Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  How do we measure the cultural health of a town or city? Should opportunities for people to consume culture be matched by opportunities for citizens to produce and create? How do we feel about living somewhere with a number of cinema multiplexes but no inclination to provide provision for film-makers to make or screen films of their own? Or a city with breathtaking art galleries but no facilities for artist workshops or studios? Or somewhere with huge-capacity live music enormodomes that showcase the big acts but no grassroots music scene? Or a city that houses millionaires or even billionaires but doesn’t have room for cheap spaces where people with ideas might gather, creativity take root, connections build – and, out of all that, a new world emerge?

  It’s still often the case that significant venues take root in the grim parts of a town that the developers of office blocks, apartments or retail malls would never touch. But this is the story that subsequently unfolds: the venue repopulates the area, attracts life and sparkle, and a bohemian cluster develops, which then attracts profile and positivity, and developers and commercialisation. The bohemian activity has brought life back into cheap buildings and the land gains in value. The independents and independently minded are driven out as developers bid to build chain hotels, retail malls or apartments. Their offers are attractive to landlords and usually also to city councils.

  In June 2006, the highly regarded and much-loved Venue in Edinburgh closed after a quarter of a century hosting live music. Within five years other venues in the city were lost, including the Forest and Roxy Art House. In addition, the Bongo Club was told to leave its Edinburgh University-owned building to make way for offices. In February 2012, Kris Walker, promoter of ‘Wasabi Disco’ at Sneaky Pete’s, told local magazine The List, ‘Edinburgh’s nightlife has suffered significantly since the millennium. It’s seen venue after venue closed down or taken over and turned into a rugby-friendly soulless commode. Edinburgh is now in a state of fur coat and no knickers – a beautiful city with great history and a world-renowned arts festival yet provides next to nothing to support grassroots, counter-culture creative types and zero diversity for its long-suffering residents.’

  In Liverpool, on Mathew Street, the original Eric’s having long gone, there’s now an unrelated music venue also calling itself Eric’s. Across the road is the rebuilt Cavern. It’s both a Beatles landmark and a Beatles theme park. I went there, saw a solo performer bang out a medley of Beatles hits to a half-empty room of people taking selfies, and fled. I reported back to a local, a man who runs events and a venue in another part of Liverpool, and he put me right: ‘The tourists love it, it’s lucrative. OK, it’s not for you, but it works.’

  By 2015 there was one issue that had become critical for small venues, related to the boom in the building of city-centre ‘luxury’ apartments: noise abatement. A noise abatement notice can be triggered by just one complaint and can lead to costly legal appeals, fines and revocation of a venue’s licence. In Newport, Gwent, in 2013, Ashley Sicolo, the grandson of John Sicolo who’d run the legendary TJ’s, was forced to close his venue, the 200 Club in Stow Hill. Big venues have been caught up in this too, including Ministry of Sound, which had moved to a dead space in Elephant & Castle but, from 2009, spent five years fighting the threat of closure after plans were unveiled to redevelop Eileen House, a tower block opposite the club’s entrance.

  You might think that if there is an established music venue and then someone moves into the area, that the new homeowner adapts to the surroundings, but that’s not the case. Guildford’s only independent, alternative live music venue, the Boileroom, was opened in 2006. After several years’ trading, two people who moved into a rental property next door to the venue put in an application for their licence to be reviewed on the grounds of noise – fortunately the Boileroom survived. Brighton’s Blind Tiger wasn’t so lucky and shut in May 2014 after a person who’d moved into a flat a year earlier called the police and then the council. The venue had been a public house in the Victorian era, and had been hosting live music since the 1850s.

  When the long-established Manchester venue Night & Day was threatened with closure after a noise abatement notice was issued in 2013, there was a suggestion that when the flats next door were built, the developer had neglected to install adequate soundproofing. Again, you might think that if a venue is already established in a location, developers moving in to build new homes are legally required to soundproof the homes, but that’s not the case either. The problem this causes for small venues has been exacerbated in recent years, the government having dismantled many of the regulatory obstacles to converting empty offices into flats. Fortunately, Bristol Council was far-sighted enough to intervene when developers decided to convert an office block close to the Fleece and insisted the developers take a number of insulation measures.

  If many of the changes in the last couple of decades – from the blurring of the lines between bars and clubs, to the smoking ban, and noise issues – have had a deleterious effect on some businesses, there are also plenty of reasons to remain positive. The spirit of self-organisation among music fans, musicians and DJs is still strong. The occasion in 1976 when Howard Trafford and Peter McNeish were instrumental in the staging of the two Sex Pistols gigs at Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall is rightly celebrated for its transformative effect on that city’s music scene, but music’s history and, indeed, its present, is full of such episodes.

  In the late 1990s Elbow were struggling to get anywhere, fighting even to keep the band together. Their brand of songwriting – thoughtful, semi-acoustic – didn’t really fit with the spirit of the times; there seemed no room for them in a city in thrall to the swaggering laddism of Oasis and the euphoric house being played in the clubs. So what did Elbow do? With the help of a friend from Bury, Scott Alexander, they ran a Tuesday night in an Australian theme bar called Down Under – nights they dubbed ‘Gecko’. Guy Garvey, lead singer of the band, says what went on most of the rest of the week there was ‘dreadful, horrible’, but Elbow and their friends had found a space.

  Each week Elbow would be playing acoustic sets alongside like-minded acts, most Tuesdays to small crowds, maybe forty or fifty people. The fact some talented people were gravitating to the stage there was picked up by local musician and DJ Clint Boon, who told Guy he should record some of the activity at Gecko. Guy says somewhere there’s video footage of one Tuesday which features sets from I Am Kloot, Badly Drawn Boy, Doves, Elbow and a band called Babel Tree. Success was just around the corner for most of them. All the while, Guy Garvey worked part-time behind the bar at the Roadhouse on Newton Street.

  Talking to Guy about Gecko, he and I agreed that the camaraderie of those nights helped encourage and sustain the musicians, and the live stage gave them an opportunity to refine songs. I suggested that although the Lesser Free Trade Hall event is rightly celebrated, it’s only a standout example of something that happens in all towns and cities with a half-healthy music scene; a poorly attended event in uninspiring surroundings might look like not very much at all, but if you fast-forward, clearly something was happening. It’s a scene, it’s significant, but it isn’t acknowledged. Gecko was one of those moments, on a Tuesday night at an Australian theme bar on Peter Street. ‘This is the first anyone’s ever asked me about this,’ Guy says. ‘You don’t realise you’re on the inside of a scene until afterwards when someone marks it as that. As far as I am concerned, I’m still mates with all the same people. Some of us have been lucky since, some of us have had to work a bit harder, but, yes, you’re right, we were in the middle of something special. We just didn’t know it.’

  The tradition of living for the weekend is built into our nation’s DNA but it’s noticeable how important nights at music venues and nightclubs have taken place away from Fridays and Saturdays when venue owners might be persuaded to try something a bit different, take a chance: Guy Stevens DJing on a Monday at the Scene; Billy’s at Gossip’s, like Gecko, on a Tuesday; and the punk festival at the 100 Club on
a Sunday and Monday. Some of the best clubs in Manchester since the demise of the Haçienda have been midweek – including ‘Tramp’, Murkage and Club Suicide – and in London, Soul II Soul at the Africa Centre, the Heavenly Social, and the Metalheadz Sessions were all on Sundays.

  The buoyant demand for literary and other sorts of festivals and for live music suggests that face-to-face, primary experiences and social occasions have virtues the virtual world lack. Furthermore, for anyone with an inclination to stage an event, nurturing and inviting an audience has never been easier, thanks to advances in electronic communication. Facebook has tended to make changes which have pushed promoters towards paying for enhanced reach, but thanks to social media the time and cost of connecting to an audience has dramatically reduced in the last twenty-five years. Back then, if you’d been in Liverpool, you might have glimpsed James Barton spreading the word about the Underground, hitting the streets, rucksack on his back, baseball cap, pair of Timberlands, dropping off handfuls of flyers and sticking posters on lamp-posts and walls. If you were in Coventry in 1992, and chanced upon Stuart Reid in the process of sending a newsletter to members of the Eclipse, in an era when a second-class stamp cost 18p, he might have told you that by the time he’d photocopied the newsletter, and bought envelopes and stamps, for every thousand members he then mailed out to the money he was spending was probably the equivalent cost of booking a decent guest DJ. Flyposters and hand-to-hand flyering still have a role to play, but so much is now instant, and online.

  The range of events after dark remains huge. From small-scale gig venues like the Adelphi, to the enormodomes like the 21,000-capacity Manchester Arena, and from nightclub events featuring ‘celebrity DJs’ like Danny Dyer and those headlined by Calvin Harris and other Mixmag cover stars at the conspicuous, commercial end of dance music, to unlicensed raves and informal little enclaves of activity, basement bars, DJs playing seven-inch vinyl.

  In the 1970s, as old-style dance hall activity was getting washed away by successive youth tribes and trends, the Barrowland Ballroom repositioned itself as primarily a live music venue as well as occasionally clearing the hall for roller discos. In the last thirty years acts that have graced the stage at Barrowlands include David Bowie, Coldplay, the Charlatans, Metallica, the Smiths and the Stone Roses. In 2014, it staged a successful ten-hour all-dayer called ‘Barraloadasoul’ featuring soul and mod classics played by DJs including Eddie Piller from Acid Jazz records, Dave Evison of the former Wigan Casino, and Yogi Haughton the man behind Scottish Soulful Weekender, an event that returned in 2015.

  Recently at Barrowlands, the East End Social organisation has hosted tea dances featuring a sixteen-piece swing band with dance instructors, guest vocalists and cake. In London, Spitalfields Tea Dances are held on a Wednesday once a month. There’s also an opportunity to quickstep back in time at the monthly thé dansants at the historic Palm Court at the Waldorf Hotel London for £49 per person (dancing to the five-piece band and an afternoon tea of finger sandwiches, freshly baked scones, cakes and a choice of teas, coffees or infusions included).

  The Floral Hall in Belfast closed in the mid-1970s and was soon semi-derelict. The mirrorball that used to throw light on the waltzes and the quicksteps was taken down to feature in a show called A Slice of Saturday Night staged at the Arts Theatre on Botanic Avenue, but has since gone missing. In January 2015 a campaign was launched to save the empty Floral Hall from collapsing. Across town, the Ulster Historic Circle installed a blue plaque on the building on the site of the Maritime Hotel, honouring ‘The birthplace of rhythm ’n’ blues in Belfast’ (it was unveiled in April 2010). A ten-minute walk away through the city, at the site of the former Harp Bar, a plaque celebrates the punk era in Belfast.

  The Granary in Bristol, designated by English Heritage as a Grade II listed building, has been converted into apartments. Artefacts relating to another significant Bristol venue, the Bamboo Club, have been donated to Bristol Record Office by Tony Bullimore. This archive includes flyers, photos and the Bamboo Club minute book where membership rules are described. Suits and ties were obligatory for the men, and one entry explains: ‘The Club management should use its discretion in deciding what disciplinary action should be taken when members or members’ guests are heard swearing (English language or Jamaican style).’

  The key role that Mothers and other West Midlands venues played in the story of rock and heavy metal was recognised in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s comprehensive ‘Home of Metal’ exhibition of 2011. Meanwhile, the online Manchester District Music Archive contains over 10,000 scanned artefacts (flyers, photographs, press cuttings, etc.), many of which relate to the 1,000-plus venues they have listed in the Greater Manchester area. Brighton & Hove Museum have a collection of oral history interviews with goths who describe the scene in Brighton in the 1980s.

  When the Duchess of York in Leeds closed in 2000, the sofa Kurt Cobain had slept on was acquired by the National Centre for Popular Music, but its days as a museum piece were numbered, as the centre closed after just fifteen months. The old Duchess of York site is now occupied by a Hugo Boss store (the sofa seems to have disappeared). When David Tennant sold the Gargoyle he offered The Red Studio to the Tate for £400 (they declined, it was sold to an American collector and now hangs in New York’s MOMA). A man called Ian Cape liberated a chair from Le Phonographique in Leeds and now describes it as his ‘prized possession’. I guess someone somewhere near Nottingham owns a shoe that once belonged to Michael Stipe.

  Most clubs close due to escalating operating costs or falling turnover, or both, but, as we have seen, there are many other causes – noise issues, or drug use or violence in the venue. As we’ve also seen, a present, pressing concern in cities throughout Britain is the enforced closure of clubs and venues as a result of redevelopment schemes. As Kris Walker suggests, there’s been a money-driven slide towards increasingly homogeneous, sterile city centres. Not much for the misfits, but a ton of stuff for the cul-de-sac fundamentalists. Offbeat venues aren’t being protected, and councils are unsympathetic when it comes to dealing with noise and other problematic issues. City councils and planning authorities are confused and defensive when faced with spaces that aren’t fully monetised and controlled.

  These issues became relevant when the fate of Legends was announced, the venue that had hosted the old Twisted Wheel/Placemate 7, the outpost of unregenerated Manchester that Luke Unabomber from HomoElectric described as ‘full of weird, dark corridors with stained walls’. In 2012 members of Manchester City Council’s planning committee approved plans for Olympian Homes to build a budget hotel on the site, to be operated by the German hotel chain Motel One. This would entail the demolition of Legends. Over the next few months HomoElectric and other regular club nights had their goodbye shows or one-off last parties there before the wrecking ball arrived.

  As with the disappearance of so many venues and clubs, the moment seemed to be more than just the demolition of the bricks and mortar. We’ve seen many examples of clubs embedded in our shared history and key to our sense of identity. As our cities develop, disintegrate or evolve, the loss of familiar landmarks has a dislocating effect. Even more so if it’s the loss of buildings we have some emotional connection with, let alone the loss of a building that for many people symbolised the best days of their life and the best aspects of their city’s music history, to be replaced by something as standard and culturally insignificant as a hotel. On the occasion of the announcement of the demolition, James Ketchell, chief executive of Music Heritage UK, said, ‘Manchester has a proud musical heritage and for one of its iconic and historic venues to be demolished to make way for a budget hotel is, quite simply, appalling.’

  A campaign flared, and there was plenty of media interest in the story. Most of the coverage of closure concentrated on the historical value of Legends in its five and a bit years as the Twisted Wheel up until 1971. There was also some focus on the name being revived by DJ Pete Roberts, who was running Twist
ed Wheel nights at the venue in 2012 on the last Thursday and the second Sunday of each month. There were far fewer mentions of its years as a gay club, the goings-on at the Mineshaft, or the fact the venue was used by the irregular gay, gay-friendly and misfit-friendly club nights HomoElectric and Bollox, a fetish club (‘Club Lash’) and a hardcore punk/metal night called ‘Back to Hell’.

  Of course, when a loved and significant building like the Twisted Wheel is threatened with closure and demolition, the default reaction is to plead for it to stay open, but it’s not clear Music Heritage UK or anyone else has viable alternative options. Should a venue deemed to be of historic interest benefit from a council grant or subsidy that other venues busting a gut and running on a shoestring have no access to? Should it be sold to a third party to do a Cavern to it and become, in this case, a nostalgic Northern Soul theme park? And why privilege its history as a Northern Soul venue when it had more years as a gay venue, including hitting the headlines when a police raid found men having sex in the toilets? An added complication remains; plenty of folk were of the view that the Twisted Wheel was never as good in Whitworth Street as it was in its early days, at its original home in Brazennose Street.

  The Star & Garter, an atmospheric, down-at-heel pub venue behind Piccadilly Station in Manchester, had hosted Morrissey/Smiths discos, Club Brenda, a regular indie night called ‘Smile’, and numerous other regular and irregular maverick club nights and small-scale gigs. The area around the station was earmarked for development. Network Rail’s plans and the three years of road closures the work would involve put the future of the business in jeopardy. In London, the area in and around Tottenham Court Road station is the site of an even bigger redevelopment plan, the Crossrail project.