London Calling
Authors: Barry Miles
First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2010 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.
Copyright © Barry Miles, 2010
The moral right of Barry Miles to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions
or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
Atlantic Books
An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd
Ormond House
26–27 Boswell Street
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wC1N 3JZ
First eBook Edition: January 2010
ISBN: 978-1-843-54613-9
Contents
18 The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream
23 The Seventies: The Sixties Continued
30 New Romantics and Neo-Naturists
Many thanks to Richard Adams, Kate Archard, Peter Asher, Don Atyeo, James Birch, Peter Blegvad, Julia Bigham, Christine and
Jennifer Binnie of the Neo-Naturists, Victor Bockris, Joe Boyd, Sebastian Boyle of the Boyle Family, Valerie Boyd, Lloyd Bradley,
Udo Breger, Alastair Brotchie and the Institutum Pataphysicum Londiniense, Peter Broxton, Aaron Budnick at Red Snapper Books,
Stephen Calloway at the V&A, Simon Caulkin, Pierre Coinde and Gary O’Dwyer at The Centre of Attention, Harold Chapman, Rob
Chapman, Chris Charlesworth, Tchaik Chassey, Caroline Coon, David Courts, David Critchley, Virginia Damtsa at Riflemaker Gallery,
Andy Davis, David Dawson, Felix Dennis, Jeff Dexter, Michael Dillan at Gerry’s, John Dunbar, Danny Eccleston at Mojo, Roger
Ely, Michael English, Mike Evans, Marianne Faithfull, Colin Fallows at John Moores Liverpool University, College of Art, Nina
Fowler, Neal Fox, Raymond Foye, Richard Garner, Hilary Gerrard, Adrian Glew at the Tate Archives, Anthony Haden Guest, Susan
Hall, Jim Haynes, Michael Head, Michael Henshaw, John Hopkins (Hoppy), Michael Horovitz, Mick Jones of the Clash, Graham Keen,
Gerald Laing, David Larcher, George Lawson, Mike Lesser, Liliane Lijn, Paul McCartney, Owen McFadden at BBC Radio Belfast,
Michael McInnerney, Howard Marks, John May, James Maycock, James Mayor of the Mayor Gallery, Susan Miles, Theo Miles, Amanda
Lady Neidpath, Thomas Neurath, Jon Newey at Jazzwise, Philip Norman, Melissa North, Lady Jaye and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge,
Mal Peachy at Essential Works, John Pearce, Gary Peters, Dick Pountain, Susan Ready, Marsha Rowe, Greg Sams, Jon Savage, Andrew
Sclanders at Beatbooks.com, Paul Smith, Peter Stansill, Susan Stenger, Martha Stevens, Tot Taylor at Riflemaker Gallery,
Paul Timberlake, Dave Tomlin, Dan Topolski, Charlotte Troy at the Hayward Gallery, Simon Vinkenoog, Anthony Wall at BBC Arena
TV, Nigel Waymouth, Mark Webber, Carl Williams at Maggs Brothers Rare Books, John Williams, Mark Williams, Andrew Wilson at
the Tate Gallery, Michael Wojas at the Colony Room, Peter Wollen.
To Michael Head for his recordings of my onstage interview with Michael Horovitz (Riflemaker Gallery, 30 January 2007); to
Jon Savage for giving me access to his punk interviews, his London photographs and his CD compilations of London songs; to
Rob Chapman and also Andy Davis for providing valuable DVDs of archive fifties and sixties TV documentaries; to James Maycock
for some extremely rare DVDs; to Owen McFadden for hard-to-find DVDs and CDs of radio and TV programmes; to Anthony Wall
for Arena documentaries; to Andrew Scanders for finding tricky sixties documentation.
Special thanks to the Society of Authors for an Author’s Foundation award which enabled me to extend my research. To James
Birch, Valerie Boyd, Caroline Coon and Genesis P-Orridge, who kindly allowed me to interview them. To Toby Mundy, Sarah Norman
and Daniel Scott at Grove Atlantic, to Mark Handsley for his fine copy-edit – all remaining mistakes are still mine – and,
most of all, to Rosemary Bailey for reading and re-reading the manuscript, correcting my numerous mistakes and, as usual,
making extremely valuable editorial suggestions.
Look at London, a city that existed for several centuries before anything approximating England had been thought of. It has
a far stronger sense of itself and its identity than Britain as a whole or England. It has grown, layer on layer, for 2,000
years, sustaining generation after generation of newcomers.
DEYAN SUDJIC
, ‘Cities on the Edge of Chaos’
1
My earliest memories are of London in the forties: watching the red tube trains running across the rooftops, which was how
it looked to a three-year-old peering out of the grimy window on the second floor, seeing the Metropolitan line trains on
their way to Hammersmith. I remember running with a gang of local kids to buy chips from the fish and chip shop on the corner:
they had to hand the pennies up to the counter for me because I was too small to reach it myself. But these were memories
of a visit. My parents had lived in London before the war when my father drove a London tram, but my mother returned to her
family in the Cotswolds when my father joined the armed forces to fight against the Nazis. Consequently, though I’m told I
was probably conceived in London, I was born in the Cotswolds. I always felt there had been some mistake. After demobilization,
my father returned to London Transport and drove a bus so we often visited him in London. But the bombing had caused a tremendous
housing shortage and there was no way we could join him there. Eventually he got a job in the Cotswolds, and we settled into
country life. But I never forgot London and hankered after the city throughout my childhood.
On the bus between Cheltenham and Cirencester I would fantasize all the way that there was a row of houses on each side, blocking
out the trees and fields. In 1959, shortly after turning sixteen, I hitch-hiked around the south coast with a friend, a copy
of Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
in my pocket, spending the nights in barns, with London as our ultimate destination. I had a cousin whose family had been
rehoused in a prefab in Wembley and the previous year he and I had explored Soho together, so we headed there, the only
part of London I knew. We went to the 2i’s coffee bar and the Partisan coffee house on Carlisle Street, where a bearded man
wearing sunglasses at nighttime strummed a guitar and people sat around playing chess and drinking coffee from glass cups.
We finished up just down the street, two doors from Soho Square, drinking wine with the waiters at La Roca Spanish restaurant,
now the Toucan Irish bar. That night they let us unroll our sleeping bags in the basement among the wine racks and shelves
of plates and napkins. To a teenage Cotswold lad, this was the height of bohemian life, just the sort of thing that Kerouac
might have done. This was the life I wanted. I was determined to live in London and throughout my years at art college I hitch-hiked
to town as often as I could, staying on couches and floors, sometimes even finding a welcoming bed. In 1963 I achieved my
aim. I lived in Baker Street, Westbourne Terrace, Southampton Row and Lord North Street before settling in Fitzrovia almost
forty years ago.
‘London calling’ were the first words heard on the crackling crystal sets across the nation when, on 14 November 1922, the
2LO transmitter of what would become the BBC first went on the air. Radio was the height of modernity and the phrase caught
on immediately, so much so that Noel Coward launched a new show called
London Calling!
Since then the phrase has had a deep emotional association with the capital. BBC newsreaders always announced themselves
with the words ‘London calling’, and throughout the war they brought a message of hope, and sometimes terrible news, to people
huddled around clandestine radio sets in Nazi-occupied countries. The BBC made a point of detailing setbacks before the Nazi
propaganda machine could use them because in that way people would believe the BBC when there was good news, or possibly the
call to arms. Even when Broadcasting House itself received a direct hit, the news reader, Bruce Belfrage, continued his broadcast
as if nothing had happened despite being covered in plaster and dust. All listeners heard was a distant ‘crump’ as the music
library and two studios were destroyed, killing seven people. Even now, for millions overseas, it is the call signal of the
BBC World Service, bringing uncensored news and, for many listeners, free English lessons.
Edward R. Murrow always opened his nightly CBS reports from the war-damaged capital with the words: ‘Hello, America. This
is London calling’, drumming up support for Britain in the hope that the Americans would one day enter the war. These days
in Britain, ‘London calling’ immediately brings to mind the name of the Clash’s single and their best album, the title of
which came from this collective memory. The phrase evokes a melange of
feelings: of nostalgia, of history and pride, memories and fantasies. To some in the provinces it provokes a simmering distrust
of ‘trendy Londoners’ but to many more it evokes a destination to aspire to, the source of so much wealth, art and culture.
Unlike the USA and numerous other countries, Britain combines its cultural, political and financial capital all in one place.
To reach the top in any of these areas, you have to move to London. The Beatles PR Derek Taylor was not joking when he suggested
that the ‘fifth Beatle’, of endless press speculation, was London; it was London where they did everything that mattered.
2
This book is concerned with the creative life of London and, more particularly, with its bohemian, beatnik, hippie and counter-cultural
life since World War Two. As this is not an encyclopedia, I have usually described the people I know, or whose work I am most
familiar with, thus the B2 gallery on Wapping Wall, but not the equally significant 2B gallery on Butler’s Wharf; I describe
C O U M Transmissions and Genesis P-Orridge but not Bow Gamelan and Paul Burwell, who were doing equally interesting work.
The subject of underground rock ’n’ roll is altogether too large for this book, and has been mulled over in hundreds of books
already; only with punk bands do I deal with the subject directly. The jazz world and the lives of black musicians and visiting
American jazzmen in London should, by rights, be included but it is largely outside my experience. Fortunately Val Wilmer
has already written a magnificent history of this subject in her book
Mama Said There
’
d be Days Like These
. In fact, to attempt to cover all aspects of avant garde, or transgressive activity in London would have led me ‘into fields
of infinite enquiry’, as Ruskin said. I have concentrated on people who make their art their life, who live in the counter-culture,
not comment upon it, those who want to transform society, and not necessarily from within. I also wanted to make the book
accessible and amusing as humour is an often overlooked side of the avant-garde, so many of the anecdotes are included purely
for the sake of levity.
The underground life of any city, Paris, Berlin or New York, and also smaller places like San Francisco, Amsterdam or Copenhagen,
is shaped not just by the prevailing social and political situation but also by its built environment: the availability of
cheap accommodation, the provision of cafés, bars and meeting places, the existence of galleries or performance spaces, the
physical sense of place created by its local architecture. There are always neighbour-hoods where artists and students gather.
So it is in London.