Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 The late-1960s saw a major shift in British government drug policy. Until that time, GPs were allowed to prescribe maintenance doses of drugs to addicts. A few GPs over-prescribed and a small black market in drugs that originated with the National Health Service developed. The government responded to this by preventing GPs from prescribing heroin and instead sent addicts to a restricted number of treatment centres. This marked the start of an American-style criminalisation of hard drugs in the UK. The result, as any objective observer could have predicted, was a disaster.

Because actress Lana Clarkson and her sadistic killer Phil Spector met in an LA hostess club, the producer’s conviction for murder earlier this week turned my attention once more to 1960s London variants on the ‘lonely men pay pretty girls for conversation’ clip joint racket. Murray’s Cabaret Club where Profumo Affair sex scandal girls Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies worked is the most famous London hostess joint. Being glitzy, Murray’s presented itself as a cabaret but the real draw was the more fatal combination of drink and hostesses. But Murray’s wasn’t the only such club in London in the sixties, other examples include Churchill’s and Winston’s.

Watching the coverage of the Phil Spector murder trial as it came in on BBC News 24 last night, really rammed home the celebrity agenda behind most reporting. There was lots about the famous people Spector worked with, and while it is always a pleasure to see footage of Tina Turner in her sixties prime, it didn’t surprise me that The Ramones weren’t among the famous acts the Beeb mentioned the record producer having worked with. There was little of Clarkson beyond one brief clip, which I didn’t see repeated. I always thought Lana was a great ‘scream queen’ even if the films she appeared in weren’t so wonderful.

In late 1961 my mother – Julia Callan-Thompson – moved across London from a one room bedist at 101 Barnsbury Street N1 (Islington) to a two room pad on the top floor at 24 Bassett Road W10 (off Ladbroke Grove). Both the basement flats beneath her at 24 Bassett Road had interesting occupants. In one was the Trinidadian drummer Russ Henderson who led the first steel band to play on the streets of London, and later had a hand in setting up what became known as the Notting Hill Carnival. In the other was a refugee from Nazism called Ruth Forster, who I’ve been told was a Jewish bookseller and a member (or a former member) of the Communist Party.

While Julian MacLaren-Ross could turn a reasonable sentence, I’ve always felt the cult that exists around this writer is based more on his sad bohemian life than his books. Therefore it has taken me a few years to get around to reading Paul Willetts 2005 biography of this bourgeois clown. Fear & Loathing In Fitzrovia is a fantastically well researched book, and for fans of MacLaren-Ross I’m sure it provides them with everything they want. For the rest of us there is a certain amusement to be gained from the repetitious nature of the MacLaren-Ross spendthrift life-style, which resulted in endless moonlight flits, but it only serves to confirm what most readers already know, he was ultimately a bore.