THE BEAST GOES ON
Aleister Crowley's Influence on Music
THERE ARE A MULTITUDE of rap, rock, hip hop, and metal songs titled “Do What Thou Wilt”, a phrase coined by Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), known, much to his own amusement, as the Great Beast 666, the Wickedest Man in the World.
Born into a wealthy family of Christian fundamentalists, Crowley rejected their beliefs but not their money and spent his youth travelling the world, climbing mountains, collecting numerous male and female lovers, and experimenting with every obtainable drug. He was a poet, painter, and arguably the most significant exponent of the occult of the twentieth century. He was also a spy, employed by British Intelligence agencies at various times during his life, a fact I have explored in two novels.
“Do What Thou Wilt” is not an invitation to do whatever you feel like, but an exhortation to discover who you truly are and to apply your will to that end. It certainly appealed to the American rapper Ab-Soul, who used it as the title of his 2016 album. In a YouTube clip, the rapper cites Crowley’s influence on the Beatles and Led Zeppelin as the key to his own interest. But the Beast’s influence on music can be traced back much further.
Born in 1923, Harry Everett Smith was a visual artist and filmmaker who drew from his extensive collection of out-of-production 78 rpm recordings to compile the iconic Anthology of American Folk Music. Issued in 1952, these songs had a huge influence on Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and the folk scene in general. A Beat and an eccentric, Smith was also a lifelong occultist who became a bishop in Crowley’s church.
Another early disciple was Joe Meek, Britain’s answer to Phil Spector and the composer of the revolutionary 1962 worldwide hit ‘Telstar’. Margaret Thatcher’s favourite record was recorded in the ramshackle home studio Meek built in his flat on the Holloway Road. A brilliant and innovative record producer, Meek’s judgement was sometimes flawed, a fact not unconnected with his huge intake of amphetamines and barbiturates. He told Brian Epstein not to take on the Beatles and The Raiders to get rid of their hoarse, talentless singer, the 16-year-old Rod Stewart.
Being brought up as a girl for the first four years of his life nurtured Meek’s highly neurotic and conflicted personality. He was also gay, which led to his arrest for importuning in a public lavatory. His erratic behaviour was legendary. After groping Tom Jones, he trained a starter pistol on the singer to make him play what he wanted. He did the same to the drummer Mitch Mitchell, later of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Meek had a passion for spiritualism, Crowley, and the occult. He planted microphones in graveyards to eavesdrop on the dead and maintained he could communicate with aliens and a talking cat. He held seances to contact the spirit of Buddy Holly, whose death on 3 February 1959 he claimed to have foreseen. On the same day in 1967, after first shooting and killing his landlady, who had frequently complained about the noise from the studio, Meek reloaded his shotgun and aimed it at himself.
A similar gory end awaited another Sixties’ Crowley acolyte, the R & B multi-instrumentalist Graham Bond, who introduced both the mellotron and Bach to popular music. Bond was adopted at birth and grew obsessed with Crowley in his teens. Finding the Beast had spawned an illegitimate son in his home county of Essex, Bond naturally concluded Crowley was his father. After Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce left the Graham Bond Organisation to join Eric Clapton in Cream, Bond devoted his music to magick, producing tracks such as the impressive “Love is the Law”. Drug-ravaged, stricken by financial and relationship troubles, Bond threw himself under a tube train in Finsbury Park Station in 1971.
In the early Sixties, Bond performed with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, the school for many rockers of the period, including Jimmy Page, who also worked for Joe Meek as a session man. Page opened an occult bookshop in Kensington called The Equinox. A great collector of Crowley artefacts, he also bought the Ulema of Thelema’s old home on the shores of Loch Ness, Boleskine House, due to re-open this April after extensive renovation. It was there that Led Zeppelin filmed the fantasy sequences for their film, The Song Remains the Same, in which Page played a magician. Rumour unkindly linked the tragic deaths of Robert Plant’s young son, Karac, and John Bonham, the drummer, with Page’s dabbling in the dark arts. While Cowley’s influence is only subtly present in the group’s music, Page had “Do What Thou Wilt” inscribed on the vinyl of Led Zeppelin III. During an address he gave to the Oxford Union in 2017, available on YouTube, the musician dismissed claims that demonic chants can be heard when playing the records backwards, pointing out that it was enough of a challenge to play the music the right way round.
Page also made a Crowley-influenced soundtrack for Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising. Anger was an American filmmaker and Crowley acolyte, principally remembered for the lurid tales of celebrity scandal in his bestselling Hollywood Babylon. Anger hung out with the Rolling Stones during their “Sympathy for the Devil” phase. Mick Jagger composed a soundtrack for another of his films on a Moog synthesiser. Page and the Stones also recorded a 1973 track together called “Scarlet”, the Scarlet Woman being a key concept in Crowley’s system.
After Page and Anger fell out, the American put a curse on the musician. Page, allegedly, did the same to our next Crowley obsessive, David Bowie, another musician whose talent Joe Meek failed to recognise. Bowie and Page recorded together in 1965 and became friends, with Page gifting Bowie the martial riff for his 1970 song “The Supermen.” Page visited the New York Townhouse where Bowie was staying in 1975, the peak period, reputedly, of both musicians’ heavy cocaine use. Bowie was living on milk and red peppers, skeletally thin, and obsessed by magick and occult Nazism. Believing Page was playing supernatural mind games, he asked him to leave by the door or the window, the latter a possible acknowledgement of Page’s powers as a magician, as they were well above street level. Terrified that Page might have gained possession of a fingernail, some urine or a strand of hair and ritually curse him, Bowie is purported to have immediately fled to the West Coast.
Page, allegedly, also put a curse on Eddie and the Hot Rods after they used a picture of Crowley wearing a comical pair of Mickey Mouse Ears to advertise their 1977 single “Do Anything You Wanna Do”, a song which demonstrated that Crowley’s impact on punk was as profound as it had been on the hippies. As a result, reputedly, their label dropped them, and a string of disasters beset them.
Bowie’s connection with Crowley was highly nuanced, as the lyrics of the 1971 track “Quicksand” demonstrate: ‘I’m drawn unto the Golden Dawn, immersed in Crowley’s uniform of imagery.’ The Order of the Golden Dawn was a late nineteenth-century magical organisation in which Yeats and the Beast waged magical warfare against each other. While fond of emulating Crowley by dressing up in ancient Egyptian costume and adopting new personae and aliases, Bowie confesses to being ‘torn between the light and dark,’ which is not so surprising when you consider the fates of Joe Meek or Graham Bond.
Bowie took things even further on 1976’s Station to Station, a tour de force he claimed to have no memory of making. In the title track, he cites the Kabbalah and White Stains, a book of pornographic poetry Crowley penned. With the coming of wisdom with time, Bowie’s enthusiasm cooled. He would regret falling into the trap of ‘black magic, kabbalism and the Crowleyism of the times’ – the mid-1970s – and dismissed, ‘That whole dark and rather fearsome never-world of the wrong side of the brain.’
This does not tell the whole story. Some maintain the lyrics of his worldwide hit “Let’s Dance” derive from a Crowley poem. The connection is tenuous. Less so is Crowley’s influence on Bowie’s remarkable farewell, Blackstar.Lines such as ‘a solitary candle at the centre of it all’ evoke the Beast’s Sapphire Ritual. Magical imagery populates the videos for the album, directed by the Swedish Crowley enthusiast, Johan Renck. In “Lazarus”, Bowie makes a poignant farewell, exiting into a wardrobe in the same astral-travel bodysuit he first wore in the mid-1970s. In the 2006 film The Prestige, Bowie as Nikola Tesla reads a copy of Crowley’s core teachings, The Book of the Law. Rather than marking a return to the Beastly fold, however, this is most likely a post-modern joke.
A byword for Satanism, though arguably not a Satanist, Crowley had an enormous impact on Heavy Metal. He inspired Iron Maiden’s “Moonchild”, and in 2008, their lead vocalist, Bruce Dickinson, brought out a film called Chemical Wedding, in which Crowley reincarnates in the body of a Cambridge professor played by Simon Callow. Ozzy Osbourne described the Beast as a “phenomenon”. Enthused by a pack of Thoth tarot cards in the studio, he wrote “Mr Crowley” along with a couple of bandmates. The song views the Beast as a tragic figure and ingeniously rhymes ‘pure’ with ‘rapport’, the former a nod to Crowley’s Gnostic conviction that he could immerse himself in filth and emerge smelling of roses.
Further afield, Raul Seixas (1945-1989), known as the ‘Father of Brazilian rock’, was introduced to Crowley in the 1970s by Paulo Coelho, who would achieve worldwide fame as the author of The Alchemist. They wrote “Sociedad Alternativa” (Alternative Society), a paean to freedom and non-conformity heavily inspired by Crowley’s Thelema philosophy. The song was a huge hit in Brazil, and, on the proceeds, they planned to create an anarchist-free state based on “Do what thou wilt” in the province of Minas Gerais. Instead, they were arrested and imprisoned by the ruling military junta. Seixas was fond of reading out Crowley’s Declaration of Human Rights, Liber Oz, at concerts. Every year on his birthday, thousands parade through the streets of downtown São Paulo to commemorate the man they called Maluco Beleza, which loosely translates as ‘Groovy Nutcase’. Seixas’s YouTube homage to Crowley, “Loteria de Babilonia,” is interspersed with animated images of the Beast.
Crowley’s modern-day followers are particularly concentrated in the USA, where Daryl Hall and Lady Gaga have been receptive to his teachings. In 1991, Red Hot Chilli Peppers brought out their breakthrough album ‘Blood Sugar Sex Magik’. Sex magick is the belief that by focusing your will on a specific objective during intercourse, you can bring about a desired result. It is a key ingredient of Crowley’s system. Chilli Peppers’ guitarist John Frusciante also borrowed from the Beast’s texts for his solo albums.
Nearer home, Damon Albarn incorporated a recording of Crowley’s voice into his 2014 opera Dr Dee. John Dee was the court magician of Queen Elizabeth 1 and one of her principal spies. He discovered or invented an angelic language called Enochian, and Crowley uses this to summon angels on “Edward Kelley,” a track named after Dee’s unscrupulous assistant.
Writing in the 1940s, Crowley declared 1965 would be a ‘critical juncture’ for the new age he prophesied, the Aeon of Horus, in which youth and personal freedom would be paramount. 1965 is considered Year Zero for the great musical/cultural leap forward of the psychedelic era. It was not just a whim that made its greatest architects, The Beatles, put Crowley on the cover of Sergeant Pepper. In a 1980 interview with Playboy, John Lennon said that “do what thou wilst” (sic) summed up the band’s philosophy. In 2007, Paul McCartney stated that there was ‘something that must be thought of as magic — with a k’ about the Beatles. This is how the word is spelt in Crowley’s system to avoid confusion with more common-or-garden conjuring.
It is not difficult to understand Crowley’s appeal to musicians. Fifty years before the word ‘hippy’ was invented, he was a pioneer of bisexual free-love, drug experimentation, and commune-living — an east-meets-west yogi spreading a gospel of personal liberation. That doctrine, compounded by other issues, had disastrous results for Joe Meek and Graham Bond, but does that invalidate the message or the music it inspired?
For my interview with Diane Hinds on Chocolate Radio about the influence of Aleister Crowley on musicians, with tracks by Joe Meek, Graham Bond, Jimmy Page, David Bowie, Ozzy Osbourne, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Ab-Soul Click here
