| AdminHistory | Born in 1933 in Clitheroe, Lancashire, Jeff Nuttall was an artist, poet, horn player, art critic, social historian, novelist, publisher, editor, actor, dramatist and teacher. He was a central figure in the group of poets and artists of the late fifties and the sixties which included Brian Patten, Roger McGough, Adrian Henri, Michael Horovitz and Tom Pickard. Jeff Nuttall made a wide ranging contribution to contemporary culture, from founding the People Show troupe of performance artists to editing My Own Mag and from his influential role as art teacher to his support for CND. Jeff Nuttall is also known as the author of Bomb Culture (1968), which explores the British counter-cultural scene in the years just before the hippies and psychedelia. He was the author of more than 40 books of poems, play scripts, memoirs, art criticism and social commentary. Nuttall was a regular contributor to International Times in its early days. Nuttall was also a ground-breaking performance artist and later appeared in a number of major commercial films and television series, from Emmerdale to Robin Hood. In 1975, Jeff Nuttall became chair of the National Poetry Society and was the Poets Conference nominee for Poet Laureate. During the early 1980s he was head of Fine Art at Liverpool Polytechnic, now Liverpool John Moores University.
My Own Mag was one of the most significant of the British ‘mimeo revolution’ magazines of the early and mid-sixties. The magazine was a precursor of the underground press and embodied many of the ideas which grew prominence in the latter part of the decade. It was playful, confrontational, erotic, political, and anti-war. It challenged the norm in presentation and readability. For example, sometimes Nuttall would cut a hole in the middle of an article, which even the later psychedelic magazines never did. It represented the non-Trocchi side of Sigma. Trocchi himself made only one appearance though many of the people surrounding Sigma were featured. Nuttall’s own Stigma installation at Better Books was featured and Sigma itself was discussed editorially. It introduced the British avant garde to Burroughs latest thoughts and experiments: cut-ups, experiments in format, and three column newspaper layouts and grids. Nuttall then often used these ideas in his imaginative layout of other contributors’ work as well as his own. With the exception of his paid-for column in Mayfair magazine, Burroughs had more pieces in My Own Mag than in any other magazine (32 appearances over 11 issues). Among the many other contributors of note in My Own Mag are: Martin Bax (1); Bill Butler (4); Robert Creeley (1); Allen Ginsberg (1); B.S.Johnson (3); John Latham (1); George Macbeth (1); Charles Marowitz (1); Tom McGrath (6); Miles (1!); Brian Patten (11); Alexander Trocchi (1); and Jeff Nuttall himself (81). In later issues, Burroughs’ contributions attracted members of the international cut-up movement and he began publishing work by Claude Pelieu and Carl Weissner, their first appearances in Britain.
In every issue Nuttall provided hand lettering, drawings, cartoons, his cartoon strip “Perfume Jack” and perhaps, at this stage of his career, he saw himself more as an artist than as a writer as each issue is like an Artist’s Book, with carefully selected paper colours contrasted against each other by the use of different paper sizes or by treatment of the paper by burning, slashing, pouring coloured dye over it, stapling additional small magazines to it, tipping in pages from other, usually pre-war, magazines or, in one issue, by cutting the pages into eight differently coloured sections and stapling them onto the back of the magazine. Mimeo is totally unsympathetic to drawing and cross hatching is impossible as it tears the skin, so Nuttall devised an entirely new way of drawing and lettering for the mag for the hundreds of drawings he included in it. He drew cartoons, hand lettered articles and made mimeo his own medium. |
| CustodialHistory | The collection was purchased by LJMU Special Collections & Archives in 2010. |