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

’im!’ by one of the girls. She continued: ‘It’s this bloke who’s got a weird religious thing about prostitutes and drives around at all hours throwing eggs at our Johns. He obviously thought you were a punter.’ Now, I wouldn’t normally divulge such information in case ‘no smoke without fire’ doubts are raised but, as Stephen said himself, ‘If anyone were innocent of such a design, then that person is me!’
    The resurgence of Soho came as a result of the district shedding its sleazy image, and by the late 1980s the number of sex establishments had dropped from a peak of nearly 200 in the 1970s to around 30. But sex and Soho will always be synonymous because the two have been bedfellows for over 200 years: even Casanova lived here for a while back in the eighteenth century. Had he arrived a little later, and of course if he could have found the time between all his liaising , he may well have paid a visit to a certain Mrs Theresa Berkley, who kept a brothel at that time at 28 Charlotte Street - which is not, strictly speaking, in Soho but shares some of Soho’s flavour - with a cat o’ nine tails, leather straps and birch canes kept flexible in water. Well, thank goodness she kept her birch in water.
    When I talked to Peter Stringfellow at his latest club on Wardour Street he was over the moon to have finally got a place in the district because he reckons that just the name ‘Soho’ arouses the interest of potential punters in a way that Crouch End never could.
    Peter will never be more than a small mullet in a big pond compared to Soho’s ‘King of Erotica’, the late Paul Raymond, who died in 2008, but I understand where he’s coming from . . . Sheffield, in fact! That’s where he used to travel from on excursions to London as a teenager, crammed into a Bedford van with his mates. But, as Peter was keen to emphasise, he and his pals were adamant they weren’t travelling to London, oh no, they were heading for Soho which was, he says, an ‘almost mystical place for Sheffield boys’ and where they believed the ‘naughty girls’ were to be found. Peter remembers being fleeced in one of Soho’s many ‘clip joints’ on that first trip, where the promise of adult entertainment failed to materialise but a large bill for fake champers did. However, it didn’t take him long to find a place where the kind of rip-offs he and his mates had come to see were happening in all their naughty, naked glory.
    His overriding memory of this trip, which was his starter for ten, is that he saw a dozen or so of the most attractive women he’d ever seen in his life, all of whom wore ‘heavy brown make-up’.
    While some came to Soho for sex, others came for the music - especially the jazz. I’ll let you into a secret. Strictly speaking, my name’s not Suggs. I named myself after a jazz flautist called Pete Suggs, not because I liked his stuff - in fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything by him - but because when I was a teenager I decided I needed a cool nickname. Who doesn’t at that age? So I stuck a pin into an encyclopaedia of jazz musicians and there he was. As I said earlier, my mum was a jazz singer and my dad was a huge jazz enthusiast, so it all seemed to fit together nicely and the name stuck.
    Which brings us to the next item on Farson’s 1951 itinerary, which he subtitled ‘Just a Little Jazz’. He headed to the 100 Club on Oxford Street, which is still going strong, although many decades have passed since it was solely a jazz club. Farson mentions watching George ‘Bunny Bum’ Melly singing ‘Frankie and Johnny’ in 1951, which is quite poignant because ‘Good Time George’ gave his final performance at the club just a few weeks before he died in 2007.
    A couple of months before that I met up with George at Ronnie Scott’s on Frith Street. This club is a Soho institution of 50 years’ standing, and that’s where I shall get my jazz fix and reflect on that last chat I had with