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Underground (British Subculture)
The British counter-culture or underground scene developed during the mid-1960s, and was linked to the hippie subculture of the United States. Its primary focus was around Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill in London. It generated its own magazines and newspapers, bands, clubs and alternative lifestyle, associated with cannabis and LSD use and a strong socio-political revolutionary agenda to create an alternative society. Beat generation influence Many in the blossoming underground movement were influenced by 1950s Beat generation writers such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who paved the way for the hippies and the counterculture of the 1960s. During the 1960s, the Beat writers engaged in symbiotic evolution with freethinking academics including experimental psychologist Timothy Leary. An example of the cross-over of beat poetry and music can be seen when Burroughs appeared at the Phun City festival, organised in 24–26 July 1970 by Mick Farren with underground ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Timothy Leary
Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs. Evaluations of Leary are polarized, ranging from "bold oracle" to "publicity hound". According to poet Allen Ginsberg, he was "a hero of American consciousness", while writer Tom Robbins called him a "brave neuronaut". President Richard Nixon disagreed, calling Leary "the most dangerous man in America". During the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the counterculture movement, Leary was arrested 36 times. As a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, Leary founded the Harvard Psilocybin Project after a revealing experience with magic mushrooms he had in Mexico in 1960. For two years, he tested psilocybin's therapeutic effects, in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. He also experimented with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), which was also legal in the U.S. at the time. Other Harvard faculty que ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Hopkins (political Activist)
John Victor Lindsay "Hoppy" Hopkins (15 August 1937 – 30 January 2015) was a British photographer, journalist, researcher and political activist, and "one of the best-known underground figures of 'Swinging London' " in the late 1960s. He also co-founded the highly influential nightclub venue UFO Club, UFO. Life Hopkins was born on 15 August 1937 in Slough, Berkshire, England. After attending Felsted School in Essex, Hopkins went on to graduate in 1958 with a degree in physics and mathematics from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which he had entered on a scholarship in 1955, and he began to work as a laboratory technician at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, Oxfordshire. When he took a trip to Moscow to attend a Communist youth festival, his security clearance was revoked. Hopkins then re-located to London at the beginning of 1960, and began to work as a photographer for newspapers and music magazines including ''Jazz News'', ''The Guardian'', ''Melody Maker'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
International Times
''International Times'' (''it'' or ''IT'') is the name of various Underground press, underground newspapers, with the original title founded in London in 1966 and running until October 1973. Editors included John Hopkins (political activist), John "Hoppy" Hopkins, David Zane Mairowitz, David Mairowitz, Roger Hutchinson (writer), Roger Hutchinson, Peter Stansill, Barry Miles, Jim Haynes and playwright Tom McGrath (playwright), Tom McGrath. Jack Moore, avant-garde writer William Levy (author), William Levy and Mick Farren, singer of The Deviants (band), The Deviants, also edited at various periods. The paper's logo is a black-and-white image of Theda Bara, vampish star of silent films. The founders' intention had been to use an image of actress Clara Bow, 1920s ''It girl'', but a picture of Theda Bara was used by accident and, once deployed, not changed. Paul McCartney donated to the paper as did Allen Ginsberg through his Committee on Poetry foundation. The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Absolute Beginners (novel)
''Absolute Beginners'' is a novel by Colin MacInnes, written and set in 1958 London, England. It was published in 1959. The novel is the second of MacInnes' London Trilogy, coming after '' City of Spades'' (1958) and before ''Mr. Love and Justice'' (1960). Each novel is self-contained, with no shared characters. Introduction ''Absolute Beginners'' is written from the first-person perspective of a teenage freelance photographer, who lives in a rundown yet vibrant part of West London he calls Napoli. The area is home to a large number of Caribbean immigrants, as well as English people on the margins of society, such as homosexuals and drug addicts. The themes of the novel are the narrator's opinions on the newly formed youth culture and its fixation on clothes and jazz music, his love for his ex-girlfriend Crêpe Suzette, the illness of his father, and simmering racial tensions in the summer of the Notting Hill race riots. Plot summary The novel is divided into four sectio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Colin MacInnes
Colin MacInnes (20 August 1914 – 22 April 1976) was an English novelist and journalist. Early life MacInnes was born in London, England, son of singer James Campbell McInnes and novelist Angela Mackail, who was the granddaughter of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones and also related to Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin. MacInnes's parents divorced in 1917. His mother remarried and the family relocated to Australia in 1920, living in Malvern, Melbourne. He attended Scotch College and, for much of his childhood, was known as Colin Thirkell, the surname of his mother's second husband. Later he used his father's surname McInnes, afterwards changing it to MacInnes. He had an older brother, Graham McInnes, and a younger half-brother, Lance Thirkell. He worked in Brussels from 1930 until 1935, then studied painting in London at the London Polytechnic school and the School of Drawing and Painting in Euston Road. Towards the end of his life, he stayed at the home ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bohemianism
Bohemianism is a social and cultural movement that has, at its core, a way of life away from society's conventional norms and expectations. The term originates from the French ''bohème'' and spread to the English-speaking world. It was used to describe mid-19th-century non-traditional lifestyles, especially of artists, writers, journalists, musicians, and actors in major European cities. Bohemian is a 19th-century historical and literary topos that places the milieu of young metropolitan artists and intellectuals—particularly those of the Latin Quarter in Paris—in a context of poverty, hunger, appreciation of friendship, idealization of art and contempt for money. Based on this topos, the most diverse real-world subcultures are often referred to as "bohemian" in a figurative sense, especially (but by no means exclusively) if they show traits of a precariat. Bohemians were associated with unorthodox or anti-establishment political or social viewpoints expressed through f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Freak Scene
The freak scene was originally a component of the Bohemianism, bohemian subculture which began in California in the mid-1960s, associated with (or part of) the Hippies, hippie movement. The term is also used to refer to the post-hippie and pre-Punk subculture, punk period of the early to mid-1970s. It can be viewed as encompassing a range of disparate groups including hippies, pacifists, Yippies, politicized radicals, as well as psychedelic music, psychedelic and progressive rock fans. Those connected with the subculture often attended rock festivals, free festivals, happenings, and alternative society gatherings of various kinds. Origins In the United States of the 1960s, especially during the heyday of the hippie counterculture on the west coast, many teens and young adults that were disillusioned with the austere confines of the postwar, suburbanite American way of life, and some of the resultant countercultural and New Left movements defined themselves as "freaks". During ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shagrat (band)
Shagrat was a British supergroup formed by Steve Peregrin Took and Mick Farren in February 1970 after they split with Twink, their partner in the prototype Pink Fairies supergroup of late 1969. They recruited Larry Wallis (guitar, backing vocals) and Tim Taylor (bass), both formerly of The Entire Sioux Nation. Farren left the band shortly after its establishment and never recorded or performed with them (although he gave some press interviews on the formative band's behalf during this time). Shagrat then became Took's band outright with Wallis, Taylor, Phil Lenoir (drums), and later Dave Bidwell (percussion). As well as being an offshoot of the birth of the original Pink Fairies incarnation of 1970–1972, Shagrat set the template for Took's solo/frontman career (into which the band eventually mutated). Shagrat also proved to be an ancestor of both the 1973 Pink Fairies incarnation which recorded the '' Kings Of Oblivion'' album and also the founding Motörhead incarnati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pink Fairies
Pink Fairies are an English proto-punk rock band initially active in the London (Ladbroke Grove) underground and psychedelic scene of the early 1970s. They promoted free music, drug use, and anarchy, and often performed impromptu gigs and other stunts, such as playing for nothing outside the gates at the Bath and Isle of Wight pop festivals in 1970, as well as appearing at Phun City, the first Glastonbury and many other free festivals including Windsor and Trentishoe. History Paul Rudolph incarnation, 1969–1972 The group were formed after the three musicians from the Deviants ( Paul Rudolph, guitar and vocals, Duncan Sanderson, bass and Russell Hunter, born Barry Russell Hunter, drums), dismissed their singer and leader Mick Farren during a disastrous tour of the West Coast of the United States. Prior to the tour, these musicians had collaborated on the '' Think Pink'' solo album by Twink, former drummer of the Pretty Things. Most of the musicians involved were membe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edgar Broughton Band
Edgar Broughton Band were a British blues rock band founded in Warwick in 1968, and in their initial form were operative through to 1976. The group were also a significant influence on the emerging politically conscious and spiritually aware proto punk scene of the 1970s. They were a power trio consisting of brothers Edgar (vocals and guitar) and Steve Broughton (drums) with Arthur Grant (bass), which was augmented at various times by a second guitarist and/or keyboardist, significantly Victor Unitt. They released five studio albums, including '' Sing Brother Sing'' (UK Albums Chart #18), and six singles, including " Out Demons Out" ( UK Singles Chart #39), on the EMI Harvest label and one further studio album for NEMS. The group reformed from 1978 to 1982, initially renamed as The Broughtons, issuing two more studio albums, and again from 2006 to 2010 with Edgar's son Luke for live appearances only. Career The band started their career as a blues group under the name of T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kevin Ayers
Kevin Ayers (16 August 1944 – 18 February 2013) was an English singer-songwriter who was active in the English psychedelic music movement. Ayers was a founding member of the psychedelic band Soft Machine in the mid-1960s, and was closely associated with the Canterbury scene. He recorded a series of albums as a solo artist and over the years worked with Brian Eno, Syd Barrett, Bridget St John, John Cale, Elton John, Robert Wyatt, Andy Summers, Mike Oldfield, Nico and Ollie Halsall, among others. After living for many years in Deià, Mallorca, he returned to the United Kingdom in the mid-1990s before moving to the south of France. His last album, ''The Unfairground'', was released in 2007. The British rock journalist Nick Kent wrote: "Kevin Ayers and Syd Barrett were the two most important people in British pop music. Everything that came after came from them." Biography Early life Ayers was born in Herne Bay, Kent, the son of BBC producer Rowan Ayers. Following his parents' di ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
