Death by luxury: the threat to culture and the power of coffins in the street

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When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battallions.

Lately, it seems that barely a week goes by without news of one of London’s seminal underground, alternative or queer venues being closed or threatened with closure: the Joiners’ Arms booted out, the Vibe Bar shuttered, the Buffalo Bar closed, the RVT sold to property developers, the George Tavern in jeopardy. And now, perhaps most brutally of all, Madame Jojo’s is no more.

Brutal in more ways than one. The catalyst for the closure of Soho’s most iconic surviving cabaret space – which has been operating under its current name for more than 30 years – was a violent incident on October 24 involving the venue’s bouncers and a member of the public. This led to the suspension of its license; last week came the news from Westminster Council that it would not be allowed to reopen.

The incident sounds truly nasty and few would question the need for repercussions. Yet these took place: the venue management promptly investigated and replaced its security staff and seem to have cooperated fully with the police investigation. Other venues have been the site of more serious and regular violent incidents without being shut down. But the axe fell on Jojo’s with shocking speed: no appeal, no stay of execution. Done.

So long House of Burlesque, Finger in the Pie, Magic Night, Cabaret Roulette, Tranny Shack, the Folly Mixtures, White Heat and the other rowdy and experimental nights of burlesque, variety, drag, magic, music and freakery to which the venue was home. Some have found shelter at Shadow Lounge over the road; some have their sights set on new homes; the fate of others remains in question.

On the afternoon of Saturday November 29, at the instigation of performer Abigail O’Neill and others including producer Alexander Parsonage, a vigil was held in Soho, ostensibly for Madame Jojo’s itself but more generally for the area at large. Around 100 performers, producers, workers and audience members from the cabaret scene gathered in funereal garb to bear a coffin and wreaths from Soho Square down Greek Street, pausing at the offices of Jojo’s landlord Soho Estates, then down Old Compton Street through Tisbury Court to Rupert Street, facing the entrance to Madame Jojo’s on Brewer Street, where the funeral trappings were laid.

 

So how did this happen so quickly? It seems possible, to say the least, that the landlord of Madame Jojo’s had no interest in keeping it open. Soho Estates, which was founded by ‘King of Soho’ Paul Raymond and is one of the most lucrative property owners in the UK, successfully applied for planning permission last year to knock down Madame Jojo’s and surrounding buildings on Walker’s Court, an alley notable as one of the few remaining sites where Soho’s iconic associations with sex and sleaze remain a reality.

The plan is to construct in their place a high-end retail and dining quarter with no discernible connection to Soho’s transgressive history except as a brand to be exploited for its perceived cachet.

It should go without saying by this point that commercial exploitation of central London space is the unifying factor to the fate of all these venues. Some people respond to these closures by noting that London has always been a place where things changed – where areas had certain characteristics and certain uses and, over time, for whatever reason, those characteristics and uses have come and gone.

This is true on the face of it: dynamism is in the city’s DNA. These processes of change are the subject of a terrific new verbatim theatre show, Jonny Woo’s East London Lecture, which I saw at the Rose Lipman Building the evening following the vigil. As the title suggests, the show is not about the West End but the East End – specifically Shoreditch, and how in the 1990s the party scene around the Bricklayer’s Arms sparked a social and creative explosion and a sea change in mainstream perceptions of the area, from dingy and dangerous to the epicentre of cool.

One of the particularly smart things about the production – in which Woo speaks the words and embodies the characters of numerous inhabitants of the area – is its acknowledgement that Hackney was not, in fact, a wasteland before the cool kids moved in and is not, in fact, a hopeless case now that it’s hipster central. The show attends without sentiment or judgment to the voices of those who lived there before and have moved there since. A space is used in many ways by the people who live, work and play there, and the fact that these ways and these people change over time is not inherently good or bad. It’s what cities do.

But there is, I would suggest, something different about the changes taking place at the moment in London. (Not that they’re exclusive to London by any means, but it’s the place I know best.) I really don’t think the tension over Soho’s future is, as one Guardian article suggested last week, a case of a split between “neophiles and neophobes, optimists and pessimists“.

The problem is that the current hyperinflation of real-estate prices is not driven by people and the way they use cities at all. It is driven by the treatment of urban space as a form of capital, to be invested in, sat on and offloaded for profit without ever actually being used.

That is to say, the purpose of a luxury flat is not to be lived in but to be bought and sold. That’s what gives us sights such as the Tower at Vauxhall – the one that looks like a giant aerosol can – which is at once the tallest exclusively residential building in western Europe and, to judge by the level of illumination after dark, a place where hardly anyone lives.

The current changes to London are not just the latest shift in the city’s ever-shifting history. These changes are a threat to the idea of change, at least in the fertile, productive sense on which communities depend. They are the urban-planning equivalent of paraquat. They make dead zones.

The more square footage large-scale high-end projects gobble up to be sold at luxury prices, the more urban space is removed from actual use – living, working, playing – by the city’s residents and the more property prices, and by extension rents, are pushed up. There’s a simple elegance to the market logic at work here: under these conditions, practically every site in London is worth more if it’s redeveloped as luxury residential property, or failing that as commercial or retail space conceived to service the luxury sector or, at a pinch, mainstream commerce.

In the absence of any meaningful construction of homes for people without access to six-figure sums, it spells disaster for the city as a place for the pursuit of social and cultural fulfilment as well as profit and consumerist prowess. It’s bad news for a city if high-end property sales and chain stores boom but experimental performance and alternative social spaces are squeezed out, because culture – real culture that provokes thought and fellow-feeling – needs mutation and innovation to flourish.

By contrast, market consumerism thrives on stasis and the inculcation of envy, insecurity, alienation and even violence. It is ultimately a nihilistic, dehumanising creed. Look at the fighting that marked the arrival of Black Friday sales to these shores – the feral consumerism of the 2011 riots given license under a veneer of legitimacy, with cash tills ringing in the background. Say hello to shopping as blood sport.

That’s why it’s so depressing looking at the architectural plans for the current site of Madame Jojo’s (and Escape, a gay bar which was also unceremoniously shuttered last month). There’s something unabashedly soulless about the co-option of the iconic Revue Bar signage on high paired with the replacement of Jojo’s entrance with generic shopfront signage saying simply SHOP. It might be standard design-mock-up shorthand but it starts to feel less like a description than an order: SHOP, monkeys, SHOP!

It’s enough to bring to mind John Carpenter’s 1988 science-fiction action satire They Live. The movie is set in a near-future world of rising environmental decay, inequality and poverty; alien entrepreneurs live among us in luxury, controlling the police and media, while a docile populace, trained to aspire only to a quiet life and the occasional morsel of luxury-branded “divine excess”, is kept in check by drone surveillance and subliminal messaging.

It’s tempting to be pessimistic about the current situation – even fatalistic. But I think there are still ways to push back. London property is not the only form of capital whose currency has skyrocketed of late: another is spectacle. And that one is home turf for cabaret and the arts. The vigil on Saturday, starring Madame Jojo’s coffin, was a great example.

Everyone from Miley Cyrus to ISIS knows that delivering compelling visuals aligned to a simple message is a hugely effective way of grabbing people’s attention and getting your point across. And if the people with power perceive you as enough of a nuisance, or as a threat to their interests, they’re much more incentivised to listen to what’s important to you and make concessions, even if just for the PR value. Failing that, you still up your chances of attracting like-minded people to your cause.

I was impressed by how many professional photographers turned up to the vigil on Saturday – at least a dozen, perhaps two – and I couldn’t guess how many photos were taken on mobile phones by people who just happened to be nearby. This was the power of an intriguing spectacle in operation.

But I was also impressed by the potency of the funeral imagery and the solemnity on the faces of those involved. Most of them were performers whom we’re used to seeing having and inspiring fun, and playing roles. Here they both were and weren’t play-acting. It wasn’t a genuine funeral in the sense that there wasn’t a corpse in the coffin. But the sense of loss was real, and this event was a powerful way of making that loss visible.

The vigil procession expressed anger and solidarity through peaceful creative expression. That speaks for itself in a way that transcends a specific interest in cabaret performance. It also offers a model for other sites facing comparable challenges.

Why shouldn’t there be a funeral for every viable arts venue closed down by rapacious property development? Such displays affirm that these places matter and make their loss public in a way that outsiders can instantly understand.

They also point up their connection with all sorts of other closures that are coming about in the name of public balance sheets as well as private profit margins.

Throughout the country, not just in relation to the arts, things are being lost that help people come together, feel better and get empowered. If these losses were given material form in the manner of Madame Jojo’s coffin, were displayed at the site where a valuable resource of whatever kind has been lost, and were witnessed by others at the time and afterwards on social media (a good hashtag would be crucial), it might help to make the cumulative scale of these losses more visible.

And the more visible such loss becomes, the harder it is is to deny or ignore, and the easier it is to feel solidarity with others who are feeling its effects. And when more people communicate about their anger and frustration over these losses, who knows what new ways forward might come to light?

That’s the hope I saw in Madame Jojo’s coffin. That’s how the spectacle of loss might offer a strategy of resistance.

Posted by Ben Walters at 18:00 on Monday December 1 2014.