London Calling (47 page)

Throughout this time Camden Town itself was changing. Until then it had been a working-class Greek and Irish community – even
now a few Greek restaurants and Irish pubs remain – and Camden High Street was just that, with ironmongers, fish shops and
greengrocers. Camden market did not exist. The Roundhouse was the initial attraction in the area. First with the UFO Club
on Friday nights, then Implosion on Saturdays. Kenneth Tynan put on
Oh! Calcutta!
at the Roundhouse, and as it was open every day Compendium opened a bookstall there. Then in 1971 Tony Macintosh and a group
of friends including Tchaik Chassey opened Dingwalls Dance Hall, the live music venue, restaurant and bar, in the old buildings
at Camden Lock, across the street from Compendium and, after a while, Camden market began in some of the outbuildings.

In 1972, Compendium expanded across the street to a building at 281 Camden High Street which, in the spirit of the age, became
the first Mind– Body–Spirit bookshop in the country. In the mid-seventies, Compendium acquired much larger premises at 234
Camden High Street and gave up the old shop at number 240. People came and went, some got strung out on drugs or went to prison,
or set out to start their own specialist book-shops, but Compendium managed to remain at the cutting edge in virtually every
subject area, from radical politics, with a bias towards situationist and anarchist publications, to Beat Generation and post-Beat
Generation fiction, critical theory, Surrealism, drug literature and the women’s movement. In 1976, just as punk was beginning,
the Clash had their rehearsal studio across the street in the Camden Lock complex and were often seen browsing in the
shop. Compendium naturally carried all the Xeroxed punk magazines like
Sniffin
’
Glue
as they came out. It was one of the world’s great bookshops but the success of the Roundhouse, Dingwalls and Camden market
eventually pushed rents up so high that in early October 2000, after thirty-two years as purveyors of revolution, anarchy,
literary experimentation, the counter-culture, occult mysteries and racial equality, they finally had to close their battered
black door.

The Roundhouse had all the makings of a concert venue doubling as an underground community centre, like the Milky Way (Melkweg)
in Amsterdam or the Fillmores East and West or Family Dog and for a few years it was like that. Jeff Dexter ran Implosion
there every Saturday night, donating half the profits to whatever underground organization most needed them: Release,
IT
, the Mangrove defence fund and so on. The other half went towards the restoration of the building itself. All bands, including
the Who, played for just £25, knowing the money was going to fund the scene. There was one exception: the Rolling Stones,
who insisted on the complete take. The focus on the building helped make Camden High Street into a prime shopping street.
Naturally, once it became popular the landlords forced out all the hippie tea rooms, vegetarian cafés and ultimately the Compendium
book shop that had established the street as a commercial destination and replaced them with shops who could pay very high
rent, some of them, allegedly, the kind of leather goods shops where it is very easy to launder money. The market, however,
retains a vestige of its old hippie flavour, now mixed with a distinct cyberpunk element; enough for William Gibson to use
it as one of the settings for his 2004 novel
Pattern Recognition
.

The hippie counter-culture continued to grow and by the summer of 1968 the Worlds End area of the King’s Road had also acquired
a distinct hippie flavour: there was Granny Takes a Trip run by Victorian clothing collector Sheila Cohen, her boyfriend,
the portrait painter Nigel Waymouth, and the Savile Row-trained tailor John Pearse. They began with antique clothing, then
started to make up their own designs. Nigel Waymouth: ‘One morning we were sitting around cross-legged on the floor, passing
a joint around, and these two blokes came in. They looked around and said, “This is a nice place isn’t it?” We looked up,
and of course it was John and Paul.’
¹¹
Soon they were dressing the Beatles, the Stones, Jimi Hendrix and the Pink Floyd. The original Victorian décor included a
vintage gramophone with a large horn. Nigel and his design partner Michael English enlarged pictures of the American Indian
chiefs Low Dog and Kicking Bear to fit the window, and followed this
with a Warhol-style portrait of Jean Harlow. Their final window was one with the front end of a 1947 Dodge protruding from
it. John Pearse once owned the whole car but it broke down in 1968 in Notting Hill and they decided to chop it in half for
the window. They had recently seen Claes Oldenburg’s
Lovers in the Back Seat of a Dodge
and were inspired by it. The council objected strenuously and this exacerbated the arguments that John had been having with
Nigel about the amount of time he was devoting writing for their band Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. John Pearse left in
1968 and the shop continued under the management of Nigel Waymouth and Sheila Cohen until 1970, when they sold it to Freddie
Hornick. He brought in Gene Krell and a branch specializing in glam rock attire opened in New York, but by then the original
1965 shop and everything it stood for had long gone.

The future novelist Salman Rushdie lived upstairs and described the shop as ‘pitch dark. The air was heavy with incense and
patchouli oil and also the aromas of what the police called Certain Substances… it was a scary place.’
¹²

He avoided it. However, when John and Yoko’s white Rolls-Royce pulled up outside the shop one evening, he decided a more friendly
approach might be called for. But when he knocked on the door to introduce himself and suggested that he might come in ‘for
a chat’, Sheila Cohen snapped: ‘Don’t you know the art of conversation’s dead, man?’ and slammed the door in his face.
¹³

Across the street, at 1 Dartrey Terrace, was Gandalf ’s Garden Shoppe, Muz Murray’s hippie commune who had taken over the
old Home and Colonial Stores shop and were busy redecorating to get rid of ‘the old butcher shop vibes’. Muz told
IT
: ‘When the place is looking like it ought, we are having a “VIBRATION CHANGING CEREMON Y” with mantra chanting and incense
burning and Chinese tea all round.’
¹⁴
The walls were painted with Tibetan iconography and the visitors sat on mats. In an ad for
IT
Muz wrote: ‘You really do meet the gentlest people at Gandalf ’s Garden Shoppe. Some days someone wanders in with his sitar
and plays awhile. Others bring guitars and sooth us all. Some days you come in and bring your flute or play our ocarinas…’
¹⁵

Just on the turn in the King’s Road, at number 402, was Town Records, one of the hip record stores that specialized in American
album imports (the others were One Stop and Musicland). Next door to Michael Rainey’s Hung on You clothes shop was the Green
Dragon at 436 King’s Road, open 11.30 a.m. to 2 a.m. For ’food, rice, and Dragon specials, exotic teas, grass walls, clouds
moving across the ceiling, nice sounds playing. Sit on floor on cushions and meet your friends.’ The outside window and wall
were painted with a huge Chinese dragon.

The Baghdad House on the Fulham Road (the BDH as it was always known) served yogurt and honey while you sat on cushions in
a basement surrounded by Moroccan hangings. It was a favourite place for people to smoke hash as it would be difficult to
raid without plenty of advance notice of the police arriving. It was a central meeting place for the King’s Road people: Michael
Rainey, Jane Ormsby-Gore, Robert Fraser, Christopher Gibbs, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, members of groups like Procol
Harum. Cecil Beaton described a visit in his diary for June 1967:

At 11.30 we went off in taxis to the Baghdad House restaurant in Fulham road. Here in the club-like atmosphere of the basement
we found others of the gang, Mark Palmer [Sir Mark palmer, ‘gypsy baronet’ and former pageboy to the Queen], more rodent-like
than ever with his greasy blond hair over his nose, Michael Wishart, looking as if he needed to go back to the nursing home,
the youngest Tennant girl [the Hon. Catherine Tennant, Palmer’s wife and future mother of today’s ‘rebel supermodel’ Iris
Palmer].

Greg Sams’s macrobiotic restaurant at 136a Westbourne Terrace was open from 6.30 until midnight and always had free food available
for those who genuinely had no money. Though usually filled with hippies slowly chewing their brown rice, it was also patronized
by John and Yoko, who did a full macrobiotic course, and other visiting musicians like Graham Bond, who once trapped everyone
in there when his Hammond organ got stuck on the stairs as he dragged it down to the basement to play. Greg and his brother
Craig were the forerunners in the organic food business, tirelessly promoting healthy food in a society that had only recently
enthusiastically embraced soggy white bread.

On 15 August 1967 the government’s Marine Offences Bill became law, marking an end to independent broadcasting throughout
the country. It was, of course, aimed at closing down the pirate radio ships that had been transmitting from outside British
territorial waters and threatening the monopoly of the BBC. John Peel, whose
Perfumed Garden
show on Radio London was a particular favourite of the underground, told
IT
:

I don’t think the public is aware of the difference the passing of offshore radio will make. It will certainly mean an end,
on radio, to the sort of music I am putting out. Although disc jockeys are virtually the jackals of the pop scene, living
off other people’s work, pirate radio did at least provide a certain medium of self-expression to anyone who cared to use
it, but it seems that the
BBC’s new pop channel is going to be totally restrictive, particularly in view of the heavy censorship which has been placed
on the recorded programme tapes that the BBC have already made.
¹⁶

John began to write a regular
Perfumed Garden
column for
IT
, beginning in issue 19, of 5 October 1967, which, considering how busy he was and the fact that he wasn’t paid, showed a
strong commitment to the cause. After urging everyone to support Release, he wrote:

Our main problem still seems to be one of personal communication. UFO and other ways have helped and I’ve been blessed with
a multitude of hob-bits, elves, dibblers, sparrows and assorted gods and goddesses through the perfumed Garden. I know the
idea of wearing a homemade PG badge seems futile or childish in many ways but think of it as being ‘childlike’ rather than
‘childish’ and I believe we must be ‘childlike’ if we are to survive and exert any real influence on the terrifying, murderous
society in which we gasp for expression.

John wrote many thousands of words for
IT
, embodying the most consistent and genuine belief in the idea of love and peace of all
IT
’s writers, often appearing surrounded by more strident voices where he was an island of calm.

He died before completing his autobiography and his widow, Sheila, completed the text, often quoting from his diary. She included
one oddly moving entry from 20 October 1967, written after a visit to the Arts Lab in Drury Lane:

Many creative people there, so I felt my usual pangs of inferiority coming on. In the presence of so many talented, creative
and constructive people on the underground scene I feel that I’m regarded as something of a hanger-on and bore. I hope this
is not so because I want people to realise that I’m doing as much as I can in my foolish way to further their several causes.
¹⁷

In reality, to the UFO and Arts Lab crowds, it was John who was the mentor. Music was enormously important to the underground
scene and his editorial sensibility was impeccable. They could depend on his judgement, and it was through John that they
first heard Captain Beefheart and Marc Bolan (who let him down disgracefully once he was no longer of use to him), as well
as numerous lesser-known artists. His late-night programme was the soundtrack to their lives, the only source of independent
music on radio.

Unfortunately John paid for his association with
IT
by being harassed
by the police. He was already a famous BBC Radio One D J when the heavy mob arrived one evening in 1969 and kicked in the
door of his flat on Park Square Mews, perhaps not realizing it was Crown Estate property or that he would have opened it had
they knocked first. But John had been expecting it. He was a non-smoking vegetarian who cared very little for either drugs
or alcohol, but his position as a promoter of obscure experimental bands and – perhaps more suspect – as a columnist for
IT
meant that he was bound to be targeted by the police and so he had in place a plan of action. As soon as the drugs squad
arrived each one was tagged by a member of the household and followed to make sure they did not plant anything; a common occurrence
in those days. They searched everywhere, dismantling the famous hamster cage and even tearing open an apple pie that Sheila,
John’s wife, had just finished baking. Next they turned their attention to the family Dormobile. Naturally the police had
brought along the press, but this time it worked against them as their presence prevented anything being planted without immediate
denial from the household. Annoyed at not pinning anything on them the police kept up a policy of intimidation. Sheila Ravenscroft
wrote in her section of Peel’s autobiography that every trip to the shops was a cause for anxiety: ‘We’d be ambling home with
bags of groceries only for a police car to screech up to the kerb and disgorge a couple of officers, who would then search
us and go through our shopping before driving off again. It happened so frequently, but it never stopped being humiliating.’
¹⁸

IT
grew and almost prospered and throughout 1968 it came out regularly and even managed to pay its contributors. Articles were
often followed in subsequent weeks by a lively exchange in the correspondence pages and it seemed to be fulfilling its original
aim of putting like-minded people in touch and fuelling public debate. One example of how avidly it was read came with issue
44 in November 1968,
¹⁹
when a small news item appeared asking readers to send any old spectacles they had to the Albert Bailey Mission in Farnborough,
which refurbished them, graded them and forwarded them to poverty-stricken people in Africa and Asia. A week later Albert
Bailey wrote to say that he had so far received 1,575 pairs of specs from
IT
readers and that ‘Christ would not be a stranger among you.’ Two months later he had received more than one hundredweight.