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