Lennon’s two Madison Square Garden concerts on August 30th 1972, are historically significant. They were the only full-length live performances he played after leaving The Beatles.

The concerts have been available for some time on DVD and album, but this film is different. It’s been completely remastered and restored, and the music remixed under the direction of Sean Ono Lennon, and given the split-screen treatment

Like McCartney’s One Hand Clapping and this year’s Man on the Run, and last year’s dire One to One: John & Yoko, this film was available for one night only at selected cinemas around the UK.

I chose to watch it at King’s Cross Everyman cinema on the northern edges of central London. It’s a place where you watch films on large double sofas with footrests, and food and wine is served to your seats beforehand. It’s no coincidence that London’s King’s Cross area is home to UK offices of Meta, with 4,000 employees based there. King’s Cross also has the UK offices for Google, with 7,000 employees based there.

The entrance price to the Everyman cinema, therefore, carries a Meta and Google supplement. Tickets are £20 each, compared to the £6.50 (£5 Mondays) I pay at The Forest, my local cinema. I suppose you don’t get a small glass of house wine delivered to your seat at the Forest for £9.50 or a vegan cheeseburger (?) for £16.50.

We not only declined the seat delivery, but I also got a 2-for-1 deal with The Times newspaper. So it came to £10 each for us. Only twice as expensive rather than four times.

It was John Lennon, so I swallowed the cost, if not the vegan cheeseburger.

The film

Following the hugely disappointing One to One: John & Yoko documentary from last year, where I fell asleep, we now get the real deal. Lennon live in the One to One concert with no useless stuff and events, huge amounts of screen time dedicated to US politicians and other unknown (to me) figures, screen images flickering, causing nausea, or Yoko’s telephone conversations about buying flies.

The film was the result of twenty years of restoration, and it was worth every second in terms of quality and results from an historical perspective, film quality, musical excellence, and seeing Lennon perform live in all his insouciant glory and genius. The sound and image quality were simply stunning.

You may have detected a but there, and you’d be correct. Unfortunately, half the songs were performed by Yoko Ono, whose out-of-tune caterwauling and animal noise interjections, particularly on Lennon’s otherwise incredible cover of Hound Dog, reduced the cinema audience to gales of laughter.

I took the film in the way that it was meant to be, I think: a musically historically important event, and Yoko, unfortunately, performed there too, so from a documentary purpose, her appearances couldn’t be cut.

Thoughts on the film

The film was a recording of the concert only, with a short introduction where we saw the Lennons walk towards and onto the stage. No fluff or taking heads.

Before analysing Lennon’s incredible performance, I need to mention his backing band, The Elephant’s Memory. This was an extremely high-quality band. Tight and powerful in an E Street Band way, and musically excellent. I was particularly drawn to Steve Bronstein on sax, and the lead guitarist, who I believe was called Guy Peritore.

The sheer excellence of the band helped us to overcome (a little) Yoko’s atrocious vocal performances. Listening to a pneumatic drill would have been preferable.

Yoko took equal prominence on stage at the concert with a former Beatle and one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century. Stevie Wonder, who came on as a guest, yes. Yoko — oh no.

Compare this with how Paul McCartney integrated Linda into Wings. Linda provided iconic backing vocals and some of Wing’s greatest keyboard riffs, playing to her abilities, one of which was that she could sing in tune. But Linda played second fiddle in musical terms to the real genius.

(Before I get the inevitable, ‘you’re just a Yoko hater’, comments, I’m not. Yoko was an artist, writer and intellectual with a personality that seemed to be exactly what Lennon needed. She is not, however, a musician, and she opened herself to unnecessary ridicule by performing alongside a music legend. This would have been difficult for anyone, let alone someone with no ear or feel for music whatsoever. She had the strength and intelligence to stand alone artistically, and she didn’t need to ride on the back of Lennon’s genius or distract us from it by insisting on performing.)

Lennon, the master

The gig kicked off with a rip-roaring live version of Sometime in New York City. If there’s a remastered album release of the concert, I’d buy it for this performance alone. Not only Lennon’s vocals, but Elephant’s Memory rocked.

We got an alternative version of Imagine played on an electric piano that was out of this world. And if I wasn’t sure about getting the album, Lennon and the band ripped through Instant Karma with a delivery that pinned me to my seat. I and others in the cinema clapped with the on-screen audience after that one. I’d never done that before.

We got classics like Mother, Come Together, the only Beatles number performed, Well Well Well and others. The performance of Woman is the Nigger of the World was once again cut, as it was from last year’s documentary.

I have no idea what Yoko’s songs were, except for a bizarre number called Open Your Box, which seemed to be an allusion to an intimate part of a woman’s anatomy. In case you didn’t get the allusion, she also sang, open your legs, open your thighs and so on.

Some of her songs were not bad, and I detected the hand of Lennon in their construction. The band was, of course, incredible. However, she sang in a high, off-key pitch with added squeals and bizarre animal noises that amused many watching, but gave me a headache.

Power to the people

I left the cinema with a sense of sadness. Not over the prices in the surrounding restaurants or Ono’s vocals, and not just that Lennon was taken from us all. My sadness was that during his solo period post-Beatles, he chose not to give us the sheer magnificence of him performing some of the greatest music of the 20th century live.

This concert film will have to do. And when I get the album and DVD, I will have the opportunity to fast-forward certain parts.

It was about time we had a Springsteen biopic. Whether you like his music or not, Springsteen operates in the same rarified atmosphere as the other great rock & pop musicians— Dylan, The Beatles, Elvis, Bowie, etc. He has a back catalogue of songs everyone knows and most of us love.

Deliver Me From Nowhere belatedly delivers the long-awaited Bruce biopic and, like the Dylan film, A Complete Unknown, focuses on a specific and crucial period in his career — the making of a homemade stripped-back acoustic folk album called Nebraska, following three highly successful and iconic full-band rock albums that positioned him as a globally acclaimed rock star.

Biopics, biopics

Deliver Me From Nowhere is the inverse of the Dylan film, which charted Dylan’s transformation from acoustic folk hero to an electric full-band rock star. Springsteen pivoted the other way, from electric full-band rock hero to acoustic folk.

The success and focus of the Dylan film may be the reason the 2023 book by Warren Zanes, Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, was chosen as the basis for the film by looking at this specific moment in his career.

Material is also clearly used from Springsteen’s autobiography, Born To Run. I assume the film, book and chapter 44 of his autobiography, which is about Nebraska, are all taken from the lyric Deliver Me From Nowhere, in State Trooper, a Nebraska track.

Music biopics don’t always hit the mark. Despite also being a super fan of The Beatles, for example, I thought none of their biopics were especially great.

However, some music biopics are superb, and my favourites have been A Complete Unknown, Walk The Line about Johnny Cash’s early life and Elvis with Austin Butler doing a fantastic job as the King, even if these artists aren’t my absolute favourites.

Springsteen is one of my favourites, though.

• I’ve seen him live several times.

• I own at least one, often two, hard copies of every single official studio and live album — original plus remastered, on CD or vinyl or both — except his execrable Michael Bublé-style covers album, of course.

• I have two CD copies of Western Stars, the original and the slightly different version from the film, with the bonus Rhinestone Cowboy track.

• I bought a triple CD of his astonishing 2023 Hyde Park concert I went to, and had to get it imported from the USA.

• I have every (expensive) Springsteen box set, such as Tracks I, The Ties That Bind, The Promise — except for the over-priced and not great Tracks II.

• I regularly play my Springsteen concert DVDs such as Live In Barcelona, Video Anthology, MTV, etc, etc.

• I’ve seen every Springsteen-related film several times, including Blinded By The Light, Western Stars, The Making Of Letter To You and so on.

So, you can imagine my excitement about Deliver Me From Nowhere. But what did this mega Bruce fan think? Was it another Complete Unknown, or was it more like John & Yoko: A Love Story?

Deliver Me From Nowhere

Reviews of the film have been mixed, and so far, it has been a relative flop at cinemas. On its opening weekend, it was outstripped commercially by releases such as Black Phone 2, Chainsaw Man and the lightweight romcom Regretting You. Hardly cinema classics.

Here’s a long-term Springsteen fan and rock music aficionado’s view of the biopic.

The Forest Cinema

So, off we went to the Forest Cinema in Walthamstow, North East London. It’s run by the local government borough, and it doesn’t sound like a great idea having politicians and bureaucrats running cultural and commercial activities.

But it’s actually a fantastic place. They rescued the cinema after the company went bust during the COVID-19 lockdown and have turned it into a great cinema that often shows independent films and live or recorded shows broadcast directly to the screens.

Deliver Me From Nowhere was shown on the ‘Impact’ screen, which is the largest cinema screen I’ve ever seen, and the surround sound is the best I’ve heard in any cinema in London.

I can’t think of a better place to watch a music biopic.

The local government also run the theatre just around the corner from the Forest Cinema, so they’re doing something right.

Overall assessment

The cinema room was fantastic, and the film was just OK. It was far too slow in places. Some scenes, such as the love interest scenes, dragged on. And on. And on….zzzz.

It was certainly not awful like John & Yoko or the Bowie biopic Stardust, but it was no Walk The Line or A Complete Unknown either.

The actors

Jeremy Allen White of The Bear fame played Springsteen. Despite having no musical background, he taught himself to play guitar for the role and learnt to sing.

His performance isn’t bad at all; he captures Springsteen’s mannerisms and even gets astonishingly close to his singing vocals.

However.

White is no Timothée Chalamet (as Dylan) or Joaquin Phoenix (as Johnny Cash). He’s not even Austin Butler (as Elvis). This was White’s first role as lead in a major film, and he didn’t command the screen or pull you in like Chalamet, Phoenix or Butler in their lead roles as rock legends.

This is important because Springsteen has that special magnetic charisma that all top stars have, and you can’t take your eyes off them on screen or in person.

Yes, White got the Springsteen poses right, probably from studying concert videos and the publicity shots for Darkness On The Edge Of Town, where Springsteen has messy hair and hands in the pockets of a leather bomber jacket.

And yes, he got the singing voice remarkably close, but without that sparkle that Chalamet achieved in the Dylan biopic. I listen to Chalamet’s album from the film on Spotify; it’s that good. I’ll stick to Bruce rather than White’s proficient Bruce imitation soundtrack.

White’s performance put me in mind of an old British TV show called Stars In Their Eyes, hosted by Matthew Kelly. The contestants would impersonate rock and pop stars and perform dressed up as the star. Matthew Kelly would ask the hopeful who they were going to impersonate beforehand, and their catchphrase reply was, “Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be…” — insert the name of whoever they impersonated.

I was waiting for White to say, “Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be… Bruce Springsteen.”

I reckon he’d have won the show finale; a fantastic impersonation. But he didn’t inhabit the part in the way Chalamet and Phoenix did in their roles.

Jeremy Strong, as Bruce’s mild-mannered yet strong-willed manager, Jon Landau, outshone White in their scenes together. That would never happen if the real Bruce was on screen with anyone. Strong is also a small-screen actor, but he has clearly progressed effortlessly to the large screen.

Another disappointment for me was the casting of Merseyside actor Stephen Graham as Springsteen’s father. He mostly manages not to slip back into his Merseyside accent, but not always successfully. Springsteen’s father (and mother) played significant parts in his life, and all I could see was Stephen Graham, who seems to be in everything these days, especially on British TV.

I was expecting the young Bruce to morph into the boy from Adolescence at any moment, or perhaps Graham was going to start cooking while snorting coke in Boiling Point. Maybe he was playing Detective John Corbett in Line of Duty, or Detective Jones in White House Farm, where he couldn’t do a Welsh accent either without slipping into a Merseyside twang. Or is he the London gangster in A Thousand Blows? Or the Merseyside criminal in one of the Peaky Blinders seasons? Or perhaps he was foiling right-wing terrorists in The Walk-In.

I didn’t, therefore, believe for one second that Stephen Graham was Bruce’s dad. Bad choice. It needed someone less well-known and less of a regular on our TV and film screens. Like Bruce’s dad.

We saw no interaction with the other members of the E Street Band. Guitarist Steve Van Zandt is Bruce’s long-time friend and confidante. We know from Van Zandt’s autobiography that Springsteen discussed Nebraska with him, and Van Zandt was supportive of the decision to go low-fi.

The love interest — mental state.

The love interest subplot didn’t work. The filmmakers appeared to copy the composite love interest from the Dylan film, but that was integral to Dylan’s story. It had little to do with Bruce’s aside from adding a subplot diversion.

Did we really need long scenes of Bruce kissing his girlfriend? No. And we really didn’t need to see him making love to her in bed. The actress was pretty good in the lover role, but superfluous. Why was this relevant to the making of Nebraska? It wasn’t.

The love scenes added nothing to the story of Bruce’s mental state at that time and his reasons for making this low-fi folk album. Removing or reducing the love interest and putting more emphasis on his complicated relationship with his father and his loving relationship with his mother, which was hinted at but not developed, would have improved the film.

The Nebraska album shock

The central tenet of this film was Springsteen’s artistic handbrake turn in releasing a low-fi folk album following years of success as a rock star, delivering three of rock’s greatest albums with the E Street Band.

An artistic handbrake turn was also the central tenet of the Dylan biopic, so once again, I’m forced to compare the films.

In the Dylan film, we saw and felt the reaction from Dylan’s fans and supporters to his change of style, including the music community. “Judas”, shouted the audience, and we saw Pete Seeger pulling the plug at a live concert.

In this Springsteen biopic, we saw only the muted response of a record executive and little else in response to what was as big a shock as Dylan’s conversion to electric rock and in retrospect, a significant moment in rock music history in terms of its influence.

Critical reactions at the time were mixed, as were Bruce’s fans’ opinions, although it was generally well-received. He never promoted the album or toured with it. I bought the album without hearing it, as it was Bruce. I disliked it and never played it again. The sound quality was atrocious, and the low-key stripped-back delivery of the songs tended to make them monotonous and samey.

Others loved it the way it was, and Springsteen states it’s his most important work.

The film insinuated that they had fixed the problem of the album being recorded on a simple cassette tape in his bedroom and onto a water-damaged boom box, leading to muffled sound and heavy distortion. But they didn’t. They just made it not so bad through some technical jiggery-pokery, but nowhere near studio quality.

Once the album was released, all we got was writing on the screen saying it got to №3 in the charts. I assume that meant the US album charts, since it didn’t elaborate, although I googled it and found it also got to №3 in the UK, Norway, New Zealand and Canada too, so maybe it was a general statement.

But what did the music industry and the fans think at the time on its release? Silence. Not good enough.

Deliver Me From Somewhere

I had high hopes (geddit?) for this film, and it wasn’t bad. Average is my assessment. I went with my wife and got a non-fan view. She largely agreed with me, although some references and scenes passed over her head as she’s not a Bruce fan by any means.

The film never explained the significance of The Stone Pony in Bruce history, and she thought it was the name of the band he was playing with there. She also didn’t get the significance of the issues with the technical aspects of the recording, why that was so important, or why the studio versions weren’t working.

Maybe actually hearing the vocal distortion of the cassette recording and comparing it with the studio versions in the film would have helped those less interested in the technical details.

The subplot about Jon Landau’s support for Springsteen’s work and his surrogate father role was possibly the strongest element of the film, helped by Jeremy Strong’s fine performance. I’m left wondering if this shouldn’t have been the main plot.

All in all, it’s not bad, but with lots of nitpicking complaints. Springsteen fans will want to see this film based on it being a significant period in Springsteen history. Just don’t expect something on the level of the very best music biopics.

A free tourist walking tour is never free. There are plenty of ‘free’ walking tours around Camden in North London, the former stomping ground of Amy Winehouse.

At the end of any ‘free’ tour, the guide will suggest a donation for his or her time. £10 a head would be a nice touch, they’ll say with feigned humility. Maybe £15? “I take credit cards,” they add.

We all know this, but when Mrs M found a ‘free’ walking tour of Amy Winehouse’s famous Camden sites through the MeetUp app, we were attracted by the fact that the guide was also a musician who would discuss Amy’s music in detail.

But just before we left to get to the tour, I received an email saying sorry, he’d double-booked himself for a live gig. Yeah, right, he’d got a last-minute booking more like.

Never mind, Mrs M and I know Camden pretty well; we don’t need a guide who has better things to do. I Googled the Amy Winehouse Camden sites and 20 minutes later, off we went anyway.

This tour really would be free. We just forgot it was a holiday weekend.

Camden on a sunny Bank Holiday Saturday afternoon

Camden is known as Camden Town, although it’s an inner London borough. This is the area’s original name from when it wasn’t in London, but a planned new town in the Middlesex countryside, built in 1791.

These days, it’s one of the capital's busier tourist spots at any time, let alone a warm late summer Saturday afternoon on a Bank Holiday weekend.

Mrs M and I hit the holiday and tourist crowds as soon as we stepped into the unairconditioned Tube Train at Euston Station, heading north for Camden. We joined the mass of sweaty bodies pressed together inside a carriage with less space than a can of sardines rammed in with a club hammer.

Luckily, it was just two stops to Camden Town station, where we burst out of the train like corks from a shaken bottle of Cava. Naturally, one escalator was out of action, so we were all funnelled onto the single working mechanical staircase. Only the bleatings of masses of sheep were missing from the scene of the crush from being forced into a narrow exit.

We got on the escalator, through the barriers and stepped out of the station. The High Street and market outside the entrance sparked with colour, noise and the smells of every kind of food from around the globe floating on streams of smoke clouds. The brightly coloured stalls and shops were stuffed full of mass-produced cartoon images of rock stars, nylon football shirts and trashy ashtrays made from sculptured CDs.

And people. Lots and lots of people.

Those on the pavements, and the closed-off to traffic for the holiday weekend High Street, weaved between each other and the stalls, finding tiny gaps and squeezing through. Different music from the shops and market speakers fought each other and lost, dissolving into one huge cacophony.

As we pushed through the crowds, we passed a side street where a DJ played music from a stage at a volume several times louder than a fully loaded Royal Air Force transport plane on takeoff. But less tuneful.

The Good Mixer Pub, 30 Inverness Street

Unfortunately, the DJ stage was in the closed-off to traffic Inverness Street, the site of our first Amy location, The Good Mixer Pub. There will be a lot of pubs on this tour, and many will be as packed as this one was.

Amy Wimehouse drank at the Good Mixer, played pool and sometimes performed. The scene in her biopic Back To Black, where she played pool and met her future husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, was filmed in this pub. It’s where it really happened.

The Tattoo Parlour Mural

Heading back onto the High Street, we find our first Amy mural. It’s in Buck Street, just off the High Road.

The Amy Winehouse statue, Stable Market inside Camden Market

Heading back to the High Street, we passed over Regent’s Canal and Camden Lock on the way to Camden Market. We’d have liked to have walked by the side of the canal and cross over to the Market on the metal footbridge, but that route was what the Spanish call petado.

Petado is a slang word I picked up when I lived in Valencia. They use it to mean packed together in a confined space with no room to move. An accurate description of Camden this weekend.

We shoved ourselves into the Market, ignoring the vendors with nose rings and purple hair selling artisanal products mass-produced in China. It took some time to get to Amy’s statue through the masses, and then more time to take a photo as everyone was lining up for their own shots or walking in front of the camera.

I quickly clicked off two shots before it got too crowded again.

We squeezed back through the masses towards an exit by the London Overground rail bridge.

We rushed across the road and took a moment to calm down. This side of the street was empty; everyone was crammed into the Market and High Street area.

The Hawley Arms, 2 Castledown Road

The next stop was the Hawley Arms, back towards the High Street. This pub by the rail bridge was popular with rock stars in the 2000s, including Amy Winehouse, who was a regular and used to sometimes hop over the bar and serve drinks.

Other stars such as Kate Moss, Liam Gallagher and Pete Doherty were regulars. The pub featured in the Netflix series Baby Reindeer, where it was renamed The Heart. It seems it was where some of the events of the story actually occurred.

The pub still hosts live rock music and, of course, we were planning to have a pint there.

The Amy Winehouse Mural, Stucley Place, behind the Hawley Arms

Silly. It was a summer Bank Holiday weekend and the pub was completely petado. Obviously.

So we moved onto the next Amy site, which is the Amy mural on the wall at the back of the pub and the image I used at the top of the article. Here’s the mural from the other angle. I should have stood by it to get an idea of its size, but I would have come up to her nose.

The Dublin Castle, 94 Parkway

The next stop on our tour was another pub (of course), but also an important London music venue — The Dublin Arms.

Most pubs in Camden have live music, and there are many other live music venues in the area, such as the Jazz Club. Our supposed free tour guide was probably performing at one of them.

We shoved down the High Road, passing the metal record-style discs laid into the pavement of artists who had performed at Camden. It’s known as the Music Walk of Fame, similar to the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

It was far too busy to do this when I was there, andthere is an Amy Winehouse star in the pavement somewhere to seek out when there aren't so many people. I did spot this one by local band, Madness.

We turned right off the High Street and onto Parkway. Suddenly, there were far fewer people, but lots of traffic. You can’t have everything.

The Parkway leads to the Dublin Castle, the location for many of Amy Winehouse’s early gigs. Many of the great British bands have played at this small venue, including Oasis, Blur, The Libertines and Coldplay. Local boys Madness began their career here too in the late 70s.

Mrs M and I thought we’d maybe get that long-awaited pint. It wasn’t busy, but the music on the sound system inside was so loud, it was probably also being heard 5,000 miles away in Camden, Nova Scotia.

Amy Winehouse's home, 30 Camden Square

We left with eardrums ringing and headed for the next location on the Amy Winehouse tour — her former house, a 20-minute walk from her old haunts in the centre of Camden.

We reached the massive semi-detached home at №30 Camden Square, a beautiful, upmarket, tranquil zone opposite a small park and a square.

The house looked to be shut up, although someone else now owns it. The square and tree opposite have been turned into a shrine to Amy Winehouse by fans with messages, pictures and personal vigils.

There is little sound - the fams maintain a silent vigil in the square, and the ambience is very different to the High Street and Market. Some listen to Amy’s music on personal earphones while others just sit quietly and contemplate.

The Flamin’ Eight Tattoo Parlour, 2, Castle Street

Just around the corner from Amy’s home, we found the Lord Stanley, a local Victorian pub in a residential street. There were just a few locals inside and plenty of spare seats and tables. Finally, we could get a beer without noise and crowds.

After we finished, we caught the bus outside the pub for our final stop – The Roundhouse Music Venue. Amy Winehouse had some of her tattoos done at The Flamin’ Eight Tattoo shop, which is between the pub and The Roundhouse; however, we ran out of time to get off the bus to check it out.

The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm

Chalk Farm is the area just north of Camden; it’s the next stop on the Tube. It was never a Chalk Farm, and the soil is London Clay. There is no chalk. Before the area was built up, it was farmland, and the two farms were called Upper and Lower Chalcot Farms.

The Roundhouse is a small but iconic London music venue opposite Chalk Farm Tube station. It was built as a circular train engine workshop in Victorian times and holds just 1500 people. I’ve been many, many times.

The Roundhouse has hosted performances from rock music’s greats, from Jimi Hendrix and The Doors, through to David Bowie, Led Zeppelin and The Clash.

And of course, Amy Winehouse.

Amy Winehouse’s last ever public performance was at the Roundhouse when she made a surprise appearance on 20th July 2011, three days before she died.

The Amy Winehouse tour of Camden

I added the street addresses to each site on the tour, should you wish to do your own truly free Amy Winehouse Walking Tour and not get let down by a double-booked musician.

Once you get to Camden Town Tube Station or Camden Road Overground Station, most locations are easily walkable. If you do the same loop as this article, you’d need to take the bus from Amy’s former home to the tattoo parlour and then the Roundhouse, though.

And it’s probably best not to go on a warm summer bank holiday weekend if you want to avoid crowds.

Probably best not to go on a warm summer bank holiday weekend, either.

English surnames generally come from simple origins. If your surname is Brown, then your ancestors had brown hair. If your name is Little, your ancestor was short; if it’s Armstrong, they were strong.

If your name is Fisher, Smith, Taylor or Baker, then that was the job your ancestor did, and Hill or Brook means they lived near a hill or a brook.

And if your name is London, Manchester or Bristol, then your ancestor came from one of those English cities.

Let’s look at some London-based rock and pop artists who have English placenames for surnames.

Eric Clapton

Many English surnames and place names are derived from Old English. In the case of the name Clapton, it was formed from the Old English words ‘clop’ for hill and ‘ton’ for town. Clopton changed into Clapton over the years, and Clapton therefore means Hill Town.

There are at least five places in England named Clapton, but Clapton in North East London is the best known and not far from my home. 30 years ago, the main road in Clapton was known as the Murder Mile due to the number of gangland killings. Things have improved somewhat since those days, and parts are now gentrified and quite desirable.

Eris Clapton’s ancestor probably came from Clapton in north east London, although he was born just south of the city. But from now on, whenever you listen to Eric Clapton, I know you’ll call him Eric Hill Town.

London Grammar

An Indie rock trio from London, or at least 2/3 of them are. The drummer moved to London from Northampton, so I’ll forgive him. Anyway, they called themselves London Grammar because they were from London, although they’ve never explained where the Grammar suffix came from.

The derivation of the name London is disputed, but it’s certainly from before my Anglo-Saxon and Viking ancestors arrived and kicked the original Celts out about 1,800 years ago. It was called Londinium in Roman times, but that was a Romanisation of the earlier Celtic name, Lowonidoniom.

Once the Romans had gone, the Anglo-Saxons called it Lundenburh, which was shortened to London. Interestingly, we still use the old Anglo-Saxon pronunciation of Lunden for London here.

London (or Lunden) Grammar have had monumental success in the UK, Europe and Australia, much less so in North America for reasons that escape me, although I think I have a good idea why. Whatever, sometimes our nations’ musical tastes coincide, sometimes not.

The Leyton Buzzards

It’s not that I’m biased about these things, but Leyton is very near to my home too.

If you’re not British, you probably wouldn’t get the pun in the name. Leyton is in East London, but Leighton Buzzard is in Bedfordshire, about 46 miles due north of here.

Back to Leyton. You now know the Old English word for town is ton. Ley is the Old English word for Lea, which is the name of the river that flows through Leyton. So Leyton = town on the (River) Lea.

The Leyton Buzzards were a rock group from Leyton. They were best remembered here for a minor UK hit in 1979, Saturday Night (Beneath the Plastic Palm Trees), that name checks a few London areas, and the lyrics use London slang.

Dusty Springfield

Dusty Springfield was from Hampstead in North West London. Dusty Springfield was not her real name, of course, which was Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien, the daughter of Irish immigrants.

Springfield is not in London, though. It’s a suburb it the city of Chelmsford, around 25 miles east of London. Springfield is not Old English like Clapton, but modern English and means exactly what it says, a spring in a field.

We all know and love Dusty. What’s your favourite of her many incredible songs?

Alex Markham

Yes, that’s me. I may not be a music artist as such, but I am a piss artist. I live in London, and I have a surname that’s an English place. That’s close enough.

(I’m unsure if the term piss artist is used outside the UK, but it means a person who wastes their time or is a drunkard. Or both).

There are two places called Markham in England — West Markham and East Markham in Nottinghamshire. West Markham is also known as Little Markham, which I’m not so keen on. But East Markham is also called Great Markham, which is much better.

The name Markham comes from Old English, too. Mearc means boundary, and became mark over time. Ham means village. So, my surname means a village on a boundary.

My ancestors moved from Great Markham (and definitely not Little Markham) to East London around the year 1200. As was common in those days, once my ancestors got to the metropolis, the Londoners called them de Markham, meaning of Markham. The de was eventually dropped since, after a few years, they became Londoners, and not Markhamers.

As a piss artist rather than a music artist, I haven’t yet got around to recording anything that’s on YouTube or Spotify. The recordings of me singing and playing Born To Run and Hey Jude, captured on my phone after a couple of beers, are probably best left there.

Instead, here’s a song about London that, I’m convinced, I could have written and recorded.

Had I not been a piss artist. And if I had Paul Weller’s talent.

Other Rock & Pop Stars With English Placename Surnames

There are a few non-London pop stars with English place names as surnames. US singer Dionne Warwick’s surname is an attractive old market town in the Midlands of England. US musician Billy Preston has the surname of an ancient city in the North West of the country.

Another famous US musician, but with a Welsh town for a surname, was Jeff Buckley - from the Old English Bucc for male deer and leah meaning a woodland clearing.

Brian Wilson’s surname is the same as Wilson, a small village in the Midlands of England. The village name comes from the Old English Wifeles tūn, which means Wifel's village. However, the surname Wilson is more likely to have come from someone who was Wil’s son.

Michael Bolton has the name of a former industrial town in North West England, and back in the UK, Mike Oldfield has a surname that’s a town in the north of England.

Do you know any more rock & pop artists with placenames for surnames?

George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden were definitely not English rock stars, but they did get their surnames from places in England.

Something had changed. Although Help! was released just one year after the Hard Day’s Night film, there was a different tone to the film and the music.

It was The Beatles playing themselves again, and they looked the same, but Help! and the boys wer…

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The problem with London is that when you rock up to see a specific location connected to The Beatles, you get sidetracked by something else that’s also interesting.

Maybe problem isn’t the right word, and I’m not saying anything is more interesting than The Beatles, but there are other interesting things around. Sometimes.

The place I was rocking on to with Mrs M was where The Beatles shot their promotional films for Paperback Writer and Rain in 1966 — Chiswick House & Gardens in West London.

Once we got to Chiswick House, I spotted a sign outside the main gates that pointed to Hogarth’s House, 400 yards away. I’m not a great appreciator of paintings, but William Hogarth holds a special place in the hearts of all Londoners.

This is because Hogarth painted a series of cartoon-like, comic book-style bawdy, satirical pictures that captured everyday life in London during the 18th century. Since they often also contained scenes of sex and drunkenness, you can see the attraction for us then and now.

Obviously, The Beatles were the main reason we rocked on to Chiswick, but before we go there to look at fab places, I think a small diversion is called for.

Hogarth and his traffic jams

Hogath’s name is mentioned every single day in London on the local news and TV traffic updates. That’s because Hogarth has the misfortune to have one of London’s busiest road junctions named after him — Hogarth Roundabout.

The house and gardens where he used to live look a picture of idyllic countryside living, much as they did in the 18th century.

However, this is 2025, not 1750, and London has engulfed the once sleepy village of Chiswick. By the early sixties, Hogarth’s roundabout and flyover had been constructed on the other side of the wall and right behind his house.

Trying to ignore the rumble of 21st-century traffic running past the side of the house, Mrs M and I had a look inside. It was free to enter, and the house has been reconstructed in the style of when Hogarth lived there.

Aside from being next door to somewhere The Beatles went for one day to make a promotional film, there is little to connect William Hogarth and the greatest band in history. Trying desperately to make another Beatles connection, I remembered Hogarth once painted The Enraged Musician.

The musician in the painting can’t work because there’s so much noise going on outside his London house, including a boy urinating up the wall. I doubt The Beatles suffered from this.

The other picture above is called Gin Lane, which isn’t a real lane but was set near to what is now the wealthy area of Covent Garden in London’s West End. In the 18th century, it was an area of high poverty, chronic alcoholism and general intemperance. One in six of all homes there was a place that made and sold gin.

They don’t call it London Gin for no good reason, you know.

Anyway, back to The Beatles, who never professed a great love of gin. In the Get Back film, they were drinking tea all the time. With lots of toast.

No Rain in the Rain

Rain is the greatest B-side in the history of rock and pop; full stop, period, punto final, arrêt complet and punkt.

Paperback Writer was revolutionary enough, but its B-side Rain was the musical tour de force that changed rock & pop and signposted the boys’ transformation into a new musical world and dragged the rest of the world with them.

In Rain we saw, the influence of Indian music in the melody and arrangement, one of rock’s greatest drum accompaniments, one of rock’s greatest counterpoint bass lines, the breaking of so-called music rules, Lennon’s unusual off-kilter vocal delivery that goes against the beat and the innovative studio techniques never before used in music.

So, onto the Rain promotion film locations.

Chiswick House and Twickenham Studios

On May 19th 1966, The Beatles recorded two promotional videos for Rain at Twickenham Studios, also in West London. The next day, they went to Chiswick House to record more promotional films for Rain and also for Paperback Writer.

The films were directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who was the director of the later Let It Be film, of course.

I covered the Paperback Writer promotional film locations at Chiswick House here.

As well as the studio film of the boys playing Rain, they recorded some alternative promotional films in Chiswick House Gardens, which can also be seen in the Anthology documentary.

Here’s the video of the Rain promotional film from the non-studio takes I used for my tour, 59 years later. And to remind yourself of what genius sounds and looks like.

The first place we went to, once we got to Chiswick House, was the conservatory. They filmed some scenes for Paperback Writer here and some alternative scenes for Rain.

The Beatles played around in the conservatory area to the right of the photo for the Rain film. Since I couldn’t enter and pretend to be a cool Beatle because it was closed off, I took a photo through a window at the end.

Mrs M and I then wandered over to where I think they next played in the film. I say think because there’s no information I could find that showed exactly where this scene was filmed, but it looked like the right location to me.

One of the most famous scenes is where the boys play under a giant cedar tree while Ringo sits on a plinth. On the way there, we took another diversion for a walk by the river that flows through the gardens. Maybe Hogarth once strolled here while thinking about his next painting. Maybe he walked where The Beatles would walk 200 years later.

Or maybe not.

I recognised the cedar tree in the Gardens from the Rain video as soon as I saw it, diagonally opposite to where the boys shot the Paperback Writer scenes by the statues.

OK, maybe I manipulated the screenshot from the video a little, but I was there, albeit 59 years later.

I guess Beatles fanatics like me used to climb into the tree and do the Ringo sitting pose on the plinth, so it’s now roped off and they’ve put something on top of the plinth to stop people sitting there.

Mrs M was confused at the end of the photo shoot because I’d normally want a beer or glass of wine, but I insisted we go to the café in the Chiswick House grounds. I told her I wanted to sit outside under the giant awning and have lemonade.

She thought I was going crazy, so I explained: I want to slip into the shade and drink our lemonade, especially when the senihs nus.

That didn’t help her to understand, but I ask you, what else would you do after an afternoon following in the Beatles’ Rain footsteps?

PS, I explained to Mrs M why we had to have lemonade in the shade and what senihs nus means and why. I decided not to mention sdeah reiht edih dna nur yeht, semoc niar eht fi.

Do I really want to pay £106 to see an artist perform on a distant stage in a large, soulless football stadium; 3 miles from the city centre; with watered down beer and rubbish food at a 250% premium (or more); a seat so far away I have to watch the musicians on a giant screen; the wind blows the sound out and onto the Irish Sea and then, the artist wastes my time and ticket money ranting about foreign politics?

Sorry, Bruce mate, but I didn’t vote for the charlatan you don’t like because I’m not from the USA. Not my problem, mate, it’s yours and I can’t do anything about it, so just get on with the music, will you? You charge a lot of money to see you play rock concerts and I don’t want to spend my money and time listening to you have a political rally.

Bruce has pushed my patience more than others with his recent antics — dynamic pricing, doing bugger all about ticket scalpers, selling priority tickets through corporate sponsors rather than fans and trying to flog 30-year-old reject album sets for an eye-watering £280 a pop. Now he’s spouting on about US politicians to a British audience and charging us to listen to it.

His behaviour has helped me to re-focus on a better way to enjoy live music, buy tickets and spend £106.

Yep, I put my Springsteen Liverpool concert ticket up for resale through Ticketmaster (grits teeth at having to write that name). I’m not going to experience anything I wrote about in the first paragraph. Instead, I spent my £106 I saved from reselling my Springsteen ticket on five (5!) events that were a far better experience.

A day in the sun (1)

I’m not sitting on a hard plastic seat in a damp, windy stadium in a dodgy suburb of Liverpool listening to someone on a large screen give a rally against Donald Trump. Nor am I wandering the streets at 11pm, wondering how to get back to my over-priced Airbnb 3 miles away in the city centre without getting mugged.

I’m not 220 miles from London, but in Chelmsford, an attractive city about 30 miles from my home. OK, it’s not London like I said in this article title, but not far and I’m in the queue to enter the County Ground — a cricket stadium on the edge of Chelmsford city centre, 10 minutes walk from the main station.

I’m here to watch my team, Essex, play cricket by the side of the River Chelmer in the sun. And they play for six hours, not Bruce’s three, although to be fair, the players are in their twenties, not 75. But they concentrate on what I paid to see, which is to play cricket, not rant about politics.

I love watching cricket as much as I love going to rock concerts, and I have four 440ml cans of IPA in a cool bag, beef and tomato sandwiches, chocolate and a flask of coffee in my rucksack. This is because they let you take in your own food and drink rather than ban it and charge you a fortune for cheap rubbish. And you can eat and drink at your seat while watching the game.

Now that’s what I call civilised.

I paid just £16 for the entry ticket that I bought from the Essex Cricket website, which will remain at £16 because they don’t use Ticketmaster. Since Bruce’s political rally with some rock music cost £106, I have £90 left to spend.

An evening with Eddie Elgar and Sergei

Next up is not a classic rock concert, but a classical concert in Central London. Unlike Bruce, the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra came to London. And the seats are not plastic but padded. And it’s inside, so there’s no wind to carry the sound away. And the orchestra are about 30ft away, not a quarter of a mile.

I’m at the Barbican Theatre in central London with my wife; it’s a ten-minute walk from Liverpool Street Station, which takes me directly home after the gig.

The orchestra played pieces from my two favourite classical composers, Edward Elgar and Sergei Rachmaninoff. The conductor explains some of the music they play, but doesn’t mention foreign politics once, even though he’s from South America and they have their fair share of charlatans too.

I guess he reasoned we’d paid to listen to music. Maybe he could have a quiet word with Bruce when he got back to Liverpool with the orchestra.

And the price to see one of the best orchestras in the country play some of my favourite music and to enjoy it with Mrs M? £27 each. I still have £63 left.

An afternoon with Pete Docherty

Two days later, and it’s nearly 4pm. I’m standing in a queue outside Rough Trade record store in East London with Mrs M. We have tickets to see Pete Doherty, one of our favourite rock artists. He’s playing a solo acoustic gig in a still slightly gritty former light industrial area, but now a trendy and bohemian district.

Rough Trade push the record shelves to one side every so often and put on an intimate gig and record signing. The place holds 300. So much nicer than a giant, sterile football stadium.

In between songs, Docherty tells us how he used to live in East London and about some of the songs he wrote there with Carl Barat, his former bandmate in the Libertines. He explains how he wrote a couple of his UK hits in his apartment in a street near to the Rough Trade store.

That had a tad more relevance to the London audience than anything Bruce had to say at his UK concerts. Pete Docherty is political too, but he chooses to convey his messages in the lyrics to his songs. Take note, Mr Springsteen.

Here’s a video from the show; it’s a song from his new album. Instead of going on about foreign politicians or any politics at all, he explained how it was a song about a friend of his who is a West Ham fan, like me. West Ham are an East London football team. We’re an East London audience. Relevance. A shared connection between the artist and the audience.

And the cost to see one of the UK’s premier rock artists play live and tell anecdotes about London rather than go on about some orange man from some place called Mar A Lago, where ever the hell that is, all from about six feet away, and to pick up a signed copy of his latest vinyl album?

£26.

Docherty’s unsigned album sells at £22, so we get to see a live rock gig for £4 each, as I’d have bought the disc anyway. We’re selling Mrs M’s album on eBay for £26, so it’s nil cost for her.

Rough Trade don’t use Ticketmaster but British ticket sellers Dice, so the price not only remained at £26 despite being sold out, but when I made a mistake with my order, I emailed Dice to change it. 30 minutes later, Dice made the change and emailed me back to check I was happy.

Oh yes, I was very happy indeed, and I still have £59 remaining.

A day in the sun (2)

That £59 is burning a hole in my pocket, but guess what? Two days after Peter Docherty played at Rough Trade, Essex are playing another game, this time against Surrey at the Oval. The Oval’s in London. Not Liverpool.

I’m now waiting for my brother-in-law, Peter, outside the Oval Cricket Ground in my sunglasses and a peaked cap with the rucksack full of…, well, you know what.

The tickets this time are £15 each as we saved the £1 online booking fee by buying at the ground. Every penny counts, even when you have £44 left from reselling the ticket to Bruce’s US political rally held in the UK.

So I blew £4 each on two chocolate-covered ice creams inside the ground after we’d drunk all the IPAs and the bottle of Pinot Noir that Peter had brought in his rucksack. I know four quid is a bit steep for an ice cream, but I was feeling flush as I still had £44.

And there’s more…

West Ham have a pre-season friendly football match against a top European team in August. It’s in Stratford, East London, not 3 miles from Liverpool city centre and 220 miles away.

My remaining £36, after splashing out on those ice creams at The Oval, will cover the entrance ticket plus a ticket for my granddaughter. The change will get us a pricey chocolate ice cream each.

I’d say this was all a far better use for my £106, wouldn’t you?

Dear Sir or Madam, what’s your favourite Beatles song?

You might choose I Want To Hold Your Hand, Hey Jude, In My Life, Let It Be or A Day In The Life. Perhaps you’d go for Something, Come Together or Yesterday.

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I take the 30-minute trip to Islington in North London by public transport so often that you might think I should move there.

No chance.

It’s not that I don’t want to, but that Islington is not exactly the cheapest area of London. I saw a one-bed flat for sale in an estate agent’s window in the high street there for £1.4M. See what I mean?

Going down to Upper Street

So on Thursday 1st May, Workers' Day or whatever they call it, I dragged the long-suffering Mrs M once again to Upper Street in Islington. This time it was to see Jesse Malin at Islington Assembly Hall on the hottest May 1st in UK history — 29°C.

The Assembly Hall is a venue with no AC. Great.

Jesse Malin is one of my all-time favourite artists and I’m bemused he’s not almost as big as Bruce, but clearly I’m one of the few with any taste in the world of rock music.

Mrs M wasn’t originally due to come along with me as she had something else on that day, but that got cancelled at the last minute, so she had no excuse.

Anyway, I bribed her to go with me.

Bribery is fairly easy if you’re going to Islington since Upper Street is over a mile long and chock-full of trendy shops, bars, pubs, restaurants, wine bars and goodness knows what else. More importantly, there are at least five incredible music venues. You can see the attraction for me.

The Hope And Anchor pub on Upper Street was one of London’s most important punk-rock venues in the 70s and 80s. The Stranglers recorded their album, Live At The Hope And Anchor there back in the day.

There’s also the Union Chapel, a working church that hosts folk-rock gigs. It’s a cool place although, if you have a bony bum like me, it’s a tad uncomfortable after a while as the wooden pews are rock hard. Bring a cushion.

Upper Street was laid down in the 12th century and by the 16th century, Sir Walter Raleigh lived there. He also owned a pub in the street, but that’s long gone and no one knows exactly where it was. However, the Bull pub in Upper Street was built on the site of his former house. Appropriate in the circumstances I suppose.

The area around the bottom part of Upper Street is called Angel and, this being England, it was named after a pub called the Angel, which is also long gone. Upper Street is a location in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and Charles Dickens mentions Angel in Oliver Twist. The area, not the pub.

Dickens described Upper Street as one of the “One of the noisiest and most disagreeable streets in London”. In Victorian times, it was known as the Devil’s Mile because of the high levels of noise, drunkenness, prostitution and crime.

Upper Street bribery

Scroll forward to 2025 and things are very different. Maybe not the noise and drunkenness now I think about it.

We got there a couple of hours before the concert and wandered the shops (as part of the bribery thing) and then found a French restaurant (bribery thing) where we had a pre-gig meal outside — this being the hottest May 1st on record.

Then it was off to the 890 capacity Assembly Hall to see the man and his band. The only snag was I’d bought the tickets off the wait list and all that were available were the downstairs standing tickets. I don’t do standing if I can help it these days, but the gig had sold out before I saw it was on, so wait list and standing it was.

Mrs M found a wide radiator to perch on for the duration, but I stood so I could see better. Being tall has many benefits and being able to see in a live concert is probably the main one. Less so for those behind me.

Jesse Malin live

There are pluses and minuses to Islington Assembly Hall as a venue. On the plus side, there are two bars downstairs and two upstairs. Another plus is that it’s an historic and atmospheric 1930 Art Deco building with lots of original features, including the original ashtrays in the upstairs balcony seats and lots of original interior Art Deco features.

On the minus side, there’s no air-conditioning. I’m guessing because it’s too difficult to install in such an historic and protected building. You can’t go drilling holes for pipes in the original Art Deco bits. Did I mention it was 29°C that day? Probably more inside.

After a support act, Jesse Malin and his band came on stage to a recording of Memory Motel by The Rolling Stones. They began the concert sitting down — Malin suffered a spinal stroke in 2023 and can only walk with a walking frame. The other band members respectfully sat too.

You would never believe they were sitting from the energy of the music if you didn’t see it. Like Springsteen, Malin is an artist who sounds and performs better live than in the studio. And like the E-Street Band, Malin’s band are one of the tightest bands you’ll ever hear with an energy impossible to capture in a studio.

I’ve got two of his live albums for this very reason.

Although smaller in number than the E-Street Band (who isn’t) and the pianist is no Roy Bittan (who is?), they are otherwise treading on their heels as one of the best live rock bands I’ve seen. Derek Cruz is a superb lead guitarist and drummer Paul Garisto has a Mighty Max power thing going on.

Malin played many of the songs from the recent Silver Patron Saints album, which he told us was his best-selling album and the only one of his albums he doesn’t actually appear on.

That’s because Silver Patron Saints was made as a charity double album to help pay for his medical bills following the spinal stroke while he was in Buenos Aires receiving treatment. Many great musicians such as Bruce Springsteen, Counting Crows, Lucinda Williams, Elvis Costello, Susanna Hoffs, The Wallflowers and many others did cover versions of Malin’s songs from across his career.

Malin also threw in a couple of covers on the night— one from the New York Dolls (I’ve forgotten the title) and Sway from The Stones’ Sticky Fingers, which showcased the influences you can hear in his own songs.

Occasionally, Malin would haul himself to his feet using the microphone stand and perform some songs standing, albeit holding on to the stand. Despite this, his voice was strong, powerful and emotional and the crowd roared their support. Mrs M told me it was one of the most lively and vocal crowds she’d seen at an English concert.

Throughout the performance, Malin amused us with his anecdotes and stories told in a broad Noo Yoick accent. He also described the story of his collapse in a restaurant with the spinal stroke. We heard how he went to Buenos Aires for specialist spinal stroke treatment after his Noo Yoick doctors told him he’d never walk again.

Malin did the encore without leaving the stage or the mic when he was joined by a couple of guest artists from the world of punk rock, including guitarist Ginger Wildheart and a great appearance from Charlie Harper from the UK Subs.

They covered the UK Subs’ classic, Party In Paris. Before Harper came on, Malin gave us another anecdote about meeting Harper in New York and described him as another of his influences.

Live music is the best, especially Malin’s

This was an extraordinary live concert from a charismatic artist who is still overcoming serious adversity. Like Lucinda Williams, who had a stroke in 2020 and also struggles to walk, he refuses to give in.

I bought the CD version of Silver Patron Saints at the gig, which at £15 was not only cheaper than on Amazon, but was signed by Jesse Malin. Result.

Live gigs in smaller venues like the Assembly Hall are so much better than those in football stadiums, especially when you have artists at the top of the game. Like the amazing Jesse Malin and his band. Incredible.

AC would have been nice, though.

Article and photos © Alex Markham 2025

It’s a hot town and summer-like in the city of London as I write this, and although I’m a cool cat, I’m not looking for a kitty because I already have one.

If that first paraphrased sentence makes no sense to you, you’re probably under 65 and not into the music of 1966.

As I write this, it’s a wonderfully sunny and summery 22°C here in this hot town and summer in the city of London, with the promise of 30°C by Thursday. I’ll be in a sweaty Islington Assembly Hall in North London on Thursday evening watching the amazing Jesse Malin live. I hope the AC is working well.

It gets even better for us Londoners because the cricket season has begun. May is the time of the year when the football season winds down and the cricket season winds up. Although there are two professional cricket teams in London, most of us in the east of our hot town summer in the city support a cricket team not based in London.

Why’s that, you may ask if you’re not from England? That would be a fair question, especially once you know that we tend to follow sports teams that represent our local areas.

The answer is that much of East London wasn’t London about 150 years ago, but in the county of Essex, which is the cricket team we support, and our parents supported, and our grandparents, and our great-grandparents. Probably our great-great-grandparents would have too if cricket had been organised that far back,

Whilst they lived in the same general area as where I live now, it wasn’t East London back then, but Essex. And 150 years ago is yesterday in our ancient land.

Ot was probably just green fields, trees and villages 150 years ago. It must have been awful. I much prefer concrete, Islington Assembly Hall, cricket and Jesse Malin concerts.

Although Islington wasn’t always in North London either, but in a county called Middlesex that used to be next to Essex. Unlike Essex, Middlesex no longer exists because hot town London swallowed it all up, including the professional cricket team called Middlesex.

This being England, however, the cricket team is still called Middlesex, the local hospital is called North Middlesex Hospital (yes there is a West and a Central Middlesex Hospital too) and the British Post Office still uses Middlesex in the postal addresses. Even though it doesn’t actually exist any more. But what’s a 150 years but a mere blip in time? I’m sure we’ll get round to the renaming thing in a few hundred years.

Essex still exists, and I live where it used to be, although it’s a lot smaller than it was in my grandparents’ days. That’s because London chewed up the west bit, cut down all the trees, built thousands of houses, laid miles of beautiful concrete and tarmac over all that nasty grass and kicked the cows out.

Anyway, to celebrate the summer-like weather where it’s hotter than a match head (1966 music, remember?), the London, Essex and Middlesex heatwave, the cricket season and that John Lennon thought Buddy Holly named The Crickets after the game, here are four of my favourite songs about cricket.

Yep, we Brits have songs about cricket. We also use a lot of cricket expressions. It’s Not Cricket by Squeeze is not about cricket, though, but uses the British expression it’s not cricket to describe something unfair. We also use on a sticky wicket to talk about a difficult situation, have a good innings to talk about someone having a long and successful life, bowled over meaning to be impressed, to be hit for six to be shocked and to be stumped, which means to be unable to solve a difficult problem.

Howzat by Sherbet

Howzat is the shout cricket fielders make when appealing to the umpire for a batter to be out. For some dismissals, the fielders need to appeal (call out howzat) to the umpire before they can make a decision.

Howzat is a contraction of How’s that?

Naturally, Sherbet were an Australian band and this 1976 song got to №4 in the UK and to №1 in those other great cricketing nations of Oz, New Zealand, South Africa and, er, Israel.

You will often hear this played at cricket grounds during one-day games when a batter is given out.

Cricket by The Kinks

It’s no surprise that the most English of bands made many references in their songs to cricket, the most English of games.

Cricket uses several metaphors based on cricket to describe the challenges of life and the battle against temptation and evil. The Kinks were from Middlesex, I mean North London, and Ray Davies was clearly a cricket fan as he uses terms only a cricket fan would understand to make his points — googly, straight bat, leg break, off spin and of course, LBW.

If you want to know what all these terms mean, let me in in the comments or ask via message.

The Age of Revolution by the Duckworth-Lewis Method

Only Neil Hannon of Divine Comedy would come with a band named after a complicated mathematical formula used in cricket to calculate a target score in a match interrupted by rain.

And only Neil Hannon would combine with Thomas Walsh to make a concept album based entirely on cricket. My kind of musician.

And only Neil Hannon would then perform one of the songs from the album live on BBC TV during the lunch break of a cricket match between England and Australia. Definitely my kind of musician.

The Age of Revolution is about the spread of cricket through the British colonies, which just goes to show what a great institution the British Empire was and how the USA left us a little too hastily as we hadn’t yet invented the game in 1776. You guys missed out. Big time.

When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease by Roy Harper

My favourite cricket song of them all. This melancholic song captures the atmosphere of a village cricket match. The title uses the cricket term, the crease, which is the area of the pitch where the batter stands when facing the bowler. The batter leaves the crease when he’s given out (maybe after a shout of howzat), so the lyrics are also a metaphor for death and for times long past.

Were you bowled over by these cricket songs?

I hope these songs hit you for 6 and that the back of your neck isn’t getting dirty and gritty.

You would think a film based on Lennon’s only full-length solo live concert would be the most wonderful event of the year for a Beatles & Lennon obsessive like me.

You’d be wrong.

Monday, April 14th, started well enough. It was an unseasonably warm and sunny day in London and we’d planned to go and see One To One, the new John Lennon and Yoko Ono film. I was far too excited to eat breakfast because I was thinking about the film—Beatle-associated stuff does that to me; my mental age ceased to develop after the age of 13 and 3/4 and I’m still like a teenage fan despite the physical evidence.

I’d persuaded the long-suffering Mrs M to come with me to see One To One at the nearby Picturehouse Cinema in Hackney, north-east London. The film is on limited release so it wasn’t on at our local Odeon but at the more expensive and arty cinemas.

The stoic Mrs M is long-suffering as in having to share me with The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen and West Ham.

“What showing would you like to go to today, 14.40 or 20.20?” she asked me over breakfast coffee, before realising the moment she said it that my answer would be 14.40. I’d already had to wait over the weekend for this, so the later showing would be a step too far. I was in danger of exploding with a barely repressed yearning to see John Lennon in remastered concert footage.

The brilliance of the McCartney and Wings One Hand Clapping film last year still plays in my head and I wanted more of the same. Mrs M also enjoyed Macca’s One Hand Clapping and she likes John Lennon’s work too so she reckoned she wouldn’t be suffering this time.

What could ever go wrong?

The Murder Mile

I first visited Hackney about 35 years ago to visit friends who lived there. It was a tad different in those days and there was definitely no arty Picturehouse Cinema. Hackney was then the poorest area in the UK and my friends were newly wed and could only afford to live in Hackney.

They were horrified that I’d turned up in a brand new upmarket saloon car and my business suit as I came directly from the office. We had to spend my entire visit keeping an eye on the car and they told me I should leave before it got dark when they bolted the doors and stayed inside until morning.

In those days, Hackney was also the most dangerous borough in the UK, with rival drug gangs openly fighting each other in the area. One Hackney street was known as the Murder Mile due to the number of shootings and murders there, often in broad daylight.

Things are a little different these days thankfully and Hackney is now considered gentrified and wealthy, although still edgy in parts.

Hackney is a 20-minute journey from where we live by London’s Overground— the train line is called The Weaver Line since Hackney was the centre of London’s textile and weaving industry once upon a long ago. It’s better to go by train than to leave a car in the side streets behind the cinema, even now.

The trendy middle-class Picturehouse Cinema, where One To One was being shown, is on the high street opposite the beautiful Hackney Empire Theatre. This fabulous theatre is next to derelict, boarded-up and rundown shops defaced with graffiti on one side and the attractive art deco Town Hall on the other but that’s Hackney.

The Beatles never played at the Empire as the stage was too small for the band — they played at nearby Walthamstow instead, which sounds like a future article. Stay tuned.

Hackney high street is called Mare Street and it was built in the 15th century when Hackney was a small town in the countryside outside London. Mare means boundary in Old English as the new street ran along the boundary between what are today two London boroughs but was then two towns separated by green fields and woods.

Mare Street is just over a mile from the Murder Mile, which was another relief since the last shooting was only a couple of years ago. This goes to show how edgy the area remains.

Giving peace a chance

There’s little chance of giving peace a chance in Hackney Central and Mare Street. The area gives me a headache as it’s so busy and noisy —there are always too many people, constant roadworks and too much traffic.

The old St Augustine church grounds, beyond the railway bridge, are a place to give peace a chance though. You can pop in there to recover from your headache as it’s now a public green space with the ancient gravestones moved to the right against the wall. Only the former church tower, built in 1590, remains after the rest was demolished in the 1790s when they built a new church.

One To One

Headache over, we walked 5 minutes or so to the trendy Picturehouse Cinema. We entered a peaceful world of craft beers, artisan burgers behind double-glazed windows and staff calling us Sir and Madam.

Those who read my articles regularly will know that the reason I waited four days to see John Lennon was because Mondays at the Picturehouse are half-price and I can be a bit tight. Why pay double?

The film began; I could hardly keep still with anticipation. I’ve not seen the DVD of the One To One concert, so this was to be new for me. Besides, I read they’d remastered the picture and sound and it was on a big screen with big sound.

Just like McCartney’s One Hand Clapping, then.

No.

I quickly saw this was not a film for Lennon fans but for arty critics who are not Lennon fans and those from the USA who enjoy historic footage of the events and commercials from their country in the early seventies. I like to see these kinds of programmes about UK history so I get that. I’d still be pissed off if it was mixed up with occassional footage of a John Lennon live concert though. Like this was.

There were so many political clips, I’d swear there was more footage of Richard Nixon in the so-called John and Yoko One To One film than of John Lennon. Did we really need to see so many clips of Nixon campaigning, Nixon speaking, Nixon at events, Nixon on TV, Nixon, Nixon, Nixon?

The film was more a constantly flashing montage of US politics and events of the period and those involved, rather than the One To One charity concert for severely disabled kids the title implied.

I did find out who John Sinclair was from the Lennon song of the same name. Not that I was remotely interested enough to ever Google it and I think I’ve already forgotten.

I know Lennon spent a lot of time watching TV in his flat in Greenwich Village and became immersed in US politics, especially campaigning against the Vietnam War. But for a British Lennon fan, watching the film cutting rapidly between US TV commercials that were meaningless to me and US politicians I was at best only vaguely aware of, this was all boring with a capital B. Mrs M fell asleep several times during the film and I don’t blame her.

I remained awake through sheer force of mind, waiting for another snippet of Lennon in concert only to become ever more annoyed as director, Kevin MacDonald, thought it a good idea to switch away from fantastric shots Lennon performing live to show yet more flashing snippets of US TV commercials and unknown (to me) US politicians and obscure (to me) US TV personalities.

We got lots of footage of someone called Jerry Rubin, whom I’d never heard of. He spoke in clichés and inanities while thinking he was rather clever and looking smug. It seems Lennon became friendly with him and they often shared a platform on social reform but I was left thinking, so what?

There were also a lot of clips about a politician called George Wallace, whose name is lodged somewhere in the back of my brain for some reason. I wasn’t sure why, nor was I interested, having come to watch remastered footage of John Lennon’s only solo concert. Ever.

Or did I write that already?

It seems this George Wallace person got shot for some reason, although I have no idea why, nor do I care. Maybe they explained it in the film but I’d possibly lost my fight against dozing at that point if so. We saw the Wallace shooting on screen from a contemporary TV news report instead of seeing John Lennon singing Well Well Well. Live. In concert. The only concert he ever did solo. For disabled kids. Not for George Wallace. Whoever he is. Or was. Who knows? Who cares?

There was another TV news report on the film that showed Wallace in hospital and in recovery, I think, although my mind had wandered off at that point and onto the subject of the cinema speakers. I wondered what wattage they were because the Lennon live songs sounded rather good during the few times they were on. When they weren’t showing scenes of US politicians talking politican stuff.

Maybe this shooting of this Wallace politician was meant to be some kind of analogy for what sadly happened to Lennon just a few years later, I’m not sure but I don’t think so.

There were also lots of scenes of something that happened at a place called Attica which I know to be the region of Greece that includes Athens. I was therefore a little confused for a bit until it became clearer that this was also the name of a prison somewhere in the US where a large number of people died at the hands of the police during a riot.

I’m guessing these scenes were put in because Lennon wrote a song called Attica State about the riot but it was hard to follow as the film was jerking incoherently all over the place and I don’t recall the song being mentioned. I might have dozed off, so I can’t be sure. The director never thought to play Lennon’s Attica State song over the scenes, which would have made things more coherent; this being ostensibly a Lennon film after all.

They missed entirely the connection to Lennon’s murderer, Mark Chapman, who was incarcerated in Attica prison (as opposed to Attica, Greece) after his conviction. This is a far more relevant fact to Lennon fans attending a supposed Lennon film than lots of news footage from the period on the riots.

We also had long periods in the film of recordings of Lennon’s phone calls — he recorded the calls, fearing correctly that he was being bugged by the US authorities. On screen, we had ticker tape type lines of subtitles on a split screen of what was being said on the calls. I’m guessing the words were on the screen because the director couldn’t think of anything else to put there since we could all hear quite clearly what was being said.

We had Lennon or Yoko’s words on one side of the screen and the other person on the other side of the screen. I’m falling asleep just writing about this.

Several of these calls were about Yoko wanting to acquire flies for an art exhibition or something. The film kept returning to the issue of how Yoko was going to find a load of flies.

Mrs M fell asleep again during one of the fly conversations about how long flies live. I held my eyes open with two fingers while plaintively looking at the green EXIT sign and humming Imagine to keep my spirits up as I waited for a Lennon in-concert clip to come along and revive me.

Watch the Concert DVD if you’re a Lennon fan

The film has received good reviews from some film critics which is always a red warning sign with a klaxon. If you’re someone from the US who lived there during this period and is interested in the tumultuous events of the early ’70s in your country, you’re probably going to enjoy this and you would also enjoy seeing the old TV commercials.

If you’re a Lennon fan not over 70 and not from the USA and have little interest in watching jerky snippets of news events and TV commercials from a foreign country and just want to see footage of your hero and to see him performing his only full solo live concert, get the DVD of the concert. It won’t be restored like the disjointed clips of the One To One concert in the film but it will be about Lennon.

And there will be no painful phone conversations about flies.

I’ll give One To One a total of 1 star for the too few parts where we saw the restored footage of Lennon in concert and for the harrowing footage of the poor, severely disabled and neglected children who inspired Lennon to put on the One To One concert. It was the title of this film after all.

There should have been much more on those poor kids and the outcome of their plight following the concert and less Richard Nixon and that Jerry person whose surname I’ve already forgotten.

I’ll give no stars to the 4/5 of the film, apparently directed by someone from the American History Channel suffering from some form of severe attention deficit.

How I wish Peter Jackson had got hold of the concert footage first.

I didn’t think too much about Jimi Hendrix or Frederick* Handel until I started teaching English.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like their music, I did, it was just that I was more absorbed by the rock music of The Beatles, Springsteen, Paul Weller, The Stones and the like, and by a preference for the melodies of Rachmaninov and Chopin in classical.

I then got into Hendrix and Handel a little more around 11 years ago when I changed career direction. I received an English Language teaching qualification and went to teach in an international language school in Mayfair in the West End of London.

I hadn’t planned to work there, I’d planned to be a private tutor because it was more money and because I was fed up with working for someone else. However, once I’d qualified, the school offered me a job and I thought it might be good practice and besides, I’d get paid.

I only stayed at the school for a few months before I branched out to become the private tutor I’d planned to be. My favourite lessons at the school were the one-to-one lessons I used to give to a former senior Spanish executive of a global banking company. He’d moved to Mayfair from Madrid with his job and stayed there when he retired.

This gentleman loved football but, although he spoke good English, he didn’t understand the language of football used on TV and in the press. Why did teams want a clean sheet in every game? he wanted to know. What was a dummy, Fergie time, hairdryer treatment, hoof it, in the hole, a nutmeg or a false 9? And why did teams sometimes park the bus?

The school knew exactly which tutor could help him with this. Maybe that’s the reason they recruited me. Whatever the reasons, getting paid for talking about football is surely a job made in heaven. Sadly, I didn’t have a student wanting to talk about music but you can’t have everything.

It was one lunchtime, after a particularly good lesson discussing the importance of a fox in the box and why someone who dribbles is a good thing in football, that I went for a stroll.

I needed to build up the energy for my next class, teaching 15 Italian teenagers how to pass the International English Language Teaching System exam.

I didn’t get far on the stroll because at the end of the street, about a minute or two from the school, runs Brook Street and my eyes were instantly attracted to two of those blue English Heritage circular plaques we have in England. They were attached to two adjacent buildings on the other side of the street.

English Heritage plaques are put up on buildings where someone historic or notable lived or worked, so they are always worth a read. London is probably the most historic city in the world for rock music and music in general, in my somewhat less-than-biased opinion. I’ve found quite a few music-related historic buildings by reading these plaques, such as Brian Epstein’s former offices near Covent Garden.

These particular plaques told me that Jimi Hendrix lived in the top flat of №23 Brook Street, the white building, while ‘Fredi’ Handel lived next door at №25.

The museum at that time was just the Handel part and even then, the whole building hadn’t been restored. Hendrix’s former flat was used as a storage room for the Handel Museum. Scroll forward to today and I found that the entire Handel house has been fully restored in the style of when Handel lived there. But also, Hendrix’s restored flat next door had been added to the exhibition.

And now I could explore the connections between two of music’s greatest composers and artists.

They were both adopted Brits

Whilst Hendrix and Handel were born abroad, most of their iconic work and their greatest successes occurred after moving to London.

US-born Jimi Hendrix was discovered by Keith Richards’ girlfriend at the time, Londoner and fashion model Linda Keith. She recommended him to former Animal bassist and music manager Chas Chandler, who brought him to London where he became wildly popular and successful.

Jim Hendrix eventually settled in 23 Brook Street. His bedroom was reconstructed based on photos and the memories of his girlfriend and others who visited.

German-born ‘Fredi’ Handel decided to settle in London too, probably because he was getting a lot of work composing for the British Royal Family.

Both Jimi and Fredi were therefore adopted Brits and in Handel’s case, he became a naturalised Brit. Here’s the reconstructed room where Fredi used to do his composing and where he wrote The Messiah, the original rock opera.

Neighbours

As I discovered from the blue plaques 11 years ago, Jimi and Fredi lived next door to each other, separated by two centuries, in Brook Street in Mayfair, London. It’s amazing to explore the ancient alleys behind their homes and know that both Jimi Hendrix and, before him, Handel, wandered these same alleyways.

I’m not sure what Handel would have made of the electric guitar or Hendrix’s rock music and playing techniques, but on finding out that Handel had lived next door, Hendrix bought Handel’s records and particularly enjoyed The Messiah.

The photo below is a reconstruction of Hendrix’s bedroom at 23 Brook Street with some of his favourite records — Dylan, Handel’s Messiah and, of course, Sgt Pepper’s by The Beatles. Hendrix famously played the title track live in front of the Beatles (unknowingly) at London’s Saville Theatre two days after its release.

Hairstyles

Both wore their hair long and curly although to be fair, Handel’s was a wig.

Both died in London

Both musical superstars died in London. Fredi passed away at his home at 25 Brook Street at 74. He was given a state funeral at Westminster Abbey where he was buried.

Jimi Hendrix, as we know, joined the 27 Club and was returned to his home city of Seattle for a private burial. Hendrix had left the flat at №23 after breaking up with his girlfriend at the time, Kathy Etchingham.

Hendrix died at his new girlfriend’s flat in what is now the Samarkand Hotel. He was living at the Cumberland Hotel, about a 15-minute walk from Brook Street. The Cumberland commemorates his time there with a picture on a door and a suite in Hendrix’s style, which you have to pay a lot of money to stay in so obviously, I don’t have a photo.

London’s music neighbours

It was a remarkable coincidence that Jimi and Fredi lived next door to one another, albeit separated by 250 years. It’s a fascinating juxtaposition of Hendrix’s rock and roll lifestyle and music with that of the more traditional and wealthy Handel and his baroque style.

*Although Handel’s first name was, of course, George Frideric, he is often known as Frederick in England and this therefore gives me an excuse to call him Fredi.

Yesterday began as just another day, until it wasn’t.

The calico skies above this eastern suburb on the grey edge of London Town grew heavy with rain clouds. There were to be no blue suburban skies that day. It was a little after 7am when James jogged from the footpath to his front door. The heavy drizzle that had accompanied him on his 3-mile run now turned to driving rain.

This story was inspired by the title of Paul McCartney's song "An Ever Present Past." I then set the story in East London and incorporated 78 other Paul McCartney song titles and references within the text. Can you identify them all without viewing the answers at the bottom?

His neighbour’s young daughter, Michelle, trotted to her front gate humming Mary Had A Little Lamb, dressed in a red plastic mac with her hood up and unperturbed by the bad weather. She smiled and called out, “Good morning good morning, Mr Laine.” She was on the way to her girls’ school.

He held up a hand and said, “Not too much rain, I hope,” and smiled back at her.

Michelle skipped off doing figure-of-eight steps through the puddles on the pavement. He closed the front door gently behind him. He’d need to rinse the raindrops from his drenched running top and shorts. His thighs stung with the icy cold.

The light was on in the kitchen; he could have sworn he’d turned it off. He strolled to the kitchen.

His wife, Penny, sat at the table and looked up. “Hello, Winston, did you have a nice run?” A faint smile flickered on her lips and her eyes glistened.

He froze in mid-step. His mouth dropped open as if someone had cut the tendons on his jaw with a razor-sharp cutlass. His name was James. Winston was his dear friend.

That wasn’t the biggest shock.

Penny had left home exactly five years ago. She went to the shops one morning and never returned. It seemed like once upon a long ago.

Penny leant down and lifted a 500-gramme bag of basmati rice from a plastic shopping bag by her feet and dumped it onto the table. He remained fixed to the spot in shock while she hummed silly love songs as if everything was normal.

“I picked up the rice we needed,” she said, “It was the last packet left in the shop.”

James Laine stared aghast at the rice and back at his wife. She was dressed exactly as she’d been when she’d left that long-ago morning. The shopkeeper had reported that a long-haired lady in a long leather coat, with her description, had bought the rice and some English tea. Although the police looked here, there and everywhere, there were no more sightings of her. Ever. Nobody knows what happened to her.

And yet she was here today in the kitchen. Five years later.

Penny’s forehead furrowed. “Aren’t you going to say anything? I can’t imagine what’s up with you this morning, Winston.”

He swallowed hard. Why was she calling him Winston? He tried to speak through a dry mouth and it came out as a squeak. He cleared his throat with a cough.

“Maybe I’m amazed to see you after all these years,” he said. “But you disappeared, Penny. I spent weeks looking for the note you never wrote to explain why you left. I cried myself to sleep every night. I gave you all my loving and I was never angry at you. Oh, woman, oh, why did you leave? It was always the two of us against the world.”

Penny got up and her chair scraped across the tiled floor. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Winston. I never went anywhere, just to the corner shop and back. Four-five seconds, no more. I’ve got a feeling you’re confused, Winston. I think you’ve been overdoing things.”

He looked away, a tear in his eye. This had to be a weird dream.

A jet coming up to land at the nearby London City Airport growled overhead and the back door rattled as it passed over.

Penny approached him and he smelt her strong, sweet perfume. His memory was almost full of her, even now. He had no words to describe this moment. The night before he was alone but if Penny really was here today, there would be no more lonely nights.

He hugged his wife. This was the end of the end. She had returned. He put his hand on the back of her pretty little head and he felt her press into his shoulder, “Put it there, my love.” He felt himself smile away with joy.

He was certain she’d explain what had happened, but for now, it was a great day and he had his feet in the clouds with the comfort of love. He didn’t feel like ever letting go of her again; it was the same love as five years before.

A thought came to him. “Penny, we have to tell everyone you’re back, especially your mother Mary; yes, your mother should know. I’ll call her now.” He fumbled for his phone.

A loud crash came from upstairs, disturbing his thoughts. A wild, rapid flapping of wings and manic chirping sounds bounced around the house. “What the hell….”

He let go of his wife and ran upstairs. The noises came from the bathroom. He rushed in. A blackbird was flailing around the room in sheer panic, its wings beating crazily, its beady eyes popping out on stalks of fear. James saw the cold darkness outside. He guessed the bird had been attracted by the warmth inside and she came in through the bathroom window.

James ushered the bird out with a certain softness and closed the window. She was free now. Freedom. He hoped there’d be no more distractions. He had to get back to his wife and a new hope for the future. The past five years had been a rough ride.

He stepped down the stairs two at a time, his mind buzzing with the odd return of his wife but with joyous euphoria swimming in his head. With a little luck, everything would return to how it was.

But the strange way she was acting puzzled him; it was as if she was trying to pretend she had only just returned from the store with the rice. And she kept confusing him with Winston.

He burst into the kitchen, his eyes swinging from side to side, looking for his wife. Her perfume persisted, but she was no longer there. Had it been a dream, or is it that she’s leaving home again? He’d try not to cry as tomorrow he might be lonely again.

In this seemingly ever-changing world in which he lived in, his eyes fell on the kitchen table. And to the 500-gramme bag of rice.

THE END

The Paul McCartney song titles and references I used in this song story.

Here they are in the order they appear in the story, with explanations for some that are a bit more vague:

Ever Present Past (story title), Let ’Em In (subtitle), Let it out (from the lead-in to the 2nd chorus of Hey Jude), Let it Be (subtitle), Yesterday, Another Day, Calico Skies, London Town, Rainclouds, Blue suburban skies (from Penny Lane), 7am, Road, Driving Rain, Michelle, Mary Had A Little Lamb, mac - a British raincoat mentioned in Penny Lane, Good Morning Good Morning (The Beatles), Mr Laine (as in Denny Laine, McCartney’s side-kick in Wings), Girls’ School, Too Much Rain, Figure Of Eight, Rinse The Raindrops, Penny (Laine) geddit? Winston (Lennon’s middle name), Dear Friend, James (McCartney’s first name: Paul is his middle name), Once Upon A Long Ago, Silly Love Songs, Picked up the rice (from Eleanor Rigby), English Tea, Long Haired Lady, Long Leather Coat, Here There And Everywhere, Nobody Knows, Here Today, Maybe I’m Amazed, So Glad To See You Here, Imagine (John Lennon), The Note You Never Wrote, Every Night, All My Loving, Angry, Oh Woman Oh Why, Two Of Us, FourFive Seconds (with Rihanna & Kanye West), I’ve Got A Feeling, Jet, Coming Up, Memory Almost Full (solo album title), No Words, The Night Before (Beatles), Here Today, No More Lonely Nights, The End Of The End, Pretty Little Head, Press, Put It There, My Love, Smile Away, Great Day, Feet In The Clouds, Comfort Of Love, Letting Go, Same Love, Mother Mary (from Let It Be), Your Mother Should Know, Wings (Macca’s ’70s band), Blackbird, She Came In Through The Bathroom Window, A Certain Softness, Free Now, Freedom, Distractions, Get Back, Hope For The Future, Rough Ride, With A Little Luck, She Leaving Home, Tomorrow, Try Not To Cry, In this seemingly ever changing world in which he lived in(paraphrased from Live And Let Die), The End (The Beatles).

Islington is a strange place but still has a lot going for it. These days it’s considered super posh and wealthy but 30% of the borough’s residents live in poverty.

It’s an inner city borough of North London with the posh part bustling with cool pubs, live music venues, trendy restaurants and shops that sell expensive stuff no one needs.

I go there for the live music. You won’t get Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift gigging here as the venues are far too small — around 900 capacity or less. Instead, you get top recording artists who don’t fill big arenas. They are often folk, folk-rock, country or other similar genres from artists such as Ron Sexsmith and Josh Ritter or artists like Pete Docherty who no longer attract big audiences but remain relevant and popular.

I prefer the more intimate theatres anyway.

The posh bits

The Prime Minister of the UK, Sir Kier Starmer, supports Arsenal, the Premier League football team based in Islington. Many other politicians, actors, musicians, and celebrities also support Arsenal, so you get the idea. Tony Blair lived there when he was PM, but I don’t think he knew what football was.

Because of the posh bits, some people have claimed Queen Elizabeth II supported Arsenal but they are wrong because she supported my team West Ham. I have no idea why because West Ham and the surrounding area are most definitely not posh so perhaps she was trying to get down with the people.

Or liked the colours. They are pretty cool.

Osama Bin Laden was also an Arsenal Football Club supporter apparently. He may have been a murderous terrorist who lived in a cave but he was born into an aristocratic family so he was posh too. Arsenal Football Club prefer to keep that one quiet although their fans used to sing, “Osama woh oh oh, he’s hiding in Kabul, he supports the Arsenal.

Bad taste but I’ve known worse from football fans.

Live Libertine

I’m not posh enough to be able to live in Islington or poor enough to have social housing. So I catch the tube from my home for a 30-minute trip. I went a couple of weeks before Christmas 2024 for a live gig with another music writer, Mark Holburn who writes over on Medium. Pete Doherty was playing and, as it turned out, some other people we didn’t know would be performing. Unfortunately.

Pete Doherty is late of the Libertines, Babyshambles, The Puta Madres and now mostly solo. Mark and I like live rock music. No, we love live rock music.

We went to the Wetherspoons pub between the tube station and Islington Assembly Hall, the venue, before the gig. For those not from the UK, Wetherspoons is a chain of pubs with two main attractions. One is that they offer very cheap drinks and food which on reflection, is the principal attraction. Two, they are not traditional pubs but refurbished and converted buildings such as theatres, cinemas, banks, stores etc so they are different to other pubs.

On the plus side, the unusual buildings and good prices can make Wetherspoons fun pubs to visit. On the minus side, the low prices can mean they are not necessarily relaxing once the evening develops and lots of cheap alcohol is consumed. The Wetherspoons in Islington is unfortunately not a former theatre or bank but probably a former furniture store. It’s therefore somewhat bereft of ambience or personality. Unless you count the sticky floor.

One or two pints later (OK, maybe a little more) Mark and I headed for Islington Assembly Hall which is a theatre connected to Islington Town Hall. Luckily there are decent bars inside the theatre although somewhat north of the Wetherspoon prices. Mark and I switched to red wine. We’re men of a certain age and need to be conscious of not filling up on too much liquid.

We took our seats with a plastic tumbler of South American Shiraz that wasn’t bad aside from the faint odour of plastic.

Pete Doherty arrived on stage promptly at 8pm, announced the concert was in support of an organisation called Hope Not Hate, introduced a support artist and disappeared again. Like many artists, Doherty is active in political movements.

He popped on stage from time to time to introduce no less than four solo support artists, ranging from quite boring to very boring. In one case, also highly irritating as a ‘singer’ rapped to a pre-recorded backing track making those annoying finger gestures.

In between all this, Hope Not Hate officials came on stage to vent. They are an anti-fascist organisation which is a laudable aim and it made me recall hearing the stories of how my uncle used to fight against the black-shirted fascists in the East London streets before the 2nd World War.

That said, I’m not entirely sure angry people coming on stage to shout student slogans and stand at the side looking angry worked. At one stage, one of them attempted to get a chant going that predictably failed. Then, an over-excited young man claimed the Far Right were outside the theatre now ready to attack us and we needed to resist.

I was under the impression the Far Right are not that incensed by an audience of mostly white middle-aged lightly inebriated males waiting to see a middle-aged wealthy white musician whose parents used to be in the British Army but it seems I may have been mistaken.

So, imagining my uncle looking down and feeling disappointed, Mark and I had another glass of plastic-flavoured wine. About an hour and a half later, Doherty arrived on stage with a guitar. He was joined from time to time by one of the previous artists but mainly sang and strummed solo.

He instantly showed the gulf in quality between successful stars like him and the four singers before him. The high standard of his material and vocals was obvious. Meanwhile, his mates wandered around on stage at times or stood at the sides in a group for some reason wearing heavy coats looking a little pissed off but contributing nothing else to the gig.

Although Doherty was light years better than the previous artists, it was all flat. Many of his great hits were rock songs recorded with a band so strumming an acoustic guitar like a street busker wasn’t doing it.

I won’t bother seeing him again live so I’ve returned to just listening to his rock music on disc as it was meant to be with a band. That’s without all the uninteresting support artists and people wandering about the stage at this disorganised event.

Here are a couple of tracks that highlight how good he is when he wants to be.

Don’t Look Back Into The Sun

Here we go. This is Docherty at his best with his original band The Libertines and one of their big UK hits. Before they kicked him out for his drug taking.

The UK’s NME has it as one of Indie Rock’s greatest anthems and I agree.

Delivery

Doherty went on to form Babyshambles showing that if only he’d not wasted his talent on drugs, he could have been a much bigger star.

This one really rocks.

Paradise Is Under Your Nose

Doherty’s drug-taking continued to cause problems and Babyshambles inevitably fell apart. He went on to join up with the Puta Madres and immediately showed his talents once again including this piece of genius.

When he was clean, he was an amazing singer-songwriter.

Pete Doherty is apparently clean these days but his gig in Islington was somewhat chaotic. One person near to me said he thought Doherty was ‘on the sauce’ such was his demeanour. I’ll be charitable and say that’s just his style.

I love watching smaller intimate gigs but I can’t help thinking that Pete Doherty’s personality and drug problems have prevented him from being one of those artists who would have filled much bigger venues and had even more success.

We rocked up to a damp North East London suburb on a cold Monday evening. Everything was a shade of grey punctuated by areas of orange street lighting sparkling up the drizzle and red car stoplights flicking on and off like strobes along the long thread of crawling traffic.

The main road past the side of the cinema may be officially designated a Major Trunk Road but it was first laid down in 1697 so it’s narrow and winding. Dual carriageways were less of a requirement for the occasional stagecoach back then. The maximum speed limit of 20mph along its route is more of an aspiration than a road law. You won’t find any police speed cameras here.

This might sound like the last place you’d want to be on a chilly wet evening but Mrs M and I ignored all this gloom as we were there for a damn good reason. The new Bob Dylan biographical musical drama film A Complete Unknown was showing at the local cinema.

You see, Monday is discount day so it’s only five quid entry at the Forest Cinema, an independent cinema here in Walthamstow, a couple of miles from our London home. Mondays are therefore our cinema days. We’re careful about our money that way – some may say tight.

Sometimes Mrs M chooses the Monday film and sometimes I do. This Monday was my choice. Obviously.

I would have paid a whole lot more to see a Bob Dylan film with lots of Dylan music, especially one based on the book Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald. Dylan going electric was one of the most iconic and transformative moments in popular music.

But I didn’t have to pay more because it was Monday which means I can use the savings to see more films and and buy more records. Result.

Are you seated comfortably?

Mrs M, who suffers my 1960s pop music obsession with admirable fortitude, and I were seated comfortably in a warm cinema screen room with huge luxurious large red seats in this fantastic Forest Cinema. You may ask why a London cinema is named Forest. That’s because this borough on the north-east corner of our city contains much of the 6,000-acre ancient Royal Epping Forest.

It’s not all grey buildings, nose-to-bumper traffic and roads built 300 years ago here. Besides, Walthamstow comes from the old English Wilcumestowe which means place of welcome. These days that seems to refer only to the Forest cinema but we’ll take what we can get. Plus there’s the discount.

Out of the cold, a gigantic curved screen filled most of the front of room 9 and a wonderful sound system blared out; a pre-requisite for a rock music film. And for a Star Trek film. Any film really.

The title of this latest Dylan film comes of course from the line before the hook on Like A Rolling Stone. The makers used the line to describe the enigmatic Dylan we see in the film although the line and much of the song itself was really Dylan’s caustically poetic rant against everyone who annoyed him at the time including an ex-girlfriend.

Once we get through 30 minutes of adverts and trailers, we start with a 20-year-old Dylan being dropped off in New York City having journeyed from Minnesota. His previous years are largely an enigma. He spins tales of how he learnt guitar from cowboys while working in carnivals and circuses and, although he uses the surname Dylan, his girlfriend only finds out it’s Zimmerman when he receives a package.

He does not explain anything to her but the scene provides an early example of his quest for fame. Dylan is a brilliant stage name in the same way that Elton John switched from Reg Dwight and Richard Starkey is Ringo Starr.

The story

Although we follow several of Dylan’s relationships, for a music person like me the story was all about the build-up to Dylan going electric at The Newport Folk Festival, the classic album Highway 61 Revisted and that sound on Like A Rolling Stone. These events were an earthquake moment in contemporary music.

I tried not to bother Mrs M too much at key moments but when Al Kooper appeared on screen, I knew what was coming and got a bit carried away and couldn’t help but nudge her and tell her what was coming.

It was a spell-binding scene that replicated how, almost by accident, Dylan arrived at that ground-breaking organ riff and sound for Like A Rolling Stone. He’d been trying for several weeks to get it right although the film didn’t show that. I guess that could be a film in its own right.

There were a couple of niggles as there always are. I disengaged for a bit during the shouts of Judas at the scenes at the Newport Folk Festival since this did not happen there.

Anyone who knows about popular music and culture will know this happened a little later on his UK tour at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 1966. It’s one of the most famous heckling moments in rock history and whilst this might seem a minor point for some, it kills the moment for music nerds like me.

A second and bigger niggle is that Dylan didn’t go electric out of thin air as seemed to happen in the film. A major influence for him going electric was probably The Beatles and to a lesser extent the wider British Invasion. We did hear the Kinks in the background at one point which hinted at his new direction but nothing of The Beatles' earlier move into electric folk for some of the Help and Rubber Soul tracks that had a big influence on his eventual musical direction

And, of course, the Byrds were also highly instrumental in his change of direction by covering his songs electrically and arguably better.

Dylan was facing competition from all sides and was in danger of losing relevance as a performing artist. The film failed to show this which was a large omission.

However, those points aside, A Complete Unknown otherwise masterfully makes several fascinating points about Dylan and great artists generally. We see Dylan’s self-centred selfishness necessary to focus on his work and the effects of fame thrust onto young shoulders.

We see his obsession with writing, even getting out of bed where he was with his girlfriend in the middle of the night to put down his ideas. Details such as hearing Peter, Paul and Mary singing Puff The Magic Dragon in one scene gave us a flavour of the smug and antiseptic direction some folk music was going before Dylan stepped in to save the day.

We see how other artists, such as Johnny Cash, understood and encouraged Dylan’s iconoclastic nature and style that made him into a music legend but how most of the others including record companies, the Newport Folk Festival board and many although not all of the audiences, didn’t appreciate that one of popular music’s greatest and historical moments was happening right in front of them.

Magical.

The players

Timothy Chamolet in the lead was incredible. I was carried along with his Dylan. Mrs M, for whom English is not her native tongue, understood nothing he said; Chamolet had perfected the Dylan mumbled drawl.

She’s fluent in London English and Cockney though which is pretty impressive when you think about it. She’s less fluent in Dylanesque.

With my guitarist head on, it looked very much to me that Chamolet was playing the guitar himself and he did an excellent job. Even more impressive, he sang all the songs himself well very and he managed to sound like Dylan but without all Dylan's bum notes and out-of-tune bits. He couldn’t match the Dylan snarl but who can?

On the negative side, Boyd Holbrook didn’t convince as Johnny Cash but had a smaller part so I could let it wash past.

Edward Norton was superb as the conservative folkie Pete Seeger and Dylan father figure. He also appeared to be playing the banjo and singing himself. I can’t testify to the accuracy of his voice as it was a little before my time and he was fairly unknown in the UK but it worked for me.

Monica Barbaro played Joan Baez. I understand she’s fairly unknown but you wouldn’t have guessed. She learnt to sing for the film and even though she doesn’t sound like Baez, she was so good it didn’t matter. She also learnt to play guitar for the film.

She was astonishing and her duets with Chamolet’s Dylan were stunning. If she doesn’t make it in films, she could be a pop star. Or both. Him too.

A complete unknown known

This is a great film and even the ever-critical Mrs M enjoyed it despite not understanding anything Chamloet said because the story and the music flowed so well and the music was so great.

All in all, a couple of niggles aside, it was spellbinding. The entire audience taking advantage of the Monday discount sat through the closing credits as Chamolet’s versions of Dylan’s songs played out. No one wanted to leave although to be fair, some of that may have been due to the weather outside.

We returned home on the bus; we get free travel around London due to being of a certain age. You don’t need to spend a lot to have a great night out although now I think of it, we are a bit tight as an Uber is only about eight quid.

This edition of London Times comes to you (in)direct from Valencia Spain. It’s (in)direct because it’s not physically from Spain because I’m writing this in my home in London.

I was in Spain for the end of 2024 and the start of 2025 so this is really a Writing Down The Words And Publishing the Photos From When I Was There But I’m Now Back Home Letter From Spain but that’s not exactly a snappy article title so I cut the first bit.

I’m therefore typing this from a grey-skied London with the central heating on full blast, wearing three layers of clothing whilst remembering the blue skies of Valencia and beer and wine at half the London prices.

This is what things look like outside the front of my home right now at 2.30 on a bleak January afternoon. Grey skies, bare trees and 3 degrees centigrade.

Going In and Out With A Valencian Bang

We (Mrs M and I) hit Valencia in late December, flying in on a budget airline. We have a lot of friends there from our five years living in the city up to the end of 2023.

When you make friends in Valencia, you should make sure that at least one couple are 1, party animals and 2, have a top-floor apartment directly opposite Valencia’s New Year midnight firework display.

The fact we have so many friends in Valencia, I must admit, has more to do with the gregarious and convivial Mrs M than her somewhat less sociable husband aka the miserable ol’ git.

What? No football?

Despite the New Year’s fun, it wasn’t all fun and games in Valencia. For a start, I had to miss three West Ham home games which was stressful. To be fair, it’s stressful going to their matches too.

Secondly, the Spanish have a two-week break from football over the festive period. Two weeks without football? That’s one reason we had to return to London; it’s not normal behaviour to go so long without football and not fill the gap with cricket.

Being Spanish, they’ve naturally tagged an extra festival onto the Christmas and New Year celebrations that they call Los Tres Reyes Magos. This means the celebrations last until around the 6th of January and the city centre is lit up until then.

We were staying near to the stadium of Valencia’s other football team, Levante. But what with the extended break and then all of Levante’s next games being away from home, there was no live football. Frustrating as all I could do was look at the stadium longingly.

Music for the soul

Valencia doesn’t have a great live music scene either but I suppose it’s hardly London where I’m more accustomed to probably the greatest music scene in the world. For three weeks I kept things together thanks to Spotify and YouTube Music. This was one I played a lot: Holiday In Spain of course although Adam Duritz wrote that he may take a holiday in Spain whereas I did.

He needs to get off his arse and do it. I also suggest he choose Valencia rather than Barcelona as it’s less expensive and not so commercialised. The music scene might be better, I have to concede.

Eat, drink and have fun

If the poor music scene and the lack of football over the Christmas period is a bummer, there is a plus side; Valencia is not short of places to eat and drink. Nor are we short of friends there who all want to go out to eat and drink with us. Well, go out with Mrs M if I’m being accurate; I come as part of the package. Rough with the smooth, so to speak.

Music and beer

But when Ms Social Butterfly, aka Mrs M, arranged a girl’s only night out, their menfolk decided to also go out to play.

The ladies went to a sophisticated up-market Vietnamese restaurant in the posh part of town to talk about relationships and emotions (I suppose). We all bowled over to a bar behind the train station to drink beer, talk about football and argue over who was the greatest ever lead guitarist.

What a brilliant bar we chose — a bar and vinyl record, CD and second-hand music book store combined.

Really; if this place is not some kind of paradise on Earth, nothing is. Nevertheless, we had to eat eventually so we found a burger place and continued the guitarist debate.

I’m going back to this bar next time though. I have a few purchases to make and not just beer next time.

Me, Omar Shariff & Valencia

Mrs M and I went to a few restaurants while in Valencia but one we visited with friends was owned by Omar Shariff’s son and his Russian wife. It was an Italian restaurant. Of course.

Now, I know what you’re going to ask. Why would the son of an Egyptian actor and his Russian wife run an Italian restaurant in a provincial city in Spain?

I do not know but the friends we went with (thanks to Mrs M and her social butterfly nexus) knew Mr Shariff and chatted with him after our meal. I didn’t like to ask Mr Shariff the question hovering on my lips as I’m sure he’s bored with it so it remains a mystery.

Our friends, who were originally from Texas, also seem to know a lot of famous and well-connected people such as Bill and Hilary Clinton and a few others so it was not a surprise they knew a film star’s son.

I did once see the Queen go past in a car 25 years ago and I sat near to James Corden at a West Ham game in 2019.

The restaurant has a lot of photos of Omar although I’m still not clear what that has to do with Italian cuisine unless it was his favourite food. And just to confuse everyone even more, the cook came out to chat with us too. He was from India.

I go down to the River

The heart of Valencia is Turia Park. After serious flooding in the ’50s, the River Turia was diverted south of the city. The former river bed was turned into an eight-mile-long public park with green spaces, paths, running and cycle tracks and sports pitches.

Sadly the south of the city remains unprotected and over 220 people died in the terrible floods of October 2024, one of the worst natural disasters in Spanish history.

The devasted area of Valencia has still not been fully cleaned up and there are memorials to the disaster everywhere, including this one in Colon Market. That’s Colon as in Cristobal Colon not the intestine that passes waste to the rectum of course.

This display is particularly poignant as it has the shovels and boots covered in mud the locals had to clear after it slid down the mountains with the flood water. It sat by a Christmas Tree to remember the victims and those still homeless.

Valencia the song

I first heard the unofficial hymn of Valencia when I went to my first Valencia Football Club football match. They play it before games to stir emotion in the players and fans. At my London club West Ham, they play London Calling by the Clash which goes some way to demonstrating the less confrontational attitude of the Spanish.

I don’t know if Levante also play it as obviously, I didn’t get to go.

You’ll also hear it during the Fallas festival in Valencia and during the L’Ofrena de Flors (the offering of flowers in the local Valenciano language) festival. They like a festival in Spain.

Wikipedia says the song was included in the soundtrack of the 1926 silent film Valencia which makes no sense.*

Lots of artists have recorded it and it was a big hit in 1926 thanks to the silent film although I’m still struggling with how anybody actually heard it. It was a hit in the USA in the 1950s for Tony Martin and then a big hit in the UK in 1963 for an instrumental version by The Shadows.

To finish the article, here’s the version they play before the Valencia FC games. If you want to get into the Valencia mood, place a hand on your heart and go all misty-eyed.

*Yes I know, the organist would play the sheet music in the cinema but that would have spoilt my joke.

Are you an Anywhere person or a Somewhere person? Do you identify with your experiences or with an area?

The terms Anywheres and Somewheres were coined by David Goodhart, a British journalist, in his 2017 book The New Tribes Shaping British Politics. Written in the aftermath of Brexit, he proposed that the old political tribes of left and right no longer applied and that people are now more likely to make decisions based on whether their worldview is that of an Anywhere or a Somewhere.

This is a tribal grouping that can probably be seen not just in the UK but across Western societies.

But of course, nothing’s quite that neat in real life. Especially when you identify with a Somewhere part of London also inhabited by Anywheres and you’ve lived abroad as an Anywhere.

Anywhere is Somewhere

Anywhere

Despite being just 25% of the population, Anywheres dominate British society from politics to journalism to business leaders according to Mr Goodhart. They are generally well-educated and have often moved from their original place of birth to live in a major city, typically London.

They base their identity on life experiences rather than location and are almost certainly middle-class.

Somewhere

Somewheres are around 50% of the UK population and as you’d expect from the name, they identify more with a location.

So a Somewhere might identify, for example, as a Scouser (the term for someone from Liverpool) or a Cockney, which implies East London working class. Somewheres will have skills but they will not necessarily be academic. They are unlikely to be as mobile as Anywheres and will usually live close to where they were raised.

An example of a Somewhere identity is the fans of the team I support in East London: West Ham United. The fans often refer to themselves and the team, not as West Ham or even by their official nickname The Hammers often used in the media, but as The Cockney Boys.

When the team is winning, they will sing 1-0 to The Cockney Boys.

This highlights their Somewhere connection in their identity and that of the team to East London. Their identity is a place.

But more often, the supporters refer to the team as The Irons.

West Ham were originally called Thames Ironworks Football Club officially, or more commonly, The Irons. It was born out of the works team of a shipbuilding company called Thames Ironworks in East London.

They changed their name to West Ham United in 1900. However, 124 years later, the supporters continue to use the team’s original name of The Irons, identifying with the same location where their great-great-grandparents lived.

If that is not Somewhere, nothing is.

The team now play at the converted 2012 London Olympic Stadium and 75% of the players are from outside the UK and those who are British including the coach, are not from East London. But the Somewhere fans and their families are.

When the team moved just two miles and further from the old Ironworks location to a new home at the former Olympic Stadium a few years back, there was uproar amongst many of the supporters. Two miles? Outrageous.

Inbetweeners

However, as well as the Anywheres and Somewheres, the other 25% of the population are Inbetweeners whose world view will be Somewhere or Anywhere depending on the topic or issue.

This is my tribe.

Going to Somewhere

The identification of the two tribes and the half & half tribe has a sociological logic and may help to explain recent political changes and political elections. I don’t know how useful it is for politicians in the longer term and, to be honest, I’m not bothered. It’s not where this article is going.

Seeing London through Anywhere eyes

I like the Somewhere-Anywhere definitions when I think about my return to live in London again as a Somewhere one year after spending five years in Valencia Spain as an Anywhere. I realised I hadn’t always taken advantage of my Somewhere London side when I lived there.

So my latest London Somewhere recharge was a photo stroll through the area where my father and grandparents used to live — Bow in East London. More specifically, the former industrial Old Ford area of Bow that lies behind the West Ham United stadium.

My family would not recognise much of their former Something homeland; there’s been so much regeneration and there’s still a lot of construction. Even I don’t recognise it much from when I lived nearby just 20 years ago.

Being an Inbetweener, I love today’s mix of the old Somewhere and the new Anywhere in Old Ford. And as someone with far too many hobbies, this trip around my Somewhere-Anywhere family homeland was also to feed my occasional photography hobby.

But first, a coffee stop in a former factory (Somewhere) and now a trendy expensive coffee bar (Anywhere).

All my expat friends back in Valencia (and my wife) are Anywheres. Unlike me, none of them missed their original countries and none of them have a Somewhere side that makes them go back every couple of months to watch football, cricket and music concerts in their former home countries or cities.

I know Valencia has two football teams and music but they weren’t the right type. If you’re an Inbetweener, you’d understand even if you supported Valencia Football Club when you lived there. Something is missing when you have a Somewhere side and you’re not there.

The conservative native Valencianos were most definitely Somewheres. The expression Valencianos use to explain their regular rituals and habits such as Sunday lunch with their families in the same restaurant or home every week was to say it was Toda La Vida — all their life.

I’ve heard younger Anywhere Valencianos call their compatriots the Todo La Vidas.

Old Ford is what it says on the tin

The place name Old Ford comes from it being exactly that: an old ford. It was a natural ford the Romans used and extended and was on the main eastern route into the city of London. Knowing all this shows my Somewhere side. My Somewhere brain also knows that the ford was replaced by a bridge in the 12th century and because the bridge was a bow shape, they called the entire area…. Bow.

Much of Old Ford is situated on an area known as Fish Island which isn’t an island. It does have water on two sides so I suppose it’s halfway there.

Fish Island used to be called The Island by the locals, despite it never being an island. When it was being developed in Victorian times, the developers named the new streets after fish so the locals started calling it Fish Island. That’s yet another Somewhere thing to know.

After my expensive organic coffee, I went for a stroll along the many waterways of Old Ford. There are a lot of waterways in the area; man-made navigation canals from its industrialised past as well as the natural River Lea and Hackney Brook.

The former Roman ford is close to lock gates. To the left of the next photo is Fish Island which as we now know isn’t an island but did form part of the old Roman ford.

And just to confuse you a little more, the photo looks at the River Lea which bears right past the houseboat and under the footbridge. The branch that continues straight ahead and past the island on the left (that isn’t an island) towards the lock gate is called the River Lee.

Of course it is.

Somewhere under the modern apartment blocks on the left and lock gates is the Roman Ford.

This must be the only area in the world with lots of waterways that isn’t called Little Venice. Maybe that’s because there’s a Little Venice in West London. But they’re all Anywheres over there in the west and besides, they don’t have as much water as us. Just the one canal.

1–0 to the Cockney Boys.

Art and design

There’s a lot of street art/graffiti in the area; Old Ford is full of artists workshops and street art is encouraged. There’s a cool friendly arty vibe going on; it’s a lot different to my grandparents’ day when this area was industrial, poor and Somewhere.

My grandparents may have strolled by Old Ford’s rivers and the Hertford Union and Regents canals in the 1930s with their two children, my dad and my uncle Alex. They would have smelt the peanuts from the Percy Dalton factory and heard the hammering noises from the Ironworks.

Maybe they put hankies over their mouths when they passed the rubber and coal tar factories; London’s low-smoke laws were still 30 years in the future and the low-emission zones 90 years away.

All these industries are long gone and it’s unlikely my Somewhere grandparents would have stopped for an Anywhere organic cappuccino and an Italian sausage panini like their grandson did several decades later.

The mix of the old Somewhere my family would have known and the new Anywhere is everywhere. The next image shows a modern apartment block built around two older factories, one daubed with street art/graffiti. The factories in this photo manufacture clothing and the workers are probably Somewheres.

Those living in the apartments are more likely to be in advertising, design or work in the financial district a couple of miles away at Canary Wharf. They will almost certainly be Anywheres. At this stage, I’m in Anywhere mode as I take the photo from the balcony of one of the apartments.

Calling them apartments usually shows they are private Anywhere homes. Social apartments are more often called flats even though they are the same thing.

At the end of the day, we’re all Londoners

It was a long tiring day wandering the streets of East London, my Anywhere sports watch says I’ve done 25,000 steps. There’s only one thing for it: a pint of London Pride beer at the pub to recharge. The pub is always a place for everyone whatever tribe they identify with.

Cheers.

Somewhere, Anywhere or Inbetweener?

Do you identify with an area or your experiences? Has your home area changed as much as Old Ford? Let me know if you’re an Anywhere, Somewhere or an Inbetweener like me and why.

After recording some 85 hours of new music for their proposed Get Back album, the Beatles put it behind them and moved on to record and release Abbey Road.

The plan for Get Back had been to ‘get back’ to their roots musically. This meant returning to the concept of a four-piece combo recording live in the studio without any overdubs, just as they’d done for their first couple of albums. The band instructed engineer and de-facto producer Glyn Johns to include studio chatter and errors for this raw ‘live’ album.

Or Glynnis as we heard Lennon refer to Glyn Johns in the Peter Jackson Get Back documentary.

The band shot a cover image for Get Back that replicated the Please Please Me album photographed in the stairwell at EMI House London to cement the get-back-to-basics connection. The updated EMI House photo was eventually used on the 1967–1969 Blue compilation album.

The Get Back sessions were difficult and at times, tortuous. Harrison even left the band at one stage. Soon after the rooftop concert, they moved on to the more rewarding Abbey Road recordings.

Glyn Johns tried to rescue Get Back and in April 1969, the Get Back / Don’t Let Me Down single was released. By May, he’d completed mixing the Get Back album and presented it to the Beatles during their Abbey Road recordings. They rejected it. It seems they had gone off the idea of a raw album and had returned to the full use of studio techniques.

In December of ’69, the remaining bandmembers asked Johns to work on Get Back again — Lennon had left the band in September although that hadn’t yet been publicised. Johns presented a new version to the band in January 1970 but it still wasn’t up to their standard and they rejected the album again.

Two months later, John Lennon gave the Get Back tapes to Phil Spector and they became Let It Be complete with the infamous Spector over-productions on some tracks.

But how good was Glyn Johns’ original Get Back and how different was it to Spector’s reworking?

The Get Back Lost Album Resurfaces

Various bootlegs of the lost album have surfaced over the years as some early versions were given to radio stations. But it wasn’t until a Super Deluxe version of Let It Be was released in 2021 that most of us got to hear the lost Get Back album.

The 2021 version of this lost album is a mix of Glyn Johns' May 1969 version and the later January 1970 version. As a box set that includes a vastly improved Giles Martin stereo remix of the ‘Spectorised’ Let It Be album, a CD album of the Roof Top Concert, rehearsals and alternate versions CDs, a Let It Be EP and the lost Get Back, it’s pure gold for us Beatles fans.

But if you analyse Get Back as a potential 1969 Beatles album, you can quickly see why The Beatles rejected it and why Lennon gave it to Spector to tidy up.

Some reviewers have loved it, saying it is closer to the Beatles’ idea of a stripped-back live studio album. That is not accurate in my opinion as that accolade should go to the 2003 Let It Be Naked remix project led by Paul McCartney himself. McCartney removed Spector’s over-production, the extraneous studio chatter and the Dig It and Maggie Mae jams and replaced them with the superb Get Back single B-side, Don’t Let Me Down.

For me, the lost Get Back album sounds closer to something you’d hear on Anthology than what was eventually released as Let It Be. Despite the inappropriate over-production on some tracks, I will grudgingly admit Spector otherwise followed Lennon’s instructions and tidied it up and put it into a more commercial and coherent package.

How is the lost album different to Let It Be?

The track order and some content of Get Back were different to Let It Be.

Here’s a listing of the 2021 Get Back album mixed version with the Let It Be tracks in brackets and italics. We can see the looser structure of Get Back as an album when compared the the tidied-up and better-sequenced Spector version.

1. One After 909 (Two Of Us)

2. I’m Ready (Fats Domino cover) / Save the Last Dance for Me (Drifters cover) / Don’t Let Me Down Medley (Dig A Pony)

3. Don’t Let Me Down (non-album B-side to the Get Back single) (Across The Universe - included on version 2 of Get Back)

4. Dig a Pony (I Me Mine)

5. I’ve Got a Feeling (Dig It)

6. Get Back (Let It Be)

7. For You Blue (Maggie Mae)

8. Teddy Boy — this track was removed for Get Back version 2 and ended up on McCartney 1 (I’ve Got A Feeling)

9. Two of Us (One After 909)

10. Maggie Mae (The Long and Winding Road)

11. Dig It (This is a full 4-minute track as opposed to the 50-second cropped version on Let It Be (For You Blue)

12. Let It Be (Get Back)

13. The Long And Winding Road

14. Get Back — a 40-second reprise

Complying with the Beatles original objective for the Get Back project, Glyn Johns’ lost album contained rougher versions, false starts, more studio chatter, song breakdowns and jams. Like Anthology.

In the end, The Beatles obviously recognised that the raw live sound complete with errors did not work well. Spector removed the errors, false starts and some jams and reduced the chatter. He retained some great lines that have become part of Beatles mythology — “We hope we passed the audition” and “Charles Hawtry and The Deaf Aids,” for example.

Get Back to Get Back

The lost Get Back album is a fascinating curio for Beatles fanatics (like me) and fits wonderfully on the Let It Be Box Set to show the process the band went through to get to Let It Be. The songs, when they get going, are fantastic of course. But the false starts, jams and studio chat grate after a couple of listens. Get Back was not up to Beatle standards.

When I want to listen to the music they recorded during the Get Back sessions in 1969 I will always choose the Giles Martin Let It Be remix of Spector’s production as a first choice. Close behind is McCartney’s Let It Be Naked which gives us what would have been released had they not lost interest and been breaking up.

Get Back is a fascinating must-have album for fans but the Beatles rejected it twice and now we can see, it was for good artistic reasons.

I was searching everywhere for my glasses this morning. This is not an uncommon occurrence these days. It’s a problem because they are black-rimmed so are difficult to spot against my dark-coloured furniture and worktops.

If you add this to the fact I need glasses for distance and I can’t see clearly without them, my daily glasses searches are a regular activity. I’m often reduced to rubbing my hand over surfaces to see if I hit against the missing spectacles like a latter-day Mr Magoo — and you need to be ancient like me to get that reference.

So what’s this got to do with The Beatles apart from sharing eyesight problems with John Lennon? Not a lot but I’ll take any connection however tenuous.

It does, however, highlight that I am of that age, as was Mr Magoo, when you forget where you put your glasses even when they are on your head.

I am therefore old enough to have heard the Beatles songs when they first came out although I’m not as old as Mr Magoo which is something I guess.

I listened to the Beatles every week of my life for the next 60-plus years and read every decent book about them. This, plus being a Beatlemaniac means I know their songs better than anything else, especially where I put my glasses.

I may forget where my glasses are daily but I never forget a single Beatles chord or lyric and I can recognise every single one of their 213 songs from the first note. Priorities.

I don’t forget their mistakes either.

Recording Schedule Mistakes

The band had tight recording schedules and time slots in the early days. They had little time to correct mistakes and the technology didn’t allow much either so they often had to go with what they had.

Please Please Me

The Beatles hit the big time with their second single and their first UK №1. In the verses, Lennon sings the lead and McCartney the Everly Bros style harmony line.

You all know this one but if you go to the 1.25-minute mark in the video below, you’ll hear Lennon get the lyrics wrong as he starts to sing a different line to McCartney on the second line of the final verse.

Lennon starts a different line entirely to McCartney — “Why,” while McCartney sings “I know,” before Lennon stumbles into the, “know I never even try…”

I’ll Get You

A great example of the Beatles writing so many incredible songs is that this amazing track in classic Beatles style, with its beautiful Everly-style harmonies, was merely the non-album B-side to She Loves You.

For any other band, it would have been their biggest hit single back in 1963.

But the Fab Four were still on those tight recording schedules and when Lennon and McCartney get to the middle eight at the 1.08-minute mark, they sing different lyrics.

Looking at the official lyrics, it seems that Lennon was the culprit again. When McCartney sings, “Well I’m gonna change your mind,” Lennon sings, “When I’m gonna make you mine,” before also stumbling on the next line as he loses his place.

I’m guessing that like me, he couldn’t find his glasses so wasn’t able to read the lyric sheet.

If I Fell

This track from A Hard Day’s Night was possibly the first sign that The Beatles were moving on to even greater things musically. Although we hear those incredible Everly harmonies again, the musical structure of the song was their most complex to date with a modulation change and two chord substitutions in just the first few seconds.

If I Fell’s influences point to George Gershwin, Cole Porter or Irving Berlin rather than Little Richard or Chuck Berry. The introduction and lead-in, which we don’t hear again in the song, is pure Gershwin/Porter.

In this one, the intro with its modulation change to another key for the song is something Gershwin did in Rhapsody In Blue for example. McCartney has often spoken about taking musical ideas from the composers their parents listened to and played - his father was a pianist and Lennon’s a banjo player.

It was a sign the Beatles were taking their musical influences from a much wider range of music than we realised and this only increased as they developed, of course.

But their tight recording schedule meant that a fluffed high-end harmony by Paul McCartney had to be left in. If you have never noticed it, take a listen at the 1.43 mark when McCartney can’t hit the high note. You’ll never unhear it again.

This song is one of their great ballads.

Can’t Buy Me Love

This error was more about the limitations of the recording technology in 1964 but nonetheless, it’s something you can’t unhear once you realise it’s there.

The Beatles recorded Can’t Buy Me Love in Paris in January 1964. When they returned to London, McCartney recorded an overdubbed vocal to make it a double-tracked vocal.

Harrison re-recorded the lead guitar part but due to the limitations of the technology, you can still hear the original guide part he recorded in Paris in the background at a lower volume.

I used to think this was deliberate too as it sounded like two dualling guitars but it was unintended and they couldn’t correct it. It therefore went out that way as there was no time to re-do the entire song.

Take a listen from 1.10 to 1.28 to hear the lead break and the ghost guitar in the background.

I’m Looking Through You

This track from Rubber Soul was written by Paul McCartney about his deteriorating relationship with Jane Asher and is riddled with recording errors.

A superficial listen doesn’t pick much up but when you’ve been listening and studying Beatles music for six decades, you start to notice these things.

For a start, some of the guitar parts are slightly out of tune throughout and I’m sure I can hear feedback at several points in the recording. The first feedback point is around the 16-second mark and the worst is at 1.18. At around the 1-minute mark, handclaps come in but they are out of time and incomplete.

Other strange guitar parts don’t quite fit and there’s a tambourine beat that stops as if Ringo dropped it at one point. On the US version of Rubber Soul, the song has two false starts which the engineers at Capitol Records thought was deliberate and left in.

I guess their recording schedule was crazy at this time and the pressure to complete the album too strong to do yet another take.

Mistakes they used deliberately

By 1965, the Beatles had moved on and were experimenting with ideas from avant-garde musicians such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. This gave them a more open-minded approach to music and led to several new and innovative ideas in their songs.

I Feel Fine

I Feel Fine was possibly the first deliberate use of feedback in recorded popular music and once again The Beatles were breaking new musical ground and leading the pack by several light years.

But the feedback that introduced I Feel Fine was based on an accident. Lennon leant his guitar on an amplifier which led to feedback. It gave the band the idea to use it as the intro for the song.

Although it’s sometimes reported that they used the feedback sound Lennon’s guitar made at that moment, I find this unlikely. It’s more probable they produced something else based on the idea the feedback accident gave them.

When you analyse the feedback intro to I Feel Fine, you’ll see it is not random at all but a deliberate choice of note that reverberates in a harmonic one octave above the note played and in the correct key for the song.

For other music nerds out there, the intro note of I Feel Fine is an A which is the second note in the song’s key of G. This A intro leads us up to Harrison’s riff which begins in D (the 5th chord of the G scale) before landing on the G root after passing through C (the 4th chord).

However, A is also the 5th note of the D scale and therefore melds perfectly with Harrison’s D intro riff to give us a sense of anticipation as to what the actual key is before settling on the home of G. The relationship between the root note or chord and the 5th is highly imortant in music as it is the most consonant sound in a musical scale. Here we have two 5th note relationships in one short intro. Hardly random.

This is an intro feedback sound deliberately designed by a songwriter who understands music implicitly. It is not something you’d get from laying a guitar against an amp but an accidental occurrence that inspired Lennon.

Rain

Rain was the most innovative song in the Beatles repertoire up to that moment. There is so much going on, I could devote an entire article to it. I think I will so stay tuned.

However, like I’ll Get You, this piece of musical genius was merely a non-album B-side, this time to Paperback Writer. The accidental mistake in this case was again Lennon’s. This time, a stoned Lennon accidentally played some of the song’s backing track backwards on his tape machine.

He loved the sound so much, he used it for the outro with Lennon’s vocals and the guitar lead played backwards. Possibly the first-ever use of backwards tapes in rock music.

Mistakes they liked so kept in

Once the Beatles stopped touring and were the world’s biggest band, they could spend as much time as they wanted in the studios. They now had the time to correct their recording mistakes and probably did.

But some mistakes, they liked. So they kept them in.

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

This was a track Lennon hated and where McCartney drove Harrison and Starr crazy with his perfectionism.

And yet, when McCartney mixed up the lyrics of the final verse which is a repetition of the previous verse, he kept them in. He decided it gave the song a new level of mystery and interest.

McCartney accidentally swapped the names Desmond and Molly for the final verse.

I used to think this was a clever switch as it shows the parents changing roles. But I found much later in a McCartney interview that it was a mistake and he’d mixed up the names in the final verse. He kept the name mix-up in as he thought it gave the song a different vibe and interest.

That last verse puts an entirely different complexion on the song and the Marmalade cover, which was a UK number one, retained McCartney’s mistake. Take a listen from the 2.30 point to hear McCartney’s lyrical mix-up and possibly the first ever transgender reference in popular music, a full two years before the Kink’s Lola which admittedly, was deliberate.

Hey Jude

Hey Jude is one of the Beatles’ greatest ballads which means it’s one of music’s greatest ballads. It started as a McCartney song to comfort Julian Lennon but he later expanded it to take on other meanings.

The song was recorded during the White Album sessions and not at Abbey Road but at Trident Studios in London’s Soho district. I visited recently purely for this reason. I couldn’t go in as it’s now an office but I stood outside to take in the Beatles/Hey Jude vibe.

The song has two mistakes and they are at the 2.56 and 2.58 marks when first someone says, “Whoa,” and then drops the f-bomb. I didn’t spot what was said at first as they’re low in the mix.

It was only when I was learning the piano part much later in life and stepping through the song section by section that I made out the actual words.

McCartney says, “Whoa,” then “Fu**ing hell” and it’s quite clear when you turn the volume up. In Lyrics, McCartney explains he said it after playing a bad chord but Lennon liked it so they kept it in. Take a listen. It’s another one you can’t unhear once you know.

The Beatles Recording Mistakes

For me, the Beatles are musical perfection. They never suffered a dud album and finished on a high with Abbey Road. That didn’t mean they didn’t sometimes make mistakes but even their mistakes just add to their mystique.

What other musical mistakes do you know of? Beatles or any other artists. I’m sure there are many.

(An earlier version of this article first appeared on Medium.com.)

Rock stars often have a great socially aware story to tell and can be innovative and open-minded thinking leaders. Like many other types of artists, they are often in the vanguard of societal and political changes. They have a large audience hanging on their work and an artistic, emotional and entertaining way to put their points across that others, including politicians, can often struggle with making.

They can then sometimes forget these artistic skills when they make political videos, social media posts or attend rallies in support of politicians.

The outpourings from the great and the good of American rock and pop music for Kamala Harris and the Democrats at rallies and on social media all came to nothing for her campaign. It would seem that what a rock & pop star might say regarding politics, may not count for anything.

On this side of the water, we watched rather bemused at anyone thinking the patronising preachings of multi-millionaire pop stars living in mansions and on 400-acre ranches would have any impact on voters. It probably plays well with those who believe in a political view but also plays badly with those who hold a different view.

The point is, how does it work with those who are undecided? Do they think, I’ll vote for this person or the other because my favourite pop star says so? The recent evidence seems to point more to a negative impact; voters probably don’t like being told how to vote.

Politicians and rock stars here in the UK learnt that lesson the hard way back in the 90s when Tony Blair tried to piggyback on the popularity of British rock stars with his Cool Britannia campaign.

It worked for a while as Blair was riding the wave of popularity but eventually went sour.

As with The Democrat Party in the 2024 US elections, Blair’s Labour Party. and the political ‘cousins’ of the Democrats, had support from the major rock bands back in the 90s — Blur, Oasis, The Pet Shop Boys, Paul Weller, Bananarama, The Smiths, Elvis Costello, Madness, Elton John and many more.

Tony Blair even invited many rock and pop musicians to a party at the home of the UK Prime Minister, 10 Downing Street, in 1997. However, British rock stars are far less deferential than their US counterparts and Damian Alban of Blur publically said he didn’t want to go despite being a vocal supporter of the Labour Party. Noel Gallagher was another Labour supporter and did go but said he only went because his mum wanted him to.

He then inconveniently added he’d snorted cocaine in the Downing Street toilets.

Paul Weller, after publically supporting and campaigning for Labour and attending their political rallies, now states that after getting to know politicians, he thinks the UK is run by idiots. Not one to hold back, he added that all politicians are mugs and criticises their corruptness, cronyism, lies and deceit.

Politicians in the UK now tend to keep rock stars away from their campaigns.

Rock stars probably still have a part to play in politics but it may not be by making patronising videos (I’m looking at you Bruce Springsteen), tweets from Beyoncé and Taylor Swift and definitely not by snorting coke like Noel Gallagher.

Rock stars have always had a gift for pointing out political and social issues through their music, lyrics and videos. Is this the best way for them to put their beliefs forward so that people listen? I think so.

Here are four examples from British and Irish bands who eschew jumping on a stage with a politician and telling people what to do but instead made and demonstrated their views through their music.

The Eton Rifles — The Jam

In echos of Ronald Regan’s colossal misunderstanding of the meaning of Springsteen’s Born In The USA, in 2008 the then UK Prime Minister David Cameron said in an interview, while trying to pretend to be cool, that Eton Rifles by The Jam was his favourite song.

Upper-class Cameron had attended Eton, the country’s most prestigious and expensive public school – actually a private fee-paying school. The Eton Rifles were the school's army cadet corps. Cameron thought the song was a jolly drinking song for the corps he used to belong to.

He’d either not listened to the lyrics or, more likely, saw the title, came over all nostalgic and had no idea who lead singer and self-proclaimed socialist Paul Weller was. The Eton Rifles was written by Weller as a class protest song about injustices based on a real event. A Right To Work march by unemployed workers was jeered at by scholars when they passed Eton. The scholars then attacked the march.

A powerful song and lyrics that use a then-recent event to highlight the disparity in the classes in Britain.

Zombie by The Cranberries

Zombie is possibly the most powerful of the four songs I’m using to demonstrate the power of using music to highlight political problems

It’s a protest song by Irish rock band The Cranberries and was written by lead singer, Dolores O’Riordan and inspired by the deaths of two young victims in a bombing in Warrington England in 1993 by the IRA. The terrorists planted a bomb in a rubbish bin in a busy shopping street in the town.

The Warrington bomb killed 3-year-old Jonathan Ball and 12-year-old Timothy Parry.

The song was a №1 hit around the world although not in the USA. It continues to be an important song in Ireland and is also played before home games for the Irish National Rugby Football Team.

The song and the associated video set in Belfast tell a far more powerful story than jumping around on a stage with a maniacally grinning politician and telling people what to do.

Waiting For The Ghost Train — Madness

Madness are a band often thought of as fun and lightweight but their lively songs often disguise a deeper meaning within the lyrics. Waiting For The Ghost Train was written by lead singer Suggs in 1986 about apartheid in South Africa, some four years before it finally ended.

The UK government at the time supported the South African government and the song’s anti-apartheid message was considered to be a bold intervention by the boys from North London at that time. It highlighted for their audience how their government was implicit in the continuing acceptance of apartheid for commercial and political reasons.

Ghost Town by The Specials

Madness’s contemporaries and stable mates, The Specials from Birmingham, also liked the ghost euphemism. This song is a commentary also about the policies of Margaret Thatcher’s government but this time the effects on the UK’s inner cities.

It was a UK №1 hit during the summer riots of 1981 against urban decay and lack of opportunities in many major UK cities such as London, Bristol and Liverpool.

It’s a powerful video and the opening was shot in and around the financial district of central London which was the point. However, it looks like it was filmed on an extremely early Sunday morning as I was working in this area in 1981 and I can tell you it was nose-to-tail traffic every weekday.

A strong message all the same and an iconic video often imitated by later artists.

Political preaching or political art?

Do rock stars help or hinder the politicians they support when they go into preach mode?

Their music gets my attention and the messages resonate for me; their preaching and patronising does not. But what do you think? Let me know.

(This article was based on a suggestion by after a comment I made on one of her excellent articles).