The Ned Wood Archive

Oh, you pretty things

There’s this place near the Royal Circus. A pub or bar or sommat. I can’t remember whether it’s called the Circus or the Royal Circus or whatever, but it was over the other side of town near the actual Royal Circus and that is obviously how it got its name. Maybe on the Royal Circus itself, maybe down Circus Place towards Stockbridge, I don’t recall. Not nearly as far down as the Shambles, definitely near the top.

Anyway, Sally took me soon after I got up to Edinburgh, late in September ‘79. She was a friend of my brother’s and had been there for a couple of years already, so she knew her way around. Not so much a friend of our kid’s, more of an acquaintance. She was in the same year as him at school, that’s all. But I’d got in contact, as you do, when I went up for the interview and asked if she’d mind showing me around. Which she did. And again when I actually started there. You know that thing about spending all of your time at University losing the friends you made in the first couple of weeks? It’s not exactly like that. You meet folk in the first couple of weeks and in the first term and then drift apart as you realise that the only thing you’ve got in common is geographical proximity. It was a bit like that with Sally. A distant acquaintance. We met up a few times. She showed me some of the places to go in Edinburgh: Henderson’s and the like, but neither of us saw the need to stay in touch. So we didn’t.

It was a new place, Edinburgh. New to me. I was finding out what it felt like. What it sounded like. What it tasted like. What it smelt like. It had a new place smell. All new places do. Southampton smelt fresh and shiny and green when I got there. London smelt gritty and oily and grey. And posh and wealthy at the same time. Vast. Edinburgh was dark and velvet and black. Mysterious. Noble and proud. And wet. It would take me a while to get to understand it and its characters. Like reading a long novel. A Dickens or a Scott. Where you meet some interesting folk, Guy Mannering, Edward Chester, whoever, but you don’t get to know them for at least a few hundred pages. Edinburgh was a long, fascinating, surprising, rewarding novel. Took a while to get to know it. Sally just provided a short preface for it.

So we went to this bar near the Royal Circus. When I saw the Royal Circus itself, I was mightily impressed. This beautiful arc of silver grey stone. Reminded me of that day me and Annie went to Bath. That was for the charity gig Peter Gabriel did at the Sports Hall near the River. When he came up and thanked us personally for coming. That was a great day. Wandering round Bath like tourists. Marvelling at the fancy buildings made out of that great gold-coloured stone of theirs. We both thought it was dead posh and talked about living in one of those houses on that arc round the circular lawn one day. But, you know what? Those places in Edinburgh beat those buildings in Bath. The Royal Circus, Ainslie Place, Moray Place. The stone’s not as bright, but the architecture’s nobler. More solid. More character. That’s where we’ll live. One day.

The Circus Bar, or whatever it was called, was just a bar. Sally thought it was special, but I couldn’t see anything to write home about. Then again, I’m not an expert. I went two or three times. I seem to remember a rectangular room with the bar itself down one of the long sides. Maybe it had fancy decorations, streamers and bunting and stuff, like a circus big top. Maybe. I can’t remember. What I do recall is that across one wall, one of the shorter walls, near the door, there were these paintings of all the customers. Well, not all the customers. Some of them. When Sally first took me, they’d just started painting them on, so there were a few faces and some outlines: ovals sketched to represent where faces would go. Not a bad publicity stunt if you think about it: “Come to our bar often enough and you’ll get painted on the wall”. Even with the few faces up there, you could see that the clientele were a fairly mixed bunch: young and old, men and women, boys & girls, a right mix. Maybe that was another bit of marketing: “All sorts of people love our bar”.

I went there a couple more times with some of the folk I met later. I went with the folk from the hotel. Pete. Gav. Just to go somewhere. Maybe I took Pete to see if he thought the same as Sally. As if it might impress him. Though why I needed to impress Pete, I don’t know. It was early days. Maybe we went just to see how the artwork was progressing. I do know that Pete wanted to be on the wall. He did tell us later than he’d got his face up there. In fact, the story that went round was that he’d managed to get into the pub under his own steam late one night so he could paint his face on the wall himself. He probably started that story, too.

I even went once with Victoria Carson. That’s right, Victoria B Carson, the most beautiful woman in all of England. During the festival. Yes, she was still stunning. They came up for the film festival, just the film festival, not the whole festival, just the films. Which made me wonder who was missing out: me or them. This was Vic and a friend of hers that I vaguely knew from Southampton. Scottish bloke. It was my first festival and I’d been like a kid in a toy shop. I’d been to all sorts of events that I’d never dreamed of going to before. Like Chekhov plays and flamenco dances and comedy reviews. Festival is when the city explodes into a cacophonous orgy of light and colour. You get this glorious eclectic mix of people filling every space. Each of them trying to do something original and some of them succeeding. I’d just spent the afternoon in someone’s kitchen with about five other folk watching a play about irons and jam tarts when they arrived. And I said

“So what do you want to see?”

And they said: “Let’s see a film.”

And I thought, but you could see a film any day. You don’t see irons and jam tarts in someone’s kitchen everyday. Well, maybe you do. Anyway, off we went to see this film about a Polish window cleaner. Which was OK, in a post-war French novel sort of way, but not memorable enough for me to be able to tell you any more about it. (So exactly like the Plague or the Fall, neither of which I can describe to you in any detail whatsoever.) And after the film, we went to the bar with the pictures on the wall. The Whatever-it-was Circus. They’d done most of the wall. (This being about ten months after my first visit there.) And with such a range of different folk. All the nobody people
and all the somebody people. The fun was spotting the famous people amongst the ordinary Joes. Bogart, Hitchcock, Law, Baxter, Mandela, Gandhi, Levi Stubbs, Keef, Aretha Franklin, Ali. And Bowie, of course. He gets everywhere. No Peter Gabriel, though. The overall effect was quite wonderful. Just like the Royal Mile on a Fringe Saturday, the wall was full of every type of face under the sun, old and young, northern and southern, male and female, western and eastern. I never thought I’d need so many people. A true celebration of what it is to be alive and human. For a moment there, I thought I had to get my mug on the wall. Cos I knew that if the landlord spotted Victoria Bloody Carson he’d insist on taking her photograph so he could have her portrait right in the middle.

So, here’s the thing. This bar, “The Circus Bar”, whatever, is a metaphor for the city. Edinburgh is this wonderful mix of old and new, style and grit, fun and fear, love and loathing.

And, it’s also a metaphor for modern music. Because, as you know, this is all about the music. What happened in those first years after punk had broken everything apart, late September 1979, when a vast new world of wonderful sounds erupted like mammals after the demise of the dinosaurs. When all manner of different music had a chance to thrive. Some of it good. Some of it downright wonderful. The punks and the post punks and the soul rebels and the fad gadgets and the silicon teens and the bunnymen and the droppies and the scars and the cheetahs and the flowers and the visitors, and so much more besides.

“Well, what do you think?” asks Sally as we leave the bar.

I thought it was a bit of a gimmick, but I hadn’t better dampen her enthusiasm, so I told her I thought it was OK and that I’d liked a couple of the faces I’d seen. One was a beautiful serene face that smiled down from the top right corner of the wall with a look that would calm anyone’s worries. Big bright Audrey Hepburn eyes. Sculptured cheek bones. Peaceful smiling lips. Don’t know who she was, but her face was unforgettable.

The other, I’m pretty sure, was Peter Perrett. He’d got the kohl black eyes just like Dusty Springfield and the floppy fringe that tried to stop you from seeing them, just like Dusty Springfield. And he’d got that pouty, ‘who you lookin at?’ mouth that told you not to ask.

“I think it’s really neat that they’ve got a portrait of Peter Perrett there, although I doubt that he’s a regular,” I said.

“Who’s Peter Perrett?” she asked.

OK, so not many people know who Peter Perrett is. I’ve got used to that. You never heard that much about him and his band. I’d play them all the time and everyone would go “who are these?” Oh, I know, a lot of people go on about that one record now, but there’s so much more to him than that.

I guess it all started at the beginning of the 70s in London. Perrett was a Dylan fanatic who did singer songwriter stuff around London. A lass called Zena saw him and persuaded him to start a band with her brother Harry, who later turned up in Squeeze with Difford, Holland, and Tilbrook. While we were all dancing to Bowie’s Jean Genie and Jeff Beck’s Hi Ho Silver Lining and Roy Wood’s Ball Park Incident, Perrett’s band “England’s Glory” were recording their album. It never got released, but a few journalists heard them and started a buzz. I remember reading an article in the NME saying to look out for them. If you paid attention to the music press, you heard about the bands before you heard the bands themselves. You remembered the recommendations and then much later came across the real thing. England’s Glory failed to set England alight, so the band all went their separate ways. Perrett formed his new band a couple of years later. Cut a few tracks. Released their own single during the summer of 77. Recorded a Peel session a month or two later. It was pretty punky stuff …. “We ain’t got feelings. We’ve got no love. We ain’t got nothing to say. We’re lovers of today” …”But, is it real love? Oh no” Perrett’s don’t look at me voice. All of which I missed in 77. That was when I was doing my own thing. When I was off on my very own summer of love. When I’d got back to the land, listening to nothin’ but sheep, and trying to get my soul free. Just not paying enough attention. I didn’t get into the Only Ones until much later, but that recommendation from the NME was still lodged in my brain, waiting for a prompt, so when … I was … Oh wait … she ain’t listening. Sally‘s not interested. She’s just turned left as we walked away from the bar and shouted a “See you again soon!” farewell.