So, I..m not sure where to begin with how last night felt to me. There are a lot of feelings that have been pulsing through me since the last note of ..Je Ne Regrette.... and I don..t understand them all yet. I have a lot of gratitude certainly, firstly to the band because I would not have done the show without them. If you were there last night then you know what I..m talking about, the violin sang, the cello roared, the bass boomed and the piano stride drove me through the whole gig, those guys are awesome and I..m constantly learning by interacting with them through this music.

The lights were blinding .. as they should be, but it meant that I couldn..t see everyone very clearly until I watched the recording of the show afterwards and then I realized how close knit the audience was and it was truly humbling to know that pretty much everyone in there was there because of the music. I also did not know until watching the video back that you all gave us a standing ovation. Thank you. Some of these songs from the Soho album were written for Jocasta when I was 19 years old. I remember starting out in the business at that time and being very adamant that it was the songs I wanted to serve and not myself. Of course at that age, it did not take long before there were lots of people who thought I should serve myself which was a shame but inevitably it was the necessary step to be taken so I could start my strange journey (which I..m still on). I really believed in those songs and I took it for granted that they would travel the world even if I would not. I think by 2000 I had forgotten about them entirely as I reached that special status of ..Unwell... So this year when I fell in love with those songs again, it was with great trepidation that I sewed myself in to a new project that would be to serve them again. I..m at ease with whatever home I find for myself but I..m never at ease about music that I..ve tried to find a home for.

Music is regurgitation, I literally fall in love with passages of melody, chord sequences, harmonic devices, starting a phrase with F sharp in the key of C with the right word.
Using a third of someone else..s motif to create a new one that becomes it..s own breed .. and then letting that take you to a bridge and a chorus that you have never heard before but it feels so warm and familiar because you used the germ of a Master to plant the sapling in the first place. That kind of thought process has possessed me since I was 12 and I don..t think there..s any place more beautiful actually .. that is music, to me.

And that..s all before I..ve shared it with anyone. I suppose what I..m getting at is that I..ve spent most of this year retuning my own inner experience of music and it..s really taken a hold of me again, stronger than it ever did and until last night, it was just sort of all in my head with the exception of a few other people. I..m not talking about my music in particular but music in general. You hear all kind of things, ..oh, music..s not what it was etc.. ..People don..t really listen any more blah blah.... and I..ve got to disagree. I have been cynical for years and never thought I..d ever play to more than 20 people ever again but there were 150 people at that gig. There was no TV promotion, no Radio, no Big hairy record company buying in people off the street, there were friends of mine and about 100 people that I have not met before. Myspace? - Some. Family? .. 3. But mainly a lot of people I have come to know over the past 4 months because they got a buzz off the buzz that I was getting from music. I know some people dig the lyrics and that..s cool because it means they are listening, but bringing people out of their homes is a real vibe. I..ve yearned to do that with music since I was a child and it worked for a while in my late teens, then it stopped for a long time and then it worked again last night. I..m not going to let it make me chase it. I guess it happened because I was getting on with what I do so that..s what I..m going to carry on doing. As it is, the next album is all done and ready to go. I don..t think people will warm to it in the same way as Secrets of Soho, in fact I think different people will like the different albums. I might of course be wrong as I was wrong when I said that no one would come to the show last night. A funny thing happened. There is this guy from Belgium who saw me playing over there in 1996 when I was in Jocasta and he..s been looking around to see what I..ve been doing for years and he found out about the show. He was the first person to RSVP for it and he and his wife flew over especially. Now, if you know me then you..ll know that this sort of things gets me all ..Goobly.. and I..m a soppy daft old bugger but .. how beautiful was that? That..s what I mean by grateful, he bloody waited for me. While I went off and ripped myself to pieces with hard chemicals and kamikaze nightcaps for years, some guy I..d never met waited a decade to hear the songs he was waitng for Jocasta to play to him when they did their Album tour (which we never did of course) and that is exactly what happened. Inside Out was the last song on the Jocasta album ..No coincidence.. and is the first song of ..Secrets of Soho... The symmetry of Soho..

It..s very soppy isn..t it? I like it though, there is something spiritually economical about it.

My oldest and best friend ran through a check-list at about 3am after the gig. He went through all the possible things that might have been wrong about the gig that might have bothered me. He knows me like the back of his hand and he..s seen me do gigs for years to tiny audiences, hard audiences, rude ones, so he knew how much it meant to me to finally sing with my ideal band of choice and ideal audience.

We both concluded that it was (and I hate this word) perfect.

Perfection is over-rated and it is never something I have strived to attain either in my life or my work. So we settled on a much more suitable word: ..Complete...

It was a ..complete.. evening and I want to thank everyone who was a part of it. That means everyone that was there and everyone who couldn..t make it too, even the heckler who thought he was heckling me until he realized it was a famous comedian who gave as good as he got..(sorry fella..). You are all Stars.

Thank you all so much, I really hope you had as good a night as I did. Stay in touch..

Love and light

Tim Arnold

The reason I first came to Soho was purely because I was accepted in to St Martins Art School to study fine art. Thats how I ended up living opposite the school on the Charing Cross Road above The Phoenix Theatre. How was Art School? I never went.

As many Soho regulars will tell you: If you dont have a clearly defined purpose when you come to Soho, it will find one for you. I kind of had a purpose. I was in a band (Jocasta), things were going well and Id moved to London. It was obvious, I had to go to art school. But my journey through a career in music was not to be as it was for John Lennon, Ray Davies, Freddie Mercury or any other of my musical heroes who all went to art school.

As a teenager, you do tend to follow the patterns of your chosen role models, but it all stopped when I got to Soho. One day, I was looking for a job in the Evening Standard, whilst sitting in a Sicilian café / restaurant on Great Windmill Street in the middle of the afternoon. I had a pint of Carlsberg and a dish of garlic heavy green olives. It was a bar I had been to before and I remembered the manager. He was a cross between Al Pacino, Humphrey Bogart and Touche Turtle. He constantly ran around his establishment talking to the customers about the time that he owned 13 clubs in Soho. How he was done for fraud but was also equitted. He even had newspaper cuttings about the trial, framed on the wall of the restaurant.

Most of my childhood was spent in Mediterranean bars and clubs in Spain, France and Italy (my mother is a Cabaret singer). So, I felt at home, immediately, in this place. The manager asked me if Id like a job in the kitchen. I was not a trained chef, but cooking is the next thing you learn after walking in my family, so it did not phase me in the slightest. After a quick introduction to the menu, I was the head chef of Café Bar Sicilia on Great Windmill Street off Piccadilly, and I was earning £40 a day.

Suddenly I felt much more Oasis than Blur. I deferred my place at St. Martins for a year and decided to concentrate on my band and earning money. I called my mother (who lives in Spain) to tell her the news, only to be told that Great Windmill Street was the street where she worked in the 1960s and the bar where I was working used to be a Salt Beef bar called Carrols, which is where my mother signed her contract to become a Windmill Girl at the famous Windmill Theatre (recently immortalised in Stephen Frears movie Mrs. Henderson Presents).

Of course I felt it was fated that I should be there and over the course of my time working at the restaurant, I began writing songs about everything I saw.

The restaurant itself was a pizza/pasta joint in the day and at night it turned into an illegal drinking den. That was the time that interested me. I was rehearsing more and more with my band in the daytime, so I changed my shift at the bar to the late shift and started working as a doorman. My job consisted of telling every passer-by that there was a BAR OPEN in my best Sicilian accent. It was a dizzy time but wonderfully inspiring. I met gangsters, pop stars, actors, Lords and Ladies, wheelers, dealers and even a cousin of royalty who was seen doing things he shouldnt have in the kitchen one evening. My funniest memory was rolling out pizza bases for a hungry customer at 3 oclock in the morning whilst two guys sat around me counting out counterfeit money.

It wasnt long before I got a record deal with Sony and I could dedicate all my time to my music, but the time that I worked in Café Bar Silcilia was incredibly inspiring and gave me so much to write about.

The song Inside Out is my personal vision of that twilight time that I lived through every day when I first became a Soho person. I saw tragedy and comedy shaking hands around every corner in those days. I actually saw a member of the gentry form a serious relationship with a homeless streetwalker, bonding over a love of self-medication. We'd often see her getting out of a limo being dropped back to her pitch in the early hours.

I wrote all the lyrics in my flat on the Charing Cross Road, and I wrote the music at Sarm West in Ladbroke Grove where my band and I were recording for the weekend. We were in a studio next door to where George Michael was recording his new album. I spent just as much time hobnobbing with pop stars as I did with homeless people. I still have a lot of friends who have remained on the street from that time, some content and some in despair. Soho is a leveller. Whoever we are, whatever walk of life we come from, we all feel the need to escape, but you find that the people who have survived this area are the ones who have faced the world, faced the changes and adapted with every transformation Soho has undergone. And it keeps transforming, in my mind, for the better.

INSIDE OUT

This is after midnight
Anything can happen
We might fall in love
We could find a doctor to pop the potion
But we just might get ripped off

This is Sloanes and hobos
Helping each other out for a bit of brown
This is you and me
Inside out in the middle of the town
And we don't believe in anything unless anything believes in us
So, the girl on the door gets a lift with a limousine straight back to Kings Cross
Yeah, we get a lift from whatever we find
Yeah, we really work each other up in our prime
And surfing channels is a waste of time
We just get inside out you know
We're just looking out
And waiting for a wave to waste the wreck we're in
What's the worth in worrying at all
There's always someone who knows your pin
Yeah, all you need is love, but I've still got hope
I've still got hope
This is all we've got, so let us not
Forget to say a prayer to whatever substitute you use
That gets you clean out of your head
There's no Great Escape or hidden agenda
You've got to keep moving through the crowds
You've got to face the world or lose
We just get inside out you know

Lyrics printed with the kind permission of the publishers © V2 MUSIC 1999

© TIM ARNOLD 2006

Soho is full of actors. Being brought up in the Theatre, it is part of what makes it feel like home to me but for anybody visiting the area, I would imagine it can be thrilling to spot your favourite star of stage or screen. My first memory of Soho is actually the view from the stage door of the Queens Theatre on Winnett Street. My older brother was acting in Alan Bennetts 40 Years On in 1984, both Paul Eddington and Stephen Fry were in the company and as a nine year old, it was very intoxicating for me to be around such dynamic characters. I did not know it then, but obviously my memory is of looking at St Annes church.

I associate Soho with this good memory and it was also the day I was given my first bike (my brother had bought me a BMX which was waiting for me in his dressing room).

During the mid 90s, I lived above the Phoenix Theatre and became very close to the cast of Blood Brothers who would regularly meet for drinks downstairs in the Phoenix Artist Bar (or Shuttleworths as it was then known). Quite often I would have been doing a gig at The Astoria or The Mean Fiddler (then known as the LA2) and have my after-show parties at the Phoenix. I was not aware of it at the time, but the friends I was making in the theatre became a really strong support network and that became a blessing when my band was dropped from Sony. Even later in 1999 when I was appointed as Master of Music at Shakespeares Globe Theatre, the team spirit of the company of actors was truly magical. Real showbiz people are wonderful like that (this does not include bandwagon presenters or celebrities from Reality TV shows!) Im talking about the sort of people who have honed their craft, the sort of people that you will find throughout Soho in members clubs after the curtains gone down. People who smile through the greasepaint even when its their last night because the directors hired a younger model for the part, or people who get standing ovations every night but still dont forget the thousands of rejections they had before their luck changed. People like that are survivors (me included) and the energy we all have in common is what courses through the veins of this extraordinary area.

When people say that Soho has that certain something, I like to think that the energy of true artists is a part of it.

Actress, the song, is of course about a real person, but I prefer to dedicate it to every young girl that dreams of becoming a great woman. This, of course, could be every female on Wardour Street on a Monday morning but you know what I mean.

If the song isn't on this myspace page, try http://myspace.com/tamusicuk

Actress

Actress, actress.. why did you pull the show?
When you know how much I would have liked to go
With a seaside stare and your New Forest air
My only care is when
I'll be under your arrest again

So, temptress, temptress... play another part
For I've seen this role played too few times apart
I'm no also-ran or flash-pan-fan
I never cared to fake it
And if you keep on breaking hearts like this
You'll make it

It's hard to know where I should go from here
Run me through the script, a walk on would be fine
Thoughts of you to me are just as typical as
Props inside a pantomime

Actress, actress...
One more encore
Don't leave just yet to the sea not yet
The coast will always scan
One day you'll find your perfect leading man
Until then I'll do the best I can

Lyrics printed with the kind permission of the publishers © V2 MUSIC 1999

© TIM ARNOLD 2006