HOW DOES IT FEEL? SLADE AND BEYOND by Jim Lea (with Daryl Easlea)

It’s no surprise that Jim Lea waited until after the other three members of Slade had written memoirs – not that he’ll have bothered to read them – before writing one of his own, but it did come as a surprise to me when, about a year ago, I learned he was writing a memoir in the first place. 

        Fiercely independent and warily protective of his privacy, Jim was the ‘quiet one’ in Slade, like George in The Beatles, John in The Who or JP in Led Zep, the member of the group who kept himself to himself, who wasn’t interviewed or photographed much, who thought being famous was a pain in the ass, who let his musical skills do the talking even if they weren’t necessarily appreciated by the world at large. He knew his value and that was all that mattered to him.

Slowly but surely, and perhaps inevitably, Jim has become exasperated by this situation. Meanwhile, Noddy Holder has been elevated to the status of national treasure, cropping up on TV chat and game shows played for laughs; Dave Hill is still out there, fronting an ersatz Slade group, promoting it for all he’s worth, unchanged from the sprightly little chap who was once trussed up like an oven-ready turkey; and Don Powell is celebrated as a heroic survivor, enduring all that a mean world can throw at him, always friendly, always with a grin on his craggy face. But Jim? Who knows? Whatever Happened To Slade?, the title of Daryl Easlea’s wonderful Slade biography, published in 2023, might just as well be applied to their reticent bass player.

How Does It Feel? goes some way to answering that question in respect of Slade’s most naturally talented yet most retiring member, their multi-instrumentalist, occasional singer, arranger and 50/50 (as credited) co-writer of all their hits bar the first, ‘Get Down And Get With It’. Here is whatever happened to Jim Lea, in bite-sized, easily digestible chunks, a strange, non-linear format for an autobiography devised by co-writer Easlea to which Jim consented, no doubt eagerly, because he invariably opts for the unorthodox. Thus, his book isn’t about Slade per se, it’s about Jim, his life and loves and music, how he felt about all that was going on around him and how he dealt with it, what he did before, during and after the group and, in spades, the immense value he places on his relationship with Louise Ganner, the pretty-as-a-picture childhood sweetheart he met aged 16 and married in 1973, the mother of his two children, still the love of his life after 53 years and to whom he wrote scores of affectionate letters while away from home, many of them reproduced in his book’s pages, kisses and all. 

Nevertheless, the book is sequenced chronologically. It is divided into five sections, beginning with Jim’s birth in 1949, and closing long after the group has ceased to function with Jim ruminating on Slade’s legacy, not least the enduring loyalty of their fans. In between are over 100 ‘chapters’, some no more than a few lines, all prefaced with the words How Does It Feel as in, to give three examples, How Does It Feel To Meet Chas Chandler or How Does It Feel To Go To America or How Does It Feel To Be Asked If Slade Will Ever Reunite. The answer to that last one, by the way, is, “Bored, and no.” 

        ‘How Does It Feel?’, of course, is the title of a song from the 1975 film noir Slade In Flame in which the group starred but which somehow fell between two stools, too dark for fans, too light for non-believers. As Easlea pointed out in his Slade biography, its lyrics “simultaneously induce pathos, despair, poignancy and hope”, adding that both Noddy and Jim (and Noel Gallagher) regard it as the best song they ever wrote and recorded, an opinion I share. As a single, it reached no higher than 15 in the UK charts, their worst showing in four years and, though its poor chart performance is unlikely to have troubled Jim, the song itself clearly still means a lot to him. 

By and large, the feelings that Jim expresses to Easlea for inclusion in his book are similar to feelings he has communicated to me over a 56-year friendship that began when I met the members of Slade for the first time in 1970, developed while I wrote about them for Melody Maker and, later, while researching my 1983 Slade book Feel The Noize!, and flourished after the group disbanded. The older and wiser Jim got, the more he told me about what really happened inside the band, sometimes with brutal honesty, unafraid to offend anyone, least of all the other three, with much of what he said diametrically opposed to the old showbiz tradition of constantly putting a positive spin on things. 

        These conversations about the inner workings of Slade began when he and I used to meet up in the 1990s, often for a pint or two in a pub near where he owns a flat close to London’s Marble Arch. I never took notes – these weren’t interviews, just informal, but not necessarily confidential, chats – but I felt he was conveying a sense of injustice and some of what he told me would subsequently inform Slade-related posts on this blog, which I launched in 2014, well after these discussions. I was somehow under the impression that this was what Jim wanted, that I was the conduit of his thoughts to the wider world, and what I wrote was occasionally confirmed by his younger brother Frank, to whom he remains close. Either way, it seemed to me that sharing some of the things he said strengthened our friendship. We even exchanged Christmas cards. 

Jim’s chief complaint was that he didn’t receive the credit he thought he deserved for his role in Slade, most especially as the group’s principal composer. Tellingly, he states in his book that he wrote “most” of ‘Coz I Luv You’, Slade’s first number one hit, but that… “Chas [Chandler] put names as Holder/Lea on the credits. I said, ‘Well hang on, I wrote most of that song’ but Chas… wanted it like that because he didn’t want me to be in front of the band… I was fuming.” Eighty pages later Jim is still fuming when he learns that Holder has told Cub Koda of the American band Brownsville Station that he wrote all the songs. “I told Nod that if he ever said that again, he’d be looking for a new bass player and a new songwriter. I was not happy.” Reading between the lines, and noting comments elsewhere in the book regarding the construction of songs, among them ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, we are left to assume that the 50/50 writing partnership was actually weighted more in Jim’s favour. Louise Lea, we are told, even wrote the couplet that opens ‘Everyday’, the perennially popular Slade ballad.

Frustrated, too, that others in the group continued to attract more attention than him, Jim would shrug when I suggested it was his own fault, that it was his decision to maintain a low profile, to avoid the spotlight, so what did he expect? He knew it was probably true. Well, How Does It Feel? represents an about-face in this regard, not only insofar as Jim has finally taken it upon himself to speak his mind for the benefit of the public, not just those close to him, but that he draws back the veil on a pop star life quite unlike what that public might imagine it to be. Not only was Jim the odd man out in Slade, he was an odd man out in the music world in general, as reflected in awkward encounters with other musicians, among them David Bowie, Ray Davies and John Bonham, his curiously offhand attitude towards success and his decision to go into psychotherapy which, in turn led to him to study counselling and psychotherapy himself. 

In 2014, Lea was diagnosed with prostate cancer, from which he has thankfully recovered, and in 2018 Holder too was diagnosed, though this wasn’t made public until 2023 by which time he, too, had recovered, equally thankfully. However, this shared misfortune does not preclude Jim from suggesting a few pages later that during chat shows Holder is economical with the facts, albeit admitting ruefully that “a tale is always far more interesting than the truth”, and condemning his former song writing partner for blaming Slade’s split on “one of five reasons [all groups split]: egos, money, drink and drugs, women or musical differences… and with Slade it was all five.” 

        “With all due respect to my old bandmate, that’s bollocks,” writes Jim. “We split because Nod had simply had enough… he wanted to diversify into DJing and acting and I felt no one was appreciating the work I was putting into crafting our records… so let’s hear less of the five ‘reasons’.”

It would be wrong to assume from these gripes that Jim’s book is all about petty point scoring. He’s fulsome in his praise for Holder’s showmanship and magnificent singing voice and also Powell’s drumming – “When we locked in together we were sticking people against the wall” – though he hasn’t much to say about Hill beyond how embarrassed he was by some of the guitarist’s OTT outfits. There’s a good deal about the Lea family, all positive, and it is touching to read about how Jim cared for his elderly parents. 

        Nevertheless, parts of the book stirred up a degree of nostalgic melancholia for me, not totally unexpected. The Slade I knew and wrote about during the first half of the 1970s was a tight, friendly, fun-loving rock and roll showband of the highest rank, masters of their stages, led by a strong, savvy and hands-on manager. It’s therefore poignant, even disheartening, to read the chapter How Does It Feel To Finish The Band. “Nod, Don, H [Hill] and I have met in public* three times since we called it a day,” writes Jim. “Twice in 1996 – one sad, one happy – Chas Chandler’s funeral and Noddy’s This Is Your Life, and in 2002 when Wolverhampton University gave us honorary degrees,” adding later that after the degree ceremony, “I couldn’t wait to leave. Nod wouldn’t have an interview done with us… I buggered off. I don’t know what the others did.” That last sentence, I thought, spoke volumes. 

        Once upon a time I thought their bond was unbreakable, their camaraderie steadfast. Now I know how it feels to be to be wrong. I must therefore advise fans that though How Does It Feel? Slade And Beyond is an essential Slade book, the most truthful they’ll ever read and as important for fans as Easlea’s biography, they’ll need to brace themselves before opening its pages. Sometimes the truth hurts. 

        The book has 301 pages, a timeline, a comprehensive Lea and Slade discography (in that order!) and is packed with pictures, including two eight-page plate sections, mostly colour, and facsimiles of letters and postcards written by Jim to Louise from far, far away. There’s also forewords by Francis Rossi and Roy Wood, and an afterword by Paul Weller. It will be published by Omnibus Press in late October. 

*Jim once told me that at least one private meeting ended in a blazing row, with doors slamming and one member, who shall remain nameless, fleeing the room. 

DAVE MARSH (1950-2026)

Dave Marsh, who has died aged 76, was amongst the first music writers I befriended in New York where I was posted in 1973 and spent the better part of the next four years as Melody Maker’s man in the US. He and I bonded over our shared admiration for The Who, but I soon came to realise that he was no sycophant and that if he felt The Who were straying from the path of righteousness – as he saw it – then he’d be the first to take them to task. Indeed, any rock or soul act that he deemed had somehow betrayed whatever values and virtues rock music was duty bound to fulfil would feel the sharpness of his pen.

In this respect Dave held true to the old-fashioned values that I believe were shared by, amongst others, Dylan, Lennon, Townshend and Springsteen; that not only was there an intrinsic morality in rock music but that its best exponents were duty bound to uphold that morality. Like these stars, Dave believed that while rock music couldn’t save the planet it did have the power to improve our world. He was the enemy of overt commercialisation, of vanity, of greed, of tastelessness and of any act that disrespected or short-changed their fans. He made a few enemies along the way but he didn’t give a shit. 

Born in Michigan, Dave co-founded Creem magazine in Detroit where he worked alongside his close friend Lester Bangs. Between them they turned Creem into an opinionated ‘must-read’ for serious rock fans, covering metal, glam and punk, never afraid to write dismissive reviews of LPs they felt were under par, regardless of the act’s popularity or status. He went on to become an associate editor of Rolling Stone, the rock and pop columnist for Newsday and in the early 1980s launched Rock’n’Roll Confidential, a subscription-only fanzine-style pamphlet that exposed dubious practices in the music industry. I was an early subscriber and even contributed a few ideas.

Dave went on to write over 20 books. His first was Born To Run, the first substantial biography of Springsteen for which Omnibus Press acquired UK rights in 1981. He wrote a second book on Springsteen, entitled Glory Days, published in 1987, his connection to Springsteen enabled by his marriage to Barbara Carr, whom I first met as a publicist with Atlantic Records in New York and who went on to co-manage Springsteen with Jon Landau. 

Dave also wrote Before I Get Old, the second in a triumvirate of Who biographies that were published in the early eighties, alongside Richard Barnes’ Maximum R&B and my own Illustrated Biography. Many fans felt the book was too pro-Townshend, with scant attention paid to the other three members of the group, but Dave didn’t care; that was the way he saw it and the way he wanted to write it. When he came to the UK to research the book we visited a few old Who sites together, among them the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford where, in February of 1964 they billed themselves as The Who for the first time, and in May of that year were joined on stage by a drummer from the audience whose name was Keith Moon. Dave and I shared a couple of pints and, together, we closed our eyes and tried to imagine the scene that night. The Oldfield was demolished in 2001.

The Oldfield Hotel where Dave and I tried to imagine the night Keith played for The Who for the first time.

        In the 1990s, when I was involved in the reissue of upgraded CDs from The Who’s back catalogue, I commissioned Dave to write liner notes for The Who Sell Out. He delivered in spades, describing it as, “The Who’s consummate masterpiece, the one work that holds together as most tightly as concept and realisation. Sell Out is the most fun of any Who album, and the one whose spirit is most tightly linked to the glorious pop insanity that psychedelia and its aftermath destroyed forever.”

Among the many other books that Dave wrote were The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, Louie Louie: The History and Mythology of the World’s Most Famous Rock’n’Roll Song, and biographies of Michael Jackson, Sam & Dave and George Clinton. His journalism was collected in Fortunate Son (1983) and his only book on the Beatles, The Beatles Second Album (2007), mercilessly skewered Dave Dexter, the clueless Capitol Records employee responsible for overseeing Beatles releases in America. Both Lennon and George Martin were also highly critical of Dexter, of whose work Dave described as “genuinely stupid”.

Many bands felt the sharp tip of Dave’s pen, among them Led Zeppelin – he was particularly critical of John Bonham’s drumming – Queen, Journey and, most notably, Kiss. Then again, he could be critical of his favourite band, The Who, writing of Meaty Beaty Big And Bouncy in 1972: “They really let us down this time. I don’t know if anyone else resents it, but I do. Why reissue things for the second (third) time on an album when you have such an incredible backlog of material? C'mon Peter: who won't get fooled again?” I disagreed with him on that one and can recall an evening spent arguing with him over its merits at JPs bar on New York's Upper East Side. On another night in that same bar my friend Glen Colson and I joined a heated discussion involving Dave, Barbara, Jon Landau and Bruce, the topic ‘the greatest British hit singles’. 

        Wrote Bruce on his website today: “[Dave] was a true Rock’n’Roll Lifer. He was soulful, intelligent, heartfelt, opinionated, bruising and often fantastically argumentative. Watching Jon Landau and Dave drive each other crazy over some arcane piece if music would make my day.”

Dave had been ill for some time and I was told recently by a mutual friend that he was losing his sight. I hope to hell he never lost his hearing and that during his final days Barbara cranked up the speakers in their Connecticut home and played Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’, Dave’s all-time favourite song, at top volume.

RIP old pal. 

VICKI WICKHAM (1939-2026)

Vicki Wickham, whose death aged 87 was announced at the weekend, was everywhere that mattered in music during the sixties and seventies, her finger always on the pulse, rushing around to meet someone, to be somewhere, to do something. Bursting with energy, she was the pioneering spirit behind Ready Steady Go!, where the weekend started, still the yardstick by which rock and pop on TV is measured. She more than anyone introduced the UK to the music of Tamla Motown, wrote for several music magazines, most notably Melody Maker, and managed successful acts. She was even the co-writer of the lyrics to a number one hit, her great pal Dusty Springfield’s ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’ in 1966. 

In 1971, on my first visit to New York, by then Vicki’s adopted home town, she steered me into a situation that enabled me to see The Who on US soil for the first time, and we remained good friends ever since, most especially after I moved to New York to become Melody Maker’s US editor in 1973 and remained in the city for three years. Partly this was because Vicki was an early supporter of The Who, occasionally part of their extended entourage and, for a period in the 1970s, headed Track Records New York office. She first encountered the group at the Marquee Club in 1965, and very quickly befriended their co-manager Kit Lambert. Shortly after its release in May 1965, The Who’s second single, ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ became RSG!’s theme tune. 

        “Vicki, bounding from the control room [at RSG!] to the studio, beaming, laughing and enthusiastic, tall and beautiful, but a little scruffy with it, like a highland pony,” wrote Pete Townshend in Andy Neill’s definitive book on RSG! “She [and RSG! director Michael Lindsay-Hogg] both conveyed the sense that we were, all of us, breaking every rule of television. I felt they were breaking societal rules as well, and of course that is now a given.”

        “Of all the groups on Ready Steady Go!, The Who most typified what the show was all about,” Vicki told US writer Dave Marsh for his Who biography Before I Get Old. “RSG! was instant pop music. It was every trend before it happened, and things came and went super-fast. It was about youth and their dreams and aspirations and had nothing to do with thinking about tomorrow… The Who was all of that.”

        Vicki was born on 23 March 1939 in Newbury, Berkshire, and raised in the village of Inkpen, the only child of a farmer and nurse. At 18, she moved to London to attend Langham Secretarial College. Her first job was with publishing house Cassell & Co in the City. A succession of dead-end jobs followed before she found work as a production assistant on BBC Radio Light Entertainment. She worked on all types of programmes ranging from Roundabout, Easy Beat, Jazz Club and Saturday Club to semi-feature documentaries. Two years later she switched to ITV, to Associated-Rediffusion, becoming secretary to Elkan Allan who would become the producer of RSG! and it was while Allan was dictating a letter about what would become RSG! that Vicki piped up and demanded to become involved.

        Involved she most certainly became. Music mad, switched on and out at clubs all night, Vicki befriended all the groups that appeared on the show, The Beatles and Rolling Stones among them, and she was an early and uber-enthusiastic promoter of black music. In 1965, she was instrumental in putting together an RSG! offshoot special featuring several Tamla Motown acts, The Supremes, Martha & The Vandellas, The Temptations and The Miracles. “The wonderful Vicky Wickham had convinced her boss to do a one-hour TV special,” said Motown founder Berry Gordy. “The Sound Of Motown was a big moment for us because it brought our music and artists to the UK’s national TV audiences for the first time.”

        Vicki’s crusade to promote black acts continued until the show went off the air, with Wilson Pickett, Irma Thomas, the Exciters, Arthur Alexander and Don Covay also appearing. When Doris Troy arrived in London, not only was she immediately booked but Vicki threw a welcoming party for her at Blaise’s club in South Kensington where Vicki first caught sight of the all-female group that were to play an important role in her future. This was Patti LaBelle and The Bluebelles whom she would book for RSG! and go on to manage. Nona Hendryx from the group became Vicki’s lifelong partner. 

        In the meantime Vicki wrote for several music magazines, starting with Fabulous, then Disc & Music Echo and finally MM. Covering The Who’s prestigious performance of Tommy live at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House in 1969, she wrote in MM: “At the end of the first show, over the incessant clapping, cries for more, shouting and applause coming through the back-stage speakers, I heard Pete say to Kit Lambert as he went back out for an encore: ‘You really book us on some bum gigs, man!’

        “They then did another twenty minutes, climaxed by Pete banging his guitar down on stage. It broke and he hurled it into the audience. Later some very small girl was hugging it like a baby as she made for the subway homeward bound!

        “The Who's performance on both shows was superb. I haven't seen them perform for some time and although I hadn't forgotten how dynamic they were, they topped all memories. Roger, his bare chest glistening, has come through as having a great body, and taken over and surpassed where Jim Morrison left off image-wise. At times he's like an angel, the lights haloing his hair against the background: then like a devil, meanly throwing the mike towards the audience, up in the air, almost to Pete and then back to neatly catch it. And Pete, in his white boiler-suit, attacking his guitar. He leaps feet above the stage, lands and goes down on his knees, to emphasise a passage. But perhaps it's Keith who steals the stage. He's everywhere. He's all over his massive drum-kit, contorting, leaping, his sticks soaring, twirling high in the air and being caught to thunderous applause. He ‘mimes’ behind Pete, he pours with sweat, he enjoys himself, and his drumming is out of sight. And then there's John. At first hardly noticeable, dressed entirely in black merging with the shadows of the amps, but as you listen the bass comes pounding through. Four people — the most exciting group in the world.”

        I wish I’d been there. 

        Vicki went on to manage Dusty Springfield and she co-wrote a Dusty biography Dancing With Demons with Penny Valentine, published in 2012. At various times she also managed Holly Johnson, Marc Almond and, very briefly, Morrissey. In 2013, Vicki was awarded the OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to music. 

        RIP Vicki. 

(Some of the information in this post was gleaned from Ready Steady Go! – The Weekend Starts Here by Andy Neill, published by BMG in 2020. The photograph at the top of this post was scanned from Rock's Back Pages website, where many of her music press articles can be found.) 

BRYONY DUNN & THE FOREST, Fieldfest, July 25

Further evidence that the popular music I wrote about in Melody Maker over 50 years ago transcends generations hit me with a pleasing splash of harmonic momentum yesterday as I listened to Bryony Dunn & The Forest, a quartet – singer/guitarist, keyboards, bass and drums – who, I was told, live on Leith Hill, an idyllic woodland a few minutes’ drive from our home between Guildford and Dorking where I used to walk our dog Shiloh. 

Sisters Bryony and Gina sing and play acoustic guitar and keyboards respectively, the latter switching to harmonium to create the ominous Nico-like drone that opened their set at Fieldfest, now an annual event in our little village. Bass player Catherine Lawyer adds a top range harmony vocal, swinging the long neck of her Fender-like guitar, all the while dancing around and occasionally jumping up and down, a bit punkish, which belies their obvious influences, Seventies-era Fleetwood Mac, with a strain of country, maybe what The Bangles might have sounded like if they wore cowboy hats. Or, then again, with their long white skirts, puckish stage presence and songs about the environment, the granddaughters of the Incredible String Band. 

I don’t know the name of their (male) drummer and the lack of an electric guitarist, as seen on their website, suggests they weren’t at full complement at Fieldfest. Nevertheless, this didn’t matter because it was their vocal attack that impressed me the most, a surprisingly fat and full choral landscape that, if fortune favours their calling, is likely to become their distinctive trademark. Much is made of how remarkable brothers can sound when they sing together – for starters think Everly, Wilson, even Gallagher – but sisters too, like Este, Danielle and Alana in Haim, can also offer up something quite special, be it in unison or harmony. 

        Much of the group’s material was original, about eight songs in all, but they offered up two covers, Sheryl Crow’s ‘All I Wanna Do’, complete with rap-like verses, playful and unexpected, and ‘Gold Dust Woman’ from Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 eponymous LP that introduced the world to Stevie Nicks and Lyndsey Buckingham. “My favourite group,” admitted Bryony which surprised me not one jot. 

For all that the familiar aroused the crowd, many of whom sat beneath gazebos to shield themselves from the sun, I was more intrigued by their original songs, most of whose titles I didn’t catch but which can no doubt be found on their six-song debut EP, Soft As Ash, released late last year. Some were bouncy pop, others mellower like ‘My Love’, a song of longing, and ‘Never Trust A Cowboy’, a dire warning along the lines of Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson’s ‘Mamas Don’t Let You Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys’ that displayed their country leanings.  

I wish them luck. 

This photograph was taken from the web.
The inferior one at the top of this post was taken by me.

BARROWLAND: THE INSIDE STORY OF GLASGOW’S BELOVED BALLROOM by Alison Irvine

Books about venues invariably dwell on the artists who have performed there, even though the reality is that they have spent a fraction of the time on the premises compared to the regular staff. The act arrives after their road crew, probably do a sound check, hang around in the dressing room and play the gig, spending at most four or five hours there, perhaps less if their overnight accommodation is close at hand and they can nip back to ‘rest’. The staff, however, are there night after night, arriving hours before the doors open and remaining on site to clear up the mess afterwards, so it stands to reason that their experiences are more profound than those who take the applause, no matter how famous they might be. 

        Alison Irvine understands this. Had her love letter to Barrowland, Glasgow’s much-loved palace of entertainment, been written by a specialist music writer then it would have been act-centred, like several other venue books on my shelves. Alison, however, is not a rock writer, though she could probably make a decent fist of becoming one if she tried; in fact, she’s a novelist whose forte is creating fiction from within the environments she knows and loves. Her book about Barrowland is certainly not fiction – but it is about an environment she came to know and love as she spent time there, with a far greater emphasis on the men and women who have worked there, many for years, and a host of regular patrons, than on the acts that have drawn the crowds. 

So, after a preliminary piece about how Simple Minds brought Barrowland back to life by filming their video for ‘Waterfront’ at the venue in 1983, we are introduced to Tam who runs the burger bar, and a couple of regulars, Sharon and Pammy, who love to dance, thus establishing the theme that runs throughout the book: that is it is the staff, the barmen and women, the crew, the security, the cloakroom attendants, the house photographer, the whole lot of them from general manager Tom Joyce, who contributes a foreword, to the cleaners, that have made Barrowland what it is to the people of Glasgow. 

As such, it’s a book about the Barrowland community as much as the building or the music. Famous now for its yellow neon sign, it was opened in 1934 for ballroom dancing, and an early photograph shows couples with men in uniform, their partners in below-the-knee skirts, the band in evening dress, a far cry from the hands-in-the air, crammed throng watching The Pogues at the book’s conclusion.  

        Adjacent to the Barras street market with its 120 stalls, the building was largely destroyed by fire in 1958, after which it was rebuilt, and from 1983 onwards it has operated as Glasgow’s premier concert venue, capacity 1,900, famed also for its sprung dance floor. Voted ‘best music venue in the UK’ by Time Out magazine, Alison Irving investigates just why so many staff and fans have taken the venue to their hearts, teasing out behind the scenes stories. Granted an Access All Areas pass, her mission was to discover how Barrowland ticks, and she has succeeded, interviewing everyone with a story to tell, staff and fans alike, occasionally offering fly-on-wall, sometimes heart-rending, accounts of situations and circumstances often overlooked by less skilled observers.

Originally published in 2019 as a limited edition under the title Barrowland Ballads, this 2025 edition has an additional seven chapters that bring the Barrowland story up to date, following its closure for Covid in March 2020 and reopening in May 2021. It has 328 pages and is illustrated with colour photographs throughout. 

PUB ROCK by Mark Wilkerson

Compact but packed with all you really need to know, Pub Rock by Pete Townshend and Thunderclap Newman biographer Mark Wilkerson is one of 18 similarly-sized titles in Bloomsbury’s Genre 33 1/3 series, all of them handy guides designed to educate the curious, probably those too young to have been around when the particular genre emerged, often briefly, into the mainstream.

Oddly for a trend that was unambiguously British, the first group to be identified in the music press as pub rockers came from San Francisco and were named after an American breakfast staple served in US diners: Eggs Over Easy. The British connection was enabled by their manager Peter Kauff who just happened to be the US partner of Chas Chander, the man who discovered Jimi Hendrix and who in 1971 was riding high on the success of his next clients Slade. Arriving in London in the spring of that year to record an album produced by Chandler, Eggs Over Easy took lodgings in Alma Street in Kentish Town, a short walk away from the Tally Ho, a pub that featured jazz most nights of the week. 

An element of subterfuge thus surrounded what Mark Wilkerson identifies as the first ever pub rock gig, Eggs Over Easy at the Tally Ho on Monday, May 3, 1971. They’d told the landlord they were a jazz band and the well-connected Chandler rounded up a decent crowd for what was traditionally the slowest night of the week. “Doubtless surprised by the distinct lack of even the slightest hint of jazz in the set but nonetheless pleased with the turnout and unmistakable quality of the Eggs’ performance, the Tally Ho’s owners gave the band a weekly residency,” writes Wilkerson. “The first domino had fallen. By October, Eggs Over Esy were performing four sets a week at the Tally Ho, with jazz relegated to just one night. By sheer accident, Eggs had tapped into a glaring need in the London music scene: accessible, direct roots rock – the anti-prog.”

The rest is history and Wilkerson’s book goes on to relate how other bands, initially Bees Make Honey, Brinsley Schwarz and Ducks DeLuxe, took up the baton, and how among the genre’s fans were Declan MacManus (17) and John “Woody” Mellor (19), soon to change their names as punk pushed pub rock aside. 

It helped that the music press was on the side of the pub rockers, and that before long a host of belting bands found themselves loosely connected to the genre, among them Dr Feelgood, Graham Parker & The Rumour and Kilburn & The High Roads who featured Ian Dury on vocals. Within a year the scene had shifted to the Hope & Anchor in Islington where promoter Dave Robinson, Brinsley’s manager, became the genre’s leading promoter. Soon he and Jake Riviera would launch Stiff Records, by which time pub rock was becoming a memory. 

Pub rock wasn’t really a style of music, just a scene, and it encompassed many actual genres, country, R&B, roots Americana, soul and even rock’n’roll fifties style, but it was the key bridge, both musically and chronologically, between before and after punk. Mark Wilkerson’s pocket book, 142 pages long, might not be the last word on the subject but it’s a more than useful guide, easy to digest and – like pub rock itself – utterly without airs and graces. 

MANCHESTER MUST DANCE by Mike Pickering

Mad about Manchester, Man City and dance music, not necessarily in that order, Mike Pickering carved a life for himself that wasn’t in line with what his dad expected from him. He hit the jackpot eventually with M People, having learned how the music business worked the hard way, moving on up through Factory Records and the Hacienda nightclub from gopher to DJ to golden boy. Along the way he got into a few scrapes, befriended just about everyone who mattered in Manchester music and observed it all from a position slightly left of centre, enabling him to offer a refreshingly honest appraisal of the scene that produced Joy Division, New Order and Happy Mondays and, hovering just outside of his orbit, The Smiths, Stone Roses and Oasis. 

Though uncredited on the front cover, the writer Paul Morley had a hand in fashioning Pickering’s story onto the page, presumably acting as a ghost-writer for the credited author who, as he readily admits, left school at the earliest opportunity with little in the way of academic credentials. Thankfully, Pickering’s down-to-earth temperament and highly-tuned bullshit antenna has reined in Morley’s tendency to bedazzle with words, and the result is a good-hearted book that rings true in every way. 

        Pickering was only nine when he saw The Beatles in Stockport on November 20, 1963, one month before I, aged 16, saw them, in Bradford but, like me, the sight and sound of the Fab Four at the height of Beatlemania, sound-tracked by screaming girls, seems to have done something to the wiring in his brain. Thereafter, conventional life wasn’t for him and, much to the regret of his conformist dad, he ingratiated himself amongst the Factory crowd, tagging along with his great pal Rob Gretton, who managed Joy Division and subsequently New Order, wryly observing the antics of visionary oddball Tony Wilson who introduced Manchester to the Sex Pistols. Punk liberated Pickering and, although he seems allergic to guitar groups, there was no turning back, nine-to-five jobs were off the agenda, travel – to Holland and Greece – beckoned and when he discovered dance music a new and better life was within his grasp.

        Much of his book focuses on the inner workings of Factory Records and the Hacienda, all fascinating stuff, especially the idiosyncratic way in which Wilson runs his shop and the ways in which those who work for him react to his oddball decisions. The rise and fall of the Hacienda is a story in itself and up in his DJ booth, hands aloft, Pickering plays ‘Ride On Time’ by Black Box and sees it all, the joy of dancing, the lure of ecstasy, the gangland violence that accompanies it and the ham-fisted approach of Manchester’s police. It all makes for grim, albeit riveting, reading, not least the consequences when his fame as a DJ leads to his name being used to promote “illegal” raves of which he is completely unaware.

        Woven throughout the book is Pickering’s long, close and occasionally combative relationship with fellow Man City fan Rob Gretton, which makes chapter 47 – A Rob By Any Other Name – a tribute to his great pal that tugs at the heart strings. The fortunes of Man City are similarly treated, their current standing as one of the world’s great football clubs treated with a measure of incredulity after the disappointments of earlier times. It ends, as you would expect, with the formation of M People and the discovery of Calvin Harris, by which time Pickering has become a roving A&R man for Sony, a role for which he is singularly well qualified, not that he’s really comfortable working for a major label. He’s left Manchester behind but his heart still belongs there. 

        Manchester Must Dance has 51 shortish chapters over 376 pages, and forewords from Martin Fry, Johnny Marr, Noel Gallagher and Calvin Harris, with additional chapters from Marr and Gallagher that extol Pickering’s integrity, 16  pages of colour photographs, playlists and a good index. It’s a must for anyone who was there and an illuminating read for those, like me, who weren’t. 

LONDON FALLING by Patrick Radden Keefe

Regular visitors to my Just Backdated blog will have noticed that these days many of my posts are reviews of music books, and as a result the impression is probably given that I read nothing else. Although two soon-to-be-read music books – one about Barrowlands, the Glasgow music venue, and another about pub rock – sit on the coffee table in our front room right now and I’ve just started another, Manchester Must Dance by Mike Pickering, which is well promising, I have read two non-music books in past month too. 

        The first was London Falling, an engrossing account of the death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler who either fell or was pushed from the balcony of Riverwalk House, a luxury apartment building that just happened to be opposite MI6’s HQ by the Thames in Central London whose cameras caught his fall. Zac led a double life and had somehow convinced various persons of doubtful morality that he was the immensely wealthy son of a Russian oligarch, and when his story began to unravel he found himself between a rock and a hard place. The book’s author, Patrick Radden Keefe, originally wrote the story for New Yorker magazine, and has turned it into a book with the help of Zak’s grieving mum and dad. 

        London Falling is a gripping tale of corruption, greed and criminality, that the Met seem curiously unwilling to investigate deeply. Keefe also wrote Empire Of Pain, an award winning investigation into the behaviour of the billionaire Sackler family whose Purdue Pharma company was largely responsible for America’s opioid epidemic. I read that three years ago and can recommend it as another fact-that-reads-like fiction tale that exposes immense greed and corruption. 

        The other non-music book I have just read – for the second time – is Memoirs Of An Invisible Man, by HF Saint, and second time around was equally as enjoyable as the first. That was almost 40 years ago now, picked up as a paperback at Gatwick airport when my plane to Spain was seriously delayed and read superfast over the next 12 hours. I think I gave that copy away. I had more time to savour the novel this time around and laughed just as hard at the droll humour, especially a sex scene, initially occurring in pitch darkness. When someone wanders in and switches on the light, however, the girl involved freaks out since the man to whom she has been making love appears not to be on top of her after all. Or anywhere else. Meanwhile, she lying there, legs apart. Think about it. 

        The hero of the story, name of Nick, is in the wrong place at the wrong time when a scientific experiment in a laboratory goes wrong and when the US forces of law and order realise what’s happened he becomes a fugitive. As before, I found myself willing Nick on against the nasties who are out to capture him and turn him into a government spy. It’s a terrific thriller, dripping with suspense, and at the same time a useful practical guide on how to survive in New York if by some stroke of ill-luck you are rendered invisible. Unlikely I know, but this time – just in case – I won’t give it away.

        Memoirs Of An Invisible Man was turned into a dodgy film starring Chevy Chase and Daryl Hannah, but the book is far better. Its author, HF Saint, earned plenty of money from it and became a recluse, writing no further books.        

        Now, back to Mike Pickering. 

THE ROLLING STONES – by Bob Spitz

Led by multimillionaires Sir Michael Philip Jagger and the now abstemious Keith Richards, The Rolling Stones are as solid a fixture in the British psyche as the Royal Family, the Houses of Parliament and 100-year-old naturalist Sir David Attenborough. This was not always the case, however. Indeed, for the first 15 or so years of a career that seems eternal, they were looked upon by the forces of law and order as desperadoes and misfits, a menace to society, a shocking manifestation of undisciplined adolescents whose long hair, scruffy clothes and jungle music was an affront to polite civilisation. “Lock ’em up,” they cried and, by golly, they almost succeeded.

This doorstopper of a biography by US writer Bob Spitz is therefore a timely reminder of those times, essential reading for anyone who became a Stones fan during the last 40 years or so, which I’ll wager is the vast majority of those who during that time have packed stadiums around the world and paid top dollar to watch Jagger and Co strut their stuff on stages large enough to accommodate the many offspring Jagger, Richards (and Brian Jones) have sired between them. For this generation of fans, that tongue and lips logo is as universal as the curvy contours of a Coca-Cola bottle, the cowbell intro to ‘Honky Tonk Women’ as recognisable as any national anthem and The Rolling Stones a byword for a dependable night out of rollicking rock and roll. 

Spitz has worked very hard to document the lives and times of the Stones and, like most biographers of rock performers who’ve stayed the course, his focus is almost exclusively on the early years. By the halfway point of this 690-page book we’re still in the 1960s, on the tour that led up to Altamont, not yet a quarter into the group’s lifespan; 150 pages later, in 1975, Jagger is vainly defending the cover of Black And Blue; 100 pages after that we’ve reached the acknowledgements followed by 90 pages of end matter. All of which demonstrates how Spitz has prudently concluded that once the Stones became rich, touring the world every three or four years – seven such tours are helpfully itemised in one paragraph on page 586 – to amass vast fortunes, their story becomes repetitive, even dull; far better to concentrate on the shenanigans that came before, the naughty years on which their legend was built.

        This, of course, is anything but dull and neither is the book. At its heart are the many chapters that cover the period between 1965 and 1975, which relate the extraordinary highs and lows of the Stones’ saga: fan mania that rivals The Beatles; pissing on garage forecourts; the Redlands and other drug busts; the court appearances; Jagger’s blustery relationship with Marianne Faithfull; the Brian/Anita/Keith love triangle; Jones’ downfall and death; the financial squeeze after falling out with US co-manager Allen Klein; Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street – the great triumvirate of Stones’ masterworks; the nightmare of Altamont and its repercussions; Richards’ debilitating heroin addiction; tax exile in France; and, finally, back on the road as a stadium-filling juggernaut. 

        Quite how Jagger, firmly in charge after Klein and early manager Andrew Oldham are dismissed, found the reserves of mental stamina to deal with it all while writing songs and fronting the group on stage boggles the mind. Spitz covers all these high jinks in great and often illuminating detail, a roller-coaster ride through the Stones’ devil-may-care years that makes this central section of his book a page-turner of the highest order, most especially when recounting the mischief that occurred at Nellcôte, Richards’ hideaway on the French Riviera that became a flophouse for every ne’er do well for miles around.

        Before and after all this, the momentum isn’t quite as recklessly debauched. Assembling the group from the pool of London’s young blues devotees took time but, unlike The Beatles, there was no Hamburg or Liverpool to hone their chops on stage for three years before fame beckoned. Once the right five had found each other, it happened quite quickly, as did the notoriety stoked by Oldham who was brilliant at PR but out his depth controlling this bunch of strong-willed characters. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts keep their noses clean for the most part, maintaining a low profile during the mayhem; Jones, acknowledged early on as the best musician in the group, is fragile, losing his way, an accident waiting to happen; and, once they started writing songs together, Jagger and Richards take control, each reliant on the other though no prizes for guessing who was the most unreliable, at least until he weaned himself off heroin following that 1977 Toronto bust. Mick Taylor, who never really fitted in, comes and goes. Ron Wood is a far better fit, musically and mentally. WAGS come and go. 

        An awful lot is crammed into the final two chapters. The penultimate finds Jagger and Richards at loggerheads, the bone of contention the former’s stab at a solo career, and for a while the group’s future is in serious doubt. Meanwhile, they lose Ian Stewart, the Rolling Stone who doesn’t get his photograph taken, Watts goes off the rails, and Wyman hits the headlines through his courtship of 13-year-old Mandy Smith whom he would marry when she turned 18. Exhausted, he leaves the band four years later.

        The final chapter concertinas the period from around 1993 to the present day, 30+years, and closes, rightly, with the death of Charlie Watts and a moving report of the tribute night at Ronnie Scott’s organised by his great friend and fellow jazz enthusiast Dave Green. A brief epilogue finds the author attending a 2024 Stones show in Los Angeles. “Mick and Keith were both eighty years old,” notes Spitz.

        The book’s only flaw is that it is written with an American accent, almost certainly a reflection of its intended market. While the size of America – where in some parts the weekly grocery shop involves a day-long round trip – can perhaps explain how Dartford is described as “around the corner” from Ealing (they’re 65 miles apart), and Cheltenham is “nearby” to Guilford (about 100 miles apart), the vast majority of reviews quoted are from US media, and the UK – the country of the Stones’ birth, after all – doesn’t get much of a look in after the group has decamped to France. As an example, their barnstorming 2013 Glastonbury appearance doesn't merit a mention. Still, this is a minor quibble in what is the most substantial Stones book I’ve read since Keith Richards’ Life in 2010. 

        As stated, the book has 690 pages, plus two 16-page picture sections, includes lengthy source notes and a decent index. The front cover features a magnificent portrait of Jagger and Richards by Norman Seeff, albeit from the era of Mick Taylor, who is on the reverse alongside Wyman and Watts. I think Woody or Jones belong there myself. 

PAUL SIMON – A QUIET CELEBRATION, London Palladium, May 18, 2026

If a top of the range, precision engineered Rolex wristband could sing, play guitar, compose songs, had a sense rhythm and a spoonful of soul, its name would be Paul Simon. He and his band were as precise as a Swiss timepiece at the London Palladium last night, yet there was nothing sterile about the concert. Perhaps acknowledging that at 84 he is on his last lap, Simon brought an element of simple humanity into his performance, a warmth communicated by his hand gestures and introductions to songs, his stature acknowledged by a respectful audience that only once broke out into song themselves, the “lie-la-lie” chorus from ‘The Boxer’, the penultimate song of the evening, and as this well-known, nearly universal melody echoed harmoniously around me, I knew with absolute certainty that there was nowhere else in the world I would rather be last night than seat O42 in the stalls of this 116-year-old theatre. 

The concert was divided into two unequal halves. For the first 33 minutes Simon, soberly dressed in a dark suit, and his band performed Seven Psalms, his 2023 album, in its entirely, seven separate movements uninterrupted with a recurring theme in which Simon defines his view of ‘The Lord’, uncertain at times, elliptical elsewhere, though describing his ‘Lord’ as a “welcome to a stranger” seems to me like a mild rebuke of the anti-immigration policies of the current White House. Although a repeated guitar chord change sounds a bit like the intro to ‘Feeling Groovy’, with the possible exception of ‘My Professional Opinion’, these songs, or psalms, don’t swing, but there’s an intimacy to them that reviewers have rightly compared to David Bowie’s Blackstar, his final statement. In Simon’s case the circumstances are underlined by the knowledge that he is now partially deaf in one ear and in 2019 caught Covid: “Broke me like a twig in a winter gale”, he sings. He, and we, are lucky he’s still here. 

The 11-piece band, of which more later, are rehearsed to fine detail, each note played or percussion tool hit arriving at the precise moment, almost like clockwork, and, as on the record, Simon is joined for two of the pieces by his wife Edie Brickell. When it is over – “It’s time to come home” is the final line – everyone rises and bows. That wouldn’t have been out of place at the Proms, I thought as the house lights came up to announce a 20-minute interval.  

In 2018, in what was billed at his farewell tour, Paul Simon filled London’s Hyde Park, tens of thousands cheering a set that included all the songs, all the hits, that all the people wanted to hear. This time, maybe the last time, he has restricted himself in London to four much smaller shows, two at the Royal Albert Hall and two at the Palladium, and the far more intimate setting enables him to select songs from his vast catalogue with greater care. There are some he can’t leave out (though there was no ‘America’, ‘Mrs Robinson’, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, ‘Mother And Child Reunion’ or ‘You Can Call Me Al’) but others performed during the lengthier second set saw a deep dive into his repertoire, a reflection perhaps of the songs he wanted to play as opposed to songs he feels an obligation to play.

Having changed into more casual attire, Simon opened the 17-song second set with ‘Graceland’, followed by ‘Slip Slidin’ Away’, ‘Train In The Distance’ and ‘Homeward Bound’, every one acknowledged after the opening bars. I noted subtle variations in his phrasing, and here and there his band of superb instrumentalists offered fills above and beyond the recorded versions. Simon, mostly seated, played acoustic guitar for almost all the songs, the two guitarists in his band, Mark Stewart and Gyan Riley, deferring to him when necessary, but the reality was that he didn’t need to play at all. When he did, however, it was clear that age has in no way diminished his skills as an instrumentalist. The others in the band – Mick Rossi on piano and percussion, Jamey Haddad on percussion, Matt Chamberlin on drums, Bakithi Kumalo on bass guitar, Andy Snitzer on reeds, Jamey Haddad on percussion, Matt Chamberlin on drums, Nancy Stagnitta on flute, Caleb Burhans on viola and Eugene Friesen on cello – interjected deftly, soloing with brilliance occasionally, though none were introduced by name aside from Kumalo, whom Simon noted was the last surviving member of the group that performed and toured with him during the Graceland era. 

I was charmed by two songs from the often unfairly overlooked Hearts And Bones album: ‘The Late Great Johnny Ace’, on which images of Johnny Ace, JFK and John Lennon were projected onto a screen at the rear, and ‘Renee And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War’, inspired by the caption to a photograph of the French painter and his wife that, as he explained, Paul saw in a book and thought was a good title for a song. I don’t believe this dreamy, slightly surreal song, long a favourite of mine, has been performed live before.

Two selections from Rhythm Of The Saints, ‘Spirit Voices’ and ‘Cool Cool River’, offered plenty of opportunity for the vast array of percussion on stage to be utilised, and Edie Brickell joined Simon for ‘Under African Skies’ from Graceland. ‘Me And Julio’, on which Simon seemed to me to drop an octave here and there, inspired some clapping from the audience that soon petered out, and the first set of encores opened with ‘Darling Lorraine’, another stage first, that traces the arc of a love affair in occasionally graphic detail. The audience sat spellbound until the mood was broken with ‘Something So Right’ and ‘Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover’. 

After that emotionally draining reading of ‘The Boxer’ everyone left the stage apart from Simon who picked up his acoustic guitar to welcome back his old friend the darkness, his first hit, recorded with Art Garfunkel just over 62 years ago. ‘Sound Of Silence’ conveys the simple message that better communication amongst mankind might create a better world, that human relationships are deteriorating in the era of mass communication, of television and telephones. Written long before the advent of computers and mobile phones, let alone AI, that message seems even more pertinent today. Slow down, Simon seems to be saying, slow down and communicate with one another, and then, only then, will we be saved from unwelcome by-products of the 20th – and now 21st – Century. This whole concert, I felt as I left the theatre, was a triumph of communication. 

(The photograph at the top of this post was lifted from Paul Simon's own website; the bottom one by Lisa Pettibone.)