An idle early summer Saturday afternoon in London ; time to join some more dots and try to make a greater sense of the totality. For some reason I find myself in Walthamstow and want to get back West without the increasingly dreary grind of going through “London” itself, however long it takes, but then I’m in no hurry. The 34 bus, going all the way to Barnet Church, from affable insolvency to uncaring prosperity; a timetable which optimistically gives an optimal journey time of 40 minutes. I settle in at the front, top deck, like the gawky tourist I suspect I still am after 23 years in this city, and we’re off.
Up Hoe Street, towards hard-trying suburban lanes which look better in the yellowing light; eventually proceeding towards the Crooked Billet roundabout (and the day’s bookends turn out to be Crooked; several hours later, on another bus, streaking through the paceless gates of North Finchley, I pass a small, shaded and possibly shady crescent named Crooked Usage); the options are for Chingford or Edmonton, and the bus takes the North Circular westward – the parallel mirror to the A40 entrails coming in from the other side but always greyer, wider, somehow less real. When you come into London from the West the flat emptiness can be accounted for by the RAF base at Northolt (but it’s all deceit; slope off at Greenford or Perivale, turn a seldom ventured corner and suddenly glimpse the city spread out beneath you like a rusty mat), but from the Eastern side the featurelessness is the feature itself. On this cut of the motorway we are bisected by two huge reservoirs, but you’d never know it from looking; instead, a forlorn mega-Sainsbury’s with no apparent means of reaching there by motor or foot; assorted, isolated tower blocks daubed in hopelessly hopeful primary coloured dots – is there such a thing as Tottenham at the other incline of this valley?
In the far distance, mere specks of the city; when you come out of Walthamstow Central bus station Canary Wharf blinks in your lap on the near horizon, but out here any notion of “ London ” is mere theory. There are glimpses of the NatWest Tower/Gherkin charged congestion; too far to touch, but it’s hardly as though this is a refuge. Where do they come from, these isolated citizens at unlikely bus stops along the motorway, with no evident cluster of habitation?
Further onwards there is slender proof of a “city”; the Angel Edmonton junction, with its unappealing parades of service shops and its traffic lights which allow one car through every six minutes. Attempts at greenness as we near the North Middlesex Hospital , but this ghost is quickly given up and back into the white, horizon-free expanse. We skirt the top (or bottom?) end of Green Lanes and so far I have seen nothing to disprove the notion that this is a Sunday rather than a Saturday. To my right, unseen, Southgate , never quite engaging with my vision or conscience; and it is with some surprise that the bus abruptly arrives at Arnos Grove with its famous Art Deco Piccadilly Line station. Both Art Deco and the Piccadilly Line I kneejerkingly associate with the West, and I feel as though I’ve crossed a boundary, but there’s little in Arnos Grove to suggest opulence (and in any case the bigger, bolder Art Deco stopoff at Park Royal is far worthier of idolatry); a scant process of shops for an age which hasn’t quite been told that shops are no longer needed. Next to the tube station, a markedly enlarged car park, maybe for daytrippers wanting to take its picture (but Southgate station itself! Or Hanger Lane , even though it’s on the Central Line and you have to cross 27 different roads to reach there!).
After Arnos Grove, however, the land turns greener and more obviously opulent; through the dim beams of New Southgate and we’re out in the sticks now right enough, the large, gobbling drives of Whetstone, Peter Sellers’ old stamping ground, N20 but a fading feeling of Londonness and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll get back home for the evening. But once you get to the shops of Whetstone’s whitened High Road you realise that the systematic desolation becomes increasingly subtler (as opposed to the derelict shutters which now constitute the majority of the non-tourist, Mornington Crescent end of Camden High Street); vacant or closing shops, a Waitrose which looks transposed from 1971 Blantyre, a huge and open but largely empty grocer’s called DEMOS across the way, a couple of interesting looking charity shops (but interesting enough to come all this way again?).
The roads start to tend towards the vertical and swift turning, is there a London out there at all? We are now heightening up towards High Barnet, Hertfordshire, the borough of Enfield, and the traffic slows up; a herd of red shirts gives it away – it’s local football passage (but in July? Out of season?). The crowd is affable but disinterested. The bus crawls patiently up the incline (and incline’s the word; this is where all those GOLF SALE banners will go to retire once Westminster Council’s outlawed them, banished them from the metropolis, just as the Boris-loving suburban burghers of these parts have banished socialism, fearful of that winking anti-jewel sitting in the middle of their rim called a city) and as we approach the Clochemerle walkabouts of Barnet town centre it’s time to call a halt and get back. Shops shut but pubs doing brisk business.
I don’t quite know (yet) what, if anything, I learned from this “day out” (nor from the journey back, which took me through the rich emptiness of Finchley and Hendon via the beaming apocalypse of Brent Cross to the foreboding bustle of Willesden and Harlesden, and even then onward, onward, a surprisingly long way onward – I didn’t recall my journeys home from the Mean Fiddler back in the 1989 or 1992 day being quite as long as this – until I returned to a London that I recognised) but folded together there was – well, not quite the hint of imminent ends, not really the smell of fear (but then it was the daytime, early evening, in the summer, and sunny) but the old story of continuing, affable and irreversible decline, a system on its diplomatically dying fall. Naturally, taking the same journey at, say, two in the morning would have presented a considerably harsher story, but the question “ London – what is it for?” was more prominent than any of the yawningly stretching skies I encountered.
A soundtrack to all this? Given the schoolgirls furiously freestyling to some ragga mp3 shoutouts on the 326 coming back from High Barnet towards Brent Cross (Lady Saw, I think) I’d say that London Zoo is in 2008 London just about unimproveable. I approached the record, as yet unheard, with some cynicism; yes, Kevin Martin, a mover and chancer who’s been around as long as (or longer than) I have, ageing anti-Lothario trying to hitch a chase on the outsourcing dubstep ambulance, yes, stock Wire rave review, yes, tell me something I don’t know already, yes, life is shit but it’s not ALL shit, is this noise noisome enough to annoy?
All of which preconceptions shatter to bits the instant Tippa Irie storms in over Cristal-clear military two-step beats on “Angry,” ranting with splendid spleen and in perfect time against the collapsing world, or at least the world collapsing in on his people – allegations of suicide bombing, the determined drowning of post-Katrina New Orleans, Tippa’s even more determined double-time toasting, the dead tone which hovers in the middleground all the way through – and it sounds like pop (I am not terribly sure that London Zoo IS pop but at least it acknowledges its presence), direct, dichromatic and dichotomy-free.
London Zoo is best approached as a series of Weegee (reprocessed by Marc Atkins) snapshots of the city at its various points of potential explosion; Ellroy paced, brisk, abrupt sentences, communiques from border posts, all incensed and/or confused. Flowdan from Roll Deep reports from not far from where my bus journey started, his Johnny Cash baritone solemnly spelling out all possible syllables of doom (the “nurse, hearse, black” mantras which climax “Skeng”), and from the South, Ricky Ranking, associate of Roots Manuva (whose Run Come Save Me is an equally stark and eloquent portrait of a declining 21st century London, seeking release via elliptical, quasi-surrealist leaps), who is cast as the Voice of Reason (even as SW9 and SW2 crumble like outdated Wagon Wheels around him); he is given the final word in the long, ominously luxurious unfolding finale of “Judgement,” the warning of the madness, the vampires (Bram Stoker, Procter & Gamble, Purfleet, the Dartford Crossing, the chemical genesis of the M25, the ultimate escape from urbanisation, literally a “sub” option). There is Voodoo Queen, exceptional in a way in which only someone who can remember ’81-2 first hand could be; her “Insane” is like the Slits doing Gnarls Barkley – is she going crazy or is it just the world going mad? Eventually her voice constructs a self-diaspora and divides in two, again coming, or stumbling, together with a laughing, misworded and mistimed (and therefore infinitely superior) reading of “Mad World.”
Even the relief is for the most part superficial; on “You & Me” Roger Robinson, deceptively light of tone, plays the part of the High Barnet High Tory, interested only in protecting himself and his, even as the river sweeps the streets away into their own watery burial as the electric currents of the musical backing switch on and off with slowly increasing franticity. And, where targets need to be struck, Superape (so much more impressive and to the point here than he was on his Burial cameo, or on his own debut album) unleashes the furiously articulate “Fuckaz” wherein he bloodily damns all patronising phonies as well as the oppressors, correctly seeing in both parties the aim to deter him and his people from bettering and improving their status in life. His intensity is unmissable, his venom justified and incendiary – though the track’s most unsettling moment comes after he’s ended his diatribe and is answered by a choir of unholy, stuttering ghosts as the rhythm keeps stopping and stealthily restarting; and note his constant reiterations of "Believe me!" and "Trust me!" with the roar of "LOOK AT THE STATE OF YOUR OWN HOME!!"
But “Freak Freak” is Martin on his own, the album’s only instrumental and the perfect accompaniment to the carapace of expansive vacancy I viewed on Saturday, moving in and out of consciousness, touching upon glitch, dub and ambient with equal skill and purpose and perhaps this represents Martin’s real coming into the light as an artist; given a contextual purpose for his anger, his sense of space has finally come into play – the radicalism is still vibrant but now we see discernible causes and even (in “Judgement”) potential solutions. It’s perhaps telling that while working on this record Martin was effectively living in his studio – rents were too high (the stage being prepared for a London where eventually no one will be allowed to live except celebrities, international tax dodgers and hedge fund managers, if we’re talking Crooked Usage) and the project had to live and breathe, even if more easily than he could – but with London Zoo there is the feeling, which I haven’t noticed on any of his previous records (whatever their other virtues – Techno-Animal’s “Dead Man’s Curve” is in its post-DJ Scud 2001 way one of the singles of the decade), that this is both something that he had to say and that he has given deep thought to how he wants to say it. Perhaps we have both had to come a long way, in our own ways, in recent years, but the expression of a crushingly oppressed culture (even if it took a white man to bring it all together – Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, never forget) is comparable to that demonstrated on something like Archie Shepp’s “Portrait Of Robert Thompson” – the freeplay howls “WHY?” and the historical context (“Portrait Of A Kiss,” Sousa marches, Tippa Irie) suggests “because.”
Up Hoe Street, towards hard-trying suburban lanes which look better in the yellowing light; eventually proceeding towards the Crooked Billet roundabout (and the day’s bookends turn out to be Crooked; several hours later, on another bus, streaking through the paceless gates of North Finchley, I pass a small, shaded and possibly shady crescent named Crooked Usage); the options are for Chingford or Edmonton, and the bus takes the North Circular westward – the parallel mirror to the A40 entrails coming in from the other side but always greyer, wider, somehow less real. When you come into London from the West the flat emptiness can be accounted for by the RAF base at Northolt (but it’s all deceit; slope off at Greenford or Perivale, turn a seldom ventured corner and suddenly glimpse the city spread out beneath you like a rusty mat), but from the Eastern side the featurelessness is the feature itself. On this cut of the motorway we are bisected by two huge reservoirs, but you’d never know it from looking; instead, a forlorn mega-Sainsbury’s with no apparent means of reaching there by motor or foot; assorted, isolated tower blocks daubed in hopelessly hopeful primary coloured dots – is there such a thing as Tottenham at the other incline of this valley?
In the far distance, mere specks of the city; when you come out of Walthamstow Central bus station Canary Wharf blinks in your lap on the near horizon, but out here any notion of “ London ” is mere theory. There are glimpses of the NatWest Tower/Gherkin charged congestion; too far to touch, but it’s hardly as though this is a refuge. Where do they come from, these isolated citizens at unlikely bus stops along the motorway, with no evident cluster of habitation?
Further onwards there is slender proof of a “city”; the Angel Edmonton junction, with its unappealing parades of service shops and its traffic lights which allow one car through every six minutes. Attempts at greenness as we near the North Middlesex Hospital , but this ghost is quickly given up and back into the white, horizon-free expanse. We skirt the top (or bottom?) end of Green Lanes and so far I have seen nothing to disprove the notion that this is a Sunday rather than a Saturday. To my right, unseen, Southgate , never quite engaging with my vision or conscience; and it is with some surprise that the bus abruptly arrives at Arnos Grove with its famous Art Deco Piccadilly Line station. Both Art Deco and the Piccadilly Line I kneejerkingly associate with the West, and I feel as though I’ve crossed a boundary, but there’s little in Arnos Grove to suggest opulence (and in any case the bigger, bolder Art Deco stopoff at Park Royal is far worthier of idolatry); a scant process of shops for an age which hasn’t quite been told that shops are no longer needed. Next to the tube station, a markedly enlarged car park, maybe for daytrippers wanting to take its picture (but Southgate station itself! Or Hanger Lane , even though it’s on the Central Line and you have to cross 27 different roads to reach there!).
After Arnos Grove, however, the land turns greener and more obviously opulent; through the dim beams of New Southgate and we’re out in the sticks now right enough, the large, gobbling drives of Whetstone, Peter Sellers’ old stamping ground, N20 but a fading feeling of Londonness and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll get back home for the evening. But once you get to the shops of Whetstone’s whitened High Road you realise that the systematic desolation becomes increasingly subtler (as opposed to the derelict shutters which now constitute the majority of the non-tourist, Mornington Crescent end of Camden High Street); vacant or closing shops, a Waitrose which looks transposed from 1971 Blantyre, a huge and open but largely empty grocer’s called DEMOS across the way, a couple of interesting looking charity shops (but interesting enough to come all this way again?).
The roads start to tend towards the vertical and swift turning, is there a London out there at all? We are now heightening up towards High Barnet, Hertfordshire, the borough of Enfield, and the traffic slows up; a herd of red shirts gives it away – it’s local football passage (but in July? Out of season?). The crowd is affable but disinterested. The bus crawls patiently up the incline (and incline’s the word; this is where all those GOLF SALE banners will go to retire once Westminster Council’s outlawed them, banished them from the metropolis, just as the Boris-loving suburban burghers of these parts have banished socialism, fearful of that winking anti-jewel sitting in the middle of their rim called a city) and as we approach the Clochemerle walkabouts of Barnet town centre it’s time to call a halt and get back. Shops shut but pubs doing brisk business.
I don’t quite know (yet) what, if anything, I learned from this “day out” (nor from the journey back, which took me through the rich emptiness of Finchley and Hendon via the beaming apocalypse of Brent Cross to the foreboding bustle of Willesden and Harlesden, and even then onward, onward, a surprisingly long way onward – I didn’t recall my journeys home from the Mean Fiddler back in the 1989 or 1992 day being quite as long as this – until I returned to a London that I recognised) but folded together there was – well, not quite the hint of imminent ends, not really the smell of fear (but then it was the daytime, early evening, in the summer, and sunny) but the old story of continuing, affable and irreversible decline, a system on its diplomatically dying fall. Naturally, taking the same journey at, say, two in the morning would have presented a considerably harsher story, but the question “ London – what is it for?” was more prominent than any of the yawningly stretching skies I encountered.
A soundtrack to all this? Given the schoolgirls furiously freestyling to some ragga mp3 shoutouts on the 326 coming back from High Barnet towards Brent Cross (Lady Saw, I think) I’d say that London Zoo is in 2008 London just about unimproveable. I approached the record, as yet unheard, with some cynicism; yes, Kevin Martin, a mover and chancer who’s been around as long as (or longer than) I have, ageing anti-Lothario trying to hitch a chase on the outsourcing dubstep ambulance, yes, stock Wire rave review, yes, tell me something I don’t know already, yes, life is shit but it’s not ALL shit, is this noise noisome enough to annoy?
All of which preconceptions shatter to bits the instant Tippa Irie storms in over Cristal-clear military two-step beats on “Angry,” ranting with splendid spleen and in perfect time against the collapsing world, or at least the world collapsing in on his people – allegations of suicide bombing, the determined drowning of post-Katrina New Orleans, Tippa’s even more determined double-time toasting, the dead tone which hovers in the middleground all the way through – and it sounds like pop (I am not terribly sure that London Zoo IS pop but at least it acknowledges its presence), direct, dichromatic and dichotomy-free.
London Zoo is best approached as a series of Weegee (reprocessed by Marc Atkins) snapshots of the city at its various points of potential explosion; Ellroy paced, brisk, abrupt sentences, communiques from border posts, all incensed and/or confused. Flowdan from Roll Deep reports from not far from where my bus journey started, his Johnny Cash baritone solemnly spelling out all possible syllables of doom (the “nurse, hearse, black” mantras which climax “Skeng”), and from the South, Ricky Ranking, associate of Roots Manuva (whose Run Come Save Me is an equally stark and eloquent portrait of a declining 21st century London, seeking release via elliptical, quasi-surrealist leaps), who is cast as the Voice of Reason (even as SW9 and SW2 crumble like outdated Wagon Wheels around him); he is given the final word in the long, ominously luxurious unfolding finale of “Judgement,” the warning of the madness, the vampires (Bram Stoker, Procter & Gamble, Purfleet, the Dartford Crossing, the chemical genesis of the M25, the ultimate escape from urbanisation, literally a “sub” option). There is Voodoo Queen, exceptional in a way in which only someone who can remember ’81-2 first hand could be; her “Insane” is like the Slits doing Gnarls Barkley – is she going crazy or is it just the world going mad? Eventually her voice constructs a self-diaspora and divides in two, again coming, or stumbling, together with a laughing, misworded and mistimed (and therefore infinitely superior) reading of “Mad World.”
Even the relief is for the most part superficial; on “You & Me” Roger Robinson, deceptively light of tone, plays the part of the High Barnet High Tory, interested only in protecting himself and his, even as the river sweeps the streets away into their own watery burial as the electric currents of the musical backing switch on and off with slowly increasing franticity. And, where targets need to be struck, Superape (so much more impressive and to the point here than he was on his Burial cameo, or on his own debut album) unleashes the furiously articulate “Fuckaz” wherein he bloodily damns all patronising phonies as well as the oppressors, correctly seeing in both parties the aim to deter him and his people from bettering and improving their status in life. His intensity is unmissable, his venom justified and incendiary – though the track’s most unsettling moment comes after he’s ended his diatribe and is answered by a choir of unholy, stuttering ghosts as the rhythm keeps stopping and stealthily restarting; and note his constant reiterations of "Believe me!" and "Trust me!" with the roar of "LOOK AT THE STATE OF YOUR OWN HOME!!"
But “Freak Freak” is Martin on his own, the album’s only instrumental and the perfect accompaniment to the carapace of expansive vacancy I viewed on Saturday, moving in and out of consciousness, touching upon glitch, dub and ambient with equal skill and purpose and perhaps this represents Martin’s real coming into the light as an artist; given a contextual purpose for his anger, his sense of space has finally come into play – the radicalism is still vibrant but now we see discernible causes and even (in “Judgement”) potential solutions. It’s perhaps telling that while working on this record Martin was effectively living in his studio – rents were too high (the stage being prepared for a London where eventually no one will be allowed to live except celebrities, international tax dodgers and hedge fund managers, if we’re talking Crooked Usage) and the project had to live and breathe, even if more easily than he could – but with London Zoo there is the feeling, which I haven’t noticed on any of his previous records (whatever their other virtues – Techno-Animal’s “Dead Man’s Curve” is in its post-DJ Scud 2001 way one of the singles of the decade), that this is both something that he had to say and that he has given deep thought to how he wants to say it. Perhaps we have both had to come a long way, in our own ways, in recent years, but the expression of a crushingly oppressed culture (even if it took a white man to bring it all together – Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, never forget) is comparable to that demonstrated on something like Archie Shepp’s “Portrait Of Robert Thompson” – the freeplay howls “WHY?” and the historical context (“Portrait Of A Kiss,” Sousa marches, Tippa Irie) suggests “because.”
