Brixton is famed as the birth place of David Jones, later known as David Bowie. It was also the scene of some pretty serious race riots in the 80s. It has a large Afro-Caribbean community. But for me, it was always about one street and one artist, Eddy Grant. The first album I ever bought was an Eddy Grant cassette. I don’t remember which one now. I’ve scanned his collection of album covers to see if any trigger a memory. But not really. I just know that while everyone else at school got their reggae fix from Bob Marley, I took a contrarian turn down Electric Avenue.
Mrs P and I took a stroll down Electric Avenue last week. Sat at the bottom of the Victoria Line, it’s not a place we’d usually go. But I’d seen a ‘Treat Week’ offer for 50% off food at a number of restaurants in Brixton Village. Like a pair of vultures detecting a far off carcass, we swooped. We love a deal, a soft launch, a discount, a cheap eat. We settled on La Nonna, a pasta place. Just pasta, no pizza. And the pasta was made fresh upstairs. It was a revelation. Better than any pasta I’d had in Scicily a couple of months back.
Reggae, pasta, legendary murals. What’s not to like. London is much more than the West End. I’ll let my stomach lead us to the next ‘hood.
The Mexile 
And the pasta was made fresh upstairs. It was a revelation.
In the 70s , I bought fresh pasta out of a storefront in front of a family factory in Niles Ohio. You got what they were making that day. Five brothers ran the concern in the back, their 90 year old mother sold the pasta to the public. The lady lived next door and loved her daytime TV. A patron would have to ring a bell, wait for the next commercial and the old women would toddle over to the store and sell what was being made that day. It was worth the wait.
Today the firm is national, sells from coast to coast, everything in plastic freezer bags labeled as fresh pasta. Just in the valley, there are hundreds of people working around the clock making ‘fresh’ pasta, thousands around the US are employed making about 20 different kinds of processed wheat for that old firm. Of course, the brothers are all gone and the firm is an arm of a big food firm-the pasta is still worth buying but nothing like the stuff I brought home in brown paper bags weighed up by a lass born in the 19th century.
Fresh pasta is worth learning how to make and it is not as simple as it might seem.
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Well if “Electric Avenue” was on your cassette then it was Killer On A Rampage (1982). But of course he started in the 70s, so…
Pick your brain time. What was “The guns of Brixton” by the Clash all about? As that predated the 80s.
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