MURRAY'S CABARET CLUB: Discovering Soho's Secret

In London's most salacious and opulent nightclub, you can look but you can't touch... 16-18 Beak Street was once filled with dancing showgirls in glitzy costumes performing to over 100 people a night. Murray's Cabaret Club night after night forged fantasies for deadened aristocrats, served dishes of dreams to Arab businessmen, and provided refuge for hounded celebrities. Founder 'Pops' Murray introduced London to the cabaret floorshow, hiring an army of dancers, musicians and seamstresses to make sure that everything was perfect from the dancers' painted nails and intricate costumes, to the polished wood walls and the gleaming glass stage. However the spell was broken in 1963 when the Profumo Scandal erupted - a love triangle between a Murray's showgirl named Christine Keeler, Britain's Minister of War and a Soviet spy, all at the height of the Cold War. The club opened in the height of the Jazz Age 1913 when Jack May, an American who had worked in New York's nightclubs, founded the club and named it 'Murrays' after a sensationally luxurious restaurant-cum-dancehall on Broadway. Between each floor show number, variety acts of conjurors, comedians, acrobats and the like would perform, but things started shaking up during the war years and into the 1950s when gambling dens and clip joints and strip licensing laws changed Soho nightlife. Superbly well illustrated throughout there is a typical nude tableau vivant, girls backstage in their underwear, glamour poses with feathered headdresses and tiny sequined bikinis, playlists like the Andrews Sisters? Sabre Dance from 1948, a sexy milkwoman full of inuendo, and best of all in our opinion is the extensive catalogue gallery of Ronald Cobb's costume drawings in full colour with Carmen Miranda brightly coloured costumes to semi-clad witches, stocking tops, see-through costumes, suspenders fabulous floaty costumes and more. A fantastical catalogue of design, all in rich colour, hundreds of images. 232pp, 19 x 24.5cm.
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