Fall Venues Abroad

What follows is the second part of an article on venues The Fall have played, this one dealing with gigs abroad. It’s not meant to be definitive or complete, but more of a sometimes random compendium of facts, nostalgia, anecdotes and memories, compiled with the help of those mentioned during the piece and, of course, with lots garnered from the internet, though there’s still a lot of information I couldn’t find out: either it isn’t on the web, or I didn’t know where to look. Please let us know if I’ve got something wrong, or if you have anything to add. This would, as someone once said, be much appreciated.

We’ll begin with the USA. The Fall’s first concert there was in 1979, since when they have performed in 27 states, 53 different cities and approximately (information being sketchy at times) 138 separate venues. (The largest city where they have never gigged is San Antonio, Texas.)

That first gig took place at the Hot Club in Philadelphia, which has long since been defunct. The second US performance was at Emerald City in Cherry Hill (New Jersey); this venue was torn down after a fire in the 1980s. Next came a date at the Palladium Theatre, New York, which was closed in 1999; the site is now occupied by a building owned by New York University. The fourth gig on this initial tour was in the famous CBGB’s, which was open from 1973 to 2006, in which year it was closed due to rent increases (the final show featured Patti Smith). As for The Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it seemed to be open until at least 1986, but I presume that it disappeared as a music venue some years ago. This leaves us with the Catamaran Hotel in San Diego as the first place the Fall played at in the USA in 1979 which is still surviving

Other locations on that first tour jaunt have long since vanished. Al’s Bar in Los Angeles, Madame Wong’s West in Santa Monica, and possibly Hope Street Hall in Los Angeles (can anyone supply any information on this?) are no longer; and the Anti Club, as of 2007, was turned into a hip-hop oriented dance club.

Madame Wong’s had an interesting back story. The proprietor, Esther Wong, emigrated from China to the US in 1949 at the age of 32 and subsequently became a punk rock promoter in L.A. in 1978, being persuaded that Polynesian dance acts weren’t really the future and that booking such groups as The Fall, Black Flag and The Ramones was the way ahead. The first Madame Wong’s was in L.A. and had been a Chinese restaurant as well as featuring a floor show with those aforesaid Polynesians.) The Santa Monica branch, the one The Fall played in, closed in 1991 and Esther Wong herself passed away in 2005.

Venue closures are a fact of life in the pop music world, but it’s still sadly nostalgic to take a quick journey through some of the other places The Fall have played at in the US over the years, to see how so many no longer exist or have been converted for other uses. The 686 Club in Atlanta, Georgia now houses a medical care facility. The Clubfoot in Austin is now occupied by the Frost Bank building. The Keystone in Berkeley, where the Grateful Dead played on no fewer than 206 occasions, closed in 1984 and became a drug store. Bloomfield, New Jersey, housed the famous Dirt Club, open from 1979 to 1991. Here, concert-goers were offered a small bag filled with dirt upon entry; this they would pin to their shirts, thus signalling that they were one of the in-crowd of that particular musical scene. John Schroeder, better known as Johnny Dirt, was the fonder of this club; he died in 2011 at the age of 66. The following clip features his own particular spiel back in 1985:

The Rathskeller, a dimly-lit establishment in Boston, closed its doors in 1997 and was eventually razed in 2000 to make way for the Hotel Commonwealth. Axis, also in Boston, was demolished in 2007, as was The Channel, to make way for Big Dig, a multi-million dollar road development project. The Channel was open from 1980 to 1991, (the owners filed for bankruptcy) during which time its liquor licence was revoked on more than one occasion for serving minors. It reopened for a year as an exotic dance club, but this was unsuccessful and it again closed. In San Francisco, The Stone and I-Beam (now home to apartments and shops) are no more. Traxx in Detroit was torn down several years ago.

Tut’s in Chicago, which closed in 1984, is now occupied by a clothing store. The Gypsy Tea Room in Dallas was shut in 2007. The Mudd Club in New York (named after Samuel Alexander Mudd, a doctor who treated John Wilkes Booth after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln) saw its last gig in 1983. The venue was known for its gender-free bathrooms and for its rotating art gallery on one of its four floors. Also in New York, the Danceteria is defunct, as is the Lone Star Cafe , which closed down in 1989, being replaced by a Korean grocery store, and then converted into luxury flats. The Peppermint Lounge (not the original venue of the same name, famous for the twist and go-go dancing, but a new venue bearing the same name) was open between 1980 and 1982. Tramps closed in 2001 and became Centro-Fly; this itself shut down in 2004. Coney Island High was also converted into apartments. The Living Room in Providence, Rhode Island is now gone. So is The Creepy Crawl in St Louis, where The Fall played in 2004, and which is described on one website as “a nasty grungy dive…with truly terrifying bathrooms”. It closed in 2008. Tumbleweeds in Tucson, Arizona, is now a thrift store.

However, there are venues which have stood the test of time. The Orange Peel in Asheville, North Carolina, which started life as a skating rink, and then was an auto parts warehouse, was voted one of the top five rock clubs by Rolling Stone magazine in 2008 and is still going strong. In the same state, in the city of Carrboro, Cat’s Cradle still exists, and even got a mention in a Sonic Youth song (Chapel Hill, released in 1992):

“Throw me a cord/and plug it in
Get the Cradle rockin’”

Other venues where you can still watch live music include: Exit Club in Chicago and, in the same city, Cabaret Metro, which dates back to 1982; the Pop Shop in Cleveland; Trees in Dallas; The Roxy in Hollywood; and the American Legion Hall in Phoenix, Arizona. The Irving Plaza in New York has an interesting history. From 1958 to 1978 it was a Polish-American community centre. From then on, it became one of Manhattan’s rock landmarks. New owners, Live Nation, renamed the venue the Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza, and its huge marquee replaced with a smaller one, but to no surprise this name didn’t catch on, and both original name and a replica of the original marquee were restored. Bond’s is another New York venue still hosting live music, as is the Underground, subsequently renamed Acme Underground, and The Knitting Factory, though this has been moved out to Brooklyn.

The First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, which dates from 1886, is another venue which has shown resilience. In November 2007, Rolling Stone magazine featured the church as one of the top alternative rock venues thanks to the success of the events organized in the basement, chapel, and sanctuary. Since the mid-90s, the church’s basement, Griffin Hall, has been a popular venue for independent music concerts in the city. The two venues where The Fall have played in Washington DC both survive: The 9.30 Club (albeit with a change of premises in 1986) and Black Cat, founded in 1993.

Here’s Graeme Semple on the subject of the Casbah in San Diego, which has been open since 1989: “It is my favourite venue in San Diego by a stretch as the set up is near perfect The stage is well padded giving a good sound for a small room (capacity is 250 or so but mirrors down one wall make it feel less claustrophobic than you may think). The soundboard is directly behind the standing area with the bar to the side. I’ve seen some flash photos that suggest you may not want to touch the ceiling and probably wouldn’t want to see any of it in the daylight, but in the dark with a full crowd and the bands playing, it is the place to be. There is another bar at the back of the venue in a separate room with old school video games and a pool table and a courtyard smoking area joining the two where the bands can set up their merchandise table (rain is very rare!) and the hipsters can hang out and chillax, as I assume they call it.”

However, Semple gives the House of Blues, another San Diego venue, the thumbs down: “Bigger, cleaner, truly obnoxious security, $10 a pint and thoroughly soulless. If you can imagine a ‘ride’ at a theme park, you know something that is trying to be like an ancient Egyptian experience but is just fake foam breeze blocks and plastic plants.”

This view is backed up by Frank Jones, from whose review of The Fall’s 2006 gig at the venue I quote:

Saturday, May 20, 2006
The Fall in San Diego, May 9 2006
Introduction: San Diego (pronounced San Dee-AY-Go) is a vibrant, prosperous town, known for its colorful Republicans and other wildlife. Its main exports are camoflage and screwing the poor. The center of San Diego culture is undoubtedly the Gaslamp Quarter, which the town likes to think is California’s version of New Orleans’s French Quarter, which is a quite accurate representation, that is to say, if the Vieux Carre were filled with almost entirely white people and chain restaurants. Nevertheless, here we are and there we go….

“But first, I would like to express my hatred for House of Blues. Especially HOB San Diego, which is like a dungeon. It is. It just is. It’s not even attached to the main House of Blues part, to see live music, you have to go through this weird security detail where a woman takes your ticket and scans it for viruses, and then another guy waves a big wand all over your body while groping you. Then you go inside, and you can’t come back out. No-reentry. No-reentry, no smoking inside. No smoking inside, no smoking outside. No smoking, no happy. Also it’s just completely dank inside the place, no matter how much “naive art” they plaster the walls with. And there are no chairs. None. Unless you bought the “dinner package,” and then you get a folding chair directly behind the sound board, where you can’t see anything. In short: fuck the House of Blues.”
Finally, as far as the US is concerned, let’s talk about the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The following quote is taken directly from the venue’s website:

“Tom Isaia, a University of Michigan senior, and Jerry Delgiudice started the club in 1971 shortly after Jerry graduated from Loyola University in Chicago. They purchased what was originally office space built for the mill next door and did some renovations, which included building a small stage and bar in the basement. They named it “Blind Pig” after a Detroit slang term for police officers that had been bribed by speakeasy proprietors during the prohibition era of the 1920s (though had more recently been used to describe the illegal after hours liquor clubs in Detroit whose seizures by police contributed to the 1967 riots), and with that, a legend was born.”

The Fall have only played in two cities in Canada: Toronto and Vancouver. The latter’s Starfish Room was demolished to make way for apartment buildings. (Vancouver’s live music scene seems to have suffered for years, due to factors such as gentrification of the city, strict drinking laws and complaints about noise.) As for Toronto, perhaps the most interesting venue is Larry’s Hideaway, where the group played in 1983 and 1986, but which closed soon afterwards. As one website contributor puts it, the floor “was a carpet covered in piss, blood and beer. It hadn’t been cleaned in years.” Promoter Gary Topp is quoted as saying, “It was the biggest shit hole in the city, but the atmosphere was great.” The venue was actually located in the basement of a hotel, the Prince Carlton. This was often occupied by prostitutes, and the building as a whole was full of drug dealers and underage drinkers. But the acoustics were great, according to many people who were only there for the music. Larry’s Hideaway was burnt down in 1991.

Moving on to mainland Europe, the two countries where The Fall have played most gigs are Holland and Germany. In the former, Amsterdam’s Paradiso has hosted the group on most occasions, 9 in total. Used until 1965 for a liberal Dutch religious group, this venue is situated in a converted church building. It’s still going strong. Also still in existence is Vera in Groningen. In this poll: http://www.vera-groningen.nl/about/poll-results/1981 The Fall’s gig was voted fifth best of all those played at the venue in 1981, finishing behind the likes of DAF, Killing Joke and the largely forgotten Medium Medium, but ahead of Pere Ubu, Echo and the Bunnymen and The Raincoats.

Eksit in Rotterdam has an interesting history. This began as a listings paper for concerts and performances and developed into a platform for artists, writers and musicians coming out of the experimental Rotterdam art scene. A website dedicated to the Dutch punk group De Rondos (http://rondos.nl/rondos_biografie/index.php?id=biography) includes the following:

“Eksit was the Paradiso of Rotterdam, only smaller. They had hosted several notorious English punk bands as early as 1977, including The Sex Pistols. Full marks. But after that they were through with punk. Bands from abroad still played there regularly, but no Dutch punk groups and even fewer Rotterdam punks. We were boycotted. And Rotterdam punks still gathered in Eksit every weekend, for the simple reason that they had nowhere else to go in Rotterdam. Many of them worked in Eksit too, as volunteers. Dissatisfaction began to build up about the rigid policy, particularly that of programmer Leo Loos. He stuck to his guns. No Rotterdam punk. Even though ever more bands appeared, with no opportunities to perform. The atmosphere grew tense. Glasses were not the only things that got broken. A strapping young punk from Puttershoek walked around the venue with the toilet seat around his neck.”

[According to this website, The Fall were interested in the Combos: “The Fall from Manchester let us know that they wanted to organize a tour of the Netherlands with The Rondos. They’d listened to our LP and were impressed. We declined because we had just planned our holidays and really needed the break.” There is no reference to this in the various books dedicated to the group. It’s possible that MES heard their song “The Russians Are Coming” being played on John Peel’s programme.]

The Fall have played, as in other countries, at a number of festivals in Holland, including Sneek (1986), primarily the venue for a sailing event, the biggest such on European inland waters and in existence since 1934), Zaal Spurgh in Vaals (2001), which ran for several years, Pandora’s Box Music Festival (1984) in Rotterdam, and the GDMW festival in the same city. There is also the Wateringen Festival (1986), which debuted in 1978 and is still celebrated every year. We’ll return to the subject of the group and festivals shortly.

So to Germany. Robert Meissner wrote an excellent article in Reformation no. 8 on the subject of The Fall’s Berlin gigs. (https://sites.google.com/site/reformationthewebzine/home/issue-008—winter-2010/your-other-sightseeing). Apart from the capital, the group have played in 25 different German cities, Essen being the largest place they have yet to visit. Some notable venues they have played include Zeche, which means colliery, in Bochum, on no fewer than 5 occasions; Battschapp (a name for a flat cap in the local Hessian dialect)in Frankfurt, 6 times; and Fabrik in Hamburg, which was built on the site of a former machine parts factory. All these arenas are still in existence. Venue casualties include PC 69 in Bielefeld, which opened in 1984 and demolished in 2005, the Volksbildungsheim in Frankfurt, now housing a multiplex cinema, and the Roehre in Stuttgart, closed this year to make way for the city’s controversial railway and development project.

The Fall played in Moscow in 2004 at a club called 16 Tons. This has been a music venue since 1997 and owes its singular name to the song of that title. The song is about the life of a coal miner and is attributed to Merle Travis, though this was disputed by George S Davis. Anyway, this dispute aside, according to Wikipedia, “it’s played before each concert held in the club. The song has been famous in Russia since the Soviet era…It was so influential that in the USSR several cover versions were made in Russian, as well as innumerable parodies in which “sixteen tons” referred to the weight of a bomb carried by some pilots to be dropped on a target country. There were versions with Americans about to bomb USSR, Russians about to bomb America, and also Russians about to bomb China.”

Festivals again: across Europe the list of those at which The Fall have performed is fairly lengthy. Ringe in Denmark hosted the Midtfyn Festival from 1976 to 2003, before it was closed due to declining ticket sales. The group played there in 1986. Roskilde, also in Denmark, hosted The Fall at the 1986 Roskilde Festival. Øyafestivalen is an annual Norwegian music festival held in Middelalderparken (the Medieval Park), Oslo. This event began in 1999 and has grown in popularity ever since. Stavanger in Norway hosts the West Coast Festival of Numusic. This was established in 2000 and The Fall visited in 2008. In Paris we have the Feedback Festival, held in Parc de la Villette and in Switzerland the For Noise Festival, whose first edition was in 1997. The Fall have played the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona on three occasions. [There is an article on the group’s Spanish gigs in Reformation no. 10]

Other cities where the group have taken part in festivals include Hechtel (Posslag), Aarhus in Denmark (Recession), Belgrade (Jelen Pivo Live, which has been held since 1976; Jelen Pivo is the name of a local beer), Arcos de Valdevez and Coimbra in Portugal, Vilnius in Lithuania (in existence since 1987), and Järvakandi in Estonia, for the Rabarock Festival in 2008. And we haven’t even mentioned festivals in Italy, Croatia, Poland…

Many of the venues at which The Fall have appeared in Australia have tended to be hotels: the Old Lion in Adelaide, which was situated on the site of an old brewery; the Cambridge in Newcastle; Charles Hotel in Perth; and the Seaview Hotel in St Kilda, Melbourne. One Australian arena which closed down a year after The Fall performed there (in 1982) was the Family Inn in Sydney, the reasons being a combination of bands charging higher prices, security problems, groups breaking local sound limits and the problems of keeping hold of the necessary licence to put on gigs in the first place. Other Australian venues which no longer exist include the following in Sydney: Stranded, where the group played in 1982, and the Trade Union Club, which closed around 1988. In 1990 The Fall played the Livid Festival, which took place in Harold Park Raceway; the festival itself ran from 1989 until 2003.

Let’s finish, for no particular reason, in Ireland. Here, The Fall have played in the following places: Cork, Dublin, Galway, Letterkenny and Stradbally. The group’s debut in the country was in the Arcadia Ballroom in 1980. This was opened in 1924 as a roller skating rink, but shortly after The Fall played there it was demolished to make way for student accommodation. In 1997 they performed at Sir Henry’s, again in Cork. Vinnie O’Shea has some comments on this arena: “This has near mythical status in Cork and Ireland as a whole. It was a five level scenario often with nights where each level had a different style party happening, techno on level 1, house level 2 etc. It was in a side lane and a fairly nondescript rundown looking building on the outside. Once the dance scene died off in the late 90s early 00s it went into vacancy and was never opened again. I guess many a Corkman would compare it to the Hacienda in Manchester.”

Vinnie O’Shea again, talking about the 2008 Spiegeltent, the Cork Midsummer Festival of the Senses. (Spiegeltent is Dutch for mirror tent, a structure traditionally made of wood and canvas and decorated with mirrors.): “The Spiegeltent is an utterly brilliant concept for a venue – a few hundred folk in an enclosed space with the focus on a very low stage just big enough to hold bands of five or six members. You enter via one of two openings at the rear of the “tent” up a ramp after giving your ticket, guided left or right bringing you out to the rear of a circular circus tentlike room, only it’s all panelled wood walls and floors. There is a balcony about two or three feet high which runs around each side of the stage ending in the bannisters so you can look sidelong onto the stage. There are very few obstructions to the views. the central area is the lower “dance floor” front of stage and the stage is directly opposite the bar which backs on to the corridor where the entrances are. It’s all very neat and hots up quickly and makes for a deadly intense environment.”

The Fall played the Tivoli Theatre in 1993, supported by an Irish group called Rollerskate Skinny, who recorded a session for John Peel and released an acclaimed album, Horsedrawn Wishes. According to Vinnie O’Shea, they were badly received and the singer’s pleadings that he was a huge Fall fan didn’t help matters. As for the venue itself, though it still exists it’s used only for theatre now, with live music consigned to the past.

The Fall played the Mean Fiddler in 1995 and 1997. This venue later changed its name to Mono, then The Fiddler and is nowadays called The Village, but the place itself hasn’t changed. The main logistical problem of the arena seems to be the positioning of the toilets, which are only accessible if you “wade through the front of stage crowd to get there…” 1997 was of course one of the all-time great MES drunken performances; according to an eye-witness the group leader arrived at 2 o’clock and sat during the sound check and up to performance time drinking whisky. However The Fall managed to put on a longish and decent gig, even though MES was often offstage.