Submitted by Barry Richards, Cheadle Hulme u3a
Juvenile Delinquent
Not so long ago, a friend’s sister lost her husband after a long illness.
My friend and I had known each other since the mid-fifties, from about the age of ten, and stayed friends throughout our teens, so I saw a lot of his sister in the fifties and sixties, both before and after she married.
Her husband was a policeman and she ran one of the new-fangled coffee bars in Levenshulme, a suburb of south Manchester. One of the employees there was a young chap called Glyn Ellis, later known in the music charts as Wayne Fontana.
I assume it was as a result of that experience that she was invited to manage a soon-to-open teenage ‘beat club’ in the city centre. A site was ready on Lloyd Street, and it was decided to call it The Oasis. It was destined to become one of the most influential music clubs in the country.
By that time, I had already been bitten by the new wave of rock ’n’ roll — the first record I’d bought myself was a 10-inch (shellac?) 78 rpm of Paul Anka’s Diana, sometime in the autumn of 1957, when I was eleven years old, and I still remember its vivid green Columbia label (number DB 3980). And, at the same time, through American radio stations I’d discovered Chuck Berry, Little Richard and many others. I was a teenager before I was a teenager.
My parents had an extremely large and cumbersome radio in our morning room, the front dial of which kept me fascinated for hours at a time. Through it, I imagined the exotic attractions of the names on the dial — Oran, Fes, Isfahan, Ulan Bator, Managua, Caracas — all pretty familiar now, but then almost totally unknown. But many other stations that were on the dial were completely unobtainable, although at the time I had no idea why. I soon learned, though, that after it got dark, I could just about receive stations from the east coast of America.
On stations like WABC and WOR, you could get audio relays of the seminal ABC TV programme Bandstand, later called American Bandstand. It was transmitted live in the late afternoon, and I found out that an audio recording of it was syndicated to a few American radio stations and transmitted on a later day at about 5pm our time, although I can’t remember which day, but it must have been a weekday, as in the dark evenings, I would race home from school to listen. And so I listened in the darkness, not only to Chuck Berry and Little Richard, but discoveries like The Coasters, Fabian and Jerry Lee Lewis.
With this initiation, I positively leapt at the suggestion that my friend could get us membership of his sister’s new club, The Oasis.
We used to go into Manchester most Friday evenings, allowed because there was no school the next day, and make a bee line for the Oasis, where his sister would let us in without the usual Friday night three-and-sixpence entrance fee (18p). Once through those swing doors, we were in a different world, a world of darkness and music. Just like our morning room in the winter evenings. But this was nothing like the radio room at home. Nor did it resemble the club scene of later years. I don’t remember hearing or seeing anything of drugs, and the only ‘booze’ available was Coca-Cola. In fact, I remember hearing that the Oasis was the biggest outlet for Coca-Cola outside London.
If you’ve seen the recently published photographs of The Beatles at The Cavern in Liverpool in 1961, you’ve also seen what The Oasis was like at the same time.
It was there that I first came across local groups like Freddie and the Dreamers, Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas (as a young boy in Stockport, I lived next door to Mike Maxfield of the Dakotas), Herman and the Hermits and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders (originally the Jets). But I also remember Brian Poole and the Tremeloes (sic) and Gerry and the Pacemakers. The list of acts at the Oasis — Gene Vincent, The Hollies, Bill Haley, Little Richard, The Who, Bo Diddley, the deliciously named Sugar Pie DeSanto — is almost endless. And, although I remember little of it, I was at the Oasis for the first appearance of The Beatles outside Merseyside, on Friday, February 2nd, 1962, before the release of their first record, Love Me Do. As an aside, I was also there on Friday, November 22nd, 1963, the day Kennedy was assassinated.
It’s almost commonplace for senior citizens in their dotage to muse that ‘those were the days’ or’ they don’t make them like that anymore’, but nights at the Oasis really were, as Eddie Cochran sang, ‘somethin’ else’.