Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  The problem I had with Marc, and the problem with English cinema, was that if you positioned yourself, consciously, within the system, you were fucked. Every whichway. If you took a position, on the side of Puttnam and Alan Parker, the other extreme, you were done for, finished.

  I remember the whole build-up to Marc Karlin’s death. He had to fly to America. Which he was very nervous about. And he had to give up smoking. The final act in the cutting room, I look back on less as something that really happened and more as a piece of fiction. Marc was obsessed with the idea of making a film about Milton. An English writer in the grand puritan tradition. I don’t know if that was the reason for his trip to America. During the time he was over there, and indeed coming back safely, some Swiss airliner crashed, just off the American coast.

  Marc had one heart attack already. There was talk of an operation, they weren’t sure he was strong enough. I suppose, looking back, he must have been taking a special interest, as he leant in the doorway, in our footage of Whitehead in hospital, with those massive scar tracks, after his quadruple bypass. Marc battled heroically to give up smoking. I remember seeing him through the window that morning. He was looking pretty good, not bad at all. I think it was the sandwich from Goodge Street that killed him.

  They did everything in the way of resurrection, kiss of life, electric-shock pads, the lot. It was pretty plain to me, Marc was dead. And he was declared dead in the ambulance. I thought, when I saw them carry him out, ‘He’s not coming back.’

  The thing I felt sorriest about, for Marc, was that having lived a certain kind of life you get stitched up with a Hampstead Church of England funeral. It was quite hard to find a slot, but they had Marc buried in Highgate Cemetery. Big turn out. Nigel Fountain gave the funeral oration, pretty well. The vicar made a hash of it. If you’re on the left in English cultural life, at least you can rely on a decent send off.

  Stewart Home

  Stewart Home, after the bricking, his encounter with the negative youth affiliation in Bethnal Green, went to ground. In a condition of mimicked catalepsy, writing in his sleep, parodying the mannerisms of the French nouveau roman, he produced a documentary fiction called Memphis Underground. Which I took to be a blatant signalling of the fact that he too was preoccupied with Hollow Earth metaphors. Home may well, in a literal sense, have gone under; hiding out, with a complimentary case of 100 Pipers whisky, in some cellar, crypt, railway tunnel. Memphis was a cult centre for the worship of Ptah, its creator-god, who was frequently represented as a mummified man. On his release from hospital, dark glasses over swathes of flapping bandage, Stewart looked more like the Invisible Man than a Hammer Films mummy. And he was just as tricky to locate.

  I pored over Memphis Underground searching for clues. Home had certainly been influenced by the microclimate of Golden Lane, the close proximity of Chris Petit. ‘Pauline had been at some arts conference and a lot of people there had been talking about how rising property prices were making it impossible for them to pursue their cultural practice in London.’

  ‘Housing and gentrification,’ he confessed, ‘have been dominant themes within my fiction from the mid 1980s onwards.’

  I walked over to the bookshop in Broadway Market to see if I could find anything by Home’s friend Tom McCarthy. Maybe his novels would suggest another direction from which to close in on the missing prankster. The blurb for a paperback called Remainder said: ‘The hero spends his time and money obsessively reconstructing and re-enacting vaguely remembered scenes and situations from his past.’ Post-bricking amnesia? Memory loss was a popular trope. Paul Auster, Christopher Nolan with Memento, they were all doing it. My rose-red Empire was built around absence, holes in the narrative, faked resolution. Characters had to wear large labels so that I would recognize them when they reappeared.

  Biographical notes, supplied by McCarthy, stated that he was ‘General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network’. Such playful associations were part of the cloud of unknowing that hung over the threatened borough of Hackney. Old-time Trots, cells splintering, regrouping: the permanently excluded in quest of a new pub from which they could be honourably barred. Spot the spook. Is it the guy emptying the ashtrays? Or the girl in the beret with a hardback novel? Every drinking school contains at least one person sponsored by the security services. The Exploding Galaxy in Balls Pond Road: the bust was a publicity stunt, column inches in the International Times to promote a psychedelic gig. Neo-Templars. Retro-Nazis. Red Army Faction. London Psychogeographical Association. The Hackney Hardcore staking out the Groucho Club. The Mapledene Mob. The Boas Society. Conradian echoes of betrayal and conspiracy, Poles and Russians: plots hatched in massage parlours. Bomb carriers, bomb victims. Wherever a radical group met, in Stoke Newington pub or Petherton Road basement, I was elsewhere. But Stewart Home, if not physically present, was fully informed and writing up the minutes as a best-selling Finnish paperback. A self-published booklet.

  Which was the pseudonym, McGlynn or McCarthy? Didn’t McCarthy sound more like Home’s invention? An obvious nod in the direction of sweaty Joe, the red-baiting senator from Wisconsin? The man who did more than any other to boost the post-war British film industry, by expelling Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, Lionel Stander and all those other chic-left technicians, producers, actors – and making sure that, so long as they changed their names, they got jobs at Shepperton, Pinewood and Sherwood Forest.

  Thinking logically, I decided that the only way to find Home was to abandon logic. In any given day, putting in my standard fifteen miles (the Dickensian measure), I would run across Stewart at least twice. As I moved slowly and steadily on foot, he serviced a much broader range of social contacts – Janet Street-Porter to acid-casualty headbangers – on his £600 bicycle. Memphis Underground was punk Defoe, a record of journeys through Britain undertaken by a double-man, novelist and intelligencer. Home breakfasted with vagrants, dropped in on television-production companies, blagged hospitality, delivered lectures, attempted to collect debts from a trashed squat, slept with past and future partners, attended a book launch, insulted Will Self and flew off in the general direction of Hamburg. Where all my quests dissolved into another viewing of The American Friend, the Wim Wenders version of a Patricia Highsmith novel: a re-recorded tape without an ending, wiped by a European Cup match forgotten by everyone except Charlie Velasco. Who was actually there. And who owned, as did Chris Petit, the striking front-of-house poster for the cult 1977 film.

  Stewart Home emerged from London’s south-eastern suburbs, as Petit – in childhood – occupied military quarters on the northwest rim. Home’s karma was to be sucked in towards Hackney. Petit’s entire career was based around strategies for avoiding this effect. If I set off down Danny Folgate’s leyline, in the general direction of what Stewart referred to as ‘Hither Scotland’ (the mouth of the Blackwall Tunnel), I was convinced that I would encounter the vanished writer and his bicycle. I might also discover the point of access to the underworld Home had spent so many years celebrating. He would be dossing down with his friend Fabian, who was thought by many to be not only the instigator of the psychogeographic coup, but the poorly paid scribe who actually composed many of Stewart’s books and pamphlets.

  I reach the towpath to discover that a thirty-yard section of the fence has been knitted with alternating sections of red and blue ribbon. Criss-cross columns that remind me of the runes on Hobo Sickert’s Grail paper. Of late, unreadable messages have been sprouting all over Hackney: woven into black mesh, sprayed over flyers for garage bands whose energies were expended in deciding on a meaningless name.

  There is a young Japanese woman at work. Or perhaps Chinese, Cambodian, Vietnamese. She’s happy for me to photograph the work in progress, she bows.

  ‘Are they words?’

  ‘You can read. Yes.’

  ‘From which side?’

  ‘As you choose.’

  The project, she explained, involved
weaving a new section each day, east from Mare Street, past the bus stop, as far as Broadway Market. The ribbons, the pattern of red-and-blue crosses, spelt out words, sentences, if not a message.

  I climbed on to the road, to study the effect from her side. I couldn’t crack the code. If anything it seemed to say: go home.

  On the far bank, alongside the gas-holders, a naked woman draped in furs is posing for a fashion shoot.

  Coming up the slope into Victoria Park at Canal Gate, I intended to orientate myself by the smashed dog statues on their twin brick plinths, but something caught my eye. A sequence of black crosses painted in Japanese calligraphy, like the woody cover of a book of poems by Gary Snyder, down the flaking bark of a slender silver birch. Haiku, eco-warning or map reference, I was too ignorant or slow-witted to discover. But the figure emerging from a neat pup tent in the shrubbery I did recognize: Stewart Home.

  He had become a sort of honorary Pole, kipping with the migrant labourers in their covert camp. Award-winning local parks, cropped, planted and improved, also hosted the sleeping-bags of rough sleepers. Home, as ever, was ahead of the trend: everything he needed in a rucksack, a slim laptop in place of a cumbersome library of rare paperbacks, dull blocks of German philosophy.

  The café by the lake was shut. We adjourned to Lauriston Road – where, for the price of a full English with regular coffee refills, Stewart recorded the story of his relationship with Hackney. There was a new Julie Christie photograph beside the mirror. I barely recognized her. Which was appropriate. The film in question, long after my time, cast her as a woman triumphing over Alzheimer’s disease: the country from which nobody comes back. Her undoubted beauty looked as if it belonged to somebody else. She was two years older than I was. And she was still in the game.

  The first time I remember coming to Hackney would have been late 1970s, to see punk rock concerts. Mainly Rock Against Racism. There was a big thing in Victoria Park. I went on the march. There was one band I used to see called Crisis. I remember seeing them at Hackney Town Hall. I didn’t agree with their politics, one of them was in the Socialist Workers Party. He subsequently joined the National Front.

  The oddest people used to turn up at the Town Hall. Rocking Pete the Teddy Boy for some reason came to the punk gig. He said, ‘I’ve just got my card, man, I’ve joined.’ In the meantime, you’ve got Tony, the bass player – illiterate and in the SWP – being taught to read and write at the age of eighteen by some middle-class member who was a schoolteacher.

  The other Hackney thing was pubs. Places like the Rochester Castle – which kept changing its name. I considered moving up to Stoke Newington in about 1980. Then I thought, ‘God, I don’t want to live here.’ It looked pretty rough. I ended up moving in the mid 1980s. I wasn’t there that long.

  There was a whole squat scene, like the squats around the east side of Victoria Park, Cadogan Terrace. They’d been squatted in the 1970s. You had the Hackney Co-operative coming out of the squats. I ended up getting Hackney Co-operative and Hackney October Community Housing. Just to find somewhere cheap to live. It was about £4.50 a week. If you were signing on, as I was, you got £2 back. So long as you did a certain number of hours’ work with the co-op. It was pretty good. This was Manor Road, Stoke Newington.

  What you saw happening, from the late 1970s, the squats were being licensed and were becoming, in effect, co-ops. The council could control the properties. When they had anarchist squatters, they had to get a court order. It was a definite long-term strategy to license squats, to break up elements of the movement, destroy it. Get people used to the idea that they require a licence for six months or two years. And then, when the licence ends, it might be renewed. Or they might be moved on. That was how the really strong squatting movement of the 1970s got wiped out.

  I was spending as much time in Hackney as anywhere else. I was seeing people in squats and housing co-ops. It was often hard to tell which was which, they looked pretty rough. I was in the October Community Housing in Stoke Newington. There was a financial crisis. I said, ‘What’s going on?’ They said, ‘We’re having trouble. There’s not enough money coming in.’ I said, ‘Let me have a look at the books.’ I said, ‘This is a list of people who haven’t paid their rent for more than three years. Why haven’t they paid? Isn’t it odd that every one of these people is a junkie? And you believe them when they say their housing benefit hasn’t been paid?’ They go, ‘Well, you can’t suggest they’re lying?’ Schoolteacher types! I say, ‘Of course they’re lying. They’re bound to be lying, they’re junkies.’

  I said: ‘I’m going to phone up the council to ask what they think. We need to know whether these people are receiving their benefits.’ The council told me that the benefits had all been paid. That got me a bad reputation in the co-op, my fascist attitude.

  I was there less than a year. I couldn’t be bothered with the arguments. I thought this was nonsense. We’re going to lose our houses. They are going bankrupt because no one can run them. Nobody can make these characters do their two hours’ work to get their two quid back. My attitude was: ‘Go and squat.’ I moved to another co-op. Having typing skills I could always do one day a week to earn my keep. I realized I was never going to get a council place in Hackney, which was my long-term aim. The list was too long. The only place you stood a chance, as a single individual, was Tower Hamlets.

  The politics were mainly SWP, a lot of middle-class types who were not in the real world. In Stoke Newington you had, at the same time, the core of the anarchist faction of the early Class War group and elements who were into more ultra-left positions than Class War. Ian Bone was up there a few times. We all used to drink in the Rochester Castle. You had a lot of punk bands playing up there in the late 1970s. The anarchists and the Trots would nod to each other. To get away from all of them, I would go up to the Birdcage.

  That was one side of Hackney, the politics. The other side was the Hackney Hell Crew, a notorious punk rock band. They had a massive property in Victoria Park Road. There was a guy who lived there called Andy Martin who had this band, the Apostles, with constantly changing line-up. I sold him a 1970 Fender Precision I’d acquired at one point. It took years to get the money. I used to go round every week to collect five quid, two quid, whatever. Which meant I had the misfortune of meeting the Hackney Hell Crew. They were the most out-of-it, drugged-up bunch of all the punks in Hackney in the 1980s. You’d knock on the door and eventually get someone to answer it. There would be some character playing the electric guitar, rather badly, to a record. His eyes out on plates. People literally pissing out of the windows. The toilets didn’t work in that house, bunged up with laundry, shit, needles, takeaways.

  ‘I have to see Andy.’

  You’d walk past mounds of dogshit, junkies glued out of their minds. People sleeping in hallways and on landings. The guy at the top of the house, Andy Martin, lived an absurdly austere life. He’d been in a mental institution. He’d been involved with fascism. Maybe not as a member, but on some kind of kick. One of their early songs was called ‘Fucking Queer’. ‘In 1976 we were out on Clapham Common and beat up the queers. They are all fucking queers, they are all fucking queers.’ It goes on: ‘And then one day I met a strange lad and fell in love with him. I am a fucking queer, I am a fucking queer.’ Ha!

  The band was pretty schizophrenic. Andy never quite fitted that anarcho scene. He was working class. Coming out of this far-right homophobic background. Then discovering he was gay!

  After that period he was living in a co-op in Brougham Road, by Broadway Market. I was still trying to get the money he owed me for the Fender Precision bass. I got it off some prog rock band a few years earlier.

  Having to deal with the Hackney Hell Crew, going to Brougham Road, I was meeting the most bizarre people. Andy was in the house with another guy from the Apostles. I met this character, the Revd Roy Divine. I called him ‘The Racist Vicar of Bethnal Green’. It turned out he had the church on the corner where I was living, G
rove Road. He was the brother of George Divine, the Scottish country and western singer. He’s absolutely huge in Scotland and nowhere else. This mad racist, the Revd Divine, was webbed up with the punk band, the Apostles.

  I don’t know where they met him. Andy Martin is now really into Chinese culture. The Revd Divine was with some woman who was obviously having immense problems. She was a cashier at a supermarket in Whitechapel. Ha!

  Broadway Market, back in 1985, was unrecognizable from what it is now. Did you know that it’s got one of the best video stores in London? The whole of Hackney is unrecognizable. After every shift in the property market you get new arrivals. The Angry Brigade were in Amhurst Road. I know one of them, John Barker. He still lives in Hackney, a really nice guy. I met him at a May Day party in 1985. In Bow. He thought I was a member of Class War – which I wasn’t. He was rather rude to me. When he discovered I wasn’t a member, he was less rude. He’s been around a long time. He doesn’t want to talk about the Angry Brigade. He’s never talked to me about that. They have an agreement. He admires his younger self for doing what he did, but at the same time he recognizes that it was a political mistake. Which would be my feeling. A different era. You could see why they got to the point where they did the bombings. They were targeting property, not people. John is just a nice guy. I think he has a book coming out from a French publisher.

  The London Psychogeographical Association had its mailing address at Centerprise Bookshop in Kingsland Road, but it was much more based on the Isle of Dogs. We all had multiple identities, which we shared around, numerous aliases. Fabian, who was also known as Richard Essex, ran it. He had worked in a bookshop in Islington. He moved down to the Isle of Dogs. I met him around ’79. He’s been there ever since – apart from a short period in the New North Road.