By the late summer of 1982, the Carved Red Lion basement where gay DJs Berni and Martin played their choons on the Essex Rd, was getting too small for its reputation.
‘Gay Noise’ had folded, despite our letter to the collective and protestations and so it was no longer a benefit night as such but its popularity saw the demand for it continue. There would be a queue down the street to get in. And it wasn’t necessarily a street you wanted to hang out too long in, though, en masse, the queue gave as good as it got and much more. The landlords finally fell out with the promoters and this precipitated a move to a new venue, just down the road to a ‘safer space’ in the middle of fast trendifying Islington, close to Angel Islington tube.
The Pied Bull was a larger venue than the ‘Lion and as such was able to take more punters in each Saturday night. It was at 1, Liverpool Rd, N1 so an easy address to remember and had a mock tudor frontage from a bijou restoration in 1932. It had had a very long history as the ‘Pied Bull’, a public house remarkably going back to 1793 but was a music venue in the period when Movements was there, every Saturday. It tends to get forgotten now in the archives, as the infamous ‘Bell’ in Kings Cross, which was to be their next move, was to be so seminal, for so long, with the gay alt crowd.
It wasn’t around as a venue for Movements for too long, as I recall there was some trouble there with a gang of skinheads that attempted to raid the place one evening, the police having to be called. It had a little bit of a reputation after that, with some people feeling worried about visiting the place. It had its moments though. The delightful Paz Paschali, editor of Attitude back in 1994, recalled the time when Boy George tried to get into the Pied Bull after doing an interview
‘when he went on and on about poofs..we were outraged, he was clearly a traitor’. The doorman at the Pied Bull challenged him saying ‘ Someone in your position should support gay rights, I’ll have you know I’ve been beaten up for wearing a gay badge‘. As Paz noted ‘we weren’t quick to forgive in those days’.
In fact Berni Hodson has since said, that they got on very well with the manager there and that there was talk at one time that the manager might take over the management of the Bell. It didnt happen though in the end. Certainly the Pied Bull was a good space for a while but, as it turned out, was just a taster for even better things to come. Central London was slowly taking off too as the number of bars there increased along with the number of punters out and about wanting to visit them. Someone with a sense of humour had opened a new one in central London’s St Martins’ Lane, called Brief Encounter, which was your full bells and whistles New York style bar: very modern with lots of chrome and tasteful eighties style pastels. Perfect for a pre theatre gin and tonic upstairs or a longer stay down in its busy but still fashionable basement. But there were always other spaces, other vibes and tribes to be a part of. In fact, for quite a while in this period I discovered a completely new watering spot. Men only though, so the vibe was always going to be pretty different to place like the ‘Lion & Pied Bull.
