A few days before I am due to meet John Hopkins, a well-meaning intermediary
suggests that it might be useful for “Hoppy” to have, in advance, a list of
the sort of things I’d like to know about. There is no sinister motive
behind this — no questions to be vetted. Instead, there’s the suggestion
that lives might be made easier if the 71-year-old were allowed a bit of
time for his thoughts to be ordered and for his memory to dredge up the
appropriate names and faces, people, places.
The problem with this list, though, is that there is almost too much to ask.
You just want to write “Everything”. Because until recently I had only the
woolliest appreciation of who Hopkins is and what he has done. In 1961 he
morphed from nuclear physicist to roving photojournalist, then going on to
become a kingpin of the London underground movement. He brought Allen
Ginsberg to the Albert Hall and established the countercultural bible the International
Times before helping to launch psychedelia with the hugely influential
UFO club. When, in 1967, Hopkins landed in Wormwood Scrubs, sentenced for
marijuana possession by a judge who called him “a pest to society” under the
punitive drug laws that almost resulted in the jailing of Mick Jagger and
Keith Richards, Paul McCartney paid for a page advertisement in The Times
as part of the subsequent campaign to liberalise the drug laws. If you have
an interest in Sixties counterculture there are worse people to talk to.
We meet because this month an exhibition opens in London displaying the best
of Hopkins’s photography from 1961 to 1966. Here, you will find Beat Poets,
the Beatles and Stones, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, CND demonstrators
and American jazz musicians, captured alongside the eerie austerity of
postwar London cityscapes and candid depictions of the era’s less celebrated
cast: the sex fetishists, the tattoo artists, the prostitutes, the drug
addicts and the families who, in the atomic age, still lived in 19th-century
poverty.
“This guy,” says Hopkins, pointing to a photograph of a cheery bloke in a
Notting Hill bedsit, “is this guy,” he says, now pointing to a picture of a
man clad in shiny black rubber boots, cape and mask, while fondling what
look like a pair of pliers. “It was quite interesting, because he had his
own language. He talked to me about what he did for clients. One of the
things he’d do was give them ‘easements’, which meant orgasms,” he smiles.
“He seemed an ordinary person, reasonably friendly. Not uptight at all.”
Hopkins asks, again, if I’d like a cup of tea. Do I have a sweet tooth, he
wonders, gesturing toward some cake in the kitchen of his Clerkenwell flat?
His voice blends an academic’s measured authority and thoughtfulness with
flecks of Mid-Atlantic, and though he does occasionally lose his thread or
pause for long moments this probably has much to do with fielding the
multi-faceted questions that his life and work draw. In his living room is a
blown-up photograph of William Burroughs (his own shot), whose eyes follow
you around the room. A psychedelic cycling cap sits above Hopkin’s now
gnomish face and, along with his chunky purple Nike trainers, he wears a
sweatshirt emblazoned with a photograph of the jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan
(also his own). It was freelancing for Melody Maker that made him a
chronicler of jazz and pop, just as commissions from The Sunday Times
did with party politics.
“I found musicians were quite accessible if you were polite,” he says. “If you
treat people like stars, they’ll behave like stars, but if you treat them
like ordinary people, they’ll behave ordinarily. But everyone was accessible
then — perhaps it’s a reflection of the era. I remember walking down a beach
in Brighton with James Callaghan, who was a minister at the time, and
photographing him with his wife and secretary, having a picnic. I remember
taking some photographs of Harold Wilson in a hotel room, and when I
finished we just shook hands and it was a ‘see you round’ sort of thing.
Now, you can’t get near those [types of] people.”
If, like Philip Larkin, you think the Sixties didn’t really get going until
1963, then much of Hopkins’s photography captures a sort of acceleration.
Compare, for instance, his CND protestors filling Trafalgar Square in 1964 —
all shirts and ties, side partings and duffel coats — with the photographs
of Hopkins and friends congregating in the same place for the same cause two
years later. He has patterns painted on his face and a faraway stare and
blissed-out smile. With him is the Warhol actress Kate Heliczer.
“Kate was married to the American poet Piero Heliczer. She was my girlfriend
at the time,” he says, peering at the photo. At the same time as she was
married? “Well, technically, I think she was married to the poet,” he
frowns. “Technically.”
Hopkins was not born into a world that promised liaisons with art-house
actresses or Vogue models such as Gala Mitchell, who also features in
his work. He was born in Slough. He went to boarding school, where he played
trumpet in the army cadet band, and then on to Cambridge where he graduated
with a “not very good degree” in physics and maths. A “not very good job”
with the Atomic Energy Authority meant he avoided National Service at the
cost of having to “lug uranium bars” around for three years.Then a friend
from the Cheltenham CND invited him on a trip to drive to Moscow in a
converted hearse to protest against nuclear weapons. “I said, yes, and told
the Atomic Energy Authority who said, well, we think you’d better not,” he
explains. “So I said: ‘F*** you, that’s where I’m going. I don’t like my
employers telling me where I can’t go on holiday.’ And I went.”
Eventually, Hopkins was thrown out of Russia for breaking the terms of his
visa by leaving his travelling party. On returning to London, he remembers
how he was “heavily grilled by MI something — 5 or 6 — which was quite
unpleasant. Incidentally, I’d been teaching myself photography. I’d sent
some pictures to The Guardian, they sent me a cheque, and on the
strength of that I decided to move to London and become a photographer.”
It was the eventual betrayal, as Hopkins sees it, by Harold Wilson — elected
in 1964 on an antinuclear platform only to “change his position 180 degrees”
— that hastened the pace of underground politics. In Hopkins’s flat what
began as small newsletters and hodge-podge collections of poetry,
photography and jazz reviews became, by late 1966, the International Times
(it). Attracting contributors such as Germaine Greer and John Peel,
it was soon an established title in an underground press that included Oz,
Ink and Friends magazine.
“There was a rivalry between all of us, but it was only superficial because we
were all striving in the same direction,” he explains, insisting that by
writing in depth about sex or drugs, these titles were merely sharing
information that hundreds of thousands of people wanted to know about. “I
thought that communications systems should be common carriers, like the
internet is now, without restriction on content.
“I remember sending a letter out to about 100 people I thought were prime
movers in one way or another,” he says, on his theme of putting
“communications theory” to work. “I think the year must have been 1967 or
1968. It was meant to be an act of inclusion, a way of saying, ‘Hi there,
we’re all really in the same boat; how are you? This is my contact
information, this is what I can do’.” The letter, which he digs out, is
signed by Hopkins as well as the founder of Oz, Richard Neville, and
the co-founder of Village Voice, John Wilcock. The list of recipients
ranges from Yoko Ono to Richard Branson. It’s the 1960s countercultural
equivalent of an exclusive Facebook group. Continued involvement with it
and related activities, such as the London Free School (a communally run
centre offering arts workshops and an underground hangout), meant that
Hopkins’s photography fell by the wayside after 1966. It also accounted,
he believes, for his stretch in prison: the Labour politician Wayland Young,
Baron Kennet, felt that his daughter, Emily (Young, of Pink Floyd’s See
Emily Play and now a sculptor), was being led astray by the activities
of the Free School. Hopkins claims that “he basically arranged to get me
busted. The police came to my place and I was charged [with possession]”.
Six months inside followed. “I’d rather have not been in jail while the Summer
of Love was happening,” he grins. On his release he married one of the girls
who appeared onstage with Frank Zappa as “Suzy Creamcheese” (for his song
Son of Suzy Creamcheese), but she “took off shortly afterwards”. He never
remarried.
By the start of the 1970s Hopkins had discovered nascent video technology,
becoming head of the video department in the Institute for Research in Art
and Technology in London. He believed that it was the most fluid medium for
unobstructed, uncensored communications, and helped to found the open-to-all
post-production company Fantasy Factory. This in turn led to work with the
Centre of Advanced TV Studies and commissions from the Arts Council, Unesco
and even the Home Office (there is something nicely subversive about this,
given that Hopkins was living in a Camden squat at the time).
Evening classes in botany and biochemistry led to a part-time job with the
University of Westminster as a “plant tissue culture consultant”, which he
held until recently. He also returned to photography, developing close-up
camera techniques that allowed him to trace changes in plant tissue growth.
Now, he spends much of his time looking for the financial means to restore
and digitalise his video archives, as well as managing his photographs from
the Sixties — a period, he concedes, that feels increasingly distant.
What, when they go on display, would he hope a young viewer might see in them?
“I’d like to think that there’s some sort of world view in there which would
be encouraging to them,” he decides, after a think. “Encourage them to throw
off some of the bad things about a society that’s too rigid. If you look at
the corruption with MPs we’re trying to deal with now, it’s very serious.
The place is in a terrible mess. It’s more urgent now than it was in the
Sixties. It might sound a long way to stretch my little exhibition with an
attitude which says ‘the state is out of date’, but it’s true.”
It is, I suggest, a strange picture: the genteel keeper of tropical
greenhouses still being the radical firebrand, letting slip to his
biochemist colleagues snippets of his time in the underground, replete with
the Beatles and Stones, Warhol actresses and stints in prison.
“Well, you don’t have to tell everyone your life story,” he frowns, then
pauses, then smiles. “Although sometimes it can be quite fun if you do.”
Hoppy Against Tyranny: Talking about a Revolutionary, Idea Generation
Gallery, London E2, June 19–July 19
