by Dave Haslam
Within a week or so of Radio Caroline’s debut, the mod movement was in the public eye. The first generation of mods had defined themselves against the trad jazz fans; the new wave of mods were defining themselves against the rockers, and the split developed into outright hostility and occasional violence. At Easter 1964 during the Bank Holiday weekend there were skirmishes between mods and rockers at seaside resorts including Brighton, Hastings and Margate. In May 1964 journalists from the Sunday Mirror went undercover to a few mod clubs in Soho and encountered pill-popping at the Flamingo and La Discotheque, all-night partying, and ‘the drug menace’, which they said was sweeping Soho’s ‘all-night clubs and dives’.
Brighton became a centre of mod activity. Mods danced at the Florida Rooms, which was just a hundred yards from one of their favourite hangouts, the Zodiac coffee bar. Another venue where the mods would hear DJs spinning Tamla Motown (in among music by the Kinks and the Stones) was the Starlight Rooms (under the Montpelier Hotel, on the junction of Sillwood Street and Montpelier Road). Each of the two tribes had their chosen venues. You’d find mods at an all-night coffee bar called the Automat behind the Clock Tower, and rockers at a café near the King & Queen pub on Marlborough Place.
The High Numbers released a single ‘Zoot Suit’ with ‘I’m the Face’ on the flip side in July and a week or so later headlined a gig at the Florida Rooms at what was billed as an ‘All Night Rave’. Meaden was relentless in his pursuit of what he considered to be the ideal demographic, and got the High Numbers a weekly residency at the Scene. However, two entrepreneurs, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, took over the management of the band, paid Pete Meaden off with £500, and the band reverted to calling themselves the Who. They wanted to attract a wider audience – apparently promoters were reporting that on seeing ‘the High Numbers’ on posters some customers were turning up expecting a bingo night.
The mods were locked into a fast-moving consumer culture; you’ll still hear rueful ageing mods talking, half-bragging, about investing in a pair of shoes that cost a week’s wages but were out of fashion the next day. The rockers were traditionalists, rode big British-made bikes, and wore leather jackets, jeans, long leather boots and heavy gloves. The rockers gave jazz and Motown a swerve; their heroes were Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. They didn’t like anything too foreign-sounding. They weren’t interested when some mods started branching out into a bit of Latin, like Cal Tjader or Ray Barretto.
The tabloid interest skewed definitions of mod, and tended to drive the cognoscenti elsewhere; clubs like the Last Chance Saloon prospered by playing rare soul to a more purist crowd. As far as Dave McAleer is concerned, this process of becoming conspicuous killed off modism: ‘Mod was only interesting for me when it was something the man-on-the-street wasn’t interested in and never heard of. By the time the mods and rockers began fighting on the beach it was all over, and it wasn’t the real thing any more.’
Another point of difference among the many thousands of young kids who called themselves mods was their appreciation, or otherwise, of the Who. In some ways, the band created a third wave of mods, those who crushed into the Florida Rooms in Brighton to see them play (they played a series of gigs there in the run-up to Christmas 1964), for example, and those who were turned on to them during their amazing, career-changing residency at the Marquee.
In 1964 the Marquee still had a reputation predominantly as a jazz club, although it had moved through the trends and the times, presenting skiffle and then rhythm & blues. Harold Pendleton had booked Muddy Waters and in 1962 instituted rhythm & blues nights on a Thursday when Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated had a residency. Late in 1963, however, Pendleton was given six months’ notice to quit by the owners of the Academy Cinema, who had plans to turn his basement into a second cinema auditorium. Defying rumours of permanent closure, the Marquee moved to 90 Wardour Street in 1964, into a building that had previously been a Burberry warehouse. The Yardbirds had just started a residency at the venue and continued in the new premises (they recorded a show there that was later released as Five Live Yardbirds, their debut album). The stage was painted with red and white stripes, although the club was generally so dark some of the customers and even some bands never got much of a handle on the decor.
The Who had taken inspiration from the Scene, but with a change of management came a change of plan. The band withdrew from Wednesdays at the Scene and secured Tuesdays at the Marquee, from 24 November. They were booked for sixteen consecutive weeks, though seven extra were later added as the residency proved to be so successful. Tuesday was not the most auspicious night of the week but the Who took full advantage of the opportunity, notably by pushing the way live music was presented to a new level, including the marketing of the gigs. The band’s management arranged for over a thousand fly-posters to be displayed all over London, designed by Brian Pike, picturing Townshend and making use of the slogan ‘Maximum R&B’, dreamed up by Kit Lambert. The band’s name became a striking logo; there was an arrow pointing upwards from the ‘o’ in the Who’s name. No one had hit the market with such a strong image before. The clever, artistic posters stood out in an era when most of those for other bands and venues looked no different to old variety or wrestling posters, just standard block typefaces.
Those weekly gigs at the Marquee through the winter are remembered fondly by Pete Townshend in his autobiography Who I Am. ‘I remember wearing a chamois jacket, carrying a Rickenbacker guitar, coming up from the bowels of the earth at Piccadilly Circus train station feeling as though there was nothing else I’d rather be doing. I was an r&b musician with a date to play. It was a great adventure, and I was full of ideas.’
With just the poorly received High Numbers single to their (other) name, this was a complete relaunch. The Who-loving mods gloried in a band with a strong mod look and a repertoire that included Motown and James Brown covers, stuff they might have heard Guy Stevens play like ‘I Gotta Dance to Keep from Crying’. In addition there was Keith Moon, with a target design on his T-shirt, building up an almighty sweat and stripping off then wringing out his shirt before kicking over his drums, plus the outpouring of energy from Daltrey and Townshend; The Who had a powerful in-your-face live show.
The Who were building a career on playing at the Marquee and elsewhere in the southeast of England, including at a series of all-night raves at Club Noreik, a bingo hall on Tottenham High Road. They also had a regular gig at the Railway Hotel in Harrow, where gigs were organised by Pete Townshend’s friend Richard Barnes. It was, and remained, a popular mod hangout (in 1968 a young Kevin Rowland saw Geno Washington’s rousing soul group perform there).
The Who’s gigs outside the London area were relatively few. They didn’t appear in Birmingham until 28 March 1965, around the time of the release of ‘I Can’t Explain’, when they played at one of Ma Regan’s venues (it was advertised that they would be at two of her venues, but it’s thought they didn’t show at the Ritz in King’s Heath). Still they looked to embrace imaginative onstage presentation. A few weeks later, at a gig at the College of Art and Technology in Leicester, a local student projected his experimental films onto the group as they played.
Other promoters with access to several venues were giving the Who good gigs at this time, including Freddy Bannister, who ran nights in Bristol, Stourbridge and elsewhere. Their reputation as a great live band reached Paris, where they played at La Locomotive in November 1965, with Roger Vadim, Jane Fonda and Catherine Deneuve in the audience. They also received great support from Ready Steady Go!, including a headline slot on the 1965 Christmas special when they performed ‘My Generation’, which was followed on the show by an all-star Cinderella panto (Eric Burdon was the Fairy Godmother).
Mod schisms remained ongoing and definitions varied, but many resisted anything that wasn’t Otis Redding, Tamla Motown, and 100 per cent authentic black American soul; generally, any support for British bands was limited to the Who and the Small Faces, although some mods went through a Yardbirds phase too. By
1966 nightlife was entering into a rock/soul split. Venues tended to prioritise either but not both. And the popularity of disc-only nights grew in many dance halls, especially once the influence of Tamla Motown blossomed.
We’ve already seen the importance of black American dance music, from ragtime through New Orleans jazz and bebop, to blues and rhythm & blues morphing into rock & roll. The clean, driving upbeat singles released by Motown sounded glorious in clubs but also on radio and juke boxes, and blaring from fairgrounds. Rhythm & blues had a rawness. Motown gave this a bit of a tidy-up and polish, but with added sparkle and glam; it had a wide, cross-gender appeal.
For DJs the Motown sound was perfect. ‘It was just the best dance music,’ Brian Rae says, contrasting it to less hip sounds in the hit parade. ‘Billy J. Kramer and stuff that was in the charts was too thin or it didn’t have a constant dance beat, but with Motown you could keep the dancefloor going. It was the base of all club music.’
In 1965 Chubby Checker released a song called ‘At the Discotheque’. The word had now achieved wider currency. The days of live bands exclusively providing the soundtrack for a night out were over. And not just nights out – daytime sessions were also proliferating. Tiles at 79–89 Oxford Street opened in April 1966. It was a basement discotheque, but it was also much more than that; attached to the club was an arcade of boutiques, a record stall and a beauty parlour.
The German TV show Beat Club filmed and broadcast a session from Tiles in August 1966. Sounds Incorporated, Cliff Bennett and The Rebel Rousers, and the Moody Blues were among the live attractions and resident DJ Clem Dalton also appeared. Clem had started his DJ career in Rochdale, before going to London and taking a job at Tiles. By the end of the year Tiles had become awash with pills, and attracted the close attention of the police.
The venue also attracted the attention of Tom Wolfe, who wrote about the lunchtime sessions there in an essay entitled ‘The Noonday Underground’ in which he describes the gathering of office girls, shop assistants and bank clerks. It would be as busy during the day as the night, sometimes more so. Wolfe writes about the particular aura surrounding Dalton: ‘All these boys want to be DJs and they will do anything for a break,’ he says.
Well before Tiles had opened, Guy Stevens had left the Scene, and he occasionally joined one of the other resident DJs at Tiles, Jeff Dexter, on the decks. Roger Eagle was also in the process of moving on, having already distanced himself from the mod movement. 1965 into 1966 could have been the time when he cashed in, but that’s exactly what put him off the scene – if you heard the record at every club in town, you wouldn’t hear it at the Wheel. Roger also edited the fanzine R&B Scene, which described itself as ‘Britain’s Leading Rhythm and Blues Magazine’ and sold for a shilling. In the April 1965 issue he praised the Esquire Club in Sheffield, saying, ‘Here’s one club where the “mod” influence has not ruined the appreciation of r&b.’ He feared dance fans were becoming too preoccupied with looking right and turning his favourite clubs into clichés.
Terry Thornton had opened the Esquire on 7 October 1962 on the second and third floors of an old flourmill and optical works on Leadmill Road in Sheffield. The venue had no alcohol licence, and daft decor that included a crocodile hanging from the ceiling, a blunderbuss and a skeleton wearing boots. The music policy started out featuring two nights of jazz and two nights of beat groups, and then nights appealing to fans of the twist, and then blues too. The Esquire hosted performances by John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, the Who, the Yardbirds and the Kinks. Thornton was a big fan of local singer Joe Cocker and he persevered, giving him gigs even though Cocker’s drinking habits negatively affected his professionalism. Local guitarist Dave Hawley – Richard Hawley’s father – was also a regular performer (Richard’s grandfather had been a music-hall performer with an act that included playing the violin behind his back while he stood on his head).
A second notable Sheffield venue in this era was the Mojo. After promoting shows at the Black Cat Club at St Aidan’s Church on City Road in Sheffield, and the Beatles’ appearance at the Azena Ballroom (the band’s first appearance in the city), Peter Stringfellow had gone on to book the Rolling Stones at the City Hall in November 1963 (alongside Dave Berry and the Cruisers). With his brother Geoff, Peter Stringfellow opened the Mojo in an old Victorian house on Pitsmoor Road in February 1964. The Mojo positioned itself on the same circuit as the Twisted Wheel, playing host to the likes of the Graham Bond Organisation, the Spencer Davis Group, Steampacket, the Yardbirds, Wilson Pickett and the Who.
In 1965 the Twisted Wheel in Manchester moved from Brazennose Street across town to 6 Whitworth Street. In the manner of clubbing cognoscenti through all eras, many of Roger Eagle’s fans are still adamant that the nights at the original venue were never surpassed, despite the fact that more lives would go on to be changed by the intensity and popularity of the Wheel in its Whitworth Street site, as we’ll see in a later chapter. At its second location the music policy was more narrowly focused on uptempo, rare soul, and attracted audiences from all over the North and even further afield.
Brian Rae would become a DJ at the new site. He’d been working at Lockers, the metal fabricators in Warrington. He also remembers people waiting eight deep all along the platform at Warrington Central station on a Saturday night getting the late trains to Liverpool or Manchester, such was the pull of the nightlife scene in those cities. Merseybeat was the prevailing sound in Liverpool, while in Manchester he’d heard of a small rare soul scene, and someone had told him about a song called ‘Harlem Shuffle’ that was being played by Roger Eagle, along with numbers of a similar quality. He was drawn to Manchester, and his destination was the Twisted Wheel. The first night he went there Solomon Burke was appearing.
Brian Rae had rightly recognised how important the Motown sound would be in filling the nation’s dancefloors. Most people of the generation who were going out to dance halls regularly around 1967 and 1968 – from the Mecca in Basildon to the Locarno in Leeds – will recall that at some point there would be a fight either inside or outside the venue. And you’d always hear ‘Reach Out’ by the Four Tops.
In the 1960s, as well as maintaining, refitting and relaunching established venues, Mecca was actively investing in the construction of brand new dance halls. Coventry Locarno was an ambitious, landmark building – the centrepiece for a city-centre development including a pedestrianised shopping precinct. In the 1960s the landscape of so many of our cities was transformed by high-rise housing, ring roads and shopping centres. New nightclubs were often a major part of these huge projects, including the Bristol Locarno.
Like Coventry, Bristol was one of Britain’s boom towns in the early 1960s. It had old trading traditions, with a centuries-old port that had been as active and lucrative as London’s. The city’s role in the slave trade had been the foundation of its prosperity; one of Bristol’s most famous venues, Colston Hall, was funded by Edward Colston, who had accumulated massive wealth as a slave trader (aware of this connection some Bristol acts, including Massive Attack, refuse to perform there). In the 1960s shipbuilding in the Bristol docks still took place, but there was huge commercial expansion in the aeronautics industry and the city had a key role in developing Concorde.
Bristol Locarno was part of a £2m Mecca project that also included a dozen bars, an ice rink, bowling lanes, a casino, an ABC cinema and a multistorey car park for the convenience of the centre’s visitors. On a good day this could number 5,000 and in the mid-1960s Bristol, basking in the white heat of technology, had plenty of good days.
The opening night on 19 May 1966 was graced with a guest list of Bristol and West Country VIPs including local councillors, business chiefs, the region’s top socialites, the Mecca top brass and Bristol’s Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress. Guests were thrilled by the ceiling illuminated by hundreds of tiny lights, the revolving stage, plastic palm trees and the polished expanse of dancefloor. Slinking their way through the crowds were half a dozen hostesses, i
ncluding winners of the West Country heat of the Miss Great Britain contest in their bikinis. Drinks were served in the swish Le Club bar, and by waistcoated, bowler-hatted barmen in the Victorian bar. In the Bali Hai bar girls sporting Polynesian-style grass skirts distributed chunks of pineapple to the assembled dignitaries.
A formula emerged in the bigger Mecca halls. The young crowds, the students and the big live shows – plus any music the mainstream fans would consider noisy or leftfield – were consigned to midweek nights. One Thursday in July 1966 the Who played at the Bristol Locarno; the week after it was Solomon Burke, followed by Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds. Flyers for the regular Thursday night claimed, ‘It’s all happening’ and promised a ‘dee jay’ every week.
By the middle of 1966, as we will see in the next chapter, we were at the beginning of a new era. Within a year, the Who would leave behind their aggressive power pop, their identification with mods, and write and record freeform, heavy tracks like ‘I Can See for Miles’. Older clubs and venues throughout Britain, especially those with student populations, saw a mini-exodus to ‘found spaces’ like the Roundhouse and demands for new venues, and new kinds of psychedelic and underground music and entertainment (including light shows and ‘happenings’). In Bristol, by the end of 1966, for example, the Bristol Troubadour had opened, which would go on to host the likes of Al Jones, Ian A. Anderson, John Renbourn, Bert Jansch and Al Stewart. The club helped spawn a scene and an alternative folk label, Village Thing. And Pink Floyd made their debut in Bristol at the ‘Chinese R & B Jazz Club’ in March 1967, at what was billed as an ‘Easter Rave’.
In the next chapter we’ll go back to the roots of the underground, the counter-culture. We’ll trace the disparate influences that fed into this – the drugs, the beatniks, Bob Dylan. In his book Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, Mick Farren recounts what happened one Bank Holiday when he and his friends Paul and Beryl were sitting on Brighton seafront watching the mods stream past. Mick’s crew weren’t mods and they hadn’t been rockers since at least 1961. They were a bit unkempt, with long hair, scruffy tight jeans, old army shirts and boots. Farren reckoned the three of them defied categorisation but they were asked to define themselves several times that day. Rockers asked if they were mods, mods asked if they were rockers, and to each and every interrogator Mick Farren replied, ‘No, mate. We’re beatniks’. Pressed for more clarification, he explained to the mods and rockers that he was a Bob Dylan fan. Little did his questioners know that they’d just met an early example of a third species that would one day fill major venues and large festival fields, but they appeared appeased. Farren writes of the ‘strong sense of impending change’ he felt witnessing a Bob Dylan gig in May 1965.