Even Angels get the blues, and this sequel to 1971’s
Chopper finds the Hells Angels from that book at their lowest ebb. ‘Chopper’ Harris is dead, and continuing his
run of bad luck in life, suffers the indignity of being buried in civilian
civvies at the instance of his long estranged parents. “If a Hells Angel had a soul, then Chopper’s
would at that moment be screaming with anger and frustration”. Marty ‘Big M’ Gresham, the head of the
Angels, is forced to hang up his Nazi Helmet for good, having lost the respect
of his fellow Angels, and takes the walk of shame to civilian anonymity.
Bored, directionless and leaderless, the remainder of
the Angels squabble amongst each other and threaten to implode as a group. It’s left to Elaine –Gresham’s girlfriend
who’d transferred her elegance and affections to Chopper- to pull the Hells
Angels back together and give the club its mojo back. Haunted by the death of her lover, Elaine
vows to do right by Chopper, by making the Hells Angels a more greater, feared
and powerful force than ever before...it’s what Chop would have wanted. Reinventing herself by donning a one-piece
leather outfit and adopting the nickname ‘Mama’, Elaine loudly announces
herself as the new leader of the Angels by riding Chopper’s Harley into the
cafe that his former comrades frequent.
The King is dead, long live the Queen.
It does come as a surprise that the sequel to Chopper
makes Elaine the central character, especially as the original book gave the
impression that author Peter Cave wasn’t much of a fan of hers. Indeed, in the previous book, she was the
type of woman who gives all the others a bad name. A heartless schemer whose sex appeal caused
Chopper to go against his Angel principles and make a power grab that proved to
be his and Elaine’s downfall. Usually
when sequel novels turn a secondary character into the protagonist they are humanised,
rendered more sympathetic and relatable, but Cave goes in the opposite
direction with Mama. Reincarnating
Elaine as a tough, Angel Queen who has all the male bikers queuing up to lick
her leather boots. Given that the female
characters in Cave’s biker novels tend to be subservient girlfriends or sexual receptacles,
I did fear that the idea of a woman as head of the Angels would be a hard sell,
but it is actually one of the more convincing aspects to the book. The slightest unzipping of her leather
one-piece outfit has the horny guys eating out of her hand, or failing that a
swift, hard kick in the balls silences her chauvinistic critics. At various points in the book Elaine is compared
to Lady Macbeth, Bonnie Parker, the Goddess Kali and Joan of Arc, a fighting
combination of genes if ever there was one.
In the original book, Chopper stood accused as being a sucker for this
hot blonde, for the sequel its Cave himself who seems to fall under Elaine’s
sexy spell. Mama is a book that rarely
lets you forget that Elaine is totally naked under that leather one-piece,
attempting to get male readers hot under the collar with descriptions of ‘the
sexy feel of the cool leather against her bare flesh’ and ‘the proud swell of
her breasts, the tightness of her narrow waist and the smooth, rounded shape of
her hips and buttocks’.
Often New English Library’s choice of cover photos
felt like a random grab for the nearest photo of a ‘tearaway’ they had to hand,
but in the case of Mama, the unknown model seen on the cover in all her fag ash
Lil glory really nails the not-to-be-messed-with attitude of the
character. She IS Mama, and as well as
that iconic image also graced the cover of another NEL Biker novel ‘A Place in
Hell’ published the same year.
Mama leads you to wonder if Cave didn’t have a
competitive streak when it came to James ‘Richard Allen’ Moffatt’s Skinhead
novels, the chief competition to Cave’s biker books at NEL. Moffatt’s 1970 book ‘Skinhead’ had kicked off
NEL’s turn towards the youthsploitation market, and Cave announced his biker
characters in Chopper by having them give an almighty beating to a gang of
skinheads. In the interim, Moffatt wrote
his sequel novel ‘Suedehead’ and here Cave has Elaine assert her right to lead
the Angels by masterminding an assault on a bunch of luckless Suedeheads. It’s as if anyone Moffatt wrote about was
destined to get the shit kicked out of them in a Peter Cave book. The message the Cave books sent out to the
schoolyards was that those skins and suedeheads were a right bunch of pansies compared
to the Hells Angels, and it’s the likes of Chopper and Mama that all the cool
kids should be reading about.
Mama might bring back all the characters from the
first book –Nick the Greek, Irish Mick, Freaky, Danny the Deathlover- but it is
no retread that merely switches the gender of the main character. Instead, Cave pitches Mama as a biker
variation on the ‘rise and fall of a small time hood’ gangster story. In that sense, Elaine is less Lady Macbeth
and more Lady Scarface. Whereas in the
first book the Hells Angels’ actions were mainly reckless and thrill seeking,
here Elaine attempts to build up a criminal organisation, funded by robberies,
extortion and drug dealing. A move that
causes friction between newer, younger members who merely want to have fun and
ride motorcycles, and older, more hard-bitten Angels who want to fully embody
their outlaw image.
As well as the regular gang, Mama also introduces new
biker characters, ‘Juice’ James so named for his IV drug use, Adolph named in
honour of his Aryan blonde hair. Most
notable Cave gives us his first black character, Winston Oliver, who Elaine
re-names ‘Superspade’. After facing all
the prejudice you’d expect from a book written in the early 1970s, Supes
ultimately earns the respect of whitey due to a combination of motorcycle skills,
judo fighting techniques and a hatred of Pakistanis. Enough for him to be ‘initiated’ into the
Angels, thus Supes becomes the first black man in England to have the honour of
being spat at, pissed on and puked on by Hells Angels and emerge from that mess
a bona fide Hells Angel himself. A fine
day for racial equality.
I’m curious how much basis in reality ‘Superspade’
had. In a 1973 Man Alive documentary
about the British Hells Angels, one of their number, Mad John, complains about
the number of imitation Hells Angels clubs springing up in the UK, and mentions
having pushed a large black man from a bike, due to the man sporting fake Hells
Angels insignias. So if we are to
believe a man called Mad John, it is possible that there were black Hells
Angels in Britain at the time, at least on an unofficial level. Even so, an outsider’s glimpse into the
British Hells Angels scene of today, suggests Cave’s crystal ball was malfunctioning
when it came to his prediction here that the Hells Angels would soon become a matriarchal,
racially inclusive society.
Cave’s approach to his biker novels isn’t dissimilar
to that of a mondo movie, with a tabloidish sense of giving the public what it
wants, he cuts straight to the bizarre, sensationalist spectacles. Serving up an edited highlights reel that
trims out the mundane aspects of the Angels lives. We never hear about their unglamorous day
jobs, their worldly responsibilities or interactions with family members...only
their lives on the hogs, and the kicks.
Had Mama been a mondo movie, its poster would no doubt have been
plastered with ballyhoo like ‘witness the Angels’ wedding rituals’, ‘be
prepared to be shocked as an Angel shoots up’, ‘what is the shameful secret
Elaine keeps locked away in her room’, and ‘see the horrific battle between the
Angels and the Pakistanis’. In the early
stages of the book, Cave maintains the stance of an impartial reporter, neither
moralising about their lifestyle, or giving the impression that he has their
backs. It’s only in a rare, introspective
moment in the book, where Elaine does some soul searching, that Cave seizes the
chance to let loose with what he really thinks about the Angels “they were
merely a pathetic band of failures- dropouts from a civilisation they couldn’t
cope with”.
What with Cave having put distance between himself and
the people he was writing about, and seemingly broken the sexy spell that
Elaine had over him, this is significantly also the point in the book that the
Angels’ behaviour turns truly heinous and beyond the pale. Much of Mama’s notoriety rightly rests on the
part of the book where the Angels decide to celebrate Christmas by terrorising
a Pakistani community centre, having become incensed at one of the Angels
having been beaten up by Pakistani men.
Cave never displayed the same eagerness to mine the vein of race-hate
that James Moffatt did, but on the rare occasions that he did trespass into
Gentleman Jim Moffatt territory, there certainly wasn’t any half measures. Just about every racial insult is freely
thrown about, as the Angels drink heavily, use speed and work themselves up
into a bigoted frenzy, with one of them joking that he’d have no qualms about
running over black people as “they just fill up the holes in the tarmac”. The Angels then ride to Stepney, grabbing
hold of one unfortunate black youth, who is bombarded by kicks and racial expletives,
before Elaine orders him to be taken away and “turn him into curry”. Despite the Angels’ expectations of a full on
gang fight with Pakistani youths, the community centre is mainly populated by
kids and old people who cower in a corner as the Angels trash the centre, and
viciously beat with knuckledusters anyone ballsy enough to stand up to
them. Thick skinned, 1970s trash fiction
without mercy. It’s a genuinely
harrowing, tough to read chapter, concluding with the sickening revelation that
the kid who got grabbed by the Angels outside the centre ended up being scalped
by them, and the ironic comment ‘it was a happy Christmas all round’. Echoing the sentiments of the skinheads
interviewed in the 1969 Man Alive documentary- ‘What’s the Truth about Hells
Angels and Skinheads’- who try and justify their attacks on Pakistanis by
claiming “it’s not their colour, cause we like the Jamaicans, they’re alright,
we mix with the Jamaicans”, Cave’s Hells Angels don’t seem to hate everyone
with black skin, and draw a similar line between Jamaican and Pakistani
cultures. Earlier on in the book, a
reggae number being played in a pub causes an appreciative Elaine to hustle the
Go-Go Dancers off the stage in order to dance and strip to the music herself
‘Elaine caught the beat and started to shake her hips in perfect time’. In sharp contrast, hearing Sitar music being
played at the community centre results in Elaine storming the stage to stomp all
over the musical instrument in a symbolic rejection of Pakistani culture ‘the
instrument folded up into a wreckage which would never play another note’. While them heavy boss sounds from Jamaica
brings out the proper rude girl in Elaine, the sound of Sitars unleashes her
inner Bernard Manning. It is said that
the well thumbed copies of Chopper that were pasted around schoolyards in the
1970s had a tendency to always open on page 93 –which is the ‘very rude part’
of that book- but had the pages of Mama fell open anywhere between chapters 8
and 9, well... you wouldn’t have wanted to be a Pakistani kid in that school.
On the rare occasions that Mama threatens to become a
re-write of Chopper, Cave cleverly uses the opportunity to go against expectations
set by the first book. A run to Bournemouth
initially looks to be a repeat of the Angels’ assault on Seaforth in
Chopper. However, whereas their Seaforth
jaunt saw the Hells Angels victoriously terrorise the seaside town and run
rings around the police, in Bournemouth the fuzz have the upper hand and the
Angels are reduced to such petty, pathetic antics as destroying a flower bed
and strangling seagulls. Bournemouth
might be a damp squib for the Angels, but Mama comes back strongly for its
finale, as Elaine plans one ‘big job’ that will get them enough money to make
the pilgrimage to the highways of America.
Naturally, it doesn’t go to plan.
Cave was always a safe bet when it came to doozy
endings, and Mama doesn’t disappoint, having its cake and eating it by offering
up a satisfying comeuppance for the characters who deserved it, while dishing
out a tragic, violent demise to the sole character in the book who’d developed
a moral compass. Peter Cave books are
unforgiving by nature.
In the world of trash fiction at least, men and women
were equal in the 1970s, and Mama seems to have been every bit the success that
Chopper was. First published in March
1972, the book was reprinted in February and June 1973 and was into its fourth
edition by 1974. Elaine was very much in
demand back then. Like its predecessor,
Mama was also revived in the 1990s, when it was republished by Nigel Wingrove’s
Redemption company, whose forays into book publishing were destined to be
overshadowed by their VHS arm.
It has to be said, you truly feel alive while you’re
reading a Peter Cave book. Still in his
early 30s when he wrote Mama, a constant charge of youthful energy and crass
willingness to shock runs through its pages.
Mama adds up to a good time with a bad girl.
