The UFO Club (pronounced "you-foe") was a short-lived part of the British counter-culture scene in London during the 1960s. The club was established by Joe Boyd and John Hopkins and featured light shows, poetry readings, well-known rock acts such as Jimi Hendrix, avant-garde art by Yoko Ono, as well as local house bands such as Pink Floyd, and Soft Machine.
The UFO Club was founded by John Hopkins (usually known as "Hoppy") and Joe Boyd in an Irish dancehall called the "Blarney Club" in the basement of 31 Tottenham Court Road, under the Gala Berkeley Cinema. It opened on 23 December 1966. Initially the club was advertised as "UFO Presents Nite Tripper". This had been because Boyd and Hopkins could not decide on "UFO" or "Nite Tripper" as a name for their club. Eventually they settled on "UFO".
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Links to Peel
In an interview with Red Bull Academy in April 1999, he spoke about his memories of the UFO Club:
"The only time I took acid deliberately was at UFO because I felt I was kind of safe and I’d be kind of okay. It wasn’t like clubbing these days. Rather than dancing around, you... obviously some people danced about in a fairly idiotic manner… but mostly you just lay on the floor and passed out really. [laughter] It sounds like fun, doesn’t it? It was okay. You’d get people like the Soft Machine and Arthur Brown, Pink Floyd and so on playing there. I think anybody, at any stage of their life, it’s important for them, particularly if they come from a solitary background, it’s quite nice to go somewhere where you feel that the other people there have essentially the same interests as you do. That’s what I felt about UFO." [1]
In the same interview he mentioned not remembering whether he did gigs there.