by Dave Haslam
By the beginning of 1964 things were beginning to take off for a third great British rock band, the Animals. Not only had they built a strong following in Newcastle but also a growing reputation in London, where they were rated by Alexis Korner and Graham Bond. Like other members of Newcastle’s music incrowd, the Animals frequented the Club A Go Go situated on the top floor in a building on Percy Street in Newcastle city centre, above a café used by Newcastle Corporation bus crews. Open by the end of 1962, the Club A Go Go was originally conceived as part casino, part live venue. It was owned by Mike Jeffery, who owned the Downbeat, and local businessman Ray Grehan, who was a sales manager at a company called Automaticket. When I meet up in Newcastle with Ronnie Barker of the local band the Junco Partners, he recalls the fall and rise of the venues: ‘The Downbeat was on its last legs, and Club A Go Go took over.’
Arriving at the Club A Go Go, when you got up the stairs you had the choice of two rooms. One was the ‘Jazz Lounge’, which was licensed to sell alcohol and where gambling took place (roulette and chemin de fer). The other room was the ‘Young Set’, which was unlicensed and thus the place you’d find the switched-on, well-dressed sixth-formers and other local under-eighteens. The advantage of having two rooms was that bands could be asked to play two sets. On Saturdays the Jazz Lounge was open from 8 p.m. till 4 a.m.
Bryan Ferry had frequented the New Orleans Jazz Club and the Downbeat and soon graduated to the Club A Go Go. He remembers Myer Thomas who managed the club – a ‘Sidney Greenstreet figure, a big, big man in a double-breasted suit’ is how Ferry described him to writer Michael Bracewell. The Club A Go Go attracted hot shots, said Ferry. ‘Some quite hard men used to go there – like gangsters; dressed in mohair suits, with beautiful girls – the best-looking girls in Newcastle, quite tarty. It was really exciting – it felt really “it”.’
In the first months Tony Henderson, who favoured jazz with Latin stylings, was resident in the Jazz Lounge. But within the first year, beat groups were booked, and blues artists like John Lee Hooker and young British rhythm & blues groups like the Graham Bond Organisation. The Animals became the resident attraction, playing sets in both rooms often three or four times a week. When they left for London, the Junco Partners took over as residents, playing for five guineas a night, and later there would be DJs too, including Joe Robertson. Ronnie Barker from the Junco Partners mentions him. ‘He’s a millionaire, very well known on the Newcastle scene. He was said to be a bit of a rogue.’
Weren’t there some court cases, and he ended up living abroad?
‘Aye, let’s call him an “entrepreneur”.’
The DJs would play from the stage, says Ronnie. ‘They’d play a few records, it wasn’t a big stage, so they were pushed over to the side; nothing like a DJ now, star of the bloody show! It was no big deal, it was just between the live music and sometimes a compere would get up and introduce the bands, old Myer might get up, usually there wasn’t a big deal about it, you got up and started.’
Myer Thomas would be around to pay the bands at the end of the night. Cash, always. ‘These places were run ad hoc,’ says Ronnie. ‘I doubt they’d pay much tax or anything, to be honest. Myer had a little office upstairs, on the same level as the club. He’d be sitting in there and he used to be drinking or something and at the end of the night he was incoherent. That’s what I remember as a young guy: old Myer incoherent, counting out the five guineas.’
The standard practice in that era was when an American musician toured they’d have a group of local musicians backing them drawn from the area around each venue, usually the club’s resident band. So a drummer like John Steel, who played in the Animals, would also when the time came play alongside Americans and other jazz stars like Tubby Hayes or Mike Carr, and maybe the next week he’d be backing bluesmen like John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson.
Jazz and blues were the strengths of the Club A Go Go, and the Young Set in particular began to attract a lot of mods. In 1963 there were a number of venues – among them the Scene, the Marquee and Manchester’s Twisted Wheel – which had no alcohol licence but attracted young fans of authentic blues and soul, many of them happy to eschew booze in favour of pills. As we’ve already seen with the Beatles in Hamburg, the mods weren’t the exclusive users of amphetamines – it was widespread. The Young Set, though, didn’t host all-nighters; venues that did tended to attract more pills.
A few weeks after playing alongside Sonny Boy Williamson on New Year’s Eve 1963, the Animals took a decision to move from Newcastle to London, linking up with Giorgio Gomelsky and taking advantage of the industry figures who were championing their music. They’d not long left Newcastle when Don Arden offered them a support slot on a Chuck Berry tour. They took some time out in Newcastle and returned to the Club A Go Go to rehearse the set and refresh it with some new material. They decided to find a number with attitude but something of a counterpoint to the pilled-up energy of a lot of their repertoire; something slower, moodier. On tour, the Animals were getting a great reaction to ‘House of the Rising Sun’. Eric Burdon later said, ‘People were leaving the theatre singing it. We could hear them through the dressing-room window.’
So the Animals went straight down to London and recorded most of an LP, including ‘The House of the Rising Sun’, in about an hour and a half. They tried to capture it as they played it live, with as few takes as possible, not over-polish it, as guitarist Hilton Valentine later recalled. ‘The dynamics of the song was what the Animals used to do when we played – start off with a certain pace, move it up a few notches, really drive it – and then drop it right back down. And then build back to a crescendo at the end. I remember thinking, “This is going to be a Number One record”.’
It’s noticeable that the live experience was the primary experience, and the way the Animals developed and then recorded ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ wasn’t out of the ordinary at that time. In blues, in jazz, in r&b, songs had their life onstage, and the aim of the studio recording was to capture this moment, this live, organic crackle. In later eras the reverse was often true: bands would work for weeks, years even, in the studio, devising and recording the songs, and then go out and tour the album to audiences expecting to hear the songs played as recorded.
The mini boom in rhythm & blues that could be traced back to those nights at Ealing Jazz Club and heard in the work of bands like the Stones, the Yardbirds and the Animals, also had a foothold in Belfast, at a mission for seamen (and before that, a Royal Irish Constabulary police station), which had been transformed into a new rhythm & blues venue called Club Rado – it would become better known as the Maritime Hotel. One of the prime movers behind the founding of Club Rado was Van Morrison, who’d just left a band called the Golden Eagles and was looking to make a fresh start in a new r&b-oriented group, Them. Them became one of the resident bands at the Maritime, all the while developing their sound, working on songs including the future classic ‘Gloria’. The A&R man from Decca Records, Dick Rowe, who passed on the Beatles but signed the Rolling Stones, went to Belfast to see Them at the Maritime and recruited the band to his label.
Although the live scene in Northern Ireland was dominated by showbands – six- or seven-piece bands playing a mix of rock & roll and country & western standards, and cover versions of chart hits – there were also, by the time Them were signed, dozens of r&b and beat groups. There were gigs to be had at the Maritime, as well as other Belfast venues (including Sammy Houston’s Jazz Club on Victoria Street). Nine miles away, in Lisburn, a venue called the Top Hat hosted live shows by the likes of Little Richard, Sandie Shaw, Roy Orbison and Brenda Lee.
There was a boom in the number of groups in Britain in the first years of the 1960s, but there was never enough room for more than a few to break into the big time. Sometimes, despite hard work and several years on the Ma Regan circuit, a break never came. Denny Laine & the Diplomats struggled to get a recording contract, which led to Denny leaving the band. In May 1964 he became t
he guitarist and vocalist of the newly founded Moody Blues. Within a year the group had a Number One hit – a version of the Bessie Banks single ‘Go Now’ – and were signed to Brian Epstein’s management company. They were the first band of that era from the West Midlands to hit the big time.
By the middle of 1965 the young Robert Plant was being seen around the Plaza and elsewhere. He was lead vocalist in various bands, including the Crawling King Snakes. At one of their last appearances at the Plaza Ballroom in Old Hill Plant was approached by John Bonham, drummer in a band called Way of Life. Bonham had some advice for Plant: he announced that his band would benefit from having a drummer like him. It was the first conversation the two had.
Unbeknown to Bonham, though, Robert Plant was about to leave the Crawling King Snakes and join Listen, after another separate encounter at the Old Hill Plaza. A music fan deep into the scene, Plant on occasions would fill in with some DJing there. One Monday night in 1965 he’d been playing ‘Land of a Thousand Dances’ by Cannibal & the Headhunters and various Motown and Stax singles and got talking to Listen, who were the resident Monday night band, the ’N Betweens having moved on. During Listen’s performance that evening, Plant asked if he could come up and sing, and the band’s John Crutchley agreed. The arrangement continued. ‘We started to look forward to Old Hill on a Monday,’ Crutchley later recalled. ‘Robert Plant would jump up and do “Everybody Needs Somebody” and “Smokestack Lightning”.’
Meanwhile Noddy, who had officially left the Mavericks just before Christmas 1965 and then rehearsed with a couple of other bands, was considering an offer to join the ’N Betweens but needed to find a quick way to keep the cash flowing, so he asked his dad if he could borrow his van and began to roadie for Listen. Listen had just decided the young man from the Plaza should join the band and offered a permanent role to Robert Plant (or ‘Planty’ as Holder calls him). Noddy recalls: ‘Planty was on the same circuit as we were, and when I wasn’t gigging I used to roadie for them with my dad’s window-cleaning van.’
As predicted by Hilton Valentine, the Animals scored a global hit with their rearranged cover version of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’. It reached Number One in the American charts in September 1964, around the same time the Rolling Stones had their first Top Ten hit in the States (‘Time Is on My Side’), although both bands were eclipsed by the Beatles, who had six different Number One hits in the USA in 1964. One of the changes ushered in by the Beatles was that they wrote their own songs, and did so, it was generally agreed, to a high standard. William Mann in, of all places, The Times, in 1963 lauded Lennon and McCartney as ‘outstanding English composers’, but what also made a difference was that America was listening to and loving them, and other British bands. We were into the so-called ‘British invasion’. Not Paris, not New York; in 1965 the heart of popular culture was wherever the Beatles or the Stones were.
On 27 September 1965 an episode of the American music show Hullabaloo was broadcast featuring a live performance by the Animals. Near the end of every episode there was a segment of the show with a special set featuring ‘go-go girl’ dancers on podiums. This was too good an opportunity to miss, and the band played an existing song, ‘Club A Go Go’, inspired by their favourite Newcastle nightspot, written by Eric Burdon and released earlier in the year on the B-side of ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’.
‘Club A Go Go’ is addressed to a girl-about-town whom the singer is dating, knowing she’s also in love with the goings-on at the Club A Go Go, where there’s a big shot she’s carrying on with. He doesn’t blame her for hanging out there: it’s a place ‘full of soul, heart and soul’. Sometimes he gives her money for the picture show, but then he thinks she probably spends it at the Club A Go Go. The song namechecks not just the club and not just John Lee Hooker, the Rolling Stones, Jimmy Reed and Sonny Boy Williamson, but Myer Thomas too. There’s a phrase casually thrown in at the beginning of the second verse: ‘You take too much though it’s bound to get you down,’ which over-alert listeners might pick up as a drug reference. When that line was delivered, Eric Burdon, live on Hullabaloo, put his finger up to the side of his nostril with a just-perceptible smirk.
We’ve seen the way that people in Britain have dreamed of music scenes in New York, Paris and Chicago, trying to get a taste of those mythical places in a home-town venue, including Eric Burdon himself at the New Orleans Jazz Club on Melbourne Street. First the Animals had recorded a song about New Orleans and made it their own, and now they were conjuring up a mythology of their own, disseminating a portrait of some thrilling in-crowd hangout in Newcastle upon Tyne that the millions of young Americans watching Hullabaloo could only dream of.
In March 1967 the Jimi Hendrix Experience played at Club A Go Go. The band’s fee for the evening was £250 and there were two shows – an early evening one to the under-eighteens in the Young Set and one after midnight in the Jazz Lounge. Hendrix’s connections with the Go Go are surprisingly strong. In August 1966 the Animals’ bass player Chas Chandler was in New York and was told by music fan and model Linda Keith to check out Jimi Hendrix playing at the Cafe Wha? He was blown away, and brought the singer over to England and became his manager, alongside Club A Go Go owner Mike Jeffery. Chandler – who lasted eighteen months or so before leaving Jeffery as sole manager – later went on to manage and produce Slade.
Noddy and his bandmates benefitted from Chandler’s experiences with the Animals and with Hendrix. ‘He pushed the idea of each of us having a character, a following – he saw the Beatles, and how that worked for them. He’d seen things from a band’s point of view and from the management side.’ A little later Chas Chandler’s connections helped the band get gigs in America. Even when Slade were a chart act in Britain, touring abroad could be just as hard a slog as playing the pub function rooms with the Memphis Cutouts. ‘They couldn’t make head nor tail of us in America, especially when we first went out there,’ says Noddy.
Back in the Black Country, in the last three or four years of the 1960s it was mostly the Motown and soul crowd who were Joe and Mary Regan’s best customers. On 29 January 1966 ‘Little’ Stevie Wonder played at the Old Hill Plaza, and the following years would witness appearances by Edwin Starr, Ben E. King and the Four Tops, as well as the biggest draws on the scene: Geno Washington & the Ram Jam Band. Subsequently you’d have appearances at the Old Hill Plaza by DJ entertainers like Emperor Rosko, or the Black Country equivalent, Barmy Barry (real name Barry Cary), who was a fixture throughout Staffordshire in the late 1960s into the 1970s at venues like Park Hall and the Lafayette (both in Wolverhampton), the Adelphi in West Bromwich, the Old Hill Plaza, and the Golden Torch in Tunstall. This was the era of lads drinking Ansells Mild and Bitter, and the girls Cherry B or Babycham or variations thereof, although some of the wilder women might have the sweet cider and Cherry B combination known as a ‘leg-over’.
The Plaza remained the centre of the social scene in the area into the early 1970s. The venue benefitted from the unshakable local demand for somewhere half decent and local where you could get a drink or two, a dance, and turn some heads. I spoke to Billy Bagnall, a former lad-around-town, now in his sixties, who had one particular memory of his days at the Plaza he wanted to share: ‘My mate’s parents went to Majorca and bought him a jacket, a cream jacket, just a shade darker than cream. With no collar . . . a jacket with no collar. It was too big for him, wasn’t it? So he gave it to me, and I when I walked into the Plaza I felt like a film star. Cream! No one could afford cream.’
In 1972 Ma Regan took the decision to close the Old Hill Plaza as a music venue and turn it into a bingo hall. Plaza Bingo suffered a fire in 1990, and the famous revolving stage was destroyed. Joe died in 2004, and Mary died four years later, aged ninety-four. Plaza Bingo then shut, and the building was bought in 2009 by Ashok Kumar and transformed into a banqueting and party venue. The main room, the Platinum Suite, is a favourite venue for Asian weddings. The Plaza in Handsworth has been refurbished and in p
arts rebuilt and is now a Sikh temple. The Ritz in King’s Heath burned down in March 2013.
Old Hill’s factories, around which communities congregated and thrived, failed to survive into our current era. The local Birmingham Sound Reproducers company benefitted from the demand for amplification equipment and turntables from album buyers and disco fans in the mid-1970s; in their best ever year, 1977, BSR’s factories and tool rooms made parts for an incredible 85 per cent of all the world’s turntables (including those for the best-selling Pioneer PL12D). But global economics began to work against them. The pound strengthened against the dollar in 1978, causing exports to America to slump at a time of increased competition from the Far East, and in 1983 their factory site in Old Hill closed. The ironworks Eliza Tinsley founded back in the mid-nineteenth century has also gone; the site, between Cradley Heath and Old Hill, is now a housing estate built by Barratt Homes.
The early 1980s were no kinder to Liverpool. When I first went there to wander around Mathew Street it was 1981 and Pete Wylie was my guide. He took me to see where the Cavern had been. The original venue closed in 1973, after which construction work on the Merseyrail filled in the cellar. In 1981 the site of the Cavern was a car park, the Beatles were long gone and there was nothing to see.
The version of the Cavern that’s open now was built in 1984 on the car park, occupying some of the same site and using some of the original bricks in a design resembling the original. This second version of the Cavern, which closed for a time from 1989, is now still booking live acts in the back room, and providing memorabilia and more photo opportunities for tourists. On the opposite side of Mathew Street there’s a wall with bricks naming all the bands that played at the Cavern, from Merseybeat acts like the Big Three and the Beatles through to the Dutch group Focus, who were the last group to play in the original building. One of the acts to have played there was Gary Glitter, back when he was known as Paul Raven. In November 2008, as a result of a campaign in the wake of the singer’s conviction for possession of child pornography and his deportation from Cambodia on child sexual abuse charges, the Gary Glitter brick was removed. However, subsequently, a brass plaque was erected adjacent to the brick display explaining that bricks honouring two former Cavern Club performers have been removed. The other missing brick was for another shamed music personality, Jonathan King. It’s a bizarre bit of hocus-pocus, this attempt to edit history in order to present a less problematic version for any squeamish visitor, but the addition of a plaque trying to explain the removal of the bricks only serves to draw attention to the shenanigans.