Each of the Pink Fairies arrived bearing the head of a dead pig on a pole

 

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Other staunch allies in combating the mod/skinhead problem were a motley bunch of Jewish East Londoners known as the Firm. The Firm were ex-mods themselves, but of the earlier, stylish variety whose twin dedications were music and creating mayhem and chaos wherever they went. Led by the dire duo of Peter Shertser and Ian Sippen, the Firm had taken a bunch of acid, but managed to retain a highly mutated version of the traditional mod obsession with making and spending money. They’d grown their hair and now dressed in sharp, custom-tailored suits of the most outrageous fabrics they could find. These bespoke monsters were made by an elderly tailor in the East End to whom they would present lengths of William Morris curtain material and demand that he sew it according to the same pattern as a three-button Tonik. At UFO, the Firm’s capacity for confusion and disorder reached inspired peaks. They spiked a number of people, attacked the more disorientated hippies with water pistols and let off an assortment of fireworks right on the dance floor.

the narrow coffee bars and darkened cellars with the kids packed tight.

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Guy Stevens never sought to label himself a mod, but the desire of the mods to be seen somewhere semi-secret, to search out the best tunes, the original versions, black dance music, drew them to his disc-only nights. At the Scene, customers would go downstairs, through a door wedged open with a brick into a bare room. The walls and floor were concrete. The sound was reputed to be poor, the rumour being that the speakers had been liberated from a fairground. Very basic. Dark, just a couple of lightbulbs and speed. The trade in pills in Soho was lucrative, and in clubs like the Scene you could buy Drinamyl pills  for around 7d, although – given that a common drug intake was probably three or four purple hearts near the beginning of the evening, topped up with a couple more every time energy levels flagged – they were usually bought in batches of five or ten. For a while, two cousins ran the door at the Scene and rigorously searched the customers who came in, confiscated pills, then passed them on to approved dealers who recycled them in the club.

wearing a miniskirt but no knickers, the latest trend among the hippies?

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We’re not a nation of prudes whatever anyone thinks. It’s only when you come on television you’re led to believe the people of Britain are very delicate flowers who must be nurtured and not offended. Unfortunately, the people who dislike us or who are critical of the BBC are very vocal and well-organised, viz. Mary Whitehouse. She says, ‘I have 800,000 people who all agree with me, this is obscene.’ But it’s nothing against the 18 million people who actually enjoy it. They don’t actually fill in questionnaires and say, ‘Yes, I’d like to see more filth on television.’

strenuous parties with wild non-stop dancing to twist and stomp music

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Mick Farren stormed into the marquee and demanded that all food stocks be distributed to the masses. He demanded that Pepsi and Birds Eye donate their entire on-site warehouse to the crowds, in return for a favourable mention in his next speech. As a ‘symbolic act of protest against élitism’, the alliance agreed to carry out a joint assault on the main fence. From the stage, meanwhile, the harried MC kept preaching peace and love and the spirit of Woodstock. The insurrection erupted at 10 a.m., led by two French anarchists with a battering ram. ‘Zeeze kids are being toe-tally controlled by zooperpigs,’ one of them yelled, thumping at the sheets of iron. ‘Ex-source-sted, wretchyard, sleeping in zee pissoirs . . . Zeeeze kids are worse than zeee Jews, at least zeee fuck’n Jews didn’t pay to go to Auschwitz . . .’ Crash! The corrugated iron caved in. Two Angels, a Panther and a Young Liberal squeezed into the arena, where, to their astonishment, the oppressed masses joined the security guys and their Alsatians in chucking them out and repairing the breach.

Times don’t change, but haircuts do, same old bullshit for me or you

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It didn’t take long for Russell to find his way around the capital’s hip and happening scenes, gravitating towards clubs like Tiles, Whiskey-A-Go-Go, and the Flamingo, where Geno Washington and other soul music was played. The Flamingo was particularly notorious as a pill den, probably a hangover from its reputation during the mod heyday.

It was reasonably easy to get pills in many clubs. Russell mentions one seedy club that used to be accessed through a car park round the back of Piccadilly: “If you wanted to go in the club you gave them five shillings and if you wanted drugs you gave them a ten shilling note. It was well accepted that if you gave them a ten shilling note then they’d give you four blues and you didn’t go into the club. It was a desolate, bomb site car park and there were the remains of an old building, the cellar of which had been propped up and turned into a club.”

But the club scene was changing, and the mod scene was fast fading with the emergence of psychedelia. By the autumn of 1966 Russell discovered a club called UFO, situated in the basement of an Irish dance hall in the Tottenham Court Road called the Blarney Club. It was here that Russell would meet up with Mick Farren and become, in 1967, a Social Deviant.

young Presley had a reputation for always having a supply of uppers

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Nowhere, though, was amphetamine more readily embraced than by the mods of London in the early 1960s. Unlike in the United States, where speed had a rural and small town reputation, English uppers were the urban/suburban drug. It was used by factory workers to cure their hangovers after a rough night at the pub. It was what the girls in the typing pool used to lose weight, and distance themselves from the mind-numbing keyboard. Among the young, it made possible non-stop Clockwork Orange weekends of rowdyism, night-clubbing, obsessive dancing, and, on occasion, outbreaks of mindless violence. A DIY teenage underworld had evolved so while The Rolling Stones sang “Mother’s Little Helper,” English mods dealt the “little yellow pills” on a thriving black market, and bands like The Who and The Move made themselves embodiments of pill-head triumph over hunger, sleep, orgasm, and reality.  The British mods had started out in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as a small, self-appointed elite who called themselves not “mods” but “modernists,” and spent their time hanging out primarily in anonymous late-night clubs in London’s West End. Although almost exclusively heterosexual, the modernists cultivated effeminacy, some going as far as mascara and eye shadow. Being so few in number, they attracted little attention except the odd article in some up-market glossy magazine, and it really wasn’t until large numbers of working-class youth aped a more robust, rock & roll version of their look—and also their taste for amphetamines—that the word “mod” was coined, and both the media and law enforcement began to take notice.

Farren's trying to turn the clock back to the Sixties underground scene

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Crowded into beat-up station wagons, covering hundreds of miles a day, eating garbage food and living in cheap motels, the pace was crushing. Although Presley has never been directly associated with drugs, there is no doubt that the majority of musicians playing these backroad circuits depend heavily on amphetamines, Benzedrine and No-Doze. If the speed didn’t get to Presley, certainly the strain of seemingly endless one-nighters did. Nice white boys didn’t wear flash pink suits from the black side of town. They didn’t listen to black radio and learn R&B hits, and they didn’t get involved in brawls with rednecks who took exception to ’nigger lovin’ faggots’ getting the females in an uproar.

“Every day, every night was the same. He chewed his fingernails, drummed his hands against his thighs, tapped his feet and every chance he got he’d start combing his hair.”

Vincent was a mental case,an absolute nutter

                                                                              

             pdf scan new link 14/2/12

                                                         pdf here , vincent article only,not the whole mag