Never mind that the subject fascinates, I’d have bought Peter Watts’ Denmark Street: London’s Street of Sound for its jacket alone, which pictures Andrew Loog Oldham, August 1964, whippet short and skinny, striding past Lawrence Wright music publishers. He’s wearing a suede Levi’s-style jacket, trademark shades, open necked button-down collar shirt and trousers that are hemmed an inch or so above his shoes. Like his hero Lawrence Harvey in Expresso Bongo, Oldham has that caffeinated presence that suggests he owns these streets, if only in that moment. Behind him, across Charing Cross Road, is Foyles book shop. Between the spaces he is marking out, to his right, looking on, is a young guy with a Glen Campbell/Wrecking Crew casual style – blonde quiff, suede Cuban heeled boots, tan pants, white shirt, denim jacket – leaning on a big American car with a crushed rear fender – has US culture ever emerged unmarked from its contact with a British reality? American pop, the photograph suggests, corrupted by a youthful English swagger, is going to turn London Town upside down. Change is coming.

Peter Watts deftly (and very eloquently) maps the transformations that have taken place on this street from the Great Plague to Crossrail, from the Great Beer Flood to the virtual reality of the Outernet. The revolutions wrought by Oldham, the Stones and The Beatles are the pivot around which he works his story; detailing the shift from sellers of sheet music for vocal with piano accompaniment to publishers of music composed, performed and recorded by the artistes themselves.

Until the recent demolitions and building projects, in my imaginary, Denmark Street was unchanged and unchangeable, it had always fallen beneath the shadow of Centre Point, guitars were always its main business and I would always move through it without care or thought, passing quickly on my way to Wardour Street or wherever. Watts causes a pause in this mindless flow so as to take stock of the street’s fabled history, to move off the pavement and into its buildings, to meet the people who worked and lived there, to follow the traces its businesses have left behind; the commerce undertaken in pursuit of fortune small and large.

Whether the exchanges parlayed were legitimate or illegitimate, selling sex or selling a tune, it all lacked even a thin veneer of bourgeois respectability. With the new developments it is not just the loss of some of the buildings that creates a nostalgia for the place, it is rather the street’s regulation and ordering of permissible activities. I don’t feel a great need for the Sex Pistols’ first rehearsal space to be saved from gentrification, that matters to me as much as a blue disc on the house in Edith Grove to mark where the Stones once lived, nor do I mourn the closing of the 12 Bar Club any more than I do the Marquee, but I do feel the absence of another central London space where, whether fuelled by nefarious business practices or more romantically inclined sensibilities, temporary creative alliances might spark into life and infuse a new generation’s imaginations. Watts’ marvellous history of a small street in London has made me feel that loss more keenly than any other. But yeah, you also need to know about the Great Beer Flood of 1814 . . . that event deserves a plaque.

With its new addition of Denmark Street to sit alongside Robert Sellers’ Marquee: The Story of the World’s Greatest Music Venue and Andrew Humphreys’ Raving Upon Thames, Paradise Road is fast becoming my favourite publisher, all are beautiful presented, generously illustrated and with stories to tell. Get some!

Andrew Humphreys, Raving Upon Thames: An Untold Story of Sixties London (London: Paradise Road 2021)

Counter to the prevailing idea that culture is disseminated from a hip centre by an irrepressible centrifugal force, in truth the worthwhile things take form first at the margins and then are dragged toward a hub, Soho say. Andrew Humphreys’ wholly enjoyable and needle-sharp history of the bands and venues, entrepreneurs and audiences in and around Richmond in the sixties is a testament to the fact that the real stories, the one’s that matter, belong first to the suburbs.

From 1960, but could have been from anytime from then until the end of the 1980s. The title page from a *Weekend* exposé of the Eel Pie Island scene. Reproduced in *Raving*

The availability of venues – The Station Hotel, Richmond Athletic Ground and Eel Pie Island – can partly explain why Richmond became the centre for the early activities of the Stones, who were closely followed by the Yardbirds and all those bands that thought they could read their own names in the contrails left in the wake of Mick Jagger. But more importantly, it was the art schools, teacher training colleges and further and higher education institutions, in and around the area, that meant there was a big enough demographic of young people who wanted to make a culture of their own, which in turn created the scene. The Stones and the ‘Birds found that audience as much as the audience found them.

Humphrey’s book gives a small cameo to The Others who produced one of the finest RnB pounders of the era and then vanished into utter obscurity

1964: The Others from the same management stable as The Pretty Things and The Fairies and with the same poise, attitude and style

My parents met in the ’50s at St. Mary’s teacher training college, opposite Richmond Lock. I doubt they went to Eel Pie Island to dance to the jazz and I know they never looked as wonderfully bohemian as their peers pictured here. My dad’s second wife did, however, see the Stones at the Station Hotel. She lived in Gunnersbury about two and a half miles from the venue, after one of the gigs Brian Jones had given her the bus fare she needed to get home. She missed her bus or chose to walk, either way she kept his gift. When I got to know her in the early Seventies she still had that pile of pennies, which she kept on the mantelpiece.

That brief moment before a band moves from being entertainment for the in-crowd to becoming revered is the story told in Raving Upon Thames. The Stones and the Yardbirds have a ready familiarity but that is more than compensated for by Humphreys’ fine-eye for contextual detail and the way he so effectively musters a myriad walk-on parts for those who may have left only the faintest trace of having passed that way. With the eye of a detective he shows how their trails, when pulled together, make up a map of the times more revealing than any star’s biography.

One such trace was the pen letter a 16 year-old, Andrea Hiorns, wrote to her American friend, it is a perfect encapsulation of why Humphreys’ history is so much more than just about the local.

Wednesdays are good days. I go to my Island. I must tell you all about it, it is an important part of my life. It’s in the River Thames. You cross a steep bridge over the river and pay a toll of 4d to an old lady called Rose. Then walk along a winding road with bungalows on either side. There’s lots of trees and its dark and mysterious. You turn a bend and see a large decrepit hotel and a crumbling façade. You hear loud blues music. Walk through the gates and you are in another world. All material cares disappear and we are the only people who exist.
There’s a large converted barn, you go down some steps after conning your way in with 6d – it’s usually 3/6d – your wrist is stamped and you go down. It’s very dark with just red and green lights. Long John Baldry is singing with his band at one end of the hall. The walls are white flaking and full of cobwebs, with cartoons, murals and names printed over them. People dance there crazily. Next door is the pub, where we and the musicians all congregate, we con drinks and play the jukebox and talk to everyone. I often go there on my own but always end up meeting someone I know to dance with.
Outside there is a long strip of grass down to the river with large stone nuts and bolts lying around and convenient bushes where couples make love and smoke hash. It’s the coolest place in England, there’s nowhere else like it.