London Calling (39 page)

There was no MC at UFO, no-one mounted the stage or did anything show-bizzy like that; nor was there any security, except
the check at the door. What announcements there were came from the lighting tower, more or less anonymously, and usually from
Jack Henry Moore in his rather camp Southern accent: ‘If you can’t turn your parents on, turn on them’ or ‘Maybe tonight is
kissing night. Don’t just kiss your lover tonight, kiss your friends’, rather like the running heads in
International Times
itself. Another good example was an announcement made by Suzy Creamcheese (Susan Zeiger, Hoppy’s girlfriend) in her best
Los Angeles drawl: ‘Some of you may be uncool, and we may be getting busted tonight. Now I know the usual thing in clubs is
to kind of throw everything on the floor. But we don’t want the fuzz to close UFO down. So, like, if you’re uncool, will
you please go out, and come back when you’re cool.’

To most people on the scene, UFO and
IT
were part of the same organization, but in fact the two were separate corporate entities. When Pete
Townshend arrived and gave £20, or on at least one occasion £100, ‘to the cause’, he thought the money was going to
International Times
. UFO was run by the
IT
staff, providing at least some semblance of a regular wage, but it was owned by Joe and Hoppy as a private company. They
donated a decent sum of money to
IT
but it was not the underground community club that everyone, including me, thought it was and we never knew what Joe and
Hoppy made out of it. When Mick Farren found out about UFO Limited, he was livid. Mick had a problem with Joe Boyd anyway
because Joe had refused to let Mick’s band, the Social Deviants, play UFO, even though he was manning the door. To now find
that Joe was profiting from the underground scene really shocked him. He wrote:

I’d been running the goddamned door at UFO on no set salary, just what Joe or Hoppy decided to hand me at the end of the
night… In my mind – and, I was quite certain, in the minds of 99 per cent of the people who read the paper and went to the
club – the two were indivisible: the weekly gathering and the communications medium, the two spearheads of the underground,
mutually dependent and mutually supportive…
²¹

Mick began to take a tithe – or a ‘skim’ might be better way of putting it – off the door takings which he used to buy office
supplies and pay other essential bills for
IT
, including a contribution to rent and salaries of some of the harder-up staff. The underground scene was not as simple as
myth and legend would have it; nor were all the players close friends.

Every week UFO grew in size until it became unpleasantly crowded. At the same time, Fleet Street ran ‘exposés’ on UFO,
where their undercover reporters saw people kissing, and even ‘smoking a joss-stick’. Now that the gutter press had the story
– six months late – the police had to act. They warned Mr Gannon that his liquor licence was in danger if he continued to
rent to hippies, and UFO suddenly had no home. Paul McCartney arranged for me to meet with Brian Epstein and Robert Stigwood,
who offered the use of the Saville Theatre, but for some reason Joe decided against it; maybe they couldn’t reach a financial
agreement. In fact the Saville, on Shaftesbury Avenue in Covent Garden, would have been perfect; a London equivalent of Bill
Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium, with hardly any of the security overheads of the Roundhouse, which was where UFO moved to.

Centre 42 had been quite quick to realize the potential of the Roundhouse after the
IT
launch party and they had done it up enough to legally rent it out as a venue by installing toilets, a floor, new wiring
and an entrance that met fire regulations. There had already been another large event featuring
the Pink Floyd, a happening called ‘Psychodelphia Versus Ian Smith. Giant Freak Out’ on 3 December 1966, organized by the
Majority Rule for Rhodesia Committee. Ian Smith was the pro-apartheid right-winger who had declared independence from British
rule in Rhodesia. The audience was encouraged to ‘bring your own happenings and ecstatogenic substances’, causing the
Daily Telegraph
to demand what ‘ecstatogenic substances’ were. The organizer, Roland Muldoon, told them they were ‘Anything which produces
ecstasy in the body. Alcohol was not allowed for the rave-up, unhappily, and nor were drugs… All it means really is that you
should bring your own bird.’
²²
Large parts of Fleet Street never fully understood what the sixties were all about.

UFO at the Roundhouse was not the same; the small dark Tottenham Court Road venue had encouraged intimacy, whereas the Roundhouse
was huge. In order to pay the much higher rent, bigger-name groups were hired – even the Pink Floyd were now charging £400
– which in turn caused a security problem because the building had so many doors and they all had to be manned. Whereas Tottenham
Court Road was in the West End, and therefore safe and with good transportation; the Roundhouse was in Chalk Farm, near Camden
Town, which was then a fairly rough area, unsuitable for stoned hippies to be wandering around. There was also the problem
of the local gangsters. When Hoppy was jailed for six months for a couple of joints, he asked if I would bank the takings
for him. Not long after UFO moved to the Roundhouse, I was robbed in a carefully planned attack: car stolen to order, when
I got home two men waiting in my doorway with pickaxe handles and ammonia. They only got £62 as everyone had been paid before
I left and the riches the Camden mob thought they would get did not exist. The next day I received a threatening phonecall
warning me to take my business out of Camden Town. This was especially galling as it was not my business; naively I thought
I was doing it for
IT
. Michael X took over security at the Roundhouse and his uniformed Black Power men certainly stopped anyone getting in for
free and any fights but they cost so much that UFO began to run at a loss. It closed in October 1967. It had lasted nine
months but entered popular culture history.

Perhaps another reason why the UFO became so legendary is that it produced the only English equivalent of the American Family
Dog and Bill Graham posters. Most were done by Michael English and Nigel Waymouth, operating under the name of Hapshash and
the Coloured Coat, a derivative of the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut who organized the legendary journey to Punt, only with her
name changed to incorporate the word ‘hash’. The early posters were silk-screened by hand, and some had no solid colour; each
colour field was a rainbow, running from blue to green or silver to gold. DayGlo pink was another favourite colour, particularly
in the poster by Michael English.

George Melly was puzzled why UFO displayed posters inside the place they were intended to advertise and was not very keen
on psychedelic art at all. He wrote:

The Underground poster is not so much a means of broadcasting information as a way of advertising a trip to an artificial
paradise. The very lettering used (a rubbery synthesis of early Disney and Mabel Lucie Attwell carried to the edge of illegibility)
reinforces this argument, and suggests that, even in the streets, the aim of the Underground artists is to turn on the world.
²³

Melly was critical of their appropriation of images, which he thought were ‘a collage of other men’s hard-won visions’ taken
from the work of Mucha, Max Ernst, Dulac, William Blake, René Magritte and Bosch as well as from comic books, Walt Disney
and old engravings of Red Indians, all ‘boiled down to make a visionary and hallucinatory bouillabaisse’. On the other hand,
he thought that underground posters had:

succeeded in destroying the myth that the visual imagination has to be kept locked up in museums or imprisoned in heavy frames.
It has helped open the eyes of a whole generation in the most literal sense. It has succeeded, however briefly, in fulfilling
the pop canon; it has operated in ‘the gap between life and art’.
²⁴

Michael English, Nigel Waymouth, Martin Sharp and Michael McInnerney no doubt agreed with him.

After we had finished I wandered about among the huge crowd. All my life I had felt an outsider, a freak, totally at odds
with my time. Now, suddenly, I realized for the first time that I was not alone. I was surrounded by thousands of other versions
of myself. I was part of a tribe, a movement, and a gigantic soul.

DAEVID ALLEN
, Soft Machine
¹

IT
had been planning a benefit concert to raise money, and now with a possible law suit looming over them, this became an urgent
necessity. Hoppy, Dave Howson and a crew of volunteers now devoted their entire time to organizing what became the 14 Hour
Technicolor Dream. Hoppy got the idea of holding it in Alexandra Palace, a huge Victorian glass and steel pleasure palace
in North London, from the all-night jazz raves he had covered there when he was a jazz photographer.

Michael McInnerney made a magnificent poster for the event, with a rainbow silk-screen ensuring that no two posters were alike,
and Michael English and Nigel Waymouth, who did the psychedelic UFO posters, designed a huge black-and-white silk-screen
poster for major ad sites. Taking our cue from a similar publicity-seeking event in San Francisco, four girls walked down
Portobello Road wearing white T-shirts, each with a letter painted on the back: Sue had ‘F’; Zoe had ‘U’, Kitty was ‘C’ and
Pru was ‘K’. The police, ever vigilant, reacted at once and asked the girls to ‘arrange themselves in less provocative groups’,
which had the desired effect of getting the story into the newspapers. The event, to be held on 29 April, was billed as the
14 Hour Technicolor Dream: a ‘giant benefit against fuzz action’, as the
Melody Maker
ad read. ‘Kaleidoscopic colour’ and ‘beautiful people’ were promised as well as a ‘free be-in on Sunday’.

An impressive number of performers donated their time to the event: the Pink Floyd, Alexis Korner, the Pretty Things, the
Purple Gang, Champion Jack Dupree, Graham Bond, Yoko Ono, Savoy Brown, the Flies, Ginger Johnson’s Drummers, the Crazy World
of Arthur Brown, Soft Machine, the
Creation, Denny Lane, Sam Gopal, Giant Sun Trolley, Social Deviants, the Block, the Cat, Charlie Brown’s Clowns, Christopher
Logue, Derek Brimstone, Dave Russell, Glo Macari and the Big Three, Gary Farr, the Interference, Jacobs Ladder Construction
Company, Lincoln Folk Group, the Move, Mike Horovitz, 117, Poison Bellows, Pete Townshend, Robert Randall, Suzy Creamcheese,
Mick and Pete, the Stalkers, Utterly Incredible Too Long Ago to Remember, Sometimes Shouting at People, Barry Fantoni, Noel
Murphy and various others; many of these were poets, performance artists or dance groups, but there were so many bands that
two stages were erected, one at each end of the giant hall in order to accommodate them all. For some reason there was confusion
concerning Tomorrow’s appearance. Twink told Ivor Trueman:

We weren’t booked to play, we just drove up & played. We just said ‘We’re Tomorrow & we’re playing’ – bluffed our way onto
the stage; and did a really good set, I think. We enjoyed it anyway. But that was the kind of thing you had to do at the time,
if you were trying to get into something which had already started, you had to push your way in.
²

In fact, as it was a benefit, the bands all volunteered to play; they weren’t booked. Presumably Tomorrow’s management hadn’t
offered their services because they were more than welcome; the UFO audience loved them.

Alexandra Palace – ‘The People’s Palace’ – had opened in 1873 but burned down just sixteen days later. It was reopened on
1 May 1875 and now covered seven acres, centred on the Great Hall. This was where
IT
held the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream. Unfortunately the Great Hall, together with many other parts of the building, was completely
destroyed in a second fire in January 1981 so the evening can never be re-created there. The benefit was announced by fireworks
shooting into the evening sky over Muswell Hill, calling the freaks to come like a psychedelic bat-signal. The galleries on
either side of the enormous hall were hung with white sheeting for the light shows by Binder, Edwards and Vaughan, Mark Boyle,
26 Kingly Street and Hornsey College of Art. Running around the gallery was a light board, like the one on Times Square, which
spelled out moving messages the way the news was displayed on the
Times
building, except these were more like the running heads that crept subversively along the top of each page of
IT
; messages you were unlikely to see in Times Square. ‘Why must we wait until they die off to fix the world?’, ‘Honesty is
the best police’, ‘Wm Blake is on the wing’, ‘This is the coming revolution’, ‘The best way to change society is to replace
it one man at a time’, ‘The only undeniable private properties are your mind and
your body’, ‘There are no leaders’, ‘Convert the man on your left’, ‘Every day more of them die and more of us are born’.

Hoppy, Dave Howson, Jack Henry Moore and their staff controlled the lights and sound mix from a huge scaffolding gantry in
the middle of the hall which was also the point where sound from the two stages met at equal volume. Some chemically enhanced
individuals were fascinated by this effect and turned their heads first one way, then the other, took a step one way, and
then the other, for hours. There was a free fairground helter skelter which was very popular and many hippies relived their
childhood by waving their arms and shrieking as they slid down on their mats; poets set up their pitch and read; folk singers
strummed in quiet corners, attracting a moving audience who stopped for a while then drifted on. Fantastically attired people
cast the I-Ching and doled out tarot cards. David Medalla and the Exploding Galaxy danced ‘Fuzzdeath’ surrounded by a ring
of friends; their first public performance.

Yoko Ono did her 1964
Cut Piece
performance, in which members of the audience were given a pair of amplified scissors and asked to cut away a part of her
clothing. For this performance she hired a model to sit in, perched on a stepladder with a bright spotlight on her body. At
the DIAS performance at the Africa Centre the previous year, the audience had been rowdy and excited and had cut off all of
her clothes. This piece raises an enormous number of issues concerning violence towards women: victim and assailant, sadist
and masochist; women as objects; disrobing and exhibitionism; passivity and sexuality; the relationship between artist and
observer; and of course racism. This time it attracted in my view a large, mostly quiet, thoughtful crowd, though Keith Rowe
from AMM, who performed that night, disagreed: ‘I remember the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream was very violent. There was violence
towards Yoko quite often when she performed these pieces with the men ripping away her pants. I found it unpleasant. A quite
powerful emotion.’ He told Julian Palacios: ‘We had a very good relationship with Yoko. She used to stay at Cornelius Cardew’s
flat, and the AMM played at the opening of her exhibition. We knew her quite well.’
³