Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Merseybeat, flashing eyes, a leg-over

  Noddy Holder is sitting with me discussing the venues he played when he was in Slade, and before; when he was playing local gigs around the West Midlands. He’d just seen a photo of Slade at their height – all four of them: Dave Hill, Jim Lea, Don Powell, and Noddy – taken by Harry Goodwin in the aftermath of a show at Belle Vue in Manchester in April 1975; they’re pictured surrounded by trashed seats.

  In the first three years of the 1970s most Slade singles would end up at Number One and most Slade tours would involve noise and chaos, mass singalongs from thousands of lads (‘headcases, a lot of them’ says Noddy, fondly) and screaming girls, and those broken seats. They were banned from some venues, but loved it, encouraging the audience, feeding the frenzy. Noddy remembers audiences foot-stamping during ‘Get Down and Get With It’ on the verge of bringing down balconies. ‘It was like mayhem when the gig finished and the hall emptied, the seats were wrecked. We paid fortunes in insurance for venue repair. Our insurance bill was phenomenal.’

  Slade were rowdy but showbiz too. They wanted their live shows to be exciting and unforgettable. In performance, including on TV of course, they’d look for outlandish outfits and headgear to wear. Dave Hill was always eccentrically dressed. Before Slade he wore a cloak around town. Noddy shakes his head. ‘I mean, wearing a cloak round Wolverhampton in 1966? Everyone was, “Look at that fella!” Whereas Jim, Jim hated all the dressing up, hated it with a vengeance.’

  Noddy’s pièce de résistance was a hat made of mirrors. His mirror hat is considered such a sight of significant historical interest that the British Music Experience at the O2 requested to exhibit it, but Noddy said no, it’s too precious. ‘The effect live was stunning,’ he explains. ‘We had to black out the whole arena and then we had a pencil beam but the mirrors were big, a good few inches across, so it was like a mirrorball but a massive mirrorball and the beams would come off and they’d be proper beams, like spotlights, and I could light the audience up, and when the spotlight hit them they’d go mad.’

  When I take him back to his roots, to the days when music became his life, we spend most of the time talking about Mary Regan (known as Ma Regan), who ran a circuit of venues in the West Midlands. Originally from Ireland, Mary and her husband Joe had arrived in the area before the war and opened tea shops in the Birmingham area. They then began acquiring dance halls, including a former snooker hall in King’s Heath (which they named the Ritz) and two venues both called the Plaza – one in Handsworth (in the old Rookery Picture House cinema) and one in a cinema on Halesowen Road in the centre of Old Hill. Old Hill is to the west of Birmingham and to the south of Wolverhampton, deep in that area of the West Midlands known as the Black Country. The Regans opened the Old Hill Plaza as a live music venue in 1962.

  I’d heard some of the story behind the Cavern and the rise of the Beatles, and the importance of the ‘Crawdaddy’ in the case of the Rolling Stones, but I hadn’t heard Ma Regan’s name. The more Noddy told me, the more I appreciated her role in the first half of the 1960s, a very fertile period for British music, and an era when teenage consumers were becoming a major cultural and economic force; that rising demand for record players, personal radios, fashions, nights out.

  In this chapter we’ll trace the electrifying effect of the rise of the Beatles, the role of venues like Ma Regan’s and the Club A Go Go in Newcastle, the proliferation of beat groups, and also those inspired by a deeper interest in rhythm & blues like the Rolling Stones and the Animals. And we’ll examine the effect of all this activity beyond Britain, and beyond music.

  Noddy talks about some of the other people for whom Ma Regan’s venues were a launchpad for later success, people who went on to be in the Move, the Electric Light Orchestra, the Moody Blues, Black Sabbath, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and Led Zeppelin. It turns out Robert Plant even had a spell DJing at one of Ma Regan’s venues – the Plaza in Old Hill. And the Plaza in Old Hill was where he met John Bonham.

  The Black Country in the early 1960s was an area of high employment; local factories were busy and always recruiting apprentices. One such place was Birmingham Sound Reproducers, whose headquarters were at the Monarch Works in Powke Lane, Old Hill, half a mile from the Plaza. BSR had 2,500 employees making budget amplification equipment, turntables and component parts for other companies to use in their products, including the famous mega-selling Dansette record player.

  As evident from the flappers and the trad-jazzers, for example, it’s something of a misrepresentation to suggest that before the 1960s the young weren’t identifiable or economically active, with their own music, venues and fashions. Conflict between the generations is age-old. However, what can be generally agreed is that the period between the early 1950s and the middle of the 1960s witnessed a shift in power in that conflict, partly through weight of numbers, and partly because the booming Western economies created full employment and put money in the pockets of teenagers.

  The youth of the early 1960s were hungry for entertainment, and for something other than the music their parents liked. Around the country teenagers, mostly lads, hundreds in every city, dozens in every town, were forming bands. They’d been energised by rock & roll and some, though not all, had been through a skiffle phase, but that had lost its novelty factor. Former skiffle bands like the Quarry Men had dropped the washboard and banjo and recruited a drummer. Many of the groups were competent, almost all were derivative, but such was the demand even those who were never going to breach the charts could fill their diaries with live appearances.

  In our current era there’s been something of a resurgence in live music, but nothing compares to the first half of the 1960s. Britain’s first and most successful rock generation performed relentlessly, on the road and at their key residencies; the Beatles at the Cavern, the Rolling Stones at the Crawdaddy and the Animals at the Club A Go Go. At their residency, or on tour, it wasn’t unusual for bands to play two or more engagements per evening, with a matinee thrown in for good measure. Bands would start by playing clubs, pub and hotel function rooms, cricket clubs and so on, and then perhaps move up to gigs in ballrooms and theatres. Travelling into the city centre wasn’t always possible or desirable; people tended to be happy to work and play close to home, family members lived in your locality, you worked close to home – perhaps in the local factory – and you frequented one of the local pubs. Down the road was a cinema and a dance hall.

  In among this sense of tight-knit communities, tiny scenes developed based in town or neighbourhood venues, anywhere a mile from a factory or a workshop or warehouse, anywhere with a few streets. Imagine being sixteen or seventeen and after work grabbing something to eat and then walking half a mile to the Old Hill Plaza and queuing with 400 other lucky ticket holders and seeing ‘Little’ Stevie Wonder, the Who, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. Going somewhere local that could bring life to your world and your world to life.

  In addition, for the young would-be musicians, the foundations for dozens of successful careers in music were laid in these neighbourhood venues. It’s imperative for a band to have somewhere they can perform, somewhere their friends can get a bus to. It gives them a chance to develop a sound and build an audience. If you were a young lad living in Stourbridge, Dudley or Walsall, and you had the talent and worked your backside off, then you might get a break – the Plaza Old Hill might be a launchpad.

  Of all the musicians Noddy worked with or bumped into on the Ma Regan circuit, only a small minority made a career from music, but the apprenticeship was invaluable; those that made it went far, and in all directions. Noddy was telling me about all the bands he was in before Slade, in and around Walsall and the Black Country. The young Neville Holder had enjoyed a musical upbringing – his mother played the violin and his father, a window-cleaner, liked to sing in local pubs – and as a teenager played in bands including the Phantoms, the Memphis Cutouts and Steve Brett & the Mavericks. He’d been in seve
ral bands before he took lead vocals; initially he was a guitarist. The bass player in an early line-up of Steve Brett & the Mavericks was Dave Holland, who ended up with a hugely successful jazz career, playing alongside Stan Getz and Chick Corea and appearing on Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew album.

  Before Dave Hill and Don Powell joined Noddy in Slade, they were part of the Vendors, who were booked regularly by Ma Regan, and then they formed the ’N Betweens and got themselves a residency playing every Monday evening at the Old Hill Plaza. Even when Slade got together, their first gigs were many, various and tiny, but from the start always showbiz and always value for money. They had a regular gig in a community centre in Walsall on Sunday nights that they dubbed ‘The Sunday Service’, and Noddy would go onstage dressed as a vicar. He tries to remember the name of the venue (he thinks it was Aldridge Community Centre), but even many of the ones he can remember have long since disappeared. It was a long time ago and Old Hill seems a long way away. We’re ordering off a menu at the Grill on New York Street in Manchester and Noddy decides he might have ostrich. The young waiter asks how he’d like it. ‘Medium,’ says Noddy. He looks at me and says, ‘I guess that’s how you have ostrich, isn’t it?’

  It’s worth reminding ourselves that wherever British rock music ends up – multimillionaires with multiple homes (Paul McCartney with $800m stashed away and Mick Jagger $305m), gigs for royal jubilees, award ceremonies, champagne, sponsors’ logos, a table at the Brits, or the singer from Slade ordering ostrich in a relatively fancy Manchester restaurant – it was founded on a network of mildewed venues, beat clubs, roughly furnished function rooms, grim basements and grotty cellars.

  Few were grottier than the Cavern, Mathew Street, Liverpool. Paul McCartney’s father offered a ton of encouragement to his son, but he was never a fan of the Cavern. ‘You should be paid danger money to go down there,’ he told Paul.

  The Beatles played the Cavern 292 times; the first occasion was in February 1961, well over three years after the Quarry Men’s debut. By the time of their last show at the venue, in August 1963, they were pop stars. The Cavern is where they honed their talent and built a fan base. Gerry Marsden, of Gerry and the Pacemakers, said the place ‘stank of disinfectant and stale onions and was hot, sweaty and oppressive’. One of the reasons Alan Sytner sold the place was that he baulked at the cost of maintaining it, knowing that the most pressing refurbishment was to improve the ‘ventilation system’. Also, he’d run out of money. ‘I had terrible advice,’ he later said. ‘There wasn’t anyone telling me not to buy another sports car or go to Paris.’

  When Sytner sold the club in 1959 there was no sense that the history of the Beatles and the Cavern would be so entwined. Up to the end of 1961, in fact, the band was most closely associated with the Casbah – a coffee bar and music venue run along similar lines to the Jacaranda but out of the city centre, spread through several basement rooms in a large Victorian house in West Derby. The Quarry Men featured on the Casbah’s opening-night bill on 29 August 1959, and Paul McCartney and John Lennon got involved setting up the venue for its opening, painting walls and ceilings to brighten up the basement. The group also had a brief Saturday residency, playing for £3 a night. Four decades later, looking back, McCartney wanted credit to go the Casbah. ‘People know about the Cavern, but the Casbah was the place where all that started. We looked upon it as our personal club.’

  The Casbah was founded and run by Mona Best as a venue for local music-loving teenagers (her son, Pete, was the drummer in a group called the Blackjacks). She knocked down dividing walls, rigged up a Dansette and showcased live music. There were soft drinks and coffee available. In addition to the Quarry Men, the Blackjacks also performed there regularly, as did Cass & the Cassanovas (who later became the Big Three).

  As with so many important venues, the Casbah developed as somewhere to hang out. It wasn’t just about the music or the live events, it was a space that all kinds of budding artists and interesting young folk gravitated towards, felt at home and met up in, plotted and planned. It was there that John Lennon and Paul McCartney persuaded Stuart Sutcliffe to play bass in the group one evening. Sutcliffe couldn’t play bass but the logic was irresistible: he’d won £65 in an art competition so he could afford to buy one, he looked cool, and he was John’s best friend. ‘We were sitting with a cup of cappuccino trying to persuade Stuart to get this bass,’ McCartney later recalled. ‘He said it was a painting prize and he was supposed to buy canvases with the money and anyway he couldn’t play. We said we’d teach him and it was at the Casbah that we actually talked him into it.’

  During the first months of the Casbah, the Quarry Men metamorphosed into the Silver Beatles, and Allan Williams from the Jacaranda set them up with gigs in Hamburg. Pete Best, perfectly placed, became the band’s new drummer. The fledgling Beatles had their first extended stay in Hamburg in the second half of 1960 with residencies at the Indra and the Kaiserkeller. While there, they worked hard and played hard on a diet of youthful enthusiasm and Preludin, a legal amphetamine they were able to buy at the chemist.

  One of the non-chemical factors that gave them energy and motivation, as with other groups who loved rock & roll and started out playing skiffle, was their disdain for the light entertainment passing for youth culture in Britain at the time. On returning from their first visit to Hamburg, they celebrated with a pre-Christmas gig at the Casbah, and a hand-drawn poster was produced advertising the ‘fabulous’ Beatles, helpfully describing them as a ‘rock combo’. Another phrase which was just coming in vogue and might have been used by Mona Best was ‘Big Beat’, then being applied to post-skiffle bands like the Beatles, who had lost their banjos and gained a drummer – home-grown bands, usually four lads with a grounding in rock & roll who wanted to avoid the smoothed-out crooner stylings of Marty Wilde, Adam Faith and friends. It was this strong beat their music carried which inspired the origin of the description ‘Big Beat’ – later shortened to ‘beat’ – rather than any connection with beatniks or beat poetry. It might be Johnny Burnette-style rockabilly, Chuck Berry covers, or versions of pop hits, but what was always of paramount importance was that the ‘beat groups’ played music you could dance to.

  If there’s one man responsible for the close connection between the Beatles and the Cavern it’s not Alan Sytner, it’s Bob Wooler, who’d been working alongside Allan Williams in various ventures. Williams opened the Top Ten Club on Soho Street, promising lots of work to Wooler, but the venue was burned down after just six days so he went back to hanging around the Jacaranda, and that’s where he met the Beatles. He’d not heard them play but promised to do what he could to get them some gigs, the first with promoter Brian Kelly at Litherland Town Hall. Wooler later recalled doing the deal with Kelly. ‘I rang him up from the Jacaranda. I asked for eight pounds for them. Kelly offered four; we settled on six.’

  Wooler attended the Litherland show, and instantly appreciated the Beatles weren’t as flimsy as the other bands on the local circuit. It was their first major gig outside the in-crowd coffee bars of Liverpool and the band made a real impact, dressed differently from all the other groups, head-to-toe in black, including leather jackets. The local girls thought they might be German, having heard the group had just arrived from Hamburg. It’s this Litherland Town Hall gig that John Lennon later identified as a breakthrough moment. ‘We stood there being cheered for the first time. This was when we began to think that we were good,’ he later said. ‘It was only back in Liverpool that we realised the difference and saw what had happened to us while everyone else was playing Cliff Richard shit. Mind you, seventy per cent of the audience thought we were German, but we didn’t care about that. Even in Liverpool, people didn’t know we were from Liverpool. They thought we were from Hamburg. They said, “Christ, they speak good English!” which we did, of course, being English.’

  The Cavern’s new owner, Ray McFall, was building a new audience. Not jazz, not skiffle, not rock & roll – beat groups. At the C
avern on 25 May 1960 the first evening advertised as a ‘Beat Night’ was held, and the bill that evening included Rory Storm & the Hurricanes (their line-up included drummer Ringo Starr). By the end of that year Beat Nights and lunchtime sessions were a fixture at the club, and McFall had recruited Bob Wooler to organise the shows and act as the club’s disc jockey and compere. It wasn’t long before the Beatles were installed as a resident band.

  Another ingredient in the rise of the Beatles was their manager, Brian Epstein. Alerted to their rising reputation by Bill Harry, the man behind the magazine Merseybeat, Epstein first set foot in the Cavern on 9 November 1961 to see the Beatles perform. He considered them a bit scruffy. Being dressed in black could be an obstacle to commercial success, he decided, so he facilitated a change that saw them ditch the leather jackets and become lovable mop-tops.

  Brian Epstein was ambitious, astute and happy for his band to sacrifice a bit of credibility in order to reach the public eye. If you had a wholesome image then you pleased crowds, promoters and venues and you earned cash. That’s just how things were. Noddy recalls 1964 and his time in the Memphis Cutouts, all clean-cut, with a big repertoire of snappy cover versions and a wardrobe of matching suits. The Memphis Cutouts got gigs, including plenty of well-paid wedding engagements, and being attired in matching royal-blue coats with black velvet trimmings was a definite plus point. When one of the other Cutouts, ‘Bern’ Burnell, had some of his gear stolen backstage at Wolverhampton Civic Hall, losing the coat was traumatic. Bern was bereft, telling the local paper, ‘I don’t mind somebody hiding it as a joke, but now it’s past that. I need it for the engagements we’ve got lined up and I can’t get another in time.’