Darren Coffield
Tales from the Colony Room
Soho’s Lost Bohemia
A new book by Darren Coffield
with a foreword by Barry Humphries
WARNING: This book contains strong language, sex, violence and extreme wit.
Hardback edition signed by the Author
Tales from the Colony Room
About the Book
Tales from the Colony Room is an oral biography, consisting of previously unpublished and long-lost interviews with the characters who were central to the scene, giving the reader a real flavour of what it was like to frequent the Club. With a glass in hand you’ll move through the decades listening to personal reminiscences, opinions and vitriol, from the authentic voices of those who were actually there.
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Signed by the Author
Tales from the Colony Room
Foreword By Barry Humphries
The Colony Room was, for me at the time, a wonderful discovery. It provided an atmosphere of delectable depravity for the select company of alcoholics and would be artists who managed to win the reluctant approval of Muriel Belcher, the gorgon-like proprietrix.
© Wally Fawkes
The Colony Room
About the Club
The Colony Room Club was London’s most infamous arts establishment. In the regimented and repressed atmosphere of post-war London, the Colony was heroically bohemian, largely thanks to the dominant personality of its founder, Muriel Belcher, who became a combination of muse, mentor, critic and guru to those who gathered around her, and provided a home for the confluence of talents that will be for ever associated with the artistic circle of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.
Now, former member Darren Coffield, has written the authorised history of this notorious drinking den. It’s a hair-raising romp through the underbelly of the post-war scene: during its sixty-year history, more romances, more deaths, more horrors and more sex scandals took place in the Colony than anywhere else, and if they didn’t happen there, they were definitely planned there.
Darren Coffield
About the Author
Darren Coffield is a British artist. He has exhibited at venues ranging from the Courtauld Institute, Somerset House to the Voloshin Museum, Crimea.
In the early nineties Coffield worked with Joshua Compston on the formation of Factual Nonsense, the centre of the emerging Young British Artists scene. A book by Coffield about this period in British art, Factual Nonsense: The Art and Death of Joshua Compston, was accompanied by an exhibition curated by Coffield at Paul Stolper Gallery.
He lives and works in London.
Francis Bacon loved his clothes. He was very fashion-conscious and always immaculately dressed. One afternoon Francis walked in, annoyed and pulling his collar.
"What's wrong, Francis?" asked Ian.
"Harrods, I'm never going to that shop again."
Francis had attended a special night for select clients and bought a lot of clothes, but when he got home he'd decided he didn't like any of them.
"I bought so many suits and shirts and threw the lot in the dustbin."
You'd never seen the club empty so quickly. And the very next day everyone was up the club parading around in their new suits and shirts from Francis' dustbin.
