Friday Photo #68

A 1930 photo of Joyce in the arms of her maternal grandmother, Anorah.

My Aunt Joyce's life, which began over 95 years ago in an East London terraced house, ended last Sunday evening in a small white room in a Norwich hospital, with my cousin and I by her side. Following a couple of years of steadily declining health, her passing from this world was peaceful.

My cousin has spent much of the last 18 months criss-crossing the Atlantic to care for her mum, while I made regular, though somewhat shorter journeys up and down the M11 to support them both. Latterly my aunt was relocated to a lovely residential care home, just across the Norfolk/Suffolk border, about a mile from my front door. It was by far the longest period she'd spent outside London in her entire life and, unsurprisingly, she didn't care for it much, but it was close enough that I could drop in to see her and report back to my cousin on a regular basis.  

For the first 15 years of my life Joyce, my uncle and my cousin lived upstairs in the same house as us. As a consequence, my cousin and I regard each other as siblings and grew up feeling that we'd each been blessed with an extra set of parents. 

Joyce leaves her daughter, son-in-law and three remarkable grandchildren.

Johnson Mkhalali - Joyce No.2

Friday Photo #67

In my mind, this series is a relatively recent, if not altogether regular, feature on the blog. Of course nothing has been particularly regular round these parts for some time, but you catch my drift. Anyway, imagine my horror to discover that the very first Friday Photo entry was way back in June 2021 - 3½ years ago! I set out my intentions in that very first post. 

'...a photo, probably taken on my phone while out walking, or maybe an oldie retrieved from the family archive, perhaps even an anonymous antique snapshot plucked from what remains of my collection of such ephemera. To accompany it, a tune, ideally one that's at least partially inspired by the image...'

Up to now, the majority of photos that I've shared have been drawn from the second category - the family archive. Unsurprising really, as it's a gift that keeps giving and there'll be more to come no doubt. Although I've dispatched hundreds of old anonymous photos that I picked up along the way, a few boxes still remain to be sifted through and/or scanned and shared - I hope to make some inroads in that direction over the coming weeks and months.

Here's an unknown drummer from the Royal Army Service Corps during WW2. He has a very modest kit, handy for moving in a hurry I would guess, though I wouldn't have wanted to be perched anywhere near that huge bass drum when it kicked in.

Jackie Mittoo - Drum Song

Friday Photo #66

My view pitch-side at Wembley in July

When Bruce Springsteen & the E-Street Band toured Europe during the Summer of 2023, the only London date scheduled was for the vast, flat, atmos-free, chatterbox-infested Hyde Park. My E-Street buddy and I hummed and hawed, consulted our wallets, took a deep breath and headed out to catch a gig in Amsterdam instead, flying back via Edinburgh for a second show a couple of days later. In spite of coming hot on the heels of a nasty bout of Covid, it was a truly glorious experience, though, for a man of my meagre means, catastrophically expensive. Still, at their advanced age, we figured that these were probably the last precious opportunities to see the E-Street Band in full effect. How wrong I was. 

When another European jaunt was announced for the Summer of 2024, my pal and I, convinced that this really would be the last time, hocked our family heirlooms and caught two UK shows, at Sunderland and Wembley. 43 years after my first Springsteen gig just across the road in the Arena, I left Wembley Stadium tired and elated after a staggering three hour performance. A great one to finish on I thought, as I shuffled down Wembley Way towards the tube station.

So now Bruce is coming back to Europe yet again next Summer, ostensibly to mop up a few 2024 shows in Italy and Spain that had to be postponed when he fell ill, but he's also added a handful of UK dates to the run. This time I was absolutely going to give it a miss (as indeed I am with Dylan's potential UK concert farewell this very week), as money, in the immortal words of The Valentine Brothers, really is too tight to mention. My E-Street buddy talked me round though and consequently I now have debts no honest man can pay, because I've stumped up for one more night on E-Street in Manchester next May. 

A moving solo acoustic interpretation of I'll See You in My Dreams has closed practically every show for the past couple of years and call me an old fool, but it gets me every time. Here's Bruce performing it at the 20th 9/11 Memorial Ceremony in New York.

Friday Photo #65

Not too long ago, I stumbled upon a forgotten old external hard-drive, buried at the bottom of a box. Firing it up, I found 500GB of music, most of which I'd long since dragged and dropped elsewhere, plus a few dozen folders worth of photos. The majority of the snapshots had been backed up on other drives too, however to my surprise I spotted an unnamed folder containing around 30-40 Swedey McSwedefaces from 2017 & 2018, roughly half of which incorporated a cunningly positioned 7" single, where an LP would traditionally be. I have no memory of taking these shots, or what I originally had in mind for them, though they were obviously intended for the blog. Here's one now! 

Jon Hart's 'Toytown' was released in September 1980, very early on in my record shop career. The single marks Hart's one and only appearance on vinyl....and then the trail goes cold. Even this new fangled World Wide Web that everyone's talking about fails to throw up any further information about the man. One thing I can state categorically though, without fear of contradiction, is that Jon Hart was an admirer of  David Bowie's music circa 1967-69. How do I know this seemingly random fact? Take a listen to both sides of the single, then have a gander at the quite extraordinary, recently unearthed, period TV performance. Your jaw will drop.

Jon Hart - Toytown

Jon Hart - Recollections

Friday Photo #64

It's the Spring of 1964 and I've just arrived home after a little rough and tumble down the park at the end of the road, probably instigated by the lad across at No.13 ringing the doorbell and, with all the innocence he could muster, asking Mum '...is Swede playing out?' My shirt hangs loose from beneath a favourite cardigan, one that I will outgrow within a matter of weeks. The wellies are still on and a plaster just above my left knee covers the most recent scrape in a childhood full of scuffs, cuts and grazes. Look at that face though - properly over-excited. The reason? It's right behind me. While I was out, Dad (and probably Uncle Ivor) had installed a full sized swing at the bottom of the garden - a swing! Actually at this point it's just the metal frame cemented into the ground, but the all important hanging bit would materialise shortly afterwards. The swing's arrival was a complete surprise and I'm impishly as pleased as punch about it.

On and off for a handful of young summers, that swing at the end of the garden was central to my world. The frame alone became a mini-chicane as I careered around the garden on a succession of scooters and bikes, it also formed the goalposts for a thousand kickabouts (reducing Mum's grass to a muddy swamp in the process) and it substituted as a Bat-pole for my imaginary adventures as the Caped Crusader. All this in addition to being a, y'know, swing! 

I've no idea (and irritatingly never thought to ask) how Dad acquired this magical plaything that made me the envy of my infant school pals and equally I have absolutely no recollection of it being dug up and removed from the garden a few years down the line, after I'd outgrown it it. The scruffy little scamp in the photo couldn't give a hoot about the details though. What larks he's going to have.

Mice Parade - Swing

Friday Photo #63

It's the summer of 1974. Go down to the bottom of my road, through the park, round the edge of the allotments beyond, on past the cricket pitches, then over the Lea Flood Relief Channel and you'd eventually find yourself in a remote open wasteland, criss-crossed by railway lines. It was the kind of no man's land where all sorts of mischief took place. Where burned out husks of cars, vans and fridges sat rusting and abandoned and where smashed bottles, broken bricks and jagged chunks of metal littered every surface. In short, it was our playground. Oblivious to the inherent danger of cuts and bruises from all of the dumped rubbish, or bloodied noses from the bigger boys who invariably loitered menacingly nearby, my mates and I often headed down there when nothing else was going on. And yes, each of us at one time or another, returned home with a cut, a bruise, a bloody nose, or occasionally all three.

In one area, a crude mud track had been carved out by the bigger boys on their mopeds and whenever they were otherwise occupied, no doubt giving some other poor unsuspecting youngster a bloody nose, we would hare around it on our bikes. Yay, yet more opportunities for cuts and bruises! And here I am, haring around that very track 50 years ago, long hair and flares flailing in the breeze, a vision in colour co-ordinated clothing. But what colour is that jeans/jumper combo exactly? Mauve? Purple? Violet? Scarlet? Vermillion? Who knows, but it sure ain't pretty and the fashion police have most definitely been informed. 

The good news to end on is that the dangerous sprawling urban wasteland of my youth is now home to a spacious nature reserve and lengthy walking trail.

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I'm sending today's tune out to our mutual blogging chum John Medd, as I reckon it fits in rather neatly with his recent Philip Glass/Steve Reich/John Adams post.

Hauschka - Blue Bicycle

Friday Photo #62

I started to seriously look into my family tree over the past winter, in an effort to make sense of the paper trail left by Mum. In the 1980s and 1990s she subscribed to various genealogy newsletters, spent hours poring over dusty documents at Somerset House in London and dragged Dad around endless country graveyards on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, in search of any clues about the life and times of our ancestors. She was keen to share her discoveries with me at the time, but of course I paid scant attention back then. Now that I am interested, there's no-one left to ask. However within a couple of clicks on Ancestry, cross-referred with Mum's handwritten notes, I'd already travelled further back into history than she managed in over 15 years of research. And I've barely scratched the surface.

This is the only known photo of my maternal grandmother's brother Sidney, with whom I share a middle name. He was born on August 30th 1895 and though I found all kinds of information about his parents and siblings with relative ease, Sidney's trail quickly went cold. Then it dawned on me and I turned my attention from birth, marriage and census records, towards an altogether more tragic resource, where I discovered that Sidney, a rifleman, was killed in action in Flanders on Good Friday March 29th 1918, 106 years ago today, and is buried in Arras, Pas-de-Calais.

Guided By Voices - Now to War

Friday Photo(s) #61

Just lately I've been spending more time than usual in London. My aunt is having a few health issues and my cousin has had to fly in from America to monitor the situation. I've bombed down the M11 at every opportunity over the past month or so to give them both a bit of moral support (I'm heading down again today). During this uncertain period, my cousin is also working all hours, including seemingly endless daily conference calls carried out on New York time. To see an unwell aunt and a horribly stressed out cousin without really being able to do anything to help either is upsetting to say the least. 

One day, while my cousin was up to her neck in unfathomably complicated technical discussions with multiple colleagues scattered around the globe and with the relentless rain briefly pausing, I took myself off to the East Ham Nature Reserve to clear my head. The reserve winds through the defunct 9 acre graveyard of an 800 year old church and in spite of incessant A13 traffic hammering across the flyover a few yards to the South and planes from the nearby London City Airport roaring overhead, it's a relative oasis of calm amid the turmoil of life.

Jape - Graveyard

Friday Photo #60

Maud, my Maternal Grandmother (Nan), was born in Stratford in the East End of London on January 19th 1893, 131 years ago. She passed away two days before my 16th birthday in 1976. Here Nan is pictured standing between two of her sisters in the early 1920s. On the left of the photo is Beatrice, known to me over 40 years later as emphysema ridden Aunt Beat, who was born in 1897 and died in 1974. To the right is Caroline, Aunt Carrie to me, who enjoyed the longest life of the three sisters, born in 1892 and passing away in 1979. There appear to have been at least a further three siblings in the family, including another sister lost in infancy and a brother Sidney, killed in France during the First World War at just 22 years of age.

This second photo, from the late 1960s, shows (left to right) Beatrice, Carrie and Nan as I knew them.

This Mortal Coil - You and Your Sister

Friday Photo #59

My maternal grandmother remarried late in life and thus Uncle Ted became the only male grandparent figure I'd ever have. He worked at the Leyton Orient football ground (in those days known simply as Orient) in the 1960s and frequently took me with him to home matches. Uncle Ted served in both wars, though, like so many, never discussed the horrors he undoubtedly witnessed - a fuller picture only emerging after his death with the discovery of his photos, papers and medals. Sadly he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1970 and passed away in 1972. Here we are in 1965.

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band - Hammer Song

Friday Photo #58

Half-time in the back garden, circa 1969

As I've mentioned a number of times on these pages, my cousin and I grew up as virtual brother and sister throughout the 1960s and early 1970s - me with my Mum and Dad downstairs, she with her parents upstairs. These days she lives in New York, but we'll be catching up this weekend when she makes a flying visit to see her Mum in London. We're probably a bit too long in the tooth for a kickabout though. 

Parquet Courts - Total Football

Friday Photo #57

Burgoyne Burbidges & Co chemical works in East Ham looms large in my family's history. The company began trading in the Hackney area in 1714, before moving to the East Ham location in 1892. Several aunts and uncles, not to mention both my parents, worked there at one time or other before it closed for good in 1952. The land has been completely redeveloped over the ensuing 70 years, though the original entrance facade on High Street South still remains and I nod to it every time I pass by. Here's Dad aged 22 (looking straight at the camera in the open neck shirt) with some of his colleagues at Burgoynes, shortly before the company closed down. The chap with the tie and Harry Hill collar to Dad's right looks a bit of a character. 

Lee Dorsey - Work Work Work

Friday Photo #56

 

Butlins holiday camp in the mid 1940s. Mum in her teens is second from left at the back. To her right is a family friend, to her left is her cousin Emily with future husband Matt. To Matt's left is Emily's brother Cyril with my maternal grandfather at the end. My maternal grandmother and her sister Carrie (Emily and Cyril's mother) sit smiling broadly at the front of the group. My grandfather and the family friend are the only two people in the photo that I didn't eventually get to know.

Jason Falkner - Holiday

Friday Photo #55

 

Skiers Street, West Ham, circa 1909. The young boy is my maternal grandfather, Sid (Sydney, 1896-1956). In the doorway stands his mother Elizabeth (1866-1946) with her eldest daughter Ada (born 1886). Next to Sid is his younger sister Marie (1902-1971), who I would come to know as Aunt Marie over 50 years later. I'm lucky enough to have a number of family photos taken early in the 20th century, though the majority are stiff studio poses. I don't know the circumstances behind this informal outdoor shot, but it's a real treasure - the framing and detail are remarkable. Skiers Street still exists in the Borough of Newham, though it would be unrecognisable to these ancient relatives, having sustained heavy damage in the Second World War and subsequently been completely rebuilt. 

Brigid Mae Power - Looking at You in a Photo

Friday Photo #54

 

With Mum's side of the family, I'm fortunate to have a well documented photographic trail to follow back through time, as far as the early years of the 20th century - Dad's much less so. Dad was one of seven children, but there are no photos of any of them in the family archive prior to their respective marriages in the 1950s. In my whole life I've only ever seen one photo of my paternal Grandfather, a man who was born in 1889 and passed away three months after I was born in 1960. From what I can gather he didn't attend the wedding ceremonies of any of his offspring, or if he did, he excused himself from the group photos, most of which I have copies of. There are precious few surviving images of my paternal Grandmother, Alice (1890-1967) and all of those were taken by my Dad in her later years. This is Alice in 1964. I have faint memories of her formidable presence at family gatherings, which was in stark contrast to the frailty of my maternal Grandmother.

Green on Red - Alice

Friday Photo(s) #53

You may be familiar with Anish Kapoor's 2006 sculpture Cloud Gate, situated in Millennium Park, Chicago. Due to its shape, the huge reflective piece quickly became referred to as The Bean. In February, mere weeks before I touched down in New York, Kapoor's 15 years in-the-making Big Apple version of The Bean was finally unveiled, located just a few hundred yards from my cousin's apartment. Where Cloud Gate stands unencumbered on prominent display, its Tribeca counterpart gives the impression of having been forcibly squished beneath a canopy in the entrance of a large residential building, spilling out across the sidewalk. I was keen to take a good look at the sculpture, but the area was very busy during my initial visit so I only managed to snatch a quick side angle shot from Leonard Street. On the Sunday morning, while on an an extended wander in search of coffee, I found Church Street practically deserted, allowing me to capture The Bean head-on. The imposing structure is 58ft long, 19ft high and cost an estimated $8-10 million dollars to create. 

Spoon - Me and the Bean  

Friday Photo(s) #52

While there was a conspicuous lack of interesting gigs during my visit to New York in March, I did have a few cultural bits and bobs set in stone long before I boarded my flight. One of those was a trip over to the Meatpacking District to catch 'Edward Hopper's New York' at The Whitney a couple of days before the show closed. Given that it was so late in the retrospective's five month run, together with the necessity to pre-book not just a ticket, but also a specific timeslot, I more or less assumed that the gallery space would be easy and comfortable to negotiate. How wrong I was. It was absolutely rammed, ridiculously oversold. I'm guessing that The Whitney had decided to ring every last drop out of the popular exhibit before it packed up and shipped out. The Hopper art on display was almost exclusively modest in size, which meant needing to get as close as possible to each piece while continuously jostling with the crowds for a couple of hours. It was like being in an ongoing series of scrums, moving slowly through the gallery. The work itself was of course fantastic. I was particularly interested by the many magazine illustrations on view, an area of his life I knew little about. Then there were the sketchbooks. The creative process in any artform is a thing of mystery and fascination to me and it was riveting to see as he edged, over successive pages, ever closer towards a finished masterpiece we know so well.

Paul Weller - Hopper (White Label Remix)

Friday Photo #51

There's a weekly feature over on Instagram that's been going on for a very long time, whereby old family photos are dug out and shared every Thursday, using the hashtag #throwbackthursday. It's an interesting way to catch glimpses of a world long gone, via anonymous vintage snapshots and memories. I've contributed to #throwbackthursday most weeks for at least 4 years now and a number of those shots have also graced these pages at one time or another. As a consequence I've plundered dad's boxes of slides and negatives multiple times, yet every now and then I still unearth one I've missed, today's being a prime example. I don't ever remember seeing this photo before a few weeks ago and I have to say that the ancient, over-exposed image caught me emotionally off-guard when I stumbled upon it.

It was taken in 1961. Dad is holding me on the pillar of the wall in the front garden. He's looking up, smiling. And me? I'm clearly loving the thrill of being up there, at just about the height I'd one day reach. These are roughly the respective perspectives Dad and I would have of each other for most of my adult life, after I'd shot past his 5' 10" at around the age of 15 or 16. It's always nice to see a photo of Dad & I together. There aren't that many in the archives, as he was the family photographer, with Mum & I as the frequent subjects. A quick squint on Google Street View shows me that, remarkably, the front garden wall is still standing, albeit in a refurbished state, 62 years later.

Human League - Empire State Human

Friday Photo #50

My aunt, who turned 94 yesterday, has lived alone in East London since my uncle died in 1978 and is the last surviving family member to have known me since birth. She's still cooks all her own meals, does her own housework and washing, all the while keeping her mind active by knitting for England and completing endless wordsearch puzzles. In fact I sent her another half a dozen wordsearch books as a birthday gift, which should hopefully keep her ticking along for a few months. As I've mentioned previously, my aunt, uncle and cousin shared our house in Walthamstow for the first dozen or so years of my life, so I've long considered her as an extra parent and I know that my cousin regarded my own mum in the same way.

Today's photo was taken in the back garden in the early summer of 1963, just prior to my cousin's arrival. My aunt at the back, doing her best to hide her baby bump beneath a baggy pinny, mum in the middle knitting something pink for the forthcoming addition to the family and me in my best bib and tucker at the front. I can only imagine that I must've been bribed to look so angelic!

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Lieutenant Pigeon were an interesting combo. They had a short run of hit singles in the 1970s that your nan would've happily nodded along to, while at the same time some of their b-sides and album fillers displayed a wacky, low budget sense of experimentalism. Here's the quite odd closing track from Mouldy Old Music, their debut LP, released in 1973.

Lieutenant Pigeon - Auntie May

Friday Photo(s) #49

Dad would've loved to have visited New York. He had a life long fascination with the city and would no doubt have spent hours walking its alleys, streets and neighbourhoods, but by the time my cousin relocated to the Big Apple in the 1980s and invited him over, it was already too late. The mobility issues that dogged his later life were beginning to take hold and he knew in his heart that he wouldn't have been physically capable of doing the things he really wanted to do, which would have frustrated him enormously. So he never made it there, but enjoyed hearing about my exploits whenever I returned from a stay with my cousin and I got into the habit of buying him a book about some aspect of New York each time. I got him one on the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and another about the growth of the subway system, but his favourite was the one I picked up about the history of the Staten Island Ferry. If Dad could have been magically transported to New York and allowed to do just one thing, I think it would have been to have taken that iconic orange ferry, gazing back across the harbour as Manhattan disappeared into the distance. He simply couldn't believe that I'd never done it. This year, on a bright, chilly March morning, I put that right.

The Upsetters - Ferry Boat