Soho/Covent Garden

Soho / Covent Garden
The Sex Pistols Rehearsal Rooms (6A Denmark St, Soho) Denmark Street is lined with music publishers and instrument shops and has been at the centre of English show business since the days of music hall in the 19th century

When Malcolm McLaren assembled the Sex Pistols in late 1975, he bought this building for £1000 to give them a place where they could practice.

The tiny building (which is located at the end of an alleyway running between #6 and #8) had only two rooms: one upstairs and the other downstairs. The downstairs area was used for band rehearsals and the upstairs room was used as a communal crash pad.

The rehearsal rooms were located next door to a graphic arts company called Hipgnosis (located just over the back fence), which designed album covers for Pink Floyd and Yes.

The Hit Factory: CBS Studios (31 Whitfield St)

In December 1966, the Jimi Hendrix Experience recorded their first album Are You Experienced at the studios. In 1973, Iggy Pop brought the Stooges to London to record their final studio album, Raw Power. David Bowie (then at the height of his Ziggy Stardust persona) produced the record. In 1977, the Clash recorded their first album at the Whitfield St Studios.

Marquee Club / Mezzo (90 Wardour St)

The original Marquee was a jazz club, located in a basement at 165 Oxford St, beneath a cinema. The jazz club moved into a bigger venue in Wardour St in 1964, Like many other jazz clubs in the area, the Marquee started booking younger pop acts like the Rolling Stones and the Who, who had started attracting a large following in the tiny R&B clubs of suburban West London.

By 1966, the management of the Marquee sensed the blowing winds of change, and staged the multimedia Spontaneous Underground happenings late in 1966. The Sunday afternoon happenings featured avant-garde improvisations, gigantic jellies, and cutting edge rock music (including a very young Pink Floyd, led by Syd Barrett).

The Spontaneous Underground events were a big success, paving the way for clubs like UFO and Middle Earth, which opened the following year.

Led Zeppelin played their debut gig in the Marquee at the end of the 60s.

By the seventies the building was starting to physically decay and the Marquee moved in the early 80s to 105 Charing Cross Rd.

The Flamingo Club / The Wag Club (35 Wardour St)

The Flamingo was one of the most popular Mod clubs in London in the mid sixties. It was located in a basement (below the Wag Club) and attracted a menagerie of West End night life.

Along with other R&B clubs like the Marquee and the Scene (41 Great Windmill Street), the Flamingo was a place where hard core Mods could see bands like the Who, Kinks, Small Faces, and the Yardbirds. Other Flamingo regulars included Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, John Mayall, Geno Washington, Cream and Eric Burdon.

At midnight, the Flamingo transformed into the All Nighter Club, where Mods could dance until dawn, fuelled by amphetamines and soul music records.

Berwick Street, Soho

The street was captured in a rare moment of tranquillity just after dawn on the cover of the second album by rockist underachievers Oasis: (What’s the Story) Morning Glory.

Berwick Street has some very good record shops. The street also features a good vegetable market, and Raymond’s Revue Bar, which has been presenting soft-core sleaze since Benny Hill was a spotty teenager (the venue also appeared briefly in the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour).

Blitz Club / The Batcave / Gossips (69 Dean street)

In the late 70s, fashion conscious young Londoners began to tire of the grey miserabilist world of “post punks” like Joy Division, Public Image Ltd, and Wire. New clubs started mixing up glam rock (Roxy Music and David Bowie) with techno pop (pioneered by Dusseldorf's Kraftwerk and Sheffield’s Human League). The new mix was a hit and by 1981, Blitz was one of the most fashionable clubs in London.

The kids who went to the Blitz every week started dressing like Pirates, Indians, and ancient Greeks. The music press dreamed up a new label for the movement: New Romantic. New Romantic bands like Duran Duran, Ultravox, and Spandau Ballet went on to huge worldwide success.

A few years later, kids started wearing black and began to take an unhealthy interest in death, vampires and noisy music. Bands like The Cure stopped combing their hair, and started wearing white makeup and black lipstick, and wrote lots of songs about death and carnivorous spiders.

The club was resurrected as the Batcave, which became the haunt of Goth favourites like Australia’s Birthday Party, and Bromley’s Siouxie and the Banshees.

2i's coffee bar, 57-59 Old Compton St

The 2is was typical of Soho’s coffee bar scene in the mid 50s. It opened in 1956 with a Spanish guitarist and a jukebox and before long it featured skiffle groups and early British rockers like Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele and Billy Fury. Teenage hipsters from all over London flocked to the 2i’s, including a very young Marc Bolan, who worked there as a waiter. Led Zeppelin's manager Peter Grant also worked there as a bouncer.

The Ad Lib Club, Prince Charles Theatre (7 Leicester Place)

The Prince Charles Theatre currently operates as a slightly down at heel art house cinema. But in the 60s, the Ad Lib was located on the top floor of the building. It was a place where the new rock aristocracy could mingle with avant garde artists, fashion designers and assorted "Beautiful People". According to some reports, the Ad Lib is where John Lennon and George Harrison shared their very first LSD trip.

The Roxy (41-43 Neal St), Covent Garden

The Roxy club was just a seedy Soho strip joint when Andy Czezowski (who was Malcolm McLaren's accountant) launched London’s very first punk club in December 1976.

The Roxy club ran for only 4 months until April 1977. But in that time the club helped create a space where anything seemed possible and music was judged not on technical ability but on imagination, commitment, and raw charisma.

The music (and the spirit) of the Roxy was captured on the Live at the Roxy LP, which preserved the raw and unpolished performances of bands like Siouxie and the Banshees and Wire.

After the Roxy closed, the punk scene moved on to The Vortex (203 Wardour St), but it never quite recaptured the cutting edge atmosphere of the Roxy.

Middle Earth (43 King St, Covent Garden)

When Mod and R&B bands started sounding stale in the mid 60s, bands like the Soft Machine and Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd attempted to copy the brand new San Francisco acid rock sound. They ended up getting it mostly wrong, and in the process they created their own entirely unique species of whimsical psychedelic rock.

The Electric Garden opened early in 1967, attempting to cash in on the emerging UK hippie movement. However, there was little interest from real hippies (who preferred the more authentic UFO club, located just a few blocks away) and the management of the club was taken over by David Housen.

Housen gave the club a makeover, and renamed it Middle Earth, after Tolkien’s (then) cult classic. He recruited John Peel (who was already a well-known announcer for offshore pirate Radio Caroline) as club DJ, and, when the UFO finally closed its doors in the middle of 1967, Middle Earth became the focus of London’s underground psychedelic community.

Middle Earth patrons witnessed the very first performance of Marc Bolan’s T.Rex. The performance was a disaster (mainly because Bolan recruited the band members on the evening of the gig, based mainly on strength of their looks or interesting names).

Within a few months of opening, the club closed in October 1967, after a campaign of police harassment. The management moved the club up to the Roundhouse in North London, where they continued to put on occasional Middle Earth club nights.

Just up the road from the original Middle Earth was the Rock Garden (6-7 The Piazza) where both The Smiths and U2 played their London debuts in the 80s.

Syd Barret’s Flat (2 Earlham St, Covent Garden)

Shortly after Syd Barrett moved to London from Cambridge in the summer of 1964, he moved into this building (eventually he occupied the top floor flat with his girlfriend Lindsay).

At the time that Barrett lived here, Covent Garden was still quite a seedy place; a porno publisher operated from the ground floor of the apartment building, and Barrett's flat was later turned into a brothel.

Arts Lab (182 Drury Lane)

The Arts Lab was a multi media theatre that celebrated the spirit of the late 60s. Highlights included The People Show, where the audience was placed in cages and intimidated by actors for half an hour, and a performance by Yoko Ono, which involved sawing household appliances in half.

The all night cinema in the Arts Lab basement featured underground films and had mattresses on the floor instead of cinema chairs. The cinema became popular with people needing somewhere to rest after a long evening of clubbing, and it soon became a well known crash pad for itinerant hippies.

Scotsman Jim Haynes opened the Arts Lab in the late 60s, and the concept spread quickly across the UK. By the 70s there were around 50 Arts Labs located across the UK (including David Bowie’s own Lab in Beckenham, just south of London) Central London

It is not too surprising that many pop stars and avant garde artists have chose to live in this ruling class ghetto of Mayfair and St James, attracted either by the prestige of their neighbours, or by the prospect of annoying them.

However, there has always been a sleazy underbelly to Mayfair. A number of "hostesses" still operate in the area, continuing a tradition of prostitution that has survived the since the17th century. And the nearby borough of St James was established when Henry VIII evicted local lepers to build St James's Palace.

UFO Club (31 Tottenham Court Rd)

For a few months in the late 60s, the UFO was London's hippest club. It was located in a former Irish dance hall, the Blarney Club, and every alternate Friday, the UFO club put on progressive rock bands and showed experimental movies until dawn. The UFO Club ran for only 6 months from Christmas 1966, but in that time it transformed the London music scene.

Pink Floyd was one of the main attractions at the club, featuring Syd Barrett’s quirky tales of gnomes, transvestites and bicycles, as well as long improvised interstellar freakouts, and throbbing light shows. Other bands that had success at the UFO included the Soft Machine, Fairport Convention (the inventors of British folk rock) and strange improvising “noise bands” like AMM.

Clubs like the UFO and Middle Earth soon became notorious for their mind-altering light shows and their all night dances, which were fuelled by loud music and a variety of illegal substances. When the police closed down these smaller clubs, the hippies simply moved north to an old railway shed in Camden that was converted into a music venue called the Roundhouse.

The UFO building was pulled down in the early 70s and replaced with an ugly shopping complex, which includes hi fi shops and a cinema.

The Astoria (157 Charing Cross Road)

As the end of the 80s grew near, the increasing drabness of the indie rock scene, with its uniform of Doc Martens, Levi 501s and Anti-Thatcher politics, was swept aside by 1988’s Second Summer of Love and the arrival of “Acid House”.

House Music was a new kind of disco music that started in Detroit and Chicago. This strange new music utilised cheap synthesisers and snatches of other records to create mantra like sound sculptures. The creators of this new dance music were influenced by European synth pop groups like Kraftwerk, New Order and the Human League, as well as “Hi NRG”, which was a type of electronic dance music popular in gay clubs in America and the UK.

The final element in the birth of the Acid House movement was the arrival of a new drug called Ecstasy, which had the fortunate side effect of making the repetitive music sound incredibly interesting over very long periods of time.

One of the best known of the early House clubs was Nicky Holloway’s The Trip, which was based at the Astoria theatre. It ran throughout the summer of 1988 (under a variety of aliases) until the acid house scene moved on to illegal raves staged in disused warehouses around the city.

Heaven, Villiers St (underneath the Arches), Charing Cross

Since the late 80s, this has been the UK’s biggest and most famous gay nightclub. It is also the where London’s Acid House movement was born. The Soundshaft annexe hosted many seminal house club nights, including Paul Oakenfold's Future (late 1987) and Spectrum (mid 1988), as well as other club nights such as Sex Love and Motion and The Drum Club.

Heaven is also where Alex Patterson (of The Orb) and Jimmy Cauty (of KLF) invented Ambient House at the Land of Oz nights in the early 90s. Patterson and Cauty were attempting to create relaxing collages of beatless music for tired club goers to “chill out”. However, they had stumbled onto a new genre that dominated electronic music for the first half of the 90s.

Ziggy Stardust cover (23 Heddon Street)

The front cover of David Bowie’s classic album showed a futuristic Bowie (wearing yellow hair and a green jumpsuit) loitering in a seedy rainswept London backstreet, looking like he had just beamed down from some alien planet. Above his head hangs a sickly yellow illuminated sign reading, enigmatically, “K. West”.

The photo was taken in Heddon Street (which is located just off Regent Street in central London) on a rainy night in January 1972, just outside the album cover photographer’s studio, located at number 23. The other tenants in the building included a fur import business named K. West, which occupied the first floor (and which has long since ceased trading).

The back cover of Ziggy Stardust depicted Bowie in a red phone box, looking enigmatically at the camera. The original phone box, which stood at the end of Heddon St, was replaced some years ago with a more modern model. However, there is still plenty of Bowie related graffiti in the new phone box.

Bowie had this to say about the imagery of the cover: "the idea was to hit a look somewhere between the Malcolm McDowell (star of the movie Clockwork Orange) thing with the mascaraed eyelash and insects. It was the era of Wild Boys by William S. Burroughs ... it was a cross between that and Clockwork Orange that really started to put together the shape and the look of what Ziggy and the Spiders were going to become".

Rock Circus / London Pavilion (1 Piccadilly Circus)

This building was a music hall for most of the twentieth century, and in the 60s the theatre premiered the Beatles movies A Hard Day's Night, Help! and Yellow Submarine. In the 80s it housed the Rock Circus, a very cheesy, sub-Tussauds tribute to the dinosaurs of rock music.

Dryden Chambers (119 Oxford St)

This run down building housed a warren of punk entrepreneurs in the late 70s, including Malcolm McLaren's Glitterbest organisation (at #40), the fanzine Sniffing Glue, and several record labels - including Deptford City Fun, Illegal, and Miles Copeland’s Step Forward (all at #27).

The Dryden Chambers crew regularly gathered at the Ship, a pub on nearby Wardour St. Other nearby landmarks include the Oxford St tube station, where Mark Perry used a Xerox machine in a (long gone) copy shop to produce early editions of his classic punk fanzine “Sniffin’ Glue”.

100 Club (100 Oxford St)

By the mid 70s, the London music scene seemed pretty boring for a generation whose expectations of teenage rebellion had been raised sky high by stories they had read about the youth revolts of the “sixties”. But just when London’s rock culture seemed ready to slip into its final coma, we were treated to the Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello, the Clash and the Jam, and a hundred other punk bands at clubs like the Roxy, the Vortex and the 100 Club.

The 100 Club started as a jazz club (called Feldman's) during the Second World War. However, it entered the annals of punk when it hosted the Punk Rock Festival in September 1976. The festival was a showcase for the Sex Pistols, and featured many of the future stars of the emerging movement (including Suzie and the Banshees, The Buzzcocks, and The Damned)

In the 80s, the tiny club was regularly used by some of the big names in stadium rock to warm up for their latest tours. In February 1986, the Rolling Stones played a surprise gig as a kind of tribute for Ian Stewart, their deceased road manager (and once their piano player). In August 1987, heavy metal band Metallica played a warm up gig at the club, just before their appearance at the Monsters of Rock festival.

Hilton Hotel (22 Park Lane)

This hotel has played a minor role in the history of rock over the years. It is where John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison attended their first ever lecture by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The whole group later followed the guru out to his retreat in India (which Ringo later compared to a Butlins holiday camp).

On an entirely different spiritual plane, the hotel is also where the Rolling Stones first met Allen Klein, asking him to become their manager in the mid 60s (a decision which almost ruined them financially before they fired him in 1970).

The eccentric Syd Barrett moved into a top floor suite briefly in 1971, thanks to a sudden influx of funds from the Pink Floyd compilation Relics. When most of the royalties ran out, he moved into an apartment block in Chelsea, where he lived until he moved back to Cambridge to live with his mother.

And it is where Elvis Costello was arrested for busking outside the CBS record company Convention in July 1977. He strapped a small amp on his back and played in front of the hotel, in the hope of getting an international record deal (at the suggestion of Stiff Record boss Jake Riviera). Costello had to get someone else to pay the £5 fine, as he didn’t have the cash.

Just around the corner is the original Hard Rock Cafe (150 Old Park Lane), the very first in an international chain of burger restaurants, which was founded by Isaac Tigret from Memphis, Tennessee. The café’s gimmick is the rock and roll memoribilia that hangs around the walls, and the loud rock music that pumps through the PA.

Charing Cross Pier

Malcolm McLaren and other punk partygoers were arrested for disturbing the peace following the infamous Silver Jubilee cruise on the evening of 7 June 1977, aboard the riverboat Queen Elizabeth.

“Subterranean Homesick Blues” film clip (alley way behind Savoy Hotel)

The film clip for Bob Dylan’s "Subterranean Homesick Blues" is an exercise in minimalist cool: the whole clip is filmed in a single shot in a seedy looking alleyway.

Dylan makes no attempt at all to lip sync; instead he holds up cue cards which have phrases from the song scrawled on them, and which he drops to the ground one by one in rough synchronisation with the song. In the background, Allen Ginsberg can be seen dressed as a biblical prophet.

The film clip was shot by DA Pennebaker in an alleyway beside the Savoy Hotel, for the move Don’t Look Back. Alan Price (founder of The Animals) and Joan Baez wrote out the prompt cards.

Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Nash House, The Mall

Many "alternative" events have been held here over the years, including: Throbbing Gristle's controversial debut in 1976, Sonic Youth’s European debut in March 1985, and several psychedelic "happenings" in the 60s. The ICA still shows cutting edge musical events on a regular basis.

Trafalgar Square

As the clubs begin to empty in the hours before dawn, the heart of London fills with people looking for their night bus home. The scene on one of these bus journeys can be like a Fellini movie or a Brughel painting, like a noisy brightly lit caravan of fools, cruising through the dark streets, while normal people have been asleep and dreaming for hours, safely inside their houses.

William Burrough’s Flat (8 Duke St, St James)

William Burroughs lived in the Dalmeney Court apartment building for 7 years from 1966. He lived first in apartment 22, and then in number 18, which was smaller and cheaper Around the same time, Eric Burdon (singer with the Animals) lived on the 3rd floor.

Jimi Hendrix’s Flat (23 Brook St, Mayfair)

Hendrix moved in to this flat with his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham in February 1969, and lived here (on and off) for around 18 months. In 1997, the Hendrix house was given its own English Heritage blue memorial plaque, which was unveiled by Pete Townsend and Kathy Etchingham.

Scotch of St. James / Indica Gallery (13 Masons Yard)

The Scotch of St. James (now the Directors Lodge Club) was one of the most exclusive rock clubs in 60s London. Jimi Hendrix performed there shortly after his arrival in the UK, and impressed Kit Lambert (manager of The Who) into offering him a recording contract late in 1966.

The club opened in March 1965, and was located next door to the Indica Gallery (#6), where John Lennon met Yoko Ono for the first time in November 1966. The Gallery was named in honour of the cannabis plant (full botanical name: Cannabis Savita Indica), and was opened in January 1966 by a collective calling itself M.A.D., ie: (Barry) Miles, (Peter) Asher, and (John) Dunbar.

Paul McCartney helped the MAD crew to move into the building. McCartney later invited John Lennon to the opening night show at the gallery (featuring avant-garde artist Yoko Ono, who Lennon later married). One of the organisers of Yoko Ono’s show was the father of Blur’s Damon Albarn.

Marc Bolan’s flat (47 Bilton Towers, Great Cumberland Place)

Marc Bolan moved here mid 1972, at the height of his fame, with his wife June and 3 "minders". He was forced to move here after the tabloids published details of his previous address at Clarendon Gardens. The building is located just behind Marble Arch.