JEFFREY BARNARD WAS HERE

Soho

Sleazy conurbation

Of bars, clubs and cabaret shows

Home of free thinkers and heavy drinkers

Sharp dressers and cutting-edge messers

Dirty, smelly, noisy Soho

Spotty chain-smoking youths

Multi-national and multi-lingual touts

Red lights everywhere

Ne’ery a green to be seen

Except that worn by some blousy Queen.

Strip clubs, massage parlours, sex cinemas, sex shops

Porn squad wallahs on the look for their brown-envelope ‘drops’

Gay boys and girls and those in between

Gerry’s, The Colony Rooms, Groucho’s, The Union and Soho House

And pubs like  the York Minsiter andThe Coach and Horses

Showing tired old louche faces in the early morning neon-lit arches

Low-lifers, high-lifers, romantic and realists

Drunks and dreamers

And Mr Big always smiling with the other behind-the-scene schemers

Madam Jojo, Molly Parkin, Francis Bacon, John Minton

The Studio Club and Muriel Belcher

Telling new faces ‘fuck off, cunty, I don’t like the look of you’

Then winking cheekily out of the blue.

The Windmill and Paul Raymond

Where girls peeled off for pleasure as well as cash

And men sat in the front row all day

With a bowler hat or a newspaper on their knee

The Kray Twins sipping coffee

Jeffrey Barnard always studying form

George Melly, The Marquee, the Flamingo,

Georgie Fame, The Who, John Pearse

El Paradise, Brewer Street, Louise’s,

Steve Strange, Billy’s.

Brothels and brothel creepers,

Perverts and goggle-eyed peepers

Sticky carpets, foul toilets, bad drinks.

Hookers, rent boys and moody gangsters

Boy George, Marilyn, Siobhan Fahey,

Marc Almond, punk-rocking Bowie fans

The Irish House,

Stephen Linard and gold lame Elvis suits,

Soul, funk, reggae goth, punk, electro, jazz

Graphic designers, painters, artists,

Writers, film-makers, poets,

Trendies, trannies, tourists and shirkers

Street walkers and dog-tired club workers.

SOHO, the buzzing queen bee of London

I am a literary man; by that I mean I read a lot and write a little. I love   reading great writers; Ernest Hemingway – Papa – is one of my favourites. He   cut his own life short at the age of sixty one, when one morning he pointed a   loaded shotgun at his head and blew his own brains out. The Hemingways, it   has to be said, have form when it comes to suicides. To date there have been   five; Ernest; his own father Clarence; his sister Ursula; his brother   Leicester; and his granddaughter Margaux. And the jury is out on Ernest’s   son,Gregory, who died in strange circumstances in 2001. By that time Gregory   was living as a transsexual called Gloria. As a betting man, it is tempting   to calculate the odds of there being an official sixth victim in the   foreseeable future.
My ‘little writing’ consists of a number of low-selling novels (very low) and   about twenty stage plays, of which roughly 50% have managed to get low-key   productions. Some performances were so low-key that the cast outnumbered the   audience!
This is an excerpt from Lorian Hemingway’s memoir on her grandfather Ernest;

I had visited my grandfather’s grave in Ketchum the summer I had caught the   marlin, arriving at the small hillside cemetery on a scalding July day, a   half-finished fifth of vodka in one hand, a filter-tip cigar in the other.   I’d made my way to the simple marble slab marked by a white cross, and stood   swaying over the marker for a long time, expecting epiphany, resolution, a   crashing, blinding flash of insight…. I wanted to say something of value to   the old man, perhaps that I had met a dare he had set forth by example, but   nothing came. The neck of the bottle grew hot in my hand. I tipped it to my   mouth, taking a long swig, then poured the rest, a stream of booze, clear as   Caribbean waters, at the head of the marker. “Here,” I said,   “have this,” and walked away.
 

LOS ANGELES

From dream factory

To nightmare landscape

Eternally self-renewing

And all but used up,

The hot LA nights

Spiked with a Santa Ana wind,

Capote, Faulkner, Mailer, Fitzgerald, et al

Haunting the many-faceted gin-mills,

Looking for characters

For the books they were soon to write,

Hockney hobbling to

The marijuana  store

To smoke away his many ailments,

Drinking Chai tea with the other lunatics,

Down Venice way

The ancient muscle men on Muscle Beach

Doing press-ups

And pull-ups that demean them,

Hollywood writ large on the hills

And a jaded sign on Santa Monica pier

Saying ‘Route 66 ends here’.

 

 

 

STUDIO 54

God made the bucolic country

But the devil made the town

And was influential in creating Studio 54

Where some heavy shit was always going down.

Even Sodom and Gomorrah

Synonymous with all kinds of vice,

And infernos of wicked delight,

Was guaranteed a run for its money

In Manhattan’s sleazy parlour of the night

Inside this depraved cathedral

of mashed, entangled bodies,

Female cowboys consorted with defrocked nuns,

And male ballerinas dressed as randy swans

Or lady Godiva frolicked on a white horse

And the altar-piece was a glittering neon sign

Depicting the Man in the Moon snorting cocaine or worse.

Ten percent were lesbian or transvestite

Twenty percent gay men, pumped up and popper-ed

The rest celebrities, celebrated for their bad behaviour

More than any talent they had to offer.

All came to worship at this altar of sleaze

Where they could drink, dance, drug themselves

And public sex was a jolly good wheeze

The right to seek happiness

Was pursued with a frenzy that was benighted

And Andy Warhol took pictures that he later recycled.

 

 

 

RAINY NIGHTS IN SOHO
See all the down-and-out lickers and fuckers
Down the Embankment they tumble
Unable any longer to bear much reality
Too much self-knowledge
And time spent trotting
Between the Tate and the National
Or one of their endless reading groups
Believing they had
A story to tell
If only things had worked out,
If only the monkey had hit the right keys.
Hush! if you listen carefully
You can hear the dead click
Of their keyboards
In the raucousness of the Soho night;
The minicabs, the limos, the rickshaws all screaming
Take me…take me…I’m free
And the hen nighters, the stag nighters,
The whatever-the fuck nighters,
Lingering in pools of their own vomit
Waiting for the paramedics to call;
Shirts open to the navel, skirts slit
From here to eternity.
Late summer, later winter, who gives a shit?
The restaurants are all full
Though nobody is really eating
Just being there is what matters.
Smokers stop the traffic
Inspecting their mobiles
What would a Martian make of that?
No one sees anything any more
Except the lampposts they walk into;
There are no witnesses to crime;
How anybody falls in love anymore is a puzzle
Eyes no longer meet in lingering amazement
Unless they are reflected
In all those infernal hand-held screens.

 

Available on Amazon

WATCHING CORONATION STREET

And another thing;

Roy in Coronation Street,

That bloody handbag he carries around,

Somebody should put a bomb in it

And blow it to kingdom come!

 

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN US IS A ROOM
Somewhere between us is a room
It has six sides and no roof
‘Why is it open to the sky?’ you ask
I myself wonder why
But rather than show my ignorance
I say it is because it has no door
‘But I am in a wheelchair’, you say
‘I cannot be expected to pole vault myself inside’
‘I can make it four-sided’, I say
‘And we can use the two spares as ramps’
‘But it is eight foot tall’, you wail
‘Okay, forget it’, I say
‘It was only for a coffee anyway’.

 

 

 

KILLER
The cigarette smoke hangs like tear gas
In the mean little honky-tonk
But nobody really gives a shit
Because Jerry is in town.
He arrives without fanfare
And seats himself down
Gimme my money and show me the piano
And don’t try and act the hound
This is rockabilly, baby
Forget about Elvis and Johnny
Jerry has just kicked the door down.

Jerry can conjure a thousand songs
And play each one seven different ways
He can make your high heel sneakers
Dance the legs off every other cat in the place
I aint no phoney
I ain’t no teddy bear
And I don’t talk baloney
As I say to my bass player
I ain’t no goody-goody
But I was born to be on the stage
It was all I ever dreamed of
From the very earliest age.

Jerry plays it slow and mournful or hard and fast
He once told Chuck Berry he could kiss his ass
And across the arc of bad-boy rockers
Who have come and gone
Jerry is the only one still rocking on
Sure, there were some bad times that caused his
Rocket ship to sputter
Like the year he crashed a dozen Cadillac’s
And was heard to utter
You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain
Too much love drives a man insane
You broke my will, oh what a thrill
Goodness gracious great balls of fire