Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  It took the Slits a couple of years from forming to releasing music, although they recorded a number of John Peel sessions in the interim. In 1978 Palmolive left and was replaced by Budgie from Big in Japan (who later joined Siouxsie in the Banshees). Their debut album Cut, produced by Dennis Bovell, released in 1979, eschewed the edgy squall of punk and embraced reggae. They became allies of the Bristol band the Pop Group, who fused freewheeling funk, punk and dub reggae with avant-jazz.

  Roger Eagle was a Pop Group fan; he thought they sounded like free jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor and passed a cassette round to some of his most discerning regulars. Bands outside London inspired by punk but not sounding like punk would be a feature of the next few years; Joy Division are another example. The Slits and the Pop Group released a joint seven-inch single and shared management for a while.

  Hammersmith Palais was the venue chosen to host the last show by the Slits on 30 November 1981. For their swansong, the band made an event of it, hand-picking the support acts – Carmel, and a troupe of nine modern dancers from the London Dance Theatre – and decorating the stage with a washing line hung with clothes.

  At the Electric Circus, on the Bank Holiday at the end of August 1977, Warsaw supported the Rezillos on the Saturday and on the Sunday the headliners were the Adverts, along with 999 and a band billed as the Slugs. The club was packed, possibly as a result of a rumour spreading that ‘the Slugs’ were, secretly, the Sex Pistols, although it turned out not to be the case. Bombsite fanzine went down and reported back in a subsequent issue: ‘The Electric Circus might be a dump but what a concert, the atmosphere was unbelievable.’

  On the back of the very next Electric Circus flyer, however, Robinson and Brooks announced the club was closing ‘Due to pressure from the Local Council and the Fire Service’. Within a year of Grundy, the Roxy had opened and closed, the Electric Circus had embraced punk and then closed; and just eighteen months after Grundy, the Pistols had broken up.

  The final weekend shows of the Electric Circus were on 1 and 2 October 1977, and a short compilation was released by Virgin Records, which included songs by John Cooper Clarke and Joy Division. Joy Division also featured on the first release by Factory Records at the end of 1978. However, Factory didn’t first come together as an organisation to be a record label, but as hosts of live music, at the Russell Club in Hulme. In the aftermath of punk the importance of small venues didn’t disappear, as we’ll see in the next chapter, when we pay visits to the ‘Factory’ nights in Hulme, the Limit in Sheffield and elsewhere, including John Keenan’s ‘F-Club’ in Leeds.

  John Keenan, after his flurry of activity in 1967 when he was at Southport Art College involved with shows at the Moulin Rouge in Ainsdale, hadn’t continued promoting live music, but in 1977, while working freelance at Yorkshire TV, he became frustrated that Leeds appeared to be missing out on some of the bands around in the months after punk broke; he resolved to host some shows. He was twenty-eight, much older than the majority of punk fans and bands: ‘I was the generation before them but this was a lot more interesting than the last ten years before it.’

  John had a conversation with the management of the student union at the local Leeds Poly. It was the summer of 1977 and there weren’t any students around, so the building was being underused. The management jumped at the chance to generate some business out of term-time, and John, with Graham Cardy, launched ‘Stars of Today’, a weekly punk night at the Poly, and booked the Vibrators, the Police, the Damned and, on 7 July, the Slits.

  There was a good little scene building but come the new student term, John and Graham were told to leave. John decided to split with Graham but to continue promoting: ‘I looked around and found an old cabaret club on Woodhouse Street called the Ace of Clubs, so I thought that I’ll just do it myself, it’s much easier to be in control and I thought, “How can I bring all the people that have been coming through the summer to the club?” so I formed a club and gave them discount as members.’

  He’d distributed membership applications to the regulars on the last night at the Poly, declaring ‘Let’s get the F out of here’, and had a book full of names and addresses, so he had some sort of database and soon had more than a few dozen members who all got F-Club cards. Between October and Christmas 1977 John presented shows at the Ace of Clubs featuring the Rezillos, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and X-Ray Spex. Although he’d split from Graham, he took with him Claire Shearsby who’d been the DJ at the Poly shows (we’ll meet her in the next chapter DJing at Le Phonographique).

  Ace of Clubs was an old cabaret club converted from and set among terraced houses. People like Diana Dors and Bob Monkhouse and all the old-school comics had appeared there. They had a small stage and then an extra section that rose up from the front if required, but for the smaller bands John would put them on the small stage. One evening, a band played from Birmingham called the Killjoys, fronted by Kevin Rowland and featuring Gil Weston on bass (she was later in the band Girlschool). John remembers the mayhem. ‘The punks were reaching out because there was a girl on bass in the band and she had fishnet stockings on and high heels and all these lads were reaching out for her legs and I remember seeing her kicking them in the face and quite a few of them retreated, bloodied, and I was, “Are you alright?” and they were like, “Yeah, yeah, fucking great, man,” and they went back to get kicked in the face again.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Posers, the Krays, a tribe called ‘goth’

  In the summer of 1977, Patrick Lilley was a seventeen-year-old Bowie fan in Birmingham who’d just started to dye his hair. He’d also decided to sell some records so he could run away from home. He had a vague idea he wanted to meet a rich older man: ‘I think I was looking for decadence,’ he tells me. ‘I felt very isolated and alienated in my life, I was being bullied at school, big-time.’

  When he went to the stalls at the Bull Ring market in the city centre to try to sell the records he met a boy who was interested in buying them who recommended that Patrick should visit the Hosteria wine bar on Hurst Street; because that’s where people like him went. Patrick didn’t quite know what he meant by ‘people like him’, but that weekend he applied more effort to his look, took the 113 bus into town and went to the Hosteria. There he met the first lesbians he’d ever encountered and the first gay man – Gay John – and felt he’d found what he was looking for: ‘It was very bacchanalian and exotic.’

  Patrick remembers some of the people he hung out with in Birmingham that summer of 1977, including Patti Bell who Patrick calls ‘the queen punkette’ (she dated local rocker Steve Gibbons and co-owned the Kahn & Bell boutique). Patrick remembers his first visit to a club called Barbarella’s with his newfound friends, and another punk venue, Rebecca’s. He met Martin Degville (later of Sigue Sigue Sputnik), who was into fashion and dressing outlandishly, and was often out after dark with Patti Bell and her set. Patrick had made his move to London in 1978, but his friends would be the core audience when the Rum Runner club was operating in its most celebrated era, the three years from 1979.

  In that era the Rum Runner cast a spell on David Wright; although he was a couple of years younger than Patrick, had grown up in Balsall Common (over ten miles outside Birmingham), had never encountered anything there remotely bacchanalian, and he wasn’t part of any in-crowd, he too became a Rum Runner regular. He remembers that when he walked in on his first visit the DJ was playing ‘TVC15’ by David Bowie.

  ‘The music has stayed with me forever,’ David says. He uses a word a couple of times to describe what he found at the Rum Runner: ‘liberation’. Now, over three decades later, David organises monthly ‘Only After Dark’ events to celebrate that era, the club and that scene. It’s in a disco room above a restaurant in Birmingham city centre and when I visit it’s fairly crowded, maybe two hundred people there. The music powers the time machine. This is how it works, isn’t it? Music has the power to take you back to a place, a time. Hearing ‘Warm Leatherette’ or ‘Tainted Love
’, the Only After Dark crowd are transported back to the mirrored walls of the Rum Runner.

  The part of Broad Street in Birmingham where the Rum Runner was once situated has changed beyond recognition. It was at No. 273, set back off the street, through a large gate (open at night) and along a short alley which dipped at a slight incline, with the club reception area off on the right. In the vicinity there’s now a convention centre and a Hyatt Hotel. I’ve checked some old photographs, trying to get some sense of where things were. Just up the road there’s now a Walkabout pub, but if you walk towards town past the Jimmy Spice restaurant, just as you draw alongside another bar, the Solomon Cutler, you’re close to the entrance of the Rum Runner. From the Walkabout it’s about fifteen yards away. Or twenty-five years.

  The Rum Runner was a catalyst, where what happened next had wider significance. Duran Duran became one of the biggest bands in the first days of the MTV video age, hit-makers and millionaire pop stars; the band worked, rehearsed and performed there. I met John Taylor from Duran Duran on the occasion of the publication of his autobiography, and talked to him about the Rum Runner. He acknowledges how very different Duran Duran’s career would have been if they hadn’t made their base there. Looking at video footage of Duran Duran performing ‘Planet Earth’, filmed in the Rum Runner, what you see is mirrors and neon and lights and colours, sashaying dancers and a connection – a connection between the band, the space, the audience. John told me about his first visits there, listening to the resident DJ, Paul Anthony, before it all took off for Duran Duran: ‘Our first exposure to it was all about glam, Bowie’s soul period, lounge-lizard era Bryan Ferry, Grace Jones, disco from New York. We loved it, it felt like home.’

  Like Patrick Lilley, John Taylor had previously been a regular at Barbarella’s and Rebecca’s. Both clubs were owned by the same family, the Fewtrells, an Irish family of ten children from Aston. Don and Eddie were the two Fewtrell brothers who were most involved in the club business, running Rebecca’s (later called Boogie’s) and Barbarella’s, but also the Bermuda Club on Navigation Street, the Cedar Club on Constitution Hill, Abigail’s, and Edward’s No.7. The Fewtrells feature in plenty of tales from the shady side of Birmingham nightlife, but some of the stories also have a national dimension, including one concerning notorious London gangsters the Kray twins. Several cities have a version of a story that involves the Krays attempting to muscle in on the local clubs, only to be confronted at the train station and sent back to London.

  The Fewtrells always claim to have resisted with violence any attempt by the Krays to expand their empire into Birmingham. The story is told in various versions. In one account, the Fewtrells were tipped off by the local police that the Krays were on their way; the Birmingham gang met their rivals at New Street Station and, after a major set-to, the Krays were banished from Brum. Eddie Fewtrell tells a different tale in his memoirs. According to Eddie, the twins recruited some local allies, including a man who worked at the local meat market and a doorman at Castaways, both of them maniacs with a long history of GBH. They came looking for him at the Bermuda Club, tooled up with multiple weapons. After backing off from his assailants, he jumped on a table, picked up a pint pot and hit one of them on the top of the head. He says the other three came at him and he did the same with them. They all dropped like flies.

  The Krays were always interested in proceeds from gambling. In Bristol, the story goes that local bookies met them at Temple Meads station and sent them back to Paddington. As for Blackpool, British heavyweight boxing champion Brian London apparently had a hand in persuading Ronnie and Reggie to jump back on the train. In Newcastle, two film-makers made a DVD called The Day the Krays Came to Town, which includes contributions from various Tyneside hardmen who apparently had a role to play in sending the Krays packing, among them Kenny ‘Panda’ Anderson, and Ted ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly. A more mundane version was told to a local paper by a former manageress at the Club A Go Go. According to Jenny Clarke, the Kray twins arrived at the club one evening in 1964: ‘They came into the club and we all spotted them. They soon left when they realised we didn’t have any one-armed bandits.’

  In addition to their apparent failure to make any headway in Birmingham, Bristol, Blackpool or Newcastle, the Krays supposedly ran into Manchester’s Quality Street Gang, were turned around at Manchester Piccadilly and put back on the train to London. One or more or all of these humiliations for the Krays may well have happened, but you’d be forgiven for asking why the twins would persist in wandering so far from their manor, wasting train ticket after train ticket on a fruitless national tour. Unless they both had free British Rail intercity season tickets it all sounds a bit unlikely.

  The Fewtrell-owned Barbarella’s on Cumberland Street has been replaced by an NCP car park attached to a gymnasium owned by TV ‘dragon’ Duncan Bannatyne. The club hosted many of the early punk gigs, including two by the Sex Pistols and several by the Clash. John Taylor and fellow Duran Duran member Nick Rhodes were childhood friends, sharing a first gig-going experience when they went to Birmingham Town Hall together in April 1974 to see Mick Ronson. By 1978 they’d become regulars at Barbarella’s, witnessing gigs by the likes of Ultravox, Blondie and the Clash.

  In the autumn of 1978 John Taylor began studying at Birmingham Polytechnic and formed a band, Dada, with another student, David Twist. In the spirit of the times, Dada mined electronic sounds. They didn’t want to be punk, they wanted to be part of what was coming next. John Taylor tells me: ‘This was a transition period. I got bored and not a little frightened by where the purist punk scene was headed. I wasn’t going to hang out with skinheads spitting at Stiff Little Fingers.’

  By the end of 1978 a number of songs had been released that presaged a wave of new British music, electronica that sounded good on the dancefloor, made by a generation inspired by punk and David Bowie, including the seven-inch double A-side from the Normal comprising ‘Warm Leatherette’ and ‘TVOD’, the Human League track ‘Being Boiled’ and early work by Ultravox. Points of reference included Bowie’s Low album and Kraftwerk (the Trans-Europe Express album and the single ‘Showroom Dummies’). You might hear these new records on John Peel’s radio show or see them talked about in one of the weekly broadsheet music papers of the era – NME, Sounds, Melody Maker. And you’d hear these records at new-wave discos and especially at clubs that had Roxy Music and Bowie fans.

  Close to Manchester Cathedral was a club called Pips, spread over several rooms playing different genres of music. The so-called Roxy Room there was the subject of the BBC’s Omnibus programme broadcast on 23 April 1977. It was one of many clubs in 1977 and 1978 that hosted nights for Bowie/Roxy fans, including Friday nights upstairs at the Adelphi pub in Leeds, and in London, most famously, Billy’s.

  Maureen Ward was in her mid-teens when she started going to Pips, and recalls how varied the looks were, and all beyond the obvious. She remembers a gang of girls in 1940s chic, Rita Hayworths with a look that managed to both impress and intimidate. Footage from Pips also reveals how androgynous the look could be at the Bowie/Roxy nights too. People like Martin Degville were brave; throughout history, suspicion of transgressive behaviour or uncertain gender has always been likely to provoke the mainstream population.

  Even those at Bowie/Roxy nights not on the edge of fashion were often met by confusion and disbelief. The Fad Gadget number ‘Back to Nature’ is one of the songs that reminds Maureen Ward of her visits to Pips: ‘I guess you had to be there, but this was very exciting to a sixteen-year-old hearing this very loud in Pips. Clubs weren’t like they are now. They were much emptier. Maybe that’s why this track felt so eerie, hypnotic, sinister even. And so was town when you stumbled out at 2.05 a.m. precisely and ran for the night bus back to Moston. That, or face a long, hostile walk home.’

  When Dada split, John got together with Stephen Duffy (a fellow student at the Poly), Nick Rhodes and bass player Simon Colley. Calling themselves Duran Duran (a variant of Durand Durand, the
evil scientist in the film Barbarella – and thus a nod towards the club of that name), their first gigs were at tiny venues, including one in the puppet theatre at Cannon Hill Arts Centre and another, the Star Club, in a room above a pub on Essex Street where the band set up in front of the fireplace and no more than forty people could fit in at any one time. Stephen Duffy and Simon Colley moved on, so Nick and John continued to look for the right line-up and hustled for more gigs. Their plans were to avoid the well-worn and deadening local band circuit at venues like the Barrel Organ near Digbeth bus station where all the Brum rock bands played. These things mattered: venues have a place, a symbolic value. Round the corner from the Rum Runner was a successful venue called the Opposite Lock, but Duran Duran would have avoided playing there too; it was the kind of place a teacher at school might recommend.

  So it was one Friday afternoon in February 1980 when Nick and John paid a daytime visit to the Rum Runner, looking for a gig. John had heard the club mentioned a few times, not always in a context that made it sound like an attractive proposition; it was known that, being close to the ATV (later Central) studios, stars and crew working on the likes of Crossroads and The Golden Shot would hang out there. However, he’d spotted a little poster glued on a lamppost on Hill Street advertising a Bowie night at the Rum Runner, so he hoped to find someone there who would give the Duran Duran demo tape a sympathetic ear.

  The Rum Runner was one of a number of businesses run by the Berrow family. The venue had been active in the 1960s and 1970s (opening in 1964), but by the beginning of 1978 the club was only open three nights a week at the most and trade was poor. Ray Berrow, one of the club’s original owners, had transferred his energies to a casino at the Grand Hotel and the Rum Runner was getting left behind; it was considered, in the words of Ray’s son Paul, ‘more of a nuisance than a viable business’. Paul and his brother Michael had worked there from a young age, learning the ropes, and they struck a deal with the family to be given the responsibility of relaunching the club. By the end of 1978 the brothers had been let loose to come up with new ideas, and took themselves off to New York to visit a number of clubs, especially Studio 54.