Johnny Hallyday live at the Albert Hall

The warm-up act is a brassy blonde in a fondant-pink dress with a belief that she sounds like Amy Winehouse. Simeon, The Only Person Who Would Come With Me To This, says she got the verses of Back to Black mixed up.

‘I wonder if she’s quite famous in France,’ he says.

Johnny loves the audience and is loved in return. Especially by the gangly Frenchman in front of us who shimmies and punches the air. He works in the veterinary laboratory of an equestrian centre. 

Our seats are very high up but Simeon says he doesn't mind; he was in the Paras.

There are three large autocues in front of Johnny. ‘Johnny does karaoke,’ says Simeon.

‘That riff is plagiarised from Eric Clapton’s Crossroads. You've got to hand it to him, he knocks the socks off Engelbert Humperdinck, know what I mean?’

Johnny gets down on the floor with the mike stand. ‘So French,’ gurgles Simeon. ‘He’s giving it a dry shag.’

There are three backing singers. ‘Look at the knockers on that one,’ says Simeon. ‘They're huge.’

From the arena, long white arms wave towards Jonny like sea anemones and stiffen at his touch.

‘Is he touching your heart?’ asks Simeon.

‘No,’ I say.

‘Mine neither.’

But he's a great entertainer.  'He doesn't waste time in a power ballad. Goes straight from nought to sixty,' says Simeon, miming hanging himself. 

‘Vous êtes chaud ce soir!’ Johnny keeps saying to his enraptured fans. Men and women cry 'Johnny! Je t'aime!' 

Johnny sits down and reminisces about Elvis, Eddie Cochrane and the first time he went to Nashville, in 1962. He is pretend-edgy but genial. Then back on his feet.

Simeon says, ‘This is direct plagiarism of Credence Clearwater Revival’s Fortunate Son. How he gets away with it I don’t know.’

The concert ends bang on eleven. It's raining. I suggest we visit some ex-Occupy squatters in The Cross Keys off Cheyne Walk, Chelsea’s oldest pub, with memories of Bob Marley, Dylan Thomas and the Rolling Stones. It’s boarded up: the owner wants to convert it into a mansion with a basement pool and flog it. Locals want it to remain a pub.

Seconds after we arrive in Simeon’s car, a police car and a meat wagon draw up. There is already a sinister black Range Rover with tinted windows outside.

I ring someone inside. He says the Range Rover belongs to the owner, who’d rather not go to court for an eviction order; he’s trying to lure them out by offering to leave a bag of cash in the middle of the road. They are staying put. In the store room they found a five-kilo block of chocolate which they chopped up with an axe.

We sit in the car with the windscreen wipers on, watching the police watching the pub. 

PS That was in 2012. It's still a pub.

Tom Palmer. 'He looks like James Dean in that picture.'

Tom was beautiful, highly intelligent, musical, raffish, playful, intuitive, funny, inventive, charming and well brought up. He was kind to cats and liked fancy cars. He had the gift of being able to write as he spoke. He died today, leaving many sorrowful people to mourn the loss of his young life.

I met him when I was drawing and writing about the Occupy protest camps and squats for this blog. Here are some extracts:

20 May 2012
Occupy camp, Finsbury Square

'Does anyone know how to tie a hangman's noose?' asks Tom, aka Johnny Teatent.
'Ask Charlie or Fern,' responds another Occupier automatically.
'Why do you want to know?' I ask.
He wants to hang bankers in effigy from the trees in Finsbury Square.


6 June 2012
Occupy camp, Finsbury Square 

Remains of rain-soaked sketches of Tom
(hand peeling clementine, right)

Tom, aka Johnny Teatent, a contemptuous blond swaggerer, peels a clementine with the prehensile fingers of one hand, leaving the peel in a single piece, without looking.

Later he emails to the clique (I quote exactly): 'Banging castle built. Campfires. If anyone wants to hammer. Slash come down take pictures. it is getting to be an awesome barricade.'







14 June 2012
Occupy camp, Finsbury Square

Roaring-boy blond-bombshell Johnny Teatent, aka Tom, dropped out of a philosophy course and won’t be going back. ‘Teatent’ in this context isn't about cucumber sandwiches: it’s the Occupy hangout for the homeless, the disaffected or the alienated.

Tom is wearing jeans decorated with scarlet spray-paint. He glares at his phone: ‘More emails. I want more emails.’

He’s built a barricade out of inner-city detritus, aspiring to a glorious last stand against the bailiffs. I think of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys without a Wendy. Two Portaloos, a bonfire in a brazier, a mains water pipe, adrenaline and testosterone are inside the barricade.

Tom feels sidelined by the Occupy cadre; he's impatient with members whose souls yearn for flip-charts and meetings about the names of meetings: ‘Occupy’s press strategy is completely xxxxed,’ he says. ‘Look at this fortress. Look over there at London’s big iconic buildings. It’s like Asterix. It’s like a World War Two outpost. It’s got to be on the news. They’re directing me to stop people lobbing bricks when the police come. Why the xxxx should I bother. The camp’s been co-opted by people who want it to be a talking shop. I don’t do that.’

Tom with Ella and fortress

He’s also frustrated by the lack of wi-fi. ‘I tried to go to the library but I had holes in my shoes.’

He flops on a muddy sofa, strums a guitar, dries a saturated pair of trousers over the bonfire.  He takes the drawing: ‘I’ll use it for my propaganda.’

A man says, ‘He looks like James Dean in that picture.’

9 November 2012 

Cross Keys squat, Chelsea

The phone wakes me up. It's a squatter from the Cross Keys, the disused pub at the classy end of Chelsea. Bailiffs are due any time.

'Can you help us move to the new squat?'

I feel like Wendy with the Lost Boys. Or Ragueneau in Cyrano de Bergerac, the pastry-chef-poet who turns up with sustenance and transport when things get rough for the ramshackle Gascon cadets.

I hear a whisper. It's Margaret Thatcher saying the Good Samaritan had money. I've got enough cash for dog food and toilet paper.

In the sunless public bar at the Cross Keys, groaning figures wriggle out of sleeping bags. Tom stretches, rolls a fag and looks into the gas flame-effect fire. The light on his perfect cheekbones is Caravaggio. I don't have my drawing kit with me.

After much nagging from me he lugs some clothes out to the car.

'Cool car,' he says.

I haven't got time to tell him he's an activist and cars aren't cool.

23 March 2013

Festival Hall; the Elephant squat

Tom (left) is refused permission to speak further

Inside the Royal Festival Hall the Philharmonia plays Charlie Chaplin's music to his 1936 film Modern Times, a satire on the Great Depression.

Outside the auditorium, Occupy is having a meeting. Activism and satire are an awkward mix. They create conflict in the soul of Johnny Teatent, aka Tom.

In the squat

From Tom's belt dangles a white man's dreadlock - the only one the man possessed. It is long, springy and shiny. It gives Tom a faint air of My Little Pony back to front. It is described as a scalp, a body part.

The victim - the former owner of the dreadlock - has asked me to cut what happened.

Some people leave the meeting in a sweary flurry. Chaplin's sentimental music swells.

Next, we head for the squat pub quiz.

The quiz is at Eileen House, Elephant and Castle, a brutal architectural disaster and subject of an eternal planning dispute. I am accused of seeking glamour in going to the squat. I wish.

'Is the asbestos on this floor?' says someone. Shrug. There is bright cheerless office lighting, a room full of bikes, grey everywhere, a couple of friendly dogs.

My friend Orlando goes to buy himself some tobacco. He comes back. He's left the tobacco in the shop. He goes back for it. Orlando and Tom are probably cool but I don't have a cool gauge. Tom has front teeth missing - knocked out by police, he claims.

Tom, Orlando and I are a team, the Radical Quiz Faction. The questions are monotonous.

'What does LASPO stand for?'
'Name two open-air squats in London.'

PS the tip of the dreadlock is now part of my drawing kit. I am unapologetic. Tom gave it to me.

21 October 2014

Parliament Square

I stop in the square on my way to the launch of a book, The First Miscarriage of Justice by Jon Robins. 'Can I come with you?' asks Tom, who yearns for the glory days of Occupy camped on chilly cobbles outside St Paul's Cathedral three years ago ('I want to get my hair cut outdoors smoking weed'). I don't think I'd get Tom through security at Portcullis House.

In the rapid sketch below, Tom is the figure holding the guitar (red) sitting under the statue of Lloyd George.

The last time I spoke to Tom, on 4 July, this was the scene:



I'll leave you with his voice:
http://occupynewsnetwork.org/blog/hobo-hilton-heir-apparant-to-st-pauls-evicted-on-oct-19th/

Supreme Court art: the right to occupy

It's easy to mock Occupy when they tweet that one of their aims is 'free pubic transport' [sic], but something beyond a chippy sense of grievance motivates the core group to spend cold nights on Parliament Square without a tent.

I stop in the square on my way to the launch of The First Miscarriage of Justice by Jon Robins. It would appeal to them. 'Can I come with you?' asks Tom, who yearns for the glory days of Occupy camped on chilly cobbles outside St Paul's Cathedral three years ago ('I want to get my hair cut outdoors smoking weed').

The book launch is in high-security Portcullis House. I can't risk it. Tom goes back to playing the guitar under the statue of Lloyd George.

Next morning I'm in Court 2 trying to pin down an iconic profile. Michael Paget is great-grandson of Sidney Paget, the first artist to depict Sherlock Holmes (the deerstalker was his idea).

Reports that the model was Sidney's brother Walter have been denied; maybe Sidney just set up two mirrors to study his own profile. Michael has inherited it.

In 2012 Michael Paget acted on behalf of Occupy in Corporation of the City of London v Tammy Samede and persons unknown, the St Paul's eviction trial in the High Court.

This morning Tammy and the litigants in person from that case are protesting on Parliament Square in the fag-end of a hurricane, one of them with Occupy Baby in a sling.

While a melodrama of kettling, chanting and arrests is going on outside, 'the right to occupy' is a mantra in court. In The Mayor and Burgesses of the London Borough of Lambeth v Loveridge, Harry Loveridge was replaced as a secure tenant while on a long trip to Ghana (he'd still been paying rent by standing order). Damages are at issue. 'Have the valuers got a stone which is set or some sort of blancmange?' muses Jan Luba QC.

I never told Occupy that the friend I brought to visit their Holborn squat two years ago was a judge, but I dare say they wouldn't have minded.

For the curious, this blog has many posts about the day-to-day life in the Occupy camps as well as this one about Michael Paget:
http://isobelwilliams.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/case-of-high-profile.html

More pictures if you scroll down.

Sidney Paget

Occupy: dreadgate

Tom (left) is refused permission to speak further

Inside the Royal Festival Hall the Philharmonia plays Charlie Chaplin's music to his 1936 film Modern Times, a satire on the Great Depression.

Outside the auditorium, Occupy is having a meeting. Activism and satire are an awkward mix. They create conflict in the soul of Johnny Teatent, aka Tom.

In the squat

From Tom's belt dangles a white man's dreadlock - the only one the man possessed. It is long, springy and shiny. It gives Tom a faint air of My Little Pony back to front. It is described as a scalp, a body part.

What follows is comic and tragic. The glaring need for professional intervention gets lost in a thicket of bureaucracy and self-congratulatory meeting-itis. The victim has asked me to cut what happened. (I suggest he goes to the police, but then I'm a taxpayer.)

Some people leave the meeting in a sweary flurry. Chaplin's sentimental music swells.

Next, the squat pub quiz.

The quiz is at Eileen House, Elephant and Castle, a brutal architectural disaster and subject of an eternal planning dispute. I am accused of seeking glamour in going to the squat. I wish.

'Is the asbestos on this floor?' says someone. Shrug. There is bright cheerless office lighting, a room full of bikes, grey everywhere, a couple of friendly dogs.

My friend Orlando goes to buy himself some tobacco. He comes back. He's left the tobacco in the shop. He goes back for it. Orlando and Tom are probably cool but I don't have a cool gauge. Tom has front teeth missing - knocked out by police, he claims.

Tom, Orlando and I are a team, the Radical Quiz Faction. The questions are monotonous.

'What does LASPO stand for?'
'Name two open-air squats in London.'





Financial Times gig and a dangerous squat

Occupy squatters at the Cross Keys, a boarded-up pub in Chelsea, have just been thrown out by a criminal gang with knives who hold raves in squats and don’t read my blog, or they’d know that bailiffs are due any day. Two male squatters were beaten up. I go to draw somewhere marginally safer: a gig at the Financial Times office.

To get there I walk past the aggressively opulent frontage of law firm S. J. Berwin. It’s a relief to reach the unglitzy, boffiny engine-room that is the newspaper. 

Mary Wilson (vocals/violin)

Peter Whitehead is celebrating 25 years as an FT journalist by holding a charity folk/rock concert with friends and a colleague. They sing and play to a congenial audience in a conference room with the passionate sincerity of non-professional musicians. 

I use conventional pens, quills, a bamboo pen and a few inches of hemp bondage rope.

Afterwards I take the stairs and find a sight which makes a freelance home-worker weep [left]. Last time I had access to something like that the techies wore Fairisle jumpers, corduroy trousers and beards. 

The day before, I borrowed a Cross Keys squatter to model for the life class I go to. She took charge of her life at the age of 13. Now 18, she is confident, well-spoken, absurdly grown up for a pretty fairy and can do things I can’t – smoke, rifle through skips outside supermarkets for food, not feel cold in flimsy clothes, go out in socks but no shoes. She has a pungent insouciance. 

One of the squatters who was beaten up by the gang, Arthur, is quoted in the Financial Times of 5 November 2012 (Chicken with wine sauce from a skip on lunch menu for pub occupiers). He says he sees ‘a choice between wasteland and trespassing.’

The life drawings
are of the squatter

Peter Whitehead and nine other musicians perform songs by Lori McKenna, Sam Baker and Mary Gauthier on his CD Lori, Sam and Mary. Sales benefit the Down’s Syndrome Association. Peter’s wife Grania Langdon-Down is descended from the doctor who gave his name to the syndrome. Details: http://peterwhitehead.yolasite.com/  

At the gig he was joined by Simon Botham/percussion, Heidi Felton/cello, Derek Huff/keyboards, Richard Lloyd/guitar, Martin Nielsen (also of the FT)/guitar and Mary Wilson/violin and vocals. 

Activist squat: from the pub to the psychiatric hospital

View from the disused psychiatric hospital

The phone wakes me up. It's a squatter from the Cross Keys, the disused pub at the classy end of Chelsea. Bailiffs are due any time.

'Can you help us move to the new squat?'

I feel like Wendy with the Lost Boys. Or Ragueneau in Cyrano de Bergerac, the pastry-chef-poet who turns up with sustenance and transport when things get rough for the ramshackle Gascon cadets.

I hear a whisper. It's Margaret Thatcher saying the Good Samaritan had money. I've got enough cash for dog food and toilet paper.

In the sunless public bar at the Cross Keys, groaning figures wriggle out of sleeping bags. Tom stretches, rolls a fag and looks into the gas flame-effect fire. The light on his perfect cheekbones is Caravaggio. I don't have my drawing kit with me.

After much nagging from me he lugs some clothes out to the car.
'Cool car,' he says.
I haven't got time to tell him he's an activist and cars aren't cool.

The new squat, off the Kings Road, is a disused private psychiatric hospital for young people which was last cleaned in 2007 according to notices on the walls. The building is eerie with an unlit spiral staircase and blind corridors.



It's a landlocked Marie Celeste. The patients' notes, complete with names, have been left lying around in the office by the departed management. Chronicles of harm and self-loathing. A girl carved FAT on her foot with a paperclip. A successful escaper went to Birmingham by train then returned the next day.

Four storeys and 17,652 square feet of dustiness. Individual en suite rooms with nowhere to hang yourself. The windows are sealed so that you can't jump out.

One of the squatters, who camped outside St Paul's cathedral with Occupy through the chill of last winter, models later on for the life class I go to.

He tells me that last night the squatters ate rump steak and sausages retrieved from a waste bin outside Waitrose and cooked in the hospital kitchen.

The Cross Keys squat in Chelsea

What do you do after Johnny Hallyday at the Albert Hall? All that pretend-edge, masking geniality? You go somewhere really edgy, of course. A squat. Except we didn't try to get in. Because as we arrived, in the dark and the rain, two police vehicles drove up and we decided we weren't that edgy. Even though nothing happened.

The squat is the Cross Keys, Chelsea's oldest pub. It was bought by a developer who wanted to turn it into a mansion with a basement pool. But locals wanted it to remain their local. So did the council. Planning permission was denied and it's back on the market.

I return in daylight. The developer has offered the squatters an unknown inducement to leave. Ella explains. 'They said: there will be something in the middle of the road. It's yours if you all come out.'

In my experience, what is in the middle of the road is a flat fox. And why walk out of a pub with a walk-in fridge and a flame-effect gas fire? The developer has now resorted to conventional court procedure.

Charlie

'What's the axe for?' I ask.
'We used it to cut up a five-kilo block of chocolate,' says Arthur.

No time for more than one quick drawing - I'm on a mission, in a Raymond Gubbay frame of mind. This place is ideal for entertainment.

They're playing vinyl on the sound system. Adam Faith sings, 'What do you want if you don't want money?'

Occupy's anniversary at St Paul's Cathedral: only our love hath no decay

Occupiers gather outside St Paul's Cathedral. Female wedding guests clip-clop by, exposing hefty thighs in too-short flimsy skirts. Heels tilt the pelvis provocatively. Careful on the cobbles, ladies.

The protesters are here for meditation and speeches. It's almost the anniversary of the day Occupy arrived outside the cathedral and stayed, in tents, for nearly five months, mostly cold ones.

The Dean of St Paul's, Dr David Ison, sits on the steps talking to Tanya Paton of Occupy Faith. (The following day, they will both be taking part in evensong when four chanting Occupiers chain themselves to the pulpit.)

He is the latest to try to fill the eternal vacancy left by John Donne. His appointment follows the resignation of the previous Dean who responded to Occupy's advent by closing the cathedral for a week. 


'What did you talk about?' I ask Tanya.

'Empires. Justice. How you go about changing cultures. You have to do it slowly to get it right. He talked about Bismarck and socialism. Thank goodness I've studied German history.'

So many of the Occupy faithful are here. We greet each other with kisses and cuddles. 

I draw Zeph while he meditates. Then he gives me a quartz crystal. He set up Occupy's meditation tent last year. 

Over the year I've blogged Occupy as an outsider. 'You're a witness,' says Tina-Louise to me. 'You're here to tell the truth. Sometimes it's ugly.'

Beautiful desperado Johnny Teatent, who never seems to have a full complement of anything, has just the one shoe today. Front tooth, shoe, seems it's always the police's fault. 

I'll leave you with the Dean:

The Anniversary
By John Donne

All kings, and all their favourites,
All glory of honours, beauties, wits,
The sun it self, which makes time, as they pass,
Is elder by a year now than it was
When thou and I first one another saw.
All other things to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
This no to-morrow hath, nor yesterday;
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.

Two graves must hide thine and my corse;
If one might, death were no divorce.
Alas ! as well as other princes, we
—Who prince enough in one another be—
Must leave at last in death these eyes and ears,
Oft fed with true oaths, and with sweet salt tears;
But souls where nothing dwells but love
—All other thoughts being inmates—then shall prove
This or a love increasèd there above,
When bodies to their graves, souls from their graves remove.

And then we shall be throughly blest;
But now no more than all the rest.
Here upon earth we're kings, and none but we
Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be.
Who is so safe as we? where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two.
True and false fears let us refrain,
Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write threescore; this is the second of our reign.

Squatting at the Hobo Hilton: Occupy and other activists

Ella

203 High Holborn is a vast, hideous office belonging to BT which no one wants to rent. It's been empty for years. Now it's squatted by activists including Occupy.

At a job interview last century, in a gruesome corner of a building not unlike this one, I was asked by a man if I was engaged to be married.
'No.'
'Really?' he said. 'Where are the men?' Then he dipped his head under the desk to look up my knee-length skirt.
People were allowed to conduct job interviews like that in those days.

Lynda

He took me to the room where his underlings were being held. They eyed me silently, each one sucking a cigarette for solace.

I'm relieved to find that there are better uses for such buildings. Here in the Hobo Hilton, the incoming squatters found that the gas outlet was dangerous and turned it off. They have registered with the power supplier as users of the electricity.

Get-a-Job Rob

People gather on the ground floor for congenial banter. Lynda is making pillows by stuffing pink air-conditioning filters with shredded paper left outside offices. A wall has been decorated with old BT remote-control units. Ella is painting motivational pictures.

Get-a-Job Rob snores on a sofa. Someone throws a roll of lavatory paper at his head but he doesn't wake up.

'Oh, it's Tchaikovsky time!' squeals Ella, and the celesta pings out The Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy.

Ben

Then the Waltz from Sleeping Beauty, followed by Sultans of Swing, Music to Watch Girls By, Spooky Little Boy.

Don't You Want Somebody to Love?

Remote control units

Upstairs I tour empty floor after empty floor.

Papers have been served and the squatters are due in court next week.

Pillow

A glance back at the Occupy London camps

Me

A wraith from Occupy removes the ice-pick from its skull just long enough to rebuke the others for not rebuking me. My crime is to write about what I see, rather than what I am told I am seeing.

'Tell her that Occupy is a horizontal movement,' whispers the wraith. (Horizontal in this context means leaderless, with nobody aspiring to have power over others inside the organisation.)

Occupy is a horizontal movement. As am I.

While I was visiting the Occupy camps, I recorded what I saw but I left some things out because people worried about their mothers:
'You won't draw the cigarette, will you.'
'You're not going to write that you can smell dope, are you.'

At the Finsbury Square camp, Ella (see previous post) made a drawing on a scrap of newspaper for me.

Ella's drawing

Rupert drawn by me

After I drew Rupert at the St Paul's camp in December, he drew me. The fag was his idea. It tasted horrible. Despite the smoke in his drawing, it was unlit. 


But the tears of blood for Occupy are accurate.

Me drawn by Rupert

And Amy (8) drew me in the crypt of St Paul's. She called her drawing 'The Happy Artist.'