to get away from the pits and the factories, all that cloth-capped bullshit

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When the scene was at its most vigorous there was this tremendous search for obscurities, and a lot of great records surfaced as a result. But after a while, the chances of discovering some old masterpiece diminish. I started Northern Soul but I actually found the music very limiting because in the early days I’d play a Charles Mingus record, then I’d play a bluebeat disc followed by a Booker T. tune, then a Muddy Waters or Bo Diddley record. Gradually there was this blanding out to one sort of sound. When I started DJing, I could play what I wanted. But after three years I had to keep to the same tempo.

“So many tickets down the Scene, honey. They’re like to blow a fuse.”

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We walked through the doors and up some steps but got stopped by the bouncers. I said, ‘We are invited by Keith,’ to which he replied, ‘Yeah and plenty of others. No tickets. No entry.’ A few minutes later Keith turned up. I told him that we were having trouble getting in. ‘Right’ he says, and goes and demands that the manager comes and speaks with him. The manager appeared and Keith explained that he had invited some friends down from London and the bouncers wouldn’t let them in, but there was still a no ticket, no entry type attitude. ‘Hmm,’ says Keith, ‘Have you ever seen The Who play without a drummer? I tell you they are bloody awful.’ By this time there’s a reasonable sized group that had gathered around us, all listening to what was going on. The manager seeing this eventually gives in and says it’s okay for Keith’s friends to go inside. To this Keith turns to the crowd and shouts out ‘the manager says that any of my friends that don’t have tickets can go in. Who doesn’t have tickets?’

Jagger regularly petitioned Pye to release more Bo Diddley records

 

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A different form of nightlife, a different form of life – Soho. Our first port of call was the Scene Club, behind Piccadilly, just off Windmill Street in Ham Yard. The Scene was a loud, smoky haven for the disenfranchised working class, soul was the soundtrack till dawn’s harrowing light. Having grown up in the relatively rough district of Edmonton, Peter was attuned and passed for one of this crowd, while I stayed close to the edge watching the kids speeding on pills and good music, posing more than dancing, jaws frantically chewing the night away. Mod monsters, bound and bonded by sound and dread of the job on Monday. We’d move over to the Flamingo on Wardour Street. On Saturday the Flamingo was the only Soho venue serving drinks and playing music all night. An exotic mélange of Soho sex and underground sorts crashed in late after disposing of earlier engagements. The Flamingo was extremely seedy, hot and sweaty. I remember the Mar-keys playing down there and a very risqué show by Sugar Pie De Santo. Basically they were all jazzers who played R’n’B. Blue Note was big, which was why the Stones and the Yardbirds didn’t fit in, because they weren’t jazzers, they hated jazz. Andrew came up with the Stones and to us that was white R’n’B, which nobody was into at all.

a new class of street hustlers and hippies, flush with disposable income.

 

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Peter Meaden and I always had a friendly competition going so he was particularly eager I see “his” band. Peter had influenced me to venture from my mother’s comfortable Hampstead enclave into the dangerous and exciting world of Soho. As Peter tried out his most outrageous hype on me I noticed an attractive couple in the audience who divided their watchful attention between the group and Meaden. When I asked Meaden if he knew the pair with the hungry eyes, he dismissed them as a couple of “film ponces.” You might even stretch a point and speculate that in many ways the Who had more in common with Peter Meaden than they did their newly adopted minders. But it was no matter. Peter could never have managed to complete a marathon and spent the rest of his short life butterflying from project to project, fueled by pills, and never totally in touch with reality.

‘I don’t want to be like everybody else: that’s why I’m a Mod!’

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A new generation of Mods, mainly from Barnsley and Preston, were recruited at a Scooter rally in Southend and put up in digs and given a mechanic for their scooters. However, a shortage of Rockers led to Roddam recasting several of these Mods as the enemy: apocryphally one of the Rockers foregrounded in the police van would not show his face to the camera lest friends at home discovered his treachery. To the first call of ‘Action!’, down the slope and onto the beach to the west of the Palace Pier charged the Mods of ‘78, while from the opposite direction came a set of (less authentic) leather boys, with in the middle police on horseback jostling and jumping over them. Roddam was pleased with the first take until told that some of the extras playing policemen had been laughing and putting their hats on back to front. So as they reset the scene, Roddam ran over to the Mods and told them that the police – many of them punks – were ruining the shooting, and that they should go for them for real. Though balsa wood deck chairs were in place, Roddam’s goading led to scenes of genuine fighting and a realistic recreation of chaos. Cinematographer Brian Tufano, got in there amidst the flying stones and flying fists, capturing the aggro ‘on the hoof’.

Vince Taylor was black leather and chains, the final rocker.

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From the start, Pepsi has been based on a single age-old precept: it's fun to be a freak. And it is, of course. It's fun to get stoned and float on giant cushions, to stay up past your bedtime. And it's fun to visit Hair, to go up on stage and dance with the kids, belonging, and believe that you've had access to secret knowledge, revelations that the straight world doesn't even suspect. It is even fun to be misunderstood, to feel yourself martyred, a rebel and outsider. What isn't much fun, though, is to be punched in the face and thrown into jail. Not at all, it isn't and, therefore, the political and philosophical basis of the movement has been more or less forgotten. In the heart of the Pepsi Rock fan, there lurks a secret shame at the blatancy and vulgarity of the music's past, Elvis in his gold lame suit, Little Richard jumping on the piano and Jerry Lee Lewis so greasy, all those wild and orgiastic exhibitions. Just like the jazz fans of 1960, who preferred Dave Brubeck to John Coltrane, they want it both ways: they want to be hip, to be in the game and yet, in the end, they don't want to get their feet wet.

'gimme some echo and some fuzz and some garbage can sound.'

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The great thing about the Pretty Things was that they didn't give two shits for blues purity, R&B purity, or any other kind of purity, except perhaps when it came to their drugs. They were therefore conceptually free to aesthetically amplify the physical uses to which distortion and proto power chord riffing could be put. Perhaps one downing the PTs was the Downliners Sect who indicated via their roughed up, impolite and impolitic take on the Chess label output that they did not give even a single shit for blues "purity."