So, before the plague arrived, I started writing a post which tried to celebrate some of the good things experienced in 2019. To recall a few joyful moments. Even the freeze-dried husk of a human resident in a rodent-infested top floor flat in one of the wealthiest streets in one of the most selfish postcodes (reportedly) in south west London, is still prone to the occasional moment of pleasure, excitement, rapture, ecstasy ....dare i say love?
Now from the perspective of a third week in isolation a long way from London, the city I enjoy slagging off but which I really love, without which I cannot live, and which I miss more acutely than anything. I will publish this silly post.
Here it is (author ducks out before you, mythical reader, can absorb any of it):
London, March 9, 2020: Someone quoted Wordsworth on the radio:
"It is the first mild day of March....this one day we will give to idleness."
The words triggered conflicting feelings. A rush of forgotten pleasures, against a shudder of shame, the guilt of a human wallowing in self-pity.
What about the good things that have happened in the past 12 months? What about the cultural riches on your doorstep?
Many things have cheered the soul. They're not necessarily fodder for the culture pages of Time Out mag (does Time Out do culture any more, apart from food and drink culture?)
(But hats off to Time Out for having the wit to rename itself Time In in the first week of the plague - ed).
Let's face it, for a depressive geezer of pensionable age, you had some good times, sometimes.1. The local pub
A place featured in at least a dozen unpublished blog entries, the Bread & Roses. And a couple of published ones, such as this one from last summer.
This trade union-owned pub half way down Clapham Manor Street is still a gem. The times I have been there, knocked out by the talent and energy of performers, when there've been as many musicians on stage as punters on the floor.
This saddens me. Why isn't this place packed out? There's theatre, music, comedy and DJ entertainment most nights of the week, so I guess overall they must be pulling in enough custom. (Well, that was before the lockdown of course. Ed.)
The pub, previously the Bowyer Arms, occupies an impressive Grade 2 listed building designed by Thomas Cubitt. It was bought by the Battersea and Wandsworth Trades Union Council in 1995, and is run on solid socialist principles alongside the great Workers Beer Company (which slakes the thirst of crowds at Glastonbury and other big events around the country, year after year).
There are great music pubs keeping the flame burning in Brixton, Camberwell, New Cross and beyond, but the fact there's one here in the heart of affluent SW4 is just such a good, surprising thing, it needs to be celebrated, as often as possible.
Can you imagine property agents boasting about a trade-union owned pub with live music two or three nights a week to potential buyers of nearby multi-million pound houses? Well, who knows, it's such a gem I think they might. I like to think they would.
Long live this beautiful bastion of fairness, humanitarian values, and a sometimes unfashionable commitment to making all forms of performing arts accessible to all.
2. Meeting Damo Suzuki last March: a brief account of this almost life-saving event, a book launch in a record shop near Brick Lane, was published here.
3. Lambeth Libraries events team
Against Lambeth council's atrocious library closure policies, the Libraries' events team have been putting on some wonderful events in the surviving branches, right across the borough.
Thanks for loads of great evenings in Brixton, South Lambeth and other libraries. One of the most memorable for me was last October, held at Clapham Library for Black History month.
This event - Sound Systems, DIY Culture and 100 Years of British Black Music - was chaired by the excellent events organiser Tim O'Dell. It kicked off with discussion on the history of black musicians in the city, led by author Lloyd Bradley. His latest book - Sounds Like London – uncovers lots of previously unknown stuff about black jazz musicians in Britain way back in the 20s and 30s, and the huge influence they had.
He screened a wonderful short film, Half A Century Carnaby Street, made by Lucy Harrison in 2013, celebrating Columbo's nightclub at 50 Carnaby St which introduced London to the delights Jamaican sound systems back in the early 60s. Lucy Harrison even managed to stage a breif return to the address - now the basement of Ben Sherman store - several original DJs and their sound-system.Things became more contemporary with the arrival of all-round local hero and globally influential Jamaican-born musician and producer Dennis Bovell, who grew up in Battersea. One of his bands, Roots Radics, helped create that unique dub poetry sound in long-term collaborations with Linton Kwesi Johnson.
Bovell also produced The Slits' first album, helping them make music that you could dance to while laying down new layers of spikey feminist attitudes.
He talked about all this stuff that night, answering questions, for example, how he got Janet Kay to hold that incredibly high note climax to her big hit, Silly Games - in the process of which he invented (and named) a new genre, lovers rock, which was a successful export, even to Jamaica.
He talked about his musical education, from his dad, from Sunday trips to the church in Brixton, his love of Jimi Hendrix, hours spent at the Dub Vendor, then hanging out in clubs in Soho including Columbo's where he met visiting Jamaican stars (including Marley). He took reggae to far flung places with his first band, Matumbi, his sound system, Jah Sufferer, and a mobile record store based on a VW camper van.
This was just one of many great evening events, mainly free, in all the borough's remaining libraries, organised by a small but dedicated team. Salute them, now more than ever.
(In the current lock down situation, libraries are closed but the events team have organised a full programme of online events and services, check it out! Ed)
3. Midsummer, a rare meeting in a Lambeth theatre-pub
One of those rare occasions when worlds I imagined would always be separate came together, briefly but to good effect. An old friend, who I used to work alongside at a Wapping-based educational newspaper, is now an increasingly busy actor. Like me and many others she'd taken voluntary redundancy in 2006 and thrown herself into the work she'd always wanted to do: acting.
By a strange coincidence she took part in a "Page to Stage" reading of part of a pilot TV series written by Stockwell-based writer, performer and podcaster - not to mention national treasure - Daniel Ruiz Tizon.
I was going to describe Daniel as having a wonderfully dark comedic style, until I saw the Italian Vogue had already used those words to introduce their rather good interview of him back in 2018. What a star!
Apart from being south London's finest and most devastatingly dead-pan podcaster and all round social commentator and good human (check his twitter feed for proof of this) Daniel is also this moribund blog's only fan, and even its occasional unpaid publicist.
So, on that warm June evening, I not only met old workmates, but also Daniel, for the first time in the flesh. I can report that he sounded exactly like he sounds in his podcasts, and that he looks just like his photo. Good facts to report.
I witnessed a read-through of part of an embryonic sitcom. It was classic Ruiz Tizon and left me wanting more.
Each short piece performed at this event, upstairs in a pub at Lambeth North, was critiqued by a front-row panel of theatre types. Some were kind, others less so, Daniel and the three other writers took it all on the jaw. Then we all went back to the bar.
We exchanged a few words. I should've bought him one of the many drinks I owe him. I did not. Short arms, they used to call me. Another time perhaps.
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| I've always loved Jah Wobble and I think he loves us all. Seen here playing at the Cropredy Festival, Oxfordshire, in 2005, Mr Wobble recently became a part-time Stockwell resident, praise the lord. Photo credit: Brian Marks/ Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic |
This truly happy piece of news hit me right at the end of the year, in an interview on BBC Radio London by Robert Elms.
Elms, a resolute north Londoner, managed not to sound too dismayed when top bass player, globally sought-after producer, ex-tube driver Jah Wobble, has found himself a gaff in Stockwell. He said they'd found a flat near the Wandsworth Road; it was ok, he said, nice and green.
At the time he was teaching "lonely old blokes" in the art and craft of dub music at an arts centre in Merton, as well as embarking on a new tour.
Now, who knows, maybe he's decamped to the Wobble family home back in Manchester. But how great to think that the musician and writer who finds divinity in Vauxhall Bridge should even temporarily be lodging not far away.
As any fan of the great man will remember, the track on the Invaders of the Heart album, Take Me To God, expresses the bliss of religious experience in a way that only Mr Wobble could pull off so brilliantly. My favourite verse:
"I am limitless in space, time and matter
Simultaneously the planet Neptune
Part of the structural support to Vauxhall Bridge
I am your left breast
I am Stepney
I am Peru
I am divine and so are you.
I love everybody."
This is a turn-to song whenever things are really grim. (Like now! Ed.)
It always works. If you know his voice, if you know his bass playing, if you know the music of the Invaders of the Heart, then you'll understand. What a fabulous addition to the deep SW8 talent pool!
