That archaic cult movie, Primitive London, was partly filmed in the One Tun Goodge Street, but does not accurately represent the cultural life flourishing in that Pub during the early and mid 1960`s. On the night of the filming most of the regulars were missing. The pub was crowded with teenagers busily preening their faces for the camera; and the promise of free booze had flashed through the youth scene like wild fire.When these youngsters denied to the camera that they were Beatniks, they were telling the truth. I was present because John Lennon had promised a fee of £10.00 if I turned up. I had a contract with Northern Songs at the time. The presence of the Beatles in the pub that evening is little known. The Group sang She Loves You, with the not quite sober crowd joining in the chorus. Although the camera was rolling while the Group sang they do not appear in any of the published prints that I have seen. At that time I had known John and the other band members for almost a year. They frequently spent an hour or so in the pub before moving on to the recording studios. Some of their songs were even part written during their evenings in the pub.
After the filming had finished there was an altercation between the Beatle and my friend Michael because of the £10.00 that flew, a little too publicly, into my top pocket. Michael stood on his imagined Rights and badgered a five pound note out of the tight grasp of the musician. This was the first of only two occasions on which I witnessed John Lennon handle cash.
Another, less interesting band, is in evidence in the film; a group that I had hardly noticed. I walked by them once or twice, ears in my hands.
My friend Michael was interviewed for the film because of the key ring, complete with a quantity of old style keys, that hung from one of his ears. At the time Michael went under the nick name "Jailer". He announced that he was aged twenty, when in fact he could not have been more than seventeen; and explained to the whey faced interviewer that he was a Poet. Now Michael had already written some decent poems, but the work that he recited to the world that evening did not do his talent justice. He thought it brilliant, but the film maker treated it as a joke. I had met Michael four years previously as a result of my involvement in CND. He enthralled crowds of adults when he spoke at Speakers Corner, they had not realized that a young boy could speak so powerfully on the subject of international politics. He was a socialist to the core, deeply interested in the founding members of the Labour Movement in Britain. He had also read a biography of Lenin. He visited Islington Public Library regularly, at least once a week, but sometimes more often. We became friends on the spot. We used to explore the historic byways of London together, in particular Bloomsbury and the then derelict Bankside.We walked for hours across Hampstead Heath talking. He was at that time still at school, but his capacity for intellectual debate was already far advanced. He dazzled me in those early years, but the extremes of rebellion that he espoused were foreign to me, and by the time of that beer drenched night we occupied two very different worlds. Sadly he took to the deadly mix of Heroin and Cocaine, and soon became an extreme addict. Once or twice I accompanied him on his nocturnal walks around Central London, and the full horror of the world of teenaged junkies became apparent to me. I hated the shear squalor of that world, and also greatly feared it.
Fortunately I was never attracted by the tarnished glamour of hard drugs. The emotional pain that was inflicted upon me by my friend`s predicament was made all the more severe by the letters that his distraught mother wrote me from time to time. One day I was able to show one of these letters to Michael, and in a moment of mental clarity he left his life on the streets and went home to his family. A rumour then started to circulate that he had died, but this was certainly not the case. A quarter of a century later I met up with him one evening on the Victoria Line. We were both travelling home from our respective places of employment. Michael still boasted a full head of long blonde hair, but his teeth were few and his left arm appeared to be paralyzed. Also his memory appeared less sharp than it had been. I do not know if he was still using drugs at that time, but he certainly had been damaged by them.
Sadly Michael`s story was not unique, but most of my friends were not ensnared by Class A drugs. The man who introduced him to Heroin is glimpsed in the film. He was known to us as Big John.Not many months later he hanged himself in his prison cell because he could not face a long stretch in goal.
But for the rest of us, life was very different. We sat up late night after night ceaselessly talking, and slowly shaped with our words views of the world that have helped to forge modern day life. The "Swinging Sixties" were created by us, the young people of the time, and not by the media moguls,who battened on our creativity to fatten their silky pockets. I have yet to see much money from the songs that I helped to write,but the usual fat cats scooped a goodly proportion of cream at the time. Most of us were well meaning, but naive idealists: the businessmen, as always, remained granite nosed and nasty.
The pub was a talking shop, and in some ways, an ad hock free lance university. Night after night, and many an afternoon too, I sat in my corner reading. The books that I devoured so greedily then shaped my life for good and ill. I studied the poems of Robert Graves in depth, and soon discovered Wilfred Owen and Keith Douglas. Poetry written under the shadow of war moved me profoundly, and helped to foster my anti militarist beliefs. This was the era of the Vietnam conflict, a terrible war that America should never have become embroiled in. The ill fated domino theory was pure dreamsville.
I also read books about eastern religions. These books did not lead me to Buddhism, although I have been deeply influenced by that austere philosophy, but towards early Christianity. When I read The Cloud of Unknowing I soon realised that all that I sought in the works of the eastern masters was already present in the western tradition. Those books led me away from a lazy minded atheism towards a more complex view of the world and the ways that my mind responded to it. Atheism seemed to lack profound moral values, or so I thought at the time. My friend Michael was then a deeply committed atheist. His espousal of free love seemed to have more to do with instant gratification than deep emotional attachment. I later learned however that he had been deeply hurt by a girl, a tall red head that I once saw him with. Some believed that this hurt sped his descent into the vortex.
The so called sexual revolution was already well under way. Although I saw little wrong in sleeping with someone outside the confines of marriage, sex without love was , and is, abhorrent to me. I remain to this day a committed romantic.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 29th. 2014. .
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