Back to top
70.
THE SUNDAY HEAD (London: August 1974) + two mimeographed flyers.
Edited and published by Heathcote Williams. Foolscap mimeograph, stapled, 24pp. (+ cover sheet), printed rectos and versos. Illustrated.
The only issue of the Albion Free State’s subversive Sunday paper, produced and printed over three days in an edition of 1000 copies, many of which were distributed by Williams and Nicholas Albery at the third Windsor Free Festival in August 1974. Accompanied by two mimeographed foolscap sheets announcing its publication, one of them addressed by hand to the pot legalisation campaigner, Steve Abrams.
Contents include extracts from Octavio Paz’s essay on the Mexican fiesta (“The Labyrinth of Solitude”, 1961); a text titled “Everyone is Wally” (a name widely adopted by squatters and hippies after the co-founder of the Windsor Free Festival, Wally Hope); a page on the Meat Roxy; excerpts from Germaine Greer’s contributions to “Hello, I Love You” (item #134); “Bop Lyrics” (from “The Gates of Wrath”) by Allen Ginsberg (not in Morgan); a map of “InGland, IREland, sCOTland, & Wails, Frayed Neurone of Schlub Konsciousness”, divided into several regions marked, variously, “Emotional Deserts: Factories & Graft Jails”, “Funeral Parlours, Bone Orchards, and Abandoned Death Fests”, “Mental Hospitals”, and “Animal Zombiedom & Atrocity Shops”, etc.; a ground plan of Williams’s proposed Free City of Love; a picture drawn by Williams’s seven-year-old daughter illustrating the AFS slogan “Everyone’s Your Mate in Albion Free State”; the final page prints the words and music to the AFS national anthem, beginning: “Giants Built Stonehenge, Giants Built This Land Let’s Spurt Up Like Mushrooms and Seize the Upper Hand.”
One of the pre-publication flyers promises “a new poem by Buckminster Fuller, a new piece from Leary in Folsom Jail, a strip cartoon of Uri Geller as anarchist werewolf”, though none of these contributions materialised, and nor did a planned second issue.
Slight creasing to extremities, with tiny nick to upper edge of cover, o/w Very Good; old horizontal folds to flyers, o/w Very Good.
