Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  Half a mile away, the Marquee began life in the basement of the Academy Picture House at 195 Oxford Street. The original plan of the owner, George Hoellering, was to run a ballroom with a circus-themed decor, complete with green, red and white marquee-style awnings. Despite the fancy furnishing, a Steinway piano and an espresso coffee lounge, Hoellering couldn’t attract an audience, so pianist Dill Jones and his manager Peter Burman took over the programming at weekends. They presented their first ‘Jazz at the Marquee’ event in January 1958. Despite their boast that at the Marquee you could ‘meet the stars at the most modern jazz rendezvous in the world’, Jones and Burman also struggled to fill the venue.

  Soon, Harold Pendleton was called in and offered the space. Pendleton, who ran the National Jazz Federation, saw the location of the Marquee as a positive: it was halfway between Humphrey Lyttelton’s club at 100 Oxford Street, and the Flamingo on Wardour Street. At 100 Oxford Street you’d expect to hear trad, at the Flamingo modern jazz – so, as befitting the location, Pendleton decided to programme both.

  With a number of small scenes and music evolving, some venues stuck to purist and niche audiences, while others opened up their programme. Even at the 2i’s, for example, skiffle and jazz co-existed for a year or two. It was the same at the Cavern in Liverpool: jazz and skiffle were the club’s mainstays in the first years. Two acts on the opening night of the Cavern on 16 January 1957 were local, proven jazz outfits (including the Merseysippi Jazz Band). The other act was the Coney Island Skiffle Group who, needless to say, were not young New Yorkers from Coney Island.

  One of the most famous music venues in our history, the Cavern, was opened by Alan Sytner, partly inspired by clubs in Paris. Sytner was in his early twenties, but he’d already been to Paris and tasted the nightlife of the Quartier Latin, and set his heart on opening a jazz club in his home town along the lines of Le Caveau on Rue de la Huchette. His father, a local GP, put up some cash and a local estate agent showed them potential premises including an old cellar that had been used as an air-raid shelter in the basement of a warehouse on Mathew Street. Even the narrow streets suggested something of the ambience of Paris to young Alan and, echoing Le Caveau in its name, the Cavern was born.

  The Cavern continued to offer nights playing both traditional and modern jazz and skiffle, but Sytner banned rock & roll from the venue. Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis had both had Number One singles by mid-1958 but in general rock & roll was associated with scruffs and teddy boys, and few club owners wanted a clientele of that kind.

  On 7 August 1957 the Quarry Men were booked to play a short skiffle set between two jazz bands at the Cavern. It was a quiet Wednesday; there was no huge fanfare. The Quarry Men at the time included Pete Shotton, Len Garry and Colin Hanton, and one young man who would go on to star in the Beatles – John Lennon. In defiance of Sytner’s ban on rock & roll, midway through their set Lennon persuaded the rest of the band to play Elvis Presley’s ‘Don’t Be Cruel’. Although this irked the club owner, the band was booked again, and on this occasion Paul McCartney was part of the Quarry Men. In the middle of 1958 they stopped performing with a banjo and a tea-chest bass and put some proper distance between themselves and the skiffle scene, although it would be 1960 before they had a regular drummer, Pete Best, by which time the Quarry Men had become the Beatles.

  Over in Newcastle, Eric Burdon, John Steel and Alan Price, now in thrall to the Joe Turner album The Boss of the Blues, were leaving pure jazz behind and getting deeper into rhythm & blues. As the Kansas City Five they took some gigs at the New Orleans Club and the Downbeat, but in May 1962 Alan Price went missing and threw in his lot with the Kontors alongside Chas Chandler. Eventually, out of all the chopping, changing, joining and leaving, the Animals would emerge.

  Skiffle triggered deeper interest in rhythm & blues (which isn’t surprising given that ‘Rock Island Line’ had been a reworking of a Lead Belly song) but also in American folk music (a number of songs Woody Guthrie wrote or played, including ‘Grand Coulee Dam’, were skiffle standards). Interest in down-home, non-glitzy folk and work-songs with American roots was marked by an increase in folk clubs, often held in pub and function rooms. Myra Abbott initiated the Hoy at Anchor folk club in Southend: ‘Its main ethos was uncommercial music – we wanted to provide an alternative,’ she said.

  In this era Ewan MacColl began hosting ‘Blues & Ballads’ events. Some skiffle groups transformed into folk groups, including the Ian Campbell Folk Group (originally the Clarion Skiffle Group), who opened their ‘Jug o’Punch’ folk club at Digbeth Civic Hall in Birmingham and played regularly at the Crown pub on Station Street (where they recorded their debut album). Dave Swarbrick was a member of the group in its early days (he later featured in Fairport Convention). Both guitarist Spencer Davis and pianist Christine Perfect also appeared with Ian Campbell’s group before going on to enjoy illustrious careers. In Edinburgh, among the plethora of folk events was a Thursday folk club at the Crown Bar run by various hands, including Bert Jansch, Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer, which helped develop their later careers in Pentangle (Jansch) and the Incredible String Band (Williamson and Palmer).

  The Troubadour was a coffee house with a cellar on Old Brompton Road in Earls Court that became one of the most significant venues during the British folk revival of the late 1950s. When Bob Dylan first visited England in late December 1962 he went out in London looking for the kind of scene analogous to that in Greenwich Village. Pete Seeger suggested he track down Anthea Joseph, who ran events at the Troubadour, which he did. One evening he played there with Richard Farina and Martin Carthy, a simple set-up; no microphones, no lights, no stage. He also hung out at the King & Queen, behind Goodge Street station, where he sang three songs at the invitation of Carthy. On his return to the States he wasn’t particularly effusive about his time in London, complaining it was cold, but he did find at least one thing to report: ‘The English can do the twist by moving only one leg,’ he told an interviewer.

  Some of the demand for alternatives to the established music venues in the 1950s came from the West Indian community. The dominant force were the Jamaicans, who’d brought with them various customs, including the music they’d enjoyed in the Caribbean and the notion of sound systems to deliver that music. Sound systems had emerged in Jamaica in the late 1940s; each would invariably include a record selector, an MC and technicians to transport and set up big box speakers. They were a team – tight-knit, community or family-run enterprises that took the music to the people, playing outdoors or at venues, often in competition with other sounds.

  Setting up a sound system outdoors wasn’t such an attractive idea in cold, rainy Britain, but they established a presence at house parties (variously known as ‘blues’ or ‘shebeens’), church halls and community centres. These first sounds in Britain would be playing Fats Domino, Jimmy Reed and calypso, as they did back home, helping keep connections and Jamaican identity strong. Two aspects of this activity need underlining: the spirit of self-organisation inherent in sound-system culture, and that sound systems were among the first examples of DJs playing vinyl to provide the entertainment on a night out. Sound-system operator Duke Vin (real name Vincent Forbes) later explained his motivation: ‘I couldn’t find nowhere for a dance. The country was dead. So I started my own system. People started using basements in houses that were packed till morning.’

  That sound systems existed outside mainstream music venues was out of necessity as much as desire. Black people faced discrimination in housing and jobs, and in clubs. There were plenty of city-centre venues that would deny black people entry to a club based solely on their colour. Back in 1929, the Locarno in Streatham was involved in controversy when the proprietor, H.S. Kingdon, imposed a colour bar. ‘Our attitude is this. We do not believe in mixing water with wine or black with white. The Locarno Dance Hall is for white people only.’

  There’s an uncomfortable history here, but it’s worth noting that Mr Kingdon faced a backlash f
rom customers appalled at his decision. The local newspaper was inundated with letters critical of him and the Locarno dropped the door policy. Discrimination of this sort was not illegal, and it wouldn’t be until the 1965 Race Relations Act outlawed operating a colour bar in a pub or club. Until then, it’s hard to know exactly how many clubs operated an implicit or explicit colour bar, but a number of cases became high profile, including that of the Scala in Wolverhampton in 1958, where the proprietor Michael Wade refused admission to black men. Despite protests to the licensing authorities the premises had its licence renewed. It wasn’t until a change of ownership that the colour bar at the Scala was lifted.

  By this time sound systems had moved into certain specific clubs (there were said to be several dozen basement clubs run by West Indians in south London alone). They were also conspicuous at public sound clashes, when the sound systems would often play in competition with each other, as happened in Jamaica. ‘The Big Five Night’ was a promotion at Lambeth Town Hall in November 1957, advertised as featuring ‘the Five Greatest Sounding Systems battling for the 1957 Club Championship of Sound and Record’. Vincent ‘Duke Vin’ Forbes triumphed: his sound system had an unrivalled reputation, as a selector he knew how to wow a crowd.

  Self-organisation in the Afro-Caribbean community extended to other activities at the end of the 1950s, with a Caribbean Carnival held at St Pancras Town Hall in January 1959. For the next few years it alternated between the Seymour Hall (at Marble Arch) and the Lyceum, and from 1965 onwards Carnival was situated in Notting Hill.

  In the late 1950s sound systems weren’t the only vinyl-led nights out in Britain. Some of the programme at rhythm clubs like the one in Newcastle would involve the jazz aficionados gathering to listen to albums. Various entrepreneurs were also beginning to look into importing the idea of record hops from America, where DJs (particularly Alan Freed, and others with a following on the radio) could attract hundreds of kids to live roadshows, playing records in venues and sports halls. A version of these record hops was already happening in Yorkshire, under the auspices of Jimmy Savile.

  In 1944 Savile was declared unfit to be called up into the armed forces, and instead was drafted to work in the mines; during a shift at Waterloo Colliery, he was injured in an accident and it took three years for him to recover. He began hiring venues close to where he lived in Yorkshire, playing dance records on customised gramophones and charging admission whenever and wherever he could get a function room. For decades, when people got dressed up and went out they had danced to a live band and there were plenty of people sceptical that the idea of people dancing to records would catch on. But hard work, commercial nous and a box of mid-tempo 78s by the likes of Joe Loss, Lee Dorsey and Jack Teagarden established Savile as a successful operator of these prototype mobile discos.

  The old-style variety theatres that had evolved out of the music hall were continuing to lose customers, some of them becoming bingo halls. TV was a cheaper source of live entertainment and the younger generation had more exciting nightlife options. Some variety theatre managers, like Harry Joseph at the City Varieties in Leeds, found a small but loyal audience for strippers and revues like Who Goes Bare? but, with only a few exceptions, variety theatres were in a bad way by the end of the 1950s. Moss Empires and other businesses did their best to chase the market. In August 1956, the Rockets – a group formed by the former Club Eleven bebopper Tony Crombie – was signed for a tour of variety venues, and described as ‘the first full-time rock & roll outfit in the country’.

  A reviewer who attended a gig by the Rockets at the Sunderland Empire reported in the Sunderland Echo: ‘I enjoy good jazz, and I can tap my feet to a pulsating rhythm as well as most, but I found the renderings of Mr Crombie’s Rockets to be nothing more than clangourous, ear-splitting uproar.’ Rock & roll, of course, was on its way to becoming louder still. We can only hope that when Black Sabbath played at the Bay Hotel in Sunderland in 1969 the newspaper sent a less fragile reporter.

  Over in Newcastle, important names were on the move. John Walters, the trumpet player for the in-house band at the New Orleans Jazz Club, later became a producer on John Peel’s radio show. Bryan Ferry moved on from hanging out at the New Orleans Jazz Club to frequenting the Club A Go Go. He’d also attend art school, where exposure to art and ideas, together with his formative experiences at the clubs, fed into his dream of finding a role on the music scene. Malcolm Cecil went on to play with some music greats, including sessions on the Stevie Wonder albums Talking Book and Innervisions. He’d left Newcastle in the early 1960s and joined Alexis Korner’s Blues Inc., which also featured harmonica player Cyril Davies. Davies and Korner had both moved from skiffle into blues, and together ran the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club, a venue that after sparsely attended first months went on to attract the likes of Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim.

  Between 1956 and 1962 – those years between the first UK hit for Elvis Presley and the first hit for the Beatles – groups were getting together at the grass roots, emerging, hungry, playing their first gigs; also, older musicians and fans of various genres self-organising, offered plenty of alternative choices in live music venues, certainly in Britain’s larger conurbations. Alternative ways of performing live, consuming music and going out dancing to music had been established, a drift away from big bands playing sweet swing or Dixielanders playing to serious, seated audiences. Coffee bar dance clubs reinforced and normalised the change that Cy Laurie’s allies helped pioneer. It was those jazz clubs that had begun to flourish in the early 1950s that became a model for going out: basement clubs, the music cranked up really high, a sense of nonconformist rebellion. When jazz had long lost its allure, later generations had new excitements but would continue to appropriate and appreciate raucous, underlit cellars.

  What’s striking about the late 1950s is the range of venues. Groups had plenty of places to play: function rooms, dance halls, youth clubs, swimming baths and coffee bars. In Sheffield, bands like Ricky & the Rebels would play all these sorts of venues, as well as wedding receptions and private functions. In addition, on Sunday nights they’d often play at one of a number of cinemas around Attercliffe: the Regal, the Plaza, the Adelphi or the Globe.

  Elsewhere in Sheffield, Club 60 was formed by Terry Thornton, a musician who, among other things, tried to promote rock & roll at City Hall, only for the council to deny him use of the venue. He’d been working on a plan to create a space for young, adventurous music lovers, which would be part nightclub and part jazz club, but where you might also expect arty-type poetry. In the spirit of the times, he opted to try to make something happen out of nothing, opening Club 60 in an old pub cellar, which he refurbished with the help of local art students and music fans. It was billed as ‘The local jazz club with the continental atmosphere’. Sheffield’s citizens grew more accustomed to the sight of teenagers in blue jeans.

  Nationwide, more coffee bars turned into coffee dance clubs. In Manchester the Left Wing on Brazennose Street described itself in advertising material as a ‘beatnik-type’ coffee bar promising reduced-rate admission for ‘feminine-type cats’. It would later house the Twisted Wheel club, with Roger Eagle installed as the club’s DJ. That was in 1963, by which time disc-only nights and DJs were becoming an accepted part of British nightlife – although the trend was causing some consternation in the established nightlife industry. The Association of Ballrooms, for example, was panicking. Melody Maker on 6 June 1959 announced the news that ‘Bosses of Britain’s ballrooms plan to probe the wave of disc hops which are springing up all over the country,’ explaining that, ‘These record sessions, often run in village halls, teenage clubs and civic centres, have already put some dance proprietors out of business.’

  In the early 1960s both Ronnie Scott’s and the Marquee would move to new premises. Terry Thornton would go on to establish one of Sheffield’s most celebrated clubs, the Esquire. Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner promoted a weekly blues night at the Ealing Jazz Club, which playe
d a part in the early days of the Rolling Stones. Lord Woodbine opened a number of semi-legal clubs, including the New Cabaret Artists Club on Upper Parliament Street, Liverpool, where an early line-up of the Beatles (John, Paul, George and Stu) played, backing Janice, a Mancunian stripper. And the 100 Club survived.

  On 10 June 2007 the 100 Club staged George Melly’s last ever gig. The eighty-year-old singer was dying of lung cancer and suffering badly with emphysema. His wife called up Jeff Horton and said George knew he was close to dying and he wanted one last hurrah at the 100 Club. ‘How long’s he got?’ asked Jeff. ‘He could be dead any day now,’ was the reply, which was a problem, as Jeff didn’t have any spare dates in the diary for at least three weeks. Still, a gig was agreed and George kept going and kept going. A few days before the show his wife called Jeff again, not with bad news but just to let him know what George was saying: that his wish was that he would drop dead on stage on the night. Jeff was perturbed: ‘I said, “Well, that might be great for George but I really hope it doesn’t happen”.’

  That evening, when George Melly arrived at the club in his wheelchair, he was accompanied by several medical staff and Jeff’s office resembled a field hospital, complete with drips and other supplies. ‘He was amazing,’ says Jeff. ‘The smoking ban was on but we still let him have a smoke on stage. Even though he was so ill, he pulled this thing off absolutely brilliantly. I think that show and the anticipation of it prolonged his life a little, as I don’t think he died until about three or four weeks after.’

  The BBC was there, filming the event, and the footage includes George being lifted on and off the stage in his wheelchair. The stage Louis Armstrong, the Who, the Sex Pistols, the White Stripes and Siouxsie and the Banshees have performed on. The stage George Melly didn’t die on.