UK Underground

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The Underground/counterculture Movement in the United Kingdom was linked to the Underground culture in America but had a number of key figures of its own and a different "feel". It focused around the Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill area of London.

Mick Farren said, "My own feeling is that, not just sex, but anger and violence, are part and parcel of rock n' roll. The rock concert can work as an alternative for violence, an outlet for violence. But at that time there were a lot of things that made us really angry. We were outraged! In the U.S. the youth were sent to Vietnam and there was nothing we could do to change the way the government did it. Smoking marijuana and doing things to get thrown in jail were our own way of expressing our anger, and we wanted change - I believed that picking up a guitar, not a gun, would bring about change". (1)

"It's like Germaine Greer said about the Underground - it's not just some sort of scruffy club you can join, you're in or you're out... it's like being a criminal." (2)

The desire to change the status quo was a key feature of the whole Underground Movement both in the UK and America. Although another, the flamboyant clothing was a somewhat more superficial. For a "true freak" the movement signified much more. People spoke in terms of creating an alternative society and of anti-commercialism, the environment etc. Many in the blossoming Underground Movement were influenced by Beatnik Beat generation writers such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg so that it can be said that the beatniks of the 1950s paved the way for the hippies of the 1960s. During the 1960s, the Beatnik writers engaged in symbiotic evolution with freethinking academics including experimental Psychologists Timothy Leary. Those influenced included radical thinkers such as Mick Farren who as the new generation, would become equals to Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Leary. There was a lot of interaction and cross-fertilisation on the scene, and musicians took in new ideas instantly and transformed them, adding a pop sensibility which made this cultural stuff accessible to kids in the street. And example of the cross-over of beatnik poetry and music can be seen when Burroughs appeared at the Farren organised Phun City festival attended by Underground community bands including the Pretty Things, the Pink Fairies, The Edgar Broughton Band and from America The MC5.

The Underground Movement was also symbolised by the use of drugs. The types of drugs used were varied and in many cases the names and effects were unknown as Deviants/Pink Fairies member Russell Hunter, working at International Times (part of the Underground press at the time), recalled. "People used to send in all kinds of strange drugs and things, pills and powders, stuff to smoke and that. They'd always give them to me to try to find out what they were! (Laughs)".

Part of the sense of humour of the Underground, no doubt partly induced by the effects of both drugs and radical thinking was an enjoyment at "freakin' out the norms". Mick Farren recalls actions sure to elicit the required response. "The band's baroque House of Usher apartment on London's Shaftesbury Avenue had witnessed pre-Raphaelite hippy scenes, like Sandy the bass player (of the Deviants and Pink Fairies), Tony the now and again keyboard player, and a young David Bowie, fresh from Beckenham Arts Lab, sunbathing on the roof, taking photos of each other and posing coyly as sodomites". (2)

There was a brief, tongue-in-cheek, offshoot from the UK Underground: "The Overground" was supposed to refer to the spiritual, cosmic, quasi-religious scene. At least two magazines (Gandalf's Garden and Vishtaroon) adopted this "overground" style and Gandalf's Garden was also a shop/restaurant/meeting place at World's End, Chelsea. The magazines were printed on pastel paper using multi-coloured inks and contained articles about meditation, vegetarianism, mandalas, ethics, poetry, pacifism and other subjects at a distance from the more wild and militant aspects of the underground.

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