Passport To Vice has its own soundtrack...
Maltese pimps, London fog, flick-knives, purple hearts, Soho toms - a score for the history of Maltese crime in London (Passport To Vice, 2022)
A lot of my Instagram reels in the run-up to the publication of Passport To Vice were from a 1994 BBC documentary on the London underworld, narrated by Bob Hoskyns, with some of the songs in this playlist accompanying them.
This is a very early-60s, pre-Beatlemania, post-Elvis window of teen idols, twangy guitars, and Joe Meek-produced bands… (Meek gets triple word-score importance for marrying his pioneering sounds with fervent dabbling in the occult, all within his lodger’s flat-cum-recording-studio).
There is the great scene in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet where Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” is played during a superbly violent moment. The implied innocence of this lullaby, which itself seems to have a tragic climax where some deep desire is finally snatched away, is negated by a violent scene that looks inappropriately paired with the clean-cut sounds and aesthetic of the pop hits of the late 1950s and early 1960s (But read Robert Goldstein’s description: “The tormented narrative of [Orbison’s] 1963 hit “In Dreams” veers unsettlingly between melancholy teenage romance and morbid adult obsession... Hearing his distinctive, plaintive voice sing, ‘I can’t help it! I can’t help it!’ meant recognizing the real possibility that neither could you. Echoes of ranchera music offer bittersweet counterpoint from the lulling intro, through the aching verses to a finish that just seems to evaporate.”)
Every time I hear a song from this kind of era, it conjures up something dangerous, just like the scene in Blue Velvet, or the trembling guitar of Link Wray’s “Rumble”, which oozes black leather and hair grease.
You have to imagine how major industrial cities like London were still trying to climb out of the effects of post-war austerity and that even the “teenager” and young people’s newfound social and cultural independence as a demographic severed from their adult parents, were novel concepts tied to moral panics about crime, rock’n’roll, and sex. A lot of the foundational crime that gave the Maltese Syndicate of pimps, gamblers and extortionate property rentseekers, was concentrated in these post-war years.