Through Warehouse Eyes

taken from Escimo Chain

Sixtyseven is legend and media recreation, but it was also a very good year. Spring and summer were the best, maybe Spring best of all because of the rising curve of expectation. That Spring flowers had sprung up in order to be available to hand to policemen; a lot of people were still trying to love policemen, who were still called fuzz, not pigs. 'Give Him a Flower' sang Arthur Brown, with a cockney, sarcastic cuteness that went back to the Kinks and stayed part of the sixtyseven scene until submerged in the welter of full-blown psychedelia. London was buzzing - you knew if people were your friends just because of the clothes they wore. You'd see a Lord Kitchener's Valet brassbutton jacket, a chiffon scarf or a police cape - that was your culture, just walking by on the other side of the road. You could crash out with it in the squat at 144 Piccadilly, or at the Arts Lab in Charing Cross Road.

But getting accurate about it presents serious technical problems, first of all because the whole culture was about it being now, this instant, and who cares about dates and labels and all that external referential shit anyway ? If you could remember all that stuff afterwards it's just saying that in another way you Weren't There.

So this stuff locked inside my warehouse eyes is fragmentary. Another problem is that the word on the gigs was happenings. The implication was that the music and any other available stimulant was going to provide liftoff for something unimaginable. There was the half-expressed idea that something would ignite, that you'd all be changed in some way, that maybe the happening would never end but would flow into other events, all beyond the edge of possibility. Something surreal, mindblowing, would tip you over the edge and would spread like a virus. A sense that legends were only just out of reach, like the legend of the freak who took so much acid that he never came down (Barrett maybe ?), but just settled permanently in another dimension.

The 14 hour Technicolour Dream at Ally Pally, organised by International Times, is now remembered as the supergig of the era. I was well prepared, so well I remember mostly only hazy impressions. The Soft Machine's later albums fit best against my memory of the sound - long, tangled impro lines you could get lost in. Also there, I'm pretty sure, Pineapple Truck, 117, The Move, but I'm less sure about Mick Farren's Social Deviants, later just Deviants, later still Pink Fairies. There were definitely stalls selling things like streamers, because I bought some that turned up in my pocket next morning, and that confirms somehow the atmosphere of mad but still seedy fairground. It hardly mattered who was playing because the acoustics were as awesome as the vast, complex, fuzzydark space it was all happening in. The sound was enormous and vague, a melange that seemed to surround you so completely that you could never get a perspective on it, never pin it down, but only swim about inside it. The space was so huge it never quite filled up - around the stage the crowd was thick, and you never actually saw the bands unless you got stuck into that, but many stood and wandered darker, pillared regions, where you'd unexpectedly glimpse towers with lights on, or the huge boards with slowly mutating blobs and bubbles called lightshows which I think I must have seen there for the first time. These didn't move fast. You'd watch for ages while a great bubble did nothing, then the whole thing would divide suddenly, like an amoeba having a peak reproductive experience.

Certainly my overall impression is that the psychedelic sound had come of age. The sound was awesome in size, but out in limboland it was so mushy that I remember having the impression that maybe two bands were playing at once. Nobody in my hearing said anything over a pa about who played what (it's possible I just wasn't listening), so if you weren't hanging in near the stage you'd have needed to be already a connoisseur to pick them out, all of which added to the overall impression of amorphousness. There were one or two clearer musical moments. The sound of many voices which all seemed to change direction at the same time, cosmic harmonies, and the insistent funky rhythm with long, vaguer guitar and melodyline that seemed to float over it. It's easy to read into this impression that this might have been the first time I heard 'Astronomy Domine', or the Machine in overdrive, but easy too to remember into it things like Peter Green's 'Supernatural' that I'm pretty sure weren't there.

My peak moment came early. I was with a group of people but we wandered about losing and finding one another. I saw this man standing very caftanned, beaded, moustached, grannyglassed; and I knew I recognised him, and the name came fast - Lennon. It didn't seem right that this cat was just standing there without entourage in the middle of dark space. First, I was in no state to trust to mechanisms of objective perception, and second I'd always figured him as being taller than his about five-four or five (legends are aways large). I wanted to go up to him and corroborate, say something stoned like 'Hey John, man, good to see you, but tell me if you're really John, please, John'. I stood a few feet from him for quite some time lacking the bottle for this ripping conversational gambit, and convinced myself it wasn't him after all. I wandered off and found Simon, and we went back to the spot. He agreed it was Lennon, but by this time there were about fifty people all standing around him, a good impression of Stonehenge on a quiet night, all just gazing, the same cogs slowly rotating.

That night was the nearest I got to happening. The world of album-covers and the world of me, contiguous, coinstantaneous. After he was dead I remember wishing I'd said Hi to him or just nodded in a human way, like welcome to the dark spaces between the pillars, but really talking wouldn't have been possible anyway. At some stage later I went outside, and the building seemed to be moving with the wailing, formless sound, as if it were breathing. It was a cool Spring night, and the music, from that distance, scored patterns in the air. That had to be enough.

It must have been later, early summer I think, that I saw the Floyd at the Roundhouse (I'm not even sure that I literally saw them at all at Ally Pally). The night was warm and our electric satin shirts stuck to our armpits. This was a much less authentically weird gig than the Dream: the musicians were right there in front of you, the crowd medum density, urbane, more of a bunch of good-timers than the astral travellers at Ally Pally. People talked about joy poppers and day trippers; it was the first time it struck me that psychedelics didn't have to be a cosmic-meaning part of the universe big yearning Aldous Huxley thing, but might just be Fun (didn't someone try to kid us that Fun was the one thing that money can't buy ?).

Fun was on sale at the Roundhouse, anyway, dispensed by afghan-coated, metallic-shaded rats-tail haired bad-tooth guys who drew you into corners and then tried to haggle on the basis that you were desperate and they weren't. Hamburgers were on sale too; generally, I found buying a hamburger a simpler, clearer process. This, I think, was the first time I really heard the Floyd, rather than just got lost inside the sound. I'm fairly sure I heard something about 'Neptune, Titan, stars can frighten'. It wasn't Highway 61 Revisited yet in terms of lyrics, but the music added a nice foreboding. Later - was it 'Arnold Layne' or was 'Corporal Clegg' really that early ? - I caught that note of cockney jeering sarcasm which seemed to add a note of continuity and gave the music a social dimension. This was British rock'n'roll.

I think there were four visual screens that night. Two, flanking the stage, had the lightshows that still hadn't been persuaded to move with anything like greased slickness. The other two were further back, behind the crowd, and films were being projected onto them. One of the films they showed was fascinating; it was just two images superimposed: there was the gyrating pelvis of a woman, just hips and crotch moving sensuously while, not in scale, a man dressed in white, his feet just about where her crotch was, did pushups, kneebends, arm-stretches, so his whole body mimed the in-out of sex, a living organ, weird and ridiculously pompous in his white day-glo.

It was sexy and strange. The music was much more together (or maybe it's just that I was). Somebody else I'm in touch with says they pulled some sort of chariot across the stage, but I must have blinked. For me the happening element came at the end: they had lots of bags of flour and they threw it over us, so the air was dusty and bits of people turned white. They did this very deadpan, moving frontstage to chuck the stuff as if emptying out a bin - no laughter, no reaction at all, a withdrawn priesthood of weird. 'Why are they throwing flour over us ?' a bright girl asked near me. I didn't say anything, but I knew what the answer should be: 'Something is happening to you, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mizziz Jones ?'

So the happening finally happened - the authentic, Dada gesture. But it came, already, too late. It didn't send us raging into the streets to subvert the structure of reality by perpetrating acts of insidious meaninglessness: instead, after our moment of defamilarization, we all went home to cookers, toothpaste, lawnmowers. The Flower Power summer was inches away - Sergeant Pepper, free concerts, being sure to wear a joss stick in your hair - but the thing was already defined; already the gigs were called love-ins, no longer happenings. Retrospectively, Ally Pally was the night madness was in the air and anything was possible - but it could only happen once. After that, you just learned to expect the unexpected.

Dr Adrian Eckersley 1995

14 Hour Technicolour Dream - 29/4/67
Pink Floyd at the Roundhouse - 9/7/67