Pirate Radio, Mods & Rockers, British Soul: 1964

Colin H on Pirate radio, mods & rockers

Radio Caroline began 60 years ago last week (28 March 1964). Three days later, there was a bit of scene on Brighton beach involving something called mods & rockers. Here is part of a chapter from the draft version of my John McLaughlin book ‘Bathed in Lightning’ (2014). I enjoyed going off an a tangent and lifting a few stones to peer underneath them when writing a chapter concerning McLaughlin-related goings on in 1964, but it was a tangent that was excised when the book mushroomed. I later included it as a standalone piece in ‘Echoes From Then’ (2017) – a companion volume to BIL. Given the anniversary, here it is – with the front page of the Coventry Telegraph the day after Brighton.

*

Pirate Radio, London Mods, British Soul (1964)

‘There were a certain number of coloured Americans around who should have been all right, but there weren’t any James Browns among them… ‘Soul’ in British pop was a non-starter.’
George Melly, Revolt Into Style, 1970 [1]

In a way, Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames were responsible for changing the world, or so the Scene Club’s co-owner/manager, 24-year-old Ronan O’Rahilly, would have had people believe. His pirate radio station Radio Caroline began broadcasting from a ship just outside British territorial waters in March 1964. It was swiftly followed by rival station Radio Atlanta and then by Radio London and a host of others, all broadcasting pop, soul and R&B to millions of kids in Britain. Ronan’s widely reported impetus for creating the station was simply that he had made a record independently for Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames and was appalled to discover, on touting it at the BBC and Radio Luxembourg, that airplay was a closed shop. Either you were an established artiste (warranting BBC attention) or you were on EMI, Decca, Phillips or Pye (who all bought slabs of time on Radio Luxembourg).

It was a great story. Everyone likes the idea of an underdog fighting for his right to fair play. What didn’t quite chime on closer examination was that Ronan had made no such record. Ian Samwell had produced, for EMI, the LP Rhythm And Blues At The Flamingo, released in January 1964. Radio Caroline would have happened anyway – as, almost simultaneously, Radio Atlanta did. Pirate radio, or something to bridge the demand/access disparity with popular music airplay in Britain, was a development that was surely inevitable. A fleet of rusting old ferries anchored three miles offshore, beyond the reach of existing UK law, was merely the solution that caught on.

The pirate stations would broadcast unchecked until the passing of the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act in August 1967. Radio 1, launched by the BBC in September 1967 and staffed largely by presenters from the pirates would fill the gap. BBC Radio would belatedly join the Swinging Sixties. After a fashion. As Nik Cohn put it: ‘After three years, everything was right back where it had started – you switched your radio on and you couldn’t hear pop when you wanted it, you were stuck with Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck instead… Government-sponsored pop…’ [2]

While the pirates were the sound of Mod culture on the wireless, the moving image equivalent – spanning a very similar time, from August 1963 to December 1966 – was Ready Steady Go! The Andrew Oldham Orchestra’s ‘365 Rolling Stones’ was the show’s theme music for a while: ‘a nice honour and a few pennies’, as Oldham reflected. [3]

Ready Steady Go! was Mod culture – the clothes, the dancing, the haircuts, the music – on telly, coming into living rooms right at the start of Friday night. Initially broadcast live by ITV regional station Associated Rediffusion, it was only available in the London area; gradually, it became available across the regions. Dancers in the studio audience were sourced from the Scene Club and Wardour Street’s La Discotheque; visiting American soul artists were welcomed with open arms. There would be special editions given over to live performances from James Brown and from assembled Motown artists, along with one episode on the Who. By April 1965, the show had moved to a large studio in the Wembley area of London and had become the start of the weekend not only for the viewers but for everyone involved in music in the city. Artists, managers, publicists all turned up and hung out at the show’s Green Room whether they or their acts were on that week’s show or not, and later everyone went on to the clubs where the party continued.

Peter Meaden, interviewed in 1979, described the lifestyle of a London scenester in those days:

‘You’d go out on a three-day bender, you know? Hit out on a Friday night, high on speed, down to Ready Steady Go!, down to the Scene Club, dance all night till Saturday morning. Saturday, you’d go shopping, to buy a pullover, or scarf, or something – pair of socks, ‘cos your feet hurt dancing all night in Desert boots. And then all through Saturday night again at the Scene Club all through to Sunday morning, that’s when the come-down comes down, ‘cos you can’t sustain it much more than three days, two nights. Three days and you start heading home to Mama’s place, you know, ‘cos you live at home, you can’t afford to live anywhere else. And then you crash, round about Sunday morning, if you can get a lift home to North London, where I was. And that was the life – It was the most amazing sort of life you could imagine – it was so amazing…

‘The records were played loud over those big speakers, like fairground speakers, and in a small room, which was what the Scene Club was, with concrete walls, so it comes bouncing back, hitting off the floor… hits off the ceiling, so you’re getting saturated with sound, and then they start pulling down the stops, you’re getting a psychedelic record in ‘64. So you’re picking up on the body all the time. This is what Mods are about, they’re very physical people. Drynamil is a drug for Mods, because it’s a functional drug, it’s a drug you can work on, you can steal in the shops on it, do all the things you need to do, you can dance on it – you lose all lack of confidence, you lose guilt. It opens up the capillary vessels of the body, therefore, with the aid of this drug you have your own society, you have Nirvana, in a single purple heart pill.’ [4]

‘Meaden was obsessed with turning us into mods,’ Pete Townshend reflected. ‘He felt that we were close enough for rock’n’roll, but he had a hard time convincing the other three members of the band… unfortunately, by the time he got to us, he was a bit pilled-out. He was still really quite brilliant but tended to babble his ideas… words like ‘face’, ‘ticket’, ‘number, which have passed into [Mod] mythology – he was the only person I ever heard using them at that time.’ [5]

‘He didn’t really have to force his ideas on us very hard,’ said Roger Daltrey, the Who’s singer. ‘He thought we could pick up on the Mod thing and he was right because Mods had no focal point at all and the Who became that, we became the spokesmen. When Kit [Lambert] and Chris [Stamp] took over management they basically just took Meaden’s ideas and made them bigger.’ [6]

Luckily for the Who’s longevity, having ridden the bandwagon into national consciousness, Pete Townshend had a wider world-view than his mentor. He told one journalist, in May ‘65: ‘We think the Mod thing is dying. We don’t want to go down with it.’ [7] He was broadly correct; and they didn’t.

‘The early Mod thing was always semi-violent,’ recalled Chris Stamp, co-manager of the Who at the time they entered national consciousness. ‘The word ‘Mod’ came from ‘Modern Jazz’. We sorta liked Gerry Mulligan, Jimmy Smith and John Coltrane; [but] we weren’t that into jazz – it was the look.’ [8]

While the Scene Club was the wellspring for the lifestyle, the look and simply hearing the records, for the booming R&B/soul crowd the Flamingo was still the best place in town for live music. It was also pretty hip with the sounds in between, as 60s Mod and future record label MD Steve Barrow recalled:

‘At the Flamingo they played good music too, in between sets. The DJ there played ‘You Can’t Sit Down 1 & 2’ by Phil Upchurch, all those Sue Records that [Scene Club DJ] Guy Stevens reissued. At the Flamingo, they played tunes like the Willie Mabon series that includes ‘Got To Have Some’ and ‘Just Got Some’, and instrumentals like Mongo Santamaria’s ‘Watermelon Man’. James Brown’s ‘Night Train’ too, a big record, and Aaron Neville’s ‘Tell It Like It Is’.

‘Georgie did a version of ‘Night Train’, and Louis Jordan’s ‘Let The Good Times Roll’ which had also been covered by Ray Charles in the late 1950s. And he did Rufus Thomas, whose ‘Walking The Dog’ was a massive club tune. So Georgie would sing these type of songs and he’d even do versions of other tunes that were played by the DJ in the club, like Willie Mabon’s ‘Just Got Some’. And he and the musicians would solo – he had two saxes, tenor and baritone, trumpet, guitar as well as organ… Michael Eve was on tenor sax, Eddie Thornton on trumpet, and Speedy on conga. [Footnote 1] He had a baritone sax player too, who would also solo. That band was great, and sounded like the ‘real thing’. It was definitely not a guitar beat group, but a band with horns – that was pretty much unique on the club scene then. I remember that the Who played in a basement in Gerrard Street, must have been [late 1964], and you could hear from outside that they didn’t have any horns, or organ, just guitars, so I never went in to hear them!’ [9]

The remarkable dichotomy within Mod culture was that while virtually all of the preferred music was by black artists, the people listening were distinctly white. Similarly, away from the largely club-level popularity of Geno Washington, Jimmy James, Ronnie Jones and Herbie Goins, the bands that we now think of as emblematic of British Mod culture in the 60s – the Small Faces, the Who, the Action, the Creation, the Yardbirds – were not only white but almost a kind of hyper-inflated Mod for the tourists. In rather the same way that the white Mod bands somehow cornered the media and the history books, the Marquee, a few doors up from the Flamingo on Wardour Street, would achieve that feat as a venue.

‘The Marquee was a kiddie club as far as I was concerned,’ was the view John Gunnell, Flamingo All-nighter supremo. ‘It ended at 11 o’clock, we opened at 12. That’s what it was all about.’ [10]

Dick Jordan, who ran Klooks Kleek, tended to agree: ‘Even if I could afford the Yardbirds they would be of no use to me,’ he explained, towards the end of 1964. ‘They attract youngsters and my club is on licensed premises.’ [11] Underlining the point, adverts for the Night-Timers at his venue would often request ‘over 18s please’.

With the curious exception of Jimmy James & the Vagabonds, who performed there over 70 times in the 1960s (almost certainly thanks to the Soho-centric worldview of their mentor Peter Meaden), the Marquee rarely featured any black artists. Ronnie Jones would play only twice at the club, in 1965 (post-Night-Timers); Herbie Goins on one occasion in 1965 and then, with Geno Washington, four times each during 1967-68, by which point the Flamingo had rebranded as the Pink Flamingo and slipped off even the footnotes of worthwhile history. [Footnote 2] All great scenes can only last a few years, and it remains a remarkably accurate piece of folk-wisdom that once the publican upgrades the carpet, the writing is generally on the wall.

During 1965, at the height of the Mod craze, a pin stuck randomly into the Marquee diary would – leaving aside the purely jazz acts that still commanded certain nights each week – in all probability have landed on the name of the Yardbirds, the Who, the Graham Bond Organisation, Manfred Mann, the Spencer Davis Group or the Mark Leeman Five. This would be the scene that would eventually morph into the (similarly white and guitar-based) British ‘blues boom’ of the later 60s – the point where, in a nutshell, pop became rock.

‘I never went to the Marquee until I played there,’ says Tom McGuinness, who, as guitarist with Manfred Mann would do so on 46 occasions during 1965–66 alone. ‘I used to go to places like the Station Hotel in Richmond – I lived in Wimbledon. I saw Alexis [Korner] three times at a pub called the Queen Vic in Cheam. There were other places to see the music which, for me, were more accessible. If you went to see the Stones at the Station Hotel [in Richmond] there would be art students and navvies, there would be beatniks and Mods: people were there for the music… The Marquee crowd, I think was similarly mixed. You were as likely to see someone with a polo shirt and Levi’s with turn-ups as you were to see someone with a corduroy jacket and leather patches on the elbows – and everything in between. [But] black faces were very, very rare at the Marquee.

‘The only time I ever went to the Flamingo was with Manfred Mann when we drove back from a gig somewhere, arrived at midnight and there was a benefit gig for Cyril Davies’ family going on [Footnote 3] – and we’d come back to play at it. That was the only time I ever went to the Flamingo: it just didn’t figure on my radar. For me, the people I was interested in weren’t playing there.

‘Dave Kelly, who I play with [now] in the Blues Band, had a band which played there, at the Flamingo, backing Howlin’ Wolf – and they absolutely died. The audience weren’t interested at all, and it was all young black guys. Howlin’ Wolf was really angry with the musicians, ‘It’s all your fault, you’re not playing well enough, these are my people’. And Dave said, ‘Look, you don’t understand, they’re not interested in your music at all. They’re here for soul and jazz and stuff like that, they’re just waiting for the disco to begin.’ And Wolf said, ‘Don’t tell me how to play to coons – I’m a coon myself!’’

While the Beatles and the Stones were busy kicking off the shackles of subservience to America and creating something distinctly British, the Mods – setting aside the white groups with power chords and union jacks – were all about revelling in American music: the more black, the more exclusive, the better. One irony being, as the Who found to their cost when trying to explain their Mod-homage Quadrophenia song-cycle to baffled American audiences in 1973, the culture that resulted was distinctly, fervently European.

‘Whilst today’s media may go on about how UK bands like the Who, Kinks and the Small Faces provided the soundtrack for the Mod scene,’ recalled one veteran mod, Mick Hall, ‘I don’t recall ever hearing any of the music of these bands being played within any of the West End Mod hangouts, although Millie Small, Prince Buster, James Brown, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Smith, Bo Diddley and Cannonball Adderley were regularly blasted out, bouncing off the ceiling and out into the street. However for many of us Mods, neither of these clubs [the Scene or La Discotheque] were a touch on the ‘Mingo.’ [12]

*

With the notable exception of Chris Farlowe, most of the singers involved in the top level British soul/R&B bands that filled clubs up and down Great Britain in the middle 60s were African-American or Afro-Caribbean. [Footnote 4] Ronnie Jones, Herbie Goins and Geno Washington had been black GIs stationed at USAF bases in the countryside around London and regular punters at the Flamingo, who all received a call-up into white British groups; PP Arnold, a young black American former backing vocalist with Ike & Tina Turner, would also enjoy the same cachet of colour and nationality in forging her own career in Britain a year or so down the line, with Andrew Oldham’s backing; Jimmy James & the Vagabonds had, by contrast, arrived intact from Jamaica, where American soul dominated the culture before home-grown developments into ska and reggae. A brief but atmospheric promotional film of the Vagabonds, made by Swinging London documentarist Peter Whitehead at a club circa 1965, excerpting ‘What’d I Say?’ and a ska instrumental, provides a wonderful glimpse of a club environment at the time and of why they were such a popular live act. [13]

‘If anyone in England was surprised by the appearance of a fully-fledged authentic soul band from Jamaica,’ wrote John Pidgeon, ‘so were Jimmy James & the Vagabonds to discover a soul scene outside the immigrant West Indian community.’ [14]

Like the pre-fame Blue Flames, Jimmy James had recorded a one-off single for the tiny ‘R & B’ label in 1963, run by Rita and Benny, the shop-keepers with hip initials. His band’s period of success as Mod floor-fillers would be chronicled by a string of singles for the Piccadilly label between 1966–67 before a last hurrah on Pye in 1968. When the Motown acts, such as the Four Tops – in whose UK touring band John McLaughlin would play – came to Britain at first, they would be stunned at how well their music was known. In large part this was through onstage covers by the British soul bands. Jimmy James went one stage further and had their moves down, too:

‘All that came from watching so many American acts in Jamaica,’ he said. ‘If you’d gone onstage and didn’t have a show to go with what you were doing, you could be the greatest singer in the world, but if you just stood there they wouldn’t want to know… Every song we rehearsed, we would rehearse some sort of routine to go with that song, so once we were on the stage people were moving to the very end. They weren’t allowed to stand still. We threw routines in and got people to shout ‘Yeah!’ here and ‘Yeah!’ there. The whole idea was to get the audience involved in what we were doing, because once they got involved, they enjoyed it more than just sitting there. It was almost like putting them on stage with us.’ [15]

This was an ethos shared by Geno Washington, who remains perhaps the quintessential artist from the British soul underground, and it explains why he (along with Ronnie Jones and Herbie Goins) still has a live audience to this day:

‘We go out and try to entertain them – rain, snow, sleet, whatever,’ he said, in 2009. ‘And it’s that aspect of entertaining the audience that, as far as I’m concerned, has become a lost art with many groups today, who basically just go out because they have the hit records and the publicity. Which is why, when they stop having hit records, nobody wants to know. Because going out there and just leaving the audience on their own is no good! You must go out there and thrill your audience, even if it’s only three people! Because if you do, then those three people will sure enough pass the word along!’ [16]

The road between the Caribbean ghetto and mainstream clubland would be opened to Jimmy James by the Who’s early stylist and champion Pete Meaden. Meaden was an energetic young Soho ‘face’ who worked for a PR agency in the very early 60s and became a mentor to first Andrew Loog Oldham and later the Who’s Pete Townshend – a couple of years older than both, at an age when such things make a difference – along with Jimmy James and doubtless others. His orbit, though, was very restricted in geographical terms:

‘Peter Meaden was very much caught up in a small Soho thing,’ recalled Pete Townshend. ‘He thrived as one of the kings of that scenario. I used to walk with him from one dingy little basement full of publicists and magazine writers to another. And as we walked, he’d talk at hyper-speed: ‘This is what’s happening, man, this is where it’s at, this is what’s going on, this is what we do…’ And in this little kinda square half-mile between Covent Garden and Dean Street he did all his business. He lived in a basement in Covent Garden.’ [17]

‘Pete Meaden and I bonded on the look of American jazz style on the back of album covers,’ wrote Andrew Loog Oldham. ‘[He] introduced me to a different form of nightlife – Soho. Our first port of call was the Scene Club, behind Piccadilly, just off Windmill Street in Ham Yard. It was run by Ronan O’Rahilly, who later started Britain’s first pirate station, Radio Caroline. The Scene was a loud, smoky haven for the disenfranchised working class, where white-on-black soul was the soundtrack till dawn’s harrowing light. Having grown up in the relatively rough district of Edmon ton, Peter was attuned and passed for one of this crowd, while I stayed close to the edge watching the kids speeding on pills and good music, posing more than dancing, jaws frantically chewing the night away. Three-legged, legless Mod monsters, pilled to the walls of aurafide stress, bound and bonded by sound and dread of the job on Monday.’ [18]

As Barry Miles explained in London Calling, his history of post-war London counterculture:

‘The Scene was the prototype early-sixties mod club, the model for dozens more that sprang up in the suburbs and other towns. [It] had been the site of Club 11 until 1950, when it transformed into Cy Laurie’s jazz club, the first club to hold Sunday afternoon record sessions; people sat on cushions or the floor of the large room and listened to American blues and British pop. During the day it was used as Mac’s Dancing Academy… Cy’s club [was] despised by the [jazz] modernists, [though] they still dropped by because it was somewhere to go and there were loads of drugs available. In the early sixties it became the Piccadilly Jazz Club before switching to its most famous incarnation… The Scene’s DJ was Guy Stevens, who had one of the most extensive collections of R&B records in the country. He featured loud Motown and Stax for the dancers but also played more obscure cuts. They also had live bands: beginning in August 1964 the Who did a five-week residence, every Wednesday night. There were still loads of drugs available but now they were mostly amphetamines. This was the centre of mod culture: they parked their scooters in Ham Yard and paraded their clothes to each other, pilled out of their minds. The Scene was a great club…’ [19]

Guy Stevens, like Peter Meaden, would be one of those people to have a huge influence on others who would in turn influence the world. Later in the 60s he produced classic albums for the likes of Free and Mott The Hoople, later still for the Clash (in awe of his 60s legend at the end of the 70s); but back in 1964–65 he was the man who suggested repertoire, and kindly copied the originals on to tape, for the new wave of Mod bands [Footnote 5] the man who advised Pye on what records to release in the UK from Chicago’s Chess catalogue, the man to whom Island Records boss Chris Blackwell entrusted his US soul-licensing subsidiary Sue Records and the man who ran Chuck Berry’s UK Appreciation Society. When Chuck was double-billed with the Who at the Royal Albert Hall’s ‘Pop Proms’ in July 1969 there was nearly a riot with the duck-walker’s Teddy boy fans reluctant to forget the old ‘Mods and Rockers’ seafront scraps of 1964–65. But back at the beginning, tastes among the early Mods were more catholic.

Pete Meaden would coin the immortal phrase ‘clean living under difficult circumstances’ to define the Mod ethos. Typically, an early 60s Mod was a young, white, working-class guy in London who spent most of what little money he earned ‘up West’ on tailored clothing, American records and going to clubs. Live music was, at least in the beginning, just the soundtrack to a weekend night out. The records, beginning a tradition that prized authenticity and exclusivity that would be carried on into the ever-nostalgic Northern Soul scene from the 70s onwards, were still where the cachet was. And records, especially imported American records, were still a relatively expensive commodity in the early 60s, with very limited options to hear them otherwise. There was either the BBC Light Programme, with a severely limited time per week for recorded pop music and a patronising attitude to it, or Radio Luxembourg, with adverts, poor reception and most of its airtime bought by the four major UK labels.

This memoir by London Mod Geoff Green, a Scene Club regular from 1963-66, is worth quoting at length to give a sense of what underpinned the surge of popularity for the kind of music with which John McLaughlin would be most involved as a performer during the middle 60s, not only with the Night-Timers but as a backing musician on UK tours by the Four Tops and Wilson Pickett:

‘I was a mod (of sorts, I was an apprentice and didn’t have a lot of money), but the main reason we went [to the Scene Club] was that the advert in the Record Mirror spoke of records played by artistes including Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed, Howling Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis and others… At this time the Merseybeat boom was getting under way, beat groups were beginning to feature cover versions of rhythm and blues songs, and we wanted to hear the originals.

‘Chuck Berry’s records had been issued in this country, but when Chess moved from London [Records] to the Pye group, his singles had been deleted. So when there was terrific interest in his material nothing was available.

‘I remember my first visit, the music seemed incredible. All the great rhythm and blues records, plus good rock’n’roll stuff, plus the current Phil Spector hits… I had never been to a club before, only to local dance halls, like the Tottenham Royal, where there was not the same atmosphere. And there were all these guys wearing the clothes I wanted and was having difficulty affording.

‘You went down a staircase, paid your money, had your hand stamped… and went into a rectangular room. As I recall the DJ was in a little box to the right of the entrance, but it was flush to the wall. In the right hand corner opposite the DJ was a bar that only sold soft drinks (I remember cola that was made from powder and water, really horrible).

‘A bit further to the left of the entrance was a passage to the cloakroom. Along the far wall to the left were booths, I think the first few times I went there you couldn’t see what was going on, but later they were opened up, I think this happened after a raid for drugs. And I think on the right hand wall between the bar and DJ booth were benches. The rest was a dance floor… People stood around or danced. A lot of the time it was a case of being seen at the right place.

‘I went a few more times, but became a regular in 1964. This was in the later part of the summer, I’d met a girl, and we were always going out to places to hear music and dance. So we went to the Scene, and the music was less rhythm and bluesy, more what we’d call soul, but it was still called rhythm and blues by us.

‘Also popular that summer were old rock’n’roll records by people like Bill Haley, Carl Perkins, etc. Remember this was the time of the mods and rockers riots, grossly exaggerated by the papers. But those records had the right beat for the dances of the time, the Block, and later the Bang. Also that time I remember the Miracles’ ‘I Like It Like That’, and the Supremes’ ‘When The Lovelight Shines In His Eyes’. I remember I wore an off white jacket with patch pockets (very fashionable then) and thought I was really cool. I also had a sort of crewcut, it was the summer of the American look, Levi’s with little turn-ups and desert boots.

‘Shortly after that I joined (instead of using vouchers from the Record Mirror), as did my mates and girlfriend. It was a guinea (£1 and 5p). That seemed a lot of money in those pre-inflation days to an apprentice. Monday nights were free to members, and Tuesday (the best weekday night) was one shilling (5p). The all-nighter on Saturday was five shillings (25p), but I couldn’t go to them with my girlfriend, her parents would have gone mad…

‘When the Who started appearing at the Marquee in Wardour Street we would often go to the Scene in the break between their appearances, for about ¾ of an hour. The music by then was what I would describe as classic soul, Motown, Chess, Major Lance, Impressions, Gene Chandler, plus tracks like ‘Boom Boom’ and ‘Dimples’ by John Lee Hooker, and Jimmy Reed classics. Also Ska (or Bluebeat as it was known) was played, but not great amounts, records like ‘Madness’ by Prince Buster and ‘Carolina’ by the Folks Brothers. Also ‘Jamaica Ska’ [by the Ska Kings, June 1964]. Incidentally when I danced with my girlfriend we often jived, this was quite common then.

‘I remember that ‘Night Train’ by James Brown was a regular play (it had just been issued on the Sue label [December 1964]), and people formed a chain and weaved in and out of the dancers. It was led by an attractive blonde who looked like Dusty Springfield, one of my mates fancied her. Organ instrumentals were highly popular, people like Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff. Quite a lot of jazzy sounding stuff was played as well plus almost anything issued by the British Sue label. I wish there were playlists available.

‘One Tuesday night an American TV [crew] were filming, I’d love to see that now. In February 1965 my girlfriend packed me in for one of my mates, this broke up our crowd. A couple of the others had girlfriends and were drifting away anyway. At that point I was pretty down and started to go to all-nighters there with one of my mates. I would meet him at about a quarter to midnight in Piccadilly Circus underground station, outside the gents’ toilets believe it or not, I must have been extremely naïve in those days about that sort of thing. We’d then go straight to the Scene, pay our money and go in to hear the music. It was exciting and the music was brilliant. It was the time all the classics were coming out, ‘Respect’ (Otis), ‘In The Midnight Hour’, ‘Nothing Can Stop Me’, ‘I Can’t Help Myself’… Now to a certain extent they seem a bit hackneyed, we have all heard them so much. But they were new then and so, so exciting… I’d hear one of my faves and be out on the floor straight away.’ [20]

FOOTNOTE 1: The line-up Steve describes is perhaps a conflation in memory drawn from many gigs: there was no guitarist in the band between April ‘63 (John McLaughlin leaving) and October ‘64 (Colin Green re-joining). Trumpeter Eddie Thornton was a semi-regular member of the band (juggling it with his cabaret commitments) between October ‘63 and April ‘64, according to Pete Frame’s Blue Flames genealogy. The soloing baritone Steve recalls is likely to have been Johnny Marshall rather than Glenn Hughes.

FOOTNOTE 2: The Marquee database in Tony Bacon’s London Live (Balafon, 1999) is an excellent resource, although not 100% accurate: both the Night-Timers and Dickie Pride’s group the Sidewinders, for example, are omitted from the New Year’s Eve 1965 listing contrary to Melody Maker advertising for that week. Also (as declared in the book) the database limits itself only to acts deemed to be in the pop (R&B, blues, soul, rock, etc.) field, hence omitting the jazz artists that gave the Marquee a significant part of its identity until well into the second half of the 1960s. The venue, for instance, only dropped its strict jazz policy for Saturday night bookings in July 1966.

FOOTNOTE 3: Cyril Davies, co-founder of Blues Incorporated and subsequently leader of his own Cyril Davies All-Stars, died in January 1964. His benefit night at the Flamingo was held on Tuesday 28 January 1964. Artists appearing included Georgie Fame, Manfred Mann, Alexis Korner, John Mayall, Zoot Money, Long John Baldry, the Animals and the Yardbirds.

FOOTNOTE 4: Bizarrely, and unbeknown to Farlowe at the time, Island Records’ Chris Blackwell and Guy Stevens released a Chris Farlowe & the Thunderbirds studio warm-up jam on ‘Stormy Monday Blues’ as a single on their (otherwise American-license based) Sue Records label in August 1965, under the pseudonym ‘Little Joe Cook’. Presumably some kind of joke, akin to white American ‘primitive guitar’ pioneer John Fahey passing his early recordings off as products of a hitherto unknown elderly black bluesman by the almost absurdly implausible name of Blind Joe Death, if the effect was to see if people believed Farlowe was black, it worked. Unfortunately, it meant that he (or his label) couldn’t accept an invitation to appear on Ready Steady Go! The record remains one of the great performances in British blues.

FOOTNOTE 5: Among the many American R&B and soul recordings passed on by Guy Stevens to the Who in 1964, for example, a handful would remain in their repertoire well into their 70s hard-rock pomp: Mose Allison’s ‘Young Man Blues’; Bo Diddley’s ‘Road Runner’; Marvin Gaye’s ‘Baby Don’t You Do It’; Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Spoonful’; Benny Spellman’s ‘Fortune Teller’; Larry Williams’ ‘Bony Moronie’.

CREDITS:
1. Revolt Into Style: The Pop Arts In Britain (Penguin, 1970), George Melly
2. Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (Weidenfield & Nicolson,1969), Nik Cohn
3. Stoned (Vintage, 2001), Andrew Loog Oldham
4. Feature on mod culture, Steve Turner, NME, 17/11/79.
5. Stoned (Vintage, 2001), Andrew Loog Oldham
6. Feature on mod culture, Steve Turner, NME, 17/11/79.
7. Melody Maker, 6/5/65
8. Stoned (Vintage, 2001), Andrew Loog Oldham
9. ‘Interview: Doug Hadgraft meets Steve Barrow’, Modculture 10/3/12 http://www.modculture.co.uk/interview-doug-hadgraft-meets-steve-barrow/ Accessed: 6/9/12
10. John Gunnell interviewed by John Pidgeon, 30/11/71
11. ‘Rhythm & Blues’, Bob Dawbarn, Melody Maker, 17/10/64
12. ‘London: the Flamingo Club’, Mick Hall, 2/9/07. http://jackthatcatwasclean.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/london-flamingo-club-source-mick-hall.html Accessed: 6/9/12
13. Peter Whitehead’s short promo film of Jimmy James & the Vagabonds can be viewed online, courtesy of Peter’s agents, at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnSevgYEZEc Accessed: 21/9/12
14. ‘Jamaican Soul’, John Pidgeon, The History Of Rock No.41 (Orbis, 1982) Ed: Ashley Brown
15. Jimmy James quoted (original source not given) in: ‘Jamaican Soul’, John Pidgeon, The History Of Rock No.41 (Orbis, 1982) Ed: Ashley Brown
16. ‘Geno Washington: Soul Good’, Pete Lewis, Blues & Soul, Issue 1055 (2012). Accessed online. Geno speaks in capitals a lot of the time, reflected in the original interview transcript. I’ve taken the liberty of amending the excessive accenting to occasional italics in the context of the present text.
17. Stoned (Vintage, 2001), Andrew Loog Oldham
18. Stoned (Vintage, 2001), Andrew Loog Oldham
19. London Calling (Atlantic Books, 2010), Barry Miles. Manfred Mann member Tom McGuinness isn’t so sure about labelling the Scene so clearly: ‘I think in retrospect it’s described as a Mod club, but it wasn’t just Mods who went to the Scene – I think people went there for the music. If you liked the music, you went to wherever it was.’
20. ‘London: The Scene Club and Soho’, Geoff Green, 2/9/07. Published online: http://jackthatcatwasclean.blogspot.co.uk (‘The Online Modernist Archive’) Accessed: 4/9/12

2