Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  With Epstein installed as the Beatles’ manager, in addition to adjustments to the band’s wardrobe renewed attempts were made to find them gigs. The right kind of gigs, too; not just to earn some sort of wage, but to boost their public profile and, when the time came, to help sell records. Some of their shows, going back to when they were the Silver Beatles, were far from profile-building. In May 1960 they’d gone up to Scotland on a short tour, making their Scottish debut at the town hall in Alloa, but only as the backing band for Johnny Gentle. The gigs had been organised by impresario Larry Parnes, and also featured Alex Harvey and His Big Beat Band.

  At a residency like the one the Beatles had at the Cavern, you could hope to count on the support of friends, friends of friends, regulars and locals, and then you’d look to take the next step: to ballrooms and theatres and to move beyond the locality. This wasn’t always possible, if there was no demand and no national record release. But Brian Epstein promised the Beatles a record deal and more national gigs. He sent them to play all over the country, often to small or unimpressed crowds. An historic building dating back to the 1830s, the Subscription Rooms were run by Stroud Urban District Council, who booked the Beatles to play there on 31 March 1962. It was so bad it was memorable. ‘Hardly anyone showed up for a start, which was not wonderful,’ Paul McCartney later said of the event. ‘A group of teddy boys started throwing coins and we ended up picking them up.’

  A few months later the Beatles recruited a new drummer, Ringo Starr, from Rory Storm & the Hurricanes. The classic John, Paul, George and Ringo line-up played their first show together on 18 August 1962 at the Hulme Hall in Port Sunlight. Audiences were growing; 500 people attended. Port Sunlight on the Wirral peninsula is a small town built by Lever Brothers to accommodate workers in its soap factory, and is relatively easily accessible from Liverpool. However, the band’s fanbase was still localised, and when their single ‘Love Me Do’ was released in early October 1962 it crawled up the charts to Number 17 in the hit parade.

  On 11 January 1963 the Beatles journeyed to the Black Country, after a lunchtime set at the Cavern, having been booked for two gigs in one evening; both shows were presented by Mary Regan. Once Ma Regan had established a small circuit of venues, she’d book bands to play two, sometimes three, of them on the same night. Local bands or touring bands, she worked them all hard. When the Beatles were booked at the Old Hill Plaza, they’d been scheduled to also appear at the Ritz in King’s Heath, but January 1963 was in the middle of the coldest winter for decades and the band were unable to make the eleven-mile journey across Birmingham to the venue so the gig was rescheduled for 15 February. (That same week saw them at the Azena Ballroom, Sheffield, at a gig organised by a young Sheffield lad, Peter Stringfellow. Stringfellow had just served a short prison sentence for selling stolen carpets and was at the beginning of his career as a successful nightclub promoter and owner.)

  The Old Hill Plaza’s role in music history is well hidden. It’s safe to say that, in comparison to Liverpool, Old Hill’s tourist infrastructure is somewhat underdeveloped. The glitterati generally give this part of the Black Country a swerve. In 1963 Old Hill was a world away from the centre of any kind of media interest, aside maybe from the local evening paper, the Express & Star.

  The Black Country was hard at work helping to create foundations for the country’s wealth, just as it had been for a hundred years or more. The area’s engineering traditions, all banging noise and hard graft, consisted of dozens of small factories, forges and workshops making chains, hooks, bolts, pressings and specialist items of metalwork. Factory owners could make a few bob making sheet metal, iron chains and nails, and many of the local musicians worked in the industry, including a young man called Tony Iommi, the guitarist with the Rockin’ Chevrolets, a band you’d see dressed in matching red lamé suits and playing regularly on the Ma Regan circuit.

  At first glance, the Black Country probably looked very much like a man’s world, but Ma Regan reigned in an area where female entrepreneurs were not unknown among all this metal-bashing. In the mid-nineteenth century, Eliza Tinsley founded one of the most lucrative factories in Britain in the area, employing around 4,000 people making nails, rivets, chains and anchors. It’s also worth pointing out that in this part of the world – as in other working-class areas of the country – in most households the wives controlled the purse strings. They’d be given any pay packets earned in the family and distribute pocket money to the men. Hard-working and trusted, Ma Regan took an active part in the club, picking the bands and doing the deals. Husband Joe was a more than competent compere and would dress in an evening suit with a black bow tie and make sure the bands got on and off the stage at the set times and introduce them from the stage in his lilting Irish accent.

  For bands operating locally they considered it a big step if they could impress Ma Regan. She’d hold auditions and pick only the best bands. It wasn’t just a chance to play with a band like the Beatles, or to be part of a big Saturday night event; even a spot on a Monday night was coveted, if you could oust the ’N Betweens. Every year there was a Big Beat Contest at the Wolverhampton Gaumont and the grand prize for winning was an audition with Ma Regan.

  Ma Regan didn’t forget the inability of the Beatles to complete January’s engagements exactly as agreed upon, though, and she reminded Brian Epstein a few times that the band now owed her a favour. In the first six months of 1963 the Beatles had released two more top-selling singles and a debut album, and Epstein – probably quite rightly – thought his band had outgrown the likes of Ma Regan. Nevertheless, she called in the favour and on 5 July 1963 the Beatles travelled down from Liverpool to play the Old Hill Plaza again. Also on the bill that evening were two local beat groups, Dane Tempest & the Atoms (winners of a Big Beat contest) and Denny Laine & the Diplomats.

  All these groups, most live groups in fact, were there to move the crowd. If you visited the Old Hill Plaza to see the Beatles you expected to dance. You wouldn’t be there to stand in ranks or politely clap; groups performed, audiences danced. The Beatles zinged through their set, playing numbers like ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘Long Tall Sally’ with both prowess and passion. But they also played their own compositions, including ‘Please Please Me’, ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘I Saw Her Standing There’.

  Regulars at the Plaza Old Hill continued to enjoy the fruits of Ma Regan’s work. A month after the Beatles had played there, the headliners were the Rolling Stones. The gig on 10 August was not only the first visit by the Stones to the Midlands, it was their first headline show outside the Home Counties. As we saw with the Beatles, local venues and a local following were a launchpad. And the very early days of the Stones were focused in the southeast of England.

  For a small contingent of music lovers in the Southeast, although Merseybeat was an improvement on Marty Wilde and Adam Faith, it was still a bit clean-cut, and they had started digging deeper, into the roots of rock & roll, into black rhythm & blues, tuning in to the American Forces Network and finding in the likes of John Lee Hooker music that was raw and radical. One of their favourite venues was a hotel ballroom on Eel Pie Island where Arthur Chisnall ran nights, originally featuring the likes of George Melly and Ken Colyer, then moving into r&b, with Long John Baldry, John Mayall and others.

  This crew of young blues aficionados began to frequent the Ealing Jazz Club, situated below a tea shop across the road from Ealing Broadway station, with an entrance down narrow steps into an alley running between the tea shop and a jeweller’s. The Jazz Club had been in existence since January 1959 but began to embrace blues in 1962 when Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner of Blues Incorporated moved on from the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club and set up a regular ‘Rhythm and Blues Night’.

  It’s always said there was something a little bit middle class and nerdy about this crew. But they were absolute enthusiasts, more than a little obsessed with the work of Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker and others. Eric Clapton was among them. For John
Mayall, who later recruited Clapton to the Bluesbreakers, those nights at Ealing Jazz Club were inspiring. ‘Ealing is obviously the foundation and starting point of everything.’

  Chris Dreja, a founder member of the Yardbirds, later recalled: ‘At this stage, it was a very elite clique, a bunch of like-minded, quasi-art-school types. There were only a handful of people – us, the Rolling Stones, a few others. We’d meet up in the cloakroom of the art school, or some damp flat in Ealing, with an import record that someone had found.’

  It was at the Ealing Jazz Club on 7 April 1962 that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards met Brian Jones when Jones was performing with Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated. They soon had a group up and running – Jagger, Richards and Jones, plus Ian Stewart and Dick Taylor – calling themselves the Rollin’ Stones (lifting their name from a Muddy Waters song).

  By September 1962 the Rollin’ Stones had a weekly residency at Ealing Jazz Club, although, like every young act, their line-up was subject to change. In December that year bassist Bill Wyman joined, followed in January 1963 by drummer Charlie Watts. The Stones at this time were ambitious, but less for commercial success than to be able to demonstrate their purist credentials. Bill observed: ‘We weren’t a pop band, we just got together and played the blues music we liked to play. And if we could play in front of a few people who liked it, well, that was the ultimate at that time.’

  The Stones were building a reasonable following via the Marquee, Ealing Jazz Club, Eel Pie Island Hotel and their numerous other London and Surrey club gigs. Interest in rhythm & blues spread beyond a handful of aficionados and a number of industry insiders were championing the Stones, including Giorgio Gomelsky from the Piccadilly Jazz Club. He’d be key to getting them a gig that established them at the forefront of the new wave: at a function room in a pub next to the River Thames, the Station Hotel, Richmond. Gomelsky had started to put live music on at the Station Hotel, which, for his sessions there, he’d renamed the Crawdaddy, taking the name from a Bo Diddley song. One group that had been playing at the Crawdaddy regularly was the Dave Hunt R&B Band, which briefly featured Ray Davies, who later formed the Kinks.

  Gomelsky gave the Rollin’ Stones a first engagement at the Crawdaddy one snowy night, 24 February 1963, on the strength of which they secured a residency. It’s said that the second or third time they played the audience was a hundred, which the band considered amazing (Bill Wyman says that only six people turned up to one of their 1963 shows at Ealing Jazz Club).

  At the Crawdaddy the Stones connected not just with a hip crowd, but a hip crowd mad with excitement. Their response to the Stones was to dance, shout and leap about; within two months they were swinging off the rafters. Brian Jones was the band’s organiser and prime mover in the early days although, once the Crawdaddy took off, Gomelsky became the band’s de facto manager. He loved the band’s attitude: ‘They were playing with guts and conviction. They were playing blues, but they weren’t an academic blues band. The Rolling Stones were more like a rebellion. At the Crawdaddy people just went beserk.’

  Some of the excitement at the venue was generated by its out-of-the-way location and the sense of a secret scene that engendered. Most Sundays through the summer the Stones played a late-afternoon session at Ken Colyer’s club at Studio 51, and then went on to the Station Hotel for their Crawdaddy engagement. Making a success of both led to fees of £25 at Colyer’s and £50 at the Crawdaddy.

  The impact of the Beatles and the Stones wasn’t instant, but then you’d go out one week and you’d see a few boys wearing winklepickers instead of brothel-creepers, ditching turn-ups and favouring drainpipes, and the white girls dressing like they were the Shirelles. And all the while Matt Monro thought he was going to be riding high in the hit parade for the foreseeable future. The week the Stones started at the Crawdaddy, top of the charts was Frank Ifield with Norrie Paramor & His Orchestra with ‘The Wayward Wind’, but eight weeks later the Beatles had their first Number One, ‘From Me to You’.

  It was at the Crawdaddy that the Beatles, invited by Gomelsky, saw the Rolling Stones perform for the first time one Sunday in April 1963. The Fab Four arrived looking every inch the pop stars, dressed in long suede coats and matching hats which they’d picked up on their latest Hamburg trip. The visit triggered a reciprocal invitation. A few days later the Beatles were at the Royal Albert Hall, their first appearance there, performing for the BBC Light Programme ‘Swingin’ Sound ’63’, and they invited the Stones to see the show.

  As we shall see, for Paul McCartney the ‘Swingin’ Sound’ event was notable for non-music reasons. For the Stones, on the other hand, the Beatles made many and various impressions upon them. Keith liked the Beatles because he was interested in their chord sequences. For Mick and Brian, sat on the front row, witnessing the show and with memories of those suede coats still vivid, their desire to become pop stars on a par with the Beatles was cemented.

  Back at their residency at the Crawdaddy, a long way from the showbiz shenanigans onstage and backstage at the Albert Hall, the audience the Stones had built up was growing. Word reached Andrew Loog Oldham who, after Ronnie Scott’s, had set himself up as a PR consultant (Brian Epstein took him on to work on spreading the word about the Beatles). In April 1963 Andrew went to see the Stones at the Crawdaddy. Andrew still has strong memories of his visit to the Station Hotel. He’d been told he’d find the entrance to the concert room at the back of the hotel, so he made his way along a path, down an alley. On his right was the Station Hotel, on his left the railway. Halfway down the pathway he had to manoeuvre past a young couple in the midst of some sort of argument, an attractive couple, he thought, the man ‘thin and waistless’, in Andrew’s words, the woman ‘with brown hair and flashing eyes’. Later he realised he’d chanced upon Mick Jagger and Chrissie Shrimpton. He thinks they were having their first fight, on their first date.

  Andrew tells me that he remembers the Crawdaddy being ‘hokey’, and a long way from the venues, the well-cut clothes and the music he liked – not just a long way from Zoot Sims and Thelonious Monk but even the pop music he liked. ‘I liked Leiber and Stoller, strings, the Drifters, that kind of r&b. I was not a big fan of the kind of r&b the Stones were playing. It was just one step away from skiffle, there was no way I could judge it. I had no criteria. But it was hokey, man. Three hundred middle-class students seizing something just to be different. Remember those student sweaters? Those Sixties films that came later with Hywel Bennett; that’s what the audience looked like.’

  You saw something though?

  ‘I saw everything.’

  Andrew insisted they should drop the apostrophe and name themselves the Rolling Stones. He also took it upon himself to remove Stewart from the band, reasoning that he was ‘too normal’ and that six was too many for a band in any case. With Andrew Loog Oldham hustling on their behalf, things started to move quickly. They secured a deal with Decca Records and, on 7 June 1963, in the middle of a run of gigs at the Scene, their debut single was released – a cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Come On’. However, he’d followed Epstein’s lead and, in order to help sell his band to the mainstream, he’d dressed them in a clean-cut style with matching jackets for their first TV appearance, on Thank Your Lucky Stars. Then he had a change of heart, put the matching jackets back in the wardrobe, and encouraged them to go back to their natural, casual, unkempt image, which he reckoned would make them distinctive and bring them attention.

  On the back of the single they secured a gig at the Outlook Club in Middlesbrough on 13 July, sharing the billing with the Hollies, soon followed by that first headline show out of the Home Counties, on 10 August, booked by Ma Regan. As ever, Ma Regan had a couple of shows lined up for them at the Plaza Handsworth and at the Plaza Old Hill supported by the Redcaps.

  Noddy Holder remembers the Redcaps as one of the best bands on the local circuit, and they threw everything at the gig, sporting burgundy caps, burgundy suits and black ties, but that evening th
e Stones made them look sartorially and, by implication, culturally redundant.

  Old Hill Plaza that evening was packed. The stage revolved with the Redcaps playing the last few bars of their final number and revealed a solitary drum kit. The Stones took to the stage one by one and delivered a stunning performance; aside from their energy and the confidence they’d gained from having made such a success of the Crawdaddy, the audience hadn’t seen a group sporting long hair before. As local music fan Brian Hoggetts, who was at the Old Hill Plaza, recalls, ‘We were mesmerised by it all – Bill Wyman playing the guitar vertical, Brian Jones never smiled. He just stood in one place all night. Charlie Watts bashing it out with a vacant look, with Jagger and Richards covering just about every part of the small stage. The end of the gig and the stage rotates with them playing out.’

  On 11 May 1964, wishing to have lunch where they were staying, the Grand Hotel in Bristol, the Rolling Stones were refused a table because they weren’t wearing jackets and ties. The press had a field day, the Daily Express carrying the story with the headline, ‘The Rolling Stones gather no lunch’. But this kind of publicity was welcomed, even stoked, by Andrew Loog Oldham. It was all helping to define his group; unlike the Beatles, who were sold as four decent, lovable northern lads in suits, the Rolling Stones were the bad boys of pop. Oldham encouraged headlines such as the infamous ‘Would You Let Your Daughter Marry A Rolling Stone?’

  Although attention was often drawn to the difference between the image of the Stones and that of the Beatles – not least by Stones fans looking for street credibility – in private there was very little sign of a personal divide between the bands. Lennon and McCartney gifted one of their songs to the Stones, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, which became their second single. In the autumn of 1963 the Stones were off playing bigger shows around Britain in bigger venues, with their first headlining tour in January 1964, with support from the Ronettes.