Posts Tagged ‘1970s’
Friday, October 28th, 2011
Until last night I hadn’t been to The Electric Ballroom in Camden for over 30 years. If you are obsessed by 70s English punk rock then the last time I’d gone might be considered an historic occasion. It was the last day of 1979 and the final time the old pre-pop Adam and the Ants played live, as well as being the swansong performance by the original line-up of The Lurkers. I don’t remember who else was on the bill, but I do recall getting belted by two bouncers. They didn’t throw me out, they were labouring under the mistaken impression that some girl who was giving Adam Ant a hard time was there with me – and being ‘gentlemen’ they didn’t want to hit a lady, so walloped me because they wrongly assumed I was her boyfriend. When I did leave at the end of the night I got hassled by some cops who said it was obvious from the blood on my clothes that I’d been fighting. The filth told me the next time they caught me in a similar state they’d nick me. I insisted I’d had my head turned as I was speaking to someone and had accidentally walked into a door; this wasn’t true and I wasn’t particularly surprised the old bill didn’t believe me – they must have heard variations on that particular story a million times…
I’d never had much luck at The Electric Ballroom. On another occasion I’d gone to see The Brian James All Stars after that guitarist had quit the original Damned – and had the misfortune to accidentally catch one of the shittiest acts of the seventies. One of the advertised support bands for Brian James was Squeeze but their van broke down, so their management put The Police on instead. This was in 1978 and well before The Police had hit records. You knew any band called The Police were gonna suck before you even heard ‘em; and of course they were truly awful, because only a bunch of utter wankers would name their act after the filth. The fifty or so punters in the venue – including me – turned their backs on the band and went to the bar at the back of the hall for a drink. The Police were completely ignored by an audience who just wanted Sting and his poxy mates to get off stage.
Things got off to a bad start last night too. I’d been to an art talk near Bishopsgate first, and to say the Robin Day chairs the audience there had been sitting on were unergonomic would be a major understatement. Arriving in Camden I realised I hadn’t eaten, so I got a take-out falafel sandwich. This was a mistake that took me right back to the seventies via my memories of how appallingly bad food tended to be in London when I was teenage. I expected to get the falafel in pita bread with salad, but it came in a French stick with chili dressing and one slice of tomato, and nothing else! The overall quality of food in London has improved massively over the past 30 odd years – it seemed I had fallen through a time slip.
Arriving at The Electric Ballroom it was good to be ushered in by Jim Driver, who was meeting and greeting those like me who were down on the guest list. I didn’t know anything about the band who were playing, I hadn’t seen Jim in a while and he’d sent me a message saying I should come to the Ballroom as he was promoting a Halloween party special and I’d enjoy it. I trusted Jim’s musical taste because at one point he’d managed Geno Washington. The band turned out to be Gandalf Murphy & The Slambovian Circus of Dreams – a New York folk rock act with a heavy sprinkling of prog on top. Back in the 70s when I paid more attention to rock music, the kind of American acts I dug when I saw them over here were the likes of The Dead Boys, The Dictators, Destroy All Monsters and Pure Hell – I got more sophisticated in the 80s, with my taste in live American music switching to the likes of Chuck Brown & The Soul Searchers.
Watching Gandalf Murphy at the Electric Ballroom last night you could be forgiven for thinking that punk hadn’t yet happened – an impression that was reinforced when the band did The Stones Gimmie Shelter as an encore. Half the audience were dressed up as pirates and they seemed to be having a ball…. but I was left wishing that rather than falling through a time slip to a hippie gig circa 1974, I’d found myself in 1972 grooving to Major Lance at The Torch in Stoke-On-Trent! I couldn’t enjoy Gandalf Murphy’s London Halloween show because there were too many punk ghosts haunting me at the Electric Ballroom. Their brand of psychedelic folk with tinges of country struck me as representing everything late-70s punk set out to destroy – and simultaneously the complete antithesis of all the stomping sixties mod and soul sounds I still love too!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1970s, Adam & The Ants, Bishopsgate, Brian James All Stars, Camden, Chuck Brown & The Soul Searchers, cops, Destroy All Monsters, Electric Ballroom, falafel, Geno Washington, Jim Driver, London, Major Lance, punk rock, Pure Hell, Robin Day, Squeeze, Sting, The Damned, The Dead Boys, The Dictators, The Lurkers, The Police, The Torch, time slip
Posted in music, performance | 22 Comments »
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
By the time I left school at sixteen in the late-seventies the big sound was disco. That said, the real hipsters among the kids who underwent the same non-education as me were into northern soul (rare mainly American and mainly 1960s records that sounded like Motown but never made the pop charts). I first came across northern soul in the mid-seventies because a school friend shared a bedroom with an older brother who was obsessed with a handful of northern soul platters. This big brother would come in from his factory job, put Tainted Love (later a huge hit when it was covered by Soft Cell) or some other northern favourite on a record deck, then flop on his bed to listen to the music until his mum had made his tea. For some reason this particular teenager also liked prog, so he was also the first person to play me Greenslade!
By the end of 1976, I was into punk rock (one of only two pupils in my school into that scene then), while a couple of kids in my class were regularly going to Wigan Casino for its northern soul all-nighters. I can remember them saying to me: “You should come to Wigan, it’s great, we drop a load of blues and dance all night!” My reply was: “Why would I got all that way to listen to records? I like seeing live bands.” There were plenty of blues (amphetamine tablets) around at punk gigs too…
And so that was that, I blew my chance to go to Wigan – possibly the worst decision I made at the age of 14 or 15. Tony Palmer’s 1977 TV documentary makes it very clear there was a truly extraordinary youth culture blossoming there. Space put it this way: “Wigan Casino documents an idiosyncratic scene based around the weekly club night that ran from 1973 to 1981. From elegant slow motion dance shots to fervent scenes of vinyl swapping, Palmer precisely captures the bustle and energy, as well as the overarching subcultural strangeness, of the Northern Soul phenomenon.”
If you have any interest in soul music you should have seen Palmer’s incredible dance shots used by other film-makers or simply posted on YouTube. But it is worth seeing those scenes in context, with a record dealer talking about the prices paid for northern vinyl and a girl who works in a hospital laundry explaining that going to Wigan is the only meaningful thing she does in her life. There is also an interview with the manager of The Casino and a couple of elderly Wigan residents giving their take on life. Cut into this are old photographs of industrial Wigan, and shots of factory machinery that turn with an almost Brion Gysin-like flicker effect. The contemporary scenes of Wigan, particularly images of terraced houses by a canal, make it look every bit as derelict as the rest of England in the late-seventies.
Wigan Casino may be a 32-year old piece of TV, but it’s the best thing I’ve seen in an art gallery for some time! It is on until 19 December at Space 129-131 Mare Street, Hackney, London E8 3RH. Catch it if you can…
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 1970s, 1977, 60s, 70s, amphetamines, blues, Brion Gysin, dancing, disco, east London, Greenslade, Hackney, London, Motown, northern soul, prog rock, punk rock, S.O.U.L., seventies, sixties, Space, Tainted Love, Tony Palmer, Wigan, Wigan Casino, YouTube
Posted in exhibitions, film | 15 Comments »
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
I’ve never been into the Cocteau Twins myself… just ain’t my thing. However, I recently got into an online discussion in which I mentioned that I’d known their second and main bass player Simone Raymonde in the old days when he’d been in a band called Disruptive Patterns, and that this group had morphed into The Drowning Craze. Or rather, I mentioned that the Drowning Craze had emerged from a band whose name I couldn’t remember off the top of my head! It took some serious thinking to retrieve the name…
In the late-seventies and early-eighties I belonged to various groups that played and rehearsed in and around London and its south-west suburbs – the furthest out of London I played was in places like Guildford and Stevenage (okay Stevenage is north of London, but mainly we played south-westish), usually in pubs or sometimes clubs like The Starlight in West Hampstead (the less prestigious upstairs venue twinned with the relatively small Moonlight Club). We practiced all over the shop too, but the best place I ever rehearsed (circa 1980-81) was in an 8 track recording studio located in the basement of Theatre Projects in Neal’s Yard, Covent Garden.
Dave King, who drummed for a band I was in called Basic Essentials, worked at Theatre Projects as a recording engineer and so we were allowed to use the place at the weekends for free, not just to rehearse but also to record. It was amazing, during breaks we’d rake through old tapes and dig up demos by the likes of T. Rex and The Average White Band who’d used the Theatre Projects studio…. although during the week the bread and butter work there was recording stage effects for plays. At the start of the eighties, Covent Garden was still in the process of being transformed into the shopping mall from hell it has become today, so we’d have a laugh in the area and after rehearsals we’d usually go to a tiny caff on the north side of Leicester Square which we called The Basic Essentials Cafe (I can’t remember it’s actual name and – like Theatre Projects in Neal’s Yard – it isn’t there any more) for espresso.
Anyway, because I was playing in various small time groups, I got to know a lot of other bands, including Disruptive Patterns. I’d guess Disruptive Patterns were a going concern around 1979-80, I certainly saw them several times and one of their tunes is still lodged in my mind. It was probably called Pleasure Never Hurt Anyone, since that line was the main refrain of the chorus. Disruptive Patterns were a fairly straightforward new wave act with some backwards and forwards psychedelic nods (and more like The Psychedelic Furs than The Sex Pistols). The two members of the combo I recall being on friendly terms with were singer Andy McInnes and bass player Simon Raymonde, although I’d imagine I spoke to other members of the group as well. Both Andy and Simon struck me as nice guys, but given the way bands work it didn’t surprise me when Andy was kicked out and an American girl called Angela Jaeger was brought in to front the group, which simultaneously changed its name to The Drowning Craze (the line-up and name change may have been at the instigation of the indie label Situation 2, who the group signed a record deal with, but I’m not certain this was the case).
I went to see The Drowning Craze early on somewhere in central London (I don’t remember which venue, but some small club) and didn’t like the new singer or the new songs (the set was completely different to the one Disruptive Patterns had been performing). I lost sight of Andy McInnes pretty soon after this, but carried on running into Simon Raymonde by chance on the street or in clubs pretty much up to the time he joined The Cocteau Twins, I haven’t seen him since then. Since I didn’t like Angela Jaeger as a singer, I only ever saw The Drowning Craze once when she was in the group – but after she was replaced by Frank Nardiello, I have a very dim memory of giving them a second chance and liking what they did with him a little bit more (but whether this was a gig or a rehearsal I’d been invited to witness, I can’t recall).
There are a couple of photos of the Disruptive Patterns on Fred Pipes’s Flickr pages, and a comment in a Cocteau Twins discussion thread riffing off Fred’s photos. But it would be nice if someone could help me recall some other Disruptive Patterns tunes, the venues they played (mainly around Guildford as far as I recall – Wooden Bridge etc.), and possibly even upload any demos that might exist! Also am I right in thinking there is a link between Disruptive Patterns/Drowning Craze and a late-seventies punk band called The Rubber Flowers who were probably based in Farnham (which is further south-west than I ever ventured) and whose line-up included Alex Binnie?
It was interesting attempting to dredge this minor piece of music history from my memory, and thereby realise how much of it I must have forgotten. That said, there are a lot of tunes that probably never made it onto vinyl rattling around my head from that time. For example, I can remember two songs by a band called The Lasers, Living In A Television (‘livin’ in a television, ray tube for a home, livin’ a television on my own!’) and Show Us Your White Bits. I can’t recall where this band were from but I assume it was south-west or west London suburbs. Anyone know anything about them? I guess I’d better stop there or this is gonna get too seriously obscure!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check - www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1970s, 1980s, 70s, 80s, Alex Binnie, Andy McInnes, Angela Jaeger, Average White Band, Basic Essentials, central London, Cocteau Twins, Covent Garden, Dave King, Disruptive Patterns, eighties, Farnham, Flickr, Frank Nardiello, Fred Pipes, Guildford, Leicester Square, Living In A Television, London, Neal's Yard, north London, Pleasure Never Hurt Anyone, Psychedelic Furs, Rubber Flowers, seventies, Sex Pistols, Show Us Your White Bits, Simon Raymonde, Situation 2, south-west London, Stevenage, T. Rex, The Drowning Craze, The Lasers, The Moonlight Club, The Starlight, Theatre Projects, west Hampstead, west London, Wooden Bridge
Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography, music | 25 Comments »
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
Last night I went to the celebration of the life and work of Tamara Krikorian and Tony Sinden at Tate Modern’s Starr Auditorium. The event was a tribute to two pioneering UK based video artists who died earlier this year; among other things, Krikorian also played a major role in setting up London Video Arts. Unfortunately, I find Krikorian’s work boring, and neither the talks about her nor the screening of her 1977 video Vanitas did much for me. In Vanitas, Krikorian stands in front of a mirror with a TV and many other objects reflected in it, the audio cuts between the artist talking about art and TV news reports. It is an understatement to say this failed to rivet me.
Tony Sinden wasn’t afraid to experiment, and I find his work hit and miss, but went it hits it nails me to the floor. The first screening last night was This Surface (1973) by David Hall and Tony Sinden. The 12 minute short kicks off with a pub scene: a right tasty geezer with a not quite full pint of beer balanced on his head dances, while guys and gals in groovy flares and sporting fabulous seventies hairdos look on in disbelief. As the dance goes on the reveller tilts his head further and further to one side in order to keep the beer balanced on top. The soundtrack is Mouldy Old Dough by Lieutenant Pigeon. After this, the film cuts to a tracking shot looking out to sea and moving from the east towards the Palace Pier on Brighton Beach. The words ‘this surface’ is written in marker pen on either the camera lens or some plate glass in front of it. The camera movement creates the impression the viewer is on one of the mini-railways that were a common feature of British seaside resorts in the 1960s and 1970s.
This Surface runs through various fragments of text relating to filming, cameras and cine-projection; both ‘interrupting’ the filmed ‘scenery’, and as ‘subtitles’. Having not quite reached the Palace Pier, the camera jump cuts to a reverse shot, and facing inland we trundle past the various boat houses and sheds located immediately beneath Marine Parade as we head back east. Next comes another jump cut to what looks like Western Road, and the camera tracks west to east along the shops immediately north of what is now Churchill Square. The next cut apparently takes us back to the seafront, and a static shot shows a Pit and The Pendulum type scenario, with a blade swinging over the body of a human dummy (displayed in the window of one of the many seaside attractions). Finally the action cuts back to the man dancing with a glass of beer on his head (still to Lieutenant Pigeon), but shot from a different angle to the scene that kicks off This Surface.
One of the things I find curious about Sinden’s work is the chance serendipities that can sometimes really enhance its effects. In the case of this particular collaboration with Hall, the setting is for me an example of this. Although I’ve never lived in Brighton, I know the town well, and as a child in the sixties and early seventies I’d be taken on day trips to Brighton Beach in the summer. Thus This Surface is jolting for me, because once the text is stripped away from it, it could almost be my own memories. Likewise, Mouldy Old Dough was a huge hit when I was a nipper, and takes me right back 1972. Sitting immediately behind me was currently London based but north American raised artist S. E Barnet. She told me afterwards she’d never heard the tune before, so although she found it striking, it had no associations for her; and I assume she doesn’t have childhood memories of Brighton in the early seventies which render This Surface even more strangely familiar to me. S. E. was obviously as grooved by the short as I was, but given it carried for her few of the associations it held for me, was she watching the same movie?
The other highlight of the night was David Cunningham (a former member of seventies one-hit wonder band/collective Flying Lizards), Rob Gawthop, and Alan Baker, performing a 1977 sound piece from Sinden’s Functional Action series. They each rubbed a couple of pots together and the resulting music was a groove sensation! The Functional Action series is where my fascination with Sinden began. I was vaguely aware of his video installations when in mid-eighties London I was doing something or other with a gallery (possibly Chisenhale in Bow) and I came across a pile of his album Functional Action Parts 2 & 3: Swing Guitars/Drift Guitars (Piano, 1980). Asking why the albums were leaning against a wall with rubbish piled up beside them, I was told the gallery were throwing them out and if I wanted the record I was welcome to take one. When I got the vinyl home and played it, I thought one side was fabulous and the other dreadful. After that I paid attention whenever I came across Sinden’s name.
Last night the Tate Modern was filled with Sinden and Krikorian’s friends and colleagues, who were paying tribute to them. It would be nice to see parts of Sinden’s Functional Action series and 16mm collaborations with David Hall reaching a new and younger audience. I trust that will happened in due course, with the best of his film and music reissued in appropriate formats. Despite an at times understandably sombre tone, the Tate tribute nonetheless provided a very useful overview of Sinden’s creative endeavours. Minimalism and conceptualism can rock, you just have to do it right!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 1970s, Alan Baker, Brighton, Brighton Beach, Churchill Square, conceptual art, David Cunningham, David Hall, Drift Guitars, Flying Lizards, Functional Action, Functional Action Parts 2 & 3, Lieutenant Pigeon, London, London Video Arts, Marine Parade, minimalism, Mouldy Old Dough, Palace Pier, Piano Records, Pit and The Pendulum, Rob Gawthop, S. E. Barnet, Starr Auditorium, Swing Guitars, Tamara Krikorian, Tate Modern, This Surface, Tony Sinden, Vanitas, Western Road
Posted in film, music, talks | 18 Comments »
Saturday, October 10th, 2009
24 Hour Party People (2002) kept coming up in conversations I was having as I wandered around the UK, and so I have finally checked it out, although I am no fan of director Michael Winterbottom. This particular film with its super self-conscious po-mo ersatz drug patter is more like his A Cock & Bull Story(2005) than Wonderland (1999) – and let’s not even get into the puke-inducing television journalist-centred Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), or the pathetic ‘pop cultural’ 9 Songs (2004). Winterbottom’s 2002 effort focuses on Tony Wilson – a Manchester based television journalist, unsuccessful businessman and would-be hipster. It goes without saying that no matter how Wilson’s PR minions attempted to gloss his life story, it always ended up looking really boring to me.
What 24 Hour Party People rams home is how Tony Wilson suffered from terrible musical taste; and it is unfortunate that via Factory Records he was mildly successful at hyping some piss-poor tunes into the British pop charts. Aside from a clip of The Stranglers early on and Blackfoot Sue’s Standing In The Road playing in the background during one scene (Wilson had nothing to do with either act), all the music on the soundtrack is truly awful. From Joy Division via A Certain Ratio and New Order to The Happy Mondays, the ‘sounds’ Wilson promoted were uniformly dire (and let’s not waste time looking at Factory’s much-vaunted ‘design’, which was in reality a shower of shite, although it worked as pseudo-corporate branding).
Manchester produced its fair share of decent bands in the late-seventies – Slaughter and the Dogs, The Drones, V2 – but there isn’t any mention of them here (despite the involvement of Wilson’s business partner Rob Gretton with Slaughter); instead, when it comes to non-Wilson controlled musicians, we get the likes of Mark E. Smith of The Fall and Howard Devoto of The Buzzcocks and later Magazine. So if we’re not being subjected to unbelievably dull super-commercial crud by The Mondays, we get the relatively well-known end of the crap that would appeal to a pretentious ex-Cambridge University student like Wilson, rather than Manicured Noise or The Passage (who were just as bad but not half as ‘famous’).
Factory Records had about as much to do with rock and roll as Stalin did with human liberation. The exception proving this rule was their release of a record by New York’s incredible ESG – but there is no sign of them on the 24 Hour Party People soundtrack. But then I’d imagine that ESG, like the more interesting elements of The Hacienda that had been copied from New York clubs, reflect Rob Gretton’s tastes rather than Wilson’s. Likewise, the fact that there is no sign of The Royal Family and the Poor (supposedly the ‘weirdest’ act’ on Factory Records) in 24 Hour Party People, is illustrative of the way the movie is pitched firmly at the mainstream and will only appeal to those who dig Hollywood crapola (and simultaneously accounts for the one-line put-down of John The Postman, who may not have been a great singer but was a curious phenomena).
Anyway, rather than wasting your time on 24 Hour Party People (assuming you’re lucky enough not to have seen it), you’d do better Watching Paint Dry. But moving on, seeing the film reminded me of one of Wilson’s little scams pulled against yours truly. Tony Wilson was an impresario, and I found myself doing a panel talk with him, Mark E. Smith, and John King from the Gang of 4, at The Hacienda in 1996. When I arrived in Manchester I was shown a local newspaper by some of Wilson’s PR people, who were very pleased to have found a tame journalist who’d been fed made-up quotes falsely attributed to me in which I was erroneously reported slagging off their boss (I really wouldn’t have bothered while he was still half-alive, he enjoyed this sort of thing too much). It seemed to give Wilson a real kick to be the subject of fake vitriol attributed to me by the Manchester press.
Needless to say the panel talk I did with Wilson was a real bore, and I’m not sure the transcriptions of it now circulating on the internet are entirely accurate. Never mind, as 24 Hour Party People makes blatantly clear, Wilson preferred legends to factually accurate history…. let the dead bury their dead (Wilson died in 2007), we will blaze a trail to new modes of being… And if Wilson thought that what went on around him was a party, he’d have no doubt considered his own funeral a real ball had he been ‘conscious’ enough to enjoy it…
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 24 Hour Party People, 9 Songs, A Certain Ratio, A Cock & Bull Story, Blackfoot Sue, Cambridge University, ESG, Factory Records, Gang of 4, Happy Mondays, Howard Devoto, John King, Joseph Stalin, Joy Division, Magazine, Manicured Noise, Mark E. Smith, Michael Winterbottom, New Order, Slaughter and the Dogs, Standing In The Road, The Buzzcocks, The Drones, The Fall, The Hacienda, The Passage, The Stranglers, Tony Wilson, V2, Welcome to Sarajevo, Wonderland
Posted in film, music | 20 Comments »
Monday, August 10th, 2009
Since Herman Brood came up on a blog I posted a few days ago, I’ve been thinking about why I like his tune Rock & Roll Junkie. There are elements within it that on their own I would normally hate. Somehow the super-dumb boogie-woogie keyboards manage to become a non-irritating element in the overall racket. Brood’s voice is acceptable but nothing special, with his cracked English lyrics and pronunciation being a definite plus element. I guess most listeners will connect the lyrical content to Brood’s own life, since he is Holland’s most famous rock and roll junkie. That said, the words relate most immediately to music and only secondly to drugs:
“Rock & roll addiction is a festerin’ habit
you gotta keep on playin’ like a paranoid rabbit
you can hook me on your tail, penetrate my soul
make me feel the sting of rock & roll
I’m a heart & soul, rock & roll, heart & soul rock & roll junkie”
This came out as a single in 1977 and then appeared on the 1978 album Shpritsz. It sounds more blow wave than new wave to me, and since Brood began his music career in 1960s beat groups, it isn’t really surprising that he’s more interested in good time rock and roll than the punk ‘revolution’. But that didn’t stop assorted record companies promoting Brood and this tune as ‘punk’ back in the 1970s. In reality Brood strays dangerously close to Bachman-Turner Overdrive territory, but what saves Rock and Roll Junkie is the overall mix of elements – and in particular the restrained sax and female backing vocals. The guitar solo is horrible but in a so bad it is good way.
And in retrospect we know that Brood really did ‘meant it man’. He jumped to his death from the roof of the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel in 2001, lending extra poignancy to the otherwise risible couplet : “but when I do my suicide for you, I hope you miss me too.” I really shouldn’t like this tune but I do. And it reminds me of a couple of other songs that groove me – Savage by The Fun Things and Rock N Roll Resurrection by Wayne County. The Fun Things were a bunch of Brisbane teens when they released Savage in 1980, and the lyrics are about on a par with Brood:
“I’m a rock and roll kamikaze and you know that I die for you
when you’re paying your bills to see me, I gotta do what you want me to
well the drums are like twin machine guns and the voice is a full throated roar
and the guitars are coming on like a buzz-saw, I can’t wait till I get some more
last of the leather age, put me on the stage and I’ll be your savage
last of the leather age, put me on the stage and I’m a savage for you…”
Brood, of course, is far more professional in terms of recording technique and production than The Fun Things, who seem to have gone into the studio and turned everything up to the max. But variety is the spice of life, and I like both approaches (although my guess is Savage could have been even better with a little studio savvy). And while Wayne County first recorded Rock N Roll Resurrection before her sex change, she made it the title track of a fabulous live album issued after she’d re-emerged as Jayne County. All of which just about proves that great rock and roll is always transsexual.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (n0) sense!
Tags: 1970s, 70s, Amsterdam, Amsterdam Hilton Hotel, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Fun Things, Herman Brood, Jayne County, Rock & Roll Junkie, Rock N Roll Resurrection, Savage, seventies, Shpritsz, Wayne County
Posted in music | 17 Comments »
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
James Daly is one of the many curious underworld figures who knew my mother Julia Callan-Thompson. It seems my mother first came across Daly when they were both scoring smack at 75a Cambridge Gardens in the early 1970s. The gear sold at this address was supplied by a former jockey of Australian extraction called Larry Benns. He’s been described to me as a hot tempered man suffering from low self-esteem who excelled at pissing off his girlfriends. The scene at 75a was intense, a number of addicts seem to have overdosed there including, it is said, one of Brenda Grevelle’s boyfriends. Benns apparently went on the run while on bail facing drug charges; he is rumoured to have returned to Australia where he died.
Turning our attention to Jim Daly, he was a blonde-haired small-time thief from an Irish family who’d take stolen goods to 75a Cambridge Gardens and exchange them for drugs. The absurd nature of Daly’s criminal life is evident from an escapade in which he played a peripheral role that garnered coverage in The Times under headings such as ‘Man On Firearm Charge’ (5 February 1973), ‘Escape Plot Alleged’ (6 February 1973), ‘Shotgun Court Breaks Up In Disorder’ (6 April 1973) and ‘Escape Bid Was Based On Black Power Type Plot’ (12 June 1973). The gist of the story is that while on remand in Brixton Prison, Daly then aged 24 met a 38 year-old American consultant engineer called Nathan Greenberg who was facing a fire-arms charge and wanted to make an escape bid. With others they cooked up a plan inspired by the antics of the Black Panthers in California, whereby Greenberg’s 19 year-old German girlfriend Erika Pijanka would smuggle guns into the West London Magistrates’ Court during his next hearing and use them to free him.
Thus on 1 February 1973 Pijanka entered the public gallery of the court, pointed a sawn-off shotgun at the magistrate and screamed: “All right, stay where you are!” As a cop wrestled Pijanka to the ground, a single shot went off. The escape bid was foiled without loss of life or serious injury. Greenberg eventually got a seven year sentence for his fire arms offences, and nine months to run concurrently for contempt of court. William White, the man who Daly had allegedly placed Greenberg and Pijanka in touch with to supply the guns for the escape bid, was found not guilty of furnishing the weapons. Daly got an eighteen month suspended sentence for his role in the plot.
Daly evidently spent a lot of time in jail in the 1970s and my mother visited him at least once while he was banged up. Among her extant papers is a letter dated 23 October 1975 on Blenheim Project headed paper and addressed to the “The Officer on the Gate, H. M. Prison, Wormwood Scrubs, Du Cane Road, W6”:
Re: James Daly.
Miss Julia Callan-Thompson is a bona fide Social Worker at the above named Blenheim Project and is the bearer of this letter.
A visit had been arranged for Miss Druecilla Verney, also of the Blenheim Project, to visit the above named at 4.00 this 23rd day of October, and we hope that it will be possible for Miss Callan-Thompson to accompany Miss Verney on this visit. Miss Callan-Thompson is also a member of the S.C.O.D.A. working team.
Yours faithfully,
Kathrine Parker,
Social Worker
The Blenheim Project.
If my mother was ‘a bona fide Social Worker” at the Blenheim Project, this was due to a touch of fraud on her part. I have a copy of a job application she made to the Blehheim Project in the summer of 1975 on which she falsely claimed she attended University College London and gained an upper 2nd philosophy B.A. Hons. in 1963 and an MPhil 1966. In fact, my mother left school at the age of 16 in 1960, and during the period she told the Blenheim Project she’d studied at UCL, she’d been far more gainfully employed as a showgirl and hostess at Murray’s Cabaret Club and Churchill’s in the west end of London. Despite her job as ‘a bona fide Social Worker’ providing my mother with an excellent front when visiting jailed friends, she didn’t like the nine-to-five regime that went with it and soon jacked it in.
As for Jim Daly, I’ve no idea what happened to him. Blog comments from anyone with information about him would be appreciated. I don’t know whether or not William White was a part of the well-known London crime family of that name, it seems possible but is certainly not proven right now; one of Alf White’s sons, known to friends and family as Billy, went by this name.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1970s, 70s, Alf White, Australia, Billy White, Black Panthers, black power, Blenheim Project, Brenda Grevelle, California, Cambridge Gardens, Churchill's, Druecilla Verney, Du Cane Road, Erika Pijanka, James Daly, Jim Daly, Julia Callan-Thompson, Kathrine Parker, Larry Benns, London, Murray's Cabaret Club, Nathan Greenberg, seventies, The Times, UCL, University College London, west end, west London, West London Magistrates’ Court, William White, Wormwood Scrubs
Posted in counterculture, Julia Callan-Thompson, True crime | 33 Comments »
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the old St Martin’s School of Art campus. The building stretches between Charing Cross Road and Greek Street. The frontage is impressive but the interior takes me straight back to Soho in the 1970s, when London was truly down and dirty. In the main entrance there’s even a ‘blue’ plaque stating the Sex Pistols played their first gig at the college in 1975. A lot of bands played at St Martin’s over the years, and you’d have thought the administration could have found a better group to commemorate than the Sex Pistols.
I’m not sure when the Sex Pistols moved into their Denmark Street rehearsal room, but if they were there by November 75 it would have been literally just a stroll across Charing Cross Road to get to the gig. Not much further away is the site of the old Marquee Club at 90 Wardour Street, the building that housed it is now demolished. The Sex Pistols played the Marquee but I managed to avoid them both there and at St Martin’s. That said, I did spend a lot of time at the Marquee in the late-seventies. Although the Marquee was originally located on Oxford Street and much latter moved to Charing Cross Road, the Wardour Street address is its core location and the club was run from there between 13 March 1964 until 18 July 1988.
When I went to the Marquee in the 1970s, Big John the bouncer would be standing at the entrance, I’d pay between 50p and a pound to see the band, and as I walked down the corridor to the first bar I’d hear Jerry Floyd or Ian Flemming spinning disks as a warm up. The place is etched in my memory, and so is how dirty Soho and the rest of London were at that time. When I walked into St Martin’s yesterday it reminded me of how great London used to be before it was cleaned up and gentrified. The Marquee in the late-seventies was peeling, and so was the rest of London. St. Martin’s is in ruins today and repairs are avoided because this institution was merged with The Central School of Art in 1989, Central St Martin’s is now a constituent college in The University of the Arts London, and is moving to a new purpose built campus in Kings Cross in 2011.
Wandering around St Martin’s yesterday I could feel Soho history wafting through the corridors, and some of it smelt rank. The building was built around 1938 and at the time would have been really grand. Now there are little locked rooms all over the place, and I wonder if when they’re finally opened there will be a yield of dead bodies. No one seems to know what is locked behind those doors. While plodding tourist ‘heritage’ items like the Sex Pistols now form the official history of St Martins, it has a much more interesting subterranean past. To give just one example, beat novelist Alexander Trocchi was employed by the sculpture department on a pretty much a full-time basis between October 1964 and March 1966. As far as I’m aware that episode is still fairly blank in terms of published biographical accounts of Trocchi’s life.
Moving on, I guess everyone imagines Soho was best in whatever state they first got to know it. My real love affair with the place was between 1974 and 1980, from the ages of 12 to 18. This was the era of the dirty bookshops and sex cinemas. The sleazy feel of the place at that time totally grooved me and I hated the way it was subsequently cleaned up. If you read the memoirs of fifties London gangsters then they tend to bemoan the arrival of the sex shops, which they say brought about the decline of the family businesses that gave the area its distinctive feel. What those who first discovered Soho in the nineties are nostalgic about I haven’t a clue… But luckily for me it looks like the credit crunch is taking what was once my favourite part of London back to the state I think it ought to be in; i.e. a dirty rotten mess. Who knows, I might even catch Sohoitis once again! Yes, going into St Martin’s yesterday gave me a real whiff of a London I know is no longer lost forever….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1970s, 70s, Alex Trocchi, Alexander Trocchi, central London, Central School of Art, Charing Cross Road, Denmark Street, Greek Street, Ian Flemming, Jerry Floyd, London, Marquee Club, Oxford Street, seventies, Sex Pistols, Soho, St. Martin's School of Art, University of the Arts London, Wardour Street
Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography | 34 Comments »
Friday, April 3rd, 2009
It has long been a cliché to say that history is written by the victors, but in terms of the London counterculture it would be far more accurate to state that to date accounts of this scene have largely been composed by the squares; individuals who failed to penetrate the truly hip inner circles because they are too straight to know about them. Since I started researching my mother’s life, I have come across a massive amount of material that was missing from histories of the period. The most amazing oversight is without doubt the Victor James Kapur acid manufacturing bust (my mother’s friend Detta Whybrow persuaded the chemist to make the LSD, and organised its distribution in London); fortunately after I turned Andy Roberts onto newspaper accounts of the court case, he did further research and included it in his book Albion Dreaming (2008).
Many beatnik faces are still overlooked in histories of the sixties because publishers and television producers think all anyone wants to hear about is the rather less sophisticated hippie scene. Likewise, the real hipsters were rather less interested in publicising their activities than interlopers like Steve Abrams. In this blog I’m going to look briefly at 1960s west London beatnik face Phil Green, who – in tandem with Alex Trocchi – made an early stab at translating French Situationist texts into English. That said, while Trocchi’s French contacts liked to drink wine and smoke a bit of weed, these London hipsters were more into smack; and this is as true of Phil Green as anyone else.
On 12 March 1962 The Times carried the headline ‘Drug Charges After Raid On Café’ above an article that mentioned Green among others, then on 26 March 1962 the same paper followed this up with ‘C.N.D. Supporters Given Drugs’, concluding on 26 April with a news story entirely devoted to Phil Green entitled ‘Youth’s Beard A Part Of Façade’. Philip John Green then aged twenty was one of ten men and women arrested for their involvement with a ‘drug ring’ centred on The Peace Café in Fulham Road, Chelsea. At the time Green worked at this establishment as a chef. He pleaded guilty to possession of Indian hemp and twenty grains of opium, as well as ‘hubble bubble pipes’ used for opium smoking.
Green’s defence lawyer said that there was no question of him being ‘a conduit pipe for this stuff or a distributor of it’. The Magistrate assented it did rather look as though everyone was experimenting together. Green was told he’d been caught in possession of a substantial amount of opium, and it was a serious matter, requiring a full medical report. He had his hair cut and trimmed his beard, and upon his return to court for sentencing was given two years probation. The beak told Green: “You have got to get a regular job. Set your sights a little higher than the kitchen and try to trim your appearance to the job. I think you are capable of doing it, having been to a public school.”
Despite assuring the law he’d mend his ways, Green had no intention of doing so. He just wanted to stay free. Jamie Wadhawan caught him on camera at Alex Trocchi’s Arts Lab event of 13 April 1969 in the documentary Cain’s Film; and one of the women present at the event told me recently that Green promised he’d come off junk if she’d sleep with him, but she politely declined the offer. I’m also told, by other sources who likewise wish to remain anonymous, that during this period Green specialised in doing over chemists to support his drug habit. However, after coming out from a spell in Pentonville Prison he met and married a millionairess who hoped to reform him; and moved to Amsterdam with her.
That said, Green kept up his more important London contacts after he left the city. Nina Trott who squatted in the flat above my mother and her common-law husband Bruno de Galzain in Tottenham Court Road in 1975/6 told me: “An old junkie friend of Julie and Bruno called Phil Green came over from Amsterdam and stayed for a while.” While another squatter from a few doors down added: “I remember meeting Phil Green at Julie’s flat, with Bruno, sometime in 1976. Phil was a photographer and a smackhead.”
Since my mother Julia Callan-Thompson died in 1979, I haven’t attempted to follow Green’s evolution from that point on. However, I’ve been led to believe he is now dead. Further anecdotes about Green, particularly if they relate to his involvements with my mother and/or Trocchi, are of course very welcome in the comments below.
Jeff Nuttall in Bomb Culture (Paladin, London 1970, page 181) mentions Phil(ip) Green by name and provides a sketch of the scene he belonged to. After mentioning the appearance by William Burroughs and Alex Trocchi at the Edinburgh International Writers conference and dating this as 1963, Nuttal continues: “Together he (Burroughs) and Trocchi moved down to London. In London they became the pivot round which a number of people revolved – Charles Hatcher, Tom Telfer, McGrath, Philip Green, myself. They were not, however, the beginning of the Underground in England. Towards the end of the great days of Aldermaston certain of the whackier and younger CND followers had gathered in the Peace Cafe in Fulham Road, eventually closed through notoriety for drugs, and formed a cultural nucleus that looked mainly towards America and the Beats for its model. Prominent figures to emerge from this group were Dave Gunliffe, Lee Harwood, Ian Vine, Neil Oram, Spike Hawkins, Miles and, most important, Mike Horovitz and Pete Brown…”
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 1970s, 60s, 70s, Albion Dreaming, Alex Trocchi, Alexander Trocchi, Amsterdam, Andy Roberts, Arts Lab, Barry Miles, beatniks, beats, Bomb Culture, Bruno de Galzain, Cain's Film, Charles Hatcher, Chelsea, CND, Dave Gunliffe, Detta Whybrow, Fulham Road, heroin, Ian Vine, Indian Hemp, Jamie Wadhawan, Jeff Nuttall, Julia Callan-Thompson, Lee Harwood, London, LSD, Mike Horovitz, Neil Oram, Nina Trott, Peace Cafe, Pentonville Prison, Pete Brown, Phil Green, Philip Green, Philip John Green, seventies, Situationists, sixties, Spike Hawkins, Steve Abrams, The Times, Tom McGrath, Tom Telfer, Tottenham Court Road, Victor James Kapur, west London, William Burroughs
Posted in counterculture, Julia Callan-Thompson | 16 Comments »
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
I headed over to the RCA in South Kensington on Thursday to catch Controlled Image: The Question of Image Control in Poland in the 70s and 80s. This was funded by the Polish Cultural Institute who in recent years have been running some groovy film programmes all over London, and this particular event was part of a season at various venues including Tate Modern and The Barbican. There was a good crowd, some had stayed on from a packed Dan Graham talk before the screening. I find Graham painful to watch in the flesh because he is so pathetic and unsure of himself, so I didn’t attend that. The Controlled Image screening was a mixed bag put together by students from Jagiellonian University, and the weakest works were shown first. Historical Camera Purchase (1984) was a home movie of Tadbusz Kantor buying a video camera in Spain; basically it’s a series of zooms and pans of Kantor’s friends in a shop plus soundtrack banter about the camera as it is tested. Romuald Kutera and Lesek Mrozek’s Transferring The Camera (1974, reconstructed 1978 & 2009) consists of the artists walking towards each other and then away again, repeatedly, with a camera passed between them; there are lots of loose and boring accidental shots of a park as this goes on.
For me the highlight of the evening came next, a nine and a half minute extract from Piotr Bikont and Leszek Dziumowicz’s Ballad Of A Strike (1988), shot during a strike at the Gdansk shipyard in support of recognition for the Solidarity union, pay rises and the release of political prisoners. In an amazing sequence at the end of the strike, the cameraman is involved in a confrontation with strike breakers at the dockyard gates and the camera is snatched by the militia. The still running camera is taken to the local militia headquarters and while examining it the plods make comments like “Sony”, but can’t work out how to turn it off. The tape ends when the battery goes flat. Pressurised by an angry public, the authorities eventually returned the camera to the dock workers with the tape still inside it. This really is an amazing piece of footage and it would be great to see the entire documentary.
Just over a minute of undated film from Polish television archives and run under the title Materials From Nowa Huta failed to make much impression on me. It was followed by more than 11 minutes of police surveillance footage of illegal currency exchange deals outside the Pewex shop in Krakow from 29 March 1983. This material had not been shot with the intention it should be publicly screened and would have worked better as a gallery installation, particularly if multiple projections had been used. From the perspective of someone from London, the clothes the people captured on camera where wearing made it look more like footage from the early 1970s rather than a decade later; although obviously this simply reflects the uneven development of capitalism in different parts of Europe and the world.
Jadwiga Singer’s Glass Pane (1977-79) featured this artist and Jacek Singer performing to camera and using a glass pane as a prop; the glass is drawn on, sprayed with water and coca-cola and smashed. This worked well both as spectacle and disruption of spectacle. Ibenbusz Haczewski’s Transmitter’s Construction (n.d.), documented his clandestine activities interrupting official TV transmissions and with pirate radio. Igor Krenz’s TV,,S (n.d) was a reconstruction of the illegal broadcast of Solidarity slogans over official TV in September 1985. This was a technically complex action set up by three scientists, and entailed their transmitter being carried high into the atmosphere by hydrogen balloons so that the range of the broadcast was maximised. The slogans deployed were effective because the modes of capitalist exploitation dominant in Poland in the 1980s were still very primitive: “Solidarity, enough of price rises, lies, repression” and “Solidarity, it is our duty to boycott the elections”.
The programme ended with three artist films. Satisfaction (1980) and Luggage (1981) by Zdislaw Sosnowski looked very much like underground artist’s video from the USA and western Europe of the same period. Shots of the artist’s scantily clad wife are mixed with repeated nonsensical actions and a soundtrack in which familiar materials are distorted and cut-up (as was the fashion in the ‘industrial’ subculture of the time). Both films held my attention although they would have benefited from tighter editing; but that said Sosnowski’s very self-conscious deployment of cliche did make me laugh out loud. The screening ended with Ewa Partum’s Drawing On TV (1976), in which lines are drawn over live TV broadcasts.
All in all an interesting selection of material, and one which left me wanting to see all of Ballad Of A Strike plus further work by Jadwiga Singer and Zdislaw Sosnowski. The pieces were obviously put together to raise theoretical questions and were chosen more for their intellectual than their aesthetic coherence; so although I found parts of the programme less than scintillating, I can still understand why it was put together in this way. After the screening there was free sparkling wine but as I don’t like fizzy white I skipped that and made use of an opportunity to catch up with Gustav Metzger who was also in the audience…. Jon Wozencroft numbered among those also present, I hadn’t seen him for years and he didn’t seem to recognise me when I said hello despite the fact I’m always being told I haven’t changed at all! Are those who say I look very young for my age lying in an attempt to flatter me? And there is no need to answer that purely rhetorical question in the comments!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1970s, 1980s, 70s, 80s, Ballad Of A Strike, Controlled Image, Dan Graham, Drawing On TV, eighties, Ewa Partum, Gdansk, Glass Pane, Historical Camera Purchase, Ibenbusz Haczewski, Igor Krenz, Jacek Singer, Jadwiga Singer, Jagiellonian University, Jon Wozencroft, Krakow, Lesek Mrozek, Leszek Dziumowicz, London, Luggage, Materials From Nowa Huta, Pewex, Piotr Bikont, Poland, Polish Cultural Institute, RCA, Romuald Kutera, Royal College of Art, Satisfaction, seventies, Sony, South Kensington, Tadbusz Kantor, Tate Modern, The Barbican, Transferring The Camera, Transmitter's Construction, TV S, west London, Zdislaw Sosnowski
Posted in film | 18 Comments »