One night in 1969 the sax improviser Lol Coxhill came on stage at Manchester's Free Trade Hall (FTH) as the support act to the Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band. He played a listless waltz on the piano, full of mistakes, stood up to the microphone and told Polish jokes (‘How to make potato soup. First, steal a potato’). Coxhill then busked a lifeless tune on his sax. He repeated these wearisome steps despite at each turn his audience shouting ‘No, not that!’ He eventually confessed to them, ‘I'm very sorry. You see, last week my wife died of cancer. (Pause). Also, I'm a terrible liar.’ Booed off, he took several minutes to exit by traipsing backwards around the four edges of the stage.
Even though this book aims to describe ‘what really happened at the Free Trade Hall over the years’ (p. viii), you will not find Lol Coxhill in it. Neither does it include the hall's main tenant, the Hallé orchestra (for which, as a player, I spent many tense hours in the hall onstage and backstage). The author's interest lies in popular music: blues, jazz, rock, some ‘world’ music and pop. He lists year by year the FTH's visiting acts, and these offer up beguiling catalogues of stars. Inside one month of 1967 audiences heard the Swingle Singers, Ravi Shankar, Earl Hines, Simon & Garfunkel and Buddy Rich, while in May 1969 the hall greeted Ella Fitzgerald, Howlin’ Wolf, The Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. However, we should expect these names because the FTH was a characteristic municipal receiving house, from its postwar inception in 1951 until it was replaced by the Bridgewater Hall in 1996. To many artists it was merely a stop on a tour, and so presumably you could re-print these lists for other metropolitan venues, such as the Sheffield City Hall, with the same acts on different dates.
Over-arching themes shape the venue's practices and constraints. One such concerns the postwar shifts of genres as they drift though the hall, from Trad to Fusion and Folk to Rock, discerned through band names and their support acts. For this, the book is assuredly of practical value to researchers. However, another issue involves the progressive technical enhancement of amplification, lighting and portable sets, and the challenges these made for a mixed-use venue run by local government. This is not dealt with at all, despite the author's access to the FTH archive; it is not until page 246 that we learn that the hall's seating capacity was 2500. Furthermore, there is space in each chapter for playlists, for accounts of the events as more complex than diary dates, and for a reflection on deeper questions about cultural provision, but instead we are too often offered weak Wikipedia-style glosses about the artists (‘Lehrer, simply, was unique’ p. 42). Nevertheless, a couple of notes from the archive show what might have been achieved here more extensively. One concerns the famous 1966 ‘Judas’ concert of Bob Dylan, where the hall manager writes to promoter Tito Burns, as the ‘hirer of the hall’, that the FTH's management had not been told that CBS was recording the show. To make space for CBS's equipment, seats had to be pulled out, patrons shifted around, and the Chief Fire Officer called in to sanction the result. ‘I am enclosing an invoice for £65. I understand you will be able to recover this from Mr. Grossman, Bob Dylan's personal manager’ (pp. 77–8). Meanwhile, a 1970 note in the FTH diary refers to a precarious concert by The Who that ends, ‘Dirtiest group to have used the hall. Not again’ (p. 176).
Two intriguing issues are faintly touched on but at least they are mentioned. One involves the growing competition of upgraded commercial venues in the city, such as the Hardrock (1972–1975) and the Apollo (1975–). The other concerns sheer prejudice: when the FTH opened in 1951 it had to take acts in line with the Musicians’ Union barring of ‘alien’ artists, while by the middle 1970s there was a quiet veto on Black bands, a practice brought to public notice after a disruptive Kool and the Gang concert (p. 165) and influential in the evolution of Manchester's Rock Against Racism movement. The annual FTH lists show the compensatory presence of Irish and Celtic acts.
The book chops its lists up different ways, with an all-female roll-call of artists, generic catalogues and a videography. However, it cannot hide an empty heart where a concert should be. The FTH archive surely has richer information to offer us, and there are conceivably more reviews to be quoted, either by witnesses or through the local and music press. It is ironic that the FTH concerts by the Hallé were regularly reviewed in three newspapers (The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and the Manchester Evening News; later on, the New Manchester Review and City Life). Recent chronicles of rock gigs like those by Duff (Reference Duff2019) and McGuirk and Murphy (Reference McGuirk and Murphy2020) examine events as memorable experiences to be accounted for through vibrant words. So, to answer the question of the title – ‘Were you there?’ – I can only answer, with Lol Coxhill in mind, ‘Yes I was. Where were you?’
