Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  Most dance halls stayed open during the Blitz. Partly this was because warnings would be sounded but then no incendiaries would drop, and this happened often enough to create a degree of complacency. But there was also a determination in the general population not to allow German bombing raids to put an end to the good life. In the case of the Café de Paris, patrons – who included celebrities, debutantes and members and associates of the royal family – were also reassured by its basement location. Staff and customers felt safe twenty feet underground; but unfortunately they were proved wrong. On the night of 8 March 1941 two bombs hit the building and it appears that one fell through a ventilation shaft and landed right in front of the stage. Band leader Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson was decapitated, and over thirty more staff, diners and dancers were killed in the raid; nearly a hundred others were injured. Looters took advantage of the tragedy and were seen stealing handbags and removing jewellery from the dead and dying.

  In north London, a busy neighbourhood dance hall on Green Lanes, Palmers Green, was destroyed and another was hit in southwest London in November 1943 when a German bomb landed on 35 Putney High Street, devastating several shops, starting fires and killing eighty-one people in the top-floor Cinderella Dance Club, the ground-floor Black & White Milk Bar and outside. Most of the casualties were under twenty-three years old.

  The Second World War brought another bout of soul-searching and media controversy about flighty females, largely triggered by the presence of the American armed forces in Britain from January 1942. A phrase became common parlance: ‘yank hunting’, to express the phenomenon of British women actively seeking out the GIs. Generally, however, it appears that condemnation was reserved for women who hung around outside military camps or approached Americans in pubs. Dance halls seemed to be considered a safe place for some harmless flirting. One woman is quoted by Philomena Goodman in Women, Sexuality & War (2001): ‘The Yanks were all over,’ she says. ‘You danced with them but you knew what kind of reputation you would get if you went out with Americans.’

  During the war business stayed strong at the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow partly thanks to the presence of American servicemen. Glasgow was a busy transit city where troops disembarked after their Atlantic crossing to await transportation to camps around Britain. On their arrival in Britain, the servicemen would watch a film preparing them for what they would find out on the town on shore leave, including the fact there was no ‘colour bar’ in bars and dance halls. As we will see in a later chapter, this wasn’t quite the case, but it was still very different from what the white American servicemen or the African-Americans had experienced at home.

  African-American servicemen in particular caused a stir in the Glasgow dance halls as many of them were great dancers, experts in the lindy hop and various versions of the jitterbug, notably one called ‘the collegiate shag’. The GIs hit the town and hit on the girls. Sometimes such goings-on and conflicts over girls caused trouble in the city but it’s said that most of the trouble was between white and African-American servicemen rather than between Americans and locals. Policing the dance halls during the Second World War was made a little more complicated by the presence of US military police outside Glasgow dance halls, complete with their white gloves and night sticks.

  Once again, as they had in the First World War, women had jobs in munitions factories and took up trades that had previously been monopolised by men. With so many male musicians conscripted into the armed forces, there were also jobs and opportunities for female musicians. The female contribution to most dance bands had been restricted to providing vocals, although there were some notable female players famous for their proficiency as musicians – including the much-lauded American drummers Mary McClanahan and Viola Smith. During the war band leader Ivy Benson became a star in Britain, and her Ivy Benson All Girl Orchestra toured extensively and were, for a while, in-house band on BBC Radio. Her lead trumpet player Gracie Cole went on to form her own all-girl orchestra.

  For many of the bigger dance halls, the late 1940s witnessed a return to pre-war music and programming. But it’s always a mistake in culture to assume all is settled. Times will change, and you can be sure that out of sight somewhere people are going off on a tangent, inventing or reinventing new, maverick, challenging ways of doing things. So it was after the war. Even while the mainstream – the big halls and BBC radio – dominated, two new strands of jazz were emerging, both of them in opposition to the prevailing idea of what was standard.

  As a result of restrictions on foreign musicians, the respectability of the music sought by band leaders like Jack Hylton and by closely directed and controlled dance halls, nightlife and the music that powered it had become too predictable. Radio had nurtured an even bigger audience for jazz but in general what you’d hear on the radio erred on the bland side, and were most often broadcasts from the sedate environs of hotel ballrooms. The millions tuning in to the likes of Jack Payne from the Hotel Cecil or the band led by Jack Hylton were experiencing a ‘domesticated’ version of jazz, according to one commentator.

  Jazz had always had a disruptive ingredient, but its power was being neutralised. Some musicians and music fans more adventurous in their tastes made a point of looking for music outside the mainstream, including a number who began to be attracted to the work of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and the free-form stylings of bebop. Saxophonists Johnny Dankworth and Ronnie Scott were both members of the Queen Mary’s orchestra when the ship journeyed over to New York in 1947, her first trip after the war. They took themselves off to 52nd Street to find Charlie Parker and returned to London, enthused and eager. They were among the very first of a small but influential group of musicians and their fans who took to ‘modern jazz’, as it was called. Writing at the end of the 1950s, David Boulton defined modern jazz thus: ‘More often than not “Modern Jazz” is a descriptive title given to the new music which originated as “bop”, “re-bop” or “bebop”.’

  Maverick musicians and music fans, fired by a spirit of self-organisation, created a new generation of jazz clubs, non-mainstream alternatives to the dance halls and restaurant venues with their dinner dances. One of these is the venue now known as the 100 Club, founded in 1942 in the basement of 100 Oxford Street; as we’ll see, it has had a part to play in British music history for more than seventy years. Another was the Fullado on New Compton Street, previously the Bouillabaisse, a drinking club with a clientele drawn mainly from the West Indian community and a regular hangout favoured by black US servicemen. Bebop became the dominant style at the Fullado. Laurie Morgan was a drummer in dance bands who would make his way to the club after work: ‘Bebop was like a clarion call. This new world was going to come.’

  Those musicians who ventured into bebop and other modern jazz styles were reacting against the blandness of the mainstream but others who were also looking for an alternative went in a different direction; back to a time before commercial imperatives had taken over, to an era when compromise and radio-friendly formulas weren’t on the agenda. That led them back to New Orleans to the works of the likes of Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver, and inspired an interest in what was called ‘revivalist’ jazz. Gramophone records were key to this interest. In 1936 the Brunswick record label issued an album devoted to King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, then came the first British release for a Bessie Smith album. Via these gramophone recordings people had a chance to hear authentic, older, purer forms of jazz for the first time.

  Musicians like George Webb began to plot ways to promote revivalist jazz. He formed the Dixielanders, using the Red Barn in Barnehurst, near Bexleyheath in Kent, as a base. Humphrey Lyttelton joined the Dixielanders in 1946 and later recalled the chin-stroking seriousness of the Red Barn: ‘Jazz was a serious music . . . to be studied and you could not give it full attention when you were being buffeted and trampled underfoot by dancers. At the Red Barn people who jogged about in their chairs too vigorously were discouraged by petulant frowns from their neighbo
urs.’ Through the 1950s both Webb and Lytteltton would be involved in venues in Soho and the West End that would be catalysts for new sounds and styles.

  In the mid-1950s jazz began to lose its place at the centre of nightlife. Some venues from the first half of the century survived, others didn’t. Thimblemill Baths hosted the Beatles in November 1962, as well as the Rolling Stones (March 1964), the Kinks (February 1965) and the Who (January 1966). Most of the artworks commissioned by Mrs Strindberg’s Cave of the Golden Calf disappeared, but a study for some of the mural decoration by Spencer Gore is now owned by the Tate. The site on which the Kosmo in Edinburgh stood and the surrounding few streets were levelled in 1966 to make way for what is now the St James shopping centre. After a spell of being owned by a dental hospital, the old Ciro’s now houses archive and administration departments of the National Portrait Gallery. The Café de Paris is still open and trading, over ninety years after its launch, with dining available in the Titanic Ballroom and cabaret every Friday. Murray’s, in various incarnations, thrived on Beak Street for several decades (Christine Keeler worked there as a hostess in the early 1960s), but closed in 1975 and is now a Byron restaurant.

  The Palais in Chorlton became the Princess, and in the early 1960s hosted Thursday ‘Stag Nights’ featuring up to seven strippers an evening. The first Locarno in Glasgow was reinvented as a discotheque, Tiffany’s, in the 1960s and then a live music venue, hosting bands like the Dead Kennedys (September 1981) and U2 (December 1982). Barrowlands was destroyed by fire in 1958, then rebuilt and reopened on Christmas Eve 1960. It remains a high point of any touring band’s schedule, with a reputation for passionate crowds. Hammersmith Palais was finally demolished in 2012 by Parkway Properties.

  Booker & Mitchell, who built and opened the Hammersmith Palais de Danse, also took over a pickle and jam warehouse owned by Crosse & Blackwell at the top of Charing Cross Road, and in 1927 turned it into the Astoria, a cinema and ballroom. The Astoria was, significantly, the first major dance hall in the West End of London. It later became the venue for the gay club Bang, and for numerous live gigs, including the Manic Street Preachers, Radiohead and Nirvana. It closed for good at the beginning of 2009 to be demolished to make way for Crossrail.

  The Bolton Palais was a flagship Mecca hall, where the popular weekly TV show Come Dancing would occasionally be filmed. Come Dancing was devised by Mecca’s boss Eric Morley in 1949, originally featuring dance instructors giving advice about the likes of the samba, the tango, the foxtrot and the quickstep. Then a competitive element was introduced, with teams formed from different areas of the country, and filmed in various halls. One evening in March 1960, ten million people tuned in to watch the East Midlands in competition with a team from the West Midlands at Nottingham Palais. This proved to be the peak of its popularity – then came the Beatles and their generation that led to a mass exodus from the established rituals and venues of ballroom dancing (and indeed bebop and trad jazz), but nevertheless Come Dancing stayed in the TV schedules until 1998 and in 2004 was remixed and relaunched as the hugely popular Strictly Come Dancing.

  The Locarno Dance Hall in Streatham, which opened in 1929, became in turn the Cat’s Whiskers (1969), the Studio (1984), the Ritzy (1990) and Caesars Night Club (1995). Paul Simonon, who would go on to be in the Clash, went dancing to ska in the early 1970s when it was the Cat’s Whiskers, and later that decade and into the 1980s weekends featured the likes of DJ Steve Walsh whipping up the crowd with records by the Fatback Band, Odyssey and McFadden & Whitehead. Kingsley Amis namechecks the Streatham Locarno in his novel The Riverside Villas Murder, making mention of its gold chairs.

  From 1994 the Streatham club was owned by Fred Batt, who gave it the name Caesars the following year. He presented professional female boxing contests there and also introduced cage fighting. The venue featured in films, such as Guy Ritchie’s movie Snatch and the ITV show Stiletto Ghetto. Batt is a renowned demonologist and was troubled by dark shapes inhabiting the place. During its empty hours he claimed to hear the sound of screaming, footsteps and creaking doors opening on their own. He believed that the ghost of a woman was present in the club. At first it was thought the ghost could be that of Ruth Ellis, but an attempt by Yvette Fielding and others to make contact with her spirit during the second series of the TV show Most Haunted in 2003 was unsuccessful.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A bare room with lightbulbs, raves, what happened next

  I’m on a stage where Muddy Waters, the Who, Oasis and the Sex Pistols have performed; where the Kinks played the week they topped the charts with ‘You Really Got Me’; where Siouxsie of the Banshees made her live debut and the Damned ducked when Sid Vicious threw a pint glass; where the White Stripes played their first ever gig in Europe; where DJs Gilles Peterson and Paul Murphy packed out jazz nights in the 1980s. I’m excited, even though it’s a Tuesday afternoon and the only people watching me standing on the stage are a sound engineer testing the speakers and Jeff Horton, the man who owns the venue: the 100 Club, on Oxford Street. Jeff is used to indulging visitors who walk in off the street and stand in the venue a while, reminiscing or imagining. ‘It’s no problem,’ he says.

  Live music began at the 100 Club on 24 October 1942, when it was known as the Feldman Swing Club, and continues to this day. It’s set back off the street through an entrance to a multioccupancy office block between two shops that looks like it might take you to a meeting with a recruitment consultant or financial adviser, but you go to the right and through a door and down the stairs, with the pay-desk on the landing, before bending to the left and into the hall. Jeff’s been working here for thirty years, and has been in sole charge of the club since 2001, when he succeeded his father Roger, who took over the club in 1964 when Jeff reckons there were probably over 200 live venues in the West End and Soho.

  The first thing you notice are the pillars down the middle of the venue, at least three of which look like they’d cut off sightlines to the stage. The size and the layout mean you can’t ever be more than about forty feet from the stage. You’re right there, a flick of sweat away from the performers. Its history is acknowledged via dozens of photographs lining the walls, including those of Ken Colyer, Mick Jagger, Alice Cooper and Humphrey Lyttelton. For a few years in the mid-1950s the club was named after the latter and became the Humphrey Lyttelton Club.

  A survey published in 1951 estimated that three million people went out dancing to palais-style dance halls every week, and that the vast majority were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four. At that point in the 1950s, restrictions that had been put into operation during the war were still in place, including limits on the sale of tea, confectionery, sugar and meat (the formal end to food rationing didn’t come until 1954). Despite the war still casting a shadow over life, and despite the twin social pressures of respectability and conformity suffocating some aspects of personal expression, the enthusiasm shared by those three million dance music fans who filled venues from the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow to the Hammersmith Palais is evidence that, although the 1950s has often been characterised as the grey and dull decade before the Swinging Sixties, there were good times to be had.

  Furthermore, the years after the war also witnessed the beginnings of a shift in nightlife habits, away from the mainstream, nearer the boundaries of conformity, and seemingly out of sight of the researchers. There was a boom in jazz clubs run by musicians taking it upon themselves to find spaces to play. The majority of musicians made a living playing with the big bands at public dance halls and private functions but craved intimate places like Feldman’s, often in basements, where, away from their commercial engagements, they could showcase their talents and indulge their passion for left-field music of various kinds. Two styles in particular appealed: modern jazz inspired by the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, and trad jazz recapturing the sound of jazz pioneers like Jelly Roll Morton or King Oliver. According to Humphrey Lyttelton, ‘Young people – not necessarily jazz fans – began to dese
rt the big dance halls for the more informal jazz club atmosphere.’

  These informal jazz clubs in basements and, later in the decade, other small venues like coffee bars, skiffle clubs, cellars with juke boxes, and pub function rooms featuring folk nights, were populated by musicians and other creative types, clued-up entrepreneurs and crusaders for new music. As we’ll see, throughout the 1950s these informal spaces, animated by the spirit of self-organisation, played a part in laying the foundations of what came later, the so-called Swinging Sixties.

  When Roger Horton took over Humphrey Lyttelton’s old club in 1964, he’d been working for a jazz promotions company called Jazzshows alongside George Webb from the Dixielanders. Jazzshows became more heavily involved in the 100 Club and Roger became the venue manager, then a director, and finally the proprietor. At this point it was being advertised as the Jazzshows Jazz Club. He was aware that other kinds of music were also in demand, and in February 1964 he changed the name to the 100 Club. Roger instinctively knew he was going to have to be flexible in his booking policy. ‘My dad changed the name to the 100 Club because of the address, and because it didn’t have the word “jazz” in the title,’ says Jeff.

  Jeff was in his teens in the mid-1970s, and began to take an interest in the affairs of the club. He recalls the problems of that era, with industrial strife resulting in the country being on a three-day week and electricity often shutting off between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. ‘There were a lot of times we were shut in the seventies because you couldn’t open without electricity and by the time you put it back on nobody was about or bothering to venture out. I remember the early seventies being a pretty difficult time.’

  Ron Watts used to promote gigs in the Home Counties in the late 1960s, including at the Nag’s Head in High Wycombe. He maintained his High Wycombe connections but also began promoting at the 100 Club, where he mostly booked blues acts. At one of Ron’s shows at High Wycombe Technical College in 1976, the Sex Pistols played on a night when Screaming Lord Sutch was headlining. Roger was impressed and offered to promote a Sex Pistols show at the 100 Club in March 1976, on a Tuesday night. The gig was a mess. Johnny Rotten got drunk, tried to start a fight with the rest of the band and stalked out of the club, but Ron offered them a residency starting a few weeks later.