When the writer Frank Norman was tasked with writing a guidebook to Soho in 1962, things didn’t exactly go as planned. For a start, he hired his best friend Jeffrey Bernard to take the pictures – not only was Bernard a notoriously unreliable drunk, he had never operated a camera before.
The day the pair received their £100 advance, Bernard blew the lot on 10 spins of the roulette wheel. “It was something of a farce … we were drunk for a year,” Bernard later reflected on the making of the book, recalling the time a sozzled Norman rolled up his shirt sleeves in one member’s club and plunged his hand into a tank of piranha fish before mounting the stage to sing Falling in Love With Love.
