The Science Fiction Of JOHN LYMINGTON

‘FROOOOOOOOOOMB’:

 THE SCIENCE FICTION OF 

JOHN LYMINGTON

John Richard Newton Chance, 

known to the Science Fiction world as 

 ‘John Lymington’ – 1911 to 1983 

As in all good soap operas, the action is firmly centred on the village pub – the ‘White Lion’, where the characters make their entrances and exits. ‘Nothing is based upon fact’ explains John Lymington helpfully, ‘except the name of the inn.’ Landlord Richard Callum is also a writer of James Bond-style secret-agent thrillers. How has he managed to write so many books? Perhaps autobiographically, he responds ‘I’m forty-four, which is no chick age’ and ‘I started very early.’ To stretch a point, if we are talking about his ‘Night Of The Big Heat’ here, that would mean he was writing it in 1955. For the novel was published, by Hodder & Stoughton, in 1959, then in Corgi paperback edition in 1961. But that’s speculation, for Lymington – born John Richard Newton Chance in 1911 in London’s Streatham Hill, was churning out a vast number of novels in a variety of popular genres, since at least 1935. According to his autobiography ‘Yellow Belly’ (Robert Hale, 1959), in 1944 he was invalided out of the RAF where he’d served as flying instructor, retaining his permanent Flight Lieutenant’s rank. This enabled him even greater writing time.

Meanwhile, Callum’s wife, Frankie has taken the car fourteen miles to Yarmouth, so their unidentified island must be the Isle of Wight, and the pub the one that Chance himself managed from 1956, with wife Shirley neè Savill and their three sons. While Patricia Wells is the flighty typist the agency has sent to help Callum’s stalled work on his latest novel. She appears to be modeled on, say, Audrey Hepburn, acute, lively intelligence, just a playful hint of ‘the tingle of sex’, which leads him to kiss her.

The various rural yokels at the bar complain of the ‘queer heat’. It’s the eighteenth of June and its unnatural intensity has been increasing for a week. This is a novel of its time. They blame sputniks and atomic testing for the abrupt climate-change, but although they hoe potatoes and speak in fractured dialect (uttering ‘it’s moi sheep. They all be dead’ in the film version), they’ve spent years stationed in the Burmese jungle, the Western Desert, Mandalay. They are the war generation.

There’s a token sinister stranger – Harsen, who books a room at the Inn, from which mysterious buzzing machine noises can be heard. And there’s a young Air Force lad from the radar station on ‘the Point’ who tells them about the strange blips their screens have been picking up. There’s also the vicar from the Saxon church, who would probably be played by a bumbling tipsy Derek Nimmo. And drunken Bob Franker who claims he saw a ‘flying saucer’ crewed by giant spiders in a ‘drunken dream’. There’s also Vernon Stone in his horn-rimmed spectacles, not so much a science writer, as an occasional contributor of science-based ‘space-stuff’ features to SF magazines – a kind of ‘Kenneth Johns’ of ‘New Worlds’. Although he’s writing ‘an article about the Martian canals’, it’s he who first suggests that the intolerable heat-levels are due to cosmic interference, and propounds some odd ideas about the interrelationship of all organic matter – ‘remember, a million years is but a night in the span of life on Earth.’ And ‘scientific research proceeds and often disproves some basis upon which the later finding was based.’ The kind of bland generalization that passes for profound in cheap fiction.

Then an ‘elongated blob’ lands in the field behind the church. There are scares and scratching noises in the dark. Harsen – still a little sinister, turns out to be a kind of UFO-ologist or conspiracy theorist who believes the heat is caused by creatures being transmitted down to the island by ‘materialising beam’, and ‘reassembled by very short radio waves.’ A kind of beam-me-down technology. Harsen investigates strange goings-on in the local chalk-pit, reporting his commentary back by radio in a sequence obviously designed to be adapted into a BBC Light Programme thriller. While, like all the best 1950s black-and-white horror movies, the monsters remain off-screen, a menacing presence, more terrible for being imagined. As though Lymington always had screenplay options in mind, offering low-budget, picturesque sets in a quaint village. Cheaper to produce than ‘Quatermass’!

If the book was purposely slanted towards the broadcast medium, it was a strategy that paid off. For ‘Night Of The Big Heat’ was filmed twice. The first, a 1960 ITV ‘Play Of The Week’ adaptation relocated the setting to a village on Salisbury Plain. Directed by Cyril Coke the screenplay was by Giles Cooper. The ‘Observer’ reviewer called it ‘a poor man’s ‘Quatermass’, more than a bit crude – yet remarkably good sport.’ The second, ‘Night Of The Big Heat’ (Planet Films, 1967) was a 94-minute UK feature film directed by Terence Fisher – retitled ‘Island Of The Burning Damned’ for US release. With the action this time switched to chill winter on the remote Scottish island of Farah, it features Patrick Allen (as ‘Jeff’ Callum) with his real-life wife Sarah Lawson (as wife Jackie), plus the impeccable duo of Christopher Lee (as Hanson/ Harsen) and Peter Cushing (as Vernon Stone).

And all the while, the heat just gets hotter. John Lymington had astutely hopped onto the SF scene in the wake of John Wyndham’s mainstream success with ‘The Day Of The Triffids’ (1951) and ‘The Kraken Wakes’ (1953). John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris had been contributing to the Pulp magazines under variant forms of his convoluted name since that same 1935 dateline. But his ‘cosy disaster’ novels were published under the respectable Penguin imprint, and achieved massive critical and commercial success. Writer Sam Youd was quick to take advantage of the window that Wyndham had opened up, and as ‘John Christopher’ found a ready market for his eco-disaster novels ‘The Death Of Grass’ (Michael Joseph, 1955) and ‘The World In Winter’ (1962). ‘Night Of The Big Heat’ was consciously jumping this trend, pitched at a less elevated level maybe, but within its frames of reference it worked spectacularly well. Brian Stableford suggests that even the name ‘Lymington’ was chosen ‘in a blatant attempt to cash in’ on Wyndham’s popularity’ (in his ‘Historical Dictionary Of Science Fiction Literature’). While to critic John Clute, Lymington didn’t work ‘at the imaginative level of his predecessors (and possible models) John Wyndham and John Christopher’, and on a downbeat note, that he ‘writes with some verve, but little style’ (in Peter Nicholls’ ‘The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction’).

When both Harsen and Vernon Stone are killed off in what some would deem developments in a group-jeopardy plot, the rest of the team set off in an old Ford Roadster. They travel through a hot darkness filled with the hushing sounds of unseen alien movement. Yet all the themes come down to conjecture, as they start working on the idea that aliens are probing the area with beam-technology using experimental test-creatures in the way that early human space-shots used an unfortunate chimp or space-dog Laika. Surely this contradicts Bob Franker’s earlier flying saucer story? Either his sighting can be rationalized as a hysteria-induced hallucination… or a Lymington continuity-lapse?

Ultimately the heat generated by the radio waves causes its own destruction when fields and trees ignite in a wall of flame, causing the still-unseen monsters to pop ‘like lice on a fire.’ Evidently Lymington expects us to recognize what this sounds like. For the film version – requiring more visual action, the characters deliberately ignite bales of hay and use dynamite to achieve the same ends. Until the novel closes, as it began, in the ‘White Lion’, as a timely rain-deluge fortuitously extinguishes the blaze. For John Lymington, this novel was about as high-profile as it gets.

There were subsequent novels. The immediate follow-up, ‘The Giant Stumbles’ (1960), also centres on an isolated motley group faced by vast menace. There’s a chain-reaction series of unnatural highly-localised storms – ‘like a man breathing with no lungs.’ Nigel ‘Ni’ Orson Rhodes is a famous scientific writer with an idyllic marriage to ‘Hal’ Harriet, and three sons, teen love-interest Joe (18), Harry (10) and John (6). They live in a great semi-circular white bungalow where he works in a study nicknamed ‘The (Looney) Bin’ by skeptical local villagers.

Rhodes’ guests include Leila, European representative for US magazine ‘Wednesday’ who calls her contributing writers ‘children of volatility’, plus ruthlessly shrewd newspaper publisher Rex Hason, and creepy bespectacled mathematician Benstead of the Almos Radio Observatory (a conflation of Los Alamos?) who uses its ‘electronic computer’ to check out Rhodes figures concerning ‘the queer thing.’ This confirms that ‘the sum total of all nuclear fission has created a charge within the earth’s composition, in just the same way as electricity can be charged in a storage battery.’ This will cause a gravitational pause, ‘a stumble, as it were… a thing infinitesimally minute in the progress of this planet, yet to us a thing so gigantic we can only start to imagine it.’

During their Long Goodbye, facing the end of civilization as gravity momentarily blips out, they endlessly debate the wisdom of publishing a warning. Career-woman Leila flirts with Nigel, Benstead suicides, Leila connives with Rex who sets out to silence Nigel, and Nigel attempts to alert the Defense Minister. Eventually the nucleus around Rhodes’ family use his derided dream-project barge called ‘Elly’, or ‘Daddys White Elephant’ to ride out the apocalypse, also carrying Harry’s zoo of pets, Noah-style. It’s wiser to skip the quasi-biblical allusions. Roland Emmerich’s film ‘2012’ (2009) takes and massively CGI inflates a similar theme – provoked by neutrino-storms cataclysmic Earth crust displacement destroys civilization, as survivors escape in giant arks. Although there can be little more than the most tenuous analogy between the two works.

When he died in 1983 an obituary in Dave Langford’s ‘Ansible’ (No.38) credits John Richard Newton Chance with writing over 150 novels ‘including twenty+ SF potboilers’, adding that he ‘made a steady income by delivering thrillers to (publisher) Robert Hale at a chapter a week.’ So he was one of a generation of writers who made their fiction viable by prolific speed and volume, rather than by striving to conform to more literary critiques. His were the kind of books you stumble upon while browsing through the crammed shelves of musty secondhand bookshops. The kind you speed-read in an hour, then toss them aside with a grunt of satisfaction. But that’s no small achievement. That’s more than enough.

JOHN LYMINGTON 

(1 January 1911- 3 August 1983): 

THE SCIENCE FICTION 

1959 – ‘NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT’

1960 – ‘THE GIANT STUMBLES’ (Hodder & Stoughton)

1960 – ‘THE GREY ONES’ To critic John Clute, ‘much of (Lymington’s) subsequent work has been a series of routine variations on the theme of alien or natural menace to Earth,’ his ‘use of genuine science is minimal and most of his books (many of which feature monsters) operate at the level of B-grade SF/Horror films, where menace strikes unexpectedly into a lazy, rural setting’ (in Peter Nicholls’ ‘The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction’)

1961 – ‘THE COMING OF STRANGERS’, ‘A Rustling In The Night, And Then Death, Horrible And Sudden’, ghostly appearances, footprints in the sand, and furniture knocked over, herald the presence of an unseen invasion

1962 – ‘A SWORD ABOVE THE NIGHT’ (reissued by MacFadden-Bartell Books, 1971)

1963 – ‘THE SLEEP EATERS’ (Corgi, 3/6d), ‘James Colvin’ (Michael Moorcock) in ‘New Worlds no.147’ (February 1965) is not impressed, writing that it ‘is no better, no worse than his usual novels. I find him dull’

1963 – ‘THE SCREAMING FACE’ (Corgi, 3/6d) according to Hilary Bailey in ‘New Worlds no.153’ (August 1965) this is ‘an end of the world story in the form of a diary written for posterity by one of the men who knows the horrid secret. As the big saw comes nearer and nearer the writer becomes increasingly tormented by the question of whether he loves his wife or her sister and whom his wife loves. Only in the last thirty pages does the eternal quadrangle, played out in one of those detective-story English villages, give way to the author’s real plot – planetary revelations, skin-saving in high places and guys fighting to get into the spacecraft’

1964 – ‘FROOMB!’ (Hodder), a time-traveller sees his own future. When explorer John Brunt, a tough, womanising adventurer, agrees to make the last exploration left to man, he cannot calculate the spiritual and physical terrors that await him. This is a story of the Future and of Now. Brunt find there is no escape from either. He finds he cannot shake off the seeds of destruction he takes with him to the years beyond Now. But does destruction come? There must be escape somewhere, somehow. But where? How?

1964 – ‘THE NIGHT SPIDERS’ (Corgi) ‘Twenty-Eight Tales Of Terror From The Imaginative Mind Of John Lymington’ including “Battle Of Wills”, “Easy With Music”, “Moving House” and “Threepenny To Mars”. James Colvin (Michael Moorcock) in ‘New Worlds no.144’ (Sept-October 1964) writes ‘though these stories are in the Corgi SF series, virtually none are SF – they’re ghost stories and very, very bad ones’

1965 – ‘THE STAR WITCHES’ (Hodder) ‘From Another World… A World That Wanted To Possess, Destroy, a man has been experimenting to make contact with the outer world. One night he disappears – to become the master of the forces he has unleashed, or their first victim? ‘She put her hands over her ears and stared at the silent man on the camp-bed. They had not touched her. He was breathing, but very slowly, so slowly that they had not noticed it at first. There were wires attached to his head by a structure like earphones. They ran under the bed and disappeared into the darkness beneath’

1965 – ‘THE GREEN DRIFT’

1967 – ‘THE WAKING OF THE STONE’

1967 – ‘TEN MILLION YEARS TO FRIDAY’, the multiplication of the speed of light imposes a resurrection of the distant past upon the modern world

1968 – ‘THE LIGHT BENDERS’ written as by ‘Jonathan Chance’

1969 – ‘THE NOWHERE PLACE’

1969 – ‘GIVE DADDY THE KNIFE, DARLING’

1972 – ‘THE YEAR DOT’

1974 – ‘THE HOLE IN THE WORLD’

1975 – ‘THE SPIDER IN THE BATH’

1976 – ‘THE LAXHAM HAUNTING’

1977 – ‘STARSEED ON EYE MOOR’

1979 – ‘A CALLER FROM OVERSPACE’

1980 – ‘VOYAGE OF THE EIGHTH MIND’

1981 – ‘THE POWER BALL’

1982 – ‘THE TERROR VISION’

1984 – ‘THE VALE OF SAD BANANA’

‘THE NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT’ (ITV ‘Play Of The Week’ broadcast 14 June 1960), produced for the Associated-Rediffusion Network by Cyril Coke, ninety-minutes in black and white, with Lee Montague (as Richard), Melissa Stribling (as Patricia), Sally Bazely (as Frankie), Bernard Cribbins (as Cpl Pearce), plus Bernard Archard, Karel Stepanek, Patrick Holt and June Ellis. In a tack-on ending not in the novel, the cunning invaders next switch their target to the Sahara Desert. The ‘Daily Telegraph’ reviewer says ‘the warning that it was unsuitable for adults of a nervous disposition was highly necessary – I was positively limp at the end and so were the hard-working, sweat-soaked cast’

‘THE NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT’ aka ‘Island Of The Burning Damned’ (1967, Planet Films, DVD by Simply Media, 2004), directed by Terence Fisher, starring Peter Cushing, Sarah Lawson, and Kenneth Cope (as Tinker). Screenplay by Ronald Liles, with additional dialogue by Pip and Jane Baker. Music by Malcolm Lockyer. Christopher Lee (Hanson) collects specimens and photos of UFO landings from ‘where the cosmic gasses ferment,’ he listens to the BBC Home Service weather forecast, and predicts that Earth will soon become ‘another hot planet… like so many others in the constellation.’ The Patricia Wells character becomes Angela Roberts (played by Jane Merrow), former mistress of Callum (Patrick Allen) who accuses her ‘you were no untouched virgin before we met.’ The aliens, beamed down through radar scanners, ‘resemble giant luminous fried eggs’ and are destroyed – not by fire as in the book, but by ‘the Triffid effect’ of dissolving in the rain. Writers David Miller and Mark Gatiss say ‘you can’t apply the word ‘abysmal’ to many films in this book, but it’s the only word to describe ‘Night Of The Big Heat’’ (in ‘They Came From Outer Space’, 1996, Visual Imagination)

John Richard Newton Chance also wrote a vast number of crime thrillers as John Nelson Chance, from his debut novel ‘Wheels In The Forest’ (Gollancz, 1935) through to ‘A Tale Of Tangled Ladies’ (Hale, 1989). He also wrote six novels in the ‘Bunst’ series – children’s stories featuring eccentric inventor Audacious Cotterell and his youthful assistant Bunstuffer, including ‘The Black Ghost’ (1947) as David C Newton, and ‘Bunst And The Brown Voice’ (1950) as John Newton Chance. Writing as John Drummond he wrote a series of War titles for the Amalgamated Press ‘Thriller Library’, and Detective crime-fiction under the Desmond Reid house-name for the ‘Sexton Blake’ series (including ‘Anger At World’s End’)

Digital Album For Refugees: 'CRISIS MUSIC'

Album Review of: 

‘CRISIS MUSIC’ 

 by VARIOUS ARTISTS 

(Crisis Music, Digital Album In Aid Of Refugees)

 ‘All that I ask is that for peace,
 

you fight today, you fight today
 

so that the children of this world
 

may live and grow and laugh and play” 

(The Byrds – “I Come And Stand At Every Door”, 1966)

Crisis music for crisis times. We’ve seen the TV-blurts. A tarpaulin shanty on Kos waste-ground, a sharp clear-eyed girl maybe ten, no name, no number, speaking to camera about her family’s escape from the escalating horror of Syria, her calm articulate intelligence reaches out to grab you, before the prying lens-attention switches on to the next item. Where is she now, as laser-wire checkpoint barriers erect across Europe, and fresh corpses wash up on Med beaches? In the spaces between her words, the story hurtles on. Meanwhile, ‘Crisis Music’ is ‘An International Digital Compilation Assembled To Help The Refugees In Need.’

The charming and very civilised Ivan Antunovic is speaking from Croatia. From his ‘Small Doses’ fanzine through his essential 0.5 online page, he’s a connoisseur of all things audio-experimental and electro. He narrates the project’s history, ‘I actually curated this donation-based compilation, asking friends from the music world if they’d like to contribute, and the response is way in front of you, with most of the material being exclusive on it, plus some of the material previously being released but now serving also a special purpose...’ He has an impressive roster of friends.

Popsimonova’s opening track “Speechless” is relentless minimalist electro, icily perfect, immaculately stoned from Croatia’s Lana Jastrevski. Ex one-half of DAF-influenced Dekolaž, now she’s her own creation. Science with synthesizers. Then there’s Stormtrap, who is Palestinian musician Abdel Hadi Hashem. His “Zikra” is a delicious noise, beautifully fractured. Followed by “All Hell Breaks Loose” from Bruch (Philipp Hanich), from Austria. Their album ‘My Name Should Be Trouble’ (2014) was a raucous Post-Punk Krautrock mash-up. But this is a previously unreleased track. A great Future-Pop sound, with an ‘Autobahn’ spine. An electric work-out for the mind and the body.

See the span? As a creative sampler from the edgier extremes of the Cosmic Groove, this album is impeccable. Sometimes recalling the electro-experimental 1980s of Mute or Factory, but carried over into new techniques and attitudes.

The next title is “Unconnected”, but Peter Hope & Charlie Collins go way back – all the way to Sheffield’s confrontational Box. Here, hissing noise-attacks, abrasive vocals and treated sax submerge in the mix, shimmering on unorthodox time-bends. No split decision about this one… they’re all positive…! According to Pete himself, ‘yes, Ivan asked me and I immediately agreed. The Syrian refugee situation is a disgusting situation brought about by greed, corruption and the Orwellian notion that war = peace. We actually recorded the track back in 2003, shortly before I left Sheffield to live in the Outer Hebrides. At this point I’d become very disenchanted with the capitalist/consumerist model that was dumbing down both education and media. ‘Unconnected’ (I don’t exist so I won’t be missed) reflects that feeling that social divisions are a tool to dehumanise and alienate people. The current world situation is very much a confirmation of that corporate political commodification of humanity. So, at last the track found its natural home…’

Ivan picks up the tale. ‘Digital-only, this album was assembled for the refugees in need – Syrian refugees included as the focus due to the sad crisis going on now in Syria, but considering there are various ethnic groups from the Middle East that were caught up in a war and had to flee, we all agreed to consider the context that will not focus on just one ethnic group alone…’

There are twenty-five laser-guided heat-seeking synapse-zapping tracks, too many to individually itemize, but collectively sat-navving the Euro-creative nerve-points. There’s what Ivan terms ‘domestic punk duo’ Markantonija – a minimalist DIY-guitar horror-movie asking ‘some intriguing questions, delivering a stunning figurative ‘horror’ piece on the lost sense of belonging and what’s left of love in this cold cold world.’ Plus synth-noire from Cipolla Varieté, Pasiune Oameni, Soft Riot (imagine Depeche Mode fronted by Ian Curtis), Two Pigs Under One Umbrella, Zorja, Carrie Cult, Schwarzer Kanal, Colin Lloyd Tucker (“Freedom”), Lime Crush (irresistible Vienna mutant girlie speed-Pop), Zukunftsstadt, the wonderfully-named Cyborgs On Crack (Croatian powerdrive-electro on “How To Use Machinery”), The Cyclist Conspiracy (guitar-driven Serbian Indie with ethereal harmony vocals), Claudine Coule, Šumovi Protiv Valova, On/a, Marinada, Jos Narg, and Mutandini Karl (“Gravedigger”). Plus ‘one of my songs is also on (“Let’s Call It A Day”), appearing under my former pseudonym ‘I/II’,’ a nagging Giorgio Morodor dance-floor hook overlaid by bleak strident voice, remixed by Kurtiz ‘another musician friend.’ Twenty-five blasts of amazement. I trance, you trance, everybody trance. But creativity counts over format every time.

Through to final track “Take Control (Newsflash)” from This Is The Bridge – which is London-based Richard Anderson. ‘You’ve had your chance, but you failed the test…’ a repeatedly accusing voice, nagging synths, jumping bassline, whirl noises, samples of formless panic, and raw stripped-to-the-nerve boings always work for me. Production and remix from Iv/An ‘yes, I did a remix for This Is the Bridge’ admits Ivan. Enjoy the music. Enjoy the silence. It is in the perfect balance of the two we find greatest contentment.

To mangle The Bridge, don’t fail this test. The Byrds track – selected and quoted here by Ivan, is adapted from a haunting poem by Nâzım Hikmet by Gene Clark for the Byrds ‘Fifth Dimension’ (1966) album, inspired by the Hiroshima atrocity event. It tells of the lost ghost presence of a seven-year-old child in search of peace. An echo of the sharp clear-eyed ten-year-old Syrian refugee girl in the tarpaulin waste-ground shanty on Kos. She also stands at every door, demanding our response. Linking ‘Crisis Music’ into a continuity of outrage against inhumanity. This album is a place where past, present and future meet and interact. The future is dead. Long live the future. You can – and should, download these tracks, as part of the entire compilation, for just €1.

From: http://crisismusicmmxv.bandcamp.com/releases
All proceeds go to the Austrian initiative http://www.thankyoumoreplease.at

Poem: 'Decline Of The Hull Fishing Industry'

DECLINE OF THE 

HULL FISHING INDUSTRY 

 (SEEN AS A NIGHT 

OUT WITH MIRIAM) 

Miriam beheaded cod,
fishscale beaded.
Claimed engagement to a man
trawler-bound off Iceland,
but she’d forget –
for a while, if
I would understand

Her knife disembowelling
head to tail, turning
innards, bloodless, pale,
their stink remaining

We met at a party,
she laughed easily and
did most of the talking.
I bought her drinks and
drove her home in a
battered white Transit van
– past the dock-fronts,
cranes black against blackness,
and terraced houses in
reticulated rows, streetlamp paced
– imagining those delicate fingers
dextrously tossing corpses
into ice, gleaming dead
fish eyes coming adrift.
We made vague plans but
I was a little too drunk
and she had me park
a street away
to allay Icelandic guilt,
but every time the wind
comes in from the east
redolent of fish
I catch Miriam laughing,
beaded with cod-eyes and scales

And now the trawlers rust
and the docks silt
and I still see
those fingers

Published in:
‘MINOTAUR no.5’ (USA - October 1981)
‘BRADFORD POETRY QUARTERLY no.5’ (UK - Aug 1986)
‘RUSTIC RUB no.2’ (July 1994 - UK)
‘CHOKING ON HONEY no.1: formerly ‘I SEE EMERALDS’ (March 1999 - UK)
‘THE PENNILESS PRESS no.18’ (Nov 2003 – UK)
and the collection:
‘POWER LINES’ Unibird Publications (Oct 1988 - UK)

Interview: COUNTRY JOE McDONALD

COUNTRY JOE McDONALD: 

 MORE ELECTRIC MUSIC 

FOR THE MIND AND BODY 

 In 1967 COUNTRY JOE & THE FISH were on 

the leading edge of what was termed the ‘Counter Culture’, 

and what the world remembers as the ‘Hippie Summer of Love’. 

But classic psychedelic albums like ‘FEEL LIKE I’M FIXIN 

TO DIE’ and their Woodstock Movie ‘Fish Cheer’ are only 

part of the story. Country Joe McDonald was an activist 

before all that began. And he’s still there, still doing it now… 

“into my life on waves of electrical sound 

and flashing lights she came, 

into my life with the twist of a dial…” 

                                             (‘Janis’) 

I first encounter Country Joe McDonald in flickering calor-gas light, hunched over a fold-down table spidering his running order on a pad in biro. “Entertainment Is My Business”, “Janis”, “Tricky Dicky”, “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”, and “Feel Like I’m Fixin To Die”. He pauses to slurp Stones Bitter from the plastic tub I’ve plied him with. Then glances down the Caravan that doubles as his Dressing Room for the duration of this ‘Leeds Folk Festival’. Geoff Francis, some-time distributor for Joe’s ‘Rag Baby Records’, sits there describing a National Lampoon satire called ‘Lemmings’, a concept-album about an ecologically-minded quasi-‘Woodstock’ where the audience commit mass suicide to alleviate world over-population. This fictional Festival also features the first and last appearance of Crosby Stills Nash Marx & Engels (wrapped in tinfoil to attract lightning during the rain-chant), and there’s John Denver singing “Eating The Baby Raw”…

“He wasn’t there” corrects Joe precisely. “John Denver, he wasn’t there. You mean John Sebastian?”

Strange to realise, suddenly, that this genial guy sat here in faded blue jeans and T-Shirt, ballpoint and pad in hand, is part of that Woodstock mythology that National Lampoon are sending up. Country Joe and The Fish, remember? ‘Electric Music For The Mind And Body’ (1967, Vanguard), ‘I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die’ (1967, Vanguard) and ‘Together’ (1968, Vanguard)? It seems light-years away that critic Lillian Roxon was writing ‘no riot or rally at Berkeley in its big historic years, ‘66 and ‘67, was complete, or even possible, without The Fish’. But although they’re remembered as the definitive psychedelic band CJ&F were never just that. The so-called ‘Counter-Culture’ was about diversity and change, about being open to influences, and using those influences creatively.

 Joe McDonald was never suckered by the fashion-accessory elements of Hippie kitsch, but instead continued to apply the constant factors of that openness, creativity and intelligence, across the years that followed. In the process he built a stack of solo albums that, although sometimes flawed, have rarely failed to come up with interesting and lyrically challenging music. From ‘War War War’ (a 1971 Vanguard album setting Joe’s songs to Robert W Service’ World War I poems), ‘Paradise With An Ocean View’ (1975, Fantasy), ‘Peace On Earth’ (1984, Rag Baby) and ‘Vietnam Experience’ (1986, Rag Baby) – to now, when he’s become a voice commenting from the sidelines, the constant irritant of conscience.

In a caravan, in Leeds, he resumes sketching out his set, a Dave Van Ronk song, then “Oh Jamaica”, “Here I Go Again” (the hit song he wrote for Twiggy), “Let It Rain”, “Coyote”, “Save The Whale”, and “Get It All Together”, while I edge my ITT cassette recorder forward, and ask:-

ANDREW DARLINGTON: Was it a personal bring-down for you when all that Sixties thing finished? You were tied closely to that ‘Movement’, it seemed to be an unstoppable upward gradient, then all of a sudden the 1970’s arrived and it was Donny Osmond and Glam-Rock.

JOE McDONALD: You shouldn’t... erm, nothing ever stopped. The media stopped covering it. That’s what happened. And it was... well, I’m not really a person that’s in love with having a high profile anyway, y’know? But there was a certain backlash within the industry which was a little disappointing, as regards all Sixties musicians, they weren’t really treated with the respect that they should have had perhaps. But it’s water under the bridge now. The media chooses to focus on certain things at different times, I suppose it has its orders from somewhere, but as far as the ‘Woodstock Nation’ or the ‘Counter Culture’ or whatever you want to call it, it was going on before the Sixties, it went on straight through the Seventies and Eighties, and it’s still going on now.

AD: I get the impression you were involved before the thing happened big in media terms, and after it had died down too. That you’ve continued on pretty much the same lines and largely ignored the hype circus.

JD: Well, yeah. Of course there’s certain things that I couldn’t have been involved in before, but I’ve been involved in progressive issues and music for my whole life. But, for instance, I mean – even ‘Greenpeace’ in the Fifties was into nuclear testing, but not really Saving Whales. They were in the Pacific Islands with boats stopping the testing. They got busted by the French. They go back a long ways. Everything goes back a long ways. Not in the media, but in real life. But a lot of the changes in the Sixties really altered civilisation as we know it, and I still think you can feel it.

AD: You did the ‘Thinking Of Woody Guthrie’ (1969, Vanguard) tribute album, and on your later ‘Animal Tracks’ (1983) you did Woody Guthrie’s “Let’s Go Riding”. And to an extent you seem to operate in a kind of Guthrie role. As a ‘Social Commentator’.

JM: Except that I’m not.... except that I don’t take my orders from the Left Wing. That was Woody Guthrie’s mistake. He was a great songwriter, a great writer and a great artist, but – it’s not until recently that things like his ‘Seeds of Man’ book have been allowed to even come out. His material was controlled mostly by political Left Wingers, and so that’s the kind of material that you heard and that got published. And I tend to make everybody nervous for the most part. Left Wing included. I’ve been ‘Eighty-Sixed’, as we say, from most Left Wing organisations for years and years. ‘Cos I grew up into that.

AD: Don’t you think it helps to work within some kind of ideological framework?

JM: No. I think it’s dangerous. Nobody knows what’s going on, and anybody who thinks they know what’s going on long enough to establish an organisation based on that idea is a little bit crazy if you ask me. No-one knows what’s going on. No-one’s ever known what’s going on yet. But someday everybody will know what’s going on. But it won’t be us, it’ll be generations from now. It’s very hard to figure out the galaxy and everything... (Joe gives a low laugh, waves dismissively with a plastic spoon he’s in the process of devouring a tray of vegetable goo with)

AD: So what ideas are you true to? Your own personal interpretations and definitions?

JM: Well, as an artist, yeah. I deal with my own personal interpretations. But I try to change all the time, that’s something important. Just to know people who are changing all the time, and just trying to figure out the right answers, y’know? It gets easier as you go along, and you have some hints y’know. Like, dying isn’t so great. And being alive is generally pleasant.

AD: Do you still enjoy performing?

JM: Oh yeah. I love performing. Specially under certain conditions. This kind of thing, like a Festival, I really love, it’s gonna be a lot of fun. I do half acoustic and half electric. I mean, I’ve been doing this solo thing for a long time, and it’s getting kinda boring to me. And the entertainment business is death when you start being bored with your own act. It doesn’t take an audience long to figure that out. So I like doing electric things with a band, and a few solo things too, I do a few Benefits at home solo.

AD: In parallel with your solo career you’ve always maintained a working relationship with other ex-members of the Fish. There was a ‘Country Joe & The Fish’ re-union tour around…

JM: ...1979. The anniversary of Woodstock. But that wasn’t the full line-up. That wasn’t Bruce (Barthol) and Chicken (Hirsch) and Dave (Cohen), it was other people (including bassist Pete Albin formerly of Big Brother & The Holding Company and guitarist Bob Flurie).

AD: Then there were announcements of a re-union to coincide with your 1984 ‘Peace On Earth’ album and tour (while Joe also issued ex-Fish Barry Melton’s LP ‘Level With Me’ (1981) on his Rag Baby Records label). Will there be other Fish-related projects?

JM: It’s not a matter of... it’s a matter of the right time, y’know. And Barry, yes. He’s an attorney now. I know he’s busy in his Lawyers business. He passed the Bar, and he never went to school for it. He did it all by correspondence course. It took him ten years. But he’s a Solicitor. So there you are. It just goes to show you what perseverance can do!

AD: You also had a ‘straight’ job at one time, ‘Red Star Music’, a store selling instruments.

JM: You’re remarkably well-informed. That didn’t last long. ‘Red Star’ yeah, but it didn’t... that was what I would call a fiasco. While Barry’s sitting for the Bar has turned out to be a big success.

AD: Is there a clear difference between work you do on stage and in the studio? For some bands it’s a completely different discipline.

JM: Well. I try to do as much on the stage as I do in the studio. But then, truth of the matter is that it is two different experiences. When you’re listening to music at home, particularly on the headphones, it takes on the quality of a modern motion picture in that you’re sucked into the Movie. You’re completely sucked into the thing you’re listening to when you’ve got your headphones on. Or you’re in the Disco and it’s up really loud, and your eyes are not really working. Your imagination and your ears and your brain are working, but when you’re in a concert your eyes are working much more than your ears. And that’s why most live records sound pretty terrible.

AD: Do you have strong opinions on the current sampling and sequencer Dance music that dominates the radio, Clubs and charts?

JM: Syntho-Rock? Techno-Rock? I really love it. Computers and synthesisers are the future music of the planet, that’s for sure. But you can’t change into the future without understanding the past. That’s stupidity. Like I said, I’ve just finished over ten years of playing, searching around traditional roots, because in the Sixties I didn’t have much chance to do that. But in the Fifties that’s what I was doing. And I have a tape music magazine where we feature some, like, roots of modern music and things like that. And so I’ve been doing, like, acoustic Folk, American traditional music, things most people don’t even know anything about anymore. But in spite of our attachment to traditional music – or traditional anything, the past is wrong and the future is correct. As a general rule. If you want to be a competent musician nowadays you have to know where it came from. Even internationally it’s a very difficult business. And you have to know all the modern stuff too, and project your own image onto that.

AD: When we spoke earlier you mentioned that on your first Country Joe & The Fish album (‘Electric Music For The Mind And Body’) you used ‘a little influence of John Cage, and David Tudor concepts’. They are still respected names.

JM: Are they? At the time that was very radical, very radical stuff, but now... it’s not. Well, that’s the roots of modern synthesiser music, I suppose. At the time everybody thought they were just crackpots. But now – compared to some modern avant garde music, it’s pretty conservative stuff. I’m not a big fan. I’m essentially a Pop musician and my roots are in traditional music. Traditional classical music, and traditional Folk music. I’m really not... but, I do have some things in the can which are not music at all! So I guess I’m lying about that (laughter). There are some tracks on my recent albums which are really... I don’t know. I think I’d have difficulty arguing that they are music at all actually, in the traditional sense.

AD: On your ‘Child’s Play’ album (1983, Rag Baby) you use what you call ‘Environments’. A technique of placing each song in some kind of context by the use of stereo sound effects. Background restaurant noises on the track “Not In A Chinese Restaurant” for example. The motives sound not dissimilar to those of people like Brian Eno who create ‘ambient music’ albums. Music intended for different settings, like his ‘Music For Airports’…

JM: I’m more inclined to do music in airports!

AD: ...music for the car?

JM: No. rather music in the car. Music you can play while you’re in the car – so it would be a case of music IN the car, FOR the car! Music IN the airport, FOR the airport. I mean, ‘cos when you have your Walkman – or whatever you call those tape recorders – WalkPERSONS, you can really put yourself just about anywhere, can’t you? But one thing you’re gonna be sure of in my music is that I’m not gonna put you in the studio anymore. And I can’t really guarantee what’s going to happen in that studio while we’re cutting tracks. That’s a little element of surprise. It’s sorta like not knowing if they’re going to drop the bomb or not.

AD: Your de-gendering the ‘Walkperson portable’ reminds me of your mixed-gender anti-sexist All-Star Band. That band and album (the 1973 ‘Paris Sessions’) with its Feminist bias seemed like a very brave project. Do you think those ideas still stand up?

JM: Well, that album certainly stands up, yes. It’s kinda the roots of Feminism in a way, you know – from a male point of view. It was the only thing of its kind around at that particular time. It was very radical. That band had three women musicians in it. I have a million stories from that band. It was only together a year-and-a-half but the things that happened to that band were like the ‘Adventures Of The Furry Freak Brothers’ or something. Really. I mean, people just could not understand that there was a woman playing the piano and a woman playing the drums and a woman playing saxophone. They didn’t understand that. The promoters didn’t understand that, the Press didn’t understand that, the audience didn’t understand that. They saw and heard something else. It was like ‘Alice In Wonderland’, or Science Fiction schizophrenia or something. I had to throw one Reporter out of the Dressing Room because he kept demanding to know who the girl backing singers were. He’d seen the whole show! So I introduced everybody in the band to him and I told him we didn’t have any background singers. Then he wrote all the names down and then he wanted to know the background singers names! And that routine went on somewhat like ‘Monty Python’ for about thirty minutes. He began frothing and I had to have him removed from the room, and as he left he was screaming “you must be crazy, I just wanna know the names of the BACKING SINGERS...!!!!”

AD: Like the only musical role he could envisage for women was as backing singers? Or groupies perhaps, but not as musicians?

JM: We were playing in the mid-West in some rather large Mafia-like Club in a town, y’know, and I came back with Anna Rizzo who was playing drums at the time, and Tucki Bailey who was playing sax. We walked into the club and went up to the Bouncer, and the guy at the... it was a little ticket-booth sort of thing. Well, it wasn’t a booth, it was just a podium sort of thing. And I said ‘I’m Country Joe, where’s the Dressing Room?’ And he said ‘just go straight through there, turn left, but the Chicks have to have passes’. And I said ‘no problem, it’s the drummer and the sax player. Let’s go’. We started to walk in and he just went ‘WHUUUMP!!!’, dropped his hand right down and said ‘I’m sorry, but you know, the Chicks have to have passes’. I said ‘this is the BAND, and we’re going to the Dressing Room if you don’t mind’. And he said ‘YOU can go, it’s OK, I’m telling you, your Dressing Room is down the hall to the left. But the CHICKS have to have passes’. So Tucki and Anna are starting to crack up now, they’re really laughing like crazy now. But I’m starting to get a little bit ticked off. So I said to this guy ‘I don’t know what your problem is, if you’re retarded or something, but THIS is the saxophone player, THIS is the drummer. I’M Country Joe. THIS IS THE BAND. And WE’RE GOING TO THE DRESSING ROOM!’ He was a very large person too. And he said ‘I’m really sorry man, I don’t want any hassles or anything, but the Chicks are GONNA HAVE TO HAVE PASSES!’ And I said ‘WHERE’S THE FUCKING MANAGER?’, y’know. And this guy standing beside there flashed this Police Badge in front of my face and said ‘don’t use that language in front of those women’. He was a plain-clothes Cop who had been standing there next to this guy all the time! And when he did that Tucki and Anna were just sort of rolling on the floor in laughter. And then they were laughing at the situation so hard they were just cracking up, and the Cop didn’t know what to do. He started blushing because he thought he’d saved the day. Then Tucki and Anna started saying ‘you ought to hear what he makes us listen to during the show!’ Anyway, finally the owner of the Club came and he said to the guy ‘let ‘em in’. And then we went in. But that was a common occurrence with that band. I’m telling you, it’s a case of, sometimes you’re doing something which is like, advanced, and it’s incomprehensible. It does not compute. I think that a lot of Animal Liberation is like that at the moment. It’s one of those things, it does not compute. And at that particular time, which was 1971, Feminism didn’t compute.

AD: I wonder if Kim Deal had those problems when she was with the Pixies? Or Gillian out on New Order? Or the Spice Girls! It’s a lot healthier now where musicians are accepted on their merits rather than their race ore gender.

JM: Female bands! Female stars! They’re all over the place! I mean, it’s really hard for a man in this business nowadays. Really. When you think about it, how many famous women singers and women musicians there are, Bonnie Raitt, the Hearts, in New Wave, Sheryl Crow, there’s more and more...! (the interview breaks down in waves of laughter).

It’s usual for journalists to edit interviews, rearranging, selecting, and in some cases rewriting conversations. It’s impossible to fully convey Joe’s humour, or the circuitous process of his arguments without presenting them intact, without alteration. Hence I’ve kept omissions to a minimum, and not corrected the usual false starts and repetitions that inevitably crop up in conversation. Joe McDonald is an intelligent and very likeable performer with a unique way of fusing humour and perception, the most valuable aspects of the past with the most urgent concerns of today. Hopefully this comes across best when he’s allowed to speak for himself.

“be the first one on your block 

to have your boy come home in a box…” 

       (‘FEEL LIKE I’M FIXIN TO DIE’)

Edgar Allan Poe: The Original Imp Of The Perverse

EDGAR ALLAN POE: 

THE ORIGINAL IMP 

OF THE PERVERSE 

 An overview based around the book ‘VISIONS OF POE’, a 

selection of EDGAR ALLAN POE stories and poems with 

photographs and an introduction by SIMON MARSDEN 

(Michael Joseph/ Webb & Bower, £14.95) 

 ‘Sleep 

those little slices of death, 

how I hate them...’ 

 (Edgar Allan Poe, quoted on the introduction to 

 ‘Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors’)

 

A gothic window from Castle Bernard, County Cork, mist-shrivelled, ivy-entangled. Perspective is vague, so that at first glance it’s a plundered grave, then it’s a door opening out onto a dread landscape of mystery and inexpressible terror. But no, it’s only a window. Then there’s a stone cadaver etched against the wall of Beaulieu House, County Louth. A grinning skeleton, a macabre victim of a premature burial or the Red Death plague, obscenely disinterred and left there to putrefy. But no, it’s only a particularly grotesque sculpture.

The photographs, from ‘Visions Of Poe’ (Michael Joseph/ Webb & Bower, £14.95, 1998) were snared by the artful Pentax of Simon Marsden whose previous work includes ‘In Ruins’ (revised edition, Little Brown, 1997), a highly personal photographic essay of churches and historic buildings in his native southern Ireland. On such evidence it’s obvious that Marsden uses his lens not just to record – but to interpret, selecting his targets, his lighting and angles, to build atmosphere. In this case to illuminate a sympathetic descent into the maelstrom of psychological horror created by the fiction and poems of Edgar Allan Poe, examples of which are matched to Marsden’s pictures – there’s “The Raven”, “The Fall Of The House Of Usher”, “The Masque Of The Red Death” and others.

Poe was a dark fantasist, with a natural perversity he considered to be a universal condition. ‘His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought him mad’ Poe writes of Prince Prospero – the decadent aristo who seals himself into his castle to escape the ravages of the ‘Red Death’. A man whose works are ‘delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little that which might have excited disgust.’ Poe could have been describing his own art, which is riddled with recurrent necrophilia, disease, cannibalism, demonic possession, resurrection of the dead, madness, mesmerism and premature burial, all described in a deliciously morbid prose that lingers on decay and death.

Born in the Michael Dukakis city of Boston over two-hundred years ago – 19 January 1809, Edgar Poe was immediately orphaned. His father, the Irish actor David Poe, deserted the family in 1810 and died soon afterwards. His mother – Elizabeth, died of pneumonia a year later. The middle name ‘Allan’ he took from the stepfather and benefactor he alternately vilified and, when finances deemed it necessary – fawned over. The young Poe was ‘removed’ from the University of Virginia for immoderate drinking and gambling which amassed debts of $2,500, and was subsequently court-martialled from West Point Military Academy for deliberate neglect of duty.

He nevertheless went on to reasonable success as editor of various periodicals – ‘The Southern Literary Messenger’ and ‘Graham’s Magazine’, minor triumphs again sabotaged by his personality problems which tended to terminate each position with the sour fetor of acrimony. He was neither a pleasant, nor an easy work colleague. In mitigation, Poe’s notorious drink problem was exaggerated by a diabetic condition, complicated by a ‘brain lesion’ that rendered him particularly succeptible to alcohol. His use of opium and laudanum is also well-documented, but hardly exceptional at an time when such tinctures were the widely-accepted valium of their day. More genuinely odd is his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia, who was already ill with the tuberculosis that was to kill her. The ‘consumption’ that seems to have been a source of Poe’s unhealthy fixation – not unconnected to the memory of his mother’s death. 

Dour and melancholic, Poe favoured neat black clothes. He was socially ill at ease, his conversations as precise and formal as his writing was meticulous. He wrote poems. He wrote protean Science Fiction that influenced HP Lovecraft, and Jules Verne – to whom Poe was ‘le créateur du roman merveilleux-scientifique.’ He wrote detective fiction, including ‘The Murders In The Rue Morgue’ (‘Graham’s Magazine’, April 1841) from which his ‘C Auguste Dupin’ served as A Conan Doyle’s model for ‘Sherlock Holmes’. But above and beyond these things, Poe created an image. The image is dark and malevolently brooding. The image is Gothic horror, a nightmarish fiction of all-pervading repulsion so obsessive that it survives and even subsumes its persistent reinterpretation by literary critics, symbolists, Freudians – and film-makers. From a single short story sequence novelist-scripter Richard Matheson was able to flesh out an entire movie – the Vincent Price/ John Kerr 1962 chiller ‘The Pit And The Pendulum’. Roger Corman, whose series of Poe adaptations stand as his most startlingly disturbing work, similarly expanded the seven-page prose-poem ‘The Masque Of The Red Death’ (in ‘Graham’s Magazine’, May 1842), into a horrifically effective full-length film that inhabits Poe’s mythos remarkably accurately, its malign spell absorbing and colouring all additional invention into itself like a spreading bloodstain. Corman’s ‘The Fall Of The House Of Usher’ (1960) with Vincent Price is a wide-screen shocker pervaded by a genuinely flesh-crawling atmosphere, while Boris Karloff joins Price and Peter Lorre in Corman’s special-FX classic ‘The Raven’ (1963), announced as ‘The Macabre Masterpiece Of Terror’.

In much the same way, Simon Marsden’s photographs not so much illustrate Poe’s stories as are infected by their bacillus, they enter Poe’s twisted vision, they draw vile energies from his morbidly introspective fascinations, and peer out through the distorting lens of his perversity.

Poe died – as that heavily over-written scenario demands he must, in grotesquely romantic squalor. After failed suicide attempts, bouts of insanity, fits and delirium tremens, he was on his way to Richmond to marry himself out of penury, when he disappeared during a stop-over in Baltimore. He was found much later on the street in a wretched condition. Following four days of hospitalised raving he groaned ‘lord, help my poor soul,’ and died. He was aged just forty.

 Edgar Allan Poe’s life has been described as ‘a long slow suicide,’ the black drugs ‘n’ booze aspects of which were posthumously exhumed by decadent French poet Charles Baudelaire who helped embellish them into the unshakably powerful literary mythology that persists. It was left to Anthony Burgess to question that myth in an ‘Observer’ book review (15 January 1978) by pointing out that ‘Poe’s life, though wretched enough, was not exceptionally so. It was the life of any writer struggling in a world devoted to commercial values.’ What makes Poe’s work so exceptional – Burgess argues, is his apparent self-absorption in that ‘wretchedness’ which – like Marsden’s camera, tints and taints all of his life-experience, and all of his creative perceptions. Poe was rigidly agnostic, a man who – according to expert fantasist Sam Moskowitz, ‘knew that the ultimate damnation lay in the distortion of a man’s own inner consciousness and not in any supernatural event’ (‘Science Fantasy’ no.38). 

Irregular, querulous and eccentric, unacknowledged in life and unmourned in death, Poe casts a long and blackening shadow that’s now exquisitely reinterpreted through the demonic gargoyles and macabre mansions in Simon Marsden’s ‘Visions Of Poe’.

‘dreaming dreams 

no mortals ever dared to dream before…’ 

(Edgar Allan Poe from ‘The Raven’)

'NASTY TALES' : BRITISH UNDERGROUND COMIX'

Book Review of: 

‘NASTY TALES: 

SEX, DRUGS, ROCK ‘N’ ROLL 

& VIOLENCE IN THE 

BRITISH UNDERGROUND’ 

 by DAVID HUXLEY 

(Headpress / Critical Vision - £13.95 / $19.95 - 

ISBN 190048613X) 

What’s so funny ‘bout Peace Love and Understanding? Well, nothing. Except that TV-clips of Hippies in silly hats, idiot-dancing, and human-daisy-chains in the park, are in danger of eclipsing the significance of what really went on in those down-dirty late-sixties. ‘Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair’– of course, but chances are that Charles Manson will also show up at the Love-In. For every Woodstock there’s an Altamont. For every Flower-Child, a Street-Fighting Man.

David Huxley’s valuable research into one particularly neglected cranny of the era, magicked into life by the lavish visual explosions provided by Headpress lay-out – vividly visceral, explicit, disturbing… and fun, goes some way towards redressing that (sub)cultural imbalance. Comics – or ‘Comix’ are his thing. The strips that ran in the ‘underground’ periodicals, and their more specialised comic-book spin-offery. More specific yet, their British manifestations. Artists such as Hunt Emerson. Tracing his lines, which form garish detonations of ludicrous invention, fluid – but angular. Faces, shapes, and figures in dynamic melt-down, vibrating with psychedelic energies. Elaborate spirals and coils of brain-matter, goggle-eyes veiny and drifting free from their sockets like loose balloon moons…

Comic-strips and animation have always been something of a cultural oddity. Their exaggerations are implicitly surreal. Think ‘Desperate Dan’ – no, really think about it. What the hell is that about? Think about the open-ended repetitive non-story structure of ‘Wylie C. Coyote & the Roadrunner’. Existential ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ or what? And it’s always been slightly subversive too. As far back as you can go Political Cartoons have been a weapon of ridicule against the corrupt pomposity of the ruling class. The sixties-cum-early-seventies had no monopoly on any of this. What it did do was reignite it all through new mix-and-max outrage combinations. Through a generation of new artists, Robert Crumb among them, illuminating the youthquake happening all around them. And by their being independently published through the new global phenomenon of disreputable titles calling itself the ‘underground press’, made possible by the proliferating cheap accessibility of offset print-technology. It also benefited from good timing.

The gore-overkill of Will Gaines’ 1950’s manic over-the-top EC ‘Tales From The Crypt’ led to questions in the House, and the subsequent imposition of the Comics Code, ushering in the gentler mockery of ‘Mad’, and an interlude of squeaky-clean aspirational UK comics following the pristine parentally-approved example of ‘Eagle’. So ensuring that a decade-long frustration built up among cartoon-artists, and a sleaze-thirsty readership, a combination that was bound to blow sooner, rather than later. More? Fuelling the ‘underground’, as well as exotic drugs, trippy vinyl, and a retro-affection for Aubrey Beardsley there were reference points to Marcuse’s ‘Frankfurt Circle’ – a New Left Think-Tank, McLuhan’s ‘The Medium Is The Massage’ proclaiming the end of literacy as we know it, and the dawn of Homo Ludens – the ‘Play-Power’ ethic. All conspiring together to show that absurdity, stupidity, chaos and black humour are just as valuable philosophical constants as logic, reason and rationality. Ideal ingredients, in fact, for graphic excess.

Initially the visual dimension of the UK titles – ‘It’, ‘Friends’, ‘Oz’, ‘Styng’ and the rest, was characterised by an over-reliance on American reprints (Crumb’s ‘My First LSD Trip’, Gilbert Sheldon’s ‘Wonder Wart-Hog’). But the early local contingent soon includes Jeff Nuttall’s free-form cut-up ‘Physiodelics’, Mick Farren’s scripts for Edward Barker, the ‘Largactilites’, Chris Welch – creator of the odd SF-saga ‘Ogoth’ who doubled by reviewing Pop singles for ‘Melody Maker’, Hunt Emerson’s debut in Birmingham Arts Lab’s ‘Large Cow Comix no.1’ through to his ‘Thunderdogs’ mayhem in 1980 and ‘Firkin The Cat’ for ‘Fiesta’, Brian Bolland’s ‘Little Nympho In Slumberland’ in ‘Graphixus no.3’, Mal Burns, Bryan Talbot, and much more.

Michael Moorcock’s innovative SF-fantasia ‘Jerry Cornelius’ was serialised through issues of ‘Frendz’. As regards self-contained titles, ‘Cyclops’ – at just 15p from the ‘Innocence & Experience Press’, cover-proclaims itself ‘The first English Adult Comic Paper’ in July 1970, followed by Felix Dennis’ ‘COZmic Comics’ – no.3 of which consists entirely of British artist Mike Weller’s work. Then the spectrum of titles runs from Alchemy Publications’ ‘Brainstorm Comix’ with a no.1 print-run of 3,500, to Joe Hirst’s modest Bamforth-derived spirit-duplicated naughtiness via Filey-based Fiasco Press. From ‘Napalm Kiss’ to Robert Crumb’s celebrated orgy-spread highlighting ‘Nasty Tales no.1’.

And the Establishment played its scripted part to perfection. We’ll be outraged – it said, if you’ll be outrageous. They were duly outraged. They took the ‘Oz’ Skool-Kids issue to the Old Bailey, and busted ‘Nasty Tales’ for obscenity. Both shock-chic stories are fully recounted here by David Huxley (who modestly omits his own art-contributions to Denis Gifford’s ‘Ally Sloper’, ‘Blood, Sex & Terror’, ‘StreetQuomix’, and ‘Either Orcomics’, while admitting to an SF weirdo in ‘Pssst’). And – although falling outside this book’s time-frame, the tradition of legalistic repression continues into the 1990’s when ‘Savoy Editions’ artist-publisher Dave Britton is jailed for the immaculately nasty ‘Lord Horror’ comic-books.

So where did it all go? Well, it continues to continue in grubby low-profile photocopied small-press editions. ‘Viz’ graduated from bedroom fanzine into a corporate institution. ‘2000AD’ – launched by IPC as a continuity of the ‘Eagle’-mentality, complete with an updated Dan Dare, discovered its long-term survival strategy through more sophisticated adult material with enough severed heads, erupting eyeballs and gratuitous nudity to bring a macabre glow to Will Gaines’ tomb. Both titles thrive. While Shelton’s collected ‘Furry Freak Brothers’ are out there on Amazon even now, alongside the lavish graphic-novel editions of DC and Marvel comic-book heroes, their drug-wise antics just as sniggery-relevant to today’s pharmaceutical tastes as they were Cheech-&-Chong-wise back then. Robert Crumb is the subject of at least one docu-movie, with a spin-off soundtrack CD. Felix Dennis – once ‘Oz’ wunderkind, is a media fat-cat with a sideline in self-publishing his own poetry. And now David Huxley’s cool academic prose preserves, keenly analyses, places in context and neatly squares the cartoon frame of the best of the rest. Cool. Groovy. Highly recommended…

 Published in: 

‘DREAMBERRY WINE (Jan-Feb)’ (UK – Jan 2004) 

‘SONGBOOK no.2’ (UK – Feb 2004) 

‘MONOMYTH no.14’ (UK – May 2004)