SKIN DEEP MAGAZINE • 47One of the peculiar things about this studio is that the street it’s on
is barely 40 foot long. It’s more of a passageway than a street. Back
in the eighties, if my memory serves me correctly, almost everything
around here had a XXX sign on it. The Raymond Revue Bar was here.
You could see European porn on a big screen, buy pretty much what-
ever you liked and if you were of a mind, submerge yourself in this
seedy subculture and never look back—and that was in the daytime!
It was like nothing else before or since.
Aside from the sex that Soho is famous for, what really pulled people
like me and Darryl to the area was the music. The Marquee was here.
The 100 Club a stones throw away. Pubs and clubs were you would end
up drinking in the same place as the bands you had come to see. That
was the real draw. The fact it was just so damn beautifully ugly to look
at was a bonus.
“It’s another world here now—and not necessarily in a good way.
They clamped down on licensing way back and the face of it began
to change. When it was small shops, it was fantastic—we could all af-
ford to operate here but when the big guns started to move in and it
turned into multi-million businesses you started to see the people who
couldn’t take the rent increases move out. The same thing happened to
Kings Road and Carnaby Street.”
Which is a totally valid reason to move out—but it’s wasn’t business
that saw Dennis leave this holy place. It was travel:
“I went to Japan for a couple of years to work and when I came back,
I bought a place on Charing Cross Road and opened it as a private
studio. Travelled a little more and when that got too much—as trav-
elling does sometimes—I came back and had a shop on Great Wind-mill Street too, right across the road from the
Windmill Theatre.
“My main focus though was being known
as the man to be tattooed by if you were in
a band. I totally encouraged it. There were
obviously the tourists here as well and all of
the people that lived and worked here butWhEn I wEnT tO JaPaN, iT wAsN’t
jUsT oN a wHiM. I wEnT tHeRe tO
lEaRn aNd wHaT I lEaRnEd, I bRoUgHt
bAcK wItH mE