Paul Simon in Catford, August 1965 (and other Catford folk tales)

Simon and Garfunkel released their first album,  'Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.', in 1964 but at the time this did not generate a lot of interest. While Art Garfunkel went off to college, Paul Simon came to the UK and honed his craft on the folk music scene, playing in folk clubs all over the country.

One of the places he played was at the folk club at the Catford Railway Tavern, on Friday 20 August 1965 (source: Melody Maker, 21/8/1965). I believe that at one time he also played at the Green Man on Blackheath Hill.

Melody Maker, 21 August 1965

By this time, Simon and Garfunkel were on the verge of bigger things. In the same month that Simon played in Catford, the duo performed on BBC TV on a Rolf Harris TV programme. Meanwhile a remix of their earlier song 'The Sound of Silence' was picking up radio play and sales in the USA, going on to reach the top of the US charts in January 1966. Paul Simon's days of playing in English pubs were over...

In this period Catford was quite a folk music centre. The club at the Railway Tavern at Catford Bridge (today the Catford Bridge Tavern) hosted many singers, including for instance American singer Julie Felix in November 1964 (Sydenham, Forest Hill & Penge Gazette, 13/11/1964).

A few year later the Rising Sun in Rushey Green hosted the regular 'Phoebus Awakes!' folk club, run I believe by one Dave Cooper (1939-2020). In 1967 for instance Scottish singer Nigel Denver was supported by Dave and Toni Arthur. The latter duo recorded the pagan-infused  cult classic 'Hearken to the Witches Rune' in 1970. Living in Lewisham (I believe at 18 Brandram Road SE13) the Arthurs hosted visiting US singer Jackson C Frank, who recorded his classic 'Blues run the game' while in London. Apparently he once closed off Lewisham high street by letting off a smoke bomb (as recalled in this Dave Arthur interview).

Melody Maker, 29 July 1967

The club was still going in 1976, when BBC Radio 2's Folkweave programme seems to have regularly featured recordings made at the Rising Sun. The pub at 88 Rushey Green closed in the noughties and has been demolished.

As mentioned here before, Pentangle singer Jacqui McShee was born in Catford.

(I am grateful for a regular anonymous commenter to an earlier post on South London Folk Clubs for digging out some of the information above)

Music Monday: South of the Thames - Skalah ft. Novelist

 

Skalah and Novelist at the Elephant

Great new track from up and coming Skalah with grime veteran Novelist. 

'I'm from the town, I'm from the zone, I'm from the South of the Thames...

I'm a navy boy in a navy world, I represent Brockley and Ladywell...

I'm a navy boy in a navy fit, I represent Lewisham fam that's it'

  

fabric · SKALAH Ft. Novelist - South of the Thames

Battle of Lewisham 1977 on Sister Midnight FM

Last week (13 August) saw the anniversary of the 1977 'Battle of Lewisham' when local communities and anti-racists from all over the country mobilised to oppose a march by the far right National Front from New Cross to Lewisham, events covered in detail at this blog before.

SE London community digital radio station Sister Midnight FM marked the anniversary with a day of programmes themed around these events.

Myself and Ben Gidley recorded a programme in the Sister Midnight studio in Catford which focused on the details of what actually happened in August 1977, with sound recordings from the day and later memories of people who took part. We also discussed the wider history of fascism and anti-fascism in SE London, including the terrible racist murders of the early 1990s and the marches against the British National Party HQ in Welling at this time. We also reflected on the most recent far right mobilisation in this part of London - the protests against drag storytelling at the Honor Oak pub, which were met with months of counter-protests in 2023. 

We also played some related music:

- Desperate Bicycles - Don't Back the Front (perhaps the first truly DIY punk band, they recorded the 'New Cross, New Cross' EP in 1978)

- Bob Marley and the Wailers - Get up, stand up (a track that Red Saunders, founder of Rock Against Racism, remembers being played from a flat overlooking the demonstration on 13 August).

- Junior Murvin - Police and Thieves  (a track that Paul Gilroy likewise remembers hearing on the day)

- Tom Robinson Band - Glad to be Gay (as described in John Gill's book, Queer Noises, the TRB got stuck into the heart of the action on 13 August, during which there was a significant LGBTQ+ presence)

The Clash - Bankrobber (Lewisham '77 inspired the growing anti-fascist/anti-racist movement with the Clash among the bands playing at the big Rock Against Racism carnival in Victoria Park in 1978. The video for this Clash song was filmed in Lewisham by the Clock Tower)

Sinead O'Connor - Black Boys on Mopeds (a song about police racism, among other things. Her music was played on the sound system at the Honor Oak anti-fascist protests in 2023, on the weekend after she died)

Linton Kwesi Johnson - Forces of Victory. (LKJ, sometime Goldsmiths student and part of the Race Today collective that mobilised for the Battle of Lewisham, and later played a key role in response to the 1981 New Cross Fire)

Sister Midnight FM · Lewisham 77 w/ Neil Gordon - Transpontine [13.08.26]

Daisy's Sounds of Solidarity highlights music from the period and the echoes it holds of contemporary racism and resilience.  I liked the device of looking at what was in the UK  charts on 13 August 1977 as a starting point - Donna Summer's I Feel Love was at number one.

Sister Midnight FM · Sounds of Solidarity [13.08.26]

South East's programme also has a musical focus, specifically on Eve records, Denis Bovell and Lovers Rock. Demonstrators passed up and down Lewisham Way within yards of the Eve studio on Upper Brockley Road, where in this period the new Lovers Rock sound was taking shape: 'the Battle of Lewisham might have been won by the anti-fascist community on 13 August 1977 but it was the work of  black-led institutions that fought the longer war against black people in Lewisham and beyond by simply existing, creating space and sharing joy'. 

Good to keep the memory of these events live, over the years they have inspired the sense of the Lewisham area as a place where the far right cannot operate. This is something that each generation has to remember and refresh, as those did who gathered behind 'South London is Anti-Fascist' banner in Honor Oak in 2023.

Next year will be the 50th anniversary, each year the number of those involved who are still around gets fewer. Would be good to do something a bit different next year, maybe with a more active street presence. There was a plan for a mobile sound system to move around the area this year, but this was abandoned due to extreme heat, perhaps a starting point for 2027?

Sister Midnight FM · The South East [13.08.26]

Eclipse 2026 in Telegraph Hill Park

The partial solar eclipse was a joyous occasion. Telegraph Hill Park (top park, pictured) in New Cross was packed with thousands of people, with sun (and moon) worshippers streaming towards it by foot and bike from all directions. It often gets crowded on New Year's Eve, and is generally busy on summer evenings, but I suspect this was the biggest ever crowd in the park.

After staying there for a while I made my way to Goose Green in East Dulwich where my T'ai chi class gathered on the grass in the strange light with a variety of  contraptions to safely look up at the heavens

What could be more natural, and simple, than gathering outside under the sky with a crowd of fellow humans (and some rather confused birds). A crowd of equals, sharing their home made tools.

Must admit I mocked the colander trick for projecting images onto paper but it worked! 

Goose Green

Levellers squat gig at Camberwell Dickie Dirts, 1986

In the early 1980s the former Odeon cinema site in Camberwell, on the corner of Denmark Hill and Coldharbour Lane, became a branch of the discount jeans chain Dickie Dirts. By 1984 it had closed and been squatted, which I believe it was intermittently for the next couple of years. 

On 9 August 1986 there was a gig there featuring The Levellers and The Bambi Slam

Source of gig advert - The Wire, Southwark Squatters zine, 8 August 1986 (held at 56a Info Shop archive). The newsletter was produced by SNOW (Squatters Network of Walworth)

The old Dickie Dirts/Odeon building was demolished in 1993 and the Nandos currently stands on its site. Loughborough Junction has the full history of the site. 

[Update: its seems that the Levellers who played at this gig were probably not the Brighton-based band who had hits in the early 1990s. There was apparently another band of the same name in the South London squat scene at this time, living in the squatted Domville Grove off Albany Road SE17. Looks like the Brighton band didn't form until 1988, though understandable confusion as they played in a similar scene. I saw the Brighton Levellers play at a squatted warehouse in Effra Road, Brixton in the early 1990s and the band apparently held an end of tour party at the squatted Brockwell Park Lido in 1993, during a period when the pool was empty.]

'Dooneen' by Keith Ridgway - from Burgess Park to revolutionary Dublin

I loved Keith Ridgway's novel Dooneen, set in an alternative present version of Dublin where housing struggles are intensifying towards some kind of uprising. The story actually starts though in Southwark with two men walking from the River Thames (including a drink at the Angel in Rotherhithe), through Southwark Park and on to their home in Havil Street SE5. The next day the lovers are separated when one of them enters a mysterious portal in Burgess Park and steps out into Blessington Street Basin park in Dublin. There are some other understated fantastical elements, and some comical ones,  but this is also a highly believable imagining of revolutionary escalation and state repression, told through a tenderly-drawn cast of characters and mostly from the point of view of a writer never quite understanding what he is caught up in.

It's difficult to write with these kind of themes without coming across as didactic or hectoring, Ridgway pulls it off though he does put some great rants in the mouths of some of his characters:

'Feeling the cold. Feeling the damp. Paying the rent. Tramping home in the rain from Peckham to the Liberties, from Makoko to the Five Lamps, from Paraisópolis to Hardwicke Street, isn't everything ridiculous when you put it next to everything else? And of course we have voted. Of course we have. Some of us have even stood. And campaigned and petitioned and lobbied and leaned in and fell over. We have withdrawn our labour. We have withheld our rent. We have picketed and protested. We have asked politely and impolitely. The letters we've written! We have been eloquent and we have been blunt. Loud and quiet. We've had a word. And we've taken to the streets. And the only fucking thing we've got in return is older. Older and colder and poorer and deader. And what would they have us do now? I can tell you what. Shuffle along the cliff edge to the point of no return and fall to our deaths so they can scold our corpses for not being careful, for not watching where we were going, for not saving, for not investing, for not getting on the ladder, for not thinking ahead, for not being born in the right place, for not getting the right sort of job, for letting a foreigner move in next door, for not understanding how complicated it is, for being idealistic, for being juvenile, for being utopian, for being anything really, for being, just for being'.

The title references the folk song which I got to know through Christy Moore and Planxty, 'the Cliffs of Dooneen', a song from the perspective of somebody leaving and bidding farewell not just to the landscape but 'to all the fine people I'm leaving behind'. There are so many such songs of exile and emigration ('Spancil Hill', also recorded by Christy, being another example), infused with a deep longing for far off places that assume a hazy, visionary quality from a distance of time and place. A similar longing infuses this novel, for Dublin, for the cliffs of the West of Ireland, but also for South London with the narrator  dreaming of being back in Havil Street with his lover.  

There aren't too many South London references after that opening chapter, though I note that this novel is published by the fine Fitzcarraldo Editions as one of their iconic blue literary volumes. The publisher is now based in the Bussey building at 133 Rye Lane in Peckham having previously had its office in Deptford at  8-12 Creekside London.

My copy with its Lala bookshop bookmark

Beer and coffee latest: ex-White Hart opening in New Cross, new coffee shop by Nunhead station and much more

As always lots going on in the SE London beer and coffee zone. 

Best news is that a new pub is set to open shortly on the site of the former White Hart in New Cross Gate. The Broken Wheel, as it will be named, will occupy the iconic junction of New Cross Road and Queens Road, a place where there really should be a pub. The White Hart was there for over 170 years, it had its ups and downs but in its most recent incarnation was doing really well with great Sunday lunches including a fine Irish music session. Unfortunately it closed in the Covid period and has been empty since. In the mean time rooms above the pub have been converted to flats which may put some limits on noise and late hours, but hopefully not hamper the pub's success (see more about the pub's history at this earlier post).

work underway at the Broken Wheel (ex White Hart), photo from their insta @thebrokenwheelpub

Not far away the famous Montague Arms is up for let but no sign of a tenant as yet. Like the White Hart the pub closed during the pandemic and at one time looked likely to be demolished. Instead the upstairs has been converted to flats leaving the space downstairs refurbished but smaller. The famous stage is long gone (more about the Monty here), but scope for a good neighbourhood bar. See previous posts about history of this place.

Montague Arms - done up but still empty

A new coffee shop is set to open by Nunhead station soon. I know it sometimes feels like there's coffee shops everywhere but there actually isn't one here for caffeine-hungry commuters and other locals at this end (though there is Goodcup of course by Nunhead Green).  Servesmiths, which runs two shops in Catford, is coming to the site of the former Tony's barber shop at 52 Gibbon Road (next to Silver Fish Chinese takeaway).

Site of new Servesmiths coffee shop by Nunhead station (building in middle to left of Silver Fish)

Hopefully some of these places will become community hubs with space for music and meetings, as happens with many of our existing bars and cafes. It's been amazing for instance seeing the Old Nun's Head become a queer destination pub, and so many people enjoying the music and the craic at Skehans. 

Here's a few more examples from next week:

Welsh electronic duo Overmono are celebrating the launch of their new album Pure Devotion by running a pub for the day, The Two Dogs, in Deptford on Friday 7 August. Actually judging by the address they are actually doing this at the famous Dog and Bell pub in Prince Street SE8.

Bar D4100 (Dinner for One Hundred) are having a party on the 8th August at their Nunhead bar. The pizza people started out at the Hill Station Cafe SE14  (actually I think they started out in a family garden even before) and are very much rooted in the New Cross/Nunhead community. Locally based singer Jessie Ware recently declared them to be the best pizza on London in an interview with Topjaw (she also name checked Eat Vietnam in Deptford)

Joyce in Brockley are hosting another Brockley Queer FLINTA social on 11 August. If you haven't been keeping up with your acronyms that's 'Female, Lesbian, Intersex, Non-binary, Trans, and Agender'.