Saturday 6 August 2016

Not Fade Away – The Rolling Stones in Soho.

“The streets of Soho were reserved for characters, cappuccino action, nerve, real verve and chat, most of it about music. The streets reeked of chutzpah and skiffle was dead – long live pop.” Andrew Loog Oldham, Stoned.

Although legend has it that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger hooked up on a station platform in Dartford, the Rolling Stones as we know them were born above a pub in Soho. 

The Bricklayers Arms in Edward Street (since renamed Broadwick Street) was where Brian Jones held auditions to form a rhythm and blues group in 1962. Some of the hopefuls replied to his ad in Jazz News, while others - including Mick and Keith - came from Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated sessions at the Marquee in Oxford Street. 

The Rollin’ Stones played their first gig at the Marquee in July ’62, and rehearsed different line-ups until Brian, Mick and Keith were joined by Bill Wyman on bass and Ian Stewart on piano. Drummer Charlie Watts climbed aboard last in January 1963. Another regular gig for the Stones in this period was at Studio 51 in Great Newport Street, where Ken Colyer ran his jazz nights.

De Hems.
Meanwhile, down the road apiece, journalists from the music papers in Denmark Street and Shaftesbury Avenue did their quaffing in De Hems bar in Macclesfield Street. It was here, in April ’63, that New Record Mirror editor Peter Jones tipped off pop publicist Andrew Loog Oldham about a certain group playing sensational R&B at the Crawdaddy club in Richmond. Over a vodka & tonic, the suave Mr Jones told Oldham that his paper was running a big piece on the Rollin’ Stones in the forthcoming issue, predicting they will “soon be the leading performers of R&B in the country” – incredible for a group that didn’t yet have a record out.


Those heady early days are captured in the photographs of Terry O’Neill and Gered Mankowitz in the book Breaking Stones, 1963-1965, A Band on the Brink of Superstardom.  O’Neill, who was then Fleet Street’s youngest photographer, walked the Rolling Stones around Soho carrying their brand new bags. They look every inch the travelling troubadours on their way to a recording session in Regent Sound studio (where the group cut their debut album and 1964 single Not Fade Away). 

Breaking Stones, 1963-1965, A Band on the Brink of Superstardom 
The black-coated Stones lined up in front of Tin Pan Alley’s red and yellow Members’ Club is a quintessential snapshot of Soho in the early 60s, with the band already exuding locked-out cool. 

O’Neill’s half of the book is a reportage-style account showing the life of a typical pop group – where the boys had to thank their lucky stars for plates of egg and chips in the BBC canteen, and the makeshift dressing rooms where Keith ran his shaver from a light fitting, while Mick wears a hair net with a fag on the go. The fateful New Record Mirror article, written by Norman Jopling and titled Genuine R&B, is also reprinted inside.

The second half of Breaking Stones features the work of Gered Mankowitz, the son of writer Wolf Mankowitz (author of Expresso Bongo, based on the 2i’s coffee bar scene in Old Compton Street). Gered’s portraits have a strong sense of creative direction and image building – from the band looking through a cage in Ormond Yard (they were dubbed ‘animals’ by the Daily Mirror) to the cover of 1965 album Out Of Our Heads. By the closing frames of the book, when Gered joins the band on their ’65 US tour, the Rolling Stones can no longer walk the streets unmolested. 

The 2i's Coffee Bar. Now Poppie's Fish 'n' Chips.

Their view of the world is from the back of limousines, with cops struggling to control thousands of screaming teenagers causing pandemonium everywhere they go. One heart-stopping moment shows Keith out cold on stage, electrocuted by a microphone stand. We see the band taking control of their own destiny as Mick and Keith become songwriters. The irony is that, by writing their own hits, the Beatles and the Stones started a trend that took the shine off Tin Pan Alley’s song merchants and hastened the end of an era. But, when midnight comes around, the streets of Soho will always echo with the sound of pointy-booted footsteps. Claudia Elliott.

Claudia Elliott is a freelance journalist who has written for BBC's Sounds of the 60s, The Blues magazine and Classic Rock.
Website: https://claudiaelliott.contently.com/

Twitter: @Claudia_Elliott

Blogger for BBC Radio 2 Sounds Of The 60s http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006wqlv

Terry O’Neill’s photograph of the Stones walking in Soho can be seen at Exhibitionism, a retrospective show of the band’s history. Other Soho-related pieces include guitars and amps bought from Ivor Arbiter’s Sound City shops and gear from John Stephen boutique in Carnaby Street. Exhibitionism runs until 4 September at the Saatchi Gallery.

Wednesday 29 June 2016

Ghosts of Soho Restaurants.

Soho Restaurants.

Restaurants. Do we regret the loss of Tomato when it turned into Barrafino? No.  L’Epicure when it turned into Waikkiki? Yes. Waikkiki when it turned into Bar Shu? An emphatic no!  In Soho we see them come and we see them go. Very few are mourned to tell the truth. It’s a hard place both physically and financially to run a restaurant.

We lived in Old Compton Street for ten years and could never quite get away from the smell of cooking.  We opened the window onto the street, and it was Opuz and Amalfi.  We opened the bedroom window one story up and it was Margot Henderson making trotters at the French House.  All of our household objects were covered in a very thin film of cooking oil.

A slice of Soho_Sunday Times Magazine 1968.
Below us then was Duke’s Bar, which changed hands several times before becoming Opuz Kitchen (now Pepe’s).  I was then a film critic on The Independent.  One evening I happened to see a Michael Winterbottom film called Wonderland (1999), and thought the location looked familiar. A large part of the film had been made twenty feet below us, without our ever noticing.  Such is Soho.

By 2008 I had become a restaurant critic for the Zagat Guides, the US equivalent of the Michelin Guides, now owned by Google.  Since then Soho has been reviving its foodie credentials, but there’s been a corresponding haemorrhage of good, cheap places to eat.   The area may have gained two or three Michelin stars and won restaurant of the year two years running in the Tatler, but where to the waifs and strays eat these days? Especially now that Stockpot is destined for the stockpot?

Soho dining originally was quite grand. Casanova’s mistress Teresa Cornelys first brought Venetian small plates to 18th century Soho (revived again by Polpo in St James bailiwick centuries later).  At the super exclusive and fashionable Carlisle House in Soho Square the food wasn’t just Venetian.  She had Brunswick pastry-cook Louis Weltje working in the kitchens; he later went to feed up the Prince Regent.  But cheap restaurants? The impoverished poets Rimbaud and Verlaine were able to dine cheaply on food that smelt of home in Old Compton St in the 1870’s.

This golden period of cheap dining was to last about 50 years. Here’s Thomas Burke in 1917 talking about Soho, bewailing to loss of bargain eateries. ‘Gone are the shilling tables-d’hote and their ravishing dishes…not in 1917 do you see Old Compton St as a line of warm and fragrant café-windows…gone are those exotic food which brought such zest to a jaded palate’.

Passport to Soho.


I rather miss L’Epicure with its fantastic gas-filled flaming torches, and its doddery waiters seemingly auditioning for a Victoria Wood sketch.  But there again Bar Shu with its Sichuan Fuschia Dunlop menu, in the same site, is one of my favourite restaurants. I remember that old-school 1950’s Italian family restaurant in Green Court, but it’s now replaced by Yalla Yalla, which is better.


L’Epicure 
A succession of awful restaurants on the site of Arbutus have been replaced by Arbutus (whose future is now sadly in doubt). One of the best new restaurants in London – Sri Lankan slice of happiness known as Hoppers – is on the site of the little-missed Alastair Little eaterie at 49 Frith St.  Bao offers brilliant cheap food but you have to queue for 40 minutes to get it.

One of the Italian restaurants I remember with particular fondness was Presto on Old Compton St, which was beloved by Derek Jarman, who lived nearby, and Sebastian Horsley.  You only ordered the ravioli, because that’s what Derek did.

Recently Young Cheung’s on Shaftesbury Avenue has closed, a particular sadness to me, not because it was the best restaurant in the world but because it was good and cheap and had the air of old Soho to it.  But it did help that I have a Chinese partner who could read all the special menus only in Chinese.

Also vanished, ECapital was a superb Shanghainese mid-priced restaurant at 8 Gerrard St, where the overpraised Haozhan is now.  Its chef David Tam is now at China Tang at the Dorchester – that’s how good it was.  Delicacies included pressed pig's ears, filleted duck's feet with celery, Lion's Head meatballs, Beggar's Chicken.  The actor Johnny Rhys Meyers was a regular after I took him there.
And we also loved China Experience on 118-120 Shaftesbury Avenue, and I remember the Swindon-based owner telling me he was spending £5,000 week in rent.  They had paper-lantern shadow beef and golden fried prawns.  The subsequent restaurant used the Zagat listed stickers for years afterwards, quite illegally.  Royal Dragon is still in Gerard St, but was ruined like Kettners by a revamp, and we followed our friend who manages it next door to Golden Dragon (her name is Jackie and we’ve known her 25 years).

Soho is full of ghosts, most especially, the ghosts of restaurants.

©Roger Clarke 2016 Twitter
Roger Clarke@Skionar

The Soho Food Feast, Sat/Sun 2-3 July 2016


Supporting Soho Parish a small primary school situated in the heart of London on Great Windmill St.

Sunday 26 June 2016

Soho and the Cholera outbreak of 1854.

The Modern Myth of Soho’s Dr John Snow.
History often gets things wrong either because of the way in which events are initially reported or as a result of later re-interpretation.

Such is the story of Dr John Snow who persuaded the Board of Guardians to remove the handle of the water pump in Soho’s Broadwick Street at the height of the 1854 cholera epidemic.  Memorialised by the John Snow pub and the replica water pump, which used to stand nearby on the corner of Poland Street, many today are of the mistaken belief that the Victorian doctor was the only scientist to discover cholera is a water-borne disease. 

Water pump in Broadwick St. removed whilst building works carried out.
Snow’s work did not make national headlines and newspapers in the 1850s were not brimming over with reports of Snow’s discovery, or that the handle removal had saved lives. 

Over 480 people died of cholera in and around Broadwick Street between late July and the middle of October 1854, but at the time the role played by Snow was not seen as particularly significant. Contrary to popular belief, the removal of the pump handle did not improve London’s sanitation overnight, and whilst Snow correctly concluded that cholera is contracted by ingesting tainted water, his work was overshadowed by others working in the tight-knit medical establishment and the widespread conviction that cholera was spread by foul-smelling air.


It is not all that surprising, therefore, that following his untimely death in 1858, Snow’s contribution to science was largely forgotten. In Bloomsbury when the new building to house the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine was opened in 1929, it incorporated a frieze around the top of its exterior into which was carved the names of those considered to be of outstanding importance in the field of hygiene. Snow’s name was not included.

Yet today the story of the removal of the pump handle is seen as a symbol for scientists working in the field who fight - as Snow did - for effective and swift action to prevent the spread of epidemic disease.

Snow’s story is remembered because it was re-told in the early twentieth century by the American public health expert, William T. Sedgwick who, in his 1902 textbook, Principles of Sanitary Science and the Public Health, called Snow’s work ‘a monument of sanitary research.’  

Since 1902 science students in the United States have been taught the story of Snow and the pump handle removal and as a result many Americans who come to London are keen to visit Broadwick Street to see the replica pump.  Until recently the replica was situated on the corner of Poland Street, unfortunately some distance from its original position, potentially contributing to a re-interpretation of historical events. 
The John Snow Public House (1973).
Few realise the site of the original pump is to be found closer to the entrance of the John Snow pub. Its position is marked by a single red granite kerbstone and a discreet sign which incorrectly implies that Snow alone discovered cholera is a waterborne disease. Sadly little is known about Snow’s groundbreaking work on chloroform or his conviction that alcohol was a danger to health.


History has re-interpreted Snow’s story so that today the one lasting memorial to this visionary scientist - and one of the Victorian era’s greatest advocates of temperance - is a Soho pub.

Join us on Thursday, 6 Oct 2016, when author, linguist and historian, Amanda J Thomas, will be our guide on an historical journey through Soho in the time of cholera at Blacks Club, 67 Dean St. W1D 4QH.
Doors open at 7pm, talk begins 7.30pm. This is a Free event exclusive to mosoho followers and Blacks members.

Space is limited so please book early to reserve a seat.email: events@blacksclub.com



Amanda Thomas is the author of ‘Cholera: The Victorian Plague’ (Pen and Sword Books, http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/ ; ISBN 978-1783463503), and ‘The Lambeth Cholera Outbreak of 1848-1849’ (McFarland; ISBN 978-0786439898). Further information can be found at http://ajthomas.com/ and on Amanda’s Amazon Author’s Page: www.amazon.co.uk/Amanda-J.-Thomas/e/B002S9FA3I/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Saturday 25 June 2016

Remembering The First Gay Pride.

West End

Wednesday 23rd June 1971, age 35


My first attempt at Gay Pride.
I’m at a Gay Liberation Front meeting at All Saints Church Hall in Notting Hill listening to Micky Burbidge of the counter-psychiatry group describe ‘aversion therapy’ to several hundred outraged gay people. ‘In this so-called “treat­ment,”’ he says, ‘gay victims are restrained and stimulated with erotic photos while electric shocks are administered to their genitals.’ After the cries of shock and outrage have died down, he asks for volunteers to march down Harley Street and paint black crosses on the doors of the guilty psychiatrists. I’m one of the many volunteers who raise their hands.

Two days later, I enter Cavendish Square to see a tiny group with a banner: ‘NO TO AVERSION THERAPY’ but am ashamed to admit I don’t dare join them because they look so few and so vulner­able! I will myself to do it but fail. Nor can I walk away but instead pathetically follow them along a parallel street listening to them chanting:
‘Give us a G! … give us an A! … give us a Y!
What does that spell? – Gay!
What is gay? – Good!
 What else is gay? – Angry!
I silently mouth the replies but still can’t join them which, unfortunately, confirms another thing Micky said: ‘Self-oppression is the ultimate subjugation which only succeeds when gay people believe straight definitions of what is good and bad.’ Chastened but thoughtful, I stumble home alone.



Next morning I realise that yesterday was a watershed for me all the same because acknowledging my own self-oppression is the first step to over­coming it.

West End

Saturday 28th August 1971, age 35

Taking Pride

The GLF Youth Group have organised a protest march against the male age of consent and this time I’ve eliminated any chance of copping out by wearing my jumpsuit embroidered with ‘Alan’ and ‘Gay Love’ on the epaulets and a rainbow on the breast pocket, plus all my gay badges and a peaked cap also embroidered with ‘Gay Love’ and my name. So I already feel ‘Out and Proud’ as I set off for Marble Arch tube where I find more happy gay people than I’ve seen in my entire life – and also discover that just ‘being in the majority’ is a liberating experience in itself.


Now we’re ambling down Oxford Street past crowds of Saturday shop­pers ‘protected’ by the police. It’s true that yesterday I thought people might throw stones at us but today I observe that most simply aren’t interested; a few look scared but many are cheering us on – so, by the time we reach Bond Street I’m so elated I go up to a gorgeous, curly-haired bearded onlooker and say: ‘You’re lovely! Can I kiss you?’




 The Sexual Offences Act 1967 decriminalised ‘homosexual acts between two men over 21 years of age in private’ in England and Wales only’ excluding the police, the army, the air force and the navy.

‘Yes, if you want to,’ he says. So I do! Then I do it again with another! And again, for the rest of the day – till I’ve kissed more divine men than I knew existed! I spot two elderly women huffing and puffing at a bus stop, clearly outraged, but today we’re the majority and they’re the psychologically disturbed.
Photograph, Nigel Robinson.

Every now and again I step out to watch my fellow marchers go by and am struck by what a complete cross-section of humanity we represent. We could be a crowd from any railway station in the rush-hour, from ordinary to amazing – especially the dozen drag queens sashaying at the front – and from my onlooker’s vantage point I carefully note how many protesters pass each minute and so, once arrived in Trafalgar Square, am able to calculate that there are about 900 of us altogether.

At one point I spot a young policeman wistfully shaking his head as he hears us chanting: ‘Two, four six eight, is that copper really straight?’ and when he sees me looking he gives me a secret smile.

Next day every national newspaper has front page photos of our dozen drag queens but not one of our 888 ordinary gay women and men. Thus stereotypes are maintained and our struggle continues.

"Fragments of Joy and Sorrow - Memoir of a reluctant revolutionary" by the late Alan Wakeman.

Gemini Press June 2015 - an Imprint of Fantastic Books Company

www.fantasticbooksstore.com © ALAN WAKEMAN 2015

WHAT ARE THE MEMORIES AND THINGS THAT HAVE DEFINED YOUR LGBT+ LIFE? 

In 2017 the BBC is marking 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality. The BBC is crowdsourcing photos, memories, film footage, historic documents, club flyers, outfits, protest banners, posters, music, diary entries and much more to help tell the story of LGBT+ life in Britain from 1967 - 2016. Do you have photos of Soho of yesteryear? Footage of past Prides?
Memorabilia from past Soho clubs, pubs or cabarets? We will be making an interactive crowd sourced archive of LGBT+ life and a BBC television series based around some of the stories, objects and memories contributed. Is there something that has defined your life as an LGBT+ person over the last 50 years? Get in touch and let us know what you have at: history@7wonder.co.uk


Tweet: The BBC is crowdsourcing photos, posters & more to explore #LGBT+ life in Britain 1967-2016. Share what you have: history@7wonder.co.uk




Monday 14 March 2016

Cinema and the West End. 1906-1930

Soho’s Silent Cinemas.

Because of his family’s health problems, the diarist George Thomas, whose tenement rooms overlooked Berwick Street Market, didn’t leave the house much. But, still, he managed to keep up with the latest film news from magazines and conversations with friends. Finally, in May 1930, he recorded a personal ‘high-spot’: a trip to see his first ‘talkie’, The Broadway Melody, probably at the nearby Empire Theatre, Leicester Square, which had recently been converted into MGM’s flagship London cinema. George was hooked. ‘From now on’, he wrote, ‘I am an ardent “talkie-fan,” in the sense that I will never refuse the chance of going again.’

The legacy of the West End’s gigantic movie palaces, most of them opened in the 1920s and 1930s, is still around us. As well as the Empire, the nearby Odeon Leicester Square and the recently closed Odeon West End have provided a link to a time when cinema was a large part of the glamour of a trip ‘Up West’. Less visible are the traces of the West End’s earlier film venues: the places that first introduced George Thomas’s fellow Soho-ites to the movies, and that helped make room for cinema in the busy West End entertainment scene.
Cinema and the West End, 1906-1930.


The National Bioscope.
The West End hosted film shows from the earliest days. In February 1896, a few months after the initial screenings in Paris, the Lumière brothers’ new Cinématographe device was given its first commercial demonstration anywhere in the UK at the Polytechnic Institute on Regent Street. Very quickly, the Cinématographe and other rival moving-picture technologies made their way onto the bills of the West End’s variety theatres, where they stayed (in some form or other) for the next two decades. Dedicated film venues took longer to emerge, although there were early experiments. In May 1896, the film pioneer Birt Acres chose ‘a pleasant little hall in Piccadilly Circus’ (at 2 Piccadilly Mansions) to open his short-lived Kineoptikon, arguably the West End’s first full-time cinema. More lasting was the venue opened in 1906 by Hale’s Tours of the World at 165 Oxford Street, which used films and special sound effects to give its visitors virtual trips to far-off locations inside a replica train carriage.

By the time Hale’s Tours closed in 1910, there were already several other cinemas in the West End. Soho proper got its first recorded cinema in 1908, when the French-born chemist Felix Haté opened the ElectricCinema Theatre at 6 Ingestre Place (later re-named the Jardin de Paris). Like many early cinemas, the Electric was a conversion, in this case from a ground-floor residence and an adjoining stable, which backed onto the narrow William and Mary Yard. This small cinema was popular with locals, especially working-class English, French and Jewish youngsters, who were charged rock-bottom prices to watch short programmes of films, accompanied by an electric piano. Also popular with Soho’s children was the National Bioscope at 20 Frith Street (a building best known for once being occupied by Mozart), which was opened by an Italian family in 1910.

Both these side-street cinemas closed before the end of World War I, unable to deal with the increasingly strict safety regulations imposed by the London Council Council, and also struggling in the face of competition from a new breed of purpose-built ‘picture palaces’. An early example was the Piccadilly Circus Cinematograph Theatre, at 43-44 Great Windmill Street, built on the site of a former motor garage. Backed by the cinema magnate Montagu Pyke, it boasted such genteel amenities as a ‘vestibule lounge’, decorated (according to one trade paper) to suggest ‘a drawing-room at a royal palace or ducal mansion’. Even more luxurious was the 700-seat West EndCinema (later the Rialto, and now the Grosvenor Casino), which opened in March 1913 at 3-4 Coventry Street, and soon became a favourite spot for film premieres and other gala events.

Palais de Luxe, Great Windmill St. Courtesy of  Media History Digital Library.

The wartime ban on luxury building meant that no new cinemas were constructed in the West End until well into the 1920s. When building re-started, the trend was for even larger ‘super cinemas’, like the Astoria on CharingCross Road, opened in 1927. But small, more specialist film venues also found a home in the neighbourhood. At the very end of the 1920s, the Avenue Pavilion on Shaftesbury Avenue (on the spot of what is now the Curzon Soho) and the Palaisde Luxe at 17-18 Great Windmill Street (before it was the Windmill Theatre) were pioneers of the repertory cinema movement in London. Their eclectic programmes of ‘classic’ and rare films from Hollywood, Britain and around Europe brought people into Soho from across the city, and allowed the era of silent films in the West End to last a little longer.

With thanks to Dr Chris O'Rourke and Media History Digital Library.



About the author: Dr Chris O’Rourke teaches Film Studies at University College London. More of his research into the West End’s early cinema history can be found on the website London’s Silent Cinemas (www.londonssilentcinemas.com).

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Soho and the Cholera outbreak of 1854.

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