NME June 19th 1976

In the mid 1970’s, the New Musical Express or NME, was the voice in rock journalism in the UK.  It was funny, irreverent and cynical and had left the previous market leader, Melody Maker, far behind in terms of sales and coolness.   It had taken a new crop of writers, from the underground press, to evolve  the NME from a rather dull paper which did little more than rehash record company publicity material into something with a clear voice and attitude of its own.  The writers became stars of sorts, their names as familiar to readers as the bands they wrote about.  I read the NME obsessively from about 1974 right through the eighties but it was the writers who were there at the beginning of that period who I remember best.

Mick Farren

 Mick Farren was possibly the most powerful voice politically, he’d been one of the founders of IT magazine, was the leader of his own band “The Deviants”. He had links to the Hell’s Angels and the British chapter of the anti-racist White Panther party.  Farren was a genuine sixties radical and hadn’t gone ‘mainstream’ or mellowed.   He might have been working for a big publishing company, but only because the underground press was disappearing, and he was using it to continue to say what he always had.  He wrote energetic science fiction novels with the same anarchic rock and roll attitude that his NME writing had that I inhaled at the time.  His more recent books may be better written but when I re-read Texts of Festival or Quest of the DNA Cowboys I read them witht he same sense of awe  as I did when I was sixteen.

Politically, Farren’s was the voice in the NME that roared most often and with most conviction. 

Charles Shaar Murray, was a middle class Jewish boy who at the age of 19 had been one of the team  responsible for the infamous Schoolkids issue of OZ.  An issue featuring a unique Robert Crumb Rupert the Bear comic strip which contributed to the magazine’s editors being sentenced to 15 months imprisonment following the longest obscenity trial in British legal history.   The verdict was later discarded on appeal and led to an investigation into the Met’s Vice Squad for corruption.

CSM borrowing Farren's Shades?

Looking back it seemed that with the exception of a few things by Bowie he hated almost every record he was asked to review for the paper.  That's a false picture, but he was the writer most prepared to shout that the emperor had no clothes.  CSM was  probably the first journalist I became aware of.  I read his articles because he wrote them, even if they were about bands I didn’t like at the time. His well-expressed disillusionment with Marc Bolan, who he had championed in the pages of Oz and Cream, and an insightful and clinical dissection of Alice Cooper are among the first articles I remember that were more than just fan pieces.  

CSM was eloquent and funny and acerbic.  Most of my more adventurous album purchases at the time were because of his reviews and I’m pretty sure he was the reason I looked up the word iconoclast in the school dictionary.

Nick Kent was cool.  Tall, skinny, handsome (or should that be pretty) and, from most accounts, almost always off his face.  He hung around with Keith Richards and managed to keep pace with Keef’s drug intake.  He wore worn leather jeans.  So worn in fact that according to Tony Parsons they amounted to an almost permanent ‘wardrobe malfunction”. 

Nick Kent with Chrissie Hynde

Kent had written for Frendz and OZ where he was responsible for a very lukewarm review of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, preferring instead the much less popular “Man Who Sold the World”.  And that just about summed him up.  Kent was the music snob that all 16 year old music fans wanted to be.  He had an educated, elitist taste in rock and you got the impression that it was all the better if only 50 other people had ever heard of a band.  I sometimes wondered if some of the bands he championed even existed at all.   But nobody wrote better about what it was like to be on tour with Led Zep, or doped to the eyeballs with Keith Richards.

 Then there was Ian MacDonald.  I never had a picture of what Ian was like.  There was less of him in his articles and more of the music.  But he brought a huge range of music alive and was no less an influence on my musical tastes than the others..  He later produced two of the best books on rock music, "Revolution in the Head" about the Beatles and "The People's Music".  

By the summer of 1976 Rock music had become turgid and uninteresting.  Like a lot of other people I read the NME for the attitude and the writing rather than the music it explored.  Prog rock was at its height with some of its most bombastic claptrap coming to the fore in the shape of the various solo projects by members of Yes.  Including the worst album I ever bought - Olias of Sunhillow by Jon Anderson.   

In many ways the June 19th issue was fairly typical.    At least the cover feature was a story about Bob Marley in Germany, but the news story that made the cover was the addition of new dates to a Genesis tour as the band promoted one of their most overblown and least imaginative albums, Wind and Wuthering. 

Inside, the charts were in a sorry state, with Wings holding the Wurzels off the number one position in the singles chart and only Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys are Back in town” and, I suppose, the Stones’ “Fool to Cry” looking anything like singles that would be memorable for the right reasons.

The album charts were led by “ABBAs Greatest Hits” with Thin Lizzy’s, Jailbreak and Led Zeppelin’s Presence being the best albums on the chart.  (Although I still have a fondness for Roger Chapman’s Streetwalkers “Red Card”.)  Otherwise it was dull as ditchwater.  Ritchie Blackmore’s “Rainbow Rising” was also in the top 30 along with the Steve Millar Band, Cliff Richard, Peter Frampton and no fewer than ten various artists or greatest hits albums.

It was only in the Virgin Imports chart where anything really interesting was going on.  The Ramones were number one, the first inkling of the New York Punk scene that followed on from the New York Dolls and gave us Television and Richard Hell among others

CSM reviewed that week’s singles, a disappointing batch with pub-rockers Eddie and the Hot Rods and The Count Bishops being the best of a bad lot.    The Hot Rods, Wooly Bully, featured Roxy Music’s Andy MacKay as producer and with his sax dominating the mix and acting as a poor replacement for Lew Lewis’s harmonica.  The Count Bishop’s ep contained some old-fashioned rock and roll played loud and fast.  

The NME was championing the pub rock scene at the time as the only interesting thing going on, even going so far as to feature Dr Feelgood on the cover before they’d been signed by a record company.  But really this was nothing new, a return to R&B based rock and sixties style pop that appealed to older rock fans disillusioned with the big stars of the day.  But bands like Joe Strummer’s 101ers and Brinsley Schwartz at least had more energy about them than the more established acts. 

And Dr Feelgood were, to be fair, the dog’s bollocks. 

The rest of the singles for that week were so insipid that CSM’s claim that the world had ended while he’d been in the loo leaving him as the last man on earth, was the most interesting thing about the column.  He quite rightly trashed the listless “I Love to Boogie” from T-Rex, and damned with faint praise a version of Bert Bacharach’s “Walk on By” by Joe Cooker wannabe Kevin Coyne.  It was only when he got to the Reggae singles of Max Romeo and Pluto that he managed to raise any enthusiasm at all.  There really was nothing else to keep his or our interest and without his “I Am Legend” angle and his acerbic wit it would have been a bit of a bore.

The album reviews for that week focused on American west coast rock.  Albums by Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman and Bonnie Rait featured along with Gram Parson’s "Sleepless Nights".  I listened to all of these while writing this entry and really liked them.  But at the time, I was 16.   They sounded too much like the “country and Irish” bands that had to be endured at most live venues in 1970’s Co Tyrone and had nothing at all to say to me at the time.

There were albums from Boz Scaggs, Ted Nugent and a sub-standard entry by Johnny Cash but nothing that seemed in any way relevant to me or anyone even close to my age. 

Overall this was a fairly dull issue by NME standards.  But on page 5, alongside the charts, was an editorial, “The Titanic Sails at Dawn”.  It was by Mick Farren and it said something that needed to be said.

Farren was responding to letters sent to the NME decrying the state of Rock music.  The bands of the sixties, which he had seen in small halls or clubs, were now playing huge venues with drinking and, god protect us, dancing banned.  The punters were being treated like cattle at bigger and bigger, more and more impersonal shows.  Gone was the feeling of freedom of the festivals of the sixties now, replaced with regimentation and tight security.  The idea wasn't to give fans a good show, it was to  protect the bands from the oiks.

He likened rock music to a doomed titanic steering directly into an iceberg of its own overblown self-importance.  

 The Stones and Led Zeppelin, led lives so far removed from their audience that any real connection had been totally lost.They were more likely to be hanging around with movie stars or royalty than be found down the pub with their audience.  Rock had become part of the entertainment establishment and lost any of the danger that had made it important in the sixties.

As Farren said “If rock becomes safe, it's all over. “  And Rock was becoming safe.  Safe and serious.  It should have been “a vibrant, vital music” a “burst of colour and excitement against a background of dullness, hardship or frustration.”  And the music of the time was anything but. 

The big names were separated from their fans, living in a world of champagne and coke while Britain went through political and social changes that left many young people jobless and bored.  And the stars were old.  There was nothing for the teenagers of the time but ugly insipid pop and rock bands demanding that fans should take them as seriously as musicians as they took themselves.

Farren recognized that the answer was not a return to the sixties climate that he had come from.  The economic realities of the seventies wouldn’t allow for that in any case, but more importantly  “the best, most healthy kind of rock and roll is produced by and for the same generation”.  He was an old fart, and he admitted it.  He understood that without another revolution rock music would crash and burn, weighed down by its own success. 

He knew that the solution lay with a new generation.    “Putting the Beatles back together isn't going to be the salvation of rock and roll. Four kids playing to their contemporaries in a dirty cellar club might”.

   “And that, gentle reader,” he said “is where you come in”.

 

And they did.  Within a year there was the Clash and the Sex Pistols.  X-ray Spex, Eater and the Damned.  Johnny Moped and the Buzzcocks.  Some of the bands may not have been great musicians, or even played great music but they played loud, with vigor and excitement.  It gave a generation something to get excited about but more importantly something that was their own.

How much Farren’s article precipitated the punk revolution I’m not sure, but the influence of the NME was real.  Nick Kent had played in an early pre-John Lydon version of the Sex Pistols, persuading them to listen to and try to play like Iggy Pop and the Modern Lovers rather than the Small Faces or the rockabilly favored by Malcolm McClaren.  And many of the early punk bands claimed influences from artists championed by the NME, Hawkwind, Bowie and T-Rex.

The irony was that Farren's own band, the Deviants, had been playing the same music for years, with the same fury and power.   The new revolution was the same as the old one, its wasn't what they did that was important, it was who did it. 

Mick Farren’s words “the best, most healthy kind of rock and roll is produced by and for the same generation” stayed with me and when I read the article again it seemed to have a different message for a different time.

I’m the old fart now, absurdly delighted that my 16 year old daughter knows the lyrics to almost all of the Grateful Dead’s songs.  That Bob Marley and the Drive By Truckers are on her Spotify playlists along with Waylon Jennings' “Are you Sure Hank Done it this Way” and the greatest pop song ever produced “Shake Some Action” by the Faming Groovies.

But I’m more pleased when I hear her play something that I just don’t get or even actively hate.  Or when I see her excitement after coming out of Queens University Mandella Hall after seeing some awful metal band that “you would have hated Dad”.

I’m not supposed to like that stuff.  It’s her music, for her generation.  Its better if boring old farts like me don’t quite get the appeal of “Need to Breath” or “Imagine Demons” or understand what the hell she is talking about when she tells me that “We Came as Romans” are a blend of post-hardcore and melodic screamo.  

I’m grateful that I had the NME.  That for six or seven very important years I got to read CSM and Ian McDonald write about Bowie and Nick Drake.  That Nick Kent introduced me to Iggy Pop and Rocky Erickson.  That week on week I got to read a magazine that made me laugh, made me angry and challenged me to try so many different types of music.  And I’m especially pleased that Mick Farren wrote this one article that put into words something that resonates as strongly with me now as it did then.

If rock music is going to survive then each generation has to have something that is their own, it’s the way it should be.  

 Mick Farren died aged 69 on the 27th July 2013, after collapsing on stage with his band The Deviants.  This blog post was written in response to a general call from Iain Banks to let the writers and artists who had inspired you know that their work had been noticed.  That it had made a difference - before it was too late.  I'm unreasonably pleased that Mick Farren and Charles Shaar Murray both got to read this and that each responded with messages that delighted me.  I'm now thinking who else I should be writing about/too next - before it is too late..

Recommended Reading:  

Charles Shaar Murray - Shots from the Hip,

Ian Macdonald - The People's Music and Revolution in the Head

Nick Kent – Dark Stuff and Apathy for the Devil

Mick Farren - Give the Anarchist a Cigarette…and Farren’s SF series “The Quest of the DNA
Cowboys”.  Rock and Roll science fiction pulp adventures.  Confiscated by the father of a friend I lent the book to on a holiday in Scotland as it was “unsuitable”.

"Elvis Died for Somebody's Sins but not Mine"  - A superb collecton of Farren's writing with an introduction by CSM. 
 

Recommended Listening

Well there is this Spotify Playlist that includes a lot of the music I've mentioned in this posting and even an example of post-hardcore, melodic screamo.  I'll probably post a comment some time droning on about whats in it.

And you could do much worse than to seek out a copy of Mick Farren's "Vampires Stole my Lunch Money"  featuring Chrissie Hyndes and Sonja Christina on vocals and Wilko Johnston on guitar.  
The Final track, "Drunk in the Morning" really is something special.  Brilliant and slightly obscure, Nick Kent must love it.


*Thanks to Mick Farren for the correction he made.  I've adjusted the text accordingly.

Repent Harlequin said the Ticktockman

Harlan Ellison is a writer, a writer of short stories and novels, of movie scripts and comics and he was the author of one of the most famous episodes of the original Star Trek series, an episode featuring Time Travel, Nazis and Joan Collins titled "City on the Edge of Forever".  Typically, he produced a script that he must have known was going to be significantly altered, (drug dealing on the enterprise?) and then complained bitterly when it was.

I've never met Ellison and I'm not sure I'd like him very much if I did.  In interviews he comes across as being arrogant, opinionated and angry at the world.  He is litigious and fiercly defensive where he regards his rights as having been infringed. Sometimes it appears, that he seeks out slights or sets himself up for persecution.  But those who know him, seem to forgive him on the basis that this behaviour is just 'Harlan being Harlan'*.

Despite that less than glowing introduction, I almost hold Ellison in awe because of three short stories that that I read when I was 13 or 14 years old and I have never forgotten.  They all appeared in two huge paperbacks, The Hugo Award Winners edited and introduced by Isaac Asimov. (The Hugo is the Booker prize of Science Fiction).  
 
I loved almost all of the stories in that book, from the military sci-fi of Gordon R Dickson's "Soldier Ask Not" to the hard science based Larry Niven story "Neutron Star" which was more of an astrophysics lesson than a piece of fiction.   But there were four stories that hit me like a brick to the head, that changed what I thought about writing, and what it was for.  Three of them were by Ellison and they were among the shortest stories in the whole 1,000 page collection.

Before I even got to read them the they looked different.  The titles were so strange.  "Repent Harlequin, said the Ticktockman", "I Have no Mouth but I must Scream" and "The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World"*.  I'd never seen anything quite like them.     

There was something strange and exotic about these titles.  They sounded like warped versions of the bad science fiction movies of the fifties that I hadn't seen but had read about in dreadful movie magazines.  I was used to titles that helped you predict what you were about to read, these didn’t help at all.

"Repent Harlequin" was the first of the stories and remains the one I like most. Originally published in Galaxy magazine in 1965, it won the Hugo for best Short Story in 1966. I could go into details about the plot, but to be honest that is the least interesting thing about the story.  It was, in the words of one particularly unsympathetic critic a "primitive statement . . . about [the] solidly acceptable idea [that] regimentation is bad".  And while that may well be a fairly accurate assessment of the plot, it misses everything important about the story.  

At its simplist, the story is about a darkly regimented world, where the clock and the schedule rules everything.  The Harlequin, a benign version of the Joker from the Batman comics, is disrupting this well-ordered, impecibly organised society with outrageously bombastic and colourful stunts, revealing the fragility of the order in this strange society.   He is anarchy personified.

The Ticktockman is the man charged with enforcing the schedule with punishments that far outweigh the crimes. The story tells of the disruption caused by the Harlequin, his pursuit by the Ticktockman and his ultimate betrayal by a loved one who 'just wants to belong'
.

That alone would be enough to have an impact on slightly disfunctional 14 year old but there was more.  Everything I ever read before this had the feeling of a storybook, however fanciful the plot or the characters, I was supposed to believe that what I was reading was real.  'Repent' was different.  There was no sense in which I thought this was a 'real' story, involving real characters.  There was some strange and fundimental separation between the readers and the characters in the story.

I reread the story again just before writing this, and that separation still exists, it was as if I was watching a troop of marionnettes under the control of a single master.  I was aware that there was an author and that he was manipulating his characters, his readers and the english language for his own purposes.  And while I may not have been able to put that into words as a 14 year old I think I understood.

The names Ellison chose for his characters re-enforces this feeling of alienation, the Harlequin, the Ticktockman and Pretty Alice, these are not the names of real people but of puppets or archetypes, of creatures of myth or pantomime fools. 

His use of language was different to any fiction I'd read before, almost poetic but harsher than any poetry I was aware of.  Ellison was ignoring as many rules as he possibly could. Sentences could run on, and on, and on, ignoring the conventions of prose writing.  One paragraph, about jelly beans, is a single run on sentence of more than 100 words.   But it never seems wrong or difficult to understand.

Short phrases or even single words were repeated, giving the writing a rhythm that demanded to be read out loud.  It was confusing, exciting, frustrating and alien all at the same time.  It stunned me, I didn't know you were allowed to write like that. Its probably the first time that I was more interested in the writing than the story being told.

I've now discovered that Ellison wrote this story overnight, at a writers workshop.  It was almost certainly written to be read out loud and I can't help but wonder if it was a reaction to someone spouting about the 'rules' of fiction and telling him what he couldn't do

In the years to come I'd come across similar books, or books that had the same feeling.  Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, the poetry of Charles Bukowski or the bizarre fantasy of House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski.  I'd understand what I was seeing much better when I got to those books, but nothing ever had quite the eyeopening effect of Harlan's story.

I may not be remembering this accurately, it was nearly forty years ago, but I think I skipped the next set of stories and went straight to the next of Harlan's award winning short stories.

"I Have No Mouth but I must Scream" is a horror story.  It has all the trappings of science fiction and operates perfectly well for scifi fans but at its heart is a single powerful idea that is truly horrific.

Like Harlequin, "I Have no Mouth…" was written very quickly.  In this case Ellison wrote it overnight, taking both the title and his inspiration from a drawing by his friend William Rotstler.  It saw publication, apparently little changed from the original draft, in Worlds of IF magazine in 1967 and won the Hugo for short fiction in 1968.
It is a very different from 'Repent'.  Written in a more traditional first person narrative. it tells the story of the last humans left alive on an earth ravaged by war.  They are being kept alive and tortured by the supercomputer that took control of that war and all but eradicated the human race.  The story is unrelentlingly grim, a modern vision of hell with the computer designing tortures specifically tailored to defile and destroy the people it has kept alive as its playthings. Taking from them the things they held most dear.  In one case looks, another intelligence, another dignity.   The ending is bleek and horrific and hopeless and I've never forgotten it. 

And in that ending lies the reason why Ellison both qualifies as one of my reasons to be cheerful and yet is an author who I have only read sparingly.  You can't read too much Ellison at one sitting, or at least I can't.  So much of his fiction has the same bleakness and lack of hope that it is exhausting to read.  There is often too little light to go with the shade. 

In the foreword to the collection named after "I Have no Mouth...", Ellison reacts to a comment from fellow author Joanna Russ that she wishes he would write more 'preciesly' so that she could go back to stories to re-read and admire them like statues.  Ellison responds by saying that "my stories were by no means 'statue' stories, immobile, fixed permanent.  They were assaults." and that is very true.  With "Harlequin" I suspect the assult to be personal, an attack on someone in that workshop who said "a story should be……" and gave a list of requirements that Ellison objected to.  The assault in "I Have no Mouth" is on the senses.  That story, quite simply, gave me nighmares.  


The third Ellison story in the collection.  "The Beast who Shouted Love at the Heart of the World", is at the same time fascinating and the story I like least of the three.  It was published in Galaxy Magazine in 1968 and won the Hugo in 69.

The story is told in five parts. dealing in turn with a psychopathic killer on earth, the discovery of a statue of the killer on a distant planet, the capture of an insane seven-headed dragon and a discussion of ethics between the creator of the technique and a friend.  Finally there is the investigation of a field that pulses with madness by a scientist with a name that translates as The Hour and his discovery that an alien race are draining madness from their own world and dumping it onto random humans.    Ellison has described the story as an experiment.  It is not sequential and he imagined it as the rim of a wheel with the pieces coming together at the centre. 
In theory the story would work no matter where you started on the wheel.but in practice I suspect nobody read it in any order other than the one it was published in.  At the time I didnlt understand what was going on.  I liked reading it, Ellison's prose always surprises and entertains, but I didn’t engage with it.  Now, I've read other things that played the same game and enjoyed them more so it has lost its impact for me.

Ellison is a great writer.  I've read his stories in fits and starts over the years and have always admired them, even if sometimes I have not quite enjoyed them.  But he wrote two stories that I have not forgotten almost 40 years later. Two stories with real impact and real style.  He editied the best selling anthology of "Speculative Fiction" of all time (Dangerous Visions) that led me to search out other authors who gave me hours of pleasure and much to think about.  Overall I'd say Ellison certainly qualifies as one of the finer things in life, one of my reasons to be cheerful.

Recommended Reading:    Deathbird and Other Stories - containing
                                        I have no Mouth and I must Scream
                                        The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World
                                        Dangerous Visions Ellison as editor.

 
* Isaac Asimov says
Harlan is not the kind of person he seems to be. He takes a perverse pleasure in showing the worst side of himself, but if you ignore that and work your way past his porcupine spines (even though it leaves you bleeding) you will find underneath a warm, loving guy who would give you the blood out of his veins if the thought that would help.
*(For the record the fourth story was Samual R Delany's "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" and I understood not as single word of it, and then read it again).