16/07/2010

London, Queen of My Heart



Light and dark. After the London of the sunlit watercolours of St Etienne it seems apt to look at it from another angle through a song that has whispers of an older, sometimes darker, story, and is more of an etching than a painting. London has a long history, 2000 years, though the distant past is often nearer than might be thought. Some 25 years or so ago, on a Family History course, someone recounted being told by a man, then in his eighties ,of his grand-father recalling a family tale of his great –great- grandfather watching the Great Fire of London of 1665 from a distance.

The past, of course -even the more lurid episodes of history - can be packaged and sold like anything else, hence The London Dungeons experience and Jack the Ripper walks, both reputedly more popular with visitors to London than Londoners. Pop songs have not been immune to this, drawing on a music hall tradition of making entertainment from the macabre. Jack the Ripper, for example, was also a staple of Screaming Lord Sutch’s act in the early sixties, along with Sutch waving a butcher’s knife and set of rubber entrails. However, the more perceptive songs have recognised, and often regretted, the old being swept away by the new. Pop music came of age as some of the major transformations of London –and elsewhere-were getting going and as the London that would have been recognisable in Dickens’ time was being 'modernised' in the interests of  global capital. The disappearance of older ways of life and values was, as already mentioned elsewhere, a theme in Ray Davies’ songs with the Kinks, out of step with the new and fashion-conscious sheen of Swinging London pilloried in Dedicated Follower of Fashion.

There have been some songs, however, that saw the old still there hidden away, and which can be compared to the writings of Ian Sinclair that explore the hidden and lost sides of the city, the unchartered territory above and below the ground. One of these was London, Queen of My Heart, by Cath Carroll, from her album of her name released in 2000. She had been in the Manchester punk scene in the late seventies/early eighties and had written for New Musical Express for a while. By the time of this ode to London, however, she had long re-located to America.

There is something shadowy, even eery, about the record that makes it linger in the mind like the damp chill remarked in the song. It is to do with the lyrics alluding to the secrets you can glimpse around you, the haunting music and the smoky voice, all calling up the lapping of the dark waters of the Thames on a foggy evening. This is a different kind of walk through London. St Etienne’s London Belongs to Me sees Camden Town as the entry point for a stroll to the dappled grass of Regents Park. Suggs’ Camden Town celebrates the ‘the string of Irish pubs as far as you can see...There’s tapas, fracas, alcohol, tobaccos’. Cath Carroll’s night bus from Camden Town passes over the ancient plague pits that lie beneath Camden Underground, passengers tumbling down the stairs hearing the echoes of Ring a –ring of Roses hovering in the air like the miasma by which the plague was once understood during the sickly summers of centuries gone. This tour takes in the black Serpentine and Hawksmoor’s ‘lost underground’. This could be a reference to Nicholas Hawskmoor, the Seventeenth/Eighteenth Century architect and designer of Christchurch, Spitalfields and other churches, or possibly to Peter Ackroyd’s novel of the same name, a detective story that revisits the dark side of eighteenth century London. It is also a reminder of the other aspects of the hidden underground of London, the lost rivers buried under concrete and, more prosaically, the closed tube stations left abandoned underground.

The song, however, is more than a mini secret history tour. It is also a love song to a city that continues to exert a pull – ‘I keep moving but you won’t let go’. It is perhaps strange that some songwriters who can seem very English at times in their songs also write from a distance. Cath Carroll continues to write about London from ‘exile’ in America, as with her recent Moon Over Archway. Maybe distance gives perspective, or maybe a love song is easier when the imperfections aren’t obvious and everyday. Her view of London is no less, or more, real than that of St Etienne or Donovan, though perhaps a more disturbing one. People make their own perspective from their relationship with the place. Cath Carroll has called this ‘a song for a lost love’-it could also be a soundtrack for a London lost but still visible if you know where to look.

Link to song

20 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting this Geoff! I think she would like this brilliant column, as a writer of note herself (I think she wrote for NME and other magazines).

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  2. Thanks for the Cath Carroll post. I was introduced to her through "Moves Like You" and "Next Time" and for some reason hadn't heard this song - what a treat!

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  3. Great post! It's very very good to remind people of her music, some only know her as the subject of Mark Robinson's affection on Unrest's last album, Perfect Teeth, where there is a love song to her called "Cath Carroll". I love this song!

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  4. Geoff this is a bit off topic, but how fabulous is her version of "The Night Before Christmas"? http://blog.lilypadrecords.com/2009/12/19/visit-from-st-nicholas-by-cath-carroll.aspx - one for all the family this December methinks:)

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  5. I love her voice, it's like a musical instrument. Like Sarah Cracknell meets Sade meets Bryan Ferry plus something else.

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  6. Geoff, you're so right that this is about the spooky, shadowy London - it has a Twin Peaks, Blair Witch feel to it as well.

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  7. This is so interesting, Geoff. I always understand the England commentary in her music to be about middle-class, suburban life - the title of her album England Made Me was inspired by the Graham Greene novel about middle-class life of the 1930s, and I loved her tribute to John Peel where she wrote: "Over the years, so many of us felt, or imagined ourselves to be both outcasts and prisoners of middle suburbia, screaming inside, tormented by unremarkable comforts and modest routine, Marks & Spencers cakes on Sunday and well-heated single-decker local buses". It's fascinating to read your take on a different commentary - about the lost, underground, Gothic London, very far from Sunday M&S cakes.......

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  8. I wonder if it would be possible to identify a whole subgenre of London songs - in this gothic mode? For example, Coldplay's Cemeteries of London, maybe Ella Fitzgerald's A Foggy Day, possibly Paolo Nutini's These Streets, Bert Jansch/John Renbourn's Soho, Robyn Hitchcock's Trams of Old London.... And then of course London, Queen of My Heart as a perfect example.

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  9. Geoff! I love the column. Any chance you'll be doing another New York entry soon? Eager to read more songs about my hometown. Here's a good list to choose from: http://www.nutsie.com/top100sradio/Top%20100%20Songs%20About%20New%20York/26322761, although I'm sure you can think of more and better.......

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  10. Geoff - it is interesting that you mention Screaming Lord Sutch doing Jack The Ripper. I was at a recording of him performing that, in Forest Gate North London, at the Lotus Club in September 1964, they screened it on BBC2 in April 1965. I was 15 and you can see my in the front row at 0.33 minutes in this clip (I am the one with blonde hair). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fynyeXrAR6I

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  11. What a great piece of writing - "hovering in the air like the miasma by which the plague was once understood during the sickly summers of centuries gone" - love it!!

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  12. Thanks for the list of songs on New York, Jackie-its a great selection to choose from.

    Thats an interesting selection, Laura. For a really gloomy listen, try This is Charing Cross by the Wraiths-http://www.idyllicrecords.co.uk/charingcross.php

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  13. I know that Night Before Christmas poem/story well, Tiffanye, from family Christmases-strange to hear it put to music like this! Thanks

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  14. We've read your posts on songs about London with particular interest. We're not sure where you are based but if it's London, then please contact us if you would be interested in leading a "Songs About London" walk for London Walks,
    (http://www.walks.com/) - London Walks is London's award-winning, original, foremost, signature walking tour company. We are contactable at londonwalks2010@gmail.com. We have 70 world-class guides, who include historians, archaeologists and professional actors. We have no 'songs about London' walk, although we do have a Beatles' London walk (http://www.walks.com/London_Walks_Home/Saturdays_Walks/default.aspx#12909), led by Richard who is the author of The Beatles' London, holder of the Beatles Brain of Britain title and owner of the Beatles Coffee Shop.

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  15. That IS a very gloomy song - especially the lyric "surely that is a dead woman, a dead woman"........!

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  16. Maybe Soho Square by Kirsty MacColl too.

    Thanks for the Lord Sutch clip, Jan-I dont think there can be many clips of him from that time.Any idea who the Savages were at that time?

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  17. I'm fairly sure it was Geoff Mew, Pete Phillips, Paul Dean and Ronnie Harwood.... Not the young Jimmy Page by then unfortunately.

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  18. Hey Geoff, thanks so much for including our song, London Queen of My Heart, Zoe mentioned you had written about it. I am so flattered that you’ve all given it such attention, cos the song wasn’t made widely available and it’s one that means a lot to me personally. You definitely have the right idea about what the song represents, how we connect to the history of a place, with time barely separating us from the others who built and made the cities. It’s about mythical London, deserted -2 a.m.-London –as-Secret-Garden, and the friends with whom I experienced the city.

    The Hawksmoor thing was started by my friend David, who’d interviewed Peter Ackroyd for the NME and introduced me to the Hawksmoor book. We became obsessed with the Hawksmoor churches overground and later, the lost tube stations underground and somehow the two met. And that came back to the feeling you get, that the past has never left us. It lives in the same space that we do.

    Thanks for the kind comments, everyone - am looking forward to reading future posts about place in song!

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  19. Hey, thanks for your comments, Cath. Its fascinating to hear the origins of the song and the link with Peter Ackroyd's book. I look forward to hearing more work.

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  20. Thanks for the kind comments, everyone i am looking forward to reading future posts.

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