by Joe Boyd
Hoppy’s role as Pied Piper of the Underground meant that policemen, journalists and outraged parents became aware of him. It has been suggested that the search warrant for his flat was triggered by a phone call from the worried and titled parent of a teenager who was dancing in the UFO lights, but it could have come from any one of a number of sources. We all assumed he would get off with a fine, but as the trial date approached the prosecution appeared to be playing for keeps. At a South London magistrates’ court in early June, we heard the eight-month sentence handed down. Everyone was devastated. Hoppy handed full control to me and I decided to try to make the club as commercially successful as I could. Half the profit would still go to Hoppy and he would need it when he came out.
Chapter 19
THE SURGE IN ATTENDANCE and publicity UFO experienced during its first six months may have been in keeping with the annus mirabilis 1967, but it was also part of a historic pattern. No matter how pure and impassioned the intention, the inevitable effect of most artistic or cultural revolutions is to feed the public’s appetite for titillation. London’s first commercial ‘hit’, The Beggar’s Opera (which ran almost continuously from 1721 to 1790), was based on the gallows confessions of highwaymen and cutpurses and the broadsheets that memorialized them. Clergy and Tory politicians were furious at its success; they felt it undermined all that was good and proper in English society. Which, of course, explains its popularity.
In the nineteenth century, the French refined the process by which the newly enlarged bourgeoisie avoided boring itself to death. Adventurous sons left the safety of the middle-class hearth, lived in sin with seamstresses in garrets, took to drugs or drink and espoused radical philosophies. They would then create a daring novel/ play/painting/poem/opera to provide vicarious thrills for those still working at their respectable jobs, earning enough as a result to reassume the trappings of bourgeois life in their old age. These rituals, speeded up and modernized (and extending now to daughters), can currently be followed in the popular press.
The twentieth century’s new twists to the old formulae involved drawing the audience farther into the subversive worlds celebrated by the artists. Few in the crowds attending The Beggar’s Opera dreamt of hanging out with thieves and murderers. Nineteenth-century audiences loved reading Scènes de la Vie Bohème and going to the opera, but would never trade their comfortable homes for garrets. And most wouldn’t tolerate their children getting up to any such behaviour.
White New Yorkers taking the A-train to Harlem in the ’20s to catch Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club demonstrated that audiences were becoming as interested in experiencing the dangerous ambience as they were in listening to the dangerous music or reading the dangerous book. When preachers fulminated against rock’n’roll for luring innocent white teenagers into sexually subversive black lifestyles or – heaven forfend! – dancing with black folk, they knew what they were talking about. Fifties teenagers were pushing the boat out that much farther than slumming jazz fans thirty years before.
What London witnessed in the spring of ’67 was more than an endorsement of a new musical style, it was a mass immersion in the sub-culture that gave rise to it. We saw them pour down the stairs week after week in search of a transcendent experience. Thanks to the chemistry in the back pockets of my security staff (freelance, of course, nothing to do with the club), they often found it. Drugs meant there was less of the toe-in-the-water tentativeness of the A-train passengers in 1928: at UFO, the grinning crocodile of psychedelics wrapped its lips around your ankle, dragged you in and licked you all over. Such experiences began to transform society, but not as we had hoped. By the summer, kaftans and beads were everywhere and UFO was swamped by tourists and weekend hippies. But were we anything more than the latest in a line of English style tribes, following Teddy boys, Rockers and Mods? We had aspired to greater things: to be as threatening to the good order of society as the authorities had feared.
The march to Fleet Street and Tomorrow’s dawn call to revolution ushered in July, but the month passed relatively calmly as our crowds continued to grow. When the News of the World spiced the nation’s Sunday breakfast at the end of the month with shocking tales from the ‘Hippie Vice Den’, Mr Gannon got a call from a local policeman: if UFO opened that weekend, a warrant would be sought for a raid and his licence could be lost. Our Blarney Club days were over.
I persuaded Centre 42, playwright Arnold Wesker’s foundation for the encouragement of ‘workers’ theatre’, to rent us the Roundhouse, a magnificently decaying brick hulk at the edge of the railway yards in Camden Town. That Friday we handed out leaflets in front of the Blarney Club telling punters they could find UFO – starring the newly mind-blown Eric Burdon – a few stops away on the Northern Line. In some respects, the Roundhouse UFO was glorious. Its extraordinary space and huge stage were liberating after the cramped confines of the Blarney Club. I looked forward to a future of big crowds and soaring profits. One problem, however, was barely noticed that first night: after eleven, the local pubs filled the streets with their inebriated Irish and skinhead patrons. A few of our customers got hassled, but we thought little of it.
By the following week, word had spread. Skinheads hadn’t had too much contact with hippies up to then, but they could smell a natural enemy. The minute our audience arrived in the neighbourhood, they were under attack. Bells were snatched from around necks, handbags stolen, eyes blacked. A group of skins charged through a fire door and started hitting anyone they found, myself included. A few police came but they seemed to enjoy seeing the hippies getting a kicking.
Our door staff were useless against the thugs, so I turned to Michael X and his Black Nationalists to provide a security patrol. He showed up the following week with seven big, mean-looking guys in black turtlenecks, tight black trousers and shaved heads. I got to know a few of them later: an actor, a film director and a writer, and they could not have been gentler souls. But when they scowled and struck karate poses, the skinheads weren’t to know that, were they? Their services, however, didn’t come cheap.
Everywhere I turned, costs soared. The rent was far more than we had been paying Mr Gannon and I could no longer use the tiny capacity of my venue as an excuse for keeping musicians’ fees down. More lighting was needed and more staff. Commercial promoters, now regularly booking the Floyd, Soft Machine or Arthur Brown, had become competitors. The eager idealists who had worked long and hard began to fade away without Hoppy to inspire them. Week after week I paid out the door cash to musicians, staff and to cover expenses with little or nothing left for my rent or Hoppy’s nest egg. For the first time, UFO began to lose money.
There were some high points amid the gloom. The balcony platform that circled the Roundhouse halfway up the high brick walls inspired me to track down the company that had ‘flown’ Peter Pan during a recent production in the West End. Arthur Brown made his first Roundhouse entrance high over the audience, his head in the trademark halo of flame, with another novel device – a radio microphone – amplifying his vocal. For a moment, I thought the Roundhouse might be worth it after all.
A side benefit of our larger size was the increased tithe paid to Release from our door takings. The bust-fund buckets passed in the spring had evolved into an organization. Michael X, always urging us to think about practicalities, called a meeting of interested parties, including an exotic-looking, dark-haired young woman who volunteered for the difficult jobs and accomplished them all impeccably. She had become active in protesting against arbitrary policing after plainclothes men stopped her Jamaican lover on the street and offered him a choice of felonies: a sack of ganja or burglars’ tools. Despite her efforts, he went down for three years. When I gave her a lift home after the second meeting, she showed me a painting she was working on: a phalanx of naked Amazons charging towards the viewer.
I recalled a visit to a friend a few months earlier. Over his fireplace, he proudly displayed his new acquisition: a pink-hued oil painting depicting pubic
hair and moistly parted labia, viewed from below. He told me he had bought it from an artist who supported herself by nude modelling – including a Mayfair cover clad in nothing but gold paint. He had an option on her next work: his description of it matched what I saw on the easel. This was my introduction to Caroline Coon: artist, feminist, journalist and campaigner.
Caroline set up Release and ran it with an effectiveness that was out of step with most underground organizations. Of all the idealistic enterprises begun during year zero of our cultural revolution in West London, only Release and the Notting Hill Carnival still carry out their original functions. Many in the Underground were uncomfortable with her businesslike attitude, but sex and class played their parts as well. Caroline is the well-spoken rebel daughter of an upper-middle-class family. Her intelligence and determination unsettled many men in the theoretically progressive scene and her accent and manners bothered many of the radicals.
By the autumn, Release had a twenty-four-hour answering service for legal help and was supplying lawyers for busted dopers all over London. Caroline met with Home Office officials and demanded that young people be permitted their statutory phone call and be given legal aid forms. These approaches were far too straightforward and effective not to annoy our self-styled anarchists. A group led by Mick Farren stormed the Release offices and threw out Caroline and her staff, but the complexity of Release’s tasks so daunted the rabble that they abandoned their mission after a few days. Caroline calmly reclaimed the office and she and her staff carried on as before.
For UFO, September was a downward spiral of bad bookings, smaller and smaller crowds, higher and higher costs. At the end of the month I decided to quit while we were ahead. My only consolation was that enough money had been put aside so that Hoppy could escape to Morocco with his loyal girlfriend when he got out.
Weekends at the Roundhouse were quickly picked up by two rival promoters: Blackhill Enterprises (Floyd managers Jenner and King) and Middle Earth, run by the pleasant if slightly vague Dave Howson. They alternated while Centre 42 weighed up the virtues of granting one or the other a permanent franchise. Initially, both contributed to Release’s upkeep. Blackhill, however, was allied with Farren, and withdrew their support after the humiliation of the abortive coup. Release’s earnings from the Roundhouse door were halved and finances were precarious.
The following summer, the well-connected Blackhill were chosen to present the UK debut of The Doors and Jefferson Airplane on a Roundhouse double-bill. Whoever promoted this show was likely to generate enough cash and momentum to control the future of the Roundhouse. I pleaded with Jenner and King for an end to the feud that was starving Release of funds but they were unyielding.
What happened next gave me, I confess, immense pleasure. I called Paul Rothchild, who put me in touch with the Doors’ management, then rang Bill Graham’s office, who put in a word with the Airplane. If these groups wanted the cachet of an ‘underground’ appearance in London, they needed to learn about the local struggles in which they were pawns. Within days, the British agent summoned Granada TV (who were filming the Doors), Blackhill and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (friends of Blackhill’s who were providing ‘cultural’ cover for the work permits). As all watched in horror, the agent crossed Blackhill’s name off the contract and wrote Middle Earth’s in its place. Caroline and I took it over to the late-sleeping Howson and shook him gently awake with the news that he was promoting the Doors and the Airplane; we got him to up his Release donations from 5 to 10 per cent of the door as well. In the years to come, Middle Earth would be a cornerstone of support for Release. It was, I felt, my finest éminence grise moment.
During these years, Release quietly gave George Harrison and Mick Jagger legal assistance on drug busts. In gratitude, Harrison summoned Caroline to the Apple offices in 1969, shook her hand and gave her an envelope which, when she ripped it open after leaving the office, was found to contain a cheque for £5,000. Thirty years later, Jonathon Green’s book about the sixties, All Dressed Up, asserted that both stars’ donations had been inspired by blow-jobs provided by employees of Release. The memory of the years of hard work by the mostly female staff and the tears of joy shed on the pavement outside Apple that day fuelled Caroline’s resolve. She sued Green and Random House, fired a solicitor who suggested an inadequate settlement, fought off foreclosure on her flat over legal bills, argued the case herself in the High Court and won a stunning victory that involved retraction, apology and substantial damages.
Beneath the surface, the progressive sixties hid all manner of unpleasantness: sexism, reaction, racism and factionalism. It wasn’t surprising, really. The idea that drugs, sex and music could transform the world was always a pretty naïve dream. As the counter-culture’s effect on the mainstream grew, its own values and aesthetics decayed. The political setbacks of the coming years grabbed the headlines while the dilution of ideals happened more quietly, but nonetheless vividly for those who noticed.
For me, the closure of UFO was sad but liberating. Pink Floyd were now a successful touring rock attraction, Arthur Brown was in the charts, the Soft Machine and The People Blues Band were touring America with Hendrix and ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ had become one of the biggest singles of all time. It was time to get down to business. Almost unnoticed among the support acts that summer, I had found Witchseason’s next group. While they wouldn’t make my fortune, they did provide the foundation for a great deal of my work over the next fifteen years. I thought I had seen the last of folk-rock but it came back to get me in the end.
Chapter 20
ONE EVENING IN THE EVENTFUL month of June ’67, I went to hear Sandy Denny at Les Cousins in Soho. I still wasn’t convinced: she insisted on performing songs by her American ex-boyfriend Jackson C. Frank and other undistinguished singer-songwriters. Her voice often seemed more big than expressive. She was entertaining company, though; her laugh was the loudest thing in a room. She had a way of jerking her cigarette to her mouth so that the ash scattered everywhere and she was very adept at knocking over drinks. I once saw her upend three mugs on one trip to the kitchen to freshen up the teapot. When playing the guitar, she would stare at her left hand, keeping a wary eye out for the inevitable slip. It was only when she sat at the piano, her first instrument, that she became serene and graceful, the dignified lady she longed to be. She was clever and quick and a brutal punisher of fools, but she wore her neediness and her heart very much on her sleeve. The only redeeming feature of the Bridget Jones’ Diary film for me was Renée Zellweger’s uncanny replication of many of Sandy’s insecure gestures.
We talked music all that first night; dawn found us listening to a tape of Radio Luxembourg’s sneak preview of Sgt Pepper at her parents’ home in Wimbledon. The ferocious impact of the Beatles’ masterpiece was magnified by the hushed and surreptitious circumstances as we huddled by the speakers so as not to disturb the sleeping household. Sandy was tired of slogging around the folk clubs with her guitar: she wanted to sing in front of a band. ‘A Day In The Life’ and ‘Lucy In The Sky’ made solo folk singing seem a very limited palette. She had made an LP with the Strawbs, but wasn’t convinced they were the right band for her. When she gave me an advance copy, I was startled by how great her voice sounded on record. The best track was her own first stab at songwriting, ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’, which Judy Collins was about to make the title song of her new LP. (Composer royalties from this song would, over the years, prove to be the most reliable source of income she ever had.) I was impressed and fascinated, but when I found the perfect band for her, I failed to make the connection.
Fairport Convention made their UFO debut a month later. They were well-behaved middle-class kids from Muswell Hill whose taste in American singer-songwriters was better than Sandy’s, but not enough to keep them from performing hack-work like Eric Andersen’s ‘Thirsty Boots’. Towards the end of their set I winced as they took up the challenge of Butterfield’s ‘East-West’. But when Richard
Thompson embarked on his version of the Bloomfield guitar solo, I was stunned. This seventeen-year-old was extraordinary! After their set, I stormed into the dressing room, Mike Jeffreys-like, and offered them a deal.
There was a curious inevitability about it. Here was a group of well-educated kids approaching rock’n’roll as if they were doing a doctoral thesis. They idolized the Kweskin Jug Band, listened to Django Reinhardt and Duke Ellington and played the kind of American folk-rock I had dreamed of creating three years earlier with Sebastian and Yanovsky. I had reached for the glamour of The Move and Pink Floyd and ended up with an English version of myself.
Richard was the key. He can imitate almost any style, and often does, but is instantly identifiable. In his playing you can hear his evocation of the Scottish piper’s drone and the melody of the chanter as well as echoes of Barney Kessel’s and James Burton’s guitars and Jerry Lee Lewis’s piano. But no blues clichés: like Bix Beiderbecke or Django Reinhardt, he is unapologetic about his whiteness.
Fairport already had a girl singer. Her name was Judy Dyble and her voice was tentative, but she was Thompson’s girlfriend and bullying them into sacking her didn’t seem like the right way to start off a relationship. Moreover, although Fairport came from the same kind of suburban grammar-school background as Sandy, their temperaments could not have been more different. It wasn’t that Fairport never drank, for example; they just never seemed to get drunk. Hard as it was to keep Sandy quiet, it was sometimes difficult to get them to say anything at all. You heard more four-letter words in a five-minute conversation with her than in a month of Fairport rehearsals. Sandy and Richard, two of the greatest talents I ever worked with, made their way slowly towards each other without any help from me.
We addressed Fairport’s vocal weaknesses by adding Ian Matthews, a former professional footballer from Scunthorpe with a pop tenor voice. He and Judy shared vocal duties on the eponymous first LP, which included a couple of unreleased Joni Mitchell songs. When Richard and Judy Dyble split up, I thought of proposing a change, but was afraid Sandy would eat them for breakfast and spit them out for lunch.