John Scarlett-Davis on Derek Jarman

A fascinating Derek Jarman talk and film at London's Farsight Gallery last month, featuring a 1984 LWT (London Weekend TV) documentary from the series 'South of Watford' about Jarman's life in London. It includes lots of great footage including Jarman on a boat going down the Thames pointing out the site of the warehouses he lived and worked in during the 1970s, including on the South Bank at Upper Ground,  at13 Bankside (St Magnus warehouse and at Butlers Wharf by Tower Bridge where he moved in 1973. There is a scene too of him going through the gates of the latter on a building where there is now a plaque to remember him. As mentioned in the film, Ken Russell visited him on the South Bank and invited him to design sets for his film 'The Devils' - the start of Jarman's involvement in the film industry.

The film was directed by Jarman's assistant John Scarlett-Davis, who introduced it and told some very entertaining stories, including about filming a scene of Sebastiene at Andrew Logan's warehouse space with Lindsay Kemp also at Butlers Wharf.  He recalled that at Jarman's Butlers Wharf studio the toilet was set up on a stage. Some people who were happy to take part in orgiastic parties apparently drew the line at going to the loo in front of everybody and a curtain was eventually put around it! Jarman and others had to move out of Butlers Wharf after a fire, one of a number in the area that some have observed were conveniently timed for property developers.  Scarlett-Davis remembers being dressed up in the Blitz nightclub when news of the fire came through.

Scarlett-Davis helped Jarman with his film and pop video work, including Marianne Faithfull's Broken English, and made many videos in his own right including for some of my favourite songs from that period such as This Mortal Coil's Song to the Siren, Cocteau Twins 'Pearly dewdrops drops' and Scritti Politti's 'The Word Girl' and 'Wood Beez' (featuring dancer Michael Clark).

Scarlett-Davis talked a bit about the connection between Jarman, William Burroughs and Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV, with the latter's Genesis P. Orridge featuring briefly int he LWT film. I was interested to hear that Scarlett-Davis and others had lived in another warehouse in Clink Street that later became a famous early acid house venue and later still a prison museum. John remembers Peter Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle/Coil)  attending parties in the warehouse there. Coil later (1998) recorded their album Astral Disaster at an underground studio in Clink Street. 

Derek Jarman, William Burroughs, Marc Almond, Psychic TV and others took part in 'The Final Academy' event in Heaven, 1983.

The event was linked to the exhibition 'Derek Jarman: from Soho to the Fifth Continent' by Jane Palm-Gold at the Farsight Gallery which is at 4 Flitcroft St next to St Giles Church. The exhibition featured photos of Derek at Dungeness by Derek Ridgers as well as Jane's paintings featuring episodes from his life, particularly in the St Giles/Soho area where Jarman lived in a flat in Phoenix House from 1979.

Jane did a great job not just in bringing together the exhibition but in bringing together some of the people who were part of Jarman's life and creative work in London. The audience at the film show including Simon Fisher Turner (who composed music for several Jarman films), Jenny Runacre (who played the Queen in Jubilee) and several people who like Scarlett-Davis himself were naked Roman extras in Sebastiene. The event was hosted by Sean McLusky from Farsight Gallery, once promoter of legendary London clubs like Club UK and the Leisure Lounge as well as sometime drummer with JoBoxers.

John Scarlett-Davis should definitely write a book. He also has some very funny stories about working in the film/TV industry including sitting in the canteen in Elstree between Jack Nicholson and Molly Sugden when he was working on both 'The Shining' and TV sitcom 'Are you being served?'.

Jane Palm-Gold's painting of the 1993 OutRage Queer Carnival in Soho 1993, which was opened by Jarman and also featured the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

'Low Class foreigners' and men dancing with men: Police raid Italian club in Soho (1900)

A police raid on an Italian-run club in Soho in 1900 led to fighting with police outside and the proprietors being jailed.

The Co-operative Club was at 2 Little Dean Street and was raided at one o'clock in the morning where around 100 people were drinking and 'dancing to piano music'. Previously 'dancing had been seen going on, men sometimes dancing with men, and very bad language had been heard in the place. All the men found there were low-class foreigners'. During the raid a 'disturbance took place' outside and 10 people were arrested - one for assaulting a constable (Evening Standard 31 July 1900)

Francesco Covini, the alleged club proprietor, and  Sebastian Cordori, a waiter, were charged with 'keeping a common, ill-governed and disorderly house'. They were jailed for 12 months and 6 months respectively (London Evening Standard, 10 August 1900)

Barcelona in Soho: a 1940s Surrealist hangout

17 Beak Street in Soho is at the time of writing a branch of the Flat Iron steak restaurant chain. But for at least 40 years it was home to the Barcelona Restaurant, at one time the social HQ of British surrealist artists.

In 1938 it was reported that the Barcelona was one of only five Spanish restaurants in London. At this time the Spanish Civil War was still raging, with supporters of Franco's fascists meeting for a sherry party at Martinez in Swallow Street. The unnamed manager of the Barcelona struck a melancholy tone stating that 'There is nothing to celebrate' as the war entered its third year.

(Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 18 July 1938)

The manager was Joaquim Carbonell (1895-1950), recalled by George Melly (see below) as a Spanish Republican sympathiser. 

1939 England and Wales Register for 17 Beak Street.

It was here that the Belgian surrealist artist Édouard Mesens summoned British surrealist sympathisers in the early days of the Second World War intending to mould them into a coherent  grouping dedicated to 'proletarian revolution' and exclusively surrealist artistic practice. Remy records that 'On Thursday 11 April 1940, E.L.T. Mesens called a meeting at the Barcelona restaurant in Soho's Beak Street of all surrealists living in London' with those attending including John Buckland-Wright, Herbert Read.. Roland Penrose, Humphrey Jennings, J.B. Brunius, Ithell Colquhoun, Eileen Agar, Edith Rimmington, S.W. Hayter, A.C. Sewter, Reuben Mednikoff , Grace Pailthorpe, John Banting, Gordon Onslow-Ford and Charles Howard. Not all of these continued to participate in the London Surrealist group but a number of them took part in the group's exhibition in June of that year at the Zwemmer gallery (26 Litchfield Street) alongside guest artists including Lee Miller and Paul Nash (Michael Remy, Surrealism in Britain, 1999)

Regular meetings continued in the upstairs dining room of the restaurant, where in addition to the  Surrealist core others would pop by: 'Dylan Thomas and Lucien Freud occasionally put in an appearance' (Levy).  The young George Melly, soon to be a key figure in the British jazz scene, joined the group around this time, with painter Conroy Maddox recalling later: 'When George Melly was on leave from the navy he would join us too. Invariably he would get terribly drunk and would start to recite his poems. One poem finished with 'it's raining knives and forks' and George would enact this line by throwing the restaurant cutlery over himself. We were then thrown out' (quoted in  Sivlano Levy, The Scandalous Eye: The Surrealism of Conroy Maddox, 2003). Incidentally, in a memoir published later - 'Don't Tell Sybil: An Intimate Memoir of E.L.T. Mesens' - Melly mentions that he was in a sexual relationship with Mesens and his wife Sybil at this time.

Gatherings continued at the Barcelona throughout the war and for a while afterward. In December 1946  Mesens organised an exhibition there, though by this time the main meeting place for the surrealist group seems to have shifted to the Three Horseshoes pub on Tottenham Court Road.

There's a remarkable 1978 BBC documentary on surrealism, made to coincide with that year's 'Dada and Surrealism Reviewed' exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. In 'The Journey', George Melly revisits some of the London surrealist haunts of the 1940s including the Barcelona which was then still open. In the upstairs room he brings back together some of the luminaries of British surrealism including Penrose, Maddox and Agar.  

Surrealists reunited in the Barcelona, 1978 including Melly at the top of table and Eileen Agar front left.

The Barcelona Restuarant was undoubtedly significant but Melly was to suggest that 'The non-existence of cafes' was one of the reasons for the relative failure of British surrealism  - exemplified for Melly by Penrose and Read accepting Knighthoods. In a 1987 article 'British Surrealism' published in The Raven: Anarchist Quarterly Melly argued  'This may seem frivolous, but it is not. Pubs are hopeless settings for the exchange of ideas; restaurants too formal. The British Surrealists tried both and found them wanting. The cafe was surrealism’s natural theatre'.

'A meeting of the Surrealist Group with dinner to follow will be held at the Barcelona Restaurant, Beak Street, W1 on Tuesday May 10th at 6:30 pm' - 1940 postcard from Roland Penrose to Jacques Brunius (French surrealist, then living in London).

Barcelona Spanish Restaurant 1968

Barcelona Restaurant 1978

Leonard Cohen in London

'I'm your man: the life of Leonard Cohen' (2012) is an excellent biography of everybody's favourite Jewish-Buddhist-Canadian singer/poet. With nearly 80 busy years behind him there's certainly plenty of material for a book like this, and Sylvie Simmons has interviewed the man himself and many of his friends, collaborators and lovers.

One of the revelations to me was Cohen's time in London before his musical career. Cohen stayed at a boarding house in Hampstead from December 1959 to March 1960, working on a novel. With Nancy Bacal, a friend from Montreal, he drank regularly in the King William IV pub in Hampstead. After closing time they would explore the night time city, wandering around Soho and the East End. They went to the legendary All-Nighters at the Flamingo club on Wardour Street, with its mixed black and white crowd dancing to jazz and R&B. Bacal recalled that 'There was so much weed in the air that it felt like walking into a painting of smoke'.

Back in Canada, Cohen came to the aid of Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi when the latter was on the run for heroin offences in 1961. He was smuggled over the Candadian border, where Cohen met him and put him up in his apartment in Montreal until he got on a boat to Scotland. Cohen later wrote the poem 'Alexander Trocchi, Public Junkie, Priez Pour Nous'.

Cohen returned to London for four months in March 1962, and moved back to 'Mrs Pulman's boarding house in Hampstead' for a while. By this point Nancy Bacal had moved in with her boyfriend, Michael de Freitas - better known as Michael X. The Trinidadian had worked as an enforcer for the landlord Peter Rachman before becoming a civil rights activist: 'a bridge between London's black underground and the white proto-hippie community. Together, Michael and Nancy founded the London Black Power Movement'.

'On this and subsequent trips to London, Leonard got to know Michael "very well". He, Nancy, Michael and Robert Hershorn, when he was in London, would spend evenings in Indian restaurants, deep in discussion about art and politics... Michael X had told Leonard - perhaps in jest, perhaps not - that he planned to take over the government of Trinidad. When he did, he said, he would appoint Leonard minister of tourism'.

Bacal and de Freitas split up in 1967, and renaming himself Michael Abdul Malik he founded the Black House centre in London's Holloway Road with support from John Lennon and Yoko Ono among others. He moved to Trinidad in 1971, where he was hanged in 1975 for murder, despite appeals for clemency from Leonard Cohen and other celebrities.

Saturday night dancing in 1950s London - Steven Berkoff

Playwright and actor Steven Berkoff (b.1937) wrote an autobiography 'Free Association' in 1997. Born in a Jewish family in Stepney (his father was a tailor), he spent his teengage years on the Woodberry Down Estate and hanging out around Stamford Hill (he went to Hackney Downs School, as did Harold Pinter). The book includes some great descriptions of going out dancing in London in the early 1950s, in particular at the Tottenham Royal, the 51 Club in Soho and the Lyceum Ballroom.

Tottenham Royal: The Mecca

'I recall in my youth the extreme beauty of some of the men and women, the sharply fierce eyes and beautiful peach-like skins and the men with their handsome Celtic faces. They would gather together like warring clans at the weekly stomp at the Tottenham Royal,which was run by Mecca. I was to write a short story about that  dance hall called Mecca - it was published in my collection Gross Intrusion. What an ironic title, Mecca Dance Halls, for it was indeed our Mecca and the weekly call to nature was as primitive as the herds of rutting deer that would gather on the Scottish moors for their mating, selecting and challenging.

It was the golden time, the weekend when the coarse and unsatisfying work had been shed and the day-to-day dose of humiliation was over, at least for me, and one could wash the week away, in the ‘neutral’ environment of the Mecca. All men and women were equal there, since the humbling work you did during the week mattered not at the Mecca. Your schooling might be shabby and abrupt, your teachers callous and indifferent, your hopes no higher than to be cannon fodder for industry and factories if you were a native, and if you were a second-generation immigrant you might be absorbed into the skills the migrants brought with them and be a worker in the garment industry, a cutter, tailor, presser, or as in my particular case, a a ghastly menswear shop.

In the Royal, Tottenham, you were you wished to be - warrior, lover, Jimmy Cagney, Tony Curtis, villain, spiv, leader, loner, heavy, Beau Brummell...

Tottenham Royal

....on Saturday we could forget all these other struggles, the dead and stultifying world outside in which you had to assert yourself with the blunt instruments of a poor education and little guidance and the hope of becoming a taxi driver or the manager of Cecil Gee’s Menswear. Now all that was behind you and in your drapes and rollaway Johnny Ray collar you spraunced into the Mecca with the expectation of a dream. Anything could and would and did happen, since the Mecca played into your hands: it was the greatest money-spinner of all time because it restated and restored the tribe and tore away the constraints of the civilized world of work and buses and factories. Here you could be who you thought you were. You created yourself. You were the master of your destiny. You entered quiffed and perfumed in the most expensive aftershave Boots had to offer. You entered and already the smell of the hall had a particular aroma of velvet and hairspray, Brylcreem and Silvikrin, lacquer, cigs, floor polish...

First you go and deposit your coat and then jostle for a square inch of mirror so as to adjust your phallic quiff, which has to protrude enough for it to be stable, until your very arm aches and you have to lower it to restore the blood supply. Many arms were crooked and like birds we were preening and pecking. In the ladies' I imagine even more complex rituals were going on, since this was the sea of flesh, a virtual harvest of all the young, bright, beautiful, sweet, delicious and not-so-beautiful and not-so-delectable, but at least the energy of all that youth swarming together in the Mecca was formidable...

  ...every night at the Royal was a dream time. You walked as if in slow motion and got there early so that you stood a good chance of pulling some sweet, delectable creature, had a good dance and swanned around. The dance was all-important since this was a way of demonstrating your skill as a mover, your grace, wit, balance and tricks. The jive was one of the greatest dance forms ever invented. And so all your arts were in some way fulfilled. You were the dandy, the mover and performer in your own drama, the roving hunter and lover, the actor adopting for the girl the mask of your choice. You wore your costume and walked the hall beneath the glittering ball and when you saw someone that you felt was about your stamp you asked her for a dance; if it was slow, when you took her on to the floor your heart started to increase its beat...  

When you entered the Royal, the band, usually Ray Ellington, would be up the far end. The Stamford Hill crowd would stand on the left-hand side and the crowd from Tottenham would stand on the right; there would be no mixing unless you felt cocky and wanted to fraternize; in that case you elected yourself to the position of leading luminary and went to pay your respects. Dancing was the thing and as the clock ticked away until the terrible hour of 11  p.m. when the band would stop, you became more and more desperate to find someone you could take home and crush for half an hour of fierce kissing and squeezing and creating sparks as your gaberdine rubbed against her taffeta'.

Jive  

I learned to jive at a formal session which a young teacher called Leslie taught at a small jazz club in Finsbury Park. I don’t remember who took me there or how I heard about it. In one corner of the room (and I now remember the room was walled with mirrors - it must have been a small ballet school in more genteel times) was a record player and Leslie would show us the basic one-two-three-four.

Once we had mastered this very simple rhythm, the next step was to guide the woman while in a kind of side-to-side locomotion our arms would spin her like a top. With the determination that was to be a hallmark of my youthful endeavours, I threw myself into the jive and practised night and day to work it out in mirrors, on door handles and on a current girlfriend, a flaring redhead who I met on the Hill. She was from the other side of the manor, which was bad news for both of us, but at that time we were mainly concerned with getting the jive together.

After a while I got into the swing of it and Greys Dance Hall became my weekly Tuesday night session. A kind of Finsbury Park clan would gather there. When you came in there was a little bar where you could buy sandies, tea, coffee and soft drinks. The place had a weird and pregnant atmosphere, not least because Curly King would turn up from time to time and it was also the time I first glimpsed the Kray twins. They were always immaculately turned out in dark suits and ties...

...Sunday was Lyceum night, but you could always do some hopping at the 51 Club in Little Newport Street. That was good for jazz and they played the best records and you danced your feet off. I did less and less exercise at school I made up for it by jiving, at which I was becoming a veritable Gene Kelly. 1 had perfected my jiving via Leslie at Grays, Finsbury Park, fine-tuned it at the Royal [Tottenham] and let it go at the‘51’.

It was my sanctuary. A small dark room with some of the best dancing to be seen in the West End. I would come home some nights soaked to the skin and it was even better than sex. I evolved a style that was ultra cool. By this time the Johnnie Ray era had been replaced by Teddy Boys and you wore four-button suits, shirts with stiff collars and double cuffs. My collars were sent each week to ‘Collars Ltd’ for starching and laundering, and woe betide if the collars came back soft or not stiff enough. I would go bananas. The style of dance was affected by the suit you wore and so you had to lift your arm, keeping your elbow fairly well in to your side or your jacket would be pulled up and you would appear ungainly. No, you had to dance cool so as to keep the form intact.

It was a brief but unique period in English social and fashion history, since it twisted the jive away from its American cousins and adapted it to fit into an idiosyncratic London style. The chaps at the Lyceum became fops and Beau Brummels and the suit was more than ever your calling card or your place of esteem. You had to be immaculate'.

Crackers 1976: daytime soul sessions in London

The Way We Wore by Robert Elms recalls the soul/funk sessions at Crackers in London in the mid 70s. This was by all accounts a very influential club - at DJHistory, Norman Jay, Fabio, Terry Farley and Jazzie B all mention its impact on them. There are a couple of other interesting points here. Crackers was another example of how in the 70s and 80s gay clubs provided a haven not just for lesbians and gay men but for all kinds of musical sub-cultures (see for instance the role of Louise's as hang out central for first generation punks). And what of day time clubbing? - Crackers had a packed session on Friday lunchtime, and there seem to have been day time sessions in London from the 1940s to the 1970s - hard to imagine now that people could get away with skipping work for a few hours in this way. Anyway here's Robert's account:

'1976, that legendary summer just heating up, we were on our way to small, hardcore clubs in Soho and Covent Garden. Two or three times a week heading into town, unknow­ingly beginning the process of trendification which would alter the fortunes of inner London. Dedicated groups of young, over­dressed soul-searchers headed through the often deserted streets of an unloved and unlovely city as the daytime temperatures kept climbing and the air became dense with heat and expectation. The Lyceum on a Monday night, Sombreros in Kensington on Thursdays: the Global Village, where Heaven now is, on Fridays, the 100 Club on Oxford Street on Saturdays. Most notable and most potent of them all was Crackers on Dean Street, on the edge of Soho itself and at the very centre of a world. Crackers, little more than another dodgy disco to look at, was one of the most influential venues of any year, and by late 1975, into the fabled summer of '76, it was at the core of this still largely secretive inner London scene. 

We, for me, meant two or three of the boys from Burnt Oak, who had really got into it and wanted to push on. And as soon as you got to places like Crackers, where the best dancers were, the most righteous young black kiddies from Tottenham and Brixton, the best-looking girls, the most knowl­edgeable music buffs, the most daring dressers, you just knew you were in the inner sanctum. The licensing laws at the time were so puritanical and arcane that this small gay club had to provide food. So all punters were handed a slice of Mother's Pride and spam as they entered and you could see these sandwiches littered round the dance floor at the end of the night. 

 Amazingly the hottest session at Crackers was on Friday after­noon, twelve until two-thirty. This was a direct revival of an old sixties tradition, when Friday lunch-hour had been a prime-time slot at Tiles, a late mod club. The idea was that nobody does too much work on Friday afternoons anyway, so who's going to notice if somebody is not at their desk or behind the counter for a couple of hours, and they're dancing or preening instead. Indeed half the crowd at Crackers on Friday were in their work-wear, office suits with the ties tucked in the pocket, hairdressers' smocks or even schoolboy blazers abandoned at the door. Others who somehow had avoided the pressure to work or study, and could make a performance of it, were attired to the nines. A young crowd, predominantly aged from sixteen to twenty-one, gathered from all corners of London to duck into this doorway amid the tacky shops and kiosks of the wrong end of Oxford Street, down the stairs and into a packed, darkened room, pounding with tough, black American tunes and throbbing with that almost tangible confidence which says this is the place to be. 

The dance floor itself, a small sprung wooden square, was strictly for dancers, and by that I mean dancers. Anyone who ventured on to the square at Crackers had to have steps, and the bottle to produce them under the gaze of the unforgiving throng. Some of the top guys at Crackers are legendary still: Horace, Tommy Mac, Jaba, and the daddy of them all, Clive Clark, a charming black guy who went on to become a professional chore­ographer, but started out scorching the opposition on Friday afternoons in Dean Street. When these boys were on the floor, a circle would form to give them an amphitheatre in which to per­form. They would then pull out moves and steps with a wickedly competitive edge, legs flying like lasers, some new twist or turn eliciting spontaneous applause from the closely watching circle. Unlike northern soul, with its dervish spins and flailing kicks, its wild amphetamine abandon, the southern style was tight and precise: feet made rapid tap movements, knees were bent, hips sashayed, shoulders rolled, heads bobbed. The whole effect was somewhere between boxing and bopping. And if you couldn't cut it, you didn't go anywhere near the floor. 

Around the square stood contenders and pretenders, who rated their chances but hadn't yet stepped into the ring. Some enrolled themselves at Pineapple, the dance studio which had recently opened up round the corner in Covent Garden. They pulled on sweat-tops and legwarmers to learn moves from ballet, jazz and tap, provoking the craze for dancewear which would result in dodgy thick socks around ankles a few years later. Others simply spent hours on council estate carpets, honing their footwork, their dips and turns while avoiding the furniture. Behind the dancers, at the bar, at the back, the rest of the club grooved and swayed, perpetual motion. My place, as a young suburban boy, was way at the back, bobbing and watching and noting and loving every super-saturated, hyped-up little minute of it. And then, come half two, the last strains of Dexter Wansel or Charles Earland still swirling around your brain, it was out. Blink­ing against the light, the sweat freezing on your face as you hit cool air, into the rushing maelstrom of Oxford Street. Leg it over the road to Hanway Street, a charismatic, piss-smelling dogleg alley, where up the stairs of an unmarked doorway was Contempo. Contempo Records was the epicentre of the London black music world in 1976, entirely contained in a room about eight feet square above a Spanish bar with an Irish name, in a forgotten street. On Friday afternoons it was the only place to buy the records the DJs had been spinning over the road at Crackers. So punters literally queued up the stairs, shouting out names of songs and artists, or listening intently to the sides which had arrived in crates from the States that day, deciding whether that was the one to invest in'.

[Robert says Crackers was in Dean Street, but as commenters have pointed out, it was actually at 203 Wardour Street]