Rock & Roll Museum *2 - "Brighton"

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The Rock and Roll Museum includes a sizeable archive of photographs of musicians taken from 1976 − 1980 from which the eight pictures shown here have been selected. I lived in Brighton ( well Hove actually) from 1974 − 1980. I moved there straight from school into a job as assistant stage-manager at the Palace Pier Theatre for the Summer season with Music Hall at The Palace a veritable “end of the pier” show and which was indeed the last production to ever grace the boards of the Victorian theatre with its silver coloured turrets standing a third of a mile from the shore at the far end of the main pier which remains standing to this day. The theatre has sadly gone and even in 1974 music hall or variety shows were long past their sell-by date and the pensioners to whom such entertainments mainly catered were too thin on the ground to sustain the two shows daily seven days a week for which a hard working assistant stage-manager was paid the Equity minimum wage of twelve pounds.

I augmented my wages by working in the Victoria and Albert bars at the front of the theatre and stayed in a hippy household in Hove where a diet of brown rice, good hashish, Grateful Dead and Captain Beefheart was all included for about six pounds a week. In addition to the usual duties of calling performers from their dressing rooms, operating an ancient lighting board and shifting scenery I assisted the aged star Sandy Powell with his conjourer’s routine and performed under the lime-light as stooge for Rubber-Neck Nat Jackley who had made a brief dim impression on a new generation as “Happy Nat” the tour-guide in the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour”. By mid-August Brighton had had enough of the “traditional sea-side entertainment” and scenery and performers, crew and all decamped (being the operative word) to Great Yarmouth for the final weeks of the season at empressario Jack Jay’s Windmill Theatre.

Ian Loughler

I bid a sad farewell to the pier with its Dodgems, Ghost-train, Helter-Skelter and tattooist and youthful new-ager that I now was ingested a chunk of Siberian Red Ginseng to fortify me for the long trip up to the Norfolk coastal resort.

Midnight and The Lemon Boys

There didn’t seem to be much of a future in music-hall so I signed up for a year foundation course at Epsom School of Art where I learned the basics of photography, video, silk-screen and took an interest in conceptual and performance art, I developed the usual lively art school social life and an abiding passion for the Velvet Underground then by 1975 moved back to Hove to begin a three year fine art course at the Brighton  art college; “Combined Studies” was a pioneering course which catered for fine art students whose main concerns did not include painting, sculpture and printmaking.

Dick Damage at The Alhambra

Along with new approaches to art around that time music was undergoing seismic changes; Jefferson Airplane converting to a starship was not enough; an entirely new generation was picking up guitars, Operation Julie, a massive undercover police operation was closing the lid on the pandora’s box of LSD that had liberally supplied cheap light shows to the hippy culture and cheap amphetamines once more became the drug of necessity for those young people who wanted to go out at night to trip the light fantastic.

Dick Damage and The Splinters

A swarm of new bands appeared often along with their audience powered by the powder and speckled blue pills. Rock and roll of the 50s and 60s had been fuelled by the speed supplied by the legitimate pharmaceutical industry; in postwar America there were as many as 17 million prescribed uppers by their doctors and Britain had as usual followed suit. The mod and skinhead cultures had notoriously cruised down to Brighton on their parents’ pep pills and now you could with some accuracy divide the new music into Punk that were speeding and New-Wave who probably weren’t.

The Vandells at Hangleton Festival

Between 1976 and 1980 my favourite Brighton venues were a pub on the sea-front called The Alhambra where local bands invariably played and the Crypt in the basement of The Resources Centre - a tiny, cramped Cavern like space where I saw Crass and The Buzzcocks and which provided rehearsal space. Notable among local contenders were The Piranhas, The Depressions, The Vandells, The Tecniques, Laughing Gas, Wrist Action, The Chefs (later Helen and the Horns), Dick Damage and The Splinters, Peter and The Test-Tube Babies, The Hot Gates, Smeggy and the Cheesey Bits, (later King Kurt)  Joby and The Hooligans, The Ijax All-Stars, The Lillets, Ian (The Hat) Loughler, Midnight and The Lemon Boys, The Poison Girls, Billy Richards and probably a whole load more. The Piranhas I believe came closest to “making it big” and had a successful single “Tom Hark”. All of the above were marvellously entertaining, exemplifying all that was best in the local music scene and trod a line somewhere between Punk and New Wave with a measure of Reggae, Garage and Rock and Roll.

The Pirhanas at The Crypt

In 1980 I moved to London and the era ended for me. The Sallis Benney Hall at the Art College and Sussex University along with The Top Rank Suite, The Dome and The Brighton Centre hosted bigger Internationally known acts. The Rock and Roll Museum will attempt to do justice to this provincial wave of talent in coming issues. Included here are eight photographs …. many more are promised over the coming months. I can be contacted via Professorro@Gmail.com.

Wrist Action