London Calling (35 page)

Rock ’n’ roll was not the only thing presented at All Saints hall. Keith West from Tomorrow put on a performance of Langston
Hughes’s
Shakespeare in Harlem
there, featuring local artists such as Horace Ove, who became a well-known film-maker. West’s interest in theatrical performance
led him to write ‘Excerpt from a Teenage Opera’, which made the charts in the summer of 1967. There were Charles Dickens amateur
dramatics and an ‘old tyme music hall’, an evening of ‘international song and dance’, as well as folk
nights and jazz concerts. Dave Tomlin’s ‘Fantasy Workshop’ also performed. Recent scholarship has played down the importance
of the L F S because not much actual teaching was done. This is true, but as a catalyst of activity and a focus of attention
it was of great importance and paved the way towards
International Times
, the UFO Club and the other sixties underground manifestations. At the time Hoppy told Richard Gilbert:

In the end I regard activities like the [London Free] School and It as crucial because they bring people together. A focus
like this is bound to be impermanent but the interaction that follows is justification enough. The Free School left its mark
in the area and we created a huge variety of activities. The school certainly helped the Pink Floyd get off the ground.
¹⁸

The London Free School also established ‘The Grove’, as the local West Indians called it, as London’s underground neighbourhood
(Ladbroke Grove was the main street). The decrepit buildings were cheap to rent and the Portobello Road had an inexpensive
food market. The writer Elizabeth Wilson remembered it as the golden age of West London, which she defined as the area bordered
to the west by Ladbroke Grove, to the east by Queensway, by Notting Hill Gate to the south, and a less defined boundary around
the Harrow Road to the north. Writing in 1982 she said:

It was a big druggy ‘head’ scene. In the peeling shells of those enormous pompous houses a new culture spread like golden
lichen, a new growth which was actually a symptom of decay. Every Saturday long haired men and women in flapping, droopy clothes
thronged the pavements of the Portobello Road…
¹⁹

There was a real sense of community, like a village.

To extend lines of communication with every country where an underground exists. To help in the creation of one where it doesn’t.

IT
26 editorial
¹

The Indica bookshop had moved to 102 Southampton Row in the summer of 1966. Bookcases were built and a false ceiling installed,
made from stretched Melinex: silver-coated plastic sheeting that shimmered with the movement in the room. There was a large
community noticeboard, which over the years was used by everyone from Yoko Ono – needing babysitters – to William Burroughs
– wanting volunteers for him to practise Scientology auditing upon – as well as the usual announcements of readings, concerts
and demos. Fulcrum Press had their own bookcases, with their complete line of poetry titles, and we stocked everything in
print by William Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the other Beats, as well as books by Charles
Bukowski, and all new Black Sparrow and City Lights titles – Tim Leary, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzger, and other psychedelic
texts. We had everything by R. D. Laing and Wilhelm Reich, Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. Aleister Crowley had to
be kept behind the desk because of theft. Whenever possible we stocked American and European underground papers, but the supply
was patchy. We carried
Evergreen Review
and even the
Village Voice
, though by the time it arrived it was seven weeks out of date. We specialized in American small-press poetry magazines such
as
C
,
Lines
,
Mother
,
Now
,
Grist
and so on, as well as the British
Poetmeat
and
P.O.T.H
.
Underdog
, and European concrete poetry magazines and publications. Three times larger than the Mason’s Yard premises, the shop also
had a basement and more rooms accessible from the block of flats above. The extra offices were donated to worthy causes: one
was used as a script-reading room for the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre and, as Trocchi was always complaining about
lack of space in his flat, another was given to Sigma. Trocchi accepted it but never worked there. I used the smaller room
below the shop for paperwork and in the large basement room the underground paper
International Times
, usually known as
IT
, had its first office. The large back room was initially used for exhibitions organized by Indica Gallery, beginning with
a large installation of musical sculpture by the Baschet brothers, François and Bernard.

Over the years, I have had scores of people tell me how much Indica changed their lives: they found books and magazines there
that transformed their ideas and gave them new perspectives on life. Pete Frame, author of the
Rock Family Trees
inscribed a copy of his book to me as follows: ‘To Miles – if it wasn’t for your fucking bookshop I’d still be a happily
married man, with a good job, a flash car and lots of money.’ Many of them have also told me how they stole books from Indica,
‘liberating books’ as they called it, knowing that we would never prosecute them if they were caught. It was thanks to them
that we finally had to go into liquidation. During the five years of its existence Indica was also a popular meeting place
and became one of the London sights, mentioned in all the ‘swinging London’ guides. To me the function of a bookshop was the
propagation of ideas and I was pleased that there was continuity from Better Books to us, and that we were in the tradition
of great pre-war London bookshops like Harold Monroe’s Poetry Bookshop and David Archer’s Parton Street bookshop. When Indica
closed on Saturday, 29 February 1970, the staff went on to work for Compendium Books in Camden Town, which continued the tradition
for several more decades. At Indica, we caught the last of the old guard: visitors included Colin Wilson, Krishnamurti, Tambimuttu,
Cecil Beaton and people like Peggy Guggenheim’s sister, Hazel Guggenheim McKinley, who would settle in a chair and hold court,
though she bought no books; her friend Sir Francis Rose, the painter whom Gertrude Stein ranked alongside Picasso, sometimes
joined her.

After the success caused by the quick
Moon Edition
newssheet that Hoppy and I put together for the 1966 Easter Aldermaston march, we had decided to bring out an actual underground
newspaper. Our model was primarily the
East Village Other
in New York, for which I already wrote as their London correspondent, though the
Village Voice
was also a great influence. Ed Fancher and Dan Wolfe, the founders of the
Voice
, made a point of stopping off at Indica whenever they passed through London. Hoppy and I enlarged the number of directors
of Lovebooks Limited, who published the paper, to include Jim Haynes, the American founder of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh,
and
his friend Jack Henry Moore, the theatre’s artistic director. We brought in Tom McGrath as the editor, a job that neither
Hoppy nor I had the time to do. Tom had previously edited
Peace News
, and had been resting up at Adrian Mitchell’s cottage in Wales when he received a fateful telegram: ‘Call Hoppy’. He was
a friend of both Hoppy and Jim Haynes; unfortunately we were not aware of the fact that he was a heroin addict, which was
the reason he insisted that he get £20 a week when everyone else was being offered only £12. In every other respect he was
brilliant, with a thorough grounding in Burroughs, Charles Olson and the Black Mountain School, the international peace movement,
jazz, the modern theatre, and virtually every other subject of concern to Hoppy and myself.

In the
Riverside Interviews
, Tom McGrath explained:

We had only the vaguest notion of what we wanted to do and how we were going to do it. There had been talk of a new ‘newspaper’
for years, but somehow no one before had felt impelled to actually start one. Now there was a new mood around, difficult to
define or estimate the strength of. We could see it, we could feel it, we thought and acted within it. There were even manifestations
– the London Free School in Notting Hill, project sigma, the Beatles’ Revolver LP, R. D. Laing’s experimental community in
Kingsley Hall, Provos in Holland, weird mass happenings in America, and so on. And everywhere – to us it seemed like everywhere
– the startling effects of LSD…

Thus we were a revolutionary movement, but clearly distinguished from the Marxists, anarchists, pacifists, what-have-you by
our tactics and our basic outlook… we coupled something of the fervour of a revolutionary movement with something of the mystique
of Zen. It was a wonder. Something new was arriving, something old was dying. Just about totally dead were all those cold
committee meetings, dreary demonstrations from CND and the Committee of 100, inter-faction poverty in the small radical
newspapers, all those grim-faced political puritans, just about dead, on the way out, their demonstrations their own funeral
marches… the emergence of this new movement and the birth of
International Times
are closely interwoven. The one could not have happened without the other.
²

At first
IT
shared my typewriter, then Sonia Orwell made Jim Haynes a gift of George Orwell’s old typewriter; at least, that’s what she
said it was. Our biggest problem was that we had yet to find an offset printer and so the whole paper was set in hot metal,
which meant any illustrations or photographs had to have copper plates made of them. There is film of Hoppy and Tom at the
printers, surrounded by machinery which looks as if it was installed in
Victorian times. The results were blurry and sometimes hard to decipher – Jeff Nuttall’s cartoon strip was unreadable – but
it was our newspaper, totally independent of Fleet Street. The first issue was dated 14 October 1966. It was so exciting to
actually have a copy of
IT
in our hands, it felt that a counter-culture, parallel to straight society, might just be a possibility. Hoppy: ‘Once we
had our own media it began to feel like a movement.’ At first it was more like an arts newspaper, with reports on Niki de
Saint Phalle’s huge
Woman
sculpture in Stockholm and an advance report on Yoko Ono’s first show at the Indica gallery, two reports on Gustav Metzger’s
‘Destruction in Art’ Symposium and Jean-Jacques Lebel’s obituary of his friend and mentor André Breton. But there was also
a column of drug news, called ‘Interpot’, and news coverage of China, Warsaw and Provo activity in Amsterdam. Jim Haynes:

We started IT because we wanted somewhere to announce underground and avant-garde events; and we wanted to tackle topics
like drugs that were treated with such hysteria in the commercial press… I don’t think people should try to be lucid; one
should try to be puzzling, to make people think.
³

IT
was launched with a fund-raising party at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, the first time it had been used as anything other
than a warehouse or train shed.

In 1960 the Trades Union Congress had passed Resolution 42, to encourage and promote working-class theatre. The playwright
Arnold Wesker was given a grant of £10,000 to set up an organization – called Centre 42 – to translate the resolution into
action. Michael Henshaw, who was then working for the Inland Revenue, was doing Wesker’s accounts on a freelance basis. He
was now asked to become the organization’s administrator. Henshaw immediately left the Revenue and threw himself into Centre
42. By 1966 he not only acted as accountant for half the playwrights in London, but he was on the editorial board of
International Times
, invited to participate by Hoppy and me; he had been Hoppy’s accountant for several years and helped set up Lovebooks Limited,
the publisher of
IT
. Centre 42 had acquired the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, an old railway roundhouse they intended to convert into an arts centre
once they had raised £280,000. In the meantime it stood empty. Michael Henshaw, however, had the keys. The building was fundamentally
unsafe: there was no proper floor, and great jagged pieces of metal stuck up from a thick layer of grime. There were only
two toilets, and the electricity supply was about the same as that of a small house, powerful enough only to light the building.
There were several large doors opening out on to the railway freight yards, but the entrance staircase from Chalk Farm
Road was so narrow that only one person at a time could enter or leave. At the
IT
launch party there were 2,000 outside, attracted by the flyer:

STRIP?????HAPPENINGS//////TRIP//////MOVIES

Bring your own poison & flowers & gas-filled balloons & submarine & rocket ship & candy & striped boxes & ladders & paint
& flutes & ladders & locomotives & madness & autumn & blowlamps &

POP/OP/COSTUME/MASQUE/FANTASY/LOON/BLOWOUT/DRAG BALL SURPRISE FOR THE SHORTEST/BAREST COSTUME.

When people emerged from that claustrophobic stairwell, which took many long minutes to slowly ascend, they found themselves
in a large version of the Spontaneous Underground or All Saints hall: Hoppy, myself and several volunteer girls in tiny silver
mini-skirts took the tickets and handed out sugar cubes. None of them had acid in them even though some people believed they
did and acted accordingly. Clouds of incense masked the slightly acrid smell of hash. Films and light shows were projected
on to plastic sheets hanging from the heavy wooden balcony constructed many years before to store Gilbey’s gin and now unsafe.
People paraded in costume. Most conversations were held on the move because it was October and there was no heating; the cold
night air whistled under the huge locomotive doors, some of which were little more than corrugated iron. Marianne Faithfull,
there with Mick Jagger, won the ‘shortest/barest’ contest for an extremely abbreviated nun’s outfit (these were pre-PC days,
though there were several men who were in the running). People wore refraction lenses to indicate their third eye; they wore
silver headdresses and long robes, spaceman outfits and rubber bondage wear. I wondered how they got there. Glitter dust rose
in clouds as people kissed each other in greeting. Paul McCartney, dressed in sheik’s robes, strolled around with Jane Asher,
Monica Vitti was with Michelangelo Antonioni, Alexander Trocchi tried to get in free by walking all the way up the railway
tracks to the British Rail entrance; Mick Farren says someone saw a camel there but it seems unlikely. There was a huge jelly,
evidence that when they get beyond a certain size they never properly set and are unstable. This one had splashed all over
the floor after the Pink Floyd’s roadie removed a vital piece of wood that supported its plastic sheeting container. Some
people ate it, Mike Lesser stripped off and dived in, which was a brave thing to do as it was very cold and there were no
bathrooms to clean up in. The two toilets flooded immediately and their doors had to be taken off to use as duckboards. Volunteers
blocked the doors to preserve
people’s privacy. A steel band warmed up the crowd and was followed by the Soft Machine.