It’s a moonless night in deepest south London, and, down an unlit dirt track, an unprepossessing industrial building looms out of the blackness. There’s no signage, no burly bouncers, no clipboard bitch; just one small illuminated window. The cab driver is anxious: “This is no place for young ladies after dark.” But that feeling hanging in the air isn’t danger. It’s the buzz of an impending encounter with an underground “moment”.
Behind the battered steel door, a bohemian free-for-all is under way: musos slouch in vintage Adidas, floppy Byronites waft in nu new romance, and the occasional militant lesbian leads the whooping at the belly dancers. All of them are buoyed by the exhilaration of lawlessness and the sense of being part of something secret and select. Instead of the usual “How do you know the host?”, the question on everybody’s lips is: “How did you find out about this place?”
Welcome to the speakeasy, Noughties style — a new breed of illegal drinking den that has more in common with the famous watering holes of the Prohibition era than the seedy after-hours haunts that flourished under Britain’s old licensing laws. Hidden away in the basements of sex shops and above mini-cab offices, these were where social misfits and late-night alkies gathered to drink warm canned lager at wobbly trestle tables.
The new bandit bars are different. They have standards, for a start. The landlords tend to be young, creative hipsters with an eye for interiors (reclaimed antiques and objets d’art effortlessly set within the whitewashed brick walls of a disused industrial space) and a taste for fringe performance — music, film, art and the requisite oddities: naked limbo dancing, glow-in-the-dark mime, yodelling competitions.
Secrecy is all. You won’t find these places in guidebooks or printed on flyers — leaving a paper trail would be an elementary mistake. Lucky ears may catch wind of a whisper — “near the fancy-dress shop on New Cross High Street” or “the boarded-up door opposite Pizza the Action” — but it’s not enough to locate the right address on the right day. There are special knocks, passwords, guest lists and door-pickers positioned behind peepholes — not just to keep out lowlife, but as an early-warning system for the law and irate neighbours.
Advance intelligence is strictly on a need-to-know basis and communicated virally by text, e-mail or MySpace. One invitation to a late-night happening in a remote London postcode reads: “Please don’t post this on public internet sites, as that gets me in big trouble with the authorities who have great big sweat patches under the arms of their ill-fitting military jackets.”
Over at the inaugural night of a sporadic warehouse den in Hackney Wick, a vast white space illuminated by handsome real-candle chandeliers surges with 500 arty Oxbridge graduates. At the bar, a sign reads: “Hard — £2, soft — £1”. Do they have a licence to sell alcohol? “Are you joking?” scowls one of the twentysomething hosts. “That wouldn’t be nearly as fun. Then there’d be rules to obey.”
Among the artfully scruffy crowd, there’s a conspicuous spirit of rebellion. Most of these kids are going places — but not tonight, as they give each other reckless trolley rides around the warehouse. There are goofball Get Stuffed-style cooking demonstrations in the kitchen and endless “tagging”, as public-school chavs (hoodies, baseball caps, swagger and plummy glottal stops) etch their names on the walls.
The party finally expires at 10am the next day, something that rarely happens in the legal world. But then, bandit bars have become skilled at sidestepping the law. “Every time we were busted,” says one former illegal-bar manager, who prefers to remain nameless, “we’d stuff all the cash into a rucksack and hide it, and tell the police it was yet another private birthday party.”
And what chance do the police have when even the clientele has trouble keeping up? Just when you think you can put your finger on what’s happening, everything changes. Take the Wednesday Club, an exclusive weekly gathering in a Bethnal Green living room. Originally called the Thursday Club, it was forced to switch days when the secret went a little too public. “So they told one person to come on Wednesday and over 100 people turned up,” says the Irish artist and Wednesday Club regular Bern Roche Farrelly. “Minimal publicity covers their backs, but, just as importantly, it safeguards their underground cool.”
The most respected licence outlaw of them all is Gary Fairfull, who turned the sophisticated speakeasy into an art form. His infamous Gary’s Place watering holes — the first of which opened in 2002 — inhabited a series of venues, including a former swingers’ club, his own home and a Victorian warehouse. Despite their precarious legal status, there was nothing makeshift about the clubs. Fairfull had interiors by the British designer Russell Sage, champagne at the bar and a loyal YBA following (Tracey Emin, the Chapman brothers, Gavin Turk, Sarah Lucas et al), plus guest appearances by Madonna, Jude Law, Keira Knightley, Kate Moss and Lily Allen.
“It got messy sometimes,” Fairfull says. “I remember being in one room and you couldn’t light a match, there was so little oxygen.
People were shagging and all sorts. But I did Gary’s Place because there were no cool places in London.”
Fairfull is now the above-board restaurateur of the sceney Shoreditch hangout Found (same crowd, same cachet, same vibe, fewer vices). He explains that, although the thrill of the illicit is alluring, it’s not just about bad behaviour: “There was a frisson of illegality, but after three visits, you wouldn’t be thinking, ‘Ooh, look at me — aren’t I a bad girl?’ There’s more to it than that: there’s a house-party atmosphere. I know about 10 couples who met at mine. You don’t get chatted up in the same clichéd way you would in town.”
Now that members’ clubs will let in any old blagger, and superclubs are full of lairy teenagers, the return of the speakeasy was pretty inevitable. “The thing about an illegal place is that it doesn’t really matter if you are a celebrity or not. Having the insider knowledge that gets you there is a real equaliser,” Fairfull says.
“People treat our place like their front room,” says the landlord of another den, whose motto is “All you need is a space and a spark”. “In the morning, we find people crashed out half on the sofa, half on the floor.” He says it like it’s a good thing.
So what’s in it for them? “I was following the money,” Fairfull says. “But I was also taking home enough stress and experience to realise my goal of having a legal place.” Others are in it for the hedonistic fun and to subsidise their rent. Plenty just want fame and glory. “It’s great fun saying: I live here, where it all happens,” one host admits. “There is definitely an aspect of self-promotion.”
It’s a genius marketing strategy — everyone likes to be in on a secret. Keep it classified, and it’s bound to get out.
