PORTOBELLO
FILM FESTIVAL 2009
THE BEAT GOES ON
1
Adrift in Notting Hill and A Blues for Shindig
2 Alex Trocchi’s
Invisible Insurrection
3 Longhair
Times: Hoppy and Miles
4 Rolling
Stones on the Portobello Road
5 Michael
X on the Black Beat in the Ghetto
6 Ladbroke
Grove Roots
PART 1
Adrift in Notting Hill and A Blues for Shindig
After Wyndham Lewis,
the Notting Hill literary pub scene moved north down
Portobello Road to the Earl of Lonsdale (formerly a
Finch’s pub and then Henekey’s). The literary
outsider title passed to the two Colins; the Inside
Outsider MacInnes, who didn’t live in the area,
and The Outsider in Literature author Wilson, who briefly
lived on Chepstow Villas with other ‘angry young
men’ including John Room at the Top Braine, Bill
Hopkins, and a bevy of beat girls. The Notting Hill
existentialist scene in the 50s was re-enacted in Colin
Wilson’s play The Metal Flower Blossom, which
became his first novel Adrift in Soho. Mo Foster’s
A Blues for Shindig novel from 2006, set in 1956/57,
features local scenes in Notting Dale and the proto-beatnik
drug culture that revolved around the Joe Lyons cornerhouse
café at Notting Hill Gate.
El Rio Cafe
As re-enacted in Scandal
by John Hurt (who also played Timothy Evans in 10 Rillington
Place), Stephen Ward took Christine Keeler on a slumming
expedition with Lord d’Laslo, building Notting
Hill up like it was a real American-style black ghetto.
On finding their regular restaurant (Fiesta One) deserted,
they moved on to ‘an even seedier-looking place’
where they were met by hostile indifference from the
entirely black clientele. This was Frank Crichlow’s
legendary El Rio café at 127 Westbourne Park
Road (now incorporated into Tom Conran’s Lucky
Seven Margarita lounge and Mexican restaurant, after
a spell as the Bossanova Portuguese restaurant).
In the early 60s, as the Rio became the hub of the West
Indian scene, the espresso coffee bar decorated with
fishing nets was the pivotal venue in both local history
and national politics through the Profumo affair. At
127 Westbourne Park Road hustlers like Michael de Freitas,
Lucky Gordon and Darcus Howe co-habited with Bohemian
beats like Colin MacInnes, the Guinness heir Tara Browne,
Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, the jazz journalist
Max Jones, and slumming swingers like Stephen Ward and
Christine Keeler. As defined by Frank in Tony Gould’s
MacInnes biography Inside Outsider, the Rio was a “school
or university” for hustlers, “it attracted
people who were rebellious and a bit smart, those with
street intelligence, those for whom the factory was
not their speed.”
West Eleven
1963, the year of the
Profumo affair and Rachman revelations, saw the release
of the film West Eleven – a gritty North Kensington
kitchen-sink melodrama adapted by Michael Winner from
The Furnished Room novel by the long-standing Portobello
market trader Laura del Rivo. The film stars Alfred
Lynch as the archetypal Notting Hill outsider anti-hero
‘Joe Beck’ who is offered £10,000
to commit a murder. His bedsit is on Colville Terrace,
down from the future Performance house on Powis Square.
The West Eleven cast also includes a young David Hemmings
as a local hooligan, three years before he appeared
in Blow Up in Notting Dale, and Diana Dors as a beat
girl. The local director’s third feature film
has been described as a Death Wish prototype, and was
dismissed by Halliwell as a ‘dingy but not very
convincing ‘realist’ melodrama with jazzy
style which induces weariness.’ The West Eleven
theme is by Acker Bilk.
Henekey’s beat bar
In Len Deighton’s
1964 spy novel The Berlin Memorandum (the follow up
to The Ipcress File) ‘Harry Palmer’ was
in Henekey’s (previously ‘top’ Finch’s,
now the Earl of Lonsdale) at 277-81 Westbourne Grove,
but unfortunately not in the 1967 Guy Hamilton film
version Funeral in Berlin. As he watched the glamorous
Mossad spy ‘Samantha Steele’ greet ‘about
a dozen poets, painters, writers and occasionally a
model or photographer’, Palmer (Michael Caine
in the film) overhears an artist at the bar extolling
the benefits of Marijuana use. The swinging 60s Henekey’s
clientele included beatnik poets, kitchen-sink playwrights,
the pop artist Peter Blake, Julie Christie and Terence
Stamp.
Christopher Logue wrote in Prince Charming of the Denbigh
Close mews in the 60s, when the antiques market was
becoming ‘all the rage’, art students earned
a living painting battles of Porto Bello, and old characters
like Mad John, Harry Dust and Eric the mews transvestite
were succeeded by the next beat generation of Notting
Hill eccentrics. In the late 60s Michael Caine as ‘Charlie
Croker’ held court round the back of Alice’s
Antiques shop, in the Bohemian Denbigh Close pad of
his girlfriend ‘Laura’, whilst planning
The Italian Job, Tom Courtenay as Otley walked by the
mews on his way down Portobello to Henekey’s,
and Yul Brynner was in the antiques market in The File
of the Golden Goose. As Alfie in 1966 Michael Caine’s
somewhat less groovy bedsit with Jane Asher (Paul McCartney’s
beatnik girlfriend) was in the former Rachman slum St
Stephen’s Gardens.
Michael Horovitz’s
New Departures and the Linden Gardens beat pad
When Michael Horovitz,
the editor of the beat/bop poetry mag New Departures,
moved into the area in the early 60s, he recalls the
scene consisting of the legendary Linden Gardens beat
pad of Johnny Byrne and Spike Hawkins at Notting Hill
Gate (featured in Jenny Fabian’s Groupie novel),
David Hockney on Powis Terrace, the four Johns; Arden,
Hopkins, Latham and Michell, Harry and Ruth Fainlight,
Christopher Logue, Allan Sillitoe (who wrote Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning), Alex Trocchi, Heathcote Williams,
and some Royal College of Art students from a Bohemian
outpost down Lancaster Road.
read on -
part 2: Alex Trocchi’s Invisible Insurrection
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