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more of a space odyssey. Having partaken of a particularly generous luncheon with some pals I’d been working with on a show called Night Fever - c’mon, who can forget Pop Monkey? - I was perched, in a Lewis ‘ The Professionals ’ Collins style, on the sill of the Colony’s toilet window. This was not somewhere, I hasten to add, that I spent my whole life but it was a manoeuvre I must have successfully performed a dozen times. A gaggle of excitable onlookers crowded in behind me, weighing up the odds as to whether it would be advisable to follow.
    I went to leap the small gap to a flat roof opposite, but things didn’t exactly go to plan, and I found myself dangling in midair. What a turn-up, literally, as the turn-up of my jeans was caught in the window catch and that was about all that was keeping me from plummeting to certain death on the roof of a Chinese restaurant below.
    I was now hanging upside down, mentally thanking Mr Levis and all the generations of his family for the consistent sturdiness of their denim, when I heard a ripping noise. Face down, I frantically grabbed the drainpipe in front of me, just as my turn-up gave way. I got hold of it and clung on for dear life, praise the Lord. Then I began to slide - the pipe had been given a good coating of anti-burglar paint, a by-product of axle grease.
    I was gaining momentum on my slow downwards trajectory, but I seemed to be moving quite smoothly and, with my legs now firmly locked on, I looked down. The flat roof below appeared to be approaching quite gently and I must have been about halfway down when I became aware of a kind of disembodied cheering, echoing down the small space between the buildings. My confidence was growing: hey, I’m gonna do this! And then, an ominous silence. Followed by a loud creaking sound.
    The drainpipe was coming away from the wall. My world was, quite literally, turning upside down. Water - at least I hope that’s what it was - cascaded down the wall, up my trouser legs and reappeared down my neck and up my nose. I started to fall backwards in slow motion and flopped on my back into a huge puddle of pigeon droppings.
    When I came round after landing on my head, I looked like I’d taken a dip in a Victorian sewer in need of renovation. I also noticed, perhaps unsurprisingly, that my loyal friends had done a runner. Miraculously, I managed to sneak out of Soho without attracting any accusatory glances or pinched nostrils and felt certain I’d managed to escape justice. The only stain on my person or character was the bloody great big one that seemed to be covering every inch of my gladrags, or so I thought. The next morning Michael Wojas telephoned to say that a Chinese chef had seen the lead singer of Madness jump off the restaurant’s kitchen roof seconds before the place was flooded and told me to get round and fix the knackered pipework pronto.
    In Daniel Farson’s Soho in the Fifties he didn’t leave the Colony until 4.30 p.m. and not by the same route as me on the occasion of my fortieth. That means he’d have spent a large part of the afternoon in the company of splenetic, gin-soaked friends and acquaintances whose chief amusement was to lob verbal grenades at one another - what Ben Jonson described as ‘the leprosy of wit’. The person Farson marks out as being of Champions League standard at this game was the writer Colin MacInnes, who generally entered the Colony by ‘pushing the door open abruptly as if it had done him some injustice’. MacInnes chronicled the emergence of the ‘mod’ scene in his novel Absolute Beginners in the late 1950s, with Soho very much the headquarters of this ‘un-silent teenage revolution’. The book’s jam-packed with references to coffee bars, scooters, jazz, Italian fashions and ‘disc shops’ which reads like a list of my favourite things minus the raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. And speaking of jam, the old ‘modfather’ himself, Paul Weller, chose it as