Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (9 page)

We ended our Dangermen days in this country with a return to the Electric Ballroom, which brought the memories flooding back. Earlier this year we made another ‘surprise’ return to the Dublin as part of the fabulous Camden Crawl. This time it was the location, not the identity of the band, which was supposed to be secret. But again, word must have leaked because when we were led into the pub by a bagpiper bellowing out ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ we received a rousing reception. Considering our advanced years, I think we gave a pretty good account of ourselves.

The great thing about the Crawl is that it’s not all about people like us, who have been around forever. Far from it. Throughout the weekend virtually every available venue in Camden is host to a new young band, who are given the opportunity to show what they can do in front of a live (and lively) audience. There’s such a buzz about the place, and it’s inspiring to see and hear all the talent that’s out there, desperate to perform. The Crawl offers that opportunity. It took me back to when we were starting out - in those days bands had options as to where they could play, but today it is so much harder. That’s why those three north London venues are so important.

M
usic hall was the most popular form of entertainment for Londoners through most of the nineteenth century and right up until the 1920s, when cinema began to eat into the audiences. At the height of the craze, in the 1870s, there were 78 so-called Grand Music Halls dotted around London and more than 300 smaller venues, which makes it all the more surprising, as well as rather sad, that so few of these palaces of working-class entertainment still survive today. The great halls that housed the entertainments vanished before their historical importance had been evaluated.

Early on, Madness were described as being ‘intrinsically’ music hall and ‘quintessentially’ English. Once I realised what those words meant, that description came as something of a surprise. Back in the 60s and 70s, when I was growing up, any mention of music hall would immediately conjure up images of the rather bizarre BBC TV show
The Good Old Days
, which seemed to mainly involve handlebar-moustachioed fellas in stripy blazers pushing ladies on flower-festooned swings singing ‘Daisy, Daisy’. Not much competition for my TV favourites at the time,
The Avengers
and
Batman
. Bish, bash, bosh! Holy alliteration! Over the years, though, I’ve come to realise that there’s no disgrace whatsoever in being associated with the tradition that gave us greats like Marie Lloyd, Max Miller or Little Tich.

Lloyd was christened ‘Queen of the Music Hall’ and her risqué act included bawdy songs such as ‘I Sits among the Cabbages and Peas’ and ‘She’d Never Had Her Ticket Punched Before’, which got Edwardian moralists all hot under the collar yet had audiences rolling in the aisles. If Marie Lloyd was the mistress of the double entendre, then Max Miller became the master of the same from the 1930s to the 1950s. Nicknamed ‘the Cheeky Chappie’, Miller was renowned for taking his comedy to the limits. He dressed in outlandish flower-patterned suits with plus-fours, matching shoes and a trilby hat and was pretty much Britain’s first alternative comedian. Now, I’ve also ended up playing in a fair few venues which were linked, one way or another, with the musical halls but I have drawn the line at flower-patterned suits.

Although music hall wasn’t foremost in our thoughts when Madness formed, it was definitely lurking in the wings. Chris Foreman, our guitarist and founder member of the band (age unknown, details kept in a vault in the Bank of England), had it in his blood. His dad, John, was reviving a lot of these old music-hall songs and performing them on the pub and club circuit when we were starting out.

So how did it come to pass that Madness became linked with the music-hall tradition, given that our tastes when growing up were contemporary rather than retro? It certainly wasn’t intentional. We were heavily into Bowie, Roxy Music, ska and reggae. Indeed, Chris Foreman’s teenage ambition was to be in Mott the Hoople, who made it big in the glam rock era with songs like ‘All the Young Dudes’ and ‘All the Way from Memphis’, and that seems a mighty long way from the music hall. Or is it?

Perhaps the 1970s glam rockers were really only a few platform-booted strides away from the music-hall performers of the past, as this article from a weekly, London-based journal called
The Tomahawk
entitled ‘An Opinion of Music Halls’ (1867) appears to show:

Now I knew my old mate Noddy Holder was getting on a bit, but I didn’t realise he was
that
old. Seriously, this review, though clearly written by a journalist with an anti-music-hall agenda, says much about the way the popular song was viewed by a certain class. It also shows how it was evolving and how important a distinctive ‘look’ was in putting it across.

We were also big fans of Ian Dury and ultimately joined the same record label as the great man. Maybe this is where the music hall really begins to kick in for Madness and me. Ian was another artist closely linked to the music-hall tradition, an interest reinforced by the artist Peter Blake, who was his mentor and lecturer at Canterbury art college. Blake was a big fan and collector of the eccentricities of the music hall, and even owns a pair of Max Miller’s shoes. Also in that continuum are the Kinks, another big influence on us. Ray Davies cites Max Miller’s
Max at the Met
as featuring in the soundtrack of his life. Ian didn’t make any attempt to hide his musical sympathies: not only did he name-check some of the stars of the halls in his songs, but his act and repertoire had clear links with the past. He wrote one of the first singles released on Stiff Records, called ‘England’s Glory’, which was recorded by the veteran music-hall performer Max Wall. In the song he lists ‘all the jewels in the crown of England’s glory’, including stars who made their names in music hall, such as Gracie Fields, Little Tich, Max Miller, Frankie Howerd and George Formby. The song also contains the immortal line ‘Winkles, Woodbines, Walnut Whips, Vera Lynn and Stafford Cripps’. The record wasn’t a hit, but it’s an infectious little number and really does go some way to invoking the sound of old London. I think you may still be able to get it on a Stiff Records compilation. The B-side is called ‘Dream Tobacco’ but that, my friends, is for another time . . . The song also reminds us that ‘Englishness’ is an essential component of the music-hall tradition. Putting on one of our albums I don’t think you could really mistake Madness for an American band, could you? To be fair, that cuts both ways. I don’t recall hearing much tell of Walnut Whips or Woodbines in any Aerosmith numbers.

Looking back at our early videos - something I regularly do when there’s nothing good on the telly - it’s easy to see the influence of music hall in our dance routines, although once again this was more by accident than design. For instance, the sand dance in ‘Night Boat to Cairo’ owes much to the off-the-wall music-hall act Wilson, Keppel and Betty, who specialised in Egyptian dance routines. However, I seem to remember we got the inspiration from two blokes who regularly used to perform the dance outside the Odeon in Leicester Square. They were clearly copying the old-time trio I now realise. And so the echoes of these funny old routines continue.

As far as I’ve been able to discover, only a couple of old stages from the early days of music hall are still standing in the modern city. I’ll be calling in on both halves of this architectural double act later on, but first let’s take a rummage in the history drawer to discover when and why the music halls were born.

The great-grannies of music hall were the district tea gardens. These were all the rage in the late eighteenth century, open spaces on the edge of town for Londoners to enjoy a stroll, some refreshment and a spot of entertainment too. Games of cricket, bowls and Dutch pins were all on the bill, along with performing poets, ballad and comic singers, actors, organists and orchestras, who entertained patrons in pavilions, ballrooms or in the open air. The gardens were located all over the suburbs, in places like Islington, Highbury, Stepney, Bayswater and Hackney. We think of these as being inner-city areas today, but back then they were villages on the edge of the city, until they began to be swallowed up when Victorian London started to expand.

It’s hard to get your head round the fact that the crowded districts that make up the modern metropolis were once rural hamlets, but there are a few reminders of this history in London today. If you ever find yourself at a loose end in Brixton, for example, you could head up Brixton Hill and take a right into Blenheim Gardens where you’ll discover, tucked away behind some industrial buildings, a windmill - yes, a windmill - which first turned its sails here in 1816 when even this bustling part of south London was all green fields.

Despite their genteel name, the tea gardens served more than cuppas; many had taverns too and it was the bar takings on which the gardens’ prosperity came increasingly to depend. The quality of entertainment on offer in these places was described by one commentator of the time as being ‘lowbrow’, which, I imagine, one should read as ‘pretty good and not too fancy’; in fact, probably the sort of entertainment that would eventually make up the repertoire of early music hall.

So the tea gardens were all eventually swallowed up by urban development, and the taverns, which once stood in open fields, were left stranded among the new streets of housing and commercial premises, beacons of hope and refreshment in the urban wilderness. It was from these taverns that the music halls evolved. The man who made it happen was called Charles Morton, the so-called ‘Father of the Halls’.

Morton obviously enjoyed a good night out and was a regular at the ‘song and supper rooms’ that sprung up in the West End in the early nineteenth century, places such as Evans’s in Covent Garden and the Coal Hole in the Strand. The Coal Hole (not to be confused with the pub of the same name which is still to be found on the Strand today) sounds like a fine old place, the hangout of the great Victorian actor Edmund Kean among others. Inside places like this, well-heeled gents (women weren’t allowed) sat at long tables next to a stage and wined and dined while an endless procession of singers and comics struggled to hold their attention. Morton saw an opportunity to do something similar in a pub environment and purchased the Canterbury Arms on Westminster Bridge Road in Lambeth, south London.

He was obviously doing something right at the Canterbury because it wasn’t long before he needed more space. In 1852 he set about extending his entertainment empire by building a hall for musical entertainment at the rear of the pub on the site of an old skittle alley. A couple of years after that he extended again, building a larger hall over the top of the original. This, the New Canterbury Music Hall as it was called, was the very first proper music hall in London, with room for 1,500 punters. Morton was so keen not to lose the custom he’d built up over two years that he decided to construct it without stopping the performances. The original hall was demolished on a Saturday night (I’ve drunk at a few places where that sort of thing happens) and the new one was up and running by Monday.

Morton’s hall had painted walls, luxury fittings, a balcony, tables and chairs for dining and a stage with a piano. An entrance fee of sixpence was charged and - unlike the song and supper rooms - women were welcome too. Each act was introduced by a chairman who sat at a table to the side of the stage, and - hey presto, what do you know? - the music hall had been born. Morton’s successful recipe, which saw the Canterbury pulling in the crowds until it finally closed in 1912, was soon copied by others, and similar set-ups were built in every corner of town. Just over a century ago, the writer and theatre critic Henry Chance Newton said that ‘without its Palaces of Variety and its Music Halls living London would only be half alive’. All of which makes it rather surprising that today just a handful of these places survive, including just two of the original music halls. The first is on Hoxton Street, east London, and is imaginatively known as Hoxton Hall. It has a white, elegant exterior and is part of a modest terrace that narrowly avoided bombing during the Blitz. It began life as McDonald’s Music Hall - named after the man who built it - and while I’d like to report that the burghers of Hoxton took to it with relish, unfortunately they didn’t have much time to sample its delights. It closed in 1871 due to complaints from the police - obviously no laughing policemen on that particular London beat. Ironically, the hall became a temperance mission in 1879 and several years later passed on to a Quaker organisation, a fate which lowered the curtain on its time as a den of iniquity and excess but which probably also saved it from the demolition squad. It has now renewed its acquaintance with the glamour of showbiz, however, leading an interesting double life as a community centre by day and a performance space by night. With its two-tiered, galleried auditorium seating around 200 punters, it’s a lovely, intimate space to enjoy a night’s entertainment but it’s not quite on the same grand scale as the only other survivor from the nineteenth-century heyday of the music hall.

Wilton’s Music Hall stands on Grace’s Alley, off Ensign Street, in Wapping. In the eighteenth century this little cut-through was just around the corner from a rather chic residential spot called Wellclose Square, which was a favoured residence of rich seagoing types - captains, merchants, ship owners and the like - who needed to be close to the river, but not so close that they would have to mingle with the dodgier types who worked on their vessels. When I paid a visit recently, in search of Wilton’s, I first strolled through this once salubrious area, but could find very little evidence of what it had once been like. Most of it was wiped away by wartime bombs and later slum clearance in the 1960s, and the only memento of its more glamorous days is a cluster of bollards on Ensign Street. These were originally installed as hitching posts for horses and marked the spot which was once a parking lot for horse-drawn carriages used by patrons of the Royal Brunswick Theatre, which opened its doors here in 1828. These bollards still bear the monogrammed ‘RBT’ of the theatre with a crown over the top. However, audiences didn’t get the chance to catch many performances at the grand new theatre because it collapsed just a couple of days after opening. Talk about bringing the house down.