gavcrimson

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.