I, meanwhile, had taken up the apprenticeship at Kennings. I knew already that it was a non-starter: I showed no aptitude for the work, and I didn’t like getting dirty.
It was a job, nevertheless, which lent me a measure of independence and a modest sum of disposable cash (i.e. a fraction of my erstwhile milk-and-honey Black Magic days) with which to furnish my capsule wardrobe.
A weekly wage was also essential to fund my increasingly active social life. Woggy, Terry, Mike, Dave, and I had achieved membership of the various music clubs in Manchester. Like me, they were all totally Americanised: suckers for certain clothing brands and movies, sick humour and slang, cartoon characters, flamboyant criminals, and music, music, music.
Manchester had a culture of American black music way before London. All those soul records that hadn’t enjoyed stateside hit status but were nevertheless fabulous, along with crates and crates of comics and the trash fiction that stuck like bubblegum to the teenage imagination, were all randomly slung into the ships’ holds for ballast before the higher-ticket consumer goods bound for Manchester or the Western-facing ports of Liverpool, Glasgow, and Bristol. Like most things American, this stuff was considered cheap, tawdry, tinny, and morally vacuous. Dock workers used to just give it away . . . and then people started reading those comics and that trash fiction, and listening to those records, many of which were eventually covered by the Northern Beat groups* of the early Sixties.
The city-centre clubs were essentially extended coffee bars where you could go to hear records and live acts, hang out with other young people, meet girls, and drink Coca-Cola; their underage demographic precluded an alcohol licence. I wasn’t fussed about alcohol – none of us drank much – although I was already into drugs. But occasionally someone would nip out to a nearby pub to blag a pint or a short. If you stuck to cider, or something like that, you could go in and nobody would call the cops. The worst that could happen was that the barman would question your age. That happened once or twice, but most of the time I got away with it because back then I was considered tall for my age,* and although Dave Redshaw was a bit older than me, he was slightly shorter and got asked his age much more often than I did, so I used to buy his drinks.
Each club had its own slightly tribal music policy. Some featured live acts, others were essentially discotheques with a resident DJ whose record collection dictated his level of success. Personality didn’t come into it: they were only as good as the records they played. It was a highly competitive scene in that respect and utterly democratic.
The first club of which we were card-carrying members was the Oasis, a two-hundred-capacity basement venue that featured a live group every night: The Animals, The Who, Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, The Stylos, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, The Cymerons, and long ago, The Beatles. Yes, The Beatles! And from America, Bo Diddley, Charlie and Inez Foxx, ‘Little’ Stevie Wonder, Lee Dorsey, Doris Troy, the Sir Douglas Quintet . . . plus much more, and then some.
The Animals appeared at the Oasis weeks before their first hit, ‘Baby Let Me Take You Home’, but they already had quite a reputation, and were already big enough to have a group uniform: pale blue four-button suits with a dark grey silk edging.
I don’t know where the dressing rooms were located but it was always necessary for the headline act to walk through the audience in order to gain access to the stage. When ‘LITTLE’ Stevie Wonder came through, he turned out to be seven feet tall, skinny as a rake, and wearing one of those evening suits with a Hispanic twist: a hip-length bolero-style jacket and a wide sash around his waist with a ruffled shirt. His hair looked like it was painted onto his scalp, as short as you could possibly get it, with a shaven-in side parting. He was an exceptionally good-looking kid; kind of otherworldly.
‘Little’ Stevie’s band were a skeleton crew of top in-house Detroit musos from the Motown Corp, although as a multi-instrumentalist he made most of the running, alternating between a Vox Continental organ, a harmonica, of course, and the drums.
Thanks to the worldwide success of the Merseybeat craze, it wasn’t long before we got a Manchester version of the Cavern. Aptly enough called the Cavern, it was a tiny venue in Cromford Court with a 150 capacity (if you broke the fire regulations). It was a real khazi of a building, frequented by what people called Dossers.
The Dossers always carried bedrolls wherever they went, even if it was just down to the Cavern, the subtext being that they were homeless, rambling beatniks. Ain’t got no home in this world any more – you know, rebels against society, kids with long, unwashed hair who bought their entire wardrobe at the Army and Navy Surplus stores.
Of course, we shopped at the Army and Navy too, but while we went for the more discerning Mod approach with the dandified chef-pants-and-Hospital-Blues ensemble, these Dossers stuck to the brown-and-olive-drab-fatigue palette. Their uniform was combat jackets with their favourite group’s name roughly painted on the back – a bit of a corny move, to our collective mind. Meanwhile, the Dossers hated us because we were poncified.
There was a lot of crossover on the club scene – musically, at least. We weren’t that tribal: one minute we’d be saying, ‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in that place’, but if the right person or group was playing there, you had to go. We went to see The Kinks at the Cavern, for example, in the days when they were wearing the whole strip with those hunting-pink frock coats.
The Cavern played host to many out-of-town combos both well-known and obscure: The Cimarons; Rev Black and the Rockin Vickers featuring the young Lemmy, later of Motörhead; Sounds Incorporated; Four Plus One; the Myaks; the Groundhogs; The Walker Brothers; Bo Diddley; Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger and the Trinity; and any one of a thousand long-haired Rolling Stones knock-offs who specialised in the kind of primitive, raucous music so beloved of that snotty, malcontented tribe for whom enthusiasm outweighed technical expertise.
The Dossers were at the obsessive centre of what became the British blues boom, intensely loyal to any group whose repertoire was dictated by Chicago’s hyper-electrified version of the blues, especially the output of Veejay and Chess Records. Ownership of any of these records depended on a level of dedication which only the Dossers could maintain. Songs by the likes of Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, and the big two, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, would have provided eighty per cent of any of the Dossers’ required set list.
If the Dossers had a house band, however, it had to be The Pretty Things, namely Phil May, Dick Taylor, John Stax, Brian Pendleton, and Viv Prince, probably because they had the longest hair in show business at that time; even longer than the Stones. That was what shot The Pretty Things to fame. Their name came from an old Bo Diddley tune, ‘Pretty Thing’, which was highly ironic because, Phil May aside, you wouldn’t describe any of them as an oil painting, unless you factor in the late Hieronymus Bosch.
Another dosser hang-out was the Heaven and Hell, which was in an old office building in Sackville Street, a two-floor establishment, hence the name: hell was downstairs in the basement, upstairs it was heaven, the most squalid approximation of paradise imaginable. It was dark, hard, and pungent. If there were any soft furnishings, I didn’t see them: everything seemed to be made out of masonry, corrugated metal, and filth. No wonder the Dossers were all on dope. If anyone had told me that people relieved themselves on the floor, I would have believed them.
Slightly upmarket from this was the Jungfrau, a ‘Swiss Coffee Dance Club’ just behind Manchester Cathedral. The Jungfrau, in a tiny basement done out to resemble a wooden Alpine ski lodge, had both live music and a DJ who played an interesting mix of stateside records: soul music, Tamla Motown, the Beach Boys, Dick Dale and the Deltones, Jan and Dean, Ronnie and the Daytonas, and the kind of outfits who would inspire the punk rockers of a later generation – Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs,w? (alias Rudy Martinez) and the Mysterians, Joe ‘King’ Carrasco and the Crowns, the Sir Douglas Quintet, and the Sonics.
Notable among the live acts at the Jungfrau were the Mockingbirds, a bunch of Jewish kids from my neighbourhood including Graham Gouldman, who went on to write songs for the Yardbirds and Herman’s Hermits, and the Hollies’ ‘Bus Stop’. Graham Gouldman lived near Broughton Park, and I’d seen him around. Given his address, I’m convinced that the bus stop in question was just beneath our rain-spattered front window: the same bus stop where I stood waiting day after day for the bus that would take me to my place of work in the centre of Manchester. The exact location of the song. If ever there was a personal connection to the pop world, this was it.
On the other side of the musical coin was the Plaza in Oxford Street. It was a Mecca ballroom, slightly smaller than its sister venue, the Ritz: the same Ritz that has been immortalised by the poet John Cooper Clarke in his poem ‘Salome’.
The Plaza was where you went for the slightly more cleaned-up, neater-haired and uniformed Manchester Beat combos, who were more Beatles than Stones. With its pre-war association with ballroom dancing, it had respectability written all over it, the guys all loitering nervously on one side and the chicks on the other, so you had to walk across a large sprung dance floor in order to be rejected by the girl you’d just plucked up the courage to ask to dance. This was a regular haunt of that dynamic duo, my fragrant cousin Mary and her hairdresser friend, the lovely Ruth Dudson. It was the kind of place that Auntie Marge might have approved of.
There were lots of groups on the Manchester scene: The Beatles weren’t the first, they were just the best. Freddie and the Dreamers, for instance, were around for ages before The Beatles, then there were the Hollies, Herman and the Hermits, The Cymerons. It wasn’t a requirement back then for a beat group to write their own material. They would perform competent covers of all the current Brill Building hits by songwriting teams such as Pomus and Shuman, Goffin and King, Mann and Weil, Bacharach and David, Sedaka and Greenfield, and of course Lieber and Stoller.
Herman and the Hermits were the resident band at the Plaza with a regular Friday and Saturday night slot, and they would do all the Drifters and Ben E. King numbers: ‘Up on the Roof’, ‘Saturday Night at the Movies’, ‘Under the Boardwalk’, ‘Stand by Me’, and ‘Spanish Harlem’.
My favourite local group was Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders – or Wayne Fontana and the Mindfucking Benders, as they were known – who featured a lot of what later became Northern Soul classics: ‘The Entertainer’ by Tony Clarke, for instance, and their cover of ‘Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um’ by Major Lance, which was probably their biggest hit. But their version of ‘Road Runner’ was just sensational; it was psychedelic before the event. Extremely versatile, they even covered the impossible: ‘Duke of Earl’ by Gene Chandler.
Our chosen domain was the Twisted Wheel on Brazennose Street. It was open every night of the week, and also during the daytime as a caffeinated rendezvous for various beatnik art-school proto-Mod types. It started out on the site of a place called Amigos, changed its name to the Left Wing Coffee Bar, then morphed into a sort of modern jazz hang-out with yet another new name: the Twisted Wheel. The Wheel’s DJ was the now legendary Roger Eagle, who was something of a musical pathfinder. Soon the music policy expanded to include rare and imported US blues, R&B and soul records by Ray Charles, Lou Rawls, Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, Cannonball Adderley, and then Motown, Booker T and the MGs featuring the Memphis Horns, and especially the hardest-working man in show business, the godfather of soul, soul brother number one, mister please please please, mister dynamite, the funky president, James Brown. I’ll say it in one sentence. Wow.
They also introduced the odd bit of Blue Beat, later known as reggae.
Thanks to its unrivalled stateside playlist, the Twisted Wheel was rightly seen as disco-unero-numo, but it also hosted many live ‘bands’, as groups were beginning to be called, on account of their horn sections no doubt, among them Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, The Graham Bond Organisation, Jimmy James and The Vagabonds, the Victor Brox Blues Train, Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds, Charlie and Inez Foxx, Sonny Boy Williamson, Ben E. King, and every Monday night, Alexis Korner’s Blues Inc, free for girls. Alexis Korner was an exquisite representative of the metropolitan demi-monde, the first man I ever knew to a) wear a bandana and b) address another man as ‘baby’.
Hitting on girls was not part of the agenda. You went to the clubs to listen to the music first, dancing second – solo dancing, at that, involving the most minimal moves. It wasn’t like the later Northern Soul guys with the back flips and splits, there was never enough room on the dance floor. Someone would popularise an arm movement – pointing at the floor, say – that would somehow catch on, and suddenly everybody would be pointing at the floor. If any fool wasn’t throwing the latest shape, their attitude was noted.
Before long, the Twisted Wheel enjoyed national notoriety. The main event was the Saturday all-nighter, which would draw punters from all over the country, especially off-duty GIs from the nearby Burtonwood military base in their sharp Continental threads. As a Salford Modernist in Greaser HQ, I naturally acquired the must-have accessory: the Pan-Am travel bag, a dual-purpose accoutrement that both carried the change of clothes to guarantee round-the-clock freshness for the all-nighters and, of course, reduced the chances of a pasting.
The GIs were a reliable source of pep pills, goofballs, and doobs, notably that military-strength pick-me-up, Drinamyl, aka Purple Hearts, available to all and free at the point of delivery until the resultant moral panic led to their criminalisation.
Drinamyl was an agreeable amphetamine preparation, with an added dash of barbiturate to alleviate the inevitable jitters. Also available were Durophet spansules, Black Bombers to you, and later Drinamyl spansules, alias Green and Clears.
Our leisure time was limited – some of us had jobs to go to – and every overstimulated moment of the weekend was amplified for all it was worth. Come six o’clock on Sunday morning, sedatives would be employed as part of the winding-down programme: Seconal, Nembutal, Mogadon, Tuinal, and even Mandrax would be on the breakfast menu.