I was sixteen when I left home and moved to London. Even before then, I’d taken up near permanent weekend residence at Phoebe’s mother’s house in Shepherd’s Bush. On Friday evenings, she and I would catch the 25-minute Paddington train from Reading, where we attended the school at which she was a weekly boarder. It was so impressive to me, her ability to get off at a busy station and wind her way around people to get on the Hammersmith and City line to her home. Her street smarts signified to me an urchinlike cosmopolitanism - like a cub whose first steps had immediately preceded its total independence in the world.
Her home on a terraced street not far from the station had a familiar smell of what I thought of as London house, though was quite possibly unique to this area of West London, where I had frequently visited cousins while growing up. It was Egyptian musk, or some sophisticated blend of aromatic oils, combined with wood and dust. Shepherd’s Bush market, where as a child I bought bindis and knock off Baby-G watches (which on closer inspection were actually inscribed “Boby-G”), had the same smell, though with the addition of warm plastic and dried fish water.
Phoebe’s mother, tall and glamorous, worked long hours, so often we opened the door to an empty house. Silence hung from the door to the kitchen, stretched across a family home, waiting to be reanimated. Occasionally, though, you’d traverse the dark, narrow corridor, like so many London terraces, squeezing past shoes and coats and bikes, every inch of wall draped in mismatched paintings and ad hoc organisational solutions, to find her mother sat elegantly on the sofa in the open-plan kitchen. Dressed in long flowing robes, a glossy mass of black hair tied with a chopstick atop her head, tortoise-shell glasses framing her feline eyes, cigarette in hand, some enormous tome or other held up to her gaze so as not to contort herself unflatteringly – to me, the house and its matriarch were sophistication incarnate.
She didn’t cook or drink alcohol. She possessed things we coveted intensely, like a collection of designer handbags and dresses, and silver bottles of foundation, which could at the time only be purchased at duty-free, at eye-watering expense, which she used daily, as if it were a human right – a utility. But otherwise the trappings were typical of middle-class London living: a mix of inherited paintings and furniture designed for a house of greater proportions, setting them at odds with more practical and appropriate pieces; A thumb tack board with faded photos of young children on holiday, rosettes and cards marking various occasions; Numerous points of accumulation atop surfaces, trinkets, ashtrays, plastic gizmos of all kinds; Thousands of books and a front room which nobody used. All London terraces are cursed by this front room - you often see people awkwardly open up the front and back drawing rooms of a London terrace after renovation, but the problem of their size and aspect can’t be solved so easily, it’s one of the reasons these types of houses never felt like home to me, though I have lived in many variants of them over the years. I’ve always struggled to imagine what a family home would feel like in London, for me.
Shepherd’s Bush would eventually become home for my late teens and the place where I began my compulsive daily walk to Notting Hill and back, which lasted a few years, across the wretched green and grand Holland Park Avenue, taking in along the way the many a varied existences it was possible to have in a great city. It was the backdrop against which I wrote my second album, I Speak Becuase I Can. It feels like a lifetime ago. Indeed, each part of town in which I have lived, each place that has housed me has been memorialised in my songwriting, of course.
I’m currently reckoning the prospect of leaving London - exactly 20 years after I first arrived. I feel very confused by this and have been reflecting on what it has meant to me to be here, how it has shaped me, what I wanted, what I thought it would be. How this has all changed. And so I’ll be writing a bit about it here. On Leaving London will be my new recurring series on Substack.
I’ll also continue doing covers - this is a song I remember listening to almost compulsively when I was first spending time in Shepherds Bush. 15, iPod, wired headphones, freshly in love with my first proper boyfriend…
My take on Secret Heart by Ron Sexsmith: