LOST IN THE TEMPLE OF LOVE

Sergey Chernov knocked on the battered door under the archway. We waited. A couple more knocks. Nothing.  Then, as we were discussing what to do, the door opened a crack and a wisp of scented smoke curled out. Against a dim glow,  a face appeared. A bulky bearded wizard-like figure peered out. Sergey spoke to him in Russian.  The figure looked at me, smiled, held the door open and said: 

"Welcome to Heaven".

We entered. For me, a borderline neurotic when it comes to domestic arrangement, it was more like Hell.  Every surface was covered with a cacophany of books, pictures, records, photographs, lamps and arcane twisted organic artwork in a dark interior which bore no resemblance to an apartment.  The atmosphere was heavy with incense, there were no windows, little furniture  and almost no evidence of ordinary life.

I had been in St Petersburg with The Real Tuesday Weld for a concert and TV show and had stayed on for a couple of days with my friend Sergey Korsakov of Cardboardia .  We were doing research and interviews for a project I am involved with about samidzat recordings from the soviet era.  Sergey Chernov another friend and a journalist for the St Petersburgh Times had set up this meeting with Nikolay Vasin, a character of some note in Russia where he is known simply as "The Beatles Guy".  In his youth in the early sixties, Nikolay had come across an illegal recording which turned out to contain a Beatles song.  It changed his life irrevocably.  He had an epiphany.  Since then he has devoted virtually his whole time and meagre resources to the Fab Four and John Lennon in particular.  He calls his apartment "The Temple of Love" and he is its priest.  

As we entered, he retreated to an armchair in the corner. We found a seat where we could amongst the chaos of his collection.  Every single item was in some way Beatles related: hundreds of items of memorabilia and tribute, homemade miniature shrines and shelves creaking under the weight  of documents and recordings.  Our conversation, alternating between Russian translated by the Sergeys and broken English began.  I can't really call it an interview.  Whilst I was able to steer Nikolay back to the period and subject we are researching, it was clear he was far happier  talking about the Beatles.  Now don't get me wrong, although I'm not a massive fan I am quite interested in them myself so his anecdotes and memories of various near-encounters with Paul McCartney, trips to foreign fan conventions, peculiar meetings  with people tangentially associated with the band and deep analysis of their lyrics were fascinating.  They are a band of course who have spawned an unparalleled amount of fandom and they did have a significant cultural effect*** in the Soviet Union, but without doubt there is no fan to compare to Nikolay.

As fascinating (albeit in a poignant way) as his reminiscences was his mystical take on the music and the effect it has on his life.  He spends most of his time in The Temple of Love listening to the band (Beatles music was playing for the duration of our visit).  His main passion is to talk to people about them. At one point he asked us if we wanted to see his 'family album'.  My understanding is that this is a feature of many traditional Russian homes - a book of photographs of a person's family and forbears.  As Nikolay had mentioned his mother several times, I was intrigued to see his.  However when he opened it, we were startled to find it was completely filled with images of McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo and especially, John Lennon. These were often personalised and worked on with odd illustrations into a kind of outsider art.

As he showed us the album, he declared several times:
'John Lennon' is my Daddy'.  

It was clear he didn't mean this literally although tellingly from a psychological perspective, his own father seemed to have been a difficult, absent figure in his life.  I was rather at a loss as to what to say. Eventually I ventured:  

"You must have been very upset when he died"

He looked at me with surprise:

"He isn't dead"

This time, all I could manage was 

"Er, oh."

He closed the album:

"He has been living secretly in Northern Italy since 1980"

He waved toward a wobbling shelf of CDrs behind him.

"And he has made 34 albums since.." 

At this point, Sergey Chernov asked if he could use the bathroom and was directed through the kitchen. He returned a little while later looking slightly stunned (he told us afterwards that there was absolutely no sign of any cooking implements or food but didn't want to talk about the loo).

We didn't get to hear any of the secret Lennon albums.  I got the impression they weren't available for anyone but a committed devotee and we never got to the bottom of why Lennon had been in hiding.  Pressing him on the subject seemed upsetting in some way, so we returned to the music itself.   Nikolay said (and I believe him) that when he is in the Temple listening to the Beatles he feels completely happy and filled with love but that when he hears it elsewhere, even at a friend or fellow fan's place, it doesn't have the same effect.

It had been a fascinating if unsettling visit but it was time to leave.  I genuinely liked Nikolay and thanked him. He gave us each a warm hug and some parting words of Beatles related wisdom.  As he hadn't asked anything about what I did, I mentioned I had made a Beatles mashup if he would like to hear it.  He would.

As the first bit of "All You Need is Love" played out on my laptop, he smiled beatifically and nodded with encouragement.  But when a beat and a sample from another song kicked in, a pained expression fell across his face.

He looked up at me and indicated I should stop the music (we were at about bar 16).

"You ruined it'  he said sadly.

He was probably right.

1. __________________

***Leslie Woodhead's recent "How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin: The Untold Story of a Noisy Revolution" has much more on the importance of the band in the ex-USSR if you want to know more about the subject.  

LONDON'S FORGOTTEN FALLEN WOMAN

I've always found something fascinating about women in the sky.  It may have been an early fascination with the aviatrixes Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson or possibly the memory of my older sister standing over me on a hilltop in West Wales, hair blowing in the sea breeze. So whenever I get chance to go to the circus, I am always keen to see the aerial artistes.

Circuses and fairs were a big deal in Regency and Victorian London.  Samuel Pepys was a big fan of Bartholomew Fair held down the road from here at Smithfield.  He was particularly fond of the freak show attractions: the woman with a third breast, the man with three legs, the midgets, the fat boys and the Siamese twins.  Personally, I would have loved to have seen "Madame Gobert, The French Female Hercules" swinging anvils and picking people up with her teeth.

I was down the Chelsea Embankment the other day and remembered it was once the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens where there was a mid-nineteenth century amusement park with a continual variety of such Burleseque attractions.  In the early 1860s a certain Miss Selina Young caused a sensation there when she crossed the Thames from Battersea on a high wire.  She was immediately dubbed 'The Female Blondin" (the male version then being a huge star) and was snapped up by a circus manager.

"The performance was decidedly sensational, and attracted a great crowd; besides having the advantage of being much less risk to the performer than any exhibition ever given by the cool-headed intrepid Frenchman whose name she borrowed. If she had fallen into the river, she would have found it soft, and so many boats were on its surface that the risk of drowning could not enter into the calculation... it would have been well for Miss Young if she had confined her rope-walking feats to localities in which she had the water beneath her.." 

The last remark refers to the fact that the Female Blondin shortly afterwards fell during a performance at Highbury Fields.  She was crossing a tightrope 100 feet up wearing a suit of armour and pushing a wheelbarrow when the fireworks attached to the support poles exploded causing her to wobble and lose her balance.  She plunged headfirst to the ground accompanied by the screams of those present and although she was later revived, was crippled and earthbound for life.

Still, better to reach for the sky and fall than never to try I believe.

Speaking of theatrical women, this week's Salon for the City at Westminster Library features two: Amber Jane Butchart and  Susie Ralph.  And they will be talking about others - the Gaiety Girls and Hollywood stars who so influenced the way fashionable Londoners have dressed.  More here.

And, speaking of Amelia Earhart:

THE LONDON FINGER

Nearly everyone knows about the London Eye. Looking over the rooftops from here I can see it winking between two chimneys. And of course the London Nose (or the Soho noses) have become a quite common dinner conversation topic of late. But I was walking with a friend the other day in Lincoln's inn fields and we were discussing the much lesser known "London Finger".

I like Lincoln's Inn Fields a lot.  As a youngster, I remember back in the prehistoric era (the nineteen eighties as you would call it),  it was the unlikely location for a  citadel of homeless people as was the Waterloo roundabout (now the site of the gleaming I-max cinema**).  It is funny how times change isn't it? I mean one of the reasons I liked the anti-capitalist protest at St Pauls last year was that it reminded me of those times when central London was not so corporate and hygenically controlled.  I was as apolitical then as I am now (albeit for reasons of age) but it seemed to be an era in which the city authorities were much kinder to the dispossessed.  Camden, who control Lincoln's Inn and a bit of Clerkenwell, must have almost encouraged them given the extensiveness of their cardboard shanty town.  But then property prices took off and everything changed. A memory of the time  does linger on as there is still a nightly soup kitchen in the square(organised by the Hari-Krishnas I believe).

On a more bloody note, it has a personally squeamish association.  During one of the darker nights of a personal apocalypse a few years back I dreamt of a scarlet road leading from my place through the centre of town to the West.  I dreamt that me and my friend and then housemate Glen Duncan were walking along it and as we passed Lincoln's Inn, we witnessed the horrific execution of Anthony Babington.  He was a young, idealistic, romantic Catholic (er, I guess that was the connection) but a bit thick and ended up disembowelled  with his head on a pole on London Bridge after leading a failed plot against Elizabeth I.  

I later discovered that this road, which leads from Shoreditch right through to Ealing, passes many such old execution sites and in fact Lincoln's Inn Fields seems to have retained some of its visceral memories.  For instance, it is still home to the Royal College of Surgeons and the grisly Hunterian collection - a sort of cross between a medical museum and a freak show.  For a while it exhibited a 'Yeti's Finger'.  This was obtained from a Himalayan monastery by the explorer Peter Byrne who, in an incredible tale of Indiana Jones style derring-do, had to substitute a human digit or it in order to avoid a curse. In an even more bizarre twist, the finger was smuggled to London hidden in the lingerie of the the wife of movie star James Stewart.   It then disappeared for many years before re-surfacing in a display case at the Hunterian.

It's a Wonderful Life.  You really can't make this stuff up can you? 

The finger came from a large, ancient withered hand which the monks in the monastery concerned believed to be that of a Yeti or 'abominable snowman'.  DNA testing established the finger to be in fact of human origin (yes I know that means it probably still has a fascinating history but it is one of the reasons I dislike science.)  Anyway, it has disappeared again.  If you find it, do let me know won't you?  The lingerie too.

On a somewhat related note, and given that it may be too late as tickets are limited,  if you like this sort of thing, join us at Westminster Arts Library next Thursday 28th March for "London Bone"  - an exploration of the skeletal underneath this city's flesh.

More details  are here

Now think on.

**Lest we forget,  this was always a musical place: Ray Davies set "Waterloo Sunset" nearby and it was here that Gavin Bryars found and recorded the tramp who sang the heartbreaking "Jesus blood never failed me yet"

LONDON BRIDGING

Are you South of the river or North of the river? After the success of sold-out Salon No 1, we are back at Westminster Arts library with Salon No.2 featuring Travis Elborough and Chris Roberts telling strange stories about London's oldest and best known bridge.  A soundtrack for the city will be provided by yours truly.  

And Hendricks will be presenting their amazing gin cocktails  - sufficient to float most people's boat I believe.

Tickets are very limited - you can get them here: WeGotTickets 

Travis (who is the author of the forthcoming "London Bridge in America: The Tall-Story of A Transatlantic Crossing") will tell us a tale beginning with a history of the bridge in its various incarnations and  how the world’s largest antique went to a waterless patch of the Arizonan desert when a previous incarnation of the bridge was bought by a "fraudster whose greatest trick was to convince the world he ever existed.."

Then, as if that wasn't enough, by drawing on his remarkable and encyclopaedic knowledge of the city, Chris (author of "Cross River Traffic" - the definitive guide to London's bridges) will present an interactive presentation on crossing the Thames in which YOU select which stories get told.  

More details are here.

LONDON TREACLE

Like many, I was languishing over Christmas with  a bad bout of man-flu.  Fortunately I was stationed in a lovely old house by the sea on the North coast of Scotland with only the odd seal between us and the Orkneys.  After a couple of weeks of coughing and sneezing I was casting around for a solution and was contemplating trying to mix up some  London Treacle.  This is a semi-mythical concoction developed in the seventeenth century as a treatment for the bubonic plague.***

I eventually found the recipe and was rooting around in an outhouse before being persuaded (against my better judgement) to opt for lemsip instead.  My 'If it was good enough for Samuel Pepys, it's good enough for me' argument had failed to persuade my companions of the efficacy of its ingredients:

-Oil
-Gunpowder
-Sack (a fortified wine)

I had already found the gunpowder so I suppose I can understand their anxiety - mind you it seemed preferable to those other plague preventives: 'Pomme d'amber' which contained whale vomit; the placing of a toad sewn up in a bag on your stomach or the application of 'oil of scorpion' to the boils.

One of the great advantages of being unwell was that it finally allowed time for the long-postponed creation and publication of the new The Real Tuesday Weld website - a kind of archive of the story so far.  It has been interesting to start to pull it all together - 'How time flies!' I kept thinking and it was quite nice to re-discover some things I had completely forgotten about.

Still trying to find some use for the gunpowder though..


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***The Great Plague wreaked havoc in London in 1665 and Charles II asked the Royal College of Physicians for advice. They came up with:

- Keeping the streets clean and flushed with water in order to purify the air
- Lighting fires in streets and houses and the burning of certain aromatic materials such as resin, tar, turpentine, juniper, cedar and brimstone.
-The digestion of London Treacle, Mithridatium, Galene and diascordium

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Here is their recipe for the “Plague-water of Mathias” should you need it:

"Take the roots of Tormentil, Angelica, Peony, Zedoarie, Liquorish, Elacampane, of each half an ounce, the leaves of Sage, Scordium, Celandine, Rue, Rosemary, Wormwood, Ros solis, Mugwort, Burnet, Dragons, Scabious, Agrimony, Baum, Carduus, Betony, Centery the less, Marygolds leaves and flowers, of each one handful; Let them all be cut, bruised, and infused three days in eight pints of White wine in the month of May, and distilled. 
Take of London Treacle two ounces, of Conserve of Wood-sorrel three ounces, of the temperate Cordial species half an ounce, of Syrupe of Limons enought to make all an electuary: Of they may be taken a dram and half for prevention, and the double quantity for cure."
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Which reminds me:

(LONDON) LIFE BECOMING ART

Leigh Bowery by Fergus Greer

Last night to Brixton to see the TABOO musical - a revival of the original award-winning production from about ten years back. I remember the posters and was intrigued by Leigh Bowery but I didn't know anything about the Blitz club / early eighties New Romantic scene in London so didn't see it then.

I was there last night because the book was written by Mark Davies Markham with whom Marcella Puppini and I have been working. Boy George co-wrote the songs (and starred in the original production as Bowery) and it includes a couple of original Culture Club songs and various early New Romantic classics.  It is very good, very funny, very entertaining - even if that isn't your sort of music.  There isn't a stage - its like being in a club with a catwalk and it happens all around you. It was absolutely rammed and went down a storm - I think it's going to run and run and very possibly go West End, a sort of hip Mamma Mia.

But last night was something else - it was like three shows in one.  You see Steve Strange, Philip Sallon, George and various other luminaries from the period were both there in the audience and major characters in the musical.  It was press night so they are not usually in attendance, but it meant you could simultaneously watch the drama unfold, watch some of them sitting there AND witness them actually interacting with their characters..  For instance The Real Steve Strange (looking rather fragile it has to be said) made various comments to his younger self on stage and, with seeming equal regard, to both The Real Phillip Sallon (sitting anciently prim on his own in a low cut dress) and the character Phillip Sallon camping it up on stage.  They had a whale of a time.

I suppose this is what is meant by Post-Modernism.

Very entertaining and interesting but also quite poignant with regard to the transitory nature of fame and age (which is kind of the modern taboo isn't it?). Where are they now? What do they do now?  What is like to see the signal events of your youth (which happened to become pop-culturally significant) re-enacted before you as you, as it were 'fade to grey'?

Slightly haunting I would have thought.   

 

DREAMING IN STYLE

I popped into New and Lingwood to treat myself to a pair of new pyjamas recently. I had completed an intense period of work with very little sleep and, as a periodic insomniac and fan of Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, I felt I deserved them.  It is a lovely shop at the Jermyn Street end of the Burlington Arcade in St James. Quite posh.

There is a famous music hall song featuring the arcade called "Burlington Bertie from Bow" about a young idler with high West End social pretensions who really lives in the then lowly East End (and obviously with no connection to yours truly).

PJs are not the sort of thing you can really try on so I spent quite a while choosing and finally selected a rather natty pair in black with a broad acid green stripe.  A well-dressed assistant had been hovering behind me for some time and as I turned toward the counter he said:

"Did you go to Eton sir?" (For non UK readers, Eton is an old and exclusive English private school)
"Er, no I didn't" I said.  He indicated the pyjamas:
"You did know that those are Eton colours though?"
"Er, no I didn't."
"Ah." 
"Did you have to go to Eton to be able to buy them" I asked
He looked slightly crestfallen:
"Not any more sir."

Well a sale is a sale, despite the world having obviously changed for the worse,  so we proceeded to the counter. I thought I would try to cheer him up as I paid.

"So, will I be cleverer when I wake in the morning then?"

He hesitated but got the joke after a moment.
"No, I am afraid not sir!"

We smiled at each other and I turned to leave.
"But they may make you better mannered.."

THE TWILIGHT LANGUAGE

I was delighted to receive a copy of this limited edition book of essays on the dead British screenwriter Nigel Kneale edited by Sukhdev Sandhu. Sukhdev has asked me to contribute a track to the accompanying album he was putting together as well as a one day symposium in New York: "A Cathode Ray Seance"

Kneale is probably best known outside a relatively small circle of afficionados as the creator of the mysterious scientific genius  Quatermass.  But he was truly a great - of the stature and influence of Dennis Potter -  I would say.  

If you are interested, for starters check out: his 1950s adaptation of Orwell's "1984" for the BBC (incredibly shot live in a single take and the program which made Peter Cushing a star);  the terrifying play "The Stone Tape";  the freakishly haunting TV show "Beasts" and of course the Quatermass films themselves.

I provided a "Theme for the Experimental Rocket Group':
"The Experimental Rocket Group was founded by Kneale's Quatermass but if they had been a band, what would they have sounded like?  It is always delightfully strange to write for an imaginary past -  especially when that past concerns an imaginary future.  So this little piece is intended to be one of the ways Now might have been imagined to have sounded Then.."

But the main delight for me in receiving the album is that it comes on a limited-edition CASSETTE

Hurrah!  That is the first time we have had music on actual tape.

Long Live Dead Formats.

CREATURE COMFORTS

The Antique Beat Boutique is full of wonderful things for Christmas.  Apart from The Real Tuesday Weld 2012 audio Christmas Card, it was recently invaded by an army of small creatures designed and made by my good friend Koo.  She is a curious creature herself- rather shy and unpredictable - but in the time I have known her, I don't think there is once when we have met and she hasn't give me something fabulous - and always designed and hand made by herself.  She has done many drawings (mostly impertinent) of The Real Tuesday Weld over the past few years.

Anyway here they are: The Creature Comforts: 
Mr Night Owl
Ms Snowy Owl
The Cad
Banker Boy and
The Pirate

Wonderful right?

I had the idea for accesories for shy men a couple of years back.  There are loads of brooches for girls but hardly anything for the fairer sex. But whenever I wore my Death's Head Flower (made by dear Za Za) people would always stop me to talk about it and I mean EVERY single time. So now it's what I recommend for a boy with a broken heart.  And I mean boys of either sex naturally.

(Antique Beat have been selling them to confident girls too  - that wasn't quite the point but that's commerce for you I guess)

As Koo says: "Show your lapel some Love"

There are also some absolutely lovely other things in the boutique but I am starting to sound like an advertisement so I will stop - you get the picture I'm sure.

I probably won't write again now until next year.  Assuming the Mayans (and me) were wrong and the world won't be ending in the next 24 days, I intend to be sitting by the fire or beach-combing in the far north of Scotland.  It has seemed a very full year.  I can't be bothered to list all the incredible achievements and witty comments I made but as ever, it was the people that mattered.

It has been great fun getting to know and playing with Matthew Snowden and Josephine Lloyd.  And I remain very appreciative of my stalwart bass player the crime jazz detective Don Brosnan not to mention the boy with the golden flute Jacques Van Rhijn and Wing Commander Clive Painter.

And of course to you, if you are there and reading, looking or listening.

A pleasure and an honour as always.

TCK

A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE

This old house is full of stuff collected over the centuries. I can no longer recall when I got some of it - but it's quite nice to open a box and re-discover something you had forgotten about. The other day I came across a 'Thunderer' a 1920s policeman's whistle. There must have been a reason why it seemed important to have one at the time. It is still very loud. I blew it and an old lady on Saffron Hill jumped a foot in the air. 

The curious object in the photographs is a Telescopic View made in 1951. Tricky to photograph but it's lovely to peep through the viewing hole into the little paper world beyond. It shows the famous view from Trafalgar Square through Admirality Arch looking down the Mall towards Buckingham Palace.  Millions have passed through the arch (often without noticing one of its secrets The London Nose). I love it. Just as with the Telescopic view, you squeeze through from the hurly burly grey noise and spin of the square and pop out into the calm green otherworld of St James. 

It is a curious building  - more a curved monument, a grave classical smile at the London sky. 

I was annoyed recently to read that it has been sold. It is a public building - well a publicly owned building at any rate -  presently a suite of drab government offices and the place that lardy John Prescott was supposed to be doing the other with his secretary. The reason given for the sale is that there is too much of such space, it is  inefficient and very expensive to run and so on. All very laudable I'm sure. 

But it has been bought by Spanish property developers to convert into a high-end hotel. Given the location I thought it would make a rather good Museum of Politics or perhaps a Tourist dis-information centre. I'd probably even settle for a Museum of the British Empire (I mean you could have a whole floor of horror!). But, as with the BBC's Bush House, that other flogged-off bit of Beaux-Arts-Paris-in-London, most Londoners (of whatever origin) will probably now never enter it. 

The surprising thing in this case was that there seemed to be absolutely no fuss made about it. Many people didn't and still don't know. Most are surprised if not a little disbelieving to find out but then the announcement was slipped out as a matter of fact, in an after-the-event sort of way: a bit like announcing that pizzas will have less salt in them from now on. 

I suppose we have got used to the family jewels being sold off quietly. It is a time of austerity after all and, like in times of war, politicians love citing that whilst smuggling through some ideologically motivated sneaky deals and making the dissenters seem naive and out of touch.  

In the 1970s, they wanted to knock down Inigo Jones' Covent Garden and build an elevated freeway. Nice. 
(Do let me know if you have any interesting ideas for how it could be used yourself - you never know..)