London Fifth Trip

I headed down for a London weekend via a £25 Apex ticket on the 12.15 train from Preston on Friday 10th May 1990. My brother picked me from Euston in his mini and we darted back to his current digs in Woolwich. We grabbed some tea and listened to some Screaming Trees and Husker Du’s Metal Circus.

We headed out at 9pm and picked up my brother’s girlfriend from her workplace on some random industrial estate in Thamesmead on the way to London Subterania in the west of the city. The venue was opened the year before by the Mean Fiddler Group. It was subsequently closed in 2003 but relaunched in 2018. It has a capacity of 600.

We were there to see Thin White Rope, the Californian desert rock band who disbanded a couple of years later. It was my first gig for four months at that stage, so it was good to be back in the fray. Unfortunately, we were a tad late in arriving and the band were already 20 minutes into their set and the place was half full, mainly comprised of students.

I grabbed an expensive bottle of Newcastle Brown and headed down to the front. They were a laid-back combo and produced a reasonable set, including two encores.     

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Thin White Rope. Image Credit LastFM.com

After the gig we headed into the city centre to Tower Records which was open until midnight as my brother wanted to purchase the latest Thin White Rope release.

The following day was the FA Cup Final. That particular year we had endeavoured without success to obtain match tickets, in those days that option was more feasible than it is nowadays. Our alternate plan was to see the parade the next day if Crystal Palace won which looked likely when Ian ‘Je Na Sa Quoi’ Wright scored in extra time before Mark Hughes scuppered it with a late equaliser for Man United. We had a gentle gather in the local Poly Bar that night.

We lazed around on the Sunday morning prepping some Wedding Present and REM mix tapes. In the late afternoon we headed back into the city visiting Petticoat Lane and Camden Town where I purchased the Last Exit to Brooklyn novel.  We then drove to Notting Hill and grabbed some grub at a cheap as chips fab Indian restaurant called Khan’s where I ordered Chicken Shahi.

Post meal we headed over to Brixton Fridge landing about 8.30pm. The venue previously had a couple of homes, one of them above an Iceland store, hence the name. The location when I visited was converted from a 1913 cinema, the Palladium Picture House. The venue closed in 2010 before reopening the following year under the new moniker Electric Brixton. It was a large slightly soulless venue with a capacity of 1789 and was almost full that night.

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Brixton Fridge. Image Credit wikimedia

We handed over our £8 entrance fee and purchased a can of Breakers and caught the last song of Benny Profane’s set. The main support was the C86 Bristolians Groove Farm. I recall chatting to another punter who I jealously discovered had seen Minutemen and Husker Du in Washington in 1984 when they a support band.

Wedding Present came on at 9.45pm. They had been collaborating with Steve Albini and it had certainly resulted in a hardening of their sound. They played ‘Brassneck’ early in the set and Dave Gedge broke a guitar string due to some Hendrix impressions.    

They played ‘Everyone Thinks he Looks Daft’ and a seemingly endless but joyous ‘Favourite Dress’. It was stiflingly hot in the moshpit resulting in me re-emerging at the end as a virtual puddle when they left the stage at 11pm. I thought they were superb, arguably better then the first time I had seen them a couple of years earlier at Manchester University as their strengthened sound was of significant benefit.

London Third and Fourth Trip

My brother moved down to London in 1988 to attend university and I headed down for a visit in November of that year. We met at Euston then went to see a film called Lapland before catching a train back to his digs in Woolwich.

That night we headed out to the Woolwich Tramshed right outside Woolwich Arsenal station. We went to the University bar prior to heading to the venue on the main square.

I was very excited to see that they had Boddingtons on draught because you never saw it more than 30 miles from the Strangeways brewery at that point, but upon tasting it I realised why that was the case. You can take a lad out Preston….!

The venue was a small little playhouse with cinema seats and was a quarter full. There was an ok support act who modelled himself a bit too literally on Billy Bragg.

The main act was a Bristol band called Blue Aeroplanes of whom I thought the lead singer resembled David McComb of the Triffids. In the best traditions of Happy Mondays, they had a male dancer gyrating throughout the set, who was an exhausting spectacle. It was quirky intelligent stuff and they were enjoyable.

The venue appears to be still in existence but is a performance theatre only now.

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The Blue Aeroplanes. Image Credit pennyblackmusic.co.uk

I headed down for another weekend in February 1989. On the Friday we headed out to the Camden Falcon. En route, I called Red Rose Radio from a phone box to discover PNE had lost 2-1 to Southend. On arrival we had a couple of refreshing pints of cold Tennants Extra in the smoky bar.

The Falcon was a large pub with a little corridor leading to the venue, the venue itself consisted of a room painted black with no windows and a very small exit, arguably sitting high on the fire hazard scale. Unsurprisingly I read afterwards that people fainted regularly when the venue was full. Thankfully the venue was at best half full the night we attended.

The main act was an unremarkable band from Chatham in Kent called the Dentists. My overriding memory was for some obscure reason the lead singer kept bashing his head on the microphone. We left before the end of the set and had a couple of more bevies before the midnight train home.

The pub closed in 2002, before conversion into residential use.  

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Camden Falcon seen better days. Image Credit soundofpen.com

The following day we went to watch a Mike Leigh movie High Hopes in Leicester Square before deciding to head out to Finsbury Library in Islingon. We embarked at Angel tube station which always seemed then to be a cold, dark and windswept location, somewhat Salfordesque at that stage which was appropriate to the music acts we were heading to see.

The large library was built in 1967 and I think we captured one of what were rare musical events within the building.    

Within a boiler room under the library, holding a twice monthly residence were Ewen McColl and Peggy Seeger. Both were seeped in the folk tradition, Ewen who penned ‘Dirty Old Town’ and father of Kirsty and then Peggy renowned protest singer, daughter of Pete who allegedly cut the cable on Dylan when he went electric and was also a link back to dust bowl poet Woody Guthrie.

It was an all seated very informal venue with about 30 punters there and they served Ruddles bitter in cans. The duo played a few folk and American protest songs and played a witty track about what jobs would be available after a nuclear war. They then invited people to come up and play, one punter playing a form of reed pipes.

It was a privilege to catch Ewen as he sadly passed away later that year.  

After an hour they took a break and after purchasing a NUM funding miner’s strike tape we headed off into the dark Islington night.