Reverberation: The Iconic History of Artist and Designer Nigel Waymouth, by way of Granny Takes A Trip, Hapshash & the Coloured Coat, and The Look Presents…
When in December 1965, Nigel Waymouth, Sheila Cohen, and John Pearce first opened the doors of Granny Takes A Trip they were perceptively at the vanguard of a moment of counter-cultural and pop-cultural combustion. Hailed as London’s first psychedelic boutique—though Waymouth now charmingly says, “what does psychedelic mean, I’ve never known, actually!”—Granny Takes A Trip ground Cuban-heeled Gohill boots into the established ideas of what, how, and where a clothes shop might be, triggering reverberations that changed the face of 1960s boutiques and are still evident today.
Cohen, Waymouth’s girlfriend at the time, was an ardent collector of Victorian, Edwardian and 1920s clothing, and as her finds began to pile up Waymouth had the idea that they should open a shop and sell them. As to the shop’s name, Waymouth explains, “We were going to be selling granny clothes and everyone was talking about tripping, so we thought it was funny.” At first the stock of vintage clothing was supplemented by a small range of shirts and ties designed by Pearce, who had trained as a tailor in Savile Row. “We’d go to Liberty’s and find really unusual fabric,” explains Waymouth, “and then ask Mrs Trott in New Cross to run them up on her sewing machine, and sell them for five guineas.”
The shop was “quite conceptual” in that “it was selling clothes, but it was also an experience.” An experience which began on the pavement, as Waymouth set an innovative pattern of regularly redesigning the frontage, and breaking convention by initially not displaying the clothes in the window, and then forgoing the window entirely. The inaugural fin de siècle façade in purple with the name in red Art Nouveau letters, featured a blow up of a Victorian pin-up photograph and a gramophone. Waymouth boarded over the window in 1966 and painted the entire frontage with successive portraits of the Sioux Chiefs Low Bear and Kicking Bear, which he replaced in 1967 with a pop art portrait of Jean Harlow. In 1968, he mounted the front half of a 1947 Dodge car to the frontage, its voluptuous bonnet and bumper, painted black and gold, then later canary yellow, jutting provocatively into the shop’s forecourt. He would change the frontages over night to maximise the element of messing with the minds of customers and passers by, as he says, “it was a trip and that was what we were all about.”
The name and design of the shop made it, at once, “threatening and very alluring” and a lot of people were scared to go in. Those who did cross the threshold found that Waymouth’s interior design placed the clothes—which gradually moved away from old clothes into new designs by Cohen, Pearce, and occasionally Waymouth—on, in, and around an array of objects. An Art Deco Wurlitzer jukebox, a tasselled black silk umbrella, and a Mutoscope showing What the Butler Saw saucy pictures, shared space with jackets in William Morris prints, tight velvet or brocade trousers, and velvet and lace skirts. “People wanted wilder clothes and we provided that,” says Waymouth, “the aesthetic idea, the Oscar Wilde idea, the very decadent look, flowery and over the top, but without being totally tasteless.” A mix which, unsurprisingly, quickly drew bands to the boutique. On the back cover of Revolver (1966) The Beatles are wearing clothes from Granny’s, as are the Rolling Stones on the front cover of Between the Buttons (1967), and Cream, The Animals and Pink Floyd were all regulars.
The choice of the shop’s location, 488 Kings Road, Chelsea, was informed by the fact that Waymouth, who had been working as freelance journalist, wrote articles for a medical journal publishers who had an office in the building. At that time, the area known as Worlds End was an unlikely location, as Waymouth says “it was the back of beyond”. But within four months of opening the boutique was featured in Time magazine’s ‘Swinging London’ cover story declaring the Kings Road as ‘the place to be seen’. Granny’s paved the way for a host of new boutiques and businesses that followed them to Worlds End, such as Hung On You, Dandy Fashions, The Flying Dragon Teahouse, Smile, Kleptomania, and Mr Freedom. Through the seventies Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm Mclaren took inspiration from Waymouth in the frequent complete redesigns of their sequence of shops at 430 Kings Road: Let it Rock (1971), Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die (1972), Sex (1974), Seditionaries (1976), culminating in Worlds End (1981). Whilst Paul Smith has cited Waymouth and Granny Takes A Trip as a key influence on his shops both nationally and internationally.
In late 1966, music producer Joe Boyd and photographer, journalist, and political activist, John Hopkins approached Waymouth with the suggestion that he might team up with artist Michael English, to design posters advertising their new club, the short lived, but highly influential, UFO. They presciently believed that not only would the two get on well—Waymouth confirms “The chemistry between us was brilliant; too good to last”—but that their combined talents would result in something special. Which, under the name Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, it duly did, as they produced a body of work, including posters, record sleeves, and shop designs, which defines the ideals and visions of the time as distinctively as any of the music or fashions.
The posters were printed and distributed by Osiris Visions which was part of the International Times (IT), the counter-culture newspaper which Hopkins had founded in October 1966 with Jim Haynes and Barry Miles. IT was based at the Indica Bookshop in the basement of the Indica Gallery in St James’, which Miles had founded in September 1965, with John Dunbar, Peter Asher, and support from Paul McCartney. The Indica Gallery, which was only open from November 1965 to November 1967, is acknowledged as the first ‘experimental’ art space in London and was where John Lennon first met Yoko Ono at an exhibition of her work. This cat’s cradle of cross-overs, including Granny Takes A Trip, played a major factor in Hapshash’s success, as Waymouth compounds, “we were all part of the same movement, whether you were a highly successful pop star minting it, or just a guy clubbing it, there was a camaraderie that swept forward this new approach to culture.”
With many of Hapshash’s posters promoting bands appearing at UFO, which with Pink Floyd as house band, and regular appearances by Soft Machine, and The Incredible String Band is an already impressive list, other key acts of the time also approached them to design to publicity material. “We were riding the crest the a wave.” Waymouth says, “you’re hard put if you’re a graphic artist now to do the equivalent of posters every week, one for Jimi Hendrix, one for The Who, one for… it doesn’t happen like that.” Hapshash also designed the posters for one of the most legendary events of the late sixties, 14-Hour Technicolour Dream, which was a fundraising gig organised by IT held on 28th April 1967 at Alexandra Palace, and included performances by Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, The Pretty Things, The Move, and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown.
Hapshash designed their posters for silk screen printing, and in so doing innovatively brought art processes to street posters, in addition to which they introduced a number of pioneering techniques which have since entered the mainstream. Which include developing the technique of gradating from one colour to another on a single separation which maximised the effect of the colours creating a “very punchy effect without being too garish”, and regularly using metallic inks which had not been used on street posters before. Waymouth encapsulates the vivid effects as “eye candy to match any psychedelic experience.” The shock of the new, the abstract effect of the high colour, overlaid intricate illustrations, and melting curvaceous type, made the posters illegible to most people. It was only, as Waymouth says, “young people of a particular desire who took the time to understand what was going in the poster”. The subversive element was heightened by the fact that Waymouth and English ‘hid’ “a lot of very naughty things” in the designs which only become apparent with close inspection, which was, Waymouth says, “an up-yours to our fathers”.
The most unexpected Hapshash project was the concept album Hapshash & The Coloured Coat featuring the Human Host & The Heavy Metal Kids, which was initiated by Guy Stevens, the legendary Mod DJ, music producer and manager. “He liked our creative energy,” says Waymouth, “and thought that he could shift this into some sort of musical form.” Neither Waymouth nor English were musicians and at the recording session, or more appropriately as Waymouth describes it “mad sort of party”, the band Art provided the musical underpining, such as it was, whilst Waymouth, English, and their friends “were banging tambourines and making noises”. Waymouth recalls that Art’s rhythm guitarist “got so pissed off, he said ‘this isn’t rock n roll!’ and stormed out.” With a Hapshash designed cover and inserts (that later featured in Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell’s 100 Best Album Covers) the record was released in 1967.
In 1969, the original Granny Takes A Trip trio disbanded and passed the shop onto Gene Krell and Marty Breslau who successfully reincarnated it as an emporium of crushed velvet and rhinestone for rock and roll gentry, before finally closing the doors in the mid-1970s. Waymouth and English also dissolved their partnership. For Waymouth it was a reflection of the times, he says, with a touch of melancholy, “The whole thing was changing, that sweet idealism was becoming dissolute, people were much more aggressive, the drugs became harder, and everything became much more commercial and cynical again; there’d been this oasis of time between ‘66 and ‘68, the little bit of sunshine really, perhaps a bit dipsy, but it was an ideal we thought may have stood a chance.”
As the 1970s began, Waymouth embarked on a new direction by moving full time into painting, save for two more forays into iconic sleeve design: Nick Drake’s Bryter Later (1971) and America’s Horse With No Name (1973). “I wasn’t looking for popularity,” he says, “not that I was particularly looking for popularity in the ’60s, but this was not a pop approach to life, this wasn’t commercial, this was refined luxury work.” Waymouth has also excelled in this discipline and over the last four decades has become particularly sought after as a portraitist, with many high-profile commissions and exhibitions including The Royal Society of Portrait Painters.
Portrait of Joe Boyd, tempera and acrylic
But as the century turned, renewed interest in Waymouth’s involvement in the ‘little bit of sunshine’ grew exponentially. Cosmic Visions, an Hapshash & The Coloured Coat retrospective, opened at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2000, and Tate Liverpool, included many Hapshash designs in the Summer of Love Psychedelic Art, 1967 exhibition in 2005. As Ruby anniversaries unfolded, Hapshash’s work was also to the fore as The Riflemaker Gallery in Soho presented Riflemaker becomes Indica in 2006, and the ICA recreated 14-Hour Technicolour Dream in April 2007. Whilst a chapter on Granny Takes A Trip in Paul Gorman’s influential book The Look - Adventures in Rock & Pop Fashion (2006) enlightened and inspired a new generation about the boutique and its legacy.
It is also with Gorman that Waymouth is collaborating on a fashion label again for the first time in nearly 40 years, The Look Presents… Despite the hiatus of two generations, because the label is available exclusively at Topman, the target audience are a similar age to Granny Takes A Trip’s customers: 16-24 year olds.
Waymouth decided to start by concentrating on a range of “works of art on t-shirts”. Five designs are currently available, with two more to be added later this year, and a new range next year. To provide a sense of continuum, Granny Takes A Trip is evoked on three of the t-shirts, with variations on his designs for the Low Bear and Jean Harlow shop fronts, and the boutique’s “femme fatale” calling card. But whilst accepting that it is his “good fortune to have been in those times and so people will refer to me in that way” with future designs he says the past will feature far less. “I’m always searching,” he says, “what I do now is very different from what I did then.” This statement of intent is underlined by the other t-shirt designs. A large bluebottle fly covers one, the inspiration for which came from the hand-coloured engravings of an 18th century book on insects. “Normally we would consider it something repulsive and want to swat it,” he says, “but it’s actually an amazing piece of nature, and it looks very beautiful on the t-shirt”. The fifth is a pop death’s head design of a pair of sunglasses above a gaping skeletal mouth and the legend ‘RIP IT UP’. Which, might well be interpreted as a comment on too much reference to a brief moment of his past. Though, any instinct to look too closely into the designs is rebuffed by his response to my question as to what he would like people to get from the t-shirts. “A sense of fun, put them on and smile; I don’t think there’s anything deeper than that about them, they’re just catchy ideas, it’s pop, it’s not deep!” He concludes by laughing heartily.
The ripples of laughter underline the sense of fun with which Waymouth has always approached his work, it is perhaps the key subversive element that has fuelled his refusal to accept the established mores or practices of any period, and in so doing create waves of innovation that continue to inspire.
Watch Nigel Waymouth interviewed by Guy Sangster Adams on the Plectrum Broadcast player.
Tags: Reverberation
