Now mainly at: http://filthylondonlucre.tumblr.com/
All about money and London.
London Eccentrics: an A to Z
"Many of the great Soho characters are dead and who can blame them?"
Monday 19 August 2013
Monday 17 June 2013
".... variously, a Communist book-packer, an RAF pilot, a gasworks fireman.."
"... a tramlines repairer, a kitchen porter, a male prostitute, a rider of freight cars in Canada, a prize-winning advertising copywriter, a drama teacher, a CND campaigner, a prisoner, a patient on the analyst’s couch and a convert to Roman Catholicism."
Oliver Bernard, poet, Soho dweller and Jeffery's brother has died at the age 87. As ever it's the Telegraph with proper obituary tribute. What an extraordinary family the Bernard's were.
Thursday 25 April 2013
Do you take sugar Bill?
Francis Bacon serving tea to William Burroughs in the Reece Mews flat: over at the 'Arena Hotel' site.
Labels:
artists,
bohemians,
Francis Bacon,
Soho,
William Burroughs,
writers
Wednesday 13 February 2013
"Hello, Bernie Rhodes? It's Tony Benn here..
I rang the manager of The Clash , a political punk rock group,
because there had been a suggestion from the BBC Television Community
Programme Unit that I have a four-minute discussion with the group. I have grave doubts about a Cabinet Minister appearing with a punk rock group, given
what the media would make it, and he agreed with me that four minutes
was not enough for a serious discussion. But what he said was
interesting. The Clash are apparently very popular with working-class
youngsters who don't find anything in our popular culture that meets
their needs or reflects their feelings. He told me the group were not
really concerned with being commercial and refused a lot of television
because it put them into an artificial setting when they were really a
live group. They were popular in Sweden, France and Yugoslavia. He said
that to get any attention at all you had to be absolutely bizarre, but
to understand what The Clash were trying to say you had to work really
hard because the lyrics were in pidgin French."
Tony Benn, Conflict of Interest: Diaries 1977-80, p.268
Sunday 10 February 2013
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.
Thursday 31 January 2013
Ian Dury, Diana Dorrs & Arthur Scargill walk into a room ...
... Georgie Fame on keys. There's no time for the boring postcard competition at the end.
Sunday 27 January 2013
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.
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