Music

9 Plan B

2 Waterloo Sunset The Kinks
No it’s not number one!
‘I used to go past Waterloo every day on my way to Croydon Art School; when I was a kid my father took me to the Festival Of Britain; my first real girlfriend, we walked by the Thames; I was in hospital at the old St Thomas’s and my room had a balcony looking out over the river. All the imagery comes from memories like that. Although the song was supposed to be about the end of Merseybeat, called “Liverpool Sunset”. But when I was writing the lyrics I started to think about Waterloo and what it symbolised for me.

‘I also come from this strange family of older sisters. One of them was my surrogate mother, who I lived with, and it was really a song for her generation: people who lived through WWII and the aspirations they had. Terry and Julie could have been Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, but it was written for a generation who thought Britain could have been something else, something great again. Obviously my generation knew that was not to be. It’s also an acknowledgement that all great places have a dark edge. That’s what makes any great metropolis. When I lived in central London I used to cycle down there at the weekends. I still get a nice feeling down there by the river. My bridge was the one next to Waterloo, where the train goes over the river and it’s got a walking part to it. I used to look at Waterloo from there because that’s where I got my connection to Croydon.

‘I recently worked with Johnny Borrell from Razorlight and I like a track he did called “Don’t Go Back To Dalston”. American music always refers to Tennessee or Tallahassee. It’s quite brave to sing about Charing Cross and Dalston in the same way. But there’s nothing wrong with referencing where you’re from.’ Ray Davies
Available on ‘Something Else’ album (1967). Ray Davies plays the Royal Albert hall, Oct 23, 24. Feature continues

3 God Save The Queen Sex Pistols [download]
We mean it, maaan!
The New York Dolls first gatecrashed Malcolm McLaren’s consciousness when they paid a visit to his Let It Rock boutique in 1972. ‘We arrived at a time when the music scene was dominated by all these cookie-cutter bands who weren’t really saying anything,’ remembers Dolls singer David Johansen. ‘There was a busload of Teds from, like, Glasgow or somewhere in the shop. We didn’t know that they were meant to be these tough guys. They looked like a gang of queens or something. So when they elbowed us, we elbowed them back.’ McLaren was entranced and decided that the band’s androgynous exoticism, street gang aura and debauched nihilism ‘rang all the bells that I wished pop culture had’.

A couple of years later McLaren was in New York, designing clothes and stage sets for the band (red patent leather and a hammer-and-sickle backdrop) and briefly managing them. The arrangement proved short-lived but a seed had been sown. Now all he needed was his own crew of snotty, combustible, teenage Rimbauds. Fellow Dolls lovers Jones, Cook and Matlock were already in place; soon John Lydon arrived and any semblance of control over the whole enterprise that McLaren may ever have had was challenged and eventually vanquished for ever.

This short, chaotic and eventually tragic trajectory climaxed with ‘God Save The Queen’, one of the most lucid, perfectly pitched and downright savage pop singles ever recorded. All the same, the song meant little to Johansen. ‘I remember hearing it and thinking it was a good song. But I didn’t really listen to punk rock. I was more into blues at the time.’
Available on ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’ reissue (1997)

4 Sheila Jamie T [download]
Discovering the romance of the Smoke
‘There’s something kind of sad about the way John Betjeman talks about London in the verse that I sample on “Sheila”. He’s chatting about this old girlfriend and how they used to walk the streets of London and it sounds fragile and romantic. I like the way he’s an old man talking about it and he’s almost pining for olde England. Everyone mentions the streets and the dirt in London, but he thinks about churches and old buildings and the beauty of the place. It’s a side of London that I’m not used to hearing about because everyone complains about it so much.’ Jamie T
Hear it at www.myspace.com/jamietwimbledon

5 Peter the Painter Ian Dury
From one London legend to another
‘I first met Ian at Walthamstow School Of Art in about 1961. He went to the Royal College Of Art in ’63 and I got a job there in ’64, and taught him through the rest of his time.

‘He wasn’t a cockney. His mum was quite a middle-class educationalist, and his aunts were both teachers. He was a very intelligent, well educated kid. He wasn’t a professional cockney like Danny Baker. He just had an enormous love of London. He was driven by curiosity – about London, about the other musicians, about music generally and about rock ’n’ roll.

‘I always followed with interest what he was doing: his painting, his photography. Artistically I was doing quite a lot of graphics at that point, but if I couldn’t do something, I’d pass it on to Ian. So there are jobs I might’ve done for the Sunday Times that I know Ian did. There was a flat going near me at that time in Chiswick, which Ian took, so we were neighbours; I’d pop in and see him quite often. I remember him inventing the name Kilburn And The High Roads. I saw a lot of the Kilburn gigs, right through to early Blockheads.

‘I had a show at the Tate in 1983 and I asked him to write the theme music for it. The idea of an art exhibition having a theme song was a strange one, in 1983. He wrote a song called “Peter The Painter”, which was on the Music Students album [“4,000 Weeks Holiday”], if you want to check it out. He’d already written a song called “Percy The Poet”, so “Peter The Painter” was a companion to it. When I was at the National Gallery much later (he was unwell by then), he also wrote the music.

‘He was a great poet, wasn’t he? In the same vein as Betjemen or Roger McGough. He used words beautifully, because he was interested in words. He always had dictionaries around him. He loved words. I really admired his portrayal of characters in his songs, he could give you a sense of a person in very few lyrical brushstrokes. So it was always great lyrics, great musicians and a great show. He wore different costumes… I remember one show where he did magic tricks right through. I miss him, you know, there’s nobody quite like him any more.’
Sir Peter Blake
Available on ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful: The Best Of Ian Dury’ compilation (2005).
Peter Blake painted the cover for John Peel tribute album ‘Right Time, Wrong Speed’, out now.

6 I Was There (At The Coronation) Young Tiger
Calypso tribute to Liz’s big day
‘It’s in the tradition of another coronation calypso, “Reign Of The Georges” by Lord Executor. My record label wanted to give the public an idea of how a calypsonian composes on the spot, so I took the information about where the coronation would be and what would happen from the newspapers. Actually, it was recorded weeks before the coronation, so it could be released the day after.’ Young Tiger
Available on ‘London Is The Place For Me’ album (1958)

7 Has It Come To This? The Streets [download]
Hanging around McDonald’s never sounded so good
If you weren’t a big Travis fan, 2000 was a bad year for music. With drum ’n’ bass appearing on Abbey National ads and UK garage becoming a bling-obsessed cul de sac, there certainly wasn’t much to represent the daily grind of the average yout’. Released on London’s leading garage label of the day, Locked On, the then-teenage Mike Skinner’s drop-out calls to arms re-energised the capital’s music. Rather than trying to compete with the glitzy million-dollar R&B bangers coming over from the States, The Streets’ refreshingly lo-tech marriage of garage beats, dubwise bass and housey samples reflected the mix of musics ruling clubland at that time, and still sounds fresh today. The single broke Skinner as a chart artist in 2001 and set the scene for everything that followed, from grime to dubstep to – yes – Lily Allen. If the ‘hug a hoody’ campaign ever needs a theme tune, this should be it.
Available on ‘Original Pirate Material’ album (2001)

8 Down In The Tube Station At Midnight The Jam [download]
The ultimate urban paranoia anthem
‘It came about in rehearsals, from my bassline, then Paul put these spasmodic guitar stabs across it, and came in with a fantastic lyric. I think he described it as a short television play transposed into a three-minute pop song. The story is self-explanatory, but it has these evocative images that stay with you – the British Rail posters may have long gone, but violence continues today. It’s a very graphic lyric, it’s frightening as well. It was straight to the point so it was incredible in terms of the commercial success we achieved. In those days, Tony Blackburn thought we should be about singing about love and all that, not violence and day-to-day issues. Bearing all that in mind, it did incredibly well in terms of chart success – it got to about number 15.’ Bruce Foxton, The Jam
Available on ‘All Mod Cons’ album (1978)

9 Kidz Plan B [download]
Scathing indictment of teen violence inspired by the killing of Damilola Taylor
‘I got kicked outta school, and I spent the last year in a PRU [pupil rehabilitation unit]. Half of the school was for people who were truant or bullied and the other half was people who bullied other people. I never bullied anyone, I just used to have scraps – I had a short temper. But some of these kids there, it wasn’t that they had a short temper, it was that they were fuckin’ little cunts. Their whole attitude towards life… they didn’t value it, they had no respect for women, they thought there was nothing wrong with sticking a knife in someone. What I hated about it most was that there was just no getting through to them. No one older could tell ’em nothing. The only people they looked up to was gangstas and shit. I thought: the only thing these kids seem to listen to is violent aggressive music that has no context, no reason for being what it is, except for just talking about killing people. I knew the only way to get through to these kids was to make them think I was like them. I thought: I can’t write a peace song – “Everybody put your knives down, stop stabbin’ each other, let’s all hold hands and be cool.” So I wanted to write a song where initially they think I’m glamourising what they’re doing and, in the process of the song, slowly strip down this character and show his weaknesses and how ignorant he is. I know violence is exciting and all that shit, but at the end of the day, it’s not right. There is no excuse for being a cunt.’ Plan B
Available on ‘Who Needs Actions When You Got Words’ album (2006)