Fantastic Metropolis

Michael Moorcock: Let’s do another long chunk of this reminiscence to take us up, say to the start of New Worlds.

Barrington J. Bayley: Events are a bit too scrambled in my mind. I’ll burble on for a bit.

You’d introduced me to Dave Gregory at Fleetway, which published boys’ papers among other things, and he started giving me work. One day he agreed an outline for a picture strip story. I think it was an ‘Olac the Gladiator’ (a house character) story set in Roman times. Well, I’d never done any picture story scripting before, although you’d already shown me the layout. You were sleeping on my floor at the time. The day after (when the script had to be written) you got up, announced you were off somewhere, and made some helpful suggestions. Then you must have realized that I didn’t really have a clue how to do it, because you took pity on me and stayed behind, and we wrote the script together. Next day I toddled into Dave’s office and he read it. I told him we’d co-authored, but he plainly believed it was all your work (well, he was three-quarters right); it must have been too practised and professional. To catch me out, he asked me to write a few inserted frames on the office typewriter. He seemed quite surprised that I could actually do it!

We regularly co-authored picture scripts after that, but you had flair for it—pictorial imagination, snappy dialogue—and my role would be more tightening up the sequence a bit. I carried on after we separated, but I never really felt confident with comics. I was happier with text. Luckily there was plenty of that work to be had as well.

Fleetway would sometimes get Italian artists to draw the comics. But the translated instructions were only the picture descriptions, not the stories. Consequently the artist didn’t know what expressions to put on the characters’ faces!

Michael Moorcock: We worked with some talented artists. Frank Hampson, the Embletons, Don Lawrence, Frank Bellamy, pretty much with all the best graphic artists of their day. It was more like the studio system in films or the production of two and a half minutes singles. Not much room for self-expression. I used to keep myself awake by doing Karl the Viking stuff in Anglo Saxon alliterative verse. I told Dave Gregory about that eventually and his comment was ‘I thought you were writing a bit funny’. He, of course, had sensibly edited it to proper comic English. We did a lot of lost city pieces, as I recall, and also I did a whole series on the Cathedrals of England for Bible Story. You were writing ‘The Man from T.I.G.E.R.’ for Tiger. We would occasionally pass on work, because it was never by-lined. I remember the horror we felt when Boys World started crediting authors. I think at least one of my short stories appeared under your name. A problem for future bibliographers! Another thing you taught me, in a way, was how to sit still and think!

Barrington J. Bayley: Round about then you married Hilary Bailey, and set up home three times in succession, coincidentally coming closer to where I lived each time. One day you phoned me up and said ‘I’m now editor of New Worlds.’ Kyril Bonfiglioni (I heard about him on the radio the other day, but I can’t remember what. I think it was a books programme) took on one of the sister magazines (Science Fantasy, later SF Impulse). Your editorship ideas were all a transformation of New Worlds. Even the cover designs were original. Questions were raised in the House of Commons objecting to the content of a Norman Spinrad serial!

Michael Moorcock: I remember—the days when we all used to be taken seriously. Before we seemed to drown in a tide of juvenilia…

Barrington J. Bayley: Your flat and Ladbroke Grove in general became a dynamo and a magnet for the sf world. Jim Cawthorn, Graham Hall, Charles Platt, Judy Merril, Graham Charnock, Bert Filer, John Sladek and Tom Disch all ended up living close by—Judy and Tom in the same house as myself, just along the road.

Michael Moorcock: I used to call on Judy and she always had some famous old jazzman, who was playing at Ronnie Scott’s or somewhere. I’ll swear I bumped into Buck Clayton, pulling on his pants and leaving with a mumbled greeting…

Barrington J. Bayley: One day I called on you carrying a typescript (it wasn’t in the Ladbroke Grove flat, but the previous one). It was a story I had written in draft some years before, but I had regarded it as unpublishable: ‘All the King’s Men’. I wouldn’t have dreamed of offering it to Ted Carnell! Because I liked the story myself, I had just revised it and typed a fair copy.

As I remember, I wasn’t submitting it, only wanting your opinion. You took it in your hand, but then announced that you needed to use the toilet, and would read it in there.