Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  Most towns had a discotheque/cabaret club. At the Nite Spot in Bedford in 1977 Saturday was cabaret night, with stars such as Ronnie Corbett and the Barron Knights (you were advised to book a table early, and reminded that men had to wear jackets and ties, and ladies in jeans would be refused entry). Thursdays and Fridays hosted live bands, like the Enid and U Boat, and Tuesdays and Wednesdays were disco nights (the £1 admission price included a 40p meal voucher).

  A key element in the success of the Mecca dance halls in the 1920s and 1930s was that they delivered escape and sophistication, and many of the discotheques and nightclubs in the 1970s also appealed to a sense of aspiration. Sometimes, however, decor designed to enhance the glamour of the experience had unfortunate side effects. I’m thinking of the presence of ultraviolet lighting, the bane of many young lads in that era, as it showed up the dandruff on your shoulders and the fillings in your teeth.

  Mecca bosses were aware that each generation needs its own space and that young people generally have some resistance to socialising where their parents had. They made haste to refurbish, reposition and, of course, rename some of the venues. A numbers of Locarnos were renamed Cat’s Whiskers, including those in Burnley and Oldham. The Plaza on Oxford Street where Savile had presided was given a refit and rechristened Tiffany’s, a name the Mecca organisation favoured for a number of its venues in the 1970s (Coventry Locarno became Tiffany’s on Valentine’s Day 1974). Tiffany’s in Manchester for many of its early years was managed by Harold Hulley and Doreen Edwards, who kept a mynah bird in a cage on the stairs that harangued customers as they walked in, until someone taught the bird to swear and, after complaints, it was removed.

  There was a flock of venues known as Cinderella Rockafella’s (sometimes Cinderella Rocker fella’s). Tiffany’s in Edinburgh became a Cinderella Rockerfella’s in about 1982. Among the many nationwide, you could find ones in Chester, Northampton, Guildford and Leeds. In Leeds, Cinderella’s was an unglorified discotheque, but Rockafella’s, next door, was for over-21s only, and appealed to locals who considered themselves a cut above their peers: footballers, wide boys with wide ties, dodgy gangster types and dolly birds.

  In London, the private members’ club Annabel’s had been founded by Mark Birley in 1963 with the intention of providing a discotheque for the aristocracy. He named it after his wife (who left him a year later for the tycoon James Goldsmith). Aristotle Onassis and Jackie Kennedy visited and model Jerry Hall was a regular, as was Lord Lucan, until he disappeared in 1974. One of the prime celebrity haunts of the early 1970s was Tramps, which could count George Best among its fans. A generation of flamboyant footballers partied at Tramps (and, later, at Stringfellows) including the much-travelled Frank Worthington who had spells at eleven teams including Huddersfield Town, Bolton Wanderers, Birmingham City and Southampton, his favourite clubs though were Playboy, Tramps and Stringfellows.

  Peter Stringfellow opened his venue in London in 1980. By that time he’d run clubs in Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds. Cinderella Rockafella’s in Leeds was one of his pre-London projects. At his Leeds venue he employed girls in black leotards to staff the bar and provide a waitress service. Sophistication was the intention, though not always the outcome. Regulars at Cinderella’s remember Mr Stringfellow encouraging good-looking girls to take to the stage to remove items of clothing, and if they did he’d reward them with a free bottle of bubbly. At Rockafella’s the entertainment included appearances by Mike and Bernie Winters. In Cinderella’s you could expect appearances by Paper Lace and Mud, and, like most mainstream clubs in that era, the girls danced round their handbags and the tempo would drop at the end of the night for a smoochy dance to ‘When Will I See You Again?’

  The Del Sol club in Manchester was another venue where the promise of sophistication in the name and advertising wasn’t quite delivered. In the era it opened, Benidorm and the resorts on the Costa del Sol and Majorca and Marbella were all considered a refined holiday – an opportunity to see some sunshine, enjoy drinks with foreign names and return with holiday slides to show the neighbours, a doll in national costume, something glamorous to wear, a cream jacket perhaps, without a collar. At the Del Sol, you’d pay 5/- (25p) admission, which would include a plate of Lancashire hotpot, the compere Cedric murdering Frank Sinatra classics, and a performance by an exotic dancer called Big Julie.

  In his autobiography Blessed, footballer George Best recounts a visit to the Del Sol club at a time when two of his friends were hoping they’d run a club together; he may have been drawn to the venue by the name, as Best loved his Spanish holidays. The Del Sol was grotty, though – ‘a pigsty’ (according to George) – but they decided to buy the venue, do it up and change the name, although a further cause for concern was that there was a police station on the same street; there’s never been an era when clubbers would consider this a plus point. Nevertheless, with Malcolm (‘Waggy’) Wagner and Colin Burn (who owned Rubens, round the corner, the venue that had once housed the Oasis), Best took the plunge and bought the Del Sol at the end of 1973. They took it up-market and offered wine and cocktails. Best also came up with a new name for the club – Slack Alice – taken from a character who cropped up in routines by camp comedian Larry Grayson, whose repertoire included a number of popular catch-phrases. As Best later explained, ‘We could have hardly called a nightclub “Shut That Door”.’

  Half a mile away, down by the Manchester Ship Canal, the Pomona Palace had fallen into ruin in the 1880s after a fire, and the buildings and Pomona Gardens had closed; the ground they stood on became canalside docks, part of Manchester and Salford’s ever-growing industrial power. But by the 1970s, nearing the tail-end of a different century, the docks were beginning to fall apart, as the area’s industries waned. Into this wasteland, some life returned in January 1974 when a part-pub, part-nightclub opened. It was billed as providing ‘luxurious and spacious surroundings with a difference’. The difference was that the venue was a ship, the North Westward Ho, which had been steered through the canal from the Irish Sea and berthed at Pomona Dock.

  Other cities had discofied boats, including Clubship Landfall in Liverpool, a former Royal Navy vessel that had taken part in the Normandy landings, and the Thekla, which arrived in Bristol harbour in 1982 and has survived over thirty years as a floating live music venue. In 1983 the Tuxedo Princess became the first of two former car ferries that became floating nightclubs moored on the Gateshead side of the Tyne. Back then, according to Newcastle’s Evening Chronicle, the Tuxedo Princess was ‘a celebrity haunt helping build Newcastle’s reputation as a party city’. Among the celebrities that haunted the Princess in the 1980s were DJ Noel Edmonds, comedian Freddie Starr, snooker player Steve Davis, singers Mick Hucknall and Nik Kershaw, and the cast of the TV series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

  Most of the DJs at the various Cat’s Whiskers, Tiffany’s and Top Ranks took their cues from big-name, jive-talking performer DJs like Jimmy Savile or the Emperor Rosko. A few became local heroes, including Barmy Barry, who would play the chart hits, announce and back-announce the records he was playing, namecheck clubbers with a birthday, let people know when cars needed reparking, and encourage frivolity. But in some venues DJs with a less obviously commercial playlist had a foothold, and this was encouraged by some club-owners. They knew if they could introduce a more creative playlist, then perhaps they could give the venue a unique selling point in the area.

  In Coventry, Pete Waterman moved on from his brief flirtation with progressive rock and immersed himself in soul music. He’d snared himself some DJ gigs at Coventry Locarno, comfortable on the microphone and happy to be earning some kind of living in the music business, playing a variety of music. Given half a chance, though, he liked to play rare soul; he would get hold of imports, numbers like ‘Queen of Fools’ by Barbara Mills.

  We’ve already seen the hostility to the notion of DJs and discotheques from the likes of the Musicians’ Union. As record labels like Motown, Stax and Atlantic continued to r
elease records people wanted to dance to and DJs wanted to play, other institutions attacked the growth of interest in imported black American dance music, and the popularity of discotheques. In 1971, the PPL – the agency empowered to collect copyright fees on behalf of performing musicians – warned specifically against ‘large quantities of soul records which presented particular problems in some kinds of discotheque use’.

  Through the late 1960s, Mecca bosses had searched for ways to reach out to new and emerging audiences without alienating their loyal regulars, and perhaps give up some midweek evenings to beat scene kids or other younger, or weirder, customers. At Blackpool Mecca, soon after the closure of the Twisted Wheel, the Northern Soul scene was given a space to grow on a Saturday night. Blackpool Mecca, with its capacity of around 5,000, was divided into two levels. On the lower level they hosted standard Mecca fare, a straightforward live band playing covers, well-dressed singers, and DJs with plenty of patter and a tried-and-tested Top Twenty playlist. Up the stairs, the Highland Room on Saturday nights featured DJs Tony Jebb and Stuart Freeman playing rare soul. In August 1971 Dave Godin made a trip north again and, on his return, delivered a hyper-enthusiastic report on the Highland Room in Blues & Soul. This was a scene, in 1971 at least, pretty much ignored by the media and the record companies. As far as Godin was concerned, ‘I think it shows how soul music has become the only true “underground” music in the country now.’

  What’s undeniable is that in the early years of the 1970s there were several tribes of music fans with antipathy to the mainstream, including the freaks with their underground magazines and the Northern Soul fans. There were also more-or-less self-contained networks of lovers of reggae, heavy metal and folk. Music choices dictated not just the state of your record collection, but what you wore, your attitudes, where you went drinking and dancing. The loosening of conformist pressures in the 60s was filtering through society, encouraging the young to follow paths of their own choosing, to feel empowered to seek out tribes and scenes away from what might be most obvious. For many of these scenes, underground was the chosen definition and destination; they didn’t want to be discovered, let alone tamed.

  The Highland Room wasn’t an all-nighter – that wasn’t Mecca’s way of doing things – so the rare soul all-nighter fans were still looking for somewhere as potent as the Twisted Wheel where they could dance till dawn, fuelling their nights out with amphetamines. They were prepared to travel; as it turned out, the place many of them would travel to was Stoke-on-Trent. I made the journey myself one breezy March morning and met up with Chris Burton and Colin Curtis, two delightful men, honest guys with deep Staffordshire roots and a love of nightclubs and music venues, proud but still a little flummoxed how it had all come together for them at the Golden Torch.

  Chris Burton had opened the Torch in 1964 in Tunstall, one of the six towns that make up the conurbation of Stoke-on-Trent. In the heart of a residential area, on Hose Street, there had once been a church on the site; the building had housed a skating rink and, for many years, a cinema. Chris had worked in the era of the ballrooms, promoting big bands led by the likes of Joe Loss and Eric Delaney, and then began promoting at the King’s Hall in Stoke, where both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones played. The total cost of knocking the cinema down and rebuilding it was £27,000. ‘As a young twenty-three-year-old I was probably earning too much money for my own good,’ laughs Chris.

  When the Torch first opened to the public, it was a neighbourhood beat club hosting a fairly predictable programme – the likes of Billy J. Kramer, and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders – but made good money, the ‘three years of plenty’ as Chris calls it. ‘It was a band-oriented period; you’d have to have three groups a night. The band were the main feature, the DJs, dare I say it, were secondary.’

  When pop culture took a psychedelic direction, the club suffered three years of famine – every week was a problem week, bills to pay, wages to find. ‘I couldn’t make it pay,’ says Chris. ‘You had the bigger places, in Hanley, the Mecca in Newcastle [under Lyme]; we had limitations. I thought it was the end of the Golden Torch’s life, then Northern Soul came along.’

  When Barmy Barry was there, he’d be playing a certain amount of soul – especially Motown – but it wasn’t until 1969 that Chris Burton launched a dedicated rare soul night, after DJ Keith Minshull persuaded him to give him Friday nights. The rare soul scene took him by surprise. Keith rarely used the microphone, and the music was mostly unfamiliar even to Chris Burton, who’d been in the music industry for years: ‘I remember the first one and thinking, what’s this about?’

  Then Colin Curtis came on board and they decided they should try Saturday all-nighters. Colin was living in Kidsgrove, running mobile discos in the area and DJing at the Crystal Ballroom in Newcastle-under-Lyme, which had been opened in an old billiard room by Eddie Fenton, who also owned a club with the most astonishing name in this era, perhaps any era: El Pussy.

  It was in March 1972 that the all-nighters began, running from 8.30 p.m. on Saturday to 8.30 a.m. on Sunday (‘Twelve hours of soulful tunes’ the publicity promised). Keith Minshull and Colin were the resident DJs, but various guest DJs would play, such as Tony Jebb and Martyn Ellis (from the Pendulum in Manchester). In addition, an astonishing selection of live acts appeared at the Torch. During 1972 and 1973 you could have paid £1 for twelve hours of music, including Junior Walker live, or Sam & Dave, Edwin Starr and Major Lance. Chris’s confusion had now become delight: ‘I just could not believe the crowd, the amount of them, and the sheer enthusiasm. It was electrifying.’

  When the Stylistics played Chris remembers they stayed at the Sneyd Arms Hotel on Tower Square in Tunstall and he walked them in their lime-green suits through the terraced streets to the venue. Another memorable occasion was the time Dave Evison was DJing and a girl with a heavily lacquered hair-do asked him for a light for her cigarette – he obliged with a match, but in so doing set her hair on fire. Intervening as quickly as he could, he took the heat out of the situation by pouring beer over her head.

  The success of the Torch came at the cost of a drop in numbers at the Highland Room, where the venue shut much earlier and Mecca’s tight grip on proceedings held back the hedonists. When we start talking about the use of amphetamines on the Northern Soul scene, Colin looks me straight in the eye and tells me the drug use was less than at the Haçienda at the end of the 1980s.

  Chris jumps in: ‘This was the problem . . .’ he says, and points across the road. Twenty-five feet away from where the queue would be there’s a row of terraced houses. Within fifty yards of the entrance of the club in 1972, there were probably thirty homes, probably double that if you count the ones backing onto the site of the Torch. They’d tolerated beat group nights until midnight or one o’clock, but the change to all-nighters brought conflict over noise and parking. The queue would go all the way up the road. All night the zone around Hose Street would be alive, and busy, and noisy. In order to counteract complaints from the local residents about noise, Chris employed a number of them as cleaners. He points out which houses had family members with jobs at the Torch and confesses that he was never much concerned with the quality of their cleaning. The important thing was to ensure they had a stake in the club staying open.

  By the beginning of 1973 the local police were logging an increasing number of drug-related incidents. One of the Torch’s DJs had been busted by officers while on a break one night; they’d found him in possession of three tablets containing amphetamine and amylobarbitone. He was fined £50 and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years. In a separate incident, two girls aged sixteen and seventeen were seen taking tablets by a Drug Squad officer and placed under supervision orders. After such incidents, it was no surprise when the police objected to the renewal of the club’s liquor and entertainment licences and the club closed at the beginning of March 1973.

  The momentum behind Northern Soul was now very strong and the all-nighter scene
didn’t die off when the Torch closed. Six months later, at two o’clock in the morning of Sunday 23 September, the first all-nighter at Wigan Casino began. These weekly all-nighters lasted over seven years, and although, as we’ve seen, the Northern Soul scene was already established by the end of 1973, it was those seven years that codified the genre, gave it a huge audience, unique fashions, and so many of its mythologies.

  The Twisted Wheel had been a warren of rooms with a stone floor; the Casino – a purpose-built ballroom, originally called the Empress – had a wooden dancefloor that encouraged the dancers to display back-flips, spins and other acrobatics. As at the Wheel, the all-nighters were alcohol-free and amphetamine use was prevalent; the most common pills included the Preludin-like Filon (introduced to the market as ‘a dramatic aid to slimming’), Durophet (‘black bombers’) made by Rikers, and Dexedrine (‘Dexies’). DJs later confirmed that the use of amphetamines by the crowd dictated a more frenetic pace to the night and created a demand for stompers at the expense of some of the slower or more subtle sides they might otherwise have played.

  Wigan Casino has been celebrated and documented in numerous books and TV documentaries. In 2014 Elaine Constantine’s film Northern Soul was released, encapsulating so much about the scene: the fashions (32-inch-wide baggies, vests or bowling shirts, badges and patches), the drugs, the sense of distance from mainstream music, and the desperation for a Saturday night fix of Northern Soul.

  The founder of the all-nighters at Wigan was DJ Russ Winstanley, but live acts like Edwin Starr and Jackie Wilson were an occasional part of the programming and a special draw. Russ booked Richard Searling for some guest slots early in 1974, for a fee of twenty or twenty-five pounds (Richard can’t quite recall) and then he became part of the regular DJ team. Richard had been a DJ at Va Va’s on Great Moor Street in Bolton, which ran all-nighter sessions every Friday. Their advertising material additionally said, ‘We also cater for trendy weddings’.