Home Tales of the Portobello

Tales of the Portobello

It is a great feeling walking down the Portobello Road on a Saturday morning amidst all the bustle of a busy market day. There is a laissez-faire air about the place, a feeling that anything can happen if you leave yourself open to the passing show, and can sense the richness of its character and history.

Starting from Notting Hill Gate, curving passed ‘The Sun in Splendour’ pub and the terraced cottages that lead down to the antiques section, streams of eager tourists from all over the world pass by the once cheap lodging house where a young, shabby genteel George Orwell ventured forth to experience being down and out in London in the nineteen thirties

The Portobello Road is world-famous as a market place for its antiques and bric-a-brac, its street stalls and indoor arcades are much sought after by dealers, collectors and buyers alike. Tables are decked up with dolls dressed in white muslin and silk fabrics, board games, art deco mirrors, vintage postcards, and much else worth making an offer for. This part of the market operates only on Saturdays and is very picturesque with its downhill slope almost heaving with the throng of tourists winding their way along. There was a market here since the Middle Ages, but the antiques section started in 1867 when conquering soldiers returning from the far corners of the British Empire with their booty of foreign plunder came here to turn it into hard cash.

The next section is the fruit and vegetable market, run by generations of costermongers, whose stalls are piled high with displays of fresh apples and pears, potatoes, carrots and onions, yams, mangoes, coconuts, and a varied mix of exotic produce. Some, like the Spencer family, have been here since the 19^th century, working the market three times a week in all seasons, drawing in the crowds with their cockney banter. This is the commercial centre of the market, three blocks of clothes and shoe shops, a Tesco, Woolworth, the Body Shop, chain store coffee shops and the grade-two listed building, The Electric Cinema, the second purpose-built picture palace in the land, and the first to have electricity. Once a bug-house showing B-movie double features. It has recently been bought by Soho House who own celebrity hideouts in the West End and New York, and now has a trendy restaurant as well as a private members club.

The patch from Lancaster road onward, beneath the Westway flyover that straddles the area like a electro-magnetic ley line, to Oxford Gardens three blocks up is known as the Portobello village. Every city has its quarter where new and avant-garde ideas take hold, and this section boasts a vegetarian takeaway, organic food supplies, and Alchemy, the headshop, that was once busted for selling rolling papers, which celebrated its thirty fifth year of counter culture in the heart of this village. In the dip of the road around the flyover, but only at weekends, to the thriving ragbag flea market which comes alive with its hundreds of stalls of trestle tables laden with crystals, knick knacks, home-made arts and crafts, and racks of jeans, leather jackets and ethnic clothing . There was once a free shop here that operated on a give and take basis, give what you can, take what you need, and many a local squatted property was decked out here, an early example of recycling . Like an oasis in a hub of grey concrete and milling crowds is the Portobello Green with its leafy trees and landscaped greenery, its benches occupied by the winos and lager imbibers whose animated bonhomie bind them in a special camaraderie.

The next stretch of the road is narrow and has stalls selling second-hand clothing and cast-offs, the remnants from jumble sales. This is a Friday and Saturday market and the goods are piled high for the thrifty to scavenge and rummage through the bundles of polyester and acrylic leftovers, to find the elusive bargain that they are always looking for but seldom find. There are no shops here, only a walled Spanish convent school on one side. Turn right into Golborne road and you are into another small market with more antiques, pine tables, paintings and ethnic food street stalls catering for local needs. The shops are mainly run by Portuguese and Moroccans and the atmosphere is less frenetic and more relaxed than the Portobello. The fashion designer Stella McCartney, daughter of Beatle Sir Paul, set up her office and workshop here, in a former rundown Baptist church. At the end of the road stands the towering high-rise apartment block Trellick Towers, designed by the architect Erno Goldfinger in the sixties. Take the lift to the thirtieth floor and you can see all of London, a vast panorama as far as the eye can see in any direction.This urban obelisk is a local landmark, much loved and hated over the years.

There are very few places in the world where there is such a rich and diverse cultural – mix of humanity living in such close proximity. Locals refer to the part near the Ladbroke Grove tube station as ‘the Grove’’ or you can see someone or something ‘in the Bella or ‘the lane’. The top end, up the hill is known as ‘the Gate’, with its garden squares and affluent dwellings.

Here in this royal borough of Kensington with its resplendent palaces and embassies, townhouses and mansions of Holland Park and Notting Hill, reside some of the richest and most influential members of our society, David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, the entrepreneur Lakshmi Mittal, steel magnate and the acclaimed richest man in Europe, Sir Richard Branson who once had close contacts with the alternative culture that thrived here and spawned the famous Virgin moniker. It was William Blake who once said “Every whore was a virgin once.’ The area has more than a fair share of actors, pop stars, Russian oligarchs, minor royals, and the odd winner of a Nobel Prize for Literature, Sir Harold Pinter.

Down the other end, by ‘the Grove’ in North Kensington, hooded teenagers roam the vast estates of social housing run by trusts and the local council. The reggae group Aswad sang of ‘African children living in a concrete jungle’. This is the ‘university of the street ‘ for those growing up in the hip-hop era of crack, skunk and one-parent families. Here live, side by side, wave after wave of immigrants as well as their children who were born and brought up here, where the community bonds that are forged over the years are strong. To the kids that live and play in this urban ghetto, ‘the Grove’ is their ‘hood’.

Not so long ago ‘the Grove’, with its wide, leafy tree-lined streets and three-storey terraced houses with their faded painted fronts and peeled- plaster stucco facades crumbling, was in a state of neglect and decay. The post-second world war settlers were young Irishmen who came here looking for work and filled the cheap bed-sits. They worked hard during the week as painters and decorators, labourers on the roads and building sites, and at the weekends they would ended up drinking and fighting at the ‘ KPH,’ the ‘Elgin’ or the ‘Warwick Castle’ public houses. The Kensington Park Hotel on the corner of Ladbroke Grove and Lancaster Road is still an Irish drinking hole with its pool tables and tarnished glory of a bygone era, and is affectionately known by locals as ‘Keep Paddy Happy’.

Of the many immigrant groups who came and made their home in this neighbourhood, the men and women who came from the then British colonies of Jamaica, Trinidad, and some of the other Caribbean islands, to work on the tube trains and buses as drivers and conductors, have made a most lasting cultural impact on the area, in the form of The Notting Hill Carnival. This two day event over the August Bank Holiday is Europe’s largest outdoor festival attracting crowds in excess of a million. The surrounding streets are full of heaving masses dancing to the cacophony of penny whistles and loud ear -splitting music blaring from the speakers of the many sound systems. The carnival procession with its South American flavor and the dancers and performers dressed up in their feathered plumes, sequined masks and lavish and outrageous costumes, pass by parading on slow moving motorized floats or dancing in pulsated rhythms in the streets.

It has not been an easy ride for that first generation of Afro-Caribbeans who came from the islands in the sun, to drab, grey North Kensington and its cold and unwelcoming locals. In the late nineteen- fifties a young black man, Kelso Cochrane became the first fatal victim of racism in recent history, when he was stabbed to death by a frenzied mob of teddy boys in Golborne road. He is buried in the cemetery just up the Harrow road nearby, and they named a community centre after him. There is a large and vibrant West Indian community in the neighbourhood with strong cultural roots. The Rastafarians and their celebration of the ‘holy weed of wisdom”’ ganja, brought them in conflict with the forces of law and order, and over a long period of time All Saints road, a stone’s throw from the Portobello road, became known as ‘The Front Line.’

The next wave of newcomers swept in from Morocco and Portugal to fill the vacancies in the National Health Service, for cleaners and porters, and settled in the estates that shoot off Golborne road. The street itself has a distinct foreign feel to it, with the two communities providing the delicate gourmet delights of Moroccan couscous, lamb tagines and freshly- minted tea, and the Portuguese serving coffee with milk in a glass with hot croissants and patiserrie in the crowded Lisboa and Porto cafes.

The area was a safe refuge for those who left the Soviet Union and its satellite states, or the perils of Nazi Germany. There is a Serbian church in Lancaster road, and further down there used to be a Jewish school where the fitness centre now stands, and a synagogue in Kensington Park road, which is now a nursery school. Since the enlargement of the European Union, the area has so many bright, educated young newcomers from the former Eastern Bloc nations, young men working as postmen, bus drivers and refuse collectors, and the girls in the coffee shops and restaurants.

On a Sunday morning when the Portobello is slowly stirring awake, a trickle of early visitors wander downward passed the shuttered lock-ups and arcades of the antique market, passed the Electric restaurant with its affluent clientele and their families tucking into a breakfast of egg Benedict and toast, in search of the ‘blue door’ and the Travel bookshop made famous by the film ‘Notting Hill’, which was shot on location here, and became an international box-office success. As the “blue door” has been sold off at auction, the bookshop in Blenheim Crescent has become a tourist shrine with Japanese, and nowadays, Chinese and Korean pilgrims being digitally photographed sitting on the ledge of the shop’s window with its display of pictorial tomes extolling the pleasures of travelling abroad.

In the movie Hugh Grant plays bumbling bookshop owner who inadvertently bumps into Julia Roberts, starring as a Hollywood actor working in London, walking incognito along the Portobello road, when he spills his takeaway coffee over her. The comedy writer Richard Curtis who wrote the film script and has a golden touch for implausible comic situations, lived for sometime with his partner Emma Freud, great-grand-daughter of the scion of psycho-analysis Sigmund Freud, in a hidden cottage with a courtyard garden which nestled behind a shop with a flat above, just off Portobello in Westbourne Park road. The flat above was the setting for the budding romance about to unfold and many of the film’s exterior shots were taken outside its decorative blue front door. The Travel Bookshop was only the model for the film-script, its fictional interior shots were filmed on a sound stage in a studio, and the shop’s street location was shot around the corner in the Portobello road using a made-up shop-front.

To many lovers of this bohemian quarter with its artist, poets, musicians, and amiable drifters and bar-stool philosophers, the hey-day of the Portobello scene was the nineteen sixties, “the good old days” for those old enough to remember them, or too stoned to remember them. This was the epicenter of the counter culture of love and peace that burgeoned out of the freewheeling swinging sixties of the earlier part of the decade, when the market was described as the street of self-made millionaires. The fashion for decorative vintage army jackets as worn by the Beatles on the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was started from a shop in the heart of Portobello village called I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, and spread to Carnaby street and became an emblem of swinging London. Antonioni, the Italian film director, dressed his characters in ‘Blow Up’, that quintessential film of that decade in the brocaded uniforms with gold-braided epaulettes.

The Portobello road was at the crossroads of Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, the Damstrasse in Amsterdam, the island of Ibiza, and the far outreaches of Goa and Khatmandu, which were the final destinations for those who made it on the overland journey East in search of the ultimate spiritual high, or just a good puff of hand-rolled Nepalese temple balls. The ‘Summer of Love’ of 1967 heralded a new era with the legendary beat poet Allen Ginsberg chanting mantras at the Legalize Pot Rally in Hyde Park, within walking distance to the market, where five thousand of ‘the beautiful people’ gathered looking splendid in the multi-coloured hippie garb of kaftans, headbands and flowing capes. The Portobello was part of a global village that preached and practiced alternative life-style choices.

The village in the late sixties and early seventies was the seedbed of the new underground culture that would permeate beyond its confines and whose influence would be generational. The first wholefood shop Ceres opened selling organically grown vegetables, brown rice, mu tea and vegan cakes and breads, in an environmentally friendly ambience, to the long-haired, fresh-faced, often bare-footed customers. Since then hundreds of similar shops have opened all over Britain. The shop was started by the Sams family, expatriates from America, father Ken and his sons Craig and Greg, who pioneered sugar-free jams, vege- burgers and organic produce and fairtrade. Craig Sams , who lived and worked in the Portobello village for thirty years, is the founder of the brand Green and Black chocolates, which he has recently sold to Cadbury-Schweppes for eighty million pounds.

For many years one of the delights of the Saturday market was the procession of Krishna devotees with their shaven heads and flowing orange robes ecstatically singing ‘hare Krishna, hare Rama’ and dancing in praise of their blissful godhead. At one time everybody seemed to be a devotee or follower of one guru or another, depending how fashionable they were at the time. A leaflet posted on a wall at the time read, ‘God is alive and well and will be giving a lecture in Kilburn on Thursday night’.

Many young musicians have served their apprenticeship living and working in ‘the Gate’ and ‘the Grove’, and its influence on new musical styles has been important. One of the earliest Pink Floyd gigs was in All Saints Church hall, a few hundred yards from the Portobello, with hippies gyrating under stroboscopic lights operated by art students. Van Morrison sang on an early album ’saw you down by Ladbroke Grove this morning’, in a haunting come-down ballad, and Yusuf Islam, then a young Cat Stevens sang ‘Walking down the Portobello’, Quintessence with their eastern beats evoked ‘We’re getting it straight in Notting Hill Gate, we sit and meditate’. Virgin Records had its head-office in Vernon Yard, a mews in the antique section, and its first retail outlet was in ‘the Gate’ with its reclining bean bags to sit on while you listened on the earphones.

Both punk and reggae music have their British roots in the Portobello, and the dub beats of reggae still echo down the road on market days blaring from shops and record stalls, and the aging rockers in the village are in mourning for Joe Strummer of the Clash, a long time habituee, and godfather of punk, who is no more with us. Bob Marley was busted in the seventies for a small deal of marijuana found in his sock while being searched by the local police, and locked up in the Harrow road nick, charged and later fined in the magistrate court.

The Mountain Grill café, latterly called George’s Fish Bar, closed a few years ago. Situated just before the Westway, by the tube train tracks that leads to Ladbroke Grove station, it was a legendary haunt for young starving musicians to meet and tuck into the cheap fried English breakfasts on offer all day. Hawkwind, Motorhead, the Pink Fairies and the Deviants were regulars and all local outfits. Hawkwind immortalized the café by titling an early album ‘ In The Hall Of The Mountain Grill, with lyrics such as ‘twixt clatter and platter.’A generation of fans have come to pay homage at the now demised premises. George, who ran the business for decades with his family, and has now retired to his homeland of Cyprus, used to say, “Its all lies what they write and say.”

The Portobello grapevine is awash with rumours of sudden and accidental tragedies and deaths, some unverifiable others a sad loss, like the death of the great guitarist and rock icon Jimi Hendrix, who died while choking on his own vomit, in his flat in Powis Square. On a sad Sunday morning Paula Yates, television presenter and former wife of Sir Bob Geldorf was found dead from an accidental overdose of drugs in her house in St. Lukes mews, her young daughter at her side. To some this is the street of broken dreams and the road to ruin, a trap they fall into when yesterdays careless pleasures turn into todays addictions. Being a market street it attracts many characters who rant to themselves or no one in particular, and can become menacing and threatening when not taking their medication. There is a young woman caked in layers of dirt who walks the street on a regular basis, carrying her personal belongings in plastic bags, with a far- off look in her dead eyes as she trundles past. This wandering, lonely and loveless figure is a haunting reminder to all those that fleetingly pass her by that, ‘There by the grace of God, go I.’

Local bard and long time resident and community activist Michael Horovitz can still be seen in the area pulling his trolley behind him, shopping or handing out information. A veteran of the legendary Beat poetry recital of 1965 at the Royal Albert Hall, he has dedicated his life to writing and presenting poetry, publishing the anthologies, New Departures and Children Of Albion, and staging the Poetry Olympics. At present he is the standard bearer in the campaign to save the derelict underground men’s convenience at the junction of Talbot and Portobello road from turning into yet another coffee house.

The Portobello and its circumference has always been a magnet for creative synchronicities that draws novelists, poets, dreamers and visionaries in close proximity, where life-long friendships are lived out until the grim reaper takes his toll. The novelists Martin Amis and Michael Moorcock have lived over many years in the Ladbroke Grove area, the thinker and Druid, John Michel who wrote the cult sixties classic ‘View over Atlantis’ and put ancient ley lines in the public domain, is a familiar figure in the street, so is Tony Allen the doyen of alternative comedy who is still performs at the Inn on the Green under the flyover. The writer and acid-guru Brian Barrit who lived in the Grove for decades, wrote “If you take a map of West London and draw a line linking the tube stations of Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill and Westbourne Park, it will enclose an area known to the wise as the Portobello Triangle.”

One of the most talked about and in historical terms infamous characters who lived there must be Peter Rachman, the bald-headed, stocky refugee from war-torn Poland and the ravages of the concentration camps, who amassed a small fortune as a landlord in the confines North Kensington in the fifties and early sixties, using strong- arm tactics and intimidation against sitting tenants who were made to leave their properties so he could let the rooms off to the newly arrived immigrants at exorbitant rents. Questions were raised in the Houses of Commons by the Member of Parliament for Paddington Ben Parker, and a housing scandal was exposed and Peter Rachman was vilified by the popular press. Rachman was linked through his girlfriend Mandy Rice Davis, who with Christine Keeler were the major players, in the Profumo scandal of 1963, that brought down the Conservative government of Harold MacMillan, and ushered in the permissive society. A new word entered the English lexicon, ‘Rachmanism, the exploitation and intimidation of tenants by unscrupulous landlords.’

There has always been a seedy underbelly to the Grove, with crack houses, gambling dens, street dealers, gay clubs and prostitution operating at different times. There were many basement dives and all night cafes, like the Eldorada in Westbourne Park road, which was the haunt of young black hustlers and it was where Christine Keeler met Johnny Edgecombe and Lucky Gordon. The Profumo scandal erupted when Edgecombe, the boyfriend of Keeler came to the mews house of Stephen Ward, a society osteopath, where Christine was staying, and fired seven shots from a pistol. The trouble was that he was not her only lover, for she was sleeping with John Profumo, the Minister for War, and the Defense Attache at the Russian embassy. Profumo had to resign in ignominy for lying to the House, Stephen Ward was found guilty of living off immoral earnings, but committed suicide before sentence was passed. Christine Keeler went to prison for perjury and perverting the course of justice.

One of Rachman’s henchmen and strong-arm enforcers was a smooth-talking, charismatic Trinidadian migrant called Michael de Freitas, who converted to the Nation of Islam and became known as Michael Abdul Malik, aka Michael X a leading exponent of Black Power in the radical sixties. Michael had many friends in the alternative movement including John Lennon and John Michel, and spent a lot of time around the village. He became friends with Nigel Samuels, the young vulnerable heir to a property fortune, who helped Michael to buy what became The Black House in Islington. Nigel Samuels once remarked that he and Michael were two of five people who were going to rule the world. When asked who the other three were, he replied, “We haven’t decided yet.” Michael was charged with blackmail and kidnapping in this country but fled to Trinidad and while there arrested for the murder of a barber. He escaped and was hunted down in Guyana, brought back to Trinidad and hanged on the orders of the Privy Council, his death warrant signed by the Queen. The word MICHAEL X appeared forty feet off the ground on the railway bridge by the Ladbroke tube station.

The place has a rich and vibrant if somewhat dark social history that in recent times includes the race riots of the fifties, the confrontations outside the Mangrove café on the ‘ frontline’and at carnival time, between the police and the local Afro-Caribbean community , the unsolved murder in the Grove of six prostitutes who were found naked by canal waterways in Acton and Ealing, the discovery of the gruesome remains of women’s bodies hidden under the floor boards of 10 Rillington Place , having been murdered by John Christie, a projectionist at the Electric Cinema who was later hanged, and other tales too numerous to mention here.

For many sojourners and wayfarers who have passed the time mingling in the anonymity of the multi -coloured social fabric that is woven into the surrounds, it is a community full of energy and happy memories of shared moments in the busy market place, and a nostalgic reminder of friendships and love affairs in bygone days.

Hundreds of years ago, the land around Portobello was a wild and wooded place, where vagrants and vagabonds, gypsies and outlaws held sway. Apart from a few farms on the edges of the woods such as Barley Shotts, near to what is now the heart of Portobello village under the Westway flyover, most of the area remained dangerous with highwaymen waylaying the occasional traveller. Like many people in London in 1737, the farmer of Barley Shotts was excited about Admiral Vernon’s capture from the Spanish of Puerto Bello in Panama, a victory that was seen as a major step to British conquest of North America. In his patriotic zeal he renamed his farm Portobello Farm. The cart track leading from the farm to the main road to London, which passed through Notting Hill, became known locally as Portobello Farm Lane.

By the early nineteen hundreds the scene around Portobello Farm Lane was described by Sir William Bull in the Times:”Saturday was carnival time in the winter, when the market was thronged like a fair. The people overflowed from the pavement so that the roadway was quite impassable for horse traffic, on the east side were coster’s barrows, in the streets were side shows.”

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Upsetter Magazine

Posted by Alchemy Culture Shop on May 4, 2012 in Books, Comics, Music & Films | 0 comments

Deluxe special edition of Upsetter Magazine Issue 1, a magazine on the great Lee Scratch Perry

Limited to 200 copies - Each copy is individually numbered -

Includes articles on Lee Scratch Perry in Studio One, The Ska Years, Upsetter News, Colour Photo Postcards

Discography 1963-68 & Original Perry art

Rating: 10.0/10 (1 vote cast)

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Home Grown Magazine – 10 x RARE A4 PRINTS

Posted by Alchemy Culture Shop on Jan 31, 2012 in Books, Comics, Music & Films | 0 comments

The ten colour A4 Prints

Come packaged in a protective cardboard cylinder

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Bryan Talbot’s Smokey Bears – 3 x RARE A4 PRINTS

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The three black and white A4 Prints

Come packaged in a protective cardboard cylinder

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Bryan Talbot’s Brainstorm Comix – 3 x RARE A4 PRINTS

Posted by Alchemy Culture Shop on Jan 31, 2012 in Books, Comics, Music & Films | 0 comments

The three black and white A4 Prints

Come packaged in a protective cardboard cylinder

Rating: 9.0/10 (1 vote cast)

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Echoes of the Underground – DVD

Posted by Alchemy Culture Shop on Jan 16, 2012 in Books, Comics, Music & Films | 0 comments

A collection of short films, featurettes & music videos with over two hours of previously unseen footage filmed during the making of the album ‘Lee Harris meets River Styx – Angel Headed Hip Hop’ from 2007 – 2010. featuring: Brian Barritt, Jim Haynes, Howard Marks, Youth, Henk Targowski, Eddie Woods, Jean-Jacque Lebel, Giles Walker & Peter Dunne (Mutoid Waste Company) and more

DVD (PAL) – Region 2

Here is the trailer

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Lee Harris meets River Styx – Angel Headed Hip Hop – CD

Posted by Alchemy Culture Shop on Jan 16, 2012 in Books, Comics, Music & Films | 0 comments

Angel Headed Hip Hop is the work of playwright, writer and spoken word artist, Lee Harris and songwriter & poet River Styx. A mesmerising journey of psychedelic soundscapes. Featuring Aldous Huxley, Howard “Mr Nice” Marks, Brian Barritt, JC001 & more. The album was released in 2009 on Genepool/Universal Music.

“The 21st century equivalent of the early experiments with beat poetry and improvised Jazz. A slice of life, a slice of history”… Upsetter Magazine.

The album is recontextualising the beat poets into the modern age”… K&C Daily Times.

Alchemy: 30 Years of Counter Culture – CD

Posted by Alchemy Culture Shop on Jan 16, 2012 in Books, Comics, Music & Films | 0 comments

New Antique Records is proud to present; “Alchemy – 30 Years of Counter Culture” an alchemical fusion of dub, jazz, celtic, ambient, psy-trance and spoken word available digitally for the first time.

Originally released in 2002, The album features Youth, Raja Ram & Simon Posford (Shpongle), Howard Marks, Brian Barritt, Bush Chemist, JC001, Drum Druids and many more, brought together by Lee Harris to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the oldest headshop in the creative melting pot of London’s Ladbroke Grove area.

“It starts perfectly chilled, dubby even, and by way of Howard Marks and the Mystery School Players, arrives at Shpongle. The flute work morphs seemlessly into a kicking Psy-Trance tune from Nervasystem & Aether. Dammit, it’s so good!” Inna?Turtle

“Very nice fusion and a nice piece to listen to at home and on the chill-out-floors around the globe” Mushroom – Hamburg

“Alchemy is trippy with a capital T. It is a celebration of one man’s journey through the counter culture that has existed in this country since the 1960’s. Listening to Alchemy gives us a sense of history that you won’t read about in school text books.” …..Peek Magazine

“If you like Lee’s trippy ramblings then check out “Alchemy – 30 years of Counter Culture, Some real gems on that one!” …..PSYAMB

The Album is also available digitally on New Antique Records

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Best of Brainstorm Comix

Posted by Alchemy Culture Shop on Nov 27, 2011 in Books, Comics, Music & Films | 0 comments

The collected adventures of Bryan Talbot’s Chester P. Hakenbush. Published by Lee Harris

“Brainstom was a ‘light’ burning through the dark days of the 70s”… Brian Barritt (Author of ‘The Road of Excess)

“Bryan Talbot is a masterful comic artist and writer. He is one of those creators whose work other creators look froward to seeing. Chester P Hakenbush, the Psychedeilic Alchemist, is his first and, I think, his most endearing character”… Tasha Lowe (The Comic Store.com)

“Trippin’ Commix live again! Thanks for getting togerther the kind of comic I’ve always wanted but could never find. It was a truly cosmic crusade, the plot was a real mind blower and the artwork beautiful. i hop you have success – There will be a lot of happy heads around if you do”… The Furry Freaks, Cornwall, 1976

“Many thanks for Brainstorm Comix, I got a kick out of it and turned it over to the bullpen so they could bask in the radiance of it’s magnificence – just as I did. Nice of you to think of us”… Stan Lee, Marvel Comics, 1977

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