Jonathan was a big love affair, the first one that really meant something to me. I’d always been anti‐drug, I’d never experimented – just grass. He lived in Hoxton. We got a minicab to Dalston. The club started very late. On Friday and Saturday nights, Dalston Junction was transformed. I guess this must have been around 1991. It was the period of the early underground rave scene, before it became mainstream. A word‐of‐mouth thing. Warehouses around the Junction. You got masses of young people on the street who would queue for hours. They would be standing there, freezing in their club gear. It was a dive. You didn’t take a coat or anything you couldn’t keep in your hand.
I remember the first time I walked through the door. It used to be an old cinema, a vaulted space. The ruined grandeur was heartbreaking. It was a club with a loose door policy, no searching, no questions asked. It was expensive to get in, £15. Which at that time was a lot of money.
So you walk into a black cavernous space with state‐of‐the‐art laser projectors shooting beams through an atmosphere that is filled with smoke. Lights and mad music. Cranked up, speeded up. Hard house music. There was a code of behaviour which fascinated me. It was like floating into a spooky religious scene. You stood in long lines, looking towards the DJ on the stage. The DJ was god! Everyone is doing this spastic dancing. And pointing. Really crazed and tribal. You don’t dance with somebody. You stay in line and face the same way. People in white gloves, Day‐Glo stuff, blowing horns. You couldn’t stay in there without drugs. Drugs were the whole thing.
I was with a man I was madly in love with. He gave me three ecstasy tablets – which could have killed me. I hallucinated that all these ravers had turned into Stamford Hill Hasids. Crows! It was the funniest thing I’ve seen in my life, they were davening. Mad prayers to save the city! Huge crazy eyes and mad faces: as if they were in pain. Dancing on hot coals. The most intense pain and pleasure, all at one time. Pure Bedlam!
The effect lasted for ten hours. You would be in there until six in the morning. Dancing non‐stop. Part of the code is that it’s never sexual. Even though it very much was. There were girls in bras and tiny little outfits and trainers, but you didn’t see people snogging. It was friendly, winking and stroking. You’d give each other massages. People would walk around with Sinexes stuck up their noses and they’d offer them to you. To wake you up, give you a jolt. You would be absolutely exhausted. No alcohol was sold, only water. You drank water, gallons of it. It was a ravers’ code to look out for people who were about to collapse.
You’d get these great, hairy, tattooed blokes – who in another situation would beat you up – giving you huge sweaty embraces. They took their shirts off. Acres of skin and sweat. It was dripping, drenched. You were packed together, responding physically, emotionally, to the music. We all had our hands in the air. The most fantastic party you can imagine. After it, you’d sleep for two days. You’d meet remarkable people. The rave scene took away all barriers of class and culture.
The thing I loved about Dalston Junction was that you created this spinning, touching, whirling mass of people. It felt as if all the people who were in the street had been sucked into this space and then spilled out again, totally transformed. It was as if that wall painting on Dalston Lane, with the banners and trumpets and faces, had been brought to life by sound! You would find doctors, lawyers, architects, psychiatrists. With local people. You’d end up gabbing away like crazy because you’re off your head on drugs. Then a pile of people would head back to your room and you’d sit there talking nonsense for hours. I met fantastic people. You couldn’t tell if someone was fourteen or forty. It was paradise. Nothing came close to it. Speak to anyone who went to the Labyrinth at that time and they’d agree. The city became a site of visions and possibilities, wild utopian schemes: gardens to plant, rivers to uncover, schools to rescue, asylums to be thrown open. We saw what lay beneath the stones and the dirt and the anger and the noise and the bad will of all those who refuse to recognize what is lying around them. Hackney is actually heaven!
The reason the club was called the Labyrinth was that it had all these underground spaces. You had the main area, painted with weird cartoon graffiti, and the stage with these speeded‐up children’s voices and music, and people moving in a slow drowning way because they’re off their heads on drugs. You walk downstairs into a cellar and there are different rooms with different music, chill‐out spaces. There is also a garden, quite a big garden. People go out there and rest from the dancing. You wander the dark stairways and corridors talking to everybody, to intimate strangers. It was really loved‐up. We were hugging. People were falling madly in love and having ultra‐intense relationships. Once that scene was over, you never saw them again.
It would go on all night, then they’d open these enormous doors and all this steam and sweat and smoke would pour out. The sun would be coming up and these zombie‐looking vampire people would flood away into London. Mad eyes! Naked bodies covered in mud from the garden.
I was thin as a rake. When you take these things you don’t eat. You dance until your toenails fall off. It’s all about eye contact. You’d dance all night in rows, meet someone, go into a mad frenzy.
While I was spending my weekends submerged in Labyrinth, I was living alone in a cellar in Smithfield. I had walked from Norwich, on the trail of animals brought to London for slaughter. I was totally fixated on what I called blood roads. My life was very extreme. In Norwich Art School, this lecturer, an old guy, had turned me on to masks. I was absorbed in dark stuff. And in the affair with Jonathan. Who was fifteen years older than me. And married. With kids. I was building an environment in that cellar – which I had no right to occupy. I thought I would stay away from the light entirely, until I understood what the subterranean meant. Tunnels, drains, strip‐clubs, bearpits. Weekends in Labyrinth were both an extension of my work and a release from it. It was the only time that I have truly experienced daylight. You could go up on to the roof, up the iron stairs, and see the whole of Dalston pulsing. Then you’d go back inside: carrying with you that intense vision of the streets.
There were darker things going on. People were smoking crack. Jonathan got hooked. The scene petered out for me when the relationship finished. It became quite dark. Jonathan had trouble doing his job, he was using heavier drugs. He moved out into a derelict warehouse in Hackney Wick. He said that he could see the world ending from his window, spider‐patterns of smashed glass. Balkan wars before they happened. We split up. By then the rave scene was everywhere, it travelled around London on the orbital motorway, out into Essex. The magic was gone.
When we spilled out, back into the streets, all the other clubs were emptying, the black clubs, R & B clubs: all these foxy, dolled‐up black women. There wasn’t any trouble. Six o’clock in the morning, early 1990s, Dalston Junction: wild. We’d go round to the bagel shop in Ridley Road. Then we’d be hit on by these really dodgy minicab drivers. You’d get into the car completely exhausted with a Turkish man, chain‐smoking, playing with his beads. You could barely remember your own address. You didn’t care where he was taking you. One morning this guy told me he had to drop off a mate and I was, like: ‘Oh sure, right, cool.’ The car stopped in an industrial estate, it was in Edmonton, by the river. The engine was still running, they were playing some wild music and smoking. I just kept talking talking and talking. I opened the door and ran away. I remember the name: I was on Angel Road. By the North Circular. I had to get back to Vauxhall.
I found out later that Jonathan had paid them, the Turks. It was madness. Anything could have happened.
In Dalston, it was the building itself that excited me. Labyrinth. The way it survived all those years, the transformations. It taught me so much about how, in architecture, you should never impose but always respond. I tried other places but they didn’t do it for me. I was ridiculously in love, not just with a man but with the whole scene, with London, with Hackney. And there was the thing we did. When you swallowed these drugs,
it took about half an hour to kick in. You get what they call a rush and suddenly your whole body is – phwwerr!!! – orgasmic. You have to dance. I think they developed ecstasy for the German army in the First War to keep them marching. The drug makes you jittery, you have to move. You hallucinate and you feel warm towards your fellow men. The drugs that have come since, like cocaine, haven’t interested me. The laser lighting at Labyrinth was specific to ecstasy. What it would do is connect people to light as it travelled through smoke: like an ambulance entering a bombed city! And these huge smiley faces. You see someone, you make a connection. It’s exciting, to have this with a stranger.
What happened next to the Labyrinth Club, at the time jungle music came in, was much darker. A very dark scene. It was horrible music actually, aggressive and dark. And the drugs got darker. I didn’t like it at all. People began to look like creatures in a zoo, panic‐stricken, dead‐eyed, grinding their teeth. I thought then the building was doomed. It was over. For all of us. For Dalston.
Parked at the back of the German Hospital, as an oblique tribute to Joseph Conrad, was a distressed, fashion‐accessory Cadillac. In layers of sedimentary brown: red mud with traces of iron. Brougham d’Elegance it said on the hood.
Shortly before the First War, Conrad purchased a Cadillac. He was thought to be an unpredictable motorist. He navigated as if at sea: tacking hard into an east wind as he swung the rudder, to lodge his land‐schooner, yet again, in a Kentish ditch. After the Hollywood film money, there were chauffeurs.
Walking home, with Anya’s Dionysiac tribute to Labyrinth ringing in my ears, I saw a different Hackney. Cars, headlights full beam, are stopped, dos‐à‐dos, in the middle of the road. While lengthy negotiations are pursued. Hammer music lifts swirls of dust. Dudes, who seem to have the gift of steering by some form of mind control, fire joints while shouting into mobile phones. Chariots of respect, German‐engineered, nudge each other aside: don’t give the bastards an inch. Scorn for generations of colonial oppression is manifested by a refusal to indicate. Why should you help the Man by telling him where you want to go? Screaming police sirens, demented cicadas of the Hackney night, carve up the territory, always squealing to a halt in time to miss the action. Sirens are a confirmation that crime is safely over the horizon. The faster we travel, the less chance we will arrive: Dalston physics. A special theory of relativity. There was total agreement: the cops would go mob‐handed to one part of town, well away from the action, and the malefactors would cluster somewhere else. Collaborative posturing, no loss of face. The weather blanket covering one of the great police horses said: ‘Video Equipped’.
Wide pavements are all very well, once you’ve negotiated the permanent holes, cones, barriers and regiments of recycling bins at which passing motorists hurl their cartons. And miss. Scavengers examine and reject shirts, underpants, tracksuit bottoms. Rats’ nests. Fast‐food for crows and foxes.
A woman in a black BMW comes off‐road, sweeping across me, to bump over the high kerb and wedge herself in a concrete garden. She slumps over the horn, screaming at a dark house. Her headlights illuminate the estate‐agent’s sign: FELICITY J LORD. HACKNEY EMPIRE. Orange sky to match the orange shutters on condemned blocks of flats. Empire of insanity. Like the credits for that television toga‐buster Rome: when ithyphallic graffiti comes to life. A preamble to orgies of blood, rapine and trashed history. The fallen rise. Our darling city.
DOMESTIC EXOTIC
I have told not narrative but ourselves – no narrative but ourselves.
– George Oppen
Albion Drive
The beam of the resurrected 8mm projector, a thing of grinding gears and rubber bands, throws up a title: May 1st 1969. The cone of light, with its washed‐out colours, its sentient ghosts, crafts a stained‐glass rectangle on to the white wall. Summoned from years of sleep in a grey filing cabinet, Renchi grins once more and gobbles the horizontally presented stalk of a pear. A green cloth disguises the pitted surface of a cheap kitchen table.
‘Why didn’t we go down the market to find something better?’ says the present, hovering, 2007 Anna. Who appears, back then, leaning against the diamond pane of the kitchen door (with its skinny plywood boxing). Yellow tiles. Speckled laminate work surfaces. Everything twice bodged: by the father of the escaping family – nails, trailing wire, original features entombed – and then by us, know‐nothing technophobes, handless bunglers with rented power tools.
Life was kitchens and cameras. Anna worked in a school called Thomas Abney in Stamford Hill. I travelled to Walthamstow as a part‐time minder of day‐release mechanics, white smokers with Mod tendencies, good‐natured for the most part, tolerant of the absurdity of a fate that inflicted this interval of cultural busking on their realist existence. With the Rockers, leathery aboriginals, it was more fun: they liked a ruck in the car park. No hard feelings, rite of passage. They came at me mob‐handed; one fat, one old‐faced midget – and the third, trouble, the only biker with a bike. His sidekicks were unnecessary, a barking chorus. I smashed the juvenile with a film can containing Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. They loved the bit where Mifune/Macbeth is punctured by whistling arrows, the rest they could do without. A legitimate nudge, shoulder to shoulder, sent the lardy one tumbling into a municipal flower bed. And then – it was like wrestling a golf bag filled with spanners – I rolled through sharp gravel with the biker, lacerating the Carnaby Street suit I’d bought for Renchi’s wedding.
This incident was unfilmed. As was the pair of flouncy scarlet knickers one of the students secreted in the passenger‐side door of the old red Mini as something for me to talk my way out of with Anna. The gesture was in keeping with the febrile climate of that institution, the Technical College with its remorseless corridors, numbered offices and cubbyholes, night‐strobing light tubes. The hum of bug‐burning electricity got into your head, sapping your will to live. A Stalinist bureaucracy meant that any money earned was always months in arrears, minor discrepancies could be found in every pay claim. The monster building was an unmapped citadel of quarrelling and hysterical fiefdoms, weasels jockeying for preferment, endless paperwork, unexplained departures. Twice‐exiled communists, New York Jews who left California for Mexico City, found a storeroom and claimed it as their own. They were never seen again. One such McCarthy‐persecuted refugee, after talking for hours about Hollywood B‐feature hack‐work, went crazy – seeing the politics of the college as a reprise of his earlier life. He gifted me his job as film lecturer. Curator of cameras, projectors, film stock. Very little of which had been used during the entire period of his lectureship: he was a purist, an old‐style documentary maker; he dispatched a pod of students to remote parts of London – Heathrow, Paddington Station, Tilbury – from which they returned, defeated, with zilch in the can. Too dark, too wet. What they took months to learn was that the expedition, the journey, was the whole experience. That was the Zen of film‐making: carry the kit and do nothing. Take coffee in a greasy spoon and keep your ears open. Watch the rain. Pick up discarded newspapers. Never shoot a single frame until you are ready to accept the dictation of the city.
One night, returning a Bolex, borrowed to record a Hackney protest organized by Ian Askead, posters pasted in the windows of empty council properties, I found that my windowless bolthole was occupied: by a senior member of the Liberal Studies department, a very smooth operator who did just enough teaching to line up the talent. And a long‐haired, long‐legged young woman. Stockinged but skirtless. A language student who was facedown, alongside juggling and bouncing reels of film, on the editing bench. The professional educator was status‐secure in a narrow‐lapelled metal‐grey suit, white poplin shirt, tie loosened: he lifted his left hand in a token salute. There was a distinct clink from his heavy wedding ring as he gripped the bench in climactic spasm. I acknowledged my intrusion and walked away, shoes squeaking, down the aggressive rubber of the mile‐long corridor.
We bought a house, the first I ever looked at, st
rolling east, beyond Kingsland Road, from De Beauvoir Town. Autumn 1968. Cost: £3,500. Two families, parents and kids upstairs, grandparents down, occupied this mid‐Victorian terraced property. They ached for escape, to Essex, the forest fringes, Ongar. They had sat out the war, a crack ran through the wall from the vibrations of a V2 rocket on Holly Street (intimations of coming events), and endured the peace; but whatever it was they mistook for the spirit of place was threatened. By a compulsory purchase order. The advance of tower‐block triffids. And the invasion of the borough by cultural difference, people from elsewhere.
This was the only time in twenty years when I had more money than was needed: on the day, for the day. Labouring wages came in a small brown envelope and were spent before the next weekend. After the Ginsberg documentary, the carrier bag of readies delivered by the Germans to the hotel in Park Lane, I had about half the sum required to close the deal. I knew nothing about mortgages but didn’t like the smack of death in that word: an inherited puritan ethic, buy only what you can pay for in cash. I would have to borrow the shortfall from my father, knowing (as I’m sure he did too) that I would never be able to make good the debt.
It was the best investment either of us ever made. And my life turned on it. My parents, in South Wales, must have owned six or seven properties, three surgeries and houses occupied by the doctors who had been assistants to my grandfather at the time when the National Health Service was introduced. The whole portfolio, sold or disposed of at the worst time, amounted to one newly built cod‐Georgian villa for their retirement. This East London ruin, as they must have considered it, would have bought a terrace of those picturesque miners’ cottages photographed, in their home town, by Robert Frank in 1953.
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 14