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Without press coverage, looking with us at the stories behind the TfTPA film project, we would have had a really difficult time reacing our funding targets. Our gratitude is extended to the many writers and photographers who have pulled out the stops to create compelling copy that is both factual and emotive.
TMMF Review
In the past few years, music biographies have become the new big thing, and each year there are at least a dozen books and films going out on the market, obviously making music enthusiasts go crazy. This year makes no exception as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, a biography film about Freddie Mercury and Queen set to be released in less than two weeks, is already on the critics’ shortlist for the upcoming Academy Awards.
TfTPA to open Portobello Film Festival
The strains and pains produced by the capital’s ravenous growth are nowhere more vividly distilled than in and around Denmark Street, that tiny avenue off the north end of Charing Cross Road known to many for many years as London’s Tin Pan Alley. The street’s long history as a hive of creativity, especially the musical kind, has been written and re-written countless times, and with mounting poignance since 2013 when Camden Council gave permission for a Crossrail-driven redevelopment scheme that some fear has already sealed a fatal change in character.
Townshend joins TPAT fight for new generations
On an historic side street in Soho in the centre of London lies the studio where the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix rehearsed and recorded, the shop where Pete Townshend bought his guitar strings and the rock club where Adele, Katie Melua and Keane played their earliest gigs.
Townshend, the guitarist and songwriter with The Who, has now called for this “massive chunk of rock history” on Denmark Street, known as London’s Tin Pan Alley, to be saved from redevelopment work and given protected status.
The future of Denmark Street?
There are two very different views about the redevelopment of one of London’s most famous creative clusters : Rebirth opportunity or dystopian hell?
On a building site gazed over by the latticed middle finger that is Centre Point, Amy Lamé, writer, entertainer, sometime Pink List National Treasure and recently appointed as London’s first “night tsar” by Sadiq Khan, explained to a hi-vised, hard-hatted showbiz camera crew why flattening a patch of a conservation area has been a good idea. “This is incredibly exciting,” she enthused: “We’ve got the infrastructure. London’s changing and having a night tsar is part of that. What a wonderful opportunity.”
That infrastructure is Crossrail. That opportunity is to be most conspicuously realised as what is shown in CGIs as a glass and gold-coloured construction to be called the NOW building: perhaps NOW as in POW and in WOW. It will grace what site developer Consolidated Developments has suggested will become “the equivalent of New York’s Times Square in London”, a cultural piazza at St Giles Circus, beckoning from the teeming, expanding Tottenham Court Road transport junction where Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road meet.
Guitar maker forced out by developer
ONE of the last independent guitar makers in historic Denmark Street has packed up his shop for the final time.
Tim Marten – who began working in Andy’s repair shop in 1978 – has toured the world with Led Zeppelin and Kinks frontman Ray Davies.
Mr Marten has been forced to leave because of a major development of the street – also known as Tin Pan Alley – by developer Consolidated.
The 62-year-old said: “It’s not come as a surprise but it is something that has been hanging over us for a long time. The sword of Damocles has finally fallen and we have to go.
“I am left in a bit of a panic with nowhere to go. The stuff is going into storage while I take some time off to try and find alternative premises. But with the prices in central London being what they are I think it is unlikely that I will find anywhere that I can afford.”
Help fund the Tales of Tin Pan Alley
Once upon a time, Denmark Street was the rugged, beating heart of the UK's music scene. It's where NME's was based, it's where Bob Marley bought his first guitar and it's where David Bowie parked up his camper van. The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, Elton John and Jimi Hendrix all laid their tracks down at Tin Pan Alley's recording studios and now a crowdfunding campaign has launched to help fund a new film entitled 'Tin Pan Alley Tales', telling the history of the famous musical street.
Sex Pistols graffiti supports Grade 2* listing
When Johnny Rotten pulled out a marker pen in the early days of Punk and started daubing words such “awful”, “headache” and “sick” over some newly-decorated walls he was inadvertently ensuring the entire building’s long-term preservation.
The cartoon drawings and graffiti he scrawled all over the 1970s hangout of the Sex Pistols - a former silversmith’s workshop attached to a townhouse in London’s Denmark Street – have helped the building be awarded Grade 2* Listed Status, a rare accolade.
Farewell to one of London's last Wild Corners
It says something about the rate of change in St Giles that when I step out the tube at Tottenham Court Road, a station I’ve used for 25 years, I don’t have a clue where I am. For centuries, this corner of seedy London has acted as a wild annexe to the West End, and from 1999 I worked here at Time Out, often ending up after a show or gig on Hanway Street for a late-night livener.
In the Press
