Jonh Hurford and retro Sixties psychedelia

 John Hurford, Middle Earth Love Festival, Magic Garden Posters, 1979, 44 x 59 cm, offset lithograph in dark blue on red or green thin paper.

In August 2015 I acquired a little-known psychedelic poster which was printed in England during 1979 and titled Middle Earth Love Festival. It celebrated an event during the 1960s which never happened - a rock music festival at the inner London venue known as Middle Earth, featuring bands Pink Floyd, the Move, Soft Machine and Arthur Brown. The design was based on an original drawing and poster by Johnny Hurford from 1968, though some additional elements had been added for the 1979 version, including the words Love Love Love in the box area at the lower right of the image. A description of the poster, along with Hurford's own account of the original work and its eventual manifestation, is presented below, taken in part from the book Johnny - the work of psychedelic artist John Hurford (Hill 2006) and this author's own research.

 John Hurford, The Human Family, 1968, 50 x 63 cm. Recreation of the original drawing, now lost.

The Human Family 1968

The Middle Earth Love Festival poster of 1979 began life back in 1968 as a drawing by Johnny Hurford entitled The Human Family which was subsequently turned into a poster. Hurford describe the evolution of that work as follows within the 2006 biography edited by Jonathan Hill: 

Poster, 1968. The Human Family. This poster was designed for an avant-garde touring theatre group run by Jack Henry Moore and collectively known as ‘The Human Family'. They were based at the Arts Lab in central London, and were already well known for creating spontaneous happenings at festivals in Britain and in Europe - the rectangle, lower right, was left blank so that different date and venue information could be inserted. I had used the same type of spidery / witch's lettering that I'd already used for the poster and magazine cover shown in fig.1 and fig.7 etc. I thought it contrasted rather nicely with the soft floating cellular structures in the background. The drawing also includes elements from what Jonathan Hill calls my 'girl-in-a-puddle' phase – a girl (usually naked), or sometimes a couple, sitting immersed or standing in a rippling pond and seen in a lot of my work around this time. 

The Arts Lab opened in September 1967 and quickly became an integral part of the London underground scene. It was essentially an experimental multi-media centre with an art gallery, theatre, cinema, bookshop and restaurant, and was often treated by visiting hippies as a general 'crash pad’. It was converted from an empty warehouse at number 182 Drury Lane, Covent Garden and was a great place to go and experience genuine 'counter culture'. You could wander from event to event (things tended to be spontaneous, often last minute), and you could buy cheap sandwiches and stay up till dawn watching their all-night film shows in the basement cinema, although many of the people reclining on its assortment of foam mattresses (no chairs) went to sleep instead. It was run by a nice guy called Jim Haynes and he got me the poster job for The Human Family. Unfortunately, when the time came for me to go and pick up my payment and collect my original artwork and a file copy of the poster, the whole place had been taken over by an English chapter of Hells Angels. This mob was led by 'Loser Pete' (who was actually Swiss). Pete told me to piss off and not to come back. Although I never did manage to get my artwork returned, or see an actual copy of the original poster, reproductions of it have appeared from time to time in print - most notably in the classic 1970 book Underground Graphics published by Academy Editions. From some of these, I've been able to have a composite made of the poster as it first appeared, and this is shown above. At the end of the 1970s, an adaptation of the poster was brought out by Magic Garden Posters commemorating a 'Love Festival' at Middle Earth in the Sixties - in fact, this event never actually took place, and none of the bands featured on the poster played together there either.

The original drawing / poster included an inscription in the middle section 'Poster by John Hurford' just above the left-hand shoulder of the woman staring out from the view. A copy of this poster appeared in the 1970 Academy Editions publication Underground Graphics at page 22. Therein the image was printed in red on thick, rough brown paper. 

Love Festival 1967

A Love Festival did take place at the UFO club in London on 10 and 17 February 1967, and a poster was originally produced for that event by Michael English of Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. The only band to appear at both the real and imagined events was Soft Machine.

Michael English, Love Festival, Osiris poster, 1967.

English's use of a bright red and pink open mouth with white teeth and lucious lips was a graphically intense, eye-catching promotional piece for the festival, even if the adjacent balloon words were difficult to read in the manner of the times. To someone who had experienced, or was experiencing the effects of an hallucinogenic drug such as LSD this poster would have made an instant connection. Psychedelic, like the drug, it was colourful and alive. It also came at the height of the so-called Summer of Love, when drugs such as LSD and marijuana were being widely used by young people in places such as London and San Francisco. They elicited a feeling of ecstacy and elation, and gave rise to mantras such as the Beatles' famous "All you need is love" and the LP Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Love was a word which in 1967 was  both a plea for peace in the face of the Cold War and horror of Vietnam, and the promise of the new Aquarian age, wherein religion, science and philosophy would be one. Unfortunately the dream of a return to a utopian Garden of Eden on earth did not eventuate for humankind in general, and by the 1970s the happy hallucinogens had been replaced by the paranoia inducing cocaine and often lethal and addictive heroin.

Love Festival 1979 

In 1979 the British firm Magic Garden Posters issued a poster entitled Middle Earth Love Festival which was based on John Hurford's original The Human Family of 1968, but with additions. As Hurford outlines in his book:

Love Festival]. Poster, 1979. The Human Family. I had no idea that this poster existed until quite recently when it was unearthed by psychedelic poster collector and historian Nigel Mantzel. It is a later adaptation of The Human Family poster I did in 1968 ...... Printed by Magic Garden Posters in 1979, it is one of those "Weren’t the Sixties Great!" posters brought out around this time to stick two fingers up to the punk era. It is commemorating an imaginary 'Love Festival' at Middle Earth in London with Pink Floyd, The Move, Soft Machine and Arthur Brown (the festival never actually took place). I had nothing to do with its publication but still I was pleased to see that they had included my name as artist on the poster. There is also a colour variant, printed on green paper.

Nigel Mantzel with a copy of the Middle Earth Love Festival poster (Hill 2006)

The 1979 poster differed from the original artwork in a number of ways. It includes the inscription: The Human Family / Love festival at Middle Earth / May 3 / Plus the Move Soft Machine and Arthur Brown - June. Also, along the upper edge a collection of fluid bubbles and lines had been drawn in between the 'soft floating cellular structures' and Hurford's original The Human Family text. Finally, in the blank box section, lower right, the scene of a rising / setting sun was included, with birds flying, hearts, and the words Love, Love, Love, Love, Love, Love.

The reuse of Hurford's original work, by the somewhat mysterious Magic Garden Posters was, as the artist points out, part of a retro-Sixties psychedelia movement which continues to this day. There is no doubt that the art, music, fashion and graphic design of that time was truly innovative. What is now termed "a mash up" was the aim of Magic Garden Posters in 1979 - to present a series of posters in the style of the Sixties, and what better way to do that then to reproduce a little known poster from 1968. The success of their venture, at least financially, is not known. However the poster stands more as a simple reproduction of Hurford's original work - slightly modified - rather then a modern day reimagining, as we typically see with airbrushed retro work in the psychedelic manner. For this reason Middle Earth Love Festival is successful in that it briefly brought the work of that talented artist to a new audience. Hurford began painting and sketching as a young man at the height of the Swinging Sixties and brought samples to the attention of the controversial countercultural magazines OZ and International Times. His drawings began to appear dotted throughout those publications from 1968 through to the early 1970s. An experience with LSD impacted upon his art at this time, making it more colourful, intense and erotic. The Human Family is one of the products of that period.

References

Hill, Jonathan, Johnny - the work of psychedelic artist John Hurford, Sunrise Press, 2006, 166p.

Michael Organ

Last updated: 11 September 2015