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.