UK underground

Many in the blossoming underground movement were influenced by 1950s Beat generation writers such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who paved the way for the hippies and the counterculture of the 1960s.

The UK's underground movement was focused on the Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill area of London, which Mick Farren said "was an enclave of freaks, immigrants and bohemians long before the hippies got there".

Key underground (community) bands of the time who often performed at benefit gigs for various worthy causes included Pink Floyd (when they still had Syd Barrett), Soft Machine, Tomorrow, Pretty Things, The Deviants (featuring Mick Farren), Tyrannosaurus Rex, Edgar Broughton Band, Hawkwind, Pink Fairies (featuring Twink and ex-The Deviants), Shagrat (featuring Steve Peregrin Took, Mick Farren (early lineup), and Larry Wallis); key people included, in the late '60s, Marc Bolan, who would leave "the Grove" to find fame with T. Rex, and his partner Steve Peregrin Took, who remained in Ladbroke Grove and continued to perform benefit gigs in the anti-commercial ethos of the UK underground.

Within Portobello Road stood the Mountain Grill, a greasy spoon cafe, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s was frequented by several UK underground artists, including Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies.

"The band's baroque House of Usher apartment on London's Shaftesbury Avenue had witnessed pre-Raphaelite hippy scenes, like Sandy the bass player (of The Deviants and Pink Fairies), Tony the now and again keyboard player, and a young David Bowie, fresh from Beckenham Arts Lab, sunbathing on the roof, taking photos of each other and posing coyly as sodomites".

[7] There was a smaller, less widely spread manifestation from the UK underground termed the "Overground", which referred to an explicitly spiritual, cosmic, quasi-religious intent, though this was an element that had always been present.

The magazines were printed on pastel paper using multi-coloured inks and contained articles about meditation, vegetarianism, mandalas, ethics, poetry, pacifism and other subjects at a distance from the more wild and militant aspects of the underground.

He had previously chosen the band's track "The Hedgehog's Song" as his only piece of popular music on the radio programme Desert Island Discs).