While I was in graduate school at Central Saint Martins, I worked in a dingy little pub on the corner of Old Compton Street & Charing Cross Road that was fumbingly trying to reinvent itself as a drag cabaret hotspot. Run by the perpetually scowling spiritual heir to the South London Krays with his sunny, talented and ferocious drag queen boyfriend (Miss Julie Paid), Molly Mogg’s was the crepuscular setting from whence I was introduced to a roving cast of really fucking heavy drinkers- all more pickled, sordid and destitute than the last, and now mostly dead.
Of course, I loved it. And indeed, there is something about Soho that calls out to anyone with an ounce of poetry in their noggins. It’s something to do with the mix of enslaved Eastern European prostitutes, drug-runners, errand boys for madams, gangsters, snakebite-swigging lads, high society heroin-addicts, jazz men, fashion students and television people, not to mention more than all the permutations of the gay scene that you could possibly try to imagine.
Anyways, it seems fitting that that particular neighborhood should have been so wholeheartedly adopted by one of the many cracking attendees of my Alma Mater- the Great British Eccentric and self-described dandy, Sebastian Horsley.
Sebastian Horsley died at the age of 48 on June 17 2010, and every time I see some Los Angeles suckling walking around with a two-bit Hot Topic accessory kit and an ‘addiction’, I will sneer at him in Horsley’s honour, and scream “KNOW YOUR REFERENCES, ANKLEBITER!”
Read his obituary by clicking here, and – even better – read his book ‘Dandy in the Underworld‘ by buying it from an independent seller here. He was a truly remarkable person and deserves to be – if not emulated – at least remembered.
