TOM VAGUE’S HOLLYWOOD BABYLON W11


INTRO
1 NOTTING HILL IN BYGONE DAYS
2 NOTTING HELL/HEAVEN W11
3 SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
4 HOUSES OF THE UNHOLY
5 ONE FOOT IN THE GROVE
6 MIDDLE EARTH W11
7 THINGS LOOK GREAT IN NOTTING HILL GATE, WE ALL SIT AROUND AND MEDITATE
8 HOUSES OF THE UNHOLY REVISITED

PART 6
MIDDLE EARTH W11

Marc Bolan’s Toadstool Studios As Syd Barrett lost the pop plot, and the rest of Pink Floyd left Pete Jenner’s Blackhill Enterprises, the producer Tony Visconti took Marc Bolan round to Alexander Street, where he was duly signed up as the new Syd. Jenner’s secretary June Child (the original Pink Floyd roadie/joint roller/Syd muse) ran off with him (and in due course became June Bolan). Then Marc quit Blackhill as well, complaining of being pushed in a too commercial electric pop direction. After a spell living in June’s van on Wimbledon Common, the couple moved into the attic of 57 Blenheim Crescent. In their ‘chateau in the west’, as Marc called it, just off Ladbroke Grove down the hill from Hendrix’s last residence, the Bolans lived a frugal macrobiotic existence. During their Tolkienesque Notting Hill hippy phase, Marc is recalled sitting cross-legged on the floor worshipping a statue of Pan (which he called ‘Poon’) on the mantelpiece, studying Buddhism, and making his own Christmas cards while June sold lampshades on Portobello.

Marc’s ‘Toadstool studios’ in a corner of the attic were frequented by the original Tyrannosaurus Rex bongo drummer Steve Peregrin Took and their MC, the DJ John Peel, who then lived up the hill on Stanley Gardens. The former (real name, Stephen Ross Porter) was re-named, ‘probably at Bolan’s command’, after Tolkien’s hobbit of the shire ‘Peregrin Took’, the loyal companion of ‘Frodo Baggins’ in The Lord of the Rings.

In the March 1969 issue of Oz magazine there’s an ad for the new Middle Earth at the Royalty Theatre (the former cinema on the site of Royalty Studios) on Lancaster Road, off Ladbroke Grove; featuring gigs by Tyrannosaurus Rex, Caravan; with Pete Brown and His Battered Ornaments, and The Writing on the Wall; Country Joe and the Fish, and Steppenwolf.

After reigning over Middle Earth in Covent Garden and Ladbroke Grove, and coming up with the longest album title in history, ‘My People Were Fair And Had Sky In Their Hair But Now They Are Content To Wear Stars On Their Brows’, Tyrannosaurus Rex went on a disastrous US tour, after which Steve Took was sacked for being generally out of it.

Steve Peregrin Took/Shagrat the Vagrant As Marc went into glam rock T Rexstacy, with ‘Hot Love’, ‘Get It On’, ‘Jeepster’, ‘Metal Guru’ etc, further along the Grove, Took descended into Hell W10 heavy rock drug culture at 100 Cambridge Gardens, accompanied by Mick Farren. With their freak hair-dos growing unkempt, their snakeskin boots wearing thin and their velvet coats threadbare, the tattered troubadours Took and Farren epitomised the dissident street hippy ‘freak’, the doomed romantic forerunner of the grebo/greaser, punk, grunge and crusty anti-style cults.

In his contemporary Revolt into Style definition, George Melly (who lived across Ladbroke Grove from Took on St Lawrence Terrace) has a freak, in this sense, as ‘a strange but admirable person within the current mores of pop and (conversely) one whose appearance or behaviour especially infuriates the ‘straights’. Hence also ‘acid freak’. One whose excessive use of LSD or one of the new hallucinogenic drugs is considered to form the basis of his behaviour or appearance.’

At the height of the Bolan boom in 1972, when T Rex were number 1 again with ‘Telegram Sam’, Mark Plummer’s ‘Down in Ladbroke Grove’ Melody Maker feature on Steve Took charted the decline of the bongo drummer. After splitting from Marc, with ideas of forming an ‘electric revolutionary band’, and a token sojourn in Paris, ‘now Took sits in a rundown Ladbroke Grove flat with a mattress on the floor to sit and sleep and think on, a few strips of carpet on the floor and the sight of a motorway staring at him as he looks out the window...’

In Mark Paytress’s Bolan book, Took goes from ‘eternally drifting along Ladbroke Grove in a Tolkienesque haze’, to representing ‘the darker underbelly of Ladbroke Grove alternative culture.’ In his post-Tyrannosaurus Rex cosmic punk role of ‘Shagrat the Vagrant’, a malign orc ‘dark lord of the black land’ from Lord of the Rings, Took was a proto-Sid Vicious/Bez of Happy Mondays/Pete Doherty rock casualty waiting to happen. He somehow survived the 70s, but only just.

On October 27 1980, whilst celebrating the arrival of his last Tyrannosaurus Rex royalties cheque, on magic mushrooms and morphine, Steve Peregrin Took choked to death on a cocktail cherry stone at 100 Cambridge Gardens. Charles Shaar Murray wrote in his NME obituary that ‘he became what is euphemistically referred to as a fixture on the scene... one of his friends told the NME: “He just never made a serious attempt to get himself together.” Took summed himself up best in his classic early 70s announcement: “It was reported that I was back on the road after straightening my head out. Well, this is entirely untrue. I haven’t been able to straighten my head out at all.” His plastic toy covered grave in Kensal Green, paid for by his fan club, maybe isn’t London’s answer to Jim Morrison’s Pere Lachaise tomb, but now rivals Marc’s Barnes Common crash site with its own website.

7 THINGS LOOK GREAT IN NOTTING HILL GATE, WE ALL SIT AROUND AND MEDITATE