Last
Night in Soho (Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky,
Mick and Tich) 1968
For
last night in Soho I let my life go
I emerged from Leicester
Square Tube into the sunlight and headed towards Soho. It is not an extensive
district, a square mile or so lying roughly between the boundaries of Oxford
Street, Regent Street, Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue, but it has
played a significant part in British pop music since the early 1950’s. In fact
it is like a geological slice cut through to show the different ages. There was
skiffle, with the London Skiffle Centre opening in Wardour Street in 1955 and
Chas McDevitt starting his own coffee bar Freight Train on the corner of
Berwick Street and Noel Street in 1958, following the success of his recording
of the same name. There was early British rock and roll, with the 2 I’s coffee
bar in Old Compton Street, the launch pad for artists from Tommy Steele to
Cliff Richard to Jet Harris, and El Condor on Wardour Street, where Marty Wilde
played. There was jazz, with Ronnie Scott’s Club opening in 1959 in Gerrard
Street, moving later to Frith Street. There was British pop and rock with the
Marquee on Wardour Street and Denmark Street, Tin Pan Alley itself. There was
rhythm and blues and ska with the Flamingo Club in Wardour Street, where
Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames and Shotgun Express with Rod Stewart played.
In 1965 there was folk and blues with Les Cousins on Greek Street, where Roy
Harper and Donovan and Nick Drake all appeared. Later in the 70’s there was
punk at the 100 Club, where the Clash and Stranglers played.
Given this heritage it is not
surprising to find a raft of songs about Soho across the years. Al Stewart, who
was living in Lisle Street in Soho when he recorded his first album Bedsitter Images in 1967, brought out a
song called Soho (Needless to Say) recalling his time then as part of his 1973
album Past, Present and Future, which
also included songs about Nostradamus and Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Nothing
if not eclectic. In 3 minutes or so, he throws in pornographic bookshops, strip
clubs, pinball arcades, winos, prostitutes, roaming football supporters and
jazz musicians on the breadline It echoes Paul Simon’s picture of Soho from his
1965 Blessed track, which listed “meth drinkers, pot sellers, illusion
dwellers.. penny rookers, cheap hookers, groovy
lookers“ as presumably the people most likely to be seen when
wandering round the area. Al Stewart, however, tops it by coming out with a
line which has a non-sequitor so great
it leaves the listener baffled by what it is supposed to mean: “The sun goes down on a neon eon, though
you'd have a job explaining it to Richard Coeur de Lion”.
The Kinks 1970 hit, Lola, had a similar take on Soho with
the story of a transvestite encounter in the kind of club where champagne
tastes like coca-cola. The Pogues turned a wet evening in Soho into a love song
in their 1991 Rainy Night in Soho
track. Two years later Kirsty MacColl brought out another love song set there ,
the evocative and poignant Soho Square.
Following her death in 2000 when a speeding powerboat illegally strayed into a
diving area off a Mexican beach, a memorial bench to her was placed in the square, with a plaque reading "One day I'll be waiting there / No
empty bench in Soho Square" The Cuban ambassador to London, amongst
others, attended the ‘opening’ of the bench in 2001. Now you can come and sit and watch the pigeons shiver in the trees and
remember what a talented and under-rated singer-songwriter she was, once
described by Billy Bragg as “the missing link between Sandie Shaw and Lily
Allen”. Soho Square has become one of those places I look at differently
because of a song. Previously it seemed a rather tatty little piece of ground
,full of pigeons and just a place to pass through on the way from Oxford Street
to Greek Street or Frith Street. With Kirsty MacColl’s words in my head I look
for an empty bench and see if the pigeons are flying.
There is another song that
often comes into my head at those times I pass through Soho, Last Night in Soho from 1968 by Dave
Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich (DDDBMT). It came out just around the time I
left home and headed for London, with Soho just a name that caused sniggers and
winks at school. Actually, my main experience of it initially was making my way to the record shop
Musicland on Berwick Street, where, as the 60’s turned into the 70’s, the shop
became a beacon of underground and pyschedelia music, where you could listen to
records in a booth with the smell of incense and patchouli in the air and pay extra (59/6 as opposed to 32/6) to get an early version of the latest
American import by Tim Buckley or Ultimate Spinach. Elton John and Bernie
Taupin apparently used to frequent the place around the same time so maybe I
passed by them one Saturday afternoon. It was only much later I discovered that
the site had been occupied a decade before by a coffee bar, Freight Train, set
up by skiffler Chas McDevitt after his hit of the same name.
Later I had a job at a shop
near Grosvenor Square where deliveries sometimes took me through the streets of
daytime Soho, past the illicit bookshops, porno cinemas, signs for Large Chest
for Sale and the flashing lights of the strip clubs, where performers would on
occasion anxiously ask the time as they rushed from one performance to another.
Malcolm McDowell was playing a schoolboy rebel in If at that time but in later years in films like Our Friends In The North and Gangster No1 he made his own the kind of gangland figure of 1960’s
Soho behind the clubs and bookstores. There is a very atmospheric black and
white film from 1963, The Small World of
Sammy Lee, starring Anthony Newley as a strip club compere needing to find
£300 by the end of the day to pay off a debt and fend off a beating and roaming
around the area of Greek Street, Dean Street and Wardour Street in his efforts.
The x-rated film posters of the time
declared “Soho-Stripped Bare” and the film captured perfectly the seedy side of
60’s Soho.
It is this Soho that DDDBMT
sing of in Last Night in Soho, the
story of a reformed gang member trying to go straight but throwing his new life
and love away for one last job. DDDBMT
occupied the same kind of musical niche in the 60’s that Slade did in the 70’s,
though they were much more firmly part of pop. Both groups had a showman lead
singer, a sound and image that appealed to both boys and girls and across ages,
a string of catchy songs that couldn’t help but
make you smile, and enough live presence and musical ability to make it
clear they were no manufactured outfit. Tich’s prowess with the fuzz-box guitar
and balalaika was commented on at the time by Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix and
drummer Mick had a highly impressive way of twirling his drumsticks as he
played. The groups were also as distinctly English as Carry On films and never
really cracked the USA market, though
Quentin Tarantino regarded them
as one of his favourite 60’s groups and used Hold Tight on the soundtrack of his 2007 film Death Proof. DDDBMT were, however, hugely popular in Germany and
remained so for the rest of their
career.
What DDDBMT lacked, though,
were songwriters in their ranks and all
of their 13 hits were written by Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, who first had success with the Honeycombs and Have I The Right. The songs for DDDBMT
were of two types. The first were catchy sing-alongs, almost football chants,
driven by stomping drums and droning
fuzz guitar: You Make It Move, Hold
Tight, Hideaway, Okay, Touch Me, Bend It ,the last beloved by schoolboys
who could go round singing ‘Bend it, bend it, just a little bit’ while waggling
their finger like Dave Dee on Top of the Pops. The song was rewritten as a
‘clean’ version for the USA release to
make The Bend sound like a new dance, when Little Eva, of The Locomotion and Turkey Trot fame, recorded it.
The second were a string of
little kitsch dramas set to music. There was Zabadak, with its African drums and made-up language; The Legend of Xanadu, the tune basically
rewritten a year later as The Wreck of
the Antoinette; Don Juan. They
were all enjoyable pantomime and Last
Night in Soho fell into this group,
a story set in the seedy side of Swinging London with a suitably dramatic
musical backing. Dave Dee later reckoned it to be their best song but it turned
out to be their last Top Ten hit. A year or so later Dave Dee left for a solo
career that never took off. The rest continued as a quartet rebadged as DBMT
for a while, getting rather ‘heavy’ whilst growing hair and beards and
recording a couple of protest songs with Tonight
Today and Mr President , a track
that also featured early use of the moog
synthesiser. They were no more successful than Dave Dee and threw in the towel
after a while, though returning on the nostalgia circuit some years later with
a new ‘Mick’, whose real name was John. Howard and Blaikley had a shorter run
of success with the Herd, the launch-pad for Peter Frampton, giving them their first hit From The Underworld, a song based on the mythical story of Orpheus
and Eurydice. They then rather spoiled things by going serious with a concept
album by Flaming Youth about the
evacuation of a dying Earth, featuring a young Phil Collins. Nobody remembers it now, not like Bend It or Have I the Right.
Last
Night In Soho and the rest of DDDBMT’s work came at a time
when pop and rock were starting their divergent paths.. Rock headed off to albums instead of
singles, serious intent, critical analysis, and musical virtuosity taken to
extreme at times. I remember attending a University concert around 1971 by
Arthur Lee and Love, one of whose classic songs was Alone Again Or, a 3 minute track complete with mariachi band
arrangements, strings and Spanish guitar touches. What we got was a new
line-up, a 20 minute drum solo by George
Suranovich and a 15 minute bass solo from Frank Fayad. I can’t remember
who played lead guitar but he probably did a solo too. If I had been to see Genesis a couple of years later ,
I would have heard a bass pedal solo. By contrast pop, for some years at least,
was banished to teeny-poppers and Top of
the Pops, not worthy of comment by the new wave of rock critics who thought
they were really rock stars, tended to get snooty about what was and what
wasn’t valid and produced lists and books on 100 Essential Albums, which usually reflected their own record
collection. In 1972 in a discussion about musical tastes I found myself in an
imaginary H.M Bateman cartoon entitled The
Student Who Admitted He Liked the Kinks More Than the Grateful Dead.
Seen in historical perspective, the strict
division being established between pop and rock by the late 1960’s seems
bizarre, leading to the under-estimation of some pop, and the over-rating of
some rock, bands. It was also hard for bands to pass from one to the other
though a few managed it, but not DBMT. The 60’s pop Small Faces successfully
metamorphosed into the 70’s rock Faces with some changes of personnel and
Status Quo passed from being a psychedelic-lite pop outfit into the 3-chord
boogie band beloved of 70’s head-bangers, but most pop groups were more
effective staying just that, rarely impressing when they grew long hair and moustaches and strayed towards extended
guitar solos, double albums and serious lyrics. Humble Pie, the ‘super-group’
formed round Steve Marriot , never produced anything as memorable as All or Nothing or Itchycoo Park
What is more, the single
became overshadowed by the album as far as critical appraisal went for much of
the next decade, until punk re-established its validity In 1969 you could
completely miss a gem like the singles I’m the One Love Forgot by the Pretenders (a New Jersey r n b group with Pat Tandy singing lead, not
the Chrissie Hynde outfit), or The Picture Matches Mine by Laura Lee, (an
uncharacteristically gentle song from a Detroit soul singer who pioneered
punchy feminist anthems like Wedlock is a
Padlock in the early 70’s). Both passed by unrecognised while every
‘serious’ music publication proclaimed that you must spend 1 hour and 18
minutes of your life listening to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica double album, as a University flat mate of the
time frequently did. Devotees of this album always say, ”Don’t
think of it as music, more a work of art” or
“You won’t get it the first time.” Er...no.
The split between pop and
rock, however, meant that lines were drawn and it was years before the
audiences of either side felt able to cross over again. Even the Beatles
couldn’t escape, with Paul McCartney labelled ‘Pop’ and John Lennon ‘Rock’. It
was silly really. Take these 2 sets of lyrics from songs 2 years apart. “You’ll
hear my words on the winds, across the sands, if you should return to that
black barren land” They are from The
Legend of Xanadu by DDDBMT and therefore pop fluff for teenage girls that
might turn up in the pages of Valentine
or Jackie. Then there is “Ah, ah, We come from the land of the ice and snow,
From the midnight sun where the hot springs blow.” They are from The Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin and
are man-size rock lyrics you could drive a truck and eat a Yorkie bar to, maybe
even rip someone’s eyeballs out to.
