Now I Am a Hippie Again Pleer
The mystery of Jesus, the naked hippie dancer
For decades, William Jellett danced at gigs and festivals, and told people he was the Son of God. And so, information technology seemed, he disappeared.
It was a Saturday evening, St Valentine'southward 24-hour interval 1970, when William Jellett commencement thought he might be Jesus. He was on the London Secret, travelling back from work, and noticed the headline of the paper unfurled opposite him: "Cambridge riots — two policemen beaten up". In that location had been student protests the dark earlier, on Friday the 13th.
Feeling "hurt for my brothers," he later told xix magazine, he put his head in his hands. He had the sense that everyone was his blood brother or sister, and that the music and freedom he had constitute over the terminal few years were slipping abroad, with this ascension violence. The lights flickered between stations, catching the dull livery.
He was just 21, just violence had always bothered him; back in the children'southward home, dorsum at school, dorsum with the mods and rockers on the beaches. Information technology seemed to be all effectually him now. The music printing talked about Manson and Altamont and Kent State, and sometimes there were photographs of crowds at gigs also, in which he could see himself dancing, conspicuously. Music was getting heavier too, at the gigs he went to almost every night: Black Sabbath had released their first album the day before, The Who recorded "Live at Leeds" that night.
As the train rumbled frontwards, Jellett looked into his hands. They were less smooth than they had been, he saw. He had not been able to agree down regular work for a while, leaving the job he had found when he start moved to London, at the tea importer, and so the job in the storeroom at the BBC, where he had spent much of his time scrawling designs in biro on paper-thin. He now sometimes told people he "worked in an role", if they asked, between songs, or in queues. He did, actually. Travelling around the urban center, he cleaned flats and houses, and offices. His hands were hardening with the work. He had never noticed the lines in his palms earlier.
For the first fourth dimension, Jellett saw that the lines crossed in the eye of each hand. The cross, he would say, in the "idle of my palm". He was well-attuned to religious symbolism, and divine calling. His parents had been in the Salvation Regular army, and he had felt something of this significance over the terminal couple of years, in the music he listened to.
Now, the logic overcame him. He idea well-nigh reincarnation, and about universality and interconnectedness. If nosotros are all ane, he thought, he could be anyone. People had been calling him "Jesus" for a while, and he had adopted the nickname, but now it made sense. If he had been reincarnated, he thought, "there would be no permissive order, no underground, but people wanting to exist themselves and live their lives the mode they wanted to earlier".
The crosses were stigmata, he thought.
It is likely no other fan e'er saw more gigs than Jellett. For more than a quarter of a century — the late sixties to the early on nineties, perhaps fifty-fifty longer — he was one of the most visible music fans in Britain. He was always there, it seemed, at mod shows and hippie shows, at soul shows and stone shows and reggae shows, at punk shows and folk shows, and indie shows and shows past bands with new electronic instruments. He was at festivals and fashionable hangouts, at events that linger in the history books, and gigs by teenage bands at out of the way venues. Magazines profiled him, and he was sought out by photographers and camera men.
Now, on nostalgic Facebook groups, people reminisce about spotting him. He was a "fable", they say, repeatedly, and "omnipresent". "If I did not encounter Him," one commented, with deliberate capitalisation, "I would check the crowd once again, always there, everywhere". "I bet well-nigh every gig goer from that flow would call back him," another said. People share photographs, and glimpses of picture show footage, or snatched memories of his often naked dancing, or the tambourine he used to play, and the fruit he used to hand out, or his preaching at Speakers' Corner. Nearly are unsure about his proper noun, or where he came from. He was ever a "mystery," they say.
"Whatsoever became of Jesus?" they ask.
Jellett had 4 pounds to his name when he first came to London, in 1967, plenty for a calendar week'south gigs simply not much else. He wanted to detect a dwelling house, to experience less broken-hearted, and to find friends, and the bands he loved. When he arrived, he was overwhelmed by the noise, and the clay.
He had felt unsettled for as long as he could remember. Born in Poole, Dorset, he was three when he was taken into care, when his parents separated. When he left the Dr Barnardo'southward children's home, at xv, he moved in with an aunt, in Bournemouth. A couple of years subsequently, on a wall outside a bowling alley, he experienced the first in a series of epiphanies. He was a mod so, he remembered, tentatively. The fighting, and the shopping, "all seemed pointless," he told NME.
At eighteen, he moved to Southampton, where he stayed at the urban center's YMCA. In that location were more than epiphanies: Geno Washington at the Mecca, at the end of the pier, with the neon sign flashing "come dancing", and the stage encircled by cruciform stars. His pilus was still short, and he danced less freely than he would do afterwards. "I didn't understand free motion then," he recalled. Non far away, at The Concorde, he watched pop acts become more "progressive": P.P. Arnold backed by The Overnice, and Family unit, and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown.
Chocolate-brown'due south lyrics — "take your mind through sacred burn", "dynamic explosions in my encephalon"— specially appealed to him, as did his long robes. "This guy was up there dancing almost, like…" Jellett told NME, struggling to notice the words to express the importance, his vocalisation rise as he spoke, "…and all of a sudden, I just got upwards out of my seat and started dancing like I'd never danced earlier. And there are people looking at me equally if to say I'grand crazy."
When he moved to London, Jellett soon found the "surreptitious" clubs, where the bands he had seen in Southampton played. The Middle Earth club became a kind of paradise for him. As well as Arthur Brown, and Family, there was The Pink Floyd, and Soft Automobile, and Tyrannosaurus Rex, and Helm Beefheart, and The Byrds, and The Who, and David Bowie before he was famous. The venue, in Covent Garden, was draped with fruit, to be sold at the next day'southward market. Many regulars were given nicknames, and could leave their old lives backside. Information technology was "an alternative universe of incense, bright lights, weird and wonderful dress, blasts of sound — and fruit," Nick Butt, the club's electrician, recalled in his autobiography, "Electric Nick". Drugs were rife, and there was a Bad Trip Room.
At showtime, in this company, Jellett was "sort of normal", some retrieve. Some knew him as "d'Abo", every bit they thought he looked like Mike d'Abo from Manfred Mann. Others idea he had "a very foreign interface with reality". "He was too out in that location for me so I gave him a broad booth," one remembered. At Center Earth, Jellett met Anna Rasle, and they married in September 1968. When he told other regulars, "no 1 believed him," Barrel says.
Things began to change for Jellett, subsequently he was married.
That calendar month, he saw Jefferson Aeroplane and The Doors play at The Roundhouse. Co-ordinate to Mick Farren, writing in "Give The Anarchist a Cigarette", although Jellett was "usually of benign countenance and disposition, he didn't seem likewise happy about The Doors; something was definitely lamentable him." Afterwards, speaking to NME, Jellett suggested Jim Morrison "knew what was going on". Jellett felt the lyrics of "Waiting For The Sun" — "every bit kickoff flash of Eden… standing there on liberty'southward shore… this is the strangest life I've ever known" — were designed "to tell u.s. where we went incorrect."
In Nov 1968, Jellett was filmed at Cream's farewell show at the Royal Albert Hall. He is with a adult female — presumably Rasle — and flings his caput forward, his arms urging on the rhythm during "Sunshine of Your Love". He wears a dark-brown leather jacket, and a scarf. Every bit the credits roll, he appears again, standing as others applaud, staring in awe. The same month, Rasle introduced him to a band chosen Uriel, who were named for an angel in Paradise Lost. At present a well-known face about town, Jellett used his contacts at Middle Earth to book them gigs.
The next month, he was filmed over again, at The Rolling Stones' "Rock and Roll Circus". He saw Cream's Eric Clapton once again, backing John Lennon. Jellett smiles and claps so hops from human foot to foot, wearing a striped, hippie shirt. He looks happy. Effectually this time, Uriel changed their proper noun, to Egg. Jellett told NME that he saw this as a portent, a sign, of a "nascence", a "commencement". He began to speak virtually the band and so much, some knew him as "The Egg Man". He told a story near The Crypt, a venue below a church building, where he saw a band called Babe. They featured a violinist, called Joseph, a carpenter. "Egg?" Jellett said, "Infant? Carpenter?"
It was probably the post-obit June, the day subsequently Jellett'southward twenty get-go altogether, at a Blind Faith gig in Hyde Park, that Jeff Dexter, the DJ from Middle Earth, looked out from the stage and saw Jellett dancing, spotting his long, flowing, white shirt. A cameraman filming the gig noticed him too. Photographs show Jellett'southward head bowed, having removed his shirt, with thousands seated effectually him, some on deck chairs. Blind Faith played "Presence of the Lord". Eric Clapton, who had been nicknamed "God", sang and played guitar. Through the microphone, possibly for the first time and certainly the about publicly, Dexter called Jellett "Jesus".
The next calendar month, Jellett was back in Hyde Park, for the "Stones in the Park" show, the weekend after watching Led Zeppelin play at the Bath Dejection festival. He saw Family, as he had dorsum in Southampton, back when his pilus was shorter and his dancing less free. When The Rolling Stones came onstage, Jellett was caught on film over again, with a few other dancers nearby. The month after, Jellett travelled to The Isle of Wight, dancing to Bob Dylan, waving to the people he knew in the crowd.
There was another gig at Hyde Park the side by side month, this time at the stage at the Speakers' Corner finish of the park. Filmed over again, Jellett is onstage, shoeless and dancing frantically, as The Deviants play. A woman tries to remove her flimsy clothes, before a Hell'southward Angel wraps his jacket around her shoulders. A pocket-size boy in shorts looks on. Later, during Soft Car'due south set, Jellett can exist seen beneath a speaker, his arms moving fluidly, before the drums first. Off phase now, on the far side of the security barrier, Jellett is lonely.
Dave Stewart, Egg'southward keyboardist, would after write that, by the dawn of the seventies, Jellett was no longer the "ex-Barnardo'southward child from Southampton whose real name was Bill Jellett" merely "naming himself (God knows why) later on the Messiah, e'er present, whirling like a dervish in his white kaftan and handing out nuts and berries to the audience". For Mick Farren, The Deviants' singer, Jellett was "known only every bit Jesus, ane of those freaks who seemed to exist in no other context except mass gatherings . Where he came from, where he went to afterwards and how he survived were a total mystery. He had no visible means of support, no by and no future."
"Tonight at that place volition exist one more thunderstorm and I volition know who I am in reincarnation," Jellett said, that St Valentine'southward Day in 1970, afterwards the revelation on the railroad train. He was looking out of the window of his flat, ane clean room in a dilapidated, terraced house in Shepherd's Bush. There was a church on the street, and the heaven was heavy again. The room was sparsely furnished, though he kept an one-time turntable. Over the side by side few years, he would pin up simple, abstruse paintings on the walls, alongside copies of unanswered letters he would ship to the media and politicians.
Jellett had one time shared the flat with Rasle. They seem non to have been together for long, but their separation clearly left its marking. In a "manifesto" that Jellett wrote in the early on seventies, and now available to read at the Great britain Stone Festivals website, he suggested that he hoped "there would exist no more than marriages, we would all live together and helping each other, there would be no more lonely people".
Jellett thought about how his life had changed, with his new life doing cleaning work, without Anna. He would oftentimes later preach about needing only enough money for his nuts and fruit, and his room. "Possessions and material things tin can merely complicate your life," he wrote. That solar day, he told 19, "I thought about the mode I was living — simply and naturally — as far as possible the style of the birds, fishes and animals, and I thought: information technology would exist cute to know if I was reincarnated."
He had commencement heard virtually reincarnation the previous week, from Brian Kitt, who he had known at Middle Earth. He told NME that, wearing long robes, Kitt had approached him in Holland Park, while he was playing bongos. Kitt had recently returned from India, he said, and had inverse his proper noun, later on receiving "spiritual knowledge". He used his apartment as the Uk base of the Divine Lite Mission, the organisation headed by Guru Maharaj Ji, a thirteen twelvemonth old Indian boy; "this boy is the reincarnation of Krishna, Buddha and Mohammed," Kitt said.
Lightning lit up Jellett's room. This was the sign he had wanted, that he had expected.
"I knew…," he said, "I knew and then that I was Jesus".
Jellett often showed people his stigmata, which he had picked and rubbed, leaving blisters. Some worried his change in personality had come nigh afterwards he was spiked, at a party, seeming "normal" one day, "Jesus" the side by side. Others suggested it had been a longer transformation. He had been a "veteran nutter" fifty-fifty at Middle Earth, some said. Some thought he had done too much acid, and so "got much worse".
Although he would subsequently preach that drugs "cloud our minds", Jellett seems to have experimented. "Almost half-dozen months agone," he wrote in his "manifesto", "I took the drug mescaline, and acid, to discover out myself what they are all well-nigh," believing they were "truth drugs". The devil, though, "knew who I was, and he told me that drugs are hither to disillusion man". His abstinence later became famous. "He was a trip in himself," ane friend remembers.
Music also contributed to Jellett's new identity, he said, his total embrace of the nickname he had been given at the hole-and-corner gigs. "Through music, films and theatre, spiritual revelation has come," he wrote in the "manifesto", "music has been used by God to open up up people to observe their true spiritual selves". There were hints that trauma had played its role likewise, for this ex-Barnado's, ex-Salvation Army kid finding Jesus. On a placard he carried in the seventies, he wrote that he was a "sensetive [sic] person who has been knowing that I am reincarnated for the terminal three years. If anyone does yous any harm it is because of lack of cocky-control or not knowing what they are doing". "Every bit soon as things get complicated I desire to go out," he told NME, "that's one of the reasons I left the planet before".
Equally the rain fell at Glastonbury Fayre in June 1971, Jellett sheltered in the "Jesus Tent", which had been set up past Christian evangelicals. When the dominicus came out, according to Jim Buck, who was next to him, his "face shone with calorie-free and dazzler", below the sheet. Buck was rocking slightly, coming off a "strongly religious, existential trip", he remembers. Jellett seemed at ease, and calmed him. He introduced himself as Jesus and said that his female parent had been Mary simply he had a "dissimilar mother" now. He was wearing what seemed to exist a cerise, patterned dress, and rows of beads. He held Buck's hands, and kissed him gently on the cheek. Buck felt reassured. "He was Jesus, as we all were," Buck says.
Clean-shaven and grinning, Jellett was captured on film at the festival, well-turned out with his blond hair and reddish robe. He wears the sandals he had made from a pair of black shoes, cut off the toes. Others seem dishevelled in comparison, every bit he jigs to Fairport Convention.
Afterwards, the film shows Jellett onstage himself, with a performer known as Magic Michael. They were often seen together at the clubs back in London. Naked from the waist downwardly, Michael shrieks "your body, your body," echoing the religious chanting that rang out around the festival. "Give thanks God, female parent, and I can be saved," he shouts. Less frantically, Jellett joins in, and plays his bongos. Dogs begin to bark. Some in the audience clap. Jellett looks tickled, and contented.
Arthur Brown also played that weekend, as did Family unit, and Guru Mahrahaj Ji preached from his throne. Others rolled in the mud, naked, equally children walked lonely. At the end of the festival, the organisers exploded three crosses beneath the stage, and the site seemed to be engulfed by flames. This was the freedom Jellett wanted. "I'm completely free of the forces man has created," he would say afterward, "which stop him from being himself".
Afterwards his revelation on the train, Jellett began to wear his robes more than often, often a white djellaba which he felt was accordingly biblical, "the same kind of clothes as I wore before," he told NME. Sometimes he pulled the hood over his head, to proceed off the rain. He ofttimes wore beads around his cervix, which he played with absent-mindedly when he talked he talked almost himself. Sometimes, at gigs, he took off his clothes, while dancing, and shook his tambourine or played his maracas.
He would often spend his Sundays at gigs at The Roundhouse. "The queue downwardly the steps outside started early," one regular remembers, "and Jesus was usually there, friendly and smiling, chatting to everyone and giving out nuts and raisins." Information technology was "like a benediction," she says. "He would work his style to a good spot for dancing, and just allow himself go, even if anybody else was sitting down. Sometimes he would strip off his dress down to his underpants, in the crusade of liberty of movement. He told me he loved Isadora Duncan and admired her for her free dance form. He seemed to think information technology was his bounden duty to trip the light fantastic toe and, of course, it was expected of him."
Looking for this "liberty of motion", he would sometimes become up on phase, with the band, often asking first. Gary Giles, bass player with Stray, remembers that "he was e'er very polite, a very gentle soul I think, the only thing nosotros would enquire of him was that he kept out of our way on phase when he was dancing about." "He was never very forthcoming on his own life when nosotros would ask him things," he says.
Jellett cut a mysterious, compelling effigy. "Usa hippie girls found this kind of boy attractive, skinny, hairless, boyish, gentle and fun," Sylvie Dupont, a regular at The Roundhouse, remembers. Other women were too shy to speak to him. One, who had danced next to him at Glastonbury, and had heard most him even before that, as a teenager in the suburbs, remembers that he made "a bee line for me" one nighttime. "He was very mannerly," she says, "he had a stiff charismatic quality, and I was persuaded to get back with him to his bedsit flat". She became, she says, "the nearest thing to a regular girlfriend he had throughout that menses".
Nevertheless, she says, he was often "eyeing upwards other girls, especially young, unattached, foreign ones… who were expendable". "This used to upset me, just I learnt to permit it get. It was how he was," she says. "There were plenty of other fish in the ocean for him," she remembers. "I realised that all that was part of the harm, i.east. no zipper, no commitment, nothing to make demands. He was a production of his rather distressing past", she says, and "of the times".
Writing on the "London in the 60s & 70s" Facebook grouping, some other woman remembers Jellett suggesting that "it would be good for my soul and well-being, that I should accept sex with him." Some other says that Jellett once woke her, ringing her doorbell, to say "that he at present knew that I was Mary Magdalene and so we must be together for always and do the work we were chosen to practise". Others, who had religious childhoods, felt they were existence sacrilegious when they slept with him.
"I used to become to Speakers' Corner with him as his Mary Magdalene," Sylvie Dupont remembers, "in a long green cape every Sunday." "He would always behave a purse of a mixture of nuts and raisins and offer some to random people," she says. These were his "miracles," Jellett told NME. He paid little attending to the other preachers and polemicists: the old men speaking nearly Christ, the homeless man talking about his sex life, the Irish nationalists and advocates of Black power. Hyde Park spread out earlier him.
"Nosotros got some funny looks," the "nearest thing to a regular girlfriend" remembers. She felt "bad-mannered and self-witting", simply Jellett "was confident and earnest, and genuinely believed in his mission. When he got to Speakers' Corner, his presence always drew a oversupply, and he would concord up his placards and rant. He often had to deal with heckling and ridicule, which he dealt with efficiently and without dismay. He could exist strident, and spoke speedily and sometimes shrill in his self-defense."
"I often felt embarrassed by him, or for him, and was sorry that he felt he had to make himself a target in this way," she says. "Still, he seemed to regard information technology every bit a sacred duty to go out and spread his word to the multitudes. I loved and admired his integrity. Even though he might be 'touched by madness', he was extremely charismatic and very special. He was a 'light-giver'. His conviction that he was actually Jesus reincarnated was something I could ignore, or at least turn a blind eye to. I never contradicted him, and nor did I encourage him. I but accepted him."
Property his placards aloft — iii feet loftier, all capitals, no punctuation — Jellett would stand on a red plastic milk crate, with his few friends around him. As he spoke, he would move from one foot to another. In his gentle, forthright voice, he preached against drugs, and for music, confronting eating meat or smoking. Sometimes he wore a Jimi Hendrix bluecoat, and would say that they were similar, and that the "wonderful" ideas of the original hippies had been lost over fourth dimension. Almost of the crowd would drift away. If a friend wandered past, he would say howdy, without breaking his stride.
His beliefs, similar his rapid fire oral communication, were hard to follow. He was sure he was Jesus merely, he told NME, "I don't believe in a God… I believe in The Universe, run across?" In his "manifesto", he explained that "nosotros are all sons and daughters of God," and should live more than similar the birds and animals and fishes. "We have been made out to be complicated — nosotros're non," he preached. "Nosotros must free ourselves from all that'due south been put into the states. We take no brain, but a mind".
"Past Speakers' Corner standards, he's non a good talker," the journalist from 19 suggested, "but he has a bearing, a dignity, an aura of innocence about him, which his rival orators lack. It'southward not and so much what he says that makes an impression, more what he is."
Being Jesus seemed to weigh heavily on Jellett. "I never wanted to be Jesus," he would often say, "but I realised I was". "All my life, I have wanted to alive the simple and natural way," he wrote in his "manifesto", "and e'er people tried to complicate my life". Despite the followers, he told NME that he was as a "loner". "I'd honey to become to Israel this Easter," he explained to 19, "I don't actually desire to spend another Easter here. Can you imagine how information technology feels?"
He frequently tried, and failed, to gain acceptance. "I went to churches. I went to meetings. I went to lectures and I was always ready to stand upwardly and tell people what I'd found out," he said. "And you know how they reacted towards me? 'Go away, y'all're interfering'. That really hurt me. I was merely trying to assistance them." He told NME that staff at the cleaning agency once tried to strip him to look for other marks, subsequently he showed them his stigmata.
Time and once again, he tried to interest the media in his message. He was turned away from the BBC, presumably at the same building where he had once worked. He went to the London offices of Rolling Stone so often, they called the police, seeking a "non-molestation" order. He told NME that he had once appeared on radio, where he was dismissed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. "Beau," the Archbishop plain said, "if you want to get a bulletin over you'll accept to get about it in another way."
Throughout this time, Jellett was increasingly visible at gigs. Watching the Incredible String Band, he danced on his seat, as the audience shouted "Jesus, we dear you". Sometimes, people would throw beer cans at him. He was "an easy target, in more ways than one," one gig goer remembers. He talked to women about cats, or walked down an aisle, handing out fruit and nuts, or exchanging grapes for front row tickets. At a pub in Ealing, someone recalled, he "jumped on stage and started singing 'I know it'southward simply stone and roll just I like information technology', before the Stones released song of said title."
At a Slade gig, in 1971, he banged his tambourine as they played "Know Who You Are". When the recording of the gig was released, as "Slade Alive", he was credited as "unknown fellow member of the audience". He watched New York Dolls in 1972, with the fashionable set, who disliked his robes. At a Frank Zappa gig in 1972, he stood to proclaim that "if y'all want to know the truth, listen to Jimi Hendrix". At another gig, "equally I started singing," 1 musician remembers "everyone began cheering and I thought it was considering of me. Then I realised it was considering 'Jesus' had arrived in the audience".
Jellett'south ubiquity led to attention in the press. In 1972, he was pictured prominently in Frendz mag, in his robe, ecstatic, so, wearing merely a pocket-sized pair of pants, grabbing Rob Tyner of The MC5. The xix magazine contour appeared in 1973, which focused on his preaching. The NME contour appeared in 1974, where he spoke virtually music, and his upbringing. In both, he told the story of the revelation on the train. Nevertheless, the NME journalist noted, "Jellett always flicks the safety catch off his Verbiage Gun whenever questions need a articulate-cut answer." Questions about "whether he's ever seen a psychiatrist, remain unanswered." Jellett was clearly witting of his paradigm. "I think the face and hair are the most important things," he said to the photographer, and made certain to show him the stigmata. The NME article carried a picture of Jellett naked, with a cross superimposed over his genitals.
After the magazine profiles, when he had become a kind of celebrity, some crowds would "phone call him past his real name — Nib — which seemed to upset him," one gig goer remembers. "He stood upwards to all sorts of jeering and shouts to 'sit downwardly'," another remembers, "happily 'idiot dancing' as plastic bottles of piss fell all around him." Footage shows him parading at the Notting Colina Carnival in 1973, with his bongos, marching similar his Salvation Army relatives earlier him. He went to Reading, and the pocket-size Welsh festivals, that were "awash with acid", another recalls.
In 1975, at Knebworth, Roy Harper noticed him dancing in the front of the stage, equally ever. "You lot still nearly, man?" Harper apparently asked. "Y'all're every bit played out every bit I am". At another festival, he removed his clothes, high-kicking as Hawkwind played. A young girl saturday beneath him. He was filmed dancing naked at a UFO gig, at The Roundhouse, clapping and waving his tambourine, facing the crowd. Once, at some other gig at The Roundhouse, when Jellett "was dancing starkers," a fellow attendee suggests, "a dog was trying to seize with teeth his willy". At a Queen gig in Hyde Park, he carried an upright vacuum cleaner. Some thought he was "vacuuming sins".
John Lydon remembers him from this era, as hippies began to fade, and before punk was born. "He'd strip naked, he had the smallest willy in the earth, and he didn't give a toss who looked," Lydon wrote, in "Anger Is An Energy". "I loved him for that. I thought, 'he doesn't care, and await, he's completely happy. He's got bongos which he doesn't know how to play, no sense of rhythm — none! — but a total sense of joy. He certainly wasn't what my mum and dad had in mind as Jesus. But his message was good."
Jellett's favourite venue in the mid-seventies was The Marquee. He had been going since the sixties — Anna Rasle had worked at a coffee shop farther forth Wardour Street — and stayed, for decades. He was conscious of his longevity, and his age, only seemed unfazed by it. "Names and ages are immaterial," he told NME, "but The Universe knows there is a organisation". "My favourite song is 'You lot Own't Seen Null Yet'," he said. "It sums it all up really."
"Jesus had a sure aura about him," Nigel Hutchings remembers, who managed the The Marquee from 1975 to 1986. "Every at present and then I would allow him in free as he was, I suppose, an allure in himself". "He visited The Marquee more than the cleaners," another regular remembers.
"Jesus had a rating arrangement," another recalls. "If the band were good he got his tambourine out, simply if the band were really good out came the maracas." He got upward on stage only with the best, he says, something Jellett was apparently very "strict about". "If he walked away (which I saw him do a couple of times)," another suggested, "the band might besides pack up and get dwelling."
Peter Egan, who worked in the bar betwixt 1975 and 1977, remembers that "a difficult stone band would naturally concenter a unlike fix of punters to say a folk band but that never bothered Jesus". "That particular time in the mid-seventies," he says, "the hippies for the most function were quietly discarding the afghan coats and flares, getting the haircut and becoming stockbrokers and manor agents. Jesus stayed true to his lifestyle. Oddly enough, I never knew the man'southward real proper name".
By now, Jellett seems to accept felt he could offer some kind of perspective on the music of the sixties. In 1976, backstage at a gig at Hammersmith Odeon, he met Neil Young. The come across was filmed, and afterward made it into Jim Jarmusch's "Year of The Horse" documentary. Jellett is calm and smiling, merely speaks urgently. He had written "universal" on his t-shirt, and drawn a middle underneath. He wears beads, and carries a tambourine, in forepart of a "no smoking" sign.
"San Francisco was, you know, the rebirth of the planet," Jellett tells Immature, "and if people knew the truth about how I lived my simple, lovely life in State of israel before and if they had known what actually happened in San Francisco…"
"In Israel?" Young replies.
"In State of israel, yes."
"Oh, I see."
"…considering 2000 years is just like yesterday, you lot know? Every 24-hour interval is a new solar day, living, working, loving, the universe, all over this planet, that'southward the style I alive my life."
"Well that'south great. Good luck to y'all."
Young glances at the camera, with half a grinning. "Hope you brand information technology this time. Last time was rough."
The aforementioned twelvemonth every bit the Neil Young gig, John Lydon was surprised to encounter Jellett at an early gig by The Sex Pistols. "I recall information technology was at the Marquee," he wrote, "when we were supporting Eddie and the Hot Rods — he was in that location! He looked completely different, he had a suit on, but he all the same had the aforementioned ludicrous hairdo, which was a very deep fringe and a long mullet at the back, and deathly blond". In Nils and Ray Stevenson'south "Vacant", there is a photograph of Jellett dancing blissfully at The Nashville Rooms, as Lydon sneers behind him, and backside him, Chrissie Hynde, later of The Pretenders, looks on.
Jellett saw so much live music, he couldn't miss punk: The Ramones, The Stranglers, Patti Smith, and Ian Dury. Bands that are now forgotten invited them to their gigs at less well-known venues, and were delighted when he arrived. Initially, according to writer Paul Gorman, punk crowds took to him well. "He was just another weirdo and most people had seen him before," he says.
After a while though, Jellett seemed to endure. At a gig at Crystal Palace, he was thrown in a lake by skinheads. According to punk musician Shanne Bradley, Shane McGowan once "pogoed off his shoulders". At a Lene Lovich gig, a pair of teenagers shouted at him, telling him to "become a wash", suggesting they would "kill the hippie". They stopped merely when someone pretended that Jellett was a friend of Mick Jones, from The Disharmonism. At a Stranglers gig, according to i who was there, he seemed "meaner" than before, "as if going forth with the fashion but he still danced downwardly the forepart". A story did the rounds that Sid Vicious once taunted him at a Sex Pistols gig, before Marco Pirroni, later on guitarist in Adam and The Ants, intervened, equally "the hippie would have slaughtered Sid".
Jellett had get a effigy of fun past then, as he turned 30. He often saw bands he had seen when he was twenty. At a Bob Dylan gig in 1978, one friend tried to avoid Jellett by hiding backside a parked auto, before his girlfriend, a "devout Catholic", offered him a lift home. "When we got to his apartment in Shepherd'due south Bush, he made tea, brought dates and figs for us to eat. Jayne then asked if he was famous, and what his proper noun was. When he replied 'Jesus,' she looked a little uneasy, just when he explained that he was "the" Jesus, and started some rap virtually my name, Peter, and something about a rock, and building something on it, the truth began to sink in, and she seemed to be in a hurry to go out". That year, he was seen "gradually divesting himself of his apparel" at Knebworth, and then again in the aforementioned spot in the next year, watching Led Zeppelin. Eddi Reader, after vocalizer with Fairground Allure, remembers rejecting his advances as she busked in Hyde Park.
Hippies became a thing of the by, and a source of nostalgia. At that place was a "Bohemian Beloved-In" at The Roundhouse, aimed at the erstwhile Centre Earth crowd. Melody Maker noted that "Jesus was at that place, of grade, announcing that Eternal Youth is the only cleaner".
Music had changed again. He saw Judas Priest , and Joy Division, and Ultravox, and the Yellow Magic Orchestra. "To us youngsters, he was like the final hippie standing," one gig goer remembers.
When John Lennon was murdered, in December 1980, Jellett went to run across a mod revival gig near his flat. A band came on, all dressed in blackness, in mourning. "He came up to us with some advice," the band's singer, Danny Holloway remembers, "'you shouldn't dress in matching dress'."
At some other gig, a couple of years subsequently, Jellett was pictured dancing in the rain. "The weather was patchy, and people were sheltering where they could during showers, just in that location was Jesus in his brightly-coloured shorts and nothing else, shaking his maracas," the photographer remembers. He wore real sandals, rather than the bootleg version he had worn for years before. There is what one gig goer remembered equally "a bald halo on the crown of his head". He is solitary, again.
Jellett still oftentimes appeared on phase — his penny whistle can be heard on the bonus rails from Stray'southward "Live At The Marquee" recorded in 1983. At the aforementioned venue, Phil "Philthy" Taylor, the drummer from Motorhead, apparently punched him off the phase, for refusing to stop playing the bongos. As he savage, the crowd stepped bated. Minutes later, he reappeared, dancing.
Jellett barely slowed down equally the eighties went on. In 1985, at an "Anti-Heroin" gig, he watched Hawkwind share a bill with Vera Lynn. In footage from a 1986 Dr & The Medics gig, he waves a banner in the audience: "nature is a friend". His shirt is unbuttoned. The residuum of the audience, ten or fifteen years younger than him, wear hippie-ish apparel, back in fashion, and their hair is long. Near appear unmoved. Some dance, though more than muted than Jellett. Other footage from the time shows him wandering aimlessly betwixt songs, still at The Marquee, and hopping and banging his tambourine equally the ring start to play.
By the early nineties, he was an establishment; he had been going to The Marquee for longer than some of those in the audience had lived for. One nighttime, the DJ announced that Jellett had sent his apologies, as he would be absent-minded for a while, due to an ingrowing toenail. Some bands felt "blessed" when he danced with them onstage, such was his renown. When The Marquee closed in 1988, and re-opened in Charing Cantankerous, Jellett went also. Having turned 40, he avoided the mosh pit at a Sepultura gig. He yet went to Speakers' Corner, sometimes talking about the significance of the Blueish Oyster Cult symbol, the "cross with the question mark".
In footage from a Concluding of The Teenage Idols gig from this time, he tin can exist seen on stage, shaking his tambourine. He wears a hat, covering his bald head. The band'south singer, Paul Mulvey, also known as Buttz, remembers that "he kind of followed us for a while". "I travelled to one of our shows with him on a tube. He was arguing with someone that had pushed into him, and now he was going to make it rain on their business firm for 'years'," he says, "I was too scared to pass up him stage access, in case he plagued the tour with locusts and shit." In 1992, the twelvemonth Jellett'southward mother died, he was seen at a "pagan stone" gig, and at a gig wearing a shirt on which he had written "one music peoples energy universe". At another, he jumped on stage, when the ring covered "Sympathy For The Devil".
There were a few more"sightings": on Oxford Street, waving; preaching at Speakers' Corner; at a festival, making the audience feeling nostalgic; at demonstrations against the Criminal Justice Beak, which targeted "repetitive beats", where he danced, and shouted "drugs destroy your minds".
And then, he stopped going to gigs.
He disappeared.
"My name is William and I was 52 on June the 6th," Jellett wrote in a flyer he distributed at Speakers' Corner, in 2000. He tried to explicate his absence from gigs for much of the nineties, and to reassert his longevity. Closely written, in capitals, and riddled with spelling mistakes and contortions, it seems different even to his writing in the seventies. It is bitterly sad. "I stay in my flat for 10 years I lookout the televition and mind to the radio I stop to trip the light fantastic play music and so Oasis single came out Let Information technology Out," he wrote. "So I came out and started to dance and play music again and the weather condition change for the improve. Then I knew the soul was working again… I am living my life on this planet the same equally I did in the summer 1970 when I was first made aware I had the same soul as Jesus."
He still saw significance everywhere. "I was the piper at the gates of dawn. Pink Floyd. I was the piper in the stairway to heaven. Led Zeppelin… Purple is for hurting or rein. Red is for honey or danger. Bluish is for true. Green is for grow or grown. Black is for the end. Brown is for the Earth. Yellow is for the Sun. Orange is for nature. White is for peace." Marble Arch, which he could see from where he preached, became "Marble (Stone) Arch".
Those who saw him at Speakers' Corner at this time remember he had pictures of Queen album covers, and wore one knitted glove, which he said was a "sign". "He told us had informed Scotland Yard and the BBC almost his deity condition," one recalls.
Just as of a sudden as he had stopped, he began to go to gigs once more, ofttimes bands that he had seen in his youth: Rex Red, Van Der Graaf Generator, Magma. In 2003, someone thought they saw him at Glastonbury, "looking very sparse and bony. His hands looked skeletal." In 2004, he went to a Stray gig, for the first fourth dimension in years. Jeff Dexter, the DJ from Centre Earth, saw him "when there was an effort to re-launch La Discotheque bounds on Wardour Street as a new rock venue. I passed him on the stairs on my arrival, as he was leaving to go dwelling house. I chatted with him, inquiring if he was however 'idiot dancing'". Jellett rolled up his trouser leg, and showed Dexter his varicose veins.
He did though find a new venue to call home. "He reappeared at the Royal Standard, Walthamstow, still with his maracas," John Mills, a regular there, remembers. There were boxing of the bands nights, and tribute bands to Yes and Led Zeppelin. "He was very polite and clean. And looked younger than I expected," Mills says. Some in the crowds suggested avoiding drugs and alcohol had kept him young.
I night, Mills says, "on the tube, subsequently a gig he declared to the whole carriage that he was the reincarnation of John Lennon, Bob Marley and David Bowie, so giggled when he realised that David Bowie was yet alive." Some on the tube were interested, but virtually ignored him. Once, according to some other regular, "he got chucked out by security, for jumping up on stage with his tambourine, while the band were playing." "LOL," he typed, on Facebook.
The last known photo of Jellett was taken in the summer of 2004. He was backstage at a gig by Dumpy's Rusty Nuts, at The Underworld. He had seen them a lot back in The Marquee days; the band used to end, mid-song, to point out that he was in the audience. Now, Jellett's hair was white, still long down the sides, and completely bald on top. He wore florescent dress, and fabricated the peace sign, beaming. He gave Dumpy i of his ambiguous pamphlets. It was a nostalgic night. Jellett was a "smash from the past," 1 fan remembered. Another suggested that "seeing Jesus again made the evening complete".
Few saw Jellett after that. He went to The Royal Standard a trivial more than, until 2005 or 2006. Shanne Bradley saw him at a gig in about 2005, where she chatted to him. "He knew all about what Shane [McGowan] and I had been up to," she recalled, online. Someone thought they say him at a Cardiacs gig. "He seemed quite delicate," 1 audition member said. "He had a stick and was beingness supported by a couple of friends coming down the stairs from the balcony at the end of the night."
He was occasionally seen effectually w London. "He was in a bad way," one person suggested on Facebook, "I didn't even recognise him, merely last I saw him (in the park) he was a lot improve." He may take been at another Stray gig, in 2011, or watching Lynyrd Skynyrd. Another thought they saw him at the Jazz Café. So, the sightings stopped.
He had disappeared, again.
In Jellett'south absence, stories began to circulate online. "Seems every Facebook group I'm in is turning up photos of Jesus at the moment," one person commented on a grouping dedicated to memories of The Marquee. "I wouldn't exist surprised if he's remembered simply as well equally some of the bands we all supported," someone said. "He's a star here," another posted, on the "London in the 60s & 70s" group. "I've certainly seen more than comments about this guy than any other 'civilian' on Facebook over the last few years," Nick Butt wrote on the Eye Earth group, "maybe he actually is a deity." "If he is still around, or resurrected, I practise hope he enjoys his fame — I call up he is pretty universally liked," another said, on the "Golden Shock of Free Festivals" group. Others complained that he used to block their view, or they joked almost his nudity. One said he used to "give me the creeps".
"I wonder if he's nevertheless alive," people said, or "still with united states". "It would exist great to find out if he still exists," ane wrote. For consecutive generations, he became a symbol of their youth, and the gigs they used to go to, an image of a lost era. In 1999, The Chemical Brothers based their "Surrender" artwork on a 1976 photo of Jellett; in 2002, an earlier motion-picture show of Jellett at Hyde Park, playing bongos labelled "peace" and "honey", was used on the cover of a volume, "Evolving Perspectives on the History of Psychology".
Many commenters recounted Jellett'due south "disappearances", the times they final saw him. Although he had certainly stopped going to gigs for a while in the nineties, and again more recently, information technology seemed that he also "disappeared" every time someone stopped going to gigs themselves: they said they hadn't seen him since 1971, 1977, the mid-eighties, the early nineties, the outset years of the twenty first century. "He brightened upward the trip for me and many," 1 wrote.
In that location was speculation about his real proper name. Some idea it was Eric, or John, or Thomas, or Geoff. More than 1 person swore that he had told them his name was Clive. The "girlfriend" recalled him joking almost the name "Beak", paying for lunch once, though she remembered he never "related" to it. She worried almost him. "A weird fish indeed, charming and charismatic but delusional, severely damaged and somewhat vulnerable," she said.
The 2004 photograph from the Dumpy's Rusty Basics show was shared widely: "Jesus lives," people commented. Some suggested information technology had been taken at Nottingham'due south Stone City venue, which gave rising to rumours that he had moved to the Midlands, perchance having settled down. Others said he had moved to Goa, or Australia, or Cornwall, or "another hippie stronghold". When someone discovered a 2002 funeral detect for Jellett's father, too chosen William, there was speculation that Jellett had died. One person said he had heard "he got stabbed outside The Roundhouse and died years ago". When the Damned played their 35th ceremony show in that location, in 2011, Captain Sensible pointed towards the spot where Jellett used to stand. "I believe in Jesus," he said. "He used to live here." "Yous'll have to Google him, it's truthful."
Those who had known him best speculated near why he wasn't online. "He did not bulldoze, have a television or radio, just a portable tape actor, and was very anti –technology," the "girlfriend" said. Some worried about what he would make of the attending at present, simply she idea he may similar it. "Knowing him, and my friend, an ex-roadie who knew him also in the seventies agrees, he may well be flattered. He is a fleck of a narcissist. But he likewise does not realise when he is being used or people are taking the piss."
Somewhere in London, farther out of town than Shepherd'southward Bush, there is a squat, angular building, built at the end of the twentieth century. It is advertised as "extra care housing", "sheltered adaptation", "a way of supporting older people to maintain their independence". Hymns sometimes drift over from the church building next door. Occasionally, staff organise trips to "interesting places", like Hyde Park.
Jellett has lived hither since 2013. He was sixty five when he moved, younger than many of the other residents. He had been living in the area for years, probably in the nineties, when he stopped going to gigs. For a while, he was a regular at a record shop nearby, before information technology closed down.
Under the care of the home's staff, Jellett lives alone. He speaks to his family, back in Poole, only infrequently, though they worry about his wellness. He has non been seen at gigs since his move. Attempts to contact him via the home's management prove unsuccessful. This summer, he will turn lxx, no longer "omnipresent", though still a "mystery".
Epilogue: in January 2021, a friend of William Jellett'south brother posted the following message to Facebook, which was presently picked up on nostalgic groups, by those who remembered Jellett:
"William Jellett was born on the 6th June 1948, Poole, Dorset, the youngest of four children. I am his brother and the eldest. I have not seen him for quite a while but one of my sisters has remained in contact with him. He has e'er remained in the London area just over the last few years he has not enjoyed the all-time of health. Recently, the decline was rapid.
Final Friday, my sister phoned to tell me that at one o'clock that forenoon, the 8th January 2021, William died peacefully in his slumber in a London hospital. Hope this clears upwardly some of the confusion as to who he was.
He will exist cremated and the family unit promise his ashes will be scattered at his favourite identify, Speakers' Corner."
You tin can read more stories past J.P. Robinson here.
Fanatics and Collectors, a drove of truthful stories near music by J.P. Robinson, is bachelor now via Few Press.
Twitter: @MrJPRobinson
millerseentrusels.blogspot.com
Source: https://jprobinson.medium.com/the-mystery-of-jesus-the-naked-hippie-dancer-9822c0da8765
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