Listen to Bad Penny Blues – The Transmissions
Transmissions
The initial seeds of the novel Bad Penny Blues were planted while reading Jack of Jumps by the late David Seabrook, a true crime account of the unsolved Jack The Stripper murders of prostitutes that happened in West London between 1959-65. Like his Whitechapel forefather, this Jack created the biggest manhunt in Metropolitan police history, yet was never apprehended. His reign ended suddenly in 1965, without explanation, and since then, these crimes seem to have faded from public memory.
Most of the victims either lived or worked in Ladbroke Grove, where I have lived for the past 21 years, and it was while reading the text for the 2007 Portobello Film Festival by celebrated local psychogeographer Tom Vague that I made the connection that demanded the book be written. In 1959, legendary producer Joe Meek was a resident of Arundel Gardens W11, where I also lived for many years and indeed set my first novel, The Not Knowing. Here, Joe was dabbling in the possibilities of both sound and Spiritualism, producing bands at Lansdowne Studios by day and holding séances or piecing together his masterwork I Hear A New World by night.
It was in Arundel Gardens that Joe and his friends conducted the séance that foretold the date of Buddy Holly’s death, which would also prove to be that of Joe’s own demise. But it was from just outside Lansdowne Studios, on the corner connecting that road and Holland Park Avenue in the minutes after 1.10am on 17 June 1959, where the first victim of Jack the Stripper was taken from this world an into the next. Could Joe have possibly been at work up at Lansdowne while it happened, using radios to create strange signals and open up new channels? Was he unwittingly letting the darkness in?
The third coincidence, which seemed to suggest that I was on the right track, again came from Tom Vague, in his Getting It Straight In Notting Hill Gate. The headquarters of the Christian Spiritualist Greater World Assembly, run in the Twenties and Thirties by the famous trance medium Winifred Moyes, was just across the road from Lansdowne Studios.
The channel was open.
The idea of turning the work into a series of 'Transmissions' came from Pete Woodhead.
Pete is an electronic composer who cut his musical teeth as part of O Yuki Conjugate and The Sons of Silence and is best know for co-composing the soundtrack for the hit British zombie movie Shaun of the Dead. United by a mutual love for weird cinema, exotic sounds and louche London living, Pete and I first bonded over a conversation about the glory of Warren Oates in the John Brown Publishing canteen over a decade ago, when we were both working for Bizarre magazine. There could be no one better to articulate the sounds bubbling away in my subconscious as I wrote this piece than Pete, a fellow longtime resident of Ladbroke Grove and fan of Joe Meek. The Transmissions were perfectly channeled through his own radiophonic workshop and convey the exact feelings that went into the writing.
You could say that we have struck a happy medium....
Click below to download Transmission 1,2 & 3
(This work is intended for Adult Audiences)
Most of the victims either lived or worked in Ladbroke Grove, where I have lived for the past 21 years, and it was while reading the text for the 2007 Portobello Film Festival by celebrated local psychogeographer Tom Vague that I made the connection that demanded the book be written. In 1959, legendary producer Joe Meek was a resident of Arundel Gardens W11, where I also lived for many years and indeed set my first novel, The Not Knowing. Here, Joe was dabbling in the possibilities of both sound and Spiritualism, producing bands at Lansdowne Studios by day and holding séances or piecing together his masterwork I Hear A New World by night.
It was in Arundel Gardens that Joe and his friends conducted the séance that foretold the date of Buddy Holly’s death, which would also prove to be that of Joe’s own demise. But it was from just outside Lansdowne Studios, on the corner connecting that road and Holland Park Avenue in the minutes after 1.10am on 17 June 1959, where the first victim of Jack the Stripper was taken from this world an into the next. Could Joe have possibly been at work up at Lansdowne while it happened, using radios to create strange signals and open up new channels? Was he unwittingly letting the darkness in?
The third coincidence, which seemed to suggest that I was on the right track, again came from Tom Vague, in his Getting It Straight In Notting Hill Gate. The headquarters of the Christian Spiritualist Greater World Assembly, run in the Twenties and Thirties by the famous trance medium Winifred Moyes, was just across the road from Lansdowne Studios.
The channel was open.
The idea of turning the work into a series of 'Transmissions' came from Pete Woodhead.
Pete is an electronic composer who cut his musical teeth as part of O Yuki Conjugate and The Sons of Silence and is best know for co-composing the soundtrack for the hit British zombie movie Shaun of the Dead. United by a mutual love for weird cinema, exotic sounds and louche London living, Pete and I first bonded over a conversation about the glory of Warren Oates in the John Brown Publishing canteen over a decade ago, when we were both working for Bizarre magazine. There could be no one better to articulate the sounds bubbling away in my subconscious as I wrote this piece than Pete, a fellow longtime resident of Ladbroke Grove and fan of Joe Meek. The Transmissions were perfectly channeled through his own radiophonic workshop and convey the exact feelings that went into the writing.
You could say that we have struck a happy medium....
Click below to download Transmission 1,2 & 3
(This work is intended for Adult Audiences)
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