Soho

Originally an area of open fields popular with the hunting fraternity, Soho evolved in the seventeenth century around Soho Square, which was built to house wealthy individuals who – not unlike rock stars moving to the country a couple of centuries later - wanted respite from the hurly burly of the city.

 By the mid-1950s, Soho clubs featuring folk, jazz and skiffle (a kind of prototype rock & roll) were proliferating, particularly around Wardour and Old Compton Streets. It was here that - in the wake of Bill Haley and and Elvis - England’s own rock & roll scene found a fissionable crucible in the shape of the 2 I’s coffee bar. From this scruffy basement dive a fuse was lit that would within a few short years see British pop music emerge – filtered through Liverpool and the Beatles - as a cultural explosion of decidedly nuclear proportions.

Soho’s importance as a locus of London nightlife has hardly diminished in the meanwhile, despite two decades of creeping gentrification.  And while the many rock and pop connections – like the legendary Marquee club on Wardour Street – have long since disappeared, many others - Bar Italia on Frith Street and Angelucci’s coffee shop on Old Compton Street, for instance - are still very much around. But for all the changes that the area has undergone in half a century – bars, clubs and restaurants appear and disappear here with dazzling rapidity – Soho still exudes a vibrant, almost continental atmosphere, as much Left Bank as foggy old London Town. As in decades past, if you’re young, single and out for a good time, Soho remains the place to head for, if only to hang out at Bar Italia figuring out where to go and what to do next. Likewise, for music fans looking to track down echoes of London’s amazing rock and pop history, Soho remains a quintessential touchstone.

Archer Street

I had often wondered why this short, non-descript Soho thoroughfare proved such a magnet for jobbing musicians in the decades preceding and following World War II. Reading A Fine Kind of Madness, Rebecca Scott’s fascinating memoir of her father, the jazz saxophonist and club owner Ronnie Scott, recently, gave me the answer. Archer Street was the location of UK Musicians Union HQ. Arriving here on Monday morning, musicians who found themselves out of a gig could check the union notice boards, share the latest news and gossip, even find themselves an impromptu jam session or two in between jobs. Adding a frissance of glamour to the whole scene, dancers from the nearby Windmill Theatre, the first UK venue to feature topless dancers, frequented the pubs and cafes nearby. For the musicians who gathered here each week, the presence of this coterie of  beautiful young females – the groupies of their day - obviously did the area’s attractions no harm whatsoever.

The Goings On  

This Sunday afternoon club, organised by Liverpool beat poets Pete Brown, Johnny Byrne and Spike Hawkins, opened in January 1966 in what was, for the rest of the week, an illegal gambling den. Actual goings-on consisted mainly of poetry readings set to music, mostly jazz, although the Pink Floyd played here during the club’s first (and only) month. It was an environment in which spontaneity was encouraged, with occasionally hilarious results. During one poetry reading, for example, the hapless poet found himself sidelined as the audience – not unnaturally - focused its attention on the his fellow performer  -  a hired stripper.

     After five weeks or so,  the local gambling fraternity grew impatient with these bizarre goings-on, and began to elbow their way back into the premises ahead of time. To avoid a potential riot, the organisers shifted the event to the more welcoming environs of the Marquee Club on Wardour Street. Here, as Spontaneous Underground, the weekly ‘happening’ began to attract a much wider audience, helping set in motion a seismic shift in London’s social and cultural landscape that would culminate spectacularly with Sergeant Pepper the following year.

Harmony Inn

This ‘greasy spoon’ café was a meeting place and hang-out for musicians looking for a break from hanging about on Archer Street during the 1940s and ‘50s. It stayed open very late, and also attracted jazz fans from the nearby Cy Laurie Jazz Club (see Ham Yard), whose sessions would finish at 11 pm.

According to the Classic Cafes website, ‘everything about the Harmony Inn was unsavoury: grubby formica tables ranged around a dismal counter in a totally bland room’. (A crisp black-and-white photograph on the same website offers a somewhat contradictory image, however: gleaming – admittedly formica – tables, and a leatherette banquette that any self-respecting lounge fiend would kill for). Cheese sandwiches, tea and ‘foul Camp coffee’ were the order of the day. The clientele were equally dubious, and included some of Soho’s more notorious characters, not least Mick the Hammer and Soho’s answer to Al Capone (if only in his own mind), Jack Spot. Café owner Dixie France, an alleged police informer, gave evidence at the trial in 1961 of James Hanratty, a petty thief and burglar accused of a brutal double murder and rape. France - a friend of Hanratty’s – had received a telegram from Hanratty at a time relevant to the murders, for which Hanratty was eventually convicted and hung. Mysteriously, France commited suicide a short while afterwards.

The Harmony was also a hang-out for a group of modern jazz musicians that had gathered around saxophonist, Ronnie Scott. Scott, and like-minded players, had begun regular jam session in the early 1950s at Club Eleven, in nearby Ham Yard, and were frequently among those looking for a gig at the Archer Street ‘labour exchange’. The Harmony provided a convenient place to meet and enthuse about the music they felt so passionate about. Whether they had much to say to the duffle-coated trad’ jazz fans who also hung around the cafe is a moot question. Less uncertain is Scott’s affinity for some of Soho’s shadier characters, and doubtless their presence at the Harmony only added to its attraction. Not the most likely of locations to have helped fan the flames of modern jazz in Britain, but pivotal nonetheless.

Argyll Street

NEMS  No.5-6

In a carefully-planned operation masterminded by Beatles manager Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ management company NEMS moved in here on 9 March 1964. Although NEMS already had a London office at 13 Monmouth Street, Covent Garden, the move to Argyll Street marked Epstein’s and the Beatles’ final break with their Liverpool base, and a shift to a more prominent and prestigious part of the West End. The offices, which occupied two floors of the building, were immediately next door to the London Palladium, setting for the birth of “Beatlemania” just a few months earlier (see London Palladium).

According to Epstein’s biographer Ray Coleman, the offices were “far from plush.” Staff and visiting NEMS artists were particularly irked by the fact that the office partitions did not reach the ceiling, resulting in an irritating lack of privacy. Epstein’s own office was “large and spartan (and) featured a black leather settee and mahogany desk, but for the most part the new hub of NEMS Enterprises had a rather cold atmosphere.” A large black-and-white photograph of the Beatles dominated one wall. Wendy Hanson, Epstein’s personal assistant (who could type at a staggering 90 wpm) found the offices “not very pleasant” and “crawling with fans.”

Following the furor over the infamous “butcher’s” sleeve for the US album The Beatles Yesterday and Today, released in June 1966 and swiftly withdrawn, an alternative cover was shot here in Epstein’s office. The office was dressed to look like a hotel room dominated by a huge steamer trunk with one Beatle sitting inside, another on top. The transparencies from the session were rushed to the States and the new covers were pasted over the old ones.

According to Brian Jones biographer Laura Jones, Rolling Stones’ co-manager Eric Easton also had offices in Argyll Street. Bill Wyman locates them nearby, at Radnor House, Regent Street.

Palladium Theatre  No.8

Built in 1910, the Palladium was for decades before and after World War II London’s premier variety theatre, although nowadays is given over to blockbuster musicals. Several theatres and a skating rink had previously existed on the site.

Buddy Holly and the Crickets performed here on 2 March 1958 during their first (and only) UK tour. The seven-minute performance was broadcast live by ATV television as part of the massively popular Sunday Night at the London Palladium show. Watching the show in Liverpool, teenager John Lennon was impressed by Holly’s electric Stratocaster guitar and the Crickets’ drummer’s incisive “paradiddles” during Peggy Sue. Just over five years later, Lennon – with the Beatles – himself would star on the same show.

On Sunday 13 October 1963, the Beatles’ debut SNLP appearance gave Britain its first taste of what would soon be widely known as “Beatlemania.” After the show, a huge crush of fans was waiting outside the stage door in Great Marlborough Street. Hoping to dodge the crowd, the Beatles slipped out through the theatre’s Argyll Street front entrance instead. Unfortunately, police had insisted the group’s getaway car should be parked away from the theatre entrance, so the Beatles had to race up the street to the waiting car, pursued by a mob of fans and newsmen. Photos of the melée were plastered all over newspaper front pages the next day. Scenes like these would be reenacted the following year in the Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night.

A different version of events is recounted in Ray Coleman’s Brian Epstein: The Man Who Made the Beatles. According to Coleman, police vans had sealed off the entrance to the Palladium so the Beatles could be “smuggled out at the back”.  More recently, it has been suggested that the press blew the incident out of proportion in the interests of good copy. Certainly, similar incidents had already been in evidence at virtually every stop on the band’s nationwide tour. As far as the Beatles were concerned, however, Beatlemania did not begin in earnest until 31 October that year at Heathrow airport, when thousands of hysterical fans mobbed them on their return from a tour of Sweden. But it was the Palladium incident that gave the phenomenon a name, and an indelible series of visual images.

To scenes of similar hysteria, the Beatles appeared here again on 12 January 1964 and again on 23 July that year for a midnight charity revue entitled Night Of One Hundred Stars.

On 1 August 1965, the Rolling Stones headlined two concerts here, promoted by co-manager Eric Easton. Brian Jones, in an all-white outfit, made sure he was the centre of attention by whacking the volume on his amp so high he drowned out Mick Jagger’s vocals. Not that it made much difference, given the high levels of audience hysteria throughout. “Teenage girls trying to get near the stage were roughly manhandled in the gangways by officials using Gestapo-like methods,” reported Keith Altham of the NME.

Unlike the Beatles, the Stones had so far refused to appear on the Palladium TV show, which they considered too square for their hip, rebel image. Under pressure from management and record company, however, the Stones finally relented, and on 22 January 1967 appeared on the show miming to their controversial double A-sided single, Let’s Spend The Night Together and Ruby Tuesday. But when it came to joining their fellow perfomers on the Palladium’s revolving stage and waving to the audience at the end of the show, the Stones refused. The decision caused outrage in the national press, ironically doing more to boost the band’s bad boy image than if they had stayed away.

The final performance of the UK’s most popular  instrumental combo the Shadows, featuring Hank B Marvin on lead guitar, Bruce Welch on rhythm guitar, John Rostill on bass and Brian Bennet on drums, took place here on 19 December 1968.

More recently, the Palladium has hosted a succession of stage musicals, not least a successful revival of Joseph & the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, starring erstwhile Australian teen idol Jason Donovan. Occasional rock gigs still feature at the venue on Sunday nights, however. Ian Dury & the Blockheads’ final gig took place here before a packed and emotional house on 6 February 2000. Dury, who was suffering from cancer, died a few months later.

Berwick Street

Strolling down Berwick Street one day in the mid-1990s, former Soft Cell star Marc Almond was hit on the head by a 40-pound neon transformer that had fallen off a wall three stories above him. Concussed, and with blood oozing from an ugly gash, Almond was rushed to hospital. “How perfect it would have been,” he ruminated, after making a full recovery: “to have spent a career singing about the world of neon and then been killed by one (sic).”

The Pad 

Situated beneath the House of Sam Widges coffee bar on the corner of Berwick Street and D’Arblay Street, this Fifties basement venue - like the nearby Heaven & Hell on Old Compton Street - catered mainly for the hip beatnik/bebop jazz crowd, early precursors of the Sixties mod scene.

Freight Train Coffee Bar  No.44

Opened in 1958 by skiffle star Chas McDevitt on the proceeds of his massive hit single Freight Train, the coffee bar enjoyed a brief career as an occasional live venue  - pre-stardom Cliff Richard and his group the Drifters played a set here - before establishing itself as a cool after-hours hang out for jobbing musicians. Fred Heath (soon to find fame as Johnny Kidd) and Brian Gregg of the Hobeaux Skiffle Group penned the UK rock’n’roll classic Shakin’ All Over in the basement here. The song would give Johnny Kidd & the Pirates a UK number one hit.

The venue survived until 1966, by which time it had morphed into an undistinguished juke box dive.