![]() |
© Joe Dilworth |
Friday, October 10, 2025
The Cramps in Nunhead Cemetery (1990)
Monday, October 06, 2025
Music Monday: 'Welcome to the Party' - Professor Green in Brockley
Professor Green is often to be seen at coffee shops and similar in the Brockley area, so perhaps no surprize to see him filming his latest video in Coulgate Street, home of Parlez, Brown's and Broca. 'Welcome to the Party' gently self-mocks his journey from working class boy does good to 'one foot in the grave, one foot in the rave' deli lifestyle. Some very funny lines, e.g. 'I don't wear crocs, but I wear birkenstocks, they're not sliders, they're sandals, I like buying coasters and candles'.
Saturday, October 04, 2025
The Gig Guide - 1995 South London music listings
Monday, September 29, 2025
Music Monday: Martin Carthy celebration (and rehearsals in New Cross Road)
![]() |
Martin Carthy at the Ivy House in 2023 |
Saturday, September 27, 2025
Miners strike benefits 1984: Deptford, Woolwich, Old Kent Road with Test Dept, The Mekons and more
![]() |
Poster for the Albany gig by Brett Turnbull (sourced from Test Dept facebook group where there are some pics from the gig) |
Tuesday, September 16, 2025
Bermondsey Folk Festival 2025
Bermondsey Folk Festival is back on Saturday, 27 September 2025 in the Blue market (SE16 3UQ) from 12 noon to 5 pm, in an event that will feature Jacken Elswyth (amazing banjo player with Shovel Dance Collective), Cunning Folk (launching new album Folk Process 2), Bity Booker, Indika Akuus, Gemma Khawaja, Okinawa Sanshinkai and others.
The festival has been going in one from or other since 2015. I remember seeing the great Andy Irvine (Sweeney's Men, Planxty etc.) playing at the 2019 iteration at the Biscuit Factory. Incidentally Andy is back at the Ivy House SE15 in November at the Goose is Out folk club).
![]() |
Andy Irvine at 2019 Bermondsey Folk Festival |
Sunday, September 07, 2025
Cenotaph South - South London's poetic landscape
'Cenotaph South: mapping the lost poets of Nunhead Cemetery' (Penned in the Margins, 2016) by Chris McCabe is a remarkable book. Partly it is what it says on the cover – an exploration of some of the largely forgotten poets buried there including Marian Richardson and Albert Craig. But he also wanders over the wider South London poetic landscape, extending from Robert Browning's cottage on Telegraph Hill, through the cemetery and onto William Blake's Peckham Rye and then to Dulwich woods and village where the Crown and Greyhound pub ('the Dog') hosted poetry gatherings upstairs from 1940s to 1980s. He also mentions contemporary Peckham poets like Caleb Femi, performing at the Review Bookshop in Bellenden Road.
He goes in search of a hawthorn tree suitable for Blake's vision of angels on Peckham Rye and find the most appropriate candidate is to be a tree on the Rye Hill estate:
'Quaint English Bauhaus. There is a map of Peck Hill and Rye Hill Park Estate laid out in the colours of a Butlins map: south London joyland. I check the Rocque map, completed almost to the date that Blake was here: this would have been open fields, the edge of an enclosure separating the Rye from what was most likely private fields. I weave through the outskirts of the estate. The land around Frome House is lined with what look to be ancient trees, bark knotted in folds. The trees grow within yards of the windows of the flats, past the patched light that breaks through the skeleton of a scaffold. The trees are trying to grow inwards, towards the sun. There is what looks like a hawthorn here - gnarled and ancient-looking, awesome in scale, towering over the flats. This is a hawthorn to take on the oaks. A hawthorn worthy of any angel'.
We don't have to take literally that this is the tree - the details of Blake's childhood visions are sketchy to say the least - but I like the idea that it might be found not in the park itself but in nearby council estate.
In 'mapping out the woods, pubs, colleges and houses of South East London's dead poets' he finds the area to be 'the richest landscape of poetic activity in London'. Is it something about the hills, home to the muses in classical times according to Robert Graves so why not here too?
'The word muse, we are told, comes from the root mont, meaning mountain. I think of the high points around Nunhead cemetery, Telegraph Hill (where Robert Browning lived) and the higher neighbouring peaks of Sydenham Hill and Forest Hill. There is a pull to poets in these high points, an irresistible urge for the heights: light, perspective, space'.
Wednesday, September 03, 2025
Pagemasters Zine Fair 2025
Thursday, August 21, 2025
Band of Holy Joy at Dash the Henge
Dash the Henge in Camberwell has so much interesting stuff going on in addition to selling records, not to mention having a pop up Henge in Brixton arcade. This Saturday 23 August sees a performance at 5 pm by the legendary Band of Holy Joy, launching a new CD of poetic psychogeographical experimentation 'Data breach on haunted beach', also available at bandcamp.
Check out their Bad Punk show on Resonance FM too.
'to the broken bottled beach once more...'
Update after the gig:
Really enjoyed the performance at Dash the Henge, a stripped back BOHJ mainly performing from 'Data Breach...' with a spoken word tale of drugs, death and revenge on the North East coast. But they also played a few of their early favourites including Rosemary Smith and Fishwives, the latter's dysfunctional relationship now reconciled with a new ending where they go out together and join a Palestinian solidarity demonstration. Good to see some members of Test Dept there too, a band who like BOHJ started out in New Cross. Look out for some early unreleased recordings from them coming out soon, also look out for BOHJ doing a full band gig in Brighton on 26 October 2025.
Sunday, August 10, 2025
RIP Charles Gallagher (Dog & Bell) and Bill Mannix (Rivoli Ballroom)
![]() |
Charles Gallagher (1947-2025) |
![]() |
William Mannix (1938-2025) |
Friday, August 01, 2025
Lewisham 'Stop Starving Gaza' protest
200+ people out tonight at Lewisham Clock Tower for a 'Stop Starving Gaza' pot and pan protest, called by Lewisham Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Lewisham and Greenwich CND.
![]() |
Photo from Brixton Buzz |
Romy at the Old Nun's Head
Friday, July 25, 2025
New Cross Songwriters Circle
Saturday, July 12, 2025
The Torch of Anarchy: 1890s meetings in Southwark Park
Sunday, July 06, 2025
Music Monday: Kae Tempest 'Sunshine on Catford
Loving the new Kae Tempest album, Self-Titled, from a transpontine perspective the track 'Sunshine on Catford' in particular, which features Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys.
Sunday, June 29, 2025
Bermondsey Socialist Club 1890s
(these flyers and many other treasures to be found in the Max Nettlau papers at the Institute for Social History online archive)