Do you take sugar Bill?

Francis Bacon serving tea to William Burroughs in the Reece Mews flat: over at the 'Arena Hotel' site.

I told you I was ill

Jeffrey Bernard's Desert Island Disks from 1991 is up on the program's archive site: here. Rather sad and bitter sweat, and he sounds like he was at deaths' door. Some nice music choices however.

Roundup - Soho centric

The Daily Telegraph Blogs section may well be as Private Eye said "that sheltered housing unit for the incurably insane" but the obituaries section is the best in the Fleet Street. Recently, they have featured two Soho characters of note:

Pamela Jennings, the well known beggar and one time jouster with Norman Balon, late of the Coach and Horses.

Jim Godbolt stalwart of the British jazz scene - booker for the Johnny Dankworth Seven and editor of Jazz at Ronnie Scott’s. He was also a contributor to the Telegraph obituaries page, and their depiction of him as a difficult sod was obviously based on first hand experience: 

"Some members of the obituaries desk, however, were exasperated at being asked to sort out his prose and put up with his surly replies to queries. One of his more unusual submissions was two versions of the band leader Cab Calloway; one in standard English, the other in hepcat’s argot. Eventually an argument about the editing of his obituary of his brother, who kept a pub, led to the appointment of a more obliging wordsmith."  

He was unmarried.

 

Free for those that can afford it

 

   "In point of fact, Bacon loved the extremes of waking in the grim discomfort of his living quarters and working in the studio's cramped chaos before appearing for dinner, impeccably groomed, in the hushed opulence of a grand hotel. What fascinated him, he often remarked, was the 'distance' between the two; staying long in either state would have seemed tedious. Like Picasso, he wanted 'to be rich enough to live like a poor person', without the restraints of convention."

Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma , p.246

Bacon seemed liked an obvious choice for full length post, but the more I read about him the more sceptical I get about his eccentric or outsider status. He seems to have been quite calculating in many ways: he never got too drunk, never lost too much money, never got too close to the criminal underworld. He outlived most of the Soho crowd and died a rich man. Still the myth of Bacon now has a life of its own thanks particularly to the several documentary he appeared on and Love is the Devil. As a teenager interested in modern art, he was exactly how you wanted an artist to be. In an interview somewhere Jenny Saville says that as an adolescent she "wanted her life to be like Bacon's'". He was just the kind of adult your parents would not invite round for dinner.