Anything But Dull: The Life and Art of Jeff Nuttall

By James Charnley

Anything But Dull: the Life and Art of Jeff Nuttall reveals the life lived and the art created by a visionary polymath whose generosity of spirit defined his character. From childhood traumas to revolutionary acts, through triumphs, defeats and resurrections Jeff Nuttall’s story is told here for the first time in all its richness and singularity. Based on over eighty interviews and meticulous archive research Anything But Dull shows just what made Jeff Nuttall such pivotal, provocative and important figure in twentieth century life and culture.

Performer, poet, artist, writer, musician, teacher, film actor, bon vivant and hell raiser. Throughout his life Jeff Nuttall was always getting into scrapes, provoking outrage, drinking, fighting, falling in and out of love. Those intense experiences became the inspiration for his art. Almost no form of creative expression was foreign to him and within these nothing was forbidden – except, of course, to be dull.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academica Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781680536751

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

All things coming under my senses quivered with a crazy potential.

Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture.

THE ONLY THING FORBIDDEN IS TO BE DULL. Jeff Nuttall’s admonition to his students could equally have been applied to himself. Nuttall was many things but he was never dull. Throughout his life he was always getting into scrapes, provoking outrage, drinking, fighting, falling in and out of love. Inevitably he pushed things too far - but not without reason. Those intense experiences became the inspiration for his polymorphous art forms. Almost no form of creative expression was foreign to him and within these nothing was forbidden – except to be dull of course.

Nuttall’s subversive acts had a serious, even exalted, purpose. They were inextricably bound up with his commitment to save the planet. The threat of thermonuclear annihilation drove him towards extremes of expression. The art he made was intended to hit like a smack in the face, to wake society up to the realities of being human. Nuttall’s art is not easy to take, or even understand. He remained an uncompromising modernist, never a crowd pleaser, believing passionately that the artist must follow his vision even if this lead to censure, even if it ended his career.

We are upstairs in a busy gastro pub off Fitzroy Square just before the plague arrived. I’m interviewing the artist Phil Shaw, hoping the music and chatter won’t drown out the recording, hoping to hear about his friend Jeff Nuttall. Phil is tall, sharply dressed, head crowned with a stylish fedora and tortoiseshell glasses. He has all the assurance that comes with success, or he is doing a pretty convincing impersonation. He is certainly a gifted mimic. With a resonant voice betraying only the faintest trace of his native Yorkshire vowels Shaw slips into Jeff Nuttall’s accent. He replicates Nuttall’s surprisingly posh voice, an educated accent at variance with his appearance. Nuttall could look like a jovial farmer on market day albeit one with a shrewd glint in his eyes, one that could snap to the imperious glance of a high court judge.

Nuttall was sharp - very observant of people and events. This comes through in his writing, whether it is commentary or poetry or autobiography, the writer cuts through to the reality of situation with unsparing, eviscerating detail, not least about himself. The words are remarkable in their abundance; their seeming profligacy freighted by a lexical mastery that allows him to convey his vision with all the panache of the raconteur he was:

Faces of battered jokes, Faces of patched burlap. Faces of tear stained gun-smoke. Mouths tooth crowded. Eyes of see-yer-comin’ Charlie, Smudger. Spud. Pedlar. Yorkie, Paddy and Titch. All in a row on the sandbags, before the transfer to the Dardanelles. Each face a badge of spirit more savagely triumphant than any peaceful joy.¹

Nuttall’s compassionate response to a photograph of young soldiers enroute to Gallipoli.

Yet while he could speak as one of the workers, his full name, Jeffrey Addison Nuttall, was a hyphen short of a double barrelled moniker. During his National Service he had refused an officer’s commission and would later move fluently between the classes, often being regarded as plebian simply going on his appearance. ‘A slob…overweight, unkempt and slovenly’ was how Marc Almond described his teacher. Nuttall cultivated the aspect of a bawdy music hall comedian, relishing every feature of the human body, particularly those that might offend. Yet for all his ribald entertaining Nuttall had a preternatural sensitivity that allowed him to pick up on the smallest nuances or respond emotionally to his environment, whether natural or artificial. This could come at a cost.

As the lunchtime rush recedes in Fitzrovia, Phil recalls what happened when he bumped into Jeff on the Piccadilly Line in 1984. Nuttall had recently left Liverpool Polytechnic. Shaw was lecturing at the Royal College of Art and things were going well for him. By comparison, his old teacher and mentor seemed broken and downcast. Phil relived the incident ruminatively over a glass of red. ‘I said to him ‘How you doing?’ and he started to cry. So I said, What’s up? and he said, I just got the boot from Liverpool. It meant a lot to him. He’d been kicked out and I never knew what the story really was, but he was crying…’

Nuttall cried easily. Like a child. He seemed to have retained the intensity of feeling that causes children to burst into inconsolable tears. The anguish is genuine even if the cause might seem trivial. When he told the performance artist Geraldine Pilgrim, ‘Artists never grow up. That is their strength,’ he was speaking about himself as much as making an insightful observation. A lot of artists, maybe the majority, produce their best work when they are young and experience the world most intensely. By 1984, Nuttall was 51 years of age and weeping liking a baby. What had made him break into sobs on a very public transport system?

Anything But Dull grew out of this single question. When I had known Jeff Nuttall in the early ‘70s he seemed invulnerable, bestriding the Fine Art Department at Leeds like a visiting celebrity. He was tight with William Burroughs, had transatlantic connections with the Beat poets in San Francisco and was riding high on the succes of Bomb Culture. He fitted right into the open ended creativity that characterised the Leeds milieu. Nuttall was later to describe the Fine Art course there as ‘a communal enquiry into individual anarchy’ - an enquiry which he was perceived as sanctioning.

Such a state was always going to be unstable and when the change came with proscriptive political certainties Nuttall’s eco-system collapsed and his pedagogic habitat was destroyed. In this new environment he was perceived as politically incorrect and pushed out into the cold. Where once he had roamed like a mighty dinosaur, rampaging through bohemia, now he was corralled within a rising orthodoxy that had no place for his anarchic individualism and Blakean visions.

The original title for this book was Precious Dinosaur, the tagline referring to Nuttall’s doomed powers and his valued companionship. He was always entertaining company while clinging to his original beliefs and hopes. This idealism made him endearing as indeed did his generosity of spirit testified to by the many people I met researching his story – in the end there were over one hundred – all valued Nuttall as a unique individual who enriched their lives. Even Barry Miles, renowned chronicler of countercultural luminaries, liked him personally and counted him a friend while fundamentally disagreeing with his analysis of the ‘60s revolution.

For Nuttall, creativity was an essential element of human happiness and fulfilment. To this end he made art in every medium he could lay his hands on. He famously said, I paint poems, sing sculptures, draw novels.² Nuttall was among the most revolutionary and avant-garde artists of his day, reeling through all the forms of self-expression going: painting, protest, poetry, performance, sculpture, music (jazz cornet), and acting, while provoking both affection and anger with his ongoing drink fuelled escapades. Then, there were the forty books he wrote: experimental novels, biographies, polemics, poetry, and memoirs. All of them contain a revealing autobiographical element. Even the most shameful incidents are acknowledged, beginning with his infant sexual abuse.

Nuttall’s childhood was spent in Orcop, a remote village community in Herefordshire where the locals viewed him and his schoolteacher parents with suspicion. They were middle-class incomers, and the child made the mistake of confessing his sexual adventures to three of the tribe. His curiosity had first been aroused on seeing a local girl pissing copiously from a low wall. More intimacies followed and, at the very early age of four years old, he was simulating sexual intercourse in various locations; the smells and textures of which stayed with him throughout his life. As did the trauma of the punishment he received when his transgressions were discovered. As a child Nuttall was physically and psychologically abused, an experience without which, he claimed, he would never have written a line of poetry.

His family and early experiences, some deeply traumatic, helped to shape him. Then there were his passions and influences but most importantly there was the person himself. Nuttall was gifted, charismatic, committed, and life embracing. Where others might draw back, Nuttall followed his inspiration and ideals. This was demonstrated through his deeds. The stories are many and I have tried to bring them together in a cohesive narrative; not all that easy given the prodigious energy he put into living and his voluminous and varied creative output.

Nuttall’s legacy is surprising. As a midwife to the birth of the counterculture, he was at the seminal point from which we can trace present cultural conventions. A once provisional and oppositional impetus took over to become the dominant culture, latterly with extensions and annexes firmly in place. The original freedoms and irreverence have gone and, what was once a cause, has become a commandment. Thus, we are living with the consequences of the triumph of the counterculture. Nuttall was one of the causes of this singularity, and this alone could make him worthy of interest. But there is more.

In his preface to Nuttall’s book Pig, published in 1969, William Burroughs repeated his (and Brion Gysin’s) often quoted assertion that writing was fifty years behind painting, and that Nuttall was one of the few writers whose ‘… structures are essentially musical as is his prose.’ He concluded with the perceptive endorsement that ‘Jeff Nuttall touches his words.’ The italicised verb identifies where Nuttall’s preoccupations lay. His writing is profoundly visceral. All the senses are involved, nothing is left untouched including places that which could cause repulsion or nausea. Nuttall believed every aspect of being human must be embraced. Nothing was to be denied or hidden. Such a position could get him into trouble and frequently did.

Politically, Nuttall was an anarchist. His politics were opposed to the restraints on personal freedom, proposing that there is an innate capacity in the individual for happiness and creativity, which is stifled within an oppressive bureaucracy. In his perception, it was organised systems of government that had brought the world to the brink of extinction via nuclear weapons. For Nuttall, the most important human qualities were antithetical to the cold and calculating decisions that were being enacted daily. His ideal was a compassionate society, where individuals could flourish and in particular, where creativity and imagination were celebrated. Nuttall’s utopian vision was one which he hoped would be possible to achieve, and towards which he initially devoted vast amounts of energy and a total commitment.

When the revolution he had worked for failed, in the fin de Sixties, a disenchanted Nuttall clung to his belief in ‘vision’. For him, vision was the conflation of authentic experience and imagination without which no great art was possible. The frustrated activist concentrated his attentions on poetry and performance. In his 1977 poetry manifesto, he declared, ‘The creative imagination of each individual is the sole continuing source of new forms, new ideas and new vocabulary by which language must be perpetually revitalised.’ This belief had been feeding into his teaching and seemed to encourage a lack of restraint and excess, for which he would be criticised. It became increasingly so as new orthodoxies took hold, demanding compliance or cancellation. Nuttall was cast out, a heretic, a dinosaur, a throwback to less enlightened times.

But this is a profound misunderstanding of the man and his art. The artist must follow his creative imagination, reflect his authentic experience and speak fearlessly of his beliefs. Nuttall could not cower before political correctness or toe the party line. And he was right. What art of any value has ever been produced by craven conformists? I can’t think of any, but can think of some fairly execrable documents, from Malleus Maleficarum to The Thoughts of Chairman Mao, designed to enforce the prevailing ideologies. Nuttall was on the side of the rebels here, cleaving to the Williams - Blake and Burroughs - both artists he was inspired by.

Nuttall was also inspired by Dada and saw, in this movement’s reaction to the horrors of WWI, a distinct parallel to the Cold War in his own time. The artists and poets of Dada blamed the same rational organisational system for leading European civilisation into a muddy trench full of stinking corpses on an annihilated landscape devoid of any element of beauty or compassion. Dada rejected the whole corrupted project of science and reason, advocating instead an art of irrational acts of crazed creativity that broke every convention of the civilised culture they had grown to despise. For Nuttall, the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation, brought about by scientific ingenuity, had an equivalence to WWI, and thus his adherence to Dadaist forms of expression. He would make an art that spoke the truth of the human condition and stand in opposition to the mainstream in politics and art.

In the late 1950s, Nuttall had joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and played cornet on the Aldermaston marches. He had hoped that such a show of mass protest might persuade governments to change their policy. Not a bit of it. CND proved to be ineffectual and, in 1962, Nuttall threw away his CND badge. He was beginning to see how art might be weaponised to change society. A letter by Peter Currell Brown in Peace News had proposed such a strategy and Nuttall became convinced that he would be the one to create a ground-breaking exhibition. By this time, he had seen Burroughs and Alexander Trocchi in Edinburgh and travelled to Salzburg where, by chance, he been brought up-to-speed with Beat culture activities in the USA. The resulting burst of activity from a frustrated artist, working as a secondary modern school art teacher and living in Barnet with a wife and four children to support, was extraordinary. Yet this was to be just the beginning of an even more intense and prolonged period of creative energy.

By the following year, 1963, Nuttall had turned everything around and was at the epicentre of what would become the Counterculture, and before it emerged was known as the Underground. This was where Nuttall worked tirelessly, inspiring, organising, and connecting other like-minded artists in Europe and the USA. In 1963 he hijacked his school’s duplicator and sent out the first of 17 ground-breaking issues of My Own Mag (MOM). The concrete poet Bob Cobbing, the organiser of Group H, was keen on the Mag and so was Burroughs. From almost complete obscurity Nuttall moved to the forefront of the literary avant-garde that was to bypass the mainstream and unite with an exploding youth and pop culture.

Producing a magazine was but a fraction of Nuttall’s activities. He had hooked up with Trocchi, John Latham, Bruce Lacey, Michael Horovitz and R. D. Laing, leading luminaries of the nascent Underground. Together, they plotted to wake up the sleepwalkers marching towards thermonuclear oblivion. Trocchi wanted an ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’ but his more immediate concern was finding a vein. Trocchi’s heroin habit was destroying his early promise and it was left to Nuttall to organise the insurrection. He worked tirelessly towards this end while holding down his job. When everything he achieved between 1963 and 1966 is taken into consideration, this is a deeply impressive achievement and, although methedrine may have helped, his drug of choice was beer. His prodigious intake of it did nothing to slow him down, and he was able to organise some of the first happenings and installation art in the UK.

These were no tame displays of cultural propriety. Quite the opposite. Nuttall’s happenings were staged within blood-soaked walls in underground rooms where his audience was assaulted with a sensory attack of repellent imagery, claustrophobic tunnels and nauseating smells. Along with his collaborators, he wanted to disrupt society’s superficial calm and reveal the true nature of human existence. The basement at Better Books became the site of some of the most extreme avant-garde events of the century. Nuttall’s 1965 sTigma installation attracted BBC coverage and was visited by Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, Paul McCartney and other happening people. A month after sTigma closed, Allen Ginsberg walked into the shop and offered to give a poetry reading. This helped to inaugurate the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall, a seminal event in the rise of the Underground in London. Nuttall was there with John Latham, their planned performance delayed and then aborted when Latham succumbed to paint suffocation.

The furious pace of Nuttall’s activities threatened both his mental stability and his marriage. In 1966, he had a breakdown, retreated to the Abbey Arts centre, where he formed The People Show; the original, best, and most enduring exponents of Performance Art in Britain. The early shows set new depths of audience participation with hurling of offal and insults to be endured. The performances were a succes de scandale and, along with his other countercultural activities, led to Nuttall being approached by a major, new publisher to write an insider account of the Underground. Articulate, cultured, bohemian and hip, Jeff Nuttall was the obvious choice to explain what on earth was happening to the squares. Bomb Culture, originally titled Square Roots, was his wide-ranging account of the development of the international counterculture. Interspersed with tragicomic vignettes describing his struggles to get the revolution underway, Bomb Culture was Nuttall’s long goodbye to the movement he had helped to create.

Nuttall retreated from London’s psychedelic scene, first to Norwich, where he wrote the book, then North to Bradford, then Leeds Colleges of Art, where his presence attracted both students and notoriety. Performance Art as a transgressive pursuit became part of the curriculum. There were arrests, court cases and newspaper headlines. Yet within a whirlwind of creativity and controversy, Nuttall was engaged in sober research, the results of which he was able to announce in a series of lectures. One of his students, the artist Dave Stephens, left a vivid account of the first of these he attended in 1972.

Stephens describes how the lecture theatre, filled with students smoking rollups and feigning a world-weary nonchalance, fell silent as Nuttall took the floor. Although appearing disheveled, overweight, and apparently ill at ease, Nuttall had important information to convey.

‘I have come here today to talk to you about a man whose discovery in recent years is astounding. His experiments into human behaviour and the way we communicate with each other are revolutionary. They open up a world of questions about the way that we create art and how we convey imagery through the production of art objects.’

The lights dim and a slide projection shows a face of indistinct features and gender. Nuttall explains that this is because the photographer is working clandestinely. To discuss this lecture with anyone outside the college would jeopardise the life of the person who had smuggled the images out of the Soviet state.

Now Nuttall has the attention of his audience, he develops his theme. It is about a man who had dedicated his life to advancing human potential. He gathered around him a clandestine group of like-minded people willing to put their very existence in danger in order to study the way the mind worked and to explore concepts of universal consciousness, eventually breaking down the divisions between human beings. The work had been done in complete secrecy because of what might ensue should a hostile government gain access to the findings. There would be no more state secrets, no more ways of disguising hostile thoughts, there would be a completely transparent system of telepathic communication.

Nuttall reveals to his rapt audience that he has obtained the very paper describing the telepathic techniques involved. Waving it in his hand he announces; ‘I propose to replicate this experiment now, with your assistance, in this lecture theatre. First you must all divide into pairs.’ Once this is accomplished Nuttall calmly continues; ‘You must both strip to the waist. One of you is to wear the blindfold provided. The other is to concentrate on visualising an object. The blindfolded person must now draw whatever comes into his mind. He must do this in marker pen on the chest you’re your partner.. The results are impressive. Stephens, for one, is convinced of the validity of this technique.

Nuttall regards the reactions his experiment has provoked with a quizzical stare.

‘Does anybody need any further evidence of the veracity of this man’s worth? This is a man whose sincerity can never be questioned; a man who has put his very life at risk to follow the truth.’

A pause for emphasis.

‘My final piece of evidence comes in the shape of a person. Unfortunately, it was not safe enough for our subject to travel, but we are lucky enough today to have in our presence his closest ally and confidant: his wife Olga!’

From the back of a hall there is a loud commotion. All heads turn as, banging and shouting, a small figure emerges backwards wrapped up in an oversize military overcoat. A voice, in what sounds like a cross between Russian and Cockney, furiously berates an unseen offender‘.…an’ you can keep zat focking donkey to youself. ‘E stinks.’

Nuttall holds his arms out in a gesture of embrace.

‘Olga! It is wonderful to see you. It is so kind of you to come and visit us. We are so proud that you would endanger your life in this way to bring us knowledge of your guru.’

Olga’s response is scornful. ‘Yessss.… that focking pig is too drrunky to move hiss fat arse an’ come ‘isself.’ Nuttall turns and explains conspiratorially to the bemused audience. ‘Olga’s grasp of English is a little strange. It was mainly learnt off sailors during the war.’

‘Vot is dat you fat piglet?! Vot are you sayink?!

As though needing to act decisively to keep the lecture on course, Nuttall enunciates a question that is also a command. Raising his patrician voice he enquires; ‘Olga. Are you going to dance for us? Olga feigns surprise. Perhaps. ‘Danz? You vishes me to danz? But of cors! Dis ist vy I am ‘ere… of cors.…to danz. I luv to danz. Olga vill danz for you!’

With this Olga throws off her military coat. Naked, wearing only a pair of oversized army boots she begins to dance. A crazy, uncoordinated flailing of limbs that cause the people nearest to her to recoil in alarm. Stephens is one of them. Then the realisation dawns on him. He has been hoaxed. Fooled into believing that the lecture was real, fooled into believing that the experiment was successful, and fooled into believing that there really was an underground organisation in Russia that was using telepathy.

Other students seemed to have reached the same conclusion. The room erupts in chaos, people scramble to leave as lights flash on and off, Nuttall is shouting now and Olga, the naked dancer, is swearing loudly in a broad cockney accent. Then the lights go out altogether, plunging the auditorium into darkness.

When the lights come back on, the performers have disappeared. Students look around sheepishly laughing, feigning nonchalance but in reality, shaken to the core. They had been completely hoaxed. But wasn’t that the point? Without belief, the performance could not have worked; it would have lost its power, would have failed as a work of art. For that was what the lecture was: a performance piece par excellence: outrageous, dangerous, and ultimately scintillating.

Yet, with this triumph Nuttall, was skirting forbidden territory. For now, it was OK for a naked woman to dance around for art, and even entertainment. Strippers were regularly hired by the student union and nudity was commonplace amongst performers and exhibitionists on campus. This was all going to change, and in a few short years, Nuttall would be attacked for his belief that the artist’s vision was inviolable, that he need only answer to his own muse. A new, politicised and intellectualised construction was being placed on the artist’s work. Previously unconsidered factors, such as the artist’s gender, the male gaze, and assumptions around the validation of art were being posited. Nuttall was cast as both sexist and, with his refusal to buy into the new ideological constructs, as reactionary. It was a small step from here to accusations of misogyny. While there is certainly a case for the former charges against him, Nuttall was never a misogynist. He pursued women ardently and throughout his life was in a relationship with at least one and very often two.

During the mid-Seventies darkest Leeds and deepest Bradford were alight with feminist activism much of it in response to the Yorkshire Ripper. More profoundly there was a repositioning of women in a society judged to be patriarchal, chauvinist and sexist. When Nuttall was battered, he had been perceived as all of these by his attackers, members of a radical theatre group that promoted gay rights and feminism under a Marxist umbrella. The General Will’s agit-prop theatre was antithetical to Nuttall’s individualist aesthetic and the attack was, in part, a punkish display of aggression aimed at toppling a representative of the old order. For his part, Nuttall was left traumatized at what appeared to him a vicious and unprovoked assault.

The move to Liverpool Polytechnic in 1981 promised a respite, but his tenure there turned out more disastrously than he could ever have imagined. He decamped to Portugal with his partner and new family, for a short-lived Shangri La that ended with him alone in London. But not for long. He met up with the woman who would become his final partner and wife and, with her, returned to his childhood rural roots in Abergavenny. Here he soon attracted a following as continued to paint, write, play jazz, and booze, all while developing a new career as a film and television actor.

Nuttall’s first film role was in Scandal¹ with John Hurt and Joanne Whalley -Kilmer who played Christine Keeler. He was a shoo in for Friar Tuck in John Irving’s Robin Hood and was callously despatched in the 1999 James Bond film, The World is Not Enough to prove what a super villain Arkov (Robert Carlyle) really was. On television he played cameo roles in some of the most popular shows of the nineties including Minder, Men Behaving Badly, All Creatures Great and Small, and Inspector Morse. Then there were the legendary Tango ads-very edgy, several were banned. Nuttall’s Apple Tango ad featured cross dressing, bondage and phone porn. You know when you’ve been Tangoed. In all, Nuttall made 63 appearances in film and television roles and worked up until his death in 2004, finally acting in Fungus the Bogeyman, whose penchant for dirt and filth was not so far from Nuttall’s own aesthetic.

Such an aesthetic might never have found expression had not the Sixties provided opportunities for radical departures. The way forward was seen as ever greater personal and sexual freedom, with permission to take drugs, love people of the same sex, and to oppose whatever the ‘squares’ conformed to. Squares followed an undeviating course, producing a grid of conformity, empty of exuberance and creativity. Such sterility stood for everything that Nuttall’s aesthetic opposed. Instead, he embraced what it is to be human, and that included flesh and blood, spittle, semen and sweat, the smells, tastes and touch of corporeal existence.

While this might seem like a polymorphous perversity, such a view was driven by a profound philosophy not so far from that most difficult of Christian injunctions to ‘Love your enemies.’ The enemies that Nuttall had in mind were internal:

…You have to overcome the difficulty of loving your state, your condition. Anybody can look at a sunset and say goo goo goo, how nice or cuddle a baby fall in love with a pretty girl or pretty boy. That’s the easy bit. The difficult bit is somehow loving a state which includes the obscene and the vicious and the dreadful and the painful and loving that. Really loving it, not tolerating it or blessing it or forgiving it or putting up with it or grinning and bearing it, but really loving it as being an integral and unavoidable part of the kind of creature you are and the state of existence you inhabit.³

William Blake had a similar view, For Everything that lives is holy, life delights in life;/Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.⁴ Nuttall’s eventful life had many moments of sweet delight as the people I interviewed during the writing of his biography confirmed. Nearly all agreed he was a generous, charismatic personality, invariably entertaining to be with, who continued to be an outrageous and exuberant enfant terrible until the end. This permanent adolescence frequently got him into trouble, more so as the world changed around him, and he saw all that he believed in being betrayed or condemned. Such negative experiences were mitigated by life-affirming events and passionate relationships. Nuttall could have lived longer if he had partied less, but he paid no heed to restraint in both his life and art; the two were inextricably entwined. What follows is the story of that dark, divine coupling.

James Charnley February 2022.

Geoff Teasdale, Phil Shaw and Jeff Nuttall, Soho 1979.

Photo by Harry Diamond. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

ENDNOTES

¹Jeff Nuttall,The Pleasures of Necessity,Arrowspire, Colne, 1998. P. 84.

²Jeff Nuttall, ‘The People’,International Times9 (London: Feb. 27 – March 12, 1967), 10.

³Jeff Nuttall interviewed by John May at the Chelsea Arts Club December 1984. Transcribed inJeff Nuttall’s Wake on Paper.P. 13.

⁴William Blake,America: A Prophecy,First published 1793.

¹ That is, if we don’t count the appearance of his bottom in Yoko Ono’s 1966 Film No. 4 made to promote world peace.

CHAPTER 1

A SNAKE IN THE GRASS

"I was a child in Orcop – ten miles from Hereford, eight miles from Ross-on-Wye, tiny volcanic crater twenty miles square - encircling ridgeway, overgrown orchards, tunnelling arsehole lanes, ferny fields and the wind on the ridge, the wild lost winging wind, a prehistoric voice. I swam in a sense dream of weather and growth, rain on my face, dew soaking my stockings over the shoes, the sun like a friendly cat, cowshit and mud streaking my knees, the bramble gashes and the tree bark scars.…"

Jeff Nuttall, Man Not Man ¹

JEFFREY ADDISON NUTTALL WAS BORN on the 8th of July 1933 in the Lancashire town of Clitheroe. With a medieval castle commanding a view over the wealthy Ribble Valley, Clitheroe has a pedigree going back much further than the surrounding arriviste towns of the Industrial Revolution. These grew rapidly during the nineteenth century, spreading out along railways and roads, throwing up mills and tall chimneys, drawing in workers and their families whose children would need schooling. Fortunately, for those in the expanding town of Whitworth, south of Clitheroe and north of Rochdale, Richard Nuttall was on hand to teach them.

According to his great-grandson Jeff Nuttall, Richard was a ‘Small town shopkeeper and fanatical Liberal voter, self-appointed schoolmaster who proclaimed a holiday for his dozen ragged apprentices when one wrote that Jesus Christ was born in Ackrington. [sic] Built Hall Fold Chapel.’² The Whitworth chapel is still there. Dating from 1830, the substantial, granite chapel is testimony to the enterprise, hard work and religious conviction of the Victorians of which the early Nuttalls were exemplary players. Jeff Nuttall came from a family of school teachers, he was one himself, as were his forefathers for several generations.

Richard passed on the headmastership of Hall Fold school to his son Walter. Born in 1868, Walter grew up with Whitworth as the town straggled further along the Manchester road, farm cottages and ancient footpaths subsumed within rows of terraces, railways, and cobbled streets. The surrounding moorlands held the high ground uncontested, as they had always done. In 1884, Walter married Susanna Hoyle and between then they had four sons, John, Richard, Ronald and Kenneth, who continued the family tradition. In 1931 Kenneth married Hilda Mary Addison, who lived in Clitheroe and was herself a school teacher, and soon to be mother of Jeff Nuttall.

Of his mother Jeff writes; ‘A girl from a country town near the Dales where the magic doesn’t work that draws strong a simple song in perfect pitch from smoke and granite terraces.’³ Nuttall favours the working-class community of Whitworth over the genteel airs of Clitheroe that is actually some distance from the Yorkshire Dales. Hilda Addison taught in Rimington, a village five miles outside of Clitheroe. This was where she and Ken married.⁴ Although he is effusive about his father, Jeff is much less forthcoming about his mother whom he characterises as; ‘A tiny delicate woman with emotions as extravagant as a hurricane, who came from a family in Clitheroe whose Methodism was even more severe than that of the chapel at Hall Fold.’⁵ While Nuttall may have written little about his mother, her influence on him was profound.

In his 1975 book, Man Not Man, he writes unashamedly of the pleasure he takes from flatulence, and not just his own.¹ From his earliest years Nuttall had none of the usual revulsions against bodily odours and secretions and was later to affirm them as a part of being human. Yet there was a tension here, a contradiction, that he saw as originating from his mother. He describes how the pleasure he takes from lying with a lover and enjoying ‘the muted horn of her fart,’ is compromised;

…..when I smell the smudged sunset of her stench, the whole experience is sharpened beyond ecstasy to panic by the fear it irritates in me of shit, of not getting to the pot in time. It irritates in me my mother’s untold terror of shit, her ecstatic shudders sometimes, cleaning me, the fastidious horror with which she carried out the cleaning……. Uncontrolled bowels, the splathering thunder from your own channels, is your first knowledge of chaos. In that my mother taught me to control it, she also taught me to fear it.⁶

Well, nobody wants to poo their pants. Yet Nuttall extrapolates from his mother’s reactions the foundations of a lifelong conflict between order and chaos, a line that he walked throughout his life; ‘She set in motion the battle between nature and rationale, and set in motion with a force of panic and wonderstruck terror that has always clothed my battling, my living, the patterns of my projects with a beautiful song.’

The first notes of that beautiful song were sounded in Orcop, the tiny and remote Herefordshire village that the Nuttalls moved to from Clitheroe shortly after their son was born. Orcop is eleven miles equidistant from Ross on Wye, Monmouth and Hereford, ‘secluded from the rest of the world by high hills surrounding it on all sides.’⁷ This eighteenth century description still applies now and even more so when the Nuttalls arrived there in late in 1933. Ken Nuttall had successfully applied for the post of headmaster of Orcop village school. His son Jeffrey was to spend the first eight years of his life in the bucolic countryside on the border between England and Wales, an area since designated as one of great scenic beauty and as such protected from modern developments.⁸

This was certainly the case when I visited Orcop on a hot August afternoon, threading my way through narrow, hedge-crowded lanes fronting cropped fields sweeping up to rounded horizons; an arcadian landscape, gilded by the sun. I could at first find no more than a road sign, no sign of Orcop though, and I drove on and turned into a private road that bought me to a lawn on which a man and woman were sitting at a table having tea. I thought I better explain myself. ‘I’m researching a book on Jeff Nuttall whose father taught at the village school in Orcop.’ ‘This is it,’ said the affable man who introduced himself as Ravi and gave me a tour around the sturdy Victorian school house where he now lived. We walked past a heavily buttressed gable end that led to the front of the building, where a bell hung under high eaves to summon the children to lessons. (See illustration) The village church and graveyard faced the school and behind a low row of cottages. Orcop seemed less than a village, a hamlet maybe, with scattered dwellings thrown out from the centre occupied by the church and school where Ken Nuttall taught the children who came in from the surrounding farms. I met one of them, Guy Thomas, an ancient, white haired old man now; ‘He was strict. He used the cane,’ he recalled but had no more to say on those far off days before the Second World War.

During the 1930s, and up to the war, life in Orcop continued as it always had done. Political and economic crises, the rise of extremist ideologies and authoritarian regimes did not intrude on the peaceful vale. Nor did they register with the young Jeff Nuttall and his even younger brother Anthony David, who was born in 1937 and would go on to be the distinguished literary critic and academic, A. D. Nuttall. For both children, the formative impressions were of a pastoral landscape where people worked in harmony with each other and the seasons. The possibility of this as a model for society was something that Jeff Nuttall clung to throughout his life.

Those first few years passed slowly and penetrated deeply. Children are acutely receptive to their experiences, with so many events happening for the first time as the days stretch out to accommodate the intensity of their impressions. The best description of the bucolic world where Jeff and Tony Nuttall grew up comes from his cousin Donald Stott Nuttall who wrote:

My elder sister, Betty, and myself spent two glorious weeks at Orcop just before the outbreak of war. It was an eye-opening adventure to go from all mod-cons to Orcop which was truly primitive. Water was pumped from a well, lighting and heating was all done with paraffin fuel. A small orchard provided plums and apples in abundance. An ancient bull nosed Morris Oxford, with a dickey seat, provided the only means of transport. Over the wall of the garden was an ancient church which was open to all to enter. We would amuse ourselves by playing the old harmonium. I don’t recall seeing any other buildings in the vicinity, so for Jeff and his younger brother, it might have been a very lonely childhood if they hadn’t had interesting hobbies and encouragement to let their imaginations guide them.⁹

While the grown man could look back on his childhood in Orcop as an ‘unbroken euphoria’ there were also incidents that were to scar Nuttall’s mind and stay with him long after. He was later to write about his innocent sexual misdemeanours and the vicious reprisals that followed without self-pity and with remarkable candour. In his contribution to B. S. Johnson’s 1975 anthology You Always Remember the First Time, Nuttall sets the scene for the disaster that was to follow:

My parents both came from the Lancashire Nonconformist middle class. Hard working, imaginative, literate, schooled in music and the theatre, teetotal and forthright, they addressed themselves briskly to this inbred foxy eyed fraternity of ragged hill farmers with heads full of cider, brooding red faces and shy elliptical speech perpetually thickened with contempt. The farmers spoke to my parents secretively, like people who knew something long forgotten by the world outside the valley. And my parents spoke to them with the bald open, mill town honesty that despises ambiguity scrubbing it away like dirt on a doorstep.¹⁰

The Nuttalls were interlopers, incomers whose survival rested on their ability to gain the respect and obedience from their charges. Not an easy task, and being able to reach for the cane must have given Kenneth Nuttall the consolation of wielding an ultimate sanction. It was his son who experienced the dark resentment of the valley tribes. Jeff would later speak of being bullied and abused.¹¹ He would write graphically of his ordeals in Man Not Man¹² where he describes the consequences of his precocious sexual adventures with a local girl. Nuttall was only four years old.

Jennifer Evans lived on a nearby farm; she was older than Jeff and wore muddy wellingtons below a pleated gymslip. Her hair was cut in a fringe and held at the back by a knotted ribbon. Jeff first glimpsed her regulation navy blue knickers when, crouched on top of a low wall, she pulled them down to piss copiously. The splashing flood shocked the boy who was also ‘alarmed by her lack of a prick.’ When he tells Jennifer about this, she demands that he show her what he means. On sight of his shrimp-like member she proffers him a small, bright blue, Milk of Magnesia bottle to piss into. According to a much older Jeff Nuttall, blue glass consequently achieved a fetishistic power for him and he notes perceptively, that fetishes are the nostalgic evocation of something lost and therefore intrinsically sad.¹³

Another and more characteristic fetish arose from the outdoor shit house they shared together, sitting side by side on two holes in a plank over a cess pit. ‘The dense farmyard fumes rising through these holes, so similar to the smell of Jennifer’s navy-blue knickers, formed another fetishistic nuance to my make up.’ Such candour allows us to glimpse the origin of Nuttall’s subsequent engagement with bodily functions, the smells, secretions and sweaty realities of the flesh.

It is Jennifer who takes their intimacies up to the next level: ‘Get your thing out and put it against mine,’ she urges in the first of the many times that the children interpret what little they know of the sexual act. Eventually Jeff has an erection although there is no penetration. The main drive is curiosity and a shared excitement hiding from the grownups in woods and barns. Unfortunately, Jeff confides in two older boys that he has been ‘fucking’ Jennifer Evans. They vent their hatred of his moralistic parents, threatening him with castration, wielding a rusty pair of shears;

They told me that the full power of the law and the knacker’s yard hung over me, that the copper had been round on his bike that very afternoon, Sometime later they promised not to disclose my whereabouts to the police provided I sucked their cocks. They took me into the church where they would stretch me on an old carved chest and play with my prick giggling and chortling. The smell of clean, cold stone in old churches is another odour these days with a special erotic power for me.¹⁴

The more immediate effect was that the four year old Nuttall lived in terror of arrest and castration until the age of ten. In repetitive, Man Not Man, he describes the full horror of the abuse where ‘the sour splendour of the boys and the drunken man as they murdered their sensitivity by taking my penis in their hands like a squealing baby rabbit and slowly, deliberately, wringing its neck.’¹⁴

Nuttall’s hatred of the repression, punishment and guilt associated with the sexual act can perhaps be dated from this incident. There was also a later one, which is alluded to his poem Return Trip, inspired by revisiting Orcop as a grown man. The full story is that he and the housemaid shared a room in the schoolhouse in Orcop. It was here, in the nursery, where ‘She often called me into her bed and thrust my birdboned child-hand to the wrist, past hair of her shaped nest, deep into her warm wet vault of writhing vipers.’¹⁵ The snake metaphor has a meaning linked to the even more darkly transgressive consequence of this event. Learning nothing from his previous experiences Jeff unwisely confides his sexual ministrations to Gwyn, the youngest of two brothers in his school. The older one, Rhys, uses this information to blackmail the maid, Betty Morris, and while the young Jeff is sent to act as lookout. ‘Gwyn and Rhys pinned her glistening limbs to the turf, as Rhys clawed the cheap satin drawers from her pelt with one hand and scooped his singing fish from the pit of his corduroy breeches with the other’¹⁶

This shameful act seems to have had a deep psychological effect on the child which manifested in a phobia for snakes, poisonous vipers in particular. The place where the rape occurs reminds the child of where he first saw an adder, basking in the sun, a nest of dry grass; ‘To come across a snake in a country walk is like meeting a murderer at a party.’¹⁷ Nuttall describes his extreme reaction: ‘My entrails writhed, my strangled penis stirred, my throat first choked and then flew open like a woman’s for the scream to fly out, echoing futilely among the dusky cries of pigeons in the woods. Had I been adult tear ducts, testicles and bowels would have spilled themselves copiously into the afternoon sunlight.’¹⁸

The image of the snake carries an intense charge for the child. Snakes cannot be controlled, they move and operate beyond human norms, they are a symbol of chaos and one which the young Jeff Nuttall conflates with sexual transgression for which he had been cruelly punished. There is an exquisite sensitivity operating here, one which can manifest as poetry but can also lead to madness and, in this case, a phobia. In his description of the snake, there is a horrified fascination. The child is transfixed and then overwhelmed as what he is seeing becomes too much to bear. The snake has slithered into his mind where it writhes around becoming the symbol of his deepest sexual guilt and suffering.

In another childhood memory, Nuttall, aged seven, is lying on his back in the vegetable garden eating a cabbage leaf. He has been chewing for some time when he sees that what he took for inanimate jewels on the leaf are crawling gold and black caterpillars. He jumps up and flees, screaming without end, throwing himself down in the orchard grass where, still screaming describes ‘my unfledged threatened prick even then tingling first agony of thanks.’¹⁹

Make of that what you will. The panic and fear subsiding registers in the return of his penis to its normal size. There is in Nuttall’s referencing of sexuality a recognition that it may be taken as an emanation of nature, not nature as a restful backdrop to human activity, but nature as a violent and fundamental force. Might this be the reason why he insists on the raw, physicality of the sexual act? There is no veil drawn over the base details the smells, the oozings, the blood and guts of the seminal point of creation. In his immersively sensual descriptions of sex, Nuttall involves all of the senses. Most writers concentrate on the visual, but he involves touch, sounds, tastes and smells. What other writer brings so much to bear on evoking the primal physicality of the act? With Nuttall, all the senses are engaged, and these were at their most acute and formative during his childhood.

Return Trip

When Jeff Nuttall revisited Orcop thirty years later his response, as recorded in his poem Return Trip, was ambivalent. There is none of the joyful recall that Dylan Thomas has of his own rural childhood in Wales.²⁰ Return Trip begins with the word ‘Golden’ as do each of the first three verses. Golden with its associations age, opulence and warmth, the colour of nostalgia and sunsets. Yet immediately this comforting image is dispelled. The landscape of his youth has been changed and not for the better. The huge oak whose roots he could sit on has been levelled, the land, once cultivated is being reclaimed by nature, ‘rank grass and river clay.’ Wilderness and decay. What has become of his childhood and the features he knew? Are they become ghosts that haunt this place? Like himself? Drunk and lost in the world? Is this how he is seen by the man who now sells wrecked cars on the place where he was rocked in his pram?

‘Ghost, this fat drunk falling up the lane with whisky in his fist

(can’t leave it in the car)

A wraith?’

There is no blissful evocation of the past here, just a sad, inebriated confusion. The poet begins to weep and sings, not for joy, but to hide his grief from the ‘car man’s kids / Come to laugh at the tears of a fat apparition.’ His own childhood is now no more than a wraithlike memory that clings around the old house he grew up in. ‘Brown sandstone, buttressed and gabled – the same place clearly.’ The same place clearly that I saw on my more recent visit. The two wide stone buttresses against the gable wall are still there but inside, refurbished rooms have erased the past. Yet for the returning poet these rooms still contain the ghosts from a distant childhood. Fragments of memory rise up.

The kitchen evokes Chamberlain’s sombre declaration of war with Germany in 1939, the drawing room, of Bing Crosby’s jaunty, crooning song, ‘Remember Me’, and then upstairs the room where the housemaid guided his hand under the bedsheets to her crotch. Return Trip concludes with Nuttall’s characteristic sexual imagery as memory and desire provoke the questions: ‘Where were we then and who are we now?’ His answer is a question: ‘Does it ever matter?’ The house does not care, neither does nature, they persist: ‘Tender and indifferent?’ The poem finishes with a question mark. Nothing has been resolved. Yet there has been an intensity of experience and that may be the point. That was why Jeff drank and other poets have done the same. Jeff Nuttall’s lifelong devotion to alcohol was due in part to its ability to unlock feeling while providing solace. Such a combination can become addictive.

War and Resistance

Beyond the cocoon of Orcop a world war was looming. ‘My father’s eyes were full of Chamberlain and Mussolini,’ Nuttall would later record. Following Hitler’s invasion of Poland, war was declared in September 1939. Chamberlain resigned in May 1940 and Churchill became the wartime leader. The British withdrawal from Dunkirk left most of Europe in Nazi hands. Hitler’s early successes made him appear invincible and the fear of invasion was very real. Should this happen, there were plans in place to continue fighting a war of resistance against Nazi occupation. Ken Nuttall was part of this secretive, desperate initiative.

I discovered this compelling fact from John Hodgson, a childhood friend of Jeff Nuttall. Nuttall himself makes no mention of his father’s role in the underground resistance but there is good evidence that he was involved. John Hodgson, is an MD and fellow of Oxford University, an alma mater he shares with Anthony Nuttall, Jeff’s brother, who studied Classics at Merton College around the same time. In an interview recorded by his son Jonathon in 2013, John Hodgson relaxes in his garden nattily attired with red braces and open necked shirt, confident and articulate.²¹ As a doctor, his bedside manner would be deeply reassuring. This is perhaps why I give more credence to his recollections, which in some respects contradict the accepted narrative.

What we know for certain is that Kenneth Nuttall was head teacher at Orcop school from January 1934 to November 1941. This is on record.²² John Hodgson however recalls the Nuttalls moving around a lot: ‘They lived in various places in Herefordshire and they always seemed to live in tiny villages wherever they were. Finally, they ended up during the war living in a great big country house.’ Dineter Wood House was situated between Pontrilas and Ewyas Harold, two little villages a few miles from Orcop. The grand house was where Jeff Nuttall and his family lived after 1941. Hodgson describes the house as being, for him, ‘like Brideshead with vast gardens and cypress trees and cedars.’