6.1 Pop Heresiarchs: Johnny Aggro’s Brian Jones Shango Baptist Routine
Tunnel Club in Deptford and Eel Pie Island
Johnny Aggro’s Brian Jones Shango Baptist Routine: part 1 of 3
Whenever I hear the name Johnny Aggro, which is rare nowadays, I always think of a forlorn young man standing at the mike in the Tunnel Club hitting the tape keys of a chunky Panasonic boom box. His fingers skipped between pause and play as he announced his political opinions over a selection of pop songs which leant heavily on the Rolling Stones. His act was advertised as a condensed version of a 60-minute spoken-word monologue called Jagger’s Army. And that monologue, I was to learn, was itself extracted from Rock My Religion II, a huge collection of tape cassettes and notes assembled by Johnny over the years. The fragment I witnessed that night in south-east London was a kind of Brechtian turn, combining as it did popular song with jokes and invective. Despite wearing the recognisable uniform of 1980s alternative comedy – a Burton’s suit and a silly hat, in this case a black Pilgrim hat – Johnny failed to get any laughs. In fact, he was bottled off-stage after 20 minutes. Given the spirit of the times, though, this was quite an achievement.
I caught up with Johnny at the bar. He was being consoled by a couple of his friends, who were introduced to me as Watson and Minerva. Watson was jovial and cynical, dressed in figure-hugging lycra – club gear, basically – while Minerva was short-haired and pouty, in a black MA1 flying jacket, fishnets and DMs. I bought a round of drinks and explained I was doing a story on the latest wave of post-punk comic talent – Vic Reeves, Jenny Eclair, Felix Dexter – to emerge from the Tunnel Club. It was 1988, a full year into Mrs Thatcher’s third term of reactionary modernisation, and the mood in the little comedy venue was defiant, if gloomy. Jammed in the back of the Mitre, a south London pub plonked next to a gasometer on the traffic-heavy approach road to the Blackwall Tunnel, it was a place that seemed to have no past and little future.
Watson was offering the miserable Johnny an Adornoite critique of his act. This is what struggling artists used to do in those days – demolish each other’s work in a spirit of high-minded exaltation. Watson was obviously familiar with the long-form version of Jagger’s Army and conceded it was a brilliant take on the endless recycling of the blues in Anglo-American rock music. Johnny nodded. He was sweating. But at the end of the day, said Watson, it only offered an intellectual justification for the continued existence of boring stadium rock bands like Queen and Guns N’ Roses. Minerva said she hated Axl Rose. He’s such a dick!
Johnny turned to me as if I were an impartial witness. He said that Jagger’s Army traced the history of the ‘60s British blues scene back via the Mississippi blues and Afro-Christian gospel music to the psalms sung by the revolutionary Puritan chaplains of Cromwell’s New Model Army. To that extent, he said, he was amplifying the thesis implicit in Rock My Religion, the film made by American artist Dan Graham, which drew a connection between rock music and the ecstatic religious assemblies of the Shakers. Johnny said that whereas Graham’s method was merely comparative, his own was properly dialectical. He also claimed that his work dated the origin of rock to a much earlier dissident religious sect than did Graham’s Rock My Religion – namely the seventeenth-century Baptists rather than the eighteenth- century Shakers. The primal scene of all rock music, said Johnny, was the resistance of Cromwell’s Baptist colonels to a mere dictatorship of the bourgeoisie after they had killed the king. It found its summation in the Rolling Stones album Beggars Banquet, with its glorification of proletarian revolution on key tracks ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and ‘Street Fighting Man.’
I thought that seemed like a rather grandiose claim for a stand-up routine. But this was back in the day when alternative comedy still had a militant edge and was open to forms beyond the quick-fire gag, including poetry, cabaret and spoken-word monologue. Johnny gave me his Jagger’s Army set list years later and I have used this document – as well as the partial tape recording I made on the night – to reconstruct his performance at the Tunnel Club.
As far as I remember, Johnny started by playing a bit from a song that that showed, despite all appearances to the contrary, that he understood his audience. It was a moment of pure English surrealism – the chorus from ‘Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?’ by the Bonzo Dog Band. There were a few anticipatory chuckles from the audience. They figured this was the set-up to a punchline. They were mistaken. Johnny stopped the tape. Stared at the audience.
Then he hit them with a few bars of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, with the ‘woo-woo’ backing vocals echoing Mick Jagger’s lead vocal in call-and-response style. Johnny spoke over the cross-rhythms of the samba beat. He was talking about Godard’s 1968 agit-prop film One + One. The French avant-garde film-maker, he said, had filmed ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ being composed by a band of white guys in the Olympic Sound Studios in London. He had cut the scenes alongside staged footage of a bunch of frizzed-up black guys throwing each other rifles in a scrap-yard as they quoted lines from Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver. Johnny let the song play for a bit. Jagger calling out the gods of political violence, anarchy and war. Brian Jones responding enthusiastically with the ‘woo-woo’ backing vocals. The Bonzo Dogs’ question is posed by Godard in a more precise way, said Johnny. Can the Rolling Stones be taken as seriously as the Black Panthers in the revolutionary moment of 1968?
Johnny dropped his next track. Al Jolson singing ‘Camptown Races’ in a coon accent which could only sound offensive to contemporary ears. ‘Da Camptown ladies sing dis song, doo-dah, doo-dah.’ At this point, there was heckling from some brave fellows in the audience, but Johnny simply glared at them and pushed on relentlessly with his theme. Yes, he said. Yes. The same Amiri Baraka, who was quoted in the scrap-yard scene in One + One, claimed as far back as 1965 that the Rolling Stones were nothing but a minstrel act. And it’s certainly tempting, he said, to see Mick Jagger clapping and squawking in the Olympic Studios as the thin minstrel Brother Tambo and Brian Jones lazing around on the sidelines as the fat minstrel Brother Bones. But is it fair?
Godstar! Godstar! shouted a nutter from the audience. Indeed, said Johnny, with a flash of teeth. Let’s condemn Mick Jagger as a phony for singing the praises of the killing of the Tsar during the Russian Revolution. Let’s by all means do that. But then we should also condemn the black British actors Danny Daniels and Roy Stewart for pretending to be American Black Panthers in One + One. Let’s not forget, he said, that they both went on to play comical African tribesmen in Carry On up the Jungle. Members of the Nosha tribe, if I remember correctly.
There was sporadic booing at this point and the club compere, a funny little man in big glasses, was becoming restless, walking up and down beside the stage. Johnny managed to keep the mood going his way for a bit. He pressed into his next song.
It was Muddy Water’s 1955 recording of ‘Mannish Boy’. The old Mississippi bluesman chanted about being first a young boy, then the greatest man alive, with the rhythm guitar and the harmonica stepping in each time to play the line back as a stomping one-chord riff. There’s the response to the call, said Johnny. Right there! The space that’s filled with the ‘woo-woo’ in ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, the ‘doo dah, doo-dah’ in ‘Camptown Races’, the repetition by the Afro-Christian congregation in the Deep South of the short melodic phrases spoken by the church deacon, the whoops of the plantation rebels in Virginia as they responded to the coded whistles of their leader Nat Turner, the, the… Johnny had to duck here as the first empty Pilsener bottle went flying. He pressed on, raising his voice slightly. It all goes back to the Baptist regiments of the New Model Army lifting their voices to repeat the lines of the psalms after they were shouted out by the chaplain on the fields of Naseby and Langport.
The crowd stamped their feet. They shouted ‘off off off!’ Johnny managed to play a snatch of the Rolling Stones song ‘Street Fighting Man’ before the plug was pulled. He took off his hat and threw it to the ground. He said he had many tracks still to play, including a version of ‘Praise our Lord all ye gentiles’ by the Choir of Merton College. The crowd booed and he was ejected from the stage. As he slunk to the bar with his crumpled hat and his boom box, the compere was already introducing the next act, a timid-looking fellow in a paper hat who did comic impressions of fondly remembered kids’ TV characters talking dirty. As I remember, he went down quite well.
By the end of the evening, Johnny was quite drunk and foul-tempered. He said that it was a shame I hadn’t seen him complete his act, that he hadn’t even had the chance to repeat George Melly’s famous quip about the British blues boom, the fact that it found its own Mississippi Delta in the Thames Valley. Well, yes, said Watson. More jokes would certainly have helped.
I don’t get it, said Minerva, peering over the rims of her flared sunglasses. The Melly joke, I mean. Well, said Johnny, perhaps it’s not a joke, more a condensed history lesson. The point being that a lot of the British blues haunts of the early 1960s were on a Thameside belt that stretched south from Ealing down to Richmond and Twickenham. Gerry Potter’s record shop, for one. The Marshall brothers’ music shop on Uxbridge Road, for another. Shops have always been so important for British youth culture. What about the caffs? said Watson. L’Auberge coffee house, Sid’s Café opposite Ealing Art College. He was counting them off on his fingers. The venues were also important, said Johnny. The Crawdaddy at Richmond Station Hotel, the Ealing Club. Don’t forget Sandover Hall, said Watson. Points for obscurity, said Johnny. It had become a competition between them, to commemorate the blues shrines of West London. The Eel Pie Island jazz and blues club, said Johnny, with an air of finality. I had a whole riff on that place. I know, said Watson. I know. He clapped his friend on the shoulder.
Johnny later sent me a vintage postcard of Eel Pie Island, featuring a colourised photo of the genteel old hotel which had once been there for many years. By the time George Melly, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and the Rolling Stones got to gig there, it was damp and dilapidated, mysterious, a world set apart. This was according to the notes Johnny had scrawled on the back of his postcard. He wrote that the Eel Pie Island blues club was a place reachable only by a rickety wooden bridge across the Thames. You bought a ticket to cross in the form of a passport, which granted access to an imaginary nation. ‘Eelpiland’, as it was called. As far as Johnny was concerned, this was a nation as real as the New World to which the radical Baptists of the English Commonwealth had been exiled after the Restoration, as real as the Afro-America of Amiri Baraka, as real as any dream of freedom. It was, he reckoned, a hidden country, a place secreted in the Thames where an emerging generation protested against the constraints of family, work and organised religion by dancing to loud music and getting high on Newcastle Brown and Woodbines. More than that, Eelpiland was a belated response to the original call to arms of English revolutionary forces when they defended the Thames at Turnham Green, a response mediated through the echoes of the gospel and the Mississippi Delta blues. Making Melly’s joke a kind of prophecy, in a way.
So said Johnny. He was always a believer in the grand dialectical sweep of history. That became quite clear to me from our conversation in the Tunnel Club all those years ago. He thought a world revolution was an inevitability. It was just a question of when circumstances would allow it to happen. There had been a chance in 1968, he maintained. Watson scoffed at this. He said that Adorno had got it right. The student protests in France, Italy and Germany and the US that year were more regressive than revolutionary. Adolescent tantrums! Johnny disagreed. He said that they mapped present injustice on to past injustice and made it clear that political events like the French Revolution, the American revolution, were versions of an incomplete project. Watson shook his head. Mysticism! he said.
Minerva wondered what any of this had to do with the ‘Street Fighting Man’. I clinked bottles with her in agreement. Johnny said that Jagger’s rhetoric in the song, with its acknowledgement of the urgent need for a people’s revolution, was as incendiary as anything proposed by the Black Panthers. Making it such a shame that Jagger had missed his own chance to seize the revolutionary moment. Minerva raised an eyebrow. Really? she said. Don’t forget, said Johnny, Jagger was part of the big rally against war and injustice in Trafalgar Square in March 1968. All he had to do was leap on-stage with his harmonica, lead the youthful crowd on a round of angry chanting and then march them down Whitehall to storm the Palace of Westminster. Imagine it! he said. The seat of British government turned into a permanent free festival burning with the light of a hundred furious Altamonts. Here would have been a rock’n’roll moment to conjure the ghost of Cromwell and the unfinished business of the English Revolution. Unreal! said Minerva. She placed her hand on Johnny’s arm.
But it was not to be, said Johnny. It never is, said Watson. He grinned. Johnny ignored him. Jagger simply followed the crowd, he said, as it was diverted through Mayfair and kettled by mounted police in Grosvenor Square. The revolutionary tendencies of 1968 were blocked in England. People went home for their tea. Johnny drained the last of his lager. Jagger, he said, at least recognised this disillusioning fact. He went home and wrote ‘Street Fighting Man’, with its rebuke to ‘sleepy London town’ for failing to rise to the occasion. And then Godard hit town a few months later, said Watson. To film the Stones recording Beggars Banquet at Olympic Studios and preserve for posterity the memory of what could have been. He gave a bright laugh.
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Johnny Aggro’s Brian Jones Shango Baptist Routine: part 2