In the early 2000s, a member of the New York dance-punk band Radio 4 was walking upstairs when he realised he’d forgotten the key to his room at London’s Columbia hotel. Rather than walk back down the several flights he’d already climbed, he drunkenly decided to jump all the way down to the reception level. When he regained consciousness, a bemused Courtney Love was staring down at his prone body. As was an irate hotel manager, who swiftly barred the band from staying there for years, before the crumpled musician was scooped up to go and spend a few days in hospital.
It was not easy to get barred from the Columbia hotel, but Radio 4 were not the only ones who managed it. Once, at 6am, members of Oasis decided to throw all the furniture in the bar out of the window, piece by piece. When items landed on the hotel manager’s Mercedes, the band had to scarper before the police arrived. It played such a significant part in Oasis’s story that Noel Gallagher wrote a song in tribute to it, Columbia, based on his escapades there back when he was a roadie for Inspiral Carpets.
“It was rock’n’roll central,” says Inspiral Carpets’ Clint Boon. “The coming and going in the car park was amazing. All these minibuses of bands pulling up. I remember Noel heckling Paul Weller one time.” For working-class kids from Manchester, it was a big deal to be suddenly surrounded by idols. “To see Noddy Holder in the bar was like ... we’ve arrived,” says Boon. “We just stood around him in awe. Noel would have been with us in that gaggle of excited young northerners, and ultimately went on to cover one of Noddy’s songs,” Slade’s Cum on Feel the Noize.
The Columbia – located in leafy west London in Grade II listed Victorian townhouses across from Kensington Gardens – was known for its cheap rooms, flexible bar opening hours in a time well before 24-hour licenses, and its look-the-other-way attitude. It became a go-to spot for musicians in the 1980s when Liverpool outfit the Teardrop Explodes started staying there. “We had some wild parties and mad drug-taking,” says David Balfe, who played keyboards in the band. “The staff seemed quite philosophical about it – I presumed they weren’t getting a lot of business.”
Word quickly spread. “Bands at the time had difficulty finding hotels that were relaxed as to the peculiarities of their behaviour,” says Balfe. “So suddenly everybody was staying there: Soft Cell, ABC, Depeche Mode.” Soft Cell’s Marc Almond practically lived there between 1982 and 1983, and in his autobiography he recalled it as a “bohemian gathering of musicians, bands and hangers-on” and a “who’s-who of the early 80s music scene”. He paints a stand-offish scene in the breakfast room populated by the Human League, Talk Talk and Kajagoogoo. “Every morning we all sat there, trying to be more aloof than one another,” he wrote. “Buttered toast and disdain.”
Unusually, the Columbia outlasted its first flush of fame and continued to be a buzzy place for decades. It was such a magnet for groups that celebrated photographer Mick Rock would hang around looking to discover new bands to shoot. “In the 90s it became the place to descend on, after hours, irrespective of whether we knew anyone actually staying there,” says music publicist Andy Prevezer. “The historical importance of that place should not be overlooked. To this day I go past it and feel an almost irresistible urge to go into the building and misbehave.”
Not everyone has such fond memories though. Miki Berenyi of Lush remembers it as being filled with “tame and boring conversations” and finding the place “a bit dismal”. The Auteurs’ Luke Haines went one further in expressing his dislike of it. On the 1996 song Tombstone he sings “taking out the garbage at the Columbia hotel / We’ll take the fucking building out, Baader Meinhof style.” The Columbia was, Haines says, a “signifier of everything I thought was crap at the time: boring cliched rock’n’roll behaviour, boring rock bands who thought they were the Faces, but who were about to be dropped after their first single on London Records.”
Haines has one fond memory of hanging out with the late Grant McLennan of the Go-Betweens there, but for him it’s largely a place fogged with regret. He says heading there would seem like a good idea in a taxi over, but then you would end up “sitting with some sweating random bass player you had never met before and hoped to never meet again, drinking lager until you both passed out. It was the natural endgame of what went on backstage: getting drunk and taking drugs with people you don’t like and having awkward conversations.” For him, it holds no comparison to other mythologised hotels. “New York had the Chelsea Hotel, which was a dump, but a glamorous dump, where you might run into Jackie Curtis, Jobriath or Alan Vega,” he says. “London had the Columbia where you’d end up stuck in a conversation with a marketing manager from East West records or a session player for Babylon Zoo.”
Nevertheless, the bands and industry people kept coming. Balfe even held his wedding reception there. “It was the only hotel that meant anything to me in London,” he says. Publicist Steve Phillips recalls having to climb a drainpipe to get back in one night after being booted out for something or other, so keen was he for the party to continue.
Despite its reputation – with documented stories of open sex and drug use in public areas – the manager during these wild years refuted it. “If we’re known as the rock’n’roll hotel I don’t know why,” Michael Rose, known for smoking a pipe and wearing a suit at all times, said in a radio documentary. “It’s a family-run hotel. It is a Victorian building and we try as far as possible to leave that Victorian atmosphere in it. We are a conservative family and I don’t think any of us have any interest in pop music whatsoever.”
Clint Boon creases up when I mention this. “I don’t remember any Victorian values,” he laughs.
The party continued well into the new millennium. “It was like a rock’n’roll frat house,” says Karen Ruttner, a music industry veteran who spent the early 2000s staying and partying there, along with the likes of the Strokes, Interpol, Kings of Leon and the Killers. “I was young and wide-eyed and loved the movie Almost Famous and all those old stories of bands hanging out together causing chaos. That was how I dreamed things in the music business would be, so to see it actually unfolding in front of me was like: wow, this stuff actually happens.”
Two of those bands almost came to blows at the Columbia. When Interpol’s black-clad bassist Carlos Dengler poked fun at Kings of Leon for looking like Lynyrd Skynyrd, as they shuffled around smoking weed in their bell bottoms with big moustaches, the band’s drummer Nathan Followill struck back. “We were like, ‘You vampire-looking motherfucker, we will break this bottle and cut you,’” he said in the scene oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom.
The Killers stayed there on their first UK tour, sharing rooms and a bathtub to puke in: they were not used to the levels of excessive drinking that took place at the bar that never closed. “Time seemed to start slowing down when you got through the entrance and eventually it stopped entirely if you stayed long enough,” recalls Conor McNicholas, NME editor at the time. “I remember everyone just slipping endlessly towards an alcohol coma.”
Tastes finally changed in the mid-to-late 2000s and bands began to go elsewhere. Today, the Columbia has had a refurb and while it now happily trades off its storied history, it’s no longer an anything-goes playground for the sleepless and inebriated. Similarly, cultural changes have taken hold: such excessive alcohol and drug consumption has lost its charm for many younger bands. And of course nobody is celebrating how tortured hotel staff had to clean up after entitled people trashing stuff for kicks. But, for some, the Columbia feels like a symbol of a pre-smartphone past. “As a participant in that madness, you were almost invisible,” says Boon.
For Ruttner, it was a chance to peek into a world that she feels has since vanished. “The biggest thing that’s been lost in the age of social media, apart from privacy, is mystique,” she says. “There was a period when musicians had such a curated image that you only knew what they wanted you to know or the music press told you. That’s what made them so exciting, forbidden and sexy. The Columbia was an embodiment of that bygone rock’n’roll era: of icons hanging out together, being messy, and getting into trouble.”
