When is a room not a room?
When it’s the Colony Room, of course! Sophie Parkin celebrates the sixtieth birthday of the infamous members’ club
If you do not know the Colony Room and you are lucky enough to be taken there, you might not be able to see it properly on your first visit. Just like Alice through that old looking glass, your -perception might be skewed into seeing it as a jumbled green, tatty, pissy, carpeted room; ‘The Room at the Top’ of some dangerous stairs (albeit famous stairs that people have fallen down and then, in less clean times than these, bounced off the rubbish bags below). No wonder so many members cannot find the door during the daylight hours.
Still, they find it even harder to find the exit once they get in.
The Colony, of course, is not only a room, but is a bar, a club, an institution full of the uninstitutionisable, and a bed to laughter, history and art. It is the only place that, as a woman, I am willing to go for a drink by myself, for I know if I were to be set upon by strange men, they would be the wittiest and kindest of depraved strange men in the most original of outfits, from Sebastian Horsley to The Rubbishmen. And if like in a regular bar they were after my tail, at least they’d go about it in the cleverest of ways. For that alone, the building deserves at least a blue plaque for being the most original place for a woman to be chatted up in, (though there are other reasons it should have one).
‘You look like you should be painted on an American bomber plane,’ a man said to the girl I was sitting with the other night at the bar. Of course, she spoke to him, but I don’t think she gave him her number – his missing teeth put her off.
Plaques should be awarded not just for the people that have lived in a building, but for the schemes and creations dreamt up, imaginings discussed and invented within its walls. The Colony already has one of Gavin Turk’s blue plaques inside stating that he worked there sometime in the 1990s; although some might not call standing at a bar “work”, not if the film historian Paul Ryan is singing along to Kenny Clayton’s piano Nice Work If You Can Get It on a Friday night.
Don’t imagine, however, that the Colony is a place to relax unless you’re up to it – and are you? Does your wit, wisdom and charisma go on automatique when you are surrounded by the Colony’s collected membership? Remember, Muriel Belcher, the founding hostess, was painted by everyone from Francis Bacon to Michael Andrews. Many tried to capture her essence on the page, from Colin McInnes to Dan Farson, and she features in too many bohemian memoirs to be overlooked. Not many did her justice. Her majesty, I suspect, never left the building, a legacy for the club’s walls, doors, and ceilings. Be afraid, baby; be very afraid. Her essence is everywhere.
Not everyone is Freddie Krueger scary, more Whatever Happened to Baby Jane – a kind of comedy horror. Lost souls, however famous or infamous, gather here to find new ones, new ones to find old ones, fat to find thin, gloom to find cheer. And somehow this tiny grass-green allotment in a city’s barren landscape contains it all, shakes it up and pours it out over the glass houses of Dean Street, to infect the rest of Soho.
Nobody who has an artist’s soul and has visited this august establishment on a normal afternoon, rain or shine, remains unaffected. It’s not quite the same as an STD, but its effects spread as rapidly. You can’t forget it and it’s more similar to Sohoitis (see Julian MacLaren-Ross and Dylan Thomas, both early Colony members).
Once you arrive you don’t want to leave in case you miss something extraordinary, and you well might. It is also the home you never had, the safe house in a storm, the merry-go-round on a grey day, the disappearing act when you couldn’t face the world; as well as the party you always wished you’d been invited to whatever age you are.
Now I have explained what the Colony represents for so many of its members and visitors in an abstracted conundrum, maybe there’s room for the practical and a little history? You’ll be wanting names, of course, dates (who doesn’t want a date? Free Friday?), the occasional anecdote that you can tell your friends as if you were there with Francis Bacon, Michael Andrews and Craig Aitchison in Muriel’s day before she died in 1979; or that time with John Maybury, Lisa Stansfield and Terry Frost in Ian Board’s day before he died in 1984; or more recently in the early days of the art brat pack with Damien getting his knob out all the time with the late-lamented Angus Fairhurst, Sarah Lucas, Keith Allen et al; or even more recently Sienna Miller, Kate Moss and Jude Law being there at The Kills (or was it The Killers?) gig. And we have all laughed and sang, danced about and fallen over as we watched Lisa sing, Paul Weller strum, Suggs croon, Howard Marks puff, Jools Holland boogie-woogie ... And however melted you got, and frightened by meeting reality in your hallway in the morning, there has never been a Colony Room hangover I’ve regretted, even if I can’t quite remember all the names and phone numbers in my notebook … it is the places one goes to after it closes, that I usually regret. George Melly had a crisis of conscience in later life about going there quite so often. By the 1980s, he’d been going there for thirty years, and the eighties was all about getting on. He wrote:
These days less often in Soho, less prepared to accept a daily hangover as a price I’m prepared to pay. I climb the stairs only occasionally but never with reluctance. Behind that reinforced door lies much of my ill-spent youth. If I’d spent it well I wouldn’t dream of revisiting it.
In later years his jazz-blurred visits became more infrequent because of his, rather than the club’s, disabilities: George’s hearing disintegrated and then his legs followed. But he represented much of what was usual with the club in the fifties – loud-suited with a louder intelligence laced with exuberance and wit.
Another regular from the early days was Dan Farson, hugely famous then for his TV -appearances, books and articles. His female counterpart must have been Muriel, though everyone said she was funnier, kinder, more original, wittier and was more outrageous, (and certainly more of a lesbian than Dan); though many found Dan in the old days outrageous enough. And, of course, there was Francis Bacon drinking champagne, the notoriously nasty photographer John Deakin and Lucian Freud, remembered by one fellow artist as always skulking in the corner with a little ingénue, plus pansies galore at a time when fucking boys was still illegal, if you were man enough.
There were a lot of these clubs around Soho in those days, each catering for a different branch of diverse society, but none has survived like the Colony Room. By 1979 Muriel was dead but the club survived. In 1988, Ian Board was well-ensconced on Muriel’s stool, on the left-hand side of the door in the bar’s corner, and having inherited the bar as Muriel’s barman for thirty years he then had his own barman-cum-Sancho Panza in Michael Wojas. Together they were gearing up for the Ruby anniversary, forty years of the club. They were going to paint the magical green box red, and have Thea Porter (famously the dress designer -character played by Susanna Yorke in the film version of Zee & Co, by Edna O’Brien, also starring Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Caine), make red outfits for them, and Board added at the time, ‘There will be lots of pink champagne and every [rich] punter who comes in will be paying.’ Already the party was anticipated for a whole year of fun but the room never got painted – it remained another glorious idea.
Twenty years later, here is the sixtieth anniversary, Michael Wojas at the stool, so to speak, Dick Bradsel behind the bar, with no plans to turn the place a different colour. By Christmas the lease will have come to an end, and sixty years gone like a flash in the pan means that whatever happens to the Colony, it will no longer exist with its piss-stained carpeting at 41 Dean Street. Property in Soho it seems is too valuable to have artists wasting their time in it. The best and the worst times will be charmingly remodelled into a des res. I wonder if the new occupants will have trouble with ghosts? You can strip the floors, walls and ceilings, but the air in between hangs heavy with memories from the gloriously best, to the worst of turgid times.
If the most famous room is to disappear from Soho, at least give it cultural status. For what could be a worthier garnish to such an institution than a blue disc to tell the public where this historical site actually is – more to the point it might help the members find their way there between now and Christmas.
And if blue plaques are only awarded for services to the community, what greater service has this small room done, as a pastoral ‘care in the community’ for all those too badly behaved to ever fit in a normal pub, let alone an institution, other than the institution that remains forever the Colony? Whether it survives the reshaping of Soho or not, it was one hell of a blast whilst it lasted, and I’m not the only one who’ll forever love the Colony Room.
llustration by Michael Constantine www.mconstantine.co.uk
