London Calling (29 page)

Latham was born in 1921 in Zambia, at that time Northern Rhodesia, where his father was District Commissioner. He attended
Winchester school, then served in the Royal Navy during the war and witnessed the sinking of the
Hood
(1,415 dead), followed, three days later, by the sinking of the
Bismarck
(more than 2,000 dead). He ended the war as a lieutenant-commander with his own motor torpedo boat. He studied painting at
Chelsea College of Art, graduating in 1950. As a result of his wartime experiences, his principal theme was the ending of
human conflict. He was looking for a synthesis between art and science, a commonality of belief systems, an end to differences
in political ideology. His quest was for the unified field, a single theory that explained the universe and humanity’s position
in it. It has to be said that his explanations were at times baffling; however, his final great work,
God is Great
, was clear to all. Consisting of torn copies of the Bible, the Koran and the Talmud embedded in a six-foot-high sheet of
plate glass, it was an attempt to unite the three main Western monotheist religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and
the god that they share. Latham:

I thought God is the opportunity to align who the hell it is that people think that they’re talking about when they use their
particular word for the Almighty… It doesn’t really convey anything but a rooted prejudice which is taught with enormous energy
from institutionalized religion. And it’s become quite dangerous in many ways. It needs synthesising into one. It needs bringing
together by an image. That’s what I’m bringing the glass into it for, that it’s such a good equivalent for the mysterious
being.
¹⁴

Using glass to represent ‘God’ or the shared concept of God, he made a number of variants using the three sacred books of
the three central theologies. He took the books and:

put them all through the glass or to make them emerge from that glass, as if extruded from it. And in that way, to say that
glass is where the truth is and the written material is vulnerable. The written material is contentious and liable to provoke
hostilities if one is not very careful… the pieces that I’m calling ‘God is Great’ are there to indicate that underneath the
theologies is a real source from which they all are extruded.
¹⁵

In 2005 the works were shown at the Lisson Gallery to critical acclaim. As Andrew Hunt wrote in
Frieze
: ‘This collection of work was timely owing to the current level of extreme political tension and fundamentalist belief within
the world.’
¹⁶
But books proved contentious in his life to the end. In September 2005 the Tate put on a show called
John Latham in Focus
which featured a 1991
God is Great
. After Muslim fanatics bombed London, this work was removed from the exhibition without his sanction or that of the curator
of the show. The Tate thought the work endangered public safety; Latham, and most of the art world, thought otherwise: that
the Tate was self-censoring, running scared and submitting to the unspoken threats of fundamentalists. Latham’s comment was:
‘To say we can’t have this in here when they know it’s right in the middle of the art track is a failure of common sense.
It’s an interrupted discourse, and therefore it’s a form of assault for purposes which are nothing to do with the art.’ Latham
died while still in dispute with the museum. Damien Hirst commented: ‘He proves it is possible to be an enfant terrible for
ever.’
¹⁷

I went up the ladder and I got the spyglass and there was tiny writing there… and you look through and it just says ‘YES’.

JOHN LENNON
on Yoko Ono’s show at Indica
¹

Shortly after the Albert Hall reading, Tony Godwin let it be known that he was selling Better Books to Hatchards of Piccadilly,
a very traditional bookseller. His enlightened policy of happenings, readings and film shows, as well as the concrete poetry
and American Beat Generation mimeo-magazines seemed unlikely to last and so, accompanied by Sue Sarkozy, who also worked at
Better Books, I left to start a new shop where we could continue the tradition. It turned out, in fact, that Hatchards did
not make the expected changes and Bob Cobbing,
²
who took over as manager of the paperback section, managed to continue the events and activities for some time. Bob had been
a conscientious objector during the war and wrote his first poetry in 1942. He had organized and participated in exhibitions,
readings, screenings and publishing ventures ever since the mid-fifties. In 1951 he got involved with the Hendon Writers’
Group, later to evolve into Group H, which put on art shows and in 1954 he co-founded a literary magazine called, confusingly,
And
. But his most ambitious and long-lasting creation was Writers’ Forum, officially launched in 1963, which published poetry
booklets mostly by unknown writers using the mimeograph machine at his school. It took a decade to reach
WF
100, a poetry anthology.
WF
500 was another anthology and he was preparing for
On Word
, Writers’ Forum’s 1,000th publication, when he died in 2002 aged eighty-two. Not all the poets were unknown: in 1965 he first
published Allen Ginsberg’s
The Change
, and released books by Lee Harwood, John Cage, Ernst Jandl – the star of the Albert Hall reading – as well as his own distinctive
concrete poetry. His performances utilized that space between words and music, a distinctive chanting but of sounds, rather
than words:
a form of scat poetry very much in the tradition of the Dadaist sonic poetry of Hugo Ball. On the page Cobbing used the materials
he had, exploring the possibilities of the mimeograph machine: sometimes letting the skin wear out so that the words merged
into shapes and textures that could be seen as text, but no longer read. He would have doubtless agreed with Ball that:

The next step is for poetry to discard language… In these phonetic poems we want to abandon a language ravaged and laid bare
by journalism. We must return to the deepest alchemy of the Word, and leave even that behind us, in order to keep safe for
poetry its holiest sanctuary.
³

Despite dealing with some of the most avant-garde and experimental materials, Bob remained every inch the old-fashioned schoolteacher.
At the conclusion of some extraordinary screeching sound poetry or happening at Better Books, he would take the stage clutching
a great sheaf of papers, place one foot up the chair to reveal a hairy calf almost up to his knee, peer at the audience through
his glasses, clear his throat and announce: ‘Now, future activities’, as if he was going to give the details of the school
trip and open day.

From the moment he joined Better Books, Bob organized screenings of avant-garde and underground films and it was out of these
that the London Film-Makers Co-op emerged. It was formally organized on 13 October 1966, with a structure based very much
upon that of the New York Co-op. As well as Cobbing, organizers and members included Steve Dwoskin, Simon Hartog, Raymond
Durgnat and Dave Curtis. Two weeks after its formation, the Co-op joined with the newly formed
International Times
to hold a Spontaneous Festival of Underground Film at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre from Halloween to Bonfire Night. From
then on, Dave Curtis or Bob Cobbing screened films at UFO, the 14 hour Technicolor Dream and the last Christmas on Earth
Revisited at Olympia. When Cobbing was fired from Better Books, the Co-op transferred its energies to the Arts Lab, where
Dave Curtis was already programming the cinema.

One of the people who read at Better Books was the American poet Paolo Leonni, a friend of Gregory Corso’s. He introduced
me to John Dunbar, recently down from Cambridge, who was planning on opening an art gallery. It seemed sensible to combine
our activities and so a company called Miles Asher and Dunbar Limited (MAD) was formed with John’s best friend, the singer
Peter Asher, as the silent partner. The gallery-bookshop was called Indica, a reference to ‘Indications’ – the name of our
group shows – or ‘to
indicate’ but mostly named after
cannabis indica
, or marijuana. Indica had strong links with rock ’n’ roll: as well as Peter’s role in Peter and Gordon, John was married
at that time to Marianne Faithfull. But the connection of most interest to the press was the involvement of Paul McCartney.
Peter still lived with his parents in a large house at 57 Wimpole Street. Other occupants included his sister Jane, the actress
and broadcaster, and her boyfriend Paul, who lived in a small maid’s attic room next to Peter’s L-shaped room with its Norwegian
wood panelling. I used the Asher’s basement as a place to store books while we looked for premises. McCartney, coming in late
from a gig or a night club, would browse through the stock and leave a note of books he’d taken. He was Indica’s first customer,
before we even had an address.

Indica was at 6 Mason’s Yard, off Duke Street, St James’s. The yard was overlooked by Dalmeny Court, the apartment block where
William Burroughs, Antony Balch, Brion Gysin and the Animals’ singer Eric Burdon lived. A short alley led to the studio of
Gered Mankowitz, who took so many wonderful pictures of the Stones, Marianne Faithfull and Jimi Hendrix. In the centre of
the yard was a large, square, humming, electricity sub-station and built as a lean-to against its east side was a gentlemen’s
lavatory, very popular for cottaging (there was also a convenient all-night Turkish baths at the end of Gerard’s alley). On
the same side of the square, across the corner from Indica, was the Scotch of St James nightclub

John Dunbar had first discovered the premises for Indica after leaving the Scotch late one night with Marianne Faithfull,
and he first showed it to me in similar circumstances. Once the lease was signed we moved in. Paul McCartney helped out on
painting the walls and putting up shelves. On the day the bookshop opened he pulled up in his Aston Martin and heaved an enormous
package from the back seat. He had designed and hand-lettered the wrapping paper for the shop: stark black letters on rather
high quality white paper. As soon as the American fan magazines heard about this we began to get requests for it from American
fans, all enclosing useless – to us – American stamps. Another gallery helper was Mark Feld, who shortly afterwards changed
his name to Marc Bolan and became a pop star. We opened in November 1965 and the gallery quickly became famous: our first
proper show – after two group shows – was of the Groupe de la recherche d’art visuel, whose leader, Julio Le Parc, won the
grand prize for painting at the Venice Biennale shortly after our show opened. He fainted upon hearing the news. The gallery
was inundated by the press and collectors. John was still in Venice and Julio, who had not expected to sell anything from
this obviously eccentric underground gallery, had left a joke price list with one
item at £10 and another for £8,000. Nevertheless, one American collector persisted and we eventually shipped off a huge piece
to Cincinnati in a large wooden crate.

The gallery was in the basement, which extended out under the street and the bookshop occupied the ground floor. Shortly after
we opened the shop, Paul McCartney brought John Lennon in to buy books. I had just received a shipment of the
Psychedelic Experience
, Timothy Leary’s reworking of the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
, and gave Lennon a copy to look at while I hunted for something by Nietzsche that he had requested. John made himself comfortable,
lying on the old settee that stood in the middle of the shop. On
page 14
of Leary’s introduction John came across the line:
‘Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.’ With only slight modification this became the opening line
of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, the Beatles’ first truly psychedelic song.

It quickly became obvious that the gallery needed ground floor space, and the bookshop needed to be somewhere with passing
trade, so before a year was out Indica Books relocated to 102 Southampton Row, one block from the British Museum in Bloomsbury,
and Indica Gallery took over the ground floor of Mason’s Yard. John’s lifestyle meant that he was often in the gallery late
at night and people leaving the Scotch would tap on the window, demanding to see the exhibition, so he had a number of celebrity
visitors. The main reason that the Indica Gallery is remembered, however, is because it was there that John Lennon met Yoko
Ono.

We had always sold Fluxus publications at Better Books and I continued to do so at Indica. We also sold Yoko’s own, privately
published
Grapefruit
. When she came to Britain for the ‘Destruction in Art’ Symposium, it was only natural that she should come to visit us. Unlike
the commercial galleries in Cork Street, John Dunbar preferred not to schedule his shows very far ahead; that way he could
respond to what was happening and show new artists shortly after he discovered them, in the first flush of excitement and
enthusiasm. Yoko’s
Unfinished Paintings and Drawings
opened on 9 November 1966, less than two months after she arrived in London.

Yoko had quite a forceful manner but she was mild compared to her husband, Tony Cox, who accompanied her. During one visit
John had to eject him from the gallery because he was shrieking and hyperventilating, the result of strenuous arm-flapping
exercises conducted in the gallery to the astonishment and consternation of visitors. John Lennon and Yoko’s first meeting
occurred on the evening before the private view while the show was still being hung. John Lennon:

I got there the night before it opened. I went in – she didn’t know who I was or anything – I was wandering around, there
was a couple of artsy type students that had been helping lying around there in the gallery, and I was looking at it and I
was astounded. There was an apple on sale there for 200 quid, I thought it was fantastic – I got the humour in her work immediately…
John Dunbar insisted she say hello to the millionaire, you know what I mean. And she came up and handed me a card which said
‘Breathe’ on it, one of her instructions, so I just went (pant). This was our meeting.
⁴