London Calling (28 page)

It was at the Albert Hall Poetry Reading with Allen Ginsberg in 1965. That was when we first saw each other. You walked in,
saw 6,000 people just like you and thought, ‘Shit, are there that many of us?’ It was a turning point and gave us a lot of
confidence.
⁹

Hoppy and I set up a company called Lovebooks Limited in order to bring out little poetry magazines and spoken-word records:
our first publication
was Lovebooks Records 001:
Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Andrei Voznesensky at the Architectural Association
, an album recorded a few days after the Albert Hall which, in poetry terms, was everything that the Albert Hall wasn’t: terrific,
accessible poetry read by four world class poets to an enormously appreciative audience. This we followed with an anthology
called
Darazt
, designed as a companion to the poet Lee Harwood’s magazine
Tzarad
(dedicated to Tristan Tzara). It contained a long poem by Harwood, a three column cut-up experiment by William Burroughs,
some collages by me and a series of nude photographs by Hoppy. It was hand-set and so the illustrations all required plates.
The problems of censorship, delay and price that we encountered with this led to Hoppy buying a £100 offset litho press which
gave Lovebooks the ability to run off two-colour flyers and political pamphlets for the community as well as our art publications.

Hoppy had trained as a scientist at Cambridge and had worked at Harwell Atomic Research Lab as a reactor scientist before
his involvement with C N D, and a trip to Moscow in a bright yellow 1936 hearse with nine other people branded him as something
of a security risk. Hoppy somehow got separated from the others in Moscow and was eventually deported to Helsinki by the Soviet
authorities. The British government was not pleased to see his picture on the front page of the
Daily Mirror
under the headline: ‘Atomic Scientist Thrown Out of Russia’. The security services sent for him and after a five-hour grilling
made an inept attempt to recruit him to their cause, vaguely suggested he might work for them, informally, that is, pass on
anything he might hear, sort of thing. He knew it was time to leave Harwell.

Hoppy’s godfather had given him a 35mm camera as a graduation present from Cambridge and he had been using it a lot. He submitted
a picture of children at a Henry Moore sculpture exhibition to the
Guardian
and three weeks later was surprised and delighted when he received a letter containing a press clip of his photograph and
a cheque for £15 – a week’s wages in those days. On the strength of this one publication he finally quit the Atomic Energy
Authority and moved to London to become a photographer. He sold pictures to the
Sunday Times
, the
Observer
, the
Melody Maker
and
Peace News
. The Fleet Street photographers did not yet know how to deal with the new rock ’n’ roll stars, and because Hoppy was of the
same generation he was able to get intimate shots of the Beatles and Rolling Stones where the older Fleet Street establishment
photographers failed. His photographs of visiting jazz musicians, of the Aldermaston marches, and the Beatles and Rolling
Stones are now collectors’ items.

Our next project was
Long Hair
, a literary magazine named by Allen
Ginsberg and featuring his book-length Cambodian journals later published as
Ankor Wat
. It was very much an Anglo-American edition as I asked both Ted Berrigan and Gerard Malanga to gather material for us in
New York. We – mostly Hoppy – printed, collated and perfect-bound the eighty-page magazine ourselves. Our real aim was to
produce a newspaper along the lines of the
Village Voice
. Then, during the New York newspaper strike which began in September 1965, some friends of mine in New York started an alternative
paper they called the
East Village Other
, in a joking reference to the
Village Voice
, though it quickly became known just as
EVO
. I was their London correspondent.
EVO
was printed by offset litho and you could see that they just stuck down typewritten text and collaged pictures and headlines
straight on to the layout page, sometimes with handwritten annotations. It was just what we wanted to do.
EVO
was printed in New York’s Chinatown by printers who could not read English, so they got away with all kinds of obscenity
and libel. Britain, however, only had eight offset presses, all owned by big respectable printers.

We sent out flyers announcing that we were going to publish ‘a monthly anti-newsletter’ to be called
T H E Global moon-edition Long Hair T I M E S
. The flyer ended: ‘We send you love, & hope to receive cosmic signals.’ Paul McCartney offered a twenty-guinea prize for
a competition, the jazz critic Ron Atkins wrote a column, Hoppy wrote a drugs column under the pseudonym Bradley Martin that
he was later to use in
International Times
and I gathered together my recent correspondence: a newsletter from Ed Sanders about his bust, a letter from John Wilcocks
and another from a member of the La Jolla Pump House Gang of Californian surfers. We reproduced everything facsimile on foolscap
size (legal) paper, stapled them together and the next day we were all on the 1966 C N D Easter Aldermaston march selling
T H E Global moon-edition Long Hair T I M E S
. A lot of copies were sold by the London Rastafarians, many of whom used to frequent Hoppy’s flat, but Hoppy sold the most.
It was the forerunner of
International Times
.

The next significant underground event of the period was the three-day international ‘Destruction in Art’ Symposium (DIAS)
held at Africa House in Covent Garden during the week beginning 9 September 1966, with numerous planned and unplanned outdoor
performances in the weeks before and afterwards. It was organized by Gustav Metzger, the founder of the Auto-Destructive Art
movement, who brought to London a collection of like-minded artists from Europe and the USA.
¹⁰
Among the speakers were the concrete poet (and monk) Dom Sylvester Houédard, happenings artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, Bob
Cobbing, sound poet Henri Chopin, action artists Otto Mühl, Wolf Vostell and Hermann Nitsch and Yoko Ono. Following a press
conference the day before the symposium, the Canadian artist Robin Page did a piece called
K R AW!
in the basement of Better Books which consisted of digging a large hole with a pickaxe and shovel. The piece came to an unexpected
end when he struck water. The council had to be called, the water tapped and Better Books had to get planning permission to
fill in the hole again. John Latham fired up three large ‘skoob towers’ called
The Laws of England
, made from piled-up books, outside the British Museum without getting permission. The police and fire brigades were mustered
in a hurry as clouds of smoke drifted across the forecourt. Yoko Ono, who came over specially for the symposium and stayed,
performed her
Cut Piece
inviting the audience to cut away her clothing with a pair of scissors fitted with contact microphones which amplified every
snip. The Puerto Rican action artist Ralph Ortiz played an old upright piano with an axe in Jay Landesman’s house until it
was completely destroyed, declaiming as he performed: ‘Each axe swing unmakes this made thing called a piano. Each destruction
unmakes my made relationship to it. It is no longer for playing; it is no longer beautifully designed or ugly…’ The London
Free School children’s playground, on land cleared to build the Westway, was the site of many events, including Pro Diaz’s
action
Painting with Explosives
. On 1 September, Mark Boyle and Joan Hill presented
Projections
at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre, in which live insects were trapped between slides and projected. The heat from the projector
killed them, and their death struggles, hugely magnified, filled the screen.

The main objective of D I A S was to focus attention on the element of destruction in happenings and other art forms, and
to relate this to destruction in society. It was Gustav Metzger’s moment of triumph, presenting his ideas to the public and
generating a lively public debate. It also, predictably, resulted in a court case. Gustav Metzger and John Sharkey were prosecuted
under the Obscene Publications Act for organizing Hermann Nitsch’s
Abreaktionsspiel No.
5 at the St Bride Institute as part of his contribution to D I A S. This consisted of a film showing male genitals controlled
by wires and dipped in various liquids projected on an eviscerated lamb carcass used as a screen. Nitsch’s work is very confrontational
and he was attempting to counter the rhetoric of the warmongers by shocking the audience into a realization of the mass murder
taking place in Vietnam. It was not pretty but it certainly was art. After a four-day trial at the Old Bailey, Metzger was
fined £100 and Sharkey given a conditional discharge.

Gustav Metzger was born in Nuremberg in 1926. He escaped from Germany
to Britain as a twelve-year-old on one of the
Kindertransport
trains, when Great Britain responded to
Kristallnacht
by taking about 10,000, mostly Jewish, children from Nazi Germany and occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia and parts of Poland.
(The USA was asked to do the same but the project never made it out of the Congressional committees debating the issue.)
The transports stopped two days before Britain and Germany declared war. Gustav and his brother Max were placed in a hostel
in Willesden but his parents perished at Buchenwald in 1943.

In 1959, he moved to London from King’s Lynn, where he had been living. Perhaps not surprisingly, given his background, Metzger
was an early activist in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and a founder member of the Committee of 100; it was Metzger
who gave it its name, a reference to the Guelph Council of 100. It was in this year he published his first Auto-Destructive
Art manifesto, an attack on capitalist values and the com-modification of art by the gallery system. He wrote:

Auto-destructive art is a comprehensive theory for action in the field of the plastic arts in the post-war period. The action
is not limited to theory of art and the production of art works. It includes social action. Auto-destructive art is committed
to a left wing revolutionary position in politics, and to a struggle against future wars.
¹¹

His own art works confounded the gallery system by self-destructing, leaving nothing to be bought and sold or to appreciate
in value. Using exclusively materials from industrial or machine production, his sculptures fell apart or corroded or were
eaten away. His best-known early work was an action on 3 July 1961 on the South Bank, when he painted three enormous nylon
canvases with hydrochloric acid. The acid took about thirty minutes to dissolve the fabric, first burning holes, then leaving
the material in ever-decreasing tatters. A demonstration of his belief that art should embody ‘change, movement, growth’.
Gustav Metzger: ‘Auto-destructive art is intended as a slow time bomb to be placed in Bond Street and equivalent “centres
de luxe”.
¹²
Auto-destructive art is public art.’ One of his biggest fans was Pete Townshend of The Who:

When I was at art college I got fantastically interested in auto-destructive art. Gustav Metzger did a couple of lectures
and was my big hero. He comes to see us occasionally and rubs his hands together and says, ‘How are you?’ I got very deeply
involved in auto-destruction, but I wasn’t too impressed by the practical side of it. When it actually came to being done,
it was always presented so badly: people would half-wittedly smash something and it would always turn around so the people
who were against it would always be more powerful than the people that were doing it.

Before the Who got big, I wanted them to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until a number one record and then wrap
dynamite around their heads and blow themselves up on TV. It’s just been one of those things. Well-presented destruction
is what I call a joy to watch, just like well-presented pornography or obscenity. Although destruction is not as strong as
obscenity, it’s not so vulgar but it’s rare, you don’t see destruction so often, not malicious destruction just for the sake
of it, and so when you do, you normally stop and watch. I’ve always thought that high class, high powered auto-destructive
art, glossy destruction, glossy pop destruction, was far far better than the terrible messy dirty disorganized destruction
that other people were involved in… I’ve really done it, on a couple of occasions, glossily and flashily.
¹³

One of the most difficult and intellectual artists working in post-war Britain, John Latham used books as his primary medium.
He cut them up, burnt them, covered them in paint and embedded them in glass. Books are the repository of knowledge and learning,
and are symbolic of these associations as physical objects, which is why, even now, the idea of burning books is abhorrent;
a reminder of the Nazi book-burnings. His treatment of books has often got him into trouble, the most celebrated case being
his reworking of Clement Greenberg’s
Art and Culture
. Like most artists, John Latham had to supplement his income by teaching, in his case at St Martin’s College of Art on Charing
Cross Road. In August 1966, a group of his students gathered at his home to consider the ideas of the American art critic
Clement Greenberg, who had dismissed British art as being ‘too tasteful’; he believed that all the best avant-garde art was
American and that Pollock was the greatest painter alive. Latham disagreed and he and his students put Greenberg’s book
Art and Culture
to the taste test. They sliced out the pages, tore them into small pieces and chewed it over, spitting out the resulting
pulp which was then collected, mixed with yeast and various chemicals and allowed to ferment. This took several months but
when the art college library sent a final demand for the return of the book, Latham presented them with a small glass phial
containing distilled ‘essence’ of Greenberg. The administration at St Martin’s did not appreciate this artistic gesture and
dismissed him from his post; his art was recognized, however, by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who bought the phial,
along with its accompanying documentation of letters and the overdue library notice, which
Latham had made into a work of art entitled
Still and Chew: Art and Culture
1966
–
1967.