London At Night

"In the markets of Soho to the far less exotic and more patriotic restraints of Pimlico ..." Noel Coward's London Pride is rightly one of the Capital's anthems, but it is by no means the great man's only song about the City. There is, for example, London At Night from his 1954 musical After The Ball, which was based on Lady Windermere's Fan. On paper the idea of Coward combining with Wilde is one to savour, but it's not everyone's favourite. Nevertheless London At Night is a wonderful number, and it's interesting to see Coward succumb to the London song writing temptation to take the listener on a whirlwind random tour of the town. I suppose there is a certain irony in the fact that Noel Coward is best remembered by some for his role as Mr Bridger in The Italian Job. It was something special though. As is of course the song London Pride. And the next time someone mentions the 'special relationship' to you then think of this amazing piece of film footage ...

Clunk Click

"We be all the King's Men. Minds of Jack The Ripper to the strokes of Big Ben. When we hear the tones we be breaking bones. Roaming through the gas lit alleyways of bloodstained cobblestones with the groans of Mr Hyde howling at the moon we be lunar like the tide ..." Ah The Brotherhood's Clunk Click captures better than any other track the dark heart of London past Peter Ackroyd also conjures up perfectly in novels like Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, The Lambs of London and The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein. The Brotherhood's Elementalz is one of the great lost masterpieces of UK hip hop. It has the distinct advantage of being produced by Trevor 'The Underdog' Jackson and features some of the most individualistic UK rap full stop. To give a flavour of how the outfit was out of step one track's entitled Punk Funk at a time when no one was listening (1996). The Brotherhood was from north west London and the city was quite a feature in its work ...

Big Ben

"On Sunday nothing opens late. The clock across the river chimes. Towers above the bridge we crossed were bound for better times ..." Nick Drake's At The Chime of the City Clock is one of the songs most often suggested for inclusion in this project. It's referenced in Roddy Frame's Big Ben, one of the highlights of the great man's Surf set. "At my best I believe in love. I can't conceive there's only sky above ..." I love those lines. It's a gloriously sentimental song. Speaking of which Big Ben is a sort of symbol for London, and so it's the perfect imagery for Vera Lynn to use when singing When You Hear Big Ben, You're Home Again. The great bell of the clock tower at the north end of the Palace of Westminster is, of course, known all over the world just like Vera Lynn, the forces' sweetheart from East Ham. Less well known is the fact that visits to the clock tower are free for UK citizens and can be arranged through the local MP. It's your democratic right but there'll be a waiting list ...

Public Servant

"Public servant number one. Sits in Whitehall. Is waited on. Do they know something we don't know? Public servant number two. Sits in Whitehall with nothing to do. Do they know something we don't know? Chief of Staff in a big black car. Buying arms for his jungle war. Does he know something that we don't know ..." sings the inimitable Charlie Harper at the start of the UK Subs' Public Servant, a great track from their second LP Brand New Age. Charlie is a London institution held in far higher regard than the heart of the Civil Service he sings about. It really is scary the role played by the higher echelons of the Civil Service in controlling this country and shaping what the Government of the day thinks is its policy. Of all the songs that make passing reference to Whitehall the most powerful and poignant has to be the Style Council's Homebreakers. Mick Talbot's vocals capture the vulnerability of the vengeful perfectly ...

Green Park

"It didn't last long. In seconds this moment had gone. It happened in Green Park ..." claims Anthony Adverse in her song Green Park. Oh I know the feeling only too well. This 'legendary b-side' was written by our old friend Louis Philippe, as was the Red Shoes suite of songs which features another fantastic Anthony Adverse London song, London My Town, which sounds rather wonderfully like the blueprint for Saint Etienne or Noonday Underground. It should perhaps be mentioned in passing that Anthony Adverse also recorded one of my favourite Vic Godard covers (T.R.O.U.B.L.E). The Anthony Adverse character was one of Mike Alway's fantasy pop figures on the wonderful el label and it's all there - the Powell/Pressburger references, the bossa inflections, the brassy '60s swing. I rather liked the fact that I didn't have a clue about who Anthony Adverse really was. Then, damn the internet, I found some snippets of information suggesting she was Julia Gilbert who had been in underground pop greats Five Or Six and who went on to become a script writer for EastEnders with a father who might have been Head of BBC Light Entertainment during one of its golden ages. Even Mr Alway couldn't have made that one up.

Klub Londinium 20-30

“The sunglass stands of Via Buckingham. People came to join the organised dancing. So we made a Klub. Made it all up ...” Klub Londinium 20-30 is a track from the final Sudden Sway record, Ko-Opera, released on Rough Trade in 1990. Sudden Sway’s story is the great untold pop adventure. Throughout the 1980s they were the ultimate pop strategists playing with formats and processes, all the while creating sounds several light years ahead of the pack. If you’re not familiar with their work follow the clues on the web to their Peel sessions, the Spacemate game, the To You With ReGard 12”, Traffic Tax Scheme, the Sing Song exercise and, my personal favourite, the ’76 Kids Forever pop opera. Ko-Opera is in some ways their ‘straight’ record, though musically it was a blueprint for the ‘90s to come. Similarly, well before the likes of Iain Sinclair were the toast of the town, to complement Ko-Opera there were special themed Klub Londinium walks around the Capital. To my eternal shame I didn’t take part, though I do seem to remember seeing people pick up headsets at the Rough Trade shop in Covent Garden. This is borrowed from an account posted online, with thanks and apologies to the author Ken C: “Klub Londinium was the best thing they ever did. It was an exercise in psychogeography in which you walked the city in someone else’s shoes. Having completed a personality assessment questionnaire, you were assigned to a tour for a quite different personality. They decided I was an Outsider, so sent me on the Hedonist tour. The cassette contained two voices; one giving directions and factual, historical information about London; the other representing the interior monologue of the ‘raver’ driving himself to despair in pursuit of the good time that must be going on somewhere else. The tour began at Charing Cross station and led through Soho and Mayfair, describing this history of the Crystal Rooms in Leicester Square, the location of the first strip show in London, Sheeky’s restaurant, the location of private gambling clubs, 18th century brothels, and much else. A tremendous amount of research must have gone into the tours. I bought the tapes for the other tours: the ‘Mystic’ personality (a satire on new-age nonsense the led around Regents Park and up Parliament Hill); Materialist (through the City, St Katherine’s Dock and the yuppie housing in Docklands, ending in Tobacco Dock) and, the best I think, the Outsider tour, an eternal wanderer’s search for a home, through Spitalfields and Brick Lane, ending at the Geffrye Museum. The degree of synchronisation between the taped speech in your head and what you saw in front of you was often uncanny; graffiti on the walls was read to you as you passed; an electronic tone representing the onset of a migraine kicked in as you emerged from the shadow of a building into the sunshine; the sound of footsteps following you as you walked through a long tunnel in a dodgy part of Shoreditch.” The same internet posting refers to an earlier Sudden Sway installation at ICA in The Mall, and a clip of the group performing its Human Jukebox featured on the Old Grey Whistle Test ...

The Changing of the Guard

"The Changing of the Guard is part of our tradition but now we find it's been applied to us ..." mourns The Marquis of Kensington as he feels the gentry is up against it in swingin' England. If his Changing of The Guard has a touch of the Noel Coward sings The Kinks about it then that'll be because their manager Robert Wace was on vocals. The Marquis of Kensington was a studio project featuring Wace with the great Mike Leander. This song was featured in Peter Whitehead's 1967 documentary Tonite Let's All Make Love In London, and was a hit on the continent. As Wace wanted to keep a low profile they got a young art student to do the TV appearances. Another single, Sister Marie, had a great mod instrumental, Flash, on the flip which was covered in Italy and became a hit for the equally aristocratic Duke of Burlington.

I Dig Everything

"Ain't had a job for a year or more. And I don't own a thing. Everything's fine and I dig everything. I feed the lions in Trafalgar Square and I dig everything ..." You could make up a nice little mix of David Bowie's London songs from the 1960s if you were that way inclined. Certainly our Dave's London Boys has been one of the most frequently suggested songs for this project. Rather brilliantly right at the offset Andy Hitchcock of the Socialist Leisure Party nominated I Dig Everything. Rob Symmons of the magnificent Fallen Leaves proposed London Bye Ta Ta. Bob Stanley has made a case for Can't Help Thinking About Me. And soul spinner supreme Jo Wallace trumped us all with Did You Ever Have A Dream? with its mention of Penge out there in deepest Shena Mackay territory. Oddly no one suggested Memories of a Free Festival . Stranger still none of Bowie's London songs seemed to feature in the fantastic Ken Pitt film, but you do get a nice shot of Mr Fish in Clifford Street here ...

I Live in Trafalgar Square

“My last ‘digs’ were on the Embankment. The third seat from Waterloo Bridge! But the cooking and, oh!, the attendance, didn’t happen to suit me so well. So I ordered my man to pack up and look out for another hotel ...” sings the splendid Ian Whitcomb on his interpretation of the old Music Hall classic I Live In Trafalgar Square which has the lovely subtitle of The Optimistic Outcast. It comes from Ian’s CD/Songbook Titanic Tunes where he recreates an impromptu ‘knees-up’ that took place in the steerage lounge of the doomed ship on the evening before the disaster. An American vaudeville act returning home, the Musical Murrays, was playing a mix of ragtime and music hall numbers they’d fallen in love with while in the UK. The audience would have been largely Eastern European immigrants whirling around the dancefloor. Ian takes on the role of Mr Mortimer St John of Mornington Crescent, “a delineator of high-class ballads, tragedian and dramatic monologist”, who may just have helped out with a spot of singing on the night, displaying an unexpectedly authentic Cockney tone at times. It’s great stuff, and a treasure chest of London songs. Proceedings end with Ian performing Albert Chevalier’s A Fallen Star which includes the lines: “I do not wish to gas. I merely state in self-defence the denizens of New Cut thought my Hamlet was immense”. Of course US audiences thought Ian was immense too ...

This Is Charing Cross

"This is Charing Cross; It is midnight; There is a great crowd. And no light— A great crowd, all black, that hardly whispers aloud. Surely, that is a dead woman—a dead mother! She has a dead face; She is dressed all in black; She wanders to the book-stall and back, At the back of the crowd; And back again and again back, She sways and wanders. This is Charing Cross; It is one o’clock. There is still a great cloud, and very little light; Immense shafts of shadows over the black crowd That hardly whispers aloud…. And now!… That is another dead mother, And there is another and another and another…. And little children, all in black, All with dead faces, waiting in all the waiting-places, Wandering from the doors of the waiting-room In the dim gloom. These are the women of Flanders: They await the lost. They await the lost that shall never leave the dock; They await the lost that shall never again come by the train To the embraces of all these women with dead faces; They await the lost who lie dead in trench and barrier and fosse, In the dark of the night. This is Charing Cross; it is past one of the clock; There is very little light. There is so much pain." This is the fifth part of the poem Antwerp by Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), which The Wraiths have set to music as This Is Charing Cross. It is a haunting poem about (Ford's) WW1 experiences which T.S. Eliot famously described as “the only good poem I have met with on the subject of the war.” Pretty daft quote that actually. The Valleys by Electrelane which uses words from Siegfried Sassoon's A Letter Home disproves that for starters. The Wraiths specialise in setting poetry to music, exceptionally beautiful music for which the words chamber folk seem ridiculously inadequate, and I am eternally grateful (yet again) to Daniel for suggesting this number be included, thus triggering a love of The Wraiths' work. Serves me right for not taking notice of him earlier. Interestingly Daniel has geographical links to both The Wraiths (Bristol) and Ford Madox Ford (Merton). The Wraiths have a fantastic new (second) collection out, Welcome, Stranger, To This Place, which continues the challenge of combining poems and music in a way that is exquisite and very moving. Coincidentally Ford Madox Ford's The Soul of London, which some argue is the best book about the Capital and I wouldn't necessarily diagree, is now available as a print-on-demand paperback. I'm not sure I like what that says about publishing today no matter how much I love the book ...