Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (20 page)

We have new kings of the road now and unfortunately, even with my tin lid on and my throttle pulled right back, it isn’t me and my scooter. Even with your motor running for a spot of cruising down the highway, the lyrics don’t really fit London’s windy streets, do they? No. Despite the resurgence of the bicycle and Chris Hoy and his endless thighs, the king of the road is still the car, though its oomph remains measured in horse power.

Back in the very early days of cars on the streets of London some people thought motorists were nothing short of barbarians. Decent people with manners had horses. At least, that is, if you can call the Marquess of Queensberry a decent man. I am not talking about the bloke who invented the rules of boxing or persecuted Oscar Wilde (obviously everyone knows that was the ninth Marquess), no I’m on about number ten, the one who found time to wage a bitter campaign against the motorists of London, following a close encounter in 1905 with a motor car on Hammersmith Road in west London, in which he suffered a graze to his arm. According to the
London Chronicle
’s report of the case, the offending vehicle was ‘going at a rate of 25 miles an hour’. I don’t think I’ve
ever
gone down Hammersmith Road so quickly. Queensberry, wanting to clarify the pedestrian’s rights in the brave new world of the motor car, asked the local magistrate to confirm if ‘I am at liberty to carry a rifle or revolver to protect myself and my family against sudden death on the road?’ Could he not, he asked, have permission to shoot at any motorist, or ‘motor fiend’, who endangered him in future? I have some sympathy with him on this point, while not, of course, advocating the use of firearms. However, the magistrate did not give him the assurance that he sought and the motorists of London slept a little easier in their beds.

At first the private car was not thought to be a serious mode of transport, and the attitude of the Marquess reflected that of many other Londoners, although perhaps there were few who were prepared to pursue their vendetta quite so ruthlessly as he did. The car was considered a menace and a nuisance and the expense of the vehicle itself made it prohibitive for anyone other than the super rich or early petrol-heads. But within 30 years of the Marquess’s complaint, motorised vehicles were becoming more of a feature. In 1900 there were only 8,000 cars in Britain. In 1927 Ford opened its car plant at Dagenham in Essex to provide cars for the London market and London’s streets began to empty of horses. By 1930 over a quarter of a million cars were registered to homes in London alone.

By my calculations, I reckon the best time to drive around central London would have been the 1930s, by which time the Marquess and his gun were safely out of the way but the streets were still pretty clear and open. Sadly this means I’ve missed the golden age of motoring by a full 80 years.

If I had been motoring back then, I might have refuelled at the Village Garage in Bloomsbury - a legacy from the halcyon days of motoring in London, which only recently pumped its last gallon of petrol. Tucked away off Tottenham Court Road, this beautiful art deco garage was built to supply petrol for vehicles run by the Bloomsbury Estate, the property wing of the Duke of Bedford’s family, which over the previous 300 years had acquired and developed most of the property in this part of London. Wouldn’t it be nice to have your own garage?

Fortunately, I dropped in on the garage a few months before it finally called time, and was shown round by the proprietor, Tim Curtis. Unlike the petrol stations of today, there was no corporate branding and the garage buildings were painted a beautiful white with pale-blue trim - the sort of scheme you’d expect to find on the bridge of an old liner in an Agatha Christie novel. But there was no mystery about what made this place popular with the locals. If filling up with fuel could ever be an aesthetic experience, this was the place where it might happen. An attendant, often Tim himself, would come to your car and fill up for you, leaving you free to enjoy the scenery. When I arrived, he was attending to a sleek black Bentley, but all Tim’s clients, from Bentley to Beetle drivers, were able, just for a minute or two, to experience the same attention and luxury.

Though Tim was diversifying by offering a valet parking service right in the heart of London, there was one factor, which he could do nothing to change, that limited his operation. The garage was on such a small parcel of land, hemmed in by roads and buildings on and around Store Street, that there was no room for expansion. Even though some of the railings had been removed to widen access, I saw Tim’s problem with my own eyes when a petrol tanker arrived to make its delivery. The tanker was just too big to get on to the forecourt. Half of it managed to squeeze on and discharge its load of fuel, while the rear end stuck out into the road.

I was glad that no one tossed me the keys and asked me to reverse it. For a brief moment I had visions of parallel parking the thing on Russell Square - another Karmann Ghia moment. It was a graphic reminder that central London’s streets were built for traffic of a quite different scale. Forget the talk of Mayor Johnson potentially reintroducing the Routemaster, perhaps I should start a campaign with Boris to bring back the horse.

I
’m off at a canter into the heart of central London, specifically to Denmark Street. It’s an unassuming thoroughfare located off Charing Cross Road which many a songwriter, me included, consider to be the spiritual home of British popular music. The street’s musical heritage dates from the golden age of music hall back in the mid-1800s and continues right on through to rock’n’roll and honest-to-goodness pop. What it doesn’t host is a roots folk club, or the earliest recorded set of Morrismen bells. No, I’m talking here about can’t-get-you-out-of-my-head popular music, thanks in no small part to the pioneering independent studios that sprang up along this stretch in the 1960s. The list of stars who’ve beaten a path to this small yet perfectly formed ‘street of song’ is longer than a prog rock guitar solo.

Walking along Denmark Street today, I wonder whether the street can sustain its association with music up to and beyond the twelfth of never or whether it will soon be a case of ‘thanks for the memories’. West End rents have gone up the ladder to the roof in recent times and multiple chains would doubtless love to stake a claim on this prime patch of real estate. Also, the development and cheapness of a home-recording set-up has led to the demise of all bar one of the street’s studios. Today, Denmark Street just about retains its musical cred because of the specialist musical instrument shops it hosts, which draw a huge variety of customers from all over the world, from absolute beginners to veritable virtuosos. It would be a big loss to London if the street’s association with the sound of music was lost forever, and it only takes a quick trawl through the tracks of its years to discover why. Okay, don’t worry, that’s enough musical puns for a while.

Music hall and, later on, variety were all the rage between 1850 and 1930. This is the era when popular music started to become divorced from its folk roots, a welcome by-product of the industrial revolution. Forget the Spinning Jenny, Stephenson’s Rocket and the Manchester mills, the real legacy of the industrial revolution was that as a result of the rural population moving to live and work in towns, working people had different life experiences and different things to sing about. After a hard day’s slog, those with a few pennies in their pockets needed a bit of light relief. Catchy, humorous new songs about the here and now became all the rage in the halls.

Professional songwriters were eventually engaged to pen hits for particular singers who needed material, the most popular of which became pub songs associated with the typical, and much derided, good old Cockney knees-up. And Denmark Street, right in the middle of theatre land, is where many of those stars’ songs were born - by which I mean, written.

Denmark Street’s musical origins were forged when music publishers began setting up shop on the street in the late nineteenth century. The publishers sold sheet music to musicians who played in the orchestras of the many theatres and music halls nearby. It became a magnet for tunesmiths with an original song in their heads and a hole in their pockets. They made a beeline for Denmark Street in the hope of flogging their songs to music publishers, who competed for the best songs to offer to music-hall performers, all of whom were constantly on the lookout for a good tune. The acts popularised the songs and the more popular the song, the more money the publishers would make.

Not everyone could afford or wanted to go out night after night to the music halls. But you could bring the songs of the halls back home if you had a piano because you could buy the sheet music for a few pennies. With the arrival of the more affordable mass-produced upright piano around 1880, sales of sheet music from Denmark Street increased greatly. London was soon the centre of the old Joanna manufacturing industry. Apparently, by 1911 there were 136 piano-makers in England and 133 of them were based in London, most of them in or around Islington. It’s probably roughly similar to the number of bars there now. Admittedly, the quality of some of these models might’ve had more in common with Russ Conway than Henry Steinway, but that didn’t matter to households who got the benefit of hearing the hits of the halls in the comfort of their own homes.

So if a song in the music hall was a hit, then the sheet music had a mass market. However, the chances of these wannabe Lloyd Webbers earning riches from their rags were not good. In the days when the only king known to Londoners lived at Buck House and not Graceland, songwriters were royally ripped off. Had I been around at the time and been given the thumbs-up by a publisher having given him a couple of verses of ‘Baggy Breeches’, I would’ve probably been offered no more than a few quid and a decent lunch in exchange for my masterwork. At best, the publisher might’ve agreed to give me a share of the writing credit along with A. N. Other. Sharp practice was rife in music publishing during the early days, not just in this country but in the States too, and dealings on the less than sunny side of the street over the pond explain how Denmark Street came by its Tin Pan Alley nickname.

Tin Pan Alley was originally a name given to a group of buildings near Broadway on Manhattan’s West 28th Street where scores of music publishers had set up shop. When songwriters came to play publishers their new compositions on the in-house pianos, dodgy hacks would transcribe them as they floated around the street on the New York breeze and then tout them round other publishing houses, passing them off as their own. To prevent the latest lullaby of Broadway from being pilfered, the publishers began to employ people to bash tin pans in the alleys outside while their ivories were being tinkled. I suppose this quirky practice hardened budding songwriters to the harsh realities of the trade if their songs were subsequently panned by the critics. Boom boom. Or should that be bang bang? Or boom bang-a-bang even?

So, in the days before Teflon, the name Tin Pan Alley stuck and was eventually applied to its counterpart in London, Denmark Street, owing to the large concentration of music publishers it hosted.

Things began to look up for songwriters in this country with the passing of the 1911 Copyright Act, which gave them lifetime ownership of their songs plus 50 years in the hereafter. And by the 1920s, many publishers employed in-house composers and arrangers, as revenue from songs was expanded through the arrival of the gramophone, wireless and films. The days of the ‘recording artist’ had arrived and popular music was set to become very big business indeed.

There was another notable arrival on the street in January 1926:
Melody Maker
. Now here’s a rag I have poured over in my time, and in which I once saw an advertisement seeking applications for my own job, which apparently I had forfeited by non-attendance at a particular Saturday afternoon session, of which more to come later.

Melody Maker
was a monthly music paper launched from the offices of publisher Lawrence Wright at 19 Denmark Street. It was one of the first music newspapers in the world and went on to become a bit of a wrinkly rocker before being incorporated into the
NME
in 2000. It was supposedly aimed at an audience who were ‘directly or indirectly interested in the production of popular music’, and Lawrence Wright shamelessly used the paper to promote his own music. Wright composed music under the name Horatio Nicholls, and his composition ‘Araby’, performed by the Savoy Orpheans, was the first record to be reviewed in the paper. Well, if I ran a music paper I’d review my own songs too, wouldn’t you? Wright also made the brazen claim in the paper that the song ‘What Did I Tell Ya’ by Walter Donaldson and B. G. de Sylva, to which his company owned the UK copyright, ‘would be the sensation of 1926’. It wasn’t.

February’s issue announced the death of the bandleader and saxophonist Bert Ralton, who made his way to the great gig in the sky having been accidentally shot while hunting in South Africa. According to his obituary, ‘He died bravely playing the ukulele and singing to his attendant while on the stretcher taking him to hospital.’ Musicians obviously knew how to go with dignity in those days.

Shortly before he copped that stray bullet, Bert Ralton had done some experimental demos in London for Columbia Records at a recording speed of 80rpm, but following his death Columbia abandoned the experiment and returned to good old 78rpm. Is this an early incidence of pop one-upmanship, I ask myself ? Was Ralton attempting to make records louder than his rivals, which running at 80rpm would surely achieve? Did Spinal Tap follow Ralton’s lead by having amps manufactured that could be turned up to 11? Like the fate of Glenn Miller’s plane, or the reason for Michael Bolton’s fame, this is likely to remain one of popular music’s great mysteries. As for
Melody Maker
, it was bought by Odhams Press three years later, who issued the following statement: ‘The passing of central control will not affect the
Melody Maker
in any way except that it will ensure complete editorial independence from vested interests.’ Now what could they have been referring to?