by Paul Howard
Marianne became part of the regular crowd at Courtfield Road.
‘That’s when I met Tara for the first time,’ she remembered, ‘around at Brian and Anita’s place. He was right in the middle of that same group of musicians that I was; always flashing around in cars, which were very low and very cool and very fast. He and Brian were quite close at that time. I suppose what they had in common was they were both young, good-looking and rich. And very worldly. It’s hard to remember Brian now, but I think of him as this worldly, intelligent man, but fucked up in a way that Tara wasn’t.
‘We all hung out together. I don’t know if you could describe a lot of these relationships as friendships, because it all happened in such a short space of time. Friendship comes later, down the line, over the course of years. But things were happening so fast in London in the Sixties that you didn’t stop to define what your relationship with anyone else really was.’
Looking at Tara and Nicki, however, it wasn’t difficult to divine that they’d made the same mistake as she had in marrying too young. ‘He’d married a village girl while they were both still kids and they’d had these children. And now he was changing and becoming something else, which was putting a strain on them. I think they liked each other very much, but it was clear they didn’t have anything in common.’
They did have psychedelic drugs – and perhaps the consciousness-altering fun of tripping helped forestall the inevitable for at least a few months longer.
The possession of LSD was still legal at that point and the subject of curiosity in official circles. In April, in what was intended as a serious scientific enquiry, the BBC threw a party in Christopher Gibbs’s house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, at which they distributed free LSD to invited guests, with the intention of filming the results.
The footage can’t have made for a compelling viewing experience. Unlike alcohol, marijuana or pills, acid wasn’t a social enabler. Melissa North, Tara’s girlfriend from his days in Paris, remembered the change in the energy around at Eaton Row when LSD replaced drink and pot as the main item on the menu after hours.
‘All of a sudden, it was a very, very non-talking environment,’ she remembered. ‘Lots of very glamorous people like Chrissy Gibbs, maybe Brian Jones, lying around, smoking enormous amounts of dope and taking LSD. There’d just be the occasional remark. Someone would put on a record and someone else might say, “Cool!” or something like that. It was all very monosyllabic. And very cliquey – especially if you weren’t taking LSD. Nobody ever told you anybody else’s name. And Nicki was suddenly very – not frosty, but uninterested. We never got the line, “Lovely to see you,” or anything like that. So in the end, we stopped calling around.’
The BBC weren’t the first media outlet to become interested in the new youth obsession with exploring inner space. In March, London Life magazine had blown the whistle on what was going on around at Michael Hollingshead’s Pont Street flat with an exclusive story advertised as: LSD – THE DRUG THAT COULD THREATEN LONDON. The story revealed that ‘some famous artists, pop stars and debs’ were risking psychotic illness by tripping on ‘the most powerful and dangerous drugs known to man’.
The police decided to put an end to the fun and games at Pont Street. They raided the World Psychedelic Centre, arresting Hollingshead and Joey Mellen, amongst others. Because LSD wasn’t a controlled drug, all of the charges subsequently brought related to cannabis possession and, in Hollingshead’s case, permitting his flat to be used for the smoking of cannabis.
‘The cops were pretty corrupt,’ said Martin Wilkinson, who stood bail for Hollingshead, ‘and they didn’t have a clue about drugs at all, except they knew what dope was.’
On both sides of the Atlantic, the authorities had decided to call time on the psychedelic era. Timothy Leary had already been busted before he got a chance to stage his acid jamboree at the Royal Albert Hall. He was arrested for bringing a small amount of marijuana into America after a holiday in Mexico and was sentenced to thirty years in prison, fined $30,000 and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment. In April 1966, four weeks after Leary was sent down, the Sandoz Corporation in Switzerland, which manufactured LSD, announced that it was suspending distribution of the drug.
In May, Hollingshead, who attempted to conduct his own defence while tripping on LSD, was sentenced to twenty-one months in prison.
‘Being busted is like going bald,’ Hollingshead later wrote. ‘By the time you realize it’s happening, it’s too late to do anything about it.’
But it was also too late to do anything about LSD. It was already shaping the music of the day. And once that happened, there was no rebottling the genie.
•
‘It seemed to happen so quickly,’ Michael Rainey said of London in the early months of 1966. ‘One day it wasn’t there, the next day it was everywhere. Fashion. Robert Fraser’s gallery. Indica Books. Granny Takes a Trip. Hung On You. All these places that were suddenly part of a movement, they all came up like mushrooms. It was in the air. Things were happening. People like me, who remembered that dull post-war London of their childhood, where you had to change your shirt if you went into the city for the day, because it smelled of smoke, we were suddenly living in this bright, colourful city and realizing what an exciting time it was to be alive.
‘It seems silly now, but LSD made you think that anything was possible. You could spend seven or eight hours staring at a buttercup, convinced that it was talking to you. I remember there was a thing at St Pancras station. All these people got together, held hands and tried to make the station levitate. I mean, they really believed it was going to. That’s how strong good acid was.’
This new London may have seemed to happen overnight, but it had been building for the best part of a decade. The King’s Road, a short walk away from Michael’s shop, had become a catwalk for the most outré fashions. And it wasn’t just women in miniskirts with knee-high Biba boots and their hair stacked high. It was men in brilliantly coloured Victorian frock coats with ruffles, fluttering from shop to shop, with Union Jack bags from shops like Granny Takes a Trip and Lord Kitchener’s Valet, picking up some eye-catching clobber to wear that night, something that might have got a man beaten up in the street two or three years earlier.
In the wonderfully satiric mood of the day, they were even sent up in a song by The Kinks that reached the top ten in April 1966. In ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’, Ray Davies mocked the ‘Carnabetian army’ who were one day in polka dots and the next day in stripes. And, though there was a sharp edge to the song – Davies was frustrated at how once spontaneous fashions were becoming just another uniform – it was embraced as an anthem by the very people that it ridiculed.
It wasn’t a time for taking offence. The year 1966 was the apogee of London’s happy, optimistic, golden age. England, the home of football, was about to host the World Cup and the team’s manager, Alf Ramsey, predicted that his Wingless Wonders would win it. Michael Caine was starring as Alfie, a Cockney womanizer who would soon be seducing American cinema audiences on his way to a string of Oscar nominations. Aftermath was being played at full volume everywhere you went.
Formal, international recognition that London was now the spigot of everything that was cool in the world of music, art, fashion and cinema came in April, when America’s Time magazine made ‘the Swinging City’ the subject of an era-defining cover story.
Piri Halasz’s article was originally conceived as a travel feature, but was pushed to the front of the magazine when her editor saw it for what it was – a piece of journalism that fossilized a unique moment in modern culture. The piece gave readers a guide to all of the trendiest restaurants, shops, bars, nightclubs, galleries and casinos in the city, and walked them through the rudiments of the new English, as spoken by Ready Steady Go! presenter Cathy McGowan, including flip terms such as ‘super’, ‘fab’, ‘groovy’, ‘gear’, ‘close’ and ‘with-it’.
But it was more social analysis than travelogue. Through a
storyboard of Swinging London scenes, she offered the magazine’s largely conservative readership an insight into life in a city that had thrown off the old Establishment of ‘the financial city of London, the church and Oxbridge’ and was now led by a ‘swinging meritocracy’ of actors, photographers, singers, admen, TV executives and writers, most of them, terrifyingly, still in their early twenties. She wrote about London as the capital of a country that had ‘recovered a lightness of heart lost during the weighty centuries of world leadership’ and where working-class men were now ‘sporting their distinct, regional accents like badges’. Other foreign news magazines, including Stern and Paris-Match, sent reporters to London to pan the same waters. Mark Palmer had so many media outlets looking to photograph him and the rest of London’s beautiful people that he decided to set up a modelling agency, called English Boy.
Vogue was also keen to get a visual on what was happening. The magazine commissioned Michael Cooper – a twenty-five-year-old freelance photographer and friend of The Rolling Stones, who would soon find fame as the man who photographed a certain Beatles album cover – to find models for a spread on how men’s clothes had become informed by women’s fashion. As it happened, he knew a couple of dandies who’d make perfect models for the job: Tara Browne and Brian Jones.
They agreed to model for the magazine, as did Nicki and Anita, who were first sent on a shopping trip to dress their men for the shoot. For Tara, Nicki chose a maroon silk suit by Major Hayward, with a gold shirt by Turnbull & Asser, and a multicoloured, brocade tie. Brian wore a black double-breasted, ‘gangster’ suit, with red and white stripes, a bright pink shirt and scarlet handkerchief and tie, with white shoes from Carnaby Street.
Hair was by Anita Pallenberg. ‘I always did it for him,’ she remembered. ‘He was so obsessed with his hair. He had to have three mirrors when he was getting ready to go out, so he could see it from every angle. Whereas Tara had this very easy hairstyle. That was how it grew naturally. He didn’t have to do a thing. Another thing he envied in Tara. Brian’s hair was a nightmare.’
It was one of Tara and Nicki’s last truly happy days as a married couple. ‘We laughed our way through the whole thing,’ Nicki remembered. ‘I can’t remember if we had taken acid, or if we were smoking something – maybe it was neither or maybe it was both. But the five of us, Michael included, just laughed and laughed and laughed. You never knew it at the time, of course, but it was one of those days – and there were lots of them in the Sixties – that you look back on and you wish it could have stayed like that forever.’
•
If Piri Halasz had waited another week or two to file her feature, she might have added another scene to her storyboard. It would have started with a Caravelle passenger jet, leased for the day, sitting on the runway at Heathrow Airport, fuelled and ready to bring a hundred or so young groovers to Ireland for a twenty-first birthday party, where The Lovin’ Spoonful, one of the hottest pop acts in America at that moment, would play at the court of England’s switched-on youth.
Christopher Gibbs remembered walking across the tarmac at Dublin Airport and looking over his shoulder at this vision of Swinging London on an away day. ‘All sorts of people got off that plane,’ he said. ‘I just remember this mass of androgynous youth moving towards the terminal building and I remember thinking how times had changed. There was a group of bohemian types there – I don’t know what their connection was to Tara, but someone must have known them – and they were carrying bottles of Guinness, which I thought was a bit odd, bringing Guinness to a party that was being thrown by the Guinness family. And they said it wasn’t for drinking, it was for washing their hair. It was that kind of weekend.’
Before they boarded the flight, Nicki, Anita and Brian dropped a pane of acid each. A chauffeur collected them at Dublin Airport and drove them, tripping, through the city, then deep into the Wicklow Mountains, where a hole suddenly opened up in the Earth. At the bottom of it was a stout-black lake, rimmed by a beach of white sand, as fine as flour. They stared out the windows as they descended towards the house, at the bleak, brown hills around them, and they listened to the quiet susurration of the wind in the hollow of the valley. And that’s when Brian announced that he needed to pee.
‘We told the driver to stop,’ Anita remembered, ‘and we all got out of the car. We were looking out at this beautiful countryside, all of us tripping, while Brian was having a pee at the top of this hill, then he went, “Aaaggghhh!” or he made some incredible noise. So we went to the top of the hill and Brian had found this dead goat.’
At the time, he had developed an obsession with the legend of Pan, an ancient Greek god with the hindquarters and horns of a goat, who was worshipped for his powers of fertility. A prolific sire himself, Brian believed that Pan encapsulated the spirit of rock and roll, according to his friend Stash de Rola. Who knows what images flashed through his mind as he stared, tripping on acid, at the animal’s skeletal remains? He started laughing. Michael Cooper, who was in the car with them, grabbed his camera and took photographs of all of them, standing around on the barren Wicklow hillside.
‘We got hysterical looking at this dead goat,’ Anita remembered. ‘It was hysterical laughter. It was totally the wrong reaction, but it’s the reaction you get when you’re on acid. We arrived at the party completely out of it.’
Behind them on the road were John Sebastian, Joe Butler, Zal Yanovsky and Steve Boone, the members of The Lovin’ Spoonful, who had just played the Marquee Club in London, watched by John Lennon and George Harrison. They hadn’t taken anything, but were equally blown away by the scene.
‘We saw the cottages on the property while we were approaching the castle,’ remembered Joe Butler, the drummer and vocalist. ‘It was like Return of the Native. All this stuff I read about as a kid. Robin Hood. The Count of Monte Cristo. Ivanhoe. That’s what I was thinking about. Anything with a castle in it. I remember entering the main hall and seeing the paintings. It was a time trip more than anything. And it remains that way in my mind. I know there were cars there, but I was able to expunge them out of my dream of the place.’
Tara, in his favourite black velvet suit, greeted them at the door. ‘He gave us each a thumb of hash and a pipe. And that’s when the party started.’
It was Saturday, 23 April 1966, seven weeks after his birthday, but Tara had chosen the date to fit around the band’s touring and recording schedule. Oonagh paid them $10,000, more than twice what the average American worker was taking home in a year, for the private concert.
The party guests started to arrive in the middle of the afternoon in a fleet of cars and also from a second Caravelle that arrived from Paris. They were a cross-section of the eclectic mix that made up Tara’s social circle, a happy jumble of aristocracy, popocracy, Chelsea bohemia, Gaelic tradition, motor world and underworld, all getting along famously in a marijuana mist under the roof of David Mlinaric’s exquisitely decorated marquee.
‘When we arrived, I think I was probably thinking the same as the other guys in the band,’ said John Sebastian, the lead singer of The Lovin’ Spoonful. ‘Which was, okay, how did we end up here? We were impressed that someone in this almost royal atmosphere was interested in us. This was a guy who could have had The Beatles and the Stones over to his house anytime he wanted. He didn’t want them to play his twenty-first birthday party – he wanted us. Why, I don’t know. Perhaps there was an exotic quality to us. But it was like nothing any of us had ever experienced before or experienced since. A dangerous number of irresponsible, young people in the grandeur of this old castle in the middle of the Irish countryside. It was extraordinary.’
Brian and Anita, suddenly ravenous, attacked the buffet, while Mike McCartney, Mick Jagger and the art collector Sir Alfred Beit giggled at the cleaning job that a maid had done on the surrealist artwork hanging in the dining room. ‘I’ve heard of Arthur Guinness,’ Mike shouted across the room to Tara, ‘but I’ve never heard of ’Alf a Magritte.’
David Mlinaric, wearing a fur coat indoors, shot the breeze with Tara and David Dimbleby about Sybilla’s, a new London nightclub, which he’d been hired to decorate. Michael Rainey and Rupert Lycett Green talked shop, as the owners of two of London’s best-known men’s boutiques, while Candida Betjeman, pregnant, looked on enviously as Nicki and a group of other women in tiny skirts moved their narrow hips and their pointed elbows and Patrick Kerr offered them dancing tips.
Garech chatted to the sculptor Eddie Delaney about Nelson’s Pillar, a monument on Dublin’s O’Connell Street that had recently been blown up by the IRA, and Brian Jones, listening in, thought he might like to take a taxi into town to see the Admiral, fallen from his perch. Gay Kindersley tried to start an Irish ballad session, but it was far too early for ‘The Mountains of Mourne’. Tara introduced Rock Brynner to his friends, the Ormsby-Gores, while John Paul Getty Jr introduced himself to the actress Siobhán McKenna.
And right in the middle of this scene sat Jimmy Scott, a Nigerian conga player whom Tara knew from the Scotch. He was dressed in native African robes and every so often he tipped Jameson onto Oonagh’s lush drawing-room carpet.
‘He looked magnificent,’ Mike McCartney remembered. ‘He kept saying “Ob-la-di, ob-la-da – I drink again, I die,” then pouring the whiskey out. I said, “What the hell are you doing?” and he said, “In Africa, before you drink, you must pay homage to God and Mother Earth.” And off he went again: “Ob-la-di, ob-la-da . . .” Paul met him in London then afterwards and he wrote a song about him.’
Paul sent his apologies. He wanted to be there, but The Beatles were busy, recording their new album at Abbey Road Studios. It was going to be called Revolver.
But all human life was there. Lords and ladies, the famous and the infamous, rich and penniless, pop stars and pipers, artists and TV personalities, ambassadors and glamour models, friends and hustlers. It was like a credits roll of the people who had played a part in Tara’s life.