With Ink and a Surface to Write on

Give me pen and paper and I can use words to carve out new worlds or dig out narratives from the past trapped under traffic and tarmac. The potentially empty time of a bus journey becomes a chance to shape stories or engage in imaginary archaeological examination of London’s streets. The 436 heading towards Paddington an opportunity to capture the thrash of a new idea trying to break through or the instant when the 10,000 lights of Hyde Park’s temporary fairground glimpsed through the swirl of falling snow seems to be illuminated storm front of some alien invasion.

With the right tools to scratch, I can steal any part of the city for you. From malkuthian stabs of brutal neon in Little Lebananon to the troll dark of the Harrow Road Bridge when it acts as a portal to Machen’s Baghdad-on-the-Thames. With ink and a surface to write on, I can trap apple smoke genies as they escape from pavement shisha or record the boiling hiss as cold rain hits the glass of the lights embedded in the towpath.

No writer living in London should ever face a blank moment. Beyond the opportunities for the city to distract and entertain, it offers up a constant rush of stories and flashes for you to snatch like a Dickensian cartarista. As long as you avoid laziness, you can lift every word you need and find every gate into Sion whilst travelling from SE11 to W2.

The Shaping of Space

There are days that even the worst abuses of pain cannot spoil. Today is one of them. Beyond the charms of a strong September sun doing its best to pretend summer is not dead and the company of Tim Dedopulos, remarkable blessings flicker around me.

Time is spent gazing at Charles Robert Cockerell’s A Tribute To Christopher Wren. An assemblage of all the buildings once thought to have been designed by Wren. The imaginary skyline of the painting shimmers with light bouncing of the soft silver hue of Portland stone, giving it the quality of being a glimpse of an elseword. Even its foreground buildings of usually solid red brick and white stone seem to be gently phasing in from another reality. I lose myself in it, feel as if I am walking within its fictional streets. Feel as if I have become part of a dream the city is dreaming of itself.

Along the galleries and passages of the V&A, I float from Cockerell induced reverie to mind-expanding words of curator Charles Hind. His passionate scholarship walks me through an original architectural model of Easton Neston. He turns the purposeful lines of nearly 300 year-old plans into a greater appreciation of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s playing with gothic adaptation and distorted classical themes. Better understand what his sometimes imposing, bullying stone dramas were trying to achieve.

My fingers turn the pages of one of Hawksmoor’s early original sketchbooks. Attempts from the early 1680s to capture the topography of English towns, castles and churches. The seventeenth century paper is crisp but firm, the sharp confident lines of his labels at contrasting with a hesitation in the drawings that comes from someone still learning the skill of perspective. As I flick through the book, it changes from relic to temporal transport. Through its pages I glimpse not just Nottingham or Oxford as Hawksmoor saw them, but Hawksmoor himself. An ink ghost telling stories in line and hatching

Later, we meet Iain Sinclair at Christ Church, Spitalfields. He graciously signs my copy of Orbital, comments on how the book records this building as one of his gates into and out of the imaginary city. I am long beyond the age of having heroes, but that does not stop me being in absolute awe at Sinclair’s talent. He is not only my favourite writer, but the possibly the greatest living user of the English language. No-one creates more perfect and powerful sentences than him.

He talks to us of the barbarism of Thatcherite Britain. Of how the detonation of its brute logic in the City of London resulted in an explosive front radiating out, obliterating the old symbolic landscape that had surrounded the church. The disruption of London’s ancient patterns and the excavation of plague energies.

He talks of memories, the ghost buildings of Cheshire Street and tangible psychic boundaries marked by Hare Marsh. The fear of fire wardens stationed on the highest point of Christchurch during the Blitz. Abandoned temples of primitive Christians, the visual echoes between this building and Truman Brewery in Brick Lane where he used to work. Patterns seemingly encoded in the ether by Hawksmoor.

He talks of Hawksmoor’s buildings being plural in time. Of the dense codes of complex mysticism embodied within the structure of his elegant churches. Of the architect’s towers linking the forces of earthy commerce to the higher realms of the imagination. The church as a movement from Malkuth to Kether.

Sinclair talks of the inspiration of his own early works when he was a council gardener in the shadow of Christ Church. I ask him if the kabbalistic drama of the building and the energies spread throughout the surrounding landscape of the area had almost ridden him Vodou-style, kicked his arse and forced him to start writing. Surprisingly he agrees. Speaking of Moon card dreams and power of place to possess a writer.

The day ends in the last of Hawksmoor’s London churches. We arrive at St. George’s, Bloomsbury as the last burst of afternoon sun paints the interior columns with all the colours of the stained glass. The essential magic of the building is not in keystone carved with the Tetragrammaton, the alchemical pelican nor the echoing of Baalbek. It is in the shaping of space, reclaiming and revealing a glimpse of some sacred mystery despite the boiling rush of the city beyond its walls.

English Pop

In London, walking 200 yards can take you to another country. You can drop several socio-economic classes. Time travel from steel and reflective glass to medieval stone. Emigrate from Little Lebanon to Little America with no need for a green card.

Therefore it should not surprise me that travelling a couple of miles to Kilburn always feels likes an expedition. A feeling enhanced by the fact NW6 never ranks in my mind as a destination of choice. It is a place I only ever go to for specific reasons. There has to be a mission element to get me walking down Kilburn High Road.

Tonight the mission was simple. Enjoy a curry and watch the sardonic pop monsters that form Black Box Recorder play their first headlining gig in five years. If I had been able to accomplish the two objectives simultaneously, the evening would have probably taken on mythic proportions when recalled years from now.

Indian food should be a sensual, satisfying experience, but too often in England it is reduced to little more than the serving rubbish smothered in a generic curry sauce.* Looking at the garish signage and its Life On Mars wood-panelled walls should have put me off eating at Vijay. However I had heard rumours of good vadai and dosai and Ragam had already taught me the value of disregarding appearance when looking for decent southern Indian food.

While no Cleveland Street miracle, Vijay’s food was good. Its heat came from chillies, the tingle on the tongue from freshly crushed spices. The selection of vadai and coconut chutney comfort for my soul frayed by lack of sleep. Surreal Girl pined for her cauliflower Manchurian, but I think even she might be persuaded to make a return visit.

The gaudy retro of Vijay was echoed when we got into the Luminaire. Unintended and without irony at the restaurant, the mirrorball scattering light off of velvet and black walls, the union jack backdrop emblazoned with gold lettering shouting: ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Not Dole’ were wonderfully deliberate. The effect was like being in a working man’s club taken over by students putting on a punk benefit for striking miners.

The Luminaire might lack Bush Hall’s Edwardian pomp and finery, but it has a wonderful intimacy. It also has a militant no talking while musicians are playing policy which I adore. Even when packed to its 300 capacity, it now gives BH a close run for title of my favourite music venue in London.

Support to Black Box Recorder was a skeleton crew Madam. This meant the band imagined as duo featuring a chantreuse called Sukie with Pat Butcher style earrings and cellist called Sarah who I would have instantly fallen in love with if I had been sixteen. Between them they performed songs of noir romance and corroded hope which veered from the achingly beautiful to nail scratch sharp.

Without any undue poncing around, Black Box Recorder came on stage a little after 9:30pm. John Moore and Luke Haines looked like aged Teddy Boys, Sarah Nixey the polished, posh divorcée who has enough glamour and Machiavellian nous to cause a lot of trouble. They exuded something between a childhood gang taking secret delight at a bit of undiscovered mischief and a disturbing menace a trois. It looked promising.

From the opening anthem swell and lines: ‘The English motorway system is beautiful and strange/It’s been there forever, it’s never going to change’ I instantly remembered why I am devoted to BBR. They are pop. English pop. Pop about England’s peculiarities of place and people, about the hidden menaces of the home counties, the unspoken terror and insecurities of childhood, the ablation of living somewhere like Southend-on-Sea.

From joining ‘the order’ in Wonderful Life to ‘keeping your mouth shut’ in Straight Life and ‘doing the decent thing’ in Brutality, the class, coldness and conformity I have spent my life kicking against were all paraded. Tonight the brilliant chill running through England Made Me was more inescapable than ever. The disappointment that Jackie Sixty did not get an airing softened by compensation of new song Do You Believe In God?

The convulsing guitar crash of the boys was just about kept in line by the caramel ice of Nixey’s vocal. Despite the extra guts of a live performance, you were constantly reminded of just how powerful and splendid a proper pop tune can be – even if it is about Lord Lucan. The Black Box Recorder school of song remains a triumphant mix of sugar and razor blades. Five years on, they are a still a bloody good reason for a Kilburn expedition.


*What I usually refer to a ‘dirty curry’ though the term ‘Jacksinated curry’ is also apposite.

London as Hoth

For those following the semi-secret photo blog, there will be a special London as Hoth posting a wee bit later today.

Sardinia via Blackheath

London is a hoodoo city. Its everyday trajectories demand syncretism. Friendships flow from the meld that would be hard to start elsewhere. Anyone who fails to respond to the joy of possibility this offers has a hardened, heavy spirit I do not envy carrying.

The gravity of the capital has pulled people into my life from across the globe. Despite this, my friends here are still scattered across its measure. North and south of the river. East and West of the Prime Meridian.

Today we celebrate news and the new in Sardinia via Blackheath. Tiramisu, tea and champagne are consumed. Conversation ranges from modelling the future to working class food culture and the enchantment of In The Night Garden …

We laugh, share and imagine together. Take joy from each other’s reasons for happiness. This is camaraderie; this the splendour of having companions you love like family. It is not the triumphant tiramisu of Mrs. Saba that is the best pull-me-up, it being with such wonderful people.

Time dilates far too easily. Between glances at my watch, afternoon tea becomes eight pm. Amid grandparents and a child that makes me feel clucky, I feel such warmth that leaving to head home is beyond hard.

Our train back pulls towards Charring Cross, spoiling us with the view of Parliament haloed by the lights of the London Eye. The magic of London is manfold. Tonight though, its greatest expression is its ability to distort geography to better bless us with friendship.

There is Magic in London Town…

It has been said there is nothing more boring than hearing other people’s dreams. Second-hand nightmares and wandering in the kingdom of Morpheus are not always meant to be shared. However, having had the following dream three times in a fortnight, I feel like recording it.

I am on stage in a nightclub. Late fifties or early sixties plush, all velvet curtains and gild. The air is thick with cigar smoke incense and the tang of rum. Dressed in the type of suit you would expect The Midnighters to wear, I am playing bass and singing. I look around me and see my band all attired in outfits matching my own like some bad boy Beatles. I recognise each member as a close friend, including Stephen Grasso playing the sweetest rhythm guitar.

We launch into a cover of Lord Creator’s Kingston Town. The lyrics are changed and I croon it like Jacques Brel possessed by Lord C. Looking into a crowd heavy with godfathers and rude boys, I find my Lady Love’s eyes and sing:

The night seems to fade, but the moonlight lingers on
There are wonders for everyone

There stars shine so bright, but they are fading at the dawn
There is magic in London Town…

My Captain Jack Moment

All Hallows Eve and I am atop City Hall. Below me the stygian black of the Thames is broken by the reflected blaze of the lights of Tower Bridge. The skin of the flowing serpent is host to rippling spills of phosphorous white and floating instants of sparkling green. Outside on the viewing deck, the wind plays with my tie while my jacket flaps with exaggerated drama. If I was wearing my leather trench coat instead of the suit, this would be my Captain Jack moment.

Thanks to the curve of Foster’s mutated giant sphere dream – the famous ‘glass testicle’ – I can look over the edge with the usual attack of height induced panic. From below I can hear the water lapping the shore, the snap of tarpaulin and creak of the moored rubbish barges. Gulls engage in Spitfire-like dogfights, vicious screeches as they turn and dive.

From St. Paul’s to the Gherkin, the city has never looked more pregnant with the potential of wonder. The emerald glow emanating from the top of Tower 42 makes it look like the headquarters of a superhero team. I half expect to see Green Lantern or Sentry fly from it, possibly to tackle the huge cranes involved in redeveloping Bethnal Green which appear at night to an alien invasion force of red-eyed monsters mechanical monsters. In the distance, sodium orange lights in Shooters Hill look like a line of fire cascading down towards Kent, threatening Bromley with a stream of lava. At this height at night, London is Fairyland.

Voodoo Child

Today is usually one of my favourite days in the capital’s calendar – Open House London. However, as I am on a deadline and alone in the city, the usual tour of usually restricted churches, towers and libraries is muted by both time and mood. Trying hard not to wear my grump head, I drift towards Oxford Street before finding my way into the obscurity of Brook Street.

Although I am ostensibly visiting the Handel House Museum, it is not George Frederick who brings me calling today. For while Handel lived at 25 Brook Street some 250 years ago, it was next door at number 23 that Jimi Hendrix and his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham lived between 1968-1970. In a rather fabulous piece of musical pantheism, the worshipers of Handel who now occupy both properties have created a shrine to the guitar god in the rooms of the upstairs flat he used.

Climbing the creaking staircases to the top of 23, I join a small party getting one of the only two public tours given each year. Whether it is coincidence this tour happens in the week marking the anniversary of Hendrix’s death or another nod to Handel mob’s generous pantheism is never made clear. It certainly seems as if some of the other tourists are beyond nostalgia and simple curiosity, deep initiates of some Hendrix boneyard cult on pilgrimage.

As for me, I am here researching for the Hendrix bio-pic script I am still working on. I know the story I want Voodoo Child to tell. How a man once expelled from school for holding hands with his white girlfriend, found the cultural hoodoo side of London in the sixties allowed him to make his syncretic mix of “earth” and “space” music. How the alchemic clash of person and time in the crucible of changed forever the way music is both played and heard. How the musician who best embodied the spirit of his age became lost to its demons.

The desire to tell this myth brings me to 23. Some mad sense that by rubbing against the rooms restored to their 1968 state my imagination will be ignited. Hunting temporal shades, trying to catch a glimpse of another time still echoing forward. Building psychometry.

It is only in the master bedroom the phyiscal traces build to obvious rock star plush. A crimson carpet that swallows your feet; the draped bed that seems a distant cousin of the Great Bed of Ware; Imperial purple curtains and rugs whose intricate designs would cause contemplation even if you were not as drug-addled as Hendrix. It is recreation of exactly the ridiculous boudoir bling expect of a man who could get away with wearing a Hussar’s jacket.

The Pyschic Boy powers kick in, possibly aided by the white woodchip walls (a touch of overpowering authenticity and one that hints Jimi’s Achilles’ heel may have home décor). While everyone else is looking at the unpublished photographs, I get an explosive flash. A room decorated more by empty bottles than Persian rugs, a pea-souper of dope smog, a wasted George Harrison crashing out. Nothing else till I am about to leave, when I get static-riddled burst of a naked Hendrix, drunk or high, fumbling as he tries open the front door.

Given that Hendrix’s wishes to be buried in England were ignored and his unfinished memorial in Seattle merely a testament to gross exploitation, the restrained way Handel House Museum handle his legacy is a model of how to honour a dead legend. They do not push souvenirs; they do not claim authenticity or offer holy relics. All that is provided is access to the space, some words and an opportunity to push your mind into the past.

Being at 23 Brook Street gives me scenes, but does not develop the narrative. I know now I will have to make the journey to Ladbroke Grove at some point. See if there is anything left in the ghost of the Samarkand Hotel other than the death choke instant burned into the forever. Beyond temporal shades, if anything at the flat brings me closer to Hendrix, it is looking out the window to the city below. London’s magic is something we both have felt.

Jude Law

London is one of those cities where you can walk a few yards and flow across a divide of money, security and class so deep it would take generations or several violent revolutions to cross any other way. By bon chance, I am an oik who for the next few months at least, is sharing space and views with Russian oligarchs. Yet within seconds I can exchange tranquillity and beauty for a carpet of crushed glass and a soundtrack of K’nann.

Nothing illustrates this better for me than my choice of where to get the papers from on a Sunday morning. With several newsagents equidistant from where I live, I can choose to walk through a council estate or flit up Victorian mews. On one journey I may meet a former child soldier from Somalia, the other Sienna Miller giving an exaggerated performance of being trying to be unobtrusive while waiting on her driver.

My own unwanted brushes with recognition, ennui at the whole notion of celebrity and a very English sense that it is rude to bother someone you do not know while there are about their own business means I would never dream of stopping any of my recognisable neighbours. Even the huge Who geek in me has not been enough to make me ask Billy Piper for an autograph when I have twice bumped into her as she took a Sunday canalside walk. Twist will rage at me for ‘wasted opportunities’ when he reads this, but I would hate to be bothered on my patch. Therefore I use that as my guiding principle when seeing the likes of Louis Theroux or Milos Forman by the water. Their fame and my admiration for their work does not give me a right to talk at them uninvited.

Today I saw Jude Law. Beyond the second or two of starring as I tried to work out where I knew his face from, I ignored him. Feeding the ducks is much more absorbing than watching an actor walking with his child. I paid only paid attention in the first place because seeing a man clearly enjoying the company of his son always gives me a moment glowing joy. It is one of those sights which make the world seem like a good place before regret over not being able to remember my father being like that with me intrudes.

A few hours later I heard that Law had been arrested that afternoon for an attack on a photographer. Allegedly he tried to grab the paparazzi’s camera, shouting only a paedophile would want to take pictures of his children. Whatever happened, it was enough for Law to be arrested on suspicion of actual bodily harm and bailed to return to the police station in October. Bizarrely, despite my years as a journalist, I feel immense empathy for Law. Yes you do give up some of your expectations of privacy when your work makes you a recognized face, but you never give up your right as a parent to defend your children.

Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner

It is official. I am a Londoner. For the first time in 18 years, I qualify as a permanent resident of Albion’s capital. I am no longer just spending the majority of my time here; no longer a constant tourist, a visitor who does not know when to leave.

According to all the bureaucrat paperwork I now live full-time in London. It is great. I even qualify for a resident’s card bestowing legitimate library user status and discounts at everywhere from the zoo to the puppet theatre.

Crawling upstream, moving from the hazy estuary border of salt and fresh to my new canalside mooring, I am another alien who has found a home in the hoodoo mix. The polarities have been reversed. When the train passes under the M25 on Tuesday, it will have stopped representing the point where London’s gravitational power splutters out and Essex reasserts itself. It has now become the barrier between future and past. The edge of my city home and the new away of an estuarial satellite destination.

To mark this special day, I have been given gifts. Black glass goblets, green metal kangaroos and cooking bibles. Over curry and champagne, watching a feature film about a boy from Southend who makes mistakes, but is smart enough to learn from them, everything changes.

So, join me in softly singing:

‘I get a funny feeling inside of me
When walking up and down
Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner
That I love London Town’

Back in Hoodoo City

After almost a month away, I am back in London. This is a grand and glorious thing.

London’s complexity, its tidal flux of people in constant motion, its density of both historical and constantly fresh information… Moorcock was right: ‘London is still the best and worst place for a poet or a novelist to live.’

One of the reasons for this is that there are two Londons. The one you see easy and the one beyond. This latter London lies under the skin of the other. It is hidden, secret and wrapped in shadow. The fire of mythological energy runs through its circuits. With every street, you get the chance to walk between worlds.

Being back in hoodoo city, I have the best of both those worlds. I can turn the key and snuggle in the comfort of my home or go outside and be part of the endless unrest. Stay in this room and create novel worlds with my words or walk the city, let it draw new maps in my imagination. London can burn my eyes with fresh information, make me see in a changed light or I can reach out and dislodge its ghosts from their brick and stone haunts.

Whatever else it may be, there is no denying London is a zone of increased potential and right now, right here is where I belong.

Midwich Cuckoos to a Northern Soul Soundtrack

According to Elvis Costello and Wendy James, ‘London’s brilliant when it’s raining…' Yesterday, it was pissing down in London. After meeting up with Dickon, I found I had four hours to kill before the evening’s action. The usual round of the bookshops on the Charing Cross Road took up two, so I decided to seek shelter in the Odeon in Shaftsbury Avenue. I feared I’d have to endure something bordering on artsy pretension in exchange for protection from the weather given which cinema it was. At best, I was hoping for a good documentary. Instead I got Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence.

I can only describe Innocence to those who have not seen it, as Blade Runner done as an animated buddy-cop movie by Ridley Scott on a magic mushroom bender, re-edited by the studio to have a happy ending and more haiku-based exposition. Seeing it on the big screen, I emerged from the bowels of the building with the decompression that always follows a potent cinema experience.

After the wonderful guilty pleasure of seeing a movie in the afternoon, it was onto Treadwells for the London launch of Generation Hex. Fittingly given the title of the book, despite it being a London occult book launch, it was a younger, less snobby crowd and the usual malicious atmospheres were absent. I’d only come up to town for it because it was Stephen Grasso’s night. Despite the distant taint of my blagger and journalist past, it takes more than a few free glasses of red get me to go to a launch, especially if it has any link to the snide, lunatic political world of the London occult scene. Stephen is one of the few people I’d ever brave that cacophony of poisonous prattle for.

However, the launch was refreshingly devoid of cocktail jazz/atonal droning, careerism and pretension Christina Oakley Harrington gave a passionate speech about the book and managed to give the whole thing a celebratory, party attitude - something also helped by Stephen’s choice of a Northern Soul soundtrack.

Good conversations with strangers on Jack Parsons and Ogun, a rum, cigar and Bounty Bar interlude and the fact that other friends apart from Stephen were there, made it a night that despite what is happening in my life, I was almost able to enjoy. Especially as I think Christina said she was smitten with my book. I might have got that wrong. I did also enjoy the free wine.

More than one person could be heard echoing my view that Stephen is the best writer on magic to emerge in the last 20 years. He read his ‘Midwich Cuckoos’ piece that, like the rest of his work, is strong on emotional truth, inspirational clarity and a nice turn of phrase without recourse to poncy language. You can be of a non-mystical persuasion and still get the same pleasure out of his prose that you can from Alan Moore or Susanna Clarke lighting up with the page with their descriptions of the magical.

Hearing that everyone’s Season went so well, the positive reaction to Stephen’s work and the general celebratory ambience gave last night a sense of a New Year party. All dues paid. Clean slates. No auld lang syne, but nods at the Crossroads. The side effect of feeling that I’d been at a New Year party was the 3am heartbreak and loss was more intense and I’m trying to cope with today on an insomnia jag. Even so, London can be brilliant when it is raining.