rather like the village post office of yore. And in the days when ‘packing plastic’ was a job description and the only cash dispenser known to Camden man was a fruit machine which paid out once in a blue moon, local landlords cashed regulars’ cheques after the banks had shut. The Dublin was - and still is - a cog in the local community, so Alo was understandably protective of his domain. He didn’t hand over the stage to any old Tom, Dick or Harry.
Our slightly less than 100 per cent accurate description of our musical tastes seemed to have done the trick because Alo took us through the Dublin’s red-lit, mock-Tudor bar to the back room, which was used for functions and the occasional bit of live Irish music. I remember thinking it was pretty damn impressive, especially the stage, which was made up of sheets of hardboard laid across stacks of beer crates. Up to this point, we’d really only played a few private parties and this room felt like the real deal.
Alo and his wife, Peggy, like many other Irish couples in the area, held their wedding reception in this very room back in 1966 and, when they took over the pub eight years later, it was a tradition they continued. The venue looked as if it could hold about 150 people at a pinch, which felt like Wembley to us at the time. ‘Well, what d’you think, lads?’ asked Alo. ‘Yeah, it’s OK,’ we replied, trying to look nonchalant. We had, at last, fallen on our feet, we thought, but there was still one difficulty to overcome to prevent this breakthrough from being ‘for one night only’: our repertoire.
The spectre of the embellishment of our playlist that we’d fed Alo haunted me somewhat, given that our act owed more to Prince Buster and the Skatalites than to Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen. And as for country and western, well, I’d only heard of Tammy Wynette, and I certainly didn’t sound anything like her. Moreover, I wasn’t convinced the Dublin Castle was the right place to attempt a cover of her most famous song. I doubt I’d have got much further than ‘Sometimes it’s hard to be a . . .’ before the locals would have made their views all too clear.
It was obviously a worry and reminded me of a story I’d heard Mike Harding, the Yorkshire comic and folk-cum-country-and-western singer (who once graced the charts with a track containing the immortal lyric ‘It’s hard being a cowboy in Rochdale’), tell about Bernard Manning who thought he’d booked a Native American sword-throwing act called the Cherokees to appear at his Manchester club in the 1960s, only to discover too late that they were, in fact, a five-piece beat band from Leeds. The second the band took to the stage and started blasting out their latest (minor) hit, an incensed Manning dashed to the fuse box and switched their amps off. When the group’s leader remonstrated with Manning, demanding that he turn the power back on because they were the ‘famous’ Cherokees, big bad Bernard said, ‘Oh yeah? Well, Custer’s just come back, so you and your mates can booger off!’ Would our act provoke a similar response from Alo Conlon, I wondered?
Fortunately, our fears were unfounded: we may not have been jazzers, and we weren’t remotely country and western, but Alo knew he was on to a winner and thankfully decided to stand by our band. A couple of months later he gave us a Friday night residency on the strength of that first gig, which had packed the place out.
A little way into that residency we got what I think was our first review. It was in Melody Maker on 1 June 1979 and it describes the audience as being made up of ‘England’s entire phalanx of pop culture during the last 25 years . . . huddled together in a room the size of your average khazi.’ The reviewer then proceeds to list the band members and I’m described as ‘a big lad called Suggs who sings’. Give the writer a Pulitzer Prize, I thought after reading such an articulate and fulsome appraisal of my good
Our slightly less than 100 per cent accurate description of our musical tastes seemed to have done the trick because Alo took us through the Dublin’s red-lit, mock-Tudor bar to the back room, which was used for functions and the occasional bit of live Irish music. I remember thinking it was pretty damn impressive, especially the stage, which was made up of sheets of hardboard laid across stacks of beer crates. Up to this point, we’d really only played a few private parties and this room felt like the real deal.
Alo and his wife, Peggy, like many other Irish couples in the area, held their wedding reception in this very room back in 1966 and, when they took over the pub eight years later, it was a tradition they continued. The venue looked as if it could hold about 150 people at a pinch, which felt like Wembley to us at the time. ‘Well, what d’you think, lads?’ asked Alo. ‘Yeah, it’s OK,’ we replied, trying to look nonchalant. We had, at last, fallen on our feet, we thought, but there was still one difficulty to overcome to prevent this breakthrough from being ‘for one night only’: our repertoire.
The spectre of the embellishment of our playlist that we’d fed Alo haunted me somewhat, given that our act owed more to Prince Buster and the Skatalites than to Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen. And as for country and western, well, I’d only heard of Tammy Wynette, and I certainly didn’t sound anything like her. Moreover, I wasn’t convinced the Dublin Castle was the right place to attempt a cover of her most famous song. I doubt I’d have got much further than ‘Sometimes it’s hard to be a . . .’ before the locals would have made their views all too clear.
It was obviously a worry and reminded me of a story I’d heard Mike Harding, the Yorkshire comic and folk-cum-country-and-western singer (who once graced the charts with a track containing the immortal lyric ‘It’s hard being a cowboy in Rochdale’), tell about Bernard Manning who thought he’d booked a Native American sword-throwing act called the Cherokees to appear at his Manchester club in the 1960s, only to discover too late that they were, in fact, a five-piece beat band from Leeds. The second the band took to the stage and started blasting out their latest (minor) hit, an incensed Manning dashed to the fuse box and switched their amps off. When the group’s leader remonstrated with Manning, demanding that he turn the power back on because they were the ‘famous’ Cherokees, big bad Bernard said, ‘Oh yeah? Well, Custer’s just come back, so you and your mates can booger off!’ Would our act provoke a similar response from Alo Conlon, I wondered?
Fortunately, our fears were unfounded: we may not have been jazzers, and we weren’t remotely country and western, but Alo knew he was on to a winner and thankfully decided to stand by our band. A couple of months later he gave us a Friday night residency on the strength of that first gig, which had packed the place out.
A little way into that residency we got what I think was our first review. It was in Melody Maker on 1 June 1979 and it describes the audience as being made up of ‘England’s entire phalanx of pop culture during the last 25 years . . . huddled together in a room the size of your average khazi.’ The reviewer then proceeds to list the band members and I’m described as ‘a big lad called Suggs who sings’. Give the writer a Pulitzer Prize, I thought after reading such an articulate and fulsome appraisal of my good
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