Americans lit the fire and the Beat configurations spread worldwide.
"The Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama had a major retrospective exhibition at the Photographers Gallery in Soho, London recently – Feb 2024. One whole section was entitled: ‘On The Road’, and it was a photographic roadtrip/ odyssey that Moriyama undertook when young and inspired by Jack Kerouac.
It’s a long way from the cross-country American highways and heartlands of San Francisco and New York, but the spark reached Daido in Japan as well."
One of the things that chimed with me, being a big skies low horizons mid-Beds boy myself was the little upstairs caff in Lime Street Bedford adjacent to the side entrance to WH Smiths. It was there in the early 70s when I was trying out my own beat schemes. You got the 'three tables eight chairs" ambience - and the inhabitants perfectly - and I name checked you on p19 of my 'under the radar memoir All I Want Is Out Of Here. It doesn't sound like it had changed a bit.
MP: Your critics, at least some and unfairly I feel, thought Beatniks was going to be an English version of On the Road. How did you feel about that?
TL: Well, I think I subtitled it ‘An English Road Movie’. I wanted it to be read alongside On the Road, but to show all ways in which we English fall short of the wild, open, hip beatnik dream. We have a fundamentally different sense of space. We’re Europeans, and that’s like being born with a number of deaths in the family.
You meet people like Neal Cassady, occasionally, but they’ve got nowhere to go! I’m speaking only for England. I think Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland are each different. Niall Griffiths’ early novels have something of the Beat in them. And Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar.
It doesn't just have to be words.
Beats talking about 'space '.
Americans lit the fire and the Beat configurations spread worldwide.
"The Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama had a major retrospective exhibition at the Photographers Gallery in Soho, London recently – Feb 2024. One whole section was entitled: ‘On The Road’, and it was a photographic roadtrip/ odyssey that Moriyama undertook when young and inspired by Jack Kerouac.
It’s a long way from the cross-country American highways and heartlands of San Francisco and New York, but the spark reached Daido in Japan as well."
Malcolm Paul." Evening in Europe ' Review.
One of the things that chimed with me, being a big skies low horizons mid-Beds boy myself was the little upstairs caff in Lime Street Bedford adjacent to the side entrance to WH Smiths. It was there in the early 70s when I was trying out my own beat schemes. You got the 'three tables eight chairs" ambience - and the inhabitants perfectly - and I name checked you on p19 of my 'under the radar memoir All I Want Is Out Of Here. It doesn't sound like it had changed a bit.
Hi Toby .
Extract from our interview.
MP: Your critics, at least some and unfairly I feel, thought Beatniks was going to be an English version of On the Road. How did you feel about that?
TL: Well, I think I subtitled it ‘An English Road Movie’. I wanted it to be read alongside On the Road, but to show all ways in which we English fall short of the wild, open, hip beatnik dream. We have a fundamentally different sense of space. We’re Europeans, and that’s like being born with a number of deaths in the family.
You meet people like Neal Cassady, occasionally, but they’ve got nowhere to go! I’m speaking only for England. I think Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland are each different. Niall Griffiths’ early novels have something of the Beat in them. And Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar.