Talk on Christine Bott at The Bonnington Café

Kate Hayes (Catherine to you, perhaps), was one of the singers in one of the best bands in Brighton- The Objeks. Right from the start, the band were overtly political and shared with The Chefs a love of the Velvet Underground. Kate's tour de force was her version of I'll Be Your Mirror. You can hear a song by the Objeks here: https://www.punkbrighton.co.uk/downloadmp.html

Kate came along to the screening/gig that I did at the University of Westminster a few weeks ago. We went off afterwards and had a really nice chat, and she invited me to this talk, and gave me a copy of her book, The Untold Story of Christine Bott. Christine was the partner of Richard Kemp, who manufactured huge quantities of LSD back in the 1960s. Both were evangelical about its properties as an agent of change for humankind.

Of course, the authorities clamped down on them when they discovered their whereabouts, and both did jail time. Christine and Kate became friends many years later, and Christine bequeathed her diaries to Kate, who has used them as the heart of her book. More on the book here: https://theuntoldstoryofchristinebott.uk/

Up high in Vauxhall in the enclave that is the Bonnington area, we sat in a sunny room and listened to Kate talking about her relationships with Christine's family and associates. Audience members seemed to have used LSD at very young ages: twelve, and fourteen. I remembered a guy on my Art Foundation at Sunderland Art College, telling me that he's been able to buy tabs of acid for sixpence on the streets when he was ten or eleven. No-one expected LSD to be imported via Jarrow: too full of working-class thickos, he told us. 

My own memory is when I was a child, of a young woman in mourning coming to stay with our family. Her boyfriend had taken LSD and flown from the roof of his student residency in Newcastle, and he had not survived.

Yes I have taken LSD, and yes I enjoyed it. But only once: I couldn't imagine anything better at the time, but I could imagine how it could have been really frightening in other circumstances. Its advocates don't dwell on the bad trips. But that's beside the point: Kate has thoroughly researched an unwritten history and put an important figure back into it, and such histories are always to be lauded. It was an interesting afternoon, for many reasons; Kate has been entrusted with a lot of material that would not have seen the light of day were it not for her her diligence as a researcher and her empathy with Christine and her family.

Here is my story of my good trip, and my friend's simultaneous bad trip. A cautionary tale:

https://helenmccookerybook.bandcamp.com/track/heaven-avenue