John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins who has died aged 77 was one of the key figures of the 1960s countercultural scene in London and pivotal in the establishment of the Notting Hill Carnival. Here his friend the poet Michael Horovitz remembers him. 

One thing that struck me on first befriending Hoppy around Oxford’s late 1950s boho/beatnik/ban-the-bomb circles was his resemblance to Adam in Michelangelo’s ‘God Creating Adam’ – in soulfulness as well as beauty of face and physique. He often warmed our growing communities with lyrical bursts of blues and boogie-woogie piano playing. When a few years later he got going as a photographer, these spiritual and musical qualities were reflected in the pictures he produced of such comrades in dedication and defiance as Louis Armstrong, Bertrand Russell, Martin Luther King, Allen Ginsberg, Ornette Coleman, the Beatles and Stones, Marianne Faithfull, et al. He was a fireball of energies around our First International Poetry Incarnation that filled Albert Hall (filmed by Peter Whitehead as ‘Wholly Communion’) to overflowing in the summer of 1965.

It is quite probable that without his input, this ground-breaking megagig might not have attracted such a full house. The anthology of reproductions from his main phase as a photographer from 1960-66, ‘From the Hip’ (Damiani 2008) closes with an eloquent personal note from the Hop. Its last sentences are characteristic of this irreplaceable pioneer of the continuing peace movement and counter-culture: “Certain of the images from this brief period have now become iconic (recognised). Many more have not been seen before and are therefore perhaps more free from the historical accumulation of meaning – at least for a little while. Then, word falling/ image falling/ lost in a dusty street half-covered in sand/ the skein unravels/ dust to dust. Meanwhile, in the Riviera sunset of the old order, the world has gone digital, old technologies have become art, and the global image bank is available to all humankind to remix, creating undreamt-of delights. Artists of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your intellectual property.”

John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins born August 15 1937, died January 30 2015.