Everywhere I Ever Lived - part 0

In the beginning

My first home, from very late 1948 ( I spent the first half a dozen weeks or so of life in an incubator, having been born, three weeks late, with pneumonia) to 1950, was the upstairs of this house (number 73, pictured 30 or more years later) in a street off Green Lanes, Harringay. I spent much of the time sleeping soundly in a pram parked in the front yard, behind that thick hedge, and, according to my mother, was 'no trouble'. What went wrong?

Everywhere I ever lived part 1

186 Clyde Road, Tottenham

Picture taken by Dad's father, Walter Granger. Note the extravagant nets and the bootscraper
shared with the Hortons at number 184

I lived here for all but a few months (at the beginning and end) of the 1950s. Before that we (Mum & Dad and me) lived upstairs at 73 Chesterfield Gardens, a bow-fronted terrace off Green Lanes, Harringay, in a rented flat.

I’m not sure why we moved: it could not have been for more space, as we moved into Clyde Road with my Mum’s mother, who had rented it since 1939, and Mum’s young brother, Bill (who would marry and move out in 1953), and we didn’t have any more room to ourselves. There were just two small reception rooms, a kitchen with a range, a small scullery with a cold-water sink and an outside toilet downstairs, and two bedrooms and a boxroom (above the kitchen). Bill slept there on a put-you-up settee that had been used by his mum and dad when they brought up 10 kids in a two-up, two-down terrace even smaller than this one. That became my first bedroom after Bill moved out.

After my grandma died in January 1955 (I was alone in the house with her: the TV wasn't working properly and I couldn't get her to pay me any attention, she just sat there with her mouth and eyes wide open, dark and faded photos leering down from the walls), there was just the three of us, and I moved into the second bedroom.  At some point dad bought the house for a few hundred quid (from the council I think – memory fails) and he celebrated by taking out the sash windows and putting in those flash casements you see in the picture, which he made himself: they were painted a red gloss verging on crimson.

The address no longer exists. That section of Clyde Road was renamed Elizabeth Place (after what used to be a rather dismal cul-de-sac where I would play football). The new houses were built on what used to be the back gardens of that side of Clyde Road, and their back gardens, ending in a high wall, are where the terrace of houses once stood. The only way I knew the place, last time I went back, about 15 years ago, was by the lamp-post that was built right outside soon after the picture was taken, opposite the junction with Bedford Road.

Update

On 20 January 2015 I did go back and tried to take a picture from the same place. I got the angle right, but was maybe a bit closer - the width of the road has changed, too.

The Fornicating Penguins Mug

Chip bought this mug on a trip to the USA, before we met, and got it for her mother, whom she believed to be a fan both of penguins and fornication. When Joan died in 1987,  Chip kept it, and, on account of both its size and weight, and her liking for taking tea from bone china or porcelain delicacies, while I favoured coffee in gulpable amounts, it became my cup by default, and one of the six elements I have assembled for virtually every breakfast over the past 20 years and more: a plateful of toast, unsalted butter, an eight-cup cafetiere of black coffee, Meridian spreads and a couple of spreading knives.

It's not so much tempting Fate as blowing it a fat raspberry and shouting ' Come on if you think you're hard enough, but this thing has survived virtually daily use by Sapper Granger for closing in a quarter century without coming close to destruction.


Edit: sadly, the prediction above came true on 12 February  2015; a but of UHU and it's reborn as a pen-mug, but I'm going to have to find something new for my coffee...

London American singles

 For decades, most of my favourite things were made of vinyl. I've been collecting* seven-inch singles for over 50 years now, since I was 13 or 14. The time elapsed means I can't actually be certain, but I've long believed that the first three singles I bought for myself (as opposed to being given some cash to buy some records for the family at Xmas) were Telstar by the Tornados on Decca, Love Me Do by the Beatles** on Parlophone and He’s a Rebel by the Crystals on London American. My love for the work of Joe Meek, Wales’s greatest-ever contributor to popular music and the creator of Telstar, remains undiminished, if marginal, while the Beatles’ march to glory over the bodies of the R&B classics they eviscerated on their early albums left me cold: the Crystals single, however, was a hallmark of things to come. To this day, I regard Phil Spector – his manifest failings as a human being notwithstanding – as the single greatest figure in music in my lifetime. I literally do not know of a single one of his auteur productions (I don't count his turd-polishing antics for the Beatles) that is less than very good: most are outstanding, and a good dozen or so would walk into my all-time top 50, if I wasn’t too old for that sort of thing.

One, I'll Never Need More Than This, nominally by Ike & Tina Turner but actually more a collaboration between Ellie Greenwich (writer), Phil, Jack Nitzsche (arrangement) and the Wrecking Crew (peerless noise), with vocals by Tina, remains as my favourite three and a half minutes of music. The song itself is about the female orgasm and the twin realizations that every epiphany contains the seed of knowledge that you can look forward to nothing better, and that the sense of loss once you let go of it will be extraordinary. The arrangement is punctured by a bubbling and tumbling bass line, great work from Hal Blaine, two extraordinary climaxes that eclipse those in River Deep Mountain High, massed saxophones surfing a tsunami of strings, and a great faded-out coda, where the Ikettes – or, knowing Spector, The Blossoms or another session vocal group – let us down easy with some la la las. And you can dance to it.
 
This was the last single on Phil’s US label Philles, and like all but a handful of them, was released in the UK on London American Recordings, a Decca-owned label that leased its material from a great many iconic American outfits, including Chess (Chuck Berry), Specialty (Little Richard),  Cadence (the Everly Brothers), Sun (Johnny Cash & Jerry Lee Lewis), Laurie (Dion & the Belmonts), Liberty (Eddie Cochran & Timi Yuro), Monument (Roy Orbison) and Atlantic (Ben E King, the Drifters, Ray Charles, etc) and just about had the English market in doo-wop, nascent soul and rock & roll sewn up. I always snapped them up when I came across them in junk shops, because the label was more or less a guarantee of excellence, Lawrence Welk and the Chipmunks notwithstanding.

It wasn’t only what was in the grooves, either: the label itself was a beautiful thing in all its incarnations. In the mid Fifties, it had gold italic script over a black background, changing to silver italic on black and finally, classically, throughout the 1960s, black with reversed-out silver/white roman script on most of the label, toppped by a silver/white sectant with the label name in black.

 On Christmas Eve 1964, my parents and I moved house from Tottenham to Ware, 20 miles north in what then seemed like fairly deep country. The house we moved into was in a new cul-de-sac that had yet to get street-lighting. Round about New Year's Eve, I was in my bedroom listening to records (the first things I had unpacked, natch) with the lights out, when I glanced out of the window to see a brilliant chill clear night, with the dark shapes of the houses across the way outlined with a rime of frost that reflected the silver starlight, a perfect image of stark stillness: and at that very moment, the stylus dropped on to You've Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ and its gorgeous, glacial arrangement shifted into motion. The chiming cathedral echo filled my mind and heart and sent both of them out to the corruscating canopy of the winternightsky in a sweet yearning epiphany of black infinity and stark, still, silverchill beauty.

Because my mercenary instincts led me to sell my copy of You've Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ when I bought the
album, you're going to have to make do with the third – and in my view the best – of the three great
tracks Spector made with Bill Medley, rather than Bobby Hatfield, taking the lead.

* collecting as in a sump, rather than in any coherent way

** the only Beatles product I ever bought new: sold it in the late 60s / early 70s for a tidy profit