The London Blitz has always been a defining trauma for the city.
It happened between 1940 and 1941, eighty years before the Covid Pandemic hit Britain. At one point in 2020 the weekly death toll in London from Covid was higher than the highest weekly death toll in London from the Blitz.
I’ll leave that to sit with you for a while.
Covid was killing more people in London than the Luftwaffe bombs did in the Second World War.
And while who died from the German bombs was largely indiscriminate – a matter wrong place, wrong time and bad luck – Covid largely targeted the old, the weak, and the vulnerable.
‘Pre-existing conditions’ became a phrase we became all too familiar with and, ugly though this reality is, became a phrase that many of us clung to in order to assuage our fear. As in ‘I don’t have a pre-existing condition, I’ll be alright’.
Not our finest hour by any stretch of the imagination.
For reasons too complex to go into I have a scrapbook inherited from a family friend that records his life in the 1930s and 1940s. In it there is a section on the London Blitz because, as the bombs dropped, he served as an air raid warden.
He was stationed in central London, on The Strand. And one of his colleagues I think must have been connected to the world of theatre as he wrote a very dark, very brilliant, lyric about the trauma they were going through.
It’s in the scrapbook, and only a handful of people have seen it before. And, unless someone sang it back in 1940, no-one has ever heard it before.
For me creativity is about lines crossing.
Things, or people, on their own particular paths, reach a nexus. They meet. And stuff happens. Stuff that, if you’re lucky, is way more than the sum of the parts. Or maybe that should be ‘way more than the sum of the paths’.
That’s what happened with ‘London Calling’ – the final film I made in 2020.
There was Covid, there was The Blitz, there was an unseen lyric from 1940, there was me, and there was the insanely talented Guy Hughes. He’s a brilliant actor and musical director that the also insanely talented Kat Kleve put me onto.
Thank you, Kat. And thank you Guy.
Guy acted the script I wrote beautifully, set the lyric from 1940 to music, and sang the resulting song so hauntingly that it still stops me in my tracks every time I hear it.
I knew this was going to be the last film. I wanted it to be special. And it is. But I’m biased. Watch the film and decide for yourself.
It’s about London. And it’s for London.
It’s a love letter.
Here’s ‘London Calling’ featuring the remarkable Guy Hughes: