Tag Archives: Charing Cross Road

The Marquee

Posted on December 6, 2022 | 1 comment

The first indoor gig I ever want to was at the Marquee in September 1992. I’d already been to a couple of huge outdoor shows that summer – Reading, Madstock – but there was something special about going up town on a weekday to see a gig in a dark, sticky floored venue that stank of fags. It was the Irish band, Sultans Of Ping FC, best known for novelty hit “Where’s Me Jumper”, and I remember very little about the show or the venue for that matter other than the noise, the crush of people and the fact that everybody in the audience was asked to lie on their backs and wave their legs in the air for the final number. Oh, and I lost my watch in the moshpit.

I’m not sure whether I was even aware at the time that this wasn’t “the real” Marquee. That had been located on Wardour Street, whereas the Marquee I went to was at the bottom of Charing Cross Road pretty much opposite Sportspages. It closed a few years later and was turned into a Wetherspoons. The story of the Marquee – which started life underneath a cinema on Oxford Street before moving to Wardour Street – is told in a new book, co-written by Robert Sellers and Nick Pendleton. Nick is the son of Harold and Barbara Pendleton, the founders of the Marquee – and I interviewed Barbara for a piece in the Telegraph.

The Wardour Street Marquee was an extraordinary venue because of Harold and Barbara’s open-minded booking policy. The venue was open every night so there were plenty of slots to fill, which is why so many huge bands got their break at the Marquee – and continued to do so as tastes and genres changed. A lot of club venues become locked into a single scene, or even a single band – think of the Cavern or Eric’s in Liverpool for perfect examples – whereas the Marquee was much more promiscuous. It started with jazz but quickly embraced blues and R&B, before following those threads through to the 80s, taking in psych rock, hard rock, prog, pub rock, punk, new wave, heavy metal, goth, indie and hair metal. Name the leading band from any of these scenes – the Stones, Who, Pink Floyd, Cream, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Yes, King Crimson, Dr Feelgood, Sex Pistols, Wire, The Cure, Iron Maiden, Joy Division, Stone Roses, Guns N Roses – they all played the Marquee. Just about the only important band that didn’t was The Beatles. One of the charms of the book is seeing some of these line-ups and realising that pretty much every week for around 25 years, a legendary bands was on stage at the Marquee.

Playing the Marquee became a rite of passage for bands on the way up, while by the 80s it became the first port of call for many US bands. It was used for filming, and it was also used for secret shows – Bowie, The Stones, The Who, Tom Petty, The Police and loads more used it for warm-ups or special events.

The Pendletons developed parallel businesses, including artist management and promotion. They started an outdoor festival in Richmond that turned into the Reading festival – and for years, Reading was every bit as important as Glastonbury. There was also a studio, where The Moody Blues recorded “Go Now!”, Chelsea FC recorded “Blue Is The Colour” and Killing Joke recorded their debut LP – three of the finest records in anybody’s collection. The Marquee studio was where the Stock Aitken and Waterman team came together, working on Dead Or Alive’s “You Spin Around”, before they left for their own space.

The book goes into this in detail with plenty of great anecdotes about some of the most famous personalities to have played the venue, including Bowie, the Stones, Lemmy, Gilbert & George and Metallica. It’s a great read and an excellent way of understanding what arts and culture can do for a city and how many lives can be touched with memories that never leave them. That’s invaluable, and there are aren’t many places where it still happens in Soho.

The Marquee was revived a couple more times – once in Angel, now the 02, with a consortium that included Dave Stewart – and then back in the West End. The brand’s current owner tells me he does one day hope to reopen a Marquee in Soho, if he can find a willing partner- ie, a landlord prepared to accept their wider responsibility for maintaining the historic culture of an area rather than simply a devotion to their own bottom line. We can all dream, can’t we?

Marquee: Story Of The World’s Greatest Music Venue by Robert Sellers and Nick Pendleton is published by Paradise Road.

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Posted in Journalism, London, Music

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Farewell to The Borderline

Posted on June 12, 2019 | 2 comments

I have a short piece in the current issue of Uncut about the Borderline (and another longer, very good, piece about the Flamingo).

The Borderline is due to close this summer after a rich history as a venue, hosting a huge number of US and UK bands including Amy Winehouse, REM and Pearl Jam. It was the last venue Townes Van Zandt ever performed, but it was also often used by labels hoping to break an act – its location, good reputation, atmosphere and 200 capacity made it an ideal showcase venue. For these reasons, Oasis chose to use it as the location for their “Cigarettes & Alcohol” video, before playing an impromptu set for the fans who attended the shoot.

I’ve seen loads of great shows here, the best of which was the UK debut by the Drive-By Truckers, which included a solo spot by new recruit Jason Isbell. I also saw Matthew Houck of Phosphorescent play here as Fillup Shack in front of an audience of around a dozen. Most of us were there thanks to the music editor of Time Out, Ross Fortune, who heard ticket sales were low so handed out freebies  to anybody who wanted a night out. Ross loved the Borderline and made it his venue of the year. He even had a favourite seat by the bar that gave him a perfect view of the stage while also allowing him to get served without having to stand up.

Jeff Buckley was another who made his debut at the Borderline – he then played a second show across the road at the 12 Bar for fans who couldn’t get tickets. I was talking to somebody recently who saw Pop Will Eat Itself at the Borderline supported by Suicide – when the crowd booed Suicide off the stage, Clint Mansell refused to perform with PWEI. A bunch of US actors who fancied themselves at musicians all played the Borderline, among them Bruce Willis, Russell Crowe, Minnie Driver and Kiefer Sutherland. How many venues in the world can claim that?

When REM played here it was under the pseudonym Bingo Hand Job, a legendary two-night stand that saw them joined by Billy Bragg and Robyn Hitchcock as this massive band played a bunch of scuzzy covers to 200 fans under their assumed identity. For the piece, I talked to Mike Mills about the shows as well as fans who say it was the most fun they ever saw the band have on stage. That’s the power and pull of a good club venue, and one you’ll never see replicated at a larger theatre or arena.

The Borderline was also worked hard. During its peak years (1990-2005) it was open every night of the week, and after gigs hosted club nights like Alan McGee’s The Queen Is Dead – which caused some entertaining culture clashes at the doors as one group of fans left and the others arrived. The music booker was Barry Everitt, who had a fascinating career in music and whose obituary is worth a read. Incidentally, the manager during this golden period now runs the Crobar, the nearby dive bar and one of the few venues that seems to be clinging on in this part of London. He believes the current owners suffered from a “lack of experience, lack of understanding, lack of contacts”.

When I wrote about the changes to the Charing Cross Road on this blog eight years ago, I speculated about what Crossrail would allow to survive. The development of this area has cost London several venues either directly or indirectly, with the Astoria, 12 Bar and Metro all disappearing along with a number of smaller bars and clubs.

And now the Borderline is going too, leaving the 100 Club  as the last decent-sized West End venue standing. Enjoy it while you can.

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Posted in Journalism, London, Music

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Secret London: streets beneath streets of London

Posted on November 7, 2013 | 24 comments

Paul, the librarian at Time Out, first told me about the street beneath Charing Cross Road in around 2005. He promised to show it to me, but never did.

Then, last month, I saw it. I was mooching around Cambridge Circus, noting the loss of London’s best-named book shop, Lovejoys, a landmark from the time I used to be a dedicated fanzine-browser across the road at Sportpages, also since departed. I had always assumed Lovejoys was a wittily named Soho porn shop, but it actually stocked cheap classics and DVDs. The shop taking over the site will be a sex shop it seems, albeit of the modern, seedless, air-brushed, air-conditioned variety rather than Soho’s traditional damp basement. With the erasure of any trace of character at the arse-end of Berwick Street, the old Soho sex shop is nearly gone. Indeed, much of this post is about things that have been removed, including Paul the librarian, who left Time Out shortly before I did.

As I crossed Charing Cross Road from Soho and stood on an island in the middle of the road waiting for a No 24 bus to pass, I happened to look into the grille beneath my feet. I have instinctive curiosity when it comes to London holes but this is the first time I’ve really seen anything of interest, as, to my surprise, I could make out what appeared to be a subterranean street sign set into the wall a few feet below the ground.

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I leaned in closer and there they were – not one, but two street signs for Little Compton Street, one blue enamel and the other painted on to brick. Here was London’s buried street.

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Although Little Compton Street has its own Wikipedia page, it is not entirely clear how the signs got here. The street itself was obliterated by the construction of Charing Cross Road – here you can see Little Compton Street on an old map of 1868, intersecting with Crown Street (which is marked by green as Soho’s border, though surely red would be more appropriate) just before Cambridge Circus. Little Compton Street ceased to exist in around 1896 and is now part of the Cambridge Circus utility tunnels, which some urban explorers write about here. (Apparently, Rimbaud and Verlaine used to drink in a pub on Little Compton Street during their dramatic London stay.)

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Were the underground signs accidentally left behind when Charing Cross Road was run roughshod over the top of Crown Street or was it a careful act of preservation by an unnaturally thoughtful council? Or were they removed from a wall by unknown hand and deliberately placed down here, where Little Compton Street has existed ever since, entombed beneath London feet and offering a tantalising glimpse of those fantasy Londons from countless dreams and dramas. There’s an echo of China Mieville, Neil Gaiman and the Borribles, but also of Malcolm McLaren’s mysterious and misremembered subterranean Victorian road (neatly discussed here) that is said to exist intact beneath Selfridges on Oxford Street.

One wonders whether the brutal Crossrail redevelopment of this bedraggled part of the West End will allow any such traces to remain. I hope so. And I hope they also have this last-gasp, accidental feel, of something that London can’t quite let go, like dying fingernails clawing a wall, leaving behind a ghost, a whisper, of one of London’s many pasts.

For some great old images of Charing Cross Road, browse here with leisure and a little sadness.

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Posted in Archaeology, Architecture, Books, History, London, Maps, Nostalgia, Photography, Secret London, Sex, Street furniture, Subterranean

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At the Poll Tax Riot

Posted on July 2, 2013 | 3 comments

I attended the Poll Tax Riot by accident. I was at the theatre with my family on Charing Cross Road when the lights came up at the end of the performance and the house manager told us there had been a little disturbance outside so we would have to remain in our seats for a short period. As we did so, this was taking place on the street above.

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We’d seen the coaches parked up as we drove into London, but I had little interest in politics. I knew who the Prime Minister and  leader of the opposition were, but that’s about as far as it went. I would have recognised other names – I watched and enjoyed Spitting Image – but none of it really meant very much to me. Perhaps that’s as it should be when you are 14. Questions of policy were largely irrelevant so the anger towards the Poll Tax Riot had passed me – and my Daily Mail-reading parents – almost completely by. And, boy, were people angry.

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When the house manager gave us the all clear, we climbed the stairs – the theatre  was in a little basement – and emerged on to a devastated Charing Cross Road. What I most remember is the stench from all the overturned bins, debris spilling on to the streets, and the complete absence of traffic, people and noise. It was spooky. That smell I can still recall, a horrible, fatty, sweet stink of rot and decay. London then was a dirty city, but this was something else.

My father – surely in a state of some fear – ushered us through back streets towards the car park in Soho but I remember little of this journey, which surely would have taken us past smashed shops, mobs of protesters and riot police desperately trying to get their shit together. Once we reached the car, my father visibly relaxed but one junction, he had to hit the accelerator while we waited at a red light. He later said he’d seen we were about to be sandwiched between a bunch of rioters and some police and decided this was not a time to obey the laws of the road. Once again, I’d missed this sight.

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I thought about all this again while reading a pamphlet I picked up recently for £2 in a local bookshop. Produced by ACAB Press (an acronym for All Coppers Are Bastards) and ‘dedicated to all working-class heroes’, Poll Tax Riot: 10 Hours That Shook Trafalgar Square contains 12 eyewitness accounts of the riot. The interviewees all appear to be anarchists, and are as equally contemptuous of the traditional Left – Militant are particularly despised, and there are amusingly barbed references to George Galloway and Tommy Sheridan – as they are the police. Most of them seem to have had a great old time, chucking stuff at coppers, smashing windows and setting fire to South Africa House. This is about revenge.

‘Off we go intent upon destruction, up Charing Cross Road, into the West End, everything a target, everything subject to our rage and deep down surely a demonstration of how hated this world is.’

Cars are turned on their roofs, shops looted, the Hippodrome smashed and the police attacked whenever they are seen. There are no dissenting voices to the general feeling the Met finally got what they had deserved for a decade. One protester who ended up in a cell even claims that his fellow cellmate was a prison officer who joined in the fun because he ‘fucking hates the cops’.

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The pamphlet is so gleefully celebratory of the riot that it has to distance itself from the Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign, set up to help those that had been arrested, even as it promises it will give them all proceeds from its sale. It also announces that ‘this pamphlet is anti-copyright and can be freely reproduced by any revolutionary group. But copyright protects it from being used by journalists, rich bastards, etc.’ I hope they don’t sue.

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Posted in Boats, Counterculture, Crime, History, London, Nostalgia, Photography, Politics, Street furniture

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