Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London by Suggs Read Free Book Online

his book on Desert Island Discs not long ago.
    Funnily enough, when a movie of the book was being made in the 80s Clive Langer, the producer of Madness’s discs, was contracted to do the music and in conversation with Julien Temple, the director, it was suggested I might make a good lead. It was with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, never having acted before, that I approached an audition. I had to do a little scene with the main girl, and considering my inexperience, I thought it went quite well. Seemingly happy, Julien then sent me to meet the choreographer in a dance studio round the corner. Well, if I thought I was an inexperienced actor, nothing could have prepared me for a professional dance audition. I shall spare you the grizzly details but suffice it to say that about an hour in, and on the point of exhaustion, I was being encouraged, again, by the Japanese choreographer and his team to make one more salmon-like leap, just that bit higher.
    I don’t remember much after that. But when I called Anne to tell her how it had gone, she was terribly amused to hear I was calling from the casualty department of the Middlesex hospital. I had broken my big toe, which I realised may have been a bit of a handicap in performing in an all-singing, all-dancing musical. Surprisingly, I never did get the call. Just think how my life may have changed. Hollywood? I only got as far as Holloway.
    It’s also funny to think that moody old MacInnes was in his mid-40s when he wrote the novel. It’s a triumph that he managed to write anything at all, given the frequency of his visits to the Colony and other Soho clubs. Soho can be the spur but also the killer of creative endeavours.
    As the exotically named Meary J. Tambimuttu, editor of Poetry London in the 1940s, correctly described it to a friend:
    ‘It’s a dangerous place, you must be careful.’
    ‘Fights with knives?’
    ‘No, a worse danger. You might get Soho-itis, you know.’
    ‘No, I don’t. What is it?’
    ‘If you get Soho-itis,’ Tambi said very seriously, ‘you will stay there always, day and night, and never get any work done ever. You have been warned!’
    One of MacInnes’s other haunts was located bang next door to the Colony and this is where Farson headed next on his daily routine. The Caves de France was a ground-floor drinking club whose clientele was partly made up of Soho habitués who’d been refused membership to the Colony. Apparently, Muriel Belcher knew instinctively whether an aspiring Colony member would be right for the club. You didn’t necessarily have to be a great wit, gay, rich, arty or talented to become a member (although any of the above might prevent you from being instantaneously dispatched back down the staircase with a barrage of expletives ringing in your ear), but she had a game hunter’s nose for sniffing out a misfit, especially a washed-out, defeated misfit. The Caves was full of such refugees, chronic sufferers of Soho-itis one and all.
    Belcher didn’t approve of her clientele sneaking off to the Caves de France but many of them did from time to time and Farson describes the place as being ‘the closest to Bohemia’. The picture he paints of the majority of Caves dwellers sounds pretty grim, all ravaged faces and musty-smelling clothes, which says much about the spurious glamour of life on the lash in the 50s. Indeed, many of Farson’s talented contemporaries failed to live up to their early promise and died young, having resorted to the bottle. Farson himself came close to joining the list of Soho casualties but somehow managed to make it beyond bus-pass age. He died in 1997, aged 70, having retreated to the West Country some years earlier. But despite checking out of Soho, he could never really leave and often came back for a fix of his spiritual home and was enthusiastic about the district’s revival. And with the Caves de France long gone, I’m off to the place he described in the 1980s as ‘the perfect