THE UNIVERSITY Of THE STREET

Once again it was Mike who started it. In 1975 he first exhibited a series of visual poems (as he styled them) in a small gallery called Art Meeting Place, in Earlham Street, Covent Garden. The series of thirty works was collectively named “From A Poet’s Travels”, and one of the individual works was titled “The University Of The Street”.

The exhibition recalls significant places and significant moments from a period of several years in the early 70s, spent following a trail through England, Wales, France and West Germany; the works feature sketches, combined with searching meditative poetry, together with found collage from each locality.

The building in this picture is the student restaurant in Hamburg, where students and non-students alike were welcome to sit, all day if they wanted, over a cup of coffee and such (but only those possessing a student card were entitled to a cheap meal!). Mike was someone who had never been at ease with institutional education, generally making common cause with outsiders of one sort or another, and in Hamburg – as the poem tells us – a stark contrast became apparent to him between two versions of enlightenment.

In 1978 he and I started performing music in the street in London, settling after a short period of experimentation into a regular pitch in Coventry Street, outside what was then known as Bernard Delfont’s London Experience

Photgraph by Michael Abrahams

So there we were, with our friend David Benn on the tin whistle (or flageolet as it is sometimes called). We were finding out what it was like to be hunted criminals, regularly hauled up in court for “obstructing the free passage along the highway”. Two songs that were to become permanent fixtures in our repertoire were composed on this very spot: It’s A Crime To Play Music In The Streets and I Am The Professor Of The University Of The Street.

“Professor”, the song, had a somewhat unusual origin. Through the Spring of 1978, as we grew into the situation that had informally become “our” pitch, Mike had taken to calling out, at odd moments, the rather memorable cry “I am the professor of the university of the street!” (He was, after all, rather funny that way!) I had in my mind a simple chord progression, which seemed to fit rhythmically with the way he would intone this message, and on one relatively quiet evening we just slipped into a mood of mellow creativity, and Mike began reciting one of his recent street poems as I gently strummed the extended guitar riff.

We were developing the theme when the atmosphere was shattered by the arrival on the scene of two “friendly” policemen: “Just packing up were we, lads? Move along now. Oh, and make sure you’re not here when we get back”.

It was a quiet night anyway; our creative moment had been desecrated; what was there left to do but take the bus back to Stockwell?

Once back in our makeshift home, we hovered between anger and despair. What was the point? Trendy folk-singers making millions out of protest songs, and you couldn’t even sing in the street!! Well, the police had blundered into the song, so they’d just have to stay in it. And so was born “I Am The Professor Of The University Of The Street”, complete with court case, police evidence and sentencing by magistrate!

Our acoustic performance of I Am The Professor… became the mainstay of our busking act on the continent, where we spent much of the following decade, in a kind of exile; but back in London ten years later, we recorded an electric version of the song, which we decided to make into a vinyl single.  We called our electric act then Disco Justice (more on that name another time), and released the record of  I am the Professor…, with  Away from Tube Trains on the B- side, on our own independent label, Newspaper Records.

Both these songs are now on a retrospective new album, THE UNIVERSITY OF THE STREET, which we’re making available on Amazon and other online platforms.