Soho in the Eighties

Bloomsbury 288pp £20 The Week Bookshop £17 In the 1980s, the writer and journalist Christopher Howse “warmed a barstool” in all of Soho’s most notorious drinking dens, said Grub Smith in the Financial Times. In The Coach and Horses, The Colony Room Club and The French House, among others, he encountered a louche cast of “hacks, artists and has-beens”, many of whom he memorialises in this “thorough and likeable” book. Howse’s “recurring hero” is Jeffrey Bernard (pictured, in 1989), the cantankerous essayist best known for his Low Life column in The Spectator (once described as a “suicide note in instalments”). Among his other “sacred villains” are the painter Francis Bacon, the actor John Hurt and various Private Eye journalists. For this group of “soidisant bohemians”, the worst crime was to be a “bore” – an “insult aimed in scattergun fashion at anyone who did not share their attitudes”. Enjoyable as Howse’s book is, one feels that some of its subjects don’t deserve such a “fine” memorialist. One such is Ian Board, Colony Room proprietor, who would yell out “Hello c***” as his customers entered, and who liked to drop coins into the toilet to see how low punters would stoop in their desperation for another drink.

Soho in the Eighties “lovingly” creates a now-vanished era, when “journalists could sneak off for a lost afternoon of liquid oblivion”, said Robbie Millen in The Times. No detail of this milieu escapes Howse’s attention: he even provides a map of the inside of The Coach and Horses. There are, admittedly, some “very funny” stories in the book, but overall, one is left feeling relieved that this world no longer exists. “As the vodkas mount up, it becomes clear how sad and twisted its inhabitants were, frittering away their talent and wallowing in self-destruction.”