Some Impressions of London

My brother and his partner Sue lived in Ponders End near Enfield. A terraced house on a long road with train stations close to either end. They had a black and white cat, Dmitri, named after the Russian composer Shostakovitch. A few doors down was Eric’s, a newsagents where a friendly Asian guy (presumably not called Eric) would keep back a copy of The Guardian newspaper for them to collect every day.

Their house was long and narrow, the bathroom located downstairs beyond a kitchen with wide windows that faced directly across to a similar kitchen of their neighbours. (There was at one point a famous neighbour dispute, a musical Mexican standoff, but that’s for another day). Ponders End itself was nothing. Some shops. Housing. Tower blocks with a small area of greenery at the rear where it was possible to play casual games of cricket. A dull pub with a pool table, serving bland beer.

Sue and her friend (also called Sue) were part of the ladies darts team at a different pub, back in Dalston where Tim used to live in a shared flat above a hairdressers on the main Dalston Kingsland road. I forget the name of the pub. I think I only visited there once. Driving over from Enfield was cinematic. Taking an orbital route, passing through all the different communities that crammed together to make up part of this vast city. All the neon signs and the streetlights shinning out in the darkness. After we left the pub (victorious? I don’t recall…) we bought bagels from one of the several all-night bagel shops that operated in Dalston back then. It was dark and still outside, a few stars visible despite the light pollution. It was oddly quiet for the city. I still carry a snapshot in my head, as clear as if it were a photograph in an album and I had just opened it up to find the image.

*

In London in the 80s you could tune down the FM dial beyond the traditional radio stations – Radio One, Two, Three and Four and a couple of local London stations – and pick up police broadcasts. They came in fragmentary bursts where you usually only heard one half of the conversations. Some were clearer than others, I guess dependent on how close the signal was coming from. It made for a fascinating audio soundscape if you listened with headphones on in the dark. I wish I’d recorded some of it – maybe I did, but it would be long gone now. It felt like being connected to a grid. It felt like living in a science fiction movie. The city with a million stories and you’re experiencing some part of all of them, all at once. Different voices drifting in and out of focus. Static bursting through like gunshot. Small dramas mostly without a resolution. Moving the tuning dial by millimetres in an attempt to reconnect - but often to no avail, like finding a book where half the pages have been randomly torn out.

Later on came the pirate radio stations. Unlicensed broadcasters with masts set up on the top of tower blocks across the city. They drowned out the police or maybe the police had moved on to more sophisticated communication methods by then. Dance music was the new revolution. Unknown DJs would play acid or techno tunes, credited to suitably anonymous musicians. In between they’d shout out listeners who’d messaged in via pager. They’d big up themselves or their station and drop coded messages as to the location of incipient home counties raves.

Everything felt wild in those days; exotic, colourful, vibrant and mysterious – the scene, the music, the distribution of these tunes, the DJs, the methods of communication. I did record a lot of these broadcasts and I probably did retain some of them for quite a while, but I doubt I have them now. There are the legendary Street Sounds compilations if you want to sample some of the music. Or listen to heavily rotated tunes of the time like Dirty Cash (Stevie V) or Bring Forth the Guillotine (Silver Bullet).

*

London back then also had the Notting Hill Record and Tape Exchange. Vinyl was still king in the 80s. There were several of these stores all within a stones throw of each other in West London. I could happily trawl these places for hours, collecting piles of cheap (or cheapish) second hand vinyl. They would famously attach price stickers on which (over time) the selling price would be reduced by fifty pence or a pound until each item could be shifted to make way for more vinyl. And they must’ve employed industrial strength glue because it was virtually impossible to remove the stickers without also removing part of the LP cover it was attached to.

I’d often travel on record buying sprees from Southend to London. Premium days out. The pleasure of completing gaps in the discography of a favourite band – the assorted random releases of electronic pioneers Cabaret Voltaire, that rare but amazing first single from The Pop Group, Slates by The Fall on 10” vinyl. There were random finds and endless excursions into newly loved genres like dub where you might return home clutching an album of Polish reggae eagerly wondering what it might sound like. (It sounded great).

I didn’t do tourist London. I didn’t even visit the parks – except for once, a poll tax demonstration in Hyde Park that was led by a series of speeches from opposition politicians, accompanied by musicians playing brief sets of protest songs. Meanwhile on the edge of the park a travelling sound system pumped out rave music to the bemusement of passing tourists. I left early to get the train back to Southend – about thirty minutes later serious fights broke out with the police and the whole event was already leading that night’s news by the time I got home.

I wish I’d known more back then about the canals and waterways that crisscross the city. The tow paths and riverside walks. The city had so much to offer that I was completely unaware of. Aside from the suburb where my brother lived, London for me was either daytimes in dingy basements crate digging (as the modern parlance terms it) or nights spent watching bands and then negotiating the long journey home before the last train departed Fenchurch Street. If you’d drunk too much you might miss a stop on the underground and find yourself going round again on the circle line because it required less effort than trying to get off and navigate backwards to your missed station.

Once I’d moved to Bristol, trips to London became less frequent. My brother and his family were now in Slough, a very different beast. For music and for gigs, as for pubs and company, I no longer needed to take a one hour train ride. Bristol was its own self-contained universe, with a very different vibe. London was of course destined to continue evolving, as it still does to this day. I knew a small part of it back then and those memories burn on, dimly, until you dig them up and expose them to the light and then they somehow gain at least a shadow of their former substance.