Town magazine from March 1967 with a cover article on The Psychedelic Scene - a part of the new London Underground. The cover shot was taken by Adam Ritchie of a dancer in the UFO club at the Round House North London. The mottled light display swirling over her, it sums up trippy swinging London.
I used to go to the Sensateria night at The Hummingbird in Birmingham around 1990 with my favourite vintage stripe sweatshirt looking all Velvet Underground. Then when I moved down to the smoke in 1992 I'd head over to some dump of an area called Shoreditch, and go to a night called The Whirl Y Gig, still sporting my cherished stripe mock turtleneck. At the end of the night the whole dance floor would sit under a silk parachute, trippy lights and balloons would cascade over the top - it was a scene man- 1990's acid house was maybe the last period of psychedelic-ness, meanwhile back 23 years to TOWN magazine.
London born Ritchie cut his teeth in photography while living in NYC from 1963-66 working for all of the major magazines, shooting the likes of Andy Warhol and Velvet Underground. In 1966 Adam moved back to London and took this TOWN cover shot. He spent less time working as a photographer and started building houses across the U.K. Unfortunately his London based lab went bust and all of his negatives were thrown away, apart from one brown paper bag of negatives that thankfully contained some great shots of Warhol, Velvet Underground and some very early Pink Floyd negs. Many of the photographs salvaged from the brown paper bag are exhibited in the Andy Warhol Museum, have featured in over 60 books and have been displayed internationally from Tate to Whitney Museum.
The TOWN (formerly Man About Town) article mentions one of the coolest London galleries that ever graced London, namely Indica on Masons Yard London W1. The one off Jermyn St and spitting distance from the iconic The Scotch St James club.
Indica so the story goes was named after either: Indications, to indicate or canabis indica (just say no). The gallery was an axis of Londons underground. The Indica gallery had a book store which was bound to succeed in part thanks to its owners: Miles, Asher and Dunbar aka MAD- their term not mine. John Dunbar was married to Marianne Faithful, Peter Asher was in the folk group Peter & Gordon and his sister was actress Jane Asher, and she was girlfriend to Paul Macca McCartney.
Book lover Macca helped Peter Asher and the M.A.D lot set-up the gallery and book shop in 1965, setting up shelving and apparently even painted walls at the 6 Masons Yard W1 location. The day before the opening of the gallery book shop, McCartney drove into Masons Yard in his Aston Martin and lugged out a heavy box containing Indica wrapping paper - paper he had designed. The design had a bold Union Flag design using the Indica name and London address, in the months to follow the world and his Mrs caught wind of the print and the wrapping was highly sought after - American fans would send S.A.E in the hope of receiving a sheet of wrapping paper, alas the U.S stamps were useless.
The graphic element of Indica gets better with one of my all time favourite posters ever, shown below promoting the galleries first major exhibition on 4th June 1966: The Groupe de Recherche de L'Art Visuel (GRAV for short). A week into the exhibition Julio Parc the Co-founder of GRAV was awarded the international painting grand prix. So the first Indica show represented the winner of the most prestigious art prize in the world. This new gallery at around 95sqm had Macca painting the walls and the most prized artist painter in 1966, a pretty good start by any standard.
I've always really rated this poster
The Indica book shop was at street level on the ground floor the gallery was down in the basement and like many properties in London ran under the cobbled street (where White Cube gallery stands today). Around the time of the launch of Indica, Macca brought John Lennon over to the gallery, most probably to show off his wrapping paper. Lennon asked Dunbar in this first introduction to the Indica book shop for a particular book on Nietzsche, Dunbar had just taken delivery of the recently released Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary, Dunbar passed it onto Lennon before heading down to the store room to find the requested Nietzsche book. Lennon sprawled out on the sofa in the book store and flicked through Learys book, pausing on page 14 and the verse 'whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax and float downstream' - with a smidge of rewriting this was the opening line of The Beatles tune Tomorrow Never Knows, the bands first psychedelic song. Thank god Nietzsche was collecting dust down in the basement, its a personal fave Beatles song on the Revolver LP.
After less than a year with A-list association across both the music and art world, it was time to expand Indica, it had become something of a fairground with people turning up for a site of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, or even Marc Feld aka Bolan - who also helped out at the gallery. A truly gifted 18 year old photographer named Gered Mankowitz opened a studio on Masons Yard too and shot the Stones Out Of Our Heads LP cover the next street over, this small square in London W1 was just too cool.
A second site opened with more of a focus on books over on 102 Southampton Row, just steps away from the British Museum in Bloomsbury. This new location is the focus of the TOWN magazine article below and how the M.A.D crew opened their arms to the Psychedelic London Underground press. The Masons Yard location switched over to more of an out and out art gallery. Geographically Masons Yard was a more discreet location, ideal for the A-list crowd that would on occasion pop-in before or after drinking at the Scotch of St James Club, just three doors away, a fluke- methinks not.
Perhaps one of the most important like it or loathe it moments for Indica was John Lennon's very first meeting of Yoko at the gallery. Yoko arrived in London with her then husband Tony Cox (ahem) to attend the Destruction in Art symposium, this is the same movement that led The Who to smash their kit - I digress. Yoko touched down in London for the first time in September 1966, and just two months later she exhibited her 'unfinished paintings and drawings' on 9th November. Ono's Grapefruit zine had already been stocked at Indica so the M.A.D lads and London art scene were already up to speed with her work. The day before the private viewing John Lennon visited the gallery and here he describes their very first rendez-vous, I cant help read this with a slight Scouse accent:
'I got there the night before it opened. I went in - she didn't know who I was or anything - I was wandering around, there was a couple of artsy type students that had been helping lying around there in the gallery, and I was looking at it and I was astonished. There was an apple for 200 quid, I thought it was fantastic - I got the humour in her work immediately........John Dunbar insisted she say hello to the millionaire, you know what I mean. And she came up and handed me a card which said 'Breathe' on it, one of her instructions, so I just went (pant). This was our meeting'
John Lennon interviewed by Jan S.Werner in Rolling Stone magazine 7th January 1971
Aside from The Beatles connections, one of the great things about Indica was that zines makers and artists were invited to make use of the gallery, from printing, networking to be granted office space there. Dunbar later claimed when they re-created the Indica gallery at The Rifle Makers gallery on Beak Street Soho in 2010 that
'I look at Indica as an outlet for virtually anything and everything'
TOWN magazine March 1967 - The New London Underground:
William S.Boroughs London pad was just around the corner from Indica
Our copy of the final issue of IT magazine
The Masons Yard gallery.
