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The British counter-culture or underground scene developed during the mid-1960s, [1] and was linked to the hippie subculture of the United States. Its primary focus was around Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill in London. It generated its own magazines and newspapers, bands, clubs and alternative lifestyle, associated with cannabis and LSD use and a strong socio-political revolutionary agenda to create an alternative society.
Many in the blossoming underground movement were influenced by 1950s Beat generation writers such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who paved the way for the hippies and the counterculture of the 1960s. [2] During the 1960s, the Beat writers engaged in symbiotic evolution with freethinking academics including experimental psychologist Timothy Leary.
An example of the cross-over of beat poetry and music can be seen when Burroughs appeared at the Phun City festival, organised in 24–26 July 1970 by Mick Farren with underground community bands including The Pretty Things, Kevin Ayers, Edgar Broughton Band, Pink Fairies, Shagrat, and, from the United States, the MC5.
The UK's underground movement was focused on the Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill area of London, which Mick Farren said "was an enclave of freaks, immigrants and bohemians long before the hippies got there". It had been depicted in Colin MacInnes' novel Absolute Beginners , about street culture at the time of the Notting Hill Riots in the 1950s.
The underground paper International Times (IT) began to appear in 1966 and Steve Abrams, founder of Soma, summarised the underground as a "literary and artistic avant-garde with a large contingent from Oxford and Cambridge. John Hopkins (Hoppy), a member of the editorial board of International Times for example, was trained as a physicist at Cambridge."
Police harassment of members of the underground (often referred to as "freaks", initially by others as an insult, and later by themselves as an act of defiance) became commonplace, particularly against the underground press. According to Farren, "Police harassment, if anything, made the underground press stronger. It focused attention, stiffened resolve, and tended to confirm that what we were doing was considered dangerous to the establishment."
Key underground (community) bands of the time who often performed at benefit gigs for various worthy causes included Pink Floyd (when they still had Syd Barrett), Soft Machine, Tomorrow, Pretty Things, The Deviants (featuring Mick Farren), Tyrannosaurus Rex, Edgar Broughton Band, Hawkwind, Pink Fairies (featuring Twink and ex-The Deviants), Shagrat (featuring Steve Peregrin Took, Mick Farren (early lineup), and Larry Wallis); key people included, in the late '60s, Marc Bolan, who would leave "the Grove" to find fame with T. Rex, and his partner Steve Peregrin Took, who remained in Ladbroke Grove and continued to perform benefit gigs in the anti-commercial ethos of the UK underground.
Within Portobello Road stood the Mountain Grill, a greasy spoon cafe, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s was frequented by several UK underground artists, including Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies. [3] In 1974, Hawkwind released an album titled Hall Of The Mountain Grill and Steve Peregrin Took wrote Ballad of the Mountain Grill (aka Flophouse Blues). [4]
Mick Farren said,
My own feeling is that, not just sex, but anger and violence, are part and parcel of rock n' roll. The rock concert can work as an alternative for violence, an outlet for violence. But at that time there were a lot of things that made us really angry. We were outraged! In the U.S. the youth were sent to Vietnam and there was nothing we could do to change the way the government did it. Smoking cannabis and doing things to get thrown in jail were our own way of expressing our anger, and we wanted change - I believed that picking up a guitar, not a gun, would bring about change. [5] It's like Germaine Greer said about the underground - it's not just some sort of scruffy club you can join, you're in or you're out ... it's like being a criminal. [6]
The underground movement was heavily symbolised by the use of drugs. The types of drugs used were varied and in many cases the names and effects were unknown as The Deviants/Pink Fairies member Russell Hunter, working at International Times (part of the underground press at the time), recalled. "People used to send in all kinds of strange drugs and things, pills and powders, stuff to smoke and that. They'd always give them to me to try to find out what they were! [Laughs]".
Part of the sense of humour of the underground, no doubt partly induced by the effects of both drugs and radical thinking, was an enjoyment at "freakin' out the norms". Mick Farren recalls actions sure to elicit the required response. "The band's baroque House of Usher apartment on London's Shaftesbury Avenue had witnessed pre-Raphaelite hippy scenes, like Sandy the bass player (of The Deviants and Pink Fairies), Tony the now and again keyboard player, and a young David Bowie, fresh from Beckenham Arts Lab, sunbathing on the roof, taking photos of each other and posing coyly as sodomites".
The image of the underground as manifested in magazines such as Oz and newspapers like International Times was dominated by key talented graphic artists, particularly Martin Sharp and the Nigel Waymouth–Michael English team, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, who fused Alfons Mucha's Art Nouveau arabesques with the higher colour key of psychedelia. British Television played a substantial role in representing the UK underground and counter-culture movement; At the beginning of the 1960s, three-quarters of the British population had a television, and the number rose to 90% by 1964. [7]
There was a smaller, less widely spread manifestation from the UK underground termed the "Overground", which referred to an explicitly spiritual, cosmic, quasi-religious intent, though this was an element that had always been present. At least two magazines— Gandalf's Garden (6 issues, 1968–72) and Vishtaroon —adopted this "overground" style. Gandalf's Garden was also a shop/restaurant/meeting place at World's End, Chelsea. The magazines were printed on pastel paper using multi-coloured inks and contained articles about meditation, vegetarianism, mandalas, ethics, poetry, pacifism and other subjects at a distance from the more wild and militant aspects of the underground. The first issue of Gandalf's Garden urged that we should "seek to stimulate our own inner gardens if we are to save our Earth and ourselves from engulfment." It was edited by Muz Murray who is now called Ramana Baba and teaches yoga.
These attitudes were embodied musically in The Incredible String Band, who in 2003 were described as "holy" by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in a foreword for the book Be Glad: An Incredible String Band Compendium (Helter Skelter Books). He had previously chosen the band's track "The Hedgehog's Song" as his only piece of popular music on the radio programme Desert Island Discs ). The critic Ian MacDonald said: "Much that appeared to be profane in Sixties youth culture was quite the opposite".
Larry Wallis was a British rock guitarist, songwriter and producer. He was best known as a member of the Pink Fairies and an early member of Motörhead.
Shagrat was a British supergroup formed by Steve Peregrin Took and Mick Farren in February 1970 after they split with Twink, their partner in the prototype Pink Fairies supergroup of late 1969. They recruited Larry Wallis and Tim Taylor (bass), both formerly of The Entire Sioux Nation. Farren left the band shortly after its establishment and never recorded or performed with them. Shagrat then became Took's band outright with Wallis, Taylor, Phil Lenoir (drums), and later Dave Bidwell (percussion).
Ladbroke Grove is a road in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, which passes through Kensal Green and Notting Hill, running north–south between Harrow Road and Holland Park Avenue.
Steve Peregrin Took was an English musician and songwriter, best known for his membership of the duo Tyrannosaurus Rex with Marc Bolan. After breaking with Bolan, he concentrated on his own singer-songwriting activities, either as a solo artist or as a frontman for several bands.
Michael Anthony Farren was an English rock musician, singer, journalist, and author associated with counterculture and the UK underground.
Phun City was a rock festival held at Ecclesden Common near Worthing, England, from 24 July to 26 July 1970. Excluding the one-day free concerts in London's Hyde Park, Phun City became the first large-scale free festival in the UK.
Pink Fairies are an English proto-punk rock band initially active in the London underground and psychedelic scene of the early 1970s. They promoted free music, drug use, and anarchy, and often performed impromptu gigs and other stunts, such as playing for nothing outside the gates at the Bath and Isle of Wight pop festivals in 1970, as well as appearing at Phun City, the first Glastonbury and many other free festivals including Windsor and Trentishoe.
John Charles Edward Alder, also known as Twink, is an English drummer, actor, singer, and songwriter who was a central figure in the English psychedelic and proto-punk movement.
Hall of the Mountain Grill is the fourth studio album by space rock band Hawkwind, released in 1974. It is regarded by many critics as a career highlight.
The freak scene was originally a component of the bohemian subculture which began in California in the mid-1960s, associated with the hippie movement. The term is also used to refer to the post-hippie and pre-punk period of the early to mid-1970s. It can be viewed as encompassing a range of disparate groups including hippies, pacifists, politicized radicals, as well as psychedelic and progressive rock fans. Those connected with the subculture often attended rock festivals, free festivals, happenings, and alternative society gatherings of various kinds.
John Victor Lindsay "Hoppy" Hopkins was a British photographer, journalist, researcher and political activist, and "one of the best-known underground figures of 'Swinging London' " in the late 1960s.
The Deviants were a British psychedelic rock band originally active from late 1966 to 1969, but later used as a vehicle for the musical work of writer Mick Farren until his death in 2013.
Gandalf's Garden was a mystical community which flourished at the end of the 1960s as part of the London hippie-underground movement, and ran a shop as well as a magazine of the same name. It emphasised the mystical interests of the period and advocated meditation and psychedelics in contrast to hard drugs.
Steve Took's Horns was an English rock band with blues rock and punk influences formed in 1977 by former Tyrannosaurus Rex percussionist turned solo artist Steve Peregrin Took together with Trev Thoms, later of Nik Turner's Inner City Unit. The band was the first in which Thoms worked with his future Inner City Unit bandmate Ermanno Ghisio Erba aka Dino Ferari, in what would be a long string of collaborations until Thoms' death in 2010. A 2004 posthumous album of the band was reviewed in Classic Rock magazine, a 1978 live performance was reviewed in Melody Maker, the band's 1977 recording session was described at length in a Forced Exposure interview with eyewitness Larry Wallis and the band was euologised in a Record Collector article about Took written by Luke Haines.
Paul Fraser Rudolph is a Canadian guitarist, bassist, singer, and cyclist. He made his mark in the UK underground music scene, and then as a session musician, before returning to Canada to indulge his passion for cycling. He resided in Gibsons, British Columbia, where he owned and operated a bicycle business, Spin Cycle. He has since retired to Victoria, British Columbia.
Think Pink is the debut album by English psychedelic musician Twink. Recorded in 1969, the album was released on Sire Records in the US in 1970 and Polydor Records in the UK in early 1971. It was produced by Mick Farren and featured members of The Pretty Things, The Deviants, plus Steve Peregrin Took of Tyrannosaurus Rex. The final two tracks were the only commercial release of any songs written by Took until 1990, ten years after his death.
Mona—The Carnivorous Circus is a 1970 album by the UK underground artist Mick Farren.
What a Bunch of Sweeties is a 1972 album by the UK underground group Pink Fairies.
Kings of Oblivion is the third album by the UK underground group Pink Fairies, released in 1973.
Human Garbage is a 1984 live album by the UK underground artist Mick Farren and friends, released under the name The Deviants.
