Rockin' At The 2i's Coffee Bar

Before Tommy Steele launched his career there and Lionel Bart started his first tentative steps into hit musicals via a bit of rock'n'roll, there was a network of late-night joints.

There, music was accompanied by cups of frothy capuccino from Signor Giovanni Achille Gaggia's new espresso machines.

Places like the Bread Basket, the Gyre and Gimble and, most notably, the Troubador in Earls Court nurtured a generation of new Bohemians who blossomed into full flower at the i's, as we always called it in those far-off days.

Though not listed in the index, Andrew Ings does mention the Cave - situated beneath the arches down by the Embankment - where a seaman called Tommy Hicks met Lionel Bart, who went on to write the cafe's theme tune Rock With The Caveman.

This was a number later associated with the i's when young Hicks became Tommy Steele and had his first hit - though, as Terry Dene says, he didn't play there very often.

Andrew doesn't just restrict his scope to the i's.

He devotes a couple of pages to Hylda Sims and the City Ramblers spasm band she ran with Russell Quaye who never played there, preferring their own Skiffle Cellar in Gerrard Street.

But he doesn't mention the club run previously at the same gaff by the banjo-playing atomic physicist Dr - later Professor - John Hasted which pre-dated all the other Soho clubs.

Nor does he acknowledge the Soho-based Intimate Review, a "little magazine" run by Hungarian anarchist John Rety who until his recent death was poetry editor of the Morning Star.

However, Ings has done a fine job of putting together an oral history of the i's which also sets it in the context of the Soho scene in those days.

Rival attractions like the Skiffle Cellar, Les Cousins and the Marquee were soon competing for the newly significant teenage trade.

There's even a brief history of Soho and after every oral testimony Andrew adds a few explanations of who was who and what was what.

This is a book for dipping into rather than reading from A to Z.

I had a wonderful time meeting up with long-forgotten old mates, as well as encountering some who were only names to me.

Thanks, Andrew.