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 6
Ladbroke Grove Roots
The IT 10.5 emergency
issue after the paper’s first bust, that doubled
as the ‘Technicolour Dream’ programme, features
a poem by Dave Tomlin calling for more flower power
in the gardens of Notting Hill: ‘Pavement bursting
grass, quickening the grove, greening out the grey this
spring, seeds scattered on brown municipal mound in
conduit lined holes, to find its way into the sun and
spread a carpet for London child to dance, these grains
carried in pockets ready to sow in subversive sweeps
where heavy unseeing law can only flounder, and with
the wirespring rooted grass mix sundry blobs of colour
from Woolworth packaged blooms to invade this grove
with smells that clog the diesel chugging pipes and
waft the scent of sanity from Portobello’s Gate.’
Notting Hill Interzone
International Times
As students took to
the barricades in Paris in May 1968, John Hopkins came
up with International Times 30, the Notting Hill ‘Interzone
A’ map issue – inspired by a combination
of William Blake and William Burroughs, Situationist
psychogeography and local history. The ‘Interzone’
IT cover features a Ladbroke Grove Carnival procession
cut-up collage by Miles, incorporating Coleridge King
Mob graffiti and the mayor Malby Crofton. In 1970 the
International Times/White Panthers stall in the basement
of the Friends Market at 305 Portobello Road sold such
head classics as Burroughs’ Speed, The Book of
Grass, and Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of
an English Opium Eater.
2 Blenheim Crescent and
Bill Hopkins
The Family Dog Shop
at 2 Blenheim Crescent was the Portobello hippy ephemera
‘headshop’, named after the San Francisco
ballroom commune of the acid guru Chet Helms. On the
site of Minus Zero 60s and 70s punk specialist record
shop, at the time ‘rings, skins and things, clothing
from the East, incense, jewellery, pipes and other smokers
needs’ were purveyed. The beatnik landlord Bill
Hopkins let the upstairs office to the Word underground
poster designers, who at Christmas ’68 sent season’s
greetings ‘to all IT readers and heads everywhere,
and new friends and old in or out of jail.’
Performance: I need a
Bohemian atmosphere
During James Fox’s
hippy makeover on Powis Square in Performance Anita
Pallenberg considers calling “Doctor Burroughs.”
As well as being an associate of Michael X, the beat
writer William Burroughs, of Junkie and Naked Lunch
notoriety, influenced the film on several levels from
his cut-up technique of editing to his favourite themes
of sexual experimentation, heroin and assassins. ‘The
Hashishin’ track and Mick Jagger’s accompanying
potted history of Hassan-I-Sabbah, the old man of the
mountains and the assassins, has been dismissed as a
hippy cliché by Michael Moorcock, but this aspect
of the film has taken on heavier significance post 9/11.
Michael X’s hustling career wouldn’t miss
a Bohemian beat. In 1967, as he reinvented himself as
Britain’s Black Power/Flower Power messiah with
an Afro, beard, satin shirt and paisley trousers, he
appeared with Allen Ginsberg at the Legalise Pot rally
in Hyde Park. In spite of the efforts of the International
Committee to Save Michael X (which included William
Burroughs, Alex Trocchi, John Michell, the Lennons and
Leonard Cohen), in 1975, after three years on death
row in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Michael was hanged for
murder and buried in the prison Golden Grove graveyard.
VS Naipaul concluded that the hippest hippies; Burroughs,
Lennon and Trocchi; all fell for Michael’s performance
and patronised him as ‘the militant who was only
an entertainer.’
The Beat Bar and Bongos
Square
The Mau Mau Bar at 265
Portobello Road (which was part of the 70s Motor City
jeans store) started out as ‘the Motown Majic
Company’s Original Soul Bar’ in the early
90s, featuring Motown record encrusted counters. After
that 265 had an existential spell as the Beat Bar before
its current hip-hop incarnation. In the 90s the Tavistock
Road pedestrianised square was an impromptu venue of
appearances by JC001, the local speed-beat-rapper, and
rave tourist beat revival bongothons.
back to talking pictures
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