Kinks star Dave Davies slams 'soulless' Denmark Street redevelopment where Mumford & Sons and Dizzee Rascal recorded

Tin Pan Alley: Supporters of the 12 Bar Club protesting against its closure
EPA

Kinks star Dave Davies says London risks becoming “soulless” and “sterile” as he condemned the redevelopment of Denmark Street, once the centre of the country’s music industry.

The last recording studio in the street, which was once called Tin Pan Alley after the area of the same name in New York, closed its doors in June after 62 years of playing host to acts from Jimi Hendrix to Jimmy Cliff, Mumford & Sons and Dizzee Rascal.

Davies, 69, whose band recorded the demo of their 1964 hit You Really Got Me in the street, said: “Denmark Street helped carve out the beginnings of a new art form, a new generation of popular music, which helped shape the future of music and art.

"It is so sad that we may all just end up becoming some distorted and soulless artifact of a dead and bygone age in some sterile Tower of Babel to come.”

One of the last links to the street’s history, the Noel Gay entertainment agency, started as a music publishers in 1938 and is leaving soon.

Its managing director, Alex Armitage, said: “I have worked in Denmark Street for 30 years, and my father 30 years before that. To lose the street from its music industry roots is cultural vandalism.”

Among the buildings that have made way for the redevelopment are rehearsal studios and shops selling sheet music and instruments. Owners Consolidated Developments are looking to redevelop the entire street, which is listed, adding luxury flats behind and above the existing scruffy-chic exteriors.

There is particular concern over the fate of No 6 and No 7, a pair of Grade II* listed 17th-century townhouses, where punk pioneers The Sex Pistols recorded and lived.

Their bass player Glen Matlock, 59, who supports the Save Denmark Street campaign, said: “Everything keeps changing in London and they forget that people visit it to see places like Denmark Street.”

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