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All the places I’ve lived in London

In the Autumn of 1977, I moved to London; I was 23 years old. I’ve lived here ever since except for an eight-year stint in Asia from 2007. During lockdown I’ve been roaming about on my bike taking pictures of the very different, almost empty, London that has appeared before us.

To set myself a goal I decided to visit all six addresses I’ve called home since I arrived in the capital and take a picture of myself in front of them. This is my home front, together with a little story or two.

Royal College Street, Camden N1 0RY

Full of fear and trepidation the decision was taken to move from Cropredy, a little village just outside Banbury in Oxfordshire, to London. We moved to a house share with my old friend James (well he’s old now) and various other young people kick starting their lives. The house had central heating which I’d never experienced before. James and I played bar billiards at the Old Eagle round the corner. The place wasn’t that much to look at then, but it looks in a right state now.

Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead NW6 3BE

After a year in Camden the first wife and I decided to rent in West Hampstead. We bought our first VHS video recorder. The night we got it, I managed to spill a glass of wine directly into the front where you loaded the tape. It had to be replaced, as indeed did the marriage.

Dukes Avenue, Muswell Hill N10 2PU

We bought this house for the princely sum of £84,000. I know this sounds like nothing now, but honestly at the time it was a king’s ransom; an unimaginable sum. We could only afford it because of generous help from the in-laws. The marriage broke down, I took to running around Alexandra Palace and ran away in 1983.

Ardleigh Road, Hackney N1 4HS

This one-bedroom flat cost me £15,000 in 1984. I had huge amounts of fun here for around ten years. It’s where I learnt to be young again. Flo did my ironing. When I went back to take this picture she was there, now 86 years old.

St Pauls Road Islington N1 2LJ

I owned a recording studio in St Pauls Road, hence the flat in Ardleigh Road. As you can see it’s now a Thai Restaurant. I didn’t live here, though there were some long nights. The studio was called the Red Shop and I ran it from 1980 to 1990 when I set out to do other things. My assistant was Robert Di Giuseppe, AKA Brains. Where is he now? I met some of my closest friends here, many of whom are my friends to this day.

Ufton Road N1 4HE

The future Mrs Preen decided that living in a one bed flat with me was more than any sane person could bear; we needed a house. I put the word out and wide-boy Barry stopped by and said words to the effect, yeah might have something. A day later he said pay £2k to this housing association and a house in highly desirable De Beauvoir can be yours for £400 a month. We didn’t ask too many questions. ABC News sent me skimming round the world and Mrs Preen worked her way around the national newspapers.

London SW8

In 2001 we bought this house from one of Mrs Preen’s colleagues on her majesty’s Daily Express. It was derelict; we did it up. We got married and our daughter was born in 2003. We moved to Thailand in 2007 and came back in 2014. We are about to do the house up again. This is home.

Lockdown Lowdown 15.5.20

This lockdown is a bit like those magnificent men in their flying machines, sometimes you feel up-tiddly-up and then down-tiddly-down.
Jack Daniel’s can help.
Having just returned from a bike ride around Hyde Park on a beautiful spring morning I’m definitely on the up-tiddly-up side of things.
One day my lovely London will return, just been put in the deep freeze. Despite being 20c today
Stat attack 1: Only 24 new reported cases of C-19 in London yesterday, down-tiddly-down from 200,000 daily cases in March.
Stat attack 2: Around 7.5 million people in the UK have been furloughed. If you combine that figure with those who work in the public sector the government is now paying the wages of almost half the working population.
As you can see, I now have a matching mask and hat combo. So important to remain stylish in these trying times.
Gentlemen, if you want the essential Lockdown Look then support a British business and click here.
The firm I work for is closing their offices in Holborn on Sunday. Going in to collect my bit and pieces. Working from home from now on. Still have a job, hurrah!
Bingeing on Ozark, the sleeziest, shadiest most squalid money laundering box set on Netflix. Required viewing for a certain warped kind of viewer.

Lowdown on the lockdown 10.5.20

Preen Sunday walk down the deserted South Bank.
Bumped into Gary filming a live and stand up for NBC.
Watched an episode of the Repair Shop. Required viewing in time of stress.
PM making announcement tonight where the words change from Stay at Home to Stay Alert.
Some criticism that this is confused messaging from Number 10.
Weather turned cold at about lunchtime. Down to 14C.
Back up to the loft for me and more rummaging.
Found some old photos.
The one on the left is me in Nashville recording a Billie Jo Spears album sometime in the dim and distant 80s.
Writing this upstairs in the office…
Cake smells emanating from the kitchen. This is good news.
Indian curry for supper tonight, also good news.
Back on the 5/2 diet tomorrow, less good news.

Lust for Life: Van Gogh at Tate Britain

It was always the sodding Sunflowers. The first Van Gogh painting I ever saw and if I’d had my way the last. Seventies student bedsits were crammed with posters of either the Tennis Girl, or Van Gogh’s drab pot of blooms. Perhaps they were right for the 70s in their awful beige flatness. Over the years my opinion of the troubled post-impressionist shifted somewhat, but I can’t say the Tate’s Van Gogh and Britain filled me with expectant joy. Sometimes it’s lovely to be proved wrong.

Everyone is describing this as a blockbuster exhibition so, being a member and to beat the crowds, I snuck in to see the show at 8am on a Sunday morning.

To be clear, VG never painted a single picture in England though he lived near the Oval in London in his early 20s while working for an art dealer. Apparently, he loved the place, loved Dickens and said: “My whole life is aimed at making the things from everyday life that Dickens describes.”

The curators of this exhibition have done an astonishing job in selecting work that influenced the artist and in turn artists who were influenced by the troubled, red-headed Dutchman. He lived for just 37 years, painted for only ten of them and only made his artistic and stylistic breakthrough in the last two years of his life during which he created more than 2,000 pictures. If my maths is right, and I certainly wouldn’t guarantee it, that’s almost 20 a week. He was mentally disturbed and of course took his own life, but the range and intensity of his work leaves the viewer breathless.

A few years ago, the Royal Academy hosted the YBA’s ‘Sensation’ exhibition with the likes of Damien Hurst and Tracey Emin. It had the right-wing press in a lather not knowing whether to be morally outraged or to make fun of it. Twenty years after Van Gogh’s death his paintings were introduced to the British public in an exhibition at the Tate titled: Manet and the Post-Impressionists. At the Tate today there’s a wall of newspaper cuttings looking at that exhibition that are just as snide and sneering as those levelled at ‘Sensation’ but interestingly just like ‘Sensation’ it was wildly popular with the public and attracted more than 25,000 visitors.

After the war, when people must have been craving colour, the Tate staged a Van Gogh exhibition which also proved highly popular. There’s a photograph in one of the glass cases of punters queuing on the front steps, eager to get in. Similarly, as I left the current exhibition today there was a line of people stretching out the door. Van Gogh identified with the working man, perhaps with everyman and we seem to respond. Even at his most psychedelic, and some of these paintings are eye-melting, he speaks directly to us.

The standout picture of his in this exhibition is probably Starry Night, but some of the self-portraits are breathtaking and, unlikely as it might seem, a small picture of a pair of boots is heart breaking for reasons it’s hard to explain.

Shoes

Obviously, those going to see this exhibition will be looking for pictures by the man himself, but there are wonderful paintings by his Contemporaries and those who came after. I thought John Everett Millais was just another of those drippy pre-Raphaelites. He did the one of Ophelia, a hippy looking bird, drowning in a river. But just take a look at his magnificent ‘Chill October’ which is technically brilliant and seems to epitomise a cold autumnal British landscape. The final three paintings are by Francis Bacon titled Van Gogh in a Landscape and I know most won’t agree but they are perhaps the greatest works in the entire exhibition.

Perhaps it’s down to decades of prejudice but ‘Sunflowers’ still looks drab, beige and curiously two dimensional. The exact opposite of just about everything else in this overwhelming exhibition. Don’t stop to think about it, just go.