BLOW JOB!

How Walk On By and a cult 60’s film took Gary Kent

 to a park in southeast London

HE STRANGLERS knew a delicious slice of 60’s music when they heard it: they did their own mind-blowing version of the Dionne Warwick classic Walk On By – and it’s still a hit in the present day live sets of both The Stranglers and Hugh.

Originally part of the Guildford Stranglers pre-fame repertoire of the mid-70s, The Stranglers finally laid down Bacharach and David’s bittersweet symphony during the Black And White sessions at TW Studios in March 1978. Following on from Nice ‘n’ Sleazy, Walk On By became the bands seventh 7” single, reaching a creditable 21 in the UK charts that August -  quite an achievement considering three months before, 75,000 copies were given away gratis with the album!

Unsurprisingly, the much-lamented and foremost DJ of the day John Peel was the first to spin it one night in May, giving us a tantalising prequel of to the groundbreaking  third album. And what a night it was! From the other side of London, this 15-year old boy secretly tuned in under candlewick bedcovers, where Walk On By brimmed with  Dave’s fantasticly wicked keyboard wizardry: he almost made the Hammond talk - in tongues, naturally. Each arpeggio run transmitted icy shivers up my backbone, and in just under six and a half minutes, I was utterly and thoroughly hypnotised, mesmerised…. blown away.  My mind was awash with the riffing fluency, not to mention Hugh’s scratchy Telecaster ripping through the track like a buzz saw through balsa.  Throbbing and pulsatile throughout, JJ’s pernicious Precision chivvied and chased Jet’s freeform, no frills, drum filling.  It was an unforgettable experience.

Walk On By was their calling card, their hallmark signature noise of the bestest band in the land.  But the cheek of it all - mauling up an old rave from the grave, right on the crest of the post New Wave nuance: it was light years ahead of Whitney’s favourite aunt’s hit of 1964. The way Hugh mangles the vocal track, his atonal, laconic timbre never sounded this threatening, menacing, and nonchalantly splenetic – and this was a fucking love song! Brooding yet ballsy, Hugh’s acidic vocal quirk is glued down with Dave’s anodyne backing harmonies. But just before the gorgeous instrumental passages kick off, Hugh suddenly lands his leading line on the vocal track:    

“…Just going for a stroll in the trees.”

I often wondered why Hugh sung that – it wasn’t in the original. But here it is, right before the lysergic solos swallow him up.  It’s only now I think I might know. On the day it was decided on an accompanying promotional video, film buff Hugh was the one who jumped at the chance make it, and where it all starts to unfold. In 2005, Hugh told me: “I based it on the film Blow Up, which is one of my favourite pieces of cinema... It’s very eerie.”

Hugh’s photographer friend Chris Gabrin helped direct it using low budget Super-8. “He took our very first photo on a record sleeve – Get A Grip... For the Walk On By video we used the exact same location they used for Blow Up – a park in southeast London.” For the shoot they got a Dionne Warwick lookalike to accompany larger-than-life jazzman George Melly for the walk through the trees of Maryon Park in Charlton in 1978 -  and for the record sleeve:  “That’s because we couldn’t get the real Dionne Warwick!”  Meanwhile, mouth-organist and Southend jail-bird Lew Lewis leaps around serenading the couple. Melly and Lewis also appear on the jazzy tongue in cheek B-side, Old Codger.

Reminiscent of McCartney zooming off to Paris on his own to shoot Fool On The Hill,  I wonder how Hugh gained almost full cinematic rein – in the light of the band’s Four Musketeers democracy within. They evenly split song writing credits into four, irrespective of who writes the songs.  But the year before, JJ posed for John Pasche for the front cover of No More Heroes – on his own on top of Trotsky’s tomb. The band rejected it and a red wreath was chosen in its place.

LOW UP was shot in London by Italian film maker Michelangelo Antonioni in 1966. In the world of cinema, where the use of the words ‘cult movie’ can sometimes be overused, Blow Up really does deserve its mantle. When Mike Myers needed a photographer for his Austin Powers pastiche, he borrowed an ample piece of Blow Up’s main character, Thomas.  Antonioni selected the youthful and handsome David Hemmings for Thomas, a successful and thoroughly arrogant fashion photographer, in ‘Swinging 60’s London’.

Antonioni dabbles with our minds, messes with our perception – much in the way our poor affluent photographer Thomas finds himself transported. One afternoon, away from snapping at future Twiggys and Shrimps, he ends up with his trusty Nikon in the obscure, secluded Maryon Park. It is here he spots Jane, played by the elegant Vanessa Redgrave, who appears to be trying to playfully lure her elderly beau towards the trees… a stroll in the trees…  Thomas innocently captures the couple on film from the glade until Jane sees him and suddenly her mood changes. She runs up to confront Thomas and demands the roll, accusing our voyeuristic snapper of invading her privacy.

He refuses, and smells a faint hint of rodent. Later on, Jane tracks him down at his trendy West London studio, where Thomas fobs her off with a different film. She leaves satisfied - and Thomas is intrigued by both her and her motive. So he starts to develop the real film from the park, and exposes something sinister in the process.

In a quest for answers, Thomas blows up each scene, frame by frame and hangs them up. Sleuth-like, he magnifies each dot until he his gruesome find is confirmed. Thomas returns to the park that night, where he is left with more questions than answers.  He returns to the studio to discover it has been ransacked. The film has gone, and so too, have all the blow-ups. Antonioni’s striking imagery combines the existential and abstract, and reality becomes blurred by the surreal purpleness.  Many questions are posed, namely - do we really only see what we want to see? And is it really true the camera never lies?

Antonioni also hints at a lower end subculture among the upper classes. He is at odds to dodge the fashionable ‘Swinging London’ zeitgeist characterised in the media.  In the outside scenes where Thomas drives through Central London, archetypical red London buses are carefully dodged.  So too are red telephone boxes, pillar boxes and Big Ben, and as if the optical illusion isn’t playful enough on the eyes, Antonioni jazzes up the cinematographic visual tone: he has both sides of a High Street shopping parade painted in bright red. 

Ali Catterall and Simon Wells, authors of ‘Your Face Here’, suggest the reddened Pride & Clarke shop fronts to have once existed in Woolwich Road, prior to the redevelopment of the through road. Admittedly it points to a likely location, considering Charlton Football Club’s 1966 cup success, with their Valley Ground literally overlooking Maryon Park, and whose home kit happens to be red: the owners might have been willing participants to the makeover. Contrastingly, on John and Brian Tunstill’s website ‘Reel Streets’ the location is revealed to be Stockwell Road, in Stockwell, just a few miles off. Evidence shows the 1966 red grinning through today’s flaking masonry paint. 

But it’s beyond the black wrought-iron gates that the profound, oblique intrigue harbours – as I was about to discover for myself.  As Thomas steps along the Tarmac pathway blackened by Antonioni’s set handymen, we are faced with the possibility of suffering from deceptive perception. Paths painted blacker? Grass painted greener? Trees painted browner? Shops painted red, and the overlooking backyards whitewashed – Antonioni must have had a colourful time in London in 1966! Having so far researched from the confines of my computer, I feel drawn to Maryon Park.  I had to go there to see for myself…

t’s an icy morning, over the Woolwich Ferry and along Woolwich Road when I spot the daunting tree tops poking at the clear blue sky over Charlton’s frosty rooftops.  Up the dead-end and through the gates, the path climbs a little, before Maryon Park suddenly opens up, invitingly.

The well-kept secret garden reveals a brace of tennis courts in the centre of a huge flat lawn that reaches out to the woody periphery and rose beds. The courts are quiet today, like they were when the rag-ball student mime artists perform their surreal game of tennis minus balls and rackets in the closing cuts of Blow Up.  Taking a left up the steep steps leads me to Cox’s Mount, the flattened out, grassy plateau where Thomas makes his dark discovery. Little has changed since sorely missed Hemmings hopped over the fence to secretly click-click-click at the odd couple. The once whitewashed backs of houses lie hidden behind overgrown trees over to my right, and to my immediate left, One Canada Square dominates the City skyline.  It’s tranquil, yet the chilly ether is charged with a profound melancholic calm. The rustling leaves overhead and the muffled traffic below never quite match the motions of the trees swaying above or the busy road I’ve just driven along below.  It’s as if the sound has been turned down, muted. Or at least, that’s my cognizance. Deception is rife.

Upon my descent a geological clue lies to Maryon Park’s ancient pre-existence as a chalk gravel pit, long since filled in and levelled out. Before that? A Roman settlement.  A shiver comes crawling up my spine like the night I heard Walk On By through the ether in the dead of night -  when I’m told the place has it’s own ghost.  I also sense my privacy has been silently and sneakily invaded… like I was being studiously watched the whole time by Thomas, and his Nikon. 

Suddenly a forthcoming and astute park keeper points me to a place on the wall where a commemorative plaque once sat. “Vandals...” he said, “they kept spoiling it so we took it down. It was in our hut but I haven’t seen it for a while. We often get people here because of the film... What  was that film called again?”

When I told Hugh during a Burning Up Times interview I had been there, he was intrigued. He also added it was a shame the Walk On By video was never shown, “apart from once at the ICA, that is.” I momentarily relay the deceptive nature of the trees in the park, and mention the one thing missing from The Stranglers coolest promotional video – The Stranglers: “Oh - they’re in it,” Hugh adds with tongue in cheek. “But only as cardboard cut-outs.”

Your Face Here: British Cult Movies Since the 60s - Ali Catterall and Simon Wells (4^th Estate) ISBN 0-00-714554-3 2002

Reel Streets: British Feature Film Locations: www.reelstreets.com/blow_up.htm

The Walk On By video can be found here: www.stranglenet.com