Haven’t had any Saint Etienne here for, oh, at least a couple of weeks. This was their first single (but you knew that) with a terrific video that screams “late 80s/early 90s London” to me with its collision of a trippy, happy Second Summer of Love vibe with twee Indie — not to mention the football shirts. It’s odd seeing Pete and Bob without Sarah Cracknell in front of them but that Moira Lambert was pretty cute too.
This is wonderful, and a great document of when the King’s Road was an exciting (and a little scary) place to be. When Ann Wobble says “There’s me!” and the camera zooms in on her younger self I found it quite touching too, you can feel the glow of youth reaching across the years. I’m the same age as her and if I saw film of myself from that year I think I’d be more cringing than delighted.
I really love this London A-Z style “Song Map” poster, it’s a brilliant idea and looks great too. A bit late now to buy it as a Christmas present for someone so just get one for yourself, I know I will.
The London A-Z is the one guide book that even natives of the city own (or at least they did before the invention of Google Maps) and I’ve always loved its visual style, it says “London” to me just as much as the Tube map does. I have an old hardback colour A-Z from the 1960s that used to belong to my Dad and I think it’s as beautiful as any art book I’ve got.
This song is on there, head left on The 59th Street Bridge Song, right on Desolation Row, and it’s the first left.
This is a rendering of what Zone One of the London Underground map would look like if it was geographically accurate (the whole thing is here). It’s not a new idea, the original Tube maps were done this way but the system had fewer lines back then and looking at the messy spaghetti above makes me appreciate the brilliance of Harry Beck‘s famous 1931 map even more.
Beck was an electrical draughtsman who based his map on circuit diagrams and his genius decision to ignore above-ground reality and strip it down to its need-to-know basics influenced the maps of almost everysubway/metro/undergroundsystem in the world. If you held a gun to my head and forced me to choose the single greatest piece of graphic design ever (but why would you do such a thing?) I’d probably choose that.
The design of the map has evolved over the years (and inspired several differentinterpretations) as the Tube system has got bigger and more complex, my personal favourite version is the 1986 map because it symbolizes my travels around the city during the time when I felt that London really did belong to me and I was taking full advantage of all it had to offer, especially at night. I should have a poster of this on my wall with the title “Good Times 1986-1992″ underneath.
One criticism of the Tube map is that it distorts the actual locations of some places in the city and the distances between them. Tourists can emerge from a station having no clue where they are or that they could have more easily and quickly have walked to get where they wanted to be — Leicester Square to Covent Garden for example. But I don’t care about the bloody tourists — serves them right for standing in the way everywhere — one of the best things about being a native of a big city is the feeling that you have some secret knowledge not available to outsiders (like where to get a drink after 11pm) and while Harry Beck might have brought logical order to the city’s unfathomable sprawl, London does not reveal all its beautiful complexity that easily.
We’ve had a bit of a savage heatwave here in the States recently and the temperature where I am reached a sweltering, Betty Swollocks 100F a couple of weeks ago (that’s 37C to you Eurotrash.) Someone asked me if it ever got that hot in London and while I don’t ever remember triple-digit heat in the city myself apparently it did hit a record-breaking 102F in the capital one day in 2003 which must have turned our non-air-conditioned Tube trains into even more fetid cauldrons of sweat and BO than usual.
Ask any Brit of a certain age about hot weather and chances are the first thing they’ll mention is the summer of 1976 which for many of us is still the touchstone for memorably scorching weather. There have been baking hot summers since but none that went on so long with so little rain (it was the driest year since records began in 1772) and caused such bad water shortages that some people had to get theirs by filling buckets from standpipes in the street.
I turned 14 that summer and in photos I have a nice dark tan, but my strongest memory of the time doesn’t involve sun-kissed days playing outside or carefree adventures around London (though I’m sure there was a lot of that), but instead the one thing that has stuck in my mind was an episode of Blue Peter that was all about tips for conserving water and John Noakes said we should turn the tap off when brushing our teeth instead of letting it run. Ever since then I’ve always turned the tap off. Thanks John!
Of course no one had heard the phrase “global warming” in the 70s — in fact the big scare at the time was the chance of another Ice Age — and apparently skin cancer didn’t exist either because we didn’t cover ourselves in SPF +100 before we went outside. No, it was a quick lube on the face and shoulders with Boot’s suncream and if we got sunburned (and I did, a lot) mum would cool our skin down with some cold Calomine Lotion straight from the fridge. So it’s no wonder the summer of 1976 seems so idyllic and perfect in our memories, hot weather didn’t fill us with feelings of impending doom back then.
“Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” was number one all that summer but I don’t think we need to hear that again, do we?
This is the 1985 remix version of “London Town” which isn’t as good as the original but it’s still a sublime ode to the greatest city in the world. Not sure about those backing singers though, they look like they’ve wandered in from Brotherhood of Man or something.
The sentimental musings of an ageing expat in words, music, and pictures. Mp3 files are up for a limited time so drink them while they're hot.
Contact me: lee at londonlee dot com
