The Book
Tales from the Colony Room
Soho’s Lost Bohemia
Like many strange stories, the book, Tales from the Colony Room, came about through an unexpected twist of fate. Before his early demise, Michael Wojas gave me some tapes, which contained interviews with old club members. I didn’t really know what to do with them at the time, so I put them away in a drawer and forgot about them.
A few years later, whilst working on Joshua Compston’s biography, Factual Nonsense, it occurred to me that a similar oral biography and interview format would work with a book on the Colony Room Club.
Personal Reminiscences and Memories
Oral Biography of the Club
The Tales from the Colony Room is an oral biography of the Colony Room club and its members. This literary form gives the reader a real flavour of what it was like to frequent the Colony and its environs.
With a glass in hand, the reader moves through the decades listening to personal reminiscences, opinions and vitriol from the authentic voices of those who were actually there.
Soho Legends
Where is Bohemia?
After twenty-seven years of working at the Colony, Michael Wojas decided to call last orders for the final time and closed the club after its sixtieth anniversary in December 2008.
Now that the club is no more and Soho is being sanitised, people ask ‘Where is Bohemia?’ Sadly, Soho’s Bohemia is no more – but fortunately for Wojas, as with so many before, whether it be Bacon, Bernard, Farson or Freud, the story never ends.They become Soho legends, the object of bar room talk, whispers and spurious truth. Such is the legacy of the Colony Room Club.
Hardback edition signed by the Author
The Colony Room Club
Would you like to join?
Sorry, the membership list is now closed. But if you really want to know what it was like to be there, pour yourself a large drink, imagine you are perched on a stool at the end of the bar eavesdropping in, and read on.
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