Sometimes footage shot for the TV news that would’ve been shoved way down the pecking order when broadcast turns out to be far more fascinating in retrospect than whatever was grabbing the headlines. Joe Public going about his business or enjoying himself can provide a greater insight into how life was lived for the majority than whatever the President or Prime Minister of the day was up to. The fashions, the vehicles, the street furniture – all offer a window to a vanished world that is nevertheless remarkably recent in the grand scheme of things; and it is realising just how much the world we look out on day-to-day has visually altered within living memory that makes such footage so compelling. YouTube has proven to be a good repository for this people’s archive, and whenever I stumble upon another addition I tend to download it and stash it away for future use in my own DIY videos. A couple of months back, I rediscovered film of punters dancing the night away at the Hammersmith Palais in the early 1970s, something I’d downloaded years before and never done anything with; this uncut reel evidently trimmed for transmission ran for the best part of 25 minutes in its raw form, and I found it so intriguing that I wondered if the old-school ballroom venue was still with us. I quickly learnt it fell beneath the wrecking ball in 2007.
Sadly, the Hammersmith Palais is not unique amongst this country’s culturally significant pleasure palaces for the proles in that it now exists only on film. With the Brixton Academy currently threatened with closure, it’s interesting that so few of these venues are regarded by developers and local councils as sites worthy of preservation, as though the fact they provided entertainment for the masses and served as epicentres of pop culture renders them completely dispensable and historically irrelevant. They’re not the Royal Opera House, therefore they don’t matter. How wrong they are. Take The Cavern, perhaps the most famous club and musical hub of the past century – yes, visit Matthews Street in Liverpool and you’ll find a venue called The Cavern; but it’s not The Cavern; it’s not the same place that acted as the maternity ward for a revolution, as the actual location where John, Paul, George and Ringo lit the blue touch paper for all of our lives was across the street from the club that now bears the Cavern name. It was demolished in 1973 to make way for a car park, long before the Rock Heritage industry existed and realised its profitable potential.
The Cavern was still primarily regarded as a Jazz club prior to the incursion of ‘Merseybeat’, with a coffee bar-cum-live venue called The Casbah previously providing The Beatles and their contemporaries with somewhere to play; this was owned and run by the mother of Pete Best and had been inspired by Soho’s 2i’s Coffee Bar, a Skiffle venue that facilitated the first wave of British rock ‘n’ rollers. The café’s handy location in London’s ‘naughty square mile’ ensured any snotty young Elvis imitator strutting his scruffy stuff could swiftly be signed-up by some Denmark Street shark and sewn into a shiny suit for a speedy transformation into an all-round entertainer. But the 2i’s was gradually usurped as the place to be once the 60s started swinging and the nature of pop acts altered; it closed in 1970, and where the 2i’s used to be is now a fish & chip restaurant, with the token plaque on the wall outside the only indication as to its past incarnation.
The increasing popularity of less ‘showbizzy’ venues than the 2i’s was epitomised by the increasing success of The Marquee, situated in the same neighbourhood on Wardour Street; unlike the 2i’s, whose Skiffle roots had led to it being viewed as a rather juvenile enterprise, the Marquee had hosted ‘grownup’ music – i.e. Jazz and R&B – when situated in its original home on Oxford Street. When it relocated to Wardour Street in 1964, The Marquee quickly established itself as one of the key stepping stones on the live music circuit, particularly for up-and-coming acts who would shortly progress to household name status. The Rolling Stones had made their live debut at the Marquee’s first home and also played the Wardour Street version, as did everyone from The Who, The Yardbirds and David Bowie to The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, to name but a tiny handful. When many of the clubs that had served as the breeding grounds for the British pop and rock scene of the 60s closed their doors in the early 70s due to the cheaper appeal of a DJ spinning discs, The Marquee remained a pivotal medium-sized music venue and continued to be so until the mid-80s. In 1988, the year I myself was photographed standing outside the Wardour Street Marquee during a whistle-stop tour around the capital’s most notable pop hot spots, the site was sold for redevelopment and the club reopened on Charing Cross Road, a location it remained at until 2001, the start of a nomadic period for the Marquee that saw it attached to various different locations until finally disappearing in 2008. The Wardour Street site is now occupied by a couple of restaurants, a cigar shop and apartments.
Most of the music venues that helped put Britain on the pop map weren’t purpose-built as such, with many undergoing several regenerations that reflected the changes in the kind of entertainment the public sought on a night out. The Wigan Casino, world-famous home of the Northern Soul scene, had been a ballroom in the Hammersmith Palais vein until its declining attendances were dramatically reversed by the introduction of all-nighters that capitalised on the regional popularity of obscure black dance music from the US. Several American Soul singers struggling to make a living at home were flown over to the UK and were pleasantly surprised to be enthusiastically received as big stars by the Northern Soul crowd; and the patrons’ passion for vintage tracks that had flopped first time round helped push a sizeable amount of them into the charts, giving a further kiss of life to down-at-heel singers who suddenly found themselves on ‘Top of the Pops’. Northern Soul was a passing fad in commercial terms, but continued to be a popular live attraction until the closure of the Wigan Casino in 1981. Nothing remains of the club now; the Grand Arcade shopping centre, an utterly forgettable retail cathedral packed with empty units, stands on the site today.
Manchester’s Hacienda had been a warehouse until Factory Records boss Tony Wilson and his label’s star band New Order converted it into a nightclub in 1982. Early attractions at the venue were something of a mixed bag, including The Smiths, Madonna (making her live UK debut), and even – on the opening night – Bernard Manning; but it was from the late 80s onwards that the club’s reputation grew as an important centre for cutting edge sounds via the Acid House scene, for which the Hacienda proved to be a Northern base. The ‘loved-up’ Ecstasy drug culture that went hand-in-hand with the music was credited with reducing football hooliganism in the city, though when harder drugs and the armed gangs that went with them began to plague the venue in the early 90s, the club’s days were numbered; ironically, drug-use at the Hacienda meant few patrons bought drinks and the venue made little money from the sale of alcohol, which is a key element of a nightclub’s income. The Hacienda finally closed in 1997 and after a period standing empty was demolished five years later. An apartment block is in its place now.
At the height of rock’s live pulling power, there were also several notable large venues that routinely held landmark concerts by the biggest draws, such as Finsbury Park’s Rainbow Theatre (closed its doors, 1982 – now an Evangelical church) and Earls Court, scene of a many a memorable big gig (closed 2014 – demolished by 2017). It’s a shame how few of the clubs and venues that gave birth to something which made a greater global impact than anything else produced in this country over the last 100 years actually remain standing and/or in use for the staging of live music. Times change, of course, and the dearth of charismatic young performers able to fill a large venue is evident at the pensioners’ away day masquerading as the Glastonbury Festival every summer; but the absence of physical evidence in the shape of these legendary locations is a sad statement on how this country views its most recent cultural legacy.
© The Editor
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A decade or so ago, when Thursday nights were actually worth watching on BBC1, ‘Question Time’ would be followed by ‘This Week’ with Andrew Neil at his inquisitorial zenith; his two stooges on the sofa were drawn from political polar opposites, yet worked as an entertaining double act – Michael Portillo and Diane Abbott. The chummy ambience of this pairing and Neil’s good-humoured ribbing of them nonetheless lulled the pair into a false sense of security that was comprehensively shattered when Neil confronted Abbott over the revelation she’d sent her kids to a private school rather than the kind of state institution she and her wing of the Labour Party had long sung the praises of; it exposed Abbott as a hypocritical champagne socialist totally unprepared for being put on the spot by a man she’d evidently assumed her genial bonhomie with would spare her from scrutiny. Neil demonstrated his ruthless absence of sentiment by treating her no different from the regular visitors to the show he’d grill as target practice, and Abbott’s response was to simply stare at him without reply, incapable of justifying her hypocrisy with a verbal riposte; she was portrayed as a fraud and had no comeback. Diane Abbott vacated the ‘This Week’ sofa not long after and never returned to it.
I don’t think of Dominic Raab very often – indeed, why would I? Life, as they say, is rather short. But if I ever do think of him, the image that instantly springs to mind is his lockdown interview from home, one conducted on the TV news. Who can forget the pile of books behind him, balanced precariously on a shelf clearly unaccustomed to supporting such weighty tomes, evidently placed there moments before the interview began by his PR posse to convey an intellectual gravitas not normally associated with a man whose desired public image was that of an Alpha Male political bruiser? The icing on the cake of this superficial makeover, however, was the seamless spines of the spotless volumes, giving the impression underlings from Team Dominic had just dashed back from the nearest branch of Waterstones armed with a recommended list of books nobody had yet perused the pages of, resulting in a telltale absence of cracks and lines on those spines in the process. Were there a camera on me as I write this, readers would notice a similarly crammed shelf behind me – albeit one designed to actually hold books whose spines indicate they’ve all been well and truly thumbed. I’m sure online comments wondering if Raab had ever read any of the books behind him must have got back to the now ex-Justice Secretary pretty swiftly, and the possibility of Raab losing his rag with those responsible seems highly likely, were the reasons that prompted his belated resignation to be believed.
An interview I recently watched with ‘alternative poet laureate’ John Cooper Clarke saw the Salford bard recall his first big break performing in the unlikely environs of the Embassy Club – a venue owned and hosted by none other than Bernard Manning. Despite being informed, upon his request for a gig, that the club’s patrons wouldn’t take to poetry because most of them couldn’t read, the young poet was nevertheless rewarded with a ten-minute slot and was greeted by the performer’s worst enemy – indifference; the punters talked amongst themselves rather than pay attention to Cooper Clarke’s recital. A similar fate greeted Barry Humphries when he made his debut on a UK stage in the early 60s, performing at Peter Cook’s legendary home of satire, The Establishment. Cook had been sufficiently tickled by Humphries’ character of a middle-class Aussie housewife name of Edna Everage to offer him a slot, but Brits took a long time to warm to the persona Humphries eventually elevated to a Dame of the British Empire.
‘Two quid?!’ So cried Ray Langton in a 1971 episode of ‘Coronation Street’ when informed how much a haircut he’d agreed to pay for Irma Barlow would cost him. I know it sounds like a virtual free gift today, but a little online calculating revealed a trip to the nearest Weatherfield salon for a two quid haircut in 2023 would set Ray Langton back over £30, which still sounds a bit pricey. A storyline from the same year saw Irma’s parents Stan and Hilda Ogden rent a colour television set; naturally, Hilda made sure the entire street knew about this when it arrived, though wasn’t as keen to share the news with her neighbours when the shop repossessed it due to missed payments. At the time both BBC1 and ITV went over to colour at the end of 1969, a Pye colour TV set was advertised in the Radio Times as retailing between £232 and £346, which would be between £3,000 and £5,000 in today’s pounds, shillings and pence; no wonder people rented them, even if Stan and Hilda still found renting something of a financial strain. The average weekly wage in the UK at the beginning of the 1970s was £32, the equivalent of roughly £500 today, so one always has to take these things into account when making comparisons.
I visited Aintree last year – well, I had a brief stop-off waiting for a train to Liverpool. Across the road from the station is a certain sporting temple most people associate with a specific annual event. The racecourse has been there for almost 200 years, which goes to show how horseracing predates most popular sports in this country, the majority of which were codified and turned professional much later, during the Victorian period. As with the sole occasion in which I attended a football match at the old Wembley stadium around 40 years ago, whenever setting eyes upon a venue one has been aware of via TV coverage all of one’s life, it’s hard not to be a tad awestruck for a moment. Seeing Aintree Racecourse merely from the outside was enough to summon up all those childhood memories of watching Red Rum’s trio of Grand National victories; catch the wind a certain way and no doubt it’d be possible to hear the rapid fire of Peter O’Sullevan’s breathless commentary again, a style which performance poet John Cooper Clarke once admitted to be an influence on his own machine gun delivery.
Watching an archive ‘Coronation Street’ of more than 50 years’ vintage the other day, I remarked to a friend that Ena Sharples’ face was like a roadmap of the first half of the 20th century; in the story imprinted on that fascinating countenance one could discern traces of the Great War, the Great Depression and the Blitz, to name but a few traumatic chapters that left a mark so indelible it would define that character and everything she represented for the remainder of her life. At the time Violet Carson was bestriding the nation’s TV sets as one of the medium’s greatest creations, the generation seizing the day in a way the generation of old ladies in hairnets and curlers had been cruelly denied was perhaps embodied in the contrasting shape of Mary Quant, a woman several years Ena Sharples’ junior, yet one who actually lived way beyond the lifespan of that character’s onscreen duration. It’s somewhat humbling to realise that when one of the late 20th century’s pivotal pop cultural architects shuffled off this mortal coil, she had actually reached the grand old age of 93, which perhaps serves as a reminder of how her generation has now superseded the one that fought the War as our most senior of citizens.
Are you a good person or a bad person? How do you define the difference? Do you rescue kittens stuck up trees or do you pull the wings off flies? If only it were that simple! At least a friend of mine was provided with a definition a couple of weeks ago when she encountered an old lady in a supermarket; she was wearing a mask and my friend was so bemused by this sight in 2023 that she was prompted to approach her and ask why she retained a face covering that most had no option but to involuntarily don at the peak of pandemic panic. ‘Because I’m a good person,’ she replied. There you go, then – a straightforward definition of a good person; whether that statement implied the mask-free shoppers around her were therefore bad people is something probably the lady herself hadn’t paused to consider; but it’s interesting how a distinction forged in the white heat of Project Fear was so deeply engrained for this woman that no amount of evidence either of a mask’s miniscule health benefits or subsequent revelations of how such a flimsy belief was spurned by those who imposed it on the rest of us could sway her from her conviction. She wasn’t like a Japanese soldier awaiting orders on an island 30 years after the end of WWII, but a good person.
For all the talk in recent years of the UK ‘leaving Europe’, Britain’s membership of a certain European institution has nevertheless proven to be remarkably enduring, far more so than another renowned European institution – i.e. the one we opted out of in 2016 (the one that continues to be held up as both Messiah and Antichrist, depending where you stand). I’m talking about the EBU – that’s the European Broadcasting Union to those of you only aware of one European Union. Our membership of the EBU predates any economic alliance with the Continent, stretching all the way back to the early 1950s – long before satellites enabled live pictures from mainland Europe to be beamed into British living rooms, a time when we were reliant on cables buried deep under the Channel to relay the Eurovision Song Contest as it happened. In fact, we have the EBU to thank for our continuous participation in Europe’s premier kitsch event and gay night-out; had we not been one of the ‘big five’ countries making substantial financial contributions to the EBU, our woeful bottom three finishes in so many Eurovision Song Contests over the past couple of decades would’ve seen us relegated from the competition; and who over here would want to watch were we denied the edge-of-the-seat drama of seeing if the UK would manage to achieve nul-points?
Bookmark it – like most, I’ve found it’s the best way to locate a video you saw online if you want to watch it again; I didn’t take my own advice with one I caught a few months back on Twitter, so I shall have to recount it solely from memory. Anyway, in said video somebody was discussing the difference in content between the Chinese version of TikTok (Douyin) and its more familiar Western equivalent, pointing out how the former bombards its young audience with videos of young people engaging in what one might call ‘heroic’ pursuits, i.e. achieving something that looks impressive on camera and evidently took months (or years) of hard work and training to realise. These are generally athletic enterprises, but a particularly prodigious musician could figure too, for example – essentially anything that has an aspirational feel to it and presents the viewer with positive images of their own demographic. Naturally, this can be regarded as rather traditional Communist propaganda rebranded for the online age; but the comparisons with the images of themselves that Western subscribers to TikTok receive were interesting – as is the fact both versions are Chinese-owned.
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