Dark luminosity, p.5
Dark Luminosity, page 5
For the first time I met hippies and some well-to-do bohemian types. Kingsway had quite a degree of cachet (for a college of further education). It had a large catchment area, which meant that it attracted some well-heeled students from places like Hampstead and Highgate, and a few make-believe beatnik types from Islington (whose parents were social workers, college lecturers or similar). Don’t get me wrong, I took the piss a bit, but actually I liked meeting new sorts of people; my horizons were starting to broaden. To be honest, I wasn’t at Kingsway for the right reasons (i.e., to pass exams), I was just killing time.
Also starting at Kingsway at that time was John Lydon. There have been a few meetings in my life that I term ‘Stanley/Livingstone moments’, and meeting John was definitely one of those moments. John, of course, was another reprobate; he was someone who thought ‘everything was bollocks’, to an even greater extent than I did. I thought that was great. I remember ‘dismal’ was his most used word. He was actually pretty quiet and shy. He often wore a deadpan expression on his face. Apparently he had missed a lot of schooling after having contracted meningitis, which is why he was making up lost academic ground at Kingsway. He was out of Finsbury Park in north London, which in those days was a proper manor. Even then he could sometimes be a quite nasty, sarcastic and moody customer. Nevertheless, I was very taken with him; he was about three years older than me. A mutual love of Hawkwind helped cement the friendship; in fact we went to see them play at the East Ham Odeon not long after we met.
I think I came to see John as an older-brother-type bloke, because three years’ difference at that age means a lot. And in a way he did take me under his wing. It was nice of him; remember, I was just turned sixteen, and could be quite gauche. John had his own style, sporting long shoulder-length hair (hennaed, I seem to remember). He was a good mix: part yob and part arty sort of a geezer. He was an Arsenal fan, whereas I was a Spurs fan, of course. Not that he took the football itself too seriously. He was more into what you could call the ‘cultural’ aspects of the game.
John introduced me to the butt end of the hippy scene over at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm on a Sunday night. He thought it was a jolly good wheeze to go and poke fun at the hippies. It was a different world to anything I had ever experienced before. Those were probably the first proper gigs that I had ever been to, and, to be honest, I don’t think that I ever saw a band there that I came near to liking. However, I quickly picked up on the habit of going to gigs.
John Lydon and his mate from his schooldays, John Gray, took me along to see Dr Feelgood out in Dagenham somewhere. Lee Brilleaux and Wilko Johnson were spellbinding, absolutely electric, like a pair of caged tigers. The two Johns also took me along to an all-nighter at London University. Kokomo and Osibisa were among the groups that played. Osibisa, who were part of London’s burgeoning ‘Afro Rock’ scene, really impressed me.
However, the best gig that I went to at that time – in fact, the best gig that I have ever seen, by a country mile – was Bob Marley and the Wailers at the Lyceum in 1975. I went with Ronnie B. The album Natty Dread had been in circulation for several months before the Lyceum show, and we were nuts for it. So we went along with great expectation to the Lyceum. It was a glorious sultry summer evening, and Marley was really on top of his game that night. I was captivated by Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett on bass. A powerful bass player, yet so musical, moving through the chords.
All the musicians in the band were top notch, but for me it was the rhythm section of Aston and Carlton Barrett who really impressed me. I had never before seen a rhythm section play so tightly together, and with such imagination in regard to enhancing Bob Marley’s song structures. There was a fantastic sense of space and unhurriedness in their playing. You get a similar feeling when watching great footballers. I’m thinking of players like Hoddle, Cruyff, Platini and Beckenbauer, who always seemed to have more time than those around them. I bet that fans of ballet say the same about their heroes and heroines; it’s as if time slows down for them (or even like they step outside of time).
Vince and Sid
Before long me and John were joined at Kingsway by John Beverley. Yet another bloody John! John Lydon had nicknamed him ‘Sid’, of course. He had met him at Hackney College the year before. There were now four Johns. Over the years that has got a bit mythologised, and people talk about ‘the four Johns’, but we didn’t really hang out as a quartet much. However, we did make a point of drinking in the Four Johns public house in Islington on a couple of occasions, because it would have been going against the natural laws of the universe if we hadn’t. I also remember us all getting our hair cropped and dyed by a bloke called Keith at Smile in Knightsbridge. I remember being surprised that Gray got that done, because he wasn’t particularly into clothes. He was a total nut about music, however. I always found him pretty easy to talk to. I generally got on all right with Sid because he liked taking the mick a lot, the same as me. Sid had a mate called Vince, who was out of Hoxton. I can remember John Lydon telling me that he couldn’t wait for me to meet Vince (yet another piss-taker), because it would be entertaining to see who came out on top in the mickey-taking stakes. Well, he was right, me and Vince verbally steamed into each other from the off. To this day we are good mates. He lives in Bethnal Green with his wife and two kids, and he’s a postman. He says he spends his days in confrontations with ‘geezers wearing gravy-stained vests, standing angrily at their front doors’. Me and Vince were a pair of what I would call ‘super-nuisances’. You really didn’t want to invite us to your wedding, or anything like that. And the girls we would hang out with were as bad as we were.
Me as Vince’s best man in 2007, when he married his long-term partner Kim
Romance
There was another person I met at Kingsway who also had a massive impact on my life. Her name was Margaux. I always called her Marg, or Margy (with the ‘g’ pronounced as it is in the word ‘gun’). We fell passionately in love. Somehow there was that immediate and easy familiarity between us, of the type that seems to characterise my close personal relationships. To me she was in a different league compared to the other girls I knew. She was really rather chic, instinctively knowing how to make the most of her hair and make-up. She looked and moved in similar fashion to the girl who played the part of the young bride-to-be in Time of the Gypsies. Margaux dressed really well, getting her clothes from Sex, as well as from its predecessor, Let It Rock, the shop that Malcolm McLaren had before Sex.
She was also a regular shopper at the famous Biba store in Kensington. Every girl I knew on the London soul scene acquired their clothes at Biba. Actually quite a few of them shoplifted from there, not because they were hardened criminals, or anything, but simply because, by all accounts, it was so easy. Security for some reason was virtually non-existent apparently, and those girls could not resist the temptation. Most of them were in poorly paid clerical jobs, or still at school, so Biba’s prices were exorbitant as far as they were concerned. The news rapidly spread through the trendy girls’ grapevine that easy pickings were to be had. Well, the rest is history, and maybe it’s no surprise that Biba went out of business.
On the day that we met Margaux invited me to her home, which lay just off Middlesex Street, by Petticoat Lane. She surprised herself by doing that, because like myself she didn’t readily invite anybody back to her home, as her mum would often be on the warpath, shouting the place down. I was more than happy to reciprocate and invite her to my place. The easy familiarity between us meant that I felt no embarrassment at her coming to my home either. A girlfriend I’d had before Margaux made herself scarce after seeing my dad attack me after I snuck her into Paymal one night for a snog and a bacon sandwich. I was so mortified with embarrassment that I had vowed never to take a girl home again.
I considered Margaux to be sophisticated. Her mum, a Catholic, was originally from the Lebanon. French was her first language. Margaux’s dad was a Mancunian exiled in London. He was a copper with the City of London Old Bill. I must admit I was a bit worried about that at first, because the ‘City Police’ could be the worst in London, even more reactionary than the Met. It was always worth taking a detour around the City boundary if you were driving from the East End to the West End at that time, otherwise you could find your car being turned upside down and inside out, without good reason. If you were black it was even worse. I used to think that black people who drove through the City at that time were nuts, they were bound to get hassled. However, to my surprise, her dad Tony was as good as gold with me.
At that time I would also be stopped very regularly by the police, sometimes two or even three times in a night. I can remember a couple of scary instances when the police who stopped me were drunk and belligerent. On one of those occasions a police van approached, driving extremely erratically down Middlesex Street. Suddenly it veered off the road and onto the pavement, trying to knock me down. I had to jump out of the way. A big, burly Met sergeant got out of the van and walked menacingly towards me. He stunk of booze and could hardly stand up. He wanted to fight me. Of course, I was on a hiding to nothing; if I had tried to hit him his colleagues would have slaughtered me. I kept calm, and in the end his colleagues restrained him. On those occasions, and there were a few, it was handy to mention that I had just taken my girlfriend home and that she was a policeman’s daughter. They would then search me, verify my story, and reluctantly send me on my way. Operation Countryman was the news of the day. Many viewed large segments of the Met as corrupt and out of control.
Now that I was at college I wasn’t working, and consequently was broke much of the time. Margaux was in the same boat. We faced the classic problems that young lovers without much money face: how to find some privacy, so that we could be intimate with one another; how to get the money to go and do the things we wanted to do, like go to nightclubs; and – far more prosaic, this one – how to stay out of the cold.
We couldn’t really spend time at her place in the evening, because of her mum mainly, plus Margaux would be driven nuts by her sisters if we sat in there for more than five minutes. It would often be best for me to give my mum and dad a wide berth, at least for a few days, after one of our frequent family disturbances, so that meant that me and Margaux would spend an inordinate amount of time sitting around in the freezing cold at Liverpool Street station while nursing a solitary cup of tea. We used to regularly get moved on by the police when they made sweeps of the station clearing the dossers (who were always very sweet to us). Even in those days (a year or so before the punk thing got going), teddy boys were a nuisance in the area around Liverpool Street. They used to frequent the Jack the Ripper pub in Commercial Street, so you had to keep your eye out for them, as well as for the police.
Down-and-Outs in the East End circa mid-seventies
I would always see Margaux home after we had been out together, to ensure that she got in OK. It was a very dodgy area for a young girl to walk in, alone, late at night. (Many people would have made the assumption that a lone woman was a prostitute.) I would then often use Shanks’s pony to get home, owing either to the lateness of the hour or lack of funds for the bus or tube (or sometimes owing to the lack of a bus). The late-night walk back to my place used to take me through Spitalfields and Whitechapel. There were quite a few hostels in the area for homeless men, and one in Middlesex Street for homeless women. Sometimes the dossers would be kicked out of the hostels if they caused trouble, or they chose not to stay in them, preferring to stay in derelict buildings. It was common for them to light fires to try to stay warm. Sometimes they would inadvertently cause the buildings to catch light, and the fire brigade would be called out. Dossers might die, or be badly injured, as a result of those blazes. Some of the sights I would see walking back at night were truly pitiful. Lost souls walking about talking to themselves while covered in thick layers of grime. You could often smell them from yards away. Dossers often had a knack for finding strange hats and clothes, and would revel in wearing them in bizarre fashion. But they could look incredibly stylish, in their own way. They are nowhere near as visible in those streets as they once were. The photographers Don McCullin and Alex Slotzkin took some incredible pictures of the East End street people at that time. If I walked back from Margaux’s late on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, Petticoat Lane market would already be setting up. A lot of the dossers would have a regular gig helping to set up the stalls, and going to get teas for the stallholders, and all that. You would have lots of old Jewish blokes trundling handcarts about. It would all look a bit how eastern Europe probably looked before the Second World War. I must mention the funky smell of pickles: pickled fish, pickled eggs, pickled gherkins. There were a number of pickling places around the East End. I think the most pungent one was down the other end of Stepney Way from where I lived. Your eyes would water. However, I must admit that I love pickled food, especially Chinese pickled preserved vegetables, which are vaguely like sauerkraut, only spicier. Shellfish was a big thing in the East End, especially cockles: your Sunday night tea, well seasoned with white pepper and condiment-style vinegar (never malt), and accompanied by brown bread and butter. That would be the only time that you took brown bread. Tubby Isaac’s late-night cockle-stand stall is still going strong at Aldgate, I notice. I used to go there in the early hours of Sunday morning for cockles or jellied eels. The Sunday papers would be on sale by the next corner. I would then go up Brick Lane to the Beigel Bake for a salt beef sandwich (on white with mustard), a cup of tea and a dozen warm bagels. Newspapers, cockles, bagels and tea; I was ‘sorted’, as the E generation would say. Of course, if Spurs had lost badly I wouldn’t buy the Sundays. I’m still like that.
Another poor soul in a Whitechapel doorway
Margaux and I both dressed very stylishly. When we had money we would go up West, mainly to soul clubs. We would also go to the movies pretty regularly. That was a golden age for film. I remember that we went to see, among many others, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Dog Day Afternoon. We also went to see Last Tango in Paris a couple of times. It had already been out for a couple of years; however, it was still considered a very risqué film, and all the provincials would flock into London to see it. We both loved that film. I saw it again recently and it still moved me. Paris in winter, bitter cold, dull afternoons with the street lights coming on, a vacant apartment and an aching empty sadness that can only be relieved by sexual contact.
We used to make regular sojourns over to west London to go shopping. We would get a bus, a number 11 or 22 from Liverpool Street, and enjoy from the top deck the long journey that wound its way through the City and West End and on into west London. Chelsea, Fulham and Putney were really different in comparison to the East End. Those areas were not as gentrified as they are now, and like every area of London they all had their fair share of council flats, firms and wide boys. Nevertheless, there wasn’t the same depth of poverty that was to be found in the East End. The funny thing is I couldn’t stand to be away from the East End for any length of time; I never felt like I belonged anywhere else, and that feeling persisted right up until I was forty or so.
As well as looking in the shops up King’s Road we would have a little stroll by the Thames in Putney, which for me was quite pastoral. Actually the vibe in all those west London manors, especially by the water, is decidedly tranquil. You can certainly see why Whistler liked it (although, of course, in his day even some of the shores, both north and south, of the west London reaches of the Thames were quite industrial).
I like the London sky over the Thames. I particularly like it in spring and autumn, just before dusk, when it can seem so wistful and yearning. It brims with a dark luminosity. It’s as if the sky is meditating. When you look at it you have to do the same.
I have to admit that Margaux was, considering her tender years, incredibly ahead of the game in some respects. She took me one night to a gay club called Rod’s in the New King’s Road. I think it was a Sundays-only club. In those days the gay and straight scenes were not as mutually exclusive as they are today. I was slightly dubious to start with but soon loved it. The music was great (the best soul and Philly) and there were no beer boys, or growlers on the door for that matter. I also thought that a lot of those gays had style (a clichéd observation, I acknowledge, but true nonetheless). This was well before the ‘clone’ look appeared. Good suits and haircuts seemed to be the order of the day. There was an easy-going vibe; they didn’t seem to mind a few girls and straight blokes coming in.
I reciprocated by taking Margaux to a rough old strip pub up the Bethnal Green Road called the Greengate. She was fascinated by it. Can you imagine that: a couple, her still sixteen, and me barely turned seventeen, sitting watching strip shows surrounded by a load of drunken geezers? Funny thing is, I don’t think anyone ever said boo to us there. I’m probably showing my age here but I thought that the strippers that you used to get around the pubs and clubs in the seventies were, generally speaking, super-sexy. They would slowly tantalise, removing each garment with perfect timing. Sometimes they were a bit chubby; however, that just made them seem even more attractive and womanly, as they seductively peeled off their costumes. I’m really not taking the mick. Some of those girls were real performers: it was an art; the vibe was nothing like the rather anodyne and cynical lap-dancing clubs of today. The comics that also performed on the strip nights were also by and large top-notch performers. Like the strippers they had to be, or they simply would not have lasted in that tough environment. Of course, I acknowledge that all that belongs firmly in another era. This is a different time, and most young people today would be appalled at the levels of sexism and racism that were inherent on that scene.
