Read Will’s latest Standard column here.

16.09.08

I have mixed feelings about the threatened closure of the Colony Room Club in Soho, which comes in the same week that a major exhibition of its most famous member — Francis Bacon — opens at Tate Britain.

As a naïve 18-year-old, I was inducted by my late friend Ben Trainin — one of the barmen — into the Colony’s atmosphere of Forties acerbity. My liberal and suburban sensibilities were at once appalled and enthralled by the Colony. It seemed a grubby little room to have been the cockpit of a social revolution — and yet this was undoubtedly the case.

Even then, in the late Seventies, you could still hear vestiges of Polari — the theatrical and latterly gay argot — spoken by its habitués. The prevailing ambience was one of extreme and camp decadence, verging on amorality.

The personal pronoun employed for everyone, regardless of sex, was “she”, and the preferred word was “cunt” in nounal, adjectival and even adverbial forms.

The likes of Dan Farson, John Deakin and Tom Baker were regulars, but the real lustre was given to the Colony’s gloomy interior by the presence of Bacon. I was roundly insulted by its then proprietor, Ian Board. However, I got to drink champagne with Bacon, and to go with him to “celebrate” the opening of Janus, the S&M porn shop on Old Compton Street that is still trading to this day.

I heard ideas and opinions expressed in the Colony that quickened the pulse of my own iconoclasm: there were no prisoners taken at the Colony — for a start, there was no room to keep them.

With the benefit of hindsight, the truth is that the Colony Room was in decline long before I started drinking there. It existed, under its original owner, the self-styled “Queen of Soho”, Muriel Belcher, as an avant garde of the sexual liberation and social promiscuity that was to come. Here, all orientations, ages and classes mixed. Almost the only criterion for membership was that you weren’t boring.

So intense was the impression made on me by the Colony that 30 years later I’ve written a novella set in the club, Foie Humain, which is part of my new book, Liver. The overall title gives the lie, for while some may say the Colony represents the old Soho that is being killed off by smoking bans and other sanitising measures, the truth is that there was another criterion for membership: the hardcore members were first and foremost raging alcoholics.

Ian Board died of cirrhosis; I suspect Muriel Belcher did too. What has done for the Colony as much as anything else is 24-hour drinking. To begin with it was an afternoon club, where a select group could indulge in the naughtiness of drinking after-hours. Now anyone can get a drink from an offie and stand in Old Compton Street swigging it.

It may not be pretty, it may be a bit boring, but for old Colony Room stagers they must accept that it’s a victory — of sorts.

09.09.08

“Some people may say toujours Provence, but having just got back from the South of France, I re-immersed myself in London like a baby swimming into a birthing pool. We went to get the puppy from his very kind dogsitters in Shoreditch, then walked home via Bunhill Fields, London Wall, St Paul’s and the South Bank. Where in the world could you get such astonishing contrasts of people, of architecture, and of different senses of deep time? In Bunhill Fields we paid homage to Blake and Defoe, then, walking down towards the Barbican, I noticed through some plate glass doors belonging to the City University the viridian square of a cricket pitch. Who would have imagined that such a space would be given over to sport in the costliest square mile on earth? A perfect London moment indeed.”

26.08.08

Read Will’s latest Standard column here.

02.09.08

Will’s latest ES column is here.

05.08.08

You can read Will’s Standard column here.

29.07.08

Will’s latest Standard column can be read here.

22.07.08

There’s been no confirmation yet but it looks as if the reclusive graffiti artist Banksy may have had his real identity revealed as 34-year-old ex-public schoolboy Robin Gunningham. You can understand why he went for nom-de-spraycan, if indeed Gunningham is the person responsible for all those subtly subversive images: the rats wielding rocket-propelled grenades along the Embankment, and the legend Do Not Paint Over This Graffiti by the Albert Bridge, to name but two.

But as to the supposed “revelation” that Banksy is far from being a man of the people — can that be any real surprise? Many of the great subversive artists of the 20th century, working when the avant garde really meant something, were from middle-class and even patrician backgrounds. Frankly, you often need a little in the way of financial cushioning to risk real nonconformity.

Not that I think Banksy ever was truly avant-garde; or rather, such credentials as he had were soon mortgaged as he acquired a certain notoriety. To begin with, graffiti art is a field full of anguished young men desperate for some kind of recognition. The archetypal graffiti artist isn’t Banksy but the obsessive-compulsive Enzo, who has marked an estimated 250,000 train windows with his simplistic tag.

As soon as “Banksy” became an identifiable artist — and particularly when his work began to appear in book form and be exhibited in galleries – he ceased to have any street cred at all, no matter that he still hung on to his anonymity. By the time his work began being collected by the likes of — gulp! — Brangelina, he was about as “street” as a Tory transport spokesman.

But anyway, having street cred isn’t the same as being avant-garde; rather, it’s the search by the jaded mainstream for some exciting and new primitivism. To be avant-garde — as the term suggests — is to be out in front of mainstream artists, creating work that through its sheer daring and brio increases the ambit of what may be possible.

Throughout the 20th century, truly avant-garde artists, writers and filmmakers fought a stiff battle against the forces of conformity: their aim was to make it possible to write and paint and make films about previously taboo subjects, principally sex and religion. They succeeded more than they ever could have believed possible, helping to make a culture in which it is now possible for us to experience the most extreme of mediatised experiences, scant few of which are genuinely art.

That has been one downside of the triumph — and subsequent death — of the avant-garde. The other is that while it’s possible nowadays to say anything, nobody much is listening any more. Or rather, they’re listening to whichever wannabe — such as Banksy — the media have seized on to.

15.07.08

Read Will’s latest Standard column here.

08.07.08

Will’s Standard column this week.