ElectricNick: No Direction Home by Nick Butt (Kindle book review)

The Kindle-only ElectrickNick: No Direction Home by Nick Butt is the fascinating story of a young man who appeared fated to sink rapidly into homelessness and addiction after leaving his dysfunctional family, but escaped and ran through London’s Swinging Sixties and early seventies like a hippy Zelig. Everyone you could possibly think to appear in the book does so. Nevertheless, Nick manages not to come across as a name-dropper; he (and his co-writer Richard Marris) simply recount, in an unadorned and workmanlike fashion, the things that happened around him, and it turns out to be everything worth happening.

The closest memoir I can think of is Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles, but Nick’s story lacks the air of glamour and the inevitability of success that peppers Boyd’s gallivant through the upper echelons of the Hippie Establishment.

Indeed, Nick writes, without mentioning any names, “In hindsight, many of the leading figures of those times were at best self-serving and at worst exploitative and sexually predatory. Their voices and endlessly self-promoting stories dominate the history of our British version of the counterculture, while people with fresh angles and insights take them to the grave.” This comes just after a mention of his (then) recent meeting with one of the London scene ladies, where she says she now “views a lot of what she experienced in her early teens as paedophilia, somehow justified as a form of self-expression.”

But the book is in no way explicit, nor salacious, nor judgmental. It merely describes Nick’s journey, which takes him from Middle Earth (the London Club of that name), Notting Hill, through Pacific Island paradises, via clapped out hippy bus-rides through the Middle East and non-airworthy planes to Bali, to Australian communes and back. What lifted him out of the quicksand of poverty that overtook so many at the time – the traps laid for troubadours who got killed before they reached Bombay – is his uncanny affinity with the mechanical and electrical. Every time the money ran out, he met someone who needed an engine repair, a recording studio built or a demon-possessed transistor radio exorcising. And in the counter-culture territories of New South Wales, everyone needed solar panels.

Thrill to what happened to the enameled pot that came in handy initially because he had dysentery and needed to bail stuff out of the window! Find out how to explain to the highway patrol why the handbrake of your faltering vehicle is lying on the seat! Have fun with adventures like the following, which almost unbelievably happened in London, not the New Hebrides:

“One Sunday afternoon a few months later we were putting on a benefit for a group called The Tribe of the Sacred Mushroom when we were raided aggressively by the Bow Street constabulary. As they left they told the market traders that we were burning a child at the stake, which goaded them into smashing up the whole club with axes and grappling hooks.”

Delight in anecdotes such as this, which is also incredibly set in England:

“Septimus had bought it [a contraption apparently composed of batteries and CRTs] for £5 from a local farmer who maintained it was a UFO he had seen crash land in one of his fields. We later learned that a local eccentric, who claimed to be Mick Jagger's uncle, had produced it as a prototype for a spaceship. Maybe he built the real thing because he disappeared one day, leaving all his belongings behind and was never heard of again. I bought the vessel for £7 as a conversation piece but before I could collect it a chap named Scorpio smashed it up with an axe 'because it was evil'.”

Or this:

“We had dropped acid on the ferry and all seemed normal until we were confronted by the 50 or so clocks in Gabe's parents' living room and by the time we sat down for tea my sausages were breathing. My efforts to force them down weren't helped by Gabe's mum, who'd had part of her gullet removed, pulling a tube and funnel out of her cardigan and pouring pieces of bacon and egg into it.”

And did you know:

“The French were testing nuclear bombs at Mururoa Atoll, 3,559 miles of nothing but sea away and the electro-magnetic pulses from the detonations fried transistors all around the South Pacific.”

I’m not using up all the best tales here, because there are literally hundreds of them. Every page has something incredible happen, or someone incredible met. Much is funny. The first half has the 60's rock royalty. The latter half, where he and his lady build a home and garden from scratch in the Australian eucalyptus forests, is equally gripping. The middle, island-hopping tales in the Pacific, are like Heart of Darkness meets Trobriand Cricket.

Nick and his co-writer seems to have been working from diaries, because they seem sure of dates, names and number of appearances. Which is interesting, because Mick Farren told me the Deviants had never played with Led Zeppelin (only with the Band of Joy) but Nick says they did, and describes the event. I guess that’s the advantage of keeping good records.

An excellent companion book to more famous memoirs by people who may have had an interest in whitewashing their sixties exploits.



Edit: Nick provided the proof!

White Bicycles by Joe Boyd (book, 2006) review

After jumping out of John Lennon's car, I walked down to Abbey Road studios on my way to record The Pretty Things and who should pass by but Margaret Trudeau, the wife of the Canadian Prime Minister.  She offered me a lift in her private plane as she was flying off to see Mick and Keith. Who should be on the back of the plane but The Byrds who said they were between managers. I said that was lucky, I was between bands to manage, so I managed the Byrds starting that Saturday. One day a month later I was offered the job as the head of Biggo-Vastola Records and I said to the Byrds, I said, I have to take this lads. They were all sad about it as they'd just recorded Eight Miles High and thought it would be a hit. It went platinum five minutes after I left in Ringo Starr's biplane piloted by Hilly Kristal but that's the breaks. We had only just landed when Bob Dylan and Albert Grossman came round and asked if they could join Fairport Convention. "Sorry, I had to stop producing Fairport records three minutes ago," I said and they were all dejected. Luckily Nick Drake and John Martyn were outside, waving through the window for me to go for a drink with them, so I did...

That's not actually an excerpt from Joe Boyd's White Bicycles, but it's pretty damn close.

I bought the book because it was subtitled 'making music in the 1960's' and all I knew of Joe Boyd was that he'd managed the UFO club in Swinging London. Alas, suckered again, because like Rob Young's Electric Eden it's actually about the Great Folk Scare. It's another chance to read about what Pete Seeger said or didn't say to Albert Grossman about Bob Dylan's electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where all of that happened. (For the record, Joe Boyd does not agree with the chopping-the-cable-with-the-axe story.) It's a lot shorter, though, and Joe Boyd really did know absolutely everybody who was everybody, from Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee to Pete Townshend and literally everybody in between. There is more about the Incredible String Band and Danny Thompson, than about Pink Floyd and the Sex Pistols, though, but there must be no one else in the world who has worked with so many people - from Dudu Pukwana to Reverend Gary Davis - nor anyone who was in the thick of it for so long. It's fascinating stuff.

He's not Boswell, so I found there was quite a lot of starting an incredible anecdote about someone - Hendrix, or Devon Wilson - and then going into the next anecdote. After a while you realize the first anecdote isn't going to peak. Maybe he'll get back to it, but maybe he won't. The only one I remember actually coming to a punchline was the story about the Incredible String Band, who get left behind talking to a waiter in California, and later get picked up again having learned something from the waiter Our Gracious Host was not happy they had learned.

I needed to know some deeper things about the Summer of Love for my NaNoWriMo novel, and I wanted to check a few opinions about folk music for it, which this book amply supplied. It mentions Mick Farren, who mentioned Joe Boyd a couple of times, a couple of times. They're not very complimentary, but Swinging London was a complicated time. Boyd dates the Sixties as stretching from the Summer of 1956, peaking on 1st July 1967 and ending in October of 1973. And I'd agree with him, before and after reading the book.

Advice for aspiring writers

One frequent piece of advice given to neophyte writers is "Keep a piece of paper and a pencil with you at all times - you never know when an idea will strike and believe me, you won't remember it, however much you think you will. Write it down immediately."

A few days ago I was in the car and had a brilliant idea for a funny pun - probably something like "Ha ha! Nerd's Best Soup!" or "Why don't I rewrite Mick Farren's 1975 classic novel The Texts of Festival as actual texts from an actual festival?" Anyway, I couldn't find a pencil and paper and STB rather pointedly (since he'd bought it for me) remarked, "Why do you need paper? You have a miniature supercomputer in your handbag!" And so I do, a Samsung Galaxy Note 3. But I have no idea how to take a note on it. I suppose I could Tweet the idea.

I do have pieces of paper and pencils in the bathroom and in my bedside drawer, though.  Every now and again some writing appears on the pad in the bedroom and the simplest explanation is that I have written it because I have had A Nidea during the night.  One appeared today and I have no memory whatsoever of writing it, and I don't know if it's from a dream or just a great idea I had while falling asleep that needed writing down so it would not be lost to the world.

It says:

"Jerry, I'm dying!"
"Dying? Good! You tried to consume the whole world and the best thing that could happen to you is die!"
Inhuman black beetle eyes made me wonder if a human could climb it.
Leaning out of the first floor window looking at the legs of the women below in their short shorts as they run for the bus ball.

I really don't have a clue what that means, or even whether it's one thought, or two, or three. How wonderful it has been preserved for posterity.

RIP Mick Farren

Mick Farren, anarchist, Deviant and science fiction writer died last night after collapsing on stage at a festival where he was performing with his band, the Deviants.  It's more or less where he came in, so I'm sure it's where he would have wanted to go out, just not so soon.

RIP, Mick my friend, and condolences to your family,.

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Dangerous Minds' blog writer Richard Metzger with a longer tribute to Mick

Ultimate classic rock obit

Apocalypse Next Week!

It's the end of the world, but not as we know it (Jim) -

Doc 40 (the legendary Mick Farren) and the even more legendary Deviants are celebrating the business end of the Mayan calendar with a suitably porklips-themed party on December 21st. Unfortunately for me, the shindig is in Brighton, England, and I am not.

However, you may be, so here's the flyer.



Mick points out that it's not a Deviants show per se, however.

It's from 8 until Doom and it's free, so go along and party like it's 1999 (again)!

The History of the NME by Pat Long: review

My copy of  The History of the NME: High Times and Low Lives at the World's Most Famous Music Magazine arrived, and I read it with the fascinated fascination of the fascinated.  I mentioned it was on its way here a few weeks ago, where I also said most of what I could say in this review.  That's because I read the NME cover to cover for six or so years in the Seventies, and maintain enough memory of the writing to spill it out long before the actual history of the mag arrived.

It's a little difficult to explain the appeal of the weekly rag, The New Musical Express - the NME - to someone who comes across it these days, where it's a horribly foreshortened magazine with a webpage that commands slightly less respect than say, Brooklyn Vegan or TNT.  But for a while, in the 1970s, when the post-hippie generation were growing up in their vast late-baby boom numbers and searching for their teenage expression, it was not only an arbiter of taste, but also the only window on society and politics that most of us (who had missed International Times and Oz) would see, at least until we left home and went to university.


I use the NME - Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols

Musical Express started publishing in the forties, after cannibalizing and driving around a zombie publication called Accordion Times for a few years. (The thirties craze for accordions had, as they do, slowed to a standstill.) For a while, it had "incorporating accordion times" on its masthead, but eventually even that went away.  The Musical Express cultivated a very British relationship with pop, and then rock when it was invented, by drinking with the stars and managers during the night and gossiping heavily about them during the day. Or rather, drinking any time after breakfast until the next dawn and then writing about them during any subsequent minutes between hangovers and the next round of drinks. Although the ME was well-placed to follow, report on, boost, and gossip about, the late fifties and early sixties stars - the 2i's crowd, the British Answers to Elvis (assuming we knew the questions)- it didn't quite *pop*, didn't really get one over on its early and permanent Moriarty, the Melody Maker.  It reacted by changing its name to the New Musical Express.  And although it grew mightily and prospered, it still wasn't differentiated.  Rolling Stone appeared, and ate its lunch.

Things had to change. Then, "one afternoon at the end of 1971, Alan Smith was pulled out of the New Musical Express writers' room and sent for a crisis meeting with senior IPC staff". The "hands of the NME clock were at five to midnight and unless something was done within months to arrest the decline in sales, the magazine would be shut down." He was given three months to turn the paper around.

This turned out to be an unbelievably apropos time. Not only was February 1972 the date when I started buying newspapers and taking an interest in music and the world around me, it was also the approximate date when the younger siblings of the hippies, who had missed out on 1967, Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix and any associated Surrealistic Pillows, also all sat up and started to take notice. The book quotes cultural commentator Peter York (who he?): "The story of the seventies was the story of everyone getting in on what a minority got in the sixties because they were in the right place at the right time." That's a slightly different slant, but same effect: The NME modernized itself in a few weeks, brought in the best brains of the Underground Press, took in the effect of the music festivals, including Bowie's performance at Glastonbury Fayre, and absorbed the influence of Time Out and the burgeoning mimeographed fanzines.



Reading my underground press - That's All You Need by the Faces.

My favorite writers came on board - Nick Kent, Mick Farren and Charles Shaar Murray. The older writers were hippies, but sort of forward looking - they had, after all, produced Schoolkid's Oz - and all were prose stylists with a wonderful turn of phrase. Many of the newer writers had heard of this Rock'n'Roll shit and wanted a piece for themselves, and some, chiefly Nick Kent, were quite capable of outdoing their heroes in the drugs and rock'n'roll arena. (We don't hear a lot about the sex, although there seem to have been convulsions later based on who was screwing, or should be screwing, Julie Burchill.) NME continued to add excellent writers and more articles about what was happening - Rock Against Racism, gay rights, the UK's successful attacks on the remaining unions - all through the seventies. We had Tony Parsons - he was a hip young gunslinger, once - and Steven Wells (Seething Wells). Half a dozen other stars.


Nick Kent namechecked sarcastically as the best dressed man in town in Press Darlings, by Adam and the Ants. Nick couldn't catch a break - he was once beaten up by Sid Vicious.

Post punk, I pretty much stopped reading the NME, and according to the book, I wasn't the only one. It continued, of course, but with a vastly shrunken page count and weekly circulation. The ads went to the new glossies, as lifestyle magazines were becoming a thing and the readers drifted off, to adult life or to those glossies. New readers tended to go to new glossy Smash Hits, founded by NME staffers, but in color, funny and snarky, and concentrating on pop.

The book does seem to end not with a bang but a Wimpy, but perhaps that's just me, as the paper I knew did indeed collapse into the Big Whimper. It's a great read, if you were there, and that's from 1935 to 1980, or thereabouts.

I couldn't close a book review without complaining about the proof reading.  This has few of the standard errors; I caught a "gyspy" and a "Quadrophrenia", and that was about it. But it has an instance of a startling new development in publishing. Language Log has noticed that ebooks tend to have people who do a global find-and-replace without considering what might be affected - in that case, a book where every instance of the word "kindle" was replaced by "Nook" which makes sense only if publishers are talking in the attached ads about the e-readers called Kindle and Nook, but not in the actual fictional text, where people are now apparently referring to lights as having being "Nookd".  In this (non-e-)  book, every instance of the word "matt" has disappeared. This may be because someone who features in the book is called "Mat" with one 't', but if that's true the expected replace function hasn't been performed. This means that in several cases, something really ers, or people are asked what's the er.  In the first instance, which puzzled me for most of the book, until I worked it out, we were told about the "people responsible for foring text submitted by the journalists." Other than that, it's well written and edited. 

I use the NME - Happy 40th Birthday, Glam Rock!

Reminiscing on this blog about the forty years between Marc Bolan and the sadly Bolan-free world of today reminded me of my love affair with the New Musical Express, known to friends and enemies alike as the NME.   I first started getting it in early 1972, about the same time it made a major push for the younger music lovers, and succeeded mightily, peaking at more than a quarter of a million broadsheets sold each week.

NME has never actually been thought well of, so I can't say that people think less of it these days, but it's definitely shrunk a little from being the paper of me and mine and of the moment to being just another pop/rock fishwrap, and that's a terrible shame. I haven't gotten it for years - it's too expensive to import to the US, and anyway if it gets any scoops the rest of the internet steals them within 8 hours. (I'd hate to be a journalist today.) The NME, perhaps realizing that now is the time for a tell all, is bringing out its biography, The History of the NME: High Times and Low Lives at the World's Most Famous Music Magazine, by Pat Long, an ex-assistant editor. I've preordered it, but it won't be here until June. [Ed: It's here.]

There is a related blog, which features at least a couple of good articles. There's an interview with my mate Mick Farren, an underground press alumnus who worked for the NME during the Golden Age. (The Golden Age of a music paper, like the Golden Age of Science Fiction, is when the reader is aged between 14 and 16.) He brought a less frivolous, more gritty edge to a paper, which after all, was there mostly to tell us about this week's Bowie haircut, or what Bryan Ferry was doing, as the other interesting article, an interview with writer Nick Kent, puts it.

Farren was the one who knew how society worked and actually ran one to the extent he ran an open air festival, and could critique society at large with a White Panther's unflinching gaze. Nick Kent was the one who dressed more outrageously than the Stones and lived a more rock'n'roll lifestyle than even Keef (and you didn't believe that was possible!) He was also a one-time Sex Pistol who got beaten with a bike chain by Sid Vicious during one of those times when gangs go off-message and do something odd. Mick, on the other hand, wrote and sang with the (Social) Deviants, and could maybe best summed up by my describing how once I heard the greatest Bob Dylan track I'd never heard before, wondering why I hadn't come across it in the past, and realizing much later it was Mick Farren singing. I don't mean to sound as if all rock writers are frustrated musicians - they obviously all have some feel for music or they wouldn't be driven to write about it, but rivaling the Stones' glamour or outdoing Dylan is rare even among NME scribes.

Mick has written many books, the most germane...no pun intended Mick...being Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, which I've never reviewed here but is worth tracking down and reading. Nick Kent's more recent book Apathy For The Devil is more intensely personal, as living the glam rock life entailed taking the glam rock drugs, which subsequently meant a long nightmare of recovery, but has more than a glimmer of his unbelievable early writing and kept me so entertained I read it twice through in one sitting. I reviewed it here.

My collection of NMEs used to stretch from 1972 - Bowie and Bolan, Sweet and Slade - to 1977 - the Sex Pistols and the Damned.  Sometime in the mid-seventies I answered an ad from a bloke paying cash for 'any articles on Bowie', and shortly opened the door to a man with a broad Yorkshire accent and a bright red Ziggy mullet. He paid me an incredible amount of money for the early NMEs and wandered off, happy. That means the ones in my cupboard stretch from 74 to early 77, a tedious musical wasteland that included bright but ultimately pointless gems such as Be Bop Deluxe and Kilburn and the High Roads. It wasn't until mid-77 that the power of punk actually became clear. (Despite Mick Farren's legendary polemic in the 1976 Titanic Sails at Dawn piece prophesying the new order...not the New Order, the new order...which I still have.)

I watched the BBC's mammoth documentary of popular music, All You Need Is Love, recently. I've been meaning to write about it but never got around to it. The last episode, in 1977, is hilarious and yet sad in its blind aimless search for the next big thing that's so obviously due, and in fact actually there, yet quite invisible to people over 15, a demographic which the film-makers did not fit. AYNIL desperately interview the Baker Gurvitz Army, and stare at Mike Oldfield or ELO or Black Oak Arkansas hoping they'll Do Something.  Well, they didn't, and unfortunately that's the time period of NME I still have in the closet. But I remember my long-sold 1972 to 1974 runs with great fondness. Great fondness.

Half Price Drinks with Mick Farren

We drove up to what one SF-dweller of my acquaintance called the Seventh Circle of Hell yesterday - otherwise known as LA. The major reason for the excursion was the imminent emigration of my mate Mick Farren, who is heading back to Blighty. However, he promises he will keep up with his blog and his live performances from his new digs in Brighton.

Mick Farren

The Citadel, an Assyrian outlet on the I-5

We ambled up the I5 at such a leisurely rate (stopping at a CPK for a Thai Pizza or two, plus starters) that we only got to our first destination, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a couple of hours before it closed for the day. I hadn't been for a few years, and it's expanded greatly, with some major new displays which I can only describe as 'of the kind that the MJT is famous for'. You really have to, like, go, to get the flavor of it. They now have a tea room, in which I had some very nice tea from a samovar, served by a young lady who appeared and disappeared mysteriously behind a curtain and in some respects resembled some of the exhibits. Outside the tea room we particularly admired the oil paintings of the heroic canines of the Soviet space program.

LA from the freeway

In the shop I bought a musical box operated by a punched roll, like a player piano, except that the rolls are blank and it's sold with a hand punch, so you can make your own music. I also got the first non-diabetes inducing set of rubber stamps I've seen in quite some time, the Pictorial Webster's set, with snails and shells and seahorses and swallows and stags and some things that don't only begin with S.

Historic Route 66 - in LA, it's festooned with poles like an R Crumb cartoon

On to the bar, then, to see Mick. He was already well-lubricated and quite a supporting cast had gathered, so we talked extensively to him and to a few new people. As a parting gift, he'd brought along a table-full of his own books which we could pick up and he'd sign, so now I have a collection of them. I should have thought to bring along my copy of Give The Anarchist a Cigarette, but it didn't occur to me he'd be signing. We all then had a nice piece of cake and shared a fond farewell. Most of my friends are electric. I rarely saw Mick in real life, so a few extra thousand miles won't make a significant difference...but still it's sad when someone leaves. Though not, of course, for them.

Afterwards, STB and I followed the disembodied voice of his Android to the Viet Noodle Bar, where I had fish noodle soup and, from their extensive collection of books, a good read of several Oscar Wilde stories, which I will now rip off. I also got to listen to a bunch of conservatives at the end of the communal table struggling to understand sexual harassment, as defined by liberals. One of them had noticed that liberals were in favor of sexual freedom and was completely stumped by Anita Hill's testimony against Clarence Thomas. The person appeared to be grappling with the concept that, if Clarence Thomas was talking about sex to Anita Hill, that was a liberated and liberal and sort of left-wingy thing to be doing, wasn't it? So what was the problem?

Well, it works like this. If someone in a position of power over you makes sexual remarks in the workplace, the implication is that you will not do well at work unless you go along with that person- which in some cases means giving sexual favors to stay employed. This is a bad thing. Even if a person who is only a peer makes sexually charged remarks - or for instance puts up a nude calendar - that can lead to what the law calls a Hostile Work Environment. Outside the work place, yeah, liberals are pretty much in favor of sex. That people can get to fifty or so in California without knowing these basics is either a sad indictment of Liberals, who haven't explained it, or a sad indictment of Republicans, who are stupid. Or both, I guess.

But the noodles were nice.

On the way back down south we saw the closing fireworks of Disneyland, which start around 9:30 pm. We were laughing about something we'd heard, that some residents had clubbed together to complain to Disneyland about the noise (as if they hadn't known about the noise when they moved in!) and pulled off on Ball to get gas.

Gas Station Disney fireworks

Man those fireworks sounded like WWII. Loud as all get out. I think the residents may have a case. Pretty though.

And so to Orange County and bed.

Edit:



(Removed original Half Price Drinks as the link broke and substituted a 2009 version.)

The End of the World As We Know It

TEOTWAWKI is planned for December 21, 2012.

Mick Farren has a piece in LA Citybeat called The Fat Lady's Aria? Humanity's Last Stand? Or Just Another Apocalypse Soon? explaining the date, summing up the arguments and talking a little bit about why people are so gosh darn keen on predicting the end of the world.

For the third time in less than 15 years, the End of the World draws near. It’s discussed in coffee shops and saloons, and texted from couches by punks of the New Age while UFO Hunters flickers unwatched on TV. Theories inundate the Internet and books are already in print. Although apocalyptic theorizing might seem a hard sell in these grim times, conferences are being staged, at least two major motion pictures are planned, and the collective consciousness wonders if the date 2012 is already copyrighted.

Read the rest at the link above.

Me, I stick with Mother Shipton.









Oh, it appears she said the world would end in 1881.

Well, she was usually right.

Oh, wait, the piece above (published in 1888) also contains a debunking, including the forger's name. Pity.

Eyes in your feet

One of the more fascinating British stories is the conjuction of time and place that was Ladbroke Grove, London, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Almost everything that I liked growing up had a Ladbroke Grove connection - from Tyrannosaurus Rex to Mike Moorcock, the (Social) Deviants to Paul Kossoff, the movie Performance, Hawkwind to the Pretty Things, The Pink Fairies to The Clash... Of course, the scene died about the same time I moved out of Podunk to London and I never saw any of it.

Mick Farren, a Ladbroke Grove veteran himself, reports that there's now an album out called Cries from the Midnight Circus – Ladbroke Grove 1967-78, which contains tracks from many of those cited above, and I've put it on my Christmas list. (I can't buy it now, because in the grand Ladbroke Grove tradition, the link to the record company doesn't work, but I'm sure it'll be fixed soon.)

Even if you think you don't want the CD (and you do, you really do), you will want to read the liner notes, which gives a potted history of the Grove and what was so special about it. Put down those 600 page crap urban fantasy novels and read about a real urban fantasy. Hippies and White Panthers and stoners and lots and lots of musicians. And guess what - the liner notes are available here, for free!