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The long, hot summer of 73. (Innocent days)

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The spring and early summer of 1973 passed by in a haze of hard and at times brutal work, with brief respite trips to London and a five week hitch-hiking sojourn to Denmark and back. Having surpassed my own low expectations by being offered a place on a Diploma in Communication Studies course at the Polytechnic of Central London in the autumn I set about getting myself my first job in England.

I moved to the Surrey town of Farnham, where my sister Jane was a textile art student and I found myself a tiny room to rent for £8 a week. Work came in the form of a job as a yard labourer at the firm of W.C.Ware & Sons on the Farnham Trading Estate. This was my harsh introduction to the world of work. A tough environment where I was expected to shift lengths of wood on my shoulder from place to place. The foreman was a brute, a former squaddie called Scouser Barry who particularly enjoyed headbutting anyone he didn’t like. Eventually he went too far and was escorted off the premises. I would walk home with splinters in my hands and sometimes in my neck. The concepts of protection and safety were far from anyone’s minds in 1973. Friday lunchtimes we were straight down the pub, but I did strike up an unlikely friendship with a young biker rocker called Sean. One particular memory was a three day job in nearby Guildford at another branch where I and one other were sent to pick up and sort out a giant bundle of lengths of wood that had fallen over. Giant pick-up sticks came to mind.

For music I had a small cassette player and I was listening to Lou Reed’s Transformer and Bowie’s Hunky Dory and much more as well as a lot of Radio 1 at the time. The house next door were friendly and I remember going with a couple of them to a windowless flat in Kensington to ‘score’ some consumables. I think the guy in the flat was the prototype for Presuming Ed, the dealer with the giant Afro in the film Withnail & I. I think I passed out after inhaling a few puffs.

I had saved enough money from the job at the timber yard to make the trip to Denmark with a local friend called Andrew, who like me was 18. He was half Danish and had some family members living there. We hitched to Dover, mostly in big trucks and got on a ferry to Ostend and arrived around midnight. We looked around in the dark for a park to pitch our tent and found what appeared to be one and scrambled over a low wall. In the morning we were woken up by a military guard and found ourselves in the grounds of a royal palace in Ostend and were swiftly escorted from the grounds with a flea in our ears. It took three whole days to reach Roskilde in Denmark travelling through Belgium, the Netherlands and West Germany. Many boring hours were spent at the side of the road, but there were moments of kindness when people helped us out. Sleeping on the side of the road with just a sleeping bag was not a great experience, although I remember one night in Holland we bunked off into the woods and set up the tent. It was a relief to get to our destination after three days and stay in a friends garden nearby in our little tent.
Denmark was full of Vikings, expensive beer and free festivals. (The first Roskilde festival where someone was handing out free beers and a lot of psychedelic blues. ) I didn’t know it at the time but this was my last year of eating meat and I indulged in a few of Copenhagen’s famous hot dogs at Tivoli Gardens with perennial wasps buzzing around. It was a surreal and carefree summer. To be continued…

18 with a plane ticket

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Like a sneaky fugitive I managed to skip away from the clutches of the encroaching arms of the security forces by boarding a flight in Salisbury to London, via Lisbon, on a TAP flight, in April 1973. I remember seeing the shiny boots of a Police Officer at the airport and then to my horror realized that they belonged to a former school colleague from just three months before, whose name I can still remember, a white farmer’s son called Ian Darby. I managed to sneak around him as I had an irrational fear that he would have stopped me boarding that plane. 

This was Rhodesia just as the guerrilla war for independence was hotting up and I knew I wanted to play no part in that by fighting for the continuation of white supremacy under the Ian Smith regime.  I was just 18 and had recently left school with three low grade ‘A’ levels in History, English and Geography. Just two weeks later an army detail visited my parents house in Salisbury, (now Harare) looking for me to be conscripted immediately. It was a narrow escape. My Mum told them “You’re too late, he’s gone.” They left disappointed. My compass was pulling me strongly towards the UK.

London was an exciting place to land, it was April and much cooler than I was expecting, I really didn’t have the right clothes for an English spring. Somewhere near Shepherd’s Bush I spent my first couple of weeks, staying with an aunt. My sister Jane was around too and I clearly remember her taking me to my first London gig, in a pub nearby with South African jazzman Dudu Pukwana supported by maverick sax player Lol Coxhill. I felt free for perhaps the first time as an adult.  The next day I was introduced to the film work of Jacques Tati and his automobile and his world of visual humour – Trafic. Life had begun in a new place and there was a new exciting world to discover. To be continued…

20 50 70 – a retrospective photo exhibition by Al Cane in late January 2025

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Some of you may be aware I’ve reached a major event in my life, which is to hold a solo photo exhibition for the first time in almost 30 years, as well as celebrating a significant birthday.

I’ve titled it 20 50 70. 

The 20 stands for the number of years my partner Helen and our daughter Anna and I have lived in this funny, old town called Faringdon in Oxfordshire.

The 50 stands for three things, approximately the number of photographs in this show, 50 years since I gave up eating meat, (inspired by G.B.Shaw’s vegetarian cookbook and a former housemate called Ken) and thirdly it is exactly 50 years since I emigrated to the USA, which was a major turning point in my life. 

The 70 is there because it sums up the total of the first two and also reflects the number of years I’ve been around. It’s a very small number in the scheme of things. 

It’s retrospective, it has to be. Where do I begin? With my sight of Victoria Falls as a ten year old armed with a Kodak Brownie camera and black and white film or later on as an adult after getting to grips with my first darkroom in the basement of the Polytechnic of Central London in Regent Street in the early 1970s. It took me a long time to get the hang of photography, nothing is ever completely finished, there’s always more to look at. My first black and white experiments were very haphazard, a lot of grainy prints ensued. But I did have a lot of encouragement to carry on. 

Travel photography, political journalism, musical performances, abstract, nature, reflections, moons and more. I’m not the kind of person who sits in a field for several hours waiting for the perfect moment. 

It was hard to narrow it down, even now I think why did I choose this over that? 

There are also four short episodes with photographs from my previous life – from the USA, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua and Estonia. 

I’d like to cover my costs first of all but over and above that I’d like to raise some funds for two causes that mean a lot to me. The first is a local charity called COGS (Community Owned Guidance Service), a project born out of the Pump House Project here in Faringdon who provide discreet support and guidance for young people in this area aged between 15 and 24. Mental health support is such a key issue. 

thepumphouseproject.org.uk/cogs/

The second cause is to help provide some support for Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). The situation facing innocent people in Gaza and the West Bank is desperate and with the intentional destruction of medical facilities just makes it appalling. Last year I rode over 200 miles for MAP and friends were kind enough to support me for over £1000. This is humanitarian aid. 

http://map.org.uk

Screenshot

The plan is to sell prints if there is interest, some are from original negatives (pre 2005) and others are digital images (post 2005). All the photos are numbered for ease of identifying. They can all be printed again to a specified size. Then there are already printed up greetings card and postcards too. 

Please leave a comment if you feel like it. Thank you. 

http://map.org.uk

Here is the link to the whole exhibition viewable until April 2025. https://artspaces.kunstmatrix.com/en/exhibition/13979913/20-50-70-take-2

Folly Under Wood

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It was in that strange pocket of time between Christmas and New Year and the small market town, which felt like it should be located near the sea, but wasn’t anywhere near it, was having its annual slumber. The ancient Mummers play had been, told its story and was gone already and it was that time when strangers in the street for a day or two gave out an extra modicum of greetings as they passed each other, as the festive decorations began to lose their meaning.

In the early hours the late bar was about to close for the few remaining stragglers, who had stumbled upon it in search of more drink, uncaring what they had spent, as they were protected by an alcoholic bubble from thinking too deeply. The tall man with the nautical beard made his way unevenly up the street towards his home, dancing to his own internal rhythms. His key knew which way to go.

The town began to draw silent deep into the night, when the only sounds were the occasional noise of a few cars in the distance and the screech of neighbourhood cats crossing paths.

In the dull grey morning the white star shone brightly from the top of the tower overlooking the sleepy town, guiding the ghostly milk float on its fanciful journey. The commuters rose at this early hour and one by one got into their cars or jumped on the bus and took their chances heading out on the busy A road…

(with apologies to Dylan – Thomas that is.)

To be continued.

Dinner on Golden Gate Bridge

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Suicide Club memories No. 4

One of the few regular Suicide Club events was the annual Potluck Dinner on Golden Gate Bridge held at the end of February each year, which began in 1977. I signed up to go on the second one in 1978 and have a vague memory of making a tub of potato salad and packing it along with a grape drink (or was it wine?) in a back pack and heading off on the bus towards The Presidio. We disembarked and met up with the 40 or 50 people who’d also decided to join in for the dinner. It was just getting dark and the city lights were beginning to twinkle in the twilight as we walked onto the bridge on the pedestrian path, not too close to the traffic, there was a barrier between us. It was a warmish and windless evening. People carried fold up tables, chairs, table cloths, plates and cutlery and we assembled together at the appointed place on the wide pedestrian path close to under the first tower we came too.

About 20 minutes into the meal, a police car turned up and two cops got out and asked what we were doing. Someone replied that obviously we were having a meal on the bridge. The cops looked at each other, scratched their heads and said that we weren’t breaking any laws as long as we were not obstructing anyone. They got back in their cars and drove off. It was a wonderful setting for a candlelit dinner, if the food was a bit random. Maybe the wine did come out later and we all had a few. There were spectacular views of the San Francisco skyline as well as the lights of the towns on the Marin County side. Sadly no camera on this occasion, what was I thinking?

Memories of San Francisco’s Suicide Club

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I landed in San Francisco in August 1976, with my then girlfriend Kris, at the end of a six week, 6000 mile road and camping trip in a beaten up silver blue mid 60s Chevy Nova. But that is another story, in this one I’m more interested in how I found myself in this city and immediately sensed that it was where I wanted to be – for now, and how I came to be involved in the Suicide Club over the next couple of years. The city was no longer the hippie enclave of years before, it was harder, and had more social issues, although strong remnants of that counter cultural time in the 60s still remained. I remember one long term resident called Kathy who said  “Living in the city was good but once in a while you’re going to step in the dog shit.” She was in fact the first person I remember telling me about the existence of this shadowy group called The Suicide Club. My interest was piqued. 

    Kris and I first lived in the Haight Ashbury, renting an apartment from a slightly dodgy landlord called Carlos. I found work eventually as a walking courier, carrying plans in tubes from one high rise office to another in the downtown district and then moved into temp office work. Outside this time I began to cultivate and explore the social world around me. I walked a lot, exploring  Golden Gate Park, the Mission and Castro districts, in fact all over the city.    

    Within a few months I had met some people in the Haight district who pointed me towards the Communiversity magazine. This was a free university, which offered classes in all kinds of esoteric subjects. It listed local and free classes in the neighbourhood. Several of these classes took place at The Circus of the Soul Bookshop run by a character called Gary Warne, who turned out to be one of the main instigators of the Suicide Club. So one thing led to another and I found myself in the spring of 1977 subscribing to the monthly Nooseletter, which listed all the events and activities that were on offer within the Suicide Club the following month. (The name was chosen deliberately to deter some people and invoke a sense of danger too.)

First there was a ‘so called’ initiation ceremony to induct newcomers to the club. It had no official membership or rules to speak of, except that on this night there were no drink or drugs involved. This event, which from memory occurred on the night of the Chinese New Year involved being blindfolded at the start and then having to follow and track down clues across the city, travelling by bus and on foot. From memory this ended up at the end of the evening in an elaborate gathering near The Palace of Fine Arts. It was entirely peaceful and enjoyable but with a surreal sense of humour surrounding the activity. I was in.

What follows are some of the activities I took part in. Sadly no photographs of mine exist.

It was the summer of 1977. A night was chosen to get into and explore Hamm’s Brewery. This brewery was a local landmark, which had fairly recently closed down. It was on Bryant Street in San Francisco, a tall building with huge metal cylindrical vats. I was among a group of Suicide Club members who broke in and crawled all over, up and down and inside the metal vats. We made some strange sounds effects by banging things and using our voices. The brewery site was later famously squatted and became a centre for musicians in the punk music scene.

Hitchhiking memories – to Denmark and back 1973

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The year was 1973, I was 18 and I had recently arrived in the UK from what was then Rhodesia, having narrowly escaped being called up for national service in that country to fight in an unwinnable war.  I had spent most of the summer working at a timber yard near Farnham, Surrey, where my sister Jane,  was at art school. It was a tough, macho world of work where I would witness much bullying  and would return home exhausted, with splinters in my hands having taken lengths of wood off a huge saw all day without ear or hand protection. The house where I was living was a friendly one made up of various members of the Nissen family, who were half  Danish.  The mother was called Jenny and the daughters were Diana and Sarah and the youngest was Andrew, 17, and just leaving school.  In a mad moment we all decided to go to Denmark for a sojourn at the end of the summer for the adventure to see Diana, who had recently had a baby son and had already moved to Roskilde.

    I teamed up with Andrew to go with. We decided it would be fun to hitchhike all the way to Denmark. (Andrew later on joined a religious order and became a monk.) Jane and Sarah went separately as we didn’t think four hitching together would work.  We set off early one morning in late August and caught lifts mostly with trucks across Kent through to Dover. This was the easy bit. A four hour ferry trip across the North Sea to Ostend followed where if memory serves me well it was well past midnight when we arrived and not much was open. We had a tent between us and we scaled a wall and decided to pitch the tent in what looked like a municipal park, it was hard to see as it was unlit. Morning came and on peering out the door of the tent we realised that we were in the grounds of a royal palace and there were royal guards in uniforms around. (These days we might have been arrested for trespass or worse.) We were quickly noticed and marched off the premises by the guards and were on our merry way towards The Netherlands and Germany.  But it wasn’t easy as we walked for what seemed like hours with a heavy backpack to get to the outskirts of Ostend without having much of a clue of where to go. More follows…

A dj’s horror night in Hammersmith

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Friends in a band in Oxford persuaded me to be their support dj at a gig at the Novotel Hammersmith in London right in the middle of Euro 96. My mistake was that I didn’t do my research of what kind of crowd it was. When I got there I found out it was a party and dinner for a convention of estate agents. The band played, they did well, but the already pissed up crowd was looking for something else. Those days I wouldn’t play just anything, I was quite particular and my speciality was soul, reggae and African. I brought along a couple of boxes of records and singles and only had record decks. Within minutes of starting I had several fairly inebriated women demanding songs, mostly Abba if I remember right. I happened to have one Abba single with me that night. That didn’t last long. I had about six singles which worked, but I couldn’t just repeat them. Then the blokes waded in and were demanding Oasis, again I failed to deliver. You can’t play what you haven’t got. It got worse and worse as the crowd became more and more inebriated. I felt a feeling of blind panic wash over me. I couldn’t escape, there was nowhere to go and I had about another 90 minutes to fill. England had beaten Spain that night so that was another factor. Again I failed to have the right music. I thought I was about to be hauled out of my space and beaten to a pulp. (Pulp would have been good.) The crowd of baying men and women were getting quite threatening and annoyed with me. The band had long since scarpered, I was completely on my own. Salvation came in the form of a guy who took pity on me and offered to help, he said he’d go home and pick up a portable CD player and some cds, which he did. The rest of the evening slowly improved, he was very helpful. To this day I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t turned up. Eventually this torturous night ended, I was a wreck and vowed to never let this happen again, always to check out in advance what was likely to work – or just bring everything. On the long drive home I was flagged down by a man whose car had broken down and I managed to tow him and his car several miles back to his house somewhere in south west London. What a night!

The sabotaged bike ride

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This was the most unexpected bike ride I’d ever taken. The time was August 1986 and the place was Harare, Zimbabwe. I was staying with newly made friends at their house in Hatfield and borrowed a bike every day to cycle to the massive Sheraton Hotel, where the Non Aligned Movement Summit was being held, to take photographs of the conference. The ride was about 25 minutes and for several minutes went alongside the railway line into the city. I had my camera with me and innocently thought it would make an attractive photograph with the railway tracks weaving their way through the rough scrubland. 
So there I was composing my photos when behind me I heard the screech of car tyres and a fast car came to a rapid stop close near me. Two Zimbabwean men in suits with dark glasses got out and approached me in a very aggressive manner. “What are you doing here? Who are you? They were plain clothes police officers. They had me up against a fence and were in no unsubtle way insinuating that I was up to no good and virtually accused me of being a South African spy who was doing some surveillance work on the railway with a view to sabotage it at a later date. 
I was starting to panic inside, having heard dark things about what happened to people inside the police stations, when I remembered that I had a piece of proof on me that proved who I was and why I was there. This was my press pass to the NAM summit which had my photo on it. I produced it and they kept me for at least half an hour while checking out my credentials. I passed and they finally were convinced I was who I said I was and not working for the enemy in the south. They let me go with a stern warning not to be so stupid. I continued my bike ride but was somewhat shaken up. Later on that very same day I found myself in a press conference with Mugabe and was the subject of a long and malignant stare from him. (This may have been co-incidental, he seemed to give everyone the hard stare.) Where are the photos now? The image alongside is a found one for illustrative purposes.

It all so nearly ended in Middletown

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Mr Schwarz was the name that came to me out of the proverbial blue yesterday. I can’t remember his first name, if I ever knew it, but what I do remember was that he was an elderly businessman from New York City and he was the owner of Lloyds the department store that I had recently been employed at in the warehouse. The year was the winter of 1975/6, there were a few feet of frozen snow and ice on the ground, the place was Middletown, Orange County, about an hour’s drive upstate from the City and about a twenty minute drive from where I was living. I had arrived in the States several months earlier, as a 20 year old fresh from London with my then girlfriend Kris, although we had gone through a registry office marriage previously so I could get that elusive green card. As a registered alien I was issued with a Social Security number, which I can still remember all these years later. Work was hard for me to find as I had quite long hair at the time falling onto my shoulders. I did a bit of casual house painting first, mostly outside on dangerously high ladders. The work dried up and I decided I had better get a regular job, so I got my hair cut, blagged a car and after some futile searching a warehouse job opened up for me at Lloyds, it was a huge all round department store, the forerunner of the superstores we know today. The job was simple, to take in deliveries through the back door, stack them on the shelving, and send down orders to the shop floor below via a rickety conveyor belt. The managers were fierce, if anyone stepped out of line they got a severe warning and on a second transgression they were out the door. It was a rather brutal introduction to the working practices at that time in the USA. As I said at the beginning the owner was Mr Schwartz, he would once in a while drop to inspect his business and the staff were somewhat in fear of his temper, which could flare up very easily. One day he was visiting and everything was made shipshape for his inspection, it seemed that we in the warehouse had passed satisfactorily and he made his way down to the shop floor below. There was then a call for several rolls of linoleum to be sent down. I was on my own and place the said rolls, at least six or seven feet long and very heavy, on the belt to go down. I watched them descend when I noticed Mr Schwartz making his way below, when one of the rolls slipped off the belt and tumbled down towards him. My blood froze in that moment as I watched open mouthed as the end of one roll fell just a few inches behind his head and missed him so narrowly I couldn’t believe it. He was known to be partially deaf and I’m guessing his eyesight wasn’t that good, he was totally oblivious of what had just happened and as I was the only witness I said nothing at the time, for no-one else noticed it fortunately. My mind was disturbed for days with the memories of that incident, I had come so close to causing some serious injury, or possibly death to the owner. I can’t imagine what would have happened if the roll had hit him – or to me either. I lived to fight another day, and so did he. I left the job a few months later and moved on eventually to California. But it taught me a huge lesson, which was to take safety seriously and not be so casual. It was a very lucky escape.