Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  In July 1975 Don went to see Bob Marley and the Wailers performing at the Lyceum, which he later described as ‘the closest I have ever got to a religious experience’. Carrying a bag of weed with him, he followed Marley and his crew back to a hotel in Harrington Gardens, off Gloucester Road. Marley talked to the Rasta brethren through the night, shared Don’s weed, and reasoned with him until sunrise.

  Reggae was one of the sounds of the 1970s. Although, like every other underground scene, there were occasions when its profile in the mainstream took a leap – when a one-off single crashed into the charts (like ‘Double Barrel’ or ‘Uptown Top Ranking’) or thanks to the star quality of Bob Marley – most venues playing reggae were away from the high street.

  The network of sound-system operators in the 1970s was nationwide, with particularly strong scenes in London, Bristol and Birmingham, and in the Leeds and Huddersfield area. Their audiences were not only devoted to the music but also had no desire to frequent mainstream clubs. Sound systems developed major followings and would travel the country, often with followers accompanying them, in order to ‘do battle’ with other sounds at community halls and other venues. In some respects there was little difference between some notable and permanent reggae clubs like the Four Aces in Dalston and community halls. The Four Aces operated as a valuable focus for its mainly Afro-Caribbean audience, hosting wedding parties, wakes, events for children and community meetings.

  The record selectors at sound-system events and clubs like the Four Aces were among those who benefitted from the arrival of the twelve-inch single format in the mid-1970s. The broader dynamic range of the new format delivered clearer, heavier bass sounds. In addition to the instrumental and dub versions, which the seven-inch format had often carried, there was room for more and extended versions on the new format. From 1976 onwards reggae singles were often released with special ‘discomix’ versions, including ‘Creation Time’ by the Maytones and ‘Keep on Moving’ by Bob Marley and the Wailers.

  The twelve-inch single format also led to developments in DJing technique, first in the disco clubs of New York; these included beat-matching and other tricks of the trade that weren’t possible on the smaller seven-inch singles, which were less easy to manipulate. Club DJs in Britain though were becoming more important in the hit-making process. DJs who were playing prerelease or import copies of tracks were creating demand on dancefloors, irrespective of whether the tracks were getting any radio play. This would be a feature of the late 1980s rave era, but was in evidence in the mid-1970s. Donna Summer’s ‘Love to Love You Baby’ became available on import and twelve-inch single late in 1975, and through sustained club play (and after some weeks in the American disco charts) the record had a British release, which, despite a BBC ban, went Top Five early in 1976.

  ‘Love to Love You Baby’ was a massive tune in the gay clubs, as post-Philly disco music locked into a spirit of gay liberation, with the latest soul, funk and proto-disco imports flooding the playlists of DJs like Tallulah (resident at Shanes in West Hampstead) and Chris Lucas at the Catacombs. It was becoming clear to Tricky Dicky that there was a demand for larger gay nights, and in 1976 he launched ‘Bang’ at the Sundowner on Charing Cross Road every Monday night, recruiting DJs including Gary London (the resident DJ at the Sundowner on straight nights), Tallulah and Norman Scott, with the atmosphere intensified by expensive and state-of-the-art venue lighting. The idea, the atmosphere and the music (new disco releases on import) pulled the crowd and Bang opened on Thursdays too.

  Over the next year or two more large-scale high-profile gay clubs were launched, including the Embassy, owned by Jeremy Norman. The Embassy was an upmarket, avowedly glamorous, loud and proud club on Bond Street, with an onus on dancing and ideas imported from Studio 54, including state-of-the-art lighting and bus boys in short shorts. Fantasy Records filmed the video for Sylvester’s ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ at the Embassy in 1978.

  The practice of DJs beat-matching and mixing records rather than stop/starting records was also being imported from New York. Greg James at the Embassy (later resident DJ at the Warehouse in Leeds) was one of the first DJs in Britain to embrace the technique, along with others including James Hamilton and Graham Canter at Gullivers in Mayfair, and Steve Howlett (known as Froggy), who was probably Britain’s most technically adept DJ at the beginning of the 1980s.

  Larger events like Bang and the Embassy drew some of the gay crowd away from smaller venues, but the gay scene didn’t move en masse to the new large clubs, partly because the compromises in the music policy inherent at a large venue had a tendency to lead to a less creative playlist, but an important factor other than music choice was that some gay customers preferred the less conspicuous clubs for reasons of discretion and privacy. Others were turned off by the increasingly straight crowd Embassy began to attract.

  Crackers on Dean Street, Soho, was predominantly a gay club that on other occasions became a haven for aficionados of soul and funk. From 1973 onwards, the resident DJ at the venue was Mark Roman. Soon he was DJing every day except Thursday, and also had launched a Friday lunchtime session that began at twelve noon and ended at 2.30 p.m. In 1976 DJing duties on Friday lunchtimes were shared by George Power and Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson. Admission was 50p.

  The regulars at the Friday lunchtime sessions weren’t into retro, fast-tempo Northern Soul, preferring modern soul, funk and a touch of jazz, but, like their Northern counterparts, they gloried in the exclusive finds of the DJs and loved to dance. They’d make their way to this small, dimly lit, dodgy basement disco, the tiny kitchen offering sandwiches at lunchtime, and scampi and chips in the evening. The girls would take their shoes to work so they could run out of the office to the club in double-quick time. Many of the young men there favoured tight jeans by Pepe or Fiorucci, loafers and sleeveless T-shirts.

  Sunday evenings were another popular night among the soul and funk cognoscenti at Crackers. People discovered DJs and followed them, just as they would in the 1990s. Paul Murphy playing jazz fusion had a great reputation at the 100 Club and also at the Horseshoe pub on Tottenham Court Road (Paul DJ’d there with Baz Fe Jazz). Every DJ was on the lookout for surprising floorfillers. George Power at Crackers would play Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Riot in Lagos’ and Manu Dibango’s ‘Goro City’.

  Many of the Crackers crowd, and the regulars at Chris Hill’s Goldmine and Lacy Lady nights, would tune into soul shows presented on radio by Robbie Vincent and Greg Edwards, and read magazines like Blues & Soul. Chris Hill had a big following. He’d built his reputation at the Goldmine on Canvey Island and made a success of the Lacy Lady. Hill had good ears (in 1975, for example, one of his big tunes was ‘Fly Robin Fly’ by Silver Convention, a Euro dance record that helped define the disco era), but the way he presented the music – alongside madcap antics and party games – irked and deterred many purists, although it certainly helped pull a commercial crowd towards funk and soul.

  As the scene grew, Chris Hill and other DJs from the southeast of England who played music on a similar tip – the likes of Robbie Vincent, Greg Edwards, Chris Brown, Jeff Young, Tom Holland, Froggy and Sean French – were dubbed the Soul Mafia. They’d feature on the bill at soul all-dayers, and then soul weekenders. The weekenders would take place over three days at holiday camps, the first being Caister-on-Sea near Yarmouth in April 1979.

  There was a clear preference for Northern Soul in the Midlands and the North, and for modern soul and funk in the South, but it wasn’t a clear-cut geographic split; there were some major exceptions. For example, at the end of the 1970s soul fans in London also had an opportunity to hear some of the retro and rare rhythm & blues and Northern Soul when the 6Ts Rhythm and Soul Society was formed in August 1979 by Randy Cozens and Ady Croasdell. Among the venues they used was the Starlight Room in West Hampstead (which had been the Klooks Kleek club in the 1960s and earlier in the 1970s), before settling on a monthly residency at the 100 Club.

  In the second half
of the 1970s, the North wasn’t only about Northern Soul, as the evolution of the music policy at the Highland Room at Blackpool Mecca demonstrates. One city in particular, Liverpool, eschewed the search for fast-paced rare 60s soul; instead, DJs like Les Spaine gave the city’s soul scene a funkier, eclectic, contemporary groove. You’d hear Les at a club called the Pun, a little cellar venue on Seel Street which held just two or three hundred.

  While he was at the Pun, Les began to pick up a following among black American servicemen, especially those stationed at the airbase at Burtonwood. They were attracted to the girls in the club – that’s a given – but the servicemen also loved Les Spaine’s selections. Ray Carrington, a white guy who owned the Timepiece on Fleet Street (it had previously been the Time and Place) asked Les if he would move there from the Pun, which he did, taking his black crowd with him, but also widening his audience.

  The sparkling reputation for quality black music at the Timepiece created by Les was bolstered by fabulous live acts such as the Ohio Players, Heatwave and Chairmen of the Board. Just as they did for Wigan Casino, people travelled to be there, especially for the all-nighters and especially the young black kids from outlying areas. As with other significant clubs, at the Timepiece people were finding their music, their friends and their identity. For the black community in Liverpool, it injected flashy, funky, Afro-American influence into a scene that had been predominantly Afro-Caribbean. The fashions were something to behold – big Afros, wide jeans, stacked heels.

  At the Timepiece Les was playing to a crowd who knew their music, even more so on occasions when he was invited to play at airbases. He’d go over to Burtonwood midweek and DJ to the Americans, and get paid in dollars. Les opened a new bank account for all these wages, but after a short while the bank manager called him in to explain where he was getting all this money. It wasn’t usual for some black guy from Liverpool to be walking into the bank every week with a bag of dollars.

  Records Les championed – like Banbarra’s ‘Shack Up’ – became so loved locally they even filtered into Liverpool’s more commercial clubs. His work had a direct influence on one of the most innovative DJs of the 1980s and after, Greg Wilson, who’d been brought up in New Brighton, a seaside town that welcomed daytrippers from all over Merseyside. The nightlife in New Brighton had a strong reputation too, though not for being trendy. A club there, the Chelsea Reach, was later the subject of photographs by Tom Wood, published in 1989 as Looking for Love. The building has since been converted into apartments.

  Greg’s passion was black music but this involved searching for records and looking for the people and the networks that could sustain and expand his interests – magazines like Blues & Soul and Black Echoes. He’d also tune in to BBC Radio Merseyside every Monday night for the soul show presented by Terry Lennaine. Fan-boy Greg often sat in on the show and hung out at Terry’s DJ events.

  One evening Terry Lennaine took Greg to the Timepiece. This was 1976; they were two of the few white guys in the crowd. Impressed by the music and the vibe, Greg resolved to concentrate his Djing on finding and nurturing similar audiences. After some adventures DJing in Scandanavia, he took a slot at the Golden Guinea back in New Brighton (formerly known as the Kraal Club; the Beatles had played a gig there in 1961) and began building his reputation. From there he went on to a residency at Wigan Pier, then also Wednesdays at Legend on Princess Street in Manchester (easily, but not to be, confused with Legends on Whitworth Street). Legend is now called 5th Avenue; it’s a massively successful student-oriented indie club, but when Greg ruled the roost he played electro, pioneering the sound in Manchester, and leading to a short residency at the Haçienda.

  In theory, the 1965 Race Relations Act outlawed operating a colour bar in a pub or club, but in practice there were numerous loopholes and no easy redress. A full-scale overhaul of legislation in the 1976 Race Relations Act included the setting up of the Commission for Racial Equality. Suspicions remained, however, that many clubs operated a quota system, welcoming a small number of black people but denying entry to others once the quota had been reached.

  In Manchester, black audiences gathered out of town in clubs like the Russell in inner-city Hulme. Half a mile further out, in nearby Moss Side, there were numerous ‘blues’ – all-night parties in private homes that brought problems for other residents. They often attracted the attentions of the police but some became almost semi-permanent, including two not far from each other on Barnhill Street and Broadfield Road. They provided somewhere to socialise and a way of raising money for the households that hosted them.

  In addition, Moss Side had several clubs, including the Reno on Princess Street with a drinking club, the Nile, attached to it. The Reno was about as far from a clean, controlled mainstream nightclub as you can imagine but the music and the crowd were a great inner-city mix. In that era you’d get soul and reggae, young hustler-type black guys on the stairs selling weed, smartly turned-out old men playing dominoes, young women in small groups with great moves and wonderful outfits, old Irish women, drunks and DJs.

  There were racist doors in most city centres, though. On one occasion Greg Wilson was playing in Liverpool and the club doormen complained to him about the way his music was attracting black kids. They’d been turning dozens away. ‘The exact question I remember was, “What’s with all the Sooties?” It was made quite clear that they held me personally responsible for the increase in black kids turning up at “their” door, and I was warned that this had to cease immediately. I quit that night.’

  Racial discrimination at a Birmingham club called Pollyanna’s came to light in November 1977 when someone from a local cosmetics company enquired about booking the venue for a Christmas party. The manager refused the reservation when he realised a large proportion of the invitees were black. Other incidents were reported over the following weeks and a protest group was set up that began to picket the club on Saturdays, only for the police to break it up and arrest nine of the protestors.

  In April 1978 the group led a protest march from an anti-racist gig at Digbeth Civic Hall up to Pollyanna’s. On flyers distributed by the Birmingham Action Committee Against Racism in Clubs – as the organisers called themselves – there were claims similar policies were in force at the Guilded Cage and Rebecca’s. Finally the Commission for Racial Equality got involved and took the owners of Pollyanna’s Birmingham to court. Pollyanna’s closed in 1987.

  All the confusion and conflicts surrounding the issue of race was played out at night. The black contribution to popular music – including but not limited to ragtime, bebop, rhythm & blues, soul and disco – has fuelled excitement at music venues in Britain for over a hundred years. In the 1970s and 1980s some of the same venues where dancefloors were being filled by music of black origin were turning away black customers. Trevor Nelson was turned away from the Goldmine, and Norman Jay and his friends were refused entry to the Lacy Lady on his 21st birthday. ‘You never forget things like that,’ he says.

  On the other hand there was progress too, signs that the young were becoming more tolerant as a result of being together in clubs, listening to soul and funk, as well as the crossover appeal of Bob Marley, the success of racially diverse acts on the Two Tone label in the late 1970s, and the efforts of left-leaning pressure groups like Rock Against Racism. Evidence this was the case is provided by the response of far-right groups in Britain. In 1979, the youth magazine published by the BNP, The Young Nationalist, declared: ‘Disco and its melting pot pseudo philosophy must be fought or Britain’s streets will be full of black-worshipping soul boys.’

  At the Catacombs in Wolverhampton white Northern Soul fans would dance their late nights away to ‘Six By Six’ by Earl Van Dyke, Barbara Randolph’s ‘I Got A Feeling’ and Jackie Lee’s ‘Darkest Days’. Up the road, the Stylistics took their talents and their lime-green suits to Stoke, and the International Soul Club (based in Staffordshire) produced cloth badges depicting Black Power’s clenched-fist salute. Some of this m
ay have been naive, but potentially thousands of ISC members were flaunting the badges: a powerful statement in an area of the country where the National Front were making electoral gains, Enoch Powell was the MP representing Wolverhampton South West, and it was barely a generation since the controversy surrounding the Scala in Wolverhampton implementing a bar on black men.

  The site of the Catacombs is now a red-brick office building called Molineux House. The Torch has disappeared. Blackpool Mecca became a Tiffany’s, closed in the 1980s and was demolished in 2009. Wigan Casino has also been demolished. Sites key to Northern Soul have been lost but the scene has never disappeared, nor the affection with which its early days are remembered. In September 2013, BBC Two broadcast a short documentary film fronted by broadcaster Paul Mason during which he met and interviewed Fran Franklin (Fran sadly died in May 2014). She tells him she grew up in Muirhouse in Edinburgh, her mother was on her own bringing up four children and Fran spent most of the time being the big sister and doing all the chores. But when she became aware of the Northern scene, her mother encouraged her to go and seek it as an outlet. When Mason asks her what it felt like being black in an immensely white, working-class scene she says, ‘For me it was like, I fit in, I’ve got a family. Every single person I ever met on the scene felt like my brother or sister.’

  Peter Stringfellow opened the Millionaire Club in Manchester in 1976, where he achieved much success before finally moving on to London, where he opened his celebrity and model-filled nightclub in Covent Garden (the Millionaire Club was later known as the Wiggly Worm in the 1990s; it closed down after the venue was ram-raided during a night called ‘Most Excellent’).

  In the 1990s, the Tuxedo Princess was used by the BBC to film scenes included in the TV drama Our Friends in the North. Tosker, the character played by Mark Strong, does up a boat and turns it into a floating nightclub with an Animals tribute act performing ‘We’ve Gotta Get Out of this Place’ on the opening night. In 2008 the boat was sent to Turkey to be scrapped, although the following year it was referred to by Maximo Park on their Quicken the Heart album, in a song mentioning a ‘revolving dancefloor in the middle of the river’. Coventry Locarno also made it into a song. In Terry Hall’s lyrics on the B-side of ‘Ghost Town’ by the Specials, Terry describes going out on a Friday night to the Locarno and returning home on a Saturday morning. He recounts a somewhat desultory experience that includes getting piss stains on his shoes.