Max Décharné

A glimpse of lost London – before the yuppie invasion

Michael Bracewell vividly evokes the grit and individuality of the capital before its relentless gentrification in the 1990s

Tina from Ealing at Batcave, in Soho, in 1984. [Getty Images]

In a 1923 book called Echo de Paris, the writer Laurence Houseman attempted to conjure up in a very slim, elegant volume the atmosphere and especially the conversation of an afternoon a quarter century earlier that he had spent in the company of the exiled Oscar Wilde. It was a conscious act of imaginative recreation, seeking to place the reader at the same boulevard table alongside the participants. As the author explained in his introduction:

The scene, as regards its setting — the outside of a Paris restaurant — is true to history; and if, toward the end, a touch of drama has been introduced, the reader will understand that it is more symbolic than actual.

In Soho clubs the DJ would finish the evening by playing Bowie’s version of Jacque Brel’s ‘My Death’

Michael Bracewell’s new work looks back across an even greater span of years, evoking the London of four decades ago in impressionistic and allusive prose that intentionally reads at times like poetry, or an experimental novella: history recalled in non-fiction that mimics fiction. This is a lost world as seen through the eyes of Blitz club regulars, ICA bookshop frequenters, readers of the Face and I.D. magazine — young people drawing inspiration from the likes of William Burroughs and Guy Debord, the residual energy of punk and glam rock, Weimar Berlin, or the newer electronic sounds of Soft Cell and Throbbing Gristle, gatecrashing Notting Hill parties where they meet random strangers such as the man deftly skewered in Bracewell’s clipped description: ‘In a band, in a commune in Kreuzberg; Kurt Schwitters; industrial Dada; runic tattoos; fuck the police.’

Despite the self-imposed timespan of 1979-1986, the episodic narrative often jumps back and forth between those years and the previous decade in order to highlight changes in the city’s architecture, the gradual dawn of computerisation or the myriad effects of the mid-1970s punk upheaval.

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