Definitions, context, and sources

In its bewildering variety of cultural expressions London's underground culture epitomizes the way in which, in both Europe and America, the avant garde had become a truly pluralistic phenomenon by the late 1960s.Footnote ² When I speak of the ‘underground’ or ‘the London underground scene’ in the course of this article, I refer to a community of people involved in various alternative cultural or social activities: this community included not only the writers and editors of the alternative press, but also musicians, artists, and political activists. This community viewed itself in terms of a counterculture, a social movement that embodied ‘a set of beliefs and values which rejected dominant society, and which “prescribe[d] a sectarian alternative”. Behaviourally, those who accepted such beliefs and values, acted in “such radically nonconformist ways that they tended to drop out of society.”’Footnote ³ The social context of post-war Britain meant that the revolution these people sought was focused on the transformation of culture rather than on any deep commitment to political causes, such as (in the USA) agitation for civil rights or opposition to the Vietnam War.Footnote ⁴ While the UK differed from other countries in this respect, closer examination of the emerging cultural formations within London's underground scene – especially those that merged high-art and popular modes of expression – reveals certain points of contact between the otherwise contrasted manifestations of the desire for change in European and American societies. But, according to Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, the ‘new aesthetics emerging in art, music, film, architecture, graphic design, and fashion joined with hippie ideologies and lifestyle’ was the only ‘truly transnational aspect of the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s’.Footnote ⁵ Certainly in the British context, when compared to the USA, France, Germany, Italy, or Czechoslovakia around 1968, the youth counterculture made no strong social or political demands.Footnote ⁶

The peculiar historical situation in Britain around 1968 resulted in large measure from the actions taken by the Labour government in this period, which, as Stuart Mitchell writes,

As a result, unlike in the USA and other European countries, protest in Britain tended to focus on local problems and thus failed to build a widespread network of radicals. As Mitchell explains, the government's liberalizing measures had important consequences for the relationship between culture and political activity: in Britain ‘rock music could be a significant cultural force without necessarily being a revolutionary one’.Footnote ⁸ A clear example of this phenomenon, noted by many critics and scholars, is the ambivalent attitude towards the revolution among such British musicians as John Lennon and Pete Townshend, for whom, as Theodore Gracyk has pointed out, ‘preoccupation with the authenticity of their self-expression precluded their participation in any sort of community with their audience’.Footnote ⁹ This problem is even more marked when we look at the alternative press: unlike the underground papers in France and the United States, these magazines were run in most cases by what Mark Donnelly calls ‘privileged middle-class students’, and this ‘meant that the upheavals of 1968 were essentially seen as a crisis within the dominant culture rather than a revolt against it’.Footnote ¹⁰

Within this overall framework London's underground scene offers a useful perspective from which to examine the mutual links between different artistic currents around 1968, currents that were especially strong in that historical moment because of the unprecedented concentration of musicians, poets, writers, and other cultural activists present in the city, many of whom shared their ideas of building something new in their respective disciplines. For this case study I have chosen to restrict my attention to a selection of publications that appeared in London between 1966 and 1973. These publications – magazines such as International Times, OZ, INK, Friends (later Frendz), Time Out, Gandalf's Garden, The Black Dwarf, and The Hustler – were then all independent of the mainstream press and had at least some pages devoted to music, whether articles, interviews, or record reviews. According to Michael Traber, the alternative or underground papers (I shall treat these two terms as practically synonymous) can be defined as media whose primary aim is not to communicate facts or opinions but to ‘change towards a more equitable social, cultural and economic whole in which the individual is not reduced to an object (of the media or the political powers) but is able to find fulfilment as a total human being’.Footnote ¹¹ In other words, what differentiates the alternative from the mainstream press is that ‘it is produced by the same people whose concerns it represents, giving a position of engagement and direct participation’.Footnote ¹² The chosen date limits of this study coincide with the first and last regular issue of IT (International Times),Footnote ¹³ one of the main voices of so-called ‘rock culture’. This term, which I shall use extensively in this essay, is closely related to the notions of underground, alternative, and counterculture sketched above, but emphasizes the crucial role of music in galvanizing the cultural, social, political, and ideological statements of the younger generation.Footnote ¹⁴ It is related to the way in which Lawrence Grossberg speaks of rock ‘as a way of mapping the specific structure of youth's affective alienation on the geographies of everyday life’.Footnote ¹⁵ It is therefore a multilayered concept that underlines the deep connection between the field of popular music (with its links to other genres and art forms) and culture as a whole, one that subsumes elements beyond the music itself, such as lifestyle, politics, and general worldview.

My intention here is not merely to describe the vicissitudes of the underground press, but rather to clarify the relationship it forged between music and the ideas expressed through it, reconstructing the concerns and beliefs of London's underground community by taking as primary sources the cultural artefacts that emanated from it. I shall start by focusing on the concept of ‘rock culture’ as an idea distinct from that of ‘counterculture’ – distinct above all in the way that it links wider claims for a renewed society with the search for new modes of performance and an expansion of musical and technical means. In this respect, popular music as portrayed by the alternative press seems to share with avant-garde tendencies a basic equation between art and life, between new creative means and their would-be disruptive effects on society as a whole. But, as we shall see in the third section, a fatal contradiction emerges between the growing commercialization of popular music and its revolutionary potential, as a result not only of the ‘co-optation’ of rock by market forces and record companies (a process noted by the alternative papers and most of their commentators and critics) but also of its own aesthetic and ideological ingenuousness and naïvety. Paradoxically, in hindsight, it was precisely when popular music began to be considered a form of ‘real’ culture – a process strongly sustained by the writers on music in the alternative press – that its effectiveness as part of the countercultural project of global revolution started to diminish. The final section of this article will look at the different political and aesthetic positions within the underground press, and the basic change that occurred in their editorial policy after 1968–9, especially with regard to music. At this moment the position and role of music and the arts in general within London's underground papers seem to be matched by a new, more individualistic, and less utopian attitude that gradually surfaced in the counterculture itself, in its cultural position as well as in its political projects and aspirations.

Underground social and cultural practices in 1960s Britain have been addressed by a number of other scholars and commentators. The historical and bibliographical surveys of Nigel Fountain and Mick Hoey provide a deep insight into the context and significance of the underground press among British youth.Footnote ¹⁶ In The British Counter-Culture 1966–73 Elizabeth Nelson addresses some of the same alternative publications that I discuss here, but, like Kevin Donnelly more than a decade later in his all-encompassing work on the 1960s in Britain, she focuses mainly on social history and the consequences of this period for contemporary society.Footnote ¹⁷ Her perspective therefore differs from mine on account of its concentration on a sociological (rather than aesthetic or artistic) paradigm and its focus on the 1960s’ impact on recent British history. Later studies focusing on the music press, such as those by Jason Toynbee, Chris Atton, Steve Jones, and Simon Frith, are closer to the present article, in that they highlight the passage of rock writers from the underground to the mainstream music press in the early 1970s.Footnote ¹⁸ By so doing, they provide a suitable narrative framework for my research (as will become clear later on in this article) but they do not discuss the underground press extensively. Another study dealing with the relationship between music and counterculture, Sheila Whiteley's The Space between the Notes, searches, like mine, for homologies ‘between musical and cultural characteristics’.Footnote ¹⁹ But whereas Whiteley focuses on sound structures and the communicative meanings of progressive rock, I explore what was written about popular music. My study thus has the potential to create for her musical observations an interpretative context, one that is able to relate them to avant-garde concepts and thus connect British popular music to wider, international trends and developments in both popular culture and the arts in general.

Rock as a catalyst: expanding boundaries, medium and music

It is easier to understand the ambiguous and multilayered concept of ‘rock culture’, and its distinction from that of counterculture, if we observe its gradual evolution in the underground press. By 1973 Margaret Geddes could write in Spare Rib: ‘Today rock music is taken so seriously by its followers that it is considered by many to be the centre of a subculture – the rock culture.’Footnote ²⁰ Back at the end of the sixties the multiform meanings such a term might take on can be illustrated by various pieces of writing from the alternative press on the Rolling Stones.Footnote ²¹ In IT 141 they are depicted, in the early phase of their career, as one of the most visible and authentic embodiments of youth culture:

In this account of the Stones’ career, sexual freedom and a new lifestyle are inextricably linked with rock music in developing an oppositional attitude towards the older generation, thus articulating an ideological position that is nonetheless not overtly political. The kind of revolution implied in a concept like this is aimed at the liberation of the individual rather than at the global reconfiguration of society and inevitably results in a fragmentation of the different components of the protest movement whereby the personal and the political are no longer clearly distinct, a process that was soon to manifest itself in the entire London underground scene. In fact, despite the Rolling Stones’ depiction in the mass media as prophets of the revolution, in the alternative papers their dominant position within the movement was never totally accepted, especially by the most radical critics. In an article published in Friends in November 1970 Jonathon Green compared the engagement in revolutionary activities of the band Hawkwind with that of their famous colleagues:

As the above quotation suggests, the danger that many commentators in the alternative press underline, given the ever stronger links between popular music and the industry, is that of confusing rock stars’ antisocial and eccentric behaviour with authentic ideological statements, and seeing their Dionysian lifestyle as a sign of protest against the system rather than evidence of their growing submission to it. As Richard Neville wrote in INK in 1971: ‘The Great Mistake was the assumption that Jagger's anti authoritarianism was based on the semblance of an Idea. For in truth, he is motivated not by any inkling of the world's ills but only by his super-id. Mick Jagger is a rebel of convenience.’Footnote ²⁴

The problems implicit in the simple equation of ‘rock culture’ and counterculture were well known generally to the alternative press, not just with reference to the Rolling Stones. A comment from OZ 32 (January 1971) suggests that there was a widespread awareness among cultural activists of the difficulty of turning the spontaneous rage conveyed through rock music into a well-defined political project: ‘To make a really dangerous Left out of the post-war somnambulists, this will need a sense of ridicule, an emotional subversiveness, the confidence to acclaim drugs and rock as actually revolutionary, not just bad habits the proletariat has picked up.’Footnote ²⁵ It is worth noting that in this short, polemical essay David Widgery does not reject the concept of rock culture in toto, but rather tries to reshape it, in order to make it once again an effective tool in social and political protest. This indicates the power of rock culture among the youth of the late sixties: popular music was undoubtedly a ‘broad church’ in which different degrees of political consciousness could coexist, but it never lost its key role in the ideological debate constructed by the counterculture. As the generation gap between the younger generation and the rest of society tended to widen, rock from its very beginning emerged as a catalyst for an entire worldview, or at least this is the way the alternative papers tended to portray it.Footnote ²⁶

The multiform nature of rock music as an aesthetic and social force (i.e., a real ‘culture’) displays itself not only in its link with the project of an alternative society, one that would emerge from a different relationship between art and life, but also in its questioning of its own medium. In British popular music of these years one can clearly see a tendency towards experimentation together with new concepts of improvisation and the live act of performance that are often, though not necessarily, drawn from contemporary or past art music.Footnote ²⁷ As Cathy Berberian claimed in a 1966 interview with Jean Jacques Lebel in the pages of IT, this was the main novelty in the contemporary art world of that period: ‘We are always encroaching on other people's territory. There is no theatre that has no music in it just as in music, good music, there should be theatre, there should be visual art, etc.… this inter-relationship has developed recently and I just happened to be working at the turning point.’Footnote ²⁸ Kevin Ayers, writing in June 1968 on a stage performance by Soft Machine, saw a radical break from the stabilized norms of the live popular music show as constituting an essential part of the group's aesthetic project, and predicted that it would become the way of the future:

When those words were written, such a reconfiguration of the symbolic power relationships between performer and public was acquiring a deeper significance as a reflection of the contemporary struggle between students and the establishment in a number of Western countries. This belief in a new kind of live show was shared by Pete Townshend, who in June 1969 explained in OZ 38 the major achievement of his band, The Who:

The inclusive and instinctive nature of the music of Soft Machine and The Who was mirrored by the protean nature of the alternative scene as a whole, which defined itself as

Even when the content of their songs was not explicitly political, popular music singers and groups affirmed the plurality of the underground movement through unconventional musical, aesthetic, and performative devices, trying to define a new kind of live event and therefore suggesting new possible models of coexistence between human beings.

From a musical point of view the idea of rock as an inclusive ‘culture’ led to the search for new compositional tools and practices that could widen the boundaries of popular music. This resulted in two main trends. On the one hand it saw the birth of groups devoted to bridging the gap between classical music (the Romantic tradition in particular) and popular music, combining the symphonic language of the nineteenth century with the instrumental resources of rock bands. Examples are The Nice's ‘Ars Longa, Vita Brevis’ (1968) or ‘Karelia Suite’ from Five Bridges (1970); Emerson, Lake, and Palmer's Pictures at an Exhibition (1971); and other songs and albums with a similar inspiration, even if they are without literal quotations of their sources. Such cases are not especially interesting from a theoretical point of view, since they remain rooted in an existing paradigm, as Frank Zappa pointed out in an interview he gave in November 1969 to Jonathon Green in the first issue of Friends:

On the other hand there were a few groups that drew inspiration from contemporary art music in a different way, from the Beatles’ Revolver (1966) and Pink Floyd's early electronic music experiments to the ‘electric chamber music’ of bands like Soft Machine, Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, AMM, and Henry Cow.Footnote ³³ The propulsive impetus of avant-garde experimentation on the London alternative scene is evident, for example, in the first paragraph of the ‘New Music Supplement’ published in IT 25 (1968): ‘Both Stockhausen and Cage, two seminal figures of the avant-garde, are having a great number of their works performed just now, and Cornelius Cardew is the first of the new wave of young English composers to have a reputation internationally. Thus the new music emerges as a potentially crucial and explosive force on a rapidly changing scene.’Footnote ³⁴

The reference to Stockhausen and Cage marked different tendencies in the appropriation of contemporary music techniques, each anticipating divergent developments in the popular music field. The first can be seen to have influenced such numbers as the Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’ or ‘Revolution 9’, Henry Cow's tape compositions on the B side of Unrest (1974), Syd Barrett's use of guitar effects during his early days with Pink Floyd, a group which itself experimented with concrete sounds, synthesizers, and sequencers from Ummagumma (1969) onwards. Cage's idea of happenings and chance processes had a big impact on the London alternative scene, while other concepts emanating from the American experimental music of Morton Feldman, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and La Monte Young were borrowed by British popular music groups and artists. Minimalist processes and the use of improvisation as integral to the structure of individual songs, for example, play a crucial role in the music of Soft Machine, as Andrew Lycett points out in a 1970 interview in Friends: ‘He [Mike Ratledge] prefers to talk of his music as “organic” and spends a lot of time working at the structure of his pieces, developing ideas from Terry Riley, and making sure that the sounds are right.’Footnote ³⁵ Another sign of the mark left by American experimentalism on British bands was the growing interest in the possibilities of repetitive melodic and rhythmic organization drawn from Asian (mostly Indian) music, which played a central part in songs such as Pink Floyd's ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ (A Saucerful of Secrets, 1968), based on the reiteration of a basic pattern with a loose improvisational scheme, or in the production of so-called raga-rock groups, such as Quintessence and Third Ear Band. Finally, another trend that influenced popular music was represented by the free-improvisation experiments carried out in both contemporary jazz and art music, looking for a new form of musical expression that was not necessarily linked with a written score or a predetermined structure. In this respect the role of Cornelius Cardew, probably the most innovative figure in English experimental music around 1968, was crucial, and not only in musical terms. His activities ranged from the organization of festivals and performances to his involvement in AMM, a collective improvisation group that often shared its live act with underground rock bands:

By questioning instinctively the structure of contemporary society (not politically but in terms of the construction of alternative lifestyles, values, and artistic practices), rock and roll in its development through the fifties and sixties progressively acquired one of the essential features of avant-garde art, according to the classic definitions of the term by Clement Greenberg, Peter Bürger, or Renato Poggioli: the struggle against established social structures.Footnote ³⁷ As Bernard Gendron points out, there are at least four areas where one can see indications of ‘high/low alliances involving popular music’, and most of them are present in sixties Britain:Footnote ³⁸

1. 1 institutions designed to bring together different art forms and high and popular culture, including the alternative papers or the clubs and happenings organized by London's underground activists, such as the UFO Club, the Indica Bookshop, the weekly ‘Spontaneous Underground’ happenings at the Roundhouse, etc. Such a confluence was made possible by the inclusive nature of rock music, whose aesthetic was moulded ‘out of two complementary but distinct historical movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Romanticism and Modernism. Both are crucial sources of the mass society critique, and major influences upon rock culture as well. Both Romanticism and Modernism challenged the emergence of industrial, urban capitalism, and both celebrated the author, artist, or musician as a privileged representative of an authentic, individual self. However, they did so in complex and somewhat different ways, and those differences have contributed to rock culture's own complex (and often divergent) formulations and expressions of authenticity’;Footnote ³⁹

2. 2 the leisure practices of artists and musicians involved the mixing and overlapping of high- and low-brow culture, such as the abovementioned involvement of the experimental group AMM with rock and pop acts and happenings, and the interest of Paul McCartney in contemporary electronic art music. Facts like these highlight the formation of a community in London based on common artistic aspirations and beliefs,Footnote ⁴⁰ a process inspired by the underground institutions and whose aim was central to the alternative press and its cultural project;

3. 3 the rise of a critical stance among underground critics (and later on in the ‘standard’ press) that saw popular music as a medium capable of expressing political statements against the status quo on account of its borrowing of techniques and sounds from contemporary art and electronic music. This led, at the end of the sixties, to a redefinition of the concept of avant garde, which was now seen as an attitude shared by musicians and composers from different personal and professional backgrounds rather than a monolithic experience with precise boundaries and programmes;Footnote ⁴¹

4. 4 the last common element between popular and avant-garde art in this context, more unequivocal from an ideological point of view than shared formal or compositional inspiration, is a particular aesthetic posture in which art and political statements are intertwined. This attitude is evident in the discourses of musicians themselves, especially those who show a deeper awareness of the cultural significance of avant-garde trends, such as Henry Cow, Soft Machine, Gong, AMM, Frank Zappa, early Pink Floyd, etc. These experiences were shaped by what Bernice Martin calls ‘some variants of the motifs of zero structuring against conventional society’, which involve experimentation in the realm of sound and, as we shall see in the next section of this article, often acted as a symbolic substitute for the quest for a renewed shape for society as a whole.Footnote ⁴²

At the same time the mass dissemination of popular music and its industrial mode of production contradicts the élitism that is often implicit in ‘classical’ theories of the avant garde, prompting instead a reformulation of avant gardism as a pluralistic concept, an interpretative move that is essential if we want to understand the complex cultural dynamics in play between high and popular art during this period.Footnote ⁴³

Rock music and revolution: views from under- and over-ground

One of the main themes found in the alternative press concerning popular music is the recognition of the increasing co-optation of rock by market forces, a theme evident in some of the comments quoted earlier regarding the Rolling Stones. For writers in these magazines (as for later historians, musicologists, and cultural studies scholars) this process led inevitably to the detachment of popular music from revolutionary ideals and a growing awareness of its inadequacy as a propaganda vehicle for the underground movement as a whole. An example of the original utopian conception of rock music can be found in an article published in IT in May 1969, where Mark Spark, while admitting that popular music is only ‘realising half its potential’ by becoming a commercial product, still believes in its disruptive power:

The problem underlined here is the status of a would-be revolutionary medium whose means of production are controlled by an industry that is interested in the political content of music only in so far as it can be used as a marketing tool, as in the advertisements stating that ‘the revolution is on CBS’. With its lack of a coherent ideology, rock revealed itself too weak to become a real unifying factor for the movement, as Germaine Greer wrote a few months later in OZ 24:

With such an attitude towards the music industry these writers laid the foundation for one of the most enduring critical myths about the sixties: that the people involved in the alternative press and other activities related to counterculture were directly threatened by the capitalist order and that business provided, as Thomas Frank puts it, a ‘fake counterculture, a commercial replica that seemed to ape its every move for the titillation of the TV-watching millions and the nation's corporate sponsors’.Footnote ⁴⁶ By erecting a binary opposition between business and alternative culture, Frank argues, these writers (and most later commentators) failed to recognize one of the most important changes taking place in the corporate culture of those years, as it too became subject to increasing market segmentation and new management trends that emphasized creativity and individualism over hierarchy and efficiency:

This would suggest that the stark contrast between industry and underground was a fundamental misinterpretation of reality: the industrial system (particularly the advertising and culture industries) was changing, following its own path, and counterculture was simply there to provide capitalism with the most appropriate images and marketing slogans to do it. On the other hand it would also suggest that the revolution portrayed by the alternative papers as based on a new lifestyle summed up in music was not a significant threat to ‘straight’ society. As George Melly had already noted in 1970: ‘At all events the political upheaval of 1968 proved that pop music, in the revolutionary sense, was a non-starter, a fake revolt with no programme much beyond the legalization of pot; yet in its insistence on its right to live by its own standards it has shown considerable tenacity, and a refusal to be pushed.’Footnote ⁴⁸ In other words, rock music was not tamed by commercial companies and industrial firms, but rather succumbed to its own ideological vagueness and the types of aesthetic posture that permitted an ever growing separation between musicians and alternative radical groups, thanks in part to the close connection with avant-garde art highlighted at the end of the previous section.

Indeed, the relationship between popular music and revolution was problematic in its own right. A number of commentators continue to hold that there was a persistent, predictable, and natural affinity between rock musicians and the counterculture. Richard Middleton, for instance, writes that ‘music offers a counter-view, a space where rebellion is possible; and that is what explains music's immense role in political contestation and in subcultures’.Footnote ⁴⁹ But the way in which ‘popular music was re-appropriated in the service of an alternative vision of social organization and relations’Footnote ⁵⁰ at the same time highlights a basic paradox already noted by Peter Wicke in the historical relationship between rock and the counterculture:

The consequence of this contradiction between the music's production and its reception not only made possible the use of the symbols of youth unrest in advertising campaigns, such as the CBS ‘revolutionary’ advertisements, but also justified the prevalent opinion among musicians that a strong connection between their art and countercultural ideas had already been established, and that there was therefore no need to push these ties further. If such a process is a logical result of what Melly called the ‘stylization’ of rock, where some elements start ‘as revolt’ and finish ‘as style – as mannerism’ after being assimilated within the capitalist system of production,Footnote ⁵² it is nevertheless important to stress the significance of this transition, even if it was probably more important from an aesthetic than an ideological or countercultural point of view. As Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison observed when commenting on the relationship between the folk-revival and the civil rights movement in the United States, the dialectical relationship between cultural manifestations and their implied political-ideological statements served both as a way of disseminating new ideas and as a means of articulating aesthetic positions: ‘Movement ideas, images, and feelings were disseminated in and through popular music and, at the same time, the movements of the times influenced developments, in both form and content, in popular music.’Footnote ⁵³ The same consequentiality of events could be seen at work in the UK of the late sixties: on the one hand it is true that rock bands managed to express a common sense of anxiety in their generation, emphasizing their intuitive and basically apolitical form of social protest and changing some of the established compositional tools and conventions of early rock and roll. On the other hand they were soon to discover that their fundamental lack of a credible ideological position undermined the development of a truly committed popular music after 1968, as this depressed account in OZ 38 stated only three years later:

As Andrew Chester wrote in the first issue of The Black Dwarf, the underground paper most influenced by the New Left debate and the only one with clear Marxist roots, a reliable convergence of music and politics should result in a radical transformation in the sound and style of the music. But by 1970

Rather than being a form of expression for the underground community, as most New Left and underground critics would have wished, in most cases rock quickly became an art for art's sake, and its former connections with the audience were progressively eroded both from the outside, by changes in the music industry and in culture more widely, and from the inside, by its own aesthetic ingenuousness. Symptomatic in this respect is Roland Muldoon's 1968 comment in The Black Dwarf concerning the Beatles, specifically their role as the first musicians and artists to be considered worthy of any attention from the ‘straight’ critics and commentators: ‘I have looked up to them as a group and I know that millions still do, and I think, wrongly, that the interest shown in them by the establishment is an acceptance of us all.’Footnote ⁵⁶

In this context the definition of ‘Classicism’ proposed by Chester as a broad label for popular music production after 1968 is a powerful conceptual tool for understanding how rock music's very accreditation as a recognized form of creativity also marked the end of its socially disruptive power.Footnote ⁵⁷ Rock stars, regarding themselves increasingly as a sort of countercultural élite separated from their audience, progressively lost their feeling of being part of the milieu in which they were first accepted and applauded. This evolution in the relationship between rock and countercultural ideals is partly the result of the symbolic, ambiguous form in which ideological and political statements are expressed in popular music. As Bernice Martin writes, ‘it is true that rock elaborates the liminal moment – the rave-up, the emotional height and depths of love and despair, egoism and isolation – but it also rests on images of taken-for-granted worlds’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In addition to that, the difficulty in strengthening the connection between popular music and social awareness also lies in the class connotations of hippie and alternative communities in the UK. As Theodore Gracyk writes:

The middle-class roots of most of the main characters of English rock at that time therefore had a twofold significance: on the one hand their education, in most cases through art schools, fed their aspiration towards a new kind of social organization that could be achieved only through experimental art (visual art as well as music), while on the other hand it developed the basis for an aesthetic discourse that, in the words of Nathan Wiseman-Trowse,

It was on account of its own artistic ambition, one could say, that the majority of the UK popular music scene detached itself from any actual commitment to political and social issues, and thus revealed rock to be a means of communication unsuitable for political messages or contents.

Rock music in the underground press: fragmentation and changes in cultural policy

Even though all the papers basically shared a strong anti-establishment attitude, the range of views they articulated concerning the means and the ends of their cultural struggle varied considerably within the alternative press, from the overall optimism of IT to the dejected Marxist analysis of popular culture found in The Black Dwarf.Footnote ⁶¹ Coming back to the possibility, or impossibility, of theoretical convergence between the arts, society, and revolution, it is particularly interesting to compare the way in which different publications – namely IT, Gandalf's Garden, and Running Man in 1967 and 1968 – could offer quite different interpretations of the same social and artistic reality. For example, in an article in IT 9 Tuli Kupferberg speaks of the ongoing sexual, artistic, and psychedelic revolution as a consequence of the generation gap that would eventually lead to an unavoidable social upheaval.Footnote ⁶² His attitude is perfectly in line with the stance of a publication that featured information on all facets of youth culture, underpinned by a broader conviction that the increasing visibility of this sector of society would inevitably favour a global cultural transformation. Discussing the same matter in Gandalf's Garden 2, Tom Scott stakes a claim for a spiritual and personal revolution rather than a public one: ‘Firstly, it was about drugs, secondly it was about meditation, thirdly it was about a supposed lack of connection between the two (especially in The Times correspondence column) and, lastly, there was the implication that meditation was unchristian and therefore bogus.’Footnote ⁶³ By focusing on the souls of individuals rather than on the political struggle, such a view of the revolution seems as naïve as the concept of deterministic social change found in IT. A final excerpt, from Running Man 1, offers a more pessimistic view of the relationships between alternative culture and society:

For this columnist, the lack of discrimination in general, and in particular between high and popular culture, reflects the vagueness of a movement that lacks any deep-rooted ideological programme for the construction of a new society. Such an attitude confirms the pronounced differences among London's underground papers, and the fragmentary nature of the alternative scene itself.

After 1968 the absence of a theoretically or ideologically defined editorial policy, even within a single paper, emerged as one of the most crucial problems for the underground magazines, especially as their impulse towards eclecticism came to focus on specific political issues (women's or LGBT liberation, ecology, the liberalization of drugs, etc.).Footnote ⁶⁵ This more ‘responsible’ political attitude, which was also a consequence of the strong restrictions operating against the alternative press shown by events such as the OZ trial in 1971,Footnote ⁶⁶ worked together with a trend towards professionalism that was to change for ever the very nature of these publications. Instead of supporting a total change in society, the alternative papers began to support the most radical fringe of the movement, looking for more effective ways to carry on the revolution:

In this context the arts now took possession of totally separate columns in most of the underground papers under consideration here, breaking the strong link that until then had united music, other artistic manifestations, and social issues. This trend started with OZ, where a music supplement named Mozic (or other compound neologisms with ‘music’ and the title of the magazine) began to appear from number 17 (December 1968) onwards, and the two other most influential alternative papers soon followed suit. Plug & Socket, ITMusic, or MusicIT, as it was variously called, became the music supplement of IT from number 53 (28 March 1969), while in Friends/Frendz a special ‘Kulcher’ section (also spelt ‘Kulchur’, ‘Kulture’, or ‘Kultur’) was available from number 22 (10 January 1971). This latter example is particularly telling, since not only did the transformation in editorial policy affect the magazine's overall structure, but it also led it to foster a stronger connection with the music industry: during 1971 the magazine began to advertise promotional subscriptions, including a free album from CBS, which was, as we saw, the first major record company to use ‘the revolution’ as one of its main slogans. This evolution in editorial policy seems like capitulation, in view of the ingenuous hopes for a radical change in society it had once espoused, and it is of particular theoretical interest because it underlines a different kind of ‘alternative public sphere’.Footnote ⁶⁸ If the main difference between the standard and alternative press is that the former is produced by ‘the same people whose concerns it represents’,Footnote ⁶⁹ then such a change in editorial policy must surely point to a deeper shift in the values and cultural priorities of the movement, a shift confirmed by the subsequent ‘migration’ of journalists from those papers to the New Musical Express, Melody Maker, and Sounds, and in the gradual closure of the underground publications. Elizabeth Nelson writes that by 1969

As part of this process, music began to be judged according to its revolutionary contents – in other words, no longer on its own terms but with reference to its capacity to spread a message, to educate people, to be a prophet for imminent social change. Groups such as the Edgar Broughton Band, Pink Fairies, and Hawkwind were praised in the underground press for their commitment to the ideals of the counterculture, but little is said about their musical influences or about their compositional practices or technical qualities.Footnote ⁷¹

If, from a commercial point of view, this can be seen as a simple convergence between the necessity of attracting advertising money for the papers and the eagerness of the record companies to attain a suitable position in the youth market, its consequences on a cultural plane were to reverberate far beyond the restricted boundaries of the underground. The process by which popular music was being alienated from the very core of the alternative press also exposed a notable change in popular musical criticism in the UK: the incorporation of the former self-appointed, amateur journalists of IT, Friends, and OZ (including, notably, Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent, Mick Farren, Caroline Coon, and John Peel) within ‘standard’ music magazines like New Musical Express, Melody Maker, and Sounds. In these publications (as Simon Frith and, more recently, Jason Toynbee, Chris Atton, and Steve Jones have pointed out) this generation of rock critics developed a new language and new techniques to deal with music, in which they substituted concerns for the ‘alternativeness’ of the artists and groups with other issues. As Chris Atton notes, ‘It is from this period that a dominant ideology of rock criticism emerges. This ideology valorized authenticity and originality, and developed a mythologized account of rock musicians that considered their work as art.’Footnote ⁷² It is interesting to note Atton's use of the term ‘ideology’, which Frith uses in a similar context to refer to a complex value system deeply rooted in rock, in part intersecting with the concept of ‘rock culture’. The rock critics therefore played an important role in emphasizing the closeness between avant-garde and popular developments, thereby reinforcing a trend towards experimentation that was already present in popular music practice and, moreover, giving these convergences a certain aesthetic legitimacy:

Following this path, it was natural for the music press of the period to portray the beliefs and aspirations of an entire generation in terms of a closed circuit in which ‘rock music was seen as the only way of making sense of the social turmoil of the era’; indeed, ‘it was this music that validated the work of rock critics as mediators of counterculture’.Footnote ⁷⁴ From such a standpoint the transformation in the editorial policy of underground papers and the separation of music from other topics provides an initial indication of a wider historical trajectory, which marked the definitive end of the dreams of a truly alternative press in Britain.

These changes in the way that music was treated in the alternative magazines mirrored other fundamental transformations in the music industry between 1965 and 1970, in the technological field especially, which deserve a brief discussion before this study is concluded. First of all, especially thanks to the Beatles and their critical success, the predominant form of rock distribution shifted from the 45rpm ‘single’ format to the 33¹/₃rpm LP. The latter allowed the bands to experiment with longer compositions, to the point that they began to demonstrate a fully developed formal awareness when dealing with more ambitious formal constructions, such as suites and concept albums. If, on the one hand, this led to musicians’ increasing dependence on technological means, it also resulted in the groups themselves taking on increasing responsibility for the sound of their records. As Kealy has pointed out, ‘further developments in recording technology facilitated the rock musician's involvement in the sound-mixing process’, and then rock musicians started to ‘act as self-contained production units’.Footnote ⁷⁵

These changes in the industry also influenced the way in which audiences listened to popular music. As exemplified in Frendz 11 (30 September 1971),Footnote ⁷⁶ it is not unusual to find in the underground press advice and articles about how to buy and assemble a good hi-fi system at a reasonable price, emphasizing the traps of dealers and manufacturers. The need to offer refinement in the home consumption of music runs parallel with the growing complexity of popular music records in the early 1970s, an increasingly widespread intellectual approach to rock music, and the accreditation of popular music as a form of art. But, as Eric Robbie wrote in the final (November 1973) issue of OZ, this technical evolution also had deeper repercussions concerning the ideal way of listening to music, and whether it should be conceived as a social or an individual experience:

This trend towards personal listening also mirrored the social reality of the counterculture after 1968, with its shift from the global revolutionary project to limited political struggles focused on specific issues. Like politics, music was no longer a collective, all-inclusive phenomenon, but tended instead to be seen as a vehicle for a solitary, individual experience.