Fact #105448

Johnny Black, first published in MOJO magazine, February 2004

In less than one year, London's UFO (pronounced "you-foe") club became the nocturnal haunt of the '60s counterculture, gathering place for the Beatles, Stones and Hendrix, spawning ground of Pink Floyd, Soft Machine and Tomorrow, and bête noir of the News of the World. Johnny Black ticks a stick along the white picket fence that lined the front of the UFO stage.

OCTOBER 15, 1966: The Pink Floyd and The Soft Machine perform at the launch party for underground newspaper International Times, in The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm.

Joe Boyd (record producer, co-founder of UFO): The IT party was the forerunner of UFO, in the sense that, unlike conventional gigs at the time, it had more going on than just music. There was body painting, a light show, motorbikes…

Barry Miles (writer, counterculture icon, co-founder of IT): The giant six-foot jelly at the IT launch was a classic English thing… It was made out of a bath. The Pink Floyd backed their van into it and knocked it over. But it was still sloshy, and the whole thing collapsed, splashing jelly everywhere. There was body painting, Mike Westbrook did an imitation of Yves Klein. He got naked and covered himself in paint and crawled along a sheet of wallpaper. I paid The Soft Machine £12 and 10 shillings and £15 to The Pink Floyd, because they had a light show.

Daevid Allen (guitarist, The Soft Machine): The IT event was important because it marked the first recognition of a rapidly spreading socio-cultural revolution that had its parallel in the States. IT was its London newspaper.

Joe Boyd: I'd just left my job at Elektra Records, so I needed money and so did my partner John "Hoppy" Hopkins. He had started the Free School in Notting Hill to provide education and information about welfare rights and so on for underprivileged people in the area, and was setting up International Times. We had this idea to take the spirit of the IT party and run a couple of events in the centre of London. There was a loose community, freaks really, who you'd see around London, that I was thinking of as our audience. You'd see them at the Indica bookshop, or in King's Road at the Granny Takes A Trip boutique, or at Portobello Road market. Everybody from Mick Farren's East End anarchists to the King's Road dandies and fops, with dope as the common denominator.

December 23, 1966: First night of the UFO, billed as "UFO Presents Night Tripper", is held at the Blarney Club, 31 Tottenham Court Road, London. Entertainment is provided by The Pink Floyd, The Giant Sun Trolley, Dave Tomlin, Fanta and Ood.

Joe Boyd: Hoppy found the Blarney Club in Tottenham Court Road. We met the proprietor, Mr Gannon, who was very amiable and agreed to rent it to us for £15 every Friday night. It was run as a business right from the start, with me and Hoppy as main beneficiaries. He probably used some of his profits to fund IT, but that wasn't the purpose of the club. We started at about 10.30, after the Irish club closed, and ran 'til the early hours of the morning, so people could get the first Tube home.

Mick Farren (author, leader of The Deviants): Suddenly there was somewhere to go on a Friday night — this old Irish showband ballroom with a revolving mirror ball.

Jeff Dexter (underground DJ): There was a little picket fence along the front of the stage and a sort of hardboard frame over it. They draped sheets over them, which made it ideal for projecting lights and slides onto, very amateurish by today's standards, but fantastic then.

Paul McCartney: A lot of projections, lots of people sort of wandering about. It was all like a trippy adventure playground, really. Chaplin films going here, Marx Brothers here, Floyd up there, conjuror over here or something — just a nice circus-cum-adventure playground.

Roger Bunn (double bass, The Giant Sun Trolley): The toilets were decorated in the usual fashion, blood-covered and syringe-patterned, and all was, shall we say, "freedom based"?

Joe Beard (guitarist, Purple Gang): The stairs down into the club were all garish day-glo colours. The pong of incense and hash used to waft up the stairs. Then there was Suzy Creamcheese, who danced erotically stageside.

December 30, 1966: The Pink Floyd play the UFO Club

Nick Mason (The Pink Floyd): We could clear halls so fast it wasn't true… the only place we played with any sort of success, or real interest, was UFO, and the various "underground" clubs and occasions.

Roger Waters (The Pink Floyd): There wasn't anything "grand" about it. We were laughable. We couldn't play at all, so we had to do something stupid and "experimental".

January 13, 1967: The Pink Floyd, The Giant Sun Trolley. The club name is now abbreviated to UFO.

Joe Boyd: The first two events had gone well, so we carried on.

John Peel (UK radio DJ): The first time I ever saw [Pink Floyd] was at the old UFO club in Tottenham Court Road, where all of the hippies used to put on our kaftans and bells and beads and go and lie on the floor in an altered condition and listen to whatever was going on.

January 20, 1967. The Pink Floyd (support band, Marmalade) is filmed by Granada TV for its Underground Scene documentary.

Mick Farren: The crowd was building fast, it was starting to get pretty chaotic. I suggested to Hoppy that I could look after the door, making sure that people like Paul McCartney, or Brian Jones and Keith Richards, or [Pete] Townshend, could get in, but dealing with the tripped-out psychos, threatening skins and undercover drugs squad in Carnaby Street sunglasses. I became the dominator on the door.

January 27, 1967: The Pink Floyd, AMM Music.

Pete Townshend: The UFO Club was where I met [underground artist] Mike McInnerney and [future wife] Karen. We used to get that Swiss stuff [acid], which was real Sandoz stuff, incredibly pure.

February 3, 1967: The Soft Machine, Pete Brown, poetry readings.

Jeff Dexter: My favourite of the poets at UFO was Michael Chapman, about six foot five, big frizz of curly hair. He did concrete poetry. He'd start off standing on a chair, then he'd dive off screaming, "Green…" And as he hit the stage he'd be screaming, "…bombs".

February 10, 1967: Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band

Joe Beard: One night you had Soft Machine, but another you would be seeing the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, witnessing Sam Spoons' famous solo on electric trouser-press — now that was a freak-out.

February 17, 1967: The Love Festival, featuring The Soft Machine.

Jeff Dexter: There was no DJ at UFO, just Jack Henry Moore who played sounds with one deck and a dodgy old reel-to-reel tape recorder. I was the DJ at Tiles nightclub, so I'd go along with the latest releases and stand beside him while he played them.

February 24, 1967: Return of the Invisible, featuring The Pink Floyd, The Brothers Grimm.

Mick Farren: The Brothers Grimm were fantastic. They had this tiger who stood there in a raincoat haranguing the crowd. They had a great song called 'Crash My Party You Bastards'.

March 3, 1967: The Pink Floyd, The Soft Machine.

Robert Wyatt (drummer, The Soft Machine): I never regarded us as part of that scene. We'd come in from the suburbs, and go down to the dressing room. Roger Waters would be sitting there with his long legs stretched out, and they'd lend us some gear so we could play. They were very generous to us, which was unusual in those days. Then we'd play and go back home to the suburbs.

March 10, 1967: The Pink Floyd play and their 'Arnold Layne' promo film is premiered.

Robert Wyatt: One person who really created the atmosphere of UFO was Mark Boyle, who did the light shows. He was up above everybody on a scaffolding burning chemicals in front of lenses to get particular effects. You'd see him climbing down with his face completely blackened by smoke.

March 24, 1967: Return of the Microbiotic UFO Mk. 2, featuring The Soft Machine.

Robert Wyatt: We'd have to slope past Mick Farren. I got the impression he didn't approve of us. He was a proto-punk, really.

Mick Farren: Robert was one of the people at UFO who I really admired, but I was a half-arsed anarchist and he was a communist, so maybe we didn't communicate as well as we might have done.

April 7, 1967: The Soft Machine, The Giant Sun Trolley.

Roger Bunn: At around four in the morning The Giant Sun Trolley would arrive… People would sit on the floor, quieten and listen. The few who had the energy left to dance could have danced to the sounds of the traffic, they were that far removed from this planet. We'd play until one of us decided the night was over, hit one extra long, deep note, work around a mode that took us into feelings of simplicity and unpretentiousness and fade into the next day...

April 14, 1967; The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, The Social Deviants, The Giant Sun Trolley.

John Peel: Arthur Brown stood and insulted the audience in much the same way as Johnny Rotten did a decade later.

Arthur Brown: I'd come on with the flaming helmet, and a huge orange Tibetan robe, which would flare out like a whirling dervish when I turned fast.

Mick Farren: You'd see [Arthur] with a bunch of people around him, batting at his head, trying to put out flames in his hair.

Arthur Brown: The next thing was a pie dish with a hole in the middle with a screw in it and a leather strap under my chin with gasoline on top [but] the heat used to come down through the screw onto my skull; so we devised a thing to hold the plate and from that we arrived at the final solution — the Viking helmet. Cow gum and other flammables were daubed on the helmet's horns, between which was a shallow dish to hold the petrol… but the lights man used to get drunk and pour petrol over me as well as into the hat.

April 21, 1967: The Pink Floyd, The Gas Company.

John "Twink" Alder (drummer. The In Crowd/ Tomorrow): As soon as I heard about UFO I went down there. The Pink Floyd were improvising at length. I hadn't heard music like this before… It was fantastic, I wanted the band I was with to play there. We tried to get a gig but they refused to book a band called The In Crowd.

April 28, 1967. Tomorrow, Purple Gang.

John "Twink" Alder: Our music was changing, we were doing extended guitar solos, more free-form experimentation with the music, and we started writing our own material. We decided we needed a complete overhaul… So we agreed to change our name.

Joe Boyd: When they arrived we were informed they'd changed their name to Tomorrow, they played and blew everybody's minds.

Steve Howe (guitarist, Tomorrow): Suddenly this figure appeared on stage. We all knew who it was, 'cos we'd seen him a lot. Hendrix picked up the bass, and we went somewhere. For the life of me, I don't know where it was. We were just improvising. I wasn't ever sure we were in the same key, but we were doing something that was electrifying.

Jeff Dexter: Purple Gang started out as a jug band, then evolved into this sort of gangster image. Their singer, Peter Walker, went by the name of Lucifer, and really did believe he was the devil. A bit weird and scary.

Joe Beard: The silence was terrifying as the UFO crowd weighed up this short-haired jug band outfit. After they heard our sound and saw Geoff's antics on washboard, all seemed to go OK, until Lucifer and Ank drew out two starting pistols and fired over their heads. There were screams as some people hit the floor but then everyone realised this was UFO and, well, just dig it.

May 5, 1967: The Soft Machine, The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown.

May 19, 1967: Tomorrow, The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, The Sun Trolley, The People Show.

Arthur Brown: Pete Townshend came down to the UFO in his kaftan. He took me out in a Lincoln Continental. He said, "Well, you know, my record company just missed the Bonzos… so I want to make sure that we got you. I think we should put you on our label."

May 26, 1967: The Move, The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, Dave Tomlin, The People Show.

Keith West: They either loved you or hated you. Some bands that played there were hated. The Move, for example. Too slick.

Ace Kefford (bassist, The Move): It really wasn't our scene. We still lived up north, so we were Northern lads coming down to London. I remember we resurrected our stage act of smashing up a TV which we'd pretty much given up doing otherwise.

Trevor Burton (guitarist, The Move): There was a rumour that you could get stoned by smoking banana skins, so our manager, Tony Secunda, and our producer, Denny Cordell, skinned up 200 banana skin joints and then threw them into the crowd, so all these hippies went scrambling for them.They did nothing at all, except give you a headache.

June 2, 1967: Allnite Intermedia, featuring The Pink Floyd, The Soft Machine, Hydrogen Jukebox, The Giant Sun Trolley. Hendrix comes along to see the Floyd.

Joe Boyd: I greeted them all as they came through, and the last one was Syd. When I'd worked on 'Arnold Layne', and in the early days of UFO, the great thing about Syd was that he had a twinkle in his eye. So he came by and I said, Hi Syd, and he just kind of looked at me. I looked right in his eye and there was no twinkle. No glint. It was like somebody had pulled the blinds, you know? Nobody home.

June 9,1967: The Pink Floyd, Procol Harum, Graham Bond Organisation

Chris Welch (journalist, Melody Maker): Happy young people waving sticks of burning incense danced Greeklike dances, waving frond-like hands, with bells jingling, neck scarves fluttering and strange hats abounding.

June 16, 1967: The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, The Soft Machine

Mick Farren: Before UFO started, Hoppy had been busted for dope, but it took about nine months to come to trial, so it was June before he got sentenced. He spent about six months in jail. Things got less focused. It started to move from being like a collective to having a boss who made all the decisions for us, which was Joe Boyd.

June 23, 1967: Liverpool Love Festival Poetry event — Brian Patten, etc.

Joe Boyd: We had a lot of events. Theatre groups like The People Show, avant-garde jazz, Yoko [Ono] used to come down and do events. One I remember vividly. She asked for a stepladder and a contact microphone with a long lead. She glued the microphone to one blade of a pair of scissors, then brought in this very beautiful girl wearing a paper dress, put the girl up on the stepladder and cut the dress right off the girl with the noise of the scissors hugely amplified.

June 30, 1967: Tomorrow, The Knack, Dead Sea Fruit.

Joe Boyd: The Stones had just been busted for drugs, so from midnight to about 3am the club emptied and went down to Piccadilly to demonstrate about the convictions. Then we walked to the News Of The World offices and protested there as well.

July 7, 1967: Denny Laine, The Pretty Things.

July 14, 1967: The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, Alexis Korner.

July 21, 1967: Tomorrow, Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.

July 28, 1967: CIA vs. UFO, featuring The Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention.

Jeff Dexter: UFO was a great place to get laid, largely because Syd Barrett was a magnet for pretty girls. He attracted some of the most beautiful girls in town, so it was worth going along just for that.

July 30, 1967: News Of The World claims UFO is a vice den.

Joe Boyd: We'd provoked them with our demonstration outside their offices, so this was their revenge. They ran a picture of a girl with her top off, and a headline about UFO being a Hippy Vice Den, with drugs and all kinds of strange behaviour.

August 11, 1967: Tomorrow.

Joe Boyd: The News Of The World story attracted the police. They told Mr Gannon they were planning to raid UFO, so he realised that if he didn't want to lose his licence, he had better get us out.

August 18, 1967: Tomorrow, Chris MacGregor Quintet.

Joe Boyd: This was the final night in Tottenham Court Road. We knew we had to get out or get busted.

August 25, 1967: First UFO night at The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, London NW. The Pretty Things, Paper Blitz Tissue.

Jeff Dexter: People said it lost its spirit when it moved to the Roundhouse, but I loved it. There was more space, more places to take drugs and get laid. Also, it was a circular space great for light projections.

September 1 and 2, 1967. The RIA Festival, (aka The UFO festival) at the Roundhouse, featuring The Pink Floyd, The Move, The Soft Machine and Denny Laine.

Joe Boyd: This was originally planned as a UFO festival in a circus tent in Paignton, a day trip to the West Country, but at the last minute, the promoter suddenly became uncontactable. So I told everybody, Forget about him, we'll do it at The Roundhouse. Being a bank holiday, most of the potential audience was out of town. I lost a lot of money on that.

Mick Farren: Joe always saw it as a very commercial scenario, and as things progressed it increasingly became me, Miles and the IT people on one side, and Joe on the other.

September 8, 1967: Eric Burdon And The Animals.

September 15, 1967: The Soft Machine, Family.

Joe Boyd: There were some fantastically good shows at the Roundhouse, but being in Camden Town brought all kinds of problems. The local skinheads were delighted to find a bunch of hippies in their midst. They'd come along just to cause trouble.

September 22, 1967: Dantalian's Chariot, The Social Deviants, The Exploding Galaxy.

September 29, 1967: Jeff Beck, Ten Years After.

Mick Farren: We were getting audiences of up to 1,200 people, so just from the sheer numbers, it had to get more formalised. Unfortunately, part of that was me having four massive tough guys standing behind me on the door, which was never what we had intended.

October 6, 1967: Denny Laine, The Knack.

October 13, 1967: The Soft Machine, Fairport Convention.

October 20, 1967: Vanilla Fudge.

Mick Farren: The local protection racket gangsters would come round and say, "Nice place you've got here. Shame if it got smashed up." We were just a bunch of hippies and we really didn't know how to deal with that. Miles was beaten up at the night-safe one night and, not long after, Joe decided it wasn't worth doing any more.

Joe Boyd: The skinheads even broke in one night and created mayhem. I didn't want to close it down, but it was becoming impossible to run, which was a great pity.

Jeff Dexter: After UFO closed, the scene moved to the Middle Earth in Covent Garden, but it was never quite the same. UFO had been the spearhead for the underground in England.

© Johnny Black, 2004