I got a message late last night from Noel Faulkner: “I will call you tomorrow to talk about losing the club.”
London’s Comedy Cafe is closing at the end of this month, after 26 years.
“We have been negotiating this for the last fucking year,” he told me. “I thought the comedy could stay, but the guy is a prick.”
“So why is it?” I asked. “The lease has ended on the building?”
“Yeah. They bid £80,000 more than we did and we can’t meet those figures, because comedy is not doing that well, you know?”
“So when exactly,” I asked, “does the Comedy Cafe close?”
“New Years Eve.”
“With a big party?” I asked.
“There will be a party on Tuesday 3rd January?”
“Where?”
“In the Comedy Cafe, because we have nine days to pull out all the equipment.”
“You have,” I asked, “been looking round for other places?”
“Yeah, well yes. But you might as well be looking up your own fucking asshole. Everyone is a fucking idiot – except me, of course.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Well, people go: Oh yeah, yeah, great. And they want to rent me rooms. And I tell them: Comedy costs me £600 a night to put on, not counting PR. I can’t afford the rent. You are going to take the bar money. But they don’t understand it and Shoreditch is up its own ass.”
“You would prefer to stay in Shoreditch?” I asked.
“Well, that’s where we are known. I can’t move to fucking Tierra del Fuego, you know? You need to stay around where people know you cos, y’know, 26 fucking years.”
“And the landlord,” I said, “is just interested in the money – obviously.”
“Of course!” said Noel. “What do you think he’s interested in? Comedy?”
“And the new leaseholder?” I asked.
Noel – smiling in the face of adversity
“The new owner wants me to stay in, because he can’t get people in his bar early – he owns 10 pubs in Shoreditch. But he doesn’t want to pay us anything for the fixtures and fittings. We re-wired the building. We put in new floors and toilets And he has already gazumped us, so I’m not going to turn round and say: Oh! I’m going to help you do good business now, even though you fucked me over and given me nothing for goodwill. So it doesn’t look like it could work with him.”
“Is there,” I asked, “a slight possibility it might?”
“It doesn’t look good. He hasn’t got back to me in two weeks. So it’s probably the end of the Comedy Cafe, unless I can find something else. I can’t really talk about this. I’m so fucking wound up, John. It’s so really annoying. The whole thing is fucking annoying. It’s 26 years. Boom! Whoom! Bang! Nothing I could do. We never made the big money. Big names play your club once and then, after that, they’re too busy to come back to you.
“There’s very little support in the comedy business. A bunch of cunts. No better than the fucking City Boys, to be honest. An awful lot of wankers in the business.”
I laughed.
“But there are,” Noel re-emphasised. “Like (he named a promoter). And the other fuckers. They’re just fucking horrible people.”
“Why are they horrible?” I asked. “They’re just trying to make a living.”
“Well,” suggested Noel, “it’s screwing comics out of their fees to make a living. Is that OK? That’s a ridiculous statement, John. The judge asks: Why did you rob a bank? – Oh, I’m just trying to make a living, yer honour! – Oh, OK. No problem there! So, no, that’s a terrible argument, John.”
(A version of this piece was also published by Indian news site We Speak News)
Bobby Valentino – when Young at Heart
This morning, Bob Diamond of Barclays Bank resigned because of the interest rate fixing scandal, which most ordinary people might consider fraud. Apparently it was not legally fraud and, of course, I would not dream of implying that anything illegal was done by anyone. Clearly, in the case of Barclays Bank, everything which was done was done in a perfectly legal way – even if, to ordinary people, it was amoral and arguably immoral.
Amorality and lateral thinking where money is concerned, of course, is not limited to the banking industry. The movie industry and the music business are notorious for creative thinking where money is concerned.
Last week, I was chatting to the superb violinist Bobby Valentino in London.
I think I first saw Bobby perform when he was part of the Hank Wangford band in the mid 1980s. He is arguably most famous for his violin intro to The Bluebells’ 1993 release of their song Young at Heart.
This resulted in a 2002 court case in which Bobby claimed he had composed the very distinctive violin intro and that it made a significant enough difference to the song to be considered an original contribution. He won the case and won 25% of the writer’s royalties, backdated to 1993.
You might think that would have made him a lot of money.
Last week, though, he told me it had not.
“How much do you reckon you are owed?” I asked.
“Maybe between half a million and three quarters of a million pounds,” he replied.
“But you won the court case,” I said.
“You like surreal comedy,” he said, “so you’ll like this.”
“Mmmmm….” I said.
“I won the court case,” he told me. “The publishers were ordered to disclose their statements and PRS (the Performing Right Society) volunteered their statements. But they are, to be charitable, surreal. Young at Heart seems to have been the only pop song in history that didn’t earn anywhere near the expected royalties. On average, the figures are about 5% of what you’d expect them to be.”
“How do people calculate the expected royalties on a song?” I asked.
“By comparing it with other songs which sold similar amounts and had roughly the same amount of radio and TV play,” he replied. Bobby studied Mathematics at York University.
“There was a very high-profile TV ad for VW,” he explained, “which should have made about £80,000 for the song on just one run, from 14th February to 31st March 1993. The PRS statement for that first run shows less than £2,000 to the writer. And there was a second run of the same ad from 5th October to 4th December 1993. That should have made another £70,000.
“So how much did that second run make?” I asked.
“There are no royalties shown for that at all,” said Bobby. “None.”
“They claim there were zero royalties from the transmission run of a high-profile VW ad over two months?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Bobby. “And zero royalties for the song from America. It wasn’t a hit in America. It was only a ‘college hit’, so there would not have been a lot due. But there should have been something. Plus there were a load of British TV shows which used the song and which played in America – Midsomer Murders, all that sort of stuff. But there’s absolutely not one penny from America on the publisher’s statements or the PRS statements.”
“But Young at Heart is like Blur’s Song 2,” I interrupted. “The sort of song where TV shows and promo & ad makers use the opening and not the song itself. Song 2 has the Wooo-Hoooooo! opening bit and Young at Heart has your violin intro.”
“Yeah,” agreed Bobby. “The number of times they use the Young at Heart opening – Diddle-diddle diddle-diddle diddle-yup-de-yup – in You’ve Been Framed!… When people are falling over, they use the violin’s Diddle-diddle diddle-diddle diddle-yup-de-yup.
“People have said to me,” Bobby laughed. “Surely there must be something dodgy with the figures that are being provided? and I tell them: Well, YOU may say that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.
“PRS’s excuse is that every UK radio station failed to report to them correctly, every UK TV station failed to report to them correctly and every overseas rights society failed to report to them correctly.”
“Who’s saying this?” I asked.
“PRS.”
“What’s the explanation?”
“Well,” said Bobby. “Someone suggested to me that the upper management at PRS has no idea what the lower echelons are doing. But that can’t be true, can it? I’m sure PRS are honourable guys. But the lower guys have come up with these statements of literally 5% of what you’d expect. You can only laugh.
“I get a bit of money. But what I should have got was the money backdated to 1993 and these statements are surreal: 5% of what you’d expect.
“In fact, I’ve got paperwork that contradicts the PRS figures, but apparently that paperwork is ‘in error’.”
“PRS is saying the EMI paperwork is in error?” I asked, incredulous.
“Yeah. And they claim the whole song made £25,000 in the first year. In that first year, it should have made about a third of a million pounds. And it would have made £2 million over ten years.”
“It’s PRS who are due to pay you the money?” I asked.
“No,” said Bobby, “it’s the publishers and the main writer who are due to pay me the money. The publishers did not disclose their performance statements. You get statements for Mechanicals (which is sales), for Synch (when something is part of a TV ad) and for Performance. Hit records usually earn considerably more in Performance royalties than they do in Mechanical royalties. And the publishers did not disclose their own Performance statements.
“So they (Clive Banks Music, Anxious Music (Dave Stewart’s publishing company) and Universal Music) relied on the PRS statements. They said The PRS statements are good enough, because PRS is supposed to be Blue Chip. But, like I say, the figures read like they are from some obscure surreal comedy.
“Young at Heart was a hit in Denmark. You’d expect maybe £25,000 in writer royalties for a hit in Denmark but the writer supposedly only earned £185.
“It was a hit in Portugal. The writer supposedly earned £141 – and the VW TV ad was also shown in Portugal which made the song No1 in the air-play and sales charts!
“It was a big hit in Italy. PRS claimed the writer was only due £31. There was a friend of mine in a bar in Italy and he asked about the song and the whole bar just started singing it – in English.
“When you average out all the amounts that are missing, it works out I got about 5% of what you’d expect.”
“And you reckon you might be down maybe £500,000 to £750,000 on it?”
“Yes,” said Bobby, “Of course, there are always cock-ups. It didn’t help that the publisher changed on 4th March 1993. Maybe, in that year, what might have happened is that we got shown the statements for money due before 4th March instead of for the whole year, but the odd thing is that PRS have matched the publisher’s statements to the penny. And that is weird. Statements never match each other to the penny. They might up a fiver; they might be down a fiver; it all evens out. But, in the real world, they never ever match to the penny.
Bobby Valentino smiles at surreal figures last week
“PRS claim that the sub-publisher changed from MCA to EMI on 31st Dec 1993 but I have a statement from EMI Music which shows them collecting royalties in July 1993 because, in fact, the change happened on 4th March 1993.
“This thing where the figures match exactly despite all those complications is just plain weird.
“I’ve done calculations on lots of other songs in the past and they’re never quite right. They can be a fiver or a tenner out each time. It’s up and down – swings and roundabouts – but these ones match to the penny. That never happens normally. If you don’t know the system, you might think the fact that they match seems reasonable: Well, they’re supposed to match, you would think.
“But not in the real world. For them to match to the penny is bizarre.”
I certainly have to admire Bobby’s ability to face the bizarre and the surreal.
What is even more bizarre is that I know someone else in the music business who tells me that there was a meeting of the Music Publishers’ Association shortly after that 2002 court case in which the judge (who was musically-trained) awarded Bob 25% of the royalties on Young at Heart.
“They were up in arms,” my friend told me. “They were going: We can’t have musicians getting royalties as writers! The world will fall apart if musicians get royalties as writers! And their whole vibe was: The judge got it wrong. So maybe someone decided to ‘put it right’.
“Someone told me PRS really stands for the Publisher’s Rip-off Society and not the Performing Right Society.”
But surely she must be wrong.
I believe that, like the movie distribution business, the music publishing business is an honourable world filled with honourable people.
In round figures, there are 4,000 cinema screens in the UK.
In China – a vastly larger country – there are only 6,000 screens.
But, within the next five years, China will have 20,000 screens and will become the second biggest film industry in the world after the US – larger than India’s Bollywood. In the last year alone, there were 500 films made in China.
I had a meal in a Chinese restaurant in Northwood last night, not far from ’the bunker’, and got home to watch yet more on the BBC News channel about a world economic situation that is barely – or perhaps not – under control. All the ‘advanced’ countries seem to be in debt that will stretch decades into the future.
But China is sitting on vast amounts of money. The irony of a Communist country becoming rich on capitalism.
The last decade was all about China making things but the next decade will be all about China owning things.
Which reminds me of something a history teacher once said as a throwaway line at my school when I was about 13.
He said: “Civilisation and power moves westwards because invading armies have always ridden westwards, following the daylight.”
Trite, of course.
But, in the northern hemisphere, it is roughly true.
At the moment, power is moving from North America to the Pacific Rim (a phrase that always sounds to me like a dubious sexual practice).
What confuses me is that the Chinese are very expansionist of late.
They have been putting money into Africa, especially into very suspect regimes, for a couple of decades. They are building an aircraft carrier or, at least, have refitted a Russian one. They are now investing heavily in the West.
This seems very un-Chinese. The Great Wall was built to keep the uncivilised long-nosed foreign devils out and to preserve the integrity of China which, with quite a lot of justification, looked inward at itself as the only truly civilised place.
Japan was always the regional expansionist power, not China.
Of course, there was the invasion of Tibet in 1949, but that seemed an unfortunate exception to the rule and a knee-jerk reaction after Mao Tse-tung’s Communists took power.
It seems to be very un-Chinese to be expansionist. It is a great mystery.
Though, sitting in a Chinese restaurant in Northwood last night, it was secondary as a mystery in my mind to the greater ongoing mystery of why the Chinese – who, let’s face it, invented pretty much everything – never invented the teacup handle not the knife-and-fork. And why on earth were chopsticks thought to be a good idea in a nation where the staple diet was and is based around small grains of rice?
Doyenne of Edinburgh Fringe comedy critics Kate Copstick has an interesting piece published in Scotland on Sunday today in which she says:
“What is that sound you hear? Ah yes, it is the Spirit of the Fringe being throttled by Big Business. Not a nice sound.”
When Copstick presented the Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards on Saturday night, she attacked the large comedy promoters and four ladies who may or may not have been from one of those large promoters (the one Copstick had just named a few seconds before) walked out.
There has been a lot of talk this year, as in many recent years, of the Fringe being destroyed because comedy has become Big Business. But, this year, it seems to have had more urgency. People are openly talking of alternatives, while the two young whippersnapper alternatives to the big paid venues – the Free Fringe and the Free Festival – seem to gain in strength each year. Why, there is even now an established alternative to the large corporate-sponsored comedy awards!
Comic, promoter and Malcolm Hardee Award nominee Bob Slayer, who performs as part of the Free Festival, tells me he was inspired to become part of the comedy business when he read Malcolm Hardee’s autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake. I think what may have attracted him was another excuse for excess.
At the Malcolm Hardee Awards Show on Saturday, his trouserless crowd-surf and unexpected contribution to Puppetry of the Penis’s ‘hamburger’ routine was not out of character.
For ten years before comedy, Bob was in the music business under various guises, latterly managing Japanese band Electric Eel Shock. They and he appeared in the movie Killer Bitch, which may or may not be categorised as comedy, depending on the extent of your taste for oddity.
But Bob’s straddling of the music and comedy business – he likes a bit of a straddle, does Bob – has given him an interesting insight into the way the comedy industry functions in the UK and particularly in Edinburgh:
“The music industry, we all know,” he told me yesterday, “is evil, evil, evil.”
“What the music industry does is sign a band who sell loads of records and then the industry cleverly accounts so the band gets none of it. They steal your money, but at least they help you make it first; they steal money they have helped to create. Whereas the comedy industry dips directly into your pocket before you have done anything. The comedy industry is double evil.
“They have the same horrible accounting ways as the music industry. But the difference is that at least the music industry make the money before they steal it, whereas the comedy industry and in particular the Edinburgh Fringe industry – and it is an industry – steals it before the performer even makes it and there’s no guarantee you’ll make it back.
“They call themselves promoters but they’re not. They rent rooms. They’re rack-rent landlords. They rent their rooms by the hour and the minimum to get an hour in one of those rooms is £100… ten shows in a day and that’s £1,000 a day and that’s a minimum for a small broom cupboard and then that money is spent on propping up an unnecessary PR, propping up unnecessary posters. All of the Edinburgh Fringe is paid for by the performers.
“I think it’s institutionally evil. The individual people doing it believe Oh, we’re doing the right thing. They’re able to justify it to themselves because nobody’s making absolute masses of money. But they are taking money from people before the money is made.
“Comedy lags behind music. You had punk in 1978 and you had alternative comedy in 1981/1982… I spent the last ten years watching the music industry change because artists realised Whoa! We’re being treated really badly! We’re propping this up but we’re being ripped off.
“The music industry has turned itself inside out… Universal, Sony, BMG still exist but they’re more in service to the artists who say No. We want a better deal. You’ve had it really good for a long while but been really inefficient.
“The music industry used to sign ten acts, throw money at the wall and one of the bands might work. The comedy industry model is Let’s have ten acts give us all their money up front, then we’ll throw their money at the wall and one of them might work.
“Comedians are accepting this. What dickheads we all are!
I got a Facebook message from Ben Peel in Bradford, saying:
“I would love you to go check out my home-made video from my debut single here. It will sure make you smile. I have currently just released my debut album – which can be previewed here. ”
I don’t know Ben Peel nor his band The Wool City Folk Club, but his video and songs are interesting.
Quite soon some unknown person is going to achieve worldwide fame and become a millionaire through YouTube clips and subsequent audio or video downloads. Maybe the Arctic Monkeys have already done it, but only on a limited scale.
Perhaps in a couple of years time, Ben Peel will be a multi-millionaire.
Or maybe not.
The world is changing fast but no-one knows what the fuck is going on or what they’re supposed to be doing.
Shortly before Apple announced their new iCloud service, I wrote a blog in which I mentioned the on-going death of the traditional record industry – by which I meant vinyl, tapes, CDs and DVDs sold in shops.
The blog resulted in some interesting feedback.
Hyphenate creative Bob Slayer (he’s a comedian-promoter-rock group manager) reacted:
“It is at worst a myth and at best very misleading to say that the record industry is dying – there is more demand for music then ever. What has happened over the last ten years is that the music industry has completely reinvented itself. The X-Factor has had an effect and a smaller number of pop artists are selling a high number of records. They still operate in a similar way to the traditional industry.
“But everywhere else has radically changed so that the artist (and their management) can play a much more hands-on role in controlling their own careers.”
Mr Methane, the world’s only professional farter, who knows a thing or two about self-promotion and has made his own music CDs produced by former Jethro Tull drummer Barrie Barlow, tells me:
“Large record labels no longer have the money to keep well-known acts on retainers or publishing contracts like they used to and have pressed the ejector seat. New and well-known acts are not as a rule getting huge piles of money thrown at them to go away and make an album. The Stone Roses’ great rock ’n’ roll heist, where they made one decent album then got a shed load of money advanced to make another and did sweet FA, just would not happen in today’s economic climate – or at least it would be highly unlikely.”
We have entered the entrance hall of an iTunes world of downloads with megastars and small self-producing, self-promoting unknowns where good middle-ranking performers and groups will potentially be squeezed out. It is much like comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe, where the big TV names and unknowns on the Free Fringe and Free Festival pull in crowds, but it is increasingly tough for very good, experienced middle-rankers with no TV exposure.
Ben Peel, just starting out in the music business, says:
“The digital realm does not have time for people who are solely musicians. You have to evolve into some type of super musician / marketing guru to be able make an impact amongst people. I have to be 50% musician, 50% marketing and branding. The digital realm is creating a new generation of musician: one-man machines cutting out the middle-men. The downside is that the middle-men had collateral – and contacts.”
Self-promotion ability is vital, though Ben thinks e-mails are outdated in publicity terms.
“I do a gig… and send an email out… I get ten people there…. I do a gig and throw out a 30 second YouTube short… one a week on the run-up to a gig…. I get two hundred people to attend and the exposure of the viral promoting and people re posting is priceless…. You cannot buy ‘word of mouth’ promoting …. you can only inspire it through something quirky/ original/ funny/ catchy etc.”
Bob Slayer manages not only the wonderful Japanese rock group Electric Eel Shock but also internet phenomenon Devvo and tells me:
“At his height, Devvo was achieving over a million hits on every YouTube clip we put online. We had no control over who was viewing them but, as they were mostly passed around between friends, he found his natural audience. Devvo is not really understood outside the UK, so that massive following came largely from the UK and predominantly in the north. It meant that, he could easily sell-out medium sized venues anywhere north of Birmingham and strangely also in Wales but, for example, we struggled to sell tickets in Brighton.”
Financially-shrewd Mr Methane has so far failed to dramatically ‘monetise’ the more than ten million worldwide hits on just one of several YouTube clips of his Britain’s Got Talent TV appearance. but he sold shedloads of CDs and DVDs via his website after appearances on shock jock Howard Stern’s American radio and TV shows because small local radio stations across the US then started playing his tracks. They were small local stations, but there were a lot of them.
The fact Mr Methane made a lot of money online, sitting at home in Britain, after very specifically local US radio exposure is interesting, though.
At the bottom of his e-mails, Ben Peel has a signature:
“Dwarves are like tents… a lot easier to get out of the bag than they are to put back in.”
Yes indeed. And that is very true with new technology. But it made me remember something else.
Years ago, I attended a Writers’ Guild of Great Britain meeting where the speaker’s message was “The way to make money is not to think big but to think small.”
He suggested that one way to make money was to create a weekly five or ten minute audio insert which could be run within local US radio shows. If anyone could come up with an idea, made in Britain, which would be of interest to Americans on a weekly basis, you could sell it to local US stations at a very low price.
If you tried to sell the mighty PBS network a weekly half hour show for £2,000 it was unlikely they would buy it.
But any small local US radio station could afford to pay £5 for a weekly five or ten minute insert. If you could sell that same insert to 499 other small local US radio stations (not competing against each other because they are small purely local stations), you would be grossing £2,500 per week for creating a five or ten minute item. And you could distribute it down a telephone line.
If you could persuade the stations to buy it for £10 – around $15 – still throwaway money – then, of course, you would be making £5,000 per week.
The trick was to price low and sell in volume.
That was before iTunes, which became successful by that very same model of micro-pricing. It was worth buying a single music track if it only cost 79c in the US or 79p in the UK. If iTunes had priced a single music track at £1.60 in the UK, they would almost certainly have sold less than half as many units, so would have grossed less money.
Think small. Think cheap. Think volume.
Modern technology allows ordinary bands to record, mix, cut and put their own tracks on iTunes alongside music industry giants. It also allows people in New Zealand to listen to and watch Ben Pool on YouTube just as easily as people in Bradford can see him play a live gig.
Just as some comedians are looking into e-publishing, bypassing traditional publishers, Ben Pool in Bradford and local bands in South East London can now expand beyond selling their own CDs after gigs and could reach a worldwide paying audience of millions with no music industry middle-men.
A week ago, I saw Paul Astles perform again, this time with his seven-man band Shedload of Love in their monthly gig at The Duke pub on Creek Road, Deptford, not far from Malcolm Hardee’s old Up The Creek comedy club. They also play the Wickham Arms in Brockley every month. They are astonishingly good. Formed in 2004, they recently recorded an album at Jools Holland’s studio in Greenwich.
Both the Paul Astles bands are world-class, playing mostly locally but, if promoted on the internet, they could garner a worldwide following with no music industry middle-men.
There are, of course, as with anything involving creativity and cyberspace, those big words IF and COULD.
Apparently plans are “well advanced” for Steve Coogan to play British porn baron Paul Raymond in a film directed by the extraordinarily prolific Michael Winterbottom – they previously worked together on the excellent 24 Hour Party Peoplein which Coogan impersonated Tony Wilson to a tee. I encountered Tony Wilson when I was working at Granada TV and Coogan’s voice was uncannily spot-on though I found the hair strangely unsettling. Paul Raymond had a hairstyle even more extravagant than Tony Wilson, so this could be the start of a movie hair trilogy.
Willetts said he originally wanted to entitle his book Panties Inferno after a long-ago American burlesque revue but, mystifyingly, there were legal problems.
I heard about both the planned movie and the book title last night at a publicity event for the book on a suitably sweaty night in Soho. Other long-ago US burlesque show titles loved by Willetts because they tried to make strip shows classy were Julius Teaser and Anatomy & Cleopatra.
Those were the days.
Paul Raymond also tried to make strip shows seem classy – “nudity without crudity” was the phrase he used. And he is a perfect movie subject – larger than life and with pretensions beyond his art. The best biographies are often akin to naff 1950s travelogues:
Paul Raymond – Land of Contrasts…
When he was 13, he wanted to be a Catholic priest – so maybe his later porn career ironically turned out to be less sexually seedy than it might have done. And, in latter days, he bankrolled Mark Thatcher’s failed motor racing career. Perhaps as a thankyou, he was once invited to Downing Street by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as “an exemplary entrepreneur”.
When he got rich, he inevitably bought a boat and even tried to give that class by naming it ‘Get ‘em Off’ – but in Latin. His girlfriend Fiona Richmond’s mother was, at the time, a teacher in a convent and got the nuns to translate the words into Latin, though quite how she managed this without suspicions being aroused remains a complete mystery to me.
I only went to the Raymond Revuebar once, in the 1980s, when it was hosting alternative comedy shows. My clear memory is that regular comedy evenings were being run there by a young Eddie Izzard, though a quick Google tells me it was the Comic Strip.
Who knows?
In its early days, alternative comedy in the UK overlapped with dodgy Soho clubs.
In his early days, before the Revuebar opened, Paul Raymond had been a theatrical agent/producer with a winning formula he called ‘the comic, the conjurer and the girl with her tits out’.
In an interview in a 1969 LWT series called On The Record, Paul Raymond was interviewed by Alan Watson and rather bizarrely compared stripping to stand-up comedy. He said (I paraphrase): “Comedians tell gags to get laughs. Stripping is like comedy. If the act isn’t having the desired effect, then the stripper has to work harder.”
No wonder Margaret Thatcher thought he was an exemplary entrepreneur.
But the character Paul Willetts chatted about from the Soho ‘scene’ of that time who most interested me was not Paul Raymond but his acquaintance Paul Lincoln, an Australian who made his name in the ring as wrestler Dr Death, then started and co-owned the legendary 2i’s coffee bar in Old Compton Street, Soho – birthplace of UK Rock n Roll.
Paul Lincoln died in January this year but, back when Paul Raymond was starting his seminal Revuebar in Walker’s Court in 1958 – allegedly the first strip club in Britain – Lincoln was promoting wrestling bouts around the country as well as running the 2i’s.
The two Pauls – Raymond and Lincoln – had a falling-out over an allegedly genuine German aristocrat – a baron – who wrestled on Lincoln’s UK circuit. The baron lived in a flat above the 2i’s and had a pet cheetah which he took for walks in Hyde Park.
These were innocent days.
The Raymond Revuebar, at the time, had novelty acts performing in its entrance area and Raymond effectively nicked the baron from Lincoln and started having wrestling bouts in the Revuebar entrance. Not only that, but he got the baron to train his cheetah to join the strippers on stage and undo girls’ undergarments with its teeth.
These were, indeed, the much more innocent, golden days before Health & Safety rules kicked in.
The Raymond Revuebar also reportedly featured a horse removing girls’ underwear with its teeth – sugar lumps were attached to relevant parts of the underwear to encourage the horse.
What encouraged the cheetah or how they got the horse into the club I don’t know.
Some of life’s most intriguing questions are doomed never to be answered.
(There is a follow-up to this blog HERE; and the comedy industry website Chortle picked up on this blog as a news item HERE.)
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 