 Welcome. I'm Roly Keating. I'm Chief Executive here at the British Library. We have many, many wonderful evenings here in this lecture theatre, but this, I think, is one of the most special yet. A real, real privilege. One of the most exciting we've done, but what's been a very, very rich programme of events to accompany comics, unmasked art and anarchy in the UK, open until the 17th of August. Please do tell all your friends. 19th of August. Two more days you've got to go and see it. Fantastic. We have, of course, with us tonight, two very special guests, Robert Crum and Gilbert Shelton. And we are also shining a spotlight on one of those moments when it was actually, Robert's work was slightly taken in vain, or whatever happened. Unwittingly, at least, it found itself part of one of the great showdowns between the counterculture and the British establishment. The Oz magazine obscenity trial of 1971. Where were you when that happened? So these days, of course, both Robert and Gilbert live in France, so it's a fantastic privilege to have them both at our desk and table tonight. And many thanks to Laura Fountain and Tony Bennett for their help in making that happen. We have an evening of two halves. In the first half, there will be a conversation shared by Charles Charmari, who as well as being himself, something of a legend of British journalism, music journalism, was, of course, one of the school kids who were involved in the creation of this famous magazine. And then in the second half, another of the school kids, who's also gone on to different great things. The head of the design museum, Dayan Sujik, will be joining us in conversation alongside Jeffrey Robertson, QC, who was junior counsel at the time for the defense in the original trial, and subsequently wrote a brilliant TV adaptation for the BBC of everything that happened. And thanks, by the way, to Dick Pountain for stepping in as chair. I should say, because it has to be said, and it's a sad thing to have to say, that we have, of course, one figure missing tonight, who is Felix Dennis, who was at the heart of the story. He was one of the editors of Oz, went on, of course, to a hugely influential career, not just in publishing, but many other things as well. His early and untimely death last month came as a shock to many, many people. And I'm sure we will all want to pay tribute to him tonight, and indeed treat the evening as something of a tribute in itself. That's it from me. I do hope you enjoy the evening. If you haven't spotted the signed books out there, there are many. And please do check them out afterwards. But it remains only for me to welcome to the stage to talk about life and their work, Robert Crum, Gilbert Shelton and Charles Sharmery. Thank you very much. Well, I'd like to kick off by saying that it is a remarkable pleasure and privilege to be here with these two gentlemen. I've been an admirer, an appreciator and a guffaw at their work since my teens, which, as you can tell, was quite a while ago. And, you know, one of the many aspects of this event now, which is fascinating, is both the parallels and the differences between probably the two finest and most influential cartoonists to emerge from the underground press explosion of the second half of the 60s in San Francisco, though neither of these gentlemen are actually from San Francisco. And also the fact that they both ended up completely independently moving to France, which is a place where they tell me artists are respected. Yeah, that's true. So I'd like to commence by asking both Gilbert and Robert, and I feel, you know, a slight frissure at the fact that I'm actually addressing Mr Crum and Mr Shelton by their first names. What was it, first of all, that drew each of you towards San Francisco? Robert. Well, for me, I was in Cleveland working at a greeting card company in 1966, and a friend of mine came back from San Francisco with some of these psychedelic posters for their rock concerts, and I could see, wow, these artists are taking LSD just like me. Wow, there's something going on out there. I got to go out there. So about two weeks later, I just ran away. I abandoned my first wife. I didn't tell anybody. I just went with these two guys that I met in a bar that were going to San Francisco that day, and I just went with them. And I called my wife from San Francisco three weeks later and apologized that I'd abandoned her without saying anything. And so she came out a few weeks later, and that was in January 67. But you were, even though you were drawn to San Francisco by the psychedelicized environment, you weren't ever exactly a flowers in your hair kind of guy. No, I couldn't really do the whole hippie thing. I just didn't, I don't know, I was too inhibited, I guess, I was too uptight. But I took LSD and I had, my sympathies were with the hippie movement. I had felt the same youthful optimism about the future and thought that if everybody took LSD and the world would blossom out and there'd be no more war or violence or greed or, you know, and that everything would be fine after all the old farts died off. And I kind of believed that too for a while, briefly. That idealism, that level of flower child idealism didn't last very long, about what, six months maybe? That was about it. And then came the revolution. People started saying, oh, we got to like, you know, we got to get rid of these motherfuckers with violence. You know, the political power begins at the barrel of a gun and da-da-da. That scared the shit out of the power establishment. And then that's when they really started moving in with, you know, Cointel Pro and all this, like, secret, you know, ways of undermining and weakening the whole thing because it was starting to be seen as something dangerous. They really got scared at that point. And they very effectively kind of did undermine it. They did a good job of kind of killing it. It was basically the hippies were not really up for, you know, risking their necks that much. It was nobody, very few people really willing to put themselves on the line to the extent that like the Black Panthers were, you know, Black Panthers really were put themselves on the line, you know. They holed up in houses in the ghetto with guns against the police. Very, very few hippies were really up for that. Well, what a bummer, man. Let's just go back to the land, you know. Was it the same magnetism that drew you, that Gilbert? Not exactly. The music scene, yes. There was a big contention of Texas musicians there and I was living in Austin, Texas. And I thought maybe I could get a job doing rock and roll posters out there like Wes Wilson and Victor Muskozo and Rick Griffin and Mouse and Kelly. I tried that until they told me, oh, we got enough poster artists. And I thought I would go out for a couple of weeks and have a vacation from the Texas summer heat that I just stayed out there. It was fun at the time. And quickly I discovered that I wasn't going to make it as a poster artist. And so I, with some friends, started my own publishing company. We published posters for a while and then we discovered that posters had to be nicely printed and none of us knew how to run the printing press very well. But comic books didn't need to be well printed so it was... Oh boy, the first few comics printed by Ripoff Press. Oh, it was a travesty. Printing was atrocious. Couldn't get that registration to save your life on that color. It was bad. You both had a greater affinity at that point for narrative, because you were both weaned on the great newspaper strips. Well, weaned on comic books mostly. I read Donald Duck. Carl Barks Donald Duck. That was the thing I read as a kid. There were children of pop culture, television, comics. There was no high-class culture in my childhood at all. There were all these weekly left-wing newspapers at the time and they were called underground newspapers. And I was more influenced by newspaper comics, Pogo Possum and Dick Tracy and Little Abner. And I saw that these newspapers were... I was in more or less sympathy with their point of view, but these newspapers were awfully dull. What they need is comic strips. Underground papers, yeah. A lot of bad writing, polemics about spiritual stuff or the revolution or whatever. But you're both in different ways. The children of Mad Magazine... Oh, yeah, absolutely. ...Disney and LSD. That's right. You got it. That's it. I wish I hadn't said that. You guys were supposed to say that. Mad Comics, not the later magazine. The first one and stuff. Bill Elder, Jack Davis. The first 24 issues were really a... Comic book. I was influenced by that comic book. And I liked Scridge McDuck and Little Lulu. Yeah, great story. So, in your separate ways, you both arrived at fusing these influences with a left-wing sensibility and the psychedelic eruption. How would you... Okay, let me ask you both. What kind of cartoonists do you think you might have been without psychedelics? How did psychedelics and your experiences with psychedelics transform you? It'd be impossible to know how it would have turned out if I hadn't taken all that LSD. I have no idea. In the early 60s, by the time I was old enough to go out in the world and try and get some kind of career job or something, the comic scene was really pretty bleak. The comics code had come in in the late 50s, so the straight mainstream comic role was very restrictive, because I was still thinking in terms of comic books. But there was no in anymore. If you weren't doing superhero comics, or the most... Rements coming? Funny animal coming? Yeah, bland, funny animal, little Audrey. There was nothing going on. I kind of gave up the idea of even pursuing that my childhood dream of being a comic book artist. I decided that's really not going to happen. So I looked around for other things to do for a living. And then the underground papers started, and I saw, wow, this is wide open. And I took LSD and stuff, and I had all these crazy visions in my head. I was drawing my sketchbook, drawing wacky comics, and suddenly you could get this stuff published. It didn't pay anything, but they would publish anything. There was no censorship whatsoever. But didn't you begin by self-publishing? The iconic image of you selling zap comics out of a cram in the street. That actually came after doing stuff for underground papers. Underground doing pages. It's like the old early days of newspaper comics where they give you a whole page in the newspaper. That would be the Sunday feature. Yeah, wow, I could do a whole page. There was no money, as I said, but to the magic of senior work in print, wow. And then, obviously, some people seemed to like it. The hippies seemed to like it. So then I got this offer from an underground paper publisher. They said, why don't you do a whole comic book? I'll publish a whole comic book. So then I set to work doing that zap comics number one. And the rest is history. But the LSD, if I hadn't done that, opened up this whole other world of utilizing these skills I'd learned as a kid. And applying it to these visions and being part of that whole social movement of the time of all these other youths my age who had done the same thing. It resonated, it spoke to them. They could see that here was this wacky comic that actually reflects this LSD experience, this visionary experience. So I was kind of at the right place at the right time. And did you have your first psychedelic experience before or after you created Wonder World? After, excuse me, I don't think my art and writing was much influenced by drugs. We, in Texas at the time, we were eating peyote cactus. Pretty much the same effect as LSD. You don't think that influenced your work? It made me see colors for the first time. Before eating peyote cactus, I thought red means stop and green means go. And then suddenly I saw that there was all these different kinds of red and different kinds of green. Look at the colors! You must have been so frustrated working in black and white comics. No, I... Did you see them in color anyway? Well, it was a little bit frustrating because to do everything color was very expensive back then. So you had to kind of accept it. It's going to be black and white except for the covers. The drawing has to be better if it's black and white. The color makes it more readable, more visible. In that sense, learning how to draw in black and white for these underground weekly tabloid papers was very helpful to me. I was an art student and flunked out of the University of Texas for doing funny drawings and funny paintings in art class and they wanted us to do abstract expressionism. That's right. That's what's dead serious abstract expressionism. What the hell are we talking about? You're both renowned for characters that you've created with Gilbert, you know, his most lasting impact has been with the fabulous furry freak brothers. But your most lasting impact has been with a character called Robert Crumb. Oh, jeez. You know, your depiction... Oh, embarrassing. Your depiction of yourself, I would say, is your ongoing depiction of yourself and your life. I would say it's something that will outlive Mr. Natural, the human, the human and that feline that nobody really wants to talk about. At least of all me. Gilbert, you've occasionally appeared in prefaces and epilogues to your stories, but if you appear as a character, then you're speaking through the other characters. Robert, how did you, after creating characters who were pretty well liked and well received, what led you to the extraordinary, ongoing autobiography which has been the dominant strain of your work for the last so many decades? Well, I got tired doing the same with those characters over and over again, Mr. Natural and all that. I get tired of that. And then also I got hitched up with Aileen. Her comics were totally autobiographical. My wife down here, she couldn't do anything but autobiographical comics. So that, living with her, I kind of got inspired to put myself more and more just as the character in my comics. That seemed kind of a, I don't know, a natural way to go, just to do it directly about yourself. And then I did a lot of collaborations with her too, and that was very easy to do because she's kind of a natural born Jewish, Don Rickles, Joan River is kind of a joke teller. This is the bad influence of the crumbs. Their stuff is interesting, but they've inspired so many inferior cartoonists to do autobiography, the scoring stuff. Well, we can't blame Bob Dylan for all those bad lyrics written by the people or Hendrix for all those terrible guitars. I just blame Woody Guthrie for Bob Dylan. Ah, but who do we blame for Woody Guthrie? All right, ma, I'm only bleeding, please. Oh, that's poetry. Poetry, that's right. He's a poet. Another, I guess another sense in which, you know, the parallel aspect of your careers has strongly diverged is that I got the impression of Gilbert as being comfortable within certain aspects of the counterculture with which you, Robert, are notoriously uncomfortable. I mean, Gilbert, as far as I know, actually likes some music recorded since 1937. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I never liked that music. He was talking about going to San Francisco because of the music. I did not find any of that music very interesting that was going on. It's psychedelic rock and roll with guys endlessly noodling on their electric guitars for, you know, for hours, Jesus, please. I went to the avalanche ballroom in the strobe lights and the noodling guitars. It just put me to sleep. I was falling asleep on this couch and waking up hours later. Hey, we're closing up. There was a few exciting acts. Both of us knew Janice Joplin and Jim. Yeah, but I liked the stuff she did back in Austin better than the stuff she did with Big Brother when she was doing that more kind of folky stuff. I liked that better. Yeah, she was, she asked Robert to do the famous Columbia record album cover. Right. The cheap thrills cover. And the cover that Robert did was supposed to be the back cover. They didn't like the front cover. The front cover was a portrait of Janice with sweat flying out of her. No, that's not right. The front cover, I took photos of all the people in the band and then I made little cartoon bodies on them and put them on a stage. They didn't like it. I never saw it again. I don't know what happened to it. They didn't like it. The back cover for the front. That image of Janice with the sweat popping off her, that was done for some paper in Cleveland. Oh. Well, that might have been too much for Columbia also. That's the story that I heard. I think the band didn't like it. That's what I think. Columbia had some other idea. They came to me like at the last minute to do that cover because Columbia had made them all like getting a bed together and take some stupid idea that these businessmen had about hippies. They went along with them. They saw the images that were really embarrassed. So they came to me and said, can you do us a cover and have it done by tomorrow morning so we can send it to New York? So I took some amphetamine and pulled an all nighter. Got it done. Big money, 600 bucks. That's big money in those days. I never saw the artwork again. You can think about getting the artwork back. Then later I found that it was sold for $21,000. Who buy and who to? And then somebody sold it after that for like $100,000. But I'm not bitter. I did all right. I did well. You also did the lettering for Jennifer's first solo album, but you turned down the stones. Yeah. I forget somebody approaching about so age into theirs or something about doing a cover. I didn't like them and hated them actually. Hated the stones. Goodbye Ruby Tuesday. Not one of their finest moments, I'll agree, but... Actually, that was one of their better songs. But all of it's the only way to be. That's kind of melodic. It's all right. Okay, bootleggers, roll that one. Robert Crumb sings Jagger and Richard. Exclusive live. With my banjo. Or your ukulele or your mandolin. Right. Do you imagine how embarrassing? A cheese. Well, I guess that is. No, we've got a ways to go yet, gentlemen. Okay. Gilbert, by some strange coincidence, arrived in the post a few days ago, a CD by Lightning Hopkins called Freeform Patterns, which I'm personally still trying to get my head around the implied contradiction. If it's Freeform, can it be a pattern and vice versa? Freeform patterns. It was recorded in and around the Vulcan Gas Company. I was the art director for the Vulcan Gas Company. I did some posters for Lightning Hopkins. What was the Vulcan Gas Company? It was a music venue in Austin, Texas. It would hold about 400 people. No air conditioning. It was really miserable in there on a summer night. So what years was this? 57, 58. Oh my God, that's ancient. I mean, no. No, no, 67, 68, sorry. And Johnny Winter's Progressive Blues Experiment Album was recorded there without an audience during the daytime. It's still one of his best records. Johnny Winter's, the owner of the Vulcan Gas Company discovered Johnny Winter's and he asked him to come do a gig at the Vulcan Gas Company. And Johnny Winter said, give me six months, I'm not good enough yet. Wow, jeez. A modest man. But you do crop up in the line of notes to this in the little history of the Vulcan Gas Company that goes along with the Lightning Hopkins stuff. And it says here that some of the people around there would the real-life fabulous furry freak brothers. It says, although he, meaning Mr. Shulton here, has maintained that the characters are an amalgam, Fat Freddy was an almost direct depiction of Fat Charlie Pritchard. Phineas distinctly resembled Houston White while Free William Franklin shared a surname with Vulcan poster artist Jim Franklin. Is this simply slander or is there any truth in any of that? Oh, not really. Fat Charlie had a good name and great hair. He might have been an inspiration. But it's the characters I designed mainly with my limited drawing ability to have three characters that you could distinguish between among the three. A lot of comic strips confuse me because I can't recognize the characters. So I made them exaggeratedly different. Kind of like the Three Stooges. Or the Monks Brothers. The Freak Brothers are sort of a combination of the Marks Brothers and the Three Stooges. And the cast is a combination of every Tom Cap that's ever lived. There was an American comic strip Mutt and Jeff and at the bottom of the page was a little filler comic strip to fill up the page if it was the longer format of a newspaper called Cicero's Cat. I loved Cicero's Cat when I was a kid reading the comics. So Cicero's Cat sort of had a human face like Cicero. So Fat Freddy's Cat has the same nose as Fat Freddy. The same eyes and nose. And of course Fat Freddy's Cat doesn't have a name. He's just Fat Freddy's Cat. People occasionally call him by saying, hey, Fat Freddy's Cat. Yeah, or they think he's Fat Freddy. You know, T.S. Eliot's verse, the naming of cats is a serious matter. It isn't just one of your everyday names. You may think that I'm as mad as a hatter when I tell you that each cat has three different names. And he goes on to say the first name is the name that the humans call it. And the second name is the name that the other cats call it. And the third name is his secret name. And that's why the cat always has a smile on his face. He's contemplating his secret, ineffable, effin-ineffable name. Who said that we weren't going to get some high culture? You know, in with all this stuff about sex, drugs, rock and roll, and revolution. Gilbert, I guess, I mean, okay, just to preface it, if the fabulous furry freak brothers had been real people, by now they would either be dead in jail, in hospital, or otherwise incapacitated by their lifestyle, which we do not recommend for teenagers and other living things. Don't try this at home. I wouldn't recommend LSD to anyone really. Even if it will transform you into a genius. Well, it's a Faustian deal, you know. You might have visions, but you also might kind of be mentally crippled for about 25 years, as I was. And probably still am. It was noted that it wouldn't necessarily transform you. It would just make you more like you were before. If you gave LSD to a cop, he would just become super cop. Were some at least the earlier and less phantasmagorical adventures of the brothers based on events which may have occurred to people you knew? Well, there was one story. We're past the statute of limitations. Mostly fiction, but there was one supposedly true story that was told to me by Edwin Bud Shraik about going out stoned in New York City one night, and he was accosted by two muggers, and they told him, give us all your money, and he was stoned. He said, well, I've got some money in my pocket, and I've got some money at home in the sugar bowl, and I've got a bank account with money in it, but the bank's not going to be open until Monday. So he said to the muggers, nope, can't do it. And they ran off. Did you put that in a comic strip? Yeah, it was Phineas, wasn't it? Yes. But Bud Shraik is a big guy, that might have had something to do with chasing off the muggers when he said nope. Did he give him the money in his pocket? No. So it all ended happily then. With the subject matter that you've both incorporated into your cartoons and artworks, have you received legal complications, confrontations with authority and people who just thought that what you were doing was not nice? Well, I got a lot of criticism from the feminists for a while in the 70s and 80s. They were kind of really down on my twisted sexual fantasies. Otherwise, you know, once I get a bad review, I'll see that people either liked it or they left it alone. You've never exactly quartered mainstream popularity. No, I don't care about that. I never was interested in that. I wouldn't compromise myself to get more readers. I worked for the New Yorker for a while, did collaborations with Aileen, but even in that, you know, there's enough of a compromise so it's not something I would, you know, depend on for my whole career. That's too much compromise. Is that, in a sense, an important part of the legacy of underground cartooning, that each piece of work is the result of an individual sensibility or a very tight collaboration between a very small number of people. Yeah, well, there's certainly a high degree of individuality in those comics. You look at, you know, the spectrum of all the stuff that was done in the 70s and into the 80s. Boy, there's some crazy stuff and the miracle that it got printed, some of it. Some of it's unreadable. I went back about a year ago. I went through my collection of underground comics from the 70s and I think about 75% of it was really unreadable. If people were so stoned, it's like incoherent. You know, what the fuck are they trying to do here? You know, incomprehensible. They did not get out of their own psychedelicized mind enough to actually do anything communicable. There's a lot of it. But still, it's interesting and history will sort it all out. You know, what value it really has. I don't know. Maybe there was too much freedom. I don't know. Excessive indulgence in people's own personal fantasies. Who knows how, you know, what value ultimately that has culturally, I don't know. In the intervening years, I mean, obviously, you know, you've both been doing this a while. Yeah. You've both worked on, you know, the art and the craft. I mean, when you sit down at your respective drawing boards now. Yeah. Do you feel that you, you know, you have chops now that you could be used when you were young guys starting out? I definitely feel like my drawing skills have improved. But, you know, just a level of virtuosity or skill is not the whole story, obviously. You know, if you have really something that you just got to say, you've got to get it out and that there's a lot of intense, you know, spirit behind it, that's much more important than a level of skill, you know, I think. But skill certainly helps to get an idea across. But, you know, some people, it's all skills, all technique and not much content, not much of interest. So, you know, I prefer something that's crudely drawn or even crudely played musically that has some kind of authentic feeling behind it than something that's very, you know, a lot of virtuosity and skill that has really not much interesting to say. But that's like the merit of, say, old-time blues or punk rock where, you know, it's the quality of the vision and the commitment to it that counts. But with some of the work you've done, you know, in the latter part of your career, I'm thinking of, like, the genesis, you know, several of the classic comic adaptations. I mean, in terms of classicist illustration, you know, there's extraordinary stuff there. Well, thank you. Yeah, my skills have definitely improved over the years, but the early stuff has that kind of spontaneous, wacky, youthful freshness to it that, you know, that just doesn't last forever. You get battered around by life and you get cynical and you get sick and tired of all the bullshit so that kind of, you know... But I mean, for both of you, it's got to be, you know, the vision that drives you now because, you know, in olden days, you, you know, undoubtedly having at certain points to crank to pay the rent, but it's got... You've still got to do that. But I mean, it's, you know, it's the, you know, the artistic urge rather than the, you know, than the, oh shit, look at this pile of bills thing. Well, you're always driven by fear of, you know, poverty to some extent, you know. That's always part of the motivation, always was, you know. You got to survive in this world somehow. If I can't draw, what am I going to do? You know, mow lawns, what? I can't do anything else. But, and, you know, when I'm sitting down drawing now, it's the same as it always was this part of me saying, what the fuck are you doing? I don't even, I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know if it's any good. I don't know if it's what I did before was better or whether this is an improvement or whether it's in fear. I never know. And I didn't know 30, 40 years ago. It's always kind of probing in the dark, you know. You're just kind of done, you know. I don't know. Gilbert, unless you've been misquoted, you once said the Freak Brothers will be immortal as long as you can still hold a pencil. You never said that. I don't remember. That's not you. I don't remember saying anything like that. I might have, sure. Right. I mean, do you still retain affection for these three wasters and their scabby pet? Well, it's a literary gimmick, a group of three as a comedy team. And it's unusual and it works well. At the University of Texas, we had a monthly humor magazine and I became the editor of the humor magazine and became infatuated about the idea of humor. What is this magic thing that makes people laugh? Laugh out loud. So I always wanted to be a laugh out loud humorist and there's tricks to it. I wasn't all that good at it even now. But I know when something is funny when it makes me laugh. So that's what I'm still looking for funny stories. That's where I first saw your stuff was in that Texas Ranger. I was working at the greeting card place. They used to get those college humor magazines to steal jokes for the greeting cards. That's where I first saw your work in there. You've said that those greeting cards you did for what was the company? American Greetings. Cleveland, yeah. Some of them are still out there and people are looking at them and going, wow, the art in that looks amazingly like crumbs. We were never allowed to sign, of course. I lived in Cleveland, Ohio for a while too and I went to American Greeting Cards Company and applied for a job and I wasn't good enough for them. Really? Wow. You weren't good enough? Jesus, they didn't hire anybody up the street. They had like hundreds of artists that were just so bad most of them. It was the lowest paying art job imaginable. But even that I felt so grateful. I actually had an art job. It was a miracle. Cleveland was really depressing town, though. It's funny, you're not the only person I've heard say that. What, about Cleveland? Yeah, it's pretty grim. Places just divided up into these hostile ethnic groups that all hate each other. So that's why they put the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame there. That's bizarre. And it's where Siegel and Schuster, they were so anxious to get out they had to create a flying guy. I think it's even worse now than it was back then when I lived there. So, with your current eminence and the Olympian Heights there on... Yes, of course. Do you still check out what younger artists do? Do you still sort of keep up with the field or do you just go, I do what I do? No, no, I still love comics and I was looking to see what's going on in comics. See if there's anything interesting going on. And now with the graphic novel thing that's going on. How do you feel about graphic novels? People are taking comics much more seriously than they ever did when I was a kid. When I was young, comics were the lowest form of culture there was. In comic arts in the 50s I heard that when there were cocktail parties somebody said, what do you do? They would say, I'm an illustrator. They wouldn't admit they drew comics. That was so embarrassing. I would say I'm in the publishing business. Back in those days in the 60s I would tell girls I was trying to impress that I drew comics and say, oh. But now it's a big serious high art form that critics and everything. It's kind of a kiss of death really. There's a lot of really pretentious comics being done now. Very pretentious. Throw that. But there's still kids coming up doing great funny stuff. There's a young guy called Aaron Lang in the US. He lives in Philadelphia. I think he's really lived on the skids. But he does these little pamphlet things that he puts out there. Hilarious. Really funny. There's always stuff. Once in a while somebody comes up like that still doing good stuff. Anybody caught your eye, Gilbert? I'm out of touch with the current scene. I read French comics in the monthly magazines. Mainly just study my French to learn French. Do you wear a David Seward drill at French cartoonists? Who's the greatest David Seward drill? No, I don't know that one. I think he's a guy in his 40s. His drawing keeps improving. Beautiful drawing. He uses himself as the main character. He's this nerdy loser guy. I wonder where he got that idea. Hey, cartoonists generally are nerdy losers. That's just the way it is. You sit at home and drawing all the time. Instead of being out in the fresh air. Yeah. You sit in your room and look at comics and draw comics. Back when I was young, anything but a comic artist was more exciting and romantic to girls. A poet, an oil painter, or you're writing a novel. Anything was more interesting and exciting than drawing comics. Now it's a little bit different. Girls actually come to comic conventions now. It's incredible. The costumes, sometimes, I've told. I saw a few Wonder Women yesterday at the London exhibition and all kinds of characters that I didn't recognize. Cute young teenage girls in their sexy costumes. Maybe someone will do an ironic revival of Sheena Queen of the Jungle. That would be nice. All the superhero stuff that still comes out is this constant river of this superhero action and adventure comics that, to me, are utterly and completely uninteresting. I have no interest in that stuff at all. Or a man guy can't get up for that at all. The quirky individualistic stuff is what I always look for. Did you guys ever check out the Anandas Brothers? Yeah, they didn't get stuff. Yeah, that's good stuff. Dan Klaus, great. Heine Hermandes is one of the great figure artists of all the cartoonists. Both of those guys can really draw the human figure. Beto is a great story writer and a fairly good artist, too. So, can your respective panting publics get any kind of hint of what we can expect from you in the future? Sneak previews or, as we call it, advanced hype? Expect more retire soon any day now. Out of here. Leave the stage for the younger kids. They can take over. Had my day. A lot of ink has gone under the bridge. Yeah, I've always had trouble drawing and now my eyes are going in. I got arthritis. A lot of pain. I had this retrospective exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris a couple of years ago. They did a good job of gathering up old work of mine from all these sources. And they said rooms and rooms of my drawings. Jesus Christ, I've done so much drawing in my life. It's enough already. You can retire, relax. You don't have to keep doing this. You can just relax and listen to your records and go out and take a walk. Take care of the grandchildren. Yeah, I want to take care of the grandchildren. Then draw once in a while. I still like to draw once in a while. I still feel like my life is meaningless unless I do some drawing once in a while. I'm nothing. I'm nobody unless I'm drawing. My wife, ladies and gentlemen. I said, gentlemen, where would I be without her? I'd be dead without her. Well, all I can say is it's been a pleasure, a privilege and an honour to sit here with these gentlemen. I mean, I've identified with them in different ways for a long time. It's only comic books, OK? It's comic books. I get too heavy about it. Well, you know, I like drugs and I like cats. So I've empathised with Mr Shelton. I like muscular women and old blues records. So I've bonded with Mr Crumb. You're my bro. Let's hope it isn't true that we will not see their like again because as far as I'm concerned, both of these gentlemen have blazed trails for the cartoonists of the future. Fuck an A. I want to see more of the kind of work that would not have been possible without them. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Gilbert Shelton and Mr Robert Crabb. OK, we're now going to proceed to... I'm getting instructions via my earpiece here. OK, we're now going to move on to the second part of our programme where we're going to be looking at the roots and branches of the Oz School Kids issue and the Oz Conspiracy Trial. And your host for this portion of the evening will be Mr Dick Poundton. And also joining us on stage will be my fellow Oz School Kid, though unlike me, he's learnt how to dress like a grown-up. Mr Dayan Sujik and one of the guys who actually defended us, or rather defended the editors. I personally was not charged in court. The distinguished human rights lawyer, Mr Jeffrey Robertson. Take it away and burn it. First of all, I should explain that I'm here as a substitute for my dear old friend, Felix Dennis, who died last month. We'd worked together for 40 years. And I like one of his qualifications and I was not in the dock at the Old Bailey, though I did work on Oz Magazine. Oz Magazine came to London in 1967, which was the year that The Beatles released Sergeant Pepper and the year that I scored my first acid trip in the bar in LSE. The magazine started off as a satirical student magazine in Australia, but in 1966 Richard Neville, Jim Anderson and Martin Sharp decided they needed a bigger pond. They moved it to London, which was becoming a centre of the international counterculture alongside San Francisco and Amsterdam. And they found the bigger pond. They found a rock and roll business overflowing with money. They brought a couple of talented graphic designers, Martin Sharp and John Goodchild, and they transformed their magazine into the best psychedelic magazine in Europe. It looked marvellous. It had great writers and it had a remarkably libertarian editorial policy. Now and again they would just hand an issue over to a guest editor or a guest group. They had an issue, gay activists edited an issue. They handed an issue over to feminists. And so it came about that in issue 26 they invited fifth form and sixth form school children who would like to edit a magazine about their grievances to come in and do exactly that. We have two of those people on the stand here tonight. There's two more in the second row here. Two more in the second row. The outcome of that we all... They're now writing to the independent. That's what they grew up to do. They came in and they did the issue, which was issue 28. One of the things that they did was what nowadays would be called a mashup. They took one of Robert's cartoons and they spliced the head of Rupert the Bear who was a very wholesome family cartoon from the Daily Express onto the body of a particularly rampant and well-endowed character of Robert's. That cartoon caught the eye of the law. The Oz officers were raided. The editors were arrested. And so began the longest obscenity trial in British legal history to that point. And sitting here we have the man who defended them in that trial. Eventually got them out of jail. So Charles, did you and the other kids know each other at all before you saw that issue of Oz? Well, I rounded up a posse of kids from my school and a nearby girls' school and was going, this looks like fun, let's go. Technically, I think it said something about 18 and under, but I was prepared to lie about my age. I was about to turn 19, but I thought this is a good way to avoid having to become a librarian or a civil servant. And I'd graduated from reading rock papers to reading the underground press. And as far as I could gather, what these guys in London were doing was leading the sort of life I thought I should be leading. They were causing plenty of inventive cultural trouble. They appeared to have attractive girlfriends and they were taking a metric fuck ton of drugs. And I thought, I'd like some of that. So I said, hey, let's go up, let's do this. And we all ended up in Richard Neville's basement in Palace Gardens Terrace and met all the contemporaries and those a bit younger who'd come for pretty much the same reasons we did and met the Oz editors. I recall Richard as being very Lucian, charming and floppy-haired and I guess it shouldn't have come as any surprise many years later that he was played on the TV adaptation by a young Hugh Grant. Jim Anderson was very tall and very skinny with blank blonde hair and resembled a sort of healthy version, comparatively healthier version of Johnny Winter. He was the first out gay man I'd ever met. And then there was Felix, the freak with a briefcase in his chocolate brown pinstripe suit with his Charles II hair and pirate's beard and deafening guffaw. And the key thing was that contrary to what the legal establishment attempted to make out later, they didn't attempt to force us into doing, saying or writing anything. They were genuinely interested in what we want to do. Is that how you remember it, Diane? Vividly. I remember that brown suit, I remember Felix who strangely had an episode at the same school that I had previously been at. He claimed to be an expelled. Of course, he wasn't an editor in those days. He was the advertising salesman. That's why he had the suit. And the reviews editor and the business manager. I suppose I remember it being something that you went into really lightly. It seemed so benign. It was a very sunny summer in London and it seemed so shocking when this very light thing suddenly turned into this really horrible thing of people being sent to jail, of school kids being lined up either to give evidence against or for them. It just seemed so unlikely. It just seemed so different from what we were expecting, I suppose. It was only a magazine. And yet it produced all those insights into Britain. I think one of the most shocking things was the judge who suggested that Felix will get a shorter sentence than the others because he hadn't been to university. That's being... The other thing that also genuinely in my innocence shocked me was of course the reaction to young women from young women who saw that issue and were horrified by what was seen as being a gross piece of sexism. That's also part of the climate. The words jailbait have rather different ten of these days, don't they? Geoff, what were they actually charged with? Well, they were charged. The book was thrown at them. They were charged, would you believe, with conspiracy to corrupt public morals by debauching the morals of young children within the realm. And that was the first charge and that carried life imprisonment. Seriously. And they would have gone to jail for many, many years if they'd been convicted of that our great success, our great thing during the trial was to have them acquitted of that. Then there was obscenity, which was a charge that this magazine depraved and corrupted those likely to read it. And thirdly, there was the pathetic little charge of sending an indecent magazine through the post. So this was... But there was more to it than that. The magazine actually had been... The first complaint to the police, the only complaint to the police was from the General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers because this had been found passing around. But it was that receded because that wasn't the reason they were prosecuted. This was 1971. This was almost revenge for the 60s in the 70s under a new conservative government. You have to understand that part of the corruption of the time was the police force. The Obscene Publications Squad, the Dirty Squad, was dealing pornography by arrangement with the Soho pornographers. You could get the most extreme pornography just by asking in Soho because Paul Rehm and others were paying off the police. The Drug Squad was dealing drugs and the Serious Crime Squad was setting up Serious Crime. Scotland Yard was utterly corrupt before Robert Mark came in in 1973. And as a result, the 18 members of the Dirty Squad were all sent to prison, convicted of running a massive protection racket in Soho. These were the people who then raided Oz and I'll never forget, in Barrick Street, they walked up three rickety blocks of stairs to knock on the door of the garret of nasty tales and arrest three stone cartoonists whom they dragged to trial just after Oz. So this war on the underground press was partly, as far as the police were concerned, to protect their cover. They were protecting and making enormous amounts of money from the most desolatingly ugly porn that was being sold in Soho and yet to pretend to Lord Longford and Mary Whitehouse and the politicians of the time that they were actually doing something, they were starting these prosecutions for conspiracy of the underground press. And in the summer of 1971, we were all there in the Old Bailey and the three main exhibits were, firstly, Robert's Rupert the Bear. Yes, modified by Viv Berger by putting the much loved iconic nursery figure of Rupert on the head of the bear. And this was, I think, something touched the British establishment. We couldn't get a QC to defend this magazine. Would you believe the Labour QCMP who had been originally briefed 11 days before the trial actually opened his brief, saw that and refused to act. Then I went to Basel Wiggider who defended Rudy Deutschka a really brilliant liberal reputation. He accepted, had a conference at which Jim Anderson, I think, mentioned possibly the Chicago Conspiracy Trial and throwing something in court. And he rang up a few hours later and said he couldn't take the risk, couldn't take the risk of not becoming chairman of boopers, I think he eventually became. And so we were there, forward on the Friday before the trial started on Monday without a QC. So Richard and I heard that John Mortimer was defending an axe murderer at the Old Bailey and was having lunch with his very young companion of 22 years whom he later married. And so we plucked up courage and we took the magazine down to the restaurant and opened it to show him Rupert. And he giggled. He actually giggled. And so did his companion. And so he said, oh, goodie, can I defend? And so I just have to finish my axe murderer. The blood stains aren't running our way. So that is how we did at least get a defender. I wasn't a counsel, I was just a student at Oxford actually who'd written for us in Australia and was writing a thesis on conspiracy to grow up public morals. So we then began this extraordinary six-week trial which featured some of the greatest intellects in the country as defense witnesses. We had the Oxford professor of jurisprudence, Ronnie Dworkin. We had Professor Hans Seinsich, the leading psychiatrist, Edward De Bono, Marty Feldman, Felix Topolski who came forward to defend Robert's work. We had John Peale who we had to call to defend Charles Charmurray who'd written a review that mentioned, I think the word, fuck music and was grilled in the Old Bailey by the Prosecuting Council. Have you ever heard of a symphony by Beethoven be inducing an orgasm to which John said in his inevitable way, he said, well, I haven't but if I wrote music I'd like to think someone was making love to it. I noticed you used making love instead of fuck. Why is that? Well John said I've used making love because I've been a courtroom. But since everyone else is saying fuck then I'll say it too. And this Charles' review was put to some psychiatrist and he said what do you think about using this fuck music? The psychiatrist said well I think Shakespeare put it rather better didn't he? Yeah but I was only young. And so it went on and provided entertainment for many, over six weeks as I say, of the summer and constantly it was packed, it was like a theatre because all the American lawyers would come and we had characters like George Melly, the great George Melly who was, I remember Jar Jar Guy leaning over to him saying for the benefit of those of us without a classical education what do you mean by this word cunnilingtus? I think he was pronouncing it like it was a cop medicine and George beamed, he actually thought, he made connection here he said oh my lord I'm so sorry I've been inhibited by the architecture or sucking or blowing or going down or gobbling or in my naval days your lordship we called it yodeling in the canyon. So everyone laughed, this is a courtroom not a theatre Captain was the judge's constant, he used to look at Rupert's erections through a magnifying quite seriously and when I did a play which was actually a verbatim transcripts it was first put on by the great late Buzz Goodbody at the Royal Shakespeare Company at the place and with the judge I think Leslie Phillips played him and I said to Buzz look you've taken out my direction to have the judge look at Rupert's erections through a magnifying glass and she said yes, I have, I said but that happened and she said it happened in court but in a theatre the public won't believe that it happened in court so there were extraordinary events, many of them and it was an extraordinary time the jury acquitted on the conspiracy to corrupt public morals charge which was an enormous relief because Argyle was mad and would have sent them down for many years they convicted on the obscenity charge which I was quite happy with because the judge was an idiot and actually had given them the wrong direction on obscenity he said obscenity meant indecency which it doesn't in law so we were confident we had that in the bag and they convicted of course on indecency which we expected which wasn't a serious effect so then would you believe the judge decided to remand them in prison for psychiatric examination they were stark staring sane and yet here they were like in Russia at the time being carted off to prison to have their heads read but more than that to have their heads shaven it suddenly the Daily Mail discovered and did a front page this is all front page stuff 3 million people were being killed in the genocide in Bangladesh at this very time it was all osstrile there were more letters to the times about the osstrile than there had been about the Suez Crisis but what was really hit the headlines was the fact that they were having their head shaven because they all had long hair of course, hippie style and so the cultural collision that was the osstrile seemed to be summed up in this atavistic prison policy the minute you got into prison you had your head hair shaved off and so it was a nervous time they spent a week in prison before we got them out on bail and inevitably won the appeal because the judge had misdirected the jury 78 times and so it had a happy ending unless you think that it's very first beneficiary a few weeks after we had won the appeal we had won freedom, I mean Lady Chatterley trial freedom for great art, osstrile, freedom for transgressive schoolboy art for trying, art for not so great art but for sincere and satirical art and the very first beneficiary of the osstrile law that we changed in the osstrile appeal was Rupert Murdoch and page 3 which appeared in the wake of the osstrile acquittal made it all worthwhile really absolutely am I right in thinking that the prosecution never suggested at any point that the osstrile editors had abused the school children there was no evidence of that in today's climate of moral panic over Jimmy Saville and Rolf Harris that would be the first thing they would have suggested I mean in a way it hasn't the clock isn't the clock being turned back right now from what was gained by the osstrile well that's interesting I think that at least the osstrile and the 70s as I say Lady Chatterley in 1960 had been the point at which great art was protected from the obscenity laws the osstrile was the point at which not so great art but genuine art was protected and it was not to the end of the 1970s John and I defended again a shabby little book called Inside Linda Lovelace and the judge said to the jury members of the jury if this book isn't obscene I don't know what is and they came back and acquitted after a couple of hours and the DPP announced that he wouldn't prosecute the written word again so we did have that achievement I guess by the end of the 70s but now yes we do have which hunts we do have people who are being kept like Paul Gambaccini arrested and then nothing happens for years they lose their job and there's a terrible state of suspense in relation to evidence which is completely non-existent virtually so there is a sense of proportion that we've got to keep while realizing that you have to go after these people and in my time in the 70s I remember in the next case we thought we'd killed off conspiracy to corrupt public morals but it was brought back for an organization called Pi and I remember the most active member of Pi in the committal proceedings was not and the one who wrote the most obscene stuff about child listing was a guy they pretended his name was Mr Henderson and the magistrate was Richard Branson's father a very very fair firm and principled London magistrate and if he had known that this was really perverting the course of justice that the most active member of this organization on the evidence before the court was not Mr Henderson that was the pseudonym for Sir Peter Heyman who was the deputy director of MI6 so there you are there was a real element of corruption and cover-up in the courts at that time and Oz by taking on courageously because they were up against a prison sentence by dressing up as school girls during the committal proceedings by calling everyone from George Melly to Marty Feldman who had a terrible row with the judge and as he went out he said to Richard and the doc pointing at the judge he said boring old fart and this was overheard by a Times reporter who reported it on page one of the Times and I said afterwards Richard said that when they got to prison they were terrified because of the way the tabloids had played the trial that they might be beaten up as if they were Peter Files but they found themselves celebrated they were rather prison royalty entirely because Marty Feldman had called a guy who was the most savage of all sentences a boring old fart he was the recorder of Birmingham and whenever anyone vandalized a telephone box in Birmingham he'd send them down for three years on the grounds that as he would say we don't do this sort of thing in Birmingham which they didn't but they did it in Coventry the telephone box vandalism hit the roof in Coventry Did Charles call Tunch in Spanish? No there was Milford Stevens, he was another horror Charles do you think you can tell us a little bit about the way the music business came behind the Oz people during the trial? Well Oz and IT International the other main underground publication Oz was a magazine, IT was a newspaper were in a symbiotic relationship with the rock business because essentially they depended on the rock business for an advertising revenue lifeblood and the rock the rock business liked to channel certain of its what they considered to be its more adventurous acts towards the hippies who were the vast majority of the readers of the magazine and with the advent of the Oz trial the magazine suddenly got an offer of help from what was probably the single greatest rock and roll luminary in the country, John Lennon and he said right I'm going to do a benefit record to raise support and funds for Oz and here's what we're going to do you know the mansion that's in the Imagine video Lennon had a studio there and he said right I'm going to write the song Phil Spector's going to produce it Ringo's going to play the drums and Yoko is going to do whatever Yoko does and Klaus Vorman was going to play the bass and the deal was right anybody in the Oz posse who plays an instrument thinks they can play an instrument or just wants to shake a bit of percussion a discreet distance away from the mic and thinks they can sing a backing vocal or in tune here's where the van's leaving from and I was thinking right I'll have a bit of this Felix had actually been a drummer in one of his many previous incarnations so he was a natural to be in the percussion section Richard and Jim sort of sang and sort of played percussion and I volunteered to play some guitar and we got there and it was a long drive up the drive this is not a little suburban place we're talking rock broke a belt we're talking mansion to be an international criminal to have afforded in previous times there was Lennon, you know, in top to toe Levi's led us into this wonderfully well appointed small but perfectly formed studio behind the drums was the small but perfectly formed Ringo in the control room was the small and not really perfectly formed Phil Spector and you know Lennon basically decided who was going to pretend to play what and you know I had I had my eye on some of the legendary electric guitars on the wall, you know there was one of the three quarter size rick and backers there was the let it be you know the rooftop concert epiphone and it was like and Lennon was saying right we're starting with acoustic guitars so I got one of those Gibson J-160 E's that were they bought from the music shop in Liverpool in 1962 and Lennon started showing everybody the song and it had this introduction which involved a particular occurrence of a first position D chord and I thought right I'm going to get clever we were sort of sitting cross-legged with microphones coming down like this and I thought right let's I'm going to show him I know what I'm doing so I did this little augmented thing at the third fret and it was none of them cheap folk club tricks in here muddy and I thought oh my god John Lennon knows my name and a little a little later on I actually broke a string I was so nervous and legendary Beatles roadie Mal Evans was hanging around and Lennon Lennon said not to worry we'll see if we can get Mal to change the string like he wouldn't change the string if he was asked then still nervous played the wrong chord Lennon stops the take I thought okay this is where the legendary John Lennon Vaporish Scorn is dumped on my teenage head but he said now let's do it again I made a mistake he took responsibility for the mistake even though he knew quite well that I'd played it later on there was actually a basic track down I was saying I don't think this needs some electric guitars on it now it was like alright moddy back in your box and then when the record finally came out all those acoustic guitars have been taken off electric guitars have been put on I thought bloody rock stars bloody John Lennon bloody Phil Specter they should have listened to me but the guy I really felt sorry for was the guy who had been brought along to sing lead vocals his lead vocal was taken off and replaced by somebody who Lennon knew who none of us had ever heard of and the punchline was that they took so long to mix it that by the time it actually came out the trial was over it was called God Save Us it was indeed it was a bit of a dirge and the B side was called Do The Old Dirge that was New Yorkers very few people have Mick Jagger also denated a song subsequently his famous cocksucker blues oh the one he used to get out of the Decker contract he was an amazing he would have been a great lawyer EMI I think it was Decker wouldn't release this amazing song and he wouldn't he wanted to change and he looked at his contract and he noticed that there was an undertaking by the record company to release every song that he gave them and so he said right release this I'm a lonely schoolboy lost in London it begins and it is an extraordinary song it was a solo performance with an acoustic guitar and they didn't release it it's been widely bootlegged amazing never heard it but you don't like the stones anyway not even a solo performance with an acoustic guitar no electric instruments involved a bit of hiss and crackle yeah maybe so Robert did you when all this was going on when somebody's riff on a bit of your artwork was bringing the British establishment to its knees did you know anything about this barely barely knew anything about it nobody contacted me they finally I saw some article about it and they they didn't mention my name he wasn't even sure whose artwork you were talking about we called Felix Tupolsky he was the artist who defended your work or defended the Rupert bear cartoon and he got into a long controversy with the prosecutor over whether it was art the question went is art is Rupert as he appears in the Rupert annual is that art no it's not is art but putting the head of the bear onto Mr. Crumb's drawing does that make it art yes what sort of art does it make it satirical art and so it went on and on like this but we spent several days defending your artistic merit because that was the defense you could run to an obscenity chart but you know when you have to explain satire to people you know they just don't get it they never will they get it or they don't actually very few people really enjoy satire it's kind of a special thing well it was very difficult because Felix Tupolsky had difficulty explaining what was art and what wasn't it's the sort of question that the cross-examiner can tie you up in but we had called Edward Dubona and the cross-examination went who was the lateral thinking expert and cross-examination went Mr. Dubona why do you think Rupert is equipped with such a large size organ to which he said I'm sorry I'm not very up to date with bears what size do you think would be natural to which the judge said you must not ask counsel questions and so we this was the kind of dialogue that went on day in and day out British experts as for Gilbert we had or the kids had chosen one of their favorite Fabulousbury Free Brothers cartoons which is where Pat Freddie sent to Rip-off Park which I guess may well be the story you told us about was that Central Park and anyway he gets sent to Rip-off Park and he gets mugged having scored a whole lot of drugs he then gets them taken from him and so he's deprived and there's a sort of moral at the end of the story but that was alleged to encourage readers to take drugs and I would have thought the adverse we argued that it had just the opposite effect if the cartoon were taken seriously there's this other strip by me that they printed in here that ends with a guy getting a blow job from a girl and they didn't seem to notice I think because the color is so confusing and people were on LSD that did the color job but you can hardly tell what's going on and there were no bears involved no nursery favorite bears so is the bear and your work as well I mean looking back on it's just shocking that all your material I think was just taken was the underground press didn't believe in copyright at that stage it soon changed its mind a tacit agreement that anybody in these hippie underground papers nobody was making any money so everybody let them use whatever they wanted all over the place it was just flattering to see your work in print nobody cared that people took your stuff and printed it all over the place I think the idea was anything for anything and of course some publications had lots of stuff that everybody wanted other publications had absolutely nothing that anybody wanted at all it was a wacky period alright but this was a period of political repression I mean the miners were starting to strike there were three days a week we were in darkness and it's often forgotten that the 60s while we looked back on them as the flour power era were actually very repressive a lot of assassinations in the US well in Britain the police were planting bricks on protestors against the Greek embassy and they were beating suspects the Vietnam War, the huge Vietnam demonstrations in Grosvenor Square but I was barely noticed any of that material it was about sunshine having a good time well the mountain sharp cartoons on LBJ were perhaps the most savage they were more savage than Gerald Scarfe in a way it was a very visual magazine the words sort of took second place to everything else well you've become a great design guru could you tell me is that actionable? could you tell me honestly now what did you think of the design of us when you look back on it has it left any legacy at all? well I think that issue was not the most beautiful one I mean the kind of psychedelia of Martin and John were just extraordinary that's what appeared on some of the early cream albums and to me that's a very powerful memory of that particular time and more distinctively Oz as well because as we've said the thing about underground magazines that time was wherever you were in the world you were underground magazine if you had Sheldon and Crumb in it without really making the best possible use of it whereas I think some of those psychedelia covers were remarkable it's quite interesting the next time I saw Sheldon and Crumb in this context was in the mid 80s in Czechoslovakia and the Samizdat material so much of it was like Oz I had no idea but you know those underground papers we used to on paste up night people would just take LSD hey the colors let's do some put some more color on here man well it's just become incoherent kind of orange reversed out of red and like here's this red type with this blue drawing printed behind it it's a huh what you can't tell what's the hell's going on half the time Richard Neville used to say if you can't read it you're too old then he confessed that being over 30 he couldn't read all of it himself all these papers were quite a long wind and they had long tirades about the establishment stuff that weren't very well written off but I guess there was there was some I mean it is normal to see in vicinity trials they'll take the worst example or the least good example I mean Lady Chatterley was perhaps Lawrence's worst books and Oz 28 was perhaps the least impressive and Oz had a number it had Robert Hughes it had Jermaine Greer they wrote extraordinary pieces and of course martinshops, cartoons, Charles's precocious music reviews I only came in with with you know this one Oz 28 but afterwards Felix said you know do you want to stick around and do more stuff and you know I thought I was being sent you know having had my little adventure you know while I was going to be sent back to the province 18 years old sent back to the provinces to rot but you know really what I laughingly referred to as my career started with this you're laughing the referred to career can I have your reviewer just find the phrase that sent the prostitution up the wall very sure could you find your reviewer it's not a complete issue it may not actually be it is a timeline I think maybe at this point we could ask if there are a couple of questions from the audience for anyone on the panel no okay we're out but as Peter Popham he went to the independent Charles Charmarin you know this really as John Peel said it was state of the art you were question over him I've got a question for Robert and Gilbert about living in France why do you feel you've settled there and you know I just wonder what your life the rhythm of your life your lives are like we go to the café we drink some wine so your grandchildren they live close situationism and instead of saying I work in the publishing business I can say just reason the senator to bondesina that's better than I can talk it this is a tremendously facile question given that we've just had a wonderful hour learning about obscenity and other tremendous topics this is for Mr Crum what do you when you were young nice lovely that's good what did you most enjoy about those Donald Duck comic books there was this I don't know if you are aware of Carl Barks he's a great storyteller he's a good artist we called him the good artist because we didn't know his name as a kid in the 50s and being a child of pop culture surrounded by television and comic books and that was it I didn't know anything else and it was the best of what was available for kids at that time the best entertainment that there was he could do great action he had a timber fit he would be thrashing around and jumping in the air he was great I was very flattered years later when somebody showed him one of my comics and took a photo of him looking at one of my comics and laughing it practically brought tears to my eyes Carl Barks lived to be 100 years old question I think this question is for Jeffrey probably I'm intrigued to hear I've heard it again this evening that some of the school kids appeared as defense witnesses and some appeared as prosecution witnesses is that correct and how did that work out? No, only one, Viv Berger was a bit a number of them I think were threatened as prosecution witnesses I saw you all didn't I, took statements from you and we were minded to call you but I think for your own protection we didn't I don't think it was because we thought you were unreliable or anything of that sort the one problem we had was with Jermaine Greer because she would have made a brilliant witness and actually she was fabulous for nasty tales the following year she got it off and single-handedly as the defense witness and I wanted to have her do it for us and unfortunately because of British tax laws at the time you had to spend a year outside Britain to make any money in her case on the female unit and so here she was stuck in an American university and I said you know we are in danger of having them sent a president and she said well look if it comes to that I will forfeit all the money I made on the female unit can fly back I said I'll look at other things I tried to get the BBC to do a video link so that she could appear in the Old Bailey from New York but they didn't work out and the final decision was made because there was in Suck on the front cover of Suck magazine which was shown on the wall with the obscene publication squad is Jermaine with her legs well a face between her legs but with her anus extremely open on the front cover and so we had to make a quick calculation that the jury would perhaps be more affected when this was put to her in cross examination than her defence but you've got to understand this was the last jury that had a property qualification and was overaged because at that time you had to own property to sit on a jury so the juries were mainly male middle class, middle aged 21 and over and I remember the night before the trial started we were all round in Palace Gardens terrorists thinking we got the list, the names and occupations of the juries and we were hoping for a graphic designer or an actor or a cartoonist and they were all in hard hats from E-15 they were all builders labourers they were all over 50 and I remember one guy I noticed his name was George Blake so everybody said yes we have to have George Blake or at hostile he looks and George Blake the next day looked so hostile that we had to challenge him but the jury was the average age was about 60 not exactly peers of the people exactly and that was another problem with the OZ trial but looking back on it it wasn't just a cover up for the EBC and Publications Squad there was a Tory, new Tory government a determination to destroy the underground press and there was an extraordinary sexual ignorance that we struck particularly in the Court of Appeal because there was a little box won't you see it there in the magazine about a technique using I think hot coffee and ice cubes you remember Dick no it wasn't Dr. Hippocrates it was the smaller and it the Chief Justice Lord Widgery the Widgery report in fame had couldn't believe it wasn't obscene because he showed the joys from the woman's perspective it wasn't just that it described oral sex it showed that it was women would get pleasure out of it and this was unforgivable and quite seriously we had three day appeal and we thought we'd won it so we'll have to apply the proviso even if you win the appeal the Court could apply the proviso which said if there's been no miscarriage of justice it can up hold it can refuse the appeal so at 12 o'clock they rose with Widgery kept saying we have to apply the proviso because this must be obscene because it shows that women can enjoy oral sex if three hours later they came back and there was no talk of the proviso the appeal was upheld and I found out later what had happened one of the judges was Nigel Bridge who had been in the Navy and was quite broad minded and had a clerk who had been an able seaman and he sent him down to Soho to collect in the luncheon to collect the run of the mill Soho porn that was on offer and he brought it back and they spent a couple of hours perusing it and realizing that Lord Widgery was living in another century and so that is why the proviso was not applied but there was an extraordinary degree of sexual ignorance and sexism well you know for years later Tony Bennett's knock about press was importing comics from the states stuff of mine other peoples that Her Majesty's customs would confiscate the books and destroy them because the customs officials had the power to decide themselves at the moment that they inspected the books if they were obscene to the customs officials they could then take them and destroy them I defended a lot of your books in customs in odd places like South Hampton Magistrates where you wouldn't know about it but some distributor would send them over and the customs would seize them and they'd go before a local magistrate I defended them once with Gilroy and Rowlinson books which had also been seized by customs and Tony Bennett of course was prosecuted at the Old Bailey for in 84 I think 84 I defended him it was for publishing a book called How to Grow Marijuana Indoors Under Lights and he'd used some illustrations of yours this was said to be depraving and corrupting and we had endless arguments from experts who came in from Wales and said that that smoking dope was a depraved and corrupted activity so the obscenity laws would cover it but we succeeded in rejecting that and so he told me that if he published stuff of mine himself in England and it didn't have to be anywhere near the customs place that he could get away with it but if it came through customs from the outside and these customs officials had the power to decide themselves that's right we eventually won because of the European Court because we became part of Europe there was a rubber sex doll that had been imported from Germany and the customs had blown her up and then seized and destroyed her but the European Court solemnly held that because there were rubber sex dolls being made in Britain which couldn't be blown up and destroyed then it was discriminatory and it was a great victory and after that they had to make the test the same and the customs could no longer seize things and destroy them because they were indecent obscenity was the test not indecency How worried were the three about actually spending a very long time in jail? They were very courageous I think because they knew we spelled out to them I did the dangers of judge Argyle the dangers of judges like Guigery and they could have spent a long time in prison they were and they would never Richard had this thing about gay rights understandably enough but it wasn't fully lawful homosexuality in 1971 there were no gay MPs no one was coming out and he insisted on having Warren Hague who was an incredibly camp guy in the well of the court desporting himself before the jury and he was saying I've got to do it to make a point about gay rights because they had a gay oz but it obviously would upset the jurors because those things did in 1970 we're back in the semi-dark ages and when of course it was an amazing story when we applied for bail the judge who was the newest, youngest judge high court judge and of course there'd be nothing but stuff about Oz in the press for and against the mail and so on totally hostile and on the Friday he said well I hear what you say it's very unusual to grant bail pending appeal but I will think about it over the weekend which meant he was going to read the editorials in the Sunday papers and anyway on Monday morning John and I, John was sitting in the front row which is reserved for QC's and I was sitting behind him and the judge was about to come out and the judge's door opened and an extraordinarily beautiful young woman in Denham came out of the judge's door and walked down and sat beside John and John said I don't think the, this is Council's bench I don't think the judge would like you sitting there I don't forget she looked up and she said I don't think Dad will mind and the judge came out and with his daughter's eye upon him gave them bail and I think that there was something in the Bob Dylan song about your sons and your daughters not beyond your command in some houses they do command and perhaps in that one they did so there was a real intergenerational clash I think it was part of the losing of faith along with Vietnam in the older generation There was a parallel case in California Art Gallery owner in Berkeley, California had an art exhibit of the artwork from Snatch Comics which is clearly obscene if that's not obscene nothing is obscene but obscenity isn't against the law in California pornography is but the law in California in this case went to the jury trial the law says that pornography needs to be a prurient interest and no one on the jury would admit to being sexually aroused by Snatch Comics and so he was acquitted It's not erotic, it's emetic I think we have time for one more audience question because we've got a gentleman here could we get a mic for this gentleman please I didn't understand the question It's a different world now When you were a child you bought the Sunday newspaper there'd be eight or ten supplements two of which would be comics certainly Washington Post was like that never seen anything like that in this country and it seems to be that America loves comics but this country does not has that changed? So why do you think that difference occurs? It's a different world now Comics have not a newspaper they have the prominence that it did back then let alone the Sunday comics Sunday comics now in America is a big nothing but comics are this special category of graphic novels and all has its own it's not no longer the big mainstream media thing that it was in the fifties things have really changed a lot As for England, I don't know I saw the exhibit today and I saw lots of stuff I'd never seen before because I've never seen in America I wasn't aware that there was so much comic action in this country over the last few decades I was kind of surprised to see that But you think England that people aren't that interested in comics in this country you think? I don't know Those comics are hugely popular in France I just wanted to go back to the school kids in court question you mentioned Vivian Berger did end up in court was he used by the prosecution? Yes he was but all he did was to say that he as I recall it or his mother certainly was called but she was president of the National Council of Civil Liberties so we weren't worried about her but there was no I think gosh there was a statement from Viv but I don't think he was actually called I think it was his mother and we called her I think the only What about this 15 year old girl that was in here what's her name Bertie Aldershot or something like that Aldershot's her hometown so it's Bertie Comer Aldershot jail baited a month here 15 years old you're right nowadays they would have thrown him all in jail just for this they'd never see the light of day again yeah let's do it and it was a that photo was a deliberate homage to your honey bunch community who was blown up to about 14 feet and led the parade of the Oz supporters on day one to the old bay 15 their child molesters mallock them up they still should be in jail nowadays I think that's about all we have time for let's just pay tribute to Felix Dennis he was so extraordinary the judge having sent Richard to jail for 15 months and then Jim I think for 12 turned to Felix and said I'm only giving you nine months because you are the youngest and you are very much less intelligent and Felix lived with this in order to go on like a multi-millionaire but the question is whether they were worried about prison yes of course they were worried initially because there was a lot of rape in prison at that time and Richard was particularly nervous and after putting on a brave face for a week or so he saw me the night before he said you've got to get me out and I said why exactly I can't stand the smell of Felix's socks they were all in a cell over crowded cell together and of course a couple of years later Oz finally bit the dust Felix and I set up a small company to publish underground comics and we called it H-Bunch Associates in the tribute to your character and years later Felix invited me and Eileen to come to his private island he said he had a staff of ten people there to serve our needs if we wanted to come we never did go though I'd like to thank all of you Robert, Gilbert, Charles, Dayan Geoffrey for coming along and giving us a very very entertaining account of the Oz Trial and please give them a round of applause