Read it in Books:In The City - A Celebration Of London Music.

"At night when you have nothing to do you can take a walk down Shaftesbury Avenue. There you will laugh and talk and enjoy the breeze and admire the beautiful scenery of London, that's the place for me" - London is the Place for Me, Lord Kitchener.

Lord Kitchener's 1948 calypso classic London is the Place for Me, later popularised by bandleader Edmundo Ros and put to service as a title for a series of excellent compilations of music made by those who migrated to London on Honest Jon's, is, on the surface, a blithe and carefree celebration of making one's life in a new city, a new (mother) country even. But the idea of an immigrant like Kitchener having "every comfort and every sport" and finding the natives "very much sociable" would appear, to anyone who's even dipped their toe into British social history or read about the Windrush generation, either a fantasy or sarcasm of the highest order.

Sarcasm with a smile? As such it's a song, one of many, that perfectly encapsulates London. A city that is both beautiful and ugly, that is both friendly and dangerous, that is both easy to live in and difficult to survive in. London is so vast that anyone attempting a comprehensive overview in a calypso, or a pop, rock, grime, or reggae song is doomed to failure. As with all other aspects of London it is when all the strands are pulled together we begin to see a fuller picture.

Back in September 2018 I curated, and led, a walk around some of London's more (hopefully) interesting musical sights (HMP Wandsworth, the Mayfair flat where both Keith Moon and Mama Cass died, the Heddon Street location used for Bowie's '72 Ziggy Stardust LP, and, of course, the Fishcotheque and Waterloo Sunset) but several years before that I was given as a gift, from a friend who has since moved to Bristol and sadly disowned me, a copy of Paul Du Noyer's In The City - A Celebration Of London Music.

 

Ten years later I finally got round to reading it and immediately, as so often, wondered what had taken me so long. Du Noyer, a Liverpool born former Mojo journalist who has also written about The Clash and Marc Bolan as well as (of course) Lennon and McCartney, may seem to come firmly from dadrock stock but the book takes a much broader and more inclusive view of the music that makes up London. The African Messengers, Light of the World, Blak Twang, Max Wall, and John Dowland, to name just five, don't seem like the sort of acts Mojo readers tend to concern themselves with.

While Mojo loves nothing more than looking back to the sixties and the days of punk, Du Noyer's time machine travels much further back. He kicks off his musical history of London over one thousand years ago when the music of the city came in two forms. That made for churches and royalty and the more popular songs of the working class that were sang in the streets and "bawled in taverns" after taking "strong waters". Du Noyer makes it clear from the off that it's the latter kind of music his book intends to celebrate.

16c London was a noisy city, horse drawn wagons rattling on cobblestones, tigers roaring from the Tower, bells, drums, cannons, organ grinders and their monkeys, and the squealing of half wild pigs, so popular songs had to be loud to compete even before amplification, before electricity. For much of its history London was the largest city on Earth and, appropriately enough, Londoners, often fuelled by booze, made the most noise.

The earliest named live music promoter, of sorts, is an Augustinian friar called Brother Rahere who, in 1133, was allowed by Henry I to stage a three day fair, St Bartholomew's fair, in aid of the priory and hospital he'd established in Smithfield, then a wide open space on the fringe of London where animals were slaughtered and criminals executed. Brother Rahere was a jester and a juggler (who is said to still the haunt the area after his tomb was opened in the 19c) and, alongside "naive bumpkins and cunning urchins" St Bartholomew's fair drew in singers of ballads who were often accompanied by their own personal pickpockets who'd enter the distracted crowds and save these buskers a need to put a cap down.

Charles II extended the fair from three to fourteen days and London theatres closed so actors could perform there but, over the centuries, some took against it as a vulgar festival of grimacing and screaming. Wordsworth described it as "barbarian and infernal" and other members of the educated classes agreed and then, in 1855, it was closed down permanently. But the cat was out of the bag and the Londoners' need to gather together in large raucous groups, drink heartily, and dance to music could no longer be denied.

Du Noyer has a belief that not only did the music of London appear at festivals and on theatre stages but that the streets of London themselves are a kind of stage and almost every action that takes place on them is in some ways performative, wondering if that's why so many of London's musical stars are stage school 'brats'. Sellers of newspapers, dumplings, and chickens competed with menders of shoes for the ear of Londoners with their jingles, songs, and bellows and at The White Horse on Fetter Lane in Farringdon spectators are allowed to drink indoors during somewhat avant-garde recitals that involve music made by rolling pins, chattering teeth, and men grunting like hogs.

William Blake held firmly that "London itself was always a facade, in front of something mystic and eternal" and the earthier the music the more he seems to have appreciated it. With Jon Gay's 1728 The Beggar's Opera the music of the streets was elevated into an art form that could be appreciated by the masses rather than the classes - and the masses were often drunk - and often singing about 'the drink'.

Alongside Greensleeves and London Bridge Is Falling Dow, early tavern standards included The Man In The Moon Drinks Claret and on warm nights Londoners would retreat West to pleasure gardens like Cuper's (near where Waterloo Bridge now stands), Vauxhall, Cremorne, and Ranelagh and boats like The Folly, near Cleopatra's needle, where Samuel Pepys partook of both wine and women.

The pleasure gardens gave way to the music halls as London swallowed formerly distant villages whole. The big stars were a rabbit skinner from Bermondsey (Bessie Bellwood) famed for singing 'coster' songs and arguing down even the most ferocious heckler, George Leybourne, a Birmingham labourer who played the part of a 'swell' and was paid by champagne importers to sing songs ("I'll moisten my throttle with many a bottle") celebrating that particular tipple, and Alfred 'The Great; Vance, an even sweller swell than Leybourne who sang about drinking gin and Going to the Derby and hobnobbed with The Prince of Wales. They were, Du Noyer suggests, the Blur and Oasis of their day.

The hip-hop stars of their day, at a squint, were the pearly kings and queens who joined the barrow boys and costermongers in the music halls to sing along to the songs of Albert Chevalier (Knocked 'Em in The Old Kent Road, My Old Dutch), Gus Elen (If It Wasn't For The 'Ouses In Between), and Harry Champion (Boiled Beef and Carrots, Any Old Iron, and I'm Henry The Eighth I Am) and shout out obscure catchphrases like 'Nice one, Cyril'.

One of the biggest stars was Marie Lloyd from Hoxton who, with songs like She'd Never Had Her Ticket Punched Before, delighted her audience with nudge-nudge wink-wink innuendo worthy of saucy seaside postcards and Carry On films. It was Lloyd, when she wasn't making Come Into The Garden, Maud sound as if it was about shagging, who popularised My Old Man Said Follow The Van and I'm One Of The Ruins That Cromwell Knocked About A Bit. She even took time out to bemoan the advent of the motor car calling them smelly old sparrow-starvers (referring to the dearth of cockney sparrows feeding on horse dung in London now the horses weren't needed for transportation). Such was her popularity that when she died, in 1922, more than 100,000 mourners attended her Hampstead funeral procession.

As the music halls made their slow and uncertain journey away from prostitution, unparalleled drunkenness, and edged towards gentrification with new venues like The Grand in Clapham, many of the songs performed were written by a partnership that would change London music forever:- W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, librettist and composer respectively.

Their style of satirical light opera, one that lampooned establishment figures like Disraeli and the purveyor of overpriced stationery WH Smith was picked up by the manager of Soho's Royalty Theatre, Richard D'Oyly Carte, and was relatable, funny, and, best of call, catchy. HMS Pinafore, Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado, and Iolanthe took gentle swipes at almost every facet of British society at the time and soon D'Oyly Carte built The Savoy, a permanent home for Gilbert and Sullivan's productions.

Gilbert and Sullivan both wished to create high art and, despite their success, this gnawed away at them. Not realising that they had, unbeknownst to them, created a bridge between the continental European operas that came before and the whole world of the musical, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Gershwin, Sondheim, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Lionel Bart, that would follow in their wake.

Soon, exacerbated by the harsh reality of World War I, the smutty innuendo of music hall began to give way to the seemingly more glamorous and sophisticated 'revue' but it was the new medium of cinema that delivered the final coup de grace to Burlington Bertie from Bow and Where Did You Get That Hat? As radio, or wireless, and then television appeared things moved further and further away from communal, smokey, noisy, rooms full of cheerful cockneys singing at the top of their voices. Community, in Du Noyer's words, began to give way to consumerism.

Patrick Hamilton and John Osborne wrote about, and Lawrence Olivier played, washed up music hall stars fighting a losing battle against these changes, In 1952's The Limelight, Charlie Chaplin both wrote and played a former music hall star and, in a way, had his cake and ate it by appearing in a Hollywood film about the London of the music halls.

While some music hall stars, like Max Miller (who inspired the likes of Ray Davies and Ian Dury), and Max 'Professor Wallofsky' Wall (who survived to record for Stiff Records - home of The Damned, Elvis Costello, and Dr Feelgood), would still emerge the limelight of which Chaplin referred had been well and truly surrendered to a more business like model that sold parlour pianos and sheet music to a burgeoning middle class. They called it 'the music industry' but it would carry within it, in the music of acts like The Small Faces and Blur, the muscle memory of music hall for generations.

It did, however, take a back seat for a while following the transition of the heart of London's music scene, in the interregnum years of 1918-1938, west to the supposedly more elegant and refined, but actually even more debauched, clubs of Mayfair. Paul Whiteman and The Original Dixieland Jazz Band had brought New Orleans jazz, albeit a white faced take on it, to London at this time. What F Scott Fitzgerald called the 'hot music', and G.K.Chesterton bemoaned as akin to being imprisoned by sound, had a huge affect on how Londoners listened to and made music - and, of course, drinking too - as cocktails replaced pints in the hand of 20s and 30s dandies.

The closeted homosexual Welsh composer Ivor Novello wrote Keep the Home Fires Burning for the first World War and We'll Gather Lilacs for the second and, between them, his parties were legend. As glamorous as they were camp, Novello was dashing and chiselled and was possibly the biggest British star of his era. Or would have been if it wasn't for some upstart who'd been born in Teddington in 1899 and, after moving around Sutton, Battersea and other locations, had settled on the edge of Clapham Common.

Noel Coward, a man who defines the word urbane for British people as surely as Duke Ellington does for Americans, was a born performer who found the lack of applause in churches depressing and reinvented himself as a kind of proto-pop performer, merging the music hall and Gilbert and Sullivan with the new jazz age and adding a British accent and humour to the new transatlantic sound. Rolling his Rs, sometimes for a whole minute, he sang love songs to London and those who lived in the city (London Pride, Mad About The Boy) but he also wrote plays, full revues, musicals, and films which he even went on to direct.

One of his plays, The Young Idea, inspired Paul Weller's lyrics for In The City and another classic punk band repurposed the title of 1923's London Calling, a title Coward himself half-inched from the newly found BBC. Suede covered his Poor Little Rich Girl and, in 1998, a tribute album came out including interpretations of his songs by the likes of Paul McCartney, Bryan Ferry, Elton John, Sting, The Pet Shop Boys, Robbie Williams, Texas, Space, and Shola Ama. Coward, like Bowie after him, seems to be influenced by everything before him and to have influenced everything that came after him. A Clapham Junction on London's musical journey.

Though not as celebrated a heartthrob as his friend Novello, he dined at the Ivy, stayed at the Savoy, and his observations of London life soon came from a window of a Rolls-Royce rather than a Northern Line tube train but when the WWII bombs fell it was Coward's London Pride, as well as Eric Maschwitz and Manning Sherwin's A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square, that proved not just that 'England can take it' but that London (a kind of synecdoche for England in Coward's world) was a special place full of special people with a special spirit. A necessary trick, perhaps, to play during a war. A downright mendacious one to employ during peacetime.

Between the wars the big star turns were the smooth Italian conductor Mantovani, Nat Gonella (whose band the Georgians turned out cockney voiced Louis Armstrong style jazz), the Wandsworth trombonist and bandleader Ted Heath (a different person to the future PM but I didn't know that as a child and it confused me greatly), and the Mozambique born Al Bowlly who fronted Ray Noble's band and was killed in 1941 when a Luftwaffe bomb landed outside his St James flat. He'd just returned from playing a gig in High Wycombe where, surely, he'd have performed his most famous number:- Goodnight Sweetheart.

Vera Lynn, of course, had a much better war. To the extent that people used to joke that her agent started it. When The Sex Pistols came on stage, in 2007, to her There'll Always Be An England it didn't seem ironic or a piss take but a genuine tribute and songs like We'll Meet Again and The White Cliffs of Dover are so firmly entrenched in the British psyche that they're almost part of our DNA.

 

As well as The Sex Pistols she inspired The Small Faces (who nicked the title of her whimsical Up The Wooden Hills To Bedfordshire - a phrase my mum used to use to inform me it was bedtime) and even The Queen during her coronavirus/lockdown broadcast. But more than that she was THE Forces' Sweetheart, there were many forces' sweethearts during WWII but Vera, who passed away last year, was always first among equals. The girl next door whose confident sense of fairness and belief that justice would out must have sounded a clarion call of hope to those soldiering in the trenches and in The London I Love she conjured up an image of the gleaming river, church bells ringing, pubs, and newsboys that many of us can still recognise now.

At a time when London was at risk of imminent destruction. Some of London was destroyed including, on the night of 8th March 1941, the Cafe de Paris in the West End. Eighty people were killed including bandleader Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson who'd moved to England from British Guiana twelve years earlier at the age of just fifteen. The American born British Nazi propagandist William Joyce, or Lord Haw-Haw, who was executed in Wandsworth Prison at the end of the war, had recently broadcast that the decadent toffs of Cafe de Paris deserved a little of what Hitler's lot had been dishing out to the cockneys of the East End.

But, even during wartime - in many ways especially so, the music kept coming. Flanagan and Allen sang about being Underneath the Arches and announced We're Going To Hang Out The Washing On The Siegfried Line before asking Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Hitler? (famously later employed as the theme for Dad's Army). Other wartime favourites that linger long in the memory include The Sun Has Got His Hat On, Leaning On A Lamppost, Run Rabbit Run (often sang as Run Adolf Run), and The Lambeth Wallk which was dismissed by a member of the Third Reich as "Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping".

Often these songs would be introduced by the BBC's orchestral supremo Henry Hall, a man of who it was said could introduce The Teddy Bears' Picnic as if it was an orchestral symphony. More familiar was former Wimbledon and Brentford footballer, racing driver, pilot, and soldier Billy Cotton who'd yell 'wakey wakey' at his audience in his new role as bandleader before performing I've Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts.

After the war Cotton moved from the ballrooms to the new medium of television and entertainment was never, quite, the same again. Flanders and Swann might have been still singing droll ditties about gnus and hippos and Matt Monro, Britain's answer to Frank Sinatra, and, to a lesser extent, Dickie Valentine may have wowed young lovers with their crooning but the big money was now being made by imported American musicals like Oklahoma! (Rodgers and Hammerstein) whose Drury Lane run Princess Margaret is said to have attended twenty-seven times.

As ever, London put its own spin on this imported format. Notwithstanding Missouri's Dick Van Dyke infamously dire cockney accent in Mary Poppins, we had Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady tell the story of a Covent Garden flower seller and featured a young Julie Andrews from the suburban town of Walton-on-Thames who, after being replaced by Audrey Hepburn for the film version, went on to appear in the aforesaid Mary Poppins with Van Dyke and, most famously of all, play Maria Von Trapp in The Sound Of Music.

The Sherman brothers, Richard and Robert, who wrote the songs for Mary Poppins were more diligent in their studies of London than Van Dyke. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious was based on Any Old Iron and Boiled Beef And Carrots and even performed in the film by cartoon pearly kings and queens, Step In Time came from a request from Walt Disney himself that they should have a song that sounds like Knees Up Mother Brown, and Feed The Birds (Tuppence A Bag) was performed by an old lady on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral.

Alan Lerner grew up in New York and Frederick Loewe in Germany before moving to the US in his early twenties but Lionel Bart was born in Stepney in 1930, the son of Galician Jews who had escaped the pogroms carried out by the Austrian Empire, and he didn't need to study London to write about it. He lived it. His 1960 masterpiece Oliver! featured Consider Yourself, You've Got To Pick A Pocket Or Two, and Food Glorious Food and sets to music Charles Dickens' 1838 novel Oliver Twist which, as an aside, provided a band name for the Southampton duo that launched Craig David's career, The Artful Dodger.

The West End theatres that line Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road may have reverberated to show tunes (and nearby Denmark Street became the UK's Tin Pan Alley, a moniker it nicked from New York's West 28th Street) but in the close knot of streets these thoroughfares enclose, Soho, a more radical and libidinous form of music was emerging.

Previously Soho had been home to the likes of Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas, and Patrick Hamilton and was already known for its sleaze, its dark and dingy drinking dens, and its Italian coffee bars and restaurants so it was a natural home for those fleeing safe suburban domesticity, conservative politics, and the stultifying incuriosity of their families and provincial peers. In London, especially in Soho, you could reinvent yourself. The weird bullied kid at school can become a poet, a rock star, or, quite simply, a professional layabout.

The first group of musicians to really emerge from Soho were the jazzers. The likes of Chris Barber, Ken Colyer, and Humphrey Lyttelton had a purist, it's trad dad, approach to the genre that had little in common with more austere, moody, and experimental beboppers. The likes of Ronnie Scott, Tubby Hayes, and Johnny Dankworth had been inspired more by Miles Davis and Charlie Parker than the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and, with their fellow modernists and a few showgirls from the Windmill Theatre, they'd hang around Archer Street. A particularly sleazy Soho street even into this millennium.

The tiff between the purists and the modernists continued between Ken Colyer, the sternest of the old guard, and his more open minded trombonist Chris Barber. When  Barber left Colyer's band he took the banjo player with him. The skiffle that Lonnie Donegan pioneered initially went by many, odd, names (spasm and hamfat being just two) but his songs, especially his cover of Leadbelly's Rock Island Line, gripped the young John Lennon and Paul McCartney and, because it was so easy to set up a skiffle band, many imitators followed in Donegan's wake. Many, including Donegan himself eventually with songs like My Old Man's A Dustman and Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour On The Bed Post Overnight, were easily dismissed as novelty acts.

But the act of stripping music down to its bare components had not been unobserved by Tin Pan Alley and a far earthier American import, rock'n'roll, was soon being moulded into a more polite, cleaner, and whiter English form. The 2i's coffee bar on Old Compton Street became London's home of rock'n'roll and both Adam Faith and Cliff Richard would get early breaks there but the first breakout star of the scene in Britain was Bermondsey boy Tommy Steele.

But Steele moved almost immediately into stage (appearing with Bernie Winters in Sunderland rather than trying to ape Elvis' stateside success) and though he still hit the top of the charts with a cover of Guy Mitchell's Singing The Blues his eyes were fixed more on the Palladium and entertaining the Queen Mother at Royal Variety Shows than they were on the live music circuit.

Steele's svengali like manager Tommy Parnes liked it that way and, anyway, Parnes had other acts too so could afford to diversify. He turned Ron Wycherley into Billy Fury, Reg Smith into Marty Wilde, and Roy Taylor became Vince Eager although Joe Brown insisted on keeping his real name in preference to the suggested Elmer Twitch. Mr Parnes Shilling and Pence, as he became known, also saw the importance of TV and with Jack Good was involved in the shows Oh Boy! and 6.5 Special. He set the template for gay band managers who seemed to have a better idea of how to sell sex to female fans and male wannabes than middle aged second hand car dealers from the suburbs.

While Joe Brown went on to become seen as Britain's first guitar hero and an idol of The Beatles it was the ill fated Vince Taylor who wrote the first truly seminal British rock'n'roll hit, Brand New Cadillac. It came out in 1958 and the following two years the eye patch sporting Johnny Kidd (Frederick Heath to his family) wrote, recorded, and released both Please Don't Touch and Shakin' All Over. Two other UK r'n'r tracks that can hold their own with the Americans.

Another hit of the time was Adam Faith's What Do You Want (If You Don't Want Money?). Faith had been born Terry Nelhams but, unlike those in Parnes' stable, had chosen his own stage name. Like Steele before him, Faith soon moved over to theatre (Beat Girl), television (Budgie), and film (playing David Essex's manager in Stardust) as well as music management, playing a role in the careers of Sandie Shaw, Leo Sayer, and Roger Daltrey.

There were few women or people of colour in the London music scene of the late fifties and early sixties but two exceptions were Bethnal Green's Helen Shapiro and Kenny Lynch from Stepney. Shapiro's Walkin' Back To Happiness is perhaps better known but Lynch's Misery was the first ever release of a cover of a Beatles track and both Lynch and The Beatles found themselves supporting Shapiro in places like Doncaster, Mansfield, and Wakefield in 1963.

As the music world, unknowingly, waited for that dynamic to be inverted many of the era's greatest hits were coming out of an upstairs flat on Holloway Road. Joe Meek was the man behind Telstar (The Tornados), Johnny Remember Me (John Leyton), and Heinz's Just Like Eddie and his music sounds amazing to this day. An even bigger hit maker, the bland Cliff Richard who arrived in the UK from India at Tilbury Docks aged seven, has always been far less to my taste although I would have to admit a grudging respect for his first single, Move It.

Those who sought a more authentic experience of black American music turned to imported records, blues clubs, and the calypso music that fully arrived in Britain when the Windrush docked in Tilbury in 1948 and in Lord Kitchener, Young Growler, and Young Tiger who sang about the perils of not paying your bill in Chinese restaurants (Chicken and Rice) and attending the coronation of Elizabeth II (I Was There At The Coronation).

The calypso music spawned one of London's most celebrated institutions, Notting Hill Carnival - or simply Carnival to those of us who live here, but the suburban devotees of the new American music were starting to make Chelsea, and the King's Road, their home - or their catwalk really.

Blackheath's Mary Quant had opened her boutique, Bazaar, there in 1955 setting in motion a scene that, by 1963, would be known as Swinging London. An almost courtly scene where the photographers, fashionistas, and models were high ranking aristocrats but the new royalty of the King's Road were The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. From Liverpool and Dartford respectively.

The Beatles, of course, made other London locations famous. From the zebra crossing outside EMI's Abbey Road studios (on the cover of their final album) to the stairwell in EMI's Manchester Square offices (on the cover of their first album). The Stones became more associated with South West London locations like Richmond (Andrew Loog Oldham spotted them playing in Richmond's Station Hotel), and Chelsea where they graduated, or at least Mick and Keith did, from a scuzzy flat beyond the World's End to chic riverside residences on Cheyne Walk.

As the sixties moved on The Beatles and The Stones changed from besuited purveyors of R&B to colourful hippies, decked out in florid Victoriana, pushing at the very edges of sonic innovation. Mary Quant became mainstream and boutiques like Granny Takes A Trip filled the countercultural void and pivotal figures in the swinging London scene included the likes of Jean Shrimpton, David Bailey, Terence Stamp, and Mick Jagger's teenage girlfriend Marianne Faithfull.

 

With the Jagger and Richards penned As Tears Go By, Faithfull found instant fame and then, almost as quickly again, descended into infamy, addiction, and homelessness. Others hovering around the fringes of this scene were The Who, The Kinks, and a visitor from Seattle - Jimi Hendrix - as well as young women like Sandie Shaw and Dusty Springfield, born Mary O'Brien in West Hampstead and with an impressive talent for converting Burt Bacharach tunes into white soul anthems.

With London now cemented as the global centre of pop music, it wasn't long before the Americans came. P.J.Proby (whose trousers just kept splitting on stage for some reason) and The Walker Brothers (none of them brothers, nor called Walker) arrived and, according to legend, The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore, which was number one at the time, was playing on the jukebox in The Blind Beggar in Whitechapel when Ronnie Kray gunned down a rival gangster.

The singer of The Walker Brothers, Scott Walker, was a sensitive kind of heart-throb. More interested in gloomy art house films and experimental literature than clubs or hanging out on the scene. When his band toured with fellow US expatriate Jimi Hendrix he saw the rules of music were changing and retreated into a solo career of edgy, difficult, yet widely loved albums about plagues, wars, and death that would see him wailing into the abyss and punching sides of bacon.

 

To look at the television images of London at the time it would be easy to imagine London a monocultural city. A rejoinder to this came in the form of Eddy Grant, the leader of The Equals, who'd arrived in London with his family from Guyana aged eight. The Equals released great songs like Baby Come Back and Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys and Grant challenged Enoch Powell to a debate about Commonwealth immigration. 

 

Powell did not accept Grant's offer of a debate and Powell was unable, also, to accept the changing face of London as the picture went from monochrome to colour and the music scene became ever more multicultural. London's next big musical phenomenon was 'mod' and the beating heart of the London mod scene was Carnaby Street in the north west corner of Soho.

The Who and The Kinks were the public face of mod but the purists knew The Small Faces were the real deal. The mods, or modernists, liked Italian clothes, French films, jazz, existentialism, and smoked Gitanes. It sounds like a world away from the beer guzzling Wellends of today with their dinner lady haircuts and their aversion to anything remotely modern.

 

The mod love of colourful clothes and, sometimes, make up didn't warm them to the more conservative elements of the time but their enthusiasm for amphetamine meant they had the energy to run from, or into, a fight if need be. By the summer of 1964 and for the next few years some of the more aggressive types who'd attached themselves to mod were fighting rockers in seaside towns like Clacton, Brighton, Hastings, and Margate.

The greatest legacy of the short lived mod movement (it carried on for decades and it still exists now but it soon became a pale shadow of its original iteration) came in the work of some of the finest London songwriters ever. Ray Davies. With Terry and Julie oblivious to the commuters swarming around Waterloo undergound, drinks in the Archway Tavern (the cover of The Kinks 1971 LP Muswell Hillbillies), his observation of people living 'lives of quiet desperation' in anonymous suburbia, and preference for watching Arsenal (pre-football being cool) at their old Highbury ground rather than hanging out on Carnaby Street, Davies was a misfit who spoke for the soul of the city.

Davies would be followed by the likes of Ian Dury, Madness, and Squeeze who, with their music, gave authenticity, complexity, and depth to the working class Londoner's life. The Who not so much offered a reflection of ordinary lives but a chance to somehow transcend them. Something almost shamanistic.

 

Steered by the vision of the Ealing born son of a saxophonist, Pete Townshend, and fronted by a former teddy boy from Shepherd's Bush, The Who smashed their instruments, applied art school techniques to a burgeoning musical subculture, and became rock gods in the process. My Generation, though now mocked as the band age, became an anthem to many of their, er, generation - and younger.

I'm A Boy, I Can See For Miles, Pinball Wizard, Pictures of Lily, the hits kept coming and The Who seemed to represent both the defiance and the nihilism of the late sixties nearly as much as The Rolling Stones of Sympathy For The Devil would go on to. But despite the Union Jack outfits and photos posed with Big Ben in the background The Who rarely wrote specifically about, or even from, London.

The Small Faces were so London they even used cockney costermonger slang and their singer Steve Marriott had played the Artful Dodger in Lionel Bart's Oliver. They met and schemed at the Giaconda coffee bar in Denmark Street (like true mods) and were signed up by the legendary Don Arden who gave them money to buy flash new threads with.

Their early run of hits (All Or Nothing, Tin Soldiers etc;) were as neat and impressive as their clothes but when they turned on to LSD they not only became more psychedelic, think Here Comes the Nice, but managed to wed that psychedelia with a very specific East End sensibility. In their timeless classic Itchycoo Park. In Du Noyer's words a "vision of another kind of London, where there is always the possibility of something extraordinary around the next corner".

 

Lazy Sunday Afternoon, with its raucous atmosphere and references to lumbago, was built to be sung round a piano in a pub and the album Ogden's Nut Gone Flake, a cult classic not just thanks to Stanley Unwin's gibberish introductions, was seen as a cockney Sgt Pepper. But as mod fashions, and music, grew more outre and began to merge with the hippy scene there was a more utilitarian school of thought that didn't buy into long hair or loose colourful clothing.

This eventually mutated into the skinheads whose hair, the name implies, was anything but long and whose clothes were often two-tone and tight fitting. While this process of evolution was slowly happening in the background, waiting to explode in the punk and post-punk era with bands like The Jam and The Merton Parkas, the London music scene, the London music rock scene at least, was being injected with a shot of the blues.

Not always the most authentic imitation, no matter how you slice it Twickenham is not Mississippi, but bands like The Rolling Stones and The Who were joined by The Pretty Things (the first band to have long hair), Eric Clapton, and Rod Stewart. All of whom were desperate to be credible. It must have hurt Clapton when his band supported bona-fide blue legend Sonny Boy Williamson whose withering assessment of them and their peers was "those English boys want to play the blues so bad - and they do".

 

A far cry from later days when John Lee Hooker would announce of the Gomez album Bring It On that it had "no defect". Those English boys, however, were not deterred and soon bands like Fleetwood Mac and Cream were to become huge and American stars like Muddy Waters came over to play to adoring fans. Even Sonny Boy Williamson changed his tune (unusual for a blues artist) and started taking to the stage in a Savile Row suit and a bowler hat from Cheapside. 

 

Clapton was one of the most adoring of those fans and he even came to be known to some as God - and others as 'that boring cunt'. He quit The Yardbirds after four singles (too pop), got invited to (and did) join John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, and formed the supergroup Cream with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce in the space of a few short years.

 

He was soon hanging out in The Pheasantry on Kings Road (now a Pizza Express) with various Beatles, Monkees, Lulu, and Germaine Greer. From this LSD fuelled hothouse of creativity came Cream's 1967 magnum opus Disraeli Gears with its singles Strange Brew and Sunshine Of Your Love showing how the blues and psychedelic rock can be meshed together to create a new sound.

 

One that would eventually morph into heavy metal. Or at least become a key ingredient of that music along with the sound of The Groundhogs (there's a couple of paragraphs devoted to how that band managed to impress both Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf). Other bands went in a different direction, bringing in sax players and Hammond organs and covering soul shouters like Otis Redding and Solomon Burke.

 

London's initial soul mecca was The Flamingo on Wardour Street and turns included Georgie Fame, Chris Farlowe, Long John Baldry, and Zoot Money. Geno Washington gave the scene some genuine American flavour (and was, of course, later immortalised in song by Dexy's Midnight Runners) and perhaps the most effective practitioners of this English soul rock music were the Spencer Davis Group and their singer Steve Winwood.

Who soon departed into the hippy world of Traffic, a band who moved to rural Berkshire and began the fashion for getting it together in the country. While rockers moved out to the sticks, the folkies took hold in London. Ewan MacColl founded the Ballads & Blues club at The Princess Louise in Holborn and the Singers Club in Soho Square (near where a plaque to his daughter who suffered a tragic death stands on a bench) but it was the 2i's on Greek Street that spawned the likes of Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, and Davy Graham.

As well as future pop stars like Donovan, Cat Stevens, and Al Stewart. Even a young New Yorker by the name of Paul Simon and another American you may have heard of - Bob Dylan. Some of the younger scene members (Ashley Hutchings, Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson) formed a folk-rock band called Fairport Convention and there was a tall, hunched, public schoolboy figure on the fringes of the scene by the name of Nick Drake.

Over in Soho there lived yet another American emigre. Jimi Hendrix was an unwelcome challenge to Eric Clapton's London supremacy but in truth Hendrix was as fascinated by the British psychedelic scene as the Brits were by the Mississippi bluesmen. In London, Du Noyer opines, Hendrix was free to invent a new self in a way he would not have been in Seattle.

He took up residence in Brook Street with his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham in a flat next to the one in which Handel once lived. Far away from the flourishes of Handel and the wild extemperisation of Hendrix, at least musically, was the burgeoning reggae scene of London. Most reggae had been imported into London from Jamaica , to shops like Orbitone in Willesden, but when  Count Suckle opened a reggae club, primarily attended by sharp dressed mods, in Paddington, the Cue Club, a young entrepreneur took notice.

 

Chris Blackwell had been born in London and attended Harrow but most of his youth was spent in Jamaica where his family were friends with James Bond creator Ian Fleming. The first record released on his Island label went on to become a massive hit. My Boy Lollipop by Millie is a thing of joy for ever. Instant sugar fix with dizzying levels of joy and just a tiny smidgeon of edge to stop it from being cloying.

When Millie died last year I had it an earworm for days. Eventually reggae transformed into blue beat and ska and as Island began signing pop and rock acts, the spin off label Trojan picked up the slack with tracks by acts like Jimmy Cliff, Dave and Ansell Collins, The Pioneers, and other singers and producers who'd relocated to London from Jamaica.

Homegrown reggae came from Symarip (Skinhead Moonstomp) and Greyhound (Black And White) but the real breakthrough came with a young mixed race boy from Jamaica with Syrian Jewish heritage. Blackwell had two ideas on how to break Marley. Firstly, he made his records more friendly to a white rock audience - which made them sound worse but sell more - and, secondly, he presented Marley as a cultural heavyweight worthy of comparison with Bob Dylan and John Lennon.

 

The plan worked. But connoisseurs of the form in the UK were more taken with a new, more feminine, style called lovers rock whose leading artists included Janet Kay and Louisa Marks. It wasn't just the mods and the Afro-Caribbeans who were listening. Young, soon to be, punks were too. But before punk there was glam rock.

Du Noyer writes about the site of Marc Bolan's death on Barnes Common, his childhood home in Stoke Newington, his affinity with William Blake, and the myth he spun of being adopted by a wizard in Paris and owning a 'magic cat'. While whitewashing his manager Larry Conn's office, Bolan was introduced to another of Conn's charge, a young Brixton lad called David Jones.

 

Jones changed his name to Bowie (as Bolan had changed his from Feld) and, for a while, sat back and watched Bolan's band T Rex become the biggest group in the country with hits like Hot Love, Get It On, and Ride A White Swan. But that power dynamic changed as the 70s moved on and Bowie became to that decade what The Beatles had been to the previous one. 

 

Bowie, at first, seemed more interested in being Anthony Newley or Max Miller than the biggest pop star on the planet. Before he became Ziggy Stardust he'd performed with The King Bees, The Mannish Boys, and The Lower Buzz and released charming and humorous tunes like I Dig Everything, She's Got Medals, and, of course, London Boys.

Born in Brixton and growing up in Bromley, Bowie may have seemed unearthly at the peak of his powers but the London accent was clearly still there. It's what gave him an earthly side, a duality that was to return later in his career but during his imperial phase he seemed more transatlantic. Hanging with Iggy Pop and Lou Reed and writing Life on Mars, Star Man, and Rebel Rebel.

Bowie may have left London for New York and, later, Berlin but back in London they were paying attention. Spandau Ballet heard the melodramatic funk of Station To Station and carved a career out of toning it down and Gary Numan did the same for the sombre soundscapes of Low but the most immediate legacy of Bowie were the glam rock bands that spawned almost immediately.

 

Glam of a sort at least. They included Cockney Rebel, Manhattan Transfer, and Ian Dury's pre-Blockheads outfit Kilburn and the High Roads - none of which quite fit the descriptor - but the lead band on the Biba scene on Kensington High Street were a bunch of art school misfits led by a suave and affected vocalist from Durham.

Ferry set up Roxy Music in the capital expressly to achieve fame and fortune and he didn't fail in his mission. They created songs that were catchy as hell yet remained avant-garde, songs that harked back to an era of Art Deco elegance yet sounded like the future:- Virginia Plain, Love Is The Drug, Do The Strand, All I Want Is You. They churned out classic after classic yet looked as if they'd never shed a bead of sweat in their life.

Roxy inspired lesser acts like Sailor (whose Glass of Champagne, nonetheless, is a deathless pleasure) as well as a young actor from West Ham who fancied having a crack at pop music. David Essex tried hard to make it. Playing in a band called The China Plates, making a song about miniskirts called Thighs High, and becoming Tommy Steele's understudy in Dick Whittington but the big break came when he played Jesus in a production of the Stephen Schwartz rock musical Godspell.

 

After leading roles in the films That'll Be The Day and Stardust, he took the infectiously outre Rock On to number three in the charts. Gonna Make You A Star and Hold Me Close went all the way to the top. But while Bowie, Bolan, Roxy Music, and David Essex were at the top another scene, a much less flashy one, was brewing in the background.

Pub rock for years never got its due when it came to the history and evolution of music. Understandable because it doesn't, generally, sound like a step forward. With 'alcoholic overtones' bands like Brinsley Schwarz, Ducks Deluxe, Bees Make Honey, the US visitors Eggs Over Easy, and, most of all, Canvey Island's Dr Feelgood helped pave the way for punk but perhaps the biggest star to come out of the scene wouldn't reach his full ascendancy until punk blossomed.

If, indeed, punk can be said to have 'blossomed'. Ian Dury had been partly crippled after contracting polio at the age of seven and adopted a gruff music hall stage persona as he hunched up to the mic singing There Ain't Half Been Some Clever Bastards, Sex and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll, Billericay Dickie, and Plaistow Patricia but he'd actually studied at the Royal College of Art and been tutored in Walthamstow by Peter Blake. A hybrid for sure. One of those very English, very London hybrids, we produce.

On his passing, in March 2000, Peter Blake remembered him as "a great poet. In the same vein as Betjeman". One of the acts most influenced by Dury would go on to, if not revolutionise music, revolutionise the music scene. The Sex Pistols usurped everybody's prediction for the next big thing, Eddie & the Hot Rods, and tore down a few trees as they (nearly) made their way to the top of charts with songs like Anarchy in the UK, God Save The Queen, and Pretty Vacant.

 

The brainchild of "carrot-topped motormouth" Malcolm McLaren whose grand theories propelled the Pistols further in the public imagination, at least to start with, than peers like The Damned or The Clash. McLaren had been inspired both by the New York Dolls and by London's confused mix of endless anarchy and ceaseless commercialism. Bassist Glen Matlock and drummer Paul Cook were fairly ordinary fellas off the street, guitarist Steve Jones was better still - a proper Dickensian oik, but when they auditioned a young man of Irish descent from Finsbury Park they knew they'd found the missing ingredient.

Johnny Rotten's whine is so famous now as to be almost a parody but at the time it sounded so urgent, so anarchic that he just had to be the singer. He may have looked an uneducated street kid but his brain was huge and his musical influences spanned Irish jigs, reggae soundsystems, and krautrock. Established rock and pop acts, Deep Purple and Melanie (!), he had less time for. Or certainly did his best to give that appearance.

 

The Sex Pistols career was fast and short and it seemed to create a huge rupture line with the past but when you listen to the music, free from the attitude, free from the baiting, and free from that whining voice, it is fairly pedestrian if decent rock music. It would take other bands to change punk from a tabloid sensation to a musical sensation and, perhaps, the first to step up to the plate in London were The Clash. 

From The Westway ("the stone dream that will never awake" - JG Ballard) they came, playing every song like it was "their last stab at immortality", The Clash saw urban dread in every direction they looked. But they soon moved away from the chugging rock of the Pistols and expanded into reggae and funk and even a crude form of early hip-hop.

These songs were not as 'London' as earlier tracks like 1977, White Man In Hammersmith Palais, White Riot, and, er, London's Burning which all burned with fury and injustice. By adopting reggae The Clash showed they were aligned to anti-racism and Bob Marley acknowledged this when he namechecked them, along The Damned, The Jam, and Dr Feelgood in 1977's Punky Reggae Party.

It had been unclear, until this point, which direction the nihililst punk movement would take politically and there soon formed a schism. The Nazi punks could fuck off but bands like The Clash joined with reggae acts to form Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. Movements that came a little before my musical rites of passage but ones that, thank fuck, informed it.

 

The Damned, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Jam, and Elvis Costello and the Attractions were the next punk bands out of London and they were all very different. The Damned were showbiz'n'swagger, Siouxsie was Cabaret by way of Sex with a dash of Louise Brooks, The Jam sang of London with the thrill and wonder, and anger, of the suburban outsiders they were, and Elvis Costello was barely a punk at all but probably wouldn't have made it if punk hadn't given an 'awkward customer' like him a way in. Shouts too should go out to other important, and eccentric, punk outfits like X-Ray Spex, Billy Idol's pre-Generation X group Chelsea, Jimmy Pursey's Sham 69, and, and there's a whole section devoted to them, the anarcho-syndicalists Crass.

Who, of all places, set up home in Dial House on the edge of Epping Forest (a short walk north from the M25). The fiercely aggressive, musically, band lived in a pacifist commune and, despite shunning almost all media, were one of the most popular bands in the early eighties. Their name, and their logo - an A in a circle representing anarchy, could be seen everywhere if you knew what you were looking for.

They baked bread, they grew their own cabbages, they drank tea, and they plotted the downfall of Western capitalist society via the medium of snotty nosed dirges like Nagasaki Nightmare and Big A Little A. Quite a musical departure from bandleader, the former choirboy and unashamed hippy throwback Penny Rimbaud.

 

Crass were never destined, nor did they desire, mainstream success. Many of the bands that came in the wake of pop, however, did desire, and achieve, pop stardom and many of those bands came not from London but from the denounced and, on the surface, culturally bankrupted satellite towns. The Cure from Crawley and Depeche Mode from Basildon and though Welling, from where Kate Bush, came can be found on a standard A-Z, its DA postcode denotes that it belongs as much to Kent as it does to London.

These acts don't detain Du Noyer for long as he insists on not straying too far from Charles II's statue in Charing Cross that is held to mark the geographical centre of London. Squeeze, Madness, and Spandau Ballet (though all sounding vastly different) were all, definitively, London groups. 

Chris Difford, a Small Faces fanatic, and the more bohemian Glenn Tillbrook both hailed from Blackheath. They joined forces with a keyboard playing friend, Julian 'Jools' Holland and started their career as Squeeze playing pubs in Greenwich and Deptford. Punks like Generation X's Tony James soon dismissed them as 'irrelevant' for playing love songs but Miles Copeland, brother of Stewart and manager of The Police, realised that punks fell in love just like everyone else.

They never looked like, and never were, punks but songs like Cool For Cats (with its lyrical nods to Heathrow, The Sweeney, and Wandsworth prison), Up The Junction (a windy Clapham Common, having a bath on Sunday, hitting the bottle), and Goodbye Girl (the line 'sunlight on the lino' always sounds so painfully evocative to me) struck a chord both Londoners and wannabe Londoners like me out in rural Hampshire.

 

Although perhaps not quite as much as the band who became my very favourite in the early eighties. Madness. Looking like a North London version of the Bash Street Kids and moving in unison as if each of the seven members was a mere component of a well oiled machine, Madness combined 'slapstick reggae' with music hall and tender ballads and, after a fashion, hits like My Girl (I was late for school once as I insisted on noting down the lyrics in their entirety), Baggy Trousers, House of Fun, and Wings of a Dove moved the band further away from their often problematic skinhead base to a younger, more pop leaning, following.

When I was a kid, Madness were barely out of the charts. Nor were a very different, and not always to my taste, London band. Spandau Ballet. They mixed saccharine, and hugely successful, ballads like True and Through the Barricades with muscular new romantic anthems like Muscle Bound and To Cut A Long Story Short and though they cultivated an international air and didn't sing of, or for, London (although Chant No 1 does mention Greek Street) the costermonger grins and accents of the Kemp brothers, Gary and Martin, as well as their Soho affectations were never far from the surface. Underlined when they played The Krays in Peter Medak's 1990 film of that name.

Gary Kemp's first musical memory is Billy Cotton singing I've Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts. The Islington that Gary Kemp grew up had a huge class divide and Kemp saw music as a way to leap across this divide. Down in Eltham, a young George O'Dowd had even bigger leaps to make and his band Culture Club, with the singer now known as Boy George, managed to upset middle England more than any band since The Sex Pistols.

 

Young George O'Dowd, as he was then, hung around David Bowie's house in Beckenham so much that Angie, Bowie's then wife, told him to fuck off. With his friend Marilyn, he got a role in Hazel O'Connor's Breaking Glass and connected with Malcolm McLaren and his new band Bow Wow Wow. But it was with Culture Club he would become a household name. An outrageously gay man who your mum, or nan, would happily have round for tea and biscuits.

Which George claimed he preferred to sex anyway. George Michael, whose band Wham! appeared on the scene the same year as Culture Club - 1982, seemed to like sex - although it was certainly suggested, back in the eighties, that the sex he liked was with ladies. Wham!, Du Noyer correctly observes, were the absolute antithesis to dour grey bands like The Smiths and Joy Division.

They were suntanned, wore clean white t-shirts (with CHOOSE LIFE emblazoned in huge letters across the front), they drank cocktails, and they had no need for socks whatsoever. Of course I preferred The Smiths and Joy Division. But I could not deny that George Michael had a way with a tune. As the man himself observed, as long as Princess Di wasn't having her hair done, Wham! were on the front page of the tabloids.

 

 

George Michael, born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, was the son of a Greek Cypriot restauteur and an English dancer and though he was born in Finchley, Wham! were formed after he moved to Bushey in Hertfordshire and, as we've seen with Paul Weller, often the artists that most define London are the ones who live in its satellite towns in Surry, Hertfordshire, Kent, and, perhaps most of all, Essex.

Billy Bragg has soundtracked quite a few important moments in my life, and the lives of my friends. While jazz funk soul boys in white loafers and Essex girls with fake tans in white stilettos were unfairly pilloried these cliches did, for certain, exist in Essex. But they were far from the whole story. From Dr Feelgood to Depeche Mode, Essex kept churning out interesting music and the man who sang in the most authentic Essex accent was Bragg.

The Bard of Barking, unlike the Essex white van man, didn't desert Labour for Margaret Thatcher but instead became one of her most trenchant critics. Songs like Between the Wars stood out against the new romantic backdrop of the mid-eighties by being stark and austere yet were underpinned by a genuine passion for humanity. These were evinced even more so in numerous love songs like The Myth of Trust, Love Gets Dangerous, The Milkman of Human Kindness, and, most powerfully of all for many, Levi Stubbs' Tears.

 

The Pogues wrote well about love too and though, for the most part - Birmingham Six a notable exception, they steered clear of politics they wrote very well about booze and equally well about London. Shane MacGowan had spent his youth in Ireland and Kent, become a misfit at Westminster School, and then found his place with other misfits in the punk years as part of The Nipple Erectors or, more politely, The Nips.

NW3, Lullaby of London, Dark Streets of London, London Girl, The Old Main Drag, and more. The Pogues' beautiful love songs to the city and those that lived in it. A Rainy Night in Soho captured the romance and life changing encounters that take place in unremarkable doorways and underground bars. Love blooming or love being destroyed as the city rolls on ceaselessly in the background, offering a stony vigil, a background, but no comment.

While some music (The Pogues, Billy Bragg) tells stories, other music creates backgrounds, scenes, and cultures that then go on to tell their own story and, sometimes, even change the world. Brit-funk bands like Hi-Tension, Light of the World, and Freeez created a movement in which a band like Soul II Soul could, eventually, both thrive and prosper. Jazzie B hailed from Hornsey Rise and with songs like Back To Life they cemented London's dominance in the early nineties dance music scene.

 

Soul, jazz, funk, and hip-hop were all fused together into what became known as acid-jazz and brought into the public sphere by DJs like Gilles Peterson and bands like the Brand New Heavies and, later, Jamiroquai. At the same time acid house and ecstasy were taking over London's clubs, the likes of Shoom and Ministry of Sound, and though much of the music played came from Detroit and Chicago, an unlikely house band called Flowered Up emerged from the working class estates of Camden.

 

But most of the baggy scene was centred in Manchester and the London flowering of talent in its wake came at the back end of it with bands like Suede and Blur who would spearhead a new, for want of a better word, movement - along with Sheffield's Pulp and Mancs Oasis. Many great songs came out of Britpop but there was always a sense, for me, that was to in thrall to Britain's glorious, and mostly false, past. All that flag waving and Keep Calm and Carry on stuff looked naff at the time and the talk of reclaiming the flag from the far right soon backfired when the far, or alt, right reclaimed it right back and waved it in the face of the nation during the interminable Brexit divisions.

The beer, birds, football culture of Loaded was not the natural home of Suede's Brett Anderson who wrote songs about taking sleeping pills, sex in council flats, and retards in leotards on escalators. Damon Albarn had an equally arty background but faked his London credentials better and, because of that, had more success if less critical acclaim.

 

For all Britpop's claims that it spoke for London, or England (but rarely the whole UK) to live in London in the late nineties was not the monocultural experience the Britpop bands made it sound like. Jungle, drum'n'bass, acid jazz, and hip-hop were not just thriving but competing on fairly equal terms with these now mainstream rock and pop acts.

Following a spell when even blander bands dominated, landfill indie they called it, these influences, influences from Jamaica and black America, would come to the fore in the new millennium's most interesting musical developments. London music forms like UK (or speed) garage, grime, and drill. When US garage imports were played in London clubs in the nineties, MCs would spit their own bars over the tunes giving them a distinctly British, or London, feel.

Battersea's So Solid Crew, Archway's Ms Dynamite, Stepney's Wiley, and Bow's Dizzee Rascal all grew out of this scene. Both the location and the names of artists like Dizzee Rascal, Tinchy Stryder, and Lady Sovereign suggest a lineage that goes right back to the Victorian music hall and the angular, sometimes discordant and undanceable, sounds of grime with its ringtones and car alarms reflected the sound of the London streets of the new millennium as surely as did the costermonger calls of Victorian times.

 

Aligned with, but not, grime, other new forms of music sprang from unlikely locales. From Croydon, came dubstep which internalised all the frustration of late night bus journeys, romantic failures, walking the streets of outer London in the rain, and feeling both elated and frightened by the enormity of London at the same time. Its most effective proponent was a young man called Willliam Bevan from Putney who became better known under the gothic name of Burial.

Around Brick Lane and elsewhere, the children of Indian and Bangladeshi parents were dancing to bhangra. Or at least a very modern version of this traditional music. Many of the stars (Apache Indian, Bally Sagoo, and Panjabi MC hailed from the West Midlands) but Hounslow's Jay Sean infused bhangra with hip-hop and R&B to find fame and MIA (Hounslow also but with a fiercely proud Tamil background) became one of the defining musicians of the early naughties with transcendent singles like Sunshowers, Bucky Done Gun, and Paper Planes.

 

It's hard to define MIA's music as it draws from so many sources and sounds, like a day-glo explosion of both joy and rage at the same time. She even describes herself as "a walking mixtape". London's multiculturalism fed into a new generation of pop performers and two of these, Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen, have small sections of Du Noyer's book devoted to them.

The book was written before Winehouse's tragic, and untimely, passing and speaks of Winehouse as a young girl from the north London suburbs of Southgate, getting expelled from the Sylvia Young Theatre School, and releasing 2006's Rehab. A brilliant song that changed her life and not necessarily in a good way. Though, in the song's title and famous lyrics, the problems, the addictions, and the demons were already clearly there.

When Du Noyer writes of Winehouse being 'nearly destroyed' we have the hindsight to realise how sad and untrue those words would prove to be. He imagines Lily Allen to be the survivor who will move music into the next decade and onwards and, no disprect to Lily - I like her but Adele proved the more enduring talent, I don't think that proved to be true. The chapter still unwritten would, I think, have focused on artists like Skepta, Stormzy, Paigey Cakey, J Hus, and Headie One. 

 

 

The drill and grime artists that even a cursory walk around London, pre-pandemic at least, would have soundtracked your movements. Some of the bands mentioned are obvious contenders for a book about the music of London:- The Kinks, The Clash, The Small Faces, Madness, Dizzee Rascal, Roots Manuva, The Streets, Amy Winehouse etc; - while others may surprise the reader:- Frank Sinatra, Walter Carlos, Louis Armstrong. Others still are rarely mentioned these days:- Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Transvision Vamp, Big Audio Dynamite, Haysi Fantayzee, the brilliant Deptford hip-hop artist Blak Twang,

Non-musical guest appearances are made by the likes of Charles Dickens, Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Pepys, William Pitt, Nell Gwynn, Geoffrey Chaucer (a big fan of the harp), William Shakespeare (if music be the food of love, play on), Elizabeth I (it's said Thomas Tallis composed Spem in Alium for her 40th birthday), George I (his Tallis was Handel and his Spem in Alium was, of course, The Water Music - George was so pleased with it he demanded the Hanoverian equivalent of a rewind), George III, and Henry VIII who, despite taking the credit, is believed not to have actually written Greensleeves (although he is celebrated in cockney singalong I'm Henry The Eighth I Am).

Elsewhere we run into George Orwell, John Peel, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Grimaldi, Al Jolson, Jonathan Swift, Walter Sickert, Charlie Chaplin, and Robert Walpole in venues like The Coal Hole on The Strand, Wilton's Music Hall, and The Eagle on City Road (so renowned it's gone down in history in the lyrics of Pop Goes The Weasel). Winston Churchill and Franklin D.Roosevelt compete to remember the lyrics to Noel Coward's Mad Dogs And Englishmen (FDR wins!) and Charlie Chaplin, and later Prince Charles and Diana, swan around high society hangouts like the Cafe de Paris in a book that guides us passionately and knowledgeably around what surely must be one of the musical, or at least noisiest, cities on the entire planet.

I loved reading it, I loved many of the artists mentioned and I look forward to discovering some that were new to me, and I loved the way Du Noyer pieced it all together. What I will love even more is getting out to pubs and gigs again, with my friends, and witnessing that music, feeling that passion. When London called me, over twenty-five years ago now, it was music, more than anything else, that was the temptation. Be it Shane MacGowan lying down drunk in Leicester Square or Spandau Ballet dressing up in their glad rags to attend the Blitz, I knew I had to get amongst it - and I bloody well did.