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Events In Transit
Please note: This transcript has been narrated and may not conform to plain english.
‘Getting hung up all day on smiles, walking down Portobello Road for miles, greeting strangers in Indian boots, yellow ties and old brown suits, growing old’s my only danger… I’ll keep walking miles till I feel a broom beneath my feet, or the hawking eyes of an old stuffed bull across the street, Nothing’s the same if you see it again it’ll be broken down to litter...’ Cat Stevens ‘Portobello Road’ 1966.
‘People raising hands to bid, taking off the lid and seeing what’s been hid, wrapping paper on the ground, screaming children showing off the things they’ve found… you can buy most anything, paperclips or even eastern wedding rings, tell you something that I found, 20 Turkish cigarettes that fetched a pound’ - Billy Nicholls ‘Portobello Road’ 1966.
‘Portobello Road, Portobello Road, street where the riches of ages are stowed, anything and everything a chap can unload is sold off the barrow in Portobello Road, you’ll find what you want in the Porto Bello Road.’– Bedknobs and Broomsticks 1971.
Mick Jagger was photographed visiting Portobello market in 1965, with Charlie Watts and Chrissie Shrimpton, before he became an honorary local in the late 60s due to his appearance in Performance.
But, if anything, the Beatles have better Notting Hill street-cred than the Stones. After founding the Portobello pop market in 1964 with their local appearances in A Hard Day’s Night on All Saints Road and Clarendon Road, various local links with the Fab 4 continue to this day.
Before becoming Pink Floyd’s manager, Pete Jenner’s commune (which included June Bolan and Mike Ratledge of Soft Machine) reputedly survived on discarded fruit and veg scavenged from the market (as would Jenner’s future charges the Clash).
Nigel Waymouth, of the psychedelic designers Hapshash and the Coloured Coat co-founded the glam-hippy King’s Road shop, Granny Takes A Trip, with second-hand clothes from Portobello market.
Marsha Hunt, the star of Hair, recalls first hearing of auditions for the hippy musical on Portobello.
Taking their local street cred a stage further, Richard Thompson of Fairport Convention and Overend Watts of Mott the Hoople had market stall sidelines; antiques and clothes respectively.
During Marc Bolan’s Tolkienesque hippy phase on Blenheim Crescent, June Bolan sold lampshades on Portobello.
When Malcolm McLaren was a radical student fan of the local Situationists, his girlfriend Viv Westwood sold hippy jewellery on Portobello to support him. Then McLaren collected rock’n’roll records from the market for their King’s Road shop, Let It Rock. At the time of John Lydon’s audition for the Sex Pistols on King’s Road, Sid Vicious is said to have been working on a Portobello market stall.
Paul Simonon of the Clash also had a job on the market after school, while Joe Strummer’s pub rock group, the 101’ers, acquired most of their instruments on Portobello from second-hand stalls.
In punk psycho-geography, if not in reality, the Clash formed in the market when Mick Jones and Paul Simonon bumped into Joe Strummer and told him they didn’t like the 101’ers but thought he had punk potential. As recounted by Joe, in ‘All the Young Punks’, he was ‘hanging about down the market street… when I met some passing yobbos and we did chance to speak, I knew how to sing and they knew how to pose…’
By then Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols, the only hereditary punk local, had accepted the proto-Clash as ‘4 square Portobello Road boys’.
At the time of punk, according to the hippy Portobello guide, ‘everywhere, like a blue tide, there is Denim’; not only in the usual trouser form, but also shirts, coats, curtains and furniture. However, the hippies underestimated the threat posed to flares’ domination by ‘last year’s tight drainpipe fashion’.
In 1990 Joe Strummer paid homage to Portobello in the track ‘Shouting Street’ on the Latino Rockabilly War album ‘Earthquake Weather’.
Heather Small of M-People, who was brought up in North Kensington, went one better when she expressed a wish to have her ashes scattered through the market.
Round the corner from the Electric, past the Samuel Beckett mural, is the site of the 50s Caribbean café, Totobag’s, at 9 Blenheim Crescent. Now a market store that looks like it’s preserved in its 50s state as a memorial, Totobag’s was also known (not always metaphorically) as ‘The Fortress’.
The cafe acted as a community centre and information bureau for newcomers; as a gambling den to the sound-system pioneers, Baron Baker, Count Suckle, Duke Vin and King Dick; as a slumming attraction or cool hangout to the likes of Sarah Churchill (Winston’s favourite actress daughter), Georgie Fame and Colin MacInnes; and as a target for white rioters.
In the Absolute Beginners film footnote to the book, Gary Beadle portrays Michael de Freitas – on his way to becoming Michael X – as he organised the black resistance at the Calypso Club on Westbourne Park Road. This involved turning Totobag’s into a real fortress, from which white rioters were repelled with Molotov cocktails.
The 1958 battle of Blenheim Crescent was re-enacted by Julien Temple in 1985, as a West Side Story-style dance sequence, on a set at Shepperton Studios combining the Blenheim Crescent and Bramley Road riot zones. The soundtrack of the riot aftermath finale goes from David Bowie’s title track into Smiley Culture’s electro Absolute Beginners mix of the 1958 Miles Davis hit, ‘So What’.
In recent years, Totobag’s has been overshadowed somewhat by its Hollywood W11 neighbour, the Travel Bookshop at 13/15 Blenheim Crescent, which was also recreated in the 1998 Notting Hill film at 142 Portobello Road.
Across the road, 2 Blenheim Crescent, currently Minus Zero, the 60s and 70s punk specialist record shop, is the longest running Portobello pop site. In the 60s and 70s this was the Family Dog Shop, the Notting Hill hippy ephemera ‘headshop’, named after the San Francisco commune of Chet Helms.
The Dog shop purveyed psychedelic posters, ‘rings, skins and things’, ‘clothing from the East, accessories, incense, jewellery, pipes and other smokers needs’ to members and followers of Camel, Caravan, Quintessence and Hawkwind. Before joining the latter, Nik Turner was employed as the Dog shop delivery van driver.
Upstairs, Richard Adams designed the last issues of the underground papers, International Times, Oz and Frendz with Barney Bubbles, and founded the esoteric Open Head Press with Heathcote Williams. Number 2 was also the base of the Hassle-free Press’ Knockabout Comics featuring the Freak Brothers, and the Legalise Cannabis Campaign.
In 1969, following a police raid in which Mike was busted for hash found in a flower vase, International Times gave the cafe a rave radical restaurant review, describing it as where ‘heads gather for their daytime food in the company of housewives, workmen and other good people’, and ‘generally dug in the neighbourhood.’
In the early 80s, the premises were used for Clash and Killing Joke press briefings. In the late 90s, during the Blur v Oasis chart battle, Damon Albarn addressed the Britpop nation on the news from outside the cafe.
To the south along Kensington Park Road, Osteria Basilico at number 29 was the Virgin restaurant Duveen’s – outside of which Richard Branson would invariably end up in his underpants and/or covered in cranberry sauce of a night in the mid 70s.
Steve Hillage of Gong, who went on to produce Simple Minds for Virgin in the 80s, lived round the corner of Elgin Crescent. Across the road from Osteria Basilico, 192 Kensington Park Road was the 90s girlpower bar/restaurant featured in Bridget Jones’s Diary, the Independent column.
Round the corner, now occupied by the E&O restaurant (formerly the Blenheim pub), is the site of the first Rough Trade record shop at 202 Kensington Park Road – currently Cheeky Monkeys toyshop.
The origin of independent (or indy) music, as we know it today, can be traced back to early 1976, when Geoff Travis returned from a record collecting tour of the States and set up his stall in the hippy headshop then on the site.
The world’s premier punk record shop and label are said to have been named either after the term for male prostitutes, a pulp novel, or a Canadian prog rock group.
In the 1977 Portobello guide it’s explained as ‘an allusion to the predilections of punk lovers’, and 202 is cited as the first British headshop, dating back to ’66. Their Wild West 11 wagon wheel still adorned the front, and sandal and moccasin makers were operating on the premises, as Rough Trade ‘step forward with new wave and reggae’, ‘punk magazoons’, and their pre-punk logo.
Once inaugurated by a visit from the Ramones, the shop-front became the hangout of all the punk and reggae movers and shakers. Most, if not all, of the first Rough Trade customers were either starting a punk band, a fanzine, or a reggae sound-system.
The sandal workshop backyard extension duly became the world distribution centre of independent punk labels, fanzines, and reggae pre releases. Mark P, the editor of Sniffin’ Glue fanzine, founded the indy label Step Forward with Miles Copeland, and formed his own band, Alternative TV, in the shop.
As this arty, political, anti-rock side of punk rock became focused at Rough Trade, it was most definitively represented by the Raincoats who, like ATV, formed in the shop in ’77, when the singer/bassist Gina Birch met the singer/guitarist/shop worker Ana de Silva.
The Rough Trade label was launched in 1978 with the release of Metal Urbain’s ‘Paris Maquis’ French Resistance single. Later that year, their gamut of reggae, experimental, electronic, agitprop, hardcore and post-punk concerns, was defined in their first batch of singles by Augustus Pablo, Cabaret Voltaire, Stiff Little Fingers, Subway Sect, Angelic Upstarts, and Spizz Oil.
In 1979, the year of the post-punk avant-garde grey mac brigade, the indy tradition was established by Rough Trade’s do-it-yourself Tory anarchist response to Thatcherite enterprise culture, embodied in the Raincoats’ ‘Fairytale in the Supermarket’ and Scritti Politti’s ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’.
The first Rough Trade album was Stiff Little Fingers’ ‘Inflammable Material’, the ‘trad but political rock’ debut of Belfast’s answer to the Clash, featuring their ‘Rough Trade’ homage; in which they find ‘people who put music first’ after their Island deal fell through.
The Raincoats’ male counterpart, quintessential Rough Trade band were the Swell Maps. The foremost exponents of quirky ‘DIY rock’, and silly names – Biggles Books, Nikki Mattress and Epic Soundtracks, they not only defined indyness with their own Rather label, but also worked part-time in the shop.
In another defining indy moment, ‘Part-time Punks’ by the TV Personalities contains the line, ‘they go to Rough Trade to buy Siouxsie and the Banshees’. This was a pet-play of John Peel, who gave Rough Trade as much airplay on Radio 1 as his previous Blenheim Crescent fave raves by Marc Bolan.
As well as their own stuff, Rough Trade distributed Miles Copeland’s labels; Step Forward, Deptford Fun City, etc; the one-off labels; Small Wonder – mainly the anarcho-punk Crass; Factory – mainly Joy Division; Two-tone’s Special AKA, and Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’.
Before the end of the 70s, the shop was so stacked up with boxes of records and fanzines that larger premises had to be found. And so, the Rough Trade Records office and distribution warehouse moved west across Ladbroke Grove to 137 Blenheim Crescent. There, the Cartel indy distribution network was founded, and the Smiths discovered. Whereupon, in 1984, the label expanded again, abandoning Notting Hill altogether for Kings Cross.
At the time of the 1983 Carnival, the Portobello pop market was turned upside down when Mick Jones left the Clash and the Rough Trade shop moved, round the corner of Blenheim Crescent, across Portobello, to 130 Talbot Road.
West along Blenheim Crescent, Codrington Mews at number 41b is another important indy site. In 1978 the Police followed the Pistols to Portobello, from their shared Oxford Street offices, when Sting’s manager Miles Copeland moved his operations here.
Copeland’s Faulty Products indy label empire – featuring Step Forward, Deptford Fun City, Illegal, IRS, Spy, etc – encompassed such dubious punk acts as the Police, Jools Holland’s Squeeze, Wayne (later Jayne) County and the Electric Chairs, Chelsea, the Fall, Sham 69, Alternative TV, the Only Ones; and later, Lords of the New Church, the Cramps, X and REM. I Codrington Mews currently hosts the XL label, who brought us the recent punk revivals of the Prodigy and White Stripes.
Back up Blenheim Crescent, across Portobello, the Ground/First Floor bar/restaurant at 186 Portobello Road was the Colville Hotel, the early West Indian pub known affectionately as ‘The Pisshouse’. In the early 80s it was another Motörhead-linked bikers’ bar, when Lemmy lived round the corner in Colville Houses. And in the late 80s it was the hub of the acid-house scene in London Kills Me, if not in reality.
A few doors up Talbot Road is the current Rough Trade shop at number 130. Here, in 1983, the original shop was recreated, with the walls covered in the punk and reggae posters, sleeves and photos from the old shop (as it still mostly is today).
130 Talbot Road was inaugurated by a Violent Femmes gig on the pavement outside, which was an existing Carnival sound-system site – as was the old shop. The underground head-shop tradition was continued in the Talbot Road Basement Station by the punk T-shirt stall Ignition.
As the old shop reverted to its head-shop roots as Strange Attractions, the new shop moved with the times from sandals to skateboards. After Paul Sunman founded Slam City Skates in 1985, behind the record shop counter on Saturdays, the shop became overrun by boarders, and Rough Trade duly diversified into skateboards and skateboarding merchandise.
The following year Slam City joined Ignition in the basement; then expanded again into the Slam City Skates/Rough Trade 2 shop in Covent Garden. The Talbot Road shop also acted as the office of The Roughler fanzine which doubled as the programme of the Old Roughians Rough Trade cricket team.
As the label found Brit pop success with the Smiths, the shop returned to its US roots, championing the hardcore-punk of Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch, Husker Du, Mud Honey, Meat Puppets and Minutemen; leading inexorably towards Nirvana. In 1987 Sonic Youth opened the Rough Trade/Slam City 2 branch at 16 Neal’s Yard.
Back in the basement of 130 Talbot Road, the current manager Pete Donne launched the shop’s in-house label Wiiija, named after their postcode W11 1JA. The Wiiija label echoed the original Rough Trade with their femcore, Asian punk/bhangra and euro pop tendencies, but then went south of the river, to Beggars Banquet in SW18, with Bis.
Rough Trade’s American roots came home to roost in 1991 when Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love visited the shop. On Kurt’s behalf, Courtney asked after Raincoats albums and Jude directed them to the antiques shop where Ana de Silva worked part-time. For services rendered to the grunge cause, Kurt and Courtney persuaded Ana and Gina Birch to reform the Raincoats, to tour with Nirvana. Kurt wrote the sleevenotes for the re-issued ‘Raincoats’ album, but then committed suicide before the tour.
As Nirvana reached the Rough Trade shop the original Rough Trade label ceased to exist. With the end of the Smiths the Cartel collapsed, taking the label with it. But the Rough Trade shops continued on a discreet indy roll into the 21st century. In 2006 the Talbot Road shop appeared in Lilly Allen’s ‘LDN’ video as ‘Tough Grade’.
From Rough Trade, proceed along Portobello to the Castle pub at the Westbourne Park Road junction.
This was formerly the Warwick Castle, the Rough Trade pub – that is, the record shop local and literally – the most notorious market watering hole from the swinging 60s to gangsta rap.
In its late 80s Irish/West Indian pool hall heyday, the Warwick was the local of Transvision Vamp, World Domination Enterprises, Clash, Aswad, Raincoats, Skids, Rip Rig and Panic, Pogues, PIL and Members members.
John Lydon as a ‘pivotal customer’ was stretching it, as much as the Standard review in which Jason Donovan, Matt Dillon and Harry Dean Stanton were regulars, though they did all appear.
The Warwick featured in such films as Portobello Pirate TV by JB of the Portobello Film Festival, and Aki Kaurismaki’s I Hired A Contract Killer.
There was even a ‘Live At The Warwick’ album, featuring the landlord Seamus Costello calling last orders, ambient pub noises, and the Clash roadie-poet Jock Scot’s ‘Ode to the Warwick’; in which ‘Lords and bores rub shoulders with the pride of London’s building sites.’
While the pub fanzine, The Roughler, was described as the proto-loaded, girlpower in pubs can be traced back to the Warwick in the 80s, when the roll call included; Neneh Cherry, Andrea Oliver, Anna Chancellor from Four Weddings, Gina Birch of the Raincoats, Margi Clarke in Contract Killer, Ronna Ricardo from the Profumo affair, Wendy James of Transvision Vamp, Jerry Hall and Jade Jagger.
In the late 80s all the requisite multicultural Portobello style elements came together in Neneh Cherry’s ‘Buffalo Stance’ on Virgin. Insert: ‘What’s she like?’ Neneh first appeared as the 5th member of the Slits, then fronted Rip Rig & Panic with Andrea Oliver, and Float Up CP. Andrea Oliver went on to present Baaadass TV with Ice-T, before hooking up with Neneh again for their BBC2 cookery show.
Transvision Vamp was originally a DIY cyber-punk sci-fi soundtrack tape, by Wendy James and Nick Christian Sayer, hawked along Portobello in the mid 80s. On the Wendy website, she describes Ladbroke Grove as her ‘spiritual powerpoint’, and recalls recruiting the bassist and drummer, Dave Parsons and Tex Axile, to spray Transvision Vamp graffiti around the area.
Their ‘W11 Blues’ track begins with Wendy ‘walking down the line, heading for the Grove.’ After echoing the Clash and Hawkwind in encounters with police and thieves, she ‘strode on down the line to Grove… left out of All Saints across Portobello Road, underneath the Westway and into Ladbroke Grove, up 2 flights of stairs into a darkened hall.’ Rounding the night off, after Neneh Cherry and Tone Loc shoutouts, her flat is raided by police.
This is the way the Sound of the Westway story of Grove rock ends. Not with a bang, with Wendy. It can be argued that Transvision Vamp were the most successful local band, with top ten hits and million selling albums, but they fared less well than anyone in the press.
In the late 90s, the front door of the Transvision Vamp drummer’s former Westbourne Park Road abode, opposite the Warwick, took the starring role in Notting Hill the movie. Meanwhile the bassist became bigger than Oasis in the States as part of Bush (the Brit grunge group named after Shepherd’s Bush). The theme of the Gwyneth Paltrow rom-com Sliding Doors, ‘Living In The City’, by the group Blair, contains the line ‘living on the corner of Portobello Road.’
Round ‘the blue door’ corner of Westbourne Park Road, Intoxica (formerly Vinyl Solution) at 231 Portobello Road became the hippest 90s record shop, on the site of the hippy Hindukush clothes shop, with a psychedelic upstairs/hip-hop downstairs set up. The shop has been recommended by Marc Almond for soul classics, and Sarah Cracknell of St Etienne as unintimidating for girls.
The William Hill betting shop next door was the haunt of ‘Keith Talent’ in Martin Amis’s London Fields; a Mike Skinner aka The Streets chav photo pose location; and Gillian Anderson of The X-Files lived in a flat above – ‘the truth is out there’.
Over the road, Eve’s café at number 222 hosts ‘the Tesco’s Disco’ Balkan Express basement bar. The Alba Place mews, the other side of Tesco’s, is the location of Jah Wobble’s market pose on the sleeve of the PIL bassist’s first solo album, ‘The Legend Lives On – Jah Wobble In Betrayal’ from 1980.
Number 230, now Nothing clothes shop, was Musicland, the hippy record shop. The Musicland and Muzik City reggae record shop chain of stores was built up by Lee Gopthal, an Indian/West Indian Windrush passenger, from a Portobello market stall. In 1968 Gopthal co-founded the Trojan reggae label, which was based at the Saga Centre on Kensal Road, with Chris Blackwell of Island Records, who he helped set up on Basing Street. The Sounds soul/dance record shop at 236 is on the site of the hippy clothes shop Etcetera.
The Market Bar at number 240, on the corner of Lancaster Road, is the site of what’s widely regarded as the classic Portobello pop pose by the local reggae group Aswad. Even outdoing the Clash, Brinsley ‘Dan’ Forde, Angus ‘Drummie Zeb’ Gaye, Tony ‘Gad’ Robinson and co, were photographed by Adrian Boot on the corner when it was the Golden Cross pub, around a young-ish Sledge the Rasta. Aswad’s local history can be traced back further than the Clash’s, and continues into the 21st century, making them the (more or less undisputed) top local band, as well as the number 1 British reggae act.
The Golden Cross pub, which was a fish shop in the 50s, was also renowned for Keith Allen appearances upstairs, and as the inspiration for ‘The Black Cross’ in London Fields. In turn, Martin Amis’s second novel in his local trilogy (between Money and The Information) inspired Blur’s ‘Parklife’ album. As the old pub was converted into the designer-gothic or retro-creole Market Bar, ‘the first of London’s new bohemian bars’, more or less the opposite of what Amis imagined in his millenarian tale.
When the Market Bar was All Saints’ local, according to the Sun, it was run by the 60s pop star/actor John Leyton (who sang ‘Johnny Remember Me’, and appeared in The Great Escape as one of the POWs who make a home run).
Right Said Fred drive by in their ‘I’m Too Sexy’ video, and the actual Market bar was propped up by Nick Cave, when the Australian goth rocker was recording ‘Murder Ballads’ round the corner on Basing Street. In 2002, the Cave co-hort, Barry Adamson came up with a suitably goth-soul tech-noir Market Bar soundtrack, with ‘The King of Notting Hill’ album on Mute. In a similar post-modern gothic vein, the premises were also haunted by Brian Molko of Placebo.
Round the south-west corner of Lancaster Road, by the pop opticians mural featuring John Lennon and Stevie Wonder, 61b was the Stone City hip-hop shop, featuring the Urban Café. Here, according to City Limits, in the early 90s you would find ‘clubbers, rap bands, hip-hop producers and Notting Hill trendies hanging out, looking for all the world as though they were on a New York sidewalk.’ Supra clothes shop has continued the tradition over the road at 253b, and now at 249 Portobello Road.
In the 70s the Café Grove corner shop was the 253 indoor hippy markets, including the original Alchemy stall. In the 90s, as the acid-house head-shop, Wong Singh Jones, it featured a Goa trance CD stall frequented by Brian Eno and India, the daughter of Roger Waters of Pink Floyd.
The current rock ephemera shop, 15 Minutes, round the corner on Portobello, was until recently the 253 Culture Shack featuring Red’s Rasta stall and indoor market. In the 90s, as the Rose of Portobello and the Grove workshops, the premises hosted Danny’s Dub shop, the office of Ishmahil Blagrove’s The Grove magazine; Oz and Gee’s street wear outfitters, and Dollar-ride cabs who employed honorary Wailer members of Sons of Jah as drivers.
The Lancaster Road to the Westway Dreadzone of Portobello market was founded in the early 70s by the rocksteady reggae outfit, the Heptones (of ‘Fattie, Fattie’ fame), posing for Adrian Boot at the Tavistock Road junction. In the later 70s, Penny Reel’s ‘Dread Tale’ about the dub producer Keith Hudson began in the same place outside the old Jamaican pattie shop.
Overlapping the reggae scene, Alchemy, the hippy head-shop/indoor market at 261, was founded at 253 by Lee Harris, the honorary white South African Rasta. 263 was the Motor City jeans store in the 70s, and the punk T-shirt shop Ignition in the 80s, featuring the first Portobello hip-hop tape stall and a Mutoid Waste Company bomb sculpture frontage.
The Mau Mau Bar at 265, which was previously part of the Motor City jeans store, started out in the early 90s as the Motown Majic Company’s Original Soul Bar; with Motown record encrusted shelves, James Brown and Martha and the Vandellas Harlem Apollo posters, and the ‘majic’ stone which remains outside on the pavement. It then had a spell as the Beat Bar before its current hip-hop incarnation. The Muse gallery/restaurant at 269 is a Portobello Film Festival venue, and the base of the Portobello Collective and the Tavistock festival.
The Grain Shop healthfood store at 269 was the Sams’ Macrobiotic restaurant Ceres (also known as Seed, Yin-yang and the Macrobiotic restaurant at various local locations). As well as purveying muesli, bean stew and brown rice to the hippy festival masses, the Sams family were wholefood suppliers to the Bolans and the Lennons.
In the Seed Portobello guidebook, Ann Sams calls the Lancaster Road to Oxford Gardens section of the road ‘the Portobello Village’, the alternative market of ‘reggae music, soul food, underground newspapers, wholewheat bread, Bedouin dresses, art deco objects, natural shoes, herbal medicines, a free shop, brown rice, and a gypsy fortune teller.’ Next door is the disused entrance to the old Isaac Newton School, which was attended by Paul Simonon of the Clash.
In Michael Moorcock’s A Dead Singer Hendrix ghost story, the roadie ‘Shakey Mo’ shuffles round the Lancaster Road corner towards the Mountain Grill café at 275, looking to score Mandies or Mandrax.
As the Pink Fairies did the street hippy ‘Portobello Shuffle’ on their 1972 album ‘What a Bunch of Sweeties’, Nick Kent called the group ‘Ladbroke Grove’s red peril’, and Charles Shaar Murray described their music as ‘classic British punk rock’.
The track ‘Portobello Shuffle’ is a proto-Motörhead ‘footstompin’ boogie’ with a gratuitous Paul Rudolph guitar solo. It’s not, as I originally thought, about scoring drugs, or avoiding people, it’s actually a positive rallying cry to ‘roll out of your seats, get out in the streets, there’s a new day a-comin’.’ The preceding track, ‘Right On Fight On’, is about a Fairies and Hawkwind gig being broken up by police under the Westway.
As the Pink Fairies and Shakey Mo did the ‘Portobello Shuffle’ into Pinkwind under the Westway, we enter the time of the Hawklords of the manor in the ‘Hall of the Mountain Grill’.
Until recently, Babes’n’Burgers restaurant/takeaway at number 275, the last house before the tubeline and Westway, was George’s Famous Mountain Grill café, as immortalised in rock history by Hawkwind: ‘And in the Grove, by Gate and Hill, midst merry throng and market clatter – stood the Hall of the Mountain Grill where table strain’d ‘neath loaded platter (from the Legend of Beenzon Toste).’
In 1974 Hawkwind’s fifth album was named in honour of the legendary greasy spoon cafe; and as a spoof of King Crimson’s ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’ Island LP. In Pete Frame’s Rock Family Trees the Hawkwind singer/sci-fi writer Bob Calvert, aka ‘Captain Lockheed’ (who wrote ‘Silver Machine’), recalls first meeting the founder member Dave Brock there.
Calvert described the establishment as “a working man’s cafe in Portobello Road, frequented by all the dross and dregs of humanity’, that turned into “a kind of left bank café-meeting place for the Notting Hill longhairs, a true artists’ hangout, but it never became chic, even though Marc Bolan, David Bowie and people like that often went there.”
30 years on, it still hadn’t, even though everywhere else on Portobello had, and it seemed that any pop appeal the premises once possessed had gone with the Wind. Then Mike Skinner aka The Streets posed there with a fry up, for some chav street cred, in an Observer photo shoot. Overnight, the rock landmark greasy spoon was gentrified into Babes’n’Burgers restaurant/takeaway. The quest for the holy Mountain Grill was lost, and the time of the Hawklords had finally come to an end.
Back in the mid-70s strata of acid-rock geology, the ‘Psychedelic Warlords’ of the Wind numbered Dave ‘Baron’ Brock, Nik Turner, aka ‘the Thunder Rider’, and Lemmy ‘Count Motörhead’. The former Hendrix roadie, Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilminster, was quoted as saying: “Hawkwind fits exactly into my philosophy. They’re weird – that suits me.”
But, after their 6th album, ‘Warrior on the Edge of Time’, and the ‘Kings of Speed’/‘Motörhead’ single, he was sacked; for the occupational hazard of being busted with speed at Canadian customs. The mid 70s line-up also included Stacia, the equally notorious Hawkwind dancer, who was summed up by Bob Calvert in another Mountain anecdote; in which an awestruck ‘spade cat’ repeats “Nice lady”.
In the sci-fantasy novel The Time of the Hawklords, by Michaels Moorcock and Butterworth, their post-apocalypse HQ was ‘the yellow van commune’ at 271 (now the Portobello Hot Food takeaway): ‘adjacent to the burnt-out shell of the legendary Mountain Grill restaurant – the supplier of good, plentiful food to many a starving freak who roamed the inhuman streets of the period.’
The previous tenants, who painted the building in geometric hippy designs, were ‘outlaw publishers of underground pamphlets, friends of Hawkwind who had been hideously killed by marauding gangs of puritan vigilantes.’ In the later 70s, 271 (which still has a large hippy style number) was occupied by Warsaw Pact, who are notable for causing the post-punk band Warsaw’s name change to Joy Division.
In the Hawklords book the post-apocalypse kids gather outside to remind Hawkwind to play for their sonic healing. Whereas, in rock real-time, when the book came out in 1976 the kids were telling them to stop. Nevertheless, Hawkwind carry on prog rocking regardless into our own time. As they held space rituals at Stonehenge, they took punk and acidhouse on board, and they’ve recently reappeared under the Westway, in a prog rock time warp, at the Inn on the Green.
In 1966 the Tavistock Road junction (now the Arts and Crafts Market square) was the starting point of the first Notting Hill Fair procession, with ‘children all ages chorusing we all live in a yellow submarine’, as recounted in the Michael Horovitz poem. By 1968 Melissa’s café (on the site of the newsagents) was sprayed with ‘All you need is Dynamite’ graffiti.
In the following decade the old junction was in the militant reggae Carnival riot zone. In the 80s and 90s the precinct became an occasional venue of impromptu gigs and video shoots of the Dread Broadcasting Corporation, World Domination Enterprises, the Trojans, James, Don-e, Freestylers, Raincoats, breakdancing and bongothons. In 2003 Sharleen Spiteri’s ‘Carnival Girl’ video was shot here on Portobello, and most recently the square featured in Lily Allen’s ‘LDN’ video.
The west end of Tavistock Park, which also appears in the Lily Allen video, is the site of the Point hippy brown rice café. Here in 1976 an unsuccessful ‘Save the Point’ demo outside featured the Derelicts, who had a proto-punk Portobello song which apparently went ‘Portobello Road! Portobello Road! W10!’ – although this is still W11.
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