London Calling (38 page)

It was at UFO, also, that the biggest demonstration against the
News of the World
originated. When Judge Block handed down vicious sentences on Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Robert Fraser following the
police raid on Redlands, Richards’s house near Chichester, it was decided that some form of protest was in order. It was widely
known that it was the
News of the World
that had tipped off the police that Richards was having a party that night and so they were the obvious target. There had
been a spontaneous demonstration in Fleet Street at ten o’clock on the night the sentences were given, but on Friday night
at UFO resentment was still running high. A large section of the audience left the club after midnight and made their way
to Fleet Street, meeting up with people from other clubs en route, all of them intending to disrupt the paper’s press day
operations (as it was a Sunday paper, Saturday was press day). The City of London police were waiting and a nasty encounter
ensued, with the police setting their dogs on the crowd – several hippies sustained nasty bites – a number of arrests and
Mick Farren, whom the police saw as the organizer of the demonstration, being taught a lesson. He wrote:

They dragged me to a dark doorway and began working me over with short jabs to the body, in that unique law-enforcement manner
that causes the most pain with the fewest visible marks. Battered and decidedly bowed, I was left with a final admonition:
‘Now, you little cunt, maybe you’ll think twice about coming down our manor and causing aggravation.’
⁷

Most of the hippies made their way back to the club, where Tomorrow took the stage for the most soaring, inspired rendition
of ‘Revolution’ they ever performed. Stones fans had also gathered at Piccadilly Circus, chanting ‘Free The Stones!’

The music at UFO tended to be album tracks, and sometimes entire albums, played with the gaps between tracks rather than
the seamless roar of music of today’s clubs. The spaces between tracks or singles gave people time to think and to begin conversations.
The dancers just kept on dancing anyway though certain tracks, such as the Purple Gang’s ‘Granny Takes a Trip’ or Tomorrow’s
‘My White Bicycle’, would always fill the floor. Twink, drummer with Tomorrow, told Ivor Truman what it was like:

It wasn’t very big but it had a great atmosphere; light shows, incense burning, theatre groups, people just doing things.
People in costume and obviously the
glittering sparkling things in their faces – the make up. It was fantastic – it was really great and as soon as I saw it I
wanted the band that I was with to play there and it affected me immediately, I started to get new ideas myself – things like
mime, more free form playing, using light shows, things like that.
⁸

It was the mix of things that most people remembered about UFO. Nick Mason, drummer with the Pink Floyd: ‘Endless rock groups,
that’s what “underground” meant to the people, but that wasn’t what it really was. It was a mixture of bands, poets, jugglers
and all sorts of acts.’
⁹
He told
Zigzag
magazine:

It gets rosier with age, but there is a germ of truth in it, because for a brief moment there looked as if there might actually
be some combining of activities. People would go down to this place and a number of people would do a number of things, rather
than simply one band performing. There would be some mad actors, a couple of light shows, perhaps the recitation of some poetry
or verse, and a lot of wandering about and a lot of cheerful chatter going on.
¹⁰

It was this mix of events and input that Hoppy wanted to maintain throughout the long hours of night. Hoppy:

We tried to keep alive the spirit of the Happening which purposely injects uncertainty into the event, which seemed to fit
with the experimental zeitgeist. Mixing different sensory inputs was certainly fun and it didn’t always work out. But one
essential was always kept in mind, to keep an overview of whatever was going on and to be sensitive to the vibe going down.
That way there were never any fights and hardly any bad scenes even when someone freaked out and had to be led away and talked
down.
¹¹

A substantial percentage of the audience was high on something. There were dealers there but they kept a very low profile.
It is said that the large German dealer Manfred always gave away his first 400 trips, but as people always bought more than
one, he presumably did well. Tottenham Court Road police station was just down the road and there was a constant fear that
they would raid, so Tony Smythe from the Council for Civil Liberties was always on hand, usually conducting meetings in a
back room. Mostly the police were bemused by the crowd that UFO attracted. They seized one hippie only to find that, rather
than the young runaway girl they were looking for, they had captured a 22-year-old man. Sometimes people freaked out on acid
and were stopped outside by the police before they got run over.
Usually the police would telephone: ‘We’ve got one of yours’, and Mick Farren would thank them and tell them: ‘Just hang on
to him. We’ll send someone up to get ’im.’ There was a quiet room at the back where people could be talked down.

Celebrities could mingle with the crowd without fear of harassment; Paul McCartney spent several evenings there, on one occasion
being almost deafened by sitting too close to the Soft Machine’s speaker stack during one of Mike Ratledge’s Lowry Holiday
Deluxe organ solos. Paul: ‘UFO was a “studenty” place, so we had no problems getting around. It didn’t matter if you were
famous because students didn’t want to let on they knew you anyway. They wanted to be cool: “Hey, we’re talking about Marx
over here, man.”’
¹²
Jimi Hendrix always arrived very late, but would sometimes sit in and jam. The most excitement was not caused by a rock musician
at all but by Christine Keeler, who arrived accompanied by several impassive pot dealers. The most famous regular was probably
Pete Townshend, who came every week unless the Who had a gig. His girlfriend, Karen Astley, was featured on the very first
UFO poster: a monochrome close-up of her face with the words ‘Nite Tripper’ painted across it by Michael English. To Who
fans, Pete was the guitar-smashing mod, but at UFO he discussed mystical texts, took L S D and wore hippie garb:

I remember being in the UFO Club with my girlfriend, dancing under the influence of acid. My girlfriend used to go out with
no knickers and no bra on, in a dress that looked like it had been made out of a cake wrapper, and I remember a bunch of mod
boys, still doing leapers, going up to her, and literally touching her up while she was dancing and she didn’t know that they
were doing it. I was just totally lost: she’s there going off into the world of roger Waters and his impenetrable leer, and
there’s my young lads coming down to see what’s happening: ‘Fuckin’ hell, there’s Pete Townshend, and he’s wearing a dress.’
¹³

There were a number of house bands: in addition to the Soft Machine, Pink Floyd and Tomorrow, there was the Crazy World of
Arthur Brown. Arthur would paint his face as a mask, pre-figuring Kiss by several years, and enter wearing a flaming headdress,
which, on occasion, had to be extinguished by the application of several pints of beer as his cloak caught fire (the beer
was from backstage). He was an energetic dancer, with much dipping and diving and sideways ‘Egyptian dancing’. Compared to
other acts at the time, Arthur was absolutely unique, combining both stagecraft and a powerful rock ’n’ roll drive. It was
at UFO that Pete Townshend first saw the Crazy World of Arthur
Brown. He liked Arthur so much that he arranged for him to be signed to his label, Track Records, and produced his hit single,
‘Fire’, which in August 1968 went to number one.

Procol Harum played their second and fourth gigs at UFO. By the fourth gig they were already in the charts with ‘A Whiter
Shade of Pale’. Hearing it performed live was a memorable experience; it was very loud and yet it created a stillness in the
audience, almost as if they were sitting at home on their living room floor. The UFO audience liked to sit and listen, as
Robert Wyatt, drummer with the Soft Machine, remembered:

One of the biggest influences was the atmosphere at UFO. In keeping with the general ersatz orientalism of the social set-up
you’d have an audience sitting down… Just the atmosphere created by an audience sitting down was very inductive to playing,
as in Indian classical music, a long droning introduction to a tune. It’s quite impossible if you’ve got a room full of beer
swigging people standing up waiting for action, it’s very hard starting with a drone. But if you’ve got a floor full of people,
even the few that are listening, they’re quite happy to wait for a half hour for the first tune get off the ground.
¹⁴

It sometimes did take that long to get going, but that was all right.

This was confirmed by Nick Mason: ‘We could only play in London, because there the audience was more tolerant and was willing
to withstand ten minutes of shit to discover five minutes of good music. We were at an experimental stage. We set out for
unbelievable solos where no one else would dare.’
¹⁵

Rick Wright, the Floyd’s keyboard player: ‘The band was an improvising group in the beginning. A lot of rubbish came out of
it but a lot of good too. A lot of that was obviously to do with Syd – that was the way he worked.’
¹⁶
It is unfortunate, in some ways, that the Pink Floyd came to be regarded as the epitome of London psychedelic music because,
with the exception of Syd, although they came up through the Spontaneous Underground and the London Free School, they were
not part of the underground scene. Unlike bands like the Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead, they did not play endless
benefits for the community; nor did they live communally in Notting Hill, ready for a rap session with their fans at any hour
of the night. Their music received a better reception in underground circles and they certainly relished the publicity that
being associated with the underground brought them, for instance their appearances on John Peel’s
Top Gear
show were very important to their career. John Peel: ‘The first time I ever saw them was at the old UFO club in Tottenham
Court Road, where all of the hippies used to put
on our Kaftans and bells and beads and go and lie on the floor in an altered condition and listen to whatever was going on.’
¹⁷

Syd Barrett, however, was another matter. Syd was an active part of the scene; he even featured in Jenny Fabian’s
Groupie
. She first saw the Pink Floyd, whom she dubbed Satin Odyssey in her lightly fictionalized roman-à-clef
Groupie
, at UFO: ‘They were the first group to open people up to sound and colour, and I took my first trip down there when the
Satin
were playing, and the experience took my mind right out and I don’t think it came back the same.’ Her boyfriend, Andrew King,
was one of the Pink Floyd’s managers, called Nigel Bishop in her book, but it was Syd, whom she calls Ben, she really wanted:
‘He was tall and thin, and his eyes had the polished look I’d seen in other people who had taken too many trips in too short
a time. I found him completely removed from the other three in the group; he was very withdrawn and smiled a lot to himself.’
Syd always had trouble with his shoelaces, which he usually left undone, but when Jenny writes that she got him home to her
bedroom and ‘Finally Ben reached down and untied his gymshoes…’, the reader knows exactly what is going to happen.

A regular group at UFO doing their own thing was the free-form jazz outfit the Giant Sun Trolley, which was assembled from
the audience by Dave Tomlin and usually went on around 4 a.m. because, as Tomlin described it in volume two of
Tales from the Embassy
: ‘Only when the dancers are completely exhausted will they be in a fit state to hear what we have for them.’ The music was
completely free-form and consequently consisted of ‘whatever happens when we get up there’.
¹⁸
Sometimes the drummer continued to play after the others had left the stage and had to be informed that they’d finished.
When Tomlin was busted, the drummer Glen Sweeney – distinctive in his goatee and shaved head – joined another free-jazz group
at UFO called Hydrogen Jukebox, a group of musicians that eventually transmuted into the Third Ear Band. Sweeney, described
as ‘group unifier’, told ‘Legolas’:

What we’re into now with the Third Ear Band really began when we were on a gig, and some kind person. Or mysterious force.
Or whatever it was, stole all our amplification equipment and just left us our instruments. This seemed so significant that
we took it as a sign. Apparently we had been going in the wrong direction by going electric, and that event caused a tremendous
change in our whole way of approach.

I met Dave Tomlin, a multi-instrumentalist who, it seemed to me, had become a kind of musical guru. And he turned me on to
an aspect of music that I had long been searching for. He was the first guy I ever met who used
his music to influence people, to turn them on, or freak them out. When I used to play with Dave’s group, the Sun Trolly,
at UFO Club, just two or three of us would take on up two thousand people, with no amplifiers or anything – and Dave could
get them all with him and do incredible things to their heads. I had never seen music used that way before. So when he split
from London to take up gypsy caravanning on the Mark Palmer scene, the Third Ear seemed a logical extension of what Dave had
been doing.
¹⁹

He explained what set the Third Ear Band apart from the usual psychedelic groups at UFO:

Once or twice when we’ve played this thing [‘Druid’] we’ve gone into a weird sort of experience we call ‘time-shift’.… It
happened once at the London arts Lab, and as we played, it seemed as if time had slowed down and we had drifted into a completely
different dimension. And when we finished nobody moved at all. They were kind of stuck there. So I felt that perhaps it had
happened to them too. So that’s the thing we are trying to get into. Although it can be quite a strain during public performance,
like living on the edge of a cliff, since nobody knows what might happen. To be on stage and feel it happening can be quite
frightening. You go out of yourself, and when you come to, you discover yourself on stage with hundreds of people staring
at you. You get this split second thought: ‘Have I been playing? Have I ruined the whole thing?’ In a way, it’s very similar
to meditation and mantra chanting, which is why I feel what we are doing has a very religious depth.
²⁰