Laidback Radio Scarpe
Since the sun has shone (and even gone again), Mr. Hare Mayfair has been listening to Laidback Radio. Song after song of uninterrupted soulful bliss (and the occasional DOOM), playing the very best in soul, funk and hip-hop, check it out !!
Your faithful correspondent
Your faithful correspondent is now the official Sneaker Correspondent for British Gentlemen's Quarterly, GQ.
Happy Birthday John Deakin
Today is the birthday of photographer John Deakin (1912-1972), namesake of a Mr. Hare classic, the 'Deacon'. Happy Birthday to one of London's most significant photographic documenters !!
John Deakin was famous for his photography centred around Francis Bacon's inner Soho circle at private members club, The Colony Room. His work also stretched out to street photography around Paris and Rome, commissions for Francis Bacon which were later made into paintings and his stints at British Vogue where he was notoriously hired and fired twice by the same editor, Audrey Withers, for losing important camera equipment and 'one too many hangovers.'
A notoriously heavy drinker, he was known to rouse editors into a blustering fury and reduce models to tears. Jazz and blues singer George Melly has ardently expressed him as 'a vicious little drunk of such inventive malice and implacable bitchiness that it’s surprising that he didn’t choke on his own venom. And yet such was his wit, his vitality, his delighted relish in his own self-destruction that we find him irresistible.'
His images totally lacked glamour, but what they lacked in this lustre they possessed in a stark presence of his subject, or as Deakin named them, his 'victims.'
Photography was a talent Deakin wasn't interested in and something that he didn't believe bought in an income, preferring the painting medium. He deemed himself unworthy at the art and after his death in 1972 his prints were retrieved from dustbins and dirty floors from under his bed. Despite his dispassion for his trade, John Deakin produced some of the most iconic portrait images of the twentieth century.
The Late William Turnbull by John Deakin