London Calling (31 page)

The discotheque craze began in Paris with the Whiskey à Go-Go, which
opened in 1947. ‘Whiskey’ meant Scotch, and so,
thinking laterally, tartan was used as the decor. In 1961, Hélène Cordet, Prince Philip’s childhood friend from Paris, opened
the Saddle Room, London’s first discotheque. She naturally used tartan. Then came Le Kilt, at 90 Frith Street, which was fully
decorated in tartan and even had a tartan carpet. Le Kilt was much favoured by Swedish au pair girls but people like the Beatles
would visit if someone interesting was playing such as the Lovin’ Spoonful. It was owned by a Mister Bloom and Louie Brown,
whose next venture, the Scotch of St James, opened in the summer of 1966. In keeping with its name, it too was decorated with
Scotch tartan, sporrans and swords. It was a split-level discotheque with a restaurant and bar on the ground floor and a disco
in the basement. There was a small sliding panel in the middle of the wooden door, guarded by iron bars, through which you
were inspected before being permitted to enter, like a speakeasy. It quickly became the in-place for the rock ’n’ roll community
to gather from 11 p.m. until 3 a.m..

The manager of the Scotch was Rod Harrod, who had previously been at the Cromwellian on the Cromwell Road. The club was very
dark – you almost had to feel your way to a table – and the music, played by a D J in a carriage of the sort that horses used
to pull around as taxis, was Motown or Stax, Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett. Regulars included the Beatles, the Stones with
their manager Andrew Loog Oldham, the Animals and virtually everyone who had a record in or near the charts. Every Friday
night Vicki Wickham would show up, fresh from the television studio in Wembley, with the stars of that week’s
Ready Steady Go!
, particularly the female ones: the Shirelles, the Ronnettes, the Toys, the Supremes, Sonny and Cher. There was a small stage
for live acts.

Simon Napier-Bell wrote:

The Scotch was more than just a club or a place to show off your status and position – it was a positive celebration of being
part of what was happening in the world’s most ‘happening’ city. It was a nightly indoor festival, a carnival, a theatrical
event, and everyone played their part to the full, co-operating with all the other stars around them in trying to make this
the longest running show of all time.
²

Downstairs the tiny dance floor was usually dominated by Tom Jones. In his memoir Napier-Bell recalls slipping drunkenly off
his chair on to the floor. He lay there for a while, feeling comfortable, and then opened his eyes to see John Lennon crawling
towards him on all fours beneath the tables and chairs. Eric Burdon remembers encountering Lennon in a similar situation at
a party in Mayfair where Burdon was administering amyl nitrate to two half-naked girls prior to breaking raw eggs over them;
Burdon was the Eggman in Lennon’s song.
³

The Scotch was the first of the very dark, very loud clubs. It was too loud to talk, all you could do was drink; Scotch and
coke was very popular as it was the Beatles’ drink. I went there once during the day with Paul McCartney, looking for somewhere
to play a new album by the Fugs that had just arrived in the post at Indica Books, next door. With the unshaded house lights
on the club looked unbelievably tatty: the walls had not been painted in decades, the banquettes were filthy and the brass
plaques, reserving certain booths for Stones or Animals, looked like tourist junk. The atmosphere at night was created by
the clientele, a few coloured lights, and a top of the line music system.

The Speakeasy, at 48 Margaret Street, just north of Oxford Street, opened shortly afterwards, and for several years musicians
moved, often several times a night, between the Scotch, the Speak and the Bag O’Nails, which had also opened in late 1966.
The Speak and the Bag were within easy walking distance of each other but most rock stars preferred to travel by car or cab.
The Speakeasy was co-managed by the owner Roy Flynn and Mike Carey. The promoter and publicity manager from 1968 for the next
ten years was Laurie O’Leary, the Speak’s public face. The Speak was in a basement. At the bottom of the stairs was the cloakroom,
presided over by Avril, and a large coffin, located between the toilets, with a brass plaque that read: ‘Ashes to ashes, dust
to dust, if the women don’t get you, the whisky must.’ The Speak had a tacky Chicago speakeasy theme with huge blow-up pictures
of Al Capone and other gangsters and some of the ugliest wallpaper ever made, featuring a pattern of coloured hearts. You
entered next to the large horseshoe-shaped bar, which had a few fruit-machines on the far side. Beyond the curved end of the
bar was the dance floor with booths on the side and a stage. To the right of the stage was Luigi’s restaurant, a long room
separated from the bar and dance floor by a partition, the top half of which was glass so that diners could see the whole
of the club, including the stage.

The Speak was more relaxed than the Scotch and allowed Keith Moon to walk naked over the tables holding a bottle of champagne,
and groupies to crawl under the tables. These things may have happened at the Scotch but it was too dark to see them. At one
point Moon installed a walkie-talkie on the bar and another in the restaurant so he could order without having to summon a
waitress. The Speak was great for jam sessions: Hendrix played there often as the featured guest, and jammed whenever he could,
not
minding if he had to play bass if no guitar was available. On New Year’s Eve, 1967, Jimi played a thirty-minute version of
‘Auld Lang Syne’ which reduced everyone to a stunned silence. Like the Scotch, the Speak was so exclusive that there was no
need for a VIP area and the long bar would be crowded with Bee Gees, Beatles, Stones, and members of the Who. I saw Frank
Zappa act as compere and introduce Cream to the audience as a ‘Natty little combo’ just before they left for their first US
tour. They played with massive stage amplification and deafened everyone. The Speak was famous for its groupies, who had a
harder time getting into the Scotch or the Bag O’Nails if they did not arrive with a musician. There were sometimes fights:
the drummer Ginger Baker from Cream was often fractious but most people managed to ignore him. The biggest problems were between
the old and new guard. At a 1967 ‘happening’, not long after the club opened, Daevid Allen, from Soft Machine, read a poem
called ‘The Death of Rock Music’ which proclaimed the superiority of psychedelic music over pop, prompting Georgie Fame to
challenge Allen to a fight in front of the stage. This further illustrated the difference between the old Soho rockers and
the new peace-loving underground: Daevid Allen would never fight anyone.

The final club on the evening crawl was the Bag O’Nails at 9 Kingly Street in Soho. This had been a brothel in Victorian times
and the Downbeat Jazz Club operated from its premises from 8 February 1948. The Downbeat often featured the Tito Burns band
and Ray Ellington and his quartet made their debut there. But the club only lasted six months or so before the Bag reverted
to its old use. Rik and John Gunnell bought it in 1966 as a rock ’n’ roll club. Less known than the Scotch or the Speakeasy,
the Bag was less trendy and more music-oriented, which attracted a wider range of people. The stars certainly flocked there:
one Hendrix concert drew a guest list which included John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Brian Epstein, Pete Townshend,
Mick Jagger, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Brian Jones, Jimmy Page, Lulu, the Hollies, the Small Faces and the Animals. The club
consisted of tiered banquettes surrounding a small stage so everyone could see everyone else as well as the stageshow. It
was very much a club for picking up people, in fact John and Christine McVie from Fleetwood Mac first met there, as did Paul
McCartney and Linda Eastman (while watching Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames).

The Bag was where the Beatles went at 3 a.m. after the
Sgt Pepper
recording sessions to unwind and get a bite to eat. Musicians work while everyone else is at play so their hours are correspondingly
later. Assorted Beatles, usually accompanied by their roadies Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall, would
often show up just as the club was closing. I was with them one night when the very last customers were being shooed out into
the narrow street. Seeing Paul McCartney and his entourage arrive, the management quickly dragged the bemused clubbers back
in the door and pushed them downstairs. As we entered the small lobby we heard the music start up again in the basement. A
typical Mal Evans diary entry was for 19–20 January 1967 and read: ‘Ended up smashed in Bag O’ Nails with Paul and Neil. Quite
a number of people attached themselves, oh that it would happen to me.’
⁴
They would order standard club food, which was the least likely to poison them: steak, chips and mushy peas. Neil Aspinall
inspected everyone’s plate with a flashlight to make sure everything was in order and gave the bill similar scrutiny.

In 1964 an ex-policeman, Bill Bryant, and his partner, Geoffrey Worthington, opened a discreet gay bar called The Lounge in
Whitehall. It was too close to Scotland Yard and didn’t work, so they took premises on D’Arblay Street and tried again, this
time modelling themselves as a gay version of the nearby Scene Club in Ham Yard. Le Duce had a coffee bar on the ground floor
and a basement club with a small dance floor, a jukebox and a seating area screened off by a huge fishtank, though the fish
kept dying because the mods threw their pills into it every time there was a police raid. The manager, Peter Burton, who joined
in 1966, played non-stop Motown, with some Blue Beat thrown in: Dusty Springfield’s ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’ and
Jimmy Ruffin’s ‘What Becomes of the Brokenhearted?’ were both very popular. For about four years it was the trendiest place
in London and where all the dancers went after filming at Rediffusion T V’s
Ready Steady Go!
on Friday nights (only the stars could afford the Scotch of St James).

The clientele were gay mods dressed in John Stephen’s Carnaby Street finery with brightly coloured shirts and trousers or
jeans, and elastic-sided Cuban heeled boots from Anello and Davide. There were a few rent boys and some straight dolly birds.
The drugs were purple hearts, lots of them. Derek Jarman described it as ‘the most exciting club of the sixties’.
⁵
They stayed open all night on Saturday. Derek was a regular: ‘the sun was up before it closed its doors. I used to walk back
home, there were no late buses.’
⁶
He featured, along with Ossie Clarke and Keith Milow, in Patrick Proctor’s painting of Le Duce called
Shades
. At first there was no licence, but as business picked up they turned the coffee bar into a restaurant and were able to serve
drinks until 1 a.m. provided you ate something. The club had a tough door policy to keep out predatory older men but could
not keep out the police. They rarely made arrests – homosexuality was still illegal but it was hard to prove – but
they enjoyed intimidating people by taking down their names and addresses. It also encouraged the club owners to pay protection.

In the late sixties the Krays and Maltese Paul moved into Soho and many of the small gay clubs moved to West London and to
Chelsea, where the Gigolo had operated safely in the basement beneath the Casserole on the King’s Road since 1967. The narrow
death-trap staircase down to the club led directly on to the tiny red-tiled dance floor, bringing members straight into the
action. No-one was allowed to touch and, if they did, the doorman would intervene and remind them: ‘Come on lads, you know
the rules.’ The walls were painted white and there was a bar which served only Coca-Cola or weak Nescafé in glass cups. At
the back was a dimly lit, raised area, about ten feet square, leading to two toilets. The doorman appeared to be unable to
see what went on in this area and customers stood around with their flies undone and openly gave each other blow jobs. It
would have been hard for police to get to the back quickly because the dancing in the front of the bar never stopped.

When they did arrive there was chaos. The clientele was lined up and waited their turn to be frisked – obviously everyone
had emptied their pockets by the time this happened and the floor would be littered with pills which crunched underfoot as
people shuffled forward to be humiliated – afterwards they were given a numbered piece of paper which they had to show at
the door upstairs before they were permitted to leave. Jarman recalled that the raids continued right into the seventies:
‘they were designed to frighten us, stop the less adventurous leaving their homes.’
⁷

The continual police harassment of gays made them take refuge in illegal drinking clubs where they were not so visible. These
were often establishments run by West Indians who were sympathetic to lesbians and gay men because, like them, they were regarded
as outsiders. Though hard to prove, some people think that in the late fifties and early sixties before the law was changed
there were more gay clubs in London than there are now.

There were certainly more drinking clubs back then, and, as usual, most of them appear to have been in Soho. Aside from the
Colony, Francis Bacon used to occasionally visit the Kismet, next door to the Pickwick Club on Great Newport Street off Charing
Cross Road. It was primarily an afternoon drinking club patronized by the usual Soho crowd. Jeffrey Bernard told the story
of a stranger entering the Kismet and asking: ‘What’s that smell?’ Without even looking up from his drink, John Bey shouted
‘Failure!’ Regulars at the Kismet included Frank Norman, John Deakin, Marty Feldman, Jeffrey Bernard, Francis Bacon, Dan Farson
and Christine Keeler. It was presided
over by the tough manager Eddi McPherson, described by Jay Landesman as a ‘strapping, good-looking, big-bosomed, tough young
woman who filled the drinker’s need for a basement madonna’.
⁸
On one occasion Bacon was there with Dan Farson and a group of other people and startled them with the revelation that one
of the ‘coppers’ who drank there on a regular basis had a ‘thing’ about him after finding out that Francis wore fishnet stockings
and suspenders beneath his fashionable trousers.
⁹
The Kismet was just across Charing Cross Road from the Premier Club, on Little Newport Street, which was also frequented
by police, in fact Freddie Foreman described it as ‘a policemen’s canteen’. In conversation with Tony Lambrianou, an associate
of the Kray twins, Freddie Foreman described how it was used as a meeting place for criminals to sort out their affairs with
the police: ‘If ever you had to do a deal with the Old Bill, you know, to part with a bit of readies and get out of trouble,
that was the club you went to.’ He described how you got your introduction, then went over into a corner and sorted out your
business. ‘Full of coppers in there.’
¹⁰