London Calling (45 page)

When Signals closed, Indica Gallery showed many of its artists, including Takis and Medalla. David’s show at the Indica Gallery
featured bubble machines and sand machines; the latter he described as ‘a kind of lament; the death of metal, stone, all the
materials of the past, they’re all dying, all changing.’
²⁰
The rice machine included ‘bits and pieces of rice which, when they vibrate, gain a kind of life’. The ever-changing bubble
machines produced a long sausage-like tube made from tiny bubbles that slowly made its way down the side of the machine and
twisted around on the floor until finally disintegrating. Even their traces continued to transform before disappearing. It
was always moving, always changing, always beautiful.

The Galaxy was formed on 1 January 1967 by David Medalla and Paul Keeler from people they met at the UFO Club. Early members
included Edward Pope, Michael Chapman, Malcolm le Maistre and Larry Smart. Within six months it had grown to fifty people,
though they did not all dance at once; nor could they all live together, but those that did shared everything. There was not
a great deal to share. There was no telephone, no electricity, no gas, and sometimes not even any water. In the early days
Paul Keeler tended to be the group’s spokesman, saying things like: ‘The Exploding Galaxy does not have any specific aims’
or ‘the Exploding Galaxy is a theatre which is becoming an art form. We are developing not only our own language but probably
a new form of communication.’
²¹
Among these new forms was a new way of writing known as ‘scrudge’.

Everything was questioned and challenged: relationships, sexual identity, clothes and costumes. Exploders could not sleep
in the same room for more than one night, or with the same person. They couldn’t eat at the same time, or cook the same food.
There was a big chest containing costumes and clothing; whatever you pulled out determined not only what you wore that day
but also your sex: if a man pulled out a skirt he was a female all day. Edward Pope explained:

Every one of us became a walking justification for his own life, and honesty became a necessity for those who wished to inspire
others with the creative way of life. You might see one of us on a bus, wearing clothes that could neither be called respectable
nor bohemian, but you might call them bizarre were they not also full of inventive imagination and poetry.

He explained that by wearing a cushion for a hat or turning an umbrella into a newspaper, ‘one penetrates the pretence that
life is humdrum, and comes to see ones own life transformed as part of the life of the imagination, the life that gives meaning
and makes history.’
²²

The bathroom was without a door so that anyone using the bath or toilet would have to do so in full view of the others as
part of a communal experience. Paul Keeler: ‘As far as we are concerned the Galaxy is an extension of our own existences.
There is no division between our private lives and what we are creating, you just cannot make a division.’
²³
They experimented in almost all the art forms: poetry, dance, film, performance art, spontaneous happenings, sculpture, painting,
kinetic drama. The
Evolving Documents
show at the Arts Lab involved poetry by Michael Chapman and dance by David Medalla played to an audience of 300. They did
a five-hour dance at the Roundhouse and an audience participation theatre piece at Middle Earth. In the 28 July 1967 issue
of
IT
, Jack Henry Moore reported: ‘The Exploding Galaxy gave a performance which must constitute London’s most liberated theatrical
performance in history. Arthur Brown, singing, while wallowing on the floor with four Galaxy nudes, reached an all time high
in erectile music… Never have so many been so nude, so early, and for such good reason.’ Keeler commented: ‘We hope the Galaxy
will continue to expand until it contains one thousand, two thousand or even three thousand people. Then the audience as such
will cease to exist.’
²⁴

A typical dance was performed at the UFO Club in October 1967 after it moved to the Roundhouse. Watched by about a thousand
people, four men and three women danced bare-breasted for about half an hour to bongos and a flute against a background of
strobes and a projected light show. They wore a sash of flowers around their necks and had ankle bands made of tiny bells
to emphasize each step. When they finished the first dance people applauded and threw money onstage. It was all very innocent.
The British art scene was fortunate that David Medalla chose to live in London: he enlivened and stimulated the scene with
an uncontrollable flow of creative energy. Comparisons have been made between the Exploding Galaxy and the American Living
Theatre, but the Living Theatre were tame in comparison and much too fond of staying with their wealthy patrons as they made
their way around the world. At a Living Theatre performance at the Roundhouse in 1967, not long after the Galaxy formed, the
performers left the stage to walk among the audience, complaining that society would not let them travel without a passport
or take their clothes off in public or smoke pot, a whole chorus of ‘don’ts’. Up jumped Michael Chapman, six and half foot
tall with wild curly hair, and yelled: ‘Well, I can!’ and proceeded to strip off, giving a loud commentary as he did so and
apologizing for his spotty body while all the time shouting: ‘You can if you want to!’ in response to the Americans’ liturgy
of prohibitions. Then he lit a joint and puffed at it as he walked around with
them naked, rather undermining the supposedly radical Americans and reducing their act to a shambles. Keith Milow and one
of his banker friends were in the audience and ran up to invite him to dinner. ‘Why the fuck would I want to do that?’ snapped
Chapman, and spat at the banker, right between the eyes.

Another side of the Galaxy’s commitment to art and culture came when their musical director, Richard Topp, performed Eric
Satie’s rarely played
Vexations
at the Arts Lab shortly after it opened; it consists of the same musical piece repeated 840 times. A support team fed him
sandwiches and drinks through the night and someone was on hand to substitute for him when he had to make unavoidable breaks.
²⁵

The idea of people living freely and communally, creating art together, naturally attracted the police, who harassed the Galaxy
continually to the extent that in the end they simply didn’t bother to put the front door back on its hinges.
IT
even editorialized on their behalf: ‘A secure and free place to live is what makes life possible for them. The police actions
to deprive them of this constitutes state censorship of the lowest form – to deprive artists of their most basic needs in
order to suppress what they have to say.’
²⁶
Paul Keeler was quoted, saying: ‘The Galaxy are threatening because they completely disregard all accepted standards in art
and living. We are not prepared to accept the society in which we live.’
²⁷
Sadly one of these standards was hygiene.

The members of the Galaxy lived together along with half a dozen un-house-trained cats that were allowed to piss and shit
where they would. The residents had little awareness of basic hygiene and the place soon became infested with lice. The smell
and dirt was so bad that a couple of the Exploders decided that measures needed to be taken to improve the living conditions.

To directly suggest cleaning the place up would have been an authoritarian, hierarchical approach which would have certainly
resulted in a long discussion and nothing being done. After much thought, they decided that the reason it was so dirty was
that the other members of the commune had not seen the filth. The answer, of course, was to increase their awareness, and
what better way than to administer a communal dose of hash. This would bring about enhanced perception and bring the more
ugly aspects of the house to their attention. The hash was passed around one morning and had its desired effect: ‘the entire
house was cleaned, disinfected, and actions taken to ensure the restoration of hygienic conditions.’
²⁸

It was at Balls Pond Road that Medalla began his
Stitch in Time
series. He gave an account of it in an interview with Gavin Jantjes in 1997:

‘A Stitch in Time’ started in 1968, I had two lovers who by chance arrived in London at the same time. One was going back
to California and the other was going to India, and in those days you had even longer waits in airports. I had to see both
of them at the same place and I had nothing to give them. I had two handkerchiefs, this is how it started, and I had some
needles and thread and I’m very bad at stitching things by the way, I couldn’t even stitch a button, so I said ‘Hey listen,
just in case you get bored along the way why don’t you just stitch things’, because I understand that if you do some needlework
it’s very therapeutic and waiting for aeroplane flights becomes less boring. I gave each a handkerchief, and at first I sort
of embroidered my name and the date and love and all that, and I didn’t see them again, neither the lovers nor the handkerchiefs,
for many many years. Then one day I was at Schipol airport in amsterdam and there was a young, very handsome, tanned Australian
who was lugging something which looked like a very crazy sort of totem and it looked very interesting. He said ‘Somebody gave
this to me in Bali and you can stitch anything on it’; it had become a column of my ‘Stitch in Time’. I looked at the bottom
of it, and it was my original handkerchief. The people had stitched in a vertical way because it’s small. I said to him ‘You
know, I think I know the person who did this’, but he had to go and catch a plane, so I haven’t seen those works again. Things
were stitched on like bones and Chinese coins, all sorts of things. After that I started to make different versions of ‘a
Stitch in Time’ in different places.
²⁹

There were a number of artists involved with the Galaxy. One of them, John Dugger, exhibited his multiples at the Whitechapel
Gallery in 1970 and the tankas and ritual objects he collected during his travels in Nepal with David Medalla were shown at
the Hayward Gallery in 1971. Another artist was Gerald Fitzgerald, who also showed at the Indica Gallery. After a particularly
nasty drugs bust in February 1968 in which, according to Medalla’s biographer, Guy Brett, cannabis was planted by a plain-clothes
police infiltrator (‘He wore jeans but they were new’), three Galaxy members were sent to trial. (Though they were happy to
use it, the Exploders rarely had enough money to eat, let alone buy drugs.) David was in Holland at the time. A Member of
Parliament, Benn Levy, gave a statement in their defence at the trial, saying:

They are unacquisitive, as oblivious of elementary comfort as a classical religious order, unselfconsciously ascetic. Their
boarding house is furnished with mattresses, sleeping bags, packing cases, bookshelves and little else. There they live in
cheerful penury working away like beavers on projects
that offer no prospect of serious remuneration, that may at best earn them a week’s supply of baked potatoes, raw carrots,
bread, jam, cabbage, Mars bars and occasional eggs. They dress and coif themselves egregiously, prompted not by fashion but
by individual fancy. Their clothes are not only a proclamation of non-conformity but often an expression of surrealist humour.
³⁰

Two of the three were acquitted, but the police achieved their aim: they destroyed the commune. The members dispersed and
Medalla, his new friend the American artist John Dugger, and several other Exploders left the country for India, a trip paid
for by a wealthy admirer. David and John did not return for eighteen months.

The Balls Pond Road building was sold, but one of the Galaxy members, the artist Gerry Fitzgerald, moved the remnants of the
commune to a building in Islington Park Street, and assumed the leadership role vacated by David. It was at this location
that both Genesis P-Orridge and Derek Jarman spent time in the Galaxy Mark II.

Urban communes like Balls Pond Road experienced many problems, police harassment being the major one, and more and more their
members decided that the city was not conducive to communal living. The Tribe of the Sacred Mushroom, who had a commune in
Notting Hill, were the first to move, and left town in January 1968. Their scribe, Lynn Darnton, wrote in
IT
: ‘We all had the same vision of a small, isolated village with nature as our garden, populated by organic, rhythmic people
instead of mechanical synthetic ones in it… we find the combination of beautiful country surroundings and a macrobiotic diet
has made the use of acid totally unnecessary.’
³¹
She was inundated with letters from readers wanting to join the tribe and had to appeal in
IT
to say that they couldn’t take anyone else, nor reply to all the letters.

Some communes took things more gradually, By the spring of 1968 Sid Rawle’s Hyde Park Diggers had over 200 members but as
many of them had jobs, and the commune was loosely spread out over a large number of rented flats, he recognized that their
long-term plan of moving to the country would take time to realize. It had been part realized in 1967 when John Lennon bought
the island of Dornish, in Chew Bay, Co. Mayo off the West Irish coast on an acid trip and afterwards hadn’t known what to
do with it. He contacted Sid, known in the press as the King of the Hippies for his long robes and beard, round granny-style
glasses (not unlike Lennon’s) and necklace of ritual objects, and offered him the custodianship of Dornish ‘to be used for
public
good’. Sid agreed and a group of twenty-five adults and a baby travelled to Dornish to see if it was feasible. Sid Rawle:

We decided we would hold a six-week summer camp on the island. Then we would see what came out of that and decide if we wanted
to extend our stay. It was heaven and it was hell. We lived in tents because there were no stone buildings on the island at
all. Most of the time was really good.
³²