The Carshalton Sound

 Some time around 1980, in an Arena documentary, John Waters (not the actor – John Peel's producer) reported on a dubious musical phenomenon that became known, very briefly indeed, as the 'Carshalton Beeches sound'. This was a minor subset of a rather more real phenomenon, the 'sound of the suburbs'. Carshalton Beeches, the drearily affluent part of Carshalton (containing not a single pub), is still a byword for suburban respectability – as, for a long time, was Carshalton itself.  Those familiar with the quasi-paradisal delights of Carshalton proper will, of course, laugh at such a notion. 
  As it happened, there really was a 'Carshalton sound' – and I was reminded of it when, last night, I found myself torpidly slumped in front of an old TOTP2 Christmas special. On came the vaguely 'glam rock' band Mud, fronted by Les Gray, who was crooning his very creditable cover of Elvis's 'Lonely This Christmas', the festive Number One of 1974. I used to see Les Gray quite often, drinking at Carshalton's once legendary pub, The Greyhound. He was a local lad, I knew, one of our little band of local celebs (the others included Windsor Davies, Nicholas Smith (the big-eared one from Are You Being Served?) and, down the road in Wallington, Jeff Beck). What I didn't know, until I had a look on Wikipedia last night, was that Mud was very much a Carshalton band: four of its five members were Carshalton born and bred (and one, drummer Dave Mount, even died in Carshalton). Les Gray, a fun-loving type who (as they say) liked a drink, and smoked 50 cigs a day, moved to the Algarve in the 1990s and died there, of a heart attack, in 2006. 
  Here are Mud in their pomp, performing the glorious 'Tiger Feet', which was the best-selling single of 1974. This is the sound of Carshalton...