I spent the summer of 1973 in a squat with some hippies at Brownhill Road in Catford. There was another squat up the road at Burnt Ash Hill that was an old Victorian condemned building. When I visited only two hippies were at home, they were on the top floor. One of the hippies was called Bob, and he was trying to make sense of what was once a kitchen, the other, Pete, was cleaning a square foot of a hopelessly dirty carpet with a toothbrush because the other had accused him of laziness. Pete, was considered to be an acid casualty, someone whose mind had been irreparably affected by LSD. Most of the local hippies called him ‘Far Out’ Pete. But his conversation was rational, if his actions were a little strange. Pete did not like to claim the homeless person’s benefit he was entitled to. Kind hippies, (whatever happened to them), took him in and fed him and in return he would just creep about quietly smiling occasionally. He would hide behind the sofa if the hippies had a television, but not because he was frightened of the programmes; he was frightened of the rays emitting from the screen. When he did collect his money, because hippies could not always afford to feed him, he bought a big sack of flour. He would make bread, but instead of using yeast he would piss in the flour mix, like some bakers did before they discovered yeast. Then the hippies would be obliged to supply him with yeast, or bake chapattis. Pete had left a tub of wholemeal flour in the upstairs kitchen at Burnt Ash Hill. The other hippie was worried about rats. ‘They’re only outside they don't come in the house. I confirmed that I had seen rats outside. Pete suggested I go up to London and meet William Burroughs. Bob, a veteran of the British White Panther Party, immediately snapped that Burroughs would not be interested in me. Bob  was also familiar with the Dilly, he was an ex-junkie who was recovering in the suburbs and hoped to join a commune in the country. Hippies who made the pilgrimage to ’The Dilly’ do not usually do well or end up shooting up with William Burroughs. Shane MacGowan describes the Dilly accurately in his song The Old Main Drag, where he tells of the fate of rent boys on Tuinal, and a kicking from the unsympathetic police. Bob was right, it was good advice and soon after that I decided to go back to my parents. There was drug taking in the hippy squats, some of it reckless, and I decided to give art therapy a go. I had heard that it could help you recover from the drug scene, though I did not know anything about it. Burroughs and Bowie were patriarchs of creativity in bohemian south London. Nearly everyone it seems had tried to read something by Burroughs. It was not only JRR Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, and the I Ching on the hippie’s book shelves.

    In early September 1973 Ray visited me at my parents with Elaine. She had brown hair, not quite shoulder length. Ray knew rock singer and guitarist Peter Perrett. In those days Peter Perrett was a dealer who sold cannabis and had started a band, then called England’s Glory, who would become better known when they changed their name to the Only Ones. Ray had been introduced to Peter Perrett, and his wife Zena, by his heroin using friends, Linda and Barry. Peter and Zena Perrett had spent a weekend with Lou Reed when they shared rehearsal space at Underhill studios in Greenwich in July 1972, where David Bowie had rehearsed his Spiders from Mars in 1971. Lou Reed worked with David Bowie who produced his transformer LP, in 1972, a record Ray would play to me when I visited him at his parent’s council house in St Mary Cray. Ray told me that Elaine knew David Bowie, though how well I do not know. My parent’s house was two roads away from the house in Irvine Way where David Bowie took saxophone lessons on the advice of his step brother Terry Burns. It was Terry who suggested the young David telephone Ronnie Ross, the saxophonist once considered the finest baritone saxophonist playing in the West End. It has been said that other saxophonists would wait outside the clubs in the hope of hearing him through an open widow if they could not afford the price of admission. Ronnie Ross had toured in a band supporting the Modern Jazz Quartet. Terry gave his copy of the MJQ’s Fontessa LP to David Bowie then still David Jones. Besides recording in his solo L.P. ’Cleopatra’s Needle, Ronnie Ross went on to become a session musician, recording as one of ‘The Session Men’ L.P’s of cover versions of the Beatles and Tom Jones. More famously he played the saxophone solo at the end of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. Ronnie Ross charged £2 per lesson, and David Bowie stopped taking lessons for three months, he had learnt to play the saxophone well enough to join a band. I remember a local piano teacher, Miss Humphries, telling me that she charged ten shillings, now fifty pence, for a lesson but if a wanted to learn jazz, I could go to Ronnie Ross down the road. The elderly woman said this laughing and with some contempt.

Elaine asked me what I did. I told her that I had painted and wrote and that I wanted to go to college to study art. Elaine asked to see my work which I hid under the bed in my parent’s house. I reached under the bed and pulled out some scraps of writing and painting that I hoped would be the start of a portfolio that would get me into art college. Some of my work was experimental. I had been trying to make sense of the cut-ups technique. ‘Cut-ups’ is the name of a writing technique used by William Burroughs who was given the idea by Brion Gysin. According to Burroughs the idea is to take some writing, any writing and cut the page into four and then rearranges the writing to make new sense. There are variations on this theme, and variations on the use to which this exercise in experimental writing is put. It can be tailored to produce poetry, descriptive or even narrative prose, painting a picture in words, evoking a picture with every phrase to the susceptible. It has been claimed that the results can be prophetic in the same way that a crystal ball or Tarot cards are, scrying with words for a glimpse into the future.

William Burroughs was well aware that teenage boys were reading his books and deciding that was the life for them. That was the theme of his book ‘The Wild Boys’. The Wild Boys of the Railroad is a film about teenagers in the depression who left home to find fortune on the railroads of America, but Burroughs’ Wild Boys were motivated by the rallying call to reject the family unit. There is no doubt that William Burroughs was an exceptional and prolific writer. If you had to name a writer who was a master of his craft, who could make words dance on a page then Burroughs was your man. But I wonder if those who praise Burroughs’ work on a literary level realise how manipulative he could be. His genius was accompanied by an incorrigible and consciously amoral personality. His heroes are the Inspector Lee type and a teenage boy to help him defeat a nameless enemy. Burroughs took up quite righteous causes when he could have settled for more popularity, and to his credit he stood up for the rights of addicts and gay men. Perhaps too much may be made of his time in Morocco, we will never know what exactly went on when the celebrity artists visited in the fifties and sixties, I think that most of his real partners were above the age of consent but he did admit to liking teenage boys and many find that unacceptable. In 1973

William Burroughs was still living in Duke Street, a couple of hundred yards from Piccadilly Circus where predatory gay men would pay to have sex with ‘rent boys’ who were usually addicts who wanted money for drugs. As a teenager in the early seventies it was heartbreaking to hear a friend tell you that they were going or had been ‘Up the Dilly’. I was however naïve when it came to reading William Burroughs; looking back it is obvious where what his interests were. I went out with a doctor’s daughter whose uncle had lived with William Burroughs in the Hotel Muniria in Morocco. But her mother said the less said about him the better. I was intrigued by the cut up novels, and found the word experiments evocative. I had read about the cut-ups in an underground newspaper but the method was not made clear in the article. Hidden facts were apparently gleaned from the rearrangement of random phrases by tapping into the subconscious. On a more practical level William Burroughs used this technique to rework material he was not happy with. By using the cut-up technique a writer could rearrange words at random joining fragments from different sentences to form a new narrative. In this way Burroughs would sometimes weave the words of other writers into his own, like a more sophisticated version of the parlour game consequences.

Elaine wanted to know more and I produced the result of my own experiments; some scraps of paper on a food tray that I have hidden under my bed, a few drawings and some poems, some of which had been dissected line by line. Elaine asked me to explain further. I described the procedure. I had read about the cut-ups but did not understand Burroughs and Gysin’s description so I invented my own variation. I took a poem cut the poem into strips, line by line, and rearranged them at random. ‘It’s supposed to give a new meaning to what I’ve written,’ and mention Burroughs’ name so as not to take all the credit should the experiment work. But it was not an entirely successful demonstration, I read a few lines, a couple of sentences seem to interact but I felt uneasy and as I was putting the tray back under the bed said that they might be alright as lyrics. I was too embarrassed to explain any further. I did not want to write words that that could be understood and remembered easily. In those days if you bought a record you would have to listen to it over and over. It would have to stand the test of time, stand up to repeated plays. The records that endured were the ones that did not make immediate sense, if ever. William Burroughs cut-ups seemed to lend themselves to poetry and in turn song writing. You could read cut-ups over and over and though they could be evocative without making much sense. I found that the records that I understood completely, however well written tended to became tedious after a while. It was the same with melody. A simple pleasant melody is delightful, but there are only so many times I could listen to the same song. I was interested in atonal music but not if it was too academic. This was quite a radical idea at the time, years before the No Wave music that freed rock from structure in the same way that Free Jazz liberated jazz musicians from the Be-Bop and Modern Jazz at the end of the fifties. I refrained from telling Elaine the theory I had arrived at and having shared my literary efforts, I hoped my guests to make their excuses and leave, but Elaine had more questions and I started to feel put on the spot. She asked what I intended to do next. I was surprised she was interested. I started to say whatever came into my head,’I want to take some more drugs’. ‘I want to see another band’. I told her that I had seen the Grateful Dead at Wembley. ‘Anything else?’ she enquired and so I said ‘commit suicide’, quickly adding that I was joking and did not even know anyone who had committed suicide, which at that time was true. I added that Ray did, but the look in his eyes indicated that Elaine was not going to be impressed by the story he had told me of the fellow from St Mary Cray who dressed in black, was into witchcraft, and had jumped to his death after listening to the first Velvet Underground LP under the influence of LSD.

 

Complaining that his fans were continually pestering him by calling at Haddon Hall in November 1973 David Bowie move out rented a flat in Maida Vale, then moved to a rented house in Chelsea. There were other reasons to leave the area; he had seen his best friend George Underwood and his step brother Terry Burns sent to Cane Hill, and had told his wife Angie that he feared for his own sanity. In the same month a meeting was arranged for David Bowie and William Burroughs by Craig Copetas, who worked for Rolling Stone magazine. They met in London. Bowie had apparently read next to nothing of Burroughs’ work but referred to a chapter of ’Nova Express’, called ‘Pay Color‘, a description of the future that describes ’People City’ and ’The Subliminal Kid’. After meeting William Burroughs, having been discouraged by Sonia Orwell from following his Aladdin Sane LP with a musical adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 David Bowie looked to William Burroughs’ novel The Wild Boys for inspiration. David Bowie started to read the Wild Boys, sometimes out loud to his inner circle of friends at his flat. He assimilated William Burroughs vision of the near future merging it that of Orwell’s 1984. Bowie’s was about to record his ’Diamond Dogs’ L.P. which starts with a description of ’Hunger City’ set in the near future. Though they did not discuss the cut-up technique in a transcript of their meeting published in Rolling Stone magazine, by spring David Bowie could be seen in the recording studio with his lyrics and a pair of scissors. He even posed with scissors for a publicity photograph.

By the early seventies Burroughs use of the cut-up style that had appeared dramatically over his sixties novels, The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded, Nova Express, was beginning to run its course. Syd Barrett had recorded his ‘Word Song’ of apparently random free associated words. In the early seventies Don Van Vliet, Captain Beefheart, the rock singer and musician, claimed to use a bag of words. Anytime that he needed a new word for a song he said he would pull one out of the bag. In 1922 Tristan Tzara caused a riot at a Surrealist rally by creating a poem by pulling random words from a hat. David Bowie was able to introduce literary influences to popular music raising the intellect of his work for his mainly young audience.

In 1974 in Alan Yentob’s documentary ’Cracked Actor’, David Bowie describing how he does his cut ups, says.'I don't know how William Burroughs does his cut-ups, but this is how I do mine'. David Bowie then goes on to demonstrate how he applied the cut up technique to the lyrics for his song 'Sweet Thing', cutting a poem or lyrics into strips, horizontally, line by line, the very same procedure that I had demonstrated to his friend in 1973.  I started to wonder if Elaine had passed on my version cut ups to David Bowie or whether he arrived at a similar conclusion. Though David Bowie has been accused of stealing ideas and has admitted this himself, how he arrived at the method is not important. Brion Gysin recognised the similarity between the results of cut ups and ‘automatic’ writing, directly from the subconscious bypassing conscious criticism and editing.. As a young man Gysin had been invited to exhibit with the surrealist but was expelled by Andre Breton at the last minute. Gysin thought that writing could evolve in the same way as the modern painting. Just as he had been inspired by the art of the mentally ill, Andre Breton was inspired by the automatic writing of Helene Smith, a French woman who claimed to be in touch with Martians who communicated through her. 19th century psychologist Pierre Janet encouraged psychiatric patients to write automatically. Schizophrenics when writing may start anywhere on the page, write for a while then continue somewhere else on the page. Schizophrenics may write down what their voices dictate. William Burroughs spent a month in psychiatric hospital, was diagnosed schizophrenic, and whether this diagnoses was accurate or not he maintained an interest in Schizophrenic art that is reflected in his own paintings. The work of mentally ill artists seldom follows trends but to this day contemporary artists are inspired by the art movements of the 20th century, not least the Surrealists the DaDa artists and the Expressionists, who in turn were inspired, in part, by the art of the mentally ill. It could be argued that the art of the mentally ill helped free the canvas for the contemporary artist. Sadly the mentally ill remain stigmatised by a society that conveniently prefers to believe the myths of mental illness rather than the reality. If the public were aware of the contribution that the mentally ill have made to the art world they might start to overcome their prejudices.

 

Ray and I had a common interest and that was music. Since 1972 we had tried recording on domestic tape recorders. We were aware of psychedelic music but I was aware of electronic music through my friend Norman. Norman’s father was a HI-Fi enthusiast, they built acoustic speakers from scratch, when his parents were out shopping or away for the weekend we listened to records on his father’s gramophone. Besides the psychedelic rock that was fashionable at the time, we listened, on Normans’s sister’s advice to anything that sounded strange, like Moroccan music or Terry Riley. Norman had a recording of Moroccan music that had a polystyrene ceiling tile as part of the cover. I would find unusual records from the library and record shops. One record I remember from this time was by John Cage and David Tudor. One side was a John Cage piano improvisation, the other was a recording of an audience as they entered the hall played back to the audience once they had taken their seats in the auditorium. Local libraries also stocked ’ethnic’ recordings of African tribal music, often recorded by David Fanshawe or Jean Jenkins, or French archivists. I weren’t looking for ideas but I noticed that ideas would show up in our recordings that I had not deliberately put there. In other words I might think I have an original part of a tune and on playing back the recording recognize the same tune as something I had heard before. The tapes were little more than work tapes useful for vetting the recording, editing exercises. If I heard something that did sound original I might remember to play that next time. At the beginning of April 1975 I bought a practice amp from a shop called Wings that was at that time next to Bromley North station. The amp was a Triumph ’Leo’, probably the cheapest in the shop it was about two foot high and had two inputs and a vibrato effect which you could turn on and off and adjust the speed of the effect. I had a Hohner pick-up for the ’Eko’ acoustic guitar that Steve sold me as he was buying a new guitar. I soon discovered that the amplifier was made for rock music, and that it would distort as the volume increased, that it would produce feedback when the pickup was near the speaker and that by resting the guitar against the amplifier with the strings touching the amplifier I could produce a drone. I had heard feedback by the Grateful Dead and when I saw them at Alexander Palace, seen ‘Ned and Phil’ celebrate Mickey Hart’s birthday with a noise improvisation that sent squegged notes and other atonal sounds out of the ‘Wall of Sound’ PA at the audience.

Then when Lou Reed released Metal Machine Music that summer John Peel played a couple of minutes of it saying  dismissively it was all like that, it was enough to endorse my belief that there was a future in combining atonal music with rock guitar. Lou Reed had also produced a drone effect by positioning two guitars in front of his amplifiers in his loft flat so they fed back, and recorded the resultant drone. He then altered the speed of the recordings and overdubbed them to make an eerie, evocative guitar noise composition that lasted just over an hour. Lou Reed was not pleased with his recode company, RCA records. They had, in March 1975 while Lou Reed was touring, released ‘Lou Reed Live’, an LP of overlooked songs from the same concert that had previously been released as ‘Rock and Roll Animal’, in 1973. One of his justifications for insisting that RCA release the extreme noise Metal Machine Music was that if they wanted heavy metal, here you are. Lou Reed took a break from touring for most of April, after playing at the Hammersmith Odeon on the 26^th of March, then resumed playing live in America at the end of the month. He took another break at the end of May then resumed touring again, visiting Japan, the Australia. An interview with a young reporter in Australia shows just how unreasonable and contrary Lou Reed could be, possibly aggravated by his drug use. Amphetamine users can be notoriously anti social and selfish. When they are not experiencing the euphoria that the drug can bring, or as addiction advances, a feeling of normality, they tend to take it out ion those nearest to them, perhaps more so with amphetamine and methedrine than with other drugs. They resort to verbal abuse dishonesty, sometimes to avenge their drug induced paranoia. Of course it is not only drug users who are guilty of that behaviour, it could be argued that the drug users behaviour is exasperated by the fact that their illness, addiction is outlawed and they have to cope with the fact they are, unnecessarily, in the eyes of the law, a criminal.

Rock journalist Mick Wall, in his biography ‘The Life’, says that Metal Machine Music was recorded three months after the January sessions when Lou Reed recorded three songs that were rejected by his producer Steve Katz. To compound the insult his record company then released Lou Reed Live, outtakes his 1973 live album, Rock and Roll Animal. According to Mick Wall Metal Machine Music was recorded in the month long rest in April 1975 between Lou Reed’s British and American concerts. I had discovered the drone effect soon after I bought my amplifier, before I heard Metal Machine Music and I would not hear the LP in its entirety until the mid 1980’s. I knew it sounded familiar but have only just found out why. However I think it unlikely that Lou Reed was influenced by my experiments which involved resting my guitar against the amplifier and listening to the change in pitch after adjusting the tone controls on the guitar and the amplifier. The idea could have got around through the drug scene. According to Diana Clapton’s candid biography Lou Reed had a dealer in every country. Ray was a bit of a speedfreak, he knew dealers, he networked, not as easy then as it is now. Ideas were ridiculed in conversation. ‘You’ll never guess what this bloke I know reckons,’’ putting someone down to impress. Part of the scoring ritual. 

In any case Metal Machine Music had a pedigree, as Lou Reed implied on the cover of the double L.P. where he mentions La Monte Young, the pioneer of avant garde music in New York from the late fifties onward. In 1967 La Monte Young had been impressed by shenai player Bismillah Khan and his band, and used tambora drones in his own music. Some of La Monte Young’s music used sophisticated harmonies. For a while, John Cale played in La Monte Young’s Dream Syndicate, before he played in the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed. John Cale recorded his own avant garde work at this time and the Velvet Underground used disruptive feedback and repetitive hypnotic themes in their improvisation.

 I thought, like others, that rock music was becoming to sophisticated and intellectual. This was not just sour grapes, and I was not the only one who felt this way. Musicians seemed to be using their virtuosity as an exercise to show how clever they were, and they seemed not only happier than their audience but also often had a superior attitude which many found alienating. Pub Rock bands like Dr Feelgood and Kilburn and the High Roads were already playing music that had more in common with Rock and Roll music than the bands that were playing to stadiums. This was just before Punk Rock and people were looking for something new. Hippie music had become played out. A change in drug use coincided, in Britain, with the loss of full employment. The subsequent unemployment meant drug users turned to amphetamine for economic reasons. There was a loss of impetus in the hippie movement worldwide with the end of American military involvement in August 1973, and with the fall of Saigon in April 1975. Amphetamine and methamphetamine turned hippie love to hate and contributed to their paranoia. And while the poor and street hippies turned to speed for kicks, the rock musicians celebrated success by graduating to cocaine, alienating them from their audience. The musicians were left with their virtuosity, but seldom had anything to say. The music seemed to be inspired by the drugs they took, and rock musicians seemed to be able to take drugs with impunity, while their audience was more likely to be harassed by the police if they took drugs. Ray and I had tried to form a band as we had jammed together a few times. It was Ray’s idea, he was far a more accomplished musician than I would ever be and besides my main interest was in visual art. I was drawing and working on a portfolio to take to interviews for art college. But Ray decided that he too wanted to go to college and asked me to help prepare a portfolio to apply for college. My heart sank when he applied to the same college as me; I wanted to go to college to escape the drug scene. But what could I do? I thought he was a friend and visited him to help him organize his pictures. We were both accepted.

Ray met Mark at registration in August. Soon after Ray introduced Mark to Steve and I when we went for a walk in the woods in Chislehurst. When it came to sitting around smoking cannabis, as a few students did in those days, and it was Mark’s turn to put one together, he invariably would not put as much in his joints as anyone else. Thrifty as this was, it annoyed the other smokers, but despite their making comments like ’Did you remember to put any in this?’ he remained adamant and consequently the joints he rolled were passed around like hot potatoes. To add insult to injury he would invariably have his girlfriend Emily in tow and though she wouldn’t ever roll a joint, she would happily smoke anything passed to her.  Emily liked to be called MT. Cannabis was not cheap it carried a considerable risk as the penalties for possession were higher and the attitude of the public was more hostile. So Mark’s action caused some resentment which was expressed one afternoon soon after College had started. Ray, Steve and Sharon myself, Mark and his girlfriend went for a walk in Chislehurst woods. Pre-warned of Mark’s unsociable habit, but unable to believe until we take time to stop along the way, Steve was offended. Walking through the woods Steve and I became separated from the others and walk down the path towards Chislehurst Ponds and the Queens Head. I wondered if we should have a smoke while the others weren’t around but John laughed and said no. We would be as bad as Mark if we did that two wrongs don’t make a right. It was a bit of an Indian summer, a precursor to the notorious hot summer of the following year 1976. Steve gathered some of that wild grass with seeds like ears of corn and when we rejoin the others he throws them at Marks back while he is not looking. Children break off the tops of these plants and throw them at other children’s pullovers. Then Steve asked me to throw a couple of these grass darts at Marks pullover. Then when we stopped again Mark noticed his pullover was covered with darts and who got the blame? Did you throw these? Mark accused me. I admitted that I threw one or two. There was no point in telling him that John had handed me a couple of darts urging me to join in so that he would not have to take all the blame. I didn’t say anything about Steve who had by now covered Mark’s wretched pullover with about thirty darts. Steve suffered from paranoia, brought on by his use of amphetamine when he was younger. He did not want to get into trouble and wanted me to take the blame so I did. It did not seem to be a big problem, so I wasn’t going to grass. But now Mark had his culprit he started to have a go at me, asking questions to get me back for throwing arrows at him. Hoping that he would embarrass me and thinking he had a card to play he asked me about the band Ray and I were trying to start.‘ It’s a bit weird ‘I said, hoping to put him off. With the work that accompanied starting college I had forgotten about any band. ‘Well we know a band that’s really weird,’ replied Mark, cattily. I’d had this before with Ray, when he brought his friend of Bowie, so I knew when I was put on the spot he would leave me too it. I had to say something because this time I was also speaking on his behalf. ’Well we improvise,’ I continued, again hoping that this was enough for him to drop the subject. ‘What chords do you use?’ he asks ‘I don’t use any chords. Ray knows chords ’ I reply, and though this is fair enough for me after all I am playing solos over Ray’s rhythm guitar it is not a fair description of Ray’s playing. So I look to Ray hoping that he will join in and be supportive. But I was digging myself into a hole and he just smiled. I had read an interview with Fred Frith in the Melody Maker and I remembered the phrase chord fragments. I quickly decided that a chord fragment is two or three notes played together that sound like a fragment of a chord, so I said’ we might use chord fragments,’ he did not question this but asked about ’vocals’, not words or songs or singing. I did not want a repetition of the embarrassment that I had felt explaining my experiments with cut-ups. So I suggested screaming. ‘We are interested in playing experimental instrumental music that goes on for a week night and day, a lot of the time it could be just drones.’ I continued. ‘like Indian music‘. We had been experimenting, and practicing for a couple of years, but had put music to one side to prepare work for college interviews. We had focused our ideas individually but did not talk about them.  We recorded with a two track tape recorder, the acoustic guitar with a pick-up, the twelve string guitar and anything else we could put to use.  I ended by saying that I left my guitar resting against my  amplifier  when I went to the shops I wanted to explain that it was turned on feeding back and producing a drone but Mark  turned away and started to talk to his girlfriend in the middle of the sentence, he seemed satisfied that he had embarrassed me enough. I had said enough to cover for Steve, and diffuse the situation. If he had let me finish the sentence what I was saying would have made sense but he was intent on showing me up convinced that I had covered his jersey with grass darts.

                                                                                                         

Soon after we started the college course Ray became distant and superior in attitude towards me as I was no further use to him. He had used me and now had new friends. As we were only receiving a grant for tuition fees, we were staying in a student squat in South Croydon started by Martin Rawlinson. I never felt that I had fallen out with Mark, he was also a resident in the squat. Early in the term we all went to see Tangerine Dream at the Fairfield Halls. Mark was hired for the night to help move the synthesizers and other electronic equipment the band brought with them. Also helping was Chris Carter. I have reason to suspect Mark knew Chris Carter. We were impressed by the concert, when Tony asked me what I thought of the band I said that they sounded industrial. What do you mean asked Ray. Like the Ruhr Valley I replied. 

It was hard work drawing all day nine to four, often being told to sketch the corridors or listen to a lecture about obscure artists and their obscure or unaffordable techniques. ‘If you’ve got a thousand pounds to spare we can get you on a video course, that’s where the future lies’ we were told. Neither of us had the money. Martin Rawlinson was a student from Croydon College, Martin called himself the Martian Warlord. In the evenings Martin used to listen to the New York Dolls, with his entourage. He liked to stalk the streets in a long hair sheepskin fleece coat and a wolf mask and once was brought back by the police. Nowadays it is exceptional not to do these things, part of the syllabus but in those days the College was strict.  They had had trouble in the sixties, with Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid.  While Malcolm McLaren managed the Sex Pistols Jamie Reid designed their artwork and one of the tutors reminded us of this one day when Ray and I were making a noise with a violin we had found lying around in a studio. Martin studied sculpture and had melted a radiogram and a television into strange landscape sculptures, which he called Martian sculptures. Eventually he would show these sculptures at Croydon library. Some of his drawings might be considered pornographic. His parents had him put in Warlingham Park before he became an art student. Perhaps he should have asked them before he melted their stereo and television and turned them into sculptures, perhaps they should not have left him on his own while they went on holiday.

 I returned to the deserted Burnt Ash Hill Squat away from the drugs and the college. I thought I could travel by bus but I had no travel grant and was on ‘no fixed abode’ counter payment. I carried on with my art work sketching the room at the top of the house. The house had been deserted for some while, since the murder in fact. Usually such houses are vandalized by local kids but the house was strangely untouched, though to say that it had been lived in was an understatement. Years of use by hippies who had little regard for tidiness or housework had taken their toll, yet the house retained an eerie Marie Celeste atmosphere. It would only take a little exaggeration for local gossips to place the murder in the old squat. I put up with the old house for a while but could not endure the journey to Croydon. The old Victorian four story houses at 123/125 Burnt Ash Hill are pulled down now replaced by modern flats. Given the choice between attending the college more regularly or leaving, I chose to leave. The Head of The Department made a comment about my not being happy at the college but what was making it impossible to attend was the fact that I could find no accommodation nearby, because I could not afford the months’ rent deposit required by landlords. I should have asked to see the social secretary but it was clear that they wanted another scapegoat. They had already expelled a female Muslim student for drawing with traditional Muslim perspective. ’You’re here to learn western art,’ said the tutor for still life and life drawing but she insisted in sticking to her medieval technique. Medieval in as much as it did not observe the rules of the vanishing point. They wouldn’t get away with it today, and would now perhaps encourage her cultural difference, but they in the seventies the staff felt that they desperately needed to make examples, lest hippies and foreigners occupy the dining hall and hold another sit-in, or daub a Situationist slogan on the concrete walls again, like Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid had in the sixties.

 

I went back to my parents yet again but they had had enough as well and though I held out during the hot summer of 76, as I, started eating less and less, and became more withdrawn the psychotic depression set in and I started to believe things that were just not true. No-one would sell me drugs and I became too agoraphobic to visit anyone. People stopped visiting because when they did I would look at them as though they were a murderer, the vibe was in the air, but I did not know where it came from. I thought it was something I had said or done, I still had not been told about Mary which was the real reason everyone went paranoid.

I borrowed ‘Composing with Tape Recorders’ by Terence Dwyer from Orpington library, and made tape loops around coffee jars with random pieces of improvised guitar music. I weighed the coffee jars down with anything I could find but the experiments, like the cut ups came to nothing. Still these basic editing exercises were useful. I could see that writing and music need not be limited by conventional editing techniques, and they were not expensive either. I bought a copy of The Job, interviews with William Burroughs, but the tape recorder experiments were too advanced for a borrowed 2 track tape recorder with no overdubbing facility or variable tape speed. I bought some a spicing block and tape, and made a few crude cut ups and made more loops. But my artistic efforts were not appreciated or encouraged. My parents could not cope with my withdrawn state. Unnecessarily they called the police who took me to Farnborough psychiatric unit. A visit from the family doctor would have been more appropriate. Being in psychiatric hospital sedated on drugs I neither wanted nor needed at the end of 1976 was no place to practice electric guitar. I was allowed to keep the guitar in the hospital, but not the practice amp. It would have been a good time to play the noise guitar that I had discovered before Industrial and No Wave musicians used atonal music and noise

 

I left the hospital in January 1977, because Ray helped me find a flat in the house in St Paul’s Cray where he was staying. Ray eventually confided in me about Mary. Mary was a girlfriend of Ray’s who had been murdered around the corner from the Burnt Ash Hill squat, by another of his admirers, called Sue. Of course I was shocked and it has taken longer than I care to admit to make sense of the situation. It would not have been fair to Ray to ask too many questions at the as he was clearly still grieving, I merely inquired to where the murder took place. I thought that explained why the house at Burnt Ash Hill was deserted yet un-vandalized. To change the subject I asked him if anything had become of the band that Mark had told us about, the one that was really weird. ‘Oh they helped make the cover for ‘Animals’’, (the Pink Floyd LP), but as the subject seemed to bring him down even more I did not pursue it. I think that Ray may have been referring to Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson who not only worked for Hypgnosis, the company that designed the cover for Pink Floyd’s ‘Animals’ LP, but also played in ’really weird’ experimental band ’Throbbing Gristle. Chris Carter was also in Throbbing Gristle. During 1976, between Art College and admission to the Psychiatric Unit at Farnborough I had made the journey to London, to visit the record and book shops. At Compendium bookshop in Camden Town I bought two issues of Sandy Robertson’s punk rock fanzine ’White Stuff’. I was surprised to read an interview with Genesis P-Orridge, of the ’Industrial’ music band ’Throbbing Gristle’. In it he said that he too left his guitar leant up against his amplifier while he went to the shops’. At the time I put it down to mere coincidence. Later, in November 1977 I read an interview in ‘Sounds’ music paper where Throbbing gristle  claimed to have introduced the idea of no chords to music. There were other coincidences, they too were experimenting with weeklong drones, they described their music as industrial. They did not use chords. Some of there vocals were screams.

Genesis P-Orridge, like David Bowie, had been compelled to meet with William Burroughs in the early seventies. In his writing William Burroughs had no problem with requisitioning the work of others and incorporating into his own work by means of his experimental techniques such as the cut-ups.  Throbbing Gristle’s singer, Genesis P-Orridge, had introduced himself and visited to William Burroughs in 1972. In 1980 Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle flew to America to collect a shoe box full of Burroughs cut-up tape experiments.  In Simon Ford’s book ‘Wreckers of Civilization’ artist and band member Cosi Fanni Tutti, is quoted as saying of Genesis P-Orridge, ‘He never exposed himself to real life, preferring instead that others bring it to him and then utilize their experience, ideas and information. It strikes me clearly that he conspired to invent himself via the talent and ideas of others’.

I know that ideas are not copyright but it was a bit strange to suspect that my ideas had been used by someone else. It may be that Throbbing gristle member Genesis P Orridge had decided to call their music Industrial at a meeting in a pub with Monte Cazzaza a few weeks before the Tangerine Dream concert at the Fairfield Hall Croydon, but that does not explain why rock journalist Mark Paytress credits Peter Christopherson with naming their music.

 

David Bowie admits stealing ideas in an interview with Cameron Crowe, published in Rolling Stone magazine.‘The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from. I do think that my plagiarism is effective. Why does an artist create, anyway? The way I see it, if you’re an inventor, you invent something that you hope people can use. I want art to be just as practical’.David Bowie, in Chris Welch’s book ’We could be Heroes’ is quoted as saying that, during the recording of his ’Young Americans’ L.P. in 1975, ’Every day 20 kids would be waiting outside and we’d let them into help out and give ideas‘.   

It would not surprise me if Mark had remembered and passed on my ideas, after all he was a student with the requisite skills. Patients in the community often have no end of ideas but have trouble putting them into practice. The so-called sane in society are more likely to have the resources to put ideas into action, but for them ideas are often thin on the ground. Though the patient in the community may be more in touch with their subconscious, it is often to such an extent that their actions are inhibited, either by the intrusion of the subconscious, the voices and other hallucinations, or by the effects of the medication taken in the hope of containing such intrusions. 

After ten years silence David Bowie has made a new record. There is an exhibition of his stage costumes and other memorabilia that has been shown at the Victoria and Albert museum and has gone on to tour the world. Subsequently there has been a revival of interest in the man who is arguably the most influential Rock singer. In a recent radio programme on Radio 4 called ‘I dressed Ziggy Stardust’, Shyama Perera describes how she sent a sketch to David Bowie and it eventually became one of his many stage costumes. The programme concluded by diplomatically saying, as it was so long ago in an era of drug use by David Bowie, and others, that memories could be unreliable and we could never say for sure.

The creative process is often more complex and involves more input than is evident in the finished work. A cut up is an editing technique with work ending up in the bin like film on the cutting room floor of a film editor. Ideas passed around in stoned conversations may be fair game. But there is a difference between someone making a mental note of an idea then passing it on in innocent enthusiasm and using it as social collateral with malice aforethought. Taking other writers work and blending it in with his own, Burroughs considered that he was avoiding the pitfall of ‘originality ‘ that was preventing him from writing more. Brion Gysin pointed out to William Burroughs that he was already using phrases that were not original. William Burroughs took this criticism as permission to requisition other writers work, and using the cut up technique turn it into new prose. The writer is rearranging the words he knows anyway, William Burroughs was doing what all writers do but consciously. The same process occurs in music, consciously and unconsciously. How many times have musicians complained that their music has been stolen? How many times have musicians doubted their own originality, thinking that they must have heard a tune somewhere else but cannot remember when? Big Jim Sullivan, a session musician who played on many records in the sixties once said that if he complained every time someone stole one of his ideas he would not have time to record at all. Working musicians sign contracts obliging them to deliver music by a deadline, and then tour to promote their new L.P. Before the internet, any musician without ideas, out of touch with their audience, can become desperate to fulfil the demands they have agreed to.   

David Bowie has often been accused of stealing ideas and admits this. Musicians such as Keith Christmas Pete Townsend and Mick Jagger have all accused David Bowie of stealing their music or ideas. Ian Dury accused Johnny Rotten of copying him. Sometimes the musicians will not even remember, events are lost in the past and/or in a drugged haze.

 

If, when I described Tangerine Dream’s music as industrial Mark had repeated what I had said I was hardly being original myself. On the cover of the l.p. ‘No pussyfooting’ by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno there is a copy of a book called ‘Futurist Manifestos. A student friend Normans had obtained a copy of this book and showed it to me. The book seemed too intellectual for me but I noticed that Marinetti used the word industrial when describing his artistic vision. In any case these ideas that were controversial in the days of DaDa and Futurism seem to have crossed over via literature to inform Rock and Pop music. 

 

 

  At St Paul’s Cray Paul Fowler asked me to help him make a tape he said he was very ill and did not want to be remembered as a bit of a laugh. He was going to work as a cook on Radio Caroline, and was allowed to play records on the graveyard shift 3am to 6am. But I did not find out that he played our tape over the airwaves until a while later, after I had left the houses. Radio Caroline was run by Ronan O’Reilly, who also financed the Phun City festival when it was decided it was to be a free festival, and the White Panthers could not afford to rent the farmland and pay the musicians. Ronan O ‘Reilly also started the ‘loving awareness’ philosophy that was promoted by the radio station and he managed the ‘Loving Awareness’ band that recorded an LP of music inspired by the ideology that Ronan O’Reilly invented to combat the decline in the peace and love values that were in decline as the hippies fell from popularity. So the St Paul’s Cray houses were an outpost of hippie culture as the Punk Rockers gained acceptance. The Loving Awareness band was adopted by Ian Dury who, with Chaz Jankel joining on guitar and as a co-songwriter, and Davey Payne playing saxophone became his backing band The Blockheads.

Sadly Paul’s tape did little to find him the recognition he wanted. It was a lo-fi recording made with the contact microphone of a domestic cassette player, I played my electric guitar, a Jedson Stratocaster copy, through the Leo amp, and we balanced the sound of Paul’s acoustic guitar by having him sit nearer the microphone. I remember we had to put the amplifier quite far from the microphone in that small front room of the terraced house in St Paul’s Cray. How ill Paul was, or what became of him I do not know, when I left St Paul’s Cray I did not want to return. The amphetamine users caused a lot of ill feeling there. There were some shady characters around and as the hippy dream collapsed, there was bitterness and bad intentions.

Ray organised a jam session in a hut up the road behind a pizza restaurant in St Mary Cray that was rented out as a flat to a hippie from Liverpool. Again it was recorded on cassette. How many tapes were lost, mislaid and stolen out of spite in those days before lo-fi was recognised as legitimate form of expression in the eighties. How many aspirations were wrapped around the spools of grubby cassettes in the hands of hippies only to be pushed to the back of the queue by the Punk Rockers, Industrial bands and New and No Wavers? There was always the fellow complaining about his lost cassette and the fellow contemptuous of the medium. But this was nothing compared to the change in attitude from ‘Loving Awareness’ to meanness of spirit and hatefulness that accompanied the change in fashion and drug use, triggered by unemployment and the political changes at the time. I was reminded of the atmosphere at Burnt Ash Hill, and recognised it now as pre-murderess. After I left, the houses in St Paul’s Cray were raided and the cannabis plants taken away and some of the hippies arrested. It was claimed that one of the residents informed on the others. I don’t know why, a slight or a refusal to share drugs were the usual sources of discontent. Then there were threats and the alleged informer moved. I lost touch with the St Paul’s Cray hippies. I stayed at my parents for a few weeks but when I returned from visiting friends in the midlands I found my possessions on the doorstep. I went to stay with a friend but was spiked with benzodiazapines. I continued with my tape experiments. I went to the midlands again but this time when I returned my friend had moved on and I had lost everything to the landlord.

I became a revolving door patient, moving back and forth from my bedsit to the notorious Cane Hill hospital admission ward. Eventually I was sectioned and consigned to the medium long stay ward where Terry Burns, David Bowie’ step brother, was also referred. I have written about Terry in my book ‘The Road to the Asylum. For nine months I avoided the medication because I complained so much Dr Roderick Evans refused to prescribe me anti-psychotic drugs. When I left Cane Hill I stayed in hostels and then I was given a council flat where I settled for a while. But I became ill and was in and out of Farnborough psychiatric unit until I moved to South Darenth, became homeless again and was admitted to Stone House hospital. All the while I continued with my tape experiments but again lost everything due to homelessness.

 

   A couple of years ago I found an Epiphone Gibson S-410 in an Oxfam shop. An oddity as it is a Stratocaster copy, it is the cheapest guitar with the Gibson name on that you can buy. But I adjusted the intonation and blocked the tremolo and it plays alright. I bought a good phaser, a delay pedal and a hand made clone of a sixties fuzz box after selling a few prints. In supported housing amplification is limited to a micro crush, but the other night the guitar fed back and with the sustain from the fuzz box it produced a drone that reminded me of the old Leo amplifier and Jedson guitar and the hypnotic effect it had all those years ago.

Of course all this does not mean I invented ‘Industrial’ music, no one person did. The cut-ups, the drone the no-chords the screaming, all circumstantial, and besides as Richard Hell said ‘ideas are free property.’ The change from Hippie to Punk and Industrial was not a straightforward and sudden reaction but a gradual change, a metamorphosis. How many others collaborated unwittingly in these changes we will never know, but in the seventies it was facilitated by a rock paper, the New Musical Express, whose staff, some of whom, like Lou Reed, at the time, seemed to favour amphetamine over the cannabis preferred by Hippies. The new ideas did not immediately have a collective name. For a while Pub Rock was the missing link between hippie and punk, in early 1976 the new emerging genre, Punk Rock was still mainly unknown outside the music business. It was not until Bill Grundy provoked the Sex Pistols to swear on ‘Nationwide’ an evening news programme, and the daily Mirror reported the incident on its front page Punk Rock became the accepted name for this new music that had been gathering momentum for a couple of years.

Influential Lou Reed, idol of the intellectual rockers was known for his aggressive attitude. He frequented the punk clubs, more at home there than with the Hippies who he despised. Lou Reed had led the Velvet Underground, a band that was a great favourites of Throbbing Gristle, who were in turn the major influence and inspiration to the Industrial musicians. During the seventies, again to some extent because of the influence of the New Musical Express, the influence of the psychedelic Hippie bands such as the Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane was played down and the Velvet Undergound was re-written into the history books as the influential sixties band, even more than the Beatles and The Rolling Stones. The British punks were also well known for their use of amphetamine, though some, no doubt influenced by the New York punk rockers started to use heroin, with disastrous results documented elsewhere.

 

So the exchange of ideas that occurred on the drug scene had some cultural significance. But now musicians no longer have to wait for friends to teach them skills that they can now acquire from the internet. With the internet conditions have changed. No musician who has access to the web need want for inspiration or ideas. But this innovation has been accompanied by illegal or low royalty legal, downloading, which has devalued the L.P. as a commodity. Musicians are more likely to be obliged to play live for their money altering the parameters of what some call the rip off game.

 

You do not need a large amplifier and speaker to produce the feedback drone effect from an electric guitar and a small portable practice amp. In fact you need not make a loud noise with feedback either, you can refine and modify the sound to endless sustain by using the volume controls on the amplifier and the guitar. Then if you have them, use effects to alter the sound so your experiments can be quite neighbour friendly. The feedback drone lends itself to table top ‘improv’ or ‘free improv’. Experiment by moving the amplifier and touching the guitar to alter the tone. This application for the electric guitar can be used to create soundscapes on its own or with pre-recorded sound or music. Blend in the sound of a shortwave radio or street scenes to augment your atonal compositions or conventional music recordings. Improvise or score your work in a live situation, Connect with others using the internet where you can also download your results for others to hear and comment.

The table top noise guitar has therapeutic possibilities. Schizophrenic non musicians could create evocative soundscapes and sound collages to block unwanted voices. Recovering addicts can build confidence and a sense of achievement that can then be applied to more practical work. In workshops patients could collaborate to encourage creative socialisation. The sound experiments of bohemia can be utilised to help the casualties of society.