by Dave Haslam
The end of Tiles had come about following a meeting of its creditors. During the summer of 1967 various versions of the underground played at the Festival of the Flower Children, an open-air gig at Woburn Abbey, part-hosted by the owners of Tiles. It wasn’t much more than a selection of post-mod groups, including the Alan Price Set and the Jeff Beck Group. Probably the most way-out act was Dantalian’s Chariot, who included Zoot Money and Andy Summers (later of the Police) in their line-up; they performed in white robes, accompanied by a dazzling light show. The Peel fiasco was a sign of the times but it was the financial losses incurred by this mish-mash of a semi-psychedelic weekend that had forced Tiles to close.
Throughout the late 1960s into the 1970s, there were people willing to host anti-commercial events and happenings. On 4 June 1967 there was a ‘be-in’ with Yoko Ono on Hampstead Heath, with a mission, apparently, to share information on how to colour the clouds and find an imaginary snail (Yoko was organised enough to set up a wet-weather plan B – ‘British Museum if it rains’ explained the listing in International Times). Someone called Malcolm Luxury-Yot organised a Sunshine Fair in Sheffield featuring frolicking minstrels, magic and freak-outs.
It wasn’t all sweetness and light shows, however. At UFO’s new Roundhouse base, practical problems surfaced. One night skinheads broke in and created mayhem and on another occasion Miles was robbed of the takings. Mick Farren later recalled the struggles to keep aggro out and protection rackets at bay: ‘The local protection racket gangsters would come round and say, “Nice place you’ve got here. Shame if it got smashed up.” We were just a bunch of hippies and we really didn’t know how to deal with it.’
Police harassment of the long-haired – under the pretext of drug enforcement – became a matter of routine. Middle Earth was busted in March 1968, with police rushing in, herding the boys up against one wall, girls up against the other. Everyone was searched, some people taken away. In his ‘Perfumed Garden’ column, John Peel urged support for Release, an organisation that had been founded the previous year by Caroline Coon and Rufus Harris and given funds from the proceeds of some of the first UFO events. Release set up a phone helpline offering legal advice to people arrested on drug-related charges.
It wasn’t just the underground press spreading the word about long-haired counter-culture; networks were developing via venues, book shops, galleries and, of course, tabloid coverage helped fuel interest. Any time there’s a new scene or an emerging music movement, the bastions of the previous eras suddenly face a battle to stay relevant. A former mod stronghold, the Birdcage in Portsmouth, closed despite a short-lived attempt to rebrand the venue as a hippy hangout called Brave New World. In Cheltenham, the Egg & Bacon milk bar, based above the Burton menswear store and beloved by mods, metamorphosed into the Blue Moon Club, featuring the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Mott the Hoople. In Sheffield, although most of the live acts remained soul-oriented at the Mojo, Peter Stringfellow gave the club’s decor a flower-power makeover. The start of 1967 witnessed a Jimi Hendrix performance, but through the year the transitioning and juggling between the soul roots of the club and the psychedelic scene wasn’t working and Stringfellow was losing interest. By the end of 1967, after some licensing hassles, the club had closed.
Despite the commercial success of Sgt. Pepper and other counter-culture interventions gaining a high public profile, long-hairs remained in a minority through the 1960s, apart from small towns with large university-student populations. Elsewhere the mod look continued to prevail (which meant, at various times, Ben Sherman and Brutus button-down shirts, Levi Sta-Prest or mohair trousers). Chris Burton at the Golden Torch in Tunstall had enjoyed three good years hosting beat groups, but from 1967 his takings took a dive. Only a few progressive rock acts pulled an audience at the venue, and his best nights were those featuring Barmy Barry, the bantering, one-deck, disc-only resident.
In Birmingham, the blues, folk and freak scenes in the area were being nurtured at the likes of the Whiskey on Navigation Street and the Elbow Room in Aston, where Band of Joy (featuring Robert Plant) had played in April 1967 and Fairport Convention and Spooky Tooth in February 1968. Traffic had come together there, jamming, and the Elbow Room DJs, among them Erskine Thomas and Micky Twitch, had built themselves a solid reputation playing blues and early psychedelia.
In Manchester, Roger Eagle hadn’t lost his devotion to John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson, but had found a new passion – Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band’s Safe as Milk album, released in September 1967. Captain Beefheart’s music was harsher than flower power, a kind of fractured blues. Roger incorporated this Beefheart influence into his events at a venue called the Blue Note, where he encouraged a young band of Manchester musicians called Jacko Ogg & the Head People to perform on a regular basis on Tuesday nights. CP Lee was part of the original line-up, as was drummer Bruce Mitchell (Bruce was known to take to the stage in a gorilla suit, and on occasion they’d randomly incorporate bagpipes in the set; their rhythm guitarist was North of England bagpipe champion). CP Lee reckons they were also the first Manchester band to use a light show. Dave Backhouse, wielding glass slides and revolving filters, soon established himself as Manchester’s most in-demand light show operator.
Roger Eagle knew it was time for him to find a new club, a new space that the emerging generation could call their own, somewhere beyond one-offs and house parties and walks in the park, and he found a venue in the back streets of old Manchester at 11 Cromford Court, the former Jigsaw Club (which, in an even earlier era, had been the Manchester Cavern where Dave Lee Travis had been one of the resident DJs). The Magic Village opened on 9 March 1968, with a performance by Jacko Ogg & the Head People. The flyer announcing the opening proclaimed, ‘This is Manchester’s first new scene for five years – Be part of it!’ (Roger was referring back to the opening of the Twisted Wheel in 1963). Dave Backhouse took charge of the light shows. Roger’s first DJ playlist included Dylan, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, the Doors, Captain Beefheart, and the Velvet Underground & Nico. Early bookings included live appearances by Tyrannosaurus Rex, Jethro Tull, John Mayall and Tim Rose.
In an issue of International Times in May 1968, a correspondent called David Stringer sketched out the problems the underground was having building any networks or finding any focus in Manchester. Stringer suspends judgement on the Magic Village but despairs at the sense of imprisonment and inertia in the city: ‘Everybody has been waiting for a mysterious someone else to lay the “golden egg” for them – which is natural in a society where the entertainer-entertained, boss-exploited, ruler-ruled, landlord-tenant relationships etc are taken for granted.’
For Roger a club wasn’t a venue where random live bands played and random audiences gathered. He liked to create a community. The intention was for the Magic Village to be a bit of an arts centre, the kind of initiative David Stringer was hoping for, somewhere poets could perform, and films could be shown. Roger’s movie plans were scuppered when it was realised that the low ceiling meant a projector wouldn’t clear the heads of the audience, but undeterred Roger hired the nearby Houldsworth Hall in June 1968 for a showing of a film about Bob Dylan, Dont Look Back (there’s some footage of Dylan soundchecking at the Free Trade Hall in the finished film).
On Saturday nights, the venue was open from 7 p.m. until 7 or 7.30 in the morning (it was alcohol-free). The Magic Village also went through phases of opening in the afternoons, just to give people somewhere to hang out.
Nicky Crewe was a fifteen-year-old convent schoolgirl who had developed a taste for music ‘that wasn’t mainstream or chart music’ (in her words). She tells me that even before then, she’d found flower power appealing and intriguing. It had led her on a school trip to finding and buying a copy of International Times (‘I absolutely devoured it, feeling a sense of recognition’). Her parents were in the Far East and she was staying with her best friend. They went searching for the Magic Village together: ‘It was just like finding where
I belonged. My parents would have been horrified because it was a dank cellar in a Dickensian-type courtyard.’
The Village was a cellar club, the walls used to run with water and the toilets were hideous. Inside there was a juke box, and Mike Don would set up selling alternative magazines including IT, Gandalf’s Garden, Friends, Oz and local publications like Grass Eye and Moul Express (later rechristened Mole Express); he’d occasionally have to deal with water dripping onto his trestle table.
‘We’d be hanging around [during] the day when other people weren’t and for me it was the coffee bar aspect as much as the music venue aspect,’ says Nicky. ‘There were bands that I saw down there but for me it was hanging around during the day and meeting up with people and it was just amazing.’
You were very aware of how much more than music it was?
‘Yes, it was a lifestyle and I was aware of it even at that age and that was interesting to me and I picked up on that. It was an intense period of time. People were talking about a lot of things, politics not just music, it was just fascinating and there was nobody telling me I shouldn’t be going there or doing that.’
Brian Jackson, a regular attender, once described the Magic Village as a ‘safe refuge for psychedelic people’. Roger Eagle and his team would do their best to help people not get busted, and there would be a sense of solidarity at the club. Freaks could find themselves targeted not just by the police but by members of the public taking against their look; CP Lee remembers ‘navvies’ chasing long-hairs down Market Street. Out touring, bands could also come up against the forces of reaction. The Deviants and Led Zeppelin shared a bill at Exeter Civic Hall in December 1968, which was disrupted by two dozen burly farmhands rioting. Led Zeppelin managed one and a half songs before retreating to the dressing room under a shower of beer glasses.
A safe and more lucrative circuit had developed at university and college unions, where there was a captive audience, more prone to growing their hair than the rest of the population, and with entertainment officers with a looser hold of budgets than most club owners. College gigs were money-spinners even for a middle-league rock band.
Students tended to give artists a warm welcome, but especially after the événements of May 1968 in Paris, student politics took a more hardline turn, and educational establishments became hotbeds of protests and sit-ins. On the college circuit various practices were being called into question by hardliners wary of perpetuating the entertainer-entertained relationship. For example, there was some ideological resistance to bands getting VIP treatment and student agitators of an anti-hierarchical bent were known to storm backstage areas and secure the crates of beer or any other food and drink, and, having liberated the band’s rider, distribute it among the audience.
On Saturday 10 August 1968 in Birmingham the Deviants played the opening weekend at Mothers. Looking to move on from Motown and following their own interests and instincts, the management team at the Carlton Ballroom had decided to radically and permanently alter the booking policy and to rename the club Mothers, with the tagline ‘The home of good sounds’. The club had a capacity in excess of 400, which was about the number that paid in on Sunday 15 September when Tyrannosaurus Rex appeared with DJ and compere support from John Peel. For a while, Peel made fortnightly appearances at Mothers, usually on Fridays. The acts and the public mingled. And Peel would too, exchanging tips on forthcoming bands and releases; on his radio show he’d report back on what had happened on earlier visits.
Going to a club like Mothers wasn’t about taking the easiest option; it was something of an adventure. After it had been open about six months or so, C.J. Stone got a sniff of something happening across town. Then a sixth-former, he went to explore. He didn’t know what to expect or what to wear. The only youth cult that had made serious inroads into wider consciousness was mod, so Stone put on his best suit; a four-buttoned mod suit made for him by his grandfather. His mate Robert Russell sported a two-tone suit of shiny grey. Stone also had on a pair of brogues.
He was exhilarated but confused by what he saw. Lots of hair, beards, hippies, freaks. As he later described in the book Fierce Dancing: Adventures in the Underground, he struggled for a point of reference. ‘No one else had suits on at all. They were in battered jeans with triangular, flowery vents to make them flared, with ragged patches all over them, which hung about the heels sucking up dirt. And some of them were wearing old stripey blazers or duffel coats two sizes too small. And bangles and beads and badges.’
The regular DJ was Erskine Thomas, who’d also been a DJ at a short-lived club called Midnight City (situated under the Moat House in Digbeth) as well as the Elbow Room. For some bands – the blues-influenced, underground progressive rock of the era – the club found and nurtured the perfect audience. Roy Harper played at Mothers half a dozen times between 1968 and 1970. ‘That was the first club outside London that meant anything at all.’
You’d queue down a side alley, walk up the wooden stairs past Lenny the doorman, hear the music Erskine was playing and go into a room with a stage set up at the far end. There were posters on the walls and even the ceiling. Stone and his gaggle of friends became regulars, and he’d attend most Fridays and some Wednesdays.
John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne, a trouble-making youth from Aston, had formed a band with the former guitarist in the Rockin’ Chevrolets, Tony Iommi. Their band, Polka Tulk, was soon renamed Earth. In September 1968 they played ‘Henry’s Blues House’, run by Jim Simpson every Tuesday at the Crown on Station Street in Birmingham (the same venue where the Ian Campbell Folk Group had recorded their live debut album). Earth then became Black Sabbath and performed several times at Mothers. C.J. Stone saw them play there, as well as Soft Machine and Blodwyn Pig. Afterwards he’d have curry and chips from a takeaway and then walk all the way home, which took hours.
As we’ll see in the next chapter, mainstream city-centre nightclubs at the time were beginning to make promises of sophistication and cocktails, but Mothers was a world away. Anyone looking for glitz was sorely disappointed. Head-scratching journalist Maurice Rotheroe – who’d concluded that Mothers was more of a cult than a nightclub – had visited one Sunday. There’s no seating to speak of, he reported, aside from a few chairs in uneven rows near the stage and some tables and chairs near the bar. The audience sit on the floor during many of the shows, or stand. There’s not much dancing to speak of. He spies a snack bar where pies can be bought for two shillings each. After concluding that the pies weren’t the main attraction of Mothers, the journalist doesn’t even attempt to explain the music. ‘The pop-20 is deliberately excluded and the sounds you hear at Mothers are, its devotees claim, way ahead of their time.’
Mothers would also attract people from all over the Midlands, Wales and occasionally from London too, and local musicians would pop in on their nights off; John Bonham lived locally, Robert Plant, Stan Webb, and Ozzy Osbourne would also visit. Mick Farren recalled being invited by John Peel to accompany him from London to Birmingham to see the Who play there. Peel was friendly with Germaine Greer; she often stayed in his spare room in St John’s Wood, when she wasn’t teaching at the University of Warwick or in Manchester (at the time she was presenting a Granada TV show called Nice Time). And she also took a ride up to Mothers with Peel that day in January 1969. They saw the Who at their most magnificent. It was the depths of winter, but a huge crowd packed in under the low ceiling generated an almighty heat; drummer Keith Moon collapsed at the end of ‘Magic Bus’ and was taken backstage and had water poured over his head. Peel dropped off Greer in Warwick and Farren got out of the car there as well, leaving Peel to drive the last hundred miles to London alone, but also marking the beginning of a Farren/Greer affair; they became something of a public couple on the scene.
Pink Floyd were at Mothers on 27 April 1969 when their set was recorded; some of the live material was later included on the Ummagumma album (together with tracks recorded at Manchester College of Commerce – now known as MMU – a w
eek later). By this time the Mothers crew were also promoting gigs outside the venue, as word spread, the scene got bigger and there was enough demand and money around to bring over American acts. In May 1969 they presented the Mothers of Invention at Birmingham Town Hall.
At Mothers itself Black Sabbath had a fortnightly residency on Wednesdays through March and April 1970. They weren’t a big draw, as the door price reflected: 4/- (20p) entrance fee to see Sabbath (the average admission at Mothers was around 15/- (75p). There were plenty of memorable nights – including the occasion the Principal Edwards Magic Theatre gave the audience kazoos and tambourines and led everyone a merry dance down Erdington High Street.
Early in 1970 the Principal Edwards Magic Theatre appeared as part of a bill in Manchester including Country Joe & the Fish and the Liverpool Scene at a gig in Houldsworth Hall promoted by Roger Eagle. Like the team at Mothers, he was branching out of his venue. By the beginning of 1970, Roger Eagle seems to have decided to concentrate on Houldsworth Hall, and the Magic Village tailed off. In the two years that the Village had been operating, the area of Manchester city centre around Cromford Court and nearby New Brown Street had become a small enclave of hippy-ish activity, with boutiques and a ‘head shop’ called On The Eighth Day (purveyor of alternative magazines, joss sticks, crafts, clothing, jewellery, bags and other hippy paraphernalia, which soon moved to Oxford Road and evolved into a vegetarian café). Roger went over to Liverpool and began to promote shows at the Stadium, a boxing arena.