London Calling (27 page)

An organizing committee, the Poets’ Co-operative, was formed and the number of poets reading rose alarmingly to fourteen,
many of whom had never before read anywhere larger than the upstairs room of a pub. The line-up was international: Americans:
Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso, Paolo Lionni, Dan Richter; British: Harry Fainlight, Adrian Mitchell, Pete Brown, Michael Horovitz,
Christopher Logue, Spike Hawkins, Tom McGrath, George Macbeth; the New Zealander John Esam; Dutch: Simon Vinkenoog; Finnish:
Anselm Hollo; and Austrian: Ernst Jandl. But though no-one thought to comment at the time, it was also 100 per cent white
male. The Poets’ Co-op wrote a collaborative poem, though the majority of it came from Ginsberg’s pen; he could be very persuasive
when it came to poetry. The principal organizer, the poet Michael Horovitz, remembered: ‘We sat in Alex Trocchi’s sordid flat
– there were heroin needles on the floor – and took it in turns to speak lines that Ginsberg wrote down. That formed our manifesto.
But we had no idea if anyone would come. Nothing like this had been done before.’
³

‘England! awake! awake! awake!

Jerusalem thy Sister calls!

* * *

And now the time returns again:

Our souls exult, & London’s towers

Receive the Lamb of God to dwell

In England’s green & pleasant bowers.’ World declaration hot peace shower! Earth’s grass is free! Cosmic poetry Visitation
accidentally happening carnally! Spontaneous planet-chant Carnival! Mental Cosmonaut poet-epiphany, immaculate supranational
Poesy insemination!

Skullbody love-congress Annunciation, duende concordium, effendi tovarisch illumination, Now! Sigmatic New Departures Residu
of Better Books & Moving Times in obscenely New Directions! Soul revolution City Lights Olympian lamb-blast! Castalia centrum
new consciousness hungry generation Movement roundhouse 42 beat apocalypse energy-triumph!

You are not alone!

Miraculous assumption! O Sacred Heart invisible insurrection! albion! awake! awake! awake! O shameless bandwagon! Self-evident
for real naked come the words! Global synthesis habitual for this Eternity! Nobody’s Crazy Immortals Forever!
⁴

John Esam was in charge of the finances and John Hopkins (‘Hoppy’) took publicity photographs of the poets seated around the
statue of Shakespeare on the Albert Memorial across from the Albert Hall. Hoppy was able to get stories about the reading
into the
Sunday Times
and other newspapers. Ginsberg was interviewed by the BBC. Tickets began selling. The reading was on 11 June 1965 and all
7,000 tickets had sold.

‘I am about as surprised to see you here as you are to see us,’ said Trocchi opening the event. The
New Statesman
praised Trocchi for ‘compering the proceedings with schoolmasterly firmness’. As Trocchi was taking twenty grains of heroin
and seven of cocaine per day it certainly took a lot to faze him. Kate Heliczer and some of her friends, their faces painted
in paisley patterns and wearing antique granny dresses, handed out flowers to the lines of people waiting to get in. The Royal
Albert Hall is a large circular Victorian concert hall with several tiers of boxes, including a royal box. Some people had
booked a whole box and brought a picnic – throughout the evening the sound of corks popping could be heard. One box kept its
curtains drawn all night. People shared what they had brought, which in many cases was pot.
A centre dais stood where a boxing rink was often employed meaning that the poets needed to keep turning round in order to
address the whole hall, and seated in the rows of seats surrounding it were the poets, organizers and their friends. There
was no real division between the audience and the poets. The floor was strewn with armfuls of flowers, salvaged after the
Floral Hall at Covent Garden Market closed for the day. Bottles of wine and glasses circulated, three-paper joints were passed
discreetly round, thick clusters of joss-sticks masking their smell, and people visited; it was a social occasion, like an
Edwardian opera.

Ian Sommerville played a William Burroughs tape during the intermission (Burroughs was in New York), which got lost in the
echo of the hall’s great dome; Davy Graham played virtuoso folk guitar; R. D. Laing brought along a group of his schizophrenic
patients, some of whom danced, including one young woman in a white dress who found rhythms in the poetry no-one else could
hear; and Bruce Lacey’s huge papier-mâché robots staggered about in the aisles vibrating and buzzing threateningly. Sadly
none of them lasted out the evening. There was also to have been a happening. Jeff Nuttall: ‘John [ Latham ] and I were to
have a battle. We dressed in blue paint and huge Aztec costumes of books which we were to tear off one another. Trocchi forgot
to signal our entrance. As we waited in the wings, John passed out.’
⁵
Al Cohen and Jeff had a fight with one of the British Legion attendants who attempted to prevent them from using a door as
a stretcher to carry John to Sir Malcolm Sargent’s dressing room. The paint had clogged Latham’s pores and he and Nuttall
needed to wash quickly as this can be deadly (or so it was popularly believed after
Goldfinger
). They jumped into Sir Malcolm’s bath and began sloshing water over each other. Nuttall: ‘It was the same attendant, pulverized
by the goodly Anglo-Saxon pouring forth from Jewish lips down in the auditorium, who burst into Sir Malcolm’s bathroom, found
John and I giggling and washing one another, assumed the worst and staggered away in an advanced state of shock.’
⁶

Not everyone could see the stage; on the web Paul A. Green remembers: ‘High in the tiers we could only glimpse a beaky profile
of MC Trocchi down there on the flower-strewn promenade, where a fey girl in a white dress undulated to the chime of Ginsberg’s
finger-cymbals.’
⁷
As a reading there were too many poets, many of whom did not know how to project to a large audience, and the best performances
were often by the lesser stars: Ernst Jandl, Pete Brown and Michael Horovitz’s performance of Kurt Schwitters’ sneeze poem
were perfect for the occasion, whereas Gregory Corso, famous for witty, audience-pleasing poems such as ‘Hair’ or ‘Marriage’
chose instead
a long thoughtful new poem which he read sitting down so half the audience only saw his back. Ferlinghetti’s poetry is written
to be read aloud and he did a brilliant job, bellowing out ‘To Fuck is to Love Again’ to the horror of the British Legion
attendants. Adrian Mitchell was the surprise star of the show with his easily accessible blast against the Vietnam war, called
‘To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies about Vietnam)’.

At this time Adrian was known as a poet and pacifist; he had a pamphlet out from Fantasy Press as early as 1955 and in 1964
Jonathan Cape published his
Poems
, which was well received. Cape had earlier published his novel
If You See Me Coming
(1962), and Calder & Boyars had published his acclaimed adaptation of Peter Weiss’s
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis
de Sade
, which consolidated his reputation in avant-garde circles. He was already well known at Better Books, where he took part
in the symposium, ‘The Theatre and it’s Future’ along with Peter Brooks and John Arden, that inaugurated the weekly Writers’
Night held in Better Books’ basement.

The audience also loved Ernst Jandl, the Austrian sound poet who, with his short grey hair, looked like a rocket scientist
or technician mounting the stage until he opened his mouth and delivered his humorous, universal sound blasts: ‘… schist schleisch
scheschlorden schund schat schlunter schluns scheschlohnt…’, one of which, ‘schmerz durch reibung (pain through friction)’
clearly ended in an orgasm.

Harry Fainlight had never before read to a large audience. Instead of picking some short, easy pieces he chose to read ‘The
Spider’, an account of an L S D trip, a subject in 1965 unfamiliar to 99 per cent of his audience. Nervous at the best of
times, Harry mumbled and the audience couldn’t hear. They began to shout for more volume, then cat-call. Harry grimaced and
twitched before coming to a grinding halt mid-poem amid clamour from the audience. The Dutch poet Simon Vinkenoog, high on
mescaline, sensing Harry’s anxiety, began chanting: ‘Love! Love! Love!’ to direct positive vibrations in Harry’s direction
to help him and calm the crowd. Harry began to leave the stage then decided that he needed to explain what the poem was about
and turned back. But Trocchi, in full dominie mode, had climbed on to the dais and now tried to take Harry’s microphone away.
‘Thank you, Harry, I think we’ve all heard enough of that now.’ Simon continued chanting: ‘Love! Love! Love!’, eyes wide as
he circled the dais. It seemed to work, and the audience was quieted.

The Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky sat in the audience but his minder from the embassy had told him that if he read with
this reactionary crowd
he would never leave Russia again. He had been forbidden even to attend and sat, hunched over, looking glum as, quite unreasonably,
both Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti took exception to his refusal to read and berated him from the stage. Ginsberg, dressed soberly
in a dark suit for the occasion, wearing my straight, woollen knitted tie which he never returned, became more and more irritable
as the event ran on and a parade of what to Ginsberg were second-rate poets climbed on to the dais. He became more and more
drunk. This was unusual for him; in fact, 1965 was the only drunken year of his life. When he finally took the stage, an hour
late, he began with a sloppy drunken reading of Anselm Hollo’s translation of Voznesensky’s ‘The Three-Cornered Pear/America’.
Most of the audience did not understand his slurred introduction and thought that the poem was his, so they reacted badly
at lines like ‘Does it hurt Mr Voznesensky?’ which they thought Allen was directing at the Russian. After Allen read his poem,
Voznesensky left the hall. Being onstage sobered Ginsberg and the remainder of his reading was fine, though not the great
Blakean occasion he had dreamed of. Most people didn’t notice; it was the social occasion that counted. The tribe had suddenly
recognized itself and was delighted. No-one wanted to leave, they wanted to carry on to the party afterwards. ‘Go back to
your homes – if you have any,’ yelled the exasperated attendants, angrily shooing people along the aisles.

The hire of the hall had cost £600: £400 for the evening plus two hours’ overrun at £100 an hour. Jill Richter’s mother put
up the front money at the request of Dan and Jill but whether she got it back is not known. The Co-operative spent £200 on
drinks and stationery, and Gregory Corso had managed to get a £100 fee in advance. John Esam was paid £100 by the BBC for
filming rights which they apparently never exercised, though they did record the event on their fixed live feed from the hall.
It was this recording that Peter Whitehead used for his film
Wholly Communion
as his own sound was unusable. The money was the subject of something of a free-for-all after the event, with poets and hangers
on grabbing handfuls, but the serious money was in cheque form and had been handled by John Esam. Strangely, Esam was uncontactable
after the event and none of the estimated £1,000 profits was ever seen again. Christopher Logue consulted his solicitor and
Michael Horovitz wrote to the
TLS
but Esam was apparently on holiday in Greece.

Ginsberg was very depressed by his own performance, by the bad poetry and by Voznesensky’s failure to read. He exchanged some
heated words with George Macbeth, one of the poets he felt should not have been there, which ended by Ginsberg very unchacteristically
screaming: ‘Fuck off!’ Eight days
later he composed a letter to the editor of the
Times Literary Supplement
(unpublished), in answer to their largely sympathetic coverage of the event:

A participant in the poetry reading, I woke up early next morning depressed, disgusted by almost all the other poets and disgusted
most by myself. The audience had been summoned by Blakean clarions for some great spiritual event, there was a hint of Jerusalemic
joy in the air, there were great poets near London, there was the spontaneity of youths working together for a public incarnation
of a new consciousness everyone’s aware of this last half decade in Albion (thanks to the many minstrels from Mersey’s shores
& Manhattan’s), there was a hopeful audience of sensitive elders and longhaired truly soulful lads and maids. The joy, the
greatness of the poets, & the living spirit coming to consciousness in England, have never been adequately defined in public,
and here was an opportunity to embody this soulfulness in high language…

there were too many bad poets at Albert Hall, too many goofs who didn’t trust their own poetry, too many superficial bards
who read tinkley jazzy beatnick style poems, too many men of letters who read weak pompous or silly poems written in archaic
meters, written years ago. The concentration & intensity of prophesy were absent except in few instances…

By the time I got up to read I was so confounded by (what seemed to me then) the whole scene turned to rubbish, so drunk with
wine, and so short of time to present what I’d imagined possible, that I read quite poorly and hysterically…
⁸

For Ginsberg it had been a disaster, but for the youth of London it was a catalyst: the birth of the London underground. From
this event came the
International Times
(
IT
), the UFO Club, the psychedelic posters of Osiris Visions, the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, BI T, the Roundhouse as a venue,
and by extension the British underground papers that followed:
Oz
,
Ink
,
Friends
,
Frendz
and
Gandalf
’
s Garden
. There were other factors, of course, and the people who started
Oz
were not even in Britain when the Albert Hall reading happened, but it created a community and a scene, the framework within
which everything happened. Hoppy: