Buoyed and excited by the very thought of such an idea, I take my post-luncheon brandy to the bar. A pair of adorably cute boys are sitting there, rhythmically drumming the bar-rail with their feet and looking nervously about them. I estimate that they are in their mid-twenties.
I have always felt that the Groucho should be a club within the most sociable meaning of the act and that open friendliness ought to be a very part of its nature. People should be made to feel welcome and at home, not snubbed or avoided. Which is not to say that they should be interrupted or have their conversations crashed. It seems to me that these two young men are certainly in need of a solacing word or two.
‘Hello,’ I say, slipping on to a stool next to them.
They nod and smile.
‘You look as if you are a little bewildered?’
‘Well,’ says one of them, who had charming mousy hair, ‘it’s the Groucho Club. You hear things …’
‘Goodness,’ say I. ‘What sort of things?’
‘That it’s a bit, you know …’ says the other, who has perfectly black hair and the deepest brown eyes, ‘not for the likes of us.’
‘Oh now, pish,’ I reply. ‘You look like just the kind of young bright people that the Groucho would most welcome. Tell me, what do you do?’
‘We’re musicians,’ says the mousy-haired one with just a hint of endearing mockney.
‘Ah, well then. You’re exactly the kind of members the club needs. I’ll make sure your candidacies are fast-tracked. Don’t you move a muscle. I’ll be right back.’
I nip to the front desk and ask – Lily would it have been? – to give me a couple of membership forms. I return, brandishing them.
‘Let’s fill these in then,’ I say. ‘Hm. “Profession?” … Musicians. “Address?” … I’ll leave you to fill those in, along with telephone numbers. “Proposer?” … I’ll sign that. “Seconder?” …’ I scan the bar area. ‘Tim!’ I call to an old friend and Groucho regular. ‘Come and second these two splendid fellows. They’re called … sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know your names …’
‘Alex,’ says the one with the black hair and brown, brown eyes.
‘Damon,’ says the one with the mousy hair and, now that I look more closely, wonderfully blue, blue eyes.
‘And they’re musicians!’ I tell Tim.
Tim takes the form and signs.
‘Are you currently in work, or do you have a band or something?’ I inquire of the pair.
‘Stephen,’ says Tim, ‘this is Damon Albarn and Alex James. They are Blur.’
This is not very helpful to me.
‘Park Life?’
‘It’s OK,’ says the dark-haired one called Alex, extending his hand to be shaken. ‘Big fan.’
Hands are shaken, and drinks ordered all round. I leave the filled-in proposal forms with the front desk and bump into Khaki Joe, another dealer. Currency notes are discreetly swapped for small, tight wraps. I am now, as Americans say, loaded for bear. Ready for a full-on Groucho evening.
The afternoon takes shape. Damon has to leave, but meanwhile Keith Allen has arrived. Keith has entered in bonhomous mood. He already knows Alex James. In fact they are to go on and have a long and productive friendship. Aside from anything else, they give the world Fat Les and the hit single ‘Vindaloo’, for which the world will always be dizzy with gratitude.
Pages could be written about the strange and extraordinary Keith Allen: throughout the late 1980s (following his Zanzibarring) through the 1990s and up until the mid-2000s he was to be found in the Groucho Club most days and nights. He could be bruisingly rude. ‘Some people are crap, some people are brilliant,’ he once told a well-known TV comic loudly. ‘You are mediocre, which is worse. So much fucking worse.’ It’s very hard to recover from this kind of assault. I sat with the poor recipient of this onslaught for two hours, trying to convince him that vitriol from Keith Allen was as healing balm from a seraph, a compliment of the highest order. Keith was an early figure in the alternative comedy world, and anyone who came after him or perhaps Malcolm Hardee* was a sell-out in his eyes. For months in the Zanzibar and then the Groucho I tried to avoid him. One day he had come up with a drink, sat down and told me that I was great. This was most discomfiting. He had told almost everyone I liked and admired that they were complete wankers and that their work was shit and derivative. How should I take a compliment from this terror? Naturally, wuss that I am, I absorbed it gratefully, and we became friends, albeit warily on my side. Griff Rhys Jones, a man of exemplary forcefulness and courage, once confided in me that Keith scared him half to death. Long Groucho poker evenings drew them closer together. Griff is a non-drinker and good boy (unless you count poker as a vice), so Keith’s acceptance of him could be counted as highly complimentary.
Why would one want to be liked or accepted by someone so loutish, rude, uncontrollable and horrific, you might wonder? Charisma, I suppose. Famed for his amatory adventures and now for the success of his children (Alfie the Greyjoy in Game of Thrones, and Lily the singer-songwriter), he has a quality of playfulness and boldness that naturally more cautious and bourgeois figures like myself cannot but be drawn to. And whatever your instincts may tell you, I can assure you that he is a very loyal and generous friend to those in need.
We decide to go upstairs to the snooker room. Oh, the hours and hours and hours and hours I spent there. I bought many of the accoutrements. A device for respotting a ball. Rests, spiders and extensions. Chalk. My own cue made from finest English ash. They rarely lasted more than a week before being broken or stolen. The room is only just big enough to fit a full-sized table. You almost have to open a window to play some shots. You certainly have to ask anyone sitting and kibitzing to lean to the left or right if you need to cue either side of the blue pocket. ‘Lining up on the white’ became a favourite, if obvious, joke. Coke, snooker, vodka, tobacco, chat.
There is a strange stumbling noise on the stairs. Up comes a round-faced, shaggy-eyebrowed young man.
‘You’re all fucking wankers,’ he says. ‘And you …’ he points at Alex. ‘Where’s that shithead All Bran?’
Alex smiles dozily.
‘Fuck you all. You can’t play for fucking toffee.’ This strange interloper grabs my cue. ‘And you,’ he says to me, ‘you are a poncey tosser.’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘OK. Poncey tosser. I shall make a note of that.’
‘Fuck off!’ he shouts, stabbing the cue up in the air. The round end of the butt bangs violently into the low ceiling. Dust descends.
He drops the cue and throws himself back down the stairs.
‘Well,’ I say. ‘Who on earth …?’
Keith is stepping on to a chair, magic marker in hand. ‘Fuck’s sake, Stephen. Don’t you know anything? Liam Gallagher.’
He draws a ring round the circular dent left in the plasterwork and writes: ‘The mark of a cunt.’
‘Oasis,’ Alex explains. ‘There’s this really dumb thing about which one of us bands is better.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Ah. Yes. Quite. I see.’ Not seeing at all.
The afternoon folds itself into an evening. Other people, including many rather desperate known figures who never can or never will buy their own supply, drift in and look longingly at us as we now more unobtrusively flit from loo to table and back, sniffing up the residue from our nostrils as discreetly as we can. A coke addict’s discreet sniff is like the trumpeting of an elephant and deceives no one but him- or herself. It is of a piece with the whisky drinker’s mouth-freshening mint or the odorous farter’s suspicious darting glances at other people. Futile fabrication, fooling none.
The pretty-please puppy-dog eyes of the liggers is distressing me. As usual, Keith ignores them. Liam Carson arrives up the stairs to join me as a partner in doubles.
Only the day before I had had an opportunity to watch Liam in action. The daily management of a club like the Groucho presents all kinds of unique problems. How to deal with the notorious Soho bohemian
Dan Farson drunkenly pulling rough trade up the stairs to the bedrooms? Vomit in unexpected places. Indiscreet snorters ruining it for the rest of us by tapping out lines on the dining table. Out-of-control revellers who think the place is open to all trying to pile in after pub hours (the club is licensed to serve drinks until two in the morning). Liam calmly deals with all these issues. There is a steely Irish resolve inside what appears to be a placid, rather doughy exterior. He was taught by the legendary Peter Langan, father of all London’s better restaurants. Peter begat Liam, Peter also begat Jeremy King and Chris Corbin of Le Caprice, the Ivy, J. Sheekey, the Wolseley, the Delaunay, Colbert’s, Brasserie Zédel, Scott’s, the Mark Hix group of restaurants, etc., etc. The better elements of London’s hospitality industry can all be traced in a direct line back to Langan.
As we were: the previous night I was sitting in the back corner of the Groucho brasserie, chatting to Liam and sipping a vodka and slimline* tonic. He would have been on a glass of Chardonnay, this being the era before that grape and its wine were mocked into an unfashionable corner and a preposterous Essex girl Christian name to make way for Sauvignon Blanc. Liam was enough of an alcoholic to think that drinking wine by the bucketful didn’t really mean anything. Only the hard stuff counted. We are interrupted by a flushed girl from the front desk.
‘Liam, there’s an awful tramp in reception. He’s just standing there in a manky old coat with his hands into his pockets staring. What do we do?’
Liam slowly gets to his feet. ‘Don’t worry, darling. I’ll deal with it.’
‘Oh, do you mind if I come too?’ I had never seen Liam handling street interlopers. I knew he would never be mean or threatening. He is a kindly man. Besides, part of his job is to avoid scenes.
In Soho, where the fashionable, successful and prosperous dine, drink and thrive in such close proximity to a parallel world of destitution, prostitution and misery, a bitter hiccup of liberal shame, embarrassment and guilt (which are of no use to anyone) rises in the breast of people like me, a kind of social acid reflux, which is the price we pay for too much good living. And useless, as I say, to the poor, who would rather have our money than our pink-faced, hand-wringing apologies.
I follow Liam as he opens the doors that lead from the bar area to the reception. The frightened girl from the front desk is next to me, just as anxious as I am to see how Liam will deal with this ‘tramp’, a word from childhood but what other does one use? Bum? Hobo? Panhandler? All rather American.
The tramp in question has his back to us, but I can see a thick overcoat a size too big for him into which his hands are thrust. As he turns, Liam quickly extends a cordial hand. ‘Mr Pacino, welcome. How can we help you?’
The girl by my side quietly melts into a puddle on the floor. I can understand her mistake. The great actor has eyes, in the old phrase, like piss-holes in the snow. He is unshaven, and his ‘affect’ is ungiving. It is possible, probable even, that he is researching for some role. I think this was before his Richard III project, but maybe this was where his mind was at the time.
Back to this evening of evenings. Liam and I play Keith and Alex, our new best friend, at snooker. We are joined by Charles Fontaine, chef patron of the excellent Quality Chop House in the Farringdon Road, a ‘working men’s’ restaurant more or less unchanged since 1869. As ever, he is anxious for poker, so we decide to go upstairs to the Club Room to play. Alex excuses himself from this and slides in a happy, lazy shuffling way downstairs. Something rather Bazooka Joe about him.
Charles, a French ‘man of the mountains’, as he likes to call himself, is passionate about poker. His skill is not in proportion to his enthusiasm, but he seems not to mind. We play Seven Card Stud, Texas Hold ’Em, Five Card Stud, Five Card Draw, Omaha, High Low, dealer’s choice. A card-table to make modern purists shudder. We even allow the dealer to nominate wild cards. I have provided the packs and a neat wooden carousel of chips, plastic but serviceable enough.
‘Oh, Stephen,’ Charles says to me excitedly during a shuffle, ‘you know the Peter Blake? I buy it.’
‘I’m sorry?’
Charles has been in London for the best part of fifteen years, working in the kitchens of Le Caprice under Mark Hix, yet still his command of the English tongue is far from secure. I manage to grasp what he is trying to tell me. He has bought a découpage artwork representing me that the pop artist Peter Blake had been commissioned to make to accompany a profile for Harpers & Queen or Vogue or some such magazine the previous year. Somehow Charles had tracked the original down and hung it in the Chop House. As I look up from the computer this very minute I see it hanging on my wall now. Charles called me up a month or so back from Spain, where he has a restaurant these days. Spanish sovereign debt crisis, money tight, he wondered if I might be interested in buying the piece? A price was agreed, and now it is mine.
But back to that day in the early nineties.
Usually a poker game lasts from around midnight to four or five in the morning. Liam will be in charge of locking us in and letting us out. The greatest fear is his wife Gabby coming round and tearing a strip out of him. They have a daughter, Flossy, and how she would love him to settle down to something sensible and secure and unconnected to alcohol and druggy people like Fry and his fiendish friends.
Tonight, however, is a very special night. At round about midnight word reaches us that we should go downstairs. There is a palpable buzz at ground-floor level. The doors that lead from reception to the bar area are thrown open, and in charges Damien Hirst, accompanied by Jay Jopling, the gallery owner, followed by Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, Sam Taylor-Wood and Angus Fairhurst. These are the leading YBAs, Young British Artists, graduates of Goldsmiths College, London. Collected by Charles Saatchi, reviled by bourgeois tabloids, they are all making a serious noise in the art world.
Damien, leader of them all for shock value and fame, is waving a piece of paper over his head like Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich. It is not peace in our time, however, but a cheque.
‘Here!’ shouts Damien, pushing his way to the bar and handing it across. ‘I’ve just gone and won the fucking Turner Prize. There’s twenty grand there. Lock us all in and let me know when it’s spent.’
A huge cheer. At round about six in the morning the barman wearily but cheerfully rings the cheque through the till. ‘That’s your twenty grand spent,’ he says.
‘Another twenty grand on me,’ says Damien to another great cheer.
Six hours later I’m sipping a Bloody Mary. Somehow the club has been tidied, shifts have been relieved. Only we hardcore imbeciles are left.
Tracey and Damien vie with each other, trying to shock the shoulder-padded power-dressed publishers who are starting to come in for lunch.
‘Oi,’ shouts Tracey, sitting on the bar, ‘are you calling my cunt a pussy?’
A knot of publishers scuttle away, baffled and alarmed.
‘You,’ says Damien to a couple as they enter, ‘how do you make a queer fuck a woman?’
‘Errrr …?’ They know who this terrifying man is and don’t for one minute want to look unsporting. ‘I don’t know …’
‘Shit in her cunt.’
Ah, les beaux jours …
Ach, die schöne Zeiten …
Those were the days …
I have almost certainly conflated several days into one. I expect Keith Allen will call me up to say that he can’t have been playing poker with me the night Damien won his Turner Prize because he was there at the Tate for the ceremony. Alex will let me know that I proposed Damon Albarn and him for Groucho membership in ’93 and Damon will say it was ’94. Everyone’s memory will be different, but none of them, I think, will dispute my representation of the spirit of the age as we lived it, foul as it may stink in your nostrils, self-indulgent as it certainly was: precious hours wantonly pissed away, good money spunked, valuable brain cells massacred, execrable shit talked. At the time I loved it. Lived for it and little else. But I was fortunate, very
fortunate, for I had a little man. I know because that genius Francis Bacon told me so, as related above.
The truly monumental Soho drinkers, carousers, wastrels and rakehells preferred the Colony Room to the Groucho. In the era of its founder, the fabulous Muriel Belcher, Francis Bacon was one of the first habitués. Dan Farson, author of Soho in the Fifties and Sacred Monsters, drew a splendid portrait of the early years of this tiny after-hours first-floor bar. When Muriel Belcher died, she was succeeded by Ian Board, the barman. Generally known as Ida, he had the most enormous spongy drinker’s nose I’ve ever seen and was one of the few people I ever met who still used, well into the 1980s, in a cracked, camp sixties voice, the appellation ‘ducky’. If he liked you more it was ‘cunty’. Someone told me, I can’t remember who – perhaps Michael, his assistant behind the bar – that when Ida died in the club, in harness naturally, everyone in the room, as he slumped to the ground, saw his great nose shrink down like a deflated balloon. The stopped heart no longer pumped blood to his scattered network of broken capillaries.
Jeffrey Bernard (whose drinking gave rise to the magnificent comedy Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, for many the last chance to see the greatness of Peter O’Toole on stage) started to frequent the Groucho rather than the Colony Room or the French House the other side of Old Compton Street, another haunt of the old guard. He grudgingly grunted good mornings to me when I came in. Perhaps because his niece Kate Bernard was a schoolfriend of my sister’s. I always felt that the pioneering generation regarded us as soft. Alcoholic dilettantes. And the coke they regarded as pretentious and pathetic. Which it is, of course. We were amateurs. Bernard was a warning to all, however. Stick-like, he was as withered and fragile as Tithonus, on whom Zeus finally took pity, turning him into a cicada. You felt you could snap him in half over your knee. In his later years he sat in a wheelchair in front of the bar, cigarette in mouth, vodka and soda in hand. First one leg was amputated, then the other. I saw him and Dan Farson at the bar together once. They each subsisted on almost identical diets of pure alcohol, yet one was as round, red and shiny as a balloon and the other dry and paper-thin.