The best of times, and the best of times: Notting Hill Carnival 2015

Noon Sunday 29 August, some lone skanking on Ledbury Road before the crowds build. Although things got rammed later, it was still one of the least-uncomfortably-packed Carnivals  in decades, or so it seemed.

Here's a surprise - an unremittingly and relentlessly cheerful post from this blogger. Obviously and inevitably, it's about the Notting Hill Carnival - the 49th edition of which ended this evening around 9pm (well, that was when I left).

Although the weather ranged from grim to vile, this was still one of the most enjoyable carnivals I can remember. Maybe this was partly because the numbers were reduced by the bad weather. It becomes difficult to enjoy anything when it seems the air is being squeezed out of your lungs by the bodies of fellow revellers.

But the great thing about Carnival 2015 was a shift back to classic roots music and plenty of great live performance. Whether or not it was "Europe's biggest street party" (and oh how heartily sick we all are of hearing this particular cliché being about the only thing mainstream media have to say about the event for the past 20 years, apart from the arrest figures) is beside the point. The thing for Carnival lovers is that this is the one chance in a year to really forget troubles, to find complete release in music and dance on the streets of this  totally bonkers city, where every square foot is now up for sale for thousands of dollars. This event is the biggest and most reliable expressions of sanity in a mad city, and that's the truth of it.

Lovers of old school Jamaican roots reggae and dub are still lamenting the loss of Jah Observer's sound system on Ledbury Road. This year though, the replacement - Solution Sound System - was making a very good bash at filling that chasm-sized gap.

There was another rootsy system further up the street, just before you got to Channel One, which has  almost become a victim of its own success. Even with the smaller crowds overall this year, the Leamington Villas system was uncomfortably rammed for most of the two days. Mind you, Rampage was always like that - that, it seems, is how the youth like it.

It was good to see Gladdy Wax still going strong on Portobello, as well as the Afro-Cuban system a little further up. And the knee-deep roots dub scholar's choice, Abu Ashanti-I, up at the northern tip of the carnival was bringing great joy to assorted old rastafarians, Euro-dreads with stringy locks,  W11 trustafarians and old buffers and puffers (self included) alike.

A real highlight this year was a package of lovely surprises on the balcony stage of the always astonishing Gaz's Rockin Blues on Talbot Road.

Drummers on the world music stage, Powis Square Gardens

I've always loved Gaz's set-up with its various themes, desert isles with bits of shipwrecks or crashed air places, palm fringed rumshacks, blues party shabeens, pirate lairs etc etc….and always great rhythmy- bluesy-bluebeaty-rare-groovy-afro-celtic-skatalite sounds, everything thrown into the mix.

This year there were real treats here which more than compensated for the crowds of W11 party kids who tend to congregate here with their cocktails and their pushed-up designer sunglasses. First time I went past a band was stirring up the crowd with a convincing rendition of Legalise It. Turned out the little singer, all in black, was Peter Tosh's nephew.

Such a brilliant band, the Trojans. A bit later, passing again, it's your actual Max Romeo donning his iron shirt and chasing the devil out of town. All this to that  little bit of street - your own personal reggae heritage concert, if you happen to be living in one of the flats opposite.

The crowds here were daunting at times, but very close by, Powis Square Gardens had its own mini-festival of world music with loads of space to sit or dance, always the oasis.

Legalise It! A junior member of the Tosh family with the
Trojans at Gaz's Rocking Blues

It was not far from here, early on day one, there were suddenly people running with iPhones held high:  Jeremy Corbyn was passing through on some sort of official walkabout with Carnival elders. He looked like he'd just popped out of an intense political meeting, tired and drawn.


Jouvert, pigment and chocolate

The revellers and masqueraders who had got up early enough to take part in the opening J'ouvert ceremony are an increasingly conspicuous element of day one, which is usually referred to as Children's Day.

It is  the day when kids strut their stuff behind the floats, but it's also when adults throw powered pigment at each other, along with a bit of liquid chocolate if you're lucky. Hence the sight of people covered head to toe in dye, or sticky with chocolate, or both. I thought I'd missed them this year, until I came across a whole tribe of masqueraders, covered in colour.

Just look at this guy…

…and then see what happens when he meets some friends….I hope they are still friends….

 …and here, waiting a few yards on, are Mr Green and Mr Yellow, just waiting to coat you…..

and then, if you think you have escaped, hiding somewhere there must be Mr Blue….

 End of Carnival

At the end of the second day, another revelation and new favourite - the Fun Bunch sound system. So, it's what sort of music? House you say?


No. Well yeah, but for the last hour of this year's carnival they were blasting out some great old school hip-hop and rap, and really got the crowd three or four feet off the ground and rising.

It was a sweet crowd, and many sweet things happened. Right at the end, the sweetest thing  - a guy in the ground floor flat right behind the system, whose weekend must have been very noisy indeed, was dancing happily on his own behind the window. Suddenly everyone was pointing at him and cheering. He responded by dancing more vigorously,  and the crowd went wild, whistles, horns, the lot, and he seemed to love it. A beautiful little ending to that part of the day for many of us.

Happy dancing resident of Talbot Road, last minutes of Carnival 2015
at Fun Bunch sound system

Except, it's not the end. Yeah, they cut-off sound system power at 7pm, but someone always manages to squeeze in one more track. And then, all those floats nose-to-tailing right the way up Chepstow Road have to get back to Ladbroke Grove, and these days they are as loud as any sound system, with their own power!

They inch forward, the music cranks up again, their masqueraders (who never stop moving their feet) step up and up, jumping up, spinning, with  their acquired followers, like pilot fish on a whale,  hanging on to their tails.

So, up to 9pm and later, there's a queue of massive lorries with scarily high-tech sound systems, blasting out hard music almost like a weapon of dance, the DJs swinging around on the poles and railings on the top deck, shouting out instructions to their crews and greetings to the crowd, and another great wave of exhausted, beautiful dancers, dancing farewell to summer, dancing like there'll never be another summer, just wanting to keep it all going another minute, another song. It's almost painfully beautiful. Carnival at its best, after dark on Westbourne Grove as the floats stack up and the cops begin to move in. It's never the last dance!

On the 452 bus home, I sat  behind two young women who had both been at the Carnival. The first, a Hungarian, had enjoyed it but had also been disappointed by how managed it all was, how corporate. She thought there would be more spontaneous performance, more individual, amateur contribution.

The second, an American, also had little good to say about the event: she had been shocked by how much violence she had witnessed, fights around sound systems, boys kicking each other and throwing drinks around, cops plunging in to make arrests.

I felt moved to intervene. But I did not. I just sat there, thinking, yes, there's  too much corporate involvement now, the floats and the song systems are all sponsored, licensed, and yet - there is still room for a bit of private enterprise, whether the young couple with a soul sound system outside their flat in Ledbury Road or all this epeople flogging tins of drink from their front room windows. Or letting out their loos at a pound a pee.

No, no  intervention. The odd thing about this London Carnival is that it is so easy to understand why it is the best possible thing for some people and the worst possible thing for others.

Close friends, impassioned lovers, can so easily be torn asunder by their views on this event. It makes no sense really - what could there be to like about wandering around a former slum quarter of west London, now largely occupied by a particularly ostentatious breed of the super-rich, in filthy weather, with head-splitting noise emanating from huge sound systems, static and mobile, every few yards? Being pushed and shoved and getting into almost insanely dangerous crowd conditions? Tripping over bottles and splashing though pools of urine, vomit and worse?

And all of this in driving rain?

And not being able to escape quickly because the cops shout the road, and the tube's closed?

I'm not just a lover of Carnival, I am an addict. I have to get my fix of it. Once a year, two full days. Back against a bass stack in Ledbury Road, my vital organs being bounced out of their normal locations by absurdly heavy baselines.

Knowing how stupid I look trying to dance, when some of the most beautiful dancers in the country are dancing nearby, not caring, and even getting some positive feedback. The thing here is that you do have to dance: the resistance, so strong, so understandable, has to be jettisoned. In my case it can take a whole day of carnival, three or four tins of Red Stripe, a great deal of passive smoking to get to that point where I can't help it, I have to dance.

Once that happens, you will be on the open road to becoming a carnival lover.

Following the floats - it was all steel pan the old days, Trinidadian, calypsonian, St Kitts and Nevis, quaint and sort of Commonwealth. Then came soca and it all changed, Hot Hot Hot, the real hard sounds of Caribbean Carnival blast the soot off the wall of the crumbling stucco terraces of Ladbroke Grove and Chepstow Road,  this music much dirtier than grime, beautiful rough filthy dirty music that cleanses the soul.

I bore my daughter and her friends to death with talk of how Carnival was in the 70s - how Aswad used to play here and Burning Spear played there, and that's where I saw Neneh Cherry in her Rip, Rig and Panic days.  I hope they'll bore their kids to death with tales of Carnival from the 2010s….how they just wouldn't believe how crazy it used to be.  And I hope their kids say back to them, "Well, it's just as crazy now, just a lot bigger and louder, but just as crazy….if only you knew".

Please god.

Have to report that not even the Notting Hill Carnival can claim to be a Jeremy-free zone. It was nice to see him but wish he looked happier.

The deafening sound of collapsing buildings

We're not talking dearly loved Einstürzende Neubauten, we're talking complaints, that is one from London mayor Boris Johnson's sister Rachel that the ceiling of her Notting Hill pad  fell down after prolonged exposure to a Carnival sound system, two days after the carnival ended.

It doesn't surprise me, having felt each and every individual organ within my own fat stomach and rib-cage vibrate at precise moments of sonic resonance as one shimmied one's way past Studio One in Ledbury Road, or at one of forty-four other sound systems and floats.

Trouble is, I love it - and feel strongly that anyone who is lucky enough to live within that golden square mile or two has a cast-iron obligation to put up with the annual Carnival. Or shut up. Or get better insurance!

Of course some were louder than others; even the floats seemed louder to me this year and I am a deaf old mutt. There was one particular sound system that got my eyeballs vibrating - a most peculiar and not totally unpleasant sensation.

Plaster of Paris is generally quite stiff and it doesn't much like being vibrated, but in London there must be millions of tons of the stuff delicately hanging on for dear life to those flimsy Victorian laths as every new generation finds new ways of shaking the stuff free and down and down onto the always unsuspecting heads of the poor refugees, the clerks, the immigrants, the toffs and the wide-boys and the spivs and the sainted few, the rich bankers quaffing champagne and caviare beneath their gilded but dodgy ceilings, and even - oh shed your tears now, dearest readers, poor lovers, their bodies all that keep each other warm 'neath worn cotton sheets - and then....

From clomping horse-hooves to throbbing Zeppelins, rumbling Routemasters and clanking tube trains 5 metres beneath, the city has always seemed to conspire against its poorly-built living quarters.

Heavy Biblical lesson stuff was always a big feature of deep bass dub roots rock reggae, and they could surely have told us all  about the walls of Jericho and how not to build our brick and plaster houses on these quivering, shifting, blancmange-like lakes of mud we call Greater London.

Now I have to feel for poor Rachel - just a few square metres of ceiling collapse is a horrible thing, as I know in this jerry-built fire damaged servants' quarters of an abode in fucking Clapham. All that dust and soot, and how heavy plaster is!

But - no. She survived, her house has survived. Things were so much worse, esp in the 1940s. Chin up, dear! Brave face on it, innit? Stiff upper!

Zadie Smith's NW and the number 37

Some swear by the A-Z, I prefer
Zadie Smith's N-W as she re-traces the map
 of the   London of her youth in N-W

Sitting on a shabby balcony in SW4 and looking across the Thames mudflats towards the higher ground of Wembley and Harrow-on-the Hill, and reading - drinking in - this delicious book, NW.

Am a big fan of Zadie Smith, have been since I read  White Teeth.

But NW is different again, in the way she swoops back down into those postcodes of her own childhood. It's a fabulous movie of a novel and the images come relentlessly, in sharp focus, layering up effects of colour and emotion, setting off  strange resonances you don't even notice until 50 pages or so later.

I haven't enjoyed reading a novel so much since the summer of 1973 when - after years of trying and failing to read Ulysses -  it flew into my head and life over a four-day series of night-time train journeys across Italy.

So now after all this praise, the boring OCD point of this  stupid  clump of words, my complaint.  Even before I get to page 161 of the hardback  edition, I am getting worried because the number 37 strand is building towards something all too familiar.

Like Leah, I have a thing about numbers, and all those things she says about 37 - on page 37, in the first of four chapters numbered 37 - are true. Shit and fuck, she's going to blow this with a bus route reference.

And then on page 161 she does blow it : "When they reached the corner by the MacDonald's, Leah Hanwell said to Keisha Blake: 'Actually I think I might get on the 37, go the Lock, see that lot.' "

Bugger it, she means the 31. I only know this because in the 70s I lived in Chalk Farm and went to work on Belsize Road, just off Kilburn High Road,  every day on the 31. And then I moved to Beaufort Street just off King's Road and again I could take the 31 bus almost door-to-door,  if I didn't cycle.

The 31 was the best tourist bus in town in those years. On a Saturday, hit Camden Lock market in the morning, scour the record stalls, go to Rhythm Records  and the Compendium bookshop, jump on a 31outside Camden Plaza cinema, get off at Westbourne Park tube statiuon, walk for 5 minutes to Portobello, scour the stalls there, drop in at Rough Trade, see a film at the Electric or just buy loads of cheap fruit and veg and stroll down to the Gate, get on another 31 to World's End, if you were in time and did not have too many carrier bags, even stumble into the Oxfam  shop next to Vivienne Westwood and see if there were any great Chelsea luvvie-donated bargains to be had, as there sometimes were.

Now living in south London - quick pass the spitoon - and occasionally boarding the 37 bus to Brixton or  to Peckham, via Camberwell - well, obviously this bus will never even begin to rival the old 31 in my personal pleasure bus route-map. Up to the late 80s I think it went as far west as Hounslow - but never strayed into any of the NW codes, however tempting they might be. (For bus route freaks, see this  item on flickr ).

So what? One digit wrong? wtf? I agree, within a page or two I was back in Leah and Natalie's world, even more so in poor  Felix's world. But in a novel in which details seem so important, then a wrong digit sort of hits you. Probably it's another deliberate device and there's a whole layer of cleverness that I am completely missing.

And I don't mind because I love this book in the same way as I love London, even the NW bits of it - and I am about to start re-reading it.

As a final sad footnote, I stupidly decided to use my favourite bus routes as my winning National Lottery formula. Here are the numbers I chose in about 1994:
11, 22, 31, 35, 37, 38

You can have them for nothing, which is about as much as they have won me in the past 20 years.

And for a really good, fair, and well-informed review of this book, read Philippa Thomas's at London fictions

Notting Hill, the Carnival, and the weird transitions between London postcodes

I spent most of last two days in London W10 and W11. Yes, am an addict, and my drug is the Notting Hill Carnival. Been there most years since 1977, sometimes just for a few snatched hours, sometimes - as this time - for the duration. Sometimes with friends or children, but more often alone.

This year was again wonderful, the weather was perfect, the crowds were huge but mainly amiable, the masqueraders seemed even more beautiful and talented than ever, the sounds were sharper, the scents sweeter, and the old medicine seemed to be as strong as ever it was.

God knows, I am 60, I could never dance in public and I am worse now than ever I was. I don't even get drunk or stoned, particularly,  but I do get very high on the atmosphere, on the sound and physical experience. Seven hours walking, two tins of Red Stripe and a pack of peanuts and ready for more.

The crowds today were by no means the biggest ever, and yet every so often you'd get into those human funnels where you realised you had no choice, you were no longer a free individual, you had to move according to the crowd, to get through to the next space.

During these progressions you make brief eye contact - and sometimes involuntary contact of large areas of other parts of the body - with dozens of strangers. Some are trying to dance, some are trying to move on, some are trying to sell you something, some are out of their heads with joy, some look frightened, some are threatening and (if you are lucky) elbowing you out of the way.

Typically, if the music's good, at the end of the tunnel I turn round and go back through it again, just for the hellish joy of it.

Try doing this in All Saint's Road at 4pm on the Monday of Carnival. Or on Ledbury Road, or around Gaz's on Talbot Road.

The route takes you back time and again to the Carnival procession, and each time you see to meet the same big Trinidadian floats with the pounding soca, the head-dresses and flour and chocolate-smearing and pigment-hurling and the ropes and the grinding of bodies against bodies and the machine-gunning electronic sounds, the MCs' endless goadings and geeings-up, their stern reproaches to a crowd which isn't responding enough, kicking up the dust.

And already it's 7.30pm and there's still a line of  six or so big floats lined up down Westbourne Grove, things seems to be cranked up beyond maximum for these last precious minutes of Carnival. We all know there's nothing to look forward to from tomorrow except nine months of winter.

Light fades, I'm off on a bike through the orderly streets of Bayswater, prim Moscow Road etc,  and through into the park, down by the Serpentine and suddenly gliding into a world which retrieves memories of Istanbul and Dubai, a Middle Eastern evening, families out wandering, threes of women in full black burka, the children let loose,  cycling, scooting, skating around their parents and big brothers and sisters, the families crowding out the café and restaurant, all moving, slowly in the same formations you might see in Beirut or Cairo or Riyadh, I suppose, I imagine.

It works tonight in that magic August twilight. The air still warm enough, and lightly scented from the rose gardens. It is still wonderfully balmy in the dark green dusk.  Next week it may well be gone, it will just be a London autumn evening. Cycling on, down across Knightsbridge, the streets choked with the huge parked Range Rovers and Bentleys and Mercs and so on of these families, often showing Gulf state number plates.

Two minutes later passing the bus queues around Sloane Square, lots of Carnival leavers finding their own routes back south of the river, the strange meetings of these different worlds within  two or three postcodes, from the Carnival heartland of W10 through the mixed ethnic flavours and dead poshness of W2,  W11, SW7,  SW3....then over the bridge into the  homeland horror of SW4.

Stranger still is the way I assume I know which person is the child of super-wealthy Gulf state family, in London for the summer, and which is the teenager trekking back home to some council flat in Streatham after another great Carnival.

On this August Bank Holiday evening, the scented groves of Hyde Park work some magic, and I am completely subject to its spell.

I know nothing but I once again feel like Jah Wobble's last lines on that Invaders of the Heart album, Take Me to God:  ".....I Love Everyone..... L-o-o-o-v-e-a-a-a-h-h-h!!!!"

Fela Kuti musical at NT in November

Ages ago I wrote this stuff about Fela the musical:

"In two minds about the news that the Broadway musical hit, Fela!, is coming to London this autumn.

I've loved Fela Kuti's music through four decades (first heard him in the early 70s, when UK rock gods started falling over each other to get a bit of authenticity by visiting Lagos).

Now he's going to be up there on the same billboards with the likes of Freddy Mercury, Abba, and Andrew Lloyd Weber - a curious fate for this tempestous musician and political activist.

Am I just being a snob? I mean, the fear that it won't live up to the reality of his music and stage presence is ridiculous isn't it? I don't like music biopics much (apart from those old Ken Russell BBC films on the likes of Delius) - but I do like the idea of Fela being brought to new audiences."

Since then I've seen the show. It was at Sadlers Wells, and it was astonishing. I never did see the real Fela, I never went to Lagos to visit the Shrine, the Kalakuta republic, I just have been deeply attracted to his music since - when?

I first heard Fela when a friend made me listen to the Ginger Baker/Fela Ransome Kuti recordings back in the early 70s. It was exciting stuff, but then so was Osibisa, and then along came Bob Marley and I was totally absorbed in Jamaican music for the next 10 years or so. Apart from a wee bit of Ian Dury, and a lot of jazz, and the Clash, PiL, Robert Wyatt  and Jah Wobble.

Partly thanks to John Peel, but even more thanks to another radio man, Charlie Gillett, I  started again listening to wider ranges of stuff. Gillett's show on BBC Radio London was a beautiful thing. He was so mild, modest, and engagingly knowledgable, he out-Peeled Peel for me.

 Thanks to him, African, specifically South African,  music, re-entered my airspace in the early 80s, and then thanks also to repeated visits to a Kentish Town pub where the great (and now late) Dudu Pukwana's band – Zila – had a regular slot. This music was just so crazily, beautifully, infectiously hot and full of human charm, and this coming form a band of exiles who'd been forced out of their own country by hatred and death-threats.

The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, District Six, Hugh Masekela, Paul simon's stuff - and the way  UK musicians like the Specials, Robert Wyatt etc, signed up to anti-Apartheid with the whole of their musical as well as political souls  - that music was powerful, joyful and even quite dangerous, in the best sense.

And then we had the Bundhu Boys,  etc etc....I needed to get back to the Nigerian sounds but there was just too much else of beauty around. Rare groove revivals, James Brown. Funk, punk, Rip Rig and Panic. All that Cuban and Brazilian stuff too, and the rise of Soca. Those were good times to love music in London, or anywhere else I am sure.

Fela was there all along BUT stupidly  I only really got back into him in 1983 or so, when, on the last evening of that year's Notting Hill Carnival, as the southern quarter of the crowd of revellers surged back up Portobello towards the tube and the buses, as we surged past pyramids of empty Red Stripe tins and coconut shells, there was one last sound system - not really a sound system, just an indoors hi-fi set up on a trestle table outdoors,  two small but good speakers and a deck and a big amp, and a girl dj/citizen swaying around, selling her last few tins of lager, with Shuffering and Smiling playing off vinyl at maximum volume, and that stream of going-home pople were stopping their going and starting again to dance, and Fela sort of led it all, a big last street dance at the 1983 Notting Hill carnival.

Anyone else who witnessed this please remind me. Maybe I was just too tired and stoned and runk and dreaming to have any accurate memories.