Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  In Erdington, the lease on the space housing Mothers was coming to a close and one of the managers, Phil Myatt, had already set up more Town Hall shows, including gigs featuring Love and Pentangle. A few months after the end of the Magic Village, it was all over for Mothers too.

  It’s probably true to say that the most creative years of the counter-culture were over; certainly there was widespread disillusionment politically, and as with any surge in new sounds and styles, many of the pioneers had success which took them out of the underground, or had faded, or had moved on. Nevertheless most towns had established at least one venue sympathetic to the long-hairs by the beginning of the 1970s. ‘Friars’ opened in June 1969 at the New Friarage Hall, then relocated first to Aylesbury’s Assembly Hall then (in 1975) to the Civic Centre. A small promotions company calling themselves Cherry Red began staging regular events at the Malvern Winter Gardens (where Pink Floyd had played in 1967). Their first show was July 1971 (when Hawkwind headlined) and other artists Cherry Red promoted at the venue included the Velvet Undergound in 1972.

  Most towns and cities also supported at least one venue where folk musicians played regularly. The Troubadour was still going strong, and elsewhere in London Les Cousins, in the basement of a restaurant in Greek Street, featured folk and blues (the likes of John Martyn, Clive Palmer, Ralph McTell and Roy Harper all appeared there). At the folk club held in the Red Rooster Café in Bow Street in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, the influence of Bob Dylan was matched by that of the Clancy Brothers and the Dubliners. Folkies met up on Thursday nights at the Green Moose Café in Liverpool’s Brooks Alley; one the regular performers was singer-songwriter Willy Russell; he later became an acclaimed dramatist who has since realised how integral that small music venue was in his life and work. ‘I now see that from having to do that gig every Thursday I was learning all kinds of things about the nature of performance, about audiences, about what will and won’t work, about how overwriting can kill a song (or, indeed, a play or any other form for that matter). Although none of us knew it at the time, all those folk places, cafés, pubs, old cellars, were a fantastic training ground for all kinds of talent – it was a completely anti-commercial, anti music-establishment phenomenon.’

  Folk was programmed alongside blues and other anti-commercial sounds; at venues including the Van Dike in Plymouth and the Granary in Bristol, for example. The Granary, on Queen Charlotte Street, was built in 1869 as a grain warehouse. Designed in a style that’s been described as ‘Ruskinian Venetian Gothic’, its imposing frontage is red-brick, augmented by decorative black and white brick and limestone dressings. In 1979, Andor Gomme, in Bristol, an Architectural History, claimed that it is ‘the most piquant and striking monument of the High Victorian age in Bristol . . . as potent a symbol of the city as the cathedral or St Mary Redcliffe’. By 1979, though, its days as a granary were long gone. In 1968 the building – which had lain empty since the 1950s – became the home of a jazz club run by Ted Cowell under the guidance of the successful singer and clarinettist Acker Bilk. After a few months, midweek nights became available and some non-jazzers seized the opportunity to run nights they dubbed ‘Plastic Dog’, featuring progressive rock, folk and blues.

  The Granary became a hub of activity. Plastic Dog spawned Plastic Dog Graphics, a company of graphic designers responsible for producing posters and other promotional material for the gigs, and the monthly Dogpress magazine, which was distributed for free and carried listings of forthcoming events. Very much of its time, most issues had a ‘groupie of the month’ (East Village Other had a regular photo feature entitled ‘Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side’). The use of photographs and drawings of naked women in the underground press was often challenged but persisted. The counter-culture was fragmenting, the world was changing. In 1973 the final issue of Oz included a piece by David Widgery that concluded, ‘What finally knackered the underground was its complete inability to deal with women’s liberation.’

  Dogpress in December 1971 announced that DJ Ed ‘Super-Ed’ Newsom was leaving to go to London, although he later returned to Bristol and the Granary turntables. The longest-serving DJ was Al Read, one of Plastic Dog’s founders. One of the directors through much of this time was Tony Bullimore, who, with his wife Lalel, had previously owned the Bamboo club in St Paul’s, a favoured venue among Bristol’s Afro-Caribbean community. Billing itself as ‘Bristol’s Premier West Indian Entertainment Centre’, the Bamboo had hosted sound-system events, a restaurant, theatre, workshops, darts, dominoes, and live acts that even included Bob Marley and the Wailers, and Jimmy Cliff.

  Deeper into the West Country, a number of the first festivalstyle events had been taking place, including the Bath Blues Festival in 1969. Twelve thousand people filled the Bath Recreation Ground to hear the likes of John Mayall, Fleetwood Mac, Taste and Liverpool Scene. Organised by Freddy Bannister, the compere was John Peel and the biggest impact was probably made by Led Zeppelin, just back from their second tour of the States. Planty had begun his life’s work.

  A year later the festival moved to a bigger site and was billed as the Bath Festival of Blues & Progressive Music, attracting tens of thousands of visitors over three days watching the likes of Frank Zappa, the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, Santana and Pink Floyd. Not only were such events in West Country fields a reflection of how big some of the international acts had become but, outdoors, far from a city, they also reflected a movement in the counter-culture away from the pressure and politics of urban protest and venues in derelict Victorian buildings, and towards dropping out in – and romanticising – rural Britain.

  Michael Eavis, then in his mid-thirties, had inherited the family farm, Worthy Farm, in Pilton, Somerset. One of his neighbours told him about the Bath Festival of Blues & Progressive Music and he took a Sunday off to see what it was all about. Inspired, the very next day he decided to put on his own festival, even though he had no experience of organising such a thing. He recalls getting a phone call from what seemed like a friendly young man with a West Country accent much like his, offering the services of him and his friends as security for the festival. It was only later he realised they were Hell’s Angels. He tried to put them off when they started demanding money from him and they ended up setting fire to one of his father’s hay wagons.

  Saturday 19 September was set as the date, and Eavis asked for a one-pound admission charge, which most people seemed happy to pay. Burned-out hay wagon notwithstanding, the Hell’s Angels did their job. Fifteen hundred people attended the 1970 Pilton Pop, Folk & Blues Festival. Eavis incurred a loss of over £1,000 but resolved to repeat the festival the following year. In the interim he was approached by Andrew Kerr and Arabella Churchill (he describes them as ‘glamorous hippies’; Arabella was the granddaughter of Winston Churchill). They persuaded Eavis to change the name to the Glastonbury Fayre.

  The following year a film crew turned up at Glastonbury (the director was Nic Roeg but it was said he soon got bored and went off to another project). Several people got naked, including a bongo player and a guy riding a motorcycle. Linda Lewis had taken mescalin; she was singing alongside Terry Reid and dancing with a tree. Arthur Brown’s stage act, which involved setting fire to himself during ‘Fire’, though a favourite of the freaks, was notorious for setting off bad trips. He started playing and Linda Lewis thought she was entering the gates of hell. A friend of the organisers, called Rollo, was also freaked out by Arthur Brown, started crying and took all his clothes off.

  The second Isle of Wight Festival featured Dylan (the first was headlined by Jefferson Airplane). The third, in 1970, included the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and other big hitters. There were many free festivals in the era, but promoter Ray Foulk had bands and invoices to pay, and to enforce paid admission arranged for the site to be surrounded by walls of corrugated iron and security guards with Alsatian dogs. Mick Farren was among those who tore the fencing down. ‘Commercial overkill’ is how he later described the festiva
l, and was recorded as saying, ‘Rock’s becoming an opiate designed to create docile consumers.’

  By 1972, the keepers of the conscience of the underground appeared to have given up on festivals as any kind of progressive force. After the Great Western Express Festival at Bardney in Lincolnshire, Richard Neville in International Times (issue 132) was scathing. ‘It was a Tory festival in the sense that it rehabilitated the concept of hierarchies, superstardom, VIPs, and all the other paraphernalia of class society, which a genuine people’s festival would strive to dismantle.’

  Mick Farren spent a lot of time in the second half of the 1970s in Dingwalls in Camden – ‘a long, narrow, live music and drinking joint’ overseen by Howard Parker, a former DJ at the Speakeasy who had also stage-managed bands, looked after both Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa, and was renowned for his unflappability and egalitarian attitude to club-goers. When Dingwalls opened in Camden Lock, Parker became the club’s creative director. At Dingwalls, Farren saw bands including Country Joe McDonald and Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, and Eric Clapton sitting in with Buddy Guy. He recalls seeing Guy Stevens drinking there, drunk and abusive. It was also the first place he saw Dr Feelgood. He felt it was his place, somewhere for ‘the freaks who’d made it through’. Mick Farren died in July 2013, hours after having collapsed onstage during a performance by a reconstructed line-up of the Deviants at the Borderline Club in London.

  Nicky Crewe started work at On The Eighth Day, where many of the Magic Village regulars congregated. It’s still easy for her to recall the music she heard coming from the juke box when she was hanging out at the Village, like Bob Dylan’s ‘Crawl out Your Window’, Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Crown of Creation’ and Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band’s ‘Electricity’. She says the latter would be one of two songs that most sum up that period in her life: ‘“Alone Again Or” by Love, which is going to be my epitaph. And “Electricity”, because that was equally influential on me, and one’s kind of sad, and one’s energising.’

  The Granary closed in 1988. DJ Al Read was still playing ‘Free Bird’ and ‘Stairway to Heaven’ at the Friday-night rock disco well into the early 1980s. Tony Bullimore hit the national headlines in January 1997 while competing in a single-handed around-the-world boat race when his vessel capsized. The 55-year-old survived in an air pocket underneath the upside-down boat and was rescued some four days later by the Royal Australian Navy.

  Earth officially changed their name to Black Sabbath in August 1969 and took their slum rock and mega-selling album tours to gigs in huge stadiums via Mothers. As Earth, they had been booked to play a few shows in the next month or so, and some promoters had to amend the tickets with the new name. They’d been booked to play at the Grosvenor Suite at the Hotel Leofric for a party hosted by Dunlop (Coventry) Apprentices and Students Association. The gig took place on 26 September 1969. The amended ticket made mention of the other acts performing on the night, including the DJ, a straggly-haired Coventry youth who’d been promoting progressive rock nights at the Walsgrave pub and worked in a record shop. His name: Pete Waterman. Tickets for the party at the Grosvenor Suite in the Hotel Leofric featuring Black Sabbath and DJ Pete Waterman were 7/6 (37½p).

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Soul power, Big Julie, ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’

  The Abadi brothers moved the Twisted Wheel to a warren of rooms at the Piccadilly Station end of Whitworth Street after leaving the Wheel’s original site on Brazennose Street. The first all-nighter at the new venue was on 18 September 1965 and featured the Spencer Davis Group. From 1963, at its Brazennose Street site, with Roger Eagle playing a leading role, the music policy had always been pioneering, rhythm & blues at the outset, and then predominantly soul music, but Roger grew restless and left, moving on to create a freak scene at the Magic Village.

  Established at their second site on Whitworth Street, the Wheel was less eclectic without Roger, but continued to thrive in the second half of the 1960s, playing host to acts including the Who, Steampacket, Doris Troy and Irma Thomas, and finding a ready audience of all-nighter fans in the north Midlands and the north of England with their roots in mod, who resisted the lure of the psychedelic freak scene of the late 1960s. They kept the faith with short, sharp, black soul from northern cities of the USA – specifically the home of Motown, Detroit – but went beyond Motown to a deep passion for rare stuff from the mid-1960s that hadn’t charted or had a UK release.

  London-based journalist Dave Godin took a train up to an all-nighter at the Twisted Wheel late in 1970, on a night when Les Cokell was DJing. Once the doors were open sometime soon after 11 p.m., people gathered in the coffee bar on the ground floor then went downstairs, where lighting was provided by single bulbs, most of them situated behind the wheels, dim light filtered through the spokes. ‘Such scarcity of illumination tends to have a widening effect on the pupils of the eyes,’ reported Godin in the pages of Blues & Soul. He was taken with the dancing – acrobatic and quite unlike anything that would be tolerated at your average Mecca venue – and the devotion to the rarities. The music played didn’t have any of the jazz or funk inflections of contemporary soul music that tended to find favour in London and the south of England. Godin in his report on the Twisted Wheel christened the scene ‘Northern Soul’. A night out wasn’t just a passing fancy. Godin puts it like this: ‘Soul is more than just music, it is a lifestyle too.’

  These soul fans, almost all of them white, were devoted to the music, almost all of it black. Fashions hadn’t yet coalesced into a specific look as they did a little later in the Northern Soul scene – particularly at Wigan Casino – although Godin does note the prevalence of Ben Shermans in the crowd. The regulars were drawn by the music, the sense of adventure, the thrill of being night owls in a city that was asleep. I once had cause to make conversation with the Scottish writer James Kelman, who has always had something of a reputation for being hard-edged and glowering. He was neither of those when we started talking about what he did at the weekends during his time living in Manchester working as a labourer on local building sites in the late 1960s; his weekends spent at the Twisted Wheel were the highlight of Kelman’s time in the city.

  Across the north of England, there were one or two other post-mod rare soul scene venues like the Bin Lid in Dewsbury, Room at the Top in Wigan, the Bee Gee in Leeds and the Tin Chicken in Castleford. The names were supposed to conjure a sense that the venues were as raw and authentic as the black American soul you’d hear there. None of them had anything along the lines of a Bali Hai bar, glamour, pineapple chunks or flashing lights.

  The Abadis closed the Twisted Wheel just a few weeks after Godin’s visit. They’d decided many months earlier they wanted to run a venue with an alcohol licence, as that was where the money was. The final all-nighter at the Twisted Wheel was on 30 January 1971 featuring Edwin Starr. The Abadis later reopened the venue as Placemate 7, with a plan to take the venue in a more commercial direction, and pitch to a smarter, monied crowd, who’d dress up, maybe have something to eat, and go out with the intention of drinking the bar dry. Placemate 7 had multiple bars making full use of the seven rooms in the building. Even tarted up, it was still a labyrinth of crumbling basement spaces under old warehouse buildings; maps were posted around the club to help visitors find their way round.

  That era through the 1970s was replete with clubs aimed at an aspirational crowd. Venues would expect you to dress up; men in suits and ties, women in evening wear. The hemline lengths went from mini to maxi skirt. Sequins and sparkles were good, as were patterns, brooches, big earrings. Even at the end of the decade, 1970s dress codes requiring formal evening wear were being enforced, if not tightened. At Park Hall in Chorley denim was already banned for both sexes, and leather jackets; in 1979, suede jackets were added to the list.

  At these nightclubs there might be roulette and cards, and often a cabaret element too, especially in the north of England, where the tradition of working men’s clubs had set certain
expectations for a night out, one of them being a comedian onstage – a ‘turn’ of some sort. At Placemate 7 the Abadis had hooked up with a business partner, William Morris, who was a specialist in booking cabaret acts (he owned a cabaret club in Stoke called Jollees). Live music might be provided by a chart-friendly act like the Dooleys (they lived in Worsley, on the outskirts of Manchester, having moved up from Essex in 1973 to be closer to the northern clubs where demand for their services was greatest).

  Other attractions would include a disc jockey, who was usually also compere for the evening, but the most important components were booze and food, though the provision for eating out wasn’t on anything like the scale it is today. For tens of thousands of people every week, the prospect of new outfits, a covers band, a disco, cabaret, laughter, booze and getting fed in a nightclub – even if the only thing on the menu was chicken in a basket – was a proper treat, and a more attractive experience than being in some chaotic basement club with water running down the walls, or sitting cross-legged in a room of long-haired folk fans above a pub somewhere.

  In 1973 Barbarella’s in Birmingham offered six bars, two restaurants, a grill bar, three ‘stereo discos’, and a cabaret. At Fagin’s on Oxford Road in Manchester, live acts would be engaged for a week-long Monday to Saturday residency. In March 1973, for example, the Dooleys were there one week; a fortnight later it was Lonnie Donegan. Prices of admission ranged from 70p on Monday or Tuesday, 85p on Wednesday or Thursday, to £1.15 on Friday and Saturday.