by Dave Haslam
The Left Wing was relaunched early in 1963 as the Twisted Wheel. The owners, the Abadi brothers – five of them, including Ivor and Jack – had a basic vision and some experience (Jack Abadi, for example, was involved with Danny Betesh at the El Rio venue in Macclesfield). The Twisted Wheel became one of a generation of clubs descended from coffee bars. A coffee-bar dance club, offering music and dancing but still no alcohol, the Wheel became one of the defining venues of the era.
This ‘dry’ aspect was far from unique. The Mojo in Sheffield, opened by brothers Peter and Geoff Stringfellow in the former Dey’s Ballroom on the junction of Burngreave Road and Barnsley Road, was another booze-free zone. For its first twenty-two years, the 100 Club also had no alcohol licence. The Marquee opened on 19 April 1958 at 165 Oxford Street and relocated to 90 Wardour Street in 1964. It finally obtained an alcohol licence in 1970.
The Wheel was far from being a glitzy venue. The decor was basic, determinedly so, although the Abadis collected wheels of various sorts to decorate the club. It was a basement: it had character, some black paint, some dark-red paint, a handful of bare lightbulbs – and an audience.
For people born in 1946 or 1947, during the baby boom in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, still too young to visit licensed premises, clubs like the Twisted Wheel were perfect haunts. The Abadis were determined that the emphasis at the Wheel would be on dancing, opening four nights a week (Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday) from 7.30 p.m. until midnight.
Venues not serving alcohol were subject to fewer restrictions, and unlicensed premises, potentially, had unlimited opening hours. In order to gain even more autonomy, a membership scheme was launched at the Wheel and, within a year of opening, the 300-capacity club had a membership of 14,000. By this time, the weekly Saturday all-nighter sessions, from midnight until dawn, had been launched. In the early months of the club, Geoff Mullin had been employed as the DJ, playing before and after acts including local bands the Hollies and the Nashville Men from Oldham. But when the owners instigated all-night sessions every Saturday, Roger Eagle took the DJing job.
The Abadis were looking for someone with r&b knowledge, having heard from one of the El Rio crew that the recently opened Place in Hanley had got a good thing going with r&b and disc-only nights. They identified Roger as a prime candidate after they’d seen him endlessly hanging around the Left Wing with his bags of newly bought records. Once he was given the all-nighter job in September 1963, Roger pioneered a playlist of blues, r&b, bluebeat and soul, and took up a major role in the club, also having a hand in booking the acts – including the likes of John Lee Hooker, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Sonny Boy Williamson – and organising the publicity as well.
Although there would be some tension between the venue owners and Roger – especially when it came to his more ‘way out’ ideas – they knew he was helping them create something that wasn’t competing with the city’s successful beat clubs like Oasis or the Jungfrau. Roger was one of the connoisseurs, on the lookout for good sounds, keen to play imports like the authentic r&b numbers rather than the UK cover versions. He wasn’t shy with his opinions, to the point of falling out with anyone he considered was missing the point. He had a row with the Hollies, telling them their version of ‘Searchin’’ was lightweight, and berating them for recording and releasing a version after it had been nailed by the Coasters. ‘It’s already been done to perfection,’ he told them, just after it had gone Top Twenty.
In many ways the Scene in Ham Yard was London’s equivalent to the Twisted Wheel. We’ve visited the Scene in some of its previous incarnations. It was housed in the venue where Cy Laurie’s all-night jazz raves took place and, before that, had been Club Eleven’s first base. By the time the Scene first opened there in 1963, Soho had a confirmed and infamous reputation as an area of bohemian, late-night and even semilegal activity. Within a few hundred yards of the Scene were strip clubs, gay clubs and late-night coffee bars. Among the bands that played in the early months of the Scene were the Rolling Stones in June and on 4 July (when the Beatles were in the audience).
The Scene and the Wheel featured live music, and many great bands played at both, but they are also both closely identified with the music tastes of the DJs – Roger Eagle at the Wheel and Guy Stevens at the Scene. Neither were showmen; they both eschewed the easy option with their music choices and music fans gravitated towards them. They didn’t just demonstrate pioneering music taste, but also encouraged it. They both had an influence way beyond the four walls of their respective basement music venues.
At these two clubs, the future was being created, and it was to be influential. The Wheel turned out to be the birthplace of what, by the early 1970s, was being called Northern Soul. The relatively small size of these clubs was unimportant. If anything it gave them strength, the potential to be purist. They were inspirational. There are similarities with some of the unorthodox, maverick clubs discussed in later chapters – particularly the Rum Runner, Billy’s and the Batcave – in the way the scenes that grew there were transmitted to a wider audience. They had a transformative effect on music but also on attitudes and clothes. Eric Clapton later recalled a group of guys at the Scene whom he eventually befriended. ‘They wore a hybrid of American Ivy League and the Italian look, as personified by Marcello Mastroianni, so on one day they might be wearing sweatshirts with baggy trousers and loafers, on another maybe linen suits. They seemed to be miles ahead of anyone else in terms of style. I found them fascinating.’
The Scene, and Guy Stevens, had a part to play in other careers, not only those of the Stones and Eric Clapton, but also the Who and the Small Faces (Stevens later went on to produce Procol Harum, Traffic and the Clash). The Scene is a venue now considered one of the key mod clubs. When Pete Townshend visited, he appreciated what he was witnessing, studied the looks, the dance moves and the music. ‘The Scene was really where it was at, but there were only about fifteen people down there every night,’ he said later. ‘It was a focal point for the mod movement.’
Among the regulars was Dave McAleer, who went on to be a successful A&R man. A few years ago I met him round the corner from where the Scene used to be. As far as he can recall, the place was often full for live shows at the weekend, but he confirms Pete Townshend’s story that the Monday night sessions featuring Guy Stevens were often sparsely attended. Stevens himself was low-key, and there was no sense of hero worship. ‘I mean, I never looked on him as a DJ; I don’t think we even knew what a DJ was. To us, he was just a guy playing r&b records.’
One of the attractions of disc-only nights for people with a real interest in music was the advantages records had over the ubiquitous live acts, many of whom, of course, fell well short of the Beatles and the Stones. Under an avalanche of four-piece acts, a rhythmically challenged drummer and a singer with the right trousers but a thin voice murdering songs like ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Long Tall Sally’, DJs could stick with the original versions, the real deal. This was the argument Roger Eagle had applied when berating the Hollies. Dave McAleer agrees. ‘Most of the live bands were crap. Most r&b fans didn’t want to see British groups even if they were singing r&b covers; it would be, what’s the point? We’d rather hear the real thing. We’d rather hear the records.’
Guy Stevens was a music fan, an evangelist for black American soul and r&b, and an avid record collector. DJing wasn’t a branch of light entertainment to him. McAleer points out how different Stevens was to the likes of Jimmy Savile. ‘He was quiet, and he was usually there on his own. He wasn’t like a “personality” DJ at all, performing or leaping around.’
It’s believed that Roger may have visited the Scene and even met Guy Stevens before he’d been invited to DJ at the Twisted Wheel. Certainly the two became friends and correspondents. They had much in common: they’d both been to boarding school, neither had much money-sense, and of course they had music in common – and they both got their DJ jobs thanks to the quality of their record collections.
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Ronan O’Rahilly arrived in London from Ireland in 1961 and became friends with various people on the music scene including Alexis Korner and Giorgio Gomelsky. Gomelsky was running the Piccadilly Jazz Club from the same premises as Cy Laurie but was looking to move on. By 1963 O’Rahilly had taken over the venue and had renamed it the Scene Club. Most of the week’s programming was given over to live music but, in time-honoured fashion, traditionally less busy nights were seen as opportunities to try something different, as O’Rahilly later explained. ‘At that time in London there were only a tiny, tiny number of people who were into r&b. I knew Guy had a large record collection, so when I opened the Scene I offered him Monday nights.’
A 1963 advertisement for a Monday evening ‘Rhythm & Blues Record Session’ gives a flavour of what Guy Stevens was playing: ‘Listen or dance to records by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Larry Williams, The Coasters and many other R and B artists.’ Guy Stevens started with a focus on the blues but he’d also soon be playing jazz-tinged grooves by Jimmy Smith or Jimmy McGriff, or deeper soul songs like ‘I Gotta Dance to Keep from Crying’ by the Miracles and ‘It’s Alright’ by the Impressions.
Mods had defined themselves by how they dressed, how they stood, how they walked. Their heroes were the likes of Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, who played and dressed in a cool style. These modern jazz fans wore skinny ties, tight suits, short jackets, narrow trousers, and had a penchant for Italian and French designers. The next generation of mods, those who began frequenting the Scene, for example, maintained this sharp Continental look and the same attention to detail, but the music had moved on. They still liked to put distance between themselves and mainstream tastes but now their music heroes were likely to be black American acts, Ray Charles, Jimmy Smith, Tamla Motown.
The mods were looking outside of England for inspiration – they’d rather have frothy Italian coffee than dishwater English tea. They had begun to gravitate towards the Scene. You’d see them as you arrived in Ham Yard; they’d be hanging around in the shadows or idling near the scooters parked up nearby. Scooters were a thing, and the most coveted were the likes of a two-tone SX200 or any other Lambrettas, the Li 150, the TV175 perhaps, or if not a classic Lambretta, then maybe a NSU Prima D, made by a German manufacturer under licence from Lambretta.
They had musical differences, but others too; whereas the Mecca dance halls served alcohol, the nascent mod scene and the all-nighters were awash with amphetamines. It wasn’t that the mods invented amphetamine use, but they took to the drug with enthusiasm, and the use of pills became another facet of the mod lifestyle. Jazz musicians who’d played in the same basement clubs where the mods now hung out had used amphetamines to stay awake, especially when they were playing three or four sets a night. Pills were also used by a wide selection of the general public in the early 1960s, many of them legally prescribed, some of which made their way onto the streets. Most of the pills taken by mods and their nightlife companions were manufactured drugs, often bearing the manufacturer’s name, SKF (Smith, Kline and French), rather than pills from illicit laboratories.
Guy Stevens, according to Dave McAleer, ‘dressed like a student’ and never sought to label himself a mod, but the desire of the mods to be seen somewhere semi-secret, to search out the best tunes, the original versions, black dance music, drew them to his disc-only nights. At the Scene, once past the scooters, customers would go downstairs, through a door wedged open with a brick into a bare room. The walls and floor were concrete; it was dark, too; this was before psychedelic light shows and strobes. The sound was reputed to be poor, the rumour being that the speakers had been liberated from a fairground. Andrew Loog Oldham described the Scene to me thus: ‘Very basic. Dark, just a couple of lightbulbs and speed. There are certain drugs you don’t have to take to be under the influence of it; speed was like a fog in the club, something that had taken over the room.’
The trade in pills in Soho was lucrative, and involved dodgy geezers in and around the environment, sometimes including those who ran the clubs, and usually gangs with various illegal interests. In Soho clubs like the Scene you could buy Drinamyl pills (the so-called ‘purple hearts’, which were actually blue and only slightly heart-shaped) for around 7d (3p), although – given that a common drug intake was probably three or four purple hearts near the beginning of the evening, topped up with a couple more every time energy levels flagged – they were usually bought in batches of five or ten. For a while, two cousins ran the door at the Scene and rigorously searched the customers who came in, confiscated pills, then passed them on to approved dealers who recycled them in the club. It’s unsurprising that there would be a few casualties by the middle of the night, propping up the walls or draped outside, with staring eyes and foam flecks around their mouths.
The venue was relatively hard to find and attracted very few tourists, but many regulars. People with a special interest in the music would be invited – or invite themselves – back to Guy’s flat. Steve Marriott hung out at the Scene; later he’d go on to play in the Small Faces and Humble Pie. Members of the Rolling Stones would sit in Guy’s flat and listen to records by the likes of Jimmy Reed and Bobby Bland. Photographer David B. Thomson shared a flat with Brian Jones in Elm Park Mews and has always maintained it was as a result of Guy Stevens playing ‘Time Is on My Side’ by Irma Thomas that the Stones got the inspiration for including a version of the song on their second album.
Pete Meaden was an enthusiastic Drinamyl user and a believer in the mod life. He had a spell as a publicist working for Andrew Loog Oldham but they fell out when Meaden got too out of his head at a Rolling Stones reception. Meaden lived in a tiny flat in Monmouth Street but mod living, for him, meant being out and about, and noticed. He used to visit the Scene with another ace face, Phil the Greek. The Scene, he once said, was where ‘the greatest records you can imagine were being played’.
Meaden began to work with the Who, taking Pete Townshend down to the Scene to introduce him to the music Guy Stevens was playing and the culture surrounding the venue. He was hoping Townshend would gain energy and take inspiration from there. He persuaded the Who to change their name to the High Numbers, pushed them towards a more overt mod image and encouraged them to play in a harder, edgier style. They’d visit other clubs too, places the mod faces talked about, like Klooks Kleek in West Hampstead and the Flamingo.
At the Flamingo, by then firmly established on Wardour Street, Rik Gunnell was hosting the all-nighters and had booked the relatively unknown Georgie Fame and His Blue Flames as resident band, a decision which turned out to be key to the venue’s success. All-nighters took place on most Fridays and Saturdays and had a reputation for attracting a multiracial crowd; it was a particular favourite with black American GIs stationed at American military bases like Hillingdon and Ruislip, and visiting jazz musicians would also drop by.
The Flamingo became notorious in October 1962 as the site of a fight between Aloysius (Lucky) Gordon and Johnny Edgecombe, two West Indian boyfriends of the model and showgirl Christine Keeler. Investigations revealed that Miss Keeler was engaged in an affair with British Secretary of State for War John Profumo and was reported to be simultaneously involved with a Soviet naval attaché, creating a possible security risk and a scandal. The heaviness that sometimes disturbed the Flamingo didn’t dissuade the occasional switched-on VIP from out of town from turning up: in June 1963 Muhammad Ali (then still known as Cassius Clay) paid a visit. Soon afterwards, though, a stabbing led to US military chiefs banning American servicemen from frequenting the venue, and rumours persisted that the Flamingo was involved in drug-dealing and prostitution.
For a short while early in 1963 the Rolling Stones had a Monday night residency there. Ian Samwell, who’d been hosting lunchtime disc-only sessions at the Lyceum since 1961, was one of the main resident DJs. Having built up his reputation via his sound system, Duke Vi
n also had some regular gigs at the Flamingo, playing r&b and ska. Georgie Fame began to build ska tunes into his band’s repertoire, calling on the services of trombone player Rico Rodriguez, who’d moved to England from Jamaica in 1961. The mods enthused about ska and early bluebeat music and Caribbean culture in general; the smartness of the Jamaican performers in their sharkskin suits and pork-pie hats was appreciated by them, and Prince Buster became a hero, as did singer Jackie Edwards, who wrote ‘Keep On Running’, a hit for the Spencer Davis Group.
Another means to access ska and bluebeat in central London was at the Sunset Club on Carnaby Street, which Duke Vin’s friend Count Suckle took ownership of just before the boutique boom there. Playing jazz and Caribbean music until seven o’clock in the morning, it attracted a mixed crowd, with the black audience being predominantly Jamaican, but often including African-American servicemen. The club was renamed the Roaring Twenties.
This was how music trends and fashion spread, radiating out from certain clubs. In August 1963, the TV show Ready Steady Go! began broadcasting. The show’s researchers and producers would visit clubs looking for potential audience members. The show’s dancers, including Sandy Sarjeant, were all regulars at the Scene. The music and the looks at the Scene one week would be on Ready Steady Go! the next, and featuring in hundreds of suburban discotheques, dance halls and youth clubs the day after that.
O’Rahilly was canny. He could see that what was happening in his small basement club on a Monday night was rapidly becoming peak-time and mainstream. In March 1964 he increased his music business interests, launching Radio Caroline, an illegal radio station broadcasting from an ex-Danish passenger ferry off the coast of Harwich. The first track played on Caroline was a Scene favourite, Jimmy McGriff’s ‘Round Midnight’. Within three weeks a Gallup survey estimated that the station had seven million listeners.
