joined late by a dark-haired girl with a distinctive gypsy look: high-piled black hair, dark-rimmed eyes, a fortune in loose change worn on chains around her waist and neck. He introduced Liana as the Revuebar’s ‘big vedette’.
Liana, it turned out, was a snake-charming spesh act: she performed with three boa-constrictors and a python while shedding her clothes and, despite her name and the exotica, talked in a homely North-country accent (Huddersfield–Barnsley, would have been my guess).
‘I have a self-imposed rule of not stripping off completely,’ I remember Liana announcing at one point. ‘Nothing full-frontal or risqué. Straight Τ and A only. I have always worked on that principle – I look on it as my insurance in life. Who knows – you might one day be prime minister!’
‘She’s doing her f-f-f-fire act when we do the turn-around,’ Raymond said, covering the girl’s hand with his own, which was noticeably hairless and weighted with gold sovereigns. ‘Sets fire to a carpet then boogie-woo-woo-woogies on it. Eats fire. Going to c-c-cost us a wedge in insurance. S-s-some versatile girl, this one. Sticks a broom up her arse and sweeps the stage for an encore, eh babes? Finish your e-education, she would. You should pop round.’
The point I’m trying to make is that, not knowing what wewere supposed to be looking for, Fay and I regularly failed to see what was staring us in the face. You could have told us shit was sugar in those days and we would have believed you. We took it all at face value.
Toot, for instance. Cocaine. Happy dust. I wouldn’t have recognised it if it had jumped up and played ‘Ole Man River’ on the spoons. Or ‘jazz woodbines’, as joints used to be called when they were just making the crossover from the jazzers to the pop boys, and the pop boys’ blissed-out chalky faces were just starting to mingle with the showbix ‘Mantan’ at our parties.
When I came across some musicians soaking gauze from inhalers for the hit of benzedrine it gave them and they told me it was a new kind of tea they were trying, what did I know? I believed them.
Self-analysis, navel-gazing of any description, had never been my strong suit. But it’s pretty obvious to me now that I started bringing names from the shows home out of a sense of guilt, as a way of keeping my mother happy, in the first instance.
My mother, though, was never happy being merely a passive recipient. From the beginning she organised sing-songs, forfeits, ham-and-egg cook-ins (we were never that orthodox), charades.
Unfazed by having some of the biggest entertainment names in the world in front of her – and a not-untypical gathering might include Noel Coward, Sophie Tucker, Danny La Rue, Michael Caine, Peter Sellers, Rudolph Nureyev, various Beatles – she’d call for her banjo and knock out some of the oldtime numbers: ‘When It’s Nighttime in Italy It’s Wednesday Over Here’, ‘If I Had My Life to Live Over, I’d Live Over a Delicatessen’ (which John Lannon always particularly requested, although I suspect it’s not the kind of information to set Jez, Hicky, Caro and the other media monkeys’ pulses racing.
(It certainly didn’t seem to do a great deal for the girl employed by Lennon’s chief American biographer when she tracked me down here – I found her peering through the wisteria into the window one morning when I came back from doing the shopping. ‘Oh brilliant ,’ she said through a watery smile,sneaking a quick glance at the train times she had inked onto her inner-wrist.)
Without us ever doing anything to consciously promote it, Fay and I found we’d got a reputation for being the most happening after-hours spot in London.
Where we lived was in no way grand – nothing like as grand as most of the people who came there were used to. On the other hand, it wasn’t totally predictable.
Having (or at least affecting) a rather advanced contemporary taste in decoration, my mother
Liana, it turned out, was a snake-charming spesh act: she performed with three boa-constrictors and a python while shedding her clothes and, despite her name and the exotica, talked in a homely North-country accent (Huddersfield–Barnsley, would have been my guess).
‘I have a self-imposed rule of not stripping off completely,’ I remember Liana announcing at one point. ‘Nothing full-frontal or risqué. Straight Τ and A only. I have always worked on that principle – I look on it as my insurance in life. Who knows – you might one day be prime minister!’
‘She’s doing her f-f-f-fire act when we do the turn-around,’ Raymond said, covering the girl’s hand with his own, which was noticeably hairless and weighted with gold sovereigns. ‘Sets fire to a carpet then boogie-woo-woo-woogies on it. Eats fire. Going to c-c-cost us a wedge in insurance. S-s-some versatile girl, this one. Sticks a broom up her arse and sweeps the stage for an encore, eh babes? Finish your e-education, she would. You should pop round.’
The point I’m trying to make is that, not knowing what wewere supposed to be looking for, Fay and I regularly failed to see what was staring us in the face. You could have told us shit was sugar in those days and we would have believed you. We took it all at face value.
Toot, for instance. Cocaine. Happy dust. I wouldn’t have recognised it if it had jumped up and played ‘Ole Man River’ on the spoons. Or ‘jazz woodbines’, as joints used to be called when they were just making the crossover from the jazzers to the pop boys, and the pop boys’ blissed-out chalky faces were just starting to mingle with the showbix ‘Mantan’ at our parties.
When I came across some musicians soaking gauze from inhalers for the hit of benzedrine it gave them and they told me it was a new kind of tea they were trying, what did I know? I believed them.
Self-analysis, navel-gazing of any description, had never been my strong suit. But it’s pretty obvious to me now that I started bringing names from the shows home out of a sense of guilt, as a way of keeping my mother happy, in the first instance.
My mother, though, was never happy being merely a passive recipient. From the beginning she organised sing-songs, forfeits, ham-and-egg cook-ins (we were never that orthodox), charades.
Unfazed by having some of the biggest entertainment names in the world in front of her – and a not-untypical gathering might include Noel Coward, Sophie Tucker, Danny La Rue, Michael Caine, Peter Sellers, Rudolph Nureyev, various Beatles – she’d call for her banjo and knock out some of the oldtime numbers: ‘When It’s Nighttime in Italy It’s Wednesday Over Here’, ‘If I Had My Life to Live Over, I’d Live Over a Delicatessen’ (which John Lannon always particularly requested, although I suspect it’s not the kind of information to set Jez, Hicky, Caro and the other media monkeys’ pulses racing.
(It certainly didn’t seem to do a great deal for the girl employed by Lennon’s chief American biographer when she tracked me down here – I found her peering through the wisteria into the window one morning when I came back from doing the shopping. ‘Oh brilliant ,’ she said through a watery smile,sneaking a quick glance at the train times she had inked onto her inner-wrist.)
Without us ever doing anything to consciously promote it, Fay and I found we’d got a reputation for being the most happening after-hours spot in London.
Where we lived was in no way grand – nothing like as grand as most of the people who came there were used to. On the other hand, it wasn’t totally predictable.
Having (or at least affecting) a rather advanced contemporary taste in decoration, my mother
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