The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

You are here: Home / Forum / Memorable 20th Century gigs: “The internet says No”.

Memorable 20th Century gigs: “The internet says No”.

by 52 Comments

Do you remember any great gigs from the 1980s and 90s that you can’t trace via the world wide web?
Do you ever get the feeling you’ve imagined a gig?
I’ve tried “Setlist FM” and other archive artist sites.
Can you recall any of the following:
Steve Winwood at Lancaster University?
A Festival at, or near, Nostell Priory, Wakefield featuring Tom Robinson and George Hamilton IV; a year or two after the 1982 Theakston’s free Jethro Tull, Lindisfarne, Marillion festival.
Chick Corea at Manchester Free Trade Hall?
Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel and the Furious Five at Lancaster Sugar House, following their hit “White Lines”?

0

Comments

  1. Ah, the Sugarhouse, or Shaggers as it was always known. When I lived in Lancaster the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets all played there when Madchester was on the verge of breaking nationwide. I didn’t see any of them.

  2. My girlfriend at the time wanted to see Jethro Tull at NostellPriory, I didn’t. We split up soon after.
    The 82 festival wasn’t free, no festival in 83. I’ve tried searching via Tom Robinson and George Hamilton 1V sitesbut can find no evidence of any festival.

  3. Lancaster Uni and the associated Sugar House staged many great acts. AC/DC for £1.50!
    There is an excellent book about the gigs at the Great Hall at L.U. “When Rock Went To College: 1969-1985: Legends Live at Lancaster University “.

  4. Not Lancaster but Liverpool University (Mountford Hall) within my first couple of months there (late 1980) I saw Echo and the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes and (Ahem) Hazel O’Connor. Interesting support acts The Sound, Thompson Twins and Duran Duran respectively

  6. I saw the Jam at Woking YMCA in 1981 when they played a charity gig. There’s very little about that on the net even less about the show the night before at the cricketers in Maybury where Paul was very very drunk.

    • I saw the Style Council’s first live performance, a miner’s benefit at Liverpool Empire. They played for 15 minutes. I can’t remember another single thing about the evening.

  7. I once asked the bloke who ran a Kirsty Maccoll super fan website thing why there was no mention of her Heineken gig at Wollaton Park in the early 90s, which I saw.
    He’d never heard of it.
    I think Green on Red were on too, and SLF with Bruce Foxton?

  8. I was at a Carter Family gig at the Mean Fiddler where (eventually) the stage was shared by Johnny Cash, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe & Joe Brown. I’ve mentioned this a few times on various forums over the years but have seen nothing else about it ever.

  9. I saw Little Feat at Newcastle City Hall in around 1977 but I’ve been convinced for years that it was a double bill with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who had just really broken through to the mainstream after their first album, on a tour where they alternated headlining.

    The internet, however, suggests this never happened.

    • @Ainsley Tom Petty first tour of UK was with Nils Lofgren – I was there at Birmingham Odeon and became a huge fan. Also saw his last gig in UK at Hyde park.
      Sadly missed.

        • it’s quite possible that time has conflated these two events. My cohort were pretty regular visitors to Newcastle City Hall around that time and I’m pretty sure I did see TP – probably just not at the LF gig!

          Memory can be a bugger – if only I’d had a mobile phone I could have held aloft for the duration of both gigs

  10. I saw Richard and Linda Thompson in 1977 at Bradford University on their short lived tour.
    I can find no mention of it. I asked RT last year about it when he was in conversation with Ian Whiteman at the Bradford Literature Festival, neither could remember doing it but to be fair it was a long time ago and there have been countless gigs after.

    Someone has posted that Jimmy Page has played at Cropredy, several people have said he didn’t. Selective memory?

    • R&LT did a some dates around that time, as they played at London Victoria’s Venue. They were at that time outwith any record label. I assume it was Mattacks, Pegg and, possibly, Nicol, as the band, but details fail, I mixing it up with a R&LT at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, a year or two ahead.

    • I don’t think he’s played, though Robert Plant has a couple of times. On a Cropredy box set I’ve got packed away for an impending house move I’m sure someone mentions seeing Page and Plant in the crowd at Cropredy getting up to dance when the between-set DJ played Rolf Harris’ version of Stairway to Heaven.

      • There’s a photo somewhere of them in the crowd.

        The chap who said he saw him play said that he was introduced to him on a Thursday night, this was before there was a Thursday night Cropredy. False memory syndrome?

  11. I went to the first ever gig by Robert Wyatt’s Matching Mole, at Hydraspace in Watford (a.k.a. the long-gone Kingham Hall, in St. John’s Road. It’s now the site of a nondescript office block). Genesis were regular visitors there in the early ’70s, both Phillips and Mayhew and early Hackett & Collins days.

    • Sometime in late ’68 or early ’69 I went to an afternoon gig at Watford’s Top Rank Suite featuring Blossom Toes and Family.
      It was planned that there would be more of these but because this first one was sparsely-attended the plan was abandoned and they never put rock bands on there again.

      Top Rank Suites were a chain of nightclubs owned by The Rank Organisation, now long gone. Most of the clubs are now gone too and they all changed ownership several times over the years.
      The one in Sheffield is still a music venue in the O2 Academy group, I believe.
      The Brighton club is now known as Pryzm Brighton.
      The Watford one remained a nightclub over the years but has recently closed down, having become Baileys, then Paradise Lost, then Kudos, then Destiny, then Oceana and most recently Pryzm.
      The owners, Pryzm Group, want to sell it for housing and retail redevelopment, but the local council are resisting, looking for other schemes that will retain the existing building for leisure facilities.

      • Growing up in Watford, my gig going years started in the late 70’s. I never understood why there were no gigs in Watford! I can now assume it was partly due to the apathy of the previous wave. Apart from pub gigs, the only big name artist I saw in Watford between 1976 & 1986 (when I moved away) was Billy Bragg at the Trades Union Hall near the Junction.

        • I grew up in St. Albans. Until reading your post, it had never occurred to me that there were never any gigs in Watford. Strange, given that it was, and still is, the largest town/city in Hertfordshire.

          Of course, the top Hertfordshire gig venue in the late seventies was the Hemel Hempstead Pavilion. In a fairly short space of time I saw the Buzzcocks, Subway Sect, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, John Cooper Clarke, Elvis Costello and the Attractions (twice), Stiff Little Fingers, the Ruts, the Specials, the Selecter (twice), Dexys Midnight Runners, A Certain Ratio, Talking Heads and XTC. There was always a brilliant atmosphere at the Pavilion. Heady days!

          • I was right up at the stage for that Talking Heads gig. I had bruises on my arms the next day where I’d been drumming on the edge of the stage! It was also to first time I’d seen Space Invaders played ‘properly’…upstairs in the corner of the bar, before the support band, Jerry Harrison’s fingers were flying! We we’re also nearly rubbing shoulders at XTC and Elvis Costello.
            It was an almost perfect venue, big enough to attract chart bands but small enough to not need to be full to have an atmosphere which often gave the support bands a running start…. not that it helped Talking Heads’ support… wasn’t that ACR? They were bloody awful whoever they were!

        • Used to get plenty of gigs in the late ’60s and early ’70s at Hydraspace/Kingham Hall (see above) and what was then Watford Tech College in Hempstead Road (now part of University of Hertfordshire). The college held occasional overspill gigs in the concert hall at the Town Hall (now known as Watford Colosseum). Also went to occasional gigs in Hemel. Either at the Civic or Dacorum College (where I once saw Fairport Convention just after Sandy Denny had joined).
          I was away from Watford from ’72 to ’84 and on my return there were no gigs to go to.
          The thing about Watford and entertainment is that central London is only a 20 minute train ride away.

  12. Remember some time in the early to mid 1990s walking along Charring Cross Road and seeing Crowded House doing an impromptu acoustic set outside that little street where the Borderline is/used to be.

    While not a big fan, remember them doing Chocolate Cake and Paul Hester banging away on a cardboard box. Also remember they had a fairly professional looking cameraman so the footage presumably exists somewhere

  13. I was trying to find information on Slade playing at our Teacher Training college. I absolutely know it happened as I helped them get to the right venue! I can narrow the dates down to a small number of Saturdays, and I know they came back again after their first hit – again, I can narrow that down because of term times and so on. There is nothing on the internet. I even contacted someone who runs a website listing their dates and he said that finding college date information is hard because they weren’t advertised in, say, the local press, so there is no trace of them.

    We tend to assume all is information is now out there and available and, if it isn’t, we seem to doubt our memory !!

Leave a Reply