Collet's

Extract from 'Roots, Radicals And Rockers'. Billy Bragg

Extract notes from CD box set Tranatlantic. David Wells

Bill Leader: The Man Who Paid The Pipers (Extract )
While Topic Records would never get involved in putting out records by TV personalities, Nathan ‘Nat’ Joseph, a Cambridge graduate, theatre and cabaret enthusiast and budding entrepreneur had no such foibles. Bill recalls their meeting one day in 1962, in Collet’s record shop:
This little fellow with a squeaky voice came in and tried to sell me some records he’d got the rights to, from America, called Live With Love – three albums of sex education which he thought were going to be a sure-fire winner. And I seem to remember he had an EP on how to give up smoking. I remember he rang the press agent in charge of getting the smoking EP off the ground and gave him such a mouthful of abuse it quite made my hair stand on end. He then suggested that maybe I should like to help him produce some records. Recently returned from a post-university year in America, Nat had come up with the idea of using 90 day credit to import various spoken-word recordings into Britain, including a language tuition series, while using 30 day credit to sell the records on to retailers. Based on the notion that the British public would be hugely interested in three subjects – the Queen (not known to be looking for a record deal), money (not an easy concept on record) and sex – he had settled on the third of these as a winning idea to kick off a record label. He had, in fact, not licensed but recorded Live With Love, with one Dr Eustace Chesser, using a pseudonym, to become the first three albums on his own label, Transatlantic Records.

Jazzjet Great memories, Big Beat Steve. I had forgotten about the Chilton's book shop, oddly because I used to work just around the corner. I grabbed some wonderful bargains there including some discographies which I still have and a battered,original copy of Leonard Feather's 'Inside Bebop'. Plus I used to buy my copy of Jazz Monthly there - always used to prefer JM to Jazz Journal.

And, of course, the 'Rare As Hen's Teeth' rack in Ray's. Even further back there was Collet's on New Oxford Street, where Ray ran the basement. I have fond memories of that basement as it was there that I did that rare thing - buying an LP on hearing it over the P.A. Twice in fact - Charles Lloyd's 'Forest Flower' and Don Ellis's 'Live at Monterey'.

Back to Ray's and those great window posters - 'From Bunk to Monk', 'From Barry Harris to Harry Barris'.

THE ROLLING STONES IN BLACKPOOL

July 1964

It was the Blitz that took me from London to Blackpool, where in the early-60s I formed my first bands, one of which, The Executives, supported The Rolling Stones at the Empress Ballroom, a show that ended in a major riot, something like 50 people, fans and police, hospitalised and the venerable venue virtually demolished, the ruin as severe as if the place had been plundered by Visigoths or others of their barbarian ilk. So miffed was local opinion, the Stones, in the aftershock of what happened, were banned from the battered municipality, told ne’er to darken Blackpool’s door again, a ban that was only lifted in 2008.

Before we went to live in Blackpool, my father, in the pre-war years, was a popular band leader in London, with residencies at many swish places, like Murray’s Cabaret Club, a private club, a favourite of gangsters and royalty, whose exclusive membership included the Duke Of Windsor, who liked to get up to play drums with the band or otherwise entertain his hooray chums by standing on his head on the dance floor. Having no particular talent for either enterprise was no handicap for the plucky royal, according to my dad.

The big bands of the era continued to play regularly after war broke out, and even into the Blitz, when London was bombed nightly. I think what happened with my dad and why he decided to move the family out of London was that he had a couple of lucky escapes and got to the point where he thought his luck was going to run out. He turned down a gig, for instance, at the Café de Paris that went to his friend, Ken ‘Snakehips’ Jensen, who was killed along with most of his band, when two bombs came straight through the skylight above the stage where they were playing. So dad started looking around for somewhere safer to move the family, me as a baby included. He knew some people in Blackpool, there were dance halls there, so that’s where we went.

It would become an absolute shit-hole later on, but Blackpool in the 60s, when I was growing up there, was a great place. It was where everybody went for their summer holidays, the town packed out for months on end. There used to be what were called Wakes Weeks, where whole towns in the north would shut down completely. The mills would close and everybody would come to Blackpool. The rowdiest Wakes Weeks were when what seemed like the entire population of Scotland turned up in town. The Glasgow Weekend was especially notorious, as the Stones would duly discover.

In those days, there were up to 16 live shows, right through the summer, featuring all the big stars of the time. You had the Tower Ballroom, and just up the road the Winter Gardens, which had the Opera House where Sinatra played; Judy Garland, too. The Winter Gardens also housed the Winter Gardens Pavilion, umpteen bars, an exhibition space and the Empress Ballroom, which held up to 7000 people, although there often seemed to be twice that number there.

There wasn’t a thriving local music scene like there was in Liverpool and Manchester, because there were no clubs apart from the Picador, which was run by a dyed-in-the-wool rocker named Arnold Franken, whose idols were Billy Fury and Johnny Kidd. Arnold told me one night, he’d had someone called Brian Epstein on the phone, offering him a deal to put on some bands in Blackpool over the summer, including The Beatles, who he’d never heard of. It so happened The Beatles were due on some early evening TV show and Arnold took a look and didn’t like what he saw. He watched it and he was appalled. He called Epstein and said, “I’ve just seen your fucking band on telly and they’re shit. If I put them on at my club, they'll be booed off.” He cancelled the contract and not long after that The Beatles were in the charts.

Gene Vincent lived in Blackpool for one summer. Completely off his fucking head, he was. One night we were at the house he shared with his backing band, who I think were called The Puppets. He comes in and he’s got a fucking big carving knife and he wants to know if anyone’s seen his wife, evidently having forgotten that a couple of days earlier he’d put her on a plane back to America.

My bands back then didn’t write a lot of original material, so we were constantly in search of songs to cover, so whenever I was in London I’d buy as many new records as I could. You were always on the look-out for something you hadn’t heard by Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, whatever you could lay your hands on. There was a chain of shops you went to if you were a blues, folk or jazz fan. There was Doug Dobell’s at 77 Charing Cross Road, which had the folk shop next door where Dylan used to go. There was also Collette’s on New Oxford Street, and Imhoff’s, which is now a Starbuck’s opposite Centre Point. It was an electrical shop that sold TVs, radios and gramophones, and in the basement they had a record shop where they not only sold records you couldn’t get anywhere else, they had an import section, which was unheard of. You’d order your records and in a few weeks you’d get a postcard to say they were ready for collection.

One day, I went in to pick up some records I’d ordered – a couple of albums by John Lee Hooker, probably a new Chuck Berry – and there was this young bloke with long blond hair, cut in the shape of a helmet, arguing with the assistant. He’d seen my records behind the counter and wanted them because he was in a band from what I could hear him telling the assistant and had to have them, simple as that. He sounded quite desperate, but I just pushed him out of the way and said, “Fucking hard luck, mate. These are mine.” He stormed off in an obvious huff.

That night, I went down to The Marquee to see a new band Alexis Korner had told me about who were billed as ‘Brian Jones, Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones’. Anyway, I was sitting in the bar and I noticed these surly types staring at me, and one of them, who was really glowering at me, was the little blond feller from Imhoff’s. He turns out to be Brian Jones, of course, which makes the people he’s with The Rolling Stones. One of them eventually came over, and introduces himself as Ian Stewart. He was lovely bloke, which is not something I’m sure you’d ever say of Brian. That night, I saw the Stones for the first time. It was early days for them, but already there was no one else like them. It was obvious they were going places, one of which turned out to be Blackpool on July 24, 1964, when they headlined the Empress Ballroom.

The Stones’ show coincided with the summer’s Glasgow Weekend, so there was always the potential for trouble. Glasgow Weekend brought a lot of money to Blackpool, but also a lot of drunkenness, noise and gang fights. You had to be able to handle the gangs if you wanted to avoid trouble. My band had played a lot of these shows and we knew how to deal with them. The first thing you did was find out what the most popular songs were in Glasgow clubs at the time and if it was something like “Skinny Minnie”, you learned it quickly and opened your set with it, usually to a big roar. I’d say to them, ‘”I don’t know about you, but we’re going to have a good time and we want you to have a good time, but you’ve got to behave yourselves.’ And sometimes they would. These guys would come up to you in the break betweens sets with fucking hammers in their pockets. You had to win them over, get them on your side, which is not something I think the Stones were interested in even attempting to do. It just wasn’t their style. They would have thought it was ingratiating, which they never were.

In those days, Brian thought the Stones were his group and he was the star, so he’d be right down the front of the stage. The girls were screaming for him, but their boyfriends got the hump because he looked so effeminate, much more so then than Jagger or Keith, who had a much more thuggish look. Anyway, Brian was just winding these blokes up, taunting them every time he came to the front of the stage, which fucked them off even more. These were all the gang leaders, of course, and they were lined up along the edge of the stage, which was high enough that you could only see their heads in the footlights. They started shouting obscenities at Brian, who didn’t pay any attention, which made them even angrier. So a couple of them began spitting at him. I’d never seen that before at a gig. It was the biggest insult you could get as a performer and I remember thinking things were getting out of hand.

I could see Keith fuming, glaring at the crowd. Someone shouted something at him and then spat at him. Keith headed straight for him, didn’t seem to give it a second thought, and kicked him – bang! – right in the face. The place just fucking exploded. There was absolute bedlam. The crowd stormed the stage and in seconds were all over it. The Stones just ran, crapping themselves. The crowd then started destroying everything in sight, smashing anything they could get their hands on. I managed to get our equipment off. Charlie had a nice set of drums that he’d just left when the riot kicked off and I banged them into some small room at the back of the stage and saved them for him. A couple of months later, I ran into Ian Stewart and he said, 'Thanks for saving Charlie’s kit. If it had been me, I wouldn’t have fucking bothered.’ The crowd, meanwhile, was taking the place apart. If they’d got hold of the Stones, they would have done the same to them. I’m convinced they would have killed them.

They’d legged it, though, and got out through a back window. It was the last anyone saw of them. The police had arrived by then, with dogs. It was war. How nobody actually got killed, I don’t know.

The riot was all over the papers the next morning, with a big splash on the cover of the Daily Express. I knew someone on the news desk there and called them up with the story. I got paid for it, too. In fact, I probably made more from selling the story than I did for the gig. Roy Carr