Calling time on London's counterculture

Closing London Underground

Reviewing London Calling: A countercultural history of London since 1945 by Barry Miles

In London’s Time Out magazine, barely a week goes by without officialdom slowly suffocating the life and soul out of London. One week it could be local councils and the police making it difficult to keep clubs open in Shoreditch on ‘residential safety’ grounds. Another week there is news that, as a result of recent music licence regulations, The Luminaire venue in Kilburn has closed down. The iconic 100 Club in Oxford Street has only managed to stay open recently due to the patronage of wealthy rock stars, but other smaller places are threatened too.

A few years back the hyper regulatory Westminster Council, as well as enforcing drinking zones everywhere, hassled Korean restaurants on stringent and sometimes unworkable ‘healthy and safety’ grounds. While last autumn, Hackney Council ordered a shop owner to paint over his rather beautiful mural of a giant rabbit for ‘environmental’ reasons i.e. they thought it was an eye sore. And now there’s a rumour sweeping seasoned drinkers that the late night bars around Hanway Street, popularly referred to as the ‘Spanish Bars’, are to be closed down too.

Many friends have reacted with genuine horror to this - and with good reason. The Spanish Bars are one of the few remaining late-night drinking dens in the west end. And they are, without doubt, one of the few remaining signposts of an altogether unsanitised, unregulated but exciting London. The bars are always heaving, the atmosphere is debauched, reckless and, at any moment, you wonder whether the floor will give way as revellers stamp their approval to Northern Soul belters, mod-garage rip snorters and perspiring disco classics. Yes, the toilets stink and the carpets would keep archaeologists busy for months but, naturally, that’s all part of the charm.

It’s this demise of west end bohemia that publisher and author Barry Miles addresses in London Calling: A countercultural history of London since 1945. It’s a timely, exhaustive account of all the artists, poets, musicians, hustlers, club owners and publishers who made Soho their own over the past sixty years. As a renowned counter-culture figure himself, Miles set up International Times and was an NME journalist in the Sixties and Seventies; he has lived to tell the frontline story. He reminds us that the phrase ‘Soho isn’t what it used to be’ is a frequently heard claim since the 1940s onwards. Only now, however, does Miles sadly concede that London’s infamous bohemian enclave is a shadow of its former self.

The journey leading up to its demise is predictably enthralling, gripping stuff. Starting with the self-styled ‘Fitzrovia set’, featuring writer Julian McLaren-Ross and poet Dylan Thomas, we’re in a boozy whirl of ‘gin and pop’ lunches, the Fitzroy Tavern, debates at the Wheatchief and slanging matches at ‘the French pub’ before it closes. Miles is clearly a gifted raconteur and his gossipy observations rise above a knocked-off ‘cut and paste’ history tome. He genuinely cares about the people and the geography he is covering. The finest chapters are ‘the Long Forties’ and ‘Sohoitis’ whereby Miles’ ear for revealing anecdotes brings to life struggling writes and artists, whether Lucian Freud and Colin Wilson, and their eventual stratospheric impact. Soho’s bit players, whether French prostitutes, book-shop owners, barfly lushes, café-dwellers and shop workers, are as tightly woven into the Soho story as famous names like Frances Bacon, Ronnie Scott, Malcolm McClaren and Boy George.

By doing so, Miles avoids any teeth-grating pop elite snobbery, particularly against ‘straight society’ (in both definitions of the word) and is frequently of the opinion that Soho was ‘open to anybody’ willing to be open minded. Miles’ solidarity with Soho gays and lesbians, and newly arrived post-war immigrants, isn’t used to take the moral high ground against the masses’ alleged ‘narrow minds’. Instead, it’s a genuine reminder of what toleration and moral autonomy once properly looked like. The artist George Melly reckoned that Soho was an area where ‘the rules didn’t apply’ and while some saw it as a ‘no go area’ for respectability, Melly countered that the area’s password was simply ‘tolerance’.

Soho’s importance in the 1950s was that it became a refuge against claustrophobic conformity right across the class spectrum. Many of the young Soho dwellers at the time, fresh in from the continent or provincial Britain, had no fear of living in rancid beds its, squats with no electricity or, in the case of Colin Wilson, sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath. It’s a far cry from today when a substantial number of young people, particularly it seems in London, choose to live at home with the folks. Miles shows how a genuine culture of freedom fosters fearless self-reliance, albeit one sustained by an informal network of support and solidarity too. A key feature of London bohemia was when established artists cultivated ‘open houses’ enabling waifs and strays to pop in for nutritional and intellectual sustenance. London’s artistic set clearly didn’t need lessons from Tory leaders on what self reliance really means.

Against all this, London Calling is no gushing hagiography either. With toleration comes judgement and Miles isn’t restrained on exposing the excesses, snobbery and lazy indulgences of Soho bohemians either. Nihilistic types are given a withering dismissal throughout, while the likes of MacInnes, William Boroughs and other Beatniks are criticised for their ‘sadistic fetishism’. While the Beats’ patronisation of Notting Hill’s black community for ‘being Negroes rather than equals’ is said to be unforgivable. Damien Hirst and Keith Allen are painted unfavourably for their cocaine-fuelled boorishness in The Grouch Club during the Nineties. For Miles, Soho was a place to go ‘for the conversation, the ideas, the alcohol and the bonhomie…Soho and its environs were the stage, the various cafes, pubs and clubs were the stage sets and in them, propping up the bar, were the characters, talking and talking’. Man-children like Hirst and Allen getting their knobs out in The Groucho Club was a sign that Soho’s intellectual repute had now become, well, rather flaccid.

Although the chapters on punk are slightly rushed and over-familiar by now (Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming is endlessly quoted), Miles challenges punk history orthodoxy by daring to suggest casual racism was rife and that the Rock Against Racism festival was cosmetic and flimsy. By the early Eighties, punk merely accentuated gormless inarticulacy and tabloidesque fearmonging and Miles deserves credit for refusing to follow the revisionist line on punk’s impeccable ‘left-wing credentials’. Oddly enough, though, Miles does have a blind spot on the daft, misanthropic indulgences of COUM Transmissions and industrial band Throbbing Gristle, declaring that they were ‘courageous…in taking on the police and the establishment to break new ground artistically, musically and politically’. In truth, Throbbing Gristle act as a cautionary tale of when being ‘outrageous’ and ‘controversial’ for the sake of it slips into wanton degeneracy. Eating used tampons, as Genesis P. Orridge did at their notorious ICA festival in 1976, sounds like a Chris Morris style parody of ‘cutting edge’ artists. If they pioneered anything, it’s the current conceit that vulgarity exposes the masses ‘stupidity’ as repeated by numerous Hoxton types, TV presenter Jonathan Ross and comedian Frankie Boyle.

Interestingly enough, Miles sees the beginning of the end of London bohemianism with the arrival and then consolidation of Thatcher in the Eighties. This is a pretty astute point, especially when every other pop historian argues that Thatcher singularly galvanised a radical opposition and alternative. True, an underground of sorts did flourish during this period, mainly in alternative music, but the established left was in retreat and a new culture of instrumentalism, born out of ‘There Is No Alternative’, stifled a genuine artistic underground. As an old left-wing radical himself, Miles is right to recognise how the demise of radical politics has lead to the demise of a vibrant public life and bohemian culture.

In more recent accounts of London, he attacks the changes to the education system and its effects on London’s artistic community. “The greater commodification of art (was) exacerbated by the disastrous move of amalgamating the art colleges into universities and colleges to that instead of having the freedom to experiment and explore dead-ends, to make mistakes and chop and change, students are now subject to regular assessment and evaluation as if they were studying maths. The aim is now to produce workers for the ‘arts industries’, a ghastly new hybrid created by arts consultants who know nothing about the actual creation of art’.

These are all good points, but surprisingly there’s nothing on the impact of the smoking ban or the tighter drinking regulations set up by Westminster Council in Soho. Instead, Miles is delighted that the establishment’s moral censoriousness on sex, particularly on oppressing gays and lesbians, has faded into the background. Indeed, New Britain watchwords of ‘social inclusion’ and ‘non-judgementalism’ gives the superficial impression that Soho liberal values are now so commonplace that the area has lost its meaning. But false declarations of ‘tolerance’ has simply redefined censoriousness to mean ousting the ‘intolerant’, while comprehensive regulations of public life has gone much further than occasional raids on Soho strip joints and sex shops.

Although there was a liberalising agenda in the late 1960s, Miles points out that sections of the state and moral entrepreneurs still attempted to enforce traditional bourgeois morality in Soho. The problem with state clampdowns justified on moral grounds is that they can be open to contestation and hostility. Throughout London Calling, the opposition to the police raids and drug busts takes the forms of ‘how dare middle class moralisers tell us how to live our lives’. But what if state regulation is apparently objective, neutral and simply acting in everybody’s best interests? What’s wrong with ensuring that safety and precautions are observed at all times?

With the benefit of hindsight, the 1986 AIDS panic was such a remarkable and important shift for the authorities. Here, Conservative politicians abandoned traditional morality to talk ‘objectively’ about a ‘health and safety issue’ that affected ‘everybody’. By posing this form of regulation in the apparently moralising free language of people’s health, state intervention of this kind was beyond criticism. In fact, to challenge such justifications was seen as cynically putting people’s lives ‘at risk’, as many radical activists said at the time.

So while traditional morality became useless in re-establishing state authority, the watchwords of health, safety and risk did so with minimal opposition. Miles notes how London’s rave and club scene were quickly neutered to meet ‘Metropolitan Police standards’ but doesn’t recognise how this was achieved through the script of risk and safety established in the mid-Nineties. Since then, further regulations on nightclubs, music venues, smoking bans and public drinking have all been justified for health rather than moral reasons. The sanitisation of a once fearless enclave like Soho is the dismal, end result.

It’s not entirely doom and gloom. The Manifesto Club’s Josie Appleton is right to point out that there’s a growing anger and opposition to hyper-regulation and the shrinking of public life. In the wider media there’s increasing column inches devoted to the calamitous state of pubs in London and elsewhere. Barry Miles’ appropriately titled London Calling is a welcome addition to such opposition as it shows, with passion and verve, why freedom and proper toleration has never been more important.

This essay is the original, unedited version of the review that appeared in March 2011 Spiked Review of Books.