We love this city. Its way too big for one person to understand completely. We are interested in how London is seen, experienced and portrayed by people in real life and in the arts.
One of the best London night clubs that I’ve ever been to was Smashing. It used to inhabit Eve’s club on Regents Street in the early 1990’s. It opened in 1991, and by 1994 was was considered by hipster journalist Alix Sharkey, writing in The Times, to be “London’s fabbest, silliest, unlikeliest and most exhilarating Friday night”.
Smashing had its roots in the London clubland of the 1980’s (as defined by Leigh Bowery and Taboo). Smashing‘s host was Matthew Glamorre, who in fact played with Leigh Bowery in Minty (they played occassional gigs at Smashing). Matthew remembers this time in an interview with the alissongothz.com.br website, here. Matthew was the perfect arch and funny host. For a year or two he turned the club into probably the coolest place on earth.
Smashing pre-empted one aspect of the 90’s music scene. It didn’t act as the meeting place of fans of a new type of music as many of the previous great night clubs had done, from the Hacienda in Manchester to Ronnie Scotts in Soho, but was rather a meeting place of fans of all the great music that had come before. The club was for people who were into the club experience and wanted a, well, smashing good old time. They wanted great music, not necessarily new and fashionable music. They were young, skinny, out there and wanted to have fun. They wanted to drink (etc) and to dance. By the 1990’s there was so much great music from the past to explore.
The music was pulled from all over. Alix Sharkey described it as “Bowie’s ‘Queen Bitch’; the Beastie Boys’ rap cacophony; the Barbarella theme song; the Happy Mondays’ narcoleptic white funk; or the Smiths’ ‘Panic’, dissolving into throbbing acid house. What kind of music do they play? The only kind. Indy rock? James Last? Grunge? Sammy Davis Jnr? Sixties soundtracks? Si, si, senor. Glam? Punk? New Wave? Disco? Pinky and Perky? Tick them all off, and anything else that comes to mind. Do your bowels clench at the sound of Weller’s warble? Mine, too. But don’t worry, a good record will be along faster than you can say: ‘Sham 69? Puh-leese.’”
By adding the ultra-cool London night club mentality to this magpie plundering of the musical past, Smashing was a breeding ground and blueprint for Britpop, which itself raided the past for its look and its soundtrack. And the club became the favourite haunt of the young Suede and Blur and Pulp as they began to break through into the charts.
Pulp filmed their Disco 2000 video at Smashing. It gives you a flavour of what the place was like. By this time, late 1995, the club had just about run its course. In 1996 the club closed, the scene was over and Britpop London split in a snowstorm of cocaine, ego and money. 1997 saw both the opening of the The Met Bar (where Gallaghers mixed with Page 3 girls) and New Labour’s Cool Britannia. The silly fun of Smashing had mutated into bloated self-importance of that is recorded in John Niven’s excellent novel Kill Your Friends.
What a great dance floor! And that handsome young man in the video? He’s my brother. He was a Smashing regular and DJ’d occassionally.
Patrick Keiller made his strange, uncategorisable film, London, in 1992. It’s not a documentary although it uses documentary style footage and it’s certainly not traditional fiction. Perhaps Peter Ackroyd’s towering London: The Biography sits closest to it with an impressionistic mix of factual grit and poetic fancy suggesting the capital.
The film is narrated by an unnamed character (voiced by Paul Scofield) who follows his friend, the unseen Robinson around London. Robinson is apparently involved with research into the “problem of London”. The film was made 13 years into a long period of Tory rule (from 1979 and 1997) and Keiller is clearly not a card carrying Conservative. The narrator records a city that is being badly let down and wearied by Thatcherism and its successors.
James Bridle has taken on the task of recreating the 1992 film scene by scene by filming the same shots as Keiller used in the original. Its now 13 years since Labour came to power and London has been reshaped in the intervening years. It feels an appropriate time to be comparing how London was with how London is.
This is Before The Hurricane, Regent Street by Bill Jacklin, painted in 1988. I like the movement in this picture, the sweep of Regent Street and the lines of vehicles and pedestrians trailing along it with the rain cutting across all. The play of light on the buildings and vehicles is lovely.
Bill Jackson is a London born, London trained artist (Walthamstow School of Art, Royal College of Art in the 1960’s) who went on to teach at Chelsea School of Art and then the Royal College of Art through to the mid 1970’s. He’s worked in a variety of styles over the years but has returned time and again to cityscapes. Strangely, given where he was brought up and educated, the city in question for most of his works tends to be New York. He moved across to the Big Apple in 1985 and according to his website has since concentrated on “painting ‘Urban Portraits’ of ‘the city’ in all its guises; from large scale canvases of crowds in flux to intimate moments in Seurat-like etchings”.
He has returned home to the Big Smoke from time to time to paint the odd London scene including the one of Regent Street which he worked up from this charcoal on paper piece called Regents Street In The Rain :
His returns to London have often been linked to large commissions such as the following two examples:
Futures Market, Royal Exchange, London which was painted in 1988
And this is The Ivy commissioned by the famous restaurant of the same name in 1992:
Morrissey was the lead singer with The Smiths. They were a tremendously Northern, as in North of England, band their faces set stern against the soft South and suspicious of London in particular. And like many a self-consciously Northern band before and since, they moved to the big bad southern city as soon as was humanly possible.
Mozza (as Morrissey is known) has had a complicated relationship with the city (Oh! the yearning, Oh! the dread…). To be fair to London, Morrissey has had complicated relationships with most of the world. He first tried to live in London aged 17, befor ehe formed the band. “I brought everything I possessed in these two huge cases”, he recalls. He lasted days before retreating back “oop North”, tail between legs. “It was a really awful experience”. Later, in early Smiths interviews, he described London as a dreadful “impersonal place”.
But London has usually been ”where it’s at” in the music business and was certainly so in the 1980’s. The Smiths broke big in 1984 and Morrissey and his song-writing partner & the guitarist Johnny Marr were both (separately) ensconced in the city by the year end. London’s allure proved too much for Morrissey’s doubts. One of their songs called, appropriately enough, London describes a young man heading down to London as his friends, (soon to be ex) girlfriend and family gather on a Northern railway station to bid farewell, nerves and uncertainty affect the young man “but did you see the jealousy in the eyes of the ones you left behind?” That old devil, London.
Here is the song with an effective video of edited clips from Billy Liar (one of Mozza’s favourite films) to illustrate:
During the 1980’s Morrissey moved around London renting houses convenient for his habit of retracing the steps of his pantheon of heroes such as Oscar Wilde.
The Smith split up in 1987 and Morrissey dropped anchor in London buying a house in Regents Park Terrace on the edges of Camden Town and Primrose Hill. It was a house with a history; its interior had been designed by William Haines a former silent movie star whose career was cut short due to controversy over his homosexuality and previous occupants included silent movie meg-star Tallulah Bankhead and, more recently, Jasper Conran the fashion designer. Morrissey became friends with the writer Alan Bennett another Northerner in exile who lived in the next road and often went for tea.
Morrissey was regularly seen in Camden supping pints of lager in the music pubs of the area up to the mid -1990’s. “I regret to say [London] really is as exciting as some people who are always considered to be misguided say it is. I think when you visit London and you only stay for a few days you get a completely obscure vision of the place and it seems impersonal and hateful and synthetic. But when you stay here for a long time you realise the enormous advantages….In Manchester the entire place closes at 8pm …but here you can go wherever you want to, whenever you want to and do whatever you want to.”
Morrissey’s early solo songs reflect this infatuation with the city. His London is mythological, composed of Union Jack tattooed skinheads (Your Arsenal album) , dark horror-filled Commons (Mute Witness) rent boys talking Polari on the meat rack at Piccadilly Circus (Piccadilly Palare), the lost (Half A Person), gangsters (Last of the InternationalPlayboys), East End boxers (Boxers), Jack The Ripper and ageing Soho Lotharios (Trouble Loves Me). It’s a London that even at the time was old-fashioned and backward looking.
And then of course, Morrissey fell out of love. Ever the contrarian he upped sticks and moved to LA. In Glamorous Glue he sang “We look to Los Angeles for the language we use. London is dead.” And he chose the future over the London past. He’s still there (mostly). He has been living in a hotel just off Sunset Boulevard. But it will never be entirely over for Morrissey and London. In Come Back To Camden he sings a love song to London, with its “slate grey Victorian skies”, “taxi drivers that never stop talking” and “tea with the taste of the Thames”. It’s one of the great London songs:
