Category Archives: London

Review: “Bob Dylan In London (Troubadour Tales)” by Jackie Lees and K G Miles | Kenny Wilson

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I am aware that every book I have read about Bob Dylan seems to raise more questions than answers. That includes this charming and well presented publication that takes us on a tour of Dylan’s time spent in London over the years. It’s full of amusing and interesting anecdotes and a remarkable level of detail for what amounted to a relatively short time in the city. In fact, it proves the point that London, and the people he met there, had a profound and important influence on Dylan as a songwriter. It’s set me on the quest to find out more about many of the things mentioned. Fortunately, it includes a map and a comprehensive locations list, so that’s a good start!

The book begins in New York 1962 when a young Dylan was spotted by Philip Saville, a producer from the BBC, and offered a part in a TV play Madhouse on Castle Street. Dylan was to play “an anarchic young student who wrote songs”. It should have been a breeze as it was a role he had been playing, more or less, since he first arrived in New York City in 1961 (along with “travelling hobo and itinerant singer”), but Dylan found the acting and reciting his lines really difficult. He ended up being given one line and singing four songs, including Blowin’ in the Wind which hadn’t been released on record yet. Not a bad gig since he received £500 (about £12000 in todays’ prices) plus expenses for it (and got a free trip to England!).

More importantly, Dylan became familiar with the London folk scene especially folk singer/guitarist Martin Carthy who drew his attention to some remarkable English folk songs including Lord Franklin and Scarborough Fair which he used in his own songs Bob Dylan’s Dream and Girl from the North Country. During his short time there he also met legendary author Robert Graves who he had a walk around “Paddington Square” with and tried to talk about The White Goddess, but couldn’t remember much about it!

He also did a few performances around London folk clubs and venues and even met up with some American friends and did some recordings at Dobell’s Record Shop in Charing Cross Road. He wasn’t particularly well known then and wasn’t very well received by some English folk club audiences especially the friends and associates of brilliant, but narrow-minded, Ewan McColl and the Singers Club. He did better at the coffee bar venues like Bungies, Les Cousins and The Troubadour where he tried out some of his new songs that would appear on his ground breaking second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in June 1963. This album actually refers to Martin Carthy on the sleeve notes. He also jokes about his time in London in the 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan. In the song I Shall Be Free No.10 he says about the guitar riff he is using “it’s nothing. It’s something I learned over in England”.

Ethan Signer, Martin Carthy, Richard Farina, Bob Dylan and Eric von Schmidt at the Troubadour in Earls Court

The following year Dylan was back in London with his own concert at the Royal Festival Hall. This time he was much better known, with two acclaimed albums behind him. Freewheelin’ had gone to No.1 in the album charts. Dylan was astonishingly prolific and influential. Many people were covering his songs and the concert was a triumph. It contains one of his best performances of all time and shows how he had matured as a writer. Astonishing that the entire concert wasn’t available on CD until 2015 and then only in a limited edition!

The legendary concert at the Royal Festival Hall in 1964

When he returned to England again in 1965 he was a big star. This time the London concert was at the Royal Albert Hall. The tour was filmed by D.A. Pennebaker in cinema verité style and has become one of the most acclaimed music documentaries of all time Don’t Look Back. It also contains what some consider to be the first “pop” video Subterranean Homesick Blues, filmed on the steps near the Savoy Hotel. This video features beat poet Allen Ginsberg who a week before had been part of an important and revolutionary poetry reading at the Albert Hall. After this concert the managers banned poetry readings at the hall for the next ten years! Interestingly, this concert was filmed by Peter Whitehead (Wholly Communion) who it is also claimed made the first pop video. Some commentators assert that these two events were so influential that they actually kickstarted the English Counterculture (Underground) that became so influential in the late 60s. American writer and critic Greil Marcus goes even further and suggests that the release of the single Like a Rolling Stone actually created the global youth counterculture! Certainly, by 1966, when Dylan toured again, he was considered by many to be the “voice of his generation”, a label he came to resent (as he also did the label “protest singer”).

A superbly laconic Bob Dylan in his video of Subterranean Homesick Blues. Looks like a great way to get some really nasty paper cuts! I think I would have worn gloves!

Dylan didn’t return to London until 1978 twelve years later when he did the hugely successful Street Legal tour and performed several concerts at the Earls Court Exhibition Centre.

I really enjoyed Jackie Lees and K G Miles book. There is a wealth of information in there and it is a great starting point for discovering Dylan and the times he lived in. I will certainly be visiting some of the places, especially Flukes Cradle, a café on Camden High Street. This was where the cover of World Gone Wrong was taken with Dylan wearing an elegant top hat. The painting behind him has got a wonderful story of it’s own! Get the book!

Cover of “World Gone Wrong“

Rethinking Schiele

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Interesting article. I recently went to the Schiele/Klimt exhibition at the Royal Academy in London.

Cody Delistraty's avatar

The passage of time tends to either confirm the supposed transgressions of historical figures, or absolve them thereof. But Egon Schiele, whose centenary is being celebrated at museums across the world, presents a particular lens throughwhich to think about the line between art and exploitation.

Egon Schiele first began hosting teenage girls at his studio in Neulengbach, Austria, around 1910. About thirty miles from Vienna, he had a small painting studio with a garden out back. Boys and girls, often from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds, would come spend time there with him and his model-slash-lover Walburga Neuzil, whom he called Wally. Schiele was only twenty at the time. Wally was seventeen. The age of consent in Austria was fourteen (as it is today), and their relationship wasn’t much of a scandal. What was a scandal was Schiele’s painting the children and teenagers who came by his studio and, as would be…

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The junky genius of Alexander Trocchi | Tony O’Neill | The Guardian

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The plotless beauty of his writing, and its fearless look at the emptiness of his own life, put ‘the Scottish Beat’ on a par with Kafka and Camus.

My scow is tied up in Flushing, NY, alongside the landing stage of the Mac Asphalt and Construction Corporation. It is now just after five in the afternoon. Today at this time it is still afternoon, and the sun, striking the cinderblocks of the main building of the works has turned them pink. The motor cranes and the decks of the other scows tied up round about are deserted.

Half an hour ago I gave myself a fix.

So begins Cain’s Book, Alexander Trocchi‘s incredible novel of existential dread. Young Adam, its predecessor, is better known, but the latter is the “Scottish Beat’s” classic.

Asked to name the best existential literature, most of us would probably say Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre or Franz Kafka. But Cain’s Book actually takes the reader one step further into the philosophical world of existential angst than any of them. It positively drowns us in a word of unremitting absurdity and meaninglessness.

A roman à clef, Cain’s Book details the life of one Joe Nechhi, a Glaswegian heroin addict living and working on a scow in New York’s Hudson harbor. It is a book almost entirely devoid of plot: Nechhi occasionally details trips into the city to score heroin, recollects his childhood in Glasgow, or talks of his attempts to write a book. What is incredible about the book is its unrelenting bleakness, and the sheer poetic quality of Trocchi’s writing.

Heroin for Trocchi, as Remainder author Tom McCarthy noted in a lecture on Cain’s Book recently, “is a moveable void: taking that void around the city with him, in him, he ensures that he inhabits negative space constantly. This is his poetic project and it’s also the way his whole perception system works at its most basic level (the two are the same).”

In real life, Trocchi seemed very glad to cut himself off from his peers, saying that his only concerns as a writer were “sodomy and lesbianism”, that those were the only interesting subjects in the previous 20 years of Scottish writing and that “I have written it all.”

Sadly, Cain’s Book was his last. As the 60s gave way to the 70s, Trocchi’s addiction to heroin took its toll and his talent lay pretty much squandered. The stories of his wild and tragic life are infamous and extensively documented in many of the leading “swinging 60s” biographies (Marianne Faithfull’s account of doing drugs with Trocchi is one of the best). Despite his addictions, and his sad death at the age of 59, Trocchi left us some of the bleakest, most beautiful writing to come out of the 60s.

In Cain’s Book the writing is all – the words ebb and flow like the inky blackness of the Hudson River. Trocchi’s descriptive powers are mesmerising: one barely even notices the lack of narrative drive until after the book has been put down.

His other books includes some interesting pseudonymous pornography for the Olympia Press. (Titles like Helen and Desire, Sappho of Lesbos and White Thighs deliver their smut with a Sadean political edge.) Young Adam, of course, was turned into a successful film starring Ewan McGregor, and helped to raise the author’s public perception a little. But it’s Cain’s book that best fulfils Trocchi’s hopes for “the invisible insurrection of a thousand minds”.

Alexander Trocchi

International Times

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1960s: Days of Rage's avatar1960s: Days of Rage


“International Times (it or IT) is the name of various underground newspapers, with the original title founded in London in 1966. Editors included Hoppy, David Mairowitz, Roger Hutchinson, Peter Stansill, Barry Miles, Jim Haynes and playwright Tom McGrath. Jack Moore, avant-garde writer William Levy and Mick Farren, singer of The Deviants, also edited at various periods. … The paper’s logo is a black-and-white image of Theda Bara, vampish star of silent films. The founders’ intention had been to use an image of actress Clara Bow, 1920s It girl, but a picture of Theda Bara was used by accident and, once deployed, not changed. Paul McCartney donated to the paper as did Allen Ginsberg through his Committee on Poetry foundation. International Times was launched on 15 October 1966 at The Roundhouse at an ‘All Night Rave’…

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1960s: Fragments of London in colour — Bob Hyde

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Bob Hyde (1927-73) studied and then taught at St. Martin’s; from the mid-sixties until his death he was a senior lecturer at Wimbledon School of Art and lecturer at the Royal College of Art, where he helped establish the Environmental Media Degree with Sir Hugh Casson. In 1966, Bob devised and directed a ballet for ITV involving two dancers and projected images and in 1969 he designed Play Orbit, an exhibition organised jointly by the ICA and the Welsh Arts Council for the Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales. This exhibition invited one hundred British artists to create a toy or game.

Through his photography, Bob captured London and Britain in fragmentary form, creating work justifiably comparable in quality to that of Saul Leiter.

Source: 1960s: Fragments of London in colour — Retronaut

Heaven and Hell Coffee Lounge in Soho, W1 |Eric Lindsay

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This is a brilliant blog post about the Heaven and Hell Coffee Bar in Soho written by it’s founder Eric Lindsay (link at end). Sadly not with us anymore. Check it out!!

Ray Jackson and I opened Heaven and Hell in late 1955. I had the idea from when I had been working in Paris, where there was a type of cheap cabaret called  “Ciel at l’Enfer” “Heaven and Hell” in Pigalle. The name and the place intrigued me, so later when I was in Paris again with Ray, I took him along to see the place and he also thought it was tacky but great.

The name stayed in my memory for a later date.

Here are some old photographs that I have just come across to show you how much the original impressed me. “Ciel et l’Enfer” was an intriguing name.

heaven-and-hell-old-postcard

heaven-and-hell-old-postcard-2

We had already sold the Regency Coffee Bar in East Sheen, which we opened with £200, £100 each, sometime in 1953. The Regency look was in, so we bought chairs from an antique shop in Putney for 5/- each and the owner of the shop taught me how to give them the antique look. We bought cheap floor covering, Ray’s uncle hung the wallpaper and my mother made the tablecloths and curtains. I used the same red Regency striped material to upholster the chairs, it was all a bit make do and mend, but the final result looked great. The major expense was the Gaggia Coffee Machine, which we paid off for. So espresso coffee came to East Sheen!

We thought we would do business, well forget it! I thought we would be stuck there for the rest of our lives. East Sheen was half way on the bus route between Hammersmith and Richmond, and really one should never get off the bus. I was convinced it was a place that people just stopped off to die. There was literally no business. Although everybody who lived there had the airs and graces of society toffs, they had no cash flow to buy a cup of coffee. In fact they hadn’t got a pot to piss in! But they lived in East Sheen so they had a little status. (They thought!)

Fortunately both Ray and I continued working in Theatre and TV, and Ray in films because we needed something extra to survive.

We were ‘so busy’ at the Regency that one person could run the whole place – serve coffee, do the cooking, the lot. So Ray and I worked alternate days. When I was on duty I would take an order and call out to the kitchen and then rush round talking to myself (the invisible chef). At least it was a good way to pass the time and it gave the customers the idea that we had staff.  I thought I was going to be stuck there forever.  We earned £10 a week each. My bus fares cost me £5, so you can see I was really in pocket! Finally we managed to sell the place to a guy who had retired from Claridges Hotel with a pension who wanted something easy to do in his retirement years. Well I could have told him that he wouldn’t be rushed off his feet here, but I didn’t and we sold the Regency for the princely sum of £1000, which was a profit, and we both breathed a sigh of relief!

We then started searching around for empty premises in Soho because I certainly wasn’t going out of town again. It had to be a shop and basement so that Heaven could be on the ground floor and Hell downstairs. We finally came across a little shop with a basement at 57 Old Compton Street. The ground floor had a small jewelry shop sharing the premises called of all things “Going Gay”.  Do you think it was an omen? The gentleman who owned the freehold was called Harry Shanson, and he owned all the freeholds of 55, 57 and 59 Old Compton Street W.1.

Shaws the estate agents who were handling  the property arranged for Ray and myself to see Mr. Shanson in his office in the City. Well, somehow it must have been our lucky day, because we talked to him and told him we were actors and what we wanted to do with the premises and the name we were going to call the coffee bar and the whole theme. He was interested in everything we had to say. Finally the question of rent came up and Ray and I nearly fell of the chairs when he told us what he wanted. It was far too much for us to afford. We got up to leave and explained that we just couldn’t afford to pay that sort of rent. He asked us how much we could afford. I told him half of what he was asking, to which he replied, “O.K.” With that, we both nearly passed out. Ray and I left his office floating on air.

We started work at 57 Old Compton Street. From the St. Martins School of Art we found a designer to make the plaster casts for the lights in Heaven and also Hell. Beforehand, Ray and I decided that Heaven should have an ethereal theme with sun flowers for lights with cherub faces. The staircase leading to Hell was a giant Devil’s mouth, which you walked down into. Hell was totally black with red flames climbing up the walls.

Out of the walls for lights we had these arms holding lighted Devil masks. The emergency exit, which we had to have, was a ladder in the middle of the room closed on 3 sides with a red curtain on which was a full length painting of the Devil with horns, tail and pitch fork. It was all very atmospheric and the customers adored it. On the street wall we had a light box with a colour transparency of Heaven and below it Hell. From the moment we opened, the place was full, at lunchtimes and evenings. I used to have to stand on the door letting customers in as a seat became vacant whilst they were queuing out in the street. Not many people wanted to stay in Heaven, they all wanted to go to Hell. No pun intended. As you may gather, business was fabulous, especially when the Soho Fair was on.

heaven-and-hell-soho-fair

heaven-and-hell-coffee-lounge-1-print

Over the years Harry Shanson and his wife became firm friends. He was one of the kindest people in the world. One day when we had been running quite a few years, Harry’s son, who was a bit of a monster when he was young, came in and said to me, “My daddy owns this place! It’s ours.” So I politely said to him “Fuck off!”

There was never a dull moment in Old Compton Street. The 2 I’s was next door. The customers would go from coffee bar to coffee bar. The 2 I’s used to have their windows smashed in regularly. We fortunately were left alone. Everyone seemed to making money and at 9 pence a coffee it was some hard going.

Two prostitutes in 1950s Soho

Prostitutes were on every street corner. The flat above Heaven and Hell was occupied by Suzy, an elegant French lady of the night who really would have been more at home in Mayfair, but I suppose she wanted a quick turn over! She wore the stair carpet out all the time. Next door at No. 57, Jackie, another French beauty, much younger than Suzy, could turn 100 customers a day. My mother, who used to come up to town regularly, used to sit in the window in Heaven and keep score. She was so intrigued by it all.

Well, the time came when Ray and I decided that we would like to get a flat together, so I spoke to Harry Shanson. The lovely  Suzy got her marching orders and Ray and I moved into Flat 1, 57 Old Compton Street at a rent that he asked us what we would like to pay, so that also was very reasonable. It was a known fact that he could always get at least double from the tarts. I did think she might send the ‘heavies’ in after being thrown out and when she found out that we had taken the flat, but no, she was always pleased to see me and talk when I saw her on her new beat at the corner of Greek St. and Old Compton St. Working ‘flats’ were not that difficult for the ‘girls’ to come by.

Suzy had kept the place spotless, after all she had he own French maid who was on duty full time during the working hours. The bedroom looked as though it had seen plenty of action. But after we had redecorated the whole place even Suzy wouldn’t have recognized it as her own little bordello.

We never had live music in Heaven and Hell, just two jukeboxes one in Heaven and one in Hell, with the same records in each. It was easier than all the hassle with live music because the customers never left. With us, they stayed about an hour and left, rather than sitting there all night. Also it was much more profitable as we would get loads of double plays from the 2 machines.

So the money rolled in and we were ready to roll out onto our next venture which was:

“THE CASINO de PARIS STRIPTEASE THEATRE CLUB”

P.S. If any of you ‘older readers’  happen to come across a picture of yourselves taken inside “Heaven and Hell,” I would be very happy to include it into my blog.

Source: Heaven and Hell Coffee Lounge in Soho, W.I. | ericlindsay 

The Cy Laurie Club and The Harmony Inn, Soho (1950s Greasy Spoon)

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This is an account of the Harmony which was an all night cafe in Soho. It is famous for being the meeting place of the earliest modern jazz musicians in England as well as some of the most dubious “wide-boys” and gangsters of London!

Cy Laurie

The late 50s was the height of the English traditional jazz boom and Soho was a Mecca for trad’ fans who headed for the clubs of Ken Colyer and Humphrey Lyttleton. But by far the most successful venue was the Cy Laurie Club.

Unlike some of his fellow New Orleans jazz revivalists, Cy never made the charts but his club was by far the most popular. Situated in scruffy Ham Yard, at the junction of Great Windmill and Archer Street, it was entered by going through a set of doors it shared with a strip-club and a boxing gym. (Ham Yard was used by the street traders of Rupert Street to store their barrows.)

A dingy staircase descended into a vast basement that was used as a dance rehearsal room during the day. There was little in the way of décor, just hardwood floors and a few dilapidated sofas, alongside minimal lighting and a PA system that worked only intermittently.

Refreshments – limited to soft drinks and crisps – were dispensed from a crude bar next to some equally crude toilets.

Despite the dismal surroundings Cy’s band drew an enormous following from, initially, art school students with a distinctly bohemian bent.

Drainpipe trousers and Jesus-sandals were de rigeur for guys, along with Bardot hairstyles for females and compulsory duffel coats for both sexes.

The club’s fame soon spread and at the weekends hundreds of fans from the suburbs packed into the smoke-filled basement, all jiving wildly as Cy waved his clarinet in front of his six piece stomping group.

The craziest scenes were at the occasional all-niters that drew much unfavourable reporting from the popular press. (Although drugs were used by jazz musicians they were very rarely seen amongst their audiences.)

When the sessions finished at eleven most of the kids ran for the late night buses and tubes back to the suburbs, but the few who hung about often ended up in the small hours in the only place around that stayed open through the night – a big greasy spoon caff in the middle of Archer Street audaciously named The Harmony Inn.

Archer Street ran behind Great Windmill Street and was home to the Musician’s Union offices. On Monday mornings in the 50s and 60s all manner of musicians would gather there to find engagements for dance bands, jazz groups and even classical orchestras. (Recently, BBC4’s Jazz Britannia series aired a documentary about it called The Street.)

Everything about The Harmony was unsavoury. Grubby Formica tables and chairs were ranged around a dismal counter in a totally bland room; the only colour was the red and white shirts on the table football teams. The most exotic fare was a cheese sandwich, tea and foul Camp coffee.

The clientele were even more dubious. The late-night trad’ fans who drifted in had little in common with the Harmony Inn’s regulars. The customers that it attracted after midnight were drawn from the spivs, petty and major criminals that gave Soho a bad name: Billy Hill, Tony Muller, Ronnie Chambers, Mick the Hammer, and the Capone figure of Jack Spot.

The caff was presided over by Dixie France who was allegedly a police informer who gave evidence at the Hanratty murder trial (and mysteriously committed suicide shortly after Hanratty was hanged in 1962.)

Those in the know said that there was an arsenal of weapons under the counter ready for any emergencies, mostly the punch-ups that arose over the football machine that occupied one corner of the room.

There was also a downstairs room used as a private club. Details of what occurred there are sketchy but are said to involve a pair of West Indian girls whose dancing skills were much ‘admired’.

Alongside the heavies and trad-merchants, The Harmony was also the hang-out for a group of modern jazz musicians that had formed around tenor-sax man Ronnie Scott. (Jazz Modernists would have no truck with trad’ which they considered an anachronism. Their heroes were the New York bop musicians like Charley Parker, Dizzy Gillespe and Thelonius Monk.)

The audience for modern jazz was relatively small and there was no central venue for it in the West End, but the Harmony Inn played a crucial role in its development.

Ronnie Scott’s Club house-magazine editor Jim Godbolt recalls: “We (including Ronnie Scott, Peter King, Benny Green, Derek Humble, Tony Crombie and Jimmy Deuchar) were all sitting in the Harmony Inn in Archer Street, near Piccadilly, one day in January 1953 when we conceived the idea of forming a nine piece co-operative band and it turned out to be one of the better ideas we had that year.”

The Harmony cafe crew would go on to set the foundations for modern jazz in England.

© Steve Fletcher

The Cy Laurie Club

Great Windmill Street, London W1.

One of the earliest jazz clubs in the UK was run by the clarinetist Cy Laurie. Born in London in 1926, Cy was an admirer of New Orleans clarinet player Johnny Dodds and would claim to be the reincarnation of Dodds, even though Dodds was alive while Cy was a teenager.

Here’s Cy Laurie’s band playing Sol Blues in 1955 with Alan Elsdon (trumpet), Graham Stewart (trombone), Cy Laurie (clarinet), Pat Hawes (piano), Brian Munday (banjo), Stan Leader (bass), and Peter Mawford (drums) :

Cy had previously run a small weekly club at the Seven Stars in Bow, but in the early 1950s he started up the club for which he would become so well known. Cy Laurie’s Jazz Club became a focal point for live traditional jazz for most of the decade and was renowned particularly for its all-night raves.

41 Great Windmill Street 2011

The club was in the basement of 41 Great Windmill Street opposite the Windmill Theatre in London’s West End. During the day, the space was used as Mac’s Rehearsal Rooms. Many jazz musicians used the rehearsal rooms at that time – if you were living in a flat or a bed-sit, you needed somewhere to practise or rehearse to avoid disturbing the neighbours. There was a nightclub on the ground floor and a boxing gymnasium on the first floor. An obituary for Cy Laurie in the Daily Telegraph newspaper (click here) describes the setting as: ‘Dark and intimate, with a dance floor surrounded by dilapidated sofas, these premises held an irresistible bohemian appeal for the young people from the suburbs who flocked to the club’s “all-nite raves”’.

Above: 41 – 44 Great Windmill Street in 2011 opposite The Windmill. Ham Yard is a little further up on the left, and Archer Street opposite Ham Yard on the right.

There is an excellent description of the club on the website Classic Cafés (click here). The page is primarily about the Harmony Cafe in Archer Street but says of Cy’s Club: ‘Situated in scruffy Ham Yard, at the junction of Great Windmill and Archer Street, it was entered by going through a set of doors it shared with a strip-club and a boxing gym. (Ham Yard was used by the street traders of Rupert Street to store their barrows.) A dingy staircase descended into a vast basement that was used as a dance rehearsal room during the day. There was little in the way of décor, just hardwood floors and a few dilapidated sofas, alongside minimal lighting and a PA system that worked only intermittently. Later on it became the most iconic club of the Mods in the early 60s The Scene, which became the model for many other clubs throughout the U.K. e.g. the Nite Owl club in Leicester.

Cy Laurie Club programme

Steve Fletcher has sent us this programme for the Cy Laurie Jazz Club in 1956. You can see from the programme that in 1956 jazz was on the menu every day of the week from 7.15 pm to 10.45 pm and if you were a member you could get in for 3/- (was that 30p?). Steve says: ‘I have lots of memories of the Cy Laurie club. I spent so many evenings there that eventually the manager gave me a job on the door. It was simply the best ‘trad’ club in London from 1953 – 58. Why? Not because it had the best music – we teenagers at the time could not really make reasoned judgements about whether Cy’s band was that much better than Ken Colyer’s or Humph’s. In all of the clubs you just went in to jive – and to try to pull a chick – and Cy’s had the best chicks, mainly from St Martin’s Art School. Cy’s, certainly at weekends, was packed to capacity, and personally I never left without a different bird on my arm. Humph’s was for tourists and Colyer’s for purists but Cy’s was for jiving and raving.’

‘The place itself was a dump, a grubby basement rehearsal room with no decent furniture, clapped-out P.A., filthy toilets and a lousy little tea bar – but the arty bohemian mob loved it like they loved the French coffee bar in Old Compton Street. Ironically Cy, himself was a very straight guy – aesthetic vegetarian, non smoker or drinker, and a total disciple of Johnny Dodds who would not compromise to cash in on the ‘trad’ boom. I was never really a ‘trad’ fan – at home I was listening to Mulligan and Kenton – but I would never miss a Friday, Saturday or Sunday night at Cy’s – for half-a-crown’s worth of unbridled noise, smoke, sweat-laden jiving and – what all young men are looking for…’

This photograph of an all-night session at the Cy Laurie Club in March 1956 is by Magnum photographer, David Hurn. It was used widely to advertise an exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2008 – Soho Archives 1950s and 1960s. You are

Cy Laurie Club photograph

able to see this and other images of Soho by clicking here.

There are two recollections of the Club on the History Is Made At Night web blog that help in describing Cy’s Club and the scene at that time (click here). The blog quotes the source of the recollections as being http://www.jazzhouse.org/com, but that website no longer seems to have the information.

‘The Windmill Street club was the Saturday Night magnet in my late teens; it was the music and the atmosphere, but also the place to find out the address of that week’s rave; there were five of us, and between us we could muster three cars – unusual in those days – which ensured that we always gathered passengers who knew the ropes. On one then celebrated occasion, four of us went to Manchester, at the drop of a hat in an Austin A35, by the time we got there it was all over, so we returned to London with an extra passenger, who had been given a trumpet which he taught himself to play on the journey’ (so years before the late 1980s London orbital parties, the convoy of rave pilgrims was established).’

Ham Yard

Great Windmill Street with Ham Yard to the right in 2010

‘All nighters at Cy’s were a buzz. I was one of the – all dressed in black and often barefoot – dancers who was first AND last on the floor…. Cy’s place was a culture thing, and included the early morning rush to Waterloo station to get the Milk Train to Hastings, for “FUN” in the Hastings caves’. Others would stumble into the Harmony Inn cafe in Archer Street. By the end of the 1950s, Laurie had moved on to India to study with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, beating the Beatles to it, while revivalist jazz had been superseded by the trad jazz boom and a new crowd of ravers.’

Archer Street was just round the corner from Great Windmill Street and it was there that musicians would meet in the street outside the Musicians Union office making contacts for gigs.

In 1958 a film was made to advertise the Ford Thames Van range. Called Band Wagon, it is a valuable piece of film in that features some rare footage of the Cy Laurie Jazz Band. Here is the video.

Steve Fletcher has identified some of the musicians: Cy Laurie -clarinet, Colin Smith – trumpet, Terry Pitts – trombone, Stan Leader – bass … but who are the drummer and banjo player? (Chris Mitchell tells us that the drummer is Ernie O’Malley and the banjo player is Tim Streeton).

Cy Laurie Mug

By the way – did you know that you can buy a Cy Laurie mug for £8.99? (click the picture)

From Norman Simpson

Norman comments on the video of the Cy Laurie band:

‘I suspect that the banjoist is Tim Stretton and the drummer Ernie O’Malley. The band had a pianist at the time, Ron Weatherburn, but he obviously couldn’t fit in the van – so it wasn’t all that great a bandwagon!’
4.2011

The 1960s Counterculture in Britain and America – a talk by Kenny Wilson at Secular Hall, Leicester on October 6th 7.00 p.m.

Counterculture Wide

I am doing a talk at The Secular Hall, Humberstone Gate, Leicester on the 6th October 7.00 p.m. Hope you can make it. It should last about an hour including audio and film clips, and there will be an opportunity for questions and comments at the end. Also, in the spirit of the time, it is free.

Counterculture Talkj

Counterculture Talk Leicester October 6th at Secular Hall