Italian Futurist Art

A talk by Christopher Adams
24 June 2020

Christopher Adams, curator at the Estorick Collection, has very kindly agreed to give us the illustrated talk on Italian Futurist art he was going to present at the Wheatsheaf shortly before the lockdown.

Edgell Rickword: Sohemian, Poet, Communist and Literary Pioneer

A talk by Brian Denny
26 February 2020

John Edgell Rickword is probably the most influential literary figure you have never heard of. Join us for a fascinating talk about the life and times of this radical Essex writer.

Born in Colchester in 1898, Rickword rebelled against his conservative roots and returned from the First World War to wage another war against the cultural and political establishment with his peers, which included Robert Graves, Nancy Cunard and Aldous Huxley, from his haunts in Soho and Fitzrovia.

His trench poetry dealt with the inhumanity of war and the love of his fellow soldiers in equal measure. This intriguing character went on to political activism against colonialism and imperialism and to become an influential critic of modernist poetry and writing. He was a publisher in many spheres, including first director of Lawrence & Wishart, and made a major contribution to the fight against the growing threat of fascism.

Brian Denny, who works for the RMT union, is the author of The Great 1919 Railway Strike: The Definitive Strike.

Noir Night

A talk by Max Décharné, plus Barry Forshaw and Cathi Unsworth in conversation
20 February 2020

Part One
Writer and musician Max Décharné, whose books include Vulgar Tongues and the slang dictionary Straight From The Fridge, Dad, will be fronting an illustrated trawl through some highlights and lowlights of pulp crime novels from the classic era of hot dames, two-bit porch-climbers and hep-cat killers.

Part Two
Barry Forshaw has met everyone from Patricia Highsmith and Alfred Hitchcock up to today’s leading lights. Acclaimed crime writer Cathi Unsworth will be talking to him about his new magnum opus, Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide. A host of anecdotes (sometimes scurrilous) are guaranteed about the people he has met and interviewed over the years.

Dead Fashion Girl: A Situationist Detective Story

Fred Vermorel in conversation with Cathi Unsworth
9 December 2019

The Sohemians are proud to co-host with Strange Attractor Press a discussion about Dr. Fred Vermorel’s new book, Dead Fashion Girl: A Situationist Detective Story.

Dr. Vermorel is the author of a number of books on subjects that include Kate Bush, Kate Moss, the Sex Pistols, Vivienne Westwood. He has also written Starlust: The Secret Fantasies of Fans, and Queen Victoria’s Lovers: Erotomania & Fantasy.

Orwell’s Vision of London

An illustrated talk by Sarah Wise
31 July 2019

Orwell’s dystopian metropolis is filled with decaying nineteenth-century houses and stumps of even older survivors; buildings and locations have been emptied of all historical meaning as The Party’s programme to vaporise all history prior to the Revolution approaches completion.

Nevertheless, vestiges of an older city remain—and part of Winston Smith’s reclamation of his non-Party identity is fed by an innate, seemingly “ancestral’ sense of a lost London.

Sarah Wise explores how, within Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell presents a passion for antiquity and a powerful sense of place as weapons in the battle against the totalitarian mindset.

A lifelong Londoner, Sarah Wise teaches at City University, London, and is a visiting lecturer on London social history for the University of California. Her three books are The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London; The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum; and Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad Doctors in Victorian England.

British Cult Movies

An illustrated talk by William Fowler and Vic Pratt
24 July 2019

Some cinematic paths lie neat and well-tended, others are ominously overgrown and ignored. Dig down deep to find the bodies beneath…

Occult rites are staged in hippie strip clubs; music hall dame Old Mother Riley haunts a vampiric Bela Lugosi; TV puppet Sooty doles out intoxicating pharmaceuticals; velvet-voiced Vincent Price presents a full-fat cookery programme…

Veteran film curators William Fowler and Vic Pratt crack open the caskets of forgotten or neglected British films and TV to serve up a feast of curiosities to tempt the palate of even the most jaded cinephile. Their unflinching, all-embracing investigative gaze is as likely to reassess an established classic as it is to focus on cobweb-covered delights like pioneering 1930s female film director Mary Field’s beautifully bizarre The Mystery of Marriage, the much-maligned Doctor Who epic “The Trial of a Time Lord”, underground offerings like Anna Ambrose’s experimental art piece Phoelix and Andy Milligan’s bawdy bloodbath The Body Beneath.

All is grist to this monstrous mill, as the authors tamper with outmoded video formats and meddle with magenta-bias safety film in their mission to finger-paint an entirely unexpected, highly irreverent and thoroughly personal picture of film and TV culture in twentieth-century Britain.

Arrested Movement: Vorticism and the London Avant-Garde, 1910-1917

An illustrated talk by Richard Humphreys
17 July 2019

The group was founded by the artist, writer and polemicist, Wyndham Lewis in 1914. Its only group exhibition was held in London the following year.

Vorticist painting combined cubist fragmentation of reality with hard-edged imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment. It was, in effect, a British equivalent to futurism, although with doctrinal differences, and Lewis was deeply hostile to the futurists. Other artists involved with the group were Lawrence Atkinson, Jessica Dismorr, Cuthbert Hamilton, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Edward Wadsworth, and the sculptors Sir Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. David Bomberg was not formally a member of the group but produced major work in a similar style.

The Last Days of Derek Raymond

Cathi Unsworth in conversation with John L Williams and Brian O’Neill
10 July 2019

Click here to listen to their conversation.

1919: Britain’s Year of Revolution

A talk by Simon Webb
19 June 2019

1919: Britain’s Year of Revolution tells the story of an almost unknown passage in British history. On the August Bank Holiday that year, the government in London despatched warships to the northern city of Liverpool in an overwhelming show of force. Thousands of troops, backed by tanks, had been trying without success to suppress disorder on the streets. Earlier that year in London, a thousand soldiers had marched on Downing Street, before being disarmed by a battalion of the Grenadier Guards loyal to the government. In Luton that summer, the town hall was burned down by rioters, before the army was brought in to restore order and in Glasgow artillery and tanks were positioned in the centre of the city to deter what the Secretary of State for Scotland described as a “Bolshevik uprising”.

Industrial unrest and mutiny in the armed forces combined  to produce the fear that Britain was facing the same kind of situation which had led to the Russian Revolution two years earlier. Drawing chiefly upon contemporary sources, Simon Webb’s book describes the sequence of events which looked as though they might be the precursor to a revolution along the lines of those sweeping across Europe at that time. To some observers, it seemed only a matter of time before Britain transformed itself from a constitutional monarchy into a Soviet Republic.

Bring It On Home—Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin and Beyond: The Story of Rock’s Greatest Manager

Mark Blake in conversation with Mojo writer Pat Gilbert
15 May 2019

The larger-than-life Peter Grant steered Led Zeppelin to global success in the 1970s. But it came at a price. For the first time ever, the Grant family have allowed an author access to previously unseen correspondence and photographs to detail the extraordinary, uncensored life and times of one of the pioneers of rock music management.

Published to coincide with Led Zeppelin’s 50th anniversary, Bring It On Home charts Grant’s rise from wartime poverty to nightclub doorman, wrestler and actor, to the birth of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, and his pivotal role in the formation of Led Zeppelin. It charts the highs and lows of life on the road with the famous—and infamous—British rock band. But it also documents his fall from grace amid death threats, drug abuse and the shadow of organised crime, and his final days as a man who shunned the excesses of the music industry in favour of friends and family.

Bring It On Home also features walk-on parts for Bob Dylan, Stanley Kubrick, John Bindon, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, and members of the FBI, CIA, and the Mafia. As his son, Warren Grant, says now, “My dad knew everyone.”

Mark Blake’s previous books include Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd and Pretend You’re In A War: The Who & The Sixties.

A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan

Laura Thompson in conversation with Nigel Jones, plus readings by Sohemian actor, Callum Coates
11 April 2019

On 7 November 1974, a nanny named Sandra Rivett was bludgeoned to death in a Belgravia basement. A second woman, Veronica, Countess of Lucan, was also attacked. The man named in court as perpetrator of these crimes, Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, disappeared in the early hours of the following morning. The case, solved in the eyes of the law, has retained its fascination ever since.

Laura Thompson, acclaimed biographer of Agatha Christie, narrates the story that led up to that cataclysmic event, and draws on her considerable forensic skills to re-examine the possible truths behind one of postwar Britain’s most notorious murders. A Different Class of Murder is a portrait of an era, of an extraordinary cast of characters, of a mystery, of a modern myth. Part social history, part detective story, it tells in masterly style one of the great tales of our collective living memory.

From Swinging London To The Kenyan Bush: The Story of Christian, the Chelsea Cat

An illustrated talk by John Rendall (one of Christian’s co-owners) who’ll be in conversation with his friend Jon Glover
20 March 2019

The year is 1969… The year a man steps onto the surface of the moon for the first time. The year of the Beatles break up. Woodstock. Senator Edward Kennedy drowns a girl in a motoring tragedy. Samuel Beckett wins the Nobel Prize for literature. The Troubles start in Northern Ireland. Sesame Street and Monty Python are screened for the first times. Paul marries Linda, and John, the lovely Yoko. The Who releases Tommy and the police detain Reg and Ronnie Kray. Meanwhile two Aussies are sharing in their Chelsea pad with Christian, their Harrods-procured lion cub!

There’s a whiff of pot and joss sticks in the air as John Rendall takes us back to a time of twenty-inch bell bottom jeans, Indian scarves and those Afghan coats that smelt like a dead sheep if you got rained on while walking your bespoke big cat down the Kings Road.

Illustrated with extraordinary photos of Christian’s life with his human pride. This incredible episode sparked John’s lifelong involvement with animal conservation.

Canine Intellectuals and Celebrated Talking Dogs

A talk by Dr Jan Bondeson
7 March 2019

Dogs have a cherished role as close companions, and their sometimes startling abilities have been a never-ending source of fascination for their observers and friends through the ages. In his new book, Amazing Dogs, Jan Bondeson uncovers the stories of some of the most extraordinary dogs in history. In the 1750s, the Learned English Dog, a Border collie with the ability to spell and perform mathematical calculations, was a sensation in London and thought by some to be a reincarnation of Pythagoras. The acting Newfoundland dog Carlo, who performed in London from 1803 until 1811, had plays specially written for him; their plots called on him to tackle villains, liberate prisoners, and dive into artificial lakes onstage to save drowning children. Don, the Speaking Dog toured the world barking out words like “Hungry! Give me cakes!” and had particular success in New York.

Some of the amazing dogs whose stories Bondeson chronicles belonged to the canine proletariat: turnspit dogs ceaselessly ran inside wheels to turn the roast meat, and terriers showed off their native abilities in rat-pits, with bets laid on the number of rats killed. The champion terrier Billy killed a hundred rats in five and a half minutes in 1823, a record that stood until 1863, when it was broken by Jacko, another champion rat-killer. Before the days of UNICEF trick-or-treaters, dogs once collected for charity in London’s railway stations, with boxes attached to their backs. Lord Byron’s rowdy Newfoundland dog, Boatswain, belonged to the opposite end of the canine social spectrum, as did the super-rich dogs that inherited money from their wealthy and eccentric owners.

The Scala: from Fitzrovia to King’s Cross

Jane Giles in conversation with Ali Catterall
20 February 2019

The deep roots of London’s legendary Scala cinema date back to the site of a concert hall on the Fitzroy estate in 1772. By the nineteenth-century the venue at the corner of Charlotte Street and Tottenham Street was a music hall before passing into the hands of the Salvation Army. Rebuilt in 1905 as the Scala theatre it was a pioneering venue for silent film projection, and a post-war home from home for the likes of Julian Maclaren-Ross, Quentin Crisp and Kenneth Williams. The theatre was demolished in 1969, but out of the rubble came the Scala cinema, a post-punk picture house which was the first in the UK to show Eraserhead, and had music gigs by bands including Spandau Ballet and Throbbing Gristle alongside its film programme.

Author Jane Giles will take us through the wild life and times of the Scala in Fitzrovia before it moved to King’s Cross in 1981.

Rex v Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders

A talk by Laura Thompson, introduced by Nigel Jones
12 December 2018

On the night of 3 October 1922, in the quiet suburb of Ilford, Edith Thompson and her husband Percy were walking home after an evening spent at a London theatre, when a man sprang out of the darkness and stabbed Percy to death. The assailant was Frederick Bywaters, a twenty-year-old merchant seaman who had been Edith’s lover. When the police learned of his relationship with Edith, she was arrested as his accomplice, despite protesting her innocence. The remarkably intense love letters Edith wrote to Freddy—some of them couched in ambiguous language—were read out at their trial for murder at the Old Bailey. They would seal her fate: Edith and Freddy were hanged for the murder of Percy Thompson in January 1923. Freddy was demonstrably guilty; but was Edith truly so?

In shattering detail and with masterful emotional insight, Laura Thompson charts the course of a liaison with thrice-fatal consequences, and investigates what the trial and execution of Edith Thompson tell us about perceptions of women in early twentieth-century Britain.

Ray Harryhausen: the Movie Posters

An illustrated talk by Richard Hollis
21 November 2018

Author and journalist Richard Hollis will showcase some of the amazing film poster art that he sourced from around the world for his new book, Harryhausen: The Movie Posters.

Now considered to be one of the world’s leading visual effects artists, Ray Harryhausen’s first encounter with the field of cinematic illusion began with the release of the original King Kong in 1933. The animator then spent the next fifteen years experimenting in the field of stop-motion photography before embarking on his first feature length film Mighty Joe Young in 1948.

Over the next three decades he worked on another fifteen feature films utilising his proprietary brand of movie magic Dynamation, to bring to life fantastic tales from both Greek Mythology and The Arabian Nights, as well science fiction classics by authors H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.

King Con: the Bizarre Adventures of the Jazz Age’s Greatest Impostor

An illustrated talk by Paul Willetts
8 November 2018

The spellbinding tale of the king of Jazz Age con artists—a real life cross between Tom Ripley and Jay Gatsby—who risks falling victim to his own dangerous game.

After several thankless years on the vaudeville and medicine circuits, the virtuoso singer, handsome young charmer, and smalltime grifter Edgar Laplante embarked upon the bravura performance that would earn him worldwide fame. In the autumn of 1917, he reinvented himself as Chief White Elk: a buckskinned, feathered headdressed war hero, sport star, civil rights campaigner, leader of the Cherokee nation—and total fraud.

Flirting with exposure and jail, Laplante traveled through the American West under the pretense of raising money for struggling Native American reservations. On the trail of even more lucrative opportunities, he crossed the Atlantic for an audience with the British king. Via the decadent nightclubs of Paris, the self-styled Prince Tewanna Rey/Chief White Elk then headed down to the French Riviera, where he instantly captivated a prodigiously rich Austrian countess, who wound up bankrolling his royal tour of Italy, which attracted vast crowds and made him a darling of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. But Laplante’s grandiose overreaching, which propelled him to these improbable heights, soon threatened to send him plummeting back to earth…

King Con—Paul Willetts’s new book—brings this previously untold story to vivid and joyously absurd life, offering a lesson in how our longstanding obsession with celebrity can make fools of us all—and proving that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Rivals of the Ripper

An illustrated talk by Dr Jan Bondeson
24 October 2018

When discussing unsolved murders of women in late Victorian London, most people think of the depredations of Jack the Ripper, the Whitechapel Murderer, whose sanguineous exploits have spawned the creation of a small library of books. But Jack the Ripper was just one of a string of phantom murderers whose unsolved slayings outraged late Victorian Britain. The mysterious Great Coram Street, Burton Crescent and Euston Square murders were talked about with bated breath, and the northern part of Bloomsbury got the unflattering nickname of the “murder neighbourhood” for its profusion of unsolved mysteries. Marvel at the convoluted Kingswood Mystery, littered with fake names and mistaken identities; be puzzled by the blackmail and secret marriage in the Cannon Street Murder; and shudder at the vicious yet silent killing in St Giles that took place in a crowded house in the dead of night. This book is the first to resurrect these unsolved Victorian murder mysteries, and to highlight the ghoulish handiwork of the Rivals of the Ripper.

Dr Bondeson has given memorable talks to the Sohemians on murders of the West End and the London Monster. This will represent a very welcome hat trick of macabre presentations.

Bowie’s Piano Man: The Life of Mike Garson

Clifford Slapper in conversation with Paul Murphy, plus a live piano set
17 October 2018

Bowie’s Piano Man is the first ever biography of the master musician who played more times with David Bowie than anyone else. Mike Garson is a virtuoso jazz and classical pianist who played on twenty Bowie albums, including Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, and Young Americans and on nine world tours with Bowie. They played over 1,000 shows together. The book appeared in 2014 as a slim hardback limited edition but is now being published by Backbeat. Now much expanded to update the past five years, it contains a real inside view of life on the road with Bowie, as well as the effect of his death in 2016 on this trusted close collaborator of his. It is an unusual biography because it takes the form of a dialogue between two pianists, and explores what it means to be a jobbing musician, to be creative, and it covers other issues such as music as therapy, addiction amongst creative people, and how living in the moment translates into music and art.

Author Clifford Slapper is also a pianist and also worked with Bowie, playing piano for Bowie on his last ever television appearance. Slapper has also played for Boy George, Suggs, Lisa Stansfield, Jarvis Cocker, Marc Almond, Holly Johnson, Alabama 3, Angie Brown, and Stereo MCs. He recently produced a special music album called “Bowie Songs One”, of Bowie’s fantastic songs arranged for just piano and voice, on which he plays piano and features singers such as David McAlmont (McAlmont & Butler), Marcella Puppini (Puppini Sisters), Billie Ray Martin, Ian Shaw, Katherine Ellis and others.

Simon Blumenfeld Evening

Ken Worple in conversation with Pete Mason
11 October 2018

Ken Worple will give an overview of the work of Simon Blumenfeld, focusing on Jew Boy and Doctor of The Lost. This will be followed by Pete Mason focusing on Phineas Kahn and then interviewing Blumenfeld’s son, Eric about the novel and its connection to their family’s history.

Simon Blumenfeld’s acclaimed second novel, Phineas Kahn: Portrait Of An Immigrant, follows the struggles of a Jewish merchant’s son, Phineas Kahn, as he makes his escape from the confines of Tsarist Russia to Vienna and then London in 1900, where he settles to raise a large family in the liberating atmosphere but desperate poverty of the East End. Hard-working and wedded to tradition, Phineas never surrenders in his fight to achieve a better life for his wife and children, who along with his great love of music offer solace in the most difficult times. Phineas Kahn: Portrait Of An Immigrant follows Blumenfeld’s ground-breaking debut Jew Boy, and shows the experience of earlier, first-generation migrants.

Based on tales from Blumenfeld’s own family history, and the lives of people he knew while growing up in Whitechapel, Phineas Kahn opens up a window on the sweatshops, slums and synagogues of the area’s Jewish community in the early decades of the twentieth-century. Not only a fascinating insight into what was a largely hidden world, Phineas Kahn is also a priceless portrayal – wrapped up in a gripping, warm narrative – of a London now vanished. With Jew Boy and Doctor Of The Lost it forms a loose trilogy that captures the shifting culture, politics and expectations of those who made the East End their home.

Ironfoot Jack: King of the Bohemians

A talk by Colin Stanley
19 September 2018

Author Colin Stanley will be talking about The Surrender of Silence, his biography of Soho legend, Jack Rudolph Neave, “Ironfoot Jack” (1881-1959), escape artist, fortune-teller, author and raconteur.

“I became acquainted with gypsies, with show people, with buskers, with people who entertained the public by performing in the city, on fair grounds and market places…and with a variety of ‘fiddles’—that is, some dubious methods of obtaining the means of life. I became a member of this fraternity.”

Ironfoot Jack, self-styled “King of the Bohemians”, was a well-known Soho character in pre-and postwar London. His rich and enthralling story of a lifestyle now gone forever was dictated as his portrait was being painted by the artist Timothy Whidborne in 1956. It was then entrusted to a Soho acquaintance, the author Colin Wilson whose first book The Outsider, had been a success in the same year. Despite his efforts, Wilson failed to find a publisher and, after his death, the manuscript was discovered among his papers by his bibliographer Colin Stanley, who assembled the text, which is accompanied by a contextual introduction by cultural historian Phil Baker.

Ironfoot Jack wrote that The Surrender of Silence was “the outcome of years of struggle to survive; of solving the problem of existence by various and curious methods… Most of the people I am talking about led a precarious life and obtained their livelihood from day to day…. They worked to live; they did not live to work.”

Tales from the Colony: The Lost Bohemia of Bacon, Belcher and Board

Darren Coffield in conversation with Clive Jennings
12 July 2018

TRIGGER WARNING: This book contains strong language, sex, violence and extreme wit.

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the closure of London’s most infamous arts establishment, the Colony Room Club in London’s Soho, former member Darren Coffield has written the authorised history of this notorious drinking club. It’s a hair-raising romp through the underbelly of the post-war arts scene. During its sixty-year history more romances, more deaths, more horrors and more sex scandals took place in the Colony than anywhere else. And if they didn’t actually happen there, they were definitely planned there.

In a regimented and sexually repressed post-war London, the Colony attracted professional drinkers to a man, woman or something in-between, since sexual non-conformity always played its part in the mix. It was heroically bohemian and created, by two dominant personalities—that of its owner, Muriel Belcher and the artist Francis Bacon. Muriel was a combination of muse, mentor, critic, and guru to those who gathered around her. The Colony brought together the confluences of talents that would help define post war London and will be forever associated with the artistic circle of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.

An Evening with Morton Myles: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Couturier Who Put Designer Labels into Department Stores.

Morton Myles in conversation with Jon Glover, interspersed by illustrations
2 July 2018

The man who’s clothes were worn by Jackie Kennedy and featured on the magazine cover that launched him on his way to fame and fortune.

Illustrated with Morton’s own photographs (never seen in this country before) in conversation with Jon Glover—actor and Sohemian Chappist fashion icon—we’ll journey from a middle class American Jewish household, via New York in the 1940s and 1950s, Paris in the 1950s, New York in the 1960s, and to Scottsdale Arizona today.

Halfway To Paradise

Max Decharne in conversation with David and Caroline Stafford
20 June 2018

“There’s only ever been two English rock ’n’ roll singers, Johnny Rotten and Billy Fury.” (Ian Dury)

If he’d merely stood like a statue on stage, he would have flooded theatres with hormonal longings, but he was incapable of standing still. He pulsed. He writhed. He invalidated the manufacturer’s guarantee on microphone stands. He provoked shock and awe.

From Billy’s troubled childhood in Liverpool, via gold and silver lamé, to his later years as a farming ornithologist and a comeback cut short by his premature death, David and Caroline Stafford’s sparkling biography brings to life this captivating performer. Billy knew everybody, auditioned the Beatles to be his backing band, met and out-handsomed Elvis, partied with Keith Moon and hosted acid parties. Yet, throughout the mayhem, he always remained true to himself: diffident and amused.

Cathi Unsworth Talks About Her Latest Novel

23 May 2018

Our First Lady of Noir, Cathi Unsworth, talks about her novels and the themes that link them together, drawing a line back from her recent release That Old Black Magic to her debut The Not Knowing and the aesthetics and obsessions that helped create the wonderful parallel universe these books inhabit. We will also be discussing the true-life crimes that inspired many of the books, including the unsolved case of “Jack The Stripper” that informed Bad Penny Blues, the disturbing events of two weeks in February 1941 that forged Without The Moon and the Hagley Woods mystery and trial of “Blitz witch’ Helen Duncan that are the main story lines of That Old Black Magic. Expect to hear tales about spooks of every nature, witches and Dennis Wheatley, rippers, strippers, musicians and magicians…

An Evening with Fenella Fielding

Fenella Fielding in conversation with Simon McKay
At The Century Club, 61-63 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1D 6LQ
15 May 2018

Best known for her 1960s film appearances in classic comedies such as Carry On Screaming, Doctor in Clover, and Carry On Regardless, Fielding's sublime talents also brought her work at Peter Cook’s Establishment Club and success in serious stage roles, including title roles in Hedda Gabler and Colette. Her reminiscences of her extraordinary life will be spiced with star-studded anecdotes.

Earthbound: The Man Who Fell To Earth

Susan Compo in conversation with Cathi Unsworth
5 April 2018

Earthbound is the first book-length exploration of a true classic of twentieth-century science-fiction cinema, shot under the heavy, ethereal skies of New Mexico by the legendary British director Nicolas Roeg, and starring David Bowie in a role he seemed born for as an extraterrestrial named Thomas Newton who comes to Earth in search of water.

Based on a novel by the highly regarded American writer Walter Tevis, this dreamy, distressing, and visionary film resonates even more strongly in the twenty-first century than it did on its original release during the year of the US Bicentennial.

Drawing on extensive research and exclusive first-hand interviews with members of the cast and crew, Earthbound begins with a look at Tevis’s 1963 novel before moving into a detailed analysis of a film described by its director as “a sci-fi film without a lot of sci-fi tools” and starring a group of actors—Bowie, Buck Henry, Candy Clark, Rip Torn—later described by one of them (Henry) as “not a cast but a dinner party.” It also seeks to uncover the mysteries surrounding Bowie’s rejected soundtrack to the film (elements of which later ended up his groundbreaking 1977 album Low) and closes with a look at his return to the themes and characters of The Man Who Fell To Earth in one of his final works, the acclaimed musical production.

The London Monster

An illustrated talk by Dr Jan Bondeson
21 March 2018

“The facts in this case are so bizarre that no novelist would have dared to invent them," said the Philadelphia Inquirer. Indeed. A century before Jack the Ripper haunted the streets of London, another predator held sway: a “vulgar-looking man” who slashed at female pedestrians with a knife while uttering profanities with a “tremulous eagerness”. The city was gripped with fear, outrage, and “monster mania.” The latter was abetted by a £100 reward and by the circulation of bawdy prints that capitalized on the Monster’s tendency to slash his victims’ buttocks. Armed vigilantes roamed the streets, and fashionable ladies dared not walk outdoors without first strategically placing cooking pots under their dresses. 

Finally, in June 1790, one Rhynwick Williams was arrested. After two long and ludicrous trials (at one of which he was defended energetically by the eccentric Irish poet Theophilus Swift), Williams was convicted. Was he guilty? Or just unlucky enough to fall into the hands of authorities when they needed someone to pay? Drawing on contemporary evidence and reinterpreting Monster mania in the light of historical and modern instances of mass hysteria, Jan Bondeson recounts with dry wit a tale that occupies a unique place in criminal history and imagination.

In the Sixties

A talk by Barry Miles
14 March 2018

At the beginning of the 1960s Barry Miles was at art school in Cheltenham; at the end he was running the Beatles’s Apple label and living in New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel. This is the story of what happened in between. In the Sixties is a memoir by one of the key figures of the British counterculture. A friend of Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Miles helped to organise the 1965 Albert Hall poetry reading. He co-founded and ran the Indica Bookshop, the command centre for the London underground scene, and he published Europe’s first underground newspaper, International Times (IT), from Indica’s basement. Miles’s partners in Indica were John Dunbar, then married to Marianne Faithfull, and Peter Asher. Through Asher, Miles became closely involved with the Beatles, particularly Paul McCartney, and In the Sixties is full of intimate glimpses of the Beatles at work and play. Other musicians who appear include the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Leonard Cohen and Frank Zappa. This is the real story of the 1960s, from the inside.

Adrift in Soho

A film by Pablo Berens, based on the novel by Colin Wilson
Screening at The Sanctum Soho Hotel, 20 Warwick Street, London W1B 5NF
23 February 2018

Music, dreams, realities and desires to change the world in the Soho of the late 1950s. Harry Preston (Owen Drake), a young writer from the provinces, settles in a London neighbourhood inhabited by unconventional characters, loitering with intent.

Ealing Studios

An illustrated talk by Charles Barr, introduced by the TLS writer David Collard
15 February 2018

“Ealing films”, “Ealing comedies”, or just “Ealing”—these are familiar shorthand terms that still have currency six decades after the studio in West London ceased production. Often the words are used, nostalgically or impatiently, to evoke the image of a certain postwar England, cosy, quirky, self-deprecating, and resistant to change. But that is less than half of the story: Ealing’s time-span was longer, and its output more complex. Charles Barr wrote the first book-length study of Ealing in the late 1970s, going behind the stereotype, and has updated it since in two revised editions. A further revision is now overdue, in response both to new discoveries and to changing times: Ealing films look subtly different, and have different uses, at different historical moments. Charles will in effect be presenting the outline for a new edition of his Ealing Studios appropriate to 2018, with a wealth of visual illustration.

Rebel Threads

Roger Burton in conversation with Cathi Unsworth
At The Century Club, 61-63 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1D 6LQ
23 January 2018

Rebel Threads features over 1,300 examples of rare vintage clothing (some of which will be shown as images on a screen at the event), from the swing, counterculture and blank generation eras, detailed photographs and factual stories of the clothes origins, alongside many previously unseen fashion and film stills.

The book traces how these distinct street punk styles were originally put together and worn by the predominant teenage subcultures that emerged between 1940-1980, and set these kids apart from mainstream fashion. With fifty years’ experience collecting vintage street fashion, costume designer, stylist and former Mod, the author, supplied original Mod clothing for the 1978 cult film Quadrophenia, before establishing the Contemporary Wardrobe Collection, to provide street fashion for TV and Film. He went on to dress literally hundreds of influential musicians, from David Bowie to the Rolling Stones. The archive now exceeds some 20,000 items and serves as a valuable resource for leading fashion and film stylists, designers and important museums around the world. Rebel Threads is prerequisite for all lovers of vintage clothing, collectors, fashion students, designers, costumiers and anyone fascinated by the history of street style.

Christopher Fowler: London Belongs To Me

Christopher Fowler in conversation with Cathi Unsworth
13 December 2017

Christopher Fowler is a Londoner who jointly owned and ran the UK’s top film-marketing company, mixing with the likes of Terry-Thomas and the Pythons in service of the legendary Brentford Nylons. He is the author of the Bryant & May mysteries, in which our heroes, octogenarian veterans of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, formed in the Second World War to tackle cases of a sensitive nature, have taken on everything from a murderous Mr Punch to a vanishing public house, utilising their vast knowledge of the folklore, forbidden zones and Forteana of The Smoke to solve each case. Other novels include Roofworld, Spanky, Psychoville, Nyctophobia, The Sand Men and two volumes of memoirs, the award-winning Paperboy and Film Freak. The multiple-awarded author also won the CWA Dagger In The Library and fulfilled several schoolboy fantasies—releasing a terrible Christmas single, writing a stage show, creating a video game with Sir Patrick Stewart, appearing in the Pan Books of Horror and standing in for James Bond. This year alone he has released a new collection of short stories, Frightening, a new Bryant & May, Wild Chamber, and The Book of Forgotten Authors—one-hundred wordsmiths who have fallen from the bookshelves of memory, including many Sohemian faves. His love of the films and literature of the Capital informs his every word, and his knowledge of obscure London locations is unrivaled.

David Bowie Made Me Gay

A talk by Darryl W Bullock
7 December 2017

From the birth of jazz in the red-light district of New Orleans, through the rock ’n’ roll years, Swinging Sixties and all-singing and all dancing disco days of the 1970s, to modern pop, electronica and reggae the LGBT community has played a crucial role in modern music.

At the turn of the twentieth century, recording technology for the first time brought the messages of LGBT artists from the cabaret stage into the homes of millions. Their personal struggle and threat of persecution during decades of political and historical turmoil—including two world wars, Stonewall and the AIDS crisis has led to some of the most significant and soul-searching music of the last century.

Through exclusive new interviews and contemporary reports, Bullock pulls back the curtain on the colourful legacy that has shaped our musical and cultural landscape, revealing the inspiring and often heartbreaking stories of internationally renowned LGBT artists from Billie Holiday and Dusty Springfield to Frankie Goes to Hollywood and George Michael and of numerous lesser-known names that have driven the revolution from all corners of the globe.

Down and Out with the Diarists

Travis Elborough in conversation with Virginia Ironside
29 November 2017

Author and anthologist Travis Elborough’s latest book, Our History Of The 20th Century: As Told In Diaries, Journals And Letters, has been praised by Craig Brown for offering a “rare, unexpurgated peep-hole to the past.”

Featuring over a hundred different diarists, from the great and the good to the obscure and unknown, and ranging from the likes of Arnold Bennett, WNP Barbellion and Benjamin Britten to Joan Wyndham, Kenneth Williams and Derek Jarman, it also contains previously unpublished extracts from the diaries of Virginia Ironside, author, journalist, agony aunt and Sohemian extraordinaire.

Join them as they embark on an entertaining exploration of the loucher side of last century via the unfiltered personal accounts left behind.

The Very Talented Mr Minton

An illustrated talk by Simon Martin
15 November 2017

Simon Martin curated the recent major Pallant House Gallery exhibition on the British artist John Minton (1917-1957), marking the centenary of his birth and sixty years since his death. Simon’s presentation will explore the artist’s achievements far beyond his reputation as a leading illustrator and influential teacher, spanning: evocative wartime landscapes, including views of London, rooting him firmly in the Neo-Romantic tradition. Exotic subject matter in a new colour palette inspired by travel to Corsica, Jamaica, and Spain, including the newly rediscovered “Jamaican Village” (1951). Figurative work including portraits of young male students and friends that express something of Minton’s experience as a leading gay artist in the 1940s and 1950s. These have added poignancy as 2017 marks half-a-century since the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England and Wales. Book illustrations, posters and lithographs, showing his position as a leading post-war illustrator. Ambitious paintings exploring historic and current events, as he sought a new context for history painting in an increasingly abstract art world.

Minton was a bohemian figure in London during the 1940s and 50s who counted artists such as Lucian Freud and Keith Vaughan in his circle, and a following of Camberwell School of Art and Royal College of Art students known as “Johnny’s Circus.” Often the life and soul of a party but also plagued by self-doubt, his work reflected his complex character. This talk will refer to Minton’s evocative wartime landscapes, including moving depictions of post-war London, which gained him the moniker “urban romantic”. Placing him firmly within the context of Neo-Romanticism in Britain, it explores the influence of the nineteenth-century visionary Samuel Palmer as well as that of his contemporaries including the Polish émigré Jankel Adler, and also Keith Vaughan, Michael Ayrton, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, all of whom he shared a home with during the 1950s.

Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of British Noir

25 October 2017
Nick Triplow in conversation with Cathi Unsworth

Get Carter are two words to bring a smile of fond recollection to all British film lovers of a certain age.

The cinema classic was based on a book called Jack's Return Home, and many commentators agree contemporary British crime writing began with that novel. The influence of both book and film is strong to this day, reflected in the work of David Peace, Jake Arnott and a host of contemporary crime & noir authors. But what of the man who wrote this seminal work?

Ted Lewis is one of the most important writers you’ve never heard of. Born in Manchester in 1940, he grew up in the tough environs of post-war Humberside, attending Hull College of Arts and Crafts before heading for London. His life described a cycle of obscurity to glamour and back to obscurity, followed by death at only forty-two.

He sampled the bright temptations of sixties London while working in advertising, TV and films and he encountered excitement and danger in Soho drinking dens, rubbing shoulders with the “East End boys” in gangland haunts. He wrote for Z Cars and had some nine books published. Alas, unable to repeat the commercial success of Get Carter, Lewis’s life fell apart, his marriage ended and he returned to Humberside and an all too early demise.

A Life in Magazine-Publishing

Prolific publisher and founder of Viz magazine, John Brown, in conversation with Cathi Unsworth
18 October 2017

Murder Houses of London

An illustrated talk by Jan Bondsman
11 October 2017

In this stately Fitzrovia house, the butler was murdered by a disgruntled pantry-boy; in that one, a king’s housekeeper lost her life. In that Kensington flat, a demented playboy murdered a prostitute for kicks; in that Gloucester Road basement, “Acid Bath” Haigh was busy dissolving the bodies of his victims. In those two elegant Chelsea houses, located in peaceful garden squares, a clergyman and his housekeeper were brutally done to death in 1870. In that peaceful little house, not far from Camden Road Station, a woman murdered her rival, dismembered the body, and disposed of it using an old-fashioned perambulator. In that peaceful pub near the Thames, the landlady was murdered in 1920, and the killer was never found. In one Islington house, George Joseph Smith disposed of one of his “Brides in the Bath”; in another, Annie Walters, the notorious baby farmer, was plying her deadly trade; in a third, a brilliant playwright was brutally murdered by his homosexual lover.

Dr Bondeson deals with central London’s architecture of capital crime: houses inside which celebrated murders have been committed. Pursue Lord Lucan as he escapes from his elegant Belgravia house, leaving the dead nanny in the basement; prowl the Soho streets once haunted by an elusive serial killer; and follow in the murderous footsteps of the Blackout Ripper and the serial killer Patrick Mackay. And read about London’s many forgotten murders, where only the murder houses remain to tell a tale.

The Traitors: A True Story of Blood, Betrayal and Deceit

A talk by Josh Ireland
20 September 2017

September 1939. For years now Britain has been rudderless, divided and grievously unequal. Successive governments have floundered as they struggled to cope with economic misery at home and machinations abroad. Many of the country’s citizens are seduced by fascism; others are simply left alienated by leaders who seem unwilling or unable to take the decisive action that is so desperately needed.

When war breaks out the imperiled nation achieves the unity and purpose that has eluded it for more than a decade. It is a time of heroism and sacrifice in which many thousands of soldiers and civilians give their lives. But some Britons choose a different path, renegades who will fight for the Third Reich until its gruesome collapse in 1945. The Traitors tells the stories of four such men: the chaotic, tragic John Amery; the idealistic but hate-filled William Joyce; the cynical, murderous conman Harold Cole; and Eric Pleasants, an iron-willed pacifist and bodybuilder who wants no part in this war.

Drawing on declassified MI5 files, as well as diaries, letters and memoirs, The Traitors is a book about disordered lives in turbulent times; idealism twisted out of shape; of torn consciences and abandoned loyalties; of murder, deceit, temptation and loss. It shows how a man might come to desert his country’s cause, and the tragic consequences that treachery brings in its wake.

Art in the Service of the Revolution: the Creation of the Soviet Myth

An illustrated talk by Dr Natalia Murray
20 June 2017

Dr Natalia Murray, lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art and co-curator of Revolution: Russian Art 1917-32, explores how visual art was used to propagate revolutionary and Communist ideas in the aftermath of the Russian revolution.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 aimed to destroy the old bourgeois society and build a new, homogenous socialist state. Overnight becoming the ruling party in Russia, the Bolsheviks aimed to use the power of mass propaganda to establish their founding mythology and disseminate their ideas to an overwhelmingly rural and illiterate population. The leader of the new Bolshevik state, Vladimir Lenin, proclaimed that culture should support political needs, which effectively meant that all culture was now viewed as propaganda. The Bolshevik regime also believed that culture should not be for a privileged minority, but should be of mass appeal, promoting a so-called “proletarian art”.

The Unfinished Palazzo: Life, Love and Art in Venice

A talk by Judith Mackrell
14 June 2017

Commissioned in 1750, the Palazzo Venier was planned as a testimony to the power and wealth of a great Venetian family, but the fortunes of the Venier family waned and the project was abandoned with only one storey complete. Empty, unfinished, and in a gradual state of decay, the building was considered an eyesore. Yet in the early twentieth-century the unfinished palazzo’s quality of fairytale abandonment, and its potential for transformation, were to attract and inspire three fascinating women at key moments in their lives: Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse and Peggy Guggenheim. Each chose the Palazzo Venier as the stage on which to build her own world of art and imagination, surrounded by an amazing supporting cast, from Gabriel d’Annunzio and Nijinsky, via Noel Coward and Cecil Beaton, to Yoko Ono.

Luisa turned her home into an aesthete’s fantasy where she hosted parties as extravagant and decadent as Renaissance court operas—spending small fortunes on her own costumes in her quest to become a “living work of art” and muse to the artists of the late belle époque and early modernist eras. Doris strove to make her mark in London and Venice during the glamorous, hedonistic interwar years, hosting film stars and royalty at glittering parties. In the postwar years, Peggy turned the Palazzo into a model of modernist simplicity that served as a home for her exquisite collection of modern art that today draws tourists and art-lovers from around the world. Mackrell tells each life story vividly in turn, weaving an intricate history of these legendary characters and the unfinished palazzo that they all at different times called home.

M: Maxwell Knight, MI5’s Greatest Spymaster

Henry Hemming in conversation with Paul Willetts
24 May 2017

Maxwell Knight was a paradox. A jazz obsessive and nature enthusiast (he is the author of the definitive work on how to look after a gorilla), he is seen today as one of MI5’s greatest spymasters, a man who did more than any other to break up British fascism during the Second World War—in spite of having once belonged to the British Fascisti himself. He was known to his agents and colleagues simply as M, and was rumoured to be part of the inspiration for the character M in the James Bond series.

Knight became a legendary spymaster despite an almost total lack of qualifications. What set him apart from his peers was a mercurial ability to transform almost anyone into a fearless secret agent. He was the first in MI5 to grasp the potential of training female agents.

The Fatal Tree

Jake Arnott in conversation with Cathi Unsworth
19 April 2017

London, the 1720s. Welcome to “Romeville”, the underworld of that great city. The financial crash caused by the South Sea Bubble sees the rise of Jonathan Wild, self-styled “Thief-taker General” who purports to keep the peace while brutally controlling organised crime. Only two people truly defy him: Jack Sheppard, apprentice turned house-breaker, and his lover, the notorious whore and pickpocket Edgworth Bess.

From the condemned cell at Newgate, Bess gives her account of how she and Jack formed the most famous criminal partnership of their age: a tale of lost innocence and harsh survival, passion and danger, bold exploits and spectacular gaol-breaks—and of the price they paid for rousing the mob of Romeville against its corrupt master.

Bess dictates her narrative to Billy Archer, a Grub Street hack and aspiring poet who has rubbed shoulders with Defoe and Swift. But he also inhabits that other underworld of “molly-houses” and “unnameable sin”, and has his own story of subterfuge, treachery and doomed romance to deliver. As the gallows casts its grim shadow, who will live to escape the Fatal Tree?

Peter York: From Sloanes to Hipsters.

Peter York in conversation with Cathi Unsworth
12 April 2017

Cathi Unsworth will be hosting what promises to be a most entertaining evening with cultural commentator Peter York, on his recent BBC documentary The Hipster’s Handbook and the various teen tribes he has previously investigated, from his legendary Sloane Ranger Handbook to the birth of punk and new wave documented in his prescient tome Style Wars. Are hipsters the first youth culture to be based entirely on capitalism? Find out what fashion’s foremost anthropologist has to say…

Living Haunted London

An illustrated talk by Ruth Bayer
9 March 2017

Ruth Bayer is a London-based Austrian photographer, whose work ranges from bands to noir-folk, to digital manifestations of the elements, ghosts, and cultural quirks. Her work has been exhibited at galleries all over the world, and her photographs have appeared in numerous music, style magazines and books over the past two decades.

Ruth has been involved in various esoteric projects with her friend Caroline Wise over the last thirty years—magical, artistic and literary. Here they present an evening looking at the ancient sacred sites of London, in history, atmosphere, and mystical nature. Caroline Wise co-edited The Secret Lore of London and has contributed to books on the ancient Goddesses, on the artist Austin Osman Spare, and on female magical pioneers.

Poet in Paint: The Art and Life of Paul Nash

An illustrated talk by David Boyd Haycock
22 February 2017

Paul Nash, currently the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Britain, was one of the most important British artists of the first half of the twentieth century. In watercolours, prints and oil paintings he successfully united the romantic tradition embodied by English artists such as William Blake, Samuel Palmer and Dante Gabriel Rossetti with modern European movements such as Futurism, Surrealism and Abstraction.

Based on his books A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (2009) and Paul Nash Watercolours, 1910-1946, David Boyd Haycock’s lecture explores Nash’s career, from his artistic education at the Slade School of Art through his experiences as an official war artist in both World Wars.

A Very English Scandal: Sex, Lies and a Murder Plot at the Heart of the Establishment

A talk by John Preston
25 January 2017

Behind oak-panelled doors in the House of Commons, men with cut-glass accents and gold signet rings are conspiring to murder. It’s the late 1960s and homosexuality has only just been legalised, and Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal party, has a secret he’s desperate to hide. As long as Norman Scott, his unstable lover is around, Thorpe’s brilliant career is at risk. With the help of his fellow politicians, Thorpe schemes, deceives, embezzles—until he can see only one way to silence Scott for good.

The trial of Jeremy Thorpe changed our society forever: it was the moment the British public discovered the truth about its political class. Illuminating the darkest secrets of the Establishment, the Thorpe affair revealed such breath-taking deceit and corruption in an entire section of British society that, at the time, hardly anyone dared believe it could be true.

A Very English Scandal is an eye-opening tale of how the powerful protect their own, and an extraordinary insight into the forces that shaped modern Britain.

Colin Wilson: The Outsider and Beyond

A talk by Gary Lachman, plus Laura Del Rivo in conversation with Colin Stanley
23 November 2016

Part 1
To mark the sixtieth anniversary of Wilson’s debut, Gary Lachman’s talk will focus on the essence of this writer’s search and is based on his new biography Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. Colin Wilson burst on the literary scene in 1956 with his first book The Outsider, a study of creativity, alienation, and extreme mental states. From then until his death in 2013, Wilson produced an enormous body of work, exploring disparate but related subjects such as existentialism, crime, sex, literature, philosophy, psychology, the occult, mysticism and more in his quest for the “peak experience”, a moment of supreme affirmation and insight.

Part 2
Colin Stanley will be talking with author Laura Del Rivo, who was a Soho regular during the 1950s, about how Colin Wilson’s second novel Adrift in Soho (soon to be a feature film) came to be written and they will discuss some of the real-life characters, such as Ironfoot Jack and Pierre the Musketeer among others, who appeared in the book.

Vulgar Tongues: An Alternative History of English Slang

Max Décharné in conversation with Cathi Unsworth
16 November 2016

​Cathi Unsworth will be interviewing the multi-talented Max Décharné about his epic history of slang, Vulgar Tongues. Tracing the threads over several centuries and across international borders, this is the story of how the English language of Shakespeare’s day fragmented and twisted into all kinds of shapes, as pickpockets, beggars, sailors, musicians, gangsters, whores, politicians, gypsies, soldiers, gays and lesbians, policemen, rappers, cockneys and biker gangs seized the King’s or Queen’s English by the throat and took it to places it would probably regret in the morning.

Max Décharné is an author, songwriter and musician. He has recorded numerous albums and singles, and eight John Peel Sessions as the singer with The Flaming Stars. A regular contributor to Mojo magazine since 1998, his books include Hardboiled Hollywood, King’s Road, the jive-talk dictionary Straight From The Fridge, Dad, and the definitive history of rockabilly music, A Rocket in my Pocket.

Banned! The BBC and Censorship

A talk by Steve Wilson
19 October 2016

George Orwell made it his model for the Ministry of Truth, the late Terry Wogan christened it “Auntie”. Call it what you will, for over fifty years the BBC—from a stone’s throw away from the Sohemian Society’s meeting place—acted as moral guardian for the nation. Surprisingly perhaps it was not sex that most often exercised the fevered brows of the various people and committees involved. Questions of taste, morale and even the correct interpretation of scripture were enough for the Department of Religious Broadcasting. While not alone in their interference, they were the most pervasive, the great Joe Meek was often in their sights and the mere mention of motorbikes seemed to send them into a frenzy. Tonight you will see and hear the startling connection between Hawkwind and Arthur Askey, the mystery of the crucifixion and how the BBC may have started rock and roll by accident by filling the clubs of Soho with expectant jazz musicians!

Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939

Virginia Nicholson in conversation with Marc Glendening
21 September 2016

Among the Bohemians charts the valiant experiments of the artists, poets, writers and composers, who in the early twentieth century declared war on Victorian conformity. Rebels and free spirits, these were the pioneers of a domestic revolution. Escaping the confines of the society into which they had been born, they carried idealism and creativity into every aspect of daily life. Deaf to disapproval, they got drunk and into debt, took drugs, experimented with homosexuality and open marriages, and brought up their children out of wedlock. In the spirit of liberty, they sacrificed comfortable homes and took to the road in gypsy caravans or moved into spartan garrets in Chelsea.

Yet their choice of a free life led all too often to poverty, hunger, addiction and even death. Among the large cast of flamboyant characters depicted in Among the Bohemians are such giants of the artistic scene as Augustus John, Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill, alongside their literary counterparts Dylan Thomas, Robert Graves and Arthur Ransome. Lesser-known (but no less colourful) characters include Kathleen Hale, Iris Tree, Philip O’Connor, Nina Hamnett and Ruthven Todd.

The Visitors’ Book: In Francis Bacon’s Shadow: The Lives of Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller

A talk by Jon Lys Turner
20 July 2016

Denis Wirth-Miller and Dicky Chopping were a couple at the heart of the mid-twentieth century art world, with the visitors’ book of the Essex townhouse they shared from 1945 until 2008, painting them as Zeligs of British society.

The names recorded inside make up an astonishing supporting cast—from Francis Bacon to Lucian Freud to Randolph Churchill to John Minton. Successful artists, although not household names themselves, writing Dicky and Denis off as just footnotes in history would be a mistake. After Denis’s death in 2010, Jon Lys-Turner, one of two executors of the couple’s estate, came into possession of an extraordinary archive of letters, works of art and symbolically loaded ephemera the two had collected since they met in the 1930s.

It is no exaggeration to state that this archive represents a missing link in British art history—the wealth of new biographical information disclosed about Francis Bacon, for example, is truly staggering.

The Visitors’ Book is both an extraordinary insight into the minutiae of Dicky and Denis’s life together and what it meant to be gay in pre-Wolfenden Britain, as well as a pocket social history of the era and a unique perspective into mid-twentieth century art.

David Litvinoff: Jumpin’ Jack Flash

Keiron Pim in conversation with Paul Willetts
18 May 2016

David Litvinoff (1928–75) was “one of the great mythic characters of 1960s London”—outrageous, possessed of a lightning wit and intellect, dangerous to know, always lurking in the shadows as the spotlight shone on his famous friends. Flitting between the worlds of music, art and crime, he exerted a hidden influence that helped create the Kray twins legend and Lucian Freud’s reputation as a man never to be crossed; connected the Rolling Stones with London’s dark side; redirected Eric Clapton’s musical career; and shaped the plot of the classic film Performance by revealing his knowledge of the city’s underworld, a decision that put his life in danger.

Litvinoff’s determination to live without trace means that his life has always eluded biographers, until now. This extraordinary feat of research entailed a hundred interviews over five years, with everyone from Eric Clapton and Marianne Faithfull to James Fox and Mad Frankie Fraser: the result is by turns wickedly funny, appalling, revelatory and moving, and epic in its scope as it traces a rogue’s progress at the interface of bohemia and criminality from the early 1950s to the 1970s. It is also an account of Keiron Pim’s determined pursuit of Litvinoff’s ghost, which took him from London to Wales and Australia in a quest to reveal one of British pop culture’s last great untold stories.

The Beatles and Me

A talk by Ivor Davis
13 April 2016

Ivor was the only British daily newspaper correspondent to cover the Fab Four’s first American tour from start to finish, given unparalleled access to John, Paul, George and Ringo on the road, in their hotel and during long nights of card and Monopoly games as they talked frankly about their bizarre new life. He also ghosted a regular newspaper column for George.

Over more than four decades as a writer for the Express and the Times (London), Ivor covered major events in North America. He penned a weekly entertainment column for the New York Times Syndicate for over fifteen years, interviewing some of the biggest names in show business, from Cary Grant to Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton to Tom Cruise and Muhammad Ali.

Quentin Crisp: Naked Hope

A one-man show, written and performed by Mark Farrelly
16 March 2016

Quentin Crisp was one of the most memorable figures of the twentieth century. Flamboyantly gay, Quentin was often beaten up on the streets of London, yet stayed resolute to his determination to be himself.

Mark Farrelly’s hit solo play comes to the Wheatsheaf following an off-West End season and UK tour. It depicts Quentin at two phases of his extraordinary life: alone in his Chelsea flat in the 1960s, stoically certain that life and love have passed him by (“I’ve come to the end of my personality”) and thirty years later, giving a sold-out performance of his one man show An Evening with Quentin Crisp in New York. Packed with witty gems on everything from cleaning (“Don’t bother…after the first four years the dirt won’t get any worse”) to marriage (“Is there life after marriage? The answer is no”), the script delivers the very best of Quentin Crisp.

Mark Farrelly previously performed for the Sohemians when he presented his other solo show The Silence of Snow: The Life of Patrick Hamilton at the Wheatsheaf last year.

The performance lasts sixty mins. Following a short break, Mark will take part in an audience Q-and-A, chaired by Nigel Jones.

Photo credit: Ross B. Lewis

John Hargrave and the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift

A talk by Cathy Ross
10 February 2016

Our guest speaker Kathy Ross will be discussing with the use of photographs and archive material John Hargrave (1894-1982), and his creations the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift and the Green Shirt Movement for Social Credit. Combining art, politics and design to visually stunning effect, Hargrave and his followers created a maverick but uniquely English form of modernism. Emerging from the turbulence of the twentieth century, this colourful utopian youth movement has strong resonances with the twenty-first-century world.

The Street of Wonderful Possibilities: Whistler, Wilde and Sargent

A talk by Devon Cox
20 January 2016

The Street of Wonderful Possibilities focuses on one of the most influential artistic quarters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries—London’s Tite Street, where a staggering amount of talent thrived, including James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Oscar Wilde and John Singer Sargent.

For Wilde, the street was full of “wonderful possibilities”, while for Whistler it was ’the birthplace of art’, where a new brand of aestheticism was nurtured in his controversial White House. Modern masterpieces in art and literature flowed from the studios and houses of Tite Street, but this bohemian enclave had a dark side as well. Here Whistler was bankrupted, Frank Miles was sent to an asylum, Wilde was imprisoned, and Peter Warlock was gassed to death.

Throughout its turbulent existence, Tite Street mirrored the world around it. From the Aesthetic movement and its challenge to Victorian values, through the Edwardian struggle for women’s suffrage, to the bombs of the Blitz in the 1940s, it remained home to innumerable artists and writers, socialites and suffragettes, musicians and madmen.