© Evan Woods 2024
A fruity, spicy concoction, that was the experience of Soho back in ‘the day’. Quite a lot of that experience involved beer. I loved it and my liver survives to this day.
While the sometimes sordid elements of Soho are what people of later years enjoy recalling – as witnesses only, not combatants of course – there was always something exciting about Soho and the W1 area in general that had nothing to do with trouserless exploits. From Fitzrovia to Piccadilly, Hyde Park to Holborn, that something was both driven by creativity as well presenting fresh minds with a path into creativity. The media businesses – advertising agencies, publishers, photographers, film producers, musicians and even the residents living in relative comfort, all were the heartbeat of the area with the working population enjoying a sense of achievable goals, thresholds to be crossed, of ‘going places’.
I was a school leaver when I first started work at a Soho rag-trade publisher in 1974. The run-over from the 1960s still carried that energy and the wind was still pushing against the sails. Steering a course could be tricky but nonetheless forgiving, fun and hopefully rewarding as the fruits of opportunity that characterised the previous ten years were still hanging within plucking distance.
With some notable exceptions the music business transitioned from the happening scene of the previous decade into chocolate-box mode, but at least the eternal gullibility of youth lent it some credibility. From the middle of the 1970s the music business saw changes and was about to go through an upheaval with the glam rock and choccy-pop beginning to sway under the impact of the harsher sound of punk which, all unwittingly, forced up the price of a good time in London – it was basic economics. This version of the next generation was uniformly young with a harder attitude and, contrary to many opinions, a few of them with plenty of cash. This particular rebellion and the amount of money that came with it made life more expensive by actually creating and fuelling corporate greed, one of the many things punks were supposed to be against. Wealthy youngsters, knowing they had to keep their backgrounds shadowy, got drawn into the scene while trying to keep their silver-spoon upbringing hidden but still managed to pour money into it, forcing up the price of a Friday night pint.
Although a lot of the real punks were dossing outside the area, living in a so-called squat became the angry ‘look at me’ lifestyle and the buildings’ owners knew it, effectively becoming what passed for cowboy landlords in those days, charging horrendous rents mostly in cash wherever possible and ignoring the shitty state of the buildings, those that had owners that is. The land would’ve been owned by some entity or other but not necessarily the building on it and the suspicion is that a lot of rent collectors were not official or legal, they were chancers. In those days London’s skyline was dominated by the Post Office Tower, Centre Point and not a lot else; amazingly many old residential buildings used as squats were still being considered for demolition or refurbishment thirty years after being damaged in World War Two. Everyone wanted to be in Soho as grit became fashionable and the Carnaby Street gloss was looking a little weathered.
Back in Soho’s media businesses, even though we took the business seriously, the best creative work seemed to happen after a liquid lunch. Entertaining customers and suppliers was inevitably an alcohol-laced and often pricey experience but by golly it always felt worth it even if it really wasn’t. After a swift breakfast apéritif in the boardroom, ad agency teams and even the relatively small operaters swept clients off to the local pubs and clubs where contracts were finalised and a high old time was in the offing; not always of the dancing-in-the-dark variety that might spring to mind.
In both the working environment and entertaining, anybody who could get pissed while maintaining a wisp of sentience was an invaluable corporate asset. Then as the 1980s slithered into view, rather blindly it has to be said, the first creepers of staleness began wriggling into the foundations of advertising and publishing. Our various worlds began to level off and that effervescent energy dulled and became a little bit tarnished. Entertaining became more conservative, its choreographed riotry toned down, corporate accountants pressing their loafers on the expenses brake pedal. It wasn’t just about the money either, ‘perceptions’ had to be taken into account.
Oh yes, the times they were a’changin’. Even in the face of corporate cutbacks we were still surfing a wave, although it wasn’t the tidal rush we were used to. Towards the middle of the 1980s our feet did occasionally touch the seabed but there were still opportunities for the self-employed, the freelancers and full-timers switching jobs from agency to agency, often following big accounts that changed agencies every year to keep fresh thinking in their brands. That’s not to say the same people kept working on the same brands in different agencies; central London was a swirling circus of creatives, copywriters and producers moving all over the place to work on a vast array of accounts. It was a similar story in publishing with sales and production staff moving from one magazine to another with comparative ease. These were highly regarded people with a long list of skills and knowledge of stock, colour theory and printing methods. CMYK, litho, intaglio, (even letterpress still), GM weights, perfect binding, saddle stitch, gloss or matt, subtractive colour, additive colour, cutter guides, not to mention the film work. The skills list was endless… even sales execs knew a lot of this stuff and the agency or publishers’ production staff worked in a mostly harmonious relationship with their printers and suppliers.
Outside of work, although occasionally attached to it, there were some colourful moments that form single though somewhat blurry memories, one of which is being ejected from Blitz by Steve Strange for not being drunk enough or colourful enough or both, who knows. I spotted brightly dressed people entering the club who looked important to the scene and I only wanted to take some photos for the heck of it. There were sad events too. Sometime earlier, the Coronet in Soho Street had been closed down and turned into a health food restaurant run by Radha-Krishna. Strange to realise that all these decades later I miss seeing them parading and chanting up and down Oxford Street. It was of the time. I’d still rather the Coronet had remained a pub though.
During the 80s things began to settle. Swinging from branch to branch became unviable for full-time creatives who sadly discovered the power that mortgages could wield over increasingly static and sometimes endangered incomes. Freelancers found their working hours were depleting in line with fewer paydays. The threat of redundancy grew with every passing year and the feeling of that being the end of a career and the start of endless months in the dole queue was pervasive. It didn’t seem that long ago that redundancy usually meant not much more than switching to a new employer, but this time round it could mean long-term giro collection. For the self-employed, the off-times between jobs and payments got longer and longer. Desktop publishing had started to make its flickering green imprint on our eyeballs and typesetting firms vanished at an incredible speed.
The thing is, in many firms the mindset was no longer about doing a great job because you wanted to and reaping the sociable rewards, it was about toeing the corporate line which for many was forget creativity, just do what the accountants say. At that time, as anybody who has observed the demise of many brewing companies would know, the numbercrunchers were often at the heart of imagination being transmuted into a flat business model which faded quickly into history through sapped will and lack of innovation. Save a tenner a day, lose a thousand a week.
Aspiration, drive, the excitement was dying, replaced with protectionism. Even the big publishers and advertising agencies like the mighty Saatchi and Saatchi may well have been suffering, although Saatchi’s version of suffering was probably unique; we all wanted to work there. Elsewhere new employees, whether experienced people or young starters, were viewed by existing employees as a threat instead of welcome enthusiastic fresh thinkers. There was a feeling of the whole Soho scene winding down. The pubs and basement bars saw a decline in custom as their mainstay customers reined in their spending habits and those drinkers that didn’t were followed wherever they went by a vague aura of misery and fear. Musicians were congregating in specific venues, leaving a lot of the pubs behind. The little back-alley bars morphed into up-market organic food emporiums, really just high-priced sandwich counters.
The 1990s crashed in. For a great many people the previous twenty, twenty-five years maybe, was their life and now that life had stopped. The expense of maintaining a business in London was becoming a financial trial even for the larger corporations; mergers were happening, the small operators disappeared, retired or just sank beneath the surface. Freelancers who had rented desk space in the area vanished as their incomes tailed off or the numbercrunchers required the space for ‘potential future use’. Some of the larger publishers, agencies and production houses offered their staff arrangements for relocation to other branches in the arse end of nowhere, even to cities hundreds of miles away or receive a redundancy payoff and take their chances. A lucky few with thirty years or so climbing the ladder in one company were still sitting pretty, after all that time making them redundant would’ve cost a fortune and there were valid reasons to keep them. Further down the ladder the rungs were rotting and one misstep could send a body back to the bottom.
Enter the mid-90s and the lustre and glitz of Soho had dribbled to a twitchy shadow, even though we did our best to bridge the cracks. The sticky underbelly had all but disappeared. The once-great boozers had become tourist traps charging a fortune for mass-poduced yellow piss and cask ale brewed to the lowest possible standard. Independent cask ale brewers had been crushed by the big boys. The production houses, those still in business, had moved elsewhere, photographers had relocated their studios to the less expensive outskirts, small agencies and publishers were struggling, freelancers were desperate to be employed and the employed were desperate to not become unemployed. Everything had split up, you couldn’t nip round the corner to brief someone on a quick job in person (maybe over a friendly pint) because they weren’t there anymore.
Into the next century. The 2000’s saw the fracturing of life, work and services not only in Soho but across the whole city. Those companies which had survived the previous exodus now found themselves threatened by an entirely new and dangerous animal – the Congestion Charge. Launched in February 2003 by then mayor Ken Livingstone, it forced everyone driving into central London to pay a toll. Designed to reduce traffic and air pollution, the Ken Effect also drove most of what was left of the SME creative businesses – plus a heck of a lot of other trades and professions – into relocating outside the charge zone or worse, forced them into bankruptcy. One advertising agency closed its doors for good and painted “THANKS KEN” on the road outside their abandoned offices.
That aside, of course there were and are still advertising agencies, publishers, new media firms that have adapted. I have no proof of this, but I will speculate the possibility that the Ken Effect could have checked rent rises meaning that new businesses with fresh funding that takes in the Congestion Charge had the financial chops to creep back into central London. But that is certainly not to forgive Mr Livingstone’s killer blow.
Well… people can get used to anything, which is just another way of saying everyone caved in. There was a trough after all the shenanigans before life in Soho and its close outer regions began to perk up. Nowhere near its heyday, that’s gone for good so far as those of us still alive and with our tincture-tinted memories intact are concerned. However, the new century brought drastic changes in the way some of those new firms carried out their business. The days of the ‘agency lunch’ were over apparently. The new wave had new ideas, clinical ideas, in some cases unfortunately to their own detriment and they were utterly blind to it. Relayed to me by a freelance colleague a few weeks after it happened is the following example… and I have no reason to doubt the veracity of every word, more or less:
Hired for the day to fill space and act as an artworking consultant provided he didn’t say anything, he was in the top floor boardroom sitting at a table with the directors and a couple of men from a new client win who were visiting from another part of the country. They’d braved the rail networks to travel to London for signing the final document appointing the firm as their advertising agency. It seems the table offerings were a bowl of oranges (a total mess to eat and therefore left alone) and several bottles of Evian mineral water (non-alcoholic, therefore also untouched by the visitors). The presence of the Evian indicated this was to be a no-expense-spared meeting but alas, that turned out not to be the case. The director, a mild-mannered tea-total chap in his late twenties who apparently only ever drank water, had great conceptual ideas and managed his leadership role well but was otherwise free of that pesky personality thing, physically invisible and possessing almost no charisma. He began the meeting by reiterating everything his new clients were already aware of – it had all been covered in the original presentation and subsequent communications. The director carried on in his mind-numbing vein for well over an hour and was so involved with himself he didn’t register his new clients constantly checking their watches and fidgeting.
Their enthusiasm had definitely flatlined, they’d come down to London only to sign the appointment – a five minute job – followed by a celebratory exploration of Soho. The meeting eventually drew to an end with the director wishing them a safe journey home. Eh? The other agency folks at the table shuffled papers, smiled and also said goodbye. Err, wait – no takey outy? Fortunately for the advertising agency my colleague, slightly older than me and having boiled his nuts through the same rites of passage, caught up with them on the way out, forced them into the nearest pub and bought several rounds of drinks with his own money (he was eventually reimbursed) and took them on a tour of ’the sights’, so to speak. Some time into the tour those gentlemen, realising what was going on, asked for his personal number “just in case” then confided that due to the director’s strange self-involvement they were beginning to have doubts during the meeting but my old colleague had saved the day for the agency and this new account. The businessmen returned to their hotel for the night happy and buzzing. Four days later he received a call from one of them who said that his presence had been requested for all subsequent London meetings. Although arranged between the new client and the ad agency in the days after the meeting, that call didn’t come from the agency, it came from one of the businessmen who offered to remunerate him directly for those days if necessary. The agency did not think to call my old chum themselves.
Not really within the historical spirit of Soho’s whacky history was it? Business attitudes change over time and space however those men could have torn up the contract and looked to a firm closer to home even though they wanted the London connection. How much potential business has been put off by that new wave attitude, where it exists that is? The takeaway on that story is that some, although obviously not all, of the young generation who took over from the oldies were unaware of what buttons to press, had no idea about sucking up time or spending money in appropriate nods to historical precedents and no feeling for the shizzle in general. This modern dry sobriety style in media businesses isn’t the be-all and end-all – no-one wants to sit in a boardroom for hours and listen to a dreary somnambulist lecture. Get ’em signed and get ’em out to soak up a few pints and I truly believe that’s the way it should still be done.
Most of that long list of skills and knowledge I mentioned earlier drained away from the soft end as DTP and the digital age emerged – has the power of understanding how to handle people gone with them? There’s nothing wrong with a bit of extras to massage a deal into a new business relationship. That’s something that even certain fumble-headed world leaders learned long ago.
Here we are in 2025 and if you’ve read this far, you may guess I’ve been away from the media whirlpool for some time. However I still love Soho and enjoy a pub crawl around the area. Could I be tempted to get involved with a potentially dry business? At my age I don’t think so, the dry businesses are no fun. Gimme a wet one any day and the mental, philosophical and critical freedom to believe and think that arrives after a few contemplative jars.
**EDIT: It’s been pointed out to me that I could’ve waxed lyrical about the characters who inhabited Soho. Well, more than one musician got the wrong idea which ended in embarrassment for them, so they should remain anonymous. Jeffrey Bernard wallowed into me (unsurprisingly) once or twice and Johnny Rotten spat at me, so that’s two sets of DNA I carry that I wasn’t born with. Or the dozens of pubs and clubs like The Nellie Dean, The Ship, The Coach & Horses, The Caveau Club, The Colony Club. The thing is the lives of individual Fitzrovian and Soho people and places are easily accessible elsewhere on the www and I could add little more than dribble.
Evan Woods 