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.