Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It

by Craig Taylor

  STACEY THE GEORDIE

  Who came to London

  By the time I was 13 I was regularly skiving off school and pinching money from my family to bugger off to London. My parents were splitting up and my brother, who was eleven years older than me, got into heroin and became psychotic, so things were really rough at home. And around about the same time that that was happening, my brother had been in London and he’d been in a band and one of the members of the band became my shoulder to cry on a bit. There wasn’t really a lot happening for me in Newcastle, I was feeling miserable, and because my family was preoccupied with everything that was going on I just seemed to get away with slipping through the back door and disappearing off on the cheap old blue-line coach you used to be able to get down to London, which was fifteen quid for a return ticket. You could sit smoking fags in the back of the bus all the way down to London. I started doing that quite a lot.

  It was a really strange thing, looking back. Jo and me pretty much grew up as siblings really, in and out of each other’s homes. My mam was very much her mam, her mam was my mam. And we were both precocious and gobby and forthright, very opinionated. I remember one our catchphrases was like, ‘God, I’m 13,’ as if to say, like, ‘Don’t patronize me. I’m 13, for god sakes.’ We were very, very sure that we knew it all.

  I was 14 when I stopped going to school, and buggered off down there for good. The guy from the band was ten years older than me, and the whole band were on the dole and had absolutely nothing. And so I moved in with him. It’s funny looking back to a time when you give no consideration at all to, like, how I’m going to pay the rent and look after myself or anything. I had my birthday money, which must have been all of 150 quid from various relatives. I was like, ‘Ah, that’s enough to see us through.’

  I was looking at this person through the eyes of a teenage girl, and he was a lot older than me, which seemed really cool. And then their band went from being a band that nobody cared about to one that major labels were fighting over. They were getting flown off to New York, they were in the middle of a bit of a record-company bidding war. So not only was I in love with someone who was much older than me and more experienced than me and in a band, I was in love with somebody who it looked like was about to become a pop star, which added a whole other layer. They ended up getting a record deal, and going off on tour and into the studio. I spent quite a lot of the time in a flat in Acton, smoking sixteen Marlboros a day, waiting for him to come home. I didn’t really have any friends that weren’t related to him. I didn’t really have very much going on there at all.

  Within the space of about six months my mum had left my dad, come down to London and moved in with us as well. So it was the three of us in this one-bedroom flat. I think my mam just thought, ‘Stacey’s in London. She seems to be all right. I’m going down there, that’s all I’ve got.’ So she hopped on the blue-line bus herself and sat in the back smoking fags and turned up. I went and picked her up at King’s Cross. It was a hot summer’s day, and I was wandering around in a really short skirt, fancying myself to be looking quite cool, and my mam got off the bus and said, ‘God, you look really, really thin,’ and I thought, ‘Yes.’ That’s the way things were at the time. That’s my abiding memory of that day. The tragedy of the situation escaped us at the time.

  *

  After a year and a half, me and the older bloke eventually split up. But by that time, the singer of the band who was older again than him, he’d taken me under his wing a little bit. I was out on the streets, it was December, it was really snowy and I had nowhere to go. The singer had bought on the record company advance a penthouse apartment, just next to Tower Bridge. Like literally open your window and look out and there’s London. He said to me and my mam, there’s no way I’m seeing you out on the streets, it’s Christmas. They were going off on tour the next day, and he just said, ‘C’mon,’ took us to his house, went out to the shops, bought us about 8,000 Marlboro Lights and a cupboard full of food, and off he went on tour for two weeks. It was completely bizarre. It snowed in London that Christmas, and it was just me and my mam. I was nearly 16 by this point. We were penniless, jobless, had no friends. I was heartbroken. My brother was going insane, somewhere, you know, a couple hundred miles north, yet we were living in this luxury penthouse apartment overlooking Tower Bridge, looking at this idyllic scene outside of the window. It was completely insane.

  The thing about this penthouse on Tower Bridge, there wasn’t even a bedroom. It was a living room, and the kitchen was just a space that you walked into where you had sort of like benches around you. It wasn’t actually a room, it was just some work surfaces, and the washing machine tucked under, and the bathroom was just a tiny little room. That was it. There was three of us, and we lived like that for almost a year. We did nothing but laugh and laugh and laugh and play computer games. At the time of the record, like I guess most bands do, they had a drugs guy and you could just go around to his house and get a massive bag of weed and loads of LSD, and jeez, we would take loads of drugs and have a right laugh and we became completely nocturnal. It’s funny because me and Jo grew up loving Prisoner Cell Block H, we were obsessed with it, and they started showing that again from the start. I think it started at a quarter past five in the morning, so we used to sit up for Prisoner Cell Block H. That was on for an hour, then we’d go to bed at a quarter past six. I was having the time of my life because the singer had the biggest record collection you’ve ever seen, as well as a massive collection of films, and he opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. That was great, but at the same time I was desperately heartbroken about the relationship. It was this total mishmash of stuff going on. It was either an ecstatically happy time or a desperately sad time. I still haven’t really made my mind up.

  On New Year’s Eve, standing on Tower Bridge, I remember looking out and thinking, what the hell is the next year going to bring us? I was feeling really jaded and cynical already. I remember there was a guy in front of us with this big coat on and a cigar in his mouth and he turned round and looked at us and said, ‘Happy New Year!’ in a broad New York accent. I thought, it doesn’t really get any more surreal than this.

  Eventually, the guy we were living with met a girl, and in about two days he said, ‘Right, she’s moving in.’ We’d met her and she was quite hard work, and it was a one-room living space. Me and my mam thought, ‘Shit.’ By this point, my mam had actually got a job working in a market stall in Covent Garden and was sort of getting it together. Things were going a bit better. I was 16 at this point, and still had absolutely no idea of the concept of working or looking after myself at all. I was dossing about, basically. Spending most days just walking around London. I knew it all. The centre of London, from south-east London where we were, I could have mapped out the whole thing, I was just so used to pummelling it by foot, every day, wandering around like a little ghost feeling sad. A little ghost in a really short skirt with lots of make-up on.

  So we ended up moving out. We had a friend who lived in Fulham, so we slept on her floor for a bit, and then I moved in with some friends in Camden. Eventually me and my mam ended up living with this lad we knew from Newcastle who had a spare room in his own home in Leytonstone. I wasn’t bringing in any money at all, and my mam was working at this freezing-cold market stall, and this guy we were living with was a little bit bonkers, a little bit ‘I’ve got a personality’ exclamation mark! He would express that by painting the living room all fluorescent-marker-pen yellow, so we had these highlighter-yellow living-room walls. We were chronically depressed and by this point, really, really psychologically dependent on cannabis. Like, you know, food came second; we smoked dope from the second we woke up to the second we went to bed, and it was the only thing that was keeping us sane, or so we thought at the time. At this point I was estranged from the bloke we’d lived with in Tower Bridge. Their band was doing really well. They were on the front cover of the NME and I was sitting with fluorescent-yellow walls in a flat in Leytonst
one, couldn’t afford a travel card even to get out of Leytonstone, sometimes couldn’t afford any dope for two days, crawling up the walls with this irritating flatmate and my mam, who was in the same state as me. It was desperately depressing, and made us realize the difference between how my life had been and the way my life was then. Basically no friends, no lifeline or link to the world outside of that highlighter-yellow room. It was absolutely horrendous.

  Dog Man Star by Suede, that album absolutely encapsulates London for me. And Sci-Fi Lullabies, the B-sides album, cause there are so many lyrics and poignant tunes, swooping, swooning sort of sad strings and sounds that encapsulate being down and out in London. I mean, not just lyrically, just the sound of it as well, sort of the sound of your heart swooping around inside you. I quite enjoyed being miserable. There was a part of it that I really indulged in, having a good cry, walking around listening to the saddest music you can possibly imagine, thinking about how desperately sad I was.

  I bought this beautiful pair of knee-high, white leather, 1960s-style platform-soled boots. I couldn’t walk in them to save my life, they were crippling, but I loved them so much and I wore them with a white miniskirt and a black polo neck. I was quite into the Sixties sort of look. I was probably hobbling and teetering around London with blisters all over my feet. I must have cut quite a strange little figure, really.

  Later that same year – this is awful, this is something that took us a long time to tell anyone, but I’m quite happy to tell people now because I’m old and I’ve done lots of nice things for people, so maybe it doesn’t matter any more. But I was walking up Oxford Street, it was Christmas Eve, and I was in my trainers. I don’t know what I was doing, I was on Oxford Street trying to get a bit of Christmas spirit. And I was running along and there was a man carrying a box with a television inside. I remember accidentally skidding on the ice and knocking into him, and I heard the television drop to the ground and smash, and so I ran and then I just kept running. And I remember having that moment where I thought, should I turn around, should I go back? Nah, I’m not going to do it, I’m just going to keep running. I spent all Christmas Day feeling sick cos I thought, I’ve deprived some family of their telly. I’ve ruined some family’s Christmas. It took a long time for me to let myself off the hook for that one, and I still feel a bit sick when I think about it.

  A few years later, when I was about 18, me and my mam came back to Newcastle to visit some friends. We stayed for a week, I think, and we got on the coach to come back to London, to go and stay in the hideous flat with the highlighter-yellow walls and the annoying flatmate. But, as soon as we’d sat down on the coach – I remember the moment as clear as day – we both just looked at each other and said, ‘I don’t really want to go back, do you?’ ‘No, I don’t want to go back either.’ We said, ‘Should we move back to Newcastle?’ And it was just decided there and then, we knew it was time to go back. It was a no-brainer, really. It totally, naturally and organically came to an end.

  Maybe everyone should do what I did and go down to London when you’re really young, really fucking irresponsible and really resilient. And really good-looking as well. Not to say that I was, but if you’re an appealing young lass, who’s quite gobby and attractive, people are more likely to look after you and see you’re all right, than if you stagger down there when you’re beaten by life and haven’t got a lot of self-confidence. I mean, I was full of myself when I went down there, and that helped us along a little bit. You know, either that or if you’re rich. I don’t think there’s any middle ground, really.

  I do think that you have to have a lot of energy if you want to go and live in London. I can’t be bloody bothered any more. A couple of days is all I can go for now. It’s a bit of a drain. I feel like I’ve turned into one of those Northern clichés, like ‘Ooh, that London, everyone’s grasping down there and everyone’s in on the rat race’ and all that crap. You know, if we’re watching the telly at home and if the news comes on, quite often there’s a reporter stood there in front of Tower Bridge in London, and I think, god, I lived there.

  GETTING ALONG

  ED HUSAIN

  Commentator

  I remember when Wonderbra adverts came out. Outside the East London Mosque, Wonderbra adverts went up. It’s all well and good advertising bras, but as we know in the lingerie industry more than bras get advertised, all sorts of other assets are displayed. So people inside the East London Mosque made sure that the adverts were taken down. And then, when they were put up again, they were painted over. I remember asking people, why don’t we just leave them alone? I was born and raised here, so for me it wasn’t such a big deal. But for many of these guys who were newcomers to Britain, who were Islamists trained in either Pakistan or Bangladesh, for them there were three levels of dislike – all based on the Prophet’s teachings, but it’s how they interpret it and implement it that’s key. If you dislike something, according to their very strict interpretation of religion, you would physically change it with your hands. If you can’t physically change it, you’d speak out against it. And if you can’t speak out against it, then you must dislike it in your heart. That’s the weakest of faith, and they want to be strongest of the strongest. So what are they doing? There they are, painting over Wonderbra ads. Guys, calm down. It’s only there for two weeks, then the next fad will be up.

  Another example is intimidating prostitutes in Brick Lane. If you speak to women in and around Jack the Ripper’s old terrain, around Spitalfields and Brick Lane and Whitechapel, they will tell you that Asian, Muslim guys, mostly Islamists with big beards and what have you, have taken it on themselves to physically remove this vice. Talk about being bullies. Leave the women alone. What business is it of yours to go around intimidating those women? The same women will tell you that it’s the uncles and the brothers of these guys who are their most regular clients. So it’s just a world full of paradoxes and contradictions. For me, the most worrying bit is the element of bullying, imposing, physically trying to change what they consider to be wrong. In the world view of most people who choose to live in a liberal democracy, it’s live and let live.

  But Islamism is built on the fact that there is only one way of doing things – God’s way. There are many ways of doing almost everything in life, and so the mission of the Islamist becomes to change all of that to bring it in accord with God’s wishes. So there is that inner tension, the driving force to saying my responsibility, my duty to God, is not just to lead what I consider to be a loyal, godly life, but also to bring all of these people to God’s path.

  It depends on the personality, the level of extremism of an individual. Those that tend to be more accepting, compassionate, would have pity on people. You know, ‘These poor, gay people,’ or, ‘These poor drug addicts. These poor single mothers, if only they were believers in God, all would be well or at least they would get rewarded in the afterlife. But these poor, pitied people aren’t what they should be, because of me. I haven’t done my proselytizing properly enough.’ So there is that element of mental self-flagellation, that ‘I should now go out and try to improve other people’s lot.’

  Most Muslims get on with life, but Islamists see themselves as the vanguard who are more than just Muslim. They have a responsibility to bring people to Islam, so there is this obsession of what they call dowah or proselytizing. You know, just being Muslim isn’t good enough. You’ve got to be a shining example for everybody else. So there is that. Pity is a positive way of putting it, but it’s damn patronizing that everyone else is somehow not on the straight and narrow and they have an attitude towards other Muslims, interestingly enough, it’s not just non-Muslims, but towards other Muslims, they have this attitude that we need to do dowah. We need to bring them back to the straight and narrow. That’s how they’d look at it.

  In the 1990s the entire easyJet culture – the culture of having foreign holidays and travelling around – emerged. Islamists in London benefited from that in terms of being able to go to
the Middle East to study. So they would go to Egypt and Syria to study and there they’d be shocked, because the very lewd women they were trying to run away from with the tight jeans and the low-cut tops, etc. – they were everywhere in the Middle East. The great Islamic lands, as they understood them to be, weren’t so Islamic. It was just like everywhere else. Even the Prophet Mohammad’s city, Medina, was like that. It was pluralist, you know, and we have the most reliable forms of the Prophet’s sayings, we would call them hadieth material, where after the Prophet passed away, even during his early Caliphs, those who were in charge of the political entity after him, or the communal entity after him, there were bare-breasted women in Medina. No one freaked out. No one said, let’s go and get these women clothed. You read even Ibn Khaldun’s travels and he’s talking about being in Africa as a Muslim scholar, traveller, dancing with women who are bare-breasted because it was the cultural norm. We don’t see him trying to impose a veil on them. So my argument is not just that we should celebrate liberal democracy here and now, but also in ancient and medieval societies that was the norm. People let other people be. Especially on these women’s rights issues. You can’t contain the human spirit. You really can’t. It always finds a way out.

  In the early 2000s, when satellite television channels started to emerge, kids in places such as Tower Hamlets were surrounded at home by versions of either Pakistan or Bangladesh. The satellite television channels from those countries set up here in Urdu or Bengali are what the parents are watching, so rather than be connected, say, to a General Election campaign – in my case I remember Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s campaigns very clearly – kids in London now are being exposed to what’s going on in Pakistan and what’s going on in Bangladesh. Their focus is over there, because that’s what their parents, first-generation immigrants, are interested in.