Back to the Five Bells

After a trip last week to see my academic supervisor at Goldsmiths in New Cross, I walked down to the Old Kent Road ‒ to the Five Bells pub.

My brother David and I, together with a small gang of friends, used to go there to drink beer and to hear the live music. It was 1964ish, so you can imagine what kind of sounds they were.

The pub was always packed and the regular house band stoked up a storm. Mostly the feeling was of shared bonhomie. At least, that’s how I recall it. They made a big impression on me, and certainly had an influence on my own style of performing in subsequent years.

The Five Bells is much as it was nearly fifty years ago, but there doesn’t seem to be any live music there these days. The stage is still in its place (above), but no one plays on it any more.

It seemed such an adventure in the ′60s, to drive down to deepest New Cross in South-East London on a dark winter’s evening, across the river from Kensington, where we were living in genteel poverty at the time.

Little did I know then that I would spend so many years living just a short way up the hill in lovely Blackheath.

Living life backwards

I’ve just signed on as a student.

I’m starting a doctoral course in music history at Goldsmiths College, which is part of London University, specialising in the arts and humanities.

My father groomed me to follow in his footsteps in medicine, but I don’t remember ever showing any real interest in that path. It seemed to me some fifty years ago that the only way to escape was to fail my ‘A’ levels and go to work. So that’s what I did.

Now, in my 60s, I may well fulfil my father’s wish and become a doctor – though not exactly in the field he anticipated for me.

It’s an exciting new chapter.