Dave Tomlin' son sent to The Guardian an obituary about his great dad.

Tom Hennessey, one of the three children of Dave Tomlin, sent to the Guardian a obituary about his great dad. You can read the original Web page at this link: https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2025/feb/13/dave-tomlin-obituary

Dave Tomlin obituary

"My dad, Dave Tomlin, who has died aged 90, was a musician, writer and figure of the British counterculture underground from the 1960s.

In 1976, he was one of those who took over the unoccupied former Cambodian embassy in London and established a community of artists, musicians, poets, artisans and radical metaphysicians who called themselves the Guild of Transcultural Studies.

Over the years, the guild became established as an opulent venue for musical and cultural events, hosting refugees from as far afield as Chile and China and holding concerts by musicians from Morocco and India, with attenders often having no idea that their elegant surroundings were a squat. A long-running court case finally forced the guild to close its doors after 15 years in 1991, ending Dave’s dream of handing the building back to a new Cambodian government.

Born in Plaistow, east London (then in Essex), to Stan Tomlin, a packing-case maker, and Louisa (nee Goodsell), Dave escaped a future in factory work by joining the King’s Guard, where he learned the bugle to accompany the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. This was the beginning of a life of music. He became a jazz musician in the 1950s, playing clarinet and saxophone in Bob Wallis’s Storyville Jazz Band and touring with Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

In the late 1960s he joined the hippy movement, travelling nomadically around the countryside in a horse and cart, playing in experimental folk groups, including the Third Ear Band, and performing at the UFO Club in London, where he would go on at 4am: “Only when the dancers are completely exhausted will they be in a fit state to hear what we have for them."

He became part of the London Free School in Notting Hill, a centre of radical adult education, where he taught free-form jazz. While there, Dave led annual musical processions down Portobello Road that would develop with other events into the Notting Hill carnival.

Other adventures included becoming stranded, penniless, on the island of Fernando Po (now Bioko) in Equatorial Guinea and gaining passage back by pretending, unconvincingly, to be an experienced cook and deckhand. He supported his frugal lifestyle with gardening and working as a handyman.

In his later years, Dave spent his time writing about his experiences (Tales From the Embassy was published in 2017), practising Chinese brush painting and learning to recite the alphabet backwards.

He is survived by three children from different relationships – Lee, Maya and me – and by his brother, Tony."

Very kindly, Tom wrote me: "I could not hope to do justice to him in the limited space available but I think it gives a good flavour of who he was.
I am very grateful to you for your friendship with Dave, it was greatly appreciated by him. He mentioned you to me a number of times. Also for your tributes to him on your blog (which was helpful to me in writing this obituary!).

We are hoping to have an event in London to remember him and we will let you know in case you are able to make the journey.

Best wishes,

Tom"

no©2025LucaChinoFerrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

Dave Tomlin funeral.

 Dave from the video interview "Radical Elders" (2019).

Dave Tomlin's brother Tony kindly wrote me today:

"Dave was cremated yesterday, an unattended cremation.

Early yesterday morning, around 7AM,  I lit 3 candles in our garden, my way of a funeral. They burned all day and the last one was still burning, in the dark, at 7 PM last night.

Dave really didn't want to let go."

For all the people interested to get his wonderful books (apart "Tales from the Embassy" all the others are almost impossible to find), Tony will ask Dave's son Tom what he intends to do, and I will inform everyone here.

 no©2024 LucaChinoFerrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

Dave Tomlin, a giant of British counterculture.

From the video interview "Radical Elders" (2019).

Multi-instrumentalist, lyricist, writer and poet, David John Tomlin (1934-2024) was a seminal figure of the British underground. A founder of Giant Sun Trolley with Glen Sweeney in 1967, a collaborator with the Third Ear Band on “Alchemy” (1969), he was a cultural and political agitator since the second half of the 1960s, after a militancy in trad jazz from the late 1950s with Bob Wallis' band. From 1976 to 1991 he directed a commune experience in the occupied Cambodian Embassy in London, rejuvenating the countercultural model of the legendary London Free University of the 60s (from where Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd, for example, became known). 

Dave Tomlin (right) with Joe Gannon (left) announcing the Notting Hill Carnival, 1966.

From the early 1990s he began a prolific writing activity, mainly in the online pages of the reborn International Times (read here), publishing several books of an autobiographical nature (e.g., on his experiences in India or chronicling his years at the occupied embassy), poetic, non-fiction with strong political and social characterization (such as the essay "Power Lines").

He acquainted me with the dramatic story of Mike Taylor, helping me with research (with his brother Tony) and the writing of his biography, with suggestions and revision of the text. In 2020 he collaborated on the book I wrote about Glen and the Third Ear Band by sending his memories and giving me this unpublished poem of his from 1967, I decided to use as the epigraph of the book:

"The Giant Sun Trolley is coming

League transversing it globally encircuits

Beneath the eversun  

Where lances of pain

Become rays of warmth

Emanating mindwards and on

Till, reaching the epiphany

Of space and time 

Flash in ozonic  splendour

For Cosmic Man."

A true giant of the British counterculture and underground. Intelligent, sharp, witty, always on the right side of those who claim, especially today, the right to a better world.

From the video interview "Radical Elders" (2019).

 

Since very little can be found about him on the internet, I repost here, updated, Dave's bibliography and discography already posted on this archive, willing to supplement or modify it if suggestions are received from you readers.

 

DISCOGRAPHY

. Mike Taylor Quartet – “Pendulum” (LP - Columbia SX6042, UK 1965) Recorded at Lansdowne Studios, London, October 1965. Dave plays soprano saxophone. A 2007 CD reissue by Sunbeam Records also exist, but now very rare.

. Third Ear Band – “Alchemy” (LP/CD – Harvest Records, UK 1969) Recorded at EMI Studios in 1969. Dave plays violin in one track composed by him, “Lark Rise”.

. Hazchem - "Strange Attractor" (CD – Worldwide Records SPM-WWR-CD-0011 7703, 1990) Dave plays violin, keyboards and bass on three tracks, co-composing six tracks of the album and all the lyrics.

. High Tide – “Ancient Gates” (CD - World Wide Records SPM-WWR-CD-0007, Germany 1990) Dave plays violin and keyboard on all the six album tracks.

. Hazchem – “Star Map Excursion” (CD - World Wide Records, Germany 1991) Dave composed two tracks for the album.

. Third Ear Band – “The Magus” (CD – Angel Air Records SJPCD173, UK 2004) Recorded in 1972. Dave plays bass guitar. He writes also the liner notes. A limited edition of 500 copies of 180 gr. vinyl was published in 2019 by Tiger Bay.

 . The Bob Wallis & His New Storyville Jazzmen - (CD – GHB BCD-262, 2006) Dave plays clarinet on three tracks recorded in London, 1959.

 . The Bob Wallis & His New Storyville Jazzmen - "Vintage" (CD – Lake Records LACD280, 2010) Dave plays clarinet on some tracks recorded in London, in the Fifties.

 . Various Artists – “Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers: British Jazz 1960-1975” (CD – Reel Recordings RR026, UK 2012) Dave plays tenor saxophone on one track, “Phrygie”, recorded at Herne Bay Jazz Club in 1961 by the Mike Taylor Quintet.

. Mike Taylor Quartet – “Mandala” (CD/LP – Jazz in Britan, UK 2021) Limited to 500 copies worldwide. Recorded live by Jon Hiseman on 8th January 1965 at the Studio Club, Westcliff-On-Sea, Southend (UK). Dave plays soprano saxophone.

. Mike Taylor Quartet – “Preparation” (CD/LP – Sunbeam Records, UK 2021) Recorded at 19 The Common, Ealing (Mike Taylor’s home) in September 1965. Dave plays soprano saxophone.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Tales from the Embassy" vol. 1 (Iconoclast Press, London 2002)

"Bluebirds" (Iconoclast Press, London 2004)

"Howling at the Moon" (Iconoclast Press, London 2004)

"India Song" (Iconoclast Press, London 2005)

"Tales from the Embassy" vol. 2 (Iconoclast Press, London 2006)

"The Collected Mister" (Iconoclast Press, London 2006)

"Into the Holy Land" (Iconoclast Press, London 2007) with Tony Jackson

"Tales from the Embassy" vol. 3 (Iconoclast Press, London 2008)

"A Hole in the Wind" (Iconoclast Press, London 2008)

"Harry Fainlight. From the notebooks. Posthumous pieces" (Iconoclast Press, London 2008) 

"Harry Fainlight. Fragments of a lost voice" (Iconoclast Press, London 2008) 

"Power Lines" (Iconoclast Press, UK 2012)

Dave in 1967.

no©2024 LucaChinoFerrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

Dave Tomlin passed away on 2 November 2024. R.I.P. dear friend!

 

Dave Tomlin (left) and Steve Pank in London, Summer 2010 (photo: Luca Chino Ferrari)

 

 

 

This is a very sad news for all of us!

Sadly Dave passed away today, age 90.
One of a kind will be missed by all who knew him.

With these few words, Dave's brother Tony gave us the sad news in a page of IT-International Times.

I got to know Dave years ago through Steve Pank (cellist Ursula Smith's husband)  and I met him in London for some interviews published in this archive. He was a cultured, clever, funny, brilliant person, an inexhaustible source about a lot of countercultural events in the 60's and 70's. His books are unique, fundamental documents for any researchers and lovers of the British underground scene. 

"Tales from the Embassy," published from 2002 in three different volumes, was probably his greatest effort to tell the story of his life in the Cambodian embassy occupied by him and a group of friends to create a kind of free university on the legendary model of the London Free School. Thanks to Dave, in 1987 at the Cambodian Embassy Glen Sweeney brought together for rehearsals the first nucleus of the reborn Third Ear Band with Dave's protégé Allen Samuel on violin.

 

Author of countless articles, mainly on the IT web site,  he wrote many books. Among them, I love particularly that one he edited on his friend Harry Fainlight, an underrated poet (1935-1982): this book ("Fragments of a Lost Voice," Iconoclast Press, London 2010) is a genial philological-creative reconstruction of two lost fragments of poetry found by chance. Also his autobiographical novel "India Song", published by Iconoclast press in 2005, is a masterpiece of sensitivity and intelligence.

It was Dave who introduced me to the controversial story of piano player Mike Taylor, prompting me to write what to date is the only existing biography ("Out of Nowhere," published by Gonzo Multimedia in 2015). It was only thanks to him and his brother Tony that I succeeded, and I will be forever grateful to them  for this extraordinary opportunity. 

I will miss him a lot!

Here below the main pages of this archive where Dave is mentioned: 

https://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2012/08/new-edition-of-book-on-poet-harry.html

https://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2012/01/dave-tomlins-lark-rise-origins-cultural.html

https://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2012/07/dave-tomlins-pendulum-real-cameo-in-his.html

https://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2012/02/dave-tomlins-new-book-out.html

https://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2013/03/dave-tomlin-analyzes-for-us-two-his.html

https://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2019/04/radical-elders-dave-tomlin.html

https://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2010/02/thanks-to-journalist-andy-roberts-i.html

https://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2017/05/dave-tomlins-forthcoming-new-book.html

https://ghettoraga.blogspot.com/2012/06/ive-left-my-heart-in-new-orleans-dawn.html

Me and Dave in London, 2010 (photo: Steve Pank).

no©2024 LucaChinoFerrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

"Radical Elders": Dave Tomlin.

Lush.com launchs a series of video interviews about English elders. First interview (11:16 long) is with 'our' Dave Tomlin, founder of Giant Sun Trolley and friend of Glen Sweeney, poet, writer, iconoclast.
This very interesting video interview is available HERE.

  

Radical Elders: Dave Tomlin.

"This new series provides a missing platform for our elders to share their experiences and knowledge with those younger than themselves. Instead of simply celebrating the youthful lives of our Radical Elders, we want to know what they have learned as older people and discover more about their experiences as an older person who lives and has lived, differently. Our first subject is Dave Tomlin: a pioneering squatter, musician, author and counterculture activist. Along with our other subjects, who will be introduced over the coming months, Dave continues to engage with the world and remains inflamed by the spirit of inquiry, the desire to learn and to share his experience and knowledge with the rest of us. There is so much that the young can learn from their elders, and there are so many ways our elders' horizons can continue to be expanded by younger people. We hope that you, your elders, and your ‘youngers’, will join the conversation."
 (Lush.com press release)

                  Dave presenting his book "Tales from the Embassy".

      Dave at the Embassy, years ago. Note in front violinist Allen Samuel.

               

no©2019 Luca Chino Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

Dave Tomlin's forthcoming new book!

Dave Tomlin's new book will be distribuited on June 9th, 2017 by Strange Attractor (http://strangeattractor.co.uk/), an interesting English publisher. It will be a reprint of the complete "Tales from the Embassy" that he published privately in three different editions (in 2002, 2006 and 2008).

On the back cover of this brand new edition you can read:

"One night in 1976, a group of squatters entered the Cambodian Embassy in London, an opulent building that had remained empty for two years following the bloody revolution of the Khmer Rouge. For the next fifteen years, this peculiar residence would play host to the Guild of Transcultural Studies, an open platform for creative monomaniacs, radical metaphysicians, poets, prophets and exiles.

Dave Tomlin, founder of the Guild, member of the experimental music ensemble Third Ear Band, and contributor to the legendary underground newspaper International Times, traces a playful, semi-fictionalised, and highly readable path through this long occupation, illustrating the unfettered nature of its many occupants while providing a vivid portrayal of a more leisured age in which eccentricity could flourish more readily.
These humorous, insightful, and deftly crafted vignettes boast a thinly disguised cast of provocateurs, many of them celebrated in their own right, including pursuer of earth mysteries John Michell, beat poet Harry Fainlight, playwright of The Warp Neil Oram, the surrealist playwright and performer Ken Campbell, heretical biologist Rupert Sheldrake, countercultural photographer and journalist John “Hoppy” Hopkins, and Sir Mark Palmer, aristocratturned-gypsy-traveller and male-model impresario."

Three excerpts from the old books with references to Glen and the Third Ear Band  are available on this Archive at: 

http://ghettoraga.blogspot.it/2010/03/first-part-of-excerpts-from-tale-from.html 

http://ghettoraga.blogspot.it/2010/03/second-part-of-excerpts-of-tales-from.html
http://ghettoraga.blogspot.it/2010/03/third-and-last-part-of-excerpts-from.html

Dave talks about his experiences at the Embassy on this Soundcloud page:  https://soundcloud.com/oliviadocmaker/tales-from-the-embassy

no©2017 Luca Chino Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)   

New edition of the book on poet Harry Fainlight edited by Dave Tomlin.

A new edition of the book on the English poet Harry Fainlight originally edited by Dave Tomlin in 2008 is out now thanks Iconoclast  Press of London.

Harry Fainlight

Titled "Fragments of a lost voice" (67 pp.), it's dedicated to the eccentric iconoclast poet Harry Fainlight, dead in 1982 after a 47 years very troubled life (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Fainlight).

The book can be obtained making a cheque of 6 pounds to Dave Tomlin at:   1a, Princess Court, 68, Pilgrim's Lane, London NW3 ISP.

Phil Baker on a recent review of it published by "Times Literary Suppliment", the most prestigious literary newspaper in England: "One of the best minds of a generation destroyed by madness, Harry Fainlight was also the finest poet to emerge from the 1960s underground scene in Britain, transcending it and being much admired by Ted Hughes as well as Allen Ginsberg. For the present, however, he seems doomed to be remembered largely for his performance at the International Poetry Incarnation, a poetry happening with Ginsberg that packed the Albert Hall in 1965. It was filmed as Wholly Communion, in which Fainlight can be seen reading poetry that is too serious for his audience and becoming distressed when they begin to heckle. It was a characteristically troubled moment in a life spent in and out of psychiatric hospitals; at one point Faber and Faber offered to publish him, at Ted Hughes’s suggestion, and he responded by putting a petrol-soaked rag through the firm’s letterbox".

"In 2008, twenty-years after Fainlight's dead in a field from hypothermia, a suitcase was found in a Welsh barn that contained writings in his hand, notably the unfinished drafts of two poems, "City I" and "City II". Difficult to decipher, they are preserved in Fragments of a Lost Voice, in which twenty-two poets attempt to offer transcriptions and write short pieces of their own in response. The writers, all of whom have some personal link with Fainlight, are mostly unknown... 
The poems are concerned with air and earth: a warm evening (planes descending like "brinking brain seeds") and the underground ("thro' the transparent mirror/prehistoric strata flicker"). Fainlight is one of the few poet who could make "ripe overcooked radios" something more than word salad, and amid the unresolved ambiguities the peculiar finesse of his work shines through, with its distinctive spatial qualities and co-extention of mind and environment.
The transcriptions, with their many variants, have the fascination of Chinese whispers ("the first delicate weight" or "the first deluxe night"?) and the form of this little book is probably unique. It has been admirably put together by Dave Tomlin, who describes himself not as "editor" but "curator", reflecting the "archaelogical" nature of the project".

Between the 26 poets, apart the same Tomlin, give their contribution also Steve Pank, Ursula Smith and Allen Samuel, as we know very involved into TEB's story.

A great underrated visionary poet, Harry Fainlight, I have to admit it. Enough to read this fragment, taken from "From the notebooks", a transcription of a 1979 reading edited in 2006 by Tomlin:

"39

This is about cemeteries and death... about the philosophy of death as it presents itself today:

The miniature housing estates of nothing but tiny stone doors; as if everyone’s relatives had done some kind of Alice on them that nobody had ever really written up, and there was nothing else to show for it but these funny little stone doors indicating somewhere they had gone. For certainly the vast majority of the population had now gone over to the ‘little stone door theory’, and the cross idea had become some kind of minority cult. To adopt the cockney saying: ‘Put your religion where your monument is’, something with which any respectable archaeologist would concur; or were we only entitled to adopt the viewpoint of archaeology having reached the final means of these nowhere doors." 

London, early June, 1965. In town for International Poetry Congress at Royal Albert Hall. Poets sit on steps of Albert Memorial. Top Left: Barbara Rubiin. Back row L-R: Adrian Mitchell, Anselm Hollo, Marcus Field, Michael Horovitz, Ernst Jandl. Front row: Harry Fainlight, Alex Troicchi, Allen Ginsberg, John Esam, Dan Richter (photo: John 'Hoppy' Hopkins).

"Wholly Communion"(parts 1-4), the 1965 Pete Whitehead short documentary: in the very first sequences you can see Harry Fainlight reading his poem... Then, at 9.36, you can see Fainlight makes the integral reading with some interjections by the audience...).

A DAVE TOMLIN BIBLIOGRAPHY 

"Tales from the Embassy" vol. 1 (Iconoclast Press, London 2002)

"Bluebirds"  (Iconoclast Press, London 2004)

"Howling at the Moon" (Iconoclast Press, London 2004)

"India Song"  (Iconoclast Press, London 2005)

"Tales from the Embassy" vol. 2 (Iconoclast Press, London 2006)

"The Collected Mister" (Iconoclast Press, London 2006)

"Into the Holy Land"  (Iconoclast Press, London 2007) with Tony Jackson

"Tales from the Embassy" vol. 3 (Iconoclast Press, London 2008)

"A hole in the Wind" (Iconoclast Press, London 2008) 

"Harry Fainlight. From the notebooks. Posthumous pieces" (Iconoclast Press, London 2008) edited by Tomlin

"Harry Fainlight. Fragments of a lost voice"  (Iconoclast Press, London 2008) edited by Tomlin

"Power Lines" (Iconoclast Press, London 2011)

A DAVE TOMLIN DISCOGRAPHY

The Bob Wallis and His New Storyville Jazzmen (UK 1959) Played soprano sax "Pendulum" - Mike Taylor Quartet (EMI, UK 1966) Played soprano sax and designed the album sleeve "Alchemy" - Third Ear Band (Harvest, UK 1969) played violin on a track ("Lark rise") composed by him  "Ancient Gates" - High Tide (World Wide Records, Germany 1990) Played violin, keyboards and bass "Strange Attractor" - Hazchem (World Wide Records, Germany 1990) Played violin, bass, keyboards and guitar in some tracks "Star Map Excursion" - Hazchem (World Wide Records, Germany 1991) Composed two tracks for the album "Magus" - Third Ear Band (Angel Heart, UK 2005) Played bass and edited the CD booklet liner notes

             August 2010: Dave Tomlin (on left) with Steve Pank in London (photo: L. Ferrari)

Follow Dave Tomlin on International Times Web site at: http://internationaltimes.it/

no©2012 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)