Author Adam Daly at The Fitzroy Hotel, Bloomsbury.
Hampstead was the place where I grew up, and it became like the ‘Locus Universalis’ for me.
Hampstead is a very twee place nowadays, which I’d absolutely hate to live in, even if I could afford to, which I most certainly couldn’t.
It’s famous for many wrong reasons, in my view.
And I aimed to reveal in my manuscript a dimension to this place, that very few people not living there would have known about in the 1960’s and 70’s especially. In some ways, it was similar to Soho - minus the sex-shops and sleazy clubs, I suppose you could say.
There was even a character in Hampstead who was similar to Ironfoot Jack - that legendary King of Bohemia - who was known simply as Bronco.
Peter Cook, and George Weiss - celebrated denizens of Hampstead! - knew Bronco better than anybody, and Cook was rumoured to have based his creation E.L. Wisty on him. But I did not want to focus on Celebrities - quite the opposite, in fact.
It’s famous for many wrong reasons, in my view.
And I aimed to reveal in my manuscript a dimension to this place, that very few people not living there would have known about in the 1960’s and 70’s especially. In some ways, it was similar to Soho - minus the sex-shops and sleazy clubs, I suppose you could say.
There was even a character in Hampstead who was similar to Ironfoot Jack - that legendary King of Bohemia - who was known simply as Bronco.
Peter Cook, and George Weiss - celebrated denizens of Hampstead! - knew Bronco better than anybody, and Cook was rumoured to have based his creation E.L. Wisty on him. But I did not want to focus on Celebrities - quite the opposite, in fact.
Strangeness fascinated me above all else.
And it abounded in Hampstead.
Adam Daly flanked by Pablo Behrens and Raffaella Lussana at Bar Italia, Soho
Hampstead at that time was full of examples of Bob Dylan’s ‘complete unknowns’ - many of whom were far more intrinsically fascinating than most Celebrities could ever be. So I reckoned they deserved a record. And I believe I am the only person to have produced a really lengthy, and in-depth record of those people, and the extraordinary, ultra-Bohemian Scene they inhabited in and around Hampstead in that time.
Hampstead was also the place where I grew up, and it became like the ‘Locus Universalis’ for me.
The Universe could only be extrapolated from the Particular and Hampstead was MY Particular if not ‘Peculiar’! I spent an incredible amount of time there when I was young because it sufficed to provide me with just about every experience I needed or wanted, strange as this might seem.
And Strangeness fascinated me above all else. And it abounded in Hampstead.
If for many people, Hampstead has scarcely a few centuries of meaningful History, for me it has at least three thousand years of meaningful History. And it was a rather differrent kind of place in the time of the Ancient Druids, e.g. than it was in the time of the execrable, so-called ‘yuppies’, in the 1980’s!
Hampstead was also the place where I grew up, and it became like the ‘Locus Universalis’ for me.
The Universe could only be extrapolated from the Particular and Hampstead was MY Particular if not ‘Peculiar’! I spent an incredible amount of time there when I was young because it sufficed to provide me with just about every experience I needed or wanted, strange as this might seem.
And Strangeness fascinated me above all else. And it abounded in Hampstead.
If for many people, Hampstead has scarcely a few centuries of meaningful History, for me it has at least three thousand years of meaningful History. And it was a rather differrent kind of place in the time of the Ancient Druids, e.g. than it was in the time of the execrable, so-called ‘yuppies’, in the 1980’s!
I wanted to pontificate on London, Britain and the World through the eyes of an Egregore.
Adam Daly outside The Fitzroy Hotel.
But perhaps my favourite period of all was the Victorian Gothic - and Hampstead was the near-perfect setting for that. So I developed a conceit that the Dark Essence of the place coalesced perpetually around that period - and it still evanesced ‘spiritually’ there during the 1960’s and 70’s, before the general corruption setting in with Thatcherism through the ensuing decade.
That overshadows, and underscores, much of the content of The Hampstead Underworld.
But I also wanted to break loose from this to pontificate on London, Britain and the World through the eyes of an Egregore - look it up, Readers! - which I considered myself to be or to have become under the spells of Hampstead, forever dislocated in Time.
That overshadows, and underscores, much of the content of The Hampstead Underworld.
But I also wanted to break loose from this to pontificate on London, Britain and the World through the eyes of an Egregore - look it up, Readers! - which I considered myself to be or to have become under the spells of Hampstead, forever dislocated in Time.
Dive into my manuscript and you will be sucked into its hovering Labyrinth of layered dreams, visions and nightmares.
And as such, I zig-zagged through Time, from that eternal, elasticated ‘Present Moment’ to the Past and the Future and back again, or vice-versa; else I jumped along all the chaos-vectors I could conjure.
The very name Hampstead is twee. But we don’t have to be button-holed by a name. Let the place be nameless instead. And just walk down Church Row alone at midnight, and see if you can’t still sense Dracula’s Shadow secreting its batwings in the tree-boughs overhanging the Road as it arrows between the two cemeteries of St. John’s Parish Church - in whose porch Bronco once slept, and in whose Font I myself was baptized.
Hampstead does have an Underworld and in every sense, from the Dantean to the Gogolian to the criminously picaresque.
It may hide itself more than ever from uninitiated view, especially in these almost unprecedentedly crass, materialistic times.
But if you delve or dive into my manuscript, you will be drawn if not sucked into its hovering Labyrinth of layered dreams, visions and nightmares.
The very name Hampstead is twee. But we don’t have to be button-holed by a name. Let the place be nameless instead. And just walk down Church Row alone at midnight, and see if you can’t still sense Dracula’s Shadow secreting its batwings in the tree-boughs overhanging the Road as it arrows between the two cemeteries of St. John’s Parish Church - in whose porch Bronco once slept, and in whose Font I myself was baptized.
Hampstead does have an Underworld and in every sense, from the Dantean to the Gogolian to the criminously picaresque.
It may hide itself more than ever from uninitiated view, especially in these almost unprecedentedly crass, materialistic times.
But if you delve or dive into my manuscript, you will be drawn if not sucked into its hovering Labyrinth of layered dreams, visions and nightmares.
Stay tuned. Second instalment coming soon on this channel.
Photos by Pablo Behrens. Free to use with a credit.
More about the real Soho underground in coming weeks