Hippie Hippie Shake

by Richard Neville

  Initial sales were brisk, both in newsagents and on the street, and Sharp’s cover image of a loony shark’s teeth grin struck the right note. But the critical reception was hostile.

  The verdict of Richard Ingrams was widely quoted: ‘Oz is gratifyingly bad’, and the publicist at Jonathan Cape sent an express letter: ‘We consider Oz is extremely immature, amateurish and completely lacking in taste . . .’ The ripples of derision reached Sydney, where the Sunday Telegraph headlined OZ A FLOP IN THE UK, quoting unnamed ‘hard-headed’ journos who judged that ‘Oz has fallen flat on its snotty-nosed face’. Peter Cook of Private Eye stood in a Soho bar, lit a match and sent Oz up in flames.

  I put on a brave face. Mates had rallied to the cause and I was ashamed of letting them down. The spite of the critics was baffling, making me feel I had committed a crime. The first issue was a little dull, perhaps, but coming from nowhere, surely valiant? Some supporters melted away; others stood by, reminding me that it takes a few issues for any new publication to find its feet – just like Sydney Oz. Martin was cheered by the sale of his LBJ artwork to connoisseur Robert Hughes, now based in London. Heart heavy, I plodded ahead with the second Oz.

  Mark Lane, the American lawyer, came to London to promote his book, Rush to Judgement, which rejected the findings of the Warren Commission into the assassination of President Kennedy. The BBC presented a live five-hour special on the assassination, supposedly to test the arguments put forward by Lane and to allow replies by the Commission’s lawyers. To my amazement – and that of the viewers who jammed the switchboards – the BBC not only sided with the Commission, but prevented Lane from presenting his case. It was as though, at the last minute, the BBC had been subjected to an edict from the Foreign Office. Mark Lane had enjoyed our first issue (‘I’ve framed the portrait of LBJ’), and he sent us a wad of copy which detailed the behind-the-scenes mechanics of BBC censorship.

  Germaine Greer must be ‘pretty ugly or a raving nympho trying too hard,’ wrote a reader from Earls Court. ‘An Englishman, if good, is the best lover in the world. If your poor frustrated writer wishes proof of this statement, I invite her to spend a night or two with me, and if I cannot, in her opinion, back up my statement with actions, she can run me down and use my name, Rod Lake.’ Germaine accepted the challenge, reserving the right to ‘refuse consummation on inspection’. A date was made to meet Mr Lake at a pub, with me as chaperone. I couldn’t wait.

  Oz 2 died on the newstands. Its chilly reception, in addition to the chill of a London winter, robbed me of zest and confidence. Was it worth trying to scrounge the money for a third issue? Louise shopped, did paperwork and brewed endless cups of tea for the stream of visitors. At nights, while Jill slept, we dealt with the mail and attended to the burdensome details, like hand-addressing the labels for subscription copies, before lugging them off in a sack to a warehouse in a South London wasteland. The revenue from sales had failed to cover printing costs, so Louise dipped into her modest trust fund, a gesture which I took for granted.

  Louise and I loved each other, in a primitive, confused sort of way, but we were still not proficient at demonstrating this love. You’d think I’d be content – the frog who finally got the princess. But no. I was more in love with making a splash than with trying to make a relationship work. Time was running out for Oz. If I didn’t get the mix right, the mag would be history, and I would slither back to the copywriters’ desk at Jackson Wain, tail between my legs, resigned to be being the life of the office party. So preoccupied did I become with Oz Rescue, that when Louise flew back to Sydney in March to see her family, I barely noticed.

  The handful of part-time helpers was spread between Notting Hill and Battersea, with no central office. The copy went to a girl with access to the latest technology, an IBM golfball typewriter, and the pages were put together in late-night fashion by ex-Mod designer Jon Goodchild, who sported a silver-topped cane and a cloak, and had a studio in Fulham. Advertising was minimal, and payments to contributors erratic. One dawn I was woken by thumps on the door. I feared the immigration police, but it was Alexander Cockburn, demanding to be paid on the spot.

  Bob Whitaker submitted a photo-collage he had first designed as an attack on Melbourne property developers. Its key image was a naked woman sitting on the lavatory, superimposed on a skyline, as though ‘shitting on the city’. Bob switched the architecture to the British Houses of Parliament – a fantasic double spread if I could find the right words. Alone in my room, deadline imminent, wracked with self doubt and missing Louise, I found them and tapped out ‘An Address to Politicians’.

  ‘You fat pompous dying alcoholic farts who can’t even free your daughter to have an abortion without dragging in the corpse of an anachronistic God . . . She’s been fucking since she was sixteen, like everyone else . . . Your son is on pot. He knows thousands of Vietnamese kids are frying to death and you sit at breakfast dribbling marmalade . . .’ To go with this spleen, deputy editor Paul Lawson devised a triptych of postcards printed on cardboard, each one perforated, and addressed to the relevant Minister. The first card protested the banning of pirate radio (the major source of pop rock), the second asked Roy Jenkins of the Home Office to ‘stop putting me and my friends in fear of jail’ (because of pernicious drug laws), and a third card insisted that the Right Honourable Norman St John Stevas, a Roman Catholic, rigorously enforce the Abortion Law. (It was appended with a quote from Ulysses S. Grant: ‘I know of no method to secure the repeal of a bad or obnoxious law as its stringent execution.’). Oz demanded that every woman who had suffered an illegal abortion be sent to jail, ‘beginning with me and my friends’.

  Jill took me to Paris. We stayed at the left-bank flat of an American who had written the screenplay for Barbarella, and his wife Jesse, the daughter of lady-of-letters Louise de Vilmorin. While in her sixties, Jill confided with relish, de Vilmorin had embarked on a steamy affair with André Malraux. My sister was contemplating marriage to a French antique dealer with impressively creased trousers, and she needed to focus on sizing him up. This left me alone in the freezing city, broke, without any contacts, and no one to talk to – not that I could speak a word of French. (How I cursed Monsieur Hudson, my sourpuss teacher at Knox, for turning me against the language.) Instead of trooping off to see the Mona Lisa I moaned alone in my room, playing Simon and Garfunkel’s I am a rock . . . I am an island . . . a rock feels no pain, an island never cries. But of course I did feel pain, however much I aspired to granite. Pain at the absence of Louise, pain at the infinitesimal impact of Oz, pain at my inability to get out and enjoy myself in the world’s greatest city. When I did venture into the cafés, the waiters shooed me off with brooms, gesticulating in horror at the length of my hair. Without realising it, I was missing the beaches of Sydney, the parties of Paddington, the adulation of my peers.

  Back in London in April, I found that Oz was starting to irritate the powerful. The Sunday Telegraph reported that the Abortion Debate was showing ‘signs of hysteria’. Norman St John Stevas was receiving ‘scores of identical printed postcards daily’, and the newspaper reprinted an Ozcard from a ‘sixteen-year-old girl’ with her signature blacked out. There was a stack of mail from far and wide, not all of it derisory. ‘This is the nearest thing to real satire I have seen come out of Britain,’ wrote Raja Neogy, the editor of Transition magazine in Uganda. ‘It proves my private theory that Britain’s expatriates will be the initiators of real cultural change, rather than the natives.’

  I reunited with Louise. Her white jeans and sloppy Joe set off her suntan, the delicacy of her body. I was overjoyed to have her back, and no doubt disguised the fact. We moved from Clarendon Road to a basement in Palace Gardens Terrace, a tree-lined backwater between Kensington High Street and Notting Hill Gate. A kitchenette entrance, a living room, a backroom: seven pounds a week. Unpacking our bags, we could hear thumps and grunts from over the walls of the nearby Soviet Embassy. Torture, I speculated, but it turned out to be the staff belting
a volleyball. The rising damp had risen above the ceiling and a dank corridor led to a showerless bathroom. I scurried off to Whiteley’s in Queensway and bought a Do-It-Yourself Shower Installation Kit. The place was packed with other Australians doing the same. Louise and I stuck a double mattress in the corner of the front room, a table under the window, which overlooked the garbage bay, and tacked up a wall-sized stone rubbing Mart had purchased in Angkor Wat. Oz had opened its London office.

  Leading hippie artists Michael English and Nigel Weymouth, founders of the design trademark Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, came to the door with a complex gatefold of a couple in a kama-sutric embrace. ‘All our ideas come from trips,’ they said, and I thought they meant to India. ‘Oh no, psychedelics . . .’ One of their ‘tripping partners’ was Pete Townshend of The Who. The pair insisted on gold metallic ink.

  ‘Okay,’ I said daringly. ‘Into the mystic.’

  The first hippie wedding had just taken place in Hyde Park, to the delight of the press, and the irritation of the Oz editor. My brain clotted with half-baked notions picked up at the bar of Sydney’s Royal George, I tiraded in jocular fashion in Oz against the institution of marriage. My piece appeared alongside a legal guide to living in sin, adding a new twist to the cover’s tantric embrace. From a Sharp-drawn flying saucer, ‘ten million light years over the Milky Way’, Frisco Ferlinghetti beamed down his good vibrations and urged our readers to come to Hyde Park on 16 July for London’s first ‘love-in’.

  Elsewhere, the vibrations were bad. Abortion reform was blocked in Parliament (despite our influx of postcards) and Last Exit to Brooklyn was prosecuted for obscenity. In May, on a tip-off from the News of the World, the police swooped on a country house party and arrested two of the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger was handcuffed, harassed and hauled before a magistrate for possessing four pep pills, and Keith Richards similarly treated for allowing his premises to be used for the smoking of marijuana. The News of the World congratulated itself on doing its duty. The moment Mick and Keith were bailed out, the Drugs Squad rolled another Stone, Brian Jones.

  The Underground paper IT was raided by police and one of its key figures, John Hopkins, ‘Hoppy’, jailed for possessing cannabis. FREE HOPPY, demanded IT’s front page, he’s in the hands of the enemy. Realise that they drink and get high and feel great, and you do other things and get high and feel great and they shit on you.

  In June 1967, Jagger and Richard were found guilty at the Sussex Quarter sessions and sentenced to jail – Mick openly tearful as he was put in the van for the Brixton nick.

  That night, 300 stoned protesters flooded out of UFO, the psychedelic dance club in Tottenham Court Road, and converged on Piccadilly Circus. Some held an all-night vigil under the statue of Eros, others swept on to the offices of the News of the World, to jeer at the staff and to blacken the screens of delivery vans. Oz was already at the binders, but I decided on an emergency insert.

  Thumping at the Olivetti on the basement table, I introduced readers to the ‘faceless’ editor of the News of the World, Stafford Sommerfield, 56, and disclosed his home address. ‘It would be inadvisable,’ Oz warned, ‘for our readers to mail him cannabis resin and then tip off the police in an effort to have him busted.’ Even the London Times was taken aback by the hostility directed at the Stones and published an editorial which admonished ‘those who would break a butterfly on a wheel’. Mick and Keith were freed on bail, pending the hearing of an appeal. The Hyde Park ‘love-in’ was converted into a Legalise Pot rally, for which Sharp produced a thrilling, fast-selling poster.

  An Oz associate, Peter Ledeboer, was so taken by my friend’s visual flair that he set up a new company, Big O Posters, geared to produce and promote every piece of artwork created by Sharp.

  In lieu of reasonable fees for contributors, Louise and I often held dinner parties – a leg of New Zealand lamb, a jug of Fosters, a stack of scratchy LPs. A few days after Robert Hughes had returned from Florence, having helped rescue works of art threatened by the floods, he strode into our basement in thigh-high angler’s pants, still caked with Arno mud. Germaine embraced him, and while we accustomed ourselves to the marshy scent of Renaissance sludge, the pair spent the rest of the night shouting at each other in Italian. A new Oz contributor, Angelo Quattrocchi, was mystified. He whispered, ‘Why does that woman speak like a slut?’ – a comment on Germaine’s accent. My sister laughed and asked what had lured the diminutive Italian to London. ‘Three things only in the world do I care about,’ he said, staring into her eyes as I cruised by their glasses with a bottle of plonk, ‘love, poetry and the revolution.’ Jill’s sigh was audible. The next morning she ended her affair with the overly dry-cleaned Frenchman.

  On a sunny, still Saturday, Louise and I walked to Hyde Park with armfuls of Oz. The Times’ metaphoric butterflies, so far from being broken, had metamorphosed into a field of fluorescent flower children, dancing, hugging and swapping colossal joints. Allen Ginsberg sat cross-legged on the grass playing a Tibetan squeeze box and chanting Om Mane Padme Hum, Om Mane Padme Hum . . .

  My feelings were mixed. I was suspicious of all religions, including imports from the East, but I could not deny Ginsberg’s tranquil authority. The Beat superhero, unfazed by the police trying to squelch his live music, chanted on, throwing his full weight behind the budding of flower power.

  The new Oz, shimmering gold in its kama-sutra gatefold and celebrating free love and spiritual alternatives, matched the mood of the moment. The issue sold like hash cookies. Louise and I stood there, the mags flying on a magic carpet ride out of our hands, and we no longer felt like unwanted immigrants floundering in a damp basement with little to offer.

  ‘Rush back and get more copies,’ I barked at Ian Stocks, a volunteer from Melbourne. This was more than a changing mood. A new culture waited in the wings. Pop music and street fashion were merely the outer trappings, a clue to a deeper wellspring. A new generation with a new explanation, sure, but what explanation? The politics of joy, maybe. A vision in search of a voice. I wanted that voice to be Oz.

  On Monday morning, 24 July 1967, while I lay in bed drinking tea and reading The Times, I came across a full-page advertisement inserted by SOMA, the Society of Mental Awareness. The headline was stark and true: THE LAW AGAINST MARIJUANA IS IMMORAL IN PRINCIPLE AND UNWORKABLE IN PRACTICE. It was a petition to the Home Secretary calling for the legalisation of cannabis (‘the use of which is increasing and the rate of increase is accelerating’) and backed by a quote from Spinoza: ‘All laws which can be violated without doing anyone any harm are laughed at . . . [this] will foment crime rather than lessen it.’ The sting in the ad came from the sixty-eight signatories – clergymen, doctors, MPs, publishers, the Beatles, Ken Tynan, David Hockney, Francis Huxley, R. D. Laing, Francis Crick, David Dimbleby, Michael X . . . The ad cost £1,800, guaranteed by Paul McCartney, and it was assumed to be in response to the bust of the Rolling Stones. But the founder of SOMA, Steve Abrams, had devised the ad before that – on the day IT’s Hoppy was sent to prison. The page in The Times sparked a heated debate in the media and the House of Commons, but failed to impress Scotland Yard. The Drugs Squad raided the home of Stafford Sommerfield, the editor of the News of the World, and, despite the strict instructions to our readers, the officers claimed to have confiscated a number of ‘suspicious envelopes’.

  I took Germaine Greer to a pub in Earls Court to meet Rod Lake, the reader who had responded to her indictment of the English in bed. With her dark perm and tight white sweater, she reminded me of a chocolate-dipped ice cream. The challenger was tall, presentable, faintly ironic. After a few beers, a patter of small talk and a souvenir photo, Rod promised our correspondent ‘complete satisfaction’ within thirty minutes. ‘You’ll ejaculate twice before I put it in,’ he said, ‘but I won’t come for a couple of hours.’ His bedsit was near. Wishing them luck, I headed for the door, pleased at my editorial coup. Like greased lightning, Germaine was at my side, clutching my arm. ‘Oh no, I
couldn’t possibly . . .’ She pushed me outside and into a cab, leaving the challenger scratching his head on the footpath. His motive had been the turn-off. ‘Patriotism was enough for him,’ she sighed, ‘but not for me.’

  Germaine’s mood swings could be startling. I once accompanied her to a party at Notting Hill, a noisy affair hosted by Australians. As we bounced into the room, I recognised Danne Emerson, a blonde Nordic goddess from Sydney who had trodden the boards in uni revues. Germaine shrieked at her, ‘How I despise you’.

  ‘What the fuck’s eating you?’ In weight, height and proportions, the pair were evenly matched.

  ‘Because you’re a liar. You always were . . . and you always will be . . .’

  ‘Come off it. You’re a bully and a bad loser.’

  ‘I don’t tell lies.’

  ‘You’re a fucking jealous bitch.’

  The ferocity of the exchanges – stemming from an interconnecting liaison with a charismatic Sydney libertarian – reduced the rest of the room to a jaw-dropped hush.

  Martin had a fresh idea for Oz. I visited him at his Chelsea studio and met a pair of fair-haired twins clad in nothing but flowers, posing for Bob Whitaker. Disregarding the viewfinder, Bob clenched the Nikon in the palm of his hand and whirled it around his head – click – or jumped on a table – click – or dived to the floor – click. On a piece of artboard as big as the back of a bus, Martin glued prints of the flower-twins in all sizes, poses and permutations. It was to be Oz as a dayglo poster, folded up and distributed like a booklet.

  ‘You mean – no articles?’

  Sharp shook his head. I pounded the floor, side-stepping the matching pair of pink satin panties, and worried about loss of continuity. ‘It’s a visual age,’ he said, unsheathing a stick-pen. Paperbacks, pop records and dirty dishes were strewn across the furniture, most of it splashed with cigarette ash and black ink. Could we really market a poster as a magazine, I wondered, prising a coffee pot from the stained cover of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, a book everyone left lying around. The radio was loud, infectious. If you’re going to San Francisco . . . be sure to wear a flower in your hair . . . While I dithered, Sharp doodled, Whitaker clicked and the twins pirouetted among the marguerite daisies.