by Dave Haslam
There’s a line that can be traced from Bowie, not just to Billy’s, but to clubs like the Batcave. And in Leeds, few locals could resist stomping glam riffs, says Peace: ‘Goth in Leeds seemed to marry the dressing-up of the Bowie nights and glam-metal stomp and riffs. I remember some spectacular dancing going on around the mirrored pillar in the centre of the dancefloor to “Alice” and “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”; all towering hair and flapping coats.’
The presence of local bands contributing to what was happening in the clubs gave goth in Leeds extra impact: bands like Sisters of Mercy, ex-Sister Wayne Hussey’s later band the Mission, and the March Violets (all from Leeds), and the Southern Death Cult from Bradford. There were landmark gigs by the Sisters at the Warehouse in Leeds, and venues like the Hellfire Club in Wakefield put on the March Violets, the Fall and the Meteors, while a number of similar nights sprang up in places like Dewsbury and Batley. The scene ended up with a huge reach, but remained small-scale; being cut off from London gave it an endearing insularity. It wasn’t showbiz. At Le Phonographique Claire Shearsby was the resident DJ. She lived above a chemist with Andrew Eldritch of the Sisters of Mercy (along with Spiggy, their cat).
At the end of 1982, back in 69 Dean Street, the Batcave was one of a host of different club nights both up in the old Gargoyle space and downstairs at Gossips, run by different promoters with separate names for each different night, with differing DJs, music policies and clientele, including ‘Gold Coast’, a relatively shortlived night playing African highlife and afrobeat hosted by Christian Cotterill and Jo Hagan, and a Radio Invicta night on Fridays, hosted by Steve Walsh and others, including Lyndon T (they’d be playing quality jazz funk). The Saturday ‘Roots Rockers’ night featured David Rodigan and Tim Westwood, who would both take to bigger stages later in their careers. The most established of all these Gossips nights, having started in July 1980, was ‘Gaz’s Rockin Blues’ hosted by Gaz Mayall, playing John Lee Hooker, Little Richard and reggae too.
I guess there aren’t many artists who’d be happy to spend their career playing dives. John Taylor will look back fondly on gigs at the Star Club and elsewhere, but he’ll be happy he hasn’t spent a lifetime lugging equipment out of vans and up and down stairs, plugging into a cheap PA and playing to a small crowd, however clued-up or flamboyantly dressed that crowd might be. Once they’d broken out of clubs, Duran Duran loved playing Birmingham Odeon but in interviews with the band in 1981 they never hid their ambition to go even further: ‘We want to be the biggest band in the world,’ they’d say. And: ‘We want to play Madison Square Garden by 1984.’
In the early 1960s a generation of bands emerged out of coffee bars and unwholesome basement beat clubs like the Cavern and moved on to headline Saturday nights in ballrooms and dance halls; but once more established, some groups had issues with the kinds of venues (and audiences) they played to. The Hollies found ballroom audiences too noisy and preferred to play in seated venues, theatres or cabaret clubs. In 1966 Graham Nash of the Hollies expressed pleasure at the week-long engagement the band had fulfilled at a cabaret club called Mr Smiths in Manchester, where the band were able to perform slower, subtler numbers like ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ and ‘A Taste of Honey’, and his bandmate Eric Haydock agreed: ‘When we work in cabaret it’s different altogether. Proper dressing rooms and lighting – and attentive audiences who have come along to listen and to applaud what they like.’
Duran Duran fulfilled their ambitions, playing two shows at Madison Square Garden in March 1984 at the height of their success. The same month, back in Britain, the miners’ strike began. The portrayal of a high-gloss world of excess in a succession of Duran Duran videos while unemployment rose, CND marched and the Thatcher government and the miners clashed was an unfortunate, perhaps even damning, conjunction. But despite their ascent into the unreal world of pop stardom, Duran Duran never forgot their musical roots; on their world tour in 2008 they performed cover versions of Kraftwerk’s ‘Showroom Dummies’, and the Normal’s ‘Warm Leatherette’, both Rum Runner favourites. Walking through that doorway on Broad Street had opened a world, a life and a career for them.
The photographer at the opening night of Skin Two, Peter Ashworth, later in 1983 was responsible for the shot of Annie Lennox on the cover of the Eurythmics album Touch (and, in the early 1990s, the beautiful photo of Billy Mackenzie on the album Outernational). The model Sue Scadding, who had shed some clothes at the opening, has in recent years featured in advertisements for Amara hair products. Jacquie O’Sullivan was one of the original greeters on the door; she joined Bananarama when Siobhan Fahey left the band. Visitors to Skin Two in the early days included the ‘robot’ recording artists Tik and Tok and their friend Carole Caplin (who later became an adviser to Cherie and Tony Blair; she advised Cherie on style, and Tony on fitness).
As for the club’s founder, David Claridge moved on from Skin Two when a puppet he created, operated and voiced became a hot property on television. His creation was Roland Rat, who appeared – latex and fishnet free – regularly on GMTV (when he wasn’t on TV, Claridge claimed the character lived beneath King’s Cross railway station in the Ratcave). The tabloids almost derailed Roland Rat’s rise to fame and fortune, however. On Saturday 27 August 1983 the Sun revealed the Rat’s creator’s link with what they called a ‘kinky sex club’. They predicted a backlash against the man behind the lovable rodent, but none materialised. Claridge had handed over the running of Skin Two to his girlfriend Lesley Herbert a few weeks earlier, but provided a quote for the paper. ‘It’s all very embarrassing,’ he said.
Four decades on from taking his records to sell at the Bull Ring, Patrick Lilley has made a life in music. After moving to London, he shared a squat with pre-Culture Club Boy George, and was Divine’s publicist. He went on to work in PR and promotions in the early acid house days, and founded London’s hugely successful club night ‘Queer Nation’ in 1990. He now runs ‘Work’, weekly since 2008, at various venues.
CHAPTER TEN
Tape machines, modern drugs, unknown pleasures
Among the stories, claims and competing mythologies of Britain’s nightclubs and music venues there are a few recurring tales in addition to those featuring the Krays; one of which is the story of the night that Jimi Hendrix put his guitar through the ceiling. Online, and in print, there are a number of eyewitness reports of this happening at several different venues. It’s said, for instance, that Hendrix put his guitar through the ceiling at the New Cellar Club in South Shields in February 1967. Sandie Brown from the local record shop, Saville Bros, was there and Sandie’s words are quoted on a website dedicated to documenting Hendrix’s visits to the Northeast. ‘He rammed his guitar upwards, not necessarily intending to do any damage, it was accidental, but it brought down some plaster from the ceiling.’
Hendrix did the same a month later at Newcastle’s Club A Go Go, ramming the head of the guitar through the plasterboard. Apparently actor/singer Jimmy Nail was in the audience and he saw the incident. ‘I was in my mid-teens and used to go to the Club A Go Go which had a very low ceiling. Hendrix – I hadn’t seen anything like it – leapt with the guitar and it went through a ceiling tile. But get this, he let it go and continued playing while it hung from the ceiling.’
Coincidentally, another future Geordie singing star, Sting, was also at Club A Go Go that same evening: ‘I remember Hendrix creating a hole in the plaster ceiling above the stage with the head of his guitar, and then it was over. I lay in my bed that night with my ears ringing and my worldview significantly altered.’
The stories of being in a cool venue on a historic occasion are useful additions to the personal mythologies of Sting and Jimmy Nail, and why not believe they were there and the incident happened? It may also be possible that Hendrix’s guitar actually damaged the ceiling a few months earlier at the Wellington Club in Dereham, a town in Norfolk, as one or two eyewitnesses report; one audience member at the Wellington claims Hendrix rammed the instrument in
to the ceiling because he was ‘getting bored in the middle of one song’.
There was an incident in 1964 when Pete Townshend accidentally broke his guitar when it struck the low ceiling at the Railway Tavern in Harrow. Townshend followed this up with a deliberate act of vandalism, banging the guitar into the ceiling again and then the stage until his instrument was in bits. It was a turning point for him, and for how music was presented onstage. ‘The old, conventional way of making music would never be the same,’ he writes in his autobiography, Who I Am, describing the act of destruction as ‘extraordinary, magical, surreal’.
Hendrix had studied the powerful onstage antics of Pete Townshend, and putting his guitar through the ceiling several times may or may not have happened and may or may not have been accidental or the result of boredom; it could have been a deliberate stunt. Certainly, Hendrix began to include the destruction and/or immolation of his guitar into his live performances. Townshend also recalls standing watching Hendrix smash up a guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas shouting, ‘Hey, destroying guitars is your thing!’ Townshend replied, ‘It used to be. It belongs to Jimi now.’
That Sandie Brown from Saville Bros saw Hendrix is unsurprising. Hendrix was often in the Northeast, as his managers, Chas Chandler and Mike Jeffery, were based there. Jeffery sold the Club A Go Go though and moved the venue manager Myer Thomas out to Palma, Majorca, where Jeffery and a business partner, Keith Gibbon, had opened a nightclub called Sergeant Pepper’s situated off the Plaza Gomila. This was 1968, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience played at the opening of the club. After the gig took place, NME writer Keith Altham reported, ‘Hendrix literally brought the roof down on the opening night by the simple expedient of ramming the neck of his guitar up through the low ceiling tiles.’
Altham was doing PR for Hendrix and the club and wrote up the full story of Hendrix’s trip in the paper. Inevitably perhaps, Jimi, the Experience and their entourage bumped into the biggest fan of Balearic holidays, George Best. According to Altham, Best was at the gig too (‘mesmerised by the Experience’s performance on stage’), but there’s no mention of any of this in George Best’s Blessed. Perhaps he’d forgotten his night out with the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Maybe Altham embellished the story a little, or even created it. There are some stories of nights out in Best’s book but maybe his worldview wasn’t as significantly altered by seeing a psychedelic rock icon destroying ceiling tiles as much as Sting’s had been in Newcastle. The kind of stories Best does include in Blessed reveal different priorities to documenting rock history being made; like the time he describes going out with Mike Summerbee in Birmingham and finding a club ‘crawling with women’.
Punk had reasserted the joy and value of experiencing live music in small venues. Basement spaces in out-of-the-way places and low-ceilinged venues were cool, and small-scale scenes and bands just starting out were to be supported, encouraged. There was participation, of various kinds, a swirl of activity; a girl selling a fanzine is the bass player in a band with a single out on a local label; the lads you see standing at the bar at the beginning of the night are the headline act.
The attractions of seeing bands made up of people you saw at gigs, hanging out at small venues a bus ride away, and feeling close and drawn to the action on the stage, were fuelling activity nationwide. Then there was the added pleasure of tracking down emerging bands – latching on to word of mouth triggered by fanzines or the weekly music papers, the occasional local radio show, and John Peel on Radio 1 – and ending up in a room full of like-minded music fans.
For some fortunate music fans embracing these excitements at Eric’s, the Factory in Manchester, the Limit in Sheffield, the Nite Club or Valentino’s in Edinburgh, the Bungalow Bar in Paisley, the Sandpiper in Nottingham back in the post-punk era – as now – some months or years later there could also be the satisfaction and a host of memories gained from having seen bands fresh, close-up and hungry, on their way to a career playing major halls and selling millions of albums. As we’ll see, back then the denizens of small-scale gigs had opportunities to pay their £1.25 and get to see the likes of the Cure, New Order or U2.
Though I’m not sure how this theory can ever be tested, it’s likely that more bands were formed in 1977 or 1978 than in any era since the beat-group boom years in the early 1960s. But in Northern Ireland, the troubles were still damaging live music; the only people out at night in Belfast and Derry city centres were the police and army patrols. The local youth stayed at home, although this had one intriguing result: it’s said that 1 per cent of listeners to John Peel’s Radio 1 show were from Northern Ireland. Punk and Peel began to make a difference. When Belfast band Highway Star discovered punk they changed their name to Stiff Little Fingers, dropped the Deep Purple cover versions from their set and wrote songs about the world around them. They recorded a single, ‘Suspect Device’, and Peel played it relentlessly. The interest in punk grew and soon punks started venturing out, bringing life back to pockets of the city.
The authorities had banned the Clash’s first scheduled appearance in Northern Ireland (they’d been due to play the Ulster Hall on 20 October 1977), but punk was taking root, at the Harp Bar on Hill Street, for example. The Harp Bar’s punk nights started in April 1978 (when Victim, supported by the Androids, performed). The establishing of non-sectarian spaces appealed to an old 60s idealist like Terri Hooley: ‘Back then there were Protestant ghettoes and Catholic ghettoes and they were controlled by the paramilitaries,’ he later explained. ‘That’s why the punks were my heroes – they were the first to say, “We’re not part of your tribe”. While the IRA and the UDA were keeping us ghettoised, it was a political statement to go down to the Harp Bar just to pogo and hear some great music.’
Terri Hooley, meanwhile, had expanded his interest in buying and selling records and set up Good Vibrations in a small derelict building on Great Victoria Street in Belfast. From that base he began promoting shows in various venues and launched a record label, releasing a Rudi single (‘Big Time’) and, subsequently, ‘Teenage Kicks’ by a Derry band called the Undertones, who had been resident at their home town’s Casbah venue. On release, ‘Teenage Kicks’ struggled to make much impact until John Peel declared it ‘wonderful’ and featured it regularly.
The Undertones, like the vast majority of the bands formed in the wake of punk, made their way through the small-venue circuit. In March 1979 they had twelve dates in England in fourteen days, starting at the Norwich Boogie House where chaotic scenes included a fan suffering a broken leg and the police being called by the management to bring calm to the proceedings. Then the band moved on to the Factory in Manchester before playing Eric’s in Liverpool on Saturday 3 March. At Eric’s they played two sets, the first a ‘matinee’ at 6.30 p.m.
It was a fertile time for bands, and many that would later become feted, iconic or stadium-filling were appearing in small venues nationwide, giving a generation of music lovers multiple chances to later lay claim to witnessing magical moments: the night Joy Division supported Dexys Midnight Runners and only seventy people were there, for example, or the night Blondie supported Television, the time Boy George sang with Bow Wow Wow, or when Terry Hall got arrested after a riot at a Specials gig. In Glasgow, Simple Minds (formerly known as Johnny & the Self-Abusers) had a Sunday-night residency at the tiny Mars Bar on Howard Street through the spring and summer of 1978, singer Jim Kerr, resplendent in a white jacket and make-up, taking the stage in front of the forty or so people there every week, the small room illuminated by the band’s DIY light show (a revolving police blue light).
Post-punk’s equivalent often-told story of paying seven shillings and sixpence to see Jimi Hendrix putting his guitar through the ceiling was paying £1.25 to see Bono split his leather trousers. There’s footage of Glastonbury 2011 that appears to show the U2 frontman doing just that, as he has been for thirty years or more. One of the first occasions it’s said to have happened was at
the Limit in Sheffield on 13 November 1980.
The Limit had its fair share of memorable moments. Kraftwerk paid a visit to the club after they’d played Sheffield’s City Hall but had to leave because a fight was about to break out. It was also where the B-52s made their debut appearance in England (July 1979). Over the following years the Limit played host to bands who were on their way to commercial success, including the Undertones, the Revillos, Wire, Simple Minds, the Police and Dire Straits. And many on their way to no commercial success or cult success whatsoever, some who managed a DIY record release, but many who disappeared – the likes of Alfalfa, the Crabs and Molodoy.
Of all the events Limit audiences could later lay claim to have witnessed, there are few as intriguing as the evening Def Leppard supported the Human League. It was 11 September 1978 and there wasn’t much happening in the nightclubs and music venues of Sheffield; it was a Monday evening, not the most auspicious night of the week. In among the deserted streets of the city centre, the Limit wouldn’t have got away with charging admission. It was free; free entry to see four local bands. Two of them, the Monitors and Graph, never troubled the charts (although watchers of alternative music around Sheffield thought that Graph had potential), but the other two bands that Monday evening at the Limit would go on to play arenas, and make hit albums. It was the first and only time the electro pop act and the heavy metal outfit shared a bill.
George Webster and Kevan Johnson, the two guys who opened the Limit in March 1978, were fans of the Eagles, and took the name of their venue from the song ‘Take It to the Limit’. In the basement of a shopping precinct on West Street, the Limit was committed to live music seven days a week, although by October 1979 the club was hosting a new-wave disco every Wednesday (with half-price admission for students and nurses with appropriate NUS and NHS identity cards). Later it was widely regarded as a dive, but at the beginning it was decorated moderately ambitiously, the toilets were clean, and they even had tablecloths in the area where meals were served.
