Notting Hill Diary

Hawkwind - did punk ever happen?

Do I care much about Hawkwind? Well not very much is the honest answer, them having been consigned to the “But surely punk got rid of all that pompous nonsense” pile by my generation in their teens.

I will, however, admit to knowing little about them beyond Silver Machine and they did play their first gig 40 years ago this year in Notting Hill, so let’s be charitable about them for a moment for the following reasons:

1) They played their first gig 40 years ago this coming August 29 (as a band with no proper name) at All Saints in Notting Hill.

2) They had Lemmy on bass for three years (’72 to ‘75). We all like Lemmy don’t we?

3) Their 40th anniversary gig is to be at the lovely Porchester Hall and B.A.D did one of their earlyish gigs there (1986). I was a roadie back then. Well more precisely I was a computer programmer during the day, then I rushed along to Porchester Hall after work to sit at the side of the stage looking busy.

4) You could make a day of it, going for a session in Porchester’s Turkish baths before the gig.

That’s about it really, four rather specious reasons for giving them a mention. One day I’ll get round to writing about the music scene in the area (Pink Fairies et al) around 40 years ago. then again one day I’ll do a lot of things I keep promising to do.

While paying a congestion charge just now (it feels rather like being gently mugged) I happened to notice that
from December 25 to Jan 1 there will be no congestion charge.

So - er - wait - having said that it won’t be possible to repeal the corn laws remove the western extension for 18 months, what you’re now telling us that, actually, you can remove the charge any time you feel like it. Which is it?

Come on BoJo, it’s great that you’ve turned conventional wisdom as to which party listens to people on its head and we (Londoners) feel like our relationship has got off to a good start, but you’re sending us mixed messages and we’re confused as to where you see “us” going.

Writing about security at the Paradise bar on Friday reminded me of a night at Sin of Charring Cross Road a few months back. I can only assume that the bouncers there are friends of those at Paradise.

Sin isn’t somewhere I’d go to through choice, but some friends and I were invited to an aftershow for a band whose name I’ve forgotten (might have been CSS, but don’t quote me!). I was there with some friends from Sweden whom I hardly see and who were flying off in the morning, so this was my last chance.

I was tired and desperate to leave for about 30 minutes before I fell asleep on the bench seat I was sitting on. I woke up to a tap on the shoulder from a bouncer who said “Time to leave mate!”, which I thought was fair enough in all honesty, it’s not a good look for a bar to have people sleeping in it. I said “Sure, I’ll just say bye to my wife”, which he was fine with, then I gave one of my Swedish friends a hug and on the way out, stopped to kiss another one good bye.

What I couldn’t see was that in addition to the bouncer leading me out, quite peacefully, 5 others had amassed behind me. They pulled my friend away very roughly and frog marched me down the stairs. At one point one of the shouted at me “Stop struggling!”. I wasn’t, it’s just that with 6 gorillas carrying and pushing me down the stairs I was having trouble finding my footing. When we got to the bottom they literally threw me out into Charring Cross Road to stumble in front of a queue of people waiting to get in. Kind of humiliating! Well it would have been if I didn’t have a better sense of humour.

As they were dragging me downstairs, my friend, a rather slight girl, asked why they were being so rough with both of us and, as one, they told her to “Fuck off!”. She left it at that, but shortly afterwards they threw her out and a little later on they pushed the guy that had invited us in the first place down the stairs so hard that he had to go to hospital the next days because he had a suspected fracture of the arm. It turned out to be a badly pulled tendon.

Yes I know this has nothing to do with Notting Hill, but sometimes I just write about what’s on my mind.

 

A fine beard that I can only aspire to

I’d never had a beard before the last couple of months, partly because I was frankly incapable of growing one, but more honestly because I thought there was something “weird” about them, as if the wearer somehow lacked confidence, or was possibly a computer programmer or archeologist.

My current crop of facial hair began as most probably do, the byproduct of sloth. I had no particular social engagements to shave for and after a couple of weeks noticed that the stubble had got past the “scruff” stage and reached “designer”.

 

A nutter

The clincher was that the following weekend, Gary and I DJ’d at something of a society wedding at the Carlton Club, a Tory hangout and the former Conservative Party HQ. The walls are adorned by portraits of prominent party members, mostly painted in the 19th Century, many of whom sported the most impressive beards (and statesmanlike guts to boot).

All of a sudden it clicked. My excuse for not shaving was now to be that it was all for the band! Rotten Hill Gang currently have this whole Dickensian thing going on you see, because of our track “Pick a Pocket”, a rap based around the late Lionel Bart’s Oliver song of the same name, so it seemed important that one of us looked the part of a .. well I’m not sure what, but something Victorian.

So for now the beard stays. It’s already been through the “uncomfortable itchy” stage and hovers between “properly trimmed” and the “difficult to eat egg mayonnaise or pizza politely” stage, having only once visited the “Sadam being pulled from the foxhole” level of dishevelment.

But the fact is, despite all evidence to the contrary (as in, my face in the mirror), I still think of myself very much as a clean shaven man.

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The travel bookstore that’s not actually on Portobello Road and they didn’t actually use in the movie

Travel Book Company
First things first. The bookshop in the movie isn’t really the one tourists keep photographing themselves in front of and there is no “Travel Book Company” on Portobello Road. The shop on which that was based is the “Travel Bookshop” round the corner at 13-15 Blenheim Crescent. The space where they built store for the movie is at 142 Portobello Road, now occupied by a Chinesish furniture and knick knacks store called Gong.

And now back to the plot.

Portobello Road
Probably one of the most famous streets in London and despite all the hype surrounding a certain movie (oh OK it was Notting Hill starring Hugh Grant, Julia Roberts and Rhys Ifans and yes, thank you fror the house price dividend) and the two decades’ worth of gentrification, Portobello Road has managed to maintain an air of unselfconscious shabbiness.

You would think by now that by now only the richest corporations could afford to open up here and it has its fair share of places you’d have to be nuts to buy furniture in, but there are still plenty that have been there for decades and plenty that have hand painted signs.

 

Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts stand woodenly as they flirt with each other

Amazingly such independent record stores as Intoxica (which formerly rejoiced under the dubious name of Vinyl Solution) and Saints Tattoist, the tattiest tattoo parlour (pardon my aliteration) in town still co-exist alongside Starbucks and Coffee Republic, more of which later.

My favourite halal butcher
One shop that has closed is what I used to call “My favourite halal butcher”. This may surprise regular readers on two counts (three including the claim that I have regular readers). Firstly, if you read any of my pub or restaurant reviews you’ll know that I rely on my wife much of the time because I’m a vegetarian. Secondly I’ve given no indication that if I did eat meat it would need to be halal.
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Actually “The Music Industry As We Know It” arguably died the best part of a decade back. The opportunities for vast wealth out of all proportion to the work input may now be limited, but my feeling is that the whole process has become more democratic. It is now not feasible for studios to charge the vast rates of the 80s because we can all (yes, that includes you, even if you have not a musical bone in your body) make a reasonable sounding recording on our home computers and we can all get our music heard over the Internet.

Finally, by being so slow off the mark by burying their heads in the sand, Record companies have allowed the genie of downloads to emerge from the bottle and no amount of bleating by them will put him back in any more than toothpaste can be squeezed back into a tube.

The words “King Canute” spring to mind.

Here’s my take on how it used to be:

1. Band records demos of songs they’ve spent their life writing and creates a buzz
2. Record company throws money at them
3. Band records hideously overproduced versions of demos with major producer in stupidly expensive studios
4. Record company/management etc sends them on tour for months (and record is a hit or not. Funnily enough it’s not relevant to the plot here).
5. By now band has bought lots of expensive equipment without which their life has previously seemed incomplete and record company tells them it’s time to write and record their second album. Despite having recorded the basics of their first one in a leaky shed or a bedroom, now they know they’ve hit the big time and settle down to write the whole album from scratch in a “proper” studio costing £1,500 a day. Of course what they come up with has ten times the polish and none of he guts of the first album, not that they recognise this till the record is released several months later. To compound their problems, since writing their first album all they’ve spent their lives doing is recording and touring, so guess what the subject matter of the second album is?
6. Despite massive promotion, sales of second album disappoint, so band resolves to go “back to basics”, which means writing and recording an album in a style they claim always to have loved. Unaccountably that usually means blues or country or somesuch.
7. Band is never heard from again. One member becomes an A&R man for the record company to which they were signed (and thus the cycle of abuse continues). After a period of poverty, (n-1) members of the former band sue the nth member claiming songwriting credits. Approximately 2 decades later, band “reforms” with 2 or more original members and tours to audiences who should know better by their age, playing tired old songs to rapturous applause. The gigs are roaring successes apart from an ill judged 15 or 20 minutes which are preceded by the dreaded words “We’re going to play a few songs from our new album now”.

… long live music

Over the weekend Stephen Webster agreed to manage Rotten hill Gang. Yesterday Gary and I had a brief meeting with him and told him that the reason we wanted him as our manager was precisely that he isn’t in the music industry. The music industry as we know it, unless you happen to be Radiohead, is pretty much dead and everyone’s scrabbling around looking for new ways to make a living out of this thing called music. We were briefly involved with a major manager within the industry. It didn’t lead anywhere, but as Stephen said, “Band signs to mainstream music manager” isn’t news. “Band to be managed by rock ‘n’ roll jeweller” is.

A few years back when P2P first became the new way to get your music, Davo (our one time roadie and full time Good Guy¹) asked me what I thought of Napster². I replied that while I was an obvious nett loser on the deal (to wit - I’ll sell less records), I thought it was for the best on balance, because it meant that bands might actually have to learn to put on a performance again and that the few decades during which musicians could amass a quantity of money completely out of proportion to any work that they’d put in would be seen as a blip on the musical map.

The true answer to the question, of course, lies somewhere between that and the status quo (sic). Artists continue to benefit from sales, but to a lesser degree and I maintain that the need to play live again to earn your keep has been beneficial overall³.

¹Davo still crews a bit as far as I know, largely for Manic Street Preachers and The Verve, but he is a brilliant musician in his own right with his band Johnny Boy. Here he is at the last Carbon Casino playing with James Dean Bradfield (and Pete Wiley as I recall, out of shot).

²Personally I download from P2P type networks either to check that the record I’m about to buy is the one I think it is, or because I can’t be bothered to trawl through all my vinyl.

³I met a Russian pop star once who told me that it’s always been the case that in Russia they made no money on records, but only released them to draw people to gigs.