London Music

London Music

30 March, 2009
by: Spoonfed Team

OK, you might think that Spoonfed is the place to find a decent pub quiz or bashment night in Knightsbridge, but we sometimes like to be educational too. Don't believe us? Well, here's a whistle-stop tour of London historical musical landmarks.

Royal Albert Hall and Wilton's Music Hall

Like the tube, sewerage, and top hats, the first attempt to really bring live music to the masses was by the Victorians. Before these guys came along, the only exposure to music for most people was church on a Sunday or a guy singing old folk songs in your local pub.

The largest statement of late 19th century public spiritedness has to be The Royal Albert Hall. Opened in 1871 and built to honour the passing of  Prince Albert (hence the name, numb nuts), the hall is one of  Britain's most famous landmarks and is home to The UK's second largest pipe organ, The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and, legend has it, Hitler's ball.

On the other end of the scale, Wilton's Music Hall in Whitechapel is the last preserved example of a Victorian music hall. In the olden days there were hundreds of these in London and cockney chimney sweeps and dockers used to crowd in on a Friday night to watch old women warble 'My Old Man', or crazed Parisian women do the can-can, a dance which was considered incredibly risqué at the time. No wonder gin palaces, and opium dens were so popular.

For more click here to check out London Classical

Abbey Road Studios

Roll on 90 years, and London was a big swinging party, not a put your keys-in-a-bowl kind of swinging party (well sort of, but not as seedy), but more of a sharp-suited, bowl cut, lets-go-down-to-Brighton-and-fight-Rockers kind of party.

Owned by EMI, Abbey Road Studio had become the centre of rock music in the UK thanks to  Cliff Richard and the Shadows ( unbelievably) who recorded 1958's ‘Move It' there ; a record considered by many to be Europe's first proper rock 'n' roll record.

By the late '60s the studio had a reputation for producing groundbreaking albums, Pink Floyd recorded most of their output and many other bands stopped by. But it took one event to turn the whole thing nuclear and that was The Beatles' session in 1970, which resulted in an album that went on to be called 'Abbey Road'. Not only did the Fab 4 invent flanging, backwards recording, automatic double tracking, and controlled feedback, the mere fact that they were there has since turned the studio into a Beatles shrine, attracting thousands of tourists each year to come and stand outside in awe (although arguably it's the zebra crossing that is more famous).

Click here for more London Rock


 
100 Club and Dingwalls

By the mid seventies, London had become ground-zero for the British punk explosion. The first major milestone was the opening of Malcolm McClaren's shop Sex on the King's Road in Chelsea, and his subsequent formation of the Sex Pistols, who had their amps trashed at their first show at the Student's Union of St Martins College.

The first main-stream venue to really pick up on punk was the 100 Club. In 1976 the club played host to the first ever International Punk Festival, an event which helped to push the then new movement from the underground into the cultural and musical mainstream. Bands which played at this event included the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Clash, Buzzcocks and The Damned. The tiny Soho club also had the balls to host a four-week-long Tuesday night residency from the Sex Pistols. Not bad for a club that had built its reputation on London jazz.

Dingwalls in Camden also secured a special place in punk history when it became the site of The Ramones' first UK show in 1976. For most people, including Joe Strummer and members of the The Damned, it was the first proper taste of US punk rock, which was well ahead of the UK at the time, and is now regarded as the catalyst that British punk music needed to move forward. John Lydon hated it though.

Check out some more London punk

Rinse FM

Grime and dubstep, like many of the off-shoots of UK garage, first came to notoriety through pirate radio, and of all these, most famous is Rinse FM. Broadcasting from a roof-top in Tower Hamlets, the station was the first to feature Dizzee Rascal and Wiley and later championed dubstep artists like Skream, Kode9 and Youngsta, despite one of their DJs Slimzee receiving an ASBO that banned him from every roof-top in Tower Hamlets.

Still going, and recently securing a legal license, the station is currently bigging up another garage derivative called Funky, which has taken electro house and combined it with soca, broken beat and afrobeat.

Now don't tell us that we never teach you anything!

Check out more London dubstep and London grime here.

For more like this check out all London Live Music, London DJ Music or London Events.

Spoonfed Team