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Nicholas Lezard

Nicholas Lezard – Nov 2024

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The other day I was complimented on my clothes again. A young-ish – well, much younger than me, because most people are – man in the lift at Waitrose pointed out my neckerchief and said that you didn’t see many of those around these days, and that I carried it off very well. Now, leaving aside the gross breach of protocol by talking to a stranger in a lift, and discarding the possibility that he was chatting me up (I’d never seen anyone looking less gay, and also I am too old to be fancied any more), this was simply a very nice thing to say, I decided, after I’d got over the initial shock.

The thing is, this only happens in Brighton. Not often, but about once a year. I once stopped to give a homeless man a light and he looked at my tweed jacket – which is older than I am, as it happens – and he said: “Love the look. Very retro. You carry it off.” 

Then there was the time I had just bought a new pair of glasses from Vision Express in Churchill Square. The lenses are the kind that go dark when it’s sunny, and that day was very bright. A young man about half my age said “nice glasses” as he passed me. He was halfway up the hill before the remark sank in. I remember vaguely what he looked like: dark skin, trimmed beard, black t-shirt, muscles. Despite the muscles I don’t think, again, he was gay. The thing is that the glasses were cool – think the Beatles on the back cover of Revolver, which all authorities agree was their coolest-looking period – and maybe something in my bearing suggested I knew this. I thought: this is going to happen every day I wear these. This is great.

It didn’t. But I did have someone say “wicked shoes, man” as they saw my multicoloured Converse with purple toecaps. Again, this has only happened once: but I’m grateful it has happened at all. And in case you think that this is because I am effortlessly stylish, I should say I have been mocked and even thumped because of my clothes. 

The only other places I have lived in for appreciable periods of time are London, Paris, Cambridge and Scotland, and in all of them bar Scotland I have suffered mockery and abuse. The worst time was on the Metro in Paris, when a young man unticked my grandfather’s paisley scarf from my collar and went “tee hee hee.” It was 44 years ago but I still glow red with shame and anger when I think about it.

No, the only possible conclusion is that this is Brighton for you. A town whose main principle is tolerance is actually going to be pretty welcoming towards the eccentric. I would hesitate to wear those Converse in any other city on earth, and as for the countryside, forget it. 

But thank you, Brighton. You may only compliment me once every two years, but that’s more than anywhere else has.

Nicholas Lezard

Nicholas Lezard – View From The Hill May 2024

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So, how was your Easter? Because of the obligations and vagaries of magazine production, I’m writing this before it’s even happened. So what shall I write about? What is still in my heart and soul to tell you? The endless rain? My endless poverty? My latest run-in with Vodafone? I’m sorry, I can’t this week, I really can’t. So instead I’ll tell you about something nice that happened to me during my week off. 

What happened was that my friend, who coincidentally happens to be the editor of The Whistler, invited me to a gig at the Prince Albert. Not only is the editor of The Whistler, he is also a gentleman of exquisite taste, so when he invites you along to a gig you go along without asking who’s playing, because you know it’s going to be good. A few days later, I asked “who are we seeing anyway?” and he replied “Jah Wobble”, and I fainted.

You might remember my having written about Mr Wobble a few months back, when I saw that he had followed me on Twitter. This put a spring in my step. For I had been a fan of his since October 1978, when Public Image Ltd’s first, eponymous single came out, with its simple but devastating bassline, played and conceived by Wobble. Since then he has released several groovy records, including collaborations with Sinead O’Connor and Holger Czukay of Can, but now is not the time for a discography. 

Now as it happens my friend, the editor of The Whistler, knows Jah Wobble (he was christened John Wardle, but “Jah Wobble” is how a drunken Sid Vicious pronounced it once, and the name stuck). As it also happens, I get a bit giddy in the company of musicians, especially in the company of musicians of whose work I approve. A girlfriend of mine once saw me in the company of Jim Reid from the Jesus and Mary Chain, and said she’d never seen me act like that ever before: simpering and giggling like a schoolkid with a crush. Writers don’t impress me nearly as much: I know their specious ways all too well. Artists can make me go a bit silly but then I knew Marc Quinn at university and I thought “grifter” and “he’ll go far”, but I once met Francis Bacon and I was deeply impressed and wondered if he’d paint me if I slept with him. But I was with another girlfriend at the time and couldn’t think of a way to drop it into the conversation. 

T

he plan was to meet with JW at the pub before the gig. I got into a right tizzy thinking about this. I shaved and bathed and brushed the few remaining hairs on the top of my head. It turned out that Spurs were playing Fulham that evening and Wobble, who is a huge Spurs fan, wanted to see the match. Only there was some rugby nonsense going on that evening, and the only pub playing the match was a cavernous pile by Old Steine mostly frequented by students. I was a bit anxious: I am not a Spurs fan, which I thought would put a spoke in the wheels of my friendship with JW before it had even got moving. As it happened he couldn’t even make it into the pub: there was a queue and he thought Sod that for a lark and went back to the Albert to watch it on his phone. 

As history records, Spurs barely even showed up either and Fulham slaughtered them 3-0 and it would have ben 4-0 but for the slimmest of offsides. After the match we went off to the Albert. “Hurry up,” I kept saying. “I want to meet Jah Wobble.”

“I’ve never seen him like this,” my friend said to another friend, another journalist who also knows Jah Wobble. Does everyone in this stupid town know Jah Wobble apart from me? 

So we finally made it to the Albert and went to see Jah Wobble in the dressing room which is even tinier than the room he was about to play in. I was, by this stage, quivering with excitement. And so what did they all talk about? Football. Worse than that: Spurs football. I’ve never been so bored in my life. Never meet your heroes, I thought.

But the gig was brilliant, and as Mr Wobble came off stage he squeezed my arm and I’m in love all over again. 

l Previously published inThe New Statesman 

Nicholas Lezard

Nicholas Lezard – View From The Hill July 2024

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“I must go down to the sea again, to the sea and the lonely sky …”

The opening line of John Masefield’s poem “Sea Fever” often occurs to me as I look out of my window, for from it, I can see the sea. When I lived in a basement flat in Dyke Road I couldn’t see the sea at all; in fact, I couldn’t even see the street. There is a part of Dyke Road by St Nicholas’s where you do get to se the sea, and something about the geography and the layout of the street means that it looks as though the sea is gigher up than you, which much impressed my children when they first came to visit. But now I have moved to the lower slopes of West Hill I have a view of a patch of sea every time I sit at my desk, and this pleases me, although it sometimes acts as a rebuke. Because what I am doing is looking at it, and not walking by it.

I wonder if this is means I have turned into a true Brightonian. When I lived on Dyke Road I only rarely went to the sea, because I lived at the very summit of West Hill and walking down to the shore meant a long uphill climb back home, and hills and I don’t get on very well. So now I live much nearer the Channel, do I go down to visit it every day? After all, living by the sea is a privilege. People go daffy trying to buy properties near the sea. (Well, ok, maybe not all places by the sea are desirable. I have a friend who lives in Southend and, believe me, you don’t even want to go there, let alone buy somewhere there.) But I don’t go down to the sea, to the lonely sea and the sky. I just look at it and admire its changing moods from afar. It’s never dull, even when it’s flat, as it is now (and blue: it’s a sunny day).

It makes me think of the place I lived in in London for ten years: because my flat, and the house it was in, was a shambles, it was the last affordable place in Central London. And all of London’s galleries and museums were within walking distance. Did I walk to them? No? Did I even take public transport to them? Also no. Because I knew I could walk there whenever I wanted, I felt no pressure to go there. And so it is with the seaside: it’s for visitors. And I wonder also if the view I have of a patch of sea, and only that, rem,inds me of my childhood, when we knew that the real holiday was beginning: when we could see, through a gap in the trees, the twinkling blue of the Cornish Atlantic. And on blustery, bright sunny days the sea, from my window, looks just the same as it did from my dad’s Vauxhall when I was 10. It’s close enough. 

Besides, it’s full of poo these days.

Brighton Life, Nicholas Lezard

Nicholas Lezard – View From The Hill Dec 2023

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The Prince Albert, you know, the one by the station, a downhill stumble from the peak of West Hill, is one of the greatest pubs in a town with a greater abundance and favourable ratio to bad pubs than in any town I have ever seen, and I’ve seen a few. Both towns and pubs. I really know what I’m talking about. And such is the way of the world, or the way of this country, pubs are being closed down and this is terrible.

The Prince Albert – and I am open to the suggestion that the lewd piercing referred to by this name originated if not in this very pub but at least in this very town, for reasons I do not need to elaborate – is one of those places where the traditional and the counterculture meet as one. 

My first proper evening there was when I finally, some years ago, moved to Brighton for good with the last items of my scant luggage. There wasn’t much: it was mostly my grandfather’s overcoat, which I was wearing, and a plastic bag containing, mostly, a teapot. I was tired, and it was late, and my new lodgings were up a steep hill – you know the one I mean – but the Albert was a brief step downhill and I could hear the noise of a band thudding through the walls and the mist, the kind of band I used to stay up late to tape off John Peel in the 70s. A truly horrendous noise, designed to both offend and charm – there were tunes behind it – with what I could tell even at a distance was a very angry female singer. This, I have to say, is one of my favourite genres.

So I went in the pub and went upstairs to listen to the band and even though I was wearing an ancient overcoat and carrying a teapot and was, by some decades, the oldest person in the room, I was utterly charmed. The band were called something that I cannot repeat even here; let’s just say a four-letter word was involved. They were clearly not aiming for chart success. But I stayed for the whole set and even chatted with the lead singer (her traumatised backing band, mostly men, had disappeared) for a while afterwards, and of course she turned out to be as sweet and modest and considerate as her on-stage persona had been confrontational and furious. This is so often the way.

And yet downstairs it’s all fireplaces and wallpaper from the 1920s as far as I can tell and, well you get the idea. The problem is that the pub has been under threat from developers. The latest recent plans have rejected by councillors but we need to make sure new plans don’t rear their ugly heads again. The best way to do that is to pop down there for a pint some time, just to let you know you love them. You don’t have to see Bleeding Ohyouknow upstairs but if they are playing, give them a listen. 

Brighton Life, Nicholas Lezard

View From The Hill – Nicholas Lezard – August 2023

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I know I’ve written about it before, but I’m going to write about it again. Because it’s the pub. And not just any pub, but the Battle of Trafalgar, which you will know because you pass it on the road up the hill from the station. For some time I avoided it on the grounds that no pub that close to a train station could be any good. How foolish I was. 

Space is tight in The Whistler so I won’t describe it in detail and you probably know it already. Except to say that it is, and this is not meant disparagingly at all, what my children approvingly call “an old man pub”. That is: it doesn’t have TV screens or music, live or recorded. And people of all ages, not just the elderly, can be found there. I wish the fireplace worked so it could be even cosier in winter but you can’t have everything and besides the place really comes into its own in summer, because of its large and well-placed beer garden. Space can be at a premium in Brighton, and even though the town is well-stocked with pubs – the second-highest density of them in the country, after somewhere in Liverpool – there aren’t that many with such a wide-open space, especially in West Hill.

Of course, what makes a pub isn’t just its space, or its look, but the people who run it, and Mel, who has been running the place for more years than I know or can count, has made it the place we love (hiring the right staff has a great deal to do with it; they are wonderful).

And then Covid happened; and other things; and their bills went up as their customer base went down. I don’t go there as often as I’d like to because of similar budgetary restraints but when I popped in there and heard what the mark-up on their energy bills was going to be I had an attack of the vapours and I wasn’t even going to be liable.

So the Battle’s future became up for grabs. The sum being asked that I heard to take it over was … large. And their energy bills had gone up fivefold. Things were looking bad. Few things are more depressing than the closure of a pub, more damaging to a locality. And the companies that own and run most of the pubs in this country are not known for their philanthropy.

Everything seemed to be up in the air until the very last minute. On the day I write this, though, the pub has not closed down, but has changed hands. 

I spoke to Mel about this: she says that the new managers – who have also taken over the Green Dragon (a pub with, shall we say, a history) – seem like the kind of people who won’t be changing the Battle for the worse any time soon. 

She’s going to miss the place but says we should give the new managers a chance. So let’s do just that.