Month: July 2022

In London – a city of some nine million people – I’ve always thought that it is strange that you can sometimes find yourself entirely alone in public. I felt this surprise recently while sitting in the central square of Hampstead Garden Suburb in the shadow of St Jude’s Church.

The vast prim and proper lawn of the square was deserted, and as I sat eating a picnic, stuffing my face, I wondered where everyone was. Given it was the hottest day of the year with the temperature edging 40 degrees and the sun not even over the yardarm – I concluded that I was probably the only person stupid enough to be out and about.

It was architectural writer Ian Nairn’s ‘Nairn’s London’ that had brought me on a sunny Monday morning to Hampstead Garden Suburb – which was built from scratch as a model community in the 1920s. Following his guidebook, which offers insightful, often catty, descriptions of some of the city’s best and least know landmarks, provides a wonderful way to explore London.*

Nairn was not that impressed with central square in Hampstead Garden Suburb. He said it suffered from a “central blankness of imagination” and lashed out at the design’s inhumanity because the square doesn’t have a pub and is instead filled with churches and institutes. It is a valid argument – especially on a hot day.

In my mind – in my heat-induced delirious fever dreams dreamed on that roasting central lawn – I was walking with ghosts through Hampstead Garden Suburb that Monday morning. Ghosts of all the famous people who used to live in that once fashionable area of the city. Maybe if I’d stayed around longer I would have spotted Tony Hancock on a park bench reading a script for the next episode of Hancock’s Half Hour of Robert Donat on his way to the studio. Maybe I would have rowed past Eric Coats, rowing across an imaginary boating lake, as By the Sleepy Lagoon played in my mind.

Sadly, these were just the daydreams of someone with an antique sensibility.

As I made my way back down Hoop Lane, I walked past Golders Green Crematorium, a bizarre looking nondenominational building that is based on the Italian architecture of Lombardy. I’m not sure what Nairn made of it – not much I assume – given it doesn’t appear in his guidebook. But I am easily swayed to investigate a graveyard of quality – so I had a quick look around.

I found myself in a little courtyard – as the soft chanting from a Hindu funeral drifted through the hot summer air – the walls of which were lined with monuments honouring the great and the good of British entertainment.

All generations were represented. The newest plaque was for Barbara Windsor and there is a corner dedicated to musical hell raisers, with one for Keith Moon and another for Marc Bolan. There is a jazz section too, I spotted a plaque for Tubby Hayes and another for Ronnie Scott. But the one that caught my eye read ‘This tablet is dedicated by the Grand Order of Water Rats to the Revered Memory of King Rat – Teddy Brown’.

The words immediately piqued my overheated imagination. What was the Grand Order of Water Rats? In my mind, I sketched an image of a fraternity of sophisticated drunkards that rampaged through Soho’s pubs and caffes in the pre-war years and that Teddy Brown was a kind of Oliver Reed or Jeffrey Bernard of his day, tottering his way into a drink-sodden oblivion.

Some swift googling quickly revealed that I was wrong. The Grand Order of Water Rats are a group of entertainers, founded by music hall comedians, that do good works for charity. Every year they elect a ‘King Rat’ from their community and in 1946 the King Rat was an overweight xylophonist called Teddy Brown.

Brown, it turns out, was very famous in the 1930s, largely for his xylophone skills, but also for his girth, which appears in old black and white Pathe films to have been considerable. He was so fat, apparently, that he had to have an especially wide door fitted to his Rolls Royce, and in one Pathe skit he appears to get lodged in an elevator door.

Often nicknamed ‘The biggest musician in the world,’ – films of Brown, who was American and spoke like a Chicago gangster, tend to start with the camera panning upwards from his feet past his huge trousers – which could have doubled as an enormous wind sock at an airfield for zeppelins – before he starts tapping away at a jaunty tune on the xylophone backed by tuxedoed men playing double bases and saxophones.

It struck me, as I stood there learning about Teddy Brown and his giant trousers, that there were whole generations of wonderful entertainers like him that had cut a dash across the music hall stages of London, who now, like the stages themselves, were lost to history.

Teddy Brown died half way through his term as King Rat. He had a heart attack in a hotel in Birmingham. This prompted, one assumes, the Grand Order to gather a conclave to elect a successor. The Order plumped for Bud Flanagan, another renowned music hall entertainer of his day.

Flanagan was exceptionally famous in London, and the wider UK, in the first half of the twentieth century as a member of the Crazy Gang – a kind of home grown Marx Brothers. This group of vaudeville comedians appeared in music hall revues and made films, including 1941’s Gasbags, in which the Crazy Gang float into Nazi Germany in a mobile fish and chip shop attached to a giant barrage balloon. Out of the frying pan and into the Fuhrer.

That kind of dreamy scenario was also adopted by Flanagan in his work with Chesney Allen. As Flanigan and Allen – a kind of pre-war Morecambe and Wise – they made Dreaming in 1944, a film about a soldier who dreams a series of odd dreams while out cold on an operating table. They also recorded hugely popular songs such as Underneath the Arches about two down and outs sleeping underneath railway arches who ‘dream their dreams away’ and another song called Strollin’ about a man who knows his “luck is rolling when I’m strolling with the one I love.”

Strangely, or not, given apparent coincidences are often pre-engineered by people with poetic souls, a plaque at Golders Green memorialising Bud Flanagan sits almost directly opposite the memorial for King Rat Teddy Brown. The king and his successor brought together again in one place.

One has to imagine that the vast majority of London’s vaudevillians – a generation or two of wonderful entertainers worth remembering – ended up at Golders Green. That’s a whole lot of lost jokes and songs that are now a whole lot of lost ashes. But never mind, there are still little scraps of evidence of their existence that it’s possible to stumble across on a wander through North London on a summer’s afternoon. Just keep your eyes open and you’ll spot them too.

As an added bonus click here for a playlist featuring some of the songs that inspired this article.

* I would highly recommend Ian Nairn’s ‘Nairn Across Britain’ series in which he travels across the country looking at buildings that were, at the time, under threat. Many of the structures are now sadly lost, but the series is still worth watching all the same – particularly the episode in which Nairn drives from London to Manchester. In fact, I first discovered him in a YouTube video that someone had made of Nairn driving into Manchester as The Duritti Column’s Otis plays in the background.

I must confess from the outset that for me there has only ever been one winner of the Beatles versus Rolling Stones contest – The Beatles – but every long-held opinion deserves an appraisal from time to time.

Let’s be counterintuitive for a second and start not with the music but with geography.

Naturally, as a Northerner, my love of the Beatles has surely been part fostered by the fact that the group launched their journey to world domination from the Cavern Club in Liverpool, which sits 46 miles away from where I was born in Oldham, Lancashire.

However, it recently occurred to me that by an unlikely quirk of fortune (or misfortune depending on how you look at it) I have come to know, over the past decade, the home of the Rolling Stones – World’s End in London’s Chelsea – much better than I have ever known Liverpool.

The first iteration of the Rolling Stones’ line-up lived at 102 Edith Grove in the early sixties, in a flat Mick Jagger and Keith Richards later described as ‘squalid’ and around the corner from a ‘cheap Italian joint’ – which I think just might still be in existence in the form of Mona Lisa on the King’s Road. The caffe still serves up bowls of remarkably cheap (for Chelsea) amatriciana festooned with long ribbons of English bacon, which should be enough to drive any self-respecting Italian mad.

It might be the only survivor from the days when World’s End was the beating heart of Swinging London. In the early 1960s, as the Lot’s Road power station belched out black soot that poured over the derelict bomb sites that would one day become Westfield Park, Vivienne Westwood arrived from Tintwistle in Derbyshire to set up a shop in World’s End, while local resident Christine Keeler set out on a liaison that would make political history.

I would like to say that it is still possible to feel a ribbon of throbbing cultural energy flying through the World’s End – but sadly it appears to have long since moved on – in fact, anyone innocent to the area’s history today would surely pass through it without giving it a second look.

I felt somewhat the same when I lived in Marylebone in a top floor flat at 14 Devonshire Place. On sunny days when my room would swelter, I would climb out through the bathroom window and sit by the chimney pots. I could see all of central London from there, including at the bottom of my street, the roof of number 57, the house where Paul McCartney lived with Jane Asher in the early 1960s.

McCartney wrote Yesterday in that house. The melody came to him in a dream. Virginia Woolf walked down Devonshire Place and Wimpole Street too. Florence Nightingale set off to the Crimea and into legend from a house on the street behind and Stephen Ward lived in Wimpole Mews during the Profumo affair. And yet, if you walk down the street today, all you will sense is a whiff of anesthetics seeping out of all the expensive dental clinics that now call the street home.

One thing that does strike me as interesting about 102 Edith Grove in Chelsea though, is that there is no exterior evidence that the building played any role whatsoever in the early years of one of the most famous bands in history.

Which is strange given that if you go to practically any location associated with the Beatles, be it Strawberry Fields or Penny Lane in Liverpool, or Abbey Road or 57 Wimpole Street in London, you will find a landmark covered in international graffiti messages and crawling with people taking photographs. Outside 102 Edith Grove there is nothing.

I suppose that is because the Beatles are a spiritual band  and people need something real to hang on to in the fab four’s absence – whereas the Stones are very much still a physical group. In fact, the band played a four hour concert in Lyon in searing temperatures at the start of this week on the latest leg of a convoluted European Tour. The Beatles, on the other hand, exist only in our imaginations, frozen in time forever on a London rooftop on a frigid January lunchtime in 1969 – the last time the group played in public.

If you are going to attempt to form any argument that the Stones outshine the Beatles then the case has to rest on the Rolling Stones’ longevity.

By 1968, the year the flower power dreams of the early 1960s were disintegrating, the Beatles released the brilliant White Album, which is a culmination of all the extraordinary influences that Paul, John, and George soaked up over the previous decade. They would release one more album while still together, Abbey Road in 1969.

The Stones, in 1968, released Beggars Banquet the first of a four album run that would culminate in 1972’s sublime Exile on Main St. It is a musical journey that charts not only the tumult of 1968, but 1969’s Altamont Festival in California –  the blood splattered concert headlined by the Stones that was policed by rampaging Hell’s Angles and which, unsurprisingly, became a vortex of violence that ended with four people dead.

It is the Stones – not the Beatles – that charted the collapse of the 1960s into blood spilling and recriminations, as well as the hedonistic selfishness of the early 1970s. While the Stones were at the very centre of that whirlwind the Beatles were in full retreat mode with Paul McCartney recording his lo-fi solo debut before disappearing to the seclusion of his Scottish farm.

The Stones – as a fully functional touring group –  would go on to age in public, to experience tragedy, to pick up drug and drink addictions by the bucket load, to enter middle age and old age as one collective that has told, over the years, the story of a lifetime, an extraordinary multi-decade story, a multi-century story, while the Beatles are frozen in time.

But. There was always going to be a but.

There is the music to consider. When it comes to the music, for me, the Beatles will always tower over the Rolling Stones.

The Rolling Stones were and remain a brilliant rock and roll band, with a love of the American blues combined with a dash of jazz, which was provided by the wonderfully self-effacing Charlie Watts in his Huntsman suits. By the way, I must say that although I would champion John, Paul and George any day over Mick and Keith, when it comes to Charlie versus Ringo, for me, Charlie wins it hands down.

The sound of the Rolling Stones is a potent, delicious mixture, but the recipe has largely gone unchanged since the early 1960s. It can, if you listen to album after album, start to sound a little painted by numbers, a little similar.

The Beatles, on the other hand, have something the Stones never had, a genius for melody provided largely by Paul McCartney. They were also willing to experiment. You won’t find a musical dream so all encompassing, so downright strange and wacky, so hypnotically brilliant as A Day in the Life on a Stones record. You won’t find anything close.

The legend of the Rolling Stones will live forever, but it will be the Beatles’ songs that people will still be singing a thousand years from now.