Underground (British Subculture) - History

History

The UK's underground movement was focused on the Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill area of London, which Mick Farren said "was an enclave of freaks, immigrants and bohemians long before the hippies got there" (1). It had been depicted in Colin MacInnes' novel Absolute Beginners which depicted street culture at the time of the Notting Hill Riots in the 1950s.

The underground paper International Times (IT) began to appear in 1966 and Steve Abrams founder of Soma summarised the underground as a "literary and artistic avant-garde with a large contingent from Oxford and Cambridge. John Hopkins (Hoppy) a member of the editorial board of International Times for example, was trained as a physicist at Cambridge"

Police harassment of members of the underground (often referred to as "freaks", initially by others as an insult, and later by themselves as an act of defiance) became commonplace, particularly against the underground press. According to Farren, "Police harassment, if anything, made the underground press stronger. It focused attention, stiffened resolve, and tended to confirm that what we were doing was considered dangerous to the establishment."

Key Underground (community) bands of the time who often performed at benefit gigs for various worthy causes included Pink Floyd (when they still had Syd Barrett), Soft Machine, Hawkwind, The Deviants (featuring Mick Farren), and Pink Fairies; other key people included, in the late '60s, Marc Bolan, who would leave "the Grove" to find fame with T Rex and his partner Steve Peregrin Took, who remained in Ladbroke Grove and continued to perform benefit gigs in the anti-commercial ethos of the UK underground.

Within Portobello Road stood the Mountain Grill greasy spoon (working man's) café which in the late 1960s and early 1970s was frequented by many UK Underground artists such as Hawkwind featuring, at the time, Lemmy. It was of sufficient import to the members of the UK Underground that in 1974 Hawkwind released an album titled Hall Of The Mountain Grill and Steve Peregrin Took wrote Ballad of the Mountain Grill (aka Flophouse Blues, two versions of which appear on Cleopatra Records' 1995 posthumous Took album The Missing Link To Tyrannosaurus Rex).