The Colony Room bio! If you're any kind of cunty, buy now

I never had the pleasure of being called 'cunty' by Soho's Colony Room founder and proprietor Muriel Belcher. Some people have all the luck. So, I'll have to settle for second best.

Sophie Parkin's chronicle of the high culture boozing parlour, The Colony Club 1948-2008: A History of Bohemian Soho, is due out on 10 December 2012 - and she's declared open a dedicated website where you can find more book details - click here.

The book is a huge collaboration involving a great many of the former habitués of the establishment. Memories, conversations, goss, names - they're all here. Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas, Tracey Emin, Princess Margaret, Molly Parkin, Lucian Freud, Jeffrey Bernard, Peter O'Toole, Kate Moss (barmaid), Christopher Hitchens, Will Self and so many other super-luminaries of stage, screen, canvas and piss contributed to the Colony legend.

Sophie is the ideal biographer. Quite possibly (or not), she trod on the dew of the vomit that Dylan Thomas projected onto the Colony carpet: she absorbed the soul of the place as a hereditary bon viveuse at her mother's knee, and for decades thereafter. Just how many of the ex-Colonists will still be talking to her post-publication?

Three editions of the title are available: Collectors, Limited and Standard (the last priced currently at £30). Without giving too much away, the Collectors and Limited editions comprise artists' prints which alone are worth the investment. Never-seen-before photographs grace all three. If nothing else, think Flog It!

Visit The Colony Room website as soon as and secure your copy - aside from my personal horoscopes, what better Christmas present is imaginable (to oneself)?

PS: For a flavour of the Colony, do read my post on writer Duncan Fallowell and the night he took off with Muriel Belcher's crutches. Be warned: the piece is illustrated by a nude photo of Duncan, cock and all. Click here.

Francis Bacon at the Colony, video

Molly Parkin: 'Cunts' at Harpers & Queen and her London Olympics movie

Molly & Sophie Parkin

I'm not entirely certain that I have returned to blogging but while I'm here, an opportune moment to catch up on the doings of permanent fiancee Molly Parkin.

Today is launched Julien Temple's collage-documentary movie London: The Modern Babylon (or, 'BabyLon/Don', my preferred title, still on Imdb), pegged to the Olympics. One of its stars is Molly who sheds aesthetic light on the filthy capital and its sulphur glamour. The film is Time Out's flick of the week so it must be good. Certainly the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw thinks it's brilliant, so hopefully it will get national distribution beyond the limited number of London flea pits, and help counter the insidious influence of the latest Batman movie, starring a certifiable psycho who hates his mother and was rude to his grandmother.

I would link the film but some jobsworth has decided the trailer can only be viewed on YouTube, so you can find it yourself if you can't shift up to the metropolis.

Molly is also to be viewed in the delightful movie linked below, in conversation at the Soho Theatre the other night with daughter, writer Sophie Parkin, currently working on a book about the infamous, seminal Soho Colony Room, out in December. What both have to say about Soho is almost as fascinating as the edgy interplay between mother and daughter. Remind me not to fall out with either of them. Moll reports that in the 50s, when she was a virgin and an art teacher, it was not uncommon, as she made her way along Soho thoroughfares, for her to be taken for a French tart, and 'a Degas ballet French tart' at that, by lowlife doorway club urchins.

We learn more about Colony queen Muriel Belcher, too, who was only a bit lesbian apparently. 'Come here, cunty,' she'd say to Moll. Apropos of Moll's glittery employment history, 'I did have an awful gruelling time on Harpers (& Queen), what a bunch of cunts there....'

To view the encounter, click here
.

Duncan Fallowell: The night he took off with Muriel Belcher's crutches

Duncan Fallowell

Alas, I was unable to attend 'libertine' Duncan Fallowell's dazzling London launch party for his new travel book How To Disappear: A Memoir For Misfits the other day. And my appointed gossip-spy, model-turned-novelist Gavin James Bower, substituted retail therapy for promised mission - tsk. It's just as well I am forgiving. However, I learn from the London Evening Standard's Diary that 'an eclectic bunch of misfits, hedonists, socialites and the odd Zoroastrian' turned out and a fab time was had by all. (Click here to read the item]

The Diary, which seems to have lost nothing in the paper's transition from paid-for to freebie, relates an amusing tale told by one of the guests, art dealer James Birch. He 'recalled his first encounter with Fallowell, which left an indelible impression. “He went up to my father and asked if he was heterosexual. When he said he was, Duncan kissed him full on the lips. My father nearly fell off his chair.”'

Ah, yes, the event is recalled and I can tell more.

The encounter was at a large sit-down dinner at the Royal College of Art for the late artist and writer Dicky Chopping's retirement. Birch was indeed there with his father. Fallowell went with sometime lover and Britain's first transsexual, April Ashley; and unfortunately he got incredibly drunk. James Birch was wearing a fetching all-white suit and Fallowell pursued him all round the hall with a trembling glass of claret. Birch proved to be too quick for his pursuer - so Fallowell ran off with Muriel Belcher's crutches which she'd parked neatly beside her seat. This had never happened to her before. The filthy-mouthed Colony crone looked panic stricken - 'For God's sake stop that young man!' she wailed as he ran off out of the hall with them.

I am happy to report that when he gallantly returned them to her 10 minutes later she made him an honorary member of the Colony for bravery. And thereafter Fallowell was always called 'Young man' at the Colony, even after her death. Once or twice I heard Ian Board call him 'Young man' when he was 40 - er, some years past now.

Incidentally, in other matters, my friends in the book trade tell me How To Disappear: A Memoir For Misfits sold out before the launch - the warehouse cleaned out - but fortunately his canny publishers Ditto kept a couple of boxes in reserve for the party. They are now rushing to reprint.

To read my review of the book, click here. Worth reading (also!) is Byron Rogers' marvellously batty Spectator review. And to think, Byron used to write Prince Charles' speeches - 'Such big hands,' he is wont to say of his once royal master.

(PS: One minute [interview] with Duncan Fallowell in the Independent.)