Over the gate...

Designed in 1913 by Victorian/Edwardian/other architect Theophilus A Allen; John Lennon's house between 1964 and 1968; sunroom, attic and prisco stripe hibernice; Mellotron and caravan; Babidji and Mimi; mortar and pestle; Wubbleyoo Dubbleyoo; curios and curiosity; remnants and residue; testimonials and traces; (Cavendish Avenue, Sunny Heights and Kinfauns); Montagu Square; mock Tudor: Brown House: *KENWOOD*.

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Wednesday 15 July 2009

Kenwood: attic, June 1967.



Inferior quality ("shitty" could be justifiably used), and yet, for all that, a rarely seen attic studio variant from June 1967, and therefore well worth a look. He appears to be tuning up. You can boil Lennon-era Kenwood down to two rooms - the sunroom and the attic. Both the look and the sound of the attic continue to ripple down the years, of course, courtesy of primitive technology which once captured monochromatic moments on film and verbatim drollery on lengths of magnetic tape; fan photos, Leslie Bryce, bootlegged demos, Two Virgins and the like. There is a vivid contrast between the black and white photos taken in June 1967 by Mr Bryce and their occasionally glimpsed colour variations. Both are highly evocative, of course, but the intense complexion of the latter lends them an odd hyper-real quality which is quite in keeping with the phantom nostalgia which surrounds the Beatles and the 1960s in general. (I'm talking about people like me who weren't alive at the time.) Such oddly luminescent faux-feeling certainly permeates this blog, which many might regard as at least slightly silly. But I feel it is all harmless fun, or at least relatively harmless fun, and I wonder if the same reservations would be expressed about the close study of, say, Beethoven's sunroom, or Mozart's stash tin. The Beatles' ship sailed a very long time ago - all too soon, in the grand scheme of things, they will have passed beyond the realm of living memory; at which point all such nonsense will be history proper, not to mention proper history. The poor quality of the above pic somehow underscores this. Still, annoying to think that in a drawer somewhere this, and others of its ilk, must exist in perfect quality.
And just how many colour variants are there?

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for sharing this photo. Even though the quality sucks, I really like it!

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