Soho Songs – Crazy Coqs

Picture: Kevin Wilson Public Relations

Soho Songs: A new Song Cycle by Barb Jungr & Mike Lindup at Crazy Coqs, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Barb Jungr and Mike Lindup, words and music, have created this poignant homage to the Soho that many of us remember from our youth in the 1970s and 80s. A Soho before Westminster Council embarked on a clean up campaign. Gone are the women working the streets discreetly from a doorway or a red light positioned high up in a window, with a discreet name on a bell push. Gone are porn cinemas. The newsagent with a discreet back room for the purchase of more exotic publications. When there was a single gay bar, discreetly situated down a flight of stairs, and a club or two with a pullback grill to be vetted before gaining entrance rather like a New York speakeasy from the 1930s.

Introduced by Barb Jungr with her characteristic humour and a tale about a porn cinema, taped voiceovers lead us into the premiere of this cycle of songs that dig deep into the back stories of the people who once inhabited Soho.

Robbie Noonan opens with ‘The Homeless Man’, accompanied by charming vocals from his fellow performers seated at a table offstage.

‘The Bouncer Man’ digs beneath the lives of those muscle-bound black suits we still see standing at venue doors.  The prison records, the families at home, the futures that they face.

‘Trafficked Girls’ evokes Eastern Europe with its minor key melody and syncopated rhythm as the song recounts the fate of exploited women, sung with a plaintive longing by Lucinda Lawrence.

‘She Won’t Be in Today’, the Pit Musicians’ Lament, is a nod to the Tin Pan Alley of Soho, Denmark Street, with a parade ground style call and response.

‘Every Kind of Blue’ is a landlady’s rumination on her past as she fends of the developers hovering like vultures.

In ‘Kit On Kit Off’ Kat Johns-Burke bemoans the repetitive tedium of a burlesque dancer’s life, then is joined by Lawrence to herald the coming of the age of disco in ‘Nice Girls Don’t Go to Soho’.

And then for anyone who’s lived through a one night stand of passion and tenderness, a longing for something deeper that vanishes with the dawn, Nate Rogers gives us a tender, soaring performance of ‘Your Heart in My Hand’, the emotional core of his voice giving way to thrilling top notes.

‘Faint Hearts Didn’t Build Hong Kong’ is another disco tinged tale of the demolition and reconstruction of Soho. And ‘Dreaming of Soho’ unites the company as they look back to the vanished Soho that these songs celebrate.

Lawrence, Noonan, Johns-Burke and Rogers nailed these songs with a very short rehearsal time, accomplished singers who deserve to be heard more widely. The backing group of Mark Edwards (piano), Arnie Somogyi (bass) and Darren Beckett (drums) played Lindup’s arrangements with swing and sensitivity, never drowning the singers and Peter Glanville’s subtle staging had just the right characterisation for the stage at Crazy Coqs.

My American companion who was unaware of Soho’s more colourful past was charmed and intrigued. The songs have hints of Brel, Piaf, Weill. Interweaved with disco and parade ground rap. Add some discreet costuming, a touch more theatricality and a venue somewhere that is reminiscent of the old Soho and this could be a hit.

Leon Ferguson