Laurie spoke to all the bands with odd names
IWENT on another magical mystery tour when Dave Whitworth of Mount recalled bands from the 1960s with strange names, like The Bonzo Dog Do Dah Band and The Temperance Seven – “all nine of them”.
He said: “I enjoyed the ‘Seven’ at the Town Hall, as well as many great jazz bands of the time.”
Which led me, in my search for appellations of an odd nature, to the Holmfirth Film Festival website and the Brian Lawton Photographic Collection, a filmed interview in which Laurie Stead talks to Festival director Stephen Dorril, and how it cost just £75 to bring Dusty Springfield, backed by a full string orchestra, to play Huddersfield Town Hall.
Brian Lawton was a former postman and amateur photographer who had the knack of getting backstage to almost any local rock, pop, blues, folk and showbusiness event. Laurie, who became jazz writer for The Examiner, went with him to do the interviews.
Some of Brian’s photographic collection can be seen via the Film
Festival website.
Many of the bands Brian snapped and Laurie talked to had odd names. The Beatles called themselves after a six legged insect (with a slight spelling change) as a tribute, some say, to Buddy Holly and the Crickets or, as Lennon’s riff on the French term Les Beat. Take your pick.
Who would have thought of calling themselves The Animals or The Rolling Stones before the Swinging 60s? The Hollies were more than seasonal and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates were no panto act.
Brian snapped them all, along with Blues legends Howlin’ Wolf, Lightning Hopkins and Sugar Pie De Santo and Manchester-based band The Dakotas, who got their name after once dressing up as Red Indians, before backing Billy J Kramer (real name William Howard Ashton), whom my wife Maria snogged at the bar of her uncle’s nightclub McGinty’s Goat in Blackpool during a soundcheck. “He gave me a wine gum and I gave him a kiss,” she explained later.
The photographs are brilliant and Laurie’s interview memories include how he took Dusty Springfield home to tea when she appeared at the Essoldo in Huddersfield.
“It was half day closing and no cafes were open,” he says, so he invited her across the road to his mum’s house next door to the Irish League Club.
“She sat down by the fire and took her shoes off and mum served her tea and sandwiches.”
When it was time for her to return to the theatre, he recruited students from the then polytechnic to form a line across the road to keep the fans at bay while she dashed to the stage door.
Brian took great pictures of everyone from Joan Baez in Huddersfield to a young Patrick Stewart (when he had hair) at the Alhambra in Bradford, and Judy Garland in Leeds. Which was the only interview that Laurie confessed he ducked.
After watching Judy perform he didn’t have the nerve to go backstage with Brian. Regrets? He’s had a few. But that’s one that sticks in his mind.