Rock Music Landmarks Of London

By Graham Vickers

Take a look at the drinking dive under a teashop where the original Rolling Stones were recruited, visit the places where skiffle was born, The Beatles played their last gig, and Paula Yates died. Rock Music Landmarks Of London is both a practical guidebook and an entertaining catalogue of stories featuring the rock stars who made parts of London famous simply by being there. All these London rock landmarks have their own stories, every one is on the London Tube system, each has a full address and a reference photograph.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: May 17, 2010
• ISBN: 9780857123091

Book preview

Introduction

When rock ’n’ roll started, the last thing it expected to have was a history. That was the whole point. Rock was new, current, fashionable and fleeting – a reaction against tired and entrenched popular music. Pete Townshend hoped he’d die before he got old. A lot of rockers actually did. But by the end of the 20th century, rock music had indeed got old… or at least old enough to have a past and therefore a history.

Rock’s history in London was one of the most colourful in the world. The new music had started in the US, but Britain embraced it from the start and London was where British show business was based at the time. Eventually rock would become a nationwide industry with many strong provincial bases, but even in the Sixties The Beatles were obliged to abandon Liverpool for London early on. British groups were born here or brought here, American groups visited for work or play, world-famous rock concerts were held here and every corner of the capital would later boast its bedsit or hotel or club or pub where some future rock star had slept or partied or played or drunk or screwed or been busted… or just woken up wondering what year it was.

Here too were the smoky basement clubs that had championed and played minority roots music before rock hijacked it. These were the traditional jazz venues that gradually (and usually reluctantly) came to accommodate skiffle and then rhythm ’n’ blues and then the whole rock scene. As a result London is exceptionally rich in rock landmarks, although they are not the sort of landmarks traditionally associated with men of science or the arts, but locations of an altogether more informal kind. For the main part they are pretty ordinary places that were accidentally touched by famous circumstances. These days, local authorities are starting to put up a few plaques around the city to honour safely dead rock heroes. But places like Abbey Road Studios need no plaque: the world’s fans have come and inscribed their own celebratory graffiti on the front wall; they have decided what was important to them and they keep coming, even the ones who weren’t born when the famous event first happened, just to stand near the special place and take a picture. Rock – which was just trying to have a good time – touched more people than it imagined along the way, and while it was doing so it left a haphazard trail of locations that continue fascinate rock fans old and young, because of their mythical associations.

This book identifies 66 such places, famous and not so famous. All have interesting stories attached to them, although many are rather ordinary looking houses, apartments, clubs or venues that fascinate because of their past, not their architectural merit. Their ordinariness is part of the appeal. Few rock bands ever set out to make history – most of them just set out to make music – but a lot of them have made history anyway, and these landmarks are part of that legacy.

G.V.

W1 THE MARQUEE

THE MARQUEE (first premises: 1958-1964) 165 Oxford Street (Tube: OXFORD CIRCUS). This famous name club had a history that very much reflected the early development of live rock music in London. It was located in the basement of The Academy, a famous art house cinema that eventually succumbed to the wrecking ball. The current building on the corner site is largely occupied by the Abbey National Building Society. The Marquee opened there as jazz club in 1958, but by the early Sixties rhythm’n’blues was the rage, mainly due to pioneering performances by Alexis Korner’s Blues Inc. The band featured Charlie Watts on drums and, occasionally, Mick Jagger on vocals. In July 1962 an early version of the future band appeared there to take part in a radio broadcast as The Rollin’ Stones. This was the real start of the Stones’ legend and also a clear signal that jazz was giving way to the more basic but muscular R&B as the music of choice for the hip. The Marquee’s manager, jazz purist Harold Pendleton, did not disguise his disapproval of the trend, and his constant carping eventually led Keith Richards to express his support for the R&B camp by trying to club Pendleton over the head with his guitar. This may or may not have been a contributing factor to the club’s change of premises, but on March 13 1964, long before the closure of The Academy, the Marquee moved on to even greater fame in nearby Wardour Street.

This was the real start of the Stones’ legend

The Yardbirds

THE MARQUEE (second premises: 1964-1988) 90 Wardour Street (Tube: LEICESTER SQUARE or TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD). This was the Marquee that everyone remembers, the one where in 1966 the club began hosting its legendary ‘Spontaneous Underground’ sessions at which poets, painters, magicians and movie-makers congregated on Sundays to hear the house band Pink Floyd. Over the years the roster of acts became equally legendary: The Who (who held a regular Tuesday residency in early 1965), The Yardbirds, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, The Police, Duran Duran, even Guns ‘N’ Roses…the list would go on and on, except that The Marquee didn’t. To the rhetorical question "Are You Ready For The Sex Pistols? the old R&B haunt answered no!" after Johnny, Sid and the boys supported Eddie & The Hot Rods there in February of 1976. This was probably the point at which The Marquee started to look destined to remain rooted in its past. Even though it flirted with the New Wave, many of its Seventies acts were more mainstream: The Pretenders and Dire Straits seemed preferable to the punks. The venue where The Yardbirds had recorded their first album (Five Live Yardbirds), eventually ran out of steam in the Eighties. Its name was bought, the premises were demolished and for a while yet another Marquee struggled on in Charing Cross Road, its musical menu largely heavy metal. That too finally went bust, to be replaced by a trendy bar. The Wardour Street site lay derelict until Mezzo – another Terence Conran restaurant – and some New York style loft apartments appeared there in the Nineties, very definitely marking the end of an era.

To the rhetorical question Are You Ready For The Sex Pistols? the old R&B haunt answered no!

W1 THE FREIGHT TRAIN

THE FREIGHT TRAIN, 44 Berwick Street, (Tube: TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD or OXFORD CIRCUS). This address, on a corner formed by Soho’s Noel Street and Berwick Street, is notable for two reasons. Once it was a record shop that employed Reg Dwight, now Sir Elton John, in the days when his craving to be part of the music business extended only as far as the retail sector. But earlier still number 44 had a