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 Schaeffer (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 or adapted while playing there (“It’s A Crime to Play Music in the Streets”, “Family of Freaks and Schizophrenics” and “I Just Wanna Live My Life” 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 relevance and 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 a famous American violinist performing incognito in a Metro station in Washington in the early morning and receiving only 32 dollars in the hat (as reported in a Washington Post article of April 2007 entitled 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 to be properly appreciated;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 to try and get through to anybody? !

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’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.

PROLOGUE

Right from the start of our busking partnership in Spring 1978, we – aka Bongo Mike and I – were unhappy about our situation as buskers in London generally, and in the West End in particular. After several months of being continually ordered by the police, for no apparent reason, to “move on”, and being then arrested and prosecuted if we resumed playing after they had gone – or even if we were simply rash enough to protest – we eventually reacted by contacting Time Out (in those days a fairly radical magazine) with the whole woeful story of the game of cat-and-mouse endured by buskers all over the capital.

Shortly after the article appeared we followed the recommendation of a Belgian visitor to London with whom we had got talking one day, during a break in our performance, and left these shores for Antwerp…. and beyond. For four years we were no more than occasional visitors back to the UK: NFA (no fixed abode), as the British police would so charmingly designate our status; or nomads, as we saw it, carrying with us, wherever we went, our musical instruments and a large army-surplus kit-bag.

Two places stood out as the only fixed points in our life – i.e. places where we knew we could simply turn up, no questions asked, no matter how low we had got, and just sleep, rest, recover, regroup, etc. These were Wädenswil, in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland, at the home of a journalist friend called Arthur Shappi; and Hotel Shar, in the Stara Charshiya district of Skopje, Yugoslavia.

Belgium had become the centre of our performing life; but Switzerland and/or Yugoslavia were our places of last refuge….

….and as for Britain, where we had now no income or base, it was just a place to which we could make occasional nostalgic forays of one or two days duration (or slightly longer if we could connect with someone we used to know, or find an empty building to squat in, such as the deserted houses on Railton Road in the aftermath of the Brixton riots of 1981).

FOOTHOLD

But all this was to change in 1982. On a train journey early that year from Leuven (the centre of our cafe musician business) to Hasselt (a town in eastern Belgium where we had many times performed), the train had developed an electrical fault and was kept stationary between stops for maybe half an hour. Sitting there with instruments primed and ready to play in the cafes of Hasselt, in a carriage full of people bored and increasingly annoyed at the delay…well, wouldn’t you have decided to just break into song for the fellow passengers, and go round with the hat? It was, after all, not that different from what we would eventually be doing in the restaurants and cafes in Hasselt – if we were ever going to get there!

So we did it, right there, on the train.

Then on a brief return to London in Spring, shortly afterwards, we got talking in a cafe near the Oval to a friend of a friend who invited us to stay temporarily in a spare room in a housing co-op nearby….and, well, the respite thus gained did allow time for an idea to cross our minds, that some tube lines, being situated above ground rather than underground, might be quite suitable for a repeat of what we had done recently on the Belgian train.

But controversy struck from the very beginning. On the first train carriage we tried, a gentleman announcing himself as an employee of the tube started shouting at us and ordered us to stop. Seeing discretion as the better part of valour, we got off the train, boarded the next one, and tried again; this time we were more lucky, and thus emboldened we continued for some time, playing two or three songs on each carriage before taking the hat round, in the time-honoured manner of gipsy-style players – such as we had indeed become on the other side of the English Channel – or indeed, of good old British buskers.

We experimented on various lines with varying degrees of success for a week or so, before returning to Belgium. Significantly, the level of official interference was sufficiently low for there to be an apparently viable modus vivendi in it.

And after as momentous an event in our lives as that had been, it was – I suppose – only a matter of time before we would relocate back to London.

In the event, it took about six months.

LEGAL CONVERSATION

But in the intervening Summer in Leuven we met by chance – while performing to a terraced street cafe – a law professor at the University there, called Raf Geraert. We were explaining to him some extremely distressing aspects of our situation – specifically, the insecurity stemming from the lack of residence rights in Belgium and the continent broadly, and this coupled with the lack of right to perform in public places (to put the case mildly) in UK. In this connection, I present here a relevant poem of Mike’s:

M. Geraert came up with no specific suggestions on this occasion, as I remember, but his grasp of what we were talking about, which few people in those days took at all seriously, impressed us, and opened a new chapter in our minds – if nowhere else, at that stage.

LONDON AGAIN

So, anyway, come Autumn 1982, with new confidence, probably derived from the fact of having glimpsed, however dimly, a way forward, both at a practical and a conceptual level, we came back to London determined this time to find a place to stay, and ran into some luck – a chance meeting in Barclay’s all-night cafe in Whitehall led us to a house in Elephant and Castle where lived a bottler for one or two of the West End buskers (a bottler is the person who takes the hat round when a crowd gathers), who seemed happy for us to sleep there for a while, making it possible for us to explore the possibilities of our new job (busking on trains), start to re-orientate ourselves to the situation in London, and hopefully reconnect with friends from the past.

There was a largish number of musicians who performed underground at Tube stations, in passageways or sometimes at the foot of escalators. This was, of course, illegal – posters announcing the fact were placed everywhere on the walls, and there was a permanent risk of being stopped by members of staff or Transport Police, and further of being charged with a bye-law offence and receiving a fine. This hadn’t appealed to Mike and me in 1978 when we first started playing together, and it still didn’t.

In parallel with this there was, performing in streets mainly in and around the West End, a certain community of more traditional buskers, most of whom we knew from our time in London in the 70’s. There’s was also a fugitive kind of existence, in and out of police stations and Magistrates Courts – precisely what we had left the country to avoid; and even if there could be periods when the heat seemed to be off, the threat was always there.

And lastly, there was just one person who was already playing on the trains – of the Piccadilly Line: a lady called Elsa, who played guitar and sang folk songs with a beautiful and powerful voice, her boyfriend always somewhere nearby, mingling discreetly with the passengers in case of trouble.

We took to performing on trains like ducks to water, concentrating in the early days on the branch of the Piccadilly Line which went to and from Heathrow Airport.

Our bottler friend in Elephant and Castle would be visited at all hours of the day and night by other members of the Soho fraternity: Scotty the one-man-band; Roy “Little Legs”, at 4′ 2″ probably the shortest busker you would run into; the Earl of Mustard, aka Norman Norris, tap dancer “extraordinaire”, self-styled “King of the Buskers” and even, in a considerable flight of fancy, “King of the Squatters” (“everyone who shares a squat with me ends up with a council flat”); and – on a brief visit to London from his then home in Copenhagen – Don Partridge, of “Rosie” fame.

At some point in December we were surprised to see – quite by accident – an article in The Times featuring an interview with a gentleman called Allan Bernard who was running an agency which apparently represented the interests of, and found occasional “professional” work for, a number of the more traditional type of buskers I’ve just been talking about. He gave an interesting appraisal – which echoed our views precisely – of the uselessness of licensed situations such as existed in Covent Garden at the time:

“The Covent Garden system is fine for young music and drama students, guitar strummers and newcomers generally. But it has developed into no more than open-air concerts with, in some cases, benches provided for the audience to sit and watch at certain set times. The art of busking is not just playing an instrument, juggling or tumbling, it is also about how to work a street corner or pavement and the ability to relate very rapidly with a constantly changing audience…”

But sadly the article itself said nothing about the real life situation of constant harassment and arrests for those who practised the art of busking thus described, and was rounded off with an absurd reference to what the journalist called “a renaissance of street life in London”, sacrificing – as it seemed to us – what working buskers knew to be the truth, in favour of a facile up-beat conclusion.

We duly contacted the journalist, Mr Tony Samstag, and explained our points to him. He was reasonable enough to take on board what we said, and on January 4 1983, some three weeks later, we were very happy to see the following article in the same paper:

What we were not expecting, was that many (though certainly not all) of the buskers around at that time would actually be quite hostile to us, and would not support our stand at all.

Nevertheless our blood was up, and though – sadly – we didn’t get the asylum in Belgium, we had a further conversation over there with our law professor friend (see above), who recommended that we try our luck with the European Court of Human Rights.

The progress of our – ultimately unsuccessful – application at the ECHR is detailed in an earlier post, “The Casebook of Bongo Mike and Extremely Frank Jeremy (1)”.

But there were further actions in UK!…..(to be continued.)