As Eva led me through an inconspicuous closed door under a restaurant just off Regent Street, a woman in a skin-tight pale pink dress with feathers in her hair was singing. ‘There is a house on Heddon Street,’ she sang to the tune of House of the Rising Sun, ‘they call it the Colony Roooo-om’; she danced up to us, one arm outstretched, and winked. I was blushing, underdressed in jeans and not wearing make-up, but the crowd was motley enough to allow for it.
The woman’s name, I would find out over a cigarette, was Rachel D’Arcy, and everything she was wearing she’d found in charity shops. As she sung on, she name-dropped the regulars—a man in a cowboy hat and waistcoat who was silent until about 2am; Tim the barman, pouring champagne at £10 a glass; Liam Stevens, the Mancunian jazz pianist accompanying her, who had a spot at Ronny Scott’s before it closed for refurbishments; Darren Coffield, the designer of the room and author of Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia. Beyond these, the small room was lined with hot blonde women and older men in various states of disrepair.
Eva is one of the bisexual women with whom I have a complicated friendship. We reconnected recently because she subscribed to this Substack and I emailed her in a panic thinking she had nefarious ends. She emailed me back with her new number and we arranged to meet in Soho that evening; we’d both been on each other’s minds. She turned up two hours late dragging a bucket, the big sort that you use to feed horses, which was full of art and miscellaneous stuff for the show she was curating. We went to the French and it turned out that we’d both been independently reading about old Soho lore and hanging out in the basement smoking area at Trisha’s, though without bumping into each other. She texted me a few days later: