London Calling (22 page)

Viewed as a social phenomenon, the current craze for Rock and Roll material is one of the most terrifying things ever to have
happened to popular music… I hope the gimlet-eyed men of commerce who are at present trying to bring about a Rock and Roll
boom in this country are aware of what they are doing. I also hope that the BBC song committee will be more vigilant than
ever when vetting the cheap, nasty lyrics on which the Rock and Roll movement thrives… It is a monstrous threat, both to the
moral acceptance and the artistic emancipation of jazz. Let us oppose it to the end.
¹⁶

Fortunately there were havens where musicians could live their lives free from both the authorities and pompous jazz critics.
The Nucleus was one of them.

The Nucleus Coffee House was in a basement off St Giles High Street at 9 Monmouth Street. It was promoted as a ‘meeting place
of London’s top jazz men, painters, writers, sculptors, poets (and layabouts)’. The club was open from midnight until 5 a.m.,
membership five shillings a year. Because of its opening hours it was a favourite among musicians as a place to go after work.
They would drift in between 2 and 3 a.m. and often impromptu jam sessions would take place. The manager was Gary Winkler,
who later took over from ‘Little Bear’ Sutton as washboard player for the Cottonpickers. The combination coffee bar and late-night
club meant that a wide cross-section of Sohoites passed through: Angel, a transvestite who braved it out years before the
public learned to accept such things, and an astrologer called George
with a long, flowing white beard who carried ancient charts with him which he would consult in order to read someone’s horoscope.
It was truly an oasis in sleeping London. The Nucleus is wonderfully described by tenor player Dick Heckstall-Smith in his
autobiography,
Blowing
:

The Nucleus was a coffee bar with a thriving jazz basement, a place where people would come creeping in – morose, subversive,
in-group, overcoat-collar-turned-up exiles carrying strange shaped boxes – who would mumble and avert their eyes until, canonically,
they came across a fellow outcast with whom to exchange incomprehensible mutterings and cynical half-looks. I was one of them.
¹⁷

There was also the House of Sam Widges, run by the poet Neal Oram on D’Arblay Street, that catered to the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament (C N D) crowd and was filled with itinerant poets nursing cups of cold coffee. At the Partisan at 7 Carlisle Street,
which opened in 1958 with the editorial offices of the Left Book Club above it, a huge noticeboard featured radical activity
from poetry readings and lectures to concerts and C N D demonstrations. It was decorated by an interior designer and was more
modern and futuristic-looking than any of the other coffee bars. In the basement folk singers sang with their finger in their
ear to hear themselves better, while, upstairs, chess players mused over complex end-games. It was the regular hangout for
the playwright Arnold Wesker and the Centre 42 activists, but the noticeboard became dominated, more and more, by notices
of demonstrations against nuclear weapons tests and the other activities of the C N D.

C N D was something which united the emerging London underground – art students and folk musicians, students and Hampstead
intellectuals. There had been many organizations protesting against nuclear weapons tests, but in January 1958, at a meeting
held in the residence of the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, these groups formally amalgamated to become the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament. One group, the largely pacifist Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War, had already begun organizing a march,
to be held that Easter, from London to the British weapons-testing labs at Aldermaston, where they hoped to talk with the
workforce and make them question what they were doing. C N D was too recently formed to help organize the march but many of
its members went and later that year they formally adopted the symbol that the Direct Action Committee had commissioned for
the march. The symbol, which was to spread across the world to become universally known as the peace symbol, was created by
Gerald Holtom, a Christian pacifist from Twickenham, where he had a design studio. Most of
his work was in designing tapestries and fittings for churches being rebuilt after the bombing. Charged with finding a shorthand
design to express the idea of unilateral nuclear disarmament to be used in public demonstrations he came up with the now familiar
symbol, a cross whose horizontal arms had dropped 45 degrees downwards. He explained that the symbol was made up of the British
navy semaphore letters for N and D. One flag held vertically and the other pointing directly down signified N while two flags
at 45 degrees from horizontal was D. Thus the symbol embodied an encoded message calling for nuclear disarmament. The enclosing
circle signified the unborn child in Gothic symbology.
¹⁸
The first march was from London to Aldermaston but the next year, with C N D in charge, this was reversed so that the final
rally could be held in Trafalgar Square. In some circles it was inexcusable not to be wearing the small tin C N D badge, white
on a black background, or even better to have one of the original badges, made from ceramic and capable of withstanding all
but a direct nuclear blast. As Alan Brien writing in the
Spectator
suggested, it was probably the case that the main attraction of the march was the ‘tremendous stimulation of ideas and arguments
and witticisms and friendships and love affairs. Perhaps it would be more tactful to keep this revelation a secret – but the
Aldermaston March is the rare phenomenon of a physical and social pleasure which yet has an intellectual and moral justification.’
¹⁹

As the fifties came to an end, London had changed. We now had espresso coffee bars, indoor plants, skiffle, jeans, full employment,
jukeboxes, interminable detergent ads on a new commercial television channel, game shows, the
Goon Show
, widescreen cinema, horror comics, rock ’n’ roll and sputnik bleeping overhead. Change was in the air, it was time to move
on and build a new society. In 1958 Kenneth Allsop wrote that it was time for an end to all the anger:

In this technologically triumphant age, when the rockets begin to scream towards the moon but the human mind seems at an even
greater distance, anger has a limited use. Love has a wider application, and it is that which needs describing wherever it
can be found so that we may all recognise it and learn its use.
²⁰

He was right, the next decade would be known as THE decade of love.

The room was rounded with seats and small tables ale-house fashion. One shilling was the price and call for what you pleased.
There was very good musick.

ROGER NORTH
,
The Musicall Grammarian
, 1728, on the first public concerts in London inns in 1672

The old guard were not happy with the way Soho and Fitzrovia were changing. The October 1961 opening of Peter Cook and Nick
Luard’s Establishment Club at 18 Greek Street was objected to vociferously by Colin MacInnes, who saw it as another of the
enterprises that was killing Soho by making it commercial. When they mounted an exhibition of photographs by Robert Colquhoun,
who in fact was often barred from the Establishment Club’s doors, he wrote in
New Society
:

The display seeks to create a legend profitable to the Establishment, irrelevant to Robert Colquhoun. This is the legend of
Soho and of a ‘Soho figure’. Both these existed until places like the Establishment moved in. Now Soho is dead, except commercially.
Soho, at one time, owed its reputation to its people: now the area bestows a bogus reputation on almost anything.
¹

(One thing that didn’t change was the £10 a week the Establishment paid to the Krays, though it was a token amount compared
to that paid by the strip club that was in the building before; the Krays liked to be seen to be supporting West End culture.)
It was the beginning of a transformation of the area: on the 25th of the same month
Private Eye
opened its offices in rooms next door to the Partisan in Carlisle Street (where it remains), and began a long tradition of
lunches and drinks in the area. The Establishment Club brought over people such as the radical comedian Lenny Bruce and was
very much a centre of ideas: TV shows like
That was the Week That Was
, which launched the career of David Frost, came from the people associated with the club.

*

The pubs and clubs began to be taken over by rock ’n’ rollers. As Sara Maitland wrote in her memoir: ‘Music was central, crucial
I believe, especially in the early sixties, to creating and communicating a mood and meaning among people of my age. Far more
than books, or even fashion, music was the marker, the expression of what we wanted.’
²

British rock ’n’ roll was born in a handful of small clubs in the early sixties. The Scene Club was in Ham Yard off Windmill
Street in Soho, run by Ronan O’Rahilly, who later started Britain’s first pirate station, Radio Caroline. It was the mod Mecca.
They played white soul music till dawn in a dark smoky room. Peter Meaden took John Paul Jones, bass player with Led Zeppelin,
to see the Who there for the first time. Jones: ‘It was brilliant, the Scene, smoky, loud, and very punky in those days… It
was all pills. Pop music was all pills in those days.’
³
The original amphetamine pill was Preludin, which was followed by what were known as blues in the jazz world but called purple
hearts by rock musicians. These were Drynamil, speed, and could keep you awake for three days.
⁴
Later, when the TV show
Ready Steady Go!
started, the dancers were hand-picked from the regulars at the Scene. It was speed that produced the loudness, the swaggering
about, the restlessness, energy and aggression. It caused the blocked stuttering and twitching that characterized the mods.
It also lowered the sex drive and promoted obsessiveness: the fine detailing on their clothes – the number of buttons, how
many inside pockets – became very important, as did the detailing on their scooters. Purple hearts were made illegal in 1964,
which pushed the street price up from 6d to 9d (2½p to 3¾p).

The Flamingo, sometimes known as ‘the Mingo’ to regulars, run by Rik and John Gunnell, was at 33–37 Wardour Street, in the
big square basement beneath the Whiskey-A-Go-Go (abbreviated in 1982 to the WAG club). The Flamingo was described by Andrew
Oldham as catering to ‘an exotic melange of Soho sex and underground sorts, gangsters really’. At the midnight to dawn All
Niters John Gunnell was on the door and Rik’s wife used to do the burger stand with Andrew Loog Oldham, who was on the after-midnight
shift. On Saturdays it was the only place serving drinks through the night. They had no drinks licence so Scotch was served
in coke bottles. The police, who were taking pay-offs, used to call ahead if they were going to raid. Because it was risky
they only served alcohol on Saturdays; other nights you had to bring your own, though there were plenty of people with pockets
filled with overpriced miniatures for sale, in particular a very sharply dressed West Indian couple called Big Time and Doll
Girl who only sold whisky. The club was very popular with black American GIs, who distributed packs of Camels
and Lucky Strikes as if it was still wartime, earning the gratitude of the kids, some of whom had nowhere else to go until
dawn. I would sometimes spend a night there before hitch-hiking back to the Cotswolds. By 4 a.m. the big concrete room was
pretty bleak; there was nowhere to sit down and the crowd had thinned out so it was sometimes quite cold but the pills helped,
and the wonderful music made it all worth while.

The Flamingo was funkier and jazzier than the other clubs. All the jazz-men who played R&B performed there: Georgie Fame,
Geno Washington, Brian Auger, Sonny Rollins, Roland Kirk, Alexis Korner. The D J played black R&B, early Atlantic and early
Stax, and Ray Charles’s ‘What Did I Say’ was played several times a night. The Mar-Keys played there, and Sugar Pie De Santo,
who according to John Paul Jones put on ‘a very risqué show’.
⁵
When blues singer Jimmy Reed (born in 1925) played the Flamingo the kids couldn’t believe it was him, they idolized him so
much. He and his manager were very wary, so much so that Jimmy didn’t take his overcoat off the whole time he played. They
were ready to grab the money and split because this kind of adulation had never happened before. The Gunnells managed Georgie
Fame and His Blue Flames, Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band and the vocalist Chris Farlowe, so they never had any problems
finding acts.

Les Cousins, at 49 Greek Street, across from the Younger’s pub, began life as a skiffle club. It was run by Andy Matheou for
his father, a Greek Cypriot who owned the Dionysus restaurant above, probably the origin of the fishing net draped above the
stage. The club was more in the folk and blues end of the spectrum as opposed to the Flamingo’s jazz and R&B but it was still
regarded as ‘cool’. Bert Jansch, Roy Harper, Paul Simon, Ralph McTell, John Martyn, Eric Anderson, Ewan MacColl, Alexis Korner,
Cat Stevens and Donovan all played there. Jimi Hendrix arrived with Chas Chandler at an all-nighter in 1967 organized by Alexis
Korner, paying admission to get in, but then blew everyone off stage. Dylan was a visitor in the early sixties.
⁶

The short-lived Ad Lib was one of the most celebrated of the early sixties nightclubs, probably because it was the first to
cater specifically for the young rock ’n’ rollers and their ilk; the other London supper clubs were more traditional, catering
to an older, more international clientele. It opened in February 1964, in top-floor premises on Leicester Place off Leicester
Square. It was reached by a small lift, which meant that people could not blunder in off the street. The club had previously
been called Wips, a high society club owned by Lord Willoughby and Nick Luard from the Establishment Club. But despite its
fur walls and tank of carnivorous fish not enough of the jet set came. They sold it to Bob and Alf Barnett, who installed
John
Kennedy, to run it. He got rid of the fish and the fur and hung huge mirrors everywhere, knowing that his clients loved nothing
better than looking at themselves. He replaced the chairs with stools and built banquettes along the walls, cut down the legs
of the tables to coffee table height, and, crucially, installed a state-of-the-art sound system, which was operated at high
volume. The ceiling was low, with inset coloured lights, but it was not claustrophobic because there was a huge window looking
out over the rooftops of the West End. Marianne Faithfull says she used to like to spend a whole evening sitting there, looking
out, talking to no-one. Drinks were miniatures, twenty-five shillings for the first and ten shillings after that; ice, a coke
or soda was included. A steak and chips was about a pound. John Lennon was the first Beatle to go there, then came Ringo,
and within seven weeks it was the in-place to be.
⁷
It was a transitional club catering for the newly emerging class of rock ’n’ roll aristocracy, but also frequented by younger
film stars like Michael Caine and people from the sports world. Only later were there enough rock stars to enable the Scotch
of St James and the Speakeasy to provide suitable royal courts.