Note: this is an introductory piece to the concept of Urban Everywhen, which will be explored further in this blog. There is a good definition of Everywhen here.
There are occasions, as I clatter over the Sydney Harbour Bridge after a hard day typing into oblong text boxes, when I think of the London I once knew.
On this specific occasion I was listening to ‘McFlurry’ by the Sleaford Mods, when the sample of two space-goons talking about drugs while child-minding sent me into a Proustian epiphany.
There’s something about those accents: they are as familiar to me as a concrete paving slab, yet — am I remembering correctly? — they seemed to have all but died out by the time I escaped the wretched place. When I finally got out all I could hear was Estuary English - Phil Daniel’s Mockney Geezer — a sort of bland generic parody of ‘Cockney’, which I’ve ended up speaking myself. But the accents on the Sleaford sample were a blast of the London accents I remember — the ones where the speaker is talking while trying not to move his lips AT ALL. Sereosly. It reaalee wozz.
Hugh Grant has a good stab at this accent in The Gentleman- I remember being strangely impressed that he dared choose it for his portrayal of sleazy journo Fletcher — but the one, for me, that opens up a spinning psychedelic wormhole — and dumps a pot of steaming black coffee all over Proust's madeleines — is when I watch The Hitcher from the Mighty Boosh sing the song ‘Eels’.
I was propelled into hunting down this clip — which I remembered with fond horror — when I read an interview where the camp Gothy one said that he modelled The Hitcher on his grandfather. Which seems somewhat harsh at first — until we come to the accent.
If I shut my eyes and mentally erased the green skin, the polo mint eye and the homicidal threats, then that WAS my grandfather Frank. And he not only talked like him, he even played the piano like him too — by ear and with plenty of music-hall enthusiasm. He used to play Christmas Carols on an out of tune piano in the old folks home where he ended his days, to the applause of everyone whose motor-functions allowed it.
And he ALWAYS had a polo mint for me.
But it wasn’t just the voice. There are more things in that video that hit me WAY harder than the sum of its gruesome parts. For example, the shop they rent, in which the series is set, is supposed to be in Deptford High Street.
Deptford was Frank’s manor. In his youth, Frank and his brother Bill used to box for money at the Thomas A Becket pub down the Old Kent Road. They boxed under pseudonyms, as they also boxed as amateurs, and invested their winnings on the tables in Deptford Snooker Hall, where they would hustle and shark it up into something more substantial. By all accounts they were as fearsome on the baize as they were in the ring.
Frank’s wild years apparently came to an end when he married my Grandma, Dorothy, in St Peter’s, the big Georgian church just off Deptford High Street — and this is yet another reason why The Eels Song gives me goosebumps. Unbeknownst to either of us, I used to attend a psychedelic club in its Crypt (imaginatively called ‘The Crypt’) in the late 80s. So, in the spirit of EveryWhen (more about that here), as my grandparents were solemnly taking their vows under the airy vaults above, their grandson was gurning to the Ozric Tentacles in the cramped and deafening basement below.
And then we come to the eels — and a prickly line of sweat starts to creep across my forehead. Although ‘jellied eels’ are an alleged London delicacy, my father only ate them when he was hungry and there was nothing else. But he never ate them again after the following incident.
Dad worked as a clerk in the London docks, just before they wound it all down and sold the real estate off on the quiet, as shown in the brilliant documentary ‘The Long Good Friday’.
When it wasn’t raining, he used to eat his lunchtime sandwiches on the wharf. One lunchtime he noticed some activity over on the other side and wandered over to get a better look. It turned out the Port Authority was fishing a body out of the docks. The body must have been weighted down and had been in the water for a while. A diver had secured the body, and they were gingerly hauling it up.
Before he even knew what he was looking at, Dad saw the body break the surface of the water.
‘I shouldn’t have looked. It was HORRIBLE’
‘Why?’ Said I.
‘It was MOVING’
‘How?’ Said I.
Dad looked at me — and it was clear from the look that, whatever he had seen, it was still there in his mind.
He paused, and then said, simply:
‘Eels’.
Comments