Getting It Straight In Notting Hill Gate: A Decade in Ladbroke Grove

by Stuart Penney

In the early 1970s, Ladbroke Grove was and still is crammed with rock & roll people and it was almost impossible not to know at least half a dozen musicians who were either already famous or would soon become famous – Michael Moorcock (sleeve notes to The New World’s Fair CD reissue 1995)

Saw you walking down by Ladbroke Grove this morning – Van Morrison (Slim Slow Slider 1968)

Everybody knows down Ladbroke Grove

You have to leap across the street

You can lose your life under a taxi cab

You gotta have eyes in your feet – Leo Sayer (One Man Band 1974)

Things look great in Notting Hill Gate

They really move with the changing times – Quintessence (Notting Hill Gate 1969)

As recounted in an earlier blog piece, in mid-1972 I was laid off from my job at the London branch of Charles H. Hansen, the famous US music publisher.  Only 22 years old and I was already on the employment scrapheap.  There was only one thing for it, I decided to become a successful business tycoon.  Now read on…

Together with Brian Sim, a likeminded pal from Kilmarnock in Scotland, we pooled our meagre financial resources and rented a basement beneath Pash’s Music Shop on the corner of Elgin Crescent and Portobello Road.  It was a prime location directly opposite the legendary Finch’s pub (aka the Duke Of Wellington) and a stone’s throw from Ladbroke Grove where I had lived since 1971. 

We decorated the place with cheap hessian wall coverings and fitted it out with basic shelving and a retail counter.  Being subterranean, however, it suffered from damp.  And when I say damp, I’m talking about fungus growing out of the walls level of damp.  Not the best place to sell sheet music and songbooks, or any kind of paper goods, in fact.

 

But selling sheet music was exactly what we knew how to do, and we had been doing it for years.  We knew every music publisher in London and had contacts nationwide, so we were convinced we could make it work.  Plus, and here comes the best part, as soon as we knew redundancy from Hansen's was looming, we began squirreling away pop songbooks and music sheets and had countless boxes of the stuff piled floor to ceiling at our respective flats.  More than enough to start a successful business, we reasoned.  Did I say “squirreling”?  OK, make that “stealing”.  It may not have been strictly (or even slightly) legal, but the left-over Hansen’s stock of sheet music, some of it dating back to Edwardian times and the music hall era, was about to be shipped en masse to the US (probably as ballast on a cargo ship), where who knows what fate awaited it?  So, we fondly imagined we were preserving a little bit of British heritage. 

Before the internet, sheet music was a big deal.  How else was an armchair guitarist, pianist, trumpet player or other budding musician supposed to find a way to play their favourite tunes?  Accurately transcribed pop songbooks giving words, music and guitar tablature were a relatively new innovation back then and business was brisk from day one.  Our basement headquarters started out selling only sheet music and songbooks, mostly by mail-order, before moving into second-hand records in a big way a year or so later.  Old vinyl was cheap and plentiful and the rare record explosion was still some years away. 

 

We called the business Fastback Music and bought weekly advertising space in the inside front pages of the New Musical Express for most of the mid-70s.  The name was a lame pun combining a car reference (think '64 Ford Mustang) with our allegedly speedy mail-order service.  Every Monday morning, I would drive to the NME’s Long Acre offices in Covent Garden and hand over the typed advertising copy together with a cheque for around £12.  Look through any back issue from that period and you’ll find our ads, usually on page three.

Michael Moorcock, Joe Strummer and Adam Ant

Before it became gentrified in a post-Richard Curtis world, Ladbroke Grove and the Portobello Road area was a colourful hippie ghetto, the epicentre of the counter culture and a cheap place to live and work.  It was sometimes called the Haight-Ashbury of London. It was a haven for musicians, writers, drug dealers, poets, painters, intellectuals and crazies, and many well-known names frequented the shop.  Among them were best-selling sci fi author Michael Moorcock; jazzman George Melly; Lemmy and various members of Hawkwind; Joe Strummer (then with his pre-Clash outfit the 101ers); Neil Hubbard (Grease Band and Kokomo); Mick Farren (NME journalist and front man of underground noise terrorists the Deviants); Paul Kossoff (who lived in Golborne Mews off Portobello Road); and Stuart Goddard, then a schoolboy but soon to find worldwide fame as the self-styled dandy highwayman Adam Ant.  We also had our share of local oddballs.  Magic Michael, who I wrote about in an earlier blog piece, bought his harmonicas upstairs at Pash’s and we sometimes saw his partner in idiot dancing crime, the recently deceased William “Jesus” Jellet.

We saw quite a lot of Stuart Goddard.  He was a school chum of Dave Pash the music shop owner’s son.  A ridiculously talented classical guitar prodigy, Dave had already appeared on the cover of guitar magazines such as BMG as a schoolboy and later studied at the Royal College of Music behind the Albert Hall when he wasn’t working in the shop.  Goddard was an aspiring graphic design student at that time, and we hired him to draw up some mail-order catalogues for us, a few of which have survived.  One of them featured an illustration (pictured above) of Edd “Kookie” Byrnes from the late 50s TV show 77 Sunset Strip on the cover (ask your dad).  I forget how much we paid him, but it probably wasn’t much.  Around this time Stuart was about to join his early band Bazooka Joe which (and here’s one for the trivia fans) featured future Fast Show cast member Arabella Weir on backing vocals.  

Despite his huge fame as a fantasy writer (the first Jerry Cornelius book, The Final Programme, was about to made into a feature film in 1973) Michael Moorcock was a genial and thoroughly approachable fellow, shopping in the guitar store and even leaving a nice dedication to the Pash’s staff on the inner sleeve of his 1975 solo album The New World’s Fair (see below).  He happily signed and annotated several first editions of his books for a girl who lived in our Ladbroke Grove house.  I expect they are worth a fortune to Sci-Fi collectors today.  

He drove a big American station wagon with fake wood panels on the side.  I don’t remember the make and model, but this thing was absolutely huge.  Far too unwieldy for the narrow London streets, it spent most of its time parked up outside his house at 87 Ladbroke Grove.  The car was so big the tailgate opened sideways like a regular door, not upwards as with most European station wagons.  

Moorcock was (and probably still is) left-handed and I remember Dave Pash sold him a lovely 60s vintage Gibson ES335 in cherry red.  It was originally a left-handed model which had been converted into a right-handed guitar, leaving the control knobs blanked off at the top, which looked a bit odd.  I think this was the instrument he used on The New World’s Fair album, where he was backed by guitarist Snowy White and members of Hawkwind.  In 2015 Moorcock devoted several paragraphs to Pash’s shop in his semi-autobiographical book The Whispering Swarm.

The Elgin pub

Joe Strummer’s band the 101ers had a mid-week residency at the Elgin pub on Ladbroke Grove and I’d often drop in to see them.  Joe was probably still going under the name “Woody” Mellor at that point and while they certainly put plenty of effort into their performances, I didn’t think they were much cop musically at that stage.  It was definitely a case of 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration as far as I could see.  During their one big number – a 20-minute version of Van Morrison’s “Gloria” – he’d give it the full Iggy Pop treatment, leaping into the meagre crowd and rolling around on the tiny stage like a man possessed.  

Joe hadn’t yet graduated to his trademark Fender Telecaster and was still playing a Hofner Verithin, a down-market instrument which has since acquired an ironic kitsch appeal. But back then it was just considered a cheap copy of an American guitar - “a fifty quid Gibson” as someone quipped.  Strummer sometimes came into the shop to buy guitar strings and, knowing I had my own van which I often hired out for furniture removals and the like, he once asked how much I’d charge to drive the 101ers to a date in Bristol.  I quoted him £60 for the round trip.  He said he’d think about it, but the price must have been too strong because it was never mentioned again.  I suspect it was more than they were getting paid for the gig.

The guitar shop owner Arnold Pash (Arnie to his friends) was a lovely man who also ran an antique store around the corner in Portobello Road.  During the week he would drive his stately Rover P5B to country auction sales all over the South East buying antique silver, bric-a-brac and various items for the shop.  On occasion he’d even come back with high quality American guitars, some of which I bought from him.  I can’t remember them all, but in the mid-70s Arnie sold me a beautiful 1963 Gibson J200 (the Elvis model) and a 1964 Epiphone Texan, like the one Paul McCartney famously plays.  45 years later I still have the Epiphone and not a day goes by when I don’t regret selling the Gibson J200.  

Groovin’ With Mr. Laurence and Mr. Preston

Ladbroke Grove is divided into three distinct sections. It begins at Holland Park Avenue in the south and travels all the way to Harrow Road and Kensal Green in the north, a distance of around two miles.  At the Holland Park end you’ll find embassies and magnificent multi-million-pound heritage listed houses owned by foreign investors and celebs such as John Cleese and Jimmy Page, where no normal person could ever afford to live.  Further along towards the tube station lies the real heart of Ladbroke Grove where the street becomes a little run-down, but noticeably more funky, multi-cultural (it’s where the annual Carnival happens) and generally far more interesting.  Then, at the northern Harrow Road end where it crosses the Grand Union Canal it loses some of its character and you could be in almost any north London suburb.

Ladbroke Grove 1977 - the view from our front door

Around 1972 my girlfriend Carol landed a job at Lansdowne Studios at the posh Holland Park end of Ladbroke Grove.  Her shorthand and typing ability were valuable skills in the early 70s and she became secretary to both the famed producer Denis Preston and pianist/arranger Zack Laurence.*  Under the name Mr. Bloe, Laurence had recently scored a huge hit with the instrumental “Groovin’ With Mr Bloe” on the DJM label.  Elton John played on the demo recording of the tune, but Laurence overdubbed his own piano on the hit version.  

Groovin With Mr Bloe Artwork By Alan Aldridge

London's first independent music recording studio, Lansdowne is probably best-known for its jazz recordings, many of them produced by Denis Preston himself, often assisted by the legendary Joe Meek as engineer.  But some important rock and pop music was cut there too, including Lonnie Donegan's “Rock Island Line”, Acker Bilk's “Stranger On The Shore” and “Mellow Yellow” by Donovan.  The first four or five Uriah Heep LPs were also recorded at Lansdowne, as were some early Sex Pistols demos. But Preston's biggest-selling artist by far during the 70s was the whistling Kenyan folk singer Roger Whittaker. And that's a fact.

The studio had a huge record library, consisting of material presumably recorded there, and Carol would sometimes bring samples home.  A kitsch favourite was a 1957 Parlophone 78rpm single of Bert Weedon’s “Theme From ITV’s $64,000 Question”, which I still have somewhere.  Mainly thanks to the Bonzo Dog Band the painfully square Bert is routinely ridiculed by rock fans, but who amongst us didn’t learn guitar via his legendary tutor book Play In A Day? 

*The "Groovin' With Mr Bloe" hitmaker's name appears variously as Lawrence and Laurence.

Murder Most Foul

Ladbroke Grove tube station was just a two-minute walk from Rillington Place, the short dead-end street which was the scene of the grisly John Christie multiple murders of the 40s and 50s.  In 1971 the grim tale was made into a movie starring Richard Attenborough as the thoroughly creepy Christie and John Hurt as the hapless Timothy Evans who was wrongly hanged for the killings. The story held a macabre fascination for us, with huge local interest. 10 Rillington Place was filmed in the actual street (it had been re-named Ruston Close in 1954 following Christie’s arrest) although a different house was used for most scenes. 

The street and the house at number 10 were still standing when we moved into the area but by this time it was fenced off at one end and the houses were boarded up ready for demolition.  Around 1973 or '74 the area was cleared and flats were built on the site.  A memorial garden was established on the space where number 10 once stood.

Ruston Close may have disappeared but the name lives on with Ruston Mews which sits today within the triangle of St. Marks Road, Lancaster Road and the Westway. 

Macabre fun fact: when he was with the Graham Bond Organisation, bald, bespectacled sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith was nicknamed “Rillo” by Ginger Baker and other band members, due to his supposed resemblance to the Rillington Place murderer John Christie.

Happier times in Rillington Place

 

How I Almost Saw the Final Ziggy Stardust Concert

I loved him like a brother and he was one of the funniest guys I ever met but when it came to long term commitment Brian was something of a dilettante and it wasn’t too long before he became bored with our music shop project.  Compared to a council estate kid like me he came from a reasonably well-off background (his family owned a cardboard box manufacturing factory near Kilmarnock) and he would often disappear for weeks on end, taking jaunts to Spain or North Africa to “find himself”.

This seemed like self-indulgent cobblers to me and no way to run a business, so in 1973 we dissolved our informal partnership (I think I bought his share for the princely sum of £100) and I was now flying solo.  With considerable help from girlfriend Carol, who took care of admin, the shop continued to tick along, making a living but not exactly setting the world on fire.  That’s when I came up with what seemed like a brilliant idea to generate some much-needed extra cash. 

We’ve all seen the hawkers and street traders selling unlicensed tat outside music venues.  I expect they’ve clamped down on it now, but when I first started going to concerts in the 60s and 70s they were everywhere, offering unofficial posters, bogus programmes and the like.  We also had to run the gauntlet of shifty-looking scalpers with their “Who wants tickets?” mantra.  Official merchandise is big business today, but back then you were lucky to get even a concert programme inside the venue, never mind an exorbitantly expensive t-shirt, hoodie or tour jacket.  What if someone were to offer decent, well-thought-out items for sale at concerts, I mused?  No point in going through the official channels, I figured.  Even if I knew who to contact, I’d already guessed what the answer would be.  No, this called for direct action.  As for those aforementioned shifty-looking geezers, we’ll return to them in more detail in due course. 

After more than a year David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust tour was set to conclude at the Hammersmith Odeon with two shows on July 2 and 3, 1973 and although we didn’t yet know it, Bowie had planned to kill off his orange-haired alter ego at these concerts.  It seemed like the perfect opportunity to put my strategy into action.

 Coincidentally, what may have been the first-ever David Bowie songbook had just been published.  The Songs Of David Bowie was a quality item (we were soon to sell plenty of them via mail-order), but at 144 pages and £1.95 (equivalent to £25 today) it was both too bulky and expensive for what I had in mind.  Then, right on cue, a slimmed-down version appeared.  Titled David Bowie – A Portrait, it was basically the same book with a different cover photo, minus the music notation and featuring just the lyrics to the songs from the Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory albums plus a few earlier tunes together with photographs and essays.  At only 36 pages and retailing at just 30p, it seemed perfect.  Just as importantly, it was a fully licensed item of the highest quality.  This is what I decided to sell at the Ziggy concert. 

Though a contact in music publishing I was able to secure several boxes of the Bowie book through the back door, no questions asked, if you get my drift.  30p is equivalent to £3 in 2021, so if I sold them all over both nights it would have been extremely worthwhile.  The first night passed uneventfully and was more of a reconnaissance exercise, if anything.  On the second night Carol and I, along with a pal called Dave, turned up at Hammersmith ready for action with our books crammed into canvas shoulder bags of the type newspaper delivery boys used at one time.  I guess they call them tote bags today.  If you watch the opening scenes of the D.A. Pennebaker documentary film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (released in 1979, but covering the events of July, 1973), you’ll see tantalisingly brief glimpses of Dave and I outside the Odeon hawking our wares.

Business was disappointingly slow at first and Carol proved surplus to requirements.  That’s when she decided to buy a spur of the moment ticket for the concert.  Imagine that.  One of the most legendary rock events of all time and it wasn’t sold out.  She just walked up to the box office and bought a £2 ticket only minutes before showtime.  You could do that kind of thing in those days.  I agonised whether to join her or not, but we’d hardly sold any books at that point, and I didn’t want to traipse back to the car with the heavy bags.  So, dressed in her best frock, Carol went inside to watch Bowie while Dave and I retired to a nearby pub for an hour or so.  

The encore was well underway when we returned to the Odeon, suitably refreshed, to find people already beginning to drift out.  That’s when I noticed a black Daimler DS420 limousine idling at the kerb immediately in front of the venue.  Then the default rock star mode of transport, the DS420 was basically a poor man’s Rolls-Royce (Bowie himself had arrived in such a car earlier in the day) and back then they were a permanent fixture at weddings and funerals.  Then, out of nowhere, an apparition appeared and swept through the double doors onto the pavement, almost colliding with me.  Dressed entirely in white with an ankle-length coat, a chiffon scarf and a beret worn at a coquettish angle, it was Barbra Streisand making an early getaway to avoid the crowds.  Here was a clear indication of how famous David Bowie was becoming.  I stepped aside to let Barbra pass, our eyes met momentarily and I swear I was close enough to get a whiff of her expensive perfume.  That’s when she gave me the kind of look I suspect she usually reserves for something she’s just scraped off the sole of her shoe, before a lackey opened the limo door and she was gone.

Bowie had obviously left a major impression on the crowd because as the punters began to pour out everyone was keen to buy something, anything, to remember the concert they’d just witnessed.  The books began to sell like hot cakes with some fans buying several copies.  Typically, we’d come ill-equipped with very little change and many people were handing over pound notes for two or three copies of the book, saying “keep the change”.  By the end of the night, we’d sold every last one and went home with around £150 (close to £2,000 in today’s money) richer.  What’s more we’d had absolutely no grief from the police, venue security or other merchandise sellers over the two nights.  Result!

On the downside I had missed seeing the final Ziggy show and it’s something that still rankles today.  If anything, I was a bigger fan of Jeff Beck than Bowie, and learning he’d come on for the encore of “Jean Genie” and “Love Me Do” was the unkindest cut of all.  But other than that, the night had been a resounding success and I resolved to do it all again.

Then There Was The Time Lemmy Out Of Motorhead Almost Killed My Dog

In mid-1974 Carol and I bought a dog.  It was a cute Old English Sheepdog puppy with a pedigree as long as your arm, but we just called her Rosie.  The Beatles informed much of our day-to-day behavior back then and I’m not ashamed to say the decision to get such a dog was directly influenced by Paul McCartney’s sheepdog Martha, of “White Album” fame.  Since we lived in a top floor flat up several flights of stairs in a house on Ladbroke Grove, it probably wasn’t the smartest thing we could have done.  But we were young and foolish and the endless grooming aside (boy, was there a lot of grooming), the puppy was a delight and grew up to be a magnificent specimen and a fine example of the breed.  When fully grown she weighed in at 5 stones (that’s 70 pounds or, for metric fans, almost 32 kilos) with a luxurious, if extremely high maintenance, coat.  We’re talking the full Dulux dog experience here.  She was also inordinately sensible too, with street smarts I’ve rarely seen on other Old English Sheepdogs.

Although not generally a nervous dog and very good around people, Rosie’s one weakness (aside from cats) was sudden loud bangs, which would terrify her.  Thunder, a car backfiring or, worst of all, fireworks and she’d take off like a bat out of hell with absolutely no regard for traffic or her own personal safety.  As Bonfire Night approached each year, we grew increasingly anxious and took every precaution to keep her safely indoors as much as possible.  Sometimes, we even got sedatives from the vet to calm her down in the weeks leading to November 5th.  But there’s no accounting for stupidity, as I soon found out thanks to Lemmy. 

I’d seen Lemmy in the shop and around the neighbourhood and I guess this was the early days of Motorhead, shortly after he’d departed Hawkwind.  At that point he was just another vaguely familiar Ladbroke Grove “head” and not yet the rock icon he’d later become.  We would exchange nods of recognition in the street, the way longhairs did back then, and he’d mumble something like “Nice dog, man!” as we passed, but that was the extent of the conversation.

  

Then, one November day in 1975, I was walking along Ladbroke Grove with the dog (off her lead, I’m ashamed to say) only yards from our house when I saw a black BMW waiting to pull out of Chesterton Road with a familiar figure slumped in the back.  As the car began to move, Lemmy (for it was he) wound the window down and with an evil laugh threw out a lighted firework.  The banger (or, for US readers, firecracker and/or cherry bomb) exploded on the footpath and all hell broke loose.  Before I was able to grab her collar Rosie took off across busy Ladbroke Grove, causing cars, trucks, taxis and buses to brake heavily and take evasive action.  Tyres squealed, horns honked and drivers yelled abuse as the dog miraculously made it to the other side in one piece.  God only knows how she wasn’t killed.  If Rosie had been a cat, I expect she had just used up eight of her nine lives in one go.  But it wasn’t over yet.  I then had to risk life and limb by running after her through the traffic in similar fashion in case she decided to double back across the road.

  

By this time Lemmy’s BMW was already disappearing down the road, leaving a scene of chaos and near carnage in its wake.  It was a downright bastard trick and the act of an irresponsible speed freak, but I had absolutely no one to blame but myself.  The dog really should have been on a lead, and it was a salutary lesson.  Thankfully Rosie lived to fight on for another decade or so, finally shuffling off to doggie heaven in 1984.  And I’m happy to report the UK sale of bangers was eventually outlawed in 1997. 

Smiling Like I’m Happy

Carol and I had been together for six years, since we were 18 or 19, but in 1975 our relationship collapsed.  It was a sad, tearful parting, with most of the tears coming from me.  It was probably my total lack of ambition that brought about the split.  That and a few other things, such as an obsession with guitars and records which occupied my every waking minute and accounted for most of our cash.  So, off she went back to Sheffield leaving me holding the baby.  The baby in this case being Rosie, the Old English Sheepdog, of which I was awarded sole custody.  

But, life as a single man with such an attention-grabbing trophy dog proved to have hitherto hidden compensations.  For one thing women found Rosie irresistible.  I was approached constantly by people wanting to fuss over her and naturally I milked it for all it was worth.  In the park, in the street and even in the pub, their opening gambit was invariably “How can your dog see?” in reference to her overgrown fringe.  This line became tiresome after a while, but I usually smiled through gritted teeth nevertheless.  There was even one scary incident on Portobello Road where someone tried to steal the dog by luring her into a car, but that’s another story.

My favourite local pub was the Prince of Wales on Princedale Road in Holland Park where Rosie became an unofficial mascot, wandering around from table to table off the lead, constantly being petted and fussed over while begging crisps from the drinkers who simply couldn’t ignore her charms.  I suspect that wouldn’t be allowed today.  

The Prince of Wales was something of a celebrity boozer frequented by actors, musicians, poets and all manner of arty types.  On any given night you might see Carry On actor Bernard Bresslaw or Liverpool poet Brian Patten at the bar, plus assorted minor musicians such as Brian “Blinky” Davison (the drummer with Keith Emerson’s pre-ELP band The Nice) and effete singer songwriters Duncan Browne and Peter Godwin, who would shortly form the band Metro. In 1983 their song "Criminal World" was covered by David Bowie on his Let's Dance album.

 

Best of all was the afternoon when Rod Stewart turned up at the Prince of Wales with a party of around 40 people to shoot the inside gatefold sleeve photo of his October 1974 LP Smiler.  There they all were, Rod, Ron Wood, Kenney Jones, Ian McLagan, assistants, wives and girlfriends, backing musicians, dogs and assorted members of the Stewart and Wood clan, boozily lined up in the back yard of the pub.  The story goes that they drank solidly for a few hours, no doubt spending an absolute fortune at the bar, then when Rod was ready to take the picture the pub manager attempted to charge him a fee for the privilege.  Even allowing for Rod’s legendary parsimony, I’m sure we can all agree that the landlord was taking the piss on this occasion.

The Prince of Wales closed for good in 2011

  

Then, in late 1976, I met Tania, the girl who would become my wife.  It started in the Prince of Wales with the usual “How can your dog see?” line I’d heard so many times before.  I turned around to see a stunningly attractive bronzed Australian girl making a fuss of Rosie.  One thing led to another and to cut a long story short, by the end of the night I’d invited her to a Wings show at the Empire Pool, Wembley.  Imagine that - our first date was a Paul McCartney concert.  Start as you mean to go on, son, as my old dad used to say. 

Going Dutch

The Bowie venture had been a triumph, so I tried to repeat the process at subsequent Hammersmith Odeon shows by Elton John and Queen, none of which were as nearly as successful as the Ziggy concert, so the idea was put on ice for a while.  Fast forward to October 1976 and the Empire Pool, Wembley. 

The Empire Pool, Wembley

 

With a seating capacity of 12,500 the Empire Pool was for decades the largest indoor venue in London, although the 20,000-seater O2 Arena has since relegated it to second place.  In 1978 it was renamed the Wembley Arena and as recently as 2014 it became the SSE Arena.  Many people, especially Americans, labour under the misapprehension that the Wembley Arena is the same place as the Wembley Stadium, so let’s get that out of the way.  The Arena stands directly next door to the famous football stadium, which is possibly where the confusion arises (that and the shared name “Wembley”) but it’s not the same thing at all.  

Wings were set to conclude their Wings Over The World tour with three nights at the Empire Pool on October 19, 20 and 21.  I had tickets for the first show and planned to sell some books at the other two concerts.  On paper it sounded perfect.  What could possibly go wrong?  As it turned out, virtually everything went wrong.  

I mentioned earlier that I had a van which I hired out for bands or miscellaneous removals from time to time.  Right on cue and with impeccable timing Ian, a friend of Brian who ran an electronics company in Acton Lane, asked if I’d drive him to Holland to deliver some computer components and bring back more of the same.  Computer components?  I hear you say.  I was surprised too, but even though we were yet to get them in our homes and offices, computers were, seemingly, around in an industrial capacity in 1976 or even earlier.  The job was due to happen on October 17 and 18 which would make things pretty tight for the Wings show, not to mention my hot date with Tania.  “Don’t worry about it” said Ian dismissively, “we’ll be back in plenty of time". 

We drove to Harwich in the afternoon to catch the overnight ferry to the Hook of Holland in good time and sat in the bar for the crossing.  The following morning we went down to the vehicle deck only to find the van had a flat tyre.  Bad start.  Even worse, the spare was almost flat too and, just to put the lid on it, I’d forgotten to bring the jack.  Oh, and since we were the last vehicle on the ferry, we were now the first one off, which meant we were holding everyone else up.

With a little help we pushed the van out of the way and, mercifully, a bloke with a Land Rover loaned me a jack big enough so I could at least fit the half-inflated spare.  I limped the van to a nearby service station to get the puncture fixed while Ian did the necessary paperwork to clear the computer components through customs.  

Our destination was Groningen in the far north of the Netherlands.  A 250km drive from the Hook of Holland, it can be reached in around three hours today.  But with no sat nav and a slow, right-hand drive van travelling on what was, for me, the unfamiliar side of the road, it took us over five hours in 1976, including getting hopelessly lost a few times.  

Now, Ian was a successful businessman.  He’d got in on the ground floor with computers and he already drove an impressive Mercedes 300 SEL 3.5, one of the fastest four door saloon cars you could buy at the time.  But while he was certainly not lacking in confidence, he had little understanding of both geography and the Dutch language.  So, as we drove through the Amsterdam outskirts becoming increasingly confused, he spotted a sign reading “Amsterdam-Oost”.  “Well, we definitely don’t want to go to Oost” snorted Ian, becoming quite animated.  He obviously believed “Oost” was the name of a town, rather than just the Dutch word for “East”.  Ah, the British abroad.  We eventually pulled over and asked for directions from a local with perfect English and were soon back on our way.  

We turned up at Groningen in the mid-afternoon and while Ian did the business, I loaded up the van for the return journey, then investigated a nearby record store.  Among other things I bought a 1971 French picture sleeve single of Frank Zappa’s “What Will This Evening Bring Me This Morning?” taken from the 200 Motels album.  

We had to drive back to the Hook Of Holland non-stop in time to catch the 10pm ferry, otherwise the next crossing was 12 hours later, which would throw the entire Wings concert situation into serious jeopardy.  Miraculously and with not a little anxiety on my part we made it with only minutes to spare.  Ian generously forked out for a two-bunk cabin so we could get a little shut-eye before arriving at Harwich the next morning. 

 

Venus and Mars Are Alright Tonight

The Wings concert went off smoothly, although our seats were near the back of the cavernous hall with poor visibility.  There were no screens in those days of course, and we were sitting so far away from the stage that it wasn’t until I saw photos of McCartney in the newspapers the next day that I realised he’d recently grown a moustache.  The following two nights would prove considerably more eventful. 

I’d secured a few hundred copies of a new book to sell at the remaining Wings’ concerts.  Edited by Paul Gambaccini, Paul McCartney In His Own Words was published in August 1976.  Retailing at £1.95 (equivalent to around £15 in 2021) it was basically just a collection of random Macca quotes lifted from various interviews, tarted up with plenty of photographs.  It looked good, but it was a classic example of cut-and-paste journalism.  There were several books in the same series including titles by John Lennon and The Beatles. 

Before computers it was almost impossible to keep an accurate eye on stock levels and, naturally, everyone was on the fiddle, often outrageously so, with stuff literally flying out the back door of warehouses across the land.  The music publishing world was no different and we’d established mutually beneficial, ahem, “arrangements” with the backroom boys at several of our suppliers.  It worked like this.  You’d put in an order totaling, say, £100 and when the invoice arrived, you’d find you’d only been charged half that amount, or less.  You’d split the difference with the warehouse boys, and everyone was happy.  

One lad at a West End publisher was an aspiring guitarist (he was a pretty good one too, I recall) and asked if I could order a Gibson Les Paul Custom for him through the shop and he’d pay me “in kind” so to speak.  The price of a new Les Paul at the time was around £400 (equivalent to £3,000 in 2021).  When the guitar arrived, we delivered it to his house in Wembley where he lived with his parents.  We were briefed on what to say, should his mum ask any awkward questions about where such a beautiful and expensive instrument came from. 

So, I turned up at the second Wings’ concert together with Jack, a Scottish friend from Ladbroke Grove and we prepared to sell our McCartney books.  Unlike the Hammersmith Odeon with its brightly lit frontage situated directly on the busy Hammersmith Broadway, the gigantic Empire Pool was well away from the road, surrounded by huge car parks and dark, unlit areas.  We’d barely started when we were grabbed from behind, frog marched to the car park and thrown roughly against the side of a nearby van.  “What the farkin' ‘ell are you two jokers up to?” demanded a voice, as my arm was forced painfully up my back.  We’d been nabbed by three or four heavies in Crombie overcoats and cropped hair, worn Bob Hoskins style.  These were textbook Cockney geezers and, seemingly, graduates of the Ray Winstone charm school to boot. It transpired that they “controlled” the car parks and surrounding area of the Empire Pool and absolutely nothing could be sold there without their say-so.  

The situation looked grim and I was sure we were about to get a good hiding.  This required some fast talking. When I eventually convinced them we were just a couple of harmless chancers who weren’t muscling in on their territory or working for a rival “firm” the bully boys calmed down and the prospect of a duffing-up receded a little.  Nevertheless, rules is rules and we were informed in no uncertain terms that if we wished to sell our books we would have to hand over £20 each for the privilege.  That translates to a total of around £300 in today’s money.  It was a classic shakedown situation, but we ignored it at our peril.  We just didn’t have that amount of cash on us, so we called it a night at that point, deciding to return the following evening.

  

On the final night I reluctantly handed over the cash to the standover merchants and we were duly allowed to sell our books.  It was good to hear the entire Wings concert again through the side doors of the arena (albeit somewhat muffled) and, as usual, sales were brisk as people were leaving the concert on a high after seeing McCartney.  We probably shifted a few hundred books, all told.  But the previous evening’s unpleasantness had rather taken the shine off things and our hearts were no longer in it.  This spelled the end of my concert merchandise enterprise.

Our top floor flat at 198 Ladbroke Grove 

 Life Is A Carnival

It’s one of the world's largest street festivals and a significant event in Black British culture.  A wonderful example of diversity and the coming together in peace and harmony of people from many races and all walks of life.  Everyone loves the annual Notting Hill Carnival, right?  

I don’t want to sound curmudgeonly, but for those of us who actually lived on Ladbroke Grove, the Carnival weekend was a major pain in the arse and the cause of huge disruption to everyday life.  For a start, we had to park our cars several streets away for days.  Then there were the crowds.  I’ve always disliked big crowds, and these gatherings (up to half a million over the August bank holiday long weekend) were oppressive to the point of claustrophobia with a healthy side order of paranoia.  Just leaving the house to buy a bottle of milk involved more pushing and shoving than you'll see following the final whistle at Old Trafford.  Sleep was difficult as the steel bands and floats seemed to start up mid-morning and continue long into the night.  We had people continually ringing every doorbell in the house around the clock asking to use the toilet.  And that’s before we get to the riots. 

Living in our top floor flat with a tiny balcony directly overlooking Ladbroke Grove, we had a grandstand seat for every Carnival riot from 1976 through to 1980.  Depending how hot the long weekend had been usually determined how spectacularly the riots would kick off.  The police had absolutely no protective riot gear back then, so they would run down into the basement areas of the houses to purloin the rubber lids from the old school metal dustbins to use as shields when the missiles started to fly.  1976 and ‘77 were probably the worst riot years and we saw cars and police vans overturned and set alight, shops looted and windows smashed.  This was simultaneously very scary and yet somehow strangely exhilarating.  In later years most shops and businesses along Portobello Road and Ladbroke Grove took to boarding up their windows well in advance as the Carnival weekend approached. 

Moving Out and Moving On

By the end of the 70s our flat in Ladbroke Grove was looking decidedly run down and in urgent need of repair and renovation.  In truth the entire house had long resembled one of Peter Rachman’s less desirable properties (again, ask your dad) and it was slowly turning into a proper slum.  We still had one of those lethal Ascot gas water heaters in the kitchen and an art deco style gas fire in the lounge which barely gave out any heat.  The bathroom and toilet were shared with other tenants on the downstairs landing and in winter it was so cold we had frost in the inside of our bedroom window due to the ill-fitting sash frames.  

The shilling-in-the-slot electricity meter was archaic and inconvenient, but this proved to be a blessing in disguise.  I’d long since worked out how to open the padlock on the meter with a hairgrip and we would recycle the same few 10p pieces endlessly.  When the landlord got wise to that ruse, I figured out how to set the meter to the lowest possible rate, so a single 50p coin would last days instead of just half an hour, as before.  

Depressingly, the roof leaked when it rained and one winter around 1976 the entire kitchen ceiling came down with a mighty crash.  On the plus side the rent was only £12 a week and had been at that rate for years.  That’s the equivalent of £90 in 2021.  Try finding a one-bedroom flat in Notting Hill for that price today.  

By 1980 talks were underway for the council to take possession of the house, renovate and convert it into self-contained modern apartments with central heating and other mod cons.  The problem was, this required all residents to move out while the work was being done.  Then we had to apply for acceptance in the new, improved house.  It all seemed like a lot of hassle. 

I’d lost interest in the music shop by this time, eventually handing the whole thing over to the Pash family to cover back rent and sundry debts.  So, in 1981 Tania and I took the plunge and got a grown-up mortgage together.  We bought a lovely little flat in Harrow Wealdstone out at the end of the Bakerloo line.  It was only 14 miles (23km) from Euston station which seems like nothing now, yet it was the furthest I’d ever lived from central London and after a decade in Ladbroke Grove it felt like we were marooned in the middle of nowhere.  

On the plus side we were within walking distance of the famous Wealdstone Railway Hotel where the Who had started out and just a short drive to Wembley, so we weren’t entirely out in the boondocks.  I took a van driving job to keep the wolf from the door while simultaneously wheeling and dealing in records with left over stock from the shop.  Car boot sales and flea markets were also a goldmine for vinyl rarities in the 70s and 80s.

 

Everyday I Write The Book

Today, Record Collector magazine is a big-selling glossy monthly, like a trainspotter’s version of Uncut or Mojo, if you will. Full page colour ads for RC can now be found within the pages of Viz comic, a sure sign of hip commercial success on an impressive scale. But it wasn’t always thus.  Record Collector started life in 1979 as a flimsy, inconsequential supplement to the reprints of the 60s fan mag The Beatles Book (aka Beatles Monthly).  Both titles were published by Sean O’Mahoney (aka Johnny Dean) who, thanks to a handshake deal with Brian Epstein, enjoyed undreamed-of access to the Beatles throughout the 60s.  O’Mahoney also published Beat Instrumental, a respected gear-focused mag which ran from 1963 to 1980.

The first stand-alone edition of Record Collector appeared in small A5 size format in March 1980, which is when I started reading it.  By modern standards the articles were a little amateurish, and the record values quoted were laughable compared to today’s prices.  I was convinced I could do as well as this, if not a whole lot better.  I’d written odd pieces for fanzines and street papers previously but the people who ran those things were notoriously flakey and since there was no money involved, the reward of seeing my name in print was hardly worth the effort of chasing them up for a response.  

Using a stone-age word processer, I knocked off a lengthy piece on Frank Zappa and submitted it, unsolicited, to Record Collector in early 1982 and sat back to see what would happen.  Then… absolutely nothing happened for weeks.  It seemed that when it came to communication RC were just as tardy as everyone else.  Eventually I rang and spoke to the editor Peter Doggett who turned out to be a lovely soft-spoken man and in time he became a good friend.  “Oh yes, I rather liked your Zappa piece” he said.  “We’ll be using it in the next issue (July 1982).  Any chance you could write something else for us?”  Could I ever!  I was in like a shot and over the next decade I contributed numerous articles to the magazine as well as freelancing for Folk Roots (later fRoots) and other smallish publications.  And, best of all, I (usually) got paid for it.

Epilogue

Much has changed around Ladbroke Grove and we’ve lost so many famous local residents over the years: Lemmy, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Farren, Larry Wallis, Robert Calvert, Barney Bubbles, Peter Bardens, Paul Buckmaster, Raphael Ravenscroft, “Jesus”, Paul Kossoff, Marc Bolan and Steve Took to name just a few. All have gone.  

Although the area has been transformed almost beyond recognition it still retains some of its old bohemian edge, albeit now greatly gentrified.  The Prince of Wales pub where Tania and I met closed its doors forever in 2011 and is now an apartment block.  Another pub, the Earl Percy, situated almost opposite our house on Ladbroke Grove was once a real old school spit and sawdust boozer.  In 2013 it took a giant leap upmarket and became the Portobello House Hotel gastro pub.  The Elgin pub is still there looking virtually unchanged from the outside, although it’s now much smarter inside. 

Lansdowne Studios closed in 2006 and the Grade II listed building constructed in 1902 was converted into self-contained apartments.

Pash’s guitar shop is also long gone and a variety of businesses have occupied the Elgin Crescent premises since they closed.  I was recently in touch with Dave Pash and I’m pleased to report he now owns the entire building, including the ground floor shop and our old basement (where the damp problem was presumably taken care of a long time ago).  While it will probably never be a music shop again, at least it’s back in safe hands.

  

This has been a kind of sequel to an earlier blog piece: 

https://andnowitsallthis.blogspot.com/2019/11/she-said-shed-always-been-dancer-soho.html