London Urban Legends Read online

  There are many things in this book that the reader should not try, most of them because they would frighten or harm other people, and despite the evidence gathered here that urinating on the electric rail of a train or tube line would not hurt or kill you, please do not try it yourself. No one will be impressed and it is a bit offensive. Wait until you get home, find a public loo or go and urinate in a pub toilet, so long as you have made sure you are undoing yourself in the toilet.

  Either at noon, or in the afternoon when the sun shines through the club-shaped balustrades running the length of Westminster Bridge, the top section stretches to cause a row of sunny, phallus shapes to appear. At first I thought it was a digitally enhanced comment on the residents of the Houses of Parliament at the north end of the bridge. Sadly, I have not found the time to linger long on Westminster Bridge seeking illuminated penises, but one brave London member (sorry) of the Snopes message board did go to Westminster Bridge and, at 1.03 p.m., photographed a raft of unfortunate shapes. This was after others had dismissed the image as ‘completely unreal IMO [in my opinion]. The contrast between the light penii and the shadow looks wrong.’ They were also wrong about the plural of penis.

  The story that came with the genuine image was a joke about the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, closing Westminster Bridge in the afternoons to avoid offending people with the luminous images. As pointed out on the Snopes board, whoever wrote the joke, taken seriously by readers outside the UK, did not know Boris Johnson and his inimitable wit. The website Liveleak attributed the appearance of the penises to the 2007 refurbishment of Westminster Bridge, when the balustrades were installed without thought to how their outlines may look in the long afternoon light.

  So far the shape made by the balustrades of Westminster Bridge has only been attributed to perverts though, I am sure someone at some time will put a hidden-insult-style story to this trick of the light. The location near the Houses of Parliament is just too good not to. Let’s wait and see …

  5

  LEGENDS OF ROCK

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  I’m in the kitchen with the tombstone blues.

  Bob Dylan, ‘Tombstone Blues’

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  ‘It’s taken you so long to

  find out you were wrong’

  Hopefully everyone now knows that the late actor and quiz-show host of Blockbusters, Bob Holness, did not play the saxophone on Jerry Rafferty’s hit song ‘Baker Street’. The myth was invented by the author and radio presenter Stuart Maconie for the ‘Believe It or Not’ column of music paper the NME (the New Musical Express). Another version of the legends origin is that LBC DJ Tommy Boyd claims to have run a ‘true or false’ question on a quiz about the ‘neat and tidy’ Bob being able to turn out a raunchy sax break. Things become more confusing when we hear that the actual saxophonist on ‘Baker Street’, Raphael Ravenscroft, claims to have told a foreign journalist that Bob had played on the song when asked if it was he who had performed it for the twentieth or thirtieth time. Bob himself was said to have encouraged the myth; on one occasion on Blockbusters a question came up about the song ‘Baker Street’ and Bob winked into the camera and complimented the sax solo. He would also claim to be the guitarist on the Derek and the Dominos song ‘Layla’, and that he was the person responsible for making Elvis laugh on the notorious live version of ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ The myth of Bob Holness on ‘Baker Street’ has begat myths of its own.

  ‘Why go to learn the words of fools?’

  Another song myth that has not popped its head too high up into mainstream culture yet is the location of Itchycoo Park from The Small Faces’ song of the same name. The first time I had a location pointed out to me, I was getting a lift from a work colleague called TBJ, who told me that Itchycoo Park was Altab Ali Park in Whitechapel, previously St Mary’s Park and the former site of St Mary’s Church. TBJ was a bit of a character, and at work he would tell stories of the characters at his local pub or gym, such as Jimmy Two Times, who was actually a gangster from the film Goodfellas.

  I read Altab Ali Park’s link to the song again in the 14 September 2012 e-newsletter from the indie music magazine Artrocker, where Tom Artrocker recounts:

  I spent a pleasant couple of hours in Whitechapel yesterday. The sun shone as the traffic roared towards the coast, I was there with my team to photograph and video Toy. We took photos in the middle of the traffic’s roar, down a dark alley and, traditionalists that we are, against a brick wall. Then we headed a few yards to Altab Ali Park. At which point I pointed out that prior to its re-naming, in honour of a young Bangladeshi murdered by several youths, this was the site of Itchycoo Park, as glorified by The Small Faces.

  Small Faces member Ronnie Lane claimed that Little Ilford Park is Itchycoo Park. Tony Calder stated that the park story was invented by himself and the band to get around a BBC ban on the song and its possible drug references. Itchycoo Park was the name of a piece of wasteground in the East End that the band played on as children.

  Valentines Park, West Ham and Wanstead Flats have all also been named as possible Itchycoo Park locations, although there is also the possibility that the song was inspired by a pamphlet about Oxford and has nothing to do with east London. Itchycoo Park is a pop music Atlantis or Camelot: it has many locations, some in London.

  The name may have migrated from another nearby location: in his 1980 book Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block 1887–1920, Jerry White describes ‘Itchy Park’ being Christ Church Gardens. This is the small ground beside Christ Church on Commercial Street, not too far from Altab Ali Park.

  According to White’s book, the park got its name from the children scratching themselves, like good East End urchins, against the railings of the park while using it as a playground. Tom Artrocker’s origin for Itchy Park is even less kind, being from the fleas on the homeless people who used the park in the past and up to the present. The lyrics to ‘Itchycoo Park’ don’t completely match either location; the dreaming spires could be the imposing steeple of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, but there is no duck pond, and so no ducks to feed a bun to. We should not get too hung up on treating song lyrics as literal descriptions, however. If song writers are seeking to mirror reality in a lyric it would still be the first thing jettisoned for a pleasing rhyme or suitable mood.

  Liverpool Sunset

  Some stories become facts not by being true but by being short, sharp, easily communicable pieces of information. Ray Davies was a chronicler and satiriser of Sixties Britain and The Kinks’ song ‘Waterloo Sunset’ was a description of swinging London, with its characters Terry and Julie meeting at Waterloo station every Friday night based upon the handsome icons of the era Julie Christie and Terence Stamp. Everyone knows that Ray Davies watched from his window as they crossed the river for untold adventures. You know it, I know it, Terence Stamp knew it when interviewed about his retrospective at the nearby British Film Institute in May 2013.

  Facts are tricky things and not always based on any actual real occurrence, particularly when the reality of the fact comes from the often volatile mind of a writer or musician. ‘Waterloo Sunset’, the song stained with the tears of countless Londoners, a group not often given over to sentimentality, started life as a hymn to Mersey-beat called ‘Liverpool Sunset’. The Liverpool Echo cheerfully quoted Ray Davies in its 14 May 2010 issue as saying ‘Liverpool is my favourite city, and the song was originally called Liverpool Sunset,’ going on to proclaim ‘London was home, I’d grown up there, but I like to think I could be an adopted Scouser. My heart is definitely there.’ It should be noted that Davies was about to play the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall when he gave the interview.

  So Terry and Julie may have had very different accents? Probably not as, according to a ‘Behind the Song’ column in the Independent dated 9 March 1998, once the change was made from Liverpool to Waterloo, Davies could incorporate the scene of countless people flowing out of Waterloo underground like another dirty old rive
r. The couple at the station were not Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, but Davies’ young nephew Terry. Davies’ brother-in-law had just emigrated to Australia and he imagined Arthur’s young son grown-up, back in London and meeting his girlfriend. The Independent article speculated that Julie symbolised England, so may have been based on Julie Christie alone.

  Is any of this true? Following the workings of a creative imagination is like trying to jog across a continuous landslide of ideas, images, thoughts and feelings, even long after the creative piece is complete. We will probably never know. If you do meet Terence Stamp however, it may be best not to mention that the Terry in ‘Waterloo Sunset’ is not him, but Davies’ nephew, all grown up and living in a fictional future London. When asked about it by the Evening Standard in an interview about his retrospective, published 2 May 2013, Stamp growled:

  My brother Chris [ex-manger of The Who] … told me in the Seventies that when Ray Davies wrote ‘Waterloo Sunset’ he was thinking of me and Julie Christie. But apparently Ray denies it now. Well, if he says it’s not true I don’t care. I’ve believed it all these years …

  ‘What’s behind the green door?’

  A London urban legend, nipped as it was budding, attempted to link an esoteric London location to the rock-and-roll track ‘Green Door’. The song is a plea from a desperate man trying to get through a green door and into a midnight party full of laughter and hot piano playing. The protagonist in the song never makes it in; when he tells the unknown revellers that ‘Joe’ had sent him, they merely laugh at him.

  First performed by Jim Lowe and reaching No.1 in the charts in America, ‘Green Door’ got to No. 2 and No. 8 in the UK. A version by Frankie Vaughn reached No.2, another by Glen Mason reached No. 24 and in 1981 Shakin’ Stevens got ‘Green Door’ to No. 1 for four weeks.

  In the Friday, 8 September 2006 ‘Culture’ section of the Guardian Brian Boyd attempted to put the lyrics into a surprising context. The green door of the song was in London, on Bramerton Street off the Kings Road in Chelsea. It was the door to The Gateway, a private lesbian bar or club. The bar was a location for the film The Killing of Sister George, the story of a lesbian love triangle. The story of ‘Green Door’ is of a man trying to get into a gay women-only bar. When he says ‘Joe sent me’, he is referring to Joe Meek, the gay British pioneering popstar, which only goes down as a joke with the club’s regulars. In his article, Boyd was attempting to put ‘Green Door’ with other gay pop songs featured in the compilation album From The Closet To The Charts, though the full title of the album, compiled by John Savage, is Queer Noises 61–78: From The Closet To The Charts. ‘Green Door’ was first a hit in 1956. It is not as popular as ‘Waterloo Sunset’ or ‘Itchycoo Park’ and the explanation of their origins, but Boyd’s theory did make it far enough to make it into Stephanie Theobald’s top five lesbian songs list in the Guardian on 6 March 2007, but this mention comes with a correction and clarification on the website.

  The lyrics of ‘Green Door’ were written by Marvin Moore, with music by Bob Davie and was composed in a four-room apartment they shared in Greenwich Village in New York. As a graduate of the Texas Christian University School of Journalism, it seems Moore would be unfamiliar with the goings-on of 1950s lesbian London, a decade when the majority of Londoners would be unfamiliar with the concept of a ‘lesbian London’.

  There are more convincing explanations of the meaning of ‘Green Door’: that the song’s original singer, Jim Lowe, was singing about a bar with a green door called The Shack when he went to the University of Missouri, or that it is based on the 1940 novel Behind the Green Door, although whatever is happening behind the door, set in as ski-resort, does not resemble the fun in the song.

  Perhaps the most satisfying explanation is that ‘Green Door’ is a response or shout-back to the song ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’ from the musical The Pajama Game, which describes a secretive nightclub for a ‘glass of wine and a fast embrace’, and where the password to get in is ‘Joe sent us’. The song was a hit the year before ‘Green Door’.

  Metal Box

  Further off the mainstream radar is the discombobulating electronic music of Richard James, the Aphex Twin. His music can jump from serene to harsh to nausea-inducing. It is a fitting tribute to this that in the early 2000s the large stainless steel box in the centre of the Elephant and Castle roundabout was said to be his home. The box is, in fact, the Michael Faraday Memorial, dedicated to the scientist who was born nearby in Newington Butts. The monument itself contains an electrical substation for the Bakerloo and Northern tube lines and is not a house. The Aphex Twin lived nearby in the slightly more conventional venue of a converted bank.

  Bob Dylan’s Crouch End Road Trip

  Researching things is great, not only because you find out things you want to know, but that you always happen upon strange and probably apocryphal facts you never knew you needed to look into. A story dated 15 August 1993 in the Independent newspaper tells me that Crouch End once had more curry houses than all of Austria. This does sound possible, although twenty years on and TripAdvisor is listing thirty-one Indian restaurants in Vienna alone.

  I stumbled on this while reading up on the connection between megalithic American folk-rocker Bob Dylan and his visits to Crouch End. Apparently he viewed a house there back in 1993 and became a regular at the Shamrat of India curry house. ‘I recognised him from the telly,’ said the owner at the time, ‘but I’m more of a Beatles fan myself.’ Bob wasn’t getting a lot of love in Crouch End back then – the owner of the local guitar shop said that ‘he used to be good, but he’s rubbish now.’

  According to urban legend a further indignity for Dylan may have happened around the same time. The real untrue story of Bob Dylan in Crouch End begins with his friendship with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, who once owned a recording studio called the Crypt, on 145 Crouch Hill. Stewart invited Dylan round, saying that the next time he was in Crouch End he should visit the studio. Dylan was seemingly so keen that he gave the studio’s address at the airport so he could go straight there. Unfortunately the taxi driver dropped Dylan off, not at Dave Stewart’s grand recording studio in an old church, but on nearby Crouch End Hill, where No.145 was a house. Dylan knocked on the door, asked for Dave and to compound his series of unfortunate events a Dave did live at the house, but was out at the time. Dave’s wife said that he would be back soon, so would the mumbling American gentleman like to come in and wait for him? And would he like a cup of tea? Dave the plumber later arrived home and asked his wife if there were any messages for him. She said, ‘No, but Bob Dylan’s in the living room having a cup of tea.’

  Writer Emma Hartley investigated the story for her ‘Emma Hartley’s Glamour Cave’ folk music blog in a post dated, of course, 1 April 2013. She rang the Crypt studio and was told by an Anthony Lerner that he had ‘heard it from the man who was Dave Stewart’s chief sound engineer at that time’. Emma went out to Crouch End to knock on the door of the house on Crouch End Hill. It was while walking up the hill that she discovered that there is no No. 145. Perhaps the taxi driver was even more cloth-eared than we thought and took Dylan to No. 45 Crouch End Hill, which was, at least in the 1891 census, a residential property. Or perhaps the whole story is made up.

  Consoling herself with a drink at Banner’s Restaurant, No. 21 Park Road, Crouch End, she spotted a mural on the side of the building showing Bob Dylan asking, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ Inside, Emma was shown a brass plaque declaring that ‘Bob Dylan sat at this table, August 1993’. Apparently, after his ill-fated trip to a possibly non-existent house on Crouch End Hill, Dylan went to console himself with a drink. At the time, however, Banner’s alcohol licence did not allow people to have a drink without food, so Bob Dylan was turned down. He asked them ‘Do you know who I am?’ just so the restaurant staff were sure of who they were denying booze. The response is not recorded, but it seems like Bob Dylan just can’t get a break in Crouch End.

  6

  NEW LEG
ENDS AS OLD

  * * *

  They were not history, but legends …

  Steve Roud, London Lore

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  The Deptford Jolly Roger

  Tucked down a street that’s off another street that comes off Creek Road in Deptford is St Nicholas Church. The churchyard is dense and old, and Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlow is buried somewhere in its grounds. On the gateposts leading into the churchyard is another of the church’s famous features: two large decaying, yet still grinning, stone skulls crossed with bones underneath. This striking feature has acquired a legend to suit its visual impact, because these skulls and crossbones are the inspiration for the pirate flag, the Jolly Roger.

  Deptford’s maritime history is mostly obliterated, save a couple of warehouses and watergates by the river, but it was once the ‘King’s Yard’, having been founded by Henry VIII, remaining a naval and shipping hub until after the Napoleonic Wars. Captain James Cook’s ship the HMS Resolution set off from and was refitted at the dockyard, and Sir Francis Drake was knighted by Elizabeth I aboard the Golden Hind at Deptford. By the 1840s ships had become larger, and the shallow, narrow bed of the river made getting to Deptford difficult, closing the area to major shipping.