Groove Grove Graphics Catalogue

Groove Grove Graphics is an exhibition about West London’s extraordinary music scene from WWII to today. It explores the sounds that emerged from successive generations of displaced soldiers, bohemians, economic migrants and political exiles who, living cheek by jowl, entertained themselves by borrowing, swapping and transforming musical ideas.

Groove Grove Graphics’ origins lay in Agitpop, an earlier exhibition at londonprintstudio, featuring activist graphics from May ’68 to today (2008). While planning that show we asked ourselves, what did West London contribute to ‘the Revolution’? We concluded that it excelled in designing the uniforms and creating the soundtrack. But this exhibition isn’t just about local Sex ‘n’ Docs ‘n’ Frock ‘n’ Role. It is also a response to other exhibitions, and to the questions: what is worthy of remembrance, and how are histories told?

Museum exhibitions are structured by classification systems that segregate and attribute significance to the items on display. Their metaphorical ideal is the perfect fossil, clinically extracted from its precise location in petrified time and revealed to the public in all its decontexturalised glory. The British Music Experience: Britain’s Interactive Museum of Popular Music (currently on show at the O2 Dome) guides the visitor through discreet time zones, presenting a high-tech spectacle of popular ‘icons.’ But it fails to reveal either the historical roots or the collective social experiences from which this vibrant culture grew. Island Life (last year’s exhibition celebrating 50 years of Island Records) came closer to acknowledging the Caribbean, Black British and American contribution to UK popular music (hardly surprising, given Island’s origins as an importer of ska and reggae), but again, as visitors moved swiftly through the maze of digitally re-mastered records and larger-than-life portraits of the ‘stars’, the exhibition - more corporate advertising than cultural product - seemed to emphasise the enormous gap between the music industry and its audience.

Groove Grove Graphics is founded on the premise that common experiences run through the lives of successive generations of West Londoners. Disturbed boundaries arising from overcrowding or inquisitiveness, coupled with a host of influences that have poured into

londonprintstudio, 2010www.londonprintstudio.org.uk

Introduction toGroove GroveGraphicsJane GoodsirJohn Phillips

the area, have led people to challenge established norms and create new or hybrid cultural forms. This exhibition employs themes (Absolute Beginners, Do It Yourself, War Ina Babylon, Sympathy for the Devil and so on) to explore those influences that have shaped musical culture.

The exhibition has drawn on the generosity of many local people who have loaned record sleeves from their personal collections. Inevitably many of these items are scarred by time. Creating displays from them is in keeping with our aim to present a living story, not a definitive history. It is a speculative collage of lived experience that aims, despite many omissions, to celebrate creativity in the neighbourhood and to stimulate further discussion and debate.

MIA GalangTubeway Army Are Friends Electric?The Pink Fairies Portobello ShuffleThe Ruts Babylon is BurningDavid Bowie Ziggy StardustCat Stevens Portobello RoadThe Raincoats Adventures Close to HomeThe Pink Fairies Portobello ShuffleThe Who My GenerationMotorhead MotorheadPulp I SpyLord Kitchener London is the Place for MeThe Clash White Man in Hammersmith PalaisJunior Dan Mystic GroveAswad Warrior ChargeEstelle 1980Vivien Goldman LaunderetteSex Pistols Holidays in the SunLily Allen LDNGorillaz Feel Good Inc.Hawkwind Silver MachineNick Lowe Basing StreetThe Slits Typical GirlsQuintessence Notting Hill GateDelroy Washington The Streets of Ladbroke GroveAdamski feat. Seal KillerT. Rex 20th Century BoySex Pistols Anarchy in the UKBlur Blue JeansKilling Joke Eighties

top 30 playlistIntroduction toGroove GroveGraphicsJane GoodsirJohn Phillips

Image © Omtentacle (Design partnership of Mike Mcinnerney and Dudley Edwards), 1967www.mikemcinnerney.com, www.amazedltd.com2

The Originators:Punk, Dub &the Female PrincipleVivien Goldman

With their raffish beginnings as a pig farm, then a racetrack, and with the commercial bustle of the market as a main artery, the winding streets around Portobello Road have always been a focus of community activity and revelry. Doubtless the late great mystic, Jean Michel, bard of our parish, knew the status of ley lines around the groovy Grove, but there must be some sort of harmonic convergence going on in Notting Hill and Dale for so much music to defy gravity by spilling up and down the slope between two Tube stations: Ladbroke Grove in the valley and Notting Hill up top. Before it became a strip of upscale boutiques, All Saint’s Road where the Carnival kicks off was known as The Front Line; mainly because of the role the old Mangrove Cafe played as a centre for black activism. In the 1970s in particular the streets around the Front Line were truly a revolutionary vanguard charting the rise to some cultural dominance of black Brits and females of all hues. The role of hippies in shaping the Grove ambiance is documented elsewhere, but though there was a much vaunted rivalry between hippies and the punks who followed, the anti-belief systems of the two successive youthquakes were quite similar; cut from the same torn kaftan, you might say. ‘Never trust a hippy’ is the punk equivalent of the hippies’ ‘Don’t trust anyone over 30’ - both adages that lose their flavour after a decade or so. Those crazy Pink Fairies, Motorhead and Hawkwind certainly paved the way for the punky Grove denizens who followed. They may have been inspirational on the LSD-anarcho front, but when it came to our old friends race and gender, the Hawkwind-Fairies axis wasn’t exactly progressive. Unreconstructed lads all, they did allow some space for the female principle, as represented by naked, body-painted dancer Stacia’s free expression. But the message to girls was as loud as Hawkwind’s ear-busting classic, Silver Machine - you weren’t invited to their party unless you were naked and covered in body paint. (Of course, The Slits, one of the Grove’s most noted femme bands, sent shockwaves by portraying themselves naked and daubed in mud on their Cut album sleeve – but mud was just one of their outrageous outfits.)

Neneh Cherry, Vivian Golman and friendsPhotograph © David Corio, www.davidcorio.com4

So the shebeens became extinct, to be re-born as warehouse parties, then raves - and that thunderous reggae bass began to boom from synthesisers, not wood. White chicks with dreadlocks sprouted up all over Europe and haute couture fashion designers in Italy started safety-pinning satin gowns. Around the world, they were using such signifiers to express a rebel sense, a quest to be original. ‘True dem no know,’ as Jamaican patois puts it; the real origins, that originated a revolution, started right here in West London. And like they say in reggae - the original is still the greatest.

Arguably the definitive tipping point from one cycle into another came when Clash co-founder Joe Strummer saw the Sex Pistols perform in 1976 and decided that his lively rockabilly combo, The 101-ers (regulars at the Elgin pub on the Grove) was passé. This epiphany showed Strummer that the uncaged rage of punk was the best route to expressing the gritty but cheery realities of life in the communal squats he frequented around West London. The Clash were female-friendly; they even had a woman manager at one stage. So The Clash decided to take their sister band, The Slits (managed by another Grove creative stalwart, film-maker Don Letts) on the road with them for their era-defining bus tour of Britain. The Slits dressed in subversive gear, their clothes combinations demolishing pre-existing ideas of ‘nice’, like pairing fishnet tights with Doc Martens. They all do it now, natch. Today’s reigning West London musical princess, Lily Allen, pairs her ass-kickin’ boots with Chanel ballgowns. Knickers over tights? ‘Fess up, Madonna and Lady Gaga - who rocked the look first? Yay, West London girls! But back then, everything was new and kinda underground, and what with (white) teenage singer Arri-Upp’s dreadlocks, The Slits’ own bus driver didn’t want to transport them. Travis was unusually intellectual and politically conscious for the record business. He created a climate in which the regular social barriers dissolved: Rough Trade sold reggae records alongside punk 45s and fanzines, responding to the proximity of so much British-Caribbean creativity. It was a time when a young dread would find it hard to book a regular venue Up West, so abandoned buildings and dodgy basements near the store became the area’s playground: shebeens - all night dance sessions - dotted the area liberally. Our favoured joint was DJ Weasel’s: an end-of-terrace house right by the junction of Portobello and the Westway. Now it’s a normal home, flowers at the window, but back then, the basement was crammed with the creators of West London sounds that would rock the world: the Clash, Sex Pistols, Slits, Boy George, Generation X, Aswad and Amazulu with their dreadlocked lead singer, Anne-Marie Ruddock, who, along with the sassy Mo-Dettes represented West London girly ska in the 1980s.

But the party couldn’t last forever. One night the Dreads arrived to open up and found that the owners had selfishly removed the floor.



Boy GeorgePhotograph © Janette Beckman, www.janettebeckman.com6

Colin MacInnes was a major writer who took as his subject new and unacknowledged voices who emerged in 1950s’ West London: ‘working class child mothers, ageing semi-professional whores, the authentic agonies of homosexual love, and the new race of English-born coloured boys.’

Published in 1959, Absolute Beginners is set in an area bounded by West Kilburn, Kensal Green, Latimer Road, Notting Hill Gate and Bayswater. The reason why people migrate to the neighbourhood is that however horrible the area is, you’re free there! ‘Give me our London Napoli I’ve been describing, with its railway scenery, and crescents that were meant to twist elegantly but now look as if they’re lurching high, and huge houses too tall for their width cut up into twenty flatlets, and front facades it never pays anyone to paint.’

Following the tradition of other great London writers, he described the poorer areas of our city. Like Charles Dickens and George Orwell, MacInnes was both a novelist and a journalist preoccupied with the interplay of different cultures and social strata. MacInnes wrote in the voices of the teenagers who lived in this area: the junkie ‘modernist’ Dean Swift; teenage pimp The Wizard, a hustler wise beyond his years; shameless and sweet seventeen year old Crepe Suzette; jazz obsessed young Mr Cool, ‘born and bred on this island of both races’; Ed the Ted, and skiffle fan the Misery Kid.

MacInnes developed an experimental style, one which foreshadows the music and art that subsequently developed locally. Critic Nick Bentley observes that MacInnes incorporates unofficial and unlicensed language creating a disruption of standard English which ‘operates as a statement or proclamation of rejection and critique of dominant cultural values. It is the mainstream reader who is the true absolute beginner in this environment, whilst the narrative voice represents itself as confident of its place within its own subcultural world, and projects directly to perceived ‘members’ of that marginalized group.’ Central to the novel is the indifference demonstrated by the characters to the conventions of ‘the dullest society in Western Europe: a society blighted by blankets of negative respectability, and of dogmatic domesticity. The teenagers don’t seem to care for this, and have organized their underground of joy.’ Joy was found in music - and particularly in jazz clubs:

AbsoluteBeginners - A West London story byColin McInnes Jane Goodsir

‘That brings me to today, and the third item in my education, my university, you might say, and that’s the jazz clubs. Now, you can think what you like about the art of jazz- quite frankly I don’t really care what you think, because jazz is a thing so wonderful that if anybody doesn’t rave about it, all you can feel for them is pity: not that I’m making out I really understand it at all- I mean, certain LPs leave me speechless. But the great thing about the jazz world, and all the kids that enter into it, is that no one, not a soul, cares what your class is, or what your race is, or what your income, or if you’re a boy, or girl, or bent, or versatile, or what you are - so long as you dig the scene and can behave yourself, and have left all that crap behind you, too, when you come in the jazz club door. The result of all this is that, in the jazz world, you meet all kinds of cats, on absolutely equal terms, who can clue you up in all kinds of directions- in social directions, in culture directions, in sexual directions, and in racial directions... in fact almost anywhere, really, you want to go to learn. So that’s why, when the teenage thing began to seem to me to fall into the hands of exhibitionists and moneylenders, I cut out gradually from the kiddo watering holes, and made it for the bars, and clubs, and concerts where the older numbers of the jazz world gathered.’

Quotes taken from Absolute Beginners and England, half English.

Alexis Korner and Blues Incorporated with US GI’s at The Marquee,1964Photograph © John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins

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Speed PopHistory MixTom Vague

For me the multi pop-cultural 60s began right here, on Southam Street (or what’s left of it, underneath Trellick Tower) in Kensal. A year after the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, Colin MacInnes’ novel Absolute Beginners appeared in print with Roger Mayne’s portrait of a Southam Street mod on the cover. The term ‘mod’ (ironically) was an old one: once referring to the 1950s modernist jazz movement, it now meant a musical subculture around blues, R’n’B, ska and soul.

Absolute Beginners was a landmark both in late 50s & 60s mod culture and in the late 70s revival. Julien Temple’s 1985 musical film version opened (like the book) with a series of Roger Mayne’s Southam Street photos. David Bowie provided the theme song and the soundtrack also featured London-born reggae artist David Emmanuel (Smiley Culture) and his electro-version of Miles Davis’ 1958 hit So What.

Local mod Tony Sparsis remembers going to the Cavern Club, Holland Park to see the High Numbers (an early incarnation of The Who), ‘then up to the Goldhawk Club in Shepherd’s Bush for the same,’ but the bands too were paying tributes of their own. In 1977, The Jam posed for This is the Modern World under the Westway roundabout where the ‘58 riots started in mod homage to MacInnes’ novel, and the 1979 film of The Who’s Quadrophenia featured scenes shot on Freston Road and Phil Daniels visiting a West Indian street in Notting Dales to score blues (amphetamines). West London was already littered with the relics of first wave mod-culture when the second arrived.

The Clash also saw themselves as emerging from an iconic moment of violence in West London’s history. Having played with the Sex Pistols at the Screen on the Green, Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon were on Ladbroke Grove for the start of the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival riot. Following the attempted arrest of a pickpocket, smouldering tensions erupted into the inevitable clash of police and youths. Junior Murvin’s reggae hit Police and Thieves became the soundtrack of the ‘76 Carnival, and was later covered for The Clash’s first album, and Rocco Macaulay’s iconic photo of the ‘Clash’ moment when policemen charged at youths under the Westway duly adorned the back cover.

Joe Strummer, 1975Photograph © Julian Yewdall10

The Beatles made Portobello famous in the 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night, and in ‘66, Cat Stevens was ‘getting hung up all day on smiles walking down Portobello Road for miles.’ But the most important rock and pop route isn’t Portobello, Ladbroke Grove, the Westway or All Saints Road - it’s Basing Street: home of Island recording studios. As well as ska, rocksteady and reggae, Chris Blackwell’s roster went through folk, progressive and glam rock. As Island became the first big independent rock label, Basing Street was frequented by Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, John Martyn, Roxy Music, Cat Stevens and Jethro Tull. After starring in the classic ’72 reggae film The Harder They Come, Jamaican artist Jimmy Cliff left Island for a better deal elsewhere, but luckily for Island, Bob Marley arrived in Basing Street soon after, and Blackwell perfected rock-reggae fusion to create the phenomenally successful Wailers’ album Catch a Fire.

In 1976 the birth of Rough Trade at 202 Kensington Park Road crystallised the punk rock and reggae scene in West London. Indieness in its original post-punk, rad-fem, DIY form was defined by the all-girl Raincoats, who formed in the first Rough Trade shop. Most of Geoff Travis’ first customers were either starting a punk band, a fanzine or a reggae sound-system (a group of DJs, MCs & sound engineers), and the shop acted as the office of Mark Perry’s Sniffin’ Gluefanzine, the first of many Xeroxed efforts by punk fans which were distributed by Rough Trade and Better Badges at 286 Portobello Road – including Vague.

‘When I think of the punk years, I always think of one particular spot, just at the point where the Westway diverges from Harrow Road and pursues the line of the Hammersmith and City tube tracks to Westbourne Park Station. After 1976, one of the stanchions holding up the Westway was emblazoned with graffiti which said simply, ‘The Clash’. When first sprayed the graffiti laid a psychic boundary marker for the group – this was their manor, this was how they saw London.’

Jon Savage, ‘Punk London’, Evening Standard 1991

The area’s history of unrest wasn’t the only influence on its music. In 1957 the legendary maverick producer Joe Meek was living at 20 Arundel Gardens. A key figure in the Notting Hill bedsit recording tradition, his makeshift studio featured an old honky-tonk piano from Portobello Market. Meek’s tenancy came to an end when the studio / flat hosted the launch party for the skiffle single Sizzling Hot by Jimmy Miller and the Barbecues. Meek then moved across Ladbroke Grove to set up Denis Preston’s recording studios on Lansdowne Road. Improvised recording studios might have begun as a necessity, but later experiments with recording in bedrooms and bathrooms were part of the production values even for the most successful, money-making musicians. It could be one form of recognising the musical heritage of West London and its poor immigrant communities living under the likes of notorious slum landlord Peter Rachman. Derek Jones remembers skiffle and jazz holding sway over rock’n’roll down the pub: ‘in Latimer they couldn’t afford drums, so they had Danny McDermott playing on a hard-seated chair with a couple of beer bottles, and that would be the rhythm section.’

Despite his unscrupulous dealings, Rachman had his supporters, and only gained widespread notoriety after the 1963 Profumo Affair, when it emerged that both Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davis had been his mistresses. The Conservative Secretary of State for War John Profumo’s own affair with Keeler had come to public attention after a fight at the All Nighters’ Club between Keeler’s other lovers - the jazz pianist ‘Lucky’ Aloysius Gordon and Johnny Edgecombe - which ended with Johnny firing shots at her door and being arrested for attempted murder.

Tom Vague edited the punk fanzine Vague distributed by Rough Trade and wrote for Zigzag magazine on Talbot Road. His London psychogeography reports can be found in the Clash London Calling CD set, the pop history guidebook Getting It Straight In Notting Hill Gate and at www.vaguerants.org



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Sunday morning, past three, in a school hall near Ladbroke Grove. Tonight it’s been transformed into a Kingston-style ‘bashment dance’ - strictly ragga reggae, with a tempo and delivery best described as hardcore. This patch of West London, and its particular attachment to reggae, has been a crucial factor in shaping music in the UK.

London’s original sound systems, Duke Vin the Tickler and Count Suckle, played in the basements of Notting Hill as far back as 1955. Bob Marley and the other Wailers set up home in Neasden and, before their advance from Island paid their fares back to Jamaica, immersed themselves in the area’s black life.

Britain’s most consistently successful reggae act, Aswad, were known as the Lions of Ladbroke Grove, while mainstream hitmakers Black Slate, Misty In Roots and Janet Kay all came from the West. In the mid seventies, the Metro Youth Club in St Luke’s Road, Westbourne Park, was where Sufferer HiFi, London’s premier sound system, defended itself and was rarely beaten in sound clashes. Aklam Hall, off Portobello Road, was another prime reggae venue, and Shepherd’s Bush Market, Harlesden High Street and All Saints Road were ‘Frontlines’ - more West Kingston than West London. And even though All Saints Road has long been gentrified, there’s the People’s Sound Record Shop, run by Jah Vigo, a selector on Duke Vin’s original sound system. He recalls, ‘there weren’t no big clubs, even though the need for them was big. Which is why the sound-system business take off here like it did. I think people that had come to England was more receptive to a Jamaican-style dance than even they had been in Jamaica.’

London’s reggae recording industry really began when Sonny Roberts, a music-obsessed Jamaican carpenter, established Planetone Records in two rooms of his house. It was Roberts who struck a deal with Chris Blackwell when the fledgling Island Records (another West London operation) needed premises bigger than Blackwell’s spare bedroom and Planetone needed a wholesaler. In the early sixties, Island Records was the leading importer and distributor of Jamaican music, and its ‘fleet’ was another West London feature: Blackwell would race around town delivering records in his Mini Cooper. Chris Blackwell hooked up with Lee Gopthal, a Jamaican accountant,

How Reggae Won the WestLloyd Bradley

AswadPhotograph © David Corio, www.davidcorio.com14

scene any more - thanks largely to pirate radio deejays. And it’s these deejays who are the local stars, because a vast proportion of the music is coming in from Jamaica rather than being made here, as has been the case in previous decades. One thing hasn’t changed though - London still leads the way in UK reggae. If anything, according to promoter/manager Deborah Ballard, it has grown stronger over the past few years. ‘London is like the apex of a triangle with its base points at Kingston and New York, the centres for contemporary reggae music - artists and people in the business go up and down between London and Kingston. That means there’s always such a creative presence here - especially in areas like Ladbroke Grove or Brixton.’

© Evening Standard

Lloyd Bradley’s Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King is out now(Viking, £12.99)

and Trojan Records was born: a label that would enjoy nearly 30 UK chart hits. Gopthal also built up Musik City, London’s best ever chain of specialist reggae shops, by expanding his original retail outlet - a stall in Portobello Road market.

Later in the seventies, that unholy alliance of punk ’n’ reggae was initially a West London phenomenon and would soon be taken to its limits by Westway rockers The Clash. Then in 1977, after Johnny Rotten announced on Capital Radio that Dr Alimantado’s Born for A Purpose was one of his favourite singles, the Jamaican deejay’s name became the most commonly sighted graffiti in the Westbourne Park area. Seventies’ artists like The Heptones and Perry would visit regularly.

The punk ’n’ reggae combination shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise, according to Dennis Bovell, leader of reggae band Matumbi and owner of Sufferer HiFi. ‘They weren’t King’s Road designer punk - that came later. These were white kids from the council flats and tower blocks around the Harrow Road and Ladbroke Grove who had grown up around black kids and felt they were being dumped on in just the same way. How they dressed was anti-fashion - their dad’s trousers, donkey jackets, Dr Martens, old shirts ... anything that rejected the glam rock that was going on around them. And because they hung around with black kids, naturally they listened to reggae.’

Don Letts, a successful reggae feature film director (Dancehall Queen) and video maker, was also there. ‘The Roxy was the first proper punk venue anywhere, and my friends and I played the sounds. I had to play the records in between the bands and, although there were always plenty of bands, there were only about ten punk records and they were all so short. So to fill in the time, we started playing our own reggae records and the kids loved it.’

Franco Rosso’s 1980 film Babylon, set among the area’s sound-system culture, was a sharply scripted slice-of-life film that managed to get across the area’s racial and social politics, as well as the internal conflicts of growing up in London as a second generation Caribbean immigrant. These days, there’s little parochialism in the sound system



Ranking Dread in Dub, 1981Image © Rod Vass, www.rodvass.com16

What happened before and after the celebrated golden years of the 60s, 70s and early 80s?

Under the influence of Hollywood movies and US troops stationed in the UK, most London teenagers were, until the 1950s, buying American records. American bebop was admired in the ate 40s, and a London-based jazz scene was developing. Musicians played club nights at the Mapleton Hotel in the West End, and at the short-lived but historic Club 11 in Soho. The finest free-form jazz was played by Joe Harriott and Harold MacNair - who went on to develop jazz fusion in the 60s. American Harry Belafonte was the only black musician to have hits in the 1950s’ UK charts with calypso; but many calypsonians made a living in local clubs. Lord Kitchener arrived from the Caribbean in 1948 - one of the original Windrush emigrants - and became an important figure on the London scene.

By the mid 50s the jazz scene had polarised - ‘modernists’ and ‘trad’ enthusiasts wore different styles, and avoided one another. In 1954, Lonnie Donegan emerged from the trad jazz scene with skiffle. Originally American folk music (mainly ballads) performed on home-made instruments, the skiffle craze swept London and beyond. Donegan was the first UK male to have chart success in the US, exporting American songs back to the US. Donegan was an inspiration, maintaining that the English had been ‘imbued with the idea that music was for the upper classes. You had to be very clever to play music. When I came along with the old three chords, people began to think that if I could do it, so could they. The reintroduction of the folk music did that.’

Gradually, UK artists populated UK charts, with local musicians in the 60s taking their inspiration from American blues, soul and folk. Local soul singer Dusty Springfield introduced Tamla Motown music to UK television, and live soul, jazz, and blues music were played at the Flamingo Club all nighters in Wardour Street, where the sound systems also featured ska and bluebeat. The mix attracted a multiracial crowd, including the emerging ‘mods’. In the mid 60s the scene moved on - Pink Floyd playing at the short-lived UFO (then at Middle Earth) was inspired by drugs and psychedelia. London’s underground culture

Before and After the Punky Reggae partyJane Goodsir

Dusty Springfield, 1965Photograph © John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, www.hoppy.be/principal.htm

centred round Ladbroke Grove with Mick Farren, the Deviants, the Pink Fairies, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Soft Machine and many others living locally or dropping in.

After punky reggae

Post-punk thrived in West London, with influential acts such as Killing Joke making their presence felt in the 1980s. Mute Records in Harrow Road signed ‘industrial’ bands, and found success with Erasure, Depeche Mode and later Goldfrapp. Mute also established offshoot labels in experimental electronic and dance. As rave culture went mainstream in the late 80s, Rhythm King had success with S’Xpress, Beatmasters and Leftfield; Guerilla Records had progressive house with William Orbit and Nation Records had UK alternative Asian. This Harrow Road scene saw small labels and studios working in the same building as londonprintstudio.

Mainstream music flourished locally with Seal, All Saints (initially on ZTT), Estelle on Richard Branson’s V2 and Omar on Harlesden’s Kongo records. Elastica were locals, MIA started her career as a West London rebel girl and Rough Trade continued to manage young artists. Lily Allen has emerged as a chronicler of West London’s scene and the worlds of music and animation merge in the studio where Gorrillaz images are created nearby.

The spirit of fusion - a musical genre emerging here in the 60s - endures in this neighbourhood. John Martyn blurred the boundaries between folk, jazz, rock and blues, Transglobal Underground mixes many musical styles and Courtney Pine has integrated UK garage with contemporary jazz.

Ari Up of The Slits Photograph © Julian Yewdall

Before and after the punky reggae partyJane Goodsir

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International Times

‘The first issue of International Times was in October 1966 - the first underground press in this country. Started on a shoestring, it got popular because it was useful - it talked about crash pads, art, culture, theatre, drugs, police, gigs. It filled a gap where there was no communication in the media. It served a whole disparate lot of people and we got to find out about one another. In ‘67 we were busted for obscenity. The police used somebody’s complaint as an excuse to close the paper down.’

‘Hoppy asked me to become Art Director of International Times, and I worked on it until Issue 13 or 14 - just after the police raid. We were working with linotype machines - very hard to design with and be psychedelic with. The chance to do more interesting stuff with layout came when we changed to offset litho so we were able to cut and paste. Much more flexible.’

The mid 60s scene

‘At Hoppy’s flat and other gatherings it was definitely a salon culture, with the apartments close together. Designers and artists and musicians at the time were trying to articulate and make sense of what this drug experience was; to bring this into their work. There was definitely an interest in the drug culture - about states of consciousness - which later moved on into mysticism.’

‘There was a lot of cross-pollenisation. It was a tighter scene then. I wasn’t alone in staying with the Beatles - most musicians knew most artists. It was the same 40 or 50 people - all friends.’

Underground clubs and happenings

‘Once you’ve got a venue all sorts of things can happen - events part planned, part unplanned. London Free School was a loose organisation we felt we might help people without much education. I decided to hold a benefit at the local church hall at the bottom of All Saints Road. A band who came to play was called Pink Floyd. Some people also arrived - some americans - with a little light show. So that’s how it happened.’

With Joe Boyd, Dudley Edwards, John Hopkins, Mike Mcinnerney and Delroy Washington.

Revolt into Style

‘The thing I noticed in Britain was clothing. The US wasn’t quite as tribal; nobody put a lot of effort into dressing up. In ‘64 in a London folk club I saw this guy - I was completely dumbfounded because he had these white boots on, this white trenchcoat tied tightly at the waist with a belt, his hair all bouffant - he just looked extraordinary. I’d never seen anybody look like that so I thought, obviously homosexual. It was still a shock to see somebody be flamboyantly feminine. I said, who’s that guy? It was Rod Stewart.’

Street art

‘We painted everything we had the opportunity to paint. We were forerunners of graffiti artists in that sense - the swinging sixties thing was already happening, but we were the first to take it out as street art. We did the facade of Wolf Olins, furniture, painted cars. We’d have painted the pavements and streets if we could. We discovered that a guy called Etchie Powell was responsible for 90% of the fairground art in this country, so we went to meet the master. An unassuming guy working in a backstreet in Battersea - he showed us all the techniques he used.’

‘By ‘67 we had regular Friday nights at UFO and decided to have a big poster. I knew a guy, Nigel Waymouth, and Hoppy knew a guy, Michael English, so we put them together. They insisted that they were going to do silk screen. At first we did a couple of hundred and had them fly posted. Flyposting was a racket. As the club became more popular, and the posters were considered wonderful, people with steam kettles were steaming the posters off the hoardings in Great Western Road and we began to see less and less of our posters up - partly because they were being steamed off, and partly because fly posting crooks discovered that they could sell them to people. We’d see a bunch of posters for sale in Portobello shops.’

Interviews

Mike Mcinnerney:

John Hopkins:

MM:

DE:

JH:

JB:

Joe Boyd:

Dudley Edwards:

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We would like to thankFaisal AbduAllahPhoenix BayJanette BeckmanJoe BoydLloyd BradleyFrancoise BroughGeorge ButlerDavid CorioIan ClarkeDudley EdwardsThe Evening StandardLarry Ford andGloria Cummings, FlamboyanBill GodberVivien Goldman Sue HallDave HendleyJohn ‘Hoppy’ HopkinsPeter JennerSteve JamesonDavid KerekesJohn Marchant, Isis galleryGaz Mayall Jean McConachieTony McDermottMike McInnerneyHerbie and Sarah at MensahElliott at MercMark MintonJohn Purcell, John Purcell PaperEnid PriceJamie ReidRon ReidSteven, Claire and Fiona, RellikSimon ReynoldsManny, Philippa and Aaron, Rough TradeSandy SamsJohn SinclairTony at SoundsTom VagueRod VassJen WallisDelroy WashingtonStella WhalleyTony Wright Julian YewdallClaudia at 282, Portobello Road

DE: ‘Before flower power had reached these shores, there was news about all the acid that was going on - about light shows at the Fillmore and Avalon in San Francisco. There were some beginning to happen in London - Mark Boyle had been doing lightshows at UFO with Pink Floyd. The guy from Avalon came over and helped us put on a lightshow at the Roundhouse which we booked for 2 nights. At the first Paul McCartney did an electronic music track. For the second show we got Jimi Hendrix to play for £50. He brought an audience - maybe 2000, 3000 people. I was watching Hendrix and thinking ‘Is he as good as I think he is?’’

Black Music

‘It’s kind of strange. I would find out that the Rolling Stones were influenced by black people, so I got introduced to black American blues music through the Rolling Stones. A lot of people don’t talk about that kind of stuff. It’s funny, black youth in this country. Well for me I got introduced to blues and deep black music through white people. The more commercial jazz stuff was in our house, but this was deeper stuff ... deep jazz and blues.’ ‘In the late sixties I was working with a band called the Blue Notes - the first multiracial band in South Africa. They were going to have a hard time coming back to South Africa and everyone thought they were great so they settled in London - and immediately the atmosphere changes. As long as they were exotic visitors passing through they were welcome, but as soon as they were staying here, there was jealousy. A visiting black person could be a hero, but you were going to leave. The union gave them a terrible time. These were refugees from apartheid. There was Musicians Union solidarity with South Africans - but on their own door step they were very hard ass.’

Joe Boyd, record-producer, co-founded the UFO club with John Hopkins. He arrived in West London from the US in 1964. John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins works as a photographer and journalist, and established the underground newspaper International Times. Dudley Edwards and Mike Mcinnerney are both artists and designers. Delroy Washington is a reggae artist.

JB:

Delroy Washington:

Credits Groove Grove Graphics was curated by Jane Goodsir, John Phillips and membersof the Bring into Being TeamResearch:Ismaa Arif, Kerry Riordan, Daniel ScownWeb design, blog design, design:Matt ScoinsCollection, acquisitions and loans management:Kerry Riordan, Ismaa ArifCommissioning:Cat Millar, Kerry RiordanPR:Cat Millar, Tamzin SimpsonInterviews:Ismaa Arif, Kerry Riordan, Simon MacAndrew,Matt Scoins, Daniel ScownExhibition copy: Kerry Riordan, Daniel Scown, Ismaa Arif, Matt ScoinsPhotowall:Ismaa Arif, Kerry Riordan,Matt Scoins, Karen SkeatsGallery and photography: Karen SkeatsDigital production:Vinesh ShahAdditional research:Simon MacAndrew

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Documents

Groove Grove Graphics Catalogue