Posts Tagged ‘north London’
Saturday, December 5th, 2009
I finally caught up with one time Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones press spokesman Michael Morgan at his Hackney flat yesterday. We spent much of the day going over Ray’s life-story, and Michael also kindly presented me with a bundle of press clippings and other material he’d photocopied for me.
Among the many impressive cuttings Michael Morgan gave me is one entitled ‘The Night I Stole Liz’s Jewels In The Gresham’ (from the Irish tabloid The Sunday World, 23 November 1997):
“One of the world’s oldest jewel thieves has spilled the beans on how he amassed a £5 million fortune by robbing top showbiz stars as revenge for his brother’s tragic death in a World War II bombing raid. And legendary burglar Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones says one of his most memorable jobs was when he broke into a Dublin hotel room and stole jewels belonging to superstar Elizabeth Taylor…
“…Ray told the Sunday World: ‘Way back in 1940 I was due to fight for the World Middleweight Championship… I was real good and I had boxed and beaten the legendary Fred(die) Mills and now I was in with a chance of a World Crown. But I was involved in a melee in London and was charged with hitting a copper. I found out later that the copper was himself a middleweight boxer. They framed me to get me out of the way. I got six years for the assault.’
“His brother, who lived in the family home in Gwent, South Wales, came to visit Ray in Pentonville prison in North London. But he was tragically killed in the first bombing of London by the Nazis at the end of 1940…. Said Ray: ‘I got on my knees in my prison cell. I vowed I would hit back at society and the judiciary for taking the things I cared most about in life away from me. When I got out, I said to myself, I would become the greatest cat burglar in the world. That was my mission in life… I would only hit rich people. They were the cream of the crop and had everything they wanted. I had been robbed of my life. I had to hit back.’ ”
My chat with Michael Morgan, other papers he gave me and one of my previous blogs about Ray The Cat, can fill in a few details here. Jones had moved to London around 1936 to further his boxing career and had settled in Maida Vale. One Sunday morning in 1937 he went for a stroll with a friend and they were stopped by the Old Bill under the notorious SUS law (this allowed the cops to stop, search -and even arrest – anyone on the suspicion they were going to commit a crime; the law was finally abolished after the Scarman enquiry highlighted the role its use played in the 1981 Brixton riots). Metropolitan police boxing champion PC Spratt told Ray he was being arrested for SUS, and when Jones protested he hadn’t done anything, this bully-boy cop grabbed Jones by the collar and punched him in the face. Ray fell back against the wall, sprang up and with a well-placed punch KOed the violent thug who was attacking him.
The knock-out blow delivered against the best fighter in the Met was a clear-cut case of self-defence, but Ray and his friend understood the necessity of being on their toes, and the cops didn’t catch up with Jones for three years. When they did, the crown used Ray’s sporting nickname of ‘Slasher Davies’ to falsely paint him as a violent thug involved in razor attacks on innocent members of the public; when in reality the moniker was derived from his punching prowess in the boxing ring. As a result, Jones did a six year stretch for an assault perpetrated not by him, but against him!
Jones insisted that he was innocent of both this and the alleged crimes (thefts of coal, shoes and a bottle of milk) that led to the spell he spent in Reform School as a boy. However, Ray was guilty of the robberies for which he was sent down at the Old Bailey in 1952, since he’d decided to hit back against the rich who were ruining society and making life a misery for poor families like his own, by stealing from aristocrats and showbiz stars. Unfortunately, despite Ray’s guilt in this instance, there were to be more fit-ups. The outline for the official biography of Ray’s life (the book was never written) includes the following: “Within eight days of leaving prison he was arrested for living on the immoral earnings of prostitution. Despite the fact that he had only been out of prison a week, and that the woman concerned was not a prostitute he was sentenced to a further 6 months. Ray says that years later the officer who had arrested him, admitted that he had been framed on directions from someone in Scotland Yard.”
Another frame-up took place in 1957, the filth used a nark to lure Jones to a London cul-de-sac in which they’d parked a a stolen car and then arrested him for the theft. This led to Ray’s famous escape from Pentonville in October 1958, when using ladders left by a work gang doing repairs to the prison, he and Johnny Rider got onto the roof and then down the walls. When Ray fell and injured himself, Rider attempted to carry him but Jones insisted his friend run on because it was important at least one of them got away; sadly Rider was recaptured very shortly afterwards. Jones managed to crawl to safety and eventually asked a couple of men, one of whom was an ex-con, for help in return for money. They drove him to a pub run by one of his cousins (one of the sons of his west London based gangster uncle Dennis ‘Dinny’ Callaghan), who gave him the keys to a flat where he could clean himself up and rest. Unfortunately the landlord was inspecting the property when Jones arrived and told him to go away, since he didn’t want someone covered in blood going into his building. Ray then directed the men aiding his escape to the home of a fence called Benny Selby, who paid them £50 and helped him clean up.
Eventually Ray found a flat to stay in, and his wife Anne who worked at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital For Children in Hackney Road, persuaded a doctor she knew there to attend to her husband’s injuries. Once he’d healed up, Jones went back to his chosen profession of robbing the rich. While Ray was on the run, Peter Scott approached him and said he’d been given inside information on a big job by a couple of bent coppers. Scott needed a skilled accomplice to rob Sophia Loren (who was making The Millionairess in England) of her jewels; once these had been flogged the detectives who’d put them up for the theft would be paid off with £6000.
The raid took place in May 1960, with the bumbling Scott acting as look-out and Ray breaking into Loren’s bedroom to steal the diamonds. The haul was sold to a fence for £44,000, with Scott and Jones netting nearly £19,000 each (slightly less because of expenses on top of the bung to the filth). Scott visited Jones immediately after paying off the bent coppers at a White City Stadium dog race, claiming that they’d read in the papers the stolen jewels were worth £185,000 and they wanted another £6000 for putting up the job. Ray thought Scott was trying to con him out of three grand and refused to give him any cash.
After he was recaptured in October 1960, Ray suspected that Scott may have given the cops the information that enabled them to track him down; the look-out was pissed off that Jones hadn’t coughed-up the extra money he later discovered the bent detectives had indeed demanded. Despite his suspicions on this score, when Ray decided to go public about having done the Sophia Loren job in the early 1990s, he warned Scott he was going to do so. At the time Scott begged Jones not to mention his name, and Ray respected his wishes although he harboured serious doubts about the integrity of this ‘man’.
Ray’s 2 years and 28 days on the run from Pentonville apparently earned him a place in The Guinness Book of Records. Michael Morgan also told me that Ray’s younger daughter Anne-Marie Jones was both conceived and born while he was on the lam; her older sibling Beryl was born before the 1957 fit-up. Thanks to Michael Morgan I also have yet more tales to tell about Ray The Cat, but they won’t all fit into one blog…. So the further adventures of this 20th century Robin Hood will have to wait for now! But before going, I would like to emphasise the injustice of the fit-ups Ray suffered: he claimed that 17 of the 33 years he spent in jail were for crimes of which he was innocent…
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Anne Jones, Anne-Marie Jones, Benny Selby, bent cops, Beryl Jones, boxing, Brixton riots, burglary, central London, Dai Jones, David Jones, Dennis Callaghan, Dennis Dinny Callaghan, Dinny Callaghan, Dublin, east London, Elizabeth Taylor, fit-ups, Freddie Mills, Hackeny Road, Hackney, John Rider, Johnny Rider, London, Maida Vale, Michael Morgan, north London, Old Bailey, PC Spratt, Pentonville Prison, Peter Scott, Queen Elizabeth Hospital For Children, Ray Jones, Ray The Cat, Ray The Cat Jones, Raymond Jones, Scotland Yard, Slasher Davies, Sophia Loren, south Wales, SUS law, The Millionairess, The Sunday World, west London, White City, White City Stadium
Posted in True crime | 15 Comments »
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
I’ve never been into the Cocteau Twins myself… just ain’t my thing. However, I recently got into an online discussion in which I mentioned that I’d known their second and main bass player Simone Raymonde in the old days when he’d been in a band called Disruptive Patterns, and that this group had morphed into The Drowning Craze. Or rather, I mentioned that the Drowning Craze had emerged from a band whose name I couldn’t remember off the top of my head! It took some serious thinking to retrieve the name…
In the late-seventies and early-eighties I belonged to various groups that played and rehearsed in and around London and its south-west suburbs – the furthest out of London I played was in places like Guildford and Stevenage (okay Stevenage is north of London, but mainly we played south-westish), usually in pubs or sometimes clubs like The Starlight in West Hampstead (the less prestigious upstairs venue twinned with the relatively small Moonlight Club). We practiced all over the shop too, but the best place I ever rehearsed (circa 1980-81) was in an 8 track recording studio located in the basement of Theatre Projects in Neal’s Yard, Covent Garden.
Dave King, who drummed for a band I was in called Basic Essentials, worked at Theatre Projects as a recording engineer and so we were allowed to use the place at the weekends for free, not just to rehearse but also to record. It was amazing, during breaks we’d rake through old tapes and dig up demos by the likes of T. Rex and The Average White Band who’d used the Theatre Projects studio…. although during the week the bread and butter work there was recording stage effects for plays. At the start of the eighties, Covent Garden was still in the process of being transformed into the shopping mall from hell it has become today, so we’d have a laugh in the area and after rehearsals we’d usually go to a tiny caff on the north side of Leicester Square which we called The Basic Essentials Cafe (I can’t remember it’s actual name and – like Theatre Projects in Neal’s Yard – it isn’t there any more) for espresso.
Anyway, because I was playing in various small time groups, I got to know a lot of other bands, including Disruptive Patterns. I’d guess Disruptive Patterns were a going concern around 1979-80, I certainly saw them several times and one of their tunes is still lodged in my mind. It was probably called Pleasure Never Hurt Anyone, since that line was the main refrain of the chorus. Disruptive Patterns were a fairly straightforward new wave act with some backwards and forwards psychedelic nods (and more like The Psychedelic Furs than The Sex Pistols). The two members of the combo I recall being on friendly terms with were singer Andy McInnes and bass player Simon Raymonde, although I’d imagine I spoke to other members of the group as well. Both Andy and Simon struck me as nice guys, but given the way bands work it didn’t surprise me when Andy was kicked out and an American girl called Angela Jaeger was brought in to front the group, which simultaneously changed its name to The Drowning Craze (the line-up and name change may have been at the instigation of the indie label Situation 2, who the group signed a record deal with, but I’m not certain this was the case).
I went to see The Drowning Craze early on somewhere in central London (I don’t remember which venue, but some small club) and didn’t like the new singer or the new songs (the set was completely different to the one Disruptive Patterns had been performing). I lost sight of Andy McInnes pretty soon after this, but carried on running into Simon Raymonde by chance on the street or in clubs pretty much up to the time he joined The Cocteau Twins, I haven’t seen him since then. Since I didn’t like Angela Jaeger as a singer, I only ever saw The Drowning Craze once when she was in the group – but after she was replaced by Frank Nardiello, I have a very dim memory of giving them a second chance and liking what they did with him a little bit more (but whether this was a gig or a rehearsal I’d been invited to witness, I can’t recall).
There are a couple of photos of the Disruptive Patterns on Fred Pipes’s Flickr pages, and a comment in a Cocteau Twins discussion thread riffing off Fred’s photos. But it would be nice if someone could help me recall some other Disruptive Patterns tunes, the venues they played (mainly around Guildford as far as I recall – Wooden Bridge etc.), and possibly even upload any demos that might exist! Also am I right in thinking there is a link between Disruptive Patterns/Drowning Craze and a late-seventies punk band called The Rubber Flowers who were probably based in Farnham (which is further south-west than I ever ventured) and whose line-up included Alex Binnie?
It was interesting attempting to dredge this minor piece of music history from my memory, and thereby realise how much of it I must have forgotten. That said, there are a lot of tunes that probably never made it onto vinyl rattling around my head from that time. For example, I can remember two songs by a band called The Lasers, Living In A Television (‘livin’ in a television, ray tube for a home, livin’ a television on my own!’) and Show Us Your White Bits. I can’t recall where this band were from but I assume it was south-west or west London suburbs. Anyone know anything about them? I guess I’d better stop there or this is gonna get too seriously obscure!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check - www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1970s, 1980s, 70s, 80s, Alex Binnie, Andy McInnes, Angela Jaeger, Average White Band, Basic Essentials, central London, Cocteau Twins, Covent Garden, Dave King, Disruptive Patterns, eighties, Farnham, Flickr, Frank Nardiello, Fred Pipes, Guildford, Leicester Square, Living In A Television, London, Neal's Yard, north London, Pleasure Never Hurt Anyone, Psychedelic Furs, Rubber Flowers, seventies, Sex Pistols, Show Us Your White Bits, Simon Raymonde, Situation 2, south-west London, Stevenage, T. Rex, The Drowning Craze, The Lasers, The Moonlight Club, The Starlight, Theatre Projects, west Hampstead, west London, Wooden Bridge
Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography, music | 25 Comments »
Monday, September 28th, 2009
Yesterday I travelled to the far-north of London to catch the world premier of the Class Wargames film The Game Of War at the HTTP Gallery, close to Green Lanes. Divided into five segments of five minutes, the individual parts of this movie can be viewed in any order. While appearing to heap extravagant praise on Guy Debord, the film actually undermined his vanguardist positions by massively exaggerating the problematic self-promotional aspects of his film-making and other cultural-cum-politico activities. The spoken word Game of War soundtrack repeatedly exhorted viewers to play Debord’s game in order to make themselves more effective proletarian revolutionaries, and did so using the most blatant techniques of (post)-modern advertising. In their Communique 7 of 27/09/09, the Class Wargames collective put it this way:
“When Debord was working on the film adaptation of The Society of the Spectacle in the early-1970s, making a movie out of movie clips was very difficult. Buying celluloid stock, hiring editing suites and organising cinema screens had required serious money from a generous sponsor. Fortunately, over the past three-and-a-half-decades, digital technology has caught up with this Situationist technique. Class Wargames only needed a small grant from the Arts Council to fund a film constructed on a Mac laptop with Final Cut out of video from our performances and excerpts from our DVD collection. Best of all, we are now able to distribute our cinematic creation to a worldwide audience for free over the Net. Detournement is no longer the privilege of a minority of avant-garde artists. Media communism is now embedded in everyday life. Become a 21st century Debord – a director of remixed movies. Sweep away the anachronistic barrier of intellectual property. Switch on the computer, start up the video editing software, plug in an external drive filled with rendered DVDs and begin making your own film. Everyone is a practical Situationist. Ludic Labour!”
And while on the visual level The Game of War film appeared somewhat retro in its aesthetic (and this was clearly worked at and intended, because it isn’t typical of other pieces by director Ilze Black), the spoken script written by Richard Barbrook and Fabian Tompsett gave it a distinctively contemporary twist. Proletarian post-modern variants on the hoary tradition of mock praise are a groove sensation! “Guy Debord had the total revolutionary critique” (for the benefit of those not familiar with the genre of mock praise, this is a joke)! So look out for this movie once it hits the net, and if you are nearby check out upcoming Class Wargames events in The Hague (10 October), Newcastle (14 November) and Helsinki (14 November).
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Arts Council, Class Wargames, detournement, Fabian Tompsett, Final Cut Pro, Green Lanes, Guy Debord, Helsinki, HTTP Gallery, Ilze Black, London, Mac laptop, Newcastle, north London, Richard Barbrook, situationist, Society of the Spectacle, The Game of War, The Hague
Posted in film | 21 Comments »
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
The author of The Acid (Vision, London 2009) uses the pen name Sam, but is probably better known to most readers of this blog as Chris Gray. For me, and probably for many of you, The Acid reads like a continuation of where Chris left off in the essays he contributed to his English language Situationist anthology Leaving The 20th Century (1974). There he wrote: “What needs understanding is the state of paralysis everyone is in. Certainly all conditioning comes from society but it is anchored in the body and mind of each individual, and this is where it must be dissolved. Ultimately the problem is an emotional, not an intellectual one. All the analyses of reification in the world won’t cause a neurosis to budge an inch…”
In The Acid, Chris says of the counterculture: “Looking back on that time, what seems so incomprehensible is that we never took LSD more seriously. How was it we failed to grasp its importance? For the concept of de-conditioning was at the heart of the New Left of the time. If any single feature set 60s and 70s radicalism apart from previous insurrectionary politics, it was insistence that individual subjectivity had to be transformed. The political was the personal. Politics were psychopolitics. Our own hearts and minds were precisely where the old order was ingrained – and if we couldn’t change ourselves, then what hope was there we could ever change the world?”
Many of those around Gray, including my mother Julia Callan-Thompson, took acid far more seriously than he did – but this was precisely because in the 1960s they were heads (whose attempts at personal transformation were doomed to failure because there was no accompanying social revolution) and he was a radical.
The Acid begins with a lucid overview of psychedelic literature and an account of Gray’s previous experiences with mind expanding substances. Chris also provides a potted autobiography, so that his readers can understand the material that comes up in the trips he describes. These vary from being joyous to total bummers. He was tripping every two to three weeks for three years as a self-prescribed acid therapy; an attempt to break down personal blockages. He tried different approaches to tripping: initially putting on a blindfold and listening to music in his flat, before moving on to outdoor excursions on Hampstead Heath. These accounts are very informative about ways of understanding and structuring trips, and will provide most readers with new approaches to the subject.
The back cover of the The Acid stresses that the breakthrough insight from these sessions is that the visions are serial. Drawing heavily on Stanislav Grof”s Realms of the Human Unconscious, Chris underlines the need to work through bad trips in order to transform oneself and achieve a sense of wholeness. The thrust of this argument I can run with, although I’m not sympathetic to all the psychoanalytic and religious elements drawn into the narrative. This is partly a generational difference, with the materials Gray used to structure his understanding of his ‘inner experiences’ very much mirroring those adopted by my mother and many of her friends in the 60s and 70s (that said, the psychedelic hermeticism my mother was involved in with Terry Taylor was quite different – and as far as I can tell, superior – to such deployments of Hinduism).
My view is that the varieties of Hinduism drawn upon by both my mother and Chris, and much of their ‘turned on’ generation, are too hierarchical to enable us to rediscover the forms of consciousness that characterised primitive communist societies. By way of contrast, shamanism (particularly in its voodoo and candomblé manifestations) does provide us with pathways to disalienation. LSD is, of course, a fantastic tool for inducing shamanistic experiences.
Mirroring Gray’s activities with King Mob in the 1960s, he draws on Keats and the English romantics as sources for understanding his experiences, whereas when it comes to LSD I would opt more for figures such as William Hope Hodgson (and others whose books currently exist outside the literary canon). This is not a matter of huge importance, and obviously reflects personal tastes and reading experiences. I went through Keats as a teenager and concluded I disliked his poetry.
The Acid is an engaging and thought provoking book, and while it is one man’s trip, it is also intended as a map that will assist any interested party in their own exploration of ‘inner space’. The text works on many levels, most obviously as a piece of writing that is a joy to read. If you have any interest in acid at all, then get your hands on this book!
But let’s give more or less the last word to Chris. He writes the following about his attendance at a San Francisco psychedelic conference in the early part of this millennium: “A well established, even well-heeled, cult I had been expecting; but not one thriving like this. The hall was so packed you could barely move. Of all the revolutionary groups of my youth – the Hippies, the New Left, the students, the blacks, the feminists – it was, however improbably, the druggies and the druggies alone who had made it through in one piece. And not just survived, but boomed.”
Well, throw in some voodoo or candomblé and I think we have a revolutionary situation!
This book has been republished by Park Street Press as The Acid Diaries by Christopher Gray and is currently fairly easy to obtain. (Note added 15 December 2010).
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: candomblé, Chistopher Gray, Chris Gray, Hampstead Heath, Julia Callan-Thompson, Leaving The 20th Century: The incomplete works of the Situationist International, London, LSD, north London, Realms of the Human Unconscious, Sam, shamanism, Stanislav Grof, Terry Taylor, The Acid, The Acid Diaries, The Acid: On Sustained Experiment with Lysergic Acid Diethylamide or LSD, voodoo
Posted in books, counterculture, psychedelia | 24 Comments »
Monday, May 25th, 2009
In the past couple of days I’ve found some more online pieces about the death of Chris Gray. I’ve also come across blog talk of a Guardian obituary that was supposed to appear on 21 May; there is no sign of it yet but I guess this may still materialise. The most comprehensive obit so far is by Charlie Radcliffe who was very close to Chris in the 1960s, had little contact with him for more than 30 years after that, then rekindled this intimate friendship seven years ago. Among the many interesting observations Charlie makes at The Void are the following:
“The Acid, published under the pseudonym of Sam by Vision Press this year, is as much a contribution to the politics of the new millennium as it is to psychedelic exploration… For Chris there was precious little contradiction between the one and the other and he saw The Acid as a rational and entirely logical development of his 60s and 70s political agenda… Chris continued his political life through the late 60s, before moving to India in 1969 to join Osho. Chris’ interesting account of this period of his life is in Osho (also by Sam!) His ‘retreat’ to India earned him the opprobrium of the ‘politically committed’ but a close reading of the book is enough to indicate that Chris never turned his back on his political convictions…”
Like Chariie, I can confirm that Chris remained ‘politically committed’ and that the revolutionary transformation of society was the focus of many of his conversations with me and a couple of other people I introduced him to. One time when I was rapping with Chris, he told me the reason he went to India was to finance the revolution. He journeyed east with the explicit intention of mailing dope back to London, so that this could be sold to raise money for political activities. Some gear was intercepted before the post office delivered it to its intended recipient, when Chris got wind of this he delayed his return home. He hadn’t planned on staying away from London as long as he did, but once the British authorities had marked his card, he faced a simple choice between living in India until the heat cooled off or being busted. This enforced stay in the east led Chris to an involvement with Buddhism and ultimately Osho. To the best of my knowledge, Charlie is right to say Chris left for India in 1969, but I would stress it wasn’t until the mid-seventies that he came across Osho (AKA Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh). To clarify further, my impression is that Chris had a period back in London after his first Indian trip before returning there and involving himself with Osho.
While I was aware that Chris had a long term involvement with Osho, this wasn’t something that came up in my conversations with him. Nonetheless, Osho was a major part of Chris’ life and an obit appeared on the Sannyas News site on 17 May 2009. This post opens with the following observation: “The main founder of the Sannyasnews website, Swami Paritosh (Chris Gray), usually known as Pari, and who for writing purposes used the pseudonym “Sam”, died in the London Hampstead Marie Curie Hospice (Eden Hall) last Thursday morning (May 14th). He had put up a brave struggle with cancer over the last 12 months. He was 67.”
A few more posts about Chris’ death can be found on the History Is Made At Night, Boredom Is Always Counter-Revolutionary and Artosphere blogs. If you want to read Life of Osho by Chris Gray there is a free download available online. New and used paperback copies of Life of Osho by Sam (Sannyas, London 1997) are still readily available and carry the following International Standard Book Numbering: ISBN-10: 0953153401 and ISBN-13: 978-0953153404; since you can get a new copy for £10, avoid the used book dealers who are charging £25 and more for it. Although I’m not convinced Osho or any other guru is worth following, I still found this book really interesting for the overtly political reading Chris gives of Bhagwan’s teachings, and for the brief account he provides of his own ‘kamikaze’ drug smuggling of the early eighties. The other book Chris wrote as Sam, The Acid: On Sustained Experiment with Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, or LSD, was officially published by Vision Press about six weeks ago but no copies appear to have been commercially distributed yet. The Acid carries the following International Standard Book Numbers: ISBN-10: 0956204902 and ISBN-13: 978-0956204905. I assume copies will become available in due course.
Christopher Nelson Gray, born 22 May 1942 in London; grew up in Crosby, Liverpool, and raised by his grandmother. Educated at Repton. Died in London on 14 May 2009.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Boredom Is Always Counter-Revolutionary, Buddhism, Charles Radcliffe, Charlie Radcliffe, Chris Gray, Christopher Gray, Christopher Nelson Gray, Crosby, drug smuggling, Eden Hall, Guardian, Hampstead, History Is Made At Night, India, King Mob, Life of Osho, Liverpool, London, Marie Curie Hospice, north London, Osho, Repton, Sam, Sannyas News, Situationist International, Situationists, Swami Paritosh, The Acid: On Sustained Experiment with Lysergic Acid Diethylamide or LSD, The Void, Vision Press
Posted in counterculture, obituary, politics | 76 Comments »
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
I just got an email from Charlie Radcliffe telling me that Chris Gray died last Thursday morning (14 May 2009). Chris is probably best known for his brief membership of the Situationist International and being one of the key figures in the Notting Hill (west London) based King Mob. Chris was the editor and translator of the first English language anthology of French Situationist texts Leaving The 20th Century: The incomplete works of the Situationist International (1974), a book that over a long period was to have an enormous impact.
I got to know Chris around 2002 when I was researching the life of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson. At that time Chris had been ill with hepatitis c for some years, but it didn’t stop him from getting out on the streets to join anti-war and other demonstrations. He was extremely upbeat about the ongoing possibilities for the revolutionary transformation of society, and never complained about his illness. Chris told me several times he felt really sorry for those who got hep c from blood transfusions etc.; his attitude was that despite becoming ill from needle sharing, at least he’d had and enjoyed the smack that went with it.
When I saw Chris it was usually at his spartan flat in New Court, Hampstead. For health reasons, he was dividing his time between London and Cornwall. Despite the minimal decor in his London pad, Chris was really hospitable and always cooked for visitors. He viewed both me and his own daughter Mob as numbering among what he humorously referred to as ‘the lost children of Ladbroke Grove’. The first time I visited Chris, he told me he’d been aware of what I’d been doing for a long time, and said it was a shame we hadn’t met before because we had so much in common; viz, shared political and cultural interests alongside his acquaintance with my mother. Nonetheless, Chris hadn’t known my mother nearly as well as two of his former partners did in the late-sixties and early-seventies; both Brenda Grevelle and Hazel Gray saw her more much more regularly than he did back then.
During the years I knew Chris he was working on a book about LSD, and he seemed particularly curious about his own mother’s medical treatment with this drug in the 1950s. There is no need to repeat here the many anecdotes about Chris that have led some to view him as legendary, you can find them elsewhere but obviously not everything that has been written about him can be described as strictly factually accurate. Suffice to say I found Chris great company and appreciated him for his sharp mind. Rapping with him really brought home for me the fact that his translations of Situationist texts were intended to have an effect on the political climate of Britain and America; he was not aiming for the dry pseudo-objectivity of an academic.
Some of the lines that most impressed me when I first read the translations Chris made from French were his interpolations; added because he wanted to ensure these incendiary Situationist tracts worked for an Anglo-American audience. My absolute favourite among them is in his translation of On The Poverty Of Student Life. Here he threw in something along the lines of: “If the anarchists will tolerate each other they will tolerate anyone…” Chris assured me this addition was based on a throwaway line of conversation the pamphlet’s author Mustapha Khayati had tossed at him, he’d merely substituted ‘anarchists’ for ‘English’.
To the best of my knowledge, Hazel Gray died many many years ago. But Chris was still in close contact with Brenda Grevelle when I knew him. So my thoughts are with her and their daughter Mob.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Brenda Grevelle, Charles Radcliffe, Charlie Radcliffe, Chris Gray, Christopher Gray, Hampstead, Hazel Gray, hepatitis c, heroin, Julia Callan-Thompson, King Mob, Ladbroke Grove, Leaving The 20th Century: The incomplete works of the Situationist International, London, LSD, Marie Grevelle, Mustapha Khayati, New Court, north London, Notting Hill, On The Poverty Of Student Life, Situationist International, Situationists, smack, west London
Posted in counterculture, obituary, politics | 40 Comments »
Thursday, April 30th, 2009
I found myself back at the Whitechapel Gallery last night for the world premier of John Rogers’ film The London Perambulator. This documentary is a portrait of arsonist and ‘deep topographer’ Nick Papadimitriou. In 1975 the teenage Papadimitriou burnt down his school, and as a result got banged up in Ashford Remand Centre; a little later he found himself locked in a cell next to serial killer Dennis Nilsen at Wormwood Scrubs prison. Now in his fifties and after overcoming drug addiction, north London based Papadimitriou spends his days tramping around the liminal spaces of the city and collecting archival material connected to his walks. Some might call this psychogeography but since the term is now hackneyed, ‘deep topography’ provides a more attractive description. Papadimitriou’s fascination with suburban sprawl and sewage works might be seen as ‘eccentric’, and The London Perambulator struck me as a cross between Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s Channel 4 movies such as The Falconer and works by the artist Luke Fowler including Bogman Palmjaguar and The Way Out (see right column on link for Fowler review).
Like Luke Fowler in his art film portraits, Rogers refrains from providing a straight account of Papadimitriou’s life, instead leaving it to the viewer to piece together biographical fragments. The London Perambulator has a grunge aesthetic, including shaky camera-work and with the outdoor shots filmed from a walkers’ perspective, so there are no panoramas or aerial shots. Intercut into this are talking head sequences of Papadimitriou’s three most famous friends speaking about him and his activities. The talking heads are media personalities Russell Brand and Will Self, complimented by writer Iain Sinclair. Self and Sinclair are shot in their homes, whereas Brand appears to be reclining in the offices of his Vanity Productions company. There is the odd shot of Papadimitriou in his flat, but mostly he is filmed outside, sometimes accompanied by Will Self. There are variations in sound quality, with the audio on the Brand segments being superior to everything else. Brand’s Vanity company produced The London Perambulator, Rogers works there and obviously studio equipment is generally superior to its portable equivalents. That said, the sound is acceptable throughout the film, and the changes in its quality are simply a part of its grunge aesthetic. In the interests of clarity, I also need to declare here that there are a couple of projects I’ve been developing with Rogers and Vanity for some time; so if anyone wants to make accusations of nepotism, I should be included in them for blogging about this film!
After the screening there was a panel talk featuring Rogers, Sinclair and Self, with Goldsmiths College academic Andrea Philips as chair. Rogers and Sinclair acquitted themselves well. Unfortunately, the discussion became somewhat strained when Andrea Philips asked Self whether there was a master/slave relationship between him and Papadimitriou. Self jumped down her throat by denouncing this as a detour into the bondage parlour, whereas it seemed to me that Philips was invoking Hegel’s famous and much discussed master/slave dialectic as a reference point. Likewise, my impression was that Philips was putting Papadimitriou forward as the more senior partner in his obviously close and collaborative relationship with Self, but the media personality angrily responded that Papadimitriou was in no way beholden to him. It is difficult to imagine anyone who had just seen Rogers’ film coming away with that impression, since after viewing it only a reversal of Self’s perspective would seem in the least bit feasible.
Philips appeared shaken by Self’s odd reply to her question, which might explain why having opened the session by talking up her own academic expertise in the areas of psychogeography and urban walking, she closed by asking why these activities appealed only to men. Sinclair soon put her straight by explaining that most of those wanting to do walks with him were women, and of course Philips’ own academic research also served to disprove her final assertion. Afterwards a good number of those present headed up to the Whitechapel bar, where Self’s claim that Papadimitriou was a contemporary Rimbaud came in for some heavy criticism. On the basis of the Rogers’ film, it would appear that Papadimitriou is principally concerned with observation, whereas Rimbaud’s focus was transformation; such differences clearly render Self’s claim untenable.
The London Perambulator was screened as a part of the East London Film Festival (23-30 April 2009, various locations).
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Andrea Philips, Arthur Rimbaud, Ashford Remand Centre, Bogman Palmjaguar, Chris Petit, deep topography, Dennis Nilsen, east London, East London Film Festival, Goldsmiths College, Hegel, Iain Sinclair, John Rogers, London, Luke Fowler, master/slave dialectic, Nick Papadimitriou, north London, psychogeography, Russell Brand, The Falconer, The London Perambulator, The Way Out, Vanity Productions, west London, Whitechapel Gallery, Will Self, Wormwood Scrubs
Posted in film, talks | 28 Comments »
Saturday, April 11th, 2009
In late 1961 my mother – Julia Callan-Thompson – moved across London from a one room bedist at 101 Barnsbury Street N1 (Islington) to a two room pad on the top floor at 24 Bassett Road W10 (off Ladbroke Grove). Both the basement flats beneath her at 24 Bassett Road had interesting occupants. In one was the Trinidadian drummer Russ Henderson who led the first steel band to play on the streets of London, and later had a hand in setting up what became known as the Notting Hill Carnival. In the other was a refugee from Nazism called Ruth Forster, who I’ve been told was a Jewish bookseller and a member (or a former member) of the Communist Party. Forster apparently threw extraordinary parties and among the many amazing people my mother allegedly met in her basement flat over the coming months and years, another former Communist Party member called Gustav Regler made perhaps the greatest impression. If my mother did indeed meet Regler, then this must have been in either late 1961 or sometime in 1962, since he died in New Delhi in January 1963.
Regler was a confused man from a German Catholic background. He was born in 1898 and wrote many books, the overwhelming majority of which have never been translated into English. A World War I hero of sorts, he travelled to Berlin in 1919 to join the right-wing militias. After serving the cause of reaction in the German capitol, Regler moved on to Munich where he abortively involved himself in defending the Bavarian Soviets, but the revolution was viciously snuffed out. Next a good marriage resulted in Regler becoming a wealthy businessman. However, feeling oppressed, he abandoned his wife and young son to become an impoverished writer. A committed Stalinist by the time the Nazis ascended to power, Regler became a German exile in Paris from where he very actively participated in the anti-fascist struggle. Regler later claimed that visits to Moscow led to his disenchantment with Bolshevism in the mid-thirties, although this didn’t prevent him from assuming a position of authority within the Stalinist controlled International Brigade in Spain.
During the Spanish civil war Regler befriended the American novelist Ernest Hemmingway and appears to have held himself aloof from the acts of sabotage carried out against the Republican cause by some of his Bolshevik comrades. Regler didn’t actually break with Stalinism until after Franco’s fascist triumph in Spain and the forging of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Following internment in a French concentration camp and then a period of exile in Mexico, he returned to Europe in 1957. All of this is recorded in his autobiography The Owl of Minerva. Ruth Forster is mentioned in passing towards the end of this book as the girlfriend of Walter, a former German artillery officer with progressive political views, who was imprisoned in France with Regler. Part of a letter Forster sent to Walter is reproduced in The Owl of Minerva and Regler makes it clear that she’d taken part in the underground resistance to Nazism in Germany and had been imprisoned for these activities in 1937. How she got away from Germany isn’t recorded. The text of her letter does, however, reveal that she was greatly enamoured by the poetry of Rilke.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes no sense!
Tags: 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 60s, anti-fascism, Barnsbury Street, Bassett Road, Bavarian Soviets, Berlin, Bolshevism, Communist Party, Ernest Hemmingway, France, General Franco, Germany, Gustav Regler, International Brigade, Islington, Julia Callan-Thompson, Ladbroke Grove, London, Mexico, Moscow, Munich, Munich Soviet, Nazi-Soviet Pact, Nazism, New Delhi, north London, Notting Hill, Notting Hill Carnival, Paris, Russ Henderson, Ruth Forster, sixties, Spain, Stalinism, The Owl of Minerva, Trinidad, west London
Posted in books, Julia Callan-Thompson | 21 Comments »