Mick Farren’s ‘70s Novels and Stories

This piece of marginalia is an ad hoc guide to Mick Farren’s fiction published during the high seventies. His six novels take the lead in this column and are followed by whatever pieces of short fiction I’ve been able to locate. Tracking these stories is an ongoing process that has me digging deep into the period’s adult magazines and elsewhere. Stay with me on this trip.

The Texts of Festival

(Hart-Davis MacGibbon, 1973)

‘Harry Krishna is dead’

Outside of his activities with The Deviants and scribing for IT, Mick Farren’s most noteworthy attempt to pull the Underground together into a revolutionary force was with the free festival, Phun City, held over three days in July 1970. That this event even got off the drawing board was a feat in itself, but happen it did despite last minute legal injunctions and the withdrawal of funding. He writes in Watch Out Kids:

none of our original plans had come together, we were no longer in control and the kids, the audience (although the word was now meaningless), had taken over the event, They were getting down, making it happen, and having the time of their lives.

If the physical and mental cost of organising things meant running a festival was not something Farren again contemplated, it did not mean he had lost faith in the idea.  His obligation to what he considered to be his community was why he took the monetarisation of festivals, especially in the case of the Isle of Wight festival, so very seriously.

After Watch Out Kids in 1972, Farren’s first novel, The Texts of Festival, published the following year, looked further and harder at what was at stake for the freak scene. Set in a post-apocalypse landscape, he slotted his dystopian world view into a generic Western framework of a frontier fort under siege from marauding Injuns: Phun City as Fort Apache. The fortified town of Festival is controlled by a dictator whose power is enabled by the keepers of the texts, celebrants who hold on to bits of rock lyrics by the likes of Dylan, Jagger and Morrison, whose names and words have become garbled over time: ‘I fought the law and the law one’. The town is built around an old stage with a PA system and a light display that are just about kept working through scavenging the countryside for spare parts. The idea of a people’s festival  – a celebration of community – had, by the time of the story’s setting, become fixed into a repressive ritual. Its final reckoning now long overdue.

Out in the countryside, the outlaws, led by Iggy, an unhinged figure high on crystal, have formed an alliance with a tribe of hill people and are intent on destroying Festival. The mauraders ambush a wagon train and take over a small town, which is used as bait to draw out Festival’s leader and his troops. With the cavalry routed, Festival is left to be defended by gamblers and whores (Farren’s kind of people). These low-lifes and renegades put up an heroic fight but it is all to no avail. Festival is lost.

The idea of a band of outlaws led by a figure named after Iggy Pop is an amusing conceit, but Farren no more saw him as an answer to the repression of authoritarian power than he did the figure of the gambler, Frankie Lee, based on Wild Bill Hickock. You fight for what you believe in, what comes after hardly matters at all.

On the jacket’s rear fly-leaf he writes:

Currently I do little else than write and try to keep stoned. . . I admire Bob Dylan and respect William Burroughs. After too many run-ins with the law I’ve tried to avoid radical politics. But the way they have this planet set up makes it difficult.

On the right, Ist paperback edition (Hart-Davis MacGibbon, 1973). Illustrator unknown. On the left, 2nd paperback edition (Mayflower, 1975). Illustration by Peter Jones.

Review

Mick Gold, Let It Rock (June 1974) found little of value in Farren’s ‘stoned synthesis of pap TV westerns, sci-fi fantasies and rock obsessions’ The writing is poor and ‘closer to the spirit of Biggles than to Burroughs’, which ‘unintentionally reveals how a philosophy of liberation can become a mental straightjacket.’ But, he thinks, if you ignore Farren’s didacticism it’s a fair homage to pulp: a ‘coke-inspired cowboys-and-injuns tale of all time. Hashish to ashes. Lust to dust. If the acid don’t get you, the B pictures must.’



The Tale of Willy’s Rats

(Mayflower, 1975)

A beat perfect confection of pulp-verité. Farren channels his own experience of playing in a band, his knowledge of the London Underground scene, especially nights at the UFO club, and draws from his involvement in the soft-core pornographic racket, turning it all into the crazy mirror story of Willy’s Rats, the most evil combo in Christendom.

The story of the group’s rise from local hopefuls onto the world stages, which climaxes with headlining shows in New York, is told with a hip swagger and a righteous knowing wink at the reader.

‘It is hard to say where it all started. You can’t pinpoint an exact time when you realize that you have an ego that is a lot bigger than it ought to be.’

The progress of Willy’s Rats from pub gigs to the big time is interupted with breaks into the present that describe their final show in NYC; singer Lou Francis is fearful that an assassin’s bullet will put pay to things.

The book draws from the big stories of the day, Altamont and Manson, and from Farren’s own life. There are numerous moments where autobiographical anecdotes, as recorded in Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, are played out as fiction. The recounting of the first grotty bedsit Lou rents in London echoes more or less precisely the situation Farren found himself living in when he first moved to the city, and his tale of the Rats’ tour of provincial towns is much the same as he tells about the early days of the Deviants; a favourite being the kicking over of a row of Greaser’s beer mugs, which had been temptingly set on the edge of the stage by the brute-horde, and of the riot that then ensues. At other points Farren will pull in elements of the MC5’s show, or a bit of Jim Morrison, a camp flounce to the mic al la Michael Jagger, thus creating an original but recognisable band who are wholly believable if you don’t probe too deep.

A big part of the novel’s attraction is the vicarious pleasure taken in Willy’s Rats relentless consumption of pharmaceuticals, rivers of beer and Johnny Walker. The band chain smoke Pall Malls, roll mighty spliffs, and eat nothing but junk food. When not playing, they are either in the pub or doped out of their heads in front of daytime TV, but mostly they amuse themselves by being blown and getting fucked by one chick after another (and a handful of transvestites who had them confused while in one or other of their various states of psychic disorder). Each gig is followed with a sexual tryst, flaccid dicks are never a problem, and these alpha-males are always good to go for a second round, no one suffers from crabs, gets gonorrhoea or gets a girl pregnant, no one falls in love and there are no petty jealousies among the band members. This is sex without consequences and responsibility, just as it is in the sex magazines Farren wrote for at the time. If you want to understand a boy’s masturbatory fantasies then this novel is as good as any case study I can imagine. Here’s the latter part of a night Lou spent with two women:

I lay feeling limp and drained, watching vestigial colours float across the inside of my eyelids. Finally I opened my eyes and saw Ruth and Rachel kissing, very close to my face. I went through a moment of surprise, but then flowed into the feeling that it seemed right, and I ran my hands over their bodies as the two girls moved together in their love-making. It was so different from the sex act between a man and a woman that I watched fascinated as their action became more and more intense.

After a period of being the third party helper in the girls’ own scene, I began to become aroused again. As the girls’ scene became slower and more languorous, I started getting involved, and a situation evolved where Ruth and I both directed our attentions towards Rachel, working on her with our hands and mouths until she threw back her arms and was writhing and moaning on the cushions. Then Ruth helped me to enter her, and Rachel and I clutched at Ruth, and she clutched at us.

At one point, Farren, realising he needs to at least briefly reflect on the sexual politics he is playing with, has Lou engage in a one night stand with a Black feminist, the idea is to show what it feels like when roles are reversed – the man is powerless and the woman’s object of desire – but you can’t say his character learns much if anything from the experience: it is either just another stage in his sexual adventuring or he doesn’t think about it at all.

            Outside of the most cursory contact, what’s particularly noticeable, given that Farren is drawing from his own experiences, is how little there is of Underground politics intersecting with the Rats’ biography. However much the band freely attach ‘freak’ to themselves, the politics of that identity is entirely ignored. The Rats don’t participate in free festivals, and there’s no attempt to put the band into a wider community of like-minded musicians, artists and writers. Sure there are dope busts and various run-ins with figures of authority, but they are never politicised unless it was when the band refused to help a left of centre Democrat to get elected – what, they asked, was he offering the kids? Certainly not the repeal of the repressive dope law. So fuck him. End of story. The band are more Rolling Stones than Social Deviants, true dandies and sexual dilettantes in fact:

With all the talk of new images, I’d hustled Jimmy to get me a black snakeskin jacket and some leather pants. As I was pulling them on the thought suddenly struck me that Lenore was just the type who’d end up wanting to be beaten. I shrugged mentally and finished dressing.

 Perhaps giving the band a social conscience would have compromised their misogyny. The book is undoubtedly of its moment, sexist, homophobic, casual in its racism, but, it has within its rip-roaring, deftly written tale, a sure understanding the allure of the pop life that was being held out to young men everywhere.

***

Most of Farren’s publications are easily found through one online trader or another, but this one is scarce. Unlike the sci-fi titles it doesn’t seem to have been horded and then sold on years later by first-time purchasers or maybe Mayflower never gave it the print run it deserved. It certainly didn’t give it the cover image it had earned. Discussing its history in an introduction for an e-book hosted by the now defunct webpages that was dedicated to his works, Funtopia, Farren wrote:

. . . my publishers went ahead with a truly hideous cover image of a scantily clad babe, who looked a lot like Marsha Hunt, about to perform fellatio on a Shure microphone. On one hand it clearly told the world that this was not literature, but at the same time it wasn't a cool-lurid pulp cover either.

Refusing to pay the ridiculous asking price for the one or two battered copies that are being offered I thought I’d peruse an original at the British Library, what do you know? It has been mislaid . . .

DNA Cowboy Trilogy

The Quest for the DNA Cowboys, Farren’s third novel, is the first part of a ‘science fantasy’ trilogy published by Mayflower; it was followed by Synaptic Manhunt in the same year, 1976, and The Neural Atrocity the year after. The novels’ plots, characters and settings are all interconnected as if he had written a long novel that was then split into three.

The opening salvo in the trilogy is a picaresque tale of two future-tense cowboys, Billy Oblivion (love that name) and Reave, who carry replica Navy Colts and porta-pac stabilisers to help them navigate a world literally falling apart. Bored, they quit the town of Pleasant Gap and step over the edge into the ‘nothings’. Spatial mapping and co-ordinates are nowhere to be found and the pair, by ill or good luck, drift from one dimension to another. On their travels they encounter characters such as Minstrel Boy (Bobby Dylan, for sure), Rainman (he makes weather), Jetstream Willie (a trucker), and Burt the Medicine (an albino with breasts). These figures help or hinder them on their journey to somewhere or other. Places in the nothings (or outside it) resemble a truckstop, where Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire’ plays on a loop, a Western ghost town, a prison, a war front, a desert landscape, an oasis, a port, and finally a lake and swamp that takes them to a city being eaten alive by its rulers .

All places and characters are thinly sketched and the plot, like Billy and Reave, appears lost in the nothings. As Minstrel Boy explains (or rather doesn’t): ‘I’m just telling the story. I don’t have to account for inconsistencies’. That also seems to be Farren’s line; the science fantasy genre allowing him to shift to something new whenever he tires of, or exhausts, any given situation. The characters drift. Beyond averting boredom, they are unmotivated, without goals or set destination. The novel’s title suggests they are on a quest for something or other, but it’s not described: ‘Where are you fellas planning to go from here?’ asks Burt the Medicine, ‘No idea, we’ll just travel on until we come to something.’ says Billy.

They eventually stumble upon a ruined city overshadowed by a vast tower in which live the utterly depraved ruling elite . A. A. Catto, a woman with the body of a 13-year-old, indulges in incestuous sado-masochist trysts with her brother and makes Reave her captive play thing. We learn that desire unbound is a wretched state of being, but we don’t learn just what a DNA cowboy is.

The novel ends in a state of uncertainty, with the two pals separated from one another and the reader still asking just who are the three phantom ladies depicted on the jacket and who appear randomly throughout? The use of italics underscores their presence (and importance?) and they are given the pronoun ‘She/They’ (how prescient). Early on, one ‘She/They’ appeared to have been shot by a western gunfighter and is then subsequently carried by the other two spirits. But to what end? Will all be revealed in episode two . . .?

The second volume in the trilogy, Synaptic Manhunt, has another terrific title that is also pretty meaningless. There is a hunt of sorts, but what it has to do with a fusion of chromosomes is as clear to me as the singling out of Billy and Reeves’ double helix in the first volume’s title. Right at the start a new and significant character is introduced, Jeb Stuart Ho, a name that conjoins a Confederate Major General with the revolutionary leader of Vietnam’s Communists, Ho Chi Minh. In actuality he is closer to David Carradine’s character in Kung Fu (1972-75). An assassin and member of the Brotherhood, he has been given the task of finding and killing A. A. Catto. To help him in his endeavour the Minstrel Boy, who has unique wayfinding powers to guide him through the nothings, is unwilling recruited. Before long he is reunited with Billy and Reeve, who are still caught up in the child-woman’s sadistic orbit.

The book has more action and conflict than its predecessor, but is still wholly reliant on the principle of deus ex machina to solve problems and to keep things mobile. Farren is at his best when the world he is depicting is close to the world he knows, the barroom and hotel lobby scenes work particularly well, getting lost in the ripped dimensions of the nothings less so. The characters remain poorly motivated, little more than ciphers who I don’t much care for and have only a bare interest in. I kept wishing that the world he populated was a bit more like Ladbroke Grove and a lot less like the horizon line in the illustration on the front of Hawkwind’s Warrior on the Edge of Time.

Farren’s three graces, if that’s what She/They are (perhaps they are sirens?), were absent from the middle volume, but make a return in the final part, again given a nice but meaningless title: The Neural Atrocity. The key characters are pulled into a tighter orbit around the now fully insane and megalomaniacal A. A. Catto. She is hell bent on the conquest of the earth (or what’s left of it) and to that end is using the ‘stuff machine’ to create a zombie army to do her bidding. When she’s not building a mighty military force, she entertains herself by ordering life copies of Elvis Presley and Oscar Wilde, but what should have been a dinner party for the ages turns out to be a dull affair. Oscar lusts after the Memphis Flash and throws out a few half-hearted bon mots and Elvis responds with mumbles and homilies. Elvis is a good looking man, it must be said, and so Catto has him dine between her thighs. Elsewhere things drift toward an apocalyptic ending with Dylan/Minstrel Boy still unable to offer any answers.

I expected Farren’s trilogy to be more carnivalesque, or at least more attuned to the freak underground’s preoccupation with putting all and sundry up against the wall, but alas it was all a little too polite, reserved and, frankly, dull. His fantasy world is based on Westerns – the nothings are like those vast empty spaces that exist between frontier towns and outposts; a dead terrain where savages wait to attack wagon trains and cowboys drift aimlessly. Distraction is found in a game of chance, a bottle and a whore’s embrace. Life is cheap and death is how debts are paid. Farren catches all of that well enough, but in the end nothing really matters. I don’t believe in his characters like I do in James Coburn’s Pat Garrett, Robert Mitchum’s Jim Garry, Walter Brennan’s Judge Roy Bean, or Jeff Bridges’ Wild Bill Hickock. Those actors make the fictive worlds they occupy real for me, Farren’s characters in these three novels not at all.

Mick Farren is a product of St. Martin’s School of Art, Phun City, IT, Nasty Tales and an Old Bailey obscenity trial. He now writes full-time and has two previous novels published.

Author’s bio in all three volumes

The Feelies

(Michael Dempsey – Big O Publishing, London 1978)

1978, 34 years old, and with his 2nd solo album, Vampires Stole My Lunch Money, sitting in the racks, Farren sends out his 6th book of fiction. Inspired by, and the title taken from, Huxley’s Brave New World, he recontextualises the feelies for the age of 24hr television. If you have the money you can buy 6 or 24 hours, a weekend, 6 months, or even a lifetime of submersion within a fantasy world of your choice: plug in, lie back and become Billy the Kid or Jesus Christ on the road to Calvary. For a transvestite the feelie of choice involves  imagining him/herself as Tralala from Last Exit to Brooklyn (though neither character or novel is named) in order to take pleasure in being assaulted by as pack of street punks. People’s fantasies are not nice, Farren is unequivocal on that idea; all the scenarios involve ultra-sex and violence.

Game shows with their endless acts of humiliation dominate television programming and are the only way for those who are without to escape the dreary. Wanda Jean is prepared to forgo any degradation if it means she can leave her dull real world for the feelies.  It doesn’t end well for her.

Keeping the vaults where the lifers are lodged clean and presentable are two barely functioning janitors, Sam and Ralph – one an alcoholic, the other addicted to tranquilisers – a cynic and a wanna be believer. Through them we understand that the game is fixed and the system is breaking down: the lifers are dying.

It’s another enjoyable read, but once again Farren’s protagonists are cripplingly passive; heroes who can actually effect change, make a difference, or just cause pleasurable moments of chaos are nowhere to be found. Acceptance of the order of the day, mind numbing repetition (in work and fantasy), or suicide are the only prospects on offer at book’s end. That’s what I’d call a dystopian vision.

 Nasty Tales collaborator Chris Welch’s illustrations are suitably bleak, heavy ink washes and cross-hatching push everything into shadow. They could have picked a better image for the cover, I think.

Magazine Fiction

Street Corner Farren

‘Some Weird Movie’

IT #122 (January 27 –February 10, 1972) pp.21–22

Farren doesn’t get a credit for this story, I’d be surprised if it isn’t his . . . but tell me I’m wrong! Whatever, it’s a good one.

‘You Name It’

IT #136 (August 25-September 8, 1972), pp. 12-13, 20

A rock band wants to keep things exclusive . . . even their drug highs.

‘Mo the Roller’

IT #139 (October 4-18, 1972), 14

A game of pool, a jacket and a stasis machine.

The Marshal’s Habit

IT #145 (January 11-25, 1973), 18-19

Farren gets down and dirty with the other revisionists Westerns of the day, Wyatt Earps’s habit and proclivities completely believable

‘A Line’s A Line’

IT #161 (August 26-September 9, 1973), 11-12

Foreshadows the characters of Sam and Ralph in The Feelies, but the conversation between the two here is much more misanthropic (and funny to boot)

‘Once It’s Started’

Oz #48 (Winter 1973), 12-15

The Underground will eat itself . . .

Cannibalism is where the promise of the counter-culture ends more certainly than in either Charles Manson’s Helter-Skelter or stage front in Altamont. The setting is Dirty Edna’s bar where a group of freaks and drug fiends are holed up. The scene, like a stage set for an Off-Off Broadway production, is lit by a pulsing red neon sign and a guttering candle. Alice stares at the flame, a cowboy spins Merle Haggard records on the stereo, while Monk and Easy, strung out on speed, are 36 hours into their rap about Kennedy conspiracy theories and whether Hitler was a junkie. All this is going on as our narrator ponders on whether he should share his pill stash. Before he can come to a definitive decision, Haggard is replaced by Johnny Cash and Ice and Belinda join the cursed. All the six of them have to do is to get it together. Yeah, just get it together.

The perfect story for the final issue of the Underground’s most notable organ of record, illustrations by Rick Gallagher capture the scene.

’The Ants Are Going’

Ad Astra #1 (October/November 1978)

Two page story in the first issue of the short-lived sci-fi magazine, 1978-81, Ad Astra. Farren’s biography in the sidebar list his four novels, and the latest, The Feelies, as being forthcoming. He writes in the genre tradition of Roger Zelazny we’re told. Illustration is by Bob Gibson.

Technological events and human foibles are viewed from the prime position of leaning against a bar. Our narrator is unimpressed by the latest space mission which he is watching on TV, his fellow drinkers await the launch with awed anticipation. The future fear is not deep space travel, but the idea of programmed ants sent off as human proxies. How long before the creatures conquer the galaxies?

Whether or not Ants is in the Zelazny tradition,it is an effective piece of fiction, if you can get past the casual homophobia that is.

My thanks to Phyll Smith for tracking down a copy for me.

Top Shelf Farren

‘Bedsitter Loving’

Club International 4:7 (July 1975), 20-22

“You tooled up, Johnny?”

“’Course.”

The story starts with the unnamed narrator getting ready to go out one Saturday night and being hit by a Proustian madeleine moment while putting on a clean shirt. He flashes back to the teenage ritual of dressing for the weekend before heading out for the café where the jukebox plays Eddie Cochran and the Hollywood Argyles. Those ‘punk adventures’ are behind him and his old cohort of rebels are now clerking for the town council.

The rest of the tale is the story of his lovemaking, first with a girlfriend in her bedsit and then the next day with her mate who he has by chance met during a Sunday lunchtime session at the pub. Which is what you’d expect from a story sold to a skin mag; white collar work hasn’t dampened our hero’s libido.

The second half somewhat pales before the description of the Saturday ritual of getting dressed in front of the mirror and combing his hair just so, ‘legs straddled, feet apart, shirt collar turned up, head dipped like Elvis singing “Lonesome Cowboy” . . . which was Farren’s subject

Terrific illustration by Stuart Bodek, who is best known for his book covers, see here. He also did the sleeve for Showaddywaddy’s Trocadero (1976). I know they ain’t the Stooges but it’s a good sleeve nonetheless.

Farren penned a more direct spin on nostalgia and the fifties for a 1975 edition of Club International, it’s pretty pedestrian, truth be told, but it is accompanied by a superb Bush Hollyhead illustration

‘Come Out to Play’

Club International 2:6 (April 1973), 38-40, 90-1

Described as a ‘frightening short story, with its prophetic Orwellian overtones . . . another warning to flee from the wrath to come.’ A future set story of corporate hell.

In the corridor he paused only to dial tranks and coffee from the dispenser beside the lift. He washed down the pills with the warm tasteless liquid while he waited to be taken down to the Exec-F level.

Brian is bored by lifeless sex and dull routine so when a colleague offers him the opportunity to experience real sex by going outside the safe environment of CON-LEC he is easily persuaded to take the chance. Outside is dangerous, polluted and alive with the threat of being jumped by a juv gang or snatched by labour squads. But the draw of visiting an old-fashioned whorehouse is not to be denied with its promise of wild animal pleasure. Brian will pay the price for acting on his desire. . .

‘The Strange Quest of Billy and Reave’ – a disturbing picture of a feasible future

Club International 2:12 (December 1973), 19-26

The Quest of the DNA Cowoys’ 223 pages abridged down to five triple columned pages. The paperback was still two or so years away from publication by Mayflower. The short version is illustrated by Terry Pastor, a regular with CI who specialised in Allen Jones type S&M figures and Philip Castle style airbrushed figures. He’s perhaps best known, at least by me, for his colour tint work on Bowie’s Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust albums. His webpages are here.

In his autobiography, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, Farren spent little time reflecting on his fiction and gives no time at all to these short stories, but he does admit to earning rent money writing for the wank mags after the Underground press had gone the way of the wax cylinder and 78 RPM 10 inch record. Apart from his fiction and editorial, he also supplied anonymous text that sat, no doubt unread, between the T&A spreads. Other than appreciating the cheque given for his labours, Farren had little positive to say about the experience: the world of pornography was, he found, tacky, at best; at worst, wretched. Believing he deserved better, he took up employment in 1974 with the NME and put his real energy into writing novels.

Jonathon ‘Days in the Life’ Green, like Farren, paid the rent by writing for the porn trade. He wrote an account of his time spent dealing in sleaze for IT #153 (May 1973)

Because I’ve been following the tracks Paul Gorman has laid down on male magazines of the early 1970s as spaces where marginalised writers and artists could find a public outlet for their work, I’ve only looked for Farren in the first four volumes of Club International (1972-74) and the first two volumes of Men Only (1971-72). It maybe he had material published in Penthouse, Mayfair, Knave, Fiesta and who knows where else, perhaps even in Tit-Bits and Exchange and Mart. He definitely published in science fiction magazines, first issue of Ad Astra has one of his stories. Did his work appear in any sci-fi collections? Is there more to find in the underground press? Let me know if you’re aware of anything else that carries his by-line.