DO YOU GET "DEJA VENUE"?
Ever have the strange feeling that you've been somewhere before? That's probably because you have....This is the "deja venue" phenomenon, and the older you get, the more often it happens.
Returning to a oft-visited, much-loved, cache-rich, time-honoured venue after its new and shiny re-launch (sometimes for the first time in decades) brings back ghosts of hedonism past.
A trip to the plush and magnificent reboot of the Camden Palace (now KOKO) - where I spent many a 1980s thursday evening frugging to the Jonzun Crew and trying to spot Boy George in the VIP, later seeing my first ever “break-dancers” IRL (the dazzling and OG, Rock Steady Crew) and, on two memorable occasions, private, late night performances by Prince - is bittersweet because the baroque, Mornington Crescent theatre still has such wonderful memories for my younger, more innocent self. Yes, the new KOKO is, inarguably, opulent, grandiose and swanky but it will always be the slightly scuzzy / fabulous “Palace” to me. (Just as the Eventim Apollo survives as the “Hammersmith Odeon” to anyone over the age of 45.)
Similar Proustian emotions evoked by a delicious boeuf bourguignon lunch at Brasserie Zedel in Piccadilly, London W1. The Parisian dining room is bright and lovely, but my authentically Gallic prix fixe experience is tainted by a profound nostalgia for its previous incarnation as The Atlantic Bar and Grill - during the 1990s, the most happening and glamorous place in London. Maybe the whole world.
Full of supermodels, fashion designers, actors and rock stars, all knocking back Cristal and Cosmopolitans, and gorging on fruits de mer tiers of langoustine and lobster, pretty much every night, the Atlantic seemed excitingly massive back then, its vaulted ceilings and seductive banquettes, its long and windy, descending staircase and its late, late, high, high times, still playing a major role in my own hazy, memory bank movies from that truly great London decade.
On entering the John Soane-designed reception rooms and triumphal arches at 17th century Aynoe Park on the Northamptonshire/Oxfordshire border the deja venue is equally forceful.
Aynhoe is now the UK home of America’s Restoration Hardware (RH) furniture behemoth but I will always recall it as the stage for some truly wild and extravagant parties during the naughty noughties when it was owned by antiques collector and former acid house rave entrepreneur James Perkins. A la recherche du fetes perdu. This happens on trips to various New York and LA addresses too. A slowly revealing and quite weird, hang on…haven’t-I-been-to-this-place-before? sensation.
And so it was with the famous Kensington roof gardens just a few weeks back. Now re-styled, at huge expense by the looks of it, as “The Roof Gardens” private members club, this spectacular, fifth floor space has retained its huge 6,000 square metres Italianate terraces and curvy art deco-ish lines (it was built in the 1930s) while generating a suitably elevated ambiance. The new loos are gender fluid and loiter-friendly, the food and decor top notch. The clientele is rich and fashionably-dressed and while the famous pink flamingos in the garden’s pond may have flown, there are still plenty of peacocks in the cocktail bar area.
I first came here back in the 1970s as a kid. I have no memories of it (wish I did!) but my Mum, a young Yorkshire woman with a hankering for London’s frocks and fast lane, brought me to the very same building when it was the fabulous BIBA store. During a seemingly endless clothes- shopping trip to the capital my Mum, her friend and I wandered around the food and fashion departments (again, no recall of any of this - damn!) before going up to the BIBA Rainbow Room for tea and fabulosity.
I have since learned that the New York Dolls once played at the roof gardens, during a short BIBA residence that also involved rampant shop-lifting (presumably in the ladies department and the make up counter - knowing bands taste for heels and slap) and thirsty champagne quaffing. Paul McCartney and David Bowie were in the audience.
Fast forward to 1986 and I am beginning my career as a pop music journalist, working for teen titles Smash Hits and Just Seventeen. A couple of tickets to attend a party for the launch of a new album from Queen, “A Kinda Magic” come my way and I head off to, yes The Roof Gardens in Kensington…where it is immediately apparent that everyone is naked. Well, all the staff are naked anyway.
To compliment the record’s magical theme that hot July night, Queen’s people had persuaded all bartenders and servers to strip off, commissioning an artist to paint their bare bodies in mineral and vegetable tones, creating a camouflage effect against the gardens’ foliage and rockeries. In line with Freddie Mercury’s famous catering specifications there were people of restricted growth serving nibbles from trays on their heads.
Who else was there? Various members of Sigue-Sigue Sputnik, Marillion, Spandau Ballet and, amusingly, the frontman of a new band called “King”. Oh, and a very unimpressed and cynical young moi.
Fresh from their triumphantly operatic performance at Live Aid the year before, Queen seemed - to my contrapuntist, hipster-tuned ears, at least - old hat, outdated and preposterously over-theatrical. By 1986, I was into Prince, Run DMC, Beastie Boys, Talking Heads. I preferred Public Enemy to a national treasure.
Anyway - the night went on, people got very drunk, and a plodding house band pumped out rock ‘n’ roll boogie classics on the roof garden’s small and low-rise stage. Then, without warning, this group of hoary session musicians suddenly became Queen themselves; Freddie (in a Hawaiian shirt) on vocals, Roger Taylor on drums, Brian May on guitar. They did a couple of Queen numbers and people went nuts.
The group then proceed to totally ruin the moment by asking the Page Three girl-tuned-pop starlet, Samantha Fox, to get up on stage for a jam session. It was, in my memory, pretty awful, shouty, drunken and way out of tune. (Not Freddie, of course, who always had perfect pitch). It was also very much not The New York Dolls at the Biba Rainbow Room.
All these images and memories ran through my head as I sat in an al fresco Roof Gardens dining terrace that seemed more California than Kensington, chewing on a 95 quid rib eye and sipping a chilled Picpoul white. My chair was just a few feet from what used to be the Freddie Mercury / David Johansen stage area, my woozy mind temporarily lost in the crazy / happy, same place / different time zone…of almost four decades ago.