Tapescape Catford

As first featured here last month, Platform 7 are holding a two week art event at the former Blockbusters store in Catford, which closed after being looted in the August riots. They say:
'This April an unusual multi-disciplinary performance and visual art intervention will take place in a disused Blockbuster Video Store in Catford, South East London. The free exhibition, called ‘Tapescape Catford: The Intervention I’, brings together new media and traditional arts in an exploration of the politics of the videocassette. The intervention has attracted international artists and performers among a host of emerging London artists.

Events will include:

• a provocation on Jane Fonda’s exercise videos and female body image
• a documentary film ‘VH-Essay’ of non-return rental videocassettes
• ‘Ext1’ an interactive sound installation around the nostalgic qualities of magnetic tape
• sculpture, photography, live performance, quiz and huge quantities of now neglected and often nostalgic equipment and cassettes and more

Audience members will be able to interact with some pieces and are encouraged to bring in old videocassette and recorders to be completely recycled by Environmental Media Services (EMS) and Lewisham Council. There is a bar serving fresh coffee and little you would expect in a video shop

The show is produced by live performance micro-events company Platform-7 and follows the acclaimed ‘Up the Line’ events (2009-11) and last summer’s ‘Moonbow Margate’ intervention.

Artists include Terry Duffy (Venice and Liverpool Biennale), Berlin’s Rimini-Protokoll (Venice Biennale), Hugh Stoddart (To The Lighthouse, Remembrance), British Pianist Julian Jacobson (Royal College of Music and Beethoven Piano Sonata Cycle), Paul Halliday (Urban Encounters: Tate, Goldsmiths, Horniman), Documentary Filmmaker Kai Clear, sound artist Nathan Harmer, Roanna Mitchell (Movement/Artistic Director: Endangered Bodies London), John Pigram (Home Museum).

Local artists include: Darren Sperring, Isabel White, Yeu-Lai Mo, Tom Bresolin, Lauren Lapidge and JC Jazzman John Clarke and more'.

Private View/opening is tonight Tuesday 10th April 2012 from 7pm.

Opening Times are as follows:

April 12-15th Thursday to Sunday 12noon - 11pm
April 17th Tuesday 12noon - 11pm
April 19-22nd Thursday to Sunday 12noon - 11pm

Admission Free.

Address:

‘TAPESCAPE CATFORD: THE INTERVENTION I’
THE OLD BLOCKBUSTERS VIDEO STORE, 95 Rushey Green, Catford , SE6 4AF

More details at:  http://www.platform-7.com/

Music Monday: Les Zoings

Have you stumbled across a colourfully dressed marching band in New Cross and Brockley recently? I saw them in Telegraph Hill Park on the weekend of the skate park opening, then again the following weekend in Gellatly Road (SE14) playing in the streets outside the Nunhead and District Municipal Museum and Art Gallery.

They call themselves Les Zoings and describe themselves as 'A BRASS FANFARE. WE ARE A MARCHING BAND WHO PLAY MUSIC AND DRESS UP TO FULL EFFECT'. In fact they are currently advertising for new members: 'We are a Marching Fanfare Brass Band with five horns and a drummer. We dress up and march at public outdoor events such as markets and festivals. We play a mixture of French, Italian, Balkan, Latin and Television theme tunes. Now we are looking to expand the band and we need in particular a drummer, a Suzaphone or Tuba, Euphonium or trombone player. We are based in Lewisham and we rehearse every wednesday evening and play every weekend'. Email thomass35@hotmail.com if you are interested.


This film clip and photographs shows them in full flow in Gellatly Road, playing the great Brecht/Weill song Moon of Alabama (or to give it the correct name, Alabama Song).

New Cross & Deptford Free Film Festival

From Friday 27 April to Sunday 6 May the New Cross and Deptford Free Film Festival  will be screening films in some very unusual places including two parks, an adventure playground, the walls of the tiny white-tiled prison cells at Deptford Old Police Station and from a 40ft lorry turned mobile cinema. Events include bike-powered open-air family screenings, film-based discussions on topics of local/global concern, and screenings of local filmmakers' work. The New Cross and Deptford Free Film Festival is organised and run entirely by volunteers with guidance and support from the Peckham and Nunhead Free Film Festivals group. Highlights include:

- Bike-powered cinema courtesy of the amazing Electric Pedals. Come along and help power the film. Everyone welcome to have a go. Bring a bike to join the fun. The film won't run without YOU!

 -Freedom Cells. A weekend of films by human rights filmmakers and artists. Old Deptford Police Station

- NO DVD. If you have old home movies stashed away in attics or cupboards then we’d love you to bring them along. Submissions must be on either VHS or Super8 and a maximum of 10 minutes in length. Films shot locally will be particularly welcome. New Cross Library, New Cross Road SE14 6AS.

- Attack the Cross. An all night celebration of aliens and bass music in the heart of New Cross! Release Nightclub, 23 Lewisham Way SE14 6PP.

The full festival programme is at http://www.freefilmfestivals.org/. Events are free, but obviously it's going to cost the organisers to put it on so please make a donation at http://www.sponsume.com/project/new-cross-deptford-free-film-festival

Cinetopia Events

As part of the festival, local purveyors of cinema culture Cinetopia are putting on three events:

Film in the Garden, Sandbourne Rd Community Garden, SE4 2NS. Sun 29 Apr, start 7.00pm ends 10.00pm. For one night only, Cinetopia will transform the garden into a magical outdoor cinema. Bring a picnic, dress as your favourite character from Alice in Wonderland and join us for a Mad Hatters Tea Party, followed by a screening of Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland. There will be some simple seating but guests are advised to bring picnic rugs, folding chairs and warm clothes. Maximum capacity 50. Entrance is first come first serve. No toilet facilities.

The Lost Cinema of Deptford at Big Red Pizzeria (next to Birds Nest Pub), Deptford Church Street, SE8 4RZ. Mon 30 Apr, start 7.30 end 9.30.100 years of the moving image in New Cross and Deptford  - Whe was Deptford's first picture palace? What was the scene of South East London's WW1 cinema disaster? Which local nightspot was once a major cinema and palais de danse? Which angry young man flick features Deptford market? What about 'last tango in New Cross'? An illustrated talk by local historian Neil Gordon-Orr with clips, and  images. Maximum capacity 35. Entrance is first come first serve.

Craters and Mirrors at The Hill Station Cafe, Kitto Road SE14. Thur 3 May. 8.00 - 10.00, featuring two films: 

- Some Foreign Field: The Lochnagar Crater On the first of July 1916 a powerful explosion beneath the German trenches resulted in a massive crater. It was the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Sixty years later the crater was bought by an Englishman. This new short film by John Whitfield tells its story.

- Sound Mirrors explores the monumental remnants of a dead-end technology and the people who visit them. The three concrete 'listening ears' at Denge near Dungeness in Kent are the best known of the various early warning acoustic mirrors built along Britains coast. This is the first film produced by director/ photographer Morgan O'Donovan with architect Stephen Beasley. Filmed August 2009.

Further details from cinetopia@hotmail.co.uk

Fftang! Fftang! - Tropical Bass in New Cross

So an SE14 neighbour of mine turned the former garage at the bottom of their garden into a temporary social space at the weekend. I ended up dancing with an all ages 14-50 crowd to a scratch band playing ska on Sunday afternoon (including a Message to Rudy). It got me thinking about how strange and wonderful it is that a music invented in Jamaica fifty years ago has become a kind of universal party sound, in the UK at least. Ska was first heard over here via Jamaican migrants, crossing over to mods via clubs like El Partido in Lewisham , then being taken up by the first wave of skinheads, revived by 2-Tone bands in late 70s/early 80s, and further popularised in the 1990s by bands like No Doubt. Now it's just part of the grammar of pop music.

Ska is just one of the many ingredients in the mix for FFTANG! FFTANG!, a night of 'Global Beats and Tropical Bass' coming to the Amersham Arms in New Cross on Easter Saturday  7th April (admission free). If you check out the mix below you'll see that is starts with a ska remix of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, but the FFTANG! FFTANG! sound includes all kinds of infectiously danceable stuff from all over the world - favela funk, dancehall, afrobeat, reggaeton  - you name it.

As they say: 'From Buenos Aires bedrooms to Cape Town raves, traditional dance rhythms from around the world are being fused with modern production to create hybrid party music. Boundaries are melting and genres breed as internet culture allows worlds to collide. FFTANG! FFTANG! is a monthly club night in London set up to champion these genre mutations. Brazilian dubstep crossed with Himalayan mambo? Swedish hip hop over Congolese speed disco? Old meets nueva. Sound-clash meets culture-clash'.

If this all sounds a bit like ethnomusicology homework, just listen to the music - all of it very accessible and get-up-on-the-floorable. In this mix, there's some Kate Bush, Etta James and versions of Seven Nation Army, Nirvana's Lithium, Uptown Top Ranking and Mas Que Nada. Oh and mash up of Cutty Ranks 'Limb by Limb' with Tequila! And you don't need to know what Moombahton is to appreciate a great mix of The Rolling Stones' Miss You (starts at about 9:30):

FF have been putting on monthly club nights at various venues across London, including 93 Feet East and the Big Chill bar. For their first night in New Cross they will be including live percussion along with the DJ sets.

Ratstar Graffiti, Camberwell

I took these photos in February of demolition in progress of buildings at 298-302 Camberwell Road, squatted for a couple of years previously as the Ratstar Social Centre (infamously raided by police in April 2011 just before the Royal Wedding). Click images to enlarge.

'Girls are vandals too'

Forest Hill shooting: police story challenged

When a young man was shot and critically injured by police in Stanstead Road, SE23 in February some people believed that it was a simple story of a dangerous knife-wielding criminal being shot by police in self-defence after tasers failed to subdue him. But as I wrote at the time 'the facts of what happened have not yet been independently established. In many previous cases the first version of events reported in the press has turned out to be incomplete and misleading'. According to a report published last night by the Daily Mail, (3 April 2012), the facts may be very different from how they were first presented:

'Police marksmen were accused last night of Tasering a man as he lay grievously wounded in the street after they had shot him four times with live bullets. Witnesses claim they heard one of the 50,000 volt stun guns being discharged after George Asare, 25, collapsed in a pool of blood. One claimed officers repeatedly kicked the suspected knifeman on the ground as they surrounded him in a chaotic confrontation. Medical evidence has emerged that one of at least four Taser shots hit him in the groin, something his family believe was deliberate.


George Asare, shot by police in Forest Hill
(incidentally his father is a well-know TV sports presenter in Ghana)



Last night they demanded answers. His mother, Elizabeth Benin, said: ‘Why wasn’t there a stand-off? I want to know why the police did not try to talk to George. George is not a bad person, he is a good person but he was not well, I don’t understand why they had to shoot him. I just thank God that he was not killed.’

Asare is due to appear before magistrates in Bromley, Kent, today accused of attempting to cause grievous bodily harm to police and affray. He is being held in a secure psychiatric ward at the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Bromley, where he is recovering from his injuries.

The new claims dramatically contradict the original chain of events that emerged in the days after the shooting in Forest Hill, South-East London. It was originally believed that police shot Asare with live rounds only after several Tasers were discharged but failed to restrain him as he threatened them... Asare, a British-born Ghanaian university graduate, was left fighting for his life with wounds to the abdomen, leg, groin and hand in the early hours of February 19. Local officers attended the suburban street where he lives with his mother after a member of the public dialled 999 to report someone suspected of trying to break into a car...

 A family friend said: ‘George has suffered horrific injuries. The family believe it is the other way around, he was shot and then he was Tasered. Witnesses claim that when police came shots were fired almost immediately. As soon as George hit the ground they surrounded him and started to kick him and then they heard the distinctive pop-pop-pop noise of a Taser.’

A spokesman for the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which is investigating the shooting, confirmed that it is looking at the exact sequence of events and appealed for anyone with information to get in touch' [foresthill@ipcc.gsi.gov.uk or on freephone 0800 096 9077].

In my earlier post on the subject I also pointed out that the actions of the person shot as described 'would suggest not a career criminal but a vulnerable adult, for instance with mental health and/or drug and alcohol problems. If that were the case, questions might include whether the person was known to other agencies and whether they had received the support they needed'. The fact that Mr Asare is now in a psychiatric ward indicates that this was indeed the case.

In a week in which evidence has emerged of a Metropolitan Police officer calling a young man a foul racist word which anybody else would get arrested for using, and of one his colleagues kicking another man as he lay on the floor, we now have a suggestion that in the borough of Lewisham a badly injured man lying on the floor may have deliberately been given an electric shock in the groin.

History Corner: Distress in Deptford 1867

'Distress in Greenwich and Deptford

On Tuesday evening a deputation of artisans from the Greenwich and Deptford districts waited upon the General Committee of the London Working Men's Association in reference to the great distress prevailing amongst the many hundreds of unemployed workmen connected with the shipbuilding trades in the above districts. The deputation represented ironworkers, shipwrights, boilermakers, engineers, platers etc. After hearing the statements of the deputation the following resolution was agreed to:

"That the committee at once open communication with gentlemen in the City of London with a view of getting up a meeting at the London Tavern for the purpose or raising funds to alleviate the great distress now existing amongst the shipbuilding artisans and labourers unemployed in the east and south-eastern districts. That the committee make applications to various clergymen and Dissenting ministers to preach sermons in their churches and chapels in aid of the above object"' (South London Press, 25 May 1867).

The London Working Men's Association (LWMA) had been founded not long before by George Potter, the editor of the trade union paper The Bee-Hive (not to be confused with a previous LWMA from the 1830s and 1840s). Potter went on the be one of the first presidents of the Trades Union Congress in 1871.

Earlier in January 1867, the same period of poverty and unemployment prompted bread riots in Deptford.

Music Monday: Basement Jaxx

In terms of dance music, Basement Jaxx (Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton) must be the biggest act to come out of South London - particularly in terms of their sustained output over 15 years and more. I heard Felix on BBC Radio 6 over the weekend, and they are working on a new album.

Basement Jaxx built their reputation putting on various legendary nights in Brixton in the mid/late 90s: at the George IV on Brixton Hill, the Junction (Loughborough Junction) and later the Telegraph (their Rooty nights).

For much of this time their studio has been in Loughborough Junction, in the Shakespeare Business Centre on the corner of Shakespeare Road and Coldharbour Lane. Earlier this year, they played a benefit at JAMM in Brixton for the Triangle Adventure Playground Association.

Their most explict tribute to the local area was the Camberwell EP released in 2000 under the name Banana Krew. Tracks include: I Live in Camberwell (with lines including "I live in Camberwell, she lives in Brixton" and "On the streets of Camberwell, the tramps are coming at me". Also includes great ice cream van breakdown.



and Camberskank:



They have also recorded a track called Camberwell Skies.

More Three-Sided Football

I really enjoyed the three-sided football in Deptford Park last weekend - note the red, yellow and blue tops of the three sides all on the pitch at the same time - with three goals. Some serious playing, with a cross section of Saturday morning park players and post-situationists. Dangerous business when your brain tells you you're still 18 and your body has other ideas.

Next match is next Saturday 6th April, 11 am - all welcome. Regular reports/updates at South East Central, I gather there was also a match planned earlier this month at Goldsmiths, so the 3-sided game seems to be taking off round here. Get involved!

Cabinets of Curiosities

[note - this post is actually from May 2011, for some reason when I added a link it updated it and changed the date so it looks like it was posted in March 2012 - sorry for any confusion]

Your average artist's open house consists of a few paintings or sculptures in somebody's kitchen, sometimes good, sometimes less so. Some though take it to another level, and transform or display their whole house as a kind of art installation. Recently I have had the pleasure of visiting two examples of the latter, both in their own very different ways 'cabinets of curiosities' collecting together various strange and beautiful objects rather than simply showing works of arts.

Nunhead and District Municipal Museum and Art Gallery

For the past three years a house in Gellatly Road SE14 has been transformed into the 'Nunhead and District Municipal Museum and Art Gallery' during the Telegraph Hill Festival. The museum exhibits includes 50+ years of domestic and pop culture detritus situated in a whole mythos of Nunhead pseudo-history featuring the sadly imaginary 'George Gellatly' (industrialist and museum founder), 'Nunhead Alhambra', lost post-punk band The Nunhead Cemeteries and the 'Nunhead Free University' - not to mention the 'Penge Pilgrimage Centre' and the 'Thamesmead DeLarge Foundation' - see below, click to enlarge.



Each year it has become more elaborate, with 2011 seeing fictional blue plaques apperaing all round the area and a theatre space created in a converted garage with lots of musical and other performances from the likes of the Transpontine Music Club and the Brockley Bonfire Choir.










(see report on Nunhead Museum 2009)

Recycled House

This year's Dulwich Festival Open House has extended to take in swathes of Forest Hill and Sydenham, encompassing Mark Hill and Kate Shipp's Recycled House (4b Longton Avenue, SE26). Unlike the 'Nunhead Museum', this is not a temporary event but an ongoing project of daily life premised on critiquing consumerism through the domestic use of recycled objects and materials. There are walls papered with pages from old French novels, 1940s letters and player piano sheet music, and collections of glass objects, Catholic artefacts and old telephones.











The Recycled House is open again next weekend, 14-15th May 2011, 11am-6pm. Their chocolate cake is very good too!

Lewisham protests update

With the government on the ropes in pasty-petrol-pensions-payforsupper-gate, Lewisham is doing it's bit to bring it on...

Teachers strike

Schools across Lewisham were closed on Wednesday during the national strike by teachers against Government attacks on their pensions. Lewisham National Union of Teachers said:

'From next month, the Government will be cutting teachers’ pay.  They want to make us pay MORE for our pensions - but they’ll be paying us LESS pension when we retire. They also want to raise the age retirement to 68 or even 70 ! How can anyone be expected to teach classes of thirty or more children at that age ? We know we’re not alone in facing cuts. Teachers will be marching down Whitehall with ex-Fords car workers who are also fighting for pensions justice. We hope our fight can help protect other workers from cuts too'. Here's a Lewisham banner on the demonstration in central London:

And here's a short film about the strike by local union activist Martin Powell-Davies:

Workfare

Following the protests earlier this month against workfare - unemployed people having to work without pay - there's further action on Saturday 31st March in Lewisham town centre - 'meet outside the front of Sainsbury's inside Lewisham Shopping Centre at 1:00pm sharp for some direct action against companies involved in workfare' (details here).

NHS protest

We mentioned last month that Lewisham Keep our NHS Public were planning to protest in Bermondsey outside the office in the Blue of Con Dem MP Simon Hughes. Apparently 30+ people took part on 25th February (pictured above). They say: 'The protest comprised of health campaigners, including 3 GPs, who spoke to the people of Bermondsey using Lewisham KONP’s sound system about the dangers of NHS privatisation, chiefly that this bill will destroy our universal NHS and will eventually usher in a US style health system. Other speakers included a US citizen now resident in Britain who told the people of Bermondsey she grew up in the 1980s without an NHS in America and recalled having to cross the Mexican border to buy medicine they could not afford in the USA. In less than 2 hours over 160 people of Bermondsey signed the open letter to Hughes urging him to drop the bill'. Hughes voted for the bill nevertheless and it was passed - but campaigners say that the fight to save the NHS is just getting started.

History Corner: Convoys Wharf Archaeology

Last Saturday there was a lot of interest in the public consultation on the future of  the Convoys Wharf site in Deptford (Deptford Dame , Deptford Misc and Deptford Is all include thorough reports of the issues raised). For me, the archaeological tour of the area was particularly interesting.

Of course I knew all about the Royal Dockyard which stood there from 1513 until 1869, and the later Foreign Cattle Market where animals were imported into London. But the major archaeological dig over the last year has made this history much more tangible by exposing its reasonably well preserved remains beneath the concrete.  The features of the yard, including the basin, slips and river wall, can now be readily seen with brick foundations and timbers surviving for hundreds of years (though they will shortly be covered up again to prevent weather damage).

Some of the timbers that have been found date back to the Tudor period when the King's Yard was first created - and as timbers were frequently recycled from broken up ships it is likely that some of them came from earlier, medieval boats.

But while the investigation has largely been focused on the dockyard remains, it has also found evidence of human occupation dating back 10,000 years. It seems that much of the site was originally marshland, with a gravel headland into the marshes alongside a river channel that flowed into the Thames. Mesolithic remains have been uncovered, iron age burials and a later substantial Roman building 

The Olympia warehouse, first built in the 1840s, is a listed building and will survive demolition of rest of site

It was good too to get a sense of the vastness of the site, which is hard to appreciate from the limited area visible from the entrance near the Dog and Bell pub. It covers a big expanse of the riverfront that has been fenced off from the rest of Deptford for many years. I don't think many of the people who saw all this at the weekend are going to be content with some Isle of Dogs style combination of luxury flats, offices and a shopping centre at Convoys Wharf.



The riverfront at Convoys Wharf with the Aragon Tower on Pepys Estate
beyond the edge of the site





A cormorant on the river



Skate Park Opening

Telegraph Hill Park in New Cross was packed on Sunday for the official opening of the new skate park. The facility is already being really well used by kids of all ages (and I don't just mean the under-18s) and is proving that there is a real demand for spaces like this - build it and they shall come.

Elsewhere in the park there was lots of activities for younger children linked to the Telegraph Hill Festival, including wrapping a tree with wool and wishes. The organisers, Cristiana Bottigella and Manali Jagtap Nyheim, described it as the Wishing Thread and said that it was partially based on a Hindu custom with Banyan trees.

Ark in the Park encouraged people to make animals out of wood, card and other found materials.

There was a cycle powered sound system by the skate park and, down by the big slide,

a wandering jazz band.

The Telegraph Hill Skate Park logo - with heart made from skateboard.

Music Monday: Eternal

A retro turn in this week's Music Monday, as we recall SE London's greatest ever girl group (at least in the soul category - we can talk about Shampoo another time).

Eternal was conceived of by manager Denis Ingoldsby in 1992 as a UK version of En Vogue. He put together sisters Easther and Verna Bennett, with Kelle Bryan and Louise Nurding (the latter of whom Ingoldsby had met in London club The Milk Bar).

Three of the four were from South London - the  Bennett sisters were from Croydon, and were steeped in gospel music via their family's church. Nurding was born in Lewisham Hospital and grew up in Eltham - she went to St.Thomas More RC Primary School in Appleton Road. In fact her grandad had a stall on Lewisham market where she sometimes helped out.

The original line up of the band only lasted until 1995 when Nurding left the band to go solo (she later became known of course as Louise Redknapp); Bryan left in 1998 after a split with the Bennett sisters.

Just a Step from Heaven is one of their better earlier tracks, nice slice of soulful pop plus the slightly surreal sight of the band cavorting to Black Panther Party/Public Enemy imagery (dancers in berets and combats, clenched fists etc):

s

"I Wanna Be the Only One", a duet with BeBe Winans, was a UK number one in 1997 and a bona fide 1990s soul classic:

Convoys Wharf Consultation

In Deptford tomorrow (Saturday 24th March) there's a consultation event on the future of the key Convoys Wharf riverside site. Cynical as I am about developer-initiated events, the fact that it is happening at all does demonstrate that the current 'Masterplan' is in question. Many people locally argue that it proposes a bland, identikit luxury tower block development that ignores the history and location of the site. Alternative proposals will be being put forward tomorrow by Deptford Is and others. There will also be an opportunity to look around the site and the archaelogical dig currently in progress there.

Timetable tomorrow:
11.00 Exhibition opens

11.15 – 12.15 Site and archaeological tour opportunity 1

12.15 –14.15:  Welcome from Hutchison Whampoa, followed by speeches and presentations, including Joan Ruddock MP, Sir Terry Farrell and colleagues, and local community groups.

The presentations will be followed by question and answer opportunities and refreshments will be provided during the two-hour period.

PLEASE NOTE: If you want to take a full part in these sessions, please arrive promptly at noon. Register for one of the site tours on arrival.

14.15-15.15: Site and archaeological tour opportunity 2

16.00 Exhibition closes

Yet more tales from The Crypt

The late 1980s Psychedelic Nites in the Crypt at St Paul's Deptford have been mentioned here before. Here's a few more images from that time and place that I have rounded up:



Here & Now in December 1988 -
incidentally they are playing at The Ivy House SE15 on 4 May 2012



Pink Faries, March 1988 - Larry Wallis from The Pink Fairies
lived for years on the Walworth Road, above the Halifax bank I think
(maybe still does)

The Troggs - presumably of Wild Thing fame

Ozric Tentacles and The Glitterband (what? Gary Glitter's old backing band?)

The Taste Experience - a separate psychedelic club

Magic Mushroom Band in The Crypt

A non-pyschedelic night - Virus on stage at Mortarhate records night
in 1986 (Conflict's record label)

Jungle Brothers in Peckham

Now I have bought my tickets I can safely publicise this without worrying whether it's going to sell out. So let's just say The Jungle Brothers are playing in Peckham!

'Fri April 13th - An Exhibition of Sound continues with Chapter 3 / Hip Hop - Featuring the Mighty JUNGLE BROTHERS LIVE + a special DJ set from the one and only DJ SAMMY B. The JBS one of the most famous and celebrated Hip Hop groups of all time returning with a career-spanning set dropped loud, hard and fast at The Bussey Building / CLF Art Cafe.

The JUNGLE BROTHERS have been around since Hip Hop's Golden Age... They first appeared on the NYC Hip Hop scene with the release of the groundbreaking “Straight Out The Jungle” in 1988.  This recording was the birthplace of the NATIVE TONGUES POSSE a triumvirate of innovative Rap groups (including De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, Monie Love and later Mos Def) and was instrumental in influencing later envelope pushing artists like the Roots, Arrested Development, Pharcyde, Madlip, Common, Kanye West and others.

Following up their raw, energetic debut, the group went into the studio with NYC underground club and house producer Todd Terry, and Hip house was born. "I'll House You" became a bona fide international hit, making Terry one of the most in-demand remixers to this day...  the Jungle Brothers subsequently signed to Warner Bros. Free to sample and manipulate in a more sophisticated setting, the JBs mixed up breaks and beats that recalled the Bronx block parties of their youth, incorporating elements from jazz, soul, and funk classics.The resulting album: “Done By The Forces Of Nature”, ranks with other masterpieces of the era like the Beastie Boys “Paul's Boutique” and De La Soul's seminal “Three Feet High And Rising”'.

'

Advance tickets available here (buy before 5 pm Friday if you can, as prices then go up)

The Budget: Brockley Speaks

'Austerity isn't working' poster in Endwell Road by Brockley station, a play on the infamous Tory/Saatchi 1979 'Labour isn't working' poster (thanks to Luke Collins for the photo). The slogan was the basis of UK Uncut's budget protest today, as reported by Andy Worthington.

Here's a short film of it being put up a few days ago:

History Corner: Nunhead Station Shooting 1924

On March 18 1924 there was a tragic incident at Nunhead railway station. John Alfred West, a 24 year old lorry driver from Marylebone, shot his ex-fiancee Edith Agnes Barker (23) as she was getting off the train. She recovered, but he died of his injuries at Kings College Hospital the next day.

Barker, of Gibbon Road, was a programme seller at the Scala Theatre. Her father, Thomas Cornish Harker,  ran a newsagent near to the station. He told The Times that the couple had been engaged for four and a half years, but had broken up six weeks before; 'Since then West has been bothering her with his attentions. Last night she came home as usual by herself, by the 11.50 train from St Pauls Station. At the Elephant and Castle Station, West, who appears to have been waiting for her, got into the compartment where she was. On arriving at Nunhead, just as she was getting out of the train, she tells me, West pointed a revolver at her and fired. He fired two shots at her and then one at himself. Edith fell forward on to the platform bleeding from a bullet wound in the face' (Times 19 March 1924)

At the inquest into West's death, station attendant Charles Abbs recalled 'Miss Harker jumped from the train, dropped her attache case on the platform, and collapsed in my arms, saying "He has shot me". The next thing I saw was the man standing in his carriage, and before anything could be done there was another report of a revolver. The man gave a half-right turn and fell on the back of his head on the platform with his legs remaining inside the carriage' (Times, 26 March 1924).

Fred Vermorel on Kate Moss

Amongst some would-be radicals there is a deep loathing of popular culture that can come across as very patronising. You know the sort of thing - 'TV is for fools and the masses' interest in celebrities just shows that they are dupes of the system' etc. etc. Sometimes this critique is dressed up in language about 'the spectacle', with a suggestion that music, TV and film simply create passive consumers unable to think or act for themselves. The notion of the Society of the Spectacle derives from Guy Debord and the Situationist International in the 1960s, though it has to be said that their notion of it is more sophisticated than the cod-situ version sometimes spouted today - certainly little trace of any moralistic condemnation of 'consumerism'.

One man who knows more about the situationists than most is Fred Vermorel. He was actually in Paris during the events of May 1968, in which the situationists were actively involved, and indeed shortly after played a critical if inadvertent role in cultural history when he introduced his friend Malcolm McLaren to the work of the Situationist International at the '36 bus stop, just outside Goldsmiths College in Lewisham Way'.  Vermorel was living in Jerningham Road, New Cross at this time (more about this here). McLaren of course went on to manage the Sex Pistols, some would say applying some ideas he culled from the situationists -  a connection made by Fred and Judy Vermorel in their 1978 book Sex Pistols: the inside story'.

Vermorel's take on 'fandom' is quite distinctive. In Starlust: the Secret Life of Fans  (1985), Fred and Judy Vermorel collected together the fantasies of music fans with a suggestion that they reflected a kind of 'utopian romanticism' - a desire for a more intense way of life that sometimes exceeded the limits set for it by the cultural industry, in its own way potentially subversive.

Since then Vermorel has written a  number of books which could be described as celebrity biogs, with subjects including Kate Bush, Vivienne Westwood, and Kate Moss. To an extent Vermorel inhabits the mindset of the obsessive fan in his books, trawling tabloids and acquaintances for tales of sex, drugs and scandals, as well as the micro-detail of  celebrity trivia. But these are also biogs with a difference - for instance the Kate Bush book includes genealogical research on her forebears in Kent, and the Westwood one includes fictional first person narrative.

'Kate Moss: Addicted to Love' (2006) starts with reflections on her 'Croydon' origins, or rather as Vermorel points out the leafier suburbs of the Croydon area: 'Forget Croydon. That is a fantasy she likes to spread as much as the media  does. A supermodel from Croydon: beauty flowering out of the concrete towered, motorway infested, chav ridden wastelands... Sanderstead... is where Kate Moss really comes from - spiritually as well as spatially. "Croydon" may be the general area, and convenient shorthand, but Sanderstead - suburbia, is what's inside her'.

Vermorel then goes on to detail Kate's South London life  - birth in St Mary's Hospital, Croydon; a short period at Pagehurst Road, Addiscombe then growing up at 75 Church Way, Sanderstead; Ridgeway Primary School; Riddlesdown High School; hanging out with the teenage drinkers and smokers in Purley Town Centre; moving in with her mum in Forestdale when her parents split up; meeting early boyfriends in Croydon wine bar Rue St George - then after being spotted at an airport on to The Face,  Johnny Depp (who told Vanity Fair in 1997 'man, you can't beat that South London accent'), Pete Doherty, 'Cocaine Kate' and all the rest.

This is definitely in the mainstream 'unauthorised' celebrity biography genre, rather than some kind of cultural studies text, but Vermorel does slip in the odd Burroughs and Baudrillard quote and some wider reflections on the relationships between celebrity, money and drugs:

'There are parallels in how celebrity works, and how money works. Both celebrity and money are formless and yet endlessly mutable... They both originate in magic belief, and their extraordinary  power to reproduce and migrate across culture comes from their 'super-objective' quality: they are beyond everything yet inside everything. The stock exchange and the hit parades both float on fetishes of reputation - and of number... the essence of any celebrity is not anything instrinsic to the person who bears the Name - the magic is in the numbers - of hits, of clicks, of number ones and top tens, the milliosn of fans or  $s or £s that accrue to that 'personality''.

And:

'Heroin stands for money - trade - turnover - feverish spending - sales bonanzas - overnight fortunes - role reversals - and amazing good luck. It equally signifies fashion, which is the pulse of pure consumerism. Heroin, as the ideal commodity, creates perfect consumers... No surprize then, the trade off between those ultimate icons of conusmerism, models, and those ultimate consumers, junkies. Both work from wasted bodies and freak energies, they live on the margins of the tragic and the phantasmagorical - between the next frock and the next fix'.

Kate Moss's first front page, The Face, 1990
(from Corinne Day's famous Camber Sands photo shoot)

Fred Vermorel now teaches at Kingston University and at Richmond.

Music Monday: Controlled Weirdness

Neil Keating aka DJ Controlled Weirdness has been DJing since the 1980s, playing out all kinds of bass and beats in London, New York, Berlin and many other places (I first came across him at Dead by Dawn in Brixton in the mid-1990s). While best known for hard breaks and electro-tinged sounds, he is also a formidable authority on disco (especially it's crossover into early rap)  as I can vouch having once spent time crate digging with him in Friedrichshain - check out some of his mixes at Ill FM.

Controlled Weirdness recently at the Bussey building in Peckham

From his Rotherhithe tower block HQ he has also released numerous tracks under various guises on his own Unearthly Records and other labels. He has recently started uploading much of his back catalogue on to Soundcloud (he has made some of the tracks featured here temporarily available for download so get busy). 

The Deptford Market Arcade Classics EP (2003) was 'Inspired by rooting through the debris and detritus of South London. The sound at the start of Docklands Battle Breaks is the Thames river rushing through one of the old dock gates in Deptford'.

'South London Bass' (2005) is a classic; the title is self-explanatory.




His latest upload is the previously unreleased 'I'm the Guvnor'.



'Let's all have a South London Acid House Party'  - great late 1980s sample at the beginning: 'Saturday night in South London, hundreds of young people are gathering for the latest craze - an acid house party in a disused warehouse'



Neil has written an excellent article in Datacide magazine about clubbing and warehouse parties in 1980s London, You’re too Young to Remember the Eighties – Dancing in a different time:

'The Saturday night ritual was to head to the Spice of Life pub on the Charing Cross Road. This is where all the various clubbers would congregate before heading out to different parties. Here you would hear about these illegal warehouse parties that had started taking place in the run down old docklands areas near the Thames and around London, Blackfriars and Southwark Bridges. This area was pre regeneration and was full of empty old warehouses with nobody living near by. You would get the address and head down after midnight and try and find the party. It would be Five pounds to get in and you could buy Red Stripe beer for a pound which was sold out of dustbins crammed full of ice. Some of these parties were massive and you would get a real cross section of people crammed into a dirty warehouse and dancing all night. The music was usually rare groove which was basically obscure funk 7 inches that DJ’s had started digging up. There was no door policy like at the some of the trendier night clubs so you’d get people dressed up in designer clothes next to punters in jeans and T-shirts dancing all night'.

As mentioned here before, Tooley Street by London Bridge was the location for some of these warehouse parties.

Controlled Weirdness is playing at the Festa Junina Brazilian festival in Berlin in June, and has some other nights lined up a bit nearer home. Follow him on Facebook or Twitter for details.