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.
If you have a copy of the terrific photo book London Through A Lens turn to page 199 where you’ll find the above picture titled “Roll’s-Royce at the Hilton” taken in 1965 with a caption that describes it as “the perfect image of urban glamour and sophistication in 1960s London”. Which it is, but besides being a great photo what makes it special to me (and gave me quite a nice surprise when I first looked through the book) is that the man in the top hat is my grandfather.
He was a doorman at The Hilton (and then The Dorchester) in the 60s and 70s and I imagine that working the door at such a swanky, jet-setter hotel during the height of Swinging London he must have seen and met a lot of the beautiful people of the era. Unfortunately I don’t have any stories about that or if I did I’ve forgotten them, and back then I wouldn’t have cared anyway unless he told me Captain Scarlet had stayed the night. That salute he’s giving reminds me that another thing I never knew much about was his military service. I knew he’d been in the Navy on a submarine during WWII (which seems to have been about the toughest job a sailor could have ) but his generation never talked about that and, to be honest, my generation never asked either. Besides I reckon he’d rather play golf than talk about that stuff anyway, the only hint that he might have had another, more serious, life in the past was the faded tattoos of anchors on his forearms. But I never could quite square those and what they implied with the warm, happy man who used to give me 50p to wash his Ford Capri at the weekends.
As is often the case by the time I was old enough to think that maybe my grandad did have some interesting stories to tell he had passed away, having a heart attack while playing golf in the early 80s. At least he went doing something he loved and it gives me a real happy feeling to see him immortalized in such a great book — as part of London’s history too.
Download: A Salty Dog — Procol Harum
I went to art college in Kent and one of the greatest pleasures of taking the train back to London at the weekend was the moment right before the train crossed the Thames on its way into Victoria Station and on the right would appear the imposing edifice of Battersea Power Station looming over you like some giant machine. Once I saw it I knew it would be only a few minutes before I would be back among the sights, sounds, crowds, and buzz of London. As a result I came to think of it as a symbol of “home”, a signpost that marked the line between the backward small-town atmosphere I was leaving behind and the cosmopolitan energy of the greatest city in the world — it was as if the building itself was saying “welcome back”.
Which is why it’s so depressing to see the state it’s in today. It hasn’t been used as a power station since the early 80s when the last of it’s generators were shut down, leaving it a silent relic of the dirty energy past, and sadly these new photographs by Peter Dazeley are a dismal reminder of how it’s been slowly falling apart since then. Several redevelopment schemes have been tried and failed to make new use of the building, including a theme park plan that died through lack of money after they had already taken the roof off, leaving it an open shell exposed to the elements, it’s walls crumbling and it’s magnificent machines rusting. As a result it’s been named one of the world’s 100 most endangered sites which is a bit bloody embarrassing for a country that’s supposed to love its heritage so much.
When you consider what was done with Bankside Power Station and the fact that London has been a buzzing hive of expensive new construction for the past couple of decades, it’s skyline constantly shifting and changing, it’s even more monumentally depressing and farcical that so far no one has been able to save a building which is just as much an icon of the city as St. Paul’s or Big Ben. There’s yet another plan in the works but I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing falls down first.
God, this makes me want to go home.
(Time-lapse video by Alex Silver)
I’m not any kind of transportation anorak who gets all swoony over buses and trains but I felt my heart sigh a little watching some of the lovely old documentaries now up at the The London Transport Museum website. Of particular interest is the wonderful All That Mighty Heart, a day-in-the-life film about London shot on a hot summer day in 1962 full of gleaming red buses driven by men with shiny Brylcreemed hair, pretty young housewives in modern new shopping centres, tennis at Wimbledon, cricket at Lords, kids enjoying a day at London Zoo and making sandcastles on the banks of the Thames (really!), all shot in vibrant you-never-had-it-so-good colour.
All That Mighty Heart is even more special to me as I was born in the summer of ’62 which according to my mother was a hot one and she often told me of the time my old man took her to see Lawrence of Arabia that summer and she had to sit through a three-hour film in a stuffy, non-air conditioned cinema while heavily pregnant with me. She suffered for me, you know.
Also worth a butchers is London On The Move made in 1970 showing a city that I actually remember, particularly those red tube trains with the green interior which brought a lot of happy memories flooding back.
So does this record, though not quite such old ones.
Download: Riding On A Train – The Pasadenas (mp3)
Back in the 1980s the statue of Eros* which had stood in the center of Piccadilly Circus since 1893 was moved over to it’s present, less grand location on the corner outside The Criterion Theatre, apparently just to improve traffic flow through the area. I remember being really pissed off about this at the time and was surprised it didn’t cause more controversy — that was also around the time British Telecom got rid of our red phone boxes without any public consultation and that caused only a small ripple of protest too. It seemed just another example of how the character of the city I loved (and the whole country) was being ruined by the forces unleashed by Maggie Thatcher and everything had to be sacrificed at the altar of capitalist “progress” — in this case the growing number of cars that were taking over the city — so one of London’s most iconic and beautiful landmarks just got booted aside. Somehow I can’t imagine this happening in any other city in the world, it would be like the French shifting the Arc de Triomphe a little to the left so Parisians could get to the Champs Élysées a bit quicker.
Even though it happened 20 years ago Piccadilly Circus still looks “wrong” to me and poor old Eros seems a little diminished removed from it’s former pride of place in the centre. You probably can’t buy drugs there anymore either. Not that I ever did you understand, but it seemed that every time I sat there I was asked by some shady-looking bloke if I wanted to.
Anyway, that little rant was really just an excuse to post this track, a lovely tune that was on the b-side of the “Shout To The Top” 12″ single.
Download: The Piccadilly Trail – The Style Council (mp3)
*Yes, I know it’s actually a statue of Anteros but everyone calls it Eros.
ABC’s “The Lexicon Of Love” album is one of the high watermarks of 1980s pop, released in 1982 it’s shiny surfaces and theatrical romanticism pretty much set the template for the flashy, hedonistic, post-modern decade to come. Which makes it a little ironic that the day I bought it I found myself in a place haunted by the once-glamourous ghosts from another pop era and as a result it’s always linked in my mind with rather more dismal surroundings than the grand, velvet-draped ballroom you imagine ABC playing it in.
I bought the album one Saturday afternoon when I was down the King’s Road in Chelsea with some mates and when we stepped out of the Our Price record shop with our purchases it started to piss down with rain — real monsoon-like buckets of it — so we ran to take shelter in the nearest boozer, which happened to be The Chelsea Drugstore.
This was the first and only time I’d been in there and had no idea then about it’s legendary past, to me it was just this dingy place I’d walked past a million times that never looked very inviting. But when it opened in 1968 The Chelsea Drugstore was one of the epicenters of Swinging London counterculture and hangout for the beautiful people, with three glitzy floors containing a bar, restaurants, clothes and record shops and a late-night chemist. They even had a delivery service made up of young girls on motorcycles wearing purple catsuits — it doesn’t get much more groovy than that. It’s most famously mentioned in The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” as the place where Mick Jagger went to get Marianne Faithful’s “prescription filled” when they lived together on nearby Cheyne Walk and she had a heroin habit. It’s also where the record shop scene in A Clockwork Orange was filmed.
But the youth culture parade is always moving on and the place must have already seemed like a relic from another era in 1976 when Punk and the Sex Pistols emerged from Malcolm McLaren’s shop “Sex” down the other end of the King’s Road, and far as I know The Drugstore’s last fling with pop history was in 1980 when it was an early hub of the new futurist/electronic music scene with it’s Monday night “Sci-Fi Disco” run by a young DJ by the name of Stevo who later founded Some Bizzare records and discovered Soft Cell, The The, and Depeche Mode. By the time I ran in there soaking wet in 1982 it really looked like the party had gone somewhere else, the place was almost empty and with it’s dingy lighting, dusty black walls, tatty black carpet and cheap chrome trimmings the vibe I got was more of a working man’s club for ageing Motorhead roadies. The rather shabby atmosphere was compounded by the appearance of a stripper on the little stage, a young girl who had that pasty-skinned, bored Reader’s Wives look common to nearly every stripper I’ve seen in a grubby English pub. It was all a bit sad and felt more suited to a seedy Pulp song than the glamour of Swinging London.
Looking back now, it might have turned into a shabby dive but at least it had some character which the King’s Road is sadly lacking these days as it’s become just another bland British high street with no trace of the vibrant counterculture and underground scenes it once spawned. When I walk down there now all I see are the ghosts of what used to be there: The Great Gear Market, Shelley’s, Fiorucci, Robot, Flip, American Classics, Acme Attractions, Johnson’s — they’ve all gone, replaced by mobile phone sellers, supermarkets and dry cleaners, not exactly the sort of places you can imagine a youth explosion starting from. The Chelsea Drugstore is long gone too, and in a perfect illustration of how far the King’s Road has fallen, on the site of what was once the hippest, most-happening scene in London there now stands a McDonald’s. There’s a giant metaphor for all of modern pop culture right there too.
I don’t think anyone needs me to post any tracks from “The Lexicon of Love” so how about all the b-sides of their first three 12″ singles instead?
Download: Alphabet Soup – ABC (mp3)
Download: Theme From “Mantrap” – ABC (mp3)
Download: Mantrap (The Lounge Sequence) – ABC (mp3)
Download: The Look of Love (Part 3) – ABC (mp3)
Download: The Look of Love (Part 4) – ABC (mp3)
Read: “King’s Road: The Rise and Fall of the Hippest Street in the World” (book)
The most memorable recent New Year’s Eve I had was in 1999 which I spent in New York City and asked my wife to marry me the moment the clock struck 12:00 to usher in the new millennium. Probably my favourite ever in London was in 1992 the last time myself and all my college friends were together in the same place and found ourselves in the tiny, members-only Troy Club (sadly now closed) standing on the tables drunkenly singing along to Frank Sinatra songs playing on the jukebox until the early hours of the next morning. But not all New Year’s Eve rose to the level of stories to tell the grandchildren, when I was a young nightclubber in London that night was both the most anticipated and most stressful of the year. The pressure to be having the greatest time of your life (champagne bottle in one hand, kissable girl in the other) when the clock struck 12:00 was enormous and usually disappointed. After several years I got fed up with the hassle of paying an arm and a leg to get into a packed, six-deep-at-the-bar club (and one time being kept waiting in the queue outside until 11:55) and the older you get the desire to chase that moment becomes less and less important anyway, by then you’ve had plenty of other “moments” to cherish in nightclubs on other nights.
So now I’m an old fart I’ll be spending it on the couch getting cozy with the missus, chances are we won’t manage to stay awake until midnight either. But I’m not dead yet and to prove it here are some actual new (new!) records I enjoyed in 2008. For some reason 3/4 of them seem to be by rather fetching young ladies.
Merry New Year everyone.
Download: Jack Killed Mom – Jenny Lewis (mp3)
Buy: “Acid Tongue” (album)
Download: Wreckless Love – Alicia Keys (mp3)
Buy: “As I Am” (album)
Download: Graveyard Girl – M83 (mp3)
Buy: “Saturdays=Youth” (album)
Download: I Thought I Saw Your Face Today – She & Him (mp3)
Buy: “Volume One” (album)
