Do you take sugar Bill?

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

"Hello, Bernie Rhodes? It's Tony Benn here..

"Wednesday 28 December

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

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.

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.

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.

Lights out for the territory?

Iain Sinclair was one of the inspirations for this blog, especially Lights Out.., Orbital and Rodinsky's Room. In the latest LRB he has a piece (inevitably) about the Olympics. It begins and ends with the fate of 'the Owl Man' of Hackney, David Mills. Mills lived in a ramshackled dwelling near London Fields and kept large numbers of birds of prey. The Owl Man has had forced out by the logic of re-development and is relocating to Wales.

Sinclair pieces either veer towards the mystical or the cynical. This one felt different: sorrowful, a panegyric. He concludes:

"When I think of the winners who have emerged from this unreal fortnight of mass hallucination, I don’t focus on the justifiably proud cyclists, the strong women in boats, or those youthful triathlon medallists, the Brownlee brothers, who look like scrubbed kids in pyjamas, allowed to stay up late with Christmas baubles around their necks. I think of two men: Boris Johnson clowning so effectively towards office, like an idiot emperor from Robert Graves – and David Mills, spirit of place, who knew just when to step away."

I read that as calling time, not just on Hackney, but on Sinclair's own life's project to document the outer limits of the capital. It must be tinged with the realisation that the semi-bohemian life he has lived is also out of time. Just as he warned Rachel Lichtenstein that Rodinsky's Room was a trap, so East London has been one for him. Can he, like the Owl Man, step away?