London Urban Legends (6 page)

In the world of urban legends, getting a penis out in the wrong place can be lethal: I am sure most have heard the story of the man who accidently urinated on the electric rail of the London Underground and was killed by the electric current jumping back up at him. The man is usually drunk, and it is late at night so he thinks he can get away with his public urinating. Sometimes he thinks he is polluting a river, other times he is just so drunk he does not care. There is even a news story from the
Daily Mail
and
Evening Standard
newspapers on 22 July 2008 of an unnamed 41-year-old Polish tourist who died whilst urinating on the live rail at Vauxhall rail station.

Many doubt that you could electrocute yourself by weeing on an electric rail. In 2003, the American television programme
Mythbusters
tested the myth by constructing an anatomically correct man full of yellow liquid. The urine flow was compared to one of the male presenter’s actual flow filmed on a high-speed camera. With the mannequin’s flow all present and correct, it was released over a live rail. It became apparent that urine does not come out in a continuous stream, but quickly breaks into droplets on the way down, making it, the programme makers said, difficult if not impossible for the current to conduct back up to the penis and hands. Online discussion forums and comments are a useful place to pick up people talking about such ephemeral things as this. Online it was presumed that the initial shock would cause the man to jump, removing the flow from the rail. The voltage of an electric fence or rail line would not kill instantly, unlike in one tragic example in Monsanto of a man urinating on a downed power cable lying unseen in a ditch.

Whilst investigating the possibility, Chicago’s The Straight Dope website found that in two cases in America of death by supposed ‘electric wee’ the victims had both made physical contact with the rail whilst urinating. So while the coroner’s report could correctly state that the two people – an adult man and a 14-year-old boy – had died while urinating on an electric rail, it was the physical contact with the live rail during or afterwards that had killed them. It is possible that this is what happened at Vauxhall. The man died around 5.20 p.m. on 12 July, when it was light and there were plenty of witnesses. This is not the late-night lethal release of legend. It was reported in the
Metro
on 22 July 2008 that the man had gone onto the rail line to relieve himself, so it is possible that he physically touched the live rail while down there, as his body was found slumped over the track. I have not been able to check a coroner’s report on the death and, in all honesty, do not wish to read it.

There are many things in this book that the reader should not try, most of them because they would frighten or harm other people, and despite the evidence gathered here that urinating on the electric rail of a train or tube line would not hurt or kill you, please do not try it yourself. No one will be impressed and it is a bit offensive. Wait until you get home, find a public loo or go and urinate in a pub toilet, so long as you have made sure you are undoing yourself in the toilet.

Either at noon, or in the afternoon when the sun shines through the club-shaped balustrades running the length of Westminster Bridge, the top section stretches to cause a row of sunny, phallus shapes to appear. At first I thought it was a digitally enhanced comment on the residents of the Houses of Parliament at the north end of the bridge. Sadly, I have not found the time to linger long on Westminster Bridge seeking illuminated penises, but one brave London member (sorry) of the Snopes message board did go to Westminster Bridge and, at 1.03 p.m., photographed a raft of unfortunate shapes. This was after others had dismissed the image as ‘completely unreal IMO [in my opinion]. The contrast between the light penii and the shadow looks wrong.’ They were also wrong about the plural of penis.

The story that came with the genuine image was a joke about the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, closing Westminster Bridge in the afternoons to avoid offending people with the luminous images. As pointed out on the Snopes board, whoever wrote the joke, taken seriously by readers outside the UK, did not know Boris Johnson and his inimitable wit. The website Liveleak attributed the appearance of the penises to the 2007 refurbishment of Westminster Bridge, when the balustrades were installed without thought to how their outlines may look in the long afternoon light.

So far the shape made by the balustrades of Westminster Bridge has only been attributed to perverts though, I am sure someone at some time will put a hidden-insult-style story to this trick of the light. The location near the Houses of Parliament is just too good not to. Let’s wait and see …

I’m in the kitchen with the tombstone blues.

Bob Dylan, ‘Tombstone Blues’

‘It’s taken you so long to
find out you were wrong’

Hopefully everyone now knows that the late actor and quiz-show host of
Blockbusters
, Bob Holness, did not play the saxophone on Jerry Rafferty’s hit song ‘Baker Street’. The myth was invented by the author and radio presenter Stuart Maconie for the ‘Believe It or Not’ column of music paper the
NME
(the
New Musical Express
). Another version of the legends origin is that LBC DJ Tommy Boyd claims to have run a ‘true or false’ question on a quiz about the ‘neat and tidy’ Bob being able to turn out a raunchy sax break. Things become more confusing when we hear that the actual saxophonist on ‘Baker Street’, Raphael Ravenscroft, claims to have told a foreign journalist that Bob had played on the song when asked if it was he who had performed it for the twentieth or thirtieth time. Bob himself was said to have encouraged the myth; on one occasion on
Blockbusters
a question came up about the song ‘Baker Street’ and Bob winked into the camera and complimented the sax solo. He would also claim to be the guitarist on the Derek and the Dominos song ‘Layla’, and that he was the person responsible for making Elvis laugh on the notorious live version of ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ The myth of Bob Holness on ‘Baker Street’ has begat myths of its own.

‘Why go to learn the words of fools?’

Another song myth that has not popped its head too high up into mainstream culture yet is the location of Itchycoo Park from The Small Faces’ song of the same name. The first time I had a location pointed out to me, I was getting a lift from a work colleague called TBJ, who told me that Itchycoo Park was Altab Ali Park in Whitechapel, previously St Mary’s Park and the former site of St Mary’s Church. TBJ was a bit of a character, and at work he would tell stories of the characters at his local pub or gym, such as Jimmy Two Times, who was actually a gangster from the film
Goodfellas
.

I read Altab Ali Park’s link to the song again in the 14 September 2012 e-newsletter from the indie music magazine
Artrocker
, where Tom Artrocker recounts:

I spent a pleasant couple of hours in Whitechapel yesterday. The sun shone as the traffic roared towards the coast, I was there with my team to photograph and video Toy. We took photos in the middle of the traffic’s roar, down a dark alley and, traditionalists that we are, against a brick wall. Then we headed a few yards to Altab Ali Park. At which point I pointed out that prior to its re-naming, in honour of a young Bangladeshi murdered by several youths, this was the site of Itchycoo Park, as glorified by The Small Faces.

Small Faces member Ronnie Lane claimed that Little Ilford Park is Itchycoo Park. Tony Calder stated that the park story was invented by himself and the band to get around a BBC ban on the song and its possible drug references. Itchycoo Park was the name of a piece of wasteground in the East End that the band played on as children.

Valentines Park, West Ham and Wanstead Flats have all also been named as possible Itchycoo Park locations, although there is also the possibility that the song was inspired by a pamphlet about Oxford and has nothing to do with east London. Itchycoo Park is a pop music Atlantis or Camelot: it has many locations, some in London.

The name may have migrated from another nearby location: in his 1980 book
Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block 1887–1920
, Jerry White describes ‘Itchy Park’ being Christ Church Gardens. This is the small ground beside Christ Church on Commercial Street, not too far from Altab Ali Park.

According to White’s book, the park got its name from the children scratching themselves, like good East End urchins, against the railings of the park while using it as a playground. Tom Artrocker’s origin for Itchy Park is even less kind, being from the fleas on the homeless people who used the park in the past and up to the present. The lyrics to ‘Itchycoo Park’ don’t completely match either location; the dreaming spires could be the imposing steeple of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, but there is no duck pond, and so no ducks to feed a bun to. We should not get too hung up on treating song lyrics as literal descriptions, however. If song writers are seeking to mirror reality in a lyric it would still be the first thing jettisoned for a pleasing rhyme or suitable mood.