TOM VAGUE’S HOLLYWOOD BABYLON W11


INTRO
1 NOTTING HILL IN BYGONE DAYS
2 NOTTING HELL/HEAVEN W11
3 SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
4 HOUSES OF THE UNHOLY
5 ONE FOOT IN THE GROVE
6 MIDDLE EARTH W11
7 THINGS LOOK GREAT IN NOTTING HILL GATE, WE ALL SIT AROUND AND MEDITATE
8 HOUSES OF THE UNHOLY REVISITED

PART 3
SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

Performance Donald Cammell/Nic Roeg 1970 ‘Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name, but what’s confusing you is the nature of my game, just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints, as heads is tails just call me Lucifer, because I’m in need of some restraint.’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ Rolling Stones 1968

The Notting Hill film, defining both Heaven W11 and Notting Hell, was made in 1968 (not ’98) by Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg, starring the most notorious local film address (apart from 10 Rillington Place), ‘81’ (really 25) Powis Square. Leading the supporting cast, Mick Jagger sold his soul to satin as the jaded rock star ‘Turner Purple’ (possibly referring to the diabolist psychedelic group the Purple Gang). As such, he basically plays himself or a Stones amalgam of himself, Keith and Brian, with traces of Michael X, Syd Barrett and Jimmy Page.

The Number of the Beast In Peter Wollen’s synopsis, ‘Performance brought together Castaneda, Aleister Crowley, Escher, tantra, ‘moss-encrusted caves of goblins and elves’ – caves in which Jagger, as the doomed King Goblin, pirouetted and pranced with his neon wand through a bewitched court, waiting for the juggler in the basement to finish him off.’ Most of this was conjured up by the writer/director Donald Cammell, who was known as Aleister Crowley’s ‘godson’ due to his father Charles being a friend of ‘the Great Beast 666’, ‘wickedest man in the world’, etc, and the author of a book about him. Donald explained his “interest in magick” as “a matter of being conditioned, because I was brought up in a house where magick was real.” (In Crowleyan terms magic is always spelt with a k.)

Turner’s doppelganger or ‘demon brother’ gangster alter ego, ‘Chas’ (played by James Fox, after Marlon Brando turned down the role), has to do a runner from his Ronnie Kray/Rachman-style boss, ‘Harry Flowers’ (Johnny Shannon), after killing his former friend ‘Joey Maddocks’ (Anthony Valentine). Having introduced himself to Turner’s girlfriend ‘Therber’ (Anita Pallenberg), as an old friend of their basement lodger Noel, “in the entertainment business”, Chas prophetically takes the place of the Jimi Hendrix lookalike (in a Notting Hill house with a Germanic girl).

After Chas goes through the looking glass and enters ‘Turner’s house’ it’s no longer 25 Powis Square but 15 Lowndes Square, Knightsbridge, the house of the rogue Tory MP Leonard Plugge. Turner’s house is steeped in magical references: As Turner invokes Chas, he describes him as “A jongleur, the third oldest profession, you’re a performer of natural magic”, while his other girlfriend Lucy says Turner spends his time reading “magic stories”. In the Happy Mondays’ ‘Performance’ track, Shaun Ryder sings the film line: ‘One day he was admiring his reflection in his favourite mirror when he realised what a freaky little beastie man he was.’

Hassan-I-Sabbah and the Assassins During the magic mushroom-induced mind blowing of Chas, Turner says “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”; quoting ‘the last words of the old man of the mountains’ Hassan-I-Sabbah, which echo Aleister Crowley’s most notorious and celebrated line, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’ Then he strums ‘Come On In My Kitchen’ by the blues legend Robert Johnson, who sold his soul for rock’n’roll at the crossroads. The classic Performance soundtrack includes an instrumental entitled ‘Natural Magic’, and ‘The Hashishin’ featuring the American Indian singer Buffy Sainte-Marie and Ry Cooder. This track, and Turner’s accompanying potted history of Hassan-I-Sabbah and the assassins, has been dismissed by Michael Moorcock as a hippy cliché, but post 9/11 has the heaviest resonance of all the film’s mystical sub-plots. There’s also some Arthurian mythology in there.

Their Satanic Majesties’ Request With his identity crisis complete, Fox/Jagger, as Chas/Turner, walks out of 25 Powis Square to John Lennon’s awaiting Rolls, and the 60s were over – bar a bit more chanting and protesting. In the immediate aftermath, most of the film’s main participants turned to hard drugs. Anita Pallenberg was accused of witchcraft, James Fox became a born-again Christian, and even Mick admits to losing it, as Cammell’s Crowleyan ‘Turner’ persona stayed with him to Altamont. Donald Cammell once said regarding the notorious Stones gig where hells angels ran amok killing a black audience member: “This movie was finished before Altamont, and Altamont actualised it.” At the time of Performance, the Stones were at the height of their powers, between ‘Their Satanic Majesties’ Request’ and ‘Beggars’ Banquet’ (featuring ‘Sympathy for the Devil’).

Cammell eventually went on to make The Demon Seed with Julie Christie, while Nic Roeg, who still lives in Notting Hill, has directed such supernatural classics as Walkabout, Don’t Look Now with Julie Christie again, The Man Who Fell to Earth with David Bowie, Eureka and The Witches.

King Mob’s Devils Party in Notting Hell As Performance was being filmed, another Notting Hill community campaign was launched in International Times by the Situationist King Mob group, after 6 of the Powis Square stormers were charged with causing ‘malicious damage’ to the gardens’ gates. When Russian tanks were quelling the student uprising in Czechoslovakia, the King Mob flyer twinned Powis Square with Prague’s Wenceslas Square, and reads like the line-up of a punk rock gig: ‘Powis (Wenceslas) Square in Notting Hell for the Devils Party – the Damned, the Sick, the Screwed, the Despised, the Thugs, the Drop-outs, the Scared, the Witches, the Workers, the Demons, the Old – give us a hand, otherwise we’ve had it.’

Michael X and Leo the Last Michael de Freitas, the former Powis Square landlord-turned-Black Power leader, Michael X/Abdul Malik, ended up more of a British Manson than Malcolm, back in Trinidad on an Obeah trip, accused and duly hanged for murder. One of the victims was Gale Benson, the daughter of Leonard Plugge, the owner of ‘Turner’s house’. In the Souvenir Programme for the Official Hanging of Michael Abdul Malik (with poems, stories and sayings by the Condemned) by John Michell and Bill Levy of IT, he was introduced as the ‘W11 club man with the fatal amiability that led him to assume the fantastic roles.’ In spite of his pivotal role in local and black British history, not all that surprisingly, Michael remains a barely mentioned pariah figure. However, his ghost haunts Performance, Jean-Luc Godard’s One Plus One: Sympathy for the Devil, which features ‘Michel X’ graffiti (as well as Mick Jagger again), and Leo the Last.

John Boorman’s 1969 film captured the local psychogeography as successfully as Cammell and Roeg. Or succeeded in making an equally ‘infuriating symbolic fantasy’, as far as Halliwell was concerned. Marcel Mastroianni (from La Dolce Vita) stars as Leo, an alienated aristocrat who brings about a ‘firework revolution’, in which his façade house across Testerton Street (on the site of the Lancaster West Estate) is destroyed.

4 HOUSES OF THE UNHOLY