From CBGB to the Roundhouse

Tim Burrows

• Publisher: Marion Boyars
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780714531625
• eBook ISBN: 9780714523101
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Casting his eye widely across the globe, Tim Burrows examines the facts, myths and characters behind such legendary venues as the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, the Astoria in London and the Cloudlands Ballroom in Brisbane. Interviewing the musicians and promoters who were there at the beginning and those still involved today, he paints striking pictures of a variety of popular musical movements including jazz, rock n' roll, reggae, punk and rave. He shows how venues have evolved over the years, some falling by the wayside, some changing with the times and some managing to kep to their original ethos against all the odds. Burrows also looks at contemporary trends in live music - the influence of corporate chains, the huge boom in festivals - and new projects such as the O2 arena, asking how the way we view live music today might evolve in the future.

PART 1

ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS

‘But the great thing about the jazz world, and all the kids who enter into it, is that no one, not a soul, cares what your class is, or what your race is, or what your income, or if you’re boy, or girl, or bent, or versatile, or what you are – so long as you dig the scene and can behave yourself and have left all that crap behind you, too, when you come in the jazz club door.’ Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes1

If we are to begin anywhere, let it be at the 100 Club, the basement space at 100 Oxford Street: the oldest independent music venue in Britain. Situated amongst chain clothes shops and electronic stores along the endless retail Mecca of Oxford Street it is unique, a relic from an age before big promoters and superclubs. On the walls, the rich history of the club is catalogued by framed photographs depicting the greats that have appeared on the modest stage. There’s bluesman Memphis Slim with his eyes closed at the piano in 1958 and Johnny Rotten on his knees performing with the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club Punk Festival in 1976.

While the Luftwaffe were raiding the capital in the early 1940s, a basement restaurant known as Mack’s became a haven for those looking for an antidote to the terror outside. In 1942, Robert Feldman, a Jewish pattern cutter professionally and clarinet player by night, started putting on jazz shows in the restaurant which was usually closed for the evenings. The club has retained the same bunker-like feel as it would have had during the 40s, only now patrons might fear being trampled by the rush of shoppers, rather than falling victim to a German air raid.

In the 40s, those looking for a distraction from the hideous mix of fear and drabness that characterised the war years were persuaded to visit the club. ‘Forget the Doodle-bug. Come and Jitterbug at the Feldman club,’ the advert went.2 Swing was the new craze, coinciding with the influx of American GIs that flooded into England, earning instant admiration from many in a nation that had seemed permagrey during the war years. By 1944, American servicemen accounted for three per cent of Britain’s population, with 1.5 million living in the UK, albeit temporarily. To many teenage girls the GI invasion was exhilarating – here were matinee idols made flesh – and many flocked to the clubs where the servicemen might be. Hammersmith Palais was one such destination, where jitterbug marathons and swing contests proved to be popular.3

Feldman’s brother Victor was held in high regard on the jazz scene after he had sat in on drums with the Glenn Miller Army Air Force band at the age of eight at the Queensbury Club. He later graduated to piano and vibes, and became famous in the US, playing with Miles Davis. After Roger Feldman ran the London Jazz Club, the Wilcox brothers took over for two or three years, but during the 50s it was renamed The Humphrey Lyttelton Club after the trumpet player who was fast making a name for himself on the UK jazz scene. Humphrey Lyttelton was an ex-serviceman who had celebrated VE Day by being wheeled around London, blowing his trumpet into the night, ending up outside Buckingham Palace. After the war he enrolled at Camberwell School of Art and became a key instigator of the post-war jazz revival in the UK.4 By the 50s, ‘Humph’, as he was known to those in the jazz scene, was playing two or three gigs a week at the clubs. The decision to cash in on the name, made by Lyttleton and his agent Lynn Dunn, proved an inspired one, and there were queues around the block for his twice-weekly performances.

After the Lyttleton Club there was a change of lease and it became Jazz Shows Jazz Club. Roger Horton worked as a junior at Jazz Shows at this time. His mother was the secretary for the club’s accountant, and would sometimes take her sixteen-year-old son along to the club. ‘I was a student and a huge jazz fan. Absolutely potty,’ remembers Horton. ‘I used to sit on the end of that stage and listen to Humphrey Lyttelton’s band in the 50s.’5

Horton became director of the club in 1964, changing the name to the 100 Club and acquiring a drinking licence. ‘The first gig I ever did as boss was a jazz night with a very popular band called Alex Welsh and his Band on a Saturday night in 1964,’ he says. ‘It cost three and six to get in and we had 931 customers. That was before the days when you had to have a license, which restricts the number of people you are admitting…today we are allowed to have 290 people. That is our capacity. In those days, the bars were not built as they are now, so it was bigger, but that many people was still absolutely staggering.’6

Roger Horton’s 100 Club

The boom had started in New Orleans, where jazz itself was born out of the songs of slaves who congregated in Congo Square in the 18^th century. Jazz cornetist Ken Colyer made a pilgrimage from the UK, sitting in with the Lewis band at Manny’s Tavern, and came back suitably enthused to start his own club – the Colyer Club at Studio 51 on Great Newport Street.7

As well as trad jazz, the blues was attracting a growing army of followers in the UK. A lot of the US blues musicians first came and worked in England at the invitation of Chris Barber, a trombonist who had been in Humphrey Lyttelton’s group, before becoming a band leader himself. Horton recalls how, ‘Barber would bring these American players over for a whole tour, everyone, and eventually they became regulars at the club – people like Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Bo Diddley, Memphis Slim, Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf.’ He has fond memories of this period, but says, ‘What struck me at the time, is how it must have been a culture shock for these guys to come to England and work in clubs which are packed to the doors with white people. Everyone coming up to them and patting them on the back. They all told me how tough things were in America, how some white promoters wouldn’t touch you. What I found quite uncomfortable was that I was probably about thirty years old then, and yet a lot of the artists called me “Sir”. Over in America you still had segregation in certain parts, so I was the white man, the boss; I was “Sir” – even though they were sixty and I was thirty. I soon put a stop to it.’8

Yet something more brash, more exciting and significantly more marketable had emerged from the blues and jazz templates to take the younger generation by storm; rock ’n’ roll. The Dominion, today the site of the endless run of the Queen musical We Will Rock You, was the setting for the first gig by an American rock ’n’ roll act in London. In February 1956, Bill Haley and the Comets played to 2,000 eager teddy boys in their drape jackets and brothel creepers. The momentum of the rock ’n’ roll craze was building and the smoky underground coffee bars of Soho were teeming with teenagers. One young lad at the show who would later become the manager of the Rolling Stones, the archetypal 1960s pop svengali Andrew Loog Oldham, was just twelve at the time. ‘I went by myself, which was just fine, since most others wouldn’t have understood my pre-show ritual in the men’s room, perfecting my kiss-curl,’ he remembered in his memoir, Stoned (2000). ‘The Dominion is a magnificent theatre; its walls slope towards the object of the evening’s awe like an audio-visual wedding train. It is a feast for the eyes and ears that impresses all who gather there, regardless of their taste in entertainment.’

Yet, if the setting itself gave Oldham impetus to throw himself into this new thing known as rock ’n’ roll, the man that drew him there proved less than inspiring: ‘Haley was a nightmare. There was an hour and a half by spastic Vic Lewis and his Orchestra, then a paltry thirty-five minutes from this fat, kiss-curled housewife from the middle of America, the uncle you never wanted… Confronted by the mediocrity that was Haley, I thought for a moment rock ’n’ roll was over. But recalling the Then of Johnnie Ray and the Now of Buddy Holly and Little Richard saved the day, my imagination roared on intact and faith returned, replete with sound and texture.’

Here was a fourteen-year-old future architect of British rock ’n’ roll success, forecasting the end of rock’n’roll before it had even begun. Yet simply by being at the venue, in amongst thousands of teddy boys accompanied by their ‘bleached, quiffed’ girls, Oldham could sense something. A new possibility, the chance to create something better and more virile than what was being offered by the overweight American gyrating ineffectually before him. It is something that can only happen at a live event. When the atmosphere is right, the mind, free of the constrictions of the outer world, begins to race; possibilities play themselves out in your head; you are ripe for an epiphany. Andrew Loog Oldham might have had his dream shattered momentarily, but the setting itself sowed the seeds of an idea – rock ’n’ roll was for him.

A visit to Soho was irresistible to teenagers, a bright crashing awakening and Oldham would visit the area as often as he could. ‘Its hustling neon crassness was a like a drug before drugs,’ he fondly recalled.9 He would lie to his mother, saying he was going to visit a friend, and make his way to the 2i’s coffee bar at 59 Old Compton Street, a bar that many considered to be the place British rock ’n’ roll was born. The restaurant that today occupies the site even has a blue plaque outside, unveiled by Cliff Richard (who met his band The Shadows in the cellar bar) in 2007, stating the case: ‘BIRTHPLACE OF BRITISH ROCK ’N’ ROLL AND THE POPULAR MUSIC INDUSTRY’.

The 2i’s was started by three Iranian brothers (it was originally called the 3i’s but had to be changed when one brother left). An Australian wrestler, Paul Lincoln, who had emigrated to the UK with his friend, fellow countryman and wrestler Ray Hunter, took over the club and reopened the place in 1956. When skiffle player Wally Whyton and his band The Vipers played an impromptu gig there in July 1956, during the Soho Fair, Lincoln saw that this might be very lucrative, so encouraged kids to come in and play live. Skiffle was very much the craze, thanks to the rise of Lonnie Donegan, teenagers with guitars were learning Leadbelly songs and slipping in a bit of Elvis’s sexy swagger to spice it up. The 2i’s quickly earned a reputation for showcasing the best new artists on the scene and Tommy Steele was ‘discovered’ there by Larry Parnes. Soon the place could add Marty Wilde and Billy Fury to its list of emerging talent.10 By the late 50s it seemed like the whole of Soho was filled with cellar coffee-bars, where skiffle and jazz were played to wildly enthusiastic audiences. The smell of marijuana became a familiar feature of the Soho atmosphere around these clubs, and though 2i’s was undoubtedly the most popular, there was also Sam Widges, the Nucleus, the Gyre and Gimble, the Farm – all of which were open most of the night.11

Not everyone enjoyed the skiffle craze. For some, these bars posed a serious threat to British society. The cultural critic Richard Hoggart summed up the attitude when he poured scorn on the milk bars in Northern towns, where teenagers would put ‘copper after copper’ into the jukebox. The milk bars in his view indicated an ‘aesthetic breakdown’. You could see it in the ‘nastiness of their modernist knick knacks,’ he suggested, as well as their ‘glaring showiness’.12 But this is exactly what attracted teenagers to the coffee bars. The American glitz, however artificial, beat the hell out of the dreary English realism. The teenagers had a new space of their own.

Black Migration, White Reactions

The Harlem Renaissance: The Cotton Club

In Harlem, jazz had arrived with the migration of black people from the south. Many jazz venues sprung up in New York during the 1920s to meet the demand for jazz players who had moved north to get up on stage and entertain Manhattan socialites. This was the first type of popular music to fill the clubs and ballrooms around the world in the first half of the 20^th century. Black people had been drifting to Harlem, as well as other cities such as Detroit, from the south since the turn of the century, to find work and escape persecution. (The significance of race in Detroit is clear from the names of some of the clubs at the time, such as Club Plantation and the Chocolate Club.13)

Harlem was eulogised by white writers and nicknamed ‘Little Africa’ by the press. It was a noisy place, many accounts suggested, that throbbed with a pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• LIST OF IMAGES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART 1
• PART 2
• PART 3
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES ON THE TEXT
• CAST – IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE:
• Plates
• Copyright