The King of Soho

A seedy era came to an end on Sunday with the death of porn king Paul Raymond. The owner of the famous Soho strip club The Revuebar and publisher of a host of soft-core nudie mags like Mayfair, Men Only and Razzle, Raymond made a considerable fortune with an empire built on tits and bums (and savvy property deals).

The Revuebar opened in the 1950s and at the time was the only venue in England to have actual naked ladies on stage moving their arms and legs (featuring such memorably-named acts as Bonnie Bell the Ding-Dong Girl and Melody Bubbles) and more than anyone Raymond was responsible for turning Soho into London's Red Light district. It was always the centre of London's "underground" culture with houses of ill-repute, but by the 1970s the area had turned into a rather dodgy place full of seedy peep shows and tawdry sex shops frequented by shabby old men in raincoats. The only time I ever got approached by a prostitute in Soho was one afternoon in the early 1980s when I was walking down the small street that runs alongside the Revuebar, she was a right ugly old bag too so no wonder the area had fallen on hard times if that was the quality of hooker on offer. That Soho doesn't exist anymore — though you can see it in the film "Mona Lisa" when Bob Hoskins makes his way through London's sordid underbelly — the area was cleaned up by the Tories who closed down the sex trade, making the way for the trendy restaurants, bars and boutiques that fill the streets now.

Raymond was probably the closest England had to a Hugh Hefner, but while Hefner promoted the image of a sophisticated man-about-town with taste, all swank bachelor pads, jazz, cocktails, and Amazonian fantasy women the likes of which you never saw in England, Raymond was more like a louche spiv with his fake tan, blow-dried hair and gold Rolls-Royce — not to mention magnificently tacky fur coats — and his magazines were far more low-rent and well, English, in their presentation. With it's cut-price production values and Reader's Wives, Raymond's world of glamour was more bedsit and suburban living room than uptown penthouse, with the women generally looking like some tarty dolly bird who worked in a pub or the blushing missus of some lorry driver, a parade of cheesy grins, mottled skin and bad lighting.

But in the days before FHM and Maxim it was Raymond's magazines that your English schoolboy looked to on the top shelf of his local newsagent's, desperately trying to summon up the nerve to buy a copy, if only that old woman buying a copy of Woman's Own would get a move on the coast would be clear and you could take that Mayfair or Razzle up to the counter, hoping the bloke behind the counter doesn't ask you how old you are. Or you could always try and steal it...

Download: Razzle In My Pocket - Ian Dury & The Blockheads (mp3)