Kenny.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about the lack of sit down eat-in restaurants in Erith, now that the cafe in Morrison's supermarket is closing down permanently, and since my report it has become apparent that 17 Morrison's supermarkets are to fully close - although local branches have been saved for now. I made one error which was picked up by several readers, in that I did not include the Starburgers restaurant located in Cross Street which has been on that location for several decades and is apparently run by the same family since it first opened. Readers tell me that the service and hospitality in the cafe is excellent and that the food is well cooked and the portions large. Certainly, the reviews on Trip Advisor are extremely good, and many amateur critics particularly praise the homemade milkshakes and the all-day breakfasts that the Starburgers specialises in. I'm also informed that it is very child friendly. I have to admit that I have never eaten in the place but once I am recovered from Long Covid and I'm back to my normal self, I will have to give the place a try as it gets so many excellent reviews and I have to regret that I've completely ignored the cafe when I wrote my original article.  Although Starburgers is part of a very small chain, it would appear that it has been family run since it very first opened, being located in a side street on the approach to the Pier Road car park. It is not somewhere that passing trade will necessarily notice but nevertheless, it would appear that it has built up a very strong reputation and a dedicated customer base over the years. One person who has been a regular customer of the establishment did say to me that his only criticism of the place was that if you ordered a plate of chips you would get a side order of chips with it, as apparently almost every single dish on the menu has this item as a component. That aside. It would appear that it is fulfilling a role for the local community - to be honest if you go to a cafe of this nature, then chips are to be expected. What do you think? Please drop me a line to the usual address - hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Record Store Day 2025 happened yesterday - this is when independent local record shops are publicised and celebrated.  I am a supporter of independent, family owned shops, and it got me thinking. some years ago, I was walking through Soho on my way to a meeting at an office just off Berwick Street. It had been some time since I had passed that way, and I was pleasantly surprised at how the area has been cleaned up and made a lot more visitor friendly. I had cut through St. Anne’s Court – once a very seedy and run down area, but now a pleasant and very up market office and residential location. I really did not need to walk the route that I did, but there were personal reasons, as the area holds some memories for me. Back in the mid 1980’s St. Anne’s Court was the home to Shades Record Shop. This was a basement shop over which was built a structure that somewhat resembled a large garden shed that was plastered in posters advertising bands and films. Alice’s Restaurant was a pirate radio station operating out of North East London, which played an esoteric mix of mainly rock based music – the record shop was allegedly nothing to do with the radio station, but pretty much everyone knew the opposite. To enter the shop you had to go through a slightly forbidding (at least to a thirteen year old) doorway and down a flight of stairs to the shop itself. The first thing one noticed about the shop was the huge number of rock and heavy metal albums the place contained – albums from bands I had never heard of, and exotic imports from Japan, America and elsewhere; the second thing was the fact the ceiling of the shop was covered in black bin liners held in place with drawing pins. Initially I thought this was some kind of post punk arty design, but I soon found out that they were there for a far more prosaic reason; they stopped the rain from leaking through from the upstairs. It was that kind of place – initially it appeared quite intimidating, but the staff were knowledgeable and friendly, and every so often a rock star would pay a visit – Lemmy from Motorhead was a regular, and many rock and heavy metal bands would hold album signings in the shop. Guns N' Roses and Metallica, amongst others appeared in Shades before they became well known, for example. When I was working for Radio Caroline I did not have time to visit, and by the time I turned up in St. Anne's Court a couple of years later, I was only to find it boarded up and empty. Their lease had run out and the landlord had decided to sell the site to a property developer; shortly thereafter the shed was demolished and a new office building constructed on the site.  To be honest the area needed improvement, but nevertheless it was a shame to see the shop disappear. Not long afterwards the radio station closed down, with some of the staff going on to form the excellent and ground breaking RFM Rock Radio, a station that nearly got a commercial licence, but ended up losing out to KISS FM. Shades record shop was a one - off place. You can read more about it here. Locally we still have long established independent record dealer Cruisin’ Records in Welling. I recall visiting the shop in the 1980’s – it held a bewildering variety of stock, from pretty much every musical genre; at the time it leaned towards jazz funk and soul, and I can recall hearing adverts for the shop on several dance themed pirate radio stations at the time. Erith used to have an independent record shop, which was part of a small chain – T.W Records was located on the site of the cab office on the junction of Pier Road and Cross Street. It was a strange place, managed by a person of (to me anyway) indeterminate gender. I never really worked out whether they were he or she, or perhaps somewhere in between (the public profile and understanding of transgender people back then was pretty low). They were not exactly unfriendly, more distant and uninterested – well, that was my impression anyway. The shop was on split levels, with most chart singles and albums on the lower tier, and the more obscure genres, along with a couple of slot machines, and the cash desk were on the upper tier. What anyone who ever visited the place always recalls is the ceiling, which was remarkable – giant purple plaster stalactites hung down, almost reaching head height when you were on the upper tier – they had been there for as long as I could recall. T.W Records also had a shop in Bexleyheath, near the clock tower, where the Furze Wren is now located, as well as a third in Plumstead High Street, though I never visited that branch. The Bexleyheath shop also housed a small cafe, that constantly seemed busy, though I reckon some of their customers nursed a cup of tea and a bacon sarnie for hours. It was a much more conventional looking shop, but both the Erith and Bexleyheath stores had one thing in common – it was widely known that they were both chart return shops. They had special tills that monitored record sales that fed into the weekly record chart. It was meant to be secret, but pretty much everyone – including the record company sales reps knew which shops were chart return, and always made sure that rarities, picture disks and other items desirable to collectors would make their way to those outlets. I recall that the Erith branch would often have large promotional displays in the window, which were left lit up at night, the glow from these would reflect off the purple stalactites to give an eerie atmosphere – very surreal stuff. A pity that the shops are long gone – but at least Cruisin’ Records are carrying on the tradition. 

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the first UK cellular telephones going on sale to the general public. The official launch was on the first of January 1985, but for the first few months, phones were almost exclusively sold to corporations and large businesses. It was only at the beginning of April 1985 that the general public could - for a price - buy a transportable phone, such as the model shown above - click on the image for a larger view. The companies we know as Vodafone and O2 today were Racal-Vodafone and Securicor-Cellnet back then; phones were the size of a small suitcase and only did voice calls - no text or apps, let alone any kind of camera or GPS. The two companies had spent the months up to the 1st January launch deadline fighting for cell sites and testing coverage, particularly in London. There was no hint of site-sharing. The services used analogue TACS (Total Access Control System), and later ETACS (Enhanced TACS), as more frequencies became necessary. The analogue calls could easily be monitored using a radio scanner - as in the infamous Princess Diana "Squidgygate" tapes. The cellular service was not actually the first mobile phone system available - there was a Carphone Radio service called Band 3, but that was push-to-talk and all calls had to go through an operator to be connected. Calls were limited as was the number of users. You had to go on a waiting list and wait for a subscriber to close an account before you could buy one. It was complex, limited in coverage and extremely expensive. The first modern, cellular call was undertaken by Vodafone's Michael Harrison, the son of former Vodafone Chairman Sir Ernest Harrison, who was the first to test the system, calling his father at midnight on 1st January, 1985. Michael Harrison secretly left his family’s New Year’s Eve party at their home in Surrey in the UK to surprise his father, calling him from London’s Parliament Square. Harrison made the historic call from one of the first mobile devices – a Transportable Vodafone VT1, which weighed 11lb (5kg) and had around 30 minutes of talk time - more on this groundbreaking device in a bit. Harrison recalls that the line was crystal clear, although the excited shouting of New Year’s Eve revellers in London created considerable background noise. As Sir Ernest Harrison answered the phone, Michael said: “Hi Dad. It’s Mike. This is the first-ever call made on a UK commercial mobile network”. Which isn't quite “one small step” but is better than, “Watson come here I want to see you". The official press launch was held days later at St Katherine’s Docks in London where Vodafone had hired comedian Ernie Wise make the first public mobile phone call. Wise brought the same transportable device to St Katherine’s Docks in London in a 19th century mail coach, using one of the oldest forms of communications – sending a letter – to highlight the speed and convenience of these new mobile phones. Ernie Wise’s call was received at the original Vodafone headquarters, where a handful of employees were based in an office above an Indian restaurant in Newbury, Berkshire. Heavy and cumbersome, the first generation of mobile phones were sold in the UK from 1984 – before the first products were even available and before the network was officially live. Such was the demand for a fully portable, cellular phone that more than two thousand orders had been taken by the Vodafone sales team before Michael Harrison made his call from Parliament Square. By the end of 1985, over twelve thousand devices had been sold. Very soon afterwards a good friend of mine got given a VT1 portable TACS phone by his then employer, British Telecom. The phone was so powerful that when he made trips to the Carrefour Hypermarket in Calais, he could call his Mum to find out what she wanted him to buy, connecting via the British mobile phone cell in Dover (there was no international mobile roaming back in those days). Comments and feedback to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com. 

This month, interestingly also marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Kenny Everett. The man who many, including myself, regard as Britain's greatest ever DJ. He was born Maurice James Christopher Cole on Christmas Day 1944 in Liverpool. He attended the same school as offshore radio DJ Mike Aherne and considered joining the church; indeed he did spend some time in a Catholic seminary, but he left under a cloud, having made free with the communion wine. His first paying job was in a bakery. With a passion for radio and playing around with tape recorders, he sent a tape of a home-made programme to the BBC. Having acquired an ability to impersonate everything from The Goons to the opening of the airlocks in Journey into Space, he bought two tape-recorders and began to make his own programmes, interspersing music with bouts of silliness. This interested the Corporation enough to invite him down to London and he was interviewed on the Home Service's Midweek programme. Kenny hoped it would lead to a job with the BBC but it did not. Instead he joined the new offshore station Radio London when it launched at Christmas 1964. Everett was madly seasick at first, but offshore radio suited him: it meant access to studio equipment 24 hours a day (DJs did three weeks on, and a week off), and all the time in the world to invent loopy characters (as the first zoo DJ, Everett was the father of Steve Wright and all the rest). He chose his new name from that of the Hollywood actor Edward Everett Horton, and both his own show and the double headed programme he co-presented with Dave Cash, The Kenny and Cash Show, won a massive following. His writing and tape-editing skills were phenomenal and Kenny was responsible for many of Radio London's more creative advertisements, jingles and promotions. Unfortunately his humour was not always appreciated by the management and he was fired for six months after making fun of the sponsored religious show The World Tomorrow, the station's biggest advertiser. Along with Jerry Leighton from Radio Caroline and Ron O'Quinn from “Swinging” Radio England, Kenny joined The Beatles on their 1966 tour of the USA sending back reports on the concerts, sponsored by Bassett's Jelly Babies. Sharing the same Liverpool background, Kenny developed an obvious rapport with “The Fab Four”. He left Radio London in March 1967 and worked on Radio Luxembourg and the BBC Light Programme, later joining BBC Radio One at its launch. Although hugely popular he was soon in trouble again. He was constantly being told off for criticising the station in the press and when he joked on air that the wife of the then Minister of Transport had passed her advanced driving test by bribing the examiner, it was the final straw. He was sacked. He presented some shows on BBC local radio and others on Radio Monte Carlo International. By 1969, he had married Audrey "Lee" Middleton, a former pop star and psychic better known by her stage name Lady Lee - who had been Billy Fury's girlfriend. Within a decade, he had realised he was gay and they parted but remained friends, and it was she who found him his first boyfriend. It was the launch of London's Capital Radio in 1973 that returned him to the forefront of British broadcasting. Here he was reunited with his old partner Dave Cash and their Breakfast Show helped to establish the new station. From Capital, Kenny moved to BBC Radio 2 and then back again to Capital. Having got a job with the BBC once more, Kenny became so big that he was often to be found hanging out with the very stars whose music he played. One of his closest friends was Freddie Mercury. It was in 1978, at the height of his radio powers, that he moved into TV with a bang. The Kenny Everett Video Show introduced the nation to a host of new, crazy characters, created by the writing team of Kenny, Barry Cryer, American Dick Vosburgh and Canadian Ray Cameron, father of current comic Michael McIntyre. The latest hit singles were featured, often performed by the bands and singers themselves, and all sorts of people were more than happy to appear alongside the anarchic Kenny. From Cliff Richard to Billy Connolly, they would all be struggling to keep a straight face as Everett created mayhem around them. Captain Kremmen, science-fiction hero, punk rocker Sid Snot and lecherous Frenchman Marcel Wave were among his characters. The third series ended with Kenny making a farewell speech as the crew removed the set and background scenery, picking him up and placing him in a dustbin. In the 80s, having fully thrown off his guilt about his sexuality, he took up nightclubbing with a vengeance, and it was on one such evening out that he met Nikolai Grishanovich, the lover from whom he would eventually contract HIV. Grishanovich was one of the two husbands he eventually unveiled to the press (the other was a Spanish waiter, Pepe Flores), and he died of an AIDS-related illness in 1991, the same year as Everett's close friend Freddie Mercury. In 1993 he confirmed newspaper reports that he was HIV-positive but continued presenting shows on Capital Gold until his death of AIDS-related causes on 4th April 1995. A genuinely original talent, a naturally funny man. and a brilliantly skilled editor, he was a disc-jockey whose listeners eagerly awaited his every word Everett was the subject of an episode of BBC Radio 4's "Great Lives". Alongside his radio success, Kenny also enjoyed a television career, starting with Nice Time for Granada in the sixties, later with LWT, Thames TV and the BBC. A radio industry organisation, the Radio Academy, has its own Hall of Fame honouring people who have made an outstanding contribution to UK radio. One of the first recipients was, quite rightly, Kenny Everett. In October 1993 Kenny was the castaway on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. Everett was fond of animals, and at one stage had a Chihuahua-Yorkshire Terrier cross, two cats, a parrot and several horses. His companion in his last years was a cat called Pussy Cat. By way of recreation, Everett enjoyed needlework.

The end video this week features the brand new and somewhat controversial Silvertown Tunnel. Comments and feedback as usual to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.