Mother London

Since Sledg has invited me to contribute here, I thought it only fitting to dedicate my first entry to him. I know he plans escaping LA to get back to Portland in the not so distant future, so here is a mix (full of old man music I am afraid) about the sprawling metropolis I escaped from yet miss every minute of every day...London.

I have been away from it now for almost five years, but had lived most of my life there up to that point. After all that time in a city of 8 million people plus, my current life in a small agricultural town in California's Central Valley is vastly different. I miss London to be sure, the city is in my blood, but it is only since I left that I have realised how crazy, dangerous and destructive life in such a place can be. If you do the transition the other way, from small town to behemoth as Sledg did, then you are bound to see the scary shit more clearly. For much of the time I was too busy living to notice the insanity going on around me. Now I can look back at the madness with a heady mixture of relief and nostalgia. I am a big city boy at heart, the pulse of London ran in time WITH my own for so many years, and I can't help looking back with more affection than I am sure Sledg has for LA. So here is my anecdote heavy homage to my home town. If LA is the city of angels and New York is the city that never sleeps, London is the city that often sleeps with it's best friend's wife and wakes up with a huge hangover and cold take away food stuck to the mattress. I give you Johnny Luddite's London...

1. WATERLOO SUNSET - THE KINKS  (3:17) (Something Else By The Kinks)

I was brought up in a fairly leafy suburb to the North of London called Finchley. Although we were less than ten miles from the center of the city, visits to "London" were regarded as special treats, Sunday bus rides to Oxford Street, vacation time trips to museums, exhibitions, riverboat trips, etc. There is a sense of wonder in Ray Davies song which when all said and done is about a very grimy not so pretty part of London that I have always identified with. It matches how I felt on these trips. 

2. CAN'T EXPLAIN - THE WHO (2:08) (Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy)

Sunday afternoons when I was a kid often meant an 11 mile bus trip through London to see my Grandmother in Fulham, right round the corner from Chelsea football ground. This was the sixties, and on that journey on the 28 bus, I saw a fairly representative cross section of London as it was at the time. We would leave Golders Green with it's trees and large houses, through West Hampstead, one of the bastions of the British blues boom. I remember seeing "Clapton is God" written on a railway bridge and wondering what his first name was. Surely not something as silly as Eric? The bus carried on through a predominantly Irish Catholic area where church collections famously featured two plates, one for the church, one for Sinn Fein. Then the bus would go through Notting Hill Gate. In those days before Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant ruined it for everyone, much of the area was a West Indian ghetto. Even as a kid, some of these streets looked dangerous yet exciting. Within a few years, Britain would have it's first race riots here, just a mile or so from posh Kensington, the buses next call. I would stare at the fancy stores such as the boutique Biba's where The New York Dolls would make their London debut. Then we would be in Fulham, and a strange couple of hours with my creepy Gran. Her nephew Nigel lived there as well, and he was alright. He had a job changing the records in juke boxes and he would always take my sister and I into his room, play us records he had brought home, and give us a few to take home with us. He was a rocker, into the Stones, Elvis, the Everleys, all the old school stuff, while my sister was a mod, perched on the back of her boyfriends Lambretta whenever my dad wasn't watching. The Who, the Kinks, the Small Faces, they were the mod bands she followed, and so the first ones I was exposed to.

3. LAZY SUNDAY - THE SMALL FACES (3:06) (Ogden's Nut Gone Flake)

So many English bands had these strange American accents when they sang, but not the Small Faces. Vocalist Stevie Marriott had this cheeky cockney chappie persona that fitted my young adolescent view of what I perceived a true Londoner to be.  Add that to the slightly laboured psychedelia of their later work and we have a uniquely sixties London sound. "Hello Mrs Brown, How's your Bert's lumbago? Mustn't grumble." Years later, i saw Marriott on the way down when he used to play gigs at the Torrington pub in Finchley to cover that days coke. He would say things like  "Hello mates. Why would you leave your Sunday dinners to come and see a little cunt like me then?" The answer to that was that on a good day he could still play "All Or Nothing" like he meant it.

4. MOTHER GOOSE - JETHRO TULL (3:53) (Aqualung)

A lot of my teenage mad dog days happened in Hampstead Village and Highgate Village. These were affluent conurbations either side of Hampstead Heath, a large area of semi wild parkland to the north of Central London. Of course they are not real villages, rather they are expensive tracts of real estate full of arty farty folk, overpriced bars and shops, Swedish Au Pairs and in the 70s, my friends and I. Jethro Tull's Aqualung album was set in around Hampstead and Highgate and this song seems to capture the fun and the falseness of the place better than I ever could.

5. ANARCHY IN THE UK - THE SEX PISTOLS (3:31) (Never Mind The Bollocks...)

The music press always spoke of 1977 as the 'Summer Of Punk', but to me the scene was already decaying by then. There is a school of thought that UK punk died the moment The damned released "New Rose" as a single and condemned it to being just another sub genre of rock for the music biz to market the hell out of. One day I was loitering around the West End with a few others when we spotted Sid Vicious. With amazing banality, we decided to follow him along Oxford Street. I don't know what we were expecting, maybe for him to murder a group of school children or bite the head off of a live chicken or something. As it was, he chewed a little gum and went to a management office in the part of Soho known as 'Tinpan'. What lives we led!

6. LONDON CALLING - THE CLASH (3:23) (London Calling)

London was a pretty dangerous place in the 70s. Rising crime, soccer hooliganism, the constant threat of IRA bombs, and also the unrest caused by the National Front, presumed to be a racist Nazi organisation that was much loved by skinheads and other bastards. People like me turned up at anti racist rallies and marches because, yeah, we did hate those clowns, but to be honest it had as much to do with the fun of it, the bands that played, the chance of a fight, all kinds of things. One Sunday march led through London's East End, once a Jewish ghetto and latterly the home of London's Bengali and Bangla Deshi communities. I had been up most of the night before, up early, and by the time we got to Victoria Park, where the post march gig was being held, I was ready to fall asleep, which I promptly did. I woke up with what I can only describe as a catastrophic shock. We were towards the back of the park, I was propped up against a tree. Behind me was a truck and on the back the reggae band Steel Plus had set up. The first few chords of their signature tune, "Klu Klux Klan" almost sent me up to the uppermost tree branches! By the time my heart returned to almost normal, the Clash had taken to the stage, delivering the finest rock set I have ever heard in my life. 

7. NIGHT BOAT TO CAIRO - MADNESS (3:31) (One Step Beyond...)

Madness, the Nutty Boys from Camden Town. Part ska band, part music hall act. Round about 1980, just before Christmas, I was with some old friends eating at George Tilley's "Ruby In The Dust" diner on Camden High St. We were all going on to a costume party later, I was dressed as a thirties gangster, but then I liked dressing like that anyway. The diner was pretty small, we were all gathered on a long table on one side of the place, while on the other side there was a stag party for Suggs, lead singer of Madness. The whole band was there, singing along to tapes of old Beatles stuff. After much eating and much more drinking, one of the nutty boys asked if we could sing some shitty songs. Immediately we went into a rendition of 'Madness, madness, they call it madness' at which point a food fight of epic proportions followed. Camden wasn't exactly the safest place to be at night if you were wandering the streets, but for that night where we were the most you were going to come away with was some custard and mashed potato on your forehead.

8. DOWN IN THE TUBE STATION AT MIDNIGHT - THE JAM (4:03) (All Mod Cons)

Big cities spawn violence. No doubt about it, London, or at least parts of it, have been rough to live in, work near or pass through. I had my pocket pinched on the tube, I had a confrontation like the one in the song at Old Street Tube station that ended badly for me. I've seen a guy get his eye gouged out in a glassing, other stuff. That last incident took place in my safe home suburb of Finchley. Islington, where I went to college in the 90's is the Murder capital of Britain. But, all told, I felt safe in London because it was my city, the place I had been born to. I know realise that to some extent that confidence was misplaced, but at the time I had this misguided notion that London would protect me somehow.

9. TOWERS OF LONDON - XTC (5:24) (The Black Sea)

London is not the most beautiful city on earth, but I could and did walk for hours and hours soaking up the architecture, the feel of it's mean and often soggy streets. I liked walking around seedy areas such as Soho as much as the more touristy places. Grey Victorian palaces of inconsideratilon bordered by trees, canal tow paths, the historical blending with the hysterical by the river Thames. I loved walking along the South Bank from Embankment tube station, over the footbridge, along past the Festival Hall, National Theater, etc all the way down to the recreation of Shakespeares Globe. Elizabethan London fascinated me, the idea that in some ways London life then was as it is now, albeit with slightly less poo and piss being thrown out of windows and a distinct lack of bear baiting. I would walk round the Tower Of London on the North side of the Thames and compile lists in my head of the people I would like to imprison there. I can still remember such lists, and they are being added to all the time. Be warned my friends.

10. CEMETARIES OF LONDON - COLDPLAY (3:21) (Viva La Vida)

I used to spend hours wandering round some of the more interesting cemetaries in London. the most famous is probably Highgate Cemetary. The older more decaying section is a spooky yet wonderfully peaceful place full of fallen monuments, overgrown shrubbery and bird and wildlife unique to that environment. I also loved to spend time in Marylebone cemetary in Finchley. It is the final resting place of Little Tich, a music hall performer in the early 20th century whose act comprised of using an amazingly long pair of shoes as stilts. There is ancient film of this around. A life-size carving of his shoes can be found on his grave-site. My best friend and my Mum and Dad are sadly there too, so it is a special place for me.

11. FUCK OFF AND DIE - THE METEORS (2:59) (Psycho Down)

You don't realise what an unfriendly place London can be till you spend some time somewhere else. I worked in Birmingham for a while, not a place especially known for it's hospitality, yet I couldn't help but notice that if strangers spoke to you, it wasn't just to insult you, get directions or sell you drugs. Some folk would actually say hello, shop keepers would say thank-you. It was very strange, not the London way at all. In London the best policy seems to be to ignore whatever is happening around you in the hope that whatever it is doesn't happen to you. Cheerful welcoming cockneys singing jovial tunes and inviting you down to the old Bull & Bush might happen in Thirties movies but I never saw it. Back in the early sixties my Mum was out with my Grandma when the old lady had what appeared to be a stroke. Sher was on the ground and my Mum was desperately looking for someone to help. Cars and pedestrians ignored her for over an hour. The same kind of people who would be offended by the title of this song by North London's very own kings of psychobilly would probably be the most likely ones to ignore a call for help like the one my Mum made that day. Funny old world isn't it.

12. LONDON DUNGEON - THE MISFITS (2:27) (The Necronomicon)

There is of course a dark underbelly to just about every place there is, it is just that London's was darker and grosser than most. Whatever you wanted was out there if you wanted it, as was a lot of stuff you didn't want. I walked into a pub called The Prince William with a girl friend one time. I knew it was a gay pub but I have to admit I was shocked by the sight of over 70's S&M leatherboys eyeing up the new meat. Once it registered that was me I was more uncomfortable than a very uncomfortable thing. It was at this point that Carol, the girl I was with, spotted a portrait of H.R.H Elizabeth II. "Oh look, it's the Queen" she yelped. I swear that every soul in that place turned round in recognition.

13. JACK THE RIPPER - MOTORHEAD (4:39) (March Or Die)

If the dark flabby underbelly we speak of is that of the past, then of course we become ultra fascinated with it. Novelist Patricia Cornwall has become one of the latest scribes to offer a published solution to the Jack The Ripper murders. there are loads of old unsolved murders in Richmond, VA or anywhere else for that matter, but there isn't the potential readership there that there is for a book about old Jack. All the elements are there. Olde London Town, fog, dead prostitutes, possible Royal involvement. London has great history, brilliant history, but come on people, this is not it! You can go and see the Guildhall, pretty much as it was the day Shakespeare premiered "Twelfth Night" there, you can see Roman ruins, the British Museum has all the swag from hundreds of years of plundering, tons of good stuff. The British Library reading room has items that will make you cry tears of joy if you are at all human like Lennon's hand written lyrics to 'In My Life", sheet music penned by the hands of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven  and Handel. They have Shakespeare's signature there for goodness sake. But there will still be more people pouring to the fictional home of the equally fictional Sherlock Holmes, folk who want to walk where the Ripper walked and generally get their London experience from Hollywood rather than London itself. Shame.

14. SEX & DRUGS & ROCK & ROLL - IAN DRURY (3:21) (New Boots & Panties)

In the many years I lived there, London nightlife was always evolving in some way. there were constants like theater-land, the food and flavor of China Town and always some kind of clubbing. Everything from 70s disco to Goth haunts like the Thursday night Kitcat club under the arches at Charing Cross. It was fun watching the cute Japanese tourists dancing to Alien Sex-Fiend. Gigs were plentiful, you could see most of the bands you wanted to see in the course of a year. It was a great party town and all the things that made the party swing were readily available. (Party favors, jello & ice cream, that kind of thing.)

15. STREETS OF LONDON - THE ANTI-NOWHERE LEAGUE (3:16) (We Are The .. League)

London is so vast, one mixtape couldn't cover it. It is a frightening, wonderful, grimy, beautiful place and I miss it. I have a different life now, one that suits my situation. the town I live in is tiny compared with London, but I feel less safe than I ever did back home. Maybe this is all about your home town eclipsing any other place you wind up in.  Yeah, escape from L.A Sledg. If it was good enough for Snake Pliskin, it's good enough for you!

There will be a link to this mix very soon. Cheers!