London Calling (37 page)

Publication of issue 10 was suspended for five days while we took legal advice; meanwhile, as a temporary measure,
IT
transformed itself into a dramatic event at that Friday’s UFO and the articles were read aloud to the audience and the
pages projected as a light show. £100 was collected from the audience. Members of the National Council for Civil Liberties
were present to give advice in the event of a police raid on the club. In the delayed issue Tom McGrath wrote a long, well-reasoned
editorial in which he came as close as anyone to defining the new movement: except that you couldn’t define it:

1. It can never be suppressed by force or Law; you cannot imprison consciousness. No matter how many raids and arrests the
police make, on whatever pretence – there can be no final bust because the revolution has taken place WI tHIn tHe MInDS of
the young.

2. It is impossible to define this new attitude: you either have it or you don’t. But you can notate some of its manifestations:

a) permissiveness – the individual should be free from hindrance by external Law or internal guilt in his pursuit of pleasure
so long as he does not impinge on others. The conflict between the importance of the individual’s right to pleasure (orgasm)
and his responsibilities towards other human beings may become the ultimate human social problem…

5. The new movement is slowly, carelessly, constructing an alternative society. It is international, inter-racial, equisexual,
with ease. It operates on different conceptions of time and space.
¹³

Some academics agreed with him, including Peter Fryer, writing in
Encounter
:

It is a thoroughgoing revolt by a section of young people against the habits, manners, standards, morals, politics, taste,
taboos, and lifestyle of their elders. Youthful rebellion is not new, as trend-sporting vicars are constantly reminding us.
But no previous expression of adolescent frustration has been so comprehensive, so self-assured, or so cynical.
¹⁴

To others, it was nothing new at all. Diana Athill, editor and director of the publisher André Deutsch, wrote in her memoir
Stet
:

Most of the people I knew had been bedding each other for years without calling it a sexual revolution. Jean rhys agreed,
saying that people were using drugs like crazy when she first came to London before the First World War, the only difference
being that the papers didn’t go on about it.
¹⁵

She saw the sixties as an invention of the media, and little different from any other decade.

An emergency two-sided half-issue of
IT
was produced by Hoppy, Mike McInnerney, Mike Lesser and others, but while it was being printed, the printers, Pirate Press
in Whitfield Street, were visited by plain-clothes police. The owner, Terry Chandler, quickly bolted the doors and called
the police to report a group of men trying to break into the press. Several squad cars arrived and minutes of delicious confusion
occurred while uniformed cops confronted CID officers bearing a forgery warrant. When this was sorted out, they made a combined
effort, broke in through a window, and seized $20,000 – in fake dollar bills, printed in lurid colours with an anti-war message
on them, but none the less they took Chandler to court, where he was found guilty and conditionally discharged for three years.
With paranoia already running high, the
IT
people thought they were trying to seize the half-issue, but it seems in this case it was otherwise.

By issue 12, the pressure had become too much for Tom McGrath and, without informing anyone of his intentions, he upped and
left, talking
IT
’s only typewriter with him. None of us knew where he’d gone as he was careful to cover his tracks. At the time we were angry
that he had deserted us without warning or explanation. Then
IT
42 of 18 October 1968 carried a news item: ‘Tom McGrath, I T’s first editor, is alive and well and living in Glasgow after
being incommunicado for over a year.’ By then
IT
’s circulation had risen to 40,000, with an estimated readership of six times that figure.

Everything was so rosy at UFO. It was really nice to go there after slogging around the pubs and so on. Everyone had their
own thing.

SYD Barrett
¹

After the success of the All Saints hall events in raising money for the L F S, Joe Boyd proposed to Hoppy that they take
their venture to the West End. They were very fortunate in finding a perfect location: the Blarney Club, an Irish dance hall
located at 31 Tottenham Court Road, halfway between Goodge Street and Tottenham Court Road tube stations and on many bus routes.
They called it UFO, pronounced ‘you-fo’, and tested the water by committing to just two Fridays, one either side of Christmas,
1966. The rent was £15 a night but no music was permitted until 10.30 because there was a cinema above and the sound leaked
through the ceiling, disturbing the audience. The Pink Floyd played on both nights. The entrance was down a grand staircase,
wide enough to be used for people to sit out on when the heat and noise became too much for them. Halfway down, a theatre
lighting unit was installed which produced the effect of continuously falling snow, it was like driving through a snow storm.
As Hoppy pointed out: ‘Stand in it for a minute or two and you become disorientated… definitely hypnotic.’ Incense burned
and the hippies gave off clouds of patchouli oil. And this was before you reached the pay desk. Admission was 10s (50p). U
F O was run as a club and memberships had to be bought or checked at a small table at the bottom of the steps. This caused
tremendous bottlenecks until Mick Farren took over the door and quickly cut through the hippie discussions about whether money
was immoral or uncool or whatever and simply took what they had on them and pushed them in.

It was a traditional ballroom, with ceiling fans and a revolving mirror ball that the light show operators used to great advantage.
It had a polished
dance floor and the only serious argument that Mr Gannon, the owner, had with the UFO management was when Jack Henry Moore
asked to pile sand on the floor as part of a theatrical event. Apparently in the old days of cut-throat competition between
ballroom owners, one of the ways of sabotaging a rival was to put sand on his dance floor. The room was dimly lit, both in
order to see the light shows and to make it more friendly. There was a cloakroom and to the left Greg Sams’s macrobiotic food
counter. There was no alcohol. There were a few stalls selling underground newspapers and other underground paraphernalia.
The main room was adjacent to the door on the right, with the stage at the far end. The stage was wide but not very deep,
protected from the audience by a thin wooden fence: a wooden rail, held twelve inches above the stage by wide-spaced ‘X’-shaped
supports which make photographs of UFO easy to identify. There were four upright WEM speakers on stands in the four corners
of the room which could be very loud if you sat too close, and which gave an exaggerated stereo separation, sometimes used
to great effect by the groups. However, the music was never so loud that conversation was impossible, except right in front
of the stage.

A lighting gantry, managed by Jack Henry Moore, stood at the back of the room. Light shows, films and projections were very
much part of the UFO experience and continued whether there was a band onstage or not. From here Jack Bracelin’s Five Acre
Lights kept the back half of the room bathed in moving lights. It was named after his nudist colony, a collection of caravans,
lived in mostly by local teachers, in a muddy field near Watford, north of London. There he had a wooden clubhouse near the
gate where the residents could relax with a cup of tea and watch the ‘trip machine’, a revolving wheel on the ceiling from
which strips of silver Melinex hung down to the floor, upon which coloured lights played. As the wheel slowly turned, the
assembled tripping nudists watched the flashing colours to the accompaniment of a very scratched copy of
Freak Out
. The Pink Floyd played there on 5 November 1966, Guy Fawkes Night – stopping off to see the fireworks on their way back to
London from a concert in Bletchley. It was all very English, and the time I went there it was freezing cold and the path was
ankle-deep in mud. Jack first developed his light shows for patients at mental hospitals. He would play some records and give
them a cup of coffee followed by an hour of slide projections. According to Alph Moorcroft the best of these were made by
a girl who was a patient at Knapsbury mental hospital: ‘The slides consisted of bright heaving masses of colour and produced
amazing emotional reactions, tears and often a state of disturbance which lasted for days. Because of these reactions some
of the hospitals he visited decided that his shows were “too
loaded” emotionally and therefore stopped them.’
²
Jack often achieved the same effect at UFO as people danced for hours surrounded by the swirling dots and blobs of light.

Other light show projectionists were Dermot Harvey, described by Hoppy as ‘an errant biochemist, discoverer of many immiscible
liquids’, and Joey Gannon, then a teenager, who had evolved his ideas at Mike Leonard’s Sound/ Light workshop at Hornsey College
of Art. Roger Waters and Nick Mason from the Pink Floyd had lived in rooms at Leonard’s house in Highgate, and he played in
an early incarnation of the band known as Leonard’s Lodgers. This was the origin of the Floyd’s interest in light shows and
spectacle. The most celebrated light show was by Mark Boyle and Joan Hills. During 1966 they had developed a series of
son et lumière
events which they presented at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre, then directed by Jim Haynes and Jack Moore, who had first shown
their work at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. Hoppy originally hired them to stage their ‘Son et Lumière for Bodily Fluids
and Functions’ at UFO. It was a light show involving phlegm, semen, piss and tears and for which Mark had apparently even
managed to cough up a bit of green bile. Afterwards, Hoppy had suggested that for a bit of extra money they might like to
stay on and project their slides on to the groups.

The Soft Machine quickly claimed Mark as their own and even took him with them when they toured America with Jimi Hendrix.
Their singer, Daevid Allen, explained in his book
Gong Dreaming
:

The light show we used for our UFO gigs was run by Mark Boyle, a Scottish sculptor turned liquid light show alchemist. The
combinations of liquids he sandwiched between the twin glass lenses, that began to alter as they were heated by the projector
lamp, were his professional secret. He worked inside a tent so nobody could see what he was doing. Some said he used his own
fresh sperm mixed with the colours and other liquids and fluids. He felt a special affinity for our music and although it
could not be logically programmed, his lights synchronized with our stops, starts, peaks, and lows, as if it had all been
pre-organized by a wizardly Atlantean re-incarnate.
³

Mark had tremendous control over his projections and I remember one evening when he made small green bubbles emerge from Roger
Waters’ tightly stretched flies; something the band was of course unaware of.

The club was open until the tubes began running again at around 6 a.m., which, as Hoppy pointed out, was ‘conveniently about
the length of an acid trip’.
⁴
By 5 a.m. there were people huddled together asleep on the floor in
the darkest corners while snow-light flickered over them. Though there were usually at least two bands playing two sets, there
was plenty of time for films and other activities. Joe Boyd:

The object of the club is to provide a place for experimental pop music and also for the mixing of medias, light shows and
theatrical happenings. We also show New York avant-garde films. There is a very laissez faire attitude at the club. There
is no attempt made to make people fit into a formula, and this attracts the further out kids of London. If they want to lie
on the floor they can, or if they want to jump on the stage they can, as long as they don’t interfere with the group of course.
⁵

Films included Marilyn Monroe or Charlie Chaplin classics, experimental films by Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol or Stan Brakhage
screened by Bob Cobbing or Dave Curtis, or old UFO favourites, Antony Balch and William Burroughs’s
Towers Open Fire
and
Cut Ups
. In an essay for the Manchester Futuresonic Festival in 2007, Hoppy recalled:

One almost forgotten favourite was Chinese animation movies hired on 16mm film from Contemporary Films – shown silent & projected
on the walls rather than the white curtain across the stage that we also used between sets. The audio could be something quite
different. The detail was ravishing to the tripping eye. The scaffolding projection tower was strategically placed so that
projectors could be occasionally swung round causing the watchers to move round to continue watching – a subtle way to keep
people moving.
⁶

David Z. Mairowitz, an American playwright then on the staff of
IT
, presented a weekly semi-improvised drama, like an underground soap opera, called
The Flight of the Erogenous
which always attracted a reasonable crowd, perhaps because it involved a lot of bubbles and foam being thrown about and female
clothing being removed. People sometimes brought in props, the biggest of which was a silver weather balloon which they inflated
in the club. With difficulty it was squeezed through the double doors and up the stairs to freedom.

When Yoko Ono was looking for people to participate in an expanded remake of her film featuring nothing but the buttocks of
her friends,
Film No.
4
(Bottoms)
, she naturally turned to the UFO audience. She rented a room in a nearby hotel and set up a film camera. Volunteers were
ferried to and from the club in the middle of the night to participate. They stripped below the waist and mounted a revolving
table while Yoko’s cameraman filmed their moving buttocks, like peasants on a treadmill. She was aiming
to get 365 participants and had already exhausted all her friends and acquaintances.