A Hero for High Times a Younger Reader's Guide
T his book is not for me. Nor was it meant to be. I am pretty much the age of its star witness and involuntary co-author – the old man of the woods, the retired thief, friend of the future famous and prompted taleteller, Mr David Robert Rowberry (AKA Bob), who is a fantastic but evidence-supported conduit to the vanished culture of Freakdom. A Hero for High Times is Ian Marchant's monumental defence of the alternative way, and Bob is the capitalised Hero, an honourably weathered and charity shop outfitted crusty who dabbles in dragon sculpture and free-festival jewellery. Smell the woodsmoke, the wellington boots, cats, dope and hot metalwork. "Low mist has lain over Radnorshire like a mildewing duvet for about a week."
Here, then, is a formidable double act: the Ancient Mariner who struggles, with distant mountain-focused gaze, towards the impossible conclusion of a smoky monologue, and the eager, overweight, stool-splintering theorist, born at the dawn of the action, mopping his wrinkled brow and arriving panting too late, with primed recording device, into an abandoned yurt. Marchant brandishes a pad of strategic questions to nudge his yarn-spinner to the next topic: situationism, skiffle, Gurdjieff, Profumo, CND, women's liberation, Glastonbury, the Angry Brigade, drugs and more drugs. The old man skins up and plays along. "The easiest way to live a superficially non-alienated life," the author concludes, "is just to have lots of money."
Marchant, a motorway-enduring university lecturer and sweary festival performer, sometimes in drag as a comedy vicar, has become resigned to the know-nothing, screen-bothering innocence of his students. So? Like, yeah. Like ... so? They are the ones he is now addressing. In the breezy, know-what-I-mean fashion of the professional explainer, the teacher breaks off – "Let me elucidate" – to bring "younger readers" closer to the fire. This is a decent man, not quite sure of his sea legs, on a sinking ship. He charms us with the apparently disingenuous calibration of his own faults and absurdities.
A heavy-spectacled Sancho Panza of the A44, Marchant has located, and now celebrates, with much dogged internet fact-checking, Bob Rowberry, his better-than-truth survivalist Don Quixote. And away the bickering pair spin, riff and counter-riff, coming together at all seasons to make a record of the heady days of Long John Baldry, Ken Colyer, Quentin Crisp and Bob Cobbing. The gigs, scams, fashions and fads to be dredged up over regular infusions of coffee and evaporated milk. Young Clapton moving from banjo to guitar. Rod Stewart harmonica-busking at a train station. Irish Republican connections of Howard Marks dropping round to threaten Bob's mum. Behind the public geniality of Freakdom were the private enforcers in the shadows, cold-eyed entrepreneurs of alternative wealth-harvesting. Many of the liberties of the counterculture were bankrolled by sniffing aristocrats who could always find a spare gamekeeper's cottage.
Rowberry, Marchant reckons, with some justification, is the key to the entire enterprise. The man who owned the cat after which Procol Harum was named. "The first person to sell acid to RD Laing." The original importer of piss-cured Afghan coats – sometimes with hash makeweights – for hardcore Ladbroke Grove casuals and Portobello weekenders. Bob lived on the streets, "attacked by nine-year-olds with half-bricks" in Liverpool. He gifted scabies to a gay lover. And he lived, thanks to a girlfriend, a borrowed wife, in Hampstead affluence: Jaguar and Young Jaeger suits, handmade shirts from Burlington Arcade.
He was a friend of villains (the man who stabbed the Krays' Maltese heavy in a very painful place) and of rock stars on their way up or out. He was a lover of women (with compliant husbands and private incomes), but he never stayed with them for long. He was a Land Rover-trashing roadie and an intrepid traveller to countries about to become war zones. Passing through Iraq, he was interrogated by Saddam Hussein. His calling card was always his skill as a bodger and fixer, welder, marksman and reliable supplier of mood-enhancing pick-me-ups. And mugs of "poppy-head tea" for his winter-sickening amanuensis, the faithful recorder of the legend of resistance.
"I want to write about the Freaks and their culture," Marchant states: a jobbing author looking for a lineage with which to align his instinctive disaffection for aspects of the contemporary world, its greed and soullessness. So listen carefully, children, to a checklist of the British underground scene from 1956 (Suez, Russian tanks rolling into Budapest, Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel") to 1994 and the Criminal Justice Act, signifying the end for new age travellers and outdoor raves. Time for the enduring myths to be commodified and packaged: from counterculture to retail counter. To website and hipster vinyl stall. "The Freaks thought the world was broken, and they might have found a way of mending it." The Marchant mantra, embodied in the presence of Rowberry, as the off-road Thoreau of hippy retreat into the Green Desert of a mid-Wales diaspora, is authenticity. Bob's career-defining bad behaviour – petty criminality, drug trafficking, wife borrowing – is, beyond and above all else, authentic. No bullshit, no self-deception.
Marchant leads us gently towards a broken-down bus, with solar panels, parked alongside a corrugated shed, and gifted at peppercorn rent by a homeopathic practitioner to one heroic veteran of the counterculture. This amiable and engaging blog-doc is an Odyssey for elective outsiders. Here are real monsters and sirens of Soho and Presteigne, legions of the talkative dead, and a great rattletrap camper van voyage carrying us back to the point of origin.
The structural models for A Hero for High Times, as Marchant indicates, are Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters, the biography of a homeless man, time-reversed, and Jeff Nuttall's Bomb Culture, a work interweaving diary entries with less compelling cultural lectures. Marchant blends the two strands by dramatising the sequence of visits to Rowberry's camp. His sociological overview covers the ground thoroughly but tends towards pass notes for students with limited attention span. "Thoreau didn't look as we might expect a Freak to look." "Alienation is an idea based on the early writings of Marx."
A lovely parallel work, emerging a few months before Marchant's book, was the life-vision of a settler in a remote cottage in the Neath valley, an incomer one year older than Rowberry, the poet Chris Torrance. The first gathering of his serially produced epic, The Magic Door, published by an independent press, Test Centre, runs to 416 pages of observation, geology, delirium and witness. "The everyday mundane becomes lambent." For an adequate picture of those vanished high times, anecdote and information, you should read The Magic Door alongside A Hero for High Times. Because this is the moment, as Torrance confesses, for "a sort of desperate last interest in everything". With these miraculously fresh songs of place, he has proved that there is nothing more authentic than poetry.
- A Hero for High Times by Ian Marchant (Jonathan Cape, £16.99). To order a copy for £14.44, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
A Hero for High Times a Younger Reader's Guide
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/20/a-hero-for-high-times-by-ian-marchant-review
0 Response to "A Hero for High Times a Younger Reader's Guide"
Post a Comment