A
Serious Life
DM Mitchell
2004
246mm x 174mm
Hard covers
424pp
ISBN 0 86130 114 5
DM Mitchell’s book-length
study of Savoy, as publishing and creative entity, from the 1970s to the
present.
Jacket design by John Coulthart
Banned,
Torn and Quartered: The Story of Savoy
b y D a v i
d K e r e k e s
From Headpress 4 (1992)
Revised for Critical Vision
(1995)
’MANCHESTER POLICE
SEIZED MORE THAN 350 copies of the novel two years ago, and last week the
magistrate, Mr Derrick Fairclough, declared it likely to “deprave and corrupt”
under Section Three of the Obscene Publications Act’.
History has a habit of repeating
itself. The above excerpt isn’t a reference to charges brought against
the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960, Last Exit To Brooklyn in 1968,
or Inside Linda Lovelace in 1976 , but to Lord Horror. And the source,
the New Statesman & Society, is dated 27 September 1991.
Lord Horror is a fictionalised life of the wartime traitor William Joyce
’Lord Haw-Haw’who broadcast propaganda messages from Germany to Britain
during the Second World War. He was hanged for treason on his return to
Britain in 1946. In the novel, Lord Horror searches for Hitler, who has
survived the war and taken refuge in a sea-bunker off the Malayan coast.
What seems to have upset Magistrate Fairclough is the virulent anti-Semitism
expressed in the book. However, the publishers declare that the work itself
is not anti-Semitic, only shocking and amoral. And they have their own
theory as to what lies at the heart of the furore. Lord Horror has a peripheral
character called ‘Appleton’, obviously based on James Anderton, the former
Chief Constable of Manchester. God’s Cop. In the novel, Anderton’s speeches
are put into Appleton’s mouthbut substituting “Jews” where Anderton referred
to gays.
Manchester-based Savoy is the publishing house responsible for the Lord
Horror novel. But Lord Horror isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of Savoy. Far
from it. Over the years, Savoy have been in constant pursual of the esoteric
and the imaginative. Their history of independent and controversial publishing
claims such luminaries as Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, William Burroughs,
and Jack Trevor Story. Not only that, Savoy are responsible for taboo-breaking
forays into the realm of comics: Their adaptation of Moorcock’s The Jewel
in the Skull stands as the first UK-originated graphic novel, while issue
No.1 of their title, Meng & Ecker, has become the first comic to be
banned in Britain. As well as Rock’n'Roll picture books on the likes of
Led Zeppelin and Ted Nugent, Savoy were behind Sinister Legends, the first
published work on The Cramps. They remain uncredited for Here To Go: Planet
R101, the celebrated volume on painter, poet and philosopher, Brion Gysin
(which, ultimately, came out as part of the RE/Search catalogue). More
recently, they have been involved in the production of peculiar dance-sleaze
records, ‘rediscovering’ Sixties pop idol PJ Proby, and getting him to
record TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ over an Edgard Varèse electronic
backing.
It was
Man Ray who said, “The Public? I think they must accept what comes to them…
People who don’t create have no right to make a choice in Art.” With each
freshly excavated idea, so, it seems, must come the inevitable CONFRONTATION
WITH THE ESTABLISHMENT. And Savoy are no strangers to such confrontation.
The Lord Horror debacle doesn’t herald the first police bust for Savoy,
nor the first obscenity prosecution. Savoy can barely put the proverbial
foot out the door without receiving a summons. Their retail outlets are
the butt of constant police ‘interest’, having received something in excess
of 60 raids over the years. They have been busted for everything from selling
bootleg vinyl, to stashing pornographic literature “behind a secret wall”.(1)
In years past, Savoy admit that it wasn’t so much the publishing house
that bothered the police, but more the Savoy shops. A combination of shrink-wrapped
pornography and a sound system playing “tapes pressured up high to limits
of aural tolerance” was simply too public a profile for the police to ignore.
Now it’s different. Now it is Savoy itself and the work they produce that
is the focus of attention.
The Greater Manchester Police don’t hold a monopoly on being pissed at
Savoy, however. At some point or another the company has managed to rub
the wrong way: United Features Syndicate Ltd, The Arts Council, a Manchester
restaurant, Rough Trade, WH Smith’s… But we run ahead of ourselves. All
and more will be revealed in good time in this, a tracing of the most glorious
history of the Savoy empire. In speaking with Michael Butterworth, one
of the founding members of the company, we shall be party to some dastardly
deeds and notorious Savoy artefacts. Here, then, follows the years and
circumstances preluding the declaration of the ‘Savoy Wars’.
THE SKY BEGINS ON THE GROUND
(2)
Independent to one another,
Michael Butterworth and David Britton were busy in the early-1970s producing
small press publications. For Britton it was Weird Fantasy, Bognor Regis,
and Crucified Toadall A4-sized, litho-printed fantasy-meets-surrealism
magazines covering some film, but mainly artwork and articles by or about
such exponents as Poe, Aubrey Beardsley, Mervyn Peake, Alan Garner, early
Ramsey Campbell, Brian Aldiss, Clark Ashton Smith, and Manchester artist
Ken Reid.
By contrast, Butterworth’s Concentrate, Corridor, and WordworksA4 litho,
colour coverswere not at all art nouveau, but more original fiction; imaginative
writers on the small press scene of the Sixties and Seventies, such as
Heathcote Williams, Thomas M Disch, psychologist John Clark, playwright
J Jeff Jones, Trevor Hoyle.
Recalls Butterworth, “We were introduced to each other by our printer,
John Muir, who later ran Babylon Books, but at that time had a press called
WHITE LIGHT on Upper Brook Street. He was printing my magazines and Dave’s,
but both of us wanted a more mainstream look and to do paperback books.”(3)
So the two got together, sometime in 1974, with Britton working as Art
Editor on Butterworth’s Wordworks and Corridor magazines. But another seed
of the Savoy empire had been sown in 1972, when David Britton and friend
Charles Partington opened the shop HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND on Port Street,
near the Crown & Anchor. Says Butterworth, “That was the shop with
the brothel upstairs, where, out of good neighbourliness, the ladies running
it offered us free wanks. House On The Borderland was the first Savoy shop
because it established the formula on which all the others were based,
selling a mix of Rock’n'Roll, cinema, fantasy, comics, SF, art and whatever
was streetwise at the time. It was a variant of the formula Bram Stokes
pioneered with his London shop Dark They Were And Golden Eyed, from which
Titan Books and Forbidden Planet later grew.”
ORBIT
BOOKS, adjacent to the Wheatsheaf pub, Whittle Street, became the second
Savoy shop. “From these premises, Charles and Dave published James Cawthorn’s
adaptation of Stormbringer. Charles dropped out of publishing almost immediately.”
In 1976, Savoy entered the world of publishing with SAVOY BOOKS LTD and
Stormbringer, a 30-page illustrated version of Michael Moorcock’s fantasy
novel (measuring in at a lowly 427mm x 305mm!). Stormbringer was the first
in a series of four adaptations of Moorcock’s works by artist Cawthorn.
The other (sizeably modest) titles are: The Jewel in the Skull, The Crystal
and the Amulet, and The Sword and the Runestaff.
A tie-in with NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY in 1979 meant that Savoy was able to
reissue the best works of artists and writers like Henry Treece, Harlan
Ellison, Jack Trevor Story and Ken Reid, and distribute them around the
world.
“In those early days, we were mainly reprinting work we thought was being
neglected. We did some original titles: The Savoy Book (4) was an anthology,
and we published an original Moorcock work, My Experiences in the Third
World War (5) “The thing was Dave and I had tastes which overlapped. We’re
miles apart in personality, but in terms of interests, we both liked Captain
Beefheart; we both remembered Ken Reid’s Fudge and Speck strips in the
Manchester Evening News…”
In 1938, a young and hopeful Ken Reid approached the Manchester Evening
News with several layouts for a strip called The Adventures of Fudge the
Elf. It became a regular feature and soon was appearing every night. With
only a few brief absences, Fudge the Elf ran right up until 1962, and even
as late as 1974 reprints were appearing in the paper.
Reid’s strip chronicled the escapades of two elves, Fudge and Speck, caught
within the landscapes of Tummy-Ache, the Land of Nowhere, the underwater
kingdom of Bubbleville, and the sugary planet of Plum-Duff. Inhabitants
here had similarly peculiar names and preoccupations. ‘King Bong’, for
instance, was the invisible owner of a pair of magic gloves.
Savoy published a total of two volumes of Reid’s work and planned to publish
four more. “We have always tried to push against the grain one way or another,”
admits Butterworth, “even when we were bringing people back to public attention.
Ken Reid’s strip in the Manchester Evening News was stopped because it
was getting too way out, and frightening kids. We regret we didn’t get
out as much of Reid’s work as we wanted to.”
I THINK THAT WAS THE CATALYST
(6)
“FUCK!” chanted the nuns.
“FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!”
“Oh, no! ” moaned the priest. “oh no, no, no!”The Gas, pg. 84
Amid this flurry of publishing
activity, unbeknownst to Savoy, their retail premises were being ‘Moonbeamed’
by undercover agents in the BRITISH PHONOGRAPHIC INDUSTRY.
‘Britain’s recording industry has cracked a bootlegging syndicate!’ screamed
the tabloid press. ‘Undercover agents working on an investigation code-named
OPERATION MOONBEAM have carried out raids in London, Manchester, Newcastle
and St. Helens.’
Beneath familiar mug-shots of Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and Elton John (‘BOOTLEGGED!),
the reports went on to stipulate how, in April 1979, a telephone tip-off
had set into motion the greased wheels of Operation Moonbeam.
‘Inquiries led to Manchester where stocks of bootleg records were being
imported from America.’The ingenuity of the Moonbeam agents was such that
‘One investigator posed as a manufacturer to infiltrate the network’ while
‘Suspects were trailed all over the country by BPI investigators with long-range
cameras’.
Both Orbit Books and BOOKCHAIN (the third Savoy outlet, Peter Street) were
hit by the operation. David Britton found himself in the High Court in
London, agreeing to pay the BPI a sum of £7,250 for damages and costs,
as well as to a permanent injunction, not to make, sell or offer for sale
any bootleg recordings.
“We were two days late making the first payment of £l,000,” says
Butterworth of the fine. “They sent the cheque back and instructed the
bailiffs to move in straight away and stuck further costs on top. This
was our second bust… at Orbit Books we had been done over by the BPI
as early as 1976.”
Although to this point their output remained relatively catholic, Savoy’s
publication of works by SF authors Samuel Delany and Charles Platt was
soon to cause considerable unrest.
Of Delany’s novel, The Tides of Lust, one reviewer said that it “might
be described as a pornographic picaresque; it’s a chronicle of various
sorts of sex, hetero and homo, but lingering on rather down-&-dirty
black/white S&M of a sort that would be automatically labelled racist
(among other things) if the author wasn’t black”. The book follows a group
of people in an uncompromising search for erogenous gratification, every
other page providing the reader with a fresh sexual twist.
Platt’s The Gas, on the other handa novel of SF eroticism, perversion
and insanity in which an accident at a secret germ warfare laboratory causes
a deadly aphrodisiac to be released over Englanddespite having been Savoy’s
most consistently requested title, has yet to elicit a review. Neither
were Savoy able to secure an English distributor bold enough to release
it, and potential readers had to purchase the book direct from the publishers.
(7)
In November of 1980, thousands of pounds worth of retail stock was seized
by police. Savoy offices and all the Savoy shops were raided in a co-ordinated
swoop. Butterworth elaborates, “The Gas was first published by OPHELIA
PRESS in the States. Savoy gave it its only UK publication. The police
seized it, as well as copies of Samuel Delany’s Tides of Lustand one copy
of Jack Trevor Story’s Screwrape Lettuce!but did not get the full print
run. The main problem was not so much the police but the booktradeno one
except us would sell The Gas. Our only outlets for it were our own shops.”
(By this juncture, Savoy had opened STARPLACE on Oldham Streetit no longer
existsand BOOKCHAIN LEEDS LTD. About to open was CHAPTER ONE in Liverpool.)
Savoy Books Ltd was forced into voluntary liquidation in February of 1981.
Was this a direct result of the raid?
“The collapse of New English Library and, since 1976, continual police
harassment. New English Library were getting our books out, but TIMES MIRROR
in Americawho own New English Librarypulled the rug from under them,
and our distribution collapsed, too. We were getting a lot of raids; Anderton
raided our shops about 60 times, acting as a constant heavy drain on our
financial resources. We just couldn’t survive as Savoy Books Ltd anymore,
and went into liquidation.”
Raids of the frequency to which Savoy were now accustomed began in 1976.
James Anderton took over as Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police
on 1 July 1976. Between the years 1977 and 1981 the Chief, in an annual
report to London, detailed that he had obtained a total of 1,010 search
warrants from magistrates, issued for the purpose of raiding under the
Obscene Publications Act (meaning that, on average, at least one Manchester
high street shop and distributor was being raided every two days).
The confiscation of the novels The Gas and The Tides of Lust was just part
of a major raid on Savoy that ultimately resulted in the prosecution of
both Britton and Butterworth, and landed David Britton in prison (albeit
a full 19 months later). Britton and Philip Bunton (shop manager) at Orbit
Books were charged with selling obscene material for gain in an operation
utilising about 25 police officers and vehicles, as well as an unknown
amount of plain-clothed officers who had been observing stock movement
for about a week before the raids.
The obscene material took the form of seven paperback novels: No Place
for a Lady by A DeGranamour; Something for the Boys by Kenneth Harding;
Mama Liz Drinks Deep, Mama Liz Tastes Flesh, and Secret Sisterhood, each
by Howard Rhinegold; Cruel Lips by Marcus Van Heller; and Two Suspicious
Girls by Katy Mitchell.
Charges were brought under Section Two of the Obscene Publications Act.
More serious charges than these it is difficult to get, yet the novels
in question contain no pictorial matter and their authors, Rhinegold in
particular, are erudite and often comical. In the well-plotted Secret Sisterhood,
a spy called ‘Jerry Cornelius’ makes a cameo appearance, which can only
be a reference to Michael Moorcock’s ironically conceived character. “It’s
a rip-snorter of a book,” says Butterworth. “Cornelius is a hapless aviation
cop who loses his job after being spiked with LSD. Just in time he manages
to implant a microscopic surveillance device into his semen!”
The novels were already widely available in bookshops and newsagents around
the country, such as the London-based WORDS AND MUSIC chain, who initially
supplied Savoy.
Of the relatively innocuous nature of the books, says Butterworth, “if
the police and courts are determined to get a conviction they will use
anything to get one.” Long after the trial several of the titles were reprinted
by an English publisher.
Published in the Seventies by the prestigious American outfits, GROVE PRESS
and VENUS FREEWAY PRESS, Savoy picked the seven titles up at remainder
prices in 1978 (meaning that they must have been freely imported into the
country, in spite of HM Customs censorial powers). Furthermore, these same
books had already been seized from Savoy on numerous occasions and returned
by the police because they did not merit prosecution.
In Savoy Dreams, the second volume in a proposed trilogy of anthologies,
Butterworth addresses an open letter to the reader with regard this “puzzling”
case. In the piece, entitled Under Siege, he claims that the trial of Britton
and Bunton was not altogether unbiased; that the judge was out to make
an example and “nail Dave”. Also, because the raids had cost many thousands
of pounds to execute, to bring the men to trial was, in some measure, a
justification of this vast expenditure of public money. Of the trial itself,
Butterworth stipulates how Judge Hardy’s “manner (for example the tone
of his voice) frequently gave otherwise fair and just pronouncements an
inflexion”. Of Hardy’s summing up to the jury Butterworth has transcribed
the speech and made references to a total of 11 points which “until that
precise moment had not been brought up in court; which might refer to parts
of the law which nebulously remained unexplained; which appeared to me
to be opinion; which appeared to be biased interpretations; which appeared
to be denials of points raised by our barrister”.
As a result, and after much deliberation, the jury found the men guilty.
Philip Bunton received a one-month suspended sentence. David Britton was
sentenced to 28-days imprisonment (of which he served 19). Inexplicably,
the case against Butterworth, who was to have been tried separately, did
not come to court. Britton later recounted to Butterworth that the guards
who escorted him to the cells afterwards threw up their hands in disbelief.
There followed widespread press denouncement over the imprisonment.
On the morning Britton was released from Strangeways, one of the Savoy
shops was again raided and relieved of ‘obscene’ material.
LIFE DOESN’T GIVE A RAT’S
ARSE WHO LIVES IT (8)
“They were like the bottom
market,” says Michael Butterworth of New English Library (NEL). “They weren’t
well regarded in literary circles.”
Interesting
titles, though.
“They were good for us because they were on rocky ground and they wanted
more titles to boost their list, you see, especially titles which would
give them credibility.”
Immediately following the liquidation of Savoy Books, SAVOY EDITIONS LTD
was formed, preparing books for publication by companies like MUSIC SALES
and PROTEUS BOOKS. Among these were the large format Led ZeppelinIn The
Light; the AC/DC biography, Hell Ain’t No Bad Place To Be; a David Bowie
Profile; and The Legendary Ted Nugent. The original cover of the Nugent
work was deemed too far over the top for wholesale distributors W H Smith.
Says David Britton, “The final design by OMNIBUS PRESS, like all their
Rock jacket designs, achieved the required condition of muzak.”
A paperback volume on American shock Rock band Kiss, sporting the legend
‘The Savoy Kiss Of Death’ on the jacket, remains to this date the company’s
biggest-selling title.
Butterworth: “Savoy commissioned, originated, conceived and performed every
function except shit these books. The Bernard Manning Blue Joke Bookthe
only Bernard Manning joke bookwas a Savoy book which we packaged to our
former distributor, NEL, who had re-emerged as part of the HODDER &
STOUGHTON group.”
On the subject of packagingthough “not really in the realm of ‘packaging’
but more a labour of love”Britton edited and assembled The Lives and Times
of Captain Beefheart (1977) for John Muir’s BABYLON BOOKS. He was partly
responsible for Babylon’s Frank Zappa book. “Dave also gave Morrissey quite
a lot of information that Morrissey, as author, eventually put into Babylon’s
James
Dean book.”
A major disappointment for Butterworth and Savoy are the titles that “got
away”. UK paperback rights for William Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night
were purchased by Savoy but had to be relinquished following the demise
of Savoy Books Ltd. Michael Moorcock’s novel The Brothel In Rosenstrasse
was originally commissioned by Savoy but, again, had to be relinquished.
Ironically, it eventually came out through NEL with an authorial credit
to Savoy.
Savoy Books Ltd were also set to publish the collected works of Gerald
Scarfe, having assembled, with the assistance of Scarfe, 90% of the artwork
which was to eventually appear in THAMES & HUDSON’s book, Gerald Scarfe.
At the time, complications that arose over the exact ownership of Scarfe’s
work for Pink Floyd’s film, The Wall, precluded use of that cartoon work
in Savoy’s book. This was later resolved and the work was used in the Thames
& Hudson edition.
Contrary to the pre-publication advertising for Nik Cohn’s definitive Rock’n'Roll
novel, Johnny Angelo, the book was six years late coming out. It tells
the story of a young Rock’n'Roll singer, the eponymous Angelo, from his
unhinged and hedonist lifestyle to his inevitable demise and consequent
legendary status. Interestingly, Savoy were scheduled to publish not one
but two versions of the novel. The firstto have carried the slightly but
significantly different title, I Am Still The Greatest Says Johnny Angelowas
to have been a reprint of Cohn’s revised, more formal, less powerful 1970
PENGUIN edition. This, because Savoy felt that both versions together told
the full story of Johnny Angelo.
Author Cohnwho went on to write Saturday Night Feverhad created in Angelo
an iconoclast not a million miles removed from that of disgraced Sixties
star PJ Proby. Little wonder Savoy should be so interested. More later.
Another work that “got away”, a recollection that rifles the slightest
pique for Michael Butterworth, is Brion Gysin’s Here To Go: Planet R101.
Gysin, interviewed by Terry Wilson, gives a travelogue of his ideas, theories,
adventures and philosophies. He relays how William Burroughs came to improvise
new meaning from the newspaper cut-ups he experimented with; mirror staring,
the first step in personality-switching; the machineries of joy; drugs,
sex and space travel without rockets (‘Here to go’ being a reference to
the ‘meaning of it all’- mankind is here to go into space).
Explains Butterworth, “RE/Search published that. The book was my idea.
I myself originated it, though I was never credited in it. I commissioned
Terry Wilson to do it and William Burroughs to write the introduction,
and after Savoy Books Ltd got into its difficulties Terry took it off me
and gave it to RE/Search. They’ve done a very good job, but he’s just taken
it as his book. If it wasn’t for me he wouldn’t have that book. You stole
the keys, Terry.”
GROWN-UPS IN A TEENAGE WORLD
(9)
The eve of 1984 saw the
publication of Savoy’s second anthology, Savoy Dreams; the first book under
the new imprint, simply SAVOY.
“We were back paying for the printing ourselves, says Butterworth, “but
from that date have done without a distributor, and our print runsonce
in their tens of thousandsare now in single 1,000 units. The police raids
and the rise of the censorious Politically Correct made things very difficult,
but coupled with this was our refusal after our dealings with NELwho often
pushed their own titles to the detriment of oursto consider a straightforward
distribution deal where we ended up paying for everything.”
September of 1985 heralded SAVOY RECORDS and the first PJ Proby single
release for the company, Tainted Love. Sylvie Simmons wrote of the record
in Kerrang!
Single of singles! The song Soft Cell made a hit gagged and chained in
some leatherette-lined sewer deep below the earth’s epidermis. Sounds like
a motorway pile-up in Hell. The band just go for it and PJ sounds gloriously
bad and sleazy. As he says on one side, “It’s a tasty world.”
Born in the United States, PJ Proby made demo discs for Elvis Presley in
the late-Fifties and early-Sixties, and appeared in several B-movie Westerns.
He came to Britain after being discovered by TV producer Jack Good, who
first displayed him on a Beatles TV spectacular in 1964. A flamboyant character,
Proby wore his hair long and in a ponytail, and dressed in tight velvet
trousers, fancy shirts and buckled shoes.
His strong, throbbing voice perfectly suited the image.
Over the next four years he had numerous hits, and his debut album in 1965
was a commercial success. However, Proby was always a controversial figure,
and trouble dogged him throughout his career. He would upset theatre managers
by refusing to take the stage without first being paid. On a 1965 tour
with Cilla Black, Proby was given the benefit of the doubt when he claimed
that his trousers splitting mid-performance was an accident. But then the
‘accident’ occurred again in other shows. Of one concert, the Record Mirror
reported that Proby leaped about, covered his right ear with a hand, splayed
his legs and executed a series of grinds as performed in a number of outlawed
burlesque houses in the States. Ecstatic teenage girls, beside themselves
with desire, hurled themselves like human bullets at the line of commissionaries
guarding the stage.
That’s not all. Later in the show, largely composed of screaming pre-pubescent
girls, Proby saw fit to introduce into his act a gesture which I personally
considered in extremely bad taste. He very carefully put one hand on the
top of his trousers and slowly pulled down the material to reveal some
inches of flesh at the top of his leg. [From then on] the act developed
into an erotic display. One which many people will agree was not fit to
be put on in front of young girls… Again, his hand was run from knee
to knee, via his stomach. His behind was massaged and his trousers were
torn from the knees to the top… with one hand, he ripped one leg all
the way up from the knee… the Texan crawled across the stage, ripped
the other trouser leg and did the splits revealing a wide expanse of flesh.
After a series of gymnastics, Proby placed a hand between his legs and
did another grind. This was not a man going just far enough, this was a
man going too far.
The RANK/ABC Organisation agreed and promptly banned Proby from performing
at their venues. So, too, did the BBC and ITV television networks.
Proby publicly declared that Tom Joneswho made his name as Proby’s replacement
on Cilla’s tourwas “rubbish’ and challenged him to a singing match. The
contest never took place and, by 1968, Proby was bankrupt. He appeared
in a couple of Jack Good stage productions in the Seventies (a rock musical
version of Othello, and as the elder Elvis in Elvis On Stage), but for
the most part was out of favour with the press and public. Like this things
remained. He made the headlines when charged with assaulting his girlfriend
and again, when at the age of 45, he wedded Alison Hardy, a girl of 15.
Not long after, recording with Savoy in 1986, Proby confessed that Alison
had left him and that this particular recordinga cover of David Bowie’s
Heroes, which Proby sang as a straightforward love song addressed to his
young wifewould be his last. He intended to shoot the girl and then join
his father in the sky. In an interview with i-D magazine, David Britton
said of Proby,”‘He’s a man who’s deteriorated a lot since I’ve known him.
When he’s sober he’s nice and sweet and when he’s drunk he’s angry and
bitter and wants to die. His liver’s shot and he’s got all the problems
that come with being an acute alcoholic. I’m told he’s lost all sensation
in his feet for instance. He’s too ill to perform… he can’t learn new
songs sufficiently well to do on stage.”
How did Savoy get involved with Proby?
Butterworth: ‘Well, we started doing his biography (in 1982). We went interviewing
him, got miles of cassette tape which we hoped to turn into a book, but
we decided what he needed more than anything else was a record deal. He
hadn’t done anything serious for about 16 years.”
What’s the arrangement?
“We originate the songs. “His voice is fed through audiofile, edited, rearranged.
Nothing is simple about these songs and they aren’t the sort that Proby
would willingly do. To be honest, he hates them. But he likes something
about usprobably recognises us as fellow musical anarchists.”
Of the singles that Proby has recorded for Savoy are covers of contemporary
anthems such as Love Will Tear Us Apart, Anarchy In The U.K., Sign ‘O’
The Times, In The Air Tonight, and Garbageman.
“The B-side of Love Will Tear Us Apart, the live version,” recalls Butterworth,
“was recorded in an old schoolhouse on the Rippenden Road, near Oldham,
a block away from the church where Joy Division recorded the original.
We went there just to get a sense of history, simply for ourselves, recording
on the doorstep of the original. One week after our recording was made,
kids from the nearby Sholver Estate burnt the school to the grounda fucking
good omen! The out-of-tune backing is deliberate. We de-tuned the synth
so it would sound like inept Velvet Underground.”
Press reaction to Savoy’s recordings was mixed. “Reeks of insanity” wrote
Melody Maker. “Hideously fascinating” admitted Creem… Hot Press denounced
Proby as “a very, very sick man in every sense of the word”, while CHANNEL
4’s talk show The Last Resort categorically refused to feature the singer
in its line-up of guests. “The only way Proby will ever get on our show
is when he’s dead.” (10)
In an original composition, Hardcore: M97002 (being Dave Britton’s prison
number in Strangeways), Savoy claimed a team-up between PJ Proby and Madonna.
Against a crushing, primordial backbeat, the unlikely duo delineate a succession
of surrealist episodes. ‘Telly Savalas uses his bald head as a phallus
/ He leaves vaseline everywhere he sits / What a knob.’
On 22 September 1987, London ’s Evening News carried the frontpage headline:
MADONNA IN PORN RECORD ROW. The following morning, the Daily Mail reported,
MADONNA TO SUE OVER ‘PORN’ DISC, stating that, ‘Despite the fact that the
female voice on the record bears no resemblance to Madonna’s, Proby yesterday
insisted that they teamed up after her debut U.K. concert at Leeds on August
13.’
Of Savoy’s recordings in general, Butterworth says, “They occupied a great
deal of our time as producers in the middle and late-Eighties. We were
consciously trying for an ironic juxtaposition between the old and the
new, so that there are lots of Fifties Rock ‘n’ Roll references in the
records, as well as literary ones. On Anarchy In The UK, we sampled the
voices of T S Eliot, William Burroughs and Harlan Ellison.” For their version
of Blue Monday, Savoy introduced one ‘Lord Horror’ on vocals.” The backing
track on that record uses the same samples as the New Order original, borrowed
from Peter Hook’s files, “only we well warped it.”
Savoy’s Blue Monday, released October 1986, gives credit to ‘The Savoy-Hitler
Youth Band’. The sleeve depicts the head of a bearded gentleman, brains
exploding through the top of his skull, around which the words ‘White Natzi
Cunt-Scum… Fucking Suckarse Nigger Jew’ are scrawled. The figure is attired
in a black uniform, displaying the emblem ‘J.A.’ and ‘l976-1986A Decade
of Service and Protection, Greater Manchester Police’. On the reverse of
the sleeve is a backdrop comprising scenes at the liberation of Dachau.
The record never got further than press review copies. No distributor would
touch it. More later.
THERE AIN’T NO SUCH THING
AS RAPE
WHEN YOU’RE WEARING A SUPERMAN
CAPE (12)
Horror reared back
up and slipped the bloodied razors carefully into his own mouth and sucked
them, sliding his thick tongue over and over the keen blades. Stretching
his pop-eyes, Horror pulled the blades free from his mouth and jumped from
the man’s shoulders, landing solidly in front of him. He turned around
and heaved his frame upwards, catching the Jew in mid-fall. He ran his
twin razors up the full length of the man’s exposed chest, completely parting
the neck and splitting the anguished face. The Jew finally collapsed, and
amongst the infra-sound of roaring blood Horror dipped his head into the
open chest, laying still for a while in the soft ooze within. He shuffled,
swallowed a mouthful of the blood. Edging further inside the gash he gripped
one of the man’s organs, knotted with veins, between his horse teeth and
tore it away. He stood up, letting the organ trail in the wind, and then
dashed it against the back window of the terrace house, where it clung
like a piece of red afterbirth on a glass slide…
Lord Horror, pg 94
In May of 1989, Savoy published
the David Britton novel Lord Horror, the first book to fictionally explore
Auschwitz and the Holocaust without the utilisation of sympathetic characters.
Later, in June, Savoy launched its no-holds-barred comics line with the
first issues of Lord Horror (13) and Meng & Ecker.
July brought the Meng & Ecker 12″ vinyl release, Shoot Yer Load / Golden
Showers, another slice of sleaze Hi-NRG dance (the B-side opening with,
‘Open your mouth let me piss in it / There’s more to sex than a pair of
tits’).
In September 1989, copies of the Lord Horror novel, and Lord Horror and
Meng & Ecker comics and records, were seized from Savoy offices and
retail premises by Manchester police.
First of all, how did the character ‘Lord Horror’ come about?
“Lord Horror is very loosely based on William Joyce, the so-called ‘English
traitor’. He’s also got albino blood in him, from characters like Zenith
the Albino, in the Sexton Blake magazines of the 1930s, and Elric of Melniboné,
Michael Moorcock’s anti-hero of the Sixties. But the culture of the Fifties,
the era in which Dave and I became teenagers, was dominated by three thingsRock’n'Roll,
the atomic bomb, and the Second World War. They had a powerful effect.
There were times when, as kids, we went to sleep not knowing whether we
would wake up, because of a hydrogen bomb war. All my first published work
in Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine in the Sixties, was set in post-atomic
war landscapes. In the Eighties I started to explore the Nazis, and the
Holocaust. By the time I met Dave, who was Rock’n'Roll, he had got together
a series of characters for a novel, which didn’t include the Lord Horror
character and therefore lacked a focus.
“I started writing a novel featuring a fictionalised Adolf Hitler in South
America; I wanted to use a symbolic exotic setting to attach to Hitler.
I portrayed him as an inane, very ordinary personand found, as of course
others have, that the contrast potentised him in a very bizarre way.
“It sparked Dave to start writingthough obviously he didn’t also want
to write about Hitler. He was looking around for another character and
eventually hit on William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw. That’s how it came about
in literal terms.”
What happened to Hitler in the South American swamps ?
“I stopped writing mine because I was getting bogged down with it. I decided
Dave’s was the book, and helped him get it into shape instead. It took
four years to write.”
Here follow the events surrounding the seizure of the Lord Horror novel
and comics:
SEPTEMBER 15 1989 Jewish
Telegraph North West, on receiving a copy to review, run a front page story
about the Lord Horror novel. The piece highlights those parts of the book
containing Chief Constable of Manchester James Anderton’s pronouncements
on gays, pornographers, anti-churchgoers, and left-wingers. In one of the
speeches, Savoy substitute the word ‘gay’ with the word ‘Jew’ to draw the
comparison between Anderton’s speeches and those of 1930s’ political anti-Semitism.
SEPTEMBER 19 1989 Manchester
Evening News run the same story next to a photograph of Anderton. Like
the Jewish Telegraph, it announces that the Police Chief is ‘investigating’
Lord Horror.
UNSPECIFIED DATE Posing as
members of the public, police officers purchase copies of the Meng &
Ecker and Lord Horror comics from Savoy shops. This enables them to obtain
seizure warrants from Stipendiary Magistrate Derrick Fairclough.
SEPTEMBER 26 1989 Police
simultaneously raid Savoy offices and three of their retail outlets in
Manchester, seizing, as well as non-Savoy material, all copies of Lord
Horror . So too all copies of Meng & Ecker comic issue No.1 and Lord
Horror comic issue No. l. The cover artwork of the former depicts the decapitated
head of James Anderton/Appleton.
OCTOBER 17 1989 Greater Manchester
Police Headquarters: Acting under orders from superiors, Detective Inspector
Malcolm Wood conducts separate hour-long interviews with David Britton
and Michael Butterworth. The interviews focus on the contents of the Lord
Horror novel and Meng & Ecker comic No. 1. (14)
JULY 1990 Summonses dated
19 July 1990 are served on Britton and Butterworth under Section Two of
the Obscene Publications Act.
SEPTEMBER 10 1990 Britton
and Butterworth appear before Stipendiary Magistrate Fairclough. To get
a quick sentence it is usual police practice to bring defendants before
the same magistrate who issues the seizure warrants. Fairclough makes it
plain that as far as he is concerned a prison sentence is inevitable. To
obtain a fairer hearingbefore a possibly unbiased judgeSavoy elect to
go before a Crown Court, enter a plea of not guilty, and are remanded on
bail until a court date can be secured.
OCTOBER 1990 Fingerprints
of Britton and Butterworth are taken at Bootle Street police station. Under
new police laws, defendants have to give their fingerprints when charged.
Elizabeth Young, reporting in New Statesman, said of the novel, “Lord Horror,
unlike American Psycho, is a work that outrages current taboos on racism:
taboos so strangulated that no one may transgress them.’
Almost two years after it had been seized, at a hearing on 28 August 1991,
Magistrate Fairclough upheld Lord Horror as obscene. It was described as
anti-Semitic, while passages of the novel were read out loud in court.
David Britton defended his work, stating that the passages had been read
out of context. The novel itself, he said, was not anti-Semitic, but Lord
Horror, the character, was. “That is what it is all about… If you are
going to do an anti-Semitic character, then you have to do it to the one-hundredth
degree,” said Britton. “It does concern me that some Jews might find it
upsetting, but others would accept it for its reality. There is no point
pretending that these sort of people do not exist… I wanted my book to
go over the top, to be taboo breaking. Even then, I could not possibly
hope to measure up to the reality of the Holocaust.” Britton told the court,
“My father was Jewish.”
Butterworth: “An interview in The Observer with frustrated anonymous Manchester
police officers made it quite clear that they recommended a prosecution
under Section Two (hardcore pornography), but the Director of Public Prosecutions
(DPP) declined to act. The police therefore pressed ahead with Section
Three, actually a more oppressive law than Section Two. Although Section
Three doesn’t carry a criminal penalty, under it magistrates are empowered
to destroy the stock without a jury. Magistrates like Derick Fairclough,
who prefer to handle the obscenity cases, do so with great regularity,
working in tandem with the police. Also, in the event of a Section Two
being brought, all past Section Three offences are dragged up to prove
you have been warned, and that you are a persistent flouter of the law.
“Because the police had got a Section Three, we found we couldn’t go to
Crown Court to defend it in front of a jury. We had no choice but to have
it judged by Fairclough. Despite protestations from our barrister that
Lord Horror was not obscene under the terms of the Obscene Publications
Act, Fairclough decided otherwise and upheld his own charge. Nobody, except
us, seemed to find the result quite amazing!
“The procedure the police took is a replay of what has gone on before,
when they prosecuted us ostensibly for pornography but actually for The
Gas and Tides of Lust . The DPP won’t let the police prosecute us for the
Savoy material because they know that before a jury we’d win hands down;
even if we lost we’d win, because of the precedent that would be set of
a work of art or literature being found obscene; whereas with ‘backdoor’
censorship they win something every time. The appeal we are making at the
moment, we made as a result of the destruction order brought about by Fairclough.”
IT’S LIKE BEING IN A LUNATIC
ASYLUM WITH PERMISSION
TO MASTURBATE FOR THE REST
OF YOUR LIFE (15)
“Garfield is perceived as
a wholesome and endearing character, with a hint of childlike rebelliousness,
with whom all the family can identify.”
So said prosecution witness Ausbert DeArce (managing director of a Dutch
company owned by UNITED FEATURES SYNDICATE) of Savoy’s usage of the lovable
feline rogue in one issue of their Meng & Ecker comic series.
Meng and Ecker are offshoot characters from the Lord Horror novel. They
are Lord Horror’s “obsequious psychotic” sidekicks (bearing the slightest
facial resemblance to Britton and Butterworth?), carving a trail of blood
and frivolity through urban society. Pertinent to Savoy’s circumstance
at the time, each issue sees artist Kris Guidio planting Meng and Ecker
firmly in a crazed celebrity curdle. As integral as the (satirical) narrative
itself are the familiar faces and arcane references; anyone from Judge
Dredd to Charles and Di, from Salman Rushdie to Divine, is liable to show
up in the strips. In one episode, Fudge the Elf claims that Meng is his
alter ego. Meng, at the time, happens to be moaning that his shafting of
a dry “old granny” (cunningly disguised as Margaret Thatcher) will require
him to undertake a foreskin transplant. In Meng & Ecker No. 3, the
doppleganger of a certain bearded ex-Chief of Manchester Policein full
riot-gear regaliacan also be seen on the receiving end of Meng’s pork
baton. No one is spared. Tank Girl and Ramsey Campbell are in there.
“Campbell was in there,” notes Butterworth, “because he asked to be in
there. So we put him in. But we genuinely spelled his name wrong. We apologized
and inadvertently spelt it wrong again some other time! Tank Girl, we put
her in because she is one of the few comic characters that we actually
like. The others we were lampooning because we felt the artwork was inferior…
and these were the characters that the media were putting forward as examples
of excellence.”
Non-excellent characters get flattened or fucked. Because Tank Girl holds
her own, she is portrayed as a chick with a dick and gets one up on Meng.
In 1991, Savoy paid around £20,000 on court costs and fines. Not
surprisingly, that was a year in which the company brought out nothing
new, embroiled as they were in the Lord Horror scandal and an out-of-court
settlement of a 10-month legal battle with United Features Syndicate (UFS).
UFS had shown an interest in Meng & Ecker. In particular issue No.4
and an eight-frame sequence where a cat, not unlike Jim Davis’ comic-strip
creation, Garfield, is featured. Meng is seen to masturbate and ejaculate
over the animal. Defending their copyright, UFS initiated extensive investigations
of Savoy’s activities. This resulted in UFS solicitors and agents, and
the covert use of an ex-Vice Squad officer, forcing a seizure of all copies
of the comic and relating artwork.
“Even a faint suggestion of obscenity would destroy Garfield as a marketing
tool,” said UFS. But, speaking in the September 1991 issue of Comics International,
Michael Butterworth argued that “for all United Features’ thoroughness
in the business of detection they were unable to apprehend the most obvious
fact about Savoyour tiny status relative to their own”.
Meng & Ecker has a circulation of 2,000.
So, then, does the whole UFS issue have more to do with Savoy’s legacy
of controversy than it does with the possible ‘destruction of a marketing
tool’?
In the heart of Manchester town centre, in a place just on the outskirts
of St. Anne’s Square, resides a pleasant, if modest, coffeeshop by the
name of MENG & ECKER. Offended by the alleged use of their name but
without sufficient funds to do anything about it, the lawyers of the coffeeshop
saw an opportunity present itself when Garfield looked to get a creaming.
They contacted the UK licensees of Garfield, who passed their letter on
to UFS
Was the title Meng & Ecker taken from the coffeeshop?
Butterworth: “I could never say that on tape (laughs)! Meng is short for
Mengele; Ecker is short for Eckhart, the Nazi poet. You can make up your
own mind from that! Well, according to the Meng & Ecker restaurant,
we have ripped off their name, and they touted this to United Features.”
How do you manage to cope with all these problems and prosecutions ?
“You just get used to going from one crisis to the next. If you set out
to do something radical it’s inevitable that the machinery is going to
catch you.” (16)
The police have a file labelled ‘Savoy’, perhaps?
“They probably have. Shout ‘LORD HORROR!’ to a policeman, see if he knows!”
COMPREHENSION IS ONLY A KNOWLEDGE
ADEQUATE TO OUR INTENTION (17)
On 31 August 1991, three
days after Magistrate Fairclough found Lord Horror obscene, police raided
Savoy again and seized over 4,000 comics, including their Lord Horror mini-series
Hard Core Horror. Issue No.5, the final instalment of Hard Core Horror,
opens with publicity photographs of Jessie Matthews, ‘England’s favourite
sweetheart’, who married ‘Lord Haw-Haw’. The full-page panels that follow
depict the satanic machinations of the Nazi death camps, putrid smoke rising
from chimneys, skeletal bodies and architecture mortified as one. An intense
blacknessthe shade of caked bloodJohn Coulthart’s artwork had never been
more harrowing. (So harrowing, in fact, the text set to accompany the artwork
was deemed impotent and not used. Hence the empty white spaces throughout
that issue). The issue closes with another set of photographs, only this
time it isn’t Jessie Matthews, but rather anonymous corpses, beaten, battered
and torn. One can scarcely imagine what ugliness must have befallen the
woman whose innards erupt from fissures the size of a football, or the
man whose hands lie at some distance from the mangled, bloody stump of
each arm. These are truly wretched creatures.
In police interviews, Britton and Butterworth were questioned on the ‘meaning’
of the more esoteric references in John Coulthart’s artwork, as well as
fending the “very strong” objections to the photographs at the close of
Hard Core Horror No.5. In a scenario comparable to that of some cliche-ridden
Hollywood thriller, the police, says Butterworth, “had the comics examined
by experts who ‘deciphered’ many of the really quite elementary references.
They had also shown the comic to one of their forensic experts who examined
the photographs.”
The conclusion?
“That we may be fascists attempting to spread Nazi propaganda in secret
code language to children. Fantastic as this sounds, they told us that
they intended to attempt prosecution under the Corruption of Children and
Minors Act.”
At Manchester Crown Courts, 30 July 1992, Savoy successfully managed to
overturn magistrate Derrick Fairclough’s ruling that the novel Lord Horror
was obscene. However, the ruling against issue No.1 of Meng & Ecker
was upheld. The appeal between Michael Butterworth and the Department of
Public Prosecutions, was made on the publisher’s behalf by Geoffrey Robertson
QC (previously defending Oz in the Seventies and Niggaz With Attitude in
the Nineties), and supported by international freedom group, ARTICLE 19.
Author Michael Moorcock and Home Office child psychologist Guy Cumberbatch
were among those to take the stand in defence of the works. Flanked by
two magistrates, Judge Gerard Humphries read passages from the book and
leafed through the comic, deliberating as to why, in Lord Horror , Hitler
might have a freethinking penis named Old Shatterhand, or the ‘point’ of
the vaudevillian sing-song that opens Meng & Ecker (doubly ironic is
irony lost). Proceedings came to a temporary halt when it was discovered
that the two magistrates had been supplied with documents of which neither
the defence nor the Judge had been made aware. Following a brief adjournment,
not wishing to postpone to a later date, Robertson and the defendant agreed
to continue.
Judge Humphries, in reaching his verdict, said of the novel, “The true
meaning of obscenity is that a book or comic is obscene if and only if
it depraves or corrupts a significant proportion of likely readers. The
book is not obscene under that definition.” Contrary, with regard to the
comic, he concluded that it “could be readand possibly gloated overby
people who enjoyed viciousness and violence. It had pictures that would
be repulsive to right-thinking people”. From an original print-run of 500,
the 150 copies of Lord Horror impounded by police in 1989, were relinquished.
Issue No.1 of Meng & Ecker, on the other hand, the first comic to be
banned in Britain, would be the focus of further appeal.
The objection levelled at the novel was that of anti-Semitism. Lord Horror
kills Jews. There was little mention in court of the book’s other harbinger
of ill-tidings: Chief Constable James Appleton (and his similarity to Manchester’s
own James Anderton). But Savoy maintain that this, indeed, is the source
of the contention.
Is the use of the ‘Appleton’ character some sort of retaliation against
the police?
“It’s not retaliation. He’s given us the ideal characterhimself. How could
we not use him! It’s him who’s got the bee in his bonnet about raiding
shops instead of doing… er… whatever police are supposed to do.”
Did it not make matters worse, though?
“It did. But his men had raided us 60 times and put Dave in jail. Then
all those ludicrous pronouncements he was making. With all this happening
we just had to record it. The pronouncements he made early in his career
about interning young people in camps, for instance. We actually brought
out ‘Blue Monday’ by the ‘Savoy-Hitler Youth Band’ as a result of that
proclamation. The sleeve shows scenes from Dachau on the back and it’s
got what looks like James Anderton’s head on the front in his uniform.
Actually, it’s a doctored still from a horror film (The Stuff ). It was
an anti-authoritarian statement we were making. It was this record that
put the new wave of Politically Correct people against us. And it’s one
of the reasons we haven’t been able to get any distribution, and coined
the term ‘Savoy Wars’. People think we’re fascists. The so-called ‘alternative’
people decided they would have nothing more to do with us at the retail
and distribution end. We were getting raided, that made them nervous, too.
And other people, who didn’t mind what we were doing but didn’t want to
get involved in police raids. We were ostracized and alienated by everybody.”
Further repercussions in the Lord Horror debacle were felt on 27 April
1993, when author David Britton was found guilty for non-Savoy material
(pornography) confiscated in August 1991, and sentenced to four-months
imprisonment. This was the raid that came three days after magistrate Derrick
Fairclough had initially ruled Lord Horror to be obscene, and in which
4,000 copies of the comic Hard Core Horror were seized.
Ironically, it was while Britton was doing time that Reverbstorm, the much-anticipated,
much-delayed follow-up to Hard Core Horror finally saw the light of day.
Says Butterworth, “Reverbstorm is an eight-part Rock’n'Roll phantasmagoria
set in an alternate Sturm-und-Drang city world. Dave sees the comic as
a fugue, with its charactersJessie Matthews, Lord Horror, James Joyce,
the Ether Jumpers, Blue Blaze Laudanum, the Ononoes… even the city, which
has a palpable presenceas musical components.”
Continuing on from Coulthart’s death camp images in the final, controversial
issue of Hard Core Horror, Reverbstorm opens to vertiginous structures
set against a bleak and foreboding skyline. Except this time it isn’t the
death camps of a Nazi Germany.
“The city, Torenbürgen, is a cross between New York and Auschwitz…
Torenbürgen was the place where the Nazis would have buried their
noble dead had they won the war.” It is where Lord Horrorwhen not broadcasting
on the radio or engaging in groupie sextakes to the streets with fellow
countryman James Joyce, making short work of anyone careless enough to
stand in their path. It is where Seurat’s La Grande Jatte becomes as volatile
as Central Park after dark. And it is where the emancipated soul of superstar
Jessie Matthews, gnarled and twisted, allows itself to be penetrated by
the soul of the Virgin Mary (18). Of course, things promise to get more
twisted from here on in.
“The similarity between our work,” says Butterworth, “and the so-called
‘apocalyptic’ culture or much of the literature arising from the current
interest in death and sex, the serial killer, is coincidental.”
But for how long do you want to argue ‘what it all means’?
“I’ve never seen it as an argument… what I mean is, there’s two aspectse.g.;
the obvious, where we show scenes of Dachau on the ‘Blue Monday’ sleeve,
or have Meng hoist Anderton’s severed head on a pike or fillet Billy the
Fish with a dagger; those might have to be explained to people who don’t
know the references; and there’s the sublime aspects, which draw from the
nature of life in the Twentieth CenturyPicasso, James Joyce, Auschwitz.
If you read Reverbstorm now, and could come back in 30 or 40 years time
you’d see that what we’re dealing with has already become the everyday
literature of the future. Auschwitz will be the subject matter of fiction
far more than it is today. Picasso, Joyce and Auschwitz are the three touchstones
of this centurythey’re all peaks in their own way that cannot be surpassed.
The trend is already distinct. It has been said that it is almost de rigueur
for an author to write a death camp novel. Well, Lord Horror started the
trend, our novel appearing well before Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow or the
current spate of death camp films.”
There stands a difference, however, in presenting a story in the form of
a novel and that same story in the form of a comic book. Many peopleas
evidenced by Judge Humphries’ dismissal of Meng & Ecker as having “pictures
that would be repulsive to right-thinking people”cannot accept that comics
might be anything but a medium for juveniles.
“One of the things that triggered Reverbstormthis probably needs explainingwas
our reaction to the low standard of so-called ‘adult’ graphic comics heralded
by the comics industry and press over the last 15 years or so. There’s
only been two graphic books that have lived up to the promiseAlan Moore’sWatchmen,
and Burne Hogarth’s Jungle Tales of Tarzan . The rest have been various
degrees of dire. Adult comics in the Eighties and Nineties have become
the platform shoes and flares of their generation.” Adult comics were far
more adult in the Thirties and Forties.
“People who want the simple-mindedness of X-Men or Judge Dredd will do
better to look elsewhere. But if you want something sublime, that will
stretch reference points in artistic and philosophical terms, then look
no further.”
THE SMALLEST REVENGE WILL
POISON THE SOUL (19)
History has a habit of repeating
itself. With the ban on Meng & Ecker No. 1, Savoy were quick to release
the latest instalment of that series, issue No.7, which has on its cover…
a bearded gentleman in uniform, surrounded by disembodied, pink and mottled,
wildly ejaculating male members. The whole issue is a kind of fond farewell
to the ex-Chief Constable.
In 1992, Savoy published Michael Moorcock: Death Is No Obstacle , Colin
Greenland’s book length interview with the celebrated author. Not focused
primarily on Moorcock’s fiction, but covering also his writing of comic
strips for Fleetway in 1960 and, later, Look and Learn, Death Is No Obstacle
comes with an introduction by Angela Carter. “She was another author of
the imaginative sort,” says Butterworth. “Not part of the realistic novel
movement; not the ‘University of East Anglia’ types who’ve been holding
sway for years.”
On a musical front, Savoy Wars is a CD compilation album of several of
the company’s rare 12″ single releases (10). As an added bonus, it includes
PJ Proby deconstructing the traditional Irish folk ballad The Old Fenian
Gun (which, in his drunken stupor, Proby pronounces ‘Finnegan’; ‘That old
Finnegan gun’). Reverbstorm, the song, is the posthumous anthem of Martin
Flitcroft, ex-Savoy Press Officer who, one day in 1992, placed himself
quite deliberately in the path of a moving train.
In March 1995, the company was filmed for BBC 2’s Clive Barker’s A-Z of
Horror. On the horizon is the imminent release of PJ Proby: The Savoy Sessions
CD LP. The bad boy of Rock made a surprise appearance on ITV’s chat show,
Barrymore, aired 30th April 1994. Successfully fielding questions levelled
at his drink problem (he hasn’t touched a drop since 1992), Proby avoided
mention of Savoy and finished on a song from West Side Story. The appearance
marked the singer’s self-reclamation in the mainstream. An extended interview
with him appeared in the August 94 edition of Record Collector magazine.
In July, Proby told Hello!, ‘I can’t find Proby any more. The things he
did, I can’t do.”
The police still have in their possession over 4,000 copies of Lord Horror
and Meng & Ecker comics seized back in September of 1989. For the hearingpending
as of writingSavoy intend to challenge the current procedure that, under
Section Three of the Obscene Publications Act, police can seize controversial
material, hold it for an unlimited period of time, and then seek its destruction
before a magistrate. It will also be argued that the publishers should
be allowed to have their trial before a jury. Under a 1964 amendment to
the Act there is a non-statutory provision for a trial if the publishers
ask for one. Savoy have asked for a jury trial, and been refused. If Savoy
win their case they may set favourable precedents for future publishers.
If they don’t win in the magistrates court, they have plans to take the
case to the divisional courts for judicial review. If they still fail,
they will answer the charge of obscenity.
For the first time in over a decade, The Gas has a national distribution.
The Savoy office is reached through a locksmith shop and up a staircase
which falls back on itself, its rickety handrail of little comfort in the
darkness. A coffin is set to one side. A floating head, painted on hardboard,
eight-foot tall and baring razor-teeth greets the visitor at the topa
backdrop from UKCAC, a comic convention which Savoy attend annually to
the chagrin of many. There is a bathtub full of books to the left, and
on the right an assortment of old metal toys and archaic filing system.
The view from the windows is of busy Deansgate, the business heart of the
city. For a surreal moment in the not too distant past, there was talk
of turning the Savoy offices into a huge pirate ship with sails billowing
down the side of the building and the Jolly Roger on a flagpole spanning
the congested main street. Unmissable, unavoidable. The kind of madcap
brainwave that Savoy would once have leaped upon and goaded into harsh
reality. One in the eye of THE ESTABLISHMENT. But now it’s a little different.
Now the insanity is tuned to work into the system as opposed to up against
it. It takes the form not of illicit vinyl recordings, bagged pornography,
or music pressured high and forced out the door, but of Savoy product.
Slivers of otherness wedged into that irritating rash called Reality. It
is societal bigotry as portrayed in Meng & Ecker; the urban despotism
of Lord Horror and Reverbstorm ; the immolation and resurrection of PJ
Proby.
What of the future?
Says Mike Butterworth, “There is quite a lot to get out. Readings of ‘The
Waste Land’ and Lord Horror on CDwe’ve got the recordings, we just need
to edit and press up. A Meng & Ecker, large format, best-of collection.
After we get this product out, if we still can’t make any breakthrough
we’ll probably call it a draw.”
Are you saying no new Savoy product? The closure of the shops?
“Since we’ve started Lord Horror we’ve paid scarcely any attention to the
shops, anyway. Today, all the shops are just dumps; they’re nothing like
they were in their heyday, when they were the first and the best. I’d like
you to mention that.” ? |
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