London Calling (55 page)

Naturally Mary Whitehouse called the Appeal Court decision an ‘unmitigated disaster… if the children of this country cannot
be protected by the law from this sort of thing, then the law should be tightened up. I am going to get on to the Attorney
General about this.’
⁷
Presumably he binned her letter. Neville and Whitehouse had met ten days before the decision was handed down at a debate
on the subject of porn at Cambridge Students Union. Whitehouse was joined onstage by the eccentric Christian moralizer Lord
Longford, known to the press as ‘Lord Porn’, who had his own unofficial commission ‘looking into pornography’. Neville’s team,
which included his solicitor John Mortimer, won by a vote of 442 to 271. Richard used the fame from the trial to write a column
for the right-wing
Evening Standard
billed as ‘the Alternative Voice of the Standard’, along with a disclaimer saying that his views were his own and not theirs.
⁸
The prisoners of war were released, but the fight would go on. (Crumb’s cartoons were prosecuted again in 1996 by HM Customs,
who seized a shipment of
Zap
comics – published in the sixties and in print for almost thirty years – and took the distributor, Knockabout Comics, to
court.
Zap
was finally passed for sale on 30 January, after a trial, described by the
Guardian
as a ‘preposterous obscenity case’,
⁹
which cost Crumb’s distributor £6,000 and thousands in lost profits.)

The
Oz
kids were not the only people in court in London for speaking out on love and sex. As they waited for their appeal hearing,
the Reverend Father Fuck
¹⁰
was defending his religion from uncomprehending magistrates. The Reverend Father Fuck ran the Church of Aphrodite in Tooting
and when the straight Christians announced their intention to hold a Festival of Light in Hyde Park, he decided his contribution
to the festival would be to bake a sacrificial cake in the shape of a phallus, using half an ounce of pot as one of the ingredients
to share with the people. The reverend father wrote:

Some six people took part in the baking of it and three of us took it to Hyde Park in the afternoon. Then I got up on our
sacrificial altar and told the crowd of about 100 heads gathered around me that the prick is the symbol of our church because
the prick with a lovely pair of balls is the symbol of life and the cross is the symbol of death. The heads were saying ‘Let’s
have the sacrament now.’ I thought it was a bit too early so I put it to a vote… some 50 pairs of hands shot up so I said
OK.
¹¹

He broke the glans off the cock and crushed it, scattering the crumbs on the ground as he prayed for peace. Then, after taking
some for himself, he distributed the rest among the crowd. ‘It just disappeared in ten seconds. Great! Great! Great happiness
all round! We joined hands and danced “Ring a Ring of Roses” – great, beautiful, everybody having a great time. A true festival
of life.’

However, when the reverend father attempted to erect his sacrificial altar a second time, six police constables moved in and
dragged him to a waiting police van. When a passing member of the audience, a psychiatrist, asked why he was being arrested,
they bundled her into the van as well. The police refused to book him under the name of the Reverend Father Fuck, occupation,
minister of religion, and locked him in the cells over the weekend. At Marlborough Street Magistrates Court he turned his
back on the magistrate and addressed the public gallery: ‘The prick with a lovely pair of balls is the symbol of life and
cannabis is our sacrament…’ He was remanded to Brixton prison for a week. On 5 October 1971 he was returned to magistrates
court, where he once again addressed the public gallery. ‘Do you want to ask anything?’ shouted the magistrate.

‘You’re not fit to sit in judgement over religion, you bloody fool!’

‘Case proved,’ said the magistrate, fining him five pounds, which they took from the money they had removed from his pockets.
The Reverend Father Fuck commented in
Frendz
: ‘If it is right to speak in the park, then, when prevented by the police, it is right to continue this speech in court.’
¹²
Sadly the system always wins.

The London underground press carried on well into the seventies. By 1973, Chris Rowley,
IT
’s business manager, revealed: ‘We’re in a perpetual state of crisis, always on trial or preparing for a trial. We have to
push everything. But then the whole function of the underground is to push.’ Each issue cost about a £1,000: £500 printing
costs, £50 rental of the IBM typesetter, £50 materials and photographic equipment, £35 a week rent, £25 a week
overheads and seven full-time staff on £15 a week. Advertising brought in about £400 an issue and the rest had to be made
up from sales. By producing and distributing themselves, wholesaling, street-selling and store-selling they cut out all the
middlemen and the financial equation just about made sense. For a time
IT
was stable financially and was a really effective alternative publication. It was housed in Wardour Mews, a dead end alley
in darkest Soho, known locally as Murder Alley. The front door was purple with a large white ‘I T’ painted on it. The office
was down a flight of stone steps into a dark basement with light bulbs strung from a network of cables looping across the
ceiling. By 1973,
IT
’s colleagues:
Frendz
,
Oz
,
Ink
,
Red Mole
,
Black Dwarf
– they were never really regarded as rivals – were all out of business. In the summer of 1973,
IT
was selling 20,000 fortnightly, about half its 1968 sale. By then the editor was Roger Hutchinson: ‘It’s more thorough, more
realistic, more working class, and carrying more news than ever.’
¹³
He said that
IT
stuck to its original convictions:

The function of the underground press is to shake people’s assumptions.
IT
is totally anarchic, it has no structures and no respect for anything. I think very highly of organizations like IS [International
Socialists], for without them there would not be any point in
IT
. But we don’t want to be like a high school lecture; we want to entertain people. You never teach anyone anything. They teach
themselves.
¹⁴

Police pressure on
IT
and
Oz
was the main cause of their eventual demise. The number of police visits became so great that both papers stopped counting.
Felix Dennis from
Oz
said:

Prosecutions are economically damaging not only in costs and fines and so on. They also damage your potential for advertising.
However much people want to sell their product, they’re still not willing to sully their name in court. One of the main causes
of our folding was that advertising dropped significantly, even though the circulation went up.
¹⁵

It was also very difficult for the underground papers to get printed.
Oz
went through twenty-nine printers in its forty-seven issues. Felix:

Another reason for our bankruptcy was artificially high printing costs. We were forced to use out-of-date machinery – sheet
fed instead of web-offset rollers. With the exception of our last two printers I’ve never met a more gutless and lily-livered
bunch of people.
¹⁶

Though
IT
never relied as much on commercial distributors as the other papers, they did use Moore-Harness to reach towns out of London.
Even so, 65 per cent of Britain was beyond the reach of the underground press because W. H. Smith’s and Menzies refused to
carry or wholesale them, even though they were happy enough to carry all the top-shelf porn magazines. By the early seventies
Moore-Harness was responsible for 55 per cent of all underground press sales and were doing very well out of them; the underground
certainly helped pay for the Moore-Harness Rolls-Royces. But by 1973 their enthusiasm had waned because there was so much
more money to made out of the soft-core porn market. By then much of the raison d’être for the underground press had gone:
Time Out
was carrying the listings and much of the political news,
Spare Rib
, started in June 1972, dealt with feminist news and
Gay News
, also from June 1972, catered to gay readers, and from 1977 Richard Boston’s
Vole
covered ecology. Also, many of the underground journalists had moved on into music newspapers or to Fleet Street proper,
working, in a mild and largely ineffective way, from within. Specialist papers had taken over and
IT
, Europe’s first underground paper, closed in 1973 after 164 issues. John Lennon, wondering where his subscription copies
had gone, had someone call to find out what was happening. When he found out the paper had closed he sent a cheque for £1,000,
which enabled a second volume of three issues to be published in 1974. Then the staff packed it in. They left the title and
logo copyright free and in subsequent years seven or more other groups of people have brought it out, sometimes for just a
few issues, other times for a long run; the last copy I saw was from the late 1980s.

Of the specialist magazines, the most underground was probably
Gay News
, started by Denis Lemon and Andrew Lumsden, which ran for eleven years; but not without problems. It was charged with obscenity
in 1974 after they featured a cover shot of two men kissing but won that round. Then, in July 1977, the vindictive Mary Whitehouse
almost managed to close it down by bringing a private prosecution for blasphemy against James Kirkup’s poem ‘The Love That
Dares to Speak Its Name’, which described the sexual arousal of a Roman centurion as he imagined having sex with Jesus on
the cross. The editor, Denis Lemon, was fined £500 and given a nine-month suspended sentence at the Old Bailey for blasphemous
libel on a majority verdict of ten votes to two, the first successful blasphemy case in fifty-five years. This proved once
more that there is no such thing as guaranteed freedom of speech in Britain, and though the poem has been widely reprinted,
it is still technically banned in that anyone can bring the same charge against it. It was generally thought that Lemon was
found guilty largely because he was gay. He told the
press: ‘I feel slightly shattered and empty.’ His persecutor, Mary Whitehouse, was delighted. ‘I am rejoicing,’ she said afterwards,
having caused months of anxiety and stress for scores of people. It was a Pyrrhic victory, however, because her prosecution
of
Gay News
saw the paper’s circulation rise from 8,000 to 40,000 because of all the publicity.

Each year, Britain’s newspaper and television news reporting is dumbed down further and further, so that it is now little
more than bite-size gobbets about celebrities, sporting figures and royalty, interspersed with ads for products no-one needs
or, in the case of the BBC, ads for their own programmes. The brain-numbed viewers seem happy enough, and still talk about
the latest pathetic offerings as they enter the office each morning. Where is the modern equivalent of the underground press;
for example, where was Britain when the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
published a dozen editorial cartoons of the prophet Muhammad on 30 September 2005 causing world-wide protests? The cartoons
were a front-page news story in every paper, but though they were reprinted in more than fifty other countries, not one British
newspaper or TV channel had the guts to publish them. The Cardiff university student paper,
Gair Rhydd
, printed them but the newspaper was pulped by the university before it could be distributed, the editor, Tom Wellingham,
and two journalists were temporarily suspended, and forced to apologize in the next issue. Ironically,
Gair Rhydd
means ‘free speech’ in Welsh. So much for free speech in Britain. I like to think that
International Times,
Oz
or
Frendz
would have printed the cartoons, even if it meant having to barricade the offices against fanatics (the Fleet Street press
is already protected by security personnel and locked doors). But with the advent of the internet the underground press is
no longer necessary in printed form as there are many sites that specialize in such information: the cartoons, for instance,
are readily available online.

If you want to live in the world this is the place. It’s the only place where you have a total grasp of the whole world. Whatever
is happening in every country you can feel in London. Every single building, every single person, every scratch on a tree,
is global because it is one of the most modern places in the world.

GILBERT AND GEORGE
, 1981
¹

Though Camden Town and Notting Hill were the traditional art student areas, many students found that housing to the east of
the City of London was even cheaper, and in the sixties that was where many chose to live. Small enclaves of underground London
life began to sprout, but it was a big area and they were scattered from docklands to Hackney. The poet Lee Harwood, for instance,
wrote movingly of Cable Street, while many art students were attracted to the Georgian housing in Spitalfields. 12 Fournier
Street, a rundown terraced house built by William Taylor in 1726 but refronted in the nineteenth century, was lived in by
a succession of St Martin’s School of Art students, including the pop artist Gerald Laing. Gilbert and George first met as
sculpture students at St Martin’s in 1967 and took over the ground floor apartment when one of their fellow St Martin’s students
moved out. They stayed. Though much has been made of their decision to live in the East End, they were simply following their
classmates in search of inexpensive housing. By the late sixties they had expanded their living space to include the basement,
which they had to fumigate for fleas, and also an upper floor. In 1973 they bought the building and they now own two more
houses on Fournier Street, which is also home to Tracey Emin, bringing a new generation of artists into the street.