Saturday 4th July 2015.
Noon: tea at High Tea of Highgate with Ella H. The place has changed a little since it changed hands. Gone is the vintage 1940s and 50s music, and the VE-day bunting. Gone is the painted clock on the wall. It’s now a bit more generic, but then again it might still be finding its feet. This must always be a problem when taking over a café. The dilemma is between pleasing the old regulars (like myself), while bringing in the new owner’s taste.
Afternoon: Hot and sunny, so I fancy hiding in a cinema. To the East Finchley Phoenix for Magician, a new documentary on Orson Welles (£5). Much is made of the way Citizen Kane became his life’s early peak, never again to be matched, and looks at how much of this was down to his reputation, as someone difficult to work with. The ever-fattening Welles is seen on umpteen chat shows down the years, forever recounting tales of people asking him if he’d ever done anything else after Kane. The film also makes a case for raising the reputations of Chimes Of Midnight, The Trial, and A Touch of Evil, all of which I’ve yet to see.
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Sunday 5th July 2015.
To the Roundhouse in Camden for a gig by the Jesus and Mary Chain. Specifically, it’s a live performance of their debut album, Psychocandy, from 1985. I’m invited by my neighbour Phil King, who is the JAMC bass player, and I take the artist K Tregaskin, who says she knows all the drum parts to the album by heart. Before I go out, I listen to Psychocandy in preparation, and find myself still shocked by the sheer extremity of white noise enveloping all the songs. And to have this raggedness appear on a major label too (the same label as my band Orlando,– Blanco Y Negro, part of Warners). Psychocandy still sounds like a train accident, one where the collapsing metal has somehow managed to turn its own terrifying noise into an approximation of sweet, twangy guitar rock songs.
The band play a half-hour set of other material first (including ‘April Skies’, a stunning ‘Some Candy Talking, ‘Reverence’, and the riot-teasing ‘Upside Down’). Then after a short break they unleashing all fourteen songs from Psychocandy, with no encores. The youthful surliness is still intact. Jim Reid’s preying-mantis body language is still there; he’s still the reluctant frontman, still apparently annoyed to exist. ‘I wanna die on a sunny day’ he sings. Well, not yet.
What’s astounding is how perfectly they replicate the Psychocandy feedback noise. It’s a very specific, mid-80s type of feedback, which the guitarist William Reid seems to have carefully set up for the relevant songs. At several moments I feel the urge to reach out my hands as if to touch this thick wall of sound that fills the Roundhouse, this former Victorian railway shed. And it is a proper wall of sound, with all the connotations of Phil Spector. The opening drum pattern of Be My Baby, is used three times on Psychocandy, not least in ‘Just Like Honey’, the song that many people know from the end of Lost In Translation, as Bill Murray drives off. Here, Miki from the 90s band Lush supplies the female vocal. More shifts in time.
Aferwards, K and I install ourselves in one of the red booths in the Roundhouse bar, and we chat about the ‘land grab’ side of music fandom. How these ‘vintage album in its entirety’ gigs demonstrate the way rock music has created a territory to belong to, and how these gigs can show such territory being passed down from generation to generation. It’s nostalgia for elders, of course, but it’s also raw primary joy for the younger fans, who are fresh to the songs. They’re the ones down the front at these shows, doing much of the jumping around.
I bump into Ms Shanthi in the bar. ‘One of Birdland is here. He’s not got blond hair anymore.’
Then we wander Camden around midnight, drunk on theories of indie rock history (as well as just drunk). I end up putting my hands on the wall of The Falcon, the pub venue where so many indie bands once played, now turned into a couple of residential flats. History, memory, territory, ghosts colliding. Giddy on palimpsests.
It’s too easy to assume one’s own generation is the default. Beautiful art for the lonely does not belong to one era. We must remember this, and pass it on.
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Monday 6th July 2015.
I am embarrassed to read how men drinking rosé wine – as I do – is now considered fashionable. A term is coined by a magazine: ‘brosé’.
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Wednesday 8th July 2015.
To Birkbeck for the first seminar in a free ‘summer camp’ module, ‘Step Up: Arts’, aimed at would-be MA arts students. We have to watch a documentary on Vivian Maier in preparation. I’d already seen Finding Vivian Maier, the cinema film, but this one is a BBC Imagine take on Maier. It covers much the same story, except that it turns out Ms Maier’s photographs were discovered by a trio of different collectors, and not just the youngish man who presents himself as the hero of Finding Vivian Maier. Deliciously, Alan Yentob says at one point that the missing collector declined to be interviewed, ‘because he’s making his own film’. It’s a reminder that there’s no such thing as the truth, only a truth.
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A tube strike starts up in the evening. My Northern Line dodge is to take a network rail train from St Pancras to Kentish Town, then a 214 bus to Highgate Village, where it terminates. As this bus only has a few stops left to go, it is less likely to be full up. While I wait, various 134 buses pass by, all rammed with people, all not stopping.
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Thursday 9th July 2015.
 The tube strike continues. Thankfully I have nothing to do in town that I can’t postpone, so I spend the day in Highgate. In the evening I walk to East Finchley (20 minutes) to see Amy at the Phoenix cinema (£5). I hadn’t realised the aptness of this: Amy Winehouse lived in East Finchley in her teens, before she moved to Camden Square. The Phoenix used to be her local cinema. Indeed, Amy includes a beautiful aerial shot of East Finchley rooftops.
The film is terribly sad, needless to say. I come away thinking Ms Winehouse should have taken the Kate Bush path: escaping the trappings of fame by becoming a recluse, somewhere far from the reach of photographers. But then again, she loved London so much. Tony Bennett appears – she records a stunning duet with him, and he endorses her as not just a talented singer, but a classic jazz singer in the traditional style. Commenting on her death, he says ‘If I’d known, I’d have told her: slow down. Life teaches you how to live it, if you live it long enough.’
Like the Orson Welles and Vivian Maier films I’ve seen this week, Amy feels that it won’t be the last word. All three lives are essentially the same story: a person with a burning talent, but a talent that is compromised. And in each case, the reasons behind the frustration are not fully explainable. Questions still remain. There is always more to say, and so more documentaries to make.
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Friday 10th July 2015.
Another hot day. I try to attend Joanna Walsh’s event at the BookArtBookshop in Old Street, but I can’t physically get inside the bookshop, such is the crowd inside. I understand the event is to launch a story about failing to find a certain book. Perhaps I should write a story about failing to get into a Joanna Walsh event.
Old Street on a Friday evening is more packed than ever, though the crowds don’t seem as overtly trendy-looking as they used to be. Just Londoners full stop. I look for a cash machine. On the corner of Pitfield Street I pass a new Sainsbury’s with an ATM, but it has a queue of some fifteen people. I walk two blocks further, to City Road, and find a trio of ATMs there, all free to use.
Quite why people still queue at cash machines in London is beyond me. There must be some sort of phone app by now, to locate the nearest machines, and yet few seem to use it. Is it the herd instinct? Or the madness of crowds?
I did once go up to a long ATM queue and tell the people at the back where to find another one nearby. They just looked at me strangely. Admittedly, I get that a lot.
I remark about this on Twitter, and am told that people are subconsciously attracted to standing behind someone using an ATM. To them, a machine without a queue signifies there’s something wrong with it. And I thought I was pessimistic.
Tags: amy, amy winehouse, ATM machines, birkbeck, east finchley phoenix, jesus and mary chain, joanna walsh, magician, orson welles, vivian maier
