Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  As well as an ersatz version of the Cavern, also on Mathew Street is the site of a club that opened nearly twenty years after the Cavern – Eric’s, which was operated by Roger Eagle, Ken Testi and Pete Fulwell. Pete Wylie is part of the Eric’s generation; it was through the club that he found friends and a scene and formed the band Wah! Heat. Another graduate of Eric’s is Jayne Casey, who went on to gain cult status in the late 1970s and early 1980s in bands like Big in Japan and Pink Military. For both of them, growing up in the late 1970s, Liverpool’s Merseybeat past was suffocating; the Beatles cast a shadow under which not much could grow. So much so that Jayne remembers the advice given to her in 1977 by Roger Eagle: ‘He told us never ever to listen to them.’

  Other bands coming out of Eric’s, like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (their first live performance was at Eric’s in October 1978), Echo & the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, Dead or Alive and others, made their mark twenty years after Merseybeat. It was as if the demolition of the Cavern had helped set the new generation free. They were to find their own role models, their own places to hang out, and to make their own culture.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Pills, thrills, not keeping music live

  Roger Eagle would have an involvement not just in Eric’s but also in other significant venues in Liverpool and Manchester. By the end of the 1950s he’d left school, enjoyed the visceral pleasure of hearing rock & roll through a cinema sound system, and bought a motorbike. He’d driven his bike from Oxford down to London several times, visiting venues like Ken Colyer’s club on Great Newport Street and Eel Pie. He’d enjoyed trad jazz, but hadn’t fallen for skiffle. He’d begun to take a deep interest in music, tuning in to tracks like ‘Peanuts’ by Little Joe Cook & the Thrillers and rockabilly like the Jive-A-Tones ‘Flirty Gertie’ on Gus Goodwin’s Radio Luxembourg show. Throughout Roger’s life (he died in 1999) he was keen to discover music and share his passion and knowledge. He’d like to turn you on to something you may not have heard before. The title of his biography reflects this: it’s called Sit Down! Listen to This!

  Before the World Wide Web, searching for music was hard work. Access wasn’t instant, and there weren’t multiple libraries of music to trawl and download. Music took time and enthusiasm to discover, especially anything a bit different. It wasn’t like it is now. One time Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham put it to me like this: ‘You couldn’t walk into Tesco and walk out with a copy of “Paint It Black”.’

  In addition, radio and TV stations were limited, in number and variety. The BBC, particularly, played safe and was slow to change. If you wanted to hunt down something specialist or beyond the obvious, you’d tune into shows like Gus Goodwin’s or the American Forces Network – a station set up to play music enjoyed by American troops stationed in Europe, which included specialist bebop and rhythm & blues shows. John Mayall would tape shows off the AFN using a reel-to-reel tape recorder; he was obsessed.

  The unadventurousness of the general provision of music drove music fans to become inventive. They’d seek out venues with well-stocked juke boxes and switched-on DJs, or start their own. Gary Brooker (later a founder member of Procol Harum) in Southend had formed a group called the Paramounts. He started a club, Shades, in 1962, with no DJ, just a juke box stocked by local r&b enthusiast Tony Wilkinson. On at least one occasion they took a giant radio set into Shades. This was when they discovered Ray Charles was being broadcast live on French radio from Paris Olympia; 150 people turned up to listen to it.

  The 1958 Ray Charles at Newport album captivated a certain section of the young, including Eric Burdon and Andrew Loog Oldham. It marked a moment when mods who’d been following modern jazz were beginning to hear something attractive in rhythm & blues. Their lifestyle still invariably included amphetamines and their look stayed sharp, but the favoured soundtrack of the mods was mutating.

  The formula of a Saturday night – ballroom dancing to a jazz orchestra in the local dance hall – wasn’t working in the way it had for thirty years. There were all the counter-attractions, the plethora of basement venues, self-organised events, coffee-bar dance clubs and new music choices. In addition, young people on a night out were beginning to accept and enjoy the idea of pre-recorded rather than live music. As we’ve seen in the 1950s, juke boxes were at the centre of a growth in all sorts of venues, formal and informal, free or relatively cheap, coffee bars and customised cellars like the Casbah. And by the early 1960s most youth clubs were expected to provide a gramophone and speakers and create enough of a vibe in a small room to get a crowd dancing.

  Pre-recorded music was being heard in a variety of locations, with disc jockeys having an increasingly important part to play. Sound systems with record selectors like Duke Vin were entertaining audiences at house parties, town hall gatherings and community centres (the attractiveness of sound systems was boosted by the emergence of Jamaican ska, bluebeat and the early roots of reggae in the first years of the 1960s). After a few months, Mrs Best at the Casbah replaced the juke box with a Dansette. With the right amplification, promoters were hiring bigger spaces for disc-only events too – function rooms and village halls.

  Much of this had been happening outside the control of the established music venues and promoters, which was why the Association of Ballrooms got together in 1959 to denounce the trend for disc-only nights. The Association of Ballrooms was being disingenuous, however. At the very moment they were bemoaning the new trend, the ballroom bosses at Mecca were hiring an expert to extend such events: a man called Jimmy Savile.

  In the second half of the 1950s, aware of the success of Savile’s record hops and disc-only events, and to enable them to absorb this new phenomenon, bosses at Mecca gave him jobs managing their venues, including the Ilford Palais. Despite the despicable nature of his crimes as a sex abuser that came to light after his death, it remains a fact that early in his career Savile was an influential figure who did much to establish how dance halls organised themselves and how DJs presented themselves. Savile moved from clubs to broadcasting when Decca executive and Radio Luxembourg DJ Pat Campbell heard him play at the Locarno in Leeds and persuaded his radio bosses to give him a show. From there, he began to be employed by the BBC.

  By the middle of the 1960s he was famous; if you’d asked record buyers in Britain to name a famous DJ, 99 per cent of them would probably have said Jimmy Savile. He was popular: in 1964 he was voted Best Disc Jockey in the New Musical Express Readers’ Poll, and won that same NME award every subsequent year until 1972, when John Peel triumphed. You can’t airbrush out his part in the history of nightclubs and music venues; that would be like pretending Gary Glitter never played at the Cavern.

  In the beat group era DJs would be employed in a secondary role, in intervals between groups, and would be expected to compere the evening as well. Brian Rae’s first experiences of DJing were at concert halls like Northwich Memorial Hall, playing records from the back of the stage in the intervals between groups. He had just a Dansette-style single deck that loaded several discs at a time and dropped them onto the turntable. He sat behind a trestle table, being very formal and announcing each record on the microphone, saying, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the new single by the Beatles,’ and then trying to gauge it right so the records dropped correctly and the intro fitted.

  At some other venues – including Mecca halls – the management would ask the sound technician or the lighting engineer to play records between bands, again without much fanfare (and nowhere near the stage; usually from the back of the hall hidden away near the projection box). When Jimmy Savile arrived at Ilford Palais he told them he wanted a small rostrum about three feet six inches high and the biggest speakers they’d got, one each side of the stage. On the rostrum he installed two linked record players so he could play one song straight after another.

  Mecca managers were supposed to keep a low profile and wear evening dress. In charge of things at Ilford Palais, Savile sported a two-tone haircut, with one
side black and the other side white, and put himself spotlit, centre stage, playing records and entertaining the customers with banter and catchphrases. It all clicked, and Savile’s mix of showbiz theatre and business acumen was a big hit with Mecca, so they moved him on to the Plaza on Oxford Street in Manchester. He was established there by the beginning of the 1960s.

  Operators knew that a disc jockey’s playlist could reflect changing tastes and be fine-tuned to suit or create an audience. A disc-only night was more than just a cheaper option; when the Musicians’ Union complained to one venue operator that he wasn’t employing enough live musicians, he was known to hire a band, and then when they arrived, he’d pay them to go away.

  Thanks to the coming of age of the post-war baby boom generation, and full employment, the demand for leisure and dance clubs was expanding. Mecca invested in new venues, including the Coventry Locarno. The city had been heavily bombed during the Second World War but a recovery and redevelopment programme gathered momentum. The highlight of the process was the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral but also included the building of a swish new hotel, the Leofric, which opened in 1955. Later described by the Coventry Telegraph as ‘a symbol of Britain’s recovery after the Second World War’, the Leofric included the Grosvenor Suite for functions and Ray’s Bar, which would become a point of call on the way to a night out at the Locarno, frequented by men in smart suits and ladies in long dresses. The city of Coventry wasn’t just recovering – it was prospering. Consumer culture was driving demand for the products of the local car manufacturing plants, and from the 1950s until the mid-1970s, Coventry had one of the highest standards of living anywhere in the country outside of the Home Counties; its population grew as the local jobs market strengthened.

  The Coventry Locarno opened in August 1960, with its entrance at the base of a glass tower in the centre of Smithford Way, part of a new pedestrianised shopping precinct. The exciting, ultra-modern design reflected Coventry’s confidence in the future, although the merits of the concrete and glass ‘brutalist’ style of architecture then in vogue are still debatable. The grand design and the presence of the glass caused one or two practical problems. While running through the precinct one afternoon, ten-year-old Ian Hambridge walked through a quarter-inch plate-glass window at the Locarno. Even though he escaped serious injury, to avoid further or worse accidents the management placed a large flower planter in front of the window. A year or so later, seven teenage boys were trapped in the lift halfway up the Locarno tower for five hours. Management served tea and biscuits to the anxious parents before the boys were freed.

  A welcome problem for many dance hall operators was how to balance the continuing demand from customers still looking for old-time nights out with ballroom-style dance orchestras and the demand from the emerging younger audience. The older crowd tended to have better jobs and more money to spend at the bar, but wouldn’t be out every week. The kids in their late teens were keener to find places to go but were less predictable in their tastes and large numbers of them would drive the bigger spenders elsewhere. They were also beginning to push against prevailing dress codes. In Edinburgh, the management of the Plaza at the corner of Morningside Road and Falcon Avenue found that mixing the old ways and the new generation could be problematic. Finally adapting the main ballroom to cater to the desire of the young to twist and shout the night away, they still hoped the clientele would adhere to the traditional modes of dress. When one youngster was turned away for wearing the latest roll-neck shirt, the newspapers sensed a scandal. ‘It’s a supposedly enlightened age,’ complained the customer. The management issued a statement: ‘People should remember it’s a dance they’re going to, not an après-ski affair.’

  Such was the demand for leisure and dancing there seemed to be no limit to how far the night-time economy could expand. In Manchester, Mecca owned two popular venues barely 200 yards from each other – the Ritz and the Plaza. The Ritz had become a landmark building in the city (it features in the film version of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey). Phil Moss and his big band was the resident act for seventeen years. When Phil passed away, his friend the radio presenter Fred Fielder paid this tribute: ‘People said he was responsible for half the population of Greater Manchester, because for the last dance of the evening the lights would go down, couples would have a kiss and cuddle on the dancefloor, end up going steady, then eventually get married and have children.’

  Round the corner was the Plaza on Oxford Street, up steep steps, on the first floor. The Plaza features in Howard Jacobson’s novel No More Mr Nice Guy; a character is thrilled by the ‘city-lights eroticism’ of a slow dance with a young lady but less thrilled to later find she had lifted his wallet from his pocket during their smooch.

  The Mecca organisation played safe with its music policy and avoided chasing trends or alienating older audiences. However, when anything new came along, if there was money to be made, it would eventually find a place in the programming. For example, away from the weekends, Coventry Locarno featured one-off concerts by Shane Fenton (who became Alvin Stardust) and Screaming Lord Sutch. In the interval between bands a disc jockey was employed to play records from a double deck on the revolving stage.

  The Locarno employed DJ Alan Mort, who was succeeded by Frank Pritchard; as was the custom, he doubled-up as compere. By 1963 Pritchard was extremely busy, as demand for disc-only sessions from the Ready Steady Go! generation rocketed. Mecca looked to win over the loyalty of the young by instituting under-eighteens disco nights. At Coventry Locarno these were on Tuesday nights and no alcohol was served – just coffee, tea or cold drinks. Alcohol-free Friday lunchtime sessions proved an attraction for office workers and shopgirls. The Friday night disco, meanwhile, remained popular through the 1960s, regularly drawing 2,000 people. In 1964 it’s said that the disc jockey stopped playing ‘Glad All Over’ because everybody would get on the dancefloor and jump up and down so hard it was a danger to life and limb.

  All sorts of clubs were going in a disc-only direction, including in London La Discotheque on Wardour Street, the Saddle Room on Park Lane and the Ad Lib above the Prince Charles Cinema on Leicester Place, although all three continued to feature live music too; at La Discotheque (formerly known as El Condor), Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated were the resident band on Wednesday nights in 1962.

  DJs were infiltrating venue after venue. In May 1962 the historic Hammersmith Palais launched a monthly disc-only night, and when, the following year, the Mecca Empire on Leicester Square opened, a resident seventeen-piece jazz orchestra featured every weekend, but every Monday evening there was a disc-only session with DJ Johnny Chapman. The Musicians’ Union ramped up their opposition to these nights and the influence of DJs and in 1963 they launched a campaign with the slogan ‘Keep Music Live’ – with its familiar sticker, as seen on guitar cases ever since.

  Mecca were keeping a tight rein on everything, not just the music but also the way staff presented themselves. Before doors opened at all Locarno ballrooms staff would gather on the dancefloor for an inspection to make sure they were clean and presentable (most of the staff wore uniforms); all of them, including the DJs, would have their fingernails checked for dirt. The music policy at weekends was expected to be similar in each and every Mecca hall. Winning formulas were milked, the pop charts reigned supreme, and spontaneity was discouraged.

  This was the opposite of Roger Eagle’s philosophy; he wanted to go beyond the obvious and find stuff people didn’t know they liked. No generation has ever had uniform taste, and there was a small audience demanding something different. We’ve already met them – the kids who formed the scene the Rolling Stones came from, for example, and the Alexis Korner and Ray Charles fans; the cells of maverick characters scoffing at lightweights like Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele, namechecking blues heroes like Sonny Boy Williamson and clutching their Chuck Berry LPs.

  The man who founded and ran the UK branch of the Chuck Berry Fan Club was Guy Stevens. As we’l
l see, Stevens would go on to have a profound effect on British music, the result of his DJ gigs at the Scene in Ham Yard. At the time he started at the Scene he was living in Leicester Square in what he later described as a ‘one-room, no-water flat’. Nearby were a number of record shops, including Transat Imports, where Guy would spend hours hanging out, listening, buying. Like Roger Eagle, he was an enthusiast.

  In 1962 Eagle had decided to leave his Oxford home and move to the big city. The Beatles would move to London to make a career, so too the Animals. Everyone did. Roger, however, moved to Manchester. He rode his motorbike up North without, it seems, much of a plan. What he found in Manchester was a change of scene and a job at the Kellogg’s factory as a quality-control line inspector.

  One of the first friends he made there was Roger Fairhurst. They’d meet up at Barry’s Record Rendezvous or clubs or coffee bars, like the Cona on Tib Lane, where the open-house policy encouraged local music aficionados to take their latest finds and spin them on the in-house gramophone. A short walk to Albert Square and right onto Brazennose Street, down on the right at No. 26, was the self-proclaimed ‘beatnik-type’ coffee bar, the Left Wing.