London Calling (44 page)

Perhaps we’ve only got one foot in the underground. It’s alright for I t, which is a newspaper, to report everything that
happens, but we are a magazine. We’re still old fashioned enough to try to evaluate. I think that the underground should try
to be more self-critical. Only one happening in ten will really be any good. We’re looking for that one.… the joke around
the oz office is that it’s [the tiny typeface
Oz
used] kept so small so that no–one over 30
can
read it.
⁵

Oz
became more the magazine of the King’s Road, Chelsea and Kensington hedonistic end of the underground, leaving the grubby
revolutionary hippies in Notting Hill, Camden Town and, increasingly, the East End to
IT
. The wonderful thing for the underground was that there were now two magazines, not just one lone voice.

The Dutch went for underground hippie culture in a big way. I attended a 1967 love-in in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam and never
in London had I seen such long hair – I never figured out how they managed to grow it so quickly – such short skirts, such
big joints, and rather than carrying one flower or a bunch like some King’s Road hippies, they carried entire boughs taken
from flowering trees. The Paradiso and the Melkweg (Milky Way) had more psychedelic décor than the Family Dog in San Francisco
or the UFO Club (which had none, except the light show). When two Dutch designers, Simon Posthuma and Marijke Koger, arrived
in London in 1966 from Morocco,
where they had sourced quantities of exotic fabrics, they outdid everyone in psychedelic patterns and finery: Marijke – in
dark eyeliner, hennaed hair, long Renaissance-sleeved tight-waisted tops like Maid Marion made from bright Moroccan prints,
panels of silk and satin – wore the shortest ever mini-skirt over brightly coloured tights. She was a pantomime figure, a
ballet dancer, not someone you expect to find on the streets. Simon wore similar clothes; with long, carefully coiffeured
hair, baggy sleeves, tights or baggy pirate trousers, a swirling cloak, he modelled himself on Peter Pan, the god Pan, a panjandrum
sometimes pictured on a white horse. Felicity Green, fashion editor of the
Daily Mirror
, described Simon: ‘longer hair than either of the girls, wearing a pendant, a purple velvet tunic, pale yellow peep-toe sandals,
and some extremely form fitting pants in pink and lime satin stripes, bias cut’.
⁶

They first set up a tiny boutique in Gosfield Street, Fitzrovia, called Karma, where they sold Marijka’s dresses and psychedelic
posters, Simon’s paintings, incense, Moroccan bowls and other appurtenances of the hippie life. They were brilliant self-publicists,
committed, certainly, to the ideas of the counter-culture but always with an eye on the main chance: ‘It’s all due to the
conjunction of Pluto and Uranus. The approach of these two planets is dynamite. It’s behind London’s new intellectual direction
and the religious revival based on love that is coming,’ said Richard Gilbert writing about them in
Town
, in March 1967.

Together with Josje Leeger and Barry Finch, they launched themselves on London as ‘The Fool’, their name taken from the Tarot
pack. Simon was the mentor of the group. He had been the organizer of the Pot Art Company in Amsterdam in 1965 before making
a long visit to North Africa and then moving to London. He was a psychedelic painter whose work was poorly executed though
often imaginative. His later work became very repetitive and stylized. Mostly he was known for his role as guru and for his
non-stop talking. Marijke Koger was the better painter and had been a commercial artist in Amsterdam before designing posters
– the famous ‘Love’ and ‘Dylan’ psychedelic posters were hers – and clothes. Josje Leeger was a clothes designer in Holland,
where she marketed her own fashions. Her boyfriend Barry Finch was the only British member. They met when the Fool designed
a poster for Brian Epstein’s Saville Theatre, where Barry did publicity. He became their organizer. With posters, interior
design, clothes and their own publicist they could hardly fail, because the clothes were so beautiful.

It worked; they were seen as the spirit of the new age. Marijka had an affair with Paul McCartney; they were commissioned
to paint lush vegetation
and reclining figures all over the fireplace of Kinfauns, George Harrison’s Beverly Hills-style bungalow in Esher, and John
Lennon had them in to paint his piano. It was a short step onward to Ginger Baker’s drums (with Cream), and album sleeves
for the Hollies and the Incredible String Band. The Fool became the designers to the underground scene. They made stage clothes
for Procul Harum and a dress for Marianne Faithfull. Patti Boyd and Cynthia Lennon were astonished by their gorgeous clothes
and quickly commissioned some for themselves.

Soon the Fool were living in luxury in Montagu Square and the Beatles had been persuaded to finance a boutique which they
were to design and stock. Simon:

It will have an image of nature, like a paradise with plants and animals painted on the walls. The floor will be imitation
grass and the staircase like an arab tent. In the windows will be seven figures representing the seven races of the world,
black white yellow green red, etc. There will be exotic lighting and we will make it more like a market than a boutique… When
they used to open shops it was just after the bread of people, not after turning them on. We want to turn them on. Our ideas
are based on love. If you are doing things for people you must be part of the people, not set yourself up as something extraordinary.
⁷

Barry: ‘We want to plough back what we earn to give more entertainment to people – even cheaper. And to get people to do things
for themselves is the final thing.’
⁸
In fact, the Fool had spent £100,000 by the time the Beatles pulled the plug, about a million in today’s money. Most of it
was lost through incompetence and lack of proper costing. When someone from Apple finally began to examine the manufacturing
accounts, it turned out that the silk label in the clothes was costing more than some of the dresses. Somehow the underground
scene in London never really accepted them; they were just a bit too pushy. Of all the psychedelic boutiques it was only the
Fool that asked
International Times
to write about them. Had they been part of the community they could have written something about themselves and their beliefs
and
IT
would have gladly published it, but to ask
IT
to send someone round, as if they were an ordinary paper, caused a lot of resentment on the staff. Their ideas would have
made a perfect article for
IT
. Simon:

We believe in reincarnation. It is the only logical idea. Once we thought about it we just knew it was true. You are what
you made yourself. Every race and nationality is joined. There is a general spiritual revival going on. In
future people will have more leisure and they will have to develop their inner eye. They will want to get to know the supreme
power, love.
⁹

But somehow, the hippies were suspicious of them, it may have been a cultural thing, a difference between the Dutch and the
English, or maybe it was because they were trying so hard to move in the top rock ’n’ roll circles that they were seen as
hustlers. Soon they moved on to Los Angeles, where they made an album and painted ‘the world’s largest psychedelic mural’
on the side of the theatre playing
Hair
.

The soundtrack to the summer of love was, of course,
Sgt. Pepper
. With this album the Beatles managed the impossible: to be both the most commercial band on Earth and the underground princes
of psychedelia. The album sleeve became a psychedelic icon in its own right, and brought many of the personalities on the
scene together in one place. The concept for the sleeve grew out of Paul McCartney’s original idea for the album. Paul:

We were fed up with being the Beatles. We really hated that fucking four little mop-top boys approach… I got this idea, I
thought, ‘Let’s not be ourselves. Let’s develop alter-egos so we’re not having to project an image which we know. It would
be much more free.
¹⁰

He came up with the name for the new band: ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. His original idea for the sleeve was to
have the group seated in a living room, with portraits of Brigitte Bardot, James Dean and other stars on the walls:

I wanted a background for the group, so I asked everyone in the group to write down whoever their idols were, whoever you
loved… folk heroes like Albert Einstein and Aldous Huxley, all the influences from Indica like William Burroughs and of course
John, the rebel, put in Hitler and Jesus, which EMI wouldn’t allow, but that was John. I think John often did that just
for effect really.
¹¹

The idea developed:

I had the idea to be in a park and in front of us to have a huge floral clock which is a big feature of all those parks: Harrogate,
everywhere, every park you went into then had a floral clock… So the second phase of the idea was to have these guys in their
new identity, in their costumes… I did a lot of drawings of us being presented to the Lord Mayor, with lots of dignitaries
and lots of friends of ours around, and it was to be us in front of a big northern floral clock,
and we were to look like a brass band… We had the big list of heroes; maybe they could all be in the crowd at the presentation!
¹²

Paul showed the art dealer Robert Fraser the drawings, and he suggested that the perfect people to execute it would be two
of his artists: a couple, Peter Blake and Jann Haworth. Paul:

They changed it in good ways. The clock became the sign of the Beatles in front of it, the floral clock metamorphosed into
a flower bed. Our heroes in photographs around us became the crowd of dignitaries. So the idea just crystallized a bit. Which
was good. It took a lot of working out but it’s one of the all-time covers, I think, so that was great.
¹³

Over the years the sleeve has come to be credited to Peter Blake, but the concept was already there, and the photographs of
the heroes had already been collected by the time he and Haworth were brought in. Also, over the years, the role of Jann Haworth
as co-designer has been overlooked, as is so often the case with women artists. Haworth told the
Observer
’s Geraldine Bedell: ‘If there’s a couple involved in something, it’s bound to be the guy who did it. I’ve even had my own
brain doing it. But I have a very clear memory of the thought processes and conversations, and I know the parts, the 50 per
cent, that I was responsible for.’
¹⁴
On a lighter note she told
Tate
magazine: ‘Best not to get me started. I’m the person who didn’t do 50 per cent of the cover… I did the other 50 per cent.’
¹⁵
As for the album itself. Allen Ginsberg described it as: ‘One of the few opera triumphs of the recording century’, and said
the Beatles ‘were giving an example around the world that guys can be friends. They had, and conveyed, a realization that
the world and human consciousness had to change.’
¹⁶

1967 was definitely the summer of love in the public’s mind, and though to many an underground activist that title should
have gone to 1966, it was in ’67 that the hippie notion of loving everyone – the Beatles’ ‘All you need is love’ – began to
be explored. David Widgery, who worked as a doctor in the East End and normally had a very unromantic, strictly Marxist analysis
of events, conceded that: ‘The Love Generation does aim at real community rather than boozy conviviality, a public total art
rather than low culture, and gentleness and warmth rather than pre-heat love and a Saturday Evening Post family.’
¹⁷
And though the underground press irritated everyone on the left, from the
New Statesman
to the
Socialist Worker
, Widgery saw some value in it:

Certainly the exuberance of the underground’s anti-censorship, anti-Grundyish hedonism did something to heave Britain finally
out of the monochrome doze of the 1950s with its fearful snobberies of class and sex, if only by rather flippantly proselytising
battles others had won… the bohemian communism
worked
: it was self supporting, unsubsidised and you didn’t just get involved for the sake of your CV.
¹⁸

Barriers seemed to be breaking down, new models for living were being explored; no-one expected them all to work – in fact,
some proved to be dead-ends or even positively dangerous, such as the Mel Lymon and Manson cults in the USA. In Britain
there were many experiments in communal living, and attempts to destroy traditional sex roles and authoritarian relationships.
The
IT
writer David Robins remembered:

We were really into non-sexist co-operatives. We actually had a house meeting because we had all these radical women. And
they said that we should have mattresses in all the rooms, so nobody belonged to anyone else, so there weren’t couples. We
were united against coupling, couples were bad. Multiple relations were good. We even had a meeting about removing the loo
doors. Loo doors were bourgeois. I used to get woken up in the night by young women. One night I was just too depressed, so
I said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m too depressed.’ She went next door and the guy there turned her down, and so did the next one, and
she shouted: ‘You’re all a load of boring old farts!’ and we were a bit.
¹⁹

A similar regime existed with the Exploding Galaxy’s commune. The Galaxy, described by
IT
as a ‘love-anarchist dance group’, lived communally in a house co-owned by Paul Keeler and David Medalla at 99 Balls Pond
Road. Keeler went to Central School of Speech and Drama before starting the influential Signals Gallery in Wigmore Street,
specializing in kinetic art. His friend the Filipino artist David Medalla showed kinetic sculpture at the gallery and edited
Signals
magazine, a glossy broadsheet format, highly influential art magazine which ranged well beyond the concerns of that particular
gallery. In 1966, Paul Keeler’s father, Charles, withdrew funding from the gallery on the grounds that it was being run ‘incompetently’,
but it was long suspected that he didn’t like the content of
Signals
magazine, in particular David’s decision to reprint Lewis Mumford’s 1965 anti-Vietnam war address to the American Academy
of Arts and Letters, and also a letter from Robert Lowell declining an invitation to the White House because of the war.