Bohemian Rhapsody – The Sixties
Junior School and part of the separate adjacent senior school. Some 144 people were killed, 116 of whom were children, mostly between the ages of 7 and 10. Gee continues: “When that happened I was really really angry and sad. Pen was joking about it cos it was his only way of dealing with it. I understand that now. But then as a very young naïve person, I thought it was callous. I do remember that very very vividly . . . in the Robin Hood pub . . . the whole disaster of Aberfan, and the first hint of corruption. They knew that was going to happen, and they did nothing.That was a political awakening for me.That and CND.” Another art college friend of the time, Dave King, would later go on to become a resident of Dial House and design the Crass symbol. He describes the college:“The art school occupied one wing of the college, with the rest of the buildings being taken up by people learning trades like welding and painting.The school, for better or worse, was very classical in its approach. For the first year, you just did hours and hours of life drawing. Just sitting there with a pencil, or charcoal, just drawing – eventually you had the idea that if you could see something as it really was, then you could draw it: that it wasn’t a big mystery. . .You might have some aptitude, but it was a technique, and it did have to do with perception.You could be taught to perceive, to see with a certain amount of clarity.” Dave King throws some light on the textures of the times, art college in 1964, when he had what he describes as “a psychedelic experience without psychedelics. After all this intense drawing, I was in the cafeteria of the college, which was pretty drab, pretty grey. I remember looking at the salt and peppershakers and seeing them light up – they suddenly seemed very bright, and you could see the light passing through them. They started to have this incredible clarity and then it spread from there to the table and the plates, to the room, the people. It was like a grey veil had been lifted, and it never went back. I attribute that to the days, hours, weeks of life drawing, of looking and concentrating. I think those techniques go back hundreds of years – that’s why renaissance paintings look the way they do, why they’re so intense. “At the same time, it’s the swinging sixties – the first time there was some colour.After the war, there was still rationing for a few years, it was
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