Apathy for the Devil (7 page)

On my last night there, I managed to broach with Roger Hutchinson -
Styng
’s nominal editor - the subject of maybe writing some articles of my own for his periodical. Not about politics per se, but about music. He appeared enthusiastic but duly noted that - as I was then resident in London - I’d be better off contributing to that city’s more prolific underground network. Roger then mentioned that he was in contact with
Frendz
magazine, a fortnightly journal based in Ladbroke Grove that he claimed was often in need of new writers. He encouraged me to visit its Portobello Road premises upon my return. ‘Speak to either Rosie Boycott or John May. Tell them Roger Hutchinson sent you.’ With these words still ringing in my ears, I hitch-hiked back from the North just in time to reconvene with the rest of my fellow students for the unveiling of London University’s spring 1972 term.

A few underwhelming days after my return to academia, I actually got up the nerve to travel by tube to the address I’d been given back in Barnsley. I stepped out of Ladbroke Grove tube station on an overcast weekday afternoon and made the short walk under the motorway to where the butt-end of Portobello Road intersected.

Standing before me as I reached the street was a young man clearly in an advanced state of chemical refreshment. I recognised him almost instantly: it was Paul Kossoff, the guitarist from Free. Eighteen months earlier I’d been one of over half a million attendees at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival and had witnessed Kossoff on stage there coaxing forth a series of barn-burning guitar solos out of a battered Les Paul alongside his three colleagues and being greeted with a mass standing ovation for his efforts. Free were at their absolute peak right at that very instant - their anthem ‘All Right Now’ had recently made no. 1 in the UK
singles charts - and they were also Britain’s best-loved up-and-coming outfit of the epoch.

They were also incredibly young. Kossoff and the others had been professional musicians since 1968 and yet he was only one year older than me. I’d just turned twenty and he was twenty-one years old when our ships briefly passed on Portobello Road. That’s a frightening age to suddenly be designated a has-been. I didn’t know it then but he was already well on his way to becoming one of the new decade’s more prominent casualties. Free had recently broken up as a direct consequence of his drug problems. The group would be in mid-performance only to discover their guitarist had fallen asleep against his amplifier. Given his marching orders in late ’71, Kossoff had quickly drowned his sorrows by moving into Ladbroke Grove’s druggy nexus and drenching his senses in a haze of Class A narcotics and tranquillisers. As we edged around each other on the street that day, I locked eyes with him for a second and he shot me a quick mischievous little smile, the kind of look you’d get from a naughty schoolboy who’d just been suspended for getting caught smoking behind the bike sheds. If I’d known more about his ongoing situation, maybe I would have taken his presence before me as some grim portent, a warning of things to come, but those kind of reflections are only triggered by hindsight. I was too busy finding my own way in the world - or at the very least the elusive address I’d been given - to focus further on his sorry fate.

Finally, I found it - 305 Portobello Road. A hippie couple with strange black sores around their mouths were running a health-food shop on the ground floor and told me to ring the bell at the side door and then go up to the first floor, where
Frendz
had its office. This I did, only to find myself in a dimly lit room festooned
with dilapidated furniture, sundry battered typewriters and filing cabinets and several beanbags masquerading as makeshift sofas. Hardly anyone was present apart from a young woman seated at a desk nearest the large window overlooking Portobello Road and typing away furiously. ‘Are you by any chance Rosie Boycott?’ I recall stammering out. She answered with a nod and smile that emboldened me to go straight into my pitch. I was a friend of Roger Hutchinson and he’d advised me to present myself here and offer my fledgling writerly services to your journal. I was interested in writing reviews and doing interviews with musicians rather than talking up the latest bomb-detonating activities of the odious Angry Brigade (some of whom had actually been part of
Frendz
’s editorial caucus in the not-so-distant past). Did she see an outlet for me here?

Amazingly, she replied ‘Yes, of course’ and urged me to write something at the earliest opportunity and bring it to the office for further perusal. I never encountered Ms Boycott again - though we briefly spoke on the phone in the early nineties just after she’d been made the editor of UK
Esquire
, the upmarket men’s magazine - but have always held her in high esteem, mainly because her kindness and encouragement that day made me feel instantly accepted in this potentially daunting new world I was trying to break into. If she’d told me to piss off I would have probably junked all my career ambitions as a writer right there and then.

Drawing on my student grant I next purchased three records that had just been released that very week. One was a mediocre album by San Francisco’s Quicksilver Messenger Service called simply
Quicksilver
and another was
Gonna Take a Miracle
, a soul-stirring collection of rhythm ’n’ blues covers performed by the
gifted Italian-American singer/songwriter Laura Nyro. I’ve forgotten what the third disc was. Burning the midnight oil in my student garret, I scribbled out in longhand my impressions of the music contained within until I’d fashioned three coherent reviews. The following day I returned to
Frendz
with my dog-eared pages of handwritten text only to find that Rosie Boycott had promptly quit the paper for unexplained reasons. Her place at the main desk had been taken by a thin young man with impressively long Pre-Raphaelite hair called John May. I repeated my basic pitch and then handed him the sheets containing my prose. He read them and told me they were very good and that almost certainly they’d be published in the next issue. I was over the fucking moon.

For the next week or so, I shied away from the office and waited with baited, hash-stained breath for the publication of the next
Frendz
issue. Then one weekend I saw a fresh pile being sold in Compendium bookshop on the high street in Camden Town and approached with tingling trepidation. As I leafed furiously through the journal I couldn’t find a trace of what I’d written but then on the last but one page there they all were - my three reviews and my name printed prominently underneath them.

It is always a magical empowering moment when a writer sees his or her considered words typeset and available for public consumption for the very first time, and I was certainly no exception. The writing itself wasn’t particularly outstanding but the three efforts had an engagingly naive and energetic tone, which is just another way of saying they weren’t very good but at least you could tell I was keen about what I was addressing. They worked like a charm anyway. When I returned to
Frendz
, I was greeted like a conquering hero and promptly offered the job of official music
editor for the princely sum of £4 a month and all the freebies I could siphon out of the record companies. I felt like I’d just won the lottery. Suddenly I was a burgeoning force to be reckoned with in the freak-flag-flying enclaves of the London underground. Little did I know that its days were already sorely numbered. By the end of the year it would be virtually extinct.

By early 1972 London’s various alternative press outlets were all struggling to survive in the face of ever-conflicting shifts in editorial direction and generally dwindling sales.
Oz
- the most notorious periodical of its ilk - had enjoyed a hearty sales boost in 1970 and briefly became a fully fledged cultural cause célèbre that same year when its three instigators were tried at the Old Bailey on charges of conspiring to pervert the morals of young children. But after being exonerated, Richard Neville, the magazine’s key motivator, had left the enterprise to concentrate on writing books, as did their most interesting writer Germaine Greer, and
Oz
had quickly degenerated into an unattractive fusion of empty ‘subversive’ ranting and hard-core pornography.
International Times
, its sister publication, was struggling on, still baying for revolution, still trying to stick it to the man - but fewer and fewer hirsute young Brits were laying down their hard-come-by shillings and pence to hearken to the call.

The same was true of
Frendz
. It had begun life in 1969 as
Friends of Rolling Stone
- a London-based outgrowth of the seminal San Francisco fortnightly - but then Jann Wenner,
Rolling Stone
’s editor and owner, had quickly grown dissatisfied with their efforts and cut off all funding; finding new backers, the original editorial team persevered into the seventies, retitling their project
Frendz
and throwing open their doors to any drug-diminished dissident or street-dwelling nutcase who wished to contribute. As a result,
the journal had a short turbulent history that’s best evoked in the printed reminiscences of those who manned the staff, edited together in the final section of Jonathon Green’s illuminating oral history of the sixties counter-culture
Days in the Life
. In the book there’s an unforgettable description of a female acid casualty who haunted the office whilst dragging an old mattress behind her. She’d vanished by the time I turned up, I’m happy to say. I couldn’t have handled her: there were already more than enough LSD-impaired individuals flocking around the premises for me to contend with. Syd Barrett even appeared one day - his last group Stars was possibly going to be managed by
Frendz
’s ersatz accountant, a fellow in a grimy white denim suit and satanic goatee called Dick - and stared like a lost dog at anyone attempting to communicate with him. He looked in a bad way - but frankly no worse than any of the other space-cases littering the room.

Frendz
had one big trump card at this precise epoch: the unquestioning support and unstinting patronage of Hawkwind. The Ladbroke Grove-based self-styled space rockers had lately been promoted to the lofty position of resident Pied Pipers for the district’s great unwashed. You’d see them everywhere - under the Westway on top of a mud-caked pick-up truck bashing out one of their endless space jams for free to a gaggle of saucer-eyed onlookers or striding around the streets purposefully in a swirl of hair, denim and cheap rococo jewellery. Most of all, I’d see them in the office of
Frendz
as they tended to use the premises for their own haphazard business purposes. Whenever they had a gig to play - which was practically every evening - they’d congregate there throughout the afternoon and the room would duly become transformed into an ongoing scene from a Cheech and
Chong movie with pot-smoke billowing from every corner and high-spirited badinage spouting forth from every pair of parched lips in the immediate vicinity.

As a musical collective, Hawkwind were closer in sound and spirit to a small army of psychedelic buskers than anything that you could conceivably refer to as ‘virtuoso-driven’. In fact, several of the original members had actually started out as buskers or street entertainers and evidently hadn’t felt the urge to improve on their instrumental techniques when they chose to go electric. This made them a somewhat unpredictable commodity. You never knew exactly what would happen when you booked the band for a show. I’d first seen them in a club in Crawley in mid-1971; only three members had turned up to perform. The audience that night were treated to Hawkwind’s very own stripped-down version of ‘Jazz Odyssey’. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall backstage when they tried to get their fee from the promoter afterwards. But by early 1972 they’d grown to twice that number and seemed to be adding new recruits by the month.

Dave Brock was their guitarist, tune-smith and - sort of - leader; he seemed somewhat older and grumpier than his colleagues and suffered from an acute haemorrhoid condition that the rest of the group never tired of lampooning - though never directly to his face. (Eventually he’d get his revenge by trade-marking the band’s name and sacking everyone from the classic early-seventies incarnation, becoming Hawkwind’s sole trustee.) Nik Turner - his second-in-command - was never going to cause Ornette Coleman any sleepless nights with his saxophone playing but he had a lot of natural style and even a hint of charisma and was also the only man I’ve ever witnessed who could convincingly sport eye make-up with a full beard and still not look
completely ridiculous. They’d recently brought on board a vocalist /lyricist named Robert Calvert who was a real, bona fide nutcase. He had occasional flashes of illumination but suffered from a particularly severe chemical imbalance in his cerebral faculties that often compelled him to seek temporary solace in various ‘rest homes’ dotted around the British Isles. Also along for the ride were two ‘electronics experts’ - Dikmik and Del Dettmar - who were really just a couple of former pot dealers who’d fallen into music-making by pure happenstance. The rhythm section was actually the key ingredient to Hawkwind’s growing appeal. Drummer Simon King and bassist ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister - both newly recruited - were able to create a solid rumbling groove for the others to play over and it was this cohesive piledriving contribution - hard, primitive, metronome-like - that ultimately made the group so prized around the country as purveyors of proto-stoner rock.

Their gigs in London and out in the suburbs quickly became homes away from home for the nation’s young drug-dabblers, not unlike ‘raves’ in the late eighties except with a bunch of hairy biker types playing electrified instruments in place of an anorak-sporting DJ gurning over the turntables. Every day was a new adventure for Hawkwind and those who happened to find themselves in its giddy orbit. No one at this juncture was in it for the money or nurturing any kind of fame-seeking agenda. If the group were offered the choice of playing for free in a field somewhere or performing at a paying venue, they would almost always go for the cash-free option. Hawkwind played numerous impromptu benefit shows for
Frendz
and were ready to show up for virtually any alternative community cause you could throw at them. In this respect, they were more authentic ambassadors of
Ladbroke Grove’s bohemian demographic than the Clash, who in the late seventies used the Westway as nothing more than a handy photo-op backdrop for their own further self-glorification.