Intellectual Capital

It is 44 years since Time Magazine placed London, The Swinging Capital on its cover and declared: “In a once sedate world of faded splendor, everything new, uninhibited and kinky is blooming.” The cast may change, but the characters remain the same, writes Allan Prosser

London Calling: A Countercultural History of London since 1945

Barry Miles

Atlantic Books, £25

LONDON can best be likened to a human body, says Peter Ackroyd, the prolific poet, essayist and author who has made the city his specialist subject.

The byways of the metropolis resemble “thin veins and its parks are like lungs. In the mist and rain of an urban autumn, the shining stones and cobbles of the older thoroughfares look as though they are bleeding. It is fleshy and voracious, grown fat upon its appetite for people and for food, for goods and drink; it consumes and it excretes, maintained within a continual state of greed and desire”.

But if London can be represented with a physical metaphor, it is to its intellectual and cultural — or specifically counter-cultural — dimension that Barry Miles turns with his latest work which follows previous offerings on Pink Floyd, The Beatles, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Frank Zappa, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg and The Clash.

The title itself might be an homage to that iconic third album produced by the Camden rockers in 1979, but the phrase London Calling was first used when the BBC went on air in 1922; was seized upon as the name for a musical by the ever-opportunistic Noel Coward, and gained its real symbolic potency during the war when it presaged broadcasts of uncensored news to a world under the yoke of oppression and to the United States where Ed Morrow used it to open his famous radio shows during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz.

And it is at the end of that conflict in 1945 that Barry Miles begins his account of London’s subterranean emergence from the bomb damaged streets. And it opens in an area known colloquially, but not officially, as “Fitzrovia” — bounded on the north by Euston Road, to the east by Gower Street, Store Street, and the southern part of Tottenham Court Road, to the south by Oxford Street and to the west by Great Portland Street.

Fitzrovia, which abuts Soho, for decades London’s home to both the cosmopolitan and the unconventional, is a literary invention (claimed by, among others, the gay MP Tom Driberg — of whom Winston Churchill once said that he was “the sort of man who gave sodomy a bad name”).

Miles uses the location as the launch pad for a dizzying list of personalities and anecdotes starting with the once notorious “Queen of Bohemia”, Nina Hamnet, whose speciality was taking off her clothes at parties and deflowering any attractive young buck who happened across her horizon — including a 21-year-old Anthony Powell whose Proustian 12-volume semi-autobiographical novel A Dance To The Music Of Time is one of the great English studies of manners, class and power of the past century.

Hamnet had a particular affection for sailors (“because in the morning they always go back to their ships”) but, like many members of the cast of this scrupulously researched period piece, her life of gin-soaked excess was to end tragically. The one-time associate of Modigliani and Picasso, Diaghilev, Stravinsky and Jean Cocteau plunged onto the iron railings outside her shabby flat in Paddington, almost certainly a suicide.

That sense of nihilism runs like a thread through this story and the next giant self-destructive character is Dylan Thomas, the elegiac and convention-busting Welsh poet who drank himself to death at the age of 39 at the Chelsea Hotel in New York while at the height of his fame.

Thomas was brought to public attention by the establishment, in September 1946, of the BBC’s Third Programme which was charged with renewing the post-war cultural and intellectual life of Britain and disseminating the arts. From its headquarters in Portland Place, Thomas made more than 200 broadcasts for the BBC, most of which the BBC didn’t bother to keep, just as they later discarded rare footage from the early ’60s of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and The Animals that would have been worth a fortune in intellectual property today.

The BBC’s London HQ gave Thomas ready access to the multiple pubs of Fitzrovia, Covent Garden and Soho where reports of his epic drinking feats are common currency on guided tours to this day. None more so than the legendary occasion in 1953, the year of the coronation of Elizabeth II, when during a binge excessive by even his standards he lost the only copy of the work by which he is best remembered, the “Play for Voices”, Under Milk Wood. It was rediscovered by the BBC producer Douglas Cleverdon — who would eventually oversee the definitive radio version with Richard Burton as ‘First Voice’ two months after Thomas’s death — by retracing the poet’s pub crawl from bar to bar until it was tracked down to the Admiral Duncan pub on Old Compton Street, the location in 1999 for the deadly nail bomb attack by neo-Nazi David Copeland designed to kill and maim members of the gay community.

The surreal sweep of this history provides access to the excesses of both the high and low life descendants of The Bright Young Things and Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies in a street opera which is comparable to the decadence of post-Weimar Berlin — Treasure Ireland actor Robert Newton stripping on a nightclub bandstand for an impersonation of Long John Silver diving naked into the sea for a refreshing dip before dinner; the artist Francis Bacon whose taste for sado-masochism evolved from his teenage beatings at the hands of his fox-hunting father’s Irish grooms; the active, and frequently threesomed, sex life of the young George Melly and the gangster-actor John Bindon who once entertained Princess Margaret on her holiday retreat of Mustique with his party piece of hanging five empty half-pint beer mugs from his erect penis (don’t try this one at home).

The creative drive unleashed in London in the 1950s was a response to the austerity of post-war Britain. George Melly said the country was blighted by “an older generation who used the accident of war as their excuse to lay down the law on every front; of a system of education which denied any creative potential”.

The seminal 1956 play, Look Back in Anger, by John Osborne, changed all that. Initially derided by critics, only Kenneth Tynan recognised the raw power of “The Angry Young Men” writing that it presented: “post-war youth as it really is... the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of ‘official’ attitudes, the surrealistic sense of humour, the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for.”

It was this rebellion that produced a drug-fuelled, sexually experimental underground high on creativity but low on fidelity; that spawned several generations of disaffected youth stretching from the teddy boys, through mods and rockers to hippies, punks, new romantics and goths.

It also created the crucible of fashion, music and art which still contributes to the city’s intellectual capital today. Mary Quant came onto the scene in 1955 at a time when English girls left school and dressed like their mother. Only tarts and homosexuals, said George Melly, wore clothes which reflected what they were. Her natural successor was Vivienne Westwood, who inspired the punk movement.

Music evolved from the skiffle groups of Lonnie Donegan through the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned to the modern Britpop of Blur and Lily Allen and La Roux.

The Stones stride across the central section of this book and the Summer of Love with a detailed analysis of their part in what some people claim is the greatest film evocation of Swinging London, Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, which paired Mick Jagger as a burnt-out bisexual, rock star with James Fox as a sexually sadistic enforcer for an East End gang. During its filming Keith Richards’ girlfriend, co-star Anita Pallenberg, was rumoured to have had an affair with Jagger. Pallenberg denied this but Richards, subsumed with suspicion, produced some of his greatest work on the next Stones LP, Beggars Banquet, including the diabolical infusion Sympathy for the Devil.

Other characters bring their own, different, talents to this tale of the darker side of London — the hugely influential novelist JG Ballard who pioneered new styles of writing to describe the modern industrial world. Artistic giants such as Lucian Freud, the master of the portrait and the nude, who is also credited with being one of Britain’s most energetic womanisers (one newspaper report claims he has 40 children).

Of course the “authorities” have done their best to stifle London’s alternative heartbeat and the author catalogues the Metropolitan Police’s campaign against “male vice”; the 1959 Street Offences Act which was designed to take prostitutes off the streets but forced them instead into the hands of pimps; the work of the hugely corrupt detectives in the Obscene Publications Squad and Flying Squad.

Somehow London’s Hogarthian tradition has repelled all attempts to tame it. It continues to nourish generation upon generation of newcomers. It is, say the artists Gilbert and George, the only city where you can feel the whole world. It may be on the edge of chaos, but it is still making the rules, and then breaking them.