by Paul Howard
‘There were a lot of prominent people there,’ Joe Butler remembered. ‘Diplomats, people like that, amid all these crazy kids who were drinking and taking drugs and having the time of their lives. And one of the things that’s always stayed with me was the way they held their cigarettes – between their thumb and their forefinger, with their palm facing up. It was part of their aristocratic bearing. And everyone there was gentle – that’s the other thing I remember. It wasn’t like being with businessmen, where everyone’s trying to sell you something, with their business voices and their hype. There was none of that. These people were sitting around and talking about – I’m not kidding you – trees and flowers!’
As evening fell on the valley, the band started their soundcheck. ‘It couldn’t have been much of a performance. We were slaughtered. We weren’t shouting drunk. But we were drunk drunk. We were high on hash and alcohol. Really lubricated.’
Tara and Brian sat cross-legged on the dance floor watching them, both of them tripping. ‘Being very yogic,’ Joe remembered. Brian had brought his sitar with him. He took it out and Tara urged him to join the band onstage. But then Zal Yanovsky asked to borrow it, tried to play it in the wild manner of Chuck Berry and managed to break it. Brian, he remembered, was suddenly not so yogic.
The band got through their set and the party stretched on through the night. Tara cut the cake while the guests sang Happy Birthday. The older ones went home or retired to bed in the house. The younger ones stayed up and kept the party going well into the following day.
Joe challenged Mick Jagger to a boat race across Lough Tay in the dark, but Mick was in the middle of an argument with Chrissie and said maybe later.
At one point, according to the following day’s Sunday Press, a taxi was called to chauffeur an unnamed rock star the thirty miles to Dublin to ‘see Nelson’, or rather his pollarded remains. Three hours after depositing the man back at the party, the newspaper reported, the taxi driver was still outside the house, waiting to be paid. It was that kind of night.
More acid was taken.
‘Anita and I got it into our heads that Mick Jagger was the devil,’ Nicki remembered. ‘We locked him into the courtyard and then we ran into the woods at the back of the house. We had these walkie-talkies, which I think had been a birthday present from someone to Tara. We were in the woods and we were talking on these things, out of our heads, and paranoid, of course, watching Mick trying to get out of the courtyard.’
Tara thought it was hilarious.
‘The way my moral compass was,’ said Joe Butler, ‘I was interested in any oxygen-breathing female, especially in the atmosphere of that castle – the fabulous intrigue of all those tight confines. I formed a relationship there with a beautiful English girl, this gorgeous creature with a music box voice. We had the most wonderful affair. She was the first woman I ever made love to who had little tufts of hair under her arms. She was so fragrant. This delicate love child in a cotton dress. The kind of girl you wanted to feel her back to see if she was about to sprout wings.
‘We made love in the middle of a field of cut grass, then we rode on horseback to some other castle to have breakfast or lunch. It was ridiculous. We saw two rainbows together at Luggala. I never saw that before. It was, like, you know, one miracle will keep you believing in God. What a time.’
13: HERE TODAY
Tara’s neighbours were always driven to distraction by the comings and goings at Eaton Row. Odd-looking people showing up drunk – and worse – in the middle of the night, to say nothing of the loud music. The Sixties or not – Belgravia was still Belgravia.
They knocked on the door, sometimes forming themselves into a delegation for the job. And Tara would give them the same answer that drove Godfrey Carey and no doubt many other tutors to the ends of frustration: ‘Sorrraaay.’
Then there were the cars. Tara liked to bring his work home with him. There were always two or three, clogging up the narrow laneway, maybe a Mini or an MG, jacked up on bricks, a wheel or two missing, the bonnet open, and a pair of black John Lobb Chelsea boots sticking out from under the chassis.
They couldn’t get their own cars in or out. And they can’t have been pleased when Tara’s mother bought him another AC Cobra for his birthday, this one red, with a sleeker body and a bigger engine. He took it straight down the King’s Road to see what it could do. It was a magnificent machine. Sitting at traffic lights, it purred contentedly, then you slipped it into gear and pressed the accelerator to the floor, and it roared like a waking lion.
His record player wasn’t just resting on the open glovebox this time. It was incorporated into the dashboard and connected to the radio speakers. He could put ‘Paint It Black’ on the little turntable, or ‘Sloop John B’ by The Beach Boys, or ‘Somebody Help Me’ by The Spencer Davis Group, then turn left out of Eaton Row, past the neat Georgian terraces and gardens, towards Sloane Square, then down the King’s Road, past the Saturday afternoon peacocks and the flocks of pretty flamingos with their shopping bags from Biba and Hung On You, all the way to World’s End. Or he could turn right, cutting through the Queen’s back garden, as he liked to call it, past Buckingham Palace, then right onto the Mall and into Piccadilly and Leicester Square, the beating heart of the swinging city.
He loved that car, but he didn’t get to enjoy it for long, because at the start of the summer of 1966 he lost his driving licence.
It happened following yet another screaming row with Nicki. He decided to blow off steam by driving to Liverpool to see Mike McCartney. But Nicki wanted to have the last word. She decided to follow him and persuaded Nicholas Gormanston to come with her.
‘We travelled up to Liverpool in the back of a limo,’ Nicholas remembered. ‘I have absolutely no idea how we came to be in it, because we’d taken acid and we were slightly off our heads. There was an Alsatian dog with us in the back, which may have belonged to Michael Hollingshead or one of his crowd. It was one of the strangest journeys of my life.’
Nicki caught up with Tara in a bar just off Dale Street in the centre of the city. ‘We were drinking in this old-fashioned pub,’ Mike remembered, ‘one of these no-women-allowed establishments, where men did the serious drinking. Nicki strides in, young, feisty, Irish woman, right across the bar, right up to Tara and she starts letting him have it. And all these men who’d been safe in this environment for a million years saw this madness walking into their lives, their comfort zone blown away. Their mouths just dropped as she went at him. I’ve never seen barmen move so quickly in my life. They were over the counter: “Madam, how are you?” and they got hold of her and walked her very quickly out to the street.’
Tara and Nicki left Liverpool in the Cobra. They hadn’t travelled very far when they were pulled over for speeding. ‘He came off the motorway at sixty miles per hour instead of fifty miles per hour,’ Nicki remembered. ‘He was ten miles over the limit and the cops caught him. And because he was a young one and driving an expensive car, they didn’t like that, so they booked him and it was three points and you’re out in those days.’
In court, Tara was represented by Max Mosley, who was then a newly qualified barrister and a racing car enthusiast, as well as a half-brother to Tara’s cousin, Desmond Guinness. Max drove up to Liverpool for the case, but he could do nothing to prevent Tara having his licence suspended for six months.
For Tara, not being allowed to drive was a particularly cruel purgatory. ‘I used to have to drive him around,’ Glen Kidston said. ‘His Cobras and everything. This brand-new car – an incredible car – and he wasn’t allowed to get behind the wheel. You can’t imagine how frustrating that was for him.’
Tara decided that if he couldn’t drive it, he’d have fun with it in some other way. One day, he and Glen were in the garage when a truck turned up, its container painted with a multicoloured mural. It was an LSD lorry. Tara loved it. ‘He turned to me,’ Glen remembered, ‘and he said, “I’m going to do that to the Cobra.”’
Ger
ard Campbell had told him about three young artists from up north who had started out painting furniture in unusually bright colours and were now doing the same thing to cars. One of them had worked, briefly, at Hobbs and Bates, the same agency where Gerard worked; he had designed an ad for Spangles sweets that the client didn’t like and he was given his cards. As it happened, Gerard was about to meet him and the two artists he worked with to put a business proposal to them.
One of the most interesting by-products of the shake-up in the British class system in the late 1950s and early 1960s was that art – for so long the preserve of bohemian types or the gallery-going rich – became of interest to the working classes. By the early 1960s most of Britain’s major cities had art colleges full of young kids whose parents couldn’t tell the difference between a Magritte and half of one. Socially and culturally, the effect was revolutionary – without realizing it, Britain had bred a generation of young people from the wrong side of the tracks who could talk their way around the Tate – in a Liverpudlian or a Mancunian or a Brummie accent. It would play a major part in shaping the Sixties. Amongst the notable alumni of the country’s suddenly burgeoning art colleges were John Lennon, Keith Richards, Ray Davies, Eric Clapton, Eric Burdon, Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page – and three members of a pop-art collective who turned Tara’s new AC Cobra into a piece of art on wheels.
Dudley Edwards, Douglas Binder and David Vaughan were three working-class lads from West Yorkshire and Lancashire who moved to London in the early 1960s, following the path laid down by David Hockney, who was Bradford born-and-bred. The three started off as Teddy Boys, became mods in art college and, by 1966, were well on their way to becoming hippies – and pioneering hippies at that, thanks to their early efforts in the area of what became recognized as psychedelic art.
‘I was born in Halifax,’ said Dudley. ‘I grew up on a farm, a smallholding. It was always my job to look after the pigs. The school I went to was notorious. I remember one of the teachers had two bulldogs sitting beside his desk for protection. Every year, the Cock of the School, who was the best fighter, had to take on the gym master on the last day. We’d all crowd around the gym, peering through the windows, waiting for the lad to go in and have a go at him.
‘I was always interested in art. That was my way out. Luckily, I had a decent art teacher who took me under his wing. When I finished school, he asked to see my dad. The old man went in and he said, “The lad’s talented. He needs to go to art school.” My dad said, “Well, he’s fifteen now. We’re looking forward to getting a wage out of him. He’ll be going in the mills or down the mines like the rest of his mates.” But my art teacher talked him out of it.
‘So I did two years at Halifax Art School, then I went to art college in Bradford – a further three years. And that’s where I met Doug and Dave. Doug was brought up in Bradford with a similar background to myself. Dave was from Manchester. He’d done twelve months in Strangeways – for nicking carpets, I think. He showed a bit of artistic talent while he was in there and Bradford was the only place that would take him when he was released.’
Douglas was a couple of years older than the other two and went to London in 1962 to further his education at the Royal College of Art. Dudley arrived shortly after graduating in 1964 and got a job with Hobbs and Bates, the advertising and public relations company where Gerard Campbell worked. Dudley and Douglas shared a flat on Gloucester Avenue. Dave had a newborn daughter, who grew up to be the actress Sadie Frost. He turned up on the doorstep one day and insinuated himself into their world. ‘I wasn’t that close to him in college,’ Dudley said. ‘But he knew where I lived and he sort of thrust himself upon us. So that was how the three of us ended up together.’
The flat they shared needed brightening up. They couldn’t afford new furniture, so they decided to paint what they had – wardrobes, chairs, chests of drawers – in what became recognized as their signature style. ‘Psychedelic art wasn’t around when we started off. The early stuff we did had nothing to do with LSD because we hadn’t had it. All our stuff came from fairgrounds – from our memories of going to the fair as kids. Bright colours. Sharp angles. We associated it with joy, from our childhoods, because the streets were dull and grey, like other major cities, until the fair rolled into town.
‘Then another major influence was the Pakistani doorways in Bradford. A lot of Asians came over after the war and they settled in Yorkshire and they painted their doorways these bright colours. In Bradford, you’d walk down these dull stone terraces, then you’d come across a house where a Pakistani family lived and it’d be multicoloured. It looked magical.
‘So we arrived in London with this urge to paint everything the same way. We’d have liked the commission to paint the whole of London if it’d been possible – streets, pavements, everything. There wasn’t a great deal of intellectual sophistication about our art. We just wanted everything to be colourful and happy.’
But their first priority was to make the rent, which became more difficult after Dudley lost his job at the advertising firm. As it happened, their Gloucester Avenue flat was just across the road from the home of David Bailey.
‘We thought if we maybe left a piece of painted furniture on his doorstep, he’d come out of the house one morning and fall over it and maybe want to keep it. In the middle of the night, we carried one of these things across the road – it was a chest of drawers – and left it on the doorstep. The next morning, his cleaner came round and she said, “David’s had to go out, but he wants that chest of drawers. If one of you comes across later, there’ll be a cheque for you.”
‘We were all a bit nervous. I don’t know if we drew straws or whatever, but I finished up having to go across for the cheque. Catherine Deneuve answered the door in her negligée – handed me the first money we ever earned as Binder, Edwards and Vaughan.’
After that, success came quickly. Lord Snowdon, Princess Margaret’s husband, ordered a chest of drawers from them, which generated some publicity in the national newspapers. Then the orders started to roll in: custom jobs, at first, often for rich clients living in Chelsea bedsits, a great many of whom had ‘turned on’ and had an urge to see the world in as many colours as possible. Henry Moore bought one of their pieces. Then they got their first major order, from Woolland Brothers, the upmarket department store in Knightsbridge, for two dozen painted chests of drawers, which they sold for between £20 and £30 per piece.
In January 1966, House Beautiful magazine ran a feature on their work, showcasing how they could beautify dull pine tables and chairs with a few licks of a paintbrush. David Vaughan, who had a particular gift for generating publicity, told the London Evening Standard that they’d been asked to paint the dome of the recently cleaned St Paul’s Cathedral canary yellow and the brand-new Post Office Tower bordello red.
Gerard phoned Dudley one day and told him he wanted to introduce them to his friend, Tara Browne. ‘He said, “I mentioned you to him. I think he’ll love you and what you’re doing,” so, a few days later, he took us around to his mews house in Eaton Row.’
It was the first week in August and London was buzzing. England had just won the World Cup, beating West Germany at Wembley, thanks to a Geoff Hurst goal that may or may not have been. It seemed almost inevitable that the Russian linesman would rule that the ball had, indeed, crossed the goal line. The momentum of the pendulum swing was still with England. Bobby Moore held up the Jules Rimet trophy one-handed and London must have felt like the good times were never going to end.
Tara took Dudley, Douglas and Dave to his garage to show them the Cobra and they set about painting it immediately, all the colours of the rainbow incorporated into a flash design. It took them two weeks to finish the job, working mostly at night and into the early hours of the morning, then going back to Eaton Row to listen to music. In a six-week period that summer, three albums were released that still feature in the top ten of most serious All-Time Greatest polls – Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys, Revolver by T
he Beatles and Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan. The era of the album had well and truly arrived.
Tara played those records all night round at Eaton Row. Especially Pet Sounds. ‘The Beach Boys were the reason he bought the Cobra in the first place,’ Dudley remembered. ‘There was something about that lifestyle that he liked. The whole California thing. The car fitted in with that.’
The heartbreaking wistfulness of songs like ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)’ may also have had a special appeal to Tara that summer, when his marriage to Nicki was reaching its end. To all intents and purposes, they were already separated. Nicki had spent much of the summer in Marbella, where she was now clearly intent on living, whether Tara was part of her future or not. She had rented a 400-year-old whitewashed cottage in Orange Tree Square that she was hoping to turn into a boutique and hairdressing salon. The children were mostly with Oonagh in London or Paris. Tara was footloose – and free to restart his affair with Amanda Lear.
•
Amanda tried to stay away from Tara, but she couldn’t. When she returned to London that summer, they picked up where they left off in Marbella. Tara would take afternoons off from the garage and call round to her flat in Chelsea. Occasionally, with Nicki away, they would go to Eaton Row. She remembered Tara playing Revolver for her there – he loved ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ – while she stared at the cover artwork and realized that her feelings for him were something she could no longer control.
‘I was madly in love with him,’ she said. ‘But at the same time I was feeling terribly guilty, because Nicki had treated me as her friend and I was doing this behind her back.
‘But it was not my fault that the marriage went bad. He was not very happy with Nicki. He wanted a different kind of relationship. Nicki was into going out, taking drugs, meeting famous people – she was very wild.’
