Well, that’s the first series finished! We’ll be back with plenty more in September.
Please note that everything will now be happening at loststeps.org not .org.uk or .co.uk so please update your browsers.
Malcom will be organising some related events at Housmans over the summer, so do keep an eye on their site for details.
Meanwhile, if you have any comments or suggestions please drop us a line.
As our first series draws to a close Malcom welcomes the artist Laura Oldfield Ford to the studio.
Originally from Halifax, West Yorkshire, Laura completed a fine art Painting MA at The Royal College of Art in 2007 and has since become well known for her politically active and poetic engagement with London as a site of social antagonism. Her work shows in galleries but also extends out onto the street in the form of fly-posting and collective ‘drifts’ around London. Laura has published ten issues of her fanzine Savage Messiah.
‘We’re done up for a bit of the old ultra, a Bakunist wrecking spree on every gastro pub travesty we can get our hands on. Flick knife activates at sight of swaggering prick whose class background has assured him of lording it status, the dirty jeans and scruffy t-shirt only serve to reinforce it. Laminated flooring, best brawled over IKEA settees. All I want to see, right, is the Clinique counter at Selfridges smashed up with Paul McCarthy abjection, Robert Gober mannequins trashed in a Ballardian make-up counter frenzy…’ Savage Messiah, Issue 8, King’s Cross to Hackney Wick.
Originally broadcast March 25th 2010 on Resonance FM.
Download an mp3 here (right click and ‘Save Link As’) or use our player to listen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:46 — 40.9MB)
This week, for the penultimate show in our first series, Malcom welcomes Marc Glendening from The Sohemian Society to the studio.
Marc explains how his fascination with the Soho and Fitzrovia began at a very early age and how it’s managed to endure through the decades as well as explaining some of the area’s history through its’ colourful characters and venues.
Marc appears in this great little film ‘Viva Fitzrovia’ made by Paolo Sedazzari.
and here’s Part 2…
Originally broadcast March 18th 2010 on Resonance FM.
Download an mp3 here (right click and ‘Save Link As’) or use our player to listen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:34 — 39.2MB)
This week Malcom is joined in the studio by the writer, publisher and unofficial historian of W10 and W11 Tom Vague.
Tom has been publishing fanzines, pamphlets and CD’s under the name of Vague for around 30 years. Kick started during the punk years, Vague has covered music, politics, film, sport, psychogeography, cyber-punk, history and much more besides. Check the shelves of Housmans bookshop for copies of Vague.
Originally broadcast March 11th 2010 on Resonance FM.
Download an mp3 here (right click and ‘Save Link As’) or use the player below to listen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:21 — 38.9MB)
This week Malcom is joined by Barry Miles to discuss his latest book London Calling.
Barry, or just ‘Miles’, as he is often referred to, has an incredibly envious CV (check the Wikipedia link on his name above) which has secured him as something of an authority on the UK sixties counterculture.
“This is a major and definitive history of the counterculture by our pre-eminent chronicler of the cultural underground. London has long been a magnet for aspiring artists and writers, musicians and fashion designers seeking inspiration and success in this great city. In “London Calling”, Barry Miles explores the counter culture that sprang up in the decades following the Second World War, focusing on the West End and Soho, where the presence of so many artists has established a unique atmosphere; creative, avant garde, permissive, anarchic – the throbbing heart of London. Here are the heady days of post-war Soho when suddenly everything seemed possible, the jazzbars and clubs of the fifties, the teddy boys and the Angry Young Men, Francis Bacon and the legendary Colony Club, the 1960s and the Summer of Love, the rise of punk and the early days of the YBAs. The vitality and excitement of these days and years of change – and the sheer creativity of London – leap off the page of this marvellously evocative and riveting book.”
Originally broadcast on March 4th 2010 on Resonance FM.
Download an mp3 here (right click then ‘Save Link As’) or use our player to listen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:30 — 40.5MB)
This week Malcom is pleased to welcome Ian Rawes to the studio. Ian is the man behind the London Sound Survey which is shaping up to be a fascinatingly comprehensive site which is divided into five sections; Sound Actions, Sound Map, Wildlife, Historical, and a blog which responds to and ruminates on issues relating to its’ subject. The project receives no external funding which helps it to maintain an independence and honesty that reflect the character of its’ creator. A shining example of what one man with an idea can achieve.
“The everyday sounds of London life are significant even when they’re taken for granted. They tell us about who lives here, what their hopes and ambitions are, how they enjoy themselves and what they believe in. They can take the form of fashions from singing canaries and windchimes to boomboxes and car horns that played ‘Colonel Bogey’. They reflect developments in trade, industry and technology, the growth of the city itself, and demographic and social change. They announce shifts in the make-up and scattering of London’s wildlife…“
Ian also maintains a YouTube channel.
Originally broadcast February 25th on Resonance FM.
Download an mp3 here (right click and ‘Save Link As’) or use the player to listen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:22 — 39.0MB)
This week’s show finds Malcom joined in the studio by the playwright, poet and novelist Bernard Kops.
Bernard is one of Britain’s most celebrated and prolific authors (see last week’s Stewart Home episode). His new collection This Room in the Sunlight includes over forty recent unpublished poems, together with most of his best poetry from his long writing years. His poems are witty, dark, poignant, mournful and celebratory. They cover his formative years in London’s East End, his Jewish identity, drug addiction, early breakdown, growing older, and his redemption and joy within his family life. He has also written more than forty plays for stage, television and radio, nine novels and two autobiographies.
The aim of the programme was to discuss Bernard’s life and work in relation to London which I now realise was extremely naive. At 84 Bernard has such a wealth of memory and experience that we could never have hoped to frame it in a 30 minute show. Perhaps he’ll return another time…
The Jewish East End deserves further exploration, we’re planning more for the second series.
Originally broadcast February 18th 2010 on Resonance FM.
Download an mp3 here (right click and ‘Save Link As’) or use our player to listen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:47 — 39.5MB)
Hear Malcom in conversation with Stewart Home on this week’s show.
Stewart was born in south London in 1962. When he was sixteen he held down a factory job for a few months, an experience that led him to vow he’d never work again. After dabbling in rock journalism and music, in the early eighties he switched his attention to the art world. Now he writes novels as well as cultural commentary, and he continues to make films and exhibitions. His thirteenth novel Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie is published by Books Works at the end of April this year.
Stewart has a keen interest in sixties London counterculture which is the main topic discussed in this show. He starts by talking us through two of his favourite ‘lost’ London novels; ‘Awake For Mourning‘ by Bernard Kops and ‘Baron’s Court, All Change‘ by Terry Taylor and then moves on to discuss his own family’s connection to the drug and criminal subcultures of the day which make for a fascinating listen and which we hope will someday make it into print (he’s already written about his mother in Tainted Love).
Stewart crops up all over the internet and is a constant source of interest, not just for his London-centred works.
Originally broadcast on February 11th 2010 on Resonance FM.
Download an mp3 here (right click then ‘Save Link As’) or use our player to listen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:35 — 39.3MB)
Malcom’s guest this week is Cathi Unsworth. Cathi is a novelist, writer and editor who lives and works in London. She began her career on the legendary music weekly Sounds at the age of 19 and has worked as a writer and editor for many other music, film and arts magazines since, including Bizarre, Melody Maker, Mojo, Uncut, Volume and Deadline.
Cathi’s latest novel Bad Penny Blues was recently published by Serpents Tail.
“…Bad Penny Blues is based on a real crime and some real people who lived and worked in the streets of Ladbroke Grove between the years of 1959 and 1965. It’s a tale of prostitutes, Op Art, swinging detectives and Spiritualism in a post-War, pre-Swinging London where the dawning of the Space Age, the crumbling of the British Empire and the reconstruction of the capital inspired a wave of creativity in art, music – and murder.
The book centres on the true, unsolved case of a fiend called Jack The Stripper, who, during those years, picked off eight working girls and left their nude bodies in or along the Thames, sparking the biggest hunt in Metropolitan Police history. The identity of the murderer was never officially revealed, and there have been several true crime accounts of the case published in the years since, all offering differing solutions. The aim of this book was not to try and solve the mystery, but rather to create a parallel universe in which an explanation could be offered that tied together a series of intriguing coincidences uncovered during the course of research.”
Cathi’s previous novels The Not Knowing and The Singer are well worth your attention and I can thoroughly recommend the excellent London Noir: Capital Crime Fiction which she edited.
Originally broadcast February 4th 2010 on Resonance FM.
Download an mp3 here (right click and ‘Save Link As’) or use the player below to listen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:01 — 38.5MB)
This week Malcom welcomes the artist film maker William Raban.
A leading figure in his field, whose work ranges from multi-screen gallery pieces to perfectly-crafted short films. Raban’s particular interests – the City of London and the British landscape – are in the tradition of the romantic landscape painters.
If you’re new to William’s work there’s an excellent BFI DVD collection of his films complete with an essay on his Thames Film by Peter Ackroyd:
“…there is beauty and sublimity in terror. Raban has learned something from the great artists of the river, such as Turner and Whistler, and portrayed the Thames as clothed in wonder. Raban is also concerned with the river’s history – liquid history, as it has often been called – but the principal impression is of the permanence of these waters. The Thames does not live in human time. It lives in geological time. The human figures in the early photographs, depicted here, are smudged and faint; they are its human votaries, already fading into invisibility. Time is therefore one of the elements of Raban’s film. What is time upon the river? The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, used the river itself as a token of flux and transience. You cannot step into the same river twice. It is always flowing and changing. But something lingers – some spirit, some atmosphere, some presence, invoked in the words of T.S. Eliot’s poetry read here by the poet. There is some brooding life that persists through time.”
William’s latest project About Now MMX is “…an attempt to map the neurolgical networks of the City” and is being shot from the 21st floor of east London’s Balfron Tower as part of a three month artist residency.
Originally broadcast January 28th 2010 on Resonance FM.
Download an mp3 here (right-click and ‘Save Link As’) or use the player to listen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:53 — 39.7MB)