A GOOD BIOGRAPHY frequently casts as much light on the times its subject lived through as it does on the person. When the subject is such an elusive personality and assiduous maker of his own myth as Michael X, and his times include desperate days in the Fifties and extremes of hedonism in the Swinging Sixties, the result is an absorbing book that adds up to rather more than one life.

Michael de Freitas, Michael X or Michael Abdul Malik changed his name to suit his ambitions, which for a poor Trinidadian immigrant of the “Windrush generation” were astonishingly varied.

On one hand this is the biography of a small-time crook, conman, pimp, drug dealer and finally executed murderer. On the other it's the story of a man who seized his opportunity to give black Britons a voice when they needed one after the Notting Hill riots of 1958. As such he has a serious claim to have founded the race relations “industry” in this country.

That he later became the leader of a sinister Black Power cult yet could still command the support of John and Yoko and other celebrities even while on death row back in Trinidad illustrates his alarming and ultimately toxic mixture of charm and force. Along the way he was absolutely up to his neck in any number of crazy Sixties ventures from music and gambling clubs to poetry festivals, radical publishing and even the Profumo scandal.

Times Archive, 1967: Michael X faces race charge

He said that the policemen who arrested him were "very, very courteous to us - indeed marvellous fellows"

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He crossed paths with just about everyone: Alan Ginsberg, John and Yoko, Pink Floyd, Muhammad Ali, Leonard Cohen, William S. Burroughs and the infamous call girls Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies, who were at the heart of the Profumo affair. Both had been mistresses of the notorious Notting Hill landlord Peter Rachman, for whom Michael had worked as a rent collector and who appears to have been something of a mentor when it came to getting others to do one's own dirty work.

The man himself may have been almost forgotten until the recent movie The Bank Job credited him with a part in a crime that, surprisingly, gets no mention here, and he could easily be dismissed as just a chancer. But in revisiting his story, the author examines several issues that are still with us in different ways: the relationship between immigration and crime; the legacy of colonialism; the political exploitation of the “race card” and the rise and fall (or at least dissipation) of the Sixties social revolution.

In striving to capture the essence of this complex character and to debunk his self-serving autobiography (From Michael de Freitas to Michael X by Michael Abdul Malik, published in 1968), John Williams draws coincidentally a more compelling picture of London in the Sixties than many of the eulogisers who have concentrated solely on pop music, sex and fashion.

What emerges in between the drugs, sex and radical politics is a portrait of a society that was socially mobile to a greater degree than today's. In his progression from the ghetto to community leadership and back to death row Michael appears to have vaulted class barriers with an ease that would be difficult to emulate today. There's no doubt that he was a brilliant networker long before the word was coined.

There are excellent descriptions here of street demos and wild parties that have the authentic note of the times, and even of the Commonwealth Arts Festival in Cardiff in 1965 that appears to have been a doped-up mixture of the two.

But when it comes to establishing the hard facts of Michael's later years as a sickeningly self-indulgent cult leader, Williams runs up against that old saw about the Sixties: “If you can remember it you weren't really there.” He is diligent and often relishes his interviews with surviving relatives, friends and radicals, but sadly their recollections sometimes fail at crucial moments.

Michael X: A Life in Black & White by John Williams
Century, £11.99; 304pp
Buy the book

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