Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (29 page)

For each new generation, the memories will be different. The stadium that drew me in like a magnet and then enfolded me in her loving embrace has gone. Now all that remains of the stadium I first visited as a child is a bit of the old Shed end wall that has a little blue plaque on it to mark its survival through years of turmoil and bankruptcy.

That old ground did have to go, but building new stands for largely absent spectators nearly brought about the club’s demise. Having won the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1971 against the might of Real Madrid, I guess we thought glory would always be ours. We pulled down the old Leitch stand and commissioned some fabulous architects, Darbourne & Darke, to redesign Stamford Bridge at a cost of £6 million - a mere bagatelle to us kings of the King’s Road. We were going to start with a ‘stand of the future’ with a built-in heating system wafting warm air, presumably perfumed with rose petals picked at dawn, around the posteriors of the spectators. Just this one stand was going to cost £1.6 million and, remember, these are 1972 prices - a loaf of bread cost about 8 new pence, we had just gone decimal, and a pint of beer was about 13 new pence. We were committing ourselves to selling a lot of burger buns and pints of lager for years to come.

One side of the ground was laid to waste while we waited and waited for two seasons for the new East Stand to emerge from the rubble, ‘massive imposing, ruinous’ as Simon Inglis notes in his book
Football Grounds of Britain
. The monster stand that was created still looks modern 30 or so years after it was completed. It’s on three levels, with a steeply raking upper tier which seems to defy gravity and a roof that hangs like a claw over the blue seats below. Again, I can’t do better than Simon’s observation that when it was first unveiled it made the rest of the ground look like ‘Neolithic ruins’. This was going to be the beginning of the new grand plan - the whole ground was to be redeveloped in this style.

The problem was that it was built just as the world was going into recession in the early 1970s. The stand was built for the boom times, not an economic slump and, what was worse, it was matched by a slump in our performance on the grass. Soon after our lovely new stand was ready for the bottoms of Chelsea fans, Chelsea were sitting at the bottom of the league. Then we were relegated, and if you were old enough, you wept into your 13p pint.

Spectators weren’t exactly clamouring to come to Stamford Bridge anyway. Football was not in the least bit fashionable, not completely unjustifiably, and the papers were full of stories about hooliganism. I remember clearly there was genuine embarrassment in certain circles to have a football supporter in their midst.

Being a Chelsea supporter, it helped that I developed the emotional range to deal with Kipling’s ‘triumph and disaster’ over the course of an afternoon without feeling the need to call a football phone-in show for support or counselling. Not that there were any. And while I have not missed a wedding or a funeral in favour of football, I admit that I have been sacked. In fact, I was sacked from Madness because I went to a game rather than to work. I’d been struggling to cover my tracks when missing our regular Saturday afternoon rehearsals, only to discover, when flicking through the now-defunct
Melody Maker
, an advert for ‘a semi professional singer’ along with our keyboard player’s phone number. Fortunately, the replacement only lasted a few weeks, and I was back. I’ve managed to have a relatively successful career with the band ever since and still follow my beloved Blues, with no sign of another replacement being sought in the small ads. Although I’m sure there have been one or two moments when they wish they could!

I went on to have two lovely girls who’ve been coming to the Bridge since they were six, and still do on occasion, even though they’re now both in their 20s. As for me, I still go as often as I can, although Madness duties do mean that I’m not always around. And despite the over-commercialisation that tests my love on an almost weekly basis, the thrill of the live spectacle excites me as much as it ever did. But it’s a real shame that standing terracing has gone. I would have loved to see a new Shed. It would be cheaper for the fans and more cost effective for the clubs because you can get more than twice the number of people standing as seated, and the atmosphere created is far more vibrant. Some German clubs have managed to overcome the health and safety concerns and have adapted stands very successfully to allow for safe standing, so where there is a will, there is a way.

I know the clubs care about the fans and the standard of facilities nowadays is wonderful, but I can’t help but feel that if football was more affordable then more families would go to the games. And that should be seen as being important. Multiple generations attending together and sharing the experience - as happened to me and as I’ve done with my children in turn - is surely essential to protect the long-term health of the game. It is the supporters who keep the whole thing alive. We are the people who care about the result, the race or the raindrop, if only for the duration of the event until normality resumes and we remember we still have to do the washing-up or walk the dog. Without spectators, greyhound racing will wither and die; and without fans and atmosphere, what is a football ground?

I
’m not proud to admit it, but as a young kid I was in a gang whose membership spread right across the country. Each Saturday morning I’d meet up with fellow members of my local branch in a dark, cavernous building on the Fulham Road. All of us wore luminous badges emblazoned with our gang’s logo, but none of us stood up for the National Anthem when ordered to do so by a rival gang known as the Management. Yes, this band of brothers (and sisters) was mad, bad and dangerous to know. We went by the name of the ABC Minors.

For me, and countless others of a certain age, the Saturday morning pictures were a ritual and a riot. Parents would happily wave their kids off to the local ABC cinema, under the impression that they’d spend three trouble-free hours watching a selection of Children’s Film Foundation movies, cartoons, westerns, The Three Stooges, Zoro and Flash Gordon etc., unaware of the ice cream- and sweet-chucking mayhem that would ensue the second our rallying song was sung and the lights went down. I can still recall ‘The ABC Minors Song’ to this day, which was all about shouting with glee, having a sing-song and being great pals, all jolly and happy and innocent.

It was so twee, it made the Ovaltinies theme tune sound like some of the more ribald choruses I would be singing a few years later in the Shed. However, it used to strike abject terror into the hearts of usherettes, projectionists, cleaners and cinema managers all over the country every Saturday morning, as they sought to contend with the major nuisance wrought by the ABC Minors. Happy days.

As I entered my teens, my local haunts were the Holloway and Camden Odeon cinemas. Both are still standing, but not as the massive one-screen movie houses I remember: they were converted into multiplexes over 30 years ago. And what a shame my daughters’ generation can’t share the extraordinary experience of sitting in the front row of the circle, looking down, through a haze of cigarette smoke, on what looked like a million people, all completely absorbed in the overhead, flickering projection of the film. In those days, of course, smoking was still permitted, but only on the left-hand side of the auditorium. How the smoke was supposed to recognise the boundary, I was never quite sure.

Having acquired half-price tickets as minors, we would then proceed to sit in the smoking section, on the backs of folded-up seats so as to look as tall as possible, but it didn’t always work. The eagle-eyed usherettes were wise to this ruse and before the film started they would scan the area left of the aisle for any shrimp-like creatures smoking cigarettes almost as big as their heads. If you felt the torch beam linger on your face for more than a second, the game was up and you would be ejected by the ear with an accompanying observation that you had to be 14 for junior admission and 16 to smoke and that you couldn’t have it both ways. Later, of course, the problem was reversed, as I tried to look 18 in order to get into X-rated movies.

Besides my north London favourites, we sometimes ventured further afield in search of celluloid fun. There were some really quirky cinemas around London in the 70s, and plenty of real dives, or flea-pits as they were infectiously known. Some had a bit of a reputation and, believe me, if a cinema did have a reputation it was best to be in the know.

The Eros Cinema, on the corner of Piccadilly Circus and Shaftesbury Avenue, seemed like a perfectly harmless place to while away an afternoon. After all, this bijou art deco picture house only screened classic cartoons. As with a lot of cinemas at the time, it had a rolling bill of features, which meant that when one cartoon ended, another began. So once you’d paid your entrance fee you could watch as many films as you liked. While I was enticed by the prospect of an endless bill, that wasn’t the main attraction for some of its clientele and I wonder whether I should’ve been paying more attention to the name of the place: it was, after all, a venue named after the god of lurve.

I ventured in and purchased my ticket. This was not printed up with information about the seat and time of the show plus your inside leg measurement and star sign, as we have come to expect, but like an old bus ticket printed on coarse, thick paper, just proving you had paid. In fact, I could have done with just a bit more info. The place was pretty busy, even at 3 p.m. on a Monday afternoon. But my mind was on the screen and a pomegranate my mum had bought me. An unusual item to take to the pictures, I’ll grant you, but I’d never seen one before and had been treasuring it for this moment, keen to find out what was inside the tough, waxy skin.

As it turned out, the pomegranate was not the only unusual occupant in the stalls. The Eros was one of the pick-up joints for the rent boys of Piccadilly Circus and their clients. I was in the dark about its notoriety, but after the auditorium lights dimmed and we were plunged into darkness, conversely I began to see the light. I think it would be fair to say that at the Eros most of the action took place at the back of the stalls rather than on the screen.

Removing the pomegranate from my trouser pocket, I groped around trying to tease my way into this mysterious fruit bursting with exotic promise. Unfortunately it refused to yield to my clumsy advances and shot out of my grasp and under the seat in front. Calamity! I had to retrieve it. But I moved too slowly, and as I left my seat and started to grope around under the seat in front of me, my pomegranate began its inexorable roll towards the screen and I followed it.

Why I decided to take a pomegranate to the cinema and not a bag of wine gums, I’ll never know. Perhaps it was going cheap and my mum was feeling the pinch. I certainly did. Whatever the reason for the fruit - and, by the way, how ahead of the times was my mum providing her son with such a healthy treat? - I’ll never forget that first pomegranate. It is forever associated in my memory with the unexpected sights, and sounds, of the stalls on my one and only visit to the Eros. I suppose it’s a kind of Pavlovian moment, only I don’t have to taste a pomegranate, I just have to see one and my mind immediately conjures up a recollection of . . . cartoons.

Today the building which housed the cinema is a Gap clothing store, but if you want to catch a glimpse of the Eros my pomegranate and I knew, here’s a bit of trivia: the cinema’s exterior was used in the final sequence of
An American Werewolf in London
. Ah-hoooo! That’s got to be showing somewhere on an endless bill.

These days, of course, a trip to the cinema can be a pretty luxurious affair: plush seats, air conditioning, tasty refreshments, including, no doubt, pomegranate juice (which would’ve saved me a whole lot of trouble). Sometimes they even throw in a decent film as well, just to complete the package. But on the whole, today’s cinemas are comfortable rather than flamboyant, with none of the character of their distinguished forebears. It was all very different at the beginning of the last century, when moving pictures first seized the imagination of London’s entertainment-seekers.

Back in the first decade of the twentieth century, films were shown in old music halls, disused shops, fairgrounds and even railway arches, as there weren’t any purpose-built cinemas. A trip to the flicks was a pretty risky business in those days because nitrate film stock was highly flammable and could burn even underwater. Following a string of fires in the early 1900s, the government decided enough was enough and introduced an Act of Parliament to protect filmgoers from the risk of going up in flames. Fire-resistant projection booths were required from then on, and this put an end to makeshift cinemas and sparked a picture-house building boom.

Within months, London was awash with purpose-built cinemas, many of which had the word ‘Electric’ in their names, which reveals much about the novelty of electricity back then. Indeed, the oldest surviving purpose-built cinema is the Electric on Portobello Road in west London. The projectors started turning there in 1910 and today it’s still one of London’s smartest picture houses. Among the other handful which are still in business are the Electric Pavilion in Brixton, now known as the Ritzy, and the Empress Electric in Islington. This one’s dropped the ‘electric’ moniker as well and is today called the Screen on the Green, the scene of many an all-night Clint Eastwood fest. All of them have had to weather many storms to make it through to the twenty-first century.

Most of the purpose-built early cinemas, like the three above, were all very similar in style, with barrel-vaulted ceilings and richly decorated auditoriums all on one level. Others, which were converted from other buildings, vary in style. If you take a trip to Notting Hill Gate you’ll find two examples not more than a few yards from one another: the Gate cinema and the Coronet. The former, located at 87 Notting Hill Gate, at first glance looks far less impressive than its grand rival, but beyond its drab facade lurks a glorious auditorium with ornate panelled walls and a coffered ceiling with decorative Edwardian plasterwork. The Gate underwent a programme of refurbishment in 2004, including the installation of plush velvet seating and some additional double ‘love’ seats. I don’t know if this is a nod to the Gate’s decadent, racy past, but in 1879 the building operated as the Golden Bells Hotel, an upmarket brothel. A surviving register from 1911, the year the ‘hotel’ swapped red lights for house lights and was converted to a cinema, reveals that trade that year was still brisk, with over 100 gentlemen booking in to its 15 rooms in one day. However, after the bell tolled for the hotel, the Gate began life as the - surprise, surprise - Electric Cinema before switching to the Embassy in 1931. The cinema’s anonymous facade is the result of Second World War bombing which destroyed the original exterior, including its ornate domed roof.