“Very soon, there was all this great underground music around, although the only guy playing it on the radio was John Peel. It was a very innocent, positive and uplifting time when anything seemed possible. The goal was to drop out and do your own thing – so I thought, ‘Right, I’m going to start my own magazine!’ So I started Zigzag, which was the first rock magazine in this country, decades ahead of the fashion. Originally it was just me and this guy Rod Yallop, a photographer, and various friends. There was a great anti-establishment feeling about everything. We all believed we were part of an alternative society – ha! naïve fools! – but I wanted to be part of that camaraderie, spreading the word. Zigzag definitely did that. It brought together a whole body of people, many of whom are still friends. Some used to make pilgrimages to my house. [Including John Fahey’s ex- girlfriend Linda Getchell, as immortalised on his albums, who turned up on the doorstep one day.]


“I dropped out of work and did it full time because I thought lying on the floor with headphones on listening to Kaleidoscope and Quicksilver was better than catching the 7:55 to St Pancras every day. The first issue came out in April ’69 with Sandy Denny on the cover. The name was derived from Captain Beefheart’s classic ‘Zigzag Wanderer’ and the well- known rolling papers. Also, I heard that if you approach a stranger in a zigzag line it means you come as a friend. I thought that summed up the whole essence of Zigzag.”


Shortly after Zigzagappeared, an Aylesbury teacher called Robin Pike had the idea of starting a club in the town. His friend David Stopps picked up the gauntlet and started promoting Friars every Monday at the local Ex- Servicemen’s Club, presenting a stellar string of bands, including King Crimson, Free, Mott The Hoople, Quintessence, Blossom Toes, Edgar Broughton and Van Der Graaf, with the mighty Andy Dunkley as resident DJ. Friars soon built a reputation for its cool vibe and warm crowds, soon at the forefront of the vibrant late ’60s-early ’70s band scene, continuing at two further venues into the mid-80s.


Pete liked the atmosphere of the club and local scene in general so much that he moved to the area. “I remember Peter Gabriel saying to me that he thought the whole focus of the music world had moved to Aylesbury, with Zigzagand Friars and so on. Of course, Stoppsy loved that. He used to talk about Aylesbury being the hub of the universe. All of us who lived round there were really lucky to have old Stoppsy. Friars was just the best club in Britain. I still firmly believe that. It had a really buzzing atmosphere, very cool, and if you didn’t like the band you could go into that very comfortable bar. He put on every interesting band that ever came down


34


the pike. And, in the early days, Zigzagwas sold in the foyer, along with other titles like Ozand the spectacular Gandalf’sGarden.”


That’s where I picked up Zigzagnumber two with NashvilleSkylineDylan on the cover and features on The Band, The Who’s just- released Tommyand Holy Modal Rounders. Pete contributed a rudimentary family tree on the little-covered L.A. country rock scene and a review of Tim Buckley’s sublime Happy Sad, along with a Richie Havens article under his Mac Garry pseudonym, invented so his name wouldn’t seem so dominant. I’d never seen a magazine like this before, especially Pete’s Zigzag Wanderings column for underground gossip.


Over subsequent, ever-thickening issues I continued to be intrigued by the artists covered, prodded to investigate names like Eclection and Mighty Baby on the strength of reviews and detailed features. It was like a highly-entertaining companion to Peel’s radio show, opening up a whole new world, especially when Peter Stampfel started writing his Notes From America column. I soon twigged that the jovial long-haired chap cavorting around Friars was Frame but was too shy to approach him, being fifteen and pretty green in the ways of the world. I already knew the music inside out though and, by the time Mott The Hoople, who Pete loved and trumpeted first, came to town that December, was already flying my own freak flag making psychedelic posters. I designed the Friars membership card but my wildest dream of all was to one day write for Zigzagwith the same irreverent humour and raging passion as Pete.


“That’s what made us different – and I include you in this because I always thought you were like me but more so! There’s no point writing about rock music unless you’re really into it. You and I both realised that. The writers on Zigzagwere stoned, passionate and wrote from the heart, whereas so many of the other writers were straight, humourless and wrote from the head. It became the norm later, but I think I was the first independent, DIY, full-time rock writer in Britain, just doing it because that was what I wanted to do. Zigzagintroduced the idea that you could write whatever you felt enthusiastic about, whereas all the weeklies wrote about what was in the charts or was being advertised in their paper. We wrote about whatever we felt like.


Framed! Top to bottom: Pete’s illustrated Kaleidoscope feature; his first ever family tree; the Year Of Love retrospective.


“We always tried to put people on the cover who weren’t big names or anything. Early on, I went to Joe Cocker’s house on the Newbury Downs out in Berkshire. [Traffic lived there too, just up the road, and were hauling his car out of the mud with their jeep.]


During our conversation, he said to me, ‘Don’t ever let anyone tell you what to write,


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