What is Soho? Still a sexy, scumbag central, or a dreary, gentrified gloryhole?
At best, it was dementedly debauched, before Yummy Dummies began sucking selfies from every picturesque brick, and I-phones, hirsute hipsters superglued themselves to touchscreens! Oh, we’ve lost so much, from blatantly criminal whores and routinely fatal excess, the essential sparks of any decent night out!
No wonder punk, arguably, exploded in Soho, but inexplicably, failed to deliver its fabulously vicious, anti-social promise. Fuck, what’s a wimpy portrait of Ludicrous Queen Lizzy with a safety-pin stuck through her cheek compared to mass, Royal douche-bags slaughter? Sadly, public beheadings – oddly unpopular since Jolly Olly Cromwell – have been replaced by gormless Rylan clones sucking Kate Middleton’s hugely talentless butt. Are we supposed to applaud some royal brood mare inflicting further parasitical sprogs on our cash-strapped and Brexit-fucked selves? Tragically, forty years after the Sex Pistols and their fake, prima-donna fury, Lizzy Windsor – England’s benefit scrounger supreme – still creams millions from Joe Public!
The social prognosis wasn’t always so dire. Remember, bohemianism and sexual outlaws need the delusion of maverick decadence to properly flourish, and Soho on the eve of punk -1974 – had that in spades. Screw Johnny Rotten – Bowiemania and glam-rock infected every totally wired, wanked-out whore in town more tenaciously than Hepatitis C! Spare even a cursory glance at Piccadilly Circus’ railings – the infamous ‘Meat Rack’ – and they’d be hung three-deep in hookers, male, female or surgically undecided. And no matter how biting the cold, how drenching the rain, they’d all be shatteringly high on the prospect of cash, the ultimate aphrodisiac!
The poor fuckers. Back then, there was no efficient, escort industry or Gaydar, so of course hard cash was the screaming, vital need for often terminally-addicted, junkie whores. Christ, do you think it’s easy, pleasant or even interesting to suck some dumb-fuck punter’s rancid cock for a living? Or worse – if marginally more profitable – to shag his often stinking, shit-crusted arse, or let him fuck yours, in the condom-free, conscience-free 1970s?
Still, 70s Soho wasn’t all work and no play. The huge Piccadilly Circus Boots chemist filled junkies’ heroin scripts 24/7, and innumerable, all-night seedy cafes catered for knackered prozzies between tricks and insomniac thieves. More glamorous still, Dean Street’s Colony Club – only closed in 2008 – was an irresistible mecca for pharmaceutically-fried artists and grand, court-holding queens. You want sociological train-wrecks? Think Lucian Freud, Quentin Crisp and lairy leather-queen rentboys all sharing coke, champagne and purest, interpersonal bile!
But forget revisionist legends – the actual Colony was just one tiny, puke-green upstairs room with a bar and drug-snowed pissoir, with everyone welcomed as ‘Cunty’. Still, as a utopia of free expression regardless of gender, desire or class, the Colony was Soho personified, the perfect, peasant’s piss on a Duke’s pantyhose!
Face it, what screaming, gay genius worth the name didn’t instantly flock to Soho’s sinfully intoxicating brew of sex, crime and unhinged creativity? Boy George, Marc Almond, Marilyn and, most infamously, Leigh Bowery, soon destined to spray paying punters with the contents of his enema bag!
Less shockingly visible – but arguably, as culturally resonant – was Grayson Perry, then, as now, a traffic-stopping vision of a psychedelic, adult Alice in Wonderland. But there’s always a joker in every pack, and Soho drew a repellent, Thatcherite, faux-dandy – Sebastian Horsley. Sure, he tried (mild) crucifixion, got buggered by a Scottish gangster, and insatiably frequented female whores, but who wouldn’t, cushioned by daddy’s millions? True eccentricity – like Quentin Crisp’s – is an uncontrollable pathology, not the mild, quirky commodity modern Soho’s become! Forget the public, gay shagging we anticipated in 1974 – the reality’s scorched-earth banality, with hardly a deviant, ill-behaved penis in sight!
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