MICHAEL X

[garth cartwright]

This, the first ever biography of Michael X, is subtitled "A Life In Black & White" and that proves true. Author John Williams is well known for INTO THE BADLANDS, his excellent overview of US crime fiction authors (republished and updated recently as BACK TO THE BADLANDS - I recommend it highly to anyone interested in American fiction's crime genre), and 3 Cardiff-based novels that uncover that city's secret history.

Doing research for those books has meant the late black radical Michael X pops up - living as he initially did in Cardiff's docks after leaving Trinidad. X appears regularly it seems in recent UK media - Joe Boyd's White Bicycles details hiring him to protect the hippie Roundhouse gigs from skinhead attacks while a silly UK bank heist film had him as a protagonist. Michael X has become a fictional figure of sorts - which makes sense as he constantly reinvented himself - and Williams has set out to uncover who the real man was beyond the hazy hippie memories and tabloid headlines. Well, it's a fascinating life story and very well written. Understandably as X's life often involved criminal activities of sorts this book reads somewhat like a crime thriller - what is going to happen next?

The Michael X story is a tragicomedy of the sixties. It’s the extraordinary, all but forgotten story of a hustler from Trinidad who conquered swinging London. Michael X was the man who knew everyone – from Muhammad Ali to Alexander Trocchi, Malcolm X to John Lennon, William Burroughs to Leonard Cohen. He was an extraordinary figure who became the public face of black Britain in the late '60s, before the media tired of him and he fell victim to the hustler's classic mistake - believing his own hype. He moved back to Trinidad, started a commune and dreamed of becoming his country’s President. Instead two dead bodies were found on his land and he was convicted of murder and hanged three years later, despite the best efforts of his celebrity supporters.

This biography expertly places Michael X in context. It evokes the many worlds he inhabited, both physical worlds - Trinidad in the '40s, Tiger Bay in the '50s, Notting Hill in the '60s - and cultural ones - emigrants, beatniks, revolutionaries.

The Michael X that emerges is not simply the black bogeyman familiar from the British press of the '60s, but a complex individual, full of contradictions: brash and insecure, funny and menacing, black and white, a trickster and as serious as your life. I must admit that Williams appears to empathise with X more than I felt necessary; he strikes me as your typical hustler, always avoiding working while looking for others to finance his dreams and uncaring of those who end up damaged/discarded. But this biography is no love letter - the author puts the life of a very flawed man on display and allows us to make our minds up.

What is most notable is just how different UK race relations now are and how more cynical and savvy as a society we are today - MX exploited the hippies and liberals because they wanted to have a cuddly black power icon. Yet the British state jailed him for inciting race hatred - which now appears a very trumped up charge, he was just sounding off, a blowhard, especially as Enoch Powell was never charged for his vile torrents of hate - and this seems to have sent MX off the edge. Many a 60s radical came a cropper in the early 70s and MX paid the highest price - hanged in Trinidad.

At the book's launch I met his lawyer who turned out to be friends with Charlie as he's a big rockabilly fan. What's that about six degrees of separation? A fine biography and an interesting history of a London now forever changed.

[Adam Blake]

Very interesting, Garth. Knowing, as I do, some of the original hippies from the Notting Hill of those days, it was always my understanding that Michael de Freitas started out here as an enforcer for Rachman, the slum landlord. That means he beat up vulnerable people for money. That makes him a bad guy in my book. The hippies adopted him as a token black because he adopted them and played the role to the hilt. Opinions are mixed to this day. Some people cheered when he got hanged, others were sad to lose such an interesting character. But when is it ok for a "blowhard" to let off steam about race? When they're black? Unleashing torrents of racial hatred, as Enoch Powell is accused of doing - is it that different to what the Black Power movement under Stokely Carmichael were doing? We all have to live together on this planet and inciting hatred is pretty much always a bad idea.

I think Michael was a wideboy, a spiv, a chancer, a petty criminal who stole his soubriquet from a genuine political revolutionary and who got his name in the papers a few times and who made the mistake of thinking he could piss about in the Carribean the same way he did here. He paid for that mistake with his life. A salutary tale. Now, pushing 40 years later, he is the subject of a book. Interesting times we live in when such a character can still command so much of the public's imagination. I'd like to read it for starters!

[Hugh Weldon]

Interesting times certainly - but I feel a little uneasy about the glamorisation/idealisation of criminals - Michael X is not that far from the Krays, is he really? (Mutatis mutandi)

And Adam is correct about the choice of name giving him political cachet he didn't really deserve - Malcolm X was a genuinely more interesting character, and a figure of some genuine political significance.

[garth cartwright]

Both Adam and Hugh are correct in their assumptions and only a fool would compare Michael with Malcolm - John Williams doesn't. And yes he worked for Rachman but John feels history has done Rachman a disservice - a slumlord, yes, but one who rented to black immigrants when no one else would (No "no blacks, Irish, dogs" signs in his flats). As for the racial abuse that sent Michael to jail for a year well John thinks he was unfairly convicted - he wasn't preaching hatred, just saying mess with us and you will be sorry. John has studied the material - obviously he was not at the event - and feels the State came down very heavily on a rather silly man. Michael did commit more serious crimes after he came out of prison. A hustler who lost control of the hustle and paid the ultimate price.

[Adam Blake]

John has studied the material - obviously he was not at the event - and feels the State came down very heavily on a rather silly man.

The details are well presented in Barry Miles's book "In the Sixties" - which is the best British Counterculture memoir I've seen.

People tend to forget that The State DID come down heavily in those days. Hoppy Hopkins did six months in the Scrubs for less than two joints worth of marijuana when actually the real reason was that he was the prime mover behind things like UFO and International Times (you ask Joe Boyd!) The police, at the instigation of the Home Office, felt it was quite acceptable to raid the offices of the International Times and steal their mailing list of subscribers and advertisers and smash up their printing press. Plus, it was a big deal for guys to have long hair in the late 60s. You were asking to get hassled by the police or beaten up by skinheads - or both. Michael de Freitas was briefly hired by Miles as a bouncer after UFO was robbed and the police refused to do anything about it.

Also, Rachman was not renting rooms to West Indians out of altruism! He saw an opportunity to exploit people who had virtually no protection. For some superb photos of what Notting Hill looked like in the early 60s (as well as lots of other weird and wonderful stuff) check out Hoppy Hopkins book of photos "From The Hip" - published by Damian Press.

[Ted]

People tend to forget that The State DID come down heavily in those days.

And lets not forget that one of the reasons for this was that in London the Old Bill were taking extremely large drinks from the likes of Rachmann and Soho porn barons.
They had to be seen to be doing something for their wages and that something was coming down hard on hippies who to quote David Widgery "were about as much of a threat to the state as people who put foreign coins in gas meters".

[Adam Blake]

coming down hard on hippies who to quote David Widgery "were about as much of a threat to the state as people who put foreign coins in gas meters".

Fabulous quote, Ted. Nice to see you're keeping up with the important issues of the day even while on reconnaissance in Jamaica...