South East London blogzine - things that are happening, things that happened, things that should never have happened. New Cross, Brockley, Deptford and other beauty spots. EMAIL US: transpontineblog at gmail.com Transpontine: 'on the other (i.e. the south) side of the bridges over the Thames; pertaining to or like the lurid melodrama played in theatres there in the 19th century'.
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)
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.
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?
It's 50 years since the Sex Pistols played their first gig, at Central St Martins art college (on 6 November 1975). But in the weeks leading up to this they rehearsed at various locations including at a venue known as the Crunchy Frog, 99 Rotherhithe Street, London SE16. The full story of that is told below, but there's much more of interest about this space, a former dockside building that became an important alternative culture venue in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Docks
99 Rotherhithe Street is located at the historic core of the old Rotherhithe riverside settlement with old St Mary's Church nearby dating back to the 13th century (and where incidentally my 4 x great grandparents Thomas Say and Frances Blackwin were married in 1790). The nearby Mayflower pub (originally the Spreadeagle and Crown) is named after the ship that sailed from Rotherhithe in 1620 carrying the 'Pilgrim Fathers' to New England, with the ship's Captain - Christopher Jones - buried in the churchyard. The pub, though, was only renamed The Mayflower in 1957 having been substantially rebuilt after wartime bomb damage.
As the British Empire and global trade expanded so did the docks on this part of the Thames. The stretch of the river from Rotherhithe down to London Bridge became known as the Pool of London, the part of the river that was navigable by ships with masts.
99 Rotherhithe Street was built in the 1840s as part of East India Wharf where there were two granaries and a barge building yard in the 19th century. No. 99 was a five floor granary run by W W Landell and later by John Dudin (1890s) and British Bluefries Wharfage & Transport (1930s). The building was also known at one time as Archers Wharf. The granaries were used to store grain at a time when Britain was importing most of its wheat and barley from abroad- mainly from Russia in 19th century and Canada in 20th century. This was unloaded from ships into riverside warehouses like these.
Like at most of the docks on both sides of the river, workers at East India Wharf took part in the famous dock strike of 1889. There is a statement from the 'South Side Central Strike Committee' confirming that workers at East India Wharf had agreed to return to work having achieved a pay rise. It is signed by Tom Mann, who was a key organiser of the strike.
The docks went into decline after the second world war, partly due to wartime damage and the loss of empire but mainly because of containerisation from the 1960s. The larger ships transporting containers were too big for this part of the river and unloaded their cargo further out at places like Tilbury. Surrey Commercial Docks closed down in 1969.
After the London docks closed down in the 1960s, the The Greater London Council took on responsibility for much of the semi derelict dockside landscape. The original plan was to demolish these buildings on Rotherhithe Street but in 1970 it was designated as the St Mary's Rotherhithe conservation area. No.99 is now an English Heritage Grade II listed building.
By this time the area had a bit of a reputation - for instance in 1967 Jack 'The Hat' McVitie was killed by Reggie Kray and his body left in a car by St Mary's Church. On the other hand there was a boujee bohemian edge - 59 Rotherhithe St, demolished in the 60s, was known as the 'Little White Room' where Princess Margaret secretly shacked up with Tony Armstrong-Jones before they got married and where various poshos partied including Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich and John Betjeman (the latter stayed there for a bit). As discussed here before, Jessica Mitford had lived at 41 Rotherhithe Street in the 1930s.
The Crunchy Frog
With Rotherhithe Street saved from demolition but no longer needed for the docks others moved in, sometimes squatting for a while or negotiating short term leases and paying rent.
In 1974 Crunchy Frog, a film animation company presumably named after the Monty Python sketch, was granted a temporary lease for no. 99. This film company doesn't seem to have last long but various artists, craftspeople and musicians set up workshops there and it was renamed Waterside Studios (though people still referred to the place as the Crunchy Frog for a few years after).
The building was pretty derelict to start with, people had to build their own rooms and put in windows to fill the gaping holes in the walls where old windows had been removed. Daniel Larson, an instrument maker, moved in during 1974 and has described how it was at the time: 'This building was a four-story structure built on the water's edge. An electric crane lifted grain to the fourth floor, and gravity pulled the flour through the grinding process down to bags on the ground floor. The milling machines were eventually sold for scrap… The artist group turned the ground floor into a theater on the Fringe Circuit that hosted many experimental programs. A carpenter with heavy machines occupied the first floor. The second and third floors were divided into small spaces and used by light-duty craftspeople such as silk screen artists, knitters, and instrument makers'.
It wasn't a place where people lived with the exception of a couple of barges that were moored in the Thames next to it, on one of which lived Mike Canty who was a potter and seems to have been a key figure in running the place. Linsey Pollak, an Australian musician who had a workshop there for a couple of years told me that in 1978 for a 'a while (1978) I squatted on the barge tied up to his [Mike Canty's] before ours sank'.
'Rotherhithe Warehouse' print by John McGowan shows the building from river side c.1981 - 'From the late 1970s through to the early 1980s Maureen, my sister-in-law, lived on Barge ‘Olga’, which was moored in the Thames next to “Waterside”, a craft collective at 99 Rotherhithe Street'. See his Rotherhithe Suite of prints.
The space was run as a co-operative originally - they set up a company called Waterside (Archers Wharf Ltd), everybody involved became a member of the company and was expected to contribute four hours a week to maintaining the building or doing admin.
Waterside (Archers Wharf) Ltd co-operative rules - this and the Waterside drawing above are from a contemporary leaflet sent to me by Linsey Pollak.
The Theatre
The Theatre at Waterside Studios started out in 1975 - confusingly at different times it was known as the Warehouse Theatre and The Waterside Theatre. In June 1975 the Greater London Arts Association awarded £5000 from its Theatre Conversion Scheme Fund 'to Crunchy Frog, a group working from a disused warehouse... to cover the conversion of the ground floor of the building into a theatre and to set up a rehearsal room and kitchen area'. In the following year structural alterations included turning the first floor level into a cafe/bar and part of the groundfloor bar into dressing rooms.
The Stage (1975) reports that the 'little theatre which us up to now has been known by the delightful name of The Crunchy Frog... is alas more prosaically retitled as The Warehouse.
1977: 'a much needed venture in a neglected area of London' with artistic director listed as Ann Colthart - I am wondering whether this was Ann Coltart (1941-2024), among other things a Greenham Common peace campaigner and chair of Bermondsey Labour Party in early 1980s.
1976 events at the 'Warehouse Theatre'
1977 events at the 'Waterside Theatre'
The Theatre hosted lots of alternative, experimental and radical theatre performances Among those who performed there were:
- Belt and Braces socialist theatre company - Gavin Richards later went on to play Tiffany's dad in Eastenders!
- Forkbeard Fantasy who presented 'The Cranium Show' in 1976 featuring Lol Coxhill - he played sax with The Damned for a while and was a big figure in the London improv music scene.
- Eastend Abbreviated Soapbox Theatre - who included later punk singer Patrik Fitzgerald
- the People Show, whose 1976 show no.68 included Mike Figgis, later film director (Leaving Las Vegas etc)
- Robert Llewellyn, who started out as a shoemaker at no. 99 then started hosting cabaret nights there and formed the alternative comedy troupe The Joeys. He later played Kryten, the android character in 1980s/90s sci fi TV series Red Dwarf.
- The Women's Theatre Group, which performed 'Pretty ugly' in December 1977, a musical show for 12 to 15 year olds.
- Incubus, whose 'Soon maybe boogie' (November 1977) was a punk influenced play featuring fictional band The Iron Jelloids who 'endlessly rehearse their unlovely, subversive and eventually super destructive rhythms'. Clearly modelled on the Sex Pistols, and possibly referencing their time using the space.
- Mutable Theatre, whose 'Stairway to Paradise' (1975) was advertised as also including 'licensed bar and disco'.
- Les Oeufs Malades (Gerard Bell, Bryony Lavery and Jessica Higgs) performing 'I Was Too Young At The Time To Understand Why My Mother Was Crying' (1976) with music by Jam Sandwich.
- Dockwalloper Company staged 'Smile Please. You're on holiday' (1975),
Nomads and Fools, 'Befooled' (1976)
Fine Artistes, founded by actor Pavel Douglas, performed there in 1976.
(the story of many of these alternative theatre companies is told at the excellent Unfinished Histories)
Early Music
There was a strong musical connection from the start, interestingly including a quite niche link with the overlapping 'early music' revival and emerging 'world music' scenes. At this time both were seen as somewhat counter-cultural movements, exploring alternative sounds and instruments from history and around the world
Linsey Pollak had a flute and bagpipe making workshop there from 1976-78. Originally from Australia, he came to England to study instrument making at the London College of Furniture in Whitechapel. Returning to Australia he has continued ever since playing and making woodwind and reed instruments and performing at numerous multi-cultural/'world music' festivals and events.
Linsey Pollak 'every few months he and his colleagues put on a lively and informal musical evening when they play the instruments they make'. Source: Tony Aldous, The Illustrated London News Book of London's Villages, 1980. This book is based on a series of articles, one of which from 1977 focused on Rotherhithe.
Outside Waterside in 1977 - Linsey Pollak with flute, Mike Canty holding poster.
Dan Larson, another London College of Furniture student, made early musical instruments including lutes at his Waterside studio and has continued to do this since in the USA. Other instrument makers who used the space included Janet Bird (who made reeds and lived on barge with Linsey Pollak), Jeremy Lowe (woodwind repairs, 1970s) and in the 1990s Brian Stapleton (ukelele maker including for the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain) and Anna Dolling (lute maker)
A list of people based in the workshops c.1977
The Sex Pistols connection
The Sex Pistols connection with the Crunchy Frog came at a pivotal moment in the formation of the band. In summer 1975 they were still trying out for a lead singer to join with Glenn Matlock, Paul Cook and Steve Jones and they rehearsed a number of times at 99 Rotherhithe Street.
Robert Neely, who describes himself as 'the original Cruchy Frog person' who found the warehouse around 1974 and leased it off the GLC' has recalled: 'yes the Sex Pistols started to practice there I jammed with them a few times. McLaren used to some along in a green leather suit'.
The venue had been suggested to Malcolm McLaren by Peter Christopherson who around this time was starting to rehearse with Throbbing Gristle. McLaren biographer Paul Gorman suggests that Christopherson knew the place through his work with album cover designers Hipgnosis who may have used it in some capacity. Gorman has also suggested that Cosey Fanni Tutti of Throbbing Gristle may also have worked at Crunchy Frog/Waterside at some point (though this is not confirmed).
The Pistols had a number of rehearsals with David Harrison as a possible singer, but seemingly they didn't feel he was the right fit. Harrison told Gorman that one of the things that didn't go down too well was that he would comment on the Thames wildlife, saying things like 'look there's a cormorant' (Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, 2020).
David Harrison - a nearly Sex Pistol
In August 1975 John Lydon was famously auditioned miming to the jukebox in McLaren and Westwood's Sex shop on the Kings Road. He was invited to a rehearsal scheduled for the next week at the Crunchy Frog and turned up there with his friend John Grey. But nobody else turned up. Lydon told Jon Savage 'I felt a fool walking round Bermondsey Wharf, it's dangerous down there, particularly the way I looked at the time' (England's Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, 1991). Glenn Matlock - who described The Crunchy Frog as 'a hippy commune/warehouse/community centre by the Thames' - said that the rest of the band 'couldn't be bothered to go' and that he had been put off by the difficulties of bunking the fare across London. It is clear that Jones, Matlock and Cook were not keen on Lydon joining the band at this point.
So while the Sex Pistols may have rehearsed there, Lydon never did (as he confirmed in 2024 - see video below). Shortly afterwards, on 31 August 1975, Lydon rehearsed with the band for the first time at the Rose and Crown in Wandsworth.
In a 2022 interview with John Robb, film director Julien Temple claimed to have stumbled across the band rehearsing at the Crunchy Frog while wandering as a film student round the area, hearing them playing The Small Faces 'I want you to know that I love you' before they had played a gig. It is possible but if he did, Lydon wasn't with them.
Later music
The Pistols association with 99 Rotherhithe Street was quite fleeting, but there was lots of music there in this period and after. This flyer from 1980 (I think) includes Red Rinse (a band who played for Rock Against Racism), Diz and the Doormen (with South African-born blues pianist Diz Watson) and the Red Lights (who I think were a Deptford punk band).
The folk band Blowzabella, still going today (as of 2025) also feature on this programme and played there a number of times. Cliff Stapleton joined the band as hurdy gurdy player having previously been involved in putting on 'drolls' - 16th and 17th century street theatre - at the Waterside Theatre. He later toured with Coil (2002).
Mountebanck Zanies with music from English Folly (1977?)
Blowzabella poster for a 1979 gig, designed by Juan Wingaard
There were disco nights there in the 1970s and in the mid-1980s Meltdown all nighters playing soul, reggae and African music. I believe Coldcut/Ninja Tune cofounder Jonathan More was involved with this night - he presented a Meltdown show on Kiss FM.
In the 1980s there were regular jazz nights promoted by John Edge. Musicians including Steve Berry, Django Bates, Dave Patman, Christ Batchelor and Steve Buckley played together regularly at Waterside, then joined the influential Loose Tubes.
In September 1985 the venue hosted a late night Jazz/Salsa Fish Fry with Baz Fe Jazz & Andy McConnell plus the Tommy Chase Quartet.As Giles Peterson recalls, Chase was a key figure in 1980s London jazz scene. In this period Peterson himself was DJing at the Royal Oak in Tooley Street along with Nicky Holloway, and the latter was involved in putting on a warehouse party at 99 Rotherhithe Street.
I haven't found any trace of any live music events after the 1980s (happy to be corrected), but the space continued to be used for workshops until 2003 when it closed down and the site was redeveloped as flats. The history of the building reflects the dockside story on both sides of the river. Dockside industrial buildings falling into decline; empty buildings being used for a period as cheap space for arts, music, living; then being redeveloped for high end housing.
Thanks to Linsey Pollak, Cliff Stapleton and Chris Gunstone for posters/flyers and memories. Would love to hear any other stories/memories people may have.
Last year me and Neil Controlled Weirdness did an episode of 'Drifting through the streets' all about this:
Lunch recently at the Cat and Cucumber Cafe on Tower Bridge Road (corner of Druid Street SE1), Neil Controlled Weirdness mentioned that the very table we were sitting at features in a 1979 film focused on punk band Sham 69.
Yes indeed 'Tell us the Truth', a BBC Arena programme, does indeed include a scene filmed there. Sorry for quality of images, screenshot from grainy youtube, but you can see Cafe had the same name then and no doubt the menu of classic fry up breakfast fare hasn't changed too much either.
Check out the film, there's a few other London locations in it so let us know if you recognise any.
Maria Alyokhina, who was jailed in Putin's Russia for her activities with punk collective Pussy Riot, is speaking at the Centre for Investigative Journalism at Goldsmiths in New Cross on Wednesday 13 September 2017.
Maria was convicted in 2012 of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” and sentenced to two years in prison. Upon her release she helped found Media Zona, an independent media outlet which aims to hold Russia’s justice system to account. She will be talking about the reach of Russia’s official media in the age of Putin - and how to get around it. She has written a book, Riot Days, about her experiences of the Russian justice system.
The event takes place from 1:00pm-3:30pm, LG02 PSH Building, Goldsmiths University, 8 Lewisham Way, London SE14 6NW. Admission is free, all welcome.
Full details here: http://www.tcij.org/events/2017-09-13/pussy-riot-russia’s-official-media-and-how-subvert-it
While she's in the area she might want to check out the painting of Pussy Riot in the Ladywell Tavern!
It's the 22nd annual Telegraph Hill Festival next month, with more than 120 events taking place from 5 – 20 March 2016 at various venues in the New Cross/Brockley border zone. You can check out the full programme here, but for now here's a few of the events that caught my ere.
'Painting & Sound Improvised Performance – audio - visual action - interaction. First meeting of reknowned painter and performer Pauline Amos and English experimental improvising musicians Mark Browne and Richard Sanderson.
PAULINE AMOS - (painting and sounds) Pauline Amos is an internationally renowned artist. She has collaborated with William Orbit, Poppy Jackson and dancer Anna-mi Fredriksson amongst others. She says of her work: “The paintings are documents and a recording of an event that happened - the action, the performance, the life, the improvised and impulsive moment is the work.” Her work is dramatic, her subjects: the female body, feminism, war, global politics, the environment, women, sex and relationships – the human condition. She has featured on YouTube and bill boards around the UK using her naked painted body to promote democracy.
British improvising musicians Mark Browne (saxophones and collected objects and Richard Sanderson (amplified melodeon and small instruments) have been playing together off and on for some 20 years, including in the quartet Fraction and the trio Browne/Thompson/Sanderson - creating instant and constantly changing music from instruments, objects and debris described as probing, adventurous, and uniquely textured exploration, haunting and fascinating. Together with Amos they will craft a totally immersive show.
This unique collaboration is presented as part of the Telegraph Hill Festival. The evening will include a discussion with Pauline Amos of her work. Admission £5 on the door.
At the Montague Arms on Saturday 19 March, band My Midlife Crisis will be backing various singers having a go at songs from the golden age of punk. As they didn't have any Crass songs on the list, I have gone for 'Boys don't cry'.
Prefab Walking Tour - Saturday 12 March 12 noon-1.00pm 'Meet at Brockley Station exit,
Mantle Road
Free but donation to museum
funds gratefully received
This moderate walk visits post war
prefab locations past and present,
derelict and inhabited. Finishing
at the Ivy House, London’s
first community-owned pub.
Booking essential, email
elisabethblanchet@hotmail.com'
Saint Patrick’s Day (17 March) 8.00pm-11.00pm
Skehan’s, Kitto Road (Free) 'Skehans is proud to invite you along
for bowl of our delicious Irish Stew
with soda bread (while stocks last and
daytime only). From 9pm The Clarkes
will rock the joint in their customary
style'
Last minute call for a free punk gig tonight at the Birds Nest in Deptford Church Street, featuring 1980s anarcho-punk/hardcore stalwarts Anthrax, Liberty and Bug Central. I saw Liberty play a few times back then with Conflict etc, nice guys.
The band started out as pioneering Texas punk band The Stains in the late 1970s, with their best known track 'John Wayne was a Nazi'. They then became 'Millions of Dead Cops', releasing their debut album under this name in 1982. Later they became known as 'Multi Death Corporation' releasing material in the UK on Crass Records..
I had their Crass records EP back in the day, and the line that has stuck with me - from the track 'Selfish Sh*t' - is 'Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Rest of You'. I now know that they didn't invent it ('Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Poor' is a long standing meme), but I always think of it when I hear about the wealthy enjoying free hospitality while many others struggle to get by.
This Saturday 22nd November there's an all day benefit for the Focus E15 Mothers campaign, who have been fighting in East London to retain social housing. Lots of great punk rock/riot grrrlish musical action, plus cakes, zines, stalls and a raffle.
Coming up next Monday 17th November at the Montague Arms, a night of bands from New Cross/Brockley area with some great punky/garagey/riot grrlish noise, some of them so lo-fi that they have released cassettes (and in the case of PAMs recorded at Brockley Studios in Arabin Road)
'From the Burning Streets of Brockley! The ‘Boss’ from the ‘Cross! An SE4-Real showcase with
Flemmings: Future ‘90s rock heroes! Take the money you’d otherwise spend on a sub-par Thurston/Mascis solo album, and GIVE IT TO THESE GUYS INSTEAD.
PAMs: Short! Fast! Loud! Stupid..? You be the judge, they’ll be the executioners.
Charla Fantasma: Long-rumoured new trio emerge from practice room cocoon as magnificent butterfly! Expect fuzz, melody, chaos, eternal love, etc.
Cat Smell: Barbed disaffection hides beneath sugar-coated joy as Give It Ups veterans shift gear toward garagey, two-guitar kerfuffle.
MONDAY 17th NOVEMBER at THE MONTAGUE ARMS, Queens Rd, SE14 2PA (Overground: Queens Road Peckham / New Cross Gate). £3 on the door. Music begins from 8ish.
The 1990s Urban Free Festival in Fordham Park was a major London event, bringing together people from what at the time was a big free party/squat/punk/rave scene. 20 years later (13 September), similar sounds were to be heard in the same place at the Party in the Park - including Back to the Planet who were on the bill there in 1992. Quite a few of the people organising sound systems etc. were also veterans from that scene, as were some of the crowd. But there were also lots of new young bands in the event organised by New Cross Learning, the Madcap Coalition and others.
Unlike last year's Party in the Park which was cursed by bad weather, this year it was sunny enough to bring out what may well have been the biggest crowd in the park since the final Urban Free festival in 1995 - nothing like on the scale of that event, which attracted about 30,000 people in very different times, but a decent free community festival.
Shocks of Mighty
Siren Sound System
Step 13 on the Siren stage by the Moonshot - great breakbeat anthems
An interesting series of talks and film screenings coming up at Goldsmiths in New Cross on Thursdays starting next week and carrying on through to December on the theme 'Post-Punk then and now'. Some key people from that time will be appearing including Green Gartside (Scritti Politti), Gee Vaucher (Crass), Lydia Lunch and zine innovator Tom Vague.
Post-punk was my formative teenage time. I loved Scritti in both their early scratchy punk and their pure pop phases, thanks to them I first heard of Jacques Derrida, even if thanks to them too I mis-pronounced his name for years. I listened obsessively to Lydia Lunch's version of Some Velvet Morning with Rowland S Howard from the Birthday Party. And I had Gee Voucher's Stations of the Crass poster on my bedsit wall as a young anarcho-punk.
So I will surely be trying to get to as much of this as I can... and yet part of me is ambivalent about the endless raking over of the embers of the punk/post-punk period, and indeed the later rave period which likewise tends to get fetishised as some kind of sub-cultural high tide mark against which the middle aged judge subsequent generations and usually find them wanting. Maybe everyone likes to think that their youth was the coolest time in history, in that respect the once future-facing punks and the ravers ended up just like the hippies before them, forever harping back to 1977 or 1992 as surely as their long haired forerunners droned on about Pink Floyd at the Ally Pally in 1967. What seems like a period of plenitude, as post-punk does, can also be seen as a period of lack. If we looked to people with guitars and synthesisers for political and cultural inspiration it's because to a large extent we didn't have anywhere else to go for information or ideas. It's interesting to talk about these times, but in a critical way that doesn't reinforce myths. There was no golden age, then, since, or now.
Next Saturday 30 August, London-based Polish anti-fascists Dywizjon 161 (Division 161) are putting on a gig at the New Cross Inn. 'Can't Kill What's Inside' features :
The riotous anti-National Front demonstration in New Cross and Lewisham in August 1977 has been covered here before (see this chronology of the events). Jon Savage's classic book 'England's Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock' notes that an image from that day taken by rock photographer Jill Furmanovsky featured on the sleeve of a punk record released in the following month - 'No I Don't Wanna' by Sham 69 (the band's name sadly refers to Hersham in Surrey, not Lewisham). The single - the band's first - was released on Step Forward records, Sham having been signed by Deptford punk Mark Perry (of ATV and Sniffin' Glue zine fame).
Sham went on to have a number of hits including 'If the Kids are United' and 'Hersham Boys'. They had quite a skinhead following, including for a time some racists, and there were fights at their gigs as a result. The band played for 'Rock Against Racism' to try and distance themselves from this.
Savage suggests that the fight against the National Front was a turning point for Punk, in the early stages of which there were some flirtation with swastikas as part of a mostly apolitical shock the elders strategy. In this context, he sees the August '77 events as a watershed: 'The events at Lewisham also helped to break Punk apart under the weight of its own contradictions. In superseding Punk's rhetoric with reality, it showed the apparent lie behind the antinomian heresy: freedom was not in the mind or the imagination, but to be fought for here and now'.
'England's Dreaming' includes an account of the events by Angus McKinnon of the NME, who took part in the anti-fascist mobilisation. He recalls that the fighting started in New Cross, where the NF were assembling to march to Lewisham: 'We were contained up by the New Cross area. The Front was a small march: there must have been about a hundred and fifty of them, all ages... They were eventually escorted onto the man street which goes towards Greenwich, and as they came out, there were mounted police, and things started to get vary scary very quickly. People started picking up bricks and stones. Some of the NF has sticks already, they threw bricks back at us. Someone close by went down with a brick in their face, the police horses came towards us. Police horses are very frightening indeed, the crowd was surging forward and back. Basically the police were saying, you have to clear away, these people are going to march. The crowd got very angry and there was a lot of brick-throwing'.
Later many of the marchers headed to Lewisham town centre. McKinnon remembers that 'There were baton charges, orange smoke everywhere. People throwing things through shop windows... Marchers and police up and down Lewisham High Street, and all over it was this enormous pall of orange smoke, very thick, acrid and very unpleasant. I slipped down the side of the High Street to get away, and then we were stuck, seven or eight of us in a cul de sac at the back of a supermarket by the delivery bay, huddled in absolute terror. Right down the end of the High Street, we were rounded up and put by a police bus to be shunted off. We weren't, only because someone started throwing stones and bricks at the police bus, which withdrew. We were denied the dubious pleasure of being detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure for rioting'.
Artist Rachael House is bringing her 'Feminist Disco' to Lewisham Arthouse in New Cross next Friday, 20 June 2014 (6 pm to 9 pm). As well lots of women's music classics, the event will also feature performance artist Silvia Ziranek and a film about women and the miners strike. Admision Free at 140 Lewisham Way SE14.
I wasn't quite sure what to expect at the Siouxsie gig at the Royal Festival Hall on Monday night. I thought it might be one of those polite 'an audience with...' sit down South Bank affairs, where ageing punks perform interpretations of Jacques Brel and Kurt Weill and labour through the Great American Songbook. But no, as soon as she came on and started with Happy House everyone stood up and stayed up for nearly two hours- there was actual pogoing upstairs in the stalls and dancing in the aisles. Siouxsie and her band played the whole of the Banshees' Kaleidoscope album and much more, finishing with the great Spellbound as second encore. The gig was part of Yoko Ono's Meltdown, and Yoko was in the Royal Box, standing and clapping for Siouxsie's version of Dear Prudence (which of course John Lennon wrote).
(She played the same set on Saturday night without Spellbound as second encore) Juju and the Horniman Museum I have been reading 'Siouxsie & The Banshees: the authorised biography' by Mark Paytress (2003). Of course there's lots in the early days about Chislehurst (where Siouxsie grew up) and the 'Bromley Contingent' from which the band emerged. But there are also a few other interesting connections further into South London. The band's original drummer, not counting Sid Vicious for one gig, was Kenny Morris who packed in a course at Camberwell College of Art to play on the band's first two albums. Steve Severin, bassist and co-songwriter, was living with his friend Simon Barker in Bermondsey/Borough during the lead up to the 1980 Kaleidoscope album, and wrote the music for 'Christine' in that Southwark Council flat. But I was most interested to read about the origins of the African image on the cover of the 1981 album Juju (which includes Spellbound and Arabian Nights). According to Severin, 'we saw a definite thread running through the songs, almost a narrative to the album as a whole. The African statue on the cover, which we found in the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, was the starting point for a lot of the imagery'. Interesting to wonder how many songs, stories, visions and more have been incubated in the Horniman over the years.
More good music coming up at Cafe Crema (306 New Cross Road). This Friday 8th March there's a return of their periodic 'New Orleans, New Cross' acoustic jam session, 'musicians and listeners of good taste and discernment' will be welcome to gather 'around the soulful piano'.
Blyth Power
Then on Friday 15th March they've got Blyth Power Duo playing: 'Joseph and Annie play songs old and new in a long overdue visit to Cafe Crema, run by Chris Boddington, from Blind Mole Rat and The Ice Cream Men, and also one time Blyth guitarist. Chris' current band Reverend Casy (edgy rock'n'roll flavoured with country and blues) will be providing support' (see facebook event details)
Blyth Power go way back to early 1980s anarcho-punk - band founder Josef Porter had previously drummed for two of the best bands in that scene, Zoundz and The Mob. I first saw them in 1985 in a squatted pub in Brixton (I believe it was the Crown and Anchor), where they played along with Flowers in the Dustbin, The Astronauts and Karma Sutra (my friends' Luton punk band whose van I came down in). They stood out in those days for their melodies but also for their subject matter - songs referencing cricket, obscure episodes in English history and trains. The band's name came from a locomotive and their early song title Bricklayer's Arms alluded to the famous railway depot on the Old Kent Road, the area now covered by Mandela Way, though the song is actually about the playwright Ben Jonson.
In various line ups Blyth Power have continued ever since - Jamie Hince of The Kills (Mr Kate Moss) is among the many musicians who have passed through its ranks.
Deptford '77
Can't claim Blyth Power as a South London band, Porter is from the West Country and was living in Hackney when they started out. In his memoirs though, Porter recalls that when he first moved to London in 1979 he lived off Camberwell New Road and then in a council flat on Tanners Hill in Deptford. He also described earlier visits to Deptford to see his brother:
'I paid my first visit to Colin, at the Rachel MacMillan hall of residence, Creek Road, Deptford, in October 1977... I was charmed by his quarters, charmed by his friends.. charmed by the student union bar, in which I became cheaply and horribly drunk, but most of all charmed by Deptford itself, which featured prominently in the mythology of the punk scene, and was a concrete manifestation of all my record collection had led me to aspire to. I took to Deptford like a duck to water. Just being there simply blew me away. It was everything that Castle Cary was not: dark, evil, mysterious, but to my eyes fantastically beautiful.
...Colin moved out of the halls of residence and into Speedwell House, a condemned block of flats just off Deptford High St. Technically they were squatting, as the council had given up on trying to collect rent there. The whole place was a magic maze of brickwork, stairways and balconies, covered in graffiti and full of lost souls in which Colin and Sam kept the flat in a constant state of devastation that I found irresistible. Coming back one day after a hard day posing in the West End, I found a minor music festival happening in the courtyards below. The Realists, This Heat, and a host of Deptford's alternative heroes played and jammed until late at night, the whole scene illuminated by the beams of a car's headlights. This was Deptford Fun City at its finest' (Joseph Porter, Genesis to Revolutions).
Oh and Blyth Power's first album, 'Wicked Women, Wicked Men and Wicket Keepers' (1987) was recorded at RMS Studios in Crystal Palace.
