By George Berger.
THE ORPINGTON-VICTORIA LINE
#10 / HERNE HILL
Being the tenth in a series of psychogeographical memories of the trainline that took me from nowhere & nothing to somewhere and… something.
I came straight up from nowhere, I’m not going straight back there.
* * *
HERNE HILL
Pulling into Herne Hill station, your view on the left is the beginning of Brockwell Park. It was here you’d alight to see one of the many big gig / rallies of the early eighties. The Right to Work, CND, righteous one day festivals often organised by the GLC under the leadership of Ken Livingstone. As such, perhaps the last time any authority got busy with proactive behaviour that felt benign and on your side. Ironically in or near 1984.
Distant memory of a distant smile. Off the train, pit stop at the offy at the bottom of Railton Road, then a day’s free entertainment as the alternative masses mingled on the grass. Good times.
As the great and the good gathered, a particularly vivid memory revolves around the ‘Jobs for a Change’ march. It’s vivid because it recalls the nuances of the times. Unemployment was rife.
The ‘dignity of labour’ was something I’d seen my dad buy into and be consumed by (see the Kent House chapter), and I had no intention of following him down that route.
That day, I had a Clash t-shirt on, with ‘Abolish Work’ written on the back in marker pen. The nuance of the times is such that nobody thought I was on the other side of the argument – people understood beyond the binary back then.
A couple of notably sympathetic people were handing out similarly sentimented leaflets on the day, entitled ‘Work Makes Free?’, and illustrated poignantly by a picture of the gates to Auschwitz (‘Arbeit Macht Frei’). The invitation was to look beyond a life of drudgery to a better existence – the rejection of the work ethic that has so insidiously undermined human happiness ever since the industrial revolution and probably before.
This had been influenced by various benign forces: I’d read (and indeed reproduced) the Yippie manifesto of 1968 which declared ‘let the machines do it!’ and foresaw a future where every man and woman is an artist, unencumbered by the drudgery of spending the majority of your time being somewhere you didn’t want to be. Over the pond, the French were expressing similar ideas:
More contemporarily, the Clash made various lyrical remarks about the soul-destroying nature of some jobs, with “Monday’s coming like a jail on wheels” and “it’s the best years of your life they want to steal”. It was supremely comforting and strengthening to know that others were thinking along the same lines.
And they were right. The protestant work ethic is hideously outdated these days, despite the reluctance of reactionaries on both the right and left to come to terms with this reality. I like to think I was in the avant-garde on that one: I had no intention whatsoever of rotting away in some job I hated. Which at that time looked like all jobs. I was far from alone that day in Brockwell Park, which was also a source of comfort. It didn’t even occur to me that there may be jobs out there I didn’t hate.
I decided not to put it to the test anyway, just to be sure.
Despite all this, of course, there was a broad solidarity with the unwillingly unemployed being tossed on the scrapheap (as they perceived it). There was a broad solidarity with anyone who was fighting the Tories on any level. I think that was understood by all sides, despite the traditional in-fighting of all the left groups, vying for top dog position in their imaginary revolutions. And Brockwell Park, Herne Hill end, was the early 80s setting for many of these debates and celebrations.
* * *
Herne Hill. It sounds like a setting in Robin of Sherwood doesn’t it? The hill of Herne, where the horned God is worshipped on the first day of spring every year, as the Wickerman soundtrack smirks insidiously in the background. Only it’s in London, so it’s nothing that prosaic.
These inner suburbs have more history than the outer ones, somewhat logically. Because people were living inner, back when it ‘were all fields round ‘ere’ outer. The area was previously known as Island Green, or even Ireland Green in some references, dating back to 1746. According to a local estate agent, there are three suspected sources of the modern name, none of which suggests a pagan place:
- It may have previously been called Heron’s Hill as the River Effra attracted a large number of herons.
- George and Benjamin Herne were residents in the 17th century.
- There was a nearby field called ‘Le Herne’, (c1495), or ‘the angle or corner of land’.
So strange how we live our lives via these semantic signposts without a clue as to the meaning of the words we utter with such regularity. Words become mere recognized patterns of sound, stripped of meaning or history. Bastards.
Though only 4 miles from Charing Cross (officially the centre of London from which all road signs are measured), it’s got a genteel suburban nature for the large part.
By the 1800s, it was home to the posh houses of the ‘merchant class’, including John Ruskin, who grew up there. Then, the train line that forms the spine of this series of articles, arrived in 1862 and changed the nature of the area into an early commuter hub.
Like so much of the London sprawl, there are outlying facts that serve as a dichotomy to the general image of the place. Just outside the station — on the right as you approach on the train — stands the Half Moon pub (which will turn up later in this story as well). In the 80s, banners advertised the boxing gym upstairs, as though a part of the Old Kent Rd had been misplaced at the end of a row of uber-posh town houses. From uber-posh to Uber.
The tragic recent death of Sinead O’Connor reported that she’d moved to Herne Hill. Other celebs hover in the vicinity too. So, I guess it must be getting trendy now, all these years later. How different it must feel to share your living area with people who (financially) have a choice. Rather like Bowie in the Beckenham Junction piece. I grew up jealous of those strokes of good fortune: no one like that ever chose to live in Petts Wood. Indeed, you never even saw anybody that looked like they knew anyone like that in Petts Wood. Doors slammed shut in your face, locked, and the key thrown away into the grey, pin-striped swamp of conformity.
For me, Herne Hill is inextricably linked to the teenage dirtbag band I was in, and somewhat defined by, when growing up along this train line. We called ourselves Flowers in the Dustbin, after a line in the Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’.
The initial formation was largely a two-man affair, with me teaming up with bass player Chas. The seeds of that were first germinated in 1980, over in Lewisham Odeon, where I saw Adam and the Ants tear up the punk rule book, even discarding white sox, and do something far more interesting instead. There was only a tiny window between that and their subsequent, rather soul-destroying move into the teenybopper market, but that window — largely ignored by history — changed me forever. It was the art education I craved but never formally had. A slow burn coming of age.
However, it’s not the gigs or records we ended up making that I remember when I think of Herne Hill. It’s the year or so of magical inspiration that took us on a quest that led all over the place whilst getting it together. ‘And then my mind exploded…’ as Hendrix once said. We were rubbish at that point, but it was a compost where the magic was grown.
Another thing I had in common with Chas — as I had had with previous bandmate Steve Steroid — was a burning desire to not get a job. From a wider perspective, of course, we were learning a trade. But the modern era, and particularly the Thatcher years, wouldn’t frame it like that at all. Through their Daily Mail filters, we were just layabouts. Of course, we were layabouts but there was a lot more to it than that.
That freedom to know that all bets are off and everything is allowed. A glorious summer of commuting to Herne Hill, out of the station and along Milkwood Road to Ferndene Road. Two young punks armed with a battered acoustic and a heartful of ideas. I wanted us to be as arty and original as the (old) Ants but as authentic as Crass. I hoovered up the subversion in Malcolm McLaren’s interviews as he promoted Bow Wow Wow, which seemed a fair stab at sitting astride both these ambitions. I sought an authentic art-glamour that could make a serious positive impact on the Culture War that was rapidly being lost to Thatcher, her theatre of cruelty and the promotion of selfishness as a good thing. She turns up a lot in these stories, doesn’t she?
Also feeding into all this were my dark experiences outlined when we stopped at Sydenham Hill. Some early songs were the sound of me trying to make sense of it all, or shed metaphorical blood in pursuit of relief from the pressure. ‘Another Love Song Bites The Dust’ springs to mind as an early song title.
Chas was a year or two younger — a long time at that time and age — and therefore into slightly different stuff: Dead Kennedys and early Pink Floyd, for instance. Joy Division were in there too. Both he and I also had a big thing about war (or perhaps peace, more accurately). As did almost everybody at that point, what with the threat of imminent M.A.D. nuclear annihilation.
We both had a thing about inspiration that summer of ‘82. I’d read Adam Ant talking about heroes and how he sponged up inspiration from great figures in modern history. We sought to do the same. ‘No more heroes’ was a decent and necessary catchphrase a few years earlier, but it didn’t give you any signposts.
We went to the Scala cinema in Kings Cross to check out Maîtresse and the Tin Drum. Maîtresse (rubbish) c/o my Ants influence and Tin Drum (brilliant) c/o a Sex Gang Children interview we did for my fanzine, by now called Stability Ink, having found a fourth chord in the rubble, to move on from Ability Stinks. We bought a chamber music LP to see if there was anything in there we could get inspiration from (you can, I assume, guess the answer to that one! Unless you’re really weird).
The point is, our minds were wide open and ready to sponge up the attitudes, successes and failures of the giants who had gone before us, and on whose shoulders we could stand: Lenny Bruce, Joe Orton, Johnny Rotten, Egon Schiele, Poly Styrene, Allan Jones. The list was endless; the guest list was open and inviting.
We tried serious covers of Jacques Brel’s ‘Seasons in the Sun’ and Nat King Cole’s ‘Nature Boy’. We went to the 121 Anarchist Bookshop in Railton Rd for their advertised Sunday lunch but were turned away. It was a mutual autodidactic DIY art course — chaotic and unfocussed, but swimming with ideas and positivity. I was moved by the appearance of the burgeoning Blitz Kids and wore a Chinese dressing gown with espadrilles, the soles of which wore out after about 2 weeks — those boots weren’t made for walking. Chas wore make up, flowing fabrics tied to his holey black jeans, and kept the hairspray industry as afloat as his hair.
This all bears little relation to the band that Flowers in the Dustbin later became. We will be forever associated with the anarcho-punk genre now. Various reasons for that include the bands we shared bills with and the record labels we were on. We certainly shared ideals with those bands, as witnessed by the various benefit gigs we played and (importantly to me) our extra-curricular activities, aimed at changing the world for the better.
I’d say this is actually where we parted company with most ‘anarcho-punk’ bands. I was interested in changing the world, not creating a self-imposed ghetto of mutual backslapping. We were at serious odds with a lot of the people in that scene, in that respect. They were often deeply (small-c) conservative and completely uninterested in taking the general public with them. Music by punks, for punks only. That was a serious fork in the road away from the original punk bands.
I wanted to play for the people ‘outside the outsiders’, the genuine freaks. I wanted to do gigs in mental homes, in prisons. I wanted to a crowd full of the disabled, the ugly, the socially rejected. When Morrisey wore a hearing aid on TOTP, I felt a kindred spirit. In Chas’ bedroom in Herne Hill, these were the kind of ideas that were in free flow. To take punk where it was meant to go next, rather than getting trapped in a revolving door. I thought everybody would do that, and was bitterly disappointed when other energies — the forces of reactionary fear — were at work instead.
I also wanted to be as trendy as Theatre of Hate, paradoxically. I wanted the people who shopped at Worlds End and Johnsons to love us, the cool fashionable kids. Diametrically-opposed views going on there, but that’s a prerogative of youth isn’t it.
* * *
That offy that we stocked up in, on the way to Brockwell Park was at the start of the then infamous Railton Rd. Chas & I would sometimes walk the road up to Brixton. The sun always seems to be shining that year. Or maybe we just didn’t bother going out when it rained.
Railton Rd had a bit of a reputation back then, particularly the squats at the Brixton end, being the epicentre of the riots, but that’s for the next station. A teenager did try to mug us once about halfway up – “give me your money”, he sneered, holding a pen as though it was a knife. We laughed and said (truthfully) we had no money and he walked off, crestfallen. That’s not to say the adrenalin wasn’t pumping though; any situation like that has dangerous potential.
(EDIT: note from Chas: “When that guy tries to mug us, I had just cashed my dole cheque!”)
* * *
Our early line-ups featured a tap-like succession of revolving drummers, finally coalescing on another Herne Hill resident on drums, Bill. When we also pulled in Simon, from the Anabollic Steroids and West Dulwich, we were essentially geographically a band based around Herne Hill, with me as the outlier down the line. On the outside again.
Bill was the other reason I spent a lot of time in Herne Hill. His knowledge of music was eclectic and encyclopedic. We’d sit in his parents’ house listening to music, grooving to all manner of stuff. Bill really opened my eyes to a lot of new things: sixties hippie obscurities, lots of funk.
By this time Chas, had defected to North London to be a squatter: though he was still in the band, the epicentre of inspiration had changed.
But Herne Hill was largely where it all started. Down the line, FITD returned to Herne Hill to play a gig at the Half Moon. The extremely dodgy promoter demanded a deposit against not enough people turning up. Though the crowd was decent, he decided it wasn’t enough. Thank God for rubber cheques.
* * *
These days, Chas lives less than a mile from where I was born, on the banks of the river Mersey. Bill lives in Mallorca. I live just outside Brighton. But it was the hill of Herne that provided the backdrop to those early accidental magic rituals.
I eventually realised that self-employment was the missing piece of the puzzle that I was blind to back then, At that time, I just didn’t know it was possible unless you were a plumber or a builder. I am more than happy for my taxes to be spent on people lazing around on the dole, for their whole life if they want to. I don’t want people punished for not wanting to work — I want a kinder, more tolerant society than that. Basic universal income would be a start. An art start. That space is where creativity would live if it was still available.
Instead, we have an artistic culture dominated by posh boys, as they’re the only ones who can afford the apprenticeship. We can all see how that’s ended up. No future.
Other than the next stop: Brixton, where we seamlessly move from the SE postcode to the SW one, and indeed into a different world altogether. One that I would love. Go west, young man. More of that next time.
An archive of all the articles in this series can be found here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Berger has resumed this 3:AM column after a 15 year hiatus. He’s written the official biographies of Crass and The Levellers, a book on mindfulness and various other books that can be found here. He’s also the singer in Flowers in the Dustbin. He’s recently finished his memoirs In Case Of Dementia, Break Glass.
