Posts Tagged ‘Terry Taylor’

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The Return of Beatnik Legend Terry Taylor

Friday, September 28th, 2012

On Wednesday (26 September) I did an event to promote Terry Taylor’s republished novel Baron’s Court, All Change, a book I’ve been championing for the past decade. The book was first issued in hardback back in 1961 when novelists weren’t expected to make endless promotional appearances, so I could appreciate that Terry – who is a very youthful 79 – didn’t want to get involved in all that. I was, however, pleased when he decided to travel down to London for the event. I checked with Terry before we started to see if he was alright with me mentioning he was in the audience, and he said this was okay.

So after a brief introduction from Malcolm Hopkins of Housmans Bookshop in Kings X, I outlined the plot of this classic London youth culture novel and talked a little about Terry’s prose. The story line that most interests me concerns the unnamed 16 year-old modernist jazz freak narrator getting into first smoking and then dealing charge (pot). I found out later after talking to Terry that this strand originally made up the bulk of the novel – but his editors had insisted he add in more of the narrator’s family background. This additional material works well enough but it is more conventional and not as ahead of its time as the rest of the book.

What is truly incredible about Baron’s Court, All Change is the prose – which is really fresh, direct and not at all hung up on literary style. The vitality of the writing really makes it stand out from everything else published in London between the mid-fifties and the mid-sixties. It is on a par with the best of American beat literature but unashamedly written in a working class London accent (with plenty of hipster slang) – and while closer in spirit to Jack Kerouac than the UK’s most famous beat Alex Trocchi, it is just as good as Cain’s Book but very different from Troochi’s more mannered prose! And while I really dig Cain’s Book, I don’t wish I’d actually written it but I do wish I’d written Baron’s Court, All Change!

After I’d rapped for a bit, Iphgenia Baal read one of three passages I’d chosen from the book to break up my talk with a very different voice to my south London monotone. The first passage I’d picked describes Terry’s unnamed narrator having his first taste of wacky baccy. It was fantastic hearing Baron’s Court being read out loud really professionally in front of an audience – it sounded absolutely fabulous. I then talked a bit about some of the legends surrounding Terry before Iphgenia read a passage from his novel set in a jazz club where the unnamed narrator is persuaded he should get into dope dealing. After further words from me, Iphgenia wrapped up our formal – albeit quite casual – presentation of Terry’s novel by reading a section of the book that covers the junkie scene, something the narrator wants nothing to do with….

We took a few questions from the floor and since I wasn’t able to answer them all correctly, Terry filled in from the audience. One question was about why ‘Jazz’ and ‘Charge’ are capitalised throughout the book. My incorrect guess based on my own experience of publishing was that Terry’s editor thought it would make them appear more dramatic. Terry corrected me by saying that the capitalisation was his idea because Jazz and Charge are as important to the narrator as God is to other people. Speaking off-the-cuff from the audience in an event dedicated to him seemed to me like a perfect non-return to public life for Terry Taylor; he writes brilliantly about being a hipster because first and foremost he’s lived his life as one! And like all those who are truly mad for kicks and living life to the full, that’s necessitated him staying out of the spotlight!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in books, counterculture | 28 Comments »

“Baron’s Court, All Change” by Terry Taylor reissued at last!

Friday, December 2nd, 2011

If you’ve checked out the main part of this site you will probably already know that I consider Baron’s Court, All Change by Terry Taylor to be one of the greatest drugs and youth culture novels of all time. Therefore I’m very proud to have written the introduction to a fiftieth anniversary reissue of the book. For my old take on the importance of this novel in relation to the emergence of mod and the counterculture see the piece I posted on 14 February 2007. My introduction to the new edition starts like this:

“Many novels are forgotten and more or less disappear from circulation. The majority of books to suffer this fate more than deserve it. A handful of them are classics and eventually find their way to wide circulation. One of the most famous examples of this is Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont, which made little impact upon publication but became a canonical example of modernist literature after being rediscovered and championed by the surrealists. Baron’s Court, All Change by Terry Taylor is a very different type of lost classic. It created a bigger splash upon publication than Maldoror, but by the late-sixties had faded from view and most people’s memories. It provides an accurate account of the drug subculture in London at the end of the fifties. The realism and hep talk of Baron’s Court shocked many readers when it first appeared in 1961, but would have raised far fewer eyebrows in the aftermath of the summer of love. That said, it is only more recently that it has become possible to appreciate its historical significance…”

Since if you’ve any sense at all you’ll want to read Baron’s Court, there’s absolutely no point in my reproducing the whole of my introduction here! You can read it all in the reissue and you’re unlikely to lay your mits on anything else – because the original sixties hardback and paperback editions have been near impossible to get for years. The reissue is available to UK residents for £8.00 by cheque from the publisher: Ross Bradshaw, Five Leaves Publications, PO Box 8786, Nottingham, NG1 9AW: or for £9.99 by credit card at  http://tinyurl.com/taylor-barons. It will soon also be in bookshops and on Amazon. If you want to order from outside the UK, you may do best to use www.bookdepository.co.uk – since they don’t charge postage. Baron’s Court, All Change was republished on 11 November 2011. It’s a stone-to-the-bone mod classic!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in books, counterculture, drugs, literature | 22 Comments »

Murder In Notting Hill by Mark Olden (Zero Books)

Friday, September 30th, 2011

The racist murder of Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane on 17 May 1959 is the centre-point of this book, but it spins off in a lot of other directions. No one was ever convicted for the butchery but Olden makes a strong circumstantial case that a painter and decorator called Pat Digby wielded the knife that killed Cochrane. Digby denied that he was the culprit, and had he not died from a heart attack four years ago, then stringent British libel laws would have forced Olden’s book to take a very different shape to the one it has now. There is no smoking gun in this case, although this book suggests Digby’s bloody knife may still lie hidden under some Notting Hill floorboards. Olden’s text is in part a narrative of his attempts to identify the killer, and the naming of Digby represents its climax.

Murder In Notting Hill is much more than simply a true crime book, it is also a social history. There are uplifting paragraphs about the struggles of those who in the 1950s were newly arrived in London from the West Indies, and far less edifying passages about racist teenage gangs and organised fascist activists. Over the years it has been claimed by some commentators that either Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement or Colin Jordan’s White Defence League had a hand in Cochrane’s murder. Olden is dismissive of this idea and if his identification of Digby as the killer is correct, then he is almost certainly right on this score. The lives of all Notting Hill residents are portrayed as pretty grim in this paperback, so Olden hits on the fascist ideologues and a toff copper – Superintendent Ian Forbes-Leith (“The Governor in the Bowler”) – as figures from whom he can wring a little humour. Describing a fascist meeting in defence of a gang of teddy boys imprisoned for a series of extremely vicious racist attacks the year before Cochrane’s murder, Olden writes:

At a meeting at Oxford Gardens School, just off Ladbroke Grove, the campaign to free the nine young men was growing. A tall thin Welshman – rarely seen out of the same jacket and trousers – held aloft a newspaper with their grinning portraits. “Thugs. That’s what they were called,” he said. This was outrageous. “These,” he shouted, “are some of the finest faces you could wish to see in Britain.” He vowed they “must not be forgotten as they lie in prison during the best years of their lives.”… The speaker was Jeffrey Hamm. He was 43-years old, had lived in Notting Hill for the past six years and was Secretary of a far-right political party called the Union Movement.

There are laughs to be had from filthy fascists who always dress in the same clothes, and such amusements very effectively lighten the mood and prevent the reader getting bogged down in Olden’s serious and at times very depressing subject matter. Occasionally the jokes are recycled, such as the chapter heading “One Foot In The Grove”, which will be familiar to those who have read Tom Vague on Notting Hill (and I wouldn’t be surprised if Vague had filched this one-liner from an earlier source). For those that aren’t acquainted with west London and/or English idioms, The Grove refers to the area around Ladbroke Grove in Notting Hill, and Olden’s chapter heading is a play on the hackneyed phrase ‘one foot in the grave’. That said, ultimately Murder In Notting Hill makes for compelling reading because Olden deftly and very confidently walks us through his own investigation into Cochrane’s murder – as well as the failed police enquiry. The book works on one level as a whodunit, although obviously there is far more to it than that.

Murder In Notting Hill explores the long lasting detrimental effects of Cochrane’s murder on both the victim’s family and the killer (assuming, of course, Digby was the thug responsible for this repugnant act). It is also a timely reminder that neither institutional racism, police corruption, nor the old bill being in the pockets of the media, are anything new in London. Like the majority of historical works I read, Murder In Notting Hill relies a little too heavily on an established history to provide a backdrop to the main story. Olden writes well about the working class (both black and white) of Notting Hill but omits to deal with the hipsters who by the late-fifties were also an established part of the area. For example, Terry Taylor and his circle go unmentioned, despite the fact that Taylor provided the inspiration for the first person narrator of Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes.

Moving on, the dry as dust far-Right splinter groups Olden disinters are old news to anyone who is au fait with the history of post-war British fascism. Less well documented – and completely passed over by Olden – is the Spartacan movement, which was organised by a group of right-wingers associated with the angry young man literary scene; they lived together at 25 Chepstow Road in Notting Hill from the mid to the late-fifties. The Spartacans appear to have had close links to Oswald Mosley and his Union Movement. They are viciously satirised by Bernard Kops in his 1958 novel Awake For Mourning. Obviously only so much material can be included in any one book, but I was nonetheless disappointed that in sketching the backdrop to his story, Olden – like the overwhelming majority of writers working today – stuck to such a well-beaten historical track.

No author or book is perfect, and despite some slight and inevitable imperfections, Murder In Notting Hill is an impressive piece of historical detective work. That said, one of Olden’s footnotes really pissed me off:

Among the speakers at Kelso’s graveside was the Notting Hill hustler Michael de Freitas, who later re-styled himself into the revolutionary Michael X, aka Michael Abdul Malik, Britain’s supposed answer to Malcolm X. De Freitas finished up more like Charles Manson, his life spiralling into megalomania and murder in his native Trinidad, where he went to the gallows in 1975.

For all his faults – and clearly de Freitas had many – to compare him to Charles Manson is deeply obnoxious. De Freitas may have engaged in criminal behaviour but he was not a deranged maniac. Anyone who looks dispassionately at the de Freitas trial will see that it was a miscarriage of justice and he should not have been hanged on the basis of the ‘evidence’ presented in court. De Freitas may or may not have been guilty as charged, but he was not a complete nutjob like Manson.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in books, politics, True crime | 20 Comments »

Terry’s Taylor’s cult novel ‘Baron’s Court, All Change’ is a classic – official at £238!

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Copies of Terry Taylor’s 1961 novel Baron’s Court, All Change don’t come up for sale at all often but until now when they did they’ve never been particularly expensive. I have a paperback that came from an exchange stall and it cost 20p. I was looking for a hardback for about 4 years until I finally acquired one via eBay – and no one else even bid on that copy of the book. I’ve been checking the obvious online places for further copies since then (eBay, Amazon, Abe Books), and I’ve not come across a single instance of Baron’s Court being offered for sale over the past few years until now. As I write, Repton Readers are offering a copy of Barons Court on Amazon UK Marketplace for a whopping £238 plus postage.

So how does a hard-to-obtain title go from being offered for sale for a few quid to an asking price of hundreds of pounds? Obviously, it is a combination of buzz and a bookseller chancing it with a high price. Baron’s Court is a far-out drugs novel that fell through the cracks and disappeared for forty odd years – the main problem being that it was at least five years ahead of its time. That said, it only needed a handful of relatively ‘young’ hipsters to realise that the book described mod and the counterculture in very early stages of their evolution, that it was the first British novel to mention LSD, and that the author Terry Taylor had a quite incredible life story, for interest in it to rocket. Since my mother (Julia Callan-Thompson) was a friend of the author, when I started researching her life at the turn of the millennium, I came across Baron’s Court and once I’d obtained copies for myself I started talking the book up. I not only wrote about Baron’s Court, I was so knocked-out by this novel, I mailed photocopies of it to key contacts – and after receiving a Xerox from me, Andy Roberts even bigged it up in his recent history of British acid culture Albion Dreaming.

If you want to know why Baron’s Court is so hard to find,  you have to understand both publishing and the used book trade. It is the difficulty of obtaining a title like this that leads dealers to asking an exorbitant price for it. I don’t know the print run of the hardback edition of Baron’s Court, but I’d guess it would have been between two and five thousand. It seems to have generated some coverage, but not massive interest – after it was published Terry Taylor was invited to do some reviewing, but the paperback rights didn’t immediately sell. Taylor’s follow-up, which drew more explicitly on the literary experimentalism of figures like William Burroughs, was rejected by his publisher. So Taylor has been to date a one-shot novelist, and was thus unable to draw readers to his earlier book through the publication of further tomes.

The publication of a Baron’s Court paperback four long years after the appearance of the MacGibbon & Kee hardcover edition is probably best explained by the burgeoning drug culture. By 1965 ‘with-it’ publishers were aware of a growing interest in drugs and casting about for books dealing with the subject. The Baron’s Court paperback was published by Four Square (later New English Library) who by the late sixties/early seventies did first printings of their books in runs of 20,000 and they only reprinted if this first run sold quickly (see my interview with NEL editor Laurence James as an example of background research I’ve done in this ares). If we assume the company worked in the same way in the mid-sixties, then 20,000 seems a reasonable guess for the print run of Baron’s Court in paperback. We can conclude that in its two editions to date possibly as many as 25,000 copies of Baron’s Court were printed. Most of them will now be destroyed. I don’t know exactly how the book sold, but since it clearly wasn’t like ‘hot cakes’ (if it had there would have been more reprints), it is possible some copies were pulped by one or both of the publishers. I have yet to properly determine the initial reception of the book, and if anyone can point me in the direction of contemporary reviews I would be grateful.

Mass market paperbacks put out by companies like Four Square are cheaply made – perfect bound rather than sewn and printed on pulp papers that deteriorate quickly – after being read a few times this type of book tends to fall apart and get thrown away. Although the paperback will have been printed in a far bigger run than the hardback, my guess would be that far fewer copies of it survive than of the first edition. That said, I wouldn’t be particularly optimistic about many copies of the first edition surviving either! It is likely the majority of hardbacks sales would have been to libraries, and library books are often roughly handled and suffer damage – before being either sold off or thrown away at the end of their lending life.

But what about those copies of Baron’s Court that were offered to secondhand dealers over the years? Since the book had no buzz about it until recently, few dealers would have wanted to buy copies even if they had recognised the title or author (and very few would have done so); and if they did acquire copies in job lots of books, they may have simply thrown them away or used them for fuel. Owners of copies of Baron’s Court who were unable to sell them to dealers may have treated this once hard-to-sell tome in an equally caviler fashion. Precisely because until recently there has been little to no market for Baron’s Court as a novel, the overwhelming majority of copies will have been destroyed.

Now there is some buzz about Terry Taylor and Baron’s Court, the remaining copies of the book have a greater potential value than many other out-of-print titles precisely because its earlier lack of popularity makes it rare. Baron’s Court is also, without a shadow of a doubt, not only a cracking good read but of considerable historical significance. So fingers-crossed that some clued-up publisher puts it back in print, and rather than having to shell out hundreds of pounds for a used copy, you can buy it new for roughly the same price as any other mass market tome. And if there are any interested publishers out there, I’d be happy to put them in touch with the author who still controls the rights….

Terry Taylor’s story is one with a relatively happy ending for those who like to believe fairy tales about ‘literary immortality’, but don’t let it blind you to the fact that the vast bulk of books published every year are very quickly forgotten!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in books, counterculture | 24 Comments »

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