JOURNEY INTO MONTY'S BRAIN - PART 2
In
1969 we moved to Brighton: home of strange lunatics of all sorts. D.D.
was studying biochemistry at Sussex University and was a regular visitor.
One day he placed a pair of headphones on my head saying, "Listen
to this!" I heard wild crazy organs and an eerie voice welling up
from subterranean depths telling an hallucinogenic tale of a sea of fire.
A swirling wind echoed across my head as if it were a huge cavern, dissonant
roar of trumpets followed and the voice roared " I am the god of
hell fire!!!" It was, of course The Crazy World of Arthur Brown:
it electrified my mind in a way I shall never forget. (I have had the
good fortune to meet him since. He is a really approachable geezer and
has lost none of his fiery energy-may he continue to roast our brains
to eternity!) D.D. also played me Soft Machine Third and Quatermass (whatever
happened to them?)
D.D.
continued to astound me with his lights and home-made electronics and
with his help I recorded my first (?) "song" on a small battery-operated
reel-to-reel tape machine, which consisted of echoed and ring-modulated
voices and some acoustic guitar mutilation entitled "Black Mass by
the Pink Devils": not very musical but great fun!
I
had accumulated a large collection of plastic monsters and these became
the focus for elaborate bizarre and often hilarious games, years before
"Dungeons and Dragons" and computer fantasy. After a while a
complex mythology developed: the monsters lived on a highly polluted smashed-up
planet where they spent all their time fighting endless wars, destroying
things, having orgies and conducting dark rituals in honour of their demonic
deities. My personal favourite was called simply "the Skull"
who was very fond of defecation and other anal products. He had a chain
of sewage factories creating the appropriate atmosphere and odour for
this most insanitary world. Dr.S.: "He vas der safe container for
das Anal-Aggression!"
D.D.
introduced some complex ideas into the games: anti-matter, time travel
and editing, mutation of matter, telepathy and telekinesis etc. My father
kindly bought a shed at my request, in which we conducted fire rituals
with the monsters; I’m surprised we didn’t burn the thing down!
Later we were joined by H.J., a school friend who shared my uncle’s
talent for all things scientific. (I was more at home with artwork and
music and still have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the realms
of technology to this day!) H.J. and myself transformed the playing field
into something like Dante’s inferno: school was a camp designed for
the torture of souls! We also played "what do you want to be killed
by", which consisted of the dramatic enactment of some gruesome (but
also usually amusing) demise. The most over-the-top performance won.
The
first ever gig I went to was Slade supported by the Alex Harvey Band,
I still 10 so me mum took me! The second was the Soft Machine at Hove
Town Hall-what a revelation that was! Incredible fuzzy electronic noises,
unusual rhythms, strange looking brass instruments, and the most incredible
drum pyrotechnics I had ever heard! (John Marshall) I started buying records:
Pink Floyd, (already in decline), The White Noise, and Caravan…These
I played to merry death.
Live
we saw Herbie Hancock (before he went disco), Camel, Captain Beefheart,
and the amazing Ron Geesin. I began listening to John Peel and one day
after a wonderfully spacey introduction a weird gnomic voice bubbled forth
from the radio saying "…the story of Radio Gnome, the way in
which the pot-head-pixies of the planet Gong communicate b.b.b.b.brain
to b.b.b.b.brain!!!!!!!!!" This was the beginning of a long and strange
journey, that still continues.