Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  The impact of rock & roll was first delivered not at clubs or live venues, but cinemas. The cinema in the 1920s and 1930s was influential in spreading the sounds of jazz and now in the 1950s would do the same for a new sound. Two films in particular featured rock & roll numbers and caused controversy and consternation, on a few occasions triggering riotous disturbances by what were identified as teddy boys. The 1955 film Blackboard Jungle was the first: it included the song ‘Rock Around the Clock’ performed by Bill Haley and the Comets. Subsequently there was a spin-off film, Rock Around the Clock, shown early the next year.

  Cinema had this role because rock & roll wasn’t easily available on radio and tours by the stars were few and far between. The only time Elvis set foot in Britain was in 1960 when he broke his journey in Prestwick airport in Scotland on his way back home to America from his military service in West Germany (although the theatre impresario and Everton FC chairman Bill Kenwright has made claims Elvis had been to London in 1958, secretly sightseeing with Tommy Steele). Exposure to rock & roll at the cinema had a visceral impact, partly and thrillingly because cinemas had a far better PA than you’d get at Cy Laurie’s or the New Orleans Club. Exposed to the volume, the kick of the bass drum, the power of the guitars, Roger Eagle was one of many young Britons who left a cinema in 1955 with a lifetime devotion to music ahead of him. He later recalled seeing the likes of Rock Around the Clock and The Girl Can’t Help It: ‘For the very first time you could see and hear this incredibly powerful music. If you can imagine what it’s like in a cinema with rock & roll being played through a cinema sound system, it was extremely exciting, because there’s a huge bass resonance there.’

  Fuelled by sensationalised press coverage and panic, a number of local authorities banned screenings of Rock Around the Clock, including those in Bristol, Liverpool, Warrington and Carlisle. At some cinemas there was a police presence outside – or on occasions, inside – but little trouble. The music was the draw, and – apart from a bit of dancing in the aisles, which to some cinema operators was scandalous enough – most outbreaks of hooliganism occurred during the boring bits when the songs ended and the storyline recommenced.

  Despite the high profile of films like Rock Around the Clock, the 1950s witnessed a steady downturn in cinema attendance from amazing highs in the 1930s, mostly as a result of the increasing ownership of televisions. The response of some cinema owners was to refurbish and transform their premises into bona fide music venues fit for touring bands and local talent contests. In 1957 Bill Haley played at the Gaumont in Coventry and elsewhere including the Manchester Odeon (where backstage he met some cousins from Cumbria; his mother was born in Ulverston). When Jerry Lee Lewis embarked on his first British tour, venues included the Gaumont State cinema in Kilburn, although the tour was cut short when the press revealed that his new bride, who was travelling with him, was only thirteen years old.

  Skiffle was Britain’s home-grown hybrid of rock & roll, blues and folk. It took off at the end of the 1950s among the young, not just as music to listen or dance to, but also to perform. Very few people could afford electric guitars and amplifiers, but a skiffle line-up – acoustic guitar, tea-chest bass that you could make yourself, and a washboard – was do-it-yourself entertainment, a form of cheap thrills. Lonnie Donegan’s commercial success in 1955 triggered further interest in skiffle.

  Donegan’s early work dates back to 1953. When Ken Colyer and Chris Barber were booked for their jazz sets they began to break up the shows with skiffle, with various line-ups. Colyer and Alexis Korner were at the core of most, often with Lonnie Donegan on vocals. Soon these skiffle performances began to attract attention and audiences. By July 1953 Jazz Journal was describing the ‘electric atmosphere’ of these skiffle sessions and praising Donegan’s version of ‘John Henry’ and Colyer’s rendition of ‘How Long Blues’. Out of this ad hoc, unhyped activity, Donegan emerged with his version of ‘Rock Island Line’, credited to the Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group, but an arrangement originally conceived by Lead Belly. It became a massive hit.

  During the second half of the 1950s, there were signs of new energies on the outskirts of culture, perhaps as a result of the 1944 Education Act, which had opened up secondary education to young people with working-class origins. According to novelist Keith Waterhouse, author of Billy Liar, it was: ‘An upstart generation who instead of becoming factory fodder had come up through the grammar schools and red-brick universities and was now ready to take the world on.’

  A new generation wanted to make its own world, find its own place, and space. In 1953, the sense that alternative ways of thinking needed developing lay behind the founding of the Theatre Workshop by Joan Littlewood in a crumbling Victorian theatre in Stratford in the east London borough of Newham. Geographically, and in most other ways, it was some distance from the established West End theatres. There was a sense of self-organisation and a political impulse in their anti-establishment philosophy, similar to that of the likes of left-leaning jazzers such as George Webb. The English Stage Company at the Royal Court provided another antidote to mainstream theatres.

  In many towns and cities, there were tea shops and coffee houses, many of them branded by Lyons or Kardomah, frequented by all kinds of people; popular meeting places, they were useful assignation sites for courting couples. A variation on the coffee house theme arrived in the 1950s, however, with the introduction of Gaggia machines, capable of producing espresso and cappuccino coffees, and the juke box. Often these emergent coffee bars were independently owned, and attracted teenagers. Many of them provided live skiffle. They were cool in the way established social spaces such as public houses weren’t. According to Adrian Horn, ‘In the late 1940s and 1950s teenagers perceived pubs as old-fashioned, lacklustre and dreary, and frequented by old men playing outdated pub games.’

  Among the most significant coffee bars in the late 1950s was the 2i’s on Old Compton Street in London where all kinds of interesting people gathered, and even the doormen went on to greater things (Peter Grant, for example, became manager of Led Zeppelin). Singer (and, later, broadcaster) Wally Whyton observed: ‘The coffee bars were the first places where you could hang about for an evening, spend a shilling on a coffee, go in at nine and come out at eleven, and nobody bothered you, nobody said you had to have a second cup of coffee.’ He became a member of the Vipers Skiffle Group, who would advertise themselves as playing ‘Blues and Folk Music’ at venues like the Bread Basket Espresso Coffee Bar on Cleveland Street (near Goodge Street station). The Vipers featured Tommy Hicks in their line-up, and were the first resident band at the 2i’s.

  On the far end of the ground floor was a narrow staircase leading down to a smaller cellar room in which there was a makeshift stage of milk crates with planks on top and, on the wall, a couple of speakers; this was where the live music was performed. While he was with the Vipers, Tommy Hicks was spotted by music impresario Larry Parnes, became Tommy Steele and covering American hits (with a band, the Steelmen), began to have UK chart success. A number of other stars were discovered or performed at the 2i’s, including Joe Brown, Eden Kane, Hank Marvin, Adam Faith and Paul Gadd (later better and infamously known as Gary Glitter). Cliff Richard also had a residency with the Drifters, who renamed themselves the Shadows after the American soul group the Drifters threatened legal action.

  Coffee bars were popular in their own right, but it’s also noticeable how many evolved into informal music venues. They had no alcohol licence so were subject to few restrictions on use and hours; a few, in Soho and other busy nightlife areas, were 24-hour establishments. If there was no inclination or space for live music, there was always room for the most important piece of furniture: a loud, well-stocked juke box. It’s reckoned there were fewer than a hundred juke boxes in Britain at the end of the Second World War, but over 15,000 by 1958. It was considered a symbol of Americanisation and a controversial cultural transformation. Richard Hoggart in his 1957 book The Uses of Literacy was clearly concerned
about what he called the ‘spiritual rot’ evident in the sight of coffee and milk bars. He claimed those who hung out at such places – ‘the juke box boys’, he called them – exhibited ‘no aim, no ambition, no belief’.

  Despite Hoggart’s disdain, the coffee bar experience proved irresistible to the young, more attractive than dance halls or pub function rooms or working men’s clubs. Colin MacInnes describes all this in his novel Absolute Beginners in 1958: ‘You could see everywhere the signs of un-silent teenage revolution,’ he writes. ‘Everywhere you go the narrow coffee bars and darkened cellars with the kids packed tight.’

  Not for the first or last time in our story, entrepreneurs were making a space, attracting a crowd, creating a scene. In Newcastle upon Tyne, a young man called Mike Jeffery had dropped out of his degree course at the University of Newcastle to run the Marimba Coffee House on High Bridge Street. His venue was unlicensed, which meant that teenagers were welcome. The Marimba offered jazz sessions every Saturday from midnight until three in the morning, but the venue also became a daytime hangout. It offered lunch for four shillings (20p) and an ‘atmosphere with a difference’.

  One of the foremost jazz musicians in the area was Mike Carr. He was a travelling salesman by day, specialising in bulk sales of Mars bars, but by night he played keyboards in various jazz combos alongside Malcolm Cecil. He got to know Mike Jeffery and later became partners with him running the Downbeat Club from 1960, another hangout for Eric Burdon.

  In the history of significant venues it makes sense to celebrate the most conspicuous in every era, but at the same time we should be aware of the smaller, marginal enterprises that innovate and nurture ideas and music; ideas and music that may disappear without trace but may reach and change public consciousness months or even years later. We’ve already seen this at Billy’s, Club Eleven and elsewhere. It’s worth pointing out too how many popular musicians who were young kids in 1957 and then went on to careers in rock music, at some point featured in a skiffle group: for example John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Van Morrison and Jimmy Page.

  ‘What happened next’ is always part of the story. Later, we’ll discuss the Sex Pistols playing at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, a celebrated occasion when the legacy of the event had a huge significance. We’ll also visit clubs in the 1980s, some unnoticed at the time, but which were key to creating the scene in the 1990s. Victor Feldman, the youngest of the Feldmans who launched the venue that became the 100 Club, enjoyed a career as a drummer and vibraphone player but then had even more success as a hardbop pianist, especially after he’d emigrated to the USA in 1957. He worked with the likes of Woody Herman, featured on Miles Davis’ 1963 album Seven Steps to Heaven and went on to work outside of jazz, with Frank Zappa, Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits.

  Many venues carried a sense of potential within their walls, as well as a coffee machine, pillars in the wrong place, a juke box and perhaps a stage. In Liverpool, the Jacaranda was founded in 1957 by Allan Williams, who converted an old watch-repair shop on Slater Street into a coffee bar, which became a coffee bar club when Williams opened the small, spartan, brick-floored basement. Through the late 1950s, the Jac became a favourite of local musicians, including members of the skiffle group the Quarry Men, and the band they became – the Beatles. The Jacaranda was also a hangout for the local Afro-Caribbean community, including the calypso star Harold Philips, who had journeyed to England in 1948 on the MV Empire Windrush. Philips had a variety of jobs in the 1950s, including as a builder and barman. Taking the stage name Lord Woodbine, he joined Gerry Gobin’s All Caribbean Steel Band, playing a tenor pan; they played regularly at the Jacaranda Club.

  So many coffee bar enterprises would also turn out to be the starting point for music business careers. Danny Betesh was one of those involved at the El-Rio in Macclesfield in 1956; fast-forward ten years to the mid-60s and he was being described as ‘the most important agent and promoter based in Northern England’. Mike Jeffery moved from the Marimba to the Downbeat and then Club A Go Go; from there he would go on to be Jimi Hendrix’s manager. In Leeds, the family that owned the Del Rio coffee bar on Basinghall Street later ran the In-Time Disco in the Merrion Centre, which had a timepiece theme, with the DJ housed inside a large open pocket watch.

  In the 1958 film Expresso Bongo, talent agent Johnny Jackson discovers teenager Bert Rudge (played by Cliff Richard) singing in a coffee bar and gives him the name Bongo Herbert as a first step to being groomed for stardom. The success of the film spawned yet more coffee bars, including one unashamedly calling itself Expresso Bongo in Morley, near Leeds (it’s now the Ho Ho Chinese takeaway).

  When Joan Littlewood went out on a limb to stage Shelagh Delaney’s ground-breaking play A Taste of Honey, the Theatre Workshop was one of a number of cells of maverick artistic activity in the 1950s that would serve as a catalyst for major cultural change. Another enlightened and influential young woman, Mary Quant – in a different field of expertise and not sharing Littlewood’s political and social views – had nevertheless also grasped that the emerging generation were on the lookout for alternatives to the obvious. Mary Quant’s Bazaar was one of the pioneering boutiques, located out in Chelsea, west London, and established in 1955 when Mary Quant was just twenty-one years old. According to one cultural historian, ‘She single-handedly reinvigorated the idea of modern British fashion.’ Boutiques like Bazaar were as different from your average department store as the Royal Court was to theatres around Leicester Square, and as a modern jazz club was different to a dance hall.

  It’s what happened in these small venues during the 1950s that laid the foundations for what happened in the 1960s. It was where the new ideas were born, ideas that were a bit ‘out there’. In the mid-1960s Dennis Hopper would enjoy Swinging London: ‘It was just amazing,’ he’d say. ‘The dance clubs and the jazz and these packed places, it was just incredible.’ That was the time when the seeds bloomed, the new culture emerged, Mary Quant’s work reached public consciousness, and clubs like the Flamingo created and connected with the zeitgeist.

  The Flamingo was founded when Jeff Kruger hosted an evening of jazz in the basement of the Mapleton Restaurant in Coventry Street in 1952 and then christened the venue with the new name. He managed to generate such a buzz about the opening night, it was said that it required forty policemen to control the crowds. Live jazz included appearances by amazing female singers like Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.

  In 1957 the Flamingo moved to Wardour Street, by which time another name later associated with the success of the venue, Rik Gunnell (who would run the legendary all-nighter sessions there), had also been active for several years, having named his first venture into jazz promotion the 2-Way Club, held on Thursdays at 100 Oxford Street from 1952. On the upper floor of the building that housed the Flamingo was the Whiskey A-Go-Go, one of the few clubs in the area licensed to sell alcohol.

  A booming nightlife feeds into a lively retail sector. In the late 1950s, snappy dressers among the young men in London headed to Vince in Piccadilly. Vince sold young men’s clothes that had colour in them and weren’t restricted to the traditional common-sense materials like tweed, wool or gabardine. At one time John Stephen worked there, before setting himself up as a designer and establishing a number of boutiques on Carnaby Street, including His Clothes and Male West One; these became a destination of choice for daring young men who appreciated colour. Ian McLagan of the Small Faces recalled: ‘Before that all you had was the same clothes your dad wore. Life suddenly was colourful.’

  At the sharp end of fashion were the mods, who’d developed (and indeed taken their name) from their taste for modern jazz, its methodology and mythologies. Their mod styles were continuing to evolve, a few steps ahead of the straights, taking inspiration from the irresistible attractions of Miles Davis and Chet Baker, who came to prominence after joining the Gerry Mulligan Quartet from 1952, and the emergence of tenor players like Wardell Gray and Dexter Gordon.

>   Among those who stalked the streets paying attention to the details of mod living was Pete Meaden. In 1960 Andrew Loog Oldham – who later managed the Rolling Stones – would hook up with Meaden and comb the West End and Soho; always checking Austin’s on Shaftesbury Avenue first and always swerving the shops selling the ubiquitous post-war grey or black suits, lusting instead after the likes of a bottle-green mohair suit with a paisley lining.

  In May 2013 I met Andrew in Liverpool and, with some encouragement, he reminisced about his younger days. He’s always made and taken great opportunities. Six months after leaving school he was working at Bazaar with Mary Quant. In October 1959 Ronnie Scott opened a venue in a basement at 39 Gerrard Street; Andrew Loog Oldham wanted in, so he called Ronnie Scott’s partner at the club, Pete King. Andrew asked for work and got it.

  Ronnie Scott’s held just a hundred people in a very cramped room – so cramped it was easier to serve drinks at the tables than to ask people to walk to the bar. Andrew Loog Oldham became the club’s first waiter, working at Ronnie Scott’s from seven till midnight throughout the week and till 1 a.m on Saturdays. Licensing regulations insisted they had to provide food, which was one of Andrew’s duties. ‘There was a Pakistani restaurant and we didn’t have a food licence so we’d take orders and I’d get the food and bring it back and I also hung the coats.’

  A working compromise was found to the Musicians’ Union ban on visiting jazz musicians initiated in the mid-1930s, in the form of an exchange arrangement with the American Federation of Musicians, so Ronnie Scott was able to host bebop artists from America, many visiting the UK for the first time. British jazz musicians and fans were hungry to hear the black American musicians. ‘It was a public service, putting on those American acts, it was incredible,’ says Andrew, recalling particularly performances by Zoot Sims. Another act that made an impression on him was Harold McNair, the super-cool flute player. He’d imagined a life sound-tracked by Miles Davis, and there he was, at midnight, in a jazz club. It was really happening: ‘Before that, everything was second-hand. Zoot Sims, man, it was like getting on a plane, it allowed you to be in America.’