Riding the Circle Line to Ladbroke Grove with Alice Cooper

Before Alice Cooper became the big thing and media darlings with ‘School’s Out’ their core appeal in Britain was to freaks and rockers. What you have here is a few choice cuts from before the deluge that mostly focus on the underground press, Frendz and IT in particular. Here’s what Mick Farren and Nick Kent, among others, had to say about the band who ‘act as a mirror – people see themselves through us’.

Alice Cooper’s CBS distributed Straight label UK releases

‘a rock and roll band made up of mean Hollywood drag queens who disembowl chickens and beat each other on stage, and are really the kind of band that I’d like to play in’ – Mick Farren

Greg Shaw, Jukebox Jury Creem

Greg Shaw thinks it is all about the Stooges, he wouldn’t be the last

You wanna know all about third generation rock n roll then look no further . . . . Alice with Steve Mann in Frendz

. . . some more third generation proselytising with Jamie Mandelkau in IT

“Got me so hot I could scream . . .”

‘Alice Cooper are supreme pooff rock . . .’ Mick Farren at his most lazy, touting the consensus.

John Peel, Singles: Disc and Music Echo (March 25, 1972)

‘This really is an odd group to come to terms with . . .’ – John Peel

All change and mind the gap: ‘The sight of rocking hordes of 12+ boppers at Alice Cooper’s Wembley concert would seem to prove that his efforts in the direction of bizzaro teen appeal are paying dividends’. – Mick Farren

Below, Myles Palmer, on the eve of the Wembley concert, gives a perfect summation of where things then stood . . . a worthy quote line in every paragraph, but the conclusion will do: ‘As music it’s not half bad, as showbiz it’s riveting and as trash it is absolutely incomparable’.

Dave “Boss” Goodman arrives late to the party . . . While Nick Kent gets the scoop on the Coop after Wembley (July 1972):

While America sinks in a mass debauch of drugs, sex andviolence, the Coopers just keep on getting bigger and bigger. They are the first of the third-generation rock bands to really make it big, while others like Lou Reed and the Velvets and the Stooges were perhaps too wild and dangerous to catch on The Coopers act, while it is extremely entertaining, is in reality not half as powerful as some would have us imagine.

Rock Revival, Brighton 1968: Advertisements for Peace

1968 and the rock ‘n’ revival as pursued by The Who was in full-flight with ‘Shaking All Over’ and three Eddie Cochran covers added to their set, while The Move, having put ‘Weekend’ on their debut album, issued another Cochran song on their live EP ‘Something Else’. Mick Farren and his pals kept the flame burning bright in the underground press and with his Deviants kept the faith. He also teamed up with Brighton’s Unicorn Bookshop for a run of posters sold under the tag ‘advertisements for peace’ . . . and there was nary a Teddy Boy in sight among these rock history mavens.

Numbers 1–3 are part of a long-ago acquired batch of posters bought by Vinyl Head, Ramsgate. Each is 30 x 20 inches, published in 1968 by Unicorn Bookshop, Brighton with ‘Production: by Mean & Filthy’.

Unicorn Bookshop was situated at 50 Gloucester Road. It was opened by American Bill Butler and ran circa 1966–1974. Its psychedelic–beat–counterculture goods were advertised by a mural that covererd both sides of the shop front and which has recently been restored to its original glory.

There are a number of blog posts on the shop, John May’s site has one of the more detailed accounts [HERE] and there is also a Butler biography by Terry Adams, which gives some background on the selling and distribution of the posters, but there’s little to be found on their design.

Mean & Filthy was a front put together by Mick Farren and Steve Sparkes – Rich Deakin’s Keep It Together has the lowdown on their activities. A revised version of #2 for a Roundhouse gig (with Deviants 3rd on the bill) is reproduced, along with a Dylan, also a Mean and Filthy production, in Mick Farren’s Get On Down history of the rock poster. Based on a cover for Oz, the Dylan was a big seller, designed by Vytas Serelis, artist, sitar player and friend of Marc Bolan.

As Deakin points out, Farren had laid out the thinking behind the series in a piece for IT. . .

Guevara, Dylan, Hendrix and Eddie Cochran – heroes of the revolution

Paul Kaczmarek, who worked with Bill Butler, has very kindly provided the following information about the various rock related posters the shop printed and sold.

There were only three titles directly related to the ‘Rock Revival’ series:

Rock Revival 1 - Gene Vincent  (2,622 printed)

Rock Revival 2 – Elvis Presley (2,565 printed)

Rock Revival 3 – Eddie Cochran (2,500 printed)

These three, along with the Dylan and Hendrix, were the only Mean and Filthy productions – all first published March 1968. There are three variants of the Dylan poster (black/grey, orange and green versions). They were heavily reprinted in the early 1970s with some 10,000 in distribution. The numbering system used related to the sequence of release and was not a continuation of the Rock Revival series, so Jimi Hendrix was Unicorn’s 14th poster (with two variants), it was also based on a Vytas Serelis illustration. Other posters that are of interest include:

#8 – ‘Beatles scene’ (drawing by Richard O’Mahoney)

#36 – Paul McCartney (PK has found references to this but has not seen a copy).

#37 – John Mayall

B1 – Maharishi and The Beatles (drawing)

C1 – Eric Clapton (PK has not seen a copy only references to it in sales invoices)

The three Rock Revival posters link effortlessly with Farren and Barker’s Watch Out Kids and with the aesthetic of Ian Sippen and Peter Shertser’s Union Pacific label [HERE] . . . This was greaser rock ‘n’ roll for the new generation and Mean and Filthy had their bedroom walls covered.

My thanks to Phyll Smith, Don Lickley, Paul Kaczmarek and @heaven_mirror for feeding me with material and insights. Paul’s book, Poetry, Publishing and Prosecutions – Bill Butler and Unicorn Bookshop is due to be published in 2023

The Hard Sell: Pin-Ups 1972

‘This intensely researched, vividly detailed book plunges you into the electric moment of 1972 – as year as revolutionary in rock history as 1967 or 1977.’

Simon Reynolds, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy and Rip It Up and Start Again

‘Peter Stanfield has scavenged the ruins – foxed paperbacks, illegible underground press layouts, yellowed national newspaper cuttings, tatty pages from Disc and NME and creased copies of curious sex magazines (including Curious) – to join the dots between art and artifice, from avant-garde interiors and anti-fashion boutiques to wayward rockers, glam-Mods and anachronistic Teds. Pin-Ups 1972 is an exhilarating ride through po-mo popular culture at its peak.’

Paul Gorman, The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren and The Look: Adventures in Rock and Pop Fashion

Marsha Hunt Sings the Marc Bolan Songbook

Performing at the IoW Festival with her band using The Who’s gear

In June 1973 Marsha Hunt went to court for an affiliation order that cited Mick Jagger as the father of her two year-old daughter, Karis. Before flying from Heathrow to Rome with his wife and their 18 month-old daughter Jade, Jagger was asked by reporters for his view on the matter, somewhat quizzically he said: ‘What’s the title of her latest record?’. Jagger was too subtle for the reporter for the Daily Mail who didn’t follow up his line of enquiry, but just let the question hang in the air. The answer was ‘Medusa’ a heavy glam rocker on Vertigo. The single was her first release since the run of three singles released on Track between April 1969 and March 1970.

Vogue January 1, 1969

Back then her afro was not girded with serpents, but it was the nation’s most talked about head of hair. It was discussed nearly as much as her TOTP’s performance of Dr John’s ‘Walk on Gilded Splinters’ where she momentarily held viewers in thrall with her barely concealed bosom. Such were the days.

Vogue January 1, 1969

The child of a psychiatrist, she had been an undergraduate at Berkeley but quit her studies to travel to London in 1966. She hung around the rock scene, putting herself into Alexis Korner’s sphere, becoming part of Long John Baldry’s show and getting a bit part in Blow Up. In between she married Soft Machine’s Mike Ratledge, but the union didn’t last.

July 1967 part of the Long John Baldry Show

She’d achieved some notoriety for her part in the cast of the London presentation of the ‘American tribal love-rock musical’ Hair. The show opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in September 1968, Robert Stigwood was among the producers. It was the first new production to be staged following the abolition of theatre censorship, which meant more than the usual fuss was made over its celebrated nude scene. The Stage reported positively on its premier though it also noted the show was greeted with ‘cheers and boos’. It made no attempt to explain just why there was such consternation in the audience, but then they’d not previously encountered Mick Farren who was living above the theatre at the time:

When the wretched show first opened we gullibly took the advertised nudity and audience participation as an open invitation to stroll into the auditorium and maybe even play an impromptu part in the proceedings. We discovered the error of our assumptions the first time we tried it, when we were immediately and bodily ejected by the burly commissionaires who hadn’t been told about the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

–      Give the Anarchist A Cigarette

Track ad in Zigzag for ‘Walk On Gilded Splinters’ with David Bailey photo credit

In April of the following year, Billboard reported that Track were rush releasing her debut single, produced by Tony Visconti for Tony Hall Enterprises. It entered the Record Retailer charts at 46, earning her the TOTP’s appearance, but didn’t get any higher. In September Rave magazine reported she would shortly have an LP released and was ‘spending her time modelling and making live bookings’. She was among the acts who appeared that month at the Isle of Wight Festival. The Daily Mirror reported she would perform ‘topless’. She didn’t, but the tabloids ran pictures of her regardless. Who could doubt she was a better prospect than the festival’s headliner, Bob Dylan?

Daily Mail ‘wriggles and writhes’ over Marsha Hunt

The Daily Express gets in on the action . . .

Two further singles followed, in November and then in March 1970, but the album remained in the vaults, perhaps because of her pregnancy. It would eventually be released in December 1971, too late to build on all the publicity she garnered over the previous two years. It was also too late to exploit her return to public performances when she shared the stage with P. J. Proby in Jack Good’s Catch My Soul – a rock musical version of Othello, which she joined 12 months earlier.

What Josephine Baker was for Parisians in the 1920s Marsha Hunt was for Londoners in the 1960s/1970s.

To tie-in with her appearance in the show, The Guardian ran a short profile of the single mother, the interview was overripe with racist and sexist tropes of the kind that had been a staple of her media profile since her role in Hair. The reporter described her afro as a ‘black golliwog fuzzball’ and thought that she ‘resembled ‘a cross between a Hottentot and a 50oz ball of wool’. She was to the mainstream media and to the Underground as Josephine Baker had earlier been for Parisian sophisticates – an exotic American delight. In the editorial that accompanied her Patrick Litchfield images for Vogue, she was described as a ‘jungle cat, cave-girl kitten, all-American girl’. She was extraordinarily beautiful but, like Jimi Hendrix before her, she was expected to play to British racial stereotypes.

IT advert which beggar’s belief . . . In the following issue they apologised. Didn’t Track provide their own print ready materials?

Those prejudices undoubtedly filtered into the decisions made with regard of the type of music she would record for Track; it would certainly have been a factor in her cover of Dr. John’s ‘I Walk On Gilded Splinters’ from his celebrated 1968 debut Gris-Gris. The New Orleans voodoo schtick worked easily with the image of her as a sexual primitive doing the ‘danse sauvage’ for the counterculture. Tony Visconti tightens up the extended meandering of the original, which ran just over seven minutes, to construct a more concise, pop orientated three minute potion. Hunt doesn’t sing the song as someone in thrall to the needle, which is how Dr. John positioned himself, but as the enchantress Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen, casting spells. There’s no ‘I’ in the title of Hunt’s version. Otherwise, Visconti’s production is remarkable true to the original’s arrangement. The congas pattering out the rhythm.

Daily Express review: ‘she looks like a delicious golliwog’

Track ad in Melody Maker

The blueprint for the single was taken up again and used for what would become the album’s title track, Bobby Goldsboro and Kenny O’Dell’s ‘Woman Child’. The two tracks echo with a taint of the bayou and French Quarter, with Cajun accents and voices that have breathed in the same foul air as Buddy Bolden. The single’s flipside swaps Louisiana witchery for the more materialist interests of Marc Bolan’s ‘Hot Rod Poppa’. It is a liberating switch. The shift from ‘Mama’ to ‘Poppa’ somewhat effaced Bolan’s conflation of gender and sexual positions, with his greased up Levi’s and baseball boots above his head, to make the song much less ambiguous. Hunt’s version has a revved-up phallic charge; a propulsive glide that was already there on the much earlier John’s Children’s version. As the lead track on My People Were Fair . . . album, ‘Hot Rod Mama’ sounded more a rattling T-Model struggling to make the quarter-mile on the long drag down Ladbroke Grove. Hunt’s version put it back into the race.

An International Times editorial assistant plays the park bench perv . . .

Given Visconti’s close relationship with Bolan, it’s not particularly remarkable that he would offer his songs to Hunt, but it is surprising that she recorded so many and did them so well. Track followed ‘Gilded Splinters’ with a Bolan double-header of ‘Desdemona’ and ‘Hippy Gumbo’. The latter more a drift through Little Venice than a walk down Bourbon Street.

Kit Lambert and Vicki Wickham (co-writer with Simon Napier-Bell of ‘You Don’t Have to say You Love Me’ and producer on Ready Steady Go!) get the production credit for ‘Desdemona’. They stay pretty true to the John’s Children original with their arrangement but bring in an electronic piano that bounces things along and has Hunt chasing after the tune. The effect is to leave the punk sneer of Andy Ellison’s vocal, backed by Bolan and The Who inspired psychedelics of over-amped guitars and cymbal splashes, a long way behind.

Zigzag #6 front page pin-up of Marsha in the graveyard

‘Hippy Gumbo’ didn’t make it to the album with ‘Hot Rod Poppa’ and ‘Desdemona’, which is a shame, but a fourth Bolan cover was included, ‘Stacey Grove’ from the album Prophets Seers and Sages. The Tyrannosaurus Rex version is a whirling incantation about a man, a nice cat with a hat full of wine, who picks ticks off his dog, Hunt’s recording is gifted a fuller arrangement with wind instruments and a harmonium creating a rich texture, but leaves out the quirks.

Though Bolan and Hunt had a romantic fling, he didn’t participate in the recording of his own songs but did provide a screeching back up vocal to her cover of The Supremes’ ‘My World Is Empty Without You’, which is from the same school as Vanilla Fudge’s overblown ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’ .

Track ad in Zigzag for ‘Desdemona’ or is it ‘DesdAmona’?

Kit Lambert produced the two sides of Hunt’s final Track single, the top-side a cover of Paul Simon’s ‘Keep The Customer Satisfied’. On the downside was an undistinguished original, ‘Lonesome Holy Roller’. Both tracks a let-down after the pop frenzy of the predecessors. The Simon and Garfunkel tune made it to the album, a 12 track affair pulled together from various sessions by Track staffers Mike Shaw and Bill Curbishley — it’s a hodgepodge. If Visconti had been left to bring it to fruition the LP would have been a whole lot more coherent, I’d wager. The Americana of ‘Long Black Veil’, Dylan’s  ‘You Ain’t Going Nowhere’, the pastiche spiritual ‘Moan You Moaners’ and even Traffic’s ‘No Face, No Name, No Number’ are all unremarkable, plodding vamps that distract from the pop urgency of Bolan’s songs and the witchery of ‘Gilded Splinters’ and ‘Woman Child’.
The album finishes with ‘Wild Thing’ making that Hendrix/primitive connection. Ron Wood, Ian Maclagan and Kenny Jones are said to be the key players, and I can believe that as I can the rumour that Pete Townshend laid down the slashing guitar. Apart from listing the producers, the album doesn’t give any credits other than a mysterious thanks to ‘“George” at Apple Studios’; The Faces no doubt remained anonymous for contractual reasons. It’s a shame they didn’t do more with Ms Hunt.

Marsha Hunt as The Seeker or a Storyville chippy. Track ad in Zigzag

Were other Bolan songs recorded by her? Probably not, but I like the fantasy of a ‘Marsha Hunt Sings the Marc Bolan Songbook’ album. What we do have are the four tracks which would make for a superfine 12” EP, with ‘Walk on Gilded Splinters’, ‘Woman Child’, ‘My World Is Empty Without You’ and ‘Wild Thing’ as a bonus disc. Whatever the format and track running order, Marsha Hunt’s sessions with Visconti, Lambert and Gus Dudgeon deserve a decent reissue.

Bolan’s songs from before the golden age of his big hits are all highly idiosyncratic and personal, intimate turns, performed as if he were playing in a cramped and damp parlour in some Notting Hill dump of a house. To hear them appropriated by someone else, even with the continuity that Visconti provides, is to realise just how deceptively well-crafted his songs are – perfect pop vignettes, like no others.

German Polydor and UK Track releases. The latter has a very cheap flmsey card cover, same as the label’s Backtrack budget releases. The Polydor is full laminated so that’s the one to get!!!!

German reissue of Woman Child retitled Dedemona and German and French pic sleeves

Reverse of German reissue and French, Norwegian and German pic sleeves

Keith Moon does his bit for Marsha and Track Records . . . Club (January 1971)

Cheese cake for the men’s mags. Club July 1970

Aggravation Time: Mick Farren v Nick Fury

Sid is geared up as the furthest-out all-time Rock and Roll Superstar – Mister Lizard King in his black open silk shirt, black flowing satin jacket, crotch-caressing codpieced black, velvet trousers, stack-heeled snakeskin boots and a gunslinger’s criss-cross of stud-crusted leather belts . . . Whammm! Blammm! The Power bombs and Energy bolts are exploding all over the stage and Sid starts prancing around doing joyful Hitleresque little dances . . .

‘Look at that’, says Sam over the roar of lusty young throats, ‘isn’t that just like Hitler at Nuremberg?’

It is no more than a bit of marginalia in the history of London’s Underground Freak scene that did not even merit a mention in Mick Farren’s autobiography, but the story of him threatening to go to court over his representation as Sid Barren in Nick Fury’s pulp novel Agro (Sphere 1971) readily caught and held my attention after I stumbled across it in my pursuit of the arcane for Pin-Ups 1972.

The Deviants! I claim my prize . . . Farren as good as openly identified in Frendz as a protagonist in Agro

In late October, early November, 1971, both IT and Frendz published dismissive reviews of the book. The former called it a ‘nasty cheap little tale’, a ‘piece of semi-porn that sets to score off individuals on the scene including Jeff Dexter, Mick and Joy Farren, Buttons, the Pink Fairies and others’. Who was the writer behind the obvious alias? An answer was demanded because Nik Cohn and Mark Williams were getting ‘blamed on the grapevine’. Frendz echoed IT’s demand and called the book ‘crap. Pure 100 per cent crap of the highest order . . . it really stinks’.

Then in February 1972 IT published a letter, printed over a caricature of Farren, that accused him of rank hypocrisy in threatening to sue Agro’s author for libel. The charge, it was said, had Sphere withdraw and pulp the pulp within days of it reaching bookshops. Whether or not the novel had any merit as literature, the correspondent, also hiding behind a comic book pseudonym, wrote, the ‘fact remains that the people have been denied the right to judge for themselves because a self-styled “revolutionary” has decided to play the paranoid ego-game and use the legal system which he claims to oppose to effectively ban the book’.

Below a quotation from Agro describing Sid Barren at a gig headlined by the Red Gnomes, Mick Farren penned his pointed response. He had no problem with parody, he didn’t mind his, or other’s, character defects being used (‘God knows they’re obvious enough’), but that’s not what Nick Fury had done. It was the wholesale invention of ‘hang-ups’ behind the most transparent of pseudonyms that peaked Farren’s righteous wrath. The Pink Fairies as the Red Gnomes being only the most see-through of the aliases and no one on the scene could miss who Sid Barren was. Fury hadn’t even bothered changing the names of the two key women in Farren’s life at this point in time, Joy and Ingrid.

Farren explained that he had at first contacted Sphere to find out who was the person behind the mask, but they weren’t telling. They did say, however, that the book was to be turned into a film. One way or another, Farren finds out the author was someone who had ingratiated himself into his life under false pretences. Rather than being a brother Freak, Fury was in fact ‘mainly employed as the house-hippie for a sexploitation movie company’. Now, Farren explained, he could give the author the good kicking he deserved, and risk being busted for assault, or he could get his lawyer to call Sphere. He did the latter and the publishers, as good as acceding to his charge, pulled the book immediately.

Sure I used the legal system to deal with the situation. It was the quickest and easiest way to show Nick Fury what I thought about his book . . . Don’t give me this shit about ‘self-styled revolutionary’ and ‘paranoid ego-games’. I don’t intend to fight my battles with one hand tied behind my back because you think it’s ideologically impure to use a system that I don’t like. The world is not perfect, and hiding behind fancy pen names and throwing shit at me is not going to improve it either.

The quoted depiction of ‘Sid mincing around’ on the stage with the Red Gnomes, ‘grooving on the recognition and adulation’, was not particularly flattering but it was hardly libellous. So what had aroused Farren’s ire?

If finding a copy of The Tale of Willy’s Rats was hard enough, tracking down the Sphere edition of Agro seemed next to impossible. A copy is listed in the British Library catalogue but, like Farren’s novel, it has been ‘mislaid’, which I guess means ‘stolen’. For the best part of two-years I’ve had no luck finding a copy on auction sites or book seller lists. Then I got lucky, through Twitter I made contact with Jonathon Green who kindly lent me the battered copy pictured here.

As it turns out the book does stink and is crap and maybe even semi-pornographic. Around the same time Sphere attempted to distribute Agro it also published Jamie Mandelkau’s Buttons: The Making of a President, which sold as the true story of the London Chapter of the Hells Angels, England. The stories told by both books are fundamentally the same in dealing with the tale of an Ace Cafe Rocker who aspires to be the leader of the most feared and infamous biker gang and the arrival of genuine San Francisco outlaws in London. Where the two differ is in the use of skinheads. Agro gives them equal billing with the bikers, ‘the Underground’s SS’.

I had some hope for the book when early on Fury describes Terry Staines and his brother skins, Chelsea FC’s finest, with an eye for detail that wholly escaped Richard Allen in his NEL published tales of Joe Hawkins. Staines wears a Crombie, ‘the type you only used to see in Burlington Arcade, neatly waisted, with a high, zig-zag collar and a neat breast pocket, showing a flash of Chelsea colours . . . and it feels just right, and he’s the only member of the crew wearing one, so everyone can see he’s the leader, or, as he thinks of himself, The King.’ Other skins in the gang wear sheepskin coats, the kind ‘male models in the ads wear as they drive their Lotus Elans through the overgreen countryside to the rugby club’, while further down the pecking-order two of the gang sport ‘blue knee-length gaberdines,

A little ordinary maybe, but they look good when you wear them unbuttoned and are leaning against the bar with hands in pockets crooked back like you’re about to whip out a couple of pearl-handled colt 45’s in the Final Gundown. Yeah, they look good, but not as good as Crombies which is why Terry is the Leader.

And on the description runs through American windcheaters (Harringtons), Levi’s, boots (Doc Martens and cherry reds) and haircuts:

Most cropheads look ugly; their shaven heads magnify facial characteristics, give them a disproportionate look – big ears, noses and teeth like horses. With The Face added, they resemble coarse, dull-witted peasants, slack-jawed and projecting a mongoloid surliness; giants brought down to size, fumbling over fi-fo-fum.

Elsewhere, other observational bits catch the eye such as Sid listening to the Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’, which, even though the lyrics are misquoted, might just be the first fictional refence to Lou and co: ‘The sounds erupt – raw jangling guitars and an asexual singsong of self-abuse, a plaintive heart-cry of New York street-sophistication’. Such minor things can impress, a snap shot of a moment in time caught through incidentals. But in themselves they are not enough. I can forgive the clumsy story-telling and over reaching for sensation and impact, which comes with the territory, but if I was Farren I too would have drawn the line with the abject description of what Sid gets up to in private with the Velvet Underground and Nico as his personal soundtrack.

Sid is munching on peppermint chocolates, on his living room walls are posters of Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleever and napalm victims, but in his bedroom the imagery turns to more erotic fare, Elvis in furs, Jim Morrison shirtless in leather pants, freewheeling bikers and pictures of ‘chicks doing weird things with chains’. With cocaine mixing with the soft-centred sweets,  Sid’s senses flare with ‘Flash-back magnesium brilliance’. On the bedroom shelves, books on sado-masochism and concentration camp memoirs are mixed with Debray, Marcuse, The Illustrated Horror Chamber and Torture Through the Ages. In a closet hangs Sid’s leather suit and an S.S. Oberleutnant’s uniform – ‘not real unfortunately, but ripped off from a theatrical agency. It’s lost something of its original sharpness, has gotten rumpled and soiled’. This is less than a sketch for the kind of scenario Liliana Cavani achieved with The Night Porter a few years later. It’s not even the less reputable Nazisploitation of the Salon Kitty variety. Truthfully, it is about as decadent as a box of  mint Matchsticks eaten while playing a round of Mastermind in a tuxedo, yet as a direct attack on what Farren stands for it is undoubtedly libellous.

Quite what Fury had against Farren and why he thought such a scene of cartoon onanistic and fascistic depravation might be included without upsetting the object of his ridicule is lost to history. The story could have lived without it, as could the novel without the character of Sid. Barren appears in two other notable scenes; in one he trashes the offices of an underground paper, stealing the hi-fi and their records, which makes Farren the aggressor when in reality he was the victim. It was the IT headquarters that were ransacked. The second scene is where he shares the stage at the Globe aka the Roundhouse with the Red Gnomes. This is fair enough if you don’t like the man and his particular attitude and style, but I really question the idea of a Pink Fairies gig as a Nazi rally, that’s just dumb spite. And Farren as a Hitler figure? Oh please. While he had on one occasion dressed up in a Nazi costume he had done it with a certain point in mind and not as a fetishistic gesture (more on this in Pin-Ups 1972).

Strange Days #2 (September 1970)

Michel Parry was the name behind Nick Fury, later a prolific writer of fantasy novels and editor of anthologies of weird and supernatural tales. He died aged 67 in 2014. Other than Agro his link to the underground lies in a uncompleted film collaboration with Barney Bubbles, Alice in Wonderland, but even sad talented Barney gets hung out to dry by Parry in Agro.  

Parry returned to the novel with a heavily revised version in 1975. Some of the names are changed, Barney Doodles (see what he did there?) becomes Barnaby Nickle, Joy becomes Gay, Mick aka Buttons, leader of the London Chapter of Satan’s Saints, becomes a less recognisable Dennis with a reduced role and Farren and the Fairies metamorphosed into the generic rock band Wild Childe. Nothing left to get litigious over, besides the new edition was printed by Mayflower who also published most of Farren’s novels in the 1970s.

Whatever, the book still stinks, as do the publishers who used the image of bikers and skinheads indulging in ‘queer bashing’ as its key selling point.  And what was it with the misspelling of ‘aggro’ as ‘agro’? As I said, marginalia and perhaps well left forgotten.

Many thanks to Phyll Smith, Jonathon Green and Andrew Nette, without whom this story would have stayed properly buried.

If you’ve not yet checked out Mick Farren’s Fiction Factory then it is just a hop, skip and click away under ‘marginalia’ in the menu bar: here. For the real deal in 1970s bovver boy youth culture read Tevor Hoyle’s Rule of Night which I’ve written about elsewhere on this blog: here

You Can’t Put Your Arms Round A New York Doll

Paul Gorman’s biography of Malcolm McLaren is a thing of wonder, monumental in size and scope; a definitive account of the man. I burned through its 800-odd pages but paid especial attention to the King’s Road years. His account of Let It Rock and McLaren’s amour fou with Teddy Boy rock ’n’ roll is without parallel, a brilliant encapsulation of the 70’s resurrection shuffle.

His story of McLaren’s interaction with the New York Dolls is also the most authoritative that we have and are likely to get. In Sylvain Sylvain’s memoir he claimed to have first met McLaren in New York in 1971, bought clothes from him and Westwood when they were staying at the Chelsea Hotel. He’s emphatic that their paths first crossed in the spring of that year. He chides others who said it must have been the summer of 1973, he gives his evidence, which all sounds reasonable enough. But as Gorman makes clear in a footnote, that Spring 1971 date is impossible because McLaren was still a student at Goldsmiths and Westwood was still a teacher. Who you gonna believe? Well, not Sylvain who later writes about the halcyon days of 1972, when the Dolls were conquering Manhattan, that he has ‘no idea today of the chronology, if indeed I ever did.’

Even if he spends too much time disputing song writing credits and contesting who was responsible for what, Sylvain’s autobiography is a funfair ride, a pleasure to read, but he is an unreliable witness. That said,  Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane is even worse. For all its undoubted charm, his memoir is full of misremembered events, half-recalled occurrences, forgetfulness and simple errors. None of which is surprising as Arthur was pretty much out of it throughout the band’s whole existence. His is a story of an alcoholic stumbling from one blackout to another, from one bad hangover to next, from a desperate and ever on-going search for a bottle and oblivion. His time in the Dolls reads like a nightmare, a delirium tremens. The bitterness he feels towards his management team (and toward Johansen) is palpable at times, he fumes away at being left to deal with things on his own, yet they could hardly take responsibility for his addictions, his acts of self-destruction.

Kane’s time spent in England recording demos in Kent, playing support to the Faces at Wembley and Billy Doll’s sad demise in a bath tub in SW7 is little more than a drunk’s set of impressions, albeit a compelling read. When not recording or travelling to one cancelled gig or barely remembered show, the Dolls hung out at the Speakeasy. One night, the band rouse themselves to get up on its stage and bang out a couple of numbers. A drunk loudly and boorishly heckles them: ‘He kept screaming and cursing at us as we tried to finish one of our songs. He was loud, totally obnoxious, and completely distracting’.  The rowdy is Mick Farren.

I couldn’t recall if Farren had mentioned the incident in his memoir, Give the Anarchist A Cigarette, but it’s my favourite autobiography of the 60s and 70s scene, so I was happy to return to it and perform a little detective work. In the past I’ve probably given it too much credence when it comes to questions of fact and veracity, but I know better now. I already knew that Farren had misremembered some things, such as reporting that Lou Reed and Iggy and the Stooges played together on the same night’s bill at the King’s Cross Cinema in July 1972, but that sort of error is easily forgivable – amphetamine psychosis, or too much to drink, or even just the passing of time, can collapse two shows into one, especially when they were only 24 hours apart. But, on the following page, he loses not a day but a whole year, a good 12 months. There’s no mention of his harassment of the Dolls at the Speakeasy, but he was there to watch them at Wembley:

The Dolls set was interesting is so far as bass player Arthur Kane was dressed as a ballerina, but they had very obviously never played to an audience of more than 300 and were lost in front of 13,000 Faces fans in the cavernous and echoing auditorium.

Never mind, because a few days later they are playing Biba’s Rainbow Room and making a lot more sense: ‘They had clearly returned to the Deviants’ ethic that rock ’n’ roll should not be the exclusive preserve of virtuoso players.’ You can’t argue with that, or at least I wouldn’t, but the Dolls played Wembley on 29th October 1972 and Biba’s on 26th and 27th November 1973.

If you want to know what happened and McLaren was involved, you can trust Paul Gorman, and if you want a great read about how pop culture shifted and changed across the course of McLaren’s 30 odd years of stirring it up then I can think of no better guide either.

ROLL UP, folks, for the great pop strip

The People, Sunday September 21, 1969, p. 5.

The Deviants rip it up in Hyde Park and in the process get to titilate sunday tabloid readers.

Dave ‘Boss’ Goodman described to Deviants’ biographer, Rich Deakin, the impact of first seeing the band:

From the bottom up, he’s got his Acme cowboy boots on, he’s got his leather trousers on, he’s got his yellow Ben Sherman shirt open to the waist and an enormous great studded belt, and hair that gone completely fucking Hendrix liker  . . . and then some. And he just looked . . . you know? . . . this huge broken nose, and he can’t sing a note in tune,, and it was the most fearsome thing the pair of us had ever seen in our lives, and we looked at each other and went, ‘Maaan! What have we let ourselves in for?’

Revolution in Abbey Wood – White Panthers on the Prowl

International Times #127 (April 6, 1972)

The revolution will be dressed by Levi’s.

We bring our music to our communities with revolutionary, high-energy bands like the Pink Fairies. Our life style becomes our politics, our politics our lifestyle.

Who are these well-dressed young men?

Norbert Nowotsch has identified John Carding, second from the right, who he met in 1971 when Carding was touring with the Irish band Fruup and used the trip to spread information on the Party and to support its German chapter, which was short-lived. Carding was the report’s author as co-ordinator White Panther Party UK.

Photo by Phil Stringer

My thanks to Norbert

From the Underground: Joy and Mick Farren

Published in early 1969, Queen magazine ran a set of interviews conducted by Jenny Fabian with the leading lights of London’s underground. Among the contenders who answered her questions and sat for photographer Clive Arrowsmith was designer John Goodchild, DJ Jeff Dexter, dancers Mimi and Mouse and, advocate for those incarcerated on drug charges, Caroline Coon. She was also the issue’s fabulous cover star. Offering a leather clad contrast to this small gallery of hipsters are Joy and Mick Farren;

‘We don’t really know why we got married,’ says Joy, ‘because neither of us really believes in marriage.’

Mick, twenty-five, is leader of the Deviants, an extreme underground group who specialise in revolting. ‘We’re a nasty group, and now we’ve started to make a bit of money we’re getting nastier.’

 Held against the image of Jeff Dexter in his satin robe, Farren really does look like he lives and loves in the shadows. He couldn’t sing for shit (he called it ‘weird-ass atonal’), but he looked every bit the part.

Clive Arrowsmith is running the images from the shoot on his webpages [here] including some beautiful shots of Caroline Coon. Amusingly he doesn’t recall who the couple are – ‘a rock musician guy and his girlfriend’ who ‘epitimised hippy style of the moment’.

Strange Days – 'The British Rock Paper'

While browsing through the incomplete holdings of Friends/Frendz in the British Library I found an advert for the new ‘British Rock Paper’ Strange Days. As luck would have it the library did have the entire run, which unfortunately only amounts to 4 issues that were kicked out at the fag end of 1970. The paper promised to give serious coverage fo the rock scene, offering an alternative to the just launched Sounds, funded by Rupert Murdoch, and the dreary MM and NME. Mimicking the fold over cover of Rolling Stone, the first issue put Elvis in gold lame suit on the front and ran with the first of two lengthy features on the IOW festival. Alongside whatever band was currently in the frame, The Who, Humble Pie, P.J. Proby (one for Nik Cohn), The Pretty Things, Eric Burdon, and the Mighty MC5, it also so covered things like god-rock, kids-rock, black rock and white soul, and reggae as the true underground music. Other aspects of youth culture got a good shake, most especially motorbikes. In the first issue you can find out where to get your bike chopped, 2nd ed has an article on speedway, and in the last issue the distaff side of things is given space with a photo essay on ‘Sister in Leather’:

Supplementing, a no doubt, meagre return on sales and advertising space, the editorial team also ran a m’cycle despatch company. Editor Mark Williams had previously looked after the rock section MusicIT at International Times, he later wrote the first book on road movies: ‘the complete guide to cinema on wheels’ published by Proteus in 1982, which I bought back in the day and have had ever since. In the author’s blurb he describes himself as having rode Harley-Davidsons all over the place, having seen Two-Lane Blacktop six times and once owned the same model Mustang as McQueen drove in Bullitt. He lives, it is written, mainly in airport lounges. A tip of the old chapeau to Mr. Williams for being so cool and for being well ahead of the curve with Road Movies and Strange Days.

Given that the politics of the rock festival loom large in the editorial content it was no surprise to see the thoughts of Mick Farren given space. After all he had had a hand in the organising of Phun City and did help pull down the fences at the IOW. What took me by surprise was the picture that sat above the article’s headline. Here was Farren and a motley crew having just raided a theatrical costumers (or maybe Ron Asheton’s house). I’ve not seen this picture before, but would be interested to know if it has circulated much since and just what the story is.

Th einside story of the paper’s demise . . .

Bert Weedon - 'Rockin' At The Roundhouse' (1970)

The early seventies rock ’n’ roll revival threw out some unexpected contributions to the trend, but none more strange than Bert ‘Play in a Day’ Weedon’s Rockin’ At The Roundhouse. The music is a so-so set of instrumentals, covers of Duane Eddy, Johnny Kidd, Elvis, and some originals. Nothing here to get the Roundhouse freaks moving. By way of explanation for this bit of exploitation of the youth scene the cover notes tell us: ‘A few months ago Rock gradually started to come back into the pop scene, and a big Rock Revival show was put on at London’s Roundhouse - the mecca of pop and beat music. All the rock stars were invited to appear, and the concert was a big success, but the hit of the show according to the press was not surprisingly guitar star Bert Weedon.’ At which point Fontana get him to put this album together. Sticking Weedon on the cover would have blown the ruse so they went for this blonde model in a superb Hell’s Angels t-shirt, and a studded leather jacket draped over her shoulders. The bit of dog chain she’s pulling on adds a touch of violent frisson to her display, well that’s the pose anyway: Altamont via The Bath Festival . . .

‘Keef’ gets credit for the photograph and album design. I’m guessing he’s Marcus Keef, aka Keith MacMillan (1947-2007) who was responsible for a slew of Vertigo label albums. See here and here

The album was twice reissued on Contour, once with the original art work and the other time with a moustachioed Bert kicking out the jams – you can see why the original went for the blonde . . .

In the words of Duane Eddy: ‘Bert is a great guitar man’ but not much of a looker . . .

I can’t imagine the East London chapter of the Hells Angels would have given their approval to Bert’s Rockin’ at the Roundhouse as they did to Mick Farren album Mona – The Carnivorous Circus, also released in 1970, which featured an incoherent Angel telling it like it is . . .

While we’re on the subject of East London Angels, it’s time to give this 1973 Paladin edition of Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils & Moral Panics a showing. Punk DIY ethos on full display here . . . as it is on NEL’s 1971 publication of Chopper by Peter Cave where the biker dress-up box is filled with their dad’s war souvenirs

Where’s the original from? Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music, 1970? Isle of Wight? Weeley? Wherever, those are superb homemade patches, 666, 13 & 1%er.

My thanks to Eddie who tipped me off to this album and for the gift of the Cohen book

screen grab from BBC Man Alive ‘What’s The Truth About Hell’s Angels and Skinheads’ (Dec. 1969) – smells like teen spirit

The Deviants have a Secret to Share

The third and final Deviants’ album lacked any track or personnel information on the sleeve and came supplied with a chapbook of sorts.

Accompanying the credits was a short rant from Mick Farren that included a manifesto of a kind:

For the past 13 years Rock & Roll has been the secret language of a generation, despite lapses into gibberish and side-tracks into academic obscurity. Rock & Roll is a secret language that the rulers cannot understand.

Which raises the question of how well kept was that secret?

Scans of the complete text and some background on the album can be found on Richard Morton Jack’s blog, Galactic Ramble . I hope he doesn’t mind me ripping off the three I’ve used.

Red Lightnin' – blues reissues – J. Edward Barker

letterhead, circa 1972, for Sippen and Shertser family of labels

Like the Union Pacific releases (see below), Ian Sippen and Peter Shertser’s collections of postwar blues wore their underground credentials on their sleeves.

I’m guessing the early releases were all unlicensed, certainly the first issue on Red Lightnin’, Buddy Guy’s In the Beginning (RL001), looks like a bootleg with its cheaply printed monotone matt image pasted onto a blank sleeve.

Later pressing of the label’s early titles were treated to slick upgrades. OZ’s Felix Dennis was responsible for the design of the first four volumes: Little Walter (RL002), John Lee Hooker (RL003) and Albert Collins (RL004). Denise Brownlow was credited for the design work on the five issues released by Syndicate Chapter and for the various artist compilation Blues in D Natural (RL005). The two subsequent Red Lightnin’ releases employed the graphic talent of J. Edward Barker, Mick Farren’s pal and illustrator at large for International Times and Nasty Tales.

Barker’s design for the label’s 7th release, Junior Well’s In My Younger Days, uses a photograph that looks as if it has been cropped from a minstrel scene in a Hollywood movie, though not one known to me. Whatever its provenance, it pulls in the same direction as the ‘Three Ball Charlie’ image on the front of the Stones’ Exile album. Both albums were released in 1972. The double LP anthology When Girls Do It (R.L.006) also sports a Barker design.

The three panels are fair summations of his interests and art: the mirrored picture of monks with pasted on devil’s eyes in the gatefold; montaged found images clipped from erotica and porn (lesbian, school girl and a Weimar-era nude) that surround a photograph of the Daughters of the American Revolution (with Abe Lincoln glued over the face of the sitting dowager and the open palm placed like a cockerel’s crown on her head) are in keeping with the aesthetic of the period’s underground publications: male adolescent salaciousness at the apparent service of political satire. On the sleeve’s rear you get a feast of backsides; this 1930s fetishism plays to the album’s title – the posterior posturing as gratuitous as anything on the front. It also echoes figures used on Barker’s sleeve for the Pink Fairies’ What A Bunch of Sweeties, another album from 1972. Fair enough?

The conjunction of rock’n’ roll revivalism, blues resurrectionism and the freak underground is fascinating in itself, but it also had me searching for some kind of appreciation, book or webpage on J. Edward Barker. I haven’t found much yet. Until then, there is always his and Farren’s Watch Out Kids, also from 1972 (a productive year)

Barker to the left, Farren to the right

Raves from the Grave – Blasts from the Past

A recent bit of deep digging uncovered Transfusion: Rave from the Grave – Blast From the Past Vol.1 (Union Pacific, UP004).  The compilation features the Del Vikings, the two Ronnies – Self and Hawkins – Conway Twitty, Nervous Norvus, Everly Bros, Al Downing, John Greer, and Vince Taylor and the Playboys with ‘Brand New Cadillac’ – a great collection. What sets it apart from, and at odds with, other early 1970s compilations is its sleeve featuring a typically salacious panel from a Robert Crumb comic. No Teddy Boys in the company of a Bardot-like leggy model and a late-sixties styled custom chopper, nor fifties convertible outside a diner, not even a Rock-Ola jukebox. Pasted together in 1972 by Ian Sippen and Peter Shertser, the album connects the period’s rock ’n’ revivalists with the British underground culture of the day as represented by the likes of International Times, Mick Farren and the Pink Fairies.

Volume 2, Loose Ends (UP005) is an all-instrumental collection bookended by Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson and The Fireballs. In between, Duane Eddy battles it out with the Fenderman, Jerry Lee Lewis and a half-dozen other contenders. The sleeve continues the graphic connection with the underground, featuring a tattooed greaser mauling a hot chick in a state of dishabille who threatens to stab him in the ‘puddin’. The panel is given a context of sorts by the incongruous tag-line: ‘Sexism is out! If you like pussy: treat it equal.’ It’s culled from the back page of George DiCaprio and R. Jaccoma’s Greaser Comics (New York: Half Ass Press, 1971), which suggests a transatlantic counter-culture mirroring of interest in rock ’n’ roll.

‘A new exciting label featuring oldies but goodies, rockabilly and rock ‘n’ roll’

Sippen and Shertser were Jewish East End Mods who made a name for themselves on the scene as The Firm. They ran in the same circles as the likes of Miles at Better Books and IT fame, and Dave ‘Boss’ Goodman, later Pink Fairies roadie and manager of Dingwalls dance hall. The Firm were involved in the UFO club, helping Mick Farren to keep out ne’er-do-wells when they weren’t pulling pranks on John Peel. With such connections, and a deep love of American rhythm and blues, the duo helped to produce and distribute The Deviants’ debut album. They sold the LPs’ American rights to Seymour Stein’s newly formed Sire records and then acted as talent scout for him, the results of which included an album they recorded in 1968 in London with Walter ‘Shakey’ Horton and another in 1969 by psych blues rockers Sam Apple Pie.

Shertser is a singular contributor to Jonathan Green’s pop-vox history of the sixties underground, Days in the Life (1988), which is where most of the references to him and Sippen are drawn from, including Clinton Heylin’s Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry (1994). The Firm were responsible for the first tranche of illicit Dylan, Stones and Beatles albums in the UK. The two volumes of rock ’n’ roll obscurities and hits are essentially bootlegs; there is nothing to suggest these tracks were licensed. Other releases on their Union Pacific label included collections of Eddie Cochran, Link Wray and Little Richard rarities.

Ian Sippen went missing, presumed drowned, in Morocco in April 1973. Shertser continued to run Red Lightnin’ and associated labels (Syndicate Chapter), which he and Sippen had set up in 1969.

You can read Greaser here. The hard-on in the pop corn seen in Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982) gets an earlier recounting. Perhaps, like the filthy lyrics in ‘Louie Louie’, this courtship ritual is part of American teenage folklore.

Depending on which version you’re looking at, the Pink Fairies debut 1971 album, Never Never Land, has the legend ‘Long Live Rock and Roll’ on either its inside sleeve or on its rear cover. The illustration that adorns the front is about as rock ’n’ roll as Robert Crumb’s fedora.

Mick Farren in International Times #161 (August 1973)

Mick Farren, Armageddon Crazy (1989)

Mick Farren

Armageddon Crazy

DelRey-Ballantine USA, 1989/Orbit-Sphere UK, 1990

‘2000AD. The year of America’s ultimate special effect . . .’ The lunatics have taken over the asylum. Religious zealots, fanatics and Elvis believers control the USA, and rock ’n’ roll is banned. But the show that never ends is just refashioned by the God Botherers to mount ever more impressive demonstrations for the brethren. The latest planned extravaganza, sponsored by the White House, is to put giant holographs of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse above Manhattan. Are you ready to testify?

A member of the revolutionary Lefthand Path is working deep undercover at the Deacon’s HQ, an old-school cynical police officer walks the street between loyalty and insurrection. As he climbs higher, an ambitious Deacon looks to pull them both down. The outcome of the impending confrontation is uncertain and then complicated when a key figure in the establishment turns out to have a Machiavellian disposition for intrigue and is about to stage coup. Which side are you on?

Very much a post-William Gibson cyberpunk novel, with cowboy hackers, a matrix which jockeys can jack into through implants behind the ears, but it is also an old style story of the underground rising up to fight the good fight. I give nothing away when I tell you that the smart and beautiful fifth columnist ends up in bed with the hard-bitten cynical cop. A formidable team beneath the sheets and on the streets.

 This is my first encounter with Farren’s fiction. It all moves along at a speedy pace, I never got bored even when the exposition felt laboured and the, sometimes, clunky dialogue made me wince. His heroes are all counterculture surrogates, all born to lose but smart enough to survive to fight another day. Motorhead bootlegs are the new currency and The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, Farren and Wayne Kramer’s musical, wins a Tony. There’s a future worth holding out for. . .