The more bohemian forerunner of The Groucho Club in London’s Soho

Sophie Parkin at the Sohemian Society meeting last night

The Groucho Club stands rather discreetly in Dean Street, Soho, with no identifying name and behind windows half-hiding what goes on inside. Its members are media trendies, but rather respectable – even if they might have a self-image of themselves that they are not.

What they certainly are not is true bohemians. But Dean Street clubs were not always this way.

Last night, I went to the Sohemian Society in an upstairs room at the Wheatsheaf pub in what some call Fitzrovia, some North Soho and some aspirational estate agents even sometimes call Noho.

Sophie Parkin, daughter of Molly Parkin, was showing an extraordinary series of photos she had collected for her new self-published book about The Colony Room Club 1948-2008: A History of Bohemian Soho.

Sophie Parkin’s new history of Sohemia

As I blogged a couple of days ago about self-publishing, it’s worth mentioning that Sophie has said “we are publishing it ourselves because it’s the only way to make any money from publishing. Authors’ advances have shrunk to the size of a cock in the North Pole. And having spent two years of my valuable life on this precious tome I didn’t want to be paid peanuts and then see it sink from lack of proper marketing.”

For most of its life, The Colony Room Club was run by the irreplaceable Muriel Belcher, who tended to welcome all comers  to the Colony with the greeting “Hello, Cunty!”

Based in a small upstairs room in Dean Street, the Colony became famous as a drinking club for the likes of painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, writer Dylan Thomas and polycreative George Melly.

Opposite the Colony Club in Dean Street stood the more up-market Gargoyle Club, which was interior-designed by the artist Henri Matisse and architect Edwin Lutyens and had as its chairman the painter Augustus John. It had been opened in 1925 by aristocratic playboy and bohemian David Tennant – not to be confused with Doctor Who – and actress Hermione Baddeley.

“David Tennant was very bohemian,” explained Sophie Parkin last night, “but he was very against ‘theatricals’, as he called them. So he would not allow even Hollywood actress Tallulah Bankhead to join his club straight away. It might be because of the story that she had met some kind of high-class landed gentry type Englishman and spent some time with him – ‘got to know him’ in a Biblical fashion – and the next time she saw him was in the Café Royal and he snubbed her, so she said loudly: What’s the matter, dahling? Can’t you recognise me with my clothes on?”

Even more bizarre stories about the even more bohemian Colony Room Club abound, featuring the likes of writer William Burroughs, painter L.S.Lowry and ballet dancers Frederick Ashton and Robert Helpmann. With the likes of writers Keith Waterhouse, Johnny Speight and Jeffrey Barnard around and with sometime barmaid Kate Moss (the model) and barman Daniel Craig (later James Bond), the possibility of legendary stories arising is endless. In the early 1960s, even Christine Keeler and Stephen Ward were said to be frequent visitors.

There were other even more surprising luminaries – including spies Burgess & Maclean, who allegedly spent their last night in London at the Colony Room Club before they fled to the Soviet Union. And East End gangsters Ronnie and Reg Kray.

Sophie’s book includes quotes from Ronnie and Reg saying how much they enjoyed meeting artist Francis Bacon at the Colony and, last night, an audience member mentioned a rumour that the Twins had actually stolen some paintings from Bacon, then sold them back to him.

The Colony was known for its homosexual members at a time when homosexuality was, as Sophie says, “not just illegal but very illegal”

The Krays had been introduced to the club by their gay MP friend and Colony Room Club regular Tom Driberg (later reputed to be a Czech spy).

According to Sophie, Driberg “admitted to Christopher Hitchens in the Colony that he loved going into special committees in the House of Commons with semen still sticky at the corners of his mouth”.

“There’s a lovely story about Tom Driberg,” Sophie Parkin said last night, “getting annoyed with another member, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who had become a publisher. In one book, Geoffrey had included a picture of him in the company of the Krays. Tom told him: I don’t want my reputation destroyed. He was complaining about this to Muriel Belcher at the Colony and she told him: You never seemed to mind when Ronnie’s cock was in your mouth.”

Sophie also talked about David Archer, the publisher in the early 1950s of Dylan Thomas, George Barker, Louis MacNeice and others.

“You can,” said Sophie, “name all the major poets of that era and he published them all in Parton Press and let them retain copyright. He had inherited a huge amount of money and didn’t care about money – He just gave it to people who didn’t have it. And then, at the end, he ran out of money and everybody deserted him. He lived in a bedsit and died penniless. He committed suicide and, the day after, suddenly this Foundation found him. They didn’t have the internet in those days. They had been searching for him for five years and they had another great big huge amount of money to give him.”

So it goes.

The Colony Room club is now no more.

So it goes.

It has been turned into three flats.

Sophie Parkin and her husband now live in Deal, Kent.

Last night, Sophie’s husband told me they hope to open the Deal Arts Club soon.

According to Sophie: “It will have to be a membership club – Ordinary people on a day trip to the seaside might be offended by the full use of our language and the freedom of our thoughts.”

Indeed.

After all, Sohemia is a state of mind rather than a physical location.

What I discovered in a Fitzrovia pub after I won the EuroLottery…

I won the EuroLottery two days ago.

The prize was £2.90.

Winning the Lottery is relevant to something that happened last night.

The famous Austin Osman Spare in 1904

I had never heard of Austin Osman Spare until last night. He is one of those boy geniuses who had a wonderful future behind him.

Is it better to be famous when you are young, then drift into obscurity? Or to be unknown, get acknowledged late in life and then die famous?

Born in 1886, Austin Osman Spare was, by 1904, being called a “boy genius”, allegedly the youngest ever artist exhibited at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. He was, says his new biographer Phil Baker, “hit by fame and then hit by obscurity”.

In 1908, the Art Journal wrote: “Can there be anyone in London interested in Art who has not heard of Austin Osman Spare?”

“This,” said Phil Baker last night,”becomes ironic as the century continues, when you’d really be very hard-pressed to find anyone who had heard of him.”

Phil Baker’s 2011 biography of Spare

Phil said this last night during a Sohemian Society meeting in the upstairs room of the Wheatsheaf pub in Fitzrovia – a pub where Austin Osman Spare regularly drank, 1950-1955, forgotten by the art world.

He died in obscurity in 1956, though he merited an obituary in The Times which said that “for most of his life he did not mix in what are called ‘artistic circles’. Not Chelsea, Fitzroy Street, Bloomsbury or Hampstead claimed him, but for years a little flat ‘in the south suburbs by the Elephant’ far removed from the coteries, deep-set in the ordinary life of the people.”

He was a draughtsman, painter, surrealist and occultist.

Spare’s drawing “Ascension of the Ego from Ecstasy to Ecstasy” (1913)

In the 1930s, impoverished, Spare was selling ‘Surrealist Horse Racing Forecast Cards’ for five shillings via a small ad in the Exchange and Mart paper.

“The reason he hit on this in 1936,” explained Phil Baker last night, “was because Britain had just had a big Surrealist exhibition. When he first started doing these cards, they were called Obeah cards – Obeah being a kind of African magic.

They were kind of like Voodoo cards. They are an artwork based on gambling, which is quite a rare combination and the only similar thing I can think of is Marcel Duchamp’s Monte Carlo Bond in 1924.

“Marcel Duchamp came up with a roulette system and said that, in future, he was going to draw or sketch on chance. So his roulette system was going to be his artwork. And it’s oddly fitting for Spare, I think, because of Duchamp’s remarks on the Lottery of Posterity.

“Duchamp said that all artists are actually gamblers – Artists throughout history are like the gamblers of Monte Carlo and this blind lottery allows some to succeed and ruins others. Posterity is a real bitch. It cheats some, re-instates others and reserves the right to change her mind every fifty years.

Spare’s “Portrait of the Artist” (1907) – now owned by Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page

“Spare’s career had another peculiar turn around this time, when Adolf Hitler tried to commission a portrait from him. Spare refused and briefly became a hero in the local papers. I think maybe there was an approach made to him by someone at the German Embassy who had seen a picture of Spare looking a bit like Hitler because, for a time, he had a ‘Charlie Chaplin’ moustache a bit like Hitler’s. Spare later did create a picture merging his own features with Hitler’s which, in art historical terms, was unusual at the time.

“He also supposedly photographed himself as Christ on the Cross. If he really did do that, then the photos don’t survive. But this is a very odd art practice for someone in that period.”

There is also an artwork in which Spare seems to have drawn himself as a woman; the picture was later owned by author E.M.Forster.

“Art historically,” said Phil Baker last night, “this is completely unlike anything anyone else was doing at the time. This idea of an artist doing himself as other people waits for… I think Cindy Sherman is the person who’s really made it famous more recently.

“And there’s a Japanese artist called Yasumasa Morimura who’s done himself as a Pre-Raphaelite woman and as Hitler and as Chairman Mao.

“This alone, you would think, might give Austin Osman Spare a bigger place in Art history. Instead, he’s completely vanished. He’s chiefly remembered as an occultist, which begins by him being seduced by an elderly witch in Kennington when he was a child.”

But that’s another story about an interesting man.

The DVD which puts the art into Mr Methane’s fart (& Piers Morgan’s face)

Mr Methane does a sound check with Yuri before the filming

A film about cakes and farting which surprisingly seems to have slipped under the radar of world critics is a 12-minute movie of variable title directed by Swiss film maker Yuri A.

According to one official description of the film, it was titled simply “S” in 2007:

_____

S is like life: short and shitty. No market research, no demographic segmentation, nothing but imagination and attitude. 100% analogue. A bad film, but good enough for you. Cakes evoke in general only good feelings, while farts, some of the most commonest substances around, shock, repel and offend. But the consequence of a culinary dish is always a fart. It can not be repressed.

_____

I first became aware of the film in 2004, when my chum Mr Methane, the world’s only professional flatulist, flew to Zürich to make an appearance in a project with the working title Cakes & Farts. Afterwards, he issued some publicity:

_____

Mr Methane Arsesists With Cakes & Farts Film Project.

Mr Methane has recently been working with award-winning Brazilian born film maker Yuri A on her latest project “Cakes And Farts” a 10 minute short film about eating cakes and farting. As well as Mr Methane, the film also stars Flin an 8 year old child and Maria the Butt Dancer.

Mr.Methane says: “I enjoyed taking part in the film very much, Not only did I get to grunt a few out, I also got to eat a selection of nice tasting cakes as well. But it was all in the name of Art and Public Education.”

_____

Then, last November, there was more news from Mr Methane:

“For many years,” he said, “I lost the scent in terms of what was happening with this project. In fact once a few years ago, while doing a Google search to see if it had ever been  released, I came upon a YouTube-type video of a lady plonking her G-stringed backside into a chocolate cake before removing herself from the same and farting at the camera with a proximity that was too close for comfort.

“This, for some strange reason, reminded me of Piers Morgan blowing raspberries with his face covered in melted chocolate. I was scared and gave up hope of ever seeing the film in its finished form, so it was nice to hear from Yuri A a few weeks back with news that the film is now available on DVD under the title of Fart Adventures.

“If anyone is looking for another Mr Methane Lets Rip comedy DVD, then this isn’t it. This is a high-end art film about a bottom-end subject. It is produced on 16mm film and seemingly shot in the high-key, high-contrast, super-saturated hues of children’s’ advertising.”

At the time, Mr Methane pointed out that Fart Adventures was retailing for 59 Swiss Francs – around £40 per copy – excluding postage and packing.

“Maybe,” he told me, “they are hoping that the bottom has not fallen out of the fart movie market. I’m not exactly sure who is going to buy such a high art production on DVD at a time when DVDs themselves are not selling and when they do a Lord of the Rings  Trilogy (Theatrical Edition Box Set) for £7.99 – £10.99 on Amazon.”

The DVD: surprisingly not yet a bestseller

The Fart Adventures DVD, with the subtitle Rectum Spectrum, is currently available for 39 Euros (£31.44p at the time of posting) and includes not just Cakes + Farts (12 mins) but also Farts (4 mins), Definitions of Art (5 mins), Shit (6 mins) and UNKO (8 mins) with this explanation:

“The title of ‘Unk’ (or “UNKO”), an invented monosyllabic word intended to function through its acoustic qualities and associations, strongly recalls both Dada poems and babes’ speech.”

 So there you have it: the DVD which puts the art into Mr Methane’s fart.

Yesterday a man stood in Leicester Square with a placard saying he had absolutely no message for the world

This man has no important message for you

(This was also published in the Huffington Post)

Yesterday, I was rushing to a meeting at 6.30pm just off Leicester Square, in London.

At 6.18pm (that exact time is on the sound recording on my iPhone) I saw a man standing in the North East corner of Leicester Square with a placard saying:

I HAVE NO MESSAGE. AND I’M NOT SELLING ANYTHING. I JUST HAVEN’T GOT ANYTHING BETTER TO DO.

So, obviously, I went up to him.

“You’re a performance artist?” I asked.

“No.”

“An actor?”

“No.”

“So” I asked, “Why?”

“Why?” he asked me in reply. “Why not? It’s something to do. I haven’t got anything better to do. It’s on the placard.”

“So what did you do,” I asked him, “before you didn’t do anything?”

“That’s a bit of a mind-turning thing,” he replied. “It’s been like this for years. I haven’t had anything better to do than this for years.”

“Did you go to college?” I asked.

“I did, but that was years ago.”

“What was the subject?” I asked.

“History and politics,” he replied.

“Ah!” I laughed. “So, you’re a failed politician?”

“Failed.” he said. ”Completely failed to be a politician.”

“You could get yourself exhibited at the Tate,” I suggested.

“Do you think so?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Like a Damien Hirst thing.”

“It’s an idea,” he agreed. “In the Tate? Just stand on the steps at the Tate?”

“Yeah,” I told him, realising he was thinking of the old Tate building. “In fact,” I said, “you should stand at the main entrance to Tate Modern – at the slope – and you might get a commission. You might get a commission to stand there for weeks on end.”

“Brilliant,” he said with little enthusiasm.

“Leicester Square is the wrong place for you,” I suggested. “This is the home of showbiz and Hollywood. But, if you go to Tate Modern, that’s the home of people who give lots of money for nothing. That’s your ideal market.”

“So that would be my attempt to advertise myself?” he asked.

“Is that too commercial?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I dunno. I probably need a seat or something. Do you think they’d give me a seat?”

“No,” I said, “you’re better to stand.”

“But it’s going to get knackering after standing for too long,” he said.

“But,” I explained, “if you’ve got a seat, it smacks of lack of cutting-edgeness.”

“You think so?” he asked me.

“I think so,” I told him.

“Basically, you’ve got the wrong market here,” I told him.

“You think so?” he asked.

“I think so,” I told him, “There was a story that Damien Hirst was on his way to see some people who wanted to commission him to create a work of art and he accidentally stood in some dog shit on the pavement outside the building and he went in and put the shoe with dog shit on it on the table and they were very impressed.”

“If there’s some dog shit, I could step in it,” he said trying, I think, to be helpful.

Message from the messenger with no message

“Nah,” I said. “That’s been done. This is original – what you’re doing here is very original and admirably meaningless. The important thing is it’s totally and utterly meaningless.”

“Of course it is,” he agreed. “Because that’s life for you. Life is totally and utterly meaningless.”

“How did you get the idea?” I asked.

“It just came to me one day,” he said, brightening up slightly. “It just came to me. I thought Why not? Why not do something completely pointless and meaningless?”

“How long ago was that?” I asked.

“About four years ago, I think,” he said, his enthusiasm dimming. “I’ve been doing this for four years.”

“Oh!” I said, surprised, “I’ve never seen you before…”

“I stopped doing it for years,” he explained. “I started four years ago, but then I didn’t bother for about two or three years.”

“Why?” I asked. “To create a demand?”

“No,” he explained. “I just stopped because I couldn’t be bothered.”

“Why not have a hat on the ground to collect money?” I asked. “Would that undermine the idea?”

“No,” he said. “I just haven’t got round to doing it.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Phil.”

“Phil what?”

“Phil Klein.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“London.”

“And you live in London?”

“I live in London.”

“Can we take a picture?” four passing girls asked Phil.

“Yeah,” he said, without much interest.

“You have a market here,” I told him. “You should be charging for this.”

The girls took their pictures.

“It spreads the word,” said Phil. “It spreads the word.”

“What word?” I asked.

“I dunno,” Phil replied. “There is no word. But it’s spreading whatever is there to be spread in its own kind of way. So this is like… yeah…”

“Where do you live?” I asked. “What area?”

“Hampstead,” Phil told me.

“Oh my God!” I laughed. “You’ve got too much money!”

“Not me,” Phil said. “My parents.”

“There’s Art somewhere here,” I mused. “Performance Art. What do your parents do? Are they something to do with Art?… Or maybe psychiatry?”

“They just earn money,” Phil said. “Doing stuff. Well, my dad earns money doing stuff.”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Erm… Thirty… nine,” Phil replied.

“You sure?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“You were a bit uncertain,” I said.

“No,” said Phil, “I just felt… It was a bit of a question… thirty nine.”

“You must have done something,” I suggested. “In an office or something?”

“No,” he told me, “I’ve literally done nothing in my life. This is as exciting as it gets for me. This is as exciting a journey, an adventure as…”

A passing girl took a photograph of the large question mark on the back of Phil’s placard.

Seeing the back of the man in Leicester Square

“Thankyou,” she said.

“It works quite well,” he told me. “You see, I have a question mark on the back and a statement on the front.”

“It might be a bit too multi-media,” I suggested.

“You think so?” asked Phil. “Too…”

“Too pro-active, perhaps,” I said.

“You think it’s too active?” asked Phil.

“You need to be more passive,” I said.

“Right,” said Phil.

“Ooh!” I said looking at my watch. “I have to be in a meeting in two minutes!”

“You’ve got to go in two minutes,” Phil told me, with no intonation in his voice.

“Let’s hope the iPhone recorded that,” I said. “If it didn’t, I’ll be back again! Are you here at the same time tomorrow?”

“I could be,” said Phil.

When I came out of my meeting an hour later, Leicester Square was more crowded and Phil and his placard had gone, like a single wave in the sea.

Putting the F in art films + a surrealist comedian mistakes himself for a chair

Martin Soan as Miss Haversham at comedy club Pull The Other One last night

I mentioned cult movie The Room in yesterday’s blog - a film which it might seem difficult to out-surreal.

But reality, as always, tends to be more unbelievable than fiction.

In the last of a trilogy of odd memories, mad inventor John Ward told me another tale yesterday about working as the projectionist for an independent cinema in the 1960s.

“Our boss used to screen a right load of old rubbish,” John says. “As in cheap but perhaps not cheerful.

“We had more than our fair share of ‘Continental’ offerings – as in stuff you had never, ever heard-of plus the added fun of subtitles.

“Our matinees used to attract a small, demented audience filled with the sort of characters who could have been in David Croft sitcoms.

“One afternoon, we were showing some French film that the poster, as always, claimed had great delights but in reality included no known form of coherent entertainment. There were nine living breathing mortals in the audience, including someone the box office staff had christened ‘Mad Martha’.

“It was a 5-reel film and we inadvertently screened Reel 5 in place of Reel 3 and nobody noticed.

“On her way out through the foyer, Mad Martha commented in all seriousness to the box office staff that Her in the nice cream blouse were a brilliant actress. That film were a masterpiece.”

I would be dubious about the truth of this story except that, eerily, exactly the same thing happened when I worked for Anglia Television, minus Martha.

In those days, feature films were screened from film reels on telecine machines, not off tape. During the screening of one late-night adventure movie with a complicated plot, the reels got scrambled and were shown in the order 1-2-5-3-4.

No-one complained.

The assumption by the Presentation Department was that people watching thought either that they had missed something in the complicated plot or that it was Art.

I did wonder when I later saw Quentin Tarentino’s excellent movie Pulp Fiction – where one central character is killed then comes back to life because the plot does a back-flip in time – if he had written the film in chronological order, realised it lacked tension, then simply swapped some of the pages round to make it more interesting.

All this would seem surreal except, last night, I went to the Pull The Other One comedy club and saw the former Frank Sanazi (sings like Sinatra; looks like Hitler) appear as orange-faced Tom Jones soundalike Tom Mones and Martin Soan appeared briefly as Miss Haversham from Great Expectations sitting in a chair. His costume included the chair. You had to be there. Allegedly the costume took a year to make. He was on stage for perhaps two minutes.

The critic Clive James once wrote of Martin Soan: “A total lack of any sense, rhyme or reason to the extent that the insignificance of this show completely escaped me… The funniest thing I have ever seen.”

I think I may have to go and have a lie down.

The talented man from “Viz” becomes every-man at the Edinburgh Fringe

In yesterday’s blog I suggested that character comedian Matt Roper, rather than playing one fully-rounded character for an entire 60-minute performance, should stage a show at next year’s Edinburgh Fringe featuring several of his characters – as a showcase for his talent.

After all, the Fringe is as much a showcase for individual talent as an opportunity to stage shows. Perhaps moreso.

Then, blow me, last night I went see former Viz editor Simon Donald perform in his show Simon Donald’s Dirty Great Fringepiece and he has done just that – his show is virtually a ready-made sales tape for a future TV series with him playing multiple characters or (less good an idea) multiple people playing different grotesques created by him.

I had seen Simon play individual characters at various of Bob Slayer’s sadly-deceased Doggetts gigs in London. But I had never seen him play a series of different characters packed tightly together.

As I blogged yesterday, seeing one person play different characters very close together really punches home a performer’s talent: if you see someone play different character monthly or occasionally, you appreciate the individual performances but you are not hit-between-the-eyes to such a great extent by the performer’s breadth of talent.

I am not talking about sketch shows which exist solely to reach a punchline; I am talking well-rounded character-based writing. Laura Solon’s award-winning 2005 Fringe show Kopfraper’s Syndrome: One Man and His Incredible Mind is a case in point.

I am not surprised that Simon Donald can create visually interesting and totally different characters quickly and with relatively simple props – he is, after all, the cartoon creator of many a unique Viz character. But I am surprised at his verbal dexterity in creating such a large number of totally different voices.

Cartoonists and actors tend not to have the same mindset.

Simon seems to have both talents.

Talented TV producers should form a queue to see Simon’s show.

…That might be quite a short queue, then.

Why I am pictured in Mensa Magazine (twice) holding a man with an erection

How did a man sporting an erect penis with a dog on the end of it get published (twice) in the current issue of Mensa Magazine, the glossy monthly publication for members of British Mensa?

And why am I holding the man?

Well, that’s an interesting question. Thankyou for asking.

Sit down with a cup of hot chocolate and pay close attention.

Preparing for Edinburgh Fringe shows in August tends to start way back in December or January each year.

I am organising Malcolm Hardee Week in the final week of the Fringe – basically two debates, two spaghetti-juggling contests (anything to get noticed at the over-crowded Fringe!) and a two-hour variety show during which the three annual Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards will be presented.

I am normally a shrinking wallflower where self-publicity is concerned but, because I am chairing the two Malcolm Hardee Debates and there are precious few other photo opportunities, I had some pictures taken, courtesy of lecturer Peter Cattrell, by photography students at St Martin’s College of Art (where, it turned out, no girl came from Greece, though they did have a thirst for knowledge).

I had brought along a giant dice box for no reason other than the fact it looked interesting. Student Cody Cai had brought along a pair of comedy spectacles and student Kerstin Diegel took a photo of me wearing the glasses and holding the box.

I remember thinking, “Oy! Oy! Malcolm Hardee could be Photoshopped into this, popping up out of the box!”

So now, dear reader, we have to take a time trip with wobbly special effects transitions back into the mists of last century – probably to the late 1990s, when the world was young and the Twin Towers still stood in New York…

London photographer David Tuck took some photos of comedian and club owner Malcolm Hardee, including an iconic one of Malcolm apparently doing shadow puppetry with his hands – you know the routine – you link your open hands together, flap them and it allegedly looks like a bird – except that the shadow on the wall behind Malcolm looks like a dog and, with the shadow of his arm included, it also looks like he has a giant penis rising out of his groin in the foreground… with a dog on the end of it.

David Tuck cannot remember exactly when the picture was taken, but it was a couple of weeks before Malcolm opened a short-lived comedy club in Harlesden, which would make it the late 1990s. Memories of Malcolm seldom come with exact dates.

David tells me: “The image Malcolm originally had in mind was that he would be doing a simple bird shape with his hands and a magnificent eagle would be the shadow image. This was before the days of Photoshop so, to get the image onto a piece of black and white photographic paper, I had to cut the image out of card and physically lay it on top of the picture during the darkroom process.

“My abilities with the scalpel weren’t exactly up to creating a photo-accurate eagle in full flight, so we talked about other possibilities and, when he mentioned a dog, I thought: Yeah, a dog I can do!

“I remember afterwards someone saying that it was funny because it appears to be coming out of Malcolm’s flies, like some sort of shadow penis. Just to set the record straight, that wasn’t the joke. I didn’t even notice until someone said it.”

From such random accidents do iconic photos come!

For anyone who knew Malcolm, it will come as no surprise that he never actually got round to paying David Tuck for the publicity photos he took and that this shadow puppet photo was used widely for years afterwards without David ever getting any money or even any credit for taking the photo.

When I used the photo on Malcolm’s website after he drowned in 2005, I found out David had taken it and have always tried to give him credit for it.

Around 2006, comic Brian Damage, at heart an arty sort, was playing around with images. Brian says:

“I was in the middle of my second or possibly third mid-life crisis. (You lose count after a while) It could have been age-related or something to do with giving up smoking or both.”

He played around with the David Tuck photo of Malcolm and basically ‘cartoonised’ it.

I thought it was excellent and got Vinny Lewis to design a poster using this image for all subsequent Malcolm Hardee shows at the Fringe.

Vinny had designed occasional artwork for Malcolm’s Up The Creek comedy club and had created the printed programme for both Malcolm’s funeral and the first Hackney Empire memorial show in 2006.

He added a coloured background to the cartoon and played with details.

So, when I got the St Martin’s photo back from Kerstin Diegel, I got Vinny to Photoshop the Malcolm shadow puppet image into the photo and the result is now available for The Scotsman or anyone else to publish to plug Malcolm Hardee Week at the Edinburgh Fringe.

‘Anybody else’ turned out to be Mensa Magazine who printed the image on the contents page of their July issue and, inside, to illustrate a piece on Malcolm Hardee Week.

I suspect it may be the first time Mensa Magazine has published a photo of a man displaying an apparent cartoon erection with a dog on the end of it. Their defence is clear – that even David Tuck and (possibly not even) Malcolm noticed that the shadow was of an erect penis.

It’s a funny old world.

You can see the photo here.

It was created by Kerstin Diegel, Cody Cai, David Tuck, Brian Damage and Vinny Lewis.

Nothing is ever simple.

Ian Hinchliffe: “You’ll never work here again” – Never any point asking WHY!

It is not often that a celebration of someone’s life includes a tribute by a belly dancer, four people smashing wine glasses with small hammers and two people with blood capsules in their mouths eating beer glasses with the result that apparent glass and blood spews down onto the stage, but Ian Hinchliffe was the sort of performance artist/comic/artist/musician/absurdist in whose memory this seemed an almost understated tribute.

Ian drowned while fishing on a lake in Arkansas on 3rd December last year.

An obituary written by his friends said he “was a performer who could bring a sense of menace, unpredictability and a surreal/absurd humour into any creative arena, unrivalled by any other artist of his time.”

He was indisputably - and perhaps again this understates the reality - mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Roger Ely was a friend and occasional co-performer. He organised yesterday’s six-hour event Ian Hinchliffe: The Memorial at Beaconsfield arts studio in London. As part of his tribute, Roger said Ian was “one of the most loveable people and one of the most difficult people” he had ever met. “He could be an evil sod,” he added, but one who created occasional “pieces of genius”.

Writer and performer Jim Sweeney was too Ill to be there yesterday, but sent a tribute saying: “He was the best of drunks and he was the worst of drunks.”

Dave Stephens is now a sculptor but was originally a performance artist often credited as an early forerunner of alternative comedy. He said that, in the early days performing with Ian, the routine was to “go down the pub, get pissed and see what happens”.

There were colourful reminiscences aplenty, including a tale of furniture being thrown out of a pub window and, when people went in to discover why, they found Ian with porridge coming out of his trousers because he was simulating an abortion.

I only met Ian a handful of times but, when I got chatting to Lois Keidan who was Director of Live Arts at the ICA in the 1990s, she told me he had once set fire to his own foot there. Why he did that she had no idea. But Why was perhaps always an unnecessary and unanswerable question in Ian Hinchliffe’s life.

Lois also told me a story about police going into the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith and saying to the staff: “There’s a man outside doing strange things in the roadworks.”

“Oh,” the police were told, “that’s just Ian Hinchliffe. It’s art.”

The police, to do them justice, apparently accepted this answer though exactly what “strange things” he was doing remain lost in the mists of anecdote.

At Beaconsfield yesterday, Simon Miles and Pete Mielniczek did a tribute performance in which a small plastic skull, perhaps not irrelevantly, quoted those famous lines from the Scottish play…

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

The indomitable Tony Green told a true story about Ian Hinchliffe performing at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith and, not for the first time, Ian was naked. He got hold of a chair and cut about three inches off one of its legs so it was unstable. He then got a broom handle and broke it in half. He managed to stuff about six inches of it up his arsehole, leaving half a broom handle protruding. He then balanced a full pint of beer on the chair, put both hands on the sides of the chair, leant forward so that his genitalia were in the pint of beer and lifted his feet off the ground so he was balancing.

“You’ll never work here again,” he was told afterwards.

I presume the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith was not the first venue to have told him that.

There is a YouTube video of Ian Hinchliffe performing in 1990 here.

The vagaries of life with a talented dead performance artist stroke comedian

After a morning involved in the intricacies of the English legal system – even with my shit-hot media solicitor who combines a fearsome reputation with a sense of humour and a love of Jonathan Swift – you need something different.

And I got that this afternoon.

Last month, I blogged about the death of performance artist cum comedian Ian Hinchliffe whose life is to be celebrated this Saturday (2nd July) at Beaconsfield arts studio in London.

The six-hour event – which I suspect may stray somewhere along the way into the area of a 1960s-style Happening – is being called Ian Hinchliffe: The Memorial and will probably (one can never be too certain about these things) start with a performance by Tony Green at 2.00pm.

The whole caboodle – music, comedy, art and mayhem will include a fully-restored screening of bizarre 1979 film The Poppy Seed Affair and should finish by 8.00pm

A generation ago, probably around 1990/1991, I was persuaded by the late, great Malcolm Hardee to go with him to see Ian Hinchliffe and Tony Green perform at a now long-forgotten comedy night called T’others at The Ship in Kennington, South London. I shot a video of part of the evening, but could not remember what was on it.

It has been twenty years, I have a shit memory and I had never used the video anywhere nor had I seen it since, largely because I have no way of watching the outdated Video-8 format it is on.

So, last week, I got the tape transferred by the redoubtable Stanley’s in Wardour Street, Soho, and it does indeed show Ian and Tony performing with glimpsed shots of Malcolm sitting in the audience and – no surprise here – going to the bar for a drink.

This afternoon, I gave two clips of Ian Hinchliffe’s performance to man-about-the-arts Roger Ely who seemed remarkably coherent for someone who only returned home yesterday, sleepless, from Glastonbury with a deep cut on his finger from accidentally stubbing his forefinger on an open razor in pitch darkness, very sore legs which never did get used to being pulled out of the mud for three days and tales of a great performance by B.B.King and the glory that was and still is The Crazy World of Arthur Brown.

Roger is organising Ian Hinchliffe: The Memorial which is a brave, if not foolhardy, thing for him to do.

But, then, he is not short on bravery. In earlier days, Roger did share a house with Ian Hinchliffe for a couple of years and was only slightly nonplussed when Ian pushed him out of a car at 70 mph. Such are the vagaries of life with a talented performance artist stroke comedian.

Saturday should be an experience.

Could spaghetti-juggling have a future?

There are going to be two spaghetti-juggling events held as part of Malcolm Hardee Week at the Edinburgh Fringe in August and, last week, Alan from Johnstone got in touch with Tom Morton’s afternoon show on BBC Radio Scotland to say “Many years ago I discovered a unique talent while seated at the kitchen dining table…”

Yup.

It was spaghetti-juggling.

So the momentum is building, something that is always useful in the art – or possibly it is the science – of spaghetti-juggling

The two Malcolm Hardee Spaghetti-Juggling Contests on 24th/25th August also now have a sponsor. The far-sighted Blue Moon cafe/bar in trendy Broughton Street, Edinburgh, has offered to supply spaghetti for the event.

Juggler Mat Ricardo’s enterprising chum Julie-ann Laidlaw also suggested to me the bright idea (which I will, of course, pretend was mine) that, in the spirit of turning food wastage into art, I should donate the remnants of the contest to someone who can craft a piece of sculpture out of the mess left behind.

I did contact Edinburgh College of Art about this but, apparently, they feel spaghetti-juggling is a wee bit beneath them.

So I am now open to offers – an e-mail to john@thejohnfleming will get me – food sculpting with the late Malcolm Hardee freely providing the pasta-based raw materials – remnants of 45 minutes of spaghetti-juggling on 24th/25th August at the Edinburgh Fringe.

If Tracey Emin can make her name with an unmade bed and Damien Hirst can become a millionaire on the back of a shark in formaldehyde, then spaghetti-sculpting could be the next big trend in Art.

Quite what we would do with the resultant piece of high art I don’t know, but my tendency would be to try to auction it off in aid of Scots critic and polymath Kate Copstick’s Mama Bashiara charity which is already set to receive any profits from the delights that are Malcolm Hardee Week.

The two debates, the two spaghetti-juggling contests and the two-hour variety show are being staged in Edinburgh as part of  the too-too wonderful Free Festival, so there’s no charge for participants or punters but, if they like what they see, an appreciative audience can bung money – coins or preferably notes – into a bucket.

So long as one does not lose one’s dignity.

I think that’s so important.