Gary Holton died in his thirty-third year in the early hours of Saturday 25 October 1985. At an all-time low, he went drinking with a couple of old friends in the Warrington Hotel in Maida Vale. He died in a flat on the Chalk Hill Estate in Wembley.
He was an addict, a legendary drinker, had a problem with heroin. The Sun and other rags chronicled details of his sex life. He died in debt. As Lemmy the Motorhead axe-man put it: ‘The bastard owed me a fiver when he died.’
He idolized Lenny Bruce. He was bad. He was the brother you never had. He was Pinter’s Lenny: forever ‘taking the piss’. Touring exploits with his band the Heavy Metal Kids read like banned out-takes from Spinal Tap or Withnail & I. The broken leg after falling off stage as support for Alice Cooper. Sacked as support for Kiss after laughing hysterically as Gene Simmons’s hair caught fire. The last gig at the Speakeasy: Gary in white cowboy boots, pink poser pouch, Smith & Wesson bullet belts; Johnny Rotten in the front row chanting ‘boring, boring’. The disastrous stand-in as lead singer for the Damned: no words known to any song apart from ‘neat’.
Gary Holton has, for the following twenty years or so after his death, continued his work as shade. In the mid 1990s I flick on Radio 1: an interview with his widow is followed by his cover of ‘Ruby (Don’t Take Your Love to Town)’. The BBC ignore my subsequent persistent telephone inquiries. In Berwick Street vinyl outlets hitherto unknown bootlegs come my way (‘HMK Live and Loud’ and ‘Sing It to Me’). Driving through Hackney past the then unrestored Empire I see heavy metal kids live chalked on a board outside a pub before the turn up into Dalston. The band (same name, RIP Gary, minus Gary) subsequently re-form. They have their own website. Gary’s followers have assembled spooky ‘voice collections’ from Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and ‘live’ performance material from the Germany tour in 1976. It’s all out there in a virtual world.
He’s just a footnote in other stories. The glossy chroniclers of punk have hipper footage, other names. They all went down the Music Machine to hear him (TV Smith, Rat Scabies and the rest) before going off to form their own little gangs to play speeded-up R&B. A lost leader. Of punk or glam/pub/yob rock, take your choice. Only ever cited in homage to others. A mention in Mark Putterford’s biography of Phil Lynott (for his involvement in the wonderful Christmas exploitation band the Greedy Bastards).
Otherwise, he’s off the map. Take Quadrophenia, for example, the movie that announces the 1980s as it cynically recycles youth culture to make it marketable and safe. Sting and Phil Daniels are going one way and Gary the other: Holton is not even credited at the end and is replaced by a look-alike before the Brighton ruck. A ghost cameo as the ‘aggressive rocker’. Sting moves smoothly on to soft-rock respectability with a hint of ‘rough’ and Phil Daniels takes on the mantle of Holton sound-alike for Brit Pop’s nadir, Blur’s Parklife. Mods and Rockers. Substitute for another guy…
The cover of his band’s last album, Kitsch (one of those Hypnosis ones), has on the front a Holton look-alike (dusk, deserted country road) opening door of sports car (registration HMK3) and fluttered newspaper headline: pop star dies in car crash. On the back: identikit image, car registration HMK4 and newspaper title STRANGE TWIST OF FATE. Absolute kitsch, innit.
I’ll helpyou out. Gary’s best-known alter ego was Wayne Winston Norris. The Cockney carpenter in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. The cheeky chappie with the shades and the dyed hair. As Holton described him: ‘a wide boy, everybody’s mate’, with ‘a set of values, just the wrong set’.
Holton died just after returning from Marbella during the filming of the second series. He was kept alive for the rest of it by a canny mix of long shots, look-alikes and voice-dubbing. Wayne reportedly dies of a rare heart condition. A ‘son’, Wyman, steps in to fill the gap. Sequels. We want more. Whatever happened to the likely lads, we don’t want them back: crinkly, balding, turning fifty. A thousand thousand slimy things live on.
When he was in his pomp, as lead singer of the Heavy Metal Kids, there were replica Holtons at the gigs (stovepipe hat, ‘Kid’ coat, braces, fox stole, Wellington boots, etc.; touring Europe the band were tracked night after night by a Holton look-alike). There was a droog element to some of this.
After his death, I adopted ‘Wayne Holton’ as one of many liberating heteronyms for fanzine articles. W. H. was a lad insane, a rioter. I enjoyed his company.
Much was made of Holton’s London street cred during his career. He was not a mockney. He was ‘born and bred’ in the East End: his father, Ernie, was an ex-boxer and owner of public houses. This helped him along. The luvvie knowingness of masks and personae as well as the much-valued diamond-geezer authenticity. He could move from Eddie Hairstyle in The Knowledge to Tennants Pilsner adverts: Are you pulling my Pilsner? His childhood progress explains a lot: posh school (Westminster), Sadlers Wells Opera Company, the Old Vic Company and the RSC at Stratford. The boy done good. On the stage from the age of eleven. He liked taking his clothes off (the lead in Hair) as well as dressing up. Good preparation for later ‘hellraising’. One of the many roles became part of the interior furniture: the Dodger, Dickens’s prototype ‘loveable rogue’. Bless.
One of the many appeals of the Dodger persona is there in Dickens’s original as well as the Bart ‘free adaptation’. Adult and child are fused: the Dodger is man/boy, a song of experience/innocence: ‘as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see, but he had about him all the airs and manners of a man…he wore a man’s coat’. He is a confusion of product and original. Much more fun than the cipher of innocence abroad, Oliver, and the sanitized middle-class world of the Brownlows. Appealing: the brother you never had.
The character is a bizarre take on Dickens’s own father, John: the shield of other names (Mr Dawkins…Jack Dawkins…the Artful…) slips at three points in the novel to ‘John Dawkins’, including the fateful delivery of Oliver to Fagin. Give the vowels a tweak and you have ‘John Dickens’, the father who betrayed young Charles to the blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs. The good bloke who was also a debtor, the big kid (‘How long he is growing upto be a man’). The clubbable blagger desperate to be well liked.
The Dodger is one to be emulated, followed. Fagin advises Oliver, ‘He’ll be a great man himself; and will make you one too, if you take pattern by him.’ Legions of future sentimentalized ‘loveable rogues’ in London culture have tucked in. From the cherubic grin of Dennis Wise, key member of Wimbledon’s ‘crazy gang’ (‘He could start a fight in an empty house’: Sir Alex Ferguson), to the Krays, or other would-be goodfellas, who still ‘look out for their own’.
Dickens (see his Preface of 1841) was anxious not to be seen to be condoning or glamorizing a world of crime (the public appetite already apparent in the lives of felons collected in the Newgate Calendar). So the Dodger is punished, but kept alive. Be honest, most of you had an image of him as the rozzas break down the door in the Lean version as they come a-looking for crazy Bill, or reprising on ‘Consider Yourself’ with the rest of the company. Instead the antecedent of ‘lad culture’ becomes a ‘lifer’, transported to Australia.
So, there in spirit as Ant and Dec welcome another C-list loser on to I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. Johnny Rotten swearing? Shock horror.
The Dodger’s first resurrection is Magwitch in Great Expectations, ready to turn Pip’s world-views upside down.
Then on via David Lean, Carol Reed and Lionel Bart and any am-dram director near you to bless and curse generations of late twentieth-century players: Anthony Newley, Jack Wild, Davy Jones, Ben Elton, and…Gary Holton.
Holton’s takes on the Dodger figure were various and often unsubtle. And the literary knowingness starts even before this. The Heavy Metal Kids was adopted as a name for the band upon the suggestion of ‘manager’ Ricki Farr (son of boxer, Tommy, who fought Joe Louis in his day). It is an in-joke that backfires, lifted from the works of William S. Burroughs. (We are in the era of Steely Dan, after all.)
The name is a curse: the band are not ‘heavy metal’. The appellation is tightened to the Kids for the second album (knowing again: its title is ‘Anvil Chorus’).
The cover of the first 1974 album reveals Holton as Dodger with gang, blocking access to the Oliver! out-take cobbled alleyway. They are doing their best to look loveable and well ’ard. The poster insert shows Holton with empty bottle, trademark Dodger hat and coat, standing next to a dustbin, screwing out the camera. Only the clay pipes are missing. Cut their hair, get Bernie Rhodes in to consult on latest punk accessories, voilà: the Clash!
The pose of violence was taken seriously enough for there to have been a Panorama special (title: ‘The New Criminals’) with man-child Holton putting himself forward as a ‘spokesman for a generation’ of junior car thieves. In it the band play ‘The Cops are Coming’, a classic anglicized take on glam-gothic about a mock deadly encounter between a biker and the police that ends with a chain fight and the gleeful punch celebrating decapitation. How was anyone ever taken in? The kid was only kidding. The cult of the Dodger is remembered lyrically in a catchy little number ‘Jackie the Lad’ (Jack Dawkins, geddit). A tale of petty criminality and moral ambivalence, it was one of Holton’s favourites on the live circuit.
The problem was that our cheeky chappie was going to meet another gang, led by Big Mal McClaren and fronted by another more ruthless frontman (an eluder, a cheat, an avoider, a surreptitious follower). Stand-upbanter, funny outfits and songs (about nose-picking, the classic ‘Bogey Woogie’; vomiting after excess drinking, the quietly restrained ‘Spew Up’; and masturbation, ‘Crisis’) were no match for a knowing spike into abstract nouns like ‘anarchy’ and ‘anger’.
Ronnie Thomas, the bassist for the Kids, relates the meeting in the Roebuck pub in the King’s Road. Rotten, accompanied by two minders, ‘undid this huge gold safety pin and put it on Gary’s lapel. He then patted his cheek and said, “You’ve been ripped off, Holton…how does it feel?”’
Charley Bates sums it up. When the Artful is taken down and made a ‘lifer’ for a ‘twopenny-halfpenny sneeze box’ he is appalled at the likely injustice to the great one’s reputation: ‘nobody will know half of what he was. How will he stand in the Newgate Calendar? P’raps not be there at all.’ And devotees of websites are out there to convince us that the dead man was greater than…Alex Harvey, Jimmy Pursey, Ian Dury, Jimmy Nail…you name it…
Twenty years on. Perhaps best not be there hereafter. He had his moment. His band’s one real hit, ‘She’s No Angel’, will never appear on TOTP2. We are instead destined to hear Robbie Williams, stand-in scally from Stoke, performing ‘Angel’ with nationwide club-land backing until the crack of doom.
[Peter Carpenter]
‘Where’s Sally gone?’
He swivelled round, trying to scan the crowd. Some of them were sitting, some standing.
‘Damn!’
‘She’ll be back.’
‘She’s got my colours.’
‘Should be easy to pick her out.’
‘Come on, Benny, she could be anywhere.’
‘Benny!…Benny?…Bunny!’ called a passing youth-citizen, a can of lager in his mitt, stars orbiting his head.
Benny took the can off him in a friendly sort of way and emptied the contents over his head.
‘We cannot just scatter. Gorra maintain our presence.’
‘Sure. She’ll be OK.’
The Festival was a big chance to show solidarity, make a public mark, mend the image, build bridges.
*
‘Danny, gerrus a coke, pal.’
‘Me too.’ Flicking a coin.
‘And don’t get lost.’
They were sat on a bank. Just high enough to make it look as though they were supervising something. Easy really, as the crowd was perfectly capable of looking after itself. Benny stretched back, aware the whole set-up was one of his better ideas.
An hour passed.
‘Looks like we’ve lost Danny.’
They decided to retrace his movements. The catering was one crowd over and a bit of a hedge away.
‘Time to eat,’ Benny explained, in case it seemed he was anxious.
At the stall:
‘Free,’ he said.
‘Nope,’ said the caterer.
‘Yes we are.’
He ducked a bit of hot fat aimed his way. Gave the van a little rock to test it. The server gave him a venomous stare.
‘All of us.’
The chiphacker looked round for something heavier than a chip scoop, but all he found was a dog howling. Close too.
He slung the side door of the van open, took a look – ‘That your dog?’
‘He’s hungry too.’
‘Gerrim off the garbage. I’ve got chips.’
‘He likes meat.’
A big bag of chips was shovelled up and passed over, a few stale burgers on top.
‘Just get him out of it.’
‘Sure.’
Danny’s dog proved hard to shift. They had to improvise a lead out of a belt.
‘Danny should look after him better.’
‘You see my girl? Blonde, colours over her shoulder?’
The caterer just curled his lip.
They moved away to eat.
‘Maybe someone’s after us.’
Jed looked worried about Sally.
‘Missing persons?’
‘They’re the ones trying to lose us.’
It seemed better to have a look round themselves. A patrol, Benny called it. In case the missing friends were sitting it out somewhere, or found new pals.
The music didn’t make it easy to communicate, but they kept together somehow. Except the dog.
In the end, Benny placed them all together on the edge of the stage. ‘That way they’ll see us easily and know where to come to.’
It gave a smart sort of impression that somehow they were controlling the music, or at least filtering it. No one interfered.
For an hour or more. And then it was the dog broke the peace. He came bounding on to the stage shaking and banging a boot, mangled but recognizably –
‘Eff !’
‘D’you think…?’
The air seemed to turn serious around them in the sound.
Jed dashed off to check.
The others pulled the dog and its relic off stage and, like a little army of improvised warriors, got hold of some space batons and tools – plenty about backstage.
They moved out of the public eye.
Jed made it back OK, one arm of his denim on fire, and some bulging bruises around his face.
‘Danny – Sally – back of the hedge – foot off.’
They ran then, a band of comets through a scene now lit by generators and chasing floodlights.
There were six catering staff.
But all they’d say was:
‘D’you think we’d eat that muck we make for you?’
[Bill Griffiths]
Real Audio stream
‘There we were setting upthe world’s first truly multicultural rock’n’ rave society, when the City of London moneymen did a deal with the Muslim monotheists and stabbed us in the back. Now look what’s happened to all our ancient liberties! No more Glastonbury Festival, no more Wicker Man, no more Beaufort Hunt! I was born in this country and I don’t even recognize it any more.’
Dr Double Oh No, Crown secret agent, occult cryptographer and head of Ukanian Stay-Behind rearguard cellnet.
Narrative voiceover
Previously, in Rave Nation, loads previously, it was 3000–2000 BCE in North West Europe. That’s right. Before the Normans, before the Saxons, before the Romans – before even the Britons and the Celts – were the Afro-Atlanteans. Now these groovy little fuckers were the original technopagan vagabonds shipped into the Mediterranean trade network from Babylon via the Old Kingdom of Egypt. They were following their oracles towards the setting sun, in search of the precious incense ambergris which was reckoned an immortality drug. So they’re passing through Cornwall, Ireland and the west coasts of Wales and Scotland on their way to Lapland and they get busy throwing down all their sacred tech – their trackways, earthworks, stone circles and long barrows.
Their shot-caller is a big fat bastard called Gogmagog. He is initiated into the mysteries of Isis and can get an indirect line that puts him through to Osiris, Lord of the Dead, and his crazy brother, Set. All the Old Egyptian deities move in the orbit of the Dog Star and are the zodiac avatars used by the Sirian breed of space aliens to communicate with their designated handlers on earth. All of this makes Gogmagog a real dab hand with proprietary Anubis interface code. The guy is a regular fucking demigod.
Anyway, years pass and all these Christian mainframes get dumped on the sacred sites of the Afro-Atlanteans by a bunch of monotheistic barbarians dressed in white sheets. The Crown/City duopoly gets going on the Thames. But old gods die hard and in 1582 true hacker and bisexual occultist Eddie Boy Krishna turns up on Dr Double Oh No’s doorstepin Mortlake with a test tube of ambergris and an Anubis manual he says he found in the ruins of Glastonbury. Soon the two of them are trip partners grooving with the dead as they set upthe Afro-Atlantean zombie circuits of the Old Ukanian Combine. Eddie worms his way into the Old Egyptian extranet while the Doctor starts running the Sirians without paying them like they were his pet monsters or something.
So, things are building to a climax. It’s 1988 – the beginning of events covered in Rave Nation – and Eddie is chilling in the monotheistic state of Goa, recovering from some really bad experiences in the 1960s. He’s got his bare feet upon the beach at Vagator catching some of the new electronic vibes when word reaches him that his old partner in crime is back in operation…
Full Motion Video
Drug lord flying in from his offshore island haven with coked-out wannabe supermodel in tow. He leans out from beneath the whirling blades: Hey, Eddie Boy, aincha heard? The Ibiza sound is the next big thing. Check out Clink Street.
Narrative voiceover
So Eddie catches the next plane to Heathrow and barrels through the jet lag to end upnecking Substance E with a bunch of London wide boys suddenly eager to get oral on his bits. Damn! Where the fuck did this new drug come from? This is better than mandrake root. He has never partied so hard.
What do you know? Eddie grabs some Adidas shell-toes and starts running with the Inter City Firm, snipping locks on empty warehouses in the East End and putting down the competition with machete attacks and Stanley blade rushes. It’s real small-time stuff but it gives him back his edge. Pretty soon he’s got the local constabulary in on his scams and he’s the lord promoter of every dodgy rave between Plaistow, Stratford and Poplar. He’s keyed himself into the local extranet and pulled down the Karma Twins to put the frighteners on the indigenes. Everything is pretty fucking sweet.
Inevitably, Eddie gets bored. He hears the Doctor is hanging at the Dungeons on the Lea Bridge Road and one night they meet at Mudchute Common opposite City of London outpost east Canary Wharf. Designated venue the Crossroads of Anubis deep now underground.
Full Motion Video
Two sad old English blokes sniffing ambergris and smoking dried leaves in a crib done uplike one of the back rooms at the Globe Theatre. It is earthy and damp.
EDDIE: How’s tricks, matey? You don’t look so good.
DOCTOR: I assure you the news of my demise was most et cetera. As a matter of fact…I’m back.
EDDIE: I dunno, man. You should lay off that kiddie porn.
DOCTOR: Very funny. Listen, Eddie, don’t you realize what we’re sitting on here?
EDDIE: Please don’t say a gold mine. That whole El Dorado thing really freaked me out.
DOCTOR: Edward! Look, my Crown rating is still good. With my intelligence contacts and your funny-money connections, we can put together the act again.
EDDIE: You want me back in the City of London?
DOCTOR: Not exactly. Have you seen the way the natives gobble down this Substance E?
EDDIE: You want me to set upthe bathtub lab again?
DOCTOR: Bigger than that, Eddie. I’m thinking the old Raleigh network. Czech drug factories, MI6 spook runs, Caribbean money washes. The works.
EDDIE: Off-shore accountability. It figures.
DOCTOR: Plus, I’m thinking pharmaceutically indentured sex labour. The groundlings are already hooked. All we have to do is manufacture a scarcity and line up a new supply.
EDDIE: Brand name?
DOCTOR: Substance F.
EDDIE: Ooh, Doctor. What a comeback!
DOCTOR: We’ll do a test run. If it works, then we’ll get the old devil in on the act.
EDDIE: Gizza kiss, ya auld cunt.
Narrative voiceover
So that’s how the Second English Revolution kicked off. Eddie gets his chemical kitchens up and running with raw materials squeezed out of Latvia and finished product cooked up in phoney biomedical research labs in the Czech Republic. He’s following the Benetton model with batch production runs and just-in-time delivery systems. The MI6 boys have their work cut out shipping the stuff into the country under the disapproving noses of Customs & Excise. Imports get so high it’s embarrassing and the spooks have to keep cutting loose more and more bodies to keeptheir HM colleagues in the loop. Luckily, they’ve got the ICF and their newly loved-up ex-rival stadium gangs – the Bushwhackers in South London, fragments of the Highbury and White Hart Lane firms up North, the Headhunters out West – patched in on the ground as a dealership network, and these guys are routinely expendable.
Pretty soon, Eddie is supplying all the orbital raves which have sprung up like weeds in the deregulated capital-investment zones that rake the late-industrial landscape outside the London ramparts of the M25. He’s got bouncers, ex-squaddies and demobbed SAS guys on the payroll wielding shotguns, TAC key codes and CS gas. Things are getting so out of control that the national police net wants to take over his drug ring. The Doctor is running interference for him with wild cover stories about Sirian black ops and psychological warfare test programmes. But no one is buying his nuclear monotheism number and when the cops send out their HOLMES encryption guys he shrugs and fucks off to Glastonbury on the Hypnosis trail.
Meanwhile Eddie is coining it. He’s opened an account in a snide name at an EC4 branch of Barings run by an old Oxford chum and finds himself on the receiving end of unlimited borrowing privileges. Time for the Church’s brogues. He funds his whole thing out of Queer Street on a mobile phone and routes his profits through a nested hierarchy of shell companies on the forex markets until they pay out from the Transatlantic Corporation registered in a Virgin Islands tax haven. Then it’s bags of cash flying back over the Atlantic pond in note form. A quick bung to Customs and the money’s in his clipnear fresh as the day it was minted.
Neat little scam, eh? Eddie lets it run on automatic pilot and rearranges his shoe closet. But then his bagman throws a wobbly at Terminal 4 and coughs him up. Suddenly the Inland Revenue sniffer dogs are wanting to go through his pockets and fucking Anubis cuts in to tell him the jig is up. Eddie siphons off his remaining assets into a Swiss holding account – no names, just numbers – and steps back to watch his entire operation go into meltdown.
Que se-fucking-ra. Looks like the scarcity economy has arrived. Eddie pulls in his remaining stash and starts cutting it with amphetamine, synthetic opiates, toilet cleaner, strychnine…any fucking shit he can find. So this is the really bad Substance G that produces a void where there should be ecstasy. Eddie don’t care. He spears 500 boys in a field in Buckinghamshire. He files his toenails. So what the fuck is happening in Glastonbury anyhow…?
Full Motion Video
The Doctor dropping science with a bunch of nomadic anarcho-occultist sound-system jugglers sporting close crops and black combat gear. He is deep under cover.
DOCTOR: So did I ever tell you kids ’bout the time I worked for government intelligence rat-fucking the Algonquins…?
Narrative voiceover
Eddie pulls on some twelve-hole Docs with rainbow laces and slots in alongside his mentor. The pair receive their marching orders and fall in behind the Dogstar Tribe. These crazy jugglers are wandering the countryside hitting on all the old Afro-Atlantean sites in an effort to rouse the Afro-Celtic gods and challenge the powers of the Old Ukanian Combine. It seems to work. The tribe gets buzzed by Tornado jets as they dance up a storm in Cornwall while reports file in that Osiris is getting moody. The Doctor is in his element working both sides of the track. He boosts his Crown rating by calling in the scores to the HOLMES boys but then gets Eddie to throw the Sirians round the place to keep the Dogstar folks on their toes. It gets so he starts handing out tips on the best domains to hack.
So this is how the Battle of Mudchute came down. The Dogstar Tribe are fronted by this charismatic turntablist called Mark 23. He travels the countryside with a band of merry people, their kids and their dogs. Mark 23 knows how to dig the crates of history as he pumps the wheels of steel. Eddie synchs him into the Raleigh network and pretty soon he’s switching the pitch on European techno tracks and animating them with escaped Atlantic drum loops using Caribbean voodoo techniques. The beats are dark and fast.
Osiris is listening. He’s trying to get past the lock Eddie has on his box:
Real Audio stream ‘Blown minds of screaming-dancing-tattooed-sorted-armed-feathered Dogstar People are only the sparks of a revolutionary implosion and devolutionary planetary regeneration.’
Narrative voiceover
Righty-ho! The Doctor has evolved a strategy of tension and is mouthing off rumours of an insurrection led by Gogmagog. Mark 23 wants the showdown at a stone circle in Wiltshire but the Doctor has other plans. He uses HOLMES to cast an exclusion zone around the meeting place in Wiltshire and sneaks the Dogstar Tribe into Mudchute’s green and pleasant land. Mark 23 throws down a mad groove with Eddie slipping him the vinyl. They throw a Stop the City party J21 as the planet turns around the sun. The people are doing a ghost dance and their dogs are going crazy.
The City of London cuts off the green with a secret police roadblock and hits back at the symbolic terror with black helicopters, FM rock and searchlights. The Dogstar folks are pinned down. Eddie has his finger on the page in the Anubis manual that deals with the conjuring of spirits. He gets the nod from the Doctor. It’s time to download Osiris. Bingo! All hell breaks loose from Mark 23’s decks as Osiris fucks with the infrasound and takes out a building near the Canary Wharf tower.
There’s pandaemonium on the Crown’s black datanets. The Dogstar Tribe seize the day. They set their dogs on the coppers and swarm over the roadblocks into the City. Eddie wrestles with his Anubis manual and gets Osiris back in his box. The Doctor hits Mark 23 with a chloroform pad and hauls him off the scene. He might need a hostage. Mudchute empties out.
Next day Mark 23 wanders Threadneedle Street in a daze. He is being led on a rope by this cute little devil dog knows which way is up. The Dogstar Tribe been celebrating with motion tactics in the City. Getting loaded and doing it in the road. Breaking finance-house windows, spilling garbage, setting fire to cars…
Full Motion Video
The Doctor and Eddie hooked upon the sacred mound at Parliament Hill engaged in an emergency failsafe procedure. Lots of thunder and lightning.
DOCTOR: This is a recoverable situation.
[Steve Beard]
The mid-1960s poetry extravaganza that posthumously became known as ‘Wholly Communion’ after the film Peter Whitehead made about it is often viewed as acting as midwife to the emergent hippie culture in London. To some ‘Wholly Communion’ was the last and greatest hurrah of the London beatnik scene, its fabulous death rattle, while for others it was the birth cry of psychedelia. Regardless of which view you take, for most of the 7,000 punters who trooped into the Albert Hall on 11 June 1965, ‘Wholly Communion’ was a spectacular success. That said, the individual poetry readings were less inspiring than their ability to attract a huge crowd, since even the appearance of beat stalwart Allen Ginsberg was viewed as disappointing. More spectacularly, the British visionary poet and acidhead Harry Fainlight was singularly unable to complete a recital of his own work. Likewise, depending on which historical commentator is taken at their word, the British beat novelist and ungentlemanly junkie Alex Trocchi either succeeded admirably or failed miserably in his role as MC. Regardless, ‘Wholly Communion’ is now a mythical event in the annals of the British counter-culture, the first mass gathering of the tribes, and no recent history of London in the swinging sixties appears complete without its reverential invocation.
By way of contrast, the zombification of the British counter-culture at the end of the sixties has for too long remained a taboo subject. Fittingly enough it was the ‘Wholly Communion’ MC who acted as chief somnambulist at the London Arts Lab slumber party of Sunday 13 April 1969 that exposed the ‘Age of Aquarius’ as a complete non-starter. This, the apotheosis of post-hippie burn-out, was promoted to an indifferent public as ‘Alex Trocchi’s State of Revolt’. The evening featured among others Trocchi, William Burroughs, R. D. Laing and Davy Graham. What went down during ‘The State of Revolt’ wasn’t as immediately horrific as the murder of Meredith Hunter at the Rolling Stones’ Altamont concert, or as self-consciously staged as the ‘Death of Hippie’ happening organized by the San Francisco Diggers, or even the Manson murders; and it is precisely this that makes Trocchi’s 1969 Covent Garden debacle such an iconic event. ‘The State of Revolt’ marks the onset of counter-cultural rigor mortis and this living death occurred not with a bang but a smacked-out whimper. It is also a death with implications that we won’t fully comprehend until the chatter of neo-critical production about the 1960s ceases to mask the violent silence that lies at the core of that decade, and which will yet prove to be its most enduring legacy.
While smackheads failed to constitute a majority among those present at ‘The State of Revolt’, both punters and participants shuffled through the Arts Lab looking like reanimated corpses intent on eating living human brains. And I say that knowing my mother, who was present, had been a vegetarian, as well as a junkie, since the mid 1960s. Footage of this Arts Lab death ritual makes up a good portion of the documentary Cain’s Film (1969) by director Jamie Wadhawan; and my mother, Julia Callan-Thompson, is visible in four separate audience shots. My mother was actually on the hippie trail in India from the beginning of 1968 until the summer of 1969, but she made at least one lightning tripback to Europe during her sojourn to the East. Both she and a number of her boyfriends were heavily involved in Trocchi’s drug dealing, and this probably accounts for her presence in the audience at ‘The State of Revolt’. Although opium was readily available in India, heroin was harder to come by and so this more powerful sedative was highly prized by those my mother hung out with in Goa, all of whom returned to Europe strung out. They also had an omnivorous appetite for LSD.
I sent a copy of Cain’s Film to native New Yorker Lynne Tillman because, after arriving in Europe straight from Hunter College, she’d asked Jim Haynes if she could put on a lecture series at the Arts Lab, and he not only agreed but also immediately suggested it should feature Trocchi. Tillman, who went on to become America’s greatest living novelist, quickly lost organizational control of the lecture to Trocchi, who was determined to transform it into a junkie jamboree. Being new to London, Tillman knew virtually nothing about Trocchi at the time she first contacted him, and was unaware of his reputation as a dope fiend. On 28 February 2004, Lynne emailed the following observations about the DVD she’d received from me: ‘It’s the weirdest thing to watch – and sad and I can’t find the words – much of it was shot in the basement cinema after I had to move everyone downstairs out of Theatre 1 or 2 by 10 p.m. to let the play go on, whatever it was…’ The Tale of Atlantis Rising was advertised in the underground press as taking place in the theatre spaces, while there was a screening of The Magnificent Ambersons in the cinema prior to its being overrun by Trocchi’s horde of bloodsucking freaks. Tillman concluded this email by saying: ‘I remember many faces…if I watched it with Jim H(aynes)., he’d remember more names…several of the women are very familiar to me, none was a close friend – seeing Lynn Trocchi and the children was deeply upsetting – and seeing their apt. was so weird and sad and empty – one of the strangest experiences seeing a night and remembering and not…’
Jim Haynes, who’d set up and run the Arts Lab, responded to my queries with the following email message sent on 25 April 2004: ‘I wish that I could helpyou, but my mind is a blank…’ Jim’s amnesia is a fitting tribute to the nihilism of those times. 1969 is the year in which many of those involved with the infamous Notting Hill activist group King Mob got seriously into smack. King Mob were best known for the nihilistic political graffiti they sprayed around West London, including the slogan CHRISTIE LIVES on the former home of the notorious sex murderer, and for contributing a float to the 1969 Notting Hill Carnival that featured a junkie beauty queen with a giant syringe protruding from her arm. My mother, of course, was on more than merely nodding terms with several King Mob activists, and the connections were through drugs rather than politics. Trocchi’s connection with King Mob had as much to do with politics as smack, since Chris Gray, one of the mainstays of the group, was a former member of the Situationist International, as well as being a drug-scene acquaintance of my mother.
An unidentified underground-press article about ‘The State of Revolt’ is reproduced within Jim Haynes’s copiously illustrated memoirs, Thanks for Coming! It didn’t take long to discover that the feature entitled ‘Alex Trocchi Gives a Party’ and bylined to Felix Scorpio had been culled from issue 55 of IT (25 April–8 May 1969). Further inquiries revealed that Felix Scorpio was a pen name used by Felix de Mendelsohn. He is described in David Leigh’s unreliable authorized Howard Marks biography, High Time, as: ‘a Jewish Austrian…hippie entrepreneur’. De Mendelsohn was editing IT at the end of the 1960s with Peter Stansill, and he went on to involve himself with another London underground publication, Friends. One of the editors at Friends was Charlie Radcliffe, who got to know my mother in the latter part of 1969 when they were both regular visitors to the Notting Hill pad of their fellow dope smuggler Graham Plinston. Radcliffe had previously been a member of the English section of the Situationist International and had fleetingly come into contact with Trocchi as a result of this. De Mendelsohn went on to found the hippie sex paper Suck with Jim Haynes. Despite being arrested as a result of a journalistic tour of Belfast with the Republican firebrand and future international dope smuggler Jim McCann, de Mendelsohn had a reputation on the freak scene as a gentle and intellectual dude.
In his IT article, de Mendelsohn mentions Ronald Laing (celebrity anti-psychiatrist), William Burroughs (beat novelist and junkie), Ken Kesey (psychedelic novelist and Merry Prankster), Dan Richter (poet and junkie), Feliks Topolski (artist), Davy Graham (guitarist and junkie), Sean Philips (folk guitarist) and a whole camera crew as being present at ‘The State of Revolt’. Unfortunately, he’s insufficiently hipto name-check my mother as a member of the assembled cognoscenti, quite possibly because her leading role in Ladbroke Grove’s weirdest drugs and magic scene (which co-starred Terry Taylor and Detta Whybrow, among others) is the stuff of reforgotten legend…In an email of 24 March 2004, Lynne Tillman commented: ‘I don’t remember Ken Kesey’s being there – he was in London at some point…if Kesey had been there, I bet he’d have been filmed by Jamie, the cameraman, don’t you think?’ That said, Lynne did clock Phil Green in Wadhawan’s footage, despite his almost criminal omission from the IT listing of luminaries. Green is another Trocchi satellite and was also a close friend of my mother.
Rather than setting up a standard lecture with questions afterwards, Trocchi insisted ‘The State of Revolt’ should be considerably more experimental; de Mendelsohn describes the result as being like a hipversion of the then current BBC television talk show Late Night Line-Up. In the end what Trocchi did was read a few of his own poems and leave most of the real talking to his friends. The discussion took place mainly upstairs in the theatre space, with Burroughs speaking on the underground media and R. D. Laing banging on about soft drugs. An IT feature on squatting also came in for some savage criticism. The event was transformed into a New Orleans-style wake in the downstairs cinema, with wailing folk guitars, deranged dancing and Trocchi’s poems. In an email sent on 26 April 2004, Chris Oakley, who was at that time connected to the freak scene and later got involved in anti-psychiatry, recalled: ‘I was at that Arts Lab thing, the only time that I ever saw Trocchi in the flesh…inevitably the memories are considerably jaded…I was far less impressed by the bands than your man from IT. Nor was I particularly enamoured by Alex Trocchi that evening as I recall him coming across as unhappy, irritable, as if he didn’t really want to be there…Burroughs and Laing made far more of a favourable impression.’
Virtually everyone who encountered Trocchi seems to have a horror story to tell about it and the following report emailed to me by Lynne Tillman on 26 August 2003 is a relatively mild example: ‘…as to Trocchi: when I met him…he was considered the most evil man in England – people blamed him for bringing heroin in, not Burroughs – one day at his flat, I witnessed a weeping father sitting on his couch, hoping to find his daughter – it was a terrible scene, and one that probably happened often in their big apt on Observatory Gardens – I don’t think Alex felt much – and his “fate” was terrible, if you think about how not feeling landed him into having to feel something, when his wife, Lynn, died and their very young and beautiful sons – it was all horrible – I wasn’t around him then – as I told you I saw him once later, on the street, and don’t remember much – by then he had a bookstore, I think, and was drinking – and fat – his indifference to others, his selfishness, was ugly – how he could’ve handled all those sad parents coming to their flat looking for their kids, I don’t know – but you’d have to have something turned off in you, absolutely – and it was he who got Lynn started on drugs, too, and she couldn’t “handle” them as he could – I watched a scene or two between them that was pretty horrific…’
Likewise on 21 January 2004, the California-based literary mover and shaker Tosh Berman emailed another relatively mild Trocchi tale: ‘…my parents knew Alex Trocchi…I am not sure if they met in LA or San Francisco. But recently we have been going through my father’s photographs for an upcoming show – and there are images of Trocchi. At this point I should mention that my father is Wallace Berman, and he was an artist. His creative time-period was mid 1950s to 1976. In 1967 the whole family went to London to see Robert Fraser – who by chance was in prison due to the Rolling Stones bust at the time. But one of the highlights of the tripfor me was visiting Alex Trocchi at his flat. What I remember was that there was a small baby and just him. He was shooting up junk – and I was shocked/intrigued at the time. I think I was twelve years old. All my young life I was surrounded by drug addicts of all sorts (strangely enough not my parents – but some of their friends were into it), but this was the first time I actually saw someone shoot updrugs. Again my take on it was typical twelve years old – disgusting and kind of neat to see!’
There are legions of stories doing the rounds about Trocchi nodding out, and during ‘The State of Revolt’ he was almost doing so in public. He’d come a long way from his native Glasgow. Trocchi relocated to Paris in the early 1950s where he edited the literary review Merlin and was involved in the early English-language publication of several influential writers including Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. Simultaneously, Trocchi assumed membership of the Lettrist International, a groupwhich mixed a revolutionary praxis with excessive drinking and which later transmogrified into the Situationist International. As well as writing high Modernist literature of his own, Trocchi was churning out porn both to make money and as a vehicle for subversion. Trocchi’s best dirty book was a faked fifth volume of My Life and Loves by the philanderer and literary middleman Frank Harris. To secure publication for his first serious novel, Young Adam, Trocchi added some pornographic touches. Trocchi moved to the US in 1956, which is where he became a fully fledged smackhead with all the accompanying lifestyle trappings, including prostituting his American wife, Lynn, to raise money for skag. Trocchi’s magnum opus, Cain’s Book, was published in New York in 1961 and shocked conservative reviewers with its audaciously autobiographical descriptions of the drug underworld. Almost simultaneously, Trocchi was charged by the American authorities with supplying drugs to a minor, and with the aid of various people, including future rock star Leonard Cohen, he fled the US, returning to the UK via Canada. After a brief spell spent in Scotland, Trocchi found himself in London, where he became a fixture of the 1960s counter-culture. As a famous literary drug casualty, one of the many ways in which Trocchi demonstrated his disdain for the bourgeois book trade was by copying out his own novels in longhand and then selling these hoax productions as his ‘original’ manuscripts. Likewise, Barry Miles in his autobiography, In the Sixties, describes Trocchi in a way that creates the impression Alex was a kleptomaniac, illicitly stuffing stock under his shirt more or less whenever he visited a London bookshop.
From the early 1960s onwards Trocchi could no longer be bothered to write novels, although he did do translations and compose some impressive occasional pieces, such as the manifesto The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds. Instead of writing fiction Trocchi would come up with a synopsis of a planned work, take an advance from a gullible publisher who wanted the completed book, and then move on to his next mark with a new abstract. Less admirably, Trocchi also took great delight in turning people – and particularly beautiful women – on to heroin, and he used drug dealing as a nice little earner. Towards the end of his life Trocchi appears to have been getting about a thousand pounds a day for the drugs he supplied his key dealer, ‘Grainger’, and there would have been other outlets for his gear. Not a bad turnover for a smack broker in the 1970s or even the early 1980s. Given that Trocchi managed to avoid being busted in London, it is possible he was bunging the notoriously corrupt but nonetheless remarkably well-informed Metropolitan Police drug squad of that era a regular drink. I have no hard evidence to prove this, and the circumstantial case that can be made should not be treated as conclusive. Moving on, Trocchi greatly exaggerated the size of his habit, telling whopping fibs to doctors in order to score large quantities of drugs on prescription, most of which he would sell on. When Trocchi was hospitalized this caused him some problems since medical staff directly administered him with far greater quantities of skag than he would normally take. Still, Trocchi survived such ill-advised medical assistance and the risk of an overdose no doubt palled in comparison to the possibility that the size of his drug script might be reduced.
Denis Browne emailed me the following observations about the scene around Trocchi on 18 September 2002: ‘I knew Alex (AT) from late ’78 upto his death in ’84. From early ’83 I worked with him as a kind of PA – the idea was that I’d helphim get it together for a triumphant return to writing. I soon realized that this wasn’t going to happen, but at that time I wasn’t going to turn down the chance to hang out doing smack with such a cool guy (also helped run his 2nd hand book biz).
‘By the time I met him he’d become a rather De Quincey-ish recluse, mainly due to Lynn & Mark’s deaths I think. Funnily enough I’d been introduced to Alex by a very straight relative who ran a club where he drank. They’d got talking & she insisted he meet her wannabe writer nephew. I’d been into smack & AT’s writing for quite a while, so it seemed a meeting which went beyond coincidence, & still seems strange to this day. I’d been hoping for Alex the mad beat writer, full-on junkie, 60s sigma activist/associate of Michael X, etc., but by then experience had made him a much more withdrawn type (tho not affecting his drug of choice). I’d been hoping for all-nite drug sessions laced with exclusive tales of Burroughs & co., but Alex was more into sitting down with a drink & some Roman history…One time he did yield to my pressure & took me to Eric Clapton’s country mansion with him. My main memory of the visit is the Great Bluesman grouching out all afternoon over an Airfix kit he was trying to make (Lancaster bomber, I think)…Once I slagged off Colin Wilson as a typical hack who’d churn out books by the yard – turned out Alex had known him in the 50s & I was firmly & publicly slapped down – Alex told me that CW had lived on a tin of beans, 2 slices of bread & a can of Heineken a day while writing The Outsider as opposed to my half-hearted, excuse-ridden attempts to get my writing together (still true!).
‘Feliks Topolski used to have a kind of “open day” at his house every Friday. I always wanted to go, but it was the same old story: – a few drinks at the Catherine Wheel, back to Alex’s for a hit en route to Topolski’s & that was that. I never knew Lynn – by the time I met Alex he’d got together with Sally Childs (much younger, didn’t use at all), who’d been living in as a kind of au pair. She always had a fantasy of straightening Alex out & turning him into a Proper Writer, whatever that is. She & I never got on – she regarded me as a junkie hanger-on.. .’
Browne’s portrait of Trocchi matches those of most other commentators who actually knew him. Despite this, Trocchi has recently undergone a kind of posthumous drug rehabilitation. The footage of ‘The State of Revolt’ in Cain’s Film shows enough bad craziness to make it glaringly obvious that this is the first and best in an endless series of somnambulistic wakes for full-on long-haired freakdom. A few scraps of the Arts Lab slumber party as shot by Wadhawan were recycled in Tim Niel and Allan Campbell’s disappointing 1996 BBC TV documentary about Trocchi entitled A Life in Pieces. Here ‘The State of Revolt’ is made to look like a literary reading rather than the hippie die-in it really was, although Niel and Campbell did have the good taste to leave in one piece of audience footage featuring my mother. The casual viewer is given no indication that what they are actually looking at is the onset of counter-cultural rigor mortis. Leaving aside the brief glimpse it affords of my mother, A Life in Pieces is not quite on a par with watching paint dry and considerably less educational. For anyone wanting to take a fresh look at the putrid corpse of the counter-culture, ‘The State of Revolt’ in its dead-to-the-world anti-glory (the fuller-length Wadhawan version rather than the Niel and Campbell re-edit) is the place to start. What you see is not so much the death of revolt, as death reified into a means of revolt; a Baudrillardian short-cut to postmodernity where Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism is simultaneously preserved and reversed. This is the destiny of objects, leading to cultural black holes, antimatter and implosion. It goes without saying that the proto-yuppies who went on to reanimate the corpse of hippie chic in the form of lifestyle consumer items (health foods, kung fu magazines, ‘alternative’ rock music, etc.) self-consciously embraced rather than combated alienation. Objects are transformed into subjects and vice versa, and it’s not done with smoke and mirrors. The inhuman reality of alienated social relations is not so much Wholly Communion as incommunicado. Burroughs was wrong about many things but correct to portray heroin as the penultimate commodity.
Asking around about the fate of student director Jamie Wadhawan, I was unable to find anyone who knew what had happened to him. The consensus of opinion was he must have disappeared into Trocchi’s somnambulistic black hole. Wadhawan made one further documentary short with Trocchi and no one seems to have heard of him since. My mother followed a similar trajectory, eventually shacking upwith Trocchi’s key dealer, Grainger, in the late 1970s and soon afterwards being found dead in their shared Notting Hill bedsit. She was thirty-five and the authorities didn’t consider it suspicious that she was found naked on her bed with the street door to her basement flat open. Inevitably the man who handled the inquiries was Paul Knapman, who subsequently became the centre of public disquiet about the coroners’ system due to his handling of the Marchioness disaster. Incidentally, while both my mother and the anonymous go-go dancer featured in Wadhawan’s ‘State of Revolt’ footage are also visible in Peter Whitehead’s Wholly Communion documentary, they haven’t to date featured in any account of the 1960s that I’ve read. Similarly, memories of Trocchi’s Observatory Gardens pad have been exorcized from the Kensington psyche, with the building he lived in being renumbered in an attempt to fox those searching out the melancholy ghosts of his smacked-out bad craziness. About all that now needs to be said is that I remain almost literally Alex Trocchi’s illegitimate son; and, since the counter-culture is dead, we are postmodern zombies…
[Stewart Home]
The toad-faced man in the green coat has just slipped out of sight through the blue door into the estate office in Godwin. Last week, he told me that years ago he’d listened to Zappa’s ‘Valley Girl’ on a ghetto blaster with a Moroccan friend, lying on a sand dune staring at the Saharan stars, smoking kif. Mohammed liked the music so much, he’d had to give him the cassette. Obviously a plant by the Medical Board, they want me to think I’m surrounded by cultural initiates. His coat looked crispand smart in the sunlight, that kind of nuanced colour which spells this season, ochre green, is it, or a touch of olive? Then, right on cue, keeping the set alive, Uri passes just under my window, with his inevitable blue baseball capand his mopand the big blue plastic detergent bucket on rollers. Everything is blue round here, just to rub in the implications of ‘Crowndale’: real estate as monarchy. Ground rent. Silver service reflecting a blue tablecloth. Royal blue rules all of you. Silence glowering over empty courtyards. Sweet meadows aswim with buttercups and daisies surveyed by armoured thugs on carthorses.
A kid exits the blue door, cheerful in the sunshine. He’s wearing a brand-new baseball cap, Uri-chic. He grins and waves at Uri, his role model. Except his cap’s peak is longer and sharper, a vicious, pecking point, no one can hold back that nestling cockiness. A kidscad buttending a bland old isaac. A middle-aged guy in white overalls walks by slowly, intimating the dignity of labour. Street ballet on the estate precinct, every move scripted by filmic omniscience. The brain spins despite the stunning dose of Largactyl. When will they splash water on my window and pretend it’s rain, let me believe the roofman is pissed off and angry? The woman in a cream-coloured robe has pulled down her veil, she’s talking to Xena and Uri, shrugging shoulders in the late March sunshine. Buds on the twigs to give me the tip-off it’s spring. The scene-setters provide so many clues, I can use the world as my calendar, it’s practically medieval. Oh your starry Almanac, put me right back in the torture rack, Jack. ‘Can you read the signs?’ is all the signs say, finally, that surly emphasis tipping you slowly into mental illness, a sick soundtrack by the Specials. Hello, Jerry Dammers, here come your bullets…
Guy with a paunch and a navy-blue fisherman’s slop, his belly welded like he’s about to give an after-dinner speech, a weapon worthy of Lawrence Upton. In his cups, he worships Odin. There’s a white van parked in front of the brick wall of Godwin Court. It shines blandly in the sun, bonnet and door emblazoned with a logo for ‘Key Elevators Ltd’: the letter ‘K’ in an octagon. It’s a scenery flat, the Medical Board reminding me of the eleventh letter of the alphabet, the primitive counter starting on a new set of fingers, the same anew. Their rationale for this ‘cheer up’ message is the chronic problem with the lifts, they’re always breaking down. One day they’ll fix them so you push the top button, and you’ll shoot straight into the sky, a jet-pack roaring at your back, azure blue studded with golden Kays, my mother smiling at me through brilliant white clouds flossed by Manzoni.
Now a middle-aged woman with dark hair and a square red shopping bag on wheels: Godwin and Crowndale are busy this morning. Wheels, the great advance on lifting things. Two workmen, young, going to fat, one with Billy Idol hair, bleached yellow, the other flips his cigarette still alight on the steps before they enter: ‘I might have to do some work, doesn’t mean I have to like it.’ Parked cars in front of the white van, shiny like tiny models. The great escape for all of you. Woman in black with a black headscarf, walking by the bottle-bin, black metal wheelie-bin with CAMDEN COUNCIL embossed in gold. After Eight-style to raise the tone of the neighbourhood. Black to tone my mood down, dampthe manic volume, alleviate my greedy rise to the champagne skies. Poor Ben’s in the big sweet jars: licorice reminders of the big black nothing which waits for me when the manic fizz dies down. OWN ASS ON, EAR ASS ONLY, APE ON: the kids love finding gawky obscenities hidden inside the council’s utility lingo. Me too.
Girl passes with grey coat, striped socks, folded arms: ‘I’m cold and I don’t have to like it.’ Blank blue sky behind untidily sketched branches. Red stoplight in front of the Working Men’s College, green council sign for the estate on the other side of Crowndale Road, temporary yellow sign with an arrow: DIVERTED TRAFFIC. Red/green/yellow prints a hieroglyph inside my eye, green/red, stop/go…eco/socialism adding upto yellow action: Go Go Go!! The 46 swings out of Camden Street and the red zone into Crowndale Road with the double yellow lines, the bus’s signage an oblong of detail moving just above the wall. Blossom, branches, window frames, bay tree. Camden Onyx dustcart, everything moving according to the street’s grid, all those hefty right-angles. What I thought was ‘abstract’ in the painting of the 1920s was just the actual moving around me, those agglomerations of intent, the real thing beneath the rim of my hot ideological bubble’n’spume. Bubbles break off in the form of postcards made with torn scraps of paper and Pritt Stick, shots of density sped to their targets by post office payments of 28p. £3.36 for a wallet of gold oblongs, reach bar-none in those instant days…
Toad-faced man emerges again, walks across the car park with the dignity of an animal observed from a naturalist’s bunker. I imagine him catching a fly with a three-foot sticky tongue, decide that’s de trop, I’ll lose my readers. Three veiled women, all reds and blacks, scarves waving raggedly in the icy wind. A cab zips by, up Crowndale, a bright pink stripe across the wall: the grey drear cracks, lets some dayglo wetness in. The Medical Board prickles my waiting knowledge-buds with sherbet powder, a trail of citric sparks and formal stings. Down here below, the groaning machinery shines nature’s lights within its walls, lets go flocks of miners’ lamps into the pump room. What a dish to set before a king.
[Ben Watson]
St Dunstan’s-in-the-East/Idol Lane/Dagon
Three and a half centuries ago, the Charles One reign came to an end in the Years of Civil Disturbance. It was then that St Dunstan’s-in-the-East was occupied by the Church of Dagon. St Dunstan’s was a wooden building in the City just north of the wharves at Balin’s Gate, where bright fishing boats loaded with herrings and shellfish used to tie up. The Church of Dagon worshipped the ancient fish-god, whose wooden statue was set upin the nave. Dagon reared himself upon his tail, his hands like flippers and the hair on his head shaped in corn-rows. His priests wore tall mitres painted with fish-eyes and long green capes. Fishmongers, ironmongers and animal skinners came to the services. They lay in hammocks made of nets and muttered their prayers as the priests cracked their bones. The grounds of the church were thick with imported vegetation and the moss on the gravestones was wet. There was once an alligator kept in the yard, a runaway from the menagerie at the Tower. Outside the church in Idol Lane, the streets were crowded with amulet vendors and incense makers, their rugs spread out on the mud. The Church of Dagon disappeared when St Dunstan’s was consumed in the Dreaded Fire at the start of the Charles Two reign. It is said they went into the River. The Architect Royal, Christoph Wren, built a stone minaret on the site to prevent them reappearing. St Dunstan’s today is a Corporation garden with pleasing effects.
St Leonard’s/Eastcheap/Moloch
It was in the Years of Civil Disturbance at the end of the Charles One reign that the Reformist Church of Moloch moved into St Leonard’s. Now, St Leonard’s was a wooden building with a high chimney, on the corner of Eastcheapand New Fish Street in the City. Its Eastcheap front entrance was imposing, with high steps, bolted oak doors and flaming lamps over the porch. People avoided it in this busy area full of bakeries, ale houses and snack bars. There were rumours that the Church practised infant sacrifice, but these were dismissed by the scholars of the time. Its vespers were attended by the shame-faced wives of wine merchants and bankers and single women dressed in veils. They used the back door on New Fish Street. The priests of Moloch wore leather aprons caked with blood. They attended to their congregation with kettles of hot water heated on the stoves raised before their idol. The effigy of Moloch comprised a brass furnace in the shape of a squatting woman with the head of a bull. Her lips were apart to reveal the fiery grate in the hole between her legs. The priests of Moloch eased bloodied offerings from their frightened devotees and placed them tenderly on the flaming lips of their idol. Trumpets were sounded to cover the sounds of the women’s cries. The Church of Moloch left the City and went south of the River to the Liberties when St Leonard’s was destroyed in the Dreaded Fire at the start of the Charles Two reign. Some say they hid themselves in a basement of St Thomas’s Hospital, others that they set upshopoutside the Bullring. The corner of Eastcheap and New Fish Street is now occupied by the Syndicate Bank.
St Margaret’s/New Fish Street/Chemos
St Margaret’s was home to the Temple of Chemos in the Years of Civil Disturbance that followed the Charles One reign. A wooden building just north of the Bridge in the City, St Margaret’s stood between New Fish Street and Pudding Lane. Its altar boys had painted faces and sported finger-cymbals and silver toe-rings. They loitered at the wharves and lured merchant seamen back to the Temple with promises of ecstasy. Here, initiates were made drunk with grain alcohol and caressed into signing away their worldly possessions to the Temple. The priests of Chemos kept their sacred papers in a wicker cabinet shaped like a man. This was their idol. They captured the moans of initiates on reed instruments and composed songs of divine love. The initiates were permitted one night of pleasure only. When the altar boys had brought them past the point of orgasm, they were stripped of their clothing and turned out of the building to beg in the streets. St Margaret’s was secretly fired by Royal Navy officers at the start of the Charles Two reign. It burned to the ground. This episode is covered over in official histories of the Dreaded Fire that spread through the narrow parts of the City. The Temple of Chemos travelled south of the River to the Liberties, where they re-formed as a transvestite band of players. The Architect Royal, Christoph Wren, drove a stone column into the ground at New Fish Street to banish the memory of the Temple of Chemos. It stands there to this day at a desolate crossroads scoured by the wind.
St Olave’s/Tooley Street/Belial
When the reign of Charles One came to an end in the Years of Civil Disturbance, St Olave’s was where the Fundamentalist Church of Belial used to worship. St Olave’s was a large wooden building south of the River in the Liberties-without-the-City. It stood on Tooley Street opposite a converted stone priory where travellers lodged for the night and backed on to a warren of tenements, wharves and quays. Tooley Street was filled with carts, mounted horses and pedestrians, all moving very rapidly. There were cargoes of leaf tobacco transported from ships in the River, barrels of beer brought in from the Southwark breweries, gangs of sailors with rings in their ears, prostitutes in bright robes, recently arrived Africans, Americans and Indians, all carrying bags over their shoulders. There was tumult. The Church of Belial congregated at night in the sunken crypt of St Olave’s. Drums sounded through the cavernous space and bright lights strobed the gloom. There were no priests in this scene. There were only celebrants. They wore black cassocks with cowls and their faces were dusted with white powder. They came together in groups of two or three and invented ceremonies of desire. There were piercings and whippings, beatings and fistings. Belial was incarnated in the throng of knotted bodies. The next day saw celebrants drifting out of St Olave’s into the alleys and lanes around Tooley Street. They walked arm in arm and expressed many words of tender love to each other. They kissed in the street. The Church of Belial disappeared from St Olave’s at the beginning of the Charles Two reign. The story goes they jumped in the air and took flight for America. St Olave’s no longer exists. In its place is an Art Deco office building named St Olaf House, just opposite London Bridge Station.
St Pancras/Soper Lane/Tammuz
During the Years of Civil Disturbance at the end of the Charles One reign, the Cult of Tammuz used to gather at St Pancras. This was a sacred grove in the City just west of the crossroads at the Royal Exchange. It lay next to St Benet Shere Hog and St Scythes in Soper Lane, a narrow stretch of little churches surrounded by tall buildings. The Cult of Tammuz worshipped the nameless Great Swine and made sacrifices to her every spring. Four or five of the most beautiful pre-op transsexuals in the Cult were chosen by the priestesses to become suitors to the Swine. They always screamed for joy and clapped their hands when they were elected. On the Day of Marriage, they were stripped of their garments, plucked to remove all facial and body hair, and led to St Pancras, where the ivy-clad boughs of the myrtle trees entwined to form a shady arbour. Here, they were tied to the trees with leather straps made by the local cordwainers. As the sun rose, the Cult of Tammuz gathered around the myrtle trees at St Pancras, took drugs and danced to the hypnotic drone of the bagpipes. This was primarily a religion of animal-skin workers and there were fellmongers, tanners and curriers among the celebrants. As evening came, the priestesses put on masks made of boarskin and leaped close to the bound men, waving knives made from tusks. They tied a cord round the scrotal sac of each young man to stopthe flow of blood to the genitals, dedicated him to Tammuz, god of flowers, and then removed the testicles and penis in one slashing motion. The sudden rush of blood was captured in clay pots. Then the heated end of a myrtle branch was placed into the ragged wound to prevent it closing over. The wailing of the transsexuals lasted through the night as the festivities climaxed with an orgy of mutual masturbation. Some didn’t make it through surgery and were claimed directly by the Great Swine. They were buried in the ground beneath the trees, where the genitals of Tammuz were also scattered. The ceremony ended as the sun rose on the first day that was longer than the last night. The surviving post-op transsexuals were cut down and gratefully ensconced in robes trimmed with white fur. They had spent the night with the Great Swine and now possessed the gift of prophecy. They were sought out by the Royal silk merchants, heroin traffickers and pepperers of Bucklebury just round the corner, for news on how their ships fared in Asia. The blood of Tammuz was prized as an aphrodisiac and sold in the grocers and chemists of Eastcheap. In the summer, St Pancras bloomed with a vitality that was obscene. Sweet-smelling gum oozed from the bark of the myrtle trees, which were covered in honeysuckle and wild roses. St Pancras was consumed in the Dreaded Fire at the start of the Charles Two reign, together with St Benet Shere Hog and St Scythes. Exiled from the City, the Cult of Tammuz took shipto America and erected their Maypole at Merry Mount. What remains of St Pancras today are a few trees in a patch of ivy-covered waste ground just upfrom the Green Man pub. It is backed on to by the Eastcheapgrocers Tesco and watched over by a bored security guard.
St Stephen’s/Coleman Street/Jehovah
The Moorish Orthodox Tribe of Jehovah camped at St Stephen’s during the Years of Civil Disturbance that ended the Charles One reign, three and a half centuries ago. St Stephen’s was a tiny wooden chapel at the south-west end of Coleman Street just off from Moorgate, a back door out of the City leading to the marshy fields where people used to walk their dogs and practise their archery. Coleman Street and its surrounds were filled with the halls of various Royal trading companies and craft guilds. St Stephen’s was just down from the Wool Exchange on the corner of one of the little alleys that cut through to the City government offices at Guildhall on Basinghall Street. The alley was covered at both ends but open to the skies at its middle and contained an arcade packed with cloth dealers. St Stephen’s had wooden shutters outside its front door, with stairs leading upto the place of worship just beneath the roof. The priests of Jehovah covered their heads with brightly beaded kipas and wore scarlet velvet gowns hung with golden chains. They brought the boys of the Tribe of Jehovah to the sacred yurt at the time of their maturity, and circumcised them as the congregation chanted from the script of the Deal prepared for them by their god in ancient times. The foreskins were gathered up, painted with gold leaf and sewn together to make the scrolls on which were tattooed the Notes on the Deal. On the Sabbath Day, the Tribe of Jehovah gathered to debate what shape the Notes should take. At the end of the ceremony, the priests retired to the rooftopto sipcoffee and consult their telescopes. When the first five stars were spied in the sky, the Sabbath was over. St Stephen’s was destroyed in the Dreaded Fire inaugurating the Charles Two reign. The Tribe of Jehovah saved their yurt from the flames, packed up and moved to America. No distinct trace of St Stephen’s remains.
[Steve Beard]