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here before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and I think I was finally rewarded on account of my persistence. Yes, I’m nothing if not persistent and often ended up in that state after a session at the Colony.
    I well remember the first time I went through the Colony’s emerald-green door on Dean Street and up the dingy staircase to the tiny club room on the first floor, its walls covered with artefacts donated by the constant stream of artists who’d been seduced by the club’s raffish charm over the years. I was seven years old when I entered the claustrophobic, bilious-green club room that day in 1968, and when I left a couple of hours later I’d probably aged another ten in terms of life experience. The Colony was the sort of place that you either instantly fell in love with and felt right at home in, or took fright at and couldn’t wait to get out of. I fell straight away into the former category and have fallen in, and indeed out of, it ever since.
    The first obstacle to overcome when venturing into the Colony was the stream of expletives that Muriel Belcher hurled at you on arrival from her ‘throne’, which was a barstool by the door. If you could handle that, which many couldn’t, you were in. My mum had no problems with the language or behaviour at the Colony as she worked in a similar club just down the road called the Kismet, which had a navy-blue hardboard ceiling with stars and moons cut out. The Kismet was located in an airless, damp, smoky cellar off the Charing Cross Road and was nicknamed ‘the iron lung’ and ‘death in the afternoon’ by those who’d had the pleasure. It was a place where the low life met the elite. In the Daily Telegraph obituary of the fiery, red-haired journalist, writer and Soho addict Sandy Fawkes (December 2005), who had a liking for such drinking establishments and was a friend of my mum’s, a story is recounted of a passing visitor asking what the strange smell was at the Kismet. ‘Failure,’ was the reply.
    The atmosphere and clientele of the Colony that I remember from my first visit probably hadn’t altered much since Daniel Farson first stepped over Muriel’s threshold in 1951. The place very quickly became a popular hangout for budding artists after a skint Francis Bacon walked into the newly opened club in 1948 and Muriel offered him a tenner a week to attract new members to the club. Bacon encouraged fellow painters and their wealthy patrons to join the Colony where they socialised with a diverse array of characters whom Muriel felt would complement their artistic bent, all of them packed tightly inside that dark, smoky room. There were jazz musicians, painters, toffs, strippers (still wearing their feather boas), poets and gangsters. If homosexuality was still ‘the love that dared not speak its name’ on the streets of London, here in the Colony it could sing, shout, dance and paint its name and address.
    This was the only place an outsider could go to mix with other like-minded souls with no fear of discrimination, unless you were boring, of course, in which case you would last precisely ten seconds until Muriel or indeed Bacon got you in their sights. This place needed no bouncers. The whole scene was, for me, perfectly summed up in the Kinks song ‘Lola’ which recounts the story of a naive heterosexual dancing with a transvestite beneath electric candlelight in a club down in old Soho. The song caused a bit of a stir at the time, but for me it was a tale of everyday life that was going on all around me.
    The Colony’s pedigree as a top-notch standard bearer from Soho’s boho past was enhanced by the fact that the club’s licence was held by just three people throughout the 60 years of its existence - Belcher, Ian Board and Michael Wojas, the last at the helm - and was handed down as an aristocrat might his estate and jewels. However, those jewels have lost their sparkle and now that the club has gone many ex-patrons have said that Soho