I think the basement that was the Rock Garden is now the workshop of an Apple Shop. More upmarket than O2. at least! Sean McDonnell was the director and booker there for a long time…
Good to hear you are alright Jim. Please keep the videos coming, you are a very knowledgeable chap on all things Pub Rock and I for one love hearing your tales.
One of the best pub rock groups I can remember was a group that started off as the Unsuited Medium and then just The Medium.This as back in 1967 and they were a covers band Psych Rock at the time but also wrote there own stuff,They were really a good old Hackney night out.They eventually morphed into the 70s Rubbettes who were not my cup of tea
The Medium sound great. Pretty maximum, in fact. Sadly, I don't think I ever saw them, though I did work a little with the Rubettes (it's a long story)!
@@JimDriver Cheers Jim,Back in those Medium days Alan Williams never had a Rubbettes voice.They used to play in a pub in Hackney Road,just across the road opposite the Children’s Hospital,I can’t remember what the pub was called,they used to play stuff like Eight Miles High and Traffics Mr Fantasy,Sharon Tandy’s version of Our Day Will Come,they were just great.Happy Days Jim ,
L00king at the line ups at the cricketers I cant believe I never went there 0nce despite living 400m away in D0rset r0ad sw8 f0r 7 years between 1983-90. D'0h!
Beer orders meant that any brewery owning more than 2000 pubs (not 200) were forced to sell off half the pubs over 2000, and the tenants of the remaining pubs were allowed to to sell one cask ale not from the brewery. So the big breweries sold almost all their pubs to new pub -owning companies, and struck exclusive beer supply deals with those companies. The beer orders didn’t apply as the pubs weren’t owned by the actual breweries, so the breweries could keep a firm grip on what the pubs sold, and the pub owning companies could set the prices and fleece the pub management and tenants. The beer orders on the face of it wasn’t a bad idea - CAMRA had been agitating for something similar. But nobody foresaw how the breweries would get round the new legislation. Cheers! R.
Thanks for the factual info, Richard. No one I knew thought anything Thatcher did was well-meaning or a good idea! Sir John Young (hardly a Marxist agitator) spent a couple of hours one day explaining how disrupting the tied house status quo would lead to the destruction of the licensed trade. He was certainly partly right!
@@JimDriver He was absolutely right, but for those of us who were real ale fiends, it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Thatcher did very little that was right (in fact I can't think of anything else, the woman was an evil witch), but at the time, it seemed that the Tory Government had agreed with CAMRA. I can rant on about the evilness of Thatcher until the cows come home, but it this case, she was doing the right thing; just this time it ended up being an absolute shitshow that no-one predicted. Tied houses weren't ideal, and the beer orders legislation was designed to break that brewery monopoly, but, hey - look how it worked. Nearly thirty years later, we're in a situation where micropubs, free houses, and small breweries can open pubs, and undercut the pubs that are owned by the likes of Star and Enterprise Inns. And a lot of those pubs will put on live music. There's a splendid independent pub / small venue in Huddersfield called The Parish, where they don't sell any Real Ale (my tipple of choice), but they do a few decent keg beers, and bottles of Newcastle Brown. Last Friday I saw, in the upstairs room, Discharge, and Geoffrey Oi!Cott. Astonishing. Real pub rock. Max. occupancy of about 150. Couple of weeks ago they had Theatre of Hate...
Glad to see you're back no pun intended. Hope you are well now. The near death of pub rock is probably due a number of factors in my view: large pub chains, Karaoke, people wanting to hear what they already know (hence he huge number of cover bands & tribute acts), hip hop (Why have a fourpiece band, when a DJ will take up less space), the number of pub closures over the past 40 years. Pubs booking live music is still a thing in Britian, sadly it is the lack of small to medium sized venues which is preventing bands from developing.
My eyesight is very recently improved but still pretty poor! Thanks! The final nail in live music's coffin was COVID, coupled with the fact that youngsters aren't too interested because nothing really new has come out since Punk - and that was nearly 50 yeasr ago!!
@@JimDriver - I'm sure that, musically speaking, there's no chance we'll see (and hear) "something new"... New sounds maybe but not "new music"... Cheers!
Thanks: luckily I had my son with me but everyone I encountered in India was kind and helpful and the care at Sreenethra Eye Clinic in Trivandrum was exceptional. Cheers!
I worked in a pub in Hanwell and if you didn't have a music license, you could only have 2 people on stage. When I enquired about the license, the Landlord told me it was around 80 grand...(1997)....It might explain why 2 piece combos seemed to have become more numerous.
That was the case but a pub music licence certainly wasn't £80k. In 1985, I seem to recall it being something like a couple of hundred quid a year in London. There was also the PRS fee to pay (which some did!), which back then was less than £50…
@@pit2ryan3 That's what I was told....It did seem far fetched....but he was the boss....I was asking him why we couldn't have bands on, bigger than a 2 piece...
I don't know how old you are, but in the 1980s, I'd guess there were more than a hundred active Pub Rock venues at any one time in London. Now, I'd say it'd be under a dozen, and many of those will predominantly feature "covers bands". Pub Rock may be alive and well, but it's sadly not what it once was… (Said the Old Codger!!) 😀😀
Good luck, mate. I had an eye op at Moorfields back in 2014. Top people. As regards the channel's subject matter, I abandoned mainstream rock after 1974 because the big boys had said everything they had to say and had become repetitive, uninspired and overly commercialized. Instead, I discovered Dave Edmunds/Nick Lowe and Rockpile, Dr. Feelgood and the Southend scene, plus a bunch of up and coming bands that played my college such as Ducks Deluxe, Snafu, and Q Tips. Then in '76 along came punk at a time when I was working in a jean shop in Carnaby St. and the rest is history. As I remember, if you had to single out one pub as the epicentre of London pub rock, it was the Hope & Anchor at Islington, at least judging from the ads in Melody Maker, New Musical Express, and Sounds.
I appreciate your good wishes! It's great to hear about your connection to the music scene. The Hope & Anchor was a great pub, especially during the first wave of Pub Rock (1970s), but I think other venues were more influential and (dare I say it) more popular. It was possibly the smallest of the prominent Pub Rock venues…
Good effort doing the video best wishes for June 👍 I remember the praise for stiff records but it didn't hit the spot for me , Ian dury was obviously brilliant ❤️💪☮️
Thanks for the good wishes: I appreciate it. I was pretty much a big fan of most of what Stiff were doing in the 1970s. I didn't get on personally with Ian Dury and I was only tjhinking the other day that Elvis Costello's singles were great but that most of the other tracks on the early albums could have been written by someone else… 😀
Thank you for your well wishes, it means a lot! Left eye much improved after laser surgery: I'll find out about the right eye this time next week. Cheers!
Music was accessible, affordable & often free. We went in droves to see some great, & not so great bands. We also bought the beer & the vinyl. If you're in your 60's you lived through a golden age of music! Hope the eye improves.
The 70s and 80s venues in my home town here in the north-east of England provided endless varieties of the same blues-based guitar rock, seemingly designed to exclude anything else such as hip-hop, electronic, folk, classical, pop, dance music...
I don't think so: I had a blood test a few weeks ago and diabetes wasn't an issue. Thanks for letting me know, though: I'll keep an eye (no pun intended) on it… 😀
Sorry bout that: getting the balance right is tricky. I think I'm doing it better on more recent videos. But music seems crucial: my viewing figures shot up when I started. The modern world… 😀😎
I wondered what had happened to you Jim, & I hope your eyesight's better soon. I read the Will Birch book on your recommendation and thoroughly enjoyed it - I never knew about the Red Sands Fort connection, despite being a pirate radio 'anorak'. What's that other book you mentioned? Be Seeing You, Peter
Cheers, Peter. The other book is Before It Went Rotten by Simon Matthews, which finishes as Punk gets going. It's a good read and full of facts and information…
Thanks for the get-well wishes! When both of the venues I promoted at closed down, I decided it was maybe time for me to stop! I think COVID finished it off for me.
Margeret Thatchers’ restrictions or moves to curtail socialising in local pubs was a master class of social engineering of which the ‘benefits’ are still keeping small supermarkets & convenience stores in the blue whilst creating deathly silent semi rural neighbourhoods & suburbs after 19:00 . Starmer will finish the job by crushing the last bastion of social communication when imposing greater control over on line activity ! The future isn’t orange 😐🐢👍
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this topic. It's always great to have diverse perspectives. Depending on who gets in at the Election and how they behave, I fear the future may be grey… 😀
Pub rock in the UK had an audience almost entirely male and white. The venues were deliberately unfriendly to women, to non-smokers, to parents, to non-drinkers, to those who liked music other than simplistic, blues-based guitar bands... The venues had no interest in making themselves more appealing to a wider audience. Is it any wonder it declined?
Interesting theory which might have been true about some venues but not to many others. For example, at The Cricketers we had performances by all-female ska bands and nights run by and for women. A lso, many of the regular performers I mentioned win the video came from Africa or Jamaican or were Black Americans…
@@JimDriver Not the case here in the north-east until the last ten years, so perhaps my experience is very localised. But many pubs undeniably had a notorious history of exclusion - which took many forms.
@@davidjohns4745 I have nothing against the blues. However, the very existence of a specific genre in the 70s/80s called 'pub rock' which was blues-based guitar music played almost entirely by white men demonstrated the narrow limits of live music played in pubs: little or no funk, electronics, jazz, classical, pop, hip-hop or many other genres that were popular at the time.
