by Dave Haslam
While the internet is abuzz with debate about venues closing and whether or not things were better back in the day, Chris Burton cracks on, full of excitement about his upcoming event. I’m thinking: this man hosted a gig by the Rolling Stones over fifty years ago; he then ran a venue in Stoke so widely admired that a coach of clubbers from Manchester would travel down every week, and one Saturday back then he took a walk through the streets with the Stylistics. If this man can look forward to his next big night, then anyone can.
Those of us who’ve experienced amazing events reserve our right to be downcast when venues close and have an urge to celebrate them in some way – a blue plaque, a film, a display in a local museum, or online pages of memories – but it’s also worth remembering that buildings come and go, but people make places. Our lives, our towns, our cities have been enriched by resourceful, reckless, entrepreneurial or desperate people who’ve not waited for something to happen, but have made something happen. And those people exist today, too; people who take their culture into their hands and create a space that’s alive with a sense of possibility.
This activity in nightclubs and music venues has similarities with other spaces and places that can create a focus and act as a catalyst: maverick theatre groups like the Theatre Workshop, the ‘head shops’ of the 1960s, basement cafés, boutiques ranging from Bazaar to Kahn & Bell via SEX, and record shops like Good Vibrations in Belfast, Rough Trade in London, Probe in Liverpool, Revolver in Bristol, Black Market in London, Piccadilly Records and Eastern Bloc in Manchester. Or like indoor markets with second-hand stalls, or radical bookshops like Indica in London in the 1960s, and News From Nowhere, which has operated in Liverpool since 1 May 1974.
What we’ve witnessed through this history is what might be called ‘the power of the cell’; how a tiny group of disaffected outsiders can create a sensation, or a movement, or even change the world. We’ve seen how important cultural activity invariably begins small-scale, maybe finding a focus in a grotty bar or a club or some barely selling magazine. And we’ve learned that, yes, the good life is out there somewhere. And that the best club in the world is the one that changes your life.
We’ve discovered how much excitement can be found lurking behind even the most inauspicious door. You don’t have to be in London or Manchester. You don’t need a red carpet or celebrity approval or even much cash. The nearest equivalent I can think of is that enduring idea of the secret garden, the midnight garden – the clock strikes thirteen and through a door a different world appears. That’s the glory of a club or venue. You have a rollercoaster life, feel a little dragged down by the mundane things, spend hours, days, getting ready, and increasingly giddy with expectation. It could be a live band on a Tuesday or a semi-secret rave on a Saturday. You make your way to a venue, turn a corner, join a queue. Getting nearer to the entrance, you hear basslines, and taxis pulling up, and shouts in the street. You reach the front of the queue. Behind that door might be stimulation, intoxication, a cross-dresser, mad dancers, eye contact with your first love, enchantment, liberation, a new life. You just have to be lucky, or know where to look. The door opens, you step inside; you never want to leave.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Unless otherwise stated in the Notes, all direct quotes attributed to Patrick Lilley, David Wright, Maureen Ward, David Peace, Brian Rae, Richard Searling, Jeff Horton, Hyeonje Oh, Noddy Holder, Dave McAleer, CP Lee, Nicky Crewe, Ronnie Barker, Alan Jones, Jayne Casey, Pete Wylie, Andrew Loog Oldham, Chris Burton, Colin Curtis, Greg Wilson, Mike Pickering, Andrew Weatherall, Anthony Donnelly, Sasha, Ed Simons, Norman Jay, James Barton, Richard Boon, Richard H. Kirk, Chris Horkan, Kris Walker, John Keenan, Guy Garvey, Viv Albertine, and John Taylor are from email exchanges or interviews with the author.
Many thanks to three especially wonderful people: Catherine, Jack, and Raili. And to Matthew Hamilton at Aitken Alexander Associates, Kerri Sharp, Hannah Corbett, Dawn Burnett and Lewis Csizmazia at Simon & Schuster, Mike Jones, Andy Miller, Tracey Thorn, Jason Boardman, Elliot Eastwick, Sefton Mottley, Rachel George, Ursula and Philip, Nick Fraser, Tim Burgess, Andy Smith, Ade Dovey, Keith Patterson, Claire Turner, Richard Jones, Nathan McGough, Andrea Csanyi, Erik Rug, Lemn Sissay, John and Marian Haslam, KT Steggles, Guy Haslam, Greg Thorpe, Blacka Acoustics, Factory Records, Everything Everything, Christine Cort, Dave Pichilingi, the Art of Tea, Fuel, Folk, Thyme Out, Volta, and Fig & Sparrow.
SOURCES
Key Texts
Tony Bacon, London Live (Miller Freeman, 1999)
Lloyd Bradley, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital (Serpent’s Tail, 2013)
Robert Elms, The Way We Wore: A Life in Threads (Picador, 2005)
Mick Farren, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette (Jonathan Cape, 2001)
Simon Frith, Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan & Emma Webster (eds), The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950–1967 (Ashgate, 2013)
Sheryl Garratt, Adventures in Wonderland: A Decade of Club Culture (Headline, 1998)
Jonathon Green, All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture (Jonathan Cape, 1998)
Paolo Hewitt, The Soul Stylists: Six Decades of Modernism – From Mods to Casuals (Mainstream, 2000)
Phil Johnson, Straight Outa Bristol (Hodder & Stoughton, 1996)
Dagmar Kift, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Claire Langhamer, Women’s Leisure in England 1920–60 (Manchester University Press, 2000)
Shawn Levy, Ready, Steady, Go! Swinging London & the Invention of Cool (Fourth Estate, 2002)
Barry Miles, London Calling: A Countercultural History of London since 1945 (Atlantic, 2010)
Helen Reddington, The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era (Ashgate, 2007)
Mike Ritson & Stuart Russell, The In Crowd (Bee Cool Publishing, 1999)
Bill Sykes, Sit Down! Listen to This! The Roger Eagle Story (Empire, 2012)
Judith R. Walkowitz, Nights Out: Live in Cosmopolitan London (Yale University Press, 2012)
Recommended Websites
http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/
http://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.co.uk
http://www.djhistory.com/
http://shapersofthe80s.com/
http://www.theskyliner.org/
Dave Haslam archive & news http://www.davehaslam.com
NOTES
Intro
The review of Trevor Allen’s novel describing the Hambone appeared in the Catholic Herald, 12 June 1953.
Liam Gallagher, interviewed in the film Do You Own the Dancefloor?
‘Strait-jacket masculinity’; Patrick Jones on BBC Radio Wales, 25 March 2011.
‘On Saturday evenings, especially, when wages are paid’; Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845: Panther, 1969), p.157.
Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Opposition Books, 1984).
Stephen Tennant’s ‘prancing’ gait is described by Philip Hoare in his book Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (Hamish Hamilton, 1990), p.81.
Chapter One
‘Flood-gates of vice and licentiousness’; discussed in Dagmar Kift, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.85.
The building that housed Evans’s music and supper room was, over a century later, inhabited by Middle Earth, a psychedelic hotspot in the late 1960s.
‘All in various stages of intoxication’; R.J. Broadbent, Annals of the Liverpool Stage (E. Howell, 1908), p.339.
Herr Schalkenbach’s act in the 1870s was remembered to have been ‘vastly impressive’ in The Spectator, 17 February 1900.
Thanks to Grace Dean at the City Varieties for permission to quote from her guided tour.
‘The public houses and gin shops were roaring full’; Angus Bethune Reach, Manchester & the Textile Districts in 1849 (1849; Helmshore Local History Society, 1972), p.61.
‘Portable ecstasies�
�; Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (John Taylor, 1826), p.92.
‘The display was very picturesque and made a great impression’; William E.A. Axon, Annals of Manchester: A Chronological Record from the Earliest Times to the End of 1885 (Heywood, 1886), p.233.
For more on Mother Clap’s (and the Samuel Stevens quote) see Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1830 (Gay Men’s Press, 1992).
Details of the raid on the drag ball at the Temperance Hall in Hulme from the Observer, 26 September 1880, and Manchester Guardian, 1 October 1880.
‘Everyone is drunk. Those who are not singing are sprawling’; Sydney Smith, quoted in The Pub & the People: A Worktown Study (Faber, 2009), p.68.
‘The War Office took steps to have the sketch “barred”’; Kift, p.41.
‘Uninteresting bicycling by riders in curious dress’; J. Ewing Ritchie, Days and Nights in London (Tinsley Brothers, 1880), p.50.
‘It is a curious thing’; J. Ewing Ritchie, p.62.
‘Guessing the number of pins or peas in a glass bottle’; The Era, 29 October 1897.
‘Cried like a child’; Broadbent, p.353.
More on John-Joseph Hillier in Andrew Davies’ The Gangs of Manchester (Milo Books, 2008), and for scuttlers see Dave Haslam, Manchester, England (Fourth Estate, 1999).
‘She prostitutes herself for her own pleasure’; Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopædia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work (Griffin, Bohn, and Co., 1862), p.234.
Brazen-faced women and shaggy-looking Germans are described in Mayhew, p.228.
‘No virtuous woman ever enters this place’; Daniel Kirwan, Palace and Hovel: Or, Phases of London Life (Belnap & Bliss, 1870), p.477.
‘A respectable, well-conducted house, frequented by low prostitutes’; Henry Mayhew, p.228.
Edward Colston was an eighteenth-century Bristol merchant with links to the slave trade. For this reason, Massive Attack have refused to play at the venue.
‘However crowded the room may be, as it was on the opening night, not the least inconvenience is felt from the heat’; The Era, 3 April 1859.
The death of Thomas Bunn was reported in the Proceedings of the Central Criminal Court, 14 December 1863.
Chapter Two
‘The dance halls we played in were dream palaces’; Eddie Harvey, quoted in Paolo Hewitt, The Soul Stylists: Six Decades of Modernism – From Mods to Casuals (Mainstream, 2000), p.25.
‘A masculine woman or a feminine man’; Ethel Mannin’s novel Sounding Brass (Jarrold’s, 1925) p.239.
Lord Rochester warned, ‘Dancing has been known to lead to impurity of thought, desire, and practice.’ See Allison Abra, On With the Dance: Nation, Culture & Popular Dancing in Britain 1918–1945 (dissertation submitted to the University of Michigan, 2009), p.123.
‘Filleted eel about to enter the stewing pot’; The Encore, April 1919.
‘Doing its best to murder music’; The Star, April 1919.
‘Bewildered by the weird discords’; The Star, April 1920.
‘The syncopated frenzy’; J.B. Priestley, The Edwardians (Heinemann, 1970).
‘Light-hearted and forgetful’; In Testament of Youth Vera Brittain writes: ‘Already this was a different world from the one that I had known during four life-long years, a world in which people would be light-hearted and forgetful, in which themselves and their careers and their amusements would blot out political ideals and great national issues. And in that brightly lit, alien world I should have no part’; (Penguin Books, 1933) p.462.
For more on Soho in the era of Freddie Ford and Kate Meyrick see Marek Kohn, Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground (Granta, 1992) and James Morton, Gangland Soho (Piatkus, 2008).
‘An absolute sink of iniquity’; see James Morton, p.50.
The definitive work on the era’s black jazz musicians, including Will Cook and Dan Kildare, is Tim Brooks’ Lost Sounds: Blacks & the Birth of the Recording Industry 1890–1919 (University of Illinois Press, 2004).
The police description of the sandwich shop’s clientele as ‘prostitutes and Continental undesirables’ is quoted in Kohn, p.37.
Letter to Sir John Simon, reported in Kohn, p.32.
The ‘list of abominations’ is quoted in David Fowler, The First Teenagers: The Lifestyle of Young Wage-earners in Interwar Britain (Routledge, 1996), p.106.
‘American peculiarities’; quoted in Jim Godbolt, A History of Jazz in Britain 1919–50 (Quartet, 1984), p.3.
‘The up-to-date dances’; quoted in Abra, p.86.
‘The picking-up place’; the memories of Freda (assumed name), quoted in Claire Langhamer, Women’s Leisure in England 1920–60 (Manchester University Press, 2000), p.117.
‘Preparing for a dance is half the fun to my mind’; quoted in Langhamer, p.65.
One of the characters in Ethel Mannin’s novel Sounding Brass is described thus: ‘Her life swung to the rhythm of the saxophone; her soul was Jazz . . . She was as bright as diamonds, and as hard’, ibid. p.187.
‘Frivolous, scantily-clad’; Manchester Evening News, 5 February 1920. Less than a week later, in the same newspaper, another opinion piece was headlined, ‘Dance Music; has it a degrading tendency?’ and concluded that, yes, on balance, it had (10 February).
‘The majority of men much prefer a girl of modest disposition’; Daily Express, 23 February 1920.
‘Partners are slow in coming forward’; see Abra, p.115.
The story of the Kosmo Club emerged during the trial of the three club officials (reported in the Glasgow Herald, 1 December 1933).
‘A woman’s dancing skills trumped her looks at the dance hall’; see Judith R. Walkowitz, Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (Yale University Press, 2012), p.189.
‘It was positively unsafe’; Phyllis Haylor and Alec Miller, quoted in Abra, p.66.
‘The cultural directors of the nation’; see Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge, Britain By Mass-Observation (Harmondsworth, 1939), p.141.
‘Women for ten shillings a bet walked naked through the rooms’; Mark Benney’s memoir is quoted in Morton, pp.46–7.
Police surveillance at the Running Horse is described in Matt Houlbrook, Queer London (University of Chicago Press, 2006), p.77.
‘The Royal dance hall in North London was known as the “Jewish” hall’; Abra, p.143.
For more on ceilidhs and other forms of female leisure activity, see Langhamer.
‘You knew what kind of reputation’; Philomena Goodman in Women, Sexuality & War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p.135.
‘“Bop”, “re-bop” or “be-bop”’; David Boulton, Jazz in Britain (Jazz Book Club, 1959), p.82.
‘Bebop was like a clarion call’; Laurie Morgan, quoted in Pip Granger, Up West: Voices from the Streets of Post-War London (Corgi, 2009), p.297.
‘Jazz was a serious music’; Humphrey Lyttelton, I Play As I Please (MacGibbon & Kee, 1954), p.122.
Chapter Three
‘Young people – not necessarily jazz fans – began to desert the big dance halls’; Humphrey Lyttelton, Second Chorus (MacGibbon & Kee, 1958), p.56.
‘The 600-strong line that stretched across two blocks’; Caroline Coon in Melody Maker, 2 October 1976.
Don Rendell and Bill Le Sage’s memories are recorded here: www.henrybebop.com/myclub11.htm.
‘The sight of a teenage figure walking the streets’; quoted in Frith et al., The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950–1967 (Ashgate, 2013), p.126.
George Melly, Owning Up (Penguin, 2006).
‘Give the poor cow a chance’; Elaine Delmar, quoted by Lucy O’Brien in Sarah Cooper (ed.), Girls! Girls! Girls! Essays on Women and Music (Cassell, 1995), p.77.
‘To me it was just like being in a movie set’; Bryan Ferry, quoted in Michael Bracewell, Roxy: The Band That Invented an Era (Faber, 2007), p.46.
‘Like a motorcycle gang
without the motorcycles’; Eric Burdon, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: A Memoir (Da Capo Press, 2001), p.38.
‘For the very first time you could see and hear this incredibly powerful music’; Roger Eagle, quoted in Bill Sykes, Sit Down! Listen to This! The Roger Eagle Story (Empire, 2012), p.12.
‘An upstart generation’; Keith Waterhouse, quoted in Robert Sellers, Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down: How One Generation of British Actors Changed the World (Arrow, 2012), p.335.
‘Pubs as old-fashioned’; Adrian Horn, Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture, 1945–60 (Manchester University Press, 2009), p.181.
‘Nobody bothered you’; Wally Whyton, quoted in Tony Bacon, London Live (Miller Freeman, 1999), p.25.
‘No aim, no ambition, no belief’; Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (Penguin, 1957), p.221.
‘The most important agent and promoter based in northern England’; Frith et al., p.191.
‘She single-handedly reinvigorated the idea of modern British fashion’; Shawn Levy, Ready, Steady, Go! Swinging London & the Invention of Cool (Fourth Estate, 2002), p.47.
‘It was just amazing’; Dennis Hopper, quoted in Levy, p.9.
‘Before that all you had was the same clothes your dad wore’; Ian McLagan, quoted in Levy, p.119.
‘Its main ethos was uncommercial music’; Frith et al., p.111.
‘The English can do the twist by moving only one leg’; Bob Dylan, quoted in Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: the Life & Music of Bob Dylan (Penguin, 1987), p.254.
‘I couldn’t find nowhere for a dance’; Duke Vin quote from Gus Berger’s documentary film, Duke Vin & the Birth of Ska (2008).
H.S. Kingdon imposing a colour bar at the Locarno Dance Hall was reported in the Norwood News, 1 November 1929.
For more on record hops, Alan Freed, Jimmy Savile and early pioneering disc jockeys see Dave Haslam, Adventures on the Wheels of Steel (Fourth Estate, 2001).
‘The first full-time rock & roll outfit in the country’; Melody Maker, 13 May 1956.
Chapter Four
‘Danger money’; Jim McCartney, quoted in Bradford E. Loker, History with the Beatles (Dog Ear, 2009), p.45.