self. All of us are said to look ‘vaguely threatening’ but, as the commentator astutely observes, ‘this proves not to be the case’. Later, the journalist correctly adjudges me ‘a natural showman’ (‘show-off’ some might say) and ends on the following note: ‘By the third encore, half the punters were jumping on tables waving clenched fists, and the other half were reeling about the glass-strewn floor, jolly pissed.’ It is a great social document of a time it is very hard to remember clearly.
Alo Conlon played an important (if inadvertent) role in launching our career and once he’d got a taste for putting on new bands there was no stopping him, because over the years the Dublin Castle has become one of the most influential venues on the circuit and a regular haunt of the A&R brigade on the lookout for new talent. I doubt whether anyone would’ve been more surprised back in the day by the pub’s cutting-edge reputation for music than the man himself.
Sadly, as I sit here tapping away on my Remington Royal during the coldest, wettest January I can remember since the last, news has reached me of John Aloysius Conlon’s death. Just a few months ago he was given a lifetime achievement award at the London Irish Centre in Camden Square and deservedly so. I’ll be raising a few Guinnesses to the man from Mayo in a few days, as I gather a big send-off is being planned in his beloved Camden Parkway. But in the meantime, here’s to you, Alo.
Having taken the Dublin Castle by storm, it was time to give some other venues the benefit of our company, we thought, the first of which was a particularly memorable bash at the celebrated Hope and Anchor pub in Islington at 207 Upper Street. It’s a four-storey, red-brick Victorian boozer with elegant arched windows and columns, but it’s remarkable for its role as a launch pad for the careers of many bands rather than its architecture.
Although the venue in the pub’s basement was even smaller than the Dublin Castle’s function room, the Hope and Anchor was London’s leading pub rock venue in the mid-70s. Pub rock came to be mocked somewhat in the music press, which, looking back now, seems strange because it was really just an umbrella term for a huge variety of groups who’d taken music back to grass-roots venues. There was no discernible musical genre as such, but the one thing the pubs did have in common was that they were giving an opportunity to bands who were an antidote to the mega-bore groups of the day. Some notable live acts such as Dr Feelgood and Ian Dury’s Kilburn and the High Roads were among the pioneering pubsters who paved the way for the punk explosion that followed.
The origins of Stiff Records can also be traced to the Hope and Anchor. Stiff’s co-founders, Jake Riviera and Dave Robinson, formed the label in a small recording studio the latter had built in a room above the pub in 1976. Both were movers and shakers on the pub rock circuit and bands and performers such as the Damned and Elvis Costello, who were associated with Stiff, began playing at the Hope as punk started to take off.
Putting on punk bands could be a risky undertaking and forced the Hope’s management to batten down the hatches. At the height of punk the basement bar was a lot more spit than sawdust, and chicken wire had to be tacked up to protect staff from flying bottles. Any ego you might’ve had as a performer had to be left well and truly in the van because the backstage facilities at the Hope made the Cavern Club look like the Palladium. The dressing room was filled with a load of kegs and buckets of beer slops, which gave it the exact appearance of a dray room, which, funnily enough, it was, and our equipment had to be lowered through a trap door in the ceiling. The primitiveness of the Hope was perfect for the pioneers of punk and the Clash, the Sex Pistols and the Stranglers played many of their earliest gigs in that tiny basement bar. The heyday of punk was
Alo Conlon played an important (if inadvertent) role in launching our career and once he’d got a taste for putting on new bands there was no stopping him, because over the years the Dublin Castle has become one of the most influential venues on the circuit and a regular haunt of the A&R brigade on the lookout for new talent. I doubt whether anyone would’ve been more surprised back in the day by the pub’s cutting-edge reputation for music than the man himself.
Sadly, as I sit here tapping away on my Remington Royal during the coldest, wettest January I can remember since the last, news has reached me of John Aloysius Conlon’s death. Just a few months ago he was given a lifetime achievement award at the London Irish Centre in Camden Square and deservedly so. I’ll be raising a few Guinnesses to the man from Mayo in a few days, as I gather a big send-off is being planned in his beloved Camden Parkway. But in the meantime, here’s to you, Alo.
Having taken the Dublin Castle by storm, it was time to give some other venues the benefit of our company, we thought, the first of which was a particularly memorable bash at the celebrated Hope and Anchor pub in Islington at 207 Upper Street. It’s a four-storey, red-brick Victorian boozer with elegant arched windows and columns, but it’s remarkable for its role as a launch pad for the careers of many bands rather than its architecture.
Although the venue in the pub’s basement was even smaller than the Dublin Castle’s function room, the Hope and Anchor was London’s leading pub rock venue in the mid-70s. Pub rock came to be mocked somewhat in the music press, which, looking back now, seems strange because it was really just an umbrella term for a huge variety of groups who’d taken music back to grass-roots venues. There was no discernible musical genre as such, but the one thing the pubs did have in common was that they were giving an opportunity to bands who were an antidote to the mega-bore groups of the day. Some notable live acts such as Dr Feelgood and Ian Dury’s Kilburn and the High Roads were among the pioneering pubsters who paved the way for the punk explosion that followed.
The origins of Stiff Records can also be traced to the Hope and Anchor. Stiff’s co-founders, Jake Riviera and Dave Robinson, formed the label in a small recording studio the latter had built in a room above the pub in 1976. Both were movers and shakers on the pub rock circuit and bands and performers such as the Damned and Elvis Costello, who were associated with Stiff, began playing at the Hope as punk started to take off.
Putting on punk bands could be a risky undertaking and forced the Hope’s management to batten down the hatches. At the height of punk the basement bar was a lot more spit than sawdust, and chicken wire had to be tacked up to protect staff from flying bottles. Any ego you might’ve had as a performer had to be left well and truly in the van because the backstage facilities at the Hope made the Cavern Club look like the Palladium. The dressing room was filled with a load of kegs and buckets of beer slops, which gave it the exact appearance of a dray room, which, funnily enough, it was, and our equipment had to be lowered through a trap door in the ceiling. The primitiveness of the Hope was perfect for the pioneers of punk and the Clash, the Sex Pistols and the Stranglers played many of their earliest gigs in that tiny basement bar. The heyday of punk was
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