Suedehead (1971, James Moffatt)

 

Suedehead is James Moffatt's 'Skinhead at the Top' as Joe Hawkins, the anti-hero of the previous year's Skinhead attempts to better himself in life and cross the class boundaries. Sentenced to 18 months in prison at the end of the previous book, in a plot twist designed to antagonize a right leaning readership, the released Joe manipulates the system, exploiting the generosity of a prisoner's aid society into funding him a plush flat, and even worms his way into a job at a stock broking firm. How long though will it be before Joe's real nature breaks through his new, gentrified veneer?

Suedehead is cursed with an influx of secondary characters who turn out to be irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, a familiar trait of Moffatt’s.  Joe clashes with his grotesque Irish landlady Mrs. Malloy, whose only purpose in the book is to be an outlet for Moffatt's anti-Irish sentiments. After she fulfills that purpose, she is out the door. Moffatt then relocates the action to Soho where Joe gets an accountancy job working for rich, ruthless porn baron John Matson, who Joe suspects is setting him up as a fall guy...only to throw this subplot away too. A pity as Moffatt writes about Soho with a degree of authenticity, as well as plenty of venom. Matson is an obvious facsimile of real life Soho dirty bookshop kingpin John Mason. Moffatt even alludes to Mason's background as a theatre carpenter as well as his nickname 'God'.  Adding a 'T' to Mason's name was Moffatt’s idea of covering his tracks.  The brief, Soho set part of Suedehead with its allusions to Police corruption and descriptions of sweaty baldheaded men in dirty bookshops, ‘tarted up birds’ and tripping hippies, reads like the work of a man who knew those streets well, and was looking for an escape route.

I think the trick with Moffatt is to never care a great deal about the secondary characters as invariably they end up being discarded... the Moffatt world is a fickle one. However you can always rely on Moffatt to plug away at Seagram's Hundred Pipers- the true love of the man's life- in Moffatt books all roads lead to Seagram's Hundred Pipers.

"I like this scotch, what brand is it" Lois asked as if the rest of the world did not exist at that precise moment.
"Seagram's Hundred Pipers, quite new I understand"
"Seagram’s...are they the people who make Canadian Rye?"

The bulk of Suedehead serves not only as a follow up to Moffatt's own work but as a speculative sequel to A Clockwork Orange, concerned as it is with a former thug's struggle to adapt to straight society and hold back those thoughts of rape and ultra-violence. Suedehead though is mainly just a frustrating read that bears the hallmarks of Jim Moffatt writing a book with no fixed idea of where he was heading. Sexual tensions threaten to rear their ugly head between Joe and his enabler Bernice Hale, an older woman and queen of mixed messages...flashing her thighs and cleavage at Joe one minute, then reminding him she has a son the same age as Joe the next. 'In the knowledge of the exquisite power her chest measurements gave her, she basked in either glory or torment'. Don't get too used to Bernice however, as after being lusted over in print by Moffatt she then gets ditched from the pages of Suedehead. Only to be replaced by Marrisa Stone, an almost identical naive do-gooder and frustrated older woman "at night she lay in bed writhing in untold agony, wishing that a man -any man- would burst into her room and rape her'.

Whereas Skinhead, for all its hyper-exploitative excess, felt it had its feet grounded in reality, Suedehead jumps the shark, years before that expression was invented. It's tough to buy into the idea that the Joe Hawkins of the original book had the chameleon like ability to blend in with the nobs and the toffs, going from the king of the skinheads to a bowler hat wearing city gent. Of course Joe doesn't abstain from his old ways entirely, earning extra money on the sly by robbing and bashing older, gay men who pick Joe up for sex. Homosexuality is a preoccupation of Suedehead, lending the book a few potentially revealing moments. Joe flies into a violent rage when his sexuality is questioned by one of his pickups "are you one of us?", and yet while Moffatt might portray Joe as a randy, resolutely heterosexual, his relationships with women either prove to be short lived or end violently. Curiously, when Moffatt writes about Marrisa Stone, the main female love interest in the book, it feels as if he is describing himself. Blacks, trade unionists, and Britain's entry into the European Union are Marrisa's bête noires, as they were Moffatt's. Making her Moffatt's dream date, but certainly not his creation's. Joe's relationship with the older woman ending in flying fists and broken ribs, mirroring his dealings with older, gay men. Towards the end of the book, Joe takes to checking out a young couple in a bar, but bats more of an erotic eye at the guy 'He had a handsome face whereas hers was plain and pock-marked.  He had a hairy chest peeping from under a loose, unbuttoned shirt…he wore tight Levi's and made no attempt to conceal his overly developed manhood'. A rather homoerotic observation for a straight, homophobic character to make, or a straight, homophobic author to write. Was Moffatt a closet case? It's tempting to theorize that self-loathing was behind the hatred of others that is let loose in his books.

The vitriol aimed at gays in Moffatt's books often emanates from the perpetrator’s fears that they too might be gay, this from 1980’s Mod Rule “Joe wanted to bash the bastard. He hated queers with a virile youth's inner fear of turning into one”. While in 1972’s Skinhead Girls, the heroine is also tormented by the idea that she is gay “Her mind boiled as she ran. Was she? Wasn’t she? The heat of the hippie girl’s body against hers had been delectable".  Saying that am I conning myself into casting Moffatt as a self-hating gay, due to that making him a more intriguing, sympathetic and palatable figure, rather than facing up to the idea that the man might simply have been a bigot and a bully.   

While it is admirable that Moffatt didn't just write a carbon copy of Skinhead, sadly Suedehead, along with the later Dragon Skins, only serves as evidence that Moffatt was lost as a writer when diverting from the Skinhead formula. Full of hateful, charmless people who can't their act together, these characteristics unfortunately define the book as well. Suedehead is a ball of negative energy that aimlessly bounces around for 110 pages, yet even at his messiest you instantly know when you are reading a Moffatt. His books always have the air of...to nab a few lyrics from The Jam..."pubs and wormwood scrubs and too many right wing meetings". Not even standing under Niagara Falls will make you feel clean after reading a Moffatt. His books are a ticket to the man's private hell.  Before descending into that snake-pit, maybe it is wise to follow Moffatt’s lead and down a few Seagram’s Hundred Pipers, he advised as if the rest of the world did not exist at that precise moment.

Devouring Eat Them Alive

 Me, Clive and Nick share thoughts on Pierce Nace's preying mantis opus Eat Them Alive

Joe the Fourth

 Another two hours plus in the D'Amato wilderness

Rogue Angels (1973, Peter Cave)

 

In 1972's The Run - the final book in his 'Chopper' trilogy of biker novels- author Peter Cave opted to 'go big' by restaging the American civil war in Torquay as Southern bikers battled Northern Bikers over the rights of blacks to be admitted into the English chapter of the Hells Angels. For his next biker novel, Rogue Angels, Cave instead adopts the approach of 'go ugly' amplifying the levels of violence and nihilism much louder than before.

A book that pits the one per cent against the one percenters, Rogue Angels centers around William Fletcher, a high flying company director who has fought hard for the finer things in life. Fletcher's drive earning him three cars, an old Tudor Mansion in Weybridge and a beautiful wife. The moment Cave begins painting Fletcher as the epitome of a working class, East End kid made good, you know the worst is going to happen. Sure enough Fletcher's Mercedes gets caught up in an altercation with Hells Angels.  His initial, native belief that these bikers are harmless kids and the victims of tabloid scaremongering "the frightening stories seemed like so much rubbish invented by reporters with fertile imaginations" proves to be tragically incorrect when they begin spitting at and trashing his car. Incensed Fletcher retaliates, only to receive a tire iron through his window, causing a car accident that costs Fletcher's wife her life, and leaves Fletcher with life changing injuries. "Half of his lower jaw and most of his right-hand cheekbone had been smashed away" while Fletcher's inability to grow back a full beard "gave him the look of a piebald alopecic".

Left with nothing but a strong desire for revenge, Fletcher vows to hunt down ‘Shades’ the bearded, dark glasses wearing Hells Angel who caused his wife's death. Initially, Fletcher comes across as a proxy for Cave himself. Both men being civilized, thirty-somethings tasked with the job of re- training their brains to think like a lawless, savage Hells Angel. Cave, in order to write a book like this, and Fletcher in order to go undercover in the Hells Angels underworld and flush out his despised, mysterious nemesis. "He dropped the thin veneer of sophistication he had built up over the successful years. The precision of his BBC voice was dropped and the harsh Cockney vowels came back to him...he toughened his fists daily by punching walls and lampposts".
Whereas the majority of vigilante themed books and movies try and persuade you to get behind their protagonists, Fletcher is an alienating, frighteningly inhuman character, willing to resort to despicable acts in order to achieve his revenge. Would we have supported Death Wish's Paul Kersey if he had responded to the attack on his family by going out and mugging or sexually assaulting members of the public? Fletcher though has no qualms about terrorizing innocent people in order to win favor within the Hells Angels community, where he earns himself the nickname 'Werewolf Willie'. Not only that, but Fletcher also gets off on doing so, admitting that "action and violence had started a warm glow spreading across his groin" after leading an assault on a Pakistani discotheque.

Whereas The Run had flirted with depicting the Hells Angels in a heroic light, by having them pick up the noble clause of defending their black brothers while not shying away from the fact that they also commit gang rape and senseless vandalism along the way, there is no such ambiguity in Rogue Angels. Fletcher's mob is irredeemably bad, consisting of head cases and hardcore criminality who think nothing of dishing out extreme violence and death.  The bloodshed here occasionally rising to a level more associated with Guy N Smith "the cold metal sliced into his belly, slicing out his guts as neatly as the disemboweling sword of a kamikaze".

They are not the only ones who have upped their game either. The Suedeheads -depicted in the earlier books as helpless human punch bags for the Hells Angels- turn out to be a formidable enemy here. Mainly due to their acumination of 'Battle Trucks' big American cars described as "travelling arsenals of weapons and tools of destruction in the capacious boots, the cars might carry everything from knives and cudgels to garden sprays filled with acid and paint stripper". If Cave wasn't pulling these ideas from real life, he was certainly giving the Suedeheads a few useful ideas in Rogue Angels.

Just as Rogue Angels captures Cave's male characters at their most violent, it's female characters rank as the most skankiest Cave ever wrote, with well fitting names like Shagger Lil and Plater Pat. After Plater Pat has lived up to her nickname by fellating Fletcher and another biker, Fletcher kicks her in the ribs and remarks "Ok sweetheart, you've been well fed...now go get us some food". Which is as romantic as Rogue Angels gets. In another sordid sexual encounter Fletcher is obliged to screw the Angels’ resident gang bang queen Shagger Lil, after many bikers have already had the pleasure "he shuddered inside, thinking of the mathematical odds in favour of the girl carrying VD". Fortunately Shagger takes him in hand "as though his penis were a bar of gold" dispelling the other bikers' concerns that Fletcher doesn't like girls. One of the many factoids to be acquired from Rogue Angels is that gay men of the time who were into bikes and leather earned themselves the nickname "Penis Pirates" a missed opportunity for a spinoff novel if ever there was one.

Rogue Angels might be Cave at his most callous, the book is dedicated to eleven different women 'who helped me through a very nasty patch' and you suspect an even larger harem would have been needed to pull him out of the dark place that Rogue Angels came from. Even so, Cave's sense of humour does manage to shine through the darkness. The author especially having fun here at the expense of Fletcher's motley crew. Biker ‘Little Lou’ is the source of some unlikely name dropping when Cave mentions Lou has 'violet Elizabeth Taylor eyes' and 'was an ardent fan of the late Adolph Hitler'. Whilst Sweet William 'sucked raw eggs off the pavement, French kissed his friends in public and shouted the vilest obscenities at shopping housewives or exercising nuns". Along the way you also have to spare a thought for Shagger Lil's mum, after her daughter's suitors show up at the Shagger Household and tell her "we only want to screw your daughter...but don't worry she's on the pill" before unzipping themselves and ‘giving the lawn and flowers and unusual watering’.

I've previously stuck my neck out and claimed that endings are a Peter Cave strong point, and Rogue Angels isn't about to throw a spanner in the works there, in fact this might be his best ever ending. While Cave did have one more biker book in him, Speed Freaks, by rights Rogue Angels feels as if it should have been the last stop. Its ending not only having an explosive air of finality about it, but also of the author cleansing himself of this extremely dirty subject matter.

If you do only ever read one Cave biker book, make it Rogue Angels. Just be aware that by skipping straight to this one, you are less being thrown in the deep end, and more having your face forced in the deep end by a leather boot. Rogue Angels is the evil runt of the Cave biker litter, leave your humanity at the door.

Emanuelle and the far from last D'Amato films

 The D'Amato saga continues....

Mama (1972, Peter Cave)

 

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.   

Speed Freaks (1973, Peter Cave)

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