by Suggs
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 diff
erent 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.
Gerry’s dark cellar bar is the place where I encountered my first avocado many years ago. It wasn’t an immediate success. They don’t do food here any more, and looking at the place today it’s amazing that they ever did food at all. However, back in the 50s, having no food on the premises was not an option because Gerry’s owner had a reputation for his huge appetite. His name was Gerald Campion and he was better known as TV’s Billy Bunter. Apparently, he used to run the club from 6 p.m. till 2 a.m. and was at Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd’s Bush rehearsing Bunter by 8 a.m. I’ve seen a film called The Guinea Pig in which a 26-year-old Richard Attenborough played a 13-year-old schoolboy, but using an actor in his mid- 30s to play a lad of similar age really takes the biscuit. Or, in Billy Bunter’s case, the whole packet. He appeared in 120 episodes of the live show between 1953 and 1961 and was almost 40 by the time the series was finally cancelled.
Under his stewardship, the club became the favourite haunt of the showbiz set of the early 60s and still gets its fair share of well-known names falling down the staircase in pursuit of one or two for the road. My mum used to work here in the 70s and it was through her contacts at the club that I managed to get a job in my mid-teens working as a butcher’s delivery boy, for which I got paid £3 a week with unlimited use of the company push bike thrown in. I’ve had many memorable nights at Gerry’s that I can’t remember. And it is always ‘nights’ there - it’s one of those places that it is just impossible to find during daylight hours.
Gerry’s belongs to the holy trinity of Soho drinking establishments which have kept old boho tradition alive (the others being the French and the now lost Colony, of course) and I hope it’s still here when I’m as grey as its owner, the old silver-haired fox himself, Michael Dillon. So without further ado, I’ll see the night off here with a few brandies and dazzle my fellow drinkers with tales of my day’s derring-do.
With my legs no longer able to do what my head is instructing them to do, it’s time to turn my collar up against the cold and damp and say goodnight to Soho, the beating heart of London. I could have written a whole book on this most wonderful lattice of streets but at least there’s one last hurrah to be had if I’m to strictly adhere to Daniel Farson’s 1951 timetable. When he and his pals staggered out of the Gargoyle at 2 a.m. they finished the night off at Mrs Bill’s coffee stall, situated on the bombsite by St Anne’s church. The church took a direct hit at the height of the Blitz in 1940, leaving only the tower intact. I remember the bombsite because the church wasn’t rebuilt until 1991, but I don’t recall a coffee stall, or indeed Mrs Bill.
Still, being a twenty-first-century boy does have its compensations because, unlike Dan the Man, I can head back to the place where my day began. Bar Italia is open round the clock, so I’ll take my coffee there - just as soon as I’ve worked out where I left my helicopter and taken an incoming call from my ‘little man’.
CHAPTER TWO
From Back Rooms to Ballrooms
Over the years I’ve played some pretty big venues with Madness: from the capacious O2 Arena on the banks of the Thames, huge American stadiums and the fabulous bedlam of Madstock, to the compact Whisky a Go-Go on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, where legends such as the Doors and Janis Joplin made their name.
But some of my favourite memories are of the gigs we played in humbler venues back in the early days. I have a particular soft spot for two pubs and a ballroom - all still going strong - which sped us on our way back in 1979. If it wasn’t for places like these, I’d probably still be delivering sausages on my butcher’s bike. So this is my chance to say thank you to them for saving me - not to mention the carnivores of north London - from a terrible fate.
When I first joined Madness or, to be more precise, the Invaders, as the band was then called, one of our main difficulties was getting a gig, any gig. The best bet was to try to get the landlord of a local boozer to give you a break, as pubs were a long way off going gastro back then, or going full stop, as is the current trend. Of course, not all pubs put on live entertainment, but the pub rock movement, which began in the early 1970s, and the punk boom that followed encouraged licensees to open up their back rooms and cellars to mop up the extra beer sales that live bands generated. But, unless you managed to find a gig supporting an established band, it was a hard road getting any joy on the bookings front: publicans wanted acts that already had a following in order to guarantee pulling in punters who required pulling of pints. So we found ourselves in a catch-22 situation: it was impossible to build a following unless gigs were in the offing and, because we hadn’t got a fan base, no gigs were in the effing offing. There was only one way out of this concert-free conundrum as far as we were concerned - being a little creative where our CV was concerned.
Having trudged round just about every pub in Camden Town during the winter of 1978-9 in search of a gig, it was with the echo of rejections still ringing in our ears that we entered the Dublin Castle on Parkway with its red-and-cream exterior and hanging baskets dripping water on to the pavement. The Dublin was - and still is - a friendly Irish boozer where you can sometimes find a bit of live music at the weekends.
‘What’s your act then, lads?’ enquired the genial Irish guv’nor, Alo Conlon. ‘Erm, we do jazz and a bit of country and western,’ I replied. It was pretty weighty stuff for a bunch of seventeen-year-olds to be claiming, I’ll grant you, but we were hoping both styles of music might be right up Alo’s, and his clientele’s, alley.
The man who held the keys to our future had come to England as a stowaway in 1956 and worked as a labourer digging tunnels in London, which perhaps explains how he later managed to unearth some major underground talent, but more on that in a moment. Alo’s labouring background chimes precisely with the Dublin Castle’s early history, which is why the two seemed made for one another. Back in the nineteenth century thousands of immigrant labourers headed for Camden to work on the construction of Euston, King’s Cross and St Pancras railway stations along with their extensive goods yards and sidings. The enormity of their achievements can really be appreciated from the window of a train pulling out of one of those stations. Although the British Rail TV adverts fronted by Jimmy Savile during my childhood would have you believe otherwise, the nineteenth century, and not the 1970s, was truly ‘the age of the train’.
The work was all by hand and unremittingly hard and dangerous yet this was no deterrent to the groups of Irish, Welsh, Scots and English navvies who, after a hard day’s graft, liked nothing better than to take out their differences in the streets of Camden over which group was getting the best jobs. In one recorded incident - defined as a riot in legal terms - a group of Irish and English clashed over a trivial incident, which quickly escalated and lasted three days, paralysing three police forces.
Eventually, the powers that be sought to keep the tribes of the British Isles apart of an evening by building each group its own pub as far away from one another as possible. So, up went the Windsor, Dublin, Caernarvon and Edinboro Castles on the four corners of Camden Town. Unfortunately, the Caernarvon Castle went down in the Camden Lock conflagration in 2008, which (to quote Her Maj after one’s own Windsor Castle suffered a right royal fire in 1992) was Camden’s ‘annus horribilis’. The other three pubs are still going strong, each with their own loyal following.
The Irish community was still thriving in Camden during the 70s and I well remember blokes gathering outside the tube station waiting for the Murphys Builders’ van each morning which, on arrival, would spark an On the Waterfront-style scrum for work. Boozers like the Dublin didn’t just serve as Guinness-pumping stations, they were also places where regulars went to catch up on the latest news from back
home, rather like the village post office of yore. And in the days when ‘packing plastic’ was a job description and the only cash dispenser known to Camden man was a fruit machine which paid out once in a blue moon, local landlords cashed regulars’ cheques after the banks had shut. The Dublin was - and still is - a cog in the local community, so Alo was understandably protective of his domain. He didn’t hand over the stage to any old Tom, Dick or Harry.
Our slightly less than 100 per cent accurate description of our musical tastes seemed to have done the trick because Alo took us through the Dublin’s red-lit, mock-Tudor bar to the back room, which was used for functions and the occasional bit of live Irish music. I remember thinking it was pretty damn impressive, especially the stage, which was made up of sheets of hardboard laid across stacks of beer crates. Up to this point, we’d really only played a few private parties and this room felt like the real deal.
Alo and his wife, Peggy, like many other Irish couples in the area, held their wedding reception in this very room back in 1966 and, when they took over the pub eight years later, it was a tradition they continued. The venue looked as if it could hold about 150 people at a pinch, which felt like Wembley to us at the time. ‘Well, what d’you think, lads?’ asked Alo. ‘Yeah, it’s OK,’ we replied, trying to look nonchalant. We had, at last, fallen on our feet, we thought, but there was still one difficulty to overcome to prevent this breakthrough from being ‘for one night only’: our repertoire.
