At Hyde Park we watched an amateur soccer match. The concept of two opposing teams fighting over a little ball had never seemed more ridiculous, and I doubled up with laughter.
At the Sloane Street corner, I stopped at a department store window, transfixed by the gold-scrawled logo: Harvey Nichols. The name had the ring of everything I hated, the synonym of squaredom, the Knightsbridge nom-de-plume of Norman Normal.
‘Harvey Nichols,’ I kept repeating, ‘Ha-Ha-Haaaarvey Nichols . . . Ha-Ha-Haaaarvey . . .’ until Sharp dragged me back to his studio and brought me down with camomile tea and Relax-a-tabs.
Oz’s irregular format, lazy schedule and unpredictable content did not encourage advertisers, so when a half-page six-issue booking came from Pellens Personal Products, I was cock-a-hoop. Pellens delivered a carton of samples along with their copy, ‘an extensive range of items designed to increase the intensity of sexual pleasure, many never before available in the country . . .’ Gadgets, potions, rubbery slip-ons. The ‘French tickler’ was a sturdy item spiralled with ridges and random dangles, like a shaft of Barrier Reef coral. I tested the tickler at the first opportunity, phone off the hook and curtains drawn. The sheath was too thick to be sensitive; like its wearer, no doubt, but the thought of what it might be doing to my partner produced feedback arousal. Such devils, the Frogs. In addition to the dangle-wangles, there were geometric sculptures of noduled rubber, seemingly crafted from the soles of Birken-stocks, which supposedly enhanced the pleasures of the bedchamber. After road tests, the carton was kept under the bed.
The hippie scene found its own space to space out. On Friday nights it was UFO – the Underground Freak-Out. Louise and I tubed it to Tottenham Court Road and descended to a vast basement where an even vaster crowd was wearing the polish off the dance floor. The atmosphere was expectant, wired-up, as though it was assumed that UFO meant spacecraft and one was about to land on stage. The music added to the eeriness: the Pink Floyd, the Soft Machine, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, where the vocalist swung from a trapeze in a flaming helmet. The Beatles and The Who’s Pete Townshend floated by, everyone too cool to gawk. From the ceiling, movies flickered, Charlie Chaplin, Kurosawa, and, beneath the twinkling mirror ball, Louise and I gazed at the dribbling blotches, ‘light shows’, and swayed along with the other dazed denizens in snakeskin cumberbunds, silver-tinted sunglasses, sequins and rainbow rags. Poets, jugglers and crazies did their thing while front-row regulars fiddled with roach clips and blew bubbles. Here, on the day of its release, Procol Harum performed an acid garage version of their dreamy evergreen, ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’.
The air was pungent with a feeling of belonging – to what, exactly, no one knew – but it certainly wasn’t your average disco. The theme tune of UFO, Pink Floyd’s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, was challenging enough, but the real test was getting home to Notting Hill after the tubes closed.
Jim Haynes presided over the the Arts Lab in Drury Lane, which ran Underground movies all night. Most were execrable, some were unforgettable, like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising. With a hundred hippies sprawled on the floor, shoeless in the dark, this realm of the senses was dominated by the olfactory – the incense overpowered by sock pong.
For fun, glamour and a hot dance floor, the only place to go was the Speakeasy. A strict membership kept the hoi polloi at bay, including myself, until a curt complaint on an Oz letterhead ensured welcoming smiles. Jimi Hendrix was a Speakeasy regular, jumping on stage and jamming till dawn. Beside the dance floor was a glass-walled restaurant, filtering the tumult. Spanish omelettes and double Southern Comforts were served by lissome dolly birds with druggy stares and blockbuster make-up. One of these, usually in a transparent chiffon micro-mini, was my old friend Jenny Kee.
Pot paranoia had cost her the job at Biba’s. After the Drugs Squad had ‘done over’ the boutiques of the King’s Road, it was rumoured to be heading for Kensington. Jenny was not caught puffing on the premises, but her partiality for pot was no secret. The dismissal was unfair, but at the Speakeasy she was thriving. John Lennon turned up with his wife Cynthia and whispered two little words in the ear of Sydney’s number one Beatle-maniac, making her laugh, ‘Contact lenses.’
Jenny Kee’s presence at the Speakeasy attracted the patronage of Martin Sharp, the old dog. One night, as they flirted over a drink order, the pair were introduced to Eric Clapton, the virtuoso guitarist from the supergroup Cream. Mart had presented me with their first album, Fresh Cream, on my twenty-fifth birthday. Clapton wore black velvet bell-bottoms, a pirate sash and a crushed velvet top appliquéd with velvet suns and moons. It was a lot of velvet, even for Clapton. After a brief discussion of Eric’s Gohill snakeskin boots, the must-have footwear of the day, Martin brought out a crumpled envelope.
‘I’ve just written a song,’ he announced, showing the guitarist his scribbled yearnings for a summer in Sydney and a spell with his absent heart-throb, Anou.
‘That’s great,’ replied Eric, another ex-art student, ‘I’ve just written some music.’ He’d been lost for the words, until Mart spouted his stirring stanzas over the disco’s backbeat: You thought the leaden winter/would bring you down forever/but you rode upon a steamer/to the violence of the sun.
Sharp’s heroic angst slotted with Clapton’s best guitar riffs. These two rising stars of psychedelia decided to share lodgings in the King’s Road, at The Pheasantry, the former home of Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II. Sharp executed a fluorescent cover for the next Cream LP, Disraeli Gears, and one of its finest tracks was Sharp’s song, ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’.
My friend’s artwork was widely circulated through Big O Posters, and deservedly acclaimed. His dayglo-on-silver portraits of Donovan, Jimi Hendrix and Van Gogh shone from shop windows and fast-sprouting poster stalls. The Oz fold-out, ‘Plant a Flower Child’, was such a hit that Sharp and I flew to Paris for a weekend and hawked it on the Boulevard St Germain – a sweet return to a city of former blues. Sales left me flush enough to breeze into Castells, an upper-crust disco, along with Sharp, his fat cheque books falling from his pockets as usual. The two of us stood at the bar, leering at the Lolita look-alikes dancing with octogenarian hunchback millionaires. Mart turned to a stranger on his other side and met his spitting image – Jean-Paul Belmondo – who, like Sharp, was exhaling. The two men looked at each other and smiled, clinked glasses, looked away. I teased Sharp about the likeness and he pretended not to get it. ‘It’s all in your head, Rich.’
In London, Mart’s poster-homage to Bob Dylan, ‘Blowing in the Mind’, a blazing swirl of pop-op circles, sold out. He drafted an A4 version for the cover of the next Oz.
However critical David Widgery had been of our readers, he was even more scathing about Fleet Street’s brightest broadsheets, the Observer and Sunday Times. He saw them as weekly instalments in the collapse of the British intellectual. ‘It is a culture of a decaying class,’ he wrote in Oz 7, ‘consisting not of ideas, but ideas about ideas. It’s a culture entirely appropriate to the audience, whose real problems are au pairs, waterproof leg make-up, young children on airplanes and what to say at the next publishers’ party . . .’ So far from decrying consumerist values, these papers worshipped them.
Angelo Quattrocchi called for flower-power guerrillas to invade his homeland – ‘Hyde Park may be conquered, but the pubs in Milan are still in the hands of the enemy’ – and he envisioned the time ‘coppers will be employed to keep the rain out of our sleeping bags’. In answer to Germaine Greer’s dumping on the British in bed, her old friend and fellow Australian, Lillian Roxon, filed a kiss-and-tell piece from New York. The ideal American coupling was ‘two neutral plastic fresh bodies that try to leave each other as untouched as possible, both physically and emotionally’. Our first full-page ad, a contra, announced, ‘Get Hip, get Penthouse’, and it promoted a cover story on flower power. Oz was singled out for its ‘curious ambivalence’ towards the counter-culture.
Media attention was welcome, in lieu of a p
romotions budget. Editors of student newspapers trooped into the basement, probing me for hours on the meaning of rebellion, cosmic consciousness and black power, as though I was Socrates. Their own publications reeked of the Gutenberg era, with few illustrations and grey pages of minuscule linotype. Into their hands I would thrust a stack of overseas Underground newspapers. ‘Look at these,’ I insisted. ‘The future!’ Frowns, shrugs – ‘Amazing, but if we looked anything like the San Francisco Oracle, we’d never get a job on Fleet Street.’ Schoolkids found their way to Palace Gardens Terrace. Julian Manyon, the editor of the St Paul’s magazine, came to the door and asked, ‘What do you think of the claim that the flower philosophy is strangled by the materialism it claims to reject?’
‘That’s far too intelligent for this time in the morning,’ I replied, putting on the kettle and quizzing him about life at St Paul’s. (In his report, he noted with shock: ‘It was 11.45 a.m!’) Julian painted a dismal scene of St Paul’s – obsessive regimentation, sadism and football fetishism – which he agreed to elaborate for Oz. ‘Congratulations,’ responded a fellow pupil in a letter, ‘but the criticism was not virulent enough.’
Trailing behind these classroom opinion-moulders, Fleet Street found its way to the Oz office/bedroom. The Daily Mail’s praise of the Underground’s influence on art, fashion, television, ‘even the Beatles’, had journalists and photographers falling down the stairwell. The BBC filmed the Oz team laying out an issue and rabbiting on about the mysteries of flower power.
‘Oz is a hotline into the deliberations of youth-cult. Is that what you are saying?’ queried John Birt, a wunderkind researcher with Granada’s World in Action.
‘Absolutely,’ I said, always eager to inflate my own importance.
As potential proof of our ‘growing constituency among the young’, I handed the doco director Gavin Millar a spool of tape sent by a reader. It had come with a scrap of paper bearing a name and address, though I had never got around to finding a reel-to-reel recorder. Courtesy of the BBC, I first heard the message on air: ‘The most f. . . {bleep} fantastic mag I’ve ever seen in my life’ – the voice was urgent, agitated – ‘your editorial address to f. . . {bleep} slimy politicians takes the cake. I will do anything to help you guys, anything . . .’ The endorsement ran with cutaway shots from the pages of Oz.
The media blitz upset Richard Ingrams, who remained adamant that nothing at all was happening: ‘The whole concept of the Underground is so ridiculous,’ he announced. ‘What does it mean? I don’t think Oz will last the year.’
The reader who had posted the rave-tape came to the door. Felix Dennis was younger than me, longer haired, scruffier, with a rough and ready London charm. He had heard his voice on the BBC. ‘Don’t you reckon I deserve a split of the royalties?’
‘Royalties?’
‘Yeah. For my voice track.’
‘No one made a mint from your tape,’ I assured him. It was the equivalent of a letter to the editor. ‘We publish readers’ reactions all the time.’ He seemed crestfallen. I admitted his tape was a promotional boost.
Felix was broke. To pay for his girlfriend’s abortion, he had sold a precious drum-kit, but it was not enough. Felix had even pawned his last possession, a Grundig tape-recorder, but not before dispatching his fateful message to Oz. No wonder he identified with my denunciation of the abortion laws.
‘You can have five hundred Ozes for free,’ I said, pointing to the stacks of returns against the wall. If he sold the lot, he would clear sixty pounds.
Felix was effusively grateful, and lugged the bundles out the door.
It didn’t feel right to put on a suit, but they begged me. When the message is wild, the producer insisted, the messenger must look docile. All along the pot trail, my sober copywriter’s suit had lain in the bottom of a rucksack, so I hauled it out for the BBC’s wardrobe department. The lengthy lunches at Notting Hill cafés with Oxbridge types, eager to make their mark on the box, had paid off. In December 1967, a bespectacled Marxist, Tony Smith, invited me to join his team of new faces for a daring series, The Eleventh Hour. It was planned as a successor to That Was the Week That Was, the satirical show that first brought the world David Frost. Each week on The Eleventh Hour, Ray Davies of the Kinks wrote and performed a tough, topical ditty: the Liverpool poet Roger McGough offered a comic recitation.
At 11 p.m. on the last Saturday night of 1967, I sat at a desk, hair blow-dried, my suit dry-cleaned, and introduced myself to the British Public: ‘Hi. I live in sin with my girlfriend.’ This segment was titled ‘The Neville Report’. All day I had been locked in a room with a toothy assistant, Esther Rantzen, who toiled to obliterate my Strine (‘No, not pwohgwam,’ she lisped, ‘It’s pwogwhm . . .’). The autocue rolled: ‘How permissive is the permissive society?’ I enquired sternly, trying to sound like a Dimbleby dummy. ‘After booking a holiday for two at Butlins, I told the man on the phone that I wasn’t married.’ At this point, an actor blurted the verbatim response: ‘In that case, Mr Neville, you can’t have a holiday here – it’s against the rules.’
‘Why?’
‘For one thing – it would upset the Queen.’
RN: ‘Then I tried with P&O Shipping, and booked a double berth to Australia . . .’ The monitor flashed my grim visage, topped with the blow-wave. ‘Then I told them I was living in sin . . .’
Actor: ‘Oh dear, impossible.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m sure it’s against the law.’
‘Really? What’s the crime?’
‘We’d be charged with corrupting public morals . . .’ The autocue jammed. What next? The cast fidgeted. I ransacked my memory – the script was drawn from real-life exchanges:
‘Of all the er . . . organisations I approached, only ah British Rail were er . . . prepared to take an unmarried couple aboard.’
‘You can reserve two single sleepers to Paris,’ voiced the actor, as the autocue jerked into place, ‘first class. And the guard will slip you an adjoining door key . . .’
A few days later, I took a taxi to the Cuban Embassy and bowled up to the front desk. ‘I want to spy for your country,’ I said, wondering if I was being tailed. In the wake of Kim Philby’s defection to Russia, espionage was all the rage. This was a way of testing the job market. It was also laughs for ‘The Neville Report’. Earlier, a spit-and-polished Marine at the US Embassy had processed my request – ‘to be forwarded to Washington’ – and hinted at big bucks for infiltrating the anti-war movement. Now a Cuban official led me upstairs to an office, where a silver-haired colonel was polite but firm: ‘Thank you for volunteering but there’s already a waiting list.’
The next stop was the Soviet Embassy. After listening to my request, a brocaded official with a bullying air asked me what access I could claim to official secrets, remarking, ‘You’re not exactly a Cambridge don.’
‘No – but I can tell you heaps about the Australian scene.’
‘I don’t think we’re in the market for that,’ he yawned.
After the second BBC show, the critics called it ‘watery stuff . . . limp . . . low voltage’. While ‘The Neville Report’, for its testing of ‘accepted clichés’, was singled out as ‘the best invention’, the presence of its progenitor was likened to being buttonholed outside a lav. ‘There’s an unfailing accusatory note to everything Neville says,’ lamented the Daily Mirror, ‘which is already very tiresome.’
9
REVOLUTION is the ECSTASY
of HISTORY
Malcolm Muggeridge, a journalist I furtively admired, lamented in the New Statesman about the ‘cesspool’ of modern society. The knee-jerk tendency of commentators and politicians to treat the world like a Hollywood Western, cheering the good guys and hissing the bad, led to the ‘prevailing malaise’. In January 1968, I sat at the Olivetti and belted out an alternative vision: ‘A growing number of people have dropped out of the competitive panic to experiment with a new way of living,’ I enthused, citing communes in W
ales and the camaraderie of the pot trail, where ‘no one sews flags on rucksacks any more’.
I predicted a future of ‘no money, no clocks, no Wimpyburgers’, where the grey skies were strobe-lit, Nirvana was up for grabs and the wizardry of Oz fuelled the engine of Utopia. ‘Perhaps the Underground will sire a new generation free from an inbuilt acceptance of war as an ultimate panacea; without a horror of manifesting emotion, without an absurd over-evaluation of wealth and worldly success,’ I concluded, and posted the piece to the New Statesman.
‘I dare not print it as a feature,’ Paul Johnson said on the phone. The Labour Party heavies on his board would have kittens. ‘I’ll pay top rate and run it as a letter.’
My gushy cri de coeur triggered a furore. ‘As safe as a baby in a playpen,’ griped Clive James, ‘racking up sales for his magazine and a startling amount of TV time.’ Clive helpfully noted that the Home Office had failed to revoke my work permit. Of course he was miffed. Clive had been a star wit at Sydney Uni before my day, and had since holed up at Cambridge to scant acclaim. Time to put his byline in Oz. ‘Every single idea of every single flower child,’ snorted another, ‘is a debased (and money making?) version of all the liberal notions of the last 200 years.’ From the Carlton Club, Quintin Hogg zapped me as a semi-literate verbal diarrhetic, while another presumed I was ‘indirectly venting embarrassment at the grotesque spectacle of rich middle-class Englishmen playing the game of flower children for a couple of years before returning to Mummy and Daddy . . .’ These grizzlepots were answered with another utopian rave, inciting further puffs of smoke. The American guest at my inaugural London dinner party, Ed Victor, swept me off to a chic eatery. Thrilled by the brouhaha, this hot-shot editor at Jonathan Cape asked me to write a book on the Underground.
Naked, Louise rose from the rubble of a corpse-strewn pro-war comic, our logo splashed on her chest, nipples erect – the cover of Oz 8. (Her nipples were always erect, being sensitive to the prevailing chill.) In October, a shot rang out in Bolivia. Headlines. Dismay. Che Guevara gunned down! Our deadline was at dawn. Paul Lawson worked through the night on a memorial poster, and by noon the next day I was at the Scottish border with the artwork.
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