On a bus in Camden. Fight Club era

You've been stuck in a lift
In the belly of a whale
At the bottom of the ocean

Lift by Radiohead

The Enterprise pub. Opposite Chalk farm tube station. Frequented a lot by me and Jimmy in 1999 and 2000. In anyone else’s book they might be good times. Tracy the prison guard, says to me, “You have a Walkman? That says poor hotel worker if ever anything does.” I’ve known Tracy and her friend Myra for all of an hour. OK, her name wasn’t Myra, but she had something about her dress sense that reminded us of mass murderer Myra Hindley. They’d come up to our table and asked if the seats opposite us were free. In London that usually means someone wants to sit down and not that they want to sit down with you. I have no idea how we got talking. They clearly crashed our world. After Jimmy left, I was left talking music, the working life of a hotel concierge, sex in pub toilets, how the prisoners would tell Tracy that they masturbate thinking about her, and why I still owned a Walkman and listened to cassettes. Myra put my headphones on. The tape was playing a Doves song, Karen, and Myra asked, “Are you a goth?” I clearly wasn’t.

2000 and the world hadn’t ended. 2000 and I still made compilation mix tapes. Planes had not fallen out of the sky because of any Y2K bug. Had people really expected that to happen? For a short while there was a feeling of – What now? Keep making mixtapes and go back to work. Keep drinking in Norf London pubs.

I had a black T-Shirt with “Norf London” printed on it in big yellow letters. Having lived in Tottenham, Wood Green, Edmonton and then South End Green, I felt I’d earned the right, to the T-Shirt and the dodgy pronunciation. South End Green was Hampstead, but not the posh bit. It was a short walk from the Heath and Parliament Hill, where you could see all of London.

I recently came across this description of the area by John Lydon:

So I went squatting with Sid. Hampstead, not the posh end, but those awful Victorian dwellings round the back of the station. Really desperate people lived up there. It was awful. I liked it.

My life was, Camden, Swiss Cottage, Belsize Park and Hampstead and more specifically South End Green. Not anywhere near as grizzly as John Lydon’s version of it, but normal people lived there back then. Where there is now a sparkly M&S food store there used to be a grubby flea pit cinema where I saw Fight Club for the first time. The White Horse, who were happy to serve any drink you asked for and had shots called Squashed Frog and Brain Haemorrhage, is long since gone, and every resurrection so far seems to have failed.

The number twenty-four bus would take me from my flat to the West End.  There’s something desperate about taking the bus, particularly when the tube was the better option. This is doubly true for night buses. The number twenty-four night-bus had got me home many a time. You could stagger out of Soho, around Soho Square, and be on Tottenham Court Road and ride the twenty-four to the South End Green Terminus. You’d eye Dominques as you got off the bus, and know you’d be there later for their all-day breakfast, the essential hangover food.

I romanticise too much. I cover the whole scene in booze. Although, that was definitely a feature of that time and place, it wasn’t everything and it wasn’t all the time. It happens so that being hungover on the twenty-four bus, listening to a compilation tape that would later be labelled “On a bus in Camden. Fight Club era,” in a dark grey drizzly London evening, is one of the strongest memories. It’s a classic, “I guess we just won’t ever drink again” moment. Lyrics stolen from Kristen Hersch. We’ll get to her in a minute.

I’d label the cassettes with names that were appropriate, that tied them to a time and place. In particular I remember Pixies “Where is my mind?” And the last track of the Fight Club soundtrack by the Dust Brothers, “This is your life.” The latter being a great use of the music and dialogue from the film, with Brad Pitt telling us, “This is your life and its ending one minute at a time.”

I don’t know what I was lamenting at the time. There’s always plenty of moments of thinking “What the hell happened for me to get here feeling like this?” Whatever chaos the night before had given left me on the downside of whatever hill had been sloppily conquered the night before. I do know that listening to the Radiohead song “Lift” seemed to be the perfect soundtrack in that moment on the twenty-four.

You've been stuck in a lift
In the belly of a whale
At the bottom of the ocean

Lift wasn’t actually released until 2017, but it existed as a bootleg recording and those were the days when you’d buy bootleg CDs online. There was also a stall in Camden, just before you cross the bridge over the lock, where you could find all sorts of bootleg CDs and DVDs. Yes. I bought CDs. You just couldn’t make mix-CDs like you could mixtapes. There was something special about having music that you couldn’t find in the shops. For a lot of Radiohead fans I think there was something mythical about some of those B-sides and rarities. It made me feel like no one else was having the same ride on the twenty-four bus as I was.  

The era, my obsession with Radiohead and all things Fight Club, there was some sort of identity there. I’ve often described the early 2000s as a time to kick against the system even though the party was long since over. I have carried with me all this time the feeling that there was something going on, like the world was descending on my small corner of London.

Hotel days. Boozy hotel days, where you could do fourteen shots of tequila in the morning and still get yourself to a shift for 3pm. The hotel itself was very ordinary. The people, on both sides of the desk, were not. It felt like an arena to do stupid. I did stupid really well. Sober as a judge, being asked to collect someone’s bike from their room, I thought I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t ride it around the corridors of the hotel, just a little bit. No one caught me. Mentally, I’m getting of that bike to throw in this disclaimer: We provided great service, despite all the messing about. Every time I stay in a hotel I think about how the staff there compare to the people I had around me, how we never said no to anyone and we got things done. The bad behaviour never got in the way of that.

The world that was descending on me was full of musicians. Being close to Abbey Road recording studios, it was convenient for musicians to stay there. And then there was the Primrose Hill mob. I remember seeing Kate Moss on Primrose Hill. Liam Gallagher was very nice to me when I took a bag up to his Mum’s room. Robert Plant had a lovely smile when he asked me to book him in for a Sunday carvery down the road. David Byrne seemed very pleasant and even laughed when I told him how the London Eye is an eyesore next to the Houses of Parliament. You can stick a big Ferris wheel anywhere. Why stick it there?

Early 2000s and I’m standing on the forecourt of the hotel asking Ray Manzerek of The Doors what Camden was like in the 60s. I always remember him saying to me that “Camden in the 60s was a very special place and time.” Only years later I thought of how he may well have said that in each and every town he’d been in. “Yeah man. Milton Keynes in the 60s was a special place and time.”

I am going to say it. Camden in the early 2000s was a special place and time. Although it all happened over time, I can almost condense it into one walk through North London, from the Holy Bush in Hampstead on a Sunday, seeing Amy Winehouse with a little dog tucked under her arm and none of my friends at that point knew who she was. Down to Marathon Bar on Chalk Farm Road, where you’d go for late night kebab and chips, where Jack White once played an impromptu set in the back rooms there. And I imagine myself walking past and deciding to not go in for chips and missing out on that whole legendary scene. But to know it was going on at the same time as I was there, makes it special. Keep going, we skip the Good Mixer, even though it’s always known as the bar that Blur would drink in before they got big, and then we’re at The World’s End, with the Underworld club below.

World’s End. The only pub I’ve been kicked out of for pretending to be drunk. I lay across two seats, with my tongue hanging out to the side, a caricature of a corpse, and a doorman told me to leave. Never mind my protestations of, “I haven’t even had a drink yet!”

The Underworld where I never got in to see Kristen Hersch play. But I’ve still got the ticket to show how I almost did. It was a weeknight and I went along to The Underworld to see if I could get a ticket on the door. It was packed out. Five complete strangers stood outside talking to the doormen about how we might get in. “If someone comes out, can we go in?” Seemed like a reasonable plan. We were happy to pay. But no. Apparently that’s not how it works. Some guy came out and said it was a deathtrap down there and he was leaving early. He gave me his ticket. The doormen said, “No.” That’s not how it works. I still have the ticket though. The five of us, I barely remember any details of the people, were all genuine fans. Although you’ve got to tip your hat to the girl who’d come from as far away as Plymouth to be there. A ticket did come our way eventually. Some guy asked us what we were doing and when we said we wanted in, he said he had a spare ticket. He said “But are you real fans? What’s the name of Kristen’s new album?” The album had only been released that week and I didn’t know. I did say, “I know the last one was Strange Angels.” That seemed to be enough for the guy, and he gave me the ticket.

The five of us stood there looking at the ticket. It was mine. But it didn’t seem right. I offered it to the girl that had come the furthest. She wouldn’t take it. We ended up drawing lots and she won anyway. I have no idea how good the gig was but that was about as Camden as it got if you ask me.

These are stories of people being in your life, sometimes for only seconds. And sometimes, as in the case of Jack White and Kristen Hersch, not even in your life at all, but very close to it. I used to say that if you sat still long enough, the world comes to you. That’s how it felt. The fame of the people was never the point. The famous were sucked into the same orbit as the rest of us. The mixtape still exists. Lift by Radiohead takes me back to that evening bus ride in the rain. Whatever was wrong at that time is long forgotten. The vibe, however, is not. It exists, for me, in those songs, in that time and place, where you can never go back to, nor ever leave.

Where Next?

→ If you want to explore how a place can become inseparable from a feeling, read Hyde Park 2018.

→ If you want to see how music can preserve a moment long after the moment itself has disappeared, read The Noise Coming From Philippe.

→ If you want to discover why the moments that seem least important often become the ones we remember most, read Not Gary Clark.

If the writing resonates, stay with it