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)

The biography on English pianist Mike Taylor written by Luca Ferrari now available at Amazon.co.uk

The biography on English piano player Mike Taylor, written by Luca Ferrari and published by Gonzo Multimedia, is available at Amazon.co.uk at the page 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-Nowhere-Luca-Ferrari/dp/1908728485/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1435852963&sr=1-5&keywords=gonzo+multimedia

Here's the front and back cover of the book:

Inside the book, memories of Dave Tomlin (who played with Mike and  shared with him a flat in Kew) and Steve Pank about Taylor and the London underground scene with some references to the Giant Sun Trolley and the Third Ear Band.

no©2015 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)     

"Third Ear Band’s Psychedelic Alchemy in Macbeth" by Glenn Kenny.

A remarkable essay of analysis on TEB's "Macbeth" music has come in last December by Glenn Kenny (critic at http://www.rogerebert.com/) published on The Criterion Collection Web site at http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3387-third-ear-band-s-psychedelic-alchemy-in-macbeth

Here's the original text of it:

 

“We were just in London, clubbing, all those things people did in the ’60s in the middle of London,” British actor Francesca Annis recalls, in an interview on the new Criterion release of Macbeth, of “crossing paths” with director Roman Polanski in the days when the Polish-born director was launching his career in the West with the still-galvanizing thriller Repulsion. “Clubbing” in London in the ’60s arguably had more cultural significance than you find in contemporary nightlife. Nightclubs were also cultural laboratories of a sort, in which musicians and other performers, sometimes with psychedelic assistance, sought to expand the borders charted by the likes of the Beatles and the Stones. The scene at London’s UFO Club, for instance, yielded experimenters both obscure and, in some cases, eventually monumental, like Pink Floyd, the Soft Machine, and an aggregation that would eventually be known as Third Ear Band—which in 1971 would provide the score for Polanski’s chilling Macbeth.

The murder of Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, and their unborn child in the summer of 1969 was in fact the second traumatic loss Polanski had suffered that year; in April, his longtime friend and collaborator Krzysztof Komeda had died after sustaining head injuries several months earlier. Macbeth was the first film Polanski made after these tragedies, and only the second without Komeda’s participation. (American jazz musician Chico Hamilton’s score for Repulsion is often mistaken for Komeda’s work, which in itself says a little something about varieties of cultural cross-pollination.) Contemporary accounts claim that Polanski, back in Europe after a U.S. filmmaking sojourn that had seen him complete the remarkably successful Rosemary’s Baby, was told of the band by an acquaintance who had worked with them on their soundtrack for an obscure animated German television film, Abelard and Heloise.

Writing of Third Ear in his excellent account of British folk-rock in the ’60s, "Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music", Rob Young notes that the group “sculpted an esoteric chamber music from acoustic elements,” yielding “incantational songs—without words, a ritualistic consort music.” Ritualistic is a significant word here; in Polanski’s film, one of the most appalling and memorable set pieces is the witches’ sabbath, and the movie’s many murders are depicted almost as fever-dream rites. Young quotes founding member Glen Sweeney, the group’s percussionist (he played a variety of hand drums), thusly: “I called the music alchemical because it was produced by repetition.” For the recording of the music soundtrack, Sweeney and oboe/recorder player Paul Minns, another founding member, were joined by cellist/bassist Paul Buckmaster (a classically trained musician who was also doing string arrangements for Elton John in this period, and who would later collaborate with Miles Davis), violinist and electronics player Simon House (later of the sci-fi psychedelic madhouse Hawkwind), and guitarist Denim Bridges, and they improvised the score at London’s Air Studios while looking at black-and-white rushes of the film. The full results of their efforts are collected on the album "Music from Macbeth", a bracing record that presents an experience pointedly different from that of the film . . . but just as breathtaking and sometimes harrowing.

There’s a hypnotic effect created via the alchemical repetition: not just in the rhythms of Sweeney’s hand drumming but in the motifs Minns spins out on his wind instruments. In the early ’60s, the British guitarist Davey Graham had taken his interest in Moroccan music and applied it to a new guitar tuning that went on to influence such players as Bert Jansch and Jimmy Page. The repetitions inherent in some forms of Western modal music—old British folk songs, for instance—seemed to find an affinity in the drones of Indian ragas. The tonal limitations of early electronic instruments, such as the VCS3 synthesizer played by House on the Macbeth soundtrack, lend themselves to a certain form of musical minimalism. The consonances implicit in these musical forms that were largely considered culturally discrete give Third Ear Band’s music for Macbeth an uncannily old-world feel, in that it evokes an atmosphere in which certain ideas of “difference” had not yet been fully formed. This feeling of a kind of antiquity prevails even when the electronic instruments in the band’s array are foregrounded. Hence, nothing in the score for Polanski’s film seems overtly anachronistic: it all fits into the sometimes verdant, sometimes blighted, always eerie and enigmatic world where the filmmaker sets the bloody action.

But Polanski uses the music sparingly in the movie, and sometimes remixes it ruthlessly. For the scene in which Macbeth (Jon Finch) seems compelled by a floating dagger to undertake the murder of Duncan, Third Ear Band recorded a track (titled “Dagger and Death” on their album) on which a repeating single-stab guitar note (like something out of a slo-mo version of the psych-rock hit of a few years earlier “Pictures of Matchstick Men”) is underscored by moans from violin, recorder, and even what sounds like a bowed percussion instrument; two minutes into the track, Sweeney’s hand drum comes flurrying in, whipping up a small frenzy that drops out as suddenly as it began. For its use in the film, though, Polanski just about mutes all the instruments save the guitar, the stinging note synchronized to the floating dagger as it first tempts, and then leads, Macbeth, drawing him down the hall to commit his first foul deed. It is with the stabbing of Duncan that the hand-drum section of the piece is heard, to great effect. In other scenes, such as Macbeth’s consultation with Lady Macbeth at the well where they both ineffectually try to wash the blood from their hands, Polanski keeps the music at the brink of audibility. When Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost, the violin swells from a larger piece of music are dropped into the soundtrack percussively.

In "Electric Eden", Young says that Third Ear Band’s “arcane, absorbing music stands as one of several unexplored lanes leading away from the psychedelic garden that remains neglected and overgrown.” It’s true that very few of the musicians who came in their wake attempted anything as ambitious as this group did. But they were influential. The soundtracks that the German group Popol Vuh created for Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath Of God and Fitzcarraldo would be unimaginable without the precedent of what Third Ear Band did in Macbeth (and in fact, Herzog used a Third Ear song on the soundtrack of his Fata Morgana). Such works exerted considerable power over musicians such as Gary Lucas, the alchemical guitar wizard who co-composed Jeff Buckley’s “Grace” and “Mojo Pin” and who recently unveiled a new guitar score for James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein. Lucas recalls visiting Glen Sweeney in London in 1973 and being presented a copy of the Macbeth script, the front page of which was embossed with a simulated-blood thumbprint! Sweeney himself passed away in 2005.

This six-minute track, “Overture/The Beach,” as it appears on Third Ear Band’s "Music from Macbeth", illustrates the atmospheric, improvisation-based method that gave Polanski a wide range of aural options to mix into the film’s actual audio track:

Here, Polanski uses the band’s percussive “stabs” on a guitar string to give hallucinatory dimension to the vision of a floating dagger that coaxes him to murder, which he does to a flurry of almost panicked-sounding hand drumming, discordant cello moans, and more pointed guitar shrieks.

no©2015 Luca Ferrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

The (Chief Druid) DAVID LOXLEY interview!

We have here a very exclusive precious interview with DAVID LOXLEY, Chief Druid of the Ancient Order of Druids (London) and designer/writer involved with the London underground and the TEB in the '60's-'70's. Loxley assembled the "Alchemy" cover and designed lot of posters and flyers for gigs and festivals, drawing graphics for magazines as "Albion" directed by Steve Pank. 
In this short interview he reveals the origins and meanings of the TEB's first album cover and the connection between the band and the Druids...

As every TEB fan knows you designed the beautiful “Alchemy” album cover. I’ve discovered the picture was taken from an old book about alchemy titled "Atalanta Fugiens", edited by German Michael Meier in 1617. Can you tell us the genesis of it, the reasons behind it, the real meanings?
"I didn’t really design the cover, it kind of happened with parts of it coming from different people. I put all the ingredients together. The main drawing is from a book written and illustrated in 1617. I think this originated from Glen or Steve Pank. I thought this was a bit too medieval.

One evening in my flat a girl from California drew a doodle of some snakes, and left them there as a gift. I redrew them and put them in the corners of the medieval image to make it look more celtic looking.
The image itself I have never interpreted for anyone before, but it has a very deep meaning, which could be the subject of a book and not just an answer, so here goes with an answer with a book hidden in it. 

The picture has a courtyard with a tunnel entrance with a man in the middle about to crack an egg on a table. This is a totally symbolic image. On a material level the courtyard is a womb, if it was the Great Pyramid in Egypt it would be the chamber of transformation. The tunnel is the entrance to the womb, it has an egg in it waiting for a sperm to fertilise it. 
 

The original 1617 engrave

The image was meant to be interpreted on the mental level according to the upper room or womb. The brain is a courtyard with an egg in it called the Pineal gland. On an abstract level this gland has the same function as the egg in the physical womb. The tunnel is the Pituitary gland or the entrance for light to enter into the courtyard or brain and fertilise the Pineal gland. Both of these eggs, abstract and material are functionaries of the moon. The Great Pyramid at Giza has two entrances, one for the physical seeds to enter (mummies) and one for the light to enter, the physical body is the same.

Detail of the egg from the original cover

The egg is the sleeping Beauty which will only wake up for the light. In the same way that the physical sperm has to give up everything or die into the egg in order to be resurrected into a new world as a baby, then the Pineal gland will only operate as an entrance to another world if the Pituitary gland which is ruled by Mercury gives up all of its light to the Pineal.

The Sword held by the man is not a weapon, but a symbol for something which cleaves the air. Light or electrons cut through space like a sword or a word and represent light and the present tense. The Moon will only give itself up to the Sunlight and than reflect it onto the land. To be enlightened the man must give up everything, judgements, what he thinks he knows and become nothing in order to be accepted by the egg, in return for this death he will be resurrected by the present tense which is the womb with an egg in it.

I think I have gone on long enough, so lets just finish by saying that the cover represents the real mysteries of Sex or creativity in the present tense".

Which meanings have the snakes around the border of the cover? In an old interview the same Glen Sweeney stated that they are there to protect the band and its music...
"The serpents at the corners of the cover had no real meaning intentionally. Originally they would have been used to protect the four corners of the world, north south east and west. The serpents lift the slightly flat image of the main picture and provide some contrast to project the cover a bit more".

 

Do you remember when/where/how did you meet Glen and the other guys of the band? 

"I cannot guarantee my memory for some of these questions but I think I first saw Glen at a club called the UFO club in Tottenham Court Road in London in 1967 or thereabouts. At the time this was the place to be, but it was still quite a small scene with enormous potential for the future of social change. Glen was playing in a band whose name I cannot remember, It was a sort of free form spontaneous jazz group, I think [maybe the Hydrogen Jukebox?]".

What was you doing at the time? Which was your role in the London underground?

"At the time I was very young and did not see myself as having a particular role other than helping out where I could. I had just dropped out so to speak, a concept which would sound alien today. I was into having a good time. My flat was raided by the police but rather than arrest me for something they just said we will be back in 30 minutes and if I was you I would not be here, so me and my brother ended up 30 minutes later walking down the road to somewhere or nowhere. We asked in a bar if anyone knew of anywhere to stay, and we were sent to Steve Pank's flat, who kindly put us up for about a week. That is how I met Steve Pank who I have known for forty something years. At the time if it was happening anywhere it was in Portobello Road, Steve had a magazine called "Albion" which I did some drawings for and
later on I helped him run a club in a church hall, for which I did the posters and handouts and any other menial tasks. This club never advertised who was playing because most of the people who came to jam did not tell their managers or record companies, even Steve did not know sometimes if anybody was coming to play or not. Some of the musicians and acts were very well known, and people just turned up to see whatever happened. The council eventually closed us down for making to much noise, or that was the reason given. One of the bands who played regulary was the Third Ear Band who Steve introduced me to them".

Can you tell me which was the real connections of TEB with the Druids?
"The real connection between TEB and druidism was or is, well I am not sure. I was interested in druidism so I joined a group, Steve Pank was also interested so he joined also. TEB music like a lot of freeform jazz at the time was about being in the present tense, opening up the door to another state of being. Some freeform jazz branched out into various kinds of indian or oriental music and created fusion music. Some of this music had spiritual connotations and meditation was also becoming popular. The TEB was a fusion between freeform jazz, indian music, meditation and folk music played on classical instruments. It was probably the first band of its kind but it was still about getting into the present tense or another state of being. The Druid Order is about the same thing in another context, linking up with another state of being or going beyond time and space searching for reality. So I guess although some of the connections are physical the real connection is abstract".

What do you think about TEB experience? Some people asks me if TEB music was devoted to the black magic... What can you tell about it?
"My previous answer answers most of this question as well. TEB has nothing to do with black magic. If black magic is superstition then no they were not. Black magic is just going against the light, every habit and resentment which we are stuck in is black magic, every desire to get revenge or hurt those whom we thought or did hurt us is black magic, war is black magic if it is based on an illusion and personal pride. Primitive people need a devil to blame otherwise they would have to take responsibility for their own actions. The devil is needed by immature people. If the devil existed he or she would be your best friend, supporting you to be in the past tense and stuck with the fantasy that you can have it all now and take it with you. It is if we are large enough a great honour to take the blame for the negative thoughts of others who cannot face the reality of their own failure to support the light. I think I will stop there as i am starting to sound like a born again preacher!" 

What are you doing now? I know you’re still a Chief Druid…

"At the moment, I am still a Chief Druid which takes up some time, I have semi retired, I still do some design work, some writing, some physical work, making things etc. It is my second dropping out and I am looking at ways to earn some money without having to work all the time. So that ends my answers on a very practical note". 

Loxley at the Spring equinox Druid ceremony on London Tower  Hill in 2010. Note Carolyn Looker at the core of the picture (photo: Steve Pank).

REFERENCES TO DAVID LOXLEY IN THIS ARCHIVE

about the "Alchemy" cover

http://ghettoraga.blogspot.it/2009/12/origins-and-meanings-of-alchemy-cover.html

about TEB alchemical iconography 
http://ghettoraga.blogspot.it/2011/12/origins-and-meanings-of-teb-alchemical.html 
about "Albion" magazine  
http://ghettoraga.blogspot.it/2010/07/first-teb-ad-on-magazine.html 
about the connections with Druids 
http://ghettoraga.blogspot.it/2009/12/trird-ear-druidic-band.html

WRITINGS BY DAVID LOXLEY IN THE NET
about the Ancient Order of Druids 
http://www.stonehengecampaign.org.uk/scdruids.htm#aod

Loxley wrote also an introduction for a Graham Howe's book titled "The Mind of the Druid" (Skoob Esoterica, UK 1990).

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

Italian edition of Barry Miles' "London Calling" out now with some quotes of Dave Tomlin, Glen Sweeney and the Giant Sun Trolley...

As reported in July 2010 (read  at http://ghettoraga.blogspot.it/2010/07/some-quotations-on-third-ear-band-and.html), on the last wonderful Barry Miles' book dedicated to the London underground ("London Calling", published by Atlantic Books), also some quotations about UFO epic era and some characters as Dave Tomlin (excerpts from his books inspired by the Embassy experiences...), The Giant Sun Trolley and Glen Sweeney (excerpts from the famous Muz Murray "Gandalf's Gardens"' interview).

Now is available an Italian translation by A. Lovisolo of the book published by EDT (pages 544, euros 23,00). Info at http://www.edt.it/viaggi/london_calling/
An excerpt from a chapter on the Punk scene at http://www.edt.it/viaggi/london_calling/lettura.php

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