London Calling (43 page)

The thing that the bookshop, the Traverse, and the Arts Lab had in common was their humanity. There were not fixed hours of
entering and leaving, people came in and lingered and talked and met each other. I keep stressing this fact that love affairs
began there but it’s true. That’s probably why the puritan elements in the country were against the bookshop, the Traverse
and the Arts Lab. The ecstasy count, the sensuality count, was very high, whereas at the Cochrane, which is a pure theatre
situation with 350 seats in rows facing the stage, people rush in at 7.30 and rush out at 10. There’s no contact among the
audience themselves, or between the audience and the performers. And by contact, I’m talking about physical contact – touching,
meeting, grabbing, holding. When I used the word contact, I meant
contact
.
¹⁴

Jim was thinking in terms of sensual contact, unlike Jeff Nuttall, whose early People Show performances at the Arts Lab set
out to confront and torture people. Jeff ’s approach was not suited to the more positive vibe Jim and Jack were looking for;
they wanted human communication. One of the most successful Arts Lab productions was not held in the Arts Lab at all. It was
called
Tea with Miss Gentry
. Jim told Derek Taylor:

People would arrive to go to a theatre performance, buy a theatre ticket, and then we would lead them down Drury Lane and
up some rickety stairs where they would have tea with this incredible woman and talk to her, and she would talk to them. I
think she had once designed hats for theatrical productions. People came from Holland, Germany, Spain, France… We paid for
the tea, and Miss Gentry served it… She would ask where they were from and talk to them and it was an outstanding production.
¹⁵

In the cinema Dave Curtis began daily screenings of classic European and American films by directors such as Jean-Luc Godard
and John Cassavetes. The
Lab was the first cinema in England to show uncut versions of Andy Warhol’s two-screen film
Chelsea Girls
(1966) and Kenneth Anger’s
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
(1954–66). When Better Books closed in August 1967, the London Film-Makers Co-operative screenings were transferred to the
Lab and the cinema intensified its emphasis on the avant-garde. The close involvement of the members of the London Film-Makers
Co-op led to the installation of film-processing equipment and the distribution of independent and underground films – fulfilling
the function of the place as a ‘lab’.

Jack Henry Moore’s theatre troupe, the Human Family, grew and evolved and in the early summer of 1968 went on an extended
tour of Europe. To the dismay of the staff, they took much of the Arts Lab’s equipment with them. Then, on 15 November 1968,
a notice was posted in the Lab to say that Jack Henry Moore and the Human Family, thirty people plus their equipment, would
be arriving on 10 December and that they would be living there until after Christmas. During that time Jack would make the
schedule and policy decisions: ‘time and space will be minimally available throughout the building which will probably be
open around the clock.’ The Human Family had been travelling in Europe for six months and had drained money from the Lab.
Basically this proved that the Arts Lab was Jim and Jack’s fiefdom, and even though the staff had devoted immense amounts
of time and energy to the project, it was not theirs but Jim’s. The theatre alone, directed by Will Spoor, had mounted around
1,000 performances of eighty productions, and the cinema felt that there was no way that the safety of the films or equipment
could be guaranteed with the building in the hands of Jack’s hippie commune. Jim and Jack’s proprietorial attitude caused
the break-up of the Lab. Most of the key people resigned in protest, intending to set up a new Arts Lab of their own.

Statement issued by staff members of the arts Lab:

Arts Laboratory, 182 Drury Lane, WC.2

THE FOLLOWING ARTS LAB CO-FOUNDERS AND STAFF HAV E BROKEN ALL CONNECTION WI TH JIM HAYNES ADMINISTRATION OF THE ARTS LAB.

On November 15th a notice was posted in the Lab signed by Jack Moore (who has been on tour in Europe for the past six months)
and Jim, vetoing all proposals for decentralizing Lab administration, and announcing that from December 10th Jack will make
all “schedule and policy” decisions and that the building will be only “minimally available” to groups other than the Human
Family.

We believe that people working in all media must have freedom of access to the Lab’s facilities, and that this cannot be guaranteed
under any dictatorship, however benevolent.

November 18th ’68.

In
IT
46, 13 December, David Curtis reported: ‘Jim summarised it as “art v people”. Another way of putting it would be “laboratory
v entertainment centre”. The most important of the proposals that were vetoed by Jack and Jim had been the setting up of movie
processing and printing equipment (film co-op), a darkroom and an electronics workshop.’ Jim was really most interested in
the social life that the Arts Lab gave him and the hundreds of young women he was able to lure into his apartment in the back
of the building. As he told it:

I look upon myself not as an artist, because I don’t really like that category any more, but as an experimental educationalist…
I’m interested in media. I’m interested in how the media can be used to fight for certain ideas that I think are worth fighting
for – spread of tolerance, curiosity, brotherhood, internationalism, social sex, physical contact, generosity, asceticism,
communal use of property.
¹⁶

The Lab struggled on but without the key members of staff, it failed before a year was out. On 28 October 1969, Jim sent a
duplicated
Newsletter number one
to his friends and contacts:

The Arts Laboratory located on Drury Lane for the past two and a half years is closed. The Arts Lab was many things to many
people: a vision frustrated by an indifferent, fearful, and secure society; an experiment with such intangibles
as people, ideas, feelings, and communications; a restaurant; a cinema; a theatre (Moving Being, Freehold, People Show, Human
Family, etc); underground television (Rolling Stones at Hyde Park, Isle of Wight, Dick Gregory All-Night Event); a gallery
(past exhibitions include Yoko ono & Lennon, takis, et al); free notice boards (buy/sell, rides to Paris); a tea room; astrological
readings; an information bank (tape, video, & live-Dick Gregory, Lennie Bruce, Michael X, Michael McClure…); happenings (verbal
and otherwise); music (live and tape including the Fugs, Donovan, Leonard Cohen, third ear Band, Shawn phillips, Kylastron,
etc.); books, magazines and newspapers (Time Out, IT, SUCK, oZ, rolling Stone); information. People flowed through – young,
old, fashionable unfashionable, beautiful, bored, ugly, sad, aggressive, friendly – five bob if you can afford it, less if
you can’t. A few people in a position to help financially took but never gave. They asked, ‘What’s the product? What’s its
name?’ the real answer was Humanity: you can’t weigh it, you can’t market it, you can’t label it, and you can’t destroy it.
You can touch it and it will respond, you can free it and it will fly, you can create it and it will grow, if you kill it
– it’s murder. The kids here don’t believe it’s the end and they’re right for it will reappear in another form. ‘We are the
seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.’

It always seems to have been summer. All the memories seem to be of gardens, leaves in full bloom, grass very long, flies
in the air, things humming.

PAUL MCCARTNEY
on the summer of 1967
¹

The fact that London was going through a subtle change was broadcast to the world in the cover story of the 15 April 1966
issue of
Time
magazine. An article by Piri Halasz called ‘London: the Swinging City’ revealed that ‘In a once sedate world of faded splendour,
everything new, uninhibited and kinky is blooming at the top of London life.’ It began with a trickle, but young people looking
for ‘everything new, uninhibited and kinky’ began to arrive in London from Australia, the USA, and Europe. When they couldn’t
find it – Halasz had only been in London a few weeks to write the piece – they had to create it themselves. Among the larrikins
– wonderful Australian slang for ‘frolic-some youth’ – were the
Oz
crowd. The first issue of
Oz
appeared in Sydney, Australia, on April Fools Day, 1963, and 6,000 copies were sold in twenty-four hours. It had not been
long before the summonses began to arrive, the issue being in breach of the New South Wales Obscene and Indecent Publications
Act. They were fined £20. The February 1964 issue caused far more trouble. The New P&O Shipping building featured a showpiece
fountain set in a wall. The
Oz
cover showed three men standing, facing the wall, which was immediately seen to resemble a urinal. Though they could not
be seen to be pissing, in fact almost certainly were not, the issue was deemed to be obscene and Richard Neville was sentenced
to six months with hard labour and artist Martin Sharp to four months. The sentences were quashed on appeal but it was certainly
a worrying time. Richard:

Martin (Sharp) rang me up and I just said ‘Let’s get the hell out of here, so we caught the next boat to Malaya and then we
hitched across, stayed
in Kathmandu for a bit; it took us about six months. Then we got here and thought ‘Great, this is it!’ But we found nothing
was happening so we got enough, and borrowed enough, to get the first issue [of U K
Oz
] going. It was all done on a big bluff really.
²

Richard’s sister, the novelist Jill Neville, was already established in London and he was able to drop into an existing social
scene. Australian
Oz
was closer in feel and look to
Private Eye
than to
IT
or any of the American underground newspapers, and when Richard started U K
Oz
, it began in more or less the same vein. The first issue included a parody on the hippies in the form of a strip cartoon,
using photographs by an Australian photographer, Bob Whitaker, shot in the Indica Bookshop, with speech bubbles added. It
was not long, however, before Martin Sharp took acid and became a proselytizer for the new hedonistic hippie lifestyle which
was ideally suited to these middle-class Australian dropouts escaping from strict Australian Puritanism. There were enough
of them for there to be a distinct Australian scene, like the Americans in Paris in the twenties – (relatively) wealthy, often
very creative people: Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer, Robert Whitaker, Clive James, et al.
Oz
became a forum for the ideas of the underground scene, but was never really a part of it, probably because most of those
involved in the early days were Australian and had a different cultural background. Felix Dennis, who joined
Oz
a little later, explained:

Though advertised as ‘the periodical for the discerning freak’… [i]t never really set out to be a community paper. It was
underground, but it was an altogether more middle class production than
IT
. It started off as a satirical magazine – our first issue had six pages satirising
Private Eye
. Ingrams attacked us viciously after that, even newspapers in Sydney were quoting him, and he tried to put pressure on our
distributors not to take us. The big change was when we came into contact with John Wilcock fresh from the American underground
scene. Also we began to consume large quantities of certain substances. The visual approach to
Oz
was partly as a result of drug experiences.
³

Oz
became known more for its graphics than for its editorial content, which was often unreadable as the various rainbow overlays
were sometimes ill-calculated and rendered the text illegible. By the summer of 1967,
Oz
had become the magazine of the flower children, and for a few brief months
Oz
and
IT
were like the newspaper and colour section of the same publication as far as editorial content went, except
IT
had hands-on contact with its
readership through the UFO Club and its jumble sales, film shows and fund-raising events, including the 14 Hour Technicolor
Dream. Richard Neville, interviewed in September 1967 by Michael Thomas said:

We use psychedelic art because it’s the most exciting graphic art. Once you get through the incense fog and the gaudy clothes
there are a lot of genuinely talented people on the scene. The thing that interests me, though, is the definite possibility
of a totally separate society, not just flowers and music, but hippie banks, hippie employment agencies and so on. I’m obsessed
with that possibility, the dialectics fascinate me. Certainly all the pretension, the eroticism, the arrogance of the hippies
is preferable to the dreary, self-conscious, earnestness of the drab ex-intellectual thing of the fifties… Hippies are creating
social tensions, which Oz breeds on, and anyway, hippies are a good market, obviously.
⁴

But, even in 1967, Richard recognized that
Oz
was not a product of the actual underground community. He told Maureen Green: