This city never changes. It never has and I'd be surprised if it ever will. A spiteful amiability is in the makeup of every Londoner. An ability to marry their nature to the throbbing and flowing of a place where you're mashed in with those who have nothing in common with you.
Whether it's a Roman centaurion shuffling his gleaming armour to the left so he can piss into the Thames on the spot where Waterloo will be, a dirty pickpocket sheltering from the rain and counting his day's takings, a working man living for the weekend jaunt down Gin Alley or a city boy blithely ripping off millions of pounds, whenever you are, you're here.
The best art is about us struggling through a stupid obstinate reality that gets in the way of our lives being easy and fun or at least tells us a story with all that in the background. The same is true of The Beggar's Opera, a song cycle from 1728 that deals with the underclass and anti-heroes. MacHeath is a robber and gangleader, somebody who stabs poor Jenny Diver and Sukey Tawdry, women of negotiable affection, who overhear his nefarious plans. Of course, he ends up with a darkly happy ending and avoids the noose.
In a strange, oddly inevitable, way, via years of perennial popularity, an adaptation into The Threepenny Opera by mad German geniuses Brecht and Weill being covered by Louis Armstrong (who was covered by Bobby Darin, Ella Fitzgerald and Sinatra) this story of ancient prostitutes and murderers snuck into the garish classless environment of Las Vegas lounge-rooms. Grimy London highwayman MacHeath underwent a makeover to become the rakish "Mack the Knife." The tune may have gone Chicago swing and become a jazzy, deathless standard, but the lyrics remained recognisably Smithfield.
MacHeath dumps the corpses of his victims into the Thames weighed down with cement. Into that same river, three hundred years later, a clean young mess named Georgina would jump to her death in the cheerful song Sheila by Jamie T.
Sheila starts, more or less, with a sample of John Betjeman reading from his poem the Cockney Amorist;
Oh when my love, my darling
You've left me here alone
I'll walk the streets of London
Which once seemed all our own.
The vast suburban churches
Together we have found
The ones which smelt of gaslight
The ones in incense drown'd.
Jamie T's first album, Panic Prevention, was so named because he made music as a way to ward off the crippling panic attacks he'd suffered throughout his life. The songs on that album, and it's superlative follow up Kings & Queens, are a mix of hip-hop, ska, punk and hook-led indie in a blend all his own. Jamie T dismisses poetry in an interview in the Guardian; "It's like being back at school, innit?" Nevertheless, with style and skill and just the bare minimum words Jamie carves out vivid characters and shows the depths of their feelings.
Sheila, as a song, isn't as smooth as Mack the Knife. It isn't supposed to be. It's got edges that don't need to be rounded off, a burbling bumpiness that is perfect for the lyrics. Some may mistake the distanced angle both songs take to the tragic events they describe as ironically aloof, devoid of emotion. The upbeat melodies of both songs aren't at all at odds with the death that occurs in their lyrics. It isn't black humour that makes us laugh when events mount up on top of us in a surprising way. "Fuck! Hah! Didn't see that coming."
Sheila and Mack The Knife say that even as we get shit on us there's something else out there. As Georgina kills herself amid a milieu of cider and heroin, and MacHeath goes on his merry slashing, somebody somewhere is having the best night of their life. You may as well celebrate the good. Suck it up, son, and keep on.
