By 1969, Newcastle’s legendary Club A’Gogo had come to an end. A new club called ‘Change Is’ opened that year on Bath Lane, Newcastle and featured a mixture of cabaret…
Author: Roger
’70
September 1970 saw the deaths of both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. It was also the year that an announcement was made that the Beatles had officially broken up. North…
’71
The band of the year is the Faces featuring Rod Stewart who also has a mega hit that year with ‘Maggie May’. Rod and the Faces inject a lot of…
’72
BBC TV’s ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’ is a popular programme. The show’s focus on “serious” rock music, rather than chart hits covered on BBC1 by Top of the Pops,…
Bruce MacDonald Lowes
One of my most enjoyable periods in North East bands was the stint with Jazzboard between 1965 and 1967. Jazzboard was fronted by the talented Bruce MacDonald Lowes, a vocalist…
Bryan Ferry
The first twenty three years of Bryan Ferry’s life were spent in the north east of England. For three of those years he was busy gigging in local north east…
Geoff Docherty
In the second half of 1968, four elements came together and changed the face of live music in the northeast for at least the next four years. This amalgamation would…
Ivan Birchall
Some time ago I had the idea of including some pages on Ready Steady Gone about non-musicians who were part of the sixties north east music scene; managers, promoters, agents,…
Jimmy Hall
I learned of the death of ex-Jazzboard organist, Jimmy Hall just after Christmas 2005. A news article on Sky News reported that a 57 year old Sunderland businessman named James…
Jimmy Nail
Not long ago, an old friend recommended that I should read Jimmy Nail’s autobiography suggesting that I may find some interesting stuff about local north east bands at the beginning…