Category: London

London Sixth and Seventh Trip

Gill and I headed out on a Royal Scot direct train down to London on 03/08/90, which was Gill’s birthday. At the point of time it was the hottest ever recorded day in Britain with a new record temperature of 98.8 logged. The other item that was broken that day was the air-con on the train and it was subject to speed restrictions due to the heat. Rather bizarrely there was an emissary to King Hussein of Jordan in our sweltering carriage. 

On arrival we headed out to my brother’s pad in Plumstead. We perused the Good Food Guide and we booked a West Indian restaurant in Deptford visiting the Studio Bar in Greenwich en route. The restaurant had recently changed hands and as a result there was nobody else in residence, so we received platinum service and just asked them to cook what they fancied. It was a BYOB place, but the clock had ticked past 10pm and the off-licences were now closed. As a result, I piled into a local rough house pub and bought 2 litres of wine for a bargain price of £15. The cuisine was excellent apart from some very odd desserts! 

Saturday dawned with another absolute scorcher. The afternoon consisted of visiting Lewisham Library to return some records, visiting a pub next door and then onto Greenwich Park for a picnic. We were heading onto a gig that evening so boarded the 8.10pm bus for what seemed like an endless bus journey to New Cross to join a long queue outside the New Cross Venue. We gained access to the venue just after 9.30pm where the entrance price as a result had increased from £3 to £5. It was packed to the gills and stunningly hot and punters were also viewing from the balconies above.

See the source image
New Cross Venue with New Cross Inn to its left and the bus stop in the foreground. Image Credit Flickr.

We saw the support band Joyce McKinney Experience and the main band was the legendary Snuff who sounded great straightaway, it was a chaotic gig with loads of punters on the stage, it resembled a Happy Monday’s gig for a while! They played all the tracks off their debut album, however there was no encore due to the intolerable heat. I could only tolerate the moshpit for short periods and literally had to wring my T-Shirt out afterwards. We left at midnight and fortunately found a bus back straightaway.

On the Sunday we visited Camden Market where I purchased a Neil Young bootleg tape of an Amsterdam concert. After we went to a cheap Malaysian restaurant and then onto an alternative comedy night at the Kings Head in Crouch End. On the Monday we went shopping down Oxford Street and we bookended the weekend by watched Gremlins 2 at night featuring a character called Mogwai, little did I know the future significance of that name….!

Fast forward to Gill’s 50th birthday where we visited London for the weekend and on the actual birthday, we had a fun day on the South Bank before having a fine meal in Southwark that night. As is my wont, I had hunted a gig down for us and we headed out of London the following evening on the overland train to New Cross station for only our second ever visit to this suburb.

The venue of choice was New Cross Inn which turned out to be the front room of a boozer. To my surprise, the pub was located literally next door to the New Cross Venue, and I could see the bus stop we disembarked all those years ago. The coincidences rolled on as firstly the weather was as scorching as the original visit and the date of this gig was 04/08/18, exactly 28 years to the day from the Snuff gig.    

Across New Cross Road, and it appears they are very keen on original names in the area, you found the New Cross House pub which stocked some fine craft ales and appetising pizzas.

The gig was very sparsely populated, and the main band were called Captain Accident and the Disasters who were a ska band but were nowhere near as high energy as I hoped they would be.

Due to Uncle George working for Virgin he managed to poach some first-class tickets for the journey home on Sunday. Just before we departed from Euston three old rockers boarded and parked themselves in seats directly in front of us. When the guard came to check their tickets, it transpired that the senior rail pass of one of the party had expired. At that point I recognised the distinctive voice and it turned out to be none other than Bob Geldof and a couple of Boomtown Rats who were heading to play an 80’s festival in Macclesfield. Thoughts of contacting Shaun Keaveny’s Small Claims Court sprang to mind with the tagline, ‘It’s a Rat Trap and you been caught’!  

See the source image
Bob Geldof. Image Credit Hollywood.com

Shortly after I recognised New Cross Road when watching a movie on TV, after checking the veracity of my intuition it turned out that was another claim to fame for the area. So, if you are watching Skyfall and Bond has just rescued M from an assassination attempt, he drives up to his ancestral home but there is a brief snippet where they are hurtling down the road in question!

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.     

See the source image
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.

See the source image
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.