Underground : The London Alternative Press 1966-74

Nigel Fountain's Underground: The London Alternative Press, 1966-1974 is the most comprehensive survey of the alternative newspapers and magazines that sprang up in the UK following the emergence of the New Journalism.

Cultural and political movements coalesced and polemicized in papers and magazines, providing the backbone of the counter culture. Its exponents were poets, artists, activists, hustlers, mystics, post-Beat and rock freaks, drawn from Britain, Europe, Australia and the United States. In telling the story of the emergence – and (in most cases) demise – of such important and influential publications as It, Oz, Black Dwarf, Spare Rib, Time Out and others, Underground holds up a mirror to the times, and in so doing reminds us that hard-fought-for liberties are never given for free, or without a cost.

Police raids, busts and court cases, farce and tragedy, spectacular successes and miserable failures all are present in an important work that travels from the first stirrings of a counter culture in the 1950s through to its demise in the late 1970s.

In this updated version of a sought-after book long unavailable, Nigel Fountain adds in a new foreword, reflecting on the original book, the book’s subject, and the relevance of the underground in a digital age.

‘The story of a generation well summed up by its publications. It’s all here. It, the trials of Oz, the impact of feminism and, most of all, the sense of possibility.’

The Observer

‘An insider’s account, and …as definitive an account as we are likely to get, written by someone who still gives every impression of being the last reporter to leave if and when the remaining buildings and institutions of London’s counter culture finally get bombed into the rubble….’

Ken Worpole, City Limits