I just got this Tartan DVD box set of music documentaries out of a bargain bin. I’d seen End Of The Century at a preview for the flick back in 2004, and I was literally the only person in the cinema when I paid to see Mayor Of Sunset Strip in 2005. I wanted to see these two films again, and figured they were worth picking up cheap even when they’d been bundled with a piece of junk like The Devil And Daniel Johnston. Why has anyone got any time for Johnston? He lacks the charm of The Shaggs and his songs are basically really bad imitations of Jonathan Richmond on his post-Velvet Underground trip.

Two names that come up frequently when I’m looking at the real hip scene of the 1960s are Malcolm Drake AKA Grainger and Trina Simmonds. Their names even appear from time to time in print but to date the semi-official historians of the London counterculture have singularly failed to get to grips with what they and their scene were all about. Alan Semple, who knew Trina Simmonds in the early sixties, told me that before she met Grainger she’d been partnered up with another London streetwalker called Kay, and that this pair were as likely to roll johns as do the business with them.

The conviction of John Worboys last week on 19 charges of drugging and sexually assaulting women in his black cab demonstrates that licenced taxis are neither safe nor reliable. It is believed Worboys raped and assaulted 100 women. The authorities have always had an indulgent attitude towards licenced cabbies and this was undoubtedly a factor that encouraged the old bill to overlook complaints about him (alongside institutional sexism). Both licenced and unlicenced cabs are a menace in London. They clog up roads and in my experience black cab drivers number among the most intolerant motorists in the city, with a size-able proportion of them being particularly aggressive towards pedestrians and cyclists.

While bringing you this blog I haven’t entirely forgotten about the main part of my site, to which this is – of course – just a back end. And over there you get pictures too, whereas this part is all text. Aside from tidying up bits and pieces on the main part of the site, I’ve also been adding new pages. But if you wanna comment on these new pieces you’ll have to do so below, since the main site consists of static pages. On MySpace (I also put this out as an “ediffusion” pamphlet a week or so ago):

My post of 24 January 2009 about career criminal Ray “The Cat” Jones caused a flurry of interest. I got a couple of messages saying Ray was dead, and further confirmation of this in a comment added to that blog yesterday: “Ray died in 2001, just so you know.” Likewise, Neil Milkins told me: “I have made some enquiries with a nephew of Ray, Michael O’Dowd of Nantyglo. (Ray was his mother’s brother.) He said Ray died of cancer in London about 7 years ago.” To clarify my own distant relative status with the greatest cat burglar of all time, Ray’s mother was an older sister of my maternal grandfather David Callaghan (AKA Dai Callan), and my mother – Julia Callan-Thompson – was named after this particular aunt.