Their club house was in a tiny yard off D’Arblay Street...

 THE SOHO RIFLEMEN

Est. 1984

I

Their club house was in a tiny yard off D’Arblay Street. They took it over from the recently disbanded facilities team of a local magazine company that had, up until then, used it to either; a) store re-purposed (i.e. stolen) gear from local shops, b) conduct midday card schools or c) conduct drunken midnight manoeuvres with Lilibet from accounts on a rather rotten looking mattress.

The Soho Riflemen were an odd bunch. A disparate group of stylish outsiders, creative collaborators and hard-living innovators. They predated the current bunch of self-obsessed influencers by a good three decades. Soho phone boxes were decorated (daily) with polaroids depicting the latest clothes the Riflemen were wearing. Typewritten poems were left pinned to pub noticeboards and startling new music filtered out from numerous speakers that were seemingly linked (or synchronised) to play the length and breadth of Soho. 

In addition, collection boxes were sent round various West-End pubs every Friday night. In those days, the implication of any collection taken up in a London pub with ‘4 the boys’ on the side was obvious. However, instead of the money wending its way back across the Irish Sea to support the families of those ‘on the blanket’. It found its way to “Riflemen’s Yard”, as it became known. 

By 1987, activity had reached warp speed. Paper aeroplane poems were literally being flung out of the barely open windows of Gt Windmill St knocking shops and from the top deck of tour buses. Cycle couriers were posting them through rogue letterboxes and traffic wardens were placing them on numerous windscreens. 

One such paper aeroplane poem was recently discovered tucked down behind an unopened bottle of Koskenkorva Salmiakki in the back bar of The Finland House (a home from home for left-wing dissident Finns and the latest group of freelance Dadaists plotting the overthrow of international capitalism using photocollage and explicit sexual images). The poem reads as follows:

Transmission will commence in 5,4,3,2,1…

The sun, trapped. Behind glass. A heart, imprisoned. The soul, fired. From a stolen gun. A thousand bullets rain down from heaven. A million tears, fall to earth. A hush descends, across London tonight. The lovers have been rounded up and shipped down river. The Thames, awash with blood…  

Making love is a revolutionary act.

Other activity involved subverting street signs, billboards and other prominent advertisements. Notably, one of the Riflemen offered to look after the sandwich board of the famous Oxford St ‘End of the world is Nigh’ man – Gregory Pinnock. When Mr Pinnock returned after a brief visit to the staff toilet in the Pantheon Marks & Spencer at 173 Oxford Street, he took back the Sandwich Board and carried about his business of reminding the infidels and holidaymakers of the perils of protein. It was only some three hours later, when yet another group of awayday Scallies (down for the Everton v West Ham game) gave him a massive thumbs up did he stop to check his sandwich board again. It read, quite simply:

‘The End of the world is High’

Mr Pinnock never let anyone, even a kindly looking Vicar from Bexhill-on-Sea, get hold of his sandwich board again. However, that didn’t stop the Riflemen from trying! They even went as far as dressing up like a kindly looking Vicar from Bexhill-on-Sea. 

The Riflemen’s musical output was equally inventive and omnipresent. At 6:00am on a bright June morning, a brisk martial tune struck up from a vast array speakers that stretched from Regent St, to Charing X Road and Shaftesbury Avenue to Oxford St. After a triumphal opening, the NEW Soho anthem bellowed out:

Arise, arise, Soho wake & rise. 
True to these sacred streets

we shall remain until death.
People of Soho, free and fearless.
My Drink and Drugs, are my shield, on You I rely.
On You I will build; never leave me,
So that I may remain pious, your servant at all moments,
Dispelling the tyranny that wounds my heart.

Arise, arise, Soho wake & rise!

And then silence returned to the streets. Shopkeepers, discombobulated nightclubbers wending their way home, early rising office workers, blitzed media executives sweating night excesses out and Soho’s slip sliding slew of homeless and dispossessed stared at each other in degrees of bemusement and pride. From that day forth until the First Banishment, the Soho anthem blared out every morning at 6:00am, a veritable call to arms for the People’s Republic of Soho. 

Other musical interruptions included the 24-hour Summer Solstice rave. Even now, gnarled old washed out ex-cycle couriers still talk in wonder of the low almost subterranean throb of tribal drums and super-funky wah-wah guitar that accompanied the ebb & flow of the traffic, that clogged the arteries of the heart of London. 

These aural assaults were not appreciated by everyone by any stretch of the imagination. The resident squares (Ad agency hacks) were forever up in arms about The Riflemen’s activities – not least because it shamed their own turgid creativity and general piss-weak plagiarism. Complaints and representations were made to the much-despised SPF (Soho Police Force). 

The leader of the SPF Commander Serena Perry went on television urging anyone with connections to the Soho Riflemen, to come forward in strictest confidence. She was quoted as saying “The Soho Riflemen are nothing but anarchists and socialists threatening the very fabric of society”. The Riflemen responded with a series of posters directly quoting Commander Perry’s obvious endorsement of their ideology. ‘CMDR Perry speaks the truth’.