How ‘The West’s Greatest Rock Shows 1963-1978’ came together

I was in my mid-teens when I started going to rock gigs regularly in the late 1970s. I stood no chance of being served at the bar, so I took to chatting to the old-timers in their twenties and early thirties about their gig-going experiences. Keenly aware that I’d missed out on so much, I soaked up their stories. I’d have been delighted if punk had never happened and 1969-1975 simply carried on forever.

As a Bristol University student in the early eighties, I knew that many of my favourite bands had played such legendary venues as the Granary Club, the Colston Hall and even the Hippodrome, and often imagined what it must have been like to be there.

I later tried to persuade my editor at Bristol what’s on mag Venue that a feature on these great shows might make a good read. My idea was rejected, probably because the bands were considered so unfashionable by those much cooler than myself. But I kept the idea on the back burner for years after Venue folded. As an avid reader of rock biographies, I’d diligently make a note whenever a local show of significance was mentioned.

The pandemic provided the opportunity to knuckle down and get on with my book project. I decided to cover the 15 year period from the advent of the Beatles to the time when I was old enough to go to gigs (1963-1978) and put the word out to all my contacts saying that I was looking for memories and anecdotes. My ambition was twofold: to provide rock nerds like myself with information that was new to them and have everyone else laughing out loud at the funny stories.

I thought it might be useful to find out what the local media made of these shows, so I spent weeks pestering the enormously helpful staff at the Bristol Reference Library and discovered even more great yarns. Unexpectedly, it turned out that the Western Daily Press was particularly good at covering the early 60s local pop scene with its enjoyably snarky weekly Teenpage. The WDP even held its own annual Teenpage Ball – a weird mix of rock show and beauty contest. These were always celebrated with a souvenir pull-out. One of the hacks who churned out the 1971 edition was a cub reporter who’d just joined the paper: Terry Pratchett. I’d known Terry since his days as a droll press officer for the CEGB, when it was his job to reassure us that the region’s dodgy nukes were perfectly safe, but was previously unaware that he’d once worked the pop beat as a journalist. It was also intriguing to revisit the bile heaped upon Sir Michael Eavis by the local press during the first two Pilton Pop Festivals.

Local telly had a stab at covering pop too. The longest-running show was TWW’s groovy Discs A-Go-Go, which featured many of the bands who were in town to play at the Corn Exchange. Alas, every single one of these was wiped – even the edition with The Beatles on. Although this was a huge success, TWW foolishly replaced it in 1965 with an inferior show taking a wider look at teenage life and fashions. The presenter of Now! was a young man making his TV debut: Michael Palin.

Favourite yarns? Well, I love the one about Arthur Brown bringing a Bristol University rag ball to a premature end by setting off the fire alarm with his flaming helmet. I’ve read just about every book ever written about the Rolling Stones, but had never come across the story of the Longleat House riot before. Ike and Tina Turner playing shows in Bristol and Bath on the same evening is also a good ‘un, as is the great Small Faces riot at the Colston Hall in 1968, Roger Daltrey being walloped by a bouncer for attempting to sneak a girl backstage at the Corn Exchange in 1965, and Freddie Mercury dragging the rest of Queen to a Bristol gay club after a show at the Hippodrome in 1977. I was also delighted to discover the delicious saga of Elton John and the Colston Hall’s piano. You’ll have to buy the book to find out about that one.

‘The West’s Greatest Rock Shows 1963-1978: Lost, Forgotten and Previously Untold Eye-Opening Tales from the Gigs You’ll Wish You’d Seen’ by Robin Askew is published by Bristol Books, price £25.

It Was 50 Years Ago This Month

May 1974 was a pretty eventful month in local rock history. Here are some extracts from the book.

Status Quo

Colston Hall, May 6 & 7 1974

Later in their career, it all went a bit Marguerita Time for Quo, which rather tarnished their reputation – as Francis Rossi readily acknowledges in his self-lacerating autobiography, I Talk Too Much. But back in the 1970s, these lovable merchants of no-nonsense, heads-down mindless boogie were seemingly unstoppable. For those of us who were just kids back then, the depressing sea of shite of Top of the Pops was regularly punctuated by the joy of the new Quo single. It always sounded the same as the last Quo single. And it was always brilliant. At least until 1979-ish.

The UK didn’t have a regional arena circuit back in the early 1970s. Apart from occasional festival and football ground shows, the only option for bands surfing huge waves of popularity was to play multiple dates at city hall venues outside London (where the Empire Pool, Wembley, and cavernous, acoustically challenging Earls Court were available to those in the big league). So it was that Quo opened their Quo tour to promote the Quo album with this two-night stand at the Colston Hall. The double-denim hordes were out in force for what was the Frantic Four’s heaviest album. This sustained boogie fury was thanks largely to the songwriting input of bassist Alan Lancaster – who later cited rock’s all-time greatest reason for falling out with bandmates. No namby-pamby ‘musical differences’ for Alan. After Live Aid, he objected that their music was no longer ‘manly’ enough.

There were no such complaints at this gig, during which Quo delivered a relentless 12-bar barrage powered by their legendary ‘Wall of Death’ backline. Oddly, the set list included only two songs from the record they’d released three days earlier (album openers Backwater and Just Take Me). The encore kicked off with Caroline. Obviously. Support came from Montrose – hyped as “America’s answer to Led Zeppelin” – featuring ace guitarist Ronnie Montrose and the young Sammy Hagar on vocals. The show was opened by funky rockers Snafu, who boasted future Whitesnake guitarist Mickey Moody.

Quo fan Jack Gibbons was there for both nights. “I met some people on the train who only came over for Montrose,” he recalls. “The band threw flexi discs over the balcony, so the second night we grabbed a hand full and sold them to schoolfriends for their dinner money. Nice little earner!”

Fellow punter Ian Gregory reports that it was a riotous experience. “If  I’m not mistaken, Quo weren’t allowed to perform at the Colston Hall for many years after those gigs as there was damage caused to the seating.”

Writing in the Bristol Evening Post (‘An orgy of rock from Quo’), reviewer James Belsey seems to have enjoyed himself. “Sheer exuberant pandemonium reigned supreme for more than an hour as they whipped through tough raunchy rock number after number and even if it was heavy on the eardrums, it was fun.”

He was mightily impressed by Ronnie Montrose: “The audience were completely stunned then slowly fascinated by the breadth of his playing and the band won a well-deserved encore – practically unknown for total newcomers opening a big-name show.”

Amusingly, Quo became the subject of huge controversy at Bristol University the following year. Not because anyone objected to their amiable brand of foot-stomping 12-bar blues, but because of the £3,000 fee they demanded to headline that year’s Rag Ball. This was considered excessive, especially as Exeter University had been offered them for £2,000. What’s more, student paper Bacus reported that Rag could have had Mud for just £1,000 – though everyone involved in the heated debate conceded that Les Gray’s mob were actually a bit crap.

Steely Dan

Hippodrome, 19 May 1974

No, really. Steely Dan did play Bristol on their Pretzel Logic tour. It was a close run thing, mind. The UK leg was abandoned after just four shows when Donald Fagen fell ill. As you might expect of the exacting Fagen and Walter Becker, the expanded eight-piece touring band comprised some superlative session musicians, including future Doobie Brothers Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter and old smoothy-chops Michael McDonald – plus Jeff Porcaro, who went on to found Toto with fellow Dan refugee David Paich. Two months after this gig, Steely Dan announced they were to stop touring permanently – which they did until that 1990s reformation. “Al Read and I were both at the Steely Dan gig,” recalls former Granary DJ Ed Newsom. “It was musicianship of the highest order – we were dead impressed. Later we were to realise how lucky we had been to see them, when Donald Fagen contracted a severe throat infection and the tour was called off.”

Bristol Post reviewer Tim Davey described the show as “sensational”. “Together the eight of them produced a flawless set, including numbers like Boston Rag, Do It Again and Showbiz Kids,” he wrote. “Becker, on bass, kept out of the limelight, but Fagen was the maestro of the whole gig. Not forgetting two extraordinarily good guitarists – Denny Dias and Jeff Baxter.”

Fascinating rock trivia note: technologically-minded Baxter, who subsequently dropped the ‘Skunk’ but retained the long hair and luxuriant moustache, went on to pursue a parallel career as a military advisor to the US government, specialising in missile defence.

Deep Purple/Elf

Colston Hall, 20 May 1974

The Burn album was another commercial and artistic triumph for Deep Purple, but it was all change in the ranks for what’s become known as Mark III of the band. Out went Ian Gillan and Roger Glover; in came the phenomenal Glenn Hughes and the unknown David Coverdale (whose previous career highpoint, lest we forget, had been working in a boutique in Redcar). But behind the scenes, Ritchie Blackmore was expressing increasing disgruntlement. He was not happy with the soul and funk influences brought in primarily by Hughes, which he described dismissively as “shoeshine music”. And on this tour he was paying particularly close attention to aptly named American support band Elf – the most diminutive act to play the Colston Hall since the Small Faces. After his departure from Purple the following year, he would recruit most of them, including vocalist Ronnie James Dio, for his new band Rainbow.

Ian Gregory was at the back of the stalls. “There was no obvious sign then of the tensions,” he recalls. “Purple were on fire. The first half of the set was almost all of Side A (in old money) of the Burn album: Burn, Might Just Take Your Life, Lay Down, Stay Down.  Ritchie teased Lazy before they played Mistreated and then went on the Mark II stuff. The interplay between Glenn Hughes and David Coverdale was electric. The people around me were in awe.”

Western Daily Press reviewer David Naylor may have been one of them, writing that “the loudest rock group in the world produced the ultimate in visual and musical magnificence in the Colston Hall.” The packed crowd “was driven to near hysteria . . and they earned the loudest and longest encore I have ever heard.”

The Bristol Post‘s Tim Davey took a very different view. While he’d been rapturous about Purple’s performance here in 1971, he now considered that they had “sold out for sound and not quality, which is a sad thing and all the more amazing when they rank as one of the world’s top rock bands . . . The act was tight and the presentation slickly done, with some magnificent stage and lighting effects – but the music was blurred and unimpressive.” Nonetheless, he conceded that Purple “could not fail with a sell-out crowd of faithful fans.”

There’s another local footnote to the story of Burn. The album was recorded in Montreux in November 1973, but two months earlier the new line-up of Purple had convened at Clearwell Castle in Gloucestershire for rehearsals. At the time, the Grade II listed castle boasted a recording studio in its basement, which became especially popular with rockers, including Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Peter Frampton and Queen. Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath claimed to have seen a ghost there while recording Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Eventually, the band managed to spook themselves so much that they refused to stay overnight. “I thought, fucking hell: we got this place in the middle of nowhere so we could start writing, and everybody has terrified themselves that much that they’re driving home at night!” writes Iommi in his autobiography, Iron Man.

Purple were made of sterner stuff, though that didn’t stop notorious prankster Ritchie Blackmore attempting to terrify fellow members of the band – especially the new recruits. “Ritchie got there first,” writes Glenn Hughes in his autobiography. “I arrived second and got a good choice of bedroom, unaware that he had wired my room up and put speakers in the closet, and of course at three o’clock in the morning there were these ghostly wails. Blackmore had waited up to do it. When you’re in a 700-year-old castle and you hear that, it’s pretty spooky.”

During their stay, the national and local press were summoned for photo shoots and interviews with the new line-up, attended by servants in mediaeval garb. In the Western Daily Press (‘Deep Purple, Rock Kings of the Castle’), it was noted that the whole experience proved rather overwhelming for 22-year-old Coverdale: “three weeks ago he was selling shirts”.

Clearwell’s then-owner Mrs. Alice Yeats remarked that Purple were “very nice people. Very human. They came to wind down and I think they enjoyed their stay. They weren’t all that noisy. They were in the basement and it’s sound-proof.”

The tradition of bands scaring themselves, and one another, at Clearwell Castle continued well into the late seventies. In his autobiography Where’s My Guitar?, Whitesnake guitarist Bernie Marsden tells of prankstering producer Martin Birch spooking the band by filtering creepy sounds into their headphones while they were recording the Lovehunter album in May 1979. He also offers a potential alternative explanation for the supposedly haunted studio’s reputation: “I thought it was all in my head and resolved to try not to get quite so stoned.”

These days, Clearwell Castle is a wedding venue. Amusingly, the former studio is now known as the Quiet Room.

Steeleye Span/Gryphon

Colston Hall, 24 May 1974

“See: Pitched Battles, Maidens Deflowered, Medieval Exorcism, Miracles . . . all plus Steeleye Span’s bag of musical tricks featuring elves, maidens, sooth sayers, magicians, witches, kings, queens, knaves and jokers.”

Really, how could anybody resist? 1974 was folk-rockers Steeleye Span’s breakthrough year with the Now We Are Six album, which reached number 13 in the chart. Ian Anderson produced, David Bowie played alto sax and folk purists were displeased – as folk purists are wont to be. Theatrical rock was a big deal at the time (Rick Wakeman had recently recorded his Journey to the Centre of the Earth production at the Royal Festival Hall), so no one batted an eyelid when Steeleye celebrated their newfound commercial success with a two-night extravaganza at the Royal Albert Hall attended by their unlikeliest fan, Prime Minister Ted Heath. They then took the dressing-up box on the road for a tour that pitched up at the Colston three days later. Demand for tickets was high and this was the first date to sell out.

As the press blurb promised, for the centrepiece of the show Steeleye donned masks and costumes to perform a full ten-minute mummers play. Written by multi-instrumentalist Tim Hart, this has St. George taking on an ‘infidel’. Plastic swordplay ensues.

Writing in the Bristol Evening Post, David Harrison was overjoyed at what he described as the finest performance Steeleye had even given in Bristol, which was a great improvement on what he considered to be a rather insipid previous show. “Simple, beautiful and incomparable updated folk music of the highest standard,” he rhapsodised. The set list for this “magnificent and unforgettable” show included crowd favourites Gaudete and Thomas the Rhymer. Even the mumming play delighted Harrison, who noted that it was “hilarious, if less than faithful”.

No strangers themselves to the lure of the dressing-up box, splendid mediaeval/Renaissance prog-folkers Gryphon unleashed their krumhorn and bassoon wig-outs in the support slot, having just released their excellent Midnight Mushrumps album. David Harrison was impressed with them too, praising their “inventive and most effective set – highly unusual and thoughtful.”

Lou Reed

Colston Hall, 28 May 1974

For those of us who take the minority view that the Velvet Underground were awful, solo Lou Reed was always a more interesting proposition. The VU cool was gone when the bleached blond Reed pitched up in Bristol on this first date of his 1974 UK tour. Now he wanted to rock, which left many of his scenester admirers aghast. They’d disliked his concept album Berlin, for which producer Bob Ezrin teamed him up with guitarists Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter, both of whom went on to work with Alice Cooper. And they’d positively loathed the hard-rockin’ reworkings of Velvets songs on his recently released live album Rock’n’Roll Animal, which the NME’s Paul Morley dismissed as “cliché ridden hack heavy metal mutations”.

Shades firmly in place throughout, Reed rocked his way through Sweet Jane, Heroin, I’m Waiting for the Man and Walk on the Wild Side. It was “brash, noisy and violent”, reckoned Post reviewer James Belsey. “Reed danced like an atomic-powered butterfly,” claimed the reviewer, mysteriously, “nice action and heavy with it”. Belsey couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether or not he enjoyed all this (” . . . last night’s concert may have been one of the most exciting rock concerts I’ve seen. I’m still not sure.”) and reckoned the audience were similarly nonplussed: “The audience weren’t sure whether to bop along or listen to the almost suicidal vocals, but Reed gave them their cue with some rocking songs to close the show – notably the classic White Light/White Heat.”

After the Bristol show, the eventful tour continued to trundle across the UK. Three nights later, there was a riot at the Manchester Free Trade Hall after mercurial Reed refused to play an encore.

Main image: Deep Purple at the Colston Hall, 20 May 1974. Pic: Bristol Post