|
|
 |
| |
 Fairport Convention rehearsing for the Liege and Lief album, produced by Joe Boyd in 1968 |
Camden books| White Bicycles Making Music | review of 1960's London music scene
The arrival of a popular music nightclub sparked chaos in 1960s Camden, writes Mike Pentelow
THE culture clash between hippies, skinheads and black nationalists erupted in Camden Town in 1967.
And it was all because the hippy music underground club UFO, where Pink Floyd and many others made their name, was driven by police from its original venue in Tottenham Court Road.
Club founder and record producer Joe Boyd managed to persuade Centre 42 (Arnold Wesker’s workers’ theatre) to rent them the Roundhouse in Camden instead.
“In some respects the Roundhouse UFO was glorious,” he recalls in his book White Bicycles. “Its extraordinary space and huge stage were liberating after the cramped confines of the Blarney Club [in Tottenham Court Road].”
“After 11pm, however, the local pubs filled the streets with their inebriated Irish and skinhead patrons. A few of our customers got hassled, but we thought little of it.
“By the following week, word had spread,” he says. “Skinheads hadn’t had too much contact with hippies up to then, but they could smell a natural enemy.
“The minute our audience arrived in the neighbourhood, they were under attack. Bells were snatched from around necks, handbags stolen, eyes blacked. A group of skins charged through a fire door and started hitting anyone they found, myself included. A few police came but they seemed to enjoy seeing the hippies getting a kicking.
“Our door staff were useless against the thugs, so I turned to Michael X and his Black Nationalists to provide a security patrol.
“He showed up the following week with seven big, mean-looking guys in black turtlenecks, tight black trousers and shaved heads. I got to know a few of them later – an actor, a film director and a writer – and they could not have been gentler souls.
“But when they scowled and struck karate poses, the skinheads weren’t to know that,” he recalls.
There was a wonderful moment when the balcony of the Roundhouse was used to winch Arthur Brown into the air over the audience’s heads, with his halo of flame, booming out his hit Fire!
The move to the Roundhouse had come after the UFO’s other founder, John Hopkins, had been jailed for drug offences in June, 1967. He had been a Melody Maker photographer who had set up the underground newspaper International Times, at 102 Southampton Row, Bloomsbury, which was also raided.
A News of the World hatchet job on UFO in July resulted in police putting pressure on the Blarney Club to throw them out, which they reluctantly did.
Sadly, rising costs meant that UFO did not last long at the Roundhouse.
Joe Boyd knew Camden both before and after this, however.
He knew folk-blues promoter Roy Guest, who lived next to Cecil Sharp House and introduced him to record producer Bill Leader, who let him sleep on the sofa of his Camden Town flat in 1965.
After leaving the Roundhouse, Boyd set up Witchseason Productions in Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia, where he produced records for three more years.
In this time he recorded 16 LPs for artists such as Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band, Nick Drake, and South African town jazz legend Dudu Pukwana (who had a flat near King’s Cross).
Sharing Boyd’s office in Charlotte Street was a Canadian communist called Danny Halperin, who designed graphics for record covers and adverts.
When working on the Toronto Globe and Mail he had been asked to run a newspaper in Nigeria calling for independence.
Government spooks stopped him on the plane, but the only way they dissuaded him from continuing was to get him a job in Paris as a jazz critic for the New York Herald Tribune.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
