The Bluffer's Guide to Rock Music by Eamonn Forde

Author:Eamonn Forde
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bluffer's Guides

LIVE AND DANGEROUS

Venues are the beating heart of music, the crucibles where new styles are formed and legends are forged in the white heat of ROCK. Bluffers should always express preference for an act’s live work over and above their recorded material. At this point, you should mention that no band has ever satisfactorily captured their raw live sound on record and then nod knowingly.

But to put live flesh on the bones of your bluff, you have to be able to discuss the landmark venues, festivals and shows that have really dictated the shape and development of rock. Not all of them are what you (or your audience) might expect. But keeping them guessing lies at the root of all successful bluffing.

VENUES YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT

CAVERN AND STAR CLUBS

The wellspring for the ever-growing Beatles nostalgia industry, both The Cavern Club (Liverpool) and the Star-Club (Hamburg) were, as venues, little to write home about, being both cramped and dank. But it’s what they represent that matters to rock fans – the totemistic places where The Beatles cut their teeth and earned their chops before the world was looking. At the mention of either, you will allow yourself to sound melancholic and talk about how ‘preservation orders’ should have been issued for The Cavern (a ‘new Cavern’ sits a few hundred feet up Mathew Street like a bad TV impressionist) and more health and safety measures applied to the Star-Club (it closed in 1969 and the building that housed it burned down in 1987).

MARQUEE

You should, if asked about the Marquee, respond by asking which Marquee. There were three major sites and then two subsequent sites because some buffoon in a marketing agency thought the ‘brand’ could be replicated in inadequate venues. The original Marquee stood on Oxford Street in London and was primarily a jazz venue, but rock bluffers get points for mentioning that The Rolling Stones first played there in 1962. By 1964 it had moved round the corner to Wardour Street and that’s where the legend really grew. The Who, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd all played there in the 1960s while by the late 1970s it had also helped give painful birth to punk. In the 1980s it was known as a metal venue and in 1988 the venue was relocated to Charing Cross Road on the other side of Soho and that – despite a 2001 move to open it again in Islington and a doomed attempt in 2003/2004 to place it in Leicester Square – was the end of that.

100 CLUB

Standing at, as the name suggests, number 100 Oxford Street in London, it has, like the Marquee, a diverse and almost schizophrenic history. So you’ll need to think strategically about what era of the club’s life you want to pass yourself off as an expert on. Opening in 1942, the basement venue was a jazz club, but by 1976 a whole new generation had taken over. Many London venues claim to have been where

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