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 26th 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.
