In the blink of an eye, we've clocked up thirty years!
A better question is why? Well, a couple of years / a few years / several years / many years ..... Okay! Thirty years ago! we did a very similar thing at the same venue, but back then it was titled: my Stag Party!
Salsa Soho AKA Bar Salsa AKA Salsa! is the cornerstone of the UK salsa scene. Like Ronnie Scotts just up the road it's been around for ages and everyone in the London salsa scene knows of it. To some it's the home of their social life. To others it is the living hell of a salsa club diluted with non-dancers and less purist dancers than their personal offinaddo status deserves. Whether alluring or sleazy, a parody of Latino culture or a home from home, Salsa! endures. Buyout after buyout owner after owner it now resides in Stonegate's ‘special portfolio’ of quirky but profitable venues. Profitable because it navigates between bar, restaurant, cafe, dance studio and club seven nights per week. Always vibrant and exciting.
Unlike Ronnie Scotts and it's status within the jazz community, Salsa! has never traded off its Latino heritage. It's always selling itself to the next generation of dancers who've just discovered Latin music and dancing. The closest it has come to being the ‘home of salsa', was after a refurb many years ago when the corridor to the toilets was going to become London’s ‘Salsa Hall of Fame’. The teachers at Salsa!, myself included, were invited to provide a framed picture (at our expense) to hang under a brass plaque announcing ‘Salsa Hall of Fame’. No doubt as internationally famous salseros visited London they too would be inducted. Sadly the plaque was never made and my picture hangs, along with the others on the ‘Corridor to the Toilets.’
Click for a YouTube clip of us dancing
Last Thursday was a special night for Fliss and I. We went out dancing, albeit middle aged style, with cocktails, a meal and mucho vinos!
Where did we go? Salsa!
Yep! That's us 30 years ago at Salsa!
We haven't changed a bit! Honest!
Salsa Soho has been going even longer than our marriage! I'm guessing it was around 1990-1992 that it was converted from a US chain restaurant: Chicago Meatpackers. It wasn't much of a conversion as the mezzanine was kept in place that once had a model railway running around on top of it. The tall and very solid round tables below are today used by the bar, and if you ever have to move them you'll find out just how solid they are! I often joke that some of the chewing gum under the tables have world heritage status! Maybe future archaeologists will prove me right.
I never went to it before it was Bar Salsa but I believe Jorge, who runs the highly successful Sunday night at Salsa Temple used to work there as a waiter! Food blogger Bill King, writes in his blog
“We especially liked Chicago Meatpackers in London’s Charing Cross district, where they had a lot of railroad memorabilia and a model train chugging around the room. We got a kick out of a notice on the menu (aimed at British customers, I assume) advising that good steaks should not be eaten well-done!”
Originally Salsa! was a group of five restaurants. I believe the tiny one in Edinburgh’s GrassMarket is still going but under different ownership. There is also Salsa Temple above Temple tube station by the Thames. Slasa Temple was not quite the expansion of the Salsa! brand people think. At the height of the property boom fueled by dodgy Russian dough, the landlords of the block in which Salsa! resides decided to reclaim the basement venue and convert it into luxury apartments. Stonegate, Salsa!’s operating company, had just brought out the Walkabout Pub group, the largest of which was at Temple. This was rapidly converted into Salsa Temple and all teachers DJ's etc were given the order to move. Just before opening the property market in that sector crashed and Salsa Soho's least was extended leaving two bar Salsa!s hence Salsa Soho and Salsa Temple.
So I'd met this violinist years earlier at a pub in Hampstead where I'd hired out my mini PA system to a band she was playing with. Fling became dates, became a trip around the world, became moving in together in a nineties version of an ageless story.
We went to the Notting Hill Carnival in the summer of 1992 and to avoid the crowds, we slipped down a side street away from the main procession. There was a Latin sound stage pumping out some strange alien music with people dancing a partner dance that clearly wasn't jive or ballroom. Whether it was the music, the dance or the sunshine, I don’t know, but it looked good. I remember reaching down and picking up a flyer. ‘Free one hour class before the dance’. Perfect! I remember thinking an hour would be more than enough to be able to dance all night! We went, enjoyed the class and sat and watched the dancers dance with a far greater appreciation of their skill. We were hooked!
By the time we first went to Salsa! it was in full swing as a Brazilian/ Latin American restaurant. That's why the signage colours are still green and yellow. People forget, or weren't born - which is a fair excuse, that Brazilian dance i.e. Samba and Lambada were arguably more popular than salsa in London in the early nineties; and the combined Latino scene was smaller than the Modern Jive scene, created and led by Ceroc. Ballroom and Latin was in its death throes as venue after venue was converted into Supermarkets (Archway, Muswell Hill) or lap dancing venues (Tottenham Court Road Spearmint Rhinos, Farringdon's EC1 club). Ballroom had yet to be resuscitated by Strictly Come Dancing, which twenty years after its launch is now in its death throes as bullying and harassment claims amount.
The London Salsa scene had gained a foothold in 1987 when Nelson Batista started teaching (he'd forgotten the exact year when I last asked him). He was closely followed by Colombian Xiomara Granados (forgive my spelling). Nelson's original sidekick was none other than Elder Sanchez who by the early nineties set up Salsateca. I once borrowed, and sadly returned, a VHS video of a T.V. documentary clip on salsa featuring Nelson and Elder dancing away. They both looked hilariously young! Oh how I'm eating those words today as I compare myself now to our wedding pictures!
1994 was the start of the golden era for salsa dancing in the UK. At the time there were under eight teachers in London at central London venues. I would drive twelve miles from Stanmore to Euston to meet Fliss for our salsa classes with Salsa Fusion. Parking was a lot easier back then! By the end of 1995 salsa had broken out of central London and into the suburbs and suddenly there were over eighty classes inside the M25! It felt like surfing a tsunami wave spreading out from central London!
Salsa! was was my list. We all had one. A list of venues spanning the week that everyone knew about. Mondays Salsa! with Ramero's night (before he moved to Sound in Leicester Square). Tuesday's Bar Rumba- Shaftesbury Ave, Wednesdays La Finca- Kings Cross, etc.
Ramiro Zapatta ran a competition once a month and we saw Robert Charlamagne and partner in a dance off against Susanna Montero and Chandi. It was awesome and in hindsight significant. Robert, at the time, represented a smooth, fluid, rotational London style that fused Cubanesque moves with Afro Caribbean effortlessness and a lot of Robert's personal funk. It was playful and inspiring. Susanna captivated us with the cheeky aire of a ballet dancer being naughty. Her style became more linear as the LA style influence grew in London. A style she championed at the expense of the original London style.
I first used the term London Style on my website in 1996 but Leon Rose later used it in the late nineties to refer to a soft linear style that had swept across Europe and remains prevalent today. Let’s face it, it's hard to maintain the anger and angst expressed by the underprivileged Los Angeles Latino communities through L.A. style, when you've grown up in some leafy European suburb! I didn't know it then, but Robert and Susanna were playing out the ancient story of the wren, representing the old year, being killed by the robin of the new year. (Yes that's why we have robins on Christmas cards)
Having started teaching in 1995 my first professional association with Bar Salsa! was in 2002 when I set up a monthly get together of salsa teachers called The Salsa Instructors Forum. Its aim was to share good teaching practice and it was useful and successful. I was also venturing out to Europe dancing a solo demo with a mop and office chair (called Catno. as in catalogue number)
Although I'd been a full time salsa teacher since 1997, only now did we have enough income and stability to buy a home. To the young people out there, I know what it's like to spend years working hard but watching the housing market seem ever further away.
My courses still run weekly and my teaching has evolved immeasurably to today's intersection of dance psychology and well-being. The 1-Day courses and its five hour group dynamic, also gave me the chance to develop my comedy skills and I credit my five shows at the Edinburgh Fringe to the many many guinea pigs that were tested on during my salsa intensives. It was also the 1-Day courses that fueled my interest in psychology. The group dynamics and the systems of fun, communication etc, all led me to a point where I trained as a counsellor. It was a retirement plan that I had little intention of using in any significant way until I started seeing clients during training who allowed me into their lives. The retirement plan really paid off when I needed chemotherapy last year and could barely teach dance.
That leads me onto the purpose of this piece. It's an open letter of gratitude to three things that are very special to me:
Bar Salsa! AKA Salsa Soho. A dear friend that has been with me on my journey for over three decades. The kindness of the management team during covid and my cancer journey was of the highest calibre.
To Salsa, that strange alien music and dance that still inspires me.
Above all, to my wife Felicity AKA DJ Felicidad, who has shared and witnessed my journey. Happy anniversary :)
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