Farewell, then, the sticky carpet, stale air, and food of which the original owner used to say, only half-joking, "A thousand flies can't be wrong." On Monday, Ronnie Scott's club, that venerable Soho institution which proudly calls itself the home of British jazz, reopens after the first major re-fit in its 47-year existence.
And about time too. After Scott and his business partner Pete King moved it from Gerrard Street to the Frith Street premises it has occupied since 1965, Ronnie's spent the next three decades obstinately resisting the gradual tidying up of Soho.
For a while, this had a certain funky, atavistic logic, on a par with the way the club largely ignored the revolutions in popular music that threatened to push jazz into the margins.
But after Scott died in 1996, that famous joke of his in which he would refer to the club as "just like home - filthy and full of strangers" didn't seem quite so funny any more. His old business partner Pete King kept it going, but the only memorable shows I've seen there in the past 10 years have been record company showcases. And the food really was terrible.
Now £1 million has been spent by the club's new owner, theatre impresario Sally Greene. This makeover will be scrutinised with as much interest as the one she carried out at the Old Vic after acquiring the theatre in 1998, although on this occasion Greene has delegated a lot of the decision-making.
The person calling the shots round at Frith Street now is the club's manager and booker, Leo Green, son of bandleader Benny.
Green, who says he "never realised there were two nine o'clocks in the day" before he started working on the re-launch last summer, is a former musician who has played in touring bands with Van Morrison, Jerry Lee Lewis and Jeff Beck.
His contacts across the worlds of jazz and R&B landed him a job which entails keeping the musical menu pretty much as it was. "In terms of the music, Ronnie's wasn't broken and we haven't fixed it," he says. Alongside jazz classics such as Billy Cobham and Ramsey Lewis, Green's first month features the Brit soul diva Carleen Anderson and pin-up bassist Kyle "Son of Clint" Eastwood.
British jazz legend Ronnie Scott
For those anoraks who believe that jazz can only be truly appreciated in louche, poorly lit dives, the good news is that the club has retained its trademark brothel-red table lighting. For the rest of us, the opening gig on Monday with the Monty Alexander Trio should spring some pleasant surprises.
Getting in is much easier now that you won't have to fight through a crush of bodies queuing at the bar, which has been sensibly moved from the side next to the entrance to the middle at the back. The carpet upon which oceans of drinks have spilled down the years and on to which the great jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie once threw up has finally been replaced. Air con, comfy seats and a range of - hoorah! - edible snacks promise a hitherto unknown level of comfort.
The upstairs part of the venue, for years a semi-detached irrelevance, has been turned into a DJ bar - jazz only - where patrons can seek refuge from tiresome support acts, and also have a smoke. The entrance fee has, unsurprisingly, gone up: £25 is now as cheap as a night at Ronnie's will get, rising to £45 when superstars Wynton Marsalis and Chick Corea appear in August. But there's no club membership to pay, and we are promised that the price of drinks will remain "reasonable".
The new regime have been careful to preserve one thing: the club's excellent acoustics. This has meant not messing around with the low ceiling, not moving the stage or otherwise altering the layout of the main room. "What musicians love about Ronnie's isn't the tradition of the place, it's the intimacy and clarity of the sound," says Green.
If the relaunched Ronnie's works, then we have Kevin Spacey partly to thank. When Greene went to meet the octogenarian Pete King in 2003 to discuss the sale of the club, she took the artistic director of the Old Vic with her to convince the old man that jazz really was at the top of her agenda. The ploy worked. No other bidders for the club were considered.
Spacey is more than a fan: he harbours serious ambitions as a jazz singer. As well as starring in a movie about Bobby Darin, he got up at Ronnie's one night with the Woody Herman Big Band, after which King was heard to mutter, "He's a good boy, he can sing."
The Old Times...
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