Many Pink Floyd gig chronologies list the group playing at the Goings On Club, held once a week in a gambling club in Archer Street, Soho, and organised by the poet Pete Brown who later went on to co-write a number of hits for Cream with his friend Jack Bruce. It was a short lived club; by the fifth week so many gamblers had infiltrated themselves back in that the atmosphere was no longer conducive to poetry and spontaneous happenings so it closed. I think I attended them all, but I have no memory of seeing the Pink Floyd play there (which is not to say they didn’t).
Nigel Fountain’s Underground: The London Alternative Press 1966-1974 suggests that I saw the Pink Floyd play there as the Ab Dabs [sic], but this is a mis-transcription of the original interview tape, which was recorded by someone else, or a misunderstanding on the author’s part. I never did see them there, or as the Abdabs. The club was more dedicated to poetry and performance art than to music. My then wife, Sue, mixes the Goings On Club up with the Spontaneous Underground Club in her description of it in Jonathon Green’s Days In The Life, which may be where the idea originates from. There were a lot of performance art events at the time in London, for instance there was a thoroughly disagreeable installation by Jeff Nuttall in Better Books at the time David Gale worked there in late 1964 which involved a maze with ‘air-locks’ made from phone books you had to push through and a tunnel filled with feathers that one had to crawl through, among other things. John Lennon was not amused when he emerged, covered in feathers.
The back room of Better Books had a low stage, rickety tables and chairs made from different textures of wood, and a coffee/tea/soup machine. It was here, in the summer of 1965, that Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Rubin, Dan Richter, Sue Miles, myself and others first planned the idea of a poetry reading at the Royal Albert Hall. I was managing the shop and had already put on a reading by Ginsberg which was so overcrowded that people fainted. Now both Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were coming to town and we wanted a venue that would hold the audience that the three premier Beat poets would attract. This reading is generally considered to be the genesis of the London underground and counter-cultural scene, spawning, among other things, the International Times underground newspaper (IT) and the London Free School. But it was not just Londoners who were inspired by it.
On her return to New York, Allen Ginsberg’s off-and-on girlfriend, Barbara Rubin, the one who had actually booked the Albert Hall, made plans for a follow-up event the next year to feature the Fugs, the Chambers Brothers and Timothy Leary, films by Warhol, as well as Allen Ginsberg and a number of other New York poets. Closely involved with Barbara’s plans was Bernard Stollman, the owner of ESP-Disk, the experimental jazz label that released the Fugs as well as Albert Ayler, the New York Art Quartet and many even more ‘difficult’ artists. He was interested in finding new artists in London and had already made plans to release a recording by William Burroughs – Call Me Burroughs – that Barbara brought back from Better Books. (It was privately pressed in Paris and I was the UK distributor.)
Visually Syd Barrett was the most convincing sartorial model for psychedelia in Pink Floyd.
Hoping to locate more unusual recordings along this line, Bernard encouraged his younger brother Steve, a film-maker and an active participant in the downtown New York art scene, to go to London to look for new acts. He arrived around the Christmas of 1965, and immediately met up with all the members of the inchoate underground who had been involved with the Albert Hall reading. There were so many people doing things, and the London scene was so spread out compared to New York, that Steve decided to start a club and have them come to him. He figured that if you provided the space for people to get together and perform, then things would happen spontaneously.
There had already been evidence of this with the Goings On Club and other happenings and performance events. Steve rented the Marquee Club, at 90 Wardour Street, on a Sunday afternoon and charged six shillings and sixpence admission to pay the rental. He made no profit from it. Though the Pink Floyd did not play at the first Spontaneous Underground, it is worth describing it in detail as it gives a good idea of the London scene that they were about to launch themselves into and introduces some of the characters who were to play an integral part in their story.
There were no ads for the events which were by invitation only, in these days before most people had telephones the usual method of communication was the mimeographed flyer. It was very important to have a good mailing list. Several lists were combined and invitations were sent out to key people consisting of an envelope filled with William Burroughs style cut-ups – each unique. There were slivers from Alexander Trocchi’s Sigma Portfolio, slices of discarded pages from Long Hair magazine and a couple of inches cut from a Marvel comic.
For the first event there was a mimeo statement which read:
SPONTANEOUS UNDERGROUND at the Marquee this Sunday January 30th organised by Steve Stollman of ESP Disk with the aid of everybody. Among those taking part will be Donovan/Mose Allison/Graham Bond/Pop/Mime/Kinetic Sculpture/Discotheque/Boutique. THIS TRIP begins at 4.30 and goes on. Liquor licence applied for. Costume, masque, ethnic, space, Edwardian, Victorian and hipness generally … face and body makeup— certainly. This is a spontaneous party, any profit to be held in trust by Louis Diamond, Solicitor, that such spontaneities may continue. Invitation only, donation at door 6/6.
The Sunday Times previewed the event under the heading ‘Revolutionary Party Organiser’:
“An absolutely new kind of rave,” claims John Hopkins, who helped to make up the star-spangled invitation list for a massive soirée, to be held this evening at the Marquee Club, London…. The organiser, 23-year-old Steve Stollman, until recently, made documentary films in America. Now he wants to make documentary “happenings” in England. The invited are the entertainment … Who will be there? Poets, painters, pop singers, hoods, Americans, homosexuals (“because they make up 10 per cent of the population”), 20 clowns, jazz musicians, “one murderer”, sculptors, politicians and some girls who defy description are among those invited. For Stollman their identity is irrelevant because this is underground culture which offers everyone the opportunity to do or say anything without conforming to the restrictions of earthmen …”
It was a great success; many of the people who had been involved with the Goings On club came along. There was nothing to do on Sundays in London in those days, in fact the whole event was probably illegal; these were the days when park attendants still chained up the swings in children’s playgrounds on the Sabbath in some parts of the country. It was not until 1969 that most parts of the 18th century Sunday Observance laws were relaxed.
True to the spirit of the club people arrived at the Marquee in fancy dress, protohippie gear and the sort of combination bowler hat and ex-war department look favoured by trad bands on the Aldermaston CND route. Just across Oxford Street from Wardour Street was the garment district, then much bigger because there were still a lot of sweat shops in the area. The bins outside these light industrial buildings were filled with fabric offcuts, and often several yards of material would still be left on a spool. Great bundles of cardboard tubes, originally wrapped with cloth, stood stacked in doorways. Enterprising young women dragged armloads of this material down to the Marquee where others had come equipped with scissors and paste, crepe paper and everything needed for a fancy dress production line. Not everyone needed them; Donovan arrived later in the day wearing thick black kohl and henna eye make-up: each eye drawn with an Egyptian Eye of Horus. He sat cross-legged on the stage and sang with six sitar players and a conga drummer but the next day he had no memory of ever being there.
Johnny Byrne* and the poet Spike Hawkins did an anarchic double-act as the Poison Bellows and arrived pushing a wind-up gramophone in an old pram wearing long overcoats and mufflers and trailing yards and yards of fabric they had found in the street and looking a lot like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. They performed inept anti-conjuring tricks using Pete Brown’s father’s antique collapsible silk top hat; the magically produced eggs were inevitably broken so that Johnny’s collar was covered with egg shells. It was the type of British slapstick humour typified by the Alberts that finds something inherently funny about a tuba. The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band had it, and to a certain extent the Scaffold. It had its immediate genesis in The Goon Show and reached its peak with Monty Python’s Flying Circus but the Poison Bellows had a harder edge. Johnny told Jonathon Green: ‘One of the things that happens in any movement is that people accept anything and we simply wanted to shock them out of that.’ It didn’t last long because part of the act involved an enormously heavy pianola that the duo had no means to transport.
Before Donovan arrived, Graham Bond did his mystical pirate act but Mose Allison did not show. It didn’t matter – the audience was the real entertainment. Being Sunday no alcohol was allowed but it was not needed, as Steve said: ‘People will be high enough on entertainment alone’ and, of course, many were high when they got there.
The ‘Spontaneous Underground’ immediately became the village pump of the underground. It had something of the atmosphere of the Albert Hall reading except the Marquee gathering became a regular event. The next invite was a promotional insert for ESP Records with a faint two colour Roneoed message overprinted and bleeding off the page on both sides of the card – barely decipherable and lacking a date, rather like rave invites in the Nineties, it read:
In memoriam. King Charles. Marquis de Sade. Superman. Supergirl. Ulysses. Charlie Chaplin. All tripping lightly looning phoenician moon mad sailors – in characteri as IN characters – characterised in costume at the Marquee this Sunday at 5 o clock …
The information given was the literary equivalent of a psychedelic poster, it suggested an attitude, a mood, a state of mind, an approach. As the activities continued there were many memorable events: the time a classical pianist calmly played her way through the Bach Preludes and Fugues surrounded by Ginger Johnson and his African Drummers who pounded out cross rhythms all around her, highlighting the good bits with trumpet reveilles and bringing out something called ‘the Big Log’ – a hollowed out tree trunk – for the grand finale.
The lights remained on during performances; after all there was not supposed to be a division between audience and performers though by end of this particular set the stage was enveloped in a thick cloud of pot smoke like the dry ice which bands used later, only more fun. The lack of division between stage and audience was emphasized on one occasion by a young woman who had her long red Rapunzel hair trimmed by a friend on stage where the lighting was better while musicians honked and hooted all around her.
Many of the pick-up bands involved members of the early, ever-changing personnel of the Soft Machine: Robert Wyatt on drums; Daevid Allen singing or sometimes reading his poems; the illustrator Mal Dean whose Jerry Cornelius strip and cartoons later enlivened International Times, on trumpet and lavatory plunger; Rab Spall on amplified violin, John Surman on soprano saxophone. There were two conga drummers who appeared regularly, also several spoons players – buskers still used this instrument while entertaining cinema queues. Then there were the extra-musical events. It was at one of the Spontaneous Underground events that Gerry Fitzgerald first presented one of his enormous jellies. A large heap of pink jelly became a regular feature of early London underground events and someone inevitably stripped off and rolled in it.
Though people always referred to it as Spontaneous Underground, the announcements for the Sunday afternoon events at the Marquee only ever used that name once. Steve called it The Trip, as in his announcement for the March 13th event. This was the first time the Pink Floyd Sound played there, though by this stage in the club’s history no bands were advertised:
TRIP bring furniture toy prop paper rug paint balloon jumble costume mask robot candle incense ladder wheel light self all others march 13th 5pm
The notion of there being no division between performers and audience was particularly suited to AMM, for whom all sounds constituted part of the piece being performed, whether they originated in the group or the audience. There was no melody, no rhythm and no score. Cornelius Cardew – who played piano, cello and transistor radio – though he rarely, if ever, touched the notes of the piano, preferring to pluck the strings or tap on the frame – wrote ‘An AMM performance has no beginning or ending. Sounds outside the performance are distinguished from it only by individual sensibility.’
Cardew studied with Stockhausen, had worked with John Cage and David Tudor in Europe and had prepared a guitar version of Cage’s Fontana Mix. The other members were Lou Gare on tenor saxophone and violin, Eddie Provost on drums, xylophone and various percussion, Lawrence Sheaff on cello, accordion, clarinet and transistor radio and Keith Rowe on electric guitar and transistor radio. This was free-form music at its cutting edge and to reinforce the sense of serious scientific investigation AMM played in white lab coats. The idea that all sound could have a musical value was absorbed by the Pink Floyd who later took up the idea and spent hours using non-conventional musical sources to try and make an album. Some of the sounds AMM made were impossible to identify. Watching from the side of the stage Syd Barrett was intrigued to see that Keith Rowe achieved some of his special effects on electric guitar by rolling steel ball bearings up and down the strings to produce peculiar sounds.
Syd borrowed this procedure and later used it himself on stage. Keith Rowe had an enormous influence on Syd’s playing, as can be seen in Peter Whitehead’s Pink Floyd London 1966/1967 film where Syd spends most of his time on the studio recordings of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, and an improvised jam called ‘Nick’s Boogie,’ using his guitar in the slide position – ‘table top position’ as Rowe called it – producing effects rather than any recognisable melodies or improvisation on the tunes.
Rowe came from a fine art background and had always been very attracted to the idea of the ‘found object’ and Marcel Duchamp’s assertion that “Whatever the artists chooses to be art is art.” At the beginning of the Sixties Rowe had been a member of Mike Westbrook’s band until his resolution never to tune the guitar again made his departure from the group inevitable. Inspired by John Cage’s ‘prepared piano’ he developed his own ‘prepared guitar’ placing objects on or between the strings to alter the guitar’s timbre and using other extended techniques to push his music into the realm of complete abstraction.
The Pink Floyd Sound were elated to be playing the Marquee, thinking that this might be the break they needed to get onto the London club circuit, so it was somewhat disconcerting for them to find that they were playing at what appeared to be a private event. There was little connection between the Spontaneous Underground crowd and the normal Marquee audiences though the wife of the club owner Harold Pendleton, was there to keep an eye on things and the Floyd’s reception was duly noted. Whereas the house lights were usually kept on for the Sunday events, in this instance they were lowered, as were the stage lights, in order for a film and light show to play over the group.
Two days before, still using the name Tea Set, they had played the Rag Ball at Essex University in Colchester – where they shared the bill with the Swinging Blue Jeans – and someone had projected a film accompanied by oil-based slides onto the stage backdrop as they played. Roger Waters told Michael Wale: “We’d already become interested in mix-media, as it were, and some bright spark down there had had done a film with a paraplegic in London, given this paraplegic a film camera and wheeled him round London, filming his view. Now they showed it up on screen as we played.” The band were intrigued by the possibilities of combining a light-show with their music
‘The LFS offers you free education through lectures and discussion groups in subjects essential to our daily life and work.’
John Hopkins
The film of London shot at a low angle view was certainly shown at the Spontaneous Underground so it was probably screened at this event, but not even the most dedicated Pink Floyd researchers seem to know who projected it and provided the light-show. Steve Stollman and Hoppy were both delighted with the group’s performance, which featured extended free-form improvisation on old R&B classics, and invited them back. The band themselves were pleased to find such a sympathetic audience and returned on a number of occasions. Nick Mason told Mojo: “There were elements of the underground that we did tune into. The main one was mixed media. We may not have been into acid but we certainly understood the idea of a Happening. We supplied the music while people did creative dance, painted their faces or bathed in the giant jelly. If it had been 30 years earlier Rick would have come up out of the floor in front of the cinema screen playing the organ.”
The Pink Floyd Sound became the public face of the London underground scene, even though, with the exception of Syd, they were actually somewhat removed from it. Roger Waters: “The whole mixed media thing started happening in 1966. We had a Sunday afternoon at the Marquee with film going and us banging and crashing away. John Hopkins and his merry men were there. By this time there were one or two names creeping over from the West Coast like Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead. Nobody had heard them.’
Most of the San Francisco bands did not release any albums in Britain until the summer of 1967, long after the Pink Floyd, the Soft Machine and the other British ‘psychedelic’ bands had developed their own styles so there was never a question of them being influenced by the American groups. In fact, when they did finally get to hear them they were disappointed to find that most of them were just blues bands; quite good but not breaking any new ground at all. It is unclear how many times the Pink Floyd played the Spontaneous Underground. Published gig lists show them as the house band, but the event was not a regular one: John Hopkins can only remember attending one and I can only remember three. In all probability there were less than half a dozen and it is certain that the Pink Floyd did not play them all.
Five days before the Pink Floyd played at the Spontaneous Underground, a group of people, many of whom were associated with the club, embarked on another underground enterprise. The London Free School was launched at a public meeting at St Peter’s Church Hall, Notting Hill, on Tuesday, March 8, 1966. The red and black flyer printed by John Hopkins read, “The LFS offers you free education through lectures and discussion groups in subjects essential to our daily life and work.” It promised that “The London Free School is not political, not racial, not intellectual, not religion, not a club. It is open to all.”
It was basically an alternative community centre, offering 24-hour free legal advice and assistance to the local largely West Indian population, running a pre-school nursery, lessons on English and other similar services. It was designed to “promote co-operation and understanding between people of various races and creeds through education and through working together.” Notting Hill was not the millionaires’ playground it is now; in the mid Sixties it was a run down area of decaying Regency houses shoddily converted into cheap flats, with a large West Indian population mercilessly exploited by slum landlords like Peter Rachman.
The LFS, aside from being the launch pad for the Pink Floyd, is best known as the organisation that founded the Notting Hill Carnival. There had been a Notting Hill Fayre and Pageant which stopped around the turn of the century, but following in the wake of the 1958 Notting Hill race riots the tradition was revived by Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian member of the Communist Party who arrived in London in 1955 who proposed that a Caribbean carnival was the best response to the racists. She organised a cabaret programme at St. Pancras Town Hall, complete with steel bands and a carnival queen beauty contest, on January 30, 1959 following a small procession in Powis Square, Notting Hill. The event was a great success and continued for seven years at various venues, including Porchester Hall and Seymour Hall where, in 1962, calypso king Mighty Sparrow played. The carnival ceased when Claudia Jones died of chronic heart disease in 1964.
It began in its present form, as a summer festival, two years later when Rhaunie Laslett, a social worker of Native American and Russian descent, known locally as Miss Las, became the first president of the London Free School. Though she must have known of Claudia Jones’s West Indian carnival – and surely attended it – she famously claimed that the idea came to her in a dream: she saw a multitude of people dressed in colourful costumes, a street procession where black and white people got to know and understand each other’s customs and created an atmosphere of warmth and happiness throughout Notting Hill. Paddington council offered a large grant towards the resurrection of the Notting Hill Carnival, but only if the LFS got rid of Michael de Freitas.
Michael had been a pimp and an enforcer for Peter Rachman – it was Michael who would go in with German Shepherds to evict recalcitrant tenants (who were for the most part West Indians). Michael had a criminal reputation and liked to boast that he had once killed a man with a machete. Some years later he was convicted of doing just this by a court in Trinidad and sentenced to death by hanging but that was in the future. In 1966 he was experiencing a number of major changes in life, one of which was his conversion to the Muslim faith, as preached by Elijah Muhammad and his Black Muslim organisation in the States. Michael changed his name, first to Michael X, then to Michael Abdul Malik in keeping with his new religion.
Michael contributed a lot to the Free School, setting up an adventure playground for the local kids on Acklam Road and – his most impressive contribution as far as drawing attention to the Free School – persuading Muhammad Ali, then the heavyweight champion of the World in the run up to his second Henry Cooper fight, to visit Rhaunie Laslett’s neighbourhood law centre and childrens’ playgroup at 34 Tavistock Crescent. Ali arrived on May 15, 1966, wearing a Beatles-style suit, sat on the floor and chatted with the 50 youngsters gathered there, signed autographs and talked with the excited crowd that had gathered outside, blocking the street. ‘Are you happy?’ someone shouted. ‘I’m happy here!’ he said.
Hoppy and Rhaunie Laslett refused to be blackmailed by Paddington council and insisted that Michael stay involved as one of the ways to connect with the West Indian community and in July 1966 the first Notting Hill Carnival happened anyway, without the council’s help. Many of the same group of activists, artists and musicians that were to play a role in the development of the London underground scene: John Hopkins, Graham Keen, Peter Jenner and Dave Tomlin, were organisers. Artists involved with the first Carnival included Ginger Johnson and the Afro Cuban Band, the New Orleans Marching Band, Agnes O’Connell’s London Irish Girl Pipers and Nell Gwynne riding in a horse drawn orange cart, but the real energy in the parade came from a Caribbean steel band.
Russell Henderson, Sterling Betancourt, Vernon ‘Fellows’ Williams, and Ralph Cherry led a parade of floats with children in fancy dress. Apparently as they passed by, people rushed to the street to join them, leaving their meals burning on the stoves or dancing with their hair still wet with shampoo, the band was so good; there was a real carnival atmosphere and about 1,000 West Indians and 1,500 white people filled the streets. There were poetry readings and competition darts matches and all manner of events. The Fair continued for a whole week and there were remarkably few arrests, despite a heavy police presence. From this humble beginning, the Notting Hill Carnival has now grown to become the largest street carnival in Europe, attracting more than a million people to the streets of Notting Hill every August Bank Holiday weekend.
There was a good cross-section of people at the LFS; one of them, for instance, was director John Huston’s daughter, the actress Anjelica who was then attending nearby Holland Park Comprehensive when she wasn’t hanging out in the LFS’s psychedelic basement headquarters at 26 Powis Terrace. She remembers playing “a good deal of hooky in the basement of a fish and chip shop in Powis Terrace called the London Free School. We used to spend many a happy afternoon with a bunch of bright hippies doing what I care not to remember … To come into one’s age in London … I remember hearing Bob Dylan for the first time and Otis Redding for the first time and going to see Ike and Tina Turner at the Revolution. Not to mention the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Roundhouse, Eel Pie Island. It was something that was unprecedented and I think it threw everyone into a state but it was awfully good fun if you were on the cusp of it.”
‘a good deal of hooky in the basement of a fish and chip shop in Powis Terrace called the London Free School. We used to spend many a happy afternoon with a bunch of bright hippies doing what I care not to remember …’
Anjelica
* Byrne later co-wrote the book Groupie with Jenny Fabian about her exciting friendships with rock ‘n’ roll musicians including Syd Barrett.