by Tim Bradford
1 ‘At the Mayday Protest’ by Jay Griffiths (from London Review of Books, 22/6/00)
2 English Heritage Archaeological Archives (http://www.eng-h.gov.uk/ArchRev/ner95_6/poultry.htm)
11: River of Punk
• The Westbourne – Hampstead to Ranelagh Gardens
Hampstead – Sting sex – Damned in Hot Rod sleeve – Kilburn – modernist flats – Paddington – Westway – Ken Boothe UK Pop Reggae – Mark E. Smith (anti-fashion) – Bayswater – Hyde Park – Knightsbridge – Lady Di lookalikes – Westbourne Tunnel
‘Let us, in imagination, open some old, quaint-looking panorama of the City as it used to be … All the landscape is dinted and curved – and behind it the uplands of Highgate and of Hampstead frame the prospect. In the lush meadows of Westbourne, near the highway to Harrow, the citizen of London could once see dragonflies and loosestrife, or, lying face down in the buttercups, tickle a brace of trout against the coming Friday’.
‘Lost Rivers of London’, Wonderful London, Alan Ivimey
The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
Engines stop running but I have no fear
‘Cos London is drowning and I live by the river.
‘London Calling’, The Clash
The Westbourne, a river of similar size to the Fleet, flowed from Hampstead down through Hyde Park to Sloane Square and into the Thames at Chelsea. Like the Tyburn it, too, had a couple of sources and a tributary. In an attempt to get to the heart of the stream I tried the visual approach again, sketching its course on a piece of paper then testing it out on my family. I felt it looked like a running stag and that the Westbourne might be related in some way to the ancient fertility custom of Swearing on the Horns, which still takes place in the odd real ale pub on the hills around Highgate.
‘A reindeer,’ said my wife.
‘No, it’s a camel, said my daughter. Scrap that idea then.
According to Victorian pedants, the river was originally called the Kilburn (Cye Bourne – royal stream) but has been known, at different times and in different places, as Kelebourne, Kilburn, Bayswater, Bayswater River, Bayswater Rivulet, Serpentine River, Westburn Brook, the Ranelagh River and the Ranelagh Sewer. But one name for the stream that the historians have mostly ignored, in their race to be right, is the one that is perhaps the most apt – the River of Punk. For, back in the mid to late seventies, a wealth of bands sprang up around the Westbourne’s banks and in the pubs and clubs that mark its course. Had not the river been buried just like the hopes and dreams of thousands of kids across recession-hit Britain? Somehow, these kids had picked up on the energy of the buried stream and transformed it into three-chord guitar gold. I looked at the picture I’d drawn again. Could those branches I thought were antlers actually represent a badly maintained spiky punk haircut?
I head out on a hot early summer day to follow English Punk Heritage’s Westbourne Trail, which starts on Hampstead Heath near Jack Straw’s Castle and goes through the winding lanes of Hampstead Village. Hampstead always seems to do something to my internal navigation systems, which are not that good at the best of times, and after two or three minutes’ walking I am already off course, but just thrust on downhill anyway and hope for the best. I wander around some dark treed lanes, not understanding which way to go and staring at my A to Z waiting for it to spit out the answer. I arrive at a big black manhole cover over a drain which seems to me to indicate the presence of the stream. It reminds of a big vinyl LP.
There aren’t really any punk bands from Hampstead. Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten had a squat in the area in the mid seventies and ‘Hampstead’ was an early song by Adam and the Ants. But really it’s known as Sting territory. The Police were punkreggae bollocks with helium vocals. They brought out Roxanne on pretty blue vinyl – my cousin Rob had a copy which I think he swapped for a gerbil cage in a deal with a local pet shop. After that the Police went rapidly downhill. Peroxide squeak-crooner singer Sting has been the Pop Squire of Hampstead for many years, more noted these days for his confessions in a popular woman’s magazine about long-player twenty-four-hour lurve-machine techniques. But what’s the difference between Sting and that archetypal eighties businessman Ralph ‘Five times a night’ Halpern? OK, one was a brazen but slightly ridiculous middle-aged man who was happy to have his image enhanced by a public display of his sexual prowess. Whereas Ralph Halpern was just a suit who got off with a model.
I make the mistake of aiming to follow the river’s course exactly through the mazy streets of West Hampstead. I try as much as possible to follow the contours of the land, but the preponderance of railway lines makes this difficult. It was here that the Moonlight Club on West End Lane was a big punk venue in the late seventies and early eighties. The Damned recorded tracks there in 1979 that were eventually released on the Eternal Damnation collection. In the back of NME there was a mail order record place that was always advertising ‘Damned Album in Hot Rods sleeve’ for £25, which I could never quite get my head around. Bizarrely, my own copy of Damned Damned Damned went walkabout after a party and now all I have is the sleeve. Is it worth anything as a collector’s item if I put another record inside it?
Joy Division played three gigs at the Moonlight Club in 1980, just before Ian Curtis died. They recorded a version of ‘Sister Ray’ which appears on their last album, Still. I foolishly turned down the chance to go and see them play at Retford around that time, preferring in my thick-headed yokel way to go to the local disco with a bottle of rum and black in my pocket in the hope that I’d get a snog from some teacher’s daughter I fancied. The morning after Curtis died I wore a black armband to school. Actually it was a brown elastic band. The other option was an orange Day-Glo armband. Not long afterwards, the myth that ‘Ian Curtis died for us’ started to do the rounds and people who’d never even heard of the band a few months previously started wearing long coats and looking miserable, which left me with a choice of either upping the ante and being even more down, to show what a true fan I was, or to forget all about it. Which I did. Another less famous post-punk death was that of the Swell Maps’ Epic Soundtracks, who died at his flat in West Hampstead in 1997. The clockwork-toy influenced ‘Big Maz in the Desert From the Trolley’ and the guitarythrash ‘Let’s Build a Car’ remain two of my favourite punkpop songs of all time.
Eventually, tired of doing detours, I double back down the back streets towards Kilburn. Ian Dury’s band Kilburn and the High Roads took their name from a local road sign. Around here is also the spiritual home of the Pogues – I imagine them hanging out in one of the big Irish boozers after doing some water divining using the metal bits in their teeth as dowsing rods. Shane MacGowan had previously been in a group called the Nipple Erectors, a reference to the holy springs that flowed from the nipple of the mother goddess. They probably created their own holy springs by pissing on the seats.
At the Priory Tavern there is lovely Truman’s beer and hunting pictures on the walls. The Westbourne flowed by here and was crossed by Hermit Bridge. Around 1100 AD a hermit called Godwin built a little cell or hole in the ground next to the stream here, like the toilets in a punk club. There’s a plaque nearby which doesn’t mention the hermit. Instead it says, ‘Thomas Creswick, preacher, died 1868. His last sermon was delivered at the bridge near this spot one week before he fell asleep in Jesus.’ ‘Fell asleep in Jesus’ sounds like a Nick Cave album. The Bad Seeds? No, they weren’t really punk as such – more OzGoth post punk voodoo thrash.
The river follows Kilburn Park Road for quite some way, and the land starts to open out into a wider valley. On the right is a school where people are moving boxes of Liebfraumilch and a chain-smoking cleaning lady guards them at the door. The headmaster and a senior teacher look serious. This is a big job – the staff room’s whole consignment of sweet white wine for the summer term. Huge sky emptiness and the sweet smell of marijuana as a group of beautiful people walk past, chatting happily. On
the right are blocks of mad modernist West Kilburn flats. Two girls in pretty summer frocks and long Rasta hair sashay past. Sashay is a good word. It’s a bit more sensual than wiggle and more graceful than waddle.
I’m getting cramps in my right foot. More red brick creeping in now. Don’t think the two are connected. Old shirtless blokes with leathery tans sit outside the done up Truscott Arms. Skin cancer? Who gives a shit – I am the brownest! There’s a strong smell of piss from the nearby phone box.
Gaye Advert, of the Adverts, apparently lives in Paddington, still with TV Smith I think. The one Adverts song that sticks in my memory is ‘Looking Through Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’. When I first heard it I naturally took it to be a reference to the Australian fast bowler Gary Gilmour, who was first change along with Max Walker, supporting the front-line duo of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson. As a batsman he still holds the Australian record for a seventh wicket partnership of with Doug Walters against New Zealand in Christchurch 1976. But in fact in June 1972 – in Furman v. Georgia – the United States Supreme Court effectively voided forty death penalty statutes and suspended the death penalty. Four years later in Gregg vs. Georgia, guided discretion statutes were approved and the death penalty was reinstated.1 Gary Gilmore, a convicted double murderer, was the first person to be executed in the United States since the reintroduction of the death penalty. Gaye Advert was the sexiest punk musician after Debbie Harry.
From Paddington, (Oh, and Elvis Costello was born in Paddington in 1954) under Harrow road and the Westway, going in a line straight down to Porchester Road. The Westway is Clash territory.
‘Drove up and down the Westway, in and out the lights’ (‘what a great traffic system, it’s so bright!’) London’s Burning … dial nine ninenineninenine. They came from here, under the Westway and further west on Ladbroke Grove. I’ll never forget the first time I heard the Clash in the summer of 1978, two years after they’d hit the big time (Lincolnshire, behind the times, no electricity, horses and carts etc., etc.):
Meernah ta sizzmun
Forty thirsty why d’ya make her?
Dillingence is Leroy Sparks
Delroy Wilson, cool operator.
Ken Boothe UK pop reggae
A backy bah Sow’s sister
And ivva annarin azai
Amaunblabiigoerizan.
Singer Joe Strummer was born in Ankara so was weaving Turkish or Arabic words into the lyrics. Hard thrash Joycean genius.
I pass Royal Oak, a pretty little station but sort of lost, named after an old coaching inn which is long gone. The noise levels have increased now. Shops, cafés and restaurants lead down towards Queensway, originally a country lane but named Queens Road in 1837 after newly crowned Victoria. I always thought Queensway never felt like London – more like Babylon Five with lots of different people milling about, all drinking espresso and buying foreign-language newspapers. When I was skint I used to go up there and pretend I was on holiday. If you go to Whiteleys, the big old shopping centre, you can go on a world gastronomic tour – you know, the usual stuff, Café Frenchy, Pizza Pappa, Jeb’s Cajun Calorie Hall, Big George W’s Texas Honky Republican Rib House.
The only pub in view now is the Dean Gooch, inside a block of modern flats near Budgens. A beautiful fish and chip smell wafts in on the breeze and I stop and savour it for a while, then go left into Bishops Bridge Road, where William Blake used to fish when he was a young man. Any visions in store for me? I have a look around but everything seems normal.
To the right is Westbourne Grove, where Shane MacGowan was hit by a taxi in 1986 while getting into a car. He was thrown into the air and left unconscious on the pavement. Seconds later, as I walk past the bus stop at the end of Westbourne Grove, two lads come flying out of the crowd of pedestrians, whacking seven kinds of shit out of each other. Actually, it’s one guy, much bigger, hitting a skinny guy with no shirt on really really hard in the head. Some others, mates of the big lad, start getting involved, kicking at the skinny guy and the scene changes from a bit of sub Queensberry Rules argy bargy to something more dangerous. Now the big lad knocks the skinny bloke over and just starts kicking him in the face. His nose disintegrates and blood splats out onto the pavement. People at the nearby bus stop are just standing around. All this happens in the blink of an eye, but the action seems to be in slow motion.
I stop and shout ‘Hey! Lads!’ but they are too engrossed in trying to separate the skinny bloke’s face from his head. ‘Hey, come on lads!’ The big guy hits him again, then stops and looks at me, then pulls out a big leather strap and snaps it menacingly.
‘There’s kids around. Look – there’s mothers with their families and you’re going to hurt someone else in a minute.’ I say in a really soft unthreatening voice. I’m only a few inches away now – though make sure I don’t touch him. The big lad looks at me and his eyes do something and he sort of calms down and wakes up, while his mates stare at him waiting for a sign. The skinny bloke, who’s been looking at me and then the big lad, then just gets up, runs into the road and legs it at Olympic speed in the direction of Royal Oak station. I decide to get away quickly before the mood changes again so walk fast in the other direction past the commuters who are still watching the scene in a daze.
Rough Trade, now on Talbot Road, started up in 1976 in nearby Kensington Park Road, first selling reggae then early punk stuff. It then became a distributor and a record company, distributing early Factory releases and releasing records by Stiff Little Fingers, one of my favourite bands of the late seventies. The first gig I ever went to was SLF at the Cleethorpes Winter Gardens in early 1980, me and my mates trying to look hard in our donkey jackets and trying to talk in really deep voices.
Punk: Got a light, mate?
Fifteen year old in donkey jacket: (high pitch) No (changes to Lee Marvin growl) No.
My cousin Rob, who had in the meantime become a successful gerbil breeder, got back into music with SLF and used to write to SLF’s singer Jake Burns on a regular basis.
Mark E. Smith of the Fall used to stay at Bayswater’s Columbia Hotel when he visited London.2 I still have it in my head that the Fall are a newish band but they’ve been going nearly twenty-five years. ‘Are you doing what you were doing two years ago? Well don’t make a habit of it.’ he shouted on one of their early live albums. Which I always thought was dead profound. Mark E. Smith still looks like seventies Leeds striker Allan Clarke, who went on to be a manager. I like to think they could have swapped places without anyone noticing. Mark E. Smith of the Fall would certainly have been a good manager, shouting slogans at players through a megaphone. And he’d have been great as a pundit during World Cups. As for the Allan Clarke Project, it would have been dour Yorkshire poetry over a John-Cale-style screechy viola. Could still happen.
Out onto Bayswater Road where the river flows right into the north part of the Serpentine. The Swan, a 300-year-old boozer packed with tourists used to be the last drinking place before criminals got hanged at nearby Tyburn gallows. Rather confusingly for people like me who get confused easily there’s a tributary of the Westbourne called the Tyburn Stream that starts a bit further to the east and flows into the Serpentine in Hyde Park. I go into Hyde Park at Marlborough Gate and walk on the left-hand side of the ponds. There used to be eleven natural ponds here which eventually became just a huge cess pit, and you can see quite a bit of the shape of the river valley. The park to the left is long grassed like a water meadow, with a more natural feel than I remember. For some reason I always think of this as a neat, trussedup park.
It brings to mind a neat, buttoned-up band. On the Jam’s first album In The City, in the song ‘I’ve Changed My Address’, Paul Weller sings:
You’ll probably find me in Hyde Park
Try the hotel first, then a bench.
Could it be the same hotel that Mark E. Smith stayed in?
Years later, Weller would write the ultimate song about the lost river Westbourne, ‘Going Underground’. But the Jam are ulti
mately positive about the fate of this lost stream – ‘Give it a chance to breathe again,’ sings Bruce Foxton in ‘London Traffic’ (from This is the Modern World, 1977).
Anyway, back to Hyde Park … In the film The Filth and the Fury Sid Vicious hangs around there, talking to the camera about himself and heroin. Sid was just the first of several pop stars to peg it from heroin overdoses in the next year – including Malcolm Owen from the Ruts and the two from the Pretenders. It’s hard to imagine any of today’s clean-cut musicians dying from anything other than being crushed by a large sack of cash. Could be a game show idea there.
The Serpentine opens out into a big expanse of pond. There’s a church in the distance and Westminster Abbey off to the east, little paddle boats in the foreground. You get a sense of the unchanging lives of Londoners – in old illustrations of the Serpentine people are behaving exactly the same, promenading, sitting around chatting. A middle-aged guy with a big nose and glasses with big brows, tweed jacket, shirt and fedora is sauntering along behaving exactly the same; one young couple are talking about Europe; another couple on a bench are all over each other, his hand in her bra; some lads are chatting about football, whilst a kid wearing a gaudy Union Jack shirt with ‘England’ on it skips past, people are slumped into deckchairs or spreading all over the place as if on a beach. This is seaside London, all life is here.