Live and free - two brief musical encounters in one London weekend

Polar Bear play the 2014 Canary Wharf Jazz Festival.
Drummer Seb Rochford has his eye on you.

From sweet Cuban sounds in SW4 to a full blast of the hot and icy jazz wastes of Polar Bear in the far east - just another weird London wet and windy august weekend.

Saturday afternoon, and for once am at home in south London. I was restless and needed some food. I thought I'd cycle the scenic route to Asda, i.e. across Clapham Common. As the sun was out I went the long way round, and noticed crowds around the bandstand area.

First thought -  just another corporate sports event. But closer up, I realised there were two unconnected events going on.

First, lots of people in loose skater-style clothing were tying long streamers between trees, then walking along them and doing stunts. A tightrope walkers' convention of some sort….but with music, nice Latino sounds.

Then I saw the band on the recently-renovated bandstand stage, an eight-piece in full flow. Turns out this was a separate concert, the band being Here to Havana, a London-based Afro-Cuban big-band re-working traditional dance music.

They looked good in their black and red gear,  and their sound had enough of that always surprising rhythm to get even my feet and hips moving. A bit. They had a battle on, though. Sudden gusts of wind were blowing the sound away, and the casual audience of young parents and their pushchair-bound kids, the dog walkers and weekend cyclists, joggers and outdoor drinkers, needed some working up.

This they did, very well, and the audience grew from a few chance passers-by to an almost-crowd with some people actually dancing! Tiny children racing around the edge of the bandstand chased by their young dads and a skinny dog which seemed to actually enjoy the music, completed the scene.

In my head I was back in the 80s, when we'd get events like these throughout the summer; in fact, when I first saw them, I thought this was Happy End all over again. The second trombonist, a woman with cropped blonde hair, looked just like Annie Whitehead had back in that strange day, even down to the print top over black leggings.

Yes, this was a powerfully anachronistic event - no signage, no one selling anything, no brighter borough claiming credit for the "Arts in the community"event.  Just sweet music, and friendly and happy crowd.

Today, I was determined to keep riding on this cultural wave. I search for interesting events, find none, and decide instead to head for the Docklands museum in West India Dock, as I had never visited it before and it has an exhibition about bridges.

I go to this area - the Canary Wharf commercial district - as little as possible, as I always think of it as a sort of fake Dallas, a hostile gated community of money-makers dumped on the mass graves of old maritime London.

Arriving today, it seemed more real, or at least more permanent. Odd how quickly these places get rooted in London's wet and sticky soil. Tens of thousands now live and work and shop and eat around here in jobs and supermarkets and bars and homes that did not exist 15 or even 10 years ago.

Above all, it was well populated, and the gigantist architecture seemed a little less show-off flash harry, a bit greened in and a bit stained.

But, it is still an unwelcoming place, despite the best attempts of all the authorities. Not that they don't try. Confused by the maps I walk past the Canada Square skyscrapers and immediately hear the weirdly inappropriate sounds of a 1970s progressive jazz-rock band. It might be Colosseum or the National Health - but no, it's a band called Nostalgia 70 or some such and they are very determined to give an authentic performance. There's a hardy crowd, clad in oilskins and carrier bags as clearly there has just been a downpour.

It all seems so odd, I can hardly believe what am I seeing. But as I walk through this odd crowd of well-dressed people sitting on squares of Canary Wharf plastic on the wet grass, I get a whiff again of that other world - the London of the early 80s, free gigs, and as I pass by by I read a poster. It's the Canary Wharf Jazz Festival, and next up are Polar Bear - a band I got very keen on three or four years ago via drummer Seb Rochford's other band (Acoustic Ladyland) - and then forgot about.

SO I make a hurried tour of the museum, memo myself to make a return visit when i have more time, and rushed back to Canada Square just in time to catch Polar Bear tuning up.

By now there's a real crowd, lots of grizzled jazz fans and  serious young jazzistas mixing with what I imagine are the cooler of the local residents, young couples and young parents, most very smartly turned out.

Polar Bear have not mellowed with age: the wall of sound they create hits the HSBC building and the On Canada Square skyscraper and for a moment I imagine this aggressively anti-establishment music bringing down the walls and trading floors of E14's neo-capitalist temples.

I love the way they veer off on mad and dangerous rhythmic adventures, then they all seem to get back together on a lovely funky freeway to pleasure, but they can never allow this to last - they never  take the easy route. Reminds me of Miles Davis at his most experimental, the era of Get Up With It, Live Evil, etc.

Stunningly crazy playing by all, I adored the two sax players, the bassist, the Apple Mac man. Seb himself is such a sweetie - he seems so shy, mumbling a little between songs, clearly rather embarrassed about the giant code-ups of his face on the three big screens around the square. As a drummer he makes maximum impact with apparently minimal display - not much evidneceof the flailing arms and pumping legs of a Ginger or a Jonh-Paul. Seb's rhythms drive it all, though, and they are always surprising and intriguing.

One piece he said, was as yet untitled but was basically about how we should all love each other.

I love him and his band, and for a short time I almost loved Canary Wharf.

Back on the track of London's disappearing public loos

The way of all London's bogs? This once splendid cottage-style public
 convenience on the north side of Clapham Common is up for grabs.
It will become either a ridiculously expensive nosherie or some
 bonused-up banker's stinky pied a terre. Whither our free
piddling places, I ask?

Time Out's Alexi Duggins uses his page this week to bemoan the decline of London's public toilets - reminding me of a blog post I started to write two years ago and never published.

As one who has (as if cursed to do so) toiled around the inner zones of London for most of the past four decades, I have an internal, instinctual map telling me when and where I have to alter my itinerary in order to find a place to pee.

This has become all the more important as age and the ripening prostate gland push up against the weakening bladder.

So I started a sort of widdler's guide to free peeing in zones 1 and 2. I will begin again, but with some very good news right from the heart of things - from Soho, London W1. In fact, the centre of Soho - the public toilets in Broadwick Street, near where it crosses Berwick St - are open again, and still free!

When they closed a year or two back I feared that they would never re-open and become yet another trendy place for a piss-up instead of a piss. If they did re-open I imagined they'd be the new fangled type with a turnstile and a charge of at least 50p, like all the now horrible toilets in all of London's railway termini.

 How lovely, then, to find these classic Soho toilets (well, the  gents at least - even for the sake of this survey I did not risk descending into the ladies) completely unchanged. Except that they seem to have removed the great slabs of sheet steel bolted between the stalls that were presumably meant to discourage cottagers taking peeks at their neighbours' bits.

Moving on towards Oxford Circus, there was another free underground loo, entered from the Regent Street traffic island on the north side of the junction. Is it still there?

If not, I would make for another good old fallback position - the toilets in John Lewis, easily accessible from the staircases on the Square side.

Moving south, I used to make frequent use of the gents in the subway of Piccadilly Circus tube, the exit that used to lead directly into the basement of the now defunct Tower Records flagship store. Such a useful convenience, this one was, allowing you to empty everything before prolonged browsing through the racks.

Now, I think, it has also gone. The door is still there but always locked.

On to Trafalgar and Leicester Squares - you pay through the nose in both for the horrible WCs. Instead, I make for the crypt of St Martin in the Fields, a great place for a cheapish lunch and a free pee, as well as brass rubbing and regular photography exhibitions.

It always makes me feel a bit guilty, entering museums and churches and shops and so on, just to relive myself - but it can't be helped. If only I had more nerve I would do what so many London flaneurs always did, and stride confidently into the poshest hotels to use the luxury facilities, precious fragrances and fluffy towels and knee-scraping flunkies and all! But I know I would be shooed away before I even penetrated those plate glass rotating doors.

With the sad changeover of the Covent Garden piazza toilets to pay-as-you-piss, I find that whole area now a bit of a piddler's desert. You can go to the British Museum, of course, or all the way up to Russell Square gardens where there's still a free loo beside the cafe. Likewise, I think, in Lincoln's Inn Fields….again, that is tbc.

Move a bit north, and there was marvellous old style public loo just by Coram's Field, but I fear that has now closed, just  like the magnificent old loos with glass cisterns by Chancery Lane tube station.  There are plenty of free loos in the Barbican complex, but getting out of there is always a gamble. Old Street tube station's subways are blessed with two fine things - a cut-price bookshop (Camden Books) and an old fashioned free London Transport bog.

I am pleased to report there's still a good subterranean  toilet in what remains of  Old Spitalfields market, over in the corner by the cashpoint.

The Brick Lane, Shoreditch and Hoxton area - use the pubs is all I can say. I'm sure these super-trendy areas have splendid community crapperies, but I have yet to experience any of them.

Angel is hopeless - I looked for a pisser in Chapel Market but it had gone. The Angel Bar - a reliably busy Wetherspoon's boozer - is a good place, and you can get a pint for the price of a piddle in some of London's more upmarket institutions.

Islington Green has one of those awful igloo things. Highbury corner, which looks so promising, seems to have nothing. I could've sworn the Overground station had a toilet once, but no such luck now. I've been known to leg it all the way down Roseberry Avenue to Sadler's Wells theatre to use their nice free toilets down the stairs.

Now we're out in zone 2, which is fast becoming a public convenience desert. Camden, Kentish Town, Maida Vale, Paddington, Notting Hill - where, oh where, are the toilets of yesteryear? Dalston,  you cry? Hackney? The town hall in MAre Street, I remember, had good loos. There must surely be a grisly market toilet in Ridley Road. Need to check out out. And something very organic on London Fields, one hopes.

Moving very swiftly south of the river, if you're caught short in Brixton head for Pope's Road behind the market, and there's a fine free Lambeth loo waiting for you there.

Excellent free loos in glorious festival of Britain style abound in lovely Battersea Park - yes, amazingly,  Wandsworth Borough Council must have forgotten about these very egalitarian poo-ing places.

By contrast, Clapham, once so well provided for, indeed famously a cottager's delight - now has very little. The bogs by Clapham Common tube are now a bar (WC, ho-ho!), and the one by the old Library (now an expensive arty place, the Omnibus) is closed and up for sale or rent. If stuck, head for Sainsburys in the High Street or the new library. But beware - the library's unisex loo is very well equipped for disabled people, so do not pull the cord thinking it will flush the loo - it sets off a very loud alarm.

Further south - give up. Either piss on one of the commons, or dive into one of the many pubs heaving with drunken yuppies.

And of course this crazy runaround has left many gaps, and missed out many hidden treasures of the world of public sanitation. If you can fill them, please do so. But do remember to adjust your clothing before you leave. Thankyou.

At last I have seen the light about the London Beam

Late last night, back from a brief holiday in the beautiful south of France, I stuck my head out of the back door in the hope of catching a glimpse of the much-trumpeted 'super-moon'.

I saw that large pale disk ascending over Canary Wharf, pretty much my eastern horizon, but what caught my eye first and much more firmly was a very bright,  dead straight line, a veritable edge or column of light, poking up from somewhere near Vauxhall Bridge to a massive but indeterminate height. A huge beam of light, bigger than any I had ever seen (and there have been plenty over the last few years).

I immediately jumped to some prejudiced conclusions.

As it appeared to originate in the Nine Elms area, close to the ghastly killer tower, "The Plunger" as it is known in Pimilico - I imagined it was just another publicity stunt by the Nine Elms Disease gang. In fact I thought they had stolen the New York twin towers 12th anniversary memorial idea (the twin beams of light) and were using it to celebrate some new victory over the GLA or Lambeth planning authorities.

I'm referring to the property developers who are spreading steel and glass boxes across the old Battersea Marshes like there's no tomorrow. I read somewhere they'd gained permission to build yet another huge tower, this one to be in Bondway,Vauxhall - known, until very recently, as the location of a big hostel for the homeless.

So, I turned my back on this astonishing beam. And today, just a few hours ago,  I read it was a work of art.

I quickly discover (thanks to these amazing photos on the Brixton Buzz website, plus reports on the Guardian and  Daily Telegraph websites ) that it is an artwork commissioned by the Mayor of London and Artangel. It was  called Spectra - a piece of art by the Japanese sound and light artist Ryoji Ikeda, to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. It was a cluster of  49 searchlights in Victoria Tower Gardens by the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. I should have realised immediately - this was real light and the usual stuttering green laser beam.

So - while I thought it was a self-promoting stunt by a property developer, I hated it. Now I know it was a great public work of art for a world-shaking centenary, I am outed as the great hypocrite I always knew I was.

So, I failed to get photos of either the super-moon or the super beam.

What an arsehole!

Old white guy has wonderful evening at Brixton's Black Cultural Archives inauguration

How often do you get to enjoy a full evening of great music,  poetry, dance, and inspiring speakers  on a warm summer's evening surrounded by thousands of happy people, then cycle home in 10 minutes with your soul fully re-charged? And all for free?

And how often would this event include one of your all-time heroes, the original Dub Poet, Linton Kwesi Johnson?

About once in a lifetime - if you are lucky. Well, tonight I was lucky, thanks to this evening's opening event for  Brixton's new Black Cultural Archives, a three-hour bash which (among many other things) made you realise what a great space Windrush Square really is.

So, thank God again for the people of Brixton, who seem to be the last part of this weird and scarily changing city who have the ability to make me feel truly alive. Even before the public celebrations began, you realised this was a much bigger event - bigger even than Brixton. The BCA is the result of a 30-year battle, and the victory that this evening represented reverberates right across the country, not just south London.

The new Archives open to the public tomorrow with a big inaugural exhibition, Re-Imagine: Black Women in Britain.

The  centre occupies the two completely refurbished  Regency townhouses (formerly Raleigh Hall) and a new education/refreshment area - an elegant piece of architectural melding and blending, which actually enhances this great space opposite the Town Hall and next to the Brixton Library and the (now sadly troubled) Ritzy Cinema.

Thanks, especially, to all the people who made this amazing new institution a reality. And the amazing performers who ripped up all your notions of the worthy benefit show. Especially good were the poet, rap artist, and blues singer Floetic Lara.
 We saw her two years back at the "Bob Marley Way" event. Then she seemed raw and exciting. Tonight she was even more exciting but far from raw. The layer upon layer of ironies and barbed line-endings, her sudden taking flight into deep Nina Simone or Aretha territory, it was moving, inspiring, funny, and amazing all at once.

It inspired me, a 61-year-old burnt-out case, so heaven knows how good she must have been for the 15-year-old aspirant artists in the crowd.

LKJ was a cool and white-hot as ever, the old stories fresh again as he reminds us of the New Cross Massacre, and all that followed back in 1981 - events which led to the determination to build this archive. When he read his poem about  the 1981 riots, Di Great Insohreckshan - well, at first you miss the heavy reggae backing of Dennis Bovell's band, but then you realise he doesn't need any accompaniment. There's already fire in the air, LKJ has ignited it.

The artists who follow him - spoken-word artists Akala and  El Crisis, and the calypsonian protest singer Alexander D Great, seemed to pick up on LKJ's mood. Unfinished business is very much in the air (see the latest Met revelations). We felt strong vibrations of 1981 and 85 and 1993 and - what 2014? in Akala's amazing Uzi-style delivery - he builds up to a hailstorm of words, each  so carefully and beautifully chosen, so sharp so deadly. You want him to slow down so you can catch it all but he can'tt slow down - and then his nice trick of separating the final word, so it hangs there like a barrage balloon of meaning.

Stuff  hanging in the humid air - there's still feeling of outrage here tonight, it was a night for white people (i.e., me) to be made very aware of how they (i.e., we) dragged their (i.e., our) feet through those decades. How much more we could all have done to help these beautiful, forgiving people who make this city so much better than it ever really deserved to be. Yeah, anyone can do more than nothing, which  with one or two exceptions (but not me, tbh), is what we did.

Read a good history of the project here on Brixton Buzz.

A London swimmer's stolen summer days in the silky socialist waters of the Serpentine

It has become a bit of a ritual, but a summer is not a summer for me without at least one hot, sunny, stolen day at the Serpentine Lido in Hyde Park.

I went three days ago, and the magic was still there, as strong as ever. As strong as it was, perhaps, way back in  1930 when the so-called "Lansbury's Lido" opened in Hyde Park, allowing mixed-sex open-air  bathing in the Serpentine for the first time.  See for yourself in this amazing footage from British Pathé.


George Lansbury, the radical socialist,  pacifist,  reformer, campaigning MP and Labour Party Leader (1932-35), who was determined to give ordinary Londoners a taste of the open-air bathing pleasures available at the seaside, right here in the centre of the richest, most royal area of the capital city.

I first went back in the mid-1970s, and kept going through to the mid 1980s. I remember being there on the day of Live Aid - a hot Saturday afternoon, I was listening on the walkman radio. You could feel the vibrations from Wembley in the hot air.

At the time the place was under threat, there were constant health scares about the water , and people generally grimaced when you said you'd been swimming there: "Oh, how could you, it's all slimy and stinky and all those old men in speedos…."

Back in those days I was a 27 year old in Speedos, and yes, there was a bit of slime under the toes as you inched your way down the slope into those greeny-brown waters. But it was benign slime,  a soft layer of weedy mud. This was real water - the Serpentine is fed by natural springs and the submerged River Westbourne - and it felt totally different to the chlorinated refined stuff you get in swimming pools. It feels soft and silky, it feels gorgeous against the skin

The crowds who went down to the Serpentine in those hot summers of 80 and 81 were very different to the diehard members of the Serpentine Swimming Club, the ones who did lengths every morning, every day of the year, before going off to work.

The "father" of the Lido, George Lansbury,
headed a successful campaign in the
 1920s to get affordable open air swimming for
 all Londoners in the heart of the city.

The great thing here was we could all co-exist - the serious swimmers and the hedonistically sun-worshippers, the narcissists and the creative skivers, taking a few hours out from their office jobs. God, how we all love that place, that little Oasis in the centre of the metropolis.

I would go with a book, a bottle of water, something to eat, Palmer's cocoa butter skin cream and plenty of cigarettes. I would lie there and wait, and sure enough before long the spaces next to me would be filled with all manny of chambering young and not-so-young swimmers. There was a strange community about the place - as if we all belonged to some slightly secret club.

We were the lazy ones, the sun-addicts, young and old, we mixed with the hordes of Spanish and Californian and Brazilian and Italian and South African and Australian backpacker tourists who found the place a bit like home from home.

.
The Serpentine Lido has so much going for it - a little bit of paradise, saved for the people of London and the world by idealistic socialists of the early 20th century.

The place still has that democratic feel. The entry fee is less than for most of the stingy local authority pools around the outer boroughs - and if the weather's good you get the feeling of being in some private club, soaking up the sun in your skimpy swimming gear as the crazy centre of capitalism goes about its greedy business a few hundred yards away.

Although, as one very long-term fan of the Lido  - she had been coming here since 1958 - told me,  they built the  Lido on the wrong side of the lake. "it's north facing, so to get the best of the afternoon sun you have to  turn away from the water," she laughed.

Clapham Old Town: A good place for single people who wish to remain single

This bit "of urban regeneration" around the Pavement/Polygon area of Clapham has already come in for some stick here - most of all for its murderous, Alice-In-Wonderland approach to bike lanes.

There's another aspect which only became startlingly clear right at the end of the project. This charming "piazza" where Claphamites (not Sodomites or Catamites, you understand) can stroll around showing off their very expensive designer gear and haircuts to each other.

We are single and we will damn well stay single: Clapham Old
Town's new public space  boasts seating arrangements are great
for the aggressively anti-social: don't invade my space, OK yah?

Sure, the mustard yellow surfacing of large areas of this "piazza" will not flatter many skin tones, but at least it's a big open space with no cars; well not many cars - going over it.

But if it's wonderful for good old-fashioned Clapham yuppy posturing, it's definitely not meant to encourage socialising.

Look at the seats the council has so thoughtfully provided for our rather onanistic population.

Yes, they are all one-seater affairs, placed at weird angles to each other. As though wanting to stop people reading newspapers over your shoulder or whatever.

Just far apart enough to make conversation difficult.

You see, if you want to socialise in SW4 you are meant to go to one of the designated places - a bar or restaurant or "patisserie" or "brasserie" or whatever - and pay through the nose for it.

Of course, there's the Common for the Common folk, like me.

Clapham comes up smelling of Bread and Roses (sort of)

Having consistently slagged off my own neighbourhood in this blog, I decided - over a lovely £3 pint of Guinness at the Bread & Roses pub in Clapham Manor Street - that in all fairness I should praise the good aspects of this fair borough.

Poetry guaranteed to lift the spirits even after
the grimmest Northern Line commute
 -  thanks to the cultured staff of Clapham North tube station

There's the first and one of the best things about the SW4 area - this pub is just as good as it ever was, and by that I mean it feels to me just the same as it did in 2004. In fact, not even the prices seem to have changed much, and while the street it is in has undoubtedly seen a five-fold increase in house-prices, the local people seems just as mixed-up and crazy and strange as ever they did.

With all the high-visibility gentrification and ruggerisation of this area, of yummy-mummification of
twixt-commons nappy zone, the banker-wankers of old-town, and boot club anti-tummification of the common itself, you can be forgiven for forgetting that Clapham is still a deeply diverse place, it still has a great clump of deep roots, as deep as the deep shelters at Clapham South where the first post-war West Indian migrant workers were supposed to sleep.

Lots of good reasons to like the place, starting as soon as you exit the Northern Line at Clapham North and read their daily quote chalked up on a board as you head for the ticket barrier.

Whoever chooses these has some genius, setting you in a frame of mind to appreciate the true spirit of this once radical borough. Remember this is where the Clapham Sect met to push through the biggest humanitarian reform in British history - abolition of the slave trade.

Hard to imagine it now beneath the onslaught of Range Rovers and yummy mummies and chaps in rugger-shirts, this place til quite recently was favoured by the left-leaning, the bohemians. Hence the HQ of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in Clapham High Street, the trade union HQs in Old Town, the former squats in Rectory Grove.

All going or gone, now, but before it all disappears completely, do something!