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Beer history beer in fiction / tv

What did John Lennon say about beer?

The Beatles in the pub.
‘Two lagers and lime and… two lagers and lime, please.’ Help (1965)

Nev, who recently made 800 posts on his long-running beer and music blog, mentioned the other day, in passing, a quotation from John Lennon that we’d not previously come across:

The price of fame is not being able to go to the Phil for a quiet pint.

‘The Phil’ is the Philharmonic, a pub in Liverpool. We love the Beatles almost as much as we love beer and pubs, so we liked this a lot, but we’ve also been fretting about sources a lot recently. Aware that 99 per cent of beer quotes, just like statistics, are either made up or inaccurate, we decided to look into it.

The fact is, we can’t find any reference to where or when Lennon is supposed to have said the above. Some websites quote other websites. Most just say that he ‘famously’ said it, or that he said it ‘once’ to a reporter. The earliest reference in print, according to Google Books, is the Let’s Go guide to Europe from 2000.

That doesn’t mean he didn’t say it, but we can’t help wondering if the attribution ought to be a clever brewery PR man or pub landlord. Chris Routledge had this to say on the subject:

Did Lennon talk about beer, pubs or pints at all? We did find this interview from 1971 which includes a classic bit of Lennonian belligerence:

As kids we were all opposed to folk songs because they were so middle-class. It was all college students with big scarfs and a pint of beer in their hands singing folk songs in what we call la-di-da voices- ‘I worked in a mine in New-cast-le’ and all that shit… mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It’s all a bit boring, like ballet: a minority thing kept going by a minority group. Today’s folk song is rock and roll.

We think he’s trying to wind up Nev and Phil, and pre-emptively taking a pop at CAMRA two months before they even existed. He certainly manages to give ‘pint of beer’ a particularly sneering spin.

Astrid Kirchher, a friend from the Beatles’ time in Hamburg in the early sixties, recalled, in the 1996 Anthology TV series, that, when Lennon drank beer as young man, it was because it was cheap, and a particularly effective accompaniment to Preludin pills (uppers). In the accompanying book, also talking about Hamburg, Paul McCartney says the he was the last to make the move (the upgrade?) to taking drugs, having said, until then: ‘Oh, I’ll stick to the beer, thanks.’

If you happen to know the interview where Lennon mentioned ‘the Phil’, or have come across him or any Beatle saying anything else about beer or pubs, we’d love to know. You might also enjoy this longish piece on rock music and pubs which mentions Ringo.

Categories
Beer history london pubs

Rocking the Back Room at the Pub

Ringo Starr's Sentimental Journey album.

“We’re about as psychedelic as a pint o’ beer wi’ the lads.” Alan Clark of The Hollies, 1967

The pub can’t claim to be the natural home of British rock and roll — that honour probably goes to the Soho coffee shops where skiffle first found a home in the mid-nineteen-fifties. In the wake of Lonnie Donegan, however, every spotty, posing schoolboy in Britain joined a band, and there weren’t enough cafes to contain them. It didn’t take long for pubs to take up the slack. There had long been music in pubs, ranging from the singalong round the Joanna to very-nearly-full-blown music hall shows, but, from this period onward, some publicans began to see live, amplified music as a possible saviour.

Louder music is required in public-houses to attract people away from television sets, a London licensee told the London County Council Public Control Committee yesterday. His application for a waiver of the special condition attached to his licence, forbidding amplification of music, was granted. The applicant, Mr Harry Sternshine, licensee of a public-house in the East End, said that a skiffle group in a neighbouring house was attracting his customers. (Guardian, 14 March 1957.)

Pubs with ‘back rooms’ (usually gloomy, damp and smelling of stale beer, in our experience) also became rehearsal spaces, in exchange for a small payment or the promise to ‘buy a few drinks’ afterwards. (The Rolling Stones, for example, rehearsed at the now defunct Bricklayers Arms on Duck Lane, Soho.) Those back, upstairs or downstairs rooms also offered temporary ‘clubs’ a home, as was the case with the Princess Louise in Holborn, whose upper rooms hosted some of the coolest skiffle and folk clubs from around 1957.

In their Guide to London Pubs (1968), Martin Green and Tony White offer a summary of the ups and downs of pop music in London pubs from the mid-fifties. Of the early sixties, they say:

Musical pubs became the glory of London pub life. Anywhere you went round London on a weekend evening, you were sure to hear the deafening twang and throb of a hundred guitars with percussion and amplifier… A new young audience of under twenty-fives was created and with a new pub vocabulary. If you went into one of the new musical pubs, you heard talk of others: ‘Heard that new lead guitar down at the Oak?’ or ‘Who’s on the drums now at the Crown?’

Man playin guitar in pub.We are fortunate that this period was captured on film in the 1964 documentary Portrait of Queenie, which includes much footage of bands and singers performing at the Ironbridge Tavern in Poplar, East London. It’s not a concert venue — people are talking and drinking at tables — but nor is it exactly ‘pubby’. A cabaret, perhaps? (At the other end of the cavernous room, an elderly cockney tries to drown out the bands by bashing away at the Old Pianner.)

As skiffle gave way to harder-edged R&B, some pubs gained double identities: decrepit Victorian piles by day but better known, to the hipsters who came out at night, by faux-American names.

I went to the end of the District Line and found a place in the back of a pub called the Station Hotel, in Richmond. I started a blues club there on Sunday nights, the worst night o the week. That’s how the Crawdaddy Club started. The Rolling Stones used to do their own version of a Bo Diddley tune called ‘Let’s Do the Crawdaddy’. When Long John [Baldry] asked, ‘What do you call your place?’ I replied that I didn’t have a name for it. It just came out ‘Crawdaddy’, and from then on we were the Crawdaddy Club. (Giorgio Gomelsky in It Ain’t Easy, Paul Myers, 2007.)

The Crawdaddy was just one of a circuit of such venues around London. The blues and R&B bands that played in them spawned rock groups like The Who, The Yardbirds, The Small Faces and The Kinks, and musicians like Baldry and Rod Stewart. It was at the Railway Hotel, Wealdstone, Middlesex, in 1964, that Pete Townshend of The Who first accidentally smashed his guitar.

Detail from a The Who poster.

With Beatlemania and the ‘beat boom’, Green and White record a slight decline after 1965, though pubs continued to offer a proving ground for young rock musicians, along with church halls, on their way to new, specialist venues, or package tours of cinemas and ‘winter gardens’ around the country. At the same time, more and more pubs turned into (crap) ‘discotheques’, losing their essential ‘pubness’ along the way. In The Beverage Report (1970), Derek Cooper wrote disparagingly of this trend:

Symptomatic of the growing move towards food and music in what was formerly a pub outlet are the Courage Barclay and Simonds discodine centres. On Saturday night at their Kew pub 500 customers throng to see a disc jockey, meet go-go girls and eat chicken and chips at 10s 9d a portion.

With the nineteen-seventies, though, the pub came back into focus, at least in superficial terms. All those ‘veteran’ rock groups, their members nearing  or having hit 30, often divorced and coming down from a decade of partying, began to look back wistfully towards their early years and a simpler life. The Who’s 1971 ‘best of’, Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, featured a sepia-toned portrait of The Railway Hotel, and The Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies, released the same year, used photographs of the Archway Tavern in North London. In his biography of The Who’s Keith Moon, Dear Boy, Tony Fletcher tells the story of the drummer’s chauffeur-driven visit, in the aftermath of a disappointing stadium gig, to the Hole in the Wall in Waterloo, then a rough cider drinkers’ hangout, where he felt quite at home. It is perhaps Beatle Ringo Starr who sums up this instinct best with the title of his 1970 album, which also features a portrait of a Victorian pub on the sleeve: Sentimental Journey.

As the decade wore on, and rock struggled to reconcile its ‘down home’ roots with the excess of stadium tours, concept albums and ‘glam’, the pub really had its hour, giving its name to an entire genre: pub rock. A musically diverse ‘movement’, the only thing many of the bands involved had in common was what they were reacting against, and the venues where they played. Crumbling, smelly Victorian pubs were the natural home for denim and leather clad guitar bands playing blues, R&B, country rock and ‘power pop’, and their fans. The venues, such as The Hope and Anchor in Islington, were more famous than many of the bands.

Once again, though, even vast Victorian gin palaces weren’t big enough: bands that ‘made it’, like Elvis Costello or Dr Feelgood, moved on to bigger venues. At the same time, ‘pub rock’ mutated into punk — a much more easily packaged scene, fueled by speed rather than beer, which didn’t quite belong in the blokey atmosphere of the boozer, but rather the basement club, student union or municipal hall.

The story arguably came full circle when crack London session rock musicians Chas Hodges and Dave Peacock formed a duo, Chas & Dave, in the mid-seventies, and invented a sound they called ‘rockney’. It had elements of boogie woogie and R&B, but also featured melodies and lyrics, performed in strong London accents, which harked back to pub piano singalongs of the pre-skiffle era.

When the barman won’t serve him anymore.
Gertcha, cowson, gertcha.
Bar stool preaching —
He’s always been the same.

They had breakthrough success when, fittingly, when several of their songs were used in a series of nostalgic black and white adverts for Courage Best. When Chas & Dave appeared on TV, it was often in the setting of a pub.

In the years that followed, pubs and rock music continued to collide — the Camden Crawl, one of the coolest annual events in the Britpop era, began with ‘a couple of pubs’, for example — but it was also during this time that ‘pub rock’ and its cousin ‘dad rock’ became insults, implying a certain plodding conservatism.

These days, it seems to us that, as an idea of ‘the perfect pub’ has solidified, rock music and the pub as concepts have been more-or-less entirely decoupled. Pubs still have music, and musicians still like pubs, but they don’t need each other as once they did.

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture opinion

Pop Will Drink Itself

We have a weakness for music analogies when it comes to talking about beer, perhaps because of the similar levels of geekiness and subjectivity involved in appreciating both.

This weekend, with a particularly weird UK Top Ten singles chart, we found ourselves pondering this question: what is the beer equivalent of pop music? Pop music (a lot of which, by the way, we like, in a chin-stroking, over-analysing kind of way) is:

  • designed to grab your attention
  • to make you want to listen again — it’s ‘catchy’, full of ‘hooks’.

It’s also targeted at the very young and so songs are usually:

  • short
  • repetitive
  • in 4/4 time and
  • ‘loud’ (actually compressed, but that’s a technicality).

What the most successful pop tunes are not is bland: they are not Muzak. Their creators would rather they were irritating than have them treated as background music. So, here’s our first nomination for a ‘pop beer’: Fruli. It’s bright red, sickly sweet and strawberry flavoured — bubblegum, if you like.

But maybe the one-off ‘craft beer’ novelties that so offend some conservative (small c) beer geeks — the Chili Black Belgian IPAs and the like — are also a nod in this direction? They’ve got hooks (“Cucumber! White chocolate! Bright purple!) and offer instant gratification.

Even though we sympathise with the conservative point of view on this, we do think they sometimes sound a bit like this: “Bah. I can’t tell if half of them are lads or lasses with all that hair; can’t make head or tail of the bloody lyrics; does no-one has the attention span to listen to one LP all the way through? And loud!? Don’t get me started….”