Brighton Beach Scumbag

October 20, 2019 by Tim Robson in Nostalgia, Tim Robson, Brighton

“This could be the saddest dusk I’ve ever seen
Turn to a miracle, high-alive
My mind is racing, as it always will
My hands are tired, my heart aches
I’m half a world away.”

— Half a World Away - REM, 'Out of Time'

Memories of early 90's Brighton

Out of Time

Michael Stipe, singer in REM, once noted that a fan's favourite REM album tended to be the one that came out straight after that fan graduated from college.

My fav REM album is 'Out of Time' - as near a perfect album as ever made. And yes, it came out the year after I graduated. REM have just reissued and repackaged a 25 year anniversary edition of Out of Time. I played it again today. Still sounds good. But I've never drifted away from it. It's one of those very few albums that form the core of my musical taste. I probably consciously play the whole album through once a year - every track (apart from the instrumental Endgame).

When Out of Time originally came out I lived in small flat in the Kemptown area of Brighton*. On the way home from my job, job, I used to stop off at The Hand in Hand pub, and - in my memory anyway - Out of Time was always playing.

Awkward Pivot and Segue

Brighton's changed pretty drastically between then and now. Whilst it still maintains the old Regency squares and buildings, the pier and the pebbly beach, it has been infilled, taken over, gentrified, redeveloped, stuffed full of wanky coffee shops and i360's. It always had a certain kind of Bohemian hipness - a jazz age Berlin vibe where anything goes within the bubble. Well not anymore - it's corporately trendy. And that isn't the same thing at all.

Yeah, I know this sounds like a things-were-better-in-my-day drone. Let me carry that burden, readers, for the road is long. With many a winding turn.**

The Brighton of the early 90's was still seedy, much more parochial than now, bathing in the afterglow of Graham Greene, with wide open derelict spaces right in the centre of town (it wasn't yet a city). There were loads of uneven car parks where buildings had been demolished (or bombed) but there was no money to redevelop. Shops were closing down. Even the main shopping centre was falling apart. The UK was in the middle of a recession. Our 'now' culture forgets that stuff happened before Brexit. Yeah - we've had recessions even before 2008. The shock, eh?

Brighton still returned two Tory MPs at the 1992 election, as did Hove.

The pubs in town pretty much still had their original names and weren't the marketing confections they'd later become but real boozers. I remember one - The Bath Arms - still there right in the middle of the Lanes. The furniture was all shabby - I remember always sitting on the same saggy and ripped sofa. Now add to this faded glory the ever present waft of cigarette, pipe, cigar smoke which fugged the air, and clung to your clothes and hair. Yes, pubs had a real atmosphere in those days!

In my mind's eye, Brighton in the early 90’s was either a dreary wet winter's evening or a fabulous summer day. No in between. And I was forever shuffling around in a black denim jacket, through the rain, taking shelter in derelict shop fronts, maybe accompanied home by some girl I'd just met in either The Basement or The Gloucester down on The Steine. Well, the clubs are gone and I never saw the girl again. She was called, er, Anna? Maria? Don't worry she won't mind my confusion; I told her my name was Bryan.***

Hove Lawns and the (near) complete West Pier December 1993 from my balcony.

For a couple of years I lived in a fabulous - landmark - four bedroom flat at the bottom of Grand Avenue in Hove. Private car park, internal lift, brass fittings, front and side stone balconies overlooking the seafront, two bathrooms, cricket pitch sized internal hall. I paid £137 a month and the landlord - trying to sell the flat - just couldn't give it away. The price was around the £130,000 mark, I seem to remember.

I enrolled in night school and got myself an A level in Theatre Studies. If I have a fault - it never takes much for me to fall into pretentiousness. Now imagine me doing a Theatre Studies course - pursuing a theme through Strindberg, Stanislavsky, and finally Steven Berkoff. I seem to remember being at the premier of Berkoff's Brighton Beach Scumbags at the Sallis Benney Theatre October 1991... I suspect back then I was tumbling up my own arse at a furious pace.

(My girlfriend at the time complained I was often 'theatrical'. I acted all upset about this and stormed away to write a song about our conversation. What an absolute, horrific nob!)

I formed a band. We played the usual venues - The King and Queen, The Hare and Hounds, The Freebutt - for no money. I named us Charlotte's Treat (after Charlotte Street in Kemptown) before changing the name to Tempting Alice. When the band broke up I started - and ended - my solo career on one night in The Great Eastern pub, Trafalgar Street, autumn 1992. As it was next to Brighton college I managed to get quite a few of my drama classmates to attend. Unfortunately for my self esteem, one of the few other blokes on the course chose this exact evening to come out. Selfish bastard; I played on oblivious. No one listened. Or clapped. And I broke a string. Afterwards, I pocketed the £20 and never played a solo gig again.

Tempting Alice with Tim Robson centre (stage)

Out of Time?

“There is still a city with the same name, and there are streets with the same name too, in the same locations, but what happens there is so transformed, in thought, word and deed, that it is not the same place. Is it better, or worse? I cannot not really tell. It is certainly different.”

— Peter Hitchens - Sunday Express 11/11/16

Interesting that Hitchens was writing (beautifully as ever) about Oxford in the context of Leonard Cohen whereas I chose Brighton in context of REM and Out of Time. And my conclusion?

The music still plays. The buildings are (mostly) still there but the streets beat to a different set of people. Who I knew, the relationships I had, gone, absolutely. Failed domesticities. The friends, dispersed, mostly not lamented. The work, ignored at the time, forgotten now completely. Occasionally, turning a corner in Brighton I encounter the shiver of yesteryear's ghost. Just faintly - 'like an ill-remembered character from a novel read years ago, or the strains of a once familiar melody playing softly in another room'.**** But mostly, the past is a different country and, more than that, half a world away.

NOTES

* When I say Brighton, I mean both Brighton and Hove. Although their characters are quite different, I moved seamlessly between the two. Of course, they are now joined as one city.

** Fun fact - Elton John played piano on The Hollies - He Ain't Heavy He's My Brother. Why I sledgehammered that reference in, who knows. How unsearchable are my judgements.

*** Bryan Robson. Geddit!!! Oh, I was a hoot in those days. For youngsters - he was a footballer and captain of England when I cared about this.

**** @Tim Robson - The Song of Vivian. I apologise for quoting myself but sometimes - not enough - I am a fucking great writer.

**** Originally published in 2016 but revised 2019

Brighton Beach Scumbag

Battersea Arts Centre

November 20, 2016 by Tim Robson in Nostalgia, Tim Robson, Brighton

“This could be the saddest dusk I’ve ever seen
Turn to a miracle, high-alive
My mind is racing, as it always will
My hands are tired, my heart aches
I’m half a world away.”

— Half a World Away - REM, 'Out of Time'

Memories of early 90's Brighton

Out of Time

Michael Stipe of REM noticed that any given fan's favourite REM album tended to be the one that came out straight after that fan graduated from college.

Awkward Pivot and Segue

Brighton's changed pretty drastically between then and now. Whilst it still maintains the old Regency squares and buildings, the pier and the pebbly beach, it has been infilled, taken over, gentrified, redeveloped, stuffed full of wanky coffee shops and i360's. It always had a certain kind of Bohemian hipness - a post-war Berlin vibe where anything goes within the bubble. Well not anymore - it's corporately trendy. And that isn't the same thing at all.

Yeah, I know I sound like a things-were-better-in-my-day drone. Let me carry that burden, readers, for the road is long. With many a winding turn.**

Brighton still returned two Tory MPs at the 1992 election, as did Hove.

In my mind's eye, it was either a dreary wet winter's evening or a fabulous summer day. No in between. Shuffling around in a black denim jacket, through the rain, taking shelter in a derelict shop front, maybe accompanied home by some girl I'd just met in The Basement nightclub down on The Steine. Well, the club's all gone and I never saw the girl again. She was called, er, Anna? Maria? Don't worry she won't mind my confusion; I told her my name was Bryan.*** (Yeah - see my October 18th blogpost about this girl. So I turn my life into stories? Sue me!)

(My girlfriend at the time complained I was often 'theatrical'. I acted all upset about this and stormed away to write a song about that very conversation. What an absolute, horrific nob!)

I formed a band. We played in all the shitty Brighton pub venues for no money. I named us Charlotte's Treat (after Charlotte Street in Kemptown) before changing the name to Tempting Alice. When the band broke up I started - and ended - my solo career in The Great Eastern pub, Trafalgar Street, autumn 1992. As it was next to Brighton college I managed to get quite a few of my drama classmates to attend. Unfortunately for my self esteem, one of the few other blokes on the course chose this exact moment to announce he was coming out. Selfish bastard; I played on oblivious. No one listened. Or clapped. And I broke a string. Afterwards, I pocketed the £20 and never played a solo gig again.

Out of Time?

“There is still a city with the same name, and there are streets with the same name too, in the same locations, but what happens there is so transformed, in thought, word and deed, that it is not the same place. Is it better, or worse? I cannot not really tell. It is certainly different.”

— Peter Hitchens - Sunday Express 11/11/16

Interesting that Hitchens was writing (beautifully as ever) last week about Oxford in the context of Leonard Cohen whereas I chose Brighton in context of REM and Out of Time. I started writing this piece back in August but because I thought it was a solipsism, a vinegar stroke of an article, I never published it. I've attended to it, edited it, changed parts, deleted much in the last three months however. And my conclusion?

NOTES

* When I say Brighton, I mean both Brighton and Hove. Although their characters are quite different, I moved seamlessly between the two. Of course, they are now joined as one city.

** Fun fact - Elton John played piano on The Hollies - He Ain't Heavy He's My Brother. Why I sledgehammered that reference in, who knows. How unsearchable are my judgements.

*** Bryan Robson. Geddit!!! Oh, I was a hoot in those days. For youngsters - he was a footballer and captain of England when I cared about this.

**** @Tim Robson - The Song of Vivian. I apologise for quoting myself but sometimes - not enough - I am a fucking great writer.

A Rainy Afternoon in Brighton

October 18, 2016 by Tim Robson in Brighton

"Outside it feels like it will rain. There is a cold wind blowing. Trafalgar Street is bleak and dark fingers of shadows icily mark our way. I feel out of time as around me autumn becomes winter. We walk closely together. Quickly and in silence - our breath marking the climb to the station. It starts to rain. Heavily. We shelter in a shop front. We face each other inches apart.

I do up another button on my black denim jacket.

The rain is now bouncing off the floor. We are well sheltered though in the shop front, snug in our cocoon. We look at each other. She seems to be daring me to make a move. Life has Moments and this is one. She's staring at me intensely but I find myself unable to cross the divide. It's just not in me. I'm twenty three and she's just nineteen yet I still can't make a move. I have no power at all. I’m like the rain running down the hill in front of me, powerless to alter course. I stand useless, devoid of direction, waiting to be shown a way."

Neil Diamond's Beard. Tim Robson 1991

(I think I'm a better writer now. Even posting the above passage, 25 years after writing it (FFS!), I've lightly edited it. Too many adverbs. Too many non-deliberate repetitions. Still; a nice scene of a Brighton now gone. A Tim that has gone. A girl that was never there.)

Tim Robson in Brighton looking sharp. He's single girls!

The Grasshopper and the Cow. A modern guide to dating.

Battersea Arts Centre

July 14, 2016 by Tim Robson in BREXIT, Bollox

“Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.” *

One of the problems of dating in Brighton - if you hold what some might classify as right-wing views - is that your potential date will be, with a 90% level of certainty, a virtue-signalling leftie. You're stuck with a choice - to stay quiet and fail gracefully to get sex or to reveal your politics and be damn certain not to.

Saying you voted Brexit perhaps, or admire Nigel Farage, is literally like turning up to the wine bar dressed in full Gestapo uniform with a copy of The Final Solution in your top pocket. There again... The hard left these days seem to love a bit of anti-semitism. Can't get enough of it.

Saying you support low taxes, a small state, free trade and capitalism is usually - and disingenuously - met with hysterical guilt-by-association accusations. That's because, to a leftie, holding a few non leftie views means you must subscribe to a whole set of others too. So, I say, Brexit for democratic reasons, they say racist; I say low taxes and they say I want to burn the poor. Maybe piss on them first.

Therefore, on a date, it's easier to take the cowardly, pragmatic approach. When your leftie date jabbers on about some social justice outrage de jour, just smile and take the conversation off at a tangent. Lefties generally - and especially in their natural environment within Brighton - tend not to meet people who disagree with them out loud. Silence is taken as assent. So she'll not spot the evasion but will take the change of subject as affirmation of her point of view - a point so obvious it should be, like, the law or something. The science is settled, the debate is over, the platform is not open, safe spaces are not going to be invaded.

It's a bit like Facebook (of which I'm not longer a member). The busy grasshoppers chirp noisily all over the timeline whilst the bovine Brexit / Tory supporting multitudes stay suspiciously quiet. Hence the outrage when these special snowflakes actually lose (see my article on 1992 election and the narcism of the self-righteous). They literally cannot comprehend it. Everyone agrees with them.

But - Edmund Burke fans - in looney-tunes Brighton, the fucking grasshoppers are in charge of the town and rigidly boss the poor cows about.

Does that mean I'm a cow? Hell no, I'm a bull me. El torre! Just a rather quiet one.

So where does that leave the nominal right-winger (libertarian actually, thanks) in his quest to bed the leftie date? Well, about in the same position as with a right wing date. Or a liberal date. Or a date with woman of no political views.

Politics, I've found, aren't actually the primary driver in the dating scene. Other, more corporeal attributes, claim that sovereignty.

It's possible I may return to this subject.

Tim

* A rather good, and prescient quote from Edmund Burke. Beware the mob!

A familiar sight in the mid to late 90's opposite The Royal Pavillion, Brighton

God-like power

March 10, 2016 by Tim Robson in Architecture

One of my passions is urban architecture and how cities change over time.

I’ll explain.

Take a large corporate plc with many employees. Staff come and staff go. There is no such thing as ‘the staff’ over any period of time. There can only ever be a snapshot of employees at any given moment.

As Pocahontas said – I paraphrase – you never can put your hand in the same river as, it is always flowing, always different. Yes, the wisdom of Disney.

It is the same with urban architecture. It is always changing and the only thing that tricks us into thinking it is not is the fact that bricks and mortar typically change more slowly than humans (or rivers) and so we don’t see it.

I first became interested in this subject when I was eleven. I used to walk through a housing estate on my way to school and every day for months I passed a house - a house where a rather large extension was being built. Day after day, I would trudge past with my briefcase and French horn and for a few months, this state of incompleteness was my experience of this house and this journey. Now, of course, the extension has been built for thirty odd years and has taken on a look of permanence. But I remember a time when it wasn’t there and a time when it was incomplete. My ‘snapshot’ is different to most.

This little experience gave me a love and interest in the urban built environment. Hey - it’s better than watching football or soaps! Old pictures of Rochdale, Brighton or London, for example, excite my interest. I found a picture once of the Houses of Parliament being built in the 1850’s with Big Ben only partially constructed. How the Londoners must have marvelled and how that incomplete tower must have been their reality for months, if not years. History literally in the making.

So urban architecture in transition is always of interest to me and if I see something being built or changed I try to snap a picture and record that moment of transition between one solid state and another. Capture the ephemeral nature of the built environment.

Unsurprisingly given the above, I did a master’s degree in portfolio management in the 90’s and, as part of it, authored many theoretical projects to develop the South London and Brighton built environment. This was an interesting period – right after the property crash of the early 90’s – and there were many underused or derelict sites lying undeveloped, in places we would now see as property hotspots.

I especially remember the site at the bottom of Edward Street opposite The Royal Pavilion in Brighton. It had been a derelict shell for years with a short term use as a temporary car park. My limited proposal was to build a hall of residence for the polytechnic as you couldn’t give away flats in those days. But what’s most interesting now to remember, is the fact that this site – right in the heart of historic Brighton – lay abandoned for years. Hard to imagine now, but cities ebb and flow with the years; we, who live in them, just don’t recognise this.

An interesting aside to this period in my life was that I was in charge of real estate for American Express Corporate Travel - the division with the largest portfolio of space in the UK. When the lease of the HQ building in the Haymarket ran out, I was tasked with acquiring the replacement. And I found it by walking around the then unfashionable district of Southwark - south of Blackfriars Bridge. This was the real old London experience where you could still imagine the Ripper wielding his knife on unsuspecting late night revellers unwisely walking through the narrow streets of tall warehouses.

I acquired a building on Blackfriars Road that was – in Amex terms – incredibly cheap. At that point the Jubilee Line extension hadn’t been completed and Southwark tube station – just yards from my building – wasn’t yet complete, let alone open. Today the area, with great tube links, is a thriving commercial part of London but when I was in the market, it was a backwater, and - as some eminent real estate professor at my university told me like the perennial late night black cab driver - no-one wants to go South of the River!

So when I walk past ‘my’ building these days, I experience several emotions. Firstly, pride in my accomplishment, of course. Reflections about how my decision influenced hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. About how I changed their lives permanently. Oh the power! Yes, the beginnings of my nascent God complex… But what I really remember - as I walk around - is my first impressions of a central London area, next to the Thames, with no tube, no intrusive glass towers, that was covered in post war Corbusier inspired hideous concrete offices but also rather marvellous back street pubs filled with growling cockneys and cigarette smoke.

It’s not just buildings that change the character of cities!

Do know what? In that period, I couldn’t even give away offices in Argyll Street and New Bond Street. Can you imagine that? I’d go up and meet the agents who’d tell me how they couldn’t get rid of my space – opposite the Argyll Theatre, amongst all the high end fashion shops. That I’d have to lower the price and give rent free periods. Different days. Different times.

Different times.

More tales from the life urban and architectural soon.

Tim