By Barry Miles
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/03/london-miles-city-book-sex
Reviewed by Jude Rogers
29 March 2010
City of dreams
London has always been a destination for dreamers, and in the past 15
years its literature has also become starry-eyed. Peter Ackroyd's
London: the Biography (2000) convinced the masses that the city's
muck and murk was full of grubby virtue rather than vice. Iain
Sinclair's non-fiction, such as London Orbital (2002), also gained
popularity, while compendiums and peculiars, bubbling with love for
the city's hidden corners, have sold thousands of copies.
Barry Miles, the author of books about Jack Kerouac and Frank Zappa,
as well as his own memoir of the swinging decade, In the Sixties, is
perfectly placed to keep this vein of London literature alive. This
is the man who founded Indica Books and Gallery, where Yoko Ono met
John Lennon, and who organised the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream at
Alexandra Palace, featuring performances by Pink Floyd. He has added
much to the magic of the capital.
He was, like so many London romantics, brought up outside it. As a
child in Cirencester, he would dream that "the trees and the fields
would be blocked out with houses", just like the city he had visited
in the early 1940s, full of "red Tube trains running across the
rooftops". London Calling maps a city fed and fuelled by outsiders.
Miles reminds us how its spirit is driven by people fleeing oppressed
countries as well as boring counties - how Greek Street was named
after refugees from Ottoman rule, and how émigrés from revolutionary
France formed Soho's network of restaurants, cafés and pubs. "It was
to Soho that people came to get away from Britain for a few hours,"
he writes in the introduction, capturing London's heavenly
cosmopolitanism in a simple phrase.
From here, Miles takes us back to the city's "bomb-shattered
streets" and explains how postwar counterculture made its way through
the wreckage. This is also, unfortunately, where the book starts to
lumber. London Calling, he explains, is about "people who make their
art their life", but it is a tough task to weave together the stories
of these wayward characters. It doesn't help when a life lived in the
counterculture often appears to be a euphemism for a life lived in
the boozer. Tales about the dank drinking circles led by the likes of
Dylan Thomas (who leaves his only copy of Under Milk Wood in the pub)
and club owners such as Muriel Belcher of the Colony Room are funny
but very familiar, as is the cast list of Mick
Jagger, Derek Jarman and Gilbert and George. Despite Miles's neat
grasp of humour, their stories cascade and fade quickly. It makes the
book feel exhausting, rather than exhaustive.
Nevertheless, certain people stand out. Very often, these are lost
stars that you sense Miles wants to preserve. Tambimuttu is a great
example, a glamorous editor from what was then known as Ceylon, who
published Nabokov and Henry Miller in his influential Poetry London
magazine and offered work to strangers without having read a word of
their writing. Then there is the pop art pioneer Pauline Boty, dead
of cancer at 28, and a whole chapter for Leigh Bowery, who would
"give birth" to his bandmate Nicola on stage with their group, Minty.
Miles is equally sharp when he unravels the myths of counterculture.
Pointedly, he quotes Diana Athill on how rife sex and drugs were in
London before even the First World War, and how only the press made
it seem new in the 1960s. He also reveals how artists would cynically
boost their profiles - Vivienne Westwood slapping a girl at a Sex
Pistols gig because she was bored, and the writer Colin Wilson
sleeping on Hampstead Heath to cement his reputation as an early
Angry Young Man.
But the shadow that hangs over this book is that of Miles himself,
who in fits and starts is a Miserable Old Man. The book finishes in a
perplexing rush, its afterword dealing with a 25-year period from the
mid-1980s house music boom to "dumbed-down" date, which suggests that
the counterculture stopped when he was in his mid-forties. He also
argues that a true underground cannot exist in a world of
instant culture, but does not mention influential clubs such as the
threatened Foundry, in Shoreditch. Nor does he notice that
underground newspapers and zines still exist.
This lets down a book that can be genuinely inspiring. Next time,
Miles would do well to look beyond his purple youth and realise that
London's heart still beats.
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