In 1983, just as the band were starting to fall apart, The Clash decided to make a film. But stung by their experiences on the strange but compelling Rude Boy, they decided to make it themselves. They called it Hell W10, filmed it on 16mm silent black and white film, and made the plot up as they went along. The result, understandably, was somewhat bizarre.
‘Let’s make a film!’ said Mick Jones in 2005. ‘We had no other agenda there than that. Everyone put in their time without thinking about it. That was what we did on our time off; we worked! It was totally Joe [Strummer]’s idea. He directed it, he shot it, he did it. And then it was gone. It didn’t even come out!’
Strummer believed the film was lost forever. In 1987, when it looked like he might carve out a new career for himself in the film world, he told an interviewer, ‘I have directed a film myself, a black and white 16mm silent movie and it was a disaster. Luckily the laboratory that held all the negative went bankrupt and destroyed all the stock, so the world can breathe again. I shot without a script. God knows what it was about. I’m the only other one that knew, and I’m not telling.’
In 2002, the film was rediscovered on video tape and re-edited by long-time Clash collaborator Don Letts, who added a fine Clash soundtrack over the top. It is a strange piece indeed, a gangster tale that follows Earl, a musician and small-time hood played by Paul Simonon, who falls foul of the local crime boss called Socrates, ‘The Lord of Ladbroke Grove’, played with some relish by Mick Jones, resplendent in white tux (‘You wanna end up as a pillar in a Canning Town flyover?’ he threatens one lackey). Strummer gives himself a cameo as a corrupt and racist policeman. It’s a cross between The Harder The Come and some of the pulp London crime novels of the 1950s (many of which have been republished by London Books).
Hell W10 also features some cracking period photography of Notting Hill, Paddington and Ladbroke Grove, and weighs in at almost 50 minutes, which suggests it must have taken quite some time to film.
What makes it particularly fascinating is that it was filmed just as the band were starting to go belly up; Topper Headon had already been kicked out for drug abuse, while Simonon and Jones were barely speaking, making their feud in the film a little too close to the truth. Things came to a head within weeks of Hell W10 being made, with Jones sacked from the band in September 1983.
In Letts’s documentary, Westway To The World, both Jones and Strummer confess that the band had simply spent too much time in each other’s company and should have taken a break; if they had done so, hotheads may have had time to cool. Instead, they made a film. Perhaps if they’d had a summer holiday in 1983 rather than fool around with a camera, the band of Jones, Strummer and Simonon might have lasted another few years. Still, it looks like they had fun making it.
Was it worth it? Watch and decide, this is the first of five parts.
I have a piece in the latest Uncut about 60s electronica pioneers Silver Apple. If you’ve never heard them before, you should. Their main instrument is The Simeon, a bank of nine oscillators mounted on plywood and played by 86 different colour-coded buttons and pedals.
Here is their amazing country-electronica jam from 68, “Ruby”, on which they also play a banjo.
After forming by accident – everybody else in the previous band left, leaving just singer and oscillator-player Simeon Coxe and drummer Danny Taylor – the band had to split in 1970 when they created an LP cover that featured the pair in a Pan Am cockpit on one side, and with a plane crash on the back. Pan Am sued and that was that.
The band reformed in the mid-90s, however, although now it’s Coxe on his own after Taylor died of a heart attack in 2005. Silver Apples play Corsica Studios in Elephant on October 27. Check them out.
Like many adolescent boys who thought they were cleverer than they really were and were scared of girls, I was obsessed with The Smiths and Morrissey.
The Smiths are a Manchester band, but by the time I became a fan, Morrissey had – like so many Northerners – fled the provinces for London where he spent the next few years revelling in the size, confusion and culture of the Big Smoke. Instead of Whalley Range and the Moors Murders, he sang about Earl’s Court and the Krays and as he entered his ‘Glam Nazi’ era he became obsessed with distinctly London aspects of working-class life such as skinheads, West Ham and the Cockney Rejects.
This was Morrissey’s London period; you could argue it began with the Smiths songs London (1987) and Half A Person (1987), and lasted until he was hounded out of the capital for going a bit crap around a decade later. Sure, London still cropped up in later songs – 2004’s Come Back To Camden, for instance – but the love was gone. He would later sound like any other tedious expat whn complaining to the NME that ‘if you walk through Knightsbridge on any bland day of the week you won’t hear an English accent. You’ll hear every accent under the sun apart from the British accent.’ But it was fun while it lasted.
Interesting Drug (1989)
Although Morrissey’s previous solo singles were very London-influenced, this was the first – rather odd – video to be clearly filmed in London. But where? The red bus glimpsed at 1:21 may tell somebody with better eyesight than I. Is it a 34, placing this somewhere between Barnet and Walthamstow? Update: Comments suggest this is Battersea, so not the 34 after all. Maybe the 37?
Our Frank (1991)
A pretty poor song, but the video marks the start of Morrissey’s skinhead obsession – it was not long after this that he took to performing before a skinhead backdrop and brandishing the Union Jack at Finsbury Park. There are lots of buses here, and also a gorgeous ghost sign at 1:47. But where is it shot? Charing Cross Road? The City? Victoria? Anybody? Update: Comments place this definitively as King’s Cross.
We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful (1992)
I hated this when it came out, but I was wrong because it is brilliant and the video is a treat as Morrissey wanders around a still not-quite-gentrified Wapping with the gang of bequiffed young boys who have put a smile back on his own thin and youthful face. Most Morrissey fans get a kick out of seeing the old boy looking happy, which is why his recent ‘love’ album, Ringleader Of The Tormentors, got such strangely good reviews. The abandoned pub in this video is now the Turk’s Head cafe and you can also catch a glimpse of Oliver’s Wharf, which was one of the first warehouses in the area to be redeveloped into housing.
You’re The One For Me Fatty (1992)
An awful song, but an unmistakable setting as a young skin takes ‘fatty’ on a date, while Moz whines about how ‘all over Battersea’ there’s ‘some hope, and some despair’, over a shot of the power station. Interestingly, a scene from one of Morrissey’s favourite Northern kitchen sink dramas, ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ was filmed by director Karel Reisz around here, in Culvert Road, Battersea. Of Reisz, we’ll hear more later.
Boxers (1995)
From the start of Morrissey’s decline – and height of his obsession-with-male-physicality – this ho-hum single was filmed at the legendary York Hall, Bethnal Green, as can be seen in the rather elegant closing shots.
Sunny (1996)
Such a terrible song I didn’t know anything about it until now, as I had long lost interest in Morrissey at this point, but it’s filmed in Victoria Park in East London. And the cover featured this iconic Morrissey shot, outside old Kray haunt the Grave Maurice (now, I think a fried chicken shop).
There were many other London influences in Morrissey’s songs at the time, with the Kray-referencing Last Of The Famous International Playboys, the song Spring-Heeled Jim (a reference to the Victorian London monster Spring-Heeled Jack), the song titles Piccadilly Palare and Dagenham Dave, and the album titles Your Arsenal and Vauxhall & I, as Morrissey explored the seamy side of London life. He was also rumoured to be making his first acting appearance at around this time as the South London gangster Charlie Richardson, although sadly that never came to pass.
I’ll leave you with one last example. This clip is of Kennington kids discussing the infamous case of Derek Bentley, who was sentenced to death for his part in the shooting of a policeman in Croydon, and it comes from Karel Reisz’s classic London documentary ‘We Are The Lambeth Boys’. It was sampled by Morrissey for the track Spring-Heeled Jim, which featured on the Vauxhall & I album. How much more London can you get?
I have a piece in the latest issue of Uncut magazine about the making of The Monkees 1967 hit “Alternate Title”, originally titled “Randy Scouse Git”.
The song was the band’s biggest hit in the UK reaching No 2 in the chart, which seems pretty appropriate given that it was written in London and is full of London references. When Mickey Dolenz said it was called “Randy Scouse Git”, the English Monkee, Davy Jones, was a little perturbed. ‘They asked me what it meant,’ he told me, ‘and I tried to explain, but they just didn’t get it.’
Dolenz wrote the song during a visit to the UK. As he explains: ‘We were in London doing press and the Beatles threw us a big party . We were staying at the Grosvenor. Mike Nesmith and I had turned up on Top of the Pops to surprise everybody by saying hello – they’d smuggled us in in the boot of a car. That’s where I met my first wife Samantha who was a Top Of The Pops DJ, the record girl. We must have had a party and the next morning there were still a few people hanging around and Mama Cass was in town, and the Beatles were huge and I’d met this girl and I just start doodling with the guitar and singing about Samantha and my friend in the room and the waiter who came in with breakfast and the girls outside screaming day and night. It was like a diary, word association. There’s no deep hidden meanings in there.
It was an amazing experience in London. I am told I had a great time. And of course I met Samantha and we had a massive love affair. Lots of stuff was going on. Brian Jones hid in one of our rooms when he was hiding from police and we got a letter from Princess Margaret asking if we could keep the fans quiet because she could hear them screaming over in the palace.
‘I must have been watching TV and Till Death Us Do Part was on and Alf Garnett called the kid, Tony Booth [later Tony Blair’s father-in-law], a “randy Scouse git”. I had no idea what it meant, no clue, but I thought it was funny. He said that line right in the middle of me writing the song and as was the way in those days I was just spontaneous – ‘Wow man, what a cool title!’ – and wrote it down.’
I dimly recall watching an animated Czech film on Channel 4 many years ago, which featured a version of the Chelsea anthem Blue Is The Colour sung in Czech. (Huw Jones in the comments now reveals this to be ‘Virile Game’, by Czech genius Jan Svankmajer – it appears 1min 45secs into this clip.)
It seems I may not have imagined this. I’ve just found out that the song was indeed recorded by Czech singer Frantisek Ringo Cech as Zelená je tráva (‘Green Is The Grass’) in 1981.
Here are some Czech footballers – including the great Antonin Panenka – singing it in the 1970s.
There’s also a Danish version called Rød-hvide farver (Red and White Colours) recorded by Flemming Anthony in 1984.
And here’s a rather chirpy Finnish version, where it was recorded by Vexi Salmi and called Hoo Ji Koo, although it’s better known as Taas Kansa Täyttää. This is probably my favourite.
Here are The Proclaimers singing a pretty awful recent version, renamed ‘White Is The Colour’ for the Vancouver Whitecaps in Canada.
Also from Canada is this version, a hilarious tribute to American Football team Saskatchewan Roughriders, in which they try to fit the entire name of the team into a rhyming scheme that was only designed for two syllables.
Away from professional recorded versions, the song has also been adapted by other football fans on the terraces. Here are fans of the Japanese club Montedio Yamagata singing it in English.
And Lazio sing a mightily impressive version of it in Italian. Only they could make such a sweet song sound intimidating.
Finally, here’s the original being recorded by Ossie and the boys in 1972.
The Muppets have a long relationship with London. That’s partly because Jim Henson lived in Camden from 1977 and opened his workshop, the Jim Henson Creature Shop, in the area, filming many of the Henson films in London. A rather fantastic Muppets walk with all locations – including a Muppets bench on Hampstead Heath – can be found on the Camden website here.
Henson’s first workshop was at 1b Downshire Hill, NW3. It was initially used for the production of The Dark Crystal but remained in use from the late 1970s to 1990. It is said it had to be closed after neighbours complained about the strange smells coming from the factory, which reminds me of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
You can watch a (rather scratchy) tour of (I think) the second Creature Shop here.
I visited this second Creature Shop in 2000 on the invitation of a model-maker who I met in a Camden pub. There was a definite magical/spooky Roald Dahl quality to the experience. This Creature Shop was located on Oval Road overlooking the canal, and was a huge mysterious building filled with puppets of all sizes. This is where the puppets for Animal Farm, 101 Dalmatians and The Muppet Christmas Carol were made.
The Creature Shop closed in 2005 and the building has since been demolished, but you can see London’s influence on the Muppets in a number of films. Here are five of my favourites.
1 ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner’
This is from the time when Chris Langham was writing the Muppets. It’s an early, possibly rather clumsy, stab at celebrating London’s multiculturalism, and thus the sort of thing that would make Rod Liddle cry.
2 Burlington Bertie From Bow A great version of one of the great London Music Hall songs, a repeated inspiration for Muppets songs.
3 The London Fog Kermit reports from ‘London, England’ and interviews a cockney frog and a Beefeater.
4 The Muppets Christmas Carol The superior Dickens adaptation is all London, obviously, but this first meeting with Michael Caine’s Scrooge sets the scene nicely. Plus: singing pigeons.
5 Wotcher (Knocked ‘Em In The Old Kent Road) Another Music Hall classic, with Fozzie Bear dressed as a Pearly King (or possibly as an Old Compton Street stroller).
For people like me, there are few things more emotive than an empty football ground, filmed in 1979 in flickery Super-8 and overlayed by a haunting soundtrack. It’s like Simon Inglis’s first volume of ‘Football Grounds Of Great Britain’ come to life.
For my recent piece in Uncut on the London underground press, I contacted Pete Townshend to ask if he had any memories of the era. His reply was long and illuminating, and is worth reproducing in full.
ME: Pete was a regular at UFO. Was it unusual for somebody so well-known and from a Mod background to go to a hippie club?
PT: I was taken hostage in a sense. My partner Karen Astley (whose pretty face was used for a few UFO posters) was working with her old friends from the Ealing Fashion School – Angela Brown and Annie Dupée. They had a company called Hem & Fringe. They made clothes for various boutiques, but in particular were designing for an adventurous new King’s Road store in the manner of Granny Takes a Trip. It was to be called Gandalf’s Garden. It was a joint effort by Barbara Allen and Michael Rainey I think.
Michael McInnerney was doing the window design, with – I believe – another artist called Dudley Edwards (who had decorated Lennon’s big Rolls Royce in psychedelic style). I had met Mike and Dudley after the Who had played Monterey Pop Festival with Jimi Hendrix in 1967, and I was interested in Meher Baba who they both followed.
The Who then went off on a very long tour supporting Herman’s Hermits, and while we were away there was a widely reported hippy wedding in Hyde Park, Michael McInnerney married Katie, and Karen was there, and in many of the photos. There is also newsreel film of Karen dancing with Barbara Allen and Hoppy. Mike McInnerney worked with Hoppy and Miles on IT. Karen was right in the centre of the hippy scene, and knew a lot of the leading faces of the time. Through her I met Joe Boyd, the producer of The Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention, and Barry Miles and his wife Sue (who was a terrific restaurateur), and Hoppy. I also got to know John Dunbar [Marianne Faithfull’s first husband] and met the other founders of the Indica Bookshop in Southampton Row at a party with the Beatles, but I never went to the shop. The way I remember it is that Paul McCartney was the chief patron of Indica from the Beatles and the pop scene at large. He was passionate about legalising marijuana, and came close to being arrested for some of the things he said. As far as I could see, marijuana and LSD were what the politics of the times revolved around. There may have been more, deeper things, but I never saw much sign of it at the time. Vietnam was big news of course, but sadly not to me. More of my myopic tendencies later.
Michael English was an old friend from Ealing Art College, and his partner was Angela Brown. When I wasn’t performing we hung out together. Michael was developing his air-brushing techniques, but also making silk-screened posters for hippy events with his colleague Nigel Weymouth. Michael and I were extremely close for about a year in 1967, and I became very fond of him. My friendship with Mike McInnerney lasted much longer, and although we don’t see much of each other today, his work on the Tommy artwork went much further than just coming up with cover art. I flew every single Tommy song past him before I played it to Kit Lambert my mentor and Who producer and manager.
I loved the UFO club. Hoppy was always on the door, smiling, welcoming, never spoke about politics although we knew he was involved in trying to get marijuana legalised. On the stairs I often found Mike McInnerney, who would never stop drawing and painting, and sometimes took his work out with him. One night Gustav Metzger who had lectured at Ealing Art College did the acid-based-light-projections for The Soft Machine. In those days Soft Machine were really very jazzy, and I seem to remember they played a few pieces by John Coltrane. I’ve always been a huge fan of Robert Wyatt, and he married one of my friends Alfreda Benge who edited The Lone Ranger, the first film for which I ever made a soundtrack. Pink Floyd were regulars, and I thought they were wonderful, and not just Syd. I’d met Syd at a few parties, and he was already pretty mad, too many trips we all thought. One Pink Floyd night at the UFO a bunch of Mod boys circled me and ridiculed my hippy coat that Karen had made me, and from then on I think I started wearing boiler suits and Doc Martens, attempting to disown both fashions. We had a lot of fun, I had about five LSD trips, one good one, the rest pretty scary. The UFO was a very friendly place, unless you happened to run into Roger Waters. I’m joking, he was friendly enough, but though handsome he was extremely scary looking, and was rather too keen on Karen for my liking, but then a lot of men were.
I am simply name-dropping here, over and over again, because I was not really a part of this scene at all. I just met all these extraordinarily glamorous and friendly people through Karen, then jumped back in the shitty old Who tour bus and went off to play in fucking Morecambe.
Was Pete’s comfort with the counterculture a result of his art school background?
I was not comfortable with it. This is where I confess my myopic nature. I never ever managed to find a sense of place in it. I think when we played Woodstock a year later, and my famous argument happened on stage with Abbie Hoffman, I suddenly realised I simply hadn’t understood how divided society had become by then. This divide was not just between young and old, but between those younger people who saw themselves as political agitators and those who simply wanted to conform, get a job and have a quiet life.
As an artist I operated within the Who as a kind of mirror or commentator, always looking at the local neighbourhood rather than the international scene, trying to give a voice to that part of our audience that seemed most disaffected, but I lost touch completely during the hippy years. Tommy was possibly only accepted from the Who because in hindsight some aspects of the hippy movement had been seen to be counterfeit and bogus. But the spiritual yearning that grew out of the LSD revolution was carried in Tommy, and made a connection somehow.
My art school work had been hugely inspiring, especially with respect to the possibilities of future technology and the way it would affect art. I have always felt I juggled art, technology and spiritual matters fairly well. But those three issues really needed from me an awareness of politics to produce balanced artistic work. That never happened for me. My mostly apolitical protests were rather sullen and sometimes resentful.
Did interviews with International Times allow musicians to reach different audiences or talk about different subjects than was possible with the mainstream press?
Oh yes. But I don’t remember my talk with Miles, I just remember Miles himself, and I adored him. Around that time (1967) I began to specialise in thought-stream interviews, just rapping really. I spoke creatively, sometimes absurdly, often moving into territory I knew little about. Occasionally this system did produce the most wonderful ideas. At other times, looking back, I just sounded out of my depth.
Why did rock stars like Pete and Paul McCartney get involved with IT, UFO and the counterculture scene? What did Pete personally do to help?
It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that Macca got taken hostage as I did, but in his case by his partner Jane Asher. I know that her brother Peter was involved in some way with John Dunbar. We were all part of what we thought would be a new London intelligentsia. In the end it was just a group of young pop stars with extremely pretty girl friends. I can remember one gathering – I think it was at an art opening for Simon and Maryka – where George Harrison was talking about Krishna, Macca about legalising marijuana and Eric Clapton and I were with the artist and lyricist Martin Sharp talking about the Oz Trial. I don’t think I helped at all, but Macca did. He gave money when Hoppy was arrested, and later for the Oz trial I believe.
Did Pete attend or have anything to do with International Times happenings at the Roundhouse or Alexandra Palace?
Yes I went to both events. Michael English and I took LSD and walked all the way to the Roundhouse from his house in Portland Road. A long, wonderful trip, one of the good ones. At the Ally Pally Rave I ‘discovered’ Arthur Brown and started recording him. Kit Lambert got thrown out of the Alexander Palace event. God knows what he did. He was rather posh, maybe he was thought to be too straight, but I got Hoppy to get him back in. The Who actually performed at one of the last IT Roundhouse events, with Elton John’s new band. By that time IT and Hoppy had lost control of the London hippy scene and it was being taken over by the old guard of promoters.
Uncut dragged me kicking and screaming out of my London comfort zone by asking me to write about Liverpool’s Cavern club. The feature was to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first Beatles show at the Cavern in February and is published in the current issue. It begins like this:
Something is happening in the streets of Liverpool. It manifests itself in a number of unusual ways: in the explicable aroma of cabbage and cheese that clings to local youths, in the long queues of teenagers that stretch down Mathew Street before disappearing into a hole in the ground and, most worryingly for the workers in nearby offices, in a constant and puzzling low rumbling sound that breaks out underground every weekday afternoon from midday.What on earth is going on?
The answer, of course, was that The Beatles were going on.
This is probably the only feature I’ve ever written that will namecheck Cilla Black, Edwina Currie and Freddie Starr but don’t let that put you off. I’ve also interviewed the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band’s about their hit ‘Urban Spaceman’, which was about as insanely entertaining as the song itself.
The Great Wen 