Recollections: Adrift in Soho

 

American chap in a black trilby comes into the shop asking if I have any old fiction about Soho, like Pan paperbacks - I say no - we talk about Colin Wilson's Adrift In Soho which I owned years ago and sold. We talk about Soho - he says he's thirty-five years old so can't remember the better times - I say it would have been great to be there in the 50s with the roaring mad crowd of Francis Bacon but even looking back to the 80s when I spent a lot of time there that now seems like a golden age, probably the last - looking back - I say I ran a cellar bar night club on Frith St - coffee afterwards in Bar Italia just up the road - dive bars, 'the piano bar where, Friday nights after the club, a singer in drag might entertain us - and 'the dive bar' in Chinatown sitting in one of the alcoves chatting all night or Friday nights after our club had ended DJ Earl Gateshead playing Jazz records as I memorably recall the first visit walking down the steps to the sound of the Art Ensemble of Chicago - looking back,,,drunk in the streets singing Lush Life because we were mad for Coltrane and Johnny Hartman's version - not being the best minds of our generation all that mattered was finishing Work and walking through Soho streets at night imagining (unspoken) ourselves to be inheritors of the Beat life aided by regularly seeing the legend as mentioned in One The Road Slim Gaillard at the Wag Club Monday nights in his beret and always big smile as he took another drink from us and never gave back one of the stories we wanted to hear about the old days but still despite retrospectively shining times I know I was miserable a lot - poor 'beat' that I was with no prospects much other than nightlife and still dreaming I could make it with a typewriter (even paintbrush sometimes) or make it with one of the girls, even the mad girl who said I was the only one who could wear a green jumper and get away with it as we parted on the underground one night - but we never made it - she was too mad, too interesting, too Out There somewhere with secrets and psychological something or other splitting her from reality - So(ho) to The Cutting Edge on Sat nights in the same bar as our night (Giant Steps) always packed, always great Blue Note tunes from the boys who spent their hard-earned cash on collecting vinyl - sweating to Horace Silver "Oh look, there's Danny" - out of his head? He studied chemistry, funny, because he took a lot of chemicals and was raving when none of us either knew about that scene or wanted any part of it but he was into Jazz too, of course, just like two of the boys who ran the night, Tim and Sheldon - here they are at The Wag...

...looking young and handsome as we all did back then (ha-ha!) because we wanted to look like the music, sharp snappy and cool like Miles Davis, like everyone who played Jazz in the 50s as we saw on all the album covers such as Art Blakey drenched in thermonuclear sweat smashing atomic drum patterns but still wearing a suit! If only! If only we could have made anything like that grade! But you know we tried and in trying we lifted ourselves somehow, if only in our dreams, flying high above and outside of The Square World. So 30-odd years later I'm working in a bookshop where a young man comes in and asks for books on Soho but I have none, only my pages of memories...