The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
THE STORY BEHIND...
It was the magazine that encapsulated the Swinging Sixties, says Iona McLaren. So why did it bomb?
1 n January 1965, American Vogue announced: “Youth, warm and gay as a kitten, yet self-sufficient as James Bond, is surprising countries east and west with a sense of assurance serene beyond all years... The year’s in its youth, the youth in its year. More dreamers. More doers. Here. Now. Youthquake 1965.”
The epicentre of this “youthquake” was London, which Vogue’s editor, Diana Vreeland, called “the most swinging city in the world at the moment”. And in London, the company that owned Tatler was about to launch a daring experiment: putting hundreds of thousands of pounds in the hands of the youth to launch a periodical of their own, London Life.
This weekly magazine, which first hit news-stands on Oct 9 1965, subsumed the stuffy Tatler and delivered, with stunningly modern design, a view of the capital as seen through the eyes of its new – and defiantly classless – royalty of rockstars, models and artists. The star power in its pages, reproduced in Simon Wells’s evocative new anthology, London Life: The Magazine of the Swinging Sixties, was formidable.
Jean Shrimpton, model du jour, did the fashion page, starting with shoes (her pick: Victorian “granny” lace-up boots in black reversed calf, eight guineas). Her boyfriend, Terence Stamp, gave advice to the boy about town.
Early issues carried an interview with David Hockney (who was made to get out of bed, then sat in pyjamas, coming up with titles for the pictures in his next exhibition); the first proper profile of the Krays; Cecil Beaton’s unveiling of his
Mick Jagger portrait; a trip to a nightclub with Brigitte Bardot; and Gerald Scarfe’s cartoon of the Beatles (George Harrison didn’t think much of his likeness, so annotated it “?”).
It was like one big party, where everyone was famous. Joan Baez and Marc Bolan could be found reviewing records. The house photographer shared a studio with Lord Snowdon. Tom Jones and a young David Bowie hung around the Holborn office. Even the letters page was filled with celebrities: Lulu, Peter Cook,
Alfred Hitchcock, Norman Wisdom and so on.
Apart from being packed with the faces that would come to define the decade, it was the cool kid’s guide to the city – in fact, the words “Swinging London” appeared here first.
Each issue, ritzily priced at half a crown for 56 pages, carried listings of things to do that week (Oct 11 1965: “the first instalment of the first pirate radio soap opera, Dr Paul, 11.15am, Radio 390”) and gossipy pieces such as “who’s dating who?” or “what’s new in Chelsea, man?” (girls wearing nothing but bodystockings and wigs) or “meet the head waiters at London’s most fashionable restaurants” (elevated by the fact that photographer Terry O’Neill had taken the mugshots). At the magazine’s launch party, held in the futuristic new Post Office Tower, youngsters including Jagger, David Bailey, Diana Rigg and Hockney mixed with old-world magnates such as Nubar Gulbenkian (who that night, we are told, managed to snog Twiggy).
Yet after just 15 months, London Life was axed, and Tatler resurrected. So what went wrong? The truth is that the executives soon realised that they weren’t as keen on a “youthquake” as they’d thought. They were aghast at the iconoclastic autonomy of the first editor, the cartoonist Mark Boxer, and his “swinging” colleagues. Before the first issue even reached the shops, the budget was cut from £1,200 an issue to £750, leaving the staff to realise their grand ambitions on a shoestring.
Diana Dare was the magazine’s photo editor when the photographer Terence Donovan (whom she would later marry) turned up for a shoot. Thanks to cuts, she realised, London Life couldn’t pay for the models. “So they rallied the girls in the office and made us all put on hideous rainwear and have our picture taken by this god who had appeared in our midst,” she said.
Within weeks, Boxer had been replaced as editor by the unsympathetic, tabloid-minded Ian Howard, nicknamed “God” for his peremptory sackings. The expensive hand-drawn dateline disappeared from the cover. Even so, it was unsustainable. By the time the 62nd and final issue came out, on the last day of 1966, the magazine had lost its backers some £400,000 (£6.3 million in today’s money).
The trouble with this visionary magazine, concluded David Hillman, its original designer, was that “nobody at the time thought it was any good”. It was trying to change the public mindset, but
“we were too far ahead of what the market would accept”.
London Life was supplanted by a rejuvenated Tatler, and by the Left-wing underground listings magazine Time Out, which was launched in 1968.
In his new anthology, Wells argues it was inevitable that London Life ended when it did. “With the hurricane of psychedelia blowing in from America, the creative focus had shifted its eye away from London,” he writes. “By Christmas 1966, ‘Swinging London’ was dead in the ground.”
Its beautiful corpse, however, has been trapped in aspic. The pages of London Life (which, until Wells’s book, had been very hard to get hold of) whisk the modern reader, more powerfully than any other mid-Sixties ephemera, back to that brief moment, of floorlength Biba nighties on the King’s Road, of pop artists in squats and of visible nipples on Carnaby Street – in short, and in London Life’s own words, to “the heyday of the Kinky and the Camp!”