Obese cars and tube carriages used as toilets...yes, this city really is the Great Wen

It was only a small story on page 19 of last Tuesday's Evening Standard - but it broke all records for provoking anger, disbelief and dismay in this easily-wound-up reader.

Just look at the headline: "Chelsea tractors plough on in capital despite launch of Ulez".

Results from a survey by AA Financial Services, "released exclusively to the Evening Standard", revealed  that 31 per cent of Londoners want their next car to be a a 4 x 4 or SUV. 

This compares to 24 per cent of the rest of the population.

Can this possibly be true? Are Londoners that stupid?

Yes, it seems they - we - are.

Londoners were found to be the least likely to intend to buy a smaller, cheaper, environmentally cleaner car, anywhere in the UK.

Another question in the survey asked whether people believed that having a flash car made them "look good". A horrifying 13 per cent said "yes".

Presumably these are the ruddy-faced chumps driving their open-top Range Rover Evoques down my 20mph max street at around three times that speed, designer shades dangling from the placket of their  Ralph Lauren polo shirts (collars up, of course). 

So we actually want our congested streets to be even more crowded, even more difficult to negotiate thanks to the arrival of even more of these obscenely inflated four-wheel fatties, do we? Yes we do.
Of course the latest and most expensive of these vehicles have more efficient engines, and are actually cleaner than cheap old bangers. Maybe they even meet the emission targets of Ulez, and thus escape the charge - what a terrible irony that would be.

But it's not just the air pollution that bothers me. It's the moving, aggressive, self-satisfied blot on the landscape that these vehicles represent: almost all of them are repulsive to look at. They are so huge you cannot ignore them. They have the stupid grinning fat faces of boozed up louts. Still, at least the bull-bars have gone.

We are Londoners. We are intent on self-destruction. It's not just Claphamites who live in Wankerville. It's the whole stinking lot of us living within the suitably vile perimeter of the M25.

Another recent piece of news reveals that it's not only London's car owners who are fouling up the city. Tfl has reported a massive increase in the numbers of people soiling tube carriages and buses. Guess which tube line is the filthiest.

SO, nothing new really. Who was it who called London the "Great Wen"?

Welcome to Wankerville: at last, we know where (and what) we are...

You know how you often pass a big welcoming sign when you drive into a village in the countryside? Like, "welcome to Upper Dicker, twinned with....etc..etc".  Well some kind soul of a signwriter has done the same for the area of south west London defined by the postcode, SW4.

In a none-too-subtle follow up to the helpful directions painted last year on one of Brixton High Street's rail bridges, a generous human has helped the often confused (or drunk) residents of Clapham know exactly where it is that they reside.

This bridge - which carries the Overground line trains from Clapham Junction to Highbury and beyond, as well as a lot of the Kent  commuter traffic (and formerly Eurostar trains) - is well chosen as a portal to the decidedly faded pleasure zone of Clapham High Street.

How long will this last one wonders? Will the burghers of Clapham take offence and whitewash it over asap? Maybe not. The inscription has gone down well on social media, with Clapham residents among its most fervent fans. See, for example, this post on Instagram.

As I live close to the borders of  C*****m and a neighbouring zone, I quite often lie about my own location - what a dastardly betrayal that is! But if it were to be officially re-branded, maybe I would have a bit more civic pride....OK, no, perhaps not. In fact I think there are very strong grounds for re-naming the entire city, all of Greater London, with this inelegant moniker. Grounds which I will explain in another post very soon.

Meanwhile, people leaving the OK-yaah Babylon of Clapham High Street and heading  for the relative paradise of Stockwell are also reminded of just what a lucky escape they are making.

Three cheers for another good use for spray paint!

I am not Damo Suzuki - but I love this new book about his life and times

Keep forgetting this blog was set up to write about music, mainly.

While it rarely features in these bile-filled posts, music is still what keeps the old git behind microgroove sort-of alive and nearly kicking.

So it was the collision of an event - going to a book launch at Rough Trade East - and reading a brief post on thebluemoment (the blog of top music writer Richard Williams) that led to this latest stream of words.

The book launched was a sort-of biography of the charismatic Damo Suzuki, the Japanese troubador who was swept to early '70s fame after he was spotted busking in Munich by a member of the German band Can.

Anyone who saw Can perform in the years 1970 - 73 will remember Damo as the sprite-like lead-singer man with a curtain of jet-black hair, almost as long as he was tall. His diminutive form concealed the whiplash, electrical energy of a thunderbolt, once he got off on his vocal improvisations against Can's famously propulsive beats.

Half a decade later, after the punk dust had sort of settled, people who dismissed most British prog-rockers as self-indulgent were still referencing Can in hushed tones.

Mark E Smith (RIP), founder of  The Fall, wrote a song called "I Am Damo Suzuki" (after which this book is obviously named). At first I thought the song was a piss-take of a longhair, but then realised it was just as much a love song.  Glimpses of affection for the crazy man who blessed the alternative music world with his presence for a few years, then more or less vanished for a decade.

The book fills in these gaps, usually in Damo's own transcribed words.

As we learned at the delightful evening at Rough Trade, where Damo and his author, Paul Woods were gently interviewed by a man from Mojo, the young Suzuki was not really into the heavy "progressive" rock coming out of the UK at that time. Pressed to think of influences, he mentioned his liking for some Kinks songs.

Unlike so many ageing rock star interviewees, Damo was genuinely more interested in his current projects than his few years with Can, and not to be at all excited by the reverence the music he contributed to is now held.

A survivor of two mortal illnesses, Damo regained his amazing energy and for years has circled the globe, seeking out what he calls the "sound carriers" with whom he can work in cities in every continent. Every so often he lands back in London, and has staged many performances at the Windmill in Brixton, and Islington's Lexington. Go to one of these: you never know what to expect, but don't expect Can's greatest hits.

The day after this event, I happened to read a post on thebluemoment called "A thought on 'RockIsland Line'" It was a playful but erudite analysis of Lonnie Donegan's 1957 hit, explaining why it was such an influential recording in the history of British pop music.

 It took me a while to hear that heavy "click" as my dull brain registers the connection. What is it about some pieces of music that causes them to go straight to some previously dormant pleasure zone in the deepest fibres of the nervous system?

Richard Williams pinned it all down to one slight change in Donegan's voice, as he sang the words Rock Island and Line:

"The tonic is the note you hear several times as he follows “Well, the Rock Island…” — all sung on the tonic — by rising to the flattened third on the next word, sung with a heavy emphasis: “…Line…”

That particular flattened third, sung by that Glasgow-born, East End-raised boy in his distinctive, breathless deep south style, was for Williams "the first blue note most of my generation ever heard, or at least noticed, and its impact was immense. "

I'm not sure Damo Suzuki ever heard Lonnie Donegan but when he really got going he seemed to toy with the blue notes, circling them provocatively, never quite hitting them but making you know what it was he was not doing....get me? Of course!

I Am Damo Suzuki, by Damo Suzuki and Paul Woods, published by Omnibus Press, 29/03/2019, price £16.99 (paperback)