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100 club days for Paul Weller |
The rise and fall of clubbing
A new book on the world’s most influential music venues recalls round-the-clock parties in the Roundhouse, writes Dan Carrier
From CBGB to the Roundhouse: Music Venues Through the Years.
By Tim Burrows. Marion Boyars £9.99
POLICE officers had a wheeze. They’d dig up the street outside the Roundhouse, find the electrical cable that fed the railway shed and simply cut it.
No power, no problem: that was the plan.
It was the summer of 1989 and the squelchy bass lines of acid house music were rumbling out of the abandoned Victorian building on a near-weekly basis. This was before the Criminal Justice Act gave the police powers to stop young people having a boogie. They couldn’t find a way to break in and kick out the couple of thousand people having fun, so they turned to desperate measures.
The current house supervisor at the Chalk Farm venue, Michael McGee, recalls the days when the venue was used for illegal warehouse shindigs in a new book by author Tim Burrows, which offers a potted history of the world’s most influential music venues.
“One of the roadies who works here now was the lad who broke in,” McGee says. “The place was knee-deep in pigeon shit, with rats rustling around.”
The organisers had hooked up power from a sub-station serving Primrose Hill. The police couldn’t get in – “It was like a fortress,” says Burrows – and the party carried on until the sub-station blew. But the organisers were not deterred: they had found an abandoned supply in the building, so the sound system carried on. It was then the police began to dig up the forecourt of the garage opposite in a bold bid to halt the party.
“After two days, they finally found this cable,” recalls McGee.
“What they didn’t realise was the lads who had set up the rave were fully aware of what was happening and arranged for two generator wagons to arrive to power the party once the police had cut them off. As soon as the police started celebrating stopping the music, it started up again.”
Such tales are the staple folklore of From CBGB to the Roundhouse, which saw the author trawl through the history’s of some of the world’s most iconic clubs. The Roundhouse features, as do other local landmarks such as the 100 Club, the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park and the Four Aces in Hackney.
“Clubs have power for a time and then they disappear,” he says. “The question is: did it leave a legacy? This is what I set out to explore.”
Tim, a one-time journalist at the Telegraph, says he has had a strange relationship with music venues. His father, a teacher, was in a soul band at the weekends and that meant he was dragged as a child to sound checks in the back rooms of pubs.
He covers much ground. As well as Hackney’s reggae club the Four Aces (my generation of thirtysomethings will recall the house night Labyrinth there in the 1990s) and other small venues in London, he has headed to Detroit to the Grande Ballroom, New York’s CBGB, and Brisbane’s Cloudlands. All, he feels, have left a mark on the music industry by offering a stage for genres to explode.
And he also charts the rise of the big concert experience and what this means for gig-goers.
“The creativity the music industry thrives on has been undermined by the loss of small clubs,” he says.
It is a trend that has taken over festivals, too. Glastonbury, that citadel of hippie ideals, has become partners with huge American companies. This has changed the way we listen to acts, contends Tim, and leads to a homogenised “safety first” attitude that sees Bruce Springsteen take centre stage at Worthy Farm and a mobile phone company run a venue called the O2.
Prophetically, considering the death of Michael Jackson last week, he discusses what use the O2 Centre is to the real music fan.
“The big, off-white tent itself is a mere symbol for the cabaret-plague that the whole of the UK has been seized by,” says Tim. “While record sales have plummeted, the industry is increasingly reliant on the big names, and the biggest money is in persuading those groups we thought we’d never see again to get them back on the road.
“The music industry big guns are coming to rely on huge performance spaces like the O2 for revenue. The collapse of what was once the surefire way of making money – record sales – has occurred due to online file sharing. In these vast arenas, labels send their charges back on the stage to do what they set out to do in the first place: play live.”
Burrows says stadium-style venues are disconnected to the physical creation of music. As he puts it: “All the big names began in crummy back room bars. Like rare truffles in dark, unattended patches of woodland, the best bands need to be left alone to develop.”
And, as this book points out, those dark, unattended patches can still be found in Camden Town. |
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Your comments:
I WAS the Production Manager on a horror/sci-fi movie that we shot in the Roundhouse in conjunction with Miramax Pictures and Palace Pictures (now defunct). We filmed for around 5/6 months circa 1989/90. The building was empty and derelict - although waterproof.
It was called "Hardware" and the Roundhouse was the perfect location. The movie has just been re-released on DVD and has a cult following.
More info here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099740/
Iggy Pop did a voice-over, and Lemmy played a taxi-driver!
We shot inside; outside and in the great basement with all it's tunnels. We had set-designers, kitchens, scenery construction - the whole lot.
Camden council just charged us a few bob or so.
Frighteningly, we had big explosions with petrol and fire-effects going-on in side. We could have easily burned-down the whole place. We must have been mad.
P. Spencer
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