Above, 2 fans just inside the gate at Kenwood, circa February 1967, courtesy of Lizzie Bravo.
Now, as ye are aware, this blog mainly concerns itself with rooting around in the muck, like an enormous sow, looking for remnants of a long vanished etc. And here's another one...
Watching Nick Cowburn's footage of Kennie from the late 90s, one bit caused a funereal bell to start tolling somewhere deep in my etc., namely, the bit of the "I LOVE" bit:
A couple of years back, I wrote about the old garden shed which once stood in the grounds, and included the following pic which I assumed showed a graffitied section of it:
I suddenly realised that this is what was causing bells to ring. Knock me down and hit me in the face with a shovel, if that isn't the very same graffito (grammar fans), all those years later, clearly
not on the auld shed, but actually a part of the front gate:
It seems highly improbable that it would have survived for over 30 years (at the time Nick shot his footage), so a bit more comparison is called for. Note the relative positions of writing, and white object:
Again, using Lizzie's pic this time, compare white object and box:
Clearly the same location, and so, equally, clearly the same writing, which is banal but remarkable (possibly remarkably banal, I grant ye).
I'd guess the white object is a doorbell (or gatebell in this instance), and the box is obviously a letter box. The area underneath the graffito would have been a door (long gone by the 90s), which explains this pic of Julian, in full "Daddy says,'Fuck off'" mode:
The wooden gate slid across to close, as it is in the Julian pic; and the rear of the aforementioned door can be seen in Lizzie's photo, with the gate (obviously) open:
I promised ye flagrant trivia, and flagrant trivia is what ye shall have.
It's highly unlikely that anything now remains of the old gate, let alone the graffito, but back in the late 1990's, another tiny piece of John-era Kenwood endured.
Cheers Lizzie and Nick.
