Well, after skirting round the issue for a considerable period of time, with many stories about what happened to Mike and me as we practised the form of art which seemed to get us into arguments and trouble the world over, I’m now going to try to explain what we meant by the term “Situation Art”, and why we were so attached to it. When I have had my say, you might still respond (as a one-man-band of our acquaintance once did) with the immortal words of our title above. But I hope not.

I shall take the argument through the following steps: a brief history of the involvement Mike and I had with the traditional culture of broadsheets and busking; a contemporary analysis that we arrived at of what we were doing, introducing the idea of Situation Art; a look at the problem of the non-recognition of Situation Art as a “self-standing” category, and the misunderstandings this causes; further definition of Situation Art, by comparison with a classical music performance and a theatrical performance; and a brief study of the meaning and value of Situation Art in today’s cultural context, along with some consideration of official attitudes to it.

But first a word of caution; the problem today is that there has been a partial acceptance, not to say adoption, of the style – everything’s “street” this and “site specific” that and “accessible” the other, and “pop-up” yet another — and you find yourself saying, wait a minute, we were doing all that way back, before there were any prizes given for it….. in the days when the best you could hope for was a free ride to the Police Station in a Black Maria!

So I’m handling today’s post with care – over the course of a lifetime a lot of things change their shape. You have to be careful that you’re not just continuing with yesterday’s battles after they’ve ceased to be relevant, and yes, sometimes you have to know when to back down. But I think it’s also good that someone keeps an eye on whether real progress is being made in relations between artists and authorities, despite the apparent blooming of interest in public place art.

STREET POETRY

Consider poetry, for example. It sometimes looks as if any poet these days who isn’t published by Faber and Faber can call themselves a street poet. But what does that actually mean, indeed does it really have a meaning at all? I’ve reproduced below an article from the London Evening Standard of May 1973, called – funnily enough – “Street Poets”, which is mainly about Bongo Mike, and which I think gives quite a reasonable account of what you might expect the life of somebody calling themselves a street poet to be like. As the journalist Angus McGill wryly comments, “the life would not have appealed to Alfred Lord Tennyson”.

Now, there was a performance element to our street poetry (I say our, because I joined Mike out in the street, from Spring 1974 until we wound the operation down four years later) – or perhaps it could better be described as an interactive element. Anyway, if we take a close look at a few memorable lines from the celebrated poem “The Waste Land”, by T.S. Eliot:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.…

(from The Waste Land, Part I. The Burial of the Dead)

we can then consider that some fifty years after this was published, street poets were entering the scenario, distributing poems (or at least attempting this feat) to those apparently undone by death.

STREET MUSIC

Towards the end of the 1970’s we decided that living solely from poetry was getting tough: inflation similar to today’s was making it difficult to set a realistic-sounding price on the sheets we were offering the public, and it was starting to seem like a misfiring idealistic venture rather than a joyous celebration. Though it must be said that in general – albeit not everywhere – we had been free from interference or harassment by police etc.

As street poets, operating frequently in London’s West End, we were of course acquainted with the characterful collection of buskers who were also around: Ronnie Ross and his Sand Dance, Don Partridge and his associate Alan Young, Scotty, Herman the German, the Earl of Mustard (otherwise known as Jumping Jack), Old Meg Allan and Paris Nat Schaffer (whom sadly I never met, on account of his early death, but still heard all about from Mike and others)… It was an inspiring bunch of people. And with encouragement particularly from Ronnie Ross, we set out to develop our own individual musical act, as what we hoped would become an alternative to – if not a huge step from – poetry as a mode of income.

Street music, or public place music might be a better way of putting it, happens in a large-ish variety of situations. After a couple of false starts, we found our first success in Green Park Underground Station, by the side of the passageway joining the Piccadilly Line and the Victoria Line, at Easter 1978. The song which resonated with the passers-by was one of Mike’s compositions “Kilburn Station”, a slow moody song which sounded perfect in the subway. (We’ve since recorded a version of it with a slightly expanded musical arrangement.) But from what I remember, we saw little chance of earning a living, performing in an environment replete with “No busking” signs on the walls, and where, away from Easter, many other players would be jockeying for a pitch.

Our next success was on the street outside Earls Court Underground Station in the early evening, featuring a song called “Midnight Special”. Unfortunately we didn’t last long there – after a few days the friendly local police put a stop to the party.

On the third attempt, we found a pitch we could call our own – Coventry Street, in the evening, outside what was then known as “Bernard Delfont’s London Experience”. A song we wrote there had a peculiar origin: it was a quiet night, not many people out, and we were in a creative sort of mood; I was playing a repetitive riff on the guitar, and Mike was starting to sing extracts from one or two of his poems, to the rhythm. Suddenly two police officers walked up to us and – as usual – ordered us to stop playing. We packed up and went home in disgust, but the following day one of us said “Well if that’s what they want, that’s what they can have!” – we picked up the rhythm again, but in place of the planned mellow poetic lyric, we put a court case where a musician is arrested and tried in a Magistrates Court, and found guilty of busking. (I have described the scenario, including a later electric version of the song, in an earlier post The Professor of the University of the Street.)

This, together with other edgy songs we composed while playing there (“It’s A Crime to Play Music in the Streets” and “Family of Freaks and Schizophrenics” come to mind), fitted very well the context in the West End; and if it weren’t for the fact that we were spending more time in Bow Street than Coventry Street, we might have continued there for many years, instead of heading off for a nomadic life on the Continent, where we became café and terrace players, delved into Mike’s jazz heritage to develop our “Spasm Band” act – and acquired the freedom of approach to take on playing on moving trains and trams, something which we then brought back to London, on occasional visits “home”.

SITUATION ART

But in every country we went to, whether the act of performing in a public place were illegal, semi-legal or broadly tolerated, we found that street musicians were exploited and relatively down-trodden. This is not to say that we were treated uniformly badly- there were great times, and golden memories. But we were always conscious of something missing. Artistic acceptance. We had come off the pedestal of poetry, don’t forget, in our attempt to find a better way to relate to the public place audience; we had developed a populist act, built around original musical material; but we were not taken seriously, by comparison with either classical artists or pop artists.

Then one day in early 1981 we had our “lightbulb moment”, as described in the first post I published on this site, Welcome , when we saw that there was a specific artistic identity that ran through all the different types of performance we did in all the different towns we visited (including street poetry in London, as we realized at this point) – and Mike gave it the name Situation Art.

As we developed this idea of Situation Art, we realized that it represented an artistic perspective in its own right, quite separate from the conventional skills (be that musical proficiency, quality of voice, excellence of repertoire etc.) exhibited by the performer. It had to do with the appropriateness of the performance to the situation – and thereby brought the situation, with all its diverse possibilities, into the equation. And it seemed to us, that it was only by an idea of this sort being accepted, at an intellectual level, that buskers would ever be recognized as artists in their own right, and so be elevated above the degraded level at which they were generally valued in the days when we were active – e.g. as some kind of traditional “folk hero”, or maybe as a music student getting some practice while studying, rather than a particular type of performer, doing something with its own timeless validity.

Musical buskers tend to get judged by so-called experts on the basis of how good a musician the expert considers them to be. Yet some of the most memorable buskers might be hardly musicians at all, in the conventional sense. For example “Coneman” (as he was affectionately christened), who would somehow acquire a traffic cone, and by blowing through a hole in the top of the cone would turn it into a kind of wind instrument with its own distinctive sound; or Victoria the Comb Lady (see below), a Dixie-style soloist who played her comb with us a few times outside Brixton Station where she was generally to be found.

And it is widely held to be part of the history of Jazz, that street bands in New Orleans, known as Spasm Bands, playing music of uncertain origin on homemade instruments, as the 19th century morphed into the 20th, were one of the founding pillars of the new culture. Early critics of jazz were not especially impressed, and could find quite negative things to say about it, e.g. “It is not music at all. It is merely an irritation of the nerves of hearing..” – this from a Professor Henry van Dyke of Princeton University. Of course, Jazz later became much more accepted, but as the intellectual heavyweights moved in, the Situation Art aspect of its early days was almost entirely phased out of the picture. (See Herbert Asbury, “The French Quarter” and Robert Goffin, “Jazz: from Congo to Swing”.)

That is not to say that Situation Art theory necessitates a conflict with conventionally proficient performance – of classical music, for example. But we only have to look at the experiment carried out by the famous American violinist Joshua Bell, as reported in the Washington Post article Pearls Before Breakfast, to see that a virtuoso performance of some of the greatest pieces of music from the western tradition doesn’t necessarily work in every location at any old time of day. Art which requires such a degree of worship, it seems, needs a suitable temple; but places need to be respected too; a player dressed as a clown doing a simple bit of juggling might have been more in keeping with that draughty passageway than Mr. Bell. And further, what sensible busker would choose the early morning rush-hour? !

ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE

In a foretaste of today’s discussion, I quoted – in an earlier post – from a book written by Peter Brook called “The Empty Space”:

“I can take an empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”

I mention this because I came across it after many years of being fascinated by the experience of sitting on the westbound District Line platform on the London Underground, at Victoria or Embankment Station, watching the eastbound platform slowly fill up with passengers after being emptied by the departure of a train. Like in a conventional theatre, some actors appeared from a staircase at the back, others from what seemed like the wings, at the side; and of course some were static on the platform already, the departing train not having been theirs.

Snatches of conversation might waft across, though a little indistinct, but one could exercise some imagination.

So… a conventional playwright might be inspired by the scene depicted above, and go away and write a play about it. A situation artist would be more likely to get on the next train with them and sing a song – or indeed recite a poem. (See picture below.) More interactive, more direct… But I’m not saying that the world should have either one or the other. I’m just making a case for what I’ve spent my life doing.

And, it being a quite different kind of thing from conventional, organized artistic events in which London abounds, it requires a different skill-set…Situation Art, as I have been calling it.

BEAUTY IN PUBLIC PLACES – AN ARTISTIC DISTURBANCE OF THE PEACE

I’m turning now to an article called “Discover: A Beauty of Situation, Provisional and Lived”, which appeared in a Belgian online progressive arts magazine called Archipelago, in 2012. The writer talks about various aspects of what he calls “beauty in public places”. He considers, among other things, the work of myself and Bongo Mike, taking ideas expressed by us online over the years, and putting them in a broad art-philosophical context. The whole article is interesting, but I’m only going to quote here what is immediately relevant to my drift. (It has here been translated from the French,)

He talks about what he calls simple scenarios from everyday life, or what we would call “social situations” – eating places, markets etc. – and continues:

“strolling players” and other street artists may make interventions “in situ”, motivated by the possibility of a renewed connection with an audience, in a relationship of proximity made impossible by the usage – now normalised – of the “stage” space, to mark a distance or boundary separating the audience from an inaccessible idol.

This contextual dimension forms the basis of the practice of busking. The busker starts by looking for a spot which is appropriate for his musical intervention. The attention is therefore focused on the environment and the relationship which may be created with the audience. The buskers or street musicians therefore develop an art of attitude and of performance rather than a specific sound.…

They are often driven away and even persecuted, running the risk of prosecution, of violence from the authorities (or the public),of fines and penalties of imprisonment…Bongo Mike and Extremely Frank Jeremy… these two singular figures, whose life of discomfort on the road has led them from London to the Balkans, through Belgium, have defined their practice as “situation art”, which one could be tempted to translate as “art de la situation”.

How does one react when facing a situation? What is the difference between an ordinary situation and an aesthetic situation? If the event is recognized from the word go, as belonging to the world of art (taken in its largest sense), it will induce behaviours, which will depend on that recognition (rejection, incomprehension, contempt or conversely, fun investigation of an ‘artefactual’ situation or even an intellectualisation on the part of an informed and initiated audience.) If the event fades into the movement of the world, so that it participates in it without too much exhibition, one could believe that the reactions, less conditioned, will be more spontaneous, freer (without interference), although without being completely unconditioned (external factors always remain, as well as biological, socio-cultural and psychological causes; the eating places, the market and street animation remain coded activities one way or another).

So he’s talking here in the last paragraph about our kind of minimalism, that blends the artistic event into “the movement of the world”, as a way of eliciting a more spontaneous, unconditioned response (which does hark back to Peter Brooke’s idea of theatre as a relationship rather than a building).

PRACTICALITIES

Bongo Mike and I had started to think that “on-train busking” (as the official world would refer to it), being the most controversial thing we did but also the most rewarding in terms of audience reaction/participation, was probably the best demonstration we could give of what we meant by our ideas – and the official response to it maybe the best gauge of how genuinely accepted was the whole artistic phenomenon. But sadly you can’t please everyone – or at least, not all the time. And despite our view of what we were offering – the element of joyful surprise, of just being there, and maybe, out of the resulting confusion of expectations, the facilitating of “a brief parting of the curtains that keep the light of immortality out of the chamber of everyday life” (as the earnest advocate, that I used to be, did once describe it)….despite all this, as I say, our performances on trains were the one thing that has never been on the table in any discussion about better treatment for buskers in the UK.

And I want to mention here the widespread opposition, amongst buskers that I have known, to the idea of a licensing scheme as the way forward, be it on the street or on transport systems. I shall in a future post give a full run-down of the legal story as I understand it, but for now I just want to display a few articles from two issues of the Independent in 2000, covering an appearance by Bongo Mike and myself before a parliamentary Opposed Bill Committee discussing proposals for the regulation of street entertainment. The press, if not the MP’s, got what we were saying. (The article entitled Private View is couched in a style of humour fashionable in its day, which I’m personally not too fond of, but the final paragraph makes some crucial points that are not often expressed.)

“Well that’s all very well”, I hear your inner bureaucrat objecting, “but how then is the whole thing ever to be regulated to everybody‘s satisfaction?”

Let me give full disclosure here – Bongo Mike and I did once obtain a licence, in 1997, to perform on the trains of the ‘S’ Bahn system in Nordrhein Westphalen, Germany, but only as a novelty for a brief period of two weeks, and the experiment – although quite successful – was not repeated. And as I have said, such performances remain illegal on all of Britain’s train systems.

A variation in the legislation regarding street music in London and elsewhere in UK has meant that busking in the street is no longer treated as a matter for the police in the first instance – except, presumably, in extreme situations which might arise in any case. It is now a matter between the performer and the local authorities, who react in different ways, along the tolerant/intolerant spectrum. So far, so quite a bit better, and a vindication I like to think, as far as it goes, of the stand taken by Bongo Mike and myself on the whole issue – controversial though it was at the time. But uncertainties and injustices remain. Busking – to use again this word I don’t really like – is a culture in its own right, and attempts that are made to bring it out of the twilight where it has lingered for so long usually seem to go wrong. It is so much a thing of the moment, and that’s a very difficult quality to capture in any broader structure….

….and it is on this note, dear reader, that I must sadly take my leave of you – for now – pausing merely to remind you of my oft-repeated mantra, that answers concerning the right treatment of street musicians, buskers etc. will be hard to come by until Situation Art is inducted, in one guise or another, into the pantheon of intellectual respectability, and it is accepted that there is an aesthetic proper to spontaneous public place performance alone.

See you next week!

It must have been Mike (Bongo Mike, my former musical partner, now sadly deceased) who first coined the term “Situation Art”.

It was at a time when we were living mostly on the continent, busking gypsy-style from cafe to cafe in the winter, and from terrace to terrace in the summer. In Britain in those days near enough any form of busking was against the law – though of course that didn’t mean that you couldn’t get away with it, it just meant that you were looking over your shoulder the whole time, or employing someone else to be a look-out for you, so that you knew when the police were coming. This way of life was apparently tolerable to some, but Mike and I – being perhaps travelers by nature – preferred the inconveniences of a nomadic existence abroad to the unpleasantness of regular visits to Police stations and Magistrates Courts in our home country.

We were based for some years in a Belgian town called Leuven, best-known in some circles for its old University, and in others for the Stella Artois brewery. Sitting one day in a student cafe on the Tiensestraat, Mike suddenly announced, in a loud voice, which he would use when he wanted others besides just me to hear what he was saying, “What we are doing is Situation Art”.

This was, I would say, the starting point of a journey that would last for many years, until we could play together no more, because of ill-health.

LEUVEN – AACHEN

[first of an occasional series]

Leuven

Walking out in the early morning from the tiny, terraced house in Leuven which we had made our base on the continent – it being some time in the early 1980’s, and the day being Tuesday, our day for traveling to Aachen (just over the border in Germany) – we were happy simply to be alive, and following our chosen occupation.

It was a short walk from our street to the railway station – we would probably have had a coffee as usual in the Café Oud Leuven on the way, bought international tickets in the station, and had a joke with our friends in the ticket office to pass the time, since we were usually early for the train.

AutoCCD, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

On our way out to the platforms on this occasion, we noticed that Padé was also at the ticket office, asking in a loud voice for a ticket to Tienen (although he called it Tierlemont- the French name). Padé was a Belgian gypsy. So far as we knew, he lived with his family in a caravan, somewhere on the edge of town. He supported his family by busking round Belgium, rather as we did, only we did not have a family. We ran into him – or perhaps I should say he ran into us – the very first day we showed up in Leuven. We were having a drink in the student café known as Alma 1, on the main road which led from the station into the centre, when in walked a remarkable-looking personage with a guitar, about as dishevelled as we were, with black hair, heavily lined, swarthy face, and a thick moustache. He started immediately to play the guitar in a distinctive rhythmic manner for a minute or so, before hurrying round the tables to make his collection.

We found out later that he was well-known in Leuven, in fact people would say that you knew summer had arrived when you saw Padé! Despite the affection people had for him though, it seemed he was not accepted as a proper musician – but I always thought that he had a perfectly natural and expressive way of making his guitar sound, and in addition he was completely professional in his relationship with the audience, no matter how informal the situation. Unfortunately, it was extremely difficult – in fact almost impossible – to get into conversation with him.

Tienen

Anyway, our train came in, and Padé got on the same train, because Tienen lay in the same direction from Leuven as did the German border. We saw Padé head straight for the buffet car and order a glass of Loburg, in French, again in a loud voice – and once again I experienced a fleeting sense of admiration for his style! Although we weren’t stopping off at Tienen ourselves that day, it was in fact a town where we frequently did play, though normally on Sundays. There was an interesting collection of cafés and restaurants that we used to sing in, in the evening, but our real joy on the visit would come from sitting through the Sunday afternoon in the strangely atmospheric railway station ticket hall, waiting as it gradually filled up every half hour with people making the journey into Brussels; then ten minutes or so before the train was due, we would give a performance of one or two old country-blues numbers and make a collection, winding up just as the carriages chugged in alongside platform 1. They were magical moments that never failed. We sometimes thought we saw the station master watching us through his little window, but he didn’t say a word.

Numérisation d’une dia personnelle (Claude Warzée 1975) de la gare des Guillemins Liège (Belgique). This file is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Liège

The train proceeded eastwards from Tienen; through Landen, where a disused train car standing near the station had been converted into a quaint little restaurant, and on to the city of Liège, where we would often have to change trains. Liège was our Friday pitch. That is to say, we would sit the whole of Friday afternoon in the station cafeteria with our instruments at the ready, every now and then playing a few songs suitable to the party atmosphere that usually prevailed, and making a collection. The waiters generally liked it, in fact on one occasion one of them did an impromptu dance on an empty table; it was the toilet attendants who disapproved, finding us – I think – a bit too cavalier on occasions when we surreptitiously unplugged the juke-box to enable the customers to hear our performance!

And so past Verviers, where sits the Cour de Cassation – the highest court in the Belgian legal system – then through the northernmost fringes of the beautiful Forest of Arden, past the border town of Welkenraedt, and on to the German border itself – which, for those entering by train, is situated in Aachen Station.

© A.Savin, WikiCommons

Heinrich_Emil_Ludwig_Martha; Kaufmann_Anton_Ypsilon

Now this could go quite smoothly, or it could go wildly wrong. It just depended on your luck on any particular day. In any event you would have your passport checked, and always our names would be spelled out into a border guard’s walkie-talkie: “Heinrich – Emil – Ludwig – Martha; Kaufmann – Anton – Ypsilon” (that’s our surnames, Helm and Kay, in German police language). But on a bad day there would be a reception committee waiting on the platform of Aachen Hauptbahnhof, we would be marched along to the police office, and ordered to strip off all our clothes…. So, despite the fact that Aachen – when you actually got there – was a most attractive, surprisingly bohemian city, the problems we had entering Germany at that border do mean that this otherwise fascinating train journey is unlikely to take first place in our eventual rankings; although, in fairness, it should be conceded that the Aachen border was not the only one to offer this unconventional type of welcome – our strip-tease act was quite well-known all over the continent, and closer to home in Britain, too.

(Since the implementation of the Schengen agreement in 1995, you can now sail through Aachen station without so much as an “Ausweis bitte!” to disturb your day; although Covid restrictions, in these strange times, can still lead to the temporary re-introduction of border controls.)

So You Think You Can Make It to the Station Alone?

And so to some music. This song – I think of it as a wiser Bongo Mike addressing his impatient younger self – was recorded acoustically, and released  as the ‘B’ Side of the first single from our own label, Newspaper Records. 

On the night of November 30th 1966 occurred an event which was to change Michael’s life forever. He had spent some hours that evening in a pub called The Ship, in Wardour Street, which was then one of several Soho pubs frequented by the music business; but he had left after an impassioned argument with music manager Tony Stratton-Smith.

Feeling rather disturbed by this argument (of which maybe more another time), he took a train to Finchley Road, where he visited some friends; then, realizing he had missed the last bus home, he hitched a lift which took him as far as Mill Hill, from where he intended to walk the rest of the way. Always as much a poet as a musician, Michael used to enjoy rambling around the deserted streets of suburban areas of London at night, finding inspiration there – and, with much on his mind after the events of earlier that evening, as he slowly made his way homeward, he wandered up a narrow tree-lined turning, deep in thought and talking to himself. When he re-emerged a few minutes later, he was suddenly grabbed from behind and thrown to the ground by a person who turned out to be a police officer, claiming to have seen him attempting to burgle a house!

To cut a long story short, he was taken to a police station where, despite his denials, he was charged with “being a suspected person, found loitering with intent to commit a felony” (the notorious, and now repealed, “Sus” law), and subsequently found guilty of this offence in the local magistrates court and fined accordingly.

But Michael was a person who wanted to believe in society and its institutions, rather than engage in slick cynicism, and against the advice of many who told him to just forget about it and get on with his life, he set out to appeal. The enforced activity of applying before a High Court judge for legal aid, finding a barrister and solicitor to represent him, and preparing his case for the appeal, acted as a kind of therapy which enabled him to keep his sanity; and, as the newspaper cutting shows, the appeal was successful, even if Mike was not so happy to be warned by the Judge (Mr Richard Vick) that for his own good he should not in future go out wandering late at night….

Fortunately for us he took little notice of this warning, and some of his best songs have come from the times when he would hang around in empty night-time or early morning streets. But the whole episode, occurring when he was in his early 20’s, had a huge effect on his later life.

Not forgetting the “Poem For A Loiterer” – one of some 80 different broadsheets of Mike’s, that he and I, working together, would print multiple copies of, and sell on the streets of London and many other towns and cities around the UK, in the 1970’s.

On September 15th 1978 we entered Jugoslavia from Italy. Bongo Mike and Extremely Frank Jeremy. And after waiting at the border for a couple of hours we thumbed a lift to Ljubljana, regional capital of Slovenia (now of course an independent country). It was late afternoon. We walked around the city for a while and came upon a large square in front of a shopping centre, surrounded by neighbouring buildings, and possessed of a raised section at one end which it was impossible for us, being street musicians, not to see as a natural stage.

We unpacked our instruments and started to play, and over the next half hour or so the square gradually filled with young people, who reacted to us as if we were the first street musicians they had ever seen. When we finished we were treated to resounding applause and showered with Jugoslavian dinars, I was button-holed by a couple of young girls, while Mike got us fixed up with a place to crash… So far so good.

But our hearts were set on a longer journey. The following morning we hit the road again, and two and a half days later were in the southernmost Jugoslavian republic of Macedonia, standing on the Boulevard 26th July, at the edge of Bit Pazaar – otherwise known as the Turkish Market – in the centre of Skopje old town.

We walked into the market area and soon were surrounded by a crowd of children, amused by the sudden appearance of two long-haired musicians complete with instruments and large travelling bag. Having made it clear that we wanted to find something to eat, we were escorted by our young entourage to a restaurant with a small terrace out front, called Restoran Turist. People were friendly, and eventually the conversation came round to where we would sleep that night. Someone said they knew of a hotel just round the corner, and would find out for us if there were any rooms. It seemed there were, and it seemed they were quite cheap – in fact, by our instant calculation, easily affordable even for two buskers. And so we were introduced to the Hotel Shar, Skopje – a place which was for many years, until we found our own home in Belgium, the only fixed point in our nomadic life on this planet Earth.

The staff of the Shar all seemed to have been hand-picked for their distinctive personality as much as anything else – each one was a genuine original. Of course, we didn’t get to know them all immediately; this first encounter with the Shar lasted only ten days. But we returned year after year until 1989, accumulating during that time unforgettable impressions, of the milieu, of the people who worked there and gravitated round it..

Adjoining the hotel there was a restaurant, also called Shar, which could be thought of as a sister-enterprise (private business was allowed in Jugoslavia, provided the total number of employees did not exceed fifteen), and I’m going to tell the story of Bayram, a deaf-and-dumb Roma, among whose responsibilities was the care of the restaurant toilet. This was situated to one side of the beautiful little courtyard lying within the hotel walls, where the restaurant’s clientele would sit, drink and eat their meals during the summer months.

We would see Bayram around, but had no direct dealings with him in the early days, because initially we never used to eat or drink in the restaurant or use its toilet, having our own washroom next to the bedroom that always seemed to be allocated to us; so he was just another regular face, but not someone we had made friends with.

Now, sometimes when we woke up in the morning (life started quite early at the Shar) we would hear a strange gurgling noise, which we assumed – without giving the matter much thought – to be the song, or cry, of some particular type of bird native to that environment. But imagine our surprise, a few visits further down the line, when we observed a blazing row between Bayram and a customer of the restaurant (who had apparently used the toilet, and failed to leave the courtesy ten dinars in the receptacle provided), and heard issuing from Bayram’s mouth the precise noise, only many times louder, that we were used to hearing in the mornings from what we thought was some Macedonian variant of the crow family.

It was an amazing revelation, and one which actually led to a deep-seated friendship between us and Bayram. I’m not sure exactly what the basis for this was, but the following idea has occurred to me (I think it’s a reasonable analysis, though some people might consider it too fanciful): thus, it could be argued that a part of the alienation which buskers typically feel in so many situations, is connected with the denial of their voice as a “proper”, legitimate artistic medium; and this could in turn have been the unconscious basis for the bonding between Bayram – the man who could only croak strange noises – and Mike and myself.

Be that as it may, Bayram soon appointed himself as our sponsor/guardian angel in the situation. Remember we were buskers, and even though from a respected country, nevertheless renegades without official recognition from that country – or indeed official invitation from the Ministry of Culture in Skopje. And so we found our standing to be at times a little insecure – as on the occasion when, having been caught busking in town and then marched back to the hotel by the local police to have our passports checked, we became the butt of humorous remarks and asides for a period of several days. Bayram alone remained loyal, offering me as consolation a pair of second-hand shoes he had picked up in the Bit Pazaar.

Or again – on Friday afternoons there used to be a gathering of ethnic folk musicians at the tables in the courtyard, and we began to notice a certain cynicism on their part towards us, as being merely “gypsies” who used music to scrape up a few shillings for the next meal (and not even proper gypsies, either). But Bayram wasn’t going to let his new friends be treated in that way. One Friday, as we were walking through the courtyard with our instruments to go out somewhere in town, Bayram suddenly appeared and forestalled any of the usual derogatory banter by insisting loudly that we should play a song right there, and prove our worth as entertainers (of course with his vocal impairment he couldn’t say all that, and we wouldn’t have understood it if he could have, because our Macedonian in those days was very limited, but it was obvious what he meant). I think we played Sweet Georgia Brown and I’m Confessing, with Mike on kazoo and vocals, and me on guitar and backing vocals – and though it probably wouldn’t have passed muster at the Cotton Club, we felt, as we often did, that the street players of the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band from New Orleans might have been watching over us approvingly. Anyway, it was good enough to silence our critics at that moment, and Bayram was overjoyed at our triumph!

A bit later still, to celebrate our friendship with Bayram, we put a photo of him, standing with me near the hotel, on the cover of our second single “Professor of the Street”, and showed a copy of it to him next time we were in Skopje. But tragedy was to strike – a few days after showing him the picture, we heard that he had been knocked over by a motor car as he was walking home, and killed. We were haunted by the thought that maybe it had been our fault in some way, and to expiate our feeling of guilt – be it real or imaginary – we wrote a song, called simply “Song For Bayram”. Below is a link to a video of it on YouTube, shot in and around Shuto Orisari (known locally as “Shutka”), a village just outside Skopje where many Roma people live. Some of the visual sequences were filmed with permission at a gypsy wedding there.

Still photography: private collection of Mike Kay.

Towards the end of the era of the “India By Land” hippy trail-makers, Mike and I often used to hang around the Sultanahmet area of Istanbul – where most western long-hairs would end up at some point – and make a bit of money busking in cafes and restaurants round about. There were two pudding shops, both very popular, one known just as “The Pudding Shop”, and the other one, a few doors away, called “Can [pronounced Jan] Shop”, or simply Can’s. The Pudding Shop itself, with its history of appearing in the film Midnight Express (although not a favourite film with Turkish people), had gone rather bigtime, and didn’t encourage buskers, but the Can Shop was a different story.

Can was the name of its owner, and he was always very friendly, encouraging us to play as much as we wanted, when he was there; but on days when his son was left in charge we weren’t welcome at all. However, a little bit further up the road (Divanyolu Caddesi) the roles were reversed. There, there was a hotel called Hotel Pirlanta, which had its own restaurant on the ground floor: and it was the boss of the hotel – the father – who didn’t like us; but his son Mehmet, running the restaurant, used to welcome us to come in and play to his customers.

A bit further up the street still was the Hotel Sultanahmet, probably the cheapest in the area, where the proprietor had once let Mike live free of charge in return for some English lessons. And it was while staying there, in a small room with walls painted a rather garish greeny-blue colour, that I had the idea one evening for a song that would start with the line, “Sometimes son is better than father, sometimes father better than son”….

We did nothing with the song for a long time, but many years later we were in Skopje, Macedonia, in the music studio of a friend of ours called Eroll Jakupi – a well-known singer of Albanian language pop songs in those days – who had said, could we find a song of ours for him? Well, we let him listen to a few we were currently working on, without getting much reaction (which didn’t surprise me, in fact, because it’s a very different musical culture down there), when I just thought to myself, “Oh well, why not try him with ‘Sometimes son…etc.’ ” and after I’d played a couple of lines Eroll stopped me. “That’s the one “, he said.

So, Mike did some magic with the lyrics, which we’d never properly finished, and which then of course had to be translated into Albanian; Eroll set Xheni (pronounced Jeni), his arranger at the time, to work; and in the end the version that seemed to come out the best was one that featured all of us weighing in with the vocals, but didn’t actually use the original line that had inspired the song – so it ended up being called “Mushti Rushti Balkan Families”. Don’t ask me what that means exactly, ’cause I haven’t a clue, but it’s got to be the only Balkan folk song that was written by two British buskers!

You can listen to it here if you like.

Myself, Bongo Mike, and Eroll Jakupi, on a bright but cold Winter’s day.

The European Court Of Human Rights

Photograph by Patrick Schrevens

We had played some songs to a café terrace in Leuven, and got into conversation with a young professional type of guy who was interested in our tale of woe about being arrested for busking the whole time in our own country, but not having a proper right to work or reside anywhere else.. Tricky situation. It meant that to keep ourselves legit in Belgium, for example, we had to make sure we left and re-entered the country every eight days – that way we could remain permanent tourists.

The person we were conversing with was a Belgian lawyer called Raf Gerard. He started talking about the European Convention of Human Rights, which he said most European countries had signed up to, and the Court of Human Rights, which the citizens of participating countries could appeal to.

Well that was the first we’d heard of it. But it seemed that it was a remedy we could only apply to one half of our illness, so to speak, because the individual only had the right to complain about their own country – so we could fight about the performing difficulties in Britain, but not about the residence difficulties on the continent. Ok, we could live with that.

Being the type of simpletons that we were, we decided on the direct approach. We hitch-hiked down to Strasbourg from our place in Leuven, having slept out one night on the way in some sort of building site just outside Metz. In Strasbourg we met some French students who befriended us and offered to put us up for a couple of nights. And so the assault on the bastions of justice began.

Turned out it wasn’t the actual Court we wanted – or at least, not at first. You had to start with the Council of Europe, and if they thought you had an arguable case they would represent you against your government at the Court.

So we go into the Council of Europe building, and someone explains that we will need to see the British rapporteur. We’re shown into a room, and a few minutes later in walks a glamorous young person announced as Madame Dollé, who turns out to be English. She’s quite matey with us, and says something along the lines of “Nice try lads, but I’m afraid you’ve got no chance!”

Well we hadn’t come all this way to be shown the door quite that quickly, so patiently we set out to demonstrate that this wasn’t just something we’d dreamed up for a laugh after a few drinks in the pub one night but was actually quite a serious issue, and eventually her face lightened up, as she said, “Yes, yes it’s about time we had a freedom of expression case here.” She gave us some forms to fill in then and there, and said we should find a lawyer to help us prepare our claim in detail. That was March 1983. Quite hopeful, after a tricky start.

Meanwhile back in England the Times and the Evening Standard had started following developments, which was a great asset, because getting publicity about the issue was half the battle – I mean, most people back home in those days didn’t even know that you couldn’t play music in a public place in London without being arrested.

We actually thought we had quite a good case. With, for example, Government publications like this one making use of images of buskers (THE HAPPY WANDERERS, a group of buskers from the 1950’s) to represent the character of Britain to people abroad, while at the same time British police were playing a nasty, dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with real-life buskers every day of the week – well, looked at in that way, the whole argument seemed cut and dried.

We had a lot to learn. The Commission Of Human Rights issued their report in October, turning down our application.

First off, they wouldn’t even commit themselves as to whether “the practice of street entertainment for gain falls within the scope of freedom of expression”.

Second, the fact that it was against the law apparently didn’t matter because “the applicants would be able to exercise their profession by virtue of an apparent official tolerance of buskers” (not something that we’d ever noticed).

And third, “The applicants have not substantiated their claim that they are outlawed, having managed to avoid serious confrontation with the police and prosecution for some years by their mobility” – so we’d weakened our case against the British Government by going abroad to avoid getting nicked, and our government had behaved very decently by allowing us to leave!

Two subsequent attempts, one in 1984 and one in 1995, also failed, and for the same reasons.

On one of our visits to Strasbourg in the eighties we stayed a night with an interesting guy we had got talking to – a soixante-huitard (or “sixty-eighter” in English), i.e. veteran of the 1968 riots and strikes in Paris. We discussed with him what we were trying to do. “Don’t worry”, he said, “the lawyers and judges will be sitting tonight in the finest restaurants in town, laughing about your case over a glass of champagne”.

To be continued…

If I look back, I can see two or three chance happenings in my early years that defined the course my life was to take. A meeting with Lionel Took when I was thirteen was the first.

So who was he, and what happened?

Well, I’d been trying for a while to get somewhere with playing a rather odd, junior-size guitar that my parents had given me for my eleventh birthday. My elder brother Martin played also, with friends of his, but though he was always quite encouraging in a general sense, there wasn’t really a role for me in their group, so I had rather a lone struggle.

Lionel Took was a friend of Martin’s, who lived nearby. One day in the Autumn of 1964, he just happened to come round to our house, but Martin was out – although his guitar must have been leaning against a chair in the living room. Lionel was interested in folk music and, for whatever reason, he just decided to fill in the time as he waited for Martin by showing me a few things on his guitar – like how to play finger style, and how to play the introduction to The Animals’ version of “House of the Rising Sun”, (a sort of all-purpose beginners package, back in the day). And if Martin hadn’t been out that afternoon, or had come back earlier…..the whole story might never have happened.

As it was, I never looked back. I pestered my mother until they got me a proper guitar for Christmas (well, Christmas and birthday combined, in fact, because it stretched the budget a bit, but I got the guitar at Christmas anyway), my grandparents chipped in with a harmonica as their contribution, I made a harness – so that I could play the two at the same time – out of a converted wire coat-hanger, and I was away, with a song about a fox and a goose, if my memory serves me. It seems that at some point during the years that followed I conceived the idea, without telling anybody else or even letting my conscious mind fully in on the plan, to live my life as a sort of amalgam of “The Autobiography of a Supertramp” and “Bound For Glory” (autobiographies respectively of the Welsh poet W.H.Davies and the American folk singer Woody Guthrie). And after I’d paid my dues to the grand old British Education System, some eight years later, I went off and just did it.

If there was a problem at school, it was that the type of pupil I was, i.e. rather conservative, earnest and hard-working, didn’t fit so well with the type of musician I was trying to be, i.e. into contemporary folk and pop-rock. My teachers were mostly very friendly and helpful to me, but I would have to say that the chief impetus was concerned with getting my arse up the M11 to Cambridge rather than getting myself a career as a busker-songwriter.

And when I did get to Cambridge, I would again have to say that I never really settled in. Considering that I was, as far as I knew at the time, the first person in my family to get to Cambridge; and then understanding how proud they all were of me, and how encouraging they had always been along the way… well, the truth was I couldn’t lightly walk away from it all. And of course, the knowledge that I had successfully competed for my place did give me something to be proud of, even if my music was going nowhere. So it was easier to just immerse myself in the whole collective experience, on the vague assumption that something would work out at some point, rather than admit that I had lost my way, and get out of the gilded cage while there was still time.

Photographs by Matt Moon

I approach my years at Cambridge with a little more humility these days than before – time alters one’s perspective. It was clearly a golden opportunity for a young person to set themselves up for life. It’s just that I wasn’t that person. And I couldn’t see any way to fit in with, nor usefully contribute to, the situation I was in – nor indeed could I even get out of it, as I have already explained. Retrospectively, I’m sorry it all went so wrong – though I hope anybody that I upset back then has recovered from it by now! A lot of water has passed under the bridge in the meantime, and today it seems to me that the years of chronic indecision, wasted though I used to consider them, were all but inevitable.

And so I want to conclude by recording that, at some point after I had started working with Bongo Mike, who was one of the most committed opponents of elitism and snobbery in art that you could ever hope to meet, he said to me that one of the reasons why he had been interested to get me to join with him in distributing poems in the street, and later playing music as well, was that when we had first met, in a squat in Belsize Park in 1973, when I was completely destitute, I told him that I had been to Cambridge University. That’s how hard it is to escape the whole thing – I even got my job as a busker because I’d been to Cambridge!

And as a footnote: I actually became acquainted with “The Autobiography of a Supertramp” because an English teacher at school read it to us in its entirety. I find myself wondering, these days, if it ever crossed his mind that any of us would be inspired to emulate the author.

“Listen Chaps, You’ve Won. It’s Only A Question Of How Much!”

It was 1984. Our second application to the European Court of Human Rights had joined our first one in the dustbin of history. And a visit we had made to the United Nations Commission in Geneva had borne similarly little fruit. It’s not my remit to belittle the work of these organisations – simply to point out how remote their authority seemed to be from the concerns of two buskers, guitar and bongos and collapsible stool in hand, who managed to fall foul of the authorities – in one way or another – in virtually every country they worked in.

Anyway, it being early July, there was a bit more busking to be done – in Geneva, Lausanne and a few other places – before the café terraces of Western Europe became populated entirely with summer tourists (who seldom paid), and then we would be disappearing to a cheaper part of the continent to give our voices a rest for a month or two, before taking on the London tubes and trains in the Autumn.

1984’s summer break was an interesting one, which I’ll probably talk about in some later post, but the storyline I’m following here skips the rest of the summer, taking us back to UK in early October, and up the M1/M6 to Chorley in Lancashire, to visit our friends Stefan Sierzant and Barry Pamplin, two radical lawyers who had successfully sued the Kensington Police on our behalf over an illegal body search, and who were interested in our campaign against the abuse of buskers on the London Tube.



At our conference with Barry we showed him a copy of the London Transport bye laws, and pointed out to him the two regulations that related to busking, viz, 22(1) which forbade the playing of music to the annoyance of any other person, and 22(2)(c) which forbade unlicensed soliciting for alms, reward or employment. We described a typical sort of incident, where a train guard or platform attendant would hear our music as we were performing on a train carriage, would board the train and summarily order us off.

Photographs by Seamus McGarvey

Barry thought for a moment: “Ok”, he said, “next time you get one of these interruptions, ask if anyone is annoyed by the music. If no-one says they are annoyed, then it seems to me that you haven’t committed an offence, so there would be no reason for the staff to demand that you leave the train. Oh, and try to get a witness to what happens.”

Not so long after that we did run into another interruption by a train guard, who heard our performance on a District Line Tube train and ordered us off. The passengers, when asked, didn’t say they were annoyed, so we refused to get off. The guard, and the platform staff who had come over to support him, eventually gave up arguing with us, and sent the train away – but four stations down the line the police were waiting. They dragged us off the train, marched us to an office where they held us for half an hour, then let us go. We had, however, got two witnesses from among the passengers, one of whom actually got off the train with us and stayed around until we were released.

We wrote out a statement and sent it off, together with the witnesses’ details, to Barry in Chorley. And after some to-ing and fro-ing of paperwork, Sierzants issued a writ for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment against the two Police officers in question, who belonged to the British Transport Police. (It seems it’s a peculiarity of legal disputes, that you don’t always end up suing the people who actually started the trouble.)

But it was a scary moment. The possibility of being run off the transport system, losing our income and having to flee abroad again was ever-present in our minds. People we spoke to advised us to give it up, repeating the mantra, “You can’t fight the police”.

For a number of reasons the case was delayed coming to court, but on July 4th, 5th and 6th 1988 we had our moment. The judge was not very sympathetic to our case, seeming to be himself annoyed about the fact that there were so many journalists there to report on it. And in fact it didn’t seem to be going very well for us, despite the evidence of a Mr Christopher Wintle – then Head of Music at Goldsmiths College – who although not present on the day of the incident under discussion, gave a glowing account of a performance of ours that he had witnessed on a train on a different day.

It was when our barrister Mr Nigel Ley was cross-examining the last witness in the case, one of the policemen, that things changed. The constable’s memory of the incident differed from ours in several respects, but it was a point about which he actually agreed with us – that he hadn’t arrested us – that seemed to cause a problem for London Underground.

It’s curious how everything can turn on one momentary slip. Because, with the PC being so sure that they hadn’t arrested us, by which power then had they held us in the office? The whole atmosphere in the court changed in a second – though Mike and I, not being lawyers ourselves, had to wait till later to properly understand why. Mr Ley spoke to us afterwards, pronouncing those unforgettable words, “Listen chaps, you’ve won. It’s only a question of how much!”

It certainly was. We got a sense of the way the wind was blowing as Judge Harris, in his summing up (which was subsequently adjudged by the Court of Appeal to have been defective), advised the Jury that they were at liberty to award minimal damages, since the imprisonment had been purely “technical” – as he saw it. The jury duly awarded us twenty pence.

There was a slightly bizarre postscript to the story. A considerable time – maybe 15 years – later, Mike and I had just finished performing our act on a British Railways train from Waterloo to Wimbledon, and were making a brief collection from the passengers. It had been quite popular, and one man spoke to Mike as he put a pound coin in the upturned bongos:

“That’s more than I gave you last time” he said mysteriously.

“Oh, how much was it that time?” asked Mike, “have you seen us before, then?”

“I sure have”, he replied, “I gave you twenty pence last time. I was on the jury at Westminster County Court that day!”.

“Oh”, said Mike, a bit taken aback, “did you know, we were quite upset about that.”

“Yes, I heard all about it”, he said, “I saw you on the news that night, on the telly. But you got us wrong. We weren’t against you. It’s just we reckoned you two was having a laugh, so we thought we’d have one as well. That’s all it was!”

So, thanks to Judge Harris’s summing up, and a jury’s sense of humour, we had all ended up looking a bit ridiculous; but in news terms, the week had been ours.

Mike and I felt already that London Underground would eventually have to back down; and following further pressure from us with a renewed application to Strasbourg and the setting up of a campaigning web-site, and after another group of buskers some years later took up a case of their own, which generated further publicity even though they lost the case, the die was definitely cast. But the idea that any new regime brought in by the said London Underground (as they would do eventually in 2003) would be operated in such a way as to genuinely liberate buskers as artists, and busking as an art form in its own right – Situation Art, as we called it ….. well that was just a dream too far.

Anyway, this is a film of an act that we used to perform on trains in and around London.