If you were a Club act (or maybe your Grandparents were?) then this is the site for you- you/they will almost certainly feature in here somewhere! The Gazette covered from Yorkshire down to Leicestershire and from Staffordshire to Lincolnshire but because of the huge club scene here we would see acts from Manchester, Newcastle, Northampton as well as from all over the East Midlands. When I began I had no idea how many acts had been reviewed in the ‘Clubmans Gazette’ over the 1970s. It amounts to over 12,000 reviews- most are favourable but some Concert Secretaries didn’t hold back! There are hundreds of news articles, adverts and general comments about Artistes from all over the country- despite apparently having several journalists writing articles several were nom-de-plumes of the Editor himself, Tom Crossley- who actually was pretty fair in his comments. Many acts became famous and it’s fascinating to read their early reviews. There is even a ‘black list’ of acts who had failed to honour their gigs. Sadder is the regularity of acts electrocuted on stage- fatalities were common in a time when there was a casual attitude to electricity.
This started when I realised all my ‘Gazettes’ were falling to pieces- and without urgent help 1,300 pages would soon be gone forever. I enlisted the help of my good friend Fred, a computer geek who has the professional scanner to cope with almost-destroyed text, which then had to have thousands of corrections because the Optical character recognition had failed to recognise faded text. He then sorted all the 12,000 reviews so we had PDF copies of every page in every Gazette as well as alphabetically sorted Artistes reviews. All this cost over £3,000 and took months of work- this is why I ask for a small contribution in return for a pdf of a page/review. Needless to say, this is non-profitmaking. Do bear in mind the site doesn’t always function perfectly. If you know of an ex-Artiste who doesn’t feature here then do send me info- I aim to expand this, with photos (preferably in colour) and information. It will be made clear I don’t have reviews of the Act but it will expand the knowledge of clubland throughout the late 60s and through to the early 80s. If you want to mention us on a Facebook page bear in mind most of the ‘Clubland- related’ pages don’t allow the site to be mentioned as it is construed as advertising (even though we can never, ever move into profit by the nature of it!). Unfortunately this does mean that the 10+ years of club history doesn’t get the audience it deserves so if you know an ex-club Act do tell them about this site.
On each page you will see the front page of a ‘Gazette’ followed by names of places and acts who were reviewed in that edition- we can send you a full quality PDF of the page for just £10 including VAT- however, we won’t charge you anything for a poor review- we’ll just warn you maybe that night is best forgotten! . Look among the menu to see the pages with Artistes listed in alphabetical order; you can then see the name (remember there were frequent miss-spellings so the name can appear in several places within the list) You can see which editions, with page numbers, featured that Artiste. Contact me and I’ll check the name is actually an Artiste reviewed in that edition. You are free to use/print it for personal use only. Print it on high-quality card and frame it- it would make a wonderful gift for an Entertainer in their twilight years!
Contact us on 0115 9674477 or email highburydesign@gmail.com
I’m Nick Flynn and I now help run a Japanese Blinds company- forgive the blatant advertising but this is a free-to-use site that I have funded with no help. With my wife I used to be part of ‘Anita & Nick’, a clubland award-winning duo playing pop, country and a wide variety of instrumental pieces ranging from Dvorak to the Shadows. I have most ‘Gazettes’ from 1970 until its closure in 1980 so it covers the ‘heyday’ of clubland music & variety acts, when clubs would be packed out at the weekends and even some weekdays. Hope nothing upsets any readers; it’s certainly the case that every act had a bad night occasionally so you might see a poor review for an otherwise excellent act- Englebert Humperdinck climbed out of the dressing-room window of one club because he couldn’t face walking through a heckling Leicester audience once! You may notice I used to write a column for the Gazette- I would love to censor it now as it was pretty puerile but I left it in anyway.
If you spot anything that is offensive in any way please let me know immediately- obviously I have tried to delete anything unacceptable today but I haven’t been able to check every page of every Gazette.
My thanks to the Editor Tom Crossley for allowing me to create this website.
By the way- this website is very useful for general knowledge about the clubs- http://www.clubhistorians.co.uk