IT, 134, 27 July-10 August 1972, pp.14-15

Jonathan Green, itinerant veteran hack of Rolling Stone, Friends, Time Out, Ink, Yorkshire Post, and Knave; discusses Mick Farren and Edward Barker's newly released magnum opus WATCH OUT KIDS (Open Gate Books, £1.50)


LIGHT
YOURSELF
A
CANDLE

Dear Mick

They asked me to review your book, Watch Out Kids and I started off trying to work out this fantasy where all the greasy punks were sitting on the stoop whittling their fingers with their switchblades, playing hot rock n roll and hopping up their cars but it didn't work too well. Then there's always the 'In this, undoubtedly his magnum opus, Farren has combined the ineluctible quintessential appeal of the alternative society and the weltaschauung of its opposition...' so in the end, it being a personal book and you being a personal friend, it seemed that a letter would be the best bet. Anyway it's easier to be rude this way...(NB. Unlike you and Edward, they did not offer me money...)

I like the book. Yeah, after three readings and actually taking the odd note for use below, I actually like it. In the first place the layout which makes it surely the biggest IT ever, with a full colour glossy cover to boot, and all one's old favourites adorning the credits, is very jolly. It's good to see all the old but undoubtedly golden pix trundled out again, and innumerable people will be able to throw away their battered old IT's, OZes, whatever, in exchange for this natty visual compendium. Also its better than Hoffman or Rubin's books in this respect. Lashing it all down in three days or so doesn't exactly enhance the look of the thing, and in Jerry Rubin's case, the content either. However more of those particular affinities anon.

Like it or not Watch Out Kids is like Richard Neville's dated good citizen's guide to the underground Playpower, though Richard confined his theory, mercifully for him as it turned out, to no more than the final chapter, and you spread the thesis throughout the book. Interleaved with the thoughts come the events and inevitability I find them easier to get of on. I can't say that the fifties bulked as large for me as they did for you: I was only twelve in 1960, though I do remember such far back horrors as 'Three Coins in the Fountain' and something that I think was called 'Gilly-gilly-Ostenpfeffer-Catsnella-Bogan-by-the-Sea' (Christ!) which influenced my preschool years and innumerable albums of what are now golden oldies towards the end of the decade. So I missed out on the whole greasy punk syndrome, I do have a feeling that my mother kept me well away from such things, and I didn't get to slash a seat until I happened to have a knife in a cinema in France in 1968. One thing worries me though: and I guess that it comes over, however played down, in the book. English kids, as they are still learning to both their benefit and their frustration, are not living in the States. It's OK to apostrophise Elvis as 'white and greasy...the sullen good looks of a succesful hubcap thief' but hubcap thieving has never really been part and parcel of the English culture that much. With the exception of pages 1, the first section is almost (up to the theory that leads into the Recap No 1) totally devoted to the teen world of fifties USA. It's a cross between Last Picture Show and Ruben and the Jets, and great myth though it may be, it ain't no place like home. The Americans were on the right end of the Marshall Plan after the war, we just had Austerity, rationing and eventually, Harold 'You've Never Had It So Good' Macmillan. It's true what Supermac told us: we hadn't, especially the kids. But what we had was distinctly an import, a second hand gift from downhome greasy Punkville, USA. Our beats tried it, but they didn't really have a way to travel. Bomb Culture is hardly On the Road.

In a world that has been under the American thumb since either of us were born, and in a country which is fighting hard to maintain a lost supremacy that was also on the way out sometime in the twenties, virtually everything lives in the shadow of the States. If English youth had one good overgrown era it was in the first half of the sixties, through from 1962-67. Mods were all English. I don't think myself that they were a grotesque parody of consumer capitalism...' just a richer version of the earlier teen consumers who arrived late in the fifties. The more there were, the greater the temptation for someone to come up with Carbaby St, mod paradise for a while and the ultimate example of totally unscrupulous exploitation. I went to one of the Who's 1970 English tour gigs - at the Orchid Ballroom, Purley, one of their old venues - and there, six years after, were the old audience. The guys had on their suits - Burtons, not Tommy Roberts - and their chicks/wives were in sort of C&A modes. They drank respectively, pints of bitter and gin and somethings. Not a pill in sight. Sic transit gloria mundi, or, so much for Margate. I do remember following a great mod crocodile around Bedford, where I was at school, for hours one Sunday, hoping for vicarious violence, but they all fucked off down the 7 Star Grill. Another illusion shattered.

Generally I really enjoy, with the odd gripe, the autobiographical stuff. Even if experiences were not identical there's plenty of people who can share feelings, memories of their own particular participation of events, just the whole movement that did exist in the sixties.. Where I think the problems come is with the politics, and the philosophies. You are a leader, Mick, and even if the ghastly back cover blurb (no apologies to anyone, whoever wrote it) does claim that you'Don't want to lead noone' (ecch), there's no way out. Image is fascinating, the media play their funny games, take the word 'underground' or 'flowerpower' and do their strange thing to it. You've had the treatment, less than some, more than others, but you played the game a little wrong. You actually kept getting arrested, or making heavy statements, you haven't kept to the rules. And this worries them. The liberals and running scared and whatever the upshot of the trial you won't be getting a column on a Fleet Street daily, even if you want one. And although I can admire the refusal to cop out and take a rather simpler, and infinitely more remunerative path (why the hell else am I writing up other people's masturbation fantasies for tit mags) I'm not sure that I go along with your particular brand of rhetoric. Once again it seems to me it comes from a dangerous desire to to turn England into America. One thing I learned doing years and years of reading 'History' was that in England anyway, revolution just isn't volatile enough. Cromwell tried and they kissed the monarchy's arse when it returned. The English understand compromise too well.

The other night Parkinson and Dick Cavett linked their talk shows. They wanked on about dirty words on the box. Cavett has a censor on the show and every time Parkinson said 'toilet' Cavett blanched. But Mort Sahl gets up there on NBC/CBS or whichever and gives a long, supposedly funny rap, which says, in so many words 'America is a Neo-Fascist Country' and plenty more in the same vein. So you can say 'Fuck', you can scream it on BBC or ITV, but no-one'll get away with calling Heath a fascist and his government a thinly veiled dictatorship. So to bring in John Sinclair's White Panther Programme doesn't, to me anyway, come over as relevant. No more, anyway, than the many and doubtless absolutely excellent points of the UN Charter or Human Rights. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Sinclair himself have told us and, more important, the Americans, the scene there. What we need is a plan of campaign for here. And, however cynical I may be, that plan can't succeed if it takes as basis an American model. You could say that what happens here is a couple of years later than similar events in the States. I believe to an extent that the straight and freak media have to content themselves with. But the English and Americans are such different people. Similar causes have totally disparate effects.

You've said to me that the problem of educating freak kids is of paramount importance. I agree. The generation gap, which is by no means a novelty, is simply that absurd struggle that succeeding youth generations have with their parents as they too discover that establishment precepts are from divine utterances. Until the fifties when kids got money, independence and became, at their worst a new and highly profitable consumer, and at their best the people who were at Phun City and Glastonbury, the cyclical movement of birth-disillusion-acceptance-conformity-death seemed inviolate, except for those who were willing to be labelled freaks. Now the label freak is no longer one of hatred. How can the establishment mock a movement that takes on itself so derogatory a label. I don't share your optimism, as written in the book, that the gloom of the 1969-70 winter has been alleviated. I don't recommend Angry Brigade methods or traditional Left or New Left politics - for the one you require a dedication/fanaticism that is beyond most people and I believe beneficially so. For the other you require a devotion to bureaucracy and partyline regulations that is if anything worse than High Toryism - at least the Tories seem to enjoy themselves - unashamed decadence has always appealed to me more than martyred misery. We have managed, like so many before us, to break down the neat conformism that parents and school have offered us as the ideal way of life. What we must do is make sure that another generation does not find us as pigheaded and self-opinionated as the one from which we have emerged. I know that violent revolution will not work here, and if there was one, people like us would be first up against the wall. Education seems the ideal way, possibly the only way. Democracy, and that, they say, is the system under which we live, accepts the vote of the vote of the majority.Maybe that is but a nominal acceptance, but one thing is definite. If the majority are educated away from the establishment view, even if there is only created a new establishment, let it at least have ideas that were radically altered from those at present dominant. Human nature won't change, people are competitive, acquisitive, some have to emerge on top, others in other places, but despite all my cynicism I really would like to see not so much an alternative society (for we have found how little headway can be made with rebellious mumblings against forces which, as you point out, could crush any violent moves with ease), but the education of the next generation towards attitudes that will rule out the need for an alternative. I imagine this is why formerly apolitical kids in the States are looking to McGovern.

Love

Jonathon