| Motoring Discussion > Springtime. | Miscellaneous |
| Thread Author: Ted | Replies: 27 |
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Sun 8 Feb 15 17:52
Springtime. - Ted
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Spent a couple of hours today fitting new rear brake pads to the SiL's Chrysler Voyager. I was surprised to note that the big beast has leaf springs. Not very substantial ones, just 1 leaf about a metre long with maybe a couple of very short ones under the cross beam. I thought these were redundant on road going passenger cars years ago. The Chrysler is a 2003. Even the 52 jowett has torsion bars. Any other cars still using them out there ? |
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Sun 8 Feb 15 18:17
Springtime. - Armel Coussine
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I know I've driven something with long single-leaf springs, perhaps one of many Ford Transits, but I can't be sure. There would have to be secondary axle locating arrangements in case of a leaf breakage. Does anyone remember the vertical Ford Anglia and Prefect of the fifties, which had a transverse front leaf spring, quite a few models, increasingly pretentious-looking but essentially a thirties car with that trusty 1172cc sidevalve engine? Cheap from new and pretty robust they were. A valued friend of mine who died the other day owned a succession of them which he drove like a maniac. Except on one occasion when with a third friend we had tied an upright piano lying on its back insecurely to the roof. Then, with one or two passengers of whom I was one leaning out of the windows adding our muscle to the dodgy ropes, which meant the car doors couldn't be opened (but we were young and could use the front windows to get in and out), he drove carefully, for him, several miles through London taking the piano somewhere or other. The slightest bend made that poor little Ford lean over for what seemed a very long time. Afterwards its roof was worse than rippled. It was worth it though. One of my late buddy's wide range of talents was stride or blues piano-playing, a bit like Jools Holland's, which he would do unpretentiously for a few minutes whenever he felt like it. RIP Hoppy... he was a fabulous cat who helped shape the sixties in London. |
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Sun 8 Feb 15 20:02
Springtime. - Armel Coussine
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>> which he drove like a maniac. What I mean by this is violent axle tramp at both ends on a whole succession of old A4 roundabouts, with equally rapid and violent steering correction to keep it out of the kerbs. Will anyone know what I mean? |
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Sun 8 Feb 15 21:01
Springtime. - Slidingpillar
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| Morgan 4/4, +4 and Roadster have leaf springs at the back. |
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Sun 8 Feb 15 22:00
Springtime. - Ted
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I was thinking more about stuff that Mr Average might be tempted to buy from one of the glass palaces since the Minnellium. I think Transits will have lost their cart springs by mow. I suppose a few Aussie utes might still be fitted. I remember replacing a broken spring on someone's MK2 Escort and having to fashion a spreader from steel tube and threaded rod. Not a tool you'd really need in the box nowadays ! |
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Tue 10 Feb 15 01:04
Springtime. - Armel Coussine
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>> a fabulous cat who helped shape the sixties in London. Some here may have noticed obituaries for Hoppy. He was a famous and energetic sixties mover and shaker, a moving spirit of the sixties underground movement, co-founder of the UFO club and the underground newspaper International Times, responsible with UFO for giving the Pink Floyd a launch pad, they having started as the UFO house band... it was a somewhat bewildering and ambiguous privilege to be present at the time. Hoppy needing a bigger venue for UFO, which caught on in the psychedelic sixties, discovered the derelict Roundhouse and opened it up. He wasn't alone in these endeavours of course... but he was a crucial moving spirit. None of his fellow-conspirators would deny it I'm sure. You had to know him well to have some idea of how he drove of course. I went to see him in the Scrubs when he was doing nine months for, I ask you, cannabis possession, he came to my 75th down here a year or so back, and I went to see him a week or so ago, blind and immobile, on his deathbed. My dear friend of 56 years. Last edited by: Armel Coussine on Tue 10 Feb 15 at 01:09
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Tue 10 Feb 15 13:13
Springtime. - Manatee
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>> >> a fabulous cat who helped shape the sixties in London. >> >> Some here may have noticed obituaries for Hoppy. He was a famous and energetic sixties >> mover and shaker, a moving spirit of the sixties underground movement, co-founder of the UFO >> club and the underground newspaper International Times, responsible with UFO for giving the Pink Floyd I made the connection to the rather sketchy Independent obit. goo.gl/jmKSfI His name rang no bells. I was at school into the 70s, and had only heard of London until I was 14. Your post has prompted me to dig deeper. internationaltimes.it/john-hoppy-hopkins/ internationaltimes.it/john-hoppy-hopkins-interview/ Sincere condolences. |
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Tue 10 Feb 15 15:03
Springtime. - John Boy
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| Thanks for those links, Manatee. I enjoyed listening to those interviews. They put him into context for me. It was interesting to see how different he was in reality to the impression you would get of him from the press. He referred to that phenomenon himself when talking about photographing the bikers at the Ace Cafe etc. It's easy to see why you would like him, AC. I'm sure I would have too. A "gentle soul" as someone said in the comments on the first IT link. I was sad to note there too that Special Branch trashed his photo archive. |
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Tue 10 Feb 15 15:31
Springtime. - Armel Coussine
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Hoppy was an anarchist. The fuzz who raided the Queensway flat were furious with him because of an obscene but funny collage featuring the Monarch, with chimpanzee's legs and other details too distasteful to describe, that he had on the wall. They ripped it up on the spot. People who knew Hoppy felt he was never quite the same after the jail sentence. He was very resilient, tough in a way, but sweet-natured, and the slammer is hard for most people of real artistic sensibility. |
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Tue 10 Feb 15 16:37
Springtime. - Armel Coussine
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>> the slammer is hard for most people of real artistic sensibility. Hoppy's lasting oeuvre is the photos of course. The collection has been published in book form, in some sort of collaboration with Lee jeans... last time I looked it was available for £35, cheap at the price. It's full of people I know, some now deceased. There's one of me in it, actually a posed shot purporting to depict a drug deal (for About Town magazine which H had a connection with) in Cable Street, Stepney. I look like a Greek gangster and there are some early sixties vehicles passing along what was then a very long cobbled one-way street. There are shots taken inside the Westbourne Terrace flat where we lived, of a scantily-clad (if that) Gala Mitchell, Hoppy's gf at the time. Last edited by: Armel Coussine on Tue 10 Feb 15 at 16:42
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Tue 10 Feb 15 17:01
Springtime. - John Boy
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>> Hoppy's lasting oeuvre is the photos of course. >> Some of them can be seen here: mignonnet.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/photos-by-john-hoppy-hopkins.html |
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Wed 11 Feb 15 00:14
Springtime. - Armel Coussine
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>> internationaltimes.it/john-hoppy-hopkins/ >> internationaltimes.it/john-hoppy-hopkins-interview/ >> Sincere condolences. Belated thanks from me too Manatee. I'm hopeless at internet stuff. All the survivors who can walk from those photos, and who aren't too far away, will be at the funeral. I've spoken to a couple on the phone. Hoppy once brought the Notting Hill gangster and landlord's enforcer Michael de Freitas, who called himself Michael X, to my house in Highbury. A clever amusing fellow, witty but a badass. Hoppy had a short-lived association with him in some housing association scam, something like that. Hoppy was extremely radical and didn't care about left and right. But he could spot a wrong'un when he had to as it were, albeit reluctantly. He didn't mind picking up a few semi-legal quid but he was against exploitation let alone extortion of slum landlord type. (Mind you he could storm into your room bawling while you were still fast asleep if you got behind with the rent. But that was personal, not corporate). Last edited by: Armel Coussine on Wed 11 Feb 15 at 00:17
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Wed 11 Feb 15 09:39
Springtime. - John Boy
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| www.colvillecom.com/page/michael-de-freitas |
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Sun 15 Feb 15 20:34
Springtime. - Manatee
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I'm listening to Last Word on BBC R4 which is doing Hoppy's obituary. Available on demand. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qpmv |
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Sun 8 Feb 15 23:46
Springtime. - Harleyman
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Ford Mustang up till not very long ago. |
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Mon 9 Feb 15 09:56
Springtime. - Boxsterboy
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>> I thought these were redundant on road going passenger cars years ago. The Chrysler is >> a 2003. >> They are on European and Japanese cars. American cars are different ... |
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Tue 10 Feb 15 15:55
Springtime. - Manatee
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| I think the last car I had with cart springs was a 1970s Hunter GLS. |
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Tue 10 Feb 15 17:03
Springtime. - bathtub tom
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I hired a SEAT Marbella in Spain many years ago. That was a copy of the first incarnation of the Fiat panda. They had leaf spring rear suspension.
Last edited by: bathtub tom on Tue 10 Feb 15 at 17:04
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Tue 10 Feb 15 22:51
Springtime. - Ted
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I had a Seat Marbella in Greece........but that was last century. I never looked under it though ! |
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Sun 15 Feb 15 20:57
Springtime. - Avant
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Interesting obituary of 'Hoppy' in the Times too - clearly someone special - not least because of his apparent ability with only two helpers to lift a piano on to the roof of an upright sit-up-and-beg 50s Ford. As you say, AC - basically a late 30s Ford 8 or 10, with a little more chrome added to the Prefect and then stripped back to basics again in its final form as the Popular. The Hopkins I knew was quite different - Dr Douglas Hopkins (1902-92), organist of Marylebone parish church and finally RMA Sandhurst. He too was known as Hoppy, and just as affectionately. |
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Sun 15 Feb 15 23:58
Springtime. - Armel Coussine
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>> special - not least because of his apparent ability with only two helpers to lift a piano on to the roof of an upright sit-up-and-beg 50s Ford. Three strong young men can lift a piano off the ground, with much slightly risky effort, and sort of roll and slide it onto the roof of an upright Ford provided the car's owner doesn't mind the roof being graunched and bashed in. Hoppy didn't. We had the iron heart of a piano complete with all the strings, the heavy harp-shaped essence of the instrument, hanging up as a sort of room divider in the Westbourne Terrace flat's hallway, our communal living space. It was secure, but hung above two seats whose occupants could start to get paranoid and peer upwards after a few joints and suggestive remarks from the flat's inhabitants. We weren't always totally kind to visitors. |
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Mon 16 Feb 15 00:07
Springtime. - Manatee
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| Did you spot my reply to your post above, about the obit on Radio 4 this evening, AC? |
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Mon 16 Feb 15 01:09
Springtime. - Armel Coussine
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Of course Manatee, listened to it hours ago. These are my people from way back. It's bittersweet for me. |
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Wed 18 Feb 15 23:43
Springtime. - Armel Coussine
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I don't think Joe Boyd who knows me well will object to my showing you his two heartfelt pieces on Hoppy. They give a very good picture of the quicksilver, f*** you brilliance and energy of the cat, and of his sweetness of nature. One is for the Grauniad, the other for Joe's blog. I wasn't a sixties mover and shaker. I was married in those years and working for regular money in market research. But I was in touch throughout, as a friend, not business associate, having lived in the seminal Westbourne Terrace pad, also throughout. That's why I can recommend Joe Boyd's accolades, since he was there too and more committed to that psychedelic world than I was. It was interesting, if stressful, working 9 to 5 in the City for a corporation and kicking up Bob's A-Dying in Soho and the Gate in the evenings, living in Highbury the while. No wonder I feel so knackered these days. John “Hoppy†Hopkins died at the end of January. Some of you may have read the obituary I wrote for the Guardian or heard my contribution to “Last Word†on BBC Radio 4. The Guardian stayed reasonably true to my original text, but added more facts and removed some of the quirkier passages. Originally, (and within their word-count restraints) it read like this: Wow!! was John “Hoppy†Hopkins’ response to any number of things: an idea, a record, a film, a poster, a joke, a poem, a drug, a girl…. And his “Wow!†did not simply echo the ubiquitous “far out†of San Francisco hippies; his delight in the world was genuine, committed, astute and infectious. Hoppy, who has died, aged 77, was co-founder of International Times, the UFO Club and the London Free School. During the intense two-year heyday of London’s fertile and diverse counterculture, he was the only true leader the movement ever had. John Hopkins was born in 1937 in Slough; his father was a naval engineer, who designed turbines for large vessels. After attending Felsted School, he took a General Science degree at Cambridge, receiving his MA in 1958. His degree was undistinguished; as Hoppy put it, he discovered sex, drugs and jazz at Cambridge and pursued all three with great diligence. After graduation he worked as a lab technician for the Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell, but lost his security clearance after a jaunt to Moscow for a Communist youth festival. In 1960, he moved to London and became a photographer. I first encountered him backstage at the 1964 ‘Blues and Gospel Caravan’ photographing Muddy Waters and Sister Rosetta Tharpe for Melody Maker. His seldom-shown work is among the most evocative of the era, including brilliantly insightful shots of Beatles and Stones, John Lee Hooker and Thelonious Monk as well as a colourful early-‘60s underbelly of tattoo parlours, bikers, fetishists and derelict architecture. (There is a book of them: “From the Hipâ€, Damiani Press 2008 - hoppyx.com/) In the summer of 1965, Hoppy joined with Barry Miles (future biographer of Ginsburg and Burroughs) and poet Michael Horowitz to organize the Albert Hall Poetry Olympics, featuring the American trio Ginsburg, Ferlinghetti and Corso, as well as Brits Adrian Mitchell, Alexander Trocchi, Christopher Logue and Horowitz; that night, the standing-room-only audience recognized themselves as a counter-culture for the first time. Two months later, Hoppy started the first of a life-long series of projects to democratize communication and information. The Notting-Hill-based London Free School achieved few of these goals, but its money-raising events gave Pink Floyd their start and his inspired collaboration with the local West Indian community brought about the first annual Notting Hill Carnival. In October of 1966, he and Barry Miles published the first issue of International Times, Europe’s first underground paper. (By the end of 1967, there would be almost 100 of them.) The IT launch party at the Roundhouse – with music by Pink Floyd and Soft Machine – inspired Hoppy and me to open the UFO Club in a West End dance hall. Every Friday, Hoppy would mount a scaffolding at the back of the club, play records, make gnomic announcements, show films, project light shows and imbue those nights of music, theatre and dance with an unforgettable atmosphere. Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Arthur Brown, Procul Harum, Tomorrow, Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and Fairport Convention are among the many bands for whom a UFO appearance helped launch a successful career. In response to a March police raid on the IT offices, Hoppy mounted a “14-Hour Technicolor Dream†at Alexandra Palace; Peter Whitehead’s film “Let’s All Make Love In London†shows a dazed John Lennon wandering in the huge crowd, transfixed by Yoko Ono cutting a paper dress off a girl as Pink Floyd greeted the North London sunrise. Revolutions are, almost by definition, factional, but during those two golden years from June ’65 to June ‘67, the working-class anarchists, vaguely aristocratic bohemians, musicians, crusaders, poets, dropouts and psychotropic adventurers were united in their respect and affection for Hoppy. Seemingly irreconcilable differences were bridged again and again by our ever-positive leader. He had a scientist’s suspicion of waffle or cant, forcing us to confront the flaws and contradictions in our ideas and actions, but always in the most positive and supportive manner. All craved the reward of a “Wow†from Hoppy. That he was seen as leader of this amorphous movement espousing recreational drug-taking, political protest, sexual liberation and “obscene†literature inevitably led to his downfall. Hoppy’s flat was raided and a small amount of hashish found. At his trial, he attacked the prohibition on drugs and, having been branded a “menace to society†by the judge, was handed a nine-month sentence. Outrage at the sentence inspired ubiquitous Free Hoppy graffiti as well as a full-page celebrity protest in The Times, paid for by Paul McCartney. Without Hoppy, UFO lost its way and closed by October; the scene he had inspired was reduced in his absence by internal bickering, police harassment and better-funded competition. Though prison robbed him of his energy for leadership, the following decades saw Hoppy persevere with his ideals. Inspired by the Paris events of May ’68, he and Miles converted IT into a workers cooperative. With his partner, Sue Hall, he formed Fantasy Factory, an offline editing facility that revolutionized affordable low-tech video editing, bringing it within reach of community activists and independent directors. UNESCO funded Fantasy Factory’s educational package and distributed it widely in the developing world. For Hoppy, culture was always seen in the context of politics and vice-versa. Always eager for scientific challenges, a chance meeting in 1990 led to Hoppy designing and constructing a greenhouse for horticultural research at the University of Westminster. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2007, he never lost his curiosity or his charm, meeting a new partner for his final years at a gathering of Parkinson’s sufferers. In his final months, his speech and movement severely hindered by disease, he was still able to open wide his brightest eye and say ‘Wow!’ John “Hoppy†Hopkins, born 15 August, 1937, died 30 January, 2015. With you, loyal mailing list readers, I can be less restrained. I have no idea what my life might have been like had Hoppy not turned up that afternoon at Fairfield Halls Croydon to snap those pix for Melody Maker. I liked him immediately and asked if he was coming to the show that night. He had other plans, but eagerly accepted a pair of comps for the Hammersmith Odeon (now the Apollo) show the following week. Afterwards, he gave me his phone number and address and, as I recall, we shared a joint in the alley outside the stage door. When I returned to London at the end of the Blues and Gospel Caravan tour (for which I was tour manager), a folk club organizer offered me a slab of hashish at a bargain price. It was far too large for my modest level of consumption, so I rang Hoppy. He jumped in a cab and the three of us rode round a Soho block while Hoppy sniffed and pinched and bargained until the deal was done. I went back to his flat to sample the bounty and a friendship was forged. (Curious to recall our shared assumption that a London cabbie in 1964 wouldn’t have the faintest idea what we were up to…) From late April until the beginning of August, I rented cheap rooms, or slept on floors and sofas waiting to go back on jazz promoter George Wein’s payroll in Paris on August 1. I made three friends during those first weeks in London: Roy Guest, who was the Caravan’s liaison for the British promoter; Nigel Waymouth, a blues fan who came backstage at that same Hammersmith Odeon concert; and Hoppy. My entire life in London since then can be traced to the headwaters of those three encounters: Roy introduced me to the folk scene and all of his musical friends, Nigel turned out to be brilliant artist and designer who started Granny Takes A Trip and designed the UFO posters and Hoppy turned out to be… well, Hoppy. That summer, he was living in a large flat on Westbourne Terrace; Paddington was unfashionable then and the rent was nothing. For a month or so, I slept on his sofa, watched, followed and learned: back-doubles around London, the best curries, the best fry-ups, how to develop and print black and white film, how to talk to girls, how to listen to the Ayler Brothers, how to roll a British joint. Hoppy was always up for it, always full of energy, always positive, always searching, questioning. And it was no free-ride; I was expected to run errands, drop off film, make excuses to stood-up girls… When I ran out of money, he loaned me £10, a large sum in those days. My first attempt at pay-back came in September when I got him a press pass to the Berlin Jazz Festival. He took fantastic photos (many still for sale, or viewable in From The Hip) of Miles, Roland Kirk, Sonny Stitt, Kenny Clarke… I got him another pass to the Newport Jazz Festival in July ’65, where he told me about the big poetry reading at the Albert Hall he’d helped organize a few weeks earlier. I didn’t grasp its significance until I moved back to London in November. I rang Hoppy as soon as I arrived and he invited me to a meeting of the London Free School the following night. Everything seemed to have changed; Hoppy was no longer taking pictures, he was organizing. Leaflets were printed, a hall was rented, West London locals – Trinidadians, Irish, Ukrainians, students on the dole – were targeted as beneficiaries. The idea was to share our privileged knowledge with the disenfranchised – a theme that would run throughout Hoppy’s life. The next two years are a vivid blur: Pink Floyd gigs to raise money, the IT launch at the Roundhouse, the UFO Club every Friday in an Irish dance hall in Tottenham Court Rd, the Technicolor Dream, borrowing a 16mm projector every Friday from Yoko Ono and returning it through a door left open to the street each Saturday dawn, police busting people in the queue, getting advice from Michael X about how to confront authority…. I’m not sure how I discovered that Hoppy was a terrific blues pianist, but he performed expertly when I hired him for Incredible String Band and Purple Gang. (The Mad Hatter’s Song and Bootleg Whiskey, respectively.) When Hoppy went down in June, the air went out of everything. We were already under siege – what had been a colourful psychedelic sidebar to “Swinging London†in the autumn of ‘66, had become a threat to the stability of society by the spring of ‘67, as the Beatles told of taking acid and then released LSD’s slickest advert, Sgt Pepper; the police colluded with the News of the World to bust the Stones. By the time Hoppy was released in January, our world had changed out of all recognition. I was busy in the studio and the “underground†was completely fragmented. Hoppy went into what he later confessed was his ‘Maoist’ period, sometimes even provoking factionalism rather than healing it. The warmth never went from our encounters, but throughout the 70s and 80s, they were sparse. In the ‘90s and ‘00ies, I saw more of him; I found there were things I could do for him – help him move a couple of times, for example. He ended up in a great 3-room ‘sheltered accommodation’ in Islington, with a garden at the back. I would sometimes explain to Americans friends why I can’t imagine living in the US; would someone like Hoppy, who had been so central to the culture but who never profited from his efforts, have been taken care of that way in America? (Will Britain still be like that if the Tories win in May…?) As his health deteriorated, I saw more and more of him. In the hospital a few days before he died, though his mouth was unable to form words, his good eye was wide and alert as I talked of how he’d changed my life and changed the life of this country. He moved his head up and down; for all his gentle humility, Hoppy knew who he was and what he’d accomplished. |
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Thu 19 Feb 15 15:20
Springtime. - Armel Coussine
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Apologies for that extremely long post. I'm aware I've gone on embarrassingly about the late Hoppy. He'd be embarrassed anyway. You can get about 20 or 30 seconds of Hoppy's blues piano playing from The Incredible String Band's 'The Mad Hatter's Tea Party', which starts about 2m 15s into the clip and runs to about 2m 50s. I could get that track by googling, but was unsuccessful with The Purple Gang's 'Bootleg Whisky'. I can't cope with jumping through internet hoops let alone paying for stuff. |
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Thu 19 Feb 15 16:06
Springtime. - Focusless
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>> You can get about 20 or 30 seconds of Hoppy's blues piano playing from The >> Incredible String Band's 'The Mad Hatter's Tea Party', which starts about 2m 15s into the >> clip www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3eW0uRAP-Y |
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Thu 19 Feb 15 16:33
Springtime. - Armel Coussine
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>>starts about 2m 15s into the clip Actually about 2m 05s, sorry about that. By the way, without wanting to be unkind to the good old Incredibles, I have to say the rest of the song is pretty boring to me. Even Hoppy's blues is somehow squeezed uncomfortably into the very different, less traditional style of the rest of the band. But that sort of thing is inevitable in that sort of music. |
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Fri 27 Feb 15 22:24
Springtime. - Armel Coussine
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I went to Hoppy's funeral today wearing a silk printed scarf, psychedelic in style, that Hoppy laid on me after a trip to India years ago. I expected to know at least half of the people there, who numbered at least a couple of hundred and vastly overflowed the crematorium chapel. All three of my daughters, a son-in-law and a couple of granddaughters were there because they loved Hoppy having known him all their lives. So was my ex. But we've all aged 20 or 30 or 40 years since last sighting - Hoppy's contemporaries I mean - and although there was a familiar look about many there, I had endless trouble firstly with names and generally with faces. People recognised me and I recognised them, but there's been all this water under the bridge. People showed up and left early to get back to their busy lives (a weekday remember). I had one large whisky (Hoppy wasn't a boozer) and a bit of rather good hash someone gave me that I had to go outside and smoke in the car. Herself noticed the pong when we were driving home after leaving the knees-up early around 7.30. There's a ten-week blockage on the A29. We had to take a tiresome detour on the way to London this morning, and took a different route on the way back, A24 all the way to Washington. Seemed to take forever but we were here around 9.30. RIP, but not too much peace because the man himself liked a bit of clamour and so on. Goodness how I'll miss him. Last edited by: Armel Coussine on Fri 27 Feb 15 at 22:25
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