The Dadzine tapes
Deep cuts from a fanzine I never wanted to make
I wanted to put these words somewhere in a non-PDF format, so here they are.1
Normal service and the Beverley Brook walk will happen soon, though I appear to have twanged something in my back, which is most unfortunate.
The kids are playing up downstairs
Where the suburbs met utopia / What kind of dream was this?
- Pet Shop Boys
New Malden is back in the news today, he says, like New Malden is often in the news. It’s a Guardian article about a local football team, with a forty year old man having an epiphany in a new Malden gastropub toilet.
“Hang on”, I thought. “New Malden doesn’t have a gastropub...”
“They must mean the Glasshouse...”, replied my friend Kamal, correctly, after I had relayed this to him via the internet.
The Glasshouse isn’t a sodding gastropub. It’s the Railway with a lick of paint and slightly fancier chips.
Dad spent quite a lot of time in New Malden. This is possibly an understatement: his family moved there in 1970, and he lived there for much of the following half a century, apart from the nine or so years he was in Nottingham, nearer to mum’s family, and the reason I have such a confused accent.
Grandma (the wonderful Carmel Walsh) always talked about moving out from Vauxhall to New Malden being “like moving to the country”.
It really must have seemed it, then, even if it was only a few stops down the Waterloo line - away from the fumes and dirt of what was still very much an industrial city, to a little place that barely existed before the coming of the railway.
We first lived on Beverley Road - I still know Anthony, my neighbour from that time - and then on Cambridge Road, before we headed off to the east Midlands.
But it was always Howard Road that felt like the centre of it all.
As a kid, some of my earliest memories are playing on the road with other local kids - something that would obviously not happen now, as cars get larger and satnavs send people down side roads.
There were other Irish people who lived on the road, including Hugh and Geraldine across the way, with their daughter Caroline, who taught me about Marc Almond.
I remember parties, listening to the Pogues, and people always popping in and out. And also getting into trouble for pretending to go to church and instead just kind of wandering about (thanks, Caroline).
There was a pub by the A3 motorway that used to be popular with the Kray brothers, but that was before our time.
It’s now a doughnut drive-thru.
Random recollections aside, I think I want to write about New Malden because a sense of place is important to me, and is one that is becoming increasingly lost as property becomes an investment rather than a home.
Howard Road, now, is home to a different class of people to who were there in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s enormous cars and people who can afford more than a million quid for somewhere to live.
One thing I loved about Dad was how he knew so many people locally. He would talk to everyone and anyone, and would of course occasionally avail himself of the local hostelries.
But what was incredible to me was for quite how long he had known them for, especially for my not-by-choice, increasingly peripatetic generation.
I remember once, sat in the bar of the Royal Oak, home of many an auntie wedding reception and, in more recent years, comedy gig.
I was there with my dad and his mates, some of whom I’d known for years - Nigel, Gerry, Chris.
There was one guy whose name I had forgotten, and we got chatting about this and that.
I asked him how long he’d known Adrian, and he said “well, I was in the Tavern with him celebrating your birth...”.
I’ll always enjoy memories of hanging out with my grandparents and my Dad’s sisters, who would pop in for lunch and to help with the crossword.
And I’ll remember tougher times too - especially the last few years with Jim, Adrian’s father and my grandfather, who suffered terribly with Alzheimer’s, an affliction that affected him and, by extension, all of us terribly.
Surburbia had a big ol’ impact on postwar culture. They were places of boredom but also places of safety; boredom begets creativity, after all.
From the two towers by the station, creating an eternal wind tunnel for new arrivals, to the multistorey car park near the swimming pool, I’ve walked New Malden’s streets a thousand times and always dreamed them anew.
In the early noughties, I started a blog about New Malden.
This was the early, naive days of the internet. I wasn’t really expecting anyone to be reading.
Suddenly, I had tens of thousands of readers a month. Even Channel 4 News’ Samira Ahmed, who lives up the hill in posh Coombe, emailed me to say how much she enjoyed it.
This was baffling to me, given the whole thing was a mock-ironic take on how normal the place was, with occasional suggestions of how it could be improved (bid for the Olympics, do the wrestling on the top of the Apex Tower, was I think one idea the authorities sadly rejected).
Things got weird pretty quickly. I started getting recognised. A guy left a comment going “you get the 8:03 to Waterloo every day, don’t you? You always go for the last carriage.
Like I said, it was the naive, early days of the internet.
And my dad mercifully didn’t read *any* of this, because he had his work emails printed out and mailed to him until at least 2011.
Inspired by Bill Drummond of the KLF (wait - come back!), I’m planning to say a psychogeographic farewell to New Malden (don’t worry, auntie Nuala - I’ll still come visit).
And this means following Beverley Brook, from source to Thames.
It rises in Worcester Park, travels down the back of that first New Malden house I lived in, and then makes its way through Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park on its way to the Thames at Putney.
I’ll paddle its waters, and hope I don’t catch something nasty courtesy of our glorious privatised water companies. And at New Malden, I will emerge from the stream, doff my cap to the places we lived, and drink in the town’s remaining pubs.
I’ll even go to the Korean karaoke bar that was once the New Malden Tavern.
And that way, the circle will be complete.
Fashion Is My Only Culture
My parents’ taste in music, and my dad’s especially, shaped a lot of who I am now as a person. It might be strange for younger people to believe this, but from 1956 until approximately 12th March 1998 the pop single - or the vinyl 45, as it was for much of that time - was the perfect, most essential unit of culture.
What’s number one this week? Nobody knows, and if David Bowie was 17 now he’d probably be figuring out how to be an influencer rather than a pop star.
But in 1967...
Roughly speaking, my dad’s appreciation of popular music started in 1967 and ended, suddenly, in 1983. How do I know this? Because vinyl is like the rings of a musical tree, and as a child I obsessively worked my way through him and mum’s record collection.
In fairness, it’s a fairly decent period to be up with the zeitgeist. As a late seventies teenager growing up near Brixton, Dad was exposed to ska, funk, blues, and soul along with rock ‘n’ roll and psychedelia.
I’m pretty sure he saw the legendary Geno Washington fairly early on in some of those sweaty clubs of maximum R & B.
It’s funny that I started this off bigging up the 45, as my Dad was more of an albums man, other than his early, beloved, and sleeveless Prince Buster singles.
One of his favourite groups, Pink Floyd, didn’t even *release* a single in the UK between 1967 and 1979. They were too busy making serious prog music for serious people with new, expensive hi-fi systems.
My parents didn’t have an fancy record player, and their records were much-played and muchloved even before I got my sticky childish fingers on them. The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Ry Cooder, Madness, Led Zeppelin, The Band, The Specials, The Beatles2, Pink Floyd of course... all were devoured, but it took me years to get through it all.
And, of course, Dad saw some of these people back in the day, in their prime: Jimi Hendrix at the Royal Albert Hall, The Who at the Isle of Wight Festival, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin at Earl’s Court...
In this era of post-everything, even irony, it’s hard to imagine how genuinely revolutionary and shocking Jimi Hendrix must have sounded in 1967. He certainly scared my grandma, Carmel, who warned teenage Adrian that Hendrix’ music was devilish, though when I asked her about this decades later she said “I’ve since realised he was just a really good musician”.
Dad also looked like a proper 1970s rock star, to the extent that my pal Ishan always simply referred to him as “Steve Harley”.
Dad’s general interest in “new” music ended, suddenly, with Squeeze. Their seminal hits collection - Squeeze 45s - was the most up-to-date record I could find, and what a banger it was. I destroyed that record playing Cool For Cats in a sweaty basement in Soho. So much beer was spilt on it, I eventually threw it out into the crowd.
And as this anecdote reveals, his taste definitely rubbed off on mine. It would have been so much easier for me as a rebellious teenager to have got into happy hardcore or nosebleed techno. But no, I had to get into sodding guitar music.
And so picture the scene: it’s the year 2000, and I’m playing the new Dandy Warhols album in the car. A catchy new song comes on - “Bohemian Like You”, which had failed to hit the Top 40 but would be a top-five hit the following year after appearing on a mobile phone advert.
I’m in the passenger seat. He’s driving along, I can’t remember where. And as we get to the chorus, he goes...
“That’s just ripping off The Stones”.
He wasn’t wrong. Ffs. I should have played him Asian Dub Foundation.
The first show I remember going to him was a Madness tribute band called Ultimate Madness, the trumpet player of which he inexplicably knew. It was at Nottingham University student union, and I was probably 13 - as was my friend Tom, who I brought along.
Over the past decade, I’ve started playing music and writing songs myself, and over the past couple of years started performing them to human audiences with the exits unlocked.
Dad came to these shows, most recently in February this year, at The Folklore Rooms in Brighton. The comedy in the first half, I think he found fairly baffling. But the songs, I think, he enjoyed. And, you know, we’re all made of songs and stories.
My exaggeratedly analogue musical lever is currently pushed to “OUTPUT”, but the songs and words that emerge are all there because of the beautiful music I was exposed to over the decades.
I’ll just try not to rip off The Rolling Stones too much.
I have a feeling they probably weren’t EXACTLY his favourite group, but Dad also provided my sister with an especially fond musical memory.
When he was working for the Department of Education, in the glory days before Cummings3 and Gove, my dad would be involved in assorted promotional schemes to try and get kids to I don’t know, read, or go to university or whatever. 4
Much better than this, though, was my sister’s experience. It seems that S Club 7, in their pomp, had been roped in to a New Labour competition to BE GOOD AT MATHS. The winners of this competition got to go to Abbey Road Studios and record their maths-based song... with S Club.
There ain’t no government-sanctioned campaign to improve maths skills like an S Club government-sanctioned campaign to improve maths skills.
My sister did not enter this competition. She probably wasn’t even aware it existed. But she did get to sneak into Abbey Road, to meet those legendary pop stars of yore. Cheers, Dad! Why couldn’t it have been Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci.
In later years, Dad’s tastes mellowed a bit. There was a lot more roots and Americana - stuff I also adore.
The CD was the last format of music for Dad, and even as recently last year he was in HMV, which apparently still exists, looking for records he’d already bought to play in the car.
And Lucy? Well she’s now old enough for nostalgia of her own, with McFly and Busted fusing into one pop juggernaut, and S Club... well, it’s best we don’t talk about S Club.
Thanks to ash for sending them over xxx
More a mum thing, I think. It was with her I saw Paul McCartney (with Linda on backing vocals) in 1989 at the Birmingham NEC.
Dad once told him to fuck off, to his face, long before Dominic became the edgelord goblin King we all love to hate. But that’s another story...
Indeed, I appeared - grudgingly, it has to be said - in a government video and pamplet with my dad encouraging kids from non-posh backgrounds to go to university.