Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  The Astoria, close to the corner of Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street, at the northwestern edge of Soho, was an early victim of Crossrail (it closed in January 2009 and was subsequently demolished). A more recent victim was the 12 Bar Club on Denmark Street where the management were told to vacate the premises by January 2015. This was just a few months after the burlesque club and music venue Madame Jojo’s in the heart of Soho was closed and plans for its demolition announced. At the same time, a gay bar, the Yard, situated opposite Madame Jojo’s in a small courtyard just off Rupert Street, also came under threat. Campaign groups including the Music Venue Trust and Save Soho took up the cause of the 12 Bar. The Yard, too, began a fightback, underlining the historic importance of the building (Rupert Street dates back to the late seventeenth century, the building housing the Yard forming part of nineteenth-century stables).

  In the context of anxieties about who runs our cities, and debates about how our cities should be, closed or under-threat venues of this kind have become a symbol of maverick, independent activity at loggerheads with the moneymen aiming to rinse every penny out of every site, and those powerful commercial forces in our society that are putting a squeeze on the counter-culture in a drive towards conformity. Alan McGee of Creation Records, who opened up his own live venue in a converted chapel in Talgarth in mid-Wales, became one of the 12 Bar Club’s most vociferous supporters. He’d seen an early gig by the Libertines there in 1999 and paid a visit to the occupied space, proclaiming, ‘We’re facing a war on culture, fuelled by consumerism.’

  While not denying that venues like the Star & Garter and the 12 Bar Club are irreplaceable, or the damaging effect wrought by the conformist and commercial forces, and also while applauding the petitions and the campaigners, it’s also important to see some positives. Just as it was in the 1920s, the 1980s, and so many times in our history, it seems to be the case that in our current era, in big cities like London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham there are enough resourceful people, motivated entrepreneurs and music fans to make their own version of Guy Garvey’s Gecko heaven; enough people with the inspiration that powered the Cave of the Golden Calf, Eric’s, Billy’s and HomoElectric; and enough venues that will waive a hire fee on a Tuesday night, for example, or build relationships with promoters and bands to ensure that when venues close or club nights come to an end, new ones launch.

  Furthermore, the mavericks and early adopters are one step ahead. There’s usually a timelag between bohemian activity reaching its height and the moneymen moving in. Often pioneers have already gone to populate other areas. The area around Nation (Cream’s venue) on Wolstenholme Square in Liverpool is currently a target for the redevelopers; it’s become a musical and creative hub, especially since the Kazimier club opened there as well, but the most recent hotspot created by independently minded venues and businesses is down at the so-called ‘Baltic Triangle’ along the river to the south side of the city centre. As one Liverpool-based website puts it: ‘Just a few years ago the Baltic Triangle was home only to disused and uninhabited warehouses and relics from Liverpool’s industrial age; today it is emblematic of somewhat of a cultural renaissance that the city is undergoing.’

  Similarly, Soho hasn’t always been the sole centre of innovation and excitement after dark. You could argue the mavericks have already moved on in recent years to run live venues and clubs in areas like Shoreditch or Dalston. There have certainly been times when other areas of London have staked a claim to be the centre of the action. One or two venues in Camden were crucial to Britpop in the early and mid-1990s, for example, including a favoured hangout, the Good Mixer bar on Inverness Street, and the Laurel Tree, where promoter and DJ Paul Tunkin ran the ‘Blow Up’ club night (he launched it in October 1993 – by 1995 it was being described in Melody Maker as ‘The Club That Changed The World’).

  In London, many live venues have been lost in the last ten years, including the Luminaire, but in the same period, gig-goers in the capital have been able to enjoy live music at a number of new venues including Islington Assembly Hall, the Lexington, Cafe Oto in Dalston, the Green Note in Camden, Indigo at the O2 (which has featured Gary Numan, Roy Ayers, PiL and Chic, among many others), and King’s Place (with a regular Friday folk night). In addition, some older venues we visited earlier in this story now host live music after a break from doing so, including Wilton’s and the Roundhouse, which reopened in 2006 after a major overhaul.

  Edinburgh, to an extent, has rebuilt its music infrastructure in the last few years, thanks to ambitious promoters programming intimate gig spaces like the Wee Red Bar in the grounds of Edinburgh College of Art, Sneaky Pete’s on the Cowgate, and Bannerman’s. The Bongo Club has relocated to a new home on the Cowgate, the Mash House is a new venture in an old church on Guthrie Street, and La Belle Angele reopened in 2014, twelve years after a serious fire. In addition, established venues like Voodoo Rooms and Cabaret Voltaire continue to operate, as does The Caves, a unique and atmospheric venue housed in a building formerly a collection of stone vaults dating back to the eighteenth century. After an open meeting of venues, promoters and the council at Usher Hall in November 2014, Councillor Norma Austin Hart, Vice Convener for Culture and Sport, agreed to look again at how the council could help, rather than hinder, the provision of live music venues. She also said: ‘The meeting has highlighted the importance many people attach to music venues, which goes far beyond sentiment and is really around cultural enrichment.’

  Culture changes, and that’s good – women are now allowed into a dance hall wearing trousers, and most DJs have dispensed with the traditional ‘smoocher’ at the end of the night – and not just good but also inevitable (go out one Thursday and everyone’s wearing flares, go out a year later and no one is – wait long enough and flares will return, and beards, and deep house). In Manchester clubs and venues have closed, but new spaces are in use too; over the last few years, music has been performed in a 100-capacity room at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, as well as at a new venue, Gorilla, opposite the Ritz, which programmes imaginatively and is well run by the Trof organisation. Trof also operate one of Manchester’s best new venues, Albert Hall, a wonderful new use for a derelict four-floor building built by the Methodist Church in 1910. Manchester has also seen recent enclaves of interesting activity out in the neighbourhoods, at various venues like Fallow in Fallowfield, Dulcimer in Chorlton and Fuel in Withington. Young creatives are populating old warehouses and empty buildings in Salford, around Chapel Street, clustering close to the pioneering arts lab and music venue at Islington Mill (the brainchild of ex-Club Suicide regular Bill Campbell).

  The way music, clothes, people, inspiration and memories radiate from a venue and take on a life of their own is some consolation to those mourning the loss of the Twisted Wheel/Legends. The erasing of all traces of the club came at a time of renewed interest in Northern Soul. Even as the wrecking ball tore into the Wheel, so much of the activity it supported had moved on, its enduring influence clear. Young Northern Soul dancer Levanna Mclean, for example, with over a million views for her dancing down the street to a mash-up of Pharrell Williams’s ‘Happy’ and its inspiration, Velvet Hammer’s late-70s song, also titled ‘Happy’. Around the same time, the Paul Mason interview with Fran Franklin was broadcast and the final edit of Elaine Constantine’s Northern Soul film was completed.

  Younger DJs carry the Northern Soul torch and keep the faith, including the gloriously named Ashby-De-La-Soul crew, who present a bi-monthly Northern Soul & Motown night in Leicestershire, and the ‘Black Bee Soul Club’. The Black Bee takes place once a month at Kraak Gallery in Manchester. Founders Paul Bailey and Sam McEwen attract an audience of clubbers who weren’t born when Northern Soul was at its height in the 1970s, so the impulse isn’t nostalgic; it’s refreshing rather than replicating what happened at the Twisted Wheel. The location of Kraak Gallery adds to the charm of Black Bee Soul Club events.

  Founded by the former Club Brenda
promoter Jayne Compton, Kraak Gallery has also played host to ‘Witch*unt’ parties and to a couple of alt-queer nights, ‘Drunk at Vogue’ and ‘Hot Space’, in Manchester. It’s the kind of place every city needs, an under-styled space a little like something you’d imagine finding in post-industrial New York circa 1980 or in a back street in Berlin. Kraak holds barely 150 people, but feeds the imagination and attracts the adventurous. Such spaces are so often fertile, as we’ve seen. The glories of the north of England’s post-punk era emerged from just such rundown, crumbling, creative venues. Bailey and McEwen say they fell in love with Kraak, the venue’s gritty vibe and the fact that it’s hidden away, seventy yards from Stevenson Square but hard to find, with no passing trade. It’s down a street no one can find, playing music the big clubs don’t play, away from the eyes of the mainstream media.

  Outside the big cities, where there’s no critical mass, and fewer enthusiasts and entrepreneurs, small venues with a dissenting soundtrack threatened with closure may not be replaceable. These places tend to be dominated by large venues that don’t have the desire or luxury to go beyond an obvious soundtrack and cheap drinks.

  Choices are restricted in Preston, for example, where the loss of the Continental and the Ferret would be a blow to anyone who valued adventurous venues. In Southampton, Joiners is a small music venue on St Mary Street established in 1968. The Verve, the Arctic Monkeys and Friendly Fires all played gigs there in their early days. But the survival of the Joiners is precarious; in January 2013 the Vaccines played a fundraising gig there (in April the same year, Joiners was declared NME’s best small venue of the year). Without Joiners, the locals and students living in Southampton would still have the opportunity to visit Jesters on Bevois Valley Road, although it’s possibly not such an attractive proposition, having recently been designated number one in an online feature describing the ‘UK’s worst nightclubs’: ‘A top tip is to make sure you’re not wearing your favourite clothes as you will have snakebite over you by the end of the night,’ said the reviewer, who happened upon a brawl within two minutes of entering the venue.

  We all need to know there’s an alternative. If you’re stumbling towards an interest in maverick music or maverick culture, you’re liberated if there’s a venue where like minds gather, a venue that could open musical possibilities, and help you identify and define the person you are or the person you want to be.

  The availability of spaces is important, but so is the role of the energised promoters who have taken possession of venues, and organised and hosted events, clubs and live music, those people we’ve met through our story like Denis Rose, Cy Laurie, Ma Regan, Roger Eagle, Steve Strange, Chris Burton and John Keenan; and, in the current era, EVOL and Now Wave, Jason Dormon and Mark Davyd at the Forum in Tunbridge Wells, and Phil Andrews at Moles in Bath.

  Away from the high street, out on the under-capitalised, uncommercial periphery of clubland, point to anywhere on a map of Britain, from the Old Fire Station in Bournemouth to the Cafe Indiependent, Scunthorpe, and there’ll be someone somewhere organising a regular night playing irregular music. These characters are making something out of nothing, even if their impact doesn’t match that of some of the maverick enterprises documented in our story – the Scene, for example, hidden away in Ham Yard, in among warehouses and old stables, off the beaten track. It’s a model of how much potential a venue can have. From disc-only nights on a Monday attended by a few people leaning against the walls, as Guy Stevens played records by the Impressions and Jimmy Reed, the club became the quintessential mod hangout and Stevens became an influence on the likes of Eric Clapton, Brian Jones and Pete Townshend. And the boss of the club founded Radio Caroline, and thus transformed British music radio.

  Closing down doesn’t mean an end to the story and influence of a venue. Laurent Garnier has had DJ residencies at the Ministry of Sound and the End in London, turned the Rex club in Paris into one of the techno meccas of the world, performed live accompanied by a full band at the prestigious Salle Pleyel in 2010, and runs his own Yeah! Festival in Provence, but his autobiography Electrochoc starts with his memory of his first visit to the Haçienda and hearing Mike Pickering playing ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’. Everything he has subsequently achieved – and the activity that, in turn, he’s gone on to inspire, particularly in France – connects back to that life-changing moment.

  Throughout this history we’ve seen and celebrated significant venues and the story of what happened next, their influence radiating; the trails lead on from Billy’s and the Blitz, from Club A Go Go, the Dug Out, Crackers and Jive Turkey. People carrying objects from an auction and memories, and inspirations, ideas and relationships from clubs: Laurent Garnier, John Bonham and Robert Plant, Bryan Ferry, Viv Albertine, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons, Samantha Morton and Patrick Lilley, for example.

  New chapters get written. Sensateria in Birmingham had a playlist which inspired a number of musicians to take influence from the 60s psych aesthetic (Trish Keenan and James Cargill from Broadcast were regulars at the club night, which lasted ten years). Giorgio Gomelsky, who staged those Rolling Stones shows at the Crawdaddy, resurfaced in the early 1980s running Plugg on Fifteenth Street in New York City. Rob King went from promoting Delirium to becoming art director for François Hollande’s presidential campaign in 2012. Warp Records, with a genesis closely bound up with Jive Turkey in Sheffield, suffered the death of co-founder Rob Mitchell in 2001, but has gone on to diversify into the production of videos and feature films including Dead Man’s Shoes, Four Lions, Submarine and Tyrannosaur.

  Sheffield is re-energised every September with the arrival of students; the growth in further education has helped nightlife in many British cities. There are, in addition, many small venues, nurturing new and emerging talent. The Plug on Matilda Street has a night called ‘Propa Local’ on the last Friday of every month, showcasing Sheffield-based bands, in addition to club nights and a range of live acts which, in the past, have included Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke, Kate Tempest, and the Vaselines, plus guest DJs (including David Rodigan, and Mike Skinner of the Streets). In addition to the Plug, other Sheffield venues in the present day making a significant contribution include the Harley on Glossop Road. Sheffield holds a city-wide music festival every summer, Tramlines. The team at the Harley have an integral role in organising Tramlines, with the help of the city and the local musical community.

  As we discovered in an earlier chapter, in the 1860s Thomas Youdan’s Surrey Music Hall in Sheffield was the biggest building in the town, partly because the locals didn’t get round to building a town hall until 1896, revealing an admirable sense of priorities and a reminder that the search for entertainment clearly runs deep in the city, as elsewhere. People still want to gather, listen to music, dance. And despite ecstasy, ketamine and nitrous oxide, alcohol is still the drug of choice.

  Alcohol has downsides, of course; it’s said to be a factor in 40,000 deaths a year and its contribution to nightlife street violence is horrifying. Not that the violence is a new thing, though; in his 1958 novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alan Sillitoe describes not only the lurch towards a beer-fuelled escape every weekend – ‘Piled-up passions were exploded on a Saturday night, and the effect of a week’s monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system’ – but accepts there’s a price to pay (a punch-up and a hangover), calling Saturday nights out ‘a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath’.

  In the early 1840s, Friedrich Engels was remarking on the intemperance of the Manchester populace. ‘I have rarely come out of Manchester on such an evening without meeting numbers of people staggering and seeing others lying in the gutter.’ Manchester has undoubtedly changed much, but the drunken, thronging atmosphere of the city on a Saturday night in the current era would be recognisable to anyone who was out and about 150 or, indeed, 50 years ago.

  The entertainments on offer, nationally, after dark, are testament to our nation’s love for experiences beyond the mundane – li
ght-shows, lasers, wrestling with an alligator, an American contortionist at the Haçienda, the Prodigy live in an old bingo hall, Jimi Hendrix playing in a club named after a mongoose, and Herr Schalkenbach’s extraordinary Piano Orchestra Electro Moteur – as well as to the imagination of venue owners and promoters who’ve found or made special spaces, cared about some of the finer details too, the part of town, the height of the ceiling, the decor, the programming.

  As we saw in an earlier chapter, in the wake of the closure of the Twisted Wheel in 1971, the focus for the Northern Soul scene moved on to the Golden Torch in Stoke, where a year of good times and intense chaos followed. After the demise of the Torch, DJ Colin Curtis moved on to continue a successful DJ career. Club owner Chris Burton, meanwhile, found himself selling satellite dishes; but selling satellite dishes wasn’t his thing and he got stuck back into promoting events. He’s now in his early seventies, still involved, still loves it.

  The most recent time I met up with Chris, he was planning an event at the University of Keele featuring Northern Soul and r&b, in a variety of rooms (some starting at 9 p.m., running through until four or six in the morning) with some veteran DJs but also representatives of the younger generation, including Black Bee Soul Club and Stacie Stewart. Chris reeled off the names, talked up the idea, told me he’d also got a modern soul room, and – although the idea had met with some surprise – he’d added a ska/reggae room. He recommended I should check it out. ‘You’d like it, Dave, it would be great to see you there.’