Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (7 page)

Gerry’s dark cellar bar is the place where I encountered my first avocado many years ago. It wasn’t an immediate success. They don’t do food here any more, and looking at the place today it’s amazing that they ever did food at all. However, back in the 50s, having no food on the premises was not an option because Gerry’s owner had a reputation for his huge appetite. His name was Gerald Campion and he was better known as TV’s Billy Bunter. Apparently, he used to run the club from 6 p.m. till 2 a.m. and was at Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd’s Bush rehearsing Bunter by 8 a.m. I’ve seen a film called
The Guinea Pig
in which a 26-year-old Richard Attenborough played a 13-year-old schoolboy, but using an actor in his mid- 30s to play a lad of similar age really takes the biscuit. Or, in Billy Bunter’s case, the whole packet. He appeared in 120 episodes of the live show between 1953 and 1961 and was almost 40 by the time the series was finally cancelled.

Under his stewardship, the club became the favourite haunt of the showbiz set of the early 60s and still gets its fair share of well-known names falling down the staircase in pursuit of one or two for the road. My mum used to work here in the 70s and it was through her contacts at the club that I managed to get a job in my mid-teens working as a butcher’s delivery boy, for which I got paid £3 a week with unlimited use of the company push bike thrown in. I’ve had many memorable nights at Gerry’s that I can’t remember. And it is always ‘nights’ there - it’s one of those places that it is just impossible to find during daylight hours.

Gerry’s belongs to the holy trinity of Soho drinking establishments which have kept old boho tradition alive (the others being the French and the now lost Colony, of course) and I hope it’s still here when I’m as grey as its owner, the old silver-haired fox himself, Michael Dillon. So without further ado, I’ll see the night off here with a few brandies and dazzle my fellow drinkers with tales of my day’s derring-do.

With my legs no longer able to do what my head is instructing them to do, it’s time to turn my collar up against the cold and damp and say goodnight to Soho, the beating heart of London. I could have written a whole book on this most wonderful lattice of streets but at least there’s one last hurrah to be had if I’m to strictly adhere to Daniel Farson’s 1951 timetable. When he and his pals staggered out of the Gargoyle at 2 a.m. they finished the night off at Mrs Bill’s coffee stall, situated on the bombsite by St Anne’s church. The church took a direct hit at the height of the Blitz in 1940, leaving only the tower intact. I remember the bombsite because the church wasn’t rebuilt until 1991, but I don’t recall a coffee stall, or indeed Mrs Bill.

Still, being a twenty-first-century boy does have its compensations because, unlike Dan the Man, I can head back to the place where my day began. Bar Italia is open round the clock, so I’ll take my coffee there - just as soon as I’ve worked out where I left my helicopter and taken an incoming call from my ‘little man’.

O
ver the years I’ve played some pretty big venues with Madness: from the capacious O
₂
Arena on the banks of the Thames, huge American stadiums and the fabulous bedlam of Madstock, to the compact Whisky a Go-Go on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, where legends such as the Doors and Janis Joplin made their name.

But some of my favourite memories are of the gigs we played in humbler venues back in the early days. I have a particular soft spot for two pubs and a ballroom - all still going strong - which sped us on our way back in 1979. If it wasn’t for places like these, I’d probably still be delivering sausages on my butcher’s bike. So this is my chance to say thank you to them for saving me - not to mention the carnivores of north London - from a terrible fate.

When I first joined Madness or, to be more precise, the Invaders, as the band was then called, one of our main difficulties was getting a gig, any gig. The best bet was to try to get the landlord of a local boozer to give you a break, as pubs were a long way off going gastro back then, or going full stop, as is the current trend. Of course, not all pubs put on live entertainment, but the pub rock movement, which began in the early 1970s, and the punk boom that followed encouraged licensees to open up their back rooms and cellars to mop up the extra beer sales that live bands generated. But, unless you managed to find a gig supporting an established band, it was a hard road getting any joy on the bookings front: publicans wanted acts that already had a following in order to guarantee pulling in punters who required pulling of pints. So we found ourselves in a catch-22 situation: it was impossible to build a following unless gigs were in the offing and, because we hadn’t got a fan base, no gigs were in the effing offing. There was only one way out of this concert-free conundrum as far as we were concerned - being a little creative where our CV was concerned.

Having trudged round just about every pub in Camden Town during the winter of 1978-9 in search of a gig, it was with the echo of rejections still ringing in our ears that we entered the Dublin Castle on Parkway with its red-and-cream exterior and hanging baskets dripping water on to the pavement. The Dublin was - and still is - a friendly Irish boozer where you can sometimes find a bit of live music at the weekends.

‘What’s your act then, lads?’ enquired the genial Irish guv’nor, Alo Conlon. ‘Erm, we do jazz and a bit of country and western,’ I replied. It was pretty weighty stuff for a bunch of seventeen-year-olds to be claiming, I’ll grant you, but we were hoping both styles of music might be right up Alo’s, and his clientele’s, alley.

The man who held the keys to our future had come to England as a stowaway in 1956 and worked as a labourer digging tunnels in London, which perhaps explains how he later managed to unearth some major underground talent, but more on that in a moment. Alo’s labouring background chimes precisely with the Dublin Castle’s early history, which is why the two seemed made for one another. Back in the nineteenth century thousands of immigrant labourers headed for Camden to work on the construction of Euston, King’s Cross and St Pancras railway stations along with their extensive goods yards and sidings. The enormity of their achievements can really be appreciated from the window of a train pulling out of one of those stations. Although the British Rail TV adverts fronted by Jimmy Savile during my childhood would have you believe otherwise, the nineteenth century, and not the 1970s, was truly ‘the age of the train’.

The work was all by hand and unremittingly hard and dangerous yet this was no deterrent to the groups of Irish, Welsh, Scots and English navvies who, after a hard day’s graft, liked nothing better than to take out their differences in the streets of Camden over which group was getting the best jobs. In one recorded incident - defined as a riot in legal terms - a group of Irish and English clashed over a trivial incident, which quickly escalated and lasted three days, paralysing three police forces.

Eventually, the powers that be sought to keep the tribes of the British Isles apart of an evening by building each group its own pub as far away from one another as possible. So, up went the Windsor, Dublin, Caernarvon and Edinboro Castles on the four corners of Camden Town. Unfortunately, the Caernarvon Castle went down in the Camden Lock conflagration in 2008, which (to quote Her Maj after one’s own Windsor Castle suffered a right royal fire in 1992) was Camden’s ‘annus horribilis’. The other three pubs are still going strong, each with their own loyal following.

The Irish community was still thriving in Camden during the 70s and I well remember blokes gathering outside the tube station waiting for the Murphys Builders’ van each morning which, on arrival, would spark an
On the Waterfront
-style scrum for work. Boozers like the Dublin didn’t just serve as Guinness-pumping stations, they were also places where regulars went to catch up on the latest news from back home, rather like the village post office of yore. And in the days when ‘packing plastic’ was a job description and the only cash dispenser known to Camden man was a fruit machine which paid out once in a blue moon, local landlords cashed regulars’ cheques after the banks had shut. The Dublin was - and still is - a cog in the local community, so Alo was understandably protective of his domain. He didn’t hand over the stage to any old Tom, Dick or Harry.

Our slightly less than 100 per cent accurate description of our musical tastes seemed to have done the trick because Alo took us through the Dublin’s red-lit, mock-Tudor bar to the back room, which was used for functions and the occasional bit of live Irish music. I remember thinking it was pretty damn impressive, especially the stage, which was made up of sheets of hardboard laid across stacks of beer crates. Up to this point, we’d really only played a few private parties and this room felt like the real deal.

Alo and his wife, Peggy, like many other Irish couples in the area, held their wedding reception in this very room back in 1966 and, when they took over the pub eight years later, it was a tradition they continued. The venue looked as if it could hold about 150 people at a pinch, which felt like Wembley to us at the time. ‘Well, what d’you think, lads?’ asked Alo. ‘Yeah, it’s OK,’ we replied, trying to look nonchalant. We had, at last, fallen on our feet, we thought, but there was still one difficulty to overcome to prevent this breakthrough from being ‘for one night only’: our repertoire.

The spectre of the embellishment of our playlist that we’d fed Alo haunted me somewhat, given that our act owed more to Prince Buster and the Skatalites than to Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen. And as for country and western, well, I’d only heard of Tammy Wynette, and I certainly didn’t sound anything like her. Moreover, I wasn’t convinced the Dublin Castle was the right place to attempt a cover of her most famous song. I doubt I’d have got much further than ‘Sometimes it’s hard to be a . . .’ before the locals would have made their views all too clear.

It was obviously a worry and reminded me of a story I’d heard Mike Harding, the Yorkshire comic and folk-cum-country-and-western singer (who once graced the charts with a track containing the immortal lyric ‘It’s hard being a cowboy in Rochdale’), tell about Bernard Manning who thought he’d booked a Native American sword-throwing act called the Cherokees to appear at his Manchester club in the 1960s, only to discover too late that they were, in fact, a five-piece beat band from Leeds. The second the band took to the stage and started blasting out their latest (minor) hit, an incensed Manning dashed to the fuse box and switched their amps off. When the group’s leader remonstrated with Manning, demanding that he turn the power back on because they were the ‘famous’ Cherokees, big bad Bernard said, ‘Oh yeah? Well, Custer’s just come back, so you and your mates can booger off!’ Would our act provoke a similar response from Alo Conlon, I wondered?

Fortunately, our fears were unfounded: we may not have been jazzers, and we weren’t remotely country and western, but Alo knew he was on to a winner and thankfully decided to stand by our band. A couple of months later he gave us a Friday night residency on the strength of that first gig, which had packed the place out.

A little way into that residency we got what I think was our first review. It was in
Melody Maker
on 1 June 1979 and it describes the audience as being made up of ‘England’s entire phalanx of pop culture during the last 25 years . . . huddled together in a room the size of your average khazi.’ The reviewer then proceeds to list the band members and I’m described as ‘a big lad called Suggs who sings’. Give the writer a Pulitzer Prize, I thought after reading such an articulate and fulsome appraisal of my good self. All of us are said to look ‘vaguely threatening’ but, as the commentator astutely observes, ‘this proves not to be the case’. Later, the journalist correctly adjudges me ‘a natural showman’ (‘show-off’ some might say) and ends on the following note: ‘By the third encore, half the punters were jumping on tables waving clenched fists, and the other half were reeling about the glass-strewn floor, jolly pissed.’ It is a great social document of a time it is very hard to remember clearly.

Alo Conlon played an important (if inadvertent) role in launching our career and once he’d got a taste for putting on new bands there was no stopping him, because over the years the Dublin Castle has become one of the most influential venues on the circuit and a regular haunt of the A&R brigade on the lookout for new talent. I doubt whether anyone would’ve been more surprised back in the day by the pub’s cutting-edge reputation for music than the man himself.

Sadly, as I sit here tapping away on my Remington Royal during the coldest, wettest January I can remember since the last, news has reached me of John Aloysius Conlon’s death. Just a few months ago he was given a lifetime achievement award at the London Irish Centre in Camden Square and deservedly so. I’ll be raising a few Guinnesses to the man from Mayo in a few days, as I gather a big send-off is being planned in his beloved Camden Parkway. But in the meantime, here’s to you, Alo.

Having taken the Dublin Castle by storm, it was time to give some other venues the benefit of our company, we thought, the first of which was a particularly memorable bash at the celebrated Hope and Anchor pub in Islington at 207 Upper Street. It’s a four-storey, red-brick Victorian boozer with elegant arched windows and columns, but it’s remarkable for its role as a launch pad for the careers of many bands rather than its architecture.

Although the venue in the pub’s basement was even smaller than the Dublin Castle’s function room, the Hope and Anchor was London’s leading pub rock venue in the mid-70s. Pub rock came to be mocked somewhat in the music press, which, looking back now, seems strange because it was really just an umbrella term for a huge variety of groups who’d taken music back to grass-roots venues. There was no discernible musical genre as such, but the one thing the pubs did have in common was that they were giving an opportunity to bands who were an antidote to the mega-bore groups of the day. Some notable live acts such as Dr Feelgood and Ian Dury’s Kilburn and the High Roads were among the pioneering pubsters who paved the way for the punk explosion that followed.