Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  During the seven years when Wigan dominated the limelight, Northern Soul still had alternatives to Wigan, including all-nighters (and then all-dayers) at Cleethorpes Pier run by Mary and Colin Chapman, and the sessions at the Catacombs on Temple Street in Wolverhampton, where you’d still get progressive rock on Sundays and Mondays (Free played there, and Caravan), but from 1967 through to 1974 you’d have found DJs like Alan Smith, ‘Farmer’ Carl Dene, and Soul Sam playing some of the rarest r&b and soul played anywhere in the country.

  Venue operators continued to look for ways to incorporate the smaller scenes without alienating the core audience. At the Coventry Locarno the management called Thursday nights ‘Rockhouse’ nights and booked live performances by the likes of Slade, Argent and Vinegar Joe. In Bristol the same year, 1972, several acts played at the Locarno under the banner of ‘Electric Village’; these were held on Sunday nights and included an August Bank Holiday appearance by David Bowie (supported by Thin Lizzy). Bowie was gigging relentlessly in this period following the release of his album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars on 6 June 1972.

  Bowie had given himself a makeover, created the Ziggy Stardust character, and released one of the most important albums of the decade, but when he embarked on a tour to promote it, shows weren’t selling out. At the Free Trade Hall in Manchester there were 300 at most, and Newcastle City Hall on 2 June was half full (among the attendees, though, was Neil Tennant, later of the Pet Shop Boys). By the end of that month, though, his fortunes had changed for a number of reasons, including a turning point that demonstrated not just the power of the live gig, and the power of the moment, but the power of the moment memorialised: a photograph by Mick Rock.

  At Oxford Town Hall on 17 June 1972 Mick Rock was taking photographs from the side of the stage. During ‘Suffragette City’, Bowie sank to his knees in front of guitarist Mick Ronson, grabbed his arse and began plucking at Ronson’s guitar with his teeth. The photo of Bowie going down on Ronson’s guitar was a high-impact image. Bowie understood that more than anyone and persuaded his manager Tony DeFries to run the photo as a full page in Melody Maker. Two weeks later Bowie appeared on Top of the Pops performing ‘Star Man’. His tour took off, and the Ziggy Stardust shows became arguably the most celebrated live performances in the history of British rock music. Wherever Bowie was playing on any given evening, it was the centre of the music universe.

  Bowie’s shape-shifting reinvention and rock & roll androgyny drew on a few influences, including gay clubs he’d visited in London – although his wife, Angie, was a more regular frequenter of gay clubs and also took a significant role in styling her husband. The gay clubs and bars in the early 1970s formed another, usually hidden, underground scene, and for good reason. Legislation had been passed in 1967 decriminalising gay sex between consenting adults but ‘coming out’ was still unacceptable in many social circles. There’s still violence and intimidation directed towards gay people but in the 1970s aggressive homophobia was more widespread; glittery guys in hot pants were accepted on Top of the Pops, but not out in public.

  Alan Jones – who would later work for Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood at their shop on the King’s Road – recalls there was no definable soundtrack to a night out at a gay venue in the early 1970s, not until disco became standard later in the decade, and then, later still, Hi-NRG. The default playlist was Motown medleys, but Alan remembers dancing to ‘Paranoid’ and revelled in the imaginative stylishness of the customers at the gay clubs and bars: ‘Most of them would be wearing Alkasura,’ Alan says. ‘I used to have every single outfit Alkasura ever had, red corduroy jumpsuits, brilliant stuff. And people would be wearing those tucked into boots and there were little gold tops, and that’s what I remember; people looking like that.’

  Some areas, like Brighton, already had a reputation for gay-friendly venues. By the mid-1960s there were several gay-friendly pubs but these were generally low-key meeting places, sedate even. The first gay venue in Brighton with anything that could be described as a dancefloor was the Curtain Club in the basement of the Queens Hotel. Like a number of late-night premises at the time, the Curtain had what was called a ‘supper club’ licence, which entailed charging an entrance fee that secured a supper ticket, which you could then exchange for a plate of food. If customers ate on the premises, the club was entitled to serve alcohol and play music until 1 a.m.

  The Curtain installed disco lights into one of the rooms, and dancing was encouraged, although under supervision. A monitor on duty would swoop on any gay couple that came close to touching each other on the dancefloor. Prosecutions of club managers for allowing close dancing were not unknown. In 1962 David Browne, the manager of the Kandy Lounge in Soho, was taken to court after plain-clothes police officers had apparently ‘observed men dancing the twist with each other’ (Browne preferred his surname to be pronounced ‘Browné’ and later became proprietor of the Downs Hotel in Hassocks).

  In London, the Gateways club was a members-only cellar bar on the corner of King’s Road and Bramerton Street in Chelsea. From its earliest days, owner Ted Ware encouraged a variety of people to use the venue, including the Chelsea Arts Club. In the 1950s pianist Chester Harriott was a performer, playing tunes made famous by the likes of Fats Waller (Chester’s son Ainsley is a well-known TV chef).

  The tolerant policy drew many lesbian regulars to the Gateways and in the early 1960s it formally declared itself women-only, a development that came after Ted’s wife Gina took more of an interest in the club in the 1960s and installed an American lesbian by the name of Smithy as a co-manager. There was an untapped demand, as lesbians had few places to mix with any degree of freedom. In many ways, women of all sexual persuasions were more marginalised in clubs and venues than they had been in the 1930s and 1940s. There were spoken and unspoken rules controlling their behaviour. It’s difficult to believe now, but women wearing trousers were often still banned from many restaurants in the 1970s, while many pubs were risky places for women to visit unaccompanied by men.

  In the 1960s more than a few queer bars operated in Soho, including the Mambo, the Apple, the Alibi and the Huntsman. In many ways the most significant was Le Duce on D’Arblay Street, owned by ex-policeman Bill Bryant and his partner Geoffrey Worthington. Le Duce was a basement where queer mods went to dance to bluebeat and Motown. There was no DJ, just a juke box and a fish tank. It’s reported that there were a higher proportion of black girls who attended regularly and that the management turned away older (predatory) men. It was fashionable, and made sense; the lyrics and the image of acts like the Supremes had a special appeal to the Le Duce audience.

  Peter Burton was the manager from 1966 to 1968 and later recalled that the use of purple hearts and black bombers was even more relentless than at any straight mod club. The police raids were frequent though, and the fish in the tank kept dying because clubbers lobbed their pills into the water whenever the police arrived. He also saw various DIY ways to get high. A transvestite called Samantha was one of the habitués of Le Duce; she had a thing for sniffing her wig-cleaning fluid.

  There were still several actively gay clubs in Soho in the mid-1970s, including the lesbian venue Louise’s – which you entered through a red door at 61 Poland Street – but in the 1970s the queer scene also expanded in West London: Chelsea, Kensington High Street and Earls Court. One venue in particular, Yours or Mine on Kensington High Street – known more familiarly as the Sombrero (the exterior decor included a sombrero above the door) – was a place to be. Through the door you could make a reasonably grand entrance into the club down a sweeping staircase. There, DJ Rudi was set up in an arch often decorated with flowers. The Sombrero drew a crowd most evenings, even Sunday nights, and even though there was no other discernible nightlife in the vicinity. There was a coloured flashing Perspex dancefloor similar to the one later made famous in Saturday Night Fever. The club had a supper licence, with waiter service; the waiters would distribute plates of ham
with potato salad. A glass of wine was 35p.

  It was a popular hang-out, and not just for gay men. David Bowie visited, and Angie. There were often rumours that Mick Jagger was planning a visit. It’s a sign of how strong some of the currents of sexual and gender experimentation were in that era that such a thing was possible; that the singer in the most famous rock band of the time might drop in for a pose and preen and a potato salad at a club described by one regular as ‘very faggy indeed, gold chains and sprayed hair, little leather clutch bags, rich older queens and their younger pickings’.

  Another gay club in London in the early 1970s was Chaguarama’s, a former warehouse on Neal Street converted into a venue in 1970 by reggae producer Tony Ashfield. At that time the area was still busy with workers from the Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market, but there were shops and offices in the neighbourhood, and also prostitutes and rent boys and others involved in the sex trade. Chaguarama’s had a struggle to stay profitable when some of the clientele disappeared after the fruit and vegetable market moved away, but it survived by becoming a gay club, with Norman Scott on DJ duties.

  In 1974 Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood opened the latest incarnation of their boutique on King’s Road, christening it SEX, a boutique with attitude. ‘Specialists in rubberwear, glamourwear and stagewear’, according to their business card. This is when Alan Jones arrived, joining the SEX gang. He particularly bonded with one of the other SEX staff, Jordan, who had arrived in London from a council estate in Seaford, Sussex, and with Alan would go to clubs like the Masquerade on Earls Court Road. Alan took to wearing stock from SEX on his nights out at one of his other favourite gay bars, the Catacombs in Earls Court, where DJ Chris Lucas threw down a great selection of tunes.

  One man making things happen on the gay scene in London in the early 1970s was promoter Richard Scanes (usually known as Tricky Dicky). He would hire straight venues, pubs no one much used, and would host one-night-only, gay-only functions, a step on from bars with juke boxes, with more emphasis on dancing. Occasionally he would attempt larger gatherings, including one in 1975 underneath a hotel in Paddington that attracted 600 dancing queens.

  In Birmingham there were covert meeting places for gay men going back to the 1950s and earlier, including the swimming baths on Kent Street. By the beginning of the 1970s there were two successful and competing gay clubs in the city. The Nightingale first opened in Camp Hill in 1969, before moving to near the Aston Villa ground. Later it moved to Thorp Street, where it helped establish the top end of Hurst Street as a focus for gay life, alongside gay-friendly pubs like the Jester and the Windmill. It was in this area where Jane Kahn and Patti Bell opened a boutique near the end of the 1970s, serving the way-out Bowie fans and Rum Runner regulars.

  Birmingham’s other major gay club in the 1970s had its roots at Guys, a former gay-friendly beatnik café co-owned by Keith Campbell and John Walters. Guys was in the Bull Ring market, very city centre, but for their next project Campbell and Walters opened the Grosvenor House Hotel at 326 Hagley Road, nearly two miles out of town. This was 1971. Neither the Nightingale nor Guys encouraged lesbians to attend the venues, but a dozen or more lesbians picketed Guys, which led to Tuesdays being relaunched as a mixed night, an arrangement that continued when the Grosvenor opened in 1971. The award-winning actress Noele Gordon, who starred in the long-running TV soap Crossroads, was a regular at the Grosvenor, often in the company of the entertainer Larry Grayson. In 1973 the pair announced their engagement, but observers who concluded it was unlikely the engagement would end in marriage were proved right.

  The 1970s was a decade full of divisions and tensions, in politics, culture and out on the street. Among music fans involved in the established and emerging subcultures, the divide between rock music and disco in the 1970s was a particularly clear-cut example of the tribalism of that decade. DJs were everywhere, on radio and TV as well as in cabaret clubs and dance halls, but not everyone was convinced they were making a positive contribution to the culture. The standardised fare in discotheques was criticised for being formulaic or escapist. DJs also came in for criticism, being described by Melody Maker in 1975 as ‘parasites’. British rock music was possibly not at its most creative at the time – lucrative, but not creative.

  In 1975, ten years after Robert Plant and John Bonham had first met at Ma Regan’s Plaza in Old Hill, Led Zeppelin were one of the biggest British rock bands, enjoying record-breaking album sales and proving a huge live draw, capable of filling all the major halls in Britain. During May 1975, they played five nights at Earls Court, attracting 15,000 people a night. Also in 1975 Yes played at QPR’s football ground, Loftus Road, and Pink Floyd headlined a festival at Knebworth Park in Hertfordshire in July, attracting 80,000 people. In October the Who kicked off the first leg of their Who by Numbers tour at Bingley Hall just outside Stafford. It was a sign how big British rock music had become that bands that had once coveted a weekend slot at the Marquee were now playing big venues to satisfy demand for tickets. Bingley Hall was a 10,000-capacity shed owned by the Staffordshire Agricultural Society, purpose-built to accommodate penned farm animals.

  In contrast to those mammoth events, in the early and mid-1970s live music was a feature of many pubs throughout the land – apart from in Northern Ireland. Record-shop owner Terri Hooley had been enthusiastically involved in the Belfast scene. ‘The sixties for me was like a great big party which I thought would never end but by November of 1968 l knew it was over,’ he later recalled. That month riots in Northern Ireland escalated, and decades of terrorism, killings and bombings began. ‘When the troubles came it was a horrific time – the start of the seventies was the pits,’ Terri says. On 17 June 1972, Lisburn’s Top Hat Ballroom was destroyed by an IRA bomb. Nightlife collapsed, bands stopped touring. Terri got involved with the Music for Belfast campaign, trying in vain to persuade English bands to include a Belfast date on their tours.

  Most of the active pub acts elsewhere were covers bands, but it was also easy to find pubs with a Sunday-night folk music session (the Blue Bell in Hull and the Three Cups in Chelmsford, for example) or a Friday biker-friendly heavy rock night. A number of pub bands specialising in recapturing the original spirit of rhythm & blues were active, particularly in London. In contrast to the big gigs and remote lifestyles of the Bingley Hall or Earls Court-type bands, these bands were reconnecting to the grassroots and, as we’ll see, the pub rock scene had a role to play in the first stirrings of punk rock.

  The ‘parasites’, meanwhile, were still enamoured of their rare soul. In Coventry in 1973 Pete Waterman launched a record shop, The Soul Hole. By 1974 he was filling the dancefloor at the Coventry Locarno with the likes of George McCrae’s ‘Rock Your Baby’ and ‘Love Train’ by the O’Jays. In his shop he was selling tons of records by the O’Jays and other stuff on the Philadelphia International label. In March 1974 he saw the Three Degrees perform at a record company showcase at the Mayfair Hotel in London. He was impressed by their harmonies and their onstage confidence, and won over by their looks: ‘The first thing that took our breath away was their see-through dresses,’ he later wrote in Coventry’s Hobo magazine.

  By the early 1970s the idea of a disco as a place of delight and entertainment was established but, via songs like ‘Love Train’, mid-1970s disco became a sound too. ‘Disco’ was a genre, music made for the dancefloor, working and reworking certain sounds and formulas. Gamble and Huff, the Philadelphia producers behind the sound of songs like ‘Love Train’ and MFSB’s ‘Love is the Message’, aimed straight at the dancefloor with lush strings, irresistible basslines and surging, usually life-affirming, choruses.

  David Bowie was also in attendance at the Three Degrees gig and Pete claims they had a conversation about soul music, which is perfectly possible; it was in this era that Bowie began incorporating black American soul influences into his music. Despite the hostility of Melody Maker, black soul music played by parasites was inspiring British musicians, including Bowie
, and especially during the making of his Young Americans album released in March 1975. The new sound worked well for Bowie. Near the end of 1975 he performed his single ‘Fame’ on the most important dance music show in the world, Soul Train.

  Bowie would have been aware of the excited embrace of funk and disco in gay clubs but the flow of great dancefloor records being made in America in the mid-1970s was too strong to ignore wherever you were, even in the heartland of Northern Soul where the sound of Detroit in the mid-1960s still ruled. After the Torch closed, Colin Curtis was asked by a manager at Blackpool Mecca to take on the DJing job at the Highland Room. Colin and his DJ partner Ian Levine developed a playlist there, which evolved from old-style Northern Soul and embraced modern soul, disco and jazz funk. Curtis and Levine proved successful and ground-breaking, although some of the Northern Soul crowd vehemently rejected the new sounds.

  ‘The Hustle’ by Van McCoy and the Soul City Symphony was one of the big hits of the summer of 1975. The 100 Club had a Tuesday soul and funk night that was packing in the crowds; a young John Wardle (later Jah Wobble, of Public Image Limited) was a regular. Another young man about town at the time was Don Letts, who was working at Jean Machine on the King’s Road and frequenting soul clubs. His big night out of the week was Monday nights at the Lyceum, where he remembers black and white kids dancing to soul and funk like James Brown, and the Ohio Players. He’d also be at places like upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s, the Q Club on Praed Street (owned by Count Suckle) and the Lacy Lady in Ilford, where Chris Hill was the DJ.

  Although Letts loved these soul nights out, in the mid-1970s he dropped away from the soul scene, as the messages he heard through sound systems like Jah Shaka, Moa Ambassa and Coxsone became more potent. Bob Marley’s Catch a Fire had been a revelation to him, as had Big Youth’s Screaming Target album. By 1975 he was immersed in the sound of dub and the words of the militant roots music champions like Big Youth, I-Roy and U-Roy.