The Sundown Experiment

January 2010 Issue 125

Jerry Gilbert talks to John Conlan about the live venue chain that rocked London in the early ’70s...

When I first met John Conlan, at the Soho HQ of the old EMI Dancing, it was towards the end of the 1970s and the ambition of his rock’n’roll past still shone like a beacon. He was then putting his energies into the newly-created World Disco Dance Championships (anyone remember Grant Santino?), yet just six years earlier he had been busy opening four Sundown theatres in London’s ’burbs for the Rank Organisation.

    By the start of the new decade he was overseeing the distinctly more disco-sounding ‘twin scene’ Romeos & Juliets for EMI Dancing, before embarking on a path that would take him to the top of the mighty First Leisure Corporation (via Sir Charles Forte’s Trusthouse Forte Leisure).

    THF had acquired the business following EMI’s sale to Thorn, and as part of Lord Delfont’s Leisure Division buy-out team, Conlan became the heir-in-waiting.

    He may equally have wondered how a journalist operating in the belly of a rock mainstream weekly in the early ’70s should now end up running a ‘disco’ trade magazine but what remains certain is how the wheels in this business turn.

    Back in 1985 we were both at the gala opening of First Leisure’s stupendous Dome, with its giant centre geodesic structure. Last year, this quintessential nightclub was converted to the O2 Academy Birmingham — for the same owner (AMG) which also operates the former Brixton Sundown, currently the O2 Academy Brixton.

    What I also remember was our mutual affection for the late Australian sound system genius, Dave Martin, who installed the sound systems at the Sundowns in 1972. The working relationship with the company continued further into the decade, with some of the Top Rank Suites being fitted out with Martin Audio Philishaves.

    And at the time of Dave Martin’s untimely demise in late 1992, the first letter of condolence I received at the magazine I was running (Live!) was from... John Conlan.

    As reported last month, the famous rock theatres that proliferated in the early ’70s were the legacy of Albert Stone, who built a quartet of Astoria Cinemas around the start of the 1930s for film exhibitor, Arthur Segal.

    While the venue that became Finsbury Park’s Rainbow Theatre was the subject of last month’s Chronicle, the corporate plan that gave rise to the other Sundowns in Edmonton, Mile End and Charing Cross proved to be almost as flawed as that of the entrepreneurial naïvety that blighted the Rainbow.

    With the exception of Edmonton, the sun would set prematurely on the Sundown experiment almost before it had risen.

FRESH FROM THE EMERALD ISLE
Let’s turn back the clock... to the very first edition of Chronicle, and our profile on Bernie Weaver, who had been working with the Rank Organisation as far back as 1935. Growing up in Ireland, John Conlan won’t remember back that far, but by the early ’60s he was planning to set out across the Irish Sea.

    Conlan had already been involved in the music industry in Ireland, working with Irish country rock musician Johnny McEvoy and trying (largely unsuccessfully) to promote concerts. “My father had contacts in the Rank Organisation and they brought me over to the UK in 1964 as a management trainee.”

    At that time Rank owned 50 or 60 so-called ‘super cinemas’ which generally doubled as venues for the 1960s Rank touring pop shows. “Rank provided the cinemas and the bands used the house system. A travelling guy in a van dressed the stage and Bernie Weaver put the sound systems in.

    “I used to get sent to places like the Regal Edmonton and Finsbury Park Astoria to liaise with the promoter and backstage crew.” Thus he was already familiar with these venues by the time the Sundown plan was being hatched.

    Vivid in his mind from that period was The Beatles’ Christmas Concert at Astoria Finsbury Park on December 11 1965, described by George Harrison as “one of [our] most incredible shows”.

    Simultaneously, the Rank Organisation started opening Top Rank Suites, which would sustain it through the 15 years and Conlan became operations manager. “These were huge multi-purpose venues for dancing and banqueting. I started renting them to promoters and we would stage soul music, such as The Drifters.”

    Operating in the south of the country, by the late ’60s his shows at Brighton’s Top Rank Suite (which would become the Kingswest Centre) were among the most successful in the UK.

    As the hierarchy at Rank started to take notice, Conlan persuaded Rank MD Bryan Quilter to accompany him on a trip to Brighton to see a sell-out show with Rod Stewart & the Faces.

    Says Conlan: “Many of the others [at Rank] were stuffed shirt, cinema guys but Bryan was always forward thinking, very progressive. We hired out the venue to promoters and he fell in love with the concept.”

    But then Conlan played his master card. “I told him we could do this ourselves. I said why don’t we get involved and do what they had done at Fillmore East and West?”

    Fortunately, Conlan had another ally in the camp. His immediate boss was John Jarvis (now chairman of Jarvis Hotels) who back in 1965 had joined Rank as operations controller for its entertainment and catering divisions.

    “I took him to American to show him Los Angeles and San Francisco, and had him sit through a long Grateful Dead show in L.A. (is there any other kind? - Ed-in-Chief).”

    On Jarvis’ recommendation, Quilter was prepared to back the idea for the new Sundown concept. “The idea was that we would rip out the seats and do a Fillmore — after all there were plenty of listed buildings that we had no use for.”

    The idea of selective conversion would have been fine had it not turned into a great unstoppable snowball. Instead of the single venue in Edmonton that Conlan originally envisaged, Rank ended up not only converting that old Regal Cinema in Silver Street, N.18, but also The Odeon, Mile End, Astoria in Brixton and Astoria Ballroom in Charing Cross Road (with the cinema above it).

    “The fact is that [Rank] were shoving venues at us,” remembers Conlan. “The only stipulation was that it had to be in London.”

    Rank allocated around £100K per unit to convert its old cinemas to live music venues, with the idea of running top line concerts on Friday and Saturday night, and a smaller band night on Thursdays.

    “It’s hard to make a large capacity venue work one or two days a week so we continued to run cinema midweek, using the Circle seating,” says Conlan. “Downstairs we took the seating out and when we wanted to operate it as a discotheque we would put dancefloors in.”

    To create his management infrastructure, Conlan recruited the doughty Ian Knight, whose background was in legitimate theatre, as production director. The two men had been introduced by Dudley Perkins, the manager of the Finsbury Park Astoria, who was retained at FOH after the Fillmore East crew had converted it to the Rainbow.

    Knight had worked for many of the leading stage designers of that era, but became best known for his involvement in the legendary Implosion at the Roundhouse with Caroline Coon and Jeff Dexter.

    Prior to that he had been working for a theatrical studio in Covent Garden — when they found themselves needing a 40’ Styrofoam statue, the owner of the studio came across Keith Albarn, father of Blur’s Damon.

    Albarn was a commissioned to produce a psychedelic dome for an event on a beach in France. “I had been around UFO [the psychedelic London club] and had become friendly with Soft Machine who were employed to play in this Dome, with Mark Boyle doing the lighting. I also knew Jimmy Page and started to get offers from Zeppelin, so suddenly I was in the rock business.”

    Knight, who worked as stage and production manager at Middle Earth (which would relocate to the Roundhouse), says: “A lot of what we later did technically at the Sundown was modelled on the Roundhouse [the charismatic multi-arts venue run by George Hoskins].”

    But the advanced technical infrastructures were not created without a fight, recalls Conlan. “Rank owned lighting company Rank Strand and wanted me to use their fixtures; they also had a favoured hifi company, and the TD at the time and I fell out over that. In fact I almost got fired.

    “We set up a demo at Brixton Astoria and they brought this hifi-cum-discotheque type system that they proposed for the sound, which was hopelessly under powered.”

    By now, Knight had introduced Conlan to Dave Martin. “It was Jeff Dexter’s idea to use a British system for the Roundhouse,” remembers Knight. For the Sundown demo, Martin lashed together a beefed-up version of the sound system he had provided for the Roundhouse.

    Rank also brought in the lighting company ESP, with Brian Croft. “We rigged up what we could,” says Conlan. “The Rank guys made their presentation... and then we lifted the safety curtain and revealed ours — the Dave Martin sound just hit you in the guts. I think we also had some of Joe’s Lights working. These Rank guys just stood in the middle of Brixton and said ‘Holy f***’.

    “They agreed we had to talk to Dave Martin. We commissioned four house systems — three large ones and one smaller one for the West End venue. We agreed a price but then realised Dave didn’t have the money to build them so we had to somehow advance it to him. That took some doing!”

    The systems would almost certainly have been based on the 215 Mk.1 bin (before it was split into the 115) — plus the Vitavox horns in use at the time. This may have been the romantic element of the prep work but the opening schedule (and locations themselves) proved to be a huge mistake.

    “We opened all four sites within a four-week period in 1972,” Conlan recalls. “We made the decision that we would promote ourselves, and I went to see Neil Warnock at NEMS, who became the agency. I said we wanted to open in three months time and he nearly fainted. We tried to fill the date sheet which was not easy because bands had loyalties with certain promoters such as John & Tony Smith or Barry Dickens.”
   
SUNRISE OVER LONDON
The Sundowns were set to open immediately after the summer recess and launched into the burgeoning autumn ’72 period.

    Brixton, for one, was looking for a big band to play the opening night in September, and the promoters secured Deep Purple, who were on their big UK Machine Head tour. It was the closing show of the tour and their only London concert, promoted by Pete Bowyer of NEMS.

    Britain’s hottest chart act in 1972, with three No.1 singles already to their name, Slade’s feverish opener at Sundown Mile End had been the first, on September 7, while Edmonton debuted with Steppenwolf on September 15 and Stephen Stills’ Manassas was also one of the first bands into Brixton.

    Memories of Mile End — and how Slade nearly pulled out of that opener — brings a rueful smile to Conlan’s face. “Mile End was a venue we should never have opened — it was in the wrong location.

    “We booked Slade and in the meantime they had broken in America and we were told ‘they are not coming back’. But we forced them to come back to the UK for one night only or we would have had no opening night.”

    Edmonton was the most successful venue, with the greatest longevity. “It had an enormous capacity of 3,500 and had an incredible stage. It was always the best venue, and where many of the bands, like Elton John, wanted to play. However, Neil Warnock found Brixton a difficult place to programme.”

    The anomaly was Charing Cross. “This was intended to be a larger version of the Speakeasy [the late night gathering point for the music industry, based in Margaret Street]. We opened with The Crickets and it was quite a successful live venue before drifting into mainstream discotheque.”

    But just as the Rainbow’s business plan had foundered when it was unable to book two shows per night to meet its business plan, so Rank Organisation’s downfall — incredibly — came on the cinema side, which had always been its core business.

    “The movie side was just so difficult. Even with Rank’s clout we couldn’t secure first run films [because it was no longer a full-time exhibitor].”

    More successful were the small band nights — often funded by record companies — and the willingness to back rising stars like Genesis and Crazy Horse.

    As for the larger events, the Sundowns still faced heavy competition and promoters such as Barry Dickens at MAM wouldn’t use the venues because the Rank Organisation were seen as competition. “We were marginally profitable but eventually the board asked ‘Is it going anywhere?’ and we said ‘No’,” says Conlan. “So it was phased out and I went on to other things.”

    But this ‘phasing out, in some cases, was implemented after a lifespan of only four or five months. Why had it failed so spectacularly after hosting some of the most memorable concerts in the annals of rock lore?

    “We simply opened too many and part of the plan was flawed,” believes Conlan. “We should have stuck with Edmonton, where Ian Knight was based.”

    It was Knight who ensured that the technical infrastructure remained fastidious. But he also believes that Rank may have pulled the plug too early.

    Also resident at Edmonton for a while was Joe’s Lights — the Fillmore lightshow originally started by Joshua White. The lightshow was under the sharp management of Cecily Hoyt, who had joined the team when they were still The Joshua Lightshow, operating at the Fillmore.

    John Conlan states that their services didn’t come cheap: “We managed to afford them for a year but we couldn’t use them on all the concerts. Some bands didn’t want them but we had a built-in cyc at Edmonton and they did some brilliant shows — they invented ACLs, using them on the crowds to get them to stand up and cheer.

    “All the installed lighting and desk was provided by ESP. But coupled with our sound crews and light guys it was an expensive place to run.”

    Nevertheless it comfortably outlasted its siblings and was responsible for some memorable concerts, notably Ronnie Lane’s final gig with The Faces on June 4 1973 and the definitive performance of Quadrophenia by The Who in the December of the same year.

    The Who had agreed to play four shows in London due to overwhelming demand for tickets during the UK tour in the autumn. The chaotic crowd scenes at London’s Lyceum in particular had influenced this decision, and tickets for Edmonton were available by mail order only.

    Pete Townshend later expressed the opinion that this series of four concerts were the best the band had ever played, and certainly the best Quadrophenia performances.

    However, Conlan made sure that when it came to breaking the house record, it was his friend, the late Rory Gallagher who would have the privilege. “I deliberately booked him on St. Patrick’s Day and all the lights were in green. The whole thing was a lot of fun.”

HOSES‘N’HARLEYS
John Conlan certainly has plenty of happy memories — from the antics of Rod Stewart & the Faces to Beck, Bogart & Appice. The general ‘after-show’ for the Faces usually consisted of a football match in the downstairs unseated area — with the band taking on the Sundown crews.

    “These usually descended into chaos,” remembers Conlan, “and on one occasion the match ended with both sides using fire hoses (with the water on of course).”

    As for Beck, Bogart & Appice, the band insisted on riding on to the Edmonton stage on Harleys. “The fire officer happened to be in the audience and no combustibles were allowed on stage. We had a word with the band, suggesting they simulate the effect, but the following night they did it again. It almost lost us our license.”

    Conlan also remembers being carpeted for one of their ‘family’ ads for their Sunday £1 shows. “It depicted a typical family scene with a Sunday joint.” The only problem was ‘the joint’ was depicted by the teen member of the family, who was toking on what was obviously wacky baccie.

    In their way, the brief lives of these iconic venues each had been responsible for hosting some of the most memorable gigs of all-time (an accolade they certainly shared with The Rainbow). And, of course, their technicians went on to achieve greatness (Ian Knight, for instance, then worked with Showco in Dallas as well as Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney’s Wings and Rod Stewart — for whom he is still organising shows).

    John Conlan carried the legacy of Martin Audio forward, and continued to use its systems in Top Rank Suites through the remainder of the decade. These were live band systems for the kind of showbands that toured the Top Rank Suites and Bailey’s cabaret circuit — spiritually a world away from the Sundowns.

    Reflecting on the experience, Ian Knight says: “For years people said it would be fantastic if [the industry] had its own theatre... and once we did so they abused it.” He is also less willing to support Conlan’s thesis that Edmonton was the best of the four venues. What he does say is that “everyone tried to live up to the Roundhouse”. But neither that or the equally coveted Hammersmith Odeon were available.

    One thing he is certain of is the integrity of John Conlan, and the value of his ongoing relationship. “He was the greatest straight man in a dodgy business... everyone who knew John said the same.”

    And so for a few glorious months from late 1972, the Rank Organisation managed to carve its name into rock history with the Sundown experiment, leaving an indelible mark and a host of wonderful memories, especially up in N18.
TPi