London Calling (32 page)

Another, more underground, club in London in the mid-sixties was the World Psychedelic Centre, run by Michael Hollingshead,
the man who first introduced Timothy Leary to L S D. The British-born Hollingshead had been given one gram of Sandoz acid
by Dr John Beresford in 1961, and after his first experiment he contacted Aldous Huxley, who in turn put him in touch with
Leary. From September 1961 he worked with Leary on a number of projects, including guiding people through their trips at Leary’s
upstate New York Millbrook centre, until departing for London in September 1965. Inspired by reports of the 1965 Albert Hall
poetry reading, it had been Leary’s original intention to rent the Royal Albert Hall – or Alpert Hall, as Leary dubbed it
after his colleague, Dr Richard Alpert – in January 1966. It was to be a psychedelic jamboree presided over by Leary, at which,
naturally, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones would be invited to perform. This gave Hollingshead three months to make the
arrangements. But in his heart Leary knew it would not happen; it was really just a way of getting rid of the troublesome
Hollingshead. On the quayside, Leary handed Michael his instructions, which were headed ‘Hollingshead expedition to London
1965–66. Purpose: Spiritual and Emotional Development’, and included as item four of the plan: ‘Centre for running L S D sessions’.

When I visited Tim Leary’s headquarters in Millbrook in 1967, Tim described how he and Dick Alpert saw Michael Hollingshead
off to London in the summer of 1965: ‘When Dick and I stood on the dock in New York waving him goodbye, I said to Dick, “Well,
that writes off the psychedelic
revolution in England for at least ten years”.’
¹¹
They gave him 300 copies of the
Psychedelic Experience
by Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert and Tim Leary, 200 copies of the
Psychedelic Reader
, edited by Gunther Weil, Ralph Metzner and Tim Leary, and half a gram of L S D to take with him; enough for 5,000 sessions.
Unfortunately Leary’s assessment of Hollingshead’s chances were accurate.

With the backing of some wealthy friends, Michael quickly set up the World Psychedelic Centre (WPC) in a large, rather magnificent
flat, in Pont Street, Belgravia; very handy for Harrods. L S D was not yet illegal, but the authorities were already muttering
about it in a threatening way so the idea was to introduce the drug to as many influential people in the shortest possible
time in the hope that they would inform the public debate; making the drug available on prescription, possibly, or for research
purposes through an institution even if it was not available to all.

Hollingshead emptied the front room of furnishings except the carpet and structured the décor along the lines suggested by
Sutra 19 of the
Tao Te Ching
. Flowers, bowls of fruit, hand-woven cloth, uncarved wood, a fire burning with naked flames, good bread, cheese, wine, candles,
temple incense, goldfish and antique objects ‘over 500 years old’. There were pillows, tapes of classical and oriental music,
hi-fi equipment and a slide projector. Hollingshead used this room to guide people on trips, usually twelve at a time and
the setting had to be right and anxiety free. Hollingshead: ‘The session was not to be thought of as some kind of show, a
piece of theatre, an entertainment, but a demonstration and a sharing of novel energy levels and unusual forms of perception.
And the décor was to assist the voyager in his experience.’ The trips were relatively high doses, 300 micrograms, served in
grapes impregnated with acid. The trip lasted between eight and twelve hours.

The president of the WPC was an old Etonian Lloyd’s underwriter, Desmond O’Brien, who was joined a little later by Joey Mellen
as vice-president. Mellen was a law graduate from Oxford and another old Etonian. Pont Street became a popular place to frequent;
you never knew who might stop by. There were talks and presentations at the WPC and by no means everyone who visited actually
took a trip. There was a strong Chelsea contingent: Victoria and Julian Ormsby-Gore, Michael Rainey, Nicholas Gormanstone,
Suna Portman and the American folk singer Julie Felix. Naturally there was a strong old Etonian contingent, including Christopher
Gibbs and Robert Fraser, and many visiting rock stars, including Paul McCartney – the only Beatle to attend – Donovan, Eric
Clapton and Peter Asher. Victor Lownes, who co-founded the Playboy Club with Hugh Hefner, was a frequent visitor and brought
along many of the
Americans passing through London. William Burroughs, Ian Sommerville, Alexander Trocchi, George Andrews, Feliks Topolski,
Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate all visited. Workshops in ‘Consciousness Expansion’ were held by the WPC at the Institute of
Contemporary Art and St Martin’s School of Art, which attracted many visitors to the centre, including Sir Roland Penrose,
who in addition to co-founding the ICA was also a director of the Tate Gallery. The so-called ‘anti-psychiatrist’ Ronnie
Laing and American psychiatrist Joseph Berke, his assistant at the Philadelphia Association, showed great interest and L S
D became the talking point of literary salons and art studios across the city. I found Michael to be a good host: charming,
funny, cosmopolitan, with a great fund of amusing stories about mutual friends.

For several months the centre seemed to be doing its job until Hollingshead began to crack up. As he put it in his autobiography:

There was a problem, a self indulgence of mine which earned me some social suspicion, if not also social ostracism, and which
led me – though against all my instincts – well over that line which divides the normal from the abnormal. I refer, of course,
only to my taking of methedrine.
¹²

He was shooting speed seven times a day, smoking large quantities of pot and taking acid, in doses in excess of 500 micrograms,
three times a week. Sometimes he would drift into a zombie-like state of catatonia and have to inject himself with dimethyl-triptamene
to jolt himself back to life again. It became obvious to visitors that the flat was going to be busted; not for the L S D,
which was still legal, or for the amphetamine, which he had on prescription, but for all the bags of marijuana and the chillums
and blocks of hash in every room. A well-known sequence of events went into operation: first came the ‘exposé’ by the Sunday
gutter press, then came the knock on the door by the police. ‘THE MEN BEHIND L S D – THE DRUG THAT IS MENACING YOUNG LIV ES,’
screamed the headline in the
People
. ‘The Centre was deserted and in a state of considerable chaos when our investigator gained entry on Thursday,’ they wrote.
‘There were used hypodermic syringes, empty drug ampoules and a variety of pills. Among the litter of papers were dozens of
phone numbers, some of them of well-known show-business stars and personalities.’ Did this mean they’d broken in and searched
the place, we wondered?

But instead of cleaning up the squalor and ridding the flat of illegal drugs, Hollingshead let things drift. There had been
a number of problems: complaints about the noise from neighbours who objected to the constant music played at high volume
and the party where eighty guests – some of whom, ‘police spies masquerading as hippies’, got accidentally turned on
when someone spiked the fruit-and-wine punch. Detective Sergeant Dalton and his men arrived in January 1966, three months
after the centre opened. There were six people living there when they were busted. The same indifference to being busted condemned
Hollingshead during his trial. He took a tab of acid before arriving at the court and made frivolous remarks and jokes during
the proceedings, all of which went against him. He was given a 21-month sentence for possession of less than an ounce of hashish
and a negligible amount of grass. It was thought that the jokes were responsible for six months of that. There was plenty
of hash and L S D in prison, brought to him by Owsley Stanley and Dick Alpert when they visited him in Wormwood Scrubs. He
shared the hash but kept the psychedelics to himself with one exception: the convicted double-agent George Blake who had already
served five years of a draconian 44-year term for betraying dozens of British MI5 agents to the KGB.

Hollingshead and Blake became friends and Michael eventually gave him a trip. Blake knew that the likelihood of his being
released or swapped for another spy was slight, but the trip made him realize that he could not handle many more years of
incarceration without going mad, despite the fact that he had been permitted a carpet, curtains, books and a short-wave radio
to ‘listen to the Arabic language stations’. He was still in contact with the Russian embassy and a few weeks after his trip
Blake escaped by scaling the wall using a rope ladder thrown over by an accomplice who had contacted him on the short-wave
service of Radio Cairo. He reappeared in Moscow as a colonel in the KGB, with the Order of Lenin, a government pension, and
a large rent-free apartment. As his trial in Britain had been held in camera, the public never did find out exactly what he
had done to merit such a harsh sentence. The whole story was like something from a John le Carré novel.

Joey Mellen, the vice-president of the World Psychedelic Centre, was the first British convert to the ideas of Bart Huges,
a Dutch medical student who advocated the use of trepanning as a method of raising one’s consciousness. According to Huges,
when the human race began to walk upright, it lost certain benefits as well as making the more obvious gains. The effect of
gravity caused by walking upright reduced the amount of blood flowing through the brain, which in Huges’ view reduced the
range of human consciousness. People had found ways to counter this: certain yogic postures, such as standing on one’s head,
jumping from hot water into cold water as practised by the Romans and Scandinavians, or the practice of trepanation – cutting
a hole in your skull – which was used by many ancient peoples as well as in the
European Middle Ages; it is, in fact, the oldest surgical procedure for which there is evidence. Children’s skulls are unsealed;
it is not until adulthood that the membranes surrounding the brain are restrained by an immovable layer of bone, inhibiting
their pulse. According to Huges, it is this that causes the adult to lose contact with the visionary imagination and dreams
of childhood. The removal of a small disc of bone allows more blood to reach the brain’s capillaries, inducing a permanently
high state. After spending two years trying to find a surgeon who would perform the operation on him, Huges did it himself;
an action which earned him a few months in a Dutch mental hospital. But not everyone thought he was mad, and when Joey Mellen
met Huges in Ibiza in 1965, Mellen became convinced that his theories were sound, and that Huges really was in a permanently
high state.

Bart Huges arrived in London in 1966 after money was raised to bring him over and provide lodgings for him. L S D, and to
a lesser extent trepanation, were subjects of great interest in London at the time and both he and Joey Mellen were in great
demand as speakers. After they gave a talk at Better Books they were approached by two reporters from the Sunday tabloid the
People
. They foolishly thought these people were seriously interested in the subject and spent most of the night explaining their
theories, only to see the headline on Sunday: ‘THIS DANGEROUS IDIOT SHOULD BE THROWN OUT’. The police obliged and the Home
Office placed Huges on the list of undesirables to be denied entry to Britain (along with Timothy Leary).

One convert was the American folk singer Julie Felix, then the resident singer on David Frost’s television show
The Frost Report
. She set a number of Joey Mellen’s songs to music, including ‘Brainbloodvolume’, ‘The Great Brain Robbery’ and ‘Sugarlack’,
but does not appear to have included them on any of her albums; nor, for that matter, did she trepan herself. During the course
of his visit, Bart Huges had become very close friends with Amanda Feilding, and when she accompanied Huges back to Amsterdam,
leaving Joey alone in charge of her Chelsea flat, Mellen saw this as the ideal time to trepan himself. It took three separate
attempts. The details of the operations are not for the squeamish but are contained in both Mellen’s 1975 account,
Bore Hole
, and in John Michell’s essay ‘The People with Holes in Their Heads’ in his
Eccentric Lives, Peculiar Notions
. When he finally achieved his aim, after several failed attempts and one burnt-out electric drill, he felt a sense of serenity
that stayed with him. In the late sixties, he and Amanda got together and she was so impressed by the results of his operation
that she performed one on herself, with Joey filming it. The resulting film,
Heartbeat in the Brain
, is regarded as an underground classic. At one London showing a film critic
reported members of the audience ‘dropping off their seats one by one like ripe plums’ at the sight of so much blood.

Amanda had studied mysticism and comparative religion at Oxford with Robert Charles Zaehner, Spalding Professor of Eastern
Religions and Ethics, whose specialty was Zoroastrianism. The investigation of higher realms of consciousness was her primary
interest and, despite the danger involved, she felt it was worth the risk. She too has been in what could be called an elevated
state ever since. Amanda stood several times for Parliamentary election in Chelsea campaigning for trepanning operations to
be made freely available on the National Health. Her first attempt received forty-nine votes but she more than doubled this
to 139 votes the second time she stood. Now Lady Neidpath, having married James Charteris, Lord Neidpath, Amanda still runs
the Trepanation Trust, and the Beckley Foundation, described as ‘a charitable trust that promotes the investigation of consciousness
and its modulation from a multidisciplinary perspective. It supports world-class research into the science, health, politics
and history of practices used to alter consciousness, ranging from meditation to the use of psychoactive substances.’