1/ Tuck in Boys [ Back to excerpts ]

London's psychedelic clubs in 1967 were stupendous palaces of sensory excess. UFO, a former Irish ballroom in Tottenham Court Road, was the best of the lot, the most psychedelic, with its black and Day-Glo decor, UV lighting and the all pervasive smell of incense and furtive dope-smoking, but the more whimsical Middle Earth in Covent Garden also had a beautiful vibe. The music in both places was more or less interchangeable- top live underground acts like Pink Floyd, Tyrannosaurus Rex, featuring another Tooting boy, Marc Bolan, and Tomorrow, plus the latest records imported from the USA. Entering one of these clubs was like entering a forbidden world. Each time you crossed the threshold of UFO, which incidentally was the brainchild of John Hopkins, who also founded International Times, it felt like you left your parents' generation's values and cynicism behind. Of course that vibe waned in time, and the club scene became just another money-spinner. But for a while, for this sixteen-year old, the London club scene was pretty damned close to Nirvana.

August 2nd 1967 was our parents' silver wedding anniversary, and they went away to New York for a month to celebrate. Given my father's surly demeanour I canÕt imagine that the trip was an especially festive affair, although to this day my mother still rhapsodises about the night they spent in Greenwich Village. Left alone for the first time, Brian and I had the most fabulous August in London. It was hot and exciting and beautiful. We met Pete and Al, a couple of American draft dodgers on the run in Europe, and they came and stayed with us for the whole month. They were like the John The Baptist and the Jesus Christ of acid. These were the guys we had been waiting for. They turned us on for the first time with some acid they had brought with them from California, and we had the most fantastic trip. It was funny and mellow and full of the most wonderful hallucinations. We did the usual stuff that everyone did on acid, listening to music, looking at paintings or just goofing around. It had none of the paranoia or the edginess that some later trips had. I could understand perfectly why people were speaking of it as a deeply spiritual drug, and I understood immediately what a powerful tool it was for increasing self-awareness. I became an instant apostle.

A subsequent acid trip came to an abrupt and extremely disagreeable conclusion. One Sunday we were tripping at our friend John Skinner's house. Skinner was very groovy, a sort of Captain Trips-figure who said the word 'nice' a lot, which was a prerequisite in those days. He had a goatee beard and wire glasses and an ultra-violet light in his bedroom, which made the Hendrix posters on his walls look fabulously other-worldly. He loved to take drugs. Around midday his friend Dave Rivett dropped by, and, seeing we were all out of our heads, he offered to cook us Sunday lunch. Dave Rivett worked as an undertaker, and was a bluff, thickset fellow who would have been more impressive if his voice had not sounded like he had ingested an overdose of helium. He dressed in the morbid attire of his profession, and had the appropriate lugubriousness, but Rivett was a major drug taker and prankster. While we got deeper and deeper into our trips, Rivett beavered away in the kitchen, and after what must have been a couple of hours preparation, he beat the gong and summoned us to the lunch table. He had set the table as if for a formal luncheon, with glassware and silverware gleaming, and white china plates decked with linen napkins. In the middle of the table sat a huge platter topped with a silver dome. Once we were seated, he poured wine into our glasses and with great ceremony whipped off the silver dome to reveal a contorted human hand, which he had roasted with potatoes and parsnips, sitting in the centre of the platter. It was cooked to a shrivelled, golden brown perfection, the skin like pork crackling or those wind-dried ducks you see hanging in restaurant windows in Chinatown. The fingers had curled up into a desperate grasp in the heat, and it was surrounded on the plate by Brussels sprouts and the roasted root vegetables. We gazed in mute horror for an instant, thinking that we must be hallucinating. Then we all simultaneously recoiled as Rivett entreated us with his helium voice to 'Tuck in, boys.' It was a monstrous prank and it freaked us out completely. In retrospect I think I find it was the premeditation of the act that was the most gruesome part. The fact that he had arrived at Skinner's with the hand in his briefcase, the outrage already planned.

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