Ink Magazine

This piece was commissioned by The Independent on Sunday in 1991 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Ink Magazine. It was never published. It might be of interest to those of you who want to read about the Underground press.

Twenty years ago this year, on May 1st 1971, INK magazine began its short lived existence. With a symbolic launch date that signified its ideological intent. INK aimed to give counter culture politics a much-needed sense of coherent strategy. The idea was that socialist press content would meet underground press style. Devised as a serious spin off from its notorious parent paper OZ, it was envisaged that INK would be an English version of New York’s Village Voice, bridging the gap between the readership of OZ, International Times, Rolling Stone etc, and the Sunday qualities. Despite the alternative society’s well entrenched reluctance to confront regular working hours and deadlines the original aim was that INK would move swiftly from weekly to daily publication. There would be a proper pay structure, NGA and NUJ affiliation, and no Biba clad dolly bird secretaries expected to work for little more than the promise of a quick unenlightened grope with a member of the hippie patriarchy during working hours.

The early 1970s were a time of for reckoning for the Underground press. Much of 1971 was dominated by the decision to prosecute OZ over its infamous "Schoolkids Issue", where among other things it was suggested that public morals were likely to be corrupted by a drawing depicting Rupert Bear with genitals. The subsequent show trial proved to be somewhat of a swan song for sixties pranksterism. OZ's readership was already in decline and its libertarian ideology looked increasingly threadbare in the face of news stories about napalmed Vietnamese villages, rising sectarianism in Northern Ireland and growing industrial unrest at home. The early part of the decade saw a significant turning point for hippie realpolitik. Gay rights, feminism and ecological issues forced their way onto the agenda, in many cases despite not because of the prevailing norms of the counter-culture. Information and advice groups like BIT and Release, initially perceived by the libertarian left to be mere halfway houses on the road to nirvana, were having to come to terms with the realities of long- term homelessness and addiction. Even though certain editorial factions of the Underground press steadfastly refused to extend their horizons beyond sex, drugs, and rock and roll it is easy to forget that the period also saw the formation of radical lawyer’s groups and claimant’s unions, the assertion of schoolkids rights, prisoner’s rights, squatter’s rights, even squaddies and prisoner’s rights. The dominant political climate of the recessionary Heath years also gave fresh impetus to a range of New Left issues. This was the era of Worker’s cooperatives and control, work-ins at Govan shipyards and widescale industrial sabotage on the car industry production lines from Turin to Dagenham. There was also a significant transformation in the militancy of the black power movement. Imported Black Panther polemic was no longer considered sufficient armory with which to resolve racist attacks in Bradford or to address the attempts of immigrant labour to get unionized in the textiles industry. There was continued campus unrest among students, fueled in no small part by the appointment of Margaret Thatcher as Education Secretary, not to mention internment in Northern Ireland, and anarchist militancy from The Angry Brigade. March 1971 saw Britain’s biggest protest march in peacetime when 1.5 million people demonstrated against the Heath government’s proposed Industrial Relations Bill. There was therefore rich potential here for reportage from the Bogside to Clydeside. Repression manifested itself in all kinds of guises, from CS gas being used on the streets of Britain to the ubiquitous Mary Whitehouse calling for the prosecution of Hansen and Jensen’s recently published Little Red Schoolbook.

Despite having the good fortune to be launched at a time when the counter culture was genuinely buzzing with hard news INK managed just 29 issues spanning nine months, and found its promise and potential dissipating the

moment it hit the newsstands. The paper had to suffer the debacle of a first edition which ran a front-page non-story on Uranium theft, already discarded by most of the dailies a fortnight previously. It was later inferred that the journalist responsible had been planted by Gerry Healy, then of the SLL, forerunner of the Workers Revolutionary Party, in order to sabotage INK at birth. Healy was said to be miffed at the potential threat the new publication posed to his Workers

Press readership. Neither the "planted" news editor nor the Art Editor outlasted the first edition.

This first uncertain phase of INK's existence lasted through the summer months of 1971, roughly spanning the period of the OZ Trial. INK's comprehensive reporting of the trial, initially serious and analytical in tone soon recognized that the whole procedure had become an absurdist cabaret. Like most of its Underground press predecessors, INK frequently worked out its ideology in public, fluctuating in the post-trial period between the playpower politics of its OZ forbears and the then fashionable Althussarian Marxism. INK continued to antagonize the Mary Whitehouse/Lord Longford brigade while simultaneously giving space to earnest discussions about ideological state apparatus and what it called "Heath’s neo-bonapartist cronies". There was still much talk of smashing the system. Such a mosaic of concerns made for some curious bedfellows. Promotions for macrobiotic restaurants and Collets Bookshop shared ad space with mail order vibrators and the kind of illustrated sex manuals now to be found gracing the pages of The Sunday Sport.

Equally lacking in consistency was INK’s coverage of music. Writers either earnestly debated whether a record was jazz or jazz rock or wrote slacker stoned prose in a style that has not worn well. Indignance generally boiled down to castigating prominent rock stars for "selling out". But while other alternative publications spent an inordinate amount of time gloomily bemoaning the loss of ‘the Woodstock spirit’ INK at least tried to move the agenda on. Of the first Glastonbury festival it said "a good time was had by all, although isn't it time we got over '67"? INK also had Charlie Gillett writing about black music, a rare excursion into a world which most of the Underground press covered poorly and largely with disdain. INK also briefly secured the services of Clive James who wrote insightfully, with customary erudition about Crosby Stills and Nash, Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin - although his pithy eulogy on the death of the latter carried more than an aromatic whiff of ‘substances’ about it. ("Tombstones ought to be foundations if only you could tilt them sideways," indeed!) James, alas, like several other high-profile names including Colin MacInnes, James Baldwin, and cartoonist Jules Feiffer drifted away after only a handful of contributions

With issue 16 in September 1970 INK began an occasional series of "specials". The first of these, a two-parter on "Repression" reflected a movement still smarting from the OZ trial verdict. Next, an "Alternatives" issue took on some of the Underground’s sacred cows. It doesn't seem like a big deal now but to have pointed out, as David Robins did in that issue that the difference between Time Out and the Guardian was not so great, or that the Underground press in general was merely opening up new markets for hip capitalism, was crucial at the time. With hindsight, this editorial line appeared to be confirmed elsewhere in the same issue when a piece on alternative advertising celebrated the hip concerns of the new small agencies. And who did they choose to quote? Among others a couple of aspiring young urban professionals called Maurice and Charles Saatchi. In ‘Alternative Politics’ Robin Blackburn proved that the Left was still shaky on Ecology. His crass statement “I think we ought to violate mother earth more thoroughly and beautifully" betrayed all the time honoured trappings of hippie speak, radical rhetoric delivered in patriarchal terms. Also laid bare were the utopian ideals of alternative psychiatry. “The days of the mental hospital, the psychiatric clinic and the Harley Street consulting room are numbered” claimed David Cooper, formerly a pioneering colleague of RD Laing, but by then a bedridden chronic alcoholic. INK's "Gay Special" celebrated the work of the newly formed Gay Liberation Front and examined alternatives to the hetero-sexist norms in all their diversity, including a very informative piece on transvestitism. A related piece in another issue exposed the dubious methods by which primal scream therapist Arthur Janov claimed he could ‘cure’ homosexuality. In early issues INK still trod the familiar Private Eye gay baiting line when it came to goading closet homosexuals active in public life. Even Charlie Gillet casually referred to the Delfonics in a music industry special as 'fag soul'. But the editorial tone on gay rights rapidly shifted from tokenistic and misinformed to militant and assertive.

INK's initial approach to feminism was similarly tentative. Its initial forays into sexual politics were mostly written by men. Even pieces written by women in early issues were routinely accompanied by gratuitously sub pornographic illustrations. One of the alternative press's less endearing traits was the way in which it still felt obliged to illustrate articles on sexual liberation with puerile toilet wall graphics and S & M cartoons. A legacy which both NME and Sounds picked up and ran with in the 1970s incidentally. Having said that, INK was still the first Underground mag to offer a genuine forum for feminist debate. Sue Small, Sheila Rowbotham, Alison Fell, Anna Coote and others provided galvanized energy, polemical insight, and a collective nucleus which later evolved into Spare Rib.

In a "Working Class Heroes" special Keith Waterhouse challenged the myth of the working-class novel. Rodney Marsh and Terry Venables talked football. Jock Young highlighted the tensions between middle-class academia and working class reality that underpinned INK's most obvious failings. However, the whiff of intellectual tourism which dogged early issues gradually disappeared. Unfortunately, INK was about to do the same. Publication dates became more inconsistent. Towards the end there were no longer editorials or staff listings and many articles went uncredited, hinting not so much at a cooperative ethos, more at complete disorganisation. The penultimate Special Issue in February 1972, a magnificent response to Bloody Sunday, vindicated INK's entire existence and offered the kind of on the ground reportage and grassroots analysis sadly lacking elsewhere. One final issue, a "Romantic Love" special, covered everything from sexism in kid’s comics to the idea of sex and marriage as a capitalist plot. The magazine that launched at the same time as the John Lennon assisted single ‘God Save Oz’ ended with a full page back page ad for Paul McCartney’s banned single ‘Give Ireland back to the Irish’.

INK's obituary is in retrospect a familiar one; no solid business infrastructure despite more than adequate funding, lack of cohesive philosophy to complement its often-innovative content, little communication between the paper’s different squabbling factions, the usual inflated expense accounts and general free loading, mounting debts, and poor distribution outside of London. Towards the end there was an obligatory stay of execution as the paper was produced on a wing and a prayer, until everyone realized how bad things really were. In the light of what happened to the equally short-lived News On Sunday more recently it all has a contemporary ring to it, doesn't it?

I've only ever seriously mourned the passing of three British publications. INK was one of them. The other two were the mid 1970s fortnightly "Street Life" (which also tried to fuse pop, contemporary political issues and the wider aspects of popular culture) and the more recently deceased Sunday Correspondent. It’s easy to see with hindsight that INK's aims were essentially flawed and that the cultural divide between NW3 and W11 was exaggerated more than a little in the quest to talk up a new editorial strategy. All I know is that as a 17 year old working class kid living in the sticks I was genuinely educated by much of its content. The Free Angela Davies campaign, Free Derry, George Jackson’s Prison Letters, Ian Purdy and Jake Prescott’s Prison Letters, the Angry Brigade communiques. The Mangrove Restaurant raid. I wasn’t getting that information, in anything like that kind of depth from anywhere else.