John Scarlett-Davis on Derek Jarman

A fascinating Derek Jarman talk and film at London's Farsight Gallery last month, featuring a 1984 LWT (London Weekend TV) documentary from the series 'South of Watford' about Jarman's life in London. It includes lots of great footage including Jarman on a boat going down the Thames pointing out the site of the warehouses he lived and worked in during the 1970s, including on the South Bank at Upper Ground,  at13 Bankside (St Magnus warehouse and at Butlers Wharf by Tower Bridge where he moved in 1973. There is a scene too of him going through the gates of the latter on a building where there is now a plaque to remember him. As mentioned in the film, Ken Russell visited him on the South Bank and invited him to design sets for his film 'The Devils' - the start of Jarman's involvement in the film industry.

The film was directed by Jarman's assistant John Scarlett-Davis, who introduced it and told some very entertaining stories, including about filming a scene of Sebastiene at Andrew Logan's warehouse space with Lindsay Kemp also at Butlers Wharf.  He recalled that at Jarman's Butlers Wharf studio the toilet was set up on a stage. Some people who were happy to take part in orgiastic parties apparently drew the line at going to the loo in front of everybody and a curtain was eventually put around it! Jarman and others had to move out of Butlers Wharf after a fire, one of a number in the area that some have observed were conveniently timed for property developers.  Scarlett-Davis remembers being dressed up in the Blitz nightclub when news of the fire came through.

Scarlett-Davis helped Jarman with his film and pop video work, including Marianne Faithfull's Broken English, and made many videos in his own right including for some of my favourite songs from that period such as This Mortal Coil's Song to the Siren, Cocteau Twins 'Pearly dewdrops drops' and Scritti Politti's 'The Word Girl' and 'Wood Beez' (featuring dancer Michael Clark).

Scarlett-Davis talked a bit about the connection between Jarman, William Burroughs and Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV, with the latter's Genesis P. Orridge featuring briefly int he LWT film. I was interested to hear that Scarlett-Davis and others had lived in another warehouse in Clink Street that later became a famous early acid house venue and later still a prison museum. John remembers Peter Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle/Coil)  attending parties in the warehouse there. Coil later (1998) recorded their album Astral Disaster at an underground studio in Clink Street. 

Derek Jarman, William Burroughs, Marc Almond, Psychic TV and others took part in 'The Final Academy' event in Heaven, 1983.

The event was linked to the exhibition 'Derek Jarman: from Soho to the Fifth Continent' by Jane Palm-Gold at the Farsight Gallery which is at 4 Flitcroft St next to St Giles Church. The exhibition featured photos of Derek at Dungeness by Derek Ridgers as well as Jane's paintings featuring episodes from his life, particularly in the St Giles/Soho area where Jarman lived in a flat in Phoenix House from 1979.

Jane did a great job not just in bringing together the exhibition but in bringing together some of the people who were part of Jarman's life and creative work in London. The audience at the film show including Simon Fisher Turner (who composed music for several Jarman films), Jenny Runacre (who played the Queen in Jubilee) and several people who like Scarlett-Davis himself were naked Roman extras in Sebastiene. The event was hosted by Sean McLusky from Farsight Gallery, once promoter of legendary London clubs like Club UK and the Leisure Lounge as well as sometime drummer with JoBoxers.

John Scarlett-Davis should definitely write a book. He also has some very funny stories about working in the film/TV industry including sitting in the canteen in Elstree between Jack Nicholson and Molly Sugden when he was working on both 'The Shining' and TV sitcom 'Are you being served?'.

Jane Palm-Gold's painting of the 1993 OutRage Queer Carnival in Soho 1993, which was opened by Jarman and also featured the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

London nightlife not dead shock

Dan Hancox has written a great piece on 'Debunking the weird myths about London's 24-hour party people' in which he rightly takes to task some dubious claims made in the Times and elsewhere that London nightlife is in terminal decline.  He rightly critiques some very dubious data, such as relying on Google Maps to show venues with late night licenses. 

Specifically he skewers a map included in the Times article 'UK’s worst night out? Costly, crime-ridden London' (27 September 2024) which purports to show venues open after 2 am on Saturday nights. Using his local knowledge of Peckham’s Rye Lane he shows that in addition to three venues shown on map (Tola, the Prince of Peckham, and the Bussey Building) there are many other places: 'My raver alarm immediately went off. Just from going out dancing in Peckham, I know that this is rubbish. That list is missing the Carpet Shop (open till 4am), Peckham Audio (4am), Peckham Levels (4am, albeit occasionally) and Four Quarters (3am). There are also at least five pubs I can think of around Rye Lane which open until 1am on a Saturday night, new audiophile bar Jumbi is open until 2am' etc. etc.

As Dan points out this 'London Declinism mingles with the fog of racist myths' that London is a hotbed of random violence overseen by a muslim mayor implementing sharia law!  Sometimes these kind of articles are really just snotty refusals to recognise that London actually exists beyond the centre of town - see for instance Bloomsbury resident Will Lloyd's 'Sadiq Khan’s silent city' (New Statesman, 24 March 2024) which begrudgingly admits that he 'could walk north to the Lexington (open until around 3am, but it smells), or south into London’s warm, unwashed armpit'.

There is also a well meaning but in my view wrong-headed left wing version of the argument highlighting that many venues are being squeezed out by property development and other pressures (true) and suggesting that there is no longer any grass roots/'underground' clubbing because its all been taken over by corporate giants (false).

Of course there are peaks and troughs, periods when everybody seems to be out clubbing and times when it is a bit more based around niche subcultures. But we also have to beware observer bias. We all have our peak periods for partying, the worse thing is to imagine that because you are personally not going out as much as you used to do that is not happening any more, or that its not as good or real or whatever as it used to be. People have been out dancing in London for hundreds, probably thousands of years and it is not stopping any time soon (see for instance this great account of London dancing from 1902).

Things do change but not necessarily for the worst. The demise of some of the old school high street nightclubs that hungover from the pre-rave period, some of them with long histories of racist and sexist door policies, is not necessarily a bad thing.  Dance music no longer always requires specialist DJs or sound rigs, great as it is to have them.  There is a more diffuse nightlife in which a pub can quickly become a dancefloor, or people can summon one up anywhere playing music from their phones through speakers. These nights might never show up on Resident Advisor or be documented anywhere but they are happening all around us in London and anywhere else with a pulse.  My South London local for instance - a pub that used to be pretty much empty much of the week - is full most nights, sometimes people are watching sport, sometimes listening to a folk session, and sometimes it erupts into dancing.  And of course as Dan points out there are countless actual club nights, gigs and other events of all sizes happening all the time.

Historically in London it is pub and restaurant backrooms, railway arches and other places off the mainstream nightlife map that have spawned new music scenes. Think about the emergence of the new jazz scene in the last ten years where places like Buster Mantis (a Jamaican bar/restaurant) and Matchstick Piehouse (a community arts/music space) hosted the Steam Down nights in Deptford, many of whose alumni are now internationally known.  I suspect that such places are not even on the radar of many of those decrying the death of London nightlife.

'30 years of Grace' - photos of Jeff Buckley

Last week I stumbled across an exhibition of photos of Jeff Buckley by Merri Cyr, including the shots she took for the cover of Grace, his only studio album released 30 years ago in 1994. A beautiful man with a beautiful voice, difficult though to approach his music with a clear perspective through the fog of the misplaced romanticism surrounding a tragic early death - in his case of course a doubling of the early death of his father. 

'30 years of Grace' is at Proud Galleries, 32 John Adam Street, just around the corner from London's Charing Cross Station. On until 24 September 2024, admission free.

 

Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent and youthful montage adventures

Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent at the Whitechapel Gallery is a retrospective of 50 years of radical image making. 

'attempt to express that outrage by ripping through the mask, by cutting, tearing, montaging and juxtaposing imagery we are bombarded with daily. It shows what lies behind the mask' the victims, the resistance, the human communality saying no to corporate and state power'

His work was very much the most striking visual imagery of the radical left in Britain when I was first getting involved in politics as a teenager in the 1980s, including designing posters for some of the first big demonstrations I went on for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (such as the 1980 protest and survive demo)

If much of the exhibition content was familiar to me, seeing it in a new context made me look at it afresh. For instance some works were projected onto pages of the Financial Times.

'blast open the continuum of history] - illustration for Guardian article on Walter Benjamin, 1990

Radical Photomontage

I've no doubt that it was through discussion of Kennard's work in the left press at this period that I first came across John Heartfield who of course was a big influence on him.

The juxtaposition of images and newspaper clippings was also a feature of punk/post punk sleeve design, such as The Pop Group's 'How much longer do we tolerate mass murder?' (1980)

Possibly my first print political intervention at this time (1980) was sticking up crude photocopied montages around my school (Luton Sixth Form) - 'The Propaganda of Real Life' - with me and my friend Robert F. Not sure how many people read them, but it acted like putting a spell out in the world to find like minded people. Off the back of this somebody invited us to a meeting in Sundon Park where a group of us teenagers set up Luton Peace Campaign, soon to become the Luton branch of the reborn CND. 

I am sure many other people were similarly inspired by Kennard, Heartfield and the DIY possibilities of photomontage at this time. Hopefully the Whitechapel exhibition will inspire some even now to pick up scissors and glue.

Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent at the Whitechapel Gallery, 23 July 2024- 19 January 2025 (admission free)

Thank God for Immigrants - Wham

Charity fundraising t-shirt from Jeremy Deller, featuring Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, of Greek Cypriot descent and Andrew Ridgeley,  son of Alberto Mario Zacharia (1933–2015), 'of Jewish, Italian, Yemeni and Egyptian descent... expelled from Egypt as a result of the Suez Crisis'. T-shirt available from  Jeremy Deller — fire-sale.store

 

Martin Simpson - Palaces of Gold, an old song for Grenfell

posters in Shoreditch, 2024

When I saw the great folk singer/guitarist Martin Simpson playing earlier in the summer (at the Goose is Out folk club, the Ivy House by Peckham Rye) he played a song which he said he had pledged to sing at every gig until there was justice for the Grenfell fire dead and their families. The song was  'Palaces of Gold', written by Leon Rosselson and which Simpson has been singing for many years. Rosselson originally wrote it in response to the Aberfan disaster of 1966 when a coal tip slid down to bury a school in Wales, killing 116 children and 28 adults. Although about a specific tragedy there is, as Simpson recognised, a universal aspect to the song. Namely that some lives are deemed to matter more than others, and that disasters like Aberfan and Grenfell wouldn't be allowed to happen to the families of the rich:

'If the sons of company directors,

And judges’ private daughters,

Had to got to school in a slum school,

Dumped by some joker in a damp back alley,

Had to herd into classrooms cramped with worry,

With a view onto slagheaps and stagnant pools,

Had to file through corridors grey with age,

And play in a crackpot concrete cage.

Buttons would be pressed,

Rules would be broken.

Strings would be pulled

And magic words spoken.

Invisible fingers would mould

Palaces of gold'.

 

Monday Blues

Spotted  by Dollis Brook while walking part of the Capital Ring this weekend

 

Judy Chicago at Serpentine

 Judy Chicago 'Revelations' is a retrospective of the artist's work at London's Serpentine gallery. Her feminist imagery is quite familiar to me, such as 'Rainbow Warrior (for Greenpeace)' which depicts a Goddess figure seemingly protecting the creatures of the sea. It was painted in 1980, five years before Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior ship was blown up by the French state while protesting against a nuclear test.

I hadn't though seen any of  film work before, specifically her documentation of a series of  performances she staged with others in the landscape in the early 1970s including Northwest Coast Atmospheres (1970-75) and Women and Smoke (1971-72):  'Staged across the Californian desert, the performers, whose naked bodies are painted in vibrant pigments, carry out a series of ritualistic gestures connected to early women-centered activities, such as the kindling of fire and the worship of goddess figures' (exhibition guide). There are some very powerful images of women moving around amidst flares and smoke. . 

Exhibition closes 1 September 2024, admission free.

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

 

Unite Against Racism demo in East End 1994 + a spycop report on David Bowie donating to Anti Nazi League

In 1993 the far right British National Party achieved a breakthrough in the East End of London when one of its members was elected as a councillor on the Isle of Dogs in Tower Hamlets. This was a period of racist murders, including the killing of Stephen Lawrence not far from the BNP HQ in Welling, SE London. The BNP still had a street presence in East London too, selling papers on Brick Lane.

It was also a period of mass opposition to the far right, one of the largest manifestations of this being the 'Unite Against Racism' demonstration called by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) on 19 March 1994. Around 50,000 people took part in the march through the East End, from Spitalfields to London Fields. This was part of a wider mobilisation that among other things led to the BNP losing their council seat in new elections in 1994.

Photos from an amazing set from the day taken by Pete Marshall, very evocative of the whole period

As has been confirmed in the Undercover Policing Inquiry, anti-racist groups were infiltrated by undercover 'spycops' who dutifully reported on everything that moved.  In July 2024, the Inquiry published a series of reports seemingly written by Trevor Morris who had infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party and Anti-Nazi League using the name Bobby Lewis (HN78). This includes an assessment of the SWP/ANL's planning for the TUC march, in the context of which it is mentioned that David Bowie had recently made a donation of $1000 to the ANL. Thus we have the unusual billing at the end of the report where the list of  'Special Branch References' - usually referring to people/organisations of interest to Special Branch - is headed by David Bowie and followed by Anti Fascist Action, the Anti Nazi League, Newham Monitoring Project and several Turkish revolutionary organisations reported to be joining the TUC march.

During the 1970s of course Bowie's brief apparent flirtation with fascist imagery had been  one of the instances that prompted the formation of Rock Against Racism, but his subsequent actions show that he decisively moved on from that time. Doubt if he had a Special Branch file (I believe that the letters n/t next to his name stand for 'no trace' in their records), but who knows?

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