Mohicans at a fiver a photograph, a pint in the pub where it all happened, and a lesson in rhyming slang I did not ask for
Camden on a Sunday, With My Nan
My nan rang at nine this morning, which she knows is the middle of the night for me, and announced that she was coming up on the train and I was taking her to Camden. Not asking. Announcing. She is eighty-one, she grew up in Bermondsey, and she has decided that as her granddaughter is a punk rocker she ought to see where they keep them.
I tried to explain that there are not many left in Camden, that it is mostly phone cases and noodles now. She said she would be the judge of that. She arrived at Euston at noon in a leopard-print coat that is older than I am and frankly better than anything I own.
The Bridge
We walked up from the station, slowly, because of her knee. The high street was the usual Sunday crush. Giant boots and aeroplanes stuck on the shopfronts, music from every door, the smell of frying from the canal. Nan loved it. She kept stopping to read T-shirts aloud. Some of them I would have preferred her not to.
On the bridge over the lock there were three punks. Real ones, in the sense that the hair was real: two great fans of red and green, a foot high, and a studded leather jacket that must have weighed as much as a small dog. They had a cardboard sign. Photographs, five pounds.
Nan asked what they were doing. I said they stand there and tourists pay to have a picture taken with them. She thought about this for a moment. Then she said, so they are in the entertainment business. I said yes. She said, good for them, it is a living. And she gave them a fiver and had her picture taken, in the leopard print, in the middle, with a face like the Queen Mother at a launching. One of them told her he liked her coat. She said she knew.
I had been ready to be sniffy about the whole arrangement. Punk as a postcard, rebellion for hire, all of that. Nan saw it straight off for what it is, which is three people making rent in an expensive city using the only asset they have got. That is the most punk thing I have heard all month and it came from a pensioner.
A Pint Where It Happened
I took her to a pub on Parkway that I like, a narrow old place with a back room where bands have been playing since before I was born. A certain group of lads from Camden Town more or less started out on that stage in 1979, talked their way into a residency and went on to be one of the biggest bands in the country. There are photographs of them on the wall, very young, in very sharp suits.
Nan had a half of stout and looked at the photos. She said she remembered them on the telly. Then she said she had seen the Sex Pistols on the telly as well, the famous time, when they swore at the presenter at teatime in 1976, and that her own father had put his foot through the screen. I have heard about a lorry driver who did that. I had no idea my great-grandad was a tribute act.
The Lesson
Somewhere into the second half she started on the slang. She does this when she has had a drink. I was told to mind my plates, meaning feet, plates of meat. She referred to the stairs to the ladies as the apples and pears, which I knew, and to her own knee as playing up something chronic, which is not slang, just Nan. A man at the bar was described as being a bit elephant’s, elephant’s trunk, drunk. She said her mother would not have a word said against the old currant bun, meaning the sun, and by extension the weather in general.
I got my phone out and showed her the Prat’s page on Cockney rhyming slang, thinking she would like it. She read it very carefully with her glasses on the end of her nose and then informed me that it was mostly right, but that nobody she ever knew said half of these and that the good ones were the ones you could not print. She then told me four. I am not writing them here. I will say that one involved a famous music hall comedian and I will never hear his name the same way.
What struck me was how much it has in common with my own lot. It was a way for people with no power to talk in front of people who had some, without being understood. A private joke that you were either in on or not. That is fanzines. That is band names. That is most of what I do for a living, come to think of it.
What Nan Thinks of My Job
She asked what I write when I am not shouting. I tried to explain the Prat, and the British satirical news it runs. She said, so you make up the news. I said, sort of, but everyone knows it is made up, and it is to make a point. I showed her their guide on how to tell satire from real news.
She was not having it. She said in her day you knew what was a joke because the man telling it was wearing a funny hat. I said that was a fair system. She said people now cannot tell because nobody wears a hat. I have been turning that over all evening and I think she may have got to the bottom of the whole business.
She did laugh at a few when I read them out. I tried her on The Daily Mash and NewsThump as well. Her verdict was that they were cheeky, which from her is very high praise, and that I should be careful not to get into trouble. I said getting into trouble was more or less the plan. She said, that is your grandfather in you, and finished her stout.
The Ballroom
On the way back to the Tube we passed the old ballroom on the high street, the big one, where half the bands I love have played. I told her that the Clash did it, and that there has been a fight for years to stop it being knocked down for a bigger station. She said she had been dancing there in 1961, when it was Irish showbands, and had met a man called Desmond who was a marvellous dancer and a terrible liar.
So my nan was going to gigs in Camden sixteen years before punk. I have been outranked by my own grandmother. I walked the rest of the way in silence.
Home
Put her on the train at six with a bag of doughnuts from the market and the photograph, which she had printed at a booth for another three pounds. She is going to put it on the mantelpiece next to my cousin’s wedding. I am told the cousin will be livid.
Flat is cold. Beans. I am too tired to play anything. But I have written down all four of the unprintable ones, in the back of the lyric book, and I have a feeling that at least two of them are choruses. The printable parts of my week live over here. Nan’s four do not, and never will.
