Authors: Barry Miles
Despite all the media attention, the Y BAS did not completely control the art scene. In 2003, when the Chapman Brothers were
confidently expecting to win the Turner Prize, the jury chose instead to award the prize to Grayson Perry. It was as Claire,
dressed in a specially made £2,500 lilac and blue frock, frilly white socks and red patent leather shoes, that Grayson Perry
ascended the podium at the Tate Gallery on 7 December 2003, and declared: ‘It’s about time a transvestite potter won the Turner
Prize.’
13
After twenty years of working in an unpopular medium, with little or no critical support, he finally won the highest prize
in the contemporary art world, the £20,000 Turner Prize. In the years to follow, no TV arts chat show was complete without
Grayson in his dress holding forth.
In many ways, Grayson’s winning the Turner Prize showed there was no
longer an underground, as such. This proved that there was no longer one society with everyone agreeing how to live, and a
shadowy alternative world, but many possible overlapping lifestyles and choices. The underground had officially come above
ground, and consequently no longer existed. That which was once private was now public. Just after the war, to be avant-garde
or underground meant to be below the radar. The general public knew little of your activities and would have been deeply shocked
if they did: abstract painting, four-letter words, nudity, living in sin, homosexuality, drugs. It was so far away from the
lives of most people it was almost incomprehensible. In the fifties the tabloids fulminated against rock ’n’ roll and Teddy
boys, establishing Elvis Presley as a teen icon and ensuring that even the smallest town had a few Teddy boys. Gradually,
the arts and popular culture came to be seen as a free source of ideas by business rather than as a threat to society. By
the end of the sixties, even the most radical and avant-garde ideas were raided by big business for their advertising, fashion
and graphic design. Now, as Danny Eccleston from
Mojo
told me: ‘the consumer society keeps just reaching in and taking what it likes from the popular culture side and the rift
never seems to heal.’ One good example was Marcus Harvey’s infamous picture based on the equally infamous thirty-year-old
police mug shot of Myra Hindley. His large painting was made using a stamp made from a child’s handprint to represent the
dots or pixels of the image. The picture caused controversy when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy’s
Sensation
show, mostly being condemned by the same newspapers that had made the image famous in the first place. Shortly afterwards
Adidas launched a series of advertisments, making portraits of sportsmen from trainer prints, just as Harvey’s picture was
made from handprints.
Some artists have been able to use the media to their own advancement. Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst used the press to help
turn their art into a celebrity brand and make them multi-millionaires, only this time round it is a collaborative effort
with the tabloids. They are now both playing the same game; a measure of notoriety is an essential part of the brand for the
artists and for the tabloids it means sales.
And now art has become global. London pulls in more people than ever: in 2001 a quarter of the population of London was foreign-born
and the city continues to attract students from all over Britain to its colleges and universities as well as people moving
to the metropolitan centre to improve their careers or find better jobs. The most amazing development has been in the East
End, where it has been estimated that more than 10,000 artists have established
studios, catered for by almost 200 galleries as well as the usual trendy bars, restaurants and private drinking clubs such
as Shoreditch House.
There is still plenty of transgression, protest, experimentation and excess in London; much of it in the East End. But it
is just not underground any more. Since the mid-eighties, art and music have gone mainstream and the newspapers and glossies
compete to report on the latest thing. A rock band has only to play a handful of well-regarded gigs to get reviewed in the
music press, and thanks to the publicity-seeking Y BAS art became a popular subject for the weekend newspaper colour magazines
because it was inherently colourful and visual. Drug-taking became so prevalent in the Thatcher era among City traders, bankers,
advertising executives and media people and at middle-class dinner parties that it could hardly be counted as a subversive
activity any more.
Public attitudes towards homosexuality have probably undergone the greatest change: from demonization to more or less general
acceptance. Now, even members of the Cabinet can be open about their homosexuality without much in the way of protest from
the tabloids; a few smutty headlines usually suffices. The London Gay Pride march in 2008 was enormous. I watched for more
than an hour as the usual gladiators, brides, bunnies and butterflies marched and danced down Oxford Street. But it was the
floats that demonstrated how far London has progressed since 1967 because they represented such a wide cross-section of the
British public. It was moving to see a gay British Airways group of about a hundred people, men and women, in full flight
deck uniform marching under the airline’s banner, followed by gay groups from the Crown Prosecution service, the gay National
Archives, by football teams and local government officers. There was a large float from the Battersea cats and dogs home,
the ‘reel gay Gordons’ in kilts and a large float from the Gay Muslim support group. There were buses and trucks representing
gay African women, London Transport, even several high street banks with what appeared to be official bank banners. London’s
Conservative mayor, Boris Johnson, attended, walking the full length of the march from Baker Street to Trafalgar Square. They
were ordinary people. As some of the banners read: ‘Some people are gay, get used to it.’
London is like a palimpsest, with pockets of different counter-cultural groups scattered across the city: old hippies near
the Westway in Notting Hill in the few surviving head shops and hippie stalls in the market; Goths and technofreaks in Camden
market, living a cyberpunk life; there are even a few mohawked punks still parading down the King’s Road, posing for tourists
for money. The latest sub-set is in the East End, where edgy-looking muscular
arts types with their close-cropped hair and turned-up, paint-splashed jeans hang about outside the Old Truman Brewery on
Brick Lane.
Since the war we have seen the growth of mimeographed poetry magazines, underground newspapers, Xerox-copied punk fanzines
and brilliantly designed flyers for raves. With the coming of the internet, underground publication has effectively disappeared.
There can be no avant-garde unless there is a time delay before the general public knows what you are doing. Now, events are
broadcast live on the net or images are bounced straight from people’s telephones to the other side of the world in nano-seconds.
The underground newspapers and Xeroxed punkzines have been replaced by blogs, YouTube and Facebook, giving immediate publication
and instant access to the general public to even the most avant-garde of activity. Information can arrive from anywhere and
it is often impossible to know if a message or image has come from around the corner or from 10,000 miles away. Whereas artists
in the sixties could work for years with no media coverage, the hardest thing now is to
not
have thousands of hits on Google or an entry on Wikipedia. Nonetheless, a walk around Shoreditch or down Dean Street, late
at night, shows that in London there are still plenty of people determined to achieve a complete ‘derangement of senses’ and
in that way the underground lives on. There will always be cutting-edge activity but bohemia has been globalized. Now, more
than a location, the underground is a state of mind.
Introduction
1
Deyan Sudjic, ‘Cities on the Edge of Chaos’, in the
Observer
, 9 March 2008.
2
Foreword by Derek Taylor in Mark Lewisohn, Piet Schreuders and Adam Smith,
The Beatles’ London
.
3
Stanley Jackson,
An Indiscreet Guide to Soho,
p.
25
.
4
Dan Farson,
Soho in the Fifties
, intro, p. xiii.
Part One
Chapter 1. A Very British Bohemia
1
Tambimuttu, ‘Fitzrovia’.
2
The best source of information on Tambimutti is Jane Williams (ed),
Tambimutti
.
4
Helen Irwin, ‘Tambi’, in
Tambimuttu
, p.
90
.
5
Tambimuttu, ‘Fitzrovia’.
6
See Denise Hooker,
Nina Hamnett.
8
Quoted by David Rhys, in ‘Nina Hamnett, Bohemian’ in
Wales Magazine
, September 1959.
9
See Paul Willetts,
Fear & Loathing in Fitzrovia
. Willetts is responsible for restoring interest in the life and work of Maclaren-Ross with this biography and his introductions
to Maclaren-Ross’s collected writings.
10
Dan Davin,
Closing Times
, p.
5
.
11
Wrey Gardiner,
The Dark Thorn
, p.
96
.
12
Robert Hewison,
In Anger
, p.
34
.
13
Humphrey Seale,
Quadrille with a Raven
, at
www.musicweb-international.com
/ searle/500.htm, accessed September 2008.
14
Joan Bakewell,
The Centre of the Bed
, p.
120
.
15
Dan Davin,
Closing Times
, p.
131
.
Chapter 2. The Long Forties: Soho
1
Michael Luke,
David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years
, p.
49
.
2
Andrew Sinclair,
The Life and Violent Times of Francis Bacon
, p.
115
, quoting Michael Luke,
David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years
.
3
Henrietta Moraes,
Henrietta
, p.
28
.
5
The best account of John Minton is Frances Spalding,
Dance Till the Stars Come Down
.
6
Ruthven Todd,
Fitzrovia & the Road to the York Minster
.
7
John Lehmann,
I am My Brother
, p.
113
.
8
Henrietta Moraes,
Henrietta
, p.
35
.
9
Frances Spalding,
Dance Till the Stars Come Down
, p.
206
.
11
Michael Wishart,
High Diver
, p.
113
.
12
Michael Luke,
David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years
, pp.
182
–3.
14
Dan Farson,
Soho in the Fifties
, p.
53
.
15
Dan Farson,
The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon
, p.
71
.
16
Dan Farson,
Soho in the Fifties
, p.
17
.
17
Dan Farson,
Out of Step
, p.
56
.
18
Anthony Cronin,
Dead as Doornails
, p.
140
.
20
Dom Moraes,
My Son’s Father
, p.
132
.
21
Dan Farson,
Soho in the Fifties
, p.
59
.
22
George Melly,
Owning Up
, p.
72
.
23
Dan Farson,
Soho in the Fifties
, p.
88
.
24
Andrew Barrow,
Quentin & Philip
, p.
196
.
Chapter 3. Sohoitis
1
Blogspot.com, accessed 18 February 2006.
2
‘An Interview with George Melly, Jazz Singer, Surrealist, Zoot Suit Enthusiast’, at
www.alternativestovalium.blogspot.com
/2006/02/interview-with-george-melly-jazz. html,18 February 2006, accessed February 2007.
3
Colin MacInnes, ‘See You at Mabel’s’, in
Encounter
, March 1957, collected in
England, Half English
.
4
Oliver Bennett, ‘Licor-ish Allsorts’.
5
Frank Norman and Jeffrey Bernard,
Soho Night & Day
, p.
138
.
6
Michael Wojas in conversation with the author.
7
Interview by Sian Pattenden in the
Independent
, 11 May 2005.
8
Oliver Bennet, ‘Licor-ish Allsorts’.
9
Dan Farson,
The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon
, p.
56
.
10
From ‘The Hopkin Syndicate’ (unpublished), quoted in Frances Spalding,
Dance Till the Stars Come Down
, p.
171
.
11
Paul Potts,
Dante Called You Beatrice
(Readers Union edn), p.
24
.
12
Dan Farson,
Soho in the Fifties
, p.
43
.
13
Dom Moraes,
My Son’s Father
, p.
169
.
14
Michael Wishart,
High Diver
, pp.
61
–4.