London Calling

"This book is fascinating. He’s a man who’s really lived it. It’s an authentic, personal account, but it’s great history as well. Obviously different to the other books because it’s within living memory. It starts with the end of the War, you’ve got a good decade where London is this really dreary, bomb-pocked, austerity-ridden place. Gloomy, not at all fun or nice. But then from the mid-50s, parts of it slowly seem to fade into colour. Soho is an area where that happens, and Soho looms large over this book. Also in the King’s Road in Chelsea, where you have what’s called the fashion quake, and people like Mary Quant quite deliberately break with tradition and actually make clothes for the young saying, ‘You can dress how you want, not how your grandmother dressed’. She went on to become the queen of the mini-skirt and the bob cut. Then, in Soho, you’ve got the arrival of the rock ‘n roll espresso bars and the teenagers who are flooding in and wearing dark sunglasses and sitting on coffins in places like the Macabre, playing skiffle music. Its coming to life. Then it really finds its stride when you move into the sixties, when there’s an extraordinary period of experimentation with drugs, LSD included. I was fascinated by the concept of the Chelsea LSD Centre, which existed. Pretty much all the drugs we’ve talked about so far, the government tried to ban them. Tobacco is a case in point. King James I was one of the most formidable opponents of tobacco, he disliked it so much he took to print and he wrote a counterblast against it in 1603, he called it ‘this precious stink’. He was worried about a process of reverse colonisation. We’ve talked about how these drugs manifest Britain’s dominance over other cultures. But James I was worried this was actually reverse colonialisation. Because you were inhaling these foreign substances it was actually weakening your physical body, which then spilled over into the body politic. Metaphors are often conflated in that period, and it was his job as king to make sure the body politic didn’t become weak because it was prone to invasion. So he increases taxes on it by 4000%. It has no effect at all except to line the pockets of smugglers and eventually he realises the value of tobacco in the new colonies of Virginia and he capitulates. With coffee it’s a very similar thing. Charles II tries to outlaw, not just coffee houses, but the sale of chocolate and tea in the 1660s. He hates the effects of it, the fact that it makes people think they can club together and have opinions on what he’s doing. He sees this as the start of a slippery slope, that he might end up the same way as his father did. He says, ‘If anyone’s caught selling this stuff a year from now, then they will face the most dire of consequences’. Complete failure. There’s such a grassroots outcry, which ironically was articulated most forcefully in the coffee houses themselves, that he’s forced to cave in. Speaking personally I find it’s an intrinsically addictive city. I didn’t grow up in London but I grew up near London and whenever I left it I wanted to go back. I found it this euphoric and fascinating place where you could just walk on and on. If you’re bored in London there’s something seriously wrong with you. You can just walk and walk and walk and you always just find something. Going back to Dr Johnson, I don’t want to have to quote the great cliché — we all know what it is — he was obviously addicted to it. He came down from Lichfield and he didn’t go back for twenty years. He didn’t go back when his mother was dying. I think he went back for her funeral. He was a man who was seriously addicted to London, and some of the drugs — namely tea — that were sold in great quantities inside it."