But how does a filmmaker cope with depression? You can have a character act moody, downbeat, irrational and dead to sentience, but by what means do you convey the grand drama and existential terror of the inner apocalypse that is the hallmark of the full-on depressive state? Lars von Trier has found a way – by reifying it as the eerily beautiful blue planet Melancholia, which is coming towards Earth and maybe will collide, or maybe not. 

Melancholia is very deliberately a film of two halves. The first, entitled ‘Justine’, depicts a train crash of a high-class wedding reception, where depressive bride Justine (Kirsten Dunst) simply isn’t in the mood, breaking off from the proceedings to take a bath, wander on the hotel golf course and capriciously shag one of the guests in a bunker, as family and friends fulminate around her. Shot in a chaotic style, with jerky camerawork, jump cutting and crossing the line, it lightly sketches Justine’s situation, but does so with knowing expertise. The interaction of her cold, ball-breaking mother (Charlotte Rampling) and skittish, ineffectual father (John Hurt), now estranged, tells us all we need to know. 

The second half is entitled ‘Claire’, after Justine’s better adjusted sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and shows the aftermath of the failed wedding, with Justine staying on at the country hotel which is owned by Claire and husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). Apart from the family there is no one else around – no guests, no golfers, no staff – so the setting could be a more aesthetic version of the Overlook Hotel. Into this hermetic bubble, the planet Melancholia makes its entrance, with John studying it through his telescope and calming fears about an imminent collision with Earth. Through careful and inspired use of CGI, the blue planet manifests in the sky over the ornate topiaried gardens and lake, forming a luminous binary combination with the moon by night and an impressive blue-white sphere of increasing magnitude by day. 

Despite reassurances from John, Claire becomes increasingly anxious and googles Melancholia to find a diagram of its trajectory in relation to Earth, which contains a tricksy whiplash sting in the tail. However, in contrast to Claire, Justine finds herself much more serene than normal, somehow  in accord with the approaching Melancholia, and even takes to bathing nude by its light, the preternatural sapphire glow sculpting her body so that she resembles an ethereal goddess.  To placate Claire, John creates a circle out of wire, to be held at a fixed distance and so measure whether the planet is getting bigger or smaller. Having loomed large in the sky, it starts to recede, causing relief all around, but presently – horror of horrors – it starts to swell again, threatening to wipe out everything, life as we know it. 

So by using the science fiction conceit of the cosmically-wrought end-of-the-world scenario, Lars von Trier perfectly recreates the conditions of depression, with its looming all-pervasive horror, waxing and waning and waxing, and the threat of apocalypse always felt to be imminent. As a rationale it’s more subtle than cracking walls, a giant talking rabbit or a dummy with a mind of its own, and has left some of its audience out in the cold and bewildered. The ponderous very Northern European style of the filmmaking, reminiscent of Bergman and Tarkovsky,  and low on entertainment value, has also acted as an alienating factor. Yet for those that ‘get it’, this is uncompromising cinema of a high order, a true auteur’s vision of a coalescence of beauty and darkness, a transcription of the perilous path that circles the Nietzschean abyss which is always there, if not always in sight.

‘…Jack and I were afire with our trip and talked about it for days. He too had experienced a sense of oneness with nature, life as energy and worlds in grains of sand as well as the sensory overload, distortion of time and space and hallucinatory after-images. Our lives had been turned on their heads and we were a great deal better for it, we agreed. Our friends ought to try this miraculous stuff. Everyone should… The light of joy was in our eyes; we’d stumbled across the elixir of life, the substance that was going to transform humanity!’

By then LSD was illegal, so Leaf’s inclination naturally pushed him onto the wrong side of the law. The next few years were colourful and picaresque, involving travelling and dope running in Europe, Turkey, Morocco and Thailand; and later back in England, he became a key member of the Julie outfit, who manufactured and supplied millions of doses of acid in the 1970s. In the book Leaf conveys the subtle changes in his outlook over the passage of time, and also the ambivalence of his position, distributing acid for idealistic reasons, yet having to put up with the stresses and strains of outlaw life.

‘At the beginning of our acid-dealing days I was light-hearted and full of optimism. Over the years the stress levels grew. Life is a continuum – by the time of the bust I was paranoid and full of anxiety, not a good exemplar for my wares.’

In the Operation Julie bust all his worst fears were realised. The gang were treated like big-time criminals and parallels were drawn between them and the IRA and Baader Meinhof. ‘It was falsely stated that there were links between us – a very effective smear in terms of demonising us in the mind of the public.’

The ‘real story’ from Leaf’s point of view – of wanting to raise consciousness to free the spirit – was lost and he became famous for all the wrong reasons and faced years in jail. So how did he cope with such a crushing experience?

‘I’d been busted with a sizeable group of like-minded friends. That helped enormously. Although riven by divisions we were all in the same mess and many of us were still good pals – we’d been through a lot of psychic territory together. By the time we were split up I was well used to being in prison. Anyway, I was accustomed to institutional life, having done ten years in boarding school. Being part of the Julie mob was another big plus; we had status. All these factors contributed to my survival.’

Leaf’s account his jail time is extraordinarily vivid and totally conveys the static horror of long-term incarceration. Jail knocked a big hole in the prime of his life and wrecked his first marriage. As someone who was basically an idealist hippy rather than a genuine career criminal, does he feel any lasting bitterness about the way the system treated him?

‘I feel no bitterness whatsoever. I got over prison. I don’t mean I’ve dismissed it – I incorporated it in the totality of my being. I’ve always tried to do what I think is best and accept the consequences of my actions. I accept it all. There’s no place for recriminations in my heart – bitterness corrodes the soul. Writing about my life has been a huge help in enabling me come to terms with all my experiences. From the moment I left school my whole life has been a series of adventures – some went wrong but most were marvellous. They’re still continuing: I’m in my sixties and have just had my first book published! It’s true, the prison dreams don’t go away, I don’t suppose they ever will. So I have some bad nights, but when I awake in the morning I fully appreciate the improbable miracle of my life all over again.’

The legal position regarding LSD and other psychedelics hasn’t changed, but there is now much greater awareness and understanding about how they differ from damagingly addictive substances, such as heroin and cocaine. Though Leaf no longer takes drugs himself, he remains adamant about the positive, redeeming powers of psychedelics.

‘Psychoactive plants and fungi can be found all over the world and psychedelics have long been a vitally important part of the human story. I look forward to the day when their use is fully accepted. In terms of the legal position, I would prefer all drugs to be legalised – even those whose use I deplore. Prohibition in the USA showed that the social costs of prohibition are far worse than the costs of dealing with the consequences of drug abuse. We should recognise that we are a drug-taking species. The stupidly-named War on Drugs cannot be won. Its direct consequences include a crime wave of theft (with something like a third of a million heroin addicts in Britain having to steal on a daily basis to support their habit), the criminalising of a big chunk of the population and the rise of ruthless gangs who fight each other for control of the lucrative traffic so that the cities have become a war zone. How clever is that?’

To Live Outside the Law covers the period from Leaf’s middle childhood in the ’50s to his release from prison in 1982. Now appearing so many years after the events it describes, what were the processes that led to its writing?

‘…it’s been twenty-seven years in the making. I got the first draft down in longhand, in Goa, in the winter of 1983-4. It was clumsily written, full of anger, and the tone swung erratically around the emotional compass. Over the years, it’s gone through ten versions. Those early drafts were my apprenticeship, my first serious attempts at the “intolerable wrestle with words and meanings”.’

Along the way Leaf also penned a thriller called Durruti’s Gold, about Catalunya and the Spanish Civil War. ‘I wrote it in Spain in the ’90s. The first agent I sent it to took me on. She believed we would break the mould with a thriller of wit and intelligence. Sadly she was wrong. Although the MS gathered fair praise it brought no offers. I’d fallen between two shelves – my book wasn’t cliffhang-crazy enough to be a modern thriller, nor was it a novel.’

A new memoir continuing Leaf’s life story, Leaf by leaf, is at the second draft stage and he intends to work on it for much of the coming winter. It will include his post-prison travels in India, and his experiences teaching English in Spain and setting up a home for orphans in Malawi. As well as writing, he is running a wholefoods business in South West France, where he now lives – a return to his original line of work before the bust. ‘I am greatly enjoying my life at present – which is fortunate, for the present is all we’ve got! I have many good friends, I live in a stunningly beautiful part of the world with a wonderful woman… I count myself a very lucky man.’

For more information about To Live Outside the Law, please visit Leaf Fielding.com

The book is tightly and economically written, telling us enough but without going into burgeoning detail, so that a large swathe of time is covered efficiently in its near 300 pages. The structure takes the time-honoured form of two interwoven strands, the first starting with the Julie bust and continuing on through the legal proceeding and imprisonment, and the second dealing with Leaf’s past life up to the bust. It works very well, with the unrelenting downbeat dourness of the former strand contrasting strikingly with the colour of the latter; and the two synergise together beautifully to answer the book’s central question, poised on its cover: How did I get into this mess?

The answer is complicated, but the honest and candid writing, coupled with the willingness to reveal intimate details, build into a lucid and fascinating portrait of a talented individual whose youthful waywardness and ‘rebellion’ ultimately stretched too far for his own good. The roots, as ever, lie in childhood, and Leaf’s, though middle class and not ‘deprived’ in the usual sense, had huge shortcomings. From the age of seven onwards, with an army officer father often serving overseas and no mother, Leaf had virtually no proper family life and was subject to the institutionalised sadism of boarding school, where he didn’t fit in. What with having to fight the school bully to prove himself, enduring vicious canings from the headmaster and slipperings from prefects for the most trivial of ‘offences’, he became radicalised early. Through George Orwell he got interested in the Spanish Civil War and developed an anti-fascist stance that both alienated him at school but secured him a place at Reading University.

By now it was 1966, the dawn of the hippy era, and in more congenial surroundings, Leaf made new friends and had an early taste of acid, which proved a highly positive life-changing experience. In the trip account, he doesn’t indulge in protracted descriptions of way-out visuals, but instead concentrates on the sense of existential transformation: ‘I was a human archetype, making every journey of exploration that every man has ever made for as long as we’ve been walking the earth. I watched myself moving forward, assessing danger, looking for opportunity, alert to the possibility of treasure. With an instant change of perspective, I saw myself leaning out of my narrow window of consciousness and scanning the wide horizons, observing the very processes of existence unfolding.’

Interestingly there was also a spontaneous psychotherapeutic element to this first trip, with Leaf able to plumb some of the painful issues of his childhood and reach a catharsis. Now fired with purpose and the belief that acid could change humanity, Leaf and his friend Jack became proselytisers, turning on as many people as were willing and going full swing into the ’67 Summer of Love. Leaf didn’t even bother to turn up for his exams, rationalising that ‘dropping out’ was the higher and nobler thing to do. Yet interestingly the text invites us to read between the lines and perhaps conclude that the decision had as much to do with economics as idealism, and the act was as much a rebellion against an unsatisfactory upbringing as a ‘political’ act against ‘society’. Leaf’s father’s upright military bearing and his insistence on conducting himself according to a rigid set of rules led to considerable pusillanimity in his role as a parent. One example of this was his refusal to pay his parental contribution towards Leaf’s student grant, making university life far less tenable than it might have been. Ironically in those days students from low-income backgrounds were often better off, as they received the full grant automatically and were free from the scourge of parental tyranny. Poverty stricken, Leaf at first had to resort to gambling to make ends meet, and later, as his immersement in the growing alternative society became more complete, he financed himself through drug dealing and trafficking.

With picaresque tales of hitchhiking, partying and dope running in Europe, Turkey, Morocco and Thailand, To Live Outside the Law starts to resemble Howard Marks’ Mr Nice in giving an uplifting sense of the wide-open frontiers of the dope trade in those earlier halcyon days. Like Howard, Leaf rose steadily through the ranks of the trafficking ‘industry’ to a position of importance, and similarly eschewed dealing in ‘hard’ drugs, staying with the more ethical psychedelically oriented fare. Back in England, he became a key member of the outfit that manufactured and supplied millions of doses of acid in the ’70s—including my own first trip—leading eventually to the Julie debacle: that most horrendous collision of hippy idealism and law enforcement overkill. By that time Leaf had settled down, was married and involved in a successful wholefoods business. His view of acid had become somewhat tempered, and he no longer retained the youthful, Learyesque belief that it could transform the world:

‘…taking a drug that expands your consciousness doesn’t, in itself, change your life. You come back to your everyday reality… A glimpse of heaven can be inspiring, but when it contrasts so strongly with your life it can also be dispiriting. And it’s no good taking more mind-expanding stuff to lift you above the fray, because acid operates on the law of diminishing marginal utility: the more you take, the less it does.’

And if the rose tint had faded somewhat from the vision, the reality of Leaf’s role as the link man between manufacturers and dealers, carrying around 50 or 100,000 tabs at a time, was hardly much fun either, producing jitters, paranoia and eerie precognitive nightmares. The actual bust and the static horror of living through interrogation, remand, trial and a lengthy stretch inside are conveyed with a sobering immediacy, stripped of any false bravado or the kind of defiance a real criminal might display. As Leaf tells it, there was also a surreal element to the treatment the gang received, with Sweeney-style cops with guns escorting them whenever they were at large and rooftop marksmen at the court proceedings. ‘Who did they think was going to come and save me—the acid army?’

Tellingly Leaf quotes Evelyn Waugh, who said, ‘Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison.’ And the two have striking similarities—a life of day-by-day survival, flying by the seat of one’s pants, ‘putting up with unpleasant company and disagreeable surroundings.’ Having to sew mailbags whilst listening to the continual dirge of ‘Mull of Kintyre’ is about as bad as it gets! In a conversation with the acid chemist Richard Kemp, both men agreed that their sense of being on a mission had done them a fat lot of good from the perspective of inside prison walls.

Overall the account comes over as an especially extreme version of the crash of the hippy dream; yet the indomitability of Leaf’s spirit and the survival of his core beliefs and attitudes is inspiring indeed. What makes To Live Outside the Law an excellent work is the way Leaf succeeds in conveying his shifting points of view in a kind of ‘Seven Ages of an Acid Idealist’ fashion, so that we get the frank and honest fruits of his experience and not some loaded piece of propaganda or regilded tale of romanticised outlawhood. It is a great read—an entertaining peculiarly British nostalgia-trip page-turner and an invaluable addition to the canon of acid literature.

It’s the summer of 1971 and an eighteen-year-old Bill Booker has reached an important developmental point. With a childhood lacking in self-confidence behind him, he’s branching out, finding new friends, thinking about purposeful journeys and being lured by the exciting scent of changing times. There’s a host of new music to dig, from serious cred stuff such as the Floyd and Syd Barrett, King Crimson, Cream and Beefheart, to the more middling cred ELP and Hawkwind, to the downright lightweight, such as the Osmonds. When it comes to reading material there’s Hesse, Heinlein and Jung, International Times and Oz, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Mr Natural…all of it imbibed through ‘a scented blue haze of joss and marijuana smoke.’

Bill and his gang see themselves as ‘Freaks’ with a capital F—a new incarnation of youth culture at the start of a new decade—and one Saturday the group identity gets expanded to ‘The Semi-Secret Fellowship of Freaks’. With suitably raised consciousness, Bill attempts to define his goals. ‘I wanted to be creative. I wanted spiritual enlightenment, although I only had a vague idea of what that meant. I wanted a girlfriend. I wanted true love. I wanted to be wise, joyful and fulfilled. I wanted to always know that life was meaningful. I wanted to know that there were mysteries to contemplate.’

One might well ask what is the difference between Freaks and good old hippies? As they both tick so many of the same boxes—long hair, alternative dress and lifestyles, anti-establishment, mystically orientated, into dope and acid, listen to Pink Floyd—it’s hard to get so much as a tissue paper between them. Yet early in the 1970s there’s already a sense that being a hippy is a bit old hat, you know man, so ’60s, and now we’re in a bright new decade with bright new decimal currency replacing that old £.s.d. (not LSD!) and we need to carve out a fresh identity. Being a Freak then is a reaction against the perceived countercultural conformity of hippiedom—Freaks are a bit rawer, edgier and less pretentious.

There is also the parallel to the aforementioned comic book characters, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, created by Gilbert Shelton. In one scene the quartet of friends assign the identities of the Brothers to one another, with Jake becoming Freewheelin’ Franklin; Bill, as the clever one, becoming Phineas; Syd, as the least skinny, becoming Fat Freddy; and resident misanthrope Ray settling for Fat Freddy’s Cat.

But of course it hardly matters what they call themselves; be it angry young men, beats, mods, rockers, hippies, freaks, bikers, greasers, punks, new romantics or whatever; the point is that each successive manifestation owns the stage for a limited, ephemeral period—that magic time after the final sandbags of childhood have been thrown overboard and before the claims of adult responsibility start to bring the balloon back down and the next generation take over the spotlight.

Very deliberately I made The Mad Artist about that period in my own life, which involved four years worth of detailed narration, with an apron of two or three in front, discursively touched upon. In Trippers the zoom factor is much greater, and the period covered in depth is but a few weeks over that summer of ’71, which are served up to the reader in total-recall luxuriant detail as the embodiment of the experience of flowering, of ‘coming out of yourself’ and defining your place in the cosmic scheme.

As for LSD (not £.s.d.!) that plays a pivotal role in the proceedings, and our Freaks, naturally, are also Trippers, as the book’s admirably straightforward title suggests. And Bill’s trip descriptions are right up there with the best. In one session he’s sprawled out on the sofa, going up and reaching the end of the first transformative hour, and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is on the turntable. ‘I’m grinning the Grin of Madness; my face stretched wider and wider, the corners of my mouth pulling away in opposite directions until my grin encompasses the universe. Habitual thoughts fall away like dry scabs. My mind is borne into clear, cool space. It is a clean page upon which each experience is imprinted with icy crispness. With the eyes of my soul I stare into the maelstrom of possibilities that is Existence—and grin.’

The familiar twists and turns of the ride that is the acid trip are put across marvellously in several accounts throughout the book. Walls perform deep breathing exercises; a carpet becomes a seething mattress of giant frogspawn; strange ‘entities’ and apparitions are mutually sighted, such as pair of figures in a churchyard who disappear on closer inspection. Then there’s the problem of tripping in pubs—thinking people are watching you, so you look to see if they are and they return the looks, locking in the dreadful self-fulfilling loop of paranoia. Yes, we’ve all been there. But as a counterbalance there’s the magic of outdoor night tripping, a Lord of the Rings-style adventure with a conjectured soundtrack of early Floyd and Hawkwind. ‘Under the ribcage arches of laneside trees we walk, zigzagging, amid green-purple meshes spiralling from clumps of foliage to the earth, like animated three-dimensional wallpaper patterns, or what wallpaper patterns seem to aspire to but never attain.’

The bulk of the summer’s adventures involve a low-budget trip from hometown Leicester to Weymouth, hitchhiking, sleeping rough and camping in true Kerouac ‘bumming around’ style. Long distance hitchhiking is now a rarity, an anachronism, but in those days everyone indulged; and its precariousness and unreliability as a mode of transport are well captured. Fruitless overheated hours on the roadside are punctuated by ‘stupidly grinning prats in suits who shouted some unintelligible insults at us, swerving towards us and away at the last instant before gunning their motor off down the road.’ After a night on a footpath, yielding an insect-bitten face, Bill and his mates are rejected from a campsite for their freaky appearance, and they eventually find an out-of-town site, involving long commutes. But none of it dampens their spirits, and they revel in the simple things, such as the coastal atmosphere, pints of bitter and their relentlessly unvarying diet of egg and chips, which makes one fear for the lack of roughage in their diet and their cholesterol levels. Such is the solipsism of Trippers, egg and chips becomes the best possible meal in the entire world…and why not?

A fortuitous encounter with another Freak in Weymouth leads to a party invite in Leamington Spa, and here Bill gets involved with a new set, some more acid and has a brief affair, all simultaneously, with pyrotechnic results. ‘Each thrust into Nell ignites a blast of brilliant light through my body, releasing a flood of spectral images in my head. I’m rushing through a tunnel of trees towards a castle gateway with delicate tracery cut into its stonework and lit from within by a thousand glimmering oil lamps. I’m flying through the castle gateway into a corridor where light from dozens of chandeliers sparkles from prisms of crystal, on into cloisters lined with gothic arches rich in erotic scenes…onward through aisles, passages, gangways and tunnels without end.’

But there’s a downside too, and one of Bill’s mates, having had too much possibly adulterated acid, ends up in the local nuthouse. This scene and several others make you aware of how much the world has changed in forty years. Back then the mere fact of long hair marked you out as a renegade, a waster, and was sufficient in itself to induce gangs of skinheads to throw bricks at you. And in the world of Cuckoo’s Nest psychiatry, acid was considered on par with heroin as addictive, and part of the ‘cure’ for acid psychosis involved an enforced haircut that left the hapless victim looking, according to one mate, like Joan of Arc. What a telling comparison!

Trippers ends with some philosophical ruminations—‘The Grail is the meeting place where the light of understanding and the light at the heart of manifestation are one’—and as the narrative fades to black, we’re left to wonder about the rest of Bill’s life. That’s the beauty of selection by book-ending, presenting a chosen vivid slice of life to synecdochically represent the whole. Ultimately Trippers is about the small writ large, the accumulation of much diverse detail to make the past live again in thrumming eidetic vibrancy. Like the best of those ’70s album covers whose designs leap out at you, at once specific to a milieu yet archetypal, the adventures of Bill and his mates celebrate both idiosyncrasy and commonality. Four decades on those happenings have matured like good port, and the taste is sweet to those who’ve trod similar paths and no doubt to those who maybe wished they had.

As one of the former, the ‘trip down memory lane’ was most smile-inducing for me, and indeed the similarities between Trippers and The Mad Artist are legion. Both Bill and I were wonderstruck by acid and felt propelled into a kind of quest, which defined its terms as it went along, taking in anything worthy as grist for the mill. We were both creatively inclined enough to write about it all, and felt our perhaps commonplace experiences were nonetheless sufficiently special to warrant such ‘theatre of self’ (Allen Ginsberg). And—perhaps the most remarkable similarity—it took us both such an incredibly long time to realise a final product!

In The Mad Artist I chart the etiology and early development of the book within its very text. What followed was several decades of making partial drafts, changing approaches, doing fictional experiments, becoming disillusioned, abandoning the project for years and taking it up again, over and over, till I finally nailed it in 2007-8. So when I read Bill’s account of working up old notes from ’71 into a draft in the late ’80s, then word-processing it only to commit the manuscript to the bottom drawer and lose it in a house move a decade later, and then have it fortuitously reappear in 2007, I had to laugh! From there, Bill completely revamped Trippers into the present version, and just like me he decided to anchor the narration in period, so as not to colour it with hindsight. Great minds think alike…ha, ha. Perhaps Bill Booker and I are really each other in two not very differently skewed worlds within the quantum multiverse; or perhaps this is a time of a great coming together of such narratives, when before the world wasn’t quite ready.

For more information on Trippers, please visit: William J Booker

This seven-minute film is the first in a projected series of ‘trippy’ films, which in various ways will celebrate aspects of the psychedelic experience. Actually it came about as a happy accident, an afterthought. The footage was shot as part of a more extensive project—an illustration of a reading of the first trip sequence in The Mad Artist—which would also involve some night shooting in other locations. I was unable to complete the night shooting in my available window, and now the trees have come into leaf, so it might all have to wait till next winter, as the trip takes place in December. 

However, in playing about with the shot footage, I experimented with various visual effects and an idea sparked: to make a trippy film in its own right, independent of the text of the book, though guided by the experiences it describes. So ‘Tripped in the Woods’ evolved as a notional, subjective point-of-view trip film, involving no people and no words, only the wood itself, progressively metamorphosing by means of trippy visual effects and complementary sound design. 

Trippy videos abound on YouTube, and in the main they feature randomly generated wormhole and fractal patterning, fast cutting of anything and everything weird, strobe and flash effects, and tend to be light on original content. The better ones are impressive, but this type of video can get boring and when compared to the fabulous, polymorphous sophistication of the actual trippy inscape, they come nowhere near. With ‘Tripped in the Woods’ I eschewed the oversubscribed inner world of tripping and concentrated instead on the outer dimension—how acid transforms the look, feel and sound of one’s environment, which is especially relevant if that setting is already ‘pretty’, as the Plymbridge Woods undoubtedly is. And that area has a special significance in being the real setting for my first acid trip, described at length in the opening chapters of The Mad Artist. 

As a big fan of the surrealist photographer Man Ray, master of the solarization, I’ve been dabbling in creating such effects since college days. Back then it all had to be done in the darkroom, with the results hard to predict in advance, and little did we dream that one day computers would take over the task. With Final Cut Pro, I used many different solarization effects, including double and sandwiched solarizations, alongside other image manipulations and stylisations, such as saturation, motion blurring and posterization, to gradually rack up the impression of consolidating trippiness. In Final Cut Pro one can apply posterization to the red, green and blue channels independently, so the range of combination effects is almost endless. Soundtrack Pro also has an extensive library of effects and atmosphere/musical beds, and again used in combination the sometimes melodic, sometimes eerie and sometimes frenetic moods of a trip can be evoked. 

More info about my first acid trip as described in The Mad Artist: ‘The Alphabet Wood’

So I approached the book Reality Hunger with considerable excitement, while at the same time anticipating some mild disappointment due to my high expectations. But I wasn’t at all disappointed: the book proved to be everything I had hoped it would. It’s subtitled ‘a manifesto’, and it takes the form of numbered sections of varying lengths, which each have an aphoristic or epigrammatic quality. Many of the shorter ones are actual quotes from a wide range of writers and other artists, which Shields, acting like a DJ or MC, ‘samples’ and incorporates into the overall ‘mashup’. It is very effective and underscores the book’s textual points in a textural way, much like a plastic work of art. And as for the accusation of plagiarism, he answers that in the form of a quote from Picasso: art is theft. Who can argue? 

As a drug memoirist, I had a special interest because I knew from the interview that this is an area Shields touches upon, and to my mind drug writing is an important component in the spectrum of this push toward ‘reality’. Indeed he mentions the Vedas—citing them as the earliest examples of written storytelling—and also De Quincey, Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson before getting stuck into James Frey and his infamous tome A Million Little Pieces. Here is one of the finest examples of an ideological clash between ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ in a contemporary book. Telling the story of a hopeless, burnt-out, twenty-three-year-old drug addict, who mends himself in a rehab centre, Frey firstly wrote the book as a novel, and when he had no success at marketing it, he rebranded it as memoir, after which it was outstandingly successful, selling in the millions. 

Around three years after its first publication, details emerged of falsifications within the book, primarily that Frey had greatly exaggerated his criminal past, creating jail time that didn’t actually exist. This put his publisher in an embarrassing position, regarding the definition of ‘non-fiction’ and opened up a debate on the latitude of factual reportage within memoirs. It reached a climax when Frey and his publisher appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show and the result was a public crucifixion for the heresy of daring to place lies into a so-called work of fact. Afterwards Frey was dropped by his agent, and his publishers made him insert an apology into future editions. Past readers were even offered a refund, such was the furore the incident created. 

As reported in Reality Hunger: ‘Oprah has created around herself a “cult of confession” that offers only one prix-fixe menu to those who enter her world. First the teasing crudités of the situation, sin or sorrow hinted at. The entrée is the deep confession or revelation. Next, a palate-cleaning sorbet of regret and repentance, the delicious forgiveness served by Oprah herself on behalf of all humanity… I’m disappointed not that Frey is a liar but that he isn’t a better one. He should have said, Everyone who writes about himself is a liar. I created a person meaner, funnier, more filled with life than I could ever be.’ 

Oh, that rings so many bells. Having written about my twenty- to twenty-four-year-old self in The Mad Artist, I discovered that however much you try to stick to the truth or the facts, you cannot help but turn yourself and others into ‘characters’, and characters start to assume a destiny of their own on the page. For me the writing of a ‘novelistic memoir’ was both an act of serving up reality and one of full literary performance at the same time.

Shields explores this issue in a number of ways, demonstrating the leakage and interdependence of fact and fiction in any work of writing and urging us to go with the flow rather than resist. His commentary and quoting is always ingenious: 

The implied secret is that one of the smartest ways to write fiction today is to say that you’re not, and then do whatever you very well please. Fiction writers take note. Some of the best fiction is now being written as nonfiction.

I’ve always had a hard time writing fiction. It feels like driving a car in a clown suit. You’re going somewhere, but you’re in costume, and you’re not really fooling anybody.

I first read A Million Little Pieces after the controversy, so I knew what I was absorbing wasn’t strictly ‘the facts’. Quite apart from the controversy-causing passages, the whole thing seemed to me very ‘fictional’, the scenes orchestrated to push forward the ‘plot’, the characters larger than life and many of the happenings farfetched, stretching credibility without altogether breaking it in exactly the way fiction does. I still enjoyed it as a read and wouldn’t have asked for my money back had I not had the benefit of the newly written disclaimer. 

Of course there’s nothing new about partially or wholly faked drug memoirs. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous was published in the early ’70s as the diary of a teenage girl who graduates from the Adrian Mole-type stuff onto LSD and is sucked into the drug scene, eventually getting hooked on heroin. We took it at face value back then, though the stereotypicality of its arc as a cautionary drug tale might have caused doubts in the minds of sophisticated readers. Later it was revealed that the book’s editor was the sole copyright holder, and she admitted to a certain amount of ‘fictioneering’. As there is a notable lack of evidence that either the original diarist or diary ever existed, then the veracity of the whole book has come into question. 

Similarly The Teachings of Don Juan and subsequent works by anthropologist Carlos Castaneda—which purport to be a record of the author’s apprenticeship to a psychedelic drug-using Yaqui Indian sorcerer—have been shown to be full of implausibilities and internal inconsistencies, and the degree to which they have been faked is still a matter of debate. Nonetheless the cult of don Juan has grown and grown, and his new age sagacity and lists of didactic hints for those challenging existential moments has transcended all fact/fiction dichotomy, much as holy books do for true believers. 

Then there is the other side of the coin, the roman à clef, the novel based on real events, which customarily attempts to disclaim the relationship to reality in much the same way as the memoir tries to assert it—often in the case of drug material because the author is still engaged in illegal activity. William Burroughs’ first novel Junkie is such a case, being a pretty faithful record of the early phase of his heroin addiction and involvement within the ’50s drug scenes in New York, New Orleans and Mexico City, originally published under the pen name ‘William Lee’—the name of the narrator. It still remains one of finest factual accounts of addiction that we have, and had Burroughs renounced drugs at the time, then it might instead have emerged as a memoir. 

Interestingly Shields makes the point that De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater is written from the standpoint of its author now being ‘off drugs’, which wasn’t actually the case. Even as early as the 1820s the familiar moral position of the drug memoirist as someone who’d ‘put all that behind him’ had become established. 

In a famous drug ‘memoir’ from 1991, PiHKAL–A Chemical Love Story, by Alexander and Ann Shulgin, the account of their synthesis of various phenethylamine-based compounds is mythologised and presented on a grand canvas as heroic alchemy and romance. Fictional names are used and much of the text is deliberately highly subjective. As the disclaimer states, this approach provided an element of cover and obfuscation in case the authorities came knocking on the doors of their lab, which indeed they have. 

There is a certain pleasing irony here in the dichotomy between the drug ‘memoir’ and the drug ‘novel’—the former insisting on its reality and denying any fictional embroidery, and the latter parading its fabrication and playing down the relationship to the author’s real life.  As Shields himself says: ‘Memoir is a construct used by publishers to niche-market a genre between fact and fiction, to counteract and assimilate with reality shows.’ 

In contrast to so-called ‘fake memoirs’, one couldn’t have a drug memoir that is more real, authentic and unfictionalised than The Doors of Perception, even though it was written by eminent novelist Aldous Huxley. Having become a master of the art of inventing narrative, Huxley could, in this case, faithfully devote himself to the real, unencumbered by the need to experiment with blending fact and fiction as developing writers will inevitably do. 

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is perhaps the perfect artistic fusion of the elements of memoir and novel in a drug-experience book. Based on a real occurrence—Hunter Thompson’s visit to Las Vegas to cover a desert race for a magazine, and full of wry observation and reportage—it is nonetheless fictionalised, using the name ‘Raoul Duke’ for the narrator, and replete with inventive, novelistic flourishes. But the whole is such an excellent piece of writing, succeeding in both capturing the true maelstrom of LSD in a way that any initiate will recognise, and also presenting a cautionary tale that will satisfy anti-drug sentiment, that any analysis of its artifice is rather pointless. 

The most successful British drug memoir of recent times has been Howard Marks’ Mr Nice, which has turned the former cannabis smuggler into a national treasure and has been recently filmed. As regards compiling his adventures, Marks says that, for obvious reasons, he kept no diaries, but was aided by the biographies of himself already published and numerous press cuttings. However the best ever record—and aid to memory—came in the form of legal depositions compiled by drug enforcement agencies over the years and used against Marks at his trail in America. He paid two thousand pounds to have them shipped to England, and they proved to be the most accurate chunk of ‘reality’ one could ever wish for. 

In another British drug memoir, Addict, the narrator (author?) is so unreliable, being smashed on amphetamines, alcohol, acid, downers and who knows what else for most of the tale, as well as being a sometime mental patient and receiver of memory-blanking electroshock therapy, that no one—probably not even the subject himself—can be sure of where the divide between fact and invention lies. 

And inevitably drug content has seeped into that staple of commercial publishing, the celebrity memoir. In Pulling Myself Together, Coronation Street actress Denise Welch tells of cocaine snorting on set in order to combat chronic depression. Russell Brand’s delightfully titled autobiography My Booky Wook contains many drug memoir ‘classic scenes’—having that first joint and recalling William Blake, watching angels; then the first acid trip in New Cross, London, possibly not the most ideal setting: ‘It’s difficult to convey the wonder and horror of LSD: most people who’ve taken it have at some time tried to document the events that take place while tripping; fancying themselves all Huxley, only to be confronted the next day with a piece of paper covered with the most frightful balderdash. What I recall is becoming aware that my presumed objectivity was subjective and arbitrary and that my hands looked like dead chickens.’ 

All these books have vastly different etiologies, intentions and relationships of fact to fiction; and beyond writing about drugs or anything else, it’s much the same in the culture at large, a point Shields expands upon as Reality Hunger continues. He dissects reality TV—‘a hybrid mutant of documentaries, games shows, and soaps’—cites various performance artists who use ‘found reality’ in their work, and charts the rise of sampling in music and the emergence of the DJ as mashup artist, a creator in his own right. In manifesto mode, he asserts the right of the creator to borrow, and analyses the clash of ideologies when such borrowing infringes copyright, as is the case of Beatles sampling, which is illegal. 

And finally, where does all this leave me? Well, to quote one of the review excerpts from the book’s front matter: ‘It’s a pane that’s also a mirror; as a result of reading it, I can’t stop looking into myself and interrogating my own artistic intentions.’ And I can’t help but see my own artistic journey—from reality to fiction and back to reality—reflected in every page. When I had my first, and most momentous, acid trip, I discovered among many other things that at last something sufficiently ‘epic’ had happened in my life to be worth writing about in a form that would be communicable to others. Over the next few years I had many other drug experiences whilst at the same time developing a framework within which to write about them. The result was several partial ‘novels’, none of which quite worked, because even though I’d seen the light of true reality fiction in a later important mushroom trip and initiated The Cult of the Novel, I nevertheless went on to ‘lose the plot’ as the years passed. 

It was only when I’d finally resolved in my own creative consciousness the dichotomy between writing-as-fact and writing-as-fiction that I was able, some thirty years on, to put the material into an acceptable form and complete a book. My solution was to let reality be the governor rather than fiction; in short to write a work of non-fiction rather than a novel and dispense with the desire to shape everything according to some pre-ordained aesthetic formula. What I discovered, amazingly, was how little the material, the writing, was changed in this new order.

Though I converted The Mad Artist back into ‘non-fiction’, the marks of its former fictionalisation remain, some of them indelible, part of reality. The long middle section, ‘Geometric Progression’, is effectively my uncompleted first novel, defictionalised. What does ‘defictionalised’ mean? Well, hardly any different, apart from the unsatisfying (real life) negative ending, which I fought so hard to replace with a novelistic ‘happy’ ending. In memoir mode—or reality mode—the problem was solved by simply bolting on more real life and choosing a more satisfying climatic point within that to serve as an ending. Importantly this was not an option in fiction mode, because that climatic point was already earmarked as the beginning of a second ‘novel’, which ironically was destined to follow real life and record it blow-by-blow, but ran out of steam because when you’re conscious of doing that it becomes boring. So in a way, only by abandoning the novel did I finally get my ‘novel’ to work… Hmmm…yeah…

Yesterday upon the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

Oh, how I wish he’d go away

—The first stanza of ‘Antigonish’ by Hughes Mearns, which I came across in childhood and retained at the back of my mind. Walking home from a party one night in September 1976, after smoking a lot of dope including some extra zappy THC oil, I had cause to remember this rhyme, as I had a hallucinatory episode along the very lines it describes. 

Voices in the head, or voices beyond the head, encountering malevolent doppelgängers and experiencing the attendant existential slippage, are familiar symptoms of a variety of mental illnesses, up to and including schizophrenia, the big one. Experiencing such things on psychedelic drugs, however, opens up a grey area—for how much of it can be put down to one’s inherent propensity to be barmy and how much is simply down to drug effect? There’s no way of accurately answering such a question, since the two things are too intimately synergistic to separate. However, if the disturbing effects dissipate and don’t regularly recur once you come down from the high, then that has to be a good sign. 

The term ‘cannabis psychosis’ has now become part of our drug zeitgeist, and what it actually means is open to debate. Certainly the phenomenon of younger people, under sixteen, consuming large amounts of the more potent skunk varieties of cannabis has led to a greater amount of visible manifestations of psychosis or psychosis-like symptoms than in previous generations of cannabis users. But psychosis-like, or psychotomimetic, episodes are of course nothing new, and remain a potential hazard to the tripper, much as losing your grip on the rock face is a potential hazard to the climber, or skidding off the road is a potential hazard to the motor racer. 

This is one of the issues that I explore in The Mad Artist, in particular in the long middle section entitled ‘Geometric Progression’, which begins and ends with encounters with the numinous being called ‘The Man’ (who wasn’t there). Naturally the account I give is as much ‘creative writing’ as faithful reportage of an actual event. And one could say that the incident itself was as much creative fantasy as any kind of ‘psychosis’. The Man’s nearest reference is Cesar Romero’s The Joker, from the original Batman TV series, which was one of my favourite shows of the mid-’60s; and he also has a flavour of Hugo, the sinister dummy from the ’40s psychological chiller Dead of Night, who takes control of his ventriloquist master Maxwell Frere (Michael Redgrave). 

Read ‘The Man’ chapter and the three following chapters, detailing more heavy dope sessions in Bournemouth and London, in an extract on Authonomy. Please do back, rate and leave a comment if you’re on the site!

With its single-word title in large shaky capitals on a lurid cover, including a pair of crazed eyes staring out at the reader, Addict does, at first glance, rather fulfil the expectations of the stereotypical tale of drug misadventure. Written in a basic, non-literary style, replete with copy editing errors and typographical oddities, it also has a very ‘homemade’ quality. Yet as a book it works. As E.M. Forster said in Aspects of the Novel, a story ‘can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next.’ 

And many of the things that happen in Addict are just too weird and too farfetched not to be true: it’s full of stuff you just couldn’t make up. But again, conversely, it isn’t entirely believable either, having, in certain sections, something of the air of the drunkard’s tall tale told in the pub, piling on the exaggerations till breaking point is reached. When you consider that here you have a narrator who was so completely out of his tree for most of the story that he didn’t know what was happening even as it was happening, who was constantly in and out of mental hospitals, at one point undergoing electroshock therapy that wiped out his entire memory for several years, the term ‘unreliable’ takes on a whole new level of connotations! 

But whatever criticisms one may make of the broad strokes of Addict’s storytelling and the embellishments that feel like fabrication, ultimately the portrait of addiction that it paints is authentic. And it perfectly conveys one essential quality of the addict/alcoholic: that of being a compulsive fantasist, unable to resist the appeal of fantasy over reality. 

Simultaneously initiated at the age of fourteen into gay oral sex and dexedrine, Stephen proceeds to spend decades taking lethal quantities of the little yellow pills, together with drink and other drugs, whilst pursuing a life of petty crime and rent boy activities, as well as having several tumultuous relationships with women. He makes huge amounts of money and either squanders it or hides it and forgets where. He gets involved in London’s ’60s gangster underworld, which is fun at first but eventually lands him in serious trouble. Forever darting from one project to another, he leads a madcap fly-by-night existence, continually stuck in amphetamine overdrive. 

There are many manic and psychotic episodes as loss of control, paranoia and mounting dysfunctionality take their toll. Familiar events from history, such as the Kennedy assassination, the Moon landings and various Beatles’ hits whiz by, signposting the passage of time, and we begin to wonder how Stephen can possibly still be alive and have a functioning heart, brain and liver in the face of such prolonged excess. There is much repetitiveness in the swinging from high to low, and as a true addict Stephen just cannot stay clean and get off the rollercoaster. Inevitably skid row beckons, and he descends further through the various strata of the underclasses, into his own Hieronymus Bosch-like hell. 

Such an account of unbridled craziness, misery and hopelessness does make for a breathless compulsive read, and despite its lack of literary charm Addict is never boring. It has much to tell us, not only about the surface of drug addiction but also about the mechanics of the addictive personality, where anything and everything is grist for the mill—be it money, relationships, risk taking or plain lunacy for its own sake. In its own very idiosyncratic way Addict is a serious work.

What comes across as intriguing is that though Hofmann chose a career path of empirical science in becoming a chemist, he nonetheless had a strong mystical orientation, which first manifested in childhood: “While I strolled through the birdsong-filled forest, freshly verdant and illuminated by the morning sun, everything suddenly appeared in an uncommonly clear light. Had I previously not looked carefully, and did I suddenly now see the spring forest as it really was? It radiated the splendour of a peculiar, heartfelt beauty, as if it wished to encompass me in all its glory. An indescribable feeling of happiness, of belonging and of blissful security perfused me.” 

It was this kind of perspective and serendipitous outlook that led Hofmann towards the discovery of LSD, and he gives a distinctly Jungian analysis of the string of chance events and coincidences that paved the way. Even though he was searching for a circulatory stimulant, not a psychedelic, and even though he’d synthesised the compound five years before and found it to be ineffective for that purpose, he was nevertheless drawn by its chemical structure to synthesise it again: “…a repetition, so to speak, founded on a hunch, chance had the opportunity to come into play. At the conclusion of the synthesis, I was overtaken by a very weird state of consciousness, which today one might call ‘psychedelic’.” Another chemist might have taken it no further, but Hofmann was sufficiently intrigued to conduct a self-experiment three days later, and the rest is history.

 As the psychedelic movement developed, Hofmann’s mystical perspective drew him inevitably towards its other major figures. He worked with R. Gordon Wasson on the isolation and synthesis of the active ingredients of Mexican magic mushrooms―psilocybin and psilocin―and also with Wasson and Carl Ruck on an investigation into the possible psychedelic underpinnings of the ancient Greek Eleusian Rites. In his essay on Eleusis, Hofmann explores how the Mysteries can serve as a model for our times: “The necessary changes in the direction of an all-encompassing consciousness, which are prerequisite for overcoming materialism and for a renewed relationship with Nature, cannot be delegated to government―the change must and can only take place within each individual person… Eleusis-like centres could unite and strengthen the many spiritual currents of our time, all of which share the same goal, the goal of creating, by transformation of the consciousness of individual people, a better world…” 

In other essays Hofmann describes his warm friendships with figures such as Ernst Jünger and Aldous Huxley. Interestingly Hofmann highlights a disagreement between Jünger and Huxley over whether LSD and other so-called phantastica should be freely available to the masses—Huxley was in favour but Jünger had his doubts. The subsequent history of LSD, its underground mass availability leading to hysteria and prohibition, would seem to bear out Jünger’s fears. But both men were united in a vision of a more enlightened world emanating from the use of phantastica, and Hofmann goes onto explore Huxley’s great literary work on the subject, his final novel Island, which serves to unify many of the themes discussed earlier and neatly rounds off Hofmann’s own contribution. 

The essays by others in Part II speak warmly of the effects of Hofmann’s generous nature and unassuming personality. Huston Smith describes a brief but very inspiring personal encounter. Myron J. Stolaroff is one of several contributors for whom LSD provided a life-changing experience, radically altering philosophical perspectives and setting a new course for the future. Stolaroff is also not alone in pointing out that LSD’s discovery in 1943 came at a turning point in world history, and that is possibly more than mere coincidence. 

In sympathy with this theme, Ralph Metzner gives a very learned account of the history of alchemy, pointing out that the notion of transmutation originally lay as much in the psychic and spiritual realms as in the material, and therefore Hofmann’s discovery fits right into the tradition. Jonathan Ott tells the colourful story of his early life on the edge, leading up to how the revelations of LSD set him on a more productive course. He also had a series of inspiring encounters with Hofmann, during which he became Hofmann’s English translator, and indeed he translated this very book. “As he told me quite rightly, he deemed it much better to have a writer/chemist as translator, and one familiar with LSD, and sympathetic towards that controversial topic, as opposed to some great expert in German letters completely ignorant of the subject of entheognosy!” 

Stanislav Grof gives a brief overview of historical and pre-historical psychedelic use, contextualising the recent era of synthetics, which LSD’s discovery defined. He looks at the myriad applications of the substance, particularly within the psychotherapeutic area, and highlights what a tragedy it was for legitimate scientific research when LSD and psychedelics generally were outlawed, a situation now gradually changing. 

Rounding off this excellent and varied collection, editor Amanda Feilding pays a tribute to the much-loved Albert Hofmann, emphasising his personal qualities as much as his scientific achievements and outlining his place in history. Amongst other things, she looks at his remarkable longevity, attributable in part to a taste for exercise and hiking, but perhaps also down to the fact that despite advancing years he never lost that initial youthful wonder for the mysteries of the Cosmos, which comes over in all his writings and dealings with others. It should surely be an object lesson to us all. 

For more information and to purchase a copy Hofmann’s Elixir, please visit The Beckley Foundation site.

As ‘careers’ in cannabis go, his has no equal, starting with his introduction to the drug as an Oxford undergraduate in the 1960s, moving quickly through the ranks of smuggling to become a major player through the ’70s and ’80s, whilst having spectacular run-ins with international policing and attaining media celebrity in the process. Later, he became a best-selling author with his autobiography, Mr. Nice, and other books, and also carved out a niche as a stage performer, a DJ and raconteur, pontificating at length about his favourite subject. He could have been a Richard Branson-type alternative entrepreneur, apart from the mere detail that his trade was highly illegal. 

Mr. Nice the movie encapsulates this picaresque life, using Marks’ own choice of actor to play him, Rhys Ifans, a fellow Welshman and like-minded friend. The evident chemistry between the two works well, with Ifans in dark wigs slipping easily into another louche Welsh charmer role, assuredly inhabiting the character of ‘Howard Marks’ and making him very sympathetic.

The movie starts with Howard’s teenage life in Glamorganshire, which, shot in black and white, 4 : 3 ratio, has a kitchen sink-drama quality, made stranger, almost Dennis Potteresque, by using Ifans himself rather than a youthful look-alike. Gaining a scholarship to Oxford, Howard mixes with the toffs and posh totty, and like Dorothy entering the land of Oz, his world blossoms into colour and widescreen after having his first toke of dope, soon followed by the inevitable sugar cube of LSD.

This method of referencing the visual formats of the era is further reinforced by blending in actual period background footage, with Howard digitally transposed into the scenes and rendered suitably grainy to match them—a nice touch, giving a contemporary technical leg-up to nostalgia. These early scenes of university life, partying and self-discovery are given a similar treatment to that of druggy films of the era, such as The Trip, Easy Rider and Performance, compounding the period associations yet more.

After university, Howard is introduced to dope smuggling when a friend is busted in Germany and Howard is tasked with bringing an alternative consignment back home. He gets to meet the contacts who will become structural to his weird life of drug running and espionage, such as big-time Pakistani exporter Malik (Omid Djalili) and IRA man Jim McCann (David Thewlis), who arranges dispersal of the consignments through his network at Shannon Airport. Also re-appearing on the scene is former Oxford chum Hamilton McMillan (Christian McKay), now working for MI6 and keen to recruit Howard because of his unique access to IRA information. Howard also meets future wife Judy (Chloë Sevigny) and in between his various escapades they enjoy the high life and the finer things that piles of laundered money can buy. 

Inevitably, with cramming three decades of a life into a two-hour film, there is much telescoping, compression and omission, with long stretches of time glossed over in broad strokes without the characters looking appreciably older. The intricacies of the smuggling operations, some of which, according to the book, involved military scale and organisation, are also simplified, the better to concentrate on the human angle of the development of Howard Marks’ weird public persona, exemplified by the alias Mr. Nice. His story, together with its conflation of narcotics and espionage—MI6, the IRA and the American DEA all figuring in the equation—eventually caught the attention of the media and Howard’s celebrity was born. As Howard and Judy’s children start to grow, the stresses and dissonance of smuggling on family life are probed, and as the law gets more and more onto Howard’s tail, the whole lifestyle seems less glamorous and more perilous.

Having a personable drug smuggler as a lead character, Mr. Nice skews away somewhat from the regular crime drama and tends more towards the comedy feel of an Ealing caper, for which Rhys Ifans’ light touch is ideally suited. One would think then that Omid Djalili would further this tendency, but, wearing an obvious wig and playing the part of Malik straight, he seems oddly cast. Much better and more rounded is David Thewlis’ Jim McCann, a rumbustious scene-stealing performance, with many comic moments and very close to the McCann of the book.

 The earlier scenes, back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, have the quaintness of an episode of Heartbeat, what with the old motors, the hassle of having to rely on cranky coin-operated phone boxes for important calls in rural settings and the comically surreal exchanges, using code words to confound eavesdroppers. One could argue that this is a rose-tinted view of the world of drug trafficking, an anodyne version suited to lighter entertainment. But the film also functions as a cautionary tale for those who would dabble in such a life, and by showing the thrills and excitement—the ‘asexual orgasm’ of fooling the customs men and the joys of narrow escapes from the arms of the law—the downfall, when it eventually comes, is all the more telling.

Bernard Rose, who has a very hands-on role as screenwriter, director, DOP and co-editor, has crafted a worthy and atypical British movie that stands apart and is not easy to pigeonhole. Part psychedelic nostalgia trip, part comedy of errors and part rise-fall-and-redemption story, it works well and is a fine vehicle for the ever-expanding talents of Rhys Ifans.