1966: A Portrait Of Soho Decadence
Coco LeBree, ever mercurial, spent much of the early 1960s moving through the scene as a golden-haired young man—long blond fringe, frilled shirts, and the keen wit and sharp profile of a fallen Renaissance prince who had flopped into a Topkapi imperial harem of mod fashion. But now and then, without announcement or apology, Coco would reappear on the scene as a striking woman: a smoky-voiced chanteuse with kohl-ringed eyes and a devastating wardrobe of silk, leather, myrrh and myth.
These shifts weren’t costume or drag—they were Coco. Entirely. Fully. The city took each incarnation in stride, particularly when she appeared on the arm of Erik Evol, the band’s aloof and intimidating frontman. Together they became living icons of Soho’s strange spectral glamour: two beings made of eyeliner, feedback, and insinuation, drifting from Ronnie Scott’s to the Colony Room like characters from an epic decadent novel London hadn’t finished writing yet.
The Libertines of Wardour Street:
Coco LeBree and Erik Evol in Psychedelic Exile
From the May 1966 issue of Albion Grotesque, your monthly dispatch of Elegant Collapse and Delirious Grace
They were seen, once again, drifting like velvet ectoplasm through the haunts of Soho’s golden dusk: Erik Evol, whose alabaster pallor, angry cheekbones and unchecked suavity made him a walking sacrament to Dionysus; and Coco LeBree, face like a Pre-Raphaelite martyr, heart like a bomb on a whipchain. The two had emerged from behind the black velvet curtain of The Bag o’ Nails at half four in the morning, trailing a scent of hashish oil, cardamom, and hysteria. Somewhere between John Wilmot and Brion Gysin, they do not so much attend London as seep into its crevices and infect it.
“They’re the New Libertines,” one besotted journalist was heard to mutter into his sherry at the Scotch of St. James, “only with better legs and worse intent.”
Let it be known, then: Erik and Coco are not figures of Swinging London, they are its oozing wound. Their version of libertinism is not about pleasure—it is about collapse as style, a deliberate plunge into the Abyss, an open kiss with Oblivion, utter nihilism clad in Ossie Clark and a Swiss Guard of mascara.
The Trolley Problem in Lace Stockings
— filed by “The Elbowed Ghost,” Albion Grotesque
On Tuesday last, Coco LeBree was heard pontificating in a Chelsea back garden that “morality is a series of low-budget science fiction plots—most of them involving trolleys.”
She wore a blood-orange catsuit and a bandolier of peppermint schnapps, lounging under a Rothko-red parasol as Erik read aloud passages from Les Chants de Maldoror, interrupting only to laugh like a man who’d just escaped the guillotine by the skin of his fangs. At one point, a philosopher from Oxford attempted to discuss trolley-switch ethics with her. Coco merely blew cigarette smoke in his face and said:
“Let the train choose. Perhaps it’s the only one among us who hasn’t lied.”
Later that night, Coco and the odd-duck were spotted at The Colony Room, dancing to a damaged acetate of a TGQ B-side that may or may not have been called “My 10PM Baby Has a 3AM Smile.” Erik was there too, Byron-shirted and reciting Wittgenstein into a reverb tank, but that’s another story.
In the Boudoir of Inversion
— filed by “The Elbowed Ghost,” Albion Grotesque
The Get Quick’s Decadent Duo have been busy this week. Coco is said to be experimenting with a new performance piece titled “The Marquis De Sade’s Winking I,” which involves live pigeons, a hacked Moog synthesizer, and a disquisition on libertine epistemology, delivered while rotating slowly on a motorized Victorian chaise. Erik, meanwhile, has allegedly completed a spoken-word EP recorded entirely during seances, the wax cylinder versions of which were later buried rather than released. He claims only the dead are worthy of his new work, though rumour has it a copy was slipped to S. True Smith at a party hosted inside the Tate’s closed-off catacombs.
Fashion Notes from the Unhinged
— filed by “The Elbowed Ghost,” Albion Grotesque
Their wardrobe is a dialectic between glamour and decay. Coco favors faded Regency corsets bleached by fog and petticoats stiff with candle wax. Erik has abandoned shirts entirely, opting instead for elaborate neck ruffs made from shredded sheet music and bits of mirror. Their look is post-moralist baroque, all epaulets and eyeliner, like if Alfred Jarry had been raised in a collapsed monastery in Andalusia by a sect of Situationists with shattered eye glasses.
A Religion Without God, Just Good Shoes
— filed by “The Elbowed Ghost,” Albion Grotesque
To follow Erik and Coco is to believe in nothing—but to believe in it aesthetically. Their nights are rituals, their gestures sacraments of subtraction. They quote Sade not because he’s transgressive but because he’s fabulously hilarious. They quote Crowley because he sounds like he smells of cold soup and rotting cabbage, which they like.
“Life,” says Coco, “is not a moral argument. It’s a costume ball in a burning building.”
Erik, overheard later outside the UFO Club, explained his view on life thus: “I know the world is insane, because I’m a mistake that it keeps making.”
They do not care what is permissible. They care what is luminous. And sometimes, that which blinds also illuminates.
The London Mercury
Issue No. 824 — June 3rd, 1966
“SICK-SCENE”
SWEETHEARTS RUN RAMPANT IN SOHO DEBAUCHERY RACKET
—by Basil Trentham, Social Affairs Correspondent (Fleet Street Bureau)
LIBERTINE? MORE LIKE LUNACY.
London society is once again under siege from the louche and lacquered darlings of the so-called “psychedelic underground”—none more flagrant than Erik Evol, alleged frontman of degenerate noise ensemble The Get Quick, and his companion in vice, Miss Coco LeBree, whose wardrobe is said to be “a cross between a Victorian séance and a crash on the M4.”
The pair were last seen cavorting through Soho’s twilight district with a ragtag entourage of continental nihilists, barefoot guitarists, and one disturbingly large and tattooed clergyman. Eyewitnesses claim the party began at The Mandrake Den (formerly a piano bar, now a “ritual space”) and ended in the alley behind The Dogstar with LeBree attempting to barter a Fabergé lighter for a street performer’s accordion.
“He [Erik] was reciting Rimbaud backwards through a bullhorn,” said one shaken grocer, “while the young lady [Coco] tried to convince a constable that ‘law is merely a suggestion if you have good hair.’”
WHAT IS “THE GET QUICK”? AND SHOULD THEY BE STOPPED?
Evol and LeBree’s “musical” band, The Get Quick, is rapidly gaining infamy for performances that some say resemble “an exorcism at a telephone exchange.” Their most recent show at the Holloway Palais was halted mid-song when a live raven was released into the auditorium and the stage caught fire—for the second time.
The Daily Mail has already called their music “aural pornography,” while a bishop writing anonymously to The Spectator described Coco LeBree’s onstage presence as “not so much androgynous as androcidal.”
Insiders allege that Evol is currently recording a concept album entirely inaudible to sober listeners, and LeBree is said to be experimenting with “olfactory stage design,” including scented fog and incense allegedly derived from extinct orchids and boot polish.
Beyond all the psychobabble all we know for sure is that the group are intent on cooking up insidiously devious ways to influence our children.
PSYCHONAUTS OR PESTILENCE?
What is clear is that Evol and LeBree, darlings of the Albion Grotesque set, have taken their self-styled “libertinism” to new levels of public spectacle. Recent sightings include:
A mock wedding in Highgate Cemetery, complete with goat-headed bridesmaids and vows whispered in ancient Greek.
A “funeral for meaning,” held at rush hour in Piccadilly Circus, where attendees chanted passages from The Book of Lies and buried a copy of Woman’s Own.
And most shockingly, the now-notorious “Meat Minuet” at the Royal Academy, during which LeBree reportedly danced in a gown made entirely of pork cutlets before passing out into a bowl of absinthe trifle.
MORAL DECLINE IN SILVER BROCADE
Sociologist Dr. Lionel Quennell warns that Erik Evol and Coco LeBree represent “a rejection of not just morality, but coherence.” Speaking at a symposium on Modern Deviancy, Quennell stated:
“They do not simply challenge tradition. They smother it in rouge, set it alight, and read Baudelaire while it burns.”
But the real question remains: Why are they being allowed to continue? Where are the voices of decency, of restraint, of propriety?
In the words of one elderly clergyman interviewed outside the Marquee Club: “When the youth of today find beauty in skeletons and call it art, we are no longer a nation—we are a nightmare.”
Next Week in The London Mercury:
“DRUGS, DRUMS & DEMONOLOGY: Inside TGQ’s Sound Cult” with exclusive photos of Evol’s “forbidden instrument” and a leaked diagram from BBC Studios titled THE CHART OF UNSOUND.
THE ALTAR IS A MIRROR
A communiqué by Coco LeBree
Published in Velvet Armageddon Zine, June 10th, 1966
Distribution by Hand, Breath, and Will
I have seen your headlines. I have licked the ink from your presses. And tasted your fresh fear and expired aftershave.
You wish to nail me to your Sunday supplement. You will find no flesh there— Only gauze, perfume, and sigils you do not understand.
You ask: What is the meaning? Let me ask: Did a rose ever explain itself to a tax inspector?
Did the aurora borealis apologize to the electric company?
You dress with drab intentions. You mistake repetition for safety. You call us libertines as if it were not a sacred title. You name our laughter blasphemy because it cracks your mirrors up.
But understand this: We are not creatures of sin. We are the children of permission.
We are not burning down morality—we are composting it. We are not godless—we are god-multiplying. We do not break your laws—we walk through them as a vale of fog.
When I danced in the pork gown beneath the chandelier of butcher’s hooks, That was not indecency. That was prayer.
When Erik recited The King in Yellow into a lamp-post for forty-seven minutes, That was not madness. That was electrical translation.
They call our shows obscene. They are not our shows. They are rips in consensus. They are new wombs, opening.
They ask, what do we stand for?
We stand for dancing backwards on the razor’s edge. We stand for devotion without doctrine. We stand for beauty where rot has bloomed. We stand for the terror of being seen clearly in the ultraviolet.
So to you—Basil Treadmill, gutter orator of the stiff-lipped inquisition—
I reply thusly: I will continue to perform in graveyards and galleries. I will continue to wear the moon on my forehead and ash on my lips. I will continue to cast no shadow, even at noon.
I will not be tamed by your column inches. I will not be pinned to the corkboard of your comprehension.
I am not a mere momentary scandal. I am a season.
And my season is your Hell.
And you are late.
—Coco LeBree, Theatre of Smoke, Soho
