THE LAST WEREWOLF

I have been working on the next The Real Tuesday Weld album.  It is a soundtrack to Glen Duncan's new novel 'The Last Werewolf'.  The book will be published in April by Canongate in the UK, in July by Knopf in the US and around the world during the rest of the year.

Glen and I are old friends - the album 'I Lucifer' was a soundtrack to his book of the same name.  They sort of grew up together in my place in Clerkenwell, as did we I suppose.

I read the manuscript to the new book at the beginning of last year.  He didn't have a publisher then but I knew right away it was going to be a success.  You see I think it may be his best yet. He has published seven previous novels and I recommend them all but this one combines his remarkable literary flair with a genuinely moving and page turning tale in a way people rarely manage these days.

The album is timed to come out in July with the US version but we will be making a musical suite drawn from it available to mark the UK publication in April.  We are intending various live events and all sorts of funny business too.  And as ever, there are some very special guests including Glen himself, Marcella Puppini, Pinkie Maclure, Piney Gir and Joe Guillotine from the very lupine Lazarus and the Plane Crash.

So, more soon -  only two more full moons to go..
In the meantime find out more about the book here

A DREAM OF THE CITY

The ongoing upheaval in the middle East reminds me that London was once considered to be 'The New Jerusalem"

According to legend, the ancient founders of the city came from Palestine about 2500 years ago, a lost tribe fleeing a cataclysm. 

This was a convenient belief in mediaeval times - it made the city older and more significant than Rome upon whom Henry VIII had viciously turned.

And it explains the meaning of the lines in William Blake's poem Milton:

"I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,

In Englands green & pleasant Land"

After the great fire in 1667,  Christopher Wren with Nicholas Hawksmoor and James Gibb planned to  rebuild the city actually as the New Jerusalem with St Pauls at the cosmic centre. They didn't manage to realise their dreams - their cosmically inspired geometric plan got lost in the labyrinthine archaic alleys and twisting patchwork of ancient ownership but they did manage to embed some of their occult ideas in the city fabric and, in Hawksmoor's case, in the buildings themselves.  Hawksmoor was a freemason, a sinister, secretive and strange man.  His churches are my favourites in the city.  Some, like St Mary Woolnoth, are deeply weird and Iain Sinclair believes Christchurch in Spitalfields actually exerts a malevolent force on the neighbourhood.  

But, when it comes to imaginary versions of the city, my favourite of course is the one depicted in Mary Poppins.  Walking up Ludgate Hill, I am always half expecting to see her bustling along with her umberella.

If you are a fan of St Pauls by the way, you may be delighted to know that there is a tiny version of it held in the hand of one of the strange statues on Vauxhall bridge. 

It is pretty difficult to see without falling into the river so mind how you go.

LOVE IS IN THE AIR

I was in Moscow the other week for the Cardboardia festival which is organised by friends and which we are hoping to bring to London.  It is quite bonkers in a very creative utopian way.  A kind of cross between origami and Woodstock.

I really like going to Russia because of the wonderful people although this time, given the ensuing terrible events at Moscow airport, I was rather relieved to get out alive.

Ironically, I was there to DJ at a "Love Party" - a task I will be happily repeating this weekend for three Valentine's events in a row in the romantic grandeur of the ruins of Battersea Power Station.  I will be accompanied by those glamorous honey-traps The Bees Knees. 
It is called The Lost Lovers' Ball

Antique Beat will be sending out  a little Valentines present to friends on the list this week.  You can join here if you haven't already.
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Then it's back to work on the next The Real Tuesday Weld album - a soundtrack to my good friend Glen Duncan's next novel "The Last Werewolf" which will be published in a few months by Canongate / Knopf and subsequently by various houses around the world.  Books haven't gone the way of albums - yet - but we will be defying convention as ever and making something you can actually hold in your hands and give to people you like.

I've always felt a little like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz with his paper heart although of course mine is now made from Cardboard.

Happy Valentines to us all!

MUDLARKING

Here is the mouth of the river Walbrook where it exits into the Thames.  I have written elsewhere about the ghost rivers of London but the Walbrook is one of the smallest - and strangest. It is also one of the more difficult to trace.  This was the river around which the Romans built Londinium, the first incarnation of the city in what is now the old financial district.  It seems to have been sacred to them.  On its banks they built the temple of Mithras, the remains of which you can still see squeezed between two grim office buildings near Mansion House.  Some very beautiful treasures, such as the head of Mithras shown here, were found deliberately placed in its channel.  

Speaking of treasure, I was down on the river bank early yesterday for one of the lowest tides of the year and I came across several 'mudlarks'.  Now the original mudlarks were written about by John Stow in his epic seventeenth century Survey of London.  They were scavengers who patrolled the banks of the river up to their waists in mud seeking a living by collecting almost anything they could use, sell or eat.  An unpleasant, cold and smelly job no doubt.  Mind you, however unpleasant, it couldn't have been worse or more dangerous than that of the 'Toshers' who entered into the sewage system from the river bank to search it for whatever valuables could be found fallen from above.  The hard won knowledge necessary for both occupations was a closely guarded secret and seems to remain so today.   

You see you can still find many old things on the river bank.  Fragment of clay pipes from the 17th and 18h century are common.  Prior to cigarettes, these were the cheapest way to smoke.  You would buy a bundle of five, pre-packed with tobacco, smoke them and throw the pipe away.  Decorated and carved ones are rare and very collectable.  Coins, pots, and other more substantial finds are found fairly regularly. Such was the case a few years ago with the gorgeous Battersea Shield.  So on very low tides a new breed of scavengers descend and start digging and sifting and searching.  There are have been a few high profile treasure finds in England in the last couple of years - usually by guys like these operating on the fringe of legality.  

The contemporary mudlarks, equipped with metal detectors, spades and rubber waders, are a tight-lipped bunch. Yesterday, I tried to engage several in conversation without much success.  They are not genial, academic or enthusiastic collector types but hard-bitten, secretive grumps.  At least one tried to waft me away from where they were digging (the mouth of the Walbrook) to somewhere where he suggested the more easy pickings were.  They claimed to be looking for ceramics (finds of which have a different legal status than gold or silver) but that seemed unlikely given the vicious spade he was vigorously wielding and the metal detectors being waved by the others.  I didn't really mind. I was glad to find that such an old London occupation was still being practised.

Besides, there has to be an upside to spending Sunday morning up to your neck in sh**.

STEP INTO CHRISTMAS

The Christmas lights on Oxford and Regent Street were lit back in November but that was just to try and push us consumers to get spending. Christmas only really felt like it had arrived this week when the snow started to fall on the city.  Lovely.

Thanks as ever for reading and responding - I see there are nearly a hundred of us and more looking quietly looking on - I like that.

There will be much more about Myth, Music, London, Love, Birth, Death, Dreams and Blood here next year.  Various personal circumstances prevented some of the releases we intended for this year but thank you for your patience.  2011 should see the release of the soundtrack to Glen Duncan's new novel 'The Last Werewolf',  an album of story and music "Tales of the Lost City" and an album by Lazarus Plane Crash I made with Joe Guillotine.  Phew.

In the meantime, best wishes to all.

Here is one more present from me and The Puppini Sisters.  Should get things kicking a bit

DECEMBER'S HERE AGAIN

The Song of December
I know the world has changed
And mainly for the Better
But I feel strange
Wishing that weren't true
For I cannot recall
When I last wrote a letter - 
I'm gonna write one now
To say "I Love You"


Now everything is free:
The love, the songs, the pornography
And we're drowning in a sea
Of stuff we'll never need,
I hope that we
Still value things that matter
I'm gonna text you now
To say that "I still love you!"

The Song of December and five other seasonal songs with our friends, Martyn Tiger Lilly, Marcella Puppini Sister, Joe Guillotine and Mara Carlyle is available on this year's audio christmas card from Antique Beat

These cards have become a little institution around here - I think this is number seven or eight. The artwork as ever is by the wonderfully talented  Catherine Anyango.  You may not be able to see but the little city in the image to the left is made from the words of the song.

It has been a crazy year in some ways - a lot of time spent looking out of the windows of various hospitals but it all worked out. I am so lucky.

LOVE 2010

Here is Edison and those wonderful women re-made over the lead track from the new seasonal mini album 'Seasons Songs' by The Real Tuesday Weld. With that old Churchillian rascal Martyn Jacques from The Tiger Lilles, a sampling of the divine Marcella from The Puppini Sisters, dream diva Mara Carlyle, and that inveterate mischief maker Joe Coles, the six song cd comes as a beautiful limited edition greetings card.


You can send it to someone special (or even to yourself)

Find it here at  Antique Beat

THE SOUTHWARK SAGE II

Prompted by Zurich's observation, here are more images from the Austin Osman Spare exhibition at the Cuming Museum.  - these perhaps showing a little more of his strangeness.

THE SOUTHWARK SAGE

In addition to the subterrannean lost rivers, there has always been a deep psychedelic stream flowing beneath London.  I know it, I can feel it.  I used to think it ran south from Regents Park down through west Soho to the river via St James - after all it is no co-incidence that William Blake grew up but a few yards from Carnaby street, the epicentre of swinging London.  But these days I think it is in fact the fracture between the two cities  - the City of London proper in the east and the City of Westminster in the west.  They have different Gods and different religions (money and power respectively).  This fracture is at least as significant as the San Andreas fault under San Francisco - if not as destructive.

But the stream of images and ideas that has flown upwards from it has permeated and powered the dreams and work of many Londoners - Chaucer, Blake, Dickens, Lord Leighton, Beardsely, Eliot. I count some temporary residents  amongst that lineage too - Carlyle, Walter Crane, Robert Calvert - even perhaps Syd Barrett for a couple of years before he fell. Unaccountably, one of the almost forgotten is Austin Osman Spare, the Kennington Blake.  Like Blake, he was prolific, oscillated between grandiosity and despair and died in penurious obscurity.  Why?  Unfashionable, difficult, untruthful, yes.  Mysterious, obsessive, inspired, definately.  A friend for a while of Aleister Crowley, an inventor of his own religious system, a master draughtsman, a mystic, a loner, a fabulist, a war artist, social chronicler. One of the greatest mysteries about him is that he is has been so neglected. 

It seems something is changing though - there is an exhibition of his work at The Cuming Museum not far from where he worked in Southwark.  And in January, our friends the Strange Attractor Press are publishing "Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist" by Phil Baker with a special limited edition.   I imagine Spare would be glad of a growing posthumous fame - like Blake he seemed to fear and desire public acceptance. If you have the money and taste for art dealing, it is a good time to buy I think.  If you haven't the money but have taste for dreaming,the book and  the work is enough. 

He was born in Clerkenwell on Snow Hill next to the river Fleet - the physical correalate of London's pyschedelic undercurrent.

F***ING LONDON!

The tower seen between the railings in the top picture is the priapic lump of open-plan office space called 'The Shard" which is jack-booting its way across an historic part of the city.  Already it has partially destroyed the wonderful Victorian Vaults below London Bridge station and evicted the Shunt arts collective that had been occupying them.  For several years, Shunt presented an amazing range of work and events to the delight of many Londoners.  I played there several times myself.  But the grey men came with a piece of paper which said it had all got to stop.  After just having been taken brutally from behind by the banking sector to the tune of several billion, it seems strange we're now letting their property developer friends do it again in Borough.  Mind you this part of the city has never been averse to vice. The railings in the picture and the 'offerings' seen in the lower photo are in the "Crossbones Graveyard" in Redcross Street

This is the site of the burial place of 'The Outcast Dead' - persons who were not considered fit to be buried within the boundary of the historical city of London.  So basically this is where all the prostitutes, suicides and pagans went.


The prostitutes were known as 'Winchester Geese' because they were licensed by the Bishop of Winchester who owned and officiated the land hearabouts.  He did this so that the pious burghers north of the river could legally hop over and get their leg over.  They got laid, he got paid.  Yes, it's completely true I am afraid.  After an often short and painful life of servicing the good citizens, the 'single women' could be buried here as the ground was unconsecrated.  And up to 15000 of them were by the mid eighteenth century.


Thanks largely to writer John Constable and others, the site, at present a scruffy piece of concrete waste-ground, is commemorated with regular events. The next is at Halloween.  It is hoped that a permanent memorial garden will be created there - well, if the greedy hands of the property developers can be kept off it that is.