Williams spray-painted graffiti on the walls of Buckingham Palace as a protest against the Queen signing Michael X's death warrant while there was no capital punishment in the UK. In the early 1970s, his agitational graffiti were a feature on the walls of the then low-rent end of London's Notting Hill district. The final paragraph of Williams' New York Times obituary summed up his philosophy: "If poetry isn't revolutionary, it's nothing," he told Saira Viola from the web publication Gonzo Today in 2015. "Poetry is heightened language, and language exists to effect change, not to be a tranquilizer." Early life and career John Henley Heathcote-Williams was born in Helsby, Cheshire. After his schooldays at Eton, he changed his name to Heathcote Williams. His father, Harold Heathcote-Williams, was a barrister (appointed Queen's Counsel) and his mother, (Margaret) Julian (née Henley) a clergyman's daughter. His first book was The Speakers (1964), an account of life at Speakers' Corner in London's Hyde Park, written when he was just 22 years old. The Speakers attracted enthusiastic reviews, with Harold Pinter describing it as "brilliant... a remarkable achievement and very, very funny". In 1974, it was adapted for the stage by the Joint Stock Theatre Company. His first full-length play, AC/DC (1970), first staged at the Royal Court Theatre, is a critique of the burgeoning mental health industry; it includes a thinly veiled attack on 1960s alternative society, and the proponent of the anti-psychiatry movement, R.D. Laing. Its production did not, however, appear to impede cordial relations between the two men in later years. AC/DC won the London Evening Standards Most Promising Play Award. It also received the 1972 John Whiting Award for being "a new and distinctive development in dramatic writing with particular relevance to contemporary society." It was described in the Times Literary Supplement in a front-page review by Charles Marowitz as "the first play of the 21st century." AC/DC was produced in New York City in 1971 at the Chelsea Theater Center at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Other plays include the one-act monologue Hancock's Last Half Hour, The Local Stigmatic, The Immortalist and the impossible to categorise Remember The Truth Dentist – an early effort, again at the Royal Court, directed by Ken Campbell. The inaugural issue of the London Review of Books included an effusive profile by fellow Etonian Francis Wyndham titled The Magic of Heathcote Williams. Poetry Williams had