Some of its films were highly memorable – though not always for the right reasons – Dark And Lonely Water offered priceless comedy value, even at the time.
“Sensible children… I have no power over them” mutters The Spirit Of Dark And Lonely Water from beneath his dark and lonely hood.
“Oi luk, vair’s samwam en va wor-ahh!” comments Hordriss The Confuser on YouTube. ” I remember when nearly every child in documentaries or public service announcements had an estuary accent which could strip paint from steel.”
But some of the COI’s intentionally funny films were genuinely hilarious, and put their point across all the more effectively. 1945’s “Coughs & Sneezes” was an alltime favourite…
It’s easy to have so much fun in late middle age – snapping little pix with your phone and adding them to the billions already online – that you forget what truly great photography is. Idly wilfing on Google this morning I was suddenly suddenly confronted with the real thing. This photo of Oxford Circus in the snow comes from quiz.cc – the BMX photoblog of Chris Hill-Scott. Click the picture to see it full-size there.
A further search on his site for the tag ‘London’ brought up a wealth of wonderful images and stories – all shared with the world for free. You’ve got to love that side of the internet – though it’s crushing the old newspaper, publishing, music and broadcast industries as we’ve known them. When a photojournalist cheerfully publishes work of this quality unpaid, how will he (or any other future Arbus or Cartier-Bresson) earn a living in decades to come?
Incidentally HCB was notoriously camera-shy himself. My favourite story about him was confirmed in an obituary letter to The Guardian 8 years ago:
In the late 1970s, Henri Cartier-Bresson took to the streets of New York, wearing his usual inconspicuous trilby and obscuring his Leica with a big pocket handkerchief, pretending to be blowing his nose while taking photographs of passers-by on the sidewalk. A New Yorker festooned with his own Japanese zoom-lens cameras interrupted him, saying: “Who do ya think y’are … the poor man’s Cartier-Bresson ?”
The great Warren Zevon at his macabre best. Other bleak classics from the same 1978 album include Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner and the title track Excitable Boy. Co-produced by Jackson Browne of all people, it also featured James Taylor sidekicks Leland Sklar, Danny Kortchmar and Russ Kunkel. Though as it happens Mick Fleetwood was the guest drummer on this track, which could (at the time of writing this) be heard below courtesy of the late lamented Grooveshark.
The marvellous Grooveshark used to let you embed pretty much anything from Bach to The Beatles pretty much anywhere you want, for free. Predictably the RIAA and BPI stomped all over them with lawyers and injunctions, and the service is now defunct. Comparitech have compiled a list of all the available, legal successors here: https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/grooveshark-limewire-alternatives
Enjoy them while they last… Meanwhile at least Warren Zevon’s Werewolves can be heard and seen on YouTube:
The Land Of Lost Content 1955-1964 from A History Of Modern Britain. Fascinating documentary by Andrew Marr – sorry for crap sub-VHS picture quality.
Nasser, Suez, Profumo and Polaris were big names splashed across the News Chronicle and bandied about by adults when we were growing up. It’s so interesting to watch Andrew Marr’s dispassionate account, all these decades late, of what was really going on behind the political headlines of the time.
The BBC certainly didn’t tell it like this back in the day…
Car broke down on my way across London last Monday. Had to pull into the nearest garage to get a new fanbelt and alternator fitted, which left me with a couple of hours to kill in Haringey, a part of town I first visited as a young man in 1973.
One Wetherspoons pub and one tiny run-down internet cafe later, I wandered back down Turnpike Lane to the garage to pick up the car. Got out the phone and snapped some garish offerings in a couple of shop windows along the way…
My first encounter with amphetamines was in 1973 when my friend H slipped me a small tablet which I stowed in my wallet for later investigation then promptly forgot. Two weeks later an ill-advised night on the town left me feeling like death at work next morning. Having crawled into the office at 9:29am I put in what felt like five hours’ gruelling work before realising it was still only 9:35. Another eight hours later the 10am tea trolley arrived – and then I remembered the little pill in my wallet. Washed it down with my morning cuppa and two minutes later it was lunchtime. Result!
The next was in the late 70s when a kindly private doctor prescribed me a particularly pure form of medicinal amphetamine designed, he told me, to help airpline pilots stay awake on longhaul flights. It was brilliant stuff – no gabbled speech, racing pulse or grinding teeth – in fact no noticeable side effects at all. You just stayed alert and awake for eight hours. Result!
With my thirties came a cocaine habit. Coke was pretty much the reverse of the Pilot Pills. All side effect and no noticeable benefit. Since so many people around me were doing it socially, we all kind of took it for granted that we were having fun. It was a buzz of course but bascially a waste of the little spare cash I had. After stopping in 1986, I’ve never felt the urge to take it again. A result of sorts…
But over the last three decades any pharmaceutical drug with even a hint of recreational possibilities has become minutely regulated. No doctor, however amenable, will risk getting struck off for the sake of helping a patient stay illicitly awake when tired. Now I have a freedom pass, keeping awake and focussed at work – or even when out in company – requires copious cups of high octane espresso plus more cans of Red Bull than can be good for anyone… And that’s no result at all.
Nina Simone’s version of Please Don’t Let Me Be Mistunderstood is being used by the BBC in a trailer for their cop drama Luther. It’s a powerful reminder of her importance as an artist. Have put together a few other favourite tracks to remember her importance as an advocate for Afro American rights.
In her songs you can hear Simone’s massive talent suffused with simmering rage. “You don’t have to live next to me – just give me my equality” (Mississippi Goddamn) “Hard times in the city… in a hard town by the sea” (Baltimore) “You better stop the things you do… I ain’t lyin” (I Put A Spell On You) “Shall we kill them now – or later?” (Pirate Jenny).
Having been born in 1933 and grown up in North Carolina she had plenty to be angry about. See her biography on Wikipedia. Meanwhile here’s that TV trailer…
The Night Before by The Beatles has been inexplicably running round my head for a few weeks. It’s not remotely their greatest song but in their mid period even the throwaway album tracks were often tiny gems that could hit an emotional nerve. Cooped up in a small closed community in my late teens, the few other overtly gay boys – with one spectacular exception – didn’t much like me. I did manage to get laid but my partners tended to be bi curious at best and, at worst, simply oversexed and desperate. Thus their behaviour The Night Before was quite often quite different from The Morning After. One cynic there used to satirically sing “when I held you near… you were turning queer” to the tune of this song.
Read a sobering piece today by Jake Wallis Simons on the slow recovery of iconic gay socialite Philip Sallon after a savage, unprovoked attack in Piccadilly Circus that could easily have cost him his life…
As Jake says, a general rise in intolerance means that any man perceived to be gay – and unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – may be at serious risk on the streets of central London. Back in the 70s queerbashing was a routine hazard of metropolitan gay life.
But as Jake says in his piece: “Although homophobic crime overall dropped by 3% in London last year, in the West End it increased by 20.9%. This is symbolised, perhaps, by the fatal homophobic attack on Ian Baynham in 2009.”
At least – compared to the 70s – the Met seems to be taking anti-gay hate crime a lot more seriously. They also seem to be committing a lot less of it themselves.
Late for work when a random taxi happened by & saved the day. I remember Ian Dury singing “waiting for my taxi… taxi never come” Luckily for me on this particular day, it did.
Used to listen to Still Crazy in the mid seventies late at night in my room on repeat – Paul Simon at his most sublime and melancholy. Thinking about it after actually meeting my old lover on the street last night. Sure enough we talked about some old times and we drank ourselves some beers too. Still crazy ? Probably. But alive – a lot of our other friends from GLF London of 1974 didn’t make it.
To tell you the truth he was there with me when I came a cropper on the street yesterday. Only then did he admit he’d just taken a tumble himself an hour earlier – measured his length down a flight of hotel stairs in Kings Cross. Thankfully he escaped pretty much unscathed. After a fifteen minute lie-down to get over the shock he’d been fine.
Listening to Still Crazy After All These Years three and a half decades later the daft thing is how young we actually all still were. Along with Neil Young, James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell etc Rhymin’ Simon provided a soundtrack for our generation to mourn the passing of our youth even while we still had it. “Time, time, time see what’s become of me” he wrote on Hazy Shade Of Winter at the age of – what – 26 or 27.
What we should have said to ourselves at that age was: this is the youngest you’re ever going to be for the rest of your life – better make the most of it. Bit then of course exactly the same thing applies now.
Car broke down on my way across London last Monday. Had to pull into the nearest garage to get a new fanbelt and alternator fitted, which left me with a couple of hours to kill in Haringey, a part of town I first visited as a young man in 1973.
One Wetherspoons pub and one tiny run-down internet cafe later, I wandered back down Turnpike Lane to the garage to pick up the car. Got out the phone and snapped some garish offerings in a couple of shop windows along the way… 
