I have a small piece in the Independent celebrating BFI Flipside, the BFI’s DVD label for forgotten, weird British films from the 1960s and 1970s.
The key Flipside films for any self-respecting London nerd are ‘London In The Raw’ and ‘Primitive London’, two endlessly fascinating exploitation documentaries that ‘lay bare’ the London of the mid-60s, with much emphasis on the weird and the shocking.
These are dayglo Soho-obsessed precursors to the rightly cherished London classic ‘The London Nobody Knows’, but possibly more entertaining for their utter shamelessness: here you’ll find strippers, wife-swapping, prostitution, Jack The Ripper re-enactments – anything that may titillate and tantalise.
It’s pretty tame stuff now of course, which is partly what makes it so intriguing. This is a key point of London history – as the hairy freaks massed their forces in preparation for the myriad cultural explosions of the late-60s – and these films capture some of that sense of a city teetering on the brink of… something. Check them out, you won’t be disappointed.
‘IT came out of the Beats – poetry, jazz and art with a bit of lefty politics,’ says Mick Farren. ‘I told them this was fucked up, they weren’t talking about the weird changes going on with The Who, or where The Beatles were coming from. I’d say that with all respect to John Coltrane there’s this black geezer in the Bag O’ Nails who has long hair and plays guitar with his teeth, what are we going to do about that? So they asked me to be music editor.’
The current issue of Uncut magazine contains my feature on the London underground press of the 1960s and 1970s. It includes a number of stupendous quotes like the above from Mick Farren, one of the most colourful figures from the British psychedelic left.
The piece covers the founding of International Times in 1966, the relationship between the underground press and pop stars, the difficulty of publishing, happenings at the Roundhouse and Alexandra Palace, the creation of the UFO Club and the gradual demise of the movement after the dehibilitating OZ trial of 1971. Interviewees included Pete Townshend, Mick Farren, Marianne Faithfull, Robert Wyatt and Jonathon Green. Townshend was particularly reflective on his troubled relationship with the counterculture, and I’ll post the whole thing up here shortly.
There is some great stuff on the internet about both these publications, which in different ways served the needs of London’s young and switched-on population who were not being sufficiently satisfied by either the mainstream newspapers or the pop press. (And does that sound familiar or what?) They covered pot, pop and politics, were revolutionary in their use of colour, design and language and paved the way for later influential print movements like the punk and football fanzines of the 1970s and 1980s.
The entire International Times archive is online, a hugely valuable resource for hippy-watchers. Discover it here. Some of the old IT heads are also collaborating on a blog called The Fanatic.
For those interested in the OZ trial, I recommend the following two-part news clip made for Australian TV at the time of the trial in 1971. It’s a fascinating watch.
My review of the Museum of London Dockland’s exhibition on the Siege of Sidney Street can be read in the New Statesman.
For once, I have little more to add. It’s an excellent exhibition and I recommend heading to Docklands before it ends in April. For more on the siege, you can see Pathe newsreel footage here or read Caroline’s article here.
Or you can watch a clip from the 1960 movie loosely based on the events.
I remember when I fell in love with Pat Nevin. It was in the playground and somebody was passing round a 1985 Panini sticker album. I turned straight to the Chelsea page to see my heroes.
There was Kerry Dixon, bluffly handsome with golden hair, azure eyes and self-confident grin. There was Colin Pates, a brick-wall centre-back with disco dancer hair. There was Doug Rougvie with a nose that looked like it had lost an argument with a spade.
And there was Pat Nevin. Pasty-faced, greasy-haired, nervous, thin and sullen. He looked like a smackhead. Who wouldn’t fall in love?
I only saw Nevin play once for Chelsea, a 3-0 victory at Watford in 1988 about which I remember little, but his legend loomed large over the following years. By the time I started watching Chelsea regularly the next season, the club were in the Second Division and Nevin was at Everton, but my bible, the Chelsea Independent fanzine, spoke of little else.
They drooled over Nevin’s dribble against Newcastle, when he beat eight players in a slalom run that took him from one end of the pitch to the other. They marvelled at his free kick against Sheffield Wednesday, when he chipped the ball over the defensive wall, ran round the other side and lofted a perfect cross on to David Speedie’s goalscoring noggin. They giggled at his famous penalty miss against Manchester City.
The love seemed mutual. When Nevin was injured playing for Tranmere, he attended a Chelsea-Everton game at Goodison Park and paid to go in the Chelsea end. This was important. Chelsea fans, then as now, were despised, but if somebody like Nevin loved us, maybe there was hope, maybe there was redemption,
And Nevin was the sort of player that fans love – an exciting, creative, unpredictable dribbler, but there was more to it than this. Nevin was smart. Nevin was cool. Nevin was different.
He angrily attacked his own supporters for their racist, violent and anti-semitic predilections – to the delight of the left-wing students at the Chelsea Independent. He read French and Russian literature. His favourite bands were Joy Division, Jesus And Mary Chain and the Cocteau Twins. He once insisted on being substituted at half-time in a friendly so he could attend a gig. He brought Brechtian principles to the club programme when he interviewed himself – yes, himself – for a player profile. He was friends with John Peel. For the teenager who read Camus and listened to Sonic Youth it was a no-brainer: if you could be a footballer, you’d be Pat Nevin.
NME described Nevin as the first post-punk footballer, although it may have been more accurate to say he was the first art school footballer. He was also the last.
When at Everton, Nevin gave a lengthy to the Chelsea Independent, and talked at length about football, music and literature, and what it was like drinking in Soho with George Melly. I’d never heard of Melly, but here I was, learning about jazz and the counterculture from a footballer, in a fanzine. Would that happen now?
When I interviewed Colin Pates – who is not a stupid man, by any means -he still seemed bemused by the fact Nevin would read books on the way to away games rather than play cards. Nevin, though, never seemed to get bullied about his interests. He was clever, but he was also proudly working-class and therefore more acceptable to other footballers and more capable of sticking up for himself than the middle-class Guardian-reading Graeme Le Saux who followed him as Chelsea’s token intellectual.
In the early 1990s, I finally got to see Nevin play at Stamford Bridge. He was wearing an Everton kit, but when he scored the Shed gave him a standing ovation – the only time I have ever seen Chelsea fans applaud an opposition goal. Pat Nevin was a very intelligent footballer and when he was around, fans seemed to use their brains a little bit more as well.
I have always considered Green Park to be the dullest of all central London parks. Look. There’s really nothing there. It’s just a very big lawn.
But twas not always this way. High Society, the Wellcome Collection’s superb new exhibition on drugs in culture – which I recently reviewed in New Statesman – includes a great story from 1799 concerning a doctor, Everard Brande, who was called to the London house of a family suffering from some form of poisoning.
Concerned for his sick family, the father had gone out to seek help but was soon found in a confused state, unable to remember where he was going or why. He was rescued by neighbours and eventually the doctor pieced the story together.
The family had been out gathering mushrooms in Green Park, which they had cooked into a broth, and this had upon the parents and four children an extraordinary effect. All were giddy – with high pulse rates and intense breathing – and all were seeing things. While the adults seemed struck by a morbid fear of death, eight-year-old Edward ‘was attacked by fits of immoderate laughter’ and his staring pupils were massively dilated.
After treatment from Dr Brande, the family recovered (aka came down). I’ll never see Green Park in quite the same way again. I’m sure they didn’t.
For more, see Michael Jay‘s excellent accompanying book.
This newsclip of the London Anti-University from 1968 is wonderfully evocative, not just for the interviewees’ earnest insistence that they could change the world of education, but also through the grim tattiness of late 1960s Shoreditch, reproduced in glorious colour.
The London Anti-University was formed after participants at 1967’s Congress on the Dialectics Of Liberation at the Roundhouse decided they wanted to continue to explore some of the themes and conversations that had started there (sample debates: The Future of Capitalism; Black Power; Imperialism and Revolution in America).
Based at 49 Rivington Street – previously home of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign – the Anti-University was opened in February 1968 by David Cooper and Alan Krebs, and featured lecturers such as Cornelius Cardew, CLR James, Robin Blackburn, Bob Cobbing, RD Laing, Yoko Ono, Jeff Nuttall, John Latham and Alex Trocchi – all key figures on the intellectual left-wing of the 1960s counterculture. The Anti-University syllabus covered three main areas: radical politics, existential psychiatry and the artistic avant-garde.
An idea of the direction of the Anti-University can be gleaned by a reported exchange at Joseph Berke’s course on ‘anti-universities, anti-hospitals, anti-theatres and anti-families’.
He asked the class: ‘How can we discuss how we can discuss what we want to discuss?’ After a long silence, somebody answered ‘Maybe we don’t need to discuss it.’ Berke pondered this for a while and then left; the class continued for an hour despite his absence.
The Anti-University lasted almost a year, which isn’t bad by the standards of the time, but it’s premises soon became squatted, and the landlords, the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, reclaimed the campus.
But the Anti-University’s most important legacy may have come from a conversation in the classroom of psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell, who lectured on literature and psychology.
One of Mitchell’s students, Diana Gravill, had inherited some money and was intending here to spend it on a women’s refuge. Mitchell instead persuaded her to put it towards a bookshop. This she did, and the shop, named Compendium, was opened by Gravill and her partner Nicholas Rochford on Camden High Street in August 1968.
Over the next thirty years it became one of the world’s great bookshops, stocking everything from academic studies of the women’s movement to punk fanzines. It was still going strong when I used to go there in the late 1990s, fascinated and intimidated by the content of the bookshelves. It eventually closed in 2000, a sad end to one of London’s greatest counterculture institutions, but a longstanding tribute to the ideas and passions raised by the London Anti-University.
This exquisite map of the 1960s West End is one of the most interesting ways I’ve seen of making tangible that fascinating era that remains tantalisingly out of reach and hard to comprehend. Produced by Herb Lester Associates, Wish You Were There is a fascinating physical attempt to bridge the gap in time, to fill in some of the blanks.
It is also a beautiful artefact, a fold-up map that offers a ‘retrospective guide to London’s shops, clubs, boutiques and sundry diversions, 1960-66’. Included are such diverse pleasures as Better Books, home of the Beats, the offices of promoter Don Arden and restaurants like Cranks and The Nosh Bar alongside better known clothes shops, bars and venues.
On one side is a map of central London, and on the other a written guide to the 130 locations, padded out with period advertisements.
Wish You Were There can be purchased here for a bargain £4.
My feature on the birth of British R&B at Eel Pie Island is in this month’s issue of Uncut.
It includes interviews with Pete Townshend, Ron Wood, Kenny Ball, Top Topham and the inventor Trevor Baylis, who still lives on the island and told me.
‘I moved to the island in the 1970s when I’d made enough money as an underwater escape artist in Berlin to buy a plot of land, but I went there regularly from 1957. They were wild times. If you wanted to get your leg over, that’s where you went. It was notorious. There was no bridge, the only way to get there was on a chain ferry. On the island, a little old lady sat in a tollbooth and stamped the back of your hand. The hotel was very Dickensian, a bit of a tramshed just about hanging together, but it had a dance floor that was like a trampoline so if you couldn’t dance when you went in you certainly could when you came out.’
South-west London was a fertile territory for music in the early 1960s, and the likes of Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart and Jimmy Page all learnt their craft in the venues of Richmond and on Eel Pie Island.
As Ian McLagan of the Small Faces explained: ‘The audience was full of musicians. Loads of them. You’d see them all in the front row – “Do you see that?”, “Yeah”, “Well I can do that too”. We were all kids, but when you saw the Stones it was “Fuck me, it’s possible…” ’
Diamond Geezer visited Eel Pie Island recently and writes about it here.
Yesterday’s protests by schoolchildren were by no means the first time London’s schoolkids have chosen to withdraw their labour from the classroom, as Clive Bloom discusses in his recently updated ‘Violent London’.
There were waves of strikes in 1889 and 1911 around issues such as corporal punishment, the length school day, leaving age, holidays and bullying teachers. In 1889 there were strikes in Finsbury Park, Homerton, Woolwich, Plumstead, Kennington, Charlton and Lambeth and in 1911 in Enfield, Islington, Hoxton, Fulham, East Ham and Deptford. Strikes continued until long into the 20th century. I’m pretty sure Grange Hill went on strike a couple of times as well.
These original strikes featured pickets, marches and demos with flags and banners, and often ended with some casual window-breaking, for which the pupils would invariably receive disproportionate punishment such as being birched in front of the whole school or sent to the workhouse.
That was because the authorities were terrified about these strikes, firstly because of the lack of discipline it demonstrated but also because they suggested the children were developing a political consciousness that challenged and threatened the establishment. Kids were learning to think for themselves and were bold enough to shout about it. Some in Bethnal Green even carried red flags.
Newspapers argued that strikes were ‘manifestations of a serious deterioration in the moral fibre of the rising generation’, argued that ringleaders ‘could prove dangerous centres of moral contamination’ and claimed that ‘such movements as this do not spring up spontaneously. They are always evidence of a deep conspiracy against social order… the doom of the Empire must be near at end if the country is honeycombed with Secret Societies of schoolchildren.’
The Great Wen 