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Fact #52906

When:

Short story:

Pink Floyd play a live set for the Dutch tv show Fan Club, in Amsterdam, Holland, Europe, then fly back to London for the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream, an International Times Free Speech benefit at Alexandra Palace. Also on the bill are The Animals, Brian Auger Trinity with Julie Driscoll, Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, Creation, Tomorrow, Blossom Toes,The Nervous System, Apostolic Intervention, Sam Gopal Dream. John Lennon of The Beatles is in the audience.

Full article:

Eyewitness: The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream, April 29, 1967, Alexandra Palace, North London

Johnny Black, first published in Q magazine, June 1995
N.B. This is an extended version of the original Q feature with several additional quotes.

Pink Floyd, The Soft Machine, The Move... Some of Swinging London's swingiest played at the legendary International Times benefit at Alexandra Palace. Johnny Black rounds up a few reliable recollections.

Pete Frame (Rock archivist) : International Times, the under ground newspaper, had got busted — the police took away their files and everything — so the idea came up of a benefit concert to raise money to conduct a defence in court. I got there about nine, in my Triumph Herald, so I was sober and straight. I'd seen the poster with all these names on it, half of whom, like The Fugs and The Velvet Underground, didn't turn up.

Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) : I'll never forget that night. We did a double header that night. First of all we played to a roomful of about 500 gipsies, hurling abuse and fighting, and then we did Ally Pally.

Peter Whitehead (filmmaker) : I was told about it by Syd Barrett's girlfriend, Jenny Spires. I freelanced as a cameraman for Italian TV, so I had a camera and two rolls of film. I had become the guy the counterculture relied on to record its events. The truth about Ally Pally is that nothing very spectacular happened. It was the event itself that was significant.

Pete Frame : There was no seating, so we sat on the floor, or wandered around and danced. There was a stage at each end and, for much of the time, two bands would be playing simultaneously. In between the two stages was an old-fashioned fairground helter-skelter with a light show playing all over it. There was also a sort of transparent igloo where you could go and smoke banana skins.

Mick Farren (Social Deviants) : We were the first band on and we were fuckin' terrible. Nobody had ever played a gig this big. It was a rectangle the size of Paddington Station with similar acoustics. Because of the helter-skelter, we couldn't see the band playing at the other end of the hall, but we could hear it, like a slightly more melodic version of the 3.15 from Exeter pulling in at the platform.

John Dunbar (artist/gallery owner) : We were all down in Weybridge, at John Lennon's, snorting up Owsley tabs and coke out of a kitchen pestle and mortar. We were watching TV and suddenly saw this thing was on. So we thought, Fuck it, let's go. So we get into one of the space age motors, Terry (Doran) the faithful guy drives, and we ended up at this place...

Mick Farren : When The Move arrived, their manager, Tony Secunda, started a ruckus. He didn't want them to go on until they'd been paid. It was a status thing. At this point, the London underground people still regarded The Move pretty much as mod-geezers-going-on-thugs from the provinces.

Pete Frame : Soft Machine were brilliant. Kevin Ayers did most of the singing. He had a huge pair of glider wings on top of a giant cowboy hat. Daevid Allen had a lighted miner's hat and a manic gaze.

Robert Wyatt (Soft Machine) : I was a bit annoyed that everything was becoming too Californian in London, so I reacted by getting a short back and sides and playing the gig in a suit and tie. I was also as straight as a die. No drugs. The great thing about that kind of event was the audience. They were so extraordinary that it took the pressure off the bands.

Daevid Allen (Soft Machine) : After we finished playing, we wandered about among the crowd. All my life I had felt myself to be an outsider, a freak, totally at odds with my time. Now, suddenly, we looked around and saw ourselves reflected in multiples and felt our power to change the world.

Mick Farren : Tomorrow went on and nobody had heard of them. Then Twink started taking his clothes off and Steve Howe played wah-wah guitar for 45 minutes. Everybody thought that was very fine.

Pete Frame : Denny Laine, who had just left The Moody Blues, was there. I saw him walking around with his guitar over his shoulder, and no-one even asked him to play, which was odd because he was in the charts with 'Say You Don't Mind'. He was standing next to Pete Townshend, who was dressed in a tuxedo and black bow tie, looking like he'd just come from a dinner party.

John Dunbar : I remember going to the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream at Alexandra Palace with John. He was totally done up on acid and we started a literal ten day trip. We went off to Ireland and bought an island (Doranish) which we'd seen advertised in The Times. We bought it because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

David Jenkins (International Times writer) : "There was the exciting moment of John Lennon arriving, and wandering around in his Afghan coat with his granny specs on, looking rather uninterested."

Peter Whitehead : Lennon was looking cool, so I filmed him, but he was not a friendly guy at the best of times. But it wasn't about Lennon, or about Pink Floyd or any of those things. It was an act of Wholly Communion — a place where the counter-culture people could go and be stoned together.

Mike Godwin (audience) : The stars of the show were The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. As I recall it, he started off in an insect costume and only moved on the stand-up-for-the-fire-demon costume later. Vincent Crane was superb, as you have to be if you are going to play all the instruments including the bass pedals. 'You're going to burn, Brown! Ha Ha Ha!' he leered, gloatingly. They did 'I put a spell on you', 'Devil's Grip', the hysterical 'Give him a flower', 'Fire' and that long track from the album - can't remember the title - 'Spontaneous Apple Creation' possibly?

Mick Farren : Arthur Brown came backstage with his hair smouldering, because he had this colander thing he wore on his head with flames coming out of it and it must have caught his hair. His keyboard player, Vincent Crane, had to put it out for him.

Pete Frame : Yoko did a performance art thing, called Cut Piece. She sat a girl up on stage and invited members of the audience to come up and cut sections of her clothes off with these amplified scissors, so you could hear every snip. The idea was that the girl would end up naked, which everybody got very excited about. Well, she got down to her bra and pants, but when this bloke cut through her bra strap, a big geezer rushed on stage, draped a blanket round her and hustled her away. This huge spontaneous groan of anticlimax went up in the audience."

John Peel (DJ) : I spent most of my time wandering around looking for Brian Jones. Everyone said he was there. We were all looking for Rolling Stones or Beatles or Hendrix.

Andy Ellison (John's Children) : Marc (Bolan) put his guitar on his head and left it feeding back for the whole of our 20-minute set. I was running around throwing feathers in the air and Chris, our drummer, was smashing up his kit. Marc started whipping his guitar and amp with chains. We went down great.

Mick Farren : The Smoke came on, played their hit, 'My Friend Jack', three times, then wandered off. They'd obviously been thrown together for the record and didn't actually know any other songs. And The Flies threw flowers around.

Miles (founder of International Times) : The Flies were certainly Britain's first punk band, and therefore the world's first. They actually pissed on the audience at Ally Pally. Even Johnny Rotten never managed that.

Peter Whitehead : I was taken with the mime troupe that was dancing in Ancient Greek gear. I don't remember much from later on. I was too stoned.

Peter Jenner (manager, Pink Floyd) : The gig I most remember was the 24-hour Technicolor Dream concert at Alexandra Palace. We'd got back from Holland the same night, I was driving the van, and Syd and I were both doing acid.

Peter Jenner (manager, Pink Floyd) : I remember trying to drive the van containing Pink Floyd's equipment into Alexandra Palace just as the acid was coming on. Beyond that, it's a bit vague.

Pete Frame : One In A Million had this 14-year-old lead guitarist, up way past his bedtime, who turned out to be Jimmy McCullough. They played Love numbers, and Jimmy did this incredible solo. Townshend was watching them and, of course, Jimmy ended up in Thunderclap Newman, which Townshend produced.

June Bolan : We couldn't find Syd, then I found him in the dressing room and he was so... gone. Roger Waters and I got him on his feet and on to the stage. He had a white Stratocaster. We put it round his neck and he walked on stage and, of course, the audience went spare because they loved them.

Peter Jenner : Ally Pally had a gorgeous old Victorian glass roof, so at about 4am the sunlight started to come streaming down on us. And that's when the Floyd came on.

Peter Jenner : The band played at dawn with all the light coming through the glass at the Palace, the high point of the psychedelic era for me.

June Bolan : Syd stood there, his arms hanging down. Suddenly he put his hands on the guitar and we thought, Great, he's actually going to do it, and he just stood there, tripping out of his mind.

Robert Wyatt : The Floyd played this incredibly slow music, calm, measured stuff. The dominant sound in it was Rick Wright's organ work, but I know Daevid was incredibly affected by Syd's guitar style.

Daevid Allen : I became aware of a celestial orchestra playing over a slow beat, under the camouflage of vividly hypnotic light projections. It was almost Wagnerian in its emotional power.

Pete Townshend : Syd was just manic, and everything went through dozens of echo units, and you couldn't tell the beginning from the middle from the end. I was stone cold sober, which may have been the worst way to see them.

Mick Farren : We left at about 7am and there was all this incredibly colourful garbage. Later it became commonplace at festivals, but that was the first time I'd ever seen that kind of mess.

THANKS: Jonathan Green (whose book Days In The Life was the inspiration for this piece); Joe Boyd; John "Hoppy" Hopkins; Johnny Green, Hank Wangford; John Howkins; Ken Kessler; Shannon Shefcik.

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