I wish I could say that things turned sunnier for the place after 1964, but sadly the future of this unique and incredibly atmospheric old place is still not fully secure. Despite the sterling efforts of the charity which currently runs Wilton’s, this Victorian monument to music, merriment and mirth still awaits restoration and requires urgent repairs to prevent it from collapse. There is hope though: Wilton’s cultural and architectural importance was recently identified by the World Monuments Fund, who added the building to their list of the world’s 100 most endangered sites, alongside such exotic places as the Inca city of Machu Picchu.
The variety theatres themselves were later edged out by the arrival of cinema, and cinema - for a period - was then edged out by TV, but for a few glorious decades variety theatres ruled the roost in London. It was this transfer of music hall into deluxe theatres that ushered in the ‘golden age of variety’. This was essentially an exercise in rebranding, to make the genre appear more respectable, as the entertainment on offer changed very little. The requirement to secure licences from a magistrate and the pressure brought to bear by moral reform groups was behind this upmarket shift.
The layout of the new halls was more in keeping with traditional theatres, with fixed seating throughout, thus removing all evidence of variety’s pub origins. Eventually, drink was banned from the auditorium altogether and music hall’s acceptance as a respectable form of entertainment, albeit in a new guise, appeared to be sealed by the first Royal Variety Performance at the Palace Theatre on Cambridge Circus in 1912. It was a bit of a sham though, given that the biggest star of the day, Marie Lloyd, wasn’t invited to sing. Her material was deemed too saucy for royalty. A bit rich, considering the recently deceased Edward VII had given one or two actresses and singers more than his personal seal of approval during the course of his marriage.
The golden age of variety was a bit before my time, but I’ve heard plenty of stories about that period. Some of the best were told by my mother-in-law, Christina. She’s sadly no longer with us, but in their youth Christina and her two sisters used to have a dance act and appeared in many of London’s great variety theatres in the 40s and 50s, such as the London Hippodrome just by Leicester Square. It’s a place that has been knocked about a bit inside over the years but is currently undergoing an intensive programme of redevelopment as a casino. Restoration and preservation of the original features (many of which have been hidden for decades) of this Frank Matcham-designed building are planned.
Christina regaled me with wonderful stories about her time as one third of the Martin Sisters. Part of their routine involved performing Russian dances on roller skates, which was fraught with danger, given that all theatre stages are gently raked, so they had to really battle to stop themselves drifting helplessly towards the footlights. Their musical accompaniment was provided by a blind pianist whose skill on the ivories was matched by his highly developed sense of spatial awareness. This proved invaluable when it came to walking the girls to and from the theatre during wartime blackouts. The sisters performed six nights a week, including matinees on the weekends: bloody hard work. They often shared the bill with the Crazy Gang, a collection of comedy double acts whose most famous members were Bud Flanagan (aka Ruben Weintrop) and Chesney Allen, whose big number was ‘Underneath the Arches’.
As if the raked stages weren’t enough of a hazard, the Martin Sisters’ act was often made all the more dangerous and thrilling by interventions from members of the Crazy Gang. Serving that demanding mistress Comedy, they took to opening and closing the stage trap doors, or turning on the wind machine and sending the girls’ skirts flying as they tried to descend a flight of stairs - on roller-skates, mind you - during their entrance.
The ownership of many variety theatres in this period was concentrated in nationwide chains (although London was still very much the industry hub) and the Martin Sisters ended up touring the circuit of theatres owned by Moss Empires, having got the contract through their agent, the famous impresario and World Charleston Champion of 1926, Lew Grade. The sisters travelled around the country on trains specially commissioned by Moss Empires, with each compartment occupied by different acts. There was a hierarchy on the train which determined who travelled where. The band went in the first compartment, dancers in the second, the Crazy Gang next, followed by assorted compartments of snake charmers, magicians, and a fella whose act consisted of meticulously winding up a series of clocks, stitched inside his coat, which would go off simultaneously as he reached his punch line and threw his garment open. Presumably to illustrate the secret of good comedy: timing. The bigger solo performers would have a compartment to themselves. What a scene it must have been as that train pulled away from King’s Cross.
Years later, in 1978, our record company, Stiff Records, adopted a similar ‘package tour’ idea and sent artists like Wreckless Eric, Rachel Sweet and Lena Lovich around the country on the ‘Be Stiff’ tour train. Variety was clearly alive and kicking in the late 70s.
The larger variety halls which Anne’s mum and aunts played during the 1940s and 1950s were far removed from the original pub halls, but it didn’t make them less charismatic. By all accounts, most of them were pretty spectacular, which makes it all the more galling that nearly all of them had disappeared by the 1960s.
Variety entertainment began to die a slow death following the arrival of the talkies in the late 1920s and was finally finished off by TV in the 1950s. The main problem for music halls and variety was that in their heyday most of the acts had one signature turn, routine or song, for which they were synonymous, and so doing the rounds of all the venues meant performing in front of a new crowd each night. Unless, that is, the audience followed the act around, which some did. Victorian groupies, screaming and throwing their bloomers and long-johns on stage.
By the time an act came back round, it would have regained some of its novelty and audiences would turn up again. You see those old films of six fellas doing the most intricate dance routine, in complete unison, that they would have perfected over years up and down the country. Pre-TV there was always another town, always another crowd. In the TV era, if an act was showcasing its routine to the nation, that would be it. Everyone who had wanted to see the renowned bird imitator, for instance, just had. There was no new audience to reach out to the next evening. People no longer needed to go to the theatre to watch performers. Once the audiences stopped turning up, it was only a matter of time before the theatres themselves faced extinction. Some of them managed to survive by adapting to new uses. One of the most famous variety theatres outside the West End, which once wowed audiences, stood close to home in Camden.
The Bedford Theatre on Camden High Street was demolished in 1969 after standing empty for ten years, thus bringing to an end a colourful showbiz career which had begun 80 years earlier when the theatre was built on the site of a former music hall. The office building that today stands in its place is still called Bedford House and I used to hear people ask bus drivers to drop them off at ‘the Bedford’ up until a few years ago. It’s like a lot of London landmarks that become embedded in the psyche of the local community, even after they are gone. The Nag’s Head in Holloway, just around the corner from me, is another one - the area is still referred to as that even though the pub from which the name came has now disappeared.
Although the Bedford is long gone, and I never saw it in its pomp, for me it lives on for two reasons. The first is because it features in the pictures of Walter Sickert, who headed the so-called Camden Town Group of artists and immortalised Victorian and Edwardian Camden in his paintings. The second reason is that the Bedford appeared, just a couple of years before its demolition, in a cult 1967 documentary entitled
The London Nobody Knows
.
I first saw this 45-minute film on TV in the late 70s, and if it ever finds its way to an art-house cinema near you, I urge you to go and see it. It’s based on a book of the same name by the artist and art critic Geoffrey Scowcroft Fletcher, written in 1962. Fletcher had a particular penchant for what he termed ‘off-beat’ London, and his book is a celebration of the quirky, unusual and downright bizarre places which make the city so special. Sound familiar? The film, inspired by Fletcher’s example, attempts a similar job.
The London it depicts is decrepit and ramshackle; what’s more, the post-war construction work that’s going on all around appears to be making things worse. The streets of this London certainly aren’t those which feature in the clichéd images of the swinging 60s. Instead, they’re filled with ragamuffin children, winos, vagrants and half-crazed street entertainers. And there are bombsites round just about every corner. I was talking with a friend recently about this and reminiscing about how we used to play on bombsites when we were little - this must have been in the late 60s or early 70s. ‘We’re going up the bombsite,’ we’d say, as if it was a purpose-built playground created specially for us. As kids we had no real notion of what had actually created these spaces of adventure.
The documentary is given a sinister edge by its presenter, former matinee idol and Hollywood A-lister James Mason. No one in the history of cinema has done ‘sinister’ quite like him. Highlights of the lugubrious Mason’s wanderings in
The London Nobody Knows
include visits to Chapel Market, squalid tenements, a gents’ loo in Holborn where goldfish swim in the glass cisterns, an egg-breaking plant and several run-down Georgian and Victorian terraced streets.
But the thing that stands out in this documentary is the sight of him skulking moodily about inside the derelict Bedford music hall. He points out the once-fancy scrollwork and the plaster decorations of nymphs and shepherds that lie in ruins on the floor. Then it really gets going when he talks about the ‘Queen of the Halls’, Marie Lloyd, who was a favourite performer at the Bedford. A scratched 78rpm recording of Lloyd singing the music-hall classic ‘The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery’ provides the background soundtrack to the scene of desolation that Mason finds in the auditorium. All rather spooky, and compelling.
The film gives a glimpse of the Bedford in a very sorry state, but in the book on which it’s based, author Geoffrey Fletcher suggests what it was like before its slow decline, describing the fusion of audience, architecture, decoration, mirrors and lighting which resulted in what he called ‘the true baroque of the music hall’. I never experienced the Bedford in all its baroque pomp, but I share Fletcher’s conclusion that its loss ‘as a living music hall can only be described as a tragic loss to London life’.
Interestingly, Fletcher contrasts the sad fate of the Bedford to that of another Camden theatre which managed to weather the end of the music-hall and variety era. Known today as the Camden Palace, on Camden High Street, it was designed by the prolific theatre architect W. G. R. Sprague in 1900. Although it’s lost some statues of classical figures that used to adorn its exterior, the ivory-coloured stone facade of this building is still impressive and is dominated by a large, oxidised copper dome on its roof.
The Palace has gone through several incarnations and name changes since it first opened its doors. Today, along with the Grand in Clapham and the Hackney Empire, it’s one of the three surviving variety theatres outside the West End that date from the turn of the last century. The reason it’s still here is because it was adaptable, being put to different uses as fads came and went. It began life as a straight theatre but swapped to variety after nine years, and just before the First World War it became a cinema. After the Second World War had ended, it was all change again, as the Palace became a BBC radio theatre where programmes such as
The Goon Show
were recorded. Finally, it opened its doors to musicians in 1972.
It’s quite a striking building, despite having lost some of the twiddly, fancy late-Victorian ornamentation that once adorned its exterior. I had an opportunity to experience the magnificent copper dome at close quarters during an excursion to the Palace in the mid-70s, long before I ever appeared there as a performer.
Back then the Palace was called the Music Machine and was a popular rock venue. I can’t recall what year it was when my friend and Madness’s future sax player Lee Thompson first showed me the circuitous route up the fire escape that led to the Palace’s rooftop dome, or even what band was playing that night, but I do remember the reason we were climbing up there: the celebrated dome had a hole in it and this was our way in. We took the precaution of striking a few matches and throwing them through the gaping rusty hole into the total darkness to ensure there was a floor to land on, but that was the extent of our risk assessment. Satisfied that we weren’t leaping into a bottomless pit, we went for it. We were risking our necks to avoid paying the admission fee. After dusting ourselves off in the dark, we entered the Palace through a fire exit which led straight to a VIP bar area. Congratulating ourselves on the daring of our enterprise, we sauntered into the room whereupon it was immediately clear that many of the other guests present were somewhat startled by our appearance. Not surprising really because when I looked at Lee and he at me, we realised we were covered in pigeon dung. Not an auspicious entry into such a fine building. But it did rather open my eyes to the curious delight of risking life and limb to bunk into places without the bother of paying. But beware, it can become a bit of a habit.
In 1979 I entered the Camden Palace again, not through the dome this time, nor by the front entrance for that matter, but by the stage door. I’m so glad this place didn’t vanish when it looked as if demolition was on the cards because, besides being a fantastic venue, it is the scene of the most momentous occasion in my life, one certainly worthy of a blue plaque if you ask me. It is where I met my wife, Anne.