“I have to tell you man, I’m in love with your wife.”
The Scala Theatre on the corner of Scala Street and Charlotte Street was knocked down in 1969, just another part of the huge redevelopment of London during the sixties – a time when town-planners planned seemingly without sentiment. The 1,139 seat Theatre had been built in 1904 but a theatre had been on the site since 1772. It is now a rather drab nondescript office block – another town-planner habit of the sixties.
The Scala Theatre, however, was famous because it was the main location for The Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night. They spent a week there filming at the end of March 1964 and it was during this part of the filming that George met Pattie Boyd. She was a model who had recently gained notoriety for appearing in a Smiths’ Crisps advertisement. It had been directed by the American Richard Lester who of course ended up directing A Hard Day’s Night and suggest Pattie for her role.
Pattie Boyd played a schoolgirl in the film (although her eventual sole line was just ‘Prisoners?!’). George asked Pattie out but at first she refused as she had been seeing the thirty year old photographer Eric Swayne for two years. However she soon relented, getting rid of her boyfriend in the meantime, and their first date was at the Garrick Club in Covent Garden but with the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein as an extra guest. Epstein was also the person from who George asked permission when he wanted to marry Pattie. Which they duly did, with Paul McCartney in attendance and Brian Epstein as best man, at Epsom Registry office in 1966.
Pattie Boyd ended being up the inspiration for ‘Something’ George Harrison’s most popular song, but in reality it was written when their marriage was coming to an end. She was also the muse for ‘Layla’ by Eric Clapton (in the guise of Derek and the Dominos). Layla’s inspiration came from an Indian short story about one man’s obsession with a married woman and someone he couldn’t have. Clapton, a close friend of Harrisons, had fallen in love with Pattie and one night in the early hours at a party he told George, who had spotted the two of them chatting in the garden, ‘I have to tell you, man, that I’m in love with your wife.’
Pattie was horrified and went back with George that night but after three year’s of George’s continuing infidelity and expectation that Pattie should be a stay-at-home housewife, she eventually ended up with Clapton, marrying him in 1979.
Pattie with Eric Clapton soon after their marriage
Pattie and Jenny Boyd
Pattie’s younger sister Jenny was also a model in London and was also the inspiration for a song – Jennifer Juniper by Donovan whom she dated for a short while in 1965. She apparently was working in a boutique called Juniper. After sharing a house with a man called Magic Alex, – one of the principal hangers-on of the Beatles huge entourage, she eventually married Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac in 1970. They had had a long on and off relationship for years. In his book, My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood describes when he first saw her “I’d see Jenny coming home from school, a stunning 15-year-old in white stockings. I lost my heart to her immediately. I had a massive crush on her, but was so shy I couldn’t say anything to her. I knew then, at age 16, that this was the girl I was destined to marry.”
Little did he know, but he would actually marry her twice. Unfortunately they also divorced twice.
Jenny Boyd working in the Apple boutique
There was a third Boyd sister, the youngest, who also dated a famous person (although there seems to be a distinct lack of songs written about her). She was called Paula and was just seventeen when she started seeing Rodney Bewes, one of The Likely Lads. He, though, had turned thirty and one day Pattie and George turned up at his flat to meet Paula – George recognised him from the BBC sitcom and said “Oh no, not you.” Pattie then exclaimed, “Now look Rodney, you must know why we are here. Paula’s only 17, just out of school, it’s not suitable. That’s all. She’s my kid sister, for God’s sake.” Bewes’s only response was to offer them a cup of tea, they refused, and as they left he mentioned how much he liked the new Beatles single.
Bewes found Paula a nearby flat to make the situation a bit more respectable. The affair lasted only a few weeks and one evening when he was expecting her to turn up to meet his parents she didn’t arrive and she soon left him for, I would imagine, someone much more exciting.
“Elegance worthy of a Wren steeple”
A few hundred yards south from Scala House is another concrete building from the sixties, this time it’s anything but nondescript. Centre Point, standing above the complicated junction of Oxford Street, Tottenham Court Road, New Oxford Street, St Giles’ High Street and Charing Cross Road was one of London’s first skyscrapers. It has always been one of post-war London’s most controversial buildings – to a lot of people symbolising the rapacious and ugly re-development of London after the war. The capital city’s rebuilding made a handful of men very rich indeed and the man who was responsible for Centre Point, a reclusive called Harry Hyams, was one of the richest. He was once called the UK’s Howard Hughes when he turned up at a shareholders meeting wearing a Mickey Mouse mask so as not to be recognised.
Centre Point, built by the architect Richard Siefert for £5.5 million, was completed in 1964. However the controversy started at the planning stage n 1956. The London County Council wanted to build a roundabout at the intersection and also sort out the surrounding area. However the council was only allowed to offer compensation at pre-WW2 values and basically couldn’t afford to buy the land. Harry Hyams let it be known that he could buy the land for the roundabout if the LCC would agree to planning permission to build around and over the top of it. This agreement was illegal and was oral rather than written.
Centre Point remained empty for years. Hyams realised that the capital appreciation was far more than the lost rental income on the building. Additionally by keeping it empty he avoided having to pay business rates on the property. In 1973 when the first advertisements appeared for the rental of the building, the estimated value was £20 million which meant it was now the most profitable building in London ever.
It was around this time that Centre Point was at its most controversial, to a lot of people it was a huge example of the thoughtless town-planning of the preceding twenty years and the fact that it was left empty at a time of great homelessness symbolised the greed of the developers such as Harry Hyams.
The building appeared on the cover of the Lindisfarne single ‘All Fall Down’.
“Politicians, planners go, look what you done,
your madness is making a machine of ev’ryone,
but one day the machine might turn on.
We’ll tear you down, mess you round,
and bury you deep under the ground,
and we’ll dance on your graves till the flowers return
and the trees tell us secrets that took ages to learn…”
The trees eventually did tell us secrets that took us ages to learn and that was that Centre Point has become rather fashionable and today looks rather architecturally splendid (although the road system below it is still a complete mess) and Lindisfarne are really only known these days for a single they made with Gazza years ago. The vagaries of fashion.
On January 18th 1974 protesters campaigning for the homeless occupied Centre Point – two of them had managed to get jobs as security guards for the building. One of the squatters described the skyscraper “the concrete symbol of everything that is rotten about our society. The protest, which actually only lasted a couple of days, inspired the name Centrepoint for a new homeless charity.
Around the same time as the building was completed, London County Council decided to make Tottenham Court Road and New Oxford Street one way, which meant that a roundabout wasn’t needed at all. In 1995 Centre Point was made a Grade II listed building with the Royal Fine Art Commission praising the building as having an ‘elegance worthy of a Wren steeple’.
I’ve got an old and trusty blackened wok at home bought over 20 years ago for £4.50 in a Chinese Supermarket called Loon Fung situated at 44 Gerrard Street – the main thoroughfare of Europe’s biggest Chinatown in London’s West End. I, and I’m sure most of the, it has to be said, slightly grumpy staff certainly didn’t know the extraordinary musical history the building had. Incidentally the original Chinatown in London was actually at Limehouse in the East End but for various reasons the Chinese community slowly de-camped to the West End centring around a few streets between Leicester Square and Shaftesbury Avenue. After the war it was a particularly seedy area at the edge of Soho but the rents were practically at peppercorn rates which suited the new Chinese restaurants that sprang up around the area.
Gerrard Street in the late sixties
In 1967, after being a bit of a dingy old strip joint, 44 Gerrard Street became known as Happening 44 – a trendy psychedelic club run by Jack Braceland, one of the earliest light show artists in the UK who’d worked on some of the early shows of Pink Floyd amongst others.
His light shows featured hand-assembled wet slides and Aldis projectors. His company called Five Acre Lights was actually named after a psychedelic nudist colony he ran with his wife at Five Acre Woods near Watford – which in reality, was a number of caravans in a sea of mud and a club house that featured a ‘trip machine’ and where Pink Floyd once played a gig on Guy Fawkes night in 1966. Braceland was a middle-aged, slightly weird beatnik character but for the relatively short while Happening 44 existed, it featured such bands as the Social Deviants and Soft Machine.
Soft Machine in 1967
Happening 44 also put on some of the earliest gigs of Fairport Convention – the folk-rock band that would soon become one of the most influential bands in the country. The band had recently placed adverts in the Melody Maker, presumably read by Jack Braceland, which read:
‘Friday; Fairport Convention stays home tonight. Saturday; Fairport stays home again, patiently waiting for bookings’.
Alas Happening 44 closed down within a few months of opening and Jack Braceland went back to his Watford nudist colony, and presumably his ‘trip machine’, and was never really heard of again.
Soft Machine 1967
Fairport Convention in 1967/68
King Of The Ravers and B-Bombs
Mick Mulligan and George Melly – Photograph by Terry Cryer
In the early fifties and fifteen years before Happening 44, 44 Gerrard Street housed The West End Jazz Club run by George Melly and the trumpeter Mick Mulligan, and it was here that the first ‘all night raves’ were held and, improbably, also where the term ‘all night rave’ was coined.
The word ‘rave’ (as in to ‘live it up’) was invented by Mulligan and took several forms: other than the verb ‘to rave’, there was the noun meaning a party where you raved, and finally a ‘raver’ – someone who raved as much as possible. A newspaper at one point called Mick Mulligan the ‘King of The Ravers’. George Melly wrote once that the original all night raves that had attracted beatniks, Soho layabouts and art school students, were an enormous social success but a financial loss.
In his autobiography Owning Up Melly described the end of a typical rave: “At seven a.m. the band played its final number and we’d all crawl up out of the sweat-scented cellar into the empty streets of a Sunday morning in the West End. Hysterical with lack of sleep, accompanied by a plump art student, her pale cheeks smeared with the night’s mascara, I’d catch the Chelsea bus and try to read the Observer through prickling red eyeballs as we swayed along Piccadilly, down Sloane Street, and into the King’s Road. Then a bath, one of those delirious fucks that only happen on the edge of complete fatigue, and a long sleep until it was time to get up and face the journey to Cook’s Ferry or whatever jazz club we were playing that evening.”
All all-night ravers, from whatever era, need a drug that keeps them awake. The drug of choice that allowed George and his fellow ravers to last the course was Benzedrine taken from broken up inhalers.
The Benzedrine inhaler was intended as a decongestant, but you could break it open, remove the paper strip inside and soak the strip in a cup of coffee or tea. This was called a ‘B-Bomb’ and the preparation got so popular the manufacturers had to withdraw the inhaler from over the counter use in the early fifties.
By the mid-fifties 44 Gerrard Street had become a folk club originally called The Good Earth but after the success of Lonnie Donnegan’s Rock Island Line it became the 44 Skiffle Club run by John Hasted – one of the earliest champions of skiffle which he saw as a form of teenage urban folk music. The house band was known as John Hasted’s Skiffle and Folksong Group and featured the young folk singer Shirley Collins. It’s easy today to be bemused about these clubs based around, as in George Melly’s case trad jazz and with Hasted skiffle and folk music, but these were the first youth movements based around music in this country. It wasn’t rock and roll that was the soundtrack for the first teenagers. Not in London anyway. Nor were they the first drug-takers in the capital.
The 43 Club – Useful For Early Breakfasts
At number 43 Gerrard Street in the 1920s there was situated an infamous nightclub run by an Irish woman called Kate Meyrick. She was famous back in Ireland for being the first woman to ride a bicycle, but in London she was well-known for running a string of nightclubs and evading the strict licensing laws whilst doing so. The most famous of which was the ’43 Club’ in Gerrard Street. It attracted bohemians like the artists Augustus John and Jacob Epstein and writers such as JB Priestley and Joseph Conrad as well as a good sprinkling of gangsters and aristocrats.
Tallulah Bankhead who often performed in London during the 1920s described the club as “useful for early breakfasts” and when asked “what time breakfast would be then?” she replied “about 10pm”. Tallulah Bankhead often admitted to her liking of cocaine and the ’43 Club’ was said to be the centre of drug dealing in the West End of London – the advantage for dealers, during the many police raids on the club, of a hidden escape route to Newport Place was obvious.
Corrupting The Womanhood of this Country
The most notorious cocaine dealer in London during the 1920s was a man known as ‘Brilliant Chang’ – his name is still used as slang for cocaine to this day.
In 1918 a popular young actress called Billie Carleton was found dead in her bed by her maid after attending the Victory ball at the Albert Hall. At her bedside was a gold box containing cocaine given to her by her boyfriend , the costume designer Reggie de Veuille. He had bought the drug from a Scottish woman called Ada and her Chinese husband Lau Ping You. Ada and de Veuille (the prosecution attempted to paint the worst possible picture and described him as ‘somewhat in foreign appearance and accent with an effeminate face and mincing little smile…’) were sentenced to five and eight months hard labour respectively but Lau Ping You escaped with just a £10 fine. The involvement of a Chinese man, however, whipped the press into a frenzy and the newspaper Pictorial News ran a series of pieces on the East End’s ‘Yellow Peril’. Very soon another Chinese man called ‘Brilliant’ Chang was brought to the forefront. Chang was a former Limehouse marine contractor but now ran a restaurant called ‘Shanghai’ in the same part of the East End. Limehouse was London’s original Chinatown but although the population reached its peak just after the First World War the population was probably only around 300 people.
The original Chinatown in Limehouse during the 1920s
The Pictorial News said that Chang ‘dispensed Chinese delicacies and the drugs and vices of the Orient.’ The paper continued that Chang ‘demanded payment for his drugs in kind’ and further enlightened its readers advising that women ‘who retained sufficent decency and pride of race’ turn down ‘this fellow with lips thin and cruel tightly drawn across even yellow teeth’. This description of Chang seems to have come directly from a Sax Rohmer Fu Manchu novel – literature that didn’t exactly help the Chinese immigrant community’s cause and stoked Londoners fears of drugs, foriegners and crime – “Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government—which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”
In 1922, Freda Kempton, a young nightclub dancer was found dead after an overdose of cocaine and the press soon found out that Chang had been with her the night before. He told the Coroner at her inquest ‘she was a friend of mine but I know nothing about the cocaine. It is all a mystery to me.’
According to the coroner there was no proof that he was linked to the death , but the police were convinced that he was. They raided his restaurant in 1924 and found a large quantity of the drug. He was jailed for 18 months and subsequently deported. The judge told him ‘It is you and men like you who are corrupting the womanhood of this country.’ While The Empire News wrote ‘Mothers would be well advised to keep their daughters as far away as they can from Chinese laundries and other places where the yellow men congregate.’
The Daily Telegraph reported a few years later that Chang had gone ‘blind and ended his days, not in luxury and rich silks, but as a sightless worker in a little kitchen garden.’
The womaniser and drug dealer ‘Brilliant’ Chang
In the thirties, probably encouraged by the atmosphere of ‘yellow peril’ hysteria whipped up by the popular press, the local council decided to clear the ‘slum area’ around Limehouse and many of the Chinese shops, restaurants and gambling dens were swept away. This, and the extensive bombing of the area during the Second World War encouraged the gradual migration of Chinatown from the East End to the West End.
Kate Meyrick, meanwhile, after several spells in Holloway prison due to repeated licensing laws offences and the bribing of policemen, died in 1933 – dance bands in the West End, apparently, fell silent for two minutes in tribute.
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-planners planned seemingly without sentiment. The 1,139 seat Theatre had been built in 1904 but a theatre had been on the site since 1772. It is now a rather drab nondescript office block – another town-planner habit of the sixties.
Pattie Boyd ended being up the inspiration for ‘Something’ George Harrison’s most popular song, but in reality it was written when their marriage was coming to an end. She was also the muse for ‘Layla’ by Eric Clapton (in the guise of Derek and the Dominos). Layla’s inspiration came from an Indian short story about one man’s obsession with a married woman and someone he couldn’t have. Clapton, a close friend of Harrisons, had fallen in love with Pattie and one night in the early hours at a party he told George, who had spotted the two of them chatting in the garden, ‘I have to tell you, man, that I’m in love with your wife.’
called Juniper. After sharing a house with a man called Magic Alex, – one of the principal hangers-on of the Beatles huge entourage, she eventually married Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac in 1970. They had had a long on and off relationship for years. In his book, My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood describes when he first saw her “I’d see Jenny coming home from school, a stunning 15-year-old in white stockings. I lost my heart to her immediately. I had a massive crush on her, but was so shy I couldn’t say anything to her. I knew then, at age 16, that this was the girl I was destined to marry.”
Bewes found Paula a nearby flat to make the situation a bit more respectable. The affair lasted only a few weeks and one evening when he was expecting her to turn up to meet his parents she didn’t arrive and she soon left him for, I would imagine, someone much more exciting.
