by Dave Haslam
It wasn’t so much music, or politics, or clothes, but the use and acceptance of drugs that was the defining, deciding issue that split the mainstream and the underground. LSD became illegal in 1966, after a number of years of being available in London where, in Chelsea, Michael Hollingshead – the man who’d turned Timothy Leary onto acid – had established the World Psychedelic Centre, selling books, issuing pro-LSD manifestos, showing slides of sacred images and dispensing doses of acid in impregnated grapes.
There were high-profile British musicians among those turned on to LSD, as the drug and the attendant culture pushed music into new directions. According to a story told by Paul McCartney, in January or February 1965 John Lennon was served LSD in coffee by a dentist friend, and from that first experience onwards had a ‘growing infatuation’ with the substance. The Beatles’ drug use and the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album endeared them to Timothy Leary – LSD’s infamous evangelist. He said the Beatles ‘are the wisest, holiest, most effective avatars the human race has ever produced’. He wittered on about them at every opportunity. They were also ‘prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God with a mysterious power to create a new species’.
There had been the Spontaneous Underground events, which had briefly colonised the Marquee, and various one-off happenings, but there were very few dedicated, permanent spaces in which to demonstrate and encourage political or cultural alternatives. In 1966, though, Indica opened in Mason’s Yard, next to the Scotch of St James club, founded by John Dunbar and Miles, with an art gallery in the basement, books on the ground floor (selling offbeat and cult novels, poetry, recordings of spoken-word performances by Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce, and a magazine rack that included import copies of underground newspapers and magazines from the USA; the likes of East Village Other and LA Free Press).
London soon had its own alternative publication, International Times, launched in October 1966. The magazine in its early months carried very little music content until Mick Farren intervened, concentrating instead on the bigger concerns of the cultural underground at that time – coverage and information about drugs and politics, and a listings service. John Hopkins (always known as Hoppy) was a member of the International Times editorial board and became a prime mover in the organising of a launch party for the magazine, for which he secured the use of the Roundhouse on Chalk Farm Road, just north of Camden Town, a former railway repair shed (built in 1847), then an improvised gin warehouse, with cracked brickwork, a gallery running around the circumference and still containing bits of Victorian machinery, washed up on the tide of history.
Playwright Arnold Wesker ran an arts scheme called Centre 42, which had started to use the Roundhouse in their search for ‘a cultural hub’, as Wesker described it. He said the Centre would ‘by its approach and working destroy the mystique and snobbery associated with the arts’. The building’s owner had given Wesker the Roundhouse, but no money to undertake the renovation and refurbishment of the building (there would be no proper renovation, at least during the lifetime of Centre 42, which was wound up in 1971, having only raised £150,000 of the £750,000 the project required). He was happy for the space to be rented out to IT for the evening. A stage was amateurishly erected and lights and movie clips were thrown onto sheets strung up on washing lines around the building.
Even though the place was a rusting ruin, the event locked into something new, something full of potential, and was mind-expanding in several ways. It built on the likes of the Spontaneous Underground but to an audience of thousands, presenting more than music, more than conventional gigs. There was body painting, a light show, and Soft Machine with their motorbike. It attracted a druggy crowd, a loose community, freaks, artists, anarchists, dandies, fops and fashion victims, with dope appearing to be the uniting factor. Onstage, Soft Machine and their motorcycle shenanigans were followed by Pink Floyd. Guests at the gathering included Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull. An Italian film crew came away with footage of topless women smearing themselves with paint.
There were other nights out, including the ‘Zebra’ club hosted at the Establishment (Soft Machine had a residency there during December 1966), and some kind of hippy ballet at the Electric Garden at 43 King Street in Covent Garden (there was an Electric Garden in Glasgow at a slightly later date, which was no formal relation, although it attracted a similar crowd and bands; Pink Floyd played there a number of times). The hippy ballet began with a curse-laden poem, then a communal dance to a distorted soundtrack. The team at International Times took against the Electric Garden, advising that it was ‘an aggressively commercial scene run by hard cash gangsters’.
Ad hoc spaces became important, many of them short-lived, including All Saints Hall in Notting Hill, the site of live events staged to raise funds for the nearby Notting Hill Free School. Pete Jenner and Andrew King, who’d just become Pink Floyd’s managers, were involved in shows there. Pink Floyd played at All Saints Hall, events for which Mark Boyle devised light shows. Also involved at All Saints Hall was Jack Braceland, who’d previously been responsible for running a nudist club in Watford.
Working with Joe Boyd – a tall American with some experience in the music business – Hoppy co-founded UFO, which was destined to become the most significant regular counter-culture music venue of the era. To stage UFO, Hopkins and Boyd hired the Blarney Club at 31 Tottenham Court Road, an old Irish dance club under a cinema, with a legal capacity of 600. Owned by a Mr Gannon, the hall had been known variously as the Carlton Dance Hall, Rector’s and the Stork Club. Back in 1919 the Original Dixieland Jazz Band had featured there. UFO opened at the Blarney Club on 23 December 1966.
UFO was weekly, every Friday, not a one-off, and soon began to attract a crowd of regulars. You’d see them at other times floating around Portobello Road market, the Indica Bookshop, or at the Granny Takes a Trip boutique (opened at the beginning of the year on the King’s Road). The venue became the home of a scene. The smell of incense and hash would waft up the stairs and, some nights, voluptuous prototype ‘hippy chick’ Suzy Creamcheese danced erotically at the side of the stage. Mark Boyle was responsible for most of the light shows; he’d be up above everybody on scaffolding burning chemicals in front of lenses to get particular effects. There was no DJ in any recognisable sense at UFO, but Jack Henry Moore was usually in residence, playing sounds with one deck and a reel-to-reel tape recorder, more in the manner of a freeform noise set than a discotheque. Sometimes Jeff Dexter would clock off from Tiles and attend, standing beside him and passing odd (literally) records to him to play.
Soon the number of regulars at UFO was into the several hundred, with chaos on the door. Most weeks in the first months, Pink Floyd played but, through the summer of 1967, the club also featured avant-garde jazz, Yoko Ono performances, poets including Brian Patten and Pete Brown, and a number of eccentric acts that may not have been appreciated by audiences in less mind-altered states, like the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band or, more particularly, Sam Spoons, who would perform, solo, on an electric trouser press.
Noting how hectic it was with not much being done to sort the chaos, after a few weeks Mick Farren found himself running the door at UFO. This involved explaining the nature of the night to Irish party people expecting the Blarney’s usual jigs, reels and ballads, but mainly keeping the queue moving. At some clubs, like Studio 54 and on the opening nights at the Flamingo and the Cavern, queues were encouraged, but they were not always good news. A rabble of freaks jamming the pavement outside UFO would draw the attention of the police, and perhaps provoke harassment. In his memoir, Mick Farren doesn’t register particularly fond memories of the customers – especially those who attempted to open a dialogue with him. Some would baulk at paying 10/- (50p) entrance fee to see a band like Pink Floyd. ‘Don’t freak me out with money, man,’ they would say. When he gruffly ordered them to hurry on inside he’d get retorts like, ‘You really need to do something about your ego, man.’
Down Shaf
tesbury Avenue and across Piccadilly Circus from UFO was the Scotch of St James in Mason’s Yard. The Scotch had been opened in 1965 by Louis Brown and John Bloom and, along with the Ad Lib and the Cromwellian, became a favourite hangout for young rock & roll royalty like the Beatles, Eric Burdon and Keith Moon. The Scotch was one of the first venues Jimi Hendrix played in Britain. It was September 1966 and, escorted by Chas Chandler, Hendrix was on a seven-day tourist visa and couldn’t do any official paid work, but that didn’t stop him getting onstage and jamming when the opportunity arose. Kathy Etchingham was a DJ at the Cromwellian Club in Kensington for a while, and also at the Scotch of St James. She was at the Scotch that evening Hendrix turned up and, true to form, took to the stage to play some blues with the in-house band. Kathy and Jimi were something of an item from that night onwards.
On that same trip to London, Hendrix met Eric Clapton for the first time when Chas Chandler took him to a Cream concert at Central London Poly on Regent Street. During Cream’s show, Hendrix joined them for a rendition of Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Killing Floor’. Clapton’s first psychedelic experience was some months later at the Speakeasy at a playback party for the Beatles Sgt. Pepper album. Up until then he’d smoked a little dope; that was the extent of his drug use. Micky Dolenz from the Monkees was at the party and had taken it upon himself to dispense pills to everybody, saying ‘Love and peace, love and peace’ while doing so. It was STP, says Clapton: ‘STP was like a quadruple-strength dose of acid – within an hour or so I was saying, “Woah, what’s going on here?” Everybody was floating into one and everything was floating or wreathed in flames. I remember being out of my mind and thinking I was in the presence of giants, and we were all going off somewhere together to another planet. The doors of perception were wide open.’
In the first months of 1967 the nascent psychedelic scene in Britain was being developed and mapped by Pink Floyd gigs. They were building audiences in cities and medium-sized towns around the country playing to International Times readers, college kids and people who’d read lurid stories in the Sunday People on the lookout for ‘obscene orgies’; they helped build networks and spread ideas and bring like minds together. When they weren’t at UFO, they were out on the road playing at student union events at the University of Hull, Leicester College of Art and Technology, St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, and the canteen at the London School of Economics, plus trips to Rotherham, West Bromwich and Portsmouth.
In February 1967 Pink Floyd played at the Ricky Tick in Windsor. The Ricky Tick events were run by music promoter John Mansfield and his business partner Philip Hayward, who took the name for their promotions from a book by Rudyard Kipling about a mongoose called Rikki Tikki Tavi. The following night they played at the Ricky Tick in Hounslow, a venue that also hosted gigs by Cream and Jimi Hendrix. Other Ricky Tick venues could be found in Reading, Slough and Maidenhead, but it was the one in the Windsor venue, at Clewer Mead – a rambling mansion by the River Thames on the outskirts of the town – that was probably Ricky Tick’s most successful venue. In Antonioni’s 1966 film Blowup, the Yardbirds play at a venue that on the outside is the 100 Club on Oxford Street and inside is a replica of the Ricky Tick at Clewer Mead built at Pinewood Studios.
Pink Floyd’s schedule through April was relentless, including engagements at the Britannia Rowing Club in Nottingham (later renamed the Boat Club) and the Floral Hall in Belfast (a beautiful modernist dance hall on the slopes of Cave Hill). Belfast was still thriving, with hundreds of bands and fifty or sixty clubs and venues in and around the city. After Them had success and moved to London, Taste (led by guitarist Rory Gallagher) were one of the Maritime’s resident bands and the venue remained busy. Music lover and record collector Terri Hooley began getting work as a DJ there but was barred for making political speeches about the war in Vietnam.
At the same time as these live shows nationwide, Pink Floyd were reported to be beginning work on a half-hour-long film called The Life Story of Percy the Ratcatcher, as well as featuring on a series of all-nighter Saturdays at the Roundhouse. These occasions ran from 10 p.m. until dawn, with light shows. On 8 April Pink Floyd were joined by other entertainments including Earl Fuggle and the Electric Poets, dancers Sandy and Harda, and Sam Gopal, a tabla performer. Admission was 5/- (25p).
International Times was usually in a state of editorial crisis, subject to pressures from the police and financial woes. Hoppy decided to promote a festival to raise funds for the paper, specifically to fund a legal fight against the police after a raid on the IT offices. It was described as ‘a giant benefit against fuzz action’ and dubbed ‘The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream’. The venue was the Alexandra Palace, which had been built almost a hundred years earlier between Muswell Hill and Wood Green in north London. Hoppy had seen the Rolling Stones play there with John Lee Hooker in 1964.
The doors to the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream on 29 April 1967 opened at 8 p.m., and the intention was for the entertainment and the event to last until 10 a.m. the next day. Pink Floyd, the Pretty Things, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the Move, the Deviants and Soft Machine were among the bands that played. In addition, there were jugglers, poets including Michael Horovitz, a reading by Alex Trocchi and a live performance by the Tribe of the Sacred Mushroom. The musical and other entertainment was set up on stages at either end of the hall, with a lighting gantry halfway along, cutting across the width of the building. Under the lighting, the music from both stages met and clashed. Mick Farren was one of a number of eyewitnesses who reported stoned hippies grooving to what he describes as ‘a weird atonal cacophony’.
The gathering at Alexandra Palace demonstrated the sounds of the new movement, the fashions and the lightshows, and should also go down in history as the evening John Lennon didn’t meet Yoko Ono. He was wandering round the event and elsewhere in the hall she was performing an art happening, employing a model and seating her on a stepladder illuminated by a spotlight, and then inviting people to cut the model’s clothing with scissors. It’s probable there were between seven and ten thousand people there, riding a helter skelter, watching the bands, losing their minds in the zone where distorted sounds clashed, smoking joints, dropping acid, floating around in a groovy haze. John and Yoko’s paths didn’t cross.
Pink Floyd had arranged to play as dawn broke, a plan which actually wasn’t cosmic theatrics but based on a practical consideration. After playing at the Tabernacle in Stockport on the 28th, they had made their way to the Netherlands via London for the afternoon on the 29th, where they were filmed for a Dutch TV show, and then drove back from there, taking the ferry. Once back in London they took a short break at the management’s HQ on Edbrooke Road before heading to Alexandra Palace. Pete Jenner, the band’s manager, later recalled the Technicolor Dream: ‘At least half the audience were doing acid. I was doing acid. We’d had to take a long drive to get there from a gig in Holland and I did the last bit of the drive in the van. We dropped in at home and I did some acid before we went, and by the time I got to Alexandra Palace, trying to drive the van was getting quite exciting.’
The band were probably just as exhausted as Pete Jenner was excited. Syd Barrett, in particular, was tired and tripping, although he seemed OK enough with his mirror-disc telecaster as the band played, dressed in flared trousers and satin shirts, the stage lit with a pink hue, dawn breaking through the windows. But acid use was shaking Syd apart.
Pink Floyd seemed always to be on the road. Early in May they were at a venue in Ainsdale on Merseyside called the Moulin Rouge. John Keenan was studying at the nearby Southport Art College and got involved in promoting events off campus. Prior to Pink Floyd, John had only promoted one show, featuring John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Liverpool band the Mojos and his neighbour Max Lunt’s band. He’s forgotten the name of his neighbour’s band but remembers the event lost £20. The Moulin Rouge in Ainsdale is now a Toby Inn.
Back at UFO, the club was often overcrowded, or at least near capacity, but was receiving unwanted
attention from troublemakers and from the media, especially the News of the World. They sent a journalist to the venue from where he filed a report describing a ‘weirdly-dressed’ audience, listened to ‘discordant music’, ‘tinkling cowbells’ and ‘obscene poetry’. The reporter claimed to have chanced upon people having sex and smoking cannabis. The paranoia of club operators and their customers wasn’t only the result of journalists but undercover police and allies of the law enforcement agencies. International Times reported various sightings of ‘a grass named Joe, thick-set, with large head’.
Encouraged so to do by the media, the police increased their pressure on Mr Gannon and threatened to close his premises, so Joe Boyd transferred UFO to the Roundhouse, although to some observers the Roundhouse was too big for something that had always thrived on its connections with the underground and drawn strength and its identity from being a minority, niche hangout.
There were alternatives, including Happening 44, founded by Jack Braceland. He converted a former strip club at 44 Gerrard Street into a psychedelic basement space, featuring a variety of entertainments: in the words of his advertising copy, ‘rave groups, exotic entertainers. Movies, strobes, discs, groovy food’. Fairly typical of the acts that took to the stage were Shiva’s Children, consisting of two underdressed hippy girls performing distorted ballet sequences while their gay friend Alan intoned and played bongos.
Tiles was still open in June 1967 and the programming included the ‘Jeff Dexter light & sound show’ presented on Tuesdays, but the venue was still mostly frequented by young mods who resisted some of the initiatives designed to attract the psychedelic underground, including a DJ set by John Peel. Peel had a show on Radio London called Perfumed Garden, with an eclectic content of poems, letters and talk, and a playlist championing a new generation of music – Captain Beefheart, Love, Pink Floyd, the Incredible String Band – but the show came to an end when the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act, which aimed to close pirate radio stations like Radio London and O’Rahilly’s Radio Caroline, came into force. He continued to use the Perfumed Garden name for a column he contributed to International Times and also for various DJ engagements, but when Peel took the Perfumed Garden to Tiles on Sunday 24 September 1967 for the first of a scheduled run of Sundays, it was a disaster, with Peel and his friends and fans abused and threatened by some of the regulars. It turned out to be the club’s last night; two days later it closed.
