“If a load of fucking mods came up here, they’d be done.”

 

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This book presents two important cultures generated during the 1960s and still widely influential today — the motor-bike boys, sometimes known as rockers, and the hippies, sometimes known as heads or freaks.

“We were at the Alhambra dance and whenever a good record came on with a big beat I had to get up and hit some fucker, or do sommat. It did, it sent me fucking wild … it just sends me mad. I’ll tell you one thing that used to send me fucking mad, that was ‘Revolution’, ‘Revolution’, any rock any one with a big beat in it, the fucking sound, I go fucking wild, I do. Me and Pete, you know, we got banned from a dance, and the police came practically every week because we used to fight every week, couldn’t help it, it used to send us wild. There’d be a perfect stranger and Pete would go and punch his head in, he wouldn’t get back up, only ’cause the records, certain records, they’d send us fucking mad, they would, they’re old beat records. … If I hear a good record it sends me wild, that fucking ‘Revolution’ used to get me mad.”

“Well, like I was with a chick and she was sick all over the floor, man, we were both sort of really spaced out, the room was swirling and I couldn’t tell where I began or anything else, but I got it together to clean up the sick. I wasn’t even revolted by it, I was in there with my bare hands scooping the sick up into a bowl. … They had this bog at Bath [festival], and it must have been a football pitch long, and it was like corrugated iron bent double in V-sections, like on to the other all the way down. And everybody was sort of pissing, it was just people all down this thing, and I was at the small end and it was like a fucking river, I was ‘tripping’ like fuck, and it was beautiful, you know, I got really hung up on the piss. All the dog-ends and matches floating down. It was beautiful, the stink was fucking terrible.”

spilling his "genetic wealth" on a basket filled with skinhead gear

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I recently got an excellent write up in the London Review of Books, which is enormously prestigious among the literati, and as a direct result, a great many 'influential' people have suddenly decided that I must be a talented writer who needs to be treated with respect. These people are incapable of forming opinions of their own, they simply venerate those writers who've been handed accolades by others. The vast majority of those who attain positions of 'responsibility' in the publishing industry feel deeply insecure about their ability to do the job for which they're paid, and quite rightly do not trust their own powers of judgement. This fact partially accounts for the abysmal state of British publishing, which is run by twats who are more interested in social climbing than creating a vibrant culture. Snobbery is second nature to these cretins, grasping the movement of post-modern culture is completely beyond them.

a hippie satanist car thief cult-leader sex-maniac bastard butcher.

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During this three-week stay at the house on Gresham occurred the famous Manson gobble-miracle. Zonked on lysergic acid, Manson was being blown by a hysteria-prone young adept named Bo. Bo was a small masochistic girl with thyroid eyes and long black hair, one of Charlie’s favorite pain-targets. The legend continues that during the gobble the girl went nuts and, all in one incision, bit in twain Manson’s virility. Then, through the miracle of magic, Manson, they claim, at once healed his tragic amputation and continued onward.

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.

Drunks, derelicts, wide-boys on the make, storytellers, argufiers

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I roamed the night city - a leather pub in Gateshead, a boxers' pub in Byker, a tarts' pub off Scotswood Road. Self-conscious myself, I worshipped abandon in others. And Newcastle, against all probabilities, turned out to be full of the stuff. The city's bleak surfaces hid all manner of chameleons and inspired excessives: Eric Burdon transforming himself into a Mississippi sharecropper; a lady named Gala who swallowed flames in the nude; and the raddled old queen, met late one boozy night at Central Station, who claimed to have been raped by Winston Churchill. 'Winnie the Poof,' the old queen called him, and showed me, wrapped up in a white lace handkerchief, the tarnished half-crown he claimed had been his hush money.
For me, this was a secret city. There were the public streets, four-square and massive, aggressively masculine. And then there was the hidden: the jigsaw of chares and alleys and precipice drops that cobwebbed the docks and the hillside above them. Clubs seemed like bunkers then. The Downbeat was a stark room at the top of an abandoned warehouse, the A'Go-Go stuck down a cul-de-sac, the New Orleans a rotting tooth in a razed street. Jazz and the blues were a code, and nightlife an underworld - not criminal, exactly, but seductively outlaw.

The music was blasting in here, loud loud jazz, ear-splitting bop sounds

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The third place he went in had a band. The cats in this place were just as weird, but when the music started up he knew he had hit on a swinging joint. The bar was packed. As soon as the musicians came on the stage, everyone in the place seemed to go crazy.

Absolutely wild.

They jumped up on chairs and tables and began clapping and stamping their feet and yelling themselves hoarse before the first note was sounded by the Negro alto saxophonist leading the group. A low, raspy guttural moaning sound came out of his glittering golden horn, louder even than the shouting going on beneath him, and then an amplified fender bass, drums and piano started up the rhythm behind him.

Jimmy didn’t know much about jazz, but he knew that this stuff was pretty far out. They didn’t seem to be playing notes at all most of the time, just bleats, wild prairie-sounding howls as a tenor man got up from a front table and joined in with the altoist. The two of them faced each other, bending backward and blowing crazy sounds through their instruments as though they had a mind to blast each other right off the stage, while behind them the rhythm section went crazy with a thundering, riffling beat of complex rhythms established by bass, piano, drums and cymbals.

The whole place seemed to rock with sound. “Yeah man, go!” someone yelled. Hands began to clap in unison. “Solid, man!” The music wailed louder and even wilder, somewhere between a twist and a dirty boogie.

A doll-faced blonde in a short flare skirt was sitting next to him, a young fierce-looking Negro boy beside her with his arm around her waist and his hand over her amazingly big breast, both of them rocking back and forth to the beat like they were drugged or something.

Suddenly the blonde leapt up onto the bar and began to dance. The other customers gathered around in a circle and began clapping their hands, and the blonde went crazy, kicking over drinks and doing a wild kicking and shuffling step that sent her little skirt flying out and up around her waist.

Standing directly underneath her, Jimmy could see very well.

Very well indeed.

in a grubby corridor with a collection of tarts and tramps and drunks

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Not many people were out except boys and girls of his own age. Cats, he called them to himself. I wonder how many of the cats are around tonight? They met at a café called Nick’s. It was a workmen’s café in the daytime but at night it was different. It acquired an excitement and a glamour. It was the café for the boys on motor-bikes. It was like a badge of admittance, the bike and the gear. It gave Reggie his only sense of belonging and being part of society. The gear was made of leather: leather trousers, leather jackets, leather gloves. It made them feel important. They felt select. They were proud. All their money went on the bike or the clothes. The girls liked to see them in leather, they liked to wear it, to have this feeling of separateness and power. Other people were frightened or attracted. Some men came along dressed in the whole kit, yet Reggie knew they hadn’t motor-cycles, but cars parked a mile down the road. The boys laughed at them. They called them ‘kinky’, and ‘the leather johnnies’, but some of them went off with them. They said it was good for an easy quid or two.

As they rode home Reggie wondered if he ought to try to see Dot tomorrow. He felt responsible and although he had no intention of living with her again, he felt they should talk about their future. What about his future? Would he go on living with Dick’s Gran? Sleeping in the same room as Dick? He had been shaken by last night. He knew it wasn’t just an instance, happening because of the particular circumstances. His feelings for Dick now were like those he had had when he first met Dot. He was excited and anxious. He thought, why should I feel like this over Dick, I’m not queer. But perhaps he was, if he felt as he did. He knew blokes often had sex together if there were no girls around, in the army and things. It didn’t mean anything. But this did. It wasn’t because there was nothing better.