The Hoxton Chronicle. 046 Cheap Booze is closing.

In 1991, Earl and his partners opened their shop, Cheap Booze, at the corner of Haberdasher Street and Pitfield Street. Cheap Booze has become a local landmark trading beneath its iconic green bottle sign made by the artist Matt Parsons. Earl comments that he would be rich if he had a pound for every photograph taken of that sign. Cheap Booze sells exactly what the name suggests. A mix of wines, beers, spirits, cigarettes and a small selection of sweets and snacks. It has a do-it-yourself feel. ‘Why spend money on the interior?’ Earl asks.‘It will not sell a single extra bottle.’    

Earl has prodigious energy, a broad smile and diverse interests in many enterprises. Somehow, despite the steady routine of the shop opening, he finds time to pursue them all.

He was born and grew up in Hackney and knew Hoxton through friends. He describes his childhood as loosely supervised, allowing him and his band of close friends to roam freely in pursuit of whatever took their interest. Their shared, obsessive passion was music. They pooled scarce resources to buy records and gradually assembled a powerful sound system from a mixture of bought, scrounged and self-assembled scrap materials. While still kids in school, Earl and his friends were already performing gigs around London. The 'Man and Van’ couriers hired to ferry the vast sound system and record collection to venues found it deeply puzzling to be contracted by children for serious late-night moving jobs to obscure locations.

At age 16, Earl’s schooling ended with a final school gig at which he and his close friends unveiled the massive sound system they had created to the amazement of fellow pupils. 

Earl and his close friends were now free from the chore of school to pursue their music passions full-time. However, Earl’s father had alternative plans for his son. He calmly explained to Earl that he was free to do whatever he wished but could no longer stay in the family home without further college study for a commercial trade. Surprised by this stern life lesson, Earl decided to take an apprenticeship as an electrician, reasoning that it might at least be useful in wiring the sound system. His friends were given similar parental injunctions, and each became apprentice electricians. On qualifying, they immediately established Heatwave Electrics, their own independent company. Work poured in, keeping the friends busy as electricians by day and sound system DJs by night. Simultaneously, Earl also established a London League football team called Heatwave FC.  

One day, whilst wiring lights for a grocery store in Leyton High Road, it occurred to the friends that they should open a shop of their own. Based on their observation that ‘everyone drinks’, they quickly hit on the idea of opening an Off Licence in a vacant shop they had noticed in Hoxton. Thirty-four years of Cheap Booze began with this inspiration.

The music side of life gradually became more serious with larger gigs and growing professionalism. They worked to pioneer an entirely new genre of music, blending reggae, ska, pop and rock themes to create what became known as Drum and Base Jungle music. Kevin Ford, a core group member since schooldays, became better known publicly as DJ Hype, recognised as one of the world’s foremost producers and performers of Drum and Base.

Music has taken Earl to almost every continent as a DJ and sound system performer. The trips were frequently long and arduous, with a dozen flights between gig venues taken in as many days, ending with a long-haul return flight to London in time to take up his familiar post behind the counter of Cheap Booze in Hoxton. Travel has become another of Earl’s passions that he is eager to indulge when Cheap Booze closes. The tropical landscape and the calm and peaceful lifestyles of Ghana in Africa and Caribbean Grenada are particular attractions. He may create his future in either or both of these locations.

The closure of Cheap Booze is just one instance of the restless process of urban change in which shops are places of experimentation in the interaction between business supply and public demand. Earl is pessimistic about the future potential of a small shop like Cheap Booze. He sees no way that income from traditional passing trade can hope to cover the costs of high rents and business rates, given the low profit margins arising from supermarkets and online competition.

The internet has also transformed every aspect of the music industry, rendering the music business that Earl developed no longer viable. The remarkable analogue sound system and LP record collection Earl and friends created and assembled now appear like museum exhibits when set against the compact power of modern phones and laptop computers. Paradoxically, these innovations also free Earl to start some new enterprise wherever he chooses. He says, ‘I have never worked for anyone. I am the centre of my business and can operate and prosper anywhere.’

After 34 years, Earl feels it is time for personal reinvention and creating some new original enterprise. Given his outlook, robust energy and enterprise, he will surely prosper.

Hoxton will be a duller place without him and Cheap Booze.

We wish him well.