Inside Out (6 page)

It was also a period of cultural change. The Beatles had kicked off a phenomenon where suddenly English bands dominated the
international music scene. In the wake of the Beatles, English bands had been adopted by the American music market. It was
the original version of Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’. This was accompanied by a flourishing of English fashion, retail innovation,
models, and photographers, bringing to prominence names like Mary Quant and Ozzie Clark, Carnaby Street and Biba, Twiggy,
Jean Shrimpton, Bailey and Donovan. Even English football was in the ascendant after the World Cup victory of 1966.

This commercial explosion was paralleled by a similar burst of activity in the educational area. Much of this was down to
the art schools, which were not only producing great designers and photographers but also a generation of talented rock musicians
including Ray Davies, Keith Richards, John Lennon and Pete Townshend. An increase in the number of grants available had
made further education not only a good career move, but also an excellent way of putting off the evil day of having to go
out and earn a real living. Jobs were relatively plentiful and long-term careers easily available, which gave students a lot
of choices, including simply opting to drop out (and back in) on an occasional basis. In fact, it’s amazing to think we were
actually worried about what we were going to do with all our leisure time once all the robots on
Tomorrow’s World
did everything for us.

The only real downside to all of this was not to appear for another thirteen years. In the brave new, and very middle-class,
alternative world, mainstream politics were rather neglected. By the time anyone realised, it was too late. The wallflowers,
who had been left out of all the fun in the Sixties, got their own back during the 1980s by gaining control of the country
and vandalising the health service, education, libraries and any other cultural institutions they could get their hands on.

In 1965, one of the significant moments marking the stirring of some kind of intellectual underground movement was a poetry
reading organised at the Albert Hall in June – with a bill featuring Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso.
The organisers expected a few hundred at most; 7,500 people turned up. This burgeoning intellectual underground began to coalesce
around the Indica Bookshop. The money for Indica had been stumped up by Jane Asher’s brother Peter, who was also an old school
friend of Peter Jenner and Andrew King. Indica’s other founders were Miles, the writer and journalist, and John Dunbar, a
friend of Rick’s who later married Marianne Faithfull. The bookshop originally incorporated an art gallery in Mason’s Yard
off St James’s before moving to Southampton Row. It was a place where ideas and experimental literature could be promoted
by importing the work of American poets, an area where the crossover with the States was well established. The name Indica
was derived from the botanical name ‘cannabis indica’, although the coy version was that it was short for ‘indications’. At
another bookshop, Better Books, Andy Warhol came over from the States for one poetry reading, accompanied by an entourage
including Kate Heliczer, the star of Warhol’s film
Couch,
who had brought over the first Velvet Underground tapes heard in the UK.

Both of these shops opened up a route for the kind of avant-garde American rock music that otherwise most of us would never
have heard, like the Fugs and the Mothers of Invention. Sometimes the names of these US bands, which sounded weird to us,
suggested an alternative group, but their music would turn out to be quite conventional. When we did get to hear many of the
Americans like Country Joe & The Fish or Big Brother & The Holding Company we were often surprised to find that their music
was in fact inspired by American country or blues music, although the content of their lyrics was radical enough for them
to be thought of as underground bands.

Some of the people involved in the Indica Bookshop also contributed to the London Free School. This had been set up by a group
that included Peter Jenner as a way of bringing further education to Notting Hill. One of the prime movers in the underground,
John Hopkins – known to everyone as Hoppy – had picked up the idea from New York’s Free University, and this had in part sparked
the whole venture. (Hoppy had been one of the first to deliberately ‘drop out’ of a set career path, leaving his job at the
Harwell Atomic Research Establishment in the early 1960s to become a freelance photojournalist.)

Peter says, ‘The London Free School was an idea for the alternative education of the masses. In hindsight it was an incredibly
pretentious middle-class operation. We’d all come from privileged backgrounds and had all been well educated, but we were
not happy with what we had learnt. We’d been educated in
very blinkered ways.’ The Free School was a response to the fact that people had become alienated from education, and that
by teaching other people, the teacher could also learn from the pupils. It flared briefly for a year or so, and then disintegrated
– all the principals were too busy with fingers in other pies from journalism to events management. The LFS, and the psychedelic
movement, was in part inspired by the multiculturalism of Notting Hill. Peter makes the point that people do not remember
the drabness of England post-war: ‘It was grim to behold. Psychedelia was anti-drab.’

The London Free School would gather in an old house in Tavistock Crescent in Notting Hill (now torn down) which belonged to
Rhaunnie Laslett, founder of the Notting Hill Carnival. The Free School needed money to survive, and the organisers also wanted
to set up a news and information sheet to let everyone know about the new underground. Peter Jenner and Andrew King came up
with the solution: like all good vicars’ sons, they knew that if you wanted to raise money, you either held a whist drive
or a dance. Whist seemed inappropriate, so the LFS hired the local church hall (also now torn down) at All Saints in Powis
Gardens, Notting Hill, and put on the Pink Floyd Sound – we had decided to stick with Syd’s name for the band during our stint
at the Marquee Club – as part of a ‘pop dance’.

We were probably not that overjoyed by the prospect: playing church halls wasn’t what we had expected our new managers to
be aiming for. But in fact it turned out to be one of the best venues we could have found, since London W11 rapidly established
itself as the hub of the alternative movement. The whole district of Notting Hill was becoming the most interesting area in
London, mixing cheap rents, multicultural residents, activities like the London Free School and a thriving trade in illegal
drugs. To combat the latter, the local police had also developed creative skills, mainly to do with
fabricating evidence. This was something new for the intellectual radicals: apart from the CND marches, the middle classes
had rarely had to confront the darker side of the law.

The All Saints hall itself was unremarkable. With a high ceiling, wooden floorboards and a raised dais at one end, it was
like countless similar church buildings throughout the land. But the event quickly took on a personality of its own. The audience
was different from the R&B fanatics and
Top Of The Pops
viewers. As well as the local hip fraternity, there were students or college dropouts, proud of being ‘freaks’, who would
sit on the floor or just waft around waving their arms, a physical definition of what became known as ‘looning about’. They
arrived with few of the preconceptions or expectations of a normal audience, and were often in a chemically altered state
sufficient to find drying paint not only interesting but deeply significant. The effect on us was terrific. They responded
so well and so uncritically to the improvised sections in our set that we began to concentrate on extending those rather than
simply running through a sequence of cover versions.

Light shows played an important role at the All Saints shows: the events were conceived as ‘happenings’ and people were encouraged
to participate however they wanted. An American couple, Joel and Toni Brown, initially projected some slides when they were
over on a visit. When they had to return to the States, the contribution of the light show had become important enough for
Peter, his wife Sumi and Andrew to construct some replacements. With budget a priority and in the absence of any friends in
theatre lighting, Andrew and Peter decided not to approach the professional lighting companies, but instead headed down to
their local electrical store, and loaded up with domestic spotlights, ordinary switches, gels and drawing pins, probably getting
a trade discount as jobbing builders. All this standard lighting equipment was mounted onto battens nailed on a few
planks, the contraption was plugged into the mains, and the lights simply switched on and off by hand. This was makeshift
equipment, but for the time it was revolutionary – no other band had this kind of stage illumination.

A
Melody Maker
report of 22nd October 1966 gives a flavour of a typical performance by us: ‘The slides were excellent – colourful, frightening,
grotesque, beautiful, but all fall a bit flat in the cold reality of All Saints Hall. Psychedelic versions of “Louie Louie”
won’t come off but if they can incorporate their electronic prowess with some melodic and lyrical songs – getting away from
dated R&B things – they could well score in the near future.’

Our set was including fewer R&B standards and more of Syd’s songs – many of which would form the basis of our first album.
The R&B classics were mixed up with our longer workouts, so that ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, which we often used as an opener,
might be followed immediately by a very straight cover of Bo Diddley’s ‘Can’t Judge A Book’ or Chuck Berry’s ‘Motivating’,
one of Syd’s favourites.

Although this series of gigs was bringing us a regular audience, and we were becoming identified with what could already be
defined as an ‘underground’, my impression is that none of the band members was particularly aware of the significance of
the movement itself. We were sympathetic to its aims, but certainly not active participants. We enjoyed the mix of people
involved, like Hoppy, Rhaunnie Laslett and the black activist Michael X, but our real interest lay in making it in the music
business and buying our new PA system, not the ideals of a free newspaper.

The money from All Saints hall helped the Free School start their newspaper.
IT (International Times)
was created as a regular institution to give some cohesion to all the happenings and events going on in London. The model
was New York’s
Village Voice,
with its distinctive mixture of arts reviews, investigative journalism and a mouthpiece for liberal and radical views. To
launch the first
issue – on sale, at all good alternative outlets, for one shilling, published by Lovebooks Ltd, and with a print run of 15,000
copies –
IT
organised a launch party at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, Camden on a cold October night.

The Roundhouse had been built in the 1840s as an inspection yard for steam engines, but the yard and its turntable became
obsolete within fifteen years, as the size of the engines simply grew too large. Gilbeys, the distillers, had used it as a
warehouse, but by the early 1960s the place was extremely run-down. It has been well documented that our road crew, who were
in fact the management since we didn’t have a road crew as such, backed the transit van into the giant jelly moulded by an
artist for the launch party. This cataclysmic culinary disaster obviously didn’t help reinforce any sense of order.

There was no stage, but there was an old cart that was used as a platform. Our entire combination of instruments, amps and
light show was being run off one single 13-amp lead, which would barely have supported the power supply for the average kitchen.
Consequently the illumination levels were extremely low, and torches and candles supplied most of the light. The power expired
on an irregular basis signalling the end of – or breaks in – the sets.

Lighting effects at the Roundhouse were also minimal. They consisted of Andrew and Peter’s hand-built rig and some underpowered
Aldis 35mm projectors – the kind of machines families used to display their summer holiday snaps – containing slides filled
with mixes of oil, water, inks and chemicals that were then heated with small butane blow lamps. Great skill was required
not to overheat the contraption; otherwise the glass cracked, spilling the ink, creating the possibility of a small fire,
and the certainty of an atrocious mess. Our lighting technicians could be instantly identified by the lurid stains on their
fingers and the blisters on their hands.

The
IT
launch was a success. The Floyd’s performance was described by
Town
magazine as ‘shattering ear-drum and eye-ball’, and by
IT
itself as doing ‘weird things to the feel of the event with their scary feedback sounds’. This was like Powis Gardens with
added glamour. The word was out, and the faces and the celebrities were starting to turn up. A couple of thousand people attended.
The event brought together the beautiful people and the celebs, including Paul McCartney, Peter Brook, Michelangelo Antonioni
and Monica Vitti, and awarded a politically incorrect prize for the ‘shortest-barest’, allegedly won by Marianne Faithfull.
Soft Machine also performed, with the startling addition of a revved-up motorbike making a guest appearance at some point
in their set. There were pop-art-painted American cars, a fortunetelling cubicle, an all-night alternative film show. And
there was the largest audience we had ever faced.

We did spend quite a lot of time out in the audience sharing the experience, but this was one of the last times we did so;
the time would come shortly when we began to retreat to the self-contained culture of the band dressing room. I do remember
that most of us were wearing heavy make-up, and spent an inordinate amount of time curling or backcombing our hair into what
we thought pop stars should look like. Our wardrobe was another drain on our budget. It was not until a few years later that
a casual T-shirt approach became the norm, along with the attendant cash savings. For now we felt that satin shirts, velvet
loon pants, scarves and high-heeled Gohill boots were mandatory.