Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (5 page)

This was the only place an outsider could go to mix with other like-minded souls with no fear of discrimination, unless you were boring, of course, in which case you would last precisely ten seconds until Muriel or indeed Bacon got you in their sights. This place needed no bouncers. The whole scene was, for me, perfectly summed up in the Kinks song ‘Lola’ which recounts the story of a naive heterosexual dancing with a transvestite beneath electric candlelight in a club down in old Soho. The song caused a bit of a stir at the time, but for me it was a tale of everyday life that was going on all around me.

The Colony’s pedigree as a top-notch standard bearer from Soho’s boho past was enhanced by the fact that the club’s licence was held by just three people throughout the 60 years of its existence - Belcher, Ian Board and Michael Wojas, the last at the helm - and was handed down as an aristocrat might his estate and jewels. However, those jewels have lost their sparkle and now that the club has gone many ex-patrons have said that Soho won’t be what it used to be. But, perhaps, as Ian Board once said in typically dyspeptic fashion, ‘It never was what it f*****g used to be!’

The Colony’s future had come under threat in the past of course but they had somehow managed to keep the spirit alive and flowing at the bar. After Soho began to shed its sleazy image in the mid-1980s, a new generation of restaurants and members’ clubs appeared and the district became the favoured haunt of the media and arts brigade. The swankiest new club on the block was the Groucho which opened in 1985 next door but one to the Colony. Although close in proximity, the two clubs couldn’t have been further apart in terms of style, size and comfort. If you ordered a vodka and tonic at the Groucho, not only was it served with ice and a slice, it would also be delivered to you on a tray while you perused the menu sitting on a comfy sofa. The Colony didn’t do ice until the new millennium, and as for a slice, not a hope in hell. Such sophisticated delicacies were reserved for the manager only. Furthermore, if you had the audacity to ask for crisps you’d be told to bugger off to London Zoo! Nevertheless, the club survived the onslaught from its new rivals and also the introduction of all-day drinking in pubs, which began in the late 1980s. I didn’t officially become a member of the Groucho until a few years ago, but that trifling matter didn’t stop me from giving the place the benefit of my company from time to time, until I quite literally landed myself in the shit.

You could see the back of the Groucho, including the windows to the ladies’, gents’ and snooker room, through the green frame of the small window in the toilet of the Colony. I think it was my mum who put the idea in my head. She noted, during a long, hot summer, that one or more of the Groucho’s windows were left ajar of an evening. Fired with a certain feeling of discontent at not having been invited as an inaugural member and a natural inquisitiveness about what they were getting up to in this flash new kid on the block, I decided that an exploration in the greatest British tradition of these things was a matter of some urgency. A delegation led by myself and Anne, my wife, sallied forth. After much scrambling over duct pipes and air-conditioning units and up and down various flat roofs adorned by single plimsoles and bicycle frames - the universal furniture of flat roofs - we reached our destination: the open window of the ladies’.

This was all done, I hasten to add, without ropes or crampons and with the help only of a broken school chair. Being the chivalrous chap I am, I gave Anne a leg up, so she went in first. A few seconds passed before she popped her head out and gave me the all clear. I scrambled up the short drainpipe after her, into the Groucho’s plush, red ladies’ powder room.

Somewhat dishevelled and covered in smut, we stood brushing ourselves down and getting our breath back. Ha ha! We made it! What jolly japes!

Now the only issue was how to get a drink. In the Groucho only members can buy refreshments, so a spurious celebrity would have to be invoked at the bar, with a ‘Yeah, we’re with Neil Tennant/Janet Street-Porter/Stephen Fry . . .’. Leaving the others to their own devices, we both took a deep breath and strode boldly to the door, ready to enter the fray, only to bump straight into one of our daughters’ teachers coming the other way. Miss Terry. Here she was, faced with Mr and Mrs McPherson emerging from the ladies’ lavatory together, red-faced and slightly out of breath. My mind raced. Even the most plausible explanation was implausible, including the truth. There was absolutely no way round this Ayckbourn-esque scenario. So we simply smiled positively and strode off with our noses in the air. Now where is that Keith Allen?

By 2001 my Groucho trick had become something of a party piece. But in that long, hot summer, as I celebrated my fortieth year, it became more of a space odyssey. Having partaken of a particularly generous luncheon with some pals I’d been working with on a show called
Night Fever
- c’mon, who can forget Pop Monkey? - I was perched, in a Lewis ‘
The Professionals
’ Collins style, on the sill of the Colony’s toilet window. This was not somewhere, I hasten to add, that I spent my whole life but it was a manoeuvre I must have successfully performed a dozen times. A gaggle of excitable onlookers crowded in behind me, weighing up the odds as to whether it would be advisable to follow.

I went to leap the small gap to a flat roof opposite, but things didn’t exactly go to plan, and I found myself dangling in midair. What a turn-up, literally, as the turn-up of my jeans was caught in the window catch and that was about all that was keeping me from plummeting to certain death on the roof of a Chinese restaurant below.

I was now hanging upside down, mentally thanking Mr Levis and all the generations of his family for the consistent sturdiness of their denim, when I heard a ripping noise. Face down, I frantically grabbed the drainpipe in front of me, just as my turn-up gave way. I got hold of it and clung on for dear life, praise the Lord. Then I began to slide - the pipe had been given a good coating of anti-burglar paint, a by-product of axle grease.

I was gaining momentum on my slow downwards trajectory, but I seemed to be moving quite smoothly and, with my legs now firmly locked on, I looked down. The flat roof below appeared to be approaching quite gently and I must have been about halfway down when I became aware of a kind of disembodied cheering, echoing down the small space between the buildings. My confidence was growing: hey, I’m gonna do this! And then, an ominous silence. Followed by a loud creaking sound.

The drainpipe was coming away from the wall. My world was, quite literally, turning upside down. Water - at least I hope that’s what it was - cascaded down the wall, up my trouser legs and reappeared down my neck and up my nose. I started to fall backwards in slow motion and flopped on my back into a huge puddle of pigeon droppings.

When I came round after landing on my head, I looked like I’d taken a dip in a Victorian sewer in need of renovation. I also noticed, perhaps unsurprisingly, that my loyal friends had done a runner. Miraculously, I managed to sneak out of Soho without attracting any accusatory glances or pinched nostrils and felt certain I’d managed to escape justice. The only stain on my person or character was the bloody great big one that seemed to be covering every inch of my gladrags, or so I thought. The next morning Michael Wojas telephoned to say that a Chinese chef had seen the lead singer of Madness jump off the restaurant’s kitchen roof seconds before the place was flooded and told me to get round and fix the knackered pipework pronto.

In Daniel Farson’s
Soho in the Fifties
he didn’t leave the Colony until 4.30 p.m. and not by the same route as me on the occasion of my fortieth. That means he’d have spent a large part of the afternoon in the company of splenetic, gin-soaked friends and acquaintances whose chief amusement was to lob verbal grenades at one another - what Ben Jonson described as ‘the leprosy of wit’. The person Farson marks out as being of Champions League standard at this game was the writer Colin MacInnes, who generally entered the Colony by ‘pushing the door open abruptly as if it had done him some injustice’. MacInnes chronicled the emergence of the ‘mod’ scene in his novel
Absolute Beginners
in the late 1950s, with Soho very much the headquarters of this ‘un-silent teenage revolution’. The book’s jam-packed with references to coffee bars, scooters, jazz, Italian fashions and ‘disc shops’ which reads like a list of my favourite things minus the raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. And speaking of jam, the old ‘modfather’ himself, Paul Weller, chose it as his book on
Desert Island Discs
not long ago.

Funnily enough, when a movie of the book was being made in the 80s Clive Langer, the producer of Madness’s discs, was contracted to do the music and in conversation with Julien Temple, the director, it was suggested I might make a good lead. It was with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, never having acted before, that I approached an audition. I had to do a little scene with the main girl, and considering my inexperience, I thought it went quite well. Seemingly happy, Julien then sent me to meet the choreographer in a dance studio round the corner. Well, if I thought I was an inexperienced actor, nothing could have prepared me for a professional dance audition. I shall spare you the grizzly details but suffice it to say that about an hour in, and on the point of exhaustion, I was being encouraged, again, by the Japanese choreographer and his team to make one more salmon-like leap, just that bit higher.

I don’t remember much after that. But when I called Anne to tell her how it had gone, she was terribly amused to hear I was calling from the casualty department of the Middlesex hospital. I had broken my big toe, which I realised may have been a bit of a handicap in performing in an all-singing, all-dancing musical. Surprisingly, I never did get the call. Just think how my life may have changed. Hollywood? I only got as far as Holloway.

It’s also funny to think that moody old MacInnes was in his mid-40s when he wrote the novel. It’s a triumph that he managed to write anything at all, given the frequency of his visits to the Colony and other Soho clubs. Soho can be the spur but also the killer of creative endeavours.

As the exotically named Meary J. Tambimuttu, editor of
Poetry London
in the 1940s, correctly described it to a friend:

‘It’s a dangerous place, you must be careful.’

‘Fights with knives?’

‘No, a worse danger. You might get Soho-itis, you know.’

‘No, I don’t. What is it?’

‘If you get Soho-itis,’ Tambi said very seriously, ‘you will stay there always, day and night, and never get any work done ever. You have been warned!’

One of MacInnes’s other haunts was located bang next door to the Colony and this is where Farson headed next on his daily routine. The Caves de France was a ground-floor drinking club whose clientele was partly made up of Soho habitués who’d been refused membership to the Colony. Apparently, Muriel Belcher knew instinctively whether an aspiring Colony member would be right for the club. You didn’t necessarily have to be a great wit, gay, rich, arty or talented to become a member (although any of the above might prevent you from being instantaneously dispatched back down the staircase with a barrage of expletives ringing in your ear), but she had a game hunter’s nose for sniffing out a misfit, especially a washed-out, defeated misfit. The Caves was full of such refugees, chronic sufferers of Soho-itis one and all.

Belcher didn’t approve of her clientele sneaking off to the Caves de France but many of them did from time to time and Farson describes the place as being ‘the closest to Bohemia’. The picture he paints of the majority of Caves dwellers sounds pretty grim, all ravaged faces and musty-smelling clothes, which says much about the spurious glamour of life on the lash in the 50s. Indeed, many of Farson’s talented contemporaries failed to live up to their early promise and died young, having resorted to the bottle. Farson himself came close to joining the list of Soho casualties but somehow managed to make it beyond bus-pass age. He died in 1997, aged 70, having retreated to the West Country some years earlier. But despite checking out of Soho, he could never really leave and often came back for a fix of his spiritual home and was enthusiastic about the district’s revival. And with the Caves de France long gone, I’m off to the place he described in the 1980s as ‘the perfect club for Soho’.

Originally conceived as a club for publishers to entertain their clients, the Groucho Club’s membership soon extended to people drawn from all fields of the media and the arts; even pop musicians were allowed in, vocalists too! The club’s now very much a part of the Soho furniture, but in its early days it was viewed as an interloper by the old brigade, such as Jeffrey Bernard. However, he and other survivors from the good old days gradually acquired a taste for the club’s smart but casual charms. By a strange quirk of timely table-turning, a new breed of talented young British artists (YBAs) - the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin - arrived on the scene in the early 1990s and not only beat a path to the Groucho, but also started to colonise the Colony, and a period of retrobohemianism took hold. In paying homage to their spiritual antecedents - the post-war ‘School of London’ painters, including Francis Bacon - the YBAs reinvigorated the Colony’s fortunes.