The Grimsby jazz club where Fleetwood Mac and other music stars once played
VENUE NOW LIESES EMP EMPTY AND TUCKED AWAY
GLOBAL jazz superstars used to grace a Grimsby stage over 60 years ago but now it lies empty and tucked away behind a busy y Victoria Street.
The Southbank Jazz Club once e took up the entire top floor and d had two fire escapes cascading g down the sides.
It is now just a shell of its forrmer self, rotted and rusty with the jazz club now shut down.
Looking at it now, it is hard to think it was once home to worldwide superstar musicians.
Every Friday, Sunday and Monday there would be lines going down the several flights of concrete steps heading up to the club waiting to get in and listen to the live music of Jimmy Witherspoon or other local legends such as The Leo Soloman Trio.
Perhaps the two most well-known local bands though were The Rumble Band (who were later renamed simply to Rumble) and Calmen Waters.
They both made regular appearances at the venue, often dubbed as “one of the last purely jazz gig venues”.
Their names still resonate to this day as being one of the leaders in the music scene in Grimsby.
The boom of blues music in Britain was coming to a slow end by 1968.
Big names such as the Keef Hartley Band, Savoy Brown Blues Band and even Robert Plant & The Band of Joy had walked the Southbank stage and played to local audiences.
The club started introducing other bands, not just jazz and blues, with lively perfor
mances f from Paper Dolls, Showstoppers, Brian Auger & Julie Driscoll and even the folk legend that is Tim Rose gracing the stage.
The club would transform into a coffee bar on
Saturday afternoons, but the spirit of the music would continue as the latest songs would be blasted through the speakers while people enjoyed their coffee.
If you walked past the venue on Friday, October 11, 1968, you’d see lines trawling past the building and up the neighbouring streets and into Victoria Square.
The original Fleetwood Mac guitarists Peter Green, Danny Kirwan and Jeremy Spencer and drummer Mick Fleetwood had made an appearance at Southbank Jazz Club and filled it to capacity.
In 1971 it was taken under new ownership and rebranded as Southbank Renaissance. Sadly though, it shut its doors for the final time shortly after struggling for a few years.