Feeling the Contour Lines of History

I am trying to prepare myself for going to Australia. Beyond the 22-hour flight, beyond travelling into the 11-hour time difference future, I have to be ready for total dislocation from my land.

Wherever I walk in England – from London’s event patined streets to Dorset’s fossil rich beaches – I am always connected. On the green lanes and sweep paths of Kent or Sussex, in the woods of Hereford and copses of Essex, I am connected. I can see the shimmering temporal projections mapping past, present and yet to come. I navigate through feeling the contour lines of history.

Atop the remains of the North Thames Cliff still bearing its Ice Age scars or squeezing through the cobbled claustrophobia of a York alleyway, I can pick out ancestral footsteps. They resonate through earth and stone, resonate through myth and folklore to carve out the invisible, underlying topology of place. In England I can always sense the undertow of temporal currents that manifest in the drifting patterns of psychogeographers.

Under railway bridges, on uncared for industrial estate mud or overgrown boneyards, I can always find imaginary fire. There is forever magic I know I will never fully capture with my words. At every crossroads I am but a step away from English Hoodoo. A step away from being in the English Dreaming.

However, all of this is about to become meaningless. The ley lines of my English imagination are about to give way to Australia’s dreaming tracks, it songlines. I am travelling into the Aboriginal sacred landscaped defined by their ‘Footprints of Ancesotrs’, the ‘Way of the Law’. There is no way to escape the fact that in less than two months, I am going to become an alien.

The Secret History of English Jazz

There have been a couple of nights during the last fortnight where I have dreamed of a future where Stephen Grasso and I have become authors of a book entitled The Secret History of English Jazz. It was less an account of the music scene, more of a novel and exploration of an occulted culture hidden in basements. It covered the magic of music from swing to sweet rocksteady. The Café de Paris to after-hour clubs on the Charing Cross Road and a certain Powis Square shebeen. Piron’s New Orleans Orchestra to Cyril Blake’s Calypso Serenaders. Rum libations, sacred smoke and the tale of how the Loa of Bouncers became the Prince of London.

The echoes of dream tumbled into the Soho twilight when I met Mr. Grasso on a Dean Street corner. One pint of the dark stuff at a spit and sawdust then we shuffled a few doors along. Descending a staircase, we entered the Black Gardenia, a strange nightclub that can only be called a true jazz dive. It was the type of venue where it would come as no surprise to learn that Lord C. had once worked the door. I had been warned the Black Gardenia was like something out of a David Lynch movie. I had not been misled.

Tight and dark, it was furnished somewhere between a faded burlesque bar and the Sunrooms of my youth. Surreal touches of decoration were rubbed raw over the cracked bones of dead glamour. There was snakeskin wallpaper in the gents and a boxed skull skulking behind bottles. The most impossibly chic barmaid I have ever seen spent the night looking like a Parisian Maquis poster while the two rooms pulsed to a soundtrack of 1940 swing interupted by the occassional eruption of Blue Beat.

Come nine, the records stopped. A man with more than a passing resemblance to a giant Kyle McLaughlin, ravaged by a diet of booze and pills, walked over the piano beside us. He called out for bits of wood to jack up the instrument so he could put his legs under it, set up his PA and we entered what he called his ‘time tunnel’ as he began to power through 1920s and 1930s jazz standards.

Requests were made and granted. I got a time travel rendition of That Old Black Magic and we also got a beautiful Caravan. This was especially fitting. Its lyrics of starlight mysteries, crossing the desert as a metaphor for crossing the abyss and getting through difficult times together make it something of a favourite with the English Hoodoo fraternity. While my request for some Ken Snakehips Johnson could not be met, his spirit was evoked by our pianist telling the story of how he had performed on the same stage at the Café de Paris where Snakehips had died in the bomb blast.

Having made our own libations and nods to the secret history of English jazz, we climbed back into rainy streets of Soho to dodge rickshaws as they splashed through neon puddles. Down below in the Black Gardenia the time travel was still happening. A crumpled lounge singer five hours off the plane from LA was guesting on vocals as the pianist played the opening bars of Ghost of a Chance. Every note and word a living line of transmission.

All Absurdly Quaint and yet Absolutely Wonderful

I am ridiculously English. This is an inescapable fact – just ask anyone who knows me. Village and church fetes are also ridiculously English. In my childhood, being dragged to them was so unavoidable it was not worth putting any effort into resisting the annual trips to vicarage gardens and school playing fields where they tended to be held. The one time I did manage to get out of going to one, my brother somehow managed to win a lamb. I was exceptionally jealous and have had a lot more time for the possibilities thrown up by fetes ever since.

Given I live in central London, village fetes are somewhat thin on the ground. However, while my little patch may lack tombolas and Maypoles on the village green, it more than make this with its own version of a traditional fete – the Canalway Cavalcade.

Living in the environs of the Regent’s Canal, I am used to site of assorted narrowboats gently chugging passed their permanently moored sisters now serving as eccentric homes and offices. Yet on the May Day Bank Holiday weekend, the area known as Little Venice becomes flooded with boats from all over the country. This year, everything from working freight barges to floating retirement homes decked out in the habitual, absurdly floral folk art used to decorate canal boats, started mooring up on the Thursday night. By the end of Friday, more than 150 assorted craft, mostly traditional narrowboats, had gathered for the floating festival.

Part boat rally, part mild-TAZ with the added trappings customary to an rural English fete, the area is turned into both a tourist attraction and a temporary community for boaters. Stalls pack the canal bank. The real ale tent jostles for space with the pitch for Punch and Judy show. There are no lambs to be won, but the tombola offers tins of beer among its prizes if you pay your money and take a gamble in aid of the campaign against the British government’s current barbaric attack on England’s canals. Dixieland jazz is played from the floating platform next to Browning Island. Polyphonic improvisation rolling out across the water to dance in the sunshine with the happy chatter of the towpath crowds.

Christians who usually tour the waterways of England proselytising run a Wheel of Hope game of chance and tract distribution racket next to a white elephant stall raising funds for Camden’s Pirate Club. The gut-punching aroma of a whole pig being roasted floats in the air while you navigate your way through crowds sifting through countless tables selling craft items made by boaters. Herb plant sellers stand next to local historian hawking his wares. Every child seems to carry a balloon or a sticky treat. It is all absurdly quaint and yet absolutely wonderful.

During the times when the canals were the thriving arteries supplying the oxygen that allowed English industry to flame and flourish, the canal folk drifted apart from those tied to the land. They developed not only their own argot, but also a free-floating culture. I used to think the only remnants of this were the twee and largely faux decorative style. However, the Canal Cavalcade has made me reassess my knee-jerk dismissal of a continuation of this waterborne heritage. A lot of boats were clearly owned by those choosing to live off the grid with alternative lifestyles going beyond making a living as travelling puppeteers-come-Reiki-healers. Many of the craft belonged to retired couples, refusing to stay in one place and let autumnal decay take hold.

This year the Cavalcade also had an underlying political message. The waterways of England could be used to combat congestion and carbon emissions, yet the Government department responsible for them – the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) – is slashing the budget that maintains them. Many of the boaters are not your typical political activists, but everywhere I looked, I saw them taking the time to passionately tell anyone on the towpath who would listen about what the proposed DEFRA cuts could mean to the future of the canals and their way of life. This is everyday politics, widely ignored but resonant beyond just those at the immediate wrong end of these atrocious DEFRA plans. The waterways are pretty much our last nationalised resource and New Labour seems bent on destroying it.*

The highlight of the Cavalcade for me was last night’s procession of illuminated boats. Surreal Girl has known me for six years, but even she has rarely seen me exhibit such childlike glee as I displayed on the blue bridge. As craft painted with hundreds of points of light and colour came down the canal towards the pool of Little Venice, I was cheering along with the thousand or so others gathered to watch. I oohed as one boat came towards us, at its prow a man swinging great chains of fire. Clapped as another did the canal boat equivalent of a handbrake turn, spinning on the black water to reveal each of its glorious illuminated sides. A huge part of the joy was just knowing that everyone else had bothered to come out on a cool night to see something so simple yet so enchanting.

My favourite entry in the procession was spun with innumerable white lights, creating the effect of waves running across its surface supporting a model Avalonian boat perched on the cabin. As it glided under the bridge, the reassuring chug of engine echoing against Victorian brickwork, I felt like I was sharing in a blissful mass hallucination. My little bit of London had never felt so of England and yet so touched by something akin to the glamour of fairyland.

I do not have to tell any follower of English Hoodoo that the word fete originally meant festival or feast. It may call itself a cavalcade, but my local floating fete is a sustaining feast for the imagination, showing how the city can be made anew through the simple celebration of shared purpose. Sometimes it is bloody grand to live around here.



*If you want to know how to protest against this, email me.