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ROGUES’ GALLERY REVISITED | SYDNEY POLICE ARCHIVES 1912-1948

Posted: August 2, 2012 in Books, History, Photography, Uncategorized
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“Some of the photographed documents are like open wounds. A hastily pencilled suicide note reads: ‘Goodbye earth, all is lost’. Another, apparently written in blood, says ‘Be prepared, you die soon’. There are obscene drawings and messages left at crime scenes by safe crackers and burglars. One, signed ‘Apache’, compliments the victim on the robustness of their safe; another thanks the home owner for the whiskey” (John Doyle, City of Shadows)

It’s a book that gives you ideas. If you’ve got a chain-smoking drifter lurking in the back of your head, or a killer stealing your thoughts, you might finally catch them here. The photos have been exhibited in Sydney a couple of times – but their story is still worth repeating.

When a flood deluged an old Sydney warehouse back in the 1980s, The Historic Houses Trust shifted around four tonnes of boxes, cartons and crates of old Kodak neg. What they cracked open was a lost covenant of crime photos, dated from 1912 to 1960. Con-men, prostitutes, itinerants, gangsters, the aftermath of murder; all caught in the flash-lamp of bygone police investigations, details of which had been long since lost. Lives and motives cut largely adrift – not for the first time.

What remains is raw – sometimes graphic – testament to their characters. Several years ago the writer John Doyle was brought on board to salvage these moments from the glass plates and acetate. Groaning ledgers of long-since forgotten mug-shot, murder scene, mishap and tragedy could now easily satisfy any director’s casting book or story-board. Doyle has done an extraordinary job, compiling a strangely intimate tour through the under-tow of a city’s dead in his book City of Shadows.

Mr Skukerman, or Mr Kukarman, or Mr Cecil Landan, glowers from across the years. The NSW Police Gazette Sydney notes he ‘obtains goods from warehousemen by falsely representing that he is in business’.

Harry Williams, sentenced to 12 months hard labour on March 1929 for breaking, entering, stealing. The Police Gazette  reported that Williams consorted with prostitutes and ‘frequents hotels and wine bars in the vicinity of the Haymarket’.

Walter Smith after a battering, somewhere in Sydney, Australia, 1924. Smith was listed in the NSW Police Gazette, 24 December 1924, as ‘breaking and entering’. He was sentenced to 6 months hard labour.

‘Harry Leon Crawford’, charged with wife murder. Crawford was soon revealed to be in fact Eugeni Falleni, a woman and mother, who had passed as a man since 1899. In 1914 Falleni  married Annie Birkett, who later told a relative she had discovered ‘something amazing about Harry’. Birkett disappeared. Falleni went on to appear in numerous mug shots through the years, becoming the notorious ‘woman-man’ killer in the press.

Mug shot of Thomas Sutherland Jones and William Smith, 15 July 1921, Central Police Station, Sydney.

The handwritten inscription reads ‘Frederick Edward Davies stealing in picture shows and theatres, Central 14-7-21′. Police held petty theft in particularly low regard – this may be why Davies is photographed front of the toilet stalls.

Thomas Bede, Central cells, 22 November 1928. The man who refuses to open his eyes for a photo. Police had to scratch this script back-the-front on the plate – so this would have been doubly annoying.

“To meditate on the uncensored history presented in these photos is to be made aware of two things; the power, strangeness and vulnerability of all human life and the need to document, resolve and rationally explain its infinite capacity for aberration” (Peter Doyle, City of Shadows)
It wasn’t until the formation of the Scientific Investigation Bureau (SIB) in 1945 that a standard procedure was enforced for mug shots. Before then, there was an enormous degree of creative license for everyone involved. The images often capture the subject in a full-blooded moment, with no consistent mode of framing or standard composition to constrain.

“Despite the elegant formal arrangements…we are left with the impression of a black and white world that is fraught with pain and misadventure. A place that the era’s magazines, travel brochures and up-beat newsreels ritually ignored.” observes Doyle.  “Men and women recently plucked from the street, often still animated by the dramas surrounding their apprehension”

Vera Crichton, 23 (left) conspired with two other women to ‘procure a miscarriage on a third woman’. She was ‘bound over to appear for sentence if called upon within three years’. E. Walker was believed to be a vagrant. Her head was probably shaved in the cells due to lice.

Convicted of using an instrument to procure a miscarriage. Janet Wright was a former nurse who performed illegal abortions at her house in Kippax Street, Surry Hills. One of her teenage patients almost died after a procedure – Wright was sentenced to 12 months hard labour. Aged 68.

‘Tilly’ Devine sentenced to two years gaol for slashing a man’s face in a barber shop with a razor. She would become Sydney’s best-known brothel madam, her public fued with sly-grog queen Kate Leigh (below) provided endless media fodder at the time. The war between the two has since been elevated to city folklore. Aged 25

A young Kate Leigh, 1915.

Some hard drinkin’ years later. Kate Leigh as Sydney’s now notorious sly-grog baroness and underworld figure, 1930.

Inscribed Hayes, date unknown – probably early 1920s.

Alfred Ladewig, alias ‘Tiny’. Police Gazette Sept 1920 reads that Ladewig was charged with ‘stealing by trick’ the sum of two hundred and four pounds.

It wasn’t until the formation of the Scientific Investigation Bureau (SIB) in 1945 that standard procedure was enforced for mug shots – until then dance routines were obviously acceptable. Friends of the missing Rene Flowers – clearly a vaudeville performer – flaunt it.

Teenager Annie Gunderson was charged with stealing a fur coat from a Sydney department store called Winn’s Limited, in 1922. Police records do not indicate whether the fur she is wearing is the stolen item. Aged 19.

Wharf labourer William Stanley Moore ‘operates with large quantities of faked opium and cocaine’ and ‘associates with waterfront thieves and illicit drug traders’.

W. Cahill, the tough guy’s Russell Crowe, hits 1923 to do some crimes. Details unknown.

Bad boy Sidney Kelly, June 25, 1924. Offences included shooting, and assault. In the 1940s was a pioneer of illegal baccarat gaming in Sydney. This NSW Police Gazette: “Illicit drug trader. Drives his own motor car, and dresses well. Associates with criminals and prostitutes.”

Kong Lee makes numerous appearances in the NSW Police Gazette. A ‘safe blower’ and ‘thief’, and is noted in 1929 as having recently been seen riding trains ‘in the company of card sharpers and spielers’.

‘Ah Num’ and ‘Ah Tom’ some time in 1930. The ‘D’ prefix on the photo indicates it was taken by the Drug Bureau. Num and Tom don’t appear in any records – their names may have been conjured for the paperwork.

The lads busted. Not for long perhaps? Hampton Hirscham, Cornellius Joseph Keevil, William Thomas O’Brien and James O’Brien – July 20, 1921

All together now. ‘Group of criminals, Central 1921′ (unnamed). The woman on the left is believed to be Eileen Leigh or Barry (daughter of Kate Leigh). The man third from the left in that row may be the pickpocket and three-card trickster known as Frederick Mewson, and the man far left in the front row is likely the pickpocket known as Norman Smith.

“Child unknown found wandering at large”. Mid 1920s, details unknown.

Hazel McGuiness, 26th July 1929, Central cells. Details unknown.

May Russell, 31st January 1922, Central cells. Details unknown.

Ah Chong, 11 July 1928, Central cells. No listing for Ah Chong found when this photo was taken, but an Ah Chong was convicted on two charges of receiving in 1922. He also received twelve months hard labour.

Mrs Dorothy Mort was having an affair with a strapping young doctor and Test Cricketer, Dr Claude Tozer. On 21 December 1920 Tozer visited her home to break off the relationship. Mort shot him dead. She was found covered in blood with a gunshot wound to her breast, and under the influence of a narcotic. Tozer was found in her drawing room, shot in the back of the head, the temple and the chest. Dorothy Mort has rebuttoned his vest over the chest wound.  The case stirred a media sensation.

Dr Tozer visits the home of girlfriend Dorothy Mort on 21 December 1920. It didn’t go well.

Exterior, scene of car crash, from bridge onto storm water canal cover, early 1940s. Details unknown.

 

Underneath a bridge, inner city Sydney, a bottle Waterbury’s Compound – a popular tonic and cough remedy – by the dead man’s side.  It is unclear whether he fell – photographs suggest the possibility.

Probably mid 1940s, details unknown.

Published in Sydney newspapers in 1933, as a practical demonstration to a sceptical press and public that police could operate undercover. The men seen here are a mix of detectives and civilians. The figure third from the right is believed to be Sergeant Frank Fahy, aka “The Shadow” – the force’s most effective undercover operative at the time.

The International Workers of the World, or ‘Wobblies’, carried out ‘direct action’ – sabotage – in Sydney in 1916, agitating for the release of their leader, Tom Barker. Barker had been jailed for sedition after making an anti-war speech in the Sydney Domain. It was seen as the modern equivalent of terrorism. Cotton waste, turpentine, phosphorous and kerosene, were allegedly found during police raids in Sydney and the ‘IWW Twelve’ were convicted of conspiracy and sedition. All received long jail sentences.

The most popular camera with crime and press photographers was the large format 4×5 Speed Graphic- made famous by Weegee. It had a large flash unit attached that could light up an entire room. It was difficult and hard to focus in low light, with ground glass and rangefinder focusing.

Probably late 1930s, early 1940s. Details unknown.

The scene where criminal heavy John Frederick ‘Chow’ Hayes shot boxer William ‘Bobby’ John Lee, at the busy Ziegfeld Club, 22 May. Hayes shot Lee in front of friends and other underworld figures, in a revenge attack. He was reportedly provoked by the line ‘you wouldn’t do it here, with all the lights shining and all the people around’. ‘Chow’ shot Lee five times. Lee refused to identify Hayes on the way to hospital – where he died that night. Hayes was not convicted.

According to the Police Report: “Four detectives went to the flat, climbed in a window and found the bodies lying on the bedroom floor. Investigations led the police to form the opinion that while Mrs Anderson was seated on a chair in the lounge she was shot. A trail of blood indicated that as she jumped up from the chair she knocked it over and then staggered towards the door. The detectives think that Anderson caught hold of her, knocking the wireless set against a sideboard. He then dragged her into the bedroom and as she slumped dead on the floor he shot himself. He fell across his wife’s body and the revolver was found under him.

Bedroom, with bloodstained bed reflected in dressing table mirror. Details unknown, late 1930s.

Safe break attempt at the Camellia Grove Hotel, now the Sports Bar, Henderson Road, Alexandria.

Three men demonstrating self-defence techniques. Details unknown, late 1930s.

Of the assorted types, Doyle says: “The subjects of the Special Photographs seem to have been allowed – perhaps invited – to position and compose themselves for the camera as they liked. Their photographic identity thus seems constructed out of a potent alchemy of inborn disposition, personal history, learned habits and idiosyncrasies, chosen personal style (haircut, clothing, accessories) and physical characteristics.”

So, given the passage of time, this collection reminds me a bit of the epilogue line at the end of Barry Lyndon: “It was in the reign of King George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now”.

The latest exhibition from the ongoing discoveries in the archive was Collision: Misadventure by Motorcar – featuring car crashes and traffic accidents in Sydney between 1920 and 1960.

All images (c) NSW Police Forensic Photography Archive, Justice & Police Museum, Historic Houses Trust of NSW. http://www.hht.net.au/discover/highlights/insites/city_of_shadows

GREAT DESKS OF THE 20TH CENTURY | CHAOS AND CALM IN THE WRITER’S ANCHORAGE

Posted: May 18, 2012 in Books, Film, History, Music, Photography, Uncategorized, Writing
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Nick Cave cocoons himself in purpose – and various accessories – while writing ‘And The Ass Saw the Angel’, Berlin 1986.

Geoff Stanton

Every desk tells a story. Take a look at your own. It may be the only place you can keep ordered; a solitary cove where you can wind life back, expand the surface and skim like a stone. I prefer to sink into mine. For this I recommend two empty bottles of red, a deck of beer coasters, maps, plots, coins, scrolling notebooks and a cup of loose pens. Pitch them headlong into the task. And turn off the computer. Ditch the facebook, the email, the blog, all the crap.

I was recently inspired by Jonathan Raban’s ode to writing aboard his sea-faring crib in Journey to Juneau: “With the floor sashaying underfoot, the chain rumbling on the sea bottom, and the view from the boat’s window’s revolving slowly on the tide, I found the equilibrium I was prone to lose on the unstable land. On winter mornings I’d fire up the heater, light the lamps and work with an intense single mindedness that evaded me at home. The creaks and groans, the smells of parrafin and diesel, were conducive to thinking and remembering”.

But whether it’s via a hatch, a cup of tea, a bottle of whiskey, a pool of blood, four walls of chaos and a nap -  the desk is a great helm.  Here’s a classical tour of some of the big guys; their desks, methods, modes for writing the masterpiece that will keep the ghost lingering.

Dalton Trumbo gets down to work, Mitzi Trumbo/AP Images

Hollywood heavyweight and screenwriting legend Dalton Trumbo. He did most of his writing sitting in the tub, working on a tray suspended over suds. According to his wife, he’d spend days in the bathroom, writing, soaking and smoking – Kirk Douglas remarked that Trumbo sometimes smoked up to six packs of cigarettes a day.

The picture comfort is instructive; next time you’re wasting time in a bath, remember it was here Trumbo wrote films such as The Sandpiper (1965) for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, The Horsemen (1971) for director John Frankenheimer and his last film, Papillon (1973). And all that after he was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950 – during which time he focused his skills on letter writing. Although he did posthumously win an Academy Award for secretly writing Roman Holiday (1953).

Truman Capote and his big ideas, 1977, Arnold Newman.

Inspiration. A glass of sherry in one hand and a pencil in another. “I am a completely horizontal author” Truman Capote told the Paris Review in 1957. “I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand.”

Ernest Hemingway at the Standing Desk on the Balcony of Bill Davis’s home near Malaga, Life/Time Images.

Hemingway wrote 500 words a day – mostly in the mornings to avoid the heat. A prolific writer, he also knew when to stop. In a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934, he wrote, “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

Hemingway discovered the standing desk method from his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, Maxwell Perkins, after an injury prevented him from spending prolonged amounts of time sitting down. In the 18th and 19th centuries, nearly everyone used a standing desk. AE Hotchner recalls Hemingway’s home set-up in Havana, in Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir:

“In Ernest’s room there was a large desk covered with stacks of letters, magazines, and newspaper clippings, a small sack of carnivores’ teeth, two unwound clocks, shoehorns, an unfilled pen in an onyx holder, a wood carved zebra, wart hog, rhino and lion in single file, and a wide-assortment of souvenirs, mementos and good luck charms. He never worked at the desk. Instead, he used a stand up work place he had fashioned out of a bookcase near his bed. His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing.”

“I hate writing. I love having written.” Dorothy Parker, Life/Time images.

“Ducking for apples” said Dorothy Parker. “Change one letter and it’s the story of my life.” Dorothy Parker; American poet, short story writer, critic, satirist – and yet another blacklisted name during the 1950s.  In her day she was known as a ‘wisecracker‘ – a label that may have been applied to Oscar Wilde had he been born in New Jersey – but one Parker despised. Yet her literary output and reputation for sharp wit has endured.

Dorothy Parker in the midst of writer’s block. She sent this telegram to her editor, Pascal Covici, as she couldn’t bring herself to look him “in the voice.”

Asked by a journalist during an interview, “Where’s the best place to write?” Parker replied, “In your head.” And her head was clocked in constantly, from speakeasies through three marriages (two to the same man – “I put all my eggs in one bastard”), the heavy drinking and smoking and some unhappiness. But her style and wit continue to entertain readers. “I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.”

Nearly finished? Lost in spools. The draft of Jack Kerouac’s Beat-defining phenomenon ‘On the Road’ appeared to the world in April 1951 as a single 36 metre (120-foot) role of paper.

Fueled by the same fever as his characters, Jack Kerouac racked a word-count to help him set course for a complete novel. “That’s not writing” Capote famously remarked,”that’s typing”. But when the whiskey and malt loosened its grip, habits at the Kerouac table-top were disciplined. From the time of first novel The Town and the City Kerouac kept a log; between 1,000 to 5,000 words a night.He also created a formula to mimic the ‘batting average’. The goal was a .400 batting average – on par with Ted Williams.

Kerouac’s fierce verbal also invoked a set of commandments, tacked on the wall of Allen Ginsberg’s hotel room in North Beach a year before Ginsberg published Howl.

“Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy. Submissive to everything, open, listening. Try never get drunk outside yr own house. Be in love with yr life. Accept loss forever. Believe in the holy contour of life. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better”

After hours. Jack Kerouac, Lucien Carr, Allen Ginsber, 1959. Image John Cohen/Hulton Archive

Alfred Hitchcock with his 1930′s Black Underwood typewriter – and cocktail bar. “More work was done on the script in the evening over cocktails, than any other time” said collaborator Charles Bennett. Life/Time images.

“In the morning, I used to get up and pick up Hitch in Cromwell Road, where he lived, at ten o’clock exactly” says screenwriter Charles Bennett, who collaborated with Hitchcock from his earliest ‘talkies’ – including The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934 – establishing the innovative wit, freshness and originality Hitchcock subsequently demanded of his writers. “He would be sitting on the curb waiting for me. And then we would go to the studio where we would discuss the script and what I was doing with it”.

“Then at about one o’clock, everything would stop, and we’d go to lunch, always at the Mayfair Hotel, and have a wonderful lunch. Then come back and at that point, Hitch would usually go to sleep in the office, and I would do a little work, and possibly doze off too slightly. At about five o’clock, we would go back to Hitchcock’s flat where we would start having nice cocktails for the evening, and talk more and more and more about the script. And I think more work was done on the script in the evening over cocktails, than any other time.”

Tennessee Williams faces a terrible question, Life/Time images

“I write as soon as I get up in the morning – facing that terrible question as soon as possible. Some mornings I get up and what I’ve been working on is repugnant to me. So then I shift to some other thing I’ve been working on. I find it absolutely necessary to have two things going on at once, then I can shift back and forth” (Tennessee Williams interview with John Gruen, 1965)

William Faulkner, 1943. “My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey. Life/ Time images.

“I can’t write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman” said Patricia Highsmith, Tom Ripley creator, and bringer of many other thrillers – including Hitchcock’s ‘Stranger’s on a Train’.”I have Graham Greene’s telephone number, but I wouldn’t dream of using it. I don’t seek out writers because we all want to be alone.”

Roald Dahl in his writing hut.

Roald Dahl created space the same way his mind burrowed out a giant peach; fantastically. He believed a writing space should be highly personal. His writing hut was closed to everyone, including family. A wing-back chair hollowed out to comfort a bad back, a writing board made from wood and green baize fitted across the arms. An electric heater hung directly overhead.

The hut was also decked with curios and artifacts; a piece of his own hip bone, his own preserved spinal shavings, fossils, magazines, fan letters, old photos, family totems, bookmarks drawn specially for him by friend and illustrator Quentin Blake (he only ever seen the interior once) and an enormous ball of wrapper foil slow-built from years of lunching on Cadbury’s chocolate.

Now that the great writing chair is empty you can take an interactive tour of the hut.

“As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I’m not sure that I’m going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says ‘you are nothing’, I will be a writer.”, Hunter S Thompson.

Hunter S. Thompson is best known for writing in a spin of campaign trails, Hell’s Angels, Holiday Inns, Wild Turkey, mescalin and an occasional lawyer. But while attending Columbia University School of General Studies and taking creative writing, he also worked at Time for $51 a week as a copy boy.  During this stint he would sneak off into a room with a typewriter and rewrite his favorite author’s books, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gastby and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, before moving on.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you. (Thompson’s Cover letter to Vancouver Sun, looking for a job, 1957)

Henry Miller in his office

Euchrid’s Crib, Nick Cave in Yorkestrasse, West Berlin, 1985, Image by Bleddyn Butcher.

Human song-sheaf Nick Cave has replaced harmful addictions with work since the eighties, and implies as much himself: “Writing is a necessary thing for me, just to keep myself level. It has beneficial effects on my life”. When he bunked down in Berlin to write the And the Ass Saw The Angel, it seemed his method was not so different from songwriting – or taking drugs. “I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can’t really find a way to change those things.”

And isn’t that what it’s all about?

“More Things to Remember…”, Nick Cave, Melbourne Arts Centre


									

			

						

				

					
JOHNNY ROTTEN IN JAMAICA 1978

					
						Posted: July 13, 2011 in Music, Uncategorized						

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By Geoff Stanton


“The Rastas loved John” said reggae icon Don Letts, who accompanied Johnny Rotten to Jamaica in 1978 to scout for Virgin’s Front Line reggae label.  “To them he was the punk rock Don from London – they were aware of all the trouble he had stirred up in London. They were into what he stood for and his stance, and they dug it. John just had a vibe you know, people were drawn to him. It was the same in London; it was the same in Kingston”.


When Richard Branson decided to send John Lydon - a passionate reggae fanatic – to Jamaica as an envoy for Virgin, a fusion of punk, dub and reggae was already fast simmering in London. The job was also welcome timing for the Sex Pistols frontman. Since becoming punk’s tabloid gristle Lydon had been stabbed in the street, glassed in the face, raided weekly by police, abandoned in the US after a shipwreck of a tour – even had Parliament clamouring after his neck for “acts of treason”. Scouting a heartland of dub and reggae artists was babylon by comparison.




“The bond was very simple,” Peter Harris, the British reggae guitarist who played on Punky Reggae Party with Bob Marley, told The Guardian. “Blacks were getting marginalised. British Irish kids – like Rotten – and black youths were forced together because of signs on pub doorways that read “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs”, which became the title of Rotten’s autobiography. The punks were the same. They were seen as dregs of society. We were all anti-establishment, so there was a natural synergy between us.”


Natural synergy. Johnny Rotten Lydon with Big Youth, one of the artists signed by Richard Branson's Virgin Records. Image by Dennis Morris.


Jamaica was also Lydon’s last stop before forming Public Image Ltd; the powerhouse of dub-fused poptone that bassist Jah Wobble recalled “would literally make your trousers flap”.


“John already had that spaciousness, that blueprint in his mind long before we went to Jamaica.” said Letts.  “He really knew his reggae. I have to emphasise that, him and Joe Strummer, Paul Simonon, Jah Wobble, they understood dub, deeply, they had a lot of music I didn’t have you know. We went to a lot of sound system sessions here in London too, people like Jah Shaka, Coxsonne, Moa Ambessa, so really, his experiences in Jamaica were an extension of what had already been in his mind for years, back in North London.”




Joe Strummer and Don Letts, image by Dennis Morris.


Don Letts facing a line of authority in London's Notting Hill race riots of 1976.  He was also walking onto the cover of Black Market Clash, after The Clash used the image for their album.




Rotten arrived in Jamiaca with Letts, journalist Vivien Goldman and photographer Dennis Morris, who had impressed Lydon with his photos of Bob Marley, and had subsequently taken some of the first photos of the Pistols. Branson had them stay at The Sheraton  – a salubrious joint with a hotel bar that was a hotbed of rotating talent.


“Knocking back the rum or fruit punches, depending on their religious inclinations” wrote Goldman “are a changeable line-up of reggae musicians. Very occasionally Peter Tosh, frequently a sprinkling of Gladiators, The Abyssinians, I-Roy and U-Roy, and Tapper Zukie and The Tamlins, Jah Lion, Prince Hammer, Johnny Clarke, John Holt, the mighty Culture with the other two Cultures, Robbie Shakespeare, Sly, Chinna, Bim Sherman, Lee Perry, Inner Circle, Prince Mahmoud, Big Youth, The Congos – it got so that you felt like you were wading through your singles collection every time you went to get a glass of water.”


Don Letts with Bob Marley


“We smoked a chalice together with U Roy for breakfast” recalled Letts. “And then went out to one of his dances, miles out in the countryside -  quite a long journey by car. I remember the dreads stringing up this sound, and kicking off with some earthquake dubs. Now let me tell you this sound system was LOUD. Me and John literally passed out. I remember hours later some dreads shaking us awake, it was like, “Wake up man, dance done, dance finish now man!” Yeah, it was pretty wild for me and John out in Jamaica. We loved it.”


Meanwhile, Lydon’s ‘Rotten’ moniker got dumped in translation for Johnny ‘Cool’.


Goldman wrote about John’s reputation: “One night John and The Congos, being in an elevated mood on account of nature’s bounty – the cave, and other things – were in prime meditative position. Cedric was regaling us with stories of his past, when a loud buzzing noise intruded on the conversation. Coupled with a strange red glow from overhead. Look up, and what do you see? – a helicopter whirring through the Kingston skies, looking both out of place and rather too militantly low-flying for comfort.


“What’s that for?” snapped John. “There could be a war going on down here, and no one would be able to see it. It’s just to annoy, like a mosquito. Make people paranoid, scared. Keep the population down.”

Roy and Cedric (The Congos) looked at one another.


“Johnny knows,” sighed Cedric.


“Johnny’s seen great heights,” Roy affirmed solemnly.


“Johnny Cool, y’know?”


John Lydon's verdict - a good list of reggae artists for anyone to dip into.







Branson’s label ended up signing a number of artists to the label including Prince Far I, Big Youth, Prince Hammer, Tappa Zukie, Sly Dunbar, and The Twinkle Brothers, and many artists already with Virgin also moved to the new label. Back in London the punk-reggae movement was picking up the pace. In 1978 activists started putting punk and reggae bands on together for a series of Rock Against Racism gigs, featuring bands as varied as XTC, Aswad, Generation X, Tribesman, the Slits, Joy Division and Misty – playing to oppose the rising National Front. The gig headlined by The Clash and Steel Pulse in east London’s Victoria Park drew a crowd of 80,000 people.






Johnny Rotten shows his true colours.


But just as punk was eventually submerged beneath a Top of the Pops sheen, by the 1980s reggae acts were also diluting their sound to get hit singles, crossing into mainstream pop with bands such as the Police and Culture Club – something of an eighties signature sound, but several times removed from the bass-heavy grooves of the London and Kingston originals. Groups like UB40, Madness and the Specials are well regarded – not really as reggae or ska bands, but as British pop groups.


Branson’s Front Line eventually folded after two years although some of the artists remained signed to Virgin. In a 2010 interview Letts sounded wistful about the lost chord that music struck in the 70s.


“Right now it feels like punk never happened. All the things that helped create punk rock; racism, recession, strikes – other than power cuts – all the things we had in the late seventies are happening again today. What’s happening about it? I don’t know. All I know is that all the interesting ideas are coming from the amateur and the naive, and it’s increasingly difficult to find anyone who meets those criteria in the west.”


It’s an echo of Lydon’s natural cynicism in ’78 when discussing his efforts to find and recruit players for his new group (which would become PIL).  “And I don’t mean mugs and prats and tits and liggers and wankers and madmen with pea-brained ideas about changing the musical course of history” he told Vivien Goldman. “Because we all know that that’s impossible.”


Meanwhile, if anyone chances upon a copy of The Upsetters version of the Pistols’ Submission or Problems, please let Barrelhouse know.








									

			

						

				

					
STUCK INSIDE OF SYDNEY WITH THE COCKSUCKER BLUES AGAIN

					
						Posted: March 3, 2011 in Uncategorized						

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While working on a recent article about Mick Jagger’s ’69 scrape around Australia, I swiftly rekindled a violent lust for Exile on Mainstreet. For me the Stones will always sum up the gritty simplicity of rock n roll. Swimming in glory; damage and filth never far away. While the legacy of the contemporary Beatles pop juggernaut was Shakespearean in triumph, the Stones pushed beyond their final trial to build a myth on sheer bloody endurance. They became Gods, they were pulled apart piecemeal; they kept playing.


They have nearly five decades of music history running through their veins. Count em on Keith’s face. Along with Gimme Shelter, Cocksucker Blues is an ultimate Stones documentary. Murky at worst, it is a fascinating siddle into the locker rooms of rock n roll excess. It was 1972, cracks in the edifice only just beginning to form. Perhaps you can see them – but I think it is still too early. For many around them things crumbled badly. But, Brian Jones aside, the group was untouchable.


Best known for the scene where Keith fades away in a slippery haze of heroin while the hangers on bustle around him, the film remains a curio, largely because the Stones banned it. “It’s a fucking good film Robert,” said Jagger at the time,”but if it shows in America we’ll never be allowed in the country again”.


Ethan Russell's photo of Mr Richards hitting the ground in the 70s.




Through a legal quirk, it can only be shown eight times a year and in the presence of its director – also shown zealously shooting up – Robert Frank. He had placed a camera in a number of rooms and encouraged anyone to film. The result is a kaleidoscopic, but ultimately honest, look at the machinations of rock nirvana. I don’t care what anyone says – Keith is drop-dead cool. If you don’t believe me read Nick Kent’s short account of spending some time with him in The Dark Stuff.


I didn’t get to watch this on Frank’s super 16, but managed to unearth a DVD. And you can, naturally, glimpse portions of the film on youtube. But where’s the intrigue in that?