London Calling (36 page)

The Softs’ drummer, Robert Wyatt, told Daniel Spicer:

In those days there was no seating in the Roundhouse so there was lots of space. A friend of the organist was a motorcyclist
and, as another member of the group, his contribution was to ride around the room to add a bit of enjoyable sound. He was
very sensitive in the way he drove his motorcycle and it fitted in with the tunes perfectly, as I remember.
⁴

My memory is that the bike was also mic-ed up, as described by the group’s singer, the Australian poet Daevid Allen, who wrote:

That was our first gig as a quartet. Yoko Ono came onstage and created a giant happening by getting everybody to touch each
other in the dark, right in the middle of the set. We also had a motorcycle brought onto stage and would put a microphone
against the cylinder head for a good noise.
⁵

The San Francisco poet and anarchist Kenneth Rexroth was visiting London so I invited him to the party. He mistook the Soft
Machine for an audience jam session and was terrified by the whole event. He wrote an unintentionally funny report in his
column in the
San Francisco Examiner
:

The bands didn’t show, so there was a large pickup band of assorted instruments on a small central platform. Sometimes they
were making rhythmic sounds, sometimes not. The place is literally an old roundhouse, with the doors for the locomotives all
boarded up and the tracks and turntable gone, but still with a dirt floor (or was it just very dirty?). The only lights were
three spotlights. The single entrance and exit was through a little wooden door about three feet wide, up a narrow wooden
stair, turning two corners, and along an aisle about two and a half feet wide made by nailing down a long table. Eventually
about 3,500 people crowded past this series of inflammable obstacles. I felt exactly like I was on the Titanic. Far be it
for me to holler copper, but I was dumbfounded that the police and fire authorities permitted even a dozen people to congregate
in such a trap. Mary and I left as early as we politely could.
⁶

In fact there were several huge manned doors opening on to the goods yards in case of fire and we had a doctor on hand in
case anyone hurt themselves, but we understood Kenneth’s anxiety.

Hunter Davies reviewed the event in the
Sunday Times
providing the first national press for the Pink Floyd:

At the launching of the new magazine IT the other night a pop group called the Pink Floyd played throbbing music while a
series of bizarre coloured shapes flashed on a huge screen behind them. Someone had made a mountain of jelly and another person
had parked his motor-bike in the middle of the room. All apparently very psychedelic… the group’s bass guitarist, Roger Waters,
[said] ‘It’s totally anarchistic. But it’s co-operative anarchy if you see what I mean. It’s definitely a complete realisation
of the aims of psychedelia. But if you take L S D what you experience depends entirely on who you are. Our music may give
you the screaming horrors or throw you into screaming ecstasy. Mostly it’s the latter. We find our audiences stop dancing
now. We tend to get them standing there totally grooved with their mouths open.’ Hmm.
⁷

The second issue of
International Times
gave them a warm review:

The Pink Floyd, psychedelic pop group, did weird things to the feel of the event with their scary feedback sounds, slide projections
playing on their skin (drops of paint ran riot on the slides to produce outer-space/prehistoric textures on the skin), spotlights
flashing in time with the drums.
⁸

This was probably the first time most of the audience had seen a light show and many stood staring open-mouthed as the amoeba-like
organic bub bles pulsed and merged with each other. As an unintentional but dramatic climax to their act, the Floyd blew the
fuses, right at the end of a long, inspired version of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, plunging the building into darkness. Afterwards
I paid the bands: the Soft Machine received £12 10s but the Pink Floyd got £15 because they had the extra expense of a light
show.
IT
’s editor, Tom McGrath:

Those early days were wonderful. The IT office was crowded with people offering their help or just coming to thank us, share
the feeling of union. New forms, strange inventions, poster art reborn in startling colours, digger communities founded on
vows of poverty and love, clothes weird and wonderful, everywhere the outrageous colours exploding shapes of psychedelia.
⁹

We hadn’t really a clear idea who our audience was, but they quickly found us. It turned out that there were huge areas of
interest that Fleet Street was just not covering, even though thousands of people were interested, and these were not entirely
to do with drugs. In fact
IT
’s drug coverage was largely informative: the price of hash in Athens, for instance, but it was certainly non-judgemental
and most of the staff were involved with the drug
counter-culture. The notice pinned to the office door gave this away: ‘Have you turned out the lights? Put away everything
important? Turned on?’
IT
provided a meeting point for all the new ideas under discussion. McGrath told Richard Gilbert:

We seem to have struck something that’s really happening in London – it’s the living out socially of an artistic philosophy
that I suppose goes right back to Dadaism. I think this is partly due to the way that writers’ ideas have finally filtered
right through society. We’re now at the stage where the message carried by writers like Burroughs isn’t all that far away
from the message carried by the Beatles, although they operate at different levels.
¹⁰

The Beatles agreed. Paul McCartney told a Granada TV crew:

I remember sitting in his [Miles’s] flat putting the paper together. That was the news organ of the time, where you could
get your little piece of news in and do your in interview and swear without anyone minding. Because, again, it was a studenty-type
thing. You knew it wasn’t going to be tut-tutted at by grown-ups. It was good to be involved with Miles on
IT
, and with his friends, like Ginsberg. We were very interested in all of that because we’d come up through the pop world and
had become known as the cute little head-shakers, and that had submerged that slightly offbeat ‘arty’ side of us.
IT
was the other side of us.
¹¹

Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ press officer, commented in the same programme:

It had such romance, hard to imagine now… Without a glimmer of pretension
IT
did have great contemporary cachet. It was a privilege to be published in it, but just about anybody could be if they were
thinking well. It had absolutely rock-solid “street cred” and yet it was really good fun. There was no cynicism.
¹²

IT
quickly ran out of money, of course, and even though UFO was up and running by this time,
IT
decided to put on a jumble sale, in the best English fund-raising tradition. The ‘Uncommon Market’ was held at the Roundhouse
on the afternoon of Sunday, 19 March 1967, and drew 800 people. It featured Ivor Cutler, singing his strange ironic ditties
to the accompaniment of a harmonium, and one of Biddy Peppin’s 56-gallon jellies. It flopped and spread out over huge sheets
of silver Melinex. Some ate it, others stomped in it and threw it around. Barry Fantoni conducted an auction and everyone
had a pleasant afternoon though not much money was raised. It was at events such
as this that the village community spirit of the London underground scene was best appreciated.

The early heady days of the underground couldn’t last, of course, and it was not long before the police targeted
IT
. The establishment is threatened by even the slightest demonstration against its all-pervasive control over people’s lives
and the police were incensed at some of the news items that we ran: the first issue, for instance, carried a report which
said: ‘Pusher named Nigel in Chelsea area reportedly being supplied with anything he wants by the fuzz in order to set people
up. Has red hair.’ On 9 March 1967 the door of Indica was flung open and a mob of a dozen policemen pushed customers out of
the way and demanded to know where
IT
’s offices were. When Tom McGrath heard the thudding of approaching policemen’s boots, he grabbed his briefcase – ‘which held
an assortment of things that would have been of great interest to them’ – and headed up the stairs to the bookshop, passing
the lead policeman on the way. ‘Excuse me,’ said Tom, politely. He didn’t look like a hippie, he was respectful, and so they
did not stop him. He walked calmly up Southampton Row to Cosmo Place and the Cosmoba Italian restaurant, where the staff frequently
ate. He asked the proprietor if he could leave his bag behind the counter for a little while then returned to the office,
which was now filled with police sniffing at ashtrays and emptying their contents into plastic bags even though they had only
arrived with an obscene publications search and seize warrant, a rarely used form that empowered them to take away anything
they wanted. One of the policemen patted down Tom’s secretary, feeling her breasts as he did so. They wanted to know the contents
of the next issue, to be published the next day, warning Tom that they would be back to bust that too if there was anything
in it they didn’t like. There was no pretence that they were there to do anything other than close the paper down.

The police brought a three-ton truck round to the front of the building and loaded it with virtually the complete contents
of the
IT
office: everything from the London telephone books to all 8,000 copies of the back issues. They seemed more interested in
disrupting the running of the paper than actually taking away anything that might be obscene. They took all the book-keeping
records, the correspondence files, all the subscription files, half the address stickers for mailing the next issue and even
an uncashed wage cheque belonging to one of the staff, but left a photograph of a nude which, for all they knew, we might
have been intending to publish. They took personal address books and advertising invoices. When they left, the room was almost
empty. There could be no better way to close down a business. They also snooped
around the Indica bookshop, taking away all the usual suspects:
Naked Lunch
by William Burroughs,
Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer
by Kenneth Patchen,
I Jan Cramer
by Jan Cramer, offprints of Burroughs’s ‘Invisible Generation’ essay from
IT
, a bundle of
IT
s, and thirty other books and poetry magazines. When they were eventually returned they were damaged, mixed in with
IT
s; though judging by the grubby thumbprints, one officer must have enjoyed
Naked Lunch
.

The original warrant was issued on the pretext that someone, thought to be the right-wing Christian MP Sir Cyril Black, organizer
of the Billy Graham campaigns in Britain, had objected to an interview with an American comedian, Dick Gregory, a write-in
presidential candidate, in which he used the word ‘motherfucker’. The MP Tom Driberg told me that the police were encouraged
to go ahead by Lord Goodman, Harold Wilson’s private lawyer, who hated
IT
despite his knowing that the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, would object to the raid. Goodman had sponsored Jim Haynes in his
move from the Traverse in Edinburgh to the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre and had taken it as a personal betrayal that Jim had
left and was involved with
IT
and planning to start his own Arts Lab. The police were delighted because the fact was that they had declared war on the
underground. It was no longer just an easy target for the drugs and porn squad to use to make up arrest numbers. They were
personally offended by its threat to their value system. This had been demonstrated in the previous week, when plain-clothes
and uniform police raided a house in Gloucester Road, off Primrose Hill, but finding that the people they were looking for
were not there, they knocked on the door of another flat and asked if they could search their premises instead. They were
told no; they had no warrant or reason to search the place. The landlord telephoned the local police station and demanded
to know what was going on. He was told that they would ‘eventually put a stop to the Round House and all that it stood for’.

The Sunday after the raid saw the acting out of the ‘Death and Resurrection of
International Times
’ as directed by Hoppy and performed by Harry Fainlight. Surrounded by about thirty mourners, Harry climbed into a red coffin
at the Cenotaph in Whitehall and was then symbolically buried: the surprisingly heavy coffin was carried to Westminster Underground
station, where the rebirth journey took place on the tube train as people played music and danced around it. Naturally the
police arrived and ordered them off the train. They obeyed, but, undeterred, soon caught another and Harry was able to spend
a further four hours on the Circle Line before his rebirth in Notting Hill. A procession made its way down Portobello Road
through the market,
led by Mike McInnerney and Mike Lesser carrying flowers. March policy was that when stopped by the police, which was inevitable,
they should be handed flowers. The police stopped them and some people attempted to offer them a few limp blooms, but some
observers noticed that other mourners were throwing their flowers instead of giving them in a spirit of love and peace. Irritated
by the delay in his rebirth, the corpse of
IT
suddenly sprang from his coffin, startling everyone, and began to harangue the police. The event ended with two arrests,
one of them Harry, who was detained, cautioned and let go. The
Daily Mirror
fulminated about ‘Sacrilege at the Cenotaph’, but far from insulting the memory of the dead of two world wars, the funeral
ceremony had been conducted with respect for the freedom of speech that the soldiers had so valiantly protected and was now
being eroded.