Sunday 23 February 2025

Exploring Leicester’s Popular Music Scene

Guest Blogger, Colin Hyde of the East Midlands Oral History Archive, reviews Leicester’s music scene, from Dance Bands to Hip Hop.

This blog looks at post-WW2 popular music in Leicester and considers both what has been written on the subject and what remains to be written.

The East Midlands Oral History Archive (EMOHA), based at the University of Leicester, contains thousands of recorded memories of local people, although only a small proportion of these recordings cover local music. While this is a useful resource, it is only one of many available sources. Researchers should start with the local music scrapbooks held by the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester & Rutland (ROLLR). These were compiled by the late Mike Raftery from local newspaper articles about local music and musicians dating back to the 1940s. They have informed most writing about pop culture in Leicester, such as EMOHA’s Post-War Leicester website and Stephen Wagg’s chapter, ‘Gonna Rock Around the Clock (Tower) Tonight: Leicester and the coming of ‘the Sixties’’ in ‘Leicester a Modern History’ (2016).

In the 1940s into the 1950s, bands who played popular dance numbers continued as they had done before the war. The names of the bands and the venues they played at are listed in the newspapers and included the well-known Lew Branston and his orchestra, the Johnny Lester Band (often played at the Lancaster Hall), Frank Watson (the Bell Hotel), and Jimmy Hearth (the Grand Hotel). The EMOHA website features the memories of musician Brian Harvey, but, as far as I know, these groups haven’t been written about in any detail and this remains a subject that should be looked at further.

The dance bands, which might contain many musicians, were difficult to maintain, especially as musical tastes changed. The local jazz scene through the 1950s and ‘60s featured smaller groups and was hugely popular. The Leicester Evening Mail ran the ‘Rhythm Corner’ column, which featured local jazz news, while the ‘Solo Spot’ highlighted individual musicians.

The Monk brothers, well-known local jazz players, started the Hungry I pancake house on Free Lane, which is now the Good Earth restaurant (and features Monk memorabilia). From 1955 onwards Betty Smith, from Sileby, is featured extensively in the local press. Billed as ‘Britain’s top girl musician,’ she was one of the country’s best jazz tenor sax players.

The scrapbooks note the progress of a number of singers and musicians who travelled to Germany to entertain the troops, which was a lucrative gig well before the Beatles headed to Hamburg. Others headed to London to seek their fortunes. One of the most successful was Bryan Blackburn who, after a stint in Germany, eventually became a writer of West End revues, as well as writing for The Two Ronnies and Bob Hope.

Another route for aspiring stars was the Caroll Levis TV show, which searched for talent much like Opportunity Knocks or X-Factor. Leicester’s first nationally-known group, The Dallas Boys, appeared on this as did several skiffle bands, including The Black Cats from Granby Road Youth Centre. Skiffle was music influenced by American folk, blues, and jazz, and was typically played on acoustic guitars, a washboard, a bass and perhaps a harmonica and banjo. It was very popular in the 1950s and the skiffle scene in Leicester was huge but has been barely written about other than in a book about the skiffle scene nationally, ‘The Skiffle Craze’ by Michael Dewe (1998). Melton Mowbray’s Nancy Whisky become well-known as the singer of the song ‘Freight Train’ with the Chas McDevitt skiffle group in 1957.

The 1960s saw several landmarks in Leicester’s popular music scene. Having paid his dues in local pubs and clubs in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Gerry Dorsey finally hit the big time as Engelbert Humperdinck and became a global star. More locally, in 1961, the first folk club was started in the Red Cow pub on Belgrave Gate by Harvey Tucker. In the following years, almost every folk act of note played at one of Leicester’s folk clubs. In 1962, the first sound system was established to play Jamaican ska, early R&B etc. at house parties. 2Funky Arts’ film ‘Spectrum’ - looks at the history of Black music in Leicester into the 21^st century, covering ska, reggae, gospel, soul and jazz through to hip hop, house, drum n' bass and R&B. This features interviews with artists such as Bizzi Dixon and Carol Leeming and is an excellent example of using personal memories to tell a story, especially as Black music wasn’t well-covered by the local press in this period.

Moving further into the 1960s, in the wake of the Beatles, a host of pop groups were formed, disbanded and reformed. Shaun Knapp has written about the local Mod scene generally, and the band Legay specifically, in two books: High Flying Around: Memories of the 1960s Leicester Music Scene (2017) and Mods: Two City Connection. Memories of the 1960's Leicester and Nottingham Mod scene (2019).

Legay later became Gypsy, while local band Pesky Gee became Black Widow (featuring Showaddywaddy’s drummer Romeo Challenger). Both bands enjoyed success, although not on the scale of Family, who were very highly regarded and formed out of local band The Farinas. Family’s Ric Grech went on to play with Eric Clapton and was, for a while, part of the superstar set of the 1970s. For further information, there is a good website about Family here.

Shaun Knapp’s books formed the basis of the hugely successful exhibition, ‘Mods: Shaping a Generation,’ which was followed by ‘Punk: Rage & Revolution,’ both at Leicester Museum. A catalyst for the Mod exhibition was an interview with John ‘Jelly’ Nixon recorded with EMOHA in 2003. John was one of the ‘faces’ of Leicester’s Mod scene and had a wealth of information about the music and youth culture of the 1960s. These inspired John’s son, Joe Nixon, to create a film about Leicester in the 1960s, ‘Moving in the Shadows’ - which looks at the large number of creative people who came out of the city and influenced fashion and the arts into the 1980s and beyond.

Kenny Wilson, who features in ‘Moving in the Shadows’, has written extensively about the music and counterculture of the 1960s, as well as his career as a musician - but this sort of memoir is rare and there are many hundreds of stories of bands and musicians that haven’t, and probably never will be, told in public. Kenny’s blog mentions many clubs and cafes of the 1960s and ‘70s including the Chameleon, The Green Bowler, the Nite Owl and, of course, Il Rondo. Almost all the top bands played at Il Rondo and John Nixon’s memories are typical of many who went there.

How much does this matter? I would say that most popular material about the ‘swinging sixties,’ for example, concentrates on London, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, at the expense of more provincial cities and towns such as Leicester, Nottingham and others. Too often the provinces are seen as places to get away from rather than places that had a thriving scene of their own.

1970 saw the ‘Godfather of Ska’, Laurel Aitken, settle in Leicester, and enjoy a resurgence in the later 1970s thanks to the ska revival and bands such as Madness playing his songs. Established bands like Family, Gypsy etc., may have had the prog-rock credentials, but it was Showaddywaddy (formed in 1973) who topped the charts. Like the Dallas Boys on the Carroll Levis show, Showaddywaddy started out by appearing on ATV’s New Faces and coming runners up in a final.

Other than the Punk exhibition, little has been written about the 1970s onwards other than posts on Facebook nostalgia groups and the occasional blog. At the time of writing, the team behind the Mod and Punk exhibitions at Leicester Museum are planning a new exhibition about the 1980s, while Trevor Locke has been writing about various musicians and venues in Leicester, mostly from the year 2000 onwards but taking in the 1990s as well. More recent projects include ‘Hold Tight Raver’ (2023) a short film by Leicester filmmakers Keith Allot, Rory Booth and Laura Wilkinson about the Leicester rave scene between 1988 and 1994, and Rory Booth’s film ‘Small Circles’ (2020), a documentary about a collective of DIY musicians creating, performing and recording in Leicester.

While there seems to be quite a lot of material about the post-war music scene in Leicester, I think there is a lot more that could be written. Colin Miller’s memoir, 'A Degree of Swing. Lessons in the facts of life; Leicester 1958-64', is good on early rock and roll in Leicester, but very little has been written about the dance bands of the 1940s and 1950s, or the skiffle scene, or the bands and venues of the 1970s. The upcoming project mentioned above will look at the 1980s but will inevitably not include everyone who was in a band from this period. The explosion of pop and rock that followed punk and turned into ‘New Wave’ encouraged many people to pick up guitars or plug in synthesisers and it would be impossible to document everything that went on.

Away from the pop/rock world, EMOHA holds quite a lot of material about the development of Indian classical dance and music in Leicester. This does include mentions of non-classical music and dance such as Bhangra, but there is little on the history of writing and performing popular South Asian music in the city, and this remains to be explored.

Another observation is that much of the writing and film mentioned above covers people who made a mark in music or the arts either locally or nationally. Speaking as someone who has been in bands in Leicester for 30 years and never made a mark of any sort, I have stories to tell of the appalling state of the toilets at places such as The Attik or The Shed, playing to empty rooms at the Factory or watching great gigs in suffocatingly smelly, sticky, small rooms across the city.

In other words, recording memories of average music fans is just as important as those who were movers and shakers, and this will have to be an ongoing process over the coming years. As mentioned above, my worry at the moment is that we are in danger of missing memories of the pre-Beatles period, and it is these that we should concentrate on as much as more recent years.

Having said this, we shouldn’t ignore the long list of talented individuals and groups who have come from Leicester and made their mark in the music world. From jazz star Betty Smith to folk legend Davey Graham to Engelbert, Diesel Park West, Mark Morrison, and Kasabian, through to contemporary names such as Mahalia and Hard Life (formally Easy Life). Behind all these performers are the people who run practice rooms, venues and studios, sell music and musical instruments, promote gigs and performers, manage bands and run labels. In the past few decades changes in technology have transformed the way the way the music industry works, and all these people have stories to tell about how this has happened in Leicester. From creating music in bedrooms, to playing in small rooms above pubs, to huge arenas, and everything in between, there are many, many stories still to record.

Colin Hyde manages the East Midlands Oral History Archive in Archives & Special Collections at the University of Leicester. Email: ch38@le.ac.uk