I must have been about 16 when this was taken, which makes it…1969? Who by, I wonder? It’s my room in Wilford Lane, Nottingham, before we moved to Surrey a year or so later.
I came across this in a box of random photo-wallets when I was moving my stuff from a garage to this flat, and looking through them today I’d put it aside to show my son when he drops by. Dad, young. It’s hard to imagine.
The wood-effect wall is wallpaper. The pinboard was made of cork tiles stuck to the wall. I’m wearing jeans and cufflinks; I must have briefly taken off my school tie.
I realise that almost all of these images were taken from Sunday papers’ colour supplements.
Tiny Tim; Che Guevara; John’n’Yoko; Robert Redford posing as The Sundance Kid; John Mills in a still from Oh What A Lovely War; an unknown dame with luxuriant red hair. Is that a photo of Oscar Wilde that they used in the Eleanor Rigby still from Yellow Submarine (which I never saw on a cinema screen)?
For my art college interviews I spent a furious weekend making a board-book of A Day In The Life off of Sgt. Pepper’s and used the John Mills photo for the page ‘…the English Army had just won the war’. This means I must have gathered my cut-outs to take with me when the family moved.
Three Don McCullen photos – one of an African war atrocity and pinned to it, type snipped from another magazine: ‘Black is Beautiful’. Did he also take the colour shot of the Buddhist monks at the roadside?
Under the atrocity exhibit I see the corner of a Michael Heath cartoon: it was a row of uniformly grim-faced Russian generals on the balcony over Red Square, with bombers in a fly-past overhead and the might of the Soviet Defence Capacity no doubt rolling past below. ‘Stop laughing, you’ll start me off in a minute!’
I had to enlarge this one to see what it was over my shoulder, two figures silhouetted against a window: two Glasgow boys display a machete and a sword used in local territorial disputes.
Young Duke Ellington. Really didn’t have a clue about ‘cool’ but the photo is it.
A full-page shot of a pastrami on rye – bread for us was white and sliced, brown bread was a minority taste; the wholemeal revolution was yet to come. This was exotic fare. Pinning it up made it pop art.
Her Majesty, mounted, by Gerald Scarfe.
Head close-up of a slaughtered horse in a French abbattoir. Above it, a speed-launch accelerates away with its pennant flying suspiciously flat-on, so probably from a Navy recruitment ad.
Two pictures of deer; Highland stags on a postcard from Scotland and a backlit African model with big cute Martian ears.
John Heartfield anti-Nazi photomontage; photo of Nazi officer with two glamorous molls, possibly a daring fashion-shoot.
A Victorian Greek romantic painting of the women watching the fleet departing for Troy.
My own graffiti: Don’t Revolve – Evolve. Clearly I was already seeing myself as a future shaper of the counterculture. Start on button-badges; work your way up to profound theoretical paradigm-shifts reified in the social fabric.
The orange patterned poster rolled up at the bottom right was a giant Madame Tussaud’s poster.
I’d not thought about my shifting photo gallery for these years and yet all these images are instantly familiar. This was what we did before we had the internet.
Thanks for posting that piece. You’ve taken me on a long, long trip down Memory Lane (No Through Road, Beware Heavy Lorries). What was on my pinboard at sixteen? It was a row of four or five polystyrene ceiling tiles, stuck over the worn chintz wallpaper of the bedroom I’d inherited from my late grandmother. The tiles were in a row on the wall, just below my three Mucha posters. (A year later, I had a proper board made of burnt cork tiles, on the back of the bedroom door. The charcoal smell still lingers in my mind.)
Among the overblown wallpaper roses of sixteen, I can see, very clearly:
A flyer for an Incredible String Band concert at the Festival Hall (I didn’t go to it, I just liked the flyer). Orange and black, with a checquerboard patterns and a woman’s head in the middle.
Several pictures cut from “Man, Myth and Magic”, a partwork. (I bought quite a few issues of before I realised how much it would cost to complete even one volume, and stopped.) The selection included Blake’s ‘Ancient of Days’, a detail from a Breugel picture of children playing games, and a zodiac figure.
An advert from (I think) British Steel, showing a steel-cased lipstick and a pink-topped nappy pin. The caption was: A marriage has been arranged’. There was also a Wrangler’s advert showing a naked couple sitting back to back.
A postcard of ‘April Love’ by Arthur Hughes, from the Tate.
A hand-written collection of button-badge philophies on a sheet of lines paper, etitled: ‘Apt Aphorisms and Laws of Life’. Most of them were not original with me. Most of them were not original, come to that.
A fluorescent-yellow notice with a pointing hand and ‘Way Out’, bought from Carnaby Street.
There were probably a lot of other things on the board, but those stick in my mind.
All gone. A few years later the smart dark-brown (and smelly) corkboard in the redecorated room had nothing on it but SF poster art from ‘Omni’ magazine, with the Bruce Pennington’s cover from Brian Aldiss’s ‘Space, Time and Nathaniel’ in pride of place, along with a Dave Hardy alien landscape. Nice art, neatly arranged, but it had lost the innocent ‘me-ness’ of the earlier muddle.