Jazz influenced the Independent Group and the students at the RCA too. Peter Blake paintings included Bo Diddley and LaVern Baker and aside from his natural interest in jazz and bebop, many of the burgeoning pop artists also frequented the new clubs in soho featuring bands like Ambrose Campbell’s West African Rhythm Brothers. They had an uncritical acceptance of the new cultural landscape of a melange of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and social class.
The most famous meeting place for members of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Byrds and other visitors such as Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix and Cassius Clay was the infamous Flamingo Club. It opened in 1952 and moved into new premises on Wardour Street in Soho in 1957. Unusually, it employed black musicians and DJs and became acknowledged as a ‘who’s who’ of 1950s and 1960s cool. It rapidly gained a strong reputation with Jonny Dankworth, Dudley Moore (a hugely accomplished jazz pianinst), Georgie Fame and Ronnie Scott regularly playing along with visiting performers from America such as Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.
Even so, fighting among customers was not unusual given the club’s weekend “all-nighters” staying open until 6am. In October 1962, it was the scene of a fight between jazz singer Aloysius ‘Lucky’ Gordon and Johnny Edgecombe, both lovers of Christine Keeler, which led to the revelations of the Profumo Affair.
With its melting pot of music, fashion and social cross-culture, the Flamingo played a small but important part in the breakdown of racial prejudice in post-war Britain and the debate about high and low culture. As Blake commented: “The difference between the ICA people and myself was that all my life until then had been working class. I’d been going to jazz clubs since I was 14 . . . Pop culture was the life I actually led.” And so did the other RCA students. They were artists as fans and participants in the culture surrounding them, not detached intellectualising observers.
