Hoffman at peace.
Posted: November 18, 2014 Filed under: Food, Health and welfare, London Music, London Types, Markets, Pavements, Performers, Vanishings | Tags: Brick Lane, David Hoffman, London street musicians, one man band, Tower Hamlets, Turkish baths Hackney Comments Off on Hoffman at peace.
Street market, Cheshire Street, Tower Hamlets 1981.
As a counterweight to David Hoffman’s images of urban protest which we ran last week, here are a few of David’s pictures of a more peaceful London. Peaceful and largely vanished … these photographs have an elegiac quality to them, glimpses of a city that seems almost as remote as the one pictured by Thomson or A.L. Coburn. In any case, they require no further comment from me … D.S.
Turkish baths, Clapton, Hackney 1983. © David Hoffman.
Street musician, Brick Lane, 1978. © David Hoffman.
Silver Jubilee, Tower Hamlets, 1977. © David Hoffman.
One Man Band, Brick Lane area, 1984. © David Hoffman.
Tea time at an old peoples’ club in Tower Hamlets 1975. © David Hoffman.
As part of East London Photomonth, David’s images are on display until the end of this month at a variety of cafes forming the ‘Roman Road Cafe Crawl’. David’s show at Muxima cafe runs until 27th of November. More details here.
On the South Bank. (5)
Posted: August 10, 2013 Filed under: Artistic London, London Music | Tags: London's South Bank, Royal Festival Hall Comments Off on On the South Bank. (5)
Before a concert, Level 3 terrace, Royal Festival Hall. Photo © David Secombe 1988.
In the years since The Royal Festival Hall opened in 1951, people have sat in this foyer waiting to hear:
Claudio Abbado, Laurie Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Burt Bacharach, Dame Janet Baker, Sir John Barbirolli, Daniel Barenboim, Count Basie, The Bee Gees, Luciano Berio, Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Sir Adrian Boult, David Bowie, Alfred Brendel, John Cale, Maria Callas, Ornette Coleman, Elvis Costello, Sir Colin Davis, Miles Davis, Neil Diamond, Christophe von Dohnanyi, Nick Drake, Jacqueline Du Pre, Bob Dylan, Electric Prunes, Duke Ellington, Fairport Convention, Marianne Faithfull, The Fall, Ella Fitzgerald, John Eliot Gardiner, Valery Gergiev, Carlo Maria Giulini, Goldfrapp, Benny Goodman, Bernard Haitink, Herbie Hancock, Tony Hancock, Jimi Hendrix, Vladimir Horowitz, Keith Jarrett, Jethro Tull, Elton John, Tom Jones, Herbert von Karajan, Rudolf Kempe, B.B. King, Carlos Kleiber, Otto Klemperer, Radu Lupu, Humphrey Lyttleton, Lorin Maazel, Wayne Marshall, Steve Martin, John Martyn, Johnny Mathis, John McLaughlin, George Melly, Modern Jazz Quartet, Thelonius Monk, Pierre Monteux, Motorhead, Riccardo Muti, Evgeny Mvravinsky, Randy Newman, New York Dolls, The Nice, Jessye Norman, Murray Perahia, Pere Ubu, Oscar Peterson, Pink Floyd, Maurizio Pollini, Lucia Popp, Simon Rattle, Lou Reed, Buddy Rich, Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovich, Artur Rubinstein, Sir Malcolm Sargent, Saint Etienne, Andras Schiff, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Ronnie Scott, George Shearing, Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone, Soft Machine, Georg Solti, Patti Smith, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Leopold Stokowski, Igor Stravinsky, Jack Teagarden, Klaus Tennstedt, T-Rex, Richard Thompson, Arturo Toscanini, Stan Tracey, Tricky, McCoy Tyner, William Walton, Brian Wilson, Yes, Frank Zappa, Krystian Zimmerman . . . amongst others.
This entry is the 200th post on The London Column. Thanks to all our contributors and readers … D.S., K.E.B.
End of Term.
Posted: July 25, 2013 Filed under: Graffiti, London Music, Out Of Town | Tags: Buzzcocks, Elton John is a Punk, Larry Parnes, Malcolm McLaren, New Musical Express, Sex Pistols, Sham 69, Strummerville, The Clash Comments Off on End of Term.
© David Secombe.
David Secombe:
July, 1978. I am 16. I am serving out my final days as a pupil at a comically inadequate private school in Surrey’s lush commuter belt. I am bailing out before ‘A’ levels because it has not been a happy three years and I am taking the earliest opportunity to escape. To mark the end of my final term I take my camera to school. There are some interesting things to photograph.
The shrine in the locker above (it wasn’t my locker) consists of pictures cut from the pages of the sacred music title of the day, New Musical Express. The photos of the Sex Pistols, The Clash, the young Bob Geldof, Ian Dury and company were most probably the work of NME stalwarts Pennie Smith, Chalkie Davies and Kevin Cummins, and would have accompanied articles by the likes of Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Charles Sharr Murray, Nick Kent, etc.. By the summer of 1978, Punk was mainstream enough to be embraced by all but the most fastidious privately-educated schoolboy, even if the irony of its acceptance by future mid-management executives was lost upon the lads themselves. (Although it is worth mentioning that the much-worshipped Joe Strummer had been a pupil at a neighbouring private school a few years earlier, where he became a friend of my brother. Joe – or John – swapped his camera for my brother’s drum kit, and later credited this exchange as furnishing him with his first musical instrument. Since I first got into photography by using my brother’s camera, you could say that Joe Strummer’s Minolta got me into photography – except that he also said that his first instrument was a ukelele.)
© David Secombe.
The atmosphere of those distant, final days was a strange admixture of gleeful anarchy and leafy English pastoral; exams done, the highlight of each afternoon was the illicit visit to an abandoned theatre, a crumbling, doomed edifice in a lush wooded hollow. This imposing structure offered wall area large enough to proclaim as loudly as one was able the primacy of favourite bands, whilst the surrounding greenery furnished a sylvan setting for ritualised smoking sessions.
© David Secombe, 1978.
© David Secombe, 1978.
The following year, the theatre and the grubby enchantment of its grotto was cleared and a monumental circulatory system took its place, thus wrecking a perfectly inoffensive little suburban town. Years later, when the thunderous circle of the M25 imprinted itself upon the green hinterland of the capital, the course of the motorway took it within a few yards of the school, destroying at least one of its favoured – and, by some of us, much-hated – routes for cross-country runs. Still later, the school was hit by a scandal attached to one of its teaching faculty (not present in my time), which made the national press and prised skeletons loose from various closets. I was able to revisit a decade or so ago, after suggesting to a director friend that it would make a good location for an episode of a TV detective series he was filming. I visited the unit on location; and it seemed to my 40-year old self that the entire school had been demolished and replaced with an 8:10 scale replica.
The late 1970s have become subsumed into the nostalgia business, and there is something absurd and not a little nauseating about the era being trumpeted as some kind of lost eden.But the youth we are given is the only one we have; as some Facebook wag said recently, Punk was for my generation what World War 2 was for our fathers’. (And what did we get afterwards? The New Romantics. That has always struck me as an indication of cultural failure.) I felt largely out of sync with my time then and, predictably enough, have felt largely out of sync with it ever since. In any case, these 35-year old photos strike me as being better than they have any right to be, and almost persuade me that I knew what I was doing when I took them. This is what our memories should look like: a flattering improvement on reality – and they are dedicated to anyone finishing school this month. Someone like my daughter, in fact.
© David Secombe 1978.
… for The London Column.
The Rainbow. Photo & text: David Secombe.
Posted: October 18, 2012 Filed under: Churches, Crime and Punishment, London Music | Tags: Eric Clapton, Frank Zappa, Muddy Waters, Rainbow Theatre, Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, Victoria Climbie Comments Off on The Rainbow. Photo & text: David Secombe.
Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, formerly The Rainbow Theatre, Finsbury Park. Photo © David Secombe 2010.
The Rainbow Theatre, as the Art Deco Astoria cinema was renamed in 1971, played host to some of the most seminal moments in rock music history, from the first concerts held there in the 1960s until its closure as a music venue in 1981. It was here that Jimi Hendrix first burnt his guitar, where Eric Clapton had his all-star ‘comeback’ concert in 1973, where Pink Floyd tried out Dark Side of The Moon, where The Clash played host to their own riot in 1977 and where Frank Zappa was pushed from the stage into the pit by a disaffected audience member in 1972. My only personal experience of the Rainbow as a rock venue was seeing Muddy Waters play to a capacity crowd in (I think) 1979, cheerfully oblivious to the full-blooded fistfight raging in the stalls. Just as cherishable was my impression of the extraordinary interior, an Arabian Nights fantasy of palm grottoes under a nocturnal desert sky. This exquisite interior is surely the main reason for the building’s listed status; it would have been lovely to have secured a picture of its fabled decor …
Following the closure of the Rainbow in 1981 the building was largely disused until it was bought by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, a Brazilian Pentecostal Church, in 1995. The former Rainbow is now the Church’s UK headquarters. I knew nothing of the Church or its activities when I visited to photograph the exterior of the building, but I discovered that the Church is sensitive about its image: an agitated young man dashed out of the ‘Moorish’ foyer (can a church have a ‘foyer’? Discuss), ran across the street to where I was photographing and grilled me on my intentions. He deflated a little when I mentioned my interest in the building’s musical past, but insisted that I needed permission from the Church to take photos, at which point the conversation became rather less civil.
A cursory internet search helped explain my interlocutor’s jumpiness, as it appears that the UCKG has acquired a rather dubious international reputation; but more immediately sensitive to local sensibilities is the involvement of a former pastor of its Finsbury Park outpost in the Victoria Climbie case, adding yet another level of shame to that sordid and preventable tragedy. The Rainbow stood as something noble and glorious in its way; the headquarters of UKCG is something else, something monolithic and far less culturally benign.
The London Column 