CHAPTER 44

 

 

 

 

#57: INNER CITY

"Good Life"

from the single "Good Life"

Released: November 1988

 

 

You came to London in the eighties because it wasn't where you grew up. You didn't have to pretend to be a stalwart son of the parish and have your every word, motion and thought suffocatingly monitored by nineteenth-century puritanism. London was everything and possibly everybody you couldn't find back at home, that they didn't even think of having at home. You'd get off the coach at Marble Arch and the WH Smiths at that end of Oxford Street would have albums by Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel in their racks. You'd drop into your local Our Price and downstairs they had Damaged by Black Flag and Einstein On The Beach. The promise of London was lushly realisable.

In the eighties, and to a lesser extent in the nineties, London was your playground. You could afford to do and buy anything and go anywhere. You could even manage to run two flats on a basic Administrative and Clerical Grade 4 salary. Every sanded stone in the city blinked promise at you. It was the city of which you had dreamed probably since about 1970, when six-year-old you fantasised about living in Buckingham Palace or Tower Bridge. In fact you'd already been through the city in 1969, in a taxi going from Euston to Victoria; you remember the Mall and the Palace looming at you like a televisual antique. It did not quite seem real. Luckily, very few things do at that age.

But you didn't get to London until the eighties and being there was like the first seventeen years of your life summed up and imperiously served back at you. The Evening Standard, 20p from outside the Tube station! Time Out and City Limits, all those jazz records drooled over by seventies music journalists there and yours for a couple of pounds, if that. Shakin' Stevens beaming in various strategic parts of the City of Westminster in his video for "What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?" summed up the astonished jouissance of the days.

Perhaps deep down we knew it was as yet uncalled-in bullshit, running on pretend money that never really existed but would still be foreclosed. I understand how people there felt, though; they considered Thatcherism the licence for a party, and anybody who didn't find the scenario gut-level attractive is lying. The expiring dregs of surplus funds in the sandcastle of capitalism were then still sufficient to permit the illusion that we could do things like this. You're young, enjoy yourself and live; don't waste your time and disposable income on boringly square mortgages. The fact that four decades later you would effectively be punished for not doing the latter occurred to you not once.

But the unimpeachable joy of boarding a number nine bus which would sidle up elegantly to Piccadilly Circus and there, immediately to your right, were the newspaper vendor selling you Melody Maker and NME on Tuesday teatime, and Tower Records, in which latter I could, and frequently did, spend entire days. The astonishment of seeing the dome of St Paul's arising like a Neptune from layers of oceanic myth on that small and important bend in Fleet Street, on the top deck of the number eleven. The unutterable happiness of vaulting up from Portobello Road with the newly-purchased Reverb Motherfuckers album in your Rough Trade carrier bag of an optimistically cloudy but airy Saturday mid-morning.

This record-buying bullshit (or was it bullshit; imagine going out for your lunch hour and coming back with a copy of Bongwater's The Power Of Pussy - you couldn't have done that in Lanarkshire) is just secondary to the overall amazement that you felt in your bones in regard to the thing which used to be called London. But it was never just about the excitement. As I've already intimated, this joy came with a price.

You could articulate that potential contradiction in various ways. In the video to Clive Griffin's forgotten 1988 single "Don't Make Me Wait" - it was A-listed on Capital and if you were there is as instantly redolent of those Sloane's Pizza/Knightsbridge underpass days as, say, "Follow The Leader" or, if you incorporate pirate radio into this schemata, "To The Rhythm" by Longsy D and Cut Master M.C. (the one which sampled "Return Of Django") - he lurks in and around Westminster Bridge, waiting for an idealised girl who never really shows up.

Or you could be Inner City, whose "Big Fun" was as inescapable in mid-1988 central London as "The Only Way Is Up" - every shop and car blared one or the other - and whose follow-up reflected the increasingly auburn times as that year approached its end (think Isn't Anything, Bummed, Winter Was Hard). In the video to the song you see Paris Grey cheerfully shopping in Regent Street - we've never had it better! - but this is balanced by footage of Kevin Saunderson impatiently waiting for her taxi at the Lister Hospital end of a rainy Chelsea Bridge, and scenes of both outside St Paul's Cathedral - later the site of an extended Occupy! protest sit-in, but in this setting lends us the indispensable spiritual(ist) backdrop to gleeful consumerism.

The song itself is in a rueful, processional minor key, as if the singer knows that this manner of existing isn't really good or life, and that there is bound to be a dismal payback. Viewing in retrospect from this purposely-wrecked shell of a city which constitutes the London of 2023, we can interpret "Good Life" as a warning, or, as Tony Bennett would understand it, a goodbye kiss to capitalism. How do we function when the baubles are exhausted?