Post by I on Jul 19, 2010 14:48:37 GMT
SOME FORTY YEARS ago I leave home and am living at a bedsit in north London when a colleague at work asks me if I’d be interesed in joining him and several others in leasing premises on Ladbroke Grove. The prospect sounds better to me than my present situation so I agree, cobble together a deposit and a few weeks later find myself knocking at the door of a Victorian terraced house in Faraday Road, a side street off the Grove.
The previous occupants of this dwelling are a group of musicians called The Pink Fairies, who are still in the process of leaving as I arrive, with a whole stack of their equipment lying stored in boxes in a room upstairs, and one of their party occupying a room, a gaunt, haunted creature who spends his days swallowing copious amounts of speed and drawing intricate, phantasmagorical dreamscapes on white cardboard with a radiograph pen. Actually, I am already aware of the Fairies and in fact witness them perform only a few months earlier at a dive in Wardour Street called the Temple. On this occasion, they are announced and three unkempt longhairs duly shamble onstage absolutely bollocks naked to perform a boisterous set of a mostly instrumental nature.
A few weeks after my moving into Faraday Road, everybody decamps to the Isle of Wight festival to see the return of Bob Dylan and the house is left eerily quiet. One evening, I return home to find two scantily clad girls occupying my bed. They inform me they are both 16 years old, named respectively Sunshine and Jagger, and are here at the bequest of one Dik Mik, the rather sinister looking electronics operator with Hawkwind. Shortly, Dik Mik himself arrives with a bag of amphetamine sulphate and several of his mates so I make my excuses and leave.
A few days later I happen upon my first Carnival by accident, when on my way to Ladbroke Grove station the strains of steel band calypso suddenly reach me and turning into the Grove I witness perhaps a dozen brightly festooned floats wheeling down the road, each with a score or so pan drummers and other percussive players aboard, many of them schoolchildren decked in identical costumes of shimmering apricot, electric blue or purple, and a mere few hundred or so people dancing wildly in the procession’s wake. Quarter of an hour later it is disappearing in the direction of the Westbourne along the Harrow Road. Little do I realise at the time that I’ll be going to Carnival annually for the next 25 years!
Following the Isle of Wight event, things move fast. People return intermittently and one guy doesn’t return at all, having been caught peddling Afghanistan hashish at the festival, evading arrest by encouraging the crowd to impede the police and fleeing to Spain. A few of the others then default on their rent, the lease is taken over by one of the residents and we are all evicted. As rent payers, my work colleague and myself are given the option of moving into rooms in a flat around the corner at Bassett Road and we agree to this. This is another house occupied by musicians and every evening a jam session is held in the front room that goes on until the early hours. The music attracts comers from all over the Grove and neighbours such as members of Spooky Tooth, Quintessence and Henry Cow are regular visitors. I am to live here for the next two years.
Even though I mostly agree with the libertarian philosophies of my peers, nevertheless our tastes differ widely when it comes to music. While they are at home nodding off to albums by Weather Report or The Strawbs, I am scouring the junk shops around Golborne and Harrow Roads for whatever rock’n’roll, rhythm and blues or ska singles I can find. My musical preferences are firmly rooted in the records that I dance away the night to in the nightclubs of Soho during my teenage years in the 1960s and even though I live among the heads of the Grove have little time for their kind of sounds.
By late 1974, I am squatting in premises in Latimer Road and one of my flatmates is a guy several years younger than myself known simply as Mole. He is a would be bass player and speaks to me of a band he is rehearsing with at a house in Maida Vale. He tells me that he and his musical friends eschew the whole process of progressive rock music and are trying to make it more in the clean style of a Gene Vincent or Chuck Berry. Perceiving a kindred spirit, I play him my favourite record of the moment, Big Youth’s ‘Screaming Target’ album. Mole loves this and begs to borrow it and play it for his mates in the band. I agree and he returns with the album saying that everybody in the band are also raving about it. One afternoon a few weeks later, he suggests I join him and go see the band play at their squat in Walterton Road, so I walk with him there and see a pretty average rock group with a lead singer everyone calls Woody performing extended versions of songs such as ‘Gloria’ and Eddie Cochran’s ‘Come On Everybody’. Just a year after this, “Woody” is known as Joe Strummer and is lead vocalist with the Clash.
Several months after meeting Mole’s band, I go to a shebeen in St Stephens Gardens and while away a couple of hours there listening to the booming reggae sounds. When I emerge from the dive, I decide to visit a former Bassett Road flatmate at her place in Talbot Road. After reaching her flat and being ushered in, I see she has another guest, a sullen teenager named John, who doesn’t so much talk as snarl and has a nihilistic view on positively everything. The three of us sit in the living room for the next half an hour sipping tea and hotly exchanging views, before John says he has to go and leaves. I see him again a year or so later, when invited to see Johnny Thunders And The Heartbreakers at the Roxy club in Covent Garden by resident deejay Don Letts. Halfway through the night, Letts points out a guy with spiky hair that I recognise at once as the fellow from Talbot Road. “That,” he says, “is Johnny Rotten.”
Penny Reel - May 2010
The previous occupants of this dwelling are a group of musicians called The Pink Fairies, who are still in the process of leaving as I arrive, with a whole stack of their equipment lying stored in boxes in a room upstairs, and one of their party occupying a room, a gaunt, haunted creature who spends his days swallowing copious amounts of speed and drawing intricate, phantasmagorical dreamscapes on white cardboard with a radiograph pen. Actually, I am already aware of the Fairies and in fact witness them perform only a few months earlier at a dive in Wardour Street called the Temple. On this occasion, they are announced and three unkempt longhairs duly shamble onstage absolutely bollocks naked to perform a boisterous set of a mostly instrumental nature.
A few weeks after my moving into Faraday Road, everybody decamps to the Isle of Wight festival to see the return of Bob Dylan and the house is left eerily quiet. One evening, I return home to find two scantily clad girls occupying my bed. They inform me they are both 16 years old, named respectively Sunshine and Jagger, and are here at the bequest of one Dik Mik, the rather sinister looking electronics operator with Hawkwind. Shortly, Dik Mik himself arrives with a bag of amphetamine sulphate and several of his mates so I make my excuses and leave.
A few days later I happen upon my first Carnival by accident, when on my way to Ladbroke Grove station the strains of steel band calypso suddenly reach me and turning into the Grove I witness perhaps a dozen brightly festooned floats wheeling down the road, each with a score or so pan drummers and other percussive players aboard, many of them schoolchildren decked in identical costumes of shimmering apricot, electric blue or purple, and a mere few hundred or so people dancing wildly in the procession’s wake. Quarter of an hour later it is disappearing in the direction of the Westbourne along the Harrow Road. Little do I realise at the time that I’ll be going to Carnival annually for the next 25 years!
Following the Isle of Wight event, things move fast. People return intermittently and one guy doesn’t return at all, having been caught peddling Afghanistan hashish at the festival, evading arrest by encouraging the crowd to impede the police and fleeing to Spain. A few of the others then default on their rent, the lease is taken over by one of the residents and we are all evicted. As rent payers, my work colleague and myself are given the option of moving into rooms in a flat around the corner at Bassett Road and we agree to this. This is another house occupied by musicians and every evening a jam session is held in the front room that goes on until the early hours. The music attracts comers from all over the Grove and neighbours such as members of Spooky Tooth, Quintessence and Henry Cow are regular visitors. I am to live here for the next two years.
Even though I mostly agree with the libertarian philosophies of my peers, nevertheless our tastes differ widely when it comes to music. While they are at home nodding off to albums by Weather Report or The Strawbs, I am scouring the junk shops around Golborne and Harrow Roads for whatever rock’n’roll, rhythm and blues or ska singles I can find. My musical preferences are firmly rooted in the records that I dance away the night to in the nightclubs of Soho during my teenage years in the 1960s and even though I live among the heads of the Grove have little time for their kind of sounds.
By late 1974, I am squatting in premises in Latimer Road and one of my flatmates is a guy several years younger than myself known simply as Mole. He is a would be bass player and speaks to me of a band he is rehearsing with at a house in Maida Vale. He tells me that he and his musical friends eschew the whole process of progressive rock music and are trying to make it more in the clean style of a Gene Vincent or Chuck Berry. Perceiving a kindred spirit, I play him my favourite record of the moment, Big Youth’s ‘Screaming Target’ album. Mole loves this and begs to borrow it and play it for his mates in the band. I agree and he returns with the album saying that everybody in the band are also raving about it. One afternoon a few weeks later, he suggests I join him and go see the band play at their squat in Walterton Road, so I walk with him there and see a pretty average rock group with a lead singer everyone calls Woody performing extended versions of songs such as ‘Gloria’ and Eddie Cochran’s ‘Come On Everybody’. Just a year after this, “Woody” is known as Joe Strummer and is lead vocalist with the Clash.
Several months after meeting Mole’s band, I go to a shebeen in St Stephens Gardens and while away a couple of hours there listening to the booming reggae sounds. When I emerge from the dive, I decide to visit a former Bassett Road flatmate at her place in Talbot Road. After reaching her flat and being ushered in, I see she has another guest, a sullen teenager named John, who doesn’t so much talk as snarl and has a nihilistic view on positively everything. The three of us sit in the living room for the next half an hour sipping tea and hotly exchanging views, before John says he has to go and leaves. I see him again a year or so later, when invited to see Johnny Thunders And The Heartbreakers at the Roxy club in Covent Garden by resident deejay Don Letts. Halfway through the night, Letts points out a guy with spiky hair that I recognise at once as the fellow from Talbot Road. “That,” he says, “is Johnny Rotten.”
Penny Reel - May 2010