Ritzy’s Nightclub – Blood and Porridge

May 13, 2024May 18, 2024

My favourite gigs

© Chrysalis

My previous blog-post was about seeing Deep Purple live in concert. This was the most recent of many gigs I’ve been to. Indeed, by my calculations, I’ve seen about 160 musical acts perform live, starting with veteran Scottish hard rock / heavy metal group Nazareth, whom I saw in Aberdeen in 1984.

Anyway, this has got me thinking about the best gigs I’ve ever been to. Here are my favourite eight.

The Proclaimers – Aberdeen Ritzy, 1987

I didn’t know what to expect when some mates got me along to a concert by Craig and Charlie Reid, better known as Scottish folk-pop duo the Proclaimers. I liked the Reids – their hit song that year, the politically charged Letter from America, was already becoming Scotland’s great anti-Maggie-Thatcher anthem – but I had no idea what they’d be like live. Also, they were performing at Aberdeen Ritzy, a place I had an aversion to because I’d once worked there as a member of the floor-staff and it was the least enjoyable job I’d ever had.

I had no reason to be apprehensive. The gig felt like a giant, joyous football match where the entire crowd supported the same team and that team was winning 10-0. I suspect one reason why the Proclaimers went down so well that night was because the Aberdonian audience could relate to their song Throw the R Away, which is about the frustrations caused when standard English-speakers can’t understand your accent. Which is a common hazard if you speak Aberdonian.

The Jesus and Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr, My Bloody Valentine, Blur – the Rollercoaster Tour, London Brixton Academy, 1992

From Craig and Charlie Reid to two more Scottish siblings called Reid. These were Jim and William Reid of the feedback-drenched East Kilbride noise-niks the Jesus and Mary Chain. Their Rollercoaster Tour date at Brixton Academy in 1992 offered not only excellent support from American alternative rockers Dinosaur Jr and dreamy, swirly shoegazers My Bloody Valentine, but also a chance to sample a young, up-and-coming band called Blur. Though my reaction when I saw Damon Albarn onstage wasn’t that he was destined to be an icon of the future Britpop movement but that he resembled a very young, musical version of Norman Wisdom.

© Blanco y Negro

Meanwhile, the headliners blew me away. Promoting their recent album Honey’s Dead (1992), which was packed with behemoth tunes like Reverence and Sugar Ray, the Jesus and Mary Chain performed in silhouette against a giant blood-red backdrop. This made them look like the imperious Masters of the Universe.

The Manic Street Preachers – Sapporo Penny Lane, 1993

Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers were promoting their album Gold Against the Soul when they turned up in the Japanese city of Sapporo, at whose Hokkai-Gakuen University I worked at the time as a lecturer. Though in Britain they were seen as having a punk edge, the Japanese took their fondness for glam clothes and eyeliner as meaning they were another Guns n’ Roses. Thus, their gig at Sapporo’s Penny Lane drew a lot of Japanese girls wearing silk scarves and floppy hats, who kept squealing “Rich-ee!” at the Manics’ guitarist, Richey Edwards. The gig was both excellent and dramatic – the drama coming when the highly-strung Edwards freaked out about an illuminated fire-exit sign at the other end of the auditorium that he claimed was putting him off his performance.

Since then, that gig has haunted me in two ways. Firstly, around the same time, I bought the Japanese edition of Gold Against the Soul. Years later, long after Edwards’ tragic and never-explained disappearance in 1995, I listened to it again and discovered the CD case contained a second tray that I hadn’t noticed before. In it was a bonus CD, a live one of them performing in Japan. When I played it, I felt poignantly transported back in time – for there, in the crowd, were those Japanese girls shouting “Rich-ee!” again at poor, doomed Richey Edwards.

From wikipedia.org / © Masao Nakagami

Secondly, when I saw the Manic Street Preachers again last year, in Singapore, they played a new song called Still Snowing in Sapporo, which I learned was inspired by that long-ago gig in 1993. How weird, I thought, to be in the audience listening to them playing a song about a concert 30 years earlier… knowing I was were probably the only person in the audience who was at that concert.

The Beastie Boys – Sapporo Jasmac Plaza, 1995

I almost didn’t attend this gig, which also took place while I worked at Sapporo’s Hokkai-Gakuen University. The show was due to begin at 7.00 PM – concerts in Japan tended to start when the tickets said they would – and the same evening I had to give a late lecture until 7.20 PM. Plus I calculated that by the time I got from the university campus to the venue, the Jasmac Plaza, the Beastie Boys would already be an hour into their gig. It didn’t seem worth it.

However, a few weeks before the concert, it was announced that work had been completed on a new Sapporo subway line, which had a station called Gakuen-Mae directly below the campus where I was working. I also discovered that the next station along the new line, Hosui-Suskino, had an exit that was only a block from the Jasmac Plaza. And a subway train left for Hosui-Susukino from Gakuen-Mae every evening at 7.30. I figured that if I caught the 7.30 train, and moved very fast, I could be at the concert hall in the Jasmac Plaza ten minutes later – hopefully not yet halfway through the Beastie Boys’ set. Fate seemed to be urging me to buy a ticket, so I did.

That evening, I finished my lecture on the stroke of 7.20, ran like hell for the subway station and charged down what seemed like half-a-dozen escalators, descending deeper and deeper into the earth. The train was already at the platform and I ran and jumped through its about-to-close carriage doors. At Hosui-Susukino, I sprang out of the train, ran up more escalators, ran along a city block into the Jasmac Plaza and up several staircases to its fourth floor, where the concert hall was. Live music blasted out of speakers above me. I dashed into the hall, gasping for breath, my university lecturer’s suit, shirt and tie soaked in sweat… And I discovered that the Beastie Boys weren’t on stage at all. What I was hearing was a support act that hadn’t been mentioned on the bloody ticket. The Beasties didn’t appear until forty minutes later.

After that, it needed to be a superb gig to justify all the hassle and indignity I’d suffered. Which, thankfully, it was.

© Mute

Nick Cave – Edinburgh Princes Street Gardens, 1999

During the 1999 Edinburgh Festival, goth-rock troubadour Nick Cave – without his band the Bad Seeds – performed in Edinburgh’s Princess Street Gardens, which meant he had the craggy Edinburgh Castle rock, crowned by the battlements of the castle itself, as a spectacular backdrop. But there was a problem. Taking place in the castle was the Edinburgh Tattoo, that celebration of tartan-swathed, bagpipe-wailing Scottish military kitsch held every August; and the Tattoo organisers were not happy about having to compete against a concert below in the Gardens. Indeed, a few evenings earlier, the Gardens had hosted the psychedelic / space-rock outfit Spiritualised and their percussive beats had caused the Lone Piper – the bagpiper who appears on the ramparts at the Tattoo’s finale to play the lament Sleep Dearie Sleep – to lose concentration and mess up the tune. This evening, to placate the Tattoo, Cave wasn’t allowed to start playing until it had finished, meaning the audience turned up at the time specified on the tickets but then had to wait an hour. To keep us entertained, some local performance-poets were brought onstage, including the late, lamented Paul Reekie.

One consequence of this was that when Cave finally did come on, the end-of-Tattoo firework display was erupting above the castle. Talk about a spectacular entrance. And the ensuing gig was worth the long wait. The songs, mostly stripped-down versions of stuff from 1997’s The Boatman’s Call and 1996’s Murder Ballads, were wonderfully enhanced by the gothic surroundings – the rock, the castle and finally a gorgeous full moon ascending into the starry Edinburgh sky.

The Waterboys – Newcastle, Tyne Theatre and Opera House, 2003

In the mid-1980s, there was a considerable buzz about the Waterboys, who were expected to go stratospheric and join U2 and Simple Minds as one of the big Celtic rock bands of the era. Instead, under the leadership of Edinburgh man Mike Scott, they decamped to Ireland, became a folk band for a while, and rock superstardom never arrived. I actually preferred their folky stuff (like 1988’s When Ye Go Away) to their rather bloated rock stuff (like 1985’s The Whole of the Moon).

For this 2003 gig in Newcastle, the band did an hour of gentle, melodic music, kicking off with a version of the Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses, which Scott decided to play because he’d “had it in his head all day,” There was an interval during which the Geordie crowd enjoyed a pint or four in the Opera House bar. And then it was back into the auditorium for a second hour of up-tempo rock music. The relaxed and nothing-more-to-prove Scott clearly wanted to have a good time and wanted to give his audience a good time too – which he did, in spades.

© Geffen Records

Alabama 3 – Newcastle, University of Northumbria, 2005

This was the best blues / country / techno / electronica / indie / trip-hop / acid-jazz gig I’ve seen, courtesy of the best (and possibly only) band in the world whose music ticks all those boxes, the Alabama 3. They’re not from Alabama, but from South London. Also, there’s eight or nine of them rather than three. With so many band-members onstage, and such a stew of different sounds, this gig at the University of Northumbria was inevitably a bit of a shambles – but what a glorious shambles. Their track Woke Up This Morning, which at the time served as the opening theme for The Sopranos (1999-2007), was particularly epic.

Primal Scream – Norwich UEA, 2009

I wasn’t expecting a great deal in 2009 when the Bobby Gillespie-fronted alternative rock band Primal Scream turned up at the University of East Anglia, where I was in the middle of doing a full-time MA. Feeling creaky and long in the tooth by then, I assumed my best gig-going days were behind me. I was too old for the mosh-pit, for jumping around and getting into the exuberant spirit of things. Meanwhile, I’d seen Primal Scream a few times before and found them a bit hit-and-miss.

But I ended up really, really enjoying myself. I managed to snag a position right at the edge of the stage, giving me a perfect view. And Gillespie and the gang were in blistering form. Primal Scream concerts can feel schizophrenic because their music veers between harsh, experimental electronica (like 2000’s Kill All Hippies) and loose-limbed, traditional Rolling Stones-style rock ‘n’ roll (like 1994’s Jailbird), but here it didn’t matter. They just alternated. They’d do one hardcore electronica number (accompanied by a brain-frying lightshow), followed by a Stonesy number, then another electronica one, then another Stonesy one, and so on. Somehow, tonight, it worked brilliantly.

From wikipedia.org / © Phil Guest

August 3, 2021August 7, 2021

How ZZ Top stopped me topping myself

From Wikipedia / © Brian Marks

It’s farewell, alas, to Dusty Hill, who recently passed away at the age of 72. Hill was bassist and sometime vocalist with the mighty blues / boogie / hard-rock Texan power trio ZZ Top, and not only was his musicianship crucial for the muscular tempo of those much-loved Top songs, but his appearance was crucial for the band’s image. Sporting Stetson, sunglasses, beard – a lot of beard – he was almost indistinguishable from the similarly hatted, shaded and hirsute Billy Gibbons, ZZ Top’s lead guitarist and vocalist. This meant two-thirds of the band seemed to consist of man-sized, guitar-wielding, Texan versions of Cousin It from The Addams Family.

The band’s third member, drummer Frank Beard, had a moustache but a clean-shaven jaw. This is probably the best-known amusing fact in the entire world, but it hasn’t stopped pub-bores during the past 40 years declaring: “Hey, here’s something funny you won’t know! The guy in ZZ Top who doesn’t have a beard is called Frank Beard!”

ZZ Top don’t get much credit for being a blues band, but one reason why I like them is because of the obvious influence blues music has had on their sound. Indeed, the ‘ZZ’ part of their name pays tribute to Texas bluesman ZZ Hill, and Billy Gibbons had toyed with the idea of calling the band ZZ King, in honour of the legendary BB King too, but decided that would be a bit much. No matter how hard, raucous, even heavy metal-ish they became at times, and even when they hit paydirt in the 1980s after sprucing up their sound with new technology, like synthesizers, and embracing new media, like MTV, the chord progressions powering their songs remained defiantly bluesy – My Head’s in Mississippi from their 1990 album Recycler is a particularly exhilarating example. Blues-music writer Charles Shaar Murray neatly described their sound from this period, lean and relentless, but with a crisp studio sheen, as ‘cyber-blues’.

When they made it big with the 1983 album Eliminator, they managed to make themselves cool by being determinedly uncool. Their videos were packed with foxy, leggy 1980s babes, but whereas the members of your average 1980s hair-metal band would be strutting like randy tomcats among the luscious ladies, eyes goggling, tongues waggling, ZZ Top stayed on the sidelines. Hill, Gibbons and Beard would suddenly appear in their videos as if they’d beamed down from the Starship Enterprise. They wouldn’t interact with the ladies but just play a few riffs, throw some schmuck the keys of the ZZ Top car (a cherry red 1933 Ford Coupe), point mysteriously and de-materialise again. This they did whilst clad in unphotogenic, dusty hats and denims. No wonder that when they made a cameo appearance in one of the Wild West scenes in Back to the Future, Part III (1990), they had no problems blending in.

All ZZ Top’s albums are worth a listen – I think their final album La Futura (2012), which has another corking blues track Heartache in Blue, is really good – but it’s their trilogy Eliminator (1983), Afterburner (1985) and Recycler (1990) that sees them capture the zeitgeist. Recycler, which one critic described as ‘worth stepping over a few rattlesnakes to buy’, is for me their finest hour. It effortlessly straddles the interface between modern America, a place of ‘concrete and steel’, ‘flying saucers off the Presley estate’, penthouses, fast food and 7-11s, and the America of old, one of the ‘Texas sand’, ‘dust and haze’, cowgirls and ‘old Levi’s’, with a clutch of songs that are both bracingly up-to-date and pleasingly retro.

There aren’t many culturally cool things that Texas is associated with. After all, this is the place that’s given us George W. Bush, Ted Cruz, Vanilla Ice and the Dealey Plaza. That’s why my partner’s parents, who live in the Texan city of San Antonio, always opt for a ZZ Top T-shirt when they want to give me a souvenir of their state of residence. Thus, I’ve amassed quite a collection of ZZ Top T-shirts over the years.

And now for a personal digression. Here’s how during 1984-85, ZZ Top helped keep me sane.

I’ve done many different jobs in my time. If anyone asks me what my least favourite job was, I immediately reply: “Being a member of the floor-staff at Ritzy’s nightclub in Aberdeen.” This was during my second year as a student at Aberdeen University and I worked at Ritzy’s three or four evenings a week, earning some money to compensate for the fact that I hadn’t been awarded any student grant that year. (Yes, this was in the days when students in the UK not only had their tuition fees paid for but many of them received a grant to cover their living expenses too. Of course, as soon as the generation that benefitted from this educational generosity graduated, became politicians and assumed positions of power – Tony Blair, I’m looking at you – they abolished the system for the kids who came after them and saddled them with potentially ruinous student loans instead.)

At Ritzy’s nightclub, I’d don a short-sleeved, light-blue boiler suit and lug around a plastic crate all evening. In the crate I’d place empty glasses and full ashtrays from the punters’ tables, then carry them to the work-spaces behind the club’s bars where I’d empty the ashtrays and wash them and the glasses. Then I’d return the clean glasses to the bar-shelves and the clean ashtrays to the tables. Doing this job at Ritzy’s – which’d previously been known as ‘Fusion’ and would later be known as the subtle-as-a-brick ‘Bonkers’ – was shit for a great variety of reasons.

It was shit that I had to work till 2.00 AM every Friday and Saturday night while all my mates were out enjoying some social life. It was shit that the club used a particular design of tumbler, a structurally unsound design, that exploded and sprayed you with shards if you stacked too many of them together. It was shit that the glasses you collected were often phenomenally grotty, with booze still inside them and cigarette butts floating around in that. (Not everyone in Aberdeen at this time had mastered the new-fangled invention that was the ashtray.) It was especially shit that many of the punters were workers in the then-flourishing oil industry whose headquarters was in Aberdeen, and made barrow-loads of money, and believed that their earnings entitled them to behave like knob-heads at all times – especially towards serfs like myself, trying to scrape together a few pennies by carting crates of glasses and ashtrays around a nightclub at the weekends.

But worst of all was the nightclub music. 1984-85 was a particularly horrible era in terms of British popular music and it was grueling indeed to lug your crate of glasses about, get insulted by dickhead oilmen, and at the same time be blasted by likes of The Reflex by Duran Duran or Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go by Wham or, joy, The War Song by Culture Club. Even worse was how the DJ – a fellow whose day-job was with the local radio station, Northsound – would play certain songs, which in themselves weren’t so obnoxious, again and again until hearing them became the musical equivalent of the Chinese water torture. Even today, if I ever hear Lost in Music by the Sisters Sledge, or Solid as a Rock by Ashford and Simpson, or No More Love on the Run by Billy Ocean, or Roni Griffith’s cover of The Best Part of Breakin’ Up, I suffer from a type of post-traumatic stress disorder where I have harrowing flashbacks to the hellscapes of mid-1980s Ritzy’s.

It wasn’t much better when I was scheduled to work mid-week at the special evening Ritzy’s held for the over-30s, which was known in local parlance as ‘grab-a-granny night’. (Yes, back then, granny-dom began pretty early in Aberdeen.) This featured a live band that performed cover versions of songs currently in the charts. I realise the band did their best and I don’t want to slag them off… But I have to say their front-man, a bloke called Stan, doing his Bruce Springsteen impersonation during Dancing in the Dark wasn’t the most edifying thing I’ve ever seen or heard.

But mercifully, this was when ZZ Top were riding high in the British album charts with Eliminator and during my year at Ritzy’s the band released a mighty trio of singles from that record: Gimme All Your Lovin’, Sharp Dressed Man and Legs. At least one of these would be played each evening in Ritzy’s and as soon as Frank Beard’s drumbeat started, followed by Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill’s crunchy guitars, I’d actually smile. I’d even find myself singing as I struggled with my heavy crate through the crowd: “You got to whip it up… And hit me like a ton of lead…!” Etcetera.

I’d even swear that as soon as a ZZ Top number started playing, the dancing in Ritzy’s – which hitherto had resembled a net-load of flopping, convulsing fish being dumped across the deck of a North Sea trawler – would suddenly improve. Folk would suddenly smarten up and jig with a military precision, courtesy of Beard and Hill’s infectious, but meticulously-measured rhythm section. I’ll go further still and suggest that Stan at grab-a-granny night never sounded better than when he was wrapping his tonsils around Sharp Dressed Man.

If only, while I was wrestling my way through the punters at Ritzy’s in the mid-1980s, ZZ Top had actually materialized and tossed me their car-keys…

From antiquesnavigator.com