London

 Underneath the arches.....

Flanagan and Allen.... The great couplings.  Wilson, Keppel and Betty (no that's three....). Wilbur and Orville Wright, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Homer and Marge Simpson.....  Oh, and Gilbert and George....,

Whose new gallery just off Brick Lane is a joy to visit, whether the

Pavement is our pillow

or

Without a sheet we'll lay

Underneath the arches

We (will) dream our dreams away

And dreaming is what it comes down to.....

I'm in London for a day or two, paying respect to the great and the good, and offering disrespect where it is due:

I laze a little, with Italy in mind:

Then wander a while in Hyde Park:

Reminiscing a little of the days when I visited this Police Station for reasons I won't go into here:

Then relaxing a moment in the shade of FDR in Grosvenor Square:

While young things prepare themselves for the upcoming celebrations of the unctions of Konig Karl von Battenberg:

Ah, but I'm not here for the fun nor the unctions.... 

The Ritz we never signed for

Savoys they can keep

No. I'm trolling (Shome mishtake?  Ed) along the South Bank with Simon Ellingworth (Multi Award Winning Photographer & Educator), in an attempt to steal some images of life as it really is.....

Starting with the Tate Modern, where concrete brutalism decapitates the passer-by:

A screen in the old oil tanks continuously plays with the shadows:

The structure of the Turbine Hall puts all in their place, section by section:

While windows obscure stories that could be interesting - or which may be just so:

I like to think that Love exists: but as with all art, maybe it's just a passing fancy - a flash between two mobiles?

Upstairs the clouds are gathering.  A shy guardian marshals the strays, while the ceiling lowers:

Sleeping when it's raining

And sleeping when it's fine

It's nice to see people quietly reflecting:

Or letting time coil by:

In colour, or in black and white:

And it is good to know that, despite the brickwork, there is a world outside:

Then we are outside, again, and 

Underneath the arches

We dream our dreams away (bon-bon-bo-da-be-do)

Sleeping when it's raining

And sleeping when it's fine

Trains rattling by above (bon-bo-bo-da-bi-da-bo)

There are truths in lies. Perhaps:

Earth has not anything to show more fair

And

these are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day.

London and I have been friends, of sorts, for over sixty years. There have been, as in most friendships, moments of friction, but I am not (yet) tired of life, and our relationship continues to grow. I accept that everything changes, from black and white:

To colour:

From noughts, to crosses:

Some people walk down concrete stairways, as if they're under orders:

While others indulge their tastes with clear expressions of delight:

The young record their progress:

And life goes on, whatever we may prefer.....

Underneath the arches

Where:

We dream our dreams away (bon-bon-bo-da-be-do)

There's only one place that we know

And that is where we sleep......

Pavement is our pillow

Without a sheet we'll lay

Underneath the arches

We dream our dreams away

Bud Flanagan, Joseph Mccarthy Jr. and Reg Connelly

With many thanks to Simon Ellingworth, Gilbert and George and Flanagan and Allen

https://gilbertandgeorgecentre.org

https://simonellingworth.com

https://youtu.be/q7HoMWuXCY4

London 15 - Handel and Hendrix

The Brook Street Brothers

I am in the heart of London's Mayfair.  I hear the sound of a guitar coming from an upstairs window. 

It explodes on the pavement a few feet from me. 

A door is open.  

Creaky stairs take me up, flights of fantasy, a stairway to heaven.....

A party is in full swing. Not conservative....  A sixties theme.....

Music by the greats......

Ostrich feathers, and a room full of mirrors.....

I used to live in a room full of mirrors

All I could see was me

Well I take my spirit and I smash my mirrors 

Now the whole world is here for me to see.....

Broken glass was all in my brain

Fall in my dreams cut me in my bed

Fall in my dreams cut me in my bed 

I said A makin' love was strange in my bed 

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!!!

The bar is in the kitchen, looking out on a forlorn London, chimney pots and grey buildings. But the bar is well stocked, and guests feel free....

Mine host is majestic.  Lord, the willows weep and moan for him......

There is some confusion.  I need to go downstairs.  And sideways.  The tenant is unhappy.  I remember entering a flat once, in search of a party, and finding nothing, then discovering the party was upstairs....

I have to say that there is a certain spooky quietness about this place....

The man downstairs is a trifle grumpy.  His sleep has been so disturbed that his bed isn't....

I cannot help but see a resemblance to my friend upstairs.  Could there have been some exchange of molecules, I think (without thinking of Brian O'Nolan)?

I hear deft fingers on the keyboard....

But then I don't. There is no one here.... Or is it me that is deft?

Time to tell a story.  

I love music.  Of all kinds.  (Pretty much.)

At the right moment, George Frideric Handel's Chaconne in G Major will take my mind off the complications of daily life.....

At other times, James Marshall Hendrix playing his C# Blues at the Albert Hall on February 18th, 1969 will set cations a-jiggling through my plasma.... (which, in due course, will take my mind off the complications of daily life....)

Anyway.  A story.  True as it can be....

The velvet jacket above was worn by Jimi for a show at The Kirk (aka The Kirklevington Country Club, once a filling station and garage on the old A19) in Yarm, North Yorkshire, on January 15th, 1967.

[The Kirk, by the way, was a venue that hosted the famous, before they were famous.... Stars-to-be such as Cream, Joe Cocker, Dire Straits, Rod Stewart, Yes, Thin Lizzy, The Moody Blues, Traffic, Brian Auger, Geno Washington, and so on, and so forth.... ]

After the show B J (Chas) Chandler, bassist of The Animals and Hendrix's manager, got into into a fight with a bouncer who had apparently made racist remarks about Hendrix. Jimi intervened, catching the jacket on a nail, ripping it below the left pocket.

The wife of the owner of The Kirk, John McCoy (of The Crawdaddies), offered to stitch up the tear and return it to Jimi when McCoy was next in London, but by the time that happened, Jimi had replaced it with the double-breasted jacket familiar from many pictures.

John McCoy was given the jacket, and he kept it hanging on a nail in his garage and then later on display in Martha's Vineyard Club and Bar (as The Kirk was renamed in the 1980s), along with Chris Rea's guitar, until John sold the premises in 1989.  In 2011, it became a feature of memorabilia to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Jimi's death. The Kirk went through several changes before 'burning down' and being redeveloped as a row of four cottage-style houses.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience were paid £50 for their appearance at the club, and afterwards stayed up all night drinking at Chas Chandler's Newcastle home.

Such were the Sixties....

Awwww shucks!

In 2014, John McCoy played a reunion gig for The Kirk at The Crathorne Arms (where Eugene and Barbara McCoy live and work), from which a version of Kansas City can be seen on YouTube.....

In Brook Street, today, you may visit the Handel House, at number 25, and, via the same entrance, the Hendrix Flat, at number 23, or you can crane your neck up to read the blue plaques that commemorate the musicians who once lived here.  

Jimi Hendrix died on September 18th, 1970.  I was staying with my brother in Sheffield at the time, and when the news broke people were stunned and struggled to accept the fact. Within hours of his being taken, unconscious, to hospital in London, Hendrix Lives! was scrawled across the walls....

I am not sure that such shock and grief followed the announcement of the death of George Frideric Handel on April 19th, 1759. He was 74 and had been blind for years, following botched cataract operations.  

He had no immediate family, but he was given full state honours, was buried in Westminster Abbey, and more than three thousand mourners attended his funeral (not a bad turn out at all, though the population of London was 750,000....)  

[And think, he, like Jimi (and King George II, the reigning monarch at the time) was an immigrant - whatever next?]

Jimi was buried on October 1st, 1970, in Greenwood Cemetery in Renton, after a private family funeral in Seattle.

After a chorus of When the Saints Go Marching in, Jimi's coffin was lowered into the earth. His gravestone reads:

Forever in our hearts, 

James M. 'Jimi' Hendrix, 

1942-1970.

To visit these two apartments is to climb those stairs to heaven, to mix with dreams.  There's nothing there, but then all your past presents itself somehow, if, like me, you can remember what it was to be young....

Purple haze all in my eyes

Don't know if it's day or night

You got me blowin', blowin' my mind

Is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?

I am on London's Brook Street, in Mayfair.  I hear the sound of a harpsichord coming from an upper window. 

[With no thought of Kenneth Horne] I deftly sidestep the threat, and carry on, regardless..... 

http://handelhendrix.org/