Posts Tagged ‘London’
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
The news that LA art scenester Mike Kelly just topped himself led me to wonder whether in ten years time he’d make anyone’s list of best ever anti-art suicides. Was his death a resolute ‘NO’ to capitalist exploitation? Or was it as tedious and pathetic as the suicide of Kurt Cobain? I’ll leave you to judge that one and give you instead my top 10 suicides. Since Kelly founded the bands Destroy All Monsters (who I saw in London in the late-seventies after he’d left the group) and Poetics (with John Miller and Tony Oursler), I’m including musicians in this alongside those involved in more visual and literary forms of anti-art.
1. Ray Johnson – a pop and correspondence anti-artist. Ray makes number one in my list because although I never met him, I did have a very minor correspondence with Johnson about 25 years ago. So there’s a small personal connection and we all know nepotism rules in the art and anti-art world. ‘New York’s most famous unknown artist’ drowned himself off Long Island in 1995 – some say it was a final work of performance art.
2. Ann Quin – a 1960s British experimental novelist who did many things before and better than her now more famous contemporary B. S. Johnson (he topped himself by slitting his wrists while lying in a warm bath shortly after Quin’s summer 1973 death). Although Quinn’s first novel Berg (1964) made an impact, by the time she drowned herself, her critical stock had dwindled. Like Ray Johnson, she swam out to sea – but into the English Channel from Brighton’s Palace Pier, rather than the North Atlantic.
3. Arthur Cravan – was a dadaist who specialised in boasting and reinventing himself. Among other stunts, he fought world boxing champion Jack Johnson drunk, and was quickly knocked out. In 1918 Cravan disappeared sailing a boat in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico and is presumed to have drowned. His rather ambiguous suicide set the tone for the deaths of later artists such as Bas Jan Ader (who was lost at sea in the North Atlantic in 1975). For me death at sea is the best way to go (it’s oceanic), but having given you three of these I’ll move on to lesser forms of suicide.
4. Donny Hathaway – is probably best known for his duets with Roberta Flack but his solo work constitutes some of the classiest soul made in the 1970s. Despite success as a singer and songwriter, Hathaway demonstrated to the likes of Herman Brood that the best way to end it all is by throwing yourself into the street from the glittering heights of an exclusive hotel. In Hathaway’s case this was from floor 15 of the Essex House Hotel in New York. Hathaway appears to have been suffering from schizophrenia before his death. His funeral was conducted by the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
5. Jacques Vaché – was a friend of Andre Breton and thus French surrealism’s most famous suicide. He didn’t really do much but maintain an attitude of indifference and disdain towards the world. Vaché killed himself by taking an overdose of opium, and thus blazed a trail for punk rockers like Darby Crash of Los Angeles band The Germs (who deliberately took an overdose of heroin in 1980).
6. Graham Bond – was in at the start of the British blues boom of the 1960s, but he is inevitably included here because he appeared in Gonks Go Beat, an unbelievably bad British movie that Mike Kelly saw on late-night TV somewhere and wanted to see again because he couldn’t quite believe what he’d been viewing. Via a mutual friend I was asked if I could help Kelly locate this item (this was before it was reissued on DVD). I found a bootleg version and passed on the information about where and how to buy it. Returning to Bond, his career basically spiralled downhill from the late-sixties onwards with this decline fuelled by drink, drugs and involvement in the occult. I picked up a typical story about Bond looking for money when I interviewed one time New English Library (NEL) editor Laurence James back in the 1990s, although I don’t seem to have included it in the published version of my conversation. Bond turned up at the NEL offices one day demanding money because somehow a photograph of him had found its way into a Hells Angels magazine published by the company (who’d thought this was a picture of a hells angel and had not realised it was in fact an image of a musician). Bond pretended to be outraged and claimed this mishap would ruin his public reputation. James gave Bond a few quid and the musician went away a happy man because he’d scored enough money to buy whatever drugs he needed that day. In 1974 Bond did the decent thing and jumped in front of a tube train at Finsbury Park Station in north London.
7. Herman Brood – is well known for songs like 1978′s Rock & Roll Junkie (which includes the line: “and when I do my suicide for you I hope you miss me too…”). in later life this Dutch rocker swapped pop excess for a career as a not particularly interesting painter. Sick from prolonged drug use and unable to kick his habit, in 2001 Brood leapt to his death from the rooftop of the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel. When I heard about this the first thought that popped into my head was that I’d thought Brood’s leather jeans looked ugly and uncool when I’ d seen him perform with his band Wild Romance in London in the late-seventies.
8. Adrian Borland – is someone I almost have a personal connection to, since he knew a number of my friends. In the late-eighties I spotted Borland posing outside a London rock venue. He was once in a seriously obscure band called Rat Poison (with a friend of mine in fact) although he later falsely claimed his first group was The Outsiders. As far as I’m aware Rat Poison only ever played one gig at New Malden Town Hall (in south west London). When I came across Borland he was obviously waiting to be recognised, and he gave me a huge smile as I walked over to him. “I know you!” I said before pausing dramatically. “You was in Rat Poison!” Borland’s jaw dropped, he’d lost his rock star composure but eventually managed to blurt: “I’m Adrian Borland. I’ve gone solo now but I used to be in The Sound.” “Never heard of ‘em mate!” I shot back before stomping off leaving my victim completely bemused. When Borland ended it all by jumping in front of a train in 1999 I wasn’t surprised – he seemed to have been in the rock business for the wrong reasons. He was more interested in fame than music and that was bound to result in him becoming very frustrated. Of course, Borland only makes this list because I like to flatter myself I made a small contribution towards his death!
9. Wendy O. Williams – was the singer in the dire American hardcore punk/metal band The Plasmatics. I always liked the idea of Williams far more than the music her band made. She’d started her career in the entertainment business by performing in sex shows, and never really moved away from that since she was usually topless on stage. Frustrated at her inability to break into the mainstream, in 1998 Williams went into the woods near her home and blew her brains out with a gun.
10. Guy Debord – this lettriste and situationist claimed that he wrote less than most writers but drank more than most drinkers. Little surprise then that in 1994 Debord shot himself because he could no longer bear the pain of the illnesses brought on by his excessive consumption of alcohol. Debord only limps in at number 10 because a more interesting dadaist suicide appears to be a completely fictional character. Julien Torma allegedly wandered ill-clad into the Tyrolian mountains at the age of 30 to end it all, and was never seen again. I like to laugh along with Torma’s aphorism: “Perfection is mediocrity. Only excess is beautiful.” Debord by way of contrast, seems to have taken this absurd joke seriously.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Adrian Borland, Amsterdam Hilton Hotel, André Breton, Ann Quin, Arthur Cravan, B. S. Johnson, Bas Jan Ader, Berg, Brighton, Dada, Darby Crash, death, Destroy All Monsters, Donny Hathaway, English Channel, Essex House Hotel, Finsbury Park, Finsbury Park Station, Gonks Go Beat, Graham Bond, Guy Debord, hells angels, Herman Brood, Herman Brood's Wild Romance, heroin, Jack Johnson, Jacques Vaché, Jesse Jackson, John Miller, Julien Torma, Kurt Cobain, LA, Laurence James, letterism, London, Long Island, Los Angeles, Mexico, Mike Kelly, NEL, New English Library, New Malden, New Malden Town Hall, New York, North Atlantic, opium, Pacific Ocean, Palace Pier, Poetics, Rat Poison, Ray Johnson, Roberta Flack, Rock and Roll Junkie, situationism, suicide, surrealism, The Germs, The Outsiders, The Plasmatics, The Sound, Tony Oursler, Wendy O'Williams
Posted in art criticism, drugs, exhibitionism, music | 22 Comments »
Monday, December 12th, 2011
For me London and Glasgow are two of the best cities in Europe, so I’m always up for an excuse to visit Red Clydeside. My reason for heading north last weekend was to do a performance at Transmission Gallery on Saturday 10 December. The train I took was about five minutes from the Central Station when Katrina Palmer – who’d organised the event – called me to say she was close by and would meet me when I got in. Her plan was to walk me straight to Transmission so that we could go through what we were doing that night. I made her detour via Turquoise – AKA “Scotland’s Turkish Kebab House” – where I got a carry out falafel. From Oswald Street we headed down to the Clyde and ambled along the river to the gallery because the city centre was heaving with Solstice shoppers.
It took less than 15 minutes to sort out what we were doing. Katrina wanted each performance to take place in a different area of the gallery and I was happy with that. I then headed across the Clyde to the Premier Inn on Ballater Street, a walk of about 10 minutes. Once I was settled in my room I ate my falafel. I was seriously hungry having skipped lunch because it was too expensive to buy on the train; meaning I hadn’t eaten for more than eight hours. After my grub I ran through what I was doing in the gallery, took a shower, and then read until about 6.45pm.
I returned to Transmission shortly before 7pm and chatted to Keith Miller and a few other people before the live action. Katrina kicked things off with a short reading. Immediately afterwards, Jefford Horrigan did a kind of waltz with a table – turning it on its side and treating two of the arms as legs – with improvised sax provided by René Salemi. With a duration of around 4 minutes, it was even shorter than Katrina’s spoken word act. I went on straight after Jefford and began by doing a headstand and reciting from my recent book Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie. After that I shredded a copy of my novel Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton – while simultaneously explaining that in transforming the tome into confetti, I was creating a work of art and thus greatly increasing the value of the book I was ‘destroying’. I finished by reciting from memory a lengthy passage from my novel Defiant Pose.
After these performances people stood around socialising and eventually most of us moved on to Mono for drinks. At 10.30pm I told Katrina I was hungry and I was going to get something to eat. She wanted nosh as well, as did René and Jefford. The Transmission crowd were more interested in drinking, so we left them in Mono (which stops serving food at 9pm). We went into an Italian restaurant only to be told they’d closed. The same thing happened in the first Indian we came across. We ended up in The Dhabba at 44 Candleriggs. My Palak Paneer (cheese cubes and spinach) was excellent – and Katrina’s Pilee Dal Tadka (yellow lentils), which I also tried, was really good too! As we ate, we talked about artists who do and don’t use the internet, and much else besides. I’m a real fan of the Banana Leaf in the west end of Glasgow – which does fantastic south Indian food – but the northern Indian cooking at The Dhabba made a nice change. Leaving the restaurant around midnight, I made my way back to the Premier Inn with Jefford and René. Katrina was staying at a different hotel, so she headed west down Argyle Street. Back at the Premier Inn I stayed up for a couple of hours to watch the TV news and read.
On Sunday morning I took a shower, made myself some tea and sat in bed reading. Breakfast in the hotel cost £7.99 so I decided to skip it. I checked out at 10am and headed into town so that I could drift through some of Glasgow’s many discount stores. I tried The Poundland on Trongate first, where I bought myself a sandwich which I ate outside the shop. They had one egg and cress special that was reduced by half to 50p – but it should have been removed from the shelf because it was past it’s sell-by-date. I wasn’t gonna take a risk on out-of-date eggs, so I parted with a round pound for my repast. Next I visited The Pound Shop, Pound City and Sports Direct. I got some Lonsdale shorts in Sports Direct and the girl at the till seemed surprised I wasn’t buying anything else – whereas I felt like I was really splashing the cash by paying a fiver for this piece of kit (with a special TV advertised bargain discount of around 70%). I then filled in more time by going to a remainder bookshop on the first floor of the complex above the Argyle Street underground station. The two and three quid books were mostly Scottish themed – and they even had discounted titles by writers such as Lorna Moon, whose work I rarely clock in London.
I kept moving west and where Woolworths used to be on the corner of Argyle and Jamaica Streets, there was a Poundland that I hadn’t seen before. Unlike the old Woolworths, Poundland weren’t using the first floor for their retail operation – but even on ground level alone it is a large shop space. Ignoring the many household items you might pick up at Poundland, I noticed they had a lot of HarperCollins (owned by Murdoch’s News Corp) titles in their book section. However, they’re not adverse to remaindering tomes critical of the Murdoch empire either, since copies of Peter Burden’s News of the World?: Fake Sheikhs and Royal Trappings were also on display. While I wouldn’t consider the Murdoch trash worth a pound of my money, I might have parted with a quid for the Burden book had I not already read it. Aside from showing up Mazher Mahmood (the so called Fake Sheikh) as a complete scumbag, Burden also explains how that wanker Neville Thurlbeck (a man at the very heart of the phone hacking scandal) acquired the nickname Onan The Barbarian – you can find this both in the book and on Burden’s website:
Thurlbeck is the hard-nosed hack who usually handles the dirtier celebrity shag’n’brag stories for the News of the World. A sting went badly wrong for him a few years ago. He’d set out to expose a naturists’ boarding house whose owners allegedly offered ‘extra’ sexual services to guests. Having made his investigations, Thurlbeck carelessly forgot to ‘make his excuses and leave’ (in the time-honoured News of the World manner). Instead, no doubt to his eternal regret, he made his excuses and came. He was caught on film begging the couple to have sex while he stood at the foot of their bed, exposed what, in its primmer days, the News of the World would have called his ‘manhood’ and indulged in an unmistakable act of onanism. Since the film was posted on the internet to the delight of his fascinated colleagues, it was inevitable that sooner or later the moniker ‘Onan the Barbarian’, bestowed on him by an uncharitable ex-colleague, would stick.
Obviously the Burden book is a few years old, so it has nothing about the closure of The News of the World in the wake of the ongoing phone hacking scandal. Still it’s an entertaining read – which is more than can be said for most of the trash published by various Murdoch presses.
Aside from books, I always find Poundland’s DVD selection curious. In the old days they often had a lot of £1 DVDs put out by the Manchester company 23rd Century – who among other things reissued a lot of public domain Italian horror classics of the 1970s and 1980s. The picture quality on these digital cheapies usually wasn’t great – but it was still good to see top of the range Eurosleaze reaching a vast new audience via pound shops. On this particular Poundland visit I noticed a bunch of DVDs released by GrabIt under the series title The International Martial Arts Collection. They had Bruce Li in Fist of Fury II and Return of the Tiger, Bolo Yeung in Bloodfight, Dragon Lee in Golden Dragon, Silver Snake (with Johnnie Chan) and The Dragon, The Hero (with John Liu), Chino in Five Fingers of Steel, Billy Blanks in Expect No Mercy and Showdown, and Mark Dacascos in Sanctuary. Some of these titles have long been popular with public domain budget repackagers – but it’s curious to see them turning up again as £1 disk reissues at a time when downloads and streaming are increasingly popular.
Crossing the top of Jamaica Street and staying on Argyle, a couple of doors along from the big Poundland there was a new shop called Thats Entertainment flogging cheap DVDs, CDs and games. The retail unit it occupied once housed the Glasgow branch of Tower Records, and more recently had operated as an outlet for the now defunct Music Zone chain. I got the feeling that there was some sort of morphic resonance going on, but since I had a train to catch I headed into Glasgow Central Station rather than pursing my psychogeographical investigations! Tower Records and Woolworths may have gone out of business, but pound shops and the like operating out of their old premises seem like a worthy subject for those into hauntology.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 23rd Century, Argyle Street, Ballater Street, Billy Blanks, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, Bloodfight, Bolo Yeung, Bruce Li, Candleriggs, Chino, Defiant Pose, Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton, Dragon Lee, Expect No Mercy, Fake Sheikh, falafel, Fist of Fury II, Five Fingers of Steel, Glasgow, Glasgow Central Station, Golden Dragon Silver Snake, GrabIt, HarperCollins, hauntology, headstand, Jamaica Street, Jefford Horrigan, John Liu, Johnnie Chan, Keith Miller, London, Lonsdale, Lorna Moon, Mark Dacascos, Mazher Mahmood, Mono, Music Zone, Neville Thurlbeck, News Corp, News of the World, News of the World?: Fake Sheikhs and Royal Trappings, Onan The Barbarian, Oswald Street, Peter Burden, phone hacking, Pound City, Poundland, Premier Inn, psychogeography, René Salemi, Return of the Tiger, River Clyde, Rupert Murdoch, Sanctuary, Scotland's Turkish Kebab House, Showdown, shredding, Sports Direct, Stewart Home, Thats Entertainment, The Dhabba, The Dragon The Hero, The International Martial Arts Collection, The Pound Shop, Tower Records, Transmission Gallery, Turquoise, Woolworths
Posted in culture gossip & parties, deep topology aka psychogeography, exhibitionism, performance | 23 Comments »
Sunday, November 20th, 2011
On Thursday (17 November 2011) I went to the opening of Margarita Gluzberg’s Avenue Des Gobelins. She seems to do a solo exhibition with her London gallery Paradise Row more or less annually. For 2011 her focus is photography – last time around she was showing paintings and before that drawings of pugilists. In Avenue Des Gobelins Gluzberg projects slides and video onto graphite paper, thereby referencing drawing – which lies at the heart of her multidisciplinary practice – in the way she presents her photographic and film work.
Gluzberg is also exhibiting platinum prints – the most expensive photographic developing process – featuring similar subject matter to her projections. The images are double and sometimes triple exposures of shots of expensive department stores. This exploration of the display of luxury goods very consciously draws out parallels with various modes of museum exhibition and interpretation; it is therefore implicitly critical of both consumerism and the institution of art. Gluzberg’s opening was busy and there was an after party at Chinawhite – a one time haunt of celebrities whose idea of living dangerously was to frequent a nightclub named after a specific type of heroin.
I didn’t make it to Chinawhite. Instead I headed to The 12 Bar – a rock and roll dive on Denmark Street – where I heard a set of tunes that thirty plus years ago were regularly described as ‘love songs for objects’ (and within which heroin addiction forms the central subject matter). Former Hearthbreakers’ bassist Billy Rath was playing a bunch of songs mostly written by his old group’s front-man Johnny Thunders. He had with him a pick-up band consisting of Chris Low on drums and Nuno Viriato on guitar. As far as I can recall, I’d last seen Rath play as part of Iggy Pop’s backing group at The Lyceum in London’s Strand back in 1979. Rath had disappeared from public view in 1985, only to re-emerge on the music scene a few years ago – having done both rehab and university (psychology at graduate level and post-grad in theology) in a ‘lost weekend’ that went on for more than two decades.
Among the select crowd present the arrival onstage of Billy Rath’s Street Pirates was greeted with rapturous applause. The band started with Pipeline, the tune that opened Johnny Thunders’ solo album So Alone. The Street Pirates were rough and ready but had the right chemistry to rock out. They ran through a half-a-dozen or so familiar songs – some of them twice – including Pirate Love, Born To Lose, Chinese Rocks and Do You Wanna Dance. The audience were ecstatic. A Spanish punkette in tightly fitting cropped shorts, black stockings, knee high books, and a Sex Pistols shirt, got up on the tiny stage and spread her legs wide across the boards, before proceeding to make amateur erotic dance moves.
Billy Rath lost his left foot in a car accident some time ago and now has a prosthetic leg. It’s a real effort for him to stand upright while wielding a heavy bass guitar onstage – he needs both hands to play so he can’t use his walking stick. The Spanish punkette clearly didn’t know this and arched over backwards with her legs spread to grab Billy’s right calf with both hands – she then mimed sucking Rath’s dick with her face beneath his crotch. Billy accepted the situation and treated it with good humor, but the girl didn’t want to let go of him. I was amazed and impressed Rath managed to stay upright. Afterwards people were laughing about this and imagining the Euro punkette’s shock if she’d grabbed Billy’s other calf and discovered that like story book pirates, Rath had a false leg!
I left The 12 Bar with a grin on my face and confident that I’d made the right choice in ducking out of the Chinawhite party. That said, I was left wondering what kind of work Margarita Gluzberg might make about Billy Rath and other members of The Heartbreakers…. A series of drawings of these notorious New York degenerates would be every bit as powerful as her wonderful pugilists. And just in case you don’t know, both Johnny Thunders and Heartbreakers drummer Jerry Nolan died in the early 1990s; while according to Wikipedia lead guitarist Walter Lure now works on Wall Street (presumably as a stockbroker).
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Avenue Des Gobelins, Billy Rath, Billy Rath's Street Pirates, Born To Lose, Chinawhite, Chinese Rocks, Chris Low, Denmark Street, Do You Wanna Dance, heroin, Iggy Pop, Johnny Thunders, London, lost weekend, Lyceum Ballroom, Margarita Gluzberg, Nuno Viriato, Paradise Row, Pipeline, Pirate Love, prosthetic leg, So Alone, The 12 Bar, The Heartbreakers, The Strand, Wall Street, Walter Lure
Posted in culture gossip & parties, drugs, exhibitions, music | 21 Comments »
Wednesday, November 16th, 2011
1. Charles I – who was beheaded on 30 January 1649. The execution was at Whitehall in London. At the very least, the current British royal family need to be completely stripped of their titles and wealth – although there are those who think it would also be a good idea to behead, hang, or shoot them!
2. Cleopatra VII Philopator is by tradition said to have committed suicide on 12 August 30 BC by inducing a snake to give her a poisonous bite. She was following in the footsteps of her bigamous husband Mark Anthony, who topped himself after losing the Battle of Actium on 2 September 31 BC. Regardless of quibbles over the exact details of Cleopatra’s death, it marked the ultimate demise of the Pharaoh royal parasites in ancient Egypt.
3. Louis XVI – beheaded by guillotine at Place de la Révolution in Paris on 21 January 1793. This was an event that dealt a body blow to royal parasites in France.
4. Diana, Princess of Wales – who was fatally injured in a car crash in the Ponte de l’Alma road tunnel in Paris on 31 August 1997. It is unfortunate that her ex Prince Charles – current heir to the British throne – didn’t die with her!
5. Frederick, Prince of Wales – who died from a burst abscess in the lung on 20 March 1751 at Leicester House in London – nearly a decade before his scumbag father George II. There are, of course, millions around the world hoping that the arch-reactionary slimeball Prince Charles will follow in Frederick’s footsteps and drop down dead right now!
6. Nicholas II of Russia was condemned to death and then shot by Yakov Yurovsky shortly after 2.00 am on the morning of 17 July 1918. There is little in Bolshevism to be praised but getting rid of the Russian royal parasites was definitely one of its better ideas – much of the Russian royal family was shot at the same time as Nicholas II.
7. King Dipendra of Nepal – who shot himself with an AK 47 after going postal and murdering nine of his family of parasites at a house in the grounds of the Narayanhity Royal Palace on 1 June 2001. Among those Dipendra shot to death were his mother and father – King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya. Dipendra, who after shooting himself outlived his parents for three days, only got to be ruler while in a coma – making for a delightfully short reign!
8. Princess Grace of Monaco – who died in hospital on 14 September 1982, the day after suffering a stroke that caused her to lose control of her car and suffer serious injuries after it plunged down the side of a mountain.
9. George I of Greece – shot in the back by the anarchist assassin Alexandros Schinas at the White Tower in the city of Thessaloniki on 18 March 1913. Like Bolshevism, anarchism doesn’t have much to offer the working class, but Schinas’s practical opposition to monarchy and aristocracy is something with which most people will have some sympathy.
10. Queen Elizabeth II. Okay so she ain’t dead yet but there are millions of us in the UK looking forward to seeing the back of this particular royal parasite! But don’t forget kids, we still need to strip the entire British royal family of their titles and wealth!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Alexandros Schinas, assassination, Battle of Actium, beheading, bizarre deaths, British royal family, Charles I, Cleopatra, funny deaths, George I, George II, going postal, House of Windsor, King Birendra, King Dipendra, Leicester House, London, Louis XVI, Mark Anthony, Narayanhity Royal Palace, Nicholas II, Paris, Pharaoh, Place de la Révolution, Ponte de l'Alma, Prince Charles, Prince Frederick, Princess Diana, Princess Grace, Queen Aishwarya, Queen Elizabeth II, royalty, suicide, Thessaloniki, White Tower of Thessaloniki, Whitehall, Yakov Yurovsky
Posted in humour, obituary, politics | 22 Comments »
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 »
Friday, October 14th, 2011
Santiago Sierra (b. 1966, Madrid) is well known for his cruel and nihilistic pranks. To save myself the effort of writing very much about Sierra (whose work is tedious but simultaneously serves to illustrate the complete decomposition of the institution of art), I’ve taken the following from a Wikipedia page about him: “Some of Sierra’s most famous works have involved paying a man to live behind a brick wall for 15 days, paying Iraqi immigrants to wear protective clothing and be coated in hardening polyetherane foam as “free form” sculptures, blocking the entrance of Lisson Gallery with a metal wall on opening night, sealing the entrance of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, only to allow Spanish citizens in to see an exhibition of left over pieces of the previous year’s exhibition… In 2006, he provoked controversy with his installation “245 cubic metres”, a gas chamber created inside a former synagogue in Pulheim Germany.”
Sierra’s cynicism and inhumanity are well illustrated by the examples above. He titillates the rich by locking them out of galleries, whereas when it comes to the wretched of the earth, Sierra delights in degrading them by providing a meagre wage in exchange for the performance of boring and humiliating tasks. Sierra’s treatment of those he hires demonstrates not just his repugnant inhumanity – his success as an artist is also based on some extremely cynical calculations about exactly what types of degradation inflicted upon the poor will most appeal to rich collectors.
As an adjunct to the Frieze Art Fair in London, Sierra’s new film No was screened last night to an invited audience at The Prince Charles Cinema just of Leicester Square. The promotion for the movie ran like this: “NO, Global Tour, 2011 A film by Santiago Sierra, Directed by Santiago Sierra, Filmed by Diego Santome, black and white film, 120 minutes. Santiago Sierra(‘s)… recent work, NO, GLOBAL TOUR, consists of the manufacture and transportation of two monumental sculptures in the form of the word “NO”, travelling through different territories on a flatbed truck. The NO, GLOBAL TOUR has resulted in a feature film that documents the passage of this large NO through various world cities… The film, full of all manner of references, does not aim for surprise but thought. Using the strict black and white that characterises his work, and with a soundtrack limited to a careful treatment of incidental sound, the film revitalises the road movie genre through a productive encounter with other languages and disciplines.”
The information that came with my invitation to the free screening was, of course, hype (as is the claim – sometimes made about Sierra – that his work is in some way ‘anti-capitalist’). Free beer and popcorn were a further enticement to attend. Rather than provoking ‘thought’, NO looked like someone had randomly strung together a bunch out-takes from one of Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s TV movies – and with results that were far less enticing than those achieved by this pair of London psychogeographers. I went to the screening with the intention of watching the reaction of the audience, who looked bored shitless after ten minutes. Most had walked out before the end of the movie. I presume this is what Sierra wanted and that he’s more than happy with this result. For the rest of us NO is simply a bit of a yawn. The lettrists achieved far more with their deliberately boring films of the early-1950s, and if you want to be alienated in style then stick with the output of the French avant-garde of sixty-odd years ago. Sierra is strictly for the idle rich, and hopefully they won’t be with us for much longer.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Chris Petit, cynicism, degradation, Diego Santome, Frieze Art Fair, Iain Sinclair, idle rich, inhumanity, Leicester Square, lettrist cinema, Lisson Gallery, London, No, No Global Tour, Prince Charles Cinema, psychogeographers, psychogeography, Santiago Sierra, Wikipedia
Posted in art criticism, film, scam | 22 Comments »
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
In August 2009, and again in August 2011, I found myself referring the games of 3-sided football staged as a part of the Alytus Biennial in Lithuania. I don’t attend many biennials, but since the one in Alytus has evolved into a jamboree of post-artistic practices – and it is also a delightfully intimate event – I’ll always make an exception for it.
But let’s get back to 3-sided football. It was Asger Jorn, the Cobra artist and founding member of the Situationist International, who first came up with the idea of a football match involving three teams. However, it appears that Jorn considered it impossible to stage a real life game of 3-sided football, and so never attempted to do so. As far as I know the first game of 3-Sided football was organised by the London Psychogeographical Association at a Glasgow Summer School in 1993. Since then there have been many games of 3-sided soccer, and in the 1990s they were particularly popular with people involved with the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (who were running an independent proletarian space exploration programme at the time).
3-sided football is played on a hexagonal pitch with each team being assigned two opposite sides for bureaucratic purposes, but only one of these two sides has a goal. The winning team is the one that concedes the least goals, not the one that scores the most. This means that strategic alliances can arise between sides, since it is in the interest of the teams that are losing at any particular point in the game to work together against those that are ahead of them.
In Alytus the pitch was marked out in the city’s forest park, meaning that not only was it difficult to kick the ball all the way across the pitch – because there were trees in the way – but also that as referee I wasn’t always able to see what was going on in the match. On both occasions I refereed in Alytus we had three teams of seven players and I ran the game in three thirds of fifteen minutes each; with two third-time breaks of five minutes. I rotated the teams around the different goals and sides of the pitch during the match, so that each team spent one third of the game defending each of the three different goals. Also, because I’m a lousy referee, I didn’t enforce offside rules (which are a more complicated in 3-sided football than conventional soccer).
The 2009 game was competitive but the teams did seem to understand how to make strategic alliances and we had an excellent match (with the team mostly made up of anarchists from Vilnius winning). This year I was a little disappointed that the two best teams were so competitive and antagonistic towards each other that the worst team won. At one point the two better teams had the ball in front of the worst team’s goal with only one defending player anywhere near them. Instead of co-operating, those who should have been attacking the worst team’s goal tackled each other. This was blatantly stupid since who scored the goal was irrelevant, I was only keeping a tally of goals conceded.
The better teams missed innumerable opportunities to thrash the frankly awful side of footballers who were mostly from London. I had complaints that since I was from London, I was biased in the worst team’s favour, and while I admired the sneaky way they played their superior rivals off against each other – and thereby won the game – I’d also be the first to admit that as athletes they sucked. Given the way the winning side tactically conceded the first goal and continually exposed their football skills as being utterly rubbish, and by such ruses goaded the other two teams into attacking each other, I’d hate to engage any of these lousy sportsmen in 3-sided chess (this is another game that interests them).
Although I was disappointed by this year’s 3-sided football game, the 2011 Alytus Biennial – which ran from 22 to 28 August – also repeated and improved upon a number of events from 2009. The monstrations – demonstrations lacking demands that would be comprehensible to a capitalist politician – were even more of a party than at the previous biennial. We marched with brightly painted placards celebrated the rise of the psychic worker and their solidarity with their dead comrades. The slogans were mostly incomprehensible and some placards even mixed languages and alphabets within words and phrases. This year we not only demonstrated during the day, but also had a late-night march. The way we threw fireworks around in the streets, banged drums and chanted, delighted the Friday night drunks hanging around outside bars.
The scratch music session was also an improvement on 2009, because it was more free form and didn’t become bogged down in rock idioms. Likewise, the 2011 discussions were both more impressive and considerably more global in scope than in 2009. We also did some cloud busting, and that gave me a remarkable sense of deja vu, since it was neither better nor worse than two years previously! I want to keep this short, so I’m not gonna describe everything that went on, but suffice to say that once again the Alytus Biennial proved a complete groove sensation!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 3-sided football, Alytus, Alytus Biennial, Asger Jorn, Association of Autonomous Astronauts, cloud busting, Cobra, football, Glasgow, Lithuania, London, London Psychogeographical Association, monstration, scratch music, Situationist International, soccer, three-sided football, Vilnius
Posted in counterculture, occulture, performance, sport | 20 Comments »
Sunday, October 2nd, 2011
Friday 30 September was a hot night in London and the meteorologists were already promising us that the late summer heatwave was going to produce record October temperatures. Likewise, after the August lull, the art world was back in full party/opening mode. Since I didn’t want to be running all over the city, I decided to pick one event and to screw all the other invitations I’d received. The Serpentine private view that night was bound to be mobbed, so I quickly dismissed any thoughts of going there. I decided not to go anywhere too ‘institutional’ because I wasn’t in the mood for sweaty crowds. Flicking through the smaller shows it was clear the only game going for a dedicated blogger like me was Richard Grayson at artist run space Alma Enterprises in Southwark. Since Grayson shares a name with Batman’s sidekick Robin, it would give me an opportunity to shamelessly recycle the superhero joke I’d used in my headline when I last wrote about one of his openings in May 2009.
Grayson’s latest exhibition - The Objectivist Studio – takes as its starting point the long dead right-wing fuck-wit Ayn Rand. Pro-’free’ market and anti-socialist quotes from Rand’s writing have been painted on canvases, paper, walls and even handmade furniture in Alma’s two rooms. The texts have been fragmented into pseudo-Italian futurist cum English vorticist style works. Graphically the pieces resemble classic modernism, but the choice of colours is pure po-mo kitsch. The results are arresting, and if the show had been a riot, a lot of people would have been nicked. That said, the painted text at first proves hard to read. However, by vocalising the slogans letter by letter, it is possible to arrive at Rand’s intended meaning. Grayson is as ever deadpan about his work, but he looked cheerful and spoke excitedly about the joys of taking up painting once again. I’ve known Grayson for some time, and I understand his political views as lying somewhat to the left of Rand. However, you wouldn’t be able to guess this from the press release accompanying his show:
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)… was the author of the novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and the founder of ‘Objectivism’ – a philosophy that holds that ‘the purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness or rational self-interest.’ She expressed these ideas in her fiction and in publications such as The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist and The Ayn Rand Letter, and her books Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and The Virtue of Selfishness…
After puffing Rand’s book sales, and the widespread and continuing popularity of her leaden prose, the press release continues:
In an interview with the New York Times in 2007 John A. Allison, the chief executive of BB&T, one of the largest banks in the US said: “I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s that Atlas Shrugged has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don’t agree with all Ayn Rand’s ideas… It offers something other books don’t: the principles that apply to business and life in general. I would call it complete.” he said… Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve who oversaw the program of deregulation and embrace of the ‘free market’ approaches that have shaped contemporary banking and finance was a devotee of Ayn Rand. Greenspan first met her when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster…
Given all this, I was left wondering if Grayson’s game plan was to see if he could sell his paintings with their ugly Rand slogans to bankers and other finance scum, who are possibly the only people sufficiently greedy and grasping enough to even contemplate hanging such works in their homes. The crowd gathered for Grayson’s opening ddn’t look like they were sympathetic to Rand’s message. Among the artists present were Susan Hiller, Mike Nelson, Suzanne Treister and Mark Wallinger; the gallerists and curators I clocked included Roger Malpert from The Hayward, Alice Motard from Raven Row, and Ingrid Swenson from Peer; and crowding the beer table were theorists such as Peter Suchin and Pauline de Souza. The gallery and courtyard outside was packed with liberal and left art world cognoscenti: there wasn’t an Ayn Rand style right-wing arsehole – or a single banker for that matter – in sight!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Alan Greenspan, Alice Motard, Alma Enterprises, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, BB&T, Federal Reserve, Fortune 500, Futurism, Ingrid Swenson, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, John A. Allison, London, Mark Wallinger, Mike Nelson, modernism, New York Times, Objectivism, Pauline de Souza, Peer, Peter Suchin, post-modernism, Raven Row, Richard Grayson, Roger Malpert, Roger Malpert from The Hayward, Serpentine, Southwark, Susan Hiller, Suzanne Treister, The Ayn Rand Letter, The Fountainhead, The Hayward, The Objectivist, The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist Studio, The Virtue of Selfishness, US Federal Reserve, Vorticism
Posted in art criticism, culture gossip & parties, exhibitions | 26 Comments »
Thursday, December 31st, 2009
I’ve already written about my experiences of producing the first season of the Mister Trippy blog at MySpace. It is obviously a little early to write about the second season in any depth since this is its closing post. There is also less need to write about Mister Trippy season two because I’ll be leaving the posts up rather than taking them down as I did with not only with the first season of Mister Trippy, but all my MySpace profiles (to protest about the platform’s support for US imperialism), in Spring 2008.
Having produced posts for the first Mister Trippy season daily, I found it far easier to blog every other day in this second season (except for the first month, which was daily). That said, at exactly a year long, this season was also quite a bit shorter than the first. While the comments remained an integral part of the blog, there were considerably fewer than during the first season. I’d view this as a consequence of hosting season two on my own site rather than a social networking platform, and also because I didn’t concentrate on replying to comments as much as I did during the first season. That said, I appear to have more readers here than when Mister Trippy was hosted at MySpace, but far fewer of them commented and those that did made less comments than on the first season of the blog. From a conventional media point of view, upping both the number and percentage of lurkers is probably a good thing, from a full-on committed to Web 2.0 perspective it probably isn’t so good, although it does make life easier! That said, there have still been loads of great comments containing both solid information and some really way-out humour on the season two blog!
A few facts and figures. Mister Trippy season two ran from 1 January 2009 to 31 December 2009, during which time I posted 193 public entries (including this one). As I write this there are 5,007 approved comments split across these posts. Likewise, between myself and the Askimet anti-spam software 10,207 comments were blocked or removed. All the blocked or removed comments were of a commercial nature. Obviously the number of approved and blocked comments will increase as time goes by, although probably not at the same rate as when I was posting on a regular basis.
I’ve found this blog and the main website to which it is attached a good way of alerting people to information I’m seeking. It has enabled me to locate individuals, unearth facts, and in particular extend my knowledge of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson and her bohemian social circle – as well as my first cousin once removed Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones (a legend for audacious Robin Hood-style thefts from the rich and famous, as well as a successful 1958 prison escape with a subsequent two years on the run). That said, while – for example – I now know that Francois Raymond who exhibited photographs of my mother in 1967 is dead and I have contact details for his brother, I’ve drawn a complete blank in my attempts to nail down the fate of Malcolm ‘Grainger’ Drake.
One of the things I’ve always tried to do on this blog, as well as the main site to which it is attached, is put information online that wasn’t previously available via the web. The pieces I’ve posted about my mother’s circle and Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones are good examples of this. When I began researching my mother’s life there wasn’t a single entry about her online. It is because of my efforts that a search engine request now brings in more than 15,000 results for Julia Callan-Thompson, rather than none (which was the result I got from my early web searches for her). There was material about Ray The Cat on the web before I started blogging about him, but by locating a primary source in the form of Ray’s testament about his life and going back to contemporary press coverage of his exploits, I’ve expanded the range of material available online and shown that recent retellings of his escape from Pentonville Prison completely distort the facts (and that the confusion appears to begin with inaccuracies introduced by Mad Frankie Fraser and his ghost-writer James Morton). However, to see this you’d need to read through all my blog entries on Ray The Cat. My research is ongoing and I revise what I have to say on the basis of what I discover. Putting material online is important, there is unfortunately a growing trend (particularly among the young), to look for information on the web and if it can’t be found there then to assume it doesn’t exist.
My research methods appear to confuse some of those I’ve spoken to, since I’ve had the odd email complaining I’ve not written up a story as the person recontacting me originally told it. I always try to find as many sources as possible for what I write. Sometimes these provide me with conflicting information, and some people even provide more than one version of the same story over a period of time. Using archival records where they are available, and all the oral history I am able to collect, I try to reconstruct events as accurately as possible. This can result in a specific person’s recollection of events being discarded; not because I necessarily think the individual in question is lying – memory can play tricks and the person concerned may simply be mistaken about what happened. Someone claiming to have direct knowledge of something does not automatically make them a reliable source for the subject. I work from all the evidence available to me and sometimes this will indicate (or even prove) that a particular individual’s memory of a specific incident is faulty or fraudulent.
Moving on, I trust that the interest of media professionals in blogging is waning, since it has had a deleterious effect on the activity. There are individuals who take up blogging in the belief that it might make them famous. Although this is unlikely, it doesn’t stop people trying and thus producing narrowly focused blogs with very limited subject matter, or else simply going in for egoblogging. One of the elements of this blog that proved particularly popular with a large swathe of readers were my reports of London art world openings. It would not be difficult to construct a blog around nothing but reports of this type, but for me it would become boring and is therefore to be avoided, despite – or rather because of – the fact that it would lead to me being viewed as a greater conventional ‘success’ than is currently the case.
Likewise, most newspapers seem to have given up on investigative journalism, or even research, and at a time when we need much more of it; clearly it is those with particular interests and specialised knowledge who are far better qualified to do this than so called media professionals, and blogging is a cheap and efficient way for the ‘real’ ‘experts’ – in other words, amateurs like you and me - to gather and disseminate information. I’m not seeing as much research based blogging or other web reportage as I’d like, but hopefully there will be more of it in coming months and years – and far fewer blogs being updated via Twitter feeds. I’d also like to see the majority of bloggers trying a little harder with their writing. While splurging something out is a great way of getting it down, you do then need to rewrite and revise. I’ve always tried to compose my blogs the night before I posted them, so that I could give them a final rewrite in the morning. Too many blogs look like their author hasn’t read through what they’ve posted even once! If you’re not prepared to read your own writing, you shouldn’t expect anyone else to do so either!
In conclusion, while I wouldn’t rule out a third season of the Mister Trippy blog, I’m not committed to doing one either. I’ll just see how things go. For now I’d rather concentrate on other pursuits. I will continue to update the main website to which this blog is attached – check the new additions page if you want to see what is being added. Wow, this may also be one of the least humorous blog I’ve written over the past year, so I obviously do need a break from Mister Trippy!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 2009, art world, blogging, egoblogging, email, Frankie Fraser, investigative journalism, jail break, James Morton, Julia Callan-Thompson, London, Mad Frankie Fraser, Mister Trippy, MySpace, prison escape, Ray Jones, Ray The Cat Jones, Raymond Jones, research, Robin Hood, social networking, Stewart Home, Twitter, Web 2.0
Posted in Web 2.0 | 30 Comments »
Sunday, December 27th, 2009
Over the past year I’ve devoted a number of blogs to my first cousin once removed Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones. Having talked to various people about Ray and located assorted print references to him made after he’d retired from being the greatest cat burglar in the world, I thought it was time to dig back into the past. Old newspaper reports of Ray’s court appearances verify much of what he had to say about his life, clarify various matters, and show that more recent accounts of his famous jail break have been distorted by those retelling the tale. Doing a quick search through national newspapers, I found no reports of Ray’s boxing career, and the earliest press coverage I could locate was dated 8 March 1940. The Daily Mirror put things this way:
“Thief Celebrated With 21 Suits
“A man living on the proceeds of house breaking once had so much money that he bought 21 suits and had £50 in his pockets. And for two years his fists kept him free.
“The police stated this at the Old Bailey yesterday when Raymond Jones, 23, described as a labourer of King Edward Walk, Lambeth, London, was sentenced to two years imprisonments for causing grievous bodily harm to a constable who tried to arrest him at the Marble Arch in December 1937, and for attempted theft from a car.
“He was arrested in Lambeth last month.
“A detective said Jones admitted assaulting numerous police officers to escape arrest in the last two years and he had been living on the proceeds of house breaking.”
There was an equally biased report in The Times also of 8 March 1940:
“Caught After Two Years. Labourer’s Savage Attack On Policeman.
“After being at liberty for over two years a man who twice escaped from police in 1937, on both occasions leaving a police officer unconscious on the ground and was not recaptured until early this year at Lambeth Walk, appeared in the dock at the Central Criminal Court yesterday.
“He is Raymond Jones, 23, a labourer of King Edward Walk, and he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for causing grievous bodily harm to one of the two constables, and attempted theft from a motor-car.
“Detective Hope said the prisoner admitted assaulting several police officers in order to escape arrest in the past two years. He had been living on the proceeds of house-breaking. On one occasion he had so much money he bought 21 suits and had £50 in his pocket.
“Judge Beazley, in sentencing Jones, said he had been guilty of a savage attack.”
On the basis of these reports, the press should be in the dock, charged with spreading unctuous bullshit. As I hope I’ve made clear in my earlier blogs, Ray was not guilty, he was fitted-up. The papers, taking their cue from the Old Bill and a slimeball judge report him as being guilty of numerous assaults on cops, but he was found guilty on just one count! And in this instance, he acted in self-defence after being violently assaulted by a bully dressed in blue.
Ray’s 1952 appearance at the Old Bailey was also widely covered by the press under headlines such as Alleged Complicity In Fur Coats Theft (Times April 25 1952), £4000 Fur’s Theft, Six And A Half Year Sentence (Times 24 June 1952), and Police Kept Watch From ‘Q Van’ He Says (Daily Mirror 21 June 1952). This need not detain us, although the swiping of guests’ coats during a swanky New Year party thrown by Colonel Martin Charteris for his upper-class chums is an amusing tale; and it is also worth noting that in his evidence Ray mentioned a feud between his family and notorious 1950s gangster Billy Hill and that to defend his brother who’d been stabbed, Ray punched out the Mister Big of the London crime world. But let’s move on to Ray’s famous jail break. The Times of 18 October 1958 described it thus:
“Two Escape At Pentonville. Others Fail In Attempt.
“Five men took part in an escape attempt from Pentonville Prison last light. Three were recaptured, but two others got away. They were the first men to break out of the prison since it was reopened in 1946. A full scale search of the area was carried out.
“The men who got out of the prison were Raymond Jones, aged 42, serving 8 years preventative detention, who Scotland Yard said might be violent, and John Rider, aged 28, serving 5 years imprisonment.
“The escape was made during the period given over to evening classes. Jones and Rider found ladders being used during the repair of the prison roof, and took them to scale the 20ft wall of the prison.
“Once on top of the wall, they jumped into an alley that skirts the side of the prison and one turned left, the other right… Tracker dogs, police cars, wardens, uniformed and plain clothes police with torches toured streets around Caledonian Road.”
The Daily Mirror (18 October 1958) used Gaol Break 2 Men Hunted as its headline, and this front page story contained the following information not provided by The Times: “Two of the other three men perched on the top of the wall then dropped back into the goal yard. The third fell and was injured.” Rider enjoyed just 24 hours freedom, as The Times reported on 20 October 1958:
“John Rider aged 34, one of two men who escaped from Pentonville Prison, London, on Friday night, was recaptured on Saturday while he was asleep on a sofa in an unoccupied home at Antler Hill, Chingford, Essex.
“The search continues for the other prisoner Raymond Jones aged 42, who was serving a sentence of eight years preventative detention. Scotland Yard issued a warning he might be violent.”
The idea that Ray was potentially violent was just a cop smear designed to justify the filth’s 1940 fit-up; Ray never carried weapons, although he would defend himself with his fists if attacked. Ray also knew how to run and hide, having spent the whole of 1938 and 1939 on his toes… When he was finally recaptured The Daily Express (24 November 1960) put the story on the front page and reported it this way:
“Two-Year Escaper Caught
“Pentonville’s record escaper, Raymond Jones, was recaptured in Staines, Middlesex, last night.
He went ‘over the wall’ two years ago – the longest time a fugitive has been on the run from the jail.
“A tip-off at lunch-time sent the police to Staines. They waited six hours to seize him at a house.
“Jones, a 42 year old Welshman, was serving eight years preventative detention.”
So there you have it, plenty of contemporary documentation to confirm just why Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones is a legend! And this is also why as recently as November this year Wales On Sunday devoted yet another page to this famous criminal, the closest thing the 20th century ever produced to a new Robin Hood!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Antler Hill, Billy Hill, Caledonian Road, car theft, Central Criminal Court, central London, Chingford, Colonel Charteris, Colonel Martin Charteris, Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Detective Donald Hope, Detective Hope, Donald Hope, Essex, fit-up, GBH, goal break, goal escape, jail break, jail escape, John Rider, John Ryder, Johnny Rider, Johnny Ryder, Judge Beazley, King Edward Walk, Laambeth Walk, Lambeth, London, Marble Arch, Martin Charteris, Middlesex, Old Bailey, over the wall, Pentonville Prison, Q Van, Ray Jones, Ray The Cat Jones, Raymond Jones, Robin Hood, south London, Staines, The Times, Wales, Wales On Sunday
Posted in True crime | 74 Comments »