London Calling (33 page)

Acid became part of the London underground scene; never in a big way as it was in San Francisco, but enough to profoundly
affect the rock ’n’ roll community. Nik Cohn wrote in
Awopbopaloobop
:

After acid, you walked around bulging with your new perceptions and you thought you’d been some place nobody else had ever
seen. You knew all kinds of secret answers and you were smug, you couldn’t help it. In this way, acid formed its own aristocracy
and pop was part of it, pop was its mouthpiece. Not all of pop, of course. Just the underground.
¹³

There were certain buildings in London associated with underground activity and L S D, among them 101 Cromwell Road, in West
Kensington. Set in a crumbling Regency terrace near the West London Air Terminal where passengers would check in before leaving
by coach for Heathrow airport, 101 was filled with creative young people just arrived in London, hoping to transform their
lives. On the ground floor lived Nigel Lesmore-Gordon and his new wife, Jenny. They had moved there from Cambridge because
Nigel wanted to become a film-maker. It was a large flat and they rented out several of the rooms to friends. One of these
was the poet John Esam, one of the organizers of the Albert Hall reading, who had arrived in London in the early sixties from
Wellington, New Zealand. As all the spare rooms were full, he built an airless, windowless shack in the corridor to sleep
in. John
was tall and thin, with jet black hair slicked back like a raven’s wing. He had a store of thousands of L S D trips, brought
over by an American friend, and was evangelical about its beneficial qualities. He also had a further 4,000 trips concealed
in a doorknob in another flat nearby. Esam, along with Hollingshead, was the main source of L S D before it was made illegal.
When visiting him, it was advisable not to eat an orange or drink juice from the fridge unless you wanted a trip. Everything
was spiked.

His altered vision meant that his conversation often appeared to be elliptical, even far removed from everyday reality, and
some people, women in particular, found him a bit frightening and nicknamed him ‘The Spider’. He wrote dense, classically
inspired poetry, including a major work called
Orpheus Eurydice
. John, and 101 Cromwell Road, was at the receiving end of the first attempt by the police to bust someone for L S D.

As the police smashed their way into the flat, John threw the acid – which was in sugar cubes – out of the window into the
garden, where it was caught by a waiting policeman. L S D was still legal at the time, but the police tried to circumvent
this by charging Esam with possession of ergot. L S D is a semi-synthetic derivative of ergot, which is a controlled poison,
so they charged him with conspiring to manufacture poisons, a charge which had a frightening unlimited sentence under the
Poisons Act. The case went to the Old Bailey and the prosecution brought over Dr Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered
L S D, from Basel, Switzerland. But what was seized was L S D, not ergot. As Steve Abrams put it: ‘The government were essentially
saying that if you boiled instant orange juice you’d wind up with an orange.’ The defence then brought in a chemist called
Professor Chain, who set out to prove that the ergot Hofmann used to create L S D was not genuine ergot, but some form of
synthetic. Abrams, reporting the case to Jonathon Green, said:

At one stage the four expert witnesses stood up, got into a sort of football huddle, told the judge to piss off and stood
there for ten minutes arguing among themselves. Then they all approached the bench together and told the judge that they had
decided that Hofmann was wrong and Chain was right and they had to let esam go.
¹⁴

Afterwards, John Esam was a changed person; he had been so traumatized by his experience that he didn’t touch another drug
for at least ten years. The police, of course, fairly soon afterwards managed to demonize L S D, largely through the Sunday
tabloids, and it was made illegal. All the potential benefits of its use in psychiatry have been hampered ever since.

Over the years Nigel and Jenny had a good cross-section of the London scene living in the spare rooms of their Cromwell Road
flat: Peter Roberts, known to his friends as ‘Pete the Rat’, and George Andrews, an American friend of Dan Richter who had
reached London via jail in Tangier. Andrews was a poet with a strong interest in drug culture. In 1967, together with Simon
Vinkenoog, he edited
The Book of Grass: An Anthology of Indian Hemp
, probably the best anthology of essays on marijuana ever assembled.

There was a close connection between 101 Cromwell Road and the Pink Floyd. Nigel Gordon knew Syd Barrett and Roger Waters
from Cambridge, and one of his earliest films was of Syd tripping on mushrooms in the Gog Magog Hills outside Cambridge. Barrett
and Waters came down to London together in 1964: Syd to study painting at Camberwell School of Art and Roger to study architecture
at the Regent Street Polytechnic. At the Poly, Roger met the painter Duggie Fields, who lived in the top-floor duplex at 101
and let him have one of the spare rooms, so Roger was the first to move there. Roger and Syd needed somewhere to rehearse
their band and Roger was the only one with enough space. Duggie Fields: ‘They used to rehearse in the flat and I used to go
downstairs and put on Smokey Robinson as loud as possible.’ Roger went to live with his girlfriend and Syd moved into the
building with his friend Scotty, another friend from Cambridge. It was Syd who came up with the name Pink Floyd by joining
the Christian names of bluesmen Pink Anderson (1900–1974) and Floyd ‘Dipper Boy’ Council (1911–76). He first used it as the
name of his cat, so the band is actually named after a tomcat. By the time Syd moved into 101, he had been taking a lot of
acid for some months so when he told reporters that the name was transmitted to him by a UFO while he sat on the ley line
crossing Glastonbury Tor he may have believed it.

Barrett was a highly stylized and original songwriter. He took as his subject matter English fairy tales, nursery rhymes,
an innocent child-like view of life contrasted with adult confusion, verses from the
I-Ching or Book of Changes
, a surreal juxtaposition of psychedelic musical passages against straightforward statements of fact, ‘I’ve got a bike’ and
a description of its bell and its basket. He was a master of the abrupt mind-bending change, the use of strange musical instrumentation,
trance-like strumming, the whole imbued with a terrible, slightly frightening urgency. Syd was losing contact with everyday
reality: the use of L S D may or may not have exacerbated his rapidly progressing schizophrenia, but it was not long before
he was forced to leave the band and, after a couple of brilliant but very patchy solo albums, leave the music scene altogether.

Counter culture is a product of the way adults demonize young people. Each generation of young people are a soft target, so
young people, in order to protect themselves from the battering they get from the establishment, has to create a counter culture.
Each generation is going to be demonized, especially in a culture which hates children as much as British culture does.

CAROLINE COON
, 2008
¹

Responding to the need for somewhere that the audience at the Albert Hall poetry reading could meet, a group of poets including
Pete Brown set up the weekly Goings-On club in a gambling club on Archer Street, Soho. But after the fifth week, so many gamblers
had mistakenly wandered back in that the club closed. It was then that Steve Stollman arrived from New York, charged by his
elder brother Bernard with the task of finding and signing underground groups for his ESP-disc label. Steve quickly contacted
Hoppy, and all the people associated with the Albert Hall poetry reading. He decided that the best way to discover new talent
was to open a showcase; somewhere that experimental groups could come and perform. He hired the Marquee, then at 90 Wardour
Street, for the afternoon of Sunday, 30 January 1966. Admission was by invitation only and a flyer was mimeographed and sent
round to the combined address lists of Hoppy, myself, Alex Trocchi and various other people involved with the original Albert
Hall reading, which claimed:

Among those taking part will be Donovan / Mose Allison / Graham Bond / Pop / Mime / Kinetic Sculpture / Discotheque / Boutique.

THIS TRIP begins at 4.30 and goes on. Liquor licence applied for. Costume, masque, ethnic, space, Edwardian, Victorian and
hipness generally… face and body makeup – certainly.

This is a spontaneous party, any profit to be held in trust by Louis Diamond, Solicitor, that such spontaneities may continue.
Invitation only, donation at door 6/6.

That day Hoppy used his contacts at the
Sunday Times
to get them to preview the event:

The invited
are
the entertainment… Who will be there? Poets, painters, pop singers, hoods, Americans, homosexuals, (because they make up
10 per cent of the population), 20 clowns, jazz musicians, “one murderer”, sculptors, politicians and some girls who defy
description are among those invited. For Stollman their identity is irrelevant because this is underground culture which offers
everyone the opportunity to do or say anything without conforming to the restrictions of earthmen…
²

Mose Allison didn’t show, but Donovan and Graham Bond did. Donovan was a little the worse for wear and the next day had no
memory of being there at all. Surrounded by six sitar players and a conga drummer he sat cross-legged at centre stage wearing
make-up: each eye drawn with a red and black Egyptian Eye of Horus. The audience happily sang along with the line about the
violent hash smoker from Sunny Goodge Street on his recent album,
Fairy Tale
. Graham Bond made a great deal more noise. Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker were still in his band – they did not leave to form
Cream until later that year. With Graham’s Mellotron, and Dick Heckstall-Smith honking away on the saxophone, the group dominated
the proceedings. Graham’s gravelly vocals were always pretty rough, but his live performance made up for it as he scowled
and grimaced at the audience and bugged his eyes at them, dressed in his pirate costume with flowing sleeves. All he needed
was a parrot on his shoulder. The Graham Bond Group was an early favourite of the underground and he even played at Seed,
the macrobiotic restaurant that Craig and Greg Sams opened in the basement of the Gloucester Hotel on Westbourne Terrace,
after a tremendous struggle to get his organ down the steps. The music fitted right in with the slowly chewing patrons who
were seated on cushions around tables made from old wooden cable reels, listening attentively.

It was really the audience that counted at the Marquee events. Pete Brown was still thought of as one of the few genuine beatniks
in London, having had his poems published in
Evergreen Review
, the Beat Generation bible where Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac and Burroughs filled the pages. Pete was bearded and carried a
trumpet; he looked the part and his poems were funny. Performing from the audience were Poison Bellows, the name given by
Johnny Byrne, who co-authored
Groupie
with Jenny Fabian, and the poet Spike Hawkins to a slapstick act involving an old pram containing a wind-up gramophone, Charlie
Chaplin clothing, and conjuring tricks in which
broken eggshells and other objects were retrieved from Pete Brown’s father’s collapsible silk top hat.

Steve’s next invite to the Marquee was printed in barely decipherable two-colour Roneo over a large square advertisement for
ESP Records. Careful examination revealed: ‘In memoriam. King Charles. Marquis de Sade. Superman. Supergirl. Ulysses. Charlie
Chaplin. All tripping lightly looning phoenician moon mad sailors – in character as IN characters – characterised in costume
at the Marquee this Sunday at 5 o clock…’ By now no acts were advertised; the audience itself was the act. It was at the Marquee
events, for instance, that the peculiar underground tradition of making huge jellies began.

Although always referred to as the Spontaneous Underground, it was only the first event that had this title. The one for 13
March was called The Trip: ‘TRIP bring furniture toy prop paper rug paint balloon jumble costume mask robot candle incense
ladder wheel light self all others march 13th 5pm.’ The main reason people remember the Marquee events is because it was here
that the Pink Floyd first met their management, and, at the same event, that Syd Barrett first saw Keith Rowe play. It was
sometime in June 1966, and both the Pink Floyd and AMM were booked to perform.

AMM were one of the most controversial groups of the time because they disposed of both melody and rhythm, giving the listener
very little to grasp hold of except that received by their ears. They used to annoy people enormously, as this contemporary
report by Michael Vestey shows:

The AMM’s manager, Victor Schonfield, watched as his group spread-eagled themselves around the floor with musical instruments
– I saw drums, a clarinet and a piano – and a weird collection of objects which they banged together with ear-piercing clarity.
It was rubbish. For two hours people listened as though it were a concert at the Festival Hall. Sometimes through the banging,
grinding screeching came the noise of a radio which one of the group switched on.
³

Victor Schonfield told him: ‘We are exploring the indeterminacy of sounds and forms. It is like watching the sea, waves breaking
on the shore, sounds rising and dying in all directions, yet somehow part of an organic whole.’
⁴

AMM transformed non-musical materials into instruments such as the collective gong and a contra-bass drum made from sheet
metal and a discarded wine barrel. Lisle Street, Soho, was then home to many army surplus stores where cheap electronic components
could be found and ingeniously transformed into sound-sources. They used contact microphones to explore the usually inaudible
parts of instruments such as the strings of a guitar
below the bridge or non-musical parts of a piano. Drums were used like guitar sound-boxes to amplify the sound as they bowed
small cymbals, bells and other objects capable of sound-making. Normal instruments were played in unconventional ways, piano
strings stroked ‘until they squeal in delight’
⁵
or plucked or glass bottles placed on them which vibrate or distort the sound when the keys are played. These new sounds
threw up new questions. As Eddie Prévost asked: ‘how do you present the sound of a plastic yoghurt carton being bowed within
a sonic aesthetic, how can such a sound be used?’
⁶