Gigging in the North East 1965-1972. A personal perspective by Roger Smith
Although the main theme of Ready Steady Gone is the northeast music scene from the mid sixties to the early seventies, I sometime come across a losely related subject that I can’t resist writing about. This one dates back to…
It’s a chilly January night in January 1966 – Saturday the 29th to be precise. My band, Jazzboard, has just finished performing at the West End Club in the Fenham area of Newcastle. We persuade our manager to take us…
Whilst driving home last week after a short trip to the northeast I turned on the car radio and caught the end of a very familiar song. It took a few seconds for me to realise that the song was…
I recently bought the February 2018 edition of Uncut Magazine, which includes an article about ‘The Great Lost Venues of Britain’. Uncut has written about 50 of the UK’s greatest lost venues chosen by the magazine’s staff and readers. Included…
For those post war baby boomers who were in their teens and twenties in the 1960s and who lived within striking distance of Newcastle, nights out in the city couldn’t have been much better. With its abundance of clubs and…
This year is the 50th anniversary of the ‘Summer of Love’. The ‘Hippy’ phenomenon had been around in the USA and Europe since the mid sixties but 1967 was the year that the media focused on this particular underground youth…
Some time ago, I posted a blog on this site about my favourite year – 1966. If you are familiar with Ready Steady Gone you will be aware that the music and stories covered on the site relate mainly to…
Newcastle University’s weekly publication, the Courier, carried advertisements for the Club A’Gogo between 1964 and 1968. Here are some of those adverts (copied from The Courier Archives ).
In 2011 I was present at a reunion of people involved in Newcastle’s club scene in the 1960s. The rendezvous took place at the Jazz Café on Pink Lane, a venue owned and run by the eccentric, charismatic Keith Crombie…
“DEE THE HUNTAH! DEE THE HUNTAH!” If you were in a northeast band for a couple of years between 1970 and 1971 or you went to gigs where local bands were playing you would have heard those words shouted hundreds…