I am doing a talk at The Secular Hall, Humberstone Gate, Leicester on the 6th October 7.00 p.m. Hope you can make it. It should last about an hour including audio and film clips, and there will be an opportunity for questions and comments at the end. Also, in the spirit of the time, it is free.
Counterculture Talk Leicester October 6th at Secular Hall
This is an article from the Guardian that cleverly shows how iconic sites in London looked in 1967 and how they look now. With a slider you can blend the two. Very impressive. It is amazing how little they have changed.
Newburgh Street (near Carnaby Street) London 1967
Newburgh Street 2017
Running parallel to Carnaby Street, Newburgh Street forms the boundary of what is known as the Newburgh Quarter, where fashionable concept stores and classic tailors sit alongside traditional pubs such as the White Horse.
Now pedestrianised and cobbled, back in 1967 it was a tarmacked road.
Summer of love 50 years on – London then and now:
Here are recent recordings and photos of La Reverie Gypsy Jazz Band. Recorded live on 22nd June 2017 at Rick Willson’s studio in Anstey, Leicestershire.
Guitars: Will Smith, Keith Pell
Accordion: Kenny Wilson
Bass: Mike Whittle
Friday 3rd and Saturday 4th of March 2017 I attended a conference at DMU, Leicester about film maker Peter Whitehead, and celebrating the donation of his archive to the University.
I found out about it late but am really glad I went. There were some excellent talks that brought new light to the meaning and relevance of the 1960s Counterculture, and other aspects of the Swinging 60s, and also a sublime showing of Whitehead’s Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London on the big screen at Phoenix Square Cinema, Leicester. It was almost like watching a different film to the one I have only previously seen on YouTube.
This is a fascinating view of what was happening at the height of what is now seen as the first great flowering of the Counterculture. It is not uncritical though and the seeds of it’s decline can be seen in the interviews of contemporary stars like Julie Christie, Michael Caine and David Hockney. There is almost a sense of impending loss, and also a critique of it’s superficiality and materialism.
The film is really a response to Time Magazine’s famous article about Swinging London that shifted American’s ‘must visit’ tourist location from Paris to London. After a brilliant start with footage from the UFO Club accompanied by a great version of Interstellar Overdrive by Pink Floyd, Michael Caine bizarrely announces that “…it all started with the loss of the British Empire….”
There is no narrative as such but a series of Chapters that are linked by the time and place, and a general sense of bewilderment by the participants. Following some amazing footage of the Rolling Stones live in Ireland Mick Jagger comes across as a slightly lost , petulant school boy trying to make sense of it all “… they don’t like violence but they themselves are violent which doesn’t seem to make sense…”. Yes okay Mick, thanks for that, you sound just like my mother. Julie Christie, who looks absolutely stunning, bemoans the fact that she is totally superficial and has nothing to say “… everything’s happening to me and I’m not happening to anything…am I allowed to talk?…”. David Hockney is not impressed by ‘Swinging London’ at all and prefers New York and California. The bars stay open til 2 a.m. and the drinks are cheaper and he can meet ordinary people in the clubs, unlike London which is overpriced and exclusive. To be fair though, David Hockney has been moaning about something for most of his life, quite often about not being allowed to smoke cigarettes wherever he wants! He is very amusing though. When Julie Christie smokes a cigarette in the film she doesn’t look like she quite knows what to do with it. Vanessa Redgrave, on the other hand, exudes confidence and political commitment and sings a capella and lectures the audience, a bit like an over-confident trainee teacher.
Andrew Loog Oldham is the stereotype of a cynical, Svengali-like pop manager who talks about how he ‘invented’ the Rolling Stones image as the ‘bad boys’ of pop, which, in fact, they quite obviously are not. He revels in his lack of knowledge but obviously believes he can do anything he wants “… I might get into politics someday..or films” he says. In some ways, this is quite a refreshing and confident attitude. Nevertheless, he never did get into either politics or films which is probably just as well as I am sure he would have joined the ranks of the Thatcherites and done something really terrible like close down the NHS or sell the whole of England to Disneyworld. The film ends where it began with some amazing footage of dancers at the UFO Club and the music of Pink Floyd. A truly remarkable film! There is a real sense of dynamism and change. The way the music accompanies the live performances of the Stones is inspired especially with the song Lady Jane. Whitehead doesn’t bother about synchronicity and blends unrelated recordings with live footage. Have You Seen Your Mother Baby (Standing in the Shadows), a surprisingly dark and seemingly uncommercial recording (even though it was a top ten hit), it’s not unlike the Velvet Underground, plays while the band and audience go wild and Lady Jane introduces a strange and eerie sense of calm.
The rest of the conference passed quickly. It took place over two days but the papers delivered were so fascinating that I never lost interest the whole time I was there. This has got to be a first for me, my attention can easily wander! I usually have alternative activities at hand in case I get bored! Didn’t need them this time! There were a wide range of themes that dealt with the 60s with some, but not all, relating to the work of Peter Whitehead
Adrian Smith discussed the interesting sub genre The Love Business: European Prostitution Drama as British Popular Entertainment. This dealt with the film distributors who were showing European films, many of which had a serious sub-text, as soft porn films to a British audience. There are some echoes of this theme in a recent Channel 4 series Magnifica 70 that deals with film and censorship in Brazil in 1970. Worryingly, this is about a right wing dictatorship in Brazil but could just as easily be about censorship and social control in Britain in the 1960s. Definitely worth a look.
The Love Business: European Prostitution Drama as British Popular Entertainment
Richard Farmar looked at the bizarre film The Touchables and Melanie Williams gave an interesting account of the film maker David Hart. She talked about the “Right-wing Counterculture” which to some would be a contradiction in terms. The majority of countercultural participants were either “left wing” or perhaps “apolitical” but she made a very good argument about how many issues, like women’s lib or gay rights, could belong to either the left or right. She pointed out how politician and journalist Jonathon Aitken started as a countercultural figure in the 1960s but ended up as a cabinet minister in the Conservative Government of the 1980s (before he ended up in jail, that is!). I have investigated elements of right wing attitudes in my essay The Decline of the 1960s Counterculture and the Rise of Thatcherism in which I look at libertarianism and other aspects of the counterculture in the 1980s such as sexual freedom, drug taking and “alternative” businesses such as Virgin and Gap.
David Hart and Right-wing Counterculture
Caroline Langhorst gave an interesting talk on three lesser known films of the 1960s all of which are critical of the optimism and the joie de vivre of the period. These are Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, Privilege (starring Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones) and Herostratus (featuring a young Helen Mirren).
1960s Dystopian Tendecies
Both Privilege and, especially, Herostratus are relatively unknown films. Privilege had a cinema release in the 1960s (I actually saw it) but I believe Herostratus was virtually lost, although there is a copy now on Blu-ray (which I have yet to see). There are some clips of it on YouTube which are quite intriguing. Personally, I feel that the films that really define and critique the era, especially in terms of pop music and the counterculture, are Easy Rider, Performance (featuring Mick Jagger) and, of course, Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London. What becomes generally apparent is the mainstream media’s inability to really understand what is going on during this period. Their attempt to commercialise the movement in films of the time often produced a cliched view of pop culture and society that, for some, defines what the 1960s are about but is actually a ridiculous fiction.
Niki de Sainte Phalle with her trademark targets. An influence on Mod fashion?
There were some interesting talks about feminism in the 1960s. Alissa Clark investigated Peter Whitehead and Niki de Saint-Phalle’s collaberation Daddy. In 1972, Saint Phalle shot footage for this surreal horror film about a deeply troubled father-daughter, love-hate relationship. She was an artist, sculptor and film maker who made quite an impact on the avant garde scene from the 1940s onwards.
Jane Arden “The Other Side of Underneath”
There was also a passionate and forceful account of radical filmmaker and theatremaker Jane Arden who I had actually not heard of before. In 1970, Arden formed the radical feminist theatre group Holocaust and then wrote the play A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches. The play would later be adapted for the screen as The Other Side of the Underneath (1972). Arden directed the film and appeared in it uncredited; screenings at film festivals, including the 1972 London Film Festival, caused a considerable stir. The film depicts a woman’s mental breakdown and rebirth in scenes at times violent and highly shocking; the writer and critic George Melly described it as “a most illuminating season in Hell”, while the BBC Radio journalist David Will declared the film to be “a major breakthrough for the British cinema”. Interesting stuff!
Stephen Glynn gave an entertaining look at Whitehead’s films of the Rolling Stones including the iconic promotional film for the song We Love You and Steve Chibnall showed us what the 1960s Counterculture was like in a provincial city, namely Leicester! Well, I should know because I was there, but he managed to come out with facts that I knew nothing about. For example, how the local paper The Leicester Mercury led a campaign to close down the late night clubs and coffee bars that proliferated at the time. Do You Know What Your Children Are Up To While You Sleep? screamed the headlines. My favourite band Legay complained that they had hardly anywhere left to play and were moving to London! I am shocked and stunned by these revelations!
Jimi Hendrix at the Leicester Art College Hawthorn Building. Local rock and roll band Warlock ended up doing the support spot.
Richard Dacre gave an entertaining account of the Counterculture and Peter Whitehead at the Royal Albert Hall. Apparently, after Wholly Communion, poetry performances were banned at the hall for more than 20 years! Hilarious. I am looking forward to the Whitehead inspired festival at the RAH later on this year!
Counterculture at the Royal Albert Hall
Almost 50 years ago, the Beatle stepped aside from the planet’s biggest band to create the soundtrack to Joe Massot’s movie Wonderwall. With the help of India’s finest musicians, he invented the idea of the world music crossover
Let’s call it the Riddle of the Dark Horse: what do you get if you cross a Monkee, two Beatles, the man they called God, Paul McCartney’s banjo, India’s musical elite and a film about a mad professor spying on a Biba girl called Penny Lane?
The answer is Wonderwall Music. Released on 1 November 1968, three weeks before the White Album, George Harrison’s heartfelt, happily eccentric film soundtrack was the first solo record by a Beatle, the first album on the Apple label and a world music crossover before such a notion even existed. That it later lent its name to a Britpop anthem is easily the least interesting thing about it.
Newly rereleased in a boxset of Harrison’s solo work, Wonderwall Music encompasses tambura drones, Vedic chants, skiffle, ragtime, clip-clopping country, wah-wah squalls, woozy Mellotron, experimental sonic collage and, on Ski-ing, 100 seconds of Eric Clapton at his most raggedly explosive. The sound of Harrison’s musical curiosity taking flight, it is also an implicit expression of his disaffection within the Beatles, perhaps even an intimation of the beginning of the end.
After the Beatles ceased touring in August 1966, Harrison spent six weeks in India with Ravi Shankar, an immersion that led to a chain reaction of musical and spiritual epiphanies. On his return, his contribution to Sgt Pepper was the quietly assertive Within You Without You; much of the album left him cold. He was scarcely more enthusiastic about Magical Mystery Tour. While McCartney worked on the title track in the studio, Harrison produced coloured crayons from his painted sheepskin jacket and started drawing pictures. “My problem, basically, was that I was in another world,” he later said. “I didn’t really belong; I was just an appendage.”
Little wonder he jumped at an invitation, from American director Joe Massot, to compose music for Wonderwall, a film starring Jane Birkin as the objectified model who sends her oddball neighbour, Mr Collins (Jack MacGowran), into a voyeuristic frenzy. With its pop-art palette, psychedelic sex scenes, dingy domesticity and an uncredited Anita Pallenberg, Wonderwall is a curious period piece, less Blow-Up than Come Down. “It’s aged badly,” Birkin says. “I wasn’t very interesting! I was disappointed, but there are rather wonderful decors. And George was lovely.”
Massot, who died in 2002, sought original instrumental music for the film’s many dialogue-free scenes, and promised Harrison a free hand. “George took advantage of this by including a lot of Indian music in his score,” says John Barham, who worked on the project as arranger, player and a kind of conceptual interlocutor. Having studied at the feet – literally – of Shankar, Harrison’s understanding of Indian music had deepened beyond the naive sitar burr heard three years previously on the Beatles’ Norwegian Wood. He viewed Wonderwall Music as “partly an excuse for a musical anthology to help spread the word”, he said. “I used all these instruments that weren’t as familiar to western people as they are now, like shehnais, santoor, sarod, surbahars, tabla tarangs.”
Heavily spiced with Indian flavours it may be, but the album is a beguiling mixture of competing passions. Visiting Twickenham film studios, Harrison “spotted” each scene, marking where the music would be inserted, then working up basic themes at his home in Esher in Surrey. Initial recordings were made at Abbey Road on 22 and 23 November 1967, with harmonica maestro Tommy Reilly, session mainstay Jim Sullivan, and the Remo Four, a Liverpool quartet from Brian Epstein’s Nems stable. The Beatles’ manager had been dead only three months; Harrison may have felt the need to maintain a connection.
“We recorded backing tracks to accompany certain points in the film,” says Remo Four drummer Roy Dyke. “George had timed it all with a stopwatch: ‘We need one minute and 35 seconds with a country and western feel.’ Or, ‘We need a rock thing for exactly two minutes.’ Nothing was really written. We’d talk over ideas he wanted, play something, and he’d say, ‘That’s good, keep that. I like the piano there.’ It was very experimental. The idea was to set an atmosphere.”
Some of the results are lovely: the stately piano waltz of Red Lady Too; the richly cinematic Wonderwall to Be Here, on which Tony Ashton’s rippling piano melody is framed by Barham’s strings. The exotically funky On the Bed was inspired by a visit Harrison had made the previous year to BBC Television Centre, where Barham and Shankar were working on the music for Jonathan Miller’s production of Alice in Wonderland. “We were recording a scene where Ravi soloed and I played an accompanying Indian jhala [a rapid climactic flourish] texture on piano,” Barham says. “George was fascinated by the combination of sitar and piano. Back at Abbey Road, I played flugelhorn over George’s jhala. Later that day, Big Jim Sullivan, who was recording with Tom Jones, happened to drop in and played bass on the same track. It was a free atmosphere on those sessions. They were very creative and enjoyable.”
Wonderwall’s most experimental five minutes are Dream Scene, a sonically disorientating pick-and-mix of ambient backwards guitar, swooning Bollywood love calls, wailing flutes, treated electronics, disjointed harmonicas, atonal pianos, air-raid sirens, the chimes of a grandfather clock, nightmarish sampled voices and church bells. Harrison later dismissed it as “horrible stuff”, but it is not entirely fanciful to view Dream Scene as an enabling step towards the Beatles’ Revolution 9, the avant-garde sound collage pieced together by John Lennon six months later.
In December, a passing Monkee was press-ganged into service. “I’d met George when he was visiting Cass Elliot in Los Angeles, and I was dating Cass’s sister, Leah,” Peter Tork says. “Later, the Monkees met the Beatles in England, and he invited me to his house. He played the sitar and said: ‘I’m working on a soundtrack album, I’d love to have you play a little banjo.’” Tork had travelled without his instrument, so Harrison borrowed McCartney’s five-string banjo for the session – “which Paul couldn’t play – at least conventionally, because the folk five-string banjo can’t be restrung in reverse order for left-handers, it must be custom made. I played for 45 minutes, George said, ‘Thanks very much,’ and we went our separate ways.”
Tork’s breezy contribution didn’t make the record, but it can be heard 15 minutes into the film, after Collins is chided by his mother for spying through the wall. “And I did not get paid,” he laughs. “George said: ‘We’ll figure that out later.’ He knew that the honour itself was payment enough!” This regally offhand attitude to accreditation was not untypical, and became an issue on Harrison’s next solo record, Electronic Sound, when he used, without permission, improvised recordings made on the Moog by Bernie Krause. Much rancour ensued.
There were other superstar cameos. Ringo Starr – old faithful – adds his unmistakable swing to the groovy-bluesy Party Seacombe, while Clapton’s monster riff ensures that Ski-ing fairly steams along. Ski-ing was later borrowed by Kula Shakar for their song Gokula, earning Harrison a co-writing credit.
Although he had used members of the Asian Music Circle in London, Harrison wanted to draw directly from the tap-root of Indian music. In early January 1968, he spent a week recording at the EMI/HMV studio in Mumbai, assisted by Shambhu Das on sitar, Aashish Khan on sarod, and many more local musicians. A two-track stereo machine was transported from Kolkata. By now, the original $600 budget for the project had risen to $15,000, the cost covered by Harrison.
As well as laying down the bulk of Wonderwall’s eclectic Indian pieces, during these sessions Harrison recorded several ragas, one of which became The Inner Light. Following a vocal overdub, recorded later at Abbey Road, it became the B-side to Lady Madonna in March, by which time the Beatles were camped out in north India, studying with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. For perhaps the first and only time, Harrison’s personal passions were driving the narrative of the band.
Wonderwall Music was released before the film – which premiered at Cannes before quickly vanishing into near obscurity – on 1 November 1968. Harrison’s participation was neither widely anticipated (“I didn’t even know until afterwards,” Birkin says) nor particularly celebrated. Although the record has always had its admirers, Harrison’s post-Beatles triple set, All Things Must Pass, released in 1970, is widely regarded as his first “proper” solo record, not least because of its colossal commercial and cultural impact.
Wonderwall Music, conversely, didn’t chart in the UK. Its significance lies elsewhere, in its affirmation of Harrison’s blossoming individuality, its determination to shine a tender light on an unheralded musical culture, and as a warning flare in the Beatles’ long race to extinction. The film it serves may have become a dated curio, but its soundtrack still carries an intoxicating whiff of not just one, but many futures.
• George Harrison: The Vinyl Collection is out now on Universal.
Here is a different version of Frederick Tipping in 4/4 time, with different words. Sung by Steve Cartwright and produced by Kenny Wilson.
Frederick Tipping is a song by Steve Cartwright about the Great War sung by Nick and Debbie Morse and produced by Kenny Wilson.
Leonard Cohen struggled to unlock the potential of “Hallelujah”—it was John Cale who held the key
Source: John Cale on Making Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ a Classic
Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” was a complex, nearly indecipherable musical riddle that flummoxed even its composer. Originally released as a funereal synth-laden dirge on 1984’s Various Positions, he spent years tinkering with the track during live performances in a relentless pursuit to unlock its full melodic potential. Ultimately, it was John Cale who provided the key.
The iconoclastic Velvet Underground co-founder, producer and innovative writer/arranger crafted an elegiac version of “Hallelujah” that vaulted the song into a rarefied strata of modern standards. Now he speaks to PEOPLE about the song’s long journey.
First included on an obscure Leonard Cohen tribute album, I’m Your Fan, commissioned by the French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles in 1991, it’s perhaps best known for the stark version that appeared the following year on Cale’s live collection, Fragments of a Rainy Season. Something of a precursor to the “unplugged” performance concept that exploded in the first half of the 1990s, the album was a stripped down career retrospective reaching back to Cale’s early collaborations with his Velvet Underground bandmate Lou Reed.
Last fall, the album was recently given a deluxe reissue, complete with bonus tracks and outtakes from throughout the extensive European tour. “Hallelujah” received a bewitching video directed by Abby Portner, invoking elements from Shakespeare’s MacBeth to portray the song’s crumbling grandeur.
Cale first heard the track while attending one of Cohen’s concerts at New York City’s Beacon Theater in 1990. “I was really an admirer of his poetry,” he tells PEOPLE. “It never let you down. There’s a timelessness to it.” The song stayed in his mind, he didn’t decide to record it until Les Inrockuptibles asked him to contribute to I’m Your Fan several months later. In the pre-digital days, there was really only one way to learn the tune at short notice: “I called Leonard and asked him to send me the lyrics.”
Famously, there were a lot. “Fifteen verses,” Cale confirms. “It was a long roll of fax paper. And then I choose whichever ones were really me. Some of them were religious, and coming out of my mouth would have been a little difficult to believe. I choose the cheeky ones.”
After recording the song for I’m Your Fan, he toyed with a variety of arrangements on his 1992 tour documented on Fragments of a Rainy Season. “There were a lot of different venues and a lot of different kinds of performances. And as it turned out the ones that were best were the ones that were done on a real piano, not an electric piano. Every time we got a real Steinway things went up a couple notches.”
Cale’s version of “Hallelujah” immediately struck a chord, inspiring a host of artists to offer their own take. A young Jeff Buckley added a hauntingly intimate version to Grace, his sole release before drowning in the Mississippi at age 30. His death added an extra dose of pathos to the intensely gripping song, and within a decade the number of cover versions had swelled to 300. According to Cale, Cohen grew weary of his creation’s popularity. “He said, ‘I don’t want to hear any more new versions of “Hallelujah”! Let’s put an embargo on that!’”
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