City of Song: A London Sixties Music Trail: City Trails

By Kit Ward

Welcome to Sixties London, the most swinging city on Earth! Gathered here were some of the greatest performers in the history of pop music: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Dusty Springfield, and over from America, Jimi Hendrix, Paul Simon and the Walker Brothers. London's music scene reached a peak of inventiveness, diversity and sheer excitement that has never been matched.

 

And there was much, much more to it than the stereotypes of Swinging London, from the R&B all-nighters at the Flamingo Club to the LSD-infused spectacles at UFO. Explore the decade and its music with City of Song: A London Sixties Music Trail. Take a walk through the city, stopping off at twenty-four locations that hosted significant performances, encounters and happenings in those years. Learn where the Rolling Stones recorded their first (and unsuccessful) demo record, where David Bailey taught the Twist to Rudolf Nureyev, and where Beatles performed their last live show. Experience London in a new and distinctive way, and go exploring with City of Song: A London Sixties Music Trail as your guide.

 

Features

• Twenty-four places of significance and interest to Sixties music fans, on a trail that takes the reader from Chelsea to Soho
• Spotify playlists for each stop available on-line
• Full route directions, with GPS coordinates for each stop
• Google Maps route map and directions available on-line and for download to your smartphone

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prydain Press
• Release date: Sep 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781916469310

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Incredible as it may seem now, there was a time when new cultural trends were communicated through newspapers and magazines. So it was that in April 1966, Time magazine published an issue with a groovy cover titled ‘London: The Swinging City’, and the phenomenon of Swinging London was unveiled to the wider world. It was, among other things, an explosion of creativity and innovation in music, fashion, design, art, and photography. Sixties London birthed pop culture in the modern sense, and it was the home for the overlapping circles of artists and entrepreneurs who worked and played together like no other such group before or since.

It was a small world, both in the size of its inner circle and in its geographic spread. The main article inside that Time issue was titled ‘Great Britain: You Can Walk Across It On the Grass’. This was not intended, despite what some thought, as a marijuana allusion, but simply pointed to the fact that two of the city’s green islands, Hyde Park and Green Park, lay between the twin poles of Swinging London, Chelsea/Kensington and Marylebone/Soho.

A story that illustrates just how small a world it was and the part that chance encounters played in it comes from a day in October 1963 when the Rolling Stones were supposed to be recording their second single. This was when the Stones were still playing R&B covers (their first single had been Chuck Berry’s ‘Come On’) and looking on enviously, as did their manager Andrew Loog Oldham, as the Beatles churned out hit after hit with self-penned songs. The second Stones single was going to be another cover, but nobody was happy with any of the options. The band had tried recording the Leiber and Stoller song, ‘Poison Ivy’, but nobody, including their record label, was happy with the outcome.

Desperate for a solution, Oldham left the band arguing about the predicament in the Studio 51 club on Great Newport Street and went for a wander around Soho. During his stroll, a taxi pulled up up and out got John Lennon and Paul McCartney on their way back from an awards ceremony. They knew Oldham from his time working for their own manager, Brian Epstein, and had spotted him walking with a worried look on his face.

Oldham recalled the conversation: ‘Ello, Andy. You’re looking unhappy. What’s the matter?’ ‘Oh, I’m fed up. The Stones can’t find a song to record.’ ‘Oh — we’ve got a song we’ve almost written. The Stones can record that if yer like.’

John and Paul went back to Studio 51 with Oldham, finished the song there and then, and handed it over to the Stones, who went straight to Kingsway Sound Studios in Holborn to record it. ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ was the song and it was a hit for the Stones (the Beatles also recorded it for their second album). It took another three covers before they were confident enough to release one of their own songs as a single.

The Time special issue played a part in turning Swinging London into a kind of modern myth, a blend of actuality, symbolism and illusion. But already, that London cultural moment was being transmuted into what came to be called the ‘counterculture’: more political, more confrontational, more ambitious, less geographically specific, and certainly druggier and darker. The Beatles’ evolution is a microcosm of that process: from sharp suits and three-minute beat songs (and cannabis) to looser clothing and psychedelic concept albums (and LSD). But there was always much more to Sixties music than the artists who coalesced around the dazzle of Swinging London and the slower burn of the counterculture. Looking back now, from a distance of fifty years and more, the quality and inventiveness is astonishing.

This Sixties music trail encompasses a broad range of music produced in that decade, but it also sticks to the basic topography outlined in that Time piece, taking a route from Chelsea to Soho, across the grass of Hyde Park, with stops at South Kensington, Bayswater, Marylebone and Covent Garden along the way. There are other places in London that should be included in any pop music history of the period: Joe Meek’s home studio on Holloway Road, where he produced hits like the Tornados’ ‘Telstar’ and pushed the boundaries of experimental recording; the Roundhouse at Chalk Farm, where the counterculture took up residence after the closures of the UFO and Middle Earth clubs (see Stops 10 and 14); Abbey Road Studios at St John’s Wood, where the Beatles recorded most of their albums and took a walk across that famous zebra crossing; and the Cue Club at Paddington, Count Suckle’s home after he moved on from the Roaring Twenties club (see Stop 21) and a seminal venue for ska and reggae.

Unfortunately, these, and many other notable spots, are too far from the centre of London to be included in a trail intended to be walked. It already covers a greater distance than I would have liked, but it was impossible to leave out Chelsea and South Kensington — that would have been like telling the story of the Beatles without George and Ringo.

Though the stops on the trail are a personal selection, the choice is not a random one, nor especially idiosyncratic. What the reader will find here is twenty-four locations that all have some significance in the history of Sixties pop music, and by extension, of twentieth-century pop music. ‘Twentieth-century pop music’ — the very phrase has the sound of the archive and the museum. But London has changed immeasurably in the last fifty years and so has its music scene. There are fewer venues where live music can be heard and fewer places — clubs, bars, pubs - where the leading lights of a musical generation gather. Pop music itself is a less distinctive culture — the ‘entertainment’ behemoth has swallowed it up and much of the action now takes place on-line. A vanishing small number of artists now break through by the relentless gigging, up and down the country, that the Sixties singers and bands took for granted. One result is that pop music has mostly lost its sense of place.

This is, of course, the eternal lament of the writer about London, that nothing is what it was. Certainly, the present-day visitor to the King’s Road and Carnaby Street will find them underwhelming. Elsewhere, the Marquee has been converted to loft apartments, the building that housed IBC Studios is the Colombian consulate, and Tin Pan Alley is under redevelopment. But the prospect is not wholly gloomy: the Troubadour and Ronnie Scott’s are still going strong and as lively as ever.

So this is a trail of presences as well as absences, though the tone is inevitably elegiac. London’s reign as the pop capital of the world came to an end as the Sixties did. From the 1967 Summer of Love onwards, pop music’s centre of gravity began shifting back to the United States. London was tired, hungover, something of an acid casualty. The symbolic end of the Sixties came not in England but in California, where the Altamont Speedway Free Festival