THE ELECTRIC BALLROOM

184 Camden High Street, NW1. Telephone: 020 7485 9006

Since the Electric Ballroom opened in July 1978, its stage has been graced by Sid Vicious, Philip Lynott, Iggy Pop, the Clash, Joy Division, Madness, U2, The Smiths, Nick Cave, The Pogues, Public Enemy and the Gallagher brothers. But the Ballroom was the centre of Camden Town nightlife in the days long before rock’n’roll.

It was first opened as a ballroom in the mid-1930s, mainly as a social centre for the large number of Irish immigrants who were coming to Britain to make up for the labour shortage during the Second World War. It was called The Buffalo because that’s what its aerial view was shaped like and, at that time, the entrance was through an iron gate on the Kentish Town Road. For the first year or so, The Buffalo was run by an Irishman called Ginger Maloney and it had a reputation for being a very rough place, full of different tribes of fighting Irishmen. The police were constantly being called in to deal with late-night violence and, after one fight too many, it was closed down.

The Buffalo was saved, however, by another red-haired Irishman called Bill Fuller. He was a 20-year-old contractor and amateur wrestler from County Kerry, who had opened the St Patrick’s Club, on Queen’s Road in Bayswater, when he arrived in London three years earlier.

“The Buffalo had been closed down by the police, who had put a big lock on the gate,” says Fuller, who still owns the Ballroom today. “So I went to the Chief Of Police in Holmes Road - he was an inspector Harris and he was a hard man to bargain with but I said “I’ll make a deal with you: if you’re ever called in to sort out a fight here, I’ll put the lock back on the gate.” We’d get all the Connemara lads in, and they were all well used to fighting, those were wild days, you know

“So I opened up The Buffalo in Camden Town - that was at the end of 1937, I think, or maybe 1938 - and I ran it myself. It was a small little place then and it was rough and ready, because I was breaking it in to see if I could handle the fights, but I handled them with these two fists [holds them up and laughs], these two fellas handled it all. You see that old gate on the Kentish Town Road? It’s the same gate that has always been there, I never did away with it. I left it as a souvenir of the old days.”

Fuller discovered that The Buffalo had previously been a Masonic Lodge, which had a swimming pool and steam baths plus a large meeting room upstairs. He immediately cleaned the old ballroom up and started to make changes. But the real opportunity for expansion came in 1941 when Camden Town Tube Station was bombed, and both the back of The Buffalo and the small side street beside it, which was called Dewsbury Terrace, were literally blown away. Bill Fuller took this as an opportunity to extend The Buffalo, rebuilding the back of the ballroom and creating a new dance floor on the site that was previously occupied by the row of terraced houses. “I bought the whole site then,” says Fuller, “and, because I was a contractor with my own gang of men, I built The Buffalo up into a ballroom that could hold 2,000 people.”

During the 1940s and 50s, Irish people came to Camden Town at the weekends, from all over London and from surrounding towns as far afield as Peterborough. The Buffalo didn’t have a licensed bar, so every-one would drink in the pubs until closing time and then hit the ballroom.

“Irish fellas would come from all over for a night out in Camden Town,” says John Fitzgerald, who took over The Brighton pub, on Camden High Street, in 1957. “They’d come here in holiday time and they’d get off at the station on a Thursday night and they probably wouldn’t go back for a week and, when holiday time came again, they’d be in droves in Camden Town. They’d enjoy themselves for a week and they’d dance in The Buffalo and probably fall in love [laughs}.”

Besides being one of the few late-night places where Irish people could meet in North London, The Buffalo was popular because of its great music. “In those early days, I always had good Irish music,” says Bill Fuller. “It was mainly old-time waltzes, reels and jigs - tunes like The Hornpipe and The Stack Of Barley, which was a big one - and, after a while, the quick step came in. At first, I used to make up my own bands: I had a blind pianist called Billy and another lad called Tommy, who was half-Irish and half-Italian, who played the accordion.”

By the late-50s, Bill Fuller was, quite literally, building a chain of ballrooms in England, Ireland and the United States, and he was also running a management and promotions company to provide live acts for his venues. Among those who worked for him in England were big band leaders, such as Ambrose, Geraldo, Jack Parnell and Joe Loss, and all of them regularly played at The Buffalo. “Joe Loss was one of my most famous bands,” says Fuller. “He worked for me for years and was a very good friend of mine.”

One of the singers with the Joe Loss band was Ross McManus, the father of Elvis Costello. Yet while it was the big bands that got The Buffalo crowds dancing, it was the Irish showbands, who began to emerge in the late-50s and early-60s, who really captured their hearts. The Clipper Carlton, from Strabane in Northern Ireland, are generally credited as being the first showband, but Bill Fuller gives that honour to the Irish big band leader, Mick Delahunty. “The Clipper Carlton were certainly one of the best Irish bands I’ve seen,” he says, “but it was Mick Delahunty who had the first showband. He was kind of like Joe Loss and he was a great showman, probably one of the best ever.”

Although he came from a different era to the Irish showbands, Mick Delahunty was supportive of the new, younger scene and helped to launch the career of The Royal Showband, by letting them open for him. Bill Fuller also did his bit for The Royal Showband, who were fronted by an Elvis-lookalike called Brendan Bowy, by booking them into his ballrooms all over the world.

“I remember seeing The Royal Show band at The Buffalo,” says Vince Power, who came to London as a teenager in the early-60s and would go on to build a Bill Fuller-style empire of his own with the Mean Fiddler Organisation. “The only reason I remember that show is because they came from Waterford, which is where I’m from. But I used to go to The Buffalo quite often - I saw lots of bands there, such as The Miami Showband and Big Tom. It was a place that filled up very quickly after the pubs closed, it would be full in five minutes. It was quite rough really, but it was one of the few places where the Irish would congregate, apart from the Galtymore in Cricklewood and the Garryowen in Hammersmith.”

The greatest story surrounding The Buffalo concerns Jim Reeves, an Irish Catholic icon on a par with John F Kennedy and the Pope. In June 1963, Reeves had done a tour of Ireland and - unlike the showbands - had been shocked by the conditions he was expected to perform in. This included playing two venues each night, some of which were up to 50 miles of winding, Irish country roads apart, and, worse still, having to deal with a series of badly tuned pianos. Some of the dates were a complete disaster and Reeves was determined not to put up with such terrible conditions again.

Reeves was scheduled to play at The Buffalo in February 1964 but, according to Fuller, it never happened. “We had Jim Reeves booked in at The Buffalo but he never showed up,” he says. “At the time, I was building a ballroom in San Francisco and I got a fellow called Philip Solomon to handle the tour. But Philip and Jim fell out, so Jim quit and he never played at The Buffalo. They sold all the tickets and Bill Foley, who was the manager, gave the crowd their money back, but they didn’t want their money - they wanted Jim Reeves!”

The Jim-I Reeves story that has passed down through Camden Town legend is even better. “Jim Reeves was due to play at The Buffalo,” says Frank Murray, who managed the Ballroom in the late-70s, “and there was just one thing on his rider: he insisted that the piano should be in tune. Irish ballroom promoters never quite grasped things like riders in those days, they just put the band up on the stage, expected them to play, took the crowd’s money and went home. So when Jim arrived at The Buffalo, there was a piano but nobody had bothered to tune it. By this time, the ballroom was really crowded - it probably had rubber walls - but Jim’s manager, or whoever, said, ‘Jim’s not playing.’ So the manager of the ballroom and the staff took all of the money that they had in the cash box, went into the lane at the back of the building, loaded the cash into a manhole, secured everything that could be secured inside the ballroom, and then one of them got up on the stage and announced, ‘Jim Reeves will not be playing tonight’. Before making a quick exit. The staff did a runner and just left the ballroom to the punters. Needless to say, there was a riot, as people started to demand their money back. The staff were off down the road and called in the police, who literally rode into the ballroom on horseback. I just have this great picture of mounted police riding into The Buffalo, with something like 2,000 Paddies going crazy because Jim Reeves hadn’t shown up. It’s cinematic.”

The month after the Jim Reeves fiasco, The Manhattan Showband played at The Buffalo on St Patrick’s Night. They were fronted by Van Morrison and had recently been formed from the ashes of his previous showband, The Monarchs. The band were invited to stay in a spare bedroom above The Buffalo and, the night before their own show, Morrison and guitarist Herbie Armstrong went to Studio 51 in Soho to see an R&B band called The Downliners Sect, who had long hair and played Jimmy Reed and Bo Diddley songs, and were exactly the kind of group that Morrison wanted to have.

Back at The Buffalo, Morrison and Armstrong sat in their little room drinking cider and Van played a song called Could You Would You. “I thought it was incredible,” Armstrong told the writer Steve Turner years later. “I had never known anyone who had written a song before.” Exactly a month after their Buffalo show, Morrison’s new band, Them, played for the first time ever at the Maritime Hotel in Belfast - Could You Would You was part of their early set, as was a song called You Just Can’t Win, which contained a reference to Camden Town Tube Station.

In the 60s, three of the key ballrooms in Bill Fuller’s chain were renamed The Carousel - these were The Buffalo in Camden, The Astoria in Manchester and a new one he had built in San Francisco [which would be leased out to the rock promoter Bill Graham in 1968 and renamed the Fillmore West]. By this time, entrance to the ballroom was from Camden High Street, rather than Kentish Town Road, and you can still see the red Carousel sign above the main door.

The Carousel continued to put on showbands, such as Big Tom & The Mainliners, Johnny McEvoy, Larry Cunningham, Brendan Shine and Dickie Rock, a romantic balladeer whose effect on women was powerful enough to inspire the universal mating call, “Spit on me, Dickie”. It also showed hurling matches on large TV screens on Sunday afternoons and continued to be a major social centre for the Irish in London. “My aunt and uncle used to go dancing at The Carousel,” says Shane MacGowan. “That’s where they met, courted and got married in the mid-60s. Camden Town has always been a big Irish area with loads of pubs, all of which were Irish.”

MacGowan’s aunt and uncle are typical of the many Irish couples who met in The Carousel and The Buffalo before it. Many of them still come back here on Sunday mornings to search for the ghosts of their youth, retracing the steps that they once made across the dance floor or to look around for the long gone mineral bar where he first bought her a drink.

In 1969, Bill Fuller asked a young woman called Anne Wellstead, who was working in one of his properties on the West Coast of Ireland, to take a job at The Carousel. She agreed to move to Camden Town, initially taking a room above the ballroom, and is still here as its co-director. A few years later some of the big rock names, including Paul McCartney’s Wings, Led Zeppelin, Gary Glitter and a few of the new punk bands who were connected to the neighbouring Chiswick Records, used the ballroom as a rehearsal room. It was also popular with the local Greek community, who held wedding receptions here on most Sunday afternoons - and this is where George Michael’s sister held hers.

In 1978, Bill Fuller got together with Frank Murray, the former tour manager of Thin Lizzy, and realised that his majestic old ballroom, with two-levels, three bars, an upstairs restaurant and glassed-in viewing areas, would make a great rock venue. Murray’s intention was to model it on Bill Graham’s Fillmore West, with no security and a good vibe, and make it the kind of place where famous musicians would be encouraged to get up and jam with other bands or even form a ‘supergroup’ for the night.

With this in mind, the Electric Ballroom opened on July 28, 1978, with the Greedies, who were the brainchild of Thin Lizzy’s Philip Lynott and featured himself, Scott Gorham and Brian Downey; the Sex Pistols’ Paul Cook and Steve Jones; Rainbow’s Jimmy Bain plus Chris Spedding. Unlike many of the successful rock stars of the 70s, Lynott had quickly aligned himself with punk, befriending Cook, Jones and even Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, who were all frequent visitors to his home in Cricklewood. The Greedies closed their Electric Ballroom set with a mass jam through Pretty Greedy, an obvious take on the Pistols’ Pretty Vacant, and a performance which partly inspired Sid Vicious to form the Vicious White Kids, who played a one-off show at the Ballroom two weeks later. The rest of the inspiration came from the fact that Sid needed a way of raising his and Nancy’s air fares to America, which is why the gig was billed as ‘Sid Sods Off’.

Featuring Sid on vocals, the Damned’s Rat Scabies on drums, [who briefly had his own band The White Cats], plus original Pistols’ bassist Glen Matlock and Steve New [who were both in the Rich Kids], they called themselves the Vicious White Kids. “It was a great band and the place was packed out with a really hip audience,” remembers Shane MacGowan. “There were a lot of transactions going down - people joining groups, buying drugs, fucking each other in the toilets, you know, the usual stuff’.”

The set was largely made up of songs that the Pistols did, including C’mon Everybody, Belsen Was A Gas and My Way, which went down so well that the band ended up playing them twice. “All I remember is that Sid took up the role of lead singer without an instrument, and loved it,” says Frank Murray. “He kept throwing Elvis shapes and grabbing his crotch - he was doing it years before Michael Jackson, believe me. He obviously hated being a bass player and this was his band. That’s what I liked about it. It was as though he was living out his fantasy of being the singer and getting all the attention, while Nancy just squealed into the mike like a bad dose of feedback.”

Fortunately, someone had taken the precaution of switching Nancy’s microphone off before she sidled onstage. Less fortunately, she and Sid took a flight to New York a couple of weeks later, but were destined never to return.

Other bands who made early appearances at the Electric Ballroom include the Pop Group, Nico and Cabaret Voltaire, while the Greedy Bastards played another show in December, this time also including Bob Geldof in their line-up. “Both Greedies’ gigs and the Vicious White Kids were big events,” says Frank Murray. “And because the Ballroom opened with the Greedies, it became a favourite spot of visiting Americans - if Blondie or David Lee Roth were in town they would pop in - and Lemmy was always there. It became quite a place for people to hang out. The Clash rehearsed at the Ballroom for a week once and I also had Frank Zappa in for four days, which was great fun because I could just stand there and watch them as much as I liked.”

However, the Electric Ballroom was forced to close down after about nine months, following severe objections to the noise levels from some local residents. It was given new soundproofing and reopened in July 1979, under a new manager, Terry O’Neill, who had previously run McGonagles, one of Bill Fuller’s clubs in Dublin. The opening show was a 2-Tone evening, featuring The Specials, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Madness and The Selecter.

There were several more 2-Tone gigs at the Ballroom that autumn and on some occasions there were fights in the crowd or friction between the support band and the audience. This happened when Madness headlined over Echo & The Bunnymen and Bad Manners in October, and some skinheads prevented the Bunnymen from finishing their set. It was probably just as well that the Electric Ballroom had a policy of making everyone check their boots into the cloakroom as they entered the building. “Unfortunately, there were fights at most of the early 2-Tone gigs, once they had grown to the Ballroom size, rather than the Nashville or Hope & Anchor,” says Rick Rogers, who managed The Specials. “There was immediately an attraction to the right wing skinhead population, who would cause trouble, and sometimes it was caused by extreme left wingers who went there to fight the skinheads. It wasn’t particularly either side, it was just one of the problems of the whole 2-Tone era. Despite the message that was being preached from the stage, there would always be opposing factions in the audience and very often there would be fights and people from the band would jump off stage to stop them.”

Joy Division also played at the Electric Ballroom twice in 1979, once in August and again in October, when their set included early live performances of Love Will Tear Us Apart and Atmosphere. Shane MacGowan was among those in the audience mesmerised by Ian Curtis. “I saw Ian Curtis sing with Joy Division,” he told Jon Wilde in 1994. “It was like a horror film. You were scared to go for a p--- in case you missed something.”

Other notable bands to play here during this period were Adam And & Ants, the B52’s, Talking Heads, the Clash, who did a two-night stint here as part of their London Calling tour in January 1980, and Wire, who recorded half of’ their Document And Eyewitness live album at the Electric Ballroom the following month.

In 1980, Brian Wheeler, who had previously promoted gigs for Straight Music, became the new manager of the Electric Ballroom and has run it ever since. “This place was an eye-opener because it was always jam-packed and seemed like a complete madhouse to me,” says Wheeler. “Most concerts that I’d been involved with were fairly well organised but, in this particular venue, it was always total mayhem and that was part of its appeal. It was laidback and seemed fairly indestructible so people could do what they wanted, within reason.”

In the early-80s, dozens of influential bands played at the Electric Ballroom, including The Cramps, The Fall, The Only Ones, The Virgin Prunes, U2, the Sisters Of Mercy and Nick Cave, first with The Cavemen and later The Bad Seeds. The Smiths’ first gig here is still remembered as an all-time great. “That was one of the best shows I’ve seen anywhere,” says Brian Wheeler. “It was just one of those concerts that happens every once in a while. Most people had never heard of The Smiths at the time, so it was a bit of a surprise to me that we got a capacity crowd, but I guess word had already got around.”

Another of the memorable shows was in August 1983 when Ace Records put together what was arguably the best R&B show to ever hit London, featuring Willie Egan, Chuck Higgins, Big Jay McNeely and Young Jessie. The same bill subsequently recorded studio sessions, which were later released as a live album on Ace. “I remember that gig at the Electric Ballroom,” says Nick Garrard, “because I had been out on a drinking contest with Shane MacGowan the night before, and ended up needing stitches in my head. I was pilled out of my brain and couldn’t stand because my legs were wobbly. So I sat in the cafeteria in a place where I could see the stage, and then Big Jay McNeely did his routine where he walks round the whole place and, of course, he makes a beeline for me because I’ve got this trilby on to hide where they shaved my head to put the stitches in. Anyway Big Jay ends up sitting on my lap - I was feeling like death at this point - and then this guy behind me takes my hat off and puts in on Jay’s head. So I take it back and he does it again, so I have to hit him. The guy, not Jay.”

In 1983, the Electric Ballroom became the place to be on a Saturday night when it started the Warehouse, which was a rockabilly club upstairs, while Jay Strongman played disco and funk downstairs. The Electric Ballroom was a legitimate place for the Warehouse which had grown out of various illegal clubs around North London, such as Dirtbox and Demob. “Loads of famous people came through the Warehouse when it first started,” says Paddy James, who DJ’d with Jay Strongman at the Ballroom’s Saturday night Crush Club for many years. “It was still hip for the first year that it went legitimate, because people didn’t want that glammy, glitzy, Mecca-venue kind of vibe.”

The Warehouse was the main reason why rockabillies originally hung out in Camden Town on Saturdays. “The first big rock’n’roll club around here was the Warehouse,” says Mouse, who started the Saturday afternoon rocking sessions at Dingwalls three years later. “Dave Mahoney used to run the upstairs part with a guy called Steve Ross and, slowly but surely, more people started hanging out round here, because there was always something happening. After the Warehouse, we’d go down to the Scala at King’s Cross and watch all-night movies. You could drink there, you could party there, you’d either get a Marl Brando bill or a freak night - good days.”

Unlike the divide between, say skinheads and mods, the Warehouse encouraged people to get into different kinds of music. “When Jay Strongman started at the Ballroom he played disco and funk but he would play rockabilly as well,” says Ben Jones, who went to the Warehouse in the early days. “He’d whack on some of the big rockabilly tracks and everyone would jive. It was a brilliant, brilliant time because there was no differentiation between music.”

One band who made themselves instantly unpopular when they played at the Ballroom were King Kurt, who encouraged their audience to shower them with raw meat. “I was aware of the general propensity of the crowd for throwing flour, offal and pigs’ livers around the place,” says Brian Wheeler, “but we decided that we’d simply confiscate anything like that as everyone came through the door. Unfortunately, people got wind of what was happening before they got to the front door and decided to unload whatever they had in the street; which resulted in all the neighbouring shops and offices being coated with flour and eggs and offal. We upset our neighbours in quite a big way. In fact, we got phone calls from a very long way away, for example, there was a Rolls Royce parked outside the station in Brighton that got completely covered in eggs and flour simply because a bunch of fans were on their way to London to see King Kurt at the Electric Ballroom and decided to offload their stuff’ early. The owner was extremely upset and expected us to pay for what he regarded as damage to his car.”

In September 1985, the Jesus & Mary Chain played here, with Bobby Gillespie on drums. After they had played their usual 20-minute set, the band left the stage. The audience demanded an encore which they were never going to get. Some people threw glasses at the ceiling and smashed the strip lights, while others climbed onstage and started kicking over the amplifiers. At this point, some of the bouncers retaliated by waving microphone stands at certain sections of the audience then dozens of police stormed into the Ballroom. It was hardly the Jim Reeves riot, but it was one of the more memorable gigs of the 80s.

Former Sisters Of Mercy Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams unveiled their new name, The Mission, at the Electric Ballroom in February 1986, after Andrew Eldritch [who was in the audience that nightl] stopped them from using their original name, The Sisterhood. Unfortunately, the banner failed to unfurl properly, announcing them to the stunned crowd as ‘The Miss’ before a roadie was quickly dispatched to pull down the other three letters.

The Mission are among the many bands who have recorded videos at the Electric Ballroom and it is also used as an occasional TV location. The most famous scenes to be shot here were in the 1986 film, Hearts Of Fire, a pretty atrocious account of a rock star, but one which nevertheless brought the lead character, Bob Dylan, to Camden Town for two days. “I was surprised that somebody of his enormity could just be like a regular Joe and walk around the streets and go into all the shops,” says Brian Wheeler.

The Pogues used the Ballroom as their personal rehearsal room during the late-80s and played here in November 1987. Bill Fuller was intrigued enough by their records to fly over from Las Vegas for the occasion. “I’ve always loved Irish music, really good Irish music, and I still love it today,” he says. “I’d travel thousands of miles to hear it.”

Fuller insisted on cooking The Pogues a steak dinner in the Ballroom’s upstairs restaurant before the show, which was a bit problematic for Shane MacGowan. “I wasn’t going to say to Bill Fuller, I’m vegetarian’, you know what I mean?” he says. “I had a lot of respect in his eyes - that would have turned me into a w----- in five seconds, so I said, “Thank you very much’, and ate the potatoes and cabbage.”

The Pogues, who were just about to release their big Christmas hit, Fairytale Of New York, made it worth Bill Fuller’s time by playing a great show and Joe Strummer unexpectedly joined them for a rendition of I Fought The Law during the encore. Strummer later played guitar on The Pogues’ US Tour that winter, a return to the stage which prompted him to form the Latino Rockabilly War band and do a Rock Against The Rich Tour the following summer. The tour stopped off at the Electric Ballroom and his set included everything from the 101’ ers’ Keys To Your Heart and the Clash’s Straight To Hell to Trash City.

Public Enemy played at the Ballroom in 1988, on one of the last occasions when they would appear in such a small venue, as did the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Gaye Bykers On Acid specifically requested this as the venue for their major London gig, after releasing their 1989 LP, Stewed To The Gills. “I always remember going to other people’s gigs at the Ballroom and thinking that I’d love to play there cos it’s such a fantastic place,” says Mary Byker. “It’s faded grandeur, glamour gone wrong; it’s lost in time somewhere. I remember when we went in to do our sound check, we were like, ‘Yes, here we are - f--- the Town & Country, this is better, it’s right in the middle of Camden.’ But the gig was a disaster because the sound limiter went off and it cut all the backline out. Rat Scabies was there and he said afterwards, ‘You should get me to produce one of your records.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, all right.’ And he goes, ‘What we’ll do is we’ll get some crates of beer, loads of cheap speed and we’ll just lock ourselves in the studio for two weeks - that’s exactly what you need to do.’ And I remember thinking at the lime, That is exactly what we don’t need to do’, but, looking back he was right. To get a great record from that band, at that time, that’s what we should have done, with somebody like him, who we all liked, because he was a punk.”

In the early part of the 90s, live bands only played here occasionally - Such as Elastica in February 1993 - and the Ballroom became best known for its Friday night goth disco Full Tilt and Saturday’s house-oriented Crush Club. It is also renowned for its Sunday fashion market and its record fairs.

In 1996, the Ballroom not only reemphasised its Irish roots by hosting Tuesday night line-dancing sessions, but started putting on live bands again, such as Menswear and Lush. The most memorable gig of that year, though, was by Ocean Colour Scene, who played two nights here in May. On the second night, Liam and Noel Gallagher came on stage during the encore and sang three Oasis songs - Live Forever, Wonderwall and Cast No Shadow - and they were joined by Ocean Colour Scene for a mass rendition of The Beatles’ Day Tripper.

BILL FULLER: THE MAN WHO BUILT THE BALLROOM

Bill Fuller is a rock’n’roll legend and one of the central figures in the history of Camden Town. He took over a run down ballroom on the High Street in the late-30s, built it up into one of the most famous Irish dance halls in London, and then transformed it into the Electric Ballroom in 1978.

Fuller - a contractor and amateur wrestler as well as an astute businessman - built a chain of ballrooms across England, Ireland and the United States, enabling many Irish couples to meet and marry. His ability to erect such places, virtually overnight, has inspired many stories over the years. “There used to be a saying about him in the 50s,” said one interviewee for this book. “ ‘What Hitler didn’t knock down in London, Bill Fuller did.’ ”

“Fuller was a legend round Dublin and further afield,” Eamon Dunphy wrote in his 1987 biography, Unforgettable Fire: The Story Of U2. “He did business with a handshake, which made it difficult to sue him when later on he told you to, ‘Fuck off, boy, and don’t annoy me.’ ”

At one point, Fuller owned 23 ballrooms around the world including San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore West. He also promoted jazz concerts, including several by Billie Holiday, at New York’s Carnegie Hall; helped to break Patsy Cline on the East Coast; ran a booking agency for country heavyweights, such as Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Willie Nelson and Buck Owens; and was the only man well connected enough to get Irish showbands into Las Vegas.

You could also say that without Bill Fuller, Oasis might never have existed - because, among his ballrooms was the Astoria, on Plymouth Grove in Manchester, which is where Peggy Sweeney met another Irish immigrant called Thomas Gallagher. A quarter of a century later, on May 29,1989, Noel Gallagher retumed to the ballroom where his parents had first laid eyes on each other to celebrate his 21st birthday. [By this time, Fuller, who still owned the building, had changed The Astoria’s name to The Carousel and, more recently, to the International 2.] Noel Gallagher was there to see The Stone Rose who were supporting James at an Anti-Clause 28 Benefit gig, and was blown away. ‘The Stone Roses made me want to be in a band,” he says simply. For Liam Gallagher, who had been watching the Roses downstairs, seeing Ian Brown perform for the first time was almost a Damascene moment. “I just went, ‘Yeah!’ ” he says. “I thought, ‘it’s here, today, in my face. I can go with that.’ ”

Bill Fuller smiles when he hears about Oasis and his latest part in rock’n’roll history. “Oasis?” he asks. “Are they the boys who sound like The Beatles?”

A lunch date with Bill Fuller in his adopted hometown of Las Vegas has turned out to be the crock of gold at the end of the Camden Town rainbow. “Would you like a glass of champagne?” he asks, as he settles himself into a big booth in the Country Star bar and restaurant. “Go on, have one, it’s a Sunday.” A gospel group, in long white cassocks, are onstage, as if to emphasise his point. And, while they sang Oh Happy Day, Bill Fuller started telling me a small part of his life story.

He was born in County Kerry, shortly before the Irish Civil War broke out in December 1921. Initially, he had not set his sights on the ballrooms of England, much less the world. He wanted to be a farmer and his driving ambition was to own a place of his own in Kerry. By the time he was 17, he had a steady girlfriend, who he was about to marry, and he had managed to put a substantial deposit down on a farm worth £2,800. “I had bred a greyhound and managed to sell it for a lot of money,” he says. “A friend of mine owned a farm in Kerry but he got a bigger farm from the Land Commission up in Dublin. So I made a deal with him: I bought the place in Kerry of him for £2,800 - put down £600 and arranged to borrow the rest from the National Bank in Listowel. I hadn’t told my father about the deal, but he heard about it anyway and went to the bank and objected. Some solicitor had told him that he would be liable if I defaulted in the payment, because I was underage. So my old fellow objected to the deal and the bank then said, ‘Sorry, we can’t give it to you.’ I used to ride a BSA motorbike - I was a handyman then at poaching the river for Salmon - and I remember well, I got on the old motorbike and rode it into Listowel town. I went to see a fellow in Listowel, called Derby Briggs, and I said, ‘Derby, there’s the bike, now. Keep it, I’m going.’ And then I turned around and got the train to Holyhead. And that was it, I’m gone ever since.”

Once in England, Bill Fuller found work on the building sites. He was lucky enough to be taught the tricks of the trade by a Scottish man called Bob Young, who was one of the main men at McAlpine’s at the time. Soon after he had first arrived in London, Fuller teamed up with Paddy Casey, to open an Irish club in Queens Road, Bayswater. Paddy Casey was one brother in a large family of Irish wrestlers and they allowed Fuller to train with them. “In my young days I was a pretty lively guy,” he says. “The Caseys taught me a lot about wrestling and boxing. One of them was a champion wrestler, known as The Crusher Casey, but it was Micky Howard - who was married to one of the Casey girls - who really showed me how to wrestle and how to counter hold. If a fella puts a hold on you, you always have a counter hold, and you can break him. The Caseys were strong and tough, but I was able to counter them. I could hold my own with them, but I didn’t want to wrestle professionally because I was too busy with the club.”

All this physical training came in useful when Fuller took over The Buffalo Ballroom in Camden Town in the late-30s. It was such a rough Irish dance hall that it had recently been closed down by the police, but Fuller persuaded the local Chief Of Police to let him reopen it, promising to man the door himself - which he did for a number of years. He also started his own contracting business and ran it from an upstairs room of The Buffalo. “When the Second World War was on,” he says. “Irish men didn’t have to join up if they were from the South, it was up to them. So I started a contracting business, and I had the Borough Of Stepney and the Borough Of Islington, with about 2,000 men working for me. During the day, I ran the building business and in the night time I moved on to entertainment.”

Before long, Bill Fuller had built The Buffalo up into ballroom that could accommodate 2,000 people. He then set his sights on building or buying other ballrooms in Ireland and England, initially going to Dublin, where he built The Crystal Ballroom, and then to Belfast, where he bought The Mecca. He also started to run his own management and promotions company, looking after big band leaders, such as Jack Parnell and Joe Loss, who would tour the West Country and also play in Fuller’s own venues.

In 1950, Fuller went to the United States for the first time and returned to New York soon afterwards to open a ballroom called City Centre. On subsequent trips, he travelled around the rest of the country, exploring different cities and picking up the new records of the time. According to Fuller, some of these records played a major role in the rise of the Irish showband phenomenon.

By 1953, the Clipper Carlton, from Strabane in Northern Ireland, had begun to deviate from the usual big band sounds of the time, by moving around the stage, rather than sitting at their bandstands, and incorporating various routines into their set. One night towards the end of 1954, Fuller, who had been in Derry promoting a show at the Guildhall, took his girlfriend of the time on a moonlight drive by the Atlantic.

“We went about 20 miles out of Derry into Donegal,” he recalls. “And, lo and behold, there was a marquee set up on the ground, and there was a band playing, which turned out to be the Clipper Carlton. I had just been over in Nashville and I had brought back several records by different bands. One of them was Bill Haley And His Comets, who had two fantastic records out at that time, Crazy Man Crazy and Rock Around The Clock. Anyway, I had these records in the back of my car, and when your man Mickey [O’Hanlon], the drummer, got up and did his Louis Armstrong routine, he got a great hand. Cheers, I thought, I’ll bring my records in to the boys. Anyway, I brought in the Bill Haley records and a couple of others, and I said to the lads, ‘Now, instead of Mickey just doing Louis Armstrong, maybe Fergie [O’Hagan, vocals] and Hughie [Tourish, piano] should start doing records by other people.’ And I told them to take one record each. And it came to New Year and I said, ‘You can play at the Guildhall on Tuesday week.’ And they brought the house down, and the next time they played they brought in 600 people of their own.”

By 1955, the Clipper Carlton had decked themselves out in shiny suits and were imitating everyone from Nat King Cole to Elvis Presley, with various comedy routines thrown in, and were packing out dance halls across Ireland. Soon dozens of other bands were following the Carlton’s style, but the most successful of all were The Royal Showband. When the Irish ballrooms closed down during Lent, showbands toured England and Bill Fuller was able to help them out by booking them into The Buffalo in Camden Town or his other ballrooms in Birmingham and Manchester.

By the early-60s, the royals had become Ireland’s number one band and Bill Fuller had opened clubs in whichever American city had a large enough Irish population to make it worth his while - including Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and San Francisco. “I was travelling an average of 6,000 miles a week,” he says. “My beat then was San Francisco to London, and I lived in San Franco for 12 years. At one time, I had 23 places around the world. I even had a club down in the Bahamas called the Cat & Fiddle. The fella who was running it got mixed up in drug dealing so he had to move out fast and I bought it off him very reasonably.”

In 1966, Bill Fuller managed to get The Royal Showband an audition in Las Vegas - an unheard of feat for someone who wasn’t a member of the Mafia. They were subsequently given a four-week stint at the Desert Inn that autumn. Two years later, they had a six-month contract at the Stardust, which was pretty spectacular for an Irish showband. Fuller even introduced some of the band to their hero, Elvis Presley. “I met Elvis a couple of times,” he says. “I brought [Royal singer] Brendan Bowyer in one time to meet him. In those days, you’d know people and wouldn’t really think of them as being famous.”

Around the same time, three of the ballrooms in Bill Fuller’s great chain were renamed ‘The Carousel’. “I was never fussy about names,” he says. “But there was a girl from Cavan working for me, called Peggy McCabe, and she liked the name Carousel.” Coincidentally, the three Carousel Ballrooms turned out to be the jewels in Fuller’s crown: the former Buffalo in Camden Town, the one-time Astoria in Manchester and a ballroom in San Francisco.

By 1968, though, Bill Fuller’s attention was firmly focussed on one of his greatest dreams yet: building an Irish village in Galway Bay. While he was doing this, the American rock promoter Bill Graham flew to Ireland in a desperate attempt to obtain the lease on The Carousel Ballroom in San Francisco. It was easier than Graham had imagined. Fuller was waiting for him when he arrived at Shannon Airport at 8am, ordered a bottle of bourbon, shook hands on a deal, finished the remaining shots of liquor and then announced that he was going back to work on his building site. By 5pm, Graham was on a flight home, all set to turn The Carousel into the legendary rock venue, the Fillmore West.

Unfortunately, Bill Fuller’s own dream did not go as smoothly. “I always had a great relationship with people from the West, both in Connemara and Mayo,” he says. “But I had a lot of bad friends there in the Irish Government and they wouldn’t give me proper planning permission. I wanted to build an Irish Village - I had good ideas and I had contact with a lot of Irish-Americans, such as the Kennedys, and other men who had yachts down along the East Coast. Galway Bay was always a big thing with Americans and I bought that site because there was nine fathoms of water in the bay. It’s so deep you could bring the Queen Mary in there. Anyway, I was going to build a big pier out into the Atlantic and a boatel out on the rocks, but I couldn’t get planning permission. The people in Galway City got jealous, because I was an outsider and I was building this big thing outside the city. I built the whole lot in about 12 weeks, but they wouldn’t give me final planning permission to build the pier out into the sea. I was promised everything, but given nothing. Delay was bad for me because I was building another place in a different part of the world and I had to move on.”

During the 70s, he sold many of his ballrooms but adapted others into rock venues. These included The Crystal in Dublin (which became McGonagles), The Carousel in Manchester (The International 2) and The Carousel in Camden Town (the Electric Ballroom). He made a point of turning up at the latter five months after it had opened to see Thin Lizzy play with Bob Geldof, Paul Cook and Steve Jones.

“Phil Lynott was good, he worked for me a lot,” he says. “And what’s the other boy called? A big tall boy from Dublin who played rock - Bob Geldof, that’s it! I remember one night there was Phil and Geldof and some other lads, there were three famous groups and I put them all together and I said, ‘How much do you want?’ They said they wanted 75 per cent of the door and I said, ‘You’re a right crowd of greedy bastards!’ When I went back to the Ballroom, there was a big poster with ‘The Greedy Bastards’ written on it. I could handle the contrariest of musicians, you know. I remember Jack Parnell wrote a jazz tune one time called The Fuller Bounce. He had the greatest bunch of musicians, but they were all headers in those days, and he used to reckon I was the only man who could run his tour. I’d look after the band and I’d roadie myself. After the show, we’d have a great party and then the following morning we’d pull out at round 8 or 9 in the morning, Which is a hard thing for musicians. But I’d get them into the groove.”

Asked about the secret of his success, Bill Fuller smiles and says: “I worked with the trends of the people. I gave them what they wanted and I gave them the best of it. It meant a lot to me to see people enjoying entertainment at a decent price. And I never went for any hocus pocus. But any fellas arguing with me about money, I’d stick it up his jumper [laughs].”

By the late-80s, Bill Fuller had decided to focus most of his attention on rock mining in Las Vegas. “I came out here and got an old mine going up the hill,” he says, “and decided to turn my life around another bend.”

The nearest thing that Camden Town has to a Bill Fuller these days is Vince Power, a one-time antiques dealer from Waterford who owns nine bars and live music venues in London and also organises five annual outdoor festivals, including Reading and the Phoenix. A big fan of country music, Power went to Nashville in the 70s and dreamed of building his own honky tonk in North London. That dream became the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden, which opened in 1981, after Power had spent a year building it himself.

“It was a later version of Bill Fuller,” says Power. “Do everything yourself, because you really haven’t got the money or the know-how. I just knew that I wanted my own honky tonk - a really nice, clean place with cold beer, good music and a band playing at the end of the bar. The original drawing to get licensing was done by an architect, but after that we made it up as we went along.”

By the late-80s, Power’s expanding empire had crossed circles with Bill Fuller’s decreasing one. Power had set his sights on Fuller’s Dublin Castle club, McGonagles, and - like Bill Graham before him - realised that the only way to do a deal was by flying halfway across the world to meet the owner.

“I got into Las Vegas at about 11pm at night,” says Power, “went to a dodgy hotel, because for some reason the place was booked out and I couldn’t find a decent one, and then I met Bill Fuller for breakfast at 9am in the Desert Inn. He came in and we started talking about everything apart from the deal. He told me about his mine and wanted to bring me out to have a look at it. Then when we eventually got around to talking about a deal on McGonagles, he just said, ‘How much?’ I mentioned a figure of what I thought the place was worth and he jumped about three feet off the ground and said, ‘If I was a young man I’d hit you’ - and he walked off. I had just spent 12 hours on a plane to see him, and that was the end of Bill Fuller. He didn’t even pay for the breakfast!”

The deal came to nothing, but there were no hard feelings on either side. “I usually bump into Bill Fuller in Camden or Dublin,” says Power. “He treats me like a young lad and tends to give me advice. He says, ‘When I was your age’ or ‘You should eat better and look after yourself’ and all that business. He’s a great character; he’s unique.”

Although Bill Fuller now feels at home in the other rock business - “up in the mountains, with the rattlesnakes” - he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of returning to rock’n’roll, even though it is now 60 years since he took over The Buffalo Ballroom on Camden High Street.

“I might make a comeback in my old age,” he says. “I’d still like to build four of five big places - maybe in Seattle or in Portland, and then I’ll come down again to San Francisco and LA. I’ll set those places off again, before I kick the bucket.”

And what about his ballroom in Camden Town?

“Oh, I’ll keep Camden until I move out of this world,” he says. “It was the first place of my own that I had, so I wouldn’t dream of parting with it. Camden will never be sold.”

Bill Fuller, November 17, 1996, Country Star, Las Vegas

From The Rock ‘n’ Roll Guide to Camden

By Ann Scanlon, Published by Tristia, ISBN 0-9531029-0-4

Reproduced by Keep It Camden with the kind permission of Ann Scanlon and Tristia