Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Chairman of the keyboard

Posted on: February 28th, 2011 by riddaway 3 Comments

Clifford Slapper is the pianist-in-residence at the uber cool and exclusive Crazy Bear club in Covent Garden.  Jean Paul Aubin Parvu talks to Clifford about music, Miss Right and why he’s a Slapper by name - not nature

CGJ: Is Clifford Slapper your stage name?CS: No, it’s actually my real name, despite what people often assume. The only worrying part is that one or two people who have got to know me quite well have assumed all along that it was a nickname – in which case how on earth did they think I would have earned such a moniker? I am a Slapper by name, not by nature.

Did you always dream of becoming a professional musician?As a young child my parents bought me a little toy piano, and apparently I was never off it, so they looked up a local piano teacher, an eccentric old lady in Wembley called Miss Beryl Silley. I had weekly lessons from the age of seven until just after I passed Grade 8 of the RSM exams, when Miss Silley sadly died. Silley and Slapper, what a combination! Years later I formed a musical duo with a young Lancaster woman called Chira Lovat, so then we were Slapper & Lovat – we resisted the temptation to re-spell that.

(more…)

It Takes Tea to Tango

Posted on: November 30th, 2010 by riddaway 1 Comment

Amy Laughinghouse cuts some old fashioned rug at The Waldorf Hilton’s tango tea

A silver-haired bandleader in a white coat and black bow tie croons into a microphone as women in towering heels and men in wingtips whirl across a marble dance floor. Other elegantly attired couples are clustered around gold linen-draped tables, sipping bubbly from champagne flutes or nibbling on finger sandwiches and delicate pastries, furtively checking their reflections in mirrored alcoves framed by ornate plaster columns.

It could be a scene from Mad Men, but in fact, it’s a 21st Century Tango Tea, one of the most original and popular takes on London’s irrepressible tea culture. This event—held every two months at The Waldorf Hilton hotel, an Edwardian grande dame near the thriving theater district—offers a hearty side of ballroom and Latin dancing along with the obligatory tea and scones.

While I love to dance, my limited moves, honed to the likes of Wham! and Modern English, don’t exactly translate to the foxtrot and the cha-cha. And although my husband Scott is perfectly competent in the side-to-side shuffle, he hasn’t attempted anything more ambitious since my parents, who misguidedly envisioned us waltzing at our wedding reception, arranged a lesson for the morning after his stag do. With Scott’s head still spinning one way and his feet attempting to spin the other, it was not what you would call a resounding success. (In the end, we cut the rug as a newly married couple by swaying spasmodically to More Than Words, a power-ballad by the 90s hair band Extreme, much to my parents’ everlasting disappointment).

(more…)

With Diamonds

Posted on: November 24th, 2010 by riddaway 1 Comment

Shannon Denny meets Sarah Owen, co-owner – alongside her sister Lily Allen – of the spectacular new vintage clothing boutique Lucy in Disguise, and hears about renting out masterpieces, dressing up for Bella Freud, and the downside to having a pop star for a business partner

Dressing up is a popular pastime for plenty of young girls, but for half-sisters Sarah Owen and Lily Allen it was more like an extension of the family business. The pair are daughters of the film producer Alison Owen, whose credits range from Shaun of the Dead to The Other Boleyn Girl. When Sarah was four, her mum married actor Keith Allen. Lily was born the next year, and Alfie came along the year after that. After the breakup with Keith, their mum was in a long relationship with comedian Harry Enfield. Lily went on to pop stardom, Alfie became an actor, and Sarah became a producer like her mum. That’s an awful lot of showbiz in one family, and an awful lot of dressing up.

Last year the half-sisters started talking about turning their love of dressing up into a business, and the result is a King Street vintage shop that’s styled as a flat belonging to “Lucy”. Each “room” represents a different era. The 1920s for example is a sitting room in which beaded dresses hang next to handmade lighting fashioned from Terry De Havilland shoes. The 1960s zone is a riot of bling, accented with Bond girl-inspired wallpaper created just for the shop. The 1970s section drips with wild prints and a serious amount of suede. Follow the pink plush carpet downstairs and you arrive in the beauty parlour, kitted out with a Grey Goose vodka bar. Manicures are available at the Wah concession, or you can flip through lookbooks to find vintage styles courtesy of the Bumble & Bumble blowdry bar and Ila Masqua makeup counter. Next door is the super-luxe dressing room that’s available for hire to groups.

A limited-edition Lucy in Disguise poster evokes Alphonse Mucha or 60s album art, but is in fact a collaboration between Tim Watkins of the Gorillaz and Nigel Weymouth, creator of the iconic swinging sixties boutique Granny Takes a Trip. “That’s a real ethos of ours – the fusion of old and new,” says Sarah. “We don’t want to be a dusty old vintage shop where you look like you’re stepping out of a BBC drama. We want it to be vintage in a modern, wearable way.” Make that modern, wearable and covetable. My eyes stinging from the effort of absorbing so many garments I would love to immediately put on, I ask Sarah about how she landed every right-thinking woman’s dream job.

(more…)

Hello Boys

Posted on: August 23rd, 2010 by riddaway No Comments

Editor of the Observer Magazine Polly Vernon looks back at her heady days and intoxicating nights as a Wonderbra flaunting barmaid in 90s Covent Garden

I spent my first year in London working in a cocktail bar on the corner of Wellington Street, bang in the middle of Covent Garden. It was neon-lit and screamingly trashy, a formerly-fashionable barn of a joint called Rumours, and I loved it. I arrived equipped with nothing more than a mediocre degree in French, a Wonderbra and a regulation catsuit, and managed to land a few shifts on the basis that someone I knew had once slept with the manager. Within a fortnight or two, I was totally ensconced on the regulars’ rota.

I fell in love with the whole scene within milliseconds. There was no way you could have dragged me away from the place. I sloshed out endless pre-mixed long island ice teas for the delectation of the Eastenders stars, Premiership footballers and City boys who became my clientele. I spent my free time doing shots after hours with Croatian bus boys and my catsuit-clad colleagues, to whom I was completely devoted. We’d troop off to Stringfellows (where I had been granted something called Model Membership) or The Roadhouse in the Piazza or The Limelight on Charing Cross Road or The Spot on Maiden Lane – our sister bar with a late license. I never got out of bed before midday, and never returned to it before 3am. I toyed with the affections of doormen and the Miss Saigon musicians who would pop in for a G&T before the evening performance. I took minicabs home to Hammersmith every night from the Ali Cabs outfit situated opposite Leicester Square tube. And generally, I thought I had ARRIVED. You could keep Studio 54 in the 70s and The Blitz Club in the early 80s—as far as I was concerned, it did not get more decadent, more intensely glamorous, more heady and intoxicating, than Rumours of Covent Garden in 1994.

I was wrong, of course. Covent Garden 16 years ago was a fading shadow of former glories, and a million miles from the slick, shiny, brilliantly refurbished operation it is now. It was smelly and not especially hip. It was filled with dismal tourists, bad street artists and overpriced coffee shops. But I was oblivious. Having grown up in Devon and studied in Brighton, Covent Garden was my introduction to London and to a life outside full time education. It seemed to me to be the very epicentre of glamour, and I embraced it as hard as my cantilevered, Lycra-encased bosom would allow.

(more…)

Under the Skin at Neal’s Yard

Posted on: June 28th, 2010 by admin No Comments

Clare Finney spends a day in Dorset exploring the gardens, laboratories and organic canteen of Neal’s Yard Remedies - the natural skincare company that grew from Covent Garden cult to international success without ever losing its soul

“Phwoar. Get a load of that”. It’s 11am and I’m standing in the sunlit mixing room of the country’s most successful organic skincare brand. Yet as I put my nose to the proffered bottle, the scent that hits me is neither soothing, nor cleansing, nor particularly pleasant. To be honest, it smells a little bit like… curry?

“Exactly!” beams Fran, lab technician at Neal’s Yard Remedies and the creative genius behind its extensive range of lotions and potions. In one hand she is holding a plastic jug of rather questionable looking cream; in the other, the ‘eau de takeaway’ that, if ancient Indian medicinal traditions are anything to go by, will help transform the cream into a ‘brightening serum’.

(more…)