Espresso: The Story Behind The Devonshire's Infamous Green Room

0:02Well the thing is I told you before that this room was an afterthought this didn't this This wasn't part of the design of the pub. It came along. What was it going to be originally? It wasn't going to be part of our purchase. So this was the shop next door, which was the same landlord. And during the process of us having already designed the pub, they said to us, we think this is a bit too small for shop. Do you want to add on to your lease? And I immediately said yes, without having any clue what we were going to do with it. And at the time, obviously, that was blocked off, so you couldn't get through.

0:33So the only way through would have been through there. so we had to work out how to break it through get fire capacity done on it and see that we could get it for license and then make a decision on it and i just basically said well we'll just do it as the back room and then we'll we'll wing it from there and actually when we opened this the carpet was down but there was nothing on the wall uh and it was just a blank space and we started with a blank space and i always wanted to have somewhere where creative people feel comfortable and that was the baseline and the second uh line in in it was that i have an obsession with soho and particularly the old colony rooms which colony room the colony room was a club that started in soho in the 40s or 50s right uh on the first floor of 41 a dean street where i coincidentally keep my flat oh and uh there's there's a couple of really great books about it and how amazing it was i mean what was so amazing about it everybody went there so basically the pubs used to close between three and six so at three o 'clock anyone who wanted to have a drink had to be a member of a club colony was one of the most uh frequented and certainly the most debauched one right so there was the academy there was blacks there was uh there are dozens of clubs and so of which only a couple remain colony closed in 2005 but the colony famously had this green wall so i copied the green color from there and there's there's photos of who went there everybody from michael caine to to David Bowie, to Francis Bacon, to Laurence Olivier, to all of the Brat Pack, to all of the West End actors, Tracy Emin.

2:30Like, you know, it must have been a den of chaos. But one of the things that happened there was that the artists of the time, from Bacon to Emmett to all of the Damien Hirst, they would donate their art to the colony in exchange for bar tabs. So they'd be drinking there all the time with this incredible art all over the place. And I didn't set out to have art of that quality, but somehow we've managed to get a few pieces as we went along. Well, it's what's mad. I think when I was here last in April, as you said, that is always but never the same in terms of this little microcosm. The green room is that because it's like there's way more stuff on here than last time.

3:16What would you say is... We don't own most of it actually. So when we started off, I asked a few friends, I said, listen, if you've got any art at home that you'd like to lend us. So Scott Collins, the owner of Meat Liquor, actually gave us the fuck them all, which was the very first thing to go up. And actually this video of the first Irish session here where they're all playing their fiddles around one table. There's not even any furniture in here. the only thing is like bare walls and fuck them all and they're all fucking playing that is such because it's it's only a year ago yeah you know and since then i've like asked everybody i know um who's got bits and pieces so you know it's it's it's amazing what's going on that's an original black larat there so black black larat i don't know that so black larat is a french Parisian graffiti artist who started in the 70s in Paris and did an awful lot of stuff that looks like Banksy before Banksy had done it so he had rats and bits and pieces all over there really great artist and my favourite thing about this is this is lent to us by a customer by the name of Marcus White who's a fabulous guy, he obviously bought this for his house and it's not fitting in his house is it so he's gone to me he's gone to me mate you can you can you can borrow it if you want and i've gone yeah and actually when we put it up first i wasn't sure about it because it's so mental and so big and whatever but we've grown into it and what was really interesting was that black larat who's probably in his 60s now and a lovely french guy right he was doing a huge exhibition in london uh in the summer it might have been june or july so the gallery owner got in touch with me and said i understand you got a black claret on on display and we said yeah and he said do you mind if we come down and have a look they've come down they loved where it is and they took a couple of photographs and everything and about two days later i came in and i noticed that on the right bottom left hand side is this white rat which had appeared so he actually came in and tagged it without us knowing the guy that's so sick you see the white on the outside that's on the frame and it casts a shadow over the uh oh my god over the picture which is really cool but he's also tagged the outside of the pub as well there's a rat above the window which you'll see on the outside which i thought was great yeah what does that actually like i know there's not to get all fucking hearty farty wanky here but i do i am really interested in this stuff what what was your mate who passed you like why did he buy that big fuck off painting in the first place i think you'll have to ask marcus yeah but i do think that it's got it's got a great symmetry i think it can be what you want it to be obviously that anonymous mask is in there which is kind of a recurring theme in in in in in in current culture at the minute you've got the whole when you say when you say that the anonymous mask that's the thing i'm going to put this on the screen for people can you see in the middle of the screen Yeah, but how is that relevant now?

6:19I don't know, but it's, you know, Anonymous is sort of, you know, all that anti-Trump thing, all that sort of hacker stuff going on in the background. You know, a guy protecting himself with the big screen. I think, you know, you can take any kind of sort of symmetry from society from that. But apart from that, I love the colour. I like how it's set up. It's a beautiful piece. what are some of the other pieces that have uh really like speak to you speak to your soul um well i mean one of my favorites is this one here which is um which is a piece done by ed sheeran and i knew that he was doing this this art now the great the great big colorful one that looks like a uh damien hirst jackson pollock yeah so ed's been during the pandemic when he wasn't performing he he he did loads and loads of art and i saw that that he'd done it and i said to him mate if you've got a spare one uh will you drop it in and fuck me he came in the side door one day and said right that's for you so we've put it up and he signed it there it says only guinness in the back room edge here and on the thing yeah this one here the the the liam gallagher one as well has a bit of history behind that one because that is by rob monday and rob monday's a pretty well known artist now and he specializes in holograms and lenticulars and that was taken in 1997 yeah and his studio was in the back garden of the pub that i ran at the time which was the marlborough enrichment and the gallagher brothers came into the pub on the day they were doing the shoot and it was all a bit mad at the time but i actually fell out of contact with rob for 20 odd years how come just well just you know you move on from the pub he became he had family became quite famous for his art did his thing i was always aware that he was there but we hadn't seen each other he walked in the pub like six months ago eight months ago and gone i've got something for you there you go what's the what when and what i find so interesting is how um nothing is truly original everything is is reinvented and i think you had the idea from this place from what was it because the colony colony rooms colony rooms yeah um again i'm so shit with names mate sorry that's right the french guy is is an inspiration for banksy yeah i think i think i think it's worth going back to that because banksy has actually written that everything no there's nothing that i've done that black larat hasn't done before you know so it's almost an admission that you know he was more than an inspiration or back to the beatles as a obviously they think people think they're the most inspirational band of all time there's fucking brilliant podcast by this bloke up in stoke funny enough who goes through rock bands and how they create all the songs yeah and he'll go through um like i don't know any any a pick a beat or song and he'll say this is what they were listening to and he listens back to it like oh my god they are inspired by those three things out of them to get david bowie's got a quote which is the only art i'll ever study is the art i can steal from which i think's sick because it's just whether it's you with I think there's a huge element of truth in that that you take the best I try and take the best of what I've seen elsewhere and amalgamate it into the thing that I'm doing if I see a really good idea I'll nick it of course thank you so much for listening to that espresso I hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and are ready for the day let's be having ya boy and please do subscribe follow the podcast share this espresso on whatsapp if you liked it And also there's a link to our newsletter in the show description.

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