The theme of this week’s Cerys Matthews show (2
July) on BBC Radio 6 Music was rivers, to celebrate London Rivers Week. In the words of London Rivers Week’s website
it:
‘aims to inspire people
like you to take pride in our waterways, understand the challenges they face
and come together to create a healthy future for our rivers.’
I’m not sure about that ‘like you’, which sounds a
tad patronising, but the sentiments are sound.
Naturally Cerys played an enjoyable selection of tracks, but one I was
expecting which didn’t appear was Dirty
Water. Written by Ed Cobb and originally
performed by the Standells in 1965, they sang about Boston, Mass., USA,
referring to the ‘banks of the River Charles’ and including the line ‘Aw, Boston,
you’re my home’.
That wasn’t though the version I thought I might
hear. A pub rock band I used to see
regularly in the late 1970s/early 80s in London was the Inmates. A vague link was a school friend, Jeff Mead,
who organised these outings. He was friends with somebody called Mike Spenser (whose
sister Maxine by coincidence I worked with for a while). Spenser had had formed the Flying Tigers but
they had broken up, producing two bands – Spenser’s the Cannibals, with whom
Jeff played for a while on bass, and the Inmates.
The Inmates covered Dirty Water and did very well with it, substituting the banks of
the River Thames for the Charles, and London for Boston. A generally punchier version than the
Standells’, with singer Bill Hurley channelling Mick Jagger, it was a huge
crowd-pleaser guaranteed to get everybody dancing. The song was included on the LP First Offence and issued as a single.
Surprisingly, it was the Standells’ Dirty Water which was used on the
soundtrack to the film Fever Pitch
(2005), a missed trick. The Inmates’ though
appeared in the 1999 film EDtv.
One unfortunate line which may account for its
failure to appear on Cerys’s show is ‘Those frustrated women have to be in by
12 o’clock’. This was apparently a
reference to the curfew imposed on female students in 1960s Boston but frankly
didn’t make much sense in late 1970s London, and sounds sexist now.
Yet overall there is a difference in tone between
the Standells’ and the Inmates’ approaches.
Where the former feels sneering and ironic (they didn’t even live in
Boston), the latter has always struck me as sincere; a love letter to a London
that, despite undoubtedly grotty aspects, still evident beneath its creeping
homogenisation, is a city worth celebrating and worthy to be called home.
Thankfully the Thames is a lot cleaner than it used
to be, but the Inmates’ Dirty Water feels
relevant all the same. I’ve not lived in
the city for a quarter of a century, but the river is in the DNA of all
Londoners, wherever they find themselves, and Dirty Water is its appropriately grungy anthem. It would have been wonderful if Cerys had
found time to play it in celebration of London Rivers Week. Perhaps she will next year.
‘Gloria’
My friend Dr Christopher Laursen at one
time had a blog, Sound Addictions, on
which he asked people to nominate a favourite track and briefly say something
about why it was important to them. My
choice was Patti Smith’s version of ‘Gloria’, and the following appeared on his
blog on 27 January 2013, linked to a video of Smith performing the song live.
‘Gloria’
Amazingly, 2013 marks the fiftieth
anniversary of Van Morrison’s composition of ‘Gloria’. It has happy associations for me: I used to
have a school friend who played in a band called the Cannibals, and saw them many
times in pubs around London. They always
finished their set with ‘Gloria’.
However, my favourite version has to be
Patti Smith’s. I bought Horses, which kicks off with her
idiosyncratic ‘Gloria’, not long after its release in 1975, and it never fails
to lift my spirits.
Updated 5 February 2018
