Says Mr R sadly, about a French girl he was chatting to: “I thought we were hitting it off. But I now realise she wasn’t flirting with me. She was just being French.”
Spend two nights in a row DJ-ing at the Boogaloo. The first is a last-minute booking for a private function. It’s something to do with a design company. Or possibly a design magazine. I don’t ask questions, not even when the event involves a transparent holiday caravan being parked on the pavement outside.
Shane MacGowan DJs with me, and his set includes Irish folk numbers such as ‘Barnyards Of Delgaty’ by the Clancy Brothers, played next to ‘Tommy Gun’ by The Clash. Which is pretty much Shane MacGowan in a nutshell. He also spins two versions of a couple of songs, in a sort of compare-and-contrast way. One is ‘Beyond The Sea’ by Bobby Darin, preceded by the original French version, ‘La Mer’ by Charles Trenet. Less known, at least to me, is ‘Stranded In The Jungle’ by The Cadets, a curious novelty hit from the 50s that cuts back and forth from a scene in the said jungle – an encounter with cannibals, naturally – to a swinging doo-wop party in the US. Mr MacG also plays a version of this by The New York Dolls.
The next evening is The Beautiful & Damned, which goes smoothly enough. Films shown: ‘The Eagle’ (Rudolph Valentino) and ‘Sunrise’. When I started the club, we had terrible problems with records being jogged by vibrations of the Charleston-esque dancing, but this no longer happens. The Boogaloo managers have invested in one of those proper CD decks for DJs with a mixing desk built in. Plus my laptop playing mp3s is all non-moving parts, so one can violently shake the table and the music isn’t affected in the slightest.
I put up a few photocopies around the venue, taken from library books on Garbo and other 20s & 30s film stars. One of which, Anita Loos, turns out to be a screenwriter and novelist – best known for ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’. I am mesmerised by her hairdo: the kind of scruffy bob more associated with London 2006 than Hollywood 1932. I’ve said before that all good authors should have hairdos that can be seen from outer space, so I now must read everything she’s written.
The British Library has dozens of Garbo biographies – not bad for someone who banged on about being left alone.
In a silly mood, and recalling that I prefer the term ‘curator’ to ‘DJ’, I use the following phrase on the club’s poster: ‘Renowned Curators Dickon Edwards & Miss Red Stagger Through The Vaulted Archway Road… to present ‘The Beautiful And Damned’.’
This a reference to the much-derided opening line of The Da Vinci Code. It’s only me who notices, I suspect. But that’s fine with me.
At Beautiful & Damned, Shane MacG insists I play ‘Layla’. After trying hard to say no to him for some time, I finally play the famous squealing rock section, and skip the lesser-known laid-back piano coda. Which makes His Nibs come up and tell me off. So I play that too, a little later. About five people come up and ask me what it is. They all recognise it from the film ‘Goodfellas’: it’s the music playing over a montage of gangsters’ bodies being discovered in different locations. A car, a freezer lorry.
The evening ends with just myself and Mr MacG drinking into the small hours, the pub locked up, the staff gone. I doze off on the sofa next to him, awake at about 4.30, and stagger across the road to bed.
I take home a belated birthday present given to me over the decks by Mr Pushaun, who works in films. It is Anna Massey’s autograph.
