Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (8 page)

The origins of Stiff Records can also be traced to the Hope and Anchor. Stiff’s co-founders, Jake Riviera and Dave Robinson, formed the label in a small recording studio the latter had built in a room above the pub in 1976. Both were movers and shakers on the pub rock circuit and bands and performers such as the Damned and Elvis Costello, who were associated with Stiff, began playing at the Hope as punk started to take off.

Putting on punk bands could be a risky undertaking and forced the Hope’s management to batten down the hatches. At the height of punk the basement bar was a lot more spit than sawdust, and chicken wire had to be tacked up to protect staff from flying bottles. Any ego you might’ve had as a performer had to be left well and truly in the van because the backstage facilities at the Hope made the Cavern Club look like the Palladium. The dressing room was filled with a load of kegs and buckets of beer slops, which gave it the exact appearance of a dray room, which, funnily enough, it was, and our equipment had to be lowered through a trap door in the ceiling. The primitiveness of the Hope was perfect for the pioneers of punk and the Clash, the Sex Pistols and the Stranglers played many of their earliest gigs in that tiny basement bar. The heyday of punk was pretty much over by the time we first played the venue in 1979, but the Hope’s legendary status remained undimmed.

The Hope was run by a bloke called John Eichler who took a bit of a shine to us despite us being a bunch of kids to whom the application of the term ‘rough and ready’ would’ve been bordering on kindness. As I’ve said, the basement bar was smaller than the Dublin and held no more than 50 people, I reckon, and this was in the days before half the population was clinically obese. We’d been going to the Hope long before we made a ripple on the local scene because - being the very discerning jukebox jury we felt we were - the choice of music on the old Wurlitzer was the best in town. In contrast to a bottle of Lambrusco, over time that jukebox got even better, as John allowed us to put our own selection of ska and Motown on it, and the Hope became our unofficial HQ.

So, having begun our ascent up pop’s greasy pole, we decided the time had come to return John’s kindness by doing a gig at the Hope - for a fee, of course. I must confess I was slightly taken aback by the fact that he wanted to hear some of our material first and was downright shocked when the selection of dodgy rehearsal tapes we gave him failed to light his fire. He relented eventually, however, and gave us a gig. The fee he offered was 40 quid - a lottery-winning sum for us back then. Of equal importance was the fact that every band worth their rock salt had played here at one time or another; even stadium-fillers Dire Straits had graced its tiny stage the year before, playing to an audience of six plus a dog according to legend.

We played the Hope and Anchor on 3 May 1979, which by some strange and unwished for coincidence was the very night Margaret Thatcher led the Conservatives to victory in the General Election. As we all know, this turn of events eventually led to unemployment and recession. In our case, that very scenario almost hit us with immediate effect following our debut at the Hope.

The gig itself was great but, in a moment of madness, I happened to put my foot through a monitor on the stage which had a value of 40 quid or, as the rest of the band politely informed me, our fee to the last penny. But John, being the person he was, not only refrained from telling us to never darken his basement again, he also gave us an extra tenner so we had something to go home with. The Hope still puts on live music to this day, though John pulled up anchor long ago and now runs the fantastic Three Kings in Clerkenwell.

Without having had the opportunity to play the pub venues, we certainly wouldn’t have made it, nor, I suggest, would just about any of the bands that made the charts in the 1980s. Henry Conlon (Alo’s son, who’s run the Dublin Castle for the past few years) made this point during a meeting with Tessa Jowell when she was Secretary of State for Culture. Henry went to Westminster as a representative of Camden’s licensees to discuss the onerous new licensing laws that had been proposed for live-music venues. While he was in the culture secretary’s office, Henry noticed a gold disc on her wall that had been awarded to Coldplay, whose first ever live gig had been at the Dublin and who had also graced the Hope. Henry thought he’d make a bit of a stand, given that his livelihood was being threatened by the new laws, so he pointed to the disc and asked her where she thought Coldplay and legions of other bands who’d contributed greatly to Britain’s culture and economy had started out. The answer was, of course, the music pubs. Many are facing last orders through redevelopment and, for some, time has already been called, such as the Tally Ho and the Falcon in my neck of the woods.

During the summer of 1979 things really began to take off for the band and we signed to Stiff Records. But only after we played at a wedding reception at the Clarendon Ballroom in Hammersmith.

The wedding in question was Dave Robinson’s, who was head of Stiff. He had expressed an interest in the band but had been too busy to come and see us perform - so he booked us to come to him instead. As a rule, I don’t suffer from stage fright but I must admit to getting a bout of nerves that night when I spied a few familiar faces in the audience, most notably those of Elvis Costello and our great hero, Ian Dury, who’d both become massive stars through their recordings on the Stiff label. A few days later we became Stiff artists ourselves, so we obviously did the business at the wedding, and the icing on the cake for us was the advance we got in exchange for signing on the dotted line. Trouble was, being strictly ‘cash only’ up until this point in our lives, none of the banks in Camden appeared willing to let us open an account and the cheque was burning a hole in our pockets.

No doubt unimpressed by our appearance, most of the bank managers in the vicinity refused to give us an interview and weren’t remotely interested in taking care of our hardly earned cash. However, we finally got lucky with a friendly manager at Williams & Glyn’s Bank in Camden (I can’t remember whether it was Williams or Glyn we saw, but he was a jolly decent bloke) and it wasn’t long before we opened our account in the singles chart too, with ‘The Prince’. Things were looking up.

Now, if the Dublin Castle started putting new bands on the musical map from 1979 onwards, the Electric Ballroom was the place to go and see established groups or those on the cusp of the big time. The venue had already given Camden a bit of a shove up the rock and pop ladder by the time we set foot on its capacious stage, and playing there was a real step up for us. It’s not much to look at from its entrance on Camden High Street, just a small blue shop front with a neon sign. Blink and you might well miss it. But inside it’s a Tardis of a place and stretches as far as Kentish Town Road to the rear.

The Electric is a great venue, although it does have its drawbacks for those of a fastidious nature. For instance, when you come off the stage you have to exit the building and walk down a small alley in order to get to the dressing rooms, which in winter, in a sweat-sodden suit, is a less-than-pleasant experience. And if you wear sunglasses on stage, which I’ve been known to do, they instantly steam up as you enter the fresh air and render you blind. Which can make it tricky to find where you are meant to be going.

In spite of these small inconveniences, the show must go on, and on 12 October 1979 we appeared as the headline act on a bill featuring Echo and The Bunnymen. What a confusion of haircuts there must have been that night! A month later we played three consecutive nights at the Electric and each one of them was wild. We were in that crossover period between punk and 2 Tone, and it is fair to say that the crowds could get a little lively. They certainly did at those three gigs. We might not have been the cup of tea of choice for everyone in the audiences but the energy that was sparking throughout the place was incredible and we loved it.

When the going’s good at the Electric, it’s very, very good indeed. You can’t beat the atmosphere when the whole place bounces up and down as one and condensation drips from the ceiling, causing sparks to fly off the lighting rigs, or when you stand on the PA stack as it sways with the crowd, making you feel like you’re on the prow of a ship. The absence of Kate Winslet does not diminish this experience in the slightest.

Not only is the Electric a great gig to play, it’s also the perfect place to watch a band. As with all the best venues, it holds about 2,000 people and is long and wide, allowing good visibility all round. That sounds like an advert for a Chelsea tractor, I know, but it happens to be a fact. I’ve had a perfect view of some greats at the Electric in my time, including the Pretenders, Iggy Pop, the Clash, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, the B52s and many, many more. If a venue makes the crowd feel good, as the Electric does, inevitably the band will too. Rough and ready certainly, but perfect for its function, the Electric is a temple for the working man and woman to let off a bit of steam jumping up and down to whoever happens to be the current obsession.

Before its reinvention as a rock venue in 1978, the Electric was a rather more sedate rendezvous for residents new to the area and looking for lurve. And as such it’s an important staging post in the career of a local entrepreneur called Bill Fuller, who set the Electric’s glitter ball spinning back in the 1930s during a long and illustrious career in music venues.

Fuller was an Irish immigrant who arrived in London as a teenager and worked on building sites, like most others, before starting his own construction business. In 1938, aged just 20, he branched out into entertainment, buying a rough Irish dance hall on Camden High Street called the Buffalo Club, which had recently been closed by the police. This was the place which was later to reinvent itself as the Electric Ballroom. Bill Fuller must have kissed the old Blarney Stone because he managed to convince the authorities to let him reopen the joint, promising there’d be no more trouble while he was at the helm. He was quite handy as a boxer, which might have swayed the judge to declare in his favour when it came to who was sorting out the door.

Fuller transformed the Buffalo’s fortunes by turning it into a venue where Irish couples could meet and hopefully waltz their way to romance. Such was the success of the Buffalo that he opened a string of ballrooms across London and the UK before branching out to the United States. Fuller became a figure of legendary status in Camden before moving to the States in the 1950s where he diversified his business empire with interests in gold mining, management and promotions, and property. He bought two of the most iconic venues in rock-music history: the Fillmore East in New York and the Fillmore West in San Francisco. However, in spite of his worldly wealth, he never fell out of love with the Camden club that helped propel him to those riches.

Even when he began selling off his ballrooms in the 1970s, when he was in his 60s, by which time the road to romance no longer led to the local dance hall, he couldn’t bear to part with the Buffalo. So in 1978 he renovated the club and renamed it the Electric Ballroom. He vowed to keep the place until the day he died and would travel from the States to watch his favourite bands, including U2 and the Pogues, performing at his beloved venue. Bill remained true to his word and still held the keys to the place when he died in 2008, aged 91.

His family have vowed to keep the old traditions going, although they face a tough task to avoid a ballroom blitz, as London Underground have proposed a redevelopment scheme on the site - a new tube station and a shopping complex - which will probably pull the plug on the Electric after all these years. The future of this major player in the community’s social history hangs very much in the balance and Fuller’s family will have to punch well above their weight to see off such a heavyweight opponent.

Twenty-five years on from making our mark on the wonderful world of popular music (and I’m not talking about our appearance on
Cheggers Plays Pop
), Madness once again played Camden in a project we’d cryptically named ‘The Dangermen’. The plan was to go back to our musical roots and play ska and reggae covers in the venues where we made our name all those years ago. It was an undercover operation, hence the title of the project, which heralded from the 1960s spy series.

We played four consecutive nights at the Dublin but our career as musical secret agents didn’t last very long. A fair-sized crowd of curious punters had already gathered in the back room by the time we took to the stage that first night and it didn’t take us long to get into our stride. By the time we’d played a few numbers, the place was stuffed to the gunnels and our cover was well and truly blown. Word soon got around that the Dangermen were, in fact, Madness and by the second night the Dublin was packed out, with queues down the street. It was a warm summer and on one particularly hot evening I asked Henry Conlon if he might consider turning on the air conditioning, to which he replied (only half joking, I’m sure): ‘Air conditioning? I’m turning the heating up.’ Oh yes, he’s Alo’s son all right.