by Dave Haslam
The arrival of the psychedelic underground wasn’t a complete or overnight shift. It took time to germinate and it took time to make an impression on the general public. The Chinese R & B Jazz Club – an old blues night on Tuesdays at the Bristol Corn Exchange – was marginal in terms of the nightlife offered in the city at the time, but Pink Floyd’s early gigs tended to draw people to them. Wherever they played – from the Technical College in Canterbury to the Winter Gardens in Malvern – dispersed, disparate audiences coalesced, as they would when the Sex Pistols began touring.
In March 1966 you’d still only be seeing glimpses of these changes, reflected in the entertainment at the Marquee, for example. From March 1966, Bernard Stollman, a native New Yorker, began hosting Sunday afternoons at the venue, gatherings he called the ‘Spontaneous Underground’. Stollman’s publicity flyers promised ‘poets, pop singers, hoods, Americans, homosexuals (because they make up 10% of the population), 20 clowns, jazz musicians, “one murderer”, sculptors, politicians and some girls who defy description’. Among the various music acts who turned up and entertained the poets, sculptors and the rest was Donovan – who was then going through a sitars and congas phase – and a former assistant to Stockhausen, Cornelius Cardew, then appearing as part of the experimental group AMM. And, of course, Pink Floyd.
There were two or three Spontaneous Underground events each month in the spring and early summer of 1966. On 12 June Pink Floyd’s future co-manager Peter Jenner, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, took a break from marking examination papers and got himself down to the Marquee. He was intrigued and then blown away by Pink Floyd playing just-recognisable versions of songs like ‘Louie Louie’, but distorted and realigned with feedback and echoes. Four months later Pink Floyd signed a management deal with Jenner and Andrew King. Several years later Jenner recalled the Marquee gig in an interview with rock magazine ZigZag. ‘They were playing these very weird breaks; so weird that I couldn’t even work out which instrument the sound was coming from. It was all very bizarre and just what I was looking for – a far out, electronic, freaky pop group.’
The Marquee is mentioned on David Bowie’s 1967 debut album in a song called ‘The London Boys’, about flash clothes and taking pills. Events like the Spontaneous Underground were ushering in a new era, still defined by clothes and drugs, but not flash mod suits and purple hearts; on the way in was the counter-culture era of long hair, unkempt hippies, freaks, headbands, bangles, frock coats, acid, grass, drop-outs, sit-ins, drug busts, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd.
The venue on Eel Pie Island closed in 1967, although it briefly reopened as Colonel Barefoot’s Rock Garden, where the likes of Black Sabbath and Genesis performed, and in 1977 Pete Townshend used the name Eel Pie for his publishing company. The Railway Hotel in Harrow burned down in 2000. The Esquire closed in 1967, although some of the same building later formed part of one of Sheffield’s most significant clubs in recent decades, the Leadmill. The Station Hotel in Richmond, which housed Giorgio Gomelsky’s Crawdaddy club, has had multiple makeovers and name changes and is now trading as One Kew Road, serving modern British food, apparently ‘interwoven with some Mediterranean influences’.
Most of the bookings at the Marquee from 1968 onwards were made by John Gee. He had a rambling, oddball way of acting as compere and introducing bands. Jethro Tull and King Crimson were two of his favourite emerging acts (Jethro Tull wrote a song about him). He liked pushing boundaries; on one occasion Gilbert & George appeared. They sat, saying nothing, on either side of a table they’d placed centre stage.
Jimi Hendrix played the Marquee three times in 1967. From the moment the Who took up their residency, if not before, the Marquee had been cultivating many of music’s various changes through the mid-1960s. According to Uncut magazine, ‘For a few chaotic and historic years, the Marquee was the most important venue in Britain.’ On 23 April 1968 the Who returned to play the venue to mark ten years of the club. There was even a birthday cake, and Keith Moon and Harold Pendleton were photographed wielding the cake knife. In 1970 John Gee retired, and Jack Barrie took over booking the bands (he’d previously managed a drinking club, La Chasse, just along Wardour Street from the Marquee). It remained an important live venue in the punk years and beyond but closed its doors at 90 Wardour Street in 1988. The site is now occupied by Soho Lofts, an exclusive block of flats. The original Marquee club at 165 Oxford Street has also been demolished, and a branch of the Santander bank now stands in its place.
CHAPTER SIX
Cosmonauts, light shows, Clapton takes acid
Mick Farren, the beatnik in Brighton, made his mark in the radical counter-culture in numerous ways. He wrote for the underground newspaper International Times and fronted the band the Deviants. He was a witness to and participant at numerous gigs, parties and happenings through the second half of the 1960s (including Jimi Hendrix’s first gig at the Marquee). The cutting edge moved a long way from ‘Love Me Do’, not least in the work of the Beatles themselves. Things got psychedelic, the music got louder. Soft Machine was a band named after a William Burroughs novel. Along with Pink Floyd and others they provided the music at an event at the Roundhouse in 1966. Part-way through, they dragged a motorcycle onstage, revved up the engine and fed the roar through the PA. Things were getting experimental.
Wherever Pink Floyd played, out came the freaks. We’ll track this activity at gatherings at the Roundhouse and Alexandra Palace, at clubs like ‘UFO’ and ‘Middle Earth’ and at venues around the country, including the Magic Village in Manchester where Pink Floyd played in June 1968, and Mothers, which was situated above a furniture store and a gentleman’s outfitters in the Birmingham suburb of Erdington.
Given the proximity of art colleges, media and broadcasting outlets, boutiques, record labels, model agencies, PR companies, and the depth of its nightlife traditions, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the area encompassing Soho and the West End of London continued to spawn several significant venues in the 60s, but it’s less predictable that Erdington would feature a club that John Peel would declare was ‘the best club in Britain’ of its time. We’ll hear about John Peel’s visits to Mothers, including the night Mick Farren shared a moment of the intimate kind with Germaine Greer.
In the late 1950s, George Melly met Tommy Steele at a time when they were both successful figures in the music industry, but Melly didn’t have a clue who Tommy Steele was. They had parallel lives, and Melly felt no compunction to keep tabs on the pop charts. Music has always had separate worlds, but what was different in the 60s was that the underground wilfully separated itself from the mainstream; it rejected and resisted the mainstream in all ways.
The mainstream could be angry or, at least, perplexed by underground counter-culture. It knew it was a world apart. Birmingham’s Evening Mail explained the goings-on at Mothers: ‘Though a huge slice of Birmingham’s population do not even know of its existence, in the appropriate circles it is famed throughout the land. Mothers is more of a cult than a nightclub and has achieved an unrivalled reputation as a centre for underground music.’
The beatniks had no connection with beat groups; their heroes were American writers and poets including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso. It was a scene in the mid-1960s that didn’t have many music heroes or music venues. When Mick Farren sat on a wall in Brighton, he was part of a dispersed tribe of nonconformists with no space or place to call home. Most venues were doing well presenting beat groups and playing Motown, among them the Carlton Ballroom, which would later be home to Mothers. Beatniks were a rare species in Brighton and Birmingham, as elsewhere. Scruffy types weren’t congregating in large numbers. Yet. Although for several years there had been moments when beatnik activity was publicised, including in one Sunday newspaper, which described beatniks as ‘drug addicts and peddlers, degenerates who specialise in obscene orgies’.
The British media had been sensationalising conflicts between mods and rockers, and ex
pected beatniks to invade the beaches too. In May 1966 the Newspaper Enterprise Association claimed British seaside resorts like Brighton and Blackpool were planning action against expected beatnik invasions. ‘In some cases the police will meet trains and buses as they arrive from London and turn back the beatniks. The Cornish resort of St Ives has already set up a beatnik patrol.’
Mick Farren first saw Bob Dylan perform at the Royal Albert Hall in May 1965, at a time when Dylan was one of the few music heroes on the underground (or ‘the rebel intelligentsia’ as Farren liked to describe his circle of friends). It was a generation that felt like outsiders, enjoyed outsider status, but craved moments of community, relishing some years later their experiences at major events at the Roundhouse, the Isle of Wight Festival (Dylan headlined the second one) and then Pilton Pop, Folk & Blues Festival (which evolved into the Glastonbury Festival). Dylan’s Albert Hall gig was one of the first occasions the dispersed tribe had gathered together.
Although its acoustics were derided, the Royal Albert Hall was, and remains, one of the best-looking venues in Britain, most famous perhaps for the annual series of promenade concerts which moved there in 1941. Although there’s a lot more to the Proms than the Last Night, witnessing the Last Night’s traditional couple of hours of patriotic music you’d struggle to imagine that on a number of occasions in the 60s the same space was filled with folkies, beatniks and acid freaks. In the years after those first Dylan appearances in May 1965, other artists who headlined at the venue include the Rolling Stones in 1966, Jimi Hendrix in 1967 and 1969, Cream in 1968 and Led Zeppelin in 1970.
That the 5,000-capacity Albert Hall was the venue for these shows was in part practical; there wasn’t a great deal of choice, as many of the bigger venues now in London weren’t operating in the mid-60s. One other was the Astoria Theatre in Finsbury Park, which hosted several momentous shows, including the Beach Boys, and had a capacity of around 3,000 (in 1971 it was converted into a full-time venue and renamed the Rainbow Theatre). Of course, neither the Rainbow nor the Royal Albert Hall has been a club or a venue with a focused music policy aimed at a particular audience. In recent years the Albert Hall has featured McFly, David Gray, Nitin Sawhney and the Bootleg Beatles.
The real Beatles were in their favoured vantage point, Grand Tier Box 12, taking a break from filming the movie Help!, when Bob Dylan took to the stage at the Royal Albert Hall, the same night Mick Farren witnessed. The Stones were there too. Both the Beatles and the Stones had been dropping Dylan’s name in interviews. He was, it appears, some sort of a threat but also an inspiration. In the first half of 1965 the Stones appeared a little bit put out that they weren’t an ‘in’ band any more, with Mick Jagger conceding in Melody Maker, ‘I guess we were a little wild and far out two years ago but now we are a little more commercial. Dylan is the darling of the sweet young things now.’
The Beatles were lovable mop-tops who’d topped the charts with ‘She Loves You’ and were boxed in by light entertainment. A few weeks earlier they’d attended a Mirror newspaper event at the Royal Albert Hall headlined by Harry Secombe and hosted by Bruce Forsyth. Via Dylan and LSD they were lured into the underground. Dylan seems to have made more of an impression on them than any other act since they formed the Silver Beatles, since Elvis probably. He was admired for his edge, his literacy, the challenge he threw down.
By the time of his 1965 Albert Hall gig, Dylan had released his ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ single, the lead track on the Bringing It All Back Home album. It entered the UK Top Ten at the end of April 1965. His trip to England in spring of that year was a turning point in his career; the success of the tour transformed him from an emergent name on the folk circuit, attracting muso interest, to an international pop music superstar attracting mass interest. It would be the same for Jimi Hendrix a few years later – an enhanced reputation in England gave his career extra momentum back home in America (Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ single only peaked at Number 39 in the USA). Breakthroughs were easier over here or, as one of Bob Dylan’s biographers puts it, ‘In a small country [he means England], excitement was like steam in a kettle.’
There were no significant music venues for the rebel intelligentsia, but the like-minded were beginning to gather, to find spaces, including Better Books on Charing Cross Road, which had a basement hosting happenings and art events, featuring the likes of Jeff Nuttall and his avant-garde troupe the People Show. One of the bookshop’s managers was Barry Miles (known always as Miles); he’d track down small-press books, beat poetry from America and offbeat novels. Alternative bookshops were a valuable focus for counter-cultural activity. New York had Peace Eye bookstore, San Francisco had City Lights, and in Edinburgh Jim Haynes opened the Book Shop on George Square.
A month after the Dylan gig, an event entitled International Poetry Incarnation took place at the Albert Hall; not a music event, but a gathering of the likes of Jeff Nuttall, Scottish writer Alex Trocchi, Better Books, the magazine New Departures, Michael Horovitz, Miles and Pete Brown. Adrian Mitchell’s anti-(Vietnam) war poem ‘To Whom It May Concern’ fired up the audience. The organisation was something of a shambles, but the event was blessed with the presence of Allen Ginsberg and the sense of energy and potential was undeniable. According to International Times contributor and counter-culture historian Jonathon Green, the Albert Hall poetry evening was ‘the moment at which the nascent underground stood up to be counted’.
The British underground was in thrall to the Americans – the beats, the poets – and were inspired to follow their lead. Alex Trocchi was in the habit of calling himself and Burroughs ‘cosmonauts of inner space’. The structures and reality of society itself were poisonous. Ginsberg imagined a better world: ‘Everybody lost in a dream world of their own making.’ (This was considered a good thing, by the way.)
Dylan returned a year later for two nights at the Albert Hall, but by this time he had embraced an electric sound, cutting his ties with many in the folk community, those who’d maybe picked up on his early work. The British folk movement felt close to Dylan; he’d always had a deep knowledge of American folk songs, but his repertoire of British standards was hugely enhanced over the weeks he spent around the Troubadour and with Martin Carthy over three years earlier. Carthy taught Dylan songs that would turn up, with a twist, on the Freewheelin’ album. In the intervening three years, though, Dylan had moved on.
The controversy on the May 1966 tour is captured on a famous live bootleg recording which for years had been erroneously labelled as a recording from the Royal Albert Hall. One audience member shouts ‘Judas!’ telling Dylan he’s never going to listen to him again. ‘You’re a liar,’ Dylan spits back, and the band launch into ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. This was music getting louder. The bootleg was actually recorded at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, a show attended by Chris ‘CP’ Lee. He remembers Dylan launching into ‘Tell Me Momma’. ‘It was like a B-52 taking off. I’d never heard anything, so loud in my life,’ he once told me.
We are used to discussions about a generation gap but what was becoming clear in the 1960s were divisions within actual generations themselves; the different fads, the ideas, the outfits, the attitudes, the sub-divisions in the audiences in venues and clubs, including that schism between the acoustic folk fans and the electric long-haired tribe. Farren considered himself a ‘freak’, with a passion for embracing louder, visceral rock, and with a look too. ‘People with whom I could empathise and identify,’ he wrote in Give the Anarchist a Cigarette. Arrayed in thrift-shop capes, spray-painted wellington boots, Edwardian dresses and Victorian military jackets, they presented a DIY version of what, in twelve months, would be hawked on Carnaby Street and King’s Road as ‘flower power’.
There’s film of the Rolling Stones playing at the Albert Hall during the autumn of 1966 catching them on the cusp of change too, as they embraced a darker, more unhinged sound – the likes of ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’, for example. In the footage you can see how
fashion was changing onstage and in the audience; generally far less buttoned-down than in the mod world, more free-flowing across all genders, more velvet, more satin, more tassles, more hair. Men with trailing scarves, bangles and eyeshadow, with the Stones a barometer and a motor for these changes. Incidents like the one at the Grand Hotel in Bristol when the Stones were thrown out of the restaurant were evidence of how their collar-length hair had become an issue, even more so when their TV appearances on the likes of Thank Your Lucky Stars and Ready Steady Go! increased. The end of national service for young men in 1960 contributed immeasurably to this freedom. Only ten years previously, those long tresses would be lopped off and erstwhile beatniks forced into drill and disciplined into respectability. Now they were free to roam and explore. Many of the Great British public found it hard to come to terms with their look. What were they? Nancy boys or delinquents? Or, heaven forbid, both?
Youth culture was near the beginning of a phase that would soon develop into dozens of dressed-up or dressed-down tribes. Pushed by Bowie, then embraced by punk, the use of dress for self-definition, even for protest, would become ubiquitous by the end of the 1970s. In the late 1960s, writer Angela Carter described clothes as ‘our weapons, our challenges, our visible insults’.
