Finding Jesus.
Nov. 7th, 2008 04:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhythmaningI found Jesus last night. I was looking through a book of photographs of London, compiled by Time Out and the Getty Hulton picture library that the daughter of the friends I was staying with in London had.
I saw the picture of Jesus there: at the Hyde Park free festival of 1971.
This link will take you to the photograph - since it is copyright of Hulton, I thought it would be a bit cheeky to post the picture itself.
Jesus was the name of this hippy - the focus of the photograph - who used to go to lots of gigs in London; I think he may have got in free. Everyone - everyone - called him Jesus. He was always at Sunday night gigs at the Roundhouse, dancing down at the front - idiot dancing.
He was kind of a mascot to the audience - a familiar fixture at every rock concert I went to in the early 1970s. I don't know what became of him after punk came along: perhaps he cut all his hair off and became a punk, or maybe he didn't like the music and stopped going to the concerts.
Co-incidentally, I spent yesterday in the bowels of the Roundhouse: not in the auditorium, but a meeting room below, a large circular brick space with corridors running of it like spokes of a wheel. Presumably it housed the machinery for turning the engines in the space above (once more a venue).
I was pleased to see, standing on a corner of the new cafe at the Roundhouse, one of Gormley's figures from Event Horizon; it was good to see it had found a new home.
I'll write about what I was doing at the Roundhouse some other time, when I have thought about it a bit more.
I saw the picture of Jesus there: at the Hyde Park free festival of 1971.
This link will take you to the photograph - since it is copyright of Hulton, I thought it would be a bit cheeky to post the picture itself.
Jesus was the name of this hippy - the focus of the photograph - who used to go to lots of gigs in London; I think he may have got in free. Everyone - everyone - called him Jesus. He was always at Sunday night gigs at the Roundhouse, dancing down at the front - idiot dancing.
He was kind of a mascot to the audience - a familiar fixture at every rock concert I went to in the early 1970s. I don't know what became of him after punk came along: perhaps he cut all his hair off and became a punk, or maybe he didn't like the music and stopped going to the concerts.
* * *
Co-incidentally, I spent yesterday in the bowels of the Roundhouse: not in the auditorium, but a meeting room below, a large circular brick space with corridors running of it like spokes of a wheel. Presumably it housed the machinery for turning the engines in the space above (once more a venue).
I was pleased to see, standing on a corner of the new cafe at the Roundhouse, one of Gormley's figures from Event Horizon; it was good to see it had found a new home.
I'll write about what I was doing at the Roundhouse some other time, when I have thought about it a bit more.