“We were young – and who wanted to go to sleep when the night was beckoning?”
WHEN John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers arrived in London for their first show, they found themselves outside what Mayall now recalls as “a very dark and evil-smelling basement” on Wardour Street. There, a narrow door stood wedged between two branches of a shoe shop. It looked unpromising – but this was the Flamingo Club and at midnight every Friday and Saturday when the rest of London was starting to wind down, the Flamingo would spark into life. Soho hipsters and the capital’s demimonde would arrive by the dozen, spending all night listening to R&B in the smoky basement. “It was so dark down there you could hardly see,” says Mayall. “It did all-nighters, so if people liked music more than sleep, that’s where they went. It was unique. It had that seedy sort of atmosphere and there was a lot of pill-popping. You usually had to scrape a couple of people off the floor when you emerged into Soho at dawn with the pigeons. I can’t imagine London in the ’60s without the Mingo.”
The Flamingo was a haunt for American servicemen, Jamaicans, mods, pimps, prostitutes and musicians. It stank of weed, came with an air of danger and had the best music policy in London. One regular describes it as like “Hamburg in the early days”, while another concedes it was “a magnet for lunatics”. “The Marquee meant nothing to me,” says Pete Townshend. “I went to The Flamingo.”
The Flamingo mattered to people like Townshend and Mayall for two reasons. It employed black DJs and black musicians, making it one of the few London venues to have a racially mixed clientele – ensuring it was one of the first clubs in London to play ska and bluebeat alongside R&B. It was also the only place in central London to hold Friday and Saturday all-nighters. This made the venue a magnet for other musicians, who would finish their gigs elsewhere in town and then head down to the Flamingo for a groove, chinwag and maybe a jam.
Kenney Jones, then the youthful drummer with the Small Faces, recalls
