Author: Adam

Dear Adam 

I’m sure you are right about this but no research has been done as far as I know, and I can’t think how one could do it. Scientific methods are rather blunt and crude and not suited for something as evanescent and subtle as this. Do please tell us more

Rupert Sheldrake

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Dear Rupert,

You have put your finger directly on the problem: if improvising musicians were aware that they were being scientifically tested for evidence of telepathic powers they would almost certainly be too self-conscious to provide any. However, some observations might be interesting. 

The act of plucking music out of the air, spontaneous composition and performance, relies on the participating musicians having a great sense of intuitive sympathy with each other. There are many forms of this. The kind of improvisation I cited to your colleague was Bebop – the school of jazz pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (amongst others) in the mid-1940s. Tragically, this coincided with a recording ban (to do with the United States war effort) so there is very little recorded evidence of what they achieved in the precise moments of their innovations. I have no idea how much, if any, technical knowledge of music you have, or if you have any interest in jazz, but I will plough on.

The great leap forward that they made relied on a hitherto unrealized thoroughness of knowledge of harmonic and rhythmic circumstances. They had a technical and theoretical facility that was right at the forefront of what was considered possible at the time. On an individual level, Parker seemed to find this came naturally (he was often described as a genius) whereas Gillespie had worked methodically and systematically to arrive at this point over the course of several years. When they met, they recognized immediately that they were working on similar lines and formed a musical partnership whereby they would play trumpet (Gillespie) and alto saxophone (Parker) in front of whatever rhythm sections they could find who were at all sympathetic to their ideas. Their musical revolution spread very quickly amongst musicians. 

But what of telepathy? There were basically two frameworks they would use: the 12 bar blues and the 32 bar popular song form known as ‘Rhythm Changes’ (often known as “I Got Rhythm”). Whoever was leading the series of improvisations would convolute these frameworks to such an extent, and at such a speed, as to make it as difficult as possible for the other to anticipate or improve or complement it. This was part of the game: to one-up each other. But how did they do this? 1. Memory – of the frameworks involved, and of the results of previous “bouts” 2. Accumulated knowledge – of what gambits were available at any given moment in a constantly shifting landscape of possibilities. 3. Judgment – the wisdom, taste and experience to know what will work.

This makes it sound a bit like a boxing match but the goal was always music. To actually make music that was pleasing to the ear whilst systematically exhausting all possible permutations of the material. In a completely different context, J.S. Bach attempted something similar in his “Art Of Fugue” and “Musical Offering”. But to return to those three conditions, In my opinion it is the second – accumulated knowledge – that gives rise to telepathic activity. Parker KNEW that Gillespie had as thorough an understanding as he did, and vice versa, and that they were both of them at the cutting edge of uncharted musical territory, creating on their feet, precisely in the moment. A situation like this is very unusual and it created very unusual results. I wish I could point you at specific examples but, as I say, most of what they did went unrecorded. All of this conjecture I am engaging in is based on oral histories and scraps of unofficial recordings made by enthusiastic amateurs (e.g., Dean Benedetti) – also, on retroactive analysis based on studying recordings that DID get made (e.g. “The Famous Alto break”).

Essentially, jazz is a music that is founded on the ideal of telepathy. The idea that musicians will feel such empathy with each other that they will be able to produce beautiful music together more or less spontaneously. It depends, to some extent, whether or not you acknowledge intuitiveness as a form of telepathy. Certainly a jazz musician (once he has mastered the basics) will be judged by his peers on his intuitive skills. A highly skilled technician who “doesn’t listen” will never be as highly valued by other musicians as someone who maybe has less technical facility but a greater intuitive understanding of what is appropriate in a given or spontaneously improvised musical setting

There are, of course, other forms of musical improvisation. “Free Improv” has become quite a rarity nowadays but I recall seeing AMM perform on the South Bank. They dispensed with form altogether and often made sounds with “found objects”. The musical collective Henry Cow formed a sort of bridge between the extremism of AMM and more conventional forms of music making. This raises philosophical questions along the lines of “what is music?” which I don’t want to get into here. Although interesting, like a lot of philosophical questions, it is a massive digression. Let us just say that most people know what music sounds like and what it is for. Certainly small children do.

But one can’t run away from philosophy and it may be that that is the central problem: some things just cannot be quantified, measured, precisely understood and that is precisely why the scientific establishment are wary of, or downright hostile towards discussions on telepathy and why the music of such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie is not taught at music schools with the same vigour as Bach or Mozart (both of whom were, ironically, prodigious improvisers). I remember asking my teacher why the music of Terry Riley was not as “respected” in academic circles as that of Philip Glass or Steve Reich. “Because he’s an improviser”, replied my teacher. “The academics don’t know what to make of improvisation. It makes them nervous.”

Does this ring any bells with you?

I am sorry if I’ve waffled on without giving any precise examples. I have studied Indian Classical Music too, not in depth but enough to see that they have integrated improvisation into their formal pieces in a natural and unforced way that we in the West could learn a great deal from. We could also talk about the work of John Coltrane and Rashied Ali but it’s just more of the same, only more concentrated (it also excludes the casual listener in a way that a lot of Parker and Gillespie’s work did not.)

I do hope that this has been of some interest to you.

All the best

Adam Blake

So sad to hear of the death of Clem Burke from cancer. He was such a lovely guy – a real gentleman of rock’n’roll. 

I have a couple of Clem Burke stories. In the Spring of 1996 I did a little tour of Spain with a Los Angeles band named The Plimsouls. I was the only guitar tech and it was quite a demanding job. They had nine guitars between them, in all different tunings, and they liked them to be re-strung if possible after every gig. I would close my eyes at night and see the tuning meter. Anyway, Clem was drumming for this band and it took me at least three days to realise who he was. The penny finally dropped: Oh my God! You’re Clem Burke the drummer from Blondie. Clem smiled. I think he liked that I hadn’t known who he was and we became fast friends. We bonded over The Who and Jimmy Reed. Such things can form deep bonds. Especially on tour. Clem had the New York/ New Jersey attitude down to the nth degree. I’ve never seen anybody shrug with such effortless insouciance. Clem was on a strict macrobiotic diet at the time and therefore could not eat 95% of the food that was set in front of him. In Spain they had the severed legs of dead animals hanging over the counter in most of the cafes we frequented so he was basically fasting most of the time. This did not stop him from drumming like a Keith Moon crazed maniac on all the gigs. Nor did he ever once complain. When the tour ended we kept in touch for a little while. The Plimsouls disbanded due to real life getting in the way. Peter Case had a flourishing solo career. Eddie Munez had a good job as an illustrator. Blondie got back together. Clem went back to being an international rock star. But still he took the time to send me a handwritten note telling me of the band’s sad demise and when Blondie came to London he got in touch to invite me to the show at the Drury Lane Theatre. With my guest ticket was a backstage pass so I ‘went round’, as you do, and Clem was the genial host, introducing me to the singer who looked like the coolest auntie you never had, taking off her make up. She was lovely, but I didn’t stick around to make a nuisance of myself. “If you’re ever in LA, give me a call”, said Clem. 

Well it so happened that I WAS in LA, a year or so later, visiting a dear friend. So I called the number Clem had given me. He picked up straight away and asked me for the address where I was staying. I gave it to him. “Give me 45 minutes,” he said. 45 minutes later he turned up in his beautiful rock’n’roll car and gave me a guided tour of his Los Angeles. We stopped at a juice bar on Santa Monica. He bought me a carrot juice. We clicked paper cups. “Welcome to Hollywood!” said Clem. We walked to the end of Santa Monica pier and I had my little American epiphany. Very poignant to consider now, with the unravelling of the America I loved. “I get it!” I said to myself. “I understand!” What the Americans get so protective about. The whole American THING revealed itself to me in a blinding rock’n’roll flash. All those Beach Boys songs suddenly made sense. I know it’s silly but it’s a very fond memory and Clem made that happen for me. It was him. I told him about it and he just smiled. What could he say? 

We ended up in a diner. I offered to pay my whack but Clem wouldn’t hear of it. We said our goodbyes and I never really saw him again until a couple of years ago when my old friend Kevin Armstrong brought the ‘Lust For Life’ band to Glasgow. Trish and I went and had a great old time, dancing around to the rock’n’roll and I went backstage afterwards, looking forward to catching up with Clem. But I don’t think he remembered me and I didn’t want to press the case and besides, Kevin was being such a gracious host, introducing me and Trish to all sorts of people. It was a lovely evening. As I left Clem was sitting in an armchair looking tired. 

Now he’s gone. Bloody cancer. Bless his rock’n’roll heart. Thank you, Clem. Wherever Keith Moon is playing, that’s where he’ll be.

It has been over ten years since Hoppy died of Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s accompanied – as it so often is – by Lewy Body Dementia. It is a slow and cruel death. In Hoppy’s case, it took just over seven years to kill him. It involves the slow atrophying of the mental faculties. Hoppy regarded it as an observational project – “becoming stupid” – but it was a tragedy nonetheless as he had such a fine mind. I had the privilege of being his friend. In his last eighteen months or so, I acted as his secretary and PA. In his last weeks, I was one of his primary carers. 

Up until his diagnosis in 2007, Hoppy worked in video – a medium he pioneered. He began in 1969 with some video equipment donated by John Lennon and Ringo Starr. He went on to found the Centre for Advanced TV Studies at his video editing facility, Fantasy Factory. As Joe Boyd pointed out in his obituary, Hoppy’s goal was always the democratisation of communication and, to this end, he wrote many articles in trade papers and organised many seminars for people who would otherwise not have had access to video equipment. He liked that video was cheap, whereas film was expensive. It was a matter of some regret to him that his work in video was so overshadowed by his work as a photographer but he took it philosophically. He was undoubtedly one of the best photographers of the 60s – as his book “From The Hip” attests. Many of the images are up online. He also worked as a part time botanist for the Royal Horticultural Society – a job he very much enjoyed. Hoppy was a kind man, an eternally open minded man. A brilliant scientist who took great pleasure in absurdity and in that which confounds science and, in this, he was a great teacher. He enjoyed life to the full. He danced, he played piano – he was particularly fond of Erroll Garner and Jimmy Yancey – and was always a snappy dresser, in the psychedelic stye. He loved women, and women loved him. Even in his last illness he had a beautiful young carer who brought him flowers and giggled whenever he smiled at her. He was stylish. Well into his 40s he would roller-skate around London. He had a classic English gift for understatement. In one of his last lucid intervals I said to him that he seemed to be experiencing several different realities simultaneously. “Yes”, he replied. “It’s most inconvenient.”

How did I meet him? Long story. I wrote it up in an open letter to Mike Lesser who was editor of International Times in 1978 and who was subsequently responsible for archiving International Times online.

In December 1977, aged 17, I had a fit of teenage rebelliousness and quit school, chucking in my ‘A’ levels to become a full time rock’n’roll musician. My parents were at war with each other at the time, going through a very unpleasant divorce, so although they were disappointed they didn’t really try to stop me. 

In January 1978 I realised that I would have to get a job of some kind so, answering an advert in the Evening Standard I got a job as a telephone salesman, selling advertising space over the phone. A horrendous job that I could not have even countenanced had I had any idea what I was doing, which I didn’t. I was assigned to sell advertising space in the Port Of London Police Motor Club quarterly journal. A more obscure and irreIevent periodical it would be hard to envisage. I had to read a corny pitch script down the phone to car hire companies and try and convince them to blow their annual advertising budget on an advert that would do them virtually no good at all. After a couple of weeks of this I realised I had to quit but I thought I’d have a little fun with it before I did. I asked myself: who would be the least likely people to place an advert in such a journal? Answer: The Sex Pistols. So I called up their management office and pitched my idea to them. They thought it was a good idea but there was a snag: The Sex Pistols had broken up the night before in San Francisco. Thus I was one of the first people in the UK to learn of their sad demise. OK. So who would be the second least likely people to advertise in this thing? The counterculture newspaper: International Times (always knows as IT).

IT was functioning at the time and I had an up to date issue with a telephone number which I called. Editor Mike Lesser answered the phone. I explained my idea to him and he immediately said:

“Sure. We’ll do a swap ad.”

“What’s a swap ad?” I asked. 

“You advertise with us, we advertise with you”, he patiently explained. 

I expressed my doubts that this idea would be well received by my paymasters but I promised that I would put it to them and get back to him. This I did. They laughed at me and told me not to be so bloody silly. I relayed this sad news to Mike. I explained that I wanted to quit this nothing job and, on the spur of the moment, offered my services to him as a writer. He said “sure”, and invited me to the next editorial meeting. This was scheduled to take place the following week at an apartment in Notting Hill. I turned up to the meeting. As well as Mike Lesser, there were about six or seven people seated around a big table. In the middle of the table was a large brick of hashish. Mike introduced me to everyone present and I took a seat. As the meeting progressed, the brick of hash was dipped into repeatedly and within half an hour or so I was stoned out of my gourd. Somehow the conversation turned around to the idea of writing and publishing The Definitive History Of IT. Everyone looked at me.

“Why are you looking at me?” I asked.

“Because you’re perfect for the job!” Said Mike, amongst general agreement. “You’re young, you’re fresh, you have no personal vendettas, no scores to settle, you’re keen. You’re perfect.” 

Gulp! 

“But wouldn’t this be rather a big article?” I stammered.

“Article? This is a book, man!” replied Mike with great enthusiasm. 

“But where do I start?” I asked in trepidation. 

“You start”, said Mike with great emphasis, “with HOPPY.”

Everyone in the room nodded in agreement. You start with Hoppy. 

What could I say? I accepted the assignment. Mike furnished me with Hoppy’s number and assured me that he was friendly and that he would warn him I was going to call. 

So I called him: 405-6862. I can remember the number to this day. Hoppy answered the phone, yes, he was expecting my call. We made a date and I went round to conduct the interview – the first interview I ever did. I was nervous as hell when I rang the doorbell. Hoppy showed me into the living room at 42 Theobalds Road – commercial premises not designed for domestic arrangements. At that time, Hoppy had a silk parachute hung upside-down from the ceiling. I took in the ambience as well as this extraordinary man and it was love at first sight. I wanted this man to be my cosmic dad. (I loved my own dad very much but he was being a bit…difficult at the time.) 

Hoppy wouldn’t let me record the interview. He insisted I take notes. He told me that I would remember it much better that way. He was right, of course. And he told me the whole story, of the foundation of the UK counterculture and the founding of IT. Chapter and verse. It was, maybe, the first time that he had really told the story. He had to tell it so many times later but at that time – early 1978 – it was still pretty much undocumented. It was an engaging story, to say the least. It still is. Hoppy chose to leave off his narrative around the time that BIT (the information and legal advice network) was formed and referred me on to Mick Farren. Farren was very friendly but he was stoned when I arrived to interview him, and he got me stoned and we ended up just talking about The Who and that, I am ashamed to say, was that. I was defeated by the hugeness of the task in hand and the daunting prospect of phoning up Farren and asking if we could do it again under more sober circumstances (I hadn’t yet grasped that a central feature of the counterculture was the ability to do anything whilst stoned.)

Getting back to Hoppy. I had mentioned that I was an aspiring musician and Hoppy, typically, immediately fished out a blank tape and told me to put some of my music on it and return it so that he could hear it. I was gobsmacked. He was really encouraging. So I did. When I brought the tape back, Hoppy wasn’t there but his partner Sue received me very genially. She assured me that Hoppy wouldn’t think I had ripped him off because I had taken a while to get the tape together. She got me stoned. There’s a surprise. Thus began my 37 year friendship with Hoppy and Sue. Over the years they came to many of my gigs and parties and suchlike. Hoppy would even sometimes take photographs which were invariably of the highest quality – even if he tended to dismiss them. He would give me little jobs from time to time, knowing I was broke. I occasionally worked in a small tape-op capacity for Fantasy Factory. It was strangely familiar, seeing as my family were all in the TV business. In 1988, Hoppy gave me a job sorting out his negatives which were in complete disarray. My gig was to put them in order and try and identify the subjects by holding the negs up to the light at an angle. I gradually realised that I was handling unpublished photographs of some of the most photographed people in the 60s. I said to Hoppy: “you know what you’ve got here?” He chuckled and said: “you tell me.” 

Unpublished photographs of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones at their mid-60s peak for a start, I said! Hoppy was unimpressed. He was much more interested in the social history, the photographs of London as it had been, the photographic compositions. The pictures of pop stars were just gigs he had done for money, for Melody Maker etc. I explained that it was not so much about how good the photos were as who they were of. Hoppy had an instinctive distaste for this idea but eventually, after a great deal of cajoling, Hoppy suggested I gather together what I thought would be the most attractive shots to a photo gallery and he would make up a couple of contact sheets for me to punt on his behalf. Thus armed with some of the most iconic, and unseen, shots of “people dressed up as the 60s” as Hoppy used to call it, I made an appointment with a posh photo gallery in Notting Hill. I was received politely but kept waiting. A serious young man eventually emerged and I handed over the contact sheets. He got out his magnifying glass. It really was one of the most delicious moments, one to savour, knowing full well that I had something he very much wanted – although he didn’t know it yet. I watched as he tried to stay cool. 

“You say these are unpublished?” he said, after a very pregnant pause. 

“Yes.” I smiled. 

“When can we meet this Mr Hopkins?”

We phoned Hoppy from the photo gallery’s office. He was in. I could hear the chuckle in his voice as an appointment was made – which I was invited to attend. For a few weeks there, I was Hoppy’s agent – and he paid me as one, with statements attached to notes saying things like: “this won’t buy many tins of beans”. At the meeting, Hoppy impressed the gallery like the visiting exotic that he was. A deal was struck and not long after, The Photographer’s Gallery in Notting Hill Gate presented Hoppy’s first fine art photography exhibition. The negs I had handled and identified were made into giant prints and sold for posh money. That was nice. 

Of course, Hoppy had to get a proper agent after that and I was relieved that he did. A smart lady, Addie Vassi, who knew about photography and really appreciated Hoppy’s work. She got it. Eventually she went off to found her own gallery in Amsterdam but she always kept in touch and one of the first shows she put on at her new gallery was one of Hoppy’s pictures. By then, Hoppy had had many exhibitions and shows and his photos were appearing in many books – the latest being the cover of the most recent biography of William Burroughs. He eventually agreed to do a book, “From The Hip” – published by Damiani Editore. He gave me a copy when it was finally ready (he said he was 95% happy with the printing). It was inscribed: “Adam – it’s all your fault, innit? Hoppy”.

To say I miss him would be an understatement. I think about him every day. In this sense, ten years since his death seems so much longer – and also like no time at all. Hoppy would have loved to have been following the developments in quantum theory since his death. I suspect he probably is anyway, skating round the universe with a big psychedelic smile on his face. He was a one off. A natural leader, who totally opposed the idea of leaders. How lucky I was to know him. How empty the world is without him.

Jimi Hendrix has been dead so long sometimes it’s hard to believe he was once alive and, almost certainly, playing the guitar. But his influence continues to be by far the biggest on guitar players – old and young and from beginners to advanced. I have made here a few general observations about his playing. Any factual errors I am grateful to have pointed out. The opinions are obviously my own.  

The first and most important thing to note about Jimi Hendrix is that from the age of about 12 he played guitar as much as he possibly could. In his youth this would have taken the form of rigorous practice. He was self-taught so he would have worked out his own regimen, but it would have been impossible for him to have have attained the level of technical proficiency that he did without a great deal of work. Hard work is not necessarily something that most people associate with Hendrix. This is a mistake. Hendrix worked very hard indeed. Firstly by mastering the rudiments of guitar very quickly – probably by about the age of 15, secondly on the blues/r’n’b (’chitlin circuit’) package tours from 1962 to 65 and thirdly as a star in his own right. Recording, touring, interviews, promo – it’s astonishing that he found time to take all those drugs and have sex with all those women as well as developing such an extraordinary guitar style. Obviously, he was prepared to put the hours in.

The second most important thing about Hendrix’s guitar playing is its absolute fearlessness. He played at very high volume but this is not the same thing. His playing is always bold, prepared to take risks, always restlessly searching for new ways to play the old licks. In his later months (for his career as a successful composer and performer can be measured in months rather than years), one can imagine how frustrated he must have been at having to play material that no longer interested him, and his heroic and usually successful attempts to find new ways of playing it. 

Hendrix’s guitar style did not appear out of nowhere. His time on the soul/r’nb package tours would have afforded him the opportunities to study many highly accomplished guitarists at first hand. Who knows? He probably sat in dressing rooms with the likes of Albert Collins, Ike Turner, Bobby Womack, Steve Cropper, Buddy Guy, Earl Hooker, Magic Sam, Curtis Mayfield. There’s no doubt that he was an exceptionally adept study. He absorbed all of the stylistic traits of these as well as listening closely to the recordings of Albert, Freddy and B B King, Otis Rush, as well as the usual Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Elmore James and John Lee Hooker. More unusually, he was also interested in the old pre-war country blues of the likes of Robert Johnson which he might have come across trawling the folkie dives of Greenwich Village in late ’65/early ’66 when he had more or less given up on making a career for himself on the soul/r’n’b circuit where had had served his apprenticeship. This is also where he encountered the music of Bob Dylan which had such an effect on his development as a singer/songwriter. It can’t be overstated how much Hendrix loved Dylan but this had little bearing on his guitar playing beyond, perhaps, underlining for him that occasionally it’s OK to just play simple tonic chords in root positions. 

Much has been made of Hendrix’s fondness for 9th chords. Certainly he used the #9 chord a great deal. So much so that it is often referred to by musicians as ‘The Jimi Hendrix Chord’. The #9 chord is a very dramatic chord. It contains both the major and minor 3rd, creating what musicologists sometimes call ‘false relations’. Is it major or minor? Either way, Jimi used it a lot. It’s the signature sound of “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)”, “Purple Haze”, “Stone Free”, “Foxy Lady”. But Jimi liked the suspended 9th chord a lot too. He would construct melodies around strings of suspended 9ths (eg, the intro and outro to “Castles Made Of Sand”), and would insert them into the choruses of otherwise ‘heavy’ songs like “Fire” and “Foxy Lady”. He liked suspended 9ths on minor chords too (“Villa Nova Junction”). A thorough understanding of how to use 9ths is central to Hendrix’s style. 

The bedrock of his guitar playing is, of course, the blues – at which he was an absolute master. As a straight Chicago style blues soloist he was at least the equal of any of his contemporaries (Magic Sam or Buddy Guy, for example) and streets ahead of such as Eric Clapton or Mike Bloomfield. His ability to use the blues scale in the most exquisitely expressive way – his control of bends, dynamics, his use of space (eg, the Albert Hall take of Elmore James’s “Bleeding Heart”), all mark him out as by far the most impressive blues player of his generation. But blues was just one of the styles he played. He also knew jazz and soul, and he also created his own uniquely mutated blend of psychedelia. The late Ian MacDonald and the very much alive Charles Shaar Murray have pointed out that the songs Hendrix wrote when he first came to London in Autumn ’66 are as much in thrall to The Beatles “Tomorrow Never Knows” or The Who and The Yardbirds experiments with feedback as they are to the black American musical traditions that Hendrix had grown up with. From the guitar playing point of view this leads us to the other most important element of Hendrix’s style: His use of the guitar as a sonic sound source. He would use everything at his disposal to create new aleatoric musical sounds. Obviously a lot of this was achieved with effects pedals: wah-wah, fuzz, phasers, dopplatone etc – very primitive by today’s standards but absolutely up to the minute for the late 60s. In the studio he would spend hours playing with backwards tapes, stereo echo, flanging etc. But strictly from the guitar end, Hendrix used every possible sonic possibility the Fender Stratocaster could offer. Interestingly, he never (to my knowledge) experimented with open tunings and he only ever used slide in the most casual way (a beer can, a lighter, a knife) but the slide solo on “All Along The Watchtower” remains a miraculous achievement. I have never heard anyone able to replicate it. He would routinely remove the plate at the back of the guitar that housed the springs for the tremolo unit and use these springs in his music. He was an unsurpassed master at the use of the tremolo arm and would also use the pick up switch to create rhythmic asides (eg. “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)”). This side of his music is well represented on “3rd Stone From The Sun”, “EXP”, “And The Gods Made Love” – all of them quite unique in their way and quite extraordinary in the context of music that was ostensibly described as ‘pop’.

Hendrix liked to dabble with jazz. His use of a perfectly executed tritone substitution at the end of the 2nd chorus of “Villanova Junction” at Woodstock demonstrates that he was conversant with jazz harmony (whilst gesticulating to the rhythm section what the hell was going on) but one senses that he was wary of jazz – of getting in too deep. In interviews he was sometimes quite scathing about people playing endless choruses of “How High The Moon” and showing off for each other so it’s possible he had some bad experiences in his early career. Nevertheless, the whole of Miles Davis’s ‘electric’ phase (from “Bitches Brew” and “In A Silent Way” through to “Pangea”) is unimaginable without Hendrix’s influence, likewise therefore the whole Mahavishnu/ Return To Forever thing over which we will draw a discreet veil for present purposes. 

Hendrix played loud electric guitar and, apart from one absolutely gorgeous exception (“Hear My Train A-Comin’”), never played acoustic. But at even the highest volume, he played with great care and attention (unless he was upset or angry, which did happen sometimes). He would routinely turn the amplifiers up full and used the volume control on the guitar for all his wide dynamic interplay. His dynamic range was absolutely enormous, possibly still the widest of any electric guitarist. The delicacy of “Little Wing” or “The Wind Cries Mary” – interpolating those beautiful Curtis Mayfield double stops combined with his own little melodies in 4ths and suspended 2nds, so hard to finger and even harder to make them sound just right – these could give way at a moment’s notice to simply the biggest guitar sound ever heard (it still astonishes me to think that “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” is just ONE GUITAR.)

I think that’ll do for now. If I think of anything else, I’ll add it. 

Bottom line: You want to play like Jimi Hendrix? PRACTICE!

I first became aware of “Amazing Grace” when Judy Collins had a hit with an acapella version in about 1971. I knew nothing about the song but I thought it was beautiful. I thought Judy Collins was beautiful too. I picked up the 45 as a cut-out for 30p. I daresay my mother was a bit surprised to hear a Christian hymn coming out of my bedroom as a change from T.Rex and The Beatles but she didn’t say anything. 

Then it cropped up on Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells A Story” album which I bought with my 12th birthday money. It was unexpected as it was uncredited on the sleeve. Rod sings it beautifully, to Ronnie Wood’s acoustic slide guitar. Thus it became part of my DNA as I played that album into the ground (as I’m sure did everyone who bought it).

Some years later, I had discovered the joys of the country blues and I heard Mississippi Fred McDowell doing it. I began to realise that there was a small sub-genre of the blues that was not Gospel but was religious (Christian) in subject matter. Sanctified blues. Lightnin’ Hopkins, taking a break from singing about women and gambling, would sing: “Jesus won’t you come by here, now is a needy time…” and it would stop me dead in my tracks every time. Blind Willie Johnson, the greatest slide guitar player ever recorded, dedicated every note he ever played to God – and lived a life and died a death so cruel it could have come straight from the Old Testament. 

Fast forward many years and I was busking as usual when a nurse came by and asked me if I would be interested in playing for the local old folks home. There was no money but I was promised NHS coffee and as many biscuits as I could eat. So I said yes and we fixed up a time. I arrived, and just before I went in to play the nurse told me that all the people I was to be playing to had advanced Alzheimers. OK…

I started playing. They completely ignored me. I thought I should try and play something they might know. So I played “Amazing Grace”. Every one of them started singing along. The whole room was full of people in their 80s and 90s who had lost their marbles but could sing the first verse of “Amazing Grace”. And me. After awhile I stopped and tried to play something else. No. They carried on singing “Amazing Grace” and several of them started dancing and swaying about. The nurses were chuckling. I was chuckling. We had quite a time of it. I told this story to a Christian couple I know (they know who they are) and said it was “cool”. 

“Yeah”, they laughed, “the Holy Spirit is cool”.

Most of my friends know I’ve been practicing Buddhism for 30 years or so but I feel that someone ought to play sanctified blues, even if it’s only me, and so I like to get up on a Sunday morning, if I’m able, put a suit on and go out and play a few sanctified melodies. Not too loud. I feel it would be hypocritical of me to sing them – but I sing a few words here and there, just to move the tune along. Today was interesting. I played “Amazing Grace” and a man stopped in front of me. He looked like a devil. He had very loud and expensive clothes and a dangerous look in his eye. He interrupted my playing. 

“What’s that?” he demanded. 

“Amazing Grace”, I replied. 

“No. That.” he said, pointing at my CD on my guitar case. “How much?”

“Eight quid”, I said. 

“Will you do it for a fiver?”

“Do you have to knock me down?” I asked.

“Yes”, he said, pulling out a £20 note. 

“I haven’t got change”, I said.

“I’ll get change”, he said. Five minutes later he returned with ten 50p coins. He handed them to me. I handed him a CD. “I like your music”, he said. Then he was gone. 

After that, I carried on playing. The music came out almost without my thinking about it. It sounded exactly right. I’ve rarely had such an enchanted sound as I had today. As I felt pleased with myself I thought about how one must put one’s ego at the service of the music, instead of putting the music at the service of one’s ego, and about how difficult this is. About how the greatest musicians are essentially vessels through which music passes. Not with all music of course, but with certain kinds – like Blind Willie Johnson or J.S.Bach or Vilayat Khan. The high mountains of music where the air is clean but not that many people travel. This sounds incredibly pompous but in actual fact demands absolute humility. As I was thinking about all this, I was earning money. Or money was appearing. I couldn’t decide. So many things to think about. An Irishman waited patiently until I took a break. He introduced himself and asked if I gave lessons. I told him that I did and I gave him my card. He gave me a fifty pound note. Nobody has ever done that before in nine years of busking. “Put that on account”, he said, and went off to buy me a coffee. 

It seemed I could see the condition of every soul who walked past me. I am not claiming for myself any special insight. Merely remarking that what is usually obscure to me seemed clear today. The children danced. The dogs barked. The Italian tourists ignored me. An Israeli lady stared at me for many minutes. We talked awhile. A Frenchman complimented my playing. The rain started. Then stopped. I will be gone from here soon. I will miss mornings like this.

I finished the Nico biography. It’s surely a good thing that the author – Jennifer Otter Bickerdike – is so keen to rescue Nico from being viewed purely from the perspective of the famous men with whom she had affairs. Why then does she quote virtually word for word from a particularly pornographic memoir by an ex member of The Doors on Nico’s fellatio technique? Could it be that her editor at Faber advised her that a certain amount of lurid sex sells books? Talk about disingenuous. This is just the most egregious example. Elsewhere we have talk of how she apparently preferred taking it from behind and how her last manager ached to oblige her in this regard. Right… 

In other respects, the biography is fairly standard. Bickerdike is to be congratulated for tracking down virtually everyone who ever had anything to do with her subject and for quoting from just about every interview she ever gave. Her writing style can be irritating. So many times she refers to Nico as “the blonde singer”, “the German chanteuse”, or just “the German”. Surely this is elementary tabloid journalism, unworthy of someone who brandishes her PhD in ‘Pop Culture’ in the first paragraph of the first chapter. Nevertheless, what emerges is a portrait of a person fatally damaged by her childhood growing up in the ruins of post-WW2 Germany. Stepping over rotting human corpses, stumbling through rubble, with no security at home or in her family – Christa Paffgen’s transformation into Nico the model, the singer, the Warhol Superstar, the film maker and eventually the helpless heroin addict is charted logically and with no small amount of sympathy. All of this is fine but what I cannot understand is why Bickerdike so studiously avoids making any attempt to discuss Nico’s actual music. Anyone who has paid any attention knows that “The Marble Index” and “Desertshore” in particular are extraordinary musical creations, quite unique and uncompromising visions of European Gothic high Romanticism. A glaring exception to Bickerdikes exhaustive index of quotes is Lester Bangs’s 1978 essay on “The Marble Index” which is, to my knowledge, the only serious critical attempt at understanding Nico’s vision. Surely this is more noteworthy than her list of lovers? I cannot believe that Bickerdike is unaware of this essay. Perhaps she is jealous that a grungy man could have had more perspicacity on her subject’s muse than she does (she is obviously deeply in love with Nico). 

Anyway. I’m glad I read it but I won’t be referring to it often. For the record, James Young’s “Songs They Never Play On The Radio” remains by far the best book on Nico, whose unflinching music remains as elusive and timeless as it ever was.

Interview conducted by Adam Blake, 20th July 2015

A.B: So, when did you first meet Hoppy?

G.K: Right. I can’t remember the actual day but it was in August of 1960. I’d come out of the Air Force – I’d been doing my National Service – I’d come out at a bit of a loss as what to do. I’d had an Art School education in Cheltenham – they didn’t give you a degree, they gave you a diploma, you did four years. If you wanted to go on with that, and use it in some way, the most likely was that you took a post-graduate teaching training course for a year. And I’d had one marked up but it wasn’t for another year so I was – I suppose it was gap year, really.  

I’d re-connected with the Art School in Cheltenham which was my hometown, and some of the students there I knew from before and some I’d met for the first time. And among this core of students, there were two card-carrying Communist party members. They suggested we got up a trip to Moscow, see what it was like behind the Iron Curtain. We got hold of a hearse, a 1937 Austin with a V-8 engine, we painted it yellow, I think we paid £25 for it. Anyway, we pooled money and we worked on this machine to get it fit for a 2000 mile trip. At the time I was working as a bus conductor, round Cheltenham, and we worked towards the idea of getting to Moscow. To make it economically viable there had to be about 11 or 12 people. So we put it around Cheltenham and the local network and we didn’t really get enough people. With our old school friends, old college friends, we had contacts in Oxford and Cambridge so we got notices put up there. Anybody wanted to join us the cost would be, I think it was about £50 to cover petrol, food, whatever. And there were a couple, I think three, maybe four people decided they’d like to come, and one of them was Hoppy.  

When I first caught sight of him we were driving with almost everybody else in the van through Deptford to the Dover Road – remember, no motorways then – and there was Hoppy waiting for us at New Cross. He had a worn Trilby, he had shoes that had a bar of leather stitched across them because they were standard issue at Winfrith Heath in Dorset, the Atomic Energy Establishment where he was working. So he obviously cared very little about his appearance. I was struck, probably in the same way that you were; he had some undefinable attraction. We got talking about cameras. I had a camera and I was very interested in photography. And we talked cameras. I had some grass, a little packet, that I’d been determined to take to Moscow and we shared it. I didn’t tell anybody else because they would have been too worried, but I assumed Hoppy would smoke – I don’t know why, just a hunch, and I was right and we shared it.

A.B: Wasn’t that very hard to find in those days?

G.K: There wasn’t any available in Cheltenham. I got it from people in Oxford. It used to be made up in five bob or ten bob deals. Somebody had obviously scored an ounce, which was beyond most people’s finances. And they’d cut it and divide it and there was a sort of special way of folding the paper so you got a little packet. I won’t tell you who I got it from because he is now a respected writer and it really, really irritates the hell out of him. I was very struck by Hoppy. We got held up in Germany and while we were there for a few days – have you seen that photograph I’ve taken of him? In a cellar looking place with his legs tucked up underneath him?

A.B: Yes, yes, you sent it to me.

G.K: Right. That was in Germany. Halfway to Moscow.

A.B: He looks like an absolute Bohemian.

G.K: He does, yes. We went to a dance in this place in Germany. And they all thought he was a Gypsy (laughs). But there was something – and you’ve probably noticed this – about Hoppy that he was sui generis. That you couldn’t imagine him having parents or brothers and sisters. He was something strange from another planet.

A.B: He was a unique person, undoubtedly.

G.K: When I saw those photographs of him as a young boy in the funeral programme, it’s almost unbelievable, you know… that he had had a normal childhood – had a bucket and spade and a tricycle – went rowing with his sister. I can’t imagine him having a sister. From what he told me she obviously thought he was from another planet too. 

So, we got friendly. When we got to Moscow, it wasn’t very nice weather and I remember one rainy afternoon he met some very dubious characters and they went down under a bridge on the Moskva river and he revealed that the holdall that he’d brought with him didn’t contain anything but nylon stockings. He sold them to these guys (laughs).

A.B: Such a hustler.

G.K: Yeah! Travelling across Europe we’d gone through customs post after customs post, the van had been searched.

A.B: You’d smoked all the grass by this point?

G.K: No, I don’t think so. It was in my pocket. People weren’t really aware of grass at that time. It wasn’t until the sixties that it really became a public issue. So customs weren’t aware that it was around but I did wonder why hadn’t they looked in Hoppy’s holdall? 

There was one lovely scene. We arrived at dawn on the Polish/Russian border, the sun was coming up across miles and miles of birch trees and the customs post was a dacha, the guys, the officers in charge had jodhpurs on. We all went in. They’d been playing chess, it was one of those kind of magical moments; they were so friendly and welcoming, probably we were such an anomaly in their dull routines – they were delighted. I’m glad I didn’t know about the nylons, it could have endangered us all actually. I just didn’t consider that I might be doing the same thing with my pot. 

On the other hand we weren’t used to military units turning round and snapping their gun at us because we made too quick a move, which happened occasionally in East Germany. I was filling in a form at one border or another and I was sitting on the bonnet of a car and I jumped down only to find that there was this great big loaded machine gun aiming at me. Quite tense! I think it was a year later? that the wall went up? So it was very, very tense. Europe. More tense than we realised. 

The next thing was I found Hoppy had left. Flown up to St Petersburg, which I found absolutely amazing. I thought, what confidence, what nerve. But he had all these roubles that he got from selling the nylons, and what’s more, he took the girlfriend of – there was a bloke from Oxford came with his girlfriend – and he’d gone off with her. Taken her with him. Seduced her so to speak. My jaw dropped. He never said anything to us about going. I think he said something to the nominal leader of our little group, but I felt he’d deserted the ship, you know, and I was quite upset actually. I had got quite close but then I realised that Hoppy wouldn’t be tied by anybody else’s expectations of him, he was totally self contained – it was quite a shock.  

When we all got back I heard from Hoppy, I’m not quite sure how, but he was living in London by then. He had a scooter for transport. He’d left Winfrith Heath – the Atomic Energy Authority – and was working for a commercial photographer in Pimlico. There must be something in the archives about Hoppy in Leningrad, St Petersburg, because it was in the Daily Mirror – he’d been approached by both the Russian and British secret services wanted to talk to him.

A.B: Well, it’s a matter of record that when he came back he was more or less kidnapped by MI5.

G.K: Yes. After all he had been working for a very sensitive Government organisation

A.B: And de-briefed at great length at some secret location in Victoria. Because they thought he fitted the profile perfectly. They thought he was a spy and, what the hell was he doing? But they didn’t find anything suspicious and more or less offered him a job as a spy and he said absolutely no way. And it was after that that he became involved with CND.

G.K: I think we were all pretty naive.

A.B: Well you would have been 22, 23?

G.K: Yeah, he’s six months younger than me. He was born September ’37. I was born Dec ’36. Eight months. Anyway, next time we met up he was working for a photographer in Victoria, learning the ropes of commercial photography. And occasionally he’d get a cover photograph on the Radio Times which was a big deal.

A.B: Were you taking photographs at the time?

G.K: Now let me see, what I was doing, ’60 to ’61 I was doing my Art teachers diploma. I then got a job in a primary school in Elstree, Boreham Wood and I took – I was inspired by Hoppy – I took lots and lots of photographs of the kids at work and play. I used to meet up with him quite often.

A.B: You also shared a love of jazz?

G.K: Yes, yes! that too. Then there was… I taught in this primary school for a year and then there was a break. I found myself living in Notting Hill Gate in a little square behind the Gate. Hoppy had established himself in Westbourne Terrace by that time. He’d set up a dark room, he’d gone freelance, he’d got a retainer from the Sunday Times and was quite the… He had enormous kind of, either confidence or courage.

AB: He also had bags of charm.

G.K: Yes! I saw him in Moscow doing things that really sent shivers down my back. The one occasion that stands out was that we were in a street and up the street was coming a very high brass army officer with a cap and some other officers. Suddenly there was Hoppy stepping out in front of them with his camera and going click click click. I thought, Christ! Hoppy! We’re all going to end up in the gulag! If you keep on confronting people like this, but no, no, nothing happened. But I thought: That’s the way to be a photographer. Or a press photographer anyway. So there were a number of things I learned about the attitude of being a photographer. 

In his flat in Westbourne Terrace there used to be a big bowl of grass on the table as you went in. It was so cool you wouldn’t believe. Hoppy seemed to have the knack of being able to get up from the table, go in to his room, and go to sleep. We’d be playing jazz, smoking, talking… He had the ability to just, I wish I had it, to just turn off and go to sleep.

A.B: Were you living in Westbourne Terrace at that time?

G.K: No, I wasn’t. I’d met a girl and we were living together in her flat in Notting Hill Gate, just round the corner, so Hoppy was in the neighbourhood. He was living with a guy called Alan Beckett who was a copywriter. There was Hoppy, there was a drummer whose name I forget – I think there was just the three of them at that time. That’s right, there were three bedrooms and a little room up a short flight of stairs that Hoppy used as a darkroom.

He showed me briefly how to develop film, but he’d just give you the basics: what you do is you put it in and then you read the instructions. So when he wasn’t busy I’d ask him if I could use the darkroom. I paid for paper and, just the basics, Hoppy wasn’t into making money out of it. Then I think a year passed and I was teaching again at a secondary school, this time in Harrow, and it was while I was at that school that I started to earn more from taking photographs than I was at teaching. Hoppy had guided me to magazines that would be likely to take the kind of photos I was taking – the Times Educational Supplement, there were a couple of other magazines, The Teacher, this kind of thing – and so I was selling them photographs of kids playing in the playground, kids in the classroom, that kind of thing. The primary school I loved, the secondary school I hated. The headmaster still caned boys publicly, you know, it was that kind of place. That must have been about ’63 and I thought I can’t take this anymore, I’ll go freelance as a photographer. My girlfriend was working at LSE for the Medical Research Council – a good steady job, so I thought, I’ll risk it.

I never looked back. I lived off photography up until 1968. Hoppy would often ring me up and say, look, I can’t do this job to go and photograph George Brown, the Labour deputy, will you go and do it instead? I would take photographs of anything for money – even weddings. You could ring up the BBC and ITV and get to go their rehearsals of things like ‘Ready Steady Go’ and the BBC one – ‘Top of the Pops’, so that’s where a lot of those photographs of pop stars and jazz musicians come from. The TV lighting was superb. And of course you were jostling with all the groups – Small Faces, The Stones, Wilson Pickett, and James Brown, you could actually talk to them, it was very heady. Very exciting. I often try and catch broadcasts of ‘Ready Steady Go’ in the 60s and ‘Top Of The Pops’ on television now to see if I might have actually been there at the rehearsal. 

I saw quite a lot of Hoppy at the time. But then suddenly he wasn’t interested in taking photographs anymore. He’d gone to America and he’d come back full of the American Free Press. He’d met a lot of avant-garde jazz people, Paul Bley, Carla Bley, he may have met Ornette Coleman. Certainly Ornette Coleman came to stay with him later on. He wanted to start an information service that he called Bit. It was very prescient in a sense in that now we’ve got it with the World Wide Web. That kind of freedom of information.

AB: Joe Boyd said at the funeral that Hoppy’s goal was always the same in that he was primarily interested in the democratisation of information and I think that’s probably pretty spot-on as far as I can see, and that was really what he was after in more or less everything that he did, as well as having a good time.

GK: He treated most of his girlfriends very badly. They were appendages, and I know he did have regrets about Gala Mitchell.

AB: No-one seems to know what happened to her.

GK: She wasn’t very stable mentally. She came from the Mitchell and Butler’s beer family. Oh, let me go back. The group of us working on the idea of getting to Moscow, one of the group was Barry Miles. Now Barry wanted to come to Moscow but he was seventeen and his father wouldn’t let him have a passport. Big tragedy. His parents were very country people except that his father had had adventures in China as an ambulance driver in the late thirties. Anyway, Barry couldn’t come with us. But when Hoppy got established in a flat, first thing I did was to take Barry Miles round to meet him.

AB: Oh I see, you introduced Miles to Hoppy?

GK: Yes I thought, I must introduce him to my friends. I introduced him to about three or four people from Cheltenham. Barry was still at Art School in Cheltenham, up until about ’63 or ’64, then he did the same as I did, he did a teacher training course but he did it at London University and then he went to teach Art in a school in Paddington probably about as dreadful as the school I was at in Harrow. Anyway he left after a year and got a job at Better Books in Charing Cross Road. But that’s his story to tell. 

AB: Well you’re leaping forward a little bit. When Hoppy got back from America and you say his head was full of the free press and that was the germ for IT. And Miles was working for Better Books, did they not publish IT out of the basement at Better Books?

GK: No, by that time Barry and Peter Asher and John Dunbar had established Indica Bookshop and Gallery.  I can’t remember because I wasn’t in on all this. I did some work for them, occasionally they’d get me to take photographs, now where are we? We must be at about ’66. Did he start UFO after he came out of prison or before?

AB: No before. UFO as far as I know was started to raise funds for IT and it was also to do with the fact that the gigs he was putting on of Pink Floyd at All Saints Hall in Powis Square were becoming so popular that he and Joe Boyd decided to start this club to accommodate all of these people who seemed to be springing up…

GK: Oh wait a minute, I know what went on in between, London Free School.

AB: Did you have much to do with that?

GK: Well my girlfriend and I got involved along with Peter Jenner (he and Hoppy became the Floyd’s first managers) – Michael X was intermittently in and out.

AB: Michael de Freitas?

GK: Yes, Joe Boyd got involved. My girlfriend at that time, Jean McNeil – she’s a painter now, she’s got her own website, she lives partly in Essex, in Wivenhoe, but she connects in other ways, on the fringe. So there was a Free School. I never really believed in it and had an awkward feeling about it. I didn’t actually form the phrase ‘middle class wankers’ but in the end that’s what I came to think of it as. It was a good idea in some ways, but it was patronising, basically, to go opening our arms to the dispossessed of Notting Hill, and saying ‘we’re going to help you or instruct you’.  But Hoppy’s energy and determination were very strong and he just pulled us with him.

AB: They were bound to fall?

GK: Yes I’m surprised, looking back, that Hoppy hadn’t thought of that, but there was a certain level on which Hoppy thought everybody could operate. And that wasn’t true. There were different levels of intelligence or understanding, the ‘Gestalt’ if you like, of living in London poor, working class.

AB: Living in very cramped conditions and having no access to facilities. You know Hoppy always assumed that people were as smart as he was, and he used to get a bit pissed off when they weren’t!

GK: That is an Oxbridge failing.

AB: Yes, I think so. He never patronised me, I was just a kid and he always expected me to keep my end up, and used to get a bit impatient with me sometimes.

GK: I don’t think he was patronising in a person-to-person way, but he had some ideas that he thought people would or should respond to, when their situations just weren’t compatible. Obviously people who were so poor, I mean they weren’t going to go for an idealised free education thing, and what we had to offer. So that was a Free School. It came before International Times. Meanwhile Miles had got involved with his two partners, John Dunbar and Peter Asher, and opened up the Indica bookshop and art gallery and he would ring me up and say: “We’ve got these artists coming”, and I’d come down and do a photo shoot. One of them was Yoko who nobody had heard of – ‘Mrs Cox’, she was pottering around putting up things with her husband, and the photographs I took there are now unique bits of history and appear everywhere. At the moment there’s an exhibition in Musee d’Art de Lyon and they want them for their catalogue, but at the time nobody was interested.

AB: Yes that’s what happened with Hoppy’s archive: he found himself in the enjoyable but faintly ludicrous situation of being paid very handsomely for work that he’d done fifty years before.

GK: Well I am too! Peter Jenner rang me up one day and said: “The Pink Floyd are going to be playing a gig at All Saints Hall, their first gig, could you come round and photograph it?” and for some reason I went round and photographed it in colour. They’re the ones that are spread across books everywhere. And the thing that I finally came to relax about was that it didn’t matter if the photographs weren’t very good artistically – it was the historical impact. I was there.

AB: Absolutely, this is what I tried to convince Hoppy of, because he was only interested in whether or not it was a good photograph. What the photograph was of, was entirely secondary. And I would say, Hoppy, it has historical value because of what it is. And he sort of grudgingly came to accept that that was the case. But if you look at the book, which is his version of his work, it’s all about the photograph.

GK: That was the aspect that was important to me too, from my Art School training. The aesthetics were most what we were interested in

AB: You’re right, it is about the photographs, but the fact is you were there photographing it and nobody else was.

GK: In his dotage Hoppy tried to take some landscape photographs.

AB: He did, yes. He was very pleased with those.

GK: Was he? They looked so mundane. It is not easy to take landscape pictures.

AB: Well he liked the format, you see. He liked the stretch camera, he really dug that.

GK: He’d got a stretch camera, had he?

AB: Yeah, he liked that. Well I don’t know whatever happened to those, they’ve disappeared, those pictures. They’re not in his archives, they’ve disappeared, I don’t know where they are.

GK: Hoppy moved from Westbourne Terrace to Queensway, so he was still a neighbour of mine. And I saw a bit less of him then. And that’s when his flat was raided by the police, and he went to prison. He was in Amsterdam, you probably know all those details.

AB: I think they raided him at the end of ’66, and he quixotically elected to be tried by jury.

GK: That’s right, and he gave them a piece of his mind.

AB: And he stood up in the dock and tried to convince them they should change the law, and of course we all know what happened. He could have got away with a fine, but he wanted to give a speech, and it cost him very dearly.

GK: Joe Boyd thinks that his experience in prison really fucked him over.

AB: I think so. Obviously I didn’t know him before, but from what you’ve said and from what so many people have said, it took the wind out of his sails. It would. It was hard time. It wasn’t a holiday camp. Also he told me that he smuggled in some LSD, up his arse. And it infiltrated his bloodstream as he was being inducted into the jail, he was coming up on quite a strong acid trip. Even if you’re quite an experienced tripper that’s still going to be…not much fun.

GK: I took a dose in Tunbridge at Mike Lesser’s place with Mike Lesser, Bob Tasher and a girl from IT. I came to work at IT because Miles asked me if I could manage to do the layouts. By that time I’d got quite interested in magazine layout. I’d been doing bits, occasionally for Peace News. They would say: Would you like to arrange your photographs on the page. I worked a lot for Peace News and CND. Hoppy was in jail, I’d just come back from Cambodia and I realised that I was quite sick of pointing my camera at napalm victims. I felt that it was intrusive, it wasn’t something I wanted to go on with. I was at this point that Miles took me to lunch somewhere in Covent Garden and said… because Miles was a director, along with Hoppy and Jim Haynes… and I looked at this stuff and said “Yeah, I think it would take me a week”. It was a fortnightly paper, and the bloke they had at the time doing it was an American, who was so strung out on acid it was taking him three weeks to get it laid out. They gave him a ticket to Amsterdam knowing that he wouldn’t be allowed back into the country. Also, at that time, Bill Levy was editing the paper. He was a bit mashugana, obsessed with Ezra Pound. 

AB: Hoppy never took credit for editing it. On the old editorial credit boards, he would always credit himself with ‘explosions’ or ‘happenings’ or something.

GK: I was talking to Hoppy one day and they were looking for a new editor and I said: “Why don’t you try Tom McGrath?”. He was features editor at Peace News. And they took him on, it was inspired. He was a very good editor, but he was a heroin addict and that was destroying him, and finally he gave it all up and escaped back to Scotland. But he did take me, from Peace News, he did take me round to see Ronnie (R.D) Laing. I think my photographs of Ronnie Laing are lost too.

AB: So this was when Hoppy was inside I presume?

GK: No, sorry, I’m darting about a bit. They had some kind of crisis, I think they’d only been running a few issues when the police came and busted them.

AB: There was a concerted effort to close it wasn’t there? They took all the address books and the advertising…

GK: Yes, at that time they were in Southampton Row underneath Miles’s bookshop ‘cause he’d moved from Piccadilly. So that was bust number one. I was involved with bust number two which came at the end of ’69. Anyway I took the job on.

AB: Of doing layout?

GK: Yes. “Art Editor”. Grand title. I was feeling my way, I’d had a little experience but not very much. But we all got our hands on Letraset and it was fun to make these headlines and everything. It only took me a week to do the layout. And at the same time we had a new editor called Peter Stansill but there was a crisis in IT, a money crisis, they couldn’t pay the bills, I think they went bankrupt, and Peter Stansill, myself and the business editor, Dave Hall, set up a new company. We borrowed money, I think about two hundred quid off John Lennon, and started up International Times again under a new company. So the three of us became directors. And Peter Stansill was a good editor, he’d trained as a journalist, he’d come out top of his journalism school somewhere in Yorkshire, he’d travelled, he’d been working in radio in Cyprus, and he was really good, efficient in what he was doing. The circulation rose enormously, I think we were selling about fifty thousand copies a fortnight, it came out on time and…

AB: Can I just ask, who knew John Lennon to ask him for money? Was that Barry Miles?

GK: No I’m not sure…oh I know, Peter Stansill was friendly with an American who was friendly with John Lennon. How, I’m not quite sure.

AB: But it’s McCartney who gets the credit for helping out with the Underground.

GK: Yes a bit, because he financed Miles’s bookshop.

AB: And he also paid for the Times advert for the legalisation of cannabis.

GK: Yes there’s a photograph, you’ve probably seen it, that I took in the basement of Indica when they were starting up, and Paul had come round to help to put up shelves and there was Marianne Faithful who was married to John Dunbar. Where are we? Oh I’m at IT, working away, we’ve got a new office, the Hare Krishnas hit town so we offered them the basement of our old office. Felix Dennis was a gofer for Bill Butler, an American poet who was also running a bookshop something like Indica only in Brighton, running an underground distribution company there as well. So there are three of us, the editor, myself and the business man making a good living.

AB: Fifty thousand copies, that’s pretty good.

GK: Yeah, and that went on for pretty much two years. There was a bit of a mess at the very beginning when I started because the editor Bill Levy was obsessed with Ezra Pound. And he was definitely a bit mashugana. The guy I got on with best was Dave Robins, who unfortunately died an early death, who was one of our feature writers, and a great guy.

AB: Any good anecdotes about Mr Hopkins. You’ve already given me several, but any more off the top of your head?

GK. Oh there were all sorts of things. We got busted towards the end of my two year period at International Times, we got busted for our homosexual small ads, and it was to do with the age of consent. Basically, the age of consent they decided after the 1967 repeal of the homosexual law was 21.

AB: As opposed to 18?

GK: Yeah, and we were taken to Wells Street Magistrates Court and charged. And the waiting room was full of gay guys who’d been summoned, The police had taken away all of our files. The editor, the business editor and myself were found guilty. We spent ten days in the Old Bailey. It was two years in jail and two thousand quid fine, the jail sentence was suspended.

AB: That’s very punitive. Barbaric times.

GK: But we were all very amused to learn that the detective that had led the case was imprisoned for taking bribes from Soho pornographers a couple of years later.

AB: The guy that did so many of the famous sixties drug busts was eventually drummed out of the police force for corruption. I think his name was Pilger. He did all the pop star busts. And was notorious for planting.

GK: We also had a drug bust at International Times office, because, well, more than one person was dealing drugs, but in this case there were two kilos of hashish in a file, and the police came in arrested Dave Hall’s assistant but missed the gear.

AB: Difficult to conceal?

GK: Yeah. They missed it. They didn’t find it. Dave Hall took it away and sold it towards the guy’s defence.

AB: That’s a real counterculture story. Any more Hoppy anecdotes. When you first met your wife through a lonely heart club column?

GK: Yes, that’s right, I started to work for Time Out, very happy to do so because I’d been freelancing for a decade or more and…

AB: You were offered a staff job?

GK: Yes, and I stayed there for twenty years until I retired, so I must have been forty five when I started in 1981. Let’s get back to Hoppy. By that time I was living just up off the Theobalds Road in a place called Old Gloucester Street, and I found out that Hoppy was just around the corner. I hadn’t seen him for years. I knew about the Fantasy Factory but it was somewhere in Camden Road originally. After the International Times bust, I had a nervous breakdown, but I was offered a job at Exeter University, so I went down there, they didn’t know I was a felon, convicted felon. It was to work on a mathematics project that a friend of mine was running and he wanted me for layout skills, photography and all sorts of things, so I was away from the London scene for nearly three years. By the time I came home, Hoppy and Fantasy Factory were going. I think I went round to look at what he was doing once, it was a vague memory, and I wasn’t terribly interested, it was as though I’d moved on from Hoppy, as one would from a lover almost. I think you probably know what I mean?

AB: Yes I do.

GK: And then we bumped into each other and found that he was around the corner in Theobalds Road, so we did see more of him. I used to go over and score from his girlfriend – she was a drug and acid dealer around the time of UFO, and Hoppy obviously offered her something concrete to work on, the TV thing.

AB: Yes, the Centre for Advanced TV studies was what he called it.

GK: Occasionally Hoppy would ring up and come down and stay for a weekend, I remember he came down just to get away from Sue. He came with all these “I’m Alright You’re Alright” by the transactional analysis man, “The Games People Play”… He was trying to find out how best he could adapt himself so that Sue would accept him. And I thought, I can’t believe this is Hoppy.

AB: Well the fact is, he really loved her. He also loved Isabel, did you meet Isabel?

GK: No I didn’t, the South American girl?

AB: Yeah, the Brazillian lady, he met her at a Parkinson’s therapy class and they just hit it off. So it was sort of typical of Hoppy that even in his dotage having been diagnosed with this awful terminal illness, he still manages to pull a bird.

GK: And what’s more, fly over to South America to to see her.

AB: That was beautiful. So you had to chuckle, he never lost his ability to charm the ladies. He had this absolutely beautiful African carer at one point who fell in love with him. She would giggle every time he said anything and she bought him a beautiful Valentine and he was just sitting there chuckling and he was…it was funny, it really was funny to see. His carers absolutely loved him. I kept in touch with them. And they were utterly bereft when he died.

GK: I know he did go down to Queens Square to the Hospital for Nervous Diseases to see if he could be of any use in experiments or whatever, I mean he was always that kind of a person.

AB: He was a remarkable man, he was a genuinely…as I said to you before I started the interview, I got the impression that he was definitely the leader of the gang in the mid-sixties. The British counterculture, for want of a better word, was largely his brainchild. And that is something that he never would have accepted. And he would bridle when people said things like that, but I think just judging from the atmosphere at the funeral, and at the wake, that that was just generally accepted to be the case. I don’t know if you have any other thoughts…

GK: We moved down here to Hastings, Alison and I, when we got married which was in ’86 and so I didn’t see so much of Hoppy because I commuted. We had a flat in Paddington that had been a nurse’s flat – my wife was a nurse, she ended up as a Senior Lecturer at Brighton University, teaching nursing practice, which was interesting because when I went into hospital with cancer, a number of the nurses that were attending me had been taught by my wife. So I only saw Hoppy intermittently then.

AB: And he’d come down to visit you?

GK: That was later. That was when they’d moved to Clerkenwell and things were getting really bad. I’d go up early, have tea with Hoppy, we’d have a chat about things, he’d tell me what he was doing.

AB: When he was living in the flat downstairs?

GK: Yes. And then she bought the whole building. You probably know much more about him at that time because I was then the occasional visitor from the country.

AB: How about Suzy Creamcheese? When Suzy came over, I’m sure you know the story better than I, you’ll probably remember her…

GK: No

AB: She came over from America and she was being pursued by the FBI or something wacky like that.

GK: Her parents were trying to put her under some sort of legal restraint?

AB: Yeah, they put her in a loony bin and Hoppy rescued her from a loony bin and married her, they had this sort of whirlwind romance, he married her, apart from everything else, to help her stay in the country.

GK: Oh I got so stoned that day at the wedding at Camden Town Hall I think. Hoppy was dressed so flamboyantly in a loose shirt and a coloured trilby – he looked so handsome . ….

AB: What, at the wedding?

GK: Yeah there was some grass going around from Panama and we all got so stoned. I can remember wandering down Kingsway to go to the bank and I had to write a cheque to get some money out and thinking they will know I am out of my head, surely someone will notice – but they never did.

AB: And there were no ATMs in those days so if you didn’t get to the bank by half past three, that was it.

GK: That was it. There is another anecdote, because I remember it was probably my first or second day at International Times sorting out what needed to be done, where the cardboard was, where the glue was and everything, and the old editor, the mashugana, and one or two other people, and Hoppy arrived, and he was acting as though he was still nominally in charge, which he was really. There was Hoppy, there was Miles and Jim Haynes.

GK: They were the three directors. Hoppy arrived and said “This is what we’re going to do to International Times. We’re going to take each page as a spread so that when you turn over the page…

AB: It continued?

GK: No, you had to lift the middle and it went straight across, each page. He’d read Marshall Macluhan’s ‘Medium Is The Message’ in prison, and that was another of Hoppy’s kind of elite ideas, which of course nobody understood. When that issue of International Times came out, everybody was totally confused. “What the fuck’s happening, this is unreadable.” Anyway the day as I remember it, it was about February or March 1968. I’ve got the first hundred copies of International Times up in the attic, together with every Oz magazine that was published, ‘cause Richard Neville was a neighbour when I was at Notting Hill Gate, and I used to go down and listen to the woes of his girlfriend. But I can remember so vividly Hoppy with… impassioned as he could be. “This is what’s going on, this is going to blow minds” and of course it was an intellectual…., it was a bit like the London Free School, he was assuming people would cotton on immediately and have their minds blown by this new format. In fact there were people like Peter Wollen, the film critic, who were saying “Hoppy’s gone off his mind, what the fuck are they doing?” You know, it was a mess. And the next issue we went back to the norm. And Hoppy didn’t say anything, he was gone, on to something else.

AB: It was an experiment that he wanted to try. He liked to experiment. I remember, he used to give me little jobs, and I remember being a sort of video tape-op for Fantasy Factory at times, and going on shoots with him.

GK: Was this when they were based at Kentish Town?

AB: No, Theobalds Road, I met him in May 1978 and he was living in Theobalds Road, and they lived there for, I don’t know, about ten, twelve years. I think he moved around 2000. I don’t know, I lose track, but there was always a spirit of adventure, no matter what he was doing, there was always a spirit of adventure, how “we’re always going to do something that’s never been done before”. Even if it was about going to a shoot at the Marquee, having to roll joints in the toilet, even something as banal as that was a bit of an adventure.

GK: Oh I can remember coming back from a party at Cambridge with Hoppy and rolling a joint in the car as we drove back to London and me thinking “This isn’t really a good idea”. Hoppy was kind of puffing and driving… it was thrilling – very exciting – he created that kind of excitement around him, he had that capacity.

AB: Yeah, he used to like to lay a number on you, I mean he’d say things like, I remember him coming round to pick me up when I was still living with my parents and he said: “Right, come with me, I’ve got something for you.” And I went, oh, okay…he turned up on the doorstep, you know, unexpectedly and picked me up, and he took me in the car and put on a tape of my music that I’d given him, very loud, and I was thinking, wow, this is cool, and Hoppy said “I just thought you might like to hear what your music sounds like in a car.” And it was so cool, it was such a cool thing to do. It was the first time I’d ever had that experience.

GK: I think there was a part of Hoppy that wasn’t gay but into a kind of Platonic Greek type of relationship with other blokes.

AB: Well I think he’d had a homosexual phase when he was a teenager.

GK: Didn’t we all?

AB: No I think his was possibly a bit more pronounced.

GK: It might have been, because he had such an adventurous spirit he wanted to probably carry it further. I mean I can remember being obsessed by a guy in my class when I first went to the grammar school, you know, when I was twelve, thinking…

AB: Hoppy’s view was that sex is the glue that holds us all together, and then once that’s gone we basically fall apart.

GK: When the semen’s dried and cracked(?)

AB: He was very sexually oriented, very much so. And he used to give me very good advice about women, which I didn’t always take, but he was always there, he was very much like a cosmic dad to me, and I miss him, I miss him very much.

GK: I envy you that, because we were the same age and I wasn’t going to get that. I needed it because my father was a rather faded figure, didn’t have much input, and I had other father figures that I drew strength from. But not Hoppy.

AB: No, Hoppy was very much like that for me, and I think he knew that, and he took that role quite seriously. Only a couple of years, no, maybe four or five years before he died he asked me if I wanted to be his next of kin, and I said, OK, what does it mean, and he said “Nothing really, but just that your name will be on any documents.” Okay…but it was then I realised that he did take that seriously, he did take the relationship seriously.

GK: Were you at his seventieth birthday?

AB: Yeah, I played the sitar. Were you there?

GK: Yeah. I remember Sue Miles asking me whether Hoppy was really well and I said no, he’s got Parkinsons.

AB: Not well at all.

GK: And yet she died before he did

AB: Did she really? I didn’t know that. I’m sorry to hear it. She was a nice lady. I didn’t know her but I met her…

GK: I knew her when she was seventeen on the Aldermaston marches. Which is where she met Miles.

AB: I asked Barry Miles at the funeral if he was planning to write a book about Hoppy and he said an unequivocal “No”, so there you go. At the seventieth birthday party I think we were all a bit worried about him because he looked so frail, but he’d only recently been diagnosed at that point. And I think (a) he was a bit shell-shocked by the diagnosis, and (b) he was not at all well and then they gave him the el-dopa, you know el-dopa will effectively reduce the symptoms of Parkinsons but its a reductio ad absurdum thing, eventually you have to take so much, and it becomes ineffective. But to begin with he had about two or three years where he was effectively back to normal, and then it started to wear off, and eventually it got him. He had seven years.

GK: I think it’s interesting that you and I never collided, and I think that was Hoppy too, he didn’t seem to…I mean he threw a party, but he’d never say “Why don’t you come over and meet so and so? And another friend of mine, you’d be interested to meet..” And he never seemed to do that.

AB: No, possibly because you weren’t London based. You know, I used to meet his more London based pals from time to time. I remember a very enjoyable evening with Beckett and John Howe where they were spinning yarns, that was great.

GK: And Beckett died young.

AB: I know, that was sad, I’m not sure about John, I need to get in touch with him and see if he’s up for doing this. Because he of course knew Hoppy back in the day. And he’s one of the people who are still friends with Sue.

GK: I don’t think he takes any shit from her. And she probably….

AB: Doesn’t give him any! (laughs).