BY FELIX DENNIS
I’VE KNOW MICK FARREN FOR LONGER THAN YOU HAVE been alive, unless you are of our generation—or even older. I have fought the law with him, lectured him, listened to him, mocked him, shouted at him, shared barricades, women and whiskey with him, commissioned him, published him, laughed and cried with him, played poker with him in smoke-filled Soho rooms while the sun rose over defunct chimney pots and have called him long-distance in the wee-wee hours when there was nobody else I dared call who would understand why I needed to call anyone.
If I had to describe him in six words, they would be: talent, style, idiot savant, outlaw, friend. Not necessarily always in that order, but often enough to bet your next-to-last last dime on; unless you were in serious trouble, in which case the order could be relied upon to reverse itself swiftly. To the world at large he has played many roles: doorman, editor, journalist, rock star, rabble rouser, critic and commentator, charlatan, jester, impresario, gunsling-ing cross-dresser, icon, author, songwriter, poet and—per-haps strangest of all—the Godfather of Punk.
Of Farren’s writing, I have nothing to say. It speaks for itself and has done for decades. I have lost count of the hours I have spent immersed in his fictional worlds. The range of his non-fictional subjects is remarkable, of course, and much of it was written to make money; but as Dr. Johnson once remarked: “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Certainly, much of what Mick has written over the years in plays, columns, dialogues and poetry never earned him a cent. All the same, these select remnants have survived the test of time in fine fettle. As Jenny Fabian put it when reviewing Give The Anarchist A Cigarette, I found myself “laughing all the way to the memory bank’ as I gulped down the originals and the wry commentary in the margins.
I will leave you with a short anecdote. We are in downtown Manhattan more than a quarter of a century ago and Mick is living in a small house near a river tunnel with his long-suffering second wife, Betsy. They have invited me and my aged mother (who is visiting New York during the Christmas holidays) over for a Boxing Day drink.
When we arrive, I find that Mick has laid out his entire robot collection over the living room floor. After my mother has been introduced and shepherded to a chair with an enormous gin martini in her hands, Mick begins the complex task of starting-up each robot. Pandemonium erupts as scores of androids begin their noisy mechanical march across rugs and floorboards while our hero solemnly intones rubbish from Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. The lights have been dimmed and torches are being waved in drunken circles as each robot crashes into whatever barrier it encounters. Eventually, only a single demented robot is left spinning in a crippled circle, its rocket booster flashing feebly.
The lights are switched back on. “Superb!” my mother cries. “Let us rescue them and do it all over again—but this time beginning on the top of the stairs!”
Mick raises an eyebrow. “Hmmm. Like mother, like son. We should have been introduced a long time ago, Dorothy!” So it is, that a ninety-three-year old lady who lives in leafy Warwickshire, still asks her son on a regular basis: “And how is that nice friend of yours? The one with the robots? Such an intelligent young man—and very talented, too.”
I am told that the Danish sage, S0ren Kierkegaard, is the author of one of my favorite maxims: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” That may be so, but it took Mick Farren to prove it to be true—to me, at least. Not as a philosophical construct, but as a glorious life’s work.
Felix Dennis
Dorsington, Warwickshire
March 2012