Lee Harris (born 1936), is a South African writer, musician, and activist who has lived and worked primarily in the United Kingdom since 1956.
He was one of the few white members of the African National Congress, where he helped with the Congress of the People and met Nelson Mandela. After moving to England at the age of 20, he acted with Orson Welles and Dame Flora Robson. He wrote for the British underground press, including International Times, and he helped found the Arts Lab. Harris has been an instrumental figure in the British counterculture movement since the 1970s. He published Brainstorm Comix and Home Grown magazines in the 1970s.
Biography
Harris was born in 1936 in Johannesburg, South Africa to immigrant Lithuanian Jewish parents. As a youth, he was one of relatively few whites in the society to join the African National Congress, opposing racial segregation at the time when the apartheid system was being enforced by the National Party, which had come to power in 1948. Harris helped with arrangements for the Congress of the People gathering in the summer of 1955, held at Kliptown, Soweto. The crowd of thousands was surrounded by two hundred armed police.
London
Harris moved to London, England, in 1956, at the age of twenty. He studied acting at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1960, he got a role in the Orson Welles adaptation of Shakespeare's Chimes at Midnight, in which Welles both acted and directed. Harris also worked with Dame Flora Robson, understudying the lead and playing a small part in The Corn Is Green.
He later began writing plays. He described his first full-length play, Love Play, as "A boy's journey through the underworld of emotional revelation". The play was awarded an Arts Council bursary in 1966. It was performed at the Arts Lab, which Harris helped found in Drury Lane in 1967 with counterculture figures Jim Haynes and J. Henry Moore. John Peter's review in the Sunday Times stated, "Lee Harris's Love Play ... might have been inspired by some of Artaud's equivocal, visionary phrases: The theatre as 'The truthful precipitate of dreams'; 'The human body raised to the dignity of signs'."
During his time at the Arts Lab, Lee worked as a makeup artist for musician Frank Zappa and traveled on tour with folk rock group the Fugs.
Also during this time, Harris wrote articles and reviews for many underground publications, such as International Times, Oz, and Frendz. His work included an interview with San Francisco beat poet Michael McClure. In IT issue 52, Harris reported on a new play by Jane Arden at the Arts Lab.
Alchemy
In 1972, Harris opened a shop on Portobello Road, London, called the Alchemy Culture Shop—named after John Lennon and Yoko Ono's The Alchemical Wedding. The shop sells items such as incense, postcards, smoking accessories, and vaporisers. It was a gathering point for alternative Londoners at least through 2016.
In 1990, Harris was sentenced to three months imprisonment for selling items such as cigarette papers and pipes "believed to be used for the smoking of cannabis". The sentence was quashed on appeal.
Brainstorm Comix
In 1972, Harris met comics creator Bryan Talbot. After reading his work, Harris decided to publish Talbot's first project, following a protagonist known as Chester P. Hackenbush on his psychedelic cerebral journey. Brainstorm Comix, debuting in 1975 (under Harris' imprint Alchemy Publications), was ostensibly an underground comix anthology, but the Hackenbush story dominated the first few issues.
The fifth issue of Brainstorm, released in 1977 and titled Brainstorm Fantasy Comix, went in a new direction. It included work by Brian Bolland, Hunt Emerson, Angus McKie, and the first published work by John Higgins. Brainstorm ultimately published six issues, with the last one coming out in the summer of 1978.
Brainstorm Comix was nominated for an Eagle Award in 1977 for Favorite Professional British Comic Publication. The series is regarded as one of Britain's "landmark underground publications" and has been called one of the country's "landmark comic book series" overall.
Harris republished the Chester P. Hackenbush trilogy in one volume in 1982. He published a third edition in 1999, titled Bryan Talbot's Brainstorm: The Complete Chester P. Hackenbush and Other Underground Classics. Talbot, meanwhile, became a renowned graphic novelist, creator of such stories as The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, The Tale of One Bad Rat, and Grandville.
Brainstorm editor Mal Burns went on to launch the alternative comics anthology Graphixus and edited another notable comics anthology, Pssst!."