Jeff Nuttall | |
---|---|
Born |
Jeffrey Addison Nuttall 8 July 1933 Clitheroe, Lancashire, England |
Died | 4 January 2004 Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales |
(aged 70)
Occupation | Poet Publisher Actor Painter Sculptor Jazz trumpeter Anarchist sympathiser Social commentator |
Jeffrey Addison "Jeff" Nuttall (8 July 1933 – 4 January 2004) was an English poet, publisher, actor, painter, sculptor, jazz trumpeter, anarchist sympathiser and social commentator who was a key part of the British 1960s counter-culture. He was the brother of literary critic A. D. Nuttall.
Nuttall was born in Clitheroe, Lancashire, and grew up in Herefordshire. He studied painting in the years after the Second World War and began publishing poetry in the early 1960s. Together with Bob Cobbing, he founded the influential Writers Forum press and writers' workshop.
He also associated with many of the American beat generation writers, especially William Burroughs. Nuttall's self-published My Own Mag mimeographed newsletter provided Burroughs with an important outlet for his experimental literature in the early 1960s.
In 1966 he was one of the founders of the People Show, an early and long-lasting performance art group and was involved in the founding of the UK underground newspaper International Times. In 1967 two of his illustrations appeared in the counter-cultural tabloid newspaper The Last Times (Volume 1, number 1, Fall 1967) published by Charles Plymell.
His book Bomb Culture (1968) was one of the key texts of the countercultural revolution of the time, a work which drew links between the emergence of alternatives to mainstream societal norms and the threatening backdrop of potential nuclear annihilation. Nuttall was one of the pioneers of the happening in Britain.