DUNCAN FALLOWELL Interview

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Welcome to the Ugly Things Podcast. I'm your host, Mike Stacks, the editor of Ugly Things Magazine, publishing in print for over 40 years. My guest for this episode is the English writer, novelist, and critic Duncan Fallowell. Along with his wonderful novels, travel books, and memoirs, Fallowell has written extensively and brilliantly about literature and about music.

In the first half of the 1970s, he had a pop music column in The Spectator and also wrote about rock music for the now defunct and largely forgotten Records and Recording magazine. It was Peter Stanfield, who we featured in an earlier episode of the podcast, who brought Fallowell's rock journalism to my attention. And I was immediately struck by not only his dazzling, high-flying prose, but also his intelligence.

his attitude, his individuality, his humor, and importantly, his taste. I really like raw rock music, he wrote in 1973. I have tiny rockets under my heels which need very little ignition. I'm not frightened of heating my cool. I like rock spunky, wild, flashy, weird, or bottomizing. He went on to give examples. The Rolling Stones, Animals, Pretty Things, Stooges, Velvet Underground, MC5, Bowie, Cannes. Our kind of music, right? Duncan had a special relationship with Cannes.

After first meeting them in 1970, he became a friend and collaborator. He wrote the liner notes for the UK release of Tago Mago. He wrote lyrics for Dizzy Dizzy on the album Soon Over Babaluma, and for some of Ehrman Schmidt's solo work. He shared some great stories about Cam in the interview that follows. We also talked about the Stooges, David Bowie, even Gary Glitter, and lots more. I really enjoyed this conversation. I'm sure you will too. Thank you.

Well, let's start with, you know, the topic that I put first was what made you want to become a writer in the first place? It was a given, really. I mean, when I was very tiny, before I could read and write even. I was making little books out of paper and stapling them together and scribbling in them. And I had a little satchel, and I'd put one in, and then I'd make another one, and I might put some colored stickers on it. It was all very three-dimensional and tactile. And I just loved it.

books and Christmas would come along. And what did you want? Oh, I'd love an encyclopedia of the natural world or an atlas or something like that. You know, and this was quite early. I mean, I was making those books when I was three or four, and I was requesting books when I was six and seven. And the first book I ever read under my own steam was Alice in Wonderland, passed to me by my sister.

Before then, it had been kind of forced reading, and it remains a foundation text for me to this day. The rest is vocational. With adolescence, your personality crystallizes. I realized writing was my handle on things. Everybody needs a handle on life. And if you've given a vocation... that decision, which is sometimes awkward, never comes up. You just pursue it. The only issue, of course, is how to make a living out of it. But that doesn't occur to you until you're 35.

So how did you end up writing about music? Was that a choice? Was that the main thing you wanted to write about? Or is that just something you fell into? No, I mean, I think writers in adolescence, particularly vocational writers, they start writing poetry. And I was writing this kind of god-awful poetry, and my sister said to me...

Oh, for God's sake, I made the mistake of showing it to my oldest. I said, why don't you write about something you know? And it was the best piece of literary criticism I've ever had. Because it was like this whimsy adolescent stuff. I did it like triplets and things like that. So I was always a literary writer in my head. And I read about writers. They seemed to...

really have loads of fun in their tortured way. And then I went to university and I deliberately didn't choose English because I knew I could deal with English. english books myself and i chose modern history which at the time was all history after the fall of rome which is a nice big subject and uh

But by this stage, I was very hooked on experimental writing because I'd swallowed a lot of standard texts. I mean, I thank a lot of schoolmasters of mine, but... I remember my last ever school report from an English master said, I'm very proud of this, I'm going to tell you, he said, he's the absolute master. of a delightful and witty prose style and of the subjects on which he chooses to employ it. Sir, watch out world, here I come.

As for the music side, that was just a sort of accident. I thought I was just going to write amazing novels. would make me terribly important, rather remote grand figure that would condescend to receive disciples. Well, it wasn't quite like that. At university, I got, by this stage, I was reviewing literary stuff, quite varied for the London Magazine, also the University Magazine.

And I was reading a lot of advanced writers. But as for the earning a living bit, what was so fantastic for me was... The arrival of new journalism at the time, it just seemed such an obvious thing to do. If you're a writer, particularly if you're an experimental writer, the new journalism... was a very important strand of experimental writing from really the mid-60s to the mid-70s. It dried up then and the corporates took over and tamed these freelancers.

rock star type writers. But what was my entree into journalism? Well, I'd already discovered, by the time I left university, or the end of my university, I was broke. I'd spent all my money on booze and drugs and parties and clothes. And I'd run up debts, which my father furiously agreed to pay off. And he said, I was going to give you X thousand pounds to make your transfer to London, and now I'm not. So I thought I'd better get my act together. And I had this.

fixed idea that I wanted to go to Germany to write about Cannes because I discovered them at Oxford in a record shop in a booth where you could play the latest records. I wanted to meet them, but because I was in this, had no money, I'd burnt all my boats on that side of things, I wanted somebody to send me there. Therefore, I needed...

to be able to place this. And literally on the spur of the moment, I wrote to the spectator and said, you've got nobody under the age of 40 writing for your magazine as far as I can see. I'd like to write a rock column or a pop column or a youth column or whatever. And I was called in to meet the editor who promptly announced. that I was going to the Isle of Wight. Well, I was not prepared for this either. What year is this now, like 1969, 1970? 1970.

This was the summer of 1970. It was the Isle of Wight Festival with Jimi Hendrix and God, I mean, I went to so many festivals, I can't remember who was at what. This whole period is like a mush of concerts and events. But anyway, I went into the spectator and instead of... it being an interview, I was sent off somewhere and they were going to give me this column. And they said they're going to call it pop because it sounded more interesting really for the general reader than just...

which was already rather counterculture. And I think they just thought, I might as well do the whole bloody thing. But because I was broke, I couldn't go to the Isle of Wight. First of all, I had no money. And I actually spoke to the arts editor and I said, do you issue expenses? Oh, no, we don't issue expenses. The press office will do all that. And I said, what's a press office? And he laughed.

at the beauty of my innocence. But I soon learned all about press offices, which in London at that time were incredibly rich. It must have been like Hollywood in the 1920s, which... was incredibly rich just before the crash in 1929, and the colossal mansions being built, the extraordinary parties being given in Hollywood was exactly like the rock scene in London. in the late 60s and 70s. It was awash with money and success and anarchy and indulgence and the beauties of life.

I got on the money train and although the spectator had a time in circulation, it was prestigious and they had my thorough run. So I rang up Liberty Records and they sent me off to Germany, paid for everything, and I hung out with lots of bands, but particularly Cannes. That was really the motive behind writing about rock music, was to get to Cannes. Free of charge.

yeah let's talk about can then what can record which can record was it that first opened your eyes to them and then tell me about that experience of going to meet them well it was like all the best It was like the first time, and it was the first track of their first album, and it was the first five seconds of it. There was my bank. The High at Oxford was a sort of forbidding Gothic place. And I went in to see the bank manager who explained what an overdraft was and that I had one.

And that I better talk to somebody, a parent, about what was going to happen next. So... I decided after this rather dismal experience to go next door to a record shop called Russell Aycott. And I said, can I listen to the latest albums of the most far out stuff you've got? And they gave me a few. And the first one I put on was Monster Movie. And I remember that there's an incredible sort of vibration on Ermin's organ at the beginning and before the...

the thumping, driving riff comes in. And the riff itself was strange and different. This wasn't your classic Brit or American. rock band doing the usual hurdy-gurdy on the Stratocaster. This was something else. And the something else was me. I just thought... This, in retrospect, I didn't think at the time. At the time, I wanted to devour it, and I did, and I dropped acid. I'd induced my friends to it and all the rest.

I became a kind of canned bore in my last term at Oxford. But it was a marriage made in heaven. And I think what it was, was... I have an intense Dionysiac pagan side, animal side, indulgent side, abandoned side. married to an equally intense, I hope, intellectual and rational side. And of all the bands I've ever heard, and it's still true today, I think Cannes embodied that.

met them and became friends with them and loved them. And they loved me and they met my friends and we became socially embedded in each other's lives and we still are to this day. Well, apart from the dead ones, of course. But they live on in the music, and they're around in my head a lot, those guys.

I can't think maybe you can. I mean, there's a lot of wonderful stuff out there. And by the way, before I hit can, I'd hit the Velvet Underground. And they certainly did the Dionysiac thing. But I went off them. They went twee on me. Suddenly, it was Candy Says. I didn't want Candy Says. You know. And I know. Lou Reed is a very gifted songwriter, but I didn't want that from Lou. I wanted the drill in the coalface of reality.

And that ended when they separated from Andy Warhol. And in a way, they went commercial and they left me behind. Almost everybody who goes commercial leaves me behind. It's just... It's true of filmmakers as well. Alan Parker made a wonderful film about, you know, the drug Midnight Express about drug dealing in Turkey. It was brilliant. got snapped up by Hollywood, and it was all over, as far as I'm concerned. This original talent was just turned into a commercial machine.

Go away. Don't waste my time. I'll find another filmmaker. And it was like that with the Velvet Underground. Maybe it was when they parted company with John Cale rather than with Andy. Well, for me, I don't know about the timing exactly, but the same applies to the films, by the way. The moment Paul Morrissey started doing them, it was all over for me.

And the first of the trilogy, which was what? Flesh. Now, Andy Warhol's influence is very, very present there, although technically, Paul Morris directed it. And it's a brilliant film, but it starts to fade and become self-conscious and over-organized with trash and with heat. It's a kind of parody of almost a John Waters film. You think it's difficult to parody a John Waters film? No, look at Heat.

Divine and John Waters did that kind of stuff better. And then it was Franklin. And the same was with Velvet Underground. That didn't happen with Cannes, largely because they... Not because... they weren't successful although they weren't in the sense that um the british and american bands became very much um money machines um but they

They did sign with Virgin later, but they didn't sell out. They tried and it failed because they couldn't be other than they were. And that parallels my own life as a writer. Right.

So tell me about meeting them for the first time. I mean, Michael Mooney would have been gone by then, right? Yeah, we called him Desi, actually. But you're right, it's Malcolm Mooney. Malcolm Mooney. Yeah, he'd gone. I mean, I remember when I pitched up. First of all, Liberty Records flew me to Cologne and put me up at the Bristol Hotel.

And then I got this phone call from a rather jolly person who said, I'm coming to collect you and take you to Hildegard Nermin's flat in Bottermund. That was great. And it turned out to be Holger Krukay who turned up in his little Volkswagen Beetle. And he was smiling. And, you know, he was... Again, he wasn't like a rock musician. He was just... I don't know what he was. He was like...

The fourth Marx brother or something. And I learned that he had an absolute passion for W.C. Fields. I learned this very early. Anyway, and he was driving me through the streets of Cologne to the Schmitz flat, going on about a lot of music stuff. And particularly about how he was wanting to play electric bass rather than jazz bass, or symphonic orchestra bass.

The importance of playing off the beat rather than on the beat and all these sorts of things with the traffic lights changing. Anyway, I then arrived and several members of Cannes were there and they gave... It was three in the afternoon and they gave me breakfast because they just got up from the studio. They were working on Take Omega and they immediately started playing me the tapes and then took me out to the studio.

And this later became Tego Mago. But I think if you really love somebody's work, the personal rapport becomes effortless. partly because you are flattering them and they feel flattered and they're open to you, but also because it implies an overlap of taste, predilections and all the rest of it. Anyway, it worked very well. Mickey turned up later and announced that he was very fond of Torquay.

And Torquay is not a hit destination for an Englishman. This is Michael Caroli, right? The guitarist, yes. And apparently he'd been there with his parents for a holiday. And I said, well, why do you like it? Oh, it's so convenient, he said. So they all, by the way, the other thing was I never, although I went to Germany a lot, met a lot of bands. spoke this fantastic English and not unnaturally as well. I mean, they just did. So unfortunately, I never learned German.

I was able to cover a lot of territory very quickly because of that. They were an incredibly sophisticated bunch, and they were all highly trained. musicians, or in the case of Jackie, they'd come through an incredibly interesting drumming school via free jazz and things like that. dharma of course was picked off the streets but that worked very well as well what was he like to interact with i mean he was oh you didn't interact with him he just smiled at you then drifted away

I mean, the ones, and Jackie didn't socialize with us. The ones I really socialized with and mixed a lot with when they came on tour to England. I was the first person to write about them in the non. specialist press and i went on a lot of tours with them and then i became rather picky because well you can't you can't keep touring with bands you just

You die. They had the energy coming off the stage. You're just sitting there waiting for something to eat. But Holger, to some extent, Ermin and Mickey Caroli. became very much part of my social group in London. But Damo and Jackie more or less went their way. And I never know what social media swallowed them up. But they did not socialise, except under the working conditions. But they were very, very easy people to get on with.

made lots of teases. Jackie was always teasing journalists about the name of the band. I think, and you know, these journalists would be so bloody solemn so that he would say, They say, oh, where does the name Ken come from? And he said something like, oh, communism, anarchism and nihilism. Well, it was a complete joke, but he would say it with a straight face.

And they would go away and say, oh, yeah, they're a revolutionary band, man. They're leading the communist, anarchist, nihilist revolution. It was all bollocks, of course, because they weren't really political. Artists are really into that art. Politics is something down there you might use for colour in a novel, but a novel that's about politics is not a work of art. I mean, 1984.

Animal Farm, Brave New World, these are novels with huge political clout, but they are written initially as works of art, which is why they work. When I stole my stupid head I was alone, I was alone

So working with Cam, I guess the first thing you really did with them was do the liner notes for Take Omega when that album was completed. Well, that was taken from... When I came back from Germany at the beginning of 1971, I wrote about it in The Spectator, and then Melody Maker saw it and said, oh, can you write a sort of longer piece for us? And I did. a big piece about Can appeared in Melody Maker. And I remember Mickey sending me a letter. They used to write letters in those days.

saying this is our most important press piece ever you know i said oh i'm glad you enjoyed it because you gave me a wonderful time and i love your music so i'm glad it's you like what i write uh then There was a delay in Tego Mago coming out. Finally, they sent me the German pressing, which was a double album with the brain cover. And they had written all these comments inside for me.

Ermin actually told me not long ago, he said that that first German edition of Tego Mago came up on eBay and sold for 8,000 euros. And I said, really? He said, yes. I said, well, do you remember the one you sent me with the band all writing notes to me on the inside sleeve? And he said, oh God, did we? I said, yes, you did. He said, oh, well, sell it if ever you get in trouble. You'll be able to live for years on the strength of that. I hope you still have it. Yes, my dear, the bank has it.

So those line of notes were an excerpt from the piece you did. Well, just to complete the trajectory of your original question, therefore, when the English edition of... Tago Mago came out with a completely different cover. They said, can we use your Melody Maker article, or at least extract it? And I said, oh yes, I'd be honored. And I was honored.

Particularly as it's now, you know, one of the key 50 albums in pop music history or something, or rock music history. Maybe one of the key five albums, who knows? Music flies off in all sorts of directions all the time. The top five keep changing, you probably notice. Yes. The last time we talked, you told me about when you met John Lydon. the subject of take omego came up ah yeah no i well yes i went to um he was in this film uh which name i've forgotten

But he and I got on very well. We just did, you know. And it was easy to get on with, really. If he thought you were, I suppose, a fairly genuine person, I didn't find him at all awkward. His kind of pantomime days of sort of vomiting over journalists seemed to have... been in the past thank god but i i we were to i did say in the course of the interview i've never heard of a band called can and uh

thinking he'd say, no, who were they? But I knew he was married, I think, to a German woman by this stage. That's right, yes. Whose daughter was in the slits, was that right? That's right, yeah. yeah and um so i thought maybe he said oh my god canna why i went i took up music at all i said really and he said yeah he said correction The liner notes to Tego Mago actually were why I took up music. And I said, really? And I said, I wrote those liner notes.

did you so we got on even better and he asked me to go with him to the dance interior that night and to protect him from all the fans who would point and say isn't that johnny rotten i said well go somewhere else then. I think it was later on… John Wobble, of course, worked with Holger Shukai, but he came later into the life of Johnny Rotten.

Unfortunately, Sid Vicious wasn't around for me to ask him what he thought of care. John told me that... I said, where are you staying? I said, well, I'm staying here at the Warwick Hotel. But I'm moving in a couple of days to the Chelsea Hotel. He said, oh, be careful. The ghost of Sid Vicious haunts the lift there. Wow. I wonder if they know. Perhaps they should put a plaque in the lift. Yes. Say hello to the ghost of Sid Vicious. It's like you do one side. Here is Gurley and Missy.

So going back to Cannes, you ended up collaborating by writing lyrics as well. Well, one of the problems when I met them... was that they were against words, because they were statements, they were absolute, they were to this, they were to that, they were part of bourgeois cult. Which is ridiculous, given that particularly Armin was just about the best red man I've ever met. So it was very...

It's funny when they came to me sort of cap in hand, begging for some words. It could have been for a press release. It could be titles of tracks. I named quite a few of those. Or it could be... lyrics to songs but because of the way they work the lyric thing didn't I did some but they didn't really work very well because

They were too prescriptive in a way. I think if I'd been working with them in the studio, after Dahmer left, they said, would you like to become a singer? And I thought about it and I knew. It would mean giving up writing, and I knew it would mean taking lots of drugs just to sustain the touring schedule. And also, I was frightened. of going on stage and making an arsehole of myself. So I said no. But I did far more. When Ermin started doing his solo work,

It was far more prescriptive. He asked me to write the words first and he would then set them to music. And that worked very well. But he did change his style. It's much more of a compositional style. And that reached its...

Apogee, if I dare use the word, in the Gormenghast opera I wrote, where I wrote the entire libretto first, and he set it to music. But that was very fascinating to me, because... I wrote a lot of these lyrics in my own way, but some of them are slightly parodic of patter songs in Gilbert and Sullivan, or... love songs by Cole Porter or just strange as things crept in. It's a long three-act opera. There's plenty of meat for me to get into.

And I love the way Ermin didn't follow my stanzaic presentation of the words. But he sort of unraveled them, and they went swirling off in different directions without being changed. Occasionally, if I was working with him, he would say,

Could I have another line or another two syllables here? This would just be perfect. And I could supply that just like that because I worked with him very well. Or he'd ring me up on the phone if I was back in London and he was working on it. I wrote that libretto in.

St. Petersburg, by the way, where I was very spaced out and very much in love with totally the wrong person. Perfect circumstances for creating what I consider a major work of art, that libretto.

Right, right. Well, then at the same time, you wrote one of your best known books. That was when I came back. The actual librescio was my... sort of work in hand while i was there i was there for months in that summer of 92 i think it was yeah and then and then i wrote a book about it one hot summer in st petersburg and it uh it An old girlfriend of mine read it and I wanted to know what she thought of it because it's very candid and it was very raw and at the same time elaborate.

She said it's an emotional strip, and that's the best. I thought that's marvelous. exposed myself in exactly the right way as opposed to the wrong way. And Russians like it. Even the Russians I hate like it because they... I got into the bloodstream somehow, just as I connected with Cannes across geographical divisions.

somehow connected with St. Petersburg in the same way and the chemical. But I didn't write a book for a long time afterwards because it really took it out of me. Yeah. You've read it, have you? Oh, yes. Yeah. Could you feel the emotional intensity? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I could see. I mean, you went through a huge emotional experience with your relationship. Well, when the boy leaves and then, well, I won't say what happens, but I remember this incredible feeling of when your loved one leaves you.

and you're left standing there, or you leave him or her and you're left standing there, this rupture. And it was like an incredible space. And I wanted to describe it. And I think I've described it in that book. It's something... Everybody feels. It's so difficult to describe. And I remember walking in a dream to the Astoria Hotel and buying an English-language newspaper. Anyway, I feel I nailed it there.

Yeah, I mean, I think the intensity of the relationship was sort of amplified because you were in this place, St. Petersburg, which was falling apart. Yeah. And when you lost him, it was like he would be irretrievable because he disappeared into this chaos of this country, you know? Yes, that's right. But also it was... a slow motion chaos. It was more like a gas than a battle because communism, people talk about the collapse of communism or the defeat, it just evaporated.

because it was totally useless. Everybody understood that it was already dead, and it was like just acknowledging. But capitalism had not yet arrived. So everybody was sort of bicycling in midair in this strange way, trying to find connections that might mean something, whether it's... Some sausages to eat tonight or a future in another country or whatever. It was very, very like an acid trip in that, a kind of volatile, febrile.

but delicate situation with lots of quietness and lots of silence. Remember, St. Petersburg was the capital, which is now back in Moscow. St. Petersburg. is a great abandoned city. Somebody said it's a great place to be lonely because St. Petersburg itself is lonely. I bet it hasn't changed. It's probably lonelier than ever now because Russia's so screwed up these days. Yeah, right. They had their chance and they blew it, not for the first time.

i guess we should get back to the the rock and roll part of things yeah twang that guitar man so i've been reading a lot of your pieces in the spectator and elsewhere from the from the first half of the 70s and they're great and one of the pieces you described you know you were trying to define your the kind of rock music you liked and you said it was spunky wild flashy weird and lobotomizing

Did I say that? Write that somewhere. Yes, yeah. Do you know where? You're going to have to help me with the references. It was in your piece about Slade, and you were sort of explaining that... they didn't really do that much for you, even though you liked raw rock music. Yeah, but there's... raw and there's sort of repeat raw isn't there however you spell raw yeah i mean you found them boring

Well, they were just a successful pop group. And I'm much more interested in cutting edge music that really is unacceptable. My first experience of music I found unacceptable, but incredibly fascinating. When I was a little boy, there were things called wirelaces. And I remember Eric on the wireless, probably in my mother's kitchen or something.

A very strange noise. It sounded like a lot of bees to me. I must have been four. And I said, what's that funny noise coming out of the wireless? Because it was sort of organised dissonance. And my mother says, oh, they're called the Andrews sisters. And this buzzing noise, which was close harmony singing.

which the Andrews sisters had huge success with and which was standard in the time of Glenn Miller and all that kind of thing, to A Little Boy didn't sound like music at all. It sounded like lots of bees coming out of the radio. And this was my first experience of dissonance. And as we know, dissonance goes back a long way in Western music. Gesualdo, Mozart did a bit, Beethoven did a lot.

Then you come to Debussy, who revolutionized music, but not in that aggressive way, by playing dissonance very slowly and lightly. So when it came to rock music, I just wanted that grating thing. combined with originality. Just really, in the end, we're talking about exploring the possibilities of sound. And Slade didn't do that, but plenty of the other rock bands did. And those are the ones that grabbed me, really.

Yeah, I mean, in the same, you give examples and you say the stones, the animals, pretty things, stooges, blue oyster cult. early velvet underground you already specified that yeah yeah i knew my stuff blue chair mc5 gary glitter can and bowie well the thing about Gary Glitter was he was doing something I wanted to do for ages and I've just done actually, which is a very basic heavy riff that doesn't change into a song.

All the others were tempted to make a song out of it, a number, let us say. But Gary Glitter would often introduce his heavy beat numbers. with something that went on for about five minutes, stomping around on the station. It was very hypnotic. And it was what Cannes were doing in a much more sophisticated way, which would later turn into Rave, where...

The beat is constant. It doesn't turn into a song, but it does a lot of other amazing things instead, you know. And I found Gary Glitter was doing that and actually wrote about it in The Spectator. And I met him once at some record launch. And he said, oh, I framed your article and it's on the wall of my dining room because I love it so much. And then later on, he was done for underage sex. Yes, right. But I can only speak of the Gary Glitter I knew.

Yeah, you wrote a great review of that concert at the Rainbow in 1973, and you actually said it ranks equal with Iggy Stooge as the most bizarre of my experience. Did I write that? Then in that case, in my memoir, I must add this because my memoir says that although I had Cannes gave wonderful concerts just in terms of a... a contained rock concert. The most amazing experience was the Iggy Stooge concert, his first in London, I think.

But let's give Gary a leg up. Is he still in prison? I'm not sure. Is he still alive? He's alive. I don't know if he's free. I'll give Gary a Google later on. We'll be right back. Cheers and destroys.

you want to talk about the iggy yes i did because that's the it's kind of a you know legendary show that the one that iggy and the stooges did at the king's cross cinema 1973. and you wrote a brilliant review of it it was kind of ostensibly a review of the raw power album but you did a sort of overview of the all the stooges catalog and wrote about that concert which was just great

Well, the Stooges weren't well known. I think they must have been with the Lecter or something, but they weren't well known. But rather like Cannes and Liberty loving me. later united artists because i was virtually the only mainstream uh writer writing about this end of music it was too far out for even the pop papers the stooges were noted but um

I'd somehow got under the skin of what they were doing, because it meant a lot to me. It was hitting me in the right place, which is basically between the eyes. So Elektra really liked me, and they gave me... Six tickets. And I took five friends along with me to that concert. And then a friend of mine called Byron Newman was a photographer. I met him there.

And he was taking photographs. He got to know Iggy as well. And we thought we were like the only two Londoners who'd ever heard of Iggy Stooge and wanted to go. And we sort of... were of the professional class, if I can put it like that. But nonetheless, the place was full of secret. uh fans who also probably thought they were the only ones you know and from all come down from all over england and filled up this theater which was quite big and the um i remember

Again, rather like the first few seconds of the Cannes album, the concert began and I knew I was in the right place to be in the whole wide world at that very second. I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, this incredibly heavy beat. just started. It was full on in the first split second, and it remained full on to the very end with minor modulations and things like that.

And into this wall of sound, by the way, I'm a great Phil Spector fan, so the wall of sound was me, only this was actual rather than monaural. He did his writhing bit and sweating bit. He didn't draw blood, funnily enough. I was telling the girls, he's going to draw blood any minute now. And he didn't. He did something much worse. He came off stage and started creeping around the audience like a demented Iguana. And all these fans drew back. It was like...

seaweed or something being drawn back by a current. Nobody wanted, oh, please don't, don't come near me. And I remember when I was a little boy going to a pantomime and somebody, a clown on stage. I thought, pointed to me and said, that little boy is laughing. You come up on stage. And I drew back and I was that little boy again. Please don't come near me, Iggy. I'm too shy and embarrassed.

He must have heard, bless him, because he didn't. But nonetheless, it was the way everything connected up into one animal, which is probably very rare. There's another example of it, which I think was Freddie Mercury at the AIDS, not the AIDS concert, the Bob Geldof thing.

Yeah, yeah. There's a moment there where somehow this huge stadium is in the palm of his hand. Iggy wasn't like that. It was like, or Judy Garland could have the whole of Carnegie Hall in the palm of her hand. It wasn't like that. He was like in there with us, but not of us. It was like some awful bacterium or virus. poisonous black mamba moving around and you wanted to escape from it but the chemistry was amazing and afterwards it was just

What the hell was that? The music ringing is... By the way, I have to congratulate the band who were just fantastic at sustaining...

The forward momentum, it never became just static, repetitive. And one of the problems with rave music is that machines make it. you know, a few minutes, it can just become static. It needs a very clever DJ to keep it bouncing, keep that incredible forward lurch, which live rock music has. I mean, if you listen to the Rolling Stones playing...

O'Carroll or Little Queenie and nearly all Chuck Berry. It's got that forward push all the time. Well, they only did it for five or six minutes to do it over half an hour. It's very difficult. To do it over two hours of concert is almost impossible, but they did it. Sounds like it was an amazing concert. Yeah, God. You don't repeat those experiences.

And there's something about also first albums in rock music that first album doesn't apply to the Beatles or the Stones. or the great Tamla stars or things like that. But to a lot of rock groups it applies to. The first album is the best album. I still play the first Led Zeppelin album more than any of their others.

Yeah. It's a fantastic first album. It's symphonic rock, I think. I mentioned this to you once before. It's just a fantastic, timeless self-album. Hugh Live at Leeds is another one. It's not their first album, but... it has that uh i think it was their first live album and um can changed after their first album because as you mentioned malcolm mooney left funny enough when i turned up

Before he told me he liked Torquay, Michael said, oh, by the way, Malcolm's left. Because he knew I loved their voice, his voice. I described Malcolm Moon's voice as something quite new in rock music. And he said, I said, why? And he said, well, perhaps I better not say what he said. Malcolm's still working as a sculptor somewhere in New York. And I didn't meet him until later. when they'd had a reunion and did right time down at the studio at the Moulin north of Nice, which was...

where Mickey's sort of country place or South of France place. That was a very weird place as well. But he had a very good studio there and they recorded right time there. And that's when I met Malcolm. But he was... by that stage, a more sedate figure. But that's a brilliant album. I went off cam in their later Virgin days, in the late 70s, because...

It just became rather automatic, you know, when they got the guy from Traffic and Rebop and all that kind of thing. They were jamming on stage, but it had become a bit glib for me. But I thought they recovered their form. as far as i was concerned with right time which is a wonderful album do you know that album um i don't have that one no well it's well worth acquiring and malcolm's brilliant on it too

What about any of the other German bands? I know in your writing you mentioned, you know, Ashrat Tempol, for example. Which other German bands did you like back then? Well, I went... I think it's the beginning of 71, maybe the spring of 71, I went to Cologne in Munich and I saw, I did all the canned stuff and that was the real success. in my personal life. Then I met Armand Duel, who were a bit too San Francisco for me.

Lots of babies and straggly-haired women and communes and brown rice and stuff. It had its place. It wasn't quite my place, in a way. Then I was invited to the Berlin Rock Targa, which was also 71, starring Pink Floyd. But Stockhausen was also premiering one of his pieces. And that happened at the same time. I went to Berlin, in other words, and that was all paid for as well. And I was very interested in all records, and they put me up. And I remember...

Was it? It was Stimmung, I think, maybe. Anyway, in the English garden in Berlin, or the Tiergarten, no, the English garden was in Munich, there was this performance. It was either that or going to the stadium to hear Pink Floyd, which happened at the same time. Well, of course, I was there for the Stockhouse and, you know, I'd heard Pink Floyd dozens of times.

I'd loved them in the 60s because that was where the cutting edge rock was. Not, I'm afraid, in the USA. But yeah, Sid had left. I was a Sid man. Really strange edge. He'd taken it with him, and we know why. Sad story. But the Berlin bands were taking that one step further. They were inventing, really. Because Can had very long pieces, but it didn't define their music. But I met Tangerine Dream before they'd only had one record up.

And in Munich, I'd met Popol Vuh and got on with them, and they ended up doing the film music for Werner Herzog and became very successful. Thorin Fricker and all these people, Bettina. And I got to know a lot of them. But I had a wonderful time in Berlin, and it was about a million years before David Bowie got there. But one thing you should remember about pop people, they always arrive in a place second.

uh it's just that's what it means to be a pop person you will discover something second yeah and something like the stones arriving in morocco in the 60s Yes, of course. Paul Bowles and Bill Burroughs, they're long before. And I was not interested in Bowie's Berlin phase, or Iggy's come to that, because...

Iggy ended the moment. I mean, Iggy has this wild original success like Lou at the Velvet Underground. Then Bowie gets hold of them because their career sorts... sort of tanks and they get Bowie-fied and that's great for Bowie because he's got avatars and disciples. He's turned these great kind of anarchic cutting-edge stars into tame poodles in his stable.

And, you know, poor Lou trying to compete with the lipstick. It's ridiculous. Bowie was wonderful at what is now called Artsongen, which German calls Lieder. These wonderful constructed songs of Bowie's are great. He could also rock, Gene Genie rock, but I think Bowie's position is slightly different. In a way, he is the greatest practitioner of art song of his time. Now, art song is what they describe.

of the conservatoire or classical tradition, which still exists this day. And so Schubert wrote art song, you know, they all wrote art. But Bowie's songs, I mean, I was listening to Lady... grinning soul is it yes um that's an amazing piece of music that's an art song uh that can compete with anything schubert did

That whole Aladdin Sane album, that was one of the first records I ever owned. In fact, it was the first album that I ever received as a Christmas gift. Really? I was about 11 years old. It was such an eye-opener. Yes, yes. But this is different from what I would call group rock music, isn't it? Which is based on the groove and the riff. But Bowie did a bit of that.

The thing that annoyed me about Burry and what I loved about punk is that Burry was suddenly talking about panic in Detroit, and he came from South London. New York's a go-go and everything tastes nice. Well, London was very a go-go and everything tastes nice. It just became slightly irritating that he adopted this.

mid-Atlantic thing and lived in New York. I can understand it for personal reasons, even for artistic reasons, but why I love punk and why I agreed with them is that this stuff hadn't just gone stateside. gone a bit corny at the same time. And punk brought the energy back to London and they started singing in British voices and about English places.

You know, they drew on that very direct energy from their own lives instead of mediating it through media opportunities and glossy magazine articles, you know, which is how rock began itself originally in the USA.

you know right down there in the grassroots did you ever write about the punk stuff at the time or by that time had you moved on from well by that time i was doing the glossy punk glossy magazines, Deluxe and Boulevard. So I was very much involved with the punk crowd, but also on the fashion side. I knew Vivian West, but I didn't know Malcolm. And McLaren. and didn't want to know him either. I found her very simpatico. I found him a bit of an arsehole. I don't know why.

Yeah, she doesn't get enough credit, especially at the time. It seemed like Malcolm was taking credit for all that punk fashion that the pistols were wearing, but it was really Vivian that was doing all the work. Yeah, but she was the housewife. She had to wash the dishes and... cook the food while he ponced around the West End doing deals or anti-deals, deals for which he would be paid and then they would scrap them. This is brilliant. I wish I had that talent.

I think his talent was really playing the managerial game, which was Brian Epstein's talent, which was Andrew Lou Goldham's talent years before. It's a different art, and sometimes you need it. They made a film about it, didn't they? I can't remember what it was called. The Great Rock and Roll Swindle. That's right.

you you're very well researched far better than i on always well yeah you lived through that early part of the 70s when i was just a child and and uh the stuff that you wrote i just think is is fantastic um So right now I know you're writing your memoirs. Where do you find it from? It's all on the Spectator archive, the stuff I contributed in the Spectator. I was also writing...

quite a lot of stuff from a German magazine called Sounds, which was never published in English. They were translated into German. But the records and recording stuff I wrote is... Don't think that's online at all. How did you locate it? Well, I've got to give credit to Peter Stanfield, who's in the British Library, seemingly.

constantly i think he lives there and uh he goes through archives yeah so he he'd send me like cell phone pictures of just your reviews your wonderful review of bowie's pinups and and one of the stooges royal power which is just fantastic Well, he's like, I don't know, some archaeologist in the ruins of Pompeii trying to find shards that lost. But the other thing is the internet is so voracious that if you can find something that's not online.

you've got something worth looking at because everything is beaten to death a zillion times a day on the internet. Yes, and it's kind of a myth that everything is on there because it's not. Correct, but a lot of people only use what's on there. missing a whole load of actuality, as the French would say. Absolutely, yeah.

so tell us about this memoir that you're working on um about the 70s well um i am a writer and i've always found it difficult to publish my books the books I wanted to write. Writing a book is a tremendous burn-up of energy, and if your heart's not in it, you can't do it. So I can't write… market-led stuff. I can't write to order. In my own language, I can't write shit. I can't even try. It always comes out rather strange and rather beautiful and rather disconcerting.

And it has a character in life of its own, and that's it. And it doesn't suit London publishers much. And it doesn't, as my life has advised, it has suited them less and less. So I've now got like two novels and I want to do a second collection of of my interviews. And nobody published me because I'm not a commercial author. I haven't had the essential thing, which is a zillion people eating at my trough. So I...

spoke to a publisher about this and I explained what I wanted to do and also that I had this idea for a memoir. And the only time he lit up in the course of this whinging conversation, which… I consider myself an avant-garde writer or avant-garde artist. I've now moved into films as well. Throughout the ages, it's not just the modern age. The Greeks said this.

It's glory or honours. In other words, write your wonderful book, but if you want money for it, don't be surprised if you don't get any. So it's been going on for thousands of years, the individual creative artists. versus the marketplace. So I can't really blame the present generation for it. But anyway, he lit up with this idea of a memoir, which I left university summer 1970, and I had this.

I was also doing a lot of rather highfalutin literary reviews as well of writers I admired, which again, I was a great friend of John Calder. And we both had problems with these abogans, getting them reviewed in the mainstream press. But I managed to get some through. Very interesting books. I reviewed as many Calder books as I could, not just William Burroughs.

But also other things he was doing, like Baudelaire on hashish and all these things were coming through in the 70s. And Jean Genet, which Anthony Blond was publishing, and other stuff. Hermann Hessecker. So I had kept up my literary side. It wasn't that rock swallowed it. But the first book I...

ended up writing was when I burnt up in London at the end of the 70s. And that was the book about my friend April Ashley, the pioneering transsexual. God, she could be a nightmare, but she could be fantastic as well. And I loved it very much. He opened lots of amazing doors for me. So I had this decade full of stuff between arriving in London and burning up at the end of it.

and having to leave in 1980 to write my first book, which was April's story. And it formed, and I was taking lots of drugs during that period. And at the end of it, I had stopped taking drugs. I decided... or let's say my condition decided for me, that once you start repeating yourself, then it's time to stop taking drugs. Once drugs are no longer enlarging your life, but shrinking it.

you must stop. And I stopped everything in 1980. But nonetheless, I had this cauldron, seething cauldron of experience. And I characterize it as... the most free decade in the history of humankind. Everything that was gathering apace in the 60s was just in an explosion of freedom in the 70s. And it sort of had to end.

The whole thing wasn't going to turn into a kind of dynamite soup or something and take everybody down with it. So at the end of it, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan showed up to try and clean up the mess. They exceeded to some extent, you know. But it's worth recording as one man's swim through this flaming swimming pool of colors. That sounds wonderful. Do you have a working title for it? Yes, it's called Studio Bloody.

And it's in three volumes, you see. Even now, I can't do it the straight with act. It's got to be in three volumes, half a million words. But the first volume is the early 70s, when I was, you know... Ticket to the Spectator column, Ticket to Ride, the rock journalist on the road with the band, you know, mixing with writers and painters and artists.

Then I went to India and the Far East for a year. That's volume two in the middle of the 70s. Then doing the punk glosses, bringing in the fashion world, meeting Michael Fish, going to the Embassy Club. and doing all that glossy uptown stuff at the end, then exploding. Great. When can we expect to start reading these? When three more people die. I don't really want to...

Edit it. Mind you, I don't think they'll publish it. I think I'll be given sensitivity readers. It's wildly politically. I don't even know what political correctness is. It just is not on my radar. So I just come out with it. And it's for my reader to respect my right as an author to do this. I know what I'm doing. I'm a highly skilled operator in prose. I operate at a very, very high level.

Somebody once asked how I'd describe my writing style. And I had two definitions. One was cyber longhand, because there's a lot coming in. bringing a lot in, but I'm keeping the line. And then I changed it to psychedelic Mandarin. But now having... completed this long prose work, which is a memoir in three volumes. By the way, I have track record as a memoirist. I won the Penn Ackley Prize for memoir, which is the only prize that exists for memoir. But I don't know.

I'm still polishing my memoir, which I would like to be read more or less conventionally and have lots of wildness en route. Well, I can't wait to read it. Well, you better kill these people off for me then. I mean, I don't want any hassle. When you get to the end of your life, I don't know, you don't want hassle. And there's so much hassle around trying to publish these days.

publishers, because everything's got to go global and be easily translated into 35 language, they just want content. They're going to get AI to produce books. They'll be the only people to conform with this prescriptive choke.

that's on the arts now and it's very very serious i have on my facebook page the artist is the last free person and there is some truth in that and they're coming now for the artist they want to choke him out i agree yeah it's it's it's really frightening so the the rebellion uh I mean, funnily enough, recently, this removal from Facebook of fact-checking and things like that and Instagram, does this mean a lot of nasty people are going to mess up the space? Because if...

It's one way of actually collapsing the whole bloody thing. People just realize that what's the point? It's full of false rubbish. So let it be, let it kind of destroy itself. and people will perhaps return to genuine freedom, which is self-expression. But I don't know. I don't know what the arts face in a highly... The whole point about technology is control.

It's just a form of electronic control. It doesn't work. If there's no control in technology, you've got a broken machine. It doesn't work. So the trouble with technology is that it's...

only a control system. It has no life of its own. It's just a control system. It's to control animal behaviour, really. We shall see. Or will we just be flooded with crap art? We already are, but now they don't even need humans to do it anymore. They just program. Oh, I can see those AI. schlock things coming towards me oh yeah they don't feel me they're so bad at it they don't smell for a start but for a lot of people that's it's good enough you know it's close enough

Well, I do notice the current pop stars like to look like humanoids. The last thing they want to do is look like a real person. They're so prinked and buff, both sexes, by the way. And now we've got the intersex. So these drag artists, they don't even look. I remember the old drag artists in pubs with, you know, telling dirty jokes to live audiences. And it was hilarious. It was wonderful.

But now they're designed to look like sort of creatures from Mars and all the rest of it. It's a bit boring. I mean, you know, they don't smell. You've got to smell. Yes. Smell is good. I don't mean smell bad. Just smell good. Yes. Like cooking, like real cooking. You know that lovely smell when you come into a kitchen? God, what's that cooking in the oven? Well, it's not AI, that's for sure. I got a big airplane.

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