Running for (creative) therapy

I am once again putting rubber to the tarmac and running the Hastings Half-Marathon on March 20th. I am doing it for two reasons: exercise obsession and to raise money for an important new therapy project being set up by two friends of mine. 

I have vowed to hang up my running shoes after I complete this event. In fact I am giving up my neuro-sports obsessionalism in general. However, before I go cold turkey on this particular (non) coping mechanism, I will seek to go out with a modest bang.

My fastest half-marathon was fractionally over 1 hour and 35 minutes, a performance conducted six years ago at the 2016 Hastings Half. I got to within 32 seconds of that in 2019. I'm now approaching 58, but have stated that I want, this year, to run the Hastings Half-Marathon in under 1:30. That said, if I can at least improve on my PB, however modestly, I'll be totally delighted.

The last Hastings Half, back in 2019; author far left

More importantly, but relevantly, I am raising money for GROWING CREATIVE COMMUNITIES. This charity is about to launch from the Langney (East Sussex) home of Amy Syrad-Hardy and Adam Llewellyn-Smith, and will offer creative therapy for adults, and a recreational space solely for men. I can personally vouch for how effective Amy Syrad-Hardy's creative therapy classes are. 

If you would like to sponsor my run, I will transfer all monies raised directly to GROWING CREATIVE COMMUNITIES. (Please message me accordingly and I will send you my bank details).

GROWING CREATIVE COMMUNITIES will be a totally inclusive charity offering safe spaces for conversation and creativity. Based in Pevensey, East Sussex, it combines two elements: creative therapy for adults, and a recreational space solely for men. ‘Your Creative Self’, run by Amy Syrad-Hardy (38), will provide both group and 1:1 therapy for anyone who needs it, whether they realise it or not. Amy is experienced and trained in providing creative therapies focused on the whole self: mind and body. She is also a survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA). Consequently, she is both professionally and  intuitively aware of how trauma affects people. Her creative therapy is focused on adults who may be struggling with the manifestations of trauma, whether due to CSA or to more recent domestic sexual or physical violence. Amy encourages people to use paint, paper, words, or just about anything, to express how they feel and to connect with the whole self.  

‘You do not have to think of yourself as ‘artistic’,’ she stresses. ‘It’s all about using different methods to tap into repressed emotion: anger, fear, shame, whatever it is that you might be feeling,’ says Amy. ‘Or if it feels like you’re not feeling anything at all.’  This Amy will do in a group setting, or via 1:1 therapy for those with specific trauma-related symptoms such as an eating disorder, suicidal ideation, addiction, chronic illness etc. 

Amy’s husband Adam Llewellyn-Smith (38) has lived experience of trauma and is bi-polar. He has actively supported Amy in her fight for justice against a former abuser. Adam is a videographer, photographer, producer and editor. From personal experience he understands how much men who’ve survived trauma need to communicate, whether with themselves or with others. Adam is setting up ‘MENT’ (Mental Health Emotions Narrative & Times) so that men can have a dedicated space where they can allow themselves to talk, or to explore. Exploration could be creative, with paint or words or by simply sharing an enjoyment of music. Or it could literally be exploring by walking or exercising, or it might be engaging in sports. MENT will provide men who perhaps aren’t used to expressing themselves, in any form, with an opportunity to gather and to just see where the conversation, or the activity, takes them.

GROWING CREATIVE COMMUNITIES will be based out of Amy and Adam’s home studio space (‘ALS Studios’). They have also booked three other facilities in the Pevensey and Westham area, including Montague Farm in Hankham. Over the next couple of months they will host exhibitions of creative work by trauma survivors at these locations; one such 'pop-up' event in being lined up for the end of March. 

Adam and Amy’s charitable project aims to support anyone who’s feeling isolated, anyone who’s struggling with depression, anyone who’s had trauma. Whatever your story, it’s likely that you will find someone, or something, that you can connect with via GROWING CREATIVE COMMUNITIES. As the work of the charity grows, it will draw on a network of trauma therapists and counsellors. Fees for  counselling and other forms of support will be set low to help ensure maximum inclusiveness.

If you want to find out more about GROWING CREATIVE COMMUNITIES, contact Amy and Adam via email on artarshcreate@gmail.com or via their individual Facebook pages:  Amy and Adam.

Self-portrait (by me)

Postscript: I am very pleased to say that I raised £770 for GROWING CREATIVE COMMUNITIES and am very appreciative to all those who donated money and/or expressed their support. I sadly didn't make it home in less than my PB, but my finish time of just under 1:39 wasn't bad. The key thing is the taking part and the cause, and the cause is a very good one for sure. A launch photography exhibition has already been held by Adam in a Pevensey pub, and he has three more planned in the Pevensey and Westham area over the Spring and Summer of 2022. Amy will be hosting an exhibition of her art and of those who've benefitted from her creative therapy (including me) during the same period.  

Penge by bike

I am on an assignment: to work out what I want with what’s left of my life and how I can ensure that I am stable, perhaps even happy, with whatever I choose. Those most affected by this, and others who know my condition well, have counselled that I need to focus on myself in working this out. Only I can save myself. My own sanity has to be my priority, just as those I love must prioritise their own sanity too. Paradoxically perhaps, this may both require more isolation and more support mechanisms. It’s another fork in the road and I cannot, this time, plough down the middle. With these ideas in mind, on Wednesday I opted to turn my back on my future and go exploring for more remnants of my dead past.... in Penge. I am at a loss as to how I got there. Figuratively speaking that is, as my dissociation is generally of the willful kind, not strange blanks where I am totally disconnected.

I had actually reached a rare calm the night before. Perhaps this was an unexpected reaction to the existential sanity of late period Mike Peterson in the utterly compelling court room-based Netflix documentary ‘The Staircase’. Peterson had served eight years in prison after having been found guilty of killing his wife whose death was actually apparently the result of a tragic accident. In keeping with the limited capabilities of the US legal system to entirely exonerate someone falsely accused, I was never entirely reconciled to his innocence. However, as presented by the end of the series, an elderly innocent man had come to accept that he couldn’t get that time back, nor fully clear his name, but that what mattered was acceptance and to make the most of what remained of his life.

Closing down the i-Pad I stood and marvelled at the panoramic neon beauty of London, as viewed from the top of a Leyton tower block. The vast visual sweep provided a calming almost soporific effect. I cannot remember ever standing in this 10^th floor flat and feeling so relaxed in the still, almost silent urban beauty of it all. I sabotaged this soon enough though in what I told myself was simply a conscious choice to just be me and to see where that notion might go if I imagined myself living alone with just virtual friends and a confessional keyboard for company. In the middle of the night self-disgust fought for control with a range of self-calming techniques. A couple of hours later the imagined tight rein on the exercise addiction had gone very slack and, in the almost light, I pounded the pavement en route to the Walthamstow filter beds via a quick spot of self-flagellation at the public exercise machines in an adjacent park. Running up the ten flights of stairs in a ball of sweat I hurried back to bed in the hope of more sleep. A planned day of facing the future by facing the computer screen, possibly punctuated by an overdue haircut and an online discussion on Bahrain, didn’t help to relax me. The thought of taking my push bike for an overland train journey to Penge seemed a more appealing option.

The past is never dead. In fact it is always present. In George Orwell's '1984', O’Brien, the senior official who eventually re-programmes Winston Smith, gets him to incant: 'Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.' Winston Smith's successful treatment was for the alteration of memory.

Memories aren't free

I don’t know if my half dozen visits in recent years to my early childhood hometown are an attempt at controlling my past in order to re-shape my future. I just know that the attraction of revisiting Penge's remembered combination of freedom and claustrophobic conformity doesn’t fade, and that it especially grows when the present, let alone the future, seems far too difficult to contemplate. In the night I had remembered what it felt like as a boy to cycle away from home and to feel free, alone, on the roads and in the parks of the area. It was a strange sensation to be doing the same thing, at presumably greater speed, 45 years later. It wasn’t quite my childhood flashing back before my eyes, but I felt a peculiar rush as I raced past various monuments from my first 12 years. For the first time since I’d left Penge in 1976 I found that St John’s Parish Church, via which I had received something of a Christian education, was actually open. While not officially open to the public, the friendly female minister I spoke to outside and the welcoming Church volunteers inside encouraged me to take a look around, highly responsive to my expressed and seemingly open and honest desire to revisit the place that had evidently had a major imprint on me.

Temperance & Hope, designed by the William Morris Co.

Chancel of St John's Church

It was not like the emotion generated on my last visit to Penge when I had stumbled through a dark alley behind where we used to live. Nor was it like an earlier revisit when I felt child-like glee at once again seeing the dinosaurs ('Dinos') of Crystal Palace Park. Being inside St John’s Parish Church was to witness that the large, dark, almost foreboding chamber, full of stiff reverence and austere pews, had given way to a largely white space stripped of its rigid, hierarchical regimentation. What's more, the primary space of communal worship was now obviously much more accessible in both the literal and metaphorical sense. The imposing brass eagle whose spread wings had formed a lectern encasing a huge Bible was now unceremoniously parked in one corner of the seemingly unused altar. Pride of place though, under the stained glass of St John The Evangelist, remains the wood carving depicting The Last Supper. 

The lofty pulpit

A more democratic space for worship

The intricate stone of the original pulpit is now essentially a well-preserved reminder, to me at least, of a fast-fading past. I wasn’t saddened, nor exactly disappointed by what I witnessed though. I didn’t imagine St John’s Parish Church Penge would have the grand sweep of yesteryear. After all I am, physically and experientially speaking at least, much grown since I last entered here, even if I often still reside in my child. I had perhaps a greater appreciation for the stained-glasses than as a boy, noting their 'modern' beauty, and could freshly appreciate some other church features. The high-vaulted wooden ceilings, the beautiful arched doors, and the design of the baptismal font in which I had surely been dipped. This was incongruously located close to the exit where money-changing had once attracted me in the subtly-lit but long gone Church ‘book shop’. It didn’t look as if the baptismal font was still in use, surrounded as it was by dozens of folded chairs. That said, I am sure there are still Christenings at St John’s, so maybe.

Baptismal font at St John's Church, Penge

The St John The Evangelist stained-glass

Walking around the outside of the Church I was reminded of where my brother and me once rode our home-made go-cart, and of a surprising (even to me then) Church fireworks display hidden round the back. More poignantly, I recalled a never-forgotten dream experienced soon after we’d left Penge when I was flying around the church grounds like a large bird (an eagle perhaps?). Briefly revisiting the Rec for the inevitable cheese sandwich, I pushed my tired legs to carry me up, once again, to Crystal Palace Park. Sleepless the previous night I had had the idea that the resumption of my childhood mode of transport would connect me with something visceral from my past life.

Fly like an eagle?

Being back here again may have been an avoidance of necessary work on planning my future, but I continue to hope that returning will somehow reveal some deeper, and less dark, mystery from the past. Cycling up to the highest point of what had once been an exciting racetrack for motorbikes of a certain vintage, I prepared to revisit the high-speed childhood thrill of freewheeling home on a bike. For a brief period it felt the same as I once again raced down through the park, zipping past the now rusting splendour of the Crystal Palace Bowl, until sadly a cluster of walkers, some with barely controlled small children and even smaller dogs, necessitated me braking before taking a wrong turn and ending up in the Sports Centre car park. Perhaps as a boy I just didn’t care about interrupting the danger of racing round tight bends, getting a speed buzz at 10 that a man approaching 60 fears to do when so many other grown-ups are present. That said, continuing down the High Street at speed on a push bike still has its moments. An urge to scream as I careened down the street was, inevitably, repressed. I’d earlier once again tried to be gain access to our former flat above the High Street shop, but, 'Surprise, surprise, surprise, there was nobody home.' I didn’t try again.

I peddled on past the old Police Station and The Pawleyne Arms, past the former secondary modern, Kentwood School, and found, more or less, the location of a record shop that, aged 9-10, I used to hang out in, pestering the sometimes indulgent staff to play LPs by Paul McCartney and Hudson-Ford. The Clock House Station shops are now the usual café, nail bar, tattoo parlour, hairdresser variety, and quite a few are boarded up too. I couldn’t work out exactly where the record shop had been. There was no point asking the people on the street in their ‘20s or ‘30s if they had any idea. It might have been the site of the bizarrely named and seemingly moribund ‘Geek School’.

Site of Clock House bridge record store?

Or here? (Clock House bridge, Beckenham)

I peddled further and came upon Beckenham Library, an attractive 1930s facility threatened by the local council, located in front of the hideously ostentatious 'Spa' erected on the site of Beckenham Public Baths. I remembered nervously trying to swim there, watched from afar by my father. I needed a place of rest, of inner calm. Inside the library I picked up a book on the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. A section on dreams argued that these were different states of mind and not to be dismissed as just what happens when we're asleep. These could be revelations of a different reality, of perhaps another version of ourselves.

I then found a shrine to local boy, David Bowie, including a well-made bust of the man. Underneath that part of the Perspex box dedicated to the global musical and cultural legend, were notes about the present-day threat to Crystal Palace Park’s ‘Dinos’, a recognised UK heritage site dating back to 1851. Next to the Bowie bust was pinned a black and white press photo of a hippy-era David playing an acoustic guitar, presumably in Beckenham’s Croydon Road Recreational Ground, evoking ‘memories’ of the free festival that he would soon immortalise in song. A little later I cycled furiously around the same park, unaware that this was the location of the event that inspired Bowie’s beautiful elegy to being… unchained. I was simply searching for a sunny park where I used to escape to.

Bowie at Beckenham Library

Bowie shrine, with a memory from a free festival 

In Beckenham’s town centre I found a kind of genteel respectability that was I think always there. The main roundabout is still dominated by the iconic Deco cinema where the whole family had once been moved by ‘The Belstone Fox’.

I cycled on and spotted a branch of WH Smith’s. What could be more mundane, if not borderline tacky? However it was here in 1973, at a little under 9 years of age, that the front page of The New Musical Express had screamed at me ‘Bowie quits’, reporting the ending of what later we’d realise was just one passing persona (Ziggy Stardust), as the end of the man’s entire career. That headline certainly caught my eye. I was very young, and the NME and David Bowie were probably more than a little forbidding. However, the idea of someone, whom I understood was himself relatively young and definitely out there, retiring had seemed amazing. Inside the dull almost empty inertia of WH Smith’s today I unsurprisingly couldn’t connect very much with that newspaper day of a half century earlier. I doubt if I knew then that he’d lived close by or had played (guitar) in the local park.   

Breaking the news of Bowie's retirement 

I rode back to Penge, going once more along the exciting fast road under the railway bridge. I’d once been driven at speed in the freshly clean white Ford Cortina Mark II GT that had been my Saturday morning responsibility for a few weeks. Alan, its 19 year old owner, sporting the hair cut of a Bay City Roller (or so I thought), incongruously combined with the then de rigeur brown overall befitting of one who ran a hardware store, had somehow agreed to let this 10 year old clean his pride and joy. It didn’t last long – too many smears on the windscreen for his liking. I doubt if I had been sod-casting via my Ferguson transistor radio, but I vividly remember one morning cleaning the Cortina and thinking intently of how much I hated 'Seven Seas of Rhye', the new single release by up and coming band, Queen.

Fast road to freedom

I stopped at a still familiar parades of shops opposite the old Kentwood School on the approach to Penge. I don’t actually recall seeing the stuffed teddy emporium 'Bearly Trading' in its heyday, but whenever it was trading it had definitely long since past. Not Trading at all. Beautiful brickwork though. Cycling on I remembered the site of a petrol station that as a boy I had visited in search of the renowned hurdler Alan Pascoe. According to the local newspaper his flat had been located above, or close by. It was given, in what was a very different era, as No 2 Kenilworth Court. I spotted the steps to the self-same flats and remembered nervously climbing them, thinking of what I would say to a medal winning hero of the athletics track. He wasn’t in, however. Another familiar church offered an enticing message (see below) as I parked up for another furtive cheese sandwich.

Not even barely trading 

The worried cyclist approaches the path

Detouring down Green Lane, I headed up Parish Lane, then journeyed along Lennard Road, once again searching for places of sweet childhood memory. A nursery school where I began learning to ride a bike, my Mum looking on happily. A playing field where I’d blagged my way into a private weekend event, scooping up masses of strawberries and cream before heading out. All gone now. However opposite the imposing Holy Trinity Church, soon to be united with St. John's, I found the half-hidden semi-gated walkway that connected to a tiny street of Edwardian houses. In recent years I have frequently revisited this path in my mind. It too cropped up in a childhood dream, and has somehow come to represent a transition to a different realm. I think this pathway had created real fear for me as a child, but somehow it also embodied excitement, as if I could cycle between different emotional states, or more simply escape into a different reality. I rode along the pathway, then carried my bike over the familiar enclosed bridge at Penge East station, as I’d done hundreds of times as a boy, and peddled on.

Conscious that I didn’t want to be taking my bike across London on rush hour trains, I peddled back up toward Crystal Palace Park and specifically Penge West station. In minutes I was back into a different reality. The present, where the past is never far behind, and the future is just one step beyond. I had probably come to Penge to escape the future. My journey into the past had thrown up a lot of notions of escape, alongside some fear and also a kind of bravery. Knocking on doors (then and now), hassling to hear a record that I was never going to buy, getting the best out of strangers. It’s so hard to believe this version of events linking my past to my present, let alone perhaps linking to my future. I have to though.   

         

Penge Revisited (Again)

Perhaps I keep going back to Penge because living there nearly a half century ago was the last time I experienced being part of what I thought was a normal, loving family.

This almost feels like a macabre thing to write because my brother certainly couldn’t go back and risk triggering the childhood trauma he went through in that south London flat. For me, the trauma came later. The self-harming certainly started in Penge though. This isn’t good when you’re nine (or at any age).  However, the photographs from that part of my childhood don’t automatically trigger the shit switch. And my schooldays there were, mostly, ok. However, after two pints of Guinness in The Pawleyne Arms and then walking aimlessly after an abandoned bus ride up Crystal Palace Park Road, I was desperate, crying, and asking my mother to forgive me.  My Mum killed herself. Not in Penge but in the last of the three horror houses my parents lived in after we left London.

There were constant reminders all over town of the festive season. I recalled some nice Christmases in Penge. However, Christmas would be poisoned later. That, and the imprint of my desperate, early teens, lunge into Christianity has left me unable to embrace Christmas as an annual secular glorification of childhood and mindless consumption. Walking round Penge at Christmas also brought up memories of a much later time when I drove to Sussex to cook Christmas dinner for my then elderly Mum, arriving early morning so that I could leave almost as soon as we’d eaten the rudimentary roast. I remember that there was so much smoke in the kitchen that the benign Orwellian monitoring regime kicked in. A disembodied broadcast voice, that of a ‘Life-Line’ operative, asked, ‘Are you alright Mrs Partrick?’ ‘Yes, I’m fine dear,’ I feigned in reply.

You were totally alone Mum, and I moaned at you about how much you needed to get out more, and do this, that and the other. I made you feel like a burden and ultimately that was a key reason why you killed yourself. That, a lifetime of depression, and then learning about your husband’s sexual abuse of your children, all played their part.

I am determined to write this. Though right now I am seriously having my doubts. I sincerely hope that other family members do not see it. If I don’t send them the link, then I guess they won’t. I do want some people to see it though. Perhaps those for whom I continue to ‘perform’ in some guise or other, whether professional or voluntary, playing the responsible and supposedly well-informed person. Everything managed, everything in its place.

There was something very familiar in those desperate feelings I experienced walking near Crystal Palace. It was a sense of abandonment that is deep and goes right back to childhood. That same feeling has this week sent me out running into the darkness of the small hours, unable to sleep, lost in the ‘child’ that these memories evoke or the vulnerability that contemporary triggers engender.  At least I am now able to recognise these feelings. Likewise, I know that going back to Penge for the second time in a little over a year was a risky exercise.  On each return visit the nostalgic excitement progressively diminishes and the darkness is always just around the corner. Of course, the darkness is always there. I have known its contours, its associations, its symptoms ever since that Penge boyhood.

I gazed up once again to the outside of my first home. I can see the bedroom where I first remember things going wrong. I recall an evening when my brother and me had ‘child minders’. I was very upset and pleaded to the evidently distraught Godsmarks that they ‘Tell my parents that it’s happened again.’ What had actually ‘happened’, they didn’t ask. I think I had meant time spent alone in my bedroom unable to cope with my feelings and feeling compelled to either poison myself (Pot Ash) or clean myself from within (soap). I don’t remember the Godsmarks, or any other child minders, ever coming again. Prior to that evening I do though remember the excitement of Mr Godsmark driving me to the centre of London in his (open top) white Triumph Vitesse.

The family flat, High St Penge

This same self-harming nine-year-old was frightened of certain girls; way more than any of the Malcolm Junior School boys (now the 'Harris Academy'). My eventual fight-back against the hardest bullying girl brought down on me the wrath, and one-sided physical punishment, of a deputy head mistress. Having been slapped hard several times on the back of my legs with a ruler, I railed, amidst angry tears of righteous indignation, at what I thought was a self-evident injustice. All of this presumably relates to the horrors I was infusing at home, even if I was not (yet) personally experiencing them. The last time I had gazed up at the front of our former High Street flat in Penge, the shop below was in business and there were signs of life above it. Not so in the relative darkness of this visit (see photo above). Circling the block once more, I walked past the Cromwells’ wall, now fantastically adorned (see below), and tried to work out exactly where the Godsmarks’ old house was. 

Montrave Road, Penge

In approaching the very familiar sight of ‘our’ part of the High Street once again, I saw, for the first time since boyhood, that there was still an entrance to an alley from where you used to be able to get to the back of where we lived.  What’s more, this time the huge gate to it was open. I nervously waited for the owner of what I later realised to be the manager of the nearby ‘Penge Masala’ restaurant to get out of their car and enter the premises. Strangers snooping about the back yards of people's houses after dark, surreptitiously taking photos, would not be welcome. I finally summoned up the courage to go down the familiar and very dark alley. Heart pounding with child-like excitement, feeling half crazy, I stumbled past the back of the curry house, past an abandoned fridge, and nearly fell over the rubbish that was strewn everywhere until I found what had once been the entrance to the back yard of the shop that we’d lived above. All was roughly boarded up and totally impenetrable. Was I going to break in? I had tried to blag my way in via the front door to our flat the last time I was here. I hurried back up the alley, adrenalin racing, past the voices from the kitchen at the back of Penge Masala.

Alleyways of childhood

Through the darkness the light of the street became visible. However, like later when I walked past the edge of Crystal Palace Park, I’d wanted somehow to fall out of the light into the darkness of the old familiar alley and be swallowed up by it. Sometimes, like much later that same night, running in the darkness of Leyton and its filter beds, I imagine deliberately falling into the blackness. Either side of that Leyton path, I could have fallen into the ice-cold water below, but I recoiled at the likely horror of what this would bring.

Back into the light

Walking up past Crystal Palace Park, I had spied the iconic broadcasting tower, strangely barely illuminated but still overwhelming in scale. After veering into sidings and photographing aspects of the area’s Victorian remains (see immediately below), I slipped into the park itself, mindful of the strangeness of all that was being illuminated. 

Crystal Palace gothic

Crystal Christmas

All part of some Christmas shopping spectacle, it seemed. Well-dressed, well-heeled couples walked into the main entrance where merchants offered choice trees and scented candles.  Imaginary conversations went through my head as I strode about in a slightly moth-eaten 20+ year old Crombie coat. You don’t know anything about me, I stated to imaginary interlocutors.  Don’t presume anything.  I am not what you see.  I am not of you.

I’d never fully appreciated that there had always been part of Crystal Palace that was moderately well to do. Large houses still abound. My father used to say we were from Crystal Palace, partly to help people locate where we lived and partly out of social embarrassment at what ‘Penge’ somehow connoted. A thoroughly middle-class white family strode by. Perhaps the children attended the Langley Park grammar school located a bus ride away. I am not of you, I quietly intoned. 

I had no interest in revisiting Langley Park Grammar School for Boys. I had only attended it for nine months, but the elitism of a state-funded institution and its almost exclusively middle-class demographic never left me. My brother had somehow slotted in. He worked hard, kept his nose clean and found some long-haired members of a more rarefied socio-economic grouping to play the officially disapproved of sport of football with during break times. Very aware that I was neither of the council estates nor possessed of the leafy assuredness that comfortable dwellings provide, I though never felt at home at Langley Park. Harold Wilson became an instant object of sympathy for me when I heard the roar of appreciation from the grammar school staff room when the news broke that he had resigned as Prime Minister.

That part of Penge High St that is close to Crystal Palace is undergoing a gentle gentrification including a bourgeois-looking café and a tap room (empty). Some of this process is even finding its way into Penge proper, although plainly not the parade that includes our former High Street flat. I saw a lot more estate agents in Penge on this return trip, and in Southey Street, behind the High Street, a sign pointed the way to a micro-brewery and adjoining tap room. However the street art in Southey Street looked way more enticing (see below). 

Southey Street art

When in 2017 I made the first of a series of return visits to Penge I saw a lot of boarded up shops and very few estate agents. Penge though is only 15 minutes by train from Victoria and has three walkable, overground stations. So, amidst London’s ever-present property price insanity, the attraction to the middle classes of its less salubrious outposts is I suppose obvious. In any case I wouldn’t have noticed so much as a kid that Penge had probably always had its ‘comfortable’ parts. Almost across the road from where we lived, Avington Grove has some large and impressive late Victorian family houses that look as if they have maintained that status. The Wilsons (no relation) lived opposite us in this (see below) quite smart house (although I think it had already been converted into flats back then).

The Wilsons' home

On Kent House Road, where the big houses that I used to steal milk from meet Thesiger Road, there’s a parade that now has an upholsterer’s and an upmarket carpet shop (and this more modest shop, below, whose awning may not have changed in the last 45 years).

 

Kent House offie

Reviewing Southey micro-brewery's website a little later, I noted that among the beers available for four days a week in the Taproom, and anytime if you order online, were the pointlessly offensive ‘Lazy Jesus’ and ‘Hazy Jesus’. The online Lazy Jesus though was proving so popular that it was listed as ‘out of stock’. St John’s Parish Church Penge is only open to the public for an hour a week. I share the anger that some fellow Survivors can feel about a ‘Man in a Purple Dress’ , even if I have retained my childhood respect for a Christian faith that gave me love and salvation. It also taught me to equate the consequences of my abuse with sin. I am still dealing with the shame of that.  

I eventually left Penge in a state of high agitation. I felt pathetic that a trip that I had taken because I couldn’t face a day with either myself or anyone else, had brought a lot of upset.  Unlike the last time I came, this was no journey of self-discovery I thought. I’d arrived in the actual darkness and had continued to dwell there.  However, I had come because I had wanted to ‘feel something’. Writing this now I realise it revealed a lot more than I had thought. Feeling shame isn’t anything new. However, if I am helping myself to process my mother’s suicide nine years on, then this is a good thing. The Pawleyne Arms’ cheap beer had only contributed to what was always going to be an emotional roller coaster. It also brought me a wonderful mash up of a 40-year-old Stranglers’ song (‘Golden Brown’), an all-time favourite number that always instantly transports me to being 17.

The Pawleyne Arms, Penge

A good friend asked me if, in blogging this and other forms of life writing, I felt ‘held’ enough. Perhaps not. But as it isn’t free writing, is typed and is constantly being edited, even mid-sentence, perhaps these are the ‘constraints’ that keep me in check.  I don’t want to be in check though.  I’d hoped this could convey the scream I had wanted to come out, especially by the side of Crystal Palace Park Road. However, hitting ‘publish’ is fairly ‘un-boundaried’ I guess. So here goes.

    

 

Doin' Her Utmost to mix pop with feeling

The new single by The Big Believe 'Doin’ My Utmost' C/W 'Hundreds' is a writing collaboration between Amanda Thompson and Daniel Wylie (of Cosmic Rough Riders fame). The Big Believe though is essentially Amanda, who writes/co-writes and performs most of the material, when she’s not busy being a Necessary Animal that is. As The Big Believe, Amanda Thompson has carved out a distinct niche fusing pop electronica with an Indie sensibility and catchy but emotional vocals.

Single cover artwork by Peter Quinnell 

The 2020 album Juggernaut provided the perfect showcase for this fusion; the single from that album, 'Tania Was A Truth Teller', was an absolute corker.

Album cover artwork by Peter Quinnell

The new single has Necessary Animals’ collaborator Fritz Catlin (23 Skidoo) at the mixing desk, Marcus Sullivan on additional guitar, and Rufus Stone on bass and percussion. While Amanda would no doubt modestly deny that The Big Believe is essentially her, the new single is very much in a groove that she has established as her own. Her promotional material stresses ‘melody’ and ‘energy,’ and these are very much what 'Doin’ My Utmost' is about. 

It’s no surprise that she’s currently getting more airplay Stateside. When it comes to intelligent pop and rock, the US had long favoured broadcasting direct and upbeat songs over the Brits’ more typical knowing introspection. The Big Believe are more than just catchy though; they want to uplift with feeling, and this single is no exception to their musical game-plan. ‘Hundreds’ does the same thing, with just a little less bounce. The Big Believe could be the next big thing. You read it here first.

'Doin' My Utmost'/'Hundreds' can be purchased/listened to via this link.

A Man in a Purple Dress

Passion, anger, self-righteousness, humility, equivocation. It’s all in here. Unsurprisingly this late period Pete Townshend/Who song says more about the author than the subject. Its target is moralising prelates; its visual embodiment is a pope (written pre-Pope Francis). However 'A Man in a Purple Dress' is full of contempt for figures of high orthodoxy in any monotheistic context. More importantly the anger is timeless, focused, articulate; the older Daltrey delivers a vocal that’s emotionally intelligent, mannered and sincere. Townshend accompanies him on acoustic guitar. Nothing more, nothing less. The song is complete. 

Unplugged but wired, circa 2016 Photo © La Stampa

Townshend isn’t saying that for a man to be wearing a long purple tunic is inherently absurd, more that it compounds the inherent risibility of those presented as infallible, or at the very least those who would have us believe they’re wise, moral and well-informed when they preach. Of course Townshend knew when he handed down these lyrical judgments to Daltrey to try to embody, that he hadn’t been above dispensing moral and political lessons to his followers for a few decades either. Toward the end of the song, Townshend, via Daltrey, notes that he too dresses up for ‘grand awards’, and that at least those apparently embodying religious certainty aren’t weighed down by moral equivocation (or ‘astride the fence’). That comes with middle aged agnosticism, presumably. Listening to it today, 15 years on from when it was released, I get an immediacy and a power, a righteous rage that could rightfully be addressed to any public figure who tries to dispense moral authority from within the confines of morally compromised power structures. Take another bow, Pete.   

‘A Man in a Purple Dress’ is on The Who album ‘Endless Wire’ (2006)

A late period classic, released 2006. Cover artwork © Polydor/Universal

Free and experimental music at the Kino-Teatr St Leonard's

Hastings and St Leonard’s music scene is re-emerging in difficult, even controversial, circumstances. However in the large, open and relatively safe space of the Kino-Teatr Gallery area, it felt ok to spend a Sunday afternoon hearing, for free, some top-notch performers. Masks are of course optional and they do make singing difficult, not to mention eating or drinking. We had witnessed music performed on a Sunday in the Kino-Teatr's Upper Gallery a few weeks earlier and therefore had a sense of what to expect on our return visit on August 1.

Back in July, ‘Simon and The Pope’ had excited the modest gathering with their funky, spacey vibe (‘punk funk drum and bass’, according to the description on Soundcloud) driven by a dextrous bass player (John Pope), cool drum patterns (Simon Charterton), and special guest Keith Rodway on keyboards/synth. However when Simon, The Pope, and fiddle player Robert Rosenthal get together they constitute something quite different; namely ‘The Aftershave’ . Dubbed ‘countrydelic’ in the Kino-Teatre’s pre-gig publicity, that genre, previously unbeknownst to me, more or less sums up what they do. 

Upper Gallery view of The Aftershave (Pic: Amanda Thompson)

I’d initially been reminded of McGuinness Flint as in a semi-acoustic catchy ‘70s folk-pop shtick, but there’s a musical versatility and an ‘otherness’ to The Aftershave that soon made them escape the confines of my initial impression. For one thing the fiddler knew how to make the relatively simple (and I mean no disrespect) sound out of this world. Simon kept things tight but loose on the drums whilst singing lyrics that were alternately funny or deeply moving but which probably escaped most of an audience that was seated below him in the lower gallery area. I heard an audience member express concern about the acoustics of the music space. However for the most part (aside from hearing the lyrics, which are never easy to discern at gigs) the bands came through well.

The Aftershave (Pic by Amanda Thompson)

Punters' view of Afrit Nebula performing in the Upper Gallery, Kino-Teatr

First up on on Sunday Aug 1 had actually been Afrit Nebula, named in part after an Arabian djinn, and at times, due mostly to the soprano sax playing of Elaine Edwards, they definitely had a Middle Eastern feel. Her first solo sounded more snake charming than ‘Naima’, but as the band’s set progressed Ellen’s playing eclectically tapped African-American, Arabian, and entirely her own vibes. Speaking of which, her keyboard provided a xylophone accompaniment at one point. Frontman, in a sense, is Ken Edwards, whose bass playing, like that of John Pope above, was stellar and conducted with feeling. On drums, percussion, and occasional bursts of acoustic guitar, was Yair Katz.

Afrit Nebula (Picture by Amanda Thompson)

This was Afrit Nebula’s first live gig since Covid, and it’s a new line up from the one that provided an inspired accompaniment to a Butoh dancer in the Kino-Teatr two years ago. Founder-member and vocalist and percussionist, Jamie Harris departed in May, but the trio, having recruited Yair Katz on percussion, have maintained the quality. What they lack – at least when they perform songs – is a decent vocalist. Having a confident and assured singer would in some way detract from Afrit Nebula’s equalitarian focus on the music; the songs though would benefit from a definably lead vocal. That said, Yair’s singing in both English and Hebrew on one number was in the emotional zone, as was the multi-musicianship he displayed at the same time. Nerves probably played their part in lessening the impact. 'Spoken singing' works for some renowned performers; it just needs assertiveness. Don’t get me wrong though, Afrit Nebula are excellent.

Necessary Animals should have been the stars of the show and, despite only performing as a duo with keyboards apiece and having technical issues, in some ways they still were. The difficulty in playing for a lunch time crowd is that in order to at least keep them in their seats, or better still up and bopping, you need to …eh…play to the gallery. 

Keith Rodway and Amanda Thompson are the nucleus of a band whose music explores the outer reaches of psych, avant rock, cosmic pop, jazz, and all spaces within and without. Much of that was communicated in their set, aided by backing tapes and samples, but only if you were among the increasingly small number who were actually listening. Amanda’s vocals are always excellent, whether with the Necessary Animals or her electronica pop outfit ‘The Big Believe’ . However this was a hard sell, especially when the tapes included a spoken voice offering disconnected ‘commentary’. 

The number ‘Acceptance’ was introduced by Keith as, I think, an exploration of coming to terms with a stalker (maybe he meant ‘Stalker’ – Ed….). Some of the Kino’s passing trade voted with their feet, which was a real shame because this is a band that deserve a lot more attention. My friend commented, ‘F*** the audience.’ Whilst this is a sentiment I understand, they can have their uses.

Necessary Animals Keith and Amanda (Pic: Amanda Thompson!)

Necessary Animals did warm up though, a recent single ‘Driving Out of Town’ mined anomie post Brexit and mid-Covid, and by the time of their closing number they were decidedly hitting their stride. Their sense of having bombed though was evident in Keith’s muted goodbye; so muted in fact that it wasn’t clear that they’d actually finished, and a couple of fellow musicians had to get a clap going. My friend and me applauded as heartily as hand strength would allow. A possibly ironic ‘more’ was distinctly heard. In truth I can’t believe that Stuart Maconie and his wigged out (Sunday evening) ‘Freak Zone’ (BBC 6 Music) or the wonderful Mark Riley (ditto; Mon-Thurs 7-9pm) haven’t discovered them yet.

Anthony Moore is something of a musical legend; a term that gets tossed around with wild abandon in these hyperbolic times. However, having been a member of renowned progsters 'Henry Cow', played with Kevin Ayers, collaborated with Paul Young (sic), and both produced a wonderful album by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (‘Angel Station’) and written a song covered by them (‘Third World Service’), he really is something of a star. 

Playing to a, by now, much emptier gallery, Mr Moore is these days a one-man band. Various guitars were deployed as well as some peddle effects to accompany the man and his voice. Not exactly Caruso but full of emotional range, and with lyrics (if you strained you could make most of them out) that had a whole lot of edge. He’s almost 72. However, viewed from the Lower Gallery, he looked (and sounded) way younger but (forgive me Anthony) still old, though in a good way. Initially I was getting (contemporary) Roger Waters unplugged, but Anthony is very much his own man. So expressive, whether apparently lauding the ‘perfect English’ of the BBC World Service or musing on, I think, ‘The Blackhills’, this was a man whose oeuvre is probably for the older and more discerning listener. Too bad that so many who’d comfortably fit at least part of that remit had actually left the building. 

Anthony claimed that he was getting more nervous as his set wore on, and he was plainly putting a lot into the performance, including some deft playing alongside his impressive vocals. My friend and me were very moved, and I’d only consumed two beverages from the excellent adjoining bar/restaurant, and she was sober. I resisted shouting ‘Moore’.

Anthony Moore (pic by Amanda Thompson)

Closing the bill were ‘Simon and The Pope’. Anthony stayed resolutely in his chair, seemingly relieved to just be just strumming in a band setting. Keith once again guested on keyboards, offering some BBC Radiophonic Workshop touches. It’s not for nothing that Keith Rodway is increasingly known as the Brian Eno of the South Coast.

Simon Charterton and John Pope are the nucleus of this white funk punk combo. They kicked things off with the irrepressible ‘Space Bossa Noodle’, before the awesome bass riff of Miles Davis’ ‘It’s About That Time’ (from his earliest jazz fusion phase) greeted us. Two numbers later and the tune had morphed, more slowly, into ‘It’s About Time’, emphasised by Simon’s repeated spoken delivery of the phrase. Simon and The Pope are only the second band I have ever heard live covering anything by Miles – the first was an African-American outfit performing in The Cotton Club….a bar in Chicago that is. A musical musing on being ‘At the bus stop…smoking a fag’ funkily followed, while another number seemingly spontaneously segued into something for the remaining older folks, T-Rex’s ‘Get It On’. That went by largely unnoticed too.

As we raced for a train, Simon and The Pope were, sadly, performing their last number. However they’ll be back. In fact the Gallery at the Kino-Teatr, St Leonard’s looks set to be a regular venue for free gigs offering variations of the above acts, and probably others, for the next few Sundays. Check it, and them, out.

Simon and The Pope, with Anthony Moore (left) and Keith Rodway (inside right) (Pic: Amanda Thompson)

For a taster of the music performed in the Kino-Teatr Gallery on August 1, click here for Keith Rodway’s video selection