Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (6 page)

The cross-pollination of ‘old’ and ‘new’ Soho meant that for all its swagger, the Groucho was never going to be immune from the occasional bout of dysfunctional behaviour from some of its members. For instance, the biggest star of Brit Art was apparently renowned for imitating his most controversial works of art by getting pickled in real life on more than one occasion.

Daniel Farson spent his time in the Caves de France ginning it up and reminiscing about his 50s pals; he also reflected on ‘sinning in Soho’. Not long ago, as part of my intensive research, I had a conversation that touched on these two subjects over a game of snooker at the Groucho Club with Stephen Fry.

Stephen met Daniel Farson’s greatest Soho chum, Francis Bacon, on several occasions in the 1980s. Bacon had, of course, gone on to achieve wealth, acclaim and notoriety in equally large measures since his days on a tenner a week at the Colony, and was, like Farson, a Soho survivor on account of being alert to the dangers of falling too far under the district’s insidious spell. He’d managed to stay the course, so he told Stephen, because he had a ‘little man in his head’ who would tell him when he’d had enough to drink and remind him that there was ‘work to be done tomorrow’. The reason Bacon felt that many of his fellow artists - like John Minton and the two Roberts, Messrs Colquhoun and MacBryde - had died young was because of the absence of that ‘little man’. Looking at the evidence, he certainly has a point. Minton was an extremely talented artist, designer and draughtsman whom Bacon considered his equal. He had a huge lust for life but became booze-dependent and took his own life aged 40 in 1957. Colquhoun and MacBryde met at the Glasgow School of Art and lived and worked together around Soho thereafter. Colquhoun was the more successful artist, yet both succumbed to the sauce: Colquhoun at 48 in 1962; MacBryde four years later aged 52.

Happily for us, Bacon observed that Stephen also appeared to have a ‘little man’ in his head, having watched him slip away from a party early, politely declining the host’s plea to stay for ‘just one more’. However, back in the days when Mr Fry lived nearby and the little man in his head used to take regular holidays, Stephen would often leave the Groucho in the wee small hours and walk home along Brewer Street, heading for his flat in St James’s.

Walking down Brewer Street at that time in the morning is usually a pretty challenging experience and it’s made all the more uncomfortable if you have raw egg running down the back of your neck at the time. This is the fate which befell the noble Mr Fry on one occasion.

Stopping to give a couple of ‘les girls’ cigarettes one morning, Stephen received a direct hit from the kind of egg you wouldn’t want to go to work on. When he inquired of the girls, ‘Who in the name of Arnold Bennett just did that?’ he was told, ‘Oh, it’s ’im!’ by one of the girls. She continued: ‘It’s this bloke who’s got a weird religious thing about prostitutes and drives around at all hours throwing eggs at our Johns. He obviously thought you were a punter.’ Now, I wouldn’t normally divulge such information in case ‘no smoke without fire’ doubts are raised but, as Stephen said himself, ‘If anyone were innocent of such a design, then that person is me!’

The resurgence of Soho came as a result of the district shedding its sleazy image, and by the late 1980s the number of sex establishments had dropped from a peak of nearly 200 in the 1970s to around 30. But sex and Soho will always be synonymous because the two have been bedfellows for over 200 years: even Casanova lived here for a while back in the eighteenth century. Had he arrived a little later, and of course if he could have found the time between all his
liaising
, he may well have paid a visit to a certain Mrs Theresa Berkley, who kept a brothel at that time at 28 Charlotte Street - which is not, strictly speaking, in Soho but shares some of Soho’s flavour - with a cat o’ nine tails, leather straps and birch canes kept flexible in water. Well, thank goodness she kept her birch in water.

When I talked to Peter Stringfellow at his latest club on Wardour Street he was over the moon to have finally got a place in the district because he reckons that just the name ‘Soho’ arouses the interest of potential punters in a way that Crouch End never could.

Peter will never be more than a small mullet in a big pond compared to Soho’s ‘King of Erotica’, the late Paul Raymond, who died in 2008, but I understand where he’s coming from . . . Sheffield, in fact! That’s where he used to travel from on excursions to London as a teenager, crammed into a Bedford van with his mates. But, as Peter was keen to emphasise, he and his pals were adamant they weren’t travelling to London, oh no, they were heading for
Soho
which was, he says, an ‘almost mystical place for Sheffield boys’ and where they believed the ‘naughty girls’ were to be found. Peter remembers being fleeced in one of Soho’s many ‘clip joints’ on that first trip, where the promise of adult entertainment failed to materialise but a large bill for fake champers did. However, it didn’t take him long to find a place where the kind of rip-offs he and his mates had come to see were happening in all their naughty, naked glory.

His overriding memory of this trip, which was his starter for ten, is that he saw a dozen or so of the most attractive women he’d ever seen in his life, all of whom wore ‘heavy brown make-up’.

While some came to Soho for sex, others came for the music - especially the jazz. I’ll let you into a secret. Strictly speaking, my name’s not Suggs. I named myself after a jazz flautist called Pete Suggs, not because I liked his stuff - in fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything by him - but because when I was a teenager I decided I needed a cool nickname. Who doesn’t at that age? So I stuck a pin into an encyclopaedia of jazz musicians and there he was. As I said earlier, my mum was a jazz singer and my dad was a huge jazz enthusiast, so it all seemed to fit together nicely and the name stuck.

Which brings us to the next item on Farson’s 1951 itinerary, which he subtitled ‘Just a Little Jazz’. He headed to the 100 Club on Oxford Street, which is still going strong, although many decades have passed since it was solely a jazz club. Farson mentions watching George ‘Bunny Bum’ Melly singing ‘Frankie and Johnny’ in 1951, which is quite poignant because ‘Good Time George’ gave his final performance at the club just a few weeks before he died in 2007.

A couple of months before that I met up with George at Ronnie Scott’s on Frith Street. This club is a Soho institution of 50 years’ standing, and that’s where I shall get my jazz fix and reflect on that last chat I had with him. George felt Soho was the right place for jazz from the moment he arrived here in the late 1940s. But it wasn’t just the excitement of jazz in Soho that appealed to him; he fully immersed himself in the whole scene. He told me that, when young, he saw a heading in the
News of the World
that read: ‘Soho: City of Sin’, and that was it. He immediately put the paper down, headed straight there, and never looked back. He was a Colony Room regular and adored Muriel Belcher, affectionately referring to her as a ‘benevolent witch’, and he even met his wife, Diana, at the club. George was also a blindingly funny writer and his anecdotes about 1950s Soho are priceless; he describes the men’s boutique Vince on Newburgh Street as being the only shop ‘where they measured your inside leg even when you bought a tie’.

When we met at Ronnie Scott’s it hadn’t long been taken over by the theatre impresario Sally Greene, who’d given the place an expensive makeover. She’d bought the place from Ronnie Scott’s business partner, Pete King, with whom he co-founded the club in Gerrard Street in 1959 before moving to the current address in 1965. George spoke affectionately of Ronnie Scott, who died in 1996, and made special mention of the deadpan routine he repeated night after night on stage as the club’s MC: ‘A thousand flies can’t be wrong,’ said Ronnie of the food being served. George was renowned for the annual gigs he played at the club over Christmas and New Year for many years with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers and, having witnessed a few of those ribald, vaudevillian performances in my time, all I can say is we won’t see his like again.

We’re also unlikely to see many new jazz clubs opening in Soho unless there’s a big revival. Trad jazz had its heyday in the 50s and early 60s and the smoky cellar clubs that George remembered are long gone. Ronnie Scott’s was, from the beginning, mainly a modern jazz club and over the years has played host to the biggest jazzers of the age and also sprung some non-jazz surprises too. For instance, The Who gave their debut performance of ‘Tommy’ here and Jimi Hendrix performed live for the last time, jamming with the band War. However, since the takeover at the club there’s been criticism over the plethora of non-jazz acts booked to play. Others have suggested that the venue has been sanitised and belongs to ‘corporate Soho’. I’m not so sure. To me, it’s still a hugely intimate venue and one of the most atmospheric clubs in the world.

Aside from the fact that they’ve scraped the chewing gum off the carpet and improved the catering, it really hasn’t changed that much from the 70s and 80s, when I used to come here to see the likes of Art Blakey and Ella Fitzgerald. But therein lies the nub of the problem: the Art Blakeys, Ella Fitzgeralds, Dizzy Gillespies and Stan Getzs of this world, like George and Ronnie, are no longer of this world. If they were, they’d still be booked to play at the club, but the golden age of modern jazz has passed too. The quota of jazz acts that play the venue has certainly increased in recent years, but whether the club can survive on jazz alone, who knows? Even when Ronnie Scott was around, the club experienced quiet times and often struggled financially and he had a stock joke in his repertoire to emphasise the fact: ‘You should have been here last week,’ he’d say to the audience. ‘We had the bouncers chucking them in!’

Having had a few spiced rums and all that jazz, I find that, unlike Louis Armstrong, I don’t have all the time in the world if I’m to complete Farson’s Soho safari. Back in 1951 he would have hit the pubs next, or rather what he calls the ‘Queer Pubs’. The first was the Golden Lion on Dean Street, which is still there today, although no longer full of sailors and guardsmen on leave looking for some action, as in Farson’s day. The other pub was the Fitzroy Tavern, which was, and still is, on Charlotte Street. It just goes to show how much things have changed over the decades. Pound for pink pound, there are probably as many gay bars as straight in Soho these days, but whether this means the ratio of straight to gay people has altered I doubt very much. As gay sex was illegal back then, you can bet your dollar bottom there were plenty of closets that remained closed in the 50s, even in Soho. But because everything is so unconcealed in Soho these days, I think the dark ages are gone forever. Part of the reason the gay community was attracted to Soho - aside from the historic openness and ‘anything goes’ legacy of the district - was boring old economics. The collision of an increasing acknowledgement of gay culture and the recession of the late 1980s, which made property in Soho affordable, brought gay businesses to the area in numbers. In a few years bars and cafes offering a bit of glamour and styling were fixtures on Old Compton and Wardour Streets. Straight drinking dens and some high-street chains now copy the clean lines and attention to décor these gay establishments introduced some 20 or more years earlier.

After downing a swift crème de menthe in the Golden Lion without getting the glad eye, I’m heading for the Coach and Horses on Greek Street for a swift one. The Coach doesn’t feature in Farson’s 50s booze cruise, although he mentions it later in the book because it was the favoured haunt of his friend, Mr Bernard. The Coach and its truculent landlord, Norman Balon, featured in Bernard’s weekly ‘Low Life’ column in the
Spectator
magazine, where he wrote about his sozzled Soho days until his formidable daily intake of alcohol began to take its toll on his health and reliability. Thereafter, the magazine often posted the notice ‘Jeffrey Bernard is unwell’ in place of his column, which later became the title of a West End play in which he finds himself locked in the Coach for a night. Bernard died in 1997 and Norman Balon, the self-appointed ‘rudest landlord in London’ (who even barred his mother for being ‘past it’), finally retired in 2006, having put in 63 years’ service behind the bar.

Norman’s departure was greeted with ‘another nail in the coffin for bohemian Soho’ headlines, but the thing is, he keeps coming back: every time I go to the Coach he’s in there watching over things. Having been a fixture at the Coach for so long, I just don’t think he can pull himself away from the pumps. Still, it’s jolly nice to see the old git every once in a while. I must remember to get hold of his 1991 memoirs, which were charmingly entitled
You’re Barred, You Bastards
.

At closing time in 1951 - strictly 11 p.m. back then, of course - Farson headed to the rather grand Gargoyle Club on Dean Street, which dates back to the 1920s ‘Bright Young Things’ era. No expense was spared on the décor here, with Edwin Lutyens hired as architect and Henri Matisse as designer. By the early 1950s the glamour was beginning to fade, although a big band was hired to play most nights and the champagne still flowed freely. I remember that traces of the Gargoyle’s art deco splendour still remained here in the late 1970s when the place was transformed into a different venue every night of the week, including the Comedy Store and a 60s soul club. There’s still a nightclub at the address but I prefer to take my nightcaps in more intimate familiar surroundings these days, which is why I’m off to Gerry’s Club on Dean Street. I’ve been ending my Soho nights here for as long as I can remember.