Chilli Willi: Haul off and love somebody.

Last minute gift op: A Barney designed freebie guitar pick for that rocker Auntie Whatsit on your klinking till stuffing spree list.

The Shepherds Bush Mob at the Rusoff’s

1968 or more possibly, March 1969, 28 Addison Gardens, watching BBC TV TW3(?) from far right: that’s writer and teacher, with Afghani soft-hat and moustache, Gary Rusoff; upagainstthewall with thoughtful hand on chin is the drama person in a cap, Carol Rusoff, both of whom whom we met at the Front Room Indian Restaurant on North End Road; Rudi, as in the song, takes a hit on the bong; next, with black Trilby embroidered with colorful braid lurks the secretive American draft protester ‘Rod’; all in white is high school teacher in Washinton State, Judi Cowper,whom we met through the Arts Lab crash pad switchboard; with tricorn and a blaze of light sits the Barney holding a torch (what I now call a flash light) probably hoping it would obscure his face; looks to be someone in a hooded mask, lower left, could be Judi’s husband, or it could have been, but wasn’t, the guy from the Moody Blues who lived upstairs, maybe it is Gary’s cousin Barbara(?), or it could be Diney Bercel just before she left for Florence, nope, I think she was there already; and I think that’s me top left, time lapse photographer, Wills, in cap, sweater and regalia.

Perhaps Gary or Carol will oblige us with their thoughts.

Rowdy Times at Leigh Court High

It is an irrefutable fact, acknowledged by all, that the future Right Honorable Lady  Wordsworth, with or without spectacles, is nowhere to be seen in this assembly.

Here the jolly fun at Leigh Court is captured during the Sounds Good Evening in 1967. Various folk from Twickers are recognizable, but all the names are a part of history that escapes me. Lower right is a non-Twickensian, the football (soccer) poet, Crispin’s amour, whose name eludes me also.  No doubt some of these good people will bless us with their mems of the occasion. More than that I’m lothe to conjecture, maybe more words will come as I sleep on it. Was that a good time or what? This was the time we lined the flat in plastic to avoid a repeat of the flying pastry dough on the carpet. It was the primer for all parties that followed.

A Right Bunch of Pricks: The Erections

IF, YOU CAN’T SEE THE PICTURE, AS SOMETIMES HAPPENS, CLICK ON ‘BARNEY3′ AND IT WILL MAGICALLY APPEAR.

Barney Fulcher photograph. The Erections: Pete Brown, Roger Bowman, Roy Burge, and there, gawdelpme, is me, David Wills. This was not my idea of fun and begat the spat that split the groovy gang.

I am happy to claim credit for what is I believe the rockband name to end all rockband names, ‘The Erections’ which, as far as I know, has never been used subsequently. I recall that it was difficult to tell me mum, “Yeah, we started a band called ‘The Erections.” That could be one reason why.

The ‘band’ had its last, and only, appearance at the Conran Christmas 1967 party in their old warehouse, by this time just Barnstable and me as an air-guitar band, i ‘played’ bass.

I printed these pictures at Barney’s place on Tranmere Road and the glass was dirty, I complained and Barney said it was cool like that, and so…  here we are.

•••

It occurs to me that this is Barney first attempt at the feel of the photographs he later adeed for Hawklords, or maybe it is but another expression of his ongoing easy feel for any frolic that could express itself in the style du jour. The next of this series of pseudo band pix, under the strict direction of Barney, snapped by me in color with a throw away color camera, soft focus and shot through a shiny tube are proto new wavy in feel. But he had to move through the sixties peace and love lore afore he could get into his stride with the brilliance of what he did at Stiff, all shiny angry and funny.

The aesthetic going on here, in late 1966(?), is the jaded Mod look, the fashion, which when revived from the morgue in the late seventies, early eighties, had a more sophisticated thing going on.

•••

For recent readers, this is from ‘The Box of Pix’ a bunch of old darkroom tests of mostly my pix that I had made in prep for our Ultimate multimediabox in 1967. Barney gave me The Box, some 18 years later, in May 1983 as he set about, unknown to me, preparing to die.

As I now realize, he wanted me to make best use of this collection, to continue the idea we’d had to ‘promote’ the A1GGz as a concept ‘band,’ and create the Ultimate multimediabox around our adventures as a demonstration of how a band might be ‘packaged.’

‘Ultimate’ was the word we used to top the word  ‘Maximum’ which we’d had stolen from us by the Who, who got it from some geezer at the Royal College of Art, (I wonder could the stealee have been Peter Blake the painter, and designer of the Beatles ‘Sgt Pepper’ cover?) Maximum had been one of Barney’s early pseudonyms, it appeared first on a letter I sent him addressed to Colin M Fulcher, and when he asked what the M stood for I said “Maximillian,” which morphed into Maximum.

We had both read that seminal book about advertising ‘The Hidden Persuaders’ that shewed us how callow and cheap the whole biz is, but also shewed how to go about creating the Image. This was, as they say ‘of course,’ the inspiration for the poster for the non-existent but quite visually apparent band ‘The Image,’ which we codded-up as a beginning of our attempt to take over the world. The whole caboodle was to be presented in much the same way that the Hawkwind and others Glastonbury Fayre album was but a pale imitation of (ok, not really, that album cover cornucopia is a real treat, but we writers like to exagerate a smidgen). So as we progress through posting the photosnap tests pretend we are in a souped up, three-D box of imaginings with captions. Have fun.

http://alphainventions.com/

Barney says, “My aim is true.” Shoots Alison.

In the kitchen, an amused Barney, arm well braced in measured anticipation of the recoil, smiles with anticipation as he takes aim at the enchanting Allison.

Allison, inspiration for the song of that name, sitting across the kitchen table, brazenly  ignoring the gun pointed at her, enchants me with what I hopefully imagine is the gaze of a beautiful woman interested in my presence. Photographed by myself (David Wills) in 1967 ten years before the Elvis Costello songs, so if there is any connection, it is difficult to imagine what. But the gun and Allison episode did happen, and these are the photographs to shew so.

From an older post:
“It’s bein’ so cheerful what keeps me goin” – Saying of the character, Mona Lott, on the 1940’s BBC radio show ITMA, probably taken from the patter of the King of the Music Hall, comedian Dan Leno, aka Little Willie. Dan Leno was the great -grandfather of the muse for the Elvis Costello song ‘Allison.’ Allison, a beautiful and insightful woman, a temp (I think) who had worked at Conran with Barney, lived in Fleet in Hants. in 1978, and was a good friend. I think of Dan Leno as a key to the humour and wilfull wit of Barney Bubbles.

One of this blog’s oft-repeated real historic fun filled facts is that the influential Music Hall comedian Little Willie and Dan Leno were, as many have suggested, the same person, and never appeared on stage at the same time. A fact sworn to by Allison, his multi-grand child, and the inheritor of his wry wit.

World scoop ! See Barney Bubbles move ! Make your own Barney flip book !

This amazing inchage filmed by Harvey Matusow and found by skilled Barnophiles on YouTube, are the only moving pictures of Barney ever seen.

It shews a sequence of Barney walking through the ‘office’ of Friends magazine on the second floor (called the 1st floor in the UK) at 307 Portobello Road, he is wearing a sheepskin vest, and holding a scalpel, he then removes something on a layout at the desk. I would be willing to bet sixpence that Barney borrowed the sheepskin vest. Further notation will surely follow.

The YouTube link is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIgPCDAVTlM and this sequence of Barney Bubbles appears from 2m01s to 2m05s.

The fireplace in the background is evocative to me of an incendiary event later that year at Frendz, when Tiny Tony (as we called him) lit a newspaper fire that set the chimney ablaze, and started an inferno in the basement, so that I had to yell, “Fire! Evacuate the studio.”

That maybe Rosie Boycot in the background. (Not so, see comments.)

Mistaken Identity: Phil points out that that may not be Friends editor Alan Marcuson in the 2nd doorway to the right, that was one of the doors to the store-full-of-stalls called Friends Market, the door on the left heads upstairs to the Friends office. The changing scene evolved with the tenants, this format probably lasted a twelve month or so in 1970-71 I think, that so?

Barney signage outside 307 Portobello Road. The store named ‘Friends,’ could be read as either, A. the magazine which was upstairs, or B. the first half of the arcade of stalls called ‘Friends Market.’ The second store, labeled Market, is where there were a few record, beads and bangle micro-biz’s. The wall between the two stores had simply been bashed through to make a mega-mall, the usual remains of a Barney demolition crew job, beams exposed, plaster crumbling from the hewn-yew lath poking into the passage for a while, which was decorously later draped in flowing fabric to cover the deed from officialdom. “I like the solution.” said Barney.

He had a secret curtained off corner in the back on the right (it was literally three sided, 3 ft x 3 x 3) where you could stand and hide, no one at the magazine knew about it. He said, “I use it sometimes.” which I did when, one day, I went to visit not wanting to meet Jo Greene (I did not like him at all*) et al. It was when b showed the Sutherland Bros art for me to deface, that Miz Moon done do.

* Apologies to Mr Greene, who I think is a fine fellow. In thinking about my attitude back then, I expect he reminded me of my insincere, critical and snide self and didn’t want to deal with it. His slang dictionary I found as fascinating as Partridge. The attempts of Wentworth, Flexner to get a grip on US slang needs revision. Perhaps my ‘Dictionary of Obscure Words That I Like’ will one day add to the shelf.

•••
I had a dream the other night, based on a real experience in 1971, of being to the north of Glastonbury Tor and trying to cross one of Mary Caine’s supposed zodiac drainage ditches, that was a gross, deep algae ridden swamp that got deeper and deeper…

Hands of the master surgeon, with a scalpel in his right hand using his left hand as a fulcrum and stand-in mall-stick, this is to keep his right hand raised so there’s no smudging of the still-wet ink type. By raising the lower hand considerable leverage is achieved, so that the blade can be controlled with precision, and kept at a constant angle, if needed. He is lifting a waxed photo up to reposition it, I think. (There is a major discussion of the minutia of this clip, see comments.) The scalpels we used must have been supplied by friendly surgeons or nurses to someone in supplies for I seldom saw anyone use a regular Xacto blade, the scalpels we used were the real thing, wrapped in sterilized foil, ready to cut. (I’m rem’ing now that Xacto’s come in foil too, so I could be, heaven forefend, misremembering here. So sue me.)

… and this is the spread in Friends he’s working on.

Barney B in graphic Kruschev visitation – see the evidence for yourself.

Connections. Twiggy and Pope’s Grotto…

Was in the coffee-palace today thinking ’bout my Barney logs and Lissitzky the Russian who worked for Stalin, and how Barney called him a “Hack.” So I pick up a copy of ‘Soviet Union for 1962′ from the  library at ‘Coffee to the People’ filched from the SF Unified School District, History dept. ex libris the James Denman Junior High thinking it might be relevant.

And bless my unsullied soul, there on a page with a Kruschev picture, someone had written a pencilled (or more properly a ball-pointed) bubble, with the words  ‘Barney B was here’ inside. For real.

Spooky.

Alessandra the daughter – who knows how to do a contortion or two – says it’s Barney talking from the other side. I’m quite certain that’s what Barney would say too. An example of Serendipity if ever there was.

And this is a Serendip type event because it was hecka weird when I saw “Barney B” in a bubble coming out of Kruschev’s shiny pate. So this is a good example to illustrate Alexander Pope’s invention of the word, Serendipity, the happy habit of fancival discovery, which was named for (or after) the Three Princes (or were they Princesses?) of Serendip, in what is now Sri Lanka, and used to be called Ceylon, and featured as a mythical place in antiquity, then made fabulous in a 17th Century novel. Recently it was Tiger-territory. Pope’s example to illustrate the word with a story about a camel was not a very apt definition. Mine is better.

Daught Aless’ current pin-up is the 60’s London model Twiggy, the thin, but healthy model, who lived in a house close by Pope’s Grotto in Twickenham, a grotto under the road made of shells and dubious antiquities cobbled together in a faux mithras alcove. Twiggy’s house was a detached pebble-dash ’30’s builder’s special, front lawn with gate and central path through the roses. The house was, and quite probably is still, about one hundred feet from the Odeon cinema that Barney did a drawing of. The front of the flick-house was built in Egyptian mode, in that suburban British tile-factory way that some admire.

•••
In other news: Twig-tech, a play on Twickenham Tech, is the contemporary expression of the wicker or wattle arts, also hedgerow weaving. I studied advanced Twig-tech with Faye Schoolcraft the sculptor in the ’80’s. Current expression of the latest advances in Twiggery are to be  found in the architcture of the raised beds in my garden.

•••
Musing on coincidences influenced by the Sceptic in Scientific American: My mind processes, say, an ‘Incident Of Note’ (an ION) about once every 3.5 seconds on average, not counting dreams – which I should but they’re timeless, that’s about 6-million IONs a year. Add in the dream factor and soon we be talking numbers. So, for those one in a million type coincidences, we get at least 6 a year. Over a life-time we see all sorts of amazing unexpected pairings.

Phantom post. Pay the Taliban.

Pay the Taliban, build schools, leave.

An embarrassed Barney. The generation gap widens.

This is a scene from 1967, probably a Saturday in June, when the A1GoodGuyz hosted a visit from my parents for some unremembered reason, as we were painting our communal van on Avonmore Road in West Kensington, London. The van, an old ambulance, was to be our conveyance for adventures.

On the left is my dad Cecil Solomon, age 62, called ‘Mickey’ by the mom, who didn’t like his given names. He was working at the time, often up in Loughborough, on the TSR2 an advanced for its time fighter bomber destined for the scrap heap. He is attired in his crooked moustache and off center, tightly knotted tie and always rumpled business suit, worried his son is mixing with a rum crew, but recognizing things are different now from when he was a young man of 25 in 1930. But he thought we’d better be careful, there’s a slump round the corner, so we better save some money.

The Mother, Ena, is hugging an acutely embarrassed Colin ‘Barney’ Fulcher (AKA Barney Bubbles) who looks to be scheming revenge on me, the photographer, when the time is right. Mom, 49, dancing to a different drummer, is a ‘temp’ supply school teacher in Hampton Wick, encouraging our youthful ‘artistic’ enthusiasm. She was having a secret relationship  at the time during lunch hour with a shepherd who, incongruously, lived in a shack on wheels in Home Park surrounded by suburbia.

Barney, as he was then beginning to be called, and I had read, probably in CIA funded Encounter(?) and Village Voice (me), Rolling Stone (Barney) and the Sunday Observer (both) about Wavy Gravy’s Pig farm and the bus ‘Further.’  This was the bus driven by Stewart Brand at the beginning of  ‘The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test.’ Brand was also organizer of the Trips Festival of 1966, and later that year of the Whole Earth Catalog. (I later worked with Brand from 1975 to ‘82 on CoEvolution and Whole Earth etc.). All that activity had a strong influence on us, carrying on as it were, our immersion in the sequence of US popular imagery, from settlers, through cowboy, to Dillinger into psychedelia. Barney was working a day-job at Conran Design Group at the time with John Muggeridge, who is looking wryly amused at mom’s embrace of Barney.

Roy Burge, in moustache next to the dad, looks to be somewhat dubious about Mr Wills Snr.

Muleskinners: Got Them Hounslow Blues Again

Colin Fulcher photograph Muleskinners in concert at Hounslow Town hall, maybe 1963.
Colin Fulcher photographs Ian McClagan , Dave Pether and ? of the Muleskinners 1963

 

Walkin down that High Street

Got no place to go

Just walkin’ down the bus depot

Got them howlin’ Hound slow Blues again…

Mac

The Twickenham art school formed band, The Muleskinners, photographed by Colin Fulcher for publicity, but destined by fate to never be used. The band went caput when Mac McLagan co-founded the Small Faces, and later joined the ‘Stones amongst other adventures. I thought he played keyboard, but is shewn here with a guitar (that may have been Fulcher’s, er, nah, it’s not). With Dave Pether, guitar; Pete Brown base, and the  guy on harp who’s name escapes me, There’s another shot in this sequence, shot in ‘Ahnslow bogs with Paolozzi prints on the porcelain that I will up-dig soon. (1963.)

Mod meets freak: Barney imbibes, Britain will never be the same.

1967. Mod meets freak. Here we see the late 20th century at that moment in time when Barney Bubbles first ingested LSD. This touching family scene shows the gang preparing in front of the mirror in my room at Leigh Court, West Kensington, London for the Alexandra Palace all-weekend bash. Barney’s hair is being combed back down, mod style, by Lorry One-day-to-be-Sartorio, to give it that fluff-it-up bouffant, Rod Stewart look. Barney’s dopamine receptor induced glassy eyes stare from a mask painted on his face, on which another mask is to be affixed. He looks to be drying his nail polish. John Muggeridge to the left. I photographed the occasion thinking it to be historic, I was right.

Above the cosy scene is a lamp shade I bought at Conran’s store, Habitat. Barney, at this time, was working at Conran’s design studio and was friendly with a manager there, whom he advised on some purchases for the store. One of his recommendations was this lampshade, because it reminded him of the Perkinje Pattern based Dreammachine we had once considered making. This spinning optical illusion device, the Dreamachine, was invented by Brion Gysin, a writer and performance artist (and associate of William Burroughs), with scientist Ian Sommerville. The Dreammachine was a  stroboscopic flicker device designed to be viewed with the eyes closed and produce visual stimuli.

I had bought the lampshade forgetting about the Dreammachine association, although it seemed familiar, so when Barney asked me, “Y’ going to use the Lampshade then?” I didn’t know what he was talking about. I figured it out and explained that it didn’t spin and the geometry was wrong so it wouldn’t work.

Reproduced here below for new readers who have not investigated the back story, is the post I previously posted explaining the workings of the Dreammachine and the Perkinje Pattern effects.

Perkinje Patterns: Great Flickering Fingers – it’s the Dreammachine

Here’s something for the Hawkwind crowd – how Barney amused himself. Gysin was the guy who taught Burroughs to do cut-ups. Here Gysin describes the lowdown heads-up on one Barney the Entertainer’s (p)arty tricks. You probably all know that Barney got his cut-up text ideas for that Hawkwind booklet off Bill Burroughs, who in turn worked with and was influenced by poet Brion Gysin. But did you know that one of Barney entertainments used Gysin’s discovery of the Dreamachine? Read all about it here.

Strange News: Key to Hallucinations Found

By Jen Palmares Meadows, Scientific Blogging

Almost fifty years ago, the beat poet Brion Gysin (1916 – 1986), described a visual hallucination that he experienced while riding a bus:

…Had a transcendental storm of colour visions today in the bus going to Marseille. We ran through a long avenue of trees and I closed my eyes against the setting sun. An overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. I was swept out of time. I was in a world of infinite number. The vision stopped abruptly as we left the trees. Was that a vision? What happened to me? (Brion Gysin, 21 December 1958)

Gysin, a writer and performance artist, though known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, which inspired writers like William S. Burroughs, was also the co-inventor (along with scientist Ian Sommerville) of the Dreamachine, a stroboscopic flicker device designed to be viewed with the eyes closed and produces visual stimuli.

At the end of his documentation, Gysin asks, “Was that a vision? What happened to me?”

PURKINJE PATTERNS

According to Dominic ffytche of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and author of ‘The Hodology of Hallucinations,’ a study recently published in an issue of Cortex, “Fifty years on we are able to answer Gysin’s question.” Gysin’s hallucinations were quite similar to what Jan Purkinje (1787-1869), the father of contemporary neuroscience, experienced as a child.

“I stand in the bright sunlight with closed eyes and face the sun. Then I move my outstretched, somewhat separated, fingers up and down in front of the eyes, so that they are alternately illuminated and shaded. In addition to the uniform yellow-red that one expects with closed eyes, there appear beautiful regular figures that are initially difficult to define but slowly become clearer. When we continue to move the fingers, the figure becomes more complex and fills the whole visual field. (Purkinje, 1819)

When Purkinje moved his fingers, he simulated an effect similar to that of Gysin’s Dreamachine.

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/081123-hallucinations.html

And check this, out.

http://pendu.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/william-s-burroughs-brion-gysin-the-cut-ups/#comment-13

• Rebeca and Mike say: The Dreamachine eh? Looking at stuff with your eyes closed eh?

  Okay then, there was a poster Barney did for the fictitious band ‘The Image’ (members of the band were Roger, Pete, Colin, Roy and Wöll). The poster featured a silhouette of a guitar-weilding guy, and was printed in two strong colours (there are different colour variations of this poster). You have to stare for a while at a star-shaped badge the guitar guy is wearing and then shut your eyes. Low and behold, due to the magic of after-imagery, ‘The Image’ of a pop star you’ve just been looking at appears, as if on the back of your eyelids!

  Before we’d come across this poster, we’d used a slightly similar after-image technique for a fashion shoot we did for Tank magazine in London. You stared at green tights (for example) and when you’d charged your eyeballs up enough you looked over to the photograph of the girl, and all of a sudden she was wearing pink tights!

• The Wöll, in RandM’s comment above is my pseudonym of the time. This ‘Image’ poster is another in the co-operative pieces Fulcher and I worked on together and which are only half credited in gorman’s ‘Reasons.’ In the absence of any obliging personnel to fulfill our grand ideas of impresariodom, we were inventing the band, The Image, in reverse, graphics first then the band.

Spooky action up real close. alphainvent…

Spooky action up real close – alphainventions.com – they’re tops.

I see in my stats that folk are researching the font used for Barney’s t-shirt, which I researched last year, and seem to think it was a Letraset face, forget the name, but def not the face used on the gorham-shirt.

It’s occurring to me as we wend our way through the mems o’ yester that the ‘box of pix’ from which I dig these snaps in time, is the ongoing A1GGz multimediabox. That the web was invented so that we can use them in ultimate style, time collage on a big scale. So as I wend the captions we’ll all join in some way right? Collaborate. Y’all join in now. It’s what Barney and I were working on, and he wanted to continue when he gave them back…

Dug up and put here:
May 1983. “Yeah. These are for you, don’t know what you’ll do with them, but I expect you’ll think of something, right?. Collage maybe?” said Barney when he gave me these old prints I’ve been posting lately. And that’s why the web was invented – to make possible their publication. They were in a box full of print tests. left over from some project way back, late ‘67 or later. We were going to do a show of the influence of the A!GGZ,as an art project A1GGism, but it dissipated as an idea to do as 1969 wore on. I was unhappy with the prints and Barney wasn’t interested in the Mega Jumble sale that I was into. I’d made the prints over at the Fulcher family house enlarger in Colin Fulcher’s, aka Barney B’s, temporary darkroom on Tranmere Road, Whitton. Most of the negs were mine but the Muleskinners and the grad pix were photographed by Colin. In a way this is the cotinuation of the work barney and I started in ‘63 and prepared for in ‘67, to art-up a multi-media AiGGz show in the ongoing sequence of ‘Inspector Burge Investigates,’ the Image poster, the Erections and the Super 8 ‘music video.’ These pictures were intended as images for an A1GGz Poster and box, to contain the Ultimate.
I’ll work this into a post I think.

A1GGz Ultimate.

alphainventions.com

Sally Evans from Brighton and Corina Ho from New…

Sally Evans from Brighton and Corina Ho  from New York talk about geese, Grace and Mary go seek the spirit, Aless and Anne are seldom seen, while Zeno and Andy are. There’s neighbors across the lightwell, and Sarah, who’s she? Chopping and searing raw food. I grilled fish and sauted chard, Portobello and carrot, “I was going with the, ahh… plate number one.” said the amusingly English artist, Grace. Cooking at home. Soup with leak, garbanzo, and beet, with a mushroom buillon base. Steam on the widows.