Welcome to Blazing Fire 2, which is the section of my substack that will be home to some of my longer form, more involved writing, as opposed to Rude Interruption, which is for more ephemeral bits and pieces. Eventually I will probably make this a paid subscriber component if there is enough interest, but it’s 100% free for the time being.
Anarchy in N16 began life as a collision of different bits of writing related to the magical landscape of Stoke Newington that I wrote at various points, which I reworked but then ended up adding more to and developing further. I lived in Stoke Newington during the late 90s, not long after I moved to London from the north east, and took some of my most important steps in magic on these roads. I was going to just edit together the existing unpublished writing here, but in the process of drawing the illustration of Abney Park Cemetery’s spirit life above, I started receiving some ghost conversations that revealed how I could expand this piece to do more justice to the landscape and its dead. Once I dug into it though, I very quickly had much more material than I had bargained for, so I’m going to split this piece across two newsletters. This first part deals with my old working crossroads on Rectory Road, and the forthcoming second part will deal with Abney Park Cemetery.
Haunted Soundsystem 2: Cabio Sile is the second in a series of mix CDs that I made in the mid-00s attempting to trace the influence of African Diaspora Traditions on popular music. This one is composed of Orisha-themed music from Cuba and Brazil. Most of these were ripped directly from my vinyl LPs, and I’ve included a few photos of the LP cover art. I started writing some fairly extensive liner notes for each track, but there are 26 songs on this so I’ve decided to split this up between two newsletters as well. Liner notes for the first ten tracks are included here and the next Blazing Fire will contain a repost of the audio with the remaining liner notes. They say that the Devil has the best tunes, but I think Shango makes a very convincing argument to the contrary in this mix.
I’m aiming to write at least three substantial Blazing Fire posts with this depth of content over the course of a year, interspersed with the less content heavy Rude Interruptions. That seems like it ought to be achievable.
Anarchy in N16
Crossroads Pacts
I learned magic by going out to the crossroads and looking for magic. Every week at the crossroads, same day, rain or shine. My form was messy, but the repetition of the process and the manner in which it is done can go some way. The first crossroads where I went looking for magic was on the corner of Rectory Road, N16. I could well have been accused of fucking around in things that the prevailing wisdom tells us not to fuck around in. Yet still, some incontrovertible instinct compelled me out to the crossroads to look for magic.
Maybe a quiet whisper of Hermes or Hecate informing my actions, bubbling up from somewhere deep in the ancestral cord. Sly nod from Odin, fixing me in the gaze of his one good eye, stirring a memory of gallows curses and hanged man murk out of the cold north. A procession of black heart witches and shady necromancers with dirt beneath the fingernails, speaking under their breath about crossroads pacts with forgotten spirits. I wasn't using any of those old names and formulas, but I was still instinctively going out to the crossroads looking for a pact. I was still doing what sorcerers always did.
I didn’t know anything about the history of the area or what was under the roads, but I instinctively grasped that my practice to date had coalesced around these streets in a curious way. London had thrown me here when I needed somewhere to go, and I was drawn irrevocably into a world of magic at the other side of this intersection when I first reached out to it.
My crossroads stood between four different districts of London each with its own character. To the north was Stamford Hill, home to the largest Hasidic community in Europe and with a Jewish heritage stretching back to the 1700s. Rows of terraced doorways fixed with mezuzahs, apotropaic cylindrical talismans containing verses of the Torah pinned to the doorway for protection and as a sign of faith, or sometimes just the painted-over outline of a mezuzah left on an outside wall as a testament to local religious customs and unstable tenancies.1
The main stretch of Stamford Hill follows the old straight track of Ermine Street, one of the original Roman roads out of London that starts at Bishopsgate and goes as far north as York. The crossroads at the top of Stamford Hill was the site of a gibbet in the 17th century, an iron cage displaying the remains of criminals executed at Tyburn. Corpses left to rot in iron for years at a time. Highwayman bones and dissident flesh. Grisly stench and slow-motion decomposition. A warning to those entering or leaving London. Stark skeletal landmarks to the power of the state. 2
To the west was Stoke Newington, which by this time had already soaked up much chattering overflow from nearby Islington, but still held fast to its counter culture roots. The dead of Abney Park Cemetery still held sway on these roads. To the east was Upper Clapton, a stretch that the newspapers at the time had dubbed “Hackney’s Murder Mile” due to its high concentration of shootings and stabbings.
To the south was Dalston, also a very different landscape in the 90s from its later gentrified iteration. The terrain of the Kingsland Road was markedly different from both Stokey and Shoreditch further south. Fashionable bars abruptly gave way to a rush of fresh veg and kebab shops, baklava and betting shops, Wetherspoon emptiness, dancehall riddims and nightbus dread.
Dalston Lane had been the location of The Four Aces Club, which opened in 1966 as the first nightclub in Hackney and one of the first Black music venues in London. Housed inside a former Victorian music hall, which had originally been built for Robert Fossett's Circus in 1886, and where performing elephants had once shared a stage with jugglers and acrobats, its labyrinthine space became the backdrop for decades of musical evolution and experimentation.
The Four Aces had hosted JA acts such as Prince Buster, The Upsetters, Desmond Dekker, Jimmy Cliff and Alton Ellis. Its foundations had been shaken by DJs and soundmen such as Sir Collins, Count Suckle, Jah Shaka, Sir Lloyd Coxsone Outernational, Fatman Hifi and Unity Hifi. Its walls had nurtured the progression of music from ska to rocksteady, dub to lovers, dancehall to jungle. In the early 90s it became Club Labrynth and functioned as a living crossroads between North London soundsystem culture and the development of 80s acid house and illegal warehouse raves into soundsystem-inflected forms such as jungle and drum & bass.
Dalston had also been the stomping ground of the North London conjure impresario, whose name we won’t throw around without caution, but whose Dark & Light Hair Products botanica was immortalised in Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographic novel ‘Lights Out For The Territory’. I scoured Dalston looking for that shop, but it had closed down before I moved to the area. Yet what Stoke Newington lacked in functioning botanicas, it more than made up for in Jamaican record shops. Visits to both establishments tended to engage the same awkward self-consciousness and a disorienting feeling of being overwhelmed by a lot of inscrutable things that I had very little existing frame of reference for.
Stepping inside record shops like Wax Unlimited in Stoke Newington was always a learning curve as I tried to get my bearings within 50 years of Jamaican musical styles cut to vinyl. The record store’s proprietor Gladdy Wax would famously DJ wearing rubber gloves because his records were so rare that they couldn’t be touched by human hands. Digging through crates of Studio One and Bluebeat 45s and often buying records on instinct without really knowing what they were, was almost analogous to sorting through packets of High John the Conqueror root and Devil’s Shoestring in the Brixton conjure shops and trying to educate myself on what I was looking at.
7” vinyl inscribed like Solomonic talismans with mystic revelation and Old Testament dread. Scratched-up records documenting a living folk music, not just of Jamaica, but of Jamaica in burning confrontation with the country and culture that had held and exploited it as a slave colony for centuries. Soundsystems, dancehalls and shebeens as unconquered space within London incarnate as the material and psychic Babylon. Rocksteady meditations on remaining conscious and resilient amid the injustices and iniquities of the oppressor city and its works.
My crossroads on Rectory Road was a territory where all these dreams converged. To pour out rum as an offering here was to dial the number of the local ghosts. Opening yourself up to the background dub of Hackney hopes and Clapton fears, Stokey dreams and Dalston defiance. An x-ray music that penetrates the bones, drums in the skull and stabs at the heart. Splashes of sweet liquid hit black tarmac, boring down into the roots of the place, and tunneling into the shared psychic landscape. The gate opens and suddenly the game you were playing becomes real. The magic stops being something that you are working and becomes something that is working you. The living reality of the mysteries pours through the hole you have made in the world and faces you down, stares right back at you and tells you to speak up quick.
The Hackney Brook, one of London’s buried and forgotten rivers, flowed invisibly under the ground at this intersection. Its silent course granting the site a watery aspect. The Kalunga below. A liquid medium to conduct the souls of the dead. The immediate area and its stretch of grass, known as Stoke Newington Common, had been old common land for centuries – only coming under public ownership as recently as 1872. A hold-out patch of the wild that was never truly taken.
In the late 19th century, a number of 400,000 year old Paleolithic flint axes were discovered here, identifying the site as one of the oldest areas of human habitation in Britain. I like to imagine that some proto-punk Stokey caveman might have set the tone of the spot back then by making primitive offerings at this same crossroads, lending the intersection an irresistible gravity that would shape its character. The same stretch had also been the childhood home of Marc Bolan, who was born at 25 Stoke Newington Common and had spent his youth and ace face mod years on these roads.
I was 21 when I moved to Stoke Newington and did not begin my practice of visiting the Rectory Road crossroads until after I had lived there for a year or so. The most compelling thing I had encountered in the British occult world at the time had been chaos magic, which had emerged initially in Leeds but also right here in Stoke Newington during the late 1970s. I always wanted magic that worked, that tangibly did things, and wasn’t just a cop-out self help manual or a convoluted system promising vague spiritual attainment. Chaos magic seemed to cut through the mist that had accrued around occultism, and put its focus on magic that worked.
It had come out of the same instinct as punk in 1970s England, and shared the DIY ethos of punk, in that you didn’t have to wait for anyone to tell you that you could do it. Discovering chaos magic really did feel like the magical equivalent of learning three chords and forming a band with your mates. It made magic appear accessible, and put it into people’s hands, where it belonged, not locked away in fraternal societies or the preserve of self-appointed high maguses.
I liked how chaos magic made a space for creativity and imagination to exist within a magical practice, and I liked how it permitted an open-minded skepticism to remain your working baseline. Nobody was trying to sell you an ideology, and your practice wasn’t the uncritical reception of someone else’s belief system, but a living laboratory where you could locate what was useful, discard what was superfluous, and begin to develop your own individual sense of magic. I wanted my magic to be able to breathe like that, and out of the various different branches of occultism that I knew about, chaos magic seemed to me the most likely path towards whatever half-glimpsed destination was calling.
Moving to London also finally gave me access to almost mythical bookshops such as Atlantis in Bloomsbury and Compendium in Camden. Entire shops full of otherwise hard-to-find tomes on magic and weirdness. My magical education had been cobbled together from library books and whatever the local chain bookshops happened to get in on a week when I had the money. Then later it was floppy disks filled with text files of various often willfully copyright free chaos magic texts that I downloaded whenever I had a chance to get on the internet. Now there were no such limitations, and I could finally start filling in some of the gaps in my occult reading and getting up-to-speed with the latest permutations of contemporary magic.
Around this same time, I managed to get out of the Post Office in the east end where I had been employed, and started working in central London at a job where I had daily internet access for the first time. I very quickly joined as many occult mailing lists as I could find, and eventually got talking to a woman who lived in South America and who became my first mentor in magic. She would set me lessons by email that I would complete and then I would write up the results and my reflections on them, and the conversation would develop from there. Suddenly though, she was visiting London, and more oddly would be staying at a friend’s house that – in an unlikely coincidence given the sprawling geography of London – happened to be just on the other side of the crossroads at Rectory Road near where I lived. She had me collaborate on designing a chaos magic initiation ritual that she approved, and I was initiated into magic by her in a motel room opposite Finsbury Park. Afterwards we went for kebabs on Green Lanes and she presented me with a knife that had a hilt carved like a monkey’s head to be my initiatory dagger. The crossroads at Rectory Road was already central to my magic, and all I did later was go out to meet it.
The magic of the crossroads is often depicted as a one-time pact or bargain with an anomalous personage, but the heart of the practice is located in the regularity, repetition and rhythm of your intentional attendance in such a space over a period of time. The firmness of your intention, and what you might be called on to demonstrate on successive visits. Anything can happen at the crossroads and you must be there for it and bear witness to it as communication from spirit. Whichever crossroads personage you may be approaching, there’s always a level to the practice where the substance and mystery of a particular junction is assembled out of the traffic that moves on its roads and the ghosts that haunt it. The crossroads of Stoke Newington are dense with layers of spirit that have occupied its roads, steeped in centuries of highly specific local mystery, yet their true centre of gravity is inevitably the unconsecrated necropolis of Abney Park Cemetery.
Haunted Soundsystem 2: Cabio Sile
This was a mix CD that I made years ago of Orisha-themed popular music from Cuba and Brazil, mostly ripped from my vinyl LPs, and which has not been online anywhere until now. I’ve also uploaded this to Mixcloud here if that is preferable to anyone versus the embedded audio below. Liner notes for the first ten tracks are below, and I will write about the remaining songs in the next newsletter.
1. A Elegua – Merceditas Valdes & Grupo Yoruba Andabo
This was not on the original CD version of this mix, but not having any Merceditas Valdes on this seemed like an oversight. While it also made sense to open with Celia Cruz singing for Eleggua, I liked how this recording began with a Mojuba and included Bata drums. Mojuba means "I pay homage to" in Yoruba, and it's a set of prayers said before acts of worship or devotion in Lukumi. There's an extract on the Mojuba from a book by my Padrino in Lukumi here.
Merceditas Valdes was one of the first Lukumi akpwóns (singers) to be recorded in 1949. She made a number of recordings, with her debut album Merceditas Valdes released in 1960, but following the Cuban Revolution, the commercialization of Afro-Cuban music was restricted and her recording career was halted. Valdes began recording again in the 1980s, and made several LPs titled Ache 1 (1982) through Ache V (1993) before her death in 1996 at the age of 73. This song for Elegua with Grupo Yoruba Andabo is from Ache IV (1990) in this later revival of her career.
2. Eleggua – Celia Cruz
Celia Cruz shouldn't really need any introduction. This recording is from a 1954 LP called Santero, which also featured Merceditas Valdes. While identifying as Catholic, the Cuban singer recorded many songs for Orisha, both solo and with her group La Sonora Matancera. Following the Cuban Revolution, she remained in exile – first in Mexico and then in the U.S. – and continued her recording career overseas. In 1973 she began recording for Fania Records and became internationally known as the "Queen of Salsa".
3. Tabú – Xavier Cugat
Tabú was written by Cuban singer and composer Margarita Lecuona, and became part of the repertoire of 1950s Exotica, following popular instrumental recordings by Arthur Lyman and Les Baxter. Versions that include vocals include a roll-call of Orisha as part of the chorus, which interestingly will tend to change depending on who is singing it, with different Orisha name-checked in the various versions. Xavier Cugat was a Spanish-Cuban classically trained violinist and bandleader who helped to popularize Latin dance music trends in the U.S., such as the conga, the mambo, and the cha-cha-cha. He was the bandleader at the Waldorf–Astoria hotel in New York for 16 years, on either side of WW2, and his band included Desi Arnaz, Yma Sumac, Tito Rodriguez, and Miguelito Valdes. While leading his band he was known for holding a conductor's baton in one hand and a small chihuahua in the other. Cugat also had a parallel career as a cartoonist and caricaturist and his work appeared in the Los Angeles Times. I think it’s Miguelito Valdés singing here but I'm not 100% sure. There's another Xavier Cugat, Miguelito Valdés and Machito version of this but it's different from this one.
4. Zarabanda – Machito
Machito and the Afro-Cubans were among the first big bands to fuse Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz improvisation and arrangements, and they recorded the first jazz song Tanga (1942) that was based in-clave. They were the first to include the Cuban music triumvirate of congas, bongo and timbales in a big band setting, and the first to use the term "Afro-Cuban" to overtly acknowledge the African roots of this music. While Xavier Cugat played before society elites at the Waldorf-Astoria, Machito and his band played for the Latin-American communities concentrated in East Harlem and the South Bronx. He worked with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and directly influenced a generation of New York Latin Jazz band leaders such as Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez.
Here he is singing about Zarabanda, the Mpungo of iron in Palo Mayombe. I had thought about removing this track as everything else on this mix relates to Yoruba while this is Congo, and wondered if there were enough Congo-influenced Latin tunes like this for a separate mix, along with records such as Bilongo/La Negra Tomasa. That would need some more research though, so I just left it on because it's great.
5. Lucumi – Miguelito Valdés
Miguelito Valdés was a former amateur boxing champ who was one of the biggest singers in Cuba in the late 1930s. He was known as Mr Babalu following his hit with the Margarita Lecuona-penned song Babalu, which Desi Arnas would later also become internationally known for following his role in the sit-com I Love Lucy. More about that, and how the Orisha of smallpox came to be globally associated with this jaunty sit-com adjacent number, in due course. Valdés moved to New York in the 1940s and continued his music career, even making appearances in movies alongside Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. Here he is singing directly about Lucumi.
6. Ogum – Arlete Moita
Abruptly shifting over to Brazil with this one. I could have done this as two separate mixes really, rather than mixing up the Cuban and Brazilian Orisha music, but that's what I did at the time. I think it works to show how Orisha music is expressed so differently through the cultural lens of Brazil compared to Cuba, while also exerting a wider influence on popular music in different ways. I know hardly anything about Arlete Moita, other than that they recorded several Umbanda LPs in the 1970s. I think you can really hear the parallels with other Brazilian popular music forms such as Samba and Bossa Nova in many of these recordings of Umbanda songs. There are loads of Umbanda LPs like this around, often on private press labels, and they are generally always good. This is a call and response song for Ogum, the Orixa of Iron.
7. Prayer to Ozain – Eddie Palmieri
Puerto Rican pianist and bandleader Eddie Palmieri recorded the LP Lucumí, Macumba, Voodoo in 1978, featuring music inspired by these traditions. It has fantastically 1970s cover art of a woman wearing Elekes – beaded necklaces consecrated to Orisha that are typically the first thing a person receives upon entry to Lukumi. The necklaces on the cover look like they could be real consecrated Elekes beaded to represent specific roads of Orisha, rather than a standard set of botanica Elekes bought for a photoshoot. This track is a short interlude prayer to Ozain, the Orisha of plants and the forest.
8. Canto de Ossanha – Quarteto Em Cy
Another oversight from the original version of this mix is that it somehow had none of the Vinicius de Moraes and Baden Powell Os Afro-Sambas recordings of songs for the Orixa. More from that record later, but I'm going with the Quarteto Em Cy version of Canto de Ossanha here for its Bossa Nova perfection. Quarteto Em Cy were/are four sisters from Bahia called Cybele, Cylene, Cynara and Cyva, who recorded with almost every major Brazilian artist of the 60s and 70s, including providing the backing vocals on the original Os Afro-Sambas record. Ossanha is the Brazilian form of Ozain, the subject of the previous Eddie Palmieri tune, the Orixa of plants and the forest.
9. Babalu – Yma Sumac
Margarita Lecuona's other wildly successful Orisha-themed song was Babalu, named for Babalu-Aye, the Orisha of smallpox, infectious disease and healing. Babalu-Aye is syncretized with Saint Lazarus, who is an extremely popular saint in Cuba. In the lyrics, someone is wondering what to do with a statue of Babalu-Aye, and is instructed to put 17 candles in the shape of a cross (17 December being Saint Lazarus's Day), and offer aguardiente, a cigar and some money.
Initially a hit for Miguelito Valdés in Cuba, Babalu later became the signature song of Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz, who had played in Xavier Cugat's band before WW2. In 1951, Desi Arnaz appeared in the TV sitcom I Love Lucy, starring as Cuban orchestra leader Enrique "Ricky" Ricardo, alongside his real-life wife Lucille Ball. His character would frequently perform the song in episodes of the show and eventually opened a nightclub called Club Babalu.
From here, the word Babalu entered into U.S. popular culture in some really weird ways, mostly separated from its meaning. There was a 1959 Doo Wop tune by The Eternal's called Babalu's Wedding Day. The Hanna-Barbera cartoon Quick Draw McGraw featured a racist Mexican donkey character called "Baba Looey" that was based on the character of Desi Arnaz (in the way that Cuban and Mexican cultures are somehow indistinguishable to white America...) There even used to be a nightclub called Babalou in the crypt of Saint Matthew’s Church in Brixton.
The Valdés version would have been the obvious choice to include here, but I wanted to show the transmission of this song into bizarro 50s Exotica, and that's this Yma Sumac interpretation. Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo, who performed as Yma Sumac, began her career singing Peruvian folk songs in her village of Ichocán, in the Cajamarca region in the northern highlands of Peru. She had a four octave – arguably five octave – range and even won a Guinness World Record for Greatest Vocal Range of Musical Value in 1956. In 1950 she was signed to Capitol Records and paired with Exotica composer Les Baxter. She worked with Baxter on her debut album Voice of the Xtabay, which led to performances at Carnegie Hall, the 1950s Las Vegas casino circuit, and a starring role alongside a young Charlton Heston in a B-movie called Secret of the Incas. Her obituary in the Guardian describes her as "marketed as a mixture of Carmen Miranda and H Rider Haggard's She." Sumac claimed to be an Inca princess directly descended from Atahualpa, the last Incan emperor, a claim that was formally supported by the government of Peru for a period. Other (debunked) rumours argued she was really Amy Camus (Yma Sumac, spelled backwards) from Brooklyn. “The creatures of the forest taught me how to sing,” is how she described unintentionally developing her massive vocal range by imitating the birds and other animals of the Andean mountains.
10. San Lazaro – Celina y Reutilio
This is one of my favourite records of Cuban Orisha music. Celina y Reutilio were the husband and wife duo of vocalist Celina González Zamora and guitarist Reutilio Domínguez. They made many recordings in the style of the traditional acoustic folkloric music of the Cuban agricultural countryside, such as the guajira, the guaracha and the punto Cubano. Celina’s mother was a devotee of the Orisha and their music incorporated many themes of Yoruba and Congo spiritual traditions. This is a song for San Lazaro or Saint Lazarus, who is syncretised with the Orisha Babalu-Aye.
I will write up liner notes for the remaining records in the next Blazing Fire, but here are the track listings so you can know what the rest of the tunes are.
11. Manteca – Dizzy Gillespie & Chano Pozo
12. A Santa Barbara – Celina y Reutilio
13. Chango – Celia Cruz
14. Quequele Xango – J B Carvalho & J B Junior
15. Canto de Xango – Baden Powell & Vinicius de Moraes
16. Elegua Chango – Tito Puente & his Orchestra
17. Omishango – Mongo Santamaria
18. Shango – Eartha Kitt
19. Louvacao a Oxum – Maria Bethania
20. Canto de Iemanja – Baden Powell & Vinicius de Moraes
21. Promessa de Pescador – Sergio Mendes & Brazil '77
22. Yemaya – Katherine Dunham
23. Yemanja – Jairo a Rodrigues
24. Yemaya – Celia Cruz & La Sonora Matancera
25. Baila Yemaya – Celia Cruz
26. Obatala – Mongo Santamaria
Stoke Newington “ghost mezuzahs” – my old flat on Brooke Road had a painted-over ghost mezuzah on the door but I never knew what it was until I encountered the research on this by @HistoryOfStokey on Twitter, to which I am indebted for this previously unknown detail. More information here: https://twitter.com/HistoryOfStokey/status/1619372658549981189?s=20
Stamford Hill gibbet – similarly I did not know about the gibbet at Stamford Hill until I read the research by Horrid Hackney here:
https://horridhackney.com/f/gibbet-at-stamford-hill
My own crossroads experience.
IThis was back in 2005? Living in a rental flat in Cheshire about half a mile from a pub situated on a crossroads named 'The Hanging Gate' I had a old wooden cigar box I had been collecting old and foreign coins in since childhood. One Wednsay/Odins day At midnight (for the amience) I took the coins and laid them in a line at the crossroads and waked away. I was barely a dozen steps away when my nose started to bleed, coppery blood running down my face runining my white shirt. I made it home, binned the shirt.
The ritual worked but I think there was a price to pay in blood not coins .