After the rapturous reception given to my rambling on about rambling last week - four people commented, which is considered viral round here for anything except puns - I have decided to subject you to some more. It is your own fault.
At the weekend I continued my trek along the route of the Mildmay line (pushing my luck but there is now a photo log covering the whole route over on Flickr if anyone is interested). This leg took me from Kentish Town to Canonbury via Camden, the Regent's Canal, Calendonian Road and Barnsbury.
The two buildings on the route that I've picked out are not as interesting architecturally as the ones last week but both have a lot of history.
The first is Pentonville prison. Over the years the famous inmates have included some who definitely deserved to be there (Dr Crippen, John Christie and David Irving); some who definitely didn't (Oscar Wilde and Roger Casement); and assorted celebrities on minor changes including a few musicians. Boy George and Pete Doherty both wrote songs about their experience but I have no time for either of those self-regarding twerps so you will look in vain for them below.
The second notable building is the Hope & Anchor pub on Upper Street in Islington. In its heyday back in the 1970s it played a major role in promoting first pub rock and then punk - at times both as the line-up on the "Hope & Anchor Front Row Festival" live album from 1978 shows.
The Hope & Anchor has had its ups and downs since as explained in this brief history on its website and to be honest it is a shadow of its former self these days - I only ever go in for a quick pint before or after a gig at the Union Chapel across the road. But it is once again a live music venue which is something to be pleased about.
The cultural highlight of the trip was a visit to the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art nearby in Canonbury Square. I went mainly to see the current exhibition of the works of Emilio Isgrò who obscures words in printed texts and maps with the aim of suggesting new meanings and visual rhythms. He calls this Cancellatura (Erasure in Italian). I enjoyed it but there are diminishing returns.
I found the permanent exhibition more interesting, in particular the section covering the Futurists and the links between them and the rise of fascism in Italy under Mussolini.
One of the most revolutionary of the Futurists, but not in a political way, was Luigi Russolo. He painted but his main interest was in music. This painting of his in the exhibition is titled "La Musica". In 1913 he published his manifesto "The Art of Noises" in which he argued for the integration of different sound effects into musical compositions, and he developed instruments that he called intonarumori (‘noise-intoners’) to try to replicate the noises of the industrial age.
There are only two known recordings of Luigi and his intonarumori, one of which makes our playlist today. But there is only really one man who top the bill, and that's the man whose band had a regular residency at the Hope & Anchor in 1976 (and later released a live album recorded there) and who also served five weeks in Pentonville in 1980 for drugs possession. Ladies and gentlemen, Mt Hugh Cornwell.
I have added a second number from the "Hope & Anchor Front Row Festival" live album because X-Ray Spex were the bee's knees in my opinion. The other two tracks are probably self-explanatory, as are the videos except perhaps for The Damned. They are included because the video was shot in the Hope & Anchor way back when.
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There's a TV series somewhere
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