Soho (Part 1)

Skiffler Bill Kent wows the girls at the 2 I's

Old Compton Street

The Pollo No.20

This cheap n cheerful Italian tratt' was a regular hang-out for the Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett - who lived in nearby Earlham Street - during the mid-Sixties. The enigmatic Pink Floyd frontman could often be found here with friends, eating, drinking and playing the Oriental board game Go.

Sadly, like so many other Soho stalwarts, the Pollo recently closed its doors. A throwback to an earlier, less pretentious age, it had served its clientele of students, bohemians and clubbers – anyone, really, who wanted a decent plate of Italian food for under a tenner – with heroic dedication for a half a century or more. Passing its bleak, closed-up store front recently, I experienced a genuine sense of desolation. Here was yet another sign of the gradual slipping away of Soho from a celebration of grubby idiosyncracy towards the kind of glossy commodification that nowadays characterises nearby Covent Garden. At time of writing, the location was being revamped as a pizza outlet.

Heaven & Hell No. 57

Right next door to the legendary 2 ‘I’s (see below), this cellar skiffle club beneath a bright and breezy coffee bar boasted all-black decor and a resident skiffle group who called themselves, appropriately enough, the Ghouls. The group featured a typical four-piece skiffle line-up of two guitars, tea-chest bass and washboard rhythm section. A similarly spooky skiffle venue, the Macabre, was located nearby in Meard Street.

According to Harry Shapiro, in his biography of UK r&b pioneer Alexis Korner, Heaven & Hell was also an important focus for the hip beatnik/bebop jazz scene – prototype for the Sixties mod movement. Hank Marvin & Bruce Welch and their group the Drifters (later to metamorphosise into Cliff Richards’s backing group the Shadows) played their first gig here, probably in early 1956.

The location is now a branch of the Dome restaurant chain. (See also The 2is, the Pad)ater to metamorphosise into Cliff Richards’s backing group the Shadows) played their first gig here, probably in early 1956.

The location is now a branch of the Dome restaurant chain. (See also The 2is, the Pad)

2 I's  No.59

With the notable exception of Liverpool’s legendary Cavern Club, sweaty cellar venues don’t come much more seminal than the 2 I’s. This was where the rootsy sounds of British skiffle merged with Presley-style rock & roll and pretty boy pop to create the first stirrings of a popular music culture that would, within a decade, go on to conquer the world. Among its graduates: Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, Adam Faith, the Shadows, Screaming Lord Sutch and Joe Brown: names that may not mean much outside the UK but who were, for a brief and crazy moment in the late 1950s, the pop music equivalent of a nuclear first strike.

The 2 I’s curious name derived from the initials of its owners, the two Irani brothers, who opened the place as a coffee bar in the early ‘50s with the aim of cashing in on the espresso coffee fad that was sweeping Soho. Finding the espresso scene tougher than expected, the brothers sold the bar to Paul Lincoln (aka wrestling star, Dr Death) and his partner Ray Hunter in 1956. Hunter went on to own an interest in the fashionable Sixties rock club, the Cromwellian; the Iranis later took over the Tropicana, home of the Establishment, birthplace of British satirical comedy in the early Sixties.

Hunter and Lincoln quickly realised that the 2 I’s needed something more potent than espresso to keep it solvent, and as luck would have it that something arrived on their doorstep – literally - on 14 July 1956 in the shape of the Soho Fair, generally acknowledged as Britain’s first pop festival of any significance. Comprising half a dozen top ‘skiffle’ groups parading up and down Old Compton Street and adjoining streets, the Fair culminated with a set by ace skifflers the Vipers outside the 2 I’s (some accounts say the group also played a set in the 2 I’s basement).

Outside the 2 I’s, a large crowd gathered to enjoy the Vipers’ set, impressing Lincoln, who asked the group to perform at the bar on a regular basis. The tiny basement was soon transformed into a rockin’ music venue complete with wall paintings by St Martin's School of Art graduate Lionel Bart. Bart later went on to achieve international acclaim as the composer of the hit musical, Oliver!. According to skiffle star Chas McDevitt, Bart decorated the place to create "a distinctive and decadent aura ... black ceiling, large stylized eyes on the walls and cubist shapes on the wall behind the small stage platform."

Earlier that year, Bart – who was gay - had taken a shine to a toothy young seaman and part-time skiffler named Tommy Hicks. Bart had seen Hicks in action at a rival coffee bar (probably the Gyre & Gimble) earlier that year and, with Hicks, had formed a group called the Cavemen. By late 1956, the Cavemen were performing regularly at the 2 I’s. Bart was also a regular at showbiz hangout La Caverne, where gay impressarios John Kennedy and Larry Parnes (a co-owner of the club) were among his friends. Persuaded by Bart to catch the Cavemen at the 2 I’s, both Kennedy and Parnes were taken with the blond-haired Hicks; publicity stunts were marshalled (including some highly-effective audience screaming at a debutantes’ ball) and within months, Hicks – renamed Tommy Steele – was in the charts with a quasi-rock & roll smash hit, Rock With The Cavemen. He followed this up with an infinitely more convincing  cover of the US hit Livin’ The Blues. Suddenly skiffle, rock & roll and a stampede of Tommy Steele clones were busy transforming the British pop scene – and at the centre of the storm - the 2 I’s.

“(The 2 I’s) was steamy, sweaty and tiny,” wrote Ian Whitcomb in After the Ball, “Nobody clapped or screamed because it was too sophisticated a place and also too hot. When customers fainted they were silently passed up through a grille in the pavement and on to the street.” The venue was also, according to Wally Whyton, a terrific place for picking up girls.

A generation of British rock'n'rollers got their first break here, including Cliff Richard & the Shadows, Joe Brown, Marty Wilde, Vince Eager, Screaming Lord Sutch and Tony Sheridan. Sheridan recalls the club being a regular source of talent for British TV's first bona fide pop music show, Oh Boy! : "Jack Good (Oh Boy!’s producer) used to come into the 2 I’s and say, 'You, you and you are on the telly next week, come to rehearsals and you'll get five or six quid for doing it'."

The 2 I’s reputation as a breeding ground for new talent soon attracted reps from major record companies. In late 1958, EMI producer George Martin offered the Vipers a recording contract after seeing them perform here. With Martin producing, the group cut their first album at Abbey Road's Studio Two, the same studio in which, a few years later, Martin would produce another promising group of youngsters: the Beatles. The Vipers scored a Top Ten chart hit in early 1959 with Don't You Rock Me Daddy-O. Future members of the Shadows, Hank B Marvin, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, were all Vipers graduates.

Pioneering British rock & roller Cliff Richard started out here as lead singer with the Drifters, one of the 2 I’s house bands, during April 1958. Richard (then known by his real name, Harry Webb) and his fellow musicians were recommended to Harry Greatorex, an impresario from Nottingham, who was keen to book the band to play at his club. Greatorex insisted they change their name to feature the lead singer, as was the fashion at the time. However, as Harry Webb & the Drifters did not exactly spell ‘rock & roll’, he suggested they come up with an alternative. The lads duly trooped along to the Swiss Pub, a few doors down from the 2 I’s, and after some ruminating came up with Cliff Richard & the Drifters, under which moniker they would shortly rocket to national prominence with their classic, self-penned debut Move It (NB. Some accounts claim the Webb/Richard name-change was conjured up next door to the 2 I’s, in the Heaven & Hell.)

In late 1958, Richard's manager dropped into the 2 I’s to hear a set by Tony Sheridan, who he was considering as an alternative lead guitarist for the Drifters. Passing on Sheridan, he chose two other musicians who were playing at the club that night: Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch. With Marvin and Welch on board, the Drifters – renamed the Shadows - would become the biggest pre-Beatles guitar group in the UK, both as a backing band for Richard and as a Ventures-style instrumental combo in their own right.

Yet another visitor to the club in the late 1950s and early ‘60s was Hamburg club owner Bruno Koschmeider of Hamburg’s Kaiser Cellar. Koschmeider was keen to import rock & roll for German audiences, but couldn't afford to bring American acts over. Thinking English bands would make a cheap alternative, Koschmeider snapped up Sheridan and the Jets and took them over to Hamburg. The move marked the start of the British "invasion" of Hamburg clubs that would give the Beatles, among others, their first break as professional musicians. The Beatles later made their recording debut with Sheridan, backing him on a German-recorded version of the old Scottish folk tune My Bonnie.

Another 2 I’s regular in the late 1950s was an ambitious fifteen-year-old, Andrew Loog Oldham. Oldham was so seduced by the club’s glamour and excitement (and by the film Expresso Bongo, which capitalised on London’s growing coffee bar scene - see Hanway Street), he dropped out of school and decided to get into pop music. He got himself a job as a waiter at Ronnie Scott’s (a jazz club in nearby Gerrard Street), spent a couple of years as a music publicist, then talked his way into pop management, overseeing the career of up-and-coming r&b group, the Rolling Stones.

Mark Feld (later better known as Marc Bolan of T. Rex), was another precocious 2 I’s regular (Feld's mum, Phyllis, ran a fruit and vegetable stall around the corner in Berwick Street market). According to legend, Bolan worked an evening shift for a while behind the counter in the 2 I’s ground floor espresso bar. Bolan - who was born in 1947 – would have been only twelve or thirteen at the time. Legend also has it that he auditioned at the 2 I’s on the same day as Harry Webb (Cliff Richard), but was turned down. Cliff, of course, got the job.

The 2 I’s continued to flourish into the early 1960s. Art student and aspiring blues guitarist Eric Clapton hung out here during 1961-62 - at that stage still too uncertain of his own ability to take the stage himself. Although the club survived as a music venue for several more years, it was unable to keep pace with the decade it had helped spawn. It finally closed its doors in 1970, and reopened as a restaurant.

The location is now a branch of the Dome restaurant chain. The restaurant's tiny basement bar is where the club was actually located, although a partition wall now cuts the room in two and it has (needless to say) been redecorated countless times in the intervening decades. According to the restaurant's current manager, it was thought for a long while that a section of Lionel Bart's legendary mural work had survived beneath a painted wall panel on the ground floor. However, when the panel was unscrewed in 1995, the year the Dome took over the premises, no sign of Bart's handiwork could be found. That said, the basement still retains a definite presence and continues to attract camera-toting Cliff fans from far and wide.

Millings No.63

Formerly show business tailor Dougie Millings’ shop. Most of the major pop stars of the 1950s got their stage outfits here, made to measure by Millings and his son Gordon. Among their customers: Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Marty Wilde, Tommy Steele, Billy Fury and Eden Kane.

Some time in early 1963, Beatles manager Brian Epstein visited the shop on the recommendation of impressario Larry Parnes. Concerned to clean up the Beatles’ “look” without out losing their raw edge, Epstein was looking for something tailored but modern, smart and just a tiny bit cheeky. He pooled his ideas with the Millings, and the famous Beatle suit was the result. Made from twelve-ounce mohair and worsted material, the suits were simple and unique, with high buttoning and velvet collars. The jackets were given a tubular look, with 8-inch side pleats and narrow shoulders; the trousers were so tight that the Beatles were barely able to sit down. Millings eventually produced over five hundred variations on the original design, in silver grey, blue, navy blue, beige and black. The cost for each suit in 1963 was £31.

The location is now the Cafe Espana, just a couple of doors down from the site of the legendary Two ‘I’s coffee bar.