A man, a myth, a legend: Gary Fairfull changed London.
Months after he had opened Gary’s Place and on a flight back from a much-needed break in Thailand, Gary Fairfull happened upon a list in Vogue of the ‘50 coolest places in the world’. His home – a gritty rented third-floor flat in an otherwise unloved corner of east London – was at number 27. ‘He said, “Oh no, that’s blown it,”’ remembers Simon Crabbe, a friend and DJ at Gary’s Place. ‘But then he said, “hang on, how many Old Bill actually read Vogue?”’ None, he imagined. ‘Fuck it, I’ll carry on.’
Gary Fairfull, for the uninitiated, was the man who invented Shoreditch. I met Gary somewhere, sometime in the early 90s – very few of us can remember exactly where and when they first met him. He was my friend, and my first business partner. About five foot ten, with naughty eyes and the cheekiest of grins, when he first dropped round to my flat, my girlfriend took me to one side and said, ‘Who is that Greek God?’. Charming, irrepressibly mischievous, almost indomitable: I had never come across someone quite like Gary.
He was an internet entrepreneur before there really was an internet, a hustler and a connector of people. On moving down to London from Glasgow, he attended South London Polytechnic, running the student bar – and also a profitable side-hustle where, having chummed up with the nerdiest boy in the year, he sold exam answers to the students propping up his bar. A classic Gary play.
Out in the world of work, he spotted more opportunities. Hanging around Soho with the ad-men, Gary noticed that none of them had a clue whether their ads had actually been shown in the regional broadcasters they’d been sold to (Granada, Anglia, Grampian, etc). Sensing an opportunity, he rang up assorted Age Concerns around the country with the following proposition: ‘If I provide the Betamax and videos and pay the postage and packing, might some of your “people” do some video recordings?’. The charity staff, eager to get their hands on a Betamax and entertain their oldies, signed up for the scheme. At a stroke, all the adverts screened across the country were duly recorded and returned to Gary, and the ad-men didn’t even have to venture out of Soho to see them – he had essentially built the first national clippings service, and could charge otherwise clueless agencies for admission. At the end of the 80s, Gary sold the business to Robert Maxwell, one of the last deals Big Bob did before ‘falling’ off the Lady Ghislaine. By the age of 26, he was a millionaire, but he wanted more from life.
For 30 years of work and friendship, we tilted at windmills. I was his sidekick, the I to his Withnail, as we tried out bright idea after bright idea. It was in the days before WeWork, so we operated from any pub with a darts board and chalkboard: Gary doing the numbers on the board, me doing the words with pen and napkin and every meeting being concluded with Gary saying, ‘and we haven’t even begun to think about America’.
We had a scheme to bring BT and the BBC together, putting set-top boxes in every household before Rupert Murdoch and Sky could fully reach them. BT would control the medium of television in Britain, the BBC could keep collecting everyone’s license fee under threat of cutting their service for non-payment – BB&T (British Broadcasting & Television) would become the biggest broadcaster in the world, or so we thought.
We were into e-sports before there were e-sports, having a series of meetings in the 90s with increasingly junior members of Nickelodeon during which Gary and I both talked a lot, and on exiting, somewhat perplexed, would say to each other ‘they’re not getting any smarter, are they?’
There was the ‘closer’ meeting when Gary was revealed to be two decimal places out on his projections and immediately riposted: ‘See it as less of a Trojan horse project and more of a Trojan pony.’
All great ideas – pulling them off was another matter. But infected by Gary’s enthusiasm, I would not only put in a call to the head of BT, but expect the fucker to pick up. Perhaps it was business as performance art, with the emphasis being on the Art of the Idea rather than the Art of the Deal. We talked, we dreamed and we laughed and laughed and laughed. If not all the way to the bank.
Inspiration would often strike when deep in his cups, as his fellow Glaswegian, Simon Clarke, remembers. ‘We were hosting a party in our rented flat in Shoreditch one night at the turn of the millennium, and Gary broke out the powder and got out the whisky and, as always, pulled out a napkin and pen. Within a minute he says, “How about we turn this flat into a private member’s club?” Ideas flowing, along with everything else, Gary continued. “And, here’s the kicker, we’ll add on a totally new concept called the Black List, an exclusive club card – piece of piss to get that sponsored by one of the big boys, Clarky.” The next thing I remember is a call from Gary at seven in the morning saying, “Mastercard are in.”’
Shoreditch in 2000 was a semi-abandoned derelict twilight zone and a little bit tasty. A few boozers, a smattering of tech companies, it was looked down upon as Silicon Ditch. Gary lived above the dole office on Cremer Street with a few other pals, some of whom – like ad-man David Dickie – had to make way for his latest grand plan. ‘I went away for a long weekend,’ Dickie remembers, ‘and came back to find my bedroom had been demolished to make way for a 30-foot long bar, so I had to move flat.’
Gary tapped another friend, Russell Sage, to deck out the interior for what would soon be known as Gary’s Place (Sage would go on to re-do The Savoy and The Goring, and later became Gordon Ramsay’s go-to guy for styling restaurant spaces). Along with the long bar that took the place of Dickie’s room, there were also five cubicle loos and just the one bedroom, complete with slightly alarming swing attached to the ceiling. Within a fortnight, it was the hottest place in town – filmmaker Alex Snelling remembers the transformation. ‘It goes from being a 3,000 square foot place with no food and about six people in it, to being this speakeasy with 300 people having the time of their lives every Friday, Saturday and maybe Sunday.’
In order to get in, an Albanian doorman called Peter would check you had a text from Gary to say you could come, before allowing you access to a grimy lift from which, with luck, you would exit on the third floor, only to be greeted by another Albanian who also answered to the name of Peter. Once you arrived, the party would begin and go on… and on… and on.
Gary’s greatest talent was knowing who to invite to a room, and then to be the epicentre of that room all evening long, ensuring no one would want to leave. The longer they stayed, the more money he made. The YBA crowd came to party (Hirst, Turk, Lucas, Emin, the Chapman Brothers); the musos (The Chemical Brothers, Bobby Gillespie, Amy Winehouse); the actors (Law, Knightley, Madonna). Vice used it as their office. After Bez won Celebrity Big Brother he headed straight for Gary’s Place and kept his head down, drinking bourbon and Coke with Gary in the corner… for 48 hours straight.
After only a fortnight, in a fit of what he described as ‘alternative marketing genius’, Fairfull closed Gary’s Place down for a short while to build some mystique; to let it cool off a bit. According to Gary, some local hoodlums decided to take what they considered to be their share of the takings, arriving tooled-up with all manner of weaponry. Gary and his friends were tied up, but even with a gun down his throat, Gary said, he didn’t let on to where the money was.
Gary’s Place was established as legend – the coolest place in town was now his grotty flatshare in the disused edge of the City. And it was all, of course, not entirely legal. ‘We had a couple of busts,’ says Tim Brice, who left the swanky restaurant Kensington Place to manage Gary’s Place. ‘A Polish guy who spoke no English would stall things for us, while we picked up the till and carried it out to the fire escape conveniently placed behind the bar. As far as coppers were concerned, it was basically a Polish guy having a private party – and there is no law against that.’
Before Gary opened his club, Shoreditch was known as ‘Hoxton and Brick Lane’. Before Gary’s Place, there was no reason to go; then the cool people go, then the slightly less cool, until no cool people go… and so it goes. Another reveller and friend, Irvine Welsh, puts it perfectly. ‘Gary was an inspirational force of nature, the Shoreditch pioneer. He enabled us all to the max.’
But Shoreditch was changing; the artists who had rented warehouses for £200 a month were replaced by trustafarians prepared to pay ten times that amount. A transformation that inspired Gary to launch a T-shirt with ‘You Are Here’ over a map of Shoreditch on the front and, on the back, ‘Now Fuck Off Back There’ over a map of Notting Hill.
And there was a natural ceiling to Gary’s Place. Once too many people were in the know, being in the know lost its lustre. No matter. Gary would simply move on to the next place, space and big idea.
He moved into food – an unusual step, I thought at the time, as I’d never seen him eat. But it was indubitably legitimate, and a healthy change of pace. He worked front-of-house at a restaurant called Found, and was also charged with handling the wine. Gary, never any good at French, introduced himself at tables as ‘the Somalian’. It received, astonishingly, a rave review from Fay Maschler in the Evening Standard and a more accurate one, perhaps, in Time Out: ‘The only surprise is that the starters were not served on mirrors.’
He had plans for what was going to be Gary’s Bar, with its magic ingredient: a new form of food which he called ‘stoup’ – soups thickened up to stew consistency, and stews thinned out to soup consistency, then sold at £6 and £10 a bowl. The money fell through, and Gary’s Bar never opened.
The business ideas became ever more grandiose. I’ll list just four:
— The Wowee – a power-bass portable speaker ‘with the potential to create a sound revolution’, which you could attach to a window to reverberate and magnify the noise. That is, until the sticky-back plastic wore off, which it would after about a week.
— The Jompy – a water purifier invented by an Ayr engineer, with which Gary tried to break into the lucrative caravan market.
— Cross-London – a Perspex tube cycle route along the Thames from Putney to Tower Bridge, complete with stops every mile or so and multi-storey car parks turned into cycle parks.
— ‘Craft World’ – ???
And the pitching was relentless. Gary would pitch any time, any place, anywhere, even funerals. Once he approached a woman he didn’t know to ask, ‘Have you any idea of the Wi-Fi code, darling?’ ‘You insensitive bastard,’ replied the grieving widow. ‘Is that lower case?’
Then there were the stunts: the pub crawl for charity where Gary crawled over a kilometre between the pubs in Shoreditch to raise money for the homeless. By the end, he was bowed and bloody-kneed, but still drinking. There was his poetry, most notably The Pope with the Coke. ‘The best poem I’ve ever heard,’ says friend and filmmaker Nick Franco. ‘It’s up there with Howl, Bukowski, Baudelaire. If he has a legacy, it’s that. It summed up everything. It summed up Shoreditch and it summed up Gary.’ He performed it in Glasgow once. ‘I was there,’ says David Dickie. ‘“Tumbleweed” would be a kind description.’
Gary and I kept on pursuing the Art of the Idea in our business partnership. There were summit meetings to review the dozens and dozens of ideas we’d come up with over the decades. Many of them were 20, even 30, years old – surely their time had come.
I remember running into Gary on Bishopsgate – we spotted each other 100 yards away, hugged, and then he carted me off to his latest venture, Arts Club East, a room above a strip bar where he was hosting a David Bowie night. Dressed as Ziggy Stardust, he made a tidy sum that evening, selling counterfeit £20 notes with the Thin White Duke in the Queen’s place. He did, however, have to share the premises with an occasional tango night, something which dimmed his otherwise irrepressible enthusiasm. He’d outline his plans for the future to me while we watched elderly couples gingerly sashay around the room – it was hard not to see it as being symbolic. But, as ever, he rallied and we were soon saying, ‘We haven’t even begun to think about America.’
At the start of his career, Gary was resolutely Thatcherite, befitting a self-made Glaswegian. But as he became increasingly self-unmade, as plans fell through, and as he moved ever-further east, his politics drifted leftward. His messages became a little elegiac. Friends and lovers stuck by Gary, even while things ran aground. As funds, like a stoup stew, became worryingly thin, they would bail him out by putting seed money into the business plans above or simply lending him cash (‘the Tithe of Gary’). ‘The thing is, pal,’ Gary once explained to Dickie, ‘whenever I have a tenner I’m straight in a taxi.’ And the tithes, and the taxis, went on.
The creditors encircled as Gary sought refuge in a riverside flat in Clapton where, says Franco, he built ‘a little farm inside a wardrobe’, and took up kayaking. As Terence Blacker memorably entitled his biography of Willie Donaldson: ‘You cannot live as I have lived and not end up like this’.
An old party pal, now a bigwig at Amazon, offered him one last shot, pulling strings to offer Gary a role as a mentor to the bright young techies now populating Shoreditch. She helped him compile a CV, with the section on Gary’s Place concluding: ‘these weekend events can best be described as salon-like’. But when it came to the day of the interview, Gary ducked it. The confidence man had lost his confidence.
Perhaps any long-odds player eventually comes to the point where the decades of enthusiasm – which sustained his pursuit, and belief, in infinite possibilities – hits the brick wall of hard reality. But where’s the glory in playing the short odds like everyone else? People remember those who tilted at windmills, rather than those who made a tidy profit renting them out.
Two weeks before he died, Gary was still pitching schemes – even at funerals. ‘We were in a cab going to a wake,’ says Alex Snelling, ‘and he’s pitching me a small stake in some CBD farm in Africa: “it’s acres, fields, square miles of it all over Africa and it’s free money, basically, Alex, free money. I can get you in for a small stake.”’
A check-up at the doctors pronounced Gary, now 58, fit as a fiddle, and Gary proceeded to celebrate the news in the typical Gary way. Feeling a pain in his chest after his exhortations, he asked his 25-year-old girlfriend to go fetch him some Rennies for indigestion. When she returned, he was dead. ‘Let’s face it,’ Nick Franco reflects, ‘he went out on a high.’ When his body had been taken to the morgue, Nick persuaded the mortician to let him in, so he could make a death mask of Gary’s face. The end result, to be honest, doesn’t look anything like him – it looks more like Cristiano Ronaldo.
The day before the funeral there was a 12-hour lunch at The French House for Gary’s family and friends. I remember the love and laughter, and the whole pub singing Sunshine on Leith. The funeral in Manor Park, fortunately just before the first lockdown, ‘was mythical,’ says Franco. ‘Even people who didn’t know him had to be there. It was like Princess Diana’s.’
The wake at EartH in Hackney attracted a real rogue’s gallery: friends, chancers and all sorts of characters. The Scottish and Chelsea pals eyeing the Shoreditch crowd with maximal suspicion; the wannabes and crashers claiming to have known Gary forever.
In a sort of memoriam, I reached for a napkin and pen and sketched out a few of our greatest hits. I may even have pitched a few of them at the wake. It is what he would have wanted, and expected.
Then the music began and my son Freddie, who had never played music in public before, stepped forward and led an a cappella version of LCD Soundsystem’s All My Friends. ‘That’s how it starts / We go back to your house…’
