Great British Takeaways
Some highlights from my week of celebrations in London.
1) ENGLISH ROSE
Or Rosé, to be acute about it. And sparkling, at that. It was completely fortuitous that I stumbled on Balfour Vineyard’s Smithfields-based wine bar/pub while waiting for my friend Bleddyn on my first night back in London, ahead of the Snapped Ankles gig (see below). It felt appropriate, though, given that I had yet to toast Crystal Palace’s progression to the FA Cup Final, now less than 48 hours away – though this is not a football post - and all the more so once it turned out Bleddyn had been to the Vineyard’s homebase in Kent, and rated the wines as highly as I was about to. You see, the south-easternmost English counties have long enjoyed a very good reputation for sparkling white wine at good prices, and when you see the modest difference in latitude between, say, Balfour in Staplehurst and Mumm’s in Reims, that makes some sense. In more recent years however, the British wineries have gone from hybrid grapes to proper Champagne grapes, including the highly fickle red vinifera grape Pinot Noir, which is unquestionably a reflection of climate change, the earth heating up.
The planet’s loss appears to be English wine’s gain, and though I would prefer it the other way around, under the circumstances I can only applaud Balfour for turning out such vibrant examples of the classic Champagne trio – Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier – and then serving them up at affordable prices by the glass in a swishy part of London. If I was impressed by the Reserve Rosé, I was positively bowled over by the Single Vineyard Brut Rosé: stone dry and, per the winery’s website, “precise”; it’s the one in the picture. The 2019 we were served also apparently reflects “one of the best years in English viticultural history.” I feel a visit to the source coming on.
2) SNAPPED ANKLES at FABRIC
Having only latched on to London’s leftfield-environmental-electro-rockers Snapped Ankles with their new, fourth studio album Hard Times Furious Dancing, I’d been thrilled to discover that I had the chance to see them perform live in their home city, and um, snapped up a ticket or two. The show did not disappoint – unless you were expecting something more hi-tech than what they bring to the stage: a lo-fi, clearly unsequenced, largely analogue-sounding electrofunkpunk that comes across. It comes across as if IDLES and LCD Soundsystem got together (which they have done, actually) but left all the valuable gear at home, and James Murphy sang-spoke like he did back in his “Losing My Edge” days, while expressing IDLES’ politics in a less shouty but no less strident manner than Joe Talbot. Oh, and as if they also decided to perform anonymously, dressing up as trees to stress the stress the environment is under, and figured to leave the guitars at home while at it, because otherwise the stage would be too crowded, preferring to send those members of the entourage into the audience instead, to dance around and spread “vibes,” as seems to the word du jour. My mate Bleddyn, already a fan, put it much more simply when he said it took him back to Bentley Rhythm Ace; by the end of the night, he was also rating it as one of his best ever gigs, so maybe we should leave all our comparisons at home and allow that here’s a band doing their own thing, in their own time, in their own space, in their own political sphere, to their own beats, and without selling out. Cheers!
3) REGENTS CANAL
Until this year I’m not sure I’d ever walked, run or cycled Regent’s Canal other than perhaps the part directly around Camden Town. That changed in February with my accommodation at the Angel, just a few hundred yards from the westernmost entrance of a footpath that then stretches all the way through East London. In many ways, it is modern London at its best, with walkers, runners and cyclists all enjoying the option to get away from the busy road traffic and enjoy the sight of all the lovely houseboats and even stop at a couple of canal side cafes.
But modern London also includes what London has always included: crowds and rubbish. Taking to the footpath in morning rush hour means taking your life in your hands at times, especially when navigating the narrow walkways underneath the many bridges at which point one can almost guarantee a commuting cyclist, will come barreling around the corner, sending you diving for cover. (As you may be able to surmise, there are no barriers to stop one falling in.) Most of us could no doubt swim our way out of an unfortunate dive into the dirty water, but not everyone survives, as a search on the subject at my end confirmed. Those who make it the distance – and I’ll be honest, that’s probably 99.9% of the public on any given day – have the advantage of being able to see last night’s beer cans and bottles piled up and, occasionally, a floating dead doll as if to send an omen.
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4) EZRA FURMAN at Rough Trade East
I had decided to keep Friday to myself, knowing the need to conserve energy before the long Cup Final Day ahead. That didn’t mean I wanted to stay home, however, and, browsing the options on Friday morning, was thoroughly surprised to find tickets still available for Ezra Furman’s record release show at Rough Trade East off Brick Lane, especially given that she has such a stellar reputation in the UK, that she lives in the States, that the £14 cover price included a copy of her new CD, Goodbye Small Head, and that it is typically my experience that these kind of events are sold out before I know about them. When it came to showtime – a convenient Friday evening 5pm -Furman did not skimp on presentation: the performance featured her full five-piece band, and if the 50-minute set was only half that of what you would normally expect for twice the money, then for someone like me with a relatively short attention span these days (and limited funds, despite what this post might suggest!), that’s a deal I’m happy to shake hands on.
There are those who surely know Furman’s extensive catalogue inside out, and some of them were evidently in the room, given the percentage of the 300 punters who upgraded their CD to vinyl (at a cost) and immediately joined the post-gig queue for an autograph. Me, even more of a neophyte than I was for Snapped Ankles, thoroughly enjoyed the harder songs from Goodbye Small Head (“Jump Out” especially lives up to its title), and though I was underwhelmed by her between-song banter (for which she herself appeared to apologize), I left as a fan. Goodbye Small Head, writes Furman in large type on the back of the small-type fold-out lyric sheet “is our record about losing control.” She later writes that “You don’t tell God where you’re going. God tells you.” Interestingly, Palace club captain Joel Ward said much the same to his teammates in a filmed post-Cup Final pep talk about 24 hours later. But then this post is not about football.
5) PARK RUN.
Founded a little over twenty years ago by a couple of weekend runners in Bushy Park, Southwest London, who fancied getting some people together for a free 5k time trial in their local park, what started out with just 13 attendees and took a solid two years to spread to even one more park is now an organization hosting thousands upon thousands of park runs in over twenty countries (including the US, here and there), all while maintaining the basic principles with which it was launched: weekly, free, for everyone, forever.” (And in unison, with a 9am start across the UK.) This means that, almost wherever you are in the UK, and especially in a city like London with its many green spaces and decent transport system, you can find a free 5k to join, at which your Park Run barcode will log your finish time so you can compare it to your previous weeks on the same or different courses. While some people use it as a chance to race each other, all Park Runs accept walkers and many of them dogs as well; this is about health and community, not competition. And though results are printed online, there are no prizes, no awards, no breakdown of age groups.
And so, on Cup Final morning, I met up with fellow Substacker (and former Jamming! contributor)
at Highbury Fields, where the course there is a little confined, involving five laps around the bottom of the park, for which you need to keep counting given that all times are logged on the honour system. Alastair and I ran the first half together, chatting, then I took off at my own speed for the fun of it; we reconvened straight afterwards, had a chat, I jogged home, and all felt good with the world. It would feel even better ten hours later, but then this is not…6) PRINT LIVES!
With so many of us getting our news online these days, and with online magazines proliferating almost as fast as old ones appear to be dying, and with the old-fashioned newsagent increasingly replaced by a modern day off-license, there’s every reason to think that print is dead. Happily, reports of such a demise are at least somewhat exaggerated. The morning after the Cup Final I promised not to talk about here, I recalled that there was a proper newsstand somewhere on one of the corners at The Angel, and sure enough once I found it, lying just an inch above the street gutter, was the reassuring array of a dozen British Sunday papers running the political gamut, though seemingly unified on this particular day by the headline “Eze Does It”. Up on the racks, I eyed the long-running Viz Comics (surely at least somewhat woke from its laddish heyday of the 1990s?), the even longer-running i-D, the revamped Face, and what I guess must also be the revamped Arena.
Later in the week, on the corner of Berwick Street, I came across the Good News Newsagent (named because it’s good news it’s still there?) filled two walls-to-walls plus two interior floor-to-ceiling-racks with magazines both familiar and seriously obscure. Though I was left wondering just how much of an audience there can possibly be for some of the weightier “slow travel” or “deep thinking” full-colour mags at £20 each, I still emerged with a copy of the £12 Sidetracked, which drew me in with its artsy cover, and its first-person “adventure inspired” travel stories from South Sudan, northern Norway, Mongolia, Oman and more. Before I left the UK, I had topped up with the latest When Saturday Comes – which also started out as a fanzine nd which I featured on one of my podcasts – plus Shindig!, which I like because it is a sparky little upstart music monthly operating in a crowded world. Throw in my patronage of The Big Issue, which I insist is one of the better newspaper-magazines out there, and my “discovery,” 438 issues in, of the very leftist the New European at the airport, and it’s fair to say my reading pile is even larger than usual. Cheers to journalism, fandom, to all the creative writers, photographers and illustrators who still ply their wares on such a freelance basis, and to the spirited indie entrepreneurs and the larger publisher houses that sponsor them.
7) BOB DYLAN at HALCYON
This wasn’t a visit with time for museums, though that was in part because I took in most of the exhibits I wanted to see this year during my longer back-and-forth through the winter. But on my last day in London, I did take time out to venture down to London’s rather gauche New Bond Street, where among the most elite of elite high-end brands, the Halcyon Gallery’s two spaces are currently hosting exhibitions by David Hockney and, um, Bob Dylan. Dylan’s new exhibition of paintings is entitled Point Blank, and I have to say, they are good ‘uns. “The idea,” writes Dylan himself in his summary of the work (as if he would allow anyone else to do it for him) “was not only to observe the human condition, but to throw myself into it with huge urgency.” Point Blank is on show until July 6: as with the jewellery, watches and pretty much everything else on sale on this road, you won’t be able to afford anything, but browsing – and admiring - is welcomed.
8) CRYSTAL PALACE at SELHURST PARK
Sorry, everyone, I promised this wouldn’t be a football post, but I can’t help it. Though it feels somehow “wrong” having the FA Cup Final played at Wembley before the end of the regular League season, it worked out in my favour as I was able to get top-notch tickets for the scheduled Crystal Palace vs. Wolverhampton Wanderers match at Selhurst Park, Palace’s last home game of the season, taking place under the floodlights just three nights after winning the Cup. I grew up here - not in these posh seats, but on the terraces to the right and left. As the late great Palace fan Maxi Jazz put it on the Faithless hit “God Is a DJ,” this is my church. Cheers.
There's nothing quite like having a fresh magazine in your hands.
Thank you for the shout out (and purchase) of Shindig! magazine.