Jocks&Nerds Issue 15, Summer 2015

STYLE HISTORY CULTURE ©

SUMMER 2015

MARK CAVENDISH £5.95

The original 1915 501® The Golden Handshake 100 years ago Cone Mills® in North Carolina made a historic deal to start producing Shrink-to-Fit denim for Levi Strauss & Co’s Lot 501® jeans. This is one of the first pairs they made. To honor them and the fine men that wore them, we’ve recreated this 1915 pair stitch for stitch, right down to the exposed rivets, suspender buttons and high waist fit. And we’ve done it all using lightweight Cone Mills® plain selvedge denim. www.levi.com/levisvintageclothing

The stitch for stitch reproduction MADE IN THE USA

BY APPOINTMENT TO H.R.H. THE PRINCE OF WALES HATTERS

BY APPOINTMENT TO H.R.H. THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH HATTERS

F O U N D E D 1 6 7 6 . LOCK HATTER S.CO.U K

STYLE HISTORY CULTURE ©

VOLUME 1 ISSUE 15 Cover Mark Cavendish photographed by Lee Vincent Grubb, styled by Karen Mason Jacket, cardigan and shirt by Hackett; pocket square by Paul Smith Retouching and colour management by Complete Colour Services completeltd.com

Editor-in-Chief & Creative Director Marcus Agerman Ross marcus@jocksandnerds.com Assistant Editor Chris Tang tang@jocksandnerds.com Editorial Assistant Edward Moore edward@jocksandnerds.com Junior Designer Anna Holden anna@tack-press.com Financial Department Emma Gregory and Bryan Kemsley accounts@tack-press.com Publisher Johanna Agerman Ross johanna@tack-press.com Subscriptions subscriptions@jocksandnerds.com

Associate Editor Chris Sullivan chris@jocksandnerds.com New York Editor Janette Beckman janette@jocksandnerds.com Contributing Fashion Editor Marcus Love love@jocksandnerds.com Staff Writers Paolo Hewitt, Chris May, Andy Thomas, Mark Webster Staff Photographer Ross Trevail ross@jocksandnerds.com Music Events Programmer Stuart Patterson

Commercial Manager Chris Jones chris@tack-press.com Creative Services Manager Tack Studio Nina Akbari nina@tack-press.com Italian Advertising Representative Angelo Careddu Oberon Media, Viale Richard 1/b, Milan 20143 +39 (0)2874 543 acareddu@oberonmedia.com Swiss Advertising Representative Amelia Guercio Magazine International, Rue du Valée 3 Geneva 1211 +41 (0)78 723 72 53 aguercio@magazineinternational.ch

Subeditor Rosie Spencer Interns Benedict Browne Pablo Greppi Original Design Phil Buckingham

Contributors Amina Agerman, Per Agerman, Goran Basaric, Oliver Clasper, Kevin Davies, Kingsley Davis, Sophie Delaporte, Nicky Emmerson, Adrian Fisk, Rose Forde, Teddy George-Poku, Orlando Gili, David Goldman, Lee Vincent Grubb, Tim Hans, Owen Harvey, Eric Hobbs, Igor Jeremic, Martin Jones, Paul Kelly, Elliot Kennedy, Kanako B Koga, Alexander Kvatashidze, Rob Low, Karen Mason, Lorena Maza, Nicolas Payne-Baader, Mattias Pettersson, Mischa Richter, Dennis Schoenberg, Richard Simpson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gavin Watson, Simon Way Special Thanks Karma Auger, Simon Bayliff and Jonathan Beckett at Areté arete.co.uk, Greg Boraman, Joe Boyd, Emma Brunn at Agnès B agnesb.com, Jeff Dexter, Masahide Hatakenaka at the Sakaki marunikikyou.jp, Flip Jelly, Martin Kelly, Sarah Lewis, Emily Mahoney at James Ware Schoenfeld Stephenson LLP jwssllp.com, Roger Marriott, Eve McQuiston at First Floor Restaurant firstfloorportobello.co.uk, Yumi Miura at Peach PR peach-pr.com, Ruby Mulraine at Black Music Canteen blackmusiccanteen.com, Steve Phillips at Carry On Press carryonpress.tumblr.com, Oliver Pitt, Chris Romer-Lee, Patrick Shier at Michael Clark Company michaelclarkcompany.com, Scott Steele at Scream Promotions screampromotions.co.uk, Nic Tuft, Nigel Waymouth, Val Wilmer Jocks&Nerds Magazine, Tack Press Limited, 283 Kingsland Road, London E2 8AS Telephone +44 (0)20 7739 8188 jocksandnerds.com facebook.com/jocksandnerds Twitter: @jocksandnerds Instagram: @jocksandnerdsmagazine Jocks&Nerds is published four times a year, printed by Park Communications Ltd parkcom.co.uk To subscribe go to jocksandnerds.com/subscriptions All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the publisher. The opinions expressed in the magazine are that of the respective contributors and are not necessarily shared by the magazine or its staff. Jocks&Nerds is published by Tack Press Limited © 2015 s

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Contents

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14–23 SEEN: Palio di Fucecchio is a

festive horse race in Italy’s Tuscan hills

24–37 NEWS: Our cultural roundup for

this summer

38–51 PEOPLE: Individuals cutting their

own paths

52–57 DETAIL: Land of 1000 Dancers

Photographs Elliot Kennedy Styling Teddy George-Poku

58–62 PROFILE: Cuts Hairdressers

has been creating bold styles for more than 30 years 64–69 MUSIC: Heavenly Recordings

celebrates 25 years

100–107 HISTORY: John Hopkins

was the chief protagonist of the 1960s counterculture movement 108–109 BULLETIN: YMC has been

80–87 GALLERY: Massimo Osti

110–115 COVER STORY: Mark

168–169 BULLETIN: Takeo Kikuchi

Cavendish is the fastest cyclist in the world 116–123 STYLE: Denmark Street

Photographs Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason

130–133 SPORT: Wild Swimming has

Archive acknowledges the legacy of one the most important menswear designers

grown in popularity in recent years but was initially a Victorian pastime

88–91 CINEMA: Nina Simone created

some of the most profound music of the 20th century 92-99 STYLE: Tokyo Now Photographs Marcus Agerman Ross Styling Teddy George-Poku

162–167 SPOTLIGHT: Steel Pan,

originally from Trinidad, is now a key part of UK’s musical culture

Influence is a series of three documentaries exploring the history of British black music

Photographs David Goldman Styling Rose Forde

Photographs Nicky Emmerson Styling Richard Simpson

making clothes for 20 years

124–129 CINEMA: Under The

72–79 STYLE: Joe Dempsie

154–161 STYLE: Momma Don’t Allow

celebrates three decades of design

170–175 MUSIC: Brian Auger is the

godfather of Acid Jazz

176–183 STYLE: Sean Haefeli

Photographs Dennis Schoenberg Styling Lorena Maza 184–189 HISTORY: Jeffrey Hinton is

making a film about disco lighting

190–191 ICON: Fred Perry Polo Shirt

has moved from the tennis court to the football terraces and beyond

134–141 STYLE: Adrien Dantou

Photographs Sophie Delaporte Styling Kanako B Koga

142–147 MUSIC: Richard Hawley

sings about Sheffield, romance and being honest 148–153 CULTURE: Pop Grenade

looks at the link between music and revolution in Europe over the past 25 years

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p130

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Made in Red Wing, MN, USA.

FOREMAN CHUKKA Style nos. 9215 & 9216

WWW.REDWINGHERITAGE.EU

Jockeys lined up before the race.

Virginio ‘Lo Zeddone’ Zedde wears the light blue and pink of the Massarella contrada

SEEN

Palio di Fucecchio Photographs Simon Way

The palio is an annual horse race that takes place all over Italy, with neighbouring contrade (city wards) competing against each other. The race itself, a gladiatorial affair dating back to medieval times, is played out in under two minutes. The grandest and most famous is the Palio di Siena.

A vibrant, photogenic affair, Daniel Craig’s James Bond popped up there in 2008’s Quantum of Solace. Later this year, a documentary feature film, Palio, promises to show off its drama and beauty.

By contrast the Fucecchio palio, set in the Tuscan hills, is a proudly provincial affair. That said, the customs surrounding the race are universal.

Although one could blink and miss the race, the pageantry surrounding the race lasts as long as a week and brings entire communities together; preparations take the whole year. Every aspect of the affair is created within each contrada; this includes the elaborate costumes worn by the riders and the town’s folk in the palio parade.

Food is cooked and wine is prepared

for endless community dinners, where tactics are discussed and songs sung. And despite all the training and bravery required of the riders, good old-fashioned divine intervention isn’t dismissed, with prayers and blessings at church and solemn visits to churchyards.

A documentary film, Palio, is out in the summer thepalio.com paliodifucecchio.it

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SEEN | Palio di Fucecchio

Walter Rosati, 69, dressed in a traditional outfit for the parade through Fucecchio What’s so special about the palio?

It brings people together and it is highly emotional.

Describe the palio in three words.

Beautiful. Addictive.

Adrenaline.

Who’s your style icon?

Leonardo da Vinci.

What’s your favourite band?

The Beatles.

Virginio ‘Lo Zeddone’ Zedde, 39, jockey, signs autographs on fazzoletti scarves from the Massarella contrada What’s so special about the palio?

Words can’t explain the adrenaline rush.

Describe the palio in three words.

Passions. Emotions. Tension.

Who’s your favourite musician?

Eminem.

What’s your favourite movie?

Basic Instinct.

Team Massarella flag-waving practice

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What’s your favourite movie?

The Da Vinci Code.

LEATHER CLOTHING

Built to last a Lifetime www.aeroleatherclothing.com

SEEN | Palio di Fucecchio Manuel Baronti, 16 Describe your style.

Bohemian.

What’s so special about the palio?

The palio is about passion, sufferance and a way of life.

What’s your favourite movie?

17 Again.

Prayer for the jockey at the local church

Marianna Rosati, 34, fashion designer; Chiara Beconcini, 21, student; Erika Guidi, 23, student What’s so special about the palio?

The palio isn’t only a horse race, it is a community. It lasts all year in a contradaiolo’s soul. It’s a tradition that requires commitment and a deep passion.

Describe the palio in three words.

Passion. Home. Hope.

Who are your favourite musicians?

Björk, Tiziano Ferro, Luciano Ligabue.

What are your favourite movies?

Harold and Maude, Life is Beautiful, Titanic and Schindler’s List.

Daniele Baronti, 42 Describe the palio in three words.

To me the palio is just one big word; family.

Who’s your style icon?

Adriano Bianconi.

Who’s your favourite musician?

Demis Roussos.

What’s your favourite movie?

Major League.

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SEEN | Palio di Fucecchio

One of several dinners that occur during the build up to the race

Umberto Bonfiglioli dressed in Massarella colours

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Contrada Massarella parading through Fucecchio

Photo: Romain Bernardie James

www.lapaz.pt

LA PAZ

SEEN | Palio di Fucecchio

Ferrero Rosati, 60, Massarella’s president, leads a remembrance in the cemetery What’s so special about the palio?

It’s a dream that lasts a year. It is like first love.

Describe the palio in three words.

Emotion. Passion. Joy.

The jockey’s helmet, painted with the emblem of Massarella, being carried to church for a blessing

Who’s your style icon?

Steve McQueen.

Who are your favourite musicians?

Bob Dylan, Lucio Battisti and Simon&Garfunkel.

Massarella president Ferrero Rosati congratulates Paolo Ceccarini, president of Querciola – this year’s winner

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The Damned: Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead

This documentary film by New York-based director Wes Orshoski focuses on pioneering quartet the Damned, who were the first UK band to release a punk single, 1976’s ‘New Rose’. Still performing today, they broke out of the punk mould by the early 1980s and inspired the burgeoning goth movement in the process. Previous films by Orshoski, who is also a photographer and writer, include the 2010 film Lemmy, about the Motorhead frontman. threecountfilms.com Words Edward Moore

Dave Vanian, Captain Sensible, Rat Scabies and Brian James of The Damned, 1977 Photograph Ian Dickson

LAPD ’53

As one of the best crime novelists of the past 50 years, American author James Ellroy’s ability to interweave historical accuracy into his noirish tales has naturally led to his work translating to the big screen, most notably The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential. Rumour has it that he is working on a script for a remake of the classic film noir Laura, originally starring Gene Tierney in 1944. Ellroy’s latest book, LAPD ’53, explores the stories behind real crimes committed in mid1950s LA, compiled after he was granted access to the Los Angeles Police Museum by its executive director Glynn Martin. abramsandchronicle.co.uk Words Edward Moore

Sarah Cracknell

After a slew of guest female vocalists, Saint Etienne decided Sarah Cracknell was a keeper after appearing on the band’s third single, ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’, in 1991. Kept busy with songwriting for Saint Etienne, Cracknell has only released one solo album, 1997’s Lipslide. This month she finally returns with follow-up Red Kite, which features guest appearances by the Rails and Nicky Wire of Manic Street Preachers. The album is produced by Carwyn Ellis of Colorama and Seb Lesley, who has worked with Edwyn Collins, the Cribs and Doves.

Red Kite is out on 15 June cherryred.co.uk Portrait Paul Kelly Words Edward Moore

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NEWS Shorai wears jacket by Ben Sherman x Alpha Industries; jeans by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; T-shirt by Harry Stedman; headscarf and bracelet, model’s own; sunglasses by Our Legacy. Kuda wears jacket

by Ben Sherman x Alpha Industries; trousers by Ben Sherman; T-shirt by Harry Stedman; hat, stylist’s own; necklace, model’s own.

Ben Sherman x Alpha Industries

Created for the US military in the 1950s, the MA-1 flight jacket has been adopted by everyone from skinheads to 1980s clubbers.

Both practical and comfortable, the MA-1’s versatility has seen it throuh from military garment to rebel-rousing, “stay away from me” piece of armour.

Ben Sherman, the archetypal British brand renowned for its clean lines and button down shirts, has teamed up with Alpha Industries, which has created garments for the US Department of Defence since the 1960s, to create three MA-1 styles that incorporate classic Ben Sherman touches such as check shirt-style linings and pocket flaps. bensherman.com alphaindustries.com Photograph Chris Tang Styling Nicolas Payne-Baader Buffalo Soldiers Kuda Raymond and Shorai Chirovamutanda Dutiro Robinson

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NEWS Hawksmill Denim

Fraser Trewick, the man behind new jeans brand Hawksmill, is driven by a passion for the history and heritage of the universal indigo fabric. Hailing from the UK, Hawksmill applies meticulous production methods to each garment. Fully felled seams and chain stitched hems are created using vintage Union Special sewing machines. The fabrics are sourced from the Cone Mills White Oak Plant in North Carolina, which has been making selvedge denim on Draper looms for 110 years. hawksmill.com Sweater and jeans by Hawksmill Denim; top, model’s own; shoes by Bass; sunglasses by Our Legacy.

Photograph Chris Tang Styling Nicolas Payne-Baader Words Edward Moore Marketing Manager Adam Brady ruffians.co.uk

Queen and Country

Director John Boorman’s semi-autobiographical film, Hope and Glory, about a young boy’s experiences in second world war London, captured moviegoers’ imaginations when it was released in 1987. For protagonist Bill Rohan, the upheaval and lack of order created by the war is an adventure, and Boorman finds intimate comedic moments against the traumatic backdrop. His sequel, Queen and Country, catches up with Bill in 1952, aged 18 and conscripted into the army for the Korean War. In cinemas on 12 June curzonfilmworld.com Words Edward Moore Still courtesy of Curzon Film World

Raymond Cauchetier’s New Wave

At the end of the 1950s, returning from press corps service for the French Air Force in Indochina, Raymond Cauchetier went on to be the primary set photographer for French New Wave directors Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville and François Truffaut. His photos from emblematic films of the movement, such as À Bout de Souffle and Jules et Jim, have been compiled in his book Raymond Cauchetier’s New Wave.

An accompanying exhibition opens at the James Hyman Gallery, Savile Row, London W1 on 17 June accdistribution.com jameshymangallery.com Words Edward Moore

Peau de Banan, Marcel Ophüls, 1963 © Raymond Cauchetier, courtesy of James Hyman Gallery, London

Edward S Curtis: One Hundred Masterworks

Edward Curtis committed himself to documenting the culture and way of life of the Native Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Starting in 1895, armed with a glass plate camera and mobile studio, he spent the next three decades crisscrossing the vast continent capturing these already-fading communities. This book, by Christopher Cardozo, showcases the best of these images. prestel.com Words Edward Moore Awaiting the Return of the Snake Racers – Hopi, 1921 © Edward S Curtis

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CONTACT: STREETWEAR@DICKIES.COM PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES A. GRANT

SINCE 1922

NEWS Justin Deakin 25th Anniversary

Shoe designer Justin Deakin, a typically affable Yorkshireman, describes how, at the start of his career, he quickly went from “not knowing what a last was” to “creating and designing some amazing plates that you most probably have or had in your wardrobe”. When barely in his twenties, he was one half of footwear brand Nicholas Deakins. After a few years he started up his own venture, Herbert Toe and Judy Toe (named after his parents), before creating Stride. Taking the notion of trainers as fashionwear, Stride was soon being exhibited at London’s Design Museum, a serious acknowledgement of the cultural impact of his work. Selling Stride at the tender age of 28, Deakin today creates shoes under his own name, with a flagship store in London’s Spitalfields. This year, among the celebrations to mark his 25th anniversary as a shoe designer, Deakin has created a line of luxury trainers – a nod to his professional past. justindeakin.com Photograph Chris Tang Styling Nicolas Payne-Baader Words Edward Moore Audrey Hepburn, Richmond Park, London, 1950 Photograph Bert Hardy © Getty Images

Justin Deakin outside his store at 22 Hanbury Street, London E1

Sinatra

Frank Sinatra would have been 100 this year. A man of many talents – crooner, actor, bon viveur – Sinatra was both the outsider rebel and the soft-centred charmer. Few people have created such an enduring legacy both through their body of work and sartorial panache. A limited edition book, Sinatra, packed with unseen photographs discovered by his granddaughter Amanda Erlinger, celebrates the great man’s centenary year. antiquecollectorsclub.com Words Edward Moore

Audrey Hepburn: Portraits of an Icon

“Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you’re exactly the same,” reflected Audrey Hepburn on her acting career, which started when she was a chorus girl in West End musicals and ended with a cameo in Steven Spielberg’s 1988 film Always. A new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London brings together 60 photographs from the likes of Norman Parkinson and Terry O’Neill, charting the rise of the British actress from ingenue to cinematic icon.

New Jersey, 1925 Photograph courtesy of ACC Editions in association with Frank Sinatra Enterprises

‘Audrey Hepburn: Portraits of an Icon’ is at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2 from 2 July npg.org.uk Words Edward Moore

normanwalshuk.com

Image by David Goldman / / Shoe - PB Ultra Xtreme

Specifically developed by Norman Walsh in the 1970s for the sport of fell-running. The cuneiform wrap construction, ultra-lightweight, water-resistant materials and the Walsh registered pyramid sole deliver performance in the harshest of terrains.

NEWS The End of Generation X

In the early 1980s, Andy Rosen was a music photographer plying his trade on the grey, wet streets of London for publications such as NME and The Face. He moved to Los Angeles in 1987 for sunnier climes, and these days works as cloud technology entrepreneur. Rosen recently uncovered a bag of old negatives and prints from his photography past, discovering images of some of the most influential musicians of the day – John Lydon, Paul Weller and the Clash, to name a few. This unique, unseen collection from a bygone era is on show at the Proud gallery in Camden, London.

‘The End of Generation X’ opens at Proud Camden, Camden Market, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1 on 11 June proudcamden.com andyrosenphotos.com NWA, Torrance, California, 1990 Photograph Janette Beckman

Words Edward Moore

Straight Outta Compton

NWA’s 1988 debut album, Straight Outta Compton, brought gangsta rap to the mainstream. With beats that professed unrest and lyrics that expressed defiance, it is held up as one of the most important records of the hip-hop genre. With both Ice Cube and Dr Dre going on to have hugely successful careers after the band’s demise, a motion picture seems fitting.

In cinemas from 14 August nbcuniversal.com straightouttacompton.com Words Edward Moore

Malcolm McLaren, British Museum, London, 1982 © Andy Rosen

Sandqvist x Hentsch Man

A holdall, tote bag and laptop case are the fruits of labour from a new collaboration between Swedish bag brand Sandqvist, founded by Anton Sandqvist, and UK-based fashion label Hentsch Man, founded by Brazilian-born designer Alexia Hentsch. The collaboration combines the Scandinavian brand’s 11 years of experience with Hentsch’s eye for detail and highlights, as described

by Sandqvist, “a common love for clean and functional design”. sandqvist.net hentschman.com Photograph Chris Tang Styling Nicolas Payne-Baader Words Edward Moore

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M L I S T F H G M NI

L I M F L H L I S I G I FLMF HT N M I G S M I L T I S N FNIGLFM T L HI TFNSIGH H M I S G L I I T S FNIGFHIN T FNIGH LM S T H G NI

. o n g e s i D h it

w n o i nd iat a c o ss a n i

S T H G NI

Featuring Playtime & Office Space 3 & 30 June 2015 with introductions from Alice Rawsthorn and Will Wiles To book tickets visit architecture.com/whatson For a full programme of Disegno’s salons visit disegnodaily.com/salons sponsored by

NEWS Ray-Ban Round

Ray-Ban continues to plunder its rich archive of sunglasses, this time looking at its round designs. The company has developed modern styles created with new acetate and metal materials in a range of contemporary colourways. ray-ban.com Photograph Chris Tang Styling Nicolas Payne-Baader Words Edward Moore Visual Artist Alex F Webb alexfwebb.com

Return of the Rudeboy

Having successfully exhibited their ‘Return of the Rudeboy’ project at London’s Somerset House and in Tokyo earlier this year, duo Dean Chalkley and Harris Elliott launch a lovingly crafted coffee table book at the Hospital Club in London in July.

The Rudeboy Salon, where the Return of the Rudeboy book launches, is at the Hospital Club, 24 Endell St, London WC2 on 5 and 6 July returnoftherudeboy.com thehospitalclub.com

Sunglasses by Ray-Ban; shirt by Tiger of Sweden.

Words Edward Moore

Terrence Malick

Having previously directed just six feature films in a career spanning four decades, Terrence Malick rather uncharacteristically has three films coming out in the coming months. Knight of Cups, starring Christian Bale and Natalie Portman, which premiered at Berlin International Film Festival this year, is slated for release soon. Weightless, currently in post-production, follows two intersecting love triangles amidst the Austin music scene. Voyage of Time, which some are describing as a sequel to 2011’s The Tree of Life, is a documentary revolving around the universe and time. facebook.com/knightofcups.movie Knights of Cups, 2015

Words Edward Moore Still courtesy of Film Nation Entertainment

Laurent Garnier

Laurent Garnier, the French electronic music polymath, brings out his autobiography, Electrochoc, in an Englishlanguage edition this summer. The book, packed full of artwork and images that tell the story of his career, follows his firsthand experiences of the evolving dance music scene in late 1980s Manchester, starting his own clubs back in France and into the wealth of music he has created over the past 25 years. The book includes contributions from a range of house and techno heavyweights such as Jeff Mills and François Kevorkian.

Electrochoc by Laurent Garnier is out on 2 July rocket88books.com An edited version of the limited edition album La Home Box is out on 31 July on F Communications laurentgarnier.com Words Edward Moore

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From the cover of Excess Luggage, 2003

NEWS David Byrne’s Meltdown

The 22nd edition of the Southbank’s Meltdown festival is curated by David Byrne (formerly of Talking Heads), following the likes of James Lavelle and Yoko Ono. His list of performers taking part in this unique series of concerts encompasses those he has seen before as well as “others I’ve missed or have dreamed of seeing”. The line-up includes Lonnie Holley, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble and Benjamin Clementine.

Meltdown 2015 runs from 17 to 28 August at the Southbank Centre, London SE1 southbankcentre.co.uk Photograph © Danny North Words Edward Moore

Detroit 67

After being sacked by music magazine NME in the late 1980s for trying to place erect penises on its cover, writer Stuart Cosgrove hightailed it back to Scotland, where at some point he started work on this epic and fascinating book. Detroit 67 is the story of a city in crisis, a forensic examination of one of its most turbulent years. It is the story of Motown Records; of Berry Gordy trying to break into the white world of showbusiness and being thwarted by the young soul rebels in his company; the Supremes, the world’s biggest group, snapping under extreme pressure; and soul losing its innocence. It is the story of MC5 and the radical Detroit hippie underground; a weak major and the Detroit police force; and the trigger happy policeman Marvin Gaye would sing so eloquently about on his masterpiece album What’s Going On, culminating in the horrific murder of three young black men at the hands of the police. detroit67.com Words Paolo Hewitt

Motor City Burning: Smoke Billows over Detroit in the first hours of rioting, July, 1967 © Corbis

Electric Elephant Festival

Born out of the Electric Chair club night in Manchester, the Electric Elephant is a five-day festival on the Croatian coast near the seaside town of Tisno. This year’s line up, which Jocks&Nerds is media partnering, includes DJ Harvey, Horse Meat Disco, Andrew Weatherall and many, many more.

Electric Elephant takes place near Tisno, Croatia, 9 to 13 July electricelephant.co.uk Photograph Heather Shuker Words Edward Moore

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ELMC.CO

Boxer by Paul Vickery

Boxer is a series of photographs documenting the life and training regime of young London fighter Ramon Levy-Vassie. After a chance meeting on the London Underground, Vickery and LevyVassie created a series of images now being shown as an exhibition and book, working with famed stylist and artist Barry Kamen.

The exhibition Boxer is at Doomed Gallery, 65-67 Ridley Road, Dalston E8, 12-14 June, with a book launch on 11 June

Amy: The Girl Behind the Name

The singer Amy Winehouse, who died tragically young four years ago, transcended the world of popular music with her soulful, blues-tinged records.

She is the subject of the latest documentary film by Asif Kapadia, whose previous films include Senna in 2010.

In cinemas from 3 July amyfilm.co.uk Words Edward Moore

paulvickeryphotography.com Words Edward Moore Ramon Levy-Vassie, Ruislip, London 2013 Photograph Paul Vickery

Bamford Grooming Department

Renowned for customising the finest watches in the world and creating bicycles that most of us can only dream of owning, George Bamford has launched a men’s grooming collection. The range – shampoo, exfoliating face wash, moisturiser et al – was inspired by his favourite places around the world. Travel will also feature in the second range, coming out later this year, designed to go through airport security controls.

Outtake from Back to Black album photoshoot, 2006 Photograph Mischa Richter

bamfordgroomingdepartment.com Photograph Marcus Agerman Ross Words Edward Moore

Marc Almond

Marc Almond first came to prominence when the pop duo he created with Dave Ball, Soft Cell, covered Gloria Jones’ northern soul classic ‘Tainted Love’ in 1981. Over the past three decades, Almond’s distinctive voice has led him to work far beyond the confines of popular music, bringing in disparate influences as varied as flamenco, cabaret and classical music.

This book, a limited edition with just 1,300 copies available, explores the singer’s life and work. firstthirdbooks.com Words Edward Moore

Marc Almond © Jamie McLeod

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NEWS

Bally Scribe Novo

Max Bally – grandson of Carl Franz Bally, founder of the Bally shoe company – created the Scribe shoe in 1951, named after his favourite Paris hotel. A mainstay of the brand ever since, it is recognised for the quality of the stitching, brogue detailing and Goodyear welting. Two new ranges, Scribe Novo and Scribe Novo Light, have updated the shoe, most significantly replacing the leather sole with a rubber one, removing the risk of slipping. The rubber sole looks and feels exactly like a leather counterpart. bally.com Photograph Chris Tang Styling Nicolas Payne-Baader Words Edward Moore Flaneur Raffi Hantabli Location Peckham Bazaar, 119 Consort Road, London SE15 peckhambazaar.com Shoes and clothes by Bally.

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PEOPLE

Palma Violets

Palma Violets, who formed in 2011, built a substantial fanbase through internet videos and live performances even before they released a record. They are one of the more interesting of the crop of UK indie bands currently vying for attention. Within a year of forming, they had performed on Jools Holland’s much lauded TV show, Later..., and they have worked with Pulp bassist Steve Mackey. Eschewing the need to fret over that “difficult second album”, Palma Violets seem comfortable in their own choices.

As bassist Chilli Jesson explains, “We listened to a lot of pre-punk while we were making the album. We like its rawness and simplicity. A lot of bands want to over-complicate their second album. We know that we didn’t.”

Their new album, Danger In The Club, is out now roughtrade.com palmaviolets.co.uk Photograph Orlando Gili Words Edward Moore

Donald Cumming

A native New Yorker, Cumming left home as a teenager, falling in with a young, creative crowd in the late 1990s and sleeping on the couch of his friend, photographer Ryan McGinley.

Floating around doing a bit of modelling and acting, Cumming met Wade Oates, with whom he formed his band, The Virgins, on a modelling assignment in Mexico with McGinley.

Essentially a rabble of musicians assembled to perform songs penned

by Cumming, The Virgins, who released their first record in 2007, quickly gained recognition, playing with the likes of Iggy Pop and Patti Smith. Having disbanded The Virgins in 2013, Cumming’s first album as a solo artist, Out Calls Only, allows him to play around with a variety of song structures and inspirations, with musicians hired for individual songs.

Cumming’s debut album Out Calls Only is out on 15 June washingtonsquaremusic.com Photograph Janette Beckman Words Edward Moore

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PEOPLE

Tuxedo

To see Tuxedo do their thing, I couldn’t have picked a better club than Bird in Rotterdam: a down and dirty converted railway arch named after Charlie Parker, with a crowd that clearly wasn’t there by accident.

Tuxedo consists of modern/classic Detroit soul man and DJ Mayer Hawthorne and Seattle studio beats merchant Jake One. Both avid vinyl collectors, they met “when I was up in Seattle doing a show”, says Hawthorne, who is now based in LA. “We exchanged mixtapes that we’d done. I gave him one of kinda obscure boogie funk records. And when I listened to his I thought man, these are the same songs. Which was weird because nobody at this time really cared about those records.”

From there, Hawthorne continues, “Jake just started sending me a few beats in that vein, thinking I’d appreciate it. So I’d just write a song. Send it back, and it was like holy shit – this is amazing!”

Nevertheless, as One continues, “It was for fun, there was no agenda. Then ‘Get Lucky’ [by Daft Punk] happened and we thought, damn we need to move.”

The result is an eponymous debut album on Stones Throw Records that is both thoroughly now, but also deeply rooted in a mix of 1980s dance grooves that, Hawthorne says, “everyone else thought we were weird for liking”. And as their DJ trip to Rotterdam proved, it is a show worth taking on the road, “to play our music – the old tunes, Tuxedo tunes – and have a party”, as One puts it. Although, as Hawthorne adds, “We’re also now a band. Using my musicians, but even bigger. After all, we have the formula.”

Tuxedo is out now tuxedofunk.com Photograph Janette Beckman Words Mark Webster

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PEOPLE

Noel McKoy

Many music fans still recognise Noel McKoy as the man who fronted the James Taylor Quartet in the 1990s. But his voice has appeared in a wealth of records over the past 25 years, including his work as part of British soul outfit McKoy, with his siblings Cornelle, Robin and Junette. He is also currently working as a member of soul legend Omar’s new outfit, The British Collective, who are set to release new material later this year. In the meantime, Mckoy’s fifth solo album, The Dutch Pot (named after the acoustic nightclub he runs in London) is set for release this August.

McKoy’s album The Dutch Pot is out in August facebook.com/britishcollective Photograph Kingsley Davis Words Edward Moore

OOFJ

OOFJ are LA-based duo Jenno Bjørnkjær and Katherine Mills Rymer. Danish native Bjørnkjær was originally a saxophone player and studied music at a conservatory in Copenhagen. He then moved to New York and became romantically involved with Rymer. The two met while Bjørnkjær was working on the soundtrack for Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, realising they shared similar tastes in music. In 2013, as OOFJ, they released their debut album Disco To Die To, and have just released their follow up album Acute Feast.

Acute Feast is out now ringthealarm.tv oofj.net Photograph Eric Hobbs Words Edward Moore

Josh Carey

Bondi Books is run by an Australian, Josh Carey, but it was in Tokyo in 2003 that he set up his business, selling special edition books on photography, art and literature.

“I studied photography at university,” says Carey. “Starting the book business in Japan meant an obvious focus on Japanese photography books. All the material at Bondi Books would be classed as modern, rare and produced post-war.”

He set up Bondi Books with the intention to run “a business I was interested in and sell books that were eclectic and a little different from what people would usually find”. Having successfully established the business in Tokyo, in 2011 Carey set up his second shop in Hong Kong, where he now resides. bondibooks.com Photographs Oliver Clasper Words Edward Moore

Goran Kajfeš

Goran Kajfeš believes in mixing it up, with inspiration coming from doing lots of different things at the same time. Looking at the Stockholm-based trumpet player and composer’s schedule for 2015, you better believe him.

With more than 20 years of solid reputation as a trumpeter extraordinaire, appearing on more than 500 albums with artists spanning from Neneh Cherry, Robyn and The Sugababes to Stina Nordenstam, Monica Zetterlund and José González, he is currently involved in four different groups and many other one-off projects.

Kajfeš has written the score for Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt’s new documentary Havana Motor Club (which premiered at the Tribeca film festival in April), he is in and out of the studio recording with critically acclaimed Swedish jazz quintet Oddjob, who are planning a new release and more concert dates, and he will also be on the road with Fire! Orchestra and Bugge Wesseltoft later this year.

But it is with his band Goran Kajfeš Subtropic Arkestra that he is stirring up the most dust at the moment. Songs from the new album The Reason Why Vol 2 (Headspin Recordings), a follow up to the first volume released in 2013, have had recent air time on BBC Radio 6 and appraisal from, among others, Uncut magazine. The album puts together a new round up of songs from Kajfeš’ musical favourites, from Cameroon’s Francis Bebey and Turkish legends Okay Temiz and Beyaz Kelebekler to Swedish 1970s jazz super group Sevda and US indie rockers Grizzly Bear. Described by Kajfeš on Twitter as #cosmicbalkanshoegazerjazz, the heavily riffed and funk based songs are also infused with improvised jazz, in a style owing a lot to Miles Davis and Don Cherry.

Kajfeš describes himself as a “first take romanticist” in the studio, and gets the band playing with just a basic arrangement to start with. Working with some of Sweden’s best musical improvisers, the result is both tight and groovy and easily transformed to a live setting on stage, where the result is even more vibrant. With gigs in both Istanbul and Stockholm so far this year, we can look forward to more European bookings for the Arkestra come summer. And the search is on for a new set of songs for a third volume. There is no reason to stop mixing it up for Goran Kajfeš.

The Reason Why Vol 2 is out now headspinrecordings.com gorankajfes.com havanamotorclub.com Photograph Amina Agerman Words Per Agerman

PEOPLE

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PEOPLE

Osunlade

Osunlade is not your average house DJ. By which I mean, not only is he one of the coolest, most vibrant and expressive spinners in clubland (“being spontaneous works better for me”, he told me on a recent DJ foray into London), but he also brings some serious all-around music knowledge and experience to his work.

He was playing piano at seven, performing as a multi-instrumentalist in his own bands at 12, and embarking on a writing career by 17 – with the likes of Sesame Street, Patti LaBelle and even Gerardo (the Latino pop star who hit the big time with ‘Rico Suave’), benefitting from his skills. “That structure of writing and producing for the majors – that education remains important to me, “ he says. “As much as I hate the system of it, it helps me do what I do now.”

Born in St Louis, then working in the business in LA, New York became home for him in 1999. It was also the moment when he began to embrace the club scene. “The public performance part,” he laughs, “was kind of a mistake – I was booked for a gig and I was like, really, you’re going to pay me to play records?” But the music he then went on to produce for his brilliant Yoruba Records label was by no means an error.

With Europe so important to the quality end of house music clubs, Osunlade moved the operation to Greece, where he has now been able to “formulate my studios to be 100 per cent organic, acoustic, live”. As a result, he has re-adopted the collective name Piscean Group (which goes all the way back to his original St Louis roots and also features a colleague from his time in LA, Daniel Crawford, on keyboards) for his first project out of there, Original Soundtrack, which has recently been released on R2 Records.

Very much conceived like a film score, Osunlade describes it as “today’s ‘Trouble Man’ ”, born out of the music that he sees as closest to his heart. “If you’re in my house more than two days, you won’t hear anything other than ambient jazz... and some funk! Low key, slow, meditative... I even have my moments of prog rock.”

Original Soundtrack is out now r2records.com Photograph Marcus Agerman Ross Words Mark Webster

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THE 2 BEARS | DJ HARVEY

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IVAN SMAGGHE | WILL SAUL | EWAN PEARSON | LATE NITE TUFF GUY MAURICE FULTON | MIKE SIMONETTI | MARK E | THE RAPTURE DJS VITO & DRUZZI MARQUIS HAWKES | JUSTIN ROBERTSON | KABAL PIPES & THE FMG UNABOMBERS | LOWLIFE BILL BREWSTER & FRANK BROUGHTON RAY MANG | AUNTIE FLO | CHRIS DUCKENFIELD | HARRI & DOMENIC JIM STANTON | MATT WALSH | LUKE SOLOMON | REMAIN PETE HEBERT | DICKY TRISCO | DISCO DEVIANCE | PLUS MANY MORE

E L E C T R I C E L E P H A N T . C O . U K

PEOPLE

James Cherry

James Cherry, 22, is a singer/songwriter from Leicester who describes his music as “aggressive soul”. Part of the new mod scene that seems to be swelling around the country, Cherry, who has just released his first single, seems to be the full package. His punky, smart look perfectly reflects his down-to-earth lyrics and exuberant charm. He talks about his time working in a pub back home, where he spent time “collecting stories while collecting glasses”.

He adds, “Most, if not all, of my songs are really personal to me and things that have happened in my life.

These could be about me cheating (sorry) or getting off my nut. But to be honest, if it’s not real then what’s the point?

I don’t just write a song for the sake of it; I write it because I want to get something off my chest. Might sound bad, but I genuinely write for myself and worry about the consequences later…”

‘Blame It On Our Youth’ is out now facebook.com/jamescherrymusic Photograph Marcus Agerman Ross Words Edward Moore

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Slaves

Laurie Vincent and Isaac Holman first met in the rap/punk band Bareface before starting Slaves in 2012. As Vincent describes, “Isaac was the first person who said ‘I wanna make the same music as you.’ That’s why it’s flowed so well.” Hailing from Royal Tunbridge Wells, the well-healed part of Kent, the duo cite the safe mundanity of their surroundings as an inspiration on their ska/punk/ psychobilly sound, which revolves around short, sharp songs, a pounding kick drum and observational lyrics.

Their debut album Are You Satisfied? is out now virginemirecords.com youareallslaves.com Photographs Ross Trevail Words Edward Moore

Daniel Harris

Daniel Harris, founder of the London Cloth Company, bought his first loom a few years ago, eager to cultivate an unusual hobby. But one wonders if a man who is prepared to buy and transport a century-old, three-tonne piece of Victorian engineering won’t end up completely consumed by the mesmerising click-clacking of his beautiful old machine.

In fact, that is exactly what happened to Harris. Not put off by his amateurish first attempts at creating cloth, he is now five years into his business, which boasts of being the first new cloth mill to open in London in more than 100 years.

With three machines in total now (the most modern dates from the 1940s), requiring marathon journeys criss-crossing the British Isles to replace old parts, the London Cloth Company today has a roster of impressive clients. These include Ralph Lauren’s RRL label, which came to Harris seeking his unique and traditional fabrics. londoncloth.com Photograph Chris Tang Words Edward Moore

PEOPLE

Ig Wilkinson

“I make things to provoke,” says Ig Wilkinson. “I’m sick of this homogenised, standardised sheep culture of disposable crap. I believe strongly that we should look back at the generations when ‘Made in England’ stood for something.”

Living between London and Devon, Wilkinson is a multi-talented maker.

With wood from felled trees, he builds hollow surfboards, as well as recently using the same wood to make lasts to create his first pair of shoes. He also makes horn glasses and is now focused on tailoring.

“I’m not into wishing I was from some past era,” he says. “Now is the time to make and create. To question instead of feeling comfy watching your TV while this country falls apart.”

Wilkinson is also a filmmaker. He worked on a short film, Process, shot entirely on expired surveillance film, with his friend Tom Kirkham, and is now writing the script for a new short set in London. igwoodsurf.com Photograph Elliot Kennedy Words Edward Moore

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DETAIL

Joshua wears trousers by Vivienne Westwood Man; shirt by Casely-Hayford.

Land of 1000 Dances Photographs Elliot Kennedy Styling Teddy George-Poku Hair Adam Garland using Balmain Hair Make-up Rosie Mason using Magenta Styling Assistant Declan Slattery Dancers Harry Alexander, Benjamin Warbis and Joshua Harriette jlm-lighting.com

Having studied at London’s Royal Ballet School in the 1970s, Michael Clark joined Ballet Rambert before establishing his own company in 1984. Taking ballet beyonds its traditional confines, Clark quickly gained recognition for his work with a range of artists and designers including Mark E Smith of The Fall, fashion design duo Bodymap and the artist Charles Atlas. Thirty years on and Michael Clark Company is still regarded as one of the most pioneering and inventive troupes working out of the UK. Harry Alexander has been with the company since he graduated from college in 2010. Joshua Harriette has been acting and dancing since he was a kid and joined the company a year ago. He is also a lighting designer, primarily focused on dance. Joining the company immediately after graduation, Benjamin Warbis recently started performing with Yorke Dance Project under Yolande Yorke-Edgell and Robert Cohan. michaelclarkcompany.com yorkedanceproject.co.uk

Harry wears trousers

by Casely-Hayford; jacket

by Berthold; shoes by Christian Louboutin x E Tautz; watch by Larsson&Jennings.

53

Joshua wears trousers

by Berthold; jacket by Richard James; top by Matthew Miller; boots by Dr Martens.

Harry wears trousers by Cos; top by E Tautz; shoes by Vivienne Westwood Man; hat by Lock&Co; watch

by Larsson&Jennings.

DETAIL | Land of 1000 Dances

Harry wears trousers by Wooyoungmi; coat by Casely-Hayford; top by Marni; watch by Larsson&Jennings.

Benjamin wears trousers

by Agi&Sam; jacket and top by Lou Dalton; boots

by Dr Martens.

DETAIL | Land of 1000 Dances

Joshua wears trousers and shirt by Marni from Matches; jacket by Agi&Sam.

Benjamin wears trousers by Cos; jacket by Richard James; top by Zadig&Voltaire; boots

by Dr Martens.

Harry wears jeans by E Tautz; jacket by Vivienne Westwood Man; shirt by Oliver Spencer; boots by Dr Martens; sunglasses by Dsquared2.

PROFILE

Cuts Hairdressers James Lebon. The Fin. Vidal Sassoon. Kensington Market. International Stussy Tribe.

Words Andy Thomas Portraits Ross Trevail

More than 20 years in the making, Cuts: The Movie is a documentary by Australian filmmaker Sarah Lewis. The film profiles the creative community around the influential hairdressers Cuts, from its birth in Kensington Market in 1979 to its current home in Soho. “In the mid 1990s I’d just finished a film for Channel 4 and was thinking about what to do next,” says Lewis. “My friend Jenny and her brother, the photographer William Selden, were part of the Cuts family. She started talking to me about Cuts and so we went down there. And that was it, we started filming together in the late 1990s and I’ve been doing it ever since.”

The genius behind the original Cuts was the late James Lebon, who created a template for a new breed of alternative hairdressers. The younger brother of fashion photographer Mark Lebon, he was encouraged to pursue hairdressing by his father, who was a friend of Vidal Sassoon. Soon after completing his course at the Sassoon Academy he set his sights on his own hairdressers, inspired by the DIY ethic of punk.

Opening the first tiny shop in the basement of Kensington Market, he found himself amongst a creative community with stalls such as Jay Strongman’s Rock-A-Cha and Lloyd Johnson’s The Modern Outfitter. With his sharp eye for the underground styles of the day, Lebon was as radical as he was talented. Known as James Cuts, he moved his store to Kensington Church 58

Street with his partner Steve Brooks in 1982. On the ground floor above the renamed These Are Cuts they set up an art gallery, where designer Tom Dixon, a regular customer, first exhibited his reclaimed scrap metal work. Along with Antenna, on the same street, Cuts was the first in a new type of independent hairdressers.

The multi-ethnic aesthetic of Cuts chimed with that of Ray Petri’s Buffalo look. And after an introduction to Petri by brother Mark Lebon (Buffalo photographer), James became their session hairdresser. Despite working on many shoots for style magazines such as i-D and The Face, he remained wary of the fashion world. “Fashion in hair – I think it’s a load of rubbish.

I think everyone’s hair should be done to suit them individually as human beings. Not just to suit a mad rockabilly trend or whatever,” he told Paula Yates in an interview on TV show The Tube.

By 1983 he was making more regular trips to the US, styling hair on various shoots. He brought back early mix tapes from New York and helped set up the influential hip-hop club the Language Lab. Soon after the shop had moved to its new address on Frith Street in Soho, Lebon left Cuts to join film school at New York University. He went on to become an influential video director working with the likes of Bomb the Bass and Mantronix. Through his connections made in New York he also became a founding member of the International Stussy Tribe.

From its new home in Soho, Cuts was steered through the rest of the decade and beyond by Steve Brooks and partners Pete Dowland, Andrew Daniel, and Roydon Davies. This was a hugely creative time in Soho, and Cuts would become part of a tight community of freethinkers, whose work reflected their anything goes attitude. As well as being a breeding ground for young talent and innovative haircuts, it also provided inspiration to other future salons in Soho such as Fish, opened in 1987.

Through the 1990s the renamed Cuts Soho, further down on Frith Street, was to continue to forge its own path in street style. Some of the cuts to emerge from the salon included the Buddha, with its shaved front and tuft of hair around the crown, and the fin that was sent global thanks to frequent customer Fran Healy, lead singer of Travis. He was just one of many musicians who became regulars, and everyone from Goldie to James Lavelle owed their hairstyles to the salon.

We Are Cuts now operates out of a basement on Dean Street, where it retains the maverick air of the original store. “I like the guys you’ve got in there now, they are really lovely people,” James Lebon says in the forthcoming documentary. “They are just the same sort of people, you know, just as much trouble.” Lebon died in December 2008, aged just 49, but his spirit lives on in one of the few remaining independent shops in Soho. >

James Lebon, founder of Cuts, at These Are Cuts, Kensington Church Street, London, 1982 Photograph courtesy of Nic Tuft and Sarah Lewis

59

were smashing that kind of area of art, style, creativity and design.”

Mitzi Lorenz, Buffalo stylist “We always had James on our shoots at Buffalo. For most of the shoots we would have a hairdresser who styled the hair, then we would have James come along with his clippers to do the boys’ hair. James was directed by Ray [Petri] as to what we wanted on the boys. It was either that American GI haircut or the quiff. And James was fantastic at the quiff.”

Johnnie Sapong, hairdresser at the Studio and ex-Cuts member, Cuts Soho, Frith Street, 1991 johnniesapong.com Photograph Stefan Ruiz

Jay Strongman, DJ/Rock-A-Cha owner “It was very DIY and had a very punk ethic. There were no fancy frills or exorbitant prices – just the basics and a fantastic haircut. It was an informal atmosphere in Cuts… lots of joking, piss taking and chats about women, clubs etc.”

Steve Brooks, Cuts partner in the 1980s and 1990s “The politics side to Buffalo was really important to me in that it was promoting black faces. And at Cuts we did that back in 1982-83 by having black and white faces together in our adverts. It was all about recognising black culture because at the time it wasn’t being honoured or respected – it was being appropriated.”

Pete Dowland, Cuts partner “We were the first to do the fin. Then I did Fran from Travis and that’s when it really took off. But it’s not like we sit down and think up a new hairstyle. It just sort of evolves out of certain requests and then you work around ideas.”

Dizzi Heights, musician/Cuts junior in the 1980s “My background was all top-class training in salons like Schumi in Knightsbridge. At that time it was either classy hairdressers, or high street places like John Frieda, Daniel Galvin, or your local barbers. When I got to 60

Cuts I had never seen those kinds of characters before in a hairdressers.

Everyone was really stylised.”

Scarlett Cannon, model/Cha Cha club host “There was a huge community around Kensington Market at that time.

Everyone knew each other and James was very much part of that. They were all neighbours so it was lovely actually.”

‘THERE WERE NO FANCY FRILLS OR EXORBITANT PRICES – JUST A FANTASTIC HAIRCUT’ Isaac Julien, installation artist/ filmmaker “It wasn’t just about the haircut, it was about the whole ambience and who you would meet there and all of that.”

Dizzi Heights “Every day you’d have someone coming in from the style magazines. You also had Mark Lebon and James working on all the shoots for i-D and all that. They

Steve Brooks “The thing about Cuts was it was always a hangout. So people would be coming down even if they weren’t getting a haircut. Someone we knew put it perfectly by saying, ‘This is like the market square.’ You were just bombarded with people’s creativity.”

Andrew Daniel, Cuts partner “It’s about what feels right for each person and what’s appropriate for him or her. We might do a secretary who wants half an inch off her bob next to some artist who is having their head shaved. It’s all about equality.”

Pete Dowland “We’ve done loads of famous people and I think what they like about Cuts is that it’s is a nice day off from the sycophancy. I really like the fact that we treat everyone equally and we’ve never had a hierarchy. I’ve had David Bowie and Goldie sitting on the couch waiting for their haircut together like everyone else.”

Alex Turnbull, musician/International Stussy Tribe founding member “James was right on the fucking pulse.

He knew everyone and he would always bring people through. That was an important thing about him – he was a catalyst to bring people together and make things happen. You’d always meet people through him – everyone loved James.”

Jay Strongman “I remember after the first cut I had with James I went to one of the Rockin’ clubs I used to go to back then, either Bumbles or Shades, and all the rockabilly guys were asking where I got my hair cut.”

PROFILE | Cuts Hairdressers Nic Tuft, co-producer and former Cuts junior “James was an amazing colourist.

I walked out of there with a purple quiff with blue sides and a red DA. From there on he used to change my colour every weekend. He then gave me the job as his first junior working on Saturdays getting £1 for each head I washed. On my first weekend I found myself washing the head of Stray Cats frontman Brian Setzer.”

Dizzi Heights “James did amazing sculptured and tailored cuts for women. He used to really like barbering the back of their hair and leaving the top long.”

Johnnie Sapong, hairdresser at the Studio “Those things evolved where you were doing black things to white hair in a sense. So you would do the tramlines on a white skinhead cut. It was all influenced by the fashion and the identity, in a similar way to Ray Petri at Buffalo.”

Steve Brooks “James was tying ribbons and putting mud and dust in hair, all kinds of shit.

It would be really beautiful. A lot of it would be people just saying, ‘James do my hair any way you want.’ Because they wanted to be different.”

Nic Tuft “James would sign his work by putting a cut in their eyebrow.

We would go out clubbing and see the cut eyebrows everywhere.”

Dizzi Heights “When I first got to Cuts all the early hip-hop was just coming over and they were pounding music out that I had only ever heard in a nightclub. Compared with the salons where I had come from, which was all, ‘Hello madam, how are you?’, it was like a club or something.”

Mitzi Lorenz “I used to live with Ray [Petri] and we’d go to Bar Italia for breakfast and then on to Cuts next door. It was a great place to hang out with your mates and listen to music and stuff. Quite often we’d use it as a bit of an office as well.

We’d be running around doing our thing in the West End and it was

Steve Brooks, James Lebon’s ex-business partner Portrait Ross Trevail

a point that you could go to make phone calls and stuff.”

Andrew Daniel “When Pete and me started there, it was the end of the quiff era. I remember cutting Tom Dixon’s hair when he was at Central Saint Martins and it was shaved on the sides with this massive curly quiff on top.”

Mitzi Lorenz “I remember them saying they were opening a barbershop in Soho, and I thought that was a bit odd. At the time a barbers was a place where the old men went. You really didn’t have cool barbers back then. You had places like Antenna or Vidal Sassoon. So Cuts was the first one really.”

Isaac Julien “I would associate Cuts with Le Beat Route right through to the Wag. It was the beginning of club culture but also what would become the more continental way that Soho moved into.

And it’s been incredibly important to my own life in Soho. It linked into me

studying at Central Saint Martins as well as the formation of Soho as a kind of gay hub.”

Steve Brooks “James was doing tons and tons of quiffs. Then there was that film Eraserhead and he used to do that kind of hairstyle, all shaved on the sides and sticking up on top. And then with women he was doing loads of bouffants.

He also started setting hair rather than blow-drying it. That was really nice – sort of going back to the 1950s vibe with a twist. There was always some kind of twist.”

Scarlett Cannon “James like the rest of us always did his own thing and he was always his own trendsetter. Even when he left Sassoon when he was 18 or 19 he always had his own style and own way of doing things.

That is what people loved about him.”

Steve Brooks “The Buddha came from me. I just wanted to cut the front of my hair off because I hated the way it was growing > 61

PROFILE | Cuts Hairdressers

The Cuts team today: Andrew Daniel, Moses Quiquine, Pete Dowland, Georgia Clarks, Devan Brodie, Hayley Rothwell, Conrad Johnson, Ashanti Bedeaux, Quango and Emil Torrens-White Location We Are Cuts, 33 Dean Street, London W1 wearecuts.com Portrait Ross Trevail

there. So I got Pete to cut the fringe right off so it would be short back, sides and front and you’d just grow it on the crown area.”

Alex Turnbull “James was my best mate and he was always this larger than life character.

Him and his brother Mark were just really cool. And what was great about James was he had this way of making you feel really at ease. That was one of the very special things about him, because a lot of people who are really cool can be kind of arsey.”

Isaac Julien “It wasn’t just about the haircut it was about the whole ambience and who you would meet there and all of that.”

Andrew Daniel “It was massively influential. You look at Fish and all those people, they are like carbon copies of what we do. You can walk around Soho and see loads of places that are like we were 25 years ago. They might have taken it somewhere else but you can see where the template came from.”

62

Johnnie Sapong “When the trajectory went from Kensington to Soho it just spawned a whole new beast. It became this meeting place and hub and you had a real vibe to it. You were doing clients that were in the music world, then after you’d done them in the salon you’d go and do a fashion shoot with them.”

‘THEY WERE POUNDING OUT MUSIC I’D ONLY EVER HEARD IN A NIGHTCLUB’ Pete Dowland “Bringing through the junior staff is one of the really important elements to the shop and always has been. That is one of the things I am really proud of.

We’ve really turned some kids around.

It’s usually very transient, hairdressing.

But Cuts is like family. We’ve been there for 30 years and even some of the people we think of as newbies have actually been there for over 10 years.”

Isaac Julien “I’ve been going to Cuts for as long as I can remember. I knew of it when it was at Kensington Market and Church Street but it was only when they moved to Soho that I got acquainted with them. That would have been around 1984. I think Cuts becomes even more important with the commercialisation and corporatisation of Soho into a bland space.”

Johnnie Sapong “Stores and people come and go but through all these years Cuts has managed to be an institution.

And that’s a big thing. In simple terms, Cuts has played such a significant part for so many of us. It has always been family.”

Cuts: The Movie is currently in production cutsthemovie.com We Are Cuts, 33 Dean Street, London W1 wearecuts.com

ADVERTORIAL

Max wears Oscar jacket and Lightening selvedge jeans.

Meriem wears Shadow leather jacket and Shadow jeans.

Barbour International Photograph Mattias Pettersson Styling Richard Simpson Couple Max and Meriem Broby Motorcycle Triumph Thruxton courtsey of James Elvery

Originally founded to provide waterproof oilskin clothing to local sailors, fishermen and dockers at the end of the 19th century, Barbour created its first motorcycle garment in 1936. Duncan Barbour, founder John Barbour’s grandson, created a one-piece motorcycle suit in dark green wax cotton, christened the “International” after the International Six Day Trials for which it was made. (The British team wore Barbour clothing at every ISDT until 1977.) In the 1960s, the International jacket was worn by the

American ISDT team, which included Steve McQueen amongst its ranks. The actor’s name remains synonymous with the brand to this day, with a special Steve McQueen range.

In 1980, the distinctive black and gold Barbour International badge first appeared on the jackets. Today, the jacket, which remains virtually unchanged since its inception, is the touchstone for a whole range of men’s and women’s clothing under the Barbour International banner, which marries the hardwearing

functionality of its heritage with a style-focused design. Next season sees a collaboration with Triumph on a menswear collection, and the introduction of soft luxurious leathers in the womenswear collections.

In celebration of Barbour International’s rich and unique heritage, Jocks&Nerds has made a short film, which can be seen at jocksandnerds.com/barbour barbourinternational.co.uk Max Broby is an architect and designer Meriem Broby is a fashion designer

MUSIC

Heavenly Recordings Beth Orton. Alan McGee. Plymouth. The Social. Sub Aqua. Sly&Lovechild. Loop. Head. Saint Etienne.

Words Paolo Hewitt Photographs Orlando Gilli

One night in 1965, onstage at a gig in New York, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian nudged his partner Zal Yanovsky and nodded at a beautiful 16-year-old girl who was dancing to their music. The next day the pair sat down and wrote ‘Do You Believe in Magic’. The second line of the song talks about a young girl’s heart and how the magic of music can free her. It also asks the listener never to get hung up on categories. Whatever music moves you, then that’s the magic. The song was a major hit, spending 13 weeks in Billboard’s Top 100. In the UK, its success was not as large. But its effect would be incalculable.

Twenty-five years now, of gigs in pubs and clubs and bars, searching for that band whose music has the magic.

Twenty-five years of recording studios, of calls to writers and distributors, hustlers and managers, chancers and saints, agents and promoters. Twentyfive years of hangovers, of feast and famine, avoiding the bills, paying the bills. Twenty-five years of playing music to dawn and back again.Twenty-five years, then, of Heavenly Recordings, the people who gave you – among others – Manic Street Preachers, Saint Etienne, Doves, Beth Orton, Ed Harcourt, Temples, Toy, the Magic Numbers, Cherry Ghost, Duke 64

Garwood, the Mark Lanegan Band, Stealing Sheep, and all of it driven by two desires that belong to the label’s head, Jeff Barrett. The desire to avoid straight society, avoid going left-right, left-right every morning, twinned with his deep desire to give people magic, the magic that had changed his life so many years ago.

Barrett sits in a pub toying with his drink. He is trying to tell me what he looks for in a band and he is finding it difficult. “I don’t know why I find this so hard to define,” he says, “because it is so personal, so it should be easier than it is. Basically, it has to affect me. My approach is, do I care and how much do I like it? It’s not, can I sell it? It is about how I respond to a piece of music. And how you respond is very personal.

“I can watch a group walk onstage and pretty much know if I am going to like them or not by the way they look. Shit shoes never do a band any favours in my book. The band should have a look and look like they mean it, but it is always the songs in the end.

They have to be able to write a song that suckers me in and that song has to have a substance to it, whether that be lyrically or musically.”

Barrett is a man of principle, a man of heart and soul. He seeks the good in everything, so I throw him a curveball.

If you saw a band that were complete melts but you knew they would make you a millionaire, would you still sign?

He does not even flinch.

“No, because I don’t particularly like bands that sell a million albums. I have never done Heavenly for that reason.

I think what I have always wanted to do with my life is live outside straight society. That is what I have achieved.

So I think if you are going to look at a band that way, it means your whole ethos is bread-driven and my ethos is not and never has been bread-driven in the slightest.”

Heavenly Recordings has had such highs and lows; surges in success and then times when it has gone into freefall. Today, it thrives. There are 15 acts on the label and yesterday offers went out to three more bands. The music business is dying and Barrett is signing up bands like crazy.

“It’s nuts right?” he says, with a selfdeprecating smile. “If you look at it purely business-wise your overheads are what they normally are, but the sales are down so you have to put more out to make a living and not just pay the bills. But that is not the drive.

The drive is because the record is great or the group are really amazing, really interesting, and that is a double thrill to take a band or an artist as far as you >

Jeff Barrett, founder of Heavenly Recordings

Duke Garwood released his latest album, Heavy Love, on Heavenly Recordings earlier this year. He will be performing tracks from the album at the Southbank Centre, London, on 19 June dukegarwood.co.uk

Toy are currently working on their third studio album. They are playing various festivals over the summer toy-band.com

can. Look at Beth Orton, that was amazing. To be involved with her from scratch, to take it where we did, that is the real satisfaction, that is the hit.”

Barrett was born in Nottingham in 1960, and he was lucky because very early on in life, the magic entered his soul. One day he turned on the radio and there were the Beatles. It was 1965 and Barrett was hooked. Fortunately, music surrounded him. In his elder brother’s room he would hear Mose Allison. And from his sister’s room, the Kinks. “My natural gravitation was towards the radio,” he recalls.

“I remember the most significant Christmas present bought for me was a transistor radio. I hold that up as one of my greatest days.”

Meanwhile, schooldays meandered around him like a lazy river. He was sharp, no doubt about it, but his yen would be for literature and art that spoke of different worlds. Richard Price is a favoured writer, so too Stanley Booth and Nick Tosches.

Barrett’s real education began at 11, when he discovered record shops in Nottingham city centre. At first he dawdled outside, looking with awe at the window displays filled with mystery 66

and art. Then he pushed himself through the door and there was no going back. He had landed. He just didn’t know it at the time.

“Neil Young would be playing and the pot and the patchouli oil would merge, and it was fascinating to me.

It seemed a place where you could be yourself, where you could meet likeminded people. You could find out what gigs were happening, where you could buy your clothes, it was great.”

When he left school he took a job selling bearings at an engineering outfit.

He wanted a record shop but ended up at the other end of the spectrum. “The weird thing was, I was quite good at it. You might as well be if you are going to be there eight hours a day.”

Then came an offer; deputy manager at a bigger bearings outlet.

His mum and dad were thrilled by the news but the son smelt a rat. “I thought, if I take this job I am fucked. I knew also that if I stayed on my estate I would be fucked as well. I knew there was more to life than getting beaten up for wearing an anti-Nazi league badge by some twat off our estate.”

Mother knows best. She called Barrett’s brother who had decamped to

Plymouth and Barrett caught the train down. His brother ran restaurants, but Barrett didn’t join the slackers and the stoners in the kitchens, instead persuading HMV to take him on. Here, he would start to learn about the actual business of making and releasing records. “I started stocking all the indie records, all the cool records. It was a chart return shop so the back wall was Shakey and Bucks Fizz, but my business was in Factory 45s and the first Pale Fountains single.”

Barrett’s instincts were to expose wonderful sounds to his customers. He gained a reputation with Revolver, the company he bought the records off.

Based in Bristol, it distributed to all the indie record shops around and had its own shop. “The company was run

by Mike Chadwick, and his partner Lloyd Harris was the first person to spot something in me, I’ll never forget him,” Barrett says. “He said I should run this amazing shop. I moved to Bristol and furthered my education.

I learnt more about Studio One, and at the time electro was coming in, so it was all fascinating. It was like the Rough Trade shop in London but with a very strong black clientele.”

MUSIC | Heavenly Recordings

Kid Wave’s debut album, Wonderlust, is out now soundcloud.com/kid-wave

Barrett spent a year in Bristol and then went back to Plymouth. He fell in love with a small label based in Scotland called Creation Records. The head was a man called Alan McGee. “The charts back then – Tears for Fears and Duran Duran? Fuck off. So I went to the extreme of that, which was loud guitars, invariably 12-string, played by people with fringes and suede jackets. And Creation seemed to tick that box. I would buy their singles with the wraparound sleeve and the spray paint cover and I would think, who put this together? Are these guys all doing speed? Is this really a spray can? Were they up all night doing these sleeves?

And when I got to know them I discovered that the answers to those questions were yes, yes and yes.”

In Plymouth, Barrett also brought in money by DJing at a club. He persuaded the owner to let him put on bands, the owner said yes, and Barrett instantly thought of Creation.

“I rang this telephone number on the Creation Records sales sheet.

It was the first time I had ever rung a record label. I was quite nervous.

I thought, OK, I am ringing this guy, I am going to tell him I am in Bristol

but I am going back to Plymouth, and I want to start putting on bands and I want to put his bands on. So I called and relayed all of this to a man with a Scottish accent who said, ‘Are you taking the fucking piss man?’ That was Alan McGee. He explained that he had put on bands in London, but nae cunts

‘SHIT SHOES NEVER DO A BAND ANY FAVOURS IN MY BOOK’ come. So I said, ‘Well, nae cunt might not come to my do, but shall we give it a go?’”

And they did. Barrett and his mates, who were all drinkers and DJs and music lovers, turned up at these gigs and they got to see early Primal Scream and The Loft and a thousand others who have now passed into history.

“Alan and I got on very well, and the night we put on The Jesus and Mary Chain, McGee said to me, ‘What are you doing in Plymouth, come and work for me.’ I made him repeat it, and I pinched myself. I made him repeat it again, and I said, ‘Yeah, ok.’”

Barrett was finally heading for where he belonged – London town.

“It is easy to think of Creation as a big company but back then it was a small little room with McGee shouting, ranting, swearing, abusing. We had no money, so that is what made it work – it was the enthusiasm. I had never met anyone like McGee in my life. He was a real instigator. It was all well and good me putting on bands, but that guy not only put bands on but he also put their records out. His ambition was immense. I have never met anybody with such ambition as Alan.

“I didn’t realise how big it was at the beginning, but every taste he got he wanted more. He lost me a little along the way, and we had our ups and downs, but I owe him a lot and we had a real good time.”

McGee could only pay a small wage, so Barrett found a good pub in Camden called the Black Horse and did what he > 67

Eaves released his debut album, What Green Feels Like, in April. He is supporting Mumford&Sons on tour this summer soundcloud.com/eavesmusic Hooton Tennis Club release their second single ‘Kathleen Sat on the Arm of her Favourite Chair’ on 29 June. Their debut album is out in August facebook.com/hootontennisclub Location Ace Hotel London acehotel.com

has done all his life – he started another scene. In 1994 he would do exactly the same with a club named the Social.

Different music, different drugs, but the same effect. “Upstairs was the music and downstairs it was a meeting of minds, selling fanzines, swapping jackets, finding partners. Not every band suited everybody, but the general ethos was the same, a really creative time. I was out of my mind with excitement, someone saying, ‘Have you read this book, have you heard this record, seen this film?’ I was working very closely with my favourite band, Primal Scream, and we were swapping records. It was a brilliant time.”

Barrett met a band named Loop and took the plunge, saying to them, ‘Do you want to put a record out?’ He was ready, and had seen and learnt what was required of a man who asks such a question. He formed his first label, and named it Head. When that finished he started another called Sub Aqua.

In the meantime, Creation had made him a press officer. All his life he had 68

devoured the music press, so he knew the ropes already.

“Having read the music papers, I knew what every writer liked. What I managed to do was work out, this guy ain’t going to like this record, but this

‘MY SKILL WAS NOT WASTING PEOPLE’S TIME AND NOT DICKING JOURNALISTS AROUND’ guy will. Ultimately my skill, which I didn’t know was a skill, was not wasting people’s time, not wasting free records and not dicking journalists around.”

Barrett became very good at his job.

Factory Records took note and invited him in. His interview with headman Tony Wilson started two hours late and consisted of Wilson smoking a spliff, talking about himself for an hour and then leaving. That was his way of giving Barrett employment.

At the same time, acid house was beginning. Music in the 1980s was a time of segregation; hip-hop over here, indie schmindie over there. By the 1990s that wall had been breached and Barrett was leading the charge.

“Those next few years were the best,” he sighs. “Barriers came down, bullshit went out of the window. There was this meeting of so many different creative minds. Everything became possible.”

Mike Chadwick now got back in touch with Barrett. Would Jeff drop the PR angle and run him an in-house record label to complement the distribution company? Barrett said yes.

Heavenly was the perfect label for the 1990s. It had been born out of the energy of the acid house scene, driven

MUSIC | Heavenly Recordings by a lifelong love of music of all shapes and sizes. With his partner Martin Kelly, Barrett would seek to create music of no description except that it had to move, inspire and excite people.

Heavenly’s first record was a house tune by Sly & Lovechild. Its second was Saint Etienne’s Balearic classic ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’.

And the fourth was by the rock band Manic Street Preachers. “The Manics were very young, very opinionated, very intelligent, very gobby working class boys from the valley,” says Barrett.

“We went and watched them and it was fucking brilliant. We met them and they were saying things to us like, ‘Oh you guys in London with your fucking ecstasy ways.’ They were absolutely anti-everything we stood for – and I liked it. I liked it that they wore their manifesto on their clothing and I knew they were going to ruffle feathers. We did their first two singles, while at the same time I had Saint Etienne’s ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ at number one in the dance charts.’

Then, drama. Chadwick, the backer, pulled out. Heavenly was not the label he had envisaged. There now came worry and struggle until CBS (now Sony) came in. Later, there would be Deconstruction/BMG and then EMI. Heavenly Recordings remained autonomous though. It rented its own offices in and around Soho and for the most part kept its own counsel.

“Our ambitions were crackers,” says Barrett, laughing. “CBS knew that I knew the Boy’s Own lot and I knew the Creation lot. Did I make them the big indie dance crossover hit they were looking for? No, I signed a country band and made the best British country record of all time with the Rockingbirds. I was not making it easy for myself. I mean, this was not what people wanted.”

But Heavenly did find the bands the people wanted. It gave the world Beth Orton, and got released in America. It found Doves, who were big – both in sales and in glorious sonic sound – and also the Magic Numbers, who gave Barrett his biggest sales – a million records and more on their debut album. It also picked up on deep musical talents such as Ed Harcourt and Edwyn Collins, and has forged ahead of late with Stealing Sheep, Duke Garwood, Temples and Mark Lanegan.

Stealing Sheep’s new single, ‘Deadlock’, is out on 15 June stealingsheep.co.uk

Heavenly is an ethos, a vehicle that has allowed Barrett to also move into publishing. His latest publication is a collection of reminiscences by the veteran jazz man, Brian Case, while the previous book, Caught by the River, extolled the virtues of nature.

Barrett finishes his drink with some last words. “Whoever I sign, I have to understand that I am lucky to be working with that band or that artist.

I have been given an opportunity to actually learn something, to see the machinations of art unfold in front of my eyes. That is the ultimate thrill, that is the ultimate achievement.”

He can’t recall where he was when he heard it, probably early in the 1990s, but every lyric of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Do You Believe in Magic’ spoke to Barrett with such depth and passion,

he bet every penny he had on it. “In exactly the same way that the label name Heavenly appeared in my mind, so did that song, and the power and the sentiment seemed so right.

I remember telling Martin in 1991, this is what we are going to say now – Heavenly – believe in the magic.

He got it immediately of course, and it’s been the mantra, the code of living ever since.”

Heavenly Recordings has a series of events over the year to celebrate its 25th anniversary heavenlyrecordings.com An exhibition and book, Heavenly 25 Yearbook, by Brian David Stevens, shows at Rough Trade, Dray Walk, London E1, 1 September to 5 October briandavidstevens.com 69

Working in Shinola’s London store

A finished apron

ADVERTORIAL

Nigel Ruwende, founder of Saint&Birchley, bespoke apron maker

Shinola Community of Craft Project Photographs Kevin Davies

Established in 2011, American brand Shinola has tasked itself with developing a manufacturing base in Detroit, reversing a trend started a generation ago when much of the west’s economy switched to service-based industries.

With specialist craftsmen brought in to head up the various divisions of the business – watches, bicycles and leather goods – Shinola has

opened factories in Detroit, creating jobs for many locals who previously worked on the assembly lines of the car manufacturers.

The Community of Craft project is a collaboration between Shinola and Jocks&Nerds magazine that brings specialist craftspeople into the Shinola store in central London. The project, running over the coming months, began with bespoke apron maker Nigel

Ruwende of Saint&Birchley. Ruwende set up for three days in the store, where the public were able to experience and discuss his work in person, as well as order their own personal apron.

The Community of Craft project is at the Shinola store, 13 Newburgh St, London W1.

For more information visit jocksandnerds.com/shinola shinola.com

Sweater by Belstaff; trousers and belt by Margaret Howell; shoes by Bass.

STYLE

Jacket by Nigel Cabourn; T-shirt by Nicole Farhi; scarf by Margaret Howell.

Joe Dempsie

Photographs David Goldman Styling Rose Forde Grooming Jody Taylor at Premier Hair and Makeup using Bumble and Bumble Photographic Assistant Ed Bournier Styling Assistants Sidney Belle Turner and Laurie Lederman Joe Dempsie, 27, is an actor from Liverpool. He first rose to prominence as a member of the original cast of the Channel 4 youth drama Skins in 2007. Since then he has starred in The Damned United, This is England ’86 and more recently as Gendry in Game of Thrones. Filming for This is England ’90, the last instalment of the Shane Meadows drama, has just wrapped. Dempsie is currently filming a new BBC drama about the Grand Theft Auto video game with Daniel Radcliffe, and he starts work on a feature film, Burn, Burn, Burn, with Laura Carmichael and Chloe Pirrie, later this year. beaumontlondon.com

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Sweater by Acne; trousers and shirt by Yohji Yamamoto; shoes by Bass; belt by Margaret Howell.

STYLE | Joe Dempsie

Top by Ben Sherman; trousers by Yohji Yamamoto; shoes by Bass; belt by Margaret Howell.

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Jacket by J Lindeberg; trousers by Acne; sweater by Hackett; shirt by Paul Smith.

STYLE | Joe Dempsie

Jacket by J Lindeberg; trousers by Acne; shirt by Paul Smith; shoes by Bass.

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STYLE | Joe Dempsie

Vest by Derek Rose; trousers by Cerruti 1881; belt by Margaret Howell.

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Shirt and T-shirt by Nicole Farhi; trousers

by Nigel Cabourn; shoes

by Yohji Yamamoto.

Boneville Navy Arctic hooded nylon bomber jacket, 1980s; golf bag by Stone Island.

GALLERY

Boneville flight jacket, circa 1987.

Massimo Osti Archive Photographs Kevin Davies Words Chris May

There’s a scene at the start of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey where an ape-like proto-human is confronted by a perfectly engineered, silky smooth, black monolith. So alien is the object to the creature’s experience that he is overwhelmed by it.

It’s easy to feel a similar sense of shock when first encountering Massimo Osti’s work. In the 1980s and 1990s, with his brands CP Company, Boneville and Stone Island, Osti reinvented modern menswear. His clothes looked like nothing you ever saw before. Osti’s cornerstone aesthetic, which held that

a garment’s form should be governed by its function, was the essential gamechanger. It had its origins in the workwear, military and naval clothing that were his lifelong inspirations. The clothes were transformed into what later became known as urban sportswear through revolutionary inventions in fabrics and materials, dyeing processes and tailoring, together with forensic attention to detailing. Osti’s garments were beautiful, with a gobsmacking sense of style, but these grew out of the rigorous foregrounding of substance and function.

Osti was born in 1944 in Bologna, just 50 miles from Florence, the epicentre of the Italian renaissance.

Engineer, inventor, scientist, philosopher and designer, Osti was himself a true renaissance man.

Looking through the monumental tome Ideas From Massimo Osti – a 412-page study of Osti’s research notes, preparatory drawings and finished garments, written and edited by his widow, Daniela Facchinato, and published in 2012 – is an experience akin to looking at fellow polymath Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbooks. > 81

Vintage military boiler suit.

Osti trained as a graphic designer and sidestepped into clothing in 1967 when he designed a family of pop artinspired images for a range of T-shirts.

From the start, he resolutely operated outside the conventional paradigm of the fashion world. He rejected the description fashion designer, calling himself a fashion engineer. He lived and worked in Bologna all his life, refusing to relocate to Italy’s fashion centre of Milan. He eschewed runway collections, believing they would belittle his garments, which were too rich in nuance and detail to be fully appreciated on a conveyor belt. Instead, for promotion, Osti published the magazine-cum-catalogue CP Company and produced his own videos. Most of his promotional photographs were shot by his wife and he preferred his garments to be photographed flat, showing all the details. When models were used they tended to be friends or family. Among his extracurricular activities, in 1991 Osti was elected a city councillor in Bologna, representing the Democratic Party of the Left. He died in 2005.

Along with “form follows function”, “continuous research” was an Osti motto. Throughout his career, he poured money into technical research, constantly looking for new materials, finishing processes and construction methods. An early breakthrough was complete garment dyeing. Osti discovered that dyeing a jacket when it was fully made, rather than pre-dyeing 82

its component parts and different materials separately, as was normal practice, created a uniquely harmonious, tone-on-tone effect. In the 1980s, his experiments with brushed wool and rubberised flax allowed striking improvements in functionality and finish. His Ice Jacket was made of a newly developed synthetic that was not only wind- and water-proof, but also changed colour as the temperature around it changed.

‘THEY WERE LIKE THINGS THAT HAD COME FROM ANOTHER PLANET’ All Osti’s brands were research-led, and none more so than Boneville.

He launched the brand in 1981 as an experimental laboratory where he could develop ideas that, for one reason or another, there was no room to take forward with his other labels.

Boneville operated until 1993, when Osti launched Left Hand.

Fast forward 20 years and enter John Sharp, chief executive of Branded Stocks, a multi-million pound

distributor of clothing and footwear and the main clearing partner in the UK for Nike Europe and Adidas. Sharp co-founded Branded Stocks more than two decades ago and it has made him a wealthy man. It has also enabled him to indulge, in the best sense of the word, a lifelong passion for Osti’s work and, in particular, for Boneville. In 2012, Sharp bought the brand.

Sharp is an ebullient, altogether larger-than-life Eastender. Think his near-contemporary Ray Winstone, but with more front. He grew up wearing Boneville and has never stopped doing so, and his passion for Osti’s work is palpable. Over 35 years, he has assembled what is believed to be the largest collection of Osti garments in private ownership in Britain, in an archive that also includes around 1,000 vintage military and workwear garments from other sources.

Kevin Davies’ photographs for Jocks&Nerds mark the first time anyone has been invited to document the archive. Davies and I spent a couple of days with Sharp and his Boneville team at the company HQ they share with Branded Stocks in Laindon, Essex, where much of the archive is housed.

Most of the garments are displayed on racks, while a few specially loved items are framed and hung, icon-like, on the office’s walls.

For most of his photographs, Davies adopted a similar approach to his 2013 Phaidon monograph Philip Treacy by Kevin Davies, shooting Osti’s garments, like Treacy’s hats, in the environment in which they were created. “Rather than place the garments in a photographic studio and isolate them,” says Davies, “I wanted to keep them on site and relate them to the vintage and new clothes, showing the history and devotion of the people involved.”

For a few photographs, Davies has captured the icon-like imagery offered by the specially selected items that Sharp has had framed and hung on the walls. “That made me look at the garments in a different way,” says Davies. “Whereas I wouldn’t usually acknowledge that as a way to take the picture, in this case it seemed right.

Placing them on a wall in a case raises them to a different level. It suggests a collecting passion which is almost religious in its fervour.”

A lot of the archive pieces here are Sharp’s personal garments. “I love >

GALLERY | Massimo Osti Archive

Boneville Navy Arctic flight jacket, circa 1986.

Boneville toffee wrapper jacket, circa 1989.

Massimo more than anyone in the world,” he says. “And somehow I’ve ended up owning Boneville. I want to carry Osti’s legacy on the best way I possibly can. It’s cost me millions but it’s in my DNA. It was meant to be.”

While there are plenty of navaland military-derived garments that have become icons of menswear – the trench coat, bomber jacket, duffel coat and field jacket among them – precious few of the manufacturing brands have become icons in themselves, or produced such intense collector commitment as Boneville, Stone Island and CP Company.

“There aren’t many menswear brands where you get such a large number of people with so much passion,” says Neil Munn, an Osti scholar and collector. “It’s almost like a cult. His passion has been repaid by the devotion of many people. What other menswear brands have that kind of following, for people to go hunting around the planet to try and find vintage pieces? Levi’s I suppose is one.

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There are stories of crazy Yanks scouring disused old mines in the hope of finding rare early jeans, and paying insane amounts for them at auctions.

But I can’t think of any another brand

‘HIS PASSION HAS BEEN REPAID

BY THE DEVOTION OF MANY PEOPLE’ that engenders the same degree of absolute enthusiasm.”

Like many other British enthusiasts, Munn discovered Osti through football, in his case during the 1980s. “In the UK it was unquestionably football fans who first embraced Osti’s work,” he

says. “Given its relative exclusivity, astonishing visual look and militarydesigned influences, it played exactly to their desire to look different, to make people stare. And it was entirely fit for a cold afternoon at the match. The first half of the 1980s was all about Fila, Ellesse, Tacchini, Lacoste, Pringle. But later in the decade Osti’s brands started to appear, and by the early 1990s they were increasingly visible on the terraces.

“It was mainly the jackets you saw and they were unlike anything that came before. They were like things that had come from another planet. And of course the compass badge on the arm was an identifying trait of the Stone Island pieces. There was a certain kudos amongst people who had a garment and would kind of nod at each other on the terraces, sometimes from a wary distance. Without the football link, it might have been a long time before Osti’s genius was seen in the UK. “It’s difficult to be innovative just once in any field, but Osti did it so many times. The body of work is sensational. They have a nice motto in the Osti studio, which appeared on one of his sub-brands later on: ‘Jump and the earth will rise to meet you.’

Osti thought that if you didn’t constantly strive for more, for different, for new, you stagnated and died.”

Sharp and the Boneville team are aware of the need to combine respect for and inspiration from Osti’s legacy with new ideas and new departures.

Boneville’s Sharp Engineer jacket is one of several successful fusions of the two strands. The jacket is a Sharp original, but it is also pure Osti – a military-feel garment that can be turned, in around a minute or so, into a duffel bag. “It feels like the Osti aesthetic,” says Sharp. “You’ve got the jacket, you’ve got the liner, you’ve got the bag. That’s what I call a threein-one jacket. The introduction of the bag in the system is our statement.”

An important element of Sharp’s Boneville collection is the KIT System, a modular approach that allows garments to be linked, updated and customised, within one season or across future collections. A good example of innovation is in the reinvention of the rope system for attaching liners.

“I’ll never match up to Osti,” says Sharp, “but my thoughts about what I want can’t be very far from the way it was. Sometimes it’s a bit spooky really.” >

GALLERY | Massimo Osti Archive

Boneville Sporting Goods bomber jacket, circa 1991; Boneville linen garment dye overshirt, circa 1993; Boneville Navy Arctic parka, circa 1988; Boneville waxed cotton parka, circa 1989; Boneville four pocket reflective jacket, circa 1989; Boneville skiwear parka, circa 1991.

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Boneville Sporting Goods parka, circa 1991.

GALLERY | Massimo Osti Archive

Boneville poplin cagoule, circa 1985.

Sharp says that since acquiring Boneville, his biggest challenge has been recruiting the right people to take it forward. The infectious esprit de corps among the small team so far assembled in Laindon suggests he’s got it right. There’s a real buzz and sense of purpose around the place.

If Osti self-identified as a fashion engineer rather than designer, it’s a feeling shared by Boneville’s creative director, Adi Wollaston, who is also the lead designer for Mastrum, an Ostiinspired brand also owned by Sharp.

Wollaston’s previous experience includes Timberland, Ted Baker, The North Face, Baracuta and Diadora.

“My grandfather was an electrical engineer,” says Wollaston. “He was one of the key players in the creation of the national grid. I remember that when I used to go and stay with him as a child, he had a computer on his car dashboard that he’d built himself. It calculated

speed, mileage, fuel consumption and so on. This was around 1974. He very much set me on the path of combining

‘IN THE UK, IT WAS FOOTBALL FANS WHO FIRST EMBRACED OSTI’S WORK’ engineering and design. At school, I’d toyed with going into mechanical engineering, but a misspent youth and love of fashion took me in a slightly

different direction. I’ve always had that engineer’s approach to problem solving and trying to build something where all the parts work and there’s a degree of simplicity and efficiency.”

Right now, Sharp is looking to open stores in Shoreditch and Carnaby Street, to replace the Boneville/ Mastrum launch store that used to be in Artillery Lane in east London.

Meanwhile, the brands are available online and at a carefully selected panel of retailers.

“There’s more to come, much more” says Sharp. “I’ve got a great team around me and we’re only just starting.

I’m in this for the long journey. I’m 60 this year and I only wish I had another 60 years to look after it. I just want Osti remembered.” boneville1981.com mastrum.com

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CINEMA

Nina Simone

Bach. Syd Nathan. Liberia. Mississippi Goddam. Simone Signoret.

Words Paolo Hewitt

No one covered the musical waterfront quite like Nina Simone.

Folk, funk, soul, pop, blues, classical, show songs, musicals – she took them all on and triumphed in every genre.

Her skill as a musical force was effortless, her deep talent remarkable.

As she stated in her 1991 autobiography, I Put A Spell On You, “Critics started to talk about what sort of music I was playing and tried to find a neat slot to file it away in. It was difficult for them because I was playing popular songs in a classical style with a classical piano technique influenced by jazz… On top of that I included spirituals and children’s songs in my performances, and those sort of songs were automatically identified with the folk movement.

So, saying what sort of music I played gave the critics problems.”

When, towards the end of Simone’s life, an interviewer expressed his great admiration for the brilliance she displayed in all styles of music, she imperiously replied, “Well, what else should a genius do?” Genius did indeed course through her heart. As a person it made her surly, unpredictable, capricious, exasperating. She was also funny, generous, driven by a hatred of injustice. Stories abound. They should be ignored. The real truth is that Simone could break your heart with the song ‘Little Girl Blue’ and then usher in spring itself with her reading of George Harrison’s ‘Here Comes the Sun’.

Simone was about solace and great happiness, about creating music to allow one to smile and dance, about songs of deep feeling that grip the soul, songs that howl at injustice and racism, songs that urge you to dance naked on 88

tables, as it is said she did in Liberia during the 1970s.

Born on 21 February 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina, Nina Simone’s birthname was Eunice Kathleen Waymon. Her family was large and poor, her parents deeply religious.

Her earliest memories were forged in music, with her mother singing gospel songs around the house. Legend has it that she came one day to find the not yet three-year-old Simone playing ‘God Be With You Till We Meet Again’ on the family organ. By the time she was six, Simone was the regular pianist at the family church. Her mother’s employer at the time, Mrs Miller, heard Simone play in church one day, and was so moved that she began paying for the piano lessons the family could not afford.

Simone’s piano teacher, Mrs Massinovitch, quickly became her mentor. She was a woman of inspiration who introduced Simone to Bach, a revelation the young musician carried with her all her life. “Once I understood Bach’s music,” Simone later recalled, “I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was my teacher, that great woman, who introduced me to his world.” A year later, Mrs Miller’s money ran out. Mrs Massinovitch wrote to the local paper asking for donations, and the town generously responded.

Pupil and teacher managed to stay together for the next five years.

At 11 years of age, Simone repaid the town with a piano recital at the local town hall. But this was an America of racial segregation. As she walked onstage she saw her family being asked to vacate their front row

seats for a white family. Straightaway, Simone announced that she would not play a single note until her family were restored to their rightful place. The venue finally relented. Stubborn courage would be a hallmark of the adventures that would now befall Ms Nina Simone.

The family moved to Philadelphia, where Simone applied to the Curtis Institute of Music to continue her studies. Acceptance at this prestigious school was her dream. To everyone’s astonishment she was rejected. It was a snub that would haunt her all her life.

The most harmful effect, she would later reveal, was not the overt racism but the self doubt it engendered.

Simone started paying her way by giving piano lessons. She was determined to reapply to Curtis the following year, but fate intervened.

One of her pupils revealed that he was earning $90 a week playing in the Midtown Bar and Grill, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Simone applied there for a job and was accepted. Fearful that her devout mother would be outraged by her daughter playing in a bar, Eunice Waymon became ‘Nina Simone’. ‘Nina’ was the name of a Mexican exboyfriend, and ‘Simone’ was from Simone Signoret, a French actress she deeply admired.

On Nina Simone’s first night at the bar she played a series of instrumental pieces, which did not please the owner.

He wanted an act that could sing.

“I only knew classical music,” Simone later recalled, “which to me was the only true music. The only way I could survive at the bar was to mix classical together with popular songs and that meant I had to sing. What happened was that I discovered I had a voice.” >

Photograph Barrie Wentzell

Carnegie Hall, New York, 1965 Photograph Alfred Wertheimer

In fact, Simone’s voice would become one of her most potent weapons; a voice capable of invoking so much emotion, with such great weight and power. It could convey with unflinching power the horrors of the song ‘Strange Fruit’ (the song about lynching made famous by Billie Holiday), the soul of ‘To Love Somebody’, the urging insistence of ‘Sinnerman’. She could shock the heart with just one verse of ‘Be My Husband’; or soothe you in the waters with her version of George Gershwin’s ‘I Loves You, Porgy’.

That voice, so sonorous, so malleable, allowed her to deliver unique interpretations of many songs as well as render perfectly her own wondrous compositions, such as ‘Blackbird’ or ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’.

“Sometimes I sound like gravel,” she said, “sometimes like coffee and cream,” and her self diagnosis was spot on.

Simone’s unique style soon drew the crowds to the bar. Emboldened, she recorded some demos and sent them off to record companies. Syd Nathan at Bethlehem Records bit. (Nathan would

later start King Records and sign a young James Brown.) He offered Simone £3,000 to make an album, which she accepted. She did not know about royalties. When one of the songs, ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’, hit big in the 1980s, she was not entitled to a penny.

‘I’VE LEARNT HOW TO HYPNOTISE THEM, TO GET THEM WHERE I WANTED’ Her first album, Little Girl Blue, remains one of the great debuts of the last century, including songs that would make up part of her repertoire for years to come; ‘Mood Indigo’, ‘Don’t Smoke in Bed’, ‘Little Girl Blue’. Her artistry

on the album, her unique style that allowed classical, jazz, soul and blues to coexist beautifully, was noted, and soon she found herself exalted in artistic circles.

African-American writers such as Langston Hughes and James Baldwin became her friends. So did the radical playwright Lorraine Hansberry. When Hansberry passed away, Simone wrote (with lyrics by Weldon Irvine) ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’, one of her many songs to achieve jazz standard status.

Simone’s musical ascent chimed with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in America, led by Martin Luther King. When four black children were murdered at an Alabama church in 1963, Simone rushed downstairs to her garage and started assembling a gun. Her intention was to go out on the street and start shooting white people indiscriminately. Luckily her husband and manager at the time, Andrew Stroud, arrived home and dissuaded her.

Instead, she sat down at the piano and composed ‘Mississippi Goddam’, performing the song that night in

CINEMA | Nina Simone concert to wild applause. When the song was issued as a single in 1964, certain southern radio stations returned it to Simone’s record company, broken into pieces. She responded by developing a position that refused to acknowledge a non-violent approach.

“To hell with that,” said Simone.

She wanted to create a separate state for African-Americans that would be achieved through vicious armed struggle. Despite all the activism and pressure, the end of the 1960s was not a good time for those who had fought injustice in America. Martin Luther King, the two Kennedy brothers and the reformed Malcolm X, who had sought to create a fairer and brighter America, were in their graves, all of them shot down by assassins.

Meanwhile, the Vietnam War was escalating. Simone left America and started to allow pleasure into her life.

She lived in Barbados, where she claimed to have an affair with the prime minister. She moved to Liberia, and on to France, where she was feted, loved and respected.

Despite an amazing back catalogue, Simone had no record deal and so existed on income from her live shows.

Certainly she knew how to play and work an audience. “I’ve learnt how to hypnotise them,” she once remarked.

“To get them where I wanted.” When the musician Nick Cave curated London’s Meltdown festival in 1999 and gave Simone a headline spot, he recalled her walking to the front of the stage and simply staring at the audience for a good minute or so, completely unnerving them, before sitting down at her piano and delivering an amazing concert.

This writer will go to his grave remembering Simone’s remarkable version of the Gilbert O’Sullivan song, ‘Alone Again (Naturally)’, which she performed at London’s Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in the mid-1980s. She began by stating that she was in a room watching her father die and, furthermore, she was glad that he was dying – alone again, naturally. As we watched in hushed silence, Simone used this pop song to express her deep unhappiness towards her father, the pain he had caused her, until finally she relented and, in the song’s final verse, told us how sad she was that he was at death’s door. Riveting does not get close to what the audience felt that night. This

Photograph Jack Robinson, 1969

was unique soul music, the artist laying bare her hurt and fear, intimate and close up, and then resolving with grace and forgiveness all the pain and anger.

Sometimes she was not so forgiving.

In 1985, she reputedly threatened a record company executive with a gun over unpaid royalties. Later on, at her house in France, she fired a gun at a neighbour’s son because his noise had broken her concentration.

Simone’s name his the spotlight again in 1987, when Chanel used her song ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ in an advert. She started getting offers to play more concerts, and record companies began making noises about signing her. In 1991 she published her autobiography, I Put A Spell On You, named after her famous version of the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins song that literally turned the number on its head.

Her final album came in 1993, A Single Woman. She died from breast cancer at her home in Carry-le-Rouet, southern France, on 21 April 2003. She was 70 years old. Her funeral was attended by hundreds of people, including the

great actor Ossie Davis, and the singers Miriam Makeba and Patti LaBelle. Her ashes were scattered in several different African countries. A 2004 biography by David Nathan and Sylvia Hampton later established that she had been taking medication to calm her nerves and temper since the mid-1960s.

Nina Simone majestically rose above all musical categories. She established a unique style and a canon of work that no one has yet to replicate or match in terms of breadth and emotion. And she paid the price for it. What’s ironic is that many people in the UK knew her music without knowledge of her name.

An instrumental of hers was used for years as the BBC theme tune for Barry Norman’s popular cinema round-up show, Film. The music was written by Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas, and the song was called, fittingly, ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free’.

RIP Eunice Kathleen Waymon.

The documentary film What Happened, Miss Simone? is out now netflix.com 91

Syohei Yamashita, 24, is an actor and model donnamodels.jp All clothes by Comme des Garรงons; shoes

by Comme des Garรงons Homme Deux.

STYLE

Lui Nemeth, 27, is an artist and designer.

She co-founded the brand Primitive London in 2011 before moving back to Tokyo last year, where she helps run the Christopher Nemeth brand with her mother Keiko.

Her sister Riyo, 25, who is a video artist, works alongside them at the label. riyonemeth.com All clothes by Christopher Nemeth.

Tokyo Now

Photographs Marcus Agerman Ross Styling Teddy George-Poku Styling Assistant Akihiro Fujisaki As Tokyo prepares to host the Olympics in 2020, all eyes are once again set to focus on Japan. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the country was at the vanguard of global culture, with the west fascinated by all things Japanese. Later, a shattered economy and a shift of the cultural spotlight to other parts of Asia – in particular China – meant Japan was no longer as captivating as it had been. This has allowed Japan to evolve with a degree of independence. As well as absorbing external influences, an interest in its own heritage has also re-emerged. The kimono has found a more prevalent place in everyday life, particularly amongst the younger generation, and in Daikanyama – an area of Tokyo known for its independent fashion boutiques – shops inspired by Japan’s heritage are thriving. Okura, created by the people behind Hollywood Ranch Market, specialises in garments made using traditional indigo dye techniques, and Kamawanu, on the same street, sells tenugui, hand towels made from traditional Japanese cloth. Many foreigners are once again flocking to Japan, attracted by the more reasonable living costs created by the economic downturn, as well as by Japan’s rich culture and a society based on trust and respect.

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Hailing from Atlanta, Georgia, Freddie McHenry, 27, is a photographer primarily working in fashion. Having previously lived in Berlin and South Korea, McHenry has been based in Tokyo for a year.

He is currently working on his first solo exhibition, which will be held later this year. kannjikilledswag.com All clothes by Pretty Green; trainers by Adidas x Raf Simons; hat, model’s own.

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STYLE | Tokyo Now

Taishi Nobukuni, 44, is a tailor. Graduating from London’s Central Saint Martins in the 1990s, Nobukuni went on to work for John Galliano and Takeo Kikuchi before setting up his own label in 2005. taishi-nobukuni.co.jp Jacket, jeans, tie and tie pin by Taishi Nobukuni; denim jacket by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; shoes by Alden.

STYLE | Tokyo Now

Mr Apollo 333 is an artist whose work ranges from painting to needlework. He also finds time to work as a commercial art director and designs his own T-shirt line. He has worked with the likes of Pharrell Williams, The Sakaki and Skoloct. apollo333.com Jacket by The Sakaki x Mr Apollo 333; hat by Mr Apollo 333.

STYLE | Tokyo Now

Yohan, 25, is a musician whose work takes on “influences from the 1980s and a little touch of deep house”. Born in Brazil, he has Japanese ancestry through his mother, and spent part of his childhood in Japan. Travelling extensively, he was one half of Virgins in Town, started up in 2009 with DJ Fujiko, putting on events and parties for a range of clients. Since 2013, Yohan has run Virgins in Town as his own creative agency, providing services for the likes of Antoine Poupel and Macy’s New York. His debut album #PopLife is out in the summer. officialyohan.com virginsintown.com All clothes and trainers by Y-3.

Celectrixx is a music duo comprising N’Dea Davenport and Katsuya Everywhere, who first came together in Tokyo in 2009. Davenport is a worldrenowned soul singer, having worked with the likes of Mos Def, Guru and Mark Ronson to name a few.

She is perhaps most famous as the singer of British acid jazz outfit the Brand New Heavies. Katsuya Everywhere has worked with an impressive roster of musicians in Japan including Toku, Quasimode drummer Sohnosuke Imaizumi and Wise from hiphop outfit Teriyaki Boyz (which also includes fashion designer Nigo). Having toured extensively around the world, both as a live act and DJing, Celectrixx will be releasing their first material later in 2015. facebook.com/celectrixx All clothes and boots by Yohji Yamamoto.

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Location Bloc Hair Salon, 1-5-19 Jinnan, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo bloc.co.jp

HISTORY

John Hopkins

UFO. International Times. Granny Takes A Trip. Val Wilmer. Fantasy Factory.

Words Chris May Photographs John Hopkins © 2015 Estate of John Victor Lindsay Hopkins

In his film Zelig, set in the 1920s and 1930s, Woody Allen plays Leonard Zelig, a fictional character who insinuates himself into the great events of his time. Al Capone, F Scott Fitzgerald, William Randolph Hearst, Adolf Hitler and Babe Ruth are among a couple of dozen public figures portrayed as Zelig’s friends, acquaintances or lovers.

Like Zelig, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, who died aged 77 this year, was present when and where it counted – in Hoppy’s case, during the emergence of the counterculture in London in the mid-1960s. But unlike Zelig, Hoppy really was there, as the founder, co-founder or inspiration for almost all the key events and initiatives. In the Order of Service for his funeral, Barry Miles – who co-founded Britain’s first underground newspaper with Hoppy, International Times – ended his tribute, “in Britain there would never have been a counterculture without him.”

The record producer Joe Boyd, who with Hoppy co-founded the all-nighter club and alternative hub, UFO, agrees: “Nothing would have happened without Hoppy. He was the guy everybody turned to. Can we do this? ‘Course we can,’ he’d say.

‘Come on, follow me.’ Without his galvanising presence we’d have had a lot of people just sucking their thumbs. He was a scientist, he wanted to try things, prove them, test them by experience, and keep moving. Hoppy had that determination that the underground scene would not just be a lot of hot air.”

100

Hoppy was born in 1937 in Slough, Berkshire, and his father was a naval engineer. He graduated from Cambridge with a masters in general science in 1958, and on graduation day his godfather gave him a camera. “For the next two years, I learned how to see,” Hoppy wrote in From the Hip, a collection of his photographs published by Damiani in 2008. After Cambridge, he worked as a scientist at Harwell’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment, but lost his security clearance and his job after being deported from Moscow, where he had been attending a youth festival.

In 1960, on the strength of a handful of photographs used by The Guardian, he moved to London and got a job as a photographer’s assistant. By 1961, he was making a living as a freelance news and features photographer on Fleet Street, working for titles ranging from The Sunday Times to Melody Maker and Peace News, with jazz and blues photography among his early specialisms. He carried on working as a photographer until the mid-1960s.

In 1964, Hoppy discovered acid. It was a “life changing experience… the psychic equivalent of seeing earth from space for the first time,” he wrote in From the Hip. From early 1965 to mid1967, Hoppy was everywhere and everything: a photographer, publisher, event organiser, agitator, teacher, torchbearer and enabler. With Barry Miles and others, he put together the International Poetry Incarnation held at the Royal Albert Hall in June 1965, the first large-scale gathering of the

counterculture. A few months later, he co-founded the London Free School in Notting Hill, which was a primary organiser of the first outdoor Notting Hill carnival in August 1966. In October 1966, he and Miles set up the magazine International Times (later known as IT), while in December he and Boyd launched the UFO club.

By 1967, the empire was striking back and, in June, Hoppy was given an exemplary prison sentence for a minor drugs offence. Outrage at the sentence inspired ubiquitous “Free Hoppy” graffiti as well as a full-page protest ad in The Times, paid for by Paul McCartney. Hoppy was released from Wormwood Scrubs after serving six months. Inspired by the uprising in Paris in May 1968, Hoppy and Miles turned IT into a workers’ cooperative.

He had already given up professional photography by the time he went to jail and, after his release, he moved over to video. With community and squatting activist Sue Hall, he co-founded the Fantasy Factory, which ran from 1969 to 1996, and brought affordable video making and editing within reach of community groups and independent directors. Hoppy was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2007, and died on 30 January 2015.

For some of Hoppy’s friends, his death is still too recent for them to want to be interviewed. But through the recollections of others – Joe Boyd, UFO poster designer Nigel Waymouth, mod and counterculture DJ Jeff Dexter, and the photographer and writer Val Wilmer, all close friends of Hoppy’s for >

Local residents march against racism, Notting Hill, London, circa 1965

50 years or more – it is possible to chronicle his achievements of the 1960s and beyond.

“I first saw Hoppy at a Duke Ellington concert we were both photographing,” says Wilmer. “It must have been late 1962, early 1963. We met at the offices of Jazz News off Soho Square. Hoppy brought in some photos of Irene Reid, who had toured with Count Basie. We got on immediately.

I remember he had a little wispy beard, a sports jacket, trousers not jeans. He whisked me off in his Mini. I can’t remember where we went – somewhere off into the great unknown. And my whole life changed forever.

“I don’t mean to imply I was Hoppy’s girlfriend. I wanted to be.

I found him incredibly attractive in every way. But he always had an extraordinary talent for having the most beautiful women. When I first knew him he had this woman Gala [Gala Mitchell, a Vogue model and favourite of Ossie Clark]. Very, very beautiful and very nice. So that was that really.

“Hoppy was the first person I ever heard mention THC, LSD and video.

He was the first person I ever saw cook a curry at home, and eat yoghurt with it. He was the first photographer I met who was interested in reportage. We 102

didn’t sit down and talk about CartierBresson, although we found out afterwards that he was our mutual hero at this time. I can’t remember exactly what we talked about when we talked photography. It was just an understanding, an empathy.”

Women photographers were rare in the jazz world when Wilmer entered the field. In an essay in From the Hip, Wilmer observed that most jazz photographers at the time were among “a group of hard-bitten men just out of National Service [in] belted gabardine raincoats… These characters loved jazz but they didn’t much care for women on their patch.” When Wilmer first saw Hoppy around at gigs, on the other hand, he “smiled winningly at me and exhibited none of the nasty attitudes I encountered elsewhere.”

Hoppy went out of his way to offer Wilmer practical help. “People talk a lot of guff about photography, but it’s all really about practicalities,” says Wilmer.

“When I got my first 35mm camera, Hoppy said, ‘You’ve only got two lenses.’ I suppose I had a standard and a wide angle, and he said, ‘You’ve got to have a long lens.’ He knew someone who was selling one at a good price, and he went and got it for me. I’ve always been attracted to people who knew the score, knew how to get things

cheaply. He also told me, ‘You have to get into the NUJ [National Union of Journalists].’ So he proposed me for membership. And he told me I had to get an accountant and introduced me to his, who said, ‘You’ve got to have a building society account, because one day you’ll want to buy a house.’ Hence this house, indirectly through Hoppy.”

Wilmer also credits Hoppy with turning her on to the free jazz revolution that swept through the African American jazz world in the mid-1960s. “I first went to New York in 1962,” says Wilmer. “I met everybody under the sun, heard loads of music, photographed lots of people. In 1966, I decided to go again. Hoppy had been there in 1965 and he said, ‘You’ve got to meet these young guys, don’t hang out with the older musicians any more, these are the people who are making it.’

It was through him, directly and indirectly, that I met people like Albert and Donald Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Sunny Murray, Milford Graves, lots of people. If Hoppy hadn’t said that, I would not have met them. I would have gone back to New York and hooked up again with the mainstream and hard bop people I’d met in 1962.”

Wilmer documented the new jazz in a series of books including As Serious as Your Life, first published by Allison

HISTORY | John Hopkins & Busby in 1977 and still one of the most important studies of the genre.

Joe Boyd got to know Hoppy a year or so after Wilmer, in 1964. The portal, once again, was music and photography.

“I had arrived in London from the US as the manager of a European package tour featuring Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Otis Spann, Reverend Gary Davis. At the run-through at Fairfield Halls, the promoter said that Melody Maker was sending a photographer. And Hoppy, for it was he, turned up and spent the afternoon photographing in the dressing rooms.

I just really liked him, immediately.

I said, ‘Do you want some tickets?’

He couldn’t come that night but I said we’dbe back in a few days to do Hammersmith, and he said, ‘Oh great.’

“After the end of the tour, I came back to London. I went to a blues gig at the Roundhouse pub in Wardour Street. And god knows why, but the guy who organised that took me aside and said, ‘I’ve got a really good block of hash, do you want to buy it?’ It was quite a chunk, several ounces.

I remembered Hoppy and I had smoked a joint after the Hammersmith show so I called him and said, ‘Are you interested?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’ll be right there.’ So the three of us met and we jumped into a cab and they did the deal and I think I went back to Hoppy’s flat on Westbourne Terrace, near Paddington station, and smoked a joint.

“When I went back to the US, Hoppy drove me to the airport and as I was getting out of his car, the famous Mini, he handed me a joint and said, ‘Here’s something to smoke on the plane.’ I stuck it in my pocket and forgot about it, and then I got busted for it at Kennedy. I came back to London in February or March 1965.

I had three months to kill before I went back to work for [promoter] George Wein for the summer festivals. I got busted again, in the flat where I was staying. The police raided the flat and confiscated the contents of every ashtray. I spent 10 days in Brixton jail.

Hoppy came to visit me and brought me something to read, a copy of the Evergreen Review, which had excerpts from Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing In America. I read it in my cell just pissing myself with laughter. I read it over and over again. It got me through those 10 days.”

Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones, 1964

Although Boyd was in the US in June 1965, when the International Poetry Incarnation was staged at the Royal Albert Hall, he remembers when the idea was first mooted. “In May, Allen Ginsberg arrived in London,” says Boyd, “and there was a poetry reading at Better Books in Charing Cross Road, where Barry Miles was the manager. Then there was another meeting, where it was decided they

‘HOPPY WAS THE FIRST PERSON I EVER HEARD MENTION THC, LSD AND VIDEO’ needed a bigger place for another reading. Hoppy or Miles suggested the Albert Hall and somebody called them up and said, ‘Have you got any free dates and how much would it cost to rent the place?’ They said there was a free date in 10 days and a deposit of £75 would be needed. So they rented it.

“In just 10 days, they sold all the tickets, somewhere around 6,500

people. I’m sure other people played important roles, but the key to that was Hoppy. He was the guy who understood the media. He had all the contacts. He worked for The Times, he worked for Melody Maker, he worked for The Daily Telegraph. He went round town and dropped off leaflets he’d mimeographed.

He worked the media.” The Royal Albert Hall event – which presented Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and Dan Richter, among others – is widely seen as the occasion that kickstarted the counterculture in Britain in the 1960s.

It was the first time large numbers of its fellow travellers came together in the same space and realised that they were not just a few, isolated individuals but a sizable community.

Boyd believes the gig also caused Hoppy to think about moving away from photography. “I think that was the moment when Hoppy realised you can go from standing behind the camera and photographing things that are going on, to saying, ‘I’m not going to be behind the camera any more, I’m going to be out front doing things.’”

In any event, Hoppy began planning the London Free School in Notting Hill just a few months later. “In September 1965 I got this dream job of working for a record company, Elektra,” says Boyd. “I had criticised their British operation and the owner, Jac Holzman, said, ‘OK, wiseass, let’s see if you can do better.’ I excitedly sent Hoppy a letter > 103

HISTORY | John Hopkins

Children dressed as cowboys playing on a bombsite on Harrow Road, London, circa 1965

and told him I was coming over. I rang him when I got in and he said, ‘Come round tomorrow night, there’s an interesting meeting at the flat.’ By now he was living in Queensway. It turned out to be one of the first organisational meetings to discuss the London Free School. This would be November 1965.

I can’t claim to be anything central to the London Free School but I went to a lot of the meetings and I threw my two cents in occasionally.

“One of the people who frequently turned up was Emily Young, then a 15-year-old school girl [now a distinguished sculptor], who had her first acid trip at the Free School and got up to all sorts of other things there. And her father, the politician Wayland Young, Lord Kennet, was very disturbed by that. According to legend, he was the man who made the phone call a year or so later that encouraged the police to have a go at Hoppy, which eventually led to his imprisonment.

“Inevitably, in Notting Hill, Hoppy met Michael de Freitas, later known as Michael X, who knew the area intimately – he’d worked as a rent collector for [slum landlord] Peter Rachman – and the woman who 104

had organised an indoor steel band event in 1965, I think in Porchester Hall in Bayswater. Hoppy wanted the Free School to collaborate with her and move the event outdoors. Hoppy realised that if you wanted to help the community – as the Free School did with legal advice, information, the

‘HE WAS THE GUY EVERYBODY TURNED TO. CAN WE DO THIS? COURSE WE CAN’ general empowerment of people who were very intimidated by mid-1960s white British power structures – what better way to reach them than through a community festival?” The ensuing event of August 1966 was the first outdoor Notting Hill carnival.

Hoppy also began staging music events in a hall in Powis Square to generate local interest in the Free School. “Two of the people who’d been involved in setting up the Free School,” says Boyd, “were Peter Jenner and Andrew King. They were unofficially managing Pink Floyd. So when it came time to find some musicians to play, they said, ‘We know this band in Cambridge who are looking for a platform in London.’ And that’s how Pink Floyd came to be involved.

“There was a previous connection.

Hoppy and Peter Jenner had come to see me with my Elektra hat on. They wanted to produce a record with this group AMM, a free improvisation outfit involving Cornelius Cardew and some serious avant-garde people. So we made this album [AMMusic] that was basically an awful lot of abstract noise.

Jenner played the record to Syd Barrett, who loved it. So you can hear in Pink Floyd at the time a lot of this music, which was Hoppy’s idea – artistically, in spirit, not just organisationally.

“And then Hoppy and Barry Miles decided to start International Times.

Until International Times, there were no underground newspapers in Europe at all. They had a launch party in October

1966 at the Roundhouse that was sort of modelled on the Powis Square events – light shows, Pink Floyd. Soft Machine was also on the bill.”

Around this time Boyd lost his job with Elektra. “There was a parting of the ways,” he says. “AMMusic probably hadn’t helped my position back at company headquarters.” Hoppy, who was no longer working as a professional photographer, was also short of money.

Out of the shared cash-flow crisis, Hoppy and Boyd came up with the idea of UFO. “Suddenly, me and Hoppy’s cashflow had fallen off a cliff,” says Boyd.

“International Times couldn’t afford to pay him a salary, and he certainly wasn’t making money with the Free School.

So we were both staring at an abyss. We came up with this idea to do an event like the International Times launch party. But we felt the Roundhouse was too big. Hoppy had spotted an Irish dance hall in Tottenham Court Road, the Blarney Club, and so we went to meet the manager. He agreed to rent it to us on a Friday night for £15.

“We decided to do two nights – in December 1966 – and booked Pink Floyd. They brought their own light show, and Hoppy got hold of a friend of his, who ran a nudist colony in Watford and who also did light shows, and he had a projector in one corner. And we set up trestle tables, where people sold International Times. We couldn’t agree on whether to call it UFO or the Night Tripper, so we used both of them to start with. The club ran from 10.30pm to dawn. All-nighters weren’t rare in London, because the buses and tubes finished so early. Most people didn’t own a car and so they couldn’t get home until public transport started up again.

“Those two Friday nights went fantastically, not complete sell-outs but really good attendance. There was a gap of a week or two and then we hired Nigel Waymouth and Michael English to design posters for some more nights.

Hoppy and I hadn’t been able to agree on whether to ask Nigel or Michael, so Hoppy said, ‘Let’s ask them both.’”

For UFO, Waymouth and English – who for the gig formed the design partnership Hapshash and the Coloured Coat – designed some of the most beautiful and enduring visual artefacts of 1960s British counterculture; deep, sumptuous, otherworldly posters that celebrated the new terrain opened up

Joint-making factory, circa 1966

by LSD, free thinking, free love and counterculture’s acid and folk-rock soundtrack. English died in 2009, but Waymouth still works as a fine artist.

“My first memory of Hoppy is going to a party at his place in Westbourne Terrace,” says Waymouth. “There were a lot of jazz people there. Booze and dope, very friendly, of its time. Hoppy was living there with Gala. I wasn’t part of his circle yet. He was clearly part of the counterculture, though we didn’t call it that then. He was very cool and hip. And that’s what we all aspired to be in those days.

“The next time I heard of Hoppy was through Joe Boyd, because Joe and I were friends. There was a loose tapestry of like-minded people in London who all knew each other. Joe wanted me to do the posters for UFO. I think Michael English did the first two. But Joe and Hoppy were looking for the X factor. I think they were conscious of what was happening in San Francisco, the Fillmore posters and all that, and they wanted something

that was representative of the London scene. And they put Michael and I together and said, ‘Let’s see what happens.’ It was lucky. Michael and I got on. It was very much, you do this bit, I’ll do that bit. We bounced off each other. We didn’t get paid anything.

Joe might turn up and say, ‘Here’s a tenner for each of you.’ It wasn’t about money, it wasn’t entrepreneurial.

That wasn’t the spirit of the age.

“The original posters are very hard to come by today. And because they were printed for flyposting, they were on very poor quality paper, not much above newsprint really, although the silkscreening itself was excellent. But we were starting out and it was all pop, all disposable, that whole ethos of that time. Little did we know that we’d end up in the Victoria&Albert Museum.”

In 2000, the V&A staged an exhibition of Hapshash’s work under the title ‘Cosmic Visions: Psychedelic Posters of the 1960s’.

If you can find an original Hapshash UFO poster for sale today, the asking > 105

Female bikers, London, circa 1962

price will be in the thousands. And there are a lot of inferior copies around masquerading as originals.

Happily, Waymouth, in partnership with retro poster store Bamalama, in London’s Leather Lane, has recently begun producing high quality reproductions of Hapshash’s work at reasonable prices.

“By 1967, the establishment had started fighting back,” says Waymouth.

“The police were constantly raiding places like UFO. Our great weakness in terms of facing up to the enemy was the fact that so much dope was around.

Dope and acid were inspirations, but we paid a heavy price. The establishment used them as a battering ram.”

Hoppy was attracting increasing personal attention from the police.

When the inevitable happened and his flat was raided, a small amount of hash was found and he was charged with permitting premises to be used for the consumption of cannabis. At his trial in June 1967, he defended the 106

counterculture and attacked the drug laws. The judge called Hoppy “a menace to society”.

“Prison broke Hoppy’s confidence,” says Waymouth. “It was traumatic for him. He’d been this wonderful guiding light, where he drew all kinds of people together. As Joe pointed out in his eulogy at Hoppy’s funeral, it wasn’t the music as the spirit of the age that drew people together, it was the people who were the spirit of the age and who created the music. He saw that all these different aspects of the counterculture – writing, music, art, fashion – were one movement. The counterculture wasn’t led by the Stones or the Beatles or Bob Dylan. It was created and driven forward by the people. That was the tragedy of Hoppy’s imprisonment. They went for the heart and soul when they went for Hoppy.”

“Jail knocked the stuffing out of Hoppy,” says Jeff Dexter. “He’d been in a whole different cultural world and

suddenly he was surrounded by screws and thieves and heavy criminals.

He was a sensitive creature. Although he was streetwise in terms of modern culture he wasn’t streetwise in terms of the people you have to mix with in jail.”

Dexter, contrary to popular belief, was never a DJ at UFO. As a top West End club DJ in the mid-1960s, he was given all the latest releases by the record companies and each week took the best of them along to UFO’s Jack Henry Moore, who taped them. “When UFO filled up with people dancing,” says Dexter, “the floor shook so much that you couldn’t play records. So Jack taped them and played them that way.”

“Hoppy’s arrest was symptomatic of a shift,” says Joe Boyd. “Before that, the underground was a marginal thing.

The establishment didn’t really care about it, they thought it was a vaguely raffish offshoot of swinging London.

Then all of a sudden there were freaks turning up all over the place; wildlooking clothes and people obviously leading a very different lifestyle to what their schoolmasters had in mind for them. And there were press interviews in spring 1967 with McCartney and Lennon, in which they directly or indirectly acknowledged taking acid. The authorities realised the power of the Beatles culturally and the idea that they were now endorsing what were considered ‘hard drugs’ freaked out people at senior levels of the establishment.

“So the pressure on the underground became much more intense. There were forces more powerful than me or Hoppy or the whole underground scene – from government, from the police. The pressure commercially also became intense. In March 1967 you could go down to Chelsea and go to Hung On You and Granny Takes a Trip [seminal boutiques], but within a couple of months all the shops on the Kings Road were selling weird shirts with long collars and flowers printed on them and promoters were booking Pink Floyd into normal rock clubs.

It all happened really fast and the whole thing became, in that inimitable English way, a fashion statement, from being a social-political revolution to being a change of clothing style and entertainment drug.”

With Hoppy in jail, UFO began to lose its focus and folded in late 1967.

“Once Hoppy was behind bars,” says

HISTORY | John Hopkins

The International Poetry Incarnation, organised by Barbara Rubin and held at the Royal Albert Hall in London, brought together some of the most important poets of the day in front of a 7,000-strong audience. Posing in front of the Albert Memorial are Barbara Rubin, Adrian Mitchell, Anselm Hollo, Marcus Field, Michael Horovitz, Ernst Jandl, Harry Fainlight, Alexander Trocchi, Allen Ginsberg, John Esam and Dan Richter, 1965

Boyd, “there was no yin to my yang and UFO became more just a colourful popmusic event. Particularly after we had to move to the Roundhouse because the police threatened the manager of the Blarney. The whole scene fragmented in Hoppy’s absence.”

While Hoppy was in jail, Jack Henry Moore, tape jockey at UFO, had discovered portable video-camera technology and had a Portapak waiting for Hoppy when he got out. Soon after, Ampex brought out one-inch VTRs, and they gave one to each of the Beatles. John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison gave theirs to Hoppy. Video-making, as an agent of social change, would absorb Hoppy for much of the remainder of his life.

With Sue Hall, Hoppy set up the Fantasy Factory, a non-profit video centre providing access to video facilities and advice. When not acting as an enabler to community groups, Fantasy Factory made its own productions. Early releases included

Squat Now While Stocks Last and Ben’s Arrest. It remained active until 1996.

“Why should art be the domain of the few and not the many?” Hoppy and Hall wrote in their 1976 article ‘The Metasoftware of Video’ for the art

‘PRISON BROKE HOPPY’S CONFIDENCE. IT WAS TRAUMATIC’ journal Studio International. “Shouldn’t democratisation of culture, and in our case the liberation of communications technology for public access, be an integral part of our actual art activity?

We demand the unity of technology, art and politics; the unity of information, meaning and effect.”

“The theme that runs through Hoppy’s life,” says Boyd, “is the democratisation of information. How do you fight City Hall? How do you make power available to the people?

To the poorest of the poor, to squatters, to people living rough, to people getting evicted, people getting arrested. That was Hoppy’s driving passion.”

This theme is echoed by Waymouth, summing up Hoppy’s character. “He was far too intelligent in spirit and in mind to really care about his own ambition. He was a truly amazing guy.

A wizard in a way.”

John Hopkins’ photography appears in the exhibition ‘Swinging Sixties London – Photography in the Capital of Cool’ at Foam, Amsterdam, 12 June to 2 September foam.org The anthology of his work, From the Hip, is available at hoppyx.com 107

William Blanchard, 51, artist and musician, wears jacket from the 1990s williamblanchardart.com What’s so special about YMC? They add a unique and personal approach to the vanguard of modern style with a classic twist.

Who are your style icons?

Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson and Keith Richards.

Luke McLean, 42, artist, wears jacket from 2007 and shirt from 2014 iamlukemclean.com Describe your style.

Magnificent.

Justin Taylor, 43, graphic designer, wears sweatshirt from 1997 personalitycrisis.info Describe your style.

Late 1960s Paris/San Francisco beatnik.

Describe YMC in three words.

Design. Quality. Versatility.

How did you first hear about YMC? I read about them in The Face, a magazine of much importance in the 1990s.

Who’s your style icon?

The Last Movie/American Dreamer-era Dennis Hopper.

What’s your favourite band?

Hawkwind.

What’s your favourite movie?

Putney Swope.

What’s so special about YMC? The design. Every time.

Describe YMC in three words.

You must create.

How did you first hear about YMC? My studio and their studio were equidistant from a well known Shoreditch pub in the 1990s.

Who’s your style icon?

Today, it’s Dennis Wilson.

Who’s your favourite musician?

Today, Peter Tosh.

What’s your favourite movie?

Again, today, it’s Rockers.

BULLETIN

Richard Fearless, 43, musician and artist, wears jacket from 2007 droneout.co.uk Describe your style.

Lone wolf.

What’s so special about YMC? The details, the underlying mod element.

And the pieces always stand the test of time.

How did you first hear about YMC? Fortunately they’re friends.

Who’s your style icon?

No one really. Karlheinz Weinberger’s Rebel Youth photography book was an influence though.

YMC

Photographs Mattias Pettersson Words Edward Moore

What are your favourite bands?

The Stooges and Underground Resistance.

What’s your favourite movie?

Gimme Shelter (with the Maysles brothers’ commentary).

Twenty years ago, graphic designers Fraser Moss and Jimmy Collins began sourcing and making clothing under the name You Must Create – now more commonly recognised by the acronym YMC. The name is derived from a quote by French-American industrial designer Raymond Loewy, who said that “you must create your own style”.

Over that time, YMC has built a legion of independent-thinking fans who clearly recognise this sentiment. youmustcreate.com

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COVER STORY

Mark Cavendish

Isle of Man. Tour de France. Ride London. Help For Heroes. Rise Above Sportive.

Words Mark Webster Photographs Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason Styling Assistant Victoria Pugh Digital Assistant Liam Aylott Location Little Italy, 21 Frith Street, London W1 littleitalysoho.co.uk

Mark Cavendish chuckles as he flicks through a range of Paul Smith clothes. The British champion cyclist selected the designer himself. “I especially love his new stuff,” he says.

“I think he’s got a much broader range.

And he’s such a lovely guy. Anyone who’s met him will tell you, he’s just real. He’s got time for everyone. It’s nice to sit and talk cycling with him.”

Cavendish is laughing at the prospect of the spot of modelling he’s about to do for us. “I’m a bit twisted into one position,” he says. “It’s the most efficient position to be on a bike, and it takes its toll. I walk with a slouch and everything now. I find it very uncomfortable to stand up completely straight. I’ll do my best for the photos.”

He pulls out a jacket and gives it a closer look, “tsking” gently. “You imagine sports people all having these six packs. For a cyclist, they’re extra weight you don’t need. We’ve all got stomachs like little boys.”

Cavendish sorts through the selection and orders espressos in perfect Italian. He has chosen to meet at Little Italy, an Italian restaurant in London’s Soho – an unsurprising choice given that Italy is his home from home when he’s working. The cycling season is well under way, and he already has several early wins under his belt. However, as a result of a stomach bug picked up in South Africa he gave himself “five days rest”, which meant he could spend some 110

extra time at the family home in Essex.

Nevertheless, Cavendish informs me he is “feeling superb” after getting to start his winter training early, and is all set for what is a milestone year (turning 30 years old) in a career that has made him one of the most successful athletes the UK has ever produced.

Cavendish hails from the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea between mainland Britain and Ireland. Growing up in the island’s capital, Douglas, it didn’t take long for the young Cavendish to make an impact on a bike. He pleaded with his parents for a BMX like the ones his mates had, and for his 13th birthday he got his wish – which immediately resulted in those mates receiving regular beatings in races.

Between wardrobe changes Cavendish tells me that, from that moment on, he knew what his destiny was and systematically set about pursuing it, with extraordinary results.

We also talk about that landmark birthday in May, something he has mixed feelings about in a career that clearly favours the young and very, very fit. “I was a bit freaked about it, to be fair,” he tells me. “Over the winter I thought I was going to have a meltdown, actually. But as it’s got closer, I’ve come to realise, fuck, when I turn 30 I couldn’t wish to have done or seen or had anything more. And I remember when I was younger, I even thought 25 was getting old. So people

who were 30? They didn’t do stuff any more. You start wearing your jumper around your shoulders, and stuff like that, don’t you?

“So all my young years are behind me, but I’ve done pretty much everything I want to do in my professional life. I’ve got a beautiful wife, an incredible little family. I’m actually really content with where I’ve got to at 30.

“And anyway, I think I’ve already had my mid-life crisis. I went through my phase of buying sports cars and stuff when I was about 23. Breaking up with exes and all that.”

Cavendish has always seemed to have an old head on young shoulders.

And of course he is pursuing his career at a time when athletes are maintained and tweaked in laboratory conditions, which is somewhat at odds with previous generations of cyclists. This is something he laughs loudly about as he recounts conversations with Danish racing legend Brian Holm, sports director for the Omega PharmaQuick Step team of which Cavendish is part. Holm was out there on the racing frontline in the 1980s.

“He’s great, Brian. Always telling stories,” says Cav (as he is widely known), before delivering what I can confirm is a spot on impression. “‘Doesn’t matter if it was rain or snow, I did my 200km.’ Well, you can do 200km but it doesn’t mean you’re doing >

Jacket and cardigan by Hackett; shirt by Richard James.

them right. But they didn’t have sports science then. It’s about quality, not smashing 200km. And he says to me, ‘You shouldn’t eat that.’ I say, ‘How many stages of the Tour de France have you won?’ But to be fair, if I could go racing in one era, it would be Brian’s.

When they wore their shorts with braces on, and a proper chamois leather inside them.”

Cavendish is, however, very much a product of the modern cycling era, and all that it delivers. Not only has he got a very clear picture in his mind of where his career has gone, but also where he can take it from here.

“Having turned pro when I was 22,” he says, “it feels like I’ve been around so long I should be coming to the end of my career. But, as it goes, most sprinters now actually have their best years in their 30s. So I may have been around a while, but there is still a long way to go. There are guys my age who are just starting to shine in the world of cycling. They’re realising their ability in their late 20s. So I’m quite optimistic that say, unlike swimmers, who peak early, I’m only about half way through my career.

“So going into my 40s would probably be stretching it. But the thing is, I always had a plan, a clear goal.

Ever since I was actually training a year before I turned pro with David Millar.”

Millar, now retired and in his late 30s, is the only Brit to have claimed every jersey at the Tour de France. But right in the middle of that was a twoyear ban for using the performanceenhancing drug EPO, starting in 2004.

It was during his entry back into cycling that Millar met the 20-year-old Cav on the Isle of Man. Cavendish was already proving himself to be a winner in the velodrome at this point, but, as he tells me, Millar said to him, “‘Listen Cav, you train like an amateur.’

I said, ‘Well I am an amateur. What the fuck, I’m winning some of the biggest amateur races in the world.’

The maximum I could ride then was 120/130km. Why would I train any more than that? But of course, he was right.”

This all happened in the year Cavendish won both World and European Gold on the track as an amateur, but by the time he took to road racing in 2006, he had indeed turned fully pro, and was racing with the T-Mobile team. And it was on his 112

Cavendish and team mate Iljo Keisse at the Ghent Six, 2014

Madison partners Bradley Wiggins and Cavendish competing at the Ghent Six, 2007

first Tour de France that Cavendish fully realised the point Millar had been making. So, as ever, he dealt decisively with the situation. “During the Tour, in that first year, I wrote a letter to the team saying, ‘Listen, I may well be out of my league, but at least I’ll know what I have to do, and come back next year and perform.’ And I won four stages the next year.

“That took a lot of learning years off my career, that first season. But I was always like that. Had a clear goal – and a clear action plan to achieve that goal. I don’t mean it all [he puffs his chest, and fakes a bit of a swagger to make his point], but I knew I was good

as a teenager. I was another level to the other lads. I knew which team I wanted to ride for at 14, which was Telecom [T-Mobile by the time he joined them].

I left school at 16 to start earning [he worked in a bank] so I could move away when I was 18. I was always going to make it happen.”

And make it happen he did. Even in that first season he managed to equal the record of wins held by a rookie cyclist, while there was still time to win gold at the World Track Championships and the European Championship points race. As the Grand Tour beckoned, and stage and overall wins started to mount up, he

COVER STORY | Mark Cavendish

Cavendish wins the opening stage of the Dubai Tour, January 2015

also managed to return to the track with Bradley Wiggins to win Madison gold at the 2008 track World Championships in Manchester. And at the time of writing, he is fourth on the all time list of Grand Tour stage wins, and third on the list for the blue riband race of them all, the Tour de France.

And of course, he owns the sprint to the Champs-Élysées, having won it for a record-breaking four times in a row by 2012. What’s more, he still has plenty of interest in being the man who takes Paris by storm. “Technically I missed out on the Tour last year,” he says, referring to his curtailed performance due to a shoulder injury, “but it made me realise how important it is to me. And that has hit the restart button. It broke up the monotony of going there every year and doing the same thing. It gave it a new emotion.”

This is not necessarily the Mark Cavendish that family, colleagues and opponents would have recognised when he was a younger, more raw talent.

But where he feels his performance levels haven’t diminished over the years, his approach has certainly evolved – manifesting itself clearly in how he deals with the demands of racing, and being a winner in the process. “In terms

of pressure, I’ve never known it any different, to be fair. I’ve had it since I started. But now it’s bigger news if I lose than if I win. That can be hard in terms of carrying on. But I’ve got a job to do. And I get paid handsomely for it. So I do that, I do my job.

“I’m not David Beckham. It’s not like you can just put out a photo of me and it’s job done. I’ve got to go out

‘I’M A BIT TWISTED INTO ONE POSITION. I WALK WITH A SLOUCH NOW’ there and perform on the bike.

Although, I might do a range of pants like him. They’ll have pads in to deal with the saddle sores, though.”

This is now a man who has left behind his third decade, and is taking his first tentative spins of the wheel into

his fourth. So although he says “I don’t like losing”, there is now an added caveat. “If it’s out of my control, if I’ve had bad luck or something like that, then I’m not too bad. Or if someone’s just better than me on the day... But I am a perfectionist. And not just on my bike. I pay absolute attention to the smallest detail. So if it was within my control, or the team’s control, then I’ll be pissed off. If we could have fixed it, and we lost…”

Cavendish lets that thought drift off into the ether. “As I get older, it takes me a little bit longer to recover, if I fall…” And he interrupts himself quickly here to point out, “I don’t mean I’m falling down the stairs – it’s not that bad yet. But if I crash my bike, it takes me a couple of days to get over it. Now, though, I’m more resilient in training. Because the body can now take it. You can push yourself harder, because your body is used to it.

“And the training”, he smiles, “I love it. I ride my bike 30 hours plus a week.

Rather than sitting in an office in front of a computer, or out bricklaying.

We all put in the same time, but I’m probably away from home a lot more.”

Being away seems to be the one thing that takes precedence over all > 113

Tour of Britain, London, 2011

others in what he calls the “positives and negatives”.

“I was talking to Paul (Smith) about it recently, funnily enough, the travelling,” he tells me. “You’d think travelling the world, it would be incredible, but in that sense, no, not really. You see the hotel. And some lads’ arses in front of me when I’m racing. And we do next to nothing in between. We basically get a massage.

I spend a hell of a lot of time on my own. With the family halfway across the world, that can be as hard as the physical training.”

This should not be interpreted as the superstar millionaire feeling sorry for himself, because Cavendish knows perfectly well it’s just something that goes with the territory. He is also aware that it’s not just all about him. Team cycling, in many ways, can be a paradoxically selfish business, but Cavendish is delighted that the sport in which he excels is proving to be a resounding success in general terms.

In terms of professional cycling, “it’s gone from being the odd British rider getting a contract to us being the dominant force in cycling. Whether that’s British riders or British teams.

Our riders are now more feared than Italian riders. Years ago that would have been laughed at.”

114

It is the fallout from this British success on an elite level that also gets the Cavendish juices flowing. So much so that he has happily committed to joining 95,000 other cyclists at the enormous Ride London event in

‘OUR RIDERS ARE NOW MORE FEARED THAN ITALIAN RIDERS. YEARS AGO THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN LAUGHED AT’ August, something, he says, “when I set out to be a cyclist, could not really have been a thing. But with all the successes on the track and the road we’ve had, people are getting out on their bikes.

And it’s a beautiful thing to see.

Whether as a mode of transport, with

their families racing… it’s wicked to see. And it means they can understand about what we do. And how hard it actually is.”

It is clear that there has been very little time in his 30 years on this planet that Cavendish has not been challenging himself, making sure that everything is just right so that he can achieve his goals. “When people say to me you’re lucky to be where you are, I tell them, I’m not lucky. I’m fortunate to do what I do, but I made my own luck.”

Mark Cavendish is an ambassador for the Help for Heroes charity. The Help for Heroes charity bike ride is on 21 June with various routes converging on Windsor helpforheroes.org.uk The inaugural Rise Above Sportive, created by Mark Cavendish, is a bicycle race beginning and ending in Chester on 9 August. There are three course to suit all levels and the chance to ride along Cavendish himself riseabovesportive.com Mark Cavendish competes all year round, most notably in the Tour de France, which takes place 4-26 June letour.com cvndsh.com

COVER STORY | Mark Cavendish

Jacket and cardigan

by Hackett; shirt by Richard James, pocket square by Paul Smith.

STYLE

Jacket by Wrangler; shirt by Ben Sherman

Perry Neech, 25, bassist with Smoke Fairies, outside Wunjo Keys, 23 Denmark Street. smokefairies.com wunjoguitars.com Describe Denmark Street in three words.

Historic. Happy. Sad. Who are your style icons?

Michael Caine, Sterling Morrison, the Allman Brothers.

Who are your favourite musicians?

Duane Allman, James Jameson, Jack White, Jack Lawrence and Paul McCartney.

What’s your favourite movie?

Almost Famous.

Denmark Street Photographs Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason Digital Assistant Liam Aylott

Denmark Street is often described as London’s Tin Pan Alley. Since 1911, when the first music publishers moved in, a veritable who’s who of British music has graced this unassuming little street on the edge of London’s Soho. Larry Parnes, Britain’s first rock ’n’ roll impresario, who managed Tommy Steele, Billy Fury and Marty Wilde, brokered deals on the street in the 1950s; The Rolling Stones, The Kinks and The Who recorded at Regent Sounds; Donovan and David Bowie recorded at Central Sound; while Hendrix and Paul McCartney made demos at Tin Pan Alley Studios (now Denmark Street Studios).

Gioconda Café was where The Small Faces hung out and got signed, alongside Elton John. The Sex Pistols’ rehearsal room was at 6 Denmark Street. Music magazines NME and Melody Maker began on the street, as did Eddie Piller’s Acid Jazz label in 1989. Countless musicians bought their first instruments here, including Carl Barât and Pete Doherty of The Libertines.

As much of Soho’s heritage is being lost to the property developers, DJ Henry Scott-Irvine has started the Save Tin Pan Alley campaign, which has received backing from a host of people including Engelbert Humperdinck, Pete Townshend and many more. savetpa.tk

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Jacket by 666; jeans by Nudie Jeans; shirt, model’s own; boots by David Preston

Barrie Cadogan, 40, guitarist with Primal Scream and Little Barrie, inside Angel Music, 25 Denmark Street. littlebarrie.com angelmusicguitars.com What’s so special about Denmark Street?

I’ve worked on the street so I’ve made lots of friends and learnt a lot about instruments over the years.

Describe Denmark Street in three words.

Historical, socially hilarious.

How did you first hear about it?

I discovered it by accident on a day trip to London in my late teens.

Who’s your favourite musician?

Jimi Hendrix.

Baxter Dury, 43, musician, at the Agnès B offices, 6 Denmark Street. baxter-dury.com agnesb.co.uk Describe your style.

Accidental.

What’s so special about Denmark Street?

I like the idea of Elton John hard at work or my hero Lionel Bart, who was known as the king of Denmark Street. Dennis Nilsen, the serial killer, used to work in the job centre here in the 1980s. He used to bring the cooking pot that he boiled people’s heads in to work.

Describe Denmark Street in three words.

Estate agent’s dream.

Who’s your style icon?

James Brown in the mid to late 1960s. He was small and muscular with a bonkers polo neck and rigid hair.

Jacket, jeans and shirt by Agnès B.

STYLE | Denmark Street Henry Scott-Irvine, radio broadcaster and founder of the Save Tin Pan Alley campaign, outside the old 12 Bar Club, 26 Denmark Street hs-i.co.uk 12barclub.com Describe your style.

Shambolic.

What’s so special about Denmark Street?

It is the “Street of the Music”.

Who’s your style icon?

Chris Stamp, manager of the Who. Who’s your favourite band?

Procol Harum. I’m the author of Procol Harum: The Ghosts of A Whiter Shade of Pale, so I have to say that.

Gary Lammin, guitarist with The Bermondsey Joyriders thebermondseyjoyriders.co.uk Describe your style.

Postmodernist. Chuck it all in there, my son, and sort it out later.

What’s so special about Denmark Street?

It’s a portal to the world known as rock ’n’ roll.

Who’s your style icon?

Brian Jones, the real true leader of the Rolling Stones.

Buckeye, outside Wunjo Keys, 23 Denmark Street wunjoguitars.com Jacob Hammerfelt Describe your style.

I guess it’s some trashy sort of rock thing.

Describe Denmark Street in three words.

Busy, beautiful and passionate.

How did you first hear about it?

I heard that Ozzy Osborne and the Rolling Stones recorded on the street.

Who’s your favourite musician?

Jerry Cantrell.

Frederik Østerby Describe your style.

Old school ’70s.

Describe Denmark Street in three words.

Good vibes music.

Who’s your favourite musician?

Probably Jim Morrison.

What’s your favourite movie?

Forrest Gump.

STYLE | Denmark Street

Ed Jalil, 31, guitarist with Cat Black, in No Tom Guitars, 6 Denmark Street. catblackcontact.wix.com/catblack notomguitars.com Describe your style.

Electric velvet voodoo retro.

Jacket, shirt and scarf, model’s own; jeans by Nudie Jeans; boots by David Preston; hat by Mayser; sunglasses

by Thom Browne

What’s so special about Denmark Street?

I bought my first electric guitar here. It’s was also home to Enterprise Studios, where we built up our band.

Describe Denmark Street in three words.

Tin Pan Alley.

Who’s your style icon?

George Harrison.

What’s your favourite movie?

The Big Lebowski.

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STYLE | Denmark Street

Crispin Weir, owner, outside Regent Sounds, 4 Denmark Street. regentsounds.com Describe your style.

Classic, or old man, depending on the day.

What’s so special about Denmark Street?

The atmosphere. If you don’t feel it, you might never.

Describe Denmark Street in three words.

Love, hate and lust.

Who’s your style icon?

Cary Grant and Nat King Cole spring to mind.

Shirt, model’s own; trousers by Dickies; shoes by Bass.

The graffiti on the wall was drawn by John Lydon in the 1970s when this was The Sex Pistols’ rehearsal space. It depicts guitarist Steve Jones and Nancy Spungen, Sid Vicious’s girlfriend

Fred McLaren wears top by Agnès B; jeans by Levi’s; trainers by Nike. Charlotte Mallory wears T-shirt by Agnès B; jeans

by Levi’s. Fin Munro wears sweater by Agnès B; jeans by Levi’s.

Rivrs, at the Agnès B offices, 6 Denmark Street facebook.com/rivrsmusic Describe your style.

Anything black.

What’s so special about Denmark Street?

It’s one of the few shopping streets left with a unique identity.

Who’s your favourite musician?

Prince.

What’s your favourite movie?

The Big Lebowski.

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CINEMA

Under The Influence UK Hip-hop. London Posse. Buffalo Gals. Covent Garden. Big Audio Dynamite. Human Beatbox.

Words Chris May Portrait Orlando Gili Photographs courtesy of Martin Jones, Zulu Dawn UK Hip Hop Archives zuludawn.org

Born Rodney Panton in Battersea, 45 years ago, Rodney P is often described as the godfather of British rap. It’s a title he modestly rejects, citing other artists who emerged shortly before him. But Panton was almost certainly the first rapper to deliver his rhymes in an English accent, rather than a fake American one. And with London Posse – formed with his friends Sipho the Human Beatbox, Bionic MC and DJ Biznizz in 1985 – he was part of the first British crew to step forward with a credible, distinctly British take on hip-hop. London Posse’s music was also infused with dub-reggae, absorbed in the dancehalls of south London, which set it further apart from the original US source. The group’s album Gangster Chronicle (Mango, 1990) is a classic of the style and has twice been rereleased, most recently as a double CD, including previously unheard material, on Tru Thoughts in 2013.

After London Posse broke up, Panton carried on recording under his own name as well as collaborating with other artists. From 2002 to 2007, he co-presented with DJ Skitz a show on BBC Radio 1Xtra. He also began making radio documentaries, including one in South Africa about the aftermath of apartheid, and narrated the Channel 4 television series Dubplate Drama from 2005 to 2007.

Panton is probably better qualified than anyone to tell the story of British hip-hop. Under the Influence is the umbrella title for three one-hour documentaries produced by him, which will deal in turn with the birth and development of British hip-hop, British reggae and British soul. First up is hiphop, due for completion this autumn, while reggae is now in development.

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Each documentary will be told through the eyes of an artist: Panton is presenting hip-hop, Tippa Irie is presenting reggae, and Panton is currently negotiating the presenter for soul.

Panton and I met on London’s South Bank on a gloriously sunny, latespring afternoon with ska booming out of the British Film Institute foyer. Over coffee, he talked about the development of British hip-hop and how he is telling its story in Under the Influence.

What was the big moment for you, when you fell in love with hip-hop?

There were a few really. There was the Sugarhill Gang on Top of the Pops doing ‘Rapper’s Delight’. That was the first time we heard rap in England and it was being written off as a ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ thing. This would be late 1979, early 1980. There were two versions of the song, a seven-minute version and a 15-minute version, and at school it was all about learning the lyrics. If you knew them all, the 15-minute version, you were cool.

I’d been winning poetry competitions at school, so I was already into words.

I knew the 15-minute version.

Then my brother went to New York in 1982 or 1983 and brought back some vinyl. Run-DMC, the Cold Crush Brothers and I think ‘Planet Rock’ by Afrika Bambaataa. I was swept straight up. I was at the age when you start looking for that thing that sets you and your generation apart from what went before. And that was hip-hop.

It played into all the things I liked – dancing, words, graffiti. I thought it was cool as fuck.

The thing that cemented everything here in the UK was ‘Buffalo Gals’ by

Malcolm McLaren. When the video came out [in 1982] we got to see the visuals that went with the music. We knew it was from New York, we knew what it sounded like, we thought it was cool, but we didn’t know what it looked like. In that video [which featured the Rock Steady Crew], we got to see body popping for the first time, breakdancing for the first time, kids putting lino on the pavement to perform on, the graffiti writers and the DJs. All the elements were there. Malcolm McLaren was a big part of the UK hip-hop story, though he’s often written out of it.

Who else gets written out?

Mike Allen on Capital Radio is one.

He predates all the other radio DJs. After ‘Buffalo Gals’, what was the next big moment?

After London Posse had started, there was UK Fresh 1986 at Wembley Arena.

It was fantastic, actually life-changing.

For a lot of us, it cemented the idea that this is what we do, this is the scene we’re part of. For the first time, we actually got to see the Americans perform – [Afrika] Bambaataa, [Grandmaster] Flash, Roxanne Shanté, The Real Roxanne, Mantronix, World Class Wreckin’ Cru, Sir Mix-A-Lot. We didn’t anticipate the flamboyance of the performances. We knew George Clinton’s kind of style, but we didn’t know rappers were doing that too. It was a real eye opener.

How important was Covent Garden as a hip-hop gathering place in the mid-1980s?

It was the centre. I started going there around 1983, 1984. I was 13, 14 years old. I was taken by older kids who knew >

Rodney P, widely regarded as the godfather of British rap, was a member of seminal UK hip-hop crew London Posse. He went on to record his own material, and is currently signed to Tru Thoughts.

He is the producer of documentary film trilogy Under the Influence.

Nottingham’s Rock City Crew performing at the Electro Rock hip-hop event, Hippodrome, London, 1985

my [elder] brothers. So it was coming home from school, taking off my uniform, getting on the 77 bus from Battersea straight to the West End. Covent had already been established by then. There was already the busking, the break-dancing. I knew I was going to the UK mecca. It was like a pilgrimage for me to go there. I didn’t go there to automatically become part of the scene, I would just stand on the side and watch, fascinated, and be a fan.

I wanted to be down, so I ingratiated myself and became part of it.

Covent was like Switzerland in terms of being neutral territory. People from all over London would come to Covent. No one lived there. It was neutral ground for everybody. You had postcode beefs and area arguments even then, though only in a minor way. Plus you could busk, make some money. And then at night we’d go over to Leicester Square. But that was more of a social thing. There were lots of foreign au pairs and the Empire night club and the Hippodrome night club around Leicester Square. So that was our evening entertainment.

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Where else was important?

The other big place was Spats Hip Hop Club on Saturday afternoons in Oxford Street. And Tim Westwood at the Arches in Vauxhall. Legendary.

‘HIP-HOP CAME TO ENGLAND AS A YOUTH CULTURE MORE THAN A BLACK CULTURE’ And the hip-hop community across the country was more connected then.

You’d go to other people’s towns and battle rap and break dance. There was a place like Covent in every major city.

Nottingham had Rock City. Leeds, the Broken Glass. In Bristol it would have been the Wild Bunch in St Paul’s. The scenes in all the towns were connected.

The friends I made back then, I still maintain the links 30 years later.

It wasn’t just black kids. I think hip-hop came to England as a youth culture more than a black culture. It is accepted as a black culture and a lot of kids in the black community definitely took it up, but in many parts of the country, where there weren’t many black kids, it was also taken up. They were still out with their lino in front of their local Woolworths doing their break-dancing.

Like British reggae a decade earlier, which started out trying to sound back-a-yard Jamaican, early British hip-hop had an inferiority complex when it came to America. How long did it take to shake that off?

In the early days, everyone had a fake American accent. There was no one, including me, who rapped in an English accent. The early artists – the Cookie Crew, Family Quest, The City Limits

CINEMA | Under The Influence

Birdie, Goldie and Lewi from the Supreme Graffiti Team, Birmingham, 1985

Birdie, Goldie and Hanifa of the Wolverhampton B Boys dance crew, returning from New York after filming the Channel 4 documentary Bombin’, Wolverhampton, 1986

Mode 2 of the Chrome Angelz at the International Street Art Contest, Bridlington, 1988

Crew – they all had huge, completely fake, American accents.

When we formed the London Posse, we wanted to authentically reflect who we were, talk in our own accents. But it took a while to get there.

When you hear the first London Posse record, you can hear I’m still trying to get rid of my American accent.

And even writing rhymes in an English accent is different to writing rhymes in an American accent. So how do we deliver this? We learnt while we were doing gigs. In those days, there were so many live performances we were able to do, opportunities to develop your craft.

We did thousands of performances before we made a record.

A lot of the impetus for authenticity came from reggae sound systems – and remember, most of us early hip-hoppers had come up through dancehalls, before

hip-hop really arrived. In England at that time, you had Coxsone’s and King Tubby’s, the traditional sounds, who brought the whole Jamaican idea and played upfront dub plate, strictly Kingston. Then, with my generation, there were sounds like Saxon, Black Unity, Young Lion, who were English sounds. Second-generation Jamaican kids building sound systems who were saying, “We’re black, we’re British, we make reggae music, but we want to do it in a way that represents us, we don’t want to pretend to be Jamaican.”

That’s when you started getting the real MC culture in the UK, like Tippa Irie [on Saxon] and Demon Rockers [on Black Unity]. These were the people I used go to school listening to. Before hip-hop tapes and mix tapes, for a kid like me it was all about taping sound systems. And we all

got on the mic first in dancehalls doing reggae. From that you got Smiley Culture doing ‘Police Officer’ [1984] and Tippa Irie doing ‘Hello Darling’ [1986]. With London Posse we took that mentality and said, “We’re going to do that in hip-hop.”

How did the British hip-hop audience take to the idea of local authenticity?

It took a while. It was partly a generational thing. The young guys who were into the sound system MC culture, they got it first. Initially, most people didn’t want to hear hip-hop with reggae in it – which was always London Posse’s intention – or in English accents. But we were getting love from people like The Specials and The Beat.

They had an understanding of how British accents worked in the music.

Then it caught on and the time came > 127

The London All Star crew at the Electro Rock hiphop event, Hippodrome, London, 1985

London’s Zodiac crew performing at the Electro Rock hip-hop event, Hippodrome, London, 1985

when if you rapped in a US accent, people laughed at you. By the time we released ‘Money Mad’ [in 1988], we had won the argument in terms of accents.

With London Posse, we kind of reinvented the wheel. It didn’t feel like that at the time, we just felt that what we were doing was the most real form of hip-hop. It wasn’t like we were intending to take hip-hop and bend it, divert it. No, we just wanted to make real hip-hop. And if it’s going to be real, it’s supposed to sound like you, reflect where you come from. It was going to America and rapping to Americans in an American accent that 128

made us realise it was stupid. Because, of course, they loved the English accent.

That was when we realised the power of the English accent.

London Posse got an early leg up touring with Mick Jones and Big Audio Dynamite. How did that come about?

It was through Sipho really, who was already really popular. He had gone on tour with them in 1985, as a human beatbox. So the next year was coming and they said, come back on tour and bring some of your mates along. So we’d go to the shows and sit backstage drinking their wine and whatever. After

one of the shows, at Hammersmith Palais, Sipho said, let’s go to Mick Jones’s house, he’s got a studio in his basement. To be honest, I didn’t know who Mick Jones was. I knew who the Clash were, but I come from a different place, I come from inner city south London, listening to reggae and lovers rock. So I wasn’t star struck about it.

I was, OK, let’s go to this guy’s house.

Mick Jones was there. Don Letts was there. Their bass player, Leo [Williams], was there. And we decided to have a little jam session. We recorded a few things and Mick and Leo said, “You guys are really good, you’re coming on tour with us.”

CINEMA | Under The Influence We formed the group that day; before that we were just a group of friends who rapped together. That first tour, we didn’t have a name. It said on the posters, The Bionic MC, Sipho the Human Beatbox, Rodney Rock and 2 Dancers. In those days, with hip-hop crews, you had to have a couple of dancers. When they went to New York, we weren’t on that show, but we said we’re coming anyway. We were young Zulus, part of the Zulu Nation through Bambaataa, so we knew we could phone him. Some of us stayed in my auntie’s house, and some of us stayed at Bam’s house. How we got the name was, while we were there, the Americans would call us the London posse. Then when we got back to the UK, and we were doing more gigs with Big Audio Dynamite, they said, “We’re doing the posters, we’re doing it today, and we need a name for your group. So we took about 30 seconds and we said, “Call us the London Posse.”

And 30 years later, all this history is being chronicled in Under the Influence. How’s it coming along?

We’re fairly well down the road. I aim to finish it in October, so it should be out next year. It starts with me as a fan, coming to Covent. I talk about the acts that influenced me. As it says in the trailer, I get credited with being the godfather of UK rap, but actually the scene already existed when I came to it as a fan. There was lots of stuff that predates me, people I’d pay money to go and see and sing their lyrics back at them. Cookie Crew, City Limits – they used to come out in army suits, navy suits, and I thought they were just the coolest thing. So I’ll be speaking to those guys, and to the breakers and graffiti writers at Covent, people like Pride, Dolby B, Danny Francis, they were dancers but they were gods.

Then it comes to London Posse and introducing the UK MC accent.

Before us it hadn’t really existed. And then it goes into what came afterwards, how it changed the sound of UK hiphop and how that accent became the UK MC voice, and then the grime voice. These grime kids rap in a UK accent and they think, why would you do it any other way? These are the dots we’re trying to connect, from the beginning until today.

It’s getting harder and harder to fit each story into one hour. So we’ll see

The Greater London Council’s Giant Open Air Break Dance Festival, organised by Tim Westwood, GLC Headquarters, Jubilee Gardens, London, 1984

how it turns out. We’ll do it and then start chipping down.

Is there much archive footage available to you?

There’s a fair bit, a lot more than you might think. It’s just trying to find out

‘IF IT’S GOING TO BE REAL, IT’S SUPPOSED TO SOUND LIKE YOU, REFLECT WHERE YOU COME FROM’ who owns what to be honest. Like where do you have to go to get the rights. But a lot of it I can get from people I know personally, who’ve got their own footage.

Who has put the money up?

So far it’s all me. We’ve spent so many years bitching and moaning that our stories are never told accurately. This is an opportunity for me, as a fan and an artist, to tell the story I know and tell it correctly. And I want to be able

to do that without any outside interference. So I haven’t gone to any TV or film companies for finance. We’ll see what we have to do when it’s time to get it distributed. But first I need to tell the story correctly and I don’t need any help. I didn’t start this thinking, I want to break into TV. I started thinking, I really want to tell this story and we need to get this story right.

I’ve spoken to a few sponsors. No one has signed a cheque yet, though they’ve given me assurances that they will. Grace Foods are going to provide goodie bags, but actually I want a cheque. Same with Puma. Free T-shirts are cool, but I want a cheque.

I’m also going to talk to [rum producer] Wray & Nephew, they’re trying to break into the UK. I’ve done some work with them before.

How are you planning to release it?

I really want to sell it to TV, because I want a wide audience. I’m not making this just for hip-hop fans. I want them to love it, but I’m trying to make an entertaining TV doc for the nonspecialist audience too. As a model, I have in mind Fire in Babylon [a 2010 documentary about the West Indies cricket team in the 1970s and 1980s].

You don’t have to love cricket to love that doc. The story that it tells and how it brings out the drama is amazing.

The UK hip-hop episode of Under the Influence is out in October undertheinfluenceuk.com 129

SPORT

Wild Swimming Thames Baths. Outdoor Swimming Society. Captain Webb. Studio Octopi.

Words Mark Webster Photographs Rob Low

“Nine years ago, the term ‘wild swimming’ didn’t exist”. So says Kate Rew, whose Outdoor Swimming Society is approaching its 10th anniversary. “Now though, there are shelves of books from swimmers on where to swim, how to swim...

An indication that it’s become a lifestyle choice. It’s what people do at the weekends. It’s part of what defines them.”

‘Wild’, when it comes to swimming, does not mean crazy. Some may say, though, if you’re happy to throw yourself into a body of water that hasn’t been chlorinated, warmed up and surrounded by lifeguards, then perhaps you shouldn’t even be allowed to leave the house. The counter argument from these natural water aficionados would be that swimming has become as sanitised as that chlorine filled, heated and walled in water.

So, ‘wild’ for the outdoor swimmer is open, natural, real. And as Rew goes on to say, “It has a way of washing that superficial crap off you.”

Rew started the society with what she describes as “a kind of missionary zeal fresh from a cold, dark swim on a stormy October night, and after a five-hour drive to the Lake District and changing under scaffolding to protect us from the lashing rain. Something only a swimmer will understand.”

Oli Pitt was one of those swimmers who understood. His introduction to swimming happened as a boy when, he says, “I went to public school and we got chucked in the lake. We’d get out 130

and be picking the leeches off each other.” Far from being put off, he maintained his passion for swimming in open water – be it lakes, rivers and, to a certain extent, the sea. “If you’re going through rock inlets and into caves,” says Pitt. “It’s not really just up and down along the beach. [It’s about] where the view is changing as you are moving through it.”

This enthusiasm has also seen Pitt take on the social media responsibilities at the Outdoor Swimming Society, which means he not only has firsthand experience of what he calls a following that is “burgeoning year on year”, but also a sense of just why so many people are being drawn to the notion of wild swimming. He feels that a genuine spark happened “in the 1980s and 1990s when people really started going to festivals and it became, like, oh, I’ve bought a tent, I’m going camping now. So I think there was a shift.

It’s happened too in more sporty environments. Like with cycling, but that comes with better equipment.

Or hiking with better fabrics.

“But that can have the mindset of going to an organised place where there is an organised event. We’ve got |a Facebook page with 15,000 members, and the conversations are more about sharing information – where can we go to splash about, take some cake, have some fun. No stress. It’s not who’s the fastest, who’s the fittest. It’s permission to explore, discuss, and enjoy.”

The exchange of information has clearly come to play a crucial role

in expanding the wild swimming community. Certainly a catalyst for its development in Britain (as Pitt points out, it has been “endemically part of Scandinavian and German society much longer than us”) was the late author Roger Deakin’s 1999 book Waterlog, in which he made the clarion call to open up the waterways to swimmers.

Rew has been more recently published on the subject with 2009’s Wild Swim, and Daniel Start’s Wild Swimming, the second edition of which came out in 2013, is another expansive book that not only helps you find hundreds of places to swim in Britain, but also vividly captures the beauty and spirit of the pastime with some fantastic photography. His recently published Hidden Beaches expands perfectly on Pitt’s theory of how the sea is best explored. Start’s website wildswimming.com is also a good source for books on the subject.

For the writer Caitlin Davies, the interest evolved close to home.

Growing up by Hampstead Heath, “I was swimming in the ponds,” she says.

“That was the natural thing for me to do. But it never occurred to me to swim in the Thames, even being a Londoner, born and bred.” Eventually the river did draw her in, in every sense, and has resulted in the book Downstream: A History and Celebration of Swimming the River Thames. Her interest in looking back at open swimming’s past was very much inspired by the new-found desire to do it in the present. Describing the activity’s rise, she says, “You had people >

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SPORT | Wild Swimming

Sharrah Pool, River Dart, Devon

Kari Furre, artist, karifurre.co.uk Lynne Rivers, 53, retired paramedic Oliver Pitt, PR for the Outdoor Swimming Society

up and down the river doing it all very informally. Then they get to hear about each other and link up. So then they make it more of a group event, by which time someone finds an old trophy in a junk shop in Maidenhead. And they realise 150 years ago, they were doing exactly what they were doing now, but far more organised.

“We’re actually just doing what our Victorian forebears did. By 1875, they actually had floating baths in the Thames. It coincided with a new sewage system for London. And Captain Webb had just crossed the channel, swimming. The average person couldn’t swim, so the idea was that it was clean, and it was safe – there were attendants, lessons.

It was a civic thing, there was pride.

It was better than the Seine!”

Davies was also compelled to experience swimming in the Thames herself: “The thing that struck me is there’s no real beginning or end point. You get in, and you’re basically following the curves; you’re forced to, which of course means you don’t know what you’re going to see next.”

For London-based architect Chris Romer-Lee, what he feels when swimming in the Thames is “the sheer volume” when you’re in it. “It is the scale that changes,” he says. He became a fan of open water swimming as a child on family holidays in Cornwall and on the Isle of Wight. But it was in Switzerland a couple of years ago that his ongoing hobby and chosen profession found themselves crossing streams: “I was in Zurich, and I had just jumped into a green, slimy lake that had decking at places for easy access, and different areas for all different demographics to swim. It is a fabulous concept. And when I got out I found out there was an open call, a competition to come up with a new idea for swimming in the Thames. So I thought I’d better get back to London and research it.”

Through his architecture firm Studio Octopi, situated just a few minutes walk from the river itself, Romer-Lee embarked on the Thames Baths lido project. It combines this current desire to swim in freshwater with the original Victorian, evangelical zeal about the open swimming experience, as well as the technical innovation of that age. “On completion of the Thames super sewer,” he says,

Kari Furre

“the river is going to be that much cleaner. So the idea is we create safe swimming zones that are going to be semi-submerged, protected from the strong currents. You will be swimming in river water.”

‘THERE’S NO BEGINNING OR END POINT. YOU’RE FOLLOWING THE CURVES.’ When the Thames Bath happens – projected to be in around 18 months’ time, with Romer-Lee saying that “people ask me now, ‘when?’ not ‘if ’” – it will provide a fusion of so much of what the wild swimmer enjoys.

Clearly it is something that can take you around the world, up and down areas of natural beauty that shift and change above and around you. But you can also sit down, have cake and chat about it with your mates afterwards.

Oli Pitt perhaps sums up the most abstract and unique perspective that wild swimming can offer, however.

“When you’re swimming in open water, you are only this size – you are the size of your head – so you are no threat to the natural environment. You can swim past ducks and geese because you’re the same size as them. It is such a privilege. A swan can just come down next to you.”

Downstream: A History and Celebration of Swimming the River Thames by Caitlin Davies is out now aurumpress.co.uk octopi.co.uk outdoorswimmingsociety.com twitter.com/thamesbaths wildswimming.co.uk wildswim.com 133

STYLE

Sweater and trousers by Juun J; shoes by Hermès.

Adrien Dantou Photographs Sophie Delaporte Styling Kanako B Koga Grooming Stephanie Farouze at Jed Root Photographic Assistants Allyssa Heuze and Emmanuel Pineau

Adrien Dantou, 27, is a contemporary dancer and filmmaker. He trained at the Conservatoire de Paris and has worked with choreographers including Daniel Dobbels, Raimund Hoghe, Benjamin Millepied and Yves-Noël Genod. Dantou made his first short film, L’Aube (The Dawn), aged 18. Earlier this year, his film Being formed part of an exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. He is currently preparing for a screening of all his films at La Cinémathèque Française, Paris, in the autumn. adriendantou.com cinematheque.fr

Jumpsuit and sweater

by Hermès.

Coat and sweater by Damir Doma; tracksuit bottoms by Isabel Benenato.

Jacket and top by 13 Bonaparte; tracksuit bottoms by Isabel Benenato.

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STYLE | Adrien Dantou

Shirt and trousers by Kolor; hat by Comme des Garรงons Shirt.

STYLE | Adrien Dantou

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Coat by Margaret Howell; jeans by 13 Bonaparte; sweater by Bleu de Paname.

Coat and shoes

by Cerruti 1881; trousers by Kenzo; sweater by Margaret Howell.

STYLE | Adrien Dantou

Shirt, jeans and shoes by Yohji Yamamoto; top by 13 Bonaparte; hat by Bleu de Paname; belt, stylist’s own; socks by Falke.

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MUSIC

Richard Hawley

Sheffield. Sky Edge. Yellow Arch Studios. Longpigs. Love Is All. George Yardley.

Words Andy Thomas Photographs Ross Trevail

Richard Hawley’s Mercury nominated LP of 2012, Standing at the Sky’s Edge, took its title from a ridge overlooking the city, where Sheffield’s razor gangs waged war in the 1920s. On the walks around Sheffield that inspired the LP, he discovered other elements of the city’s past, such as the 17th-century headstone of charcoal burner George Yardley, the subject of folkloric tales and source for Hawley’s song ‘The Wood Collier’s Grave’. The ancient and modern history of Sheffield and its people has been central to Hawley’s work since he left alternative rock band Longpigs at the end of the 1990s.

After joining Pulp for three hectic years of touring, he was encouraged

by Jarvis Cocker to release his own music after he heard a demo. The sleeve photography of the resulting debut LP, Richard Hawley of 2001, was taken outside a bingo hall in Cleethorpes, where his gran took him on holiday.

Similarly rooted in childhood memories, his Late Night Final album of the same year took its name from the call of Sheffield Star newspaper vendors.

Its sleeve featured Sharon’s Snack Bar in Castle Market, a favourite childhood haunt of Hawley. Released two years later, the LP Lowedges was named after a part of the city he had first encountered on the front of a bus.

“I see romance in fairly fucking ordinary things,” he once said.

Born in 1967, Hawley grew up in Pitsmoor in the north of Sheffield.

His steel-worker father Dave worked in the foundries by day and played guitar by night, fronting his own combo in the 1960s and appearing with blues greats such as John Lee Hooker and Little Walter. Picking up the guitar when he was just six, the young Richard Hawley was guided by his dad as well as his uncle, Frank White, a wellknown Sheffield blues guitarist.

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Hawley Sr died during the making of his son’s 2007 LP Lady’s Bridge. The album was named after the oldest bridge in Sheffield and an old fording point that connected the rich and poor parts of town. He also wrote about the wider metaphorical meaning of the title in the sleeve notes: “We all have to cross bridges in our lives and we all have to leave things behind that are hard to let go sometimes, pause though before you cross and watch the ancient river flow.” The past is a theme that recurs in Hawley’s music. His nostalgic songs of union were used to beautiful effect on the soundtrack to Kim Longinotto’s recent documentary film, Love is All. It’s a melancholic but elevating sound that is unashamedly out of step, in keeping with much of the great music to emerge from Sheffield.

From the electronic post punk innovations of Cabaret Voltaire to the 1990s bleep techno of LFO, Sheffield musicians have always trodden their own path. As someone who has lived in the city through punk, rave and Britpop, Hawley has his own theory on this dislocation from the rest of the country. “You can link it to the little mesters who used to make the knives and forks here,” he told The Yorkshire Post newspaper. “They were fiercely independent and I think that somehow rubbed off onto the music. Sheffield always throws up the real mavericks that don’t want to be part of a scene and it’s something to do with the mentality of the people here.”

Hawley’s own music is very much a part of that heritage. And as he made clear prior to the recent re-release of his first three LPs, he has no intention of leaving the city that inspires him. With this in mind we headed up to Sheffield to meet him at the famous Yellow Arch Studios in Neepsend, where he is recording his new LP. We have soon

relocated to a nearby pub on the banks of the River Don. When did you start writing songs?

I was nine years old, my dad came upstairs and I was sat in my bed playing my guitar. I can’t remember what time of night it was but I was supposed to have been asleep a long time ago.

He asked me what I was still doing up.

I told him that I’d got this song and I didn’t know whose it was. So I played it to him. “It’s thine,” he said. “What do you mean it’s mine?” I asked. “Well, it’s yours. I’ve never heard that before,” he said. And he really was like a library when it came to songs. So he turned the light off and told me to go to sleep.

I lay there with the sudden realisation that I had written a song. And it’s been like that ever since. At any given moment in my head it’s chaos in there, just ideas for tunes all the time.

What do you do when you get ideas for songs? Do you write them down?

No, it’s best not to. I remember toying with the idea of being some kind of artist, where you’d have a notebook and pad. I tried that and it didn’t really work. Basically the good ones survive.

It’s like the survival of the fittest in my head. It’s like Jurassic Park in there.

Did your dad encourage you to play the guitar?

He was so desperate for me to pick up and play that he borrowed as many guitars as he could and left them around the house. And I remember him getting really excited because I brushed against a guitar one day with my Action Man’s head and he thought I had picked one up.

As you learned how to play guitar did he mentor you?

No, he didn’t do that at all. What he >

MUSIC | Richard Hawley would do was show me a third of the thing and then go off and do something else. So he left me to work it out. And that was genius, because it hooked you and you’d have to go and figure it out for yourself. It was a bit like doing the first bit of a jigsaw for you and then getting you to do the rest. So you had to figure out the shit on your own. And that’s like life. From my perspective there was never any life plan. I just knew that I didn’t want to do what my dad and grandfather and all my uncles did, which was work for the man. And then at the end of it get pissed on from a great height. The only thing I had to take me away from that was the guitar.

What was it like growing up as the son of a well-known local musician?

My dad was never famous, but it was still quite hard to live up to a musician of his stature. He was just fucking brilliant, and I hope I am getting close to that.

Which clubs did he play at?

If he got a right good gig it would be somewhere like the Dial House and then Limes Club and places like that.

And then my uncle Frank used to play at the Pheasant, where he had one of the longest residencies in the world.

What are your memories of Sheffield in the 1970s?

My dad used to work in heavy industry and I remember coming down to this sort of area where we are now as a kid.

Now, if you and me went down to the river and got two sticks with some bait on and dropped them into the water, we would probably catch a salmon or a trout. That kind of dirty industry has been fucked around here for years so the river is so clean now. But back then you’d see globules of purple and pink chemicals. It was horrific, there was nothing living in there.

So is there a danger of romanticising the old days in the city?

I despise it when people deify miners and steel workers. I don’t like that at all, it’s not a true picture. If you were there and lived amongst it you’d see that a lot of things were not right. But they do deserve to be deified in their resistance to the kind of evil we are living in now.

How much of that do you attribute to Thatcher’s attacks on the miners?

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She had already practised on the steel workers. When Ian MacGregor [head of British Steel and then the National Coal Board] came in, he became her henchman and they used the police as a military force against its own people.

And that is a well-documented fact.

I was there although I was only a young boy. When it all kicked off I was about 12. I remember because [British TV show] Grange Hill had just started. So when I went to comprehensive school I was with [Grange Hill character] Tucker Jenkins all the way. And I remember watching avidly to see how you should be at that age. And then I looked at Thatcher and it was pretty apparent that whatever plans she had for this country it didn’t include this little kid from Sheffield. If you were northern and from my kind of area, you definitely were not included in her plans.

‘WHAT IS CUTTING EDGE ARE YOUR THOUGHTS’ What was it like to watch the destruction around you?

I could break down in tears at any moment talking about this stuff.

It’s so massively painful. It destroyed communities, there is no doubt about it.

And the ripples of that are still being felt. You’ve just got to go to any of the satellite towns around here – when work moved away drugs moved in and places lost hope very quickly.

Because your records are released under your own name you are often known as a solo artist, but you’ve played with pretty much the same band since the first LP. Me, Shez [Sheridan] and Colin [Elliot] have been there right from the start.

From where I’m from it’s always been important to be in a gang. So this is my little gang. I often think we should have been called a band name, but I avoided that because of my history, being in a band called Longpigs, for example – how stupid a name can you get?

When you are young you think you

are really clever coming up with some band name, and it’s just something to hang your identity on. I never realised the importance of that identity until I got to a certain age and I saw things slipping away. And I suddenly felt it was important for me to preserve things. Like with folk music.

You’ve been at Yellow Arch Studios since the first album. Walking around here you can see you’ve got a great affinity for the area.

I really wanted to bring you here to Neepsend because we are in the lowest point in the city geographically, but actually it’s one of the highest points.

It is still industrially important and is one of the last of the increasingly shrinking places here to have that.

And when I get my fish and chips or whatever I know I am with people who actually work for a living. And I like that. It’s not because I’m a fucking tourist looking at all this – they all know me.

Where do you stand on regeneration?

Someone far more eloquent than me has put it into his poetry, and that is John Cooper Clarke, who is a dear pal of mine. I love him so much. He wrote ‘Beasley Street’ back in the 1980s, and he has written a new poem called ‘Beasley Boulevard’. So ignore what I’ve got to say and go and listen to that. He just puts it into words so well.

There is a big part of me that just hates regeneration and I can’t get my head around it at all. It’s about the people.

Where do they go when they get shoved out and they haven’t got anywhere else to go?

I think history might remember this time as a bit of a dark age for humanity.

Everything is being sold off, the NHS, the woods and forests and all that.

And after a century or so of trying to claim some kind of justice and getting away from sending kids up chimneys and that, we are getting close to going back there. People working for next to nothing or actually for nothing.

Just look at interns, what the fuck is that all about? You work and you do a job and then you get fucking paid.

You’ve poked the bear now, don’t get me started on all this stuff.

There was an old American Indian saying along the lines of: “Only when the last tree has died, will we realise we cannot eat money.” The rich think there

is this world with them above everything else, like an upside down pyramid. Have you known any pyramid to stand up on its top end? They think we’ll cut the NHS, and then we’ll cut the army, the police force. So they are kind of forcing a revolution. It will come to that point. Their strength comes from dividing us, but one of the most powerful things in the world is union and our sense of togetherness.

And if we stick together we can bring about change. It’s like all the online petitioning – that’s amazing and I sign a lot of that. It’s a bit like using all the tools that they control us with, by being addicted to phones and the internet and all that, against them.

What do you think about the advance of technology?

I think it is an evolution. My kids are on all these devices and it does my head in because I want their time, because I know my time is short. But there is an evolving thing going off that I don’t think people like me understand.

Because I don’t know how to push all those buttons though, it doesn’t mean I’m not valid. It’s important to keep an open mind and I think that’s the key to getting older – don’t get a closed mind.

You have to keep your radar on all the time. I watch my kids doing stuff that I just can’t ever dream about. But the best I can get on a good day is to be a pretty good singer, and an OK songwriter, and a damn fine guitar player. And that’s kind of enough for me.

Do you use the internet a lot?

I think the internet is a great thing.

The other day I was trying to find out what gauge strings Cliff Gallup, Gene Vincent’s guitarist, used. With my dad, I’ve got loads of notes him and my uncle made about little granules of information that they managed to glean from writing to someone in America.

It might have taken them six months to get an answer, and then I go on the internet and it’s just there. But it’s not about the way you get the information, it’s what you do with it. If that means you get off your arse and so something that’s really beautiful, all power to you.

Do you feel a weight of responsibility as a musician?

I’m earning a living and surviving by doing music, and it’s come to a point

that some folks believe in what I’m doing. A lot of folks don’t and that’s fine. You are not going to please all the people all the time. I was sitting in Fagin’s pub the other day and one of the lads in there – Don, who I do a pub quiz with on a Thursday – he says: “A right nice lad you are Rich, but I can’t stand your fucking music.”

And I’m sat there next to him having a pint. And I quite like that, because it’s an absolutely grass roots view, it’s not some sarcastic or snide review.

You’ve obviously got a great love for Sheffield, but how do you feel when you’re always asked it?

It’s got to the point where I do get a bit uppity when people ask me that; I don’t really know why I have to do that. I just wake up here and it makes me happy.

The thing I’m really scared of is somehow all of a sudden becoming the voice of Sheffield. That is something I really don’t like. I don’t want to become a voice for anyone and I certainly don’t want to become a voice for this city. Sheffield is, for want of a better word though, my muse, and I do worry if I go somewhere else that I will lose my mojo. I have been connected to so many different things in this city. I have gained so many friendships with those I respect – from

people like DJ Parrot [Sheffield dance music pioneer] to Cabaret Voltaire.

Musically we’re as different as chalk and cheese, but it doesn’t matter, I know what they are trying to do and it’s awesome.

Did you get into the electronic scene back in the 1980s?

Absolutely, I used to love Cabaret Voltaire. They were utter pioneers.

I think of them as explorers going to places that nobody else had gone.

They just invented it as they went.

I remember going to see them at the university and they had hundreds of TV screens on stage. You’d never seen shit like that before. And then Duran Duran is on TV doing the same thing, because they stole the ideas. But the thing I don’t like is the inference that electronic music is the only cutting edge music. What is cutting edge are your thoughts. So be mindful of your thoughts. It’s to do with how you think and what runs through your mind on a day-to-day basis. All the other shit is neither here nor there.

What was the most important record shop back then?

Well it’s still there now and it’s Barry Everard’s Record Collector. Barry is just beautiful. He can talk about music > 145

MUSIC | Richard Hawley forever. John Peel used to go to him for his records. Barry got me into so much stuff over the years. the Seeds, the 13th Floor Elevators and loads of other mad shit I would never have encountered if it weren’t for him. There are some people that are like walking poems, and he’s one of them.

Another important local figure is JP Bean. I’ve just been reading his book The Sheffield Gang Wars about the Sky Edge razor gangs.

Julian has been a family friend since day dot. He’s lovely, smart as fuck. His Singing From the Floor [about British folk clubs] is great as well.

Is he one of the unsung heroes?

It depends on what you mean by unsung. We just keep digging away at what we do. And don’t give in because it’s so hard to carry on. I’ve been incredibly lucky in that I’ve had people believe in what I’m doing.

The list is a long one and I’m grateful for that.

I think it was Norma Waterson who called you a folk artist. Is that where you see yourself?

I don’t know, you tell me. Someone once called me a post punk neorockabilly. I thought, I’ll have that. Because it’s so confusing, I thought that’d do. As for being a folk singer, I don’t know what that means. I just plant my flag in the ground and stick to it. I guess what I am is an incurable romantic. That’s just the way I am and I don’t see that as a problem.

You wrote ‘Down in the Woods’ off the last LP as a response to the Tories selling off the forestland. Nature and the elements are recurring themes in your songs, from ‘Roll River Roll’ to ‘The Wood Collier’s Grave’.

I like being near the rivers of this city and by the trees. What gets me really angry is how people misrepresent the city – they think of it as this postindustrial shit hole and it really pisses me off. But the river is all-powerful.

We are sitting in a pub that nearly got destroyed by it. You should never underestimate nature. If you really take the time to look and pay attention you can see kestrels and falcons on top of the flats here. Nature is far more adaptable than us.

There is an underlying spiritual element to your song writing.

Do you meditate?

I play guitar. I feel naked without my guitar, completely and utterly naked.

It’s a funny thing, when you’ve been connected to something for so long it affects your posture. I’m getting a hump in my back because I’ve spent so many years hunched over my guitar, studying.

But studying it is a beautiful thing when you just turn everything else off.

One of my favourite times as a kid used to be when my mum and dad went to the club on a Friday night and I would be on my own. And I would just sit there with my headphones on, studying records. I would spend hours sitting there and hearing the beauty of Little Walter and Chuck Berry. My dad used to keep this collection of seven-inch singles on the London American label behind these speakers and I’d just listen

‘LOVE AND PEACE ARE STATES OF MIND, THEY ARE NOT FASHION ITEMS’ to them for the pure love of it. But then I began to ask myself questions about how they did it. And then tried to figure it out in my head. I reckon I probably got it all wrong. But that’s where the invention comes in. It was like the Rolling Stones trying to play black R&B and getting it wrong; they kind of invented something else.

What’s the most important thing to you as a musician?

When I hear a musician, I know just from their playing whether they are sincere or whether they are bullshitting.

Martin Simpson, my neighbour, and Nancy Kerr, who have kindly blessed me with their presence on this new album – I was nearly in tears listening to them. Just amazing. I’m more turned on by all that. I don’t get turned on by shallow things. It just doesn’t do it for

me. I had a brief kiss of it, being nominated at the Brits for this anomalous term “Best Male”. You’ve met some of the best males in this pub this afternoon. It’s just a joke, the whole awards thing. I remember at the Brits they put me in what they called “the pit” with the other nominated artists.

And Paul McCartney came on to sing ‘Hey Jude’… again. And I just thought, how the fuck do I get out of here? But I’d allowed myself to be manipulated, so more fool me.

One writer called Standing at the Sky’s Edge your “psychedelic howl of rage”.

Love and peace are states of mind, they are not fashion items. That is why the hippy thing failed. Because the minute it stopped being cool, they dropped it and became accountants. It’s like that line in Withnail & I: “They’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths man.”

The people who stayed with it did so through a state of mind. But I hate that word “psychedelia”, it’s bullshit. Look at Aldous Huxley, who wrote all those beautiful, mind-opening books; he wore a three-piece suit, a tie and specs. But he was a supreme intellect, and it wasn’t the way he looked but the way he thought that was important.

So it’s coming down to the way culture has been badged and avoiding being caught up in all that?

Absolutely, and I won’t be part of that.

So don’t try to nail me down because I won’t be. Keep wriggling kid, that’s what I’ve told everyone I’ve ever worked with, because they will try and nail you.

What is the key to keeping the band together all these years?

Being able to play and sing and do whatever you do is only part of being in a band. For longevity, that is only about 30 per cent of the gig. The rest is not being a pain in the arse at 4am at an airport in Singapore, or wherever this mad ride has taken me. And to turn up on time and be almost sober.

You can quickly fuck things up by giving in to it all too much. You have to remember that music is the most important thing, and if you don’t keep that focus then you’re fucked.

Richard Hawley’s new album is out in late summer parlophone.co.uk

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CULTURE

Pop Grenade

B92. Otpor. Love Parade. Public Enemy. Fela Kuti. Taksim Square.

Words Andy Thomas Portrait Alexander Kvatashidze Photographs Goran Basaric, Matthew Collin, Adrian Fisk, Igor Jeremic, Wolfgang Tillmans and Gavin Watson

“Music is a weapon of the future; music is the weapon of the progressives; music is the weapon of the givers of life.” So said Fela Kuti, whose words provide a maxim for a new book, Pop Grenade, by Tbilisi-based writer Matthew Collin. “People have been using music to damn the iniquities of the powerful and narrate the emotions of changing times since the earliest days of recording, and for centuries before that,” says Collin in the introduction.

Pop Grenade is the latest in a series of books from Collin about youth rebellion. Previously editor of i-D magazine and author of the 1997 book on acid house, Altered State, he penned This is Serbia Calling after travelling to Belgrade for The Face magazine.

Published in 2001, the book documented the 10-year campaign of Belgrade station Radio B92, which waged war against Slobodan Miloševic, armed with a radio transmitter and copies of the Clash’s ‘White Riot’ and Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’. “Four wars; a brutal police force running rampant; riots in the streets; a state of mass psychosis generated by the shrill of propaganda,” wrote Collin. These were just some of the barriers to normality and freedom that Belgrade’s isolated youth faced in the 1990s. The courageous actions and dark humour of Radio B92 and its listeners were witnessed first hand by the author.

“They chose the international call signs of techno and rock’n’roll over the parochial, folksy paeans to nationalism; the music of life over the music of death,” he wrote.

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Collin explored similar themes in his next book, The Time of the Rebels: Youth Resistance Movements and 21st Century Revolutions. Defying arrest, or worse, groups such as Otpor in Serbia, Pora in Ukraine and Kmara in Georgia used satire and the power of youthful ideals as tools of resistance. “Their methods were resolutely modern: the marketing techniques of the advertising industry, the new technologies of the internet and the mobile phone, the graphic possibilities of desktop publishing, the seductive signs and symbols of popular culture,” wrote Collin. After moving to the region and working as a correspondent for the BBC, he documented the momentous events in the former communist states.

“This was politics with a smart logo and a pulsing beat. It made regime change fun,” he wrote.

Pop Grenade begins with more recent uprisings at the beginning of the Arab Spring. “The story of how an obscure young rapper from a provincial Tunisian city became a revolutionary hero was just another example of how pop, in its widest definition, can still help to inspire and sustain movements for change, and in turn transform the lives of those who channel the energies of social turmoil into sound,” writes Collin in the introduction. Although it is broader in scope than This is Serbia Calling, his new book is similarly focused on pivotal times when music became a force for change. “The six pieces of reportage that make up this book are about extraordinary moments – fleeting periods in recent history

when music became a soundtrack to social transformations,” writes Collin.

From Public Enemy to Pussy Riot via Berlin’s Love Parade and rappers in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, Collin has created another insightful book on music as a weapon. It’s in the personal stories witnessed firsthand by the empathetic Collin where the book shines. “It is not intended to be a comprehensive history of pop and politics over the past couple of decades, rather it is just what I managed to see with my own eyes,” he writes.

Just prior to the book’s release we catch up with Collin during one of his regular trips to Belgrade from his home in Georgia.

Could you tell me how you went from journalist with the style magazines to writing about the Balkans?

The first time I came to Belgrade was in 1996 for a story for The Face about the student protests against the Slobodan Miloševic regime. This was November 1996 and there were massive protests on the streets. When I got there I had one email address of some guy from this radio station B92.

Basically, B92 was providing an alternative source of information, both politically and musically, through those times. So I emailed this guy Gordan Paunovic and he turned out to be the music editor there, and I went over and stayed at his place. We became good friends and I kept going back to visit.

It became increasingly obvious that the story of this radio station was of a different kind of Serbia, and >

Matthew Collin, journalist and author of Pop Grenade

continue the activities that paved the way for the change of the regime.

The people really were great and I have kept those connections right up to this day, as I stand here talking to you overlooking the Danube.

How would you summarise the importance of what they did?

They showed that another way was possible. That a creative, liberal community of people could still exist amongst this nationalism and war mongering. They not only soothed the other troubled souls with their music and cultural activities, but also provided the information that was being blocked out by the state media system. And so they kept the lights on in the darkness.

Turkish band Replikas, Taksim Square, Istanbul, Turkey, 2013 Photograph Matthew Collin

a different kind of people from those you read about in the papers. These people were resolutely against this militaristic and nationalistic regime.

What were your impressions before you went there as a western journalist?

I’d been to Bosnia and Croatia before, just after the end of the war, so I knew some stuff, but not much about how it had affected people in Belgrade. And when I got there I just thought that this was such a fascinating story. It was not just about people who were trying to keep some spirit of humanity alive despite their horrific situation. It was also a wider story about young people using culture as a means of opposition to a repressive government.

When was The Face article published?

It must have been a couple of months after I got there in November 1996.

The article developed into a story about the protests and these incredible people I had met at this inspirational radio station. I’d gone there thinking this would be a wholly political story. I had to do a lot of convincing work with the editor to make The Face interested in such a story. But it turned out there was this incredible music and culture angle as well, which made it much more interesting, not just for the magazine but for me personally. And that developed into This is Serbia Calling.

What made those people so determined?

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Actually a lot of them had known the last years of peace in Yugoslavia in some ways as something of a golden time.

Unlike other people in the Soviet Bloc, they had passports that meant they could travel. Because of the loans the government was taking, the economy appeared on the surface to be healthy.

The people could travel to the coast in

‘WHAT KIND OF REGIME WOULD BOTHER WITH SOME GUY FROM A STYLE MAGAZINE?’ Croatia in the summer, they could go to London to buy records. So for them there was this remembered past of freedom and possibility. That was annihilated in the war years from 1991 to 1995, followed by an increasingly repressive government trying by any means possible to stay in power. So the people had this memory of a better way of life contrasting with the darkness of the present. I think that knowledge of a better past fuelled people’s abilities to maintain hope. And that helped them

How did your previous jobs prepare you for writing about the political issues in Serbia?

My first full time journalistic job was at i-D, so that doesn’t sound like the ideal preparation for a Balkan war zone.

I had been involved in some small way in political activism as a teenager though, and had always been interested in that. Then after leaving i-D I had worked at Time Out for three years and then moved to The Big Issue. We were doing a lot of investigative work with a really strong news team. So that side of my interests developed there.

It must have been a very tense time to be in Serbia. Were you scared?

No I really wasn’t. They had kicked out the BBC correspondent, but I guess I felt so small time working for The Face. What kind of regime would bother with some guy from a style magazine? I think I was so far below the radar that I was an insignificant threat.

Your next book, The Time Of the Rebels, focused on the youth resistance movements in the following decade.

When did the internet become an important tool for them?

The first time it was used as this wide resistance tool would have been during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004. It was used to spread information and mobilise people to demonstrate at certain locations. Now everyone is using the internet for everything, so it’s become something of a cliché to talk about it as a tool for activists, but then it really was new. Now of course, as we

CULTURE | Pop Grenade

Slough Centre rave, Berkshire, 1989 Photograph Gavin Watson B92 radio station, Belgrade, Serbia, 1992 Photograph Goran Basaric

see in this situation between Russia and Ukraine, it’s being used in widespread ways by governments to promote their ideas and subvert their opponents’ ideas.

When did you start writing the book?

Altered State had just been published in Russia and I was asked to go over there and do some interviews with journalists. I’d got the ticket and then the Orange Revolution breaks out, so I thought Kiev is not that far from Moscow, I’m going to change my ticket and go there as well. I heard they had been using some of the same techniques that had been used in Serbia, and that they also had some kind of connection to the Rose Revolution in Georgia. So I thought maybe there is some kind of pattern or connection here.

I just went there for a few days to take a look and I did find it pretty inspiring. Looking at the situation Ukraine is in today, that all seems very innocent and peaceful. As with a lot of these revolutions, you have these moments of hope and passion, and then afterwards the real difficulties begin again when you are struggling to recreate a society that’s been morally and financially destroyed from within.

What was the connection with the Serbia resistance movement?

Some of the leaders and tacticians of the Serbian resistance movement called Otpor went on to advise youth activists in other countries. So they advised people in Georgia before the revolution

there and then in the Ukraine. And that is where I found the connection that drew it all together.

Pop Grenade brings a lot of different stories together. When did the idea for it come about?

I guess I’d been doing it for a few years before realising. I started the idea of revisiting these pieces of reportage I had done before, which I thought had more to them. I started writing up the various stories but it wasn’t until 2003 that I saw the link that connected them all together. To me initially they were just disparate pieces of reportage.

Because I was travelling between Tbilisi and Belgrade a lot, I was always going via Istanbul and spending time there. So I’d developed a group of friends who were involved in music in Istanbul. Then you had the Taksim Square uprising, and I thought I should check it out. And again I was just totally inspired by what was going on there with this cultural angle as well as the political one. That’s when I saw the link between all these disparate pieces of reportage. They were all connected with achieving temporary or permanent cultural or political change. Now I had the focus for it all and started to revisit all these different stories.

The book shows the cultural and political impact of music as it crosses borders. Was that something that was important when putting it together?

I wasn’t consciously thinking about that, but certain connections and

inspirations did become clear in hindsight. For example, how these rappers who are involved in the Arab Spring uprisings were influenced in some second-hand or even third-hand way because they are so young, with the conscious rap from America in the late 1980s.

That brings us to your own trip to New York in 1988 and the Public Enemy chapter of the book.

This was one of my first trips as a journalist. When I started out I decided I would go to the places that the music I loved was from to find out more about it. I went to Chicago to find out about the roots of house music. And in the same way I went to New York just on my own accord. I had a DJ friend who was living there. So the idea was, I would write stories that I could sell to magazines.

Did you have a Public Enemy story come out of the New York trip?

Yes, I did it for a long deceased Scottish magazine called Cut that existed for two or three years. Of course when you just start out and you call important editors at the big magazines, they are not going to take your call. So you start out where you can. But from there I managed to get some little stories into i-D and it sort of developed from there.

New York in 1988 must have been quite a trip.

Anybody’s first visit to New York back then was always going to be this cliché > 151

Otpor activists, Slavija Square, Belgrade, Serbia, 2000 Photograph Igor Jeremic

of shock and awe at how the city looks, feels, smells and lives. I was no exception to that. I thought it was the most wonderful place I had ever been to in my life. I was staying with a friend on the Lower East Side and obviously the Manhattan that I experienced then doesn’t really exist any more. The waves of gentrification have crashed over the city sanitising all in their wake. It was a much more edgy and creative place back then, but also a lot grimmer and more risky.

Chuck D must have been a great interview for you just starting out?

Yeah, he enjoyed at that point taking on this combative and provocative role when communicating with white European journalists. It was as if he was kind of a preacher who was provoking you to rethink your attitudes, in the same way as he was doing in the music. So it was kind of like a performance in the way he was giving this non-musical drama to provoke you to think about issues that would then provoke your readers.

But he took the British music press incredibly seriously because it was so vital at the time. And in turn the British music press really championed Public Enemy. I think they were initially surprised that these white middle class intellectuals from Britain had embraced them in such a way. From our point of view we were looking for something that fulfilled our hope that there would be a music that had some political vitality, but was also musically adventurous. We felt this is what we had been waiting for to shock the world out of its torpor.

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Desert Storm Soundsystem, Mostar, Bosnia, 1996 Photograph Adrian Fisk

How did you end up writing about the Berlin Love Parade in 1992?

I had been to Berlin once before in 1986 and was totally convinced to go back by my Croatian photographer friend Vanya Balogh. He did a lot of reports for i-D when I was editor there.

One day he burst into the office waving these photos of all these freaks wearing gas masks, and other various pieces of industrial cast off clothing, and said he had seen the future. He said that we not only had to go there but also we had to run our own float at this Love Parade.

So somehow we made this happen, and rented this little flat-bed truck and stuck some speakers on it and away we went.

What was the Love Parade like then?

When I talk about the Love Parade now people tend to think of the classic image of the 800,000 people, wearing fluorescent clothing and firing water pistols as they hang from lampposts.

But when I first went it wasn’t like that at all. It was still a descendent of the Berlin scene before the fall of the wall, very much a part of that counter cultural scene. It had that feeling of being very raw and slightly ramshackle, with a genuine bunch of freaks. And of course it was much smaller. But we thought it was massive and couldn’t believe that you could get 15,000 in the street dancing to techno.

The fall of the wall and the rise of Berlin techno is such a wonderful, dramatic and in some senses romantic story. So in the new book I really wanted to look at the Love Parade in hindsight. It started in the hope for a better future and ended in some

dismal industrial estate in the Ruhr with people getting killed in a stampede. That forever tainted its memory. But it did play a vital role in what appears to have become a suitable alternative culture in Berlin that still attracts people to move there.

How did you get to follow the UK free party scene of the 1990s and the people behind Desert Storm?

Because I’m from Nottingham, I knew the DIY Sound System, who were essentially house people rather than techno. But they were involved in these massive free parties in the early 1990s like Castlemorton and all that. And I actually did a story about them in I think it was 1991. It was about them and Tonka sound system. I knew about that scene then but got more interested in it when I was doing the research for Altered State and was interviewing people like Spiral Tribe. Through them I heard about this sound system called Desert Storm that at the time was based between Nottingham and Glasgow. I heard they had done these trips to Bosnia and I just thought this was really interesting.

And it was around the same time that the British house scene was becoming very commercialised?

Yes it had started to turn into this super club scene. It was increasingly about aspirational wealth and super star DJs getting huge amounts of money, and spending it on cocaine.

I know it’s a cliché, but acid house really did change my life. It gave me the opportunity be a journalist. I felt this whole super club thing was tawdry

CULTURE | Pop Grenade

Love Parade, Berlin, 1992 Photograph Wolfgang Tillmans

and grotesque and it wasn’t what I thought the original acid house spirit was all about. I actually believed in it so much and now felt betrayed by it. That is how I was feeling at the time.

And at the same time I got more interested in the politics of the culture as well. I thought, this Desert Storm sounds interesting, I’ll go and take a trip with them. So off I went with them to France.

What made you so interested in their lifestyle?

I was just fascinated by this group of people who had taken this choice to live a full time existence of selfimposed poverty in a way. It was like they had taken some vows or something to commit themselves to this mission of going beyond the borders in any way possible. They were adventurous free spirits and that was the kind of people I was interested in.

The book also focuses on the flipside and how the government in Georgia was using music as a weapon, with a Boney M gig...

In 2006, I moved to Tbilisi to be the BBC correspondent in the Caucasus region. And that was just as things had started to hot up there. I didn’t realise at the time I moved there, but this was the beginning of a kind of

two-year build up to war with Russia in 2008. So you had a government who was starting to stamp its mark on society in every sphere of life, be it the law or education, the police force, and of course culture. They were using music as one of their political weapons in the flipside of that Fela quote.

And this Boney M thing seemed

‘IT FELT VERY RAW AND SLIGHTLY RAMSHACKLE, A GENUINE BUNCH OF FREAKS’ to symbolise the whole bizarre, extravagant insanity of what was going on in the build up to war. So yeah, a Boney M gig on the frontline, why not?

What is your proudest achievement either as a writer or editor?

I feel absolutely blessed to have been part of some great teams of journalists,

photographers and designers who’ve managed to do something special that had real cultural and political significance at the time. From working at i-D we managed to cover things like the Love Parade or the start of the renegade sound system thing – so to be part of that was fantastic.

Then at The Big Issue, we were doing some fantastic campaign reporting with journalists who’ve gone on to do amazing things since.

And of course at the BBC – it’s an absolute privilege to work there. Now I work for a company called the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, which is why I am here in Belgrade today. It’s the biggest independent media network in the Balkans. In a time when here again the horizons for independent journalism are narrowing, and governments are becoming more overbearing and trying to bend media to their advantage, I feel proud to be part of a small group of journalists who are trying to resist that. Again it’s about enabling alternative voices to be heard.

Pop Grenade. From Public Enemy to Pussy Riot: Dispatches from the Musical Frontlines by Matthew Collin is out now zero-books.net 153

STYLE

Jamaal wears shirt and trousers

by Caruso; shoes by Bass.

Momma Don’t Allow Photographs Nicky Emmerson Styling Richard Simpson Grooming Oliver Daw at Frank Agency for Blow to Go Photographic Assistant Chris Kennedy Hepcats Jamaal Evans and Jack Oliver Saunders

Jamaal Evans is a 28-year-old aspiring actor from north London. The son of Mike Evans, bassist in 1960s mod band The Action, entertaining seems to be in the blood. Starting as an extra, Evans has already built up a reputable CV ranging across advertising, theatre and film, even working as the body double for Tom Hiddleston’s Loki in the action film Thor. castingcallpro.com/uk/actor/profile/jamaal-evans Jack Oliver Saunders, 22, from Essex, is a presenter on rock radio station Kerrang. You can catch his show every Sunday morning. He also runs his own club night, Hop/Scotch at the Social in London. jackoliversaunders.uk facebook.com/ukhopscotch

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Jack wears sweater and trousers by Agnès B; shoes by The Kooples; bracelet by Bunney; socks by Falke.

Jamaal wears sweater and trousers by Canali; shoes by Bass.

Jack wears coat by Paul Smith; suit, shirt and tie by Caruso; hat by Borsalino for Lock&Co.

STYLE | Momma Don’t Allow

Jack wears jacket

by Folk; trousers

by Cos; shirt, stylist’s own.

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STYLE | Momma Don’t Allow

Jamaal wears jacket and shirt, stylist’s own; trousers by Paul Smith; shoes by Bass; socks by Falke.

Jamaal wears T-shirt

by Folk; trousers

by Caruso; shoes

by Bass; braces, stylist’s own; socks

by Falke.

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STYLE | Momma Don’t Allow

Jamaal wears sweater by Folk; trousers

by Vivienne Westwood Man; belt by Paul Smith. Jack wears jacket by APC.; trousers by Folk; sweater by Agnès B; belt by Paul Smith.

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Jamaal wears shirt by Agnès B; trousers by Andrea Pompilio; shoes

by Bass; socks by Falke.

SPOTLIGHT

Steel Pan Festival of Britain. Sterling Betancourt. Trinidad.

Words Mark Webster Photographs Kevin Davies

“I can remember as a teenager being very grumpy at being dragged along behind steel bands on a drizzly bank holiday,” recalls journalist and author Lloyd Bradley, as we sit in a bar on Portobello Road not far from this childhood scene. “It was a taste of the Caribbean which, of course, I didn’t understand, and couldn’t care less about.

I was a Londoner by birth.”

These days, the steel pan is an established part of British culture, celebrating half a century of life on the streets of west London.

“Tell a teenager to walk when he can hang around on a street corner?” continues Bradley. “This was the 1970s.

The era of the sound system. We were forging our own way. Building our own black London culture. The steel pan was part of the older generation.

“But of course I now know it was important. It was a metaphor, nothing else could do that. And not as a historic symbol. It is contemporary. I now see the total value of it.”

The significance of this surprisingly youthful instrument – one of barely a few acoustic inventions of the 20th century – is spelled out in a chapter of Bradley’s vibrant and informative book, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital. He also expresses a somewhat thrilled surprise that the pan also happened to start out life on the wrong side of the tracks.

It was invented in Trinidad in the 1930s on the poor, eastern side of the island’s capital, Port of Spain, and

essentially replaced the tamboo bamboo percussive instruments that the colonial governors had seen fit to try and ban.

So, naturally, the locals began to improvise. “And it was so simple, really,” says ‘captain’ of the west London-based Nostalgia Steel Band, Lionel McCalman, who is sitting with Bradley and I in the bar at First Floor Restaurant – formerly known as the Colville Hotel, which, in the 1950s, became one of the popular hotbeds for West Indians to hear steel pan music. McCalman continues, “One guy had got a little tin drum and was hitting it with his hand to get a ‘boom boom’ sound. Then he handed it to someone else who started hitting it, shall we say, more enthusiastically. And he soon handed it back to the other guy, when he told him the sound had gone. He’d been hitting it so hard. So he got a stone to knock it back where he’d been hitting it, and he got two sounds. Hey, hey! A tune! It was born. And the first melody that got played on a steel pan – ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’.”

That inoffensive nursery rhyme may well have been somewhat at odds with the often-aggressive way the emerging bands competed with each other. This was why, in part at least, steel pan music didn’t chime with Trinidad’s traditional sound – the more up town and widely exported calypso.

It would be a long time before the two would become intertwined on the island – helped initially by calypso legend Lord Kitchener.

After the war, as people from the Caribbean began to travel the ocean to make their homes in Britain, so a few steel pan players also made the journey with their instruments. However, it was in July 1951, on the South Bank of the Thames at the excitingly new Royal Festival Hall, that the steel pan’s fate as a musical symbol of the Caribbean was sealed. “It was the Festival of Britain,” explains McCalman, “and it was a very big event, presenting itself to the whole world. And they put together a team of what were considered the best pan musicians of the day, known as the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (TASPO).

And don’t forget, the pan only started 10 years or so before, so you can see the progress that had been made. And they blew the roof off. These guys didn’t take any prisoners. But the reason for that is, don’t forget, the genre didn’t come out of university; it wasn’t a middle class thing. It was the music of the working people. Their initiative, their ingenuity, that pushed it.

“And Sterling tells the story that people were looking under the pans to see if there was any recording equipment making the music. They thought there had to be speakers there.

That was truly the birthplace of what became a global music phenomenon.”

Sterling is Sterling Betancourt MBE, a living legend in the steel pan world. He was one of the earliest men to make the permanent journey to the UK from the wrong side of the tracks >

Grafton Yearwood, pan tuner, in his east London workshop grafton_yearwood@outlook.com

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Lloyd Bradley, author of Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital.

Location First Floor Restaurant, 186 Portobello Road, London W11 firstfloorportobello.co.uk

in Trinidad and give this island its first resident steel drum. It was Betancourt who formed the Nostalgia Steel Band in 1954 (he retired from the band in 2004), but he was also smart enough to convince virtuoso player Russell Henderson to form a smaller group with him. Taking Henderson’s name for the band, they became recording artists, had a residency in Carnaby Street, and even doubled up playing as a jazz ensemble around London’s West End. And if you happen to see an old episode of The Saint or Danger Man – or James Bond’s Caribbean adventure in the 1962 film Dr No – and you see some steel pan playing, that’s Sterling Betancourt and the boys.

Having been introduced to the world at such a highbrow event, it is perhaps not surprising that the steel drum, as well as giving newly arrived West Indians a little taste of home, 164

Soundproof tuning room, Grafton Yearwood’s workshop

would retain that ritzy profile it established by the Thames. “In the 1950s,” points out Bradley, “ska didn’t

‘A KID GOES UP AND HITS IT. IT MAKES A NOTE. NEXT, THERE’S A BIG QUEUE OF KIDS’ exist. Reggae didn’t exist. The pan and calypso was it. So if you were having a debutante ball or an upscale party,

you wanted to conjure up the Caribbean. And that was by then a luxury tourist destination – so they were also trying to recreate their holidays. They did that by having a steel band walking through in their striped pants and straw hats that looked like they’d been nibbled by a donkey.

“Of course these same guys would then go and put on a suit or a tux and go and play jazz in a nightclub, or on a Sunday lunchtime right here.”

But it was when steel pan was taken to the streets of 1960s west London that it became truly recognisable to all – and in the truly authentic way, with a strap around the neck worn by the player.

That the Notting Hill Carnival is an internationally renowned event and has been for nearly 50 years is not in doubt. However, quite which of the community of pan players is responsible >

SPOTLIGHT | Steel Pan

Kirk Delano Thorne, musician, at his studio in Maidstone, Kent nicemusiccorporation.com

Lionel McCalman, steel pan drummer and member of the Nostalgia Steel Band

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SPOTLIGHT | Steel Pan

Kimani van der Maten, student and member of the Nostalgia Steel Band

for it starting, and how they did it, seems to not only be clouded in mystery, but also no nearer to being explained than it ever was.

Or as Bradley puts it, “If you ask six different people, you’ll get half a dozen explanations.” However, he does tell the popular tale of how the aforementioned Sterling Betancourt, with Russell Henderson, “came together to play a kid’s party just up the end of the road from here. And they were playing pan-around-the-neck, as you should, and the kids were enjoying themselves when it was decided it would be a good idea to give them a little taste of the Caribbean, and take them on a road march.

“So they all went down to Ladbroke Grove on this march – ended up over at Queensway, and back around Westbourne Park. Longer than any Carnival route. So a lot of the local West Indian community saw what was happening, came out and joined in. It ended up as a huge session.

People banging bottles and cans and just joining in. And people enjoyed it so much they said let’s do it again next year.”

“But,” says McCalman, who has most certainly heard this story before, 166

“that’s why the whole notion of who started Carnival should not be entertained. OK, that happened, but then... The fact is, they all started it. They were all part and parcel.”

Bradley nods in agreement at this, and adds, “The important thing here is not the who, anyway. The important thing is that what was actually at the centre of it all was the steel pan.”

EACH DRUM HAS SOMETHING OF THE STRADIVARIUS ABOUT IT Of the actual steel pan, its manufacture – even in the relatively short life it has had as an instrument – has become an art form in itself.

‘Tuners’, as they are called, can actually be numbered in the few hundreds around the world, so each drum has

something of the Stradivarius about it. “I couldn’t do it,” gasps McCalman at the thought. “It is a remarkable skill.

I could watch someone like Grafton working on one for hours, in awe.”

Grafton Yearwood is one of only a handful of tuners in London. He learned his trade from his late father Ezekiel, who arrived in the capital in the 1960s from St Vincent to work for Ford Dagenham, but soon decided to try his hand at making drums and help sate the burgeoning demand for them from West Indian communities across the country.

Since those times, with orchestras and competitions a familiar sight in many cities, and steel drums a pretty regular feature within schools (as Bradley says, “A kid goes up, hits it. It makes a note. Next, there’s a big queue of kids”), what may once have been an exclusively Caribbean caucus of players is now an all-embracing steel pan community. McCalman’s own Nostalgia Steel Band reflects perfectly how the instrument draws in people of all ages and backgrounds. It made them the ideal choice to represent the music at the London Olympics opening ceremony in 2012. And just as it was when Betancourt, Henderson and the

Nostalgia Steel Band, Maxilla Hall Social Club, 2 Maxilla Walk, London W10

rest were introducing pan music to a new audience, the music too is more than just an echo of calypso.

Just as an example, a sixth former from Trinidad and Tobago by the name of Keishaun Julien is a prolific YouTuber – playing hits by the likes of Bruno Mars, Adele, Ne-Yo and Whitney Houston on his pan, mainly from his parents’ front room.

The instrument, too, is frequently used outside of its natural environment.

Hamburg funk ensemble the Mighty Mocambos – whose work has included collaborations with the likes of Afrika Bambaataa and Kenny Dope – recently introduced what they refer to as their ‘alter ego’ to their repertoire, the steel drum-led Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band.

Last year, a cover version of Fifty Cent’s ‘P.I.M.P.’ led to an album deal with Brooklyn label Truth & Soul, and an album, 55, is due out this year.

What’s more, if you happened to be at the Brixton Academy a few years ago for a concert by synth-poppers La Roux, you’d have seen Lionel

McCalman’s son and the Nostalgia Steel Band member Kimani playing in a pan trio on the song ‘I’m Not Your Toy’.

Then there is Kirk Delano Thorne, who is very much a product of steel pan’s development in the UK, and as such is the new generation of what came over half a century before. Thorne is a multi-instrumentalist to start with, and can often be seen playing steel pan with a guitar strapped around his neck.

He played with Washington’s go-go music-inspired outfit DC All Stars in the 1980s, while he works now with jazz and soul duo Perfect Union with pianist Trevor Gregory. He also runs his own Panache Steel Band, which can be a trio, playing traditional calypsos and bossa novas at weddings, or a more carnival-style sextet. As Thorne himself puts it on the band’s website, “We have been known to cover every style of music, but did fall short of a request for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.”

So be it marching through the streets, or at a debutante’s ball, whether it’s beating out a version of Lord

Kitchener’s groundbreaking calypso song of 1946, ‘Yes, I Heard the Beat Of a Steel Pan’, or a hit by Queen (but not that one), it would seem that the steel pan is, to paraphrase Bradley, at once “historic”, “contemporary” and “a metaphor”, all in one drum.

Nostalgia Steel Band perform at the Notting Hill Carnival in August and the Shanghai Tourism Festival in September nostalgiasteelband.co.uk en.tourfest.org Lloyd Bradley hosts a series of film screenings, talks and live music focused on historic and contemporary British black music at the Russet, 17 Amhurst Terrace, London E8 at the end of July soundslikelondon.co.uk eatworkart.com/the-russet Kirk Delano Thorne’s band the Perfect Union release their debut album Hitting the Road in June theperfectunion.co.uk

Takeo Kikuchi Photograph Marcus Argerman Ross Rudies Harris Elliott and Barry Kamen

Although many Japanese fashion designers have become household names around the world, Takeo Kikuchi – who celebrates 30 years in the business this year – has chosen to remain, resolutely, a star only in his own country. The 100-plus stores in Japan are testament not only to the scale of his business but also its popularity.

However, the royal crown and stags that make up his logo are a clear indication of the western influences on his clothing, so it is rather a mystery that he has chosen not to bring his label to the broader masses. In fact, Kikuchi the man is a sworn Anglophile; so much so that he is credited as the person who 168

first brought Ray Petri (and his Buffalo collective) to Tokyo in the early 1980s.

He even asked Petri to style his debut collection when he began designing under his own name in 1985. He also brought other young talents over from the UK, including filmmakers John Maybury and Baillie Walsh.

Since the first days of his brand, Kikuchi has kept a close relationship with Barry Kamen, who was a key member of the Buffalo crew. Kamen was tasked with bringing an external pair of eyes to Kikuchi’s landmark 30th anniversary collection, as well as creating a capsule collection in collaboration with fashion store United Arrows&Sons.

Alongside Kamen, Londoner Harris Elliott was asked to style the catwalk show. Elliott’s ‘Return of the Rudeboy’ project, which he created with photographer Dean Chalkley, documents how the style, attitude and sentiment of the rudeboy culture has been adopted by certain factions of contemporary Britain. After successfully exhibiting at the prestigious Somerset House in London last year, the exhibition transferred to Tokyo earlier this year, where it was sponsored by both Takeo Kikuchi and United Arrows&Sons. store.world.co.jp/s/takeokikuchi unitedarrowsandsons.jp

BULLETIN Barry Kamen is a London-based multimedia artist and stylist. He has worked with Kikuchi on several occasions, including collaborating on the 30th anniversary collection barrykamen.com Harris Elliott is a London-based stylist and art director. Elliott styled Kikuchi’s 30th anniversary catwalk show in Tokyo in March.

He is styling the Julius menswear show at Paris Fashion Week in June harriselliott.com All clothes from the Takeo Kikuchi 30th anniversary collection

MUSIC

Brian Auger The Flamingo. Oblivion Express. Acid Jazz. Steampacket.

Words Andy Thomas Portrait Tim Hans Photographs courtesy of Brian Auger

In the late 1980s the British Hammond organ maestro Brian Auger became the ‘Godfather of Acid Jazz’ for a new generation of modernists inspired by the past. His late 1960s and early 1970s albums with his bands Brian Auger & the Trinity (including his LPs with singer Julie Driscoll) and Oblivion Express spawned club tracks such as ‘Indian Rope Man’ and ‘Whenever You’re Ready’. “Oblivion Express were the band that invented the acid jazz sound, that uniquely British movement that came to prominence some 25 years after this album was recorded,” wrote Eddie Piller, founder of the Acid Jazz record label, in the sleeve notes to the reissue of the 1973 LP Closer To It!.

First becoming aware of the Hammond player through Auger’s mod connections in 1960s Soho, Piller called him “a real musical hero who helped establish the Hammond organ as the weapon of choice for a whole host of British jazz players”.

Greg Boraman (ex A&R man at Acid Jazz) was one of those Hammond players to have been influenced by Auger. As well as playing for the Soul Destroyers and the

Fantastics!, Boraman now runs Freestyle Records. Since its birth in 2003, the London label has been spearheading the new wave of deep funk, soul, Latin and jazz, and can be seen as the natural successor to Acid Jazz. And it has now released the first serious Brian Auger anthology to celebrate the many sides of his 50 years in music. Alongside those pivotal Hammond recordings from the mod and fusion years, Back to the Beginning also shines a light on his lesser-known jazz trio recordings from the early 1960s, as well as those from the mod blues band Steampacket (featuring Rod Stewart, Long John Baldry and Julie Driscoll).

The second part of this revival arrives later in the year, in the form of a live LP with Oblivion Express, featuring Auger’s son Karma on drums and original singer Alex Ligertwood.

The session was recorded in 2013 in LA, where Auger has lived since the 1980s. And nearly half a century since he first picked up the Hammond B3 after hearing Jimmy Smith’s Back at the Chicken Shack LP, Brian Auger sounds as fiery and funky as ever. As he

prepares to bring Oblivion Express to Europe for a series of gigs in the autumn, we catch up with him at his home in LA. You were born in London in 1939.

Where were you brought up?

I lived in Latimer Road in north Kensington until 1944, just before my fifth birthday, when we were bombed out. A V-1 bomb dropped on a row of houses behind ours. My mum heard this thing and threw me under the table in the living room, and the whole place came down around us. Fortunately for us, although the house was totally destroyed, we were all unscathed.

Was it a musical household?

Yes, there was music in the house all the time – my mum and dad really liked light operatic stuff. My dad was a very Victorian guy and he had a player piano [self-playing piano] and a whole cupboard of these piano rolls – an amazing collection, with all the operas, some overtures and lots of ragtime, which I loved. From the age of about three, I was totally in love with this >

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rent a bus and go with all their friends down to Southend to see the illuminations. But it was really a good excuse for all the guys to go on a pub crawl. And they would take me along to play the piano and pass the hat around for me – so that was pretty amazing.

JulIe Driscoll and Brian Auger, Brussels, 1968

thing and learned how to put the piano roll in. It was driven by air and there was a pair of pedals and I used to be able to stand on the pedals, hang on the underneath of the keyboard and pedal away. I was just totally fascinated – and that was it for me.

You had an older brother who had a big jazz collection.

First of all my two older sisters were totally in love with Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. But yes, my eldest brother had the most influence on me because he had a collection of American jazz records. So I was listening to Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Benny Goodman, and all these people. So that was the whole mix of stuff I grew up around until we were bombed out. Then I was evacuated away with my sister for two years to Batley [in Yorkshire].

Fortunately for me, the household had a proper piano. I learned to play ‘In the Mood’ by Glenn Miller and they would invite the neighbours in and I would go through my party piece.

What was it like when you moved back to London?

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When I got back they moved us to Shepherd’s Bush. We had been away for more than two years and it was very strange for me. I knew my dad was my dad but I was so young I wasn’t sure about the rest of it. But I went into the front room and there was the piano.

So all of a sudden I was like, yeah I’m home. And then I would listen to more of the jazz records my brother had got.

I was about seven now.

When did you start mimicking the jazz you were hearing?

It was one of those things that dawned on me when I would be wandering around whistling to myself. After a while I realised I was whistling over a 12-bar blues. At the time a musician was an absolute non-profession, so there was no effort to send me to piano lessons or anything like that. I was just left on my own. I picked things up off the radio and started to get it all together by ear. And then I heard some boogie-woogie on the radio. Winifred Atwell was one of the great boogiewoogie players and so I started to play boogie-woogie whenever I got near a piano. People used to love that stuff at parties. At the time everyone would

Were there any particular radio stations where you heard all the jazz?

My brother had this huge radio – I think it was a Ferguson. It had a big knob that you could turn to catch all the different stations. And he gave me this when I was about 10.

So I rigged up an antenna and hung it out of my bedroom window. I used to wait until my parents had gone to sleep and I’d be dialling around. Then all of a sudden I heard this voice say, “This is the American Forces Radio in Germany – we present Jazz Hour.” And the Stan Kenton Orchestra came and on and blew me away. And I used to bombard my local record shop WG Stores in Shepherd’s Bush Market and ask them if they had this stuff. I actually asked them for two years for Oscar Peterson’s ‘Tenderly’ and they eventually found a 78 for me.

When did you get a band together?

I got a scholarship to go to a grammar school. The first thing I spotted was this piano on the stage. It was a beautiful Bechstein piano and it sounded incredible. I was itching to get my hands on it but couldn’t figure how to do that. But then I waited one day until everyone had gone home and I leapt onto the stage and started playing ‘Cross Hands Boogie’ by Winifred Atwell. It sounded absolutely amazing on this piano but around the corner came my headmaster. He was this really old guy from the Empire and he had this insane voice that started in a falsetto and came down. So he said, “What kind of devil music is that?” I replied, “It is called boogie woogie sir.”

Anyway the school would have a Friday solo given by a violin player or something and amazingly he invited me to play. So I let forth with ‘Cross Hands Boogie’ and instead of the usual shuffling around there was like a football roar at the end of it. And so I got to play regularly on Fridays.

Then I started to hear all the Blue Note and in particular the hard bop of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. And I got myself into a band and we played

MUSIC | Brian Auger at pubs and clubs doing all the Jazz Messengers stuff.

There was this club in Southall called the Octave, and the Green Man in south London – all over the place in fact. This was a quintet with vibes, alto, piano, bass and drums, called the Dave Morse Quintet. Playing that material sorted out a lot of harmony for me.

And you also had a trio that played the clubs of Soho.

The original jazz piano trio, which I named the Brian Auger Trinity, was myself, Rick Laird on upright bass, and Phil Kinorra on drums. We played with most of the guys on the scene – so Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott, and then at the Flamingo with all sorts of people.

They would call me and say they wanted a piano trio to open for someone or other.

How was it playing at Soho clubs such as Ronnie Scott’s and the Flamingo?

Soho was incredible back then. And to actually play there was amazing because it was like, wow, I’m playing in the West End. But the Flamingo was particularly special.

The Flamingo became known as one of the hubs of the mod scene. When did you become aware of the scene and how connected did you feel to it?

In the beginning it wasn’t known as mod or anything, but I was really into the Ivy League look of the hip jazz players from New York. There was one place in Shaftesbury Avenue – Cecil Gee – and they would import these clothes. Or we could get a suit made that would copy that. So these were the clothes I used to play in.

Obviously the Hammond organ changed everything for you. When did you first hear Jimmy Smith?

I was wandering past my local record shop one day and I heard this sound.

And I thought, oh my god what is that?

The only other organ I heard was the theatre one up in Blackpool Tower, and in the break at the movies when this big Wurlitzer would come up and play ‘The Dam Busters March’ or something. The sounds of these organs were so foreign to playing jazz. So when I first heard Jimmy Smith I really couldn’t figure out what this was. When I discovered that it was a Hammond organ he was playing I went, oh my goodness.

When did you first play it?

The people at the Flamingo decided to lease the weekends to a couple of guys called Rik and Johnny Gunnell.

These guys started putting on bands like Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames, Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band, The Chessmen, Graham Bond and Chris Farlowe. So it was tons of these R&B bands. I got a call one day from Rik and he says, “Brian, you got to help me out, Georgie went down to Cornwall over the weekend and fell asleep on the beach and he’s got sunburn. He had to be taken to hospital.”

So Rik told me to be at the Roaring Twenties in Soho at 8pm. When I got there and the guys were putting everything together, I said, “There’s no piano, where’s the piano?” And they said, “That’s Georgie’s organ over there, you’re playing that.” I looked at the Hammond with all these switches, knobs and dials and thought, don’t

‘WHAT KIND OF DEVIL MUSIC IS THAT? IT’S CALLED BOOGIE WOOGIE SIR’ panic, just try and make it sound as close to Jimmy Smith as you can. So that’s what I did. I remember coming off the stage dripping in sweat, and one of the regular guys came up and said, “I didn’t know you played organ Brian, how long you been playing organ?”

And I said, “Well, about 45 minutes.”

So that was my introduction to the Hammond. And then I bought my own Hammond B3 and that changed the whole direction of everything for me.

So it was through the organ that you really connected with the R&B and rock scene?

There was so much jamming going on in the 1960s that I completely changed my outlook. I was originally one of those jazz snobs who looked down on the burgeoning rock society. I used to

think it was three or four chords and that was about it. But when I actually got into playing the real blues with people like Clapton and Jeff Beck, I saw things differently. This wasn’t the place to unleash every lick you know – it’s a feel and if you don’t play the feel right, it doesn’t work. So it taught me a big lesson and I began to look at all the amazing creative bands that were coming out and I quickly got over my jazz snobbism.

And this led to you joining the Steampacket?

Yes that was 1965 with Long John Baldry, an unknown Rod Stewart and Julie Driscoll, with Micky Waller, Ricky Brown and Vic Briggs. We ran that band for two years and we were covering so much material, including Jimmy Smith and my own compositions. Julie would sing some Tamla Motown or Nina Simone, Rod would come on and do Chicago blues, and then John would do some gospel stuff. It was really a great success, and if it wasn’t for the fact that we all had different managers arguing for two years, we might have gone in a whole other direction. But it broke up sadly.

The Steampacket were known as a mod band, right?

Well yes, but towards the end the whole thing changed from Ivy League to the Chelsea Antiques Market look.

All the old secondhand stuff became really popular.

That was very much the look of the later period of the Trinity. What was the thinking behind the new band?

Because I’d been playing across this huge spectrum of music, I had a good idea that I wanted my own band to reflect all these different feels. I knew what I wanted and that was a funk rhythm section, overlaid by what I was doing with jazz, and then a guitar player who could do both jazz and rock. These were difficult people to find at the time. I guess I wanted a drummer like Bernard Purdie and a bass player like James Jamerson, if I could find them, and a singer with a lot of soul. And that turned out to be Julie Driscoll.

How did you come across Julie?

We had the same manager and I was called in to do some sessions with her. > 173

the strings and just experimenting. You couldn’t buy this kind of equipment, but the British are really good at coming up with something out of the shed at the bottom of the garden. And our engineer Eddy Offord was only 18, but he made this great big shoebox-sized thing with a great big knob on the front of the needle. He said, listen to this. And played the phaser on the strings and turned the knob and I went, oh my god – keep that in. So there were all these things popping up not only with fashion and bands, but also all the studio guys who were helping us achieve what we were looking for.

When did you first go to America?

We first went out with the Trinity and Julie in 1969 and did a tour there.

It went quite well considering the band was falling to pieces at that time.

The reason was the management really drove Julie too hard. It caused terrible repercussions. But the tour had some great moments – at the Fillmore East we got two encores. The only person to have got two encores before was my good buddy Jimi Hendrix.

Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express, London, 1971

And when I heard her I just thought, wow. And when I talked to her about the singers and bands she liked I thought, here’s a find. So when I heard she was interested in joining the Trinity I was really happy. And it then took off right away. After the Open album it really moved up a gear, particularly in Europe. And we ended up headlining the Berlin Jazz Festival, the purest of all the jazz festivals.

What was that like?

That was amazing really. It was like the boundaries breaking down right in front of you. I remember looking down into the audience at the Philharmonic Hall and there were all these kids there. So it cut across everything. I did wonder how it would go though. Because I had lime green crushed velvet trousers on and all this stuff from Chelsea Antiques Market, and about 50 people in the crowd started to boo. I wasn’t having any of that so I told them, “Hey, maybe you don’t like what I wear, but until you hear what I play you have no right to boo.” Then there was loads of cheering and we did our set and people loved it.

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Where did the psychedelic influence come from?

It all came around Haight-Ashbury time in San Francisco and the Monterey Jazz Festival and Woodstock,

‘THE ONLY OTHER ORGAN I HEARD WAS THE THEATRE ONE UP IN BLACKPOOL TOWER’ so we’d seen and heard all the stuff like that. When I recorded ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’, for example, I tried to aim the production to give it a kind of psychedelic sound – using a phaser on

Can you tell me how Hendrix came to play with the band in London?

I got a phone call one night in 1966 and it was Chas Chandler from the Animals and his manager. Just prior to this I had put the Trinity together and I knew exactly where I wanted to go with it. Anyway they said they’d brought this guy over from America who was a fantastic guitar player and they wanted him to front the band.

What was I supposed to do, I had Julie and the whole band together and they were offering me this guitar player I had never heard before. I told them I wasn’t interested. I suggested they bring him down to the Cromwellian on Friday. That was a late club where all the bands would play.

I knew that anyone who’s anyone would be there and said he could sit in with the band. So the time came and at the break they brought Jimi up and introduced me. He played this sequence of chords to me that turned out to be ‘Hey Joe’. In the audience were Clapton, Beck, Alvin Lee, everyone was there that night. Anyway he came on and he started to play. I did a double take because even though I really admired all the British blues players, you could still hear the sources. In Jimi

MUSIC | Brian Auger it was something else and such a unique voice. I thought, where has this guy come from? So then we became friends and he’d come down to where we playing, so maybe Blaises and the Bag O’Nails, and would sit in with us. And we would hang out at Zoot Money’s house at Barons Court and we’d listen to all the new records all night. It was like a meeting of everyone.

Did Jimi influence you?

I liked the things he did because he exposed me to the really exciting things you can do with an instrument. But my soloing really came from all the saxophone players that I had listened to.

So it was the hard bop blues-edged sax thing. Of the pianists, Oscar Peterson was an influence as well as Victor Feldman, who was a fantastic player.

But when it came to the Hammond, that really needed a different technique.

If you play it like a piano, that is what it will sound like. So it was like travelling backwards in some way, because I had to give up some of my technique in certain areas to make the instrument speak the way I wanted it to.

How did Oblivion Express come about?

With the Trinity, we had all this success that bordered into the pop thing. Julie was being chased by the paparazzi, which was OK for about six months and then it got really too much. So I thought, to hell with it, I’m going to form a new band and I want to press on with this idea of rock, jazz, classical and everything.

I had all this energy to push forward so I got the first Oblivion Express together. I had Barry Dean on bass, Robbie McIntosh on drums, Jim Mullen on guitar, and Alex Ligertwood on vocals. The idea was to roll on and push the envelope forward, but the record company didn’t want that at all. They wanted me to keep doing the same winning formula we had with the Trinity. So I thought maybe I’m pushing against the commercial tide here and maybe I’m going to oblivion – so to hell with it, I’ll call it the Oblivion Express. And the funny thing is, it’s still called that after all these years.

When did you find out Closer To It! had become such a big influence on the acid jazz scene of the 1980s?

I was kind of shocked because I heard

Brian Auger Trinity, London, circa 1963 Photograph Lewis Morley

that people were having these big parties and imbibing certain substances and having a great time dancing to my music. And they were calling it acid jazz. Then some of these bands who were playing at these parties were saying, “Brian Auger – he is the ‘Godfather of Acid Jazz’.” And this kind of carried on. Then, when I found out there was a label called Acid Jazz, I finally met up with Eddie Piller and he said, “Don’t you realise the template for Acid Jazz was the Closer To It! album?”

And I went to some of these parties and they were playing stuff off the Trinity Streetnoise album like ‘Indian Rope Man’ and ‘Listen Here’, the Eddie Harris number from the Befour album, and everyone was boogying away to it.

How did you feel when you heard it connect with the new young audience?

Absolutely great. That is the whole point in this, to bring the new generations through.

And the Oblivion Express that you are about to bring to Europe now includes your son Karma on drums.

I first played with him in 1990 in a band with Eric Burdon. He was hired as a roadie but meanwhile he was playing drums. There were always board tapes of the concerts we did.

And he would take them away and go into his room and play to them. One afternoon Eric came around and Karma was upstairs playing drums. And Eric said, “Who the hell is that?” I told him it was Karma. Three days before we were about to go, the drummer quit.

So I suggested we bring in Karma. And that was it, he’s been playing drums with me ever since. Karma has not only become a phenomenal drummer that everyone loves, he’s also become a tremendous producer and engineer.

He helps me a great deal, and I think at this particular stage in my life, if Karma wasn’t around I don’t think I’d have a band. It would all be too much.

A compilation album Back to the Beginning: The Brian Auger Anthology is out in July Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express: Live in Los Angeles is out in September freestylerecords.co.uk 175

Top by Cos.

Shirt and trousers by Hien Le.

STYLE

Suit by Tiger of Sweden; sweater by Hien Le.

Sean Haefeli

Photographs Dennis Schoenberg Styling Lorena Maza Styling Assistants Nauva Nauva and Elisa Restrepo Locations Diener Tattersall, Grolmanstrasse 47, Berlin diener-berlin.de and Paris Bar, Kantstrasse 152, Berlin parisbar.net Sean Haefeli, 38, from Chicago, is a pianist, vocalist and composer. His music incorporates elements of soul and jazz with hip-hop and spoken word. Now based in Berlin, he has released three self-produced albums – the most recent, Rise, came out in 2012. His fourth album is in production, with plans to come out at the end of the year. He is performing as part of the Poetry International festival at the Southbank Centre in London, which takes place from 23 July til 26 July. seanhaefeli.com southbankcentre.co.uk

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Suit by Brioni; shirt by Acne.

Top by Fred Perry.

STYLE | Sean Haefeli

Jacket and trousers by Burberry Prorsum; sweater by Hien Le; scarf by Roeckl.

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Jacket and shirt by Sissi Goetze.

STYLE | Sean Haefeli

Shirt by Tiger of Sweden.

Suit by Joseph; shirt by Tiger of Sweden.

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Coat by Cos; trousers

by Hugo Boss; sweater by Hien Le.

STYLE | Sean Haefeli

T-shirt by Merz B Schwanen.

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HISTORY

Jeffrey Hinton

Taboo. Cha Cha. Scratch Video. Hydraulic Disco. John Maybury. Bloolips.

Words Andy Thomas Portrait Owen Harvey Images copyright Jeffrey Hinton

When he was once asked for a defining club experience, Jeffrey Hinton replied: “I used to love lying flat out on the dance floor with my friend Space at the Heaven club. They used to have the most amazing disco lighting rig and we would just look up and bathe in music and lights, while people danced and stepped over us.” The London DJ and video artist has been working in the intersection of music and visuals for nearly 40 years now, and his passion for lighting has culminated in a new film, Hydraulic Disco.

Hinton earned his legendary status as DJ at Taboo, Leigh Bowery’s famously decadent London club of the mid-1980s. In an interview with writer Bill Brewster, DJ Mark Moore described Hinton’s innovations. “I think what made it so great was Jeffrey would do his own edits where he would elongate the best bits with these mad sound effects over the top.” To accompany his heady mix of music at Taboo (heavy on Italian disco and trashy pop) and bewildering edits, Hinton created his own video collages projected above the dance floor. These films chopped up TV shows and pop videos with horror films and gay porn, mixing pop and underground sources to create darkly playful montages.

His mix of music and videos were deliberately unsettling. “It was very disorientating, but in that kind of place it really worked,” Hinton told writer Tim Burrows. “It reflected the chaos. If you went down there feeling normal, it would mess you up. But most people arrived messed already, so it suited them.”

Before Taboo he was a DJ at Cha Cha, held in the back bar of Heaven.

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Opening in 1981 after the closure of the Blitz, Cha Cha was fronted by Scarlett Cannon, with Judy Blame and Michael Hardy (aka Maria Malipasta).

Like them, Hinton had experienced the creative energy of punk, and its intersection with London’s gay scene.

Clubs such as El Sombrero (also known as Yours or Mine) on Kensington High Street provided the teenage Hinton with ideas of his own. As did the Blitz a few years later, where he received another education through DJ Rusty Egan. Although he was inspired by the electronic futurism of the Blitz, the soundtrack he would go on to create was far more deviant and playful. “Very trippy and some of it was completely out of beat, but it didn’t matter. Totally suited Taboo,” wrote Moore.

With fellow Blitz kids including filmmaker John Maybury, milliner Stephen Jones, David Holah of fashion label Bodymap, stylist Kim Bowen, and long time friends Jeremy Healy and Princess Julia, he joined the creative community at the famous Warren Street Squat. Barriers between artistic forms were being broken down and Hinton began to experiment further with film, becoming a pioneer of scratch video, alongside the Duvet Brothers, Gorilla Tapes and George Barber.

Throughout the 1980s right up to now, Hinton has also used video to document the creativity of London’s gay counterculture – from Taboo to Kinky Gerlinky. His recent films include a collection from his archive that documents the drag scene and its importance to gay club culture. Along with his Taboo Scratch Video, this was one of the highlights of the ICA OffSite exhibition of 2013, ‘A Journey

Through London Subculture: 1980s to Now’. Also at the exhibition were Hinton’s videos of Bodymap’s 1980s catwalk shows (such as ‘The Cat In the Hat Takes a Rumble With the Techno Fish’) that he soundtracked.

While these mid-1980s works provide a defining snapshot of London subculture at its creative peak, Hinton does not believe in living in the past.

And he continues to take inspiration from late night London – whether spinning at Old Street’s East Bloc or creating the soundtrack for fashion duo Meadham Kirchhoff ’s Taboo-inspired collections. We catch up with him as he takes a break from production for his new film.

Growing up, your brother was an important figure to you.

Yes, my brother Stephen was a really early member of the Gay Liberation Front and used to bring loads of literature home; International Times, Oz and all this other stuff about countercultures from around the world.

At the time I had all these health problems and I was really bullied at school. I would look at people at school and think I didn’t want to be like them.

I’d had all this knowledge passed on from my brother and I knew there was another world out there.

At what age did you start soaking all that up?

Oh my god, from forever. I was really fascinated by all of it. And then I used to hang around the streets a lot with him and I met all these different people. We used to go to this squat in Powis Square, which was like the first kind of gender fuck squat. It was where >

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ever heard. I was fascinated by the way the song would suddenly deconstruct.

Film still from Alternative Miss World. Peter Hammond, aka Space Princess, backstage, 1989

all the [gay cabaret troupe] Bloolips lot lived so I met Bette Bourne and all of them. I then went to see their show The Ugly Duckling at the Tabernacle near their squat.

Were they a bit like San Francisco’s Cockettes?

Yes very much – but in a very English way. Bette Bourne had been in the New York-based gay cabaret group Hot Peaches, who I had seen perform at the ICA. When he got back from New York he set up the Bloolips. The Ugly Duckling was the most amazing thing that this 12-year-old boy could have seen. It was just about the beauty of being you, no matter how different you are. The message of that to me was incredible. It was visually stunning and so playful, and that is something that has always interested me. I remember they finished with T-Connection’s ‘Do What You Wanna Do’ and everyone was dancing, and I was jumping all around. It really was a total liberation and a language I could understand.

What was your introduction to clubs?

It had always been around me. I didn’t make a distinction between where I heard music. I just danced wherever I was – and I was obsessed with dancing for as long as I can remember. You really couldn’t keep me still. But the first big club I went to in London was Global Village, which eventually became Heaven. I was about 13 or 14 and I remember being in this space and feeling the reverbs of the sound system, soaking in the music and thinking, wow.

Were there any records that stand out?

I remember one track that was playing and it’s called ‘Pipeline’ by Bruce Johnston. There is this breakdown in it where it’s very percussive and rhythmic; so that would have been the first break I 186

You’d been experimenting with your own tape deconstructions from a very early age.

My dad gave me a reel-to-reel tape recorder when I was about five or six.

I had this tiny little round microphone and I would tape everything; the TV, people in the street, just everything, I loved sounds. And then I instinctively found a way of wiring it into the back of the hi-fi where the speakers go, and feeding it back through the speakers then playing a record over the top. And I did that at the age of about six, just to mush and mix things together.

Did anyone influence that?

Kenny Everett had his radio show where he used to make these mad jingles, and I loved the way he mixed his talking over the music. His whole

‘I HAVE A HUGE ROMANTIC PASSION FOR HYDRAULIC DISCO LIGHTING’

he would always play the whole side of a record. So 16 minutes of Amanda Lear’s ‘Follow Me’ or Dee D Jackson and all these other concept albums that were coming out by the likes of Love & Kisses. Although he didn’t mix as such and was very relaxed, he was a great DJ in the way he provided the whole dancing experience.

How did the Sombrero differ from other places you had been?

It was very sexually charged so that was different. It had a round, lit-up dance floor and alcoves all around it. You can sort of see it in Adam & the Ants’ ‘Antmusic’ video. There were these very camp Spanish waiters and it was just the most fun, social playground you could imagine. That’s also where I met my first boyfriend. They didn’t really have a licence so you had to have a plate of cheap spam and coleslaw. Being quite poor at the time I would eat it and everyone else would throw it away.

Who did you go there with?

I originally went there with these queens who were trolley dollies and also Princess Julia, who I have known since forever. And I just met a lot of interesting people there. It was a very underground club and you were theoretically meant to be a member, as with most of the clubs in the 1970s like the Embassy, Copacabana and Bangs.

concept of jingles was so energised and playful. And I was always attracted to playfulness. He always had a great rhythm and the way he would deliver words and weave in the music was great. He was a master of all that and really influenced me. Everyone is doing those kinds of mash ups now, but he was doing that quite instinctively way back then.

What was the crowd like?

You had a great mix of people – an unforced high life meets low life. I always think to be a great club you have to have a big mixture. So multicultural outcasts, gay, bi and straight, but especially sexually confused, trannies, old money rich people, prostitutes, rent boys, drug dealers, actors/singer types, and a few confused fillers that are there by mistake. And then at the Sombrero you had all the more gay experimental end of punk, which was what I was involved in.

Who was the first DJ to have an impact on you?

The first DJ I was properly aware of was this guy called Rudy, who used to play at the Sombrero on High Street Ken. He was really interesting. That club and his music – I honestly thought I had died and gone to heaven. Rudy played this incredible mix of early Italian disco, so very landscapey. And

When did you start making the tapes you became known for?

I always made tapes for myself and other people and these were a real mash up of loads of things. So I was pause editing and adding feedback and stuff.

Any piece of equipment I got I would always use it to the max. I was always very mechanically minded because my dad was a plumber. He would show me

HISTORY | Jeffrey Hinton these machines and how to take them apart and put them together. And I was fascinated by that and would spend hours in the cellar at home taking apart radios and that. So I always loved how things worked.

What equipment did you use?

For editing I had this amazing portable Sony tape recorder specifically for sound effects. It had this massive microphone and was huge and weighed a ton. And it had this really precise little pause button. I am quite specific as to what I am listening to and where points are, so I would do these real funny edits, chopping up sounds and music and then re-editing and also overlaying odd tracks.

Film still from Bodymap catwalk show. Nick and Barry Kamen modelling, 1984

You said before that you’ve always had a very visual mind. When did you become aware of that?

We went travelling across Europe on camping holidays as a kid. I remember it really well, the roads in France and all the trees and I had this filmic impression of everything. And I’ve always had that, even with music, it’s very visual. When people are telling me stories I’m always visualising everything. But those trips really were a feast and totally influenced me and again I knew there was another world out there.

That whole visual thing links into your love of disco lighting and your first time at Heaven.

I went there soon after it opened and it really was an incredible place. I have a huge romantic passion for hydraulic disco lighting and Heaven was the first place I had seen that. That was the start of me seeing all this mechanical, heated, motorised lighting that was timed to the music. They were buying all these pieces of equipment all the time and there would always be something new to wow you. It was all part of the excitement – new visuals and music.

Why did disco become so important for you at this time?

I immediately latched onto it because it was a musical movement that spread so quickly across the world and had such a strong simple message – and that was liberation. Disco was so energised and spoke of freedoms – it was letting you be whatever you were. And it all comes from gay and black struggles from the

Film still from Bodymap catwalk show. Dancers Michael Clark and Les Child modelling, 1986

late 1960s. And here I was hearing this amazing music in Heaven and I had a friend who had been to New York.

At the time Laker Airways were doing £55 one-way fares. That was the only time I’d sold any records in my life but I had to get there.

How long did you spend in New York?

I was there for a year and thought I was going to stay forever. There was this real, strong and liberated gay scene that was so right for me. I went to all these places like Anvil and other really extreme places. And I was just like, wow this is incredible. I loved the energy and again the visual aspect. The clones [gay American style movement] over there were always very detailed and accessorised. They always worked on their look. It was beautiful. Then I met

this guy at some party and he lived in this place on Bleecker Street and he knew William Burroughs. So I ended up staying with William Burroughs in his apartment called the Bunker on the Bowery. Then I was introduced into the CBGB and the Mudd, so all that punk thing, and then of course Studio 54. So I’d met this poetry lot, this punk lot, then the gay disco lot. That experience was really influential.

When you returned to London it was the time of Warren Street Squat.

I guess what I had seen with the Bloolips in the early 1970s was kind of like a blueprint to what happened at Warren Street. So I felt very at home when I first walked through the door there. I had just got back from New York and I had no home so I stayed > 187

HISTORY | Jeffrey Hinton

Jeremy Healy and Jeffrey Hinton, 1978

Jeffrey Hinton and Kate Garner of Haysi Fantayzee backstage at Top of the Pops,1982

with Jeremy [Healy]. I visited, then basically never left.

Can you describe the squat?

The front part of the building was all fashion, film, music and design people, and then at the back it was a bit more of a punky druggy vibe. There was this great constant energy, similar to what I had experienced in New York. There was no morning, noon or night. It really was just constant and I was naturally attracted to that. That house was alive with everything going on. It had this osmosis of energy and everyone was equal, because no one had any money.

And that is where you find the most creativity, when everyone is on the same page. It was a great mix and everyone was involved in everyone else’s creativity. So I naturally dived in. Then we were all going to the same clubs.

There were just so many creative people around at the time. Space Princess [Peter Hammond] also has to be mentioned because he was a huge person in my life. He was so very creative and gave me a lot of confidence in what I wanted to do.

You’ve spoken before about how the styles at Billy’s and the Blitz were very spontaneous. How much of that came from the creative, communal living?

My favourite thing about Warren Street was we all wore each other’s clothes.

Everyone thinks we made these amazing looks and I guess we kind of did, but really a lot of that had to do 188

with smell. There wasn’t a washing machine so you would pick up what smelt the least and then made it work or made something new. I also attribute some of what became known as the New Romantic look to this theatrical shop that was closing down. It was part of Charles Fox near Covent Garden and we would take all these clothes from there and adapt them. We also helped ourselves to the make up. The important thing with all these clubs was that we were doing them for ourselves;

‘THERE WAS NO MORNING, NOON OR NIGHT. IT WAS JUST CONSTANT’ it was to entertain us rather than for publicity. Nobody did anything for anyone else’s appreciation.

When did you start making videos?

I was always obsessed with videos. My brother took me to see these avantgarde films all the time, so I was going to film clubs very young, places like the Paris Pullman in Earls Court. I‘d seen all the Warhol films, Kenneth Anger

and John Waters. I was always interested in that side of DIY filmmaking. And of course John Maybury and Cerith [Wyn Evans], they were all into their Super 8 films, and so I helped them with their set ups and that. I think John influenced me a lot in terms of just doing it. But the whole of Warren Street was like that and it cemented the thing I had always had. And that was, don’t think about doing something, just do it. Everything I have ever done, whether filming, editing or DJing, has come from that.

I have never studied it as such. The minute I got a video, I began pause editing instinctively. It was the same shit I was doing with the music tapes, mixing things up, and juxtaposing things that don’t necessarily go together When did you start playing your videos at clubs?

The first film things I did specifically for an environment was at Circus [ Jeremy Healy’s club]. I did these four or five hour-long tapes all made by pause editing. These things took fucking weeks to do. And then the next time was Taboo, when I was really given carte blanche to do anything. That was great because they had a big screen above the dance floor, so I could control the sound, visuals and lighting. I was basically mixing everything. I was taking the sound from the videos, along with my cassettes of sound effects, plus the records, and mixing it all together.

I’ve no idea how anyone managed to

Tasty Tim’s Birthday Disco Hospital at Planets, London, 1985 Photograph Fiona Cartledge

dance at all. That’s when I famously played the slip mat while tripping off my head and people just danced anyway, because that grinding noise was not that different to some of the things I was doing. Taboo was great.

How important was Leigh Bowery?

Leigh was just such an amazing strong presence in my life. He was just this incredibly energised child. I would see these amazing outfits he wore, but I would also always see Leigh coming out of them. He had such a sharp wit, no matter what drugs he was on. He was so clever at situations. Some people thought he was quite bitchy or catty, but he never was. He was just really playful and loved getting a reaction.

So if you are really uptight he is going to look for a reaction from you. But not so different to a lot of people who went to Taboo. It was not like, here’s this really extreme person. He was also a great person to work with.

You’d previously played at Cha Cha. How important was your time there?

That was the first club I had really DJ’d at, so it was very important.

It gave me the opportunity to experiment, so I did lots of chop-up tapes. Lots of long mixes, stuff that let me jump down on the dance floor and roll around with my mates. But Cha Cha was definitely me being given the freedom to experiment.

When did you start documenting the scene with video and how did you do that without being intrusive?

I was always taking pictures and videos and it’s hugely important now that we have that as a record. I’ve collected things for my whole life and was always known as a hoarder. Now it’s called an archive because it holds a lot of stuff that wasn’t documented at the time.

I wish I’d had a camera in New York, as there were so many things I saw there. But then in some situations, like at the Anvil and the more extreme environments, it isn’t appropriate to film. And I know the difference. Also most of the people I have filmed know me and they are not conscious of me filming them, it’s just a natural thing because we are in each other’s world all the time. I tend to capture things as just fragments of what is around me.

Why do you think your film Hydraulic Disco is needed?

All the industry behind the hydraulic disco lighting has gone. There was a huge industry around this, it was operators, mechanics, maintenance, inventors, and it doesn’t exist any more.

There was a big lighting invention curve between the 1970s and early 1990s. The hydraulic disco lighting industry were making bespoke, and ever more dynamic, mechanical machines and rigs. This came to an abrupt end mainly because of operational and

maintenance cost. But tragically all this stuff was completely ripped out of clubs worldwide and replaced by the same generic Gobo projectors. Now everywhere has flat, cold, LED-lit patterns projected from the same point all night long and not even timed to the music. This cannot compare with the overwhelming drama, noise and thrill of the original hydraulic lighting.

I haven’t seen anyone else really cover this subject, but when you do speak to people who experience it they get really passionate. So I just want to celebrate what was lost because for me it is such an emotional memory. Why I wanted to create a homage to that was to give people a sense of what it felt like. The way all these massive lighting machines above you were kind of woven into the music, and woven into the energy, and the smell and sexuality of the environment. The way the lights would move to the music was basically like having another dance partner. And if you have a great sound system, all this noise and light and energy, when that is all merged into one it is so intoxicating.

It would just draw you into the dance floor and you would totally lose yourself. And the whole idea of being lost on a dance floor is one of the biggest highs I have ever experienced.

Jeffrey Hinton’s film Hydraulic Disco is currently in production jeffreyhinton.co.uk 189

ICON

Fred Perry Polo Shirt Words Mark Webster Photograph Marcus Agerman Ross Singer Chloe Marriott

In his twilight years, Fred Perry happily acknowledged that his name would be remembered more as a brand of sportswear than a legend of the tennis court. But the fact remains, he had been both. And the direct result of this was an item of clothing that has transcended the decades, both a perennial staple and an adaptable fashion statement.

That the shirt has been adopted by so many working class youth movements over the years is a fact that sat well with the man who produced it.

Perry was born in 1909 in Stockport, Greater Manchester, into a working class family. His father Samuel was an ardent socialist and member of the Co-operative Party, a position that saw the Perrys move south and settle in Ealing, west London, where Samuel was also to serve as a Labour MP. As a teenager, when Perry discovered he wasn’t going to be an outstanding footballer, he turned his hand to table tennis. By the time he was 20, he had become a world champion.

However, while on holiday with his family he noticed some rather nice cars parked together and speculated about who they might belong to. When he found out they were owned by members of the local tennis club, young Perry was on a new mission.

The first Briton to win four Grand Slams, he was also a Davis Cup champion and, of particular importance to British tennis fans, scored a hat trick of Wimbledon singles titles in 1934, 1935 and 1936. The only people unimpressed by this were the members of the tennis establishment, who 190

frequently tried to find ways to block the progress of this cocky young upstart. A one time chairman of the Lawn Tennis Association made sure Perry Sr overheard his son being described as “not one of us”. Not that he ever wanted to be, and he made that quite clear when he went professional in what had been a determinedly amateur sport. “Bloody-mindedness is one of my specialities,” Perry once wrote. “And revenge was never against my principles, either.”

And when he did get his own back, he did so with style. A well-paid exhibition tour of the US enabled him to invest in a prime piece of California, and he became the owner of the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. He’d discovered on previous visits that Hollywood’s finest loved to be seen watching tennis, so the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Errol Flynn, David Niven and Groucho Marx became members and friends, while leading ladies such as Jean Harlow and Marlene Dietrich became a lot more than that.

Fred Perry was now the sport’s entertainer, who jumped nets, changed his sweaty tops and fine Daks trousers during games and wore the first sweatband. This was an idea taken to him in the late 1940s by Austrian footballer Tibby Wegner, and was the simple item that launched Fred Perry as a clothing brand, with Wegner as his business partner.

The plain white tennis shirt first appeared in 1952 – thankfully with the laurel leaf logo (adopted from Perry’s Davis Cup blazer) and not, as Perry first suggested to Wegner, an image

of his favourite pipe. This innovative and practical piqué shirt became all the rage in the tennis world. But it wasn’t until the late 1950s – when a few fans of West Ham United football club began putting in calls to the shirt’s stockist, Lillywhites of Piccadilly – that it would evolve into what would be its universally adopted, classic look.

The West Ham fans asked whether Fred Perry might consider adding some claret and blue stripes – known as tipping – and the call went over to the man himself, who approved of the idea.

From there, a few East End stockists who had noticed local boys wearing the shirt requested other colours, something Perry and his partner again agreed to.

The first Fred Perry top made not specifically for tennis was born, and with it a series of appearances in counter-cultural wardrobes.

In 1984, the Lawn Tennis Association formally acknowledged how important Fred Perry had been to their sport by erecting a bronze statue of him at Wimbledon for the 50th anniversary. So, they got there in the end. However, as the man himself readily admitted, he’d already been acknowledged for his achievements – by generations of mods, skins, northern soul fans, two toners, Britpoppers and plenty of other folk in between who loved to simply pull on a Fred Perry. fredperry.com The Wimbledon Tennis Championships starts on 29 June wimbledon.com

Chloe Marriott, 18, is a blues singer/ songwriter from Canvey Island in Essex.

She is currently recording material with producer and percussionist Snowboy, and will be performing live at Village Green Festival on 11 July at Chalkwell Park, Southend-on-Sea facebook.com/chloemarriottofficial1 villagegreenfestival.com

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