The Invaders

I first came across the Invaders in the early months of 1965. I’d recently joined my first established Newcastle band, the Kylastrons. One of the places we regularly played was…

James South

The hot summer of ’67 was the Summer of Love. People were wearing flowers and beads – not just in Haight-Ashbury, San Fransisco but also in the north east. Even…

Jasper Hart Band

Way back in the summer of 1967, the ‘Summer of Love’, I’d just joined a newly formed seven-piece soul band called the James South Set. One of our earliest gigs…

Jazzboard

In 1965 there were a lot of good bands around and if you didn’t want to do the working men’s club circuit, competition was stiff. Popular bands from the Sunderland…

Junco Partners

Newcastle’s Junco Partners must be one of a small number of bands that performed for over 50 years whilst retaining most of its founding members. Amazingly, when the Junco Partners…

Kylastrons

In the early sixties, before Screaming Lord Sutch became a politician and leader of the Official Monster Raving Loony party, he was a fairly successful UK rock horror performer. He…

Lindisfarne

After The Animals took the world by storm in 1964 it was a long time before another Newcastle band would make a sizable impression on the record buying public. It…

Roger’s first bands

I started playing saxophone at the age of fourteen while I was still at school. When I first took up the instrument it wasn’t because I wanted to play in…

Scallywag

By 1971 things were starting to change in the local band scene. Whereas a few years earlier, bands had been happy to emulate their favourite artists by covering their material,…

The Sect

In the sixties there weren’t many Newcastle bands that made it to the top. After the Animals in 1964, there was a long gap of 6 years before Lindisfarne achieved…