Just Nostalgia

Ah, I was so going to follow up the poem with a massive piece on women, men and beauty but that will require time, sources and erudition and all three are in short supply at the moment, so another time, though not another place. Tripping off down to Essex, and then Birmingham for work next week.

However, a chance glance at a vase on another blog, emblazoned with the AC/DC logo (I can't type the lightening flash) and I was hearing "Whole Lotta Rosie" in my mind and instantly I was back at ...

The Granary. Which is a place of the heart.

The Granary is in Bristol and looks like this on the outside.

A rare surviving example of "Bristol Byzantine", it is Grade II listed now.

Currently a top-notch conversion into residential flats, it was a wine bar for a while. A very rarely known fact, which I may have made up, is that during its incarnation as a wine bar a certain scene from "Only Fools and Horses" was filmed there.

That scene. The one where Del Boy falls through the bar.

But prior to all this, for twenty years (1968 to 1988) The Granary was one of the best rock clubs in the world. Ever.

Rock

But The Granary also embraced Punk

Of course, I only found it when I went to Bristol for University. Bristol was rather rich in nightclubs, and as we were students in the halcyon grant days, we were obliged to go out every night. I went to different clubs with different sets of friends, but Friday and Saturday nights were reserved for me, Sarah and The Granary; we were rock chicks to our core, loved the music and lusted only after men with bikes and long hair. Hard Rock and bikers were strictly rationed at most places. Not so The Granary: an embarrassment of riches.

It is hard to describe how filthy, exciting and loud the place was.

Clue as to filth. This photograph obviously not taken whilst club open, as bar cages are up.

The Granary was inhabited by the strangest assortment of people. From Pill Man to Catweazle to Rob the Dealer - who always sat on the basins in the women's toilets (no doors on the cubicles) in order to conduct his business to the Mud Men. You couldn't talk to anyone, ever, as the music really was ear-drum-shatteringly loud, but we were all regulars and nodded knowingly at each other over our bottles of Newcastle Brown. Perhaps strangest of all was the manager, the wonderful Les Pearce, who had a soft spot for me. Reputedly an ex-safe cracker, he began as a doorman at the club and worked his way up to manager because of his expertise with the snooker cue, as weapon.

Les with a band. Yep, we reckoned it was a wig too.

It was the lovely Les who got me a job as an extra when the BBC filmed part of a TV Play (now available as a film on DVD!), “Unfair Exchanges”, with the late David Rappaport and Julie Walters, in the club. My acting involved dancing to “School’s Out” by Alice Cooper without the music. Yes, without the music, that was to be added in after. I was fed by the BBC Outside Broadcast Unit and got paid the day rate of £40, which was double my weekly allowance at that time. Riches indeed.

At The Granary, Friday night was Rock Disco night, whilst Saturday was for bands. And what bands! Over its twenty years, The Granary hosted, amongst many others, Yes, King Crimson, Mott the Hoople, Supertramp, Curved Air, Judas Priest, Mungo Jerry, Motorhead, Genesis, UFO, Iron Maiden, Billy Idol, The Stranglers, Thin Lizzy etc etc.

Backstage
Sarah and I spent most of the week constructing our outfits for the Friday night. T-shirts and skirts were slashed, fishnet tights artfully holed, shorts dyed, studded belts sourced. A lot of leather. All black, occasionally relieved by a splash of red. Jeans? Never. Finished, always, with stilettos even Posh would have struggled to walk in.
With hindsight, my look could best be described as Drag Queen Dominatrix.

The music was everything you wanted to hear and skipped seamlessly between the decades because rock, unlike perhaps most popular musical genres, had a formal “canon” of greats and no “chart” playlist. So early Sabbath mixed with early, mid and late Zeppelin and Floyd, the new British Rock of Iron Maiden and Saxon and Def Lepperd, the less-obviously-rock from Fleetwood Mac and Heart, then Focus, Van der Graaf Generator, Rush, Atomic Rooster, Deep Purple and all the post-Purple bands – Rainbow, Ronnie James Dio, Gillan – then AC/DC pre and post-Bon, Hawkwind, Motorhead – I could go forever, and that’s not even going into the Metal coming from across the Atlantic (the big Spandex bands). I don’t think you’d get such a diversity of styles and tempo in any other club.
We danced until the make-up that had taken two hours to apply ran off our faces. My hair always lasted the course however, as I suspect the hole in the Ozone Layer is very largely down to my use of can of Silvikrin each night.

The greatest thing of all?
At every other club in Bristol you ran the gamut of men. “Vadim’s” (great "niteclub" name) in particular was notorious for having to avoid the gropers and the picker-uppers.
But The Granary? We dressed like heavy metal hookers and not once, not once, were we approached by a man. You could have danced naked (indeed, there was the occasional evening when someone did) and no one would have turned a hair.

The Granary was just about the music, and the dance. Club Heaven, RIP.

A book has been written about the club, and this has led to a website, here: http://www.thegranaryclub.co.uk/