Royal Albert Incarnations
Sneezing in the Albert Hall, Jimmy Page the Beat, Ginsberg drunk under Eros
I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood...
...and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, I Am Waiting, from A Coney Island of the Mind, 1958.
(Performed at the International Poetry Incarnation, Royal Albert Hall, 1965)
i
JP: You know that 1965 event at The Royal Albert Hall?
JC: The International Poetry Incarnation. There was a movie, right? Wholly Communion?
JP: That’s right. I was there that night.
JC: In 1965? You were there?
JP: Yes. We all knew it was going to be a big thing. It had to be. Allen Ginsberg was in town!
JC: You were probably like 20 then?
JP: Yes, and I was desperate to get a ticket. It was sold out, but a friend got me one.
Jimmy Page in conversation with Jerry Cimino, director of The Beat Museum, San Francisco.
ii
Patti Smith had wanted to do a job at the Royal Albert Hall for quite a while. Finally her agent had secured a slot and I had my tickets, which was then delayed for over a year due to the Covid pandemic. Finally, in October 2021, I danced happily in the aisles of the history drenched venue, with my partner, to the compulsive melody of People Have the Power. Behind the Patti Smith Band, above the grand organ was a sign to mark the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the building.
Being in the stalls, midway to the stage, I reflected on the fact that we were standing very close to the spot where Allen Ginsberg and a roster of international poets had performed at another legendary gig over fifty five years prior.
The International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall, on June 11th 1965, is well documented in books, newspapers and Peter Whitehead's film Wholly Communion. At short notice, following a reading at Better Books, Allen Ginsberg, Miles, Barbara Rubin, Dan Richter and The Poets Co-operative had managed to book the Albert Hall and sell out the tickets for an ambitious poetry reading. They set up a makeshift stage in the centre of the stalls, decorated it with flowers and turned the hall into a giant theatre in the round.
Well aware of Allen Ginsberg's significance, Jimmy Page had got wind of the event and went searching for a ticket. Back in February of that year, Eric Clapton had left the Yardbirds and Page had been invited to replace him. He declined at that point, as he had a well paid job as a session musician. By that time he had already contributed to a surprising number of famous and not so famous recording artists' output. He continued to be a prolific session musician throughout the '60s. A short indicative sample includes:
Them (with Van Morrison) - Baby Please Don't Go; Gloria
Lulu - Here Comes the Night; Heatwave; Shout
Rod Stewart - Good Morning Little Schoolgirl
Petula Clark - Downtown
Tom Jones - It's Not Unusual
Marianne Faithful - Come and Stay with Me
The Rolling Stones - Heart of Stone; The Last Time; Under My Thumb
Joe Cocker - I'll Cry Instead
Donovan - Sunshine Superman; Hurdy Gurdy Man
Jeff Beck - Hi Ho Silver Lining; Beck's Bolero
All of those artists went on to perform at the Royal Albert Hall at some stage in their career. Page played there several times, notably with Led Zeppelin in 1970 and interestingly, as a guest for Donovan's performance of the album Sunshine Superman in 2011, where he reproduced the string bending backing melody and solo he created in the studio for the title track of the album.
Despite being sold out, Jimmy Page finally secured a ticket from a friend for the Poetry Incarnation. He went alone. Alone, yet amongst what was, and probably still is, the largest audience for a poetry reading in the UK. He witnessed nineteen poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Michael Horovitz, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Christopher Logue, Harry Fainlight, Adrian Mitchell, Alexander Trocchi, Ernst Jandl, Simon Vinkenoog, Anselm Hollo and Pete Brown perform a chaotic mix of political verse, spaced out stanzas, sound-poems, sacred chants and beat metres. Page was happy to see Christopher Logue on the programme. In his teens he had been taken by the Victorian Romanticism of Keats, Byron and Shelly, but he also became inspired by Logue's 1959 EP Red Bird, a recording of adaptations of some of Pablo Neruda's love poems with jazz backing from The Tony Kinsey Quintet. Neruda had been booked to participate in the Albert Hall reading, but had to cancel.
The International Poetry Incarnation event got mixed reviews. Some headlines from newspapers at the time could probably be turned into a Ginsbergian poem:
Flowers galore
Poets go way out
'Beat' poets take over the Albert Hall
A 'planet-chant' carnival
Feast of 4-letter words
Obscene
Nobody's crazy
Beat poets talking, Shakespeare listening
Declaration of Joy
Poets pack the Albert Hall
Poets, but you wouldn't know it
Ginsberg Makes the World Scene
Not Amused
Nevertheless, the event is consequently recognised as a major signifier in the shift of the cultural zeitgeist of the '60s. Perhaps, the overall analysis boils down to the event as a whole being more weighty than the specific poetry itself. The collective communion was greater than the sum of the poetic priests. The arrival of 7000 people for such a 'happening' indicated the underground-swell was connected enough to become a visible movement. Or, a loud audible sneeze. Some felt that a highlight was when Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown accompanied Austrian sound poet Ernst Jandl, in a crowd activating and uplifting version of Kurt Schwitters’ Dada fun poem.:
Fury of Sneezing
Tesch, Haisch, Tschiiaa
Haisch, Tschiiaa
Haisch, Happaisch
Happapeppaisch
Happapeppaisch
Happapeppaisch
Happapeppaisch
Happa peppe
TSCHAA!
Kurt Schwitters, 1945
I witnessed Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown perform the same piece, as part of the 2015 Poetry Reincarnation, at the Roundhouse, London. A few tables away from me sat Jimmy Page with his partner Scarlett Sabet, herself a poet with a keen interest in the Beats. I wonder if he was was thinking about the first time he heard that sound poem. And was he taken back to that same year when he laid down guitar solos for the man sitting next to him, Van Morrison?
iii
Allen Ginsberg didn't come away from the Albert Hall with a sense of fun. Only a few weeks ago he had hung out with Bob Dylan and the Beatles at the Savoy Hotel. He had participated in Dylan's famous video for Subterranean Homesick Blues in a backstreet behind the Hotel. Also, he had been to both Dylan concerts at the very same Royal Albert Hall he had just performed at himself. It had been high times. Now, after leaving the venue, he made his way up to Piccadilly Circus. He felt the whole evening had been a wasted opportunity. He was ashamed of himself for getting drunk and giving a less than adequate performance. At the statue of Anteros he looked around, taking in the condensed panorama of night life. It was after midnight. He turned his mind to Basil Bunting whom he had recently visited up in Newcastle upon Tyne at Tom and Connie Pickard’s flat, prior to a reading at Morden Tower. He had been reading Bunting's famous poem Briggflatts and felt re-inspired. He took out his note book and started a new poem.
...the cars glide slowly around Eros
shooting down on one who stands in Empire’s Hub
under his shining silver breast...
.....a wakened
pigeon flutters down from streetlamp to the fountain,
primly walks and pecks the empty pave—now deep
blue planet-light dawns in Piccadilly’s low sky.
From Studying the Signs, Allen Ginsberg, 12 June 1965
Ginsberg went back to Miles' flat on Hanson Street, slept a while but he,
...woke up early next morning depressed, disgusted by almost all the other poets and disgusted most by myself. The audience had been summoned by Blakean clarions for some great spiritual event, there was a hint of Jerusalemic joy in the air, there were great poets near London, there was the spontaneity of youths working together for a public incarnation of a new consciousness everyone's aware of this last half decade in Albion (thanks to the many minstrels from Mersey's shores & Manhattan's), there was a hopeful audience of sensitive elders and longhaired truly soulful lads and maids. The joy, the greatness of the poets, & the living spirt coming to consciousness in England, have never been adequately defined in public, and here was an opportunity to embody this soulfulness in high language...
There were too many bad poets at Albert Hall, too many goofs who didn't trust their own poetry, too many superficial bards who read tinkley jazzy beatnick style poems, too many men of letters who read weak pompous or silly poems written in archaic meters, written years ago. The concentration & intensity of prophesy were absent except in a few instances...
By the time I got up to read I was so confounded by (what seemed to me then) the whole scene turned to rubbish, so drunk with wine, and so short of time to present what I'd imagined possible, that I read quite poorly and hysterically...
This unpublished letter to The Times Literary Supplement and reproduced in Barry Miles' book In the Sixties, indicates his Piccadilly poem of the previous night had not cleared his disillusion. He then went over to the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara at Haverstock Hill, to meet the Western Buddhist monk Sangharakshita and shared his disappointment about the previous night’s events. Ginsberg had first met Sangharakshita in Kalimpong in June 1962 where he was introduced to the Chinese Yogi C.M. Chen. Sangharakshita said of Ginsberg he was one of the few people I had ever met who concealed nothing of himself. Like his much admired William Blake, he was a man without a mask.
Unfortunately, Sangharakshita, my primary Buddhist teacher for several years in the '80s and '90s had concealed something of his own character. An exposé in The Guardian, in 1997, revealed psychological and sexual manipulation of young men, implicating Sangharakshita and other senior Order members. The revelations were a big shock to me and many others. Although never directly effected myself by this behaviour, my disillusionment, and the mirror of shadow cult dynamics, was heavy.
iv
I was less than four years old when the '65 International Poetry Incarnation was invoked. Almost 50 years later I’m sitting in the Roundhouse Café. This was my first trip to the famous venue in Camden, London, a place that has always sparked my imagination as one of the most unusual and iconic venues of the 60s underground. I'm there for the 2015 Poetry Reincarnation - a full day 50th anniversary celebration of the original International Poetry Incarnation. The building has evolved from an indoor railway-turning circle, to derelict warehouse, to gin storage facility, to venue for mind bending psychedelic music and now performing arts centre. As a result of the Albert Hall event, John 'Hoppy' Hopkins and Barry Miles, (known widely, simply as 'Miles'), were convinced that there needed to be an underground newspaper to disseminate ideas, information and to develop a network of connection. The 15 October 1966 All Night Rave, at the Roundhouse was the inauguration event of the underground newspaper The International Times. On the bill were Soft Machine and Pink Floyd. The paper was funded in part by Paul McCartney and an advert for Yoko Ono's November 9, 1966 Indica Gallery event appears in this first issue.
As I sit in the café, taking the building in, looking at historical posters glued to the walls, Miles comes in and sits next to me. He sips his coffee and opens his newspaper. I recognise him from my first meeting with him not so long ago. I re-introduce myself.
Hi Miles, I met you at the ICA, at the Adrian Henri event earlier in the year.
He puts his newspaper down to give me his attention.
Yes. I remember. I was hung-over from Hoppy’s funeral. But it was great to meet so many people from 1965 including Syd Barrett’s old girlfriend at the wake. I was also pretty tired from touring the launch of my new book on William Burroughs.
I remembered him at the ICA, looking very sad at the loss of his friend John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins to Parkinson’s disease. As well as co-founder of International Times, Hoppy was a photographer of the sixties, founder of the UFO Club, and general mover and shaker of the underground scene. John Lennon gave him his first video camera in 1969, which he went on to use as an art and education tool.
Miles has written books on the sixties, articles for the music press and biographies of Paul McCartney, Frank Zappa, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. He opened Indica Gallery and Bookshop in 1965. It was there, whilst Miles was hanging her first European show, that Yoko Ono met John Lennon. In the same year, Allen Ginsberg was staying with Miles and gave a reading at Better Books. It was that reading which led to Miles co-organising the Albert Hall International Poetry Incarnation. Miles took another sip of his coffee to bring us back to the present. Today the Roundhouse is a clean smoothly run arts centre. There are a few token posters of the past still on the walls. I wondered what Miles made of the place in the early days.
I was never too fond of the Roundhouse as it was so filthy. The toilets used to be overflowing regularly, they took the doors off to cover the flood and a bouncer would stand outside the door to hide you.
Despite Miles’ distaste of the early Roundhouse, I’m nevertheless transported and briefly drift into a reverie about lay lines and the convergence of energies. Railway lines, mystical lines, poetry lines, the phrenology of the earth. A round-house, a stone circle, a mandala, a Japanese ink enso. I can’t help but get excited about how much creative overlap can happen in specific places. It reassures my romantic sense of nostalgia for cultural moments I was too young to live through. Some people are cynical about the nostalgic urge, especially the desire to be ‘back in the good old days’. But for me, oddly it’s not about regret; it’s about timeless linkages. The past doesn’t stop; it is enfolded in the present, if you let it. I’m suddenly aware of Miles, is he in a reverie too? I don’t think he’s the nostalgic type. Someone once said, If you remember the sixties, you were Miles, or as the Guardian’s James Campbell wrote, If you don't remember Miles in the 60s, you weren't really there. He’s seen too much change, it’s all in him, and he’s brought it all present through writing about it.
He’s not in a reverie, he’s watching a couple of guys he knows coming towards us. Quick introductions reveal them to be Dom Search and Jeff Laster who tell me they were involved with the Synergy Project, which was a radical clubbing event that hosted controversial counterculture debates.
I worked with Fraser Clark at Megatripolis underground night club when, in 1995, I live streamed Allen Ginsberg reading a 40 minute set, Dom informs me. (I subsequently found out this was to be Ginsberg’s final UK stage reading.) Jess, my sister has just been celebrating the awards coming in for the Citizenfour documentary about Edward Snowden which she was involved with as commissioning editor for Channel Four.
We left Miles to finish his coffee and prepare for his afternoon panel. The panel with Miles, Michael Horovitz, Pete Bearder ‘The Temp’, Pete Brown, and Cecelia Knapp, is to be followed by a rare screening of Wholly Communion, Peter Whitehead’s seminal film of the 1965, First International Poetry Incarnation.