London Calling (42 page)

The
IT
Three were convicted on both counts and were sentenced to eighteen months, suspended for four years. The Appeal Court upheld
the verdict in June 1971, with the judge ruling that while the acts in question might be legal, public encouragement of such
acts was not. The trio took it to the House of Lords, which a year later upheld the view of the appeal court, though the conviction
on the lesser charge was quashed. As Peter Stansill wrote: ‘It was the last victory in the rearguard action to legally enforce
an antiquated morality.’
¹⁹
None of the defendants ever fully recovered from the anxiety and stress caused by the case. Detective Sergeant Fisher, however,
later went down for four years, guilty of conspiring to accept money from
persons trading in pornography, so at least one of the ‘real villains’ was caught. The squad was so corrupt it had to be disbanded.
At the end of the police corruption case in December 1976, Justice Mars-Jones said: ‘Thank goodness the Obscene Publications
Squad has gone. I fear the damage you have done will be with us for a very long time.’
²⁰

At the Arts Lab, it was not unknown for a play to reach its climax as the audience reached theirs, all unconcernedly intertwined
with each other.

RICHARD NEVILLE
¹

When the Free School put on the first Notting Hill Festival in 1966, they suggested that Jeff Nuttall present a People Show
performance, which gave him just one week to prepare a show. Jeff had just moved into the Abbey Art Centre in New Barnet,
a National Trust-protected reinforced-concrete clock tower surrounded by shacks. He had no performers for the show so he knocked
on the doors of the assortment of huts and chalets surrounding the clock tower. Thus the original People Show consisted of
his neighbours Mark Long, Syd Palmer, John Dod Darling, Laura Gilbert and Jeff himself. The performance was held at the church
hall in Powis Gardens and was a success, though Jeff was annoyed that, although his script called for nudity, the girls wore
‘drawers’ as he always called them. A polythene sheet was draped over the audience and Jeff called for a variety of bizarre
objects to be brought to him onstage to the accompaniment of frenzied drumming. A plant in the audience screamed and ran from
the room. Music was provided by the Mike Westbrook group, which then consisted of Westbrook, Gaz Griffiths, Mike Osborne and
John Surman. Nuttall: ‘A saxophone and I performed a duet for music and disintegrating narrative, merging this into a full
band ensemble.’ Meanwhile Mark Long and Darling sold strawberry-jam-smeared newspapers to the audience. Nuttall: ‘Although
I was angry about the funked nudity I was nonetheless well pleased, excited that something had taken place that was not bourgeois
culture applying art as a thinly smeared cosmetic, but was,
in its nature
, right in the middle of creativity.’ In the van back to the arts centre Syd Palmer suggested that they stick together. Bob
Cobbing, the sound poet and by then the manager of Better
Books on Charing Cross Road, offered the use of the basement, giving them a regular venue.
²

The first show was in December. The cellar had crumbling walls and had not been painted in decades. The ‘Destruction in Art’
Symposium had not yet occurred, so the floor was intact, though the plumbing and drains were exposed and the ceiling was just
the floorboards of the shop above. The far wall of the cellar was divided into three alcoves. The group screened them off
with cardboard and carefully cut holes in it to display parts of their bodies: Nuttall’s fat beer belly protruding through
a large circular hole, one of Laura’s breasts through another, smaller, hole, Mark’s feet stuck out through a hole at the
bottom of the third alcove. Don was wrapped in disgusting rags and Syd stood, masked, on a pedestal. The audience wandered
around, sometimes prodding them, wondering if they were real or models. Then Mark and Syd began to speak, monosyllabic grunts
gradually turned into personal remarks about the audience. Then Nuttall burst through and began haranguing the audience while
Mark produced a whip, made from old soiled underwear, and began lashing out at the audience, screeching about human vanity.
The event was judged a great success. Jeff wrote: ‘The show was, like many of my poems then, an angry last ditch attempt to
rub people’s noses in their own meat to such an extent that they would come to embrace their condition without cosmetic, deodorant,
without modification or rationalisation.’ Of course, such a show was not to last long; there are not enough masochists in
the avant-garde theatre audience to keep such a theatre troupe going.

Jack Henry Moore was there from the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre, and immediately made sure that they were included in a Granada
TV programme then being made about the emerging underground scene. Unfortunately their segment, filmed in Better Books basement,
was less likely to make viewers turn away from the screen, overcome by a shocking realization of the true horror of the human
condition, than to rush from the room in sheer embarrassment at their gauche amateurism. But Jeff liked it: ‘Something quite
new had begun in London and begun well. It was a good feeling.’ But Nuttall only remained in London until Easter, 1967, before
returning to live with his family in Norwich. This meant that, though he wrote the scripts, he only appeared in the first
ten People Shows. His lack of involvement in the actual performance eventually estranged him from the group. In his
Memoirs
he wrote: ‘the performers know that, for a man who insisted on his scripts being carried out to the letter, I was avoiding
an awful lot of the hard labour, public risk, and sheer nervous strain of performing.’
³
Naturally, the
performers began to interpret the scripts to emphasize their own areas of interest or special skills such as mime.

When Jim Haynes and Jack Henry Moore suggested that they become the resident drama group at the newly opened Arts Lab they
jumped at the chance.
⁴
Jeff was still involved, but he and the performers were growing more and more apart. The performers were not as keen on outright
confrontation as Jeff.
People Show
15, performed in November 1967 shortly after the Lab opened, featured more contact than the audience normally likes. Nuttall
shut them inside four cages, where they were deafened alternately by the actors hammering on the bars or by the Mel Davis
group playing free-form jazz while being, not always successfully, encouraged by Nuttall to join in the improvisations on
the subject of paranoia, faulty communications between people and the games people play with each other.
⁵

Nuttall described
People Show
15 in his memoirs:

An early show at the Arts Lab involved four huge cages wrought of chicken wire and old bedsprings. The audience were locked
in the cages and were to be let out one at a time to be interrogated. Their interrogation thus formed the central event. Each
interrogation was to be something of an ordeal, the interrogator (Syd) accusing each person of being Mrs Meadows and insisting
that they prove otherwise. There was to be a telephone on hand for people to ring witnesses. Syd turned the interrogation
into a farce, skimped over it to make room for a whimsical sketch about the man in the moon.
⁶

Sergeant Major Nuttall wanted to berate and torture the audience, make them grovel until they recognized the horrific nature
of reality.

People Show
15 also called for offal to be thrust through the chicken wire on to the audience. Nuttall had a fetish about offal, as he
did about large-size ladies’ underwear and nudity. As Jeff was not a performer, the People Show substituted water pistols
and other weak stunts. Jeff was outraged: ‘Only Laura, at that time, shared my wish to turn human activity out to grass, or
my other wish to wrench human-response off-centre. Only Laura shared my contempt for the cuckoo land of Flower Power.’ Throughout
this time Jeff had held on to his job as a teacher at a secondary school in Norwich. Then in October 1968 he joined the teaching
staff at Bradford Art School. ‘I was glad to get out of the psychedelic south where dope, vanity and commercial pop were already
to erode the so-called alternative society. The crumbling black stone, rough pubs, heavy beer drinking, regional humour… animated
and revived me to a very welcome degree.’
⁷

When we started
IT
, I naturally tried to involve Jeff Nuttall, who had
contributed so much energy to the emerging counter-culture. In the end he decided that he would like to draw a fortnightly
comic strip, which, unfortunately, didn’t really get much reaction because it was very hard to tell what was going on. For
some strips he became Jeff Sodall or Jeff Farkall and once used his friend Criton Tomazo’s name, as he was unsure that he
wanted to be involved with
IT
. In fact Jeff soon began to distance himself from the
IT
staff, the main problem being his determination to remain stuck in the era of trad jazz and warm beer. He claimed it was
a class problem, but most of the staff were just as working class as him. He summed up his position accurately enough: ‘Physiodelics,
not psychedelics, I prefer a good pint to L S D.’ He also had no interest in rock ’n’ roll, whereas many of the new people
involved with
IT
were part of the rock ’n’ roll revolution. He hated Mick Farren in particular, as he, to Nuttall, was the epitome of this
new attitude. In Jonathon Green’s
Days in the Life
Nuttall spelled it out: ‘Mick Farren was a bad man – I thought he was a bad man anyway…’
⁸
In his autobiography Mick revealed how shocked he was: ‘Until that point, I didn’t really suspect quite how much the man
loathed me.’
⁹

In 1968, Jeff was commissioned by Granada Publishing to write
Bomb Culture
. Nuttall: ‘I wrote it because I wanted to distance myself from the underground on a number of scores, because I wanted to
make it clear publicly that there were a number of aspects of the underground that I wanted none of – particularly marijuana
and rock ’n’ roll.’ As he said: ‘I had no idea that I was stepping so far into the enemy camp.’
¹⁰
Straight society loved it; here was a tame sociologist that they could talk to and reason with. The underground disliked
the book, in part for its factual inaccuracies, such as putting Venice Beach in San Francisco or misspelling the names of
people like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which showed Jeff ’s relatively slight knowledge of the Beats. Jeff left London; it was
too much for him.

After spending four years with the American Air Force, working as a Russian translator in an American spy base at Kirknewton,
just outside Edinburgh, Jim Haynes stayed on to study at Edinburgh University. In 1959 he opened The Paperback, at 22a Charles
Street, off George Square, probably Europe’s first paperback bookshop. He advertised it as ‘Europe’s new international bookshop,
coffee-cellar and gallery’. The gallery mostly showed pottery and tapestries. There was free coffee and conversation and Jim
was quite likely to ask anyone who happened to be in the shop to keep an eye on it while he popped out, sometimes not returning
for hours. He began putting on evening performances: poetry readings, David Hume’s
Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion
, Fiona McCullough’s
Trial of the Heretic
s or Plato. His next move was to open the Traverse Theatre at Long Acre in Edinburgh, in a medieval building with room for
an audience of fifty-eight – plus a couple of seats for the actors – sitting on two banks of thirty seats facing each other
with the stage in between. He put on some of the most obscure plays ever seen in Edinburgh, by Mrozek, Pinget, Eveling, Duras
and Alfred Jarry, to name the most well known. The theatre was a direct extension of the bookshop.

Lord Goodman was instrumental in Jim being offered the new Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre in London as an extension of the Traverse
and in 1966 he and his favourite director, Jack Henry Moore, moved down to London. The London Traverse Theatre Company was
formed by Haynes, Charles Marowitz and Michael Jelliott, the two latter having directed plays at the Traverse in Edinburgh.
During their one year at the Cochrane they put on Joe Orton’s
Loot
, the Marowitz
Hamlet
and plays by Saul Bellow. But Jim was not satisfied:

I was frustrated because I wanted to bring in other activities like music, poetry, films and social painting. For architectural
and other reasons it was almost impossible to do this at the Cochrane. It became pretty difficult and about last summer (1966)
I began looking at warehouses in central London. I had a flat in Covent Garden (Long Acre) and I was very aware of it as an
interesting area, and it has none of the overtones that Hampstead, Kensington or Chelsea have.
¹¹

In the meantime, he concentrated his activities on helping to start up
International Times
, finding backers, using his enormous list of contacts to contact writers, illustrators and advertisers. Once
IT
was fully up and running, from March 1967 Jim worked solely on the Arts Lab project and in seven months he managed to raise
the £3,000 necessary to get it open. Jim:

I found the Arts Lab building in Covent Garden and started on the mechanics of getting the lease and gathering people around
me to make it work. I sent out a letter to 800 people, telling them what the ideas were behind the scheme and asking them
to become members. The letters raised about £3,500 – about a quarter of the amount needed. Rather than wait until you get
it all, I believe in plunging. So we began.
¹²

Jim left the Cochrane officially in February 1967 and took over the Drury Lane building that July. The Arts Lab opened at
182 Drury Lane, on Monday, 25 September 1967. The front door led into a large rectangular space, subdivided into two galleries;
one for art, the other for the theatre run by Jack Henry Moore. In the basement was the cinema, programmed by David Curtis
and featuring underground, cult and classic movies. Shortly after the opening there was a season of Doris Day movies. Upstairs
was the restaurant/coffee bar run by my then-wife, Sue Miles who later moved on to more serious catering. Jim’s role was very
much that of a genial host, creating a stimulating atmosphere for his guests so that some evenings developed into wonderful
parties. ‘You must keep moving, remain flexible,’ said Jim. ‘I call it my toy. This whole place is my flat. I just live in
the back and work in the back. But the rest is my flat and the people who come here are, I hope, my friends and they’re welcome
to stay as long as they want.’
¹³
It was this aspect, the Lab as a community centre for creative individuals, a place to meet and talk and make contacts, that
set the Arts Lab apart from other performance spaces. Jim: