Interring the state with the bones of its leader’s husband

I don't believe in disrespecting any public figures at the moment of their death. However I was appalled that Prince Philip, who held no constitutional status or constitutional role in the UK, was so absurdly and endlessly lauded on UK media. I have recently been reminded that very well-established protocols cover the state media's handling of such events, and no doubt it would, by established convention, have been required that there be a uniform and (for viewers at least) black-tied announcement across all BBC TV and radio platforms. In addition, the supposedly 'no fuss' duke may have been a party to some of the more recent media pre-planning. However it still came across as beyond excessive in an era of proliferating media platforms and a supposed lack of deference. This felt like the death of George VI redux, minus that monarch's constitutional status. 

For example, all BBC domestic radio platforms - including Radio 1 and BBC6 Music - were for three hours carrying an identical diet of semi-deification of a man who was no more no less than a hardworking consort of the head of state. He was a war hero and launched an impressive public service scheme. However Middle Eastern dictatorships, many of with which I'm familiar, would do a lot less in propagandist wall to wall coverage - in part admittedly because of modesty over what would be, by definition, a female 'consort'. Why though is the state media of our great British democracy engaging in serial broadcast hagiography of a figure who, by definition, represented no one - and, constitutionally speaking, did not even represent or deputise for the Queen.

 

Copyright The Daily Express 

Part of the answer is the BBC's irresponsibility and institutional cowardice. This publicly-subsidised state broadcaster has a greater operational and political distance from the UK government than officially independent media in most Middle Eastern states or in, say, Russia or China. However state patronage wielded via a regressive flat tax (AKA 'the TV license'), that these days only the old-fashioned who watch terrestrial TV on quaint TV sets actually pay, has been under political threat from the Right ever since the 1980s. The BBC's coverage of Philip's death has exceeded the wildest dreams of even the most zealous monarchists (the PR sop of an online complaints page was soon snuffed out). The state broadcaster has sought to give itself domestic political cover at a time when an opaque hereditary institution that determines our head of state is deemed crucial to the establishment's rear-guard action to save the Kingdom. Intra-Windsor fighting has though long weakened the royals' ability to embody our imagined Union. And an out of touch terrestrial media won't breathe life into that old firm, any more than it can ol' Phil, by behaving as if its role is to serve the rulers of the state rather than to educate as well as entertain HM's subjects. Meanwhile the mullahs heading our state religious cabal were widely deployed across the BBC in an anachronistic and sacrilegious application of unction on a departed member of the royal institution that invented the Church of England. Incredibly, nearly a century after its last serious political opponent left No 10, Anglicanism still plays its dutiful part in a UK national project rooted in the holy trinity of Royalty, Church and State. 

The crass, belated, neo-nationalist pincer movement of the last few days may come to seem like a last hurrah for a Union about to collapse into far less than the sum of its non-consensually joined parts. The castration of the UK's international influence is the irreversible result of a prolonged period of strategic self-abuse. This first began, unwittingly, with Blair's politically unnecessary introduction of devolution, and was then deepened by both of the UK's leading unionist parties being unable to hold Scotland in the 200 year old monarchial bloc. Those unionists constituted in what the BBC these days absurdly refers to as the 'nation' of Northern Ireland were probably inevitably set to lose the numbers game, and, dangerously, in the process lose control of their angry and economically struggling community, in favour of Irish reunification.

Copyright The Daily Record

The grotesque UK ruling class folly of unthinkingly ramming through Scottish and Welsh self-rule was though avoidable. Its ineptness was revealed in Cameron granting, via the monarch, a Scottish independence referendum that he had no political clue how to win, and seemingly little real political concern about either way. The close-run survival of the state after that particular indigenous challenge could not withstand a further Cameron role in the inevitable destruction of the Union. Our international relevance, long a key part of the contemporary construct that is the UK, was then decimated thanks to Cameron providing an unnecessary and highly irresponsible referendum on Brexit, followed by Johnson's grossly inept, spatchcock, delivery of it. 

After the widely admired Elizabeth II will shortly come Charles III or perhaps an in-house monarchial putsch in favour of William V. More relevantly, the rulers of a rump England, with maybe the Welsh principality for company, will need for the first time in the sceptred isle's history to admit to 'their' people that the future can no longer be anything like the imagined past. 

Who rules, and how, can never be reduced to a binary referendum question. However there is a desperate need for some very complex questions to be asked and for their resolution to be widely debated. Post-Covid, this must, of necessity, mean mass and tactile engagement, not the bougeois liberal stage-managed 'debate' in so-called Citizens' Assemblies. The supposed 'citizens' need to wake up to the inherently pre-democratic way in which they, as monarchial subjects, are governed, and to the fact that their supposed sovereignty is in fact loaned to political administrators wielding pre-democratic monarchial powers rather than actively exercised by the 'citizenry'. This by no means necessitates embracing a solely Left-inclined agenda, or even necessarily becoming a republic. It does require awareness of how we are governed and how little authority we, the people, have (in or out of the EU). Otherwise the political mire of division and petty nationalism will continue in an England overseen by an almost natural Tory 'majority'. The propaganda machinations of the Windsors, the Anglican Church and the BBC, conjoined with a Covid era nationalist add-on tritely called 'our NHS', won't save an England that has never been able or even interested in defining itself distinctly from the UK. 

(This is an expanded and updated version of what I wrote on Facebook on the day that the death of HRH Prince Philip was announced)

A Labour leader with intellect and passion who advocated defence, patriotism and peace

Michael Foot's reply to Margaret Thatcher in the emergency House of Commons' Falkland Islands debate in April 1982 was the speech of a statesman, delivered with passion, wit and intellect. Its assault on the Thatcher Government’s signal failure to deliver on the first responsibility of any government, that of protecting its people, ought to have made a mockery of the Conservatives’ vaunted defence credentials. It was delivered by a Labour leader who believed in conventional military deterrence and who rhetorically asked why Margaret Thatcher seemingly didn’t, in practise. The previous Labour Government, of which Foot was a very senior member, had mobilised a flotilla in advance of an Argentinian threat, thereby successfully preventing the possibility of invasion. Given the current Conservative Government‘s announcement of a large defence expenditure expansion amidst economic retrenchment, when the Con-Dem Government had previously recklessly slashed defence spending and left the UK without an aircraft carrier for many years, it would be wise to once again question the credentials of a Conservative Government on defence. Foot of course could reach back to his own assaults on another Conservative Government being soft on defence and on fascism (I use the word advisedly) in the latter 1930s. Sad that this great man should have been so pilloried and so parodied to the detriment of appreciating the power of his reason and his rhetoric. Sad that after the moronic disdain for defence shown by the last Labour leader we don’t have one now who's able to rip apart the Tories’ pretensions as the ‘patriotic party’. To hear Foot's speech click on this link

Necessary Animals: The indefinability of 'Dark Jazz'

The beating heart of Necessary Animals, its nucleus and core creative partnership, are the musician, composer and musical auteur Keith Rodway, and the multi-instrumentalist, song-writer and singer Amanda Thompson. They are in essence the two surviving members of a five year old musical project that has always been highly eclectic; more a platform for a very diverse range of talents than some static ‘rock band’ churning out songs. In fact while the term ‘rock band’ doesn’t fit them, nor does ‘South Coast alt psych supergroup’, a label literally attached to their eponymous first album in a futile attempt at defining their shtick. (Although they may well be a supergroup). Necessary Animals’ latest album ‘Dark Jazz’ has classically-trained avant garde musician Paul Huebner on trumpet on the opening track ‘Driving Out’, and, like on their debut, the string musicians Camo Quartet are featured throughout. This is not a music that’s easy to pigeon-hole. In fact attempting to do so is pointless, especially if any such attempt is confined to the realm of one of rock’s many narrow sub-genres.

A cop-out definition that comes to my mind is ‘fusion’. However, while the instrumental ‘Driving Out’ has more than a trumpet to evoke Miles Davis, the man who invented several ‘jazz’ fusions, this album as a whole is a fusion of almost anything you can think of. There is a jazz, even a dark jazz, undercurrent heard in the sensibility of some of the playing, but what the hell does ‘jazz’ mean anyway? When Miles Davis invented so-called ‘jazz-rock’ fusion he’d left the established conventions of jazz long behind, other than the fact that he and Wayne Shorter were African-Americans playing brass instruments. On the ‘Dark Jazz’ title track the feel is more filmic than fusion. Keith’s synth treatments orchestrate proceedings while his ‘free jazz’ piano gels intensively with Fritz Catlin’s jazz-style drumming.

The cover artwork of 'Dark Jazz' c/o Necessary Animals' Bandcamp page

This album, consisting of various Necessary Animals’ musical collaborations from 2016-19, isn’t just instrumentation either. Ingvild Deila performs most of the vocals, as she did on the first album just before departing to play Princess Leia for a Disney-produced Star Wars movie. The Norwegian has also contributed some vocals to a third Necessary Animals album that’s currently in progress with various supporting musicians. Her suitably atmospheric vocal contributions on ‘Dark Jazz’ match the charged, off the wall, instrumentation at the core of Necessary Animals. In addition to playing percussion, Fritz Catlin, a founding 23 Skidoo member, mixed much of the album, as he did the debut LP.

Necessary Animals' image for the title track c/o its Bandcamp release 

‘You Took the South, I’ll Take the Twilight Skies’ is one of the most successful musical collaborations on this record. The drone-like interplay of the Camo Quartet’s Laurens Price-Nowak on cello and Bill John Harpum on viola, combined with Keith on synthesiser and Holly Finch’s spoken ethereal vocals, evoke the sound and atmosphere of a south Asian religious chant. Her religious text though was random sections of The Times Literary Supplement and, says Keith’s explanation on BandCamp, the musical inspiration was primarily a piece by La Monte Young (a man who influenced and collaborated with a wide range of musicians including John Cale, one time viola player in The Velvet Underground).

There’s a similar musical vibe on ‘Improvisation 1’, a wholly instrumental piece that was incredibly, as the title suggests, worked up in real time by Laurens and Bill on cello and viola respectively, before the result was mixed by Fritz Catlin. This track has an intense emotionality at its dark core; a soundtrack for a movie almost too unbearable to watch. It evokes a film scene running through the mind on a constant, nightmarish, loop until, eventually, the mood somehow lifts and things draw to a close with a vague, and very ill-formed, sense of hope.

‘Darkness Comes Over the Hills’ will be familiar to some because the song version was on the first album. This instrumental version features Keith and Amanda contributing different piano parts, while Keith is also on bass, and Steve Finnerty (of Alabama 3 fame) contributes some excellent bluesy riffs on guitar. Their combined effect is somehow both tight and loose, expertly and evocatively played with, again, a dark edge that can so easily take you to where you want, or don’t want to go.

Visual artist Lucy Brennan-Shiel adds her voice to two pieces that form a distinct element to this album in that on both she reads text from Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ against improvised music by Keith, Amanda, Lee Inglesden (on guitar) and, on one, even a bowed tree branch courtesy of Nick Weekes. On ‘Fox and Clock’ Keith took an audio sample of a vulpine visitor to nearby gardens, the musicians then weaved their contributions on top, before Lucy read words evoking a canine’s wild and ultimately fatal night while Nick also plays a pine cone to surprisingly good effect. As spoken text on top of an improv, it works. However ‘Bronze by Gold’ is an unnecessary version of a broadly similar idea but is done at much greater length. At over 11 minutes this is the longest track by far on the album. Its atmosphere is killed stone dead when Lucy switches from the spoken delivery that is her forte as a Joycean scholar, to sudden flights of sub-operatic style vocal fancy. It’s not her fault that this aspect wasn’t edited out of the mix. The whole thing put me in mind of the experimentation of ‘Horse Latitudes’ on The Doors’ second album (‘Strange Days’). Wild, even for 1967, it featured Jim Morrison intoning his own (supposedly inferior) text to what sounds (more or less) like improvised accompaniment. At least he, or producer Paul Rothschild, reined that in to less than two minutes.

However this listener’s discomfort with what is only one out of nine pieces shouldn’t distract from what, overall, is a fine musical collection by a fine bunch of musicians. ‘Familiar Heat’ for example instrumentally reworks a track that appeared as an extra on a very limited CD run of the debut album. It ranges, as does the whole of ‘Dark Jazz’, through many different tempos and styles, and features the deft touch of Peter O’Donnell on both guitar and piano and Alan Bruzon, a long time musical collaborator with Keith and Amanda, on ebow guitar (an electronic strings effect gizmo). The album concludes with ‘Snoen Falt ikwald’ (or ‘Snow Fell Tonight’) on which Ingvild sings her father’s lyrics to an accompaniment that includes Alan playing the kalimba, and Amanda and Keith on steel food bowls (natch). Together they somehow successfully acoustically evoke the dark white light of a Scandinavian night. 

Necessary Animals' image for 'Familar Heat' c/o its Bandcamp release

This isn’t the Necessary Animals ‘difficult’ second album. Rather it brings together projects outside of what Keith calls the band’s musical ‘day job’, some of which were conceived of before the first Necessary Animals’ record was recorded. Right now he and Amanda are continuing work on that third album, having just released a stellar Covid era number, ‘Above The Waterline’. Amanda is also very active with her own, highly melodic and highly impressive, indie pop band The Big Believe, while Keith has several film and archival music projects planned. In a sense ‘Dark Jazz’ is a slice of Necessary Animals’ musical history, but it’s no less fascinating for that.   

 

      

Pilgrimage to Penge

Penge East no longer seemed like a dream to me now. The first time I returned here as a middle aged man it was as if I was in my own movie; every step carefully measured and every sight and sound visceral. Now revisiting for the third time in as many years, my impressions of Penge are closer to the place it really is now, rather than how I’d imagined it as boy. Yet every time I come back and take in the roads that were my patch, I am still that small kid on a bicycle plotting his way through what are more or less unchanged residential streets. I still felt sharp jolts of memory, flashbacks, deep resonances of those childhood times and the same desperate desire to reconnect with ….something. 

Unlike the last time I visited when I had a fixed purpose – meeting a school friend whom I hadn’t set eyes on for four decades – this time felt like I was running away. I’d bunked off a planned workday and was somehow, guiltily, running home. The first time I came back to Penge I had bunked off college and had a belated rite of passage drink in The Market Tavern on Maple Road whose old street stalls were still in full swing outside. I vividly remember wearing a non-descript green anorak, nervously asking for ‘half a bitter’, and taking as unimposing a seat as I could find: a low stool near the door. It was a busy lunchtime on a market day. 

Maple Road market sadly bit the dust many years ago. Nothing feels busy when I return to Penge now, except my head. Still, there are things that surprise me. Distinct feelings from the past, possibly apocryphal, back-filled memories; memories that my mind has reprocessed in light of all that came after we left. I walked along Station Road from Penge East, self-conscious but less so with each return visit, surreptitiously snapping the odd photo on my mobile. Where were the people, I asked myself, noting the row upon row of terraced houses and an almost ghost like atmosphere. My memories told me that there were always many people on the streets but perhaps this was just a child’s heightened awareness of other kids. Today all the children were in school, but not me. I’d made a point this time of dressing more discretely than my return three years earlier. That boiling hot summer day has seen me arraigned in drainpipe jeans, a colourful Nepalese-made shirt, and a white imitation Moygashel jacket. On this much cooler day another version of the anorak was donned; this time alpine-style red, with regular sized jeans and hiking boots. Hardly inconspicuous among Penge-ites but then, I said to myself, I’m hardly a local really. 

A couple, possibly not much older than me, advanced in my direction. She a wide woman with a walking stick, heavily tattooed; he with assorted carrier bags and sounding like he had ‘issues’. I didn’t want to create the impression of getting out of their way, but a fairly wide pavement was simply not wide enough to enable movement in both directions. I looked right at them and half-smiled; my modest effort at engagement was reciprocated. Clocking Kingswood Hall where, to my disbelief, I’d once won a second hand farm in a raffle and was totally overwhelmed, I looked up behind me and clocked a sign for an old dairy that was presumably long gone even when we lived here, and then did a left into Crampton Road and was reminded of schooldays friends who’d lived there. 

What was the point of doing this again, I asked myself, hitting a deep low within minutes of arriving back. Walking down the High Street in the direction of where we’d lived, I passed my old school, Malcolm Infants, now some kind of academy or other, re-named after a more contemporary obscurity. I located what I’d believed to be the tree where, aged approximately 6 or 7, I had alternated between kissing one of two girls on either side of its trunk, and took a photograph of this imagined shrine to the confident, uncomplicated, young man I might have been.

From across the road I looked at the flat where I had been born and where I’d spent my formative years. I noted that the barber shop signage below looked almost fire-damaged; the words ‘Ossaga’s Unisex Salon’ barely visible compared to just a year earlier. The shop didn’t look open for business.

Born and (partly) bred; High St, Penge 

I decided to return later, still somehow imagining that I could blag my way upstairs to what has since been converted into two flats, on the not too Covid-friendly pretext of needing to reconnect with my birthplace. When I had returned three years earlier I had gone into the dentists over the road and asked if they knew whether their building was once the local doctor’s house/surgery. I’d mentioned being born at Number 81 to their total un-surprise and that a doctor from more or less this location had delivered me. ‘It’s long been a dentists as far as I know,’ the middle-aged receptionist told me. That may well be so, of course. I didn’t tell her that the local GP in the 1960s, Dr Jack Redman, had had his surgery very close to this spot. According to the family legend, the doctor ‘over the road’ had been knocked up at 2 am to save my life. In a fairly common occurrence in those days the umbilical cord was caught around my throat and the midwife couldn’t intervene. It seems I was lucky that the doctor lived so close by. 

Heading into Penge Rec it looked and felt a lot sadder than I remembered. Upkeep was no longer what it had been; resources no doubt more stretched. A place where I’d often gone alone to play still had the look and feel of the old park though. I retraced steps as if retracing key memories, somehow thinking that explanations could be found if, for example, I touched a tree that had stood where I’d played, or where I'd given myself a hernia at the age of 10. I projected on to this space the image of my mother, my brother and me that an old photo has since implanted as a real memory. I could somehow work out where we would have stood for such rare slices of personal history. I am pleased that my father, being the one who took the picture, cannot intrude into that image.

The stone pillar drinking fountain is now a sad relic, but the park benches were still aligned in rows at the High Street entrance. On leaving that way I smiled and said hello to two older ladies chugging on fags; their heavily-lined faces broke into warm smiles and something in me softened as I somehow reconnected with humanity. Walking on I realised that, despite appearances, they could be my age, and were perhaps at Malcolm Infants or Junior school. I am very good at recognising faces though and, not recognising them, promptly dismissed the idea. 

The park-keeper’s house, a detached and mysterious place that I used to marvel at as a boy, is still there, but by the look of the park there is no such person living there anymore. The next door Army Recruitment Centre that I had visited as a boy is now several flats, but an ATC hut around the back connected Penge to a local military heritage, as of course does the First (and Second) World War memorial. I found out later that Penge was apparently the most bombed part of London during WW2. Not a lot of people know that. There had once been a large army parade ground and sheds here storing army vehicles; now there was a modest private housing estate. 

St John’s Church is always closed these days; admission by appointment only (unless on a Sunday, I assume). When I came back a few years ago I’d even rung the advertised number for admittance, but didn’t get an answer. My mind went back to numerous visits to this church as a boy; amazed at its then seeming enormity and dark mystery. I recalled what for my parents (and me) was the embarrassment of me receiving numerous prizes – the result of a day spent at Summer Sunday School - and the occasion when I saw the Reverend Humphrey Newman on his knees, deep in prayer. This was a devotion I’d never witnessed before but that I would personally connect with a year or two after we moved away. I walked up Maple Road again, past the location of the old market pub, now a south-east Asian take-away, and crossed to where I remembered the market itself being. 

This street had once been very alive but now seemed bland. I noted the destruction of the old library, a place of austere learning and churchlike solemnity replaced with a block of flats of some description. The Sally Army building was still in place, outside which I remember an Army band would periodically perform, an unlikely event now. A middle-aged woman in a dressing gown and slippers walked past smoking a joint, then talked to a young guy in a car before making her way onwards. I knew that St John’s School, with its church-like assembly hall, had been razed to the ground many years before, but I marvelled at the trashy, hut-like, classrooms that stood in its stead. I turned on to Croydon Road and sought an escape from the flood of memories by entering a park that I didn’t remember being there when I was a boy.

Winsford Gardens is the site of the ‘Penge Green Gym’ where volunteers ‘workout’ by conducting socially-responsible gardening. On this lunchtime though the local brew crew were in situ, right in its most ornate area. I said a semi-confident 'Hello' and nodded. This brought a kind of acknowledgement but the assembled throng were deep in discourse. I walked around the Gardens, still thinking it had all been an absurd mistake to come back this time. A quiet seating area though enabled me to break out the cheese sandwiches. After a little while a member of the drinking party came past. I stared, defiantly. ‘Hello Sir,’ he said, in a friendly and surprisingly high-pitched voice. ‘Alright,’ I half-gruffly replied, somehow feeling the defensive need to prevent too much of an opening. He wasn’t looking for a conversational opportunity though. His ulterior motive was checking that a location very close by, where he’d presumably stashed something of value, hadn’t been disturbed.



My mood didn’t lift as I exited and walked past the absurd enormity of Ancaster Garage (or rather of the huge, imposing, office tower above it), the place where my father had once purchased a new Vauxhall Chevette (I’d preferred the old Austin 1100). I headed past what had been The Robin Hood pub (razed), noted Sherborne Court, and headed down Elmer’s End Rd, thinking vaguely of the daily bus journey I used to take to West Wickham, specifically to get to a hated grammar school that I’d only spent a year at. Walking past coffee shops and cafes, I remembered the fairly fast road under the railway bridge, and spotted these mementoes.

On this occasion though I only got only as far as Beckenham Cemetery, a huge place that I had no previous memory of. I wanted to find some inner peace but had, perhaps ironically, not chosen the best place to do so. I didn’t realise at the time that South Norwood Country Park was right next door. At this convenient, but now corporatised location, care of the Crematoria & Memorial Group (see signage above), both cremations and burials are easily available. 

One of the former was actually underway when I walked in, under strict social distancing rules of course. The cemetery is a bizarre mix of collapsing Victorian headstones, absurdly ostentatious family tombs, more tastefully simple epitaphs, and tragic memorials to recent, young deaths. One such was a 20-something boxer, ‘Nico’, whose shrine is adorned with his gloves and a mass of loving messages from family and friends. I couldn’t avoid thinking about my mother’s burial just a few years back and what I’d tried to say at her funeral service about the circumstances that had led to her suicide. I thought about the fact that we buried her separately from my father, in stark contrast to the tasteful item (see below) proffered at the Funeral Directors, which was handily located directly opposite the cemetery gates.





The train from Birkbeck station, Beckenham, took me straight to Crystal Palace Park. The urban farm is in the same space where there had been a zoo of sorts before. Although Covid has made it inaccessible for the foreseeable future, it was beautiful to see llamas, goats and sheep together in one place. I stared, and stared and stared; transfixed. The experience connected with the donkey I’d seen there as a small boy. I have clearly missed my vocation. Perhaps if we hadn’t moved away in 1976, I might have flunked my ‘O’ levels and dropped out of the snotty, up-itself, Langley Park Grammar School for Boys, and become a zoo attendant in Crystal Palace Park, although I’d much rather be a herder in the urban farm that replaced it.

I don’t know what ever happened to the life-size Tyrannosaurus Rex but there were still a few of the bare stone mid-Victorian originals dinosaurs left and some new, less interesting, additions. Walking around the lake and emerging where Guy the Gorilla hangs out, my mood was up. I was relieved to see that the toilets were still there, working, and free. The community building next door looked funky, though not as funky as the long vanished ‘Adventure Playground’ where as a small boy I’d summoned up the courage to climb a high platform and fly on a rope and tyre across a virtual forest, and where you could get your face painted by long-haired men and women wearing very colourful, free-flowing, clothing.

Walking down the High Street again, but still avoiding getting close to our old home, I detoured down St John’s Road and went through Queen Adelaide flats. I’d done this walk once before in my adulthood as a matter of facing down old, personal, demons. I think I’d always felt uncomfortable there as that’s where the tough kids hung out, but it was one particular memory that I knew I was still, even now, trying to face down. Back in the day I’d been lippy to a local hard nut when he teased my elder brother and it was my brother who got kicked hard in the shins for it. Perhaps there was a relationship to the private horror that occupied our High Street flat, but I will never forget that my Mum, out of character and ignoring our pleas to do otherwise, stormed right round there, determined to have it out with the lad’s mother. She returned, still visibly angry at my brother’s bruised leg. We though were relieved to hear that nobody had answered the door.



I passed a shop on Penge Lane that had once been 'The Bottle and Basket' off-license, where the somehow refined and ‘different’ owner sold an extensive selection of ales and, probably, wines. I now realise that what I saw as his sophisticated ‘difference’ was probably his Jewishness. Incredible street art now adorns the sides of the old brick bridge on Bycroft Street between Parish Lane and Penge Lane.

I headed down Green Lane to get to The Pawleyne Arms, being one of only two surviving pubs that I remember being aware of as a boy, fascinated as I was with what forbidden pleasures went on inside. I already had my mask on in preparation. Nervously remembering the eyeballing I’d got in here the last time I’d stopped by – the whole reason I was determined to give it another shot this time -  I hadn’t expected to walk in on a veritable party. I was invited to sit down by the barmaid who was taking the orders but without the protection of the Perspex screen behind which the pub manager was ensconced pouring the beer. ‘We don’t have any single tables free, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Is that alright,’ she enquired, having probably got the measure of me straight away. But this time was different. I parked in one of the few available empty chairs. The juke box (or rather Spotify) was blaring out ‘50s rock n roll classics to an audience that at first glance fitted that description too. A big, bevied-up, guy started talking to me at the large communal table where social distancing was only a possibility, that is if you didn’t have to lean in to actually hear what was being said to you. Addressing the call and response singing contest taking place across the pub between two good humoured groups of men, the big guy informed me that ‘They’ve just closed the local looney bin.’ The scary thing though, he added, is that 'these guys are all our age.' I looked around and, aside from an older gentleman sporting a white Mac, collar and tie, and a flower in his lapel, this was pretty much a pub of 50-somethings, and they were all getting hammered. 

My first pint of Guinness was kicking in fast. Del Shannon (‘Runaway’), Dion (‘The Wanderer’), ‘Windmills of My Mind’, Elvis… all was bliss. A second Guinness was brought to me. When Tony Bennett sang ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco,’ I thought I would cry. ‘I left my heart in Penge High Street,’ someone sang, but this wasn’t a number for the would-be karaoke singers. In fact there was a marked drop in volume as the punters drank in the exquisite quality of the song and of the performance. Or so it seemed. ‘They don’t write ‘em like this anymore,’ I said, once again trying to engage a taciturn guy who’d sat down near me. He smiled and slowly but surely began to engage. Despite his initial reticence, he began talking to me about his life. A year older than me, born and bred in Penge, he’d kept coming back. He’d worked in Israel with the army, he said, but preferred the Bedouin; decent people who you could trust, he said. He’d worked all over Europe too, Switzerland included. I never did find out what he did in these places. ‘I keep coming back though,’ he repeated. In the meantime the musical standard had dropped. Peter Frampton was unfortunately coming alive again, as he’d first done the year I’d left Penge.

I told him that I was born and brought up here too. This didn’t surprise him, though he twice insisted that I must be either Italian or Jewish. ‘Not as far as I know,’ I said. He denied, without prompting, that he was a drinker but also volunteered that he’d ‘had a few issues today’. Constantly on his feet, very restless, he was either smoking roll-ups outside, or planning to. He seemed to want to confess something. ‘I made mistakes,’ he said. ‘I was in Borstal. I can defend myself, but I want to practise what’s in my heart.’ He told me of a local gangster who comes in from time to time. 'This gangster said to me “I know you’re a nice guy”. That’s respect,' he said before disappearing once again. With an empty glass but a sense that I needed to move on, I headed on out. My new friend greeted me as I went out through the in-door. He stroked the lapels of my alpine-style anorak. ‘Keep strong,’ I said to him, before deciding, finally, to check out the former family home.

Ossaga's, the Afro-Caribbean barbers, was, I was pleased to discover, open for business and, as I took this picture of the wall outside, a friendly guy came out and encouraged me to move their mobile sign for a better shot. Probably happens all the time. In fact there’s great street art all over Penge. 





Two pints down on a fairly empty stomach I rang the door bells to the flats above and ended up chatting on the street to three young Romanian guys, having eventually located the one who actually rents the flat. His friend works as a barman in a West End nightclub, or rather he did. ‘I was born up there,’ I said, pointing to the flats above. ‘I know to you it’s probably just convenience to live here, but would you let me take a look at my birthplace?’ What the hell was I expecting, the same bed in the same bedroom? He told me that the landlord had told him not to let anyone in at this time. He offered to call him though, if I'd like to talk to him. I should have said yes. However I felt like I had already imposed on these guys quite a bit already. We shook hands. They’re young, but I’m not I thought afterwards.

I wasn’t sure about going to The Crooked Billet this time, but a third Guinness (all had been at the definitely not London pub price of £3.05 a pint) beckoned. The place was dead save two young guys and a young barman playing Johnny Cash via his phone. A middle-aged guy who didn't fit my profile of the Billet, walked in. He told the lads of his relationship difficulties with a barrister girlfriend. ‘You must have it made, bro,’ one said. The Doors followed via Spotify before, at my encouragement, the conversation turned duller, to owner-occupied property. Turned out the middle-aged bloke was the owner of one of the old alms houses opposite that had long since been sold off (Watermen’s Square). We then discussed what pubs, other than The Billet and The Pawleyne Arms, were ‘original’ (my word). More than I'd imagined, it seems, although I'd conspicuously avoided the Farrow & Ball ubiquitously grey-painted gastro pubs I'd noted around town.

The truth of course is that my sense of what is 'original' to Penge is just circa 1964-76. The Crooked Billet has a hall out the back used, in normal times, for gigs, the lads said. This was the site of a coaching house it seems, but otherwise The Crooked Billet is mostly late-19th century with some modern frontage. Its location is older though, and the pub has long lent its name to the junction outside which once hosted a fine subterranean toilets. Polished porcelain and brass, with a black and white tiled floor. As a boy I thought that the caretaker lived in his frosted glass office downstairs in the Gents. Perhaps he had a bed or maybe it was just a sofa that he had in there for comfort as he listened to the football on a Saturday afternoon. I'd thought that he had the best job in the world. Too late for that career change though. 

Bury Bus Station and beyond

I arrived at Manchester Victoria station from the sleepier denizens of Whittle-le-Woods near Chorley. Specifically I’d departed for the big city from a bizarre new creation called Buckshaw Village. Village it is not. A large new housing development built around a new railway station and superstore it is. 

Arriving in the heart of the great northern city of Manchester, capital of the cotton trade etc., I was immediately struck by the number of (young) people on the street and the apparent normality of life amidst a global pandemic. The Cathedral beckoned and I figured it might offer safe refuge. Social distancing wouldn’t need to be rigorously enforced in the House of the Lord. I was right about the limited punters, but security was relatively tight. I was taken by the beauty of the stained glass windows, the agnostic humanity of the 'Artist's Statement' by P. Wharton, who made the appropriately-named 'Hope's Last Call' sculpture (below), and a depiction of Christ (see also below). Public displays of Christian iconography can be counted in their millions, but this unique painting, modestly appended to a pillar, moved me in its simplicity and modern reinventions.

I was soon thrown back again into the serried ranks of the fully legal, open air drinking frenzy that the centre of this city seems dedicated to. Unpleasant at the best of times, it seemed downright dangerous now. I decided to get out of town fast, not least as I’d earlier invested nearly a Fiver in a ‘PlusBus’ pass.

I travelled from the centre of Manchester’s last chance saloon boozing orgy to the Bury Interchange via the Number 138. Taking about an hour each way, this was a voyage of discovery, ‘a sociologist’s paradise’ as John Cooper Clarke wrote of Beasley Street in Salford. We journeyed through the outskirts of Manchester, taking in a very different cultural scene to that I’d departed from around Manchester Victoria Station. Traditionally dressed older men of Pakistani heritage, and young Anglo-Pakistani women dressed in variations of hijab. A particularly vocal set of such girls had, from the start been on the top deck of the bus from Manchester city centre, engaging in a war of increasingly loud, hostile and very crude words with boys of, from what I could work out, the same heritage who were positioned at the back of the top deck. The boys kept loudly labelling them ‘racist bitches’, a moniker they rammed home on their eventual departure, thank God, somewhere just before Prestwich. Perhaps the girls were viewed by these boys as being down on their own (and their) culture, or I, as a total outsider, was missing differences of heritage or simply taking their language too literally. As the bus went through Prestwich my drive-by cultural history tour changed from being overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim and, outwardly at least, ‘observant’, to Jewish, and often Orthodox at that, although this was a Saturday afternoon. The shops looked as modest as the array of Pakistani grocers and barbers I’d seen in Cheetham Hill. Many of course were closed as Shabbat fast approached.

In Bury itself the bus pulled into the impressive ‘Interchange’, a large and very organised bus stop. I felt foreign, not because of religious or cultural traditions different to my own, but because Bury seemed, despite appearances, homogenously northern and working class. Among its many traditionally dressed Asians out shopping, and often unhealthy looking older white men spilling out of a nearby pub, I put my mask away and sat in the main pedestrianised shopping area near the bus station. With my home-made cheese sandwiches I felt more like Alan Bennett than somehow blending in with the other middle-aged white people occupying the public benches. While my thermos flask might have been something Bennett’s parents would have deployed waiting for the homeward bus from Leeds town centre, it was a pretty rare specimen round here. I was tempted by a Wetherspoon’s pub (‘The Robert Peel’), but was fearful of the post-drinking comedown more than the lack of social distancing. Passing a gaudy sports bar, I sought refuge in the nearby Bury Art Museum (and ‘Sculpture Centre’) (BAM). It was every inch an architectural tribute to late Victorian municipal splendour from the outside, and was not really that much different in terms of its content. Upon entry, greeted in a very friendly manner and managed sensibly in terms of logging in my personal details and maintaining distancing etc., I was struck by a confusing array of abstract sculptural images that seemed, in part at least, to to be the product of schools’ art projects. Certainly there were several references and indeed work spaces throughout BAM intended to motivate children to take up or at least be interested in art. They all felt like add-ons though in a desperate bid to suggest that what remains irrevocably, in spirt as well as in name, a museum, is somehow relevant. A tribute to a comedian, local girl Victoria Wood, did little to assuage this impression. In much of BAM, in its tall gallery rooms (see photo below) and up its generous stone staircase, the heart of what still defines it adorned the walls: paeans to the old ruling class, fat generals sat astride struggling old nags, local burghers typical of those whose spare cash helped start the Museum itself, and especially educative time pieces such as ‘The Slave Girl of Cairo Market’, a depiction, bizarrely, of a pretty white girl in what I suppose was an example of orientalist prejudice/propaganda. A huge and perfectly executed oil painting of a slain deer being mourned by, or still breastfeeding, its offspring, was either an unexpected condemnation of bourgeois slaughter sports of the animal variety, or just a soulless caricature of ‘natural’ exploits.

There was a very large space at the top of BAM that on the occasion I visited was dedicated solely to some moderately interesting work by a modern sculptor cum installation artist where I witnessed an over-zealous attendant inform an only partially interested punter of all that was apparently important about this (possibly local) artist. There was space in a stairwell for a different tribute to the Bury local, and former PM and police founder, Sir Robert Peel, than that provided by Wetherspoons. The one and only public toilet in the building wasn’t working though.

BAM is a strange place. Still very much a tribute to Victorian class-ridden philanthropy whose literal legacies probably help to keep it running, with would-be kiddy-friendly and ultra-modern sculpture spaces added on without seemingly much thought. Perhaps any really promising local artists would get the hell out of Bury as soon they’ve graduated from university, but thinking of that large space occupied by just one artist, a conceptual sculptor, I wondered about all the local and totally amateur work that could be displayed there. A floor full of the best work of a local art college’s students might get some punters in from the nearby pubs, some of whom would probably be related to the artists on display, a very unlikely proposition at present. If such open access happens regularly at BAM then forgive me, but my brief experience – I had bowled up just 20 minutes before closing time – suggests a place different to that being bizarrely re-imagined on the BAM website and equally disconnected.

Interestingly, as I exited BAM I spied more contemporary art but of a very public kind. Positioned above Bury Interchange itself, "From Northern Soul (Bury Neon)", by Ron Sliman (see below), spelt out the forced punning of ‘Poetry has been Bury, Bury good to me.’ It was though an interesting antidote to the public art that first greets you as the Manchester bus pulls into Bury: a sculpture of a senior officer from the Lancs Fusiliers marks the 1905 South African Boer War (by George Frampton; see below). I’d be surprised if there was as much pressure from Bury locals to pull that down as there is from some Manchester and other folk regarding the sculpture of Sir Robert Peel in Manchester Piccadilly.

(Photo, left, by Nick Smale). 

                                                                                            (Photo above by David Ingham from Bury)

On the bus back from Bury to Manchester, I was, like earlier, for what this observation’s worth, the only other white male present for most of the one hour journey, apart that is from the very obliging driver. Economic demographics play a role in urban bus usage, hence why there were plenty of elderly white women using their free bus passes. Being a ‘bus wanker’ is though for some an expression of personal economic failure once cited, albeit not quite in those terms, by Margaret Thatcher. 

As we approached the city a man got on who bore more than a passing resemblance to Robert Wyatt. Of course I was under no flashback-driven delusion that this was in fact the former drummer with Soft Machine who'd gone on to make 'Shipbuilding' famous. For one thing the socio-demographic factors in the area didn’t compute, despite the rock star’s professed commitment to public services, including those of the omnibus kind. The most obvious preclusion of this possibility though was the fact that he self-evidently wasn’t in a wheelchair. The uncanny thing though was that he got on somewhere past Cheetham Hill with what looked like a couple of walking implements, one of which he laid out in the heavy luggage section at the front of the bus. The other is that Wyatt has just turned 75; this chap looked 20 years younger, perhaps more, as part of his aged appearance was due to the fact that he was a bit dishevelled and plainly not that healthy. Life hadn’t been kind to him, it seemed. The first thing that struck me, aside from his long grey hair and long grey beard, when he walked on to the bus was that he was armed with a large black note book. Whilst I was musing on the idea of him being Robert Wyatt, I noticed after he sat down a few rows in front of me that he was actually keenly reading what was hidden inside the note book: a section of what looked like a guide to rock music written at least three decades ago with parts marked in highlighter pen. Perhaps he was reading about himself?

Back in Manchester I wandered around the back streets close to Piccadilly and Victoria stations and found myself spying the original Co-Operative Wholesale Society building (right). 

Just around the corner from this, and facing Manchester Victoria station, was the HQ of the Co-op Bank. A large display in its window gave expression to the halcyon days of the Co-Op Movement, topped off by the bronze statue outside of Robert Owen. With a needy child at his feet, 'The Father of Co-operation' stood as a, presumably unthreatened, monument to a Victorian philanthropist and to a different, if not idealistic, time. As the Co-Op Bank's window testament implies, Owen can be claimed for the Labour Movement's traditional focus on wage protection and ending destitution. So far so safe. However his statue, and the accompanying Bank tribute, is also testament to his desire to build a new 'model society' as he sought to do in the New Lanark mill village in Scotland. The Co-Op seems keen to draw on some of that legacy to offset the poor PR of its late capitalist cynicism. A late middle-aged woman weighed down with life and luggage, propped herself against Mr Owen. A great image perhaps, but it prevented me from taking a photo of my own.

 

            (Photo above by Mike Peel) 

  

Heading back by train to the new model society that is Buckshaw Village, the rudimentary socialism of a free public toilet in Manchester Victoria station was appreciated. However it was not socially safe inside. 'We're not even practising social distancing for our knobs,' a local wag drolly observed. 

I headed out of Manchester, passing through the intense architecture around Salford Central, clocking the bizarrely named 'New Bailey' amongst the varieties of old and new brutalism on display. Changing at Bolton the 'heritage' industry was seemingly making a virtue of social apartheid. Edwardian frosted  windows on the station platform included such legends as 'Gentlemen's First Class Waiting Room', juxtaposed with the rather less exclusive 'General Waiting Room', or, further along, the 'Ladies' First and Second Class Waiting Rooms.' In the real world of the present day we usually share the same facilities but social and cultural hierarchies seem as rigid as ever, in Bury and beyond.    

 

 

Schitzoid Joe - Lost No More

That journal of 'Swinging London', the International Times, has published my profile of the lost classic album, 'Schitzoid Joe'. Written and performed by Lucy Nabijou and Steve North, and featuring world-renowned sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith, this concept album tackles alienation, abuse, personal freedom and family misery. With its mix of prog, folk, and rock, 'Schitzoid Joe (sic)' should have been perfect for a record company with imagination, even in 1981. However Lucy and Steve were too young and disconnected to get a break. The article also explores the musical contributions of renowned keyboardist and guitarist Nick Bunker and drummer Pascal Consoli, and specifically what happened after they, Lucy, Steve and Dick had completed the sessions at the rehearsal rooms of Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart. 

You can read the article in International Times, the publication once dubbed 'the underground Daily Mirror' by Alternative London, by clicking on this link. You can listen to the album here.

The Well House Laurie Anderson portal

This morning I was in a Well House near Tockholes in Darwen Moor. It’s reputed by some to be based on an ancient spring that nearly a millennia ago was part of a direct pilgrimage trail to Whalley Abbey. The Well House of today is around 250 years old, like the rest of the remains of Hollinshead Hall, which are mostly little more than stone pillars and foundations. The Well House though is intact, more or less, and the ancient lion from which the holy water of God poured forth, is still recognisable, if a little deteriorated. Incredibly, and luckily, the normally padlocked old wooden door was open. 

Sitting in the calm of a friends’ music room I am journeying once again to that Well House, ancient sanctuary, where, like among the remnants of a mill house near Tintagel in south Cornwall we visited in 2018, one can commune with the past, both long distant and not so far removed. Just like yesterday, standing outside the Church of St Michael and All Angels in Grassington,in the Yorkshire Dales, bathed in the spectral calm of summer dampness, there are many ways to channel ethereal beauty. Such as via Laurie Anderson's album ‘Mr Heartbreak’. Listening to this record now is like reliving an LSD trip. I am in 1984 again, the year of its birth.

‘Kokoku’, ‘Blue Lagoon’; impossibly transcendent; beauty beyond.... Was this how I found an inner path, inner calm, when there was nothing, when, as another album of 1984 almost had it, “instead of doing some good in the world, I’d burned every bridge I’d crossed”? Laurie Anderson went from ‘Oh Superman’ gimmicks, and a five record album entitled ‘The United States’, to almost mainstream, by way of aural hypnosis; electronica in the service of simple, gorgeous beauty. Perhaps there always was a “party in my head” that really never did stop, as David Byrne had it a little earlier. And Mr Heartbreak is merely a portal; a way to open the sanctuary door to the wellhead, to that place, as another contemporary album had it, ‘Across the Bridge Where Angels Dwell’. 

As Laurie Anderson sang, ‘It’s Sharkey’s Day today....On top of Old Smokey all covered in snow, that’s where I wanna, that’s where I’m gonna, that’s where I’m gonna go.’