Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Marianne Faithfull

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СКАЧАТЬ this album is the missing link between my early work and Broken English.

      Sometime late in 2000 I received the proofs of a book through the post called Turn Off Your Mind, Relax, and Float Downstream by a member of Blondie. It’s about the ‘mystic sixties’, and it really does capture the light and the dark side of the decade. And there was a lot of dark, creepy stuff in the sixties, I can tell you: The Process, Kenneth Anger, Mel Lyman, Manson, Anton LaVey, and L. Ron Hubbard. Those people were always trying to get hold of me. Somehow I managed to negotiate my way around them quite successfully. I didn’t get involved in any cults, apart from going up to Bangor for that regrettable weekend with the Maharishi and the Beatles, the weekend that Brian Epstein killed himself.

      It’s so odd that few of my friends see anything negative about the sixties. Most of them from back in the day say, ‘Oh but, Marianne, I don’t remember the sixties like that at all … it was wonderful!’ When I hear things like that I question myself, wondering if I got it all wrong and am mad. But I think I have been completely sane all along. Back in the sixties I certainly did seem to attract the most dreadful people: fringe types, cranks, weirdos, people who were after power. It was all so creepy …

      This reminds me about the time at the tail-end of the sixties when dear Henrietta Moraes – about whom much more anon – wrote an investigative article for the Daily Telegraph colour supplement about L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Scientology religion. She infiltrated meetings in order to write her piece, which went into great detail about what she saw as the dark rotten core of what Hubbard did. She wrote all this stuff about how his partner, Mary Sue Whipp, was a homunculus with three breasts, and how he planned world domination through the power of the spirit. Hen was sure he was all about mind domination, and about muscling in on you immediately and filling your head with all this nonsense, isolating you from family and friends and brainwashing you. So of course he was furious when the Telegraph published Hen’s article. She became convinced that people were following her around and waiting outside her house, and got so terrified that she eventually went to the police.

      I wanted to leave the sixties in a blaze of glory – under a volcano. That would be the Vesuvio, Spanish Tony’s Million Dollar Bash, almost emblematic of the blithe, hedonistic sixties overweening-ambitions-and-carpe-diem approach to life. Spanish Tony was the dealer to Swinging London’s stars and the jeunesse dorée.

      All of London’s rock aristocracy were in attendance the evening Spanish Tony, nefarious drug dealer to the stars, finally opened his nightclub (which had, actually, only one night). Like all dealers, he didn’t consider himself just a dealer, he wanted to be something else, something a bit more grand, a ma?tre d’ to the hipoisie. Thus, the Vesuvio. It was pretty much of a dive, but the people there were just stupendous: le tout Londres hip. All the Beatles, most of the Stones, a few Whos, spangled guitar slingers, mangled drummers were there – in short, everybody who was anybody, or thought they were. The punch had, of course, been spiked with LSD. And in strolls Paul – very casually, very cool, almost whistling, you know, with one of those little smiles on his lips as if he’s got a really big secret. John was already there and seemed to have had quite a bit of punch by the time we arrived. George, too, of course, and Pattie Boyd, the quintessence of Pop chic. So there’s our Paulie, looking rather pleased with himself. He was in fact very cool, a real man-about-town and interested in different things than George. Curious Paul, fascinated with all sorts of strange things – he really was like that. And what swinging scene would be complete without Robert Fraser, Groovy Bob – the title of Harriet Vyner’s biography, a bricolage portrait of the archetypal boulevardier of swinging London. The Robert Fraser Gallery was the place to be. He showed the classic Pop artists of the sixties – Richard Hamilton, Jim Dine, and Andy Warhol – and made avant-garde art hip to the rock princelings. He was beautiful, took a lot of drugs, and could always be found where the new thing was happening. ‘More than any other figure I can think of, Robert Fraser personifies the Sixties as I remember them,’ so blurbed Lord McCartney on the back of the Vyner bio. Robert even tried to turn Paul on to heroin, but Paul didn’t care for the experience – that was lucky!

      So there we were, all having a wonderful time, really high and even a little bit of alcohol, which to us was anathema. It was punch, which is easy to drink and a rather delicious sort of drunk. Little did we know what was in it. Finally we decide to drink, and it was acid! And then in the middle of all this, Paul, sidling about with his hands behind his back.

      ‘What have you got behind your back, Paul?’ we are crying out.

      ‘Oh, nothing, really,’ says he. ‘Just something, um, we’ve just done.’ Knowing that everyone would say, ‘Oh! Play it!’

      Well, the thing about the Vesuvio that was really great was the speakers. That’s where all of our money had gone, on the very best speakers, huge speakers, the biggest that you could possibly get. Everything else was on the floor, of course; just loads of cushions. Come to think of it, the set-up would never have worked as a club, but Tony wasn’t one to get hung up on the details. For a private party, however, it was perfect. So there was a lot of ‘Oh, go on, Paul, please!’ You know, you always had to do that with him, basically.

      ‘Oh, yeah, all right, then,’ he says. And then he proceeds to put on ‘Hey, Jude’. It just went – boom! – straight to the chest. It was the first time anyone had ever heard it, and we were all just blown away. And then, of course, we couldn’t stop playing it, we just played away, mixed up with a bit of Little Richard and some blues.

      What a night! Right then you just knew how lucky you were to live in these times, with this crowd. That song was so impossible to describe or even take in that I didn’t know what to say to Paul, but of course I did go up to him (we were a polite little lot) and probably burbled, ‘Wow! Far out, man!’ The required string of incoherent sounds, but I felt I had to say something even though, the state I was in, I could hardly speak. Even Mick said it was fantastic, because it was. I guess most people would think the Stones may have had mixed feelings at that moment, and perhaps they did. But (possibly due to the laced punch) the main feeling was one of: aren’t we all the greatest bunch of young geniuses to grace the planet and isn’t this the most amazing time to be alive. It was as if only with this group and at that moment could Paul have done it. We had a sense of everybody being in the right place, at the right time, with the right people. And every time something came out, like ‘I Can See for Miles and Miles’ or ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, ‘Visions of Johanna’, or the sublime ‘God Only Knows’ from Pet Sounds, or anything at all, it seemed like we had just broken another sound barrier. Blind Faith, the Mothers of Invention … one amazing group after another. Tiny Tim, anything, we were instant fans! And I don’t think it was just the drugs.

      It was one of the most incestuous music scenes ever. And how did they all find each other? And how did they all seem to be in the perfect group for them? Most knew that they were, but some, like Eric Clapton, kept jumping about trying to find exactly his right space and never quite finding it. But even that made sense for him. If not for the peregrine wanderings of Eric we would never have had ‘Layla’ and all that. Experimental Eric, mixing it up with different bands: Derek and the Dominos, Greg Allman, Delaney & Bonnie, Blind Faith. He was in so many different bands – a restless troubadour. In the end, though, all this wandering about from group to group made him into a separate entity: Eric Clapton. He’s his own brand.

      The Vesuvio may have limped along for another couple of weeks before it closed. Of course, the whole venture was a very dangerous idea; it would have been a place where people went to score. Definitely needed, of course, but somewhat unwise. How tempting it must have been to all – a sort of one-stop shop: you go to the club and you get the drugs right there. It would have made life easier for Spanish Tony because instead of having to drive down to John and Yoko and then to me and then drive to СКАЧАТЬ