TALES FROM THE COLONY ROOM
SOHO’S LOST BOHEMIA
DARREN COFFIELD
Unbound, 427pp, £25, ebook £25
The painter Darren Coffield discovered the Colony Room in Soho in the 1980s when he was an art student. He has compiled an oral history of the club, founded by Muriel Belcher in 1948, by its members and hangers-on. In the Mail, Roger Alton thought it ‘riveting’ and ‘an elegy to a vanished world: not necessarily the best of times for everyone, but a world where people talked to each other, not just their mobile phones’. Roland White in the Sunday
Times also felt as though he were there, listing all the Colony’s celebrated habitués: ‘Members or guests over the decades included Noël Coward, EM Forster, Francis Bacon, Damien Hirst, John Hurt, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Henri Cartier-bresson, Ian Fleming and Ian Dury. Tracey Emin, Daniel Craig and Kate Moss were among the people who occasionally did unpaid stints behind the bar.’ In an interview with the Camden New Journal, Coffield described how he’d spent five years tracing the artwork from the Colony’s walls – including works by Francis Bacon given in lieu of payment for drinks. Only Roger Lewis, in the Times, was glad to have
missed the party. ‘According to Coffield, “the only unforgivable sin in the club was to be boring”, but, as always in books about Soho and its denizens, while assertions are made about the pervasive wit and conversational brilliance, actual evidence of dazzling talk is nonexistent. There is nothing left but ugly recollections of snarling and swearing, everyone plastered and “getting angry” like “a pack of mongrel bitches in a slum alley”.’