Old & New Hackney and the triumph of Lyle Zimmerman

Riding the W15 west over the marshes to Hackney is like traveling on an old time stage coach. This was the forest road in and out of London. It still feels that way to me. Tonight I’m on my way to a screening of London Overground at The Institute of Light – a new cinema + restaurant in a railway arch just off London Fields. I’ll be introducing the film with Iain Sinclair and revisiting the year we spent walking the Overground circuit.

Wandering through New Hackney to the venue it surprises me how much of Old Hackney survives given all the hype. I lived on an estate here in the early 90’s. The BBC shot a documentary on the nearby Kingshold Estate during my first summer in Hackney – Summer on the Estate – I recognised many of the residents in the film from my rounds canvassing alone for the local Labour Party. There were only 7 of us who attended ward meetings and 2 of them were barely mobile so door-knocking was a solitary task.

Institute of Light Hackney

I only seem to pass through Hackney these days – or travel directly to a meeting or an event – I never really hang around there or dwell for long so my sense of the New Hackney comes mostly through popular chatter and reports from the flood of middle-class property seeking Hackney refugees who have poured into Leytonstone and Walthamstow.

The vibe around Morning Lane isn’t so different to what it was 20-odd years ago. The end of Well Street also strikes a familiar tone. Pemberton Place is timeless. The Hobson’s Choice is still a pub but under a different name. The main difference I can see is that now there appear to be some people around who have money, whereas back then everybody was skint. I consider going for a pint and stopping for a while to sample the ambience some more, but no, I don’t particularly want to go searching for that Hackney of the early 90’s and hop back on the W15 to Leytonstone instead.

I drop into the brilliant Whats Cookin ‘rockin country-fried music’ night in the Ex-Servicemen’s Club and catch the end of The Verklempt Family’s set. The lead singer is playing what looks like a curious bass mandolin, and it’s difficult not to become transfixed by it. Their set ends and is met with loud applause and a couple of people give them a standing ovation.

As I’m leaving a friend calls out from one of the outside tables to tell me that the lead singer, the fella playing the curious bass mandolin, was the person who was attacked with a knife in Leytonstone Tube Station last December in what was reported at the time as a ‘terrorist incident’. Lyle Zimmerman had his throat cut with a knife in the attack, his life being saved by a GP who happened to be passing through the station. I’d been outside the station underpass with my family stopped from walking into the scene by a police officer.

I remembered the description of the, at that time unnamed, victim as carrying an instrument – the curious bass mandolin. I don’t know if Lyle Zimmerman was on his way to play at What’s Cookin’ that evening, but on Wednesday night his performance was a real triumph of courage – and he really country rocks that bass mandolin.

Whats Cookin down at the Birkbeck

Last night ventured down to Whats Cookin’s new home at The Birkbeck Tavern in Langthorne Road, between the cemetery and the old hospital – perfect place for a knees up. Ramblin Steve and Ally now run the pub as well as the music night – an Americana boozer in the Lea Delta, serving up Maldon Gold ale from Essex’s Mighty Oak Brewery.

A trip to the Birkbeck is like time-travel for me – back to the London I first experienced as an 18-year old fresh up from the provinces and decamped to a terrace in Forest Gate. The Birkbeck is still there in 1989. The spirit of Whats Cookin reminiscent of the music nights that inspired me (drunk) to write reviews for the City Poly student rag.

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What’s Cookin at The North Star


The North Star, Browning Road 7.45pm Sunday night (just now) and it’s throbbing, barely space to stand, What’s Cookin has rolled in with a regular blues night. The act, Little George, sits huddled between the speakers peering out of plastic undergrowth. The mostly middle-aged audience stood around in a semi-circle heads nodding like some kind of South Pacific tribal ritual. There’s a liberal spattering of pork-pie hats and at least one yellow Stove Pony Records t-shirt stretched clingfilm-tight across a proud pot-belly. This is the E11 beat generation, greying, with enlarged prostates but still going. The possible closure (then rebirth) of this brilliant boozer because of a bureaucratic licensing difficulty gives the night a millenarian vibe – will they be kicking out the blues here on Monday night or will the stiffs at the town hall have closed it down. Nobody seems to care that much if the dancing is anything to go by.

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Off the Map with Pete Molinari at the Sheep Walk E11

I sit here at 12.15pm with “Off the Map” spinning on the turntable, Pete Molinari’s signature pressed into the cover but 25 minutes ago. In old media terms this is ‘hot off the press’. I’ll transcribe my notes as honestly as possible.

8.45pm What’s Cookin presents Pete Molinari’s album launch at their night in the upstairs room of the Sheep Walk E11. One end of the room is like an altar to Tex Mex/ Americana via Honolulu (maybe the link is obvious to those in the know but I don’t remember seeing Johnny Cash in a Hawaiian shirt) – gold lame pleated drapes, garlands of flowers hanging from the ceiling, potted palms and ferns, red flower fairy lights, 1950’s lampshades and candle-holders. It’s ‘Blue Velvet’ without the psychosis, a corner of Graceland, a forgotten country singer’s trailer pulled up on a dustbowl roadside. Not a face in the room under 30, lots of sideburns and the odd quiff, charity shop shirts. The two fellas in front in discussion about a song playing – the be-quiffed one gets up to speak to the DJ, examine the sleeve notes, returns to his friend, argument not settled he goes back to the DJ for clarification. The boys are character studies not used for Nick Hornby’s ‘High Fidelity’ (Cusak was too relaxed, not OCD enough) – vinyl obsessives who could sail through the notoriously impossible Record & Tape Exchange Staff Entrance Exam (I failed twice).

Billy Childish’s discovery of Pete Molinari in Chatham is like a Medway re-invention of the Jeff Buckley creation myth (but give me Molinari any day). And the tone of the evening is given a distinctly Medway feel by the when the mic is taken by Wolf Howard doing a set irreverent-punchline poetry. Delivered in 1981 this would be great, quite good in ’85. Amusing for 5 minutes in 2006. The room love him, he has them quiet and laughing – with a gig audience that is an incredible achievement. I realise that my two years of running and MC-ing a poetry night (Brixtongue) has made me hate live poetry. But his book title “Journals of a Jobseeker” is much better than the one for my forthcoming self-publication “Mink City Journals”, I may have to reconsider.

There is something wrong with my bladder – every time I piss I want to go again. I was one of the first in the room, now it’s packed but I notice that I have about 3 feet of space all around me, maybe one of my boys peed on my trousers today (they certainly have poster paint on them), or is it that a man scribbling in a notebook scares people. This evening makes me wonder whether the counter-culture has the ability to manifest itself physically anymore. As soon as a gathering happens that on paper marks the cultural fringe, it becomes ‘reasonable’ and ‘ordered’, filtered and mediated. If such a thing as a counter-culture still exists it must be in cyberspace, from a bedroom or a park bench via WiFi.

I guess Kris Dollimore isn’t with the Medway Mafiosi as he plays his blistering Blues to a noisy room that the poet had pin-drop silent. The noisy corner should take their cue from the great Bluesman Billy Childish who stands rapt in the performance.

The Blues and the beer are getting me into the spirit of the evening at 10.30pm. A fella in a suit drunk dances away. In this most multicultural of boroughs the audience is 99% white – that’s an observation not a criticism.

Molinari starts up with a broken-hearted voice, a Dylan comparison does him no justice at 40 years distance and the fact of living in this Blair-World where to wear a red hat and sing folk songs is to get you on some MI5 watch-list. I think back to the arc-lights I saw flicking off the shore line as I passed through Chatham on a train early one morning – if you were looking for cultural references here you’d be bound to look West, to plaid-shirted pioneer stories, coast to coast journeys hopping on and off freight trains. The M11 outside the pub is recast as The Lost Highway. The duets with Billy’s wife Julie are beauty itself. I’m lost, I’m sold, I’m off the map.

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