Where Does The Music Go To ?

It’s a Friday morning in early 1974. I have gone with Bongo Mike to the Covent Garden Community Centre in Earlham Street, Central London, because a jazz group that’s going to be playing there at the weekend will be performing some of his songs as part of their set, and he’s going to be doing a spot himself. There’s just been a general election the day before, and we sit around watching late results as they come through on the TV, while we wait to see Mike’s contact at the Centre, and discuss tomorrow’s concert. (Harold Wilson won, by the way.)

So now it’s Saturday evening, and a group called Okuren, featuring singer Maggie Nicols, are playing – including, as mentioned, four songs co-written by Mike. The lyrics of the songs have been written out with illustrations, in Mike’s trademark style, and displayed at the front of the stage, where Maggie can point to them as she introduces and sings each one.

Over the years that followed I would run into Maggie from time to time, generally when I was with Mike, and once or twice we met her daughter Aura – and in between, Mike would fill me in about how he got to know them…

It was in the early 60’s. Maggie was working at the famous Windmill Club as a “Windmill Girl”. After the show the girls would chill at a hang-out called Le Duce in D’Arblay Street, and who should Maggie get into conversation with but a young drummer called Mike Koskie (later to re-brand himself as Bongo Mike), who was a “face” round Soho clubs in those days. One of the topics of conversation was how Maggie had an ambition to be a jazz singer…and she credits Mike with having been the first person on the scene to take this idea of hers seriously, and encourage her.

With regard to her subsequent lifelong career as singer and activist, let me provide a link to Maggie’s website .

Though not a street musician, Maggie was always a supporter of the cause we had given ourselves to, and although very busy with her own involvements, she did support us – along with Aura – at demonstrations against the heavy-handed busker licensing schemes, notably those proposed by London Underground and Westminster Council, which seemed to be the official answer – in the early 2000’s – to our campaign about a better deal for street musicians. Below is a clip from BBC local news coverage of one of these:

At around the time when these licensing schemes were being put forward, or maybe a bit earlier actually, Mike and I were in Skopje, Macedonia – a place which often felt like our second home in those days – and having there the peace of mind to be creative, we wrote between us a song called “Where Does The Music Go To..”. We asked Vlatko Kaevski, a Macedonian musician and associate of ours at that time, to make an arrangement of the song, and started wondering who might sing it.

Back in London we played to Maggie what we had already got together, asked if she was interested, she suggested she might do it along with Aura her daughter, since the song works best with two singers – and the result, renamed as “A Secret Love”, can be listened to below. I have always particularly liked this lyric of Mike’s, dancing as it does between artistic censorship and sexual repression.