That was the triumph of London, and that, I concluded, as the awards ceremony neared its climax, was the point I needed to put to Keith Richards. By now it was getting on for 11 p.m., and the black-tied crowd was getting tired. So many top-notch celebs had been hailed onstage that it seemed the appetite for fame was nearly glutted. Then Keef was finally announced, and as he sauntered swayingly onstage—jacket sleeves rolled up to expose his sinewy wrists, headband making him look like an ancient John McEnroe—we were all lifted spontaneously to our feet.
His speech was short, droll, modest, and as soon as he had gyrated back to his seat I knew that this was it. This was my moment. Quickly I did my own turn onstage, introducing Seb Coe, and then with some pushiness I persuaded Keith’s agent Barbara Charone (a kindly person I had come across before) to let me station myself by his side. “Just five minutes, Barbara, just three,” I pleaded.
At last Keith came back from having his photo taken and there took place a vicious contest for the honour of sitting next to him. I was later informed that Keith’s people had somehow rebuffed Stephen Fry in the mistaken belief that he was Prime Minister David Cameron.
After decades of hoping, I found myself sitting inches from the kohl-eyed demigod, and I noticed that though his face was as lined as Auden’s, his teeth were American in their whiteness. We began with some small talk about how much I had enjoyed Life, and about his grandparents, and about what it was like growing up in wartime Dartford, where a doodlebug explosion had famously lobbed a brick onto his cot.
But the crowd around us was jostling and jabbering ever more insistently, and I knew that I must blurt it out.
“Er, Keith,” I stumbled.
“Mr. Ma-yor,” he said in his courtly way.
“I’ve got this theory that, er . . .” and as I tried to get it out, assorted supplicants descended like harpies, begging him to sign their napkins, their £20 notes, their left breasts, etc.
For a moment or two they were repulsed, and I gasped out the story, as told by Joe Walsh, the god-gifted guitarist of the Eagles.
Joe Walsh revealed that he had never even heard Muddy Waters until he went to hear a Stones concert, right?
“That’s right,” said Keith, nodding.
And so, I went on, you could argue that the Stones were critical in the history of rock and roll—by now I was half shouting—because they gave back the blues to America!
“I’ll go with that,” said Keith with infinite affability.
And I’ll go with it, too, Keith. It’s more than enough to go on. It may not have been the longest and most probing interview in the history of rock journalism, but it was a good deal more useful than my conversation with Chirac.
I didn’t need to waste any more of his time, forcing him to sit there amid his caterwauling fans and regurgitate the supermasticated anecdotes that are to be found in his book. He had affirmed my key point. Without the Stones, a great American band like the Eagles would never have been turned on to Muddy Waters. Without the intermediation of Keith Richards, Joe Walsh would never have come to play such epic guitar solos as diddle-ee diddle-ee diddle-ee diddle-dee did did did diddle-ee diddle-ee DEE, the climax of “Hotel California.”
As nineteenth-century London took in sugar and oranges and sold them back to the world as marmalade, so twentieth-century London imported the American blues and re-exported it as rock/pop. It was a great trade.
Now it was time for Keith Richards to make his royal progress from the Opera House, and I followed him out at the back of his tide of admirers. I watched the flashguns pop like Chinese New Year, and as his entourage climbed into some vast limo, I thought how much had changed in London since he first hit the scene.
When Keef was growing up, one of the most important points about rock and roll was that it was subversive; it was disapproved of. Melody Maker said it was “one of the most terrifying things to have happened to popular music.” When a hundred and twenty teddy boys were thrown out of an east London cinema and danced on the municipal flowerbeds, top conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent harrumphed that “this music is nothing more than primitive tom-tom thumping. I think if rock and roll is capable of inciting young people to riot then it is obviously bad.”
The film Rock Around the Clock was actually banned. It was a world of vicious laws against homosexuality, and censorship of plays by the Lord Chamberlain, and a ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and where the vice squad was so dur-brained that in 1966 they raided the Victoria and Albert Museum postcard shop in order to seize some pictures by Aubrey Beardsley.
It is this climate of disapproval that helps to create a counterculture, where so much of the fun is in the fact of rebellion itself. With his drugs and his women’s clothes, Keith was obviously part of that counterculture, and a vibrant phenomenon it was—while it lasted.
The 1960s counterculture could survive police raids and bourgeois hysteria and draconian magistrates. Indeed, it thrived as long as there was an effort at repression. The one thing, logically, that it could not survive was Establishment approval.
I would say the rot set in on 1 July 1967, when the Times published a leader about the infamous Rolling Stones drugs bust at Redlands. Like some Victorian beldame loosening her corset and beginning to jive, the Times opined that the sentences were too harsh. “Who Breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?” was the headline William Rees-Mogg rather brainily put on his piece.
It was the Times—the Thunderer!—siding with these snake-hipped drug-snorting rapscallions; and for the 1960s counterculture it was downhill all the way from there. As the years went by, ever more liberal laws were passed in favour of gay rights or gender equality or freedom of expression, to the extent that today the idea of a counterculture is very largely defunct.
Counterculture values have been mainstreamed, folded into the lilac-scented bosom of the Establishment and celebrated at awards ceremonies. When I made this point recently on the radio, I came in for some flak on the Internet from some people who said indignantly that they were still into S&M and necrophilia and other things—and therefore proud upholders of a counterculture in that their values are still rejected by polite society. Fair play to them, I say, though I suspect they will remain a happy and defiant minority.
Then there are some young people (mainly men) who inspire apprehension in the rest of society, and who angrily reject some of the very values—sexual tolerance and freedom, for instance—that were espoused by the 1960s rebels. Perhaps there are some who would argue that the new counterculture is the intolerant version of Islam.
But the old counterculture has been adopted and expanded and has permeated society in a way that is good for London and the London economy. Where once we had Mary Quant hacking away with her scissors in a bedsit, we now have a London fashion industry worth £21 billion and employing eighty thousand people. Instead of the debauched figures of William Burroughs and Francis Bacon, we have the “young British artists” charging quite fantastic sums—and getting them—for diamond-studded skulls, including the brilliant Tracey Emin having no shame whatever in telling the world that she is a Conservative.
The Colony Room is still going, but it is now supplemented by the Groucho Club and dozens of other posh-washroomed venues occupied by people with some sort of creative talent: advertising, media, PR, TV production, film editing, you name it. There are all sorts of reasons why London is one of the world’s most important centres for these “creative, culture and media” industries.
We might mention the English language, the proximity of a dynamic financial sector and associated legal and accountancy services, with their endless requirements for creative work of all kinds. There is the dual relationship London enjoys with the EU and the USA. But there is one art form that serves more than any other to intensify our emotions, that creates an atmosphere or a feeling by sheer power of association. One art form more than any other helps to ma
ke a city cool, and that is the music; and if the music makes your city likeable, then people from all kinds of vaguely cultural sectors will be confident that it is the hip and jiving place to be.
London has more live music venues—about four hundred—than any other city in the world, and there is more happening in London every night than there is anywhere else. In the 1960s London became the rock/pop capital of the world, and as the driving force behind the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards played a big part in that achievement. A knighthood? The least the man deserves.
The Midland Grand Hotel
Since my dinner companion is unavoidably late I have loads of time to study the restaurant and its staff. What a swell place it is. About three blond women take care of my bike helmet and rucksack and show me to a relatively quiet table where I slump down and look about me.
The walls are a rich mustard yellow; a deep tasteful tone that somehow intensifies the gold of the writhing beech leaf capitals on top of the slender marble pilasters. The ceiling is a riot of twiddles and volutes, like some mad wedding cake; and the whole room curves in a wave, as if you are already drunk.
Still my companion fails to show but my mood improves as a bunch of semi-inebriated IT consultants celebrate some contract by sending me a glass of wine. When she finally appears I am so thrilled that I would eat almost anything that the kitchen produces. As it is—and I am no restaurant critic—we can soon tell that this is posh tucker.
For no reason at all someone brings us a little ceramic beaker of something yellow. Is it soup? Is it a mousse? We can’t tell whether it is tomato or vanilla ice cream or a fusion of the two. But an hour or so later it is in a fairly exalted frame of mind that we head for the exit, where we are waylaid by a man named Tamir. He wants to give us a tour. He keeps saying that it is an incredible place to work, and we can see why.
We go up the double staircase, like a DNA helix, and we pass symbolic Victorian paintings of seated women in classical drapery with names like “Industry” and “Forbearance.” The walls are a noble red, hand-stencilled with golden fleurs-de-lys. The oak of the banisters is lustrous and warm. The chintzy carpet is thick and fleecy and held in place with gleaming brass rods. Tamir wants to show us one of the master bedrooms, and he radios down to Reception to see if it is vacant, while we fantasise about the kind of luxury we might find within. A walk-in humidor? A Jacuzzi? Alas, whoever has rented the master bedroom is making full use of it just now, and who can blame them?
So we wander out through something called the Ladies Smoking Room—a name it was apparently given in 1902, in deference to the suffragettes. It has a faint echo, in its gorgeous internal arches, of the Great Mosque at Córdoba; and then we are out on the balcony, and snuffing the perfume of the Euston Road. I look out at the traffic—flowing smoothly, I am pleased to note—and then back and up at the bonkers castellations of the hotel: the dormer windows ranged like a man-o’-war’s gunports in the steeply raking roof, the wizard hat conical turrets. You expect Tinkerbell to fly out, or possibly Dumbledore. It’s as if King Ludwig of Bavaria had been invited to design a railway station hotel, and then come up with a collision between the Doges’ Palace in Venice and the Grand Place in Brussels. It is a prosciutto-pink brick fantasy in Victorian Gothic, and the history of this hotel is the story of London over the last 140 years.
We are not just here to have dinner. We are here for the purposes of research, to examine the glorious rebirth of a building that tells us a lot about the waxing and waning—and then rewaxing—of London. When the Midland Grand Hotel was reopened in 2011—as the Millennium Hotel, with luxury apartments on top—it was hailed as a masterpiece of restoration that finally did justice to the plans of its creator, George Gilbert Scott. As it happens, it is a miracle that the building is there at all. For my entire lifetime—and for most of the twentieth century—it was shut, abandoned, derided and neglected; and in 1966 it was announced that the no-longer grand hotel would be knocked down.
Yet when the Midland Grand had first opened, in 1873, it was meant to be the ne plus ultra, the most opulent and expensive of London’s increasingly extravagant station hotels. There were grand pianos in the fancier bedrooms; Axminster carpets on the floor. Hand-operated lifts distributed coats and luggage to the rooms. There was a wine-cellar, complete with bottling plant, and a laundry that could boil, dry and iron three thousand pieces of linen on a single day, with a special tube system to send the dirty sheets shooting around the place.
Son of a Buckinghamshire parson, George Gilbert Scott (1811–1878) was a star architect, the Richard Rogers or Norman Foster of his day, and a man who believed fervently in the Gothic idiom. This was not just a hotel. Every painted cornice, every spike or curlicue or otherwise pointless piece of decorative exuberance, was a statement; and that statement was: This is us. This is us, the Londoners of the Victorian epoch. This is how we build our station hotels; imagine how we deal with our parliaments and palaces!
For a few decades the formula seems to have worked. The Midland Grand became the favoured venue for Sheffield cutlers, West Riding woollen merchants and Clydeside shipbuilders, and the clientele was courted with continual improvements. Electric light was installed in the 1880s. When residents complained about the noise of horse-drawn traffic, the hotel paid for the road to be repaved with wooden blocks set in rubber. One of the city’s first revolving doors was installed in 1899, and even though there were too few en suite bathrooms (of a kind they had the wit to fit at the Savoy), the place prospered until the First World War.
Then on 17 February 1918 the cathedral-vaulted booking office was hit by a bomb dropped from a German plane. The explosion killed twenty and injured many others; but the first real rumbling of doom came in 1921. Times were tighter now. The running of the railways had been taken over by government, and rationalisation set in. It was decided that those stations served by St. Pancras—Glasgow, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Nottingham—could equally be served by Euston. The Midland Grand became starved of custom. Its grandeur slipped imperceptibly away. By 1930 the place had become so rackety that a member of the visiting Australian cricket team had his bag stolen. The painter Paul Nash recorded a wretched evening in the early 1930s, sitting in silence with a broken radio and being offered “the most poisonous coffee I’ve ever tasted.”
In 1934 the chairman of the London Midland and Scotland Railway, Sir Josiah Stamp, mused aloud about tearing the masterpiece down. It was a hulk, an embarrassing reminder of Victorian pretensions the market could no longer bear. “Will it be vandalism of the first order to destroy it?” he asked a dinner companion hopefully. In 1935 the hotel closed, and in theory the building became the office of the railway company. Such was the cost of upkeep that in practice large parts of the structure were deserted.
Children would sometimes penetrate the boarded-up doors and climb the soot-covered carpets and discover the portentous Victorian women still looking down on a London whose Industry and Forbearance had failed to match their expectations. Mark Girouard, the architectural historian, recalls entering the building in about 1950 and finding dirty and empty rooms, and a ladder that took him out on to the roof of the western tower, with spectacular views across London. By the 1960s the electrification of the West Coast main line sent most trains to Euston. St. Pancras was downgraded, and in 1966 British Rail wrote their fateful letter to ask ministers to approve the “necessary changes”—and to allow them to take the wrecking ball to the work of George Gilbert Scott.
Decrepit and humiliated, the former hotel was a metaphor for a culture and a society that had decisively fallen off its Victorian perch. It was a symbol of a city that had sustained a decline in self-belief, in relative wealth, and in global status. For the first time in more than two hundred years, London was now experiencing a substantial and unexpected fall in population. Ever since 1940, planners had been saying that London was too preponderant in the UK economy, and that its wea
lth-creating power should be somehow dispersed to other regions. Now the planners were getting what they wanted at last—but not in the way they wanted it.
The weird campaign began with the wartime Barlow Commission, which opined that London was over-dominant in manufacturing and trade. In 1941 Sir Patrick Abercrombie was commissioned by the London County Council to produce a plan; and by 1944 he reported. The plan had many good points. Abercrombie recognised the importance of London’s old town centres and villages, and of improving transport networks. And yet the thrust of the Abercrombie Plan was to move 600,000 people out of London to “new towns” or “garden cities”; and though the intentions were doubtless good, this forced exodus was often accompanied by the disruption of old ties of kinship and friendship, and the construction of unloved high-rise complexes on the outskirts of the city.
Even in 1967, we can find traces of the Barlow-Abercrombie dogma in a South-East Planning Council’s report that repeated the essential demands—with what now looks like an insane attack on the city that had once been the powerhouse of the imperial economy and the workshop of the world. There should be “major and sustained efforts to move out manufacturing industry . . . continued control of office development and every possible encouragement of moves to office centres away from London . . . there is a national interest in moving our manufacturing away from London.”
These words seem incredible now, in view of what was already happening to employment in London. The planners had called for London’s riches to be taken and spread—like so much jam—over a wider area; and yet they fatally failed to predict the collapse of the docks and the decline of traditional manufacturing.
In the year I was born, 1964, the docks were apparently flourishing. The West India Docks were the centre for sugar, fruit and hardwood trade, and for thirty miles downstream of London Bridge there were oil refineries, power stations, cold stores and vast industrial enterprises such as Ford at Dagenham. The London docks were still served by 11,000 vans or lorries every day, and goods of all kinds were loaded on and off 6,300 barges. Beneath the surface, though, all was not well with London’s port.
Johnson's Life of London Page 34