Northern Music Online Blog

So who’s your favourite bass player?  Lovers of the upright jazz/bass will put their hands up for Charles Mingus or perhaps the wonderful English player Danny Thompson.  The brilliant and ultimately tragic Jaco Pastorius still has a big cult following and old rockers will tell you that you can’t beat a bit of Bill Wyman.  For me, The Who’s thunderous Jon Entwhistle cannot be mastered.  Not only am I a fan, I was also lucky enough to be probably, the last person to interview him for television before his untimely death at the beginning of The Who’s Millenium world tour.

The interview came about because Yorkshire Television wanted to celebrate the making of The Who - Live at Leeds, one of the handful of truly great live rock recordings.  We were invited to make a short ten minute piece with the big fella’ at his home, a seventeenth century mansion in the Cotswolds.  We arrived at midday to find, like all proper rock stars, Jon Entwhistle was  still in bed.  We were shown to the bar by Jon’s guitar technician and told “Jon will join you shortly.”   When I say bar, I’m not talking a little cocktail thing in a corner with a bottle of drambuie inside a furry pink poodle.  This was a full blown pub inside the house, called “The Barracuda Tavern”.  Huge stuffed game fish hung on wires from the ceiling.  Jon’s hobby we were told was fishing for barracuda.

Jon joined us within half an hour.  We sat on two tall stools at the bar and the camera started rolling.  I posed my first question “Live at Leeds is regarded has one of The Who’s finest achievements, can you remember much about how it came about?
“I beg your pardon!”
I asked the question again.
“Look I,m  sorry, but you’re going to have to speak a lot louder.”  Jon’s guitar tech interrupted.  You will have to shout Ian.. Jon is very deaf.  All those years of playing at maximum volume have shot his eardrums to pieces.

The interview took about an hour to complete.  I shouted myself hoarse.  And then had my own ear drums blasted when Jon picked up his bass and played a full throttle version  of ‘Yong Man Blues.”  Our own private rock concert.

As we packed up to leave, Jon’s American girl friend asked us if we’d like to stay for dinner.

We had to decline, telling them that we had to be in London to film a sequence about The Sex Pistols with a director called Julian Temple.

Jon rose up from his stool.   ‘Well you’ll have more fun here!”  I’m  sure we would have done.

The fuller version of this story and much more is now available in Ian’s latest book “Bringing it all back home“

My Grandmother’s Father was a horsekeeper at Glasshoughton Colliery. He drank his evening pint at the Royal oak pub and otherwise only ventured from his little house in Churchfield Lane to tend his allotment. I wonder what he would have though if someone had told him “In the next century we’re going to knock this coal mine down, do away with the coke ovens and brickworks and on the slag heaps build restaurants, hotels and a great big ski slope with real snow and casll it X-scape.” Actually I know what he would have thought and said, but I don’t need to repeat it here.

Some things seem preposterous, unreal, but then in time comes familiarity. It’s not such a surprise these days to see young people in alpine clothing heading down the motorway with skis on their roof racks following signs to Glasshoughton. But how many of these people know much about the proud industrial heritage of the village? That the glass in Glasshoughton refers to glassblowing and making and that here was a pit that for over a century employed thousands of men?

And how many of you reading this know that Glasshoughton played a minor role in the development of blues music in this country? In the 1950’s the legendary Big Bill Broonzy was one of the first Delta Blues singers to tour Europe. Broonzy had been brought up behind the mule in the cottonfields of Arkansas. His Grandmother was an emancipated slave. Between the 1920’s and 1958 when he died he made thousands of recordings of authentic country blues. In 1956 he found himself in the north of England, he recorded a live session in a theatre in Nottingham and performed in a Jazz club in Leeds. The story goes that a showbiz entrepreneur owed a favour to a cinema owner. The cinema in question was ‘The Cosy’ at Glasshoughton. One saturday night Big Bill Broonzy was despatched from Leeds to play there. What the youth of Cannon Street near the cinema made of it is anybody’s guess. But apparently it was a great night. I have been told by one or two who went that “I should have been there.”
And my mate Kevin Reynolds tells me that when he first started as an apprentice at Atkinson’s Printers in Pontefract that they still had archive copies of the poster. Long before TV adverts enticed shoppers and skiers to Glasshoughton, The Cosy Cinema encouraged music fans to come and see Big Bill Broonzy.

P.S. The Cosy incidentally closed down in the sixties like lots of other Cinemas. It became a clothing factory called Castletex. This was knocked down in the late 1990’s and the area is now a car park.

Pub 26th October 2006

I did an interview for television with Mr James Corrigan just a few weeks before he died. Mr Corrigan was arguably the greatest of all music and showbiz entrepreneurs in Yorkshire. In the middle of the 1960’s he bought a piece of derelict land in Bradford Road, Batley which had once been the site of a municipal sewage works. He had a vision to create an entertainments venue to rival anything in the West End. Within sixteen short weeks he had built, opened and recruited thousands of members to what became world famous as the Batley Variety Club. Mr Corrigan was impressed first of all by supermarkets that were springing up in every Northern town. He thought that the pile it high and sell it cheap principle could be applied to showbiz. If you had a big enough revenue, a long enough residency and plenty of willing punters you could bring in big stars at reasonable ticket prices.

Batley variety club opened with The Batchelors. Within months it was attracting the likes of Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones. In 1969 Mr Corrigan pulled off his biggest coup. Along with a colleague he travelled to New York with a case of pound notes to visit the office of Joe Guy. Now Joe Guy was a hard-nosed showbiz agent with a roster that read like a who’s who of jazz music; Billy Holiday, Lional Hampton, Roy Eldridge, Benny Carter and the man Mr Corrigan was interested in, Louis Armstrong. A deal was struck to bring Louis, the greatest trumpeter in the history of jazz to Batley, a place that Joe Guy and Armstrong had never heard of.

At the time of the three week residency, the song “What A Wonderful World” was riding high at number one in the charts. The club was packed every night.

With a twinkle in his eye in his last ever interview Mr Corrigan told me about a joke they played on Louis Armstrong. They picked him up from Leeds Airport in a Rolls Royce and chauffeured him to Batley. In the middle of town the driver stopped outside a badly derelict mill. The roof was falling in, all the windows broken. In the street outside mucky kids were playing with busted footballs and rusting bikes. “Welcome to Batley variety Club” said Mr Corrigan. Louis Armstrong and his team looked aghast. Mr Corrigan smiled and said “only kidding” before instructing his driver to continue on to the real club. They say Armstrong’s face was a picture. What a wonderful world!

What was the first record you bought with your own money? I’m convinced that the distance in time between the purchase and now affects what you tell people. Memory plays tricks, but so does mood. How cool, naff, honest or sophisticated do you want to be? Are you trying to impress? Give people a laugh, or are you unbearably sincere, honest and down to earth about your bygone tastes?

Over the years I have told people that my first record was “Those Were the days” by Mary Hopkins (slightly sophisticated, after all Paul McCartney wrote it, but also naff because it was a winner on ‘Opportunity Knocks’). Sometimes I have said it was “Ernie, the Fastest Milkman in the West” by Benny Hill (good fun, but then slightly dodgy in these politically correct times). It could have been Peter Sarsted’s “Where Do You Go to My Lovely?” (bit more bedsit studenty that one, shows the awakening of an adult conscience). Then again it might have been “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies (shows a fondness for a good pop tune).

Actually it was none of the above in my case. I know for a fact it was “Get it On” by T. Rex. I can be sure of this because one friday I was in my local corner shop and I heard Margaret Johnson the shopkeeper’s daughter, talking to her mates in between blowing bubbles of chewing gum. She said “Have you heard T. Rex’s new record? It’s like really cool y’know”. It was the best sentence I’d ever heard spoken. I rushed out next day to buy that record from a shop in Pontefract indoor market. It cost 7/6d in old money. It was on the ‘Fly’ record label and the B side was “Life’s a Gas”. I never hear it on the radio now without thinking about Margaret Johnson blowing bubbly gum.

To read Ian’s latest article, “What a Wonderful World,” visit www.northernmusiconline.co.uk

If somebody told you that Jimi Hendrix once queued up at Harry Ramsden’s Fish Shop for his supper, you might possibly think that they were pulling your leg. You might also think that a fisherman’s tale was being spun if you were told that Hendrix blasted out a version of Purple Haze at a hotel in Ilkley, that’s now a nursing home. And that a Police Sergeant on a bicycle dressed in regulation gaberdine raincoat threatened to arrest him.

All these things happened, right here in Yorkshire back in 1967. Some lads who ran a blues club called “The Giro” in the ballroom of what was then the Troutbeck Hotel at Ilkley booked a relatively unknown blues singer just over from America. By the time the gig took place “Hey Joe” was riding high in the pop charts, but to his credit Hendrix honoured the gig at this little Yorkshire blues club. Instead of a handful of blues fans and a wet dog turning up on a quiet, rainy Sunday night, the place was thronged by hundreds of boisterous teenagers.

Enter Sergeant Tommy Chapman. He had been doing his rounds and heard a commotion. Realising the place was well overcrowded, he forced his way through the mass to the stage, and tapping Hendrix on the shoulder, told him “Turn down that racket!” and pulled the plug.

Hundreds of disillusioned hippies from all over the West Riding queued up to get their money back; some of them queued twice!

Later on that evening, a woman called Sheila Lilley was waiting to be served at Harry Ramsden’s famous fish shop. behind her in the line appeared none other than Jimi Hendrix dressed in psychadelic gear. He said to Sheila that he was sorry that the gig had to be cancelled after just one number. He signed her a photo. She still has it. Framed on the living room wall.

To read Ian’s latest article, “What a Wonderful World,” visit www.northernmusiconline.co.uk