly useful since, even though I didn’t know it at the time.’ He concedes that ‘none of the art we were producing was wonderful, and so I can’t say that I learned at the feet of any great masters. What it did teach me was a certain attitude to art, an attitude that was not precious, that held that art was something you put together in fifteen minutes before you went on stage and performed it … it was messy – no lasting work of art emerged from it. What did emerge from that period was a certain set of aspirations, feelings, an idea of possibilities more than anything.’ It was also a forum that stressed performance – Moore couldn’t just write a poem, he was encouraged to recite it. He found he had a particular talent: ‘If you’d have seen me back then, you might have thought I was good at reading poems, I could engage an audience, I was a decent performer. I’m not saying the poems themselves were any good, but I was increasingly aware of what an audience responded to.’

  The Arts Lab also provided a venue for existing artists. Moore was particularly impressed by the Principal Edwards Magic Theatre, a dozen-strong group who lived in a commune in Kettering, just up the road from Northampton. He saw them as ‘a model of the sort of thing that I wanted to do’, and what they were doing was described by the Observer in 1970:

  A group of young people, mostly from Exeter University, are at present touring the country giving what they call mixed-media entertainment under the name of Principal Edwards Magic Theatre. They perform songs, dance, present light shows, intone semi-mystical poetry and enact masques. There are 14 members in all and they have just released an LP of some of their music, called, appropriately, Soundtrack.

  But perhaps the main benefit Moore got from the Arts Lab was that he acquired a new group of friends, people like Richard Ashby, ‘one of my all-time heroes … Rich would overcome his own lack of talent in certain areas by thinking up some way to get around the difficulty, and it would usually be simple, ingenious, elegant. He had a mind which I really admired; he had an approach to art which I really admired. That was an influence that stayed with me every bit as much as the influence of people like William Burroughs, Brian Eno or Thomas Pynchon.’

  Moore, Ashby and their friends wore their hair long, and they smoked dope on camping trips to Salisbury Plain, Scotland and Amsterdam. Arriving in Holland, on his first trip abroad when he was eighteen or nineteen, Moore was told by a Dutch customs official that his long hair made him look like a girl. So he began growing a beard.

  It was through the Arts Lab that Moore met the Northampton-based folk musician Tom Hall, who took him under his wing. The two would remain friends (and occasional artistic collaborators) until Hall’s death in 2003. Hall was the first full-time professional artist Moore got to know. He remembers Mick Bunting, a leading member of the Arts Lab, saying once, ‘“If Tom Hall can’t live by his music he can’t live.” Which was the first time I’d actually heard that spelled out. I remember thinking that was awesome. That that’s what I wanted to be: somebody who could be completely themselves, who did not have a master or boss and who subsisted entirely upon the fruits of their own creativity. Tom was a real formative idol.’

  But the countercultural movement had already peaked. California and London had moved on, and while the provinces lagged a little behind, the Northampton Arts Lab fizzled out around August or September 1972. As Moore explains, ‘The reasons are very similar to those that caused the demise of similar groups everywhere – lack of money, public support at gigs, really good usable premises and equipment, and the general frustration of not getting very far, all of which caused general disillusionment. After around four years the people involved no longer seemed to feel the need for “organised” group activities any more. Many felt they could work better on their own, or with a few friends than in a “big” group; others just seemed fed up.’

  Within six months, a successor organisation had formed: the Northampton Arts Group, which was active for around eighteen months from spring 1973. This was a loose association of about twenty people, many of whom had previously been published in Embryo or Rovel. Moore has said he only had ‘some involvement’ with the Arts Group, and he appears on one list among those who ‘on occasions we’re helped by’, rather than as a member of the group, but in terms of finished results, it was more fruitful for him than the Arts Lab had been. The group published three electrostencilled zines in 1973 – Myrmidon, Whispers in Bedlam and The Northampton Arts Group Magazine #3 – and Moore drew the covers for all of them, as well as contributing pieces like ‘The Electric Pilgrim Zone Two’ and ‘Letter to Lavender’ and internal illustrations. He was an ‘inevitable’ presence at poetry readings, performing ‘ever popular’ pieces like ‘Lester the Geek’ and ‘Hymn to Mekon’. Neither of those was ever published, but a couple of Moore’s Arts Group pieces would go on to have convoluted afterlives.

  Moore’s cover for the third magazine, which he titled ‘Lounge Lizards’, stuck with him. He first used it as the basis of his pitch when he entered a talent competition run by the comics company DC Thomson: ‘My idea concerned a freakish terrorist in white-face make-up who traded under the name of the Doll and waged war upon a totalitarian state sometime in the late 1980s. DC Thomson decided a transsexual terrorist wasn’t quite what they were looking for … Thus faced with rejection, I did what any serious artist would do. I gave up.’ Nearly ten years later, however, elements of this idea would provide some inspiration for V for Vendetta, and a quarter of a century on, the Doll showed up as the Painted Doll, a major villain in Moore’s series Promethea (1999–2005).

  Moore also wrote a performance piece, ‘Old Gangsters Never Die’, which would resurface in a number of places in different forms over the years. He has joked that as it was a spoken monologue set to music about gangsters, he therefore invented gangsta rap. He was proud of the piece: ‘The language in that, and the rhythms, that was the pinnacle of my style of writing at that time and I�
��d written it to perform. I realised it had great emotional effect, it had a got a lot of punch, especially with a little bit of music in the background. I also realised it didn’t mean anything, other than evoking this rich material about gangsters. It didn’t say anything. I started to think the best thing to do would be stuff with the same command of language, but if it means something as well, I might get somewhere.’

  As with the Arts Lab, a legacy of the Arts Group was that Moore formed a number of long friendships and industry contacts. These included Jamie Delano, who would follow him into a successful career in British and American comics; Alex Green, who would go on to be the saxophonist for a number of bands, including Army; and Michael Chown, known by the nickname Pickle, with the stage name Mr Liquorice, who Moore would later describe as a ‘new wave composer, entrepreneur, and Adolf Hitler lookalike’.

  And it was on the way home from an Arts Group poetry reading in late 1973 – they were both taking a shortcut through a graveyard – that Moore met Phyllis Dixon. Another Northampton native, Phyllis was small and slim, a honey blonde. The two soon moved into a small flat in Queens Park Parade together. Within six months they were married, had moved to a bigger flat on Colwyn Road and had acquired a cat called Tonto. By this point, Moore had an office job at Kelly Brothers, a subcontractor for the Gas Board.

  The Arts Lab movement had proved short lived, and virtually all of them had vanished by 1975. The only exception was the Birmingham Arts Lab, which survived until 1982, most likely because it owned its own premises, had always been run with relative professionalism and had secured Arts Council funding. Moore put the end of the movement down to the zeitgeist: ‘The tone of the times was changing, that sort of very spontaneous approach to art was something that could only have happened in the late sixties and didn’t survive very long into the early seventies. The economic climate was changing, people were changing.’ Moore was acutely aware that the sixties were over. The broad utopian vision that global consciousness was expanding and the Age of Aquarius was dawning had been scaled back to a few people living in communes and advocating ecological positions like self-sufficiency. Countercultural and ‘underground’ art styles became subsumed into the cultural mainstream. The Beckenham Arts Group might have ended, but David Bowie had the consolation prize of seeing Ziggy Stardust go platinum.

  Maggie Gray has noted that ‘the prevalent narrative of this period … asserts an absolute and definitive split between contradictory but previously co-existent sections of the counterculture, usually categorised as its cultural and political wings’. The movement appeared to split into two factions: those who sought radical social change through political activism, and those had come to see the counterculture purely as a mode of art and music. In 1975, Moore found what looked like the perfect vehicle to square that circle. This was the Alternative Newspaper of Northampton, which started as a newsletter concerned with grass-roots politics, particularly charting the problems caused by the rapid expansion of the town. Issue #2 boasted of ‘Featuring trade unions, household fuel, welfare rights, citizens’ advice, arts, community information, education, housing’. Moore’s own experiences made him highly sympathetic to ANoN’s aims and he took up political cartooning; in the event, though, this effort wasn’t entirely successful. He diagnoses the problem as the venue: ‘ANoN was a very tame, very very tame, local alternative newspaper who asked me to do a comic strip for them. I did the rather anodyne Anon E. Mouse, which is not one of the high points of my career, but even that was apparently too inflammatory for the sensibilities of the editors and so I withdrew the strip.’

  The sum total of Anon E. Mouse is five four-panel strips, published in ANoN #1–5, December 1974 to May 1975.

  The first strip consists of four almost identical panels in which Anon E. Mouse and Manfred Mole are depicted sitting at a bar bemoaning the fact that people only sit around, they never do anything. The second (reproduced here) starts with Anon E. Mouse ‘laying it on the line with the Reverend Cottonmouth’. In the third, Anon E. Mouse rejects the idea of being a movie star after seeing a washed-up Mickey Mouse, while the fourth has Anon E. Mouse and Manfred falling out on the day of the revolution over the colour of the flag they’ll be flying on the barricades. The fifth is based around a pun – cartoonist Kenyon the Coyote tells Anon E. Mouse that he’s going to try ‘biting humour’; ‘if you don’t humour me, I’ll bite your throat out’. And that is it.

  There’s nothing specific to Northampton or particularly topical, but perhaps most damning – and far harder to pin on editorial policy – Moore does nothing very interesting with the medium. The art is stiff. The ‘repeated image’ of the first strip exposes just how inconsistent the drawings are. Most panels are straightforward talking heads and all five strips are simple conversations between two characters. There’s no visual invention or much in the way of background detail. It’s early work, and there’s very little of it, but Anon E. Mouse is not a good place to look for glimmers of Alan Moore’s nascent genius.

  Around this time, perhaps at least partially out of frustration with ANoN, Moore began planning his own magazine. Having decided on a title, Dodgem Logic, he wrote a letter with a list of interview questions to Brian Eno, and received a very thoughtful ten-page set of answers. Moore has remained an aficionado and it’s not hard to see why. Eno thinks very hard about a supposedly ephemeral art form like pop music, he’s concerned about the purpose of art, about the process of making it, and his work is often collaborative. His influences are science fiction and surreal comedy as much as they are other musicians. In his own words, however, Moore was not ‘together enough’ to complete an issue of the magazine, and spent a great deal of time doing little more than drawing the cover. Thirty years later, given the chance to interview whoever he liked for an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Chain Reaction, Moore chose Eno, and took the opportunity to apologise that his earlier attempt never saw print.

  In 1976, Moore collaborated on a musical play that must count as his first major completed work: ‘Another Suburban Romance was a surrealist drama, I’m not even sure what it was about, or if it was even about anything. It involved a number of characters that were moving through this series of scenarios that involved meditations upon politics, sex, death and all of the other big issues.’ Among Moore’s contributions were three songs: ‘Judy Switched Off the TV’, ‘Old Gangsters Never Die’ (which, as noted, he had written about three years before) and the finale, ‘Another Suburban Romance’. (A surviving copy of the script – which was made on Moore’s typewriter – has handwritten annotations by him indicating where musical cues should go.)

  While a 29-page script was completed, the piece was never performed in full, and it remains unpublished (although the songs were visualised as comic strips, without reference to the original play, by Avatar in 2003). Alex Green, one of the participants, says it was ‘a cross between Beckett and Peyton Place, had been written by Alan and Jamie Delano and was then in rehearsal. Glyn Bush and Pickle wrote an incredibly complex score which was exhaustingly perfected and mostly recorded only for the project to founder when a couple of actors dropped out.’

  Another Suburban Romance has four scenes, and five characters: Kid, Gangster, Whore, Politico and Death. It was designed to be performed to an elaborate taped backing track, with a number of ambitious lighting effects, and features several long monologues and pieces of beat poetry. Scene One opens in a coffee bar where Kid is lamenting how bored he is when Gangster arrives, and – after he gives a rendition of ‘Judy Switched Off the TV’ – tells Kid he is looking for the mirror Bela Lugosi was using when he died cutting himself shaving. Gangster then performs ‘Old Gangsters Never Die’. Kid decides to track down Whore, who might know where the mirror is.

  Scene Two starts with an elaborate mimed routine in which Whore accosts Politico, then Gangster and finally Death. She performs a monologue that starts ‘Torn stockings, crumpled silk, lipstick and Benzedrine’ then Kid catches up with her. After comparing hard
luck stories, they are joined by Gangster and decide to visit Politico. At the opening of Scene Three, Politico is giving a long right-wing diatribe, before Kid enters. Politico is annoyed by Kid and doesn’t know anything about Lugosi’s mirror, but becomes excited at the thought it might be valuable. Gangster now enters, and reports that he has killed a number of Politico’s enemies, as ordered.

  Scene Four begins with a long diary entry from Death. The arrival of Kid and Whore interrupts him, and Death goes on to explain the afterlife: you only go to Heaven if you still have your tonsils, and Heaven’s located on Pluto. Politico is now looking to cut a deal with Kid to acquire the mirror. Death has the mirror, and shows it to each of them in turn. Whore performs ‘Whore’s Poem’ that starts ‘I heard men say she loved a lantern fish’. As they look in the mirror, Kid sees himself in a vast landscape, while Politico sees the Virgin Mary in a mansion. The Gangster arrives, and Kid, Whore and Politico learn that they are to die and depart for the afterlife. Gangster – who reveals himself to be another of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Pestilence – now performs ‘Another Suburban Romance’, after which Death pays Gangster for delivering the other three to him.

  We can see here hints of Moore’s interests in Americana. There is also a seedy cabaret vibe that recurs in a number of his other works. But Another Suburban Romance is an early piece, designed to play to the strengths of specific performers. Moore seems to have written the part of Gangster for himself to perform: we know he wrote the character’s songs, as he received sole credit for them in the Avatar adaptation, while Gangster has a similar persona (and gruff American accent) to the narrator of Brought to Light (1989), which Moore would later adapt into a performance piece. From the fact that Scene Four is longer than the others, twelve pages out of a total of twenty-nine, and shifts the focus from Gangster to Death, we might speculate that although Moore wrote the majority of the first half of the play, Delano was responsible for the second.