London Calling (19 page)

Pauline Boty was born 5 March 1938 in Carshalton, Surrey, and did four years at Wimbledon School of Art followed by three
at the RCA. In common with many other art school girls, Boty modelled herself on Bardot, whose naked scene in
Doctor at Sea
and free spirit as portrayed in
And God Created Woman
helped usher in the sixties. (Even the title of the latter was censored in Britain, where the film was called
And Woman… Was Created.
) The architect Edward Jones, who knew Boty in the late 1950s, said: ‘She looked just like Bardot, with a few extra pounds
– charming, direct and very flirtatious. There were other beautiful girls who could paint at the time, but none who were quite
as wonderful as her.’ Peter Blake was one of many failed suitors.

The autumn 1959 term at the RA featured David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips, Allen Jones and Ron Kitaj and it included
Pauline Boty, though she was supposed to be in the stained-glass department. Painting had been her first choice, but she had
been advised to take the stained-glass course instead as painting was too competitive. Less than a third of the painting students
were women, even though they won more than half the firsts. She was
ahead of them and left the RA in 1961 when she turned to painting full-time. She exhibited at the A I A Gallery at 15 Lisle
Street and the show,
Blake Boty Porter Reeve
(Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, Christine Porter, Geoffrey Reeve), can probably claim to be the first pop art exhibition in the
world. It opened on 30 November 1961 and ran until the end of the year. Like many of the pop artists (Blake, Jones), she used
the imagery of female glamour and pin-ups, but as a woman she looked at these representations in a different way. Her use
of them was joyful, exuberant, with none of the dull masturbatory ‘male gaze’ of the male pop artists. She used them to celebrate
her own sexuality, to seize control of them, and was one of the first, if not
the
first, to explore this area. Her work was playful, and sometimes she was accused of triviality, but pictures such as
It
’
s a Man
’
s World
, an early feminist critique of both male dominance and the Vietnam War, show that her work operated on a number of levels.
She painted Brigitte Bardot, Monica Vitti and Marilyn Monroe as powerful women, not sex toys; and as Alice Rawsthorn points
out, in her 1963 portrait of Marilyn Monroe,
The Only Blonde in the World
: ‘The smiling Monroe strides confidently across the canvas as a strong, vibrant woman – much as Boty is remembered by her
friends.’

She was not only commenting on the inchoate pop scene but played an active part in it: she and her partner, Derek Boshier,
were chosen as dancers on the TV pop series
Ready Steady Go!
, prompting her to use the presenter Cathy McGowan as the subject for a painting. And as an actress she flirted with Michael
Caine in
Alfie
(though she lost out to Julie Christie for the lead in
Darling
) and starred in television plays and on the stage at the Royal Court Theatre. When Ken Russell made
Pop Goes the Easel
, his 1962 BBC
Monitor
documentary on four young pop painters – Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips and Pauline Boty – it was Boty that the
camera lingered on, and not just because of her extraordinary beauty; she was the most playful, the most experimental, the
one most prepared to enter Russell’s vision and consequently appears pursued by a sinister wheelchair-bound villain, running
down endless curving corridors and in a wrestling match with the other three artists. Her handling of bright pop colours and
iconic sixties imagery made her the purest, and perhaps the best, of the British pop artists of the time. In June 1963 she
married Clive Goodwin, left-wing activist, actor, writer and literary agent. Their flat in Cromwell Road became a fashionable
salon for the early sixties scene where you could meet everyone from Harold Pinter to Bob Dylan. Sadly, her time was brief
and she died of a rare form of cancer in 1966 at the age of twenty-eight. One of her brothers stored her canvases in his barn
and her career was almost forgotten until the curator David Mellor
tracked them down and exhibited them in his
The Sixties Art Scene in London
show at the Barbican in 1993.

The musical accompaniment to the Anti-Uglies marches was provided by the Alberts, in one line-up or another; they were also
an indispensable element in the early C N D Aldermaston marches which would have been incomplete without their tuba and their
skinny whippet. The core of the Alberts consisted of the painter and sculptor Bruce Lacey, and the brothers Tony and Dougie
Gray. When the occasion called for it, they would assemble the Massed Alberts, which looked like a reunion of Boer War veterans
and consisted of many of the musicians who later became the Temperance Seven. They were a major influence on the Bonzo Dog
Doo-Dah Band. The Boer War was a subject of special interest to them and they ended one of their numbers, ‘Goodbye Dolly Grey’,
with an explosion and the delighted scream: ‘Ladysmith has been relieved!’, an incident from the year 1900. They dressed in
Victorian clothes with capes and deer stalkers and appeared onstage accompanied by a variety of props – penny-farthing bicycles,
horns and hooters, as well as tubas and euphoniums and other Victorian instrumentation.

Bruce Lacey studied at Hornsey Art College and then the Royal College of Art, where he arrived at a college dance in 1952
with a dummy dance partner; her feet were attached to his shoes. As an encore he did a trapeze act with another puppet. After
the RA he worked on special effects and props for both the
Goon Show
and for Michael Bentine’s
It
’
s a Square World.
The Alberts later appeared on several of Spike Milligan’s television series, and when the BBC launched its second television
channel, the Alberts had their own show, called
The Alberts
’
Channel Too
. The highlight of their career was probably their theatrical extravaganza,
An Evening of British Rubbish
, which also featured Joyce Grant and the dry wit of Ivor Cutler. They had a residency at Peter Cook’s Establishment Club,
where they presented a Dadaist quiz show. Lacey was the question master. The competitor was asked a question, and then immediately
a bucket of whitewash was poured over his head. After wiping his eyes and mouth the competitor asked: ‘Could you repeat the
question, please?’ Theirs was a particularly British form of surrealist anarchism.

In 1955 Lacey listed the contents of his attic as:

1 elephant’s tooth, 1 elephant’s toenail, 1 elephant’s mating horn, 8 magic lanterns, 2 whale’s ear drums (left and right),
9 family photograph albums, 3 stereoscopes, 1 boy’s head (wax skin, glass eyes, human hair – full size), 2 moustache cups,
1 boarskin complete with head, 1 Prof. King’s Perpetual
Calendar (0 BC – AD 3,000), 1 early Admiral Fitzroy’s barometer (with atmospherical anecdotes), 1 painting of my grandfather
(on my mother’s side), 2 Edison-Bell photographs (one large, one small), 1,006 magic lantern slides, 56 statues, figures and
carvings, 1 harmonium, 14 one-string fiddles, banjoes, guitars, mandolins, pianos, etc., 263 miscellaneous, 19 weapons, 1
fireman’s helmet, 1 American Civil War uniform, 5 bowler hats, 4 silk top hats, 1 police-man’s helmet (genuine), 1 admiral’s
cocked hat.
³¹

Bruce had a parallel career as an artist; Victor Musgrave exhibited his robots at Gallery One, including one that sang ‘I’m
Forever Blowing Bubbles’ and blew bubbles, a precursor to David Medalla’s bubble machines. Another was ‘The Womanizer’, now
owned by the Tate, which was inspired by ‘wondering what it would be like to be a hermaphrodite and make love to myself. It
had six breasts and rubber gloves that inflated every 30 seconds’. He was described as a neo-Dadaist by the critics, ‘which
surprised me because I didn’t know what Dada was. At the Royal College, art history had stopped with the Impressionists.’
He later said he was glad when the term ‘performance art’ was invented, ‘because it finally explained what I’d been doing
all my life’. One 1964 robot was called ‘Old Money Bags’ and was triggered by shouting at it. Lacey used to bellow ‘Get to
work, you bastard’ and the cogwheels would spring into action, moving two-shilling pieces through the ‘heart’ like white blood
corpuscles. This same year he appeared as Paul McCartney’s gardener in the 1964 Beatles film
Help!
where he trims the small grass lawn inside the Beatles’ house using nothing but two pairs of clockwork chattering teeth.
In his 1968
Cybernetic Serendipity
show at the ICA, Lacey exhibited his sex simulator, a bit like the orgasm machine in Roger Vadim’s
Barbarella
, made the same year. It was a participatory work: the viewer climbed into a sort of capsule where they were rocked and tilted
like a fairground ride while being shown what Lacey called: ‘non-specific erotic images. Meanwhile, through a sheet of red
rubber, rollers ran over your breasts and a soft thing would fall into your crotch and vibrate.’
³²
Apparently women liked it more than men, though many men were willing to give it a try, including Lord Snowdon, then married
to Princess Margaret.

The skewed humour of the Alberts and Bruce Lacey in which elements of Britain’s imperial past are collaged in a kind of ferocious
surrealist camp critique of Victorian values paralleled that of the Goons. It was a demystification of the imagery of the
State: the uniforms, the medals, the military bands, the hypocrisy, the repressed rage, the colonial attitudes of superiority
and self-righteousness. It was the spirit of the sixties being given form.
Its influence was considerable, from the Monty Python crew to the Bonzo Dog Band to young married couples buying a gramophone
with a huge horn and mounting enamelled Victorian advertisements on their living room walls. It became a major element in
the pop art of Peter Blake, with his paintings of Victorian boxers, and the Union Jack jacket worn by the Who’s Pete Townshend.
Many of the stereotypical images have since been wittily recycled by Mike Myers in his Austin Powers films.

Viewed as a social phenomenon, the current craze for Rock and Roll material is one of the most terrifying things ever to have
happened to popular music… It is a monstrous threat, both to the moral acceptance and the artistic emancipation of jazz.
Let us oppose it to the end.

STEVE RACE
,
Melody Maker
, 5 May 1956

In October 1955, Mary Quant, her boyfriend, later husband, Alexander Plunket Greene, and Archie McNair, a former solicitor
turned photographer, opened a dress shop called Bazaar on the King’s Road, Chelsea. Using £5,000 that Plunket Greene had inherited
on his twenty-first birthday and money put up by McNair, they bought a lease on Markham House, next door to the Markham Arms,
intending to use the basement for an upmarket jazz club, the ground floor for the shop, and the rooms above as workshops.
Archie McNair had recently opened Fantasie, London’s second ever coffee bar, at 128 King’s Road, where he also lived and ran
his photographic studio. Among his team of photographers was Anthony Armstrong-Jones, who later married Princess Margaret.
After the opening of Bazaar, Quant moved from her bedsit in Oakley Street to rooms above the Fantasie, where she both lived
and worked. Her living space was restricted because they had to hire more and more people to work the sewing machines providing
clothing for the shop, which was an immediate success. Quant’s designs were revolutionary in terms of fashion, from her short
hem-lines to her use of bright colours she ran contrary to the fixed ideas of the haute couture fashion houses. Quant arrived
at a time when English girls left school and dressed like their mother. As George Melly put it: ‘Only tarts and homosexuals
wore clothes which reflected what they
were
.’
¹
Quant chucked all the accessories in the dustbin and enabled young women to look young. Away went the white gloves and the
hat and the matching bag and shoes. She was a precursor of sixties ideas and attitudes.

Bazaar’s window displays caused astonishment in the King’s Road. They
would do anything to attract attention, including hanging the mannequins upside down. Once they filled the window entirely
with empty milk bottles and the back of a departing tailor’s dummy with a sign saying ‘Gone Fishing’, and another time re-created
Gerard de Nerval taking his pet lobster for a walk on a gold chain.

Though Alexander and Mary had decided not to join McNair in his coffee bar venture – the new coffee bar craze seemed like
too much of a fad – they still spent much of their time socializing there because, as Mary revealed: ‘Some nights at the Fantasie
the espresso coffee was laced with vodka.’ The trio were unable to get an entertainment licence for a jazz club in the basement
of Bazaar so instead they opened a restaurant, named Alexander’s, after the proprietor. Groundbreaking like the shop, this
was a precursor of the sixties bistros, with a relaxed friendly atmosphere, totally unlike the fussy formal restaurants of
the period. Often the customers finished up at midnight upstairs in Bazaar drinking brandy. McNair was experienced in the
catering trade and the combination of the restaurant and dress shop was a great success, so much so that they kept running
out of stock. One woman grabbed a dress from Quant as she carried new supplies down the street, following her into Bazaar
to pay for it without even trying it on. Bazaar, Alexander’s, the Fantasie and the Markham Arms became the gathering points
for the Chelsea Set. The Fantasie features in Elizabeth Russell’s wonderful surreal movie
Food for a Blush
, which also features a brief appearance by Colin Wilson. One gets a glimpse of the Chelsea scene before the chain stores
and high prices, when it was still a haven for artists and young people and had an almost village atmosphere.