Late Nights and Early Mornings at Ye Olde Axe…

  • Afterhours Sleaze and Dignity-other work-Late Nights and Early Mornings at Ye Old Axe
    File under: Rarities / Demos / Searching for a Soho of the mind.

    While we’re considering bars imbued with a sense of speakeasy-ness…

    One of the places that I kept finding myself returning to (or rather being drawn to) while I was taking photographs for the Afterhours Sleaze and Dignity book was Ye Olde Axe in London’s East End.

    This was a traditional bar, with traditional British bar fittings – quite opulent in fact, ornate and velvet walled, although admittedly in its own particular slightly worn manner.

    Earlier in the evening it was a bar where shall we say gentlemen could enjoy the appearance of gals in various states of deshabille – not in a contemporary playful burlesque manner, more in an overtly prurient / transactional (and possibly curiously traditional for East End / central London) manner.

    Afterhours-Sleaze-and-Dignity-other-work-Late-Nights-and-Early-Mornings-at-Ye-Old-Axe-cropThen at some point in the evening – well, probably heading more towards the morning – there would be a transitional period where such things still occurred but it would become an afterhours bar.

    It would then be filled with a fine mixture of East End hipsters, suavely attired older gents and gals who had been enjoying their own versions of reimagined culture from the past for a fair few years before vintage / retro trends became fashionable / mainstream, a scattering of sharply dressed arty-mod-soul chaps and the like.

    All of whom would be carrying out the time honoured traditions of imbibing, staying out too late and one over the eight, carousing, wooing, staggering and the like while cutting a rug to a soundtrack of classic rock’n’roll, garage punk etc.

    As with The Black Gardenia (see here), it was a world unto itself – something that seemed to be highlighted in the summer / spring months when you would step out from its dimmed fug to find that the night had become day, the sun was now out and things had started to feel surreal.

    The photograph/collage above is from I think the first time I went to Ye Olde Axe.

    It seems to capture or conjure up a mixture of the reckless late night suaveness (and indeed the surrealness) of the place rather well and I’ve stayed rather fond of it (a touch of the Deborah Turbevilles / Sarah Moon to it as well, if I say so myself).

     

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