From CBGB to the Roundhouse E-Book

Tim Burrows

• Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007

Beschreibung

Casting his eye widely across the globe, Tim Burrows examines the facts, myths and characters behind such legendary venues as the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, the Astoria in London and the Cloudlands Ballroom in Brisbane. Interviewing the musicians and promoters who were there at the beginning and those still involved today, he paints striking pictures of a variety of popular musical movements including jazz, rock n' roll, reggae, punk and rave. He shows how venues have evolved over the years, some falling by the wayside, some changing with the times and some managing to kep to their original ethos against all the odds. Burrows also looks at contemporary trends in live music - the influence of corporate chains, the huge boom in festivals - and new projects such as the O2 arena, asking how the way we view live music today might evolve in the future.

Leseprobe

Advance praise forFROM CBGB TO THE ROUNDHOUSE: MUSIC VENUES THROUGH THE YEARS

Mick Brown, Daily Telegraph

‘Much more than simply a history of live venues, From CBGB to theRoundhouse offers a vivid, informed and highly engrossing alternative history of rock ’n’ roll, as live as it should be in all its raucous, joyful and exhilarating splendour.’

Stephen Poole, The Guardian

‘One of your correspondent’s most formative experiences was seeing Gaye Bykers on Acid perform at the old Marquee on Charing Cross Road. The club itself, now much missed, was at least as exciting as the band, so Burrows’s idea of writing a history of music venues – from the Grande Ballroom Detroit to the London Astoria – is a promising one. The author is also apparently in a band called Private Trousers, of which one cannot help but approve.’

Sarah Fakray, Dazed and Confused

‘Tim Burrows feels the noise in an intimate exploration of music venues… From the first rumblings of the skiffle boom in Soho coffee bars, through the 70s when the rock dream turned sour, to 80s club culture and the present day closures of venues like the Astoria and CBGB, twenty-five-year-old Tim Burrows’s debut examines the rise and fall of an astonishing number of music venues, comments on the effects of their gentrification and corporatisation; and describes the proliferation of interesting small and semi-legal venues in the UK and America…’

Guy Raphael, Borders, The Bookseller

‘From the pokiest clubs to the mega-festivals, this interesting sideways glance at pop music history looks at the role of the venues in shaping the events. Well worth checking out.’

FROM CBGB TO THE ROUNDHOUSE

Music Venues Through the Years

by Tim Burrows

CONTENTS

Title Page

List of Images

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

PART

Absolute Beginners

Freak Out

Woodstock and the Rise of the Festival

PART

The Rainbow

The Armadillo

High Meets Low at Max’s Kansas City

Bowie at the Rainbow

Eric, Bob and Reggae Clubs

CBGB and New York Punk

UK Punk

The End of the Rainbow

PART

Nightclubbing

The Haçienda and Rave

Closing Down

The O2 Arena: The Shape of Things to Come

New Venues in London and Beyond: What’s In a Name?

Brooklyn and the Nouveau Shebeen

EPILOGUE

NOTES ON THE TEXT

CAST – IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE

Plates

Copyright

LIST OF IMAGES

1. Café Wha, Greenwich Village, New York – Hayley Hatton

2. The Armadillo Follies – courtesy of Margaret Parypa

3. Armadillo staff – courtesy of Margaret Parypa

4. Ticket stubs from gigs in the 70s – courtesy of Peter Chapman

5. The Rainbow in Finsbury Park, London – Hayley Hatton

6. The Rainbow interior – Hayley Hatton

7 The entrance to Club Four Aces in the 80s – photo by David Corrio, courtesy of Winstan Whitter (www.fouraces.com)

8. Legacy In The Dust Montage – Winstan Whitter

9. The sign outside the 100 Club – Tim Burrows

12. Adam Ant at the 100 Club in 1978 – courtesy of Jeremy Gibbs

13. The stage of the 100 Club today – Tim Burrows

14. Son House album John the Revelator – Tim Burrows

15. The John Varvatos boutique, formerly CBGB – Hayley Hatton

16. The crowd outside CBGB in 1987– Andrew Gardner

17. The Haçienda, mob at the door – peterjwalsh.com

18. Dancers on the Haçienda’s main stage – peterjwalsh.com

19. Phebes in Stoke Newington – Hayley Hatton

20. Palace Pavilion in Clapton – Hayley Hatton

21. The Astoria, Charing Cross – Tim Burrows

22. Iron Maiden play Twickenham Stadium 2008 – Hayley Hatton

23. Ticket for the Astoria’s Demolition Ball – Rebecca Gillieron

24. Inside the O2 Arena – Hayley Hatton

25. Leonard Cohen at the 02 Arena – Hayley Hatton

26. The Fucking Ocean at Death By Audio – Hayley Hatton

27. Drunkdriver at the Market Hotel, Brooklyn – Hayley Hatton

28. The bar at the Market Hotel, Brooklyn – Hayley Hatton

29. The Roundhouse in Camden Town – with thanks to Nadia Syed

30. The Roundhouse interior – Barry R. Bulley

31. The Roundhouse from above – BBC Electric Proms

32. Liars at White Heat, Madame JoJo’s – Hayley Hatton

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Mostly I would like to thank Marion Boyars: Catheryn Kilgarriff for asking me in the first place to undertake this project and my editors Rebecca Gillieron and Kit Maude, who have helped me so much, even offering to transcribe many of the interviews. Special thanks also to Joanna Hatton and Sarah Wayman. To Winstan Whitter and Newton Dunbar for their considerable time and effort when helping me with the Four Aces information; good luck with keeping the name alive. To Roger and Jeff Horton for their willingness to chat about the 100 Club, both yesterday and today. To John Morris, who provided me with the link between the Fillmore and the Rainbow. Thanks to Tessa Pollitt and Ari Up of the Slits for being so up for talking. So too C.P. Lee, John Robb, Princess Julia, Vic Godard, Bonnie Carr, Jamie Eastman, Dave Parker, Yvonne Ruskin, Margaret Parypa, Steve and Peter Chapman, John Sinclair, Iain Sinclair, Dennis Bovell, Barry Miles and John Hopkins (and anyone I have left out). Huge appreciation to the New Yorkers who offered assistance: Steve Paul for teaching me about the Scene; Elliot Aronow for the link to Steve, the info on the modern Lower East Side, as well as the use of his sofa; the people at Death By Audio, Dead Herring and the Woodser, also Todd P. for his enlightening conversation and for providing the possibility of a future for grass roots venues: long live the Market Hotel. Thanks to Mick Brown for all his advice. Lastly, undying love and thanks to Hayley Hatton for taking some great pictures, but most importantly putting up with it all.

INTRODUCTION

Growing up, I had a strange relationship with music venues. I probably didn’t even know what they were in fact, but I seemed to spend many a Saturday in one or another, while my dad would set-up and soundcheck with his soul band, South Side – an after-work outfit he formed with other teachers from the school in Basildon where he taught art. My sister and I would entertain each other in places like Club Riga, a venue attached to a pub called The Cricketer’s Inn in Southend, while the band ran through their set ahead of the night’s performance. Club Riga was a small venue, and would not win any prizes for imaginative booking, opting for cover bands and smaller acts, with the odd young indie group mid-week. A few years later at thirteen years old I was on the Riga stage myself, sitting in on drums for the first time at an open jam night. It was my first time on an actual kit – I had been holed up in my bedroom before then, clicking pencils against my wooden desk to records from bands like Radiohead and The Beatles. Perhaps to save the desk, or to halt the irritating tapping coming from my bedroom, I had been brought to the venue by my dad to see if I could hold a beat. I was immediately hooked: playing live was exhilarating.

I soon started attending venues as a fan also. Sitting politely in seats at Southend’s Cliffs Pavilion, watching the Britpop also-rans The Bluetones play in 1995; travelling up to Wembley on a coach to see Pulp play in 1996, trapped in seating high up in the Wembley Arena; watching Blur at the V Festival in 1997, camping with my sister and mum and sneaking in a stubby bottle of weak French lager. Yet the places that really mattered to me were those closer to home. The basement of the Royal Hotel is where I spent many Saturday nights during my late teens. It was a dark venue in the cellar of a down-at-heel Georgian hotel, which held a night called Junkclub. The club took inspiration from the past fifty years of music-related subculture. We were offered a taste of the 1960s psychedelic dungeons such as UFO, the New York-inspired danger of CBGB and the Manchester clubbing Mecca, the Haçienda. Teenage Debbie Harrys flirted with modern-day Gene Vincents, as Southend youth flittered around the dancefloor to a polyrhythmic soundtrack that spanned the decades. Yet out of it came a future of sorts. Friends became DJs and started bands such as These New Puritans and The Horrors.

The Royal Hotel closed down at the start of 2009 due to financial problems. It is a common malady. Venues around the world have been falling victim to the current financial climate. The Point in Cardiff closed down in March of this year as the company that owned it went into liquidation. CBGB fell in 2006 due to an astronomic rise in rent. The Astoria closed earlier this year prompting much eulogising from the press and talks of a crisis. Yet perhaps the life-span of venues has always been this fleeting. The only constant is the fact that few venues – bar the odd stalwart that enjoys a kind of cyclical re-invigoration as new scenes emerge – peak for more than a few years.

This is not an issue to be taken lightly. Why do so many music venues close when art galleries and museums are preserved? Venues have long been seen as illicit and unwelcome additions to any modern community. They are seen as awkward to control, an unwanted commodity in a society eager to ensure that life is as unfussy and noise-free as possible. Unwelcome interference from councils and vice squads often hits the more independent-minded venues hardest, ensuring that only the monopolies such as Live Nation – the Californian live events group who merged with ticketing giant Ticketmaster, and who have acquired cherished venues around the country such as the Brixton Academy, Shepherd’s Bush Empire, and the Academy in Leeds – have the chance of a future.

It’s not that you don’t get some great bookings at the more corporate venues but there certainly aren’t as many surprises. Crucially, there is no chance of cultivating a creative scene in a chain venue, such is the ‘pack em in and kick ’em out by 11’ ethos. What is clear is that for music venues to have any influence at all over the music that they showcase, a degree of autonomy is needed. Autonomy over booking, over the time the venue shuts, over the price of drinks.

The term ‘music venue’ is in many ways vague. It can mean any kind of physical space, outside or in. The necessary feature is the music itself; this is the subject of the occasion of visiting a venue, the reason that the venue is there in the first place. Yet music venues matter because they can shape this music; the best ones do in fact. At the root of most interesting groups or scenes, if you dig far enough, it is likely that a particular building or significant site will be found.

In this book I have been reluctant to pick favourites or compile lists. Instead, I have approached certain venues that have in some way assisted to the furthering of popular music, picking out particular moments, exchanges and connections that have been made. Some venues here will have been the subject of much discussion. Some have been lost in the footnotes of history, demolished like so many others over the years: buried under rubble, flattened to make way for other buildings, with memories erased by the fame of similar establishments. I have tried to revive some lost venues here, such as the Four Aces in Hackney and the Rainbow in Finsbury Park. The Four Aces in particular, struck a chord. It is a venue that existed in Hackney for thirty years, where it might be said that the first seeds of the UK reggae genre lover’s rock were sewn, and where jungle grew out of the cross pollination of ragga and hardcore rave. To a whole community it was the centre of life. To the outside, it never existed.

There are many gaps: this is not a directory, a ticking-off of each venue in turn. It is more a story, with some key players absent and others given a starring role. Some of the cities with a particularly strong musical heritage feature: London, New York, Manchester, Liverpool, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit. Yet one could look at any city, or town, in any country in the world and find a venue worthy of inclusion. The main venues here are like rocks protruding above crashing waves. We will use them to keep a footing, while mindful that much is submerged beneath that might be just as important

To borrow a cliché, venues really are spaces where dreams are made. To me, music is still the most immediately affecting of all the arts. It is a direct portal into our innermost feelings. A performance can be transformative, leaving you weightless or perhaps even crushed. It can be hilarious or vicious. But whatever state it might leave you in, it will not last for long. The transience of a live gig is criminal, but how could it be any different? The same might be said for the venue itself.

Tim Burrows, 2009

PART 1

ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS

‘But the great thing about the jazz world, and all the kids who enter into it, is that no one, not a soul, cares what your class is, or what your race is, or what your income, or if you’re boy, or girl, or bent, or versatile, or what you are – so long as you dig the scene and can behave yourself and have left all that crap behind you, too, when you come in the jazz club door.’ Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes1

If we are to begin anywhere, let it be at the 100 Club, the basement space at 100 Oxford Street: the oldest independent music venue in Britain. Situated amongst chain clothes shops and electronic stores along the endless retail Mecca of Oxford Street it is unique, a relic from an age before big promoters and superclubs. On the walls, the rich history of the club is catalogued by framed photographs depicting the greats that have appeared on the modest stage. There’s bluesman Memphis Slim with his eyes closed at the piano in 1958 and Johnny Rotten on his knees performing with the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club Punk Festival in 1976.

While the Luftwaffe were raiding the capital in the early 1940s, a basement restaurant known as Mack’s became a haven for those looking for an antidote to the terror outside. In 1942, Robert Feldman, a Jewish pattern cutter professionally and clarinet player by night, started putting on jazz shows in the restaurant which was usually closed for the evenings. The club has retained the same bunker-like feel as it would have had during the 40s, only now patrons might fear being trampled by the rush of shoppers, rather than falling victim to a German air raid.

In the 40s, those looking for a distraction from the hideous mix of fear and drabness that characterised the war years were persuaded to visit the club. ‘Forget the Doodle-bug. Come and Jitterbug at the Feldman club,’ the advert went.2 Swing was the new craze, coinciding with the influx of American GIs that flooded into England, earning instant admiration from many in a nation that had seemed permagrey during the war years. By 1944, American servicemen accounted for three per cent of Britain’s population, with 1.5 million living in the UK, albeit temporarily. To many teenage girls the GI invasion was exhilarating – here were matinee idols made flesh – and many flocked to the clubs where the servicemen might be. Hammersmith Palais was one such destination, where jitterbug marathons and swing contests proved to be popular.3

Feldman’s brother Victor was held in high regard on the jazz scene after he had sat in on drums with the Glenn Miller Army Air Force band at the age of eight at the Queensbury Club. He later graduated to piano and vibes, and became famous in the US, playing with Miles Davis. After Roger Feldman ran the London Jazz Club, the Wilcox brothers took over for two or three years, but during the 50s it was renamed The Humphrey Lyttelton Club after the trumpet player who was fast making a name for himself on the UK jazz scene. Humphrey Lyttelton was an ex-serviceman who had celebrated VE Day by being wheeled around London, blowing his trumpet into the night, ending up outside Buckingham Palace. After the war he enrolled at Camberwell School of Art and became a key instigator of the post-war jazz revival in the UK.4 By the 50s, ‘Humph’, as he was known to those in the jazz scene, was playing two or three gigs a week at the clubs. The decision to cash in on the name, made by Lyttleton and his agent Lynn Dunn, proved an inspired one, and there were queues around the block for his twice-weekly performances.

After the Lyttleton Club there was a change of lease and it became Jazz Shows Jazz Club. Roger Horton worked as a junior at Jazz Shows at this time. His mother was the secretary for the club’s accountant, and would sometimes take her sixteen-year-old son along to the club. ‘I was a student and a huge jazz fan. Absolutely potty,’ remembers Horton. ‘I used to sit on the end of that stage and listen to Humphrey Lyttelton’s band in the 50s.’5

Horton became director of the club in 1964, changing the name to the 100 Club and acquiring a drinking licence. ‘The first gig I ever did as boss was a jazz night with a very popular band called Alex Welsh and his Band on a Saturday night in 1964,’ he says. ‘It cost three and six to get in and we had 931 customers. That was before the days when you had to have a license, which restricts the number of people you are admitting…today we are allowed to have 290 people. That is our capacity. In those days, the bars were not built as they are now, so it was bigger, but that many people was still absolutely staggering.’6

Roger Horton’s 100 Club

The boom had started in New Orleans, where jazz itself was born out of the songs of slaves who congregated in Congo Square in the 18th century. Jazz cornetist Ken Colyer made a pilgrimage from the UK, sitting in with the Lewis band at Manny’s Tavern, and came back suitably enthused to start his own club – the Colyer Club at Studio 51 on Great Newport Street.7

As well as trad jazz, the blues was attracting a growing army of followers in the UK. A lot of the US blues musicians first came and worked in England at the invitation of Chris Barber, a trombonist who had been in Humphrey Lyttelton’s group, before becoming a band leader himself. Horton recalls how, ‘Barber would bring these American players over for a whole tour, everyone, and eventually they became regulars at the club – people like Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Bo Diddley, Memphis Slim, Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf.’ He has fond memories of this period, but says, ‘What struck me at the time, is how it must have been a culture shock for these guys to come to England and work in clubs which are packed to the doors with white people. Everyone coming up to them and patting them on the back. They all told me how tough things were in America, how some white promoters wouldn’t touch you. What I found quite uncomfortable was that I was probably about thirty years old then, and yet a lot of the artists called me “Sir”. Over in America you still had segregation in certain parts, so I was the white man, the boss; I was “Sir” – even though they were sixty and I was thirty. I soon put a stop to it.’8

Yet something more brash, more exciting and significantly more marketable had emerged from the blues and jazz templates to take the younger generation by storm; rock ’n’ roll. The Dominion, today the site of the endless run of the Queen musical We Will Rock You, was the setting for the first gig by an American rock ’n’ roll act in London. In February 1956, Bill Haley and the Comets played to 2,000 eager teddy boys in their drape jackets and brothel creepers. The momentum of the rock ’n’ roll craze was building and the smoky underground coffee bars of Soho were teeming with teenagers. One young lad at the show who would later become the manager of the Rolling Stones, the archetypal 1960s pop svengali Andrew Loog Oldham, was just twelve at the time. ‘I went by myself, which was just fine, since most others wouldn’t have understood my pre-show ritual in the men’s room, perfecting my kiss-curl,’ he remembered in his memoir, Stoned (2000). ‘The Dominion is a magnificent theatre; its walls slope towards the object of the evening’s awe like an audio-visual wedding train. It is a feast for the eyes and ears that impresses all who gather there, regardless of their taste in entertainment.’

Yet, if the setting itself gave Oldham impetus to throw himself into this new thing known as rock ’n’ roll, the man that drew him there proved less than inspiring: ‘Haley was a nightmare. There was an hour and a half by spastic Vic Lewis and his Orchestra, then a paltry thirty-five minutes from this fat, kiss-curled housewife from the middle of America, the uncle you never wanted… Confronted by the mediocrity that was Haley, I thought for a moment rock ’n’ roll was over. But recalling the Then of Johnnie Ray and the Now of Buddy Holly and Little Richard saved the day, my imagination roared on intact and faith returned, replete with sound and texture.’

Here was a fourteen-year-old future architect of British rock ’n’ roll success, forecasting the end of rock’n’roll before it had even begun. Yet simply by being at the venue, in amongst thousands of teddy boys accompanied by their ‘bleached, quiffed’ girls, Oldham could sense something. A new possibility, the chance to create something better and more virile than what was being offered by the overweight American gyrating ineffectually before him. It is something that can only happen at a live event. When the atmosphere is right, the mind, free of the constrictions of the outer world, begins to race; possibilities play themselves out in your head; you are ripe for an epiphany. Andrew Loog Oldham might have had his dream shattered momentarily, but the setting itself sowed the seeds of an idea – rock ’n’ roll was for him.

A visit to Soho was irresistible to teenagers, a bright crashing awakening and Oldham would visit the area as often as he could. ‘Its hustling neon crassness was a like a drug before drugs,’ he fondly recalled.9 He would lie to his mother, saying he was going to visit a friend, and make his way to the 2i’s coffee bar at 59 Old Compton Street, a bar that many considered to be the place British rock ’n’ roll was born. The restaurant that today occupies the site even has a blue plaque outside, unveiled by Cliff Richard (who met his band The Shadows in the cellar bar) in 2007, stating the case: ‘BIRTHPLACE OF BRITISH ROCK ’N’ ROLL AND THE POPULAR MUSIC INDUSTRY’.

The 2i’s was started by three Iranian brothers (it was originally called the 3i’s but had to be changed when one brother left). An Australian wrestler, Paul Lincoln, who had emigrated to the UK with his friend, fellow countryman and wrestler Ray Hunter, took over the club and reopened the place in 1956. When skiffle player Wally Whyton and his band The Vipers played an impromptu gig there in July 1956, during the Soho Fair, Lincoln saw that this might be very lucrative, so encouraged kids to come in and play live. Skiffle was very much the craze, thanks to the rise of Lonnie Donegan, teenagers with guitars were learning Leadbelly songs and slipping in a bit of Elvis’s sexy swagger to spice it up. The 2i’s quickly earned a reputation for showcasing the best new artists on the scene and Tommy Steele was ‘discovered’ there by Larry Parnes. Soon the place could add Marty Wilde and Billy Fury to its list of emerging talent.10 By the late 50s it seemed like the whole of Soho was filled with cellar coffee-bars, where skiffle and jazz were played to wildly enthusiastic audiences. The smell of marijuana became a familiar feature of the Soho atmosphere around these clubs, and though 2i’s was undoubtedly the most popular, there was also Sam Widges, the Nucleus, the Gyre and Gimble, the Farm – all of which were open most of the night.11

Not everyone enjoyed the skiffle craze. For some, these bars posed a serious threat to British society. The cultural critic Richard Hoggart summed up the attitude when he poured scorn on the milk bars in Northern towns, where teenagers would put ‘copper after copper’ into the jukebox. The milk bars in his view indicated an ‘aesthetic breakdown’. You could see it in the ‘nastiness of their modernist knick knacks,’ he suggested, as well as their ‘glaring showiness’.12 But this is exactly what attracted teenagers to the coffee bars. The American glitz, however artificial, beat the hell out of the dreary English realism. The teenagers had a new space of their own.

Black Migration, White Reactions

The Harlem Renaissance: The Cotton Club

In Harlem, jazz had arrived with the migration of black people from the south. Many jazz venues sprung up in New York during the 1920s to meet the demand for jazz players who had moved north to get up on stage and entertain Manhattan socialites. This was the first type of popular music to fill the clubs and ballrooms around the world in the first half of the 20th century. Black people had been drifting to Harlem, as well as other cities such as Detroit, from the south since the turn of the century, to find work and escape persecution. (The significance of race in Detroit is clear from the names of some of the clubs at the time, such as Club Plantation and the Chocolate Club.13)

Harlem was eulogised by white writers and nicknamed ‘Little Africa’ by the press. It was a noisy place, many accounts suggested, that throbbed with a primitive beat that could only come from descendents of the ‘Dark Continent’.14 Yet the noise was made out of necessity. Residents threw ‘rent parties’ to raise funds to meet the inflated rates that landlords deemed fit to charge those desperate enough to pay it – in Harlem rent was $12 to $20 higher than in other Manhattan areas. At these events, known as ‘jumps’ or ‘shouts’ by the musicians, a jazz band would play, or just a piano player if money was particularly tight. Charleston contests were held. Soul food from the south was on offer in the kitchen.15 In Harlem during the 1920s, New York’s middle to upper classes had found their own night-time playground, of which the Cotton Club was the jewel.

It was opened by Owney Madden, a powerful New York gangster, because at the time of the Prohibition he needed a place to sell his own illegal beer. Perhaps unintentionally, Madden rode the wave of the Harlem Renaissance of the mid 1920s. Harlem was the original destination for the upper echelons of white society to ‘slum it’. Popularised by the novel by Carl Van Vechten – the ill-advisedly titled Nigger Heaven – it was seen as an exotic, exciting place by New York whites. Harlem harboured the biggest black community outside of Africa. Clubs like Connie’s on 7th Avenue would rival the Cotton Club on Lenox, in terms of its popularity with New York high society, and both embodied the segregation of the times.

The performers and staff were black, the clientele white. As the Daily News newspaper reported in 1929, mixed race parties were not allowed at the Cotton Club: ‘Colored parties with the necessary doubloons are welcomed, of course, but they usually look a bit lonesome.’ In truth, it was rare that a black person would be enjoying the club’s hospitality as a paying customer. Instead, a mixture of rich Manhattanites, such as Gertrude and Emily Vanderbilt and Broadway star Ann Pennington, sat at ringside tables draped in white tablecloths that surrounded the polished dancefloor. The chorus girls were the main attraction yet were badly treated, forced to sneak into the toilets when nobody was looking, as the one bathroom in the club was reserved for white women only.16

The boss of the club during its peak periods in the late 1920s and early 1930s was Herman Stark, an old hand. Though the club fostered the cream of the jazz musicians of the 1920s and 30s including Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holliday, Duke Ellington’s band was the house band at the club during its most popular periods, and helped raise the profile of swing.

When Prohibition was lifted in 1933, it took away the appeal of Harlem for after-hours tourism. So too did the riots in 1935. In search of a new clientele, the Cotton Club moved downtown to 48th Street and Broadway, but never found its feet again, closing in 1940. By this time Duke Ellington had significantly grown in stature. In 1943 he premiered his masterpiece ‘Black Brown and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in America’ at Carnegie Hall in Midtown, New York. Built in 1891 by the Scottish millionaire Andrew Carnegie and the composer Walter Damrosch,17 the hall was the preserve of European classical music, and very rarely used for jazz. Ellington’s performance heralded the fact that jazz music had come of age, yet it still remained at home in less formal surroundings.

West Indians, Britain and Blues Parties

In England, black migration from the West Indies affected music on an unprecedented scale. On June 22nd 1948, the SS Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in Essex. On board were 492 West Indians, the majority of them men with idealistic dreams of making a successful move to the nation that had ruled over them since the 17th century.

The event of Britain withdrawing from India and recognising its independence a year earlier, in 1947, had encouraged MPs to pass the Nationality Act of 1948, which ensured that Britain kept an open door policy for its Commonwealth members. The low demand for sugar from the UK during the war had severely depleted the Jamaican economy and a natural disaster, the nameless hurricane of 1944, worsened conditions on the island: for the majority the hopeful journey for a better life was a necessity. The Windrush had made voyages to Britain before, during the 30s, but under a different name, the Monte Rosa, a cruise ship used by Nazi party members during World War II, and there were many in Britain who viewed the ship’s journey from Jamaica to England as a similarly unwelcome invasion. With politicians arguing in the House of Commons that the ship should be sent back to Jamaica, the HMS Sheffield was ordered to shadow the intruder, and make it turn back if need be.18

Yet by 1956 the ruling Conservative party, led by Anthony Eden, had started to recruit men from the Caribbean with the promise of financial assistance, to tackle the post-war labour shortage in the transport sectors and newly-created NHS. As a result, more and more people made the trip to start their lives over in Britain, in London, as well as every major city from Glasgow to Bristol. Many West Indians met with hostility from a nation experiencing a similar economic slump, made all the more real by the wartime hangover of food rationing. The immigrants were not likely to earn much – bosses were reluctant to offer them skilled work through fear it might antagonise white workers suddenly positioned below them in the pecking order. Ninety per cent of landlords admitted that they did not take black lodgers. This was the time of the famous proviso seen on ‘To Let’ signs countrywide: ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs.’ Prejudice in Britain was exacerbated by Oswald Mosley returning to London in 1956, following exile in France and Ireland, to re-launch his Union Movement party. He coaxed disgruntled Londoners into supporting him, and tried to position himself as a leader for the new breed of adolescent that had emerged during the 1950s: the teenager. Mosley’s sixteen-year-old son Max, an upper class wannabe teddy boy – today the super rich president of FIA, the governing body of Formula One – busied himself with the task of daubing the walls of west London with fascist slogans.19

Unwelcome in the majority of local pubs and social clubs, the new arrivals set up impromptu parties known as ‘blues’ dances or ‘shebeens’ in their own homes – in many ways similar to the rent parties that had been held in the US in the 20s and 30s. The ‘blues’ here had little to do with the blues of Mississippi; the chosen style of music played was jazz, calypso, r ’n’ b, and later progressing to ska and its more relaxed successors of a slower tempo, rocksteady and dub.20 Instead, the name ‘blues’ derived from the widespread usage of the Blaupunkt radiogram, a German record player that was renowned for the rich bass sounds that it produced and also doubled as a cocktail cabinet. Together with the instant party this nifty drinks cabinet brought with it, this portable music system proved ideal for setting up a get-together which could happen anywhere, from basement flats to the courtyards of apartment blocks.

Sound-systems had started popping up in Kingston, Jamaica in the 1940s and 50s, playing the American ‘race records’, jazz and r ’n’ b, in outdoor shack-style bars. By the mid 50s the wattage of the speakers began to increase and soon 40,000 watt sound-boxes blasted out the latest imported records around downtown Kingston.21

Blues dances provided a vital connection to the scene that the immigrants had left behind. Many who moved to the UK were shocked by the severity of the place; by the bleak weather and low paid jobs. Metro, a sound-system operator from Kingston, remembers the impact of the culture shock after moving to Nottingham in the late 1950s: ‘When I got here, I cry living tears, because of what I left in Jamaica, the happiness and the music,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know where I was, I was lost.’22 For many, the parties provided an antidote to despair, becoming centres for the Diaspora to get together and dance as they might have done back home. Not all were satisfied with the Blaupunkt gramophones however. Metro and many like him were unimpressed with their sound, so set about building bigger sound-systems that could pump out a heavier bass to impress the burgeoning West Indian community.

Notting Hill was an area of west London that became home to a large population of West Indians – predominantly Trinidadian and Tobagans – during the 1950s, and played host to many of the first parties of this kind. At the time the area was unrecognisable from its current incarnation as a desirable enclave of antique markets and delicatessens, favoured by politicians and popularised by the 1999 Richard Curtis film (of the same name, Notting Hill). During the 50s it was a run down, shabby victim of post-war neglect, a ghetto where those deemed undesirable by the populace – such as the hundreds of prostitutes that serviced the wealthy of Park Lane and Bayswater – ended up.

It was the era of Peter Rachman, the Polish landlord made famous posthumously by the Profumo affair – Christine Keeler, who had an affair with married Secretary of State John Profumo in the late 60s, had once been Rachman’s mistress. From him came the term ‘Rachmanism’, referring to the exploitation of tenants by their intimidating and dishonourable landlords. Rachman began his slum empire when he crammed eight West Indian musicians into one room of an eight room lodging house on Harrow Road, and willed them to hold all-night parties. The motivation behind this encouragement was ruthlessly economical: he could glean more money from those desperate for somewhere to live than from one English tenant protected by rent control and immune from eviction. He wanted his old tenants out. The plan worked. All the other tenants left due to the noise and Rachman filled the other rooms with eager West Indians willing to gather together friends and relatives to pay newly-inflated rent. By the time he died, it is said that Rachman owned from 400 to 500 properties in the Notting Hill area. Pilloried by the British press, Rachman was seen by many West Indians as a saviour. Interviewed by the long defunct Empire News newspaper, he spelt out his philosophy: ‘I find coloured people good tenants. I take people as they come. Mind you, some white people do object to coloured people when they move in. They don’t like the way they play jazz records up to 1am and always loudly. So when they come to me and say they are unhappy I help them find another house.’23 The policy may have had have a whiff of the inhumane about it, but it undoubtedly helped Caribbean music establish itself in Notting Hill as the blues clubs took over.24

Michael de Freitas, the Trinidadian hustler and pimp who later fancied himself as a civil rights hero with the name ‘Michael X’, was a tenant and associate of Rachman. De Freitas began to host blues dances in a basement flat on Powis Square, and instigated a residency by jazz pianist Wilfred Woodley. ‘Having the flat created a whole new scene for us… Blues dances are not very complicated to organise. We simply cleared the floor, put a table across the kitchen door to serve as a counter and stocked up on a whole load of canned beer. We charged 2s 6d to come in and 2s 6d for each beer – and we just didn’t have enough room to accommodate the rush.’25 Blues clubs became more established and sound-system trailblazers such as Duke Vin and Count Suckle made names for themselves in new clubs such as the Fullerton Club, Calypso Club and the Blechynden Street Blues Club. But as more and more of these makeshift clubs appeared, piping out West Indian sounds until the early hours, the angrier white residents became. Already concerned that their new neighbours had brought about a rise in prostitution as pimps like De Freitas moved in, tolerance levels had reached breaking point for many.

The folk devil of the violent, sexually potent Jamaican man that preys after young white girls had taken shape in people’s minds some years earlier, born out of the media interest in Edgar Manning. A jazz drummer, sometime criminal and associate of prostitutes, Manning was described as an ‘evil negro’ and ‘king of London’s dope traffic’ by the News of the World after he was arrested on drug charges in 1923.26 Yet the man described by The Times as ‘the worst man in London’ was little more than a petty thief and drug user. Manning had arrived in the UK in 1912 to serve in the army, but, as he later explained in a newspaper biography, he had been led astray.27

Yet it was an appealing myth for a population on its knees. During World War II, clubs like the bebop heavy Paramount Dance Hall on Tottenham Court Road catered for black American GIs and seamen, as well as a number of young girls keen to dance the night away. To a country severely weakened by war and a male population undergoing a palpable crisis of identity, these places, which were notorious for ‘ganja’ smoke and carried the threat of encouraging sexual relationships between black males and white females, represented an affront to the very fabric of British society.28 For working class whites in the slums of mid 50s Notting Hill, the sinful scenario envisaged for these clubs was moving ever closer to home: literally, in the case of the blues parties and illegal shebeens taking place under or above the very place that their family might be sleeping that night. Police all around London obliged the fearful majority by frequently raiding the parties, beating up revellers and kicking in sound-systems.

On the evening of August 30th 1958, the first day of the Notting Hill race riots, the strength of resentment against the clubs became clear. A 300-strong mob shouting the familiar fascist slogan ‘Keep Britain White’ descended on the Blechynden Street Blues Club, where Count Suckle was playing calypso records. White gangs fought with black party-goers until the police broke up the fight and escorted the Caribbean contingent to a separate club. An interview with the landlord of a pub on nearby Bramley Road for an ITN News bulletin covering the riots spelt out the importance of noise in fostering public anger against the blues clubs:

Interviewer: ‘Can you hear any noise from the houses here at night?’

Landlord: ‘Yes, there has been until half past four in the morning noise which has kept a lot of people awake.’

Interviewer: ‘Do you think that is the root of the trouble?’

Landlord: ‘It has a lot to do with it, yes.’

The riots weren’t purely a reaction against the blues clubs; there were plenty of people unaffected by the noise, whose blood boiled at the mere site of the new neighbours. Yet the clubs did act as a focal point for attack. These were the places where, by moving to a soundtrack of modern jazz, calypso and early ska – music that would have been alien to the ears of the majority of white residents’ ears – the West Indians exuded a kind of joie de vivre, a willingness to get together and enjoy the music which rooted their culture. Yet it is possible to understand how scores of night parties underneath family homes might cause disturbance and alarm within communities.

While the beginnings of the riots in Notting Hill may be down to a complex array of factors, noise seems to have been key. This flashpoint in 1958 established Notting Hill as an important area for West Indians in Britain, an accolade that it has kept to this day thanks to the Notting Hill Carnival that takes place each year during the August bank holiday, when noise, and the occasional clash with police, returns.

‘The Most Famous Club in the World’

By the late 1950s, alcohol-free coffee bars had sprung up around the UK. There were around 200 clubs in the Greater Manchester area alone. A license was not required, so you could turn anything into a club. The cigar-waving eccentric Jimmy Savile ran the Plaza Club in 1959, putting on daytime shows for the kids, from midday until 2pm. The city even had its own homage to the 2i’s; the 2J’s on Lloyd Street, named after the owners Jack Jackson and John Collier. Others included the New Astoria Coffee Jive Bar, the New Paddock and La Cave.29 By the 1960s in the centre of Manchester there were around twenty or thirty ‘proper’ beat clubs. Bluesmen like John Mayall or some of the visiting American originals would perform, as well as soul acts such as The Supremes.30

It seemed there was a written edict in the promoter’s handbook stating that for a club to be successful it had to be below the soil, and sweaty as sin. The most famous of these subterranean dens is the Cavern Club in Liverpool. In fact it might even be the most famous music venue of all time thanks to The Beatles. It was opened on Matthew Street by Alan Sytner, a jazz fanatic who owned Liverpool’s 21 and West Coast jazz clubs. He loved Paris, was particularly enamoured of Le Caveau de la Huchette on the Left Bank and fancied a subterranean club of his own back in his hometown. He found it in the form of a disused cellar that had been used to store eggs, wine and electrical equipment, as well as being utilised during the war as an air raid shelter. It began as a jazz club – the ‘Merseysippi Jazz Band’ played the opening night, on January 16th 1957, in front of an audience of 600 packed into the sweaty cellar and with 1,500 people outside the venue unable to get in.31

The club was noted for its three vault-like rooms, each 100 feet long and 10 feet wide, joined up by 6-foot-long archways. Rock ’n’ roll was not tolerated on the bill by Sytner, but skiffle and blues were. The Quarrymen, featuring John Lennon trying to channel the spirit of Elvis, were one skiffle outfit who appeared during the first year. Lonnie Donegan also played down in the cellar in 1957, as did bluesman Big Bill Broonzy. It is well documented that The Beatles played an early gig at the venue before going on to play the Reeperbahn in Hamburg’s red light district, but these first appearances weren’t always received well by the Cavern’s management, who would pass notes to them during the gig, telling them to get off the stage32 – the rock ’n’ roll music that The Beatles played was deemed too rough and ready for the local crowd. Not that the surroundings suggested anything remotely sophisticated. ‘It stank of disinfectant and stale onions,’ was the unglamourous description that Gerry Marsden, the frontman of Gerry and the Pacemakers, gave of the squalour. The back of the club was known as the ‘deep end’ as leakage coming from the toilets flowed out there.33

Like the 100 Club and the Soho skiffle bars, the club was not licensed. Some believe this contributed to the intensity of both the audience’s responses to the music and the players’ performances. Inebriation through alcohol was not required when the atmosphere was so lively and the sound, if not the smell, was so fresh. After falling into debt, Sytner sold the club in 1959, and went into business with his brother Frank, a racing driver. From 1960-1962, The Beatles gave a quite unfathomable 273 performances. A lot of these performances took place during the day. Cilla Black, the cherished Liverpudlian singer-cum-TV presenter who is now a household name in the UK, started off manning the cloakroom of the club. She soon had a record deal.

Following the success of their first album Please Please Me in 1963, it became evident that the band had outgrown the stage on which they had first appeared and which had helped shape them. When their chart success was announced live at the Cavern Club, the Liverpudlian girls who had screamed so hard for their idols realised that they could no longer claim ownership over the group and openly wept upon hearing the news. The Beatles’ last appearance at the Cavern was a lunchtime gig in February 1963, and few would have the opportunity to see them up-close ‘rough and ready’ again before the inevitable circuit of world tours took over.

The Cavern Club itself carried on for a while until 1973, when it was closed to make way for a ventilation shaft that never materialised. The building was eventually demolished and the cellar filled in. In 1984 it was rebuilt across the street, using seventy-five per cent of the old site and 15,000 of the original bricks.34

Today, the Cavern Club is a site of pilgrimage for hordes of tourists around the globe. Tribute acts to the Fab Four, such as the Cavern Beat, a particularly well-honed Beatles act from Chicago, Illinois, appear regularly, for those who wish to travel back, via a meticulously studied yet slightly creepy re-creation of what it was like to have been there first time around.

On the Banks of the Thames

In the mid 50s, Surrey born junk shop owner Arthur Chisnall started to notice how popular the old jazz records were becoming amongst his younger customers and envisaged how wonderful it might be to open a venue for this same breed of music fan to fill. He earmarked the down-at-heel Eel Pie Hotel, a faded building on Eel Pie Island, situated on the Thames between Ham and Twickenham in Middlesex. The hotel was erected in 1830, and had hosted tea dances during the 20s and 30s. Chisnall opened his club on April 20th in 1956 and jazz players such as Ken Colyer, George Melly and Acker Bilk played during its early years. It differed from the coffee houses and milk bars, where music provided the main buzz, in that it was licensed.

The club became one of the centres of the British blues boom, after bookings of the US originals such as Buddy Guy and Howlin’ Wolf.35 The fact that it was on an island meant that the club felt quite exclusive, a factor always sure to make a place more appealing for subcultural youth, away from the prying eyes of the establishment – or at least across a thin wedge of the Thames from it. Initially, to get across from the mainland you had to be pulled across the river while sitting in a punt attached to a chain, but a bridge was built from Twickenham to the island in 1957. The reputation of the club was furthered by the fact that one had to be a member to attend (the membership cards were known as Eel Pie Passports), making members feel they were part of a kind of secret society, even though it regularly attracted crowds of 500 or more.

The Eel Pie Jazz Club has earned a place in London folklore and has been reincarnated on the mainland, in the form of a regular night at the Cabbage Patch pub in Twickenham, yet it was a dump during its heyday. ‘The dressing room was a tiny little space above the stage. After being in the audience it was a thrill getting in there, but really, it was horrible,’ Ian McLagan of the Small Faces – then of the beat group the Muleskinners – recalled recently. ‘The piano on the side of the stage was all beaten up – people poured drinks into it and there were bits of broken glass among the hammers. It was a very stinky place, but Arthur Chisnall kept it going; he had a love for the music.’ The police closed it down in 1967. Although it reopened for a short while as Colonel Barefoot’s Rock Garden, when that closed also, squatters seized upon the hotel. The building burned down in a suspicious fire in 1971, and was replaced by an apartment block.36

Gradually, British groups began to mimic their black American betters and west London became the hotspot for blues and r ’n’ b groups. The Ealing Club was started by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies who, after scouting around, had found a suitable drinking club in which to house their event by Ealing Broadway Station. On St Patrick’s night in 1962 Cyril and Davies’ band Blues Incorporated opened to a packed audience of 200 people. His group were joined on the night by Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts, and soon the other Stones-to-be – Brian Jones and Keith Richards – were joining them on stage.37 The Crawdaddy Club, another popular haunt at the time, was started by Giorgio Gomelsky, a Russian working at Shepperton Studios as a film editor, at the Railway Hotel opposite Richmond train station. The Rolling Stones played their first date as a bonafide group there in February 1963 and soon attracted scores of locals, as well as fellow peers; The Beatles dropped in during those early days.

Folk Village

In Greenwich Village, New York, cheap rent encouraged artists and performers to stay in the area, and many bars began to host folk singers such as Odetta, a black singer from Alabama with a huge, soulful vocal.

Café Wha? is one of the few bars that remains open of the many that existed during Greenwich Village’s heyday in the 1950s and 60s (though it is no longer in its original location – the club started in the building next door, which is now a comedy club). Opened by Manny Roth, the uncle of Van Halen’s David Lee Roth, in the late 1950s the club played a key role in a boom period in Greenwich Village. For a time the Village might have been considered the centre of live performance in North America, as its artists, like Odetta, were proving to be hugely influential. There was one particular fan of hers who would propel folk into the spotlight.

On a freezing cold day in late January 1961, Bob Dylan, then a plucky nineteen-year-old folk singer, stepped through the doors of the Wha? and played on his first New York stage. ‘The place was a subterranean cavern, liqourless, ill lit, low ceiling, like a wide dining hall with chairs and tables – opened at noon, closed at four in the morning,’ wrote Dylan in his memoir, Chronicles. ‘Somebody had told me to go there and ask for a singer named Freddy Neil who ran the daytime show at the Wha?’38 Fred Neil was a singer-songwriter who, like many moving to New York at the time, wanted a shot at making it in the music business. Arriving from St Petersburg, Florida in the late 1950s, he began a career as a jobbing songwriter; Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison were early beneficiaries of his talents. Neil played all over the area. He would tour multiple venues, taking in Café Wha, Café Bizarre, the Cock & Bull (later renamed the Bitter End), the Gaslight, the Kettle of Fish, the Fat Black Pussycat, the Commons and Café Flamenco, often in one night.39