Too High Too Far Too Soon - Simon Mason

TOO HIGH TOO FAR TOO SOON –

SIMON MASON

There was a nagging familiarity with Simon Mason's memoir, Too High Too Far Too Soon, that was impossible to shake off. I kept looking at the section of photographs of the author included within its pages and thinking 'Do I know this man? Have I met him or seen him somewhere before?' Then finally on page 275 there it was: 'As well as sharing a house, they also rented a studio together in Easton and over the following years, whenever I was passing through, we'd all hang out, either at the workspace, The Plough pub or various free parties and festivals'.

Simon is talking about the neighbourhood where I used to live in Bristol and my then local pub, The Plough. The 'they' he refers to is Banksy and his flatmate who did indeed frequent from time to time the same pub. It's a small world.

The title of Simon Mason's book is taken from the Waterboys song, The Whole Of The Moon, and he describes the pivotal moment when whilst on LSD he watched them perform at Glastonbury Festival in 1986. I was there too and though I wasn't on acid, from what I remember they were indeed very good, The Whole Of The Moon being for everyone watching them the very high point of the set.

The book starts with him writing about Weston-super-Mare where he grew up and the drugs he started taking whilst living there. Weston-super-Mare, of course, is next to Bristol and was always well known to be a place where heroin could be scored quite easily. I was never into heroin though I knew a fair few people who were. I was never into crack cocaine either, unlike Simon who discovered it whilst living in Los Angeles having flown over to America for a 'holiday' at the age of eighteen.

As you might gather, Simon's book is all about drugs and rock'n'roll and his experiences of both whilst traversing their respective worlds, which as everyone knows is essentially one and the same world.

It's not the most difficult thing to write a book about your drug-taking experiences. If you've ever done drugs then you're going to have some anecdotes to tell. If – as Joe Strummer once sang – you've ever been a 'drug prowling wolf who looks so sick in the sun' then you're going to probably have a lot more. Did I ever say about the time me and my friends once had a gun pulled on us by some Jamaican Yardie at some free party? Probably not because it's not of much interest to anyone else and the same goes for a lot of Simon's anecdotes.

Getting mugged at gun-point on Venice Beach as he informs us he was is all well and good but of little interest to others. On the other hand, taking Bez of the Happy Mondays up to the travellers field at Glastonbury Festival to score some opium is of interest, if only limited. This is what Simon informs us he does and it's his very first foray into supplying drugs to the stars and his first tentative steps into making it into a career.

1994 and Simon's back at Glastonbury Festival and this time he's got his own tent in the fenced-off camping area at the back of the pyramid stage where he's set himself up as the main on-site dealer, with members of Oasis being some of his best customers. The drawback being that in a bid to ingratiate himself with the band, Simon's giving his drugs to Oasis for free and though it leads to him introducing them to the audience at T in The Park before they make their entrance on stage – that's about it. Essentially, he's paying for the privilege of hanging out with them.

There's still profit to be had from selling to normal punters and journalists but the cost of glad ragging with what is soon to be one of the biggest bands in the world doesn't come cheap. The only payback apart from his five seconds of fame introducing them on stage being some good anecdotes derived from the whole experience.

When he first meets Oasis he chops out some lines of coke for them as a freebie and after finishing off, notices the rolled-up £20 note he's also supplied has vanished. For the first and only time one of them asks how much he's selling it for?

'Sixty a gram,' Simon tells him to which he's asked if he can do it for fifty? Simon agrees and is given his rolled-up £20 note back and told the rest will be sorted out later...

The band's van breaks down on the motorway whilst on the way to a festival and when the AA arrive they're told it will have to be towed away. The AA man tells them he's got space for four passengers to get them to their destination and the others will have to wait a few hours for the tow truck to arrive to ferry away the others. So the lead guitarist steps up and makes an executive decision:

'Right, obviously I'm going with the AA man now, cos I'm in fookin' charge and I've got press interviews in three hours' time. Simon, you're coming with me for obvious reasons'. Simon doesn't say which band members were left behind but it's pretty funny to think that the guitarist viewed Simon as being more important than them...

Later on at the festival, the same guitarist tells Simon 'You are my personal chemist this weekend and as such you need to remain within 20 feet of me for the duration, OK?'

'Of course, it'll be my pleasure,' Simon replies.

'It's your fookin' job, Simon!' the guitarist tells him. No mention is made, however, of payment...

As Oasis ascend to super-stardom, Simon's services are not deemed as being indispensable and he's ditched, or rather the band simply fail to make contact with him ever again. Life goes on, however, and Simon's next plan is to make a bid for fame and fortune himself by forming his own band. Unfortunately, all that happens is that he ends up being a fully-fledged junky strung out in heavens high hitting an all-time low.

As an insight into the depths a person can sink in pursuit of heroin, Simon's book is as good as the multitude of other books written on the same subject. From William Burroughs, to Christiane F, to Shaun Ryder's autobiography. Apart from a few of the anecdotes its saving grace is the self-depreciating, black sense of humour that runs through it. At times, the dialogue is even quite comical in a Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels kind of way. Which makes you wonder if during the writing of it Simon had one eye on the possibility of it being made into a film? It's all there but the problem is that it's all been done before with Trainspotting.

Nowadays Simon Mason is a recovering addict who sings and plays guitar in a band called Hightown Pirates. They're a relic from the past, of course, ploughing an epic, Rolling Stones/Eric Clapton groove but for all that are surprisingly good. They're never going to be massive and I suspect Simon knows this but that's okay because the bottom line is that Simon's very lucky to still be alive and that anything he does from now on whether it be making music, writing a book or just being a good father and helping other people is a bonus. A little gift to the world as a way of saying both 'sorry' and 'thank you'.

John Serpico

Fighters Against Fascism - Max Arthur

FIGHTERS AGAINST FASCISM – MAX ARTHUR

“I ain't got no heroes,” as Johnny Rotten once said “They're all useless.” and overnight a generation identified and adopted 'No more heroes' as a totem. We were all so much older then and we're younger than that now, however, and after being round the block a few times we see now that there are indeed heroes in this world, with some more deserving of the accolade than others. The International Brigades – those men and women from all corners of the globe who made their way to Spain during the Spanish Civil War in defense of the Republic against Franco and his fellow Fascist supporters – are such heroes to me.

Fighters Against Fascism – British Heroes Of The Spanish Civil War by Max Arthur is a collection of the fascinating and inspiring testaments of various British men and women who answered the call in 1936 and headed to Spain. There are eight testaments in total, this being the total number of those still alive at the time of writing who went there and survived to live to a ripe old age. Written in 2009 they are now, however, all departed, serving to make the book more poignant and more important than ever.

The first thing that is apparent when reading these testimonies is that they were all of the Left, but also that they were all working class and had all come from extreme poverty. As Jack Jones (who in later life went on to become the General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union) says: 'I was continuously struck by the working class background of most of the British and Irish who were fighting in Spain. This was the first working class war, in which people got involved directly, rather than being in an organised force in trenches. In that sense it was genuine warfare.'

Interestingly, he identifies an exception to this in the appearance of a young Ted Heath – future British Prime Minister – who was there as part of a five-man delegation from the Federation of University Conservative Associations. Though not there to take up arms, apparently Heath was genuinely supportive of the Spanish Republic as opposed to those in the Labour Party who advocated non-intervention who Jones held a strong feeling of repugnance towards. As Jones says, he had more support from Ted Heath than he had from the Labour leaders and in later life identified more with him than with Harold Wilson.

Heath was, however, an exception as exemplified in the testimonial of Bob Doyle, a former IRA member who whilst being held captive in a Fascist concentration camp in San Pedro de Cardena was visited by a British government delegation headed by Lady Chamberlain, widow of the British Foreign Secretary, Austin Chamberlain, who was the brother of the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.

Whilst inspecting the line of prisoners, Lady Chamberlain asked them why they had come to Spain, to which they all replied “To stop Fascism before it comes to England”. According to Doyle, she probably would have preferred someone to say “I was in Hyde Park one day and someone came up and asked me if I wanted to go to Spain and as I was unemployed, I joined up”. Disgusted with the actual replies, she turned to her escort and said “I say, can you pick me out an intelligent one?”

All of the testimonials give mention to Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts and indeed, Jack Edwards says in his testimonial 'If it was me I'd have bloody shot Mosley if I'd had a gun. I would: I hated the bastard. He was against the working class and that was it'.

What also binds them all is their conviction that if other governments had supported the Spanish Republic and quashed the Fascist threat in its infancy, the course of history might have been different, and perhaps there would have been no Second World War.

According to Penny Feiwel, who went to Spain as a nurse: 'If the Fascists in Spain were beaten, there wouldn't be any danger of air raids over London. I never ceased to believe this, all the time I was in Spain. Spain was a warning of what would happen to all of us. If we let Spain go, then it would be our fate too, to go to war'.

According to Sam Lesser, an East London boy growing steadily wary of the rise of the Blackshirts: 'The Spanish could have beaten Fascism, and could have stopped Hitler and Mussolini. I know it sounds idiotic to say so – we might even have averted or avoided the Second World War'.

And according to Jack Jones again: 'At that time Hitler and Mussolini weren't the enemy of everyone in Britain, but at the time of the civil war there were Mosleyites – Fascists openly marching around in black shirts. The Second World war ended any idea of sympathy for Fascism. Our cause was justified subsequently, so in a way we feel ours was a little part but in a progressive direction, justified later by the war against Fascism in general, in which the whole country was involved'.

When Johnny Rotten declared that he didn't have any heroes, he himself became a hero of sorts but at the same time forged a contradiction and a conundrum. Rotten inadvertently threw a question mark over the word that ultimately could only be resolved subjectively. The word 'hero' comes always with context and it's the context that always needs to be considered before agreeing whether the attribute is fitting or not.

When it comes to the people featured in Max Arthur's book and indeed to all those who joined the International Brigades, there is no doubt in my mind that they are heroes whose bravery, foresight, compassion and conviction should be applauded and forever remembered. The word 'hero' is too easily bandied about these days as indeed so too the word 'Fascist'. Max Arthur's book and the testimonies therein underscores the true meaning of the word.

As La Pasionaria Dolores Ibarruri declared in her farewell speech to the International Brigades at a parade at which more than 300,000 people lined the streets: 'Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, Republicans – men of different colours, differing ideology, antagonistic religions – yet all profoundly loving liberty and justice, you came and offered yourselves to us unconditionally. You gave us everything – your youth or your maturity, your science or your experience, your blood and your lives, your hopes and aspirations – and you asked us for nothing. But yes, it must be said, you did want a post in battle, you aspired to the honour of dying for us.

Banners of Spain! Salute these many heroes! Be lowered to honour so many martyrs!

You can go proudly. You are history. You are legend.'

John Serpico

My Eighty-One Years Of Anarchy - May Picqueray

MY EIGHTY-ONE YEARS OF ANARCHY– 

MAY PICQUERAY

Obscure anarchists, aren't they the best? There's nothing wrong, of course, with the anarchist grandees such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, and Proudhon etc but they are in a way but the very tip of the spear and it's the more obscure ones that give strength to the whole length of that spear, without which the tip would be pretty useless. The obscure anarchists are like a metal horseshoe hidden inside a boxing glove ensuring the delivered blow is a knock-out one.

A case in point is May Picqueray. Born in France in 1898, even as a child Picqueray always felt she was the rebel of the family though it wasn't until the age of twenty when she moved to Paris and met a Serbian medical student who introduced her to anarchist ideas that she became active in actual Anarchist organisations. Two years later she ended up sending a parcel bomb to the US Embassy in France as part of a campaign on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. Whilst this act achieved its desired aim as in catapulting the Sacco and Vanzetti case onto the front pages of the French newspapers, it was in the end to no avail and the two men were sent to the electric chair only to be redeemed decades later after their innocence was proven. From there on, however, there was no stopping her.

My Eighty-One Years Of Anarchy is May Picqueray's memoir and whilst it shows that her life has not always been an easy one it shows at the same time that it's been a life worth living. A finer attitude to life, in fact, is hard to imagine. Picqueray was a natural born anarchist so in that sense her fate was sealed from the start. There was simply no avoiding it and subsequently was no avoiding or turning away from injustice when she saw it.

Her story is a sprawling one, taking in many global, historical events. In 1922, for example, she travelled to Moscow as part of the Metalworkers Federation to attend a Trade Union congress there. After witnessing first hand the desperate poverty and hunger out in the streets she mounted a table at the sumptuous banquet laid on for the delegates and loudly denounced the whole affair. How dare these workers' delegates gorge themselves and stuff their faces when Russian workers were perishing of hunger, she cried.

At another grand meal, this time in the Kremlin, Trotsky himself was there and out of the blue asked Picqueray to sing them all a song 'just like in France'. She responded by singing a French anarchist song. On later meeting Trotsky face to face, she refused to shake his hand.

'Unwilling to shake my hand, comrade May. Why would that be?' Trotsky asked her.

'I am an anarchist,' she replied 'and we are divided by Makhno and Krondstadt.'

'I too am an anarchist,' Trotsky claimed 'but the Russian people are an ignorant people. It is necessary to evolve and, for that to happen, we must go through a transitional phase.'

'Which would last how long?' she responded.

'As long as it takes.' Trotsky replied.

Without doubt, it was a curious and fascinating exchange.

Two years later back in France, Picqueray ended up harbouring Nestor Makhno and his family after having fled Russia following the decimation of his troops by the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine. Around the same time she also got to know Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, ending up at one point typing up the manuscripts for Goldman's autobiography.

Come the Second World War, Picqueray concentrated her activities on helping the many Spanish refugees thrown into French prison camps after fleeing Spain following the victory of Franco and his forces in the Spanish Civil War. During the German occupation of France she helped to secure and fabricate papers for the resistance and people on the run, as well as harbouring resisters and smuggling people to safety.

Many years later she was – as almost to be expected – involved in the events of May 1968, and in 1974 she launched her own anarchist newspaper entitled Le Refractaire which she remained at the helm of until her passing in 1983 at the age of 85.

Picqueray starts her book with a long quote from the French anarchist Sebastien Faure, whose words set her off at a tender age and continued to guide her throughout her whole life. The bottom line, as Picqueray puts it is that it is on love that anarchy is based.

Picqueray's final message at the end of her book is a passionate one and sums up one of the main reasons for her writing it: 'Let the young take up the torch, let them learn and be unsparing in their efforts. Should events evolve, the anarchist philosophy is still relevant. It is achievable, and it is the most beautiful thing, the thing that will bring happiness through freedom and joie de vivre.

Long live Anarchy! Go for it, young people! Go for it!... for Love, Fraternity, and Liberty!'

My Eighty-One Years Of Anarchy is May Picqueray passing on the anarchist baton to the next generation in the continuing fight for a brighter and better future.

John Serpico