First pressing of flexi
Second pressing of flexi
Crass – ‘Tribal Rival Rebel Revel’ flexi disc
This particular issue of Toxic Grafity is probably the most well known of the handful that were produced. It was also one of the best selling (of all fanzines, not just Toxic Grafity!) due to the free flexi disc of a (then) unreleased track by Crass being included.
It should be noted that Throbbing Gristle are also featured in this issue which was always a bonus for fanzines in the late 1970’s.
I am indebted to Toxic Grafity’s writer and editor, Mike Diboll for supplying the following information below on how this particular issue of Toxic Grafity got produced. All artwork on this post is from this issue of Toxic Grafity.
This edition of Toxic Grafity was put together while I was squatting in New Cross, south London and originally printed during late 1979, but it didn’t really get into folks homes until early 1980, when a substantial reprint was done. Originally 2,000 came off the presses, quite how many were eventually printed, I am not sure.
Joly from Better Badges (who also printed the first three KYPP’s fanzines, the last three were printed by Little ‘A’ Printers) used to always swing things so it seemed that I owed him lots of money (quite large sums for those days); I’m sure he may well have been diddling me, but that was my fault, because I was very naive in those days and thought that anything do with business, copyright etc, was bourgeois and reactionary, so perhaps I deserved it. Also, it must also be added that I was off my head a fair bit in those days, but of course so was Joly! Judging by the number of flexi’s that were sent to Better Badges, I suspect the actual print run was over 10,000, perhaps well over.
A year before the release of this particular issue of Toxic Grafity, in 1978, and also during 1979, there had been some really nasty rucks at Crass gigs at the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square in west central London. These rucks had mainly been fought between boneheads and bikers brought in by the SWP.
I can’t remember what the gigs were in aid of, but it was something the SWP had a hand in. The boneheads were used to pushing punks around, but got far more than they bargained for when taking on the bikers, some of whom were grown men in their 30s and 40s armed with bike chains, knives etc. After those experiences at there concerts Crass seemed to get a lot more edgy than they had been previously about sharing any sort of platform with members of the ‘hard’ left wing.
The lyrics to the Crass 7″ single ‘Bloody Revolutions’ is based on that feeling from the band around this time.
Basically it was the left wing causes that Crass would sometimes support, that seemed to aggravate the boneheads, and of course the boneheads would generally mill around the halls looking dangerous, and on occasions causing some real trouble.
Toxic Grafity didn’t really have those left wing associations, and (luckily) I also knew a few of the bonehead contingent quite well. I had always despised their ideology, but on a human level I was quite friendly with some of them. This I think helped diffuse things when Crass performed at the Toxic Grafity event staged at the Conway Hall late on in 1979.
It was not a violent night at all, which was obviously good news at the time considering the previous gigs at the Conway Hall. There were of course some minor problems, but those situations were quickly nipped in the bud by some friends of my family that had come to witness the gig.
The flexi disc followed on from the Toxic Grafity benefit gig, it was Penny’s idea, he bought it up one evening at Dial House, the Crass commune, way out in North Weald, Essex.
The original Toxic Grafity benefit was staged because of an incident late on in 1978 when I was pulled by the police in Soho, the seedier area of the west end of London. The police stopped me on one of those charges they used to pick punks and other ne’r-do-wells up on, the infamous SUS law. I had stopped off in Soho on my way back from a visit to Dial House, and had the artwork of an earlier Toxic Grafity on me. The police found this highly amusing, as you might imagine, destroyed the artwork, treated me a bit roughly, threatened me, and said that they’d put me on some sort of Special Branch terrorist watch list. Looking back on this as a 50 year-old I can see that this was almost certainly bullshit, but I took it seriously enough at the time!
As a result, Crass decided to help Toxic Grafity out (a previous issue had carried one of the first in-depth interviews with them), and the gig at the Conway Hall and the flexi disc followed on from that.
The track on the flexi disc, was not one of Crass’ more in-depth or enigmatic tracks, rather it was what it says it is, a protest against violent political sectarianism screwing up the young. Of course I was extramely grateful never the less.
I’ve repudiated so much of what I used to believe in during those days in the late 1970’s, but the closing words for Crass’ ‘Bloody Revolutions’ track “but the truth of revolution, brother, is Year Zero” still appeals to the Burkeian in me!
Joly at Better Badges did the litho printing for the fanzine and sorted out the badges. Southern Studios took care of the flexi disc by Crass, but I can’t remember where they had it pressed, or how many exactly were manufactured. The Crass flexi discs were written in red for the original publication of Toxic Grafity, others were written in silver for subsequent issues of the fanzine.
Eventually there were five Toxic Grafity fanzines that were produced and sold from 1978 – 1981.
Toxic Grafity issue 6 and 7 were planned and in large part nearly prepared, but I became a father in March 1982 (I’m now a grandfather, twice), and ‘reality’ stepped in quite soon after so all those projects were cancelled.
The later Toxic Grafity’s, including the issue above, had dropped the whole band interview thing and had became more like an anarcho-punk agit-art magazine, similar to what Kill Your Pet Puppy would evolve into.
By 1983 I was doing a lot of dispatching and also a lot of ‘white van man’ work until sometime in 1989. While doing these small jobs, a friend of mine, Wayne Minor (from Brixton’s 121 Railton Road bookshop) and myself brought out one issue of “The Commonweal” which was a more mainstream anarchist publication in 1985.
In 1989 I entered university as a mature student.
I now live and work in the middle east.
To advertise this issue of Toxic Grafity, Crass arranged to press up a few hundred vinyl copies of the same version of ‘Rival Tribal Rebel Revel’ to give to record stores that were ordering the fanzine in bulk. This was so the shop had a ‘hard’ vinyl copy that the shop could play rather than play the flexi disc from the fanzine if any potential buyers wanted a snippet pre buying the product.
With thanks to Chris Low for supplying the personal letter from Mike to Chris
baron von zubb
April 8, 2009 at 7:49 pmJust to bring this back to punk if i may.
Just had a couple of weeks in occidental mediteranian. Sth Turkey. Big nature, mountains, rivers, sea, sun, rain, hail, groves of lemon, orange, pomigranate, olives, wild herbs everywhere. Good shit.
I havent had any time away on the land since this mad bad KYPP stuff started. Usually get a couple of months in the winter. This year not though.
Really cleared my head.
And I remembered how fucking different things were then.
For me, for all of us.
I mean we were so full of hate. I wasn’t alone in that.
And i knew others who weren’t, my girlfriend at the time for example.
It was like a hate contest. What was that all about?
Who could hate the most things the most.
Hated the Pistols cos they sold out. Hated the Crass cos they were hippies.
Hated skins cos they were skins. Hated punks cos they were posuers.
Yeah i know the Clash wrote about it first.
Mike putting the window through at 66A in a fit of anger. About what?
The argumants round the kitchen table about who or what was the newest figure of hate.
The fisticuffs. All about what?
Testosterone? Stupidity? ‘The times’?
And when we started using?
That became the new competition.
Me and wank hated people who didnt use. Like we’d only been using for a couple of weeks.
And Campbell Buildings may now being reconstructed as a glorious haven but christ as a group of people we were no differnt from the scousers.
If we could’ve terrorised them as they did us we would ‘ave. But we weren’t even that united! And personally I was too young and green to know how to. But I wanted to. We all did.
Not all punks ended up squatting & living off tuinol and mugging and killing and dying young.
What WAS that all about?
Ram Ram.
alistairliv
April 8, 2009 at 9:39 pmWhat I remember are a several conversations which troubled me about family backgrounds. I was surprised / shocked to hear personal stories about physical / sexual abuse and generally damaged and damaging families.
That there were a lot of young people who had run away or otherwise escaped from abusive or intolerable homes (or had been in care) and ended up homeless on the streets in London. The same process must have gone on before and carries on to the present.
The difference was that punk provided an alternative identity and via squats – an alternative community. But a community made up of lots of disturbed teenagers was not a stable community. The punk squats did not have the countercultural coherence of the older hippy ones – where the mix often included families.
Apart from both being squats, there are few similarities between Campbell Buildings and Brougham Road. I don’t think many people have positive memories of Campbell Buildings, but many do have positive memories of Brougham Road.
Sam
April 8, 2009 at 9:50 pmI can’t see anyone reconstructing Campbell Buildings as anything other than the ultimate den of iniquity, but I know what you mean. I think it was largely learned behaviour and the eventual inability to see anything in a positive light. We taught ourselves to see the bad in everything – sex, music, entertainment, family, education…you name it. Having said that, listen to Joy Division; “When will it end? when will it end?” etc…
It was partly the mood of the times. I think with punk, playing at despair and anger was a thrill at first, but it soon changed into the real thing. I never quite get nostalgic about all this. There’s always a part of me that remembers the darkness of it and I’m glad it’s gone.
It was very hip to be ‘fucked up’ in some way. Later, in the early eighties it became hip to be depressed. Most of this was self-indulgent pleas for sympathy.
Mind you, melancholia is traditionally the Romantic creative state, and we certainly were creative.
I think some of it may be the natural tendencies of groups of people to play stuff out like disfunctional families. Although we would have denied it at the time, there were always power struggles going on and the unholier-than-thou competitions were a part of that. Plus, punk lost its sense of humour with Crass and there was no going back. Self-deprecation was replaced with pious dogma.
And…on the other hand, many of the teenagers and even 30 somethings I know have this bland Prozac positivity that I find even more bleak. Everything’s ‘cool’, ‘it’s all good’. Some of it is still shite.
baron von zubb
April 9, 2009 at 4:31 pmGood posts Sirs.
About community and the romantic mindset.
It was dark. Maybe they were dark times.
When i look back i think we were darker than the times. And maybe we were just a load of self indulgent wastrels.
We could have sat around listening to Joan Armartrading or Santana..
It certainly seems to be recreated in that light by the tele.
3 day weeks, Yorkshire rippers, ‘riots’ , Blair Peach, N F, only 3 channels.
Ooh it were right mad it were.
And hey old punks never die. I’m with you there about this current bland ‘all is cool’ shite.
What ever happened to youth folks critical faculties?
But then we would say that..
Mike Diboll
April 9, 2009 at 6:42 pmBVZ:
For so long now I’ve put “that” time behind me, so much so that I think I got into denial over what it was all about. I’ve only recently been able to think about it, let alone write about it, largely on these KYPP threads. I’m grateful for the opportunity to do so.
If were to avoid being just another nostalgia or retro site about some imagined “good old days” we have to be honest. We weren’t fans of some pop or rock group, what we were into was far more intense than that. So to do it justice, we have to be honest, brutally honest.
If “killing one’s pet puppy” is about symbolocally stripping away falsehoods (see KYPP home page), then I’m afraid there are a few spikey haired, nose-pierced pet puppys that are going to have to killed. But rather that then rose-tinted glasses, naff nostalgia, or hypocrisy.
Yes, those days were full of hate. Hate, hate and more hate, all of it solipsistic and self-regarding. In that respect I regard them as evil. I know not everybody who reads the pages would agree with that. But frankly (and thankfully) not everybody went so far down the road of fanaticism, and evil-as-learned-behaviour, evil as habit, as we did.
Perhaps “evil” is too strong a word? Perhaps. But I really to think that those days and subsequent scenes I got into have given me real in UK’s Al Qaaeda mimetics, the Real IRA, or for that matter gun and knife weilding teenage postcode murderers, violent street gangs, school shooter-uppers, teen suicide cults and pacts, &ct., &ct.
To me the ideology is entirely secondary. Probably a Goth with a pump action down his trenchcoat or a spotty 13 year-old with an Uzi in his hoodie has just as much of an ideology (t least in embryonic form), as a wannbe AQ suicide bomber concocting “Mother of Satan” in his bedsit sink, or an unempolyed and unemployable scallywag putting a bullet through some poor sod’s head for a “united Ireland”. Or put another way maybe a wanna be Jihadi or one of the handful of people in the “Real IRA” is just as much a mindless, deluded thug as said school shooter or hoodie.
Okay, so I dont think any of us got that far down the road of no return, but probably at least some of us went a lot further down that road than we’d like to imagine. Suppose there had been a real revolution, with real chaos to hide behind. I shudder to think of the crimes against humanity that at least some of us would have committed.
I agree with you Sam about learned behaviour. What started out as a pose gradually became, at least for some of us, the real thing. This is undoubtedly true: we trained ourselves, and each other, in a kind of nihilistic, hate-filled solipsism and self-referentiality that led us into ever decreasing social circles of fanatics, until we (or at least some of us) finally impolded into our lonely, hate-filled selves, like so many Raskolnikovs.
I once read about a tall bit-part actor with steely-blue eyes and a conveniently placed cheek scar who cut out a niche for himself playing SS officers &ct in the mny WW2 movies of the 1950s and ’60s. He started out as a humane man who had ambitious ideas for his acting career. He became more and more convincing in his Nazi roles, but flopped when offered other parts. Then he started ordering people about on set and talking to them like shit. Next he would answer his door in uniform and in character, then he started going to the newsagents or the pub in character. Even the Nazi parts dried up. He went insane, then died. Thank God there wasn’t a real Nazi Party for him to join, but I suppose in the 1930s there were many like him who enthusiastically joined the real NSDAP.
I don’t think that in our punk days we were that much different, those of us who went more than halfway down the road of no return. And we all of us knew people who went all the way down that road, and died in horrible circumstances in their teens, 30 years ago.
But you’re also right about the creativity. That was there, that was really there, and on the more positive side it is something to be recalled and celebrated, what isn’t utterly lost and forgotten. But what happened to the creative side? As I recall it wasn’t drugs, violence or self harm that finished it off, but the drab uniformity of fanaticism, and its side-kick, humourlessness. You’re dead right there.
Yes, Alistair, I know there were some punks who had gone through hellish childhoods of abuse, violence and care. I had a child with one of them. But there were plenty of others who had kind, loving parents who genuinely only wanted the best for their kids.
My Dad was a working class Cockney. In the closing days of WW2 and the ocupation of Germany. Working in radio signals he worked his nuts of at night school after the war and set himself in business (with the help of a certain notorious slum landlord and various other dodgy dealings) in the newly emerging consumer industry of television (selling, renting and servicing, not being on telly!). He did well for himself and moved out to Biggin Hill in Kent, and showered my sister and I with whatever we wanted, so that we would never know real poverty like he had as a child.
But selfish bastard here had to make out that he too was an “old cunt”, no different to the parents who were abusers, part of the system, part of the problem, not the solution, &ct, &ct. Sure, I grew out of it. But I look back in deep shame that some screwed up fanaticism made me think like that about someone who had only wanted the best for me and who supported me (against the police, for example), even when he knew I ws going wrong.
Looking back at the squats and housing co-ops I lived in, I can’t really recall anything positive about them. Nearly all I can recall is ever increasing drug abuse, alcoholism, violence, petty crime and fiddles, self harm, and fanaticism. Perhaps the early days, say the first month or two, at 66a was an exception.
Mike Diboll
April 9, 2009 at 7:15 pmJake:
I take your point about the eastern Mediterranean, its climate, topography and way of life; I really love it. I once lived for a year in Turkey, and much later spend a few months in Crete, well away from the tourist shite way up in the mountains. When you walk through the wild thyme and sage it is like a natural aroma therapy, and the quality of the light is utterly amazing. I spent a good few months in Sicily, in the near-Arab west of the island, that was really good too, ditto Sardinia. I once had a Maltese lover; the Maltee language is amazing, more or less Arabic written in Latin letters with lots of Italian, French and Latin words. The islands of the eastern and central Med still fascinate me, almost the Middle East or North Africa, but not quite, part of the EU, but hardly Europe: a living refutation of “the clash of civilizations”; civilizations can blend and meld too. I’d like to work in Lebanon, but these days I’m a family man and therefore (at last) “responsible”. Tomorrow I’m off to the Good Friday mass at the Catholic church in Manama, the capital of Bahrain. I’ll go to the mass in Arabic, where the congregation is mostly Leb or Syrian; many come over the causeway from Saudi, where churches are forbidden. Manama even has a small synagogue, and the Bahraini ambassedor to the US is a Bahraini Jew, whise ancestors were on the island before Islam. The mass celebrated in Arabic reminds me of the religion’s Middle Eastern origins. Yes, the olives, the pommegranates, the lemons, the wild thyme. . .so much better than all that hate-filled shit. But then the eastern Med has its own woeful history, and is no stranger to hate.
Graham Burnett
April 10, 2009 at 8:31 pmBut isn’t thinking that our parents were ‘old cunts’ part of the job description for being a young person, and always has been and always will be, just like being the first generation to invent sex?
Mike Diboll
April 10, 2009 at 9:26 pmSure, I take you point, Graham. But what shocks me is the sheer intensity of the way I thought then, the fanaticism. Everyone goes through that stage, but not everyone dwells on it and pushes it to its furthest conclusions. And is proud of it, proud in the worst possible sense.
Freud of course would say that the son’s existential struggle against the father is universal and therefore inevitable and we shouldn’t be surprised, &ct. That it’s the thing that divides the consciousness upon itself and is therefore the origin of the symbolic order, all art, all culture, &ct., &ct. But then who the fuck was Freud but one creative writer amid a plethora? A doctor? No! Certainly I wouldn’t want to be treated by him.
I’m sensitive to these things, as my own family life is complex: I have a daugher of 27, step children of 25 and 23, grandchildren of 11 and 4; a son of 12 and a daughter of 4 months. I try to be good to them all, but I’d hate it if my son thought the way I used to think about my father. My “older” children have every reason to think me an “old cunt”, and worse. But they don’t.
So my bit of paricidal fantasy was what, yet another pose? There is, I’m sure, a value in recalling our youthful egotism (otherwise I wouldn’t spend time writing it), but we should shy away I think from celebrating it, lest we become real “old cunts”, hyopcritically nostaligic about the “old days”.
Wasn’t there a punk song or two about that?
Mike
Sam
April 10, 2009 at 9:54 pmThe teenager was a 50s marketing invention. Apparently before that you were a child, then you left school and went to work and entered adulthood. I felt a lot of guilt too Mike, especially with the drugs. My folks knew I was fixing up smack and, as a parent I can only imagine the constant worry with no way of stopping it other than calling the law.
Having said that, we all grew up in a country that was still incredibly staid, rooted in medieval class ideas and institutionally racist and sexist. Siouxie Sioux grew up in Petts Wood, Kent (where my Grandmother lived and not a million miles from Biggin Hill, Mike) and it amazes me she was wandering around in all the fetish wear in 1974-5. Suburbia par excellence and she must have horrified all the retired colonels and little Englanders. The change was on the cards and we were lucky to be a part of it. Much of it turned incredibly dark, as has been said but, looking back on it, I always felt stifled by my upbringing and my parents DID drive me up the wall as a teenager. I still love them but what happens happens, and I wouldn’t really change a thing. The hard lessons I learned in regards to Anarchism and all that bollocks has stood me in good stead. Never trust anyone who claims to have the answers, be it politics, religion or anything else. And, people are people with all their faults and failings and imperfection is far more interesting than utopia.
Ian S
April 11, 2009 at 12:21 pm“Siouxie Sioux grew up in Petts Wood, Kent (where my Grandmother lived and not a million miles from Biggin Hill, Mike) and it amazes me she was wandering around in all the fetish wear in 1974-5. Suburbia par excellence and she must have horrified all the retired colonels and little Englanders.”
She probably had them scrabbling for the Yellow Pages to find out where the ‘She an Me’ fetish clothes shop was based (it was opposite Olympia in West London).
Graham Burnett
April 11, 2009 at 9:37 pmMike said >”we should shy away I think from celebrating it, lest we become real “old cunts”, hyopcritically nostaligic about the “old days”.”
Dick from Subhumans/Citizen Fish gave me a badge when I bumped into him at a Reclaim The Streets event a few years back which said “Old punks don’t die, they just stand at the back…”
On that note, I sometimes attend the Steve Pegrum (ex-Sinyx & Kronstadt Uprising) organised Southend on Sea ‘Punk Reunion’ gigs where greying, balding and paunched ex-punks from back in the day get together to reform the bands from days of yore, and indeed we do stand around like ‘old cunts’. Or so a much younger red mohicaned chappie made a point of yelling at us as he leapt around at the front, giving us the ‘wanker’ sign; “you’re a bunch of old cunts, where’s yer fuckin’ energy, all standing around tapping yer feet…”
5 minutes later I came across him sparked out unconscious slumped over a table near the bar, pint still in hand… Ah youth, eh?
Mike Diboll
April 11, 2009 at 11:39 pm“. . .gigs where greying, balding and paunched ex-punks from back in the day get together to reform the bands from days of yore, and indeed we do stand around like ‘old cunts’.”
Yes, but where was he when punk meant something (however fucked up those days seem from the perspective of a 50 year-old)? And slumped over a pint, eh? What ever happened to the heroic alcohol and drug abuse and “carry on wasted” ethos of my old wayward years?
For the record, I still have a full head of (long) hair, and the only grey that shows though is in my beard on those occasions whaen I’ve not been arsed to shave for a week or so. I put a huge amount of physical, emotional and intelectual energy into my very “kinesthetic” approach to teaching. And no gut either!
That said, I shouldn’t be flash about it. Sometimes I stare vacantly into an open fridge thinking “what the fuck did I open this fridge to get?” Then I get para about the prospect of some horrible brain disease catching up with me, born of past chemical abuse of the brain (especially my early 1990s MDMA phase, post-Islam, pre-Christianity).
/’in shaa’ aLLaah/, Deo volente, there’s no problem there. “And all shall be right, and all shall be right, and all manner of thing shall be right”, /’in shaa’ aLLaah/! Now my mother suffers from Alzhiemers, and my mother-in-law is in her 25th year of early-onset Parkinsons; both, apparently, brought on by those “Valley of the Dolls” years in the 1960s and ’70s when middle class (boo! hiss!) housewives were kept permentantly strung out on prescription tranqs.
I know of a few pub-rock pubs in and near Brighton (where my parents and sister now live) where “old” greying, balding pot-bellied once-punks go through the classics, where down a good few pints of wonderful real ale, Harveys fron Sussex, Adnams and Greene King from East Anglia, like a prisoner on his first day of freedom. How wonderful those first few pints are, the first downed in three gulps, after the fizzy largers and non-Irish Guinness on offer in Bahrain! At these gigs I certainly do more than “stand at the back”! Then regret it later, not because of a hangover, but because I know I must have looked like a silly fool the night before.
These are wicked sessions (in every sense), and musically on a par with the best I’ve been lucky enough to witness in my life: Sufi music in eastern Turkey; Pashtun qawali; jazz and blues in Chicago NYC and New Orleans; organ recitals in Sussex’s Anglo-Catholic churches; “Tribal” trance befoire it became a cliche; Dexys and Squeez in London pubs before they became famous; the Leonard Cohen and Dylan that this old fart listens to as he drives his classic Land Rover to work (car audio inaudible after about 40 mph).
Graham Burnett
April 12, 2009 at 12:02 amAlcohol (more specifically beer) was always my drug of choice Mike, I have a luverly bottle of Hopback Summer Lightning beside me as I type, and I’ve always liked pub culture (proper pubs that is), even in the punk days a good percentage of my socialising was with my non-punk friends over real ales in ‘proper’ boozers… Maybe that was what kept me from the nihilistic spirals of self-destruction that you so eloquently described before… Even when I used to go to the late (un)lamented Autonmy Centre in Wapping which was one of my first encounters with the darker factionalism and implosiveness of the Anarcho-punk scene I used to nearly always stop off at the Prospect of Whitby just around the corner for a couple of pints beforehand. I’m afraid I never really ‘got’ drug culture. I took speed once in a mod club in 1980 and fell asleep, and dropped a handful of my mate’s mums Vallium on the night of the Queens Jubilee in 1977 and spent the night roaming the streets spraying anti-royalist graffitti and pulling down bunting set up for the next days street parties. As both of these drugs affected me in completely opposite ways to the ways they were meant to I never tried anything stronger. I’d probably spend the evening scowling at strangers rather than luvvin them up if I took MDMA… And smoking dope just makes me paranoid, not touched it for years…
Mike Diboll
April 12, 2009 at 1:05 am“Alcohol (more specifically beer) was always my drug of choice Mike, I have a luverly bottle of Hopback Summer Lightning beside me as I type”
Stop it, you’re torturing me! I forgot to mention Shepherd Neame (an the old joke to the bar made about “Give me a (Bishop’s) Finger), and London brews Fullers and Youngs. I never quite got the thing about northern beer. . .utter piss!
The “Prospect”, tell me about it! In the late ’90s I used to live in Rotherhithe across the river. Weekends, I’d get the East London Line to get an authentic Bengali takeaway over Wapping way, taking in on the way the Mayflower directly opposite on the other side of the river, then the Prospect. My wife always complianed how the curry was cold.
Years before, I’d sat frowning in the Prospect over anarchist copy before taking it to Little @ printers.
My wife and I were married in St. Mary’s Rotherhithe, directly across the river from Little @ (by then yuppie apartments) in December 1997, by Fr. Nick, a quite boozy Anglo-Catholic priest who’d know the area in its really bad old (gangster) days. He died of a heart attack a couple of year ago, God bless “Nick the Vic”, as he was fondly remembered in the Bermondsey pubs.
My even boozier mate Ray ran “La Maison” restaurant in Rotherhithe, just across from St. Mary’s. He was the real “Cockney lad made chef”, not at all like that Mockney twat Oliver (they’d been at the same chef’s school). Ray was a diamond geezer, until some drunken fuckwit stabbed him to death in his restaurant in 2003. God bless him too, this Easter Sunday.
Even though his menu was expensive and quite beyond my means except on anniversaries, &ct he used to call me in when he saw me coming back with said weekend Bengali curries, and used to invite me in for a wine bucket or too. So the curry was even colder when I got in, and my poor darling wife that much more vexed.
As for the rest of it, the chemicals, the opiates, &ct., don’t regret not doing it. Drugs fuck you up! I’m not being ironic (well, I am a bit); no, I’m being truthful. Seriously, I mean it. Something really terrible happened to someone I loved deeply at a time when if I wasn’t strung out I could have done something about it.
True, the chemicals open the doors of perception (really they do, at least until you get to depend on them), and opiates make ever kind conceivable kind of pain so, so distant (until you’re in agony without them). But all this comes at a terrible, terrible price.
You get a certain sort of insight too. For instance I can never take seriously cliches about “religion is the opium of the people” from ideologists who’ve never done opiates. But again, the price paid for the insights is far, far too high (sic). Leave it, don’t regret it. You did the right thing.
I’ll stick with my miserable Bahraini Heinekin, and phantasise about my first pint of Greene King I’ll down when, /’in shaa’ aLLaah/ I’m on my summer vacation in the UK. My wife and kids are in the UK for a month, so while they’re away I’ll endulge my other guilty pleasure, a nice cigar. Out here they’re tax-free and you can get a nice Cuban Cohiba for the price of a packed of Malboro Lites in the UK. Better fumiagate the house before she gets back though!
Penguin • Post Author •
April 12, 2009 at 1:31 amI always enjoyed going down the Prospect Of Whitby, still go there from time to time. Cider is the main thing for me nowadays, and even that little luxury is quite a rare occurence compared to what I would or could swallow up on a binge in the past…Have dabbled a fair bit in most of the grade A’s. Knocked it all out to touch now thankfully.
Mike Diboll
April 12, 2009 at 2:03 amMy very last experience with illegal d-rugs was at my wedding reception in a Bermondsey pub in December 1997. A mate brought along shed loads of Uncle Carlos from Columbia as a wedding present. It went well with the Champagne. That was the very last time, and I’ve not at all missed any of it since.
Yes, I like a pint. But then I like a sunrise and the smile on my baby daughter’s face; I like the velvet black of a desert sky with 3-D stars and milky way, distant glaxies and the International Space Station racing Venus agains the evening sky (the air’s that clear deep in the desert; I like a good book, the more obscure the better (recent bedtime reading: a 800 page history of the American Civil War, a biography of St. Augustine, and various obscure grammars of dead Middle Eastern languages); I like the smell of my wife’s hair when it’s wet, and so on and so forth.
Against all this, the chemical illusions and alkoliod succour are pretty weak stuff. But what I’d do for a pint of Adnams right now:
“Hurry up Harry come on. weeee’re goin’ down the pub. . . .” What was ever the harm in this little bit of blokey mindlessness. A little cry of joy, however naff, silenced by the humourlessness of never-neverland radicalism and self-harming “existentialism”. Whatever. . . .
Graham Burnett
April 12, 2009 at 3:47 pmHere’s some more recent images from Dial House from various courses and visits over the last few years http://www.spiralseed.co.uk/course/coursepics.html
Last years Permaculture Design Course http://www.flickr.com/photos/naturewise/sets/72157610904406458/
General Dial House garden pics http://www.flickr.com/photos/naturewise/sets/72157606434334532/
Permaculture for Children and families weekend July 2007 http://www.flickr.com/photos/naturewise/sets/72157601260257795/
Mike Diboll
April 12, 2009 at 7:22 pm“About community and the romantic mindset. It was dark. Maybe they were dark times.”
I always try to impress on my students that Romanticism isn’t just about a bunch of druggy idealists who lived circa 1790-1836, but that we live with the regretable fall out from Romanticism today.
Romanticism isn’t just about hosts of golden daffs & that sort of thing. There’s “Dark Romanticism” that starts with Coleridge’s poetic fables, then Byron’s so-called “Satanic” Romantic egotism (“Manfred” & stuff), goes on to Frankenstine, Edgar Alan Poe, Stoker’s Drac., and eventually Lovecraft & similar, the modern horry story and horror movie, &ct. I suppose somewhere along the line that sort of Romanticism fed into the Golden Dawn, Crowley, et al.
But far darker was the way in which mainstream non-dark Romanticism developed in continental Europe, especially Germany. From innocent-ish beginnings in Beethoven’s musical tribute to Napoleon, to Wagner, to the Third Reich and the sort of Romantic Nazi nationalist aesthetic we see in “Triumph of the Will” and stuff, so skillful, and all the worst for it (what ever happened to Goethe?).
There was always that nasty anti-Semitic trend in Romanticism that contrasted the heights on depths of the European mind that climbed the Alps and sailed the depths with the shallow, desert-dust-dry rationality of the Jews (there’s a paralell trend in modern anti-Arab anti-Semitism).
There’s even an Anarchist-Romantic-Strausserite-Fascist-Third Positionist trend in the form of “National Anarchism”; former bootboys gone Green, now they’re too balding and pot-bellied to kick head? Maybe; but you can trace the intellectual threads back to Proudhon, Kropotkin, Stirner, et al.
Then there’s naff Romanticism that’s not so much dark as stupid, and is still alive and kicking in Hollywood, “Titanic”, Valentine’s Day, and that sort of thing.
Come back Wordsworth, all is forgiven! But then in late middle age he forsook his quasi-pagan pantheism for Trinitarian Christianity in the form of the C of E, old fart!
Why do I write this stuff? To show of my book learning. Perhaps. But more than that, looking back I can see they way all these big picture intellectual and artistic currents fed into my TG and other punk work, although at the time I was too ignorant, arrogant, and pig-headxed to admit it.
University? Pah! What could that teach me?
Sam
April 13, 2009 at 12:36 amI think Triumph of the Will is bastardised Classicism Mike. If you take Romanticism to be generally about nature being dominant/a fascination with non-western culture and thought and a fascination with the subconscious mind, Naziism really deals with a perverse rationalism. The will, logic and the intellect are very classical ideas.
If you take the love interest out of Titanic, it’s the greatest Romantic event in history. Man’s intellect coupled with technology produces unsinkable ship. Nature swats it out on maiden voyage. I think Romanticism and its repercussions are very much with us today. And you can’t beat Turner, Goya, Blake and the rest. Funnily enough I think punk was unique for a while in that it didn’t really fit into any earlier models. Hippy was very romantic – personal liberty, free love, drugs, India, rural idyll etc..
Punk may have complained about tower blocks and urban hells but we weren’t going to live in a teepee. Bloody Crass had to spoil it didn’t they?
Sam
April 13, 2009 at 5:38 amAnd your talk of pubs and ale has slayed me. I feel your pain. My chief pleasure in returning to Blighty is sitting in some old, woody pub with a bunch of good mates and bullshitting. It is very heaven. And all the pubs are going apparently to be replaced by apartments or theme pubs. Some of the pubs I’ve frequented are 200-300 years old. Three centuries of unique character and pissed up philosophising, passion (of all persuations) and humour. There are no pubs in the States. There are great bars but the British pub is a singular animal that cannot be replaced.
Mike Diboll
April 13, 2009 at 6:52 am“My chief pleasure in returning to Blighty is sitting in some old, woody pub with a bunch of good mates and bullshitting. It is very heaven. And all the pubs are going apparently to be replaced by apartments or theme pubs. . .”
I could wax lyrical about a few I know, but obviously you know the vibe. Yes, the woodier and older the better, and obviously the wider the selection of ales the better to! Than there’s country pubs vs city pubs, &ct; but they’re all wonderful in their special ways.
I wonder if I’d still feel the same way if I lived in the UK? Certainly absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that, but I was hardly a stranger to “the pub” when I lived there.
Still, not being able to take it for granted does help. Like with weather. How I love England’s moody, changable climate, especially deep autumn, serious winter, and early spring, the amazing effects of low angle light on clouds and water, the subtle, illuminated menage of greys.
People in England think I’m nuts whan I talk like that, but I think if I see one more palm tree, sand dune or turquoise sea I’ll pull my hair out. It’s starting to seem odd to me that people in the UK spend great chunks of their disposable income to see these things for a week or two.
Anyway, back to pubs. A different sort of pleasure in the late ’70s was the pub rock pub, pub rock bands, &ct. I’m pretty sure these have gone the way of all things by now, apart from amature band nights in locals, which can be very good.
The British pub, especialy the “Free House” (beer not free, alas) has indeed been under threat for decades, from theme bars, chains, &ct. I hear the latest threat is the economic crisis. If all one wan’t to do is get pissed, it’s far cheaper to stock up at the local supermarket than pay 3 GBP per pint in a pub.
You see old pubs turned into all sorts of things nowadays: doctors’ surgeries, solicitors offices, mosques, appartments. The old Prince of Orange in Rotherhithe used to be an excellent jazz pub, now it’s 10 little flats.
The US sports bar is an institution. I like to get a stool at the bar and watch my $20 bill reduced to shrapnel (which doesn’t take too long these days) while I try to make sense of gridiron on the bank of TV screens before me.
More than that I like the almost subterranian old bars nestled away deep in the bowels of public transport termini in NYC and Chicago. Again, your large bill gets reduced to small change as you wash down sour mash with some pissy larger-like brew and listen to the rush hour commuters come and gossip and go, while the barman’s heard it all and knows who comes and goes at what time almost to the second.
Takes you back in your imagination to the days when such bars would have been thick with smoke and the men all wore hats.
Mike Diboll
April 13, 2009 at 7:01 amHi, Sam:
Re Triumph of the Willies (weak humour, I was thinking of all those coal scuttle helmets and Roman salutes), I think the Romanticism comes in at the beginning: it’s all just clouds and mountains (like one of Wordsworth’s or Shelley’s mountain odes), Nazi tunes are played by what sounds like a Bavarian um-pah band, and gradually medieval Nurnberg appears through the clouds, all flags and gabled rooftops as the Furher’s three engined Fokker descends like some neoplatonic ideal of Germany made steel. Streams of SA cross ancient bridges like so many ants, simple farmers gaze up at the heavens, hysterical women and children jump up and down, waving and smiling, &ct, &ct. There are huge chunks of Romanticism in the whole Volkisch thing, but you’re right, the rest of it is cod-Classicism, all those squares of uniformed Nazis and massed public choreography, &ct. Mike
Graham Burnett
April 13, 2009 at 10:36 am> Anyway, back to pubs. A different sort of pleasure in the late ’70s was the pub rock pub, pub rock bands, &ct. I’m pretty sure these have gone the way of all things by now, apart from amature band nights in locals, which can be very good.
Interesting that you talk of taking the sights of the Middle East for granted, when pub rock pubs is what I used to take for granted, living here in Southend on Sea, once R’n’B capital of the universe and brought up on a diet of regular gigs by Wilco Johnson, Dr Feelgood, Lew Lewis, Eddie and the Hot Rods, etc, etc, and many many third rate chancers who wanted to jump on the band-wagon… I think that is why punk felt so very very fresh at the time, especially local lads like the Machines and The Sinyx who if nothing else bucked the trend for doing umpteenth covers of Route 66. And of course learning that Crass lived just down the road… Possibly this is false memory syndrome again, but I’m sure I used to see the Mini with the horses painted on the side that is on the cover of Feeding The 5000 parked around Southend.
Now of course the pub rock movement has indeed all but gone, the few pubs that do still have live entertainment mainly hosting ‘tribute’ acts and covers bands, which although sometimes entertaining are hardly groundbreaking in their creativity or innovativeness… Like Joni Mitchell once sung, “Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got til its gone…”
Ian S
April 13, 2009 at 12:24 pmMike wrote:
“Maybe; but you can trace the intellectual threads back to Proudhon, Kropotkin, Stirner, et al.”
Never read Stirner or Proudhon, but in the case of Kropotkin, I don’t see how that can be.
Re. pubs closing. Loads have closed in recent years in south-east London. Even ones that turned a modest profit have been shut – the pubco’s figured they’d make more money selling them to developers to be turned into ‘luxury flats’. Or at least that was the case during the property boom years.
The smoking ban hasn’t helped either, nor cheap booze in supermarkets. It’s a shame. There was a pub rock compilation CD put out year before last – lots of stuff by Roogalator, Radiators from Space, The Pirates and others. Only the Dr Feelgood tracks sounded any good imo.
Mike Diboll
April 13, 2009 at 10:17 pmHi Ian:
First let me stress that of all the thinkers who might come under the (very) broad definition of “Anarchist” Kropotkin is perhaps the only one for whom I have any time these days (tellingly, in my old extremist days I used to think “prince” Kropotkin was the most compromised and “bourgeois” of the Anarchist thinkers).
For instance, Kropotkin had credentials as a serious scientist (more so, say, than Engles), particularly his ideas about “mutual aid” as an alternative motor to evolution to “survival of the fittest”, “nature red in tooth and claw” &ct that are accepted so unctitically these days.
Today evolutionists opposed to crude neo-Darwinists like Dawkin’s are reinventing Kropotkin’s mutual aid wheel, unaware (I think) of what the anarchist prince pioneered, Brian Goodwin is a case in point, and in an earlier generation E. F. Schumacher.
Some of Kropotkin’s social-economic-political ideas come very close to the ideas espoused my Catholic Distributivist thinkers like G. K Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc, and Pope Pius XIII.
Part of me is quite sympathetic to various forms of either Anarchist or Catholic Distributism as an alternative to free-market capitalism or socialism. However, I also know that looked at from a different perspective these ideas feed in to Strasserite Nazism, Moseley’s BUF Fascism, and more recent post-NF and BNP “Third Positionist” post-Fascism.
For that matter, they also feed into Blairite arguments about the “Third Way”, and I’ve made a stand about this in print in my articles “The Duce of Downing Street” (Times, 6th August 1999), “Unite Against the Centre” (Spectator, November 1999), “One Nation Under a Groove” (Tribune, December 1999), and my contribution “Democracy Direct?” to the book “The Rape of the Constitution” (Imprint Academic, 2000).
Was Blair a fascist? I would argue that he came closer to it than many people realise. Am I saying that Kropotkin was a Nazi, or that Mosley was an Anarchist? Of course not.
But what I would say is that ideas that one is for good, humane reasons sympathetic to can lead into disturbing directions. I had a wake up call over this (and went into deep denial over it) during my anarcho-punk days when I found out about Pol Pot’s adoption of certaain Anarcho-Syndicalist ideas.
I agree with Sam on this one, that all this goes to show the impossibility, unworkability, and unpredictability of political utopianism. Of course, one could convincingly argue that “Third Positionist” former bootboys are just jumping hypocritically on green and anti-globalisation bandwagons. No doubt they are.
Yet on a deeper level the fact remains that there are so often genuine conceptual and theoretic consistencies between political ideas that one loves, and others that one loathes.
Let’s get back onto the pub rock thing!
alistairliv
April 14, 2009 at 8:04 amBefore going back to the pub, what about Hegel? As part of my Galloway Levellers research, I have just discovered that he was interested in and influenced by the theories of political economy first developed in Scotland e.g.
James Steuart’s Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (1767) and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776).
Engels and then Marx critiqued Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where Hegel discussed political economy and then – mostly Marx -developed the critique at great length. Can’t say much more, since still researching Hegel’s Scottish sources.
Mike Diboll
April 14, 2009 at 8:49 amAlistair, I don’t think Hegel would be particularly endebted to Smith so far as the German’s idealist philosophy of Spirit goes.
Nevertheless, it seems very likely that he might have been influenced by Smith’s economic-political ideas. At the very minimum, he would have read the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment as part of his backgound reading into the thought of the generation previous to him.
That said, the Smith quote on the new-ish 20 GBP note about the “manufacture of pins” always winds me up and brings out the small-minded little Englander in me, since I feel I can discern Gordon Brown’s chewed-nail fingerprints all over it.
But then what goes around comes around. Wasn’t Elgar once on that note during Thatcher or Major’s days?
Re Green, post-Fascist, anti-Globalisation, peacenik National Anarchist former bootboys I should of course have added “Now they’re too fat to fight. . . .”
Of course, we all know that all Hitler wanted was peace. . . “Piece of Poland, piece of France, piece of Czechoslovakia. . . .” Not that much of an improvement on “Triumph of the Willies”, I know, but I’m trying to reinstate my sense of humour.
The bootboys who used to strike terror into many of us at gigs are now pushing 50 or past it, and might well be too fat and sclerotic to fight these days, but the other problem they face is that those who would have been their new recruits are too strung out on cheap smack cut with with quinine and bicarb, or too pissed on White Lightening cider to be arse with even the most mindless political ideology.
Sam’s right about the “cool” generation of teens, pre-teens, and young adults whose minds are numbed by braindead consumerism. Now my son’s not too far away from his teens I try to steer him away from that with active things like Rugby and driving my old 4×4 in the desert. But perhaps I’m fighting a losing battle. I deeply loathe the TV he watches and the computer and Internet games he gets sucked into, but what can I do? And how it winds me up when he says “Awesome”, I can hear Blake rolling in his grave.
Anyway, if the “cool” generation are, relatively speaking, the “haves”, the “have nots” are said cheap smack and White Lightening imbibers, the post code shootings lot, deluded nutcases who think they’re in something called “Al Qaeeda”, &ct.
Between the “cool” brigade and the other lot I can’t see the left and right wing ideologues of our youth making much headway.
Ian S
April 14, 2009 at 2:05 pmMike, yes I like Kropotkin too. ‘Mutual Aid’ remains an interesting book, while ‘The Conquest of Bread’ and ‘Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow’ seem more rooted in the conditions and possibilities of Russia as it was over a hundred years ago.
‘Mutual Aid’ was intended in part as a counter-balance to the social Darwinism of the likes of Francis Galton. But Dawkins isn’t a social Darwinist by any stretch of the imagination. Some assume he is, because his best-known book is titled ‘The Selfish Gene’. But that book isn’t an apology for everyday selfishness; instead Dawkins was trying to promote the then newish idea of the gene as the primary focus of selection, rather than the group or the individual organism.
Gene-centric selection remains poorly understood outside evolutionary biological circles, probably because it is counter-intuitive and bound up with statistical thinking, which most people unfortunately aren’t taught much about at school.
It seems that ‘National Anarchists’ only comprise a handful of quite odd people involved in things like Neo-Folk music, they’re not at all significant. They might like Kropotkin’s rejection of the law of comparative advantage and economic specialisation of countries, but presumably for very different reasons to Kropotkin. Racial or ethnic nationalism remains fundamental to such people’s outlook – race is to them like class is to Marxists.
Alright, pub rock. I remember loads of pub rock venues in West London, such as the Red Cow, the Nashville and the Fulham Greyhound. But I was too young to get into those places in the heyday of pub rock. Punk and new wave killed pub rock by siphoning off the most energetic and original acts – 101’ers, Kilburn and the High Roads, Squeeze etc imho.
Mike Diboll
April 14, 2009 at 7:38 pmLet’s go back to the pub. One of the things I feel really nostalgic about is the “philosophical” or “political” pub conversation, preferably with the participation of friends you don’t entirely see eye-to-eye with, preferably within earshot of a few folks who’s horizons don’t stretch that far beyond the Premier League (or FA cup, there wan’t no such thing as t’Premier League when I were a lad an’ th’ England team earned 10 bob for winning th’World Cup).
The challenge in such circumstances was always to struggle to retain the thread of one’s argument, pint after pint, round after round, struggling against sluring speech, the need occasionally to get a round in or go for a pee, and the irritating noise made by those untermench, lumpenprolateriate, or whatever who’ve simply come to have a good time on a Friday or Saturday night.
The wonderful thing is that before too long everyone would lose the thread of their argument, their control over speech, &ct., and submit to the hegeomony of “des autres” (in fact, perfectly sensible, intellegent people), who’d merely gone to the pub to have a good time on a Friday or Saturday night.
Of course, the pub has to offer a range of wicked (“awesome”?) real ales, and you’d need a time machine so that you could still smoke in the pub. A pub rock band tuning up JUST as you were about to get to your clinching argument is also essential.
Part of me suspects that punk had more than a little to do with the demise of the old pub rock pub, what with glasses being used for purposes other than drinking, and mini left vs. right Spanish Civil Wars erupting every other gig.
Still, those were the days. Who would pay 20 quid (before drinks) to see, say, the tribute band “Utter Madness”, when you’ve seen the real Madness in the Dublin Castle (a smaller venue than the tribute one), 30 years ago, or there about. And I don’t even like Madness!
Alas, those days, probably, have gone, or are going. For from what I see in my capacity as an occasional tourist to the UK is that the sports bar, the DVD jukebox, and the semi-club pub has totally taken over, drowning out with all manner of irreverant drivel the pub debates of the pissed up existentialists, Marxists, anarchists, and on-the-dole literary buffs (no diss intended, I’ve been them all).
Here in Bahrain I live a ten minute walk or 2 minute drive from Bahrain RUFC, a Mecca throughout the Gulf region for alcohol abuse and pubbery. In fact I chose my house on Google Earth before I came here for exactly that reason.
It’s about as close as you could get to a British local, although it’s very spit ‘n’ sawdust and the only brew worth drinking (Guinness) is 5 GBP per pint.
It is of course a sports bar, but in the good sense that there are three full-size pitches attached, and most days of the week various RU, RL, Aussie Rules, Gaelic Football, Gridiron, & Soccer teams traipse through in sudded boots to sink pints and run riot.
Teams come from across the Gulf because of Bahrain’s “liberal” alcohol laws (now there’s a subject for a pub debate, “Liberal in what sense), and we host the Inter-Gulf Gaelic Football Festival which, as you might imagine, has to bee seen to be believed. RN Rugby and USN Gridiron teams are also a regular fixture.
Still, not much scope for the “intellectual” pub conversation once two teams and their supporters have come in from the field of battle.
Then there’s that other “existential” pleasure of my stupid youth: being on my own in a pub, say a nice country one, or a dockers’ pub when it was quiet in the afternoon, and READING A BOOK, preferably a hugely controversial one, or ludicrously intellectual one, left cover up of course when you go to get a pint or have a pee, over a five hour, five pint afternoon session. I even did cut ‘n’ paste work on TG in those circumstances (in those days literally cut ‘n’ paste).
Like so much else, all that is behind me know, and I wouldn’t be happy if my son did it (old fart)!
Mike Diboll
April 14, 2009 at 8:03 pmRe driving back from the Rugby Club, I ought to say that I DO NOT DRINK AND DRIVE, at lesat not on public roads, Bahrain has terrible road carnage.
There’s an off-road route I take to my house, through some Bronze Age burial mounds (I shit you not). I usually mutter the Islamic prayer/apology “as-salaamu ‘alaykum, yaa ‘ahl qubur”, “peace be upon you, oh people of the graves” as I trundle through in my old ’84 V8 stick shift Range Rover.
This minor infringement is nothing compared to what the Bahrainis do to their ancient monuments, bulldozing them for speculative property developments, &ct.
Land Rovers are infinately recylable, being built meccano style and therefore can be kept going no matter what. And it’s better of road than modern 4x4s (although it’s crap on road).
70% of a car’s energy use/carbon footprint comes from building it and scrapping it, only 30% comes from emissions throughout the life of the car, so the old Range is greener than green compared to even modern “green” cars, 15 mpg fuel consumption notwithstanding.
Here petrol is tax free, in fact it’s subsidised, so that it works out at about 12p per lire!
Ian S
April 14, 2009 at 8:08 pmHave to add one thing to your list of pub wants . . .
A pub where the staff leave you alone if you fall asleep. They keep an eye on you, but they don’t do all that shaking and waking nonsense or give you your marching orders.
(Very cruel thing to do if it’s all sunny and bright outside.)
Sam
April 14, 2009 at 8:15 pmNot too many bars around here as we live in the Bible Belt, but me and my wife lived in NYC for 3 years and we went to some good ‘uns. Having the 11.00pm British witching hour firmly imbedded in my subconscious I’d always find it surreal to ask someone the time. I’d expect something like 12.30pm and it’d be 5 in the morning. Funnily enough I rarely got plastered in the way I did in England. Subconsciously you tend to drink a bit slower. No wonder Britain has always been violent. 8 pints in 4 hours and EVERYONE turned out onto the streets at the same time.
Last time I came back to London I went with Si to The (glorious) Prince of Wales in Highgate. I used to hate this part of the world with all its monied connotations but The Prince of Wales is kind of a basement pub that you walk down into. Dark, old wood, wooden tables and chairs, couple of builders there after work, chalked menu. Sweet Mother of Pearl….I can taste that first foaming pint.
I remember shunning pubs during my druggie phase (alchohol was for wimps after all) and it wasn’t until me and Si started random pub crawls in the eighties that I rediscovered their uniqueness again. The finest route was ‘The Baker Street Run’ which took us from behind Oxford street to Baker street via a series of bizarre establishments. One was full of strange, theatrical old men who’d gather around a piano and sing wartime songs. I later saw them on a documentary on homosexuals in WWII. Another was frequented by Barbara Windsor and another was one of those pubs converted to a cocktail bar called ‘Champers’ or something.
London, I salute you.
Ian S
April 14, 2009 at 8:19 pm“One was full of strange, theatrical old men who’d gather around a piano and sing wartime songs.”
That pub is still there Sam, if we are thinking of the same one: the Golden Eagle in Marylebone Lane, just north of Oxford Street.
Here they are singing round the piano, recorded last year (just over 2 minutes long):
http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/mp3s/categories/Golden%20Eagle%201.mp3