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W11 in the 70s. Chapter 3: Dope and the Electric |
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When you walked around the streets in W11 you saw many people of different cultures. It was very cosmopolitan. One thing common to many of them was that the hippie culture together with the Afro-Caribbean culture made the use of marijuana common. You saw many people walking around in a drug-induced haze. People often said to you: I’m really spaced out, or I’m tripping. LSD was also used, especially in GLF because it changed consciousness, bringing more awareness to gender roles. One of my friends one day asked me up for coffee and a chat. You don’t mind me getting on with this, do you, he said, we can still talk, and in front of him were a weighing scale and blocks of marijuana. This dark one is Afghanistan, he said, it’s the best. You have to heat it before you can use it because it’s hard. This one’s Moroccan, and I could see it was a paler brown, and this one’s Lebanese, he said, and he proceeded to weigh certain amounts out. What’s that? I asked, pointing to some see-through paper. Those are acid tabs, he said, called California sunshine. My friend, I discovered, was a dope dealer, but I don’t think it was uncommon in those days. There must have been lots of dope dealers in W11 in the seventies.
The Electric Cinema on Portobello Road was just wonderful. It was old and run-down but magical. It still had the old gas lamps for lighting and it showed all the film classics: Eisenstein, Pasolini, Fassbinder, you mention it and it was shown in the Electric Cinema. Not only that but it showed about four different films each night.
The first thing to hit you when you went into the cinema was the strong smell of strawberries. I soon discovered that the smell came from the rows of joss sticks called strawberry fields at the back of the cinema. This was to mask the smell of marijuana. I remember sitting watching a film and I was nudged and a joint was handed to me. Take some, pass it on, the man on my right said. In between films you could go and get really good coffee and sandwiches and cake at the back of the cinema, and the raffle tickets were drawn from a hat, and whoever won (and there were many) won an LP record.
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| Pictures: old photos: the Electric Cinema (two); a programme of the Electric Cinema; people in the Electric, with Bob Mellors at the far right. |
| Contents Bobby and I. 1 How I found out. 1 |
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You could go in at six o’clock and stay until three in the morning. Also I saw one person telling the man at the ticket office that his benefit hadn’t come through and he had no money for the ticket; the reply was that money shouldn’t stop culture, and he was allowed to go in free of charge. Your ticket was a raffle ticket which they told you to keep.
There was of course the cinema cat who sometimes rubbed against your legs looking for the scraps of food that might have fallen on the floor. All in all I loved the old Electric Cinema. There was a tale that the mass murderer Christie was once a projectionist there. I know that a friend of mine called Clare was a projectionist there some time in the seventies before she went to Australia to live, and Bob Mellors sold tickets there for a while, because I used to go there to have a chat with him. It was a good place to go to meet everyone from the area. I don’t know what happened to all those old films. There was the Ritzy in Brixton, the Scala
in King’s Cross, the Hampstead Everyman, and the Electric Cinema in
the Portobello Road, and a courier on a motorbike took the films
from place to place. An announcement sometimes came over a
loudspeaker in between films saying: the courier hasn’t arrived yet,
won’t be long, and everyone groaned. I found out all about film
through going to the Electric Cinema.