London Calling (34 page)

There was very much an art college sensibility about AMM; in fact, both Keith Rowe and Lawrence Sheaff had been to art school
and were making their living as graphic designers and Lou Gare was a mature student studying art. As Eddie Prévost points
out, art school in those days was as much to do with examination and enquiry and an experimental voyage of personal discovery
as it was to do with making ‘art’, a situation which no longer pertains as the art colleges have been absorbed into the universities
and the creation of art commercialized.
⁷
Rowe described the way AMM music was made as ‘painterly’ and continued his appreciation and practice in the visual arts alongside
his music-making. Prévost says that Rowe and Sheaff were influenced by ideas associated with American abstract expressionism,
particularly the work of Pollock, De Kooning and Franz Kline, in the manner of musical execution; a gestural approach but
intellectually he felt that AMM were closer to ‘analytical cubism’, the approach to an object in which many different facets
of the object are shown at the same time. ‘This non-hierarchical concept became reflected in the manner in which sounds and
musicians were placed, perceived and understood. Out went the classical concerto model, and also the bebop model of featured
soloist supported by a rhythm section.’
⁸
Prévost acknowledged the debt to Jackson Pollock in particular, pointing out that even the method of creation is similar.
Pollock laid his canvas on the ground and dribbled paint on it; Rowe laid his guitar flat on its back to ‘enable certain “actions”
to be carried out, to let dribbles of sound meander, collect in drowning pools of volume or run off the edges into congealed
silences’.
⁹

All members of AMM used these techniques: Sheaff used tops and wind-up toys placed on different surfaces or amplified, Prévost
scratched and scraped objects, bowed anything that was likely to produce a note, dropped a handful of drumsticks on to the
skin as if casting the yarrowstalks for a reading of the I-Ching, and drummed so fast that it was ‘designed to fall, through
an impossible momentum, into chaotic and unknowable sequences’.
¹⁰
The
most unpredictable sound source of all was Keith Rowe’s radio, which he faded in and out, a station chosen by a random flip
across the frequencies so that everything from a Churchill speech to rock ’n’ roll entered AMM’s music. Prevost: ‘The unpredictability
of the radio tests the ensemble’s ability to accommodate whatever emerges (sometimes almost to breaking point).’
¹¹
They became masters of the ‘controlled accident’, like the imperial Chinese potters who allowed the glaze to run. Sometimes
they purposely allowed the music to go out of control to see what would happen, and had the courage to fail if need be. Prévost:

For AMM these ‘controlled accidents’ were practiced variously: through random radio frequency switching: rolling empty tin
cans across (and often off) the stage: testing the bowing qualities of an unknown metal sheet. there is a dynamic relationship
of intention and creativity in Pollock’s work that is matched, if not excelled, by the flashing brush strokes of the best
imperial Chinese calligraphers.
¹²

It is interesting that Syd Barrett, who so admired Keith Rowe’s guitar techniques, was himself a painter and was still at
art school when he first saw AMM play. Two of Syd Barrett’s signature guitar techniques were taken from Keith Rowe. The use
of ball bearings, rolled down the strings, and the detuning of the strings as a musical effect during a solo, though as Syd’s
illness progressed, he sometimes detuned the strings until they hung down like limp washing lines, incapable of producing
a note at all.

The importance of AMM is often overlooked, though to his contemporaries abroad Cardew was a towering figure. Morton Feldman,
in
Conversations Without Stravinsky
(1967), said:

[Any] direction modern music will take in England will come about only through Cardew, because of him, by way of him. If the
new ideas in music are felt today as a movement in England, it’s because he acts as a moral force, a moral center. Without
him, the young ‘far-out’ composer would be lost. With him, he’s still young, but not really lost.

Cardew remained committed to the underground, teaching courses in experimental music at the Anti-University in 1968–9 and
at Morley College, where everyone was encouraged to join, whether or not they had a musical education.

Hoppy returned from a visit to New York in 1965 filled with information about the Free University of New York and plans for
a London equivalent. The
idea of an educational institution outside the usual controls of the authorities was very appealing and Hoppy used his prodigious
energy to organize some public meetings to see how the Notting Hill community felt about starting one of their own. The usual
suspects were rounded up: Hoppy’s flatmates Ron Atkins and Alan Beckett – both jazz critics – Kate Heliczer – Hoppy’s girlfriend
– Joe Boyd, the economist Peter Jenner, Andrew King, Graham Keen – a photographer and old friend of Hoppy from C N D and jazz
days – Michael de Freitas – later known as Michael X,
¹³
then Michael Abdul Malik – and John Michell, the landlord of a building the London Free School could use.

Hoppy: ‘The idea was to make whatever skills we had, such as painting or photography, available to kids in the neighbourhood.’
People were canvassed and asked to participate. In his autobiography Michael de Freitas recalled: ‘The educational side of
the project was basically simple: to hold free classes on as many subjects as there were available teachers and to establish
a sort of dialogue – a pooling of experience and knowledge – between teachers and pupils so that both would benefit.’ When
Hoppy asked if Michael would take a class he agreed to teach basic English: ‘I chose this subject because I knew the area
was swarming with illiterates who didn’t like the idea of people teaching them anything and I felt that if this two-way system
got going they would find it acceptable.’
¹⁴
Michael’s classes were filled, not with West Indians but older Irish people from the area and some Africans. Michael: ‘I
learned more social history, more vividly, than I’d have got out of any book.’
¹⁵
He wrote what they told him on the blackboard, and they in turn laboriously copied down their own stories.

The London Free School ( L F S ) was launched at a public meeting at St Peter’s Church Hall, at the corner of Elgin Avenue
and Chippenham Road (now demolished), on Tuesday, 8 March 1966. The red and black flyer printed by Hoppy on the Lovebooks
offset machine read: ‘The L F S offers you free education through lectures and discussion groups in subjects essential to
our daily life and work.’ It promised that ‘The London Free School is not political, not racial, not intellectual, not religion,
not a club. It is open to all.’ Michael had been using the basement of 26 Powis Terrace as a gambling club but had been forced
to close it down. He gave it to the L F S free for eighteen months with the blessing of the landlord, John Michell, who lived
on the top floor. Michell had himself offered courses in UFOs and ley lines, the subject of his
The Flying Saucer Vision
published the next year. Michael’s own office was across the street in the same block as David Hockney’s studio.

A musician, Dave Tomlin, moved in and used the room for jam sessions; rehearsals were not really required for free-form jazz.
The walls were painted
with psychedelic designs and the Free School headquarters quickly became associated with the emerging hippie lifestyle. The
Free School had two distinct sides: the community work, citizens’ advice, children’s play groups and so on; and a late-night
scene where people hung out in the psychedelic basement and played music and took drugs. In order to get everyone involved
locally, Hoppy had somehow gained access to Holland Park Comprehensive School and invited all the kids to come and hang out.
Two that took up his offer were Emily Young, the daughter of Wayland Young, who was shortly to inherit the title of Lord Kennet,
and her friend Anjelica Huston, John Huston’s daughter, who lived with her mother in Little Venice. Emily quickly became Dave
Tomlin’s girlfriend and began to spend most nights there, sneaking out of her parents’ house at 11 p.m. to make bonfires on
waste ground, take acid and hang out with the strange band of older men that the L F S had attracted: the poets Neil Oram
and Harry Fainlight, and Mike McCavity, as he called himself, who was an old-style Irish tramp. She would creep home at five
or six in the morning ready to go off to school as if everything was normal. After studying at Chelsea and St Martin’s art
schools, Emily Young went on to become one of Britain’s most important sculptors, best known for her work in coloured marble.

Anjelica Huston became a well-known actress but remembers playing:

a good deal of hooky in the basement of a fish and chip shop in Powis Terrace called the London Free School. We used to spend
many a happy afternoon with a bunch of bright hippies doing what I care not to remember… to come into one’s age in London…
I remember hearing Bob Dylan for the first time and Otis redding for the first time and going to see Ike and Tina Turner at
the revolution. not to mention the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Roundhouse, Eel pie Island. It was something that was
unprecedented and I think it threw everyone into a state but it was awfully good fun if you were on the cusp of it.
¹⁶

In order to involve local people, the L F S began to knock on people’s doors, one of which belonged to Rhaune Laslett. It
turned out that she was a person of formidable energy and organizational skills and, being eminently respectable, she was
also the perfect interface between the L F S and the local council. Many people were impressed in the apparent change in Michael
X, who really did appear to have become a reformed character: gone were the days when he ran illegal gambling dens, pimped
a number of working girls and acted as an enforcer for the slum landlord Peter Rachman. He now involved himself in the production
of
The Grove
, the L F S newsletter, and when Muhammad Ali,
then the heavyweight champion of the world, arrived in the country for his fight with Henry Cooper, Michael somehow managed
to bring him to visit the fifty children in Rhaunie Laslett’s Free School play group and to talk with some of the locals.

By this time whole streets of houses were being demolished to make way for the Westway, blighting the whole area, which took
decades to recover. The cleared land looked like a bombsite and quickly filled with rubbish. Sometimes, on a warm night, Dave
Tomlin, playing the saxophone, would lead a procession of people there to build a bonfire. People would sit around it and
take acid, smoke pot, play music and improvise poems as the smoke drifted in clouds around them. One early L F S project was
to raise money to build an adventure playground for the local children at Acklam Road, on the wasteland of demolished houses.
The council agreed to remove the burned-out cars and lumps of rusty scrap metal that littered the area but then suddenly seemed
to lose interest. It turned out that they did not like the involvement of Michael X in the Free School. Michael’s colleagues
received visits from Special Branch, who told them he was a subversive element and a dangerous character and they should have
nothing to do with him. The Free School called a meeting to discuss what had happened and voted categorically not to be pressured
by the police. Hoppy went to Scotland Yard to complain and received a verbal apology. Volunteers from the Free School cleared
the wasteland themselves without assistance from the council, and built their own playground. It was ‘opened’ on 12 September
1966 with an auto-destructive art performance by Gustav Metzger called
Painting with Explosion
, described by one writer as ‘basically local kids burning a pile of rubbish’.

The council had also promised considerable funding for the rebirth of the Notting Hill Fair and Pageant, which had not taken
place for more than a hundred years, but once more the money was contingent upon them getting rid of Michael X. Michael wrote:
‘The School had been really depending on the money and I felt they would have to yield under this sort of pressure. But they
refused point blank. I was happy about this and it made me work that much harder.’
¹⁷
In July 1966 the fair happened anyway, without the council’s help. A Caribbean steel band led a parade of floats and children
in fancy dress. There was a real carnival atmosphere with jazz bands and poetry readings and, according to Michael X, about
1,000 West Indians and 1,500 white people filled the streets. The Fair continued for a whole week and there were remarkably
few arrests, despite a heavy police presence and the strange insistence by the police that a fire engine follow immediately
behind the steel
band wherever they went. There are conflicting memories over numbers. Darcus Howe recalled ‘five hundred revellers and a makeshift
steel band in a swift turnaround along Great Western Road, Westbourne Park and thence on to Powis Square’. As Pete Jenner
was a lecturer at the London School of Economics, he was appointed as the Carnival’s first treasurer and keeper of the chequebook.
Rhaunie Laslett and her team did most of the work. From this humble beginning, the Notting Hill Carnival has grown to become
the largest festival in Europe, attracting more than a million people to the streets of Notting Hill every August Bank Holiday
weekend.

The L F S needed to raise money to print
The Grove
, and to pay for some of the L F S’s other projected activities. Pete Jenner, as a vicar’s son, knew that the correct way
to raise money was by holding events in the church hall. The vicar of All Saints church hall had always been supportive of
the L F S’s community efforts and had allowed them to establish their first under-five playgroup there – the first in the
country. Jenner suggested that they put on a series of Friday night church Hall dances and that they feature the band he saw
at Steve Stollman’s Sunday afternoon Marquee event, the Pink Floyd, that he and Andrew King were now managing. One of the
people at the first L F S meeting was Joe Boyd, an American record producer who had been the stage manager at the Newport
Festival when Dylan went electric. He had a lot of experience of touring with blues packages and knew exactly how to put on
a weekly musical event. The first Friday only attracted a handful of people, L F S regulars like Emily Young and Anjelica
Huston, but very few paying customers. The band discussed mixed-media and light shows with the audience afterwards. The next
week, word of mouth almost filled the hall. Two Americans, Joel and Toni Brown, showed up from Tim Leary’s Millbrook centre
bringing their light show with them and projecting it on to the Floyd with magical effect. The third week was so crowded that
it was uncomfortably hot and at the fourth people were turned away. The Pink Floyd had found their audience. The audience
had its effect on them as well, because Emily Young became Syd Barrett’s muse: their single ‘See Emily Play’ was written in
her honour.