London Calling (23 page)

New bands were moving to town and these clubs were their stamping ground. Some were more bohemian than others. One R&B band,
the Rolling Stones, started their London life living in total squalor, but it was this contrast with their middle-class upbringings
that helped to bond them together as a group. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones moved to 102 Edith Grove, sw10,
in 1962. They had two rooms on the middle floor of the house, the rent paid for by Brian’s job at Whiteley’s department store
on Queensway. It was at Edith Grove that the Stones encountered the legendary Phelge, whose name they appropriated for their
song-writing pseudonym, Nanker-Phelge. Keith:

You would walk into this pad and he would be standing at the top of the stairs, completely nude except for his underpants,
which would be
filthy
, on top of his head, and he’d be spitting at you. It wasn’t a thing to get mad about, you’d just collapse laughing. Covered
in spit, you’d collapse laughing.
⁸

Whiteley’s eventually fired Brian for stealing and conditions at Edith Grove deteriorated rapidly. The kitchen smelled so
much that they decided to seal it off and taped the door shut with gaffer tape; there was never anything to eat or drink in
there anyway, not even tea, coffee or sugar. Mick and Keith moved to Mapesbury Road in September 1963 to share a flat with
their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, and Brian moved in with his girlfriend in Windsor.

In 1965, Brian moved to Elm Park Lane, a mews off Chester Street, sw3, and lived there for about two years. Keith often stayed
there, having no place of his own, and divided his time between Brian’s spare room and Mick’s. John Lennon was one of the
many visitors to the place and the machismo and misogyny of Jones and Lennon combined was sometimes so intolerable that, in
order not to hear it, John’s wife Cynthia would lock herself in the lavatory until it was time to leave.

In the early sixties London was also dotted with small private gay clubs: the Calabash in Fulham, run by the photographer
Leon Maybank, was popular with film stars. Businessmen favoured the Festival off St Martin’s Lane in Covent Garden because
they had their own private key, like the Chelsea Arts Club, so they didn’t have to wait outside and be seen entering. The
Rockingham Club was favoured by old Etonians like the art dealer Robert Fraser. It had dancing on Sunday evenings but you
had to bring a female to partner you. The A&B in Soho was predominantly filled with show business people; it stood for Arts
and Battledress, having been started during the war when many patrons were in uniform. But because homosexuality was still
illegal, and punishable by a long prison sentence, most gays preferred the privacy of private homes. Simon Napier-Bell wrote:
‘As far as the music business went, the centre of the universe was Lionel Bart’s house in Reece Mews.’
⁹

Because Britain still had an official theatre censor, the Lord Chamberlain, who had to approve all scripts and had the power
to make changes before they could be performed, the only way experimental improvisational theatre could be staged was in
a private club. One of the earliest experimental spaces in London was In-Stage, started in 1958 by the American director Charles
Marowitz, who persuaded Peter Carpenter of the British Drama League to allow him to convert a tiny studio at the top of their
building on Fitzroy Square into an experimental theatre. The room seated about fifty. The audience gathered in an ante-room
on the floor below, where Marowitz’s girlfriend, Gillian Watt, served them tea and biscuits. When the actors were ready, the
audience climbed, single file, up the steep narrow staircase to the rooftop studio. There was no admission charge and the
actors were not paid, but Gillian stood at the bottom of the staircase holding a wicker basket as the audience left and some
would drop coins into it. On good nights there might even be notes and on one remarkable occasion someone donated a 50-pound
note, the first they’d ever seen. They mounted the British premiere of Samuel Beckett’s
Act Without Words II
, William Saroyan’s
The Cave Dwellers
and Arthur
Miller’s
The Man Who Had All the Luck
. Marowitz: ‘The fare was remorselessly off-beat and highbrow; and before long it became known throughout London that a night
at the In-Stage would be oddball, idiosyncratic and different.’
¹⁰
Its regular audiences were the forerunners of the public who were to support experimental drama a decade later at the Roundhouse,
the Soho Poly, the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre, the Arts Lab and so on.
¹¹

When Marowitz arrived in London in 1956 he found it poverty-stricken and beaten down, still recovering from the war, but with
the advent of the sixties London changed out of all recognition. He found there were so many new places opening up, so many
new cuisines to try out, new people to meet arriving from all over the world, so many new ideas, and artifacts and trends
to assimilate, that:

it was if a small but dynamic segment of the population had invited the entire nation to a party and, because it was noisy
and precluded the possibility of getting any sleep, neighbours felt obliged to leave the sedateness of their own homes and
join in. Those who participated got an enormous charge out of the sixties; the po-faced grumps who shut their windows and
pulled down the blinds never quite realised what they missed.
¹²

One thing they missed was Britain’s first happening. At the Edinburgh Drama Conference at the MacEwan Hall, organized by the
publisher John Calder in 1962, Ken Dewey, Charles Marowitz and Mark Boyle enlivened a tedious and boring conference with a
happening. Although there were many different elements to the nine-minute event, the one the papers naturally seized upon
was the quick glimpse the audience got of a nude model – Anna Kesselaar – being whisked across the organ loft on a wheeled
spotlight stand. As Adrian Henri later pointed out: ‘Ever since then, the Great British Public has associated happenings with
naked ladies.’ It had the intended effect: fusty Edinburgh society was outraged and both Calder and Kesselaar were charged
with various offences against public decency, which were later dismissed. Naturally, after this, happenings spread like wildfire.

In the fifties and early sixties, I and all my friends listened to Radio Luxembourg or the American Forces Network in Frankfurt,
even though Luxembourg faded out, sometimes for minutes at a time, depending on weather conditions. There was no other way
of hearing rock ’n’ roll or R&B. Britain has no guaranteed freedom of speech and this applies particularly to the airwaves.
The government has always retained complete control over who broadcasts what: the chairman of the BBC is appointed by the
government, making
it essentially a branch of the civil service, though it likes to pretend it is independent (until someone criticizes the government
too much; then heads roll). The commercial stations toe the line because they want their licences renewed. The BBC monopoly
prevailed until the invention of the transistor radio. In 1960, less than 4 per cent of cars had radios but then transistors
made music portable with transistor sets and cheap car radios. The BBC, however, made no adjustment to its programming.
This is why it was a welcome breath of fresh air when on Easter Sunday, 1964, tens of thousands of people tuned in to hear
Chris Moore and Simon Dee announce: ‘This is Radio Caroline on 199, your all-day music station.’ BBC Radio’s monopoly was
shattered and finally Britain had some music worth listening too. Within a matter of weeks Caroline had 7 million listeners.
Until then, most young people had ignored the BBC altogether as it made no effort to cater to their needs.

The British public had always had to do this; before the war even though they were forced to pay for the BBC, the majority
of listeners tuned in to one of the Continental stations: Radio Lyon or Normandy (home of Captain Plugge, whom we visit later),
Radio Athlone, Radio Méditerranée and of course Radio Luxembourg. Despite the fact that the BBC could be heard loud and clear
across the Continent, to listen to Continental stations in Britain was regarded as an affront. The government pressurized
British newspapers not to print programme details of overseas stations, leaned on royalty organizations to overcharge them
for playing copyright material, and suggested, subtly, that the BBC should not employ any artist or presenter who had worked
on an English-language Continental station. In spite of all this, by 1938 the BBC only had 35 per cent of the Sunday listening
audience – radio prime time – whereas Radio Luxembourg had 45 per cent, and the others divided up the rest. The war put an
end to all this, of course, but after the war Radio Luxembourg staged a strong comeback, and probably had as many listeners
as the BBC. The problem was that Luxembourg leased blocks of time to the major record companies, who only played their own
releases, which were often dire. There was no room for independents, so no experimental or new music was played. Nonetheless,
Luxembourg was hugely popular; anything rather than listen to the BBC.

The world of BBC radio producers consisted of light entertainment, mindless pap for the masses, and proper classical music
for the middle classes who ran the country. Programmes for the former divided into
Housewives
’
Choice
for women,
Music While You Work
for factory workers, largely men, and
Children
’
s Favourites
. The Northern Dance Orchestra, the N D O, played soulless, pathetic versions of popular hits when what the public wanted
to
hear was the originals by Elvis Presley, Fats Domino or Little Richard. To hear one of the BBC orchestras – they had a number
– grinding their way through ‘Tutti Frutti’ was enough to make you vomit. To listen to the Shadows themselves play their hits
you had to sit first through ‘Nellie the Elephant’ and ‘The Runaway Train’ on
Children
’
s Club
. The idea that teenage music was serious never occurred to the grey suits who ran the corporation. When the penny finally
dropped, they found kindly patronizing-uncle types to act as comperes on
Saturday Club
as if they were running a youth club.

But then came the pirates. Ronan O’Rahilly found five city millionaires to back him in buying a ship, and hiring engineers,
catering staff and two ten-kilowatt transmitters at £50,000 apiece. In launching Radio Caroline he described himself as being
‘part of a revolution… against the establishment’, and though it was an entirely commercial venture, he was.
¹³

Seeing his success, a second ship, Radio Atlanta, opened up, mooring close to O’Rahilly’s ship. He started up a second ship
off Ramsey in the Isle of Man to reach audiences in Liverpool and Manchester. Then came Radio London, a well-financed American
commercial operation, and a whole fleet of imitators: Radio Britain, Radio King, Radio Victor, Radio England, Radio 227, Radio
270 and Radio 390, the ‘easy listening’ pirate. Not to be outdone, Screaming Lord Sutch established himself on an abandoned
fort in the Thames estuary and broadcast rock ’n’ roll interspersed with readings from
Lady Chatterley
’
s Lover
. They created an excitement about pop music that had not previously existed in Britain, helped, of course, by the fact that
the music was coming from reconditioned boats, bobbing up and down outside British territorial waters, in storms and inclement
weather. Listeners felt that the music must be important if people were prepared to put up with conditions like that to broadcast
it. Once outside the three-mile territorial limit, the boats were in international waters, subject only to the laws of the
country in which they were registered. Panama had no laws which forbade broadcasting.

The British establishment reacted in an entirely predictable manner. The sensible thing to have done would have been to recognize
that the BBC had failed miserably in providing for this massive audience and to issue broadcasting licences to the pirates
and let them get on with it. The money could have been used to fund more operas and live cricket matches, lectures by their
cronies, and all the stuff the BBC liked. But the freedom to broadcast is not recognized in Britain, unlike the USA, so
the government introduced new laws to close them down; but not immediately. Even they could see that this would be unpopular
with the voters, a third of whom, 20 million people, were tuned in to the pirates. They needed to somehow discredit the romantic
pirate image they had and erode public support. The Radio London D J Dave Cash said years later: ‘they could not act against
us… They needed something heavy like drugs or murder, we gave them murder.’

David (Screaming Lord) Sutch sold his Radio Sutch operation on the sea fort to his manager, Reg Calvert, who changed the name
to Radio City. As the result of some business disagreement, a Major Oliver Smedley occupied Calvert’s fort and the radio station.
Calvert went round to Smedley’s house in London and attacked him, throwing a heavy stone ornament at his head. Smedley produced
a shotgun and killed him. It was the chance the government were looking for. They had just been voted in for a five-year stretch
and the news of the murder portrayed the pirates not as romantic buccaneers but as murderous gangsters. The 1967 Marine Broadcasting
Offences Act was quickly pushed through and became law on 14 August, making it illegal to supply, advertise or in any way
aid the pirates, depriving them of staff, supplies and income. One by one they began closing down. The BBC launched its own
watered-down pop channel complete with jolly station-I D jingles which they had to have recorded in America as they were incapable
of making anything like that themselves. Many of the now unemployed D Js were forced to work for ‘auntie’.

Ronan O’Rahilly, however, did not give up. In a long and convoluted series of operations, he reopened Radio Caroline with
Swiss backing as Radio North Sea International. The Postmaster General, John Stonehouse, reacted by jamming their signal,
just as the Russians jammed the BBC. Ronan O’Rahilly had thoroughly enraged the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, over the
years, and at one meeting he had screamed at O’Rahilly, telling him that he was ‘finished’. This was a foolish move because
the Labour Party had forgotten its own new legislation, which enabled young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one
to vote. They constituted a major percentage of the 20 million listeners who had been deprived of their music by the arrogance
of the Labour politicians. When the next election came around, O’Rahilly sent battle buses into all Labour marginal constituencies
and pasted up tens of thousands of anti-Labour posters. He instigated a rolling telephone campaign to recruit anti-Labour
voters and got supporters to jam the phone lines into Labour HQ with hoax calls. The Labour Party had been confident of an
easy victory but instead they were voted out. Shortly afterwards, O’Rahilly accidentally bumped into Ted Short, a Labour politician
on the street. Short recognized him and asked, simply: ‘Why did you do it?’