Free Johnny Cigarini by John Cigarini

An advertising tycoon to be? I wouldn’t have put my money on me! But then again, I’ve never been a betting man…

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    My other sister Christina was by now married to a graphic designer, Gordon Miller. While working at Hobson Bates, I lived with them in their two small attached houses in Colville Place, off Charlotte Street. This made it very convenient to walk to work at Hobson Bates on nearby Gower Street. By 1968, I was living in Chelsea in a flat off the King’s Road, with four young chaps. In total, we were paying twenty-five pounds rent a week. In total! Yes, just five pounds each. I was the lucky one (again) because I had my own room, but it was really more like a large cupboard; the bed took up the entire floor and it had no windows. You would simply open the door and fall onto the bed, something that I hear is still quite common for youngsters in London – living on a budget without any money to put down for a deposit on a double room. I think the going rate is a whopping £600 a month these days, just for a room. I don’t know how they manage it.
    One of my flatmates was Richard Synge, who I had been to school with. He was related to the famous Irish playwright J.M. Synge. Another was a Russian ballet dancer named Micha who was a look-alike for Rudolph Nureyev, and one was Vaughn Ingham, who later became a junkie. John Leaver made up the group. He was into music and introduced me to the sounds of Family, with Roger Chapman, and Sly and the Family Stone. The sixties were almost over and the seventies were coming. I could hear it in the music; there was a change coming, a big change. If the sixties were for me to mark a coming of age, the seventies would be the coming of money. But it wasn’t just me, there was a sense of enterprise in people everywhere – they were tired from all the parties and it seemed people were ready to knuckle down and get to work. Or was it just me?
    John Leaver sold advertising space for a new gig guide and he thought it was going to hit the big time. I remember when the owners Tony Elliott and his girlfriend had come down early from Keele University to start it. It was a fortnightly publication, and every two weeks they would come over to our flat. We would all sit on the carpet folding the single sheet in two, and addressing envelopes to the subscribers. The later-to-become-legendary DJ from the
Old Grey Whistle Test
, Bob Harris, was co-editor, so he would also come to the flat. The name of the publication was
Time Out
magazine. Tony Elliott bought out his, by then, ex-girlfriend very early, and
Time Out
went global. It is now published in sixty different countries. I still smile when I see a copy. I think back to the gang sat on the floor all those years ago.
    In 1969, I bought my own flat. I worked at Hobson Bates with a very nice lady, Carol Adler; she was a copywriter and the daughter of harmonica maestro Larry Adler. She had a small flat at the other end of the King’s Road, in a mansion block called Argyll Mansions, just on the corner of Beaufort Street. She was getting married at the time and moving to a bigger flat in Mayfair, so she sold me the fixtures and fittings to her King’s Road flat for 500 quid. This is how people got cheap leases, paying what was called ‘key money’. Yet again, I got lucky; though on my taxed income there was no way I could ever have afforded £500, my granny had left me that much in her will from the sale of her house. The rent on the flat was cheap, just a tenner a week. Eventually that £500 from Granny escalated on the property ladder to £3 million by 2008. I’m not bragging, I’m just telling you… I’m lucky!
    Somehow or other, Carol and I got hot and steamy the night before her wedding. We both managed to resist the temptation to consummate the marriage with the wrong guy, and I think she was always grateful to me for that. I still have strong memories of my first few days