In October 1967 I saw blues guitarist
Freddie King perform here with
Chicken Shack - who were both his opening act and backing band. Freddie himself is long dead - killed by a heart attack in 1976 according to Wikipedia at the age of 42. Chicken Shack continues to this day, fronted as ever by guitarist
Stan Webb. Their keyboard player back in 1967 was
Christine Perfect, who subsequently married
John McVie, joined
Fleetwood Mac and moved to LA in the early 70s. The rest is legend.
The gig was rammed and took place in the upstairs room at the
Manor House pub - after which the nearby tube station was named. Today, a sign is offering that first floor venue on leasehold as a standalone nightclub. It was something of a shock to see that the main pub premises is now a
CostCutter supermarket. Similar oblivion has overtaken nearly all the other legendary
London venues of the 1960s -
the Marquee,
Speakeasy,
Scotch of St James,
Crawdaddy,
Bag o’ Nails…
Even the last survivor - the venerable
100 Club, slap bang in the heart of central London - has only just been reprieved thanks to a last minute intervention by
Sir Paul Macca. It makes me wonder whether there’ll be similar campaigns to save the
Camden Barfly,
Lexington,
Buffalo Bar,
93 Feet East,
Dublin Castle and
The Old Blue Last in another 40 years’ time, fronted by the likes of
Sir Mike Skinner or
Sir Pete Doherty.
We’ll never know. Well, you might - but I won't.
Like the magnificent Freddie, I’ll very definitely have left the building by then...
Shot on my phone through a random store window somewhere in Manchester last Autumn. VIPs, or maybe even celebrities, are obviously expected any moment - who knows who they’ll turn out to be ? And why are there three silver security guards ? There again, who cares ? My mate and I didn’t - we stomped off in search of somewhere to have dinner instead of waiting to find out.
Reblogged from thiswamps:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
“The Scunthorpe problem occurs when a spam filter or search engine blocks e-mails or search results because their text contains a string of letters that are shared with an obscene word. While computers can easily identify strings of text within a document, broad blocking rules may result in false positives, causing innocent phrases to be blocked…”
Props to THISWAMPS for posting the Wikipedia link and to The Socialist Way for the photo…
The Lincolnshire Farmer’s family.
Great anecdote from Cousin Rich: “I went to see a farmer last week with his wife and two kids. They needed to Talk about Father’s will – in his eighties and proper poorly. Son had been working the farm for forty years, daughter working as a teacher. We chewed the fat for a couple of hours and brought things out into the open.
At the end of it all I said: ” Just keep talking this way. It’s not about tax, it’s not about farming. It’s just about what you all think is fair. You need to do it now Mr C. or otherwise it’ll be too late.” At which point Ma C said: ” That’s exactly what your grandad said around the table to my family in 1958. Just the same. That’s lovely, is that. You’re just the same as your Grandad, getting us talking like we should.” I thought I’d done well.
The daughter walked me to the door, shook my hand and said to me: ” Thank you very much for coming. You’re hilarious. You needn’t think you’re going to get paid for telling us the fucking obvious.”
My cousin works in his family’s law firm and is a fund of sharply observed local stories. Keep wishing he’d write a book – or at the very least start blog of his own.
Last Christmas my brother, sister and I headed back to village where our family lived in the late 60s, to take Dad’s ashes to the churchyard where Mum had been buried 39 years earlier. By bizarre chance we’d discovered that the back part of our old house was currently available for holiday lets and we were able to rent it for the weekend.
From this rear window the view hadn’t changed in four decades – it was like catching a sudden glimpse back into childhood. It’s also the window outside the door of Grandma’s bedroom where she died in the night of November 21st 1969 – three months after her beloved second husband. Their grave, too, is up in the village churchyard.
Car broke down on my way across London last Monday. Had to pull into the nearest garage to get a new fanbelt and alternator fitted, which left me with a couple of hours to kill in Haringey, a part of town I first visited as a young man in 1973.
One Wetherspoons pub and one tiny run-down internet cafe later, I wandered back down Turnpike Lane to the garage to pick up the car. Got out the phone and snapped some garish offerings in a couple of shop windows along the way… 
