"People in general don't like themselves, they've got low self esteem and low confidence, so what they want to do is look like somebody else, whereas I just want to look like me. "A lot of people really don't know who they are," he says. George Skeggs on the streets of Soho (Image: Facundo Arrizabalaga/MyLondon)īut he's also a bit of a philosopher and life coach, our George. "I'm planning a one-man show at L'Escargot (a French restaurant that's been at the heart of Soho dining since 1927)," says George "But I just need that light bulb to go on again." George says the pandemic "killed my urge to paint", but he's beginning to get it back. All the shops were boarded up, apart from the Soho Dairy in Derek Street which was brilliant because you could buy everything there, milk and cheese etc. I always used to say to my daughter, 'if I don't go out, nothing happens'. I go into the Royal Academy, the bookshops. "Walking and talking, that's how I stay alive," says George. But George has enjoyed success as a model too, appearing in numerous photo shoots, films and features on Soho. Going from job to job taught him valuable lessons which he says kids coming straight out of college just don't get these days. George snapped with Noel Fielding Walking and talking 'is how I stay alive' "I knew where all the secret doors were too!" Through it all, he was quietly working away on his impressive modernist paintings which is still his greatest passion, but one he's never pushed at. "I had history in my hands, it was a fantastic job," says George. He still goes there for a quiet browse to get away from things. It seems an unlikely profession for someone as creative as George, but something about the rare manuscripts appealed to him and he became adept at finding things hidden away that others couldn't. Later he settled on a job in the British Library cataloguing rare books for 23 years. In the 60s he worked at a Soho ad agency and once even for Disney drawing cartoons and as a plumber working on the Barbican. I did about two weeks and got fed up with it," he laughs. So I said OK! I didn't like the idea of getting up at 7am in the morning with a bugle though. My mate was working on the QE2 and said it was a good way of meeting millionaire heiresses. "I ended up having about 40 jobs," he grins. Because jobs were so plentiful back then, he moved around a lot. George would wear a box jacket with green snakeskin winkle pickers. George has met numerous celebrities over the years. Fashions were daring and colourful, record stores were selling Rock 'n' Roll and cafe bars were springing up everywhere. Carnaby Street’s first menswear tailor, John Stephen, was stitching classic designs and and Mary Quant’s modern designs were injecting new life into women’s fashion. Sometimes we'd walk round the alleyways and deliberately knock on the doors to see if they would come to the window. It was illegal by then to solicit on the streets but we'd see them everywhere as teenagers and giggle and say, 'there's one over there!'. There were a lot of Italian, Maltese and French," says George. "It was like a village when I first came here. The original 2i’s neon-lit logo still shines on the walls of what is now Poppie’s Fish & Chips. It was a tinpot stage, a couple of milk crates with a couple of scaffold boards, a terrible speaker but it was different and new and had that American diner feel to it."Īmong the stars was Joe Moretti, whose dramatic guitar solos on 1960 hit single ‘Shakin’ All Over’ originated in the basement of 2i’s, and a young, undiscovered Cliff Richard. "If you wanted to get discovered you had to move through there. "A lot of famous people performed there before they went on to have famous careers," says George. It was London's Cavern Club before the Cavern even existed. They began to go to the 2i's coffee house - a sweaty basement club where the groups would play. Vince Taylor and his Playboys perform on stage at the 2Is Coffee Bar in Soho circa 1958
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