Meek died when the psychedelic scene was about to explode, by which time his recordings were considered old hat. Moreover, his business affairs were in a mess and creditors needed to be paid. The Official Receiver was called and Meek’s recording equipment and 67 tea chests full of master tapes were put up for auction. Cliff bought the tapes for £300 in 1968, on the understanding that the collection wouldn’t be broken up or sold and that he wasn’t permitted to release any of the music on the tapes because he didn’t own the copyright.
Over the years, Meek’s legendary status began to grow and grow and a couple of years ago a play based on his life story, entitled
Telstar
, hit the West End. Recently, a film biopic of the same name was released. Increasingly there have been calls by Meek aficionados for the release of the so-called ‘Tea-Chest Tapes’, which are said to include unreleased recordings by the likes of David Bowie, Gene Vincent, Billy Fury and Jimmy Page. For much of the past 40 years the tapes have allegedly been preserved by Cliff in a Tin Pan Alley basement, but just recently he put them up for auction, where a bid of £170,000 failed to meet the estimate of £250,000. Quite an investment to make on spec, and probably more than the Telstar satellite cost to launch all those years ago.
For a while, Cliff was the landlord of Tin Pan Alley Studio, which is still going after all these years and is the street’s sole survivor at number 22. Today, Steve Kent runs the basement studio that Ralph Elman first opened in 1954. Steve was a musician and singer before he moved to the other side of the glass and became a producer, and has worked with some top talent, such as George Michael and Marc Almond. When I visited him at the studio recently, he told me that the place had acted as a sort of training ground for groups such as the Who and the Small Faces in the 1960s before they moved on from what he called ‘the Denmark Street stage of their careers’. The studio continued to flourish throughout the following decades, until computers and home-recording equipment began to take business away. As Steve says, in the past artists had no option but to go to a studio if they wanted to cut a record, which meant that Tin Pan Alley was busy 24/7. Today, rent and rates have gone through the roof but studio rates are falling owing to the stiff competition from home recording. But Steve is determined to keep this small, den-like studio going, come what may. Let’s hope so, because Denmark Street without a recording studio would be like rock without the roll.
Although the recording technology at Steve’s studio is pretty much state-of-the-art today, the atmosphere of the place, with its low ceilings and walls that seem to have absorbed the conversations, chords and crashing cymbals of pop legends, is redolent of the early years of pop. But there is somewhere where musicians can go to get a truly authentic retro experience that replicates the recording experiences of bands of the 60s and early 70s, and that’s a studio where Madness recently recorded some tracks for our album
The Liberty of Norton Folgate
. Situated to the rear of a Victorian terrace on Glyn Road, Hackney, Toe Rag Studios is a real blast from the past. It is the brainchild of producer Liam Watson, who has gathered together a large collection of vintage analogue recording equipment from the 1960s and installed it in a studio lovingly created to resemble those from the golden age of pop.
However, Toe Rag isn’t a museum: it’s a successful working studio that specialises in recording in the old-fashioned manner in vintage surroundings. The floor of the compact ‘live room’ has a black-and-white chequered, linoleum-style floor and bakelite headphones hang from the green doorframe of this predominantly white, sound-proofed space. A 1965 Ludwig drum kit sits ready for action in one corner of the room and in another stands an old upright piano that just happens to be the same one that we used on our first single, ‘The Prince’, Liam having picked up the instrument from the now defunct Pathway Studios in Highbury, where Madness recorded the track back in 1979. Behind the glass panel that separates (or protects, in some cases!) the producer from the band is Liam’s control room, which is a veritable Aladdin’s cave of classic equipment. Reel-to-reel tape recorders vie for space with speakers, mixers, cables and microphones. And to give the place a really authentic retro feel, Liam even wears a white lab coat when at work here, just like the studio technicians of yesteryear (he’s drawn the line at smoking a pipe at the same time, though).
Dominating the control room is a mixing console that came from Abbey Road Studios, which, Liam informs me, dates from the period when the Beatles were making musical history there. It’s all levers and dials and very Heath Robinson by today’s standards, but to Liam, who’s been collecting recording kit since he was kid, it’s the business. He can’t be sure that George Martin, the Beatles’ famous producer, ever used the console when recording the group, but, as he pointed out to me, there’s no harm in making the assumption that he did. It’s a great studio because you have to record mainly live, with all the musicians in the room, and the sound Liam achieves beats the pants off many of the digital recordings of today.
Toe Rag is all very much in the spirit of the studios that used to sit side by side in Denmark Street back in the 60s. Tin Pan Alley might be down to just one studio today, but it’s still a colourful, vibrant street with a history to match. Like the remaining music pubs of London, it needs to be cherished because of its glorious association with popular music. Admittedly, in its early years it didn’t produce songsmiths of the caliber of Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, who were Tin Pan Alley stalwarts in the USA, but we almost matched them. So putting old Rubber Lips, David Bowie, Reg Dwight, the birth of independent producers and studios, and the continuing invention and reinvention of the sounds of pop music to one side for a minim, consider this.When Americans Frank Silver and Irving Cohn wrote ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’ back in 1923, English composer Fred Heatherton trumped them, I feel, with his evergreen and marvelously English standard ‘I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts’. In my songbook, that’s reason enough to celebrate Tin Pan Alley. When challenged to come up with a song about exotic fruit, Tin Pan Alley wasn’t to be squashed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Food, Glorious Food
M
usic may be the food of love, but you can’t spread it on toast, can you? A man has to eat, and London is now one of the food capitals of the world. We have some of the best chefs too, and you can sample almost any of the planet’s cuisines right on your own doorstep, though I would generally recommend a plate. Well, who would have thought it? Certainly not me, when I was growing up in a world of Smash and spam. Exotic cuisine consisted of the Happy Garden Chinese takeaway, spaghetti Bolognese and, the London perennial, the humble kebab.
But - shock, horror and hold the front page - as I am about to reflect on the stories behind a few of the tastiest and oddest foods I have encountered in London, as well as some places that feature on my personal food map, the radio is informing me that a new study tells us that kebabs aren’t good for us if we eat them regularly. Well whoopi-do, well I never, people who have kebab and chips every night turn out to be less healthy than those who eat a more balanced diet. Don’t you love these studies? Who comes up with them? Presumably the same lot who announce red wine is good for you, bad for you, good for you etc.
Anyway, to go some way towards redressing the balance in the interests of public health, let me share with you my personal and exhaustive 40-year study of the late-night kebab. It has proved no more dangerous than a certain repetition of raw onion the following day. Admittedly I couldn’t completely vouch for the entire list of ingredients that make up the slowly revolving elephant’s leg that is the doner, but having worked making hamburgers in a butcher’s, I can guess, and I don’t think anyone died from eating one of them, well not as far as I know.
The ‘scientists’ who sat around watching subjects eat kebab and chips for six months might have been better placed simply to offer the advice that it’s better to eat a doner from a shop that’s busy, so the meat doesn’t get to hang around too long. There, how’s that for science. And as for my man the shish, I challenge any scientist on earth to suggest there could be anything remotely unhealthy about a freshly grilled skewer or two of lamb, lashings of mixed salad and a drizzle of chilli sauce, all cosily wrapped in a lightly toasted pitta bread. Leaving aside the six pints of lager, obviously.
I am not going to claim the doner kebab is a London invention first popularised by Samuel Pepys and cooked on the burning embers of the original St Paul’s when it was destroyed by the Great Fire of London, though now I’ve said that, it does have a certain ring of authenticity. After hours of diligent study, I now know that actually the doner was invented in Berlin not London. But what is the London equivalent of this convenient and cheap dish of the working classes of Berlin? A few dishes come to mind. Let’s start with eels.
Londoners along the Thames have been catching and eating eels for over 1,000 years, God help them. A smoked eel pâté is a tremendous thing, but when jellied, which is traditionally how generations of Londoners have enjoyed them, eels are not my takeaway dish of choice. However, in the spirit of enquiry, I have tried to follow their snaky trail through London and found it rather electrifying. Let’s begin by heading way up west, travelling along the river towards Teddington.
As you get to Twickenham and feel the country breeze ruffle your toupee, you’ll find Eel Pie Island, nestling appropriately in a snaking bend in the river. It’s a proper island, joined to the northern bank, the Middlesex side, by a gently arching footbridge. It’s actually more famous for being part of the music scene in the 1960s than its culinary heritage. The Stones, the Yardbirds, the Small Faces and the Who all played at the Eel Pie Hotel, an extremely grand building with a white-painted front and veranda overlooking the Surrey bank. The hotel became something of a hippy hangout until a police raid in 1967 did for the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll and left the owners with a list of required repairs totalling £200,000. It burnt down in 1971.
The island is now rather an idyllic spot, all leafy tranquillity and boats and not a mosh pit or Marianne Faithfull lookalike in sight. But how did this suburban island come by its curious name? Well, if you were after a bit of traditional London nosh in Tudor times this would have been the spot for you. It was the home of the finest eel pies in London. I can say that with some certainty because apparently that’s the view taken by Henry VIII and who am I to argue with one of England’s greatest gourmands? The story goes that Henry was given a pie from the island to sample, and liked it so much he asked for the first pie of the season to be made especially for him. Given the size of the man, it must have taken some amount of eels to fill a pie, or indeed pies, to satiate that big appetite. At last the mystery is solved. Who ate all the pies? Henry.
Eel pies and meat pies survived down the centuries and became more associated with the poor than the affluent, as they reduced in size from large dishes fit for a feast to pies you could hold in your hand. In London, they became more closely associated with the East End than the leafy suburbs of the western reaches of the Thames. Hot pies, eel pies and meat pies were sold by street vendors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By some accounts, at the height of their popularity there were as many as 600 piemen plying their pies around London. After my experience on the mincer in the butcher’s, I’m still a bit wary of ‘meat’ pies and it would seem that even my own scepticism has something of a tradition, because by the middle of the nineteenth century Londoners were obviously concerned about just what exactly lay under the crust of pastry, as an honest-looking pie could hide a multitude of sins.
A Victorian journalist, Henry Mayhew, wrote in his book
London Labour and the London Poor
, published in 1851, that it was generally held that piemen weren’t ‘too particular’ about the meat they bought as they could ‘season it up’. Some young wags would return the pie-sellers’ cries of ‘al ’ot pies’ with slightly grisly chants of their own, like ‘bow wow’ or ‘mee-ow’. They weren’t wrong to be worried because food and drink was commonly adulterated in nineteenth-century London. Milk had chalk added and coffee was coloured with lead oxide to bulk up the volume and make it look more palatable.
The addition of poisons like lead to food was becoming so big a problem that in the end the Victorians introduced the first food-safety laws to try to regularise what was sold. I guess it’s from that perfectly sensible beginning that we have arrived at notices on almost everything warning us about nuts or the possibility of nuts, even on a very nutty snack, like, for example, a bag of nuts. By the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851, it should also have been show time for the piemen of London, what with all the thousands of hungry culture-vultures descending on the capital from all corners of Britain and beyond, but it was to be the last hurrah for the pie boom. Selling hot pies on the streets was becoming a dying trade because as soon as the first pie shops opened their doors around 1850, with stalls outside selling eels and clean marble interiors offering a variety of hot pies straight from their onsite ovens, the poor street vendor couldn’t compete on quality or on price and ‘cook shops’ - shops that cooked food and sold it straight from their premises - began to open up across London, and in particular the East End.
But I have digressed from my eely investigations. What of the origins of a dish of eels? If you were too poor or not drunk enough to buy a pie of dubious origin at a penny a go, then you could buy hot eels at half the price.
Their popularity in London was based on the fact that eels were plentiful in the Thames and appear to be able to survive quite polluted waters. In Victorian times many of the eels that made their way on to London’s streets came from Dutch eel boats. They sailed down the Thames and moored at the east of the city, just off Billingsgate fish market, which in those days was sited at the bottom of Lower Thames Street, along the bank of the river. They sold their eels straight off their boats, and they had a monopoly on the trade for a while, which was granted to them for helping to feed Londoners after the Great Fire. Imagine the scene in 1666. There you are, carrying your belongings in your cart, no home, no food, wondering what is going to become of you, when you hear the reassuring drawl of a Dutch eel fisherman: ‘Hey, sho you’ve had a bit of a fire, guys, just relax, no worriesh, have shome eels.’ I wonder if they were nicely shmoked?