| Original Message |
Tim Arnold (Login Timkrabok)
Posted Oct 19, 2006 5:10 PM
INSIDE OUT
The reason I first came to Soho was purely because I was accepted in to St Martin’s Art School to study fine art. That’s how I ended up living opposite the school on the Charing Cross Road above The Phoenix Theatre. How was Art School? I never went.
As many Soho regulars will tell you: “If you don’t have a clearly defined purpose when you come to Soho, it will find one for you.” I kind of had a purpose. I was in a band (Jocasta), things were going well and I’d moved to London. It was obvious, I had to go to art school. But my journey through a career in music was not to be as it was for John Lennon, Ray Davies, Freddie Mercury or any other of my musical heroes who all went to art school.
As a teenager, you do tend to follow the patterns of your chosen role models, but it all stopped when I got to Soho. One day, I was looking for a job in the Evening Standard, whilst sitting in a Sicilian café / restaurant on Great Windmill Street in the middle of the afternoon. I had a pint of Carlsberg and a dish of ‘garlic heavy’ green olives. It was a bar I had been to before and I remembered the manager. He was a cross between Al Pacino, Humphrey Bogart and Touche Turtle. He constantly ran around his establishment talking to the customers about the time that he owned 13 clubs in Soho. How he was done for fraud but was also equitted. He even had newspaper cuttings about the trial, framed on the wall of the restaurant.
Most of my childhood was spent in Mediterranean bars and clubs in Spain, France and Italy (my mother is a Cabaret singer). So, I felt at home, immediately, in this place. The manager asked me if I’d like a job in the kitchen. I was not a trained chef, but cooking is the next thing you learn after walking in my family, so it didn’t phase me in the slightest. After a quick introduction to the menu, I was the head chef of ‘Café Bar Sicilia’ on Great Windmill Street off Piccadilly, and I was earning £40 a day.
Suddenly I felt much more ‘Oasis’ than ‘Blur’. I deferred my place at St. Martins for a year and decided to concentrate on my band and earning money. I called my mother (who lives in Spain) to tell her the news, only to be told that Great Windmill Street was the street where she worked in the 1960’s and the bar where I was working used to be a Salt Beef bar called ‘Carrol’s’, which is where my mother signed her contract to become a Windmill Girl at the famous Windmill Theatre (recently immortalised in Stephen Frears’ movie ‘Mrs. Henderson Presents).
Of course I felt it was fated that I should be there and over the course of my time working at the restaurant, I began writing songs about everything I saw.
The restaurant itself was a pizza/pasta joint in the day and at night it turned into an illegal drinking den. That was the time that interested me. I was rehearsing more and more with my band in the daytime, so I changed my shift at the bar to the late shift and started working as a doorman. My job consisted of telling every passer-by that there was a “BAR OPEN” in my best Sicilian accent. It was a dizzy time but wonderfully inspiring. I met gangsters, pop stars, actors, Lords and Ladies, wheelers, dealers and even a cousin of royalty who was seen doing things he shouldn’t have in the kitchen one evening. My funniest memory was rolling out pizza bases for a hungry customer at 3 o’clock in the morning whilst two guys sat around me counting out counterfeit money.
It wasn’t long before I got a record deal with Sony and I could dedicate all my time to my music, but the time that I worked in Café Bar Silcilia was incredibly inspiring and gave me so much to write about.
The song ‘Inside Out’ is my personal vision of that twilight time that I lived through every day when I first became a ‘Soho person’. I saw tragedy and comedy shaking hands around every corner in those days. I actually saw a member of the gentry form a serious relationship with a homeless streetwalker, bonding over a love of ‘self-medication’. We’d often see her getting out of a limo being dropped back to her ‘pitch’ in the early hours.
I wrote all the lyrics in my flat on the Charing Cross Road, and I wrote the music at Sarm West in Ladbroke Grove where my band and I were recording for the weekend. We were in a studio next door to where George Michael was recording his new album. I spent just as much time hobnobbing with pop stars as I did with homeless people. I still have a lot of friends who have remained on the street from that time, some content and some in despair. Soho is a ‘leveller’. Whoever we are, whatever walk of life we come from, we all feel the need to escape, but you find that the people who have survived this area are the ones who have faced the world, faced the changes and adapted with every transformation Soho has undergone. And it keeps transforming, in my mind, for the better.
INSIDE OUT
This is after midnight
Anything can happen
We might fall in love
We could find a doctor to pop the potion
But we just might get ripped off
This is Sloanes and hobos
Helping each other out for a bit of brown
This is you and me
Inside out in the middle of the town
And we don't believe in anything unless anything believes in us
So, the girl on the door gets a lift with a limousine straight back to Kings Cross
Yeah, we get a lift from whatever we find
Yeah, we really work each other up in our prime
And surfing channels is a waste of time
We just get inside out you know
We're just looking out
And waiting for a wave to waste the wreck we're in
What's the worth in worrying at all
There's always someone who knows your pin
Yeah, all you need is love, but I've still got hope
I've still got hope
This is all we've got, so let us not
Forget to say a prayer to whatever substitute you use
That gets you clean out of your head
There's no Great Escape or hidden agenda
You've got to keep moving through the crowds
You've got to face the world or lose
We just get inside out you know
Lyrics printed with the kind permission of the publishers © V2 MUSIC 1999
© TIM ARNOLD 2006
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