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Classic Cafes |
The Times | October 2003 | by
Bob Stanley
Soho's survivors - The
New Piccadilly, Centrale, Bar Bruno, Presto - are still packed
with artists, layabouts and Colin Wilson wannabes. If Soho is
our Left Bank then the New Piccadilly is our Deux Magots, existentialism
with chips and beans...
The back cover
of The Sun And The Rain by Madness summed it up. A pop group
whiling away the day in a cafe with steamed up windows and a
green and white luncheon vouchers sticker in the window. Plotting
a revolution over tea and toast. The romance of the squeezy ketchup
bottle.
As a kid, cafes
had always seemed to me just as illicit and secretive as pubs.
Out shopping in Woodhatch, Surrey, the lure of the Corner Cafe
could only be enhanced by dark, vague warnings from my mum. We
were only given the occasional treat in Fortes, Redhill. It had
no jukebox.
A few years
on, Dexy's Midnight Runners - a band that demanded total compliance
from their listeners - released an intense, atmospheric instrumental
called The Teams That Meet In Caffs which just about sealed it.
As soon as
I moved to London I sought out a base. Starting a pop group (Saint
Etienne), writing a fanzine (Caff,of course), it all came together
very quickly at The Oval Platter on Charing Cross Road, Gattopardo
at King's Cross, The Regent Milk Bar on Edgware Road. Bohemian
no-go areas.
three
dimensional socialist propaganda...
The first coffee houses in Britain opened in 1652, fomenting
dreams of empire for merchants and the new media.
Three hundred
years on, the Festival of Britain was the spark for a British
art boom that would sweep the world, and expresso bars were the
new dens of iniquity.
Churchill called
the festival "three dimensional socialist propaganda."
Lord knows what he would have made of the Moka on Frith Street,
London's first milk bar, opened by Gina Lollabrigida in 1953.
The festival
had pumped colour into modernism and, with help from new materials
from Scandinavia such as Formica and melamine, milk bars and
expresso bars were built to look hypermodern. Within months,
The Moka had inspired a space age hidey-hole on every British
high street.
Soho had a greater concentration of coffee bars in the fifties
than anywhere. Post-war austerity seemed absent there and the
new caffs attracted many of London's leading intellectuals -
Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Frank Auerbach. At Cafe Torino on
the corner of Dean Street and Old Compton Street, Colin Wilson
literally made his name and his fame as a caff dweller.
The prices
were low and the owners allowed credit. The poets and pale young
artists flocked there, inspiring Wilson's The Outsider, an existentialist
phenomenon in 1956.
The licensing laws kept you out of the pub until you were 21,
so coffee bars incubated teen culture. If the war had created
the first generation gap, then post-war reconstruction blew it
wide open.
Disaffected
creativity gave birth to the DIY skiffle craze, kids with washboards,
kazoos, and tea-chest basses playing in coffee bar basements.
Youth revelled in a new found freedom.
Evening sessions
at the 2i's on Old Compton Street provided a melting pot for
jazz, skiffle, and new American rock'n'roll. Regulars included
Adam Faith, Cliff Richard, The Shadows, Vince Taylor - when Jack
Good started broadcasting TV shows from the 2i's in 1958, British
rock began.
flick
knives and scratched Formica...
In the sixties
the mods ruled the towns but the rockers had the countryside.
The New Piccadilly on Denman Street barred bikers after they
produced flick knives and scratched the Formica tables with their
boots - the owners were rewarded with bricks through the window.
The transport
cafe was the biker's home, where rock'n'roll blared from the
jukebox as loudly as it did at a fairground.
The Ace Cafe
on the North Circular was a lorry driver's cafe by day, but a
home for the Ton-Up Boys by night, in the days when that stretch
of dual carriageway was almost totally empty.
Great art may
not have poured from the bikers' leather gloves, but writers
like Nell Dunn were drawn to these outsider gangs, and Sidney
Furie's The Leather Boys (1963) is a masterpiece of Brit angst.
The homo-eroticism of the bike gangs would not have been lost
on Gilbert and George who spent much of the seventies and eighties
in Spitalfields' Market Cafe.
hey even helped
run the business for a while and served behind the counter as
the number of customers slowly fell away. "It was like Rules"
said Gilbert, "only much better and cheaper."
At the same time in Birmingham, Kevin Rowland was putting together
Dexy's Midnight Runners at The Apollonia on Broad Street.
Their New Soul
Vision was formed over endless rounds of teas "waiting on
information, planning our next move" while Rowland organised
gigs using the payphone. The caff features briefly in the video
for Geno.
The Beatles'
favourite meal...
In Liverpool, Brian's Diner was opened by ex-boxer Brian McCaffrey
in the sixties. He claimed to be in the Guinness Book Of Records
for having the fastest punch which, obviously, nobody ever questioned.
Initially he
serviced the kids who went to The Cavern and Iron Door clubs,
but by the late seventies much of the hinterland was derelict.
Brian's was
claimed by the new Merseybeat bands. The Teardrop Explodes did
a photo session there. Echo And The Bunnymen made a documentary
called Life At Brian's.
Eventually,
only skint bands from the adjacent rehearsal rooms went, nursing
40p cups of tea, and Brian served his last egg and chips - The
Beatles' favourite meal - in the late nineties.
Adrian Maddox's Classic Cafes website has kept the flame burning
during the barren Starbucks era. His argument that cafes are
central to the cultural life of post-war Britain is solid, so
it seems all the more sad that they are falling by the wayside
with alarming regularity.
"We are
left with the Aztec ruins of a bigger civilisation" cries
Maddox. Yet Soho's survivors - The New Piccadilly, Centrale,
Bar Bruno, Presto - are still packed with artists, layabouts
and Colin Wilson wannabes.
If Soho is
our Left Bank then the New Piccadilly is our Deux Magots, existentialism
with chips and beans.
More > Adrian
Maddox: Legend of Booth 4B & Sunday Post interview
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