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By Root 394 0

hang out. Coffee was sixpence upstairs, but half a crown downstairs to listen to the music, which seemed a lot at the time, but in retrospect was a bargain to watch the likes of Shirley Bassey, Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard and Lonnie Donegan perform. For dancing and meeting girls there were the big ballrooms like Mecca, just off the Strand where they had live bands and played waltzes, quicksteps and foxtrots, although of course none of us knew how to dance, so these places were usually half empty. We didn’t like that sort of music and the sort of music we did like – pop music – you could only get on radio from the illegal Radio Luxembourg or via the American Forces network from Germany. The BBC wouldn’t play it until the pirate radio station Radio Caroline, which broadcast pop music from a ship anchored just outside UK territorial waters, became so popular that they were outlawed and Radio 1 was founded. The very worst thing about the London social scene in those days was that everything shut at ten thirty – pubs, theatres, cafés, buses, tube, everything. I once heard a member of parliament explain that it was to make sure the working classes weren’t late for work the next day. You can imagine how that went down with my friends and me . . .

Music wasn’t the only form of popular culture that was booming in those years. The world of drama was changing and with it London’s nightlife. Because all the restaurants and pubs closed so early there was nowhere for actors to get a meal after the show and so they started their own late-night dinner and drinking clubs in defiance of the Establishment’s rules. Theatre itself was no longer the province of the middle classes; playwrights like John Osborne and the rest of the ‘Angry Young Men’ were transforming it with plays like Look Back in Anger and they were being championed by critics like Ken Tynan. Working-class actors like Terence Stamp, Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole and me were blazing a trail, too – and we were all taking full advantage of a much freer attitude to sex and booze, to have the time of our lives.

Peter was probably the wildest of us all. During my time understudying him in The Long and the Short and the Tall in 1959, my main job was to bring in the drink and find the parties, but I soon learnt to start the evening off with him and then duck out. God knows, I love a party, but I just couldn’t keep up. On one Saturday night after the show we were about to set off when he suggested that we line our stomachs first at a fast-food place in Leicester Square called the Golden Egg. This seemed to me to be perfectly sensible and I was encouraged because Peter’s diet hadn’t to this point seemed to include any food, so I went along and ordered a fry-up. I have absolutely no idea what happened after that because the next thing I remember is waking up in broad daylight in a flat I had never been in before, still wearing my coat. I nudged Peter, who was lying next to me, and asked him what time it was. ‘Never mind what time it is,’ he said, ‘what fucking day is it?’ Our hostesses, two rather dubious-looking girls I really don’t remember having set eyes on before, told us it was Monday and it was five o’clock. The curtain went up at eight. Somehow we got to the theatre in time – we hadn’t even been sure we were still in London – but instead of being pleased to see us, the stage manager was very cross. It seemed that the manager of the Golden Egg had already been round: henceforth we were both banned. ‘But what did we – ?’ I began. Peter nudged me. ‘Never ask,’ he said. ‘Better not to know.’ The voice of experience. They say that if you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t there. And this was only 1959 . . .

By the time we actually got to the Sixties, I’d wised up a bit. London was buzzing with energy. The Beatles had left that Liverpool café behind and were dominating the charts; the Rolling Stones were unstoppable, Mary Quant had designed the mini-skirt, photographers like David Bailey and Terry O’Neill were chronicling our lives and everything felt new and exciting. Most exciting