Light Perpetual - remembering the New Cross V2 disaster

An eye catching, if slightly storm frayed billboard advert in New Cross Road announces the paperback publication of Francis Spufford's novel 'Light Perpetual'. Spufford has been teaching creative writing at Goldsmiths since 2008 and the novel is directly inspired by events in New Cross Road. As he explains in the book, 'for the last twelve years, I've been walking to work at Goldsmiths College past a plaque commemorating the 1944 V2 attack on the New Cross Road branch of Woolworths. Of the 168 people who died, fifteen were aged eleven or under. The novel is partly written in memory of those South London children, and their lost chance to experience the rest of the twentieth century'.

The premise of the novel is to imagine what might have been given some very slight alteration in circumstances - supposing a technical fault has caused the missile to fail during its journey, as many did, or it landed relatively harmlessly in a park rather than a crowded shop on a Saturday?

'That's time for you. It breaks things up. It scatters them. It cannot be run backwards, to summon the dust to rise, any more than you can stir milk back out of tea. Once sundered, forever sundered. Once

scattered, forever scattered. It's irreversible. But what has gone is not just the children's present existence [....]  It's all the futures they won't get, too. All the would-be's, might-be's, could-be's of the decades to come. How can that loss be measured, how can that loss be known, except by laying this

absence, now and onwards, against some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be still may still be'.

And so Spufford imagines how the lives of some of the children who died might have played out in the decades to come, what they missed out on and what the world missed out by their absence. I really enjoyed the novel but admit to being puzzled why he set a story that is so clearly tied to a real New Cross event in the fictional south east London borough of Bexford. But as he recently explained, 'I wanted to find a way of remembering the event that was faithful but not literal, so had to invent a London borough and drop a V2 of my own on to it, not to trample on anybody’s real grief'.

Memorials

There are actually two memorial plaques at the site (where the Iceland store now stands)- the first put up by Deptford History Group in 1994...

...and the second sponsored by Lewisham Council unveiled in 2009, as reported here.

As I roved out on Deptford Broadway

The events are also referenced in a song from 2012 included on the compilation 'Deptford Day: Songs About SE8'. 'As I roved out on Deptford Broadway'  by Neil Gordon-Orr imagines somebody looking back on their youth in the pubs and cinemas of New Cross and Deptford and missing his friends lost in the Second World War, including in the V2 attack.

As I roved out on Deptford Broadway

As I roved out one summer Sunday

To take the air on Deptford Broadway

Fell in with Jo and Sam and Susie

Says I who'll share my wages with me?

We had a quick dram in the Dover

In the Royal Albert we sipped some porter

Sam left with Jo and Susie after

She caught the tram and I fell over

I saw Susie the next Friday

In the Odeon kissed through a movie

Next week we danced in the New Cross Palais

Next year in St Pauls we were married

Now I sit here in the Granby

And all those years have gone behind me

So have a drink and sit beside me

My old friends' stools are all long empty

Sam never came back from the army

Jo crossed the seas when she got married

And Susie died right here in New Cross

When the rocket blew up Woolworths

Now I go walking every Sunday

I dodge the cars on Deptford Broadway

I think of Sam and Jo and Susie

And all the other ghosts beside me

The sunlight perpetual reflects off the gold letters on the billboard

'Come, other future. Come, mercy not manifest in time; come

knowledge not obtainable in time. Come, other chances. Come,

unsounded deep. Come, undivided light. Come dust' (Frances Spufford)

 

Joy Crookes - South London Songs

Joy Crookes at Queens Road, Peckham

Singer Joy Crookes has a new album out, Skin,  and very good it is too. She's been compared to Amy Winehouse, but she has a great voice of her own and her songs are rooted firmly in 2020s London. Joy grew up at Elephant and Castle and her songs reference various South London locations, notably the Elephant itself on the track '19th floor' which bemoans the changes there: 'Lost the tower where my heart is,  Cinema skylines that I don't recognise, Strip the life out of these streets,  It's a daylight robbery'. The song mentions 'Bopping down Walworth Road'

'When you were mine', a single from the album, has a Brixton setting - 'Hand in hand, Coldharbour Lane... Smile with a Brixton shine'.  The Ritzy cinema and Electric Avenue are namechecked and the video is filmed around Brixton market particularly the area near Brixton Rec.

 

Joy explored these streets on some of her earlier songs. London Mine (2019) is a kind of hymn to multicultural London with a video shot on Walworth Road featuring local faces including tailor George Dyer.  Lyrics include 'Lovers walk Old Kent Road' and Kennington Road is also mentioned.

 

There are kids playing football at Peckham Town's ground...

...and dancing in the now vanished Elephant and Castle shopping centre.

Another 2019 track, 'Two Nights' sings of 'runnin' through East Street with emotional baggage', and much of the video is shot in East Street market as well as at the Michael Faraday steel box memorial at the Elephant (erroneously believed by some to have once belonged to Richard James/Aphex Twin!)

Music Monday: The Battle of Lewisham 1977

Long time New Cross balladeers Ceri James and Mark Sampson have collaborated on a new single, 'The Battle of Lewisham 1977', released last week on the anniversary of the historic anti-National Front demonstration in New Cross and Lewisham (see lots of previous posts here for background to this)

Syd Shelton's iconic image from the 'Battle of Lewisham' show Darcus Howe with megaphone standing on toilets on Clifton Rise with the (now mostly demolished) Milton Court Estate tower blocks behind him

 Ceri says: 'Our single The Battle of Lewisham 1977 is out today on the 44th anniversary of the protest. Big thank you to everyone who helped out with this track. Lead vocals/guitars Mark Sampson/myself, bass Nathan Persad and drums Andre St. Clair Dyer. Bvs from Nathan, Andre, Alice Renouf, Caffy St Luce, Daryl Castillo, Clare Portman, Mark Salmon, Robert Robertson. NoNameKid for editing and Pat Collier mixing/mastering. Photography by Syd Shelton. All profits go to Love Music Hate Racism'.

The accompanying video features various local faces and was filmed at locations significant on the day, including Clifton Rise SE14 and the Lewisham Clock Tower.

'In Clifton Rise and New Cross Road, many decent people showed, 

to oppose their racialism and far right fascism...

The people united won't be defeated'

Music Monday: Elephants and Castles - Song for the Birds

We've featured some of  Elephants and Castles' South London-tinged songs here before, including Concrete Love (filmed in the now vanished Elephant and Castle subways) and The  World's Greatest Complainers, filmed in Jenny's cafe in Deptford.

Their latest single, Song for the Birds, was inspired by hearing birdsong down Deptford High Street during lockdown  'so we wrote a song back to them, trying to explain the shit show they've been looking down on over the past year or so'. The video was filmed in Deptford and Cornwall, featuring the band's Robin Spencer and Chris Anderson, as well as birds including a robin, great tit and waxwing I think. Never seen the latter in SE London, but a quick google search found an old Brockley Central posts with a photo of some in Arklow Road SE14.

You can support them by buying the single at their bandcamp site as well as on iTunes.

In case you missed their earlier lament to the demise of the Elephant and Castle shopping centre and the Heygate Estate, What's Left for Larry and Janet?, here it is:

Music Monday: Down on Deptford Creek by The Alan Tyler Show

Alan Tyler was the lead singer of The Rockingbirds, who in their early 1990s indie/country rock hey day put out a couple of albumns and a series of singles and EPs on Heavenly then Cooking Vinyl records.

A couple of years ago the Alan Tyler Show recorded their song 'Down on Deptford Creek':

The water’s rising with the tide
That comes in twice a day
The city streets are always near
But now we drift away

From muddy beds we’re lifted up
In boats that crack and creak
It’s time to strain the ropes again
Down on Deptford Creek

And though the wind is blowing low
And though my light is weak
I’ll see a moving picture show
Down on Deptford Creek

And when the tide begins to turn
And go back to the sea
A mossy wall shows velvet green
That used to be the quay

Where bigger boats had once come to
When Ha’penny Bridge was raised
Unloading cargo from afar
Back in the older days

Below the rumbling dockland train
Down in the waters bleak
I see the ages ebb and flow
Down on Deptford Creek

And when the sea has left the scene
It leaves a shallow flow
Where duck and wader, gull and grebe
And heron come and go

To pick among the rank remains
For filthy foraged fare
In tangled twine a Christmas tree
A broken office chair

Up on a rung my fisher-king
Above the sea-birds’ shriek
Surveys the silver in the stream
That swims in Deptford Creek

A flash of blue, a dip, a dive
A tiddler’s in its beak
I hope that I’ll see you again
Down on Deptford Creek
I hope that I’ll see you again
Down on Deptford Creek

from The Alan Tyler Show, released March 17, 2015
Words and music by Alan Tyler (published by Bucks Music

Definitely one more for the South London aongbook

Cutty Sark - Camberwell Now

Last weekend 40,000 people including both myself and the world's greatest endurance runners ran round the Cutty Sark in the course of the London Marathon. The week before thousands more were in the area for the Tall Ships festival. Since the ship was first put in in dry dock in Greenwich in 1954 it has become an iconic part of the SE London landscape.

The Cutty Sark was built on the Clyde in 1869 and in its heyday transported tea and possibly opium between Britain, China and India. For me, it has an ambivalent meaning as simultaneously a loved local landmark (mile 6 and a bit of the marathon no less); an impressive product of the ingenuity of human labour (my dad did his engineering apprenticeship in the Clyde shipyards, obviously in a later period, so I have a romantic appreciation of their products);  a vehicle of both colonial plunder and global connections.

Some of this ambivalence is expressed in the song Cutty Sark by Camberwell Now from their 1983 album Meridian (1983):

I dream of empire, I dream of sailing ships

A fortune beneath their decks

Heavy with cargo, copper and ivory

I cross the ocean from one land to the next

I trade the space between, I cross the ocean

I trade the space between

Up in the crow's nest or down in the hold

I hear the ocean sing to me

It sings to me of another way of life

I ignore it, I choose to ignore it

I work with chart, compass, latitude, longitude

A world of reference points

To cross the ocean, measure the space between

Still this singing insists and insists

Won't go away, won't leave me be

It sings to me of another way of life

I ignore it, I choose to ignore it

I ignore its melody

Camberwell Now were formed in 1982 by Charles Hayward and others previously involved in influential experimental band This Heat.

Music Monday: Steven Ball - Collected Local Songs

Steven Ball's Collected Local Songs, released in February, is an album that is as local as it gets in terms of Deptford. Ball describes it as 'a collection of songs of quotidian and local reflection, mostly constructed from everyday language, observations, overheard conversations, encounters, signs, community notices, announcements, phrases from historical texts about Victorian social life; from around and about the neighbourhoods of Deptford and New Cross in South London; using simple compositional structures, recorded with minimal instrumental setting'.

Reviewing it in The Wire (April 2015) , Sukhdev Sandhu described it thus: 'a drifting, sometimes aleatory assemblage of signs and signals encountered in South London's Deptford and New Cross. Ball sees the city as plunderphonic terrain, and this music is built up from layers of centrifugal texts... Memories, fragmented and not always lucid, act as bulwarks against capitalism's amnesia. The city is battered but not down for the count'.

The first track, Beautfiul Shoes, conjured up images of 'walking and falling'..

'across Creek Road
and then down the High Street
into Douglas Way
Amersham Vale
Amersham Grove
right into Edward Street
left down the High Street
across Creek Road
into Watergate Street
up to the river
and back down
Watergate Street'

'Deptford Flea Market interlude' includes sampled sounds from down the market.

I believe Steven Ball will be releasing some more material shortly via Hither Green-based Linear Obsessional Recordings.

Lewisham McDeez

Lewisham McDonalds gets its dues at last in this grime track from Novelist - 'I wanna sit down with my fillet-o-fish bruv'

Knocked 'Em in the Old Kent Road

Former Hollywood child star Shirley Temple (1928-2014) died this week. Once upon a long time ago she sang a South London song in 'The Little Princess' (1939), loosely based on the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Fallen on hard times as a servant girl, she searches the Veterans Hospital for her missing father, entertaining the inmates along the way with a few verses of 'Knocked 'Em in the Old Kent Road'.



Others who have sung the same song have included Marlene Dietrich in the 1950s. In 1954, 'Dietrich swept on to the "Night of a Hundred Stars" at the London Palladium with Noel Coward. The glamorous pals faked a cakewalk to "Knocked 'Em in the Old Kent Road", a number neither of them really knew, but nobody minded, for they raised £10,000 for the Actors' Orphanage' (Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend by Steven Bach, 2011):



...Julie Andrews (in 1973)- this is awful -



... and best of all Fozzie Bear as a Pearly King in the Muppet Show (1978):



If all this is a terrible mockney/cockernee caricature, you could say the same about the original song. It was written in the 1890s by music hall star Albert Chevalier (1861-1923), with music by his brother Charles Ingle. Chevalier was born in Notting Hill to a French father and Welsh mother, hence his rather wonderful full name of Albert Onesime Britannicus Gwathveoyd Louis Chevalier.

Previously a professional actor, Chevalier specialised in writing 'coster songs' (costermongers were street sellers, especially of fruit and veg), using the costers' cockney slang. The full lyrics, with its tale of a Camberwell donkey being left in a will, are as follows:

Last week down our alley came a toff,
Nice old geezer with a nasty cough;
Sees my Missus, takes 'is topper off
In a very gentlemanly way;
"Ma'am," says he, "I have some news to tell,
Your rich uncle, Tom of Camberwell,
Popped off recent, which ain't a sell,
Leaving you 'is little donkey Shay."

Chorus.
"Wot cher!" all the neighbors cried,
"Who're yer goin' to meet, Bill?
have yer bought the street, Bill?"
Laugh? I thought I should 'ave died.
Knocked 'em in the Old Kent Road!

Some says nasty things about the moke,
One cove thinks 'is leg is really broke;
That's 'is envy, 'cos' we're carriage folk,
Like the toffs as rides in Rotten Row;
Straight, it woke the alley up a bit,
Thought our lodger would 'ave 'ad a fit
When my missus, whose real wit,
Says, 'ates a 'bus because its low."

When we starts, the blessed donkey stops,
He won't move, so out I quickly 'ops,
Pals start whackin' him when down he drops,
Some one says he wasn't made to go.
Lor ", it might 'ave been a four-in- and,
My old Dutch Knows 'ow to the grand,
First she bows, and then she waves 'er 'and,
Calling out we're goin' for a blow!

Ev'ry evenin' on the stroke of five,
Me and missus takes a little drive;
You'd say, "Wonderful, they're still alive"
If you saw that little donkey go.
I soon showed him that 'e'd have to do
Just whatever he was wanted to,
Still I shan't forget that rowdy crew,
'Ollerin' Woa! steady! Neddy woa! -

Another Chevalier song, The Cockney Tragedian mentions The Cut at Waterloo, opening with the line 'I used to wheel a barrow for my father down the Cut, until I saw a drama at the Brit what turned my nut'.

Music Monday: Ceri James - Blythe Hill Fields

South London/Welsh troubador Ceri James has a new clutch of songs to add to his transpontine collection, which has included songs about Deptford Broadway and a coffee shop on New Cross Road.  His latest hymn to the southlands is Blythe Hill Fields, included on his City Fields EP on Deep River Records, and honouring that little green patch of Lewisham (featured in photo). Stillness Road and Crystal Palace get mentioned too.

The video for the song was shot on the Big Red Pizza bus and its film trailer in Depford, as well as on Blythe Hill Fields obviously.

Music Monday: Pretty Maids of Greenwich

'Pretty Maids of Greenwich' is an old song in the 'don't marry a sailor' sub genre of English folk music. Sussex traditional singer Bob Lewis apparently learnt it from his mother.

You pretty maids of Greenwich of high and low degree

Pray never fix your fancies on the man that goes to sea

For seamen's wives lead careful lives when at their very best

For in my mind in stormy wind they can take but little rest.

Beside the many dangers that are upon the sea

When they are on the shore they will ramble where they please

It’s up and down in sea port town the seamen they do trade

And he that boast he spend the most, he’s a jolly blade.

I give you this advice now as you may understand

It being at the time when seamen come to land

For up and down in Greenwich town they’ll court both old and young

They will deceive, do not believe the sailors flattering tongue

Suppose you have a sailor who sails before the mast

If he’s best of husbands his breath is but a blast

The roaring waves their will have - there’s no man can with stand

And he may sleep in the ocean deep while you are on the land

Suppose you have a captain a person of great fame

And yet there is great danger in sailing on the main

For fate unkind and stormy wind might lay his honour low

And then his wife, with care for life laments his over throw

Give me an honest tradesman of high or low degree

I’ll never fix my fancies on a man who goes to sea

For a trades mans wife is a happy wife if he’s an honest man

He’ll take a share in all the care deny it if you can

In 1981 Tundra (Doug and Sue Hudson, with Alan Prosser) released a remarkable collection of songs linked with Greenwich, including a version of this song. The full track listing of Songs of Greenwich is as follows:

1. Greenwich Park
2. Pretty Maids Of Greenwich
3. The Rambling Sailor
4. Rebellion Of Watt Tyler
5. Admiral Benbow
6. The Greenwich Lovers' Garland
7. Homeward Bound
8. The Blackheath Burglar
9. The Jolly Sailor or The Lady Of Greenwich
10. So Handy
11. Jack At Greenwich
12. I'm Going To Leave Her Shallow Brown 

The album is currently unavailable - find out more at Gonzo's Music Cafe.

Music Monday: Ode to South London

Leon Rhymes of duo Too Many Ts has composed Ode to South London, a rap featuring puns on various Transpontine locations - e.g. 'foraging for florets of Brockley and its Walworth it'. The video was shot variously in Deptford, New Cross, Brockley, Ladywell, East Street, Old Kent Road, Greenwich, Tooting, Battersea, the Horniman museum and many other places.

Too Many Ts are on the line up for The Big Red Sessions on Tuesday 29th May 2012, a night of free music taking place in The Container - a truck trailer fitted out for performance at The Big Red Pizzeria, 30 Deptford Church Street, London SE8 4RZ (next to The Birds Nest pub)


Also taking part are Shanel Brown, Nick Capocci, Jean Genie’s Massive Hugs and Jamie Fisher. Doors open 7:30 pm, performances start at 8 pm (further details here). Drinks and pizza available of course in the big red bus.

Music Monday: Skinny Lister

Skinny Lister were featured on Transpontine a couple of years ago, a South East London folky outfit playing out at places like the Birds Nest (Deptford), Jam Circus (Brockley) and the Ladywell Tavern (the latter a Brockley Central gig), Now they look set for bigger things, signing for Sunday Best records (run by East Dulwich resident Rob da Bank) and currently touring the States where they have played everywhere from SXSW in Austin, Texas to Los Angeles.

Their first single on Sunday Best was released last week, featuring two fine tracks. 'If the gaff don't let us down' is a Pogues-style singalong shanty,  described by  the band's Dan Gray as follows: 'This self penned Skinny ditty is about longing for and returning to "dear old Deptford town"' where we all met up and started to play music together'. Dan and the band have put together a nice playlist of London songs for Q, explaining: 'London is close to all our hearts. Having fled our home towns and villages for the draw of its bright lights and all its promises; the band met, lived and loved in this great city... London is what brought Skinny Lister together and it continues to inspire us in our song writing as it has inspired those before. Even after many years living in the city, its romance doesn't fade. On these rotten streets our best days have been spent.'



  'we'll sail away tomorrow, back to dear old Deptford Town'

'The Plough and Orion' is a beautiful romantic song with video to match.

 

Their debut album is due soon, and to celebrate their return from the USA they are playing a free gig this Wednesday at the The Ship in New Cavendish Street, on stage at 7 pm.

Music Monday: Ceri James

Ceri James and his guitar have been a feature of the New Cross music scene for some time. His third solo album, The Lost Souls Parade, is out now and includes the song The Real Coffee Shop - not only a catchy upbeat number, but also a nice slice of cultural history celebrating an actual cafe in early noughties New Cross Road (think it was open for around 18 months from around 2000 to 2002, coinciding with the last days of the Goldsmiths Tavern in its wild south east phase). 


The Real Coffee Shop

Do you remember the coffee shop?
Well I admit that I almost forgot
And It was run by Robbie who was loved by Melanie
And it was open whenever you wanted to throw a party

I once saw the crackheads who were smoking in the alley
Beneath the posters of the latest rally
Did you get involved?

At the Coffee Shop A
 place that starbucks couldn’t stop
Somewhere South of The Thames
It was a real Coffee Shop

The building was in desperate need of some renovation
But inside you could always find a decent conversation
It opened just before the internet super highway and you could read a book there by Chomsky or Hemingway

Let’s say the toilet wasn’t always a pretty site
But you could smoke in the lounge all through the night or pass your spliffs if you liked
And it happened a lot

At the coffee shop
Somewhere in New Cross
They had things Costa didn’t stock
It was a real coffee shop

Student philosophers, artists, punks and hippies
All showed up to satisfy their curiosity
Side by side but never in complete harmony
But they tolerated each others company

Outside in the garden there were art installations
But the Police talked about the legal complications
There were undercover cops
At the coffee shop

Where we used to dance alot
It was South of the Thames
A place that Costa couldn’t stop

It attracted outsiders, travellers and renegades
And all kinds of music was DJ’d
Marathon guitar jams with mandolins and banjos
And someone playing on the out of tune piano

Live performers and other festivities
But I don’t remember ever buying a cup of coffee
It wasn’t necessary
When you went

To the coffee shop
Where we used to drink a lot
It was Somewhere in New Cross
They had things Starbucks couldn’t stock

Yes I remember the coffee shop
But the shenanigans had to stop
It all seemed to disappear somewhere into the ether
And the class A’s didn’t help much either

When Robbie needed to move away
The businessman next door opened a new cafe
And it was the end of the cabaret
At the coffee shop

A store that high streets haven’t got
Where we smoke a lot
Somewhere South of The Thames

The real Coffee shop
The real coffee shop

The video was shot in New Cross Road and includes some old footage from the Coffee Shop itself, which I believe was located at 310 New Cross Road. In fact the video was directed by Robert O'Meara, who was involved in running the Coffee Shop - apparently he is the Robbie mentioned in the song, and Melanie is the Mel who still runs Prangsta. Robert recalls: 'The Coffee Shop was a squat which turned a run down empty space into a vibrant hub and resource for the community'.

The Coffee Shop

The shop today - next door but one to Cafe Crema

Deptford Broadway

Back in 2004, Ceri's former band Zen put out another South London song: Deptford Broadway.

London Song

Happy New Year everyone, to get you in the mood here's London Song by French singer June Caravel. The song is seemingly made up of words from London street names, and the video features her singing by the relevant street signs from all over the city. South East London streets featured include Mint Street and Mermaid Court (SE1) and in Brockley, Darling Road SE4. The closing shot is in Greenwich Park.


(thanks to Mark B. for spotting this)

The Biggest Aspidistra in the World

The Biggest Aspidistra in the World was a hit song in the late 1930s for Gracie Fields, the quintessential Lancashire comedy singer. So it might seem strange to try and claim this as a South London song. Still years ago somebody told me that it was inspired by an actual aspidistra plant in Evelina Road in Nunhead - this is mentioned in passing in a couple of places online, but I can't be certain that they aren't just amplifying a rumour that I passed on to them!

The song was written in 1938 by Will E. Haines, Jimmy Harper and Tommie Connor (the latter also wrote I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus and the English version of Lili Marlene). Connor is on record as saying the inspiration for the song 'came when he was walking along a London street' and saw a woman in a window with a giant green plant (Our Gracie: the life of Dame Gracie Fields - Joan Moules, 1983). But the road in question isn't identified in this source. Can anybody confirm the Evelina Road connection, or maybe a connection between Tommie Connor and South East London that would make it plausible? He was born in Bloomsbury in 1904 and died in Farnborough (Kent) in 1993, so that leaves plenty of time in between to wander the streets of Nunhead!

Anyway the song does mention Crystal Palace, alluding to its destruction by fire in 1936:

We 'ave to get it watered
By the local fire brigade,
So they've put the water rate up 'arf a crown.
The roots stop up the drains,
Grow along the country lanes,
And they come up 'arf a mile outside the Town.
Once we 'ired the Crystal Palace for an 'ot 'ouse,
But a jealous rival went and burned it down.

Smiley Culture

Reggae MC Smiley Culture (real name David Emmanuel) died yesterday in as yet unexplained circumstances during a police raid in Surrey.

The South London MC went to Tulse Hill School (as did Linton Kwesi Johnson, and indeed Ken Livingstone) and was originally known as 'Culture Smiley. So named because of his refusal to chat 'slackness' in his rhymes, but renamed Smiley Culture by his management, David Emmanuel was a popular DJ with the Deptford-based Saxon sound system run by Lloyd 'Musclehead' Francis and Dennis Rowe' (Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, 1987).

In 1984/5 he had two groundbreaking hits: Cockney Translation and Police Officer. Dotun Adebayo recalled yesterday:

'My pioneering generation of black Britons wanted our own MCs, just as lovers rock a few years before had given us our own reggae singers. Out of that grew a much more vibrant and entertaining expression of second-generation black Britons based around the Saxon Sound System in Smiley's end of southeast London.

It was at a Saxon dance in Deptford in 1984 or 1985 that I first saw Smiley perform his cockney anthem. And you know, for the first time in my life I relished in being black and British ... and was proud of it. And it wasn't just me. I could see the same feeling in the 500 or so other youngsters in the place'.



Schooltime Chronicle is all about his time at Tulse Hill, which is name checked a couple of times in the track:



(I have the 12" of this somewhere, will dig it out and post the lyrics later)

See more at History is Made at Night

Deadboy - Brock Lee Riddim

Deadboy is a South East London bassnik who has put out some great tracks over the last couple of years including If U Want Me and U Cheated. As an oblique tribute to SE4 he has also made Brock Lee Riddim. Extolling the local area in an interview last year he said: 'it’s lovely here in the summer, there’s something tropical about it, probably the amount of trees and the parakeets.

MC Eksman - Ruff Neck Cockney in Brockley

MC Eksman (real name Kevin Forrester, born 1980) is one of the world's foremost drum and bass MCs and he comes from Brockley (he is also a University of Greenwich graduate). Not only that but he has a great rhyme about driving through the streets of SE4 and in that familiar 'young black man in decent car' routine, getting pulled over by the police. Herbz mentioned here is another South London MC.

Too much undercover police on the streets
On the beat, stopping me, giving me bare grief

I'm a Ruffneck Cockney
Driving through Brockley
See a police car
Policeman want stop me

regular stop and search
step outside your car please
turn the ignition off
give me the car keys

police officer, woah that's harrassment
where you coming from, I said a Drum and Bass bashment
where was the bashment? Down in Stratford,
where you goin now I'm droppin Herbz back to Catford...

Lucky Soul on Hilly Fields

Lucky Soul are SE London's finest purveyors of indie-pop-soul, and their new single honours the green heights of Ladywell - Upon Hilly Fields.



Following the earlier post on the closure of the Ivy House (SE15), Darryl at 853 has reminded me that Lucky Soul's 2007 video for 'Add your light to mine, Baby' was filmed in that very pub, and even features a shot of Darryl's arm.