London Urban Legends by Scott Wood Read Free Book Online Page A

, although whatever is happening behind the door, set in as ski-resort, does not resemble the fun in the song.
    Perhaps the most satisfying explanation is that ‘Green Door’ is a response or shout-back to the song ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’ from the musical The Pajama Game , which describes a secretive nightclub for a ‘glass of wine and a fast embrace’, and where the password to get in is ‘Joe sent us’. The song was a hit the year before ‘Green Door’.
Metal Box
    Further off the mainstream radar is the discombobulating electronic music of Richard James, the Aphex Twin. His music can jump from serene to harsh to nausea-inducing. It is a fitting tribute to this that in the early 2000s the large stainless steel box in the centre of the Elephant and Castle roundabout was said to be his home. The box is, in fact, the Michael Faraday Memorial, dedicated to the scientist who was born nearby in Newington Butts. The monument itself contains an electrical substation for the Bakerloo and Northern tube lines and is not a house. The Aphex Twin lived nearby in the slightly more conventional venue of a converted bank.
Bob Dylan’s Crouch End Road Trip
    Researching things is great, not only because you find out things you want to know, but that you always happen upon strange and probably apocryphal facts you never knew you needed to look into. A story dated 15 August 1993 in the Independent newspaper tells me that Crouch End once had more curry houses than all of Austria. This does sound possible, although twenty years on and TripAdvisor is listing thirty-one Indian restaurants in Vienna alone.
    I stumbled on this while reading up on the connection between megalithic American folk-rocker Bob Dylan and his visits to Crouch End. Apparently he viewed a house there back in 1993 and became a regular at the Shamrat of India curry house. ‘I recognised him from the telly,’ said the owner at the time, ‘but I’m more of a Beatles fan myself.’ Bob wasn’t getting a lot of love in Crouch End back then – the owner of the local guitar shop said that ‘he used to be good, but he’s rubbish now.’
    According to urban legend a further indignity for Dylan may have happened around the same time. The real untrue story of Bob Dylan in Crouch End begins with his friendship with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, who once owned a recording studio called the Crypt, on 145 Crouch Hill. Stewart invited Dylan round, saying that the next time he was in Crouch End he should visit the studio. Dylan was seemingly so keen that he gave the studio’s address at the airport so he could go straight there. Unfortunately the taxi driver dropped Dylan off, not at Dave Stewart’s grand recording studio in an old church, but on nearby Crouch End Hill, where No.145 was a house. Dylan knocked on the door, asked for Dave and to compound his series of unfortunate events a Dave did live at the house, but was out at the time. Dave’s wife said that he would be back soon, so would the mumbling American gentleman like to come in and wait for him? And would he like a cup of tea? Dave the plumber later arrived home and asked his wife if there were any messages for him. She said, ‘No, but Bob Dylan’s in the living room having a cup of tea.’
    Writer Emma Hartley investigated the story for her ‘Emma Hartley’s Glamour Cave’ folk music blog in a post dated, of course, 1 April 2013. She rang the Crypt studio and was told by an Anthony Lerner that he had ‘heard it from the man who was Dave Stewart’s chief sound engineer at that time’. Emma went out to Crouch End to knock on the door of the house on Crouch End Hill. It was while walking up the hill that she discovered that there is no No. 145. Perhaps the taxi driver was even more cloth-eared than we thought and took Dylan to No. 45 Crouch End Hill, which was, at least in the 1891 census, a residential property. Or perhaps the whole story is made up.
    Consoling herself with a drink at Banner’s