Keep your wits about you, I advise my plus-ones. Remember, you’re an observer, a tourist who’s rocked up out of curiosity. Better a fly on the wall than rolling around in the pigsty known as 32 Portland Place — reprobate central and site of Bonnie Blue’s infamous thousand-man gangbang.
‘So, why do you keep going back?’ a friend asks.
‘I wonder.’
Portland Place is louche, that’s undeniable. But perhaps, it has precisely the dissolute charm that we so often complain has been sanitised out of Soho. The Colony Room Club — artist Francis Bacon’s bohemian drinking den — was hailed as the ‘seediest spot in Britain’ before it closed its doors in 2008, like all the other old-school haunts. In a way, Portland Place is her unruly nephew.
Last year, a series of subdued art salons were launched by Russian painter Philip Firsov. Initially, they attracted the sort of peculiar bloke who, in stiff period attire, fancies himself as Napoleon. Now, these salons have exploded into sweaty and lascivious 350-person bashes. ‘Anti-Frieze’ — whose name says everything you need to know about its vision — was his latest two-day show.
These salons are cult events where you run into the same fruitcakes time and time again. One step inside and I regret wearing my ostrich feather waistcoat. The windows are jammed shut to keep the noise from the crowd raising hell inside from spilling onto the streets. It’s a smoky sauna. A pompous boy with floppy curtain bangs and a scroll is squawking into a mic. A woman dressed as Cleopatra is performing shibari on a four-poster bed. One girl is getting ‘32’ inked onto her arm. Another is smooching a horse taxidermist.
The latest edition opened with a fashion show of models wearing painted costumes. Dubbed ‘Decadence’, it included over forty of Firsov’s artworks and an auction, alongside an impressive slate of DJs, acrobats, fire dancers, and artists flown in from Italy and Paris.
‘Unlike Frieze — where artists need to be represented by a gallery paying a high fee just for a stand — our event allows them to represent themselves and only pay twenty percent towards our costs upon sale of their work,’ Firsov says to COLD Magazine.
I lark about London with Firsov for a few fun weeks when I discover he’s a magnet for mischief. Whenever he runs into Lucian Freud’s son, they bicker over their drawn-out art feud — allegedly, Freud Junior took Firsov’s work and sold it as his own. Then Bonnie Blue shows up and says Firsov’s paintings ‘gave her something to look at while she was getting fucked.’
‘I picked Portland Place for its freedom,’ Firsov tells me. ‘I was drawing scenes at the sex parties, then they invited me to do an art show.’
Personally, my days at Portland Place have come and gone. It’s a place I love to hate, my bête noire. But back at Oxford, I’d make the trip to London, party my heart out, then catch the coach back in time for a full English breakfast at Christ Church. Then, a necessarily long shower.
‘How many expensive STIs do you have?’ a pub bartender in Central asked me as he poured a half pint. I’d mentioned that I’d frequented — well, biannually — 32 Portland Place for over six years. Needless to say, I was indignant at his unsavoury remark. I’ll have you know…! etc. etc.
But it had a kernel of truth. In fact, Lord Edward Davenport had a reputation for lending his mansion to parties frequented by the dregs of high society for decades. One pal told me he was drinking there when I was in nappies and that its denizens are as unsanitary as the furniture.
The antics of ‘Fast Eddie’, 59, have been done to death by the gutter press and gossip columns since the 1980s. He was called a ‘tycoon of teen lust’ for throwing lavish balls for posh kids from private schools. He didn’t slow down when he entered adulthood, becoming known as the ‘wolf of the West End’. Various events have been launched there on his coat-tails.
When you actually meet him, you wouldn’t clock him as a fly-by-night convicted fraudster. He’s a nimble gentleman and tireless party host with impeccable manners, a remarkably smooth forehead, and a kidney transplant. But his Instagram page shows off his playboy lifestyle in Bangkok, pouring champagne into the mouths of an entourage of Thai women in bikinis.
Eddie’s twenty-four-bedroom Georgian mansion was the Sierra Leonean embassy until he claimed it as his residence during the civil war. The impoverished West African state then accused him of tricking them out of their headquarters. When they reached a settlement, he kept the house.
Eddie’s website is peppered with snaps of himself with dozens of celebrities from Hugh Grant, Colin Firth and Helena Bonham-Carter to Paris Hilton, Dita Von Teese and Kate Moss. But the high life almost came crashing down when he was sentenced to seven years in jail in 2011. As it turns out, he was the ringleader of a £4.5-million series of advanced-fee schemes that swindled victims of their savings. He got let out early due to his kidney transplant.
Portland Place almost brings to mind dandy and artist Sebastian Horsley, who used to walk around Soho in a top hat. He was known for getting crucified in a jungle and his obsession with brothels. A week before his heroin overdose in 2010, he told The Independent: ‘The air used to be clean and the sex used to be dirty. Now it is the other way around. Soho has lost its heart.’
When a Parisian author friend came to visit, I took him straight to get a slice of this dark, glittery underbelly of Soho’s lost bohemia, and he wasn’t disappointed. These art salons are a gritty and bizarre experience for the curious and adventurous, but be prepared to keep your wits about you.