Interview: 40th Anniversary of the `14-Hour Technicolor Dream`
1. How did you first hear about the original event?
**First up: my memory is shot through like a Gruyere cheese and I do not remember much beyond being helped into the bath this morning by a muscled Polish woman in a smart blue overall and later being spoon-fed soggy Weetabix.
**That said I recall there was a general buzz around town. An ascending sense of anticipation: which bands would play, would there be free acid for everyone at the door as rumoured, would we all get naked, would it go on for days, would this actually be the start of the true revolution...?
**This was a time when the very air we breathed vibrated with a sense of `something is happening...` My girlfriend (now wife) and I used to trawl the Kensington Antique Market and the Chelsea Antique Market for clothes; ancient velvet dresses, uniform jackets once worn by some terrified hero, glass jewel-encrusted evening shoes that were once waltzed across some talcum-powdered spotlit dance floor. It would be here -- as we rubbed shoulders with other shoppers like Donovan or Marianne Faithful and inhaled copious amounts of incense-rich air -- that you would over-hear snatches of conversation, that you would see posters and flyers for everything from the biggest gig to the smallest get-together of some tribe of well-meaning dreamers who were congregating next Wednesday at midnight in Hyde Park to hum the world into a state of perpetual touchy-feely peace; "Hum for Peace. Bring an umbrella."
**At the Portobello Road market on a Saturday morning we`d buy turn-of-the-century broaches and scarves and rumours would be underlined as we wound in and out of the labyrinth of shops and stalls. Further down the road the locals would be buying their fruit and veg from the traditional market stalls, the stall-holders shouting out their wares just as they did centuries before. We`d buy a couple of apples if we had the money and wander back up the road to where the fledgling dandies rummaged hopefully through piles of cast-off clothes. A few tourists would snap away happily, capturing images of colourful chaotic '67 London to shock their families back home in Wyoming.
**A verbose way of saying: we listened and what everyone heard was that there was to be the greatest flowery musical gathering of all-time at Ally Pally. Wow! Gotta be there!
2. What're your memories of the event?
**Can`t recall what time the fun began, but I see us walking towards the hall in the dark, a wide flight of steps, a hushed and reverent colourful crowd all moving like a quiet wave towards the entrance. The first strains of echoey music drifting towards us, the `thrash-thrash-thrash` of a drum kit, the chesty throb of a fat bass.
**We entered through open doors and there above us were huge white breeze-blown flags waving gently, forming an ephemeral entrance of their own to what lay beyond. We walked beneath the flags looking up, our mouths open.
**The hall itself was a cathedral-like space, darkness pushing in from every direction apart from the stage area so far in the distance: a bright promising galaxy of brilliant light and oily colours. Now the music really hit you: No more silence til dawn...
**Janet and I were dressed in our very best finery. We`d dared to enter the forbidding `Granny takes a trip` in Worlds End a few weeks before. Can`t remember if this was when they had the car smashing through the window or if it was the totally blacked-out front. Either way you had to be mighty hip to feel at ease in that exclusive interior where the staff gazed at you through glazed unfocused eyes, a fashionable sneer teasing the corners of their glittering mouths. We splashed out, stage gear and fab long-collared shirts for me, gossamer dresses and floppy hats for Janet.
**As we preened and fluttered like pretty butterflies in the pulsating innards of the Ally Pally a photographer approached and requested a picture. We posed, he flashed, we moved on. But, oh, how we have cursed ourselves over the intervening forty years for not asking him to send us a copy, securing us forever in that moment in that place -- in that expensive clobber. Perhaps it will surface one day, a sepia relic from the past, a photograph of two wide-eyed twenty-somethings who didn`t have the faintest awareness of Time, frozen in that brilliant moment.
3. Can you recall much about any of the bands?
**I would love to recall the acts I saw but they`ve vanished into some dingy corner of my soggy cerebellum. Memories of the 14-Hour Thingy get mixed up with an all-nighter we did at Aldwych and another at Earls Court. We would have seen most of the bands that performed, but I guess they made no lasting impression on me. I do distinctly recall a film that was projected behind one of the bands, perhaps it was the Floyd. I caught a glimpse of a group of horses galloping -- with their manes on fire, frantically tossing their heads, wild and unstoppable. It disturbed me terribly and I looked away instantly, but the image was seared into my brain -- and I can still see it. It was probably a clever cinematic montage, but to me it was real. Perhaps it was the heady surreal atmosphere of the night, the pulsating noise, the sweaty press of over-excited or zonked out humans, the magic baccy that exuded its own perfumed-like-a-damp-bonfire aroma. The horses galloped on -- locked in their own fiery nightmare.
4. How central to you at the time was the whole acid scene?
**Last month I did an interview for USA radio programme on Kaleidoscope. The interviewer asked me how much acid I had to take to write our little psychedelic ditties. I laughed so much my dentures fell out. We were never part of an acid scene. Never knowingly took acid -- although I do recall after one show biz party where we all sampled the host`s sponge cakes, flying home in my yellow mini. Never once touched the ground.
**For some reason drugs never had much attraction for us. We were so immersed in the every-thinking-moment creative process that drugs would have been a self-indulgent distraction. !CLICHE ALERT! We were high on our music. Fantasy and reality coalesced in the song-writing process. So perhaps we did drugs by proxy: absorbed the head-bending experience by observing others, listening to medicated music created by acid heads, feeling the vibes, man. (Did we really talk like that? Yep. We should have had a damn good thrashing.)
5. What kind of legacy or impact do you think the event really made?
**Ahh.. Mid-way through this interrogation and you throw in a tough one. To be honest I think all it did in the final analysis was to plant a few memories in the brains of all those who attended. Memories to be dredged up fondly decades down de line. We never thought we could get old. That was for our parents` generation. We were going to live -- young -- forever. No question about it. We were a very special generation. We were in love with the world. We all loved each-other. Christ, we even wore flowers. How could that old man in the sky with the unshaven visage even think about imposing ageing on his children? Well, we soon found out. But that proves Big G has a sense of humour: he makes you age, then he takes the hair off yer head and shoves it in your ears and up your nose. Unlike the Isle of Wight festivals -- at which we appeared in 1970 -- and Woodstock, the 14-Hour Thing was only attended by a few thousand so its lasting influence is reduced. But it was a magic moment -- to quote Perry Como. Just wish I could find that damn photo of me and my girl in all that expensive gear.
6. I've heard vague rumours there were a few fights - and possibly even rapes - at the event. Do you recall any aggro of any sort?
**As the evening wore on the shimmering gloss that had dazzled and beguiled began to wear off. One fifty-minute wait to use the over-subscribed loo saw to that. I can`t remember anything about food and drink at the event... Presumably drinks were on sale and some kind of quick-fried stuff to harden the arteries. But as Wilson Pickett`s hour approached the detritus began to accumulate in dead piles across the floor: fag boxes, fag ends, empty Rizla packs, glistening pools of vomit, apple cores, condoms, crisp packets, odd shoes, handbags, watches, beads, the corpses of flattened chips, ketchup and a fair old crop of discarded Wrigleys.
**In the centre of the hall or in front of the stage everyone was bathed in the effervescent glow of the light show: the mesmerising Technicolor dream of one colour melting and merging into another, flowering for a moment before a wave of a different hue swept in from some farway psychedelic sea... (Look -- I apologise for that. It was uncalled-for, nauseous prose of a shade of purple that should have been banned. I put my hands up. I`ve waited forty years for the opportunity to write stuff like that again. But now is not the time or place. If you have had to make use of the sick bag then I apologise. It won`t happen again.)
**Rather foolishly we wandered hand-in-hand into the shadowy extremities of the hall, away from the brilliant core. And there we came upon a guy who had just been glassed in the face. He honestly looked like a ketchup accident in a trucker`s cafe: blood all over his face, bits of flesh hanging off like used Elastoplasters. It would have taken more than a sticky strip to put him back together again. We went towards the light. Back to the dream...
7. How did the era define what you went on to do or become in the 70s / 80s and onwards?
**Ahh... At last: a fun question that shouldn`t involve too much elaborate over-the-top pen-pushing. By `the era` I take it you mean `The Sixties.` First off: don`t forget that back then we didn`t actually know we were in `the Sixties.` We were living in the 1960s. Although we felt we were living in special social and cultural revolutionary times it had yet to be named. That would come later with the benefit of hindsight, nostalgia and rosey-tinted spectacles.
**For us -- Kaleidoscope -- this was the era of psychedelia. And that`s another thing: psychedelia was a very short-lived phenomenon. I guess Lennon started it all with his `Tomorrow Never Knows` on the brilliant but over-shadowed, `Revolver` of `66.
**We lived and breathed The Beatles. The Beatles were everywhere, everything, we were conscious that they were out there writing recording making history -- making the youth revolution a reality. This would have been around '64 or `65. The establishment didn`t like The Beatles or rock `n roll or pop music or youth culture or teenagers or fashion or long hair. The older generations were trying to preserve the rigid class system that had prevailed for hundreds of years. They were at the top. We were at the bottom. The ones in the middle wanted to be like the ones at the top so they also looked down on us with explicit contempt and disdain. But they were all glued to a stuffy world of manners where the lower classes still doffed their hats to them and didn`t speak unless spoken to and knew their place and were down there with the crumbs they caste our way. This was the monochrome world of Harold Macmillan Tories, bowler hats, ex-Army Colonels, blue-rinsed matrons, black cars, detachable starched collars and undetachable starched stiff upper lips. They were blind.
**By now Carnaby Street had erupted in a florid flush of boutiques with loud music and mini skirts and Mary Quant rippoffs and lace shirts and high-heeled boots for men and see-through dresses and spend spend spend! Teenagers had money and they were going to spend it. Records. Clothes. Alcohol. Cigarettes. Drugs. Holidays in Spain. Hairdos. Cheap food. Magazines. The tide was turning. The colonels were drowning. We were going to change the world. And we had our own leaders, thank you very much: John Paul George and Ringo.
**Kaleidoscope embraced the new fashion in music. After listening to the songs we were now writing Fontana thought they had the new Beatles. We signed a five year contract in early '67 and had an open door to the main Stanhope Place studios. We wrote and recorded our first album, `Tangerine Dream.` We were heavily influenced by everything that was happening in London at that time. But we were very insular as a band, self-contained, powered from within. We weren`t musos, mixing with other musicians, going to clubs all the time. Psychedelia suited us nicely at the time. The English brand was more fairytale than the USA product which owed more to intoxicants than to J M Barrie or the Brothers Grimm. We put the flowers on -- but flowers wilt and then they die. Psychedelia`s moment had come and gone. Charles Manson was on the prowl. The Sixties were leaving the stage.
**I still write about those times in my songs. It`s inevitable. I was twenty-one in `67. I feel privileged to have had that experience. The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream was part of that experience. In songs like `A Linden tree in Chelsea` (`Candy:The Best of Peter Daltrey` 1999) and `The Kubrick Letter` (`When we were Indians` 1996) and `Tambourine Days` (Tambourine Days` 2000) I look back with terminal nostalgia. From this distance the view is a little hazy now and the details are somewhat blurred, perhaps the colours not quite so bright. But I wouldn`t have missed it for all the char in China.
8. How did it feel to be at the ICA event? What was similar and what was different? How do you feel things have changed culturally since then?
**Well -- of course this is the `kick-yerself-up-the-backside` moment. I didn`t get there. Janet and I both wanted to go if only to look for that bloody photograph.
**How have things changed since then? Where do we begin? We never got our revolution. The suits and the generals still run the world from their underground bunkers. The bankers still pull all the strings. The government -- of whatever colour -- still fails to listen even though the concept of democracy demands that they do. And then they have the nerve to attempt to impose democracy on other nations, secretly hoping that they can install an `elected` government that will do their bidding. They should all be strapped down and made to listen to Dylan`s searing epic, `Masters of war.`
**Knives, guns, drug wars, crime large and small. And the hippies and so-called flower-children of yesterday now more worried about their pensions and the state of the NHS than making revolutionary social waves. And I can`t understand a word they`re singing on Top of the Pops.
**Last Christmas we had one of those `murder mystery` evenings. Invited a few friends and family. It was set in the Sixties and we all had to dress up appropriately. Janet and I dug deep into the spidery corners of our over-stuffed wardrobes. We dug out her tie-dyed mini dress and the Indian shirt I`m wearing on the cover of the `Tangerine Dream` album. They still fitted. Perhaps nothing has changed. Perhaps life is a circle. Perhaps we`ll all come back one day and find that the revolution did happen. We`ll sit in sunlit meadows making daisy chains listening to Donovan on our 1000GB i-Pods. Perhaps not...
Copyright:Peter Daltrey 2007
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