London Calling (72 page)

E changed London’s nightlife totally. So many young people were taking ecstasy that beer sales in Britain declined by 11 per
cent. The huge e-raves grew in momentum. The police, of course, wanted to close them down and even set up a special squad
under Ken Tappenden, divisional commander of Kent police, whose entire job was to search out and close down raves, but they
met with little success; the advent of mobile phones proved too much for them. Party organizers set up equipment that could
relay messages to a thousand mobile phones, giving the location of the venue, and at 1 a.m. the motorways would suddenly be
packed with kids. By the time police arrived the rave was usually too big for them to stop without a riot ensuing. Killjoy
Tappenden claimed victory because, as he said: ‘We won because we stopped it all in 18 months and we drove it underground…
we drove it into warehouses.’
²

Now raves were in the safe hands of proper businessmen the police were happy. The Ministry of Sound, London’s premier rave
club, was in a disused London Transport bus garage beneath the railway arches at Elephant and Castle, with an intimidating
fortress-like façade, made secure so that no-one could get in without paying, and with the roof fixed to stop leaks. It was
owned and run by an old Etonian, James Palumbo, who had made his money in the City selling stock options. His father, Lord
Palumbo, had been the head of the Arts Council of Great Britain during the Thatcher regime. Palumbo had a very simple business
model: he only opened from midnight until seven in the morning on Fridays and Saturdays, ensuring that people could get home,
just like the UFO Club. He dressed conservatively, in pinstripes and cufflinks, and had no trouble in getting what he wanted
from the local council. As everyone was on ecstasy there was no need for a drinks licence; all he needed was a dance licence,
and it was very easy to convince the council that it was much better to let the kids stay until the first tubes and buses
began running rather than turf them out into the streets in the middle of the night, where they might cause a nuisance. Jeff
Kruger had used the same arguments with
the police back in the fifties for his Flamingo Club. The club may have been a tip but Palumbo did spend money on constructing
the best sound system in Britain, operated it at maximum volume and flew in the world’s best D Js. It was so successful that
he started his own record label of compilation C Ds of music played there.

Even the Notting Hill Carnival succumbed to Thatcherite economics. When in 1988 the carnival lost £133,000, the committee
found themselves ousted and replaced by people who had always felt threatened by the way that Carnival celebrated morals and
values that the police, in particular, didn’t like. They immediately implemented the recommendations of accountants Coopers
and Lybrand to make the subsidized event into a profitable concern. Though it is still fun, at first glance it seems little
more than streets and streets of overpriced ethnic food stalls. And so market values finally overtook one of the last children
of the London Free School.

In addition to clandestine radio stations, there was underground television. For six months, throughout the months of April
to September 1986, the pirate NeTWork21 broadcast on channel 21 on the UHF band, just below ITV, using a low-power transmitter
that covered an eight-mile radius across London. The programme lasted thirty minutes and went out on Friday night at midnight.
The station was estimated to have about 50,000 viewers after most of the newspapers ran stories on it. The Department of Trade’s
principal concern was over the channel’s complete lack of censorship of the programme’s contents, which appeared to be dangerously
close to freedom of the press, something unknown in Britain. The collective who made the programmes said: ‘We want to challenge
people’s perceptions of what broadcasting really is. The images we display speak for themselves.’ Programmes centred mostly
on the underground arts scene, with an interview with Derek Jarman, footage of the Sex Pistols’ television appearance with
Bill Grundy, a programme on tattoos, live concerts by Diamanda Galás and Test Department, and many films by video artists
of admittedly varying quality.

London had changed. In the sixties there were no tables on the streets outside restaurants, by the eighties London had begun
to look like Paris. In the sixties you had to drive out to London airport to get a meal after midnight: an outing that was
so popular that the terminal restaurant began to insist that at least one member of the party held a boarding card. By the
eighties, Soho had gone through a period of revitalization caused by a combination of the pink pound, which had made Old Compton
Street as crowded at midnight as it was at midday, and the opening of the Groucho Club just around the
corner on Dean Street. Not only did Old Compton Street have gay pubs, bars and cabarets, but it had gay cab companies ensuring
a safe journey home, as well as sex shops and specialized clothing stores, making it ‘the gay high street of Europe’
³
according to one Dutch magazine.

The Groucho Club,
⁴
which opened in May 1985, was the idea of a group of publishers and literary agents who wanted somewhere to meet other than
a restaurant or pub. None of the traditional, conservative, old gentlemen’s clubs were suitable, as places like the Garrick,
Boodle’s and White’s all then refused to accept women as members. The publishers Liz Calder, from Bloomsbury, and Carmen Callil,
from Virago, came up with the idea at the Frankfurt Book Fair when they and a group of other British publishers and literary
agents, including Louis Baum, Matthew Evans, Michael Sissons and Ed Victor, sat around discussing the news that the Garrick
had once more voted against allowing women members. Fed up with the fact that there was nowhere for them all to meet in London
they decided to start their own club. Louis Baum produced a document setting out their aims: they wanted a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week
bookshop, a sauna and jacuzzi, coffee shop, meeting rooms and of course a bar and restaurant. They approached Tony Mackintosh
to be managing director as he had already had great success with Dingwalls Dance Hall in Camden, the 192 restaurant in Notting
Hill and the Zanzibar Club just down from Blitz in Covent Garden. On all three ventures he had worked with the same friends:
the wine merchant John Armit and architect Tchaik Chassay. A dozen of the group met with Tony at Tchaik’s Notting Hill flat
and set out their proposals. Seeing the large group of partners already involved, Mackintosh initially proposed that they
pay him to conduct a four- to six-month feasibility study. As they wanted somewhere in Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury or Soho he immediately
recognized that premises large enough to house all their wants would be prohibitively expensive and asked them which elements
were sacred, that he couldn’t cut out. After a long silence Louis Baum said: ‘The name.’
⁵

Several years before, with an eye to starting a Soho restaurant, Tony had looked at Gennaro’s, at 45 Dean Street, which had
been closed for several years, but there were so many rooms on so many floors that it was impractical. However, the premises
were well suited for a club so he returned. The price was £450,000 with about the same again to do it up. With an amusing
prospectus designed by Richard Adams with drawings by Quentin Blake they found more than 400 people to put up the minimum
subscription of £500 or more. The required amount did not come in until the morning the offer legally had to close; any later
and the cheques would have had to be returned.
Tony was appointed CEO and chairman, a position he held for the club’s first eighteen years. In another inspired move, Liam
Carson was made general manager.

Liam had started out at Blitz, where he rose from being the washer-up to managing the club in a matter of a few weeks. He
moved from there to Langan’s Brasserie at the time when Peter Langan was at the height of his powers: drinking eight bottles
of champagne a day, pouring wine over the customers, throwing out any who dared to criticize the food and administering cunnilingus
under the tables to any female diner who would allow it. Langan showed Liam how things should be done and he learned fast.
After a few other culinary adventures he finished up at the Groucho possessed of a love for late nights, drugs and parties.
He was beautifully described by Jonathan Meades as looking like an ‘unusually dissipated cherub’ who ‘carried with him a faint
but distinct whiff of danger – and the inchoate prescience of future self-destruction’.
⁶

As Thatcherism brought mass unemployment, and her deregulation of the Stock Exchange opened the way for decades of greed and
the amassing of paper fortunes, an atmosphere was created in London of hedonism and total self-indulgence among those who
were benefiting that only ended with the terrible crash of 2008. At the Groucho Club, cocaine was the king. Celebrities stumbled
among the tables, their nostrils coated with the stuff. The tops of the cisterns and the sinks in the bathrooms all bore traces
of hastily snorted lines. Several pushers worked out of the club itself and at one time you could ask at the bar for matches
and the bartender would reply: ‘Certainly, sir, that will be £40’, handing over a wrap hidden inside the club’s free bookmatches.
For a decade the Groucho Club was one long party, a modern-day equivalent to the old Gargoyle Club across the street.

Liam encouraged everyone to treat the club as their living room, and they did. His interests extended from sport to music
and, on one memorable occasion, he had the captains of the English cricket team, football team and rugby team all lined up
at the bar. I remember walking in one day to see Neil Kinnock, leader of the Labour Party, deep in conversation with the former
armed robber John McVicar, or John McCriminal as people called him behind his back. After an anxious startup financially,
Tony Mackintosh knew the club was finally going to survive when he walked in one afternoon and found only two people in the
bar, sitting at each end of the room, reading the newspaper and having a cup of tea: one was Eric Clapton and the other Harold
Pinter. There were so many rock stars that the membership committee had a person specifically designated to deal with their
applications; musicians
of course had a reputation to live up to and they caused the most damage. Liam Gallagher from Oasis went on a coked-up rampage
in the snooker room in November 1996, laying into the lighting, a wide-screen television and the snooker table itself with
a snooker cue. The table had been donated by Janet Street Porter in memory of her late husband, Frank Cvitanovich. It cost
£5,000 to repair and Gallagher was banned for life.

But it was not just rock stars who suffered bans. The Groucho was quickly added to the rounds of the old time Sohoites Dan
Farson, Francis Bacon and Jeffrey Bernard. Farson got himself banned when a rent boy he had spent the night with in one of
the club’s nineteen bedrooms not only robbed him, but ransacked the rooms of all the other guests as well. When he was readmitted,
he celebrated by getting so drunk that he pissed against the bar. Despite Liam’s arguments that Farson would have probably
injured himself if he had attempted to negotiate the notoriously tricky narrow staircase leading to the men’s toilet he was
banned again by the unsympathetic management.

There were two Groucho Clubs. The daytime club, which began with power breakfasts and led on to business lunches: people doing
deals, agents discussing projects with writers or screenwriters, lawyers advising their clients. After lunch things became
slightly less respectable. There was a period when Jeffrey Bernard spent each afternoon sleeping off his liquid lunch in the
armchair just inside the bar by the window. Later, when he was wheelchair-bound, they moved the furniture so that he was accommodated
in his usual place. When he was awake, he would trade loud insults with Dan Farson across the room though much of it was put
on for the benefit of other afternoon drinkers. The other Groucho Club began around six o’clock when the bar quickly filled
with people from the Wardour Street film industry and others who worked nearby. The club really got into its stride around
ten, when people stopped by after dinner. It was going flat out by the official closing time of 1 a.m.. Of course there were
lock-ins and sometimes the party carried on all night. Liam Carson was so impressed by the prodigious drinking marathon held
by Robert Elms and Spike Denton in 1987 that he framed the final bill on his wall at home. The total was seventy-six bottles
of Becks, two bottles of champagne and one club sandwich, all consumed over fifteen hours.

Cocaine use was so blatant, and went on for so many years, that it was often commented upon how strange it was that the drugs
squad never made an appearance, despite numerous reports of drug-taking in the tabloid press. One reason may have been that
they were never sure who they might find there. When Prince Edward was working nearby for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
The Really Useful Company, he became a regular lunchtime guest; there was no telling if he might return in the evening and
the police certainly didn’t want to bust the place when he was there. There were also a number of politicians who used the
club, again making it more or less immune. This feeling of safety led to greater hedonism and feats of excess.

Damien Hirst was the most outrageous of the artists at the Groucho, better known for his penchant for exposing his penis to
everyone, and for his excessive cocaine use, than for his art. In
On My Way to Work
he said: ‘I had the best two years of my life on drugs. We used to celebrate. I used to walk into the Groucho Club with my
arm in the air: going “Chop ’em out!” And I used to love it.’
⁷
Hirst stories abound: there was the night he, the actor Keith Allen and Alex James from Blur hid under the pool table when
the club closed and remained locked in until 10 a.m. opening, fortified by bottles of wine and an ample supply of cocaine.
To extend the evening into the new day they removed their trousers and stood behind the bar naked from the waist down telling
the long-suffering staff that it was ‘no trousers day’. Stephen Fry walked in for a business breakfast and ordered sausages.
Hirst walked out from behind the bar with his cock on a plate which he plonked down in front of Fry: ‘You ordered sausage,
sir.’ Fry didn’t blink: ‘I said a sausage, not a chipolata.’ A more dangerous prank occurred when Hirst set fire to the publicist
Mark Borkowski’s chest hair, burning him so badly that he ended up in casualty. Hirst spent thousands of pounds in the club
so they did not complain, except by letter, asking him to please refrain from pissing in the sink. After a decade of service,
Liam Carson was so exhausted that his wife persuaded him to quit and they moved to France, near Nice, where he attempted to
write a sitcom. The club was never the same without him.