London Calling (53 page)

Burroughs lived in London from 1965 until 1974, but rarely made public appearances unless he was on a mission. After witnessing
the police riot at the Chicago Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in 1968, which he covered for
Esquire
magazine, Burroughs became more interested in the practical applications of his cut-up technique:

Deconditioning means the removal of all automatic reactions deriving from past conditioning… all automatic reactions to Queen,
Country, Pope, president, Generalissimo, Allah, Christ, Fidel Castro, The Communist party, the CIa… When automatic reactions
are no longer operative you are in a condition to make up your mind. Only the deconditioned would be allowed to vote in any
thinking society and no hostess can be asked to put up with the man
who has not been deconditioned there he is on about student anarchy and permissiveness such a bore. Very promising techniques
now exist suitable for mass deconditioning and we’ll all be less of a bore.
³⁴

The actual methods used to achieve this deconditioning were the subject of many of Burroughs’s articles. He spoke at length
about the use of tape recorders as a revolutionary tool:

It’s more of a cultural takeover, a way of altering the consciousness of people rather than a way of directly obtaining political
control… Simply by the use of tape recorders. As soon as you start recording situations and playing them back on the street
you are creating a new reality. When you play back a street recording, people think they’re hearing real street sounds and
they’re not. You’re tampering with their actual reality.
³⁵

He found that by making recordings in or near someone’s premises, then playing them back and taking pictures, various sorts
of trouble occurred. He immediately set out to exploit his discovery.

‘I have frequently observed that this simple operation – making recordings and taking pictures of some location you wish to
discommode or destroy, then playing recordings back and taking more pictures – will result in accidents, fires, removals,
especially the last. The target moves.’
³⁶
By 1972, Bill decided that his dissatisfaction with the Scientologists merited an attack on their headquarters. Burroughs
carried out a tape and photo operation against the Scientology Centre at 37 Fitzroy Street and, sure enough, in a couple of
months they moved to 68 Tottenham Court Road. However, subsequent operations carried out there did not work and at the time
of writing they still occupy the building. It is possible they erected some form of defence after the inconvenience of their
first move.

Encouraged by his initial success at making the Scientologists relocate, he turned his weapons on an easier target: the Moka
Bar at 29 Frith Street, Soho; London’s first-ever espresso bar. He began the attack on 3 August 1972. The reason for the operation
was ‘outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy and poisonous cheesecake’. Bill closed in on the Moka Bar, his tape recorder running,
his camera snapping away. He stood around outside so the proprietor could see him. ‘They are seething in there. The horrible
old proprietor, his frizzy-haired wife and slack-jawed son, the snarling counterman. I have them and they know it.’

Bill played the tapes back a number of times outside the Moka Bar and took even more photographs. Their business fell off
and they kept shorter
and shorter hours. On 30 October 1972, the Moka Bar closed and the premises were taken over, appropriately, by the Queen’s
Snack Bar.

Buoyant from the effectiveness of his attack, Bill went on to hypothesize what could be done in a location such as a rock
festival:

You could cause a riot easily. All you have to do is take the tape recorders with riot material already recorded and then
record any sort of scuffle that goes on. When you start playing it back, you’re going to have more scuffles… a recorded whistle
will bring cops, a recorded gunshot when they have their guns out – well – it’s as simple as that.
³⁷

It was once seen as astonishing that Warhol could set up a camera and walk away, letting the machinery get on with the job
of making the film: no-one attended the whole of the making of the 8 hour 6 minute
Empire
(1964), and very few bothered to watch it all the way through, including Warhol himself. Now, in modern police state Britain,
hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras, clustered like metallic fruit on lighting poles and purpose-made derricks,
continue Warhol’s work, recording and storing millions of films that will never be watched by anyone. But do they, as Burroughs
suggests, disrupt the time-space continuum? The writers Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd repeatedly stress the danger of disrupting
the sacred geometry of the city: the Temple of Mithras rebuilt to the incorrect alignment, London’s rivers redirected, Temple
Bar leading nowhere, the graveyard of Pancras Old Church – the centre of Blake’s Jerusalem – covered by railway tracks, the
Roman gateways to the city blocked or diverted, surveillance films flattening reality, draining energy from the built environment,
turning Londoners into consumer zombies.

Burroughs was then living at 8 Duke Street, St James’s, just down from Piccadilly. He shared his apartment with John Brady,
a young Irish Dillyboy to whom he paid £5 a day. The film-maker Antony Balch lived in the same building and they often dined
together; in 1972, Brion Gysin also moved in, taking Burroughs’s flat while Burroughs moved to a smaller one at the top of
the building. Apart from making tea and taking a light lunch of his usual salted biscuits and a glass of milk, both obtained
from Fortnum and Mason, his local food shop, Burroughs did not cook. His social life consisted of eating dinner in a restaurant,
sometimes alone, but usually with friends: Balch, Gysin, Ian Sommerville, Eric Mottram, sometimes Alexander Trocchi, though
he tried to avoid Alex, who was always trying to involve him in various schemes in which Burroughs would do the work and Trocchi
get the kudos.
Occasionally Burroughs would venture to the French pub or the Colony to see Francis Bacon, whom he knew from Tangier. Burroughs:

I met him through Paul Bowles. I saw a lot of Francis in Tangiers, I’ve seen a lot of him over the years. I was very interested.
He’s charming and also he’s got a lot of very interesting things to say about modern painting. He said so much of it is nothing,
it’s decoration, it’s not painting, and as to what painting actually is, his views were hard to understand but very interesting
to hear… He likes mature men.
³⁸

The sixties was the time of Bacon’s second great love affair, which began two years after the death in Tangier of Peter Lacey
in 1962. George Dyer was to be the subject of dozens of his paintings. They met in 1964, when Dyer saw John Deakin and Francis
Bacon enjoying themselves at the bar and approached them. ‘You all seem to be having a good time,’ he said. ‘Can I buy you
a drink?’ Dyer was a petty criminal, he had served time, but was a weak, emotional individual, far from the hard man front
he hid behind. He had a drink problem and quickly became dependent on Bacon for emotional and financial security. When Bacon
suggested they should see each other less often, Dyer reacted by planting cannabis in Bacon’s studio and tipping off the police.
Bacon didn’t take drugs and particularly did not smoke cannabis because of his asthma, but Dyer hid some among Bacon’s canvases
and telephoned the police. They arrived with two sniffer dogs and quickly found 2.1 grammes wrapped in silver paper in a paintbox
beneath a pile of underclothes. This could have been a very costly business for Bacon; if he was convicted then he would not
be able to travel to the USA for shows.

Marlborough Gallery engaged one of the best, and most expensive, Q Cs in the country to defend him. He appeared in Marlborough
Street Magistrates Court in October 1970, where it was quickly revealed that Detective Sergeant Carol Bristow had been tipped
off by George Dyer, an unreliable witness who had been in borstal and in jail and who, though no longer employed by Bacon,
constantly returned to the house and tried to batter the door down. Dyer was described as a handyman and Bacon testified that
Dyer was an alcoholic and often made allegations against him when drunk. ‘When he is drunk he feels I don’t pay him enough.
Sometimes he has broken down my front door and broken into my flat. I pay him a regular wage but that doesn’t suffice because
of his drinking and he comes and asks for more. Sometimes I give him some, sometimes I don’t.’
³⁹
On 27 August 1970 he had refused Dyer’s demands and so Dyer attempted to find revenge. Bacon told the court he bore no animosity
towards Dyer. ‘He is a very sick man. I still employ him
and I have kept in contact with him while he was in hospital… Naturally I am relieved this whole business has cleared my name.
It has been a great strain.’
⁴⁰
Judge Leslie still smelled something of a rat, sensing it was homosexual quarrel, and refused to award costs.

Dyer accompanied Bacon to Paris for the opening of Bacon’s 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais by the President of France,
Georges Pompidou. Like his Tate retrospective, this celebratory occasion was marred by death. Dyer returned early to their
hotel room from the celebration party and committed suicide.

Despite his great wealth, Bacon lived a remarkably simple life: ‘People think I live grandly you know, but in fact I live
in a dump.’ Bacon may well have used Château Pétrus to make sauces – he was an exceptionally good cook – but he spent no money
on his accommodation. Number 7 Reece Mews was essentially a bedsitter: a modest kitchen-bathroom with a tub in the corner,
a sitting room where the settee was splattered with paint, and a main room used as a studio, which was always in a state which
appeared to be total chaos, though Bacon was able find things among the deep piles of discarded paint tubes, torn photographs,
clothes, books and magazines. He rarely cleaned his brushes, rubbing them on the wall or wiping them on his dressing gown
or on old clothes or socks. He told David Sylvester: ‘I throw an awful lot of paint onto things, and I don’t know what’s going
to happen to it… I use anything. I use scrubbing brushes and sweeping brushes… I impregnate rags with colour, and they leave
this kind of network of colour across the image. I use them nearly always.’
⁴¹
His last boyfriend, John Edwards, would sit in there with him, talking to him while he painted: ‘He held his brush like a
sword and stood far back from the canvas, like he was fencing with an unseen opponent.’
⁴²
In the winter he would sit in the kitchen with the gas oven door slightly open to warm him while waiting for the bath to
fill.

He used old socks and bits of corduroy trousers to achieve certain textures on his canvases and at one point lost a valuable
Patek Philippe watch that he had hidden in a sock; it must have been thrown out with the other hardened socks and paint-stiffened
corduroy scraps. He loved the small room and always said he could work better there than in any other studio he ever had.
He never drank in there while he was painting but would join John Edwards for a glass of wine in the kitchen afterwards.

He left Reece Mews to Edwards when he died in 1992 and, despite Bacon’s well-known antipathy towards Ireland, in 1998, Edwards
donated the studio and what was left of its contents after numerous beachcombers had rifled
through it to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Bacon’s home town of Dublin. In-depth examination of its detritus
revealed a number of sketches and drawings for paintings, something Bacon had always sworn he never did, claiming that each
picture was totally spontaneous.

The freedom of the press is being forcibly stifled by policemen who have taken it upon themselves to enforce, not the law,
but their own dismal and hypocritical standards of morality.

RICHARD NEVILLE

The
Oz
¹
trial which took place in London in 1971 came to symbolize the division in British society between the large sections of
the middle class who felt they had the right to impose their bourgeois values on everyone in the country, as symbolized by
Mary Whitehouse, and the liberal intelligentsia, who advocated greater freedom for the individual, freedom of speech, sexual
freedom and the like. It was accurately described by the
Daily Telegraph
headline: ‘Underground versus Establishment Clash’. It was a typically British trial in that it contained a large element
of farce: the main subject matter under discussion was a cartoon drawing of a little bear with a very large penis, but the
entire court pretended it was something serious under discussion. The trial was also very convenient for the dirty squad,
who used it as a smokescreen for not prosecuting the Soho porn barons. The
Oz
trial was the most expensive and the longest obscenity trial ever held in Britain to date. It was also a travesty.

Oz
was not an underground newspaper at all: as a monthly it did not appear frequently enough to report underground news, which
in any case was done perfectly well by
IT
and later
Friendz
and
Ink
.
Oz
was a full-colour glossy, and as such it nurtured many of the illustrators and young artists who are well known today. Rather
than report news, it tended to fuel the debate between the underground and the left, and to discuss in more depth the issues
touched on by the underground papers. It also ran an enormous number of articles about sex, which is why it sold so well.
Oz
had a number of themed issues: a gay issue, a feminist issue guest edited by Germaine Greer, a flying saucer issue, an issue
devoted entirely to Martin Sharp’s graphics, and
so on. It was on this idea of themed issues that the following advertisement appeared in issue 26, their ‘Pussy Power’ issue
of February 1970: ‘Some of us at Oz are feeling old and boring. So we invite any of our readers who are under 18 to come and
edit the April issue… you will receive no money, except expenses, and you will enjoy almost complete editorial freedom.’ As
Neville recalled: ‘There was the idea that perhaps children were starting to pick up on some of the moods and ideas of the
sixties. There was a bit of restlessness in the secondary schools so we thought we would turn an issue over to them.’
²
Some
Oz
staff members have also suggested that Richard liked the guest-edited issues because it meant less work for himself.