London Calling (24 page)

‘Listen, baby,’ replied O’Rahilly. ‘If you hurt Caroline, I hurt you.’
¹⁴

I’m sure we’ll have some fun yet in London.

ALEXANDER TROCCHI
to William Burroughs, 12 october 1963

Happenings did not appear out of thin air; among their precursors in Britain were the mixed-media events staged by Brion Gysin,
Ian Sommerville and William Burroughs, the first of which was a show called
Action Painting and Poetry Projection
held at the Heretics Club at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University, in 1960. This was an attempt by Gysin – the principal
organizer – to produce the ‘derangement of the senses’ that he and Burroughs had spent long hours discussing, by combining
painting with sound poetry and light projections in a theatrical performance. In December 1960 they put on a performance at
the ICA in Dover Street, where a light show by Sommerville using both slide projectors and an epidiascope was combined with
a cut-up tape by Burroughs called ‘Brion Gysin Let the Mice In’, featuring, in addition to Burroughs’s flat Midwestern voice,
radio static and distorted Arab drumming, while Gysin pranced about the stage, painting a vigorous sloppy abstract on a huge
sheet of paper. An enormously improved version of this performance was repeated at the ICA five years later, when, to Sommerville’s
great satisfaction, about half the audience left, unable to stand the volume of Burroughs’s collaged recordings of pneumatic
drills, radio static and wailing Moroccan flutes. At the end of the performance, Brion slashed the painting to pieces, causing
several small cries of alarm among the already jittery audience for whom this was tantamount to a book burning.

Brion Gysin added a touch of the pre-war, high-modernist, European avant-garde to the London scene with his reminiscences
of the expulsion of his paintings from a Surrealist exhibition in 1935 on the instructions of
André Breton, who thought the large calf ’s head in Gysin’s poster looked rather too much like himself; of his friendship
and travels with Paul Bowles; of buying his marijuana from Billy Holiday in New York, and providing Alice B. Toklas with the
recipe for hashish fudge she used in her celebrated cookbook: ‘She neglected to say you had to cook it!’ He was described
by Allen Ginsberg – though not to his face – as ‘a high tea-cup queen’, which Ginsberg explained thus: ‘wherever you go in
the world there will always be an old queen who knows where to get the best antiques, the best rugs, the best olive oil and
the friendliest boys. Brion’s like that.’
¹

Gysin was born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire, in 1916, was raised in Canada, became a naturalized American, and lived most of
his life in Tangier or Paris. His longest periods in London were in the early seventies, when he moved into William Burroughs’s
building in Duke Street, St James’s. His impact on sixties London came largely through his sound poetry:

I understand poetry really mostly as is called in French
poésie sonore
, and what I preferably have called ‘machine poetry,’… I don’t mean getting up there and saying it once off, or declaiming
it, or even performing it the way people do nowadays, but actually putting it through the changes that one can produce by
tape recording and all of the technology, or even the just
minimal
technology that one has had in one’s hands in the last few years…
²

In 1959, Gysin had accidentally discovered the cut-up technique by slicing through a pile of newspapers while mounting a picture
and noticing the different slivers of newsprint could be read as a text. Burroughs took this technique and began to collage
together his own writing with that of Rimbaud, Shakespeare,
Time
magazine and any other texts on his bookshelves, some of which were published the next year as
Minutes to Go
, an anthology of cut-ups by Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Sinclair Beiles and Gysin. In 1960, George Macbeth, the Director of
Talks at the BBC Third Programme, came across a copy and thought that Gysin’s permutated poems would be suitable for broadcast.
He contacted Gysin, who was living at the legendary Beat Hotel on the rue Gît-le-Coeur in Paris, which was also then the home
of William Burroughs. Anxious to get his hands on some sophisticated sound equipment, Gysin waited until the summer, by which
time the BBC had installed a new eight-track machine in their ‘Footsteps’ studio in Shepherd’s Bush. This was where the BBC
recorded the sounds for their radio dramas: the squeaking floorboards, the galloping horses, flocks of birds and striking
matches, all of which required skilled sound technicians to record and implement as they needed very elaborate overdubbing.

Gysin’s producer was Douglas Cleverdon, who had made the acclaimed recording of Dylan Thomas’s
Under Milk Wood
. They spent three days recording a 23-minute programme, devoting a whole day to
I Am That I Am
, which involved speed changes, very difficult to achieve in those days. At one point Cleverdon was slowing up the machine
gradually by pressing his finger against the capstan. To speed it up they would record the section backwards then slow it
down. When played correctly it would become a speed-up. These techniques were done dozens of times and layered on the multi-track
tape in what must have been the most complex overdubbing ever attempted by the BBC.
The Permutated Poems of Brion Gysin
had the second-worst reception ever received from the BBC’s panel of listeners. However, as the worst was a programme by
W. H. Auden on the state of Britain, Gysin was in distinguished company.

That same year, 1960, Gysin met a young English film-maker in Paris. At the age of ten Antony Balch screened his home-made
films in his living room, charging the family admission and preceding the main feature with a rented newsreel. His mother,
Delta, worked in the film industry and he grew up fascinated with all aspects of the business, from exhibiting to distribution
to editing and film-making itself. He worked as a production assistant on television commercials, which gave him experience
in lighting, print grading, cutting, editing and eventually directing; the first film he made was a television commercial
for Kitekat cat food. He bought a 35mm wartime De Vry camera and in 1959 shot footage of an old would-be ballet dancer dancing
under the bridges of Paris, and of his friend Jean-Claude de Feugas naked on a funereal couch with candles all around him.
Balch: ‘It was terribly pretentious.’
³
He was disappointed with the footage and never completed it. He also wrote reviews for
Continental Film Review
and ran two London cinemas: the Jacey on Piccadilly and the Times in Baker Street.

Balch was tall and slim and his manner was somewhat stereotypically camp; he had full wet lips and a rather arch way of speaking
with a public school accent. He was always beautifully dressed. He and Brion Gysin became good friends and in the course of
their conversations, Balch became more and more intrigued by the cut-up technique, seeing it as a way to cut through to a
deeper reality. He was impressed by Burroughs and Gysin’s early experiments with cutting up political speeches and they were
amazed at how the real intentions of the speaker – usually insidious – came through; a case of literally reading between the
lines. Over the next few years Balch was to adapt the technique to film-making and made three experimental films:
Towers Open Fire
,
The Cut Ups
and
Bill and Tony
, the latter featuring just himself and
Burroughs in a film designed to be projected on to their actual faces while their lips synched the voice of the other person.

Towers Open Fire
was Burroughs’s first acting job. In it he plays Colonel Bradley, a commando figure dressed in camouflage fatigues, tin hat
and gas mask, and armed with a large ping-pong ball gun bought at Hamley’s toy shop in Regent Street. Another section, filmed
in January 1963, featuring Alexander Trocchi, was shot in the boardroom of the British Film Institute. Burroughs and Ian Sommerville,
then his boyfriend, assembled the sound-track in their room at the Empress Hotel in London using Gysin’s recordings of Jajouka
trance music, radio static and Burroughs reading from his own text of the same name which finally appeared in his novel
Nova Express
in 1964. There was no synchronized sound, as such, though the radio static corresponds, more or less, with white noise static
on screen. Balch: ‘“Towers Open Fire” went round to the censor, and the exception slip said “Remove words fuck and shit”.
So I had to, for the English version.’
⁴

But the most important collaboration with Burroughs and Gysin was
The Cut Ups
, in which the cut-up idea is taken to its final, logical conclusion. Balch had about twenty-five minutes of film of Burroughs
and Gysin, shot at the Beat Hotel in Paris, the Hotel Chelsea in New York, the Empress Hotel in London and the Hotel Muniria
in Tangier, from the abandoned, unfinished
Guerrilla Conditions
and he used this as the basis for the film. In addition to a normal print, he had about half of it printed in negative. Lengths
of film, usually from the same shot, were superimposed on each other out of sequence. Sometimes three separate lengths of
film would be superimposed, and sometimes negative film would be used. The triple and negative superimpositions were done
last and included footage taken from other films, such as
Bill Buys a Parrot
, a 16mm colour short filmed in August 1964 at John Hopkins’s house in Tangier. Burroughs and Balch simply showed up one day
and asked if they could film Bill talking to Coco the parrot. The footage appears in black-and-white negative in
The Cut Ups
. Then all the assembled footage was literally cut up.

Balch explains:

I cut the original material into four and then gave it to a lady who simply joined it… [she] was employed to take a foot from
each roll and join them up. I didn’t actually make the joins; they were a purely mechanical thing for laboratory staff. Nobody
was exercising any artistic judgement at all.
⁵

The length of the shots except for the last is always a foot, the only variations being when a shot change occurs within one
of those foot-long
sections. Balch: ‘That’s rather like a train going over points.’ A foot was long enough for people to see what’s there, but
not to examine it in detail. Ian Sommerville, Brion Gysin and William Burroughs recorded the soundtrack. The film was 20 minutes
and 4 seconds long so they produced permutated phrases to just that, including the final ‘Thank you’.
⁶
The text consisted of quotes from the Scientology classes which Burroughs was attending at that time in London.

The Cut Ups
screened for two weeks at the Cinephone in Oxford Street, where half the audience loved it and the other half hated it. People
sat head in hands, members of the audience ran out to complain, saying: ‘It’s disgusting’, to which the staff would reply:
‘It’s got a U certificate, nothing disgusting about it, nothing the censor objected to, what are you objecting to?’ Balch:
‘
The Cut Ups
is too long, though; the 12 minute version was much better… We shortened it because Provior and the staff had to put up with
this five times a day: it was alright in the evenings when they got an appreciative audience, but in the afternoons customers
would walk out.’
⁷
The assistant manager, Roy Underhill, told Balch that during the run of
The Cut Ups
there was an extra-large number of articles left behind in the cinema – hats, coats, bags, shoes – forgotten in the hurry
to leave.

Even now Balch is rarely acknowledged as the first of the British sixties experimental film-makers, probably because he exhibited
in ordinary cinemas. He was never part of the underground film-makers’ community; he did not want to join the London Film-Makers
Co-op when it started and he was probably not invited. Balch: ‘I find I operate best when I’m doing it all myself… it’s a
matter of temperament.’
⁸
From the very beginning he had decided that he had to be his own producer, director, editor, distributor, cinema exhibitor,
businessman and everything else. He said: ‘I hate being turned down, as it were, and so I’d rather turn myself down.’
⁹
Balch was not just a precursor of the British underground film-makers,
The
Cut Ups
deconstructed the whole process of film-making; his ideas were a good deal more radical and challenging than most film-makers
that followed him, but the combination of cut-ups, an illegal sexual preference, and a friendship with both Burroughs and
Gysin – then seen as dangerous drug-taking characters – made most people shy away. Not that Balch wanted to be a part of an
underground film-making scene; he saw them all as scruffy hippies who, instead of just getting on with it, were always bleating
about getting grants. He preferred his independence and his own smart high-flying gay friends. They were two different worlds.

An influential, though largely inactive, figure on the sidelines of the London scene in the sixties was the novelist Alexander
Trocchi, who had made a name for himself in the fifties as the editor of
Merlin
magazine in Paris, where he also helped to revive the career of Samuel Beckett by publishing his novels in Merlin Editions.
From there he went to New York, where he moved in Beat Generation and Greenwich Village circles, lived on a barge or scow
on the Hudson River and took heroin; this was the subject of his 1960 novel
Cain
’
s Book
, the powerful personal testimony of his addiction assembled from his notes by his wife Lyn. Trocchi returned to Britain after
escaping from the United States in April 1961 by jumping bail and using his friend Baird Bryant’s passport to reach Canada.
George Plimpton was left to pay the $5,000 bail bond that he had unwisely guaranteed. Police had found a heroin prescription
in Trocchi’s name that he had given to a sixteen-year-old girl and he had been arrested for supplying drugs to a minor, an
offence punishable in New York State by death in the electric chair; Trocchi was guilty and the police would have made it
stick.