Down the Dungeon

You can still find men and women in their late 70s prepared to argue over the best act they ever saw at the Dungeon Club. Was it Little Stevie Wonder, then 15 years old, or Little Walter? The Who or the Small Faces? Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles or Inez and Charlie Foxx? The Yardbirds or the Moody Blues? T-Bone Walker or Sonny Boy Williamson? Sugar Pie DeSanto or the Soul Sisters? The Action or the Move? Lee Dorsey or Wilson Pickett? The Alan Bown Set or the Jimmy Brown Sound?

Stanford Street is an unremarkable stretch of road, about a hundred yards long, leading up from the empty shopfronts of Lister Gate in the centre of Nottingham towards the hill on which the Castle stands. It’s amid something of a wasteland now, close to the demolished remains of the Broadmarsh shopping centre, which awaits the money for redevelopment as an urban park. The estate agents’ website currently offering office space at No 6 — “to be refurbished to a high standard throughout” — mentions the building’s period features but nothing about its history, which I’m guessing began in the late 19th century with an involvement in the city’s then-thriving textile industry.

On July 10, 1964 — 60 years ago this week – the ground floor and basement of 6 Stanford Street were opened by a man called Mick Parker as a club for live music with room for two or three hundred teenagers and no drinks licence. It lasted three and half years. During its short but hectic life, the Dungeon’s basement stage hosted the artists mentioned above, and many others, including Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, the Exciters, Long John Baldry’s Hoochie Coochie Men, the Moody Blues and the Dixie Cups (with Alvin “Shine” Robinson on guitar).

In those years Manchester had its Twisted Wheel, Sheffield had its Mojo and Newcastle had its Club A Go Go. London, of course, had its Flamingo and Marquee. But we in Nottingham felt lucky. We had the Dancing Slipper, where the acts booked by Bill “Foo” Kinnell (say it quickly) evolved from trad jazz to R&B (and where I first saw the 19-year-old Rod Stewart with Baldry’s band). We had the three rowing clubs, cheek by jowl along the towpath by Trent Bridge: the Union, the Britannia and the Boat Club, all of them with upstairs rooms presenting live music three or four nights a week: Graham Bond, Herbie Goins, John Mayall, Freddie Hubbard, eventually even the Pink Floyd. In the Lace Market there was the Beachcomber, where we were fortunate enough to see Jimi Hendrix, Martha and the Vandellas and the complete Ike & Tina Turner Revue at very close quarters.

But the Dungeon was a special place, which is why this week there will be an event commemorating its 60th anniversary. It was the centre of mod culture in the region, where the music you danced to and the clothes you wore seemed like the only things that mattered in life.

I was lucky enough to play there a number of times in a local semi-pro R&B band called the Junco Partners — not to be confused with the slightly better known Newcastle band who’d also borrowed their name from a record made in 1952 by the Texas-born singer James Wayne. I joined them in the autumn of 1964, playing drums alongside Mick Dale (lead guitar), Dave Turner (rhythm guitar, harmonica and vocals), an art student from down south called Ian Taylor on electric piano, and our leader, Rae Drewery, on bass guitar and vocals. (Rae was a builder by trade and after work he’d clear out his Transit van to take us and our gear to gigs; he was already the father of a small daughter who would become the wonderful Corinne Drewery of Swing Out Sister.)

We were all blues fans, missionaries for this music, and our repertoire included Sonny Boy’s “Don’t Start Me to Talkin'”, Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightnin'”, Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me to Do”, Muddy Waters’s “Hoochie Coochie Man”, Bo Diddley’s “Before You Accuse Me” and “Mama Keep Your Big Mouth Shut”and John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” and “Dimples”. Cultural appropriation on a grand scale, in other words. But, you know, at that stage everybody — us, the audience, the originators — benefited from this enthusiasm.

We were getting about £25 a night, as I recall, and it took us a few months to move up from art college hops, blues clubs and pub gigs to the comparative big time of the Dungeon. When an act couldn’t make it one Sunday just before Christmas, Parker called us in at a couple of hours’ notice to play what amounted to an audition. We must have passed because he booked us in to play on a Saturday night in January 1965, supporting the Original Checkmates.

Eight days later we were back in support of the Applejacks. A month later we were supporting Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, then the Lancastrians. In March we supported Robb Storme and the Whispers, Screamin’ Lord Sutch and the Savages, and the Moody Blues, a couple of months after “Go Now” had topped the chart. In April we supported Baldry, Mark Fayne and the Fontaines, and Eden Kane and his Downbeats. And on Friday 4 June we were the sole attraction: topping the bill.

A couple of weeks later I played my last gig with Rae, Mick, Dave and Ian, and went off to get a haircut and start a job. You can see us in those two photos (alas, only the top of Ian’s head), taken on one of those nights at the Dungeon. There’s also my membership card, with which I was able to dance with my friends to the likes of James Brown’s “Out of Sight” and Jr Walker’s “Shotgun”. I can’t be there to celebrate the anniversary this week, but a feeling for the place has never left me.