Mayfair (Part 2)

Ringo Starr relaxes in his Curzon Street pad

Clifford Street

Mister Fish No.17

Fish originally made his name knocking out kipper ties and sharply-cut suits for early Sixties popsters like the Dave Clark Five.

In 1970, casual shoppers David and Angela Bowie dropped by and took a shine to a range of v-necked, ankle-length silk dresses on display in Fish’s exclusive basement studio (beneath his ground floor shop). David Bowie slipped one of the dresses on, so impressing Fish he knocked £250 off the £300 asking price on condition that Bowie mention the Fish name as often as possible. Ever the astute business person, Bowie agreed and bought the lot. The dresses went on to form the basis for the singer’s early Seventies, cross-dressing phase, causing quite a stir on his first American promotional tour a few weeks later.

Curzon Street

No. 9 (Flat 12)

Astonishingly, two pop stars met untimely deaths in this apartment. Mama Cass Elliott, former vocalist with the Mamas and the Papas (who had borrowed the apartment from its owner, singer Harry Nilsson), choked to death on a sandwich here on 29 July 1974.

Four years later, on 7 September 1978, the Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, died here from an overdose of the anti-alcoholism drug, Heminevrin, a powerful muscle relaxant and sedative. Moon had been out that night to a private party and screening of The Buddy Holly Story at the restaurant Peppermint Park. The event had been organised by Paul McCartney to celebrate Buddy Holly's birthday. Returning home around 4.30 am with his girlfriend Annettte Walter-Lax, Moon swallowed a few Heminevrin tablets and popped The Abominable Dr Phibes, a camp horror classic starring Vincent Price, on the video, before drifting off. Three hours later, Moon woke up feeling hungry. After failing to rouse his girlfriend sufficiently to make him a meal, he wandered in the kitchen, cooked up a steak, swallowed some champagne and a few more Heminevrin, went back to sleep, and never woke up again.

Radio London No.17

Headquarters of what arguably the most dynamic and professional of the pirate stations that revolutionised British music broadcasting during the heady days of Swinging London. Radio One staples in later decades, including Tony Blackburn and Kenny Everett, got their first taste of live broadcasting here. The US-financed station, based in a former US Navy minesweeper anchored in the North Sea three-and-a-half miles off Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, England, was operational between December 1964 and August 1967, when a change in British law, and the launch of Radio One, a sanitised BBC version of the pirate station sound, forced Radio London, and most of its competitor pirate stations, off the air. The only pirate station to defy the ban was Radio Caroline, which continued to broadcast, on and off, until 1990.

Green Park Tube Station, Piccadilly, W1

Bunking off from school in 1978, young Giorgios Panayiotou – aka George Michael - began his performing career as a busker in the London underground. Green Park was Michael’s favourite pitch because he felt the acoustics of the station’s tiled walkways helped boost the “thinness” of his voice.

Green Street

No. 26

Location in late 1976 or early 1977 of an impromptu jam session between an unknown Newcastle musician calling himself Sting, and Stuart Copeland, American-born former drummer with late ‘60s cult art rockers Curved Air. The two struck up an immediate rapport, both personal and musical, but neither could have guessed that the spark lit that night would lead to one of the great pop success stories of the next ten years: the Police.

Recalling the event in his autobiography Broken Music, Sting describes phoning Copeland – who he had met briefly only once before – on impulse from a phone box on the corner of Green Street, and being invited up to Copeland’s top floor flat at no.26. The flat, which was as spacious and elegant as you would expect from a Mayfair address, was, in fact, a squat. The owner, boxer Muhammed Ali’s publicist, had loaned the flat to a friend, who had refused to move out. Copeland, whose former CIA agent father was a friend of a friend of the publicist, had arranged to move Stewart and several others into the property as ‘sub-squatters’ in an effort to 'persuade' the unwelcome tenant to vacate the premises, by generally anti-social behaviour. And what better way to achieve this aim than by using one of the rooms as a practice space for one of the most high energy drummers in rock history?

By all accounts, the tactic was effective, because within months the squatter had moved on, and Copeland and his girlfriend, the spectacularly beautiful singer with Curved Air, Sonja Kristina, had moved to less salubrious quarters. The Police, however, were already well on track, and before leaving the address the first publicity photographs for the band, featuring Sting, Copeland and guitarist Henry Padovani (soon to be replaced by Andy Summers), were taken on the roof of the building on a bitterly cold day in February, 1977.

Sting, on the roof of Stuart Copeland's Green Street gaff, 1977

No. 57

The Beatles rented two apartments in this rather elegant, red-brick Victorian building from October 1963 to March 1964. The apartments they occupied, Flats I and L, are still listed as such in the entrance-way, Flat I being the second buzzer down on the right, Flat L the fourth. (It goes without saying that you should not, on any account, bother current residents by ringing either buzzer in the hope that the ghosts of Beatles past might answer!) Flat L was on the 4^th (top) floor, Flat I on the 3^rd floor. The five months they spent here was the only time all four Beatles lived together. Paul and John eventually moved out of their own accord; George and Ringo were asked to leave by the landlady, a Mrs Thorogood, who was unhappy that crowds of fans had begun hanging around outside.