London Calling (30 page)

All the objects in the show were either white or transparent, with one exception,
Add Colour Painting,
1966, where the viewer was allowed one colour to add to the painting. A white chair was provided with the painting to hold
the paints and brushes.
Apple
consisted of an apple on a transparent perspex stand and the catalogue featured a photograph of John Dunbar eating it; the
apple was replaced daily. The show also contained a 1964 piece called
Pointedness
consisting of a small sphere on a perspex stand. The most popular piece in the show with the public was an all-white chess
set – all the pieces, and all the squares on the board were white – set on a white table with two white chairs. The actress
Sharon Tate and film director Roman Polanski visited the show several times, late at night after an evening at the Scotch,
to play long games of white chess, but they did not buy the piece.

One of the most acclaimed shows at Indica was by Mark Boyle – the pieces were all jointly made by him and Joan Hills but the
male-dominated art world was not yet ready for a husband and wife team. Boyle was then known largely for his happenings and
light shows and few people had seen his large-scale ‘paintings’. Mark and Joan gave their first public performance of their
light projections in a show called
Suddenly Last Supper
in 1964. They invited a group of friends to their flat at 114 Queensgate, for a meal and a film show. Guests included Pauline
Boty, Michael and Sarah White, Christopher Logue, Clive Goodwin, Derek Boshier and Jo Cruikshank. Mark Boyle and Joan Hills:
‘The landlord hated us working there and hated our pictures, but we invited about 60 people who had been to our place and
knew what it meant to us, both as a home and a studio.’
⁵
After the meal Mark told his guests that a film called
Ends
would be shown in the large basement room which, aside from the 16mm projector, was empty. The theme of the film show was
destruction and creation, birth and death. At one point a slide of Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus
was shown projected on to the nude body of a woman. The slide was allowed to burn in the projector and through the disintegrating
image there emerged a real woman. Most of
Ends
turned out to be just that,
lengths of film retrieved from the waste bins of the Wardour Street cutting rooms, spliced together in random order and accompanied
by a soundtrack of distant traffic. It lasted twenty minutes, just long enough for the novelty to wear off and the audience
to begin thinking about another drink.

Someone turned on the light and the audience trooped back upstairs. Christopher Logue: ‘However, while we had been watching,
without making a sound, the Boyles had moved. Chairs, tables, sideboards, carpets, beds, kitchen equipment, pictures, books,
crockery, clothes, television, drinks and glasses – all gone, the house empty, the front door open, the keys in the lock.’
⁶
The bewildered audience found themselves in a dark empty flat; the Boyle family had moved and taken all traces of their life
there with them. A member of the audience recounted: ‘We were left alone, a group of self-conscious strangers, without anybody
left to say goodbye to or thank for an extraordinary evening.’
⁷
The Boyles had been evicted, and had used the occasion to create a happening.

At one 1965 event at the Theatre Royal in Stratford East, Mark asked the audience in the stalls to come up on to the stage
through the side door, then raised the curtain and left them there facing the audience surrounded by stage props and costumes.
They had twenty minutes to do what they wanted, though most were too self-conscious to perform. He got better results with
an event at the ICA on Dover Street. The room was darkened, then Boyle shouted through a microphone that if anyone wanted
an event they would have to do it themselves. Then some spotlights were turned on to illuminate various props. This time the
audience reacted immediately: they bounced about on the trampoline, danced with the ballet dancers, honked and banged away
on an assortment of plastic instruments and attacked the piano. The piano became the centre of the liveliest activity and
by the end of the event it had been smashed and rebuilt several times to create an extraordinary sound machine. The audience
were also given control of the lighting, including slide and movie projectors. The audience made their own film of the event
and in the end wrote a press release describing their work.
⁸

The Boyles’ best-known work was
Journey to the Surface of the Earth
,
⁹
a series begun in 1964 that includes many different projects, among them the
London Series
, the beautiful
Tidal Series
made from impressions made by the tide on Camber Sands on the Sussex coast, the
Thaw Series
, the
Japan Series
and the Boyle Family’s endless lifelong project, the
World Series
. In each case random-selection techniques were used to isolate a rectangle of the Earth’s surface. The
World Series
was launched at the ICA in 1969, when it was expected to take twenty-five years to complete. A 13-foot-wide map of the
world was displayed on the wall and members of the public were blindfolded and given darts to throw at it. The Boyles’ stated
intention was to visit 1,000 of these randomly selected sites. A larger-scale map was then obtained of each area indicated
by a dart and a second series of darts thrown in order to pinpoint an exact location. Mark, Joan and their children, Sebastian
and Georgia, then travelled to each site and selected a six-feet-square at random by throwing a large set-square. This way
the artists became ‘presenters’ of our earthly environment as they had no subjective say over which segment of the planet
was going to be chosen as representative of the whole, what they called ‘motiveless appraisal’. The presentation of the site
was then constructed by using photographic and film records, samples collected from the site, by collecting live specimens,
plants and seeds, digging and taking surface casts in Epikote resin. When the site was beneath the sea, as many inevitably
were, surface studies were to be made using film and, where possible, surface coatings of the seabed, though many of the sea-sites
were obviously non-starters, such as the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
¹⁰
This project was obviously impossible to realize, but impressions have been taken from a surprisingly large number of locations:
they braved the heat and dust of the Australian Outback, avoided becoming road-kill on a four-lane highway in New York, and
survived the sub-zero temperatures of the Vesterålen Islands off the Norwegian coast. The most dangerous work was to take
a cast of the surface of the Negev Desert while Israeli tanks swerved around them.

Making a perfect copy of a location, including whatever objects are littering it, is virtually impossible, just as it is impossible
to prevent some elements of subjective selection creeping in. In some cases they removed the flattened tin-cans, pebbles,
cigarette ends, small stones and dust and used the actual objects, incorporating part of the location in their piece, thus
changing the location itself. They worked mostly in fibreglass and painted resin, using a method so secret that they have
been known to request that security cameras be turned off during certain stages of installation in a gallery. They always
achieve their aim: to make the observer look closely at something they have never examined or noticed before: broken tiles,
a patch of rippled sand, a heap of twisted rusted metal:

We want to see if it’s possible for an individual to free himself from his conditioning and prejudice. To see if its possible
for us to look at the world or a small part of it, without being reminded consciously or unconsciously of myths and legends,
art out of the past or present, art and myths of other cultures. We also want to be able to look at anything without discovering
in it our mothers’
womb, our lovers’ thighs, the possibility of handsome profit or even the makings of an effective work of art. We don’t want
to find in it memories of places where we suffered joy and anguish or tenderness or laughter. We want to see without motive
and without reminiscence this cliff, this street, this field, this rock, this earth.
¹¹

In the course of assembling the stock for Indica Books in the basement of Peter Asher’s family house I got to know Paul McCartney.
He often visited my flat, which was five minutes’ walk from Wimpole Street, and borrowed copies of
Big Table
,
Evergreen Review
and other magazines of experimental literature. One evening he suggested that we should do the same thing for sound; instead
of a magazine, we should issue a record each month containing new poems, rehearsals or demo tracks by bands, the interesting
bits from conversations, collage and cut-up tapes we had made, and so on. It seemed a brilliant idea; the Beatles had the
organization in place to press and distribute such a magazine through NEM S and EMI, their management and record companies.
What was needed was a recording studio so that AMM, or the latest R&B band, or a visiting blues singer, could just drop by
and cut a few tracks. There were very few independent studios in London at this time – unlike the USA – and even poorly
equipped ones were expensive. Paul decided that, as it only needed to have the most basic facilities, we could set up our
own. This gave rise to two problems: where to put it and who was going to operate it?

34 Montagu Square had been bought by Ringo in 1964 but before long so many fans knew where he lived that he moved to Weybridge
in the stockbroker belt. The flat consisted of the ground and lower ground floors of a converted elegant 1820s town house.
The ground floor master bedroom was white-carpeted with grey, watered silk wallpaper and had an en suite bathroom with a pink
sunken bath. The panelled downstairs bedroom had its original fireplace and access to a small outside courtyard. The downstairs
bathroom had two entrances, one from the kitchen and the other off the dressing room. Paul McCartney rented the flat from
Ringo in the autumn of 1965 and used the downstairs bedroom as an experimental recording studio. It happened that Ian Sommerville
had recently moved out of William Burroughs’s flat and needed somewhere to live. Ian was a mathematician and knew about tape
recorders; he was the one who had first turned everyone on to the Philips cassette machine when it was put on the market.
With Ian actually living in the flat, he would be on the spot whenever anyone wanted to record a few tracks.

Paul authorized the purchase of a pair of Revox A77s, a selection of microphones, stands, speakers, tape and editing equipment.
Ian and his boyfriend Alan moved in and set up in the basement living room. In practice no-one knew how to contact Ian and
so the only real use of the studio was by William Burroughs, who conducted a number of stereo experiments and cutups there,
and by Paul McCartney, who made all the early demos of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ there using Ian as tape-op. Many evenings were spent
with people such as John Dunbar, Peter Asher, Paul and myself, banging on assorted objects with echo turned on full, but it
hardly justified the studio. In the end Paul gave one of the Revoxes and the speakers to Ian and returned the keys to Ringo.

After this, in September 1966, Ringo rented the flat to Chas Chandler and Jimi Hendrix. Jimi and Cathy Etchingham took the
downstairs bedroom, where they had tremendous rows, with much plate throwing and screaming, resulting in complaints from the
neighbours. The party for Chas Chandler’s twenty-eighth birthday on 18 December got so out of hand that the next day Ringo
had to ask them all to vacate. One of the many incidents that night involved the large Christmas tree falling on Bill Wyman
and his girlfriend, who were sitting beneath it. Ringo’s next tenants were John and Yoko when John moved out of his house
in Weybridge after Cynthia discovered him with Yoko. They were busted in Montagu Square on 18 October 1968 for pot, having
hidden or disposed of the heroin. Finally the Portman Estate, owners of the ground lease, had had enough and Ringo was told
to either sell his lease or forfeit it. He sold it. As the site of so much cultural activity the building deserves a blue
plaque.

I had brought with me from America a quantity of L S D, about half a gram, or enough for 5000 sessions.

MICHAEL HOLLINGSHEAD
,
The Man Who Turned On the World
¹

The Scene was the prototype early-sixties mod club, the model for dozens more that sprang up in the suburbs and other towns.
The Scene, in Ham Yard, Soho, had been the site of Club Eleven until 1950, when it transformed into Cy Laurie’s jazz club,
the first club to hold Sunday afternoon record sessions; people sat on cushions or the floor of the large room and listened
to American blues and British pop. During the day, it was used as Mac’s Dancing Academy, a school for ‘hoofers’, and as a
rehearsal space. Cy’s club itself specialized in 1920s-style traditional jazz with Cy leading his own band on clarinet. Though
despised by the modernists, they still dropped by because it was somewhere to go and there were loads of drugs available.
In the early sixties it became the Piccadilly Jazz Club before switching to its most famous incarnation: the mod R&B club,
the Scene. The Scene’s D J was Guy Stevens, who had one of the most extensive collections of R&B records in the country. He
featured loud Motown and Stax for the dancers but also played more obscure cuts. They also had live bands: beginning in August
1964 the Who did a five-week residence, every Wednesday night. There were still loads of drugs available but now they were
mostly amphetamines. This was the centre of mod culture: they parked their scooters in Ham Yard and paraded their clothes
to each other, pilled out of their minds. The Scene was a great club, but as rock ’n’ roll musicians became more famous, they
found it more and more difficult to visit places like the Scene because they were pestered by fans and autograph seekers.
As usual, market forces provided, and in 1966 three clubs opened to cater to their needs.