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My White Bicycle

My White Bicycle (1967), poster by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. Too risqué for EMI.

In what passes here for spare time I’ve been working on a private project that concerns events in London during a single week in 1967. I won’t elaborate for now but the research has been fun, and has led down byways where it’s easy to get lost in a profusion of historic detail. The International Times archive is a great time-sink if you want to see London’s psychedelic culture evolving from one week to the next. Oz magazine covered much of the same ground but in broader strokes; IT being a weekly paper was the closest thing the underground of the time had to a journal of record which means you’ll find things there which weren’t reported anywhere else.

International Times, Volume 1, issue 13, 19/05/1967.

A brief item about a poster for the debut single by Tomorrow caught my eye, the artwork being an early piece by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (Michael English and Nigel Waymouth) who we here discover were briefly known by another name:

MY WHITE BICYCLE

EMI join the long and growing list of those self-censors who still believe that the younger generation are going to continue to support them. The above poster for the Tomorrow record, MY WHITE BICYCLE, was rejected by EMI on the grounds that the titties might provoke “complaints from certain organizations…” So Jacob and the Coloured Coat (Mick English and Nigel Weymouth [sic]) put on their crocheted boots and manufactured a poster design from every phallic image they could. Subliminal pornography triumphed where open indecency had failed and the prick within sustains where the exposed breast falters.

Tomorrow were one of the first British psychedelic bands. My White Bicycle is their most memorable song but the rest of their self-titled debut album still holds up today. Ace guitarist Steve Howe became a lot more famous in Yes a few years later, while drummer Twink was in a host of bands in the late 60s and early 70s, Hawkwind included. My White Bicycle sounds superficially like a typical piece of psych whimsy à la Pink Floyd’s Bike (both songs were recorded at Abbey Road) but according to Twink there’s an anarchist subtext:

“My White Bicycle” was written out of what was actually going on in Amsterdam. One of the owners of Granny Takes a Trip, Nigel Weymouth [sic], had gone there and come back with a Provos badge which he gave to me. They were kind of like a student anarchist group that believed everything should be free. In fact, they had white bicycles in Amsterdam and they used to leave them around the town. And if you were going somewhere and you needed to use a bike, you’d just take the bike and you’d go somewhere and just leave it. Whoever needed the bikes would take them and leave them when they were done.

What would have been dismissed as pure utopianism now looks like prescience when bike-sharing schemes have become a reality. As to the redrawn poster, there’s a copy here which is described as very rare, hence its absence from other Hapshash galleries. Not really as phallic as the IT report implies; Aubrey Beardsley got away with a lot more priapic subterfuge in the 1890s when the strictures were also more severe.

My White Bicycle (1967), the replacement poster by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat.

On the same page of IT there’s a brief announcement that The Beatles will have a new album out in June, something entitled Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. That album also gave EMI a headache with both Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and A Day In The Life being accused by “certain organisations” of promoting drugs. If the record company could have seen the greater headache that was coming less than ten years later from Malcolm McLaren and his King’s Road scallywags they might not have been so uptight.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hapshash Takes a Trip
• Michael English, 1941–2009
• The Look presents Nigel Waymouth
• The New Love Poetry

Weekend links 165

Cahill Expressway (1962) by Jeffrey Smart whose death was announced this week.

• “Russell Beale is awed by the beauty of the Roman silver Warren Cup showing men and youths making love, so startlingly erotic that the first time the British Museum was offered it in the 1950s, it turned it down flat. In 1999, when it came on the market again, the museum had to raise £1.8m to acquire it. ‘It’s just heaven, isn’t it?’ Russell Beale sighs.” Maev Kennedy on Same-Sex Desire and Gender Identity, a new exhibition at the British Museum.

• “The route to Tyburn Tree snaked through Holborn and St Giles, then went along Tyburn Road, today’s Oxford Street. It was dense with spectators.” Matthew Beaumont on the tiny memorial (Google view) for the estimated 50,000 people executed in the centre of London.

• Mixes of the Week: Bottoms Up by Staffan Lindberg for BUTT Magazine, and Electronic Ladyland, a collection of women with synths (and other instruments) from Bitch Media.

But the very thing that is valuable about diversity – the cultural and ideological clashes that it brings about – is precisely what many people fear. And that fear takes two forms. On the one hand you have the little Englander sentiment: immigration is undermining the national fabric, eroding our sense of British or Englishness, turning our cities into little Lahores or mini-Kingstons. And on the other you have the multicultural argument: that diversity is good, but it has to be policed to minimise the clashes and conflicts and frictions that diversity brings in its wake. And so we have to restrain speech, and police the giving of offence.

Kenan Malik on The Pleasures of Pluralism, The Pain of Offence.

• L’Empire des Lumières is a great title for Anne Billson’s blog about Belgium. Tram-wire covered streets are one of my favourite things.

• The Outer Church, 28 musical artists with an uncanny temperament collected by Joseph Stannard for Front & Follow.

• His Heavy Heart, a film by Alan Moore & Mitch Jenkins, is looking for Kickstarter funding.

• In 1997 Quentin Crisp wrote about “Ten Wonderful Gangster Movies” for Neon magazine.

• Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep redesigned for the Penguin Design Award, 2013.

• Out on DVD/Blu-Ray this month: The Curtis Harrington Short Film Collection.

• A billion-pixel panoramic view of the planet Mars from the Curiosity Rover.

• In the TLS: Robert Craft on Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring.

• Typophonic: Album cover typography.

• The Owl Theremin is a thing.

• LSD ABC

• Spring Rounds From The Rite Of Spring (1975) by Alice Coltrane | Revenge Of The Black Regent (1999) by Add N To (X) | Sore Ga Afrirampo (2010) by Afrirampo

The Modern Antiquarian

The stones of Callanish are explored again, this time by an energetic and erudite Julian Cope. The Modern Antiquarian was a 55-minute TV documentary produced by the BBC in 2000 as a spin-off from Cope’s book-length study of the ancient past of the British Isles, The Modern Antiquarian: A Pre-Millennial Odyssey Through Megalithic Britain (1998). Cope has always been a great enthusiast, blessed with a talent for communicating that enthusiasm in his own inimitable manner. Needless to say this film, which follows him while he visits some of his favourite neolithic sites, is nothing like the standard television approach to archaeology. Cope isn’t an academic (thank Odin) yet his book is 448-pages of deep investigation which involved visiting every one of the sites he was writing about; he’s also not that other television standby, the shallow audience proxy, he’s too well-informed for that. It would have been good if this one-off film had developed into a series but for its original screening it was shunted into a late-night slot where few people would have seen it. Cope then, as now, is probably too intense for a general audience.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Callanish panoramas
• Japrocksampler

Callanish panoramas

Photo by Serge (SEB) Bogdanov.

A post for the Summer Solstice. I’ve linked to panoramas of the Callanish standing stones before but these are more recent photos at 360Cities where the full-screen views are more immersive, especially if you have a large monitor. The stones are situated on the Isle of Lewis in north-west Scotland, and still tend to be overshadowed by the reputation of their more visible relations in the south of England. Stonehenge and Avebury may be more famous but they’re ruined cathedrals next to the Callanish stones which have survived four thousand years of harsh Atlantic weather very much intact by virtue of being so remote. In that respect they retain some of their original aura: anyone planning a visit has to really want to see these things, you can’t simply drive past them on the way to somewhere else.

Photo by Alan McLean.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive

Nocturnes

KOBAYASHI, Eijiro–”A High Bridge by Night”

The Night Scenes is a series of 21 woodcut prints by Japanese artists published by Hasegawa/Nishinomiya in the early 1900s. Gorgeous work, and apparently popular enough for the prints to have been reissued many times since. These examples are from a print-selling site with several extensive galleries of 20th-century Japanese prints.

The High Bridge at Night struck me for being remarkably similar to Whistler’s famous painting of Old Battersea Bridge, Nocturne: Blue and Gold (1872–75). Whistler, of course, developed his mature style through looking at Japanese prints, and the Tate’s note for his painting says it may have been derived from a Hiroshige print. The Hiroshige looks nothing like the High Bridge at Night, however; was the latter based on an earlier print which Whistler had seen, or is the High Bridge (which post-dates Whistler’s painting) an example of the Japanese stealing back some of their influence from the West?

(Thanks to Wood s Lot for the prints tip.)

ARAI, Yoshimune II–”A Ferry Boat”

KOBAYASHI, Eijiro–”A Pagoda by Moonlight”

Continue reading “Nocturnes”