I did this interview with Mick late last year- it appears in OBSOLETE! #7 and "The Best of OBSOLETE!"He was so generous with his time and loved the underground paper aspect of OBSOLETE!– he was our single most consistent contributor. His guidance and encouragement was a big part of what kept us going.
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OM: Do you think there is room for a real “underground” in
the age of twitter?
MF:I think it’s probably a double-edged sword. It’s never
too clear what’s meant when we talk about an underground. If we’re talking
about the psychedelic left – which is how I’ve pretty much always described my
political persuasion – then social networks, blogs, Twitter, and, indeed the
whole of the internet, make a lot of things possible that could never have been
achieved in a time of print, limited access to radio, and even more limited
access to broadcast TV. The internet is impossible to control and almost
impossible to censor. It is a near infinite resource of a vast variety of
information. You want to build a bomb or cook crystal meth? Hell, it’s all
there. The potential offered by instant communication has scarcely been
scratched. Flash mobs? Viral protests like the ones during the BP Gulf oil
spill? They are only the tip of a huge subversive iceberg. Like I said though,
it’s a double-edged sword. It’s a huge resource and if you want to find out
about The Rapture or the Earth being flat that’s all there too. The internet is
also wholly transparent. Any passing troll or secret policeman can see exactly
what you’re doing, and, of course, computers never forget anything. A perfect
example occurred during the recent UK riots. Looters were coordinating their
efforts on iPhones and Blackberries but also had the police listening in, and
then rounding them up later using their call records. You have to keep moving
and keep a low profile. It makes visible leaders like Julian Assange hopelessly vulnerable.
OM:I feel like digital technology has knocked some of the
sharp edges off western culture. Does your experience as a writer of science
fiction inform how you feel about the new media environment? Is this the future
you would have expected?
MF:I guess this is close to the future I expected. It’s not
the utopia I dreamed about, but it also isn’t the glow-in-the-dark nuclear
wasteland that was our worst-case scenario back in the 20th century.
I’m not one of those ancient 1960s freaks who whine about the revolution being
a lost boulevard of broken dreams. The gay movement, despite a fatal plague,
has made great advances. Feminism is changing the face of society. We warned of
a lot of current dangers, especially in the area of the environment and the
spread of global totalitarian capitalism, but we were ignored, often ridiculed,
and now the price is being paid. Yes, we told you so, but you chose to believe
the oil baron’s media shills! The current media environment is nothing short of
bonkers since Craig’s List gutted the newspapers – both mainstream and
alternative – by taking away the classified ads. “50 Shades of Grey” is a
bestseller while small independent imprints are publishing any worthwhile
writing and inspired experiments in print. Literature and especially poetry is
rapidly coming a wholly DIY business – only business is hardly the right word
since no money is being made on the web except by Amazon. Sony can’t keep free
Bob Dylan off YouTube; creativity on the internet – that may well be the
repository of most popular creativity – can’t be supported by paid corporate
advertising and t-shirts. Ultimately the web may spawn a form of
cyber-socialism since capitalism can’t really handle it except by constantly
reconfiguring the hard and software to sell us new but hardly improved versions
of the same old shit..
OM: In your autobiography “Give the Anarchist a Cigarette”,
you describe your time on the scene in London in the 60's, and it reads to me
as having been ground zero for the “Modern Age”. In many ways it seems more
modern than the present, despite our technological advances. There was an
energy and excitement about the future, and revolutionary changes in all
aspects of life. Where do you think that went?
MF: In the 1960s, we were on our way to the Moon; we thought
we were going to Mars and Stanley Kubrick told us we’d make it to the moons of
Jupiter by 2001. We took our drugs and believed all things were possible. The
floodgates looked wide open, even as the corporate filters were closing on us.
Obviously I am extremely disappointed that all we’ve now got in the future is
fancy phones, robot drones, CCTV and Twitter. Some developments are nothing
short of bizarre. The Black Panther Party is nostalgic history, but America
elects center right black president. Norman Spinrad predicted in his 1969 novel
“Bug Jack Barron” that, by around 1980, Acapulco Golds – legal packaged marijuana – is sold
across the counter. In reality the War On Drugs drags on into a new century and
is close to destroying Mexico. Where do I think the energy and excitement went?
I think it got hard when it ceased to be just a sex, drugs, and rock & roll
culture war and we hit the real thing. We were taking on the whole concept of
capitalism. It might not look like it, but capitalism is fighting for its life
and capitalism fights hard and dirty.
OM: Are you seeing signs of real revolution anywhere now?
MF: I think
it’s all around us. There’s Occupy, there’s the One Percent. But, for the
moment, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for America. A century ago the
Bolsheviks had no trouble motivating a Russian underclass that was starving and
oppressed by Cossacks. How you move a proletariat that weighs 500 pounds, lives
on animal fat and high fructose corn syrup, and is hard wired to Fox News and
the Bible is beyond me. You have to look past the USA and think more
internationally. Kids in the UK went one a mindless instinctive rampage looting
and burning. The workers in Greece and Spain have been pushed much too close to
the edge by the so-called austerity – a racket that’s truly nothing more than a
global scam for the rich to get all of the money. They’re mad as hell and not going
to take it much longer. Then there’s the Arab Spring in the Middle East, which
is a real AK47 shooting revolution. The only problem there is it will most
likely be taken over by jihadists who will drag it back into a very nasty
thirteenth century. I hear interesting things coming out of Bangalore, the
Indian DIY Silicon Valley. Indeed, my revolutionary bets are on the “BRICK”
nations – Brazil, Russia, India, China and Korea. Pussy Riot may be showing us
all the way of the future.
OM: In
addition to being too fat to fight, Americans are too medicated as well. In the last issue of OBSOLETE! we ran a
story called "Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnoses as Mentally Ill",
in which psychiatrist Bruce Levine lays out how the American medical
establishment is actively engaged in maintaining the status quo by medicating
away dissent. On the other end,
kids in the Northwest are getting arrested for possession of anarchist
literature, essentially thought crimes. I know that the UK is surpassing even
the US in CCTV use and other high tech surveillance- since returning to live in
the England, do you see that having an effect on the national consciousness?
MF: This
shit has been going on at least since Napoleon banged up The Marquis de Sade in
the lunatic asylum at Charenton, Let’s not forget that De Sade – aside from
being a world class perv – was also an early utopian socialist. Stalin was very
good at locking away dissidents in mental hospitals. In the US ECT and lobotomy
were 20th century favourites for keeping the rebellious in line.
Think of Francis Farmer or the fictional McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoos
Nest. Nurse Ratched is the scourge of though crime. In the Levittown,
production-line conformity of the 1950s, the CIA had a mission goal of creating
what they dubbed the “psycho-civilized society”. Totalitarian capitalism where
conformity would be maintained with speed, barbiturates, and meprobamate happy
pills (Milltowns) a pre-Valium tranquilliser, reinforcing a constant barrage of
anti-Soviet better-dead-than-Red paranoia and massive sexual repression. I
believe Elvis Presley and rock & roll did a whole lot to upset that apple
cart.
I would
venture that a slightly different perspective on the war on drugs is that it’s
a face-off between Ritalin, Adderall, Valium, Prozac and Thorazine on one side
and pot, acid, MDMA, and DMT (if we could get it) on the other. It’s the
lockdown drugs against the liberating drugs. Those are the chemical battle
lines.
I don’t
worry about CCTV too much because I’m so fucking ancient I don’t participate in
street actions any more, I do notice that teen fashions now tend to conceal the
face – masks, hoodies, balaclavas etc. (Pussy Riot), anything to hide the
facial biometrics. I’m hoping we will have a future fad for really elaborate
renaissance-style masks.
OM: At some
point in the 70's you turned from writing for the underground press and song
writing to writing Sci Fi. I first got on board with The Song of Phaid the
Gambler
in the
early 80's, but then went back to DNA Cowboys and other earlier stuff. How did you start
writing Sci Fi- were you a fan as a kid and does that relate in any way to the
political or musical sides of your work? There is a thread of Sci Fi
sensibility in the bands you have written for- Hawkwind, Mötorhead....
I really
don’t have a neat answer for this. I was a space cadet before I was a rocker.
It’s like the two halves of my brain and it’s all interconnected. I started at
five years old with a Brit comic Dan Dare Pilot of The Future and Flash Gordon
and just sailed on from there. Sci Fi has such potential for stretching one’s
imagination. The path led through Arthur C. Clarke, Orwell, Phil Dick, Ellison,
Mike Moorcock, (who is a friend) and on to Uncle Bill Burroughs (who was a
mentor), which meshed neatly with the surreal “Gates Of Eden” period of Bob
Dylan. The DNA Cowboys books were really an attempt to set a narrative in a
quasi-Dylan world. And of course, Sci Fi was an essential preparation for
psychedelic drugs. It’s also a perfect medium for satire and oblique political
commentary When I started, I didn’t really didn’t give up anything else, I was
working at the NME and writing songs with Lemmy and Larry Wallis and later Andy
Colquhoun with whom I still work today. I just wasn’t singing in a band right
then which gave me some time on my hands and you can only watch so much
television after the bars close. This all makes perfect sense to me. I don’t
know about anyone else.
OM: Sci Fi has been very much
fan-driven since it's earliest days, as was rock and roll. The
"Fanzine" goes back to early 20th century amateur Sci Fi
publications, long before the pre-internet punk rock "zine"
explosion. Now, the blogosphere is like one giant fanzine. As a veteran
of the indie publishing scene, what roll do you see for indie book publishers
in the coming years?
Whatever
future I might have in print – especially now I’m concentrating on poetry and
experimental fiction – would seem to be entirely in indie publishing. There’s
essentially no longer any point in dealing with the major publishing houses in
NYC or London. They only want to publish Harry Potter, 50 Shades of Grey and
cookbooks. The real question is how much of the work I’m doing will be in
print. I firmly believe that popular art and popular culture always adapts
itself to the prevailing technology. The 1960s underground press – particularly
the very colourful one like Oz (UK) and The Oracle (Bay Area) – got real jiggy
with the web offset printing. Punk zines of the 1970s where make possible by
fairly sophisticated copier machines like the Cannon 500. Now we have all the
ramifications of the internet from Twitter to YouTube, to Pirate Bay. On the
other hand, people still have a need for tangible objects from the past. The
obvious example is music on vinyl. (Or Obsolete) I could see a lot of my
fiction coming out as ebooks. (Although I do see a problem with a lack of
visual reinforcement. Where would all those Conan books have been without the
Frank Frazetta covers?) Other stuff, especially poetry lends itself better to
print. Book will increasingly become object rather than just delivery systems
for information. They will be read but also be treasured, collected, and put on
shelves or left lying around to impress visitors. All in all, I’m open to
anything, open to offers, and riding into the purple sunset to see what happens
next. Right now I’m pushing the novelette Road Movie that is published by Penny
Ante. The UK indie publisher Headpress will be bringing out the first deluxe
hardback edition of Elvis Died For Somebody’s Sins But Not Mine, which is a
mammoth “greatest hits” collection of my essays, commentary, short stories
etc., and I also wrote a learned introduction to a coffee table collection
called Classic Rock Posters. And back catalogue is still up on Amazon. (Mick
has left the computer.)
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