Pulp in Uncut

Posted on September 15, 2025 | Leave a comment

I am incredibly fortunate to get to meet and write about people and places that have always fascinated me. This is particularly true when it comes to the musicians whose music I fell in love with as a teenager – I’ve interviewed Suede, Madness, Evan Dando, Paul Weller, Buzzcocks and many, many more, something that was impossible to imagine when I was reading about them in NME and Melody Maker as a kid.

But this month’s Uncut cover story feels particularly special. It’s Pulp.

Pulp always felt like my band. Scott had The Cure, Mike had Teenage Fanclub, the other Pete had Dodgy and I had Pulp. Jarvis Cocker told me that he knows a song is special when he gets a “tingle”. I know what he means, but I don’t actually get the “tingle” very often – although I did the first time I heard “Razzmatazz” (probably on Mark Radcliffe’s Radio One show).

I bought the single. Then I heard “Babies” and fell in love with that. For a while, I bought all their singles on the day of release – right up until “Common People” in fact, when it became very clear they no longer needed my support. Now I didn’t need to buy the single if I wanted to hear Pulp because their music was everywhere. I still bought the albums of course, and This Is Hardcore became one of my favourite albums of the late 90s. I would play it as I went to sleep before getting abruptly awoken by Jarvis’s disembodied “bye bye”, which comes after 15 minutes of silence at the end of “The Day After The Revolution”. It became a tradition.

“The Day After The Revolution” is one of 40 Pulp songs the band chose as their favourites for the Uncut article, so I told Jarvis about my interrupted sleep when I interviewed him – he apologised but I hadn’t really been complaining. I also told him about when I saw Pulp support Blur at Alexandra Palace and he teased the audience by playing the opening notes to “Babies” and then stopping, forcing the crowd to shout for more. He said he didn’t remember doing that – in fact, he admits he couldn’t remember anything about the show – but might reintroduce that intro to the set.

It was, in short, a bit of a dream come true. The other three members of the band – Candida, Mark and Nick – were all lovely and I got to ask them about dozens of my favourite songs, and learn what they meant to the band themselves.

Jarvis also curated a covermount CD of his favourite songs from the Rough Trade label. To my delight, it turns out that one of these is “You Made Me Like It” by the 1990s, a great Glasgow band whose drummer was my best friend Mike, who introduced me to indie music in the first place. That unexpected coincidence made this whole exercise even more special. Isn’t music brilliant?

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Posted in Journalism, Music, Nostalgia

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Time Out – smoking hot and strikes

Posted on September 8, 2025 | 1 comment

BBC Archive recently posted a fantastic video about Time Out magazine in 1978.

It’s a fascinating snapshot of London past, from the references to “seedy” King’s Cross and “trendy” Covent Garden to the fact that everybody appears to be smoking, all the time. The broadcast focuses around a couple of interviews with Tony Elliott, the magazine’s handsome founder and proprietor who looks like the lost member of Genesis.

It’s remarkable to think that despite his theoretical control, the magazine’s union was powerful enough to close down publication after Elliott had the temerity of appointing his wife, Janet Street-Porter, as deputy editor. That led to a strike and management climbdown. Another strike took place after the union chapel took offence to the appointment of a new TV editor, John Wyver, as they felt the job should have gone to an internal candidate – one of whom was broadcaster and writer Jonathan Meades.

As this film relates, at this time, almost all Time Out staff – there were a few exceptions – earned the same salary, whether they were editing a section or working as a receptionist. There were also other then groundbreaking initiatives, including mandated sabbaticals and paternity leave (“Do I have to take it?” asked one soon-to-be-father). Many of the staff members featured in this footage, including recently deceased news editor Duncan Campbell, would leave Time Out in 1981 after an extended strike following an ugly dispute regarding this pay arrangement. They went on to form City Limits, while Time Out relaunched and continued to enjoy great success.

Time Out stayed in their Covent Garden office until early 1994. That means that when I first started working there in the summer of 1998 it was still very much the new place, even though it already felt thoroughly lived in. Smoking by then was reserved for the eighth floor, where the entire top floor was given over to a massive smoking area, complete with sofas, daily newspapers and views across the West End. Different times, and great ones.

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Posted in History, Journalism, London

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London – “a card-index system to an inexhaustible set of topics”

Posted on August 11, 2025 | 4 comments

It doesn’t happen that often, but every now and then I read a description of London that makes me sit up – finally somebody sees London in the same way that I do! The following is from Penelope Lively’s very pleasant 1984 novel According To Mark – and is a perfect study of the overlapping Londons that exist inside my brain, and perhaps some of the other readers of this very occasional (sorry!) but still just about hanging on blog.

“To drive from south-west to north-east London is not just to spend a lot of time sitting in traffic-jams but also, for a certain kind of person, to pass through a system of references and allusions that ought to be more dizzying than it actually is. Mark, during the next hour and a quarter, found himself reflecting – in quick succession – upon Roman Britain, Whistler, Daniel Defoe, Harrison Ainsworth, Virginia Woolf, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and various other matters, all of these prompted by fleeting glimpses of the slivery glitter of the river, the dome of St Paul, a railway station or street name.

The city, indeed, seemed to exist not just on an obvious, physical and visual plane but in a secondary and more mysterious way as a card-index system to an inexhaustible set of topics… And all these references coexist in a landscape even though separated from one another by decades and centuries; the mind has no problem latching onto each one in turn, switching obediently from one level to another, providing without effort the appropriate furnishings by way of costume, language and action.

The head should be spinning, and yet it isn’t; it accepts quite calmly the promptings of what is seen and what is known.”

More soon, perhaps.

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Posted in Books, History, London

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Battersea Power Station – updated paperback edition

Posted on March 17, 2025 | Leave a comment

When I completed Up In Smoke, my history of Battersea Power Station, in early 2016, the power station was still a derelict shell in the centre of a huge building site. Some believed it would always remain so. But in October 2022 the power station finally opened to the public after almost 40 years of failed dreams.

The new paperback edition brings this story up to date. It is still the only complete history of the power station from its inception and decades of electricity generation through the long years of abandon when successive developers tried to remake Battersea for the modern age. It includes interviews with people who worked at the power station in the 50s and 60s, plus the developers, architects and planners who worked on the many schemes that followed closure. There’s also a chapter about Pink Floyd’s flyaway pig.

Revised throughout with a new final chapter containing fresh interviews and insights about the completed development, we felt this needed a new cover and title. It is now called White Elephants And Flying Pigs: The Extraordinary Afterlife Of Battersea Power Station and is available through Paradise Road.

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Posted in Architecture, Battersea Power Station, Books, History, London

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The Rock and Roll Public Library

Posted on March 10, 2025 | 1 comment

I am not usually the type of person who can summon a quote off the top of their head but one came to mind as I looked around the Rock And Roll Public Library in St Giles. This is a collection of pop culture and ephemera accumulated by Mick Jones – of The Clash and Big Audio Dynamite – and it’s gloriously random nature reminds me of something I once read about collecting: “The most important item in any collection is always the next one”.

The Rock And Roll Public Library includes all manner of Clash and BAD-related material: lyrics, tapes, costumes, instruments, props etc. But it also includes loads of stuff. Comics, VHS tapes, posters, flyers, toys, board games – the sort of ephemera that collectively explains how we become ourselves, how we develop our areas of interest and points of references, our personal passions or things that, for some reason, struck a chord at a particular moment in our lives.

I particularly liked the colour-coordinated montages of otherwise unconnected items. There were also areas set up to look like Jones’s childhood home, and areas that focused on specific themes – Americana, Elvis and WWII for instances – showing how these influenced his musical approach both in the Clash and BAD.

I’m told that this this exhibition constitutes less than half-a-percent of the objects that Jones has collected – and continues to collect. The exhibition at the Farsight Gallery on Flitcroft Street – comes with a fantastic hardback magazine about the collection, the first of three planned issues that will come out during the year.

It’s open daily 12-7pm and entry is free. Get there before it closes on March 16 – although there are rumours of an extension.

https://www.rocknrollpl.com/

https://farsightcollective.com/

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Posted in Art, Collecting, Counterculture, Exhibitions, Music

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Sohemian Society talk – December 5

Posted on November 7, 2024 | Leave a comment

I have a talk coming up with the Sohemian Society on Thursday December 5, where I will be in conversation with writer and musician Max Décharné about Denmark Street: London’s Street Of Sound. The event will be held upstairs at the Wheatsheaf pub on Rathbone Place in Fitzrovia – tickets can be purchased here.

The Sohemian Society was founded in 2003 to celebrate Soho Bohemia and is organised by the cream of London nerdery, with input from the likes of Travis Elborough, John King and Paul Willetts – authors and speakers of great repute in the London-obsessed world.

I am really looking forward to talking to Max, who has written brilliant books about the Kings Road and Teddy Boys. Max is a musician with Gallon Drunk and Flaming Stars, so will have plenty of first-hand memories of Denmark Street from his career. The talk is at the Wheatsheaf, one of the classic London pubs and a short stroll across Oxford Street to Denmark Street itself.

It should be a great evening. Please do come along and say hello.

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Posted in Books, Counterculture, History, London, Soho, Talks

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Rough Trade on Denmark Street

Posted on September 12, 2024 | 2 comments

When I wrote my history of Denmark Street – Denmark Street: London’s Street Of Sound – I delivered what some felt was an overly optimistic conclusion. This commercial makeover might not be all bad, I said, citing one example: “Might Denmark Street even finally get a record shop like…. the new Rough Trade hidden inside a clothe’s shop… in west Soho?”

And so it has come to pass with the news that Rough Trade will be taking a lease at No 24, the former HQ of Noel Gay Music. This will be the first record shop for the street, which has been home to every other business related to music over the past 100-plus years but, as far as I could tell, never had a record shop.

While most observers painted the street’s future in apocalyptic terms seeing only a complete obliteration of history and tradition by evil developers, I was cautiously upbeat. Of course, when the scaffolding was removed Denmark Street would not be the same as it had been, but the history of the street had always been one of adaptation, as the shops and businesses that populated Denmark Street moved with the changing rhythms of the music industry. The publishers of the 20s and 30s had given way to the bands and managers of the 60s and 70s, who were then replaced by the guitar-purchasing amateurs of the 80s and 90s. Things change. They have to.

Music today occupies a different, less culturally vital role, but it’s still big business and Rough Trade’s stock of expensive coloured vinyl and related merch will be exactly what a younger audience is looking for. Add the continued survival of the instrument shops and the excellent work being done round the corner at Meanwhile where a new 500-capacity grassroots venue is taking shape, and you have a recipe for something genuinely interesting. The next step is improved programming at the developers own two venues, Here and The Lower Third, neither of which have really managed to take full advantage of their location.

This feels like something close to a homecoming for Rough Trade, whose old Covent Garden store was a favourite haunt of mine in the 1990s – something I wrote about here. But let’s not wallow in nostalgia. This isn’t about me. As I wrote in my book, “Denmark Street’s story is not done yet and there is still the possibility that future generations will visit Tin Pan Alley and leave with treasured memories of their own.”

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Posted in Books, History, London, Music, Place

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Denmark Street talk with Andy’s Guitars

Posted on July 2, 2024 | 1 comment

I am doing a talk next Thursday (July 11) at the new Meanwhile space, which is just round the corner from Denmark Street, backing on to No 4, where the Rolling Stones recorded their debut album.

I will be talking to Andy Preston, founder of the legendary Andy’s Guitars as well as the 12 Bar.

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Meanwhile… On Denmark Street

Posted on March 18, 2024 | 3 comments

Flitcroft Street is the short street at the east end of Denmark Street. You might know it from its most famous building – the one with the huge door (theatre backdrops were painted here – hence the big door to get them out on to the street).

Flitcroft Street used to be known as Little Denmark Street. Readers of my book, Denmark Street: London’s Street Of Sound, might recall it was the location of Billie’s, a legendary London gay club populated by musicians in the 1930s that was the subject of a homophobic police raid.

Flitcroft Street is now home to Meanwhile, a gallery run by the Farsight Collective. Walk down Denmark Street, turn right and it’s right there. The Farsight Collective have huge plans for this site. The gallery will be on the ground floor. A couple of floors below, almost directly below Regent Sounds at No 4, that will be a cabaret bar – modeled partly on Billie’s. In the floor between there is space for a live music venue that will hold around 300 people. The Farsight Collective have considerable experience running both clubs and galleries in London so they know their stuff.

This is, in my view, the most exciting thing to happen in the West End for decades. It has the potential of confirming Denmark Street as an essential location for live music, particularly if it encourages the Lower Third (once the 12 Bar) and Here to up their game. Other new arrivals for the street – as yet unconfirmed – will add to this experience by filling in other gaps that are currently lacking in the street’s offering.

Meanwhile is open weekdays 12-6pm. It is currently hosting an exhibition that celebrates the musical history of Denmark Street and Soho. This includes photographs of great London nightspots from the past, covering everything from jazz to Trash. There’s a video timeline showing London clubs from 1900 to today – apparently there were more nightspots open in Soho during the Blitz than there are today – and some drawings of famous Denmark Street locations including Lawrence Wright House at No 19, Bowie and Bolan at La Gioconda and The Sex Pistols outside their outhouse at No 6.

‘Paintings from Regeneration City Blues exhibition © Jane Palm-Gold/DACS 2015

There is also a short history of every building on Denmark Street using text taken from Denmark Street: London’s Street of Sound.

Other displays discuss the plans for the location and how you can support their license application.

Highly recommended.

Meanwhile, Flitcroft Street, weekdays 12pm-6pm.

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Posted in Exhibitions, London, Music

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POSTPONED Denmark Street at Regent Sounds – free talk

Posted on November 29, 2023 | 3 comments

No 4 Denmark Street could be the most important single address on Tin Pan Alley. It’s housed Regent Sound, the studio where the Rolling Stones recorded their debut album, the Helter Skelter bookshop that specialised in books about music, and is now home to Regent Sounds, London’s best guitar shop. Other residents include Johnny Dankworth and Essex Music, publishers of the Rolling Stones among others. There might even be a connection to the Krays.

I will be giving a talk about the general history of Denmark Street amid the Fenders at No 4 on Friday December 15 at 7.30pm, and then signing copies of the second edition of Denmark Street: London’s Street Sound. Crispin Weir, who owns Regent Sounds, will be talking about the history of No 4 in particular, having done extensive research into the building over the years. It should be a great event for anybody who loves music, books, history and guitars. Hope to see you there.

Denmark Street talk – at No 4 Denmark Street, WC1, on Dec 15, 7.30pm.

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Posted in Books, History, London, Music, Talks

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