Jimmy Page, Aleister Crowley, and the curse of The Hot Rods
“Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will.” – Aleister Crowley
Ever since the conservative side of the proletariat began pointing pickets at ‘the devil’s music’ and its dangerous propagators, there has been a hint of abrasion about rock ‘n‘ roll. As it first arose, Pastors knew that their collection boxes were competing for the same scarce dollars as a blues player’s tip jar, so they sullied it as an ungodly darkness. In a twist of fate, the blues players bought into the romance of their outlaw status and reclaimed it as a marketing technique for their outsider liberation.
Thus, when rock ‘n’ roll finally got swinging in the 1960s, it needed a genuine devil to pop on the poster… and there he was, perched between Sri Yukteswar Giri and Mae West on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s cover: Aleister Crowley. The devil himself had seemingly given up on convincing the world that he didn’t exist, and now the bastard was openly placing his face on the biggest album cover of the day.
His inclusion was fitting. After all, Crowley was a very prominent figure whose influence lurked throughout the counterculture revolution. The eccentric Englishman, born Edward Alexander Crowley in 1875, was a drug-using bisexual who openly advocated occultist practices, magic, and the communal spirit of revolt. He was outside the norm. By very definition, counterculture was also a movement that stationed itself outside of the norm and called for change.
This change was far more vital than we often care to remember. “We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s,” John F. Kennedy began in his Presidential election acceptance speech at the decade’s dawn, “The frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled threats.” Aside from going a little heavy on the word ‘frontier’, the highs and lows he prognosticated came to fruition and defined the era. Following the scourge of World War II, society was in transition, and the children who had been brought up in the shadow of all that peril were determined to go about things differently.
Enter Crowley, the savvy madman who proclaimed the doctrine: “Do What Thou Wilt”. Sadly, this mantra was often troublesome amid pop culture when rockers took liberation too far. However, it’s easy to see why Crowley and his occultist, gripping poetry and wild anecdotes appealed, and boy, oh boy, did he appeal. The Rolling Stones were into it, The Doors dug him, as were Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath…
Beyond the attraction of being an outsider, there was also a far more benign factor behind it all: Aleister Crowley was undoubtedly interesting. With bourgeoisie taboos being busted like whack-a-moles by the children of the revolution, the free pass to enjoy satanism as a far-out kick was there for all who dared to venture. How on earth do you expect a coked-up Bowie not to be enthralled by the concept of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn? In an age where normal was boring, the counterculture quote of Hunter S. Thompson came to the fore: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
Crowley was so beyond weird; he was more than a pro, more of a deity, and he drew in a harem of fascinated onlookers. However, there was one soul who proved more interested than most: Jimmy Page. A lot of stars of the era fell down rabbit holes, and Crowley was his. In fact, Eddie and the Hot Rods claim that his obsession nearly destroyed them. Speaking to the band’s Simon Bowley, he explains: “In 1976, Eddie and the Hot Rods were the new big thing; everybody was talking about the band, and the music press loved them.”
“The debut album, Teenage Depression, was climbing the album charts, and the boys were big news in the US too. Then, in 1977, they released a track called ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’, it quickly made its way up the charts and into the top ten, the band were in high demand, and the future looked bright,” Bowley happily tells me. ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’ remains their masterpiece; it is as fine a punk song as Britain has managed. Its riff is the sort that carried the mystic notes of reminiscence, retrospectively conjuring memories of grass-stained trousers on summer holidays, bugging older siblings to pop into Oddbins for your pals, and mounting a bicycle with no set destination.
It would, however, be an opus that proved doomed. “The artwork for the single was a picture of English occultist Aleister Crowley,” Bowley tells me. This was a nod to the fact that his mantra, “Do What Thou Wilt”, had been an evident inspiration behind their hit. But the interest was passing; they weren’t Crowley disciples. Eddie and the Hot Rods were more likely to be Frank Spencer’s disciples than anything occultists.
So, they fatally made this point clear by ensuring that Crowley was “wearing a pair of Mickey Mouse ears on the cover.” This may have been an error. As Bowley explained: “Story is that Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page was (and probably still is ) a fan of Aleister Crowley. Upon seeing his hero being made fun of on the cover of the record, he decided to put a curse on the band.”
Was it true or not? I eagerly ponder. “One thing is for certain,” Bowley begins, “things certainly took a downward turn for the band after ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’. The follow-up single ‘Quit This Town’, predicted to be another top ten hit, just didn’t receive the airplay, and the music press largely began to overlook the band. Crazy, strange decisions by the record label and management began, and cracks started to appear between band members.”
“By the end of 1979, Paul Gray and Graeme Douglas had left, and Island Records were no longer interested. In 1980, with a new manager and a new label, EMI Records, things seemed to be looking up once more, and the Fish & Chips album was recorded with the promise of a big PR push. A US tour was on the cards. But the curse was about to take hold once more when EMI decided not to give any support to the release, and it went out pretty much unnoticed,” he continues.
Eddie and the HotRods were finished as a serious recording and touring band at that point, the damn Crowley ears insidiously lingering over the whole cartoonish affair, a nebbish tittle-tattle industry tale about them having angered Page spoiling their picnic like an uninvited wasp. Uncorroborated and surely brushed off as madness, the band simply couldn’t escape the notion that something wasn’t meant to be. Whether this was self-fulling or a convenient excuse (or maybe even the wild chance that it was all true), it is certain that ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’ promised more.
Fast forward to the present, and the line-up of Bowley, Barrie Masters, Dipster and Richard Holgarth have been together as Eddie and the HotRods for over 20 years. In that time, they have achieved the things that were all once laid out for them: global tours, album recordings, counterculture antics. Then came the tragic death of Barrie Masters, and Bowley says, “As far as we could see, Eddie & the HotRods were finished for good. With the global pandemic, weeks in the doldrums turned to months, but the remaining members were constantly being urged by fans to carry on.”
Eventually, they would get back at it, and Guardians Of The Legacy arrived. It has spawned two top five hits and a number one on the worldwide Legacy Music Chart. “Has the curse been broken?” Bowley asks. “Was there ever a curse? Who knows?”.
