Posts Tagged ‘1960s’
Monday, December 21st, 2009
The label tells it like it is – “Beat Beat Beat was a German music programme that ran during the sixties. Not to be confused with the other well known German pop programme Beat Club. Beat Beat Beat was broadcast out of Frankfurt commencing in 1966.” Well you wouldn’t want to confuse the two programmes as far as getting the DVDs of material from them is concerned, coz while the Beat Beat Beat (ABC Entertainment) disks give you classic mod, British Invasion, freakbeat, pop and even soul performances, on the The Best of Beat Club vol 1 & 2 (Eagle Vision) you apparently get Deep Purple, The James Gang, Johnny Winter, Santana, Procol Harum, Nazareth, Free, Humble Pie, Jethro Tull, Alice Cooper, The Kiki Dee Band, Johnny Rivers, The Hollies, Bachman Turner Overdrive, The Doobie Brothers, Ten Years After, Canned Heat and Three Dog Night. So while a mixed bag, the The Best of Beat Club vol 1 & 2 will appeal more to headbangers and others of that ilk; whereas Beat Beat Beat is a groovers kinda thang! That said, there were earlier year by year compilations of Beat Club and those for 1965, 1966 and 1967 look a lot better than the more recent ‘total overview’ disks… But I’ve only seen them listed online, I’ve not actually viewed them.
There are Beat Beat Beat DVDS running to about 10 minutes each devoted to The Small Faces, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, Eric Burdon and the New Animals, The Spencer Davis Group and The Hollies. Performances by these acts are not particularly rare and I’ve certainly seen enough footage of them to know the Small Faces totally rock onstage, whereas the Kinks or The Yardbirds (both of whom made records I love) tend to look too static and overall not that great. With more tunes and some groovy but less well known acts, The Best of Beat Beat Beat compilation disks are a better option, despite a really odd selections of talent.
At 41 minutes The Best of Beat Beat Beat volume 1 offers the longest running time. There’s Barry Ryan (Eloise), Cat Stevens (Granny and Matthew & Son) and Chris Farlowe (Out Of Time and Ride On Baby) lip-synching really badly to pre-recorded tracks. Farlowe in particular looks completely uninterested in what he’s doing, but remains compelling in a train wreck kinda way, especially as he is one sad and ugly motherfucker who had an obsessional interest in Nazi memorabilia (fortunately it was illegal for him to wear his fascist uniforms on German TV). There’s straightforward sixties pop from Herman’s Hermints (No Milk Today and My Reservation’s Been Confirmed) that while adequate need not detain us. By way of contrast, Casey Jones and The Govenors (Come On And Dance and Don’t Ha Ha) are a bit of an oddity.
In the UK Casey Jones AKA Brian Casser is known to music fans (but not the general public) as the bloke who booked The Beatles as his support act and briefly had Eric Clapton as his guitarist, but not really for his music. In Germany he had a huge hit with Don’t Ha Ha, hence his inclusion here. And if you like primitive beat sounds then you’ll dig the two Casey Jones and The Governors tunes on the The Best of Beat Beat Beat volume 1. It is probably unnecessary to add Don’t Ha Ha was a Huey ‘Piano’ Smith song. Volume 1 also gives us two tunes from The Trinity featuring Julie Driscoll (Save Me and Road to Cairo), with keyboardist Brian Auger’s theatrics totally upstaging his singer Julie Driscoll (who sounds great, albeit not as good as Aretha Franklin when covering her, but doesn’t have much stage presence). The best is saved for last, The Easybeats doing Loving Machine (incorporating the Batman Theme) and that old stomper Friday On My Mind. As prot0-punkers The Easybeats completely outflank Casey Jonees and The Governors.
Volume 2 is shorter but better. The Minderbenders do a Wilson Pickett medley in the form of Land Of A Thousand Dances/In The Midnight Hour and their big hit Groovy Kind Of Love; and also Don’t Cry No More and a medley of C. C. Rider/Jenny Jenny Jenny. P. J. Proby’s What’s Wrong With My World provides another spectacular train wreck; his lip-synching is terrible and the old rocker looks both off his box and down on his luck – he has to be seen to be believed! The disk winds up with two total class acts, P. P. Arnold and The Creation. A former Ikette (an Ike and Tina Turner backing singer) and session vocalist for the likes of The Small Faces, Arnold is diminutive but her voice is 100% pure soul and her two tracks here (Speak To Me and The First Cut Is The Deepest) are just fabulous.
You’d think there’d be nothing in the Beat Beat Beat vaults that could credibly follow Arnold, but The Creation are up for it! Aside from being a truly awesome song writer and musician, their guitarist Eddie Phillips also had the greatest haircut of 1966, just look at the shape of it around his ear in the footage of The Creation doing their cover version of I’m A Man! The Creation look fabulous in their dark trousers and button-down shirts with contrasting white details (buttons and belts). The shame here is that on the same edition of Beat Beat Beat (their first TV appearance) they also did That’s How Strong My Love Is and Makin’ Time, but they ain’t included on the DVD. Still you do get to see Eddie using his innovative technique of playing his guitar with a violin bow, something much imitated by lesser talents like Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. What you also see here is The Creation doing Painter Man a year later, with their hair a little more grown out; the band still look really stylish but a little freakier. When I was a teenager back in the 197os I was on the lookout for some Creation vinyl for a long time, and when Raw Records stuck out Makin’ Time and Painter Man on either side of a 45 in the latter part of that decade, I grabbed a copy as soon as it came out. I really love this band, Makin’ Time in particular. And, of course, we should never forget the famous Eddie Phillips quote: “Our music is red with purple flashes.” Incidentally, after The Creation broke up, Phillips joined P. P. Arnold’s backing band.
Volume 3 of The Best of Beat Beat Beat features solid sixties pop from The Searchers (Love Potion No. 9, Sweets For My Sweet and C. C. Rider) and The Tremeloes (Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever, Silence Is Golden and Here Comes My Baby). Then there are the more psychedelic sounds of The Move (Walk Upon The Water and I Can Here The Grass Grow). However, the real highlight is The Smoke doing My Friend Jack, a song banned by the BBC in the sixties because it is about LSD! My Friend Jack is a psyche classic and everything else on this particular disk looks second-rate in comparison… so surely we could have had more than one track from The Smoke!
I’ve also spotted but haven’t acquired a two band Beat Beat Beat DVD compilation featuring The Troggs alongside Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. I love The Troggs but I figure the DVD ain’t worth getting coz there won’t be enough of ‘em. Likewise, any disk you see in the Beat Beat Beat series will probably feature gawky looking teenagers dancing badly to groovy sounds… You can also see most of this stuff and much more for free on YouTube, although it comes and goes and the image is obviously heavily compressed- whereas on these disks both the audio and visual quality is really top-notch. Weird how you can see and hear so much shirt now that just wasn’t available to those of us based in London back in the old days, but I ain’t complaining! It’s like time travel for ravers…
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, ABC Entertainment, Alice Cooper, Aretha Franklin, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Barry Ryan, Batman Theme, BBC, Beat Club, Brian Auger, Brian Casser, C. C. Rider, Canned Heat, Casey Jones and The Govenors, Cat Stevens, Chris Farlowe, Come On And Dance, Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick & Tich, Deep Purple, Don't Cry No More, Don't Ha Ha, Eagle Vision, Eddie Phillips, Eloise, Eric Burdon and the New Animals, Eric Clapton, Free, Friday On My Mind, Granny, Groovy Kind Of Love, Here Comes My Baby, Herman's Hermints, Humble Pie, I Can Here The Grass Grow, I'm A Man, Ike and Tina Turner, In The Midnight Hour, Jenny Jenny Jenny, Jethro Tull, Jimmy Page, Johnny Rivers, Johnny Winter, Julie Driscoll, Land Of A Thousand Dances, Led Zeppelin, Living Machine, Love Potion No. 9, Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever, LSD, Makin' Time, Matthew & Son, My Friend Jack, My Reservation's Been Confirmed, Nazareth, No Milk Today, Out Of Time, P. J. Proby, P.P. Arnold, Painter Man, Procol Harum, Raw Records, Ride On Baby, Road to Cairo, Santana, Save Me, Silence Is Golden, sixties, Small Face, Speak To Me, Sweets For My Sweet, Ten Years After, That's How Strong My Love Is, The Beatles, The Best of Beat Beat Beat, The Best of Beat Club, The Creation, The Doobie Brothers, The Easybeats, The First Cut Is The Deepest, The Hollies, The James Gang, The Kiki Dee Band, The Kinks, The Mindbenders, The Move, The Searchers, The Small Faces, The Smoke, The Spencer Davis Group, The Tremeloes, The Trinity, The Troggs, The Yardbirds, Three Dog Night, Walk Upon The Water, What's Wrong With My World, YouTube
Posted in film, music | 23 Comments »
Monday, December 7th, 2009
The oldest of suppressed traditions
In a world dominated by illusion, it comes as no surprise that censorship should be popularly misperceived as a form of social repression. The contradictions which support such an inversion are manifest in every area of daily life; they constitute the apparent “reality” of our “time”. Despite the fact that it has been demonstrated time and again that consciousness is an effect of a closed system of exclusive focus, of censorship, “literate” consensus maintains that censorship and silence are the negation of consciousness. It is clear that Power has a vested interest in maintaining a monopoly on censorship. The “concept of freedom” is an unreachable, collapsing, absolute. All experience becomes equal when exchanged via Capital; with class “privilege” determining how much of this worthless “equality” each person is entitled to.
The negative and its use
Anything can be censored for any reason; start by censoring this text. The censors of the “left”, “right” and “centre”, all do their collective part; despite the fact that they imagine themselves to be motivated by the very beliefs we will ultimately negate.
From originality to ontology: the decline of the text
The possibilities for communal transformation of this world lie in disconnection from imposed notions of progress and democracy. Plagiarism is the “beginning”, the negative point of a culture which finds its justification in the “unique”. Censorship supersedes plagiarism as an “intelligent” negation of “originality” because it suppresses not only (“original”) production, but also reproduction (plagiarism, appropriation &c.) which revalue the “original” and maintain its circulation in “reality”. Censorship is to the present what plagiarism was to history.
The healing power of doubt
Revolutionary propaganda sets itself the task of discrediting all received ideas without offering a single “alternative” thought with which they might be replaced. Kill your desires and live! Erase, destroy and make useless all recorded information. Physically and otherwise attempt to suppress all expression in art, politics, history &c. Resist culture and all other forms of institutional identity. Suppress, by refusing to participate in, interpersonal and mass social relationships. As you see fit, smash the “imagination”, “schizophrenia”, “death”, “sexuality”, “values”, “time” and all other forms of seduction and abstraction. Experimentally break down the frames of reference by which you organise non-valued perceptions into valued entities: i.e. objects, ideas, means of self-perception &c.
An end to social relations
“Self-destruction” is a semantic swindle. The moralism against suicide is reactionary resistance to change. Only total opposition, both theoretical and practical (i.e. silence), is irrecuperable. Anything else must necessarily appear absolutist and contradictory.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 557087 Seattle, 60s, Alex Trocchi, Alexander Trocchi, APG, Art and Culture, Artists Placement Group, Arts Journal, Barry Flanagan, beat generation, Better Books, black beauties, black bombers, Bluecoat Gallery, Bow Street Magistrates Court, cannabis, central London, charge, Clement Greenberg, conceptual art, Destruction In Art Symposium, Destruction in Art: Destroy to Create, Diamond & Co., drug smuggling, Durophet, Finch College, Finch College Museum of Art, Fluxus, forgery, Francis Morland, heroin, Jeff Sawtell, Jeffrey Sawtell, John Latham, John Lennon, John Perreault, junkies, Liverpool, London, LSD, Lucy Lippard, MOMA, Morning Star, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York City, New York Museum of Modern Art, Norwich, Norwich School of Art, Number 7, NYC, Paula Cooper Gallery, pot, purple hearts, Seattle, Seattle Art Museum, Sheila Malcham, Simon Ford, sixties, Soho, St. Martin's School of Art, Still and Chew, The Art Forum, UK, USA, weed, Yoko Ono
Posted in art criticism, counterculture, True crime | 26 Comments »
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
By the time I left school at sixteen in the late-seventies the big sound was disco. That said, the real hipsters among the kids who underwent the same non-education as me were into northern soul (rare mainly American and mainly 1960s records that sounded like Motown but never made the pop charts). I first came across northern soul in the mid-seventies because a school friend shared a bedroom with an older brother who was obsessed with a handful of northern soul platters. This big brother would come in from his factory job, put Tainted Love (later a huge hit when it was covered by Soft Cell) or some other northern favourite on a record deck, then flop on his bed to listen to the music until his mum had made his tea. For some reason this particular teenager also liked prog, so he was also the first person to play me Greenslade!
By the end of 1976, I was into punk rock (one of only two pupils in my school into that scene then), while a couple of kids in my class were regularly going to Wigan Casino for its northern soul all-nighters. I can remember them saying to me: “You should come to Wigan, it’s great, we drop a load of blues and dance all night!” My reply was: “Why would I got all that way to listen to records? I like seeing live bands.” There were plenty of blues (amphetamine tablets) around at punk gigs too…
And so that was that, I blew my chance to go to Wigan – possibly the worst decision I made at the age of 14 or 15. Tony Palmer’s 1977 TV documentary makes it very clear there was a truly extraordinary youth culture blossoming there. Space put it this way: “Wigan Casino documents an idiosyncratic scene based around the weekly club night that ran from 1973 to 1981. From elegant slow motion dance shots to fervent scenes of vinyl swapping, Palmer precisely captures the bustle and energy, as well as the overarching subcultural strangeness, of the Northern Soul phenomenon.”
If you have any interest in soul music you should have seen Palmer’s incredible dance shots used by other film-makers or simply posted on YouTube. But it is worth seeing those scenes in context, with a record dealer talking about the prices paid for northern vinyl and a girl who works in a hospital laundry explaining that going to Wigan is the only meaningful thing she does in her life. There is also an interview with the manager of The Casino and a couple of elderly Wigan residents giving their take on life. Cut into this are old photographs of industrial Wigan, and shots of factory machinery that turn with an almost Brion Gysin-like flicker effect. The contemporary scenes of Wigan, particularly images of terraced houses by a canal, make it look every bit as derelict as the rest of England in the late-seventies.
Wigan Casino may be a 32-year old piece of TV, but it’s the best thing I’ve seen in an art gallery for some time! It is on until 19 December at Space 129-131 Mare Street, Hackney, London E8 3RH. Catch it if you can…
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 1970s, 1977, 60s, 70s, amphetamines, blues, Brion Gysin, dancing, disco, east London, Greenslade, Hackney, London, Motown, northern soul, prog rock, punk rock, S.O.U.L., seventies, sixties, Space, Tainted Love, Tony Palmer, Wigan, Wigan Casino, YouTube
Posted in exhibitions, film | 15 Comments »
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
Last night I went to the celebration of the life and work of Tamara Krikorian and Tony Sinden at Tate Modern’s Starr Auditorium. The event was a tribute to two pioneering UK based video artists who died earlier this year; among other things, Krikorian also played a major role in setting up London Video Arts. Unfortunately, I find Krikorian’s work boring, and neither the talks about her nor the screening of her 1977 video Vanitas did much for me. In Vanitas, Krikorian stands in front of a mirror with a TV and many other objects reflected in it, the audio cuts between the artist talking about art and TV news reports. It is an understatement to say this failed to rivet me.
Tony Sinden wasn’t afraid to experiment, and I find his work hit and miss, but went it hits it nails me to the floor. The first screening last night was This Surface (1973) by David Hall and Tony Sinden. The 12 minute short kicks off with a pub scene: a right tasty geezer with a not quite full pint of beer balanced on his head dances, while guys and gals in groovy flares and sporting fabulous seventies hairdos look on in disbelief. As the dance goes on the reveller tilts his head further and further to one side in order to keep the beer balanced on top. The soundtrack is Mouldy Old Dough by Lieutenant Pigeon. After this, the film cuts to a tracking shot looking out to sea and moving from the east towards the Palace Pier on Brighton Beach. The words ‘this surface’ is written in marker pen on either the camera lens or some plate glass in front of it. The camera movement creates the impression the viewer is on one of the mini-railways that were a common feature of British seaside resorts in the 1960s and 1970s.
This Surface runs through various fragments of text relating to filming, cameras and cine-projection; both ‘interrupting’ the filmed ‘scenery’, and as ‘subtitles’. Having not quite reached the Palace Pier, the camera jump cuts to a reverse shot, and facing inland we trundle past the various boat houses and sheds located immediately beneath Marine Parade as we head back east. Next comes another jump cut to what looks like Western Road, and the camera tracks west to east along the shops immediately north of what is now Churchill Square. The next cut apparently takes us back to the seafront, and a static shot shows a Pit and The Pendulum type scenario, with a blade swinging over the body of a human dummy (displayed in the window of one of the many seaside attractions). Finally the action cuts back to the man dancing with a glass of beer on his head (still to Lieutenant Pigeon), but shot from a different angle to the scene that kicks off This Surface.
One of the things I find curious about Sinden’s work is the chance serendipities that can sometimes really enhance its effects. In the case of this particular collaboration with Hall, the setting is for me an example of this. Although I’ve never lived in Brighton, I know the town well, and as a child in the sixties and early seventies I’d be taken on day trips to Brighton Beach in the summer. Thus This Surface is jolting for me, because once the text is stripped away from it, it could almost be my own memories. Likewise, Mouldy Old Dough was a huge hit when I was a nipper, and takes me right back 1972. Sitting immediately behind me was currently London based but north American raised artist S. E Barnet. She told me afterwards she’d never heard the tune before, so although she found it striking, it had no associations for her; and I assume she doesn’t have childhood memories of Brighton in the early seventies which render This Surface even more strangely familiar to me. S. E. was obviously as grooved by the short as I was, but given it carried for her few of the associations it held for me, was she watching the same movie?
The other highlight of the night was David Cunningham (a former member of seventies one-hit wonder band/collective Flying Lizards), Rob Gawthop, and Alan Baker, performing a 1977 sound piece from Sinden’s Functional Action series. They each rubbed a couple of pots together and the resulting music was a groove sensation! The Functional Action series is where my fascination with Sinden began. I was vaguely aware of his video installations when in mid-eighties London I was doing something or other with a gallery (possibly Chisenhale in Bow) and I came across a pile of his album Functional Action Parts 2 & 3: Swing Guitars/Drift Guitars (Piano, 1980). Asking why the albums were leaning against a wall with rubbish piled up beside them, I was told the gallery were throwing them out and if I wanted the record I was welcome to take one. When I got the vinyl home and played it, I thought one side was fabulous and the other dreadful. After that I paid attention whenever I came across Sinden’s name.
Last night the Tate Modern was filled with Sinden and Krikorian’s friends and colleagues, who were paying tribute to them. It would be nice to see parts of Sinden’s Functional Action series and 16mm collaborations with David Hall reaching a new and younger audience. I trust that will happened in due course, with the best of his film and music reissued in appropriate formats. Despite an at times understandably sombre tone, the Tate tribute nonetheless provided a very useful overview of Sinden’s creative endeavours. Minimalism and conceptualism can rock, you just have to do it right!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 1970s, Alan Baker, Brighton, Brighton Beach, Churchill Square, conceptual art, David Cunningham, David Hall, Drift Guitars, Flying Lizards, Functional Action, Functional Action Parts 2 & 3, Lieutenant Pigeon, London, London Video Arts, Marine Parade, minimalism, Mouldy Old Dough, Palace Pier, Piano Records, Pit and The Pendulum, Rob Gawthop, S. E. Barnet, Starr Auditorium, Swing Guitars, Tamara Krikorian, Tate Modern, This Surface, Tony Sinden, Vanitas, Western Road
Posted in film, music, talks | 18 Comments »
Sunday, September 6th, 2009
Yesterday I posted an essay on the main part of this website entitled The Real Dharma Bums: on the beatnik frenzies of Julia Callan-Thompson & Bruno de Galzain. The text documents one of my mother’s relationships and the endless scamming that accompanied the hardcore drug use that was a part and parcel of said romance. Running to 10,000 words, this piece was too long to use as a blog. I prefer to place shorter and more fragmentary materials here. But as a supplement to that and other writings about my mother, I’m running below a couple of letters she wrote to my grandmother Elsie in the early 1960s.
The first letter was written from 101 Barnsbury Street, London N1. It is undated but would have been composed in either August or September 1961; most likely mid-to-late August. My Uncle Terry had recently been caught in possession of stolen goods and was banged up, while my Uncle Johnny was on the run from the army and the cops. Shortly before this, my grandfather Dai was one of several Newport dockers to lose his job after he was discovered incapacitated at work as a result of liberating and downing a large amount of booze that he’d been handling. The early 1960s were tough times for my family and my mother resolved to hide from them fact that she was pregnant (they would, of course, have been very happy to hear this had she been married). My mother was always a little cagey in her letters home, and I’ve heard enough stories about her teenage years to know that while she was only 17 years-old when she penned the first missive I reproduce here, she was already extremely streetwise and adept at pulling scams and cons.
I don’t really know what to make of the employment my mother refers to below, she was a nightclub hostess at the time she wrote the letter. Likewise, the story about going to Germany appears to be no more than a way of covering her tracks: she did not want to see family members when she was heavily pregnant with me. My view is my mother had no intention of leaving London – where I was born just before Easter 1962. That said, while disentangling truth from falsehood may be difficult here, the expressions of love towards my grandmother and our wider family are nonetheless one hundred percent genuine. So here’s the first letter:
“I’m writing because I’m wondering why you haven’t written. I sent you a card and a small something on your birthday which included my present address. Have you received this? If it has been mislaid in the post tell me in your next letter and I’ll get in touch with the post office as I’ve a receipt.
“How are things at home, did Terry get off lightly and have they caught up with Johnny yet? Hell! Here I am writing you what is supposed to be a cheerful letter and I haven’t said one cheerful thing yet.
“I’m living near to the hospital where I used to work. Its quite a nice area except when the Cypriots that live next door start arguing. Honestly I’d thought our family could argue but you should see this lot once they start going. Bank Holiday they started at about 11 am and no word of a lie mum they were still at it when I came home about midnight. The trouble is they start off with two people arguing and then their family join in then all the people that occupy the flats where they live join in, then the bloke who owns the cafe down the road joins in until you’ve got every Cypriot that lives within the radius of 4 miles joining in . It wouldn’t be so bad if you knew what they were arguing about but the trouble is that you don’t because they’re either babbling in Greek or Turkish and it does make old nosey want to know what’s going on.
“I must tell you mum I’ve actually acquired a sewing machine, a typewriter and a camera all within the last week. No I haven’t won the pools!!! The typewriter I had given me. You see mum up until this week I was working for a solicitor in Baker Street and the girl who I was supposed to be successor to was leaving to go to South Africa with her husband so naturally she wanted to get rid of all the things that she couldn’t take with her. The only problem was that I had to carry it all the way from East London. God I nearly killed myself doing it. It’s not a nice modern portable, but one of those big black heavy pre-war things and so you can imagine what a job it was lugging it all the way to the underground. When I got there the tube was full so I had to carry it. Then off the underground to get the bus then I had to walk about 200 yards from the bus stop to the house. Honestly mum I’m sure that if anything I lost about 2 stone that night and put muscles that were never there in my arms. Still I mustn’t grumble must I. At least I’ve got a typewriter for nothing. Also I bought the camera off her for only £1. Is a simply super one too.
“Now for the sewing machine. Last Sunday I was in the market. I don’t know if you know mum but the markets in London are all in the streets not closed in like the ones at home. You know you can bid a price down and I got the machine that was advertised for £6.10 for £3.10. I was so pleased with myself for getting it at £3 less that I just had to buy it.
“I’ve also paid my overdraft at the bank and got my tape machine out of the pawn shop. Honestly mum with all these things I’m beginning to feel that I ought to open up a shop.
“By the way is the radio working? I’m enclosing a spare valve because one of them is practically burnt out and it would cost you about fifteen bob to replace so as I’ve one here which I can’t use for anything else you might as well have it.
“Also mum when I collected my cases at Paddington there were only two. Did you send the other one or not? In case you haven’t I’m enclosing ten shillings which I hope will pay it, if not I’ll send on the difference You might as well have it sent straight to the house mum.
“I don’t think I’ll be home before next Easter at the earliest mum, as a German girlfriend who I have known since I’ve been in London stayed with me last week as she was going back to Cologne this week and she invited me to stay with her family for Christmas. If the finances will enable me I intend staying until almost up to Easter in which case I’ll come home straight from Germany and stay for a few weeks before I move on to somewhere else but after next Easter I don’t somehow think I’ll come back to London. I’m thinking of going to Leeds or Manchester or some other city as I’m becoming a bit fed up with London. Or maybe I’ll do a season job in Germany or someplace. I just can’t get over how much I’ve written, honestly mum, I’m bound to have paralysed my hand or something.
“I hope that you had some days out mum. I really do wish that I could share my luck with all the family. I had a really wonderful holiday in the Isle of Wight. I visited Ventnor and tried to see if I could find the hotel Johnny stayed at, but I’d forgotten the name. I hope you all received my cards and that Pat and Gerald received their rock all in one piece. Also when I was down there after about two weeks I went on to Lee-On-Solent which is just a small seaside place – but I was able to go to Southampton – which wasn’t very thrilling as I’d been there too many times before, and also you only had to take the ferry over the water and you came to Portsmouth where I’d never been before. Also, Margaret will probably know its only a 5d bus fare from Portsmouth to Southsea which is a lovely place, really mum you ought to spend a holiday there. The beaches are just as nice if not better than Brighton and the lights in the nights are really and truly beautiful from the water.
“I really must close now mum although I do miss you all. I must say thank you mum for giving me such a nice welcome at home and look forward to my next visit whenever that is. My regards and best wishes to the family. All my fondest love, Julia.”
Here’s the second letter, written by my mother on 2 March 1963 from 24 Bassett Road, London W10:
“Dear Mum
“I’m glad to hear that you’re up and about again, I was quite worried but it was good to know that the family hadn’t neglected you.
“In your letter, as in nearly all the letters you’ve written me, you have once more asked me to come back home. Well mum although I haven’t been very much use to you as a daughter, I would be of even less use to you in Newport. At least in London I’m being of some use to myself and I hope my friends.
“I was very young when I left home and most probably it caused you considerable worry, but myself I have never regretted the decision. This is no reflection on you but rather on other circumstances.
“You always seem to think that I’m unhappy. I sincerely want to stress the point mum that I am far happier here than I would be down there, it isn’t because of the higher wages that I stay here, although obviously it is much more pleasant not to have to worry about every penny. I had a very different life than I would have had had I stayed at home, and have therefore become a different type of person. I just wouldn’t fit into a Newportonian way of life any more, so please don’t fret about it.
“It’s very sweet of you to save up for my 21st. I’m not being ungrateful, but I’d much rather you had a holiday or some extra luxury with the money.
“Fondest love to dad, also my love to the rest of the family. Bye for now. Affectionately, Julia.
“PS. Look after your legs and don’t over use them, you won’t be supplied with a new pair if those should wear out.”
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Barnsbury Street, Bassett Road, Bruno de Galzain, central London, Cologne, David Callaghan, Elsie Callaghan, Germany, Isle of Wight, Islington, Johnny Callan, Julia Callan-Thompson, Ladbroke Grove, Lee-On-Solent, Leeds, London, Manchester, Newport, Paddington, Portsmouth, sixties, Southampton, Southsea, Stewart Home, Terry Callan, Ventnor, west London
Posted in Julia Callan-Thompson | 17 Comments »
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
In her book Ruth Ellis: My Sister’s Secret Life, Muriel Jakubait claims that her club hostess sibling (who was the last woman to be hanged for murder in Britain) was set up by the security services after she’d performed various minor tasks for them, and learnt too much about things they didn’t want the general public to know. Drawing a broader picture, other commentators also make it appear that in the middle of the twentieth-century British intelligence was very interested in hostesses like Christine Keeler and Mariella Novotny. According to some observers, Keeler’s club crowd was manipulated for geo-political gain by the British and other security services; books such as Honeytrap by Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril, or An Affair of State by Caroline Kennedy and Philip Knightley, cover this in some depth. While allegations of this type are often notoriously difficult to substantiate or disprove, it is nonetheless worth noting that alongside the Soho club world, the Notting Hill drug scene in which Keeler and other women from these hostessing circles were simultaneously immersed was also subject to undue influence by representatives of the British state, albeit it in the form of ‘bent coppers’ (see, for example, The Fall of Scotland Yard: A Penguin Special by Barry Cox, John Shirley and Martin Short).
My ongoing interest in Keeler and company is due in part to the fact that my own mother – Julia Callan-Thompson – was a part of their set in the early 1960s. She both worked at Murray’s and lived in Notting Hill, and was completely immersed in the drug subculture there. My mother’s problems with bent west London coppers didn’t really kick in until the mid-sixties, by which time she was working at Churchill’s Club, but while at Murray’s she did mingle in other spook connected circles; for example, the social scene centred on the University College London (UCL) philosophy department in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. The dominant UCL philosophy figures of that time were A. J. Ayer and Stuart Hampshire, both had worked in military intelligence during the war. They’d previously been part of the same social set as British Soviet spies Burgess, Philby, Blunt and MacLean; and of those more ambivalent and ambiguous Bolshevik sympathisers of the thirties typified by Coronwy Rees.
Roger Taylor, author of the late-seventies cult work of Marxist aesthetics Art, An Enemy of the People, met my mother through her UCL connections in September 1962, the day he enrolled for a philosophy PhD. I should explain here that after my mother settled in London at the age of 16 in 1960, she often socialised with art students from The Slade and through them developed friendships within the UCL philosophy department. Taylor emailed me the following recollections of UCL and my mother Julie on Thursday, May 22, 2003:
“In the early sixties UCL philosophy could be very seductive. Gordon Square was Bloomsbury, it had the “radical” traditions of Mill and Bentham, its philosophers generally were on the Left, many of them had a sort of celebrity status (Ayer on the Brains Trust, Hampshire writing in Encounter), they were manifestly clever (Bernard Williams had the reputation of being the cleverest man in England!). They were engaged with everything “advanced” in culture, they had all the “taste” and “discernment” of the haute bourgeoisie, they were public school and Oxford and the Foreign Office, their morality unconventional with a frisson of scandal. It was the world of Burgess and Blunt but in place of subterfuge they offered furious and ingenious debate about counterfactuals and the like. Entering Gordon Square was to have a feeling of having attained access to somewhere very elevated. Some of this would have been sensed by Julie. She was at home in Gordon Square. When I arrived from the North, very aggressive and very unsure, she was already there and well in. The students knew her, she was very familiar with the secretary and… socialised with faculty.”
While Taylor sees beyond the fake glamour of Gordon Square in the early sixties, his account of the atmosphere to be found there remains very much in accord with those of other observers who still view the place through the ideological blinkers of bourgeois idealism. For example, Alan Ryan in his Independent (17 June 2004) obituary of Stuart Hampshire, writes: “…in 1960… Ayer moved to Oxford, and Hampshire replaced him as Grote Professor at University College, London. There he presided over weekly seminars that offered glimpses of an intellectual heaven where the depth of the issues discussed was matched only by the elegance of the arguments with which they were addressed.” My mother was a clever and feisty working-class teenager from south Wales, and so she would have been more than able to hold her own against upper-class academics who were a lot older than she was at the time.
Likewise, in my mother’s relationships with these philosophers the element of seduction would have run two ways, since the logical positivists from Gordon Square were attracted to the bohemian Soho club world of which she was already a fixture. A. J. “Freddie” Ayer would get drunk and dance in the Gargoyle Club where his fellow drinkers included the painters Francis Bacon and Johnny Minton, publisher David Archer, writer Graham Greene and before they were exposed as Soviet moles, the double agents Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean. So if Julie was drawn to the fake glamour of Gordon Square, there were also those in the UCL philosophy department who felt a strong pull towards the world she worked in.
And as for the spookery, I should emphasis that I don’t think Ayer and Hampshire were still on the payroll of British intelligence while directing philosophical activities at UCL. But casual social ties would have been maintained, and while these were no doubt useful to the spooks, I don’t imagine they had any impact on my mother’s life. By way of contrast, the nefarious activities of bent west London coppers clearly did have an effect on my mother but that’s another story; and as for the shenanigans around the likes of Keeler and Novotny, as far as I’m concerned the jury is still out on that one!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, A. J. Ayer, Alan Ryan, An Affair of State, Anthony Blunt, Anthony Summers, Art An Enemy of the People, Barry Cox, Bernard Williams, Bloomsbury, Caroline Kennedy, central London, Christine Keeler, Coronwy Rees, David Archer, Donald MacLean, Francis Bacon, Gargoyle Club, Gordon Square, Graham Greene, Grote Professor, Guy Burgess, Honeytrap, Independent, Jeremy Bentham, John Shirley, John Stuart Mill, Johnny Minton, Julia Callan-Thompson, Kim Philby, Mariella Novotny, Martin Short, Muriel Jakubait, Notting Hill, Philip Knightley, Roger Taylor, Ruth Ellis, Ruth Ellis: My Sister's Secret Life, sixties, Slade School of Fine Art, Stephen Dorril, Stuart Hampshire, The Fall of Scotland Yard: A Penguin Special, UCL, University College London, west London
Posted in Julia Callan-Thompson, occulture | 41 Comments »
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment by Timothy Wyllie (Feral House $24.99) provides a curious history of one of the minor cults that flourished on the fringes of the counterculture. That said, The Process has remained very visible to this day, thanks in part to claims it was the hidden ‘evil’ force behind both the Tate-LaBianca and the Son of Sam slayings. Wyllie insists that these claims, as well as salacious stories about Process founder Mary Ann MacLean having been married to American boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson and playing a role in the Profumo Affair, are false. All the available evidence would suggest Wyllie is correct on these matters, and while this adds to the credibility of his tale, it will probably do little for the sales of his book.
The book is a personal account of Wyllie’s time with The Process and the story he tells is more convincing than the portraits of the group found in books such as The Ultimate Evil by Maury Terry and the first edition of The Family by Ed Saunders, but it is also far more banal. Therefore, if you want to read sensationalist and ultimately fictionalised accounts of Satanic killing sprees, you’ll have to look elsewhere. There is plenty of that online, and a web search will also locate many Process writings and graphics.
The history of The Process is essentially this: in 1963 two former Scientologists Mary Ann MacLean and Robert de Grimston established a therapy business in Wigmore Street, London. Mary Ann MacLean was a former prostitute who grew up in poverty in Glasgow, while Robert de Grimston was from an upper class family and had served as an officer in the British army before becoming an architecture student and then dropping out three years into these studies. Wyllie first met de Grimston in 1959 when they both enrolled on the architectural course at Regent Street Polytechnic (renamed Polytechnic of Central London in 1970, with a further name change to University of Westminster in 1992). In 1963 McLean and de Grimston began using Wyllie as a guinea pig to test and develop techniques they’d learnt as Scientologists, adapting them to their own purposes.
Wyllie’s circle of student friends provided the initial recruits to what was then called Compulsions Analysis. In Wyllie’s account, those involved with MacLean and de Grimson recognised a sense of spirituality in their activities and the name of the group was therefore changed to The Process in 1965. My own impression is there was nothing spiritual about MacLean and essentially she conned the group into becoming her disciples and funding the luxury life-style she and de Grimston craved. Even from Wyllie’s rather misty-eyed account, it is apparent MacLean was a hard-bitten hustler who’d mastered the con game when she was working as a high class London hooker throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s.
While Process acolytes panhandled for money and lived in abject poverty, the group rented properties it could barely afford in an attempt to trick the outside world into believing they possessed wealth and power. De Grimston and MacLean were the only Process members to live in style. While de Grimston provided the theology, MacLean was the real power running this cynical money-grabbing hierarchy. Over the years the group expanded and at various times had chapters in Rome, Paris, New Orleans, San Francisco, Munich, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, New York, Boston, Chicago, Toronto and Miami. Chapters were sometimes moved from one city to another, and the membership never seems to have stretched beyond the very low hundreds, although The Process claimed to have tens of thousands of members.
Process theology was based on the unification of opposites, and a reading of the Bible that took Christ’s injunction to ‘love thy enemy’ to mean love Satan. Much of this gnostic garbage was confected in group sessions and then written up by de Grimston, and even Wyllie admits it didn’t read well on the printed page. After an Idris Shah book fell on his head in a Notting Hill bookshop, Wyllie convinced himself that de Grimston and MacLean were disguised Sufi masters, and like other members of the cult was also prone to viewing the latter as a human incarnation of the Goddess! The original core of The Process consisted chiefly of over-privileged and privately educated brats, and it seems to me that much remains to be written about how an upper-class upbringing renders individuals peculiarly susceptible to the brainwashing techniques of religious cults.
The Process fell apart when de Grimston and MacLean ended their marital relationship in 1974. De Grimston attempted to revitalise The Process without success. MacLean led the disciples who stuck with her into The Foundation, which adopted increasingly conventional Christian doctrines before reinventing itself as a secular animal charity called Best Friends. MacLean died in 2005, de Grimston is still alive.
Wyllie’s account of his 15 years with The Process is supplemented by the stories of various other members. The most shocking thing to come out of this is the criminal neglect of children whose parents belonged to the cult. The overall impression I’m left with is that life in The Process was very dull, and you had to be deluded to join it in the first place. The Process memoirs gathered together here also show that those conned by guru-figures are very slow to give up their illusions, and will often attempt to off-set the fact they were ripped-off with the desultory claim they enjoyed some kind of spiritual adventure in ‘the process’.
In addition to these memoirs, this book also contains a selection of unimpressive texts by de Grimston, and a very silly essay by Genesis P. Orridge about how he modelled Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth on The Process. The image section in this tome is rather more interesting, since it illustrates the strong design sense and corporate-style marketing of The Process as a self-consciously totalitarian cult. From Wyllie’s account of the group it is clear why The Process chose to project itself as a totalitarian ‘elite’:
“Mary Ann (cult leader Mary Ann MacLean) never made any apologies, for instance, about having considerable sympathy and respect for the Nazi regime. Doubtless it suited her authoritarian personality. A story I have heard her relate more than once is of her as a small girl of nine or ten, who found herself leaving her physical body and being transported into Hitler’s bunker during World War II. There she would slip around the table in her astral form whispering into the generals’ ears. Whether she ever claimed to observe der Fuehrer’s legendary rages, I don’t recall, but if she had I can only imagine she would have egged him on in his carpet-biting frenzies.” (Page 56).
Elsewhere Wyllie recalls:
“Michael and I stopped in to visit George Lincoln Rockwell, the ‘American Nazi’, out of allegiance to Mary Ann’s interest in extreme ideologies…. Rockwell sat in the only armchair… He looked younger than I thought he was going to be, with a buzz-cut and a surprisingly open, pleasant, face, marred now by a fixed scowl that didn’t leave him while we were there… He had a military bearing but was clearly a frightened man… Later I found out that Lincoln Rockwell was killed in August of 1967 by a disgruntled ex-member of his party and only days after our visit. I should add that Michael is the scion of a wealthy Jewish family and I can only imagine that Mary Ann instructed him to visit Rockwell as a way of testing his mettle…” (Pages 80-81).
Elsewhere in his narrative Wyllie tells tales of counterculture figures like Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman and Simon Vinkenoog, assisting The Process. He also writes about a few of the celebrities the group attempted to shake down for donations; they range from Miles Davis to Salvador Dali. Sadly, he has nothing to say about Funkadelic frontman George Clinton, who okayed the reproduction of Process material on the art work to a couple of his albums. Mostly this is a book about the internal dynamics of The Process and as such it makes for curious but nonetheless extremely depressing reading; it appears that most of the ‘former’ cult members contributing to it are still deluded about their experiences years after the group broke up.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Abbie Hoffman, Adolf Hitler, American Nazi Party, Amsterdam, Best Friends, Boston, central London, Charles Manson, Chicago, Christianity, Compulsions Analysis, Ed Saunders, Feral House, Funkadelic, Genesis P. Orridge, George Clinton, George Lincoln Rockwell, Glasgow, Gnosticism, Idris Shah, London, Los Angeles, Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, Mary Ann MacLean, Maury Terry, Miami, Miles Davis, Munich, Nazism, New Orleans, New York, Notting Hill, Paris, Polytechnic of Central London, Profumo Affair, Regent Street Polytechnic, Robert de Grimston, Rome, Salvador Dali, San Francisco, Satanism, Scientology, Simon Vinkenoog, sixties, Son of Sam, Suagr Ray Robinson, Sufism, Tate-LaBianca murders, The Family, The Process, The Process Church of the Final Judgement, The Ultimate Evil, Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth, Timothy Leary, Timothy Wyllie, Toronto, University of Westminster, Wigmore Street
Posted in books, counterculture | 51 Comments »
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
On Thursday night I went to the launch of the British Film Institutes’s first 3 Flipside releases of neglected and off-beat British cinema. These DVD and Blu-ray reissues are an extension of the monthly Flipside screenings at BFI Southbank. The launch consisted of both a public screening of Richard Lester’s The Bed Sitting Room (1969), and a private party afterwards. Aside from The Bed Sitting Room, the other two disks being promoted were the fabulous London In The Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965), both directed by Arnold L. Miller. The Miller titles are mondo movies about London and its nightlife in the 1960s.
I’m not a fan of director and producer Richard Lester but I’ll sit through anything with Rita Tushingham in it at least once – with The Leather Boys (1964, directed by Sidney J. Furie) being my favourite film featuring this actress, since among other things her character Dot gets to deliver the immortal line: ‘Do you like me hair?’ By way of contrast, The Bed Sitting Room is merely a curious sixties period piece greatly lifted by the presence of Tushingham, but nonetheless a movie that is ultimately a vehicle for Spike Milligan. It is based upon his Cuban missile crisis inspired play of the same name, and is imbued with a pre-Beatles and pre-permissive society mind-set.
The Bed Sitting Room takes place in the ruins of post-nuclear apocalypse London, and I guess the humour is supposed to be zany and surreal, but I found it very old-fashioned. The best joke comes during the credits where the cast are listed by height from shortest to tallest; a device that fortuitously provides Tushingham with top billing. Among the other famous names featured in this film are Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Marty Feldman, Harry Secombe, Jimmy Edwards and Arthur Lowe. During a panel talk after the screening, Lester said that while he had no issues with the cast when making the film, their respective agents proved rather argumentative about billings and thus listing the actors by height was his means of resolving this problem.
Lester dominated the panel talk although he’d been joined for it by Rita Tushingham, with BFI curators Will Fowler and Vic Pratt moderating. Lester mixed some entertaining anecdotes with an unbelievably superficial take on events in Paris in May 1968. He seemed to view the entire year – and in particular the occupations movement in France – as a bit of a downer, largely because these political events disrupted his travel plans. Unfortunately Rita didn’t get to say much, but she’s an old pro and having known Lester for around forty-five years appeared both used to and unflustered by his habit of hogging the conversation.
Tushingham is in incredibly good shape for a 67 year-old, and while she now appears a little older than in her 1960s prime, her distinctive looks are still very much with her. At the BFI she adroitly deployed her exaggerated feminine moves of the sixties, with several big arm swings to keep her legion of fans happy. Afterwards in the corridor as I was making my way towards the private party, I was nearly knocked over by a group of men who were mobbing Rita for autographs. I haven’t seen a celebrity creating that amount of havoc at the BFI since Jane Fonda was in the building signing copies of her autobiography My Life So Far back in 2006.
At the party I exchanged brief greetings with BFI luminaries Eddie Berg and Vic Pratt, spent a little longer speaking to Will Fowler about the Flipside releases, and managed a proper conversation with my fellow-freelancer Kim Newman; this latter exchange covered everything from Lester’s films to our shared family connections to Elgin Crescent in west London. The BFI had provided crisps and peanuts for revelers, but I wanted to eat something more substantial and so left after a couple of drinks. While I had a curry on my mind, of more interest to everyone else will be the viewing menu on offer to those that grab hold of the current and upcoming BFI Flipside releases. Of the future releases I’m particularly looking forward to Privilege (1967, directed by Peter Watkins), coz it must be coming on for 30 years since I last saw this very curious flick about the corporate control and political manipulation of a rock star. As already mentioned, out next week are two of the most important films of the mondo movie genre: London In The Raw and Primitive London. There are variant versions of each film on the disks plus a host of extras, including two great documentary shorts about London strip clubs – Strip (1966) is served up alongside London In The Raw, while Carousella (1966) acts as a side-dish to Primitive London.
And now it’s time to declare my personal interest in all this. I contributed an essay to the London In The Raw booklet, while Iain Sinclair provides a companion-piece to my text for Primitive London. I got quite carried with this engagement, since it was an opportunity to write about London clubs in the 1960s… and very quickly my composition became too long to accompany a film release. Therefore, I chopped out a lot of material before I emailed the text to the BFI and reformatted some of that into an earlier blog (the opening and closing paragraphs were written to make this material work as an online post, the rest is unrevised material I’d cut from my BFI essay). I find the subject of London clubs of the 1960s endlessly fascinating, which is why I ran way over the word count the BFI provided and had to take rather a lot out. Originally, I’d wanted to conclude with a paragraph or three of contextualising remarks, but in the end this also had to go. One of those ‘lost’ paragraphs read as follows:
“The fascination with strip and hostess clubs evident in the work of both sets of film-makers represented on this disk reflects the fact that such establishments proliferated in London during the sixties as a direct consequence of the 1959 Street Offences Act, which attempted to sweep prostitution off the city’s pavements in line with the desires of the Wolfenden Committee. It should go without saying that the sex industry didn’t disappear, although large parts of it did relocate to both dank basements and apparently swanky clubs. When strip clubs spread to the vast bulk of cities in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, a similar cinematic obsession with such establishments was evident in many North American movies. That said, to my eyes and ears, London in the sixties is infinitely preferable to the American mid-west of the nineteen-nineties; the girls were more varied in those largely pre-plastic surgery days and the music was better. The British pop-cultural obsession with strippers was still very much in evidence a few years after the films gathered here were made; one example being the song The Girls Are Naked issued by top London mod act The Creation as the b-side to their May 1968 Polydor single Midway Down.”
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Arnold L. Miller. Arnold Louis Miller, Arnold Miller, Arthur Lowe, BFI, British Film Institutes, Carousella, Dick Lester, Dudley Moore, Eddie Berg, Elgin Crescent, Flipside, France, Harry Secombe, Iain Sinclair, Jane Fonda, Jimmy Edwards, Kim Newman, London, London In The Raw, Marty Feldman, May 68, Midway Down, My Life So Far, occupations movement, Paris, Peter Cook, Peter Watkins, Polydor Records, Primitive London, Privilege, prostitution, Richard Lester, Rita Tushingham, Sidney J. Furie. The Leather Boys, sixties, south London, Southbank, Spike Milligan, Street Offences Act, Strip, The Bed Sitting Room, The Creation, The Girls Are Naked, Vic Pratt, west London, Will Fowler, Wolfenden Committee
Posted in culture gossip & parties, film | 22 Comments »
Sunday, May 17th, 2009
As noted in an earlier post on this blog, at the end of 1961 my mother Julia Callan-Thompson moved to a two room top floor flat at 24 Bassett Road, London W10. The area around Bassett Road had been developed as a series of housing estates in the 1860s in conjunction with the extension of the Metropolitan train line on a viaduct constructed over the Portobello stream and marshes to Ladbroke Grove. The station at this latter location was originally called Notting Hill, which is why an area that might more properly be designated Notting Dale is better known by the former designation. The development of the area was followed by an economic depression, which led the likes of nineteenth-century busy-body Florence Gladstone to complain: “Whole streets were not inhabited by the class of people for whom they were designed.”
In the late-nineteenth century rather than housing city clerks, many of the buildings in the Ladbroke Grove area were under multiple occupancy by members of the working class, and in particular Irish labourers who’d been forced by famine to migrate and were engaged in the construction of new railways in the area. Multiple working class occupancy of these building was something that would continue for more than a hundred years. By the beginning of the sixties the rail network was still providing work for many of the recent immigrants who were enlivening this drab part of west London; although now rather than constructing railways, a substantial proportion of those who’d been enticed to the metropolis from the West Indies with promises of remunerative employment were involved in the smooth running and maintenance of public transport.
24 Bassett Road is a large house with some neo-classical features such as the pillars that hold up the porch to the main door. By the early sixties the building’s generous rooms had been carved up into smaller units. I’ve been told the property was owned by a Trinidadian called Sandy Dalton-Brown who liked bohemians. My mother made friends with her landlord and would visit him at his home near Hyde Park. At one point he offered to sell her both the flat she rented and that of another tenant, so that the rent from the second flat would pay off the one hundred percent mortgage which he offered to arrange for the two dwellings. Before the introduction of stricter controls on British building societies at the start of the sixties, it was common for property speculators to off-load properties to both tenants and other parties with one hundred percent mortgages which the seller had pre-arranged. Indeed, constant resale was one of the best ways of inflating the value of slum dwellings. Despite the prices paid under such arrangements generally being above market value, ownership still proved cheaper than renting.
Apparently my mother didn’t like the idea of being a landlady, so she opted to remain a tenant. Dalton-Brown seems to have been known by this double-barrelled moniker in bohemian circles, which is how he is listed in my mother’s address book, without a forename or even a prefix such as Mister. It may be that Dalton-Brown was fronting as landlord for the real owner of the property, since the use of nominee landlords was common in Notting Hill at the time. If Dalton-Brown ever actually owned either parts or all of 24 Bassett Road in the early sixties, he’d at least partially sold up before my mother moved out since the Kensington General Rate book for the year to 31 March 1966 contains the following listings: Basement Flat – Dalstead Property Co. Ltd; Ground Floor Rooms – Miss Mary Murphy crossed out and entered by hand G. J. Warden; First Floor Rooms – The Occupier; Second Floor (on which my mother lived) – Miss Whitehurst. Dalton-Brown is said to have been involved in many different business ventures, and also seems to have owned a race horse which was kept at a stable in the north of England.
In one of the two basement flats was a Trinidadian musician called Russell Henderson who’d come to London in 1951 as a mature student and never left. Henderson was a first cousin to Sandy Dalton-Brown – who at one time owned or managed at least part of the property – and some of those in Henderson’s circles referred to his and my mother’s landlord as Uncle Sandy. In 1952, Russ Henderson linked up with Sterling Betancourt. Together they made some recordings of Henderson’s piano music which were released as singles by Melodisc. With the addition of Mervyn Constantine they switched to playing pan drums and became The Russ Henderson Steel Band. When Constantine left the band, it was augmented by Ralph Cherrie and his brother Max Cherrie. As well as performing regular gigs, they also appeared on the radio and in both TV shows and feature films; including Danger Man, The Saint and Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors (Amicus, 1965, in a segment also featuring Roy Castle and the Tuby Hayes Quartet!). By the mid-sixties, with a minor shift in the line-up, Henderson was running his ensemble as both a steel band and a jazz quartet. For the latter, he’d sit at the piano, Sterling Betancourt played drums, Max Cherrie was on double bass and Gigi Walker blew the trumpet. The group had house spots as both a jazz ensemble and a steel band at different London venues, and also played further afield. Henderson continued to make records in the sixties but all are now deleted and they have become collector’s items; however, one of his best tracks, West Indian Drums, appeared a few years ago on the CD compilation London Is The Place For Me Volume 2.
In the second basement flat at 24 Bassett Road was a Jewish refugee from Nazism called Ruth Forster (covered in an earlier blog). Both Forster and Henderson lived at 24 Bassett Road from the nineteen-fifties right through to the mid-eighties. Forster appears to have died in the mid-eighties, while Henderson moved on to other parts of west London, where he still lives, now aged 85. Another very interesting occupant of a conversion at this address in the earlier part of the sixties was Peter Hammerton, who’d set up an Interplanetary Society in the late-fifties and was a fixture of early science-fiction conventions. Hammerton was a friend of the writer Michael Moorcock who also lived in the area. During the half-decade my mother rented her two room flat at 24 Bassett Road, she would take long trips to Europe but nonetheless liked having somewhere secure to come back to, despite being away for periods of up to six months. Eventually in the summer of 1966 she moved on to a pad at 55 Elgin Crescent W11; this street is only a short walk from Bassett Road, but the flat my mother lived in there was located to the east of Ladbroke Grove, rather than to its west like her old gaff.
At the time it was first developed in the 1860s, the area around Elgin Crescent was known as The Stumps. A hundred years before my mother moved there it was described in Building News as ‘a graveyard of buried hopes’ with ‘naked carcasses, crumbling decorations, fractured walls and slimy cement work’. The terraced houses in Elgin Crescent were of a similar pseudo-classical design to the detached building my mother had just left in Bassett Road albeit with fuller whitewashing. When Julie moved in, the property at 55 Elgin Crescent had just been divided into flats by a development company, so she signed a three year lease which she was able to sell on at a small profit when she left for Paris less than six months later.
In the mid-sixties, Michael X’s mother Iona Brown lived in Elgin Crescent, and she made money practising Obeah and dispensing spiritual advice from her flat. However, Iona Brown died in May 1966, shortly before my mother moved to the street. Someone my mother had befriended and who lived in Elgin Crescent at the same time as her was Terry Taylor. He had a place right by Finches pub, possibly at number 16. At the end of 1966, my mother left London to live in Paris and after a year there travelled on to India. When my mother took up living in London full-time once again in the summer of 1969, it was initially in a flat she shared with Terry Taylor and other friends at 58 Bassett Road. But that’s another story….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check - www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Bassett Road, Building News, central London, Dalstead Property Co. Ltd, Danger Man, Doctor Terror's House of Horrors, Elgin Crescent, Finches, Florence Gladstone, G. J. Warden, Gigi Walker, Hyde Park, India, Interplanetary Society, Iona Brown, Julia Callan-Thompson, Kensington, Ladbroke Grove, London, London Is The Place For Me, Mary Murphy, Max Cherrie, Mervyn Constantine, Michael Moorcock, Michael X, Miss Whitehurst, North Kensington, Notting Dale, Notting Hill, Paris, Peter Hammerton, Portobello, Ralph Cherrie, Roy Castle, Russ Henderson, Russell Henderson, Ruth Forster, Sandy Dalton-Brown, sixties, Sterling Betancourt, Terry Taylor, The Russ Henderson Steel Band, The Saint, The Stumps, Tuby Hayes Quartet, West Indian Drums, West Indies, west London
Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography, Julia Callan-Thompson | 33 Comments »
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009
Last night I was down at the BFI on the South Bank (the nearest thing you’ll find to a real rock ‘n’ roll club in London these days) to catch the first screening in a series dedicated to notorious underground/art film-maker Stephen Dwoskin, a one time contemporary of Andy Warhol. The first night of this month long season was given over to 5 early underground shorts. After an introduction by William Fowler which laid out Dwoskin’s role as a pioneer in both the New York and London underground movie scenes, the films were screened in chronological order, so Asleep (1961) came first. This shows the movements of a woman’s feet as she sleeps, it appears to have been sped-up and supposedly a whole night’s worth of movement is shown. This is a slight work, with the blanket from which the feet poke proving almost as distracting as the silent movie comedy-style piano soundtrack by Ron Geesin that was added in the late sixties – after Dwoskin had moved from New York to London.
Asleep looks like it comes from a different era to the rest of Dwoskin’s work, it resembles an early Fluxus joke piece and brought to my mind the extensive use of feet and shoes in the collages of Ray Johnson. Nonetheless, the inclusion of Asleep in the programme was useful, since it served to remind viewers that all artists have to start somewhere, and good film-makers develop rather than making their best work first time out. Next up was Alone (1963), which shows a fully clothed girl – identified as Zelda – picking her nose, then smoking a cigarette and moving through various sexually alluring poses. This, like the first short, was a new print and the quality of the film was quite extraordinary (which was not the case with Asleep, due both to inferior lighting and the battering the source for the new print of the 1961 short had obviously suffered over the years). Once again there was a Ron Geesin soundtrack added in the late-sixties after Dwoskin had moved across the Atlantic, but this time it was pulsing industrial-style noise that worked wonderfully with the imagery it accompanied.
The third short Dirty (1965) was shot in London shortly after Dwoskin’s transatlantic relocation. Two nude girls identified as Barbara and Ann, drink booze from a bottle and then frolic on a bed. The camera freezes at key moments and this, alongside the dirty and damaged nature of the black and white print, gives the short a dream-like quality. Dirty almost functions as pornography, but its formalism and minimal soundtrack by Gavin Bryars – again added several years after the film was shot and first screened – will frustrate the expectations of any viewer hoping for a wank fest. I found this film a real groove sensation; but it also left me wondering whether the two women it featured were sex industry professionals, aspirant actresses, or simply acquaintances of the director having a bit of a laugh. The rhythm of Dwoskin’s films is much slower than that of commercial cinema, and after watching Alone and Dirty my head was in a different space and moving at a very different speed from when I’d arrived at the BFI’s Screen 2. Dwoskin can be very trippy, although the effect of his later films is sometimes more like the psychosis induced by too many downers.
The fourth film in the BFI’s shorts screening was Moment (1969). This is shot in colour and shows the face of a girl called Tina Fraser framed on a pillow. The dominant colour is red and this gives the film a warm feel as Tina smokes and either masturbates or simulates this act. We see her face as she works herself up to orgasm, then afterwards in complete relaxation. As a consequence this feels very much like a heterosexual version of Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (1963). Perhaps Dwoskin felt his short Asleep had provided the template for Warhol’s Sleep (1963), and was calling in the debt. Moment was the most carefully composed of the Dwoskin shorts on show last night. That said, the top right side of the screen is a kind of dead space made up of nothing but reddish pillow, with Tina Fraser’s head on the left of the frame; presumably the shot was set up in this way, with a mild imperfection, to prevent viewers from responding to it simply on the level of visual aesthetics.
The 30 minute Trixi (1970), was the longest of the films screened last night. It shows Beatrice Cordua being assaulted by Dwoskin’s camera. At first she has her clothes on, then they have been removed. As Cordua writhes through various poses, it becomes evident that the camera is metaphorically raping her. At various points we see her face and various parts of her body in extreme close-up. Like other Dwoskin women, Cordua is not particularly photogenic: her heavy eye make up is ugly, her skin looks course and uneven, the hair on her head appears to be dirty, while her bushy pubes could do with a trim. Cordua is skinny and looks like she’s not enjoying the best of health. Perhaps Dwoskin’s subjects are typical of what ordinary – as opposed to photogenic – individuals look like on camera; we’re not used to seeing averagely attractive people on film because Hollywood and the entertainment industry are so fixated with beauty. But this isn’t the only reading that might be made of the state of the women in the Dwoskin’s films screened last night; there are parallels with the drug intake – and thus also the states of consciousness – one might associate with the London underground over the period covered in the last three films: a move from mid-sixties exuberance involving alcohol, speed and acid, to the sonambulism of heroin and ultimately burn out.
The soundtrack to Trixi is simply the endless repetition of this name, and that also reflects the psychobabble one might associate with the counterculture at the dawn of the seventies. The verbal repetition of this soundtrack may hark back to a similar effect on The Cut Ups (1966) directed by Anthony Balch, but the use of a single word rather than several repeated phrases ultimately creates a pulse that resembles a heartbeat. By the end, the viewer – like the counterculture – is strung out and beaten into submission. Trixi is an unpleasant and confrontational film precisely because the camera functions as rapist, but for me it does not fit the reductive notions of ‘male gaze’ championed by the likes of Laura Mulvey and dismissed by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. You’d have to be psychotic to identify with the camera in Trixi, and the film is a formalist exercise because of the sadistic way it forces viewers to acknowledge the difference and distance between themselves and this recording device.
After the screening, I made my way up to The Strand for a bindhi at the India Club Restaurant (2nd Floor, Strand Continental Hotel, 143 Strand, London, WC2R 1JA). This establishment is very broken down and looks like it hasn’t been redecorated since the 1960s, I suspect it only survives because it is right next to the Indian High Commission, and probably attracts custom from there at lunch time. I’ve always liked the non-gastro and undecorated atmosphere at the India Club, although I’ve never thought the food was that great, and it has got worse since I last visited the place a couple of years ago. From The Strand, I moved on to The Foundry in Old Street, where I’d arranged to meet Nina Power and Laura Oldfield Ford. Yet again I only succeeded in exchanging a couple of sentences with Nina before Laura dragged her off to a rave in a squat on Kingsland High Street. I didn’t want to go clubbing and since I hadn’t clocked Foundry owner Tacey Moberly, with whom I might have exchanged a friendly greeting, I decided to check out some action online instead….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s sixties, Alone, Andy Warhol, Anthony Balch, Asleep, Beatrice Cordua, BFI, Blow Job, British Film Institute, Carol J. Clover, central London, Dirty, east London, Fluxus, Gavin Bryars, India Club Restaurant, Indian High Commission, Kingsland High Street, Laura Mulvey, Laura Oldfield Ford, London, Men Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Moment, New York, Nina Power, Old Steet, Ray Johnson, Ron Geesin, Sleep, South Bank, south London, Stephen Dwoskin, Strand Continental Hotel, The Cut Ups, The Foundry, The Strand, Tina Fraser, Tracy Moberly, Trixi, William Fowler
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