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.

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.  

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.