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A project by Lucy Harrison RAMILLIES STREET MARSHALL STREET NEWBURGH QUARTER SOHO Carnaby Echoes is a commission by artist Lucy Harrison AMES ST. that reveals the hidden stories behind the music heritage UPPER J of the Carnaby area. From 1930s jazz clubs such as NEWBURGH STREET the Nest and the Florence Mills Social Parlour, to the introduction of Ska to the UK by Count Suckle and GREAT MARLBOROUGH ST. Duke Vin at the Roaring Twenties Club in the 1960s. ADWICK STREET ADWICK O This history encompasses several diverse musical styles (including jazz, reggae, rhythm and blues, rock and R 10 B 13 hip hop) as well as a wide range of venues including nightclubs, record companies, magazines and shops LOWNDES COURT LOWNDES MARLBOROUGH CRT. MARLBOROUGH that attracted particular music fans and sub-cultures. It is these curious and unknown narratives that Carnaby CARNABY STREET 14 Echoes uncovers by connecting the sounds, stories and 12 characters from locations around Carnaby with a series BEAK STREET BEAK of embedded commemorative plaques. These markers 11 then link to film and audio interviews accessed via a 15 Above Carnaby Street, 1982. UPPER JOHN ST. website and audio walking tour app in which contributors including Boy George, Count Suckle, Dynamo and Mark CE T Y COUR Ellen are brought back to buildings that hold significant KINGL 1 music memories for them. This publication accompanies ON STREET ON the project presenting texts, archive images and film stills RAMILLIES STREET A T’S PL T’S 2 relating to locations around Carnaby Village. T GAN 3 4 Music and fashion remain at the heart of Carnaby #carnabyechoes Village. Many fashion stores have links to musicians and carnabyechoes.com R GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET FOUBE Carnaby continues to support emerging music through Fold out for Carnaby Echoes live events. Carnaby Echoes has been commissioned by carnaby.co.uk location map. Shaftesbury PLC. @carnabylondon LITTLE MARLBOROUGH STREET PICCADILLY KINGLY STREET CIRCUS OXFORD CIRCUS REGENT STREET PICCADILLY CIRCUS RAMILLIES STREET MARSHALL STREET NEWBURGH QUARTER SOHO . UPPER JAMES ST NEWBURGH STREET GREAT MARLBOROUGH ST. 9 Carnaby Echoes is a commission by artist Lucy Harrison ADWICK STREET ADWICK that reveals the hidden stories behind the music heritage O 8 of the Carnaby area. From 1930s jazz clubs such as R 10 B 13 the Nest and the Florence Mills Social Parlour, to the introduction of Ska to the UK by Count Suckle and LOWNDES COURT LOWNDES Duke Vin at the Roaring Twenties Club in the 1960s. MARLBOROUGH CRT. MARLBOROUGH This history encompasses several diverse musical styles CARNABY STREET 14 (including jazz, reggae, rhythm and blues, rock and 11 12 hip hop) as well as a wide range of venues including BEAK STREET BEAK nightclubs, record companies, magazines and shops that attracted particular music fans and sub-cultures. It . is these curious and unknown narratives that Carnaby 15 UPPER JOHN ST Echoes uncovers by connecting the sounds, stories and CE T Y COUR characters from locations around Carnaby with a series KINGL 1 of embedded commemorative plaques. These markers ON STREET ON then link to film and audio interviews accessed via a 7 Top Carnaby Street, 1982. RAMILLIES STREET website and audio walking tour app in which contributors A PL T’S 2 including Boy George, Count Suckle, Dynamo and Mark T GAN 3 Ellen are brought back to buildings that hold significant 4 music memories for them. This publication accompanies R GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET FOUBE the project presenting texts, archive images and film stills 5 6 relating to locations around Carnaby Village. LITTLE MARLBOROUGH STREET PICCADILLY Music and fashion remain at the heart of Carnaby KINGLY STREET CIRCUS Village. Many fashion stores have links to musicians and Carnaby continues to support emerging music through OXFORD live events. Carnaby Echoes has been commissioned by carnaby.co.uk CIRCUS Shaftesbury PLC. @carnabylondon REGENT STREET PICCADILLY CIRCUS There’s a Time AND A PLACE Miranda Sawyer Carnaby Street seems like a time, rather than a Lucy Harrison, an artist who uses place to get how exciting everything was, how chaotic and the-Sex-Pistols-to-Radiohead history that tells the place. And that time is the sixties, or an ersatz to people’s stories, has uncovered a new old youthful, as though all responsible adults had story of British pop in acceptable linear fashion. version. One with minis and Minis and mods and Carnaby Street. One that’s still musical, but not been locked in a cupboard and the keys chucked Anything that doesn’t fit is disregarded; the train- mop-tops, where wrong-uns mingle with Rolling so clichéd. One where histories jump, stop-start, into Regent Street. And I look at Mark Ellen, tracks run straight, with room for one carriage at Stones, blue bloods with Beatles, a time of trippy fold back on themselves, fast forward, fade who worked there before me, sitting in the white a time. What Lucy Harrison has done is reminded psychedelia and groovy chicks and squares who and emerge again, louder, stranger, but still space that was once our office, a place filled us that not everyone was on that journey. Some just don’t get it, man. We see Carnaby Street lit connected. One where the stories are unknown, with paper and people and mess and optimism. detoured, some were ignored. Carnaby Street by a lava lamp, swirling, swinging. Did that era forgotten or never heard. So we hear about the Sitting, remembering. To go back to a place isn’t an era; or if it is, it isn’t just the one. ever exist? Carnaby Street time? Beatles rocking up after-hours to the Bag O’Nails, to recall your life in it is a privilege; Lucy has dancing and carousing into the morning; learn of taken every scene’s players and put them where It’s strange how we use place names as Jimi Hendrix brandishing his first major pay check they were, no matter what is there now. That’s a shorthand, for tragedy (Dunblane) or of £1000; of Keith Moon drinking the bar dry. But important; not just for the memories but to Below Smash Hits from 1990, triumph (Waterloo), for culture, high and low we also discover the Roaring Twenties, which understand the evolution, the onward march, your including Miranda Sawyer’s Stone Roses feature. (Glyndebourne, Glastonbury). Madchester equals brought ska and sound systems to the West End; significance and insignificance. Things change, acid house; Kings Road means punk. Places are and Deal Real, where Diesel is now, a British hip- times change, and so they should. defined by events, by epoch, by sound; and, in hop hangout favoured by Mos Def, Kanye, the turn, come to define those events, that epoch, Wu Tang Clan when they were over in the 2000s. A scene gains traction through its interpretation; that sound. Should we start again? Forget the And a place for happenings, the Artists’ Own how its story is told defines its future. Manchester, era, consider the area? For every place has Gallery, founded at 26 Kingly Street in the 1960s the city I grew up in, has always had its pop what, in Carnaby Street time, were called vibes. by Keith Albarn, father of Damon; whose band, culture chroniclers; writers who tell its tale, Something in their fabric that seems to favour Blur, years later, signed to Food Records, around whether of post-punk Joy Division or Stone certain activities. And so clubs and shops and the corner on Golden Square, and drank in the Roses’ Madchester. I’m a music journalist: I am bars spring up that, over the years, create a White Horse on Newburgh Street. asked over and over about the Hacienda, about small environment conducive to a particular New Order; sometimes about Britpop. Not about frame of mind. Landlords and councils can make I worked at Smash Hits when it was on Carnaby Brixton, where I’ve lived for over 20 years. I don’t a difference too; as can the layout of streets, Street, above the BOY shop, in the late 1980s fit into the easy clichés about Brixton; also black a location within a city. Just off-centre; in the and early 1990s. My first proper job, and it was pop culture is rarely so well documented as white. middle but not mainstream. as amazing as could be. I could never believe There’s a straightforward The Beatles-through- 1 MURRAy’s CLUB 16-18 BEAK STREET 1913-75 Left Murray’s Club, c1920s. Below Stills from Pathé news reel, 1922. Murray’s was a jazz and cabaret club on Beak Street which opened in 1913, whose displays and costumes became more extravagant and risqué in later years. The venue is known for its notorious hostesses, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice- Davies, who were both implicated in the Profumo affair in the 1960s. Murray’s Club closed in 1975. 2 THE CAT’s Whisker 1 Kingly STREET 1950s The Cat’s Whisker was a coffee bar in the 1950s which played rock ‘n’ roll and skiffle, and which saw the invention of ‘hand jiving’, a form of dancing which was said to have been started due to the lack of space in the club. The bar was started by entrepreneur Peter Evans and was one of the first in London to have a juke box. Left and above Photographs of the Cat’s Whisker by Ken Russell, 1957. 3 Bag O’ NAILS 9 Kingly STREET 1930s-PRESENT The Bag O’ Nails has been a nightclub since the 1930s, when it was originally a jazz club.