Rathbone's Ramblin'

[Bob Jefferson]

Welcome back rathbone. We missed you. Carry on.

[Epykat]

Wow! Rathers, you've not emigrated to Kenya and forgot to tell us after all........ I was almost making arrangements to visit just to see what you'd left me

[rapunzell]

Rathbone! Hello again

[rathbone]

My but it's cold and lonely on this forum these days.

It reminds me of 1963.

It began to snow just after Christmas and it carried on snowing until March. Blizzards kept sweeping the country. Arthur’s Seat was completely covered in snow. If you looked directly at it, it disappeared into the white of the sky. First there was a mountain, then there was no mountain, then there was.

These were the worst winter conditions since 1741. In England the River Thames froze over. It became so cold that in places around the country even the sea froze. Ferry services across the Channel were abandoned because of ice floes. Roads and railways were blocked, telephone lines brought down, and some villages were left cut off for several weeks. Factories closed down and there were regular power cuts when all the electricity went off. The snow was so deep farmers couldn’t get to their livestock, and many animals starved to death. The football season was so badly disrupted that a special Panel was set up to produce hypothetical results for un-played games in order to keep the League functioning.

With only the fire in the living room, our house was absolutely freezing, with the windows covered in ice on the inside where our breath had frozen against the glass. My Mum kept the oven lit in the kitchen to help keep the house warm.

[rathbone]

As so few people seem to come by here anymore, I've decided that I'm going to have to bring my own friends with me.

In 1963 my best friends were Neil and Donny. Neil came from Craigentinny and went to Leith Academy. We met through Young CND meetings in those heady days of protest marches. Donny came from Bingham and was in the same year as me at Portobello High.

It was Neil’s idea that we went to the Ideal Home Exhibition in the Waverley Market.

There’s a fortune tae be made”, he promised. “All we’ve got tae dae is tae buy a copy of the News and then find the man.”

So we bought a copy of the Evening News and three concessionary children’s tickets. We went down the big flight of stairs into the market. In front of us was a sea of stands and exhibits culminating in a whole house at the far end which had been built inside the market. It seemed that there were blue stars hidden on the stalls and if you managed to find them there was a prize. What we were really interested in, though, was the mystery man who would be patrolling the exhibition. If you were seen to be in possession of a copy of that day’s paper and were lucky enough to be picked, he gave you a hundred pounds.

Needless to say, we wandered around the stands all day without finding a single blue star, nor were we stopped by anyone from the Evening News, despite waving our copy of the paper in the face of every likely suspect. What we did get, though, was a lot of free samples - cheeses on a wee stick, quiche on a wee stick, different kinds of cake, all on wee sticks. It was a great day out.

[rathbone]

Neil, Donny and I would meet every Saturday morning at the top of Leith Walk. I would pay my mum’s hire purchase on the three piece suite at Drages in Leith Street and then we would walk up to Woolworths to buy pick’n’mix. Then it would be the library in George IV Bridge so I could change my library books. After that there was a whole range of possibilities.

Fortunately all three of us had similar interests. Some weeks we would go to the museum. Some weeks we would climb Arthur’s Seat or Calton Hill. Sometimes it was looking for Covenanters in Greyfriar’s Churchyard. Another time it was looking for rare orchids in the greenhouses at the Botanic Gardens.

Looking back, the museum was probably the best. In 1963 the Royal Scottish Museum was still as it was when the victorians built it. The rooms were crammed with exhibits. All of the exhibits were in mahogany and glass cases. We used to go up to the top floor where few people ever ventured. One of the rooms was devoted to gem stones and we would compete to see who could find the most valuable. Another held the lepidoptery and insect collection in row after row of wooden drawers which you pulled out to view the specimens. We would have competitions to find the most beautiful butterfly or the most revolting creepy-crawly.

[rathbone]

The Paperback Shop in Charles Street became a regular feature on our Saturday jaunts. Charles Street was opposite the McEwan Hall in Bristo Place. It formed one side of what was known as Parker's Triangle. These were all torn down in the early 1970s. Outside the shop was hung a rhinoceros head, which meant the shop was generally known as the Rhinoceros. The stock blended left wing literature, the Beats, and the New Absurdists with more regular things. There were lots of strange magazines and newspapers. The very first one I bought was a copy of the New Departures poetry magazine edited by Michael Horovitz. The people who went there weren’t the ones you saw in Thins or John Menzies.

Quite quickly we noticed messages pinned up on the walls about The Howff and The Traverse. The Howff was a club in the High Street where folk singers performed. Some of the names playing there were familiar to me from my Uncle George’s record collection: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee; Pete Seeger; Big Bill Broonzy and others. There were also names we didn’t recognise such as Bert Jansch and Archie Fisher. One Saturday Neil, Donny and I went along to The Howff, but couldn’t get in because we were too young, but at least now we knew where it was.

[rathbone]

Most of the people in Young CND were students. We had become friendly with one of them called Alan and used to go to his flat in York Place.

The flat was an attic in the roof space. From the windows you could look clear across the Forth to the hills of Fife. Alan shared it with two other students whose names I can’t remember. Like him they were ‘big hairies’ with beards, and wore arran jumpers and jeans. There were always girls around the flat as well, whom I took to be their girlfriends. People were always coming and going.

It was hard to say which room was which. They all had mattresses on the floor which were used as much as settees as they were beds. People seemed to sleep where ever they wanted to. There were pictures of people like Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe on the walls along with CND posters and all the doors had been painted bright red. There was no television, just a radio and a record player. There were books by authors I had seen in the Rhinoceros shop. People like Ferlinghetti and Kerouac.

Every time we went there the guys were sitting around on the mattresses drinking wine and playing guitars. To thirteen year olds it was incredibly exotic. In our eyes Alan and his flatmates were the Edinburgh Beats. Their lives seemed genuinely bohemian. With hindsight it was just a typical student flat.

[rathbone]

Like most students at that time Alan and his mates went regularly to The Howff and other folk clubs. Though we couldn’t get in ourselves, Neil, Donny and I now got a lot of feedback about what was going on. When they heard people that they really liked, such as Tom Paxton or Hamish Imlach, the guys would learn the songs and teach them to us.

Then the day came when they told us that the person who owned The Howff with Jim Haynes, Roy Guest, had run away with the takings and that The Howff had closed down. The guys moved on to Buffs folk club in Albany Street and the Waverley at the top of St. Mary’s Street. Buffs was so called because it was located in a building owned by the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes. It was open only on Monday nights. The Waverley was open six nights a week. Apparently there was a great new group at the Waverley called The Corrie Folk Trio.

[rathbone]

Donny and I had both entered that stage of puberty where the glands go wild. I was lucky, I just had a few spots, but Donny had developed full blown acne and was really self-conscious about it. Neil, on the other hand, whizzed through and out the other side of the hormonal changes. He was now approaching six foot tall and muscles were beginning to fill out the gangly figure. He had a head of thick dark hair and was now shaving every day. The slight shadow heightened the sharpness of his features. I seemed to be growing in regular proportion everywhere except my head. My ears were far too big and my teeth were definitely too prominent. My hair was the opposite of Neil’s. It was dirty blonde, thin and couldn’t hold a parting. Donny seemed stubbornly unable to grow any taller, but he was becoming quite stocky. He had developed hairy legs and toes. I realise now that he was turning into a Hobbit. The three of us must have looked quite amusing as we marched along the Promenade to Fun City.

[rathbone]

Sometimes we used to go along the beach beyond the amusement arcade, past the Penny Bap, which was a huge rock which stuck out of the sand at Seafield, and on to Leith Docks. The Penny Bap was later swallowed up by the extension to the docks and the sewage works.

The first time we climbed over the fence into the docks it had been an adventure.

“It’ll be okay”, Donny would say. “Nobody ever stops you. I know an other boy who does it all the time.”

He never actually identified who this other boy was, but he was right, no-one ever did challenge or question why we were there.

Once we got past the Penny Bap, it was up the embankment and on to the railway, which ran along the back of the Bond warehouses in Salamander Street until we came to the goods station next to the Edinburgh Dock grain elevator. Then it was just a case of over the fence, dodging through the alleys between the huts around Edinburgh Dock and then along the back to the Albert Dock. That way we avoided the dock offices in Tower Place.

The various docks were very patriotic. As well as Albert, there was the Victoria Dock, the Prince of Wales Dock and the Alexandra Dry Dock. If we were lucky we would see the St. Ninian sail. The St. Ninian was the ferry which travelled every week from Leith, first to Aberdeen, then to Orkney, Shetland and back to Leith.

Our favourite destination, though, was the West Old Dock. It was here that the merchant navy training ship, the Dolphin was moored. The Dolphin was an old, timber war ship with what looked like a big portacabin on the top and two high masts. It was used for teaching cadets, deck boys and ships’ cooks and up to ninety of them would be living on it at any one time. We would sit on the quay all afternoon and watch them training on the deck and climbing up and down the mast.

[rathbone]

There wasn’t much of a music scene in Portobello. Apart from guys at school we would occasionally notice someone playing a guitar on the beach. From time to time the local hairy folksinger, Robin Williamson, would be spotted.

Like the rest of the country, in Portobello there weren’t many places for young people to get together either. There were occasional dances in the Old Parish church hall. These weren’t usually much cop, but we did go along to one because we liked the name of the group. They were four school kids called The Hipple People, who played covers of merseybeat songs. I thought they were quite good, but then they were the first pop group I had ever seen playing live.

The Hipple People were David Valentine - vocals, Jim Marshall - lead guitar, Sandie Lax - rhythm guitar, John Cross - bass, Ian Nichol - drums

They were formed at Broughton School in August 1963 Their first gig was at Portobello Youth Club.
Sadly Ian Nichol died on 15 July this year, which was one of the things which prompted this series of reminiscences.

The Hipple People can be seen and heard here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zofozFa6NJ4

[rathbone]

The usual place for everyone to get together was Arcari’s ice-cream parlour,the home of the famous 99. It was tiny and got very crowded with kids after school finished in the afternoon. There was a good juke box. We would sit in there for hours and discuss the records that people played. It would be an exaggeration to describe Arcari’s as a coffee bar, or us as Mods, but that is what we thought we were. On Friday nights at 6 o’clock, the weekend started here.

In the newspapers we were seeing more and more coverage of these kids in England who were calling themselves ‘The Modernists’. The papers contracted that to ‘Mods’. Most of the coverage was negative. According to the media the Mods spent all their money on clothes and were out dancing every night to something called Rhythm and Blues music. That made them alright in our book.

What the papers did do was to make us aware of what was happening in the rest of the country. Now we all knew that to be ‘in’ guys had to have a smooth, sophisticated look that meant buying tailor-made mohair Italian suits with narrow lapels, button-down collar shirts, thin ties , wool or cashmere jumpers and hand made leather winkle pickers. It was depressing. We were lucky if we could afford a pair of Clark’s desert boots.

Above all the Mods had scooters. We had never seen a scooter in Portobello. Public transport stopped relatively early at night, so having a scooter would allow the Mods to stay out all night at dance clubs. Scooters were chosen over motorbikes because the body panelling concealed the moving parts and made them cleaner and less likely to stain your expensive suit with grease. Wearing army surplus parkas protected the suits from mud and rain. Italian scooters were preferred due to their clean lines, curved shapes and gleaming chrome. We fantasised about rows of gleaming Vespas lined up in the High Street outside Arcari’s.

[rathbone]

Over Easter Mods and Rockers invaded Clacton. The newspapers went mad. None of us in Arcari’s knew where Clacton was. In fact more than 1,000 youths had turned up in the resort. It was described as an invasion. Most of them slept rough on the beach. The weather was foul. Roving mobs of cold, bored teenagers swarmed over Clacton’s pier, smashing windows, overturning cars and stealing alcohol. Pistol in hand, one youth used a big storefront window for target practice. Another was tossed over a 20ft. bridge. Clacton police called for reinforcements from neighbouring towns and fought pitched battles with the teenagers, many of whom were armed with axe handles and furniture legs. Finally the bobbies restored order and 120 kids were arrested on charges ranging from burglary to assault.

[rathbone]

It was announced that The Beatles were going to play the Regal in April. Donny’s sister, Janice, queued up for hours in Lothian Road to get tickets, two for her and her mate, two for Donny and me.

There are some really good pictures of the queue here:
http://www.edinburghgigarchive.com/page2.htm

The Beatles concert was on 29 April. We were up the back of the stalls and didn’t hear a single song because of the constant screaming. Girls were crying and they hadn’t even seen the Beatles yet. When they did come on stage the screaming just got louder. But the point was They were there, right in front of us. We could just about tell they were real, because they were moving about.

[rathbone]

All three of us were now getting interested in girls. The problem was to get the girls interested in us.

Firstly that meant looking cool. We had to find a way of dressing right without having to spend much money. We had to improvise. Finally we decided that we would all dress the same. Up on Princes Street C&A sold black gabardine raincoats with patch pockets. We each bought one. They went down to our knees. In Leith Street there was a shop that sold black knitted ties. We bought three. The shoe shop on the corner of Regent Street sold cheap loafer shoes with crepe soles. We bought them in black. Together with our white school shirts and black school trousers we thought we looked the business.

Next we had to find somewhere to go in order to chat up girls. We settled on The Milk Bar. This was just off Princes Street, on the way to St. Andrews Square bus station. It was a shiny chrome, no frills type of place with self service, and a rather spartan layout. You perched precariously on bar stools at formica-topped tables. On Fridays it was usually packed. Apart from milk shakes and coffee, you could get rolls and sandwiches. My favourite was the sardine roll. This was a large soft finger roll, laced with butter and a filling which was two parts mushed-up sardines and one part vinegar. Inevitably I would end up with oily, smelly hands. Perhaps it was no wonder that we did not have much success chatting up the young ladies.

[rathbone]

One Sunday, sitting in the York Place flat, Alan dropped a bombshell. He and the other guys had all finished their courses now. After graduation they would be splitting up and going away. Alan, himself, was going to London. The night before the flat broke up they had a party with what seemed to be an endless succession of wine bottles. I must have had a drink out of every one of them. It was the first time I got properly drunk.

“So, what are we going to do now?”, I lamented on the back seat of the No. 12 bus going home.

“Dinnae be daft”, Neil said. “Now we start going tae the Waverley Bar.”

The following Friday the three of us got into our gear and headed up the Royal Mile to the Waverley. The guy behind the bar looked us over.

“Aye lads,” he said, “And what can I do for you?”

“We’re here for the folk club”, Donny replied.

“Well maybe you should come back later”, the bar man smiled. “Maybe in two or three years. Ye’re underage. Away ye go.”

He indicated the door. We took our time retreating from the bar.

“Oi”, he shouted. “Ah telt ye tae go. Skedaddle.”

[rathbone]

That summer Neil, Donny and I spent much of our time getting thrown out of pubs before we could even order a drink. It never occurred to us that we must have looked like a juvenile comedy act, dressed as we were in our matching raincoats and string ties. It also probably explains our singular lack of success in chatting up women. At the time we blamed Donny’s acne.

After a while we started going to Cephas. This was a youth club in the basement of the church in Shandwick Place. Cephas was unlicensed so we could only drink coffee, but it did have people playing folk music. Later on it changed its name to the Triangle Folk Club. The women we tried to talk to remained unimpressed.

[rathbone]

Someone in Cephas told us that you could get in to folk nights at the Crown bar in Bristo Street even if you were under age, so we went along there. The Crown was right in the heart of the University area and was full of students. With a fair amount of apprehension we approached the bar.

“Aye, it’s okay if you’re only here for the music and if you buy a coke.”

With the coke it came to two shillings each. Finally we got to hear Hamish Imlach for ourselves. Everybody in the room was wearing jumpers, so the following week we ditched the raincoats and wore jumpers as well. People started to talk to us, but still not the women. One night Robin Williamson, from the beach at Portobello, came in with a guy with a limp who played the banjo. This was Clive Palmer. They played a short set and left.

Having had success at the Crown, we thought we would try the Waverley again. This time we were a bit smarter. We went along with our jumpers on and only Neil went up to the bar. Because of his height and his stubble he looked older than he was. Provided we stuck to soft drinks we were in. Again Hamish Imlach was a regular. So were Bert Jansch and the Corrie Folk Trio with Paddy Bell.

[rathbone]

By now Rhythm and Blues music was making it on to the charts. In London important clubs, devoted just to it, had opened in Richmond and at the Marquee in Soho. There were regular items in the NME. A place called the AdLib disco had opened. This was a club where people danced exclusively to records. It became the main meeting place for the so-called ‘in’ crowd. It was only a matter of time before something similar opened in Edinburgh.

That something turned out to be the Top Storey club which, as its name implies, was located on the top floor of a tenement, in Leith Street. In those days Leith Street had a terrace along the top of the shops, a bit like the one in Victoria Street. You reached the Top Storey along the terrace. It was just above Burton's the Tailors. (These buildings were all demolished and replaced by the St. James Centre in 1973.)

One Friday we decided to see what it was like. We started off in The Milk Bar as usual, but instead of heading along Princes Street to Cephas, we went the other way, round the corner, to the Top Storey. It was a hefty climb, three steep flights up from the terrace. While we were making our way up the stairs the bouncers were throwing people down. People were having to squeeze to get past. With hindsight the whole place was a gigantic fire trap.

[rathbone]

The Top Storey had formerly been a snooker hall and was quite big. It was packed. I was surprised to recognise people from school, Paul from the rugby team and Raymond. It had never occurred to me that other people I knew might like this kind of music.

The music policy was a mixture of records and live groups. Right at the beginning the records were R&B of the variety played by groups like the Kinks and the Animals. Gradually these changed with the DJ introducing Motown, until by 1965 the sound was predominantly soul.

The resident band was The Beachcombers. That year they ruled the Edinburgh music scene. They had a mad drummer called Eccles who wore Buddy Holly glasses and jumped around a lot. His real name was Kenny McLean. Mike Cummings was the vocalist with Sandy Alexander on bass and Dave Anderson on rhythm guitar. What made them a great band, though, was their lead guitarist, Davie Paton.

“He’s younger than us, you know”, Raymond said, with awe.

I looked again at the boy on the guitar.

“No, he’s no”, I said. “He cannae be.”

But he was. He was fourteen.

Paton had seen an advertisement in the Evening News which said “Edinburgh’s top band require lead guitarist”. He played a wee bit of guitar so he thought he would give it a go, but thought they might think he was a bit young, so he got his sister to ‘phone up for him. At the audition, thanks to some flashy equipment he had borrowed from his sister’s boyfriend, he got the gig.

Davie Paton went on to be a member of the Bay City Rollers in their early days and then found great success with the group Pilot who had several big hits in the 1970s, including ‘January’ and ‘It’s Magic’. Then he became a regular in Elton John’s band for several years. As a session musician he appears on literally dozens of the CDs I own.

For me, it was Eccles who stole the show. Like Keith Moon of The Who, he literally threw himself into the drums. One week he was described by a newspaper as the wildest drummer this side of Africa. He was very chuffed with that, cutting the article from the paper and showing it to everybody, until it was in tatters.

After that first night we went to the Top Storey every week.

[rathbone]

The down side of the Storey was that it sucked you into the fashion trap and while we could get away with the raincoat and tie outfits a couple of times, it wasn’t something we could maintain for long.

Neil, Donny and I were never ‘Mods’. We couldn’t afford to be. But there were plenty of people who went to the Top Storey who did try to live the myth. The fashions were constantly changing and it was really difficult to keep up and be ‘in’.

The gent’s outfitter downstairs in Leith Street who had sold us the ties was really astute and began to cater for the kids who frequented the club five floors above him. Top of the range were two-tone mohair suits. These were a special mix of wools which looked green from one angle and ice-blue from another. They cost a fortune, but I can remember at least a couple of people wearing them.

In the middle range were Fred Perry tennis shirts. These had to be the genuine article with the little laurel wreath embroidered on the left breast. They were worn with cardigans, tight check trousers and cuban heel boots.

Those of us who were bottom of the financial heap wore gingham shirts from Woolworth with Levi jeans and desert boots. The Levis were the old ones with all button flies. You bought them a size too big and then sat in the bath until they shrunk to fit you. The only claim to be cool that Neil, Donny and I had rested on the Adidas trainers, black with three white stripes, which we had bought in the shoe shop on the corner of Regent Street.

Our ambition was to buy Harrington jackets. These were casual suede jackets with a zip front and elasticated cuffs. The Harrington was named after Rodney Harrington, the character played by Ryan O’Neal in the T.V. soap, Peyton Place. We never did get our Harringtons.

[rathbone]

It seemed that everyone’s ambition now was to be in a band. Groups had sprung up all across the country. There were even a few attempts to fabricate a regional boom on the lines of Merseybeat. For example, the Applejacks from Solihull had come up with Brumbeat. Most people saw through that. These were not genuine movements and few of the bands measured up to their publicity.

Edinburgh wasn’t any different. There was never an ‘Edinburgh’ sound. The groups mostly played covers of rhythm and blues standards and songs that had been in the charts. They varied from really good to really crap. Among the crap groups were Tiny and the Titans, who I never rated, and The Saracens, despite their lead guitarist, a guy called Mike Heron. Among the good local bands were The Embers and The Crusaders.

The Embers consisted of Willie Syme, Alan Bomford, Jimmy Hush, Peter Bottomley, Jimmy Cruickshank and Robert Smith, who was known as ‘Smiggy’. Another club had opened up in the Cowgate, called The Attic. The Embers secured a residency at The Attic. They couldn’t afford to hire a van and became legendary for pushing their equipment down the Bridges to the Top Storey in a pram.

The Crusaders featured Tam Paton on keyboards. Tam went on to manage the Bay City Rollers. The lead singer, Roddy Reynolds, was half-caste, which was exotic in Edinburgh in the sixties. The drummer, Tommy ‘Toto’ McNaughton was nearly as manic as Eccles. In addition they had two other singers, Pat Fernie and a girl called Dot Walker. Ron Fraser was on bass, with Frank Connor on lead guitar and Paddy Dixon on rhythm. What made The Crusaders really stand out was the way they dressed. They had special stage suits made, with everybody in bright red except Roddy Reynolds who was in purple.

A national Battle of the Bands competition was announced and they decided to enter. They won the Edinburgh heat against stiff opposition from The Hipple People, and then the overall Scottish heat against groups from Glasgow and Dundee. The final was in London. They came 10th. Despite the red suits, one of the judges, Brian Epstein said that the music was good but they lacked image.

Finally, there was The Jury, who belted out Atlantic and Motown covers. It wasn’t really my sort of music, but a little later, when ‘Smiggy’ Smith joined them from the Embers and ‘Toto’ McNaughton defected from the Crusaders, they changed their name to Three’s a Crowd and that was a different matter.

[rathbone]

So our weekend routine became going up to The Milk Bar on Friday night. Then it was round to the Top Storey. On Saturday it was up to the Waverley, depending on who was playing, and on Sunday either Bungy’s or The Gonk.

Bungy’s was half way down the stairs in Old Fishmarket Close. It was basically a coffee bar which did music. They also did good spanish omelettes as well. It had been set up by the Waldman Brothers, Paul and Brian, who were responsible for many of the good Edinburgh music venues.

At the time I didn’t know much about the Waldmans, but looking back, in many ways they were responsible for shaping the music scene in Edinburgh through the 60s and 70s and, consequently had a huge influence on that side of my life.

They were Londoners in their early twenties who, in a reversal of the usual cliché, had come up to Edinburgh to make their fame and fortune. Of the two, Brian Waldman was the driving force. He thought that Edinburgh was a bit drab and decided to do something about it, so he opened Bungy’s.

Bungy’s was the first genuine coffee bar in the city. Edinburgh had seen nothing like it. It proved instantly popular. It was a magnet for teenagers like us. It wasn’t like the Top Storey, which was frenetic. In Bungy’s you could hang out to talk and listen to the music.

The Waldmans needed no further encouragement and quickly moved to consolidate their position on Edinburgh’s burgeoning social scene. They opened The Place, a jazz and rock club in Victoria Street, which featured all the local groups as well as headlining chart acts. Then a disco, the Casablanca in Rose Street Lane. Then they opened The Kontiki, a sophisticated nightclub above a car showroom in Lothian Road and switched from there to Queen Street with a hamburger joint named Buck Rogers. Moving on to Leith, they opened Bonkers, a pub with live entertainment, where patrons were invited to sing, play instruments or do comedy routines on the bar. When they had saturated Edinburgh they moved back to London, opening the Middle Earth club in Covent Garden in 1967, with an up and coming DJ, John Peel.

Personally, I wasn’t too keen on Bungy’s. It was neither one thing or another. Besides the coffee bar, it had a casino upstairs and a disco featuring a girl in a cage. It was the girl in the cage that kept us going back. It certainly wasn’t the regular band, who were called The Andy Russell Seven. It wasn’t until psychedelics came along a couple of years later and they changed their name to Ali-Ben-The-Hoose and the Tuaregs that they came close to being interesting.

[rathbone]

I didn’t much like The Gonk either. It was in an old church hall in Reigo Street, Tollcross. The main reason we went to The Gonk was to see The Hipple People who played there regularly. I suppose there was a bit of loyalty there, because the Hipples had been the first band I had seen live at that dance in Portobello. But they had also become very popular on the Edinburgh scene, drawing large crowds and winning the Evening News Beat Competition two years running.

The other regular band at The Gonk was Phil and The Flintstones. Their speciality was to take classical tunes, speed them up, and add a rock beat, which was a concept a few years ahead of its time. Most of their set, though, consisted of covers of Little Richard, Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones. They were famous as the first of the Edinburgh bands to appear on television, six minutes on the STV programme ‘One Night Stand’ when they played Little Children and Sweet Little Rock’n’Roller. They also made a short film as an advert for the Milk Marketing Board. Despite the television appearance, they didn’t get a record deal and split up at the end of 1964.

[rathbone]

So, our music venue of choice remained the Top Storey. The Friday night routine remained the same. We would try to get a drink in one of the pubs in Leith Street, including the infamous Black Bull where all the ladies of ill repute plied their trade. We would get thrown out, go across the road to the Deep Sea chip shop, where the ladies of ill repute would get their clients to take them for dinner, and then make the long climb up the stairs to the Top Storey.

The Top Storey was booking lots of really good headlining acts. The Rocking Berries, The Applejacks, The Moody Blues when they were still an R&B band and hadn’t discovered psychedelics, Sounds Incorporated and, repeatedly, Jimmy James and the Vagabonds, who had a cult following among the Edinburgh crowd. None of the other clubs came near it.

[rathbone]

It was watching Jimmy James one night when I bumped in to the guy in front of me. Before I could say sorry, he spun round and hit me across the face with a long handled steel comb. Neil started to go for him.

“Hey”, Neil shouted, “That’s not on.”

The other guy stared back.

“Want tae make somethin’ of it?”, he demanded.

Somebody else pulled Neil back.

“Bar-Ox”, he said.

“Aye, away ye tosser”, the guy hissed. He brandished the comb again.

We moved away to another part of the room and Donny helped me to wipe the blood off my face with his hanky. Fortunately I had been moving away when the guy struck and the comb only managed to scratch my cheek.

Fights at the Top Storey were a regular occurrence. Edinburgh was full of street gangs. The guy I had bumped into was a member of Bar-Ox from Oxgangs. There was also the likes of Young Niddrie Terrors and Clerrie Jungle. Most of them just put the words “Young Mental” in front of the scheme they came from, like Young Mental Drylaw. One or other of the gangs turned up at the Storey every Friday night looking for a ruck. The trick was to just get out of the way and leave the gangs to fight themselves.

[rathbone]

Donny’s sister Janice queued up again for tickets to The Beatles’ return concert at the Regal on 19 October.

Before then, the ugliest group in Britain, which is what the Daily Mirror called the Rolling Stones, came to the Usher Hall and then, only a few days later, the Yardbirds at the Regal. Both of them were really good concerts.

The Beatles concert was more or less a repeat of the April one, except that this time you could hear the support acts. With the exception of Mary Wells and Sounds Incorporated, these were all lesser known acts being promoted by Brian Epstein, people like Michael Haslam, the Reno Four and The Ruskins. As usual, when The Beatles came on pandemonium broke out and we couldn’t hear a thing.

[rathbone]

We were now hard up against exams. For Donny and I it was O-grades. Neil was studying for his Highers. At school we had all clubbed together to buy a record player for the common room. Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band’s ‘Hand Clappin, Foot Stompin’ Funky But Live’, was never off the turntable. We considered ourselves to be hipsters, flipsters and finger poppin’ mamas.

Everyone’s musical tastes had diversified. In my year alone Alan and David were now absolutely fanatical about traditional scottish music. Paul was into James Brown and hardcore soul. Another one of the rugby clique, Derek, had discovered an obscure native american singer called Buffy Sainte Marie and was collecting her records. Les had found jazz. Not the easy listening stuff, but people like Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Raymond was into Motown. One of the girls in our year, Sheila, was seeing Mike Heron, the lead guitarist of the Saracens, who played at the Top Storey.

Despite the prospect of the exams, we carried on going to the Top Storey every week. Usually it was to hear the Beachcombers and to watch Eccles bouncing around, but some weeks it was to see one of the visiting Glasgow bands such as The Beatstalkers or The Poets. The Poets were a bit different. They played 12-string guitars and wrote their own songs and they were managed by Andrew Loog Oldham who managed the Rolling Stones. They had had a big hit with ‘Now We’re Thru’. Though they had the chart success, the really great Glasgow group in those days was Alex Harvey’s Big Soul Band. I don’t remember Alex Harvey playing the Top Storey, but I think Dean Ford and the Gaylords did. They eventually changed their name to Marmalade.

At the Top Storey the DJ had now stopped playing R&B altogether. Increasingly we spent the evenings listening to the Temptations, Stevie Wonder, Smokie Robinson and the Miracles, the Supremes, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and, if we were really lucky, more obscure acts like the Earl Van Dyke Six. Earl Van Dyke was a great instrumentalist. His 6X6 later became a staple of Northern Soul. All of this suited Raymond, but I missed the R&B records.

[rathbone]

The O-Grades came and went. I hardly noticed. I was in love.

There was a new girl working behind the counter in Portobello branch library. She had long blonde hair and I thought she looked gorgeous. I soon found myself going in to the library two or three times a week just to look at her. I would sit in the reference section pretending to be reading, but actually just staring. On my way past the counter I would smile at her.

Donny and Neil thought all this was really funny. They started egging me on to ask her out. It took a lot of encouragement. I was terrified she would either laugh at me or say no. Eventually I plucked up enough courage and asked if she would like to go to the pictures. It was at that point I realised that I knew absolutely nothing about her, not even her name.

It turned out to be Helen. She was eighteen and lived with her mum and dad in Musselburgh.

We met the following Saturday and went up to the Playhouse in Greenside. Neil and Donny were warned not to turn up. As it happened, it might have been better if they had. During the bus journey from Portobello it became obvious that Helen and I had little in common. She had not noticed me in the reference section. She wasn’t particularly interested in literature. She was only working in the library because her father had seen the advert and thought it was a good job.

Her musical tastes stretched to Jackie Trent and Sandie Shaw. I was convinced that the thought of the Top Storey would have filled her with apprehension.

The evening was full of awkward silences. We agreed not to take it any further and on the way back I got off the Musselburgh bus in Portobello High Street and let her go home on her own.

The lads demanded a blow by blow account.

[rathbone]

My life style was now seriously demanding finance. I was the oldest paper boy in Portobello.

I took on a job after school working Monday to Friday in the Tower Amusement arcade on the promenade. Most of the time I was in the little booth which changed punters’ cash into pennies which could be used in the slot machines. It was really boring, but the upside was that the booth was next to a juke box which had a really good selection of music, particularly The Byrds, Bob Dylan and the Lovin Spoonful. At the end of the day, I helped to bring in all of the machines from out on the prom and lock up. It paid well.

On Saturday I had a second job making deliveries for Lipton’s, the grocer on the High Street. That also paid well.

Our night for the Top Storey had to change from Friday to Saturday. The Saturday crowd was slightly different, more fashion fixated, but the essentials were the same. Same bands, same records, same aggro.

With my first wages from Lipton I was finally able to afford something from the menswear shop in Leith Street. I bought two sweaters, both black. One was crew-necked in mohair. The other was a chunky black polo neck. These became my defining attire for the next decade. The following month I bought a pair of low cut hipster trousers which were a bold yellow and black check. With my black framed ‘Buddy Holly’ specs which I copied from Eccles, I thought I looked good. The trousers soon went. I realised they looked ridiculous and moved on to black jeans.

[rathbone]

Neil had been sitting his Highers and had done okay, but not brilliantly. The results of the O-Grades proved disastrous. Not for me, as I passed all of mine with good grades, but for Donny who hadn’t done too well. In fact he hadn’t managed to pass any. There was talk of him re-sitting the exams, but he was thoroughly demoralised and I think his parents thought that it was best if he left school and got a job.

Everything started changing very rapidly. Neil, Donny and I seemed to spend a lot of time just loafing around Portobello. Opposite my house in Bath Street there was a lane with a car repair workshop. At one end of the lane, behind the shops on the High Street, there was a patch of grass piled up with a number of old, rusting car bodies which had been cannibalised for parts. We would go and sit on the old cars to talk over what we were going to do with the rest of our lives.

Neil left school and got a job as a trainee accountant with a firm in Leith. It wasn’t his first choice of career, but he hadn’t got good enough grades to go to University to do law, which is what he really wanted to do. From his point of view, it was a stop gap, better than nothing until he could get himself sorted out.

Donny, however, was in a mess. He was disillusioned and depressed. Every job he went after he didn’t get and he found himself applying for more and more unsuitable things. Most of the available jobs were really manual labour and he wasn’t cut out for that. Eventually his parents suggested that he went through to Glasgow and stay with relations there. So he did and within a few weeks had got a job as a junior clerk with a warehouse company. He moved through to Glasgow permanently at the end of August. He swore to keep in touch with us and we swore to keep in touch with him, but of course we didn’t.

[rathbone]

At first Neil and I going out together without Donny was strange, but our routine remained the same: either The Milk Bar first and then the Top Storey, or get thrown out of various pubs and then the Top Storey.

Suddenly, in September, the Top Storey closed down. I don’t know why. It may have been financial problems, it may have lost its fire licence, or it may have been police concerns. Whatever the reason, a huge hole had suddenly developed in our lives.

Initially we consoled ourselves by going to The Gonk. Most of the Top Storey bands also seemed to be using it as a stop gap. On September 5 it was the Crusaders who we went to see as much for ‘Toto’ McNaughton as anything else. The following week Fayne and the Cruisers, who I can hardly remember and the week after that Phil and the Flintstones.

And then McGoos opened.

[rathbone]

McGoos was a ten minute walk from the Top Storey, directly opposite John Knox's house in the High Street.

The old Palace picture house, it had lain empty and boarded up for years until an aspiring Italian, one of the well known Crolla family, who had various ice cream and fish and chip shops all over Edinburgh, turned it in to what we considered the world’s most perfect club. 

From the High Street the land falls steeply down to the Cowgate behind it. The Palace cinema was built into the side of the hill. This meant that from the High Street you went in on the top level, then down to what had been the balcony of the cinema, and then down further to the stalls. Crolla’s master stroke was to link the balcony area to the stalls with stairs which went down on either side of the auditorium, enclosing the DJ’s booth in between, looking out over the dance floor below. Where the screen had been became the stage for live acts. The balcony was converted into a smart coffee bar with a huge Wurlitzer juke box.

Almost instantly all the regular Top Storey crowd were going there.

[rathbone]

The first big act to play McGoos was The Who, who played there on 4 October 1965. Because they were a name band it cost 6 shillings to get in (30p). As expected the place was packed. We were on the balcony, which was probably a better view than down stairs on the floor.

The opening act were The Hipple People. They went on, and two hours later were still playing because The Who hadn’t turned up yet. To keep the punters happy the Hipples decided to give them at least a taste of The Who and launched into a version of Can’t Explain. Finally they were given the signal to stop, only to turn around to find that the members of The Who had been standing at the side of the stage through the whole number laughing at them.

There was then a break while the roadies set up two sets of Marshall amp columns and nailed Keith Moon’s drum kit to the stage. We had never seen roadies before. The amp stack on one side of the stage was immaculate. The one on the other side was full of holes. It was soon apparent that this was because Pete Townshend kept hitting his stack with his guitar and John Entwistle didn’t. We had never seen anything like those amp stacks before either.

The Who’s opening number was Daddy Rolling Stone, at the end of which the bottom half of Pete Townshend’s Rickenbacker fell off and he had to change over to a Telecaster. About half way through Keith Moon took lead vocals on Barbra Ann and they played C.C. Rider and finished with My Generation. At the end of My Generation Townshend started hitting the Telecaster against the amps, but it wouldn’t break so he just threw it up in the air and walked off. It still didn’t break when it landed back on the stage. Keith Moon however did manage to kick the whole drum kit into the crowd.

(This concert is one of the enigmas of rock. It does not appear in the authorised list of Who gigs maintained by the Who website. Consequently, officially it didn’t happen. Simon who runs the Edinburgh Gig Archive cannot put it in his listings.

Notwithstanding the fact that at least a dozen people I know were there, not counting myself, that another half a dozen that I don’t know have posted on the Gig Archive message board that they were there, and, not least, the members of the support band all believe that they were there and played that night, without documentary evidence, the Who themselves consider all of that merely anecdotal and so won’t recognise that the gig took place.
The night before the Who played in Carlisle. The night after they played in Dunfermline. Presumably their stay in Edinburgh was a night off! .......

If anyone out there has a ticket, a flyer or a review, Simon would love to hear from you.)