Notting Hill Diary

So following my previous post pointing out that while he plays with us much of the time Mick Jones is not actually a member of Rotten Hill Gang, it seems that we are still not quite getting the point.

Here’s a tip - if you want Mick to play at one of your nights, why not ask Mick’s own band, Carbon Silicon to play, or better still, just ask Mick himself! If, however, you want Rotten Hill Gang to play, just ask our manager. And once a deal has been hammered out, don’t then go and promote the gig as being about Mick. It’s an almost surefire way of guaranteeing that it won’t happen. To misquote the Feds, we can neither confirm nor deny that Mick Jones will play at any specific Rotten Hill Gang gig.

Mick Jones

Rotten Hill Gang

We set out with the best of intentions
Last Friday we were both very tired so we decided to stay in, having already had a couple of unscheduled late ones that week.

We went to Sainsburys to pick up a couple of ingredients for dinner. That was mistake number one. Sainsburys Ladbroke Grove is West London’s Rock & Roll supermarket on account of the number of musicians who live
around Notting Hill. Now some of the more successful musicians make a play of only buying organic produce from the we-saw-you-coming “Traditional” butchers and grocers in Holland Park, but between you and me you can spot nearly all of them at some time or other pushing a shopping cart around Sainsburys.

Gaz Mayall is a real gent

One man who is very successful, but not at all embarrassed to be seen in Sainsburys is Gaz Mayal. Gaz runs the longest running club night in London, Gaz’s Rockin Blues, and is also leader of the brilliant Trojans ska band. We ran into him in the vegetable aisle. Gaz is one of those people familiar to people living in the Notting Hill area, but I only got to know him better when Ray & I look a random trip to Tregaron, a small village in Wales, to
see the Trojans place in a hotel bar last December.

No we are NOT going to the Paradise bar tonight!
As it happens I wanted to talk to him anyway because they do a couple of Russian songs in their set and I thought it would be good if they had a balalaika, one of which I’ve recently acquired. He was up for the idea (I thought he would be because he gets all sorts of people to join in. My favourite so far being a bagpipe player.). He asked what we were
doing that evening and we explained that despite having been invited to go to the Paradise on Kensal Rise where a few bands were playing and he was DJing, we were having a quiet night in.

You’re a dangerous man Gaz Mayall!But only because he’s so disarmingly charming in the first place.

He asked if we ‘d pop back to his place “on the way home”because he had “a few bottles of mead”. I think it might be first time anyone’s asked me that. Once there, we ended up staying for dinner (Gaz is an excellent cook) and by the time we finished it was time for him to DJ so were - er - accompanied him. Suffice to say I got bed about 4am and Ray
came home some time later.

I was browsing through some photos on my phone recently when I came across these two. In brief, Ray and I had just left Inn on the Green near Portobello where Rotten Hill Gang had been playing with Mick Jones’s band Carbon Silicon. At the start of this year, Carbon Silicon hosted a run of seven fantastic nights there called Carbon Casino. These shots are just after the last one. We were walking along Portobello Road on the way to a friend’s house for a nightcap when we were pounced on by three paparazzi.

Now I don’t pretend for one minute that they had any interest in me or Ray, or even really in Gaz Mayall, the dapper looking fellow on the left. Just a hunch, but I suspect they might have thought there would be more mileage in a late night bleary eyed shot of Sienna Miller and Rhys Ifans.

I decided it would be nice to see what it looks like from the victims’ angle so I took a shot myself. The next day the same scene from the view of one of the scumbags appeared in the Daily Mail or somesuch quality rag. The nice thing is that it’s taken at exactly the same moment. Look at the position of Sienna’s arm and hand in both shots and, a little bit harder to see, Ray’s right arm and legs. Oh - and the geek in the background with a camera phone to his eye.

As the weazels danced around in front of us like three crazed leprachauns, Rhys called out to them “Right lads, you’ve got thirty seconds or this beer goes over you”. He counted down from about 10 and did indeed give the pieces of human waste probably the closest thing they’d had to a shower all day.

Just for fun, here’s the celebrity spotting page on the the Smirkle site.