Lockdown Day 42: Sunday 3rd May, 2020

The taxi dropped me on Haymarket before speeding my mate Jase along past Hyde Park into the western wastes. I strolled through Piccadilly Circus under the halon glow, still busy as tourists gathered aimlessly below an absent Eros in the attractionless night. ‘Caveat emptor,’ I mused, ’90s London is not the swinging city it used to be. Time gentlemen, please.’ As I sauntered on, the lost tribes descended on Shaftesbury Avenue, pubs and theatres emptying, all jostling for positioning in the minicab melee.

  I cut up through Soho, squalid, sexless and sick. The district was the stuff of  louche legend, mundane immoralities of more puritan times blown out of all proportion and assuming undeserved glory, with putrid ponces, nonces, pricks and poseurs scaling the pap pantheon. I couldn’t stand the place. It was a shithole. A rancid cesspit reeking of piss and last night’s puke, fresh splattered with chilli blood and the guts of dead kebabs fermenting in steaming rivers of urine.

  ‘Surely to God someone will do something with this tip soon. Centre of London and it’s a manky hole. Why can we not have lively cafés and boulevard streetlife like Paris or Barcelona? I could handle that.’ I lamented the laws and the lawless that castrated Soho and kept it buried in the shit of the city, the affluence and effluence that always cohabited.

  In the doorways and murky corners the angels of the dark congregated; pallid junkies wasting in the night, preying for their personal dawn, occasional humans, diseased, destitute and discarded; muggers and pickpockets, the vampires of the vapid; upping the ante, the pimps and pushers, small-time purveyors and unholy wholesalers. Caribbean, African, European and Asian, greed and sickness know no colour. Time-served, rancid whores in pockmarked limbo; apprentice hookers broadcasting fear and needled bravado on wavelength hell; spent rentboys aggressively pouting by Automatic Teller Machines desperate to cash in on the sympathy of the deluded; broken night bodies littering entrances; the gloom was alive with precursors of death.    

  ‘Dealers keep on dealing, pushers keep on pushing, whores keep on whoring.’ I hummed away to myself, words forgotten in my chilled alco-fall but the meaning quite clear. A primal scream required to clear the accumulated trash of eight million minds. ‘Fucking tip.’

  Then, like a ray of sun on a grey winter’s day, I strolled past the fairytale window of my favourite shop, Milroys of Soho. I’d never been much of a whisky drinker, but strangely this small Soho shop had been my real introduction to uisge beath, the water of life, when I was seventeen, rather than those stolen swallays of parent’s bottles of Grouse and Bells we’d all taken as Glasgow teens.
  I’d traveled down sleepless on the shoogly old overnight train from Glasgow to meet some wandering Asgardeans and was walking through a bright summer seven o’clock Soho morning heading for Trafalgar Square. Outside this innocuous little black-walled shop called Milroys I got chatting to the émigré Scot brushing the night away. I knew nothing about whisky and as it soon struck me that he knew everything, I asked him what I should buy to share with a bunch of mad Germanics. Although they were moving malts in a big way, he suggested a bottle of VAT 69. There was some face-saving explanation about northern europeans, schnapps, aquavit and peatiness but it was really to just to make sure my youthful palate wouldn’t rebel against the hallowed tradition of Scotland whilst in company. So at eight o’clock on a sunny summer morning, at the age of seventeen I bought my first bottle of whisky, not in Glasgow, but in London. At Milroy’s of Soho.

  I stalked through an alley stinking strongly of piss and warm pasta, past the BMWs, Mercedes, Jeeps and Jaguars parked along the street and cut into the takeaway at the corner. Two minutes later I exited with a slice of rubber pizza.   I gazed back the way I had come as I munched, ‘What a fucking dump.’ It had been this way for years and if change was coming, it wasn’t coming fast enough. I stepped forward. Now this end, this end of Charing Cross road I loved. Bookshops and bright music stores bracketed the road, rising from Leicester Square in a parade of linguistic passion and symphonic extasy, specialist stockists of esoteric tomes – their interest restricted to a fading band of musty collectors; small stores with their favoured customers and themes; my personal favourite, Foyle’s, a chaotic celebration of the written word, books stacked throughout a jumbled store in seeming madness. Then as you neared Oxford St, the music stores lit up the night. Discordant window displays, the electric and eclectic, the old and new, Fender Strats and Telecasters, gorgeous Gibsons and metallic Dobro; golden horns gleaming in the neon glow – tenor and alto saxophones, trumpets, cornets, trombones and tubas; synthesizers and keyboards – Korg, Moog, Yamaha and even aging Fender Rhodes; a winged chorus of mandolins, violins, violas and cellos; all beside a scattered soundstudio of PAs, amps, monitors, slaves and masters, mixing desks and decks. I loved these stores. Dreams unleashed. Life with a sunburst soundtrack. Make it yourself, make it better, make it matter. Personally, if I had to choose my soundtrack I’d go for ’67 to ’77 – Wish You Were Here, Are You Experienced? Who’s Next, Led Zep IV, Solid Air, What’s Going On, Astral Weeks, On Your Feet Or On Your Knees, Dark Side of the Moon, 4th of July Astbury Park, The Last Waltz, Close to the Edge, Every Picture Tells a Story, Ziggy Stardust, Sgt Pepper, Blonde on Blonde, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Jimi, Janis and Jim, Hawkwind, Nektar, John Lennon, Lynyrd Skynyrd, T.Rex, Nick Drake, Thin Lizzy, Nils Lofgren, AC/DC, the Grateful Dead, Dylan and the Stones. How could life not be wonderful with a soundtrack like that? Let me at it.

I love guitars.