Billy Bragg discussed Camden, The Clash’s Joe Strummer and The Smiths as he was inducted into the Music Walk of Fame.
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00:00 The first time I ever met Josh Drummer was he was at the bar of a Stranglers gig I went to up the roundhouse up the top of the road there.
00:07 The first time I ever saw the Smiths was at the Electric Ballroom in 1983.
00:12 I've been traveling around doing gigs and people were telling me about this band who were an amazing band.
00:17 And it was at the Electric Ballroom there that I really first had the opportunity to see them.
00:22 And so many other gigs, not just on this stretch, but in the London Borough of Camden.
00:28 It's always been a place where young musicians have come with their dreams, with their ideas.
00:34 This is where you bring your hustle.
00:36 And one of those hustlers in the early days when I used to come up here on a Saturday,
00:41 there was always a guy selling bootleg cassettes of gigs on a stall in the street.
00:48 And he always looked a bit sheepish when he saw me because he always invariably had one of my cassettes or several of my cassettes for sale.
00:56 And weirdly enough, someone sent me one last week from New Zealand.
01:01 A guy said, "I found this. I thought you might want to..."
01:03 And it's actually Billy Bragg from the 11th of January, 1986, live at the Camden Diorama.
01:10 If you remember the Diorama, which was a great gig down by the gates of Regent's Park.
01:16 But yeah, they would have loads of these and they'd always look really sheepish.
01:19 And I'd be like, "Mate, it's cool. You just have to give me a copy of one of them."
01:23 So I've got them.
01:24 And the nice thing also is that his stall was more or less here in front of this old covered market used to be here, you might remember.
01:33 His stall was more or less somewhere around here.
01:36 So to have my stone there, it's really, really touching to find that it's been put there.
01:45 Because there's something about Camden and something about this strip that's really, really important.
01:51 You know, when I said Camden was the punks market back in the day,
01:57 what that meant for someone like myself who lived out in the eastern suburbs,
02:01 it meant, you know, punk didn't really reach out there in 1977.
02:04 We read about it. We heard it on the radio.
02:07 But we weren't really, you couldn't really be part of it out there because there were no gigs that people were playing.
02:11 But when you came up Camden on a Saturday, you were part of it.
02:15 It was here. It was alive.
02:17 The places you walked by, the people you passed in the street, it was here.
02:22 You know, it was an incredibly groovy place.
02:26 And, you know, that's what you wanted then. That's all you had.
02:29 You just wanted to be as a teenager, doing punk.
02:32 You just wanted to be in that groovy place where things are happening.
02:36 And now, thanks to the Music Walk of Fame, I'm going to be in that groovy place forever.
02:43 Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Thank you.