MC5’s ‘Miss X’: Tales of Wanton Nudity (and Other Acts of Depravity) in London W1

Following the baptism in the fire of love delivered by ‘Sister Anne’ and ‘Baby Won’t Ya’ on Side One of High Time comes Wayne Kramer’s paean to love’s healing power, ‘Miss X’ –  the Five’s most affecting trip into the arms of carnal romance. But who was Kramer’s amour fou, his mystery woman, his Miss X?  The Seth Man has gleaned the righteous dope on this tale of passion unwound, or what he calls  – ‘an exercise in capturing the spirit of sexual abandon and outright helpless rutting (“Sensations rollin’, turnin’ from me to you / Causing this aura of heat to swirl, yeah”)’.

Here ’Tis; his story:

Miss X, MC5 & Pink Fairies At The Speakeasy August 4, 1970 (Tuesday night) and aftermath (Wednesday morning)

In August, the International Times ran with a parody of a sensational tabloid-styled headline that it splashed across its front page: ‘NUDE WOMAN, LONDON PIGS & REBEL MUSICIAN’. Above and below the headline, in equally bold san serif type: ‘TITS, ASS & HOT REVOLUTION! / MULTIPLE L.S.D. – RAPE SUICIDE BID’. The main story was sub-headed ‘Lovely New Zealander’s night of drama’ and delivered in scandalous detail the events that had unfolded one night at the Speakeasy club. The piece, by Mick Farren, satirised newspaper shock and sensation stories of the underground freak scene, and referred to the ‘nude woman’ in question as ‘auburn-haired Miss X’, whose name we are unable to reveal’. Since Wayne Kramer was already fast friends with Farren, could it be that he took the anonymous appellation of said woman and used it as both title and subject of one of his most uncharacteristic songs? As told in IT, the story follows closely the first-hand account of the night’s events that was much later told to me by Joly McFie, a member of The Pink Fairies road crew at the time.

***

A little more than a fortnight after their televised appearance at a free concert staged at Wayne State University in Detroit on Tartar Field, the MC5 were in the UK for the legendary Phun City Festival, held near Worthing in West Sussex. Promoted and assembled by ex-Deviants vocalist Mick Farren, it would become known as a highwater mark of 1970 Rock Music in the UK courtesy of The MC5’s high energy performance as well as that of The Pink Fairies whose two drummers, Twink and Russell Hunter, stripped naked at one point during their set in a show of zapped-out freak power.

Following Phun City, on August 4, The MC5 were scheduled to appear at the Speakeasy club, located at 48 Margaret Street in London’s busy West End. Earlier that day, MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer encountered a young woman from New Zealand who expressed a desire to get high. Always obliging, he passed the young woman some speed along with an invitation to see his band that night.

Supporting the MC5 were the Pink Fairies, who shared their gear with the headliners. Twink, however, was banned from the Speakeasy, so had to be secretly transported into the club hidden inside a bass drum case. Let loose, and dressed, once more, only in his birthday suit, he invaded the stage during the MC5’s set, which led to him being, yet again, ejected from the club.

MC5 Kicking it out at the Speakeasy, photograph by Noel Shearer

After the MC5 finished their set, the young woman had begun to exhibit the effects of not only the speed but of several alcoholic drinks and a dose of LSD from an unknown donor. Acting in an irrational and agitated manner, in the ladies’ room she began blocking the sinks and turning on all the taps before, like Twink, stripping off all her clothing. The manager of the club insisted the scene cease at once or law enforcement officials would be summoned. Swift steps were then taken by Pink Fairies bass player, Duncan ‘Sandy’ Sanderson and Roderick ‘Noddy’ Mackenzie of White Trash, who ushered the young woman into a waiting Morris 1100 automobile driven by Pink Fairies roadie, Joly McFie. Once on the road, the young woman, still naked, still freaking out, was now repeatedly screaming: ‘I NEED A FUCK!! CAN NONE OF YOU GIVE ME A FUCK?!’ While doing so, she was positioned on her back, lodged in-between the front seats with her head blocking the gear stick, causing Joly to make the short journey stuck in third gear. As he recalled later: ‘every light seemed to be red, and I was having to crawl away using the clutch’.

As the woman repeatedly yelled out for ‘A PROPER FUCK!’, Sandy attempted to oblige her while the automobile wended its way through the early morning hours to Regent’s Park where Joly found a quiet spot to pull over and park the car, where upon he got out. Those left inside kept ‘sensations rollin’ until Miss X changed position and popped out the windscreen with her feet, which Joly, standing nearby, caught whole. Coitus interruptus, Miss X then ran off in the direction of the nearby Regent’s Canal into which she jumped.

Sandy and Joly kept an eye on the intoxicated woman while she swam and continued her vocal dissatisfactions for several minutes before the police showed up. While the police cars were converging, Joly procured a blanket to cover her up. She was then escorted by Metropolitan police to a nearby hospital. Her condition improved with daylight and, according to Joly, ‘she was feeling much better and graciously sent thanks for our efforts’ on her behalf.

Whether or not Kramer just swiped his title from the story or from elsewhere, or even if ‘Miss X’ was more profoundly influenced by the ‘lovely New Zealander’s night of drama’, is perhaps neither here nor there. However compelling the coincidences, keeping true to convention the subject of ‘Miss X’ must remain as much a mystery as Miss X herself.

– The Seth Man

The tale of Miss X’s night of misadventure has also been retold in Rich Deakin’s inestimable biography of The Deviants and Pink Fairies, Keep It Together, with further collaboration from Sandy Sanderson, but the potential link to Kramer’s composition is all The Seth Man’s. Farren didn’t re-live that night in his autobiography, he does, however, give over a fair few pages to the Speakeasy and the sexual politics of the time:

The Speakeasy was not only the place for late booze. It was also where the girls were; one of the city's high temples of the groupie culture that would so fascinate the media. The lipstick killer parade of assumed boredom, platform shoes, scarlet talons, transparent chiffon, fishnets, false eyelashes, appliqué glitter, hotpants, short-short dresses and attitudes of superiority would continue for more than a decade. Much has been made of the oppression of women in rock & roll. Was the groupie a brainwashed victim craving a second-hand and illusionary contact high, or an independent woman making her own choices, fully in control of her own body and sexuality? Germaine [Greer] appeared to cleave to the former in both word and deed when I knew her, but in later life I understand she has recanted her former hedonism.

Tracking back only a few years and ‘Miss X’ was the nom de plume used by the press for Christine Keeler in the Profumo Affair . . . West End Stories on repeat with a Cha Cha Cha rhythm as scored by John Barry [click on the image below]

The Seth Man’s outstanding webpage The Book of Seth on Julian Cope’s Head Heritage can be read HERE His Fuz magazine from the end-of-the-twentieth-century is equally essential reading.

The Love Bug Pink Fairie style

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

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)

. . . and in Peter Shertser’s own words to Roy Carr, NME (May 25 1974)