Up West

by Pip Granger

  Italians returning to post-war London from the Isle of Man and Canada, where they had been interned for the war years, were joined by a new wave of Italian migrants fleeing an economically depressed, war-battered Italy. With them, they brought trattorias. These were considered by Italian restaurateurs, such as Peppino Leoni of Quo Vadis, as cafés rather than restaurants. They were less formal for one thing, dispensing with crisp, linen napkins, heavy cutlery, sparkling glassware and courtly service in favour of brightly coloured Formica tables and counters, mirrors, mosaics, frescos and potted plants. They brought a little of the colourful Mediterranean to grimy old London and drew even more people into Soho – especially the young.

  The coffee bar and espresso culture of the fifties also began in Soho, partly because of the large Italian community and partly because Gaggia had their first British premises in Dean Street. Achille Gaggia invented the espresso machine that bears his name in Milan in 1946. Pino Riservato, an Italian dental technician, set up Riservato and Partners to import the machines to England, and in 1953 got Gina Lollobrigida to open the Moka Bar at 29 Frith Street, England’s first coffee bar, to show off his wares. The Moka claimed to be ‘patronised by over fifty nationalities’, a claim to fame that typified Soho’s pride in its traditionally multicultural appeal.

  The advent of espresso was the beginning of the end for milk bar culture, which lasted well into the sixties, and even the seventies, in provincial towns. Mr Gaggia’s shining machines transformed many traditional ‘caffs’ and Italian ‘greasy spoons’, which cut the grease and stodge from their menus and acquired a set of toughened glass cups and saucers (which not only looked modern, but also made sure that drinks soon got cold, discouraging those who wanted to linger all night over a single cup).

  The colourful informality of trattorias and the all-important coffee bars made Soho the Mecca of the newly discovered teenager. Before the fifties, those who had reached their teens were just young replicas of their parents, on the cusp of joining Mum and Dad in adulthood – teenagers as a separate, distinct group with their own tastes and cultural influences, entirely different from the stifling conformity and rigid class structure of their parents and grandparents, were unknown.

  The older generation had had their crack at running things their way, and two devastating world wars had been the outcome. It was time for change. It was time for the young to make their own, distinct mark on society. Teenagers began to create their own music and their own fashions and they were as radically different from what had gone before as it was possible to be. Many of them made the pilgrimage Up West to buy their new fashions and to hang out in the coffee bars, to socialize and set the world to rights.

  The time young people could spend in a tea room was severely limited. Once you’d finished your cuppa and bun it was time to pay up and vacate the table. Fuller’s Tea Rooms were the worst, apparently, because they were ‘very posh’. The waitresses were snooty, and the punter had to ‘drink their tea and bugger off’: there was no question of being allowed to hang about with your mates, eyeing the girls.

  Coffee bars were different. Old fogeys tended to steer clear of them, and the owners didn’t mind their young customers hanging around for hours chatting up the talent. In Italy and other parts of continental Europe, there was a tradition of using trattorias, coffee houses and pâtisseries as places to meet and talk, or simply to watch the world go by, and that notion arrived in England along with Gaggia and the drink that is so popular now in the twenty-first century, the cappuccino.

  Individual coffee bars soon became associated with different factions. The 2I’s in Old Compton Street was for rock ’n’ roll and skiffle fans. Old Compton Street also boasted the Prego Bar Restaurant, Heaven & Hell, and Act One Scene One, a theatrical dive. Bunjies, in Lichfield Street, catered for the beatnik and folk music crowd. Le Macabre in Meard Street, with its eccentric décor – coffin-lid table tops and menus printed on ‘tombstones’ – was also more of beatnik kind of a place, while Les Enfants Terribles in Dean Street attracted beatniks and bohemians with a serious turn of mind and a small pile of Jean Paul Sartre, Françoise Sagan and Jean Genet tucked under their arm for all to see.

  It wasn’t only teenagers. Bohemians of all descriptions enjoyed the ambience. The Nucleus, in Monmouth Street, was a basement coffee bar that stayed open until five or six in the morning and attracted all sorts of night owls – ‘Jazz Men, Painters, Writers, Sculptors, Poets (and Layabouts)’ as its ads proudly proclaimed – while the Gyre & Gimble in John Adam Street also nurtured folkies and skifflers. Carlisle Street offered the Partisan, a hang-out for left-wing political types, while an arty crowd swarmed in to Trattoria Terrazza in Romilly Street from the moment it threw open its doors. According to Jeffrey Barnard,* the place attracted ‘writers and painters, film directors and extras, and also a great cross-section of businessmen and lovers’.

  Not all of the coffee bars were welcoming. When I became interested in coffee bar culture, I went to the Macabre, Les Enfants Terribles and, of course, Bunjies, but I never entered the Bar Italia in Greek Street because it seemed to be the sole preserve of Italian men and was more than a little intimidating to a young girl. It still is, even to an old girl – I wandered in there a few years back by mistake, but the very male, vaguely hostile atmosphere soon had me back through the door, looking for somewhere more welcoming.

  Sonia Boulter, though, had an ‘in’ at the Bar Italia because she had a relative on the inside. ‘My cousin, the one with the ponytail who looks like he’s in the Mafia now, he’s Italian, he always used to be in there with his dad and my other cousin. You rarely saw anyone but Italian men there; it was like a clique. But I was fortunate because my cousins were there. You would be allowed in, but because I had a connection with the Italians I was made welcome.’

  The new coffee bars brought in a new range of taste experiences; along with the impossibly exotic frothy coffee came continental pastries and other delights. Gary Winkler, who took over the Nucleus in the mid fifties, remembers, ‘We were very famous for our spaghetti bolognese, because then it was unusual. I’d been in the army in France before I was demobbed, so I brought in some unusual ideas from France. We used to have milk with grenadine, which was a French drink, like a milkshake but with pomegranate juice, and we had yoghurts, which were virtually unknown then. You know, musicians who used to come in and play, we’d always give them a bowl of spaghetti, keep them going.’

  Father moved out of his flat in Old Compton Street in 1960. Although I no longer had a home there, I was continually drawn back, as a teenager and a young woman, to its coffee bars and music venues, but also to its cheap and cheerful restaurants and, if I was in funds, its more expensive ones as well. My taste buds had been fine-tuned by the things I found there, and there was nowhere else to get the fine nosh I was used to. I had grown accustomed to the fact that Soho was always ahead of its time. It took the quality and cultural diversity of food seriously decades before the rest of the country and, of course, there was the pull of the music. Post-war Soho always seemed to be in the vanguard of any new trends, and slowly, very slowly, the rest of the country would eventually follow.

  *They mostly succeeded, although in my opinion, their Wimpy Bars – the first one opened in the West End in 1954 – were a big mistake. They simply were not good, although I’m sure they raked in plenty of profit even though their burgers were greasy, tough, rubbery affairs that could readily second as street stopcock covers or, possibly, outsized washers.

  *Sir David Wilkie is quoted on page 3 of Judith Summers’s book, Soho.

  *As quoted in Soho Night & Day by Frank Norman and Jeffrey Barnard.

  13

  Making Music

  I believe that the social freedoms and cultural innovations that swept Britain in the sixties had their roots in Soho in earlier decades, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the field of music. I’m not talking about the music made in the area’s opera houses, concert halls and ballet companies
– even though these had plenty of aficionados, including my own family – nor the dance band stylings, light crooning and up-tempo novelty songs that were the staple of broadcast music at the time. I’m referring to what was then considered underground music, produced by and for young enthusiasts coming up from the streets. Modern and traditional jazz, folk, blues, skiffle and, later, rock ’n’ roll all found a home and a place to grow in Soho.

  The lines that link the jazz music of the twenties with the Beatles-led ‘Beat Boom’ of the sixties are unbroken, and in the post-war years they form a knot around Soho, where the music’s freedom of spirit was valued as much as any other freedom.

  Musicians naturally gravitated to the West End. There were more jobs to be had there than anywhere else in the country, for a start. There was work to be found in the pit orchestras of theatreland, while big bands still played in dance halls such as the Lyceum, at the bottom of Drury Lane. Small groups worked the nightclubs, changing personnel as the job demanded. Some clubs had a resident band, while others hired musicians on short-term contracts.

  A few clubs opened that were entirely devoted to a particular form of music, such as jazz, folk or blues. Before long, they were packing in punters six nights a week. Later, there were jobs for young performers in the coffee bars, while piano trios could find employment providing background music for diners in the larger Joe Lyons or the ‘Palm Court’ room of fashionable hotels. Even the strip clubs and the clip joints provided work for a pianist and a drummer, who would hit rimshots as another piece of costume floated to the floor. Pubs provided work for semi-pro pianists, while guitarists, accordionists and one-man bands could always take to the streets and ‘bottle’ for tips while busking the cinema and theatre queues.

  Musicians also congregated in Soho because the national headquarters of the Musicians’ Union was in Archer Street, hard by St James’s and St Peter’s School, and just around the corner from the Windmill Theatre. On Monday mornings, throughout the forties and fifties, musicians (and, as the old joke goes, drummers – easily picked out as they wore sticks poking out of their pocket as a badge of their trade) would gather outside the offices with the words ORCHESTRAL ASSOCIATION picked out in relief above the door. As Ronnie Mann recalls, ‘Archer Street was full of these strange blokes, all trying to get a job: we’re not talking about a dozen, it seemed at the time to be hundreds of them.’

  Sonia Boulter remembers them well: ‘Archer Street was notorious, because on the way to school and on the way out you’d see them all queuing up waiting to see if there were any jobs. That was all they used to do, hang around there, so we met quite a few. They used to say hello, because they knew we went to school there.’

  These shifting knots of people came to Archer Street to check out the Union’s noticeboards, to gossip and to look for a gig. Anyone who already had an engagement for the coming week would go there to hire other musicians, usually looking for faces they knew. Mondays in Archer Street were often as much about putting old bands back together as they were about creating new alliances. At that time, the average jobbing musician would not have had a phone, nor, most likely, a permanent home to put one in.

  As jazz drummer Laurie Morgan remembers, ‘Musicians from every part of the musical profession would meet here, but they would only meet at specific places, where they’d arranged to meet each other. Because people were so jammed together, they might have to strike deals across, as it were, a crowded room, so instead of being able to speak properly, they would have a private way, hand signals, of letting each other know how much the money was.’*

  Another attraction of Archer Street for the average musician was that the Windmill was just around the corner. The theatre’s glamorous dancers, as well as those whose job it was to stand both naked and perfectly still on the stage, would frequent nearby pubs and cafés in their downtime, which tended to coincide with the musicians’ hanging-about-near-the-Union-having-a-desultory-chat times.

  Another focal point for musicians was the north-east corner of Soho, on the far side of Charing Cross Road. Denmark Street, popularly known as Tin Pan Alley, was jam-packed with the offices of song publishers and writers and music biz agents, above shops selling instruments and sheet music. It was a place for star-spotting. Graham Jackson remembers ‘going down there with Mum, and she’d say, “Look who’s over there,” and there’s Alma Cogan just come out of one of the places’. There was another attraction for fans and musicians alike at 77 Charing Cross Road: Dobell’s record shop was the only place in the country where imported American jazz, blues and folk records could be found in the fifties.

  And, of course, all the clubs and cafés, theatres and cinemas – not to mention the opera houses, dance halls and concert halls – made the West End a Mecca for music lovers as well as musicians. They came from all over London, and further afield, to dance barefoot in a smoky dive, or more formally at the Lyceum, to tap their toes or do the hand jive in the 2I’s basement, join in with the folkies at the Gyre & Gimble or Bunjies Folk Cellar, jive in a jazz club, or simply bop away to records played on jukeboxes or gramophones in club and restaurant basements. Often, the locals joined in.

  The West End’s reputation as the home for British jazz dates from 1942, when the Feldman Swing Club, London’s first jazz club with live acts, opened in the basement at 100 Oxford Street. On Sunday nights, the jazzier dance-band musicians would sit in with semi-pro players, such as the young Ronnie Scott and John Dankworth, as well as the owner’s young son, Victor Feldman, a drum prodigy. Feldman’s became a refuge for English jazzers who had fallen under the spell of American beboppers, such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Bebop, with its radically new approach to harmony and melody, and intricate rhythmic patterns, laid the ground for modern jazz.

  The Fullado Club at 6 New Compton Street attracted black US servicemen, and jam sessions developed there in the post-war years. Swing musicians – many moonlighting from regular gigs with ‘squarer’ bands – played with young beboppers from 3 p.m. until midnight. Drummer Laurie Morgan was a dance band musician whose head was turned by hearing Charlie Parker. ‘I used to go to the Fullado Club,’ he remembers. ‘Black American servicemen would come, and they would bring in records. It just blew our minds. The Fullado was really the first place where English bebop musicians got together as groups and played. Bebop was like a clarion call. This new world was going to come.’

  In the summer of 1948, 6 New Compton Street housed the Metropolitan Bopera House. Ten of the young musicians who played there, along with the manager Harry Morris, founded Club Eleven in December that year. Club Eleven began at Mac’s Rehearsal Rooms, at 41 Great Windmill Street – literally around the corner from Archer Street. The jazzmen arranged themselves in to a quartet (later a quintet) led by Johnny Dankworth, and a six-piece band led by Ronnie Scott.

  The growing reputations of Dankworth and Scott brought in the crowds, and radio broadcasts, record releases and concerts in larger venues saw the British – or at least the West End – public embrace modern jazz. Soon the club was packed out. It took on new premises in Carnaby Street, where it opened six nights a week. The crowds continued to grow, attracted by the atmosphere of excitement and transgression. Then, as musicians do, the founders began to squabble about money. Dankworth left to form his Seven, and things started to drift. On 15 April 1950, the club was raided by the police. Several musicians and customers were arrested and later convicted for possessing drugs or deserting from the army. Although the notoriety of what was the first drugs bust in Britain brought the club a brief resurgence in popularity, it folded before the end of the year.

  In the meantime, another group of young musicians had revived earlier styles of jazz. Traditional jazz, or Trad as it came to be known, looked for inspiration to the Dixieland of New Orleans in the early decades of the century, the speakeasy styles of Prohibition-era Chicago and the bluesy, sexually charged sounds of singers such as Bessie Smith. Bessie was the particular inspiration for the singer George
Melly, who, as the vocalist with Mick Mulligan’s band, was at the centre of things.

  While there was a certain amount of chin-stroking seriousness about modernist jazz fans – studied ‘cool’ was a large part of what the new sounds were about – Trad was all heat and hedonism. The grey years of rationing (which continued until 1954) were, in Chas McDevitt’s words, ‘coloured by the music and a liberal consumption of Merrydown cider’.* Dancing – even jiving, which had been banned in many dance halls – was encouraged in the Trad clubs, while the modernists tended to sit down and nod along to the music, which might have had something to do with the apparently ready availability of dope in the jazz clubs.

  They could party hard when the mood took them, but beboppers and other modernists tended to be serious about their craft; however with a Trad band, though the odd bum note went unnoticed in the joyous, boozy riot. Many of the Trad jazzers added other types of American ‘Roots’ music, such as folk and blues, to their repertoire, as well as the odd pop tune or calypso: the latter was enjoying a new popularity in Britain as the West Indian population slowly grew.

  These differences created an intense rivalry. Although George Melly visited Club Eleven and Ronnie Scott’s first club in Gerrard Street, because Scott had a policy of inviting over great American soloists, he remembers that there was little love lost between musicians of his persuasion and the modernists, who called the Trad aficionados ‘mouldy figs’. Leo Zanelli remembers the schism well, from the other side. ‘I grew up in an atmosphere of modern jazz and bebop, so I went to Club Eleven in a basement in Gerrard Street, and 100 Oxford Street on special nights. In those days, if it wasn’t beboppish, well . . . And as for Dixieland, pffft. Even if you liked it secretly, you couldn’t say so.’