London Calling (46 page)

They stayed for two years, growing their own vegetables and buying groceries in bulk, but the local people on the mainland
were hostile to them, and in 1972 the hippies left. Rawle and his fellow communards set up the famous Tipi Valley commune
in Wales where 150 people lived for twenty years. Meanwhile scores of hippies made the move to North Wales and the border
country near Newport, Monmouthshire, where they established communal houses, workshops, yoga centres and the like. The wealthier
ones moved to Glastonbury and its surroundings, in order to study ley lines, flying saucers and Arthurian vibrations.

The biggest difference between the hippies and straight society, apart from the drug usage, was sex. Nicola Lane told Jonathon
Green:

There was a lot of fucking going on. It was paradise for men in their late twenties: all those willing girls. But the trouble
with the willing girls was that a lot of the time they were willing not because they particularly fancied the people but because
they felt they ought to… there was a lot of misery. Relationship miseries: ghastly ghastly jealousy, although there was supposed
to be no jealousy, no possessiveness. What it meant was that men fucked around… there were multiple relationships but usually
in a very confused way; usually the men wanted it.
³³

David May told Jonathon Green of going to see a film of Richard Neville and Louise Ferrier fucking:

I couldn’t get over that. Richard and Louise fucking and the cinema was filled with people watching Richard’s arse going up
and down and these squelching noises and him licking her tits. They put on a great performance. It was a genuinely extraordinary
act, wonderful, the stuff of legends – but does it count for anything now?
³⁴

Though many men misused the situation, many women regarded it as beneficial. Sara Maitland in her sixties memoir wrote: ‘Libertarianism
was of course fun (at least for a great many women), but part of the fun was the conviction that it was brave, important and
socially useful, liberating at a
global level, to do these things.’
³⁵
There was a sexual revolution going on; a confused, sometimes exploitative, sometimes predatory one, but one that ultimately
led to a more positive attitude towards sex in Britain. The hippies said you shouldn’t feel guilty about having sex, or having
sexual thoughts. They revealed that women have sexual needs – a shocking idea to many establishment figures. They proclaimed
that sex was good, not evil and sinful. They practised and preached free love. Marriage was seen as to do largely with property
and passing on the male name; as having little to do with love or loving people. They attacked Victorian prudery and British
uptightness, leading to a situation where at least a substantial portion of British society now regards sex as a positive
thing. If this was all they achieved, then it was worth it.

The history of post-war subcultures is a lurid one, and all of it has at one time or another washed up at the shop.

ELIZABETH YOUNG
on Compendium
¹

Though not strictly underground, the Dialectics of Liberation Congress, held from 15 to 30 July at the Roundhouse in the summer
of 1967, gave a platform for many of the ideas being discussed at that time. Described by David Widgery in
New Society
, in 1989, as:

R. D. Laing, David Cooper and their collaborators, known mainly for their exegesis of Sartre and work on the families of schizophrenics,
announced that the aim of their conference was to link the internalized violence said to be characteristic of psychotic illness
with the mentality which fuelled the American war on Vietnam. The conference was to be nothing less than ‘a unique gathering
to demystify human violence in all its forms.’ the intellectual equivalent of levitating the pentagon.
²

Of the four psychiatrists who organized the conference, Ronnie Laing, the ‘anti-psychiatrist’, was best-known. His controversial
ideas on the nature of schizophrenia were very much part of the public debate in the late sixties, known through such books
as
The Divided Self
(1960) and
The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise.
He had a strong Glaswegian accent and could be very persuasive. Joan Bakewell described him as ‘an eager young doctor with
a shock of unruly black hair, a gaunt restless body and brown eyes of commanding intensity. In three minutes on air he outlined
his theory that a dysfunctional family might be a prime cause of schizophrenia.’
³
His powers of persuasion were sometimes marred by whisky and he would sometimes shout people down rather than reason an argument.
He was closely associated with the older generation on the underground scene; giving
interviews to
IT
and treating many of the waifs and strays who wandered, disoriented, into the UFO Club or the
IT
offices.

At the conference people were lined up in sleeping bags inside the doors, pot smoke rising, like an encampment of Mongolian
nomads. For two weeks, the Roundhouse became a prototype for the occupations and teach-ins that occurred during the Events
of May in 1968 in Paris. Everywhere small groups of people were engaged in animated discussion. The subjects covered by the
conference were wide-ranging: R. D. Laing and David Cooper both talked about dealing with the pressures of society on the
individual; Gregory Bateson proposed the theory of global warming, saying it would be at least twenty-five years before its
effects started to be seen; John Gerassi, Paul Sweezy and several others discussed monopoly and global capitalism; Herbert
Marcuse spoke on ‘Liberation from the Affluent Society’; Julian Beck represented the Living Theatre, Michael X represented
the British black community, Allen Ginsberg spoke on enhanced consciousness, and there were events by the performance artist
Carolee Schneemann.

The debates polarized between hippies and blacks, a subject argued by the American black power leader Stokely Carmichael,
who dismissed hippies as middle-class kids who played with long hair and flowers for a year or two before returning to their
class backgrounds. He said they could not be compared to the black community, who were genuine outsiders and had nowhere to
go back to. He was interested only in revolution: ‘I do not feel that a reform movement will solve the socio-economic problems
facing us…’ His extreme misogyny helped form the women’s movement. When asked what role women could play in the liberation
movement, he replied ‘a horizontal one’. It was this type of remark that made women activists realize that they needed their
own movement, that they would never achieve equality within any of the existing organizations. Allen Ginsberg was the most
successful in at least debating these issues with him: Carmichael knew and respected Ginsberg, and though he didn’t agree
with many of his positions, he recognized his genuine desire to change the situation faced by American Blacks. (Ginsberg had
often been criticized for his support for LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka). Ginsberg’s own speech quoted heavily from William Burroughs
on the subject of control systems. Burroughs himself had refused to participate. When the proceedings of the conference were
released in a series of long-playing records, it was the Burroughs quotes that caused a woman working at the pressing plant
to complain of obscenity and stop the presses. That volume was pressed elsewhere. The continuous debate – which carried on
late into the evening at ‘Dialectics House’, where many of the delegates gathered to
eat, drink whisky and take drugs with Ronnie Laing after each day’s proceedings – was very stimulating, and in order to continue
the discussions the London Anti-University was formed the next year. But first, some of the overheated rhetoric and elitism
of the events was deflated by Mick Farren’s Social Deviants, who had been hired to close the event. The organizers seem to
have been expecting a British folk-rock version of the Fugs, something socially relevant but with a beat; instead they got
prototype punk at astonishing volume. Mick Farren: ‘When we slammed into a teeth-grinding fuzz-tone thrash, a few people actually
blanched.’
⁴

More serious was the trick played upon the conference by Emmett Grogan, the ‘leader’ of the San Francisco Diggers. He received
an enthusiastic reception, and after the handclapping died down he delivered a stirring revolutionary speech, speaking strongly
and clearly as if delivering a Shakespearian soliloquy. It was just what the revolutionaries in the audience had wanted to
hear:

Our revolution will do more to effect a real, inner transformation than all of modern history’s revolts taken together!… nobody
can doubt the fact that during the last year, an enviromental revolution of the most momentous character has been swelling
like a storm among the youth of the West… power to the people.
⁵

His speech lasted for just over ten minutes and at the end the audience rose to their feet and gave him an enthusiastic standing
ovation. He described what happened next in his autobiography,
Ringolevio
:

He stood there and waited for the crowd to settle back down so he could finally tell them what he
really
came there to say… ‘I neither wrote nor was the first person to have ever given this speech… I do know who was the first
man to make this speech. His name was adolf Hitler, and he made his delivery of these same words at the Reichstag in, I believe,
1937. Thank you and be seein’ ya.’
⁶

The audience sat in stunned silence for a full half-minute before exploding with fury. Arguments raged and fights even took
place between the righteous angry who thought he had pulled a cheap trick on them and those who thought that Grogan had revealed
how phoney most of the revolutionary rhetoric they had been listening to really was. But most of the anger was directed at
Emmett, who, as he put it, ‘got his ass out of there real quick’.
⁷

The Dialectics of Liberation Congress was described by David Cooper as ‘really the founding event of the Anti-University of
London’. This was an
attempt to continue the dynamics of debate and learning that had prevailed during the fortnight of the congress. Premises
were found at 48 Rivington Street, Shoreditch, EC2, and a cast of the usual suspects rounded up as teachers. Some interesting
things were promised: Cornelius Cardew was to give a fortnightly course in experimental music: ‘My aim would be to identify
the experience and expand and prolong it. Speaking for myself, the concert hall is one of the less likely places to find a
musical experience’
⁸
; Steve Abrams, director of Soma, the outfit that put the pot ad in the
Times
, was to talk on methods of altering consciousness; Bob Cobbing taught sound poetry; R. D. Laing committed to four meetings
over three months on politics and religion; David Cooper lectured on psychology and politics; Joseph Berke spoke on the anti-institutions
and the need for a ‘counter-society’; there were poets like Lee Harwood, Ed Dorn, John Keys and Calvin Hernton and artists
like John Latham and Barry Flanagan. Alexander Trocchi used his ‘Invisible Insurrection’ text as the basis for his anti-university
prospectus statement:

I take it that the anti-university is an experiment in relation to the urgencies of the invisible insurrection, that what
we are consciously undertaking is an exploration of the tactics of a broad (r)evolt. Speaking personally, I for one am quite
sure that I can express lucidly and comprehensively the main features of this cultural transition, and I can describe in immaculate
intellectual terms, the spiritual attitudes and the new economic scaffolding which must be brought into play as the tactical
bases of any possible evolution of man.
⁹

He was to speak fortnightly on Tuesdays at 9.30 p.m..

One of the founding members of the Anti-University was Juliet Mitchell, who organized seminars with women, one of the first
of the political women’s groups of the late 1960s. Juliet Mitchell:

One of the people in this class inherited two thousand pounds, and she was going to put it towards a refuge for women, because
violence against women was quite a topic. I persuaded her to put the money into a bookshop instead, so she opened a very good
bookshop in Camden Town called Compendium Books, which became a very important alternative political bookshop.
¹⁰

The woman in Juliet Mitchell’s class was Diana Gravill and she and her partner, Nicholas Rochford, opened Compendium in a
small shop at 240 Camden High Street in late August 1968. The people involved in the Dialectics of Liberation conference and
with the Anti-University were very supportive of the shop and also acted as an influence on their initial choice of stock;
they specialized in experimental and radical fiction and psychology, as well as
second-hand books. Diana was to run the philosophy and criticism sections for the next fourteen years. Their initial staff
came from Indica Books: Nick Kimberley and Ann Shepherd. Nick specialized in poetry and published two issues of the poetry
mag
Big Venus
while he was at Indica. When Indica Books closed on 29 February 1970, Nick became Compendium’s first employee, opening a
poetry section in a poky room in the basement, and later in a larger space upstairs. Their second hiring was Ann Shepherd
who first went to Watkins, the occult bookshop on Cecil Court, before joining Compendium early in 1971 to start an esoteric
book section next to Nick’s poetry books in the cellar. It was this system of hiring specialists in each field to run those
sections that kept the shop vital and exciting for decades. In those days there were no specialist comic shops, and Compendium
soon had the best line in American underground comics in the land. This was the period of growth of the women’s movement and
soon there were enough titles in print for Compendium to open the first Women’s section in any British bookshop.