|
|
 |
| |
Yester-year. A poster from the Marquee club |
Take a stroll down
melody lane
Don Ryan turns south from the Camden Crawl and revisits Soho’s musical haunts
IT'S Friday evening and the Camden Crawl is in full swing.
I find myself drifting south, for a stroll round Soho. For almost 20 years it’s nurtured wave after wave of musical innovation.
Soho had been the home of literary and artistic Bohemians since the turn of the 20th century.
With the Second World War over, a new generation moved in and music replaced literature as the preferred art. To many they were bums – they preferred to call themselves Beatniks. They were rebels all right – radical politics, coffee instead of tea, the national drink, and jazz, the music of black America – were their pleasures.
Musicians Ronnie Scott and Johnny Dankworth ran Club 11, a jazz café that opened in 1948 in Windmill Street. George Melly organised the first all-nighter in 1951.
A few years later, Alexis Korner and Lonnie Donegan, drawing on American blues and folk music, created and developed skiffle in Soho’s numerous clubs. Donegan commercialised the new music and went on to become the UK’s top home-grown recording star of the 1950s.
Skiffle became a national phenomenon and Soho began to embrace a new genre of American music. Tommy Steele, Adam Faith and Cliff Richard, backed by the Shadows, performed at the 2i’s club in Old Compton Street. Guided by Soho wide boys such as Larry Parnes, they quickly achieved national fame by aping white American rock ’n’ rollers such as Elvis Presley.
Another, commercially less successful and often older group of blues purists stayed in Soho. Partly influenced by the amplified folk music, pioneered by black American musician Muddy Waters, they created one strand of a national process – another was in Liverpool – that would transcend and even undermine England’s ancient class system. They also developed a genuinely ethnic English form of rock music that would within a couple years sweep across the developed world.
It was Alexis Korner, alongside harmonica player Cyril Davis, who, fanning out apostle-like, helped spread the new embryonic English rock music beyond Soho, inspiring Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and many others. In 1962 they returned to W1, guesting at the Marquee Club, then in Oxford Street but from 1964 to 1988 sited in Wardour Street.
The Marquee was to play a pivotal role in the development of the new English rock. The Yardbirds, Manfred Mann, The Spencer Davis Band and The Who – all playing the interval sessions before working their way up to the top of the bill, then on to national and international stardom. In the process they helped redefine popular music and laid the foundations that still dominate the music pubs and clubs of neighbouring Camden.
Yet again as one innovation moved up and onwards a new genre emerged out of Bohemian Soho – 1966 saw the birth of The London Underground. Nothing to do with transport but a movement of libertarians, with an overtly political agenda that sought to use the arts as a revolutionary tool.
The Marquee again played a leading role, hosting a series of events. Conjuring artists performed alongside African drummers, offbeat, avant-garde performers and dreamy, drug-inspired light shows. But the stars were Pink Floyd, a loud, weird, highly original band. The press called them Hippies, or even freaks and their music was labelled psychedelic.
As with the Beatniks in the 1950s, the Hippies were inspired by events in America. But they were a far bigger phenomenon and in April 1967, 10,000 people attended the all-night Technicolor Dream multimedia happening at Alexander Palace.
Sex had always being one part of the heady pleasure-seeking mix that was Soho’s raison d’etre, now it began to dominate. The gangsters who controlled the vice trade – helped by crooked cops – were taking over. The area began to suffer from blight, with sex shops, prostitutes and strip clubs spread throughout most of the district.
There wasn’t space to accommodate the mushrooming new movement and the centre of the Underground drifted to Camden and Notting Hill.
Although Soho played a part in the rise of punk, its reign as a leading centre of pioneering popular music was all but over. |
|
|
|
|
|
