Sunday 12 August 2007

Waterloo Sunset

Ok, here's a pop-quiz question. As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset, what am I in?

Yes, I am in paradise.

And what does the dirty old river do?

Quite, it keeps flowing into the night.

I'm in Waterloo now, sitting on the first floor balcony of the Reef Bar, with its commanding view down the sweeping concourse of Waterloo Station.

So, if I were to tell you I was looking down at the millions of people, what would they be doing?

That's right, they'd be swarming like flies 'round Waterloo Underground.

Waterloo Sunset is one of those songs that millions of us know the words to. Ray Davies, its author and leader of The Kinks, is the poet laureate of London, and in this and a clutch of other delightfully evocative, catchy and unforgettable songs about the capital he has succeeded in chronicling its glamour, its seediness, its pleasures, its follies, and its homely suburbs better than anyone before or since.

He wrote Dedicated Follower of Fashion, which is about Carnaby Street, Regent Street and Leicester Square, Lola about Soho, and Muswell Hillbillies about his home turf up on the hill beyond Highgate. His song Victoria is, strictly, about the queen rather than the area, but you can stretch a point and add that in too.

Infact, so good is he at conjuring up the spirit of the capital city that you can take a Kinks Tour of London, starting at Waterloo, delving into the West End, heading north through Archway and ending up in Muswell Hill, singing his lyrics all the way.

And yet, remarkably, it's only by chance that Waterloo Sunset is so called. Originally the song was Liverpool Sunset, and hence the dirty old river would have been the Liver. But before it was recorded The Beatles came out with their Liverpool-inspired double-A side, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever, and Ray decided that, rather than seeming to follow in their wake, he would transfer the location of his song to his home city.

And I for one am very glad that he did

From my Waterloo vantage point I can do what is most interesting about railway stations - watch people. Pensioners getting lost, policemen in twos, pigeons in flocks and at any one time at least a dozen fond farewells and heartfelt hellos. In Waterloo Sunset, Terry meets Julie every Friday night. Perhaps beneath the four faces of the station clock suspended, high above, from the glass roof.

These days, Waterloo is not so much a station, more a shopping mall. I could do any number of things here, eat any variety of food or drink, buy a shirt and tie, send an e-mail or text from a public phone, check out a Dali exhibition. There's even an impotence clinic.

Today, of course, the trains don’t just go to the suburban destinations carved into the stone of the war memorial arch - Surrey, Sussex, the Isle of Wight - but Paris, Brussels and Lille.

Waterloo Sunset conjures up the former incarnation, when for children like me the most exciting thing on the concourse was a cumbersome machine which, for 1d, and after much manoeuvering of a brass dial and tugging on a heavy iron lever, stamped out a narrow aluminium strip with your name on it.

When Terry and Julie left the station they crossed the river where, we are told, they feel safe and sound.

Ray Davies feels safe and sound in a little pub just across Waterloo Bridge in Savoy Street. I walk there, against a north wind, overtaking foreign students bent double beneath their backpacks like mountaineers. Ahead of me is the Shell-Mex building like an old fashioned petrol pump in white Portland stone, its prominent clock measuring hours rather than gallons.

The pub is the Savoy Tup. It's a rare find - an unimproved, unthemed, unspoilt pub in the heart of London. Its bar is plain, with a bare-board floor, cream-painted panel walls - the sort of place where Ray feels comfortable.

He mentions it in his book Waterloo Sunset, which is a curious blend of autobiography, fiction and myth-making.

A girl is asked "Who are you waiting for." And replies: "The man who wrote Waterloo Sunset. I've been in the bar at the Savoy every night, just as he said, but he never comes. He's not ready to leave the underground."

It sounds like whimsy, but its also a hint at the less than sunny side of Ray Davies. He is reputed, in 1973 when his marriage was breaking down, to have spent Christmas Day on the Circle Line, drinking cans of Kronenbourg.

From the Savoy Tup I walk along the Strand to Charing Cross. I take the northern line up towards Muswell Hill, stopping on the way at Archway, where the Archway Tavern had the distinction of appearing on the cover and inside the gatefold sleeve of the Muswell Hillbillies album. They weren't dumb enough to stand in their real local, I'll come to that later.

The pub is no longer the dark-wood and etched mirror place it was then, but somehow even more pertinent as a place to gaze into your beer and think, as Ray sang in Muswell Hillbillies, of coming from a nowhere kind of place and dream of a far romantic place you have never been - not Muswell Hill but New Orleans, (?)Oklahoma, Tennessee.

Then it's on to East Finchley station. From here, tree-lined Fortis Green takes me to Muswell Hill. If there is one street that can claim ownership of Ray Davies, this is it.

He was born here 56 years ago and grew up in a cramped house with his mum, dad and seven brothers and sisters. The pub where he first performed is in this road, and so is the grander house he bought when he became famous.

I find the Davies family home, 6 Denmark Terrace, just opposite the Clissold Arms. It's a Victorian brick semi with tiny bay windows attached to a joinery workshop. It was a musical home, with a piano in the parlour, to which Ray's parents Annie and Frederick would weave back from the Clissold Arms with a gang in tow for a singsong.

And it was here that, in 1964, Ray and his brother and fellow Kink Dave worked out the chords to You Really Got Me, the song that first put them at the top of the charts in August 1964.

The Clissold Arms is a real Kinks find. The large back bar has a display of Kinks memorabilia. Among them is a signed copy of the Kinks first single, Long Tall Sally, a guitar, a wall of photographs and a small brass plaque which reads:

Site of 1957 performing debut of

Ray and Dave Davies

Founding members of the Kinks.

Ray hasn't written about this street and the pub, but Dave has. His song Fortis Green goes:

"Mum would shout and scream when dad would come home drunk,
When she'd ask him where he'd been, he said 'Up the Clissold Arms',
Chattin' up some hussy, but he didn't mean no harm."

On my way up Fortis Green I had passed the home Ray bought when he got married. No. 87 is a large white-painted detached Victorian villa set back from the road with a gravel drive. He lived here in the late Sixties and early Seventies with Rasa, who he met when she was still a Bradford schoolgirl and mad-keen Kinks fan and saw them perform whenever she could, and his two daughters. It's Rasa's falsetto that you hear on the backing vocals of classic such as Sunny Afternoon.

Their schools were here, too. Fortismere School in Creighton Avenue, which was called William Grimshaw School when the brother attended and, on the other side of Fortis Green, St James Church of England Primary School. It's now in Woodside Avenue but when they attended was on Fortis Green opposite Fortismere Avenue.

I head off east into Muswell Hill, down Fortis Green Road with its deli, café, record store and bookshop, where Robbie Williams dominates the window display.

Where Sainsbury's now stands was once the Athenaeum, a dance hall that featured in the song Come Dancing. Athenaeum Place is still there alongside it, like a Ray Davies vignette - with a beggar on the corner, and rutted cobbles leading to a former orange brick Victorian church that is now an O'Neill's Irish bar.

I walk down Priory Road where the ground falls away and London is at your feet, first the trees and terraces of the lesser houses in the valley, then the City's tower blocks and Wren churches, finally Canary Wharf, grey and blinking in the winter sunlight

I find myself in another Kinks vignette as I reach the beer-sticky Northern Railway Tavern, step over a yawning dog in a tartan coat and pass a Baptist church with the sign reading "Heaven Knows when You were last Here".

I'm headed for the last outpost on my Kinks tour: their recording studios, Konk, on Tottenham Lane in Hornsey. A blue neon sign spells out the name above the door. It’s a windowless, beige-painted pebbledash place. Very anonymous, very North London rock star.

Why, such scenes are so evocative you could write a song about them. Or at least, you could if you were Ray Davies, the poet laureate of London.


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