From Sinatra to Hendrix: The Forgotten Alhambra of South London
Jazz Cow, Jimi Hendrix, and the Alhambra That Never Was
Today, we’re stepping away from Jazz Cow for a peek at my day job—a tale of live music, unexpected architecture, and the curious ways councils find to complicate things.
The Art of Not Seeing What’s in front of your face
Too busy scrolling to spot something marvellous tucked away in plain sight in South London’s Tooting? Robert Mitchell, one of our Jazz Cow musicians, learned that Jimi Hendrix played the Tooting Alhambra back in ’67. He even dedicated a track to it on his album Little Black Book—and wanted us to make the music video.
- Record scratch. -
Granada in Tooting? Music history, architecture, and Jimi Hendrix? It was as if someone had plucked a few favourite books from my mental bookshelf.
A Tale of Two Alhambras
The Alhambra is one of my favourite buildings, so my ears pricked up when I heard Tooting had its own version. Turns out… It’s a bingo hall.
But don’t be disappointed! Step through the Art Deco facade, and you’re in a theatrical, luxurious space—a Byzantine church meets hall of mirrors with slot machines. Beatles, Sinatra, and Jerry Lee Lewis1 — all played there, and local historian Geoff Simmons is begging the council to slap a blue plaque on the place so locals might notice. What did the council say? Well… more on that later.
The Planning: When Buildings Go Psychedelic
So, what would a music video be? Obviously psychedelic, and psychedelic poster art is often Art Nouveau on a sugar rush. That got me thinking: could the same thing be done with other styles? Like wandering into a kaleidoscopic cathedral—maybe the building itself was the trip.
This was the animatic (a moving storyboard), the blueprint for production.
The Shoot
Although it’s an animated video, I wanted some live-action elements, so I organised a mini shoot. In a lovely Jazz Cow connection, Luly’s daughter joined us as a runner. She was super helpful and proved to be an expert paper thrower. It was also great to see the band in the light, since the last time I saw them was at a gig cut short by a power outage.
Animation Production: an Adventure in Chromatic Tomfoolery
It’s a bit audacious to attempt this on a shoestring; luckily, our aesthetic thrived on ramshackle charm. Those hand-drawn posters and zines from the 60s counterculture had a tactile, unpolished "handmade" quality.2
I aimed for a colour scheme that makes colours bounce, placing complementary colours of the same value side by side, so your eyeballs go a bit skewiff.3 Naturally, cranking up the chroma means you need some order, or your audience will drown in a rainbow soup. The trick is finding the sweet spot—vivid enough to throw your retinas a distortion party, but just shy of the visual assault that sends viewers reaching for the nearest bucket. I hope I've achieved that.
Another danger is looking like the contemporary plague of AI-generated psychedelic imagery: too precise, too shiny, and augh! What I wanted was something closer to Yellow Submarine, which came out the year after the Hendrix Granada concert.
As the work was so much, my friend Amin, who loved the ideas, swooped in to assist with some of the illustrations, helping me bring this vision together.
Round up
It’s the sort of project that makes you remember why you got into this business in the first place: because sometimes, just sometimes, some of your random interests align like planets, and you get to make something gloriously, unapologetically bonkers.
And that, my friends, is how Jazz Cow led me to a psychedelic ode to a bingo hall that once hosted the greatest guitarist who ever lived. If that’s not worth a blue plaque, I don’t know what is.
But what did the esteemed council have to say about this modest proposal?
Here we encounter classic bureaucratic reasoning: the building, they inform us, is listed; therefore, there will be no plaque. Yet they display a remarkably relaxed attitude toward graffiti artists and general decay—a couple of screws are hardly going to wreck the building. Computer says no—a kind of bureaucratic nonsense that a certain cow might well revolt against.
LITTLE BLACK BOOK (Vol1) Blueprint (Of An Infinite Gift)
(WhirlwindRecordings CD WR4842/ Vinyl WR4842LP)
https://whirlwindrecs.lnk.to/LittleBlackBook
23 Nov ALBUM LAUNCH - CRAZY COQS
https://www.brasseriezedel.com/events/little-black-book-debut-album-launch/
The animated legends tossing paper from the clouds in the animation are Frank Sinatra (‘53), Paul Robeson (‘60), Ronnie Spector (‘64), John Lennon (‘65!), and Carmen Miranda (‘48). They are just a taste of who’ve graced Granada’s stage. Add to them the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Jerry Lee Lewis, Walker Brothers, Dusty Springfield, the Bee Gees, Roy Orbison… the list goes on.
Animation like this is typically for a smaller cult audience. As animation legend Richard Williams noted, even at the height of the Beatles’ popularity, audiences still avoided it; he put it down to its jerky, stop-start animation.
Optics & Colour theory a bit tricky to unpack here (which is just as well, as I’m no expert), but in short: Opposite colours on the wheel “vibrate” when they’re similar in value—that is, if they’d look alike in black and white. So the poor eye just can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
Last year, I visited The Dreamachine with friends—a 360-degree psychedelic marvel inspired by Brion Gysin’s 1959 light-spinning contraption. Created by artist Jennifer Crook and her neuroscientist-philosopher crew. Many reported life-changing experiences, I wasn’t quite launched into cosmic ecstasy (alas), but the optical antics were a fun reminder of colour and light’s power.
Incredible job!!!!!!!!
Lovely work guys!