Tower Hamlets - Cockney Rebels exhibition

'Cockney Rebels: Popular Music in Tower Hamlets, 1624-2003' is a free exhibition at Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (20 June 2024 - 21 February 2025).

African music in East London A Ghana Independence Day Celebration at the St Louis Club, 46 Commercial Road E1 in 1958 with 'African Cubano Band Leader  Jimmy Scott'. Plus at the Cosmopolitan Club (1963?), 9 Artillery Passage, Bishopsgate E1, Deroy Taylor 'West Africa's Leading Guitarist' in a night 'featuring Ghana High Life, Jazz, Cha-Cha and Twist'. Ghanaian music legend Deroy Taylor aka Ebo Taylor had a an international hit in 2010 with 'Love and Death'.

'The twilight jazz at Poplar. Open air dancing at the public recreation ground last night. It will be seen that male partners were shy' (The Star, 17 June 1919)

As one of a series of events linked to the exhibition, the archive hosted 'Anarchy in the East End' featuring Jah Wobble and Suresh Singh (Spizz drummer) , both of whom grew up locally. They were in conversation with Debbie Smith (Curve, Echobelly etc). Interesting talks, with quite a spiritual vibe (Wobble is a longstanding Buddhist, Singh talked of the influence of his parents' Sikh heritage). As a bonus Talvin Singh was in the audience and commented that seeing Jah Wobble's Invaders of the Heart playing at the Wag Club was a big musical turning point for him.

Wobble, Singh and Smith

 

'It's Ravers' top town': Brighton 1959

'40 coffee bar night spots- some of them dimly lit cellars were teenagers go on unlimited necking parties - have earned for the seaside town of Brighton this new title… It's ravers' top town.

The "ravers" are gangs of young people who travel from London on early morning milk trains to have a rave day and night whooping it up in the coffee bars.

Why ravers? Because they move around in a crowd not caring where, not caring why...

The dingy ill-ventilated coffee bars have one piece of equipment common to all. The juke box. To the canned music the teenage ravers jive themselves into a frenzy. As they jive they kiss. When they tire they lounge around often on the floor because there aren't enough seats.

And the necking goes on continuously. In London coffee bars necking is strictly forbidden. But no such prudery in Brighton. There the ravers can neck from 11:30 am to 11:30 pm and no one will tell them to calm it down.

When they have enough of one bar the rave starts up again and they move to the next spot. Often the ravers carry their own musical instruments and jive in the streets.

They are not popular with the Brighton police who will be keeping a special watch for them on bank holiday trains this weekend. Not long ago a trainload of ravers paraded hrough Brighton streets at dawn, singing, jiving and waking sleeping people [...] Mr Hugh Sanders, Brighton's senior probation officer says 'Some of the coffee bars are unhealthy dungeons where the immature attempt to pass off infantile behaviour as virile. They are dark unhealthy dens that are breeding grounds for juvenile crime'

(Sunday Pictorial, 29 March 1959)

 

Discothèque dancing - 'you don't need a band' (1964)

'you Frug, Surf and Watusi and you don't need a band - Discotheque Dancing.  As of last night, the smart dances to do were the Frug, Wash Wash, Surf, Hitchhiker and Watusi. But so rapidly are dances invented and discarded nowadays that they may be outmoded tonight - along with the Saint, in which dancers wave hands as if they were marching in. It is being danced below in a new kind of nightclub called a discotheque - this one is New Jimmy's in Paris but they are popping up everywhere in Europe and the US. At a discotheque recorded music is played' (Life magazine, 22 May 1964). 

The full article includes photos of people dancing in Paris, London and Los Angeles.

Stuart Hall on the transition from Teds to Mods (1959)

Stuart Hall (1932-2014), who died yesterday, was of course one of the founders of 'cultural studies', and one of the first British-based critical thinkers to take seriously youth sub-cultures. In 1975 he edited, with Tony Jefferson, the influential 'Resistance through rituals: youth sub-cultures in post-war Britain'.

In the 1950s Hall moved from Jamaica to Oxford Universtity and then to London, where he helped edit the Universities and Left Review and then the New Left Review. One of his earlier published articles, Absolute Beginnings: Reflections on the Secondary Modern Generation (ULR 7, 1959), was informed by his experience of teaching in a South London school - Secondary Moderns accommodated the majority of working class pupils who failed the 11+ exams for the more academic and better-resourced Grammar Schools.

One of the things Hall documents in this article is the transition from 'teddy boy' fashions to mod styles, with a close attention to what people were wearing:

'while the superficial changes of style and taste ring out successively, there are some important underlying patterns to observe. In London, at any rate, we are witnessing a "quiet" revolution within the teenage revolution itself.

The outlines of the Secondary Modern generation in the 1960's are beginning to form. The Teddy Boy era is playing itself out. The L-P, Hi-Fi generation is on the way in. The butcher-boy jeans, velvet lapel coats and three-inch crepes are considered coarse and tasteless. They exist- but they no longer set the "tone". "Teds" are almost square. Here are the very smart, sophisticated young men and women of the metropolitan jazz clubs, the Flamingo Club devotees—the other Marquee generation. Suits are dark, sober and casual-formal, severely cut and narrow on the Italian pattern. Hair cuts are "modern"—a brisk, flattopped French version of the now-juvenile American crewcut, modestly called "College style". Shirts are either white-stiff or solid colour close-knit wool in the Continental manner. Jeans are de rigeur, less blue-denim American, striped narrowly or black or khaki. The girls are shortskirted,
sleekly groomed, pin-pointed on stiletto heels, with set hair and Paris-boutique dead-pan make-up and mascara. Italian pointed shoes are absolute and universal.

A fast-talking, smooth-running, hustling generation with an ad-lib gift of the gab, quick sensitivities and responses, and an acquired taste for the Modern Jazz Quartet. They are the "prosperity" boys—not in the sense that they have a fortune stashed away, but in that they are familiar with the in-and-out flow of money. In the age of superinflation, money is a highly volatile thing. They have the spending habit, and the sophisticated tastes to go along with it. They are city birds. They know their way around. They are remarkably self-possessed, though often very inexperienced, and eager beneath the eyes. Their attitudeto adults is less resentful than scornful. Adults are simply "square". Mugs. They are not "with it". They don't know "how the wind blows". School has passed through this generation like a dose of salts—but they are by no means intellectually backward. They are, in fact, sharp and self-inclined. Office-boys—even van-boys—by day, they are record-sleeve boys by night. They relish a spontaneous
giggle, or a sudden midnight trip to Southend: they are capable of a certain cool violence. The "Teds"
are their alter-egos.

They despise "the masses" (the evening-paper lot on the tubes in the evening), "traditionals", "cops", (cowboys), "peasants" and "bohemians". But they know how to talk to journalists and TV "merchants", debs and holiday businessmen. Their experiences are, primarily, personal, urban and sensational: sensational in the sense that the test of beatitude is being able to get so close you feel you are
"part of the act, the scene". They know that the teenage market is a racket, but they are subtly adjusted to it nonetheless.They seem culturally exploited rather than socially deprived. They stand at the end of the Teddy-boy era of the Welfare State. They could be the first generation of the Common Market...

If post-war prosperity have lifted this working class generation up out of poverty, and raised their cultural experiences and their social contacts— that is an unqualified gain. It is the sophisticated advance guard of the teenage revolution who are—at universities and training colleges and art schools and in apprenticeships—the most articulate in their protest about social issues, and who feel most strongly about South Africa or the Bomb. If the cool young men of today were to become the social conscience of tomorrow, it would be because they had seen sights in the Twentieth Century closed to many eyes before. It would not be the first revolution which came out of social deprivation, nor the first Utopia with absolute beginnings.'

(Hall is of course  referencing Colin MacInnes' Absolute Beginners in this closing line, which he reviews favourably in the course of the article).

Leonard Cohen in London

'I'm your man: the life of Leonard Cohen' (2012) is an excellent biography of everybody's favourite Jewish-Buddhist-Canadian singer/poet. With nearly 80 busy years behind him there's certainly plenty of material for a book like this, and Sylvie Simmons has interviewed the man himself and many of his friends, collaborators and lovers.

One of the revelations to me was Cohen's time in London before his musical career. Cohen stayed at a boarding house in Hampstead from December 1959 to March 1960, working on a novel. With Nancy Bacal, a friend from Montreal, he drank regularly in the King William IV pub in Hampstead. After closing time they would explore the night time city, wandering around Soho and the East End. They went to the legendary All-Nighters at the Flamingo club on Wardour Street, with its mixed black and white crowd dancing to jazz and R&B. Bacal recalled that 'There was so much weed in the air that it felt like walking into a painting of smoke'.

Back in Canada, Cohen came to the aid of Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi when the latter was on the run for heroin offences in 1961. He was smuggled over the Candadian border, where Cohen met him and put him up in his apartment in Montreal until he got on a boat to Scotland. Cohen later wrote the poem 'Alexander Trocchi, Public Junkie, Priez Pour Nous'.

Cohen returned to London for four months in March 1962, and moved back to 'Mrs Pulman's boarding house in Hampstead' for a while. By this point Nancy Bacal had moved in with her boyfriend, Michael de Freitas - better known as Michael X. The Trinidadian had worked as an enforcer for the landlord Peter Rachman before becoming a civil rights activist: 'a bridge between London's black underground and the white proto-hippie community. Together, Michael and Nancy founded the London Black Power Movement'.

'On this and subsequent trips to London, Leonard got to know Michael "very well". He, Nancy, Michael and Robert Hershorn, when he was in London, would spend evenings in Indian restaurants, deep in discussion about art and politics... Michael X had told Leonard - perhaps in jest, perhaps not - that he planned to take over the government of Trinidad. When he did, he said, he would appoint Leonard minister of tourism'.

Bacal and de Freitas split up in 1967, and renaming himself Michael Abdul Malik he founded the Black House centre in London's Holloway Road with support from John Lennon and Yoko Ono among others. He moved to Trinidad in 1971, where he was hanged in 1975 for murder, despite appeals for clemency from Leonard Cohen and other celebrities.

Asger Jorn

So there I was talking to a neighbour and the Situationists came up in the conversation, and he says to me I think I've got some of their stuff up in the attic that I got when I was doing house clearance (he being somebody who over the years has dipped in an out of the world of art/labour.) Not going to tell you where he lives because he'll be getting a load of radical theory pimps breaking into his house and flogging his worldly goods for ludicrous prices online.

Next day he comes round and lends me this, Pour la Forme by Asger Jorn, published by  the Situationist International in 1958.

A signed copy no less:

Complete with Guy Debord and Jorn's famous detourned map of Paris, The Naked City:

Asger Jorn (1914-1973) was a Danish radical artist and founder member of the Situationist International. Some of the texts  from Pour La Forme have recently been translated into English by Ken Knabb:

http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/asger-jorn/index.htm

Automation and the Leisure Society

Jorn's essay on The Situationists and Automation is interesting. On the one  hand it shows how much the SI were a product of their time - like mainstream sociologists in that period they took for granted that humanity was on the threshold of a leisure society in which automation had rendered most work unecessary. But Jorn has quite a nuanced view of the opportunities and dangers of this future.  He recognises the risk that 'the devaluation of all human goods to a level of “total neutrality” will be the inevitable consequence of a purely scientific development of socialism... contributing toward the adaptation of humanity to this bland and symmetrified future'.  He poses the question of whether automation 'opens up more interesting realms of experience than it closes. Depending on the outcome, we may arrive at a total degradation of human life or at the possibility of perpetually discovering new desires. But these new desires will not appear by themselves within the oppressive context of our world. There must be a collective action to detect, express and fulfill them'. That was what he saw as the Situationist project.

Well the leisure society promised in the 1950s and 1960s certainly hasn't materialised, with no jet packs and people seemingly working longer hours or unemployed with time on their hands but no material abundance to go with it. Was it a fantasy or is it something that is still on the horizon, a cyber-communist future enabled by some development beyond 3D printing that makes material goods as freely available as the internet has rendered digital goods? So far only science fiction writers like Iain M Banks (the 'Culture' novels) and Ken MacLeod seem to have seriously thought through what living in such a world might be like.

Saturday night dancing in 1950s London - Steven Berkoff

Playwright and actor Steven Berkoff (b.1937) wrote an autobiography 'Free Association' in 1997. Born in a Jewish family in Stepney (his father was a tailor), he spent his teengage years on the Woodberry Down Estate and hanging out around Stamford Hill (he went to Hackney Downs School, as did Harold Pinter). The book includes some great descriptions of going out dancing in London in the early 1950s, in particular at the Tottenham Royal, the 51 Club in Soho and the Lyceum Ballroom.

Tottenham Royal: The Mecca

'I recall in my youth the extreme beauty of some of the men and women, the sharply fierce eyes and beautiful peach-like skins and the men with their handsome Celtic faces. They would gather together like warring clans at the weekly stomp at the Tottenham Royal,which was run by Mecca. I was to write a short story about that  dance hall called Mecca - it was published in my collection Gross Intrusion. What an ironic title, Mecca Dance Halls, for it was indeed our Mecca and the weekly call to nature was as primitive as the herds of rutting deer that would gather on the Scottish moors for their mating, selecting and challenging.

It was the golden time, the weekend when the coarse and unsatisfying work had been shed and the day-to-day dose of humiliation was over, at least for me, and one could wash the week away, in the ‘neutral’ environment of the Mecca. All men and women were equal there, since the humbling work you did during the week mattered not at the Mecca. Your schooling might be shabby and abrupt, your teachers callous and indifferent, your hopes no higher than to be cannon fodder for industry and factories if you were a native, and if you were a second-generation immigrant you might be absorbed into the skills the migrants brought with them and be a worker in the garment industry, a cutter, tailor, presser, or as in my particular case, a a ghastly menswear shop.

In the Royal, Tottenham, you were you wished to be - warrior, lover, Jimmy Cagney, Tony Curtis, villain, spiv, leader, loner, heavy, Beau Brummell...

Tottenham Royal

....on Saturday we could forget all these other struggles, the dead and stultifying world outside in which you had to assert yourself with the blunt instruments of a poor education and little guidance and the hope of becoming a taxi driver or the manager of Cecil Gee’s Menswear. Now all that was behind you and in your drapes and rollaway Johnny Ray collar you spraunced into the Mecca with the expectation of a dream. Anything could and would and did happen, since the Mecca played into your hands: it was the greatest money-spinner of all time because it restated and restored the tribe and tore away the constraints of the civilized world of work and buses and factories. Here you could be who you thought you were. You created yourself. You were the master of your destiny. You entered quiffed and perfumed in the most expensive aftershave Boots had to offer. You entered and already the smell of the hall had a particular aroma of velvet and hairspray, Brylcreem and Silvikrin, lacquer, cigs, floor polish...

First you go and deposit your coat and then jostle for a square inch of mirror so as to adjust your phallic quiff, which has to protrude enough for it to be stable, until your very arm aches and you have to lower it to restore the blood supply. Many arms were crooked and like birds we were preening and pecking. In the ladies' I imagine even more complex rituals were going on, since this was the sea of flesh, a virtual harvest of all the young, bright, beautiful, sweet, delicious and not-so-beautiful and not-so-delectable, but at least the energy of all that youth swarming together in the Mecca was formidable...

  ...every night at the Royal was a dream time. You walked as if in slow motion and got there early so that you stood a good chance of pulling some sweet, delectable creature, had a good dance and swanned around. The dance was all-important since this was a way of demonstrating your skill as a mover, your grace, wit, balance and tricks. The jive was one of the greatest dance forms ever invented. And so all your arts were in some way fulfilled. You were the dandy, the mover and performer in your own drama, the roving hunter and lover, the actor adopting for the girl the mask of your choice. You wore your costume and walked the hall beneath the glittering ball and when you saw someone that you felt was about your stamp you asked her for a dance; if it was slow, when you took her on to the floor your heart started to increase its beat...  

When you entered the Royal, the band, usually Ray Ellington, would be up the far end. The Stamford Hill crowd would stand on the left-hand side and the crowd from Tottenham would stand on the right; there would be no mixing unless you felt cocky and wanted to fraternize; in that case you elected yourself to the position of leading luminary and went to pay your respects. Dancing was the thing and as the clock ticked away until the terrible hour of 11  p.m. when the band would stop, you became more and more desperate to find someone you could take home and crush for half an hour of fierce kissing and squeezing and creating sparks as your gaberdine rubbed against her taffeta'.

Jive  

I learned to jive at a formal session which a young teacher called Leslie taught at a small jazz club in Finsbury Park. I don’t remember who took me there or how I heard about it. In one corner of the room (and I now remember the room was walled with mirrors - it must have been a small ballet school in more genteel times) was a record player and Leslie would show us the basic one-two-three-four.

Once we had mastered this very simple rhythm, the next step was to guide the woman while in a kind of side-to-side locomotion our arms would spin her like a top. With the determination that was to be a hallmark of my youthful endeavours, I threw myself into the jive and practised night and day to work it out in mirrors, on door handles and on a current girlfriend, a flaring redhead who I met on the Hill. She was from the other side of the manor, which was bad news for both of us, but at that time we were mainly concerned with getting the jive together.

After a while I got into the swing of it and Greys Dance Hall became my weekly Tuesday night session. A kind of Finsbury Park clan would gather there. When you came in there was a little bar where you could buy sandies, tea, coffee and soft drinks. The place had a weird and pregnant atmosphere, not least because Curly King would turn up from time to time and it was also the time I first glimpsed the Kray twins. They were always immaculately turned out in dark suits and ties...

...Sunday was Lyceum night, but you could always do some hopping at the 51 Club in Little Newport Street. That was good for jazz and they played the best records and you danced your feet off. I did less and less exercise at school I made up for it by jiving, at which I was becoming a veritable Gene Kelly. 1 had perfected my jiving via Leslie at Grays, Finsbury Park, fine-tuned it at the Royal [Tottenham] and let it go at the‘51’.

It was my sanctuary. A small dark room with some of the best dancing to be seen in the West End. I would come home some nights soaked to the skin and it was even better than sex. I evolved a style that was ultra cool. By this time the Johnnie Ray era had been replaced by Teddy Boys and you wore four-button suits, shirts with stiff collars and double cuffs. My collars were sent each week to ‘Collars Ltd’ for starching and laundering, and woe betide if the collars came back soft or not stiff enough. I would go bananas. The style of dance was affected by the suit you wore and so you had to lift your arm, keeping your elbow fairly well in to your side or your jacket would be pulled up and you would appear ungainly. No, you had to dance cool so as to keep the form intact.

It was a brief but unique period in English social and fashion history, since it twisted the jive away from its American cousins and adapted it to fit into an idiosyncratic London style. The chaps at the Lyceum became fops and Beau Brummels and the suit was more than ever your calling card or your place of esteem. You had to be immaculate'.

Drag is about many things

'Drag is about many things . It is about clothes and sex. It subverts the dress codes that tell us what men and women should look like in our organised society. It creates tension and releases tension, confronts and appeases. It is about role playing and questions the meaning of both gender and sexual identity. It is about anarchy and defiance. It is about men's fear of women as much as men's love of women and it is about gay identity'

Drag: a history of female impersonation in the performing arts - Roger Baker, London, Cassell, 1994

(photo from New Orleans in the 1950s)

Hobsbawm on Jazz, Dance and Class

The historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) died yesterday at the age of 95.  There's plenty to criticise in his political judgement  as he aligned himself with  the various phases of the Communist Party of Great Britain from its outright Stalinism to its proto-New Labour 'Marxism Today' period - even if it's not hard to understand why somebody who spent some of his teenage years in Berlin during the rise of Hitler joined the KPD. But his history writing on class and culture was often very nuanced and non-dogmatic. He also wrote extensively on jazz.

One of my favourite short essays of his looks at the early days of jazz in Europe, reflecting on how its popularity related to changing class cultural practices. 'On the Reception of Jazz in Europe'  was originally published in 1994 and then republished as 'Jazz Comes to Europe' in the excellent collection 'Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz' (1998). Here's a few extracts:

'The speed of transatlantic transport was such that ideas, notes and people could already cross the ocean very rapidly indeed. Will Marion Cook's Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk - Cook was later to bring Sidney Bechet to Britain - was performed in 1898 in both New York and London. The foxtrot, the basic dance routine associated with jazz, first appeared in Britain in the summer of 1914. a few months after its first appearance in the USA , and in Belgium in 1915. Jazz had hardly been baptized in the USA when groups under that name already toured Europe. They were there from the middle of 1917.

  ...the interesting thing about this diffusion is what was being diffused. It was one of several kinds of novel cultural and artistic creation that emerged, in the late nineteenth century, from the plebeian, mainly urban, milieu of Western industrial society, most probably in the specialized lumpenproletarian environments of the entertainment quarter in the big cities, with their specific subcultures, male and female stereotypes, costumes - and music. The Buenos Aires tango which secured for Latin American music a permanent but minor place on the international dance floor at the same time as jazz did, is one example. Cuban music is another...jazz was both novel and, in origin, an art belonging to an autonomous subculture...

  ...Jazz made its way and triumphed , not as a music for intellectuals but as a music for dancing, and specifically for a transformed, revolutionized social dance of the British middle and upper classes, but also. and almost Simultaneously, the British working-class dance. During the 1900s the upper-crust dance was transformed in two ways. (An expert contemporary witness dates the major change precisely to the season 1910-11.) First urban dancing had already ceased t be a seasonal occupation linked to special occasions. and was being practised all the year round as a regular social and leisure activity. To some extent it was practised privately, but special dancing clubs developed - there were three in Edwardian Hampstead alone - and it occurred in hotels and what were not yet called 'nightclubs' . The tea-dance and the restaurant-dance appeared on a modest scale. Second, the dance lost its formality and ordered succession. At the same time it became simpler, more easily learned and less demanding and exhausting. The crucial change here was that from the turning dance (for example. the waltz) to the walking dance, such as the Boston. a sort of rectilinear waltz, in the early 1900s. It seems clear that these developments reflected a substantial loosening of aristocratic and middle-class conventions, and they are a striking and neglected symptom of the notable emancipation of women in these classes before 1914. The link between the dance revolution, even specifically between the new primacy of rhythm in social dancing, and the emancipation of women, did not pass unperceived. It is noted in the most intelligent or the early jazz books, Paul Bernhard's Jazz: Eine musikalische Zeitfrage (1927)...  

...British jazz had a broad popular base, because its uniquely large working class had developed a, for Europe, uniquely recognizable, urbanized, non-traditional lifestyle. Even before 1914 huge popular dance halls had already been built for the holiday demand of specifically proletarian seaside resorts like Blackpool, Morecambe, Margate and Douglas on the Isle of Man. The post-war mania for dancing was immediately met by the new institution of the so-called Palais de Danse, of which the Hammersmith Palais. the first . immediately became a jazz venue by booking the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1919. No doubt the music to which the plebs danced would not always be considered jazz today. Indeed, the central tradition of British mass dancing moved away from jazz towards a curious phenomenon called 'strict tempo' dancing, which was to become a competitive sport on British television. Nevertheless, jazz made its mark as a name, an idea, a novel and demotic sound.

The massive dance mania produced an unusually large body of dance-band musicians, mainly of proletarian origin, or at least raised in the environment of the brass-band movement, much appreciated in the industrial areas. These formed the original core of the jazz public... Socially speaking. dance-band musicians, who did  rather better in the 1920s than in the depressed 1930s, were on the borders between the skilled workers and the lower-middle classes. It was in the higherparts of this zone that the bulk of British jazz evangelists were to be found before 1945. They were typically self-made intellectuals. In London we find 'Rhythm Clubs' (ninety-eight of which sprang up in Britain between 1933 and 1935) not in middle-class quarters like
Chelsea, Kensington or even Hampstead, but in the outlying districts like Croydon, Forest Gate, Barking or Edmonton...

We can leave aside the reaction of high society and its associated intellectuals. In Britain this was of no great importance though doubtless it pleased Duke Ellington to have the future King Edward VII sit in on drums at a party for his band in London. Much more important, as has been suggested, was the democratic and populist character of the music, which made the Melody Maker state approvingly: [It appeals not only to the fauteuils but to the gallery also. It considers no class distinction.'

...[what Britain] did develop, however, probably in close association with American New Deal radicalism ,was a powerful bonding of jazz, blues, folk and the extreme left, mainly communist but also, marginally, anarchist. For such people jazz and blues were essentially 'people's music' in three senses: a music with folk roots and capable of appealing to the masses, a do-it-yourself music which could be practised by ordinary people, as distinct from those with technical training, and lastly a music for protest, demonstration and collective celebration. Revivalist or Dixieland jazz lent itself unusually well to all these purposes. So much so that at its peak in the 1950s it came closer to turning jazz from the art of a coterie into a mass music than has been achieved anywhere else, except perhaps, for a moment, during the swing boom of the later 1930s in the USA. It is no accident that a typical anthem of the 'trad' jazz fans also became the typical song of the football fans on the terraces : 'When the Saints Go Marching In'. However, it should be noticed that, while revivalist jazz became de facto the music of an age-group in which students, and particularly art students, became prominent for the first time. it was neither consciously nor militantly a youth music... The 'trad' boom prepared the triumph of rock, but only rock turned itself into a conscious manifesto of immaturity'.

Music for Pleasure

Last week I had the opportunity to visit a rarely opened archive in South London. The basement of New Cross Learning (the volunteer-run library/community space in New Cross Road) holds the collection of the Lewisham Local History Society, an eclectic assortment of specifically local artifacts and general 'old things' assembled over the years with an aim of one day forming the basis of a museum collection. 

Naturally I was intrigued by some of the musical items, including this metal sign for the old 'Music for Pleasure' label. I spent some of my teenage wages from working in the library and Debenhams (like someone in a Belle & Sebastian song) on these budget LPs, often consisting of early material or live recordings from well known bands.  My favourite was 'Relics', a fantastic compilation of Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd.

The archive also include various bits of semi-obsolete technology stacked up on the shelves. Here's an Alba gramophone:

Most evocative for me was this Regentone valve radio, made in Romford at some point in the early 1950s. I remember as a child going to visit an elderly relative in the Forest of Dean and they had something similar.

I recall that I was fascinated by the dial with its list of exotic sounding places and stations. Looking at it now as an adult it still seems to embody a kind of utopian internationalist dream of the radio, the possibility of sitting in a room somewhere in post-war England and listening in to Marseilles, Bologna, Berlin or the USSR.

The Malatesta Club in Soho

1950s Soho clubs are one of the enduring obsessions of this site, but I didn't realise until recently that there was a specifically anarchist club there during that period - the Malatesta Club in Soho, named after the famous Italian revolutionary.

The club seems to have first opened on May Day 1954 and 'was run by the London Anarchist Group from 1954-8, seven nights a week. Habitues used to write songs and poetry and perform them at the club, which also had a resident jazz band' (Ian Walker, Anarchy in the UK, New Society, November 1979). Walker's article includes reminiscences of 'Justin', a veteran anarchist, who recalled  '"I used to make up songs - sort of sing and shout, to a drum. Couldn't play anything used to hammer away on the drum . . . it was really something, all run completely voluntarily". The anarchists' coffee house (it never had a licence) was called the Malatesta because he was the only anarchist writer the group could agree on. 'Some were Kropotkinists and some were Bakuninists, but we all agreed Malatesta was a good guy.'"

According to The University Libertarian (1955), 'Founded two years ago with much honest sweat, the Malatesta Club provides a meeting place and social centre' (University Libertarian 1955).

Among the founders was Philip Sansom (1916-1999), one of those put on trial in 1945 for their involvement in the anarchist paper War Commentary. and Donald Rouum, a prolific cartoonist for the journal Freedom for many years.

Philip Sansom in 1945

Donald Rouum in a 1952 portrait by Frank Lisle 
on display in Wakefield Art Gallery



Among those who went to the Malatesta Club at various times were the later socialist feminist writer Juliet Mitchell, author Colin McInnes; gay Labour MP and possible spy Tom Driberg  and libertarian architect and writer Colin Ward. The club was clearly a key portal into the anarchist movement for the curious and the committed. John Rety, who went on to edit Freedom in the 1960s, was a Hungarian Jewish refugee who started out on the Soho literary scene publishing magazines such as Fortnightly  and the Intimate Review. His collaborator John Pilgrim went to the Malatesta Club to do a report for the Review and both he and Rety were drawn into the movement.

In his book The Consul (2002), the sometime English situationist Ralph Rumney mentions that  ‘in Soho, I found the Malatesta Club, the final redoubt of old English anarchists’, and the writer Michael Moorcock has said that ‘Listening to old guys at the Malatesta Club talking about the Spanish Civil War’ was one of the influences on his anarchism ('Mythmakers and Lawbreakers – anarchist writers on fiction', AK Press 2009). It is mentioned in passing in his London novel King of the City  where a character says  'my grandad used to complain that the anarchists (he never missed a meeting at the Malatesta Club, Red Lion Square ) had been sold out to the communists who had lost the Spanish Civil War'. Moorcock and Rumney also both hung out at the Gyre and Gimble coffee house, though not sure if they knew each other.

I'm still a little unclear about where the club was. In some references, it appears it may have started out in Holborn before moving to Soho (maybe that's why Moorcock mentions Red Lion Square). In 'Inventing ourselves: lesbian life stories' by Hall Carpenter Archives (1991), Sharley MacLean recalls her first lesbian sexual experience was with someone she 'met through the Malatesta Club which was an anarchist cafe, a dingy cellar in Charlotte Street'. But Colin Ward  recalls that it was in Percy Street, which runs off Charlotte Street, so maybe it was near the corner.

As an interesting aside, the Club may have had a role in UFO history. As reported in Fortean Times (January 2011): 'In Flying Saucerers (Alternative Albion, 2007, p74), David Clarke and Andy Roberts relay a quaint eyewitness account from historian Laurens Otter. In early 1954, a drunken taxi driver entered a meeting at the anarchist Malatesta Club in Soho, and asked for Sam Cash, a fellow cabbie. Learning that Cash was expected later, “…the tired and emotional taxi driver lay down across some chairs and promptly fell asleep.” At the end of the guest speaker’s talk, the chairman asked if there were any questions. Whereupon "the taxi driver suddenly woke, asking, ‘How do I make a mill­ion pounds?’. Robinson [the chairman] took the question in good humour and speculated the best way to make a fortune was to found a fake religion. A discussion about how best to do this ensued with Otter opining that a much better idea would be to get in on the flying saucer craze. Robinson concurred, suggesting that the two ideas could be combined for best effect. […] A few years later, Cash told Otter that the drunken taxi driver, whose name was George King, had taken his advice about melding religion with flying saucers, and it had worked. The rest, as they say, is history".

George King founded the Aetherius Society, claiming to have been contacted by the 'Space People' with the message 'Prepare Yourself! You are to become the Voice of Interplanetary Parliament'.

(well that's all I've been able to find out so far - would love to know more, including - what was the exact address? what kind of activities happened there? I've seen mention of chess, meetings and jazz- was there dancing? If you have any more information, or even personal recollections, please comment).

The Art of Parties

This article 'Retort Goes to a Party' by Holley Cantine was originally published in the Autumn 1951 issue of Retort, a journal of anarchism, poetry, literature and essays edited by Cantine, with contributors including Paul Mattick, Kenneth Rexroth and Paul Goodman. It was reprinted in the Portland-based journal Communicating Vessels (Fall/Winter 2008-9). There are more Retort articles here - it was published in New York in the 1940s and 50s.

A 1950s report of a 1920s retro party might seem obscure even for this site, but there are some interesting reflections on the art of parties.

'On last March 24th, in Greenwich Village, a party, was thrown for the ostensible purpose of commemorating the 1920s. The editors of Retort, being at the time on one of their occasional visits to New York, attended. It was a fairly large party — upward of 100 people, most of them costumed in the styles of the period — either authentic or reasonably faithful representations. There was a competent Dixieland jazz band and an adequate amount of drink, the price of admission being a bottle. The party was held in a commodious sculptor's studio on the top floor of a loft building in a non-residential section of the Village, so there was both plenty of room and sufficient isolation to permit complete freedom from the usual urban inhibitions about noise.

Yet, in spite of all these manifest advantages, the party, as a party, and especially as an attempt to recapture the spirit of the '20s, didn't really come off. There was a good deal of boisterousness, some fairly wild dancing, and a determined effort on the part of the sponsors to keep things moving, but the atmosphere was not at all that of the period that was supposed to be commemorated, and the level of intensity that a really good party attains was never observable. The present writer, who has a very warm feeling for the '20s, perhaps because he was just a little too young to take part in the revels of that era, but old enough to have witnessed some of them, stayed on to the bitter end, hoping that  something might turn up, but unfortunately the evening just wilted away, and when at 3 or 4 in the morning the last remaining revelers began looking for their coats, it was as if nothing had happened.

To the connoisseur of parties — and in the '20s, the party was an art form with many zealous devotees, not a few of whom gave their lives as a result of their single-minded dedication to art — a party is not really successful unless something happens other than the usual banalities of passings out, corner seductions, et al. Exactly what is supposed to happen is impossible to foresee (this is the chief charm of the party as an art form). At some point in the evening, usually well after midnight, when the more inhibited guests have gone home and the rest are sufficiently liquored up to be ready for anything, a sort of spirit of the party begins to take over, fusing the participants into a spontaneous organic whole which is capable of very curious and memorable acts.

At the party in question, the focal point of the evening was the so-called Charleston Contest, and had the party been sufficiently alive, this could have been the spark that started things moving. As it turned out it was merely an exhibition of rather extreme dancing (none of it the Charleston) with most of the people reduced to spectators while a dwindling number of couples competed. I can recall parties in the '20s when an event of this nature suddenly evolved into a mock revival meeting or voodoo ceremony, with everyone taking part, or at least experiencing the excitement — a sort of pseudo-religious ecstasy that could be quite breathtaking.

Of course, such a performance is only possible in an entirely spontaneous andabandoned atmosphere, and the heavy aura of self-consciousness that hung over this party was a serious detriment to even bogus spirituality. Perhaps we who have endured the terrible '40s are unable to recapture the fine, free and essentially naive gusto for wickedness that characterized the lighter side of the '20s. The '20s, despite the fond belief of its Flaming Youth, was — at least in perspective — a very innocent period. There was something ingenuous and good-natured about its revolt against Victorianism. The bottomless pit that the First World War had opened up before the Lost Generation was a shallow ditch compared to that which our generation has witnessed, and the consequent cynicism was childlike and lighthearted, in comparison to the numb apathy that is characteristic of the more advanced youth of today.

The "wild" party was the perfect vehicle for expressing this spirit, especially since, as the result of Prohibition — that last desperate stand of the forces of Puritanism — the simple act of taking a drink was transformed into a wicked and excitingly illegal event. (Today, the youth must resort to the more deadening narcotics to achieve a similar thrill). A party in the '20s that commemorated the '90s was a lively, good-natured spoofing of the previous generation's foibles; we of the '50s, with our prevailing atmosphere of doom and disintegration, are hardly in the proper mood to give the same sort of treatment to the youthful follies of our parental generation'.

Jackie Wilson's Melisma - 20 notes for the word 'for'

'The extent to which the music is integrated with the literal meaning in soul is apparent in some of its basic stylistic conventions, the call and response structure, for instance, where a phrase from the lead vocalist - which may not even take a verbal shape - is as often echoed by the band as by other singers. Or the distinctive use of melisma - the concentration of several notes into one syllable - by soul performers. The effect of this technique is often to give the impression that the singer is none too sure that the words exist which could adequately convey the power of what he is feeling. When Jackie Wilson packs more than twenty notes into the word "for" in his version "Danny Boy", the literal meaning of the song is virtually superseded' (Ian Hoare, Mighty mights spade and whitey: soul lyrics and black-white crosscurrents, in The Soul Book, edited by Ian Hoare, London: 1975)

Check out the closing bars of this song for the example given - 20 notes for the word 'for':

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Alan Sillitoe died earlier this year, 50 years after he came to prominence with the classic post-war Northern working class novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, first published in 1958:

'For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled-up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week's monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill...'

'Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can't help being one. You can't deny that. And it's best to be a rebel so as to show 'em it don't pay to try to do you down. Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking - so they say - but they're booby-traps and will suck you under like sinking-sands if you aren't careful. Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you're still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death ... Ay, by God, it's a hard life if you don't weaken, if you don't stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain't much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits'.

Sillitoe also wrote the screenplay of the film (released in 1960):



'I'm a fighting pit prop that wants a pint of beer, that's me. But if any knowing bastard says that's me I'll tell them I'm a dynamite dealer waiting to blow the factory to kingdom come. Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not because they don't know a bloody thing about me! God knows what I am'

'I'm out for a good time - all the rest is propaganda!'

The book and film have been endlessly mined in popular culture ever since. The Arctic Monkeys famously quoted the 'Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not' film line as the title of their debut album. The film line 'I want to go where there's life and there's people' inspired The Smiths' 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out' (although the film's star Albert Finney - pictured above - refused his permission to be featured on the cover of 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now'). The Specials recorded their own take, 'Friday Night and Saturday Morning': 'When my feet go through the door, I know what my right arm is for, Buy a drink and pull a chair, Up to the edge of the dance floor, Bouncers bouncing through the night, Trying to stop or start a fight,I sit and watch the flashing lights, Moving legs in footless tights'.

54 and Filuzzi

54 by Italian collective author Wu Ming is a novel set in 1954, with a fine plot involving the mafia, secret services, communist ex-partisans in Italy and Yugoslavia, the geopolitics of the post-WW2 period and Cary Grant.

One of the themes of the book is what might be termed 'proletarian dandyism' - working class pride in dressing up and looking sharp as an assertion of human dignity and as a refusal to accept an 'inferior' social status.

Two of the characters - Grant and Tito (leader of Yugoslavia) - are seen to share this perspective, with the Cary Grant character concluding that "he and Tito had a great deal in common. Above all there was his obvious interest in matters of grooming and clothes... And then there was the fact that they had both become famous with a name other than their given name. They had both passed through different identities".

The authors put an explicit defence of dressing-up into the mouth of 'Tito': "the mirror unites the individual with the community, and its admission into proletarian houses has cemented class pride, that sense of decorum thrown back into the bosses' faces, 'We have been naught, we shall be all! We can be, and we are, more stylish than you are!'".

Pierre, another key character, is a communist bar worker who models himself on Cary Grant. He is a local face as a filuzzi dancer in the dancehalls of Bologna, a scene involving competitive displays of dancing prowess to mazurkas and polkas:

'Everyone took to the floor for the mazurka, even the women, who couldn't usually keep up with the giddy rhythms of those dances. Two or three pieces in, the rhythm started to speed up. Nino Bonara's concertina, supported by bass and guitar, sounded as though it was never going to stop. By the sixth item on the programme only the musketeers of the Bar Aurora were left on the floor. Shouts of encouragement rose up from the tables, along with applause for the more complex movements... the four filuzzi followed the music each on his own, the couples parting and reforming each time the tune came round again..."

The couples in filuzzi were usually men dancing with each other. It was specifically a Bologna scene - in fact it still exists there to an extent - and there is very little about it written in English. There is, however, some filuzzi footage on youtube:


Wu Ming are in London this week doing a series of events, I am planning to go along to Cafe Oto in Dalston tomorrow night.

Electric Eden

Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music is an ambitious, accomplished and entertaining survey of 100 years of music-making and its associated literature and counter-cultures. Its focus is on the pastoral dream of evergreen Albion, with its core the story of folk music since Cecil Sharp began collecting rural song at the turn of the 20th century. Folk’s various revivals and re-inventions are encompassed, from the use of folk themes in English classical music (e.g. Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock), through the proletarian focus of Ewan McColl and A.L. Lloyd and on to folk rock and beyond.

Young is less interested though in ‘folk’ as a specific musical genre, than in the vision he sees underlying it - the use of music as a form of ‘imaginative time travel’ to the ‘succession of golden ages’ (both semi-historical and entirely fictional), found in British culture – Merrie England, Albion, Middle Earth, Avalon, Narnia. As he states in the introduction ‘The ‘Visionary Music’ involved in this book’s title refers to any music that contributes to this sensation of travel between time zones, of retreat to a secret garden, in order to draw strength and inspiration for facing the future’.

This is not a characteristic solely of what is normally defined as ‘folk music’ and he includes within it dreamy English psychedelia, and the work of later visionary musical outsiders such as Kate Bush and Julian Cope.

The stories of Cecil Sharp and Ewen McColl have already been well documented, for me the most interesting parts of the book deal with the subsequent trajectories of late 1960s/1970s folk rock and ‘acid folk’, with their infusions of both Early Music and futuristic psychedelia. As well as covering the obvious reference points (Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Incredible String Band, Nick Drake), Young gives space to many less well known artists such as Bill Fay, Comus and Mr Fox.

After languishing in relative obscurity for many years, some of these have only recently secured the listeners denied them at the time. In another form of time travel, it’s almost as if some of the albums recorded in the late 1960s/70s were set down as ‘time capsules’, to be unheard in their present but acting as a gift to the future that would appreciate them. The paradigmatic examples are of course Nick Drake, who only achieved posthumous fame when his fruit was in the ground, and Vashti Bunyan, whose Just Another Diamond Day sold only a few hundred copies in 1970s and who has only really gained widespread recognition in the last five years or so. I saw her give one of her first major performances at the Folk Britannia 'Daughters of Albion' event at the Barbican in London in 2006, alongside Eliza Carthy, Norma Waterson, Kathryn Williams, Sheila Chandra and Lou Rhodes.

Places and Spaces

Young is very good on place – both the specific landscapes that influenced particular musicans, and the spaces where music was performed. In relation to the former he mentions for instance Maiden Castle in Dorset, inspiration for John Ireland’s Mai-Dun (as well as incidentally the novel Maiden Castle by John Cowper Powys, an author with a similar take on the visionary landscape).
In relation to the latter, he mentions clubs such as Ewen McColl’s Ballads and Blues club/Hootennanay upstairs in the Princess Louise pub in Holborn (founded in 1957) and its later evolution into The Singers Club at the Pindar of Wakefield on Grays Inn Road. In Soho, Russell Quaye’s Skiffle Cellar at 49 Greek Street (1958-60), was replaced at the same address in 1965 by ‘the poky palace of Les Cousins, where the folk monarchy held court, audiences of no more than 150 were routinely treated to mystically revelatory performances. The club never got around to applying for a liquor licence, so patrons consumed tea and sandwiches in a haze of hash smoke, straining to hear the soloists over percussive effects from the cash register’. Denizens included Bert Jansch, Davy Graham, Simon & Garfunkel, John Martyn, Martin Carthy and Roy Harper.

Outside of London in the 1960s, ‘Hertfordshire was already one of the most influential hotbeds of the new folk movement outside of Soho… Herts heads keen for a lungful of marijuana and subterranean entertainment would gather at the Cock in St Albans… Down the road from The Cock brooded the Peahen, where a more traditional, MacColl-style folk-revival club was held’. In nearby Hemel Hempstead, singer Mick Softley ran the Spinning Wheel, while at the Dolphin Coffee Bar, Pete Frame opened Luton Folk Club in 1965.

There's also a good chapter on free festivals, 'Paradise Enclosed', as 'a serious attempt to stake out and remake Utopia in an English field. The temporary tented villages of Britain's outdoor festivals represented a practical attempt to live out the dream of Albion' two hundred years after the Inclosures Act of 1761 and the enclosure of common land.

Some criticisms

In a work of this scale and scope there are bound to be some factual errors of geography (Luton is in Bedfordshire not Hertfordshire) and history (Aleister Crowley was not the founder, or even a founder, of the Golden Dawn). But these are minor quibbles.

There are though a few problems with the framework Young uses for all this rich material. The chief one is its use of the term ‘Britain’s visionary music’ when it is clear that what he is describing is primarily an English phenomenon. Of course there has been plenty of folk music from other parts of the British Isles, but Young barely mentions it. In any event, it has often had a different aesthetic, concerned precisely to differentiate itself from Englishness and commemorating historical conflicts with the 'English' state from Bannockburn to the clearances (in the case of Scottish music).

Although Ireland is clearly not part of Britain, its influence on English folk is also largely unacknowledged here. Did the raucous Dubliners influence those who wanted to take folk in a more rocky direction? Did Irish rebel song envy inspire English political song (Dominic Behan was a key figure in the Singers Club)? Wasn't Thin Lizzy's Whiskey in the Jar one of the biggest folk rock hits? This is left unexplored, and arguably the greatest London folk band of all time - The Pogues - don't even get mentioned.

Young is a better musicologist than a folklorist, and while he is clearly aware that claims of an unbroken folk music tradition stretching back into the mists of time are highly questionable, he seems to want to hold on to some notion of 'pagan survivals' in folk. Despite citing Ronald Hutton in the footnotes, he disregards Hutton's findings that we know very little about the pre-Christian beliefs of the British Isles. Instead he repeats the whole Golden Bough/Wasteland mythology of ritual sacrifice as it if were fact: ‘The gods controlling these cycles needed to be appeased with sacrifices. At first, the leader of the pack, the king himself, was slaughtered before his vital energies began to die off, and a new healthy replacement was appointed in his place’.

Finally, Young does not really explore the potential dark side of all this dabbling with blood and soil. He may be right that many of those working within the folk idiom ‘have been radical spirits, aligned with the political left or just fundamentally unconventional and progressive in outlook’ – something that applies not just to the post-1950s Communist Party revivalists but to earlier pioneers such as Holst and Vaughan Williams who, as Young mentions, hung out with William Morris’s socialist circle in Hammersmith. But it is also true that this look backwards to a pre-capitalist idyll can be profoundly reactionary, and potentially very right wing. In a brief survey of current trends, Young mentions the post-industrial 'neo-folk' scene, but does not refer to the controversies over some of the neo-fascist elements involved (see the new Who Makes the Nazis? blog for more on that).

Now I've read the book (all 664 pages), I will no doubt be spending the rest of the year tracking down some of the music in it that I haven't heard yet.

(see also review at Transpontine of some of the South East London connections)

Skip Jive

In our search for the origins of rave, we have previously looked at the revivalist and trad jazz scenes in London from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. The 'ravers' of the later period were looked down on by the early mods, with their taste for cool, modern jazz and by jazz musicians like George Melly who mocked their dancing. So I was delighted to get a post recently from someone in that scene putting the alternative view. Here's Terry Monaghan's account:

'Just a quick note as someone who danced in the 1950s off and on the Aldermaston Marches - I'd like to defend the dancing against some of the derogatory descriptions by the likes of George Melly, who even in much later life would not tolerate dancers from distracting audiences while he was performing.

'Skip-jiving' (sometimes abbreviated to 'trad') during the second phase of the music was in fact quite skilled and far from clumsy. At the culmination of the 1961 Aldermaston March for example there was a massive trad band ball at the Lyceum Ballroom which is the first time I saw a dance floor pulse in time with the music. The collective feet all hitting it at the same time, and with the special force of skip jive that consisted of a steady skip step, resulted in the necessary stomp effect. I'd never seen a floor move up and down a good two inches before. It was funny seeing the regular teds standing on the sidelines utterly amazed at this variety of unkempt enthusiasts pounding away so enthusiastically.

The 'out of time' jibe comes in my opinion from musicians who have difficulty in keeping a steady rhythm given their natural tendency to speed up, particular on the British scene where they seldom attached much importance to a reliable rhythm section. Thus while it was true at that Lyceum gig that the tempo's of the dancers and the musicians began to separate - depending on which band was playing, the fault in my opinion largely lay with the bands. Having had much more experience of this kind of thing in later life, and the ability to make comparisons with dancers and the musicians from Harlem's former Savoy Ballroom, it seems safe to suggest that a mass of dancers who are able to fall collectively into one rhythmic groove keep excellent time. Bands have to be attuned to respect this, and back then of course few of us had a clue about what we were really doing. The Lyceum was, and is, a very stable building, but in other locations the kinetic energy generated in this way physically collapsed ballrooms resulting in considerable death and injury tolls. No danger of that these days, everyone seems to be out of time with each other!

It seems to me that there is a parallel between what happened in this period with what happened with dance music in the early 1990s. Namely that one fraction embraced 'cool', 'sophistication' and 'intelligence' and looked down on the 'ravers' - but who had the best parties?

Lena Horne and the civil rights movement

Most of the obituaries to Lena Horne (1917-2010), who died last weekend, mention her involvement in the civil rights movement. But what is striking about her life is that she was consistently an activist during, and indeed before, a musical career that encompassed dancing at the Cotton Club, singing and acting in Hollywood musicals, and recording albums.

As Lena Horne herself recalled in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples magazine The Crisis in 1983: 'My grandmother, an early pioneer of the NAACP, taught me never to forget. The seeds of a continuing passion for black freedom and liberation were sown in those earliest childhood years when my grandmother, Cora Calhoun, took me to NAACP meetings'. Paul Robeson and WEB Du Bois were family friends.

She also recalled: 'As I travelled as a singer throughout a segregated America, countless racist acts were redressed by local chapters of the NAACP'. In the 1940s at an Army base in Arkansas, she objected to black GIs having to sit behind white Italian POWs: 'I left the hall, found the black GI who was my driver and asked him to take me to the local NAACP. The NAACP in the local town turned out to be Daisy Bates, heroine of Little Rock'.

In 1946, she became a sponsor of the Los Angeles chapter of the Civil Rights Congress (as as was Frank Sinatra). She played benefits for various left wing causes, and was active in supporting Ben Davis, the black Communist elected to the city council of New York City, representing Harlem, in 1943 ( he was later jailed under the notorious Smith Act). For these activities she was blacklisted as a communist sympathiser to the detriment of her career.

She was, for instance, denounced in Red Channels a 1950 'report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television' published by Counterattack, set up by ex-FBI agents. Lena Horne was in good company in this report, along with the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Parker and Pete Seeger.

She was in the front ranks of the 1963 March onWashington for Jobs and Freedom and spoke alongside Medgar Evers shortly before he was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in the same year.

Here she is singing Stormy Weather from the 1943 film of the same name:

Stars Campaign for Inter-Racial Friendship: rock against racism in the 1950s?

Jazz musician John Dankworth died last month. As this BBC film from 1959 shows, one of his early achievements was to chair the Stars Campaign for Inter-Racial Friendship, founded in 1959 to combat the activities of the White Defence League. As well as Dankworth, members of the campaign included Cleo Laine, Tommy Steele, Lonnie Donegan (looking very like a young Billy Bragg), Humphrey Lyttelton, and folk singer Karl Dallas.



As described at Love Music Hate Racism, Colin Jordan's White Defence League later merged as part of the first British National Party in 1960, with Jordan's former comrade John Tyndall later going on to form the National Front and then the current BNP. Jordan, who was once jailed for trying to burn down synagogues, was later the fuhrer of the British Movement leading a motley crew of neo-nazi skinheads to nowhere in the 1980s.

Couple in Voodoo Trance

This sublime image has turned up on a number of blogs including Royal Quiet Deluxe and Lucky Charm (I was alerted to it by Drumz of the South twitter feed). The photo was taken by Weegee - as the photographer Arthur Fellig (1899–1968) was known - and was featured in an exhibition at the International Center of Photography a few years ago. Weegee was a Jewish immigrant to the US from Ukraine, and is best known for his portrayal of life in New York. So I am guessing that this 1956 photo, entitled 'Couple in Voodoo Trance', was taken in the States rather than in the Haiti homeland of Voodoo (or Vodou).

What is striking is the calm dignity of these participants - who could be dancers anywhere - quite at odds with the racist caricature of Vodou as some blood-crazed evil cult. Such caricatures have sadly been getting quite an airing in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, most notably from right wing US Christian fundamentalist nutjobs like Pat Robertson, who blamed the earthquake on a pact between Haitians and the devil. Clean Living in Difficult Circumstances is among those who have taken these views to task.