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

club for Soho’.

    Originally conceived as a club for publishers to entertain their clients, the Groucho Club’s membership soon extended to people drawn from all fields of the media and the arts; even pop musicians were allowed in, vocalists too! The club’s now very much a part of the Soho furniture, but in its early days it was viewed as an interloper by the old brigade, such as Jeffrey Bernard. However, he and other survivors from the good old days gradually acquired a taste for the club’s smart but casual charms. By a strange quirk of timely table-turning, a new breed of talented young British artists (YBAs) - the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin - arrived on the scene in the early 1990s and not only beat a path to the Groucho, but also started to colonise the Colony, and a period of retrobohemianism took hold. In paying homage to their spiritual antecedents - the post-war ‘School of London’ painters, including Francis Bacon - the YBAs reinvigorated the Colony’s fortunes.
    The cross-pollination of ‘old’ and ‘new’ Soho meant that for all its swagger, the Groucho was never going to be immune from the occasional bout of dysfunctional behaviour from some of its members. For instance, the biggest star of Brit Art was apparently renowned for imitating his most controversial works of art by getting pickled in real life on more than one occasion.
    Daniel Farson spent his time in the Caves de France ginning it up and reminiscing about his 50s pals; he also reflected on ‘sinning in Soho’. Not long ago, as part of my intensive research, I had a conversation that touched on these two subjects over a game of snooker at the Groucho Club with Stephen Fry.
    Stephen met Daniel Farson’s greatest Soho chum, Francis Bacon, on several occasions in the 1980s. Bacon had, of course, gone on to achieve wealth, acclaim and notoriety in equally large measures since his days on a tenner a week at the Colony, and was, like Farson, a Soho survivor on account of being alert to the dangers of falling too far under the district’s insidious spell. He’d managed to stay the course, so he told Stephen, because he had a ‘little man in his head’ who would tell him when he’d had enough to drink and remind him that there was ‘work to be done tomorrow’. The reason Bacon felt that many of his fellow artists - like John Minton and the two Roberts, Messrs Colquhoun and MacBryde - had died young was because of the absence of that ‘little man’. Looking at the evidence, he certainly has a point. Minton was an extremely talented artist, designer and draughtsman whom Bacon considered his equal. He had a huge lust for life but became booze-dependent and took his own life aged 40 in 1957. Colquhoun and MacBryde met at the Glasgow School of Art and lived and worked together around Soho thereafter. Colquhoun was the more successful artist, yet both succumbed to the sauce: Colquhoun at 48 in 1962; MacBryde four years later aged 52.
    Happily for us, Bacon observed that Stephen also appeared to have a ‘little man’ in his head, having watched him slip away from a party early, politely declining the host’s plea to stay for ‘just one more’. However, back in the days when Mr Fry lived nearby and the little man in his head used to take regular holidays, Stephen would often leave the Groucho in the wee small hours and walk home along Brewer Street, heading for his flat in St James’s.
    Walking down Brewer Street at that time in the morning is usually a pretty challenging experience and it’s made all the more uncomfortable if you have raw egg running down the back of your neck at the time. This is the fate which befell the noble Mr Fry on one occasion.
    Stopping to give a couple of ‘les girls’ cigarettes one morning, Stephen received a direct hit from the kind of egg you wouldn’t want to go to work on. When he inquired of the girls, ‘Who in the name of Arnold Bennett just did that?’ he was told, ‘Oh, it’s