promising small parts in film, and my agent wanted me to try Los Angeles. The great pink castle in the sky. But, being a rebellious sort — or “idiot,” if you prefer — I decided instead to spend that spring in thrall to a radical group of actors in London. Radically averse to bathing or picking up the tab, as it turned out.
They preferred to style themselves performance activists, taking over derelict buildings to torment audiences with blood- and snot-drenched productions of Edward Bond and Samuel Beckett. They ate and drank Brecht and Boal: “liberation through theatre.” In fact, they were liberating their todgers: the four actresses in the company were meant to inspire creativity in a variety of ways, none of which required clothes. We were meant to be grateful for such offerings: so many other girls waited in the wings.
I was insecure about my own talents, tainted with the stain of television success. So I was perversely happy to be told that everything I had done, to that point, was shit. It was a relief to shut my mouth and follow someone else’s bad decisions for a change.
Did I mention they had great drugs? That might have been part of the lure. I was still an amateur at this point — a bit of speed, a bit of hash, a few lines of coke at the beginning of the night and a Valium at the end. But these guys were serious. The Edmund Hillarys of mind expansion. They were on the frontiers, at the summit, always looking ahead for new and better ways to claw through the barriers around their imaginations.
This is how I came, one warm night in May, to be sitting in a decrepit flat in Notting Hill with a wizened creature who called himself a shaman, drinking a brew that tasted of cat litter, which was supposed to blow my mind open forever. Only after I’d taken the first rancid sip did it occur to me: I was probably better off with my mind sealed against draughts.
To start at the beginning, though. Danny was our troupe’s leader — as an anarchist collective, we shunned hierarchies, but Danny always got his choice of roles and women. He’d been to Peru, shooting a small role in a Werner Herzog movie, and there he’d got wind of a powerful hallucinogen used by Quechua Indians in their rituals: ayahuasca . It translated to “vine of spirits” or “vine of life” or “vine of death”; Danny wasn’t sure which.
Somehow, Danny blagged his way into an ayahuasca ceremony — using his beautiful voice or his luscious bottom or perhaps both — and came back to London a new man. While he was tripping, all knowledge in the world became available to him. For weeks he droned on about how we needed to take this drug together, to fly as one through the cosmos. The world’s first ayahuasca bore. To shut him up, we agreed. This is the thing about druggies: they’re always looking for the new best high. Why not a potion brewed from an Amazonian weed?
That was our first problem. It grew in the Amazon, and the only fellow capable of administering it was also in the Amazon, having his jaguar visions at the end of an impassable dirt track. Danny was adamant that we needed to take the trip properly, and that meant having a shaman as our navigator. He put all his energies into bringing the vine and the man to London, a highly illegal and fraught proposition. The troupe’s meagre resources were marshalled toward this purpose. It meant the end of our plans for a black-light version of No Exit , to be staged in an abandoned post office in Pimlico. The world somehow survived its absence.
Finally Danny had pulled sufficient strings, bribing a baggage handler at Heathrow and a cousin who worked at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The date was set. The setting was crucial — a hut in the jungle would have been ideal, but we didn’t know anyone who lived outside the M25. So we settled for a flat in Notting Hill, the next best thing.
You must remember that in those days Notting Hill was a jungle, a different country, a
They preferred to style themselves performance activists, taking over derelict buildings to torment audiences with blood- and snot-drenched productions of Edward Bond and Samuel Beckett. They ate and drank Brecht and Boal: “liberation through theatre.” In fact, they were liberating their todgers: the four actresses in the company were meant to inspire creativity in a variety of ways, none of which required clothes. We were meant to be grateful for such offerings: so many other girls waited in the wings.
I was insecure about my own talents, tainted with the stain of television success. So I was perversely happy to be told that everything I had done, to that point, was shit. It was a relief to shut my mouth and follow someone else’s bad decisions for a change.
Did I mention they had great drugs? That might have been part of the lure. I was still an amateur at this point — a bit of speed, a bit of hash, a few lines of coke at the beginning of the night and a Valium at the end. But these guys were serious. The Edmund Hillarys of mind expansion. They were on the frontiers, at the summit, always looking ahead for new and better ways to claw through the barriers around their imaginations.
This is how I came, one warm night in May, to be sitting in a decrepit flat in Notting Hill with a wizened creature who called himself a shaman, drinking a brew that tasted of cat litter, which was supposed to blow my mind open forever. Only after I’d taken the first rancid sip did it occur to me: I was probably better off with my mind sealed against draughts.
To start at the beginning, though. Danny was our troupe’s leader — as an anarchist collective, we shunned hierarchies, but Danny always got his choice of roles and women. He’d been to Peru, shooting a small role in a Werner Herzog movie, and there he’d got wind of a powerful hallucinogen used by Quechua Indians in their rituals: ayahuasca . It translated to “vine of spirits” or “vine of life” or “vine of death”; Danny wasn’t sure which.
Somehow, Danny blagged his way into an ayahuasca ceremony — using his beautiful voice or his luscious bottom or perhaps both — and came back to London a new man. While he was tripping, all knowledge in the world became available to him. For weeks he droned on about how we needed to take this drug together, to fly as one through the cosmos. The world’s first ayahuasca bore. To shut him up, we agreed. This is the thing about druggies: they’re always looking for the new best high. Why not a potion brewed from an Amazonian weed?
That was our first problem. It grew in the Amazon, and the only fellow capable of administering it was also in the Amazon, having his jaguar visions at the end of an impassable dirt track. Danny was adamant that we needed to take the trip properly, and that meant having a shaman as our navigator. He put all his energies into bringing the vine and the man to London, a highly illegal and fraught proposition. The troupe’s meagre resources were marshalled toward this purpose. It meant the end of our plans for a black-light version of No Exit , to be staged in an abandoned post office in Pimlico. The world somehow survived its absence.
Finally Danny had pulled sufficient strings, bribing a baggage handler at Heathrow and a cousin who worked at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The date was set. The setting was crucial — a hut in the jungle would have been ideal, but we didn’t know anyone who lived outside the M25. So we settled for a flat in Notting Hill, the next best thing.
You must remember that in those days Notting Hill was a jungle, a different country, a
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