London Urban Legends (7 page)

Liverpool Sunset

Some stories become facts not by being true but by being short, sharp, easily communicable pieces of information. Ray Davies was a chronicler and satiriser of Sixties Britain and The Kinks’ song ‘Waterloo Sunset’ was a description of swinging London, with its characters Terry and Julie meeting at Waterloo station every Friday night based upon the handsome icons of the era Julie Christie and Terence Stamp. Everyone knows that Ray Davies watched from his window as they crossed the river for untold adventures. You know it, I know it, Terence Stamp knew it when interviewed about his retrospective at the nearby British Film Institute in May 2013.

Facts are tricky things and not always based on any actual real occurrence, particularly when the reality of the fact comes from the often volatile mind of a writer or musician. ‘Waterloo Sunset’, the song stained with the tears of countless Londoners, a group not often given over to sentimentality, started life as a hymn to Mersey-beat called ‘Liverpool Sunset’. The
Liverpool Echo
cheerfully quoted Ray Davies in its 14 May 2010 issue as saying ‘Liverpool is my favourite city, and the song was originally called Liverpool Sunset,’ going on to proclaim ‘London was home, I’d grown up there, but I like to think I could be an adopted Scouser. My heart is definitely there.’ It should be noted that Davies was about to play the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall when he gave the interview.

So Terry and Julie may have had very different accents? Probably not as, according to a ‘Behind the Song’ column in the
Independent
dated 9 March 1998, once the change was made from Liverpool to Waterloo, Davies could incorporate the scene of countless people flowing out of Waterloo underground like another dirty old river. The couple at the station were not Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, but Davies’ young nephew Terry. Davies’ brother-in-law had just emigrated to Australia and he imagined Arthur’s young son grown-up, back in London and meeting his girlfriend. The
Independent
article speculated that Julie symbolised England, so may have been based on Julie Christie alone.

Is any of this true? Following the workings of a creative imagination is like trying to jog across a continuous landslide of ideas, images, thoughts and feelings, even long after the creative piece is complete. We will probably never know. If you do meet Terence Stamp however, it may be best not to mention that the Terry in ‘Waterloo Sunset’ is not him, but Davies’ nephew, all grown up and living in a fictional future London. When asked about it by the
Evening Standard
in an interview about his retrospective, published 2 May 2013, Stamp growled:

My brother Chris [ex-manger of The Who] … told me in the Seventies that when Ray Davies wrote ‘Waterloo Sunset’ he was thinking of me and Julie Christie. But apparently Ray denies it now. Well, if he says it’s not true I don’t care. I’ve believed it all these years …

‘What’s behind the green door?’

A London urban legend, nipped as it was budding, attempted to link an esoteric London location to the rock-and-roll track ‘Green Door’. The song is a plea from a desperate man trying to get through a green door and into a midnight party full of laughter and hot piano playing. The protagonist in the song never makes it in; when he tells the unknown revellers that ‘Joe’ had sent him, they merely laugh at him.

First performed by Jim Lowe and reaching No.1 in the charts in America, ‘Green Door’ got to No. 2 and No. 8 in the UK. A version by Frankie Vaughn reached No.2, another by Glen Mason reached No. 24 and in 1981 Shakin’ Stevens got ‘Green Door’ to No. 1 for four weeks.

In the Friday, 8 September 2006 ‘Culture’ section of the
Guardian
Brian Boyd attempted to put the lyrics into a surprising context. The green door of the song was in London, on Bramerton Street off the Kings Road in Chelsea. It was the door to The Gateway, a private lesbian bar or club. The bar was a location for the film
The Killing of Sister George
, the story of a lesbian love triangle. The story of ‘Green Door’ is of a man trying to get into a gay women-only bar. When he says ‘Joe sent me’, he is referring to Joe Meek, the gay British pioneering popstar, which only goes down as a joke with the club’s regulars. In his article, Boyd was attempting to put ‘Green Door’ with other gay pop songs featured in the compilation album
From The Closet To The Charts
, though the full title of the album, compiled by John Savage, is
Queer Noises 61–78: From The Closet To The Charts
. ‘Green Door’ was first a hit in 1956. It is not as popular as ‘Waterloo Sunset’ or ‘Itchycoo Park’ and the explanation of their origins, but Boyd’s theory did make it far enough to make it into Stephanie Theobald’s top five lesbian songs list in the
Guardian
on 6 March 2007, but this mention comes with a correction and clarification on the website.

The lyrics of ‘Green Door’ were written by Marvin Moore, with music by Bob Davie and was composed in a four-room apartment they shared in Greenwich Village in New York. As a graduate of the Texas Christian University School of Journalism, it seems Moore would be unfamiliar with the goings-on of 1950s lesbian London, a decade when the majority of Londoners would be unfamiliar with the concept of a ‘lesbian London’.

There are more convincing explanations of the meaning of ‘Green Door’: that the song’s original singer, Jim Lowe, was singing about a bar with a green door called The Shack when he went to the University of Missouri, or that it is based on the 1940 novel
Behind the Green Door
, although whatever is happening behind the door, set in as ski-resort, does not resemble the fun in the song.

Perhaps the most satisfying explanation is that ‘Green Door’ is a response or shout-back to the song ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’ from the musical
The Pajama Game
, which describes a secretive nightclub for a ‘glass of wine and a fast embrace’, and where the password to get in is ‘Joe sent us’. The song was a hit the year before ‘Green Door’.

Metal Box

Further off the mainstream radar is the discombobulating electronic music of Richard James, the Aphex Twin. His music can jump from serene to harsh to nausea-inducing. It is a fitting tribute to this that in the early 2000s the large stainless steel box in the centre of the Elephant and Castle roundabout was said to be his home. The box is, in fact, the Michael Faraday Memorial, dedicated to the scientist who was born nearby in Newington Butts. The monument itself contains an electrical substation for the Bakerloo and Northern tube lines and is not a house. The Aphex Twin lived nearby in the slightly more conventional venue of a converted bank.

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