| Main Performers | Allen Ginsberg - vocal, speaker, cymbals
Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Adrian Mitchell,
Gregory Corso,
Christopher Logue,
Harry Fainlight,
Ernst Jandl,
John Esam,
Pete Brown,
Anselm Hollo,
George Macbeth,
Simon Vinkenoog,
Paulo Leonni,
Daniel Richter,
Spike Hawkins,
Tom McGrath,
Michael Horovitz - speakers,
William S Burroughs (recorded voice),
Davy Graham - guitar |
| Set List | Chant (Allen Ginsberg)
Poetry readings including:
Poem, S Vinkenoog (Simon Vinkenoog),
'To Whom It May Concern', A Mitchell (Adrian Mitchell),
'New York Bird, A Vosnesensky (Allen Ginsberg),
'The Change' A Ginsberg (Allen Ginsberg),
'Who Be Kind To' A Ginsberg (Allen Ginsberg) |
| Performance Notes | The event attracted an audience of 7,000 people to readings and live and tape performances by a wide variety of figures. 'The International Poetry Incarnation' or 'Gathering of the Tribes - Poetry Reading Festival' was sometimes called the first British 'Happening' where beatniks met the emerging hippie culture. The near-hallucinatory event, which was organised and booked at the last moment, was unlike anything that had taken place at the Hall before and came to be seen as one of the cultural high points of the Swinging Sixties. Audience members were handed flowers as they entered and the arena quickly became filled with a marijuana smoking and heavy drinking crowd. The seventeen mainly American Beat and British poets were not given any running order and the event ran for four hours.
Adrian Mitchell read his popular anti-Vietnam War poem 'To Whom it May Concern' to huge enthusiasm. Allen Ginsberg read 'New York Bird' by Russian poet Andrei Vosnesensky, who was present but forbidden to perform by the Russian authorities. To round off the evening Ginsberg read two of his long poems - 'The Change' and 'Who Be Kind To' which contained the line 'Tonite Let's all Make Love in London'.
The event was filmed by Peter Whitehead who made the film, 'Wholly Communion' (1966) to document the event.
Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful met at this event. Other guests in the audience included Indira Gandhi, and poets Christopher Logue and George Macbeth.
The Daily Mail later reviewed the 'Happening', citing many of the poets who complained that they hadn't been paid and the Hall's General Manager Christopher Hopper saying "I don't want that sort of filth here. Would you send your teenage daughter to hear that sort of thing?" However the Times Literary Supplement (17 June 1965) declared that the event 'made literary history by a combination of flair, courage, and seized opportunities'.
The event was attended by John 'Hoppy' Hopkins who was a counterculture impresario who defined and chronicled Sixties underground culture. His obituary in the Times stated that, 'He identified the moment when the British counterculture first coalesced as a 1965 poetry reading by Allen Ginsberg at the Royal Albert Hall. "You walked in, saw 6,000 people just like you and thought, 'are there that many of us?' It gave us a lot of confidence." '
(The Times, 3 February 2015)
"During the last two decades there have been many international cultural festivals, but this manifestation at the Royal Albert is remarkable in that, conceived, plotted, and undertaken in ten short days, the thousands came and many were turned away at the door. ...The impulse to bring all these people together to participate in an evening of poetry was regarded by some of us as a kind of experiment in human festival, a practical demonstration of the immediate availability of creative people of very different backgrounds to the idea of cultural experiment. And the toleration they showed of some very indifferent poetry during more than four hours was surely evidence of the audiences general appreciation that something was being achieved, something significant, just by our all being there at all in such a place, poets so very different, all together, participating."
(Topolski's Chronicle No.5-6, pg 281-282, Vol. XIII, 1965)
"A crowd closely rivalling that which turns out for the first and last promenade concerts filled the Royal Albert Hall last night to hear readings by a group of beat poets. The size of the audience, at least 7,000, came as a frank surprise to the poets - about 18 of them seated in the arena of the Hall. Outside girls handed out free flowers by the fistful. Indira Gandhi had a seat in the front row.
The evening started with Mr Allen Ginsberg singing a heavily amplified and incomprehensible song to the accompaniment of the bell-like instrument. Then Mr Simon Vinkenoog strode into the arena like a matador looking for a bull, and when the microphone had been fastened around his neck he began with 'a poem I wrote on the night President Kennedy was assassinated.'
Applause was warm and polite, and the audience largely in the 20-30 age group, appeared to enjoy the contributions however the 'poems' appeared as a collage of words whose meaning might be left to wide interpretation.
In fact once the shock ripple of an oft-repeated four-letter word ringing around the corners of the Victorian citadel had subsided there was little left. Subjects which would have outraged the founders of the Hall - and the poets seemed to pick strongly on various themes which would shock the Establishment - were received with amused tolerance."
(The Times, 12 June 1965)
"POETS PACK THE ALBERT HALL.
You do not often see the Albert Hall full to capacity of people whose avergae age is around 20. It happened on Friday night. With remarkable orderliness they filed in, like some mass fashion parade for a beatnik boutique, and took their seats around the small rostrum in the middle of the arena, where a group of modern poets were installed.
Many of the audience carried white or blue irises, distributed free at the doors by volunteer ushers. "We don't get half as many as this for the Liberal rally." a voice said behind me...
...the evening began dramatically enough with a long, vaguely Oriental chant from Allen Ginsberg, accompanied by himself on a tiny pair of cymbals.
The effect, aplified by the excellent public address system, was eerie enough if not entirely comprehensible, but it was extremely well received.
...What a brave experiment... for the pets of the group to take the Albert Hall for the night. They stood up well to its great spaces and to their huge audience, which must have come as a disturbing revelation to them."
(The Daily Telegraph, 13 June 1965)
"The somewhat grandiosely bannered First International Poetry Incarnation which filled Albert Hall to overflowing on 11 June 1965 was not at all a birth per se. It was, as I quoted Adrian Mitchell saying in my editorial Afterword to the Children of Albion anthology,
public proof of what had been accelerating for years. A quorum of the poets who read at Albert Hall that evening had met just before and co-composed a manifesto for it, including the line from Ginsberg: You are not alone. The testimony of many of the 7,500-plus who were there confirms this, in that a goodly fraction of them had hardly been aware that they were not the only ones cranking out little mags on duplicators and presenting little poetry and music gigs from Falmouth to Northumberland, to northern Scotland, western Ireland and all over Wales."
(Michael Horovitz, WriteOutLoud.net, 9 April 2015)
Bishopsgate Institute special collections and archive hold John 'Hoppy' Hopkin's archive, which contains photographs, video, correspondence, ephemera etc. from the event. (Reference HOPKINS / The Hoppy Hopkins Archive [1900-2015])
A press conference for the event was held on the steps of the Albert Memoiral on Wednesday 9 June 1965.
The event was recorded and excerpts broadcast by Radio Third at 19:30-20:00 on 19 August 1965. |
| Related Archival Material | Programme (RAHE/1/1965/81),
B&W Photograph (RAHE/3/1965/1),
Video (RAHE/5/1/2000/2) |