Posts Tagged ‘west London’
Saturday, December 5th, 2009
I finally caught up with one time Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones press spokesman Michael Morgan at his Hackney flat yesterday. We spent much of the day going over Ray’s life-story, and Michael also kindly presented me with a bundle of press clippings and other material he’d photocopied for me.
Among the many impressive cuttings Michael Morgan gave me is one entitled ‘The Night I Stole Liz’s Jewels In The Gresham’ (from the Irish tabloid The Sunday World, 23 November 1997):
“One of the world’s oldest jewel thieves has spilled the beans on how he amassed a £5 million fortune by robbing top showbiz stars as revenge for his brother’s tragic death in a World War II bombing raid. And legendary burglar Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones says one of his most memorable jobs was when he broke into a Dublin hotel room and stole jewels belonging to superstar Elizabeth Taylor…
“…Ray told the Sunday World: ‘Way back in 1940 I was due to fight for the World Middleweight Championship… I was real good and I had boxed and beaten the legendary Fred(die) Mills and now I was in with a chance of a World Crown. But I was involved in a melee in London and was charged with hitting a copper. I found out later that the copper was himself a middleweight boxer. They framed me to get me out of the way. I got six years for the assault.’
“His brother, who lived in the family home in Gwent, South Wales, came to visit Ray in Pentonville prison in North London. But he was tragically killed in the first bombing of London by the Nazis at the end of 1940…. Said Ray: ‘I got on my knees in my prison cell. I vowed I would hit back at society and the judiciary for taking the things I cared most about in life away from me. When I got out, I said to myself, I would become the greatest cat burglar in the world. That was my mission in life… I would only hit rich people. They were the cream of the crop and had everything they wanted. I had been robbed of my life. I had to hit back.’ ”
My chat with Michael Morgan, other papers he gave me and one of my previous blogs about Ray The Cat, can fill in a few details here. Jones had moved to London around 1936 to further his boxing career and had settled in Maida Vale. One Sunday morning in 1937 he went for a stroll with a friend and they were stopped by the Old Bill under the notorious SUS law (this allowed the cops to stop, search -and even arrest – anyone on the suspicion they were going to commit a crime; the law was finally abolished after the Scarman enquiry highlighted the role its use played in the 1981 Brixton riots). Metropolitan police boxing champion PC Spratt told Ray he was being arrested for SUS, and when Jones protested he hadn’t done anything, this bully-boy cop grabbed Jones by the collar and punched him in the face. Ray fell back against the wall, sprang up and with a well-placed punch KOed the violent thug who was attacking him.
The knock-out blow delivered against the best fighter in the Met was a clear-cut case of self-defence, but Ray and his friend understood the necessity of being on their toes, and the cops didn’t catch up with Jones for three years. When they did, the crown used Ray’s sporting nickname of ‘Slasher Davies’ to falsely paint him as a violent thug involved in razor attacks on innocent members of the public; when in reality the moniker was derived from his punching prowess in the boxing ring. As a result, Jones did a six year stretch for an assault perpetrated not by him, but against him!
Jones insisted that he was innocent of both this and the alleged crimes (thefts of coal, shoes and a bottle of milk) that led to the spell he spent in Reform School as a boy. However, Ray was guilty of the robberies for which he was sent down at the Old Bailey in 1952, since he’d decided to hit back against the rich who were ruining society and making life a misery for poor families like his own, by stealing from aristocrats and showbiz stars. Unfortunately, despite Ray’s guilt in this instance, there were to be more fit-ups. The outline for the official biography of Ray’s life (the book was never written) includes the following: “Within eight days of leaving prison he was arrested for living on the immoral earnings of prostitution. Despite the fact that he had only been out of prison a week, and that the woman concerned was not a prostitute he was sentenced to a further 6 months. Ray says that years later the officer who had arrested him, admitted that he had been framed on directions from someone in Scotland Yard.”
Another frame-up took place in 1957, the filth used a nark to lure Jones to a London cul-de-sac in which they’d parked a a stolen car and then arrested him for the theft. This led to Ray’s famous escape from Pentonville in October 1958, when using ladders left by a work gang doing repairs to the prison, he and Johnny Rider got onto the roof and then down the walls. When Ray fell and injured himself, Rider attempted to carry him but Jones insisted his friend run on because it was important at least one of them got away; sadly Rider was recaptured very shortly afterwards. Jones managed to crawl to safety and eventually asked a couple of men, one of whom was an ex-con, for help in return for money. They drove him to a pub run by one of his cousins (one of the sons of his west London based gangster uncle Dennis ‘Dinny’ Callaghan), who gave him the keys to a flat where he could clean himself up and rest. Unfortunately the landlord was inspecting the property when Jones arrived and told him to go away, since he didn’t want someone covered in blood going into his building. Ray then directed the men aiding his escape to the home of a fence called Benny Selby, who paid them £50 and helped him clean up.
Eventually Ray found a flat to stay in, and his wife Anne who worked at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital For Children in Hackney Road, persuaded a doctor she knew there to attend to her husband’s injuries. Once he’d healed up, Jones went back to his chosen profession of robbing the rich. While Ray was on the run, Peter Scott approached him and said he’d been given inside information on a big job by a couple of bent coppers. Scott needed a skilled accomplice to rob Sophia Loren (who was making The Millionairess in England) of her jewels; once these had been flogged the detectives who’d put them up for the theft would be paid off with £6000.
The raid took place in May 1960, with the bumbling Scott acting as look-out and Ray breaking into Loren’s bedroom to steal the diamonds. The haul was sold to a fence for £44,000, with Scott and Jones netting nearly £19,000 each (slightly less because of expenses on top of the bung to the filth). Scott visited Jones immediately after paying off the bent coppers at a White City Stadium dog race, claiming that they’d read in the papers the stolen jewels were worth £185,000 and they wanted another £6000 for putting up the job. Ray thought Scott was trying to con him out of three grand and refused to give him any cash.
After he was recaptured in October 1960, Ray suspected that Scott may have given the cops the information that enabled them to track him down; the look-out was pissed off that Jones hadn’t coughed-up the extra money he later discovered the bent detectives had indeed demanded. Despite his suspicions on this score, when Ray decided to go public about having done the Sophia Loren job in the early 1990s, he warned Scott he was going to do so. At the time Scott begged Jones not to mention his name, and Ray respected his wishes although he harboured serious doubts about the integrity of this ‘man’.
Ray’s 2 years and 28 days on the run from Pentonville apparently earned him a place in The Guinness Book of Records. Michael Morgan also told me that Ray’s younger daughter Anne-Marie Jones was both conceived and born while he was on the lam; her older sibling Beryl was born before the 1957 fit-up. Thanks to Michael Morgan I also have yet more tales to tell about Ray The Cat, but they won’t all fit into one blog…. So the further adventures of this 20th century Robin Hood will have to wait for now! But before going, I would like to emphasise the injustice of the fit-ups Ray suffered: he claimed that 17 of the 33 years he spent in jail were for crimes of which he was innocent…
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Anne Jones, Anne-Marie Jones, Benny Selby, bent cops, Beryl Jones, boxing, Brixton riots, burglary, central London, Dai Jones, David Jones, Dennis Callaghan, Dennis Dinny Callaghan, Dinny Callaghan, Dublin, east London, Elizabeth Taylor, fit-ups, Freddie Mills, Hackeny Road, Hackney, John Rider, Johnny Rider, London, Maida Vale, Michael Morgan, north London, Old Bailey, PC Spratt, Pentonville Prison, Peter Scott, Queen Elizabeth Hospital For Children, Ray Jones, Ray The Cat, Ray The Cat Jones, Raymond Jones, Scotland Yard, Slasher Davies, Sophia Loren, south Wales, SUS law, The Millionairess, The Sunday World, west London, White City, White City Stadium
Posted in True crime | 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 »
Sunday, September 6th, 2009
Yesterday I posted an essay on the main part of this website entitled The Real Dharma Bums: on the beatnik frenzies of Julia Callan-Thompson & Bruno de Galzain. The text documents one of my mother’s relationships and the endless scamming that accompanied the hardcore drug use that was a part and parcel of said romance. Running to 10,000 words, this piece was too long to use as a blog. I prefer to place shorter and more fragmentary materials here. But as a supplement to that and other writings about my mother, I’m running below a couple of letters she wrote to my grandmother Elsie in the early 1960s.
The first letter was written from 101 Barnsbury Street, London N1. It is undated but would have been composed in either August or September 1961; most likely mid-to-late August. My Uncle Terry had recently been caught in possession of stolen goods and was banged up, while my Uncle Johnny was on the run from the army and the cops. Shortly before this, my grandfather Dai was one of several Newport dockers to lose his job after he was discovered incapacitated at work as a result of liberating and downing a large amount of booze that he’d been handling. The early 1960s were tough times for my family and my mother resolved to hide from them fact that she was pregnant (they would, of course, have been very happy to hear this had she been married). My mother was always a little cagey in her letters home, and I’ve heard enough stories about her teenage years to know that while she was only 17 years-old when she penned the first missive I reproduce here, she was already extremely streetwise and adept at pulling scams and cons.
I don’t really know what to make of the employment my mother refers to below, she was a nightclub hostess at the time she wrote the letter. Likewise, the story about going to Germany appears to be no more than a way of covering her tracks: she did not want to see family members when she was heavily pregnant with me. My view is my mother had no intention of leaving London – where I was born just before Easter 1962. That said, while disentangling truth from falsehood may be difficult here, the expressions of love towards my grandmother and our wider family are nonetheless one hundred percent genuine. So here’s the first letter:
“I’m writing because I’m wondering why you haven’t written. I sent you a card and a small something on your birthday which included my present address. Have you received this? If it has been mislaid in the post tell me in your next letter and I’ll get in touch with the post office as I’ve a receipt.
“How are things at home, did Terry get off lightly and have they caught up with Johnny yet? Hell! Here I am writing you what is supposed to be a cheerful letter and I haven’t said one cheerful thing yet.
“I’m living near to the hospital where I used to work. Its quite a nice area except when the Cypriots that live next door start arguing. Honestly I’d thought our family could argue but you should see this lot once they start going. Bank Holiday they started at about 11 am and no word of a lie mum they were still at it when I came home about midnight. The trouble is they start off with two people arguing and then their family join in then all the people that occupy the flats where they live join in, then the bloke who owns the cafe down the road joins in until you’ve got every Cypriot that lives within the radius of 4 miles joining in . It wouldn’t be so bad if you knew what they were arguing about but the trouble is that you don’t because they’re either babbling in Greek or Turkish and it does make old nosey want to know what’s going on.
“I must tell you mum I’ve actually acquired a sewing machine, a typewriter and a camera all within the last week. No I haven’t won the pools!!! The typewriter I had given me. You see mum up until this week I was working for a solicitor in Baker Street and the girl who I was supposed to be successor to was leaving to go to South Africa with her husband so naturally she wanted to get rid of all the things that she couldn’t take with her. The only problem was that I had to carry it all the way from East London. God I nearly killed myself doing it. It’s not a nice modern portable, but one of those big black heavy pre-war things and so you can imagine what a job it was lugging it all the way to the underground. When I got there the tube was full so I had to carry it. Then off the underground to get the bus then I had to walk about 200 yards from the bus stop to the house. Honestly mum I’m sure that if anything I lost about 2 stone that night and put muscles that were never there in my arms. Still I mustn’t grumble must I. At least I’ve got a typewriter for nothing. Also I bought the camera off her for only £1. Is a simply super one too.
“Now for the sewing machine. Last Sunday I was in the market. I don’t know if you know mum but the markets in London are all in the streets not closed in like the ones at home. You know you can bid a price down and I got the machine that was advertised for £6.10 for £3.10. I was so pleased with myself for getting it at £3 less that I just had to buy it.
“I’ve also paid my overdraft at the bank and got my tape machine out of the pawn shop. Honestly mum with all these things I’m beginning to feel that I ought to open up a shop.
“By the way is the radio working? I’m enclosing a spare valve because one of them is practically burnt out and it would cost you about fifteen bob to replace so as I’ve one here which I can’t use for anything else you might as well have it.
“Also mum when I collected my cases at Paddington there were only two. Did you send the other one or not? In case you haven’t I’m enclosing ten shillings which I hope will pay it, if not I’ll send on the difference You might as well have it sent straight to the house mum.
“I don’t think I’ll be home before next Easter at the earliest mum, as a German girlfriend who I have known since I’ve been in London stayed with me last week as she was going back to Cologne this week and she invited me to stay with her family for Christmas. If the finances will enable me I intend staying until almost up to Easter in which case I’ll come home straight from Germany and stay for a few weeks before I move on to somewhere else but after next Easter I don’t somehow think I’ll come back to London. I’m thinking of going to Leeds or Manchester or some other city as I’m becoming a bit fed up with London. Or maybe I’ll do a season job in Germany or someplace. I just can’t get over how much I’ve written, honestly mum, I’m bound to have paralysed my hand or something.
“I hope that you had some days out mum. I really do wish that I could share my luck with all the family. I had a really wonderful holiday in the Isle of Wight. I visited Ventnor and tried to see if I could find the hotel Johnny stayed at, but I’d forgotten the name. I hope you all received my cards and that Pat and Gerald received their rock all in one piece. Also when I was down there after about two weeks I went on to Lee-On-Solent which is just a small seaside place – but I was able to go to Southampton – which wasn’t very thrilling as I’d been there too many times before, and also you only had to take the ferry over the water and you came to Portsmouth where I’d never been before. Also, Margaret will probably know its only a 5d bus fare from Portsmouth to Southsea which is a lovely place, really mum you ought to spend a holiday there. The beaches are just as nice if not better than Brighton and the lights in the nights are really and truly beautiful from the water.
“I really must close now mum although I do miss you all. I must say thank you mum for giving me such a nice welcome at home and look forward to my next visit whenever that is. My regards and best wishes to the family. All my fondest love, Julia.”
Here’s the second letter, written by my mother on 2 March 1963 from 24 Bassett Road, London W10:
“Dear Mum
“I’m glad to hear that you’re up and about again, I was quite worried but it was good to know that the family hadn’t neglected you.
“In your letter, as in nearly all the letters you’ve written me, you have once more asked me to come back home. Well mum although I haven’t been very much use to you as a daughter, I would be of even less use to you in Newport. At least in London I’m being of some use to myself and I hope my friends.
“I was very young when I left home and most probably it caused you considerable worry, but myself I have never regretted the decision. This is no reflection on you but rather on other circumstances.
“You always seem to think that I’m unhappy. I sincerely want to stress the point mum that I am far happier here than I would be down there, it isn’t because of the higher wages that I stay here, although obviously it is much more pleasant not to have to worry about every penny. I had a very different life than I would have had had I stayed at home, and have therefore become a different type of person. I just wouldn’t fit into a Newportonian way of life any more, so please don’t fret about it.
“It’s very sweet of you to save up for my 21st. I’m not being ungrateful, but I’d much rather you had a holiday or some extra luxury with the money.
“Fondest love to dad, also my love to the rest of the family. Bye for now. Affectionately, Julia.
“PS. Look after your legs and don’t over use them, you won’t be supplied with a new pair if those should wear out.”
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Barnsbury Street, Bassett Road, Bruno de Galzain, central London, Cologne, David Callaghan, Elsie Callaghan, Germany, Isle of Wight, Islington, Johnny Callan, Julia Callan-Thompson, Ladbroke Grove, Lee-On-Solent, Leeds, London, Manchester, Newport, Paddington, Portsmouth, sixties, Southampton, Southsea, Stewart Home, Terry Callan, Ventnor, west London
Posted in Julia Callan-Thompson | 17 Comments »
Friday, July 24th, 2009
I knew 1979 was gonna be a bad year before it even started, although I didn’t see Thatcher’s election as a certainty until it happened. Much of my take on the world back then was filtered through the music I loved. On 29 December 1978 I headed up to Camden to catch a multi-band new wave gig at The Electric Ballroom headlined by The Brian James All Stars. This was the band that eventually became The Brains. Their performance that night was so-so and for me it didn’t compare with the excitement of seeing The Damned live when James was their guitarist (or even when they reformed without him).
I don’t remember who was bottom of the bill on 29 December 1978 at the Electric Ballroom. I hope it wasn’t 4th Reich, who used to do a lot of central London support slots at that time; they were one of the worst named punk bands of that era. As far as I could tell this group weren’t political, they had a female singer and their most memorable song was a cover of the early sixties hit Bobby’s Girl. But the name 4th Reich was so stupid that I never paid them much attention, although I saw them at least half-a-dozen times as support to other bands. Billed immediately beneath Brian James was Squeeze. I was more interested in Squeeze then than I would be now, since I’d rather liked their Packet of Three EP (more to do with John Cale’s production than the band’s live sound); their subsequent chart hits failed to groove me. Anyway, at some point it was announced that the Squeeze van had broken down with them and their equipment in it, and since they couldn’t make the gig, the The Police would play instead.
I knew before I heard them that any band calling themselves The Police had to be terrible. The filth were scum and no one in their right mind would name their group after the old bill. Brian James hadn’t pulled much of a crowd, and there were only about 50 punks in the Electric Ballroom, which I guess had a capacity of something between one and two thousand. When The Police took to the stage everyone in the venue walked away from it and headed for the bar at the back of the room. Pretty much the entire audience had their backs turned on Sting and company for their entire set. Unfortunately this was the most memorable thing about the night… Not a good gig.
I don’t remember what I did that New Year, my recollection of the following one is much better since I was back at the Electric Ballroom to see in 1980 with a double-bill of The Lurkers and Adam & The Ants. Musically this was a much better night than Brian James and The Police a year and two days earlier. That said, while the Ants were playing a girl who was standing close to me tried to pull Adam off-stage, and rather than taking it out on her, the bouncers beat me up. Then, because I looked a mess with my bloodied face, I got pulled by the filth on my way home. I’d picked up one of the free clear vinyl flexi-singles The Lurkers used to give away at their gigs, and the old bill held me for ages while they tried to work out what this was. I told them it was a record but they didn’t believe me; apparently they’d never seen a flexi-disk before. Eventually, after a radio conversation with their controllers and a close inspection of the grooves, they concluded my Lurkers freebie was indeed a record and not some drug paraphernalia, so plod let me go with a warning that if I was caught fighting again, I’d be nicked. I headed off with their verdict on my flexi-single still ringing in my ears: “Very clever!” Little things impress little minds.
Three days later I made my way to Wardour Street in Soho to catch Eater who’d been advertised as playing at The Marquee. This schoolboy punk band were best known for bitching that The Sex Pistols were too old, and I really dug their super-dumb sleaze-bag thud. Unfortunately, being almost as young as me (I was sixteen at the time), they tended to bicker a lot. When I arrived at 90 Wardour Street (now a swanky Terence Conran restaurant, but back then a rock and roll toilet) on 3 January 1979, there was a sign saying Eater had split up and Marseille would play instead. I’d heard the Marseille song Do It The French Way and seen pictures of this Liverpool based group, so I knew they weren’t for me. Back then people didn’t use the phrase New Wave of British Heavy Metal, but that’s what Marseille were subsequently tagged.
I was on my own and since Eater weren’t playing, I decided I’d only go inside if some of my mates were around. I couldn’t see anyone I knew but got talking to punkette in the queue and since she was going in, I decided to hang with her. I warned her that Marseille played heavy metal and we should go somewhere elsewhere. I wasn’t interested in Marseille but I was taken with the girl, so I parted with 50p to get in. Afterwards we both agreed that Marseille sucked and I walked the punkette down to Charing Cross station, where she caught a train to south east London. Unfortunately she didn’t invite me to go home with her but I did get her phone number. When I got around to calling the punkette a week later, she wouldn’t meet me coz I’d taken so long to bell her. I was playing cool, not hard to get.
So 1979 started badly and ended badly too with a beating at the Electric Ballroom. There were some good gigs in-between, with The Specials just before they broke being particularly memorable. First time I caught them was bottom of the bill to the reformed Damned (without Brian James) and The UK Subs (I think), at The Lyceum Ballroom in The Strand. The Specials were even better when I saw them headlining at The Nashville in South Kensington – unfortunately they had the same support band both times, Madness, who were fucking awful. The best gig I saw at The Marquee that year was Slaughter and the Dogs on Monday 3 September. The most impressive act at The Lyceum in 1979 is hard to pin down, Pure Hell from Philadelphia were memorable – but I’m unsure whether I saw them there in 1979 or the year before. Ditto Destroy All Monsters, who I saw at The Lyceum, but this might have been in 1980 rather than 1979. Both Pure Hell and Destroy All Monsters were right up there with some of the class US acts I’d seen in 1977, such as The Dictators and The Dead Boys. But even The Fall, who I’d hated when I’d seen them at The Marquee the year before, were excellent supporting Stiff Little Fingers at The Lyceum in 1979. The audience loathed them and Mark E. Smith did a perfect job of winding up the massed ranks of punk zealots. Smith is very entertaining when he has an audience that really hates him, but under all other circumstances I find him a bore.
I was also going to see a lot of the mod revival bands in 1979: Purple Hearts, The Mods, The Chords, Secret Affair, Back To Zero etc. But rather than the big events like Mod’s Mayday at the Music Machine, the best gigs were smaller ones at places like The Notre Dame Hall off Leicester Square and at The Global Village under the Charing Cross arches (then a straight disco, but later the gay nightclub Heaven). I liked catching bands from around London who you could see play every few weeks, and if they had a pop sensibility that made them even better. I saw both The Vapors and The Members repeatedly in 1979, as well as some of the more dire-hard acts like Chelsea and even Raped; the latter more after their name change to Cuddly Toys. So there was some good music, some bad music, but the winter of discontent was the real groove sensation – even if it was followed by the affront of Thatcherism. And since the current economic crisis is reopening the revolutionary possibilities that the ruling class wants us to believe were closed down back then, the seventies are on my mind a lot right now….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1979, 4th Reich, Adam and the Ants, Adam Ant, Back To Zero, Bobby's Girl, Brain James All Stars, Brian James and the Brains, Camden, central London, Charing Cross, Chelase, Cuddly Toys, Damned, Dead Boys, Destroy All Monsters, Do It The French Way, Eater, Electric Ballroom, Global Village, John Cale, London, Lyceum Ballroom, Madness, Margaret Thatcher, Mark E. Smith, Marseille, Music Machine, Notre Dame Hall, Packet of Three, Pure Hell, purple hearts, Raped, Secret Affair, Sex Pistols, Slaughter and the Dogs, Soho, South Kensington, Squeeze, Stiff Little Fingers, Sting, Terence Conran, The Chords, The Dictators, The Fall, The Lurkers, The Marquee, The Members, The Mods, The Nashville, The Police, The Specials, The Strand, The Vapors, UK Subs, Wardour Street, west London
Posted in music | 37 Comments »
Friday, July 10th, 2009
I imagine there must be many autobiographical accounts of working as a film extra in London in the sixties, although I can’t recall reading any. Looking at the film industry from the bottom up strikes me as considerably more interesting than the recent obsession with celebrity focused accounts of the movie world. My mother, Julia Callan -Thompson, briefly took up extra chores in the mid-sixties and she ran them in tandem with attempts to establish a modelling career. She found her way onto the fringes of the London film world through a friend called Annette Monaghan. Annette had grown up two streets away from my mother in Newport and relocated from south Wales to London to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In London, Monaghan adopted the stage name Annette Foley. My mother had arrived in London in 1960 to pursue a beatnik lifestyle and accompanied Annette to a film audition circa 1964 just to keep her company. The producer auditioning Annette said he’d employ my mother too if she got an Equity card, which she did.
One of my mother’s first film jobs was working as an extra on the historical movie Becket. It starred Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud. The film was adapted by Edward Anhalt from a Jean Anouilh play and directed by Peter Glenville. Despite being nominated for a bunch of film awards, the movie is actually a camp romp in which sado-masochism and homo-eroticism are delightfully evoked through lush visuals and barbed dialogue. In the film, Thomas a Becket comes across as a Saxon version of St Sebastian, and the blatantly sexualised whipping of Henry II in Canterbury Cathedral is used as a framing device for the entire story. The first shot of Henry shows him arriving at Canterbury with a tolling bell swinging in the frame. After detailing his friendship and estrangement from Thomas in a series of flashbacks that last for over two hours, Henry is finally shown taking pleasure in his punishment and afterwards he gaily thanks the church officials who’ve lashed him. Archbishop Becket’s murder is just as stylised and heavily eroticised. The dialogue in Becket mixes Machiavelli and Clausewitz with high camp. For example, Becket telling Henry II that he should have no illusions about his popularity because the crowd cheering him have been paid to do so.
My mother, who mainly worked as a Soho nightclub showgirl and hostess, was used to staying up until the small hours and sleeping late. Film work, even when she was only employed as an extra, required her to get up at the crack of dawn. While my mother had long harboured a taste for amphetamines, the car already loaded with extras that would arrive at 6.AM to take her from Ladbroke Grove to Elstree increased their immediate usefulness. In an undated note she told our family back in Wales: “Apologies for the long silence – but I’ve been working every day – yesterday was my first day off working on the film Casino Royale, a send up James Bond – lots of people working on it. Peter Sellers, David Niven, Ursula Andress, George Raft etc. – not grumbling because the money is so good but will be glad when it’s finished so I can have a rest.”
The original Casino Royale was so star filled that my mother doesn’t bother to list all the celebrities appearing in the movie. Among those omitted from her roll call are Orson Welles, Woody Allen, Daliah Lavi, Joanna Pettet, Deborah Kerr, William Holden, Charles Boyer and one of the most famous faces of French cinema at that time, Jean Paul Belmondo. The film had five credited directors: John Huston, Ken Hughes, Val Guest, Robert Parrish and Joe McGrath. It was very loosely based on the James Bond book Casino Royale, with comic innuendo largely replacing novelist Ian Fleming’s extreme sado-masochistic fixations. While elements of the trouser dropping humour on display are patently English, overall the film has a pan-European feel with the sparse plotting and international cast bringing to mind Roger Vadim’s similarly camp late-sixties confection Barbarella. In both films scantily clad female ‘eye candy’ (hence the hiring of my mother as an extra) brighten up a series of exotic and often high tech locations. Casino Royale’s arch-villain Woody Allen is creating doubles of world leaders and various spies in an attempt to take over the planet. The soundtrack is by Burt Bacharach. There are many bedroom and bathroom sequences, including slinky shots of Ursula Andress exotically costumed and filmed through a fish tank. Casino Royale is a thoroughly enjoyable period piece, replete with speculation about bad guy Woody Allen being a junkie and various other heavily sign-posted drug references.
In another undated note my mother wrote to our family: “…have finished working on Casino Royale, did three days this week on a Dirk Bogarde film called Accident and will be working on a Laurence Harvey film Spy With A Cold Nose tomorrow, so I’ve been pretty lucky with work this summer – unless something really great happens I’m planning to winter in Paris – anyway if I do decide not to stay in London – will come and see you all before leaving…”
In Joseph Losey’s Accident, love triangles among the Oxford University set provide a vehicle for a lingering exploration of guilt, repression, thwarted desire and emotionally restrained but nevertheless excessive drinking. In striking contrast, Spy With A Cold Nose was a spoof espionage movie about a dog that had been bugged and presented as a gift to the head of the Soviet state. Directed by Daniel Petrie, the film starred Laurence Harvey, Daliah Lavi and Lionel Jeffries. Harvey plays a sex obsessed society vet blackmailed by the security services into assisting them; his character appears to be modelled on Profumo Scandal fall guy Stephen Ward who was a sex obsessed society osteopath. To underline the Profumo Scandal parallels, one scene in Spy With A Cold Nose is set in a hostess club.
To the best of my knowledge, after 1966 my mother stopped working as an extra on London film productions, although she does turn up on documentary footage of countercultural events including The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream and Alex Trocchi’s State of Revolt. I know she worked as an extra on some Bollywood movies in 1968, but to date I’ve not managed to unearth the titles of these epics.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Accident, Alex Trocchi's State of Revolt, Annette Foley, Annette Monaghan, Barbarella, Becket, Bollywood, Burt Bacharach, Canterbury, Canterbury Cathedral, Carl von Clausewitz, Casion Royale, Charles Boyer, Daliah Lavi, Daniel Petrie, David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Dirk Bogarde, Edward Anhalt, Elstree, George Raft, Henry II, Ian Fleming, India, James Bond, Jean Anouilh, Jean Paul Belmondo, Joanna Pettet, Joe McGrath, John Gielgud, John Huston, Joseph Losey, Julia Callan-Thompson, Ken Hughes, Ladbrook Grove, Laurence Harvey, Lionel Jeffries, London, Newport, Niccolo Machiavelli, Orson Welles, Peter Glenville, Peter O'Toole, Peter Sellers, Profumo Scandal, Richard Burton, Robert Parrish, Roger Vadim, south Wales, Stephen Ward, The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, The Spy With A Cold Nose, Thomas Becket, Ursula Andress, Val Guest, west London, William Holden, Woody Allen
Posted in film, Julia Callan-Thompson | 14 Comments »
Saturday, June 20th, 2009
On Thursday night I took in the opening of the Hoppy (John Hopkins) exhibition Against Tyranny: Talking about a Revolutionary at Idea Generator on Chance Street in Shoreditch. The displayed photos date from the early and mid-sixties. Mostly they seemed to be straightforward examples of photojournalism and celebrity portraiture. There were also some freak graphics by people other than Hoppy, but connected to him via his involvement with the underground newspaper International Times. So what Idea Generator presents us with is very much an official history of one phase of the London counterculture. That said, it looked a little odd in east London, when so much of what was on display depicted west London more than 40 years ago.
The opening was too packed to be able to see the images properly, but what most interested me was coverage of ‘ban-the-bomb’ demonstrations. I didn’t clock Hoppy’s Doctor Steve Abrams portraits which I’ve roundly criticised elsewhere (do a word search to get to Abrams and Hoppy on this page) for: “mimicking the depiction of male doctors and female hysterics in nineteenth-century medical paintings. Since some viewers were inevitably going to make a connection between these publicity japes and the earlier imagery upon which they so strikingly draw, Abrams left himself wide open to criticism for generating negative perceptions of both women and recreational drug users.” If these problematic images were on display, they were hidden in one of the nooks it was impossible for me to enter because of the crowds already there.
I couldn’t see enough of the show to make any real judgement of it; and beyond Joe Boyd and Hoppy himself, I spotted very few familiar faces from the sixties. I did manage to grab hold of Malcolm Dickson from Street Level Gallery in Glasgow, and as we needed to catch up, we ducked out for refreshments elsewhere. So I guess I’ll go back and see the show properly later, it is on until 19 July. The place was just too mobbed, with endless flashbulbs going off and professional film-makers getting in my way, to be pleasant.
Moving on, I hadn’t posted anything on YouTube for more than six months until yesterday because I was fed up with being censored on that site. As I’ve said elsewhere: “YouTube actually removed a parody of a Fluxus film for violating their rules. This was a countdown from 10 to 1, no images in it at all, just numerals. Presumably the problem was the joke title 10 Erotic Movies – it had more than twenty thousand hits before being taken down by the authoritarians who run that platform. If YouTube won’t allow a film like this, then Web 2.0 is a joke and we need to move on to Web 2.1, where we control the sites we’re posting on!”
But right now there is a new video of mine up on YouTube entitled Does Modern Art Give You A Headache? Check it out, and see how it emerged from an earlier blog on this site: Performing Localities: Recent Guatemalan Performance Art On Video.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org - you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 10 Erotic Movies, Against Tyranny: Talking about a Revolutionary, ban-the-bomb, Chance Street, Does Modern Art Give You A Headache, east London, Fluxus, Hoppy, Idea Generator, International Times, Joe Boyd, John 'Hoppy' Hopkins, John Hopkins, London, Malcolm Dickson, Performing Localities: Recent Guatemalan Performance Art On Video, Shoreditch, Steve Abrams, Street Level Gallery, Web 2.1, west London, YouTube
Posted in counterculture, culture gossip & parties, exhibitions | 26 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 »
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
In her book Ruth Ellis: My Sister’s Secret Life, Muriel Jakubait claims that her club hostess sibling (who was the last woman to be hanged for murder in Britain) was set up by the security services after she’d performed various minor tasks for them, and learnt too much about things they didn’t want the general public to know. Drawing a broader picture, other commentators also make it appear that in the middle of the twentieth-century British intelligence was very interested in hostesses like Christine Keeler and Mariella Novotny. According to some observers, Keeler’s club crowd was manipulated for geo-political gain by the British and other security services; books such as Honeytrap by Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril, or An Affair of State by Caroline Kennedy and Philip Knightley, cover this in some depth. While allegations of this type are often notoriously difficult to substantiate or disprove, it is nonetheless worth noting that alongside the Soho club world, the Notting Hill drug scene in which Keeler and other women from these hostessing circles were simultaneously immersed was also subject to undue influence by representatives of the British state, albeit it in the form of ‘bent coppers’ (see, for example, The Fall of Scotland Yard: A Penguin Special by Barry Cox, John Shirley and Martin Short).
My ongoing interest in Keeler and company is due in part to the fact that my own mother – Julia Callan-Thompson – was a part of their set in the early 1960s. She both worked at Murray’s and lived in Notting Hill, and was completely immersed in the drug subculture there. My mother’s problems with bent west London coppers didn’t really kick in until the mid-sixties, by which time she was working at Churchill’s Club, but while at Murray’s she did mingle in other spook connected circles; for example, the social scene centred on the University College London (UCL) philosophy department in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. The dominant UCL philosophy figures of that time were A. J. Ayer and Stuart Hampshire, both had worked in military intelligence during the war. They’d previously been part of the same social set as British Soviet spies Burgess, Philby, Blunt and MacLean; and of those more ambivalent and ambiguous Bolshevik sympathisers of the thirties typified by Coronwy Rees.
Roger Taylor, author of the late-seventies cult work of Marxist aesthetics Art, An Enemy of the People, met my mother through her UCL connections in September 1962, the day he enrolled for a philosophy PhD. I should explain here that after my mother settled in London at the age of 16 in 1960, she often socialised with art students from The Slade and through them developed friendships within the UCL philosophy department. Taylor emailed me the following recollections of UCL and my mother Julie on Thursday, May 22, 2003:
“In the early sixties UCL philosophy could be very seductive. Gordon Square was Bloomsbury, it had the “radical” traditions of Mill and Bentham, its philosophers generally were on the Left, many of them had a sort of celebrity status (Ayer on the Brains Trust, Hampshire writing in Encounter), they were manifestly clever (Bernard Williams had the reputation of being the cleverest man in England!). They were engaged with everything “advanced” in culture, they had all the “taste” and “discernment” of the haute bourgeoisie, they were public school and Oxford and the Foreign Office, their morality unconventional with a frisson of scandal. It was the world of Burgess and Blunt but in place of subterfuge they offered furious and ingenious debate about counterfactuals and the like. Entering Gordon Square was to have a feeling of having attained access to somewhere very elevated. Some of this would have been sensed by Julie. She was at home in Gordon Square. When I arrived from the North, very aggressive and very unsure, she was already there and well in. The students knew her, she was very familiar with the secretary and… socialised with faculty.”
While Taylor sees beyond the fake glamour of Gordon Square in the early sixties, his account of the atmosphere to be found there remains very much in accord with those of other observers who still view the place through the ideological blinkers of bourgeois idealism. For example, Alan Ryan in his Independent (17 June 2004) obituary of Stuart Hampshire, writes: “…in 1960… Ayer moved to Oxford, and Hampshire replaced him as Grote Professor at University College, London. There he presided over weekly seminars that offered glimpses of an intellectual heaven where the depth of the issues discussed was matched only by the elegance of the arguments with which they were addressed.” My mother was a clever and feisty working-class teenager from south Wales, and so she would have been more than able to hold her own against upper-class academics who were a lot older than she was at the time.
Likewise, in my mother’s relationships with these philosophers the element of seduction would have run two ways, since the logical positivists from Gordon Square were attracted to the bohemian Soho club world of which she was already a fixture. A. J. “Freddie” Ayer would get drunk and dance in the Gargoyle Club where his fellow drinkers included the painters Francis Bacon and Johnny Minton, publisher David Archer, writer Graham Greene and before they were exposed as Soviet moles, the double agents Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean. So if Julie was drawn to the fake glamour of Gordon Square, there were also those in the UCL philosophy department who felt a strong pull towards the world she worked in.
And as for the spookery, I should emphasis that I don’t think Ayer and Hampshire were still on the payroll of British intelligence while directing philosophical activities at UCL. But casual social ties would have been maintained, and while these were no doubt useful to the spooks, I don’t imagine they had any impact on my mother’s life. By way of contrast, the nefarious activities of bent west London coppers clearly did have an effect on my mother but that’s another story; and as for the shenanigans around the likes of Keeler and Novotny, as far as I’m concerned the jury is still out on that one!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, A. J. Ayer, Alan Ryan, An Affair of State, Anthony Blunt, Anthony Summers, Art An Enemy of the People, Barry Cox, Bernard Williams, Bloomsbury, Caroline Kennedy, central London, Christine Keeler, Coronwy Rees, David Archer, Donald MacLean, Francis Bacon, Gargoyle Club, Gordon Square, Graham Greene, Grote Professor, Guy Burgess, Honeytrap, Independent, Jeremy Bentham, John Shirley, John Stuart Mill, Johnny Minton, Julia Callan-Thompson, Kim Philby, Mariella Novotny, Martin Short, Muriel Jakubait, Notting Hill, Philip Knightley, Roger Taylor, Ruth Ellis, Ruth Ellis: My Sister's Secret Life, sixties, Slade School of Fine Art, Stephen Dorril, Stuart Hampshire, The Fall of Scotland Yard: A Penguin Special, UCL, University College London, west London
Posted in Julia Callan-Thompson, occulture | 41 Comments »
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
On Thursday night I went to the launch of the British Film Institutes’s first 3 Flipside releases of neglected and off-beat British cinema. These DVD and Blu-ray reissues are an extension of the monthly Flipside screenings at BFI Southbank. The launch consisted of both a public screening of Richard Lester’s The Bed Sitting Room (1969), and a private party afterwards. Aside from The Bed Sitting Room, the other two disks being promoted were the fabulous London In The Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965), both directed by Arnold L. Miller. The Miller titles are mondo movies about London and its nightlife in the 1960s.
I’m not a fan of director and producer Richard Lester but I’ll sit through anything with Rita Tushingham in it at least once – with The Leather Boys (1964, directed by Sidney J. Furie) being my favourite film featuring this actress, since among other things her character Dot gets to deliver the immortal line: ‘Do you like me hair?’ By way of contrast, The Bed Sitting Room is merely a curious sixties period piece greatly lifted by the presence of Tushingham, but nonetheless a movie that is ultimately a vehicle for Spike Milligan. It is based upon his Cuban missile crisis inspired play of the same name, and is imbued with a pre-Beatles and pre-permissive society mind-set.
The Bed Sitting Room takes place in the ruins of post-nuclear apocalypse London, and I guess the humour is supposed to be zany and surreal, but I found it very old-fashioned. The best joke comes during the credits where the cast are listed by height from shortest to tallest; a device that fortuitously provides Tushingham with top billing. Among the other famous names featured in this film are Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Marty Feldman, Harry Secombe, Jimmy Edwards and Arthur Lowe. During a panel talk after the screening, Lester said that while he had no issues with the cast when making the film, their respective agents proved rather argumentative about billings and thus listing the actors by height was his means of resolving this problem.
Lester dominated the panel talk although he’d been joined for it by Rita Tushingham, with BFI curators Will Fowler and Vic Pratt moderating. Lester mixed some entertaining anecdotes with an unbelievably superficial take on events in Paris in May 1968. He seemed to view the entire year – and in particular the occupations movement in France – as a bit of a downer, largely because these political events disrupted his travel plans. Unfortunately Rita didn’t get to say much, but she’s an old pro and having known Lester for around forty-five years appeared both used to and unflustered by his habit of hogging the conversation.
Tushingham is in incredibly good shape for a 67 year-old, and while she now appears a little older than in her 1960s prime, her distinctive looks are still very much with her. At the BFI she adroitly deployed her exaggerated feminine moves of the sixties, with several big arm swings to keep her legion of fans happy. Afterwards in the corridor as I was making my way towards the private party, I was nearly knocked over by a group of men who were mobbing Rita for autographs. I haven’t seen a celebrity creating that amount of havoc at the BFI since Jane Fonda was in the building signing copies of her autobiography My Life So Far back in 2006.
At the party I exchanged brief greetings with BFI luminaries Eddie Berg and Vic Pratt, spent a little longer speaking to Will Fowler about the Flipside releases, and managed a proper conversation with my fellow-freelancer Kim Newman; this latter exchange covered everything from Lester’s films to our shared family connections to Elgin Crescent in west London. The BFI had provided crisps and peanuts for revelers, but I wanted to eat something more substantial and so left after a couple of drinks. While I had a curry on my mind, of more interest to everyone else will be the viewing menu on offer to those that grab hold of the current and upcoming BFI Flipside releases. Of the future releases I’m particularly looking forward to Privilege (1967, directed by Peter Watkins), coz it must be coming on for 30 years since I last saw this very curious flick about the corporate control and political manipulation of a rock star. As already mentioned, out next week are two of the most important films of the mondo movie genre: London In The Raw and Primitive London. There are variant versions of each film on the disks plus a host of extras, including two great documentary shorts about London strip clubs – Strip (1966) is served up alongside London In The Raw, while Carousella (1966) acts as a side-dish to Primitive London.
And now it’s time to declare my personal interest in all this. I contributed an essay to the London In The Raw booklet, while Iain Sinclair provides a companion-piece to my text for Primitive London. I got quite carried with this engagement, since it was an opportunity to write about London clubs in the 1960s… and very quickly my composition became too long to accompany a film release. Therefore, I chopped out a lot of material before I emailed the text to the BFI and reformatted some of that into an earlier blog (the opening and closing paragraphs were written to make this material work as an online post, the rest is unrevised material I’d cut from my BFI essay). I find the subject of London clubs of the 1960s endlessly fascinating, which is why I ran way over the word count the BFI provided and had to take rather a lot out. Originally, I’d wanted to conclude with a paragraph or three of contextualising remarks, but in the end this also had to go. One of those ‘lost’ paragraphs read as follows:
“The fascination with strip and hostess clubs evident in the work of both sets of film-makers represented on this disk reflects the fact that such establishments proliferated in London during the sixties as a direct consequence of the 1959 Street Offences Act, which attempted to sweep prostitution off the city’s pavements in line with the desires of the Wolfenden Committee. It should go without saying that the sex industry didn’t disappear, although large parts of it did relocate to both dank basements and apparently swanky clubs. When strip clubs spread to the vast bulk of cities in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, a similar cinematic obsession with such establishments was evident in many North American movies. That said, to my eyes and ears, London in the sixties is infinitely preferable to the American mid-west of the nineteen-nineties; the girls were more varied in those largely pre-plastic surgery days and the music was better. The British pop-cultural obsession with strippers was still very much in evidence a few years after the films gathered here were made; one example being the song The Girls Are Naked issued by top London mod act The Creation as the b-side to their May 1968 Polydor single Midway Down.”
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Arnold L. Miller. Arnold Louis Miller, Arnold Miller, Arthur Lowe, BFI, British Film Institutes, Carousella, Dick Lester, Dudley Moore, Eddie Berg, Elgin Crescent, Flipside, France, Harry Secombe, Iain Sinclair, Jane Fonda, Jimmy Edwards, Kim Newman, London, London In The Raw, Marty Feldman, May 68, Midway Down, My Life So Far, occupations movement, Paris, Peter Cook, Peter Watkins, Polydor Records, Primitive London, Privilege, prostitution, Richard Lester, Rita Tushingham, Sidney J. Furie. The Leather Boys, sixties, south London, Southbank, Spike Milligan, Street Offences Act, Strip, The Bed Sitting Room, The Creation, The Girls Are Naked, Vic Pratt, west London, Will Fowler, Wolfenden Committee
Posted in culture gossip & parties, film | 22 Comments »
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
I just got an email from Charlie Radcliffe telling me that Chris Gray died last Thursday morning (14 May 2009). Chris is probably best known for his brief membership of the Situationist International and being one of the key figures in the Notting Hill (west London) based King Mob. Chris was the editor and translator of the first English language anthology of French Situationist texts Leaving The 20th Century: The incomplete works of the Situationist International (1974), a book that over a long period was to have an enormous impact.
I got to know Chris around 2002 when I was researching the life of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson. At that time Chris had been ill with hepatitis c for some years, but it didn’t stop him from getting out on the streets to join anti-war and other demonstrations. He was extremely upbeat about the ongoing possibilities for the revolutionary transformation of society, and never complained about his illness. Chris told me several times he felt really sorry for those who got hep c from blood transfusions etc.; his attitude was that despite becoming ill from needle sharing, at least he’d had and enjoyed the smack that went with it.
When I saw Chris it was usually at his spartan flat in New Court, Hampstead. For health reasons, he was dividing his time between London and Cornwall. Despite the minimal decor in his London pad, Chris was really hospitable and always cooked for visitors. He viewed both me and his own daughter Mob as numbering among what he humorously referred to as ‘the lost children of Ladbroke Grove’. The first time I visited Chris, he told me he’d been aware of what I’d been doing for a long time, and said it was a shame we hadn’t met before because we had so much in common; viz, shared political and cultural interests alongside his acquaintance with my mother. Nonetheless, Chris hadn’t known my mother nearly as well as two of his former partners did in the late-sixties and early-seventies; both Brenda Grevelle and Hazel Gray saw her more much more regularly than he did back then.
During the years I knew Chris he was working on a book about LSD, and he seemed particularly curious about his own mother’s medical treatment with this drug in the 1950s. There is no need to repeat here the many anecdotes about Chris that have led some to view him as legendary, you can find them elsewhere but obviously not everything that has been written about him can be described as strictly factually accurate. Suffice to say I found Chris great company and appreciated him for his sharp mind. Rapping with him really brought home for me the fact that his translations of Situationist texts were intended to have an effect on the political climate of Britain and America; he was not aiming for the dry pseudo-objectivity of an academic.
Some of the lines that most impressed me when I first read the translations Chris made from French were his interpolations; added because he wanted to ensure these incendiary Situationist tracts worked for an Anglo-American audience. My absolute favourite among them is in his translation of On The Poverty Of Student Life. Here he threw in something along the lines of: “If the anarchists will tolerate each other they will tolerate anyone…” Chris assured me this addition was based on a throwaway line of conversation the pamphlet’s author Mustapha Khayati had tossed at him, he’d merely substituted ‘anarchists’ for ‘English’.
To the best of my knowledge, Hazel Gray died many many years ago. But Chris was still in close contact with Brenda Grevelle when I knew him. So my thoughts are with her and their daughter Mob.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Brenda Grevelle, Charles Radcliffe, Charlie Radcliffe, Chris Gray, Christopher Gray, Hampstead, Hazel Gray, hepatitis c, heroin, Julia Callan-Thompson, King Mob, Ladbroke Grove, Leaving The 20th Century: The incomplete works of the Situationist International, London, LSD, Marie Grevelle, Mustapha Khayati, New Court, north London, Notting Hill, On The Poverty Of Student Life, Situationist International, Situationists, smack, west London
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