Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever, Bryan Ferry (These Foolish Things, 1973)
Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever, The Four Tops, (Ivy Jo Hunter/Stevie Wonder, 1966).
Club a’Gogo, Eric Burdon and The Animals (Animal Tracks, 1965)

My baby found a new place to go
Hangs around town at the Club-a-gogo
Takes all my money for the picture show
But I know she spends it at the club-a-gogo

Eric Burdon and the Animals, 1966

Written in typically optimistic fashion by Stevie Wonder (You Are the Sunshine of My Life/Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing) Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever is a wonderful Four Tops recording released by Motown in 1966, reaching #45 on the Billboard 100. The Four Tops original is so bright and assured that most of 70s rock royalty have added it to their reportoire – The Band, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins – failing in all instances to re-capture the sprightly bounce of the 1966 Motown release. Only Marvin Gaye comes close to the original by re-thinking the music and applying his typical pixie dust to the recording. Bryan Ferry and his magic band of John Porter, Eddie Jobson and Phil Thompson come close to the mark – the backing track is a percussive and funky wonder – but unfortunately the Ferry trademark vocal style interrupts the beat of the song, deflating it of its attractive innocence.

‘Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever’ continues Ferry’s fascination with the hit-making factories of 50s and 60s America, in this instance foregoing New York’s Brill Building hit-factory in favour of Detroit City’s Motown Records (the name Motown a mix of motor and town, the nickname for Detroit, and significantly, the location of the world’s first stage dive by Iggy Pop – it’s amazing what you can find at detroithistorical.org!).

The pull to Motown was significant for Ferry, for, growing up in Washington, County Durham during the 1950s, like many young people he needed a lifeline and an inspiration: “I loved American music,” he told Jon Savage in 2018. ““From the age of about 10, every week you’d discover somebody new. I was very much into jazz. You know how English people are; there’s a certain amount of musical snobbery. I mean, I loved Little Richard and Fats Domino, but when I heard Charlie Parker for the first time, this was something I really loved, and nobody else who I knew knew anything about him.” (Guardian).

Jazz came first (“In 1955, I also started listening to jazz – I became obsessed”), followed by R n’ B, Stax & Motown, soul – female singers, in particular, caught his ear: “I love women’s voices, actually – I haven’t got much time for men’s voices…But Billie Holiday is probably my favorite singer ever because she was so inventive, and soulful, and just so cool” (Pitchfork).

I. West Side
What is interesting is that the absorption of American influences and styles would produce such as European, neo-futurist, and often very weird sound with Roxy Music, a compositional blueprint that would eventually morph into the softer, restrained and more soulful sound of Manifesto (“West Side”), Flesh and Blood, and Avalon. Coming off an interview with Ferry in 2013, journalist Lindsay Zoldaz is impressed with how closely Ferry studies the form of song and performance – in this case, Prince on YouTube during a George Harrison tribute (“Ferry studies the screen like a quarterback taking mental notes on a rival’s game”) – and goes on to say, significantly:

From the innovative pastiche of Roxy Music‘s earliest records to his best solo albums– which feature wildly imaginative covers of Dylan, Otis, and Lesley Gore, to name just a few– [Ferry’s] career has played out like one prolonged, well-informed, and often-exclamatory conversation with popular music.

Lindsay Zoladz, Pitchfork, 2013

As musician and music theorist, Andy Mackay has identified the process of Ferry absorbing musical influences and turning it into a sound that was so successful for Roxy Music, while also recognizing the “tremendous influence” Ferry’s vocal style had “on people who perhaps wouldn’t have been confident in going out and becoming singers, because they didn’t sound enough like soul or rock singers or whatever. And then they heard Bryan…”:

The band he [Ferry] was in before, The Gas Board, was basically a soul band; and it’s very interesting that as soon as he got the chance to launch his solo career […] with These Foolish Things, he immediately did covers of all the songs by singers who he admired – which were soul songs. I think he thought he was singing one thing, but because he was English, it came out differently.

Andy Mackay, 1997

The Gas Board // Bryan Ferry (r)

While I was at university I put together my own band called The Gas Board and we played a lot of clubs in the area. None of the material we performed was original – it was mainly R ‘n’ B covers. But two of the musicians from that band – Graham Simpson and John Porter – were later to play with me in Roxy Music, so as you can imagine this was a very important time for me.

Bryan Ferry, 2009

The Gas Board was formed in the latter half of 1965 and included a three piece horn section (which, a bit surprisingly, included future film-maker Mike Figgis). American Soul was popular in the UK charts in the 60s, with Motown stars The Four Tops (Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever); The Temptations (My Girl); The Supremes (Baby Love); and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (Tears of a Clown) having big hits in the country, instigating a move away from classic Rhythm & Blues towards Soul.

Knowing which side their bread was buttered, this is the direction the Gas Board decided to take, with Ferry covering as best he could quintessential 1960s Stax and Motown hits of the day. “In my college band, I had been imitating whichever song I was singing.” Around the same time he hitchhiked to London to see the Stax Roadshow featuring Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes and Sam and Dave. This was the singer’s ‘Road to Damascus moment’: “I’d been nursing the idea for Roxy since my last band [the Gas Board], since 1964-65. Obviously, when I stopped with the other band I was still thinking about music, but in more creative terms” (Ferry). With the concept and idea firmly in his mind, Ferry started to plan the mixing of “black soul music and the art school influence” to create a new hybrid European sound.

II. Devil With a Hatchet
The cross-pollination of styles and collisions in Bryan Ferry’s musical output was due in part to the location and heritage of his hometown – the unglamorous working-class industrial city of Newcastle Upon Tyne (specifically, Washington, County Durham), in North East England. Against a backdrop of Newcastle’s typical cobblestoned, coal-dirty streets Ferry took in the visual influences of architectural marvels Penshaw Monument and the Central Arcade (see: The Track of My Tears), Newcastle also provided access to American Jazz in the 50s, R n’ B, Soul, and high-pedigree rock in the 60s. An early home for jazz in the city in the 50s, The Newcastle Jazz Club was followed by The New Orleans Club, and The University Jazz club – the latter owned by Michael Jeffery (probably best known as the man who managed the Animals and Jimi Hendrix) and also as the future founder and owner of the Club a’Gogo.

The Club a’Gogo was great. That was near the bus station. You’d go up these stairs, past all these bus drivers and bus conductors who had a tea room or office there, and the club was at the top. Later I saw all sorts of people there: Cream, the Spencer Davis Group, Wilson Pickett, Captain Beefheart – I was DJ at the club the night Beefheart played there.

Bryan Ferry, 2008

The significance of the Club a’Gogo was to provide a place where art, commerce, and music could meet.  In the latter half of 1961 Mike Jeffery and and his partner Ray Grehan had gone ahead with the purchase of a site above the Handyside Arcade on Percy Street. According to the excellent online series of articles on gigging in the North East (Ready, Steady, Gone), the expectation for Jeffrey was that the club be the “best in the city”. As well as live Jazz and Latin American music, there was to be a games room with roulette, meals and a late drinks license. Mike Jeffery targeted the youth and older crowds –

“by splitting the Club A’Gogo into the two discrete venues. The club consisted of two rooms either side of a landing. On the right was the licensed ‘Jazz Lounge’. On the left was the unlicensed ‘Latin American Lounge’, later to be renamed the ‘Young Set’”.

Roger Smith, 2013

John Lee Hooker: ‘You ever hear’a Newcastle’?
Interviewer: ‘Newcastle, Mississippi?’
John Lee Hooker: ‘Newcastle in Britain. Newcastle . . . boy, that was rough. There was a bar I played every night. It was rough.’

Like many Northern music venues, the club had a violent reputation. Gambling and late night drinking were a problem. Eric Burdon and The Animals were the house band during some of the club’s most influential years (even recording a song called Club a’Gogo) and the influx of music styles and cast of characters made it an exciting place:

The Club a Go-Go was a shining star of the northern British club world, which meant it also had to be a den of iniquity. It’s where the North East mob was born – they ran several clubs in the area. It was a mixture of teen heaven, with the devil running loose wielding a hatchet. It was the only place outside of one club in London that actually had a full-on gaming licence. It was very clear that the mob from London would take interest, as gaming back then was strictly controlled in England and only one club in London’s West End had been allowed the game of roulette. I have many great memories from Club A Go-Go.

Eric Burdon

My baby found a new place to go
Hangs around town at the Club-a-gogo
Takes all my money for the picture show
But I know she spends it at the club-a-gogo
Let’s go babe, let’s go, I love you, come on, yeah!

It’s one of the coolest spots in town
You take too much tho’ it’s bound to get you down
She’s got a boy-friend they call Big Joe
He’s a big shot at the club-a-gogo
Babe, come on, let’s go, let’s go babe, yeah!

Now they play the blues there every day and every night
Everybody monkeys and they feel all right
Ask my friend, Meyer he’ll tell you so
That there ain’t no place like the club-a-gogo
Let’s go babe, ah let’s go, come on it’s all right, s’all right, s’all right
Yeah!

I guess I can’t blame her for goin’ up there tho’
The place is full of soul, heart and soul, baby
It’s all right dad, John Lee Hooker, Jerome Green,
Rolling Stones, Memphis Slim up there, Jimmy Reed too baby,
Sonny Boy Williamson baby

Eric Burdon and The Animals, Club a Go-Go, 1966.

From Burdon’s description and lyric it is safe to say Club a’Gogo provided Ferry with access to music of some considerable variety and character, introducing an explicitly Roxy Music sensibility born of trampy, stylish decadence – the sleazy scene depicted on the cover of For Your Pleasure coming alive in its high-heeled glory – girls, clothes, dirty deeds done dirt cheap – as Ferry confirms: “Some quite hard men used to go there – like gangsters; dressed in mohair suits, with beautiful girls – the best looking girls in Newcastle; quite tarty. It was really exciting – it felt really “It” to go there. Beautiful girls …” (Ferry). And Ferry connects the dots of his flash American fantasy to the style and attitudes of the American bands – “the Stax label and Motown, they were into presentation and show business, mohair suits, quite slick. And the cover art…was a bit off-kilter as well; there was something a bit strange about it, futuristic as well as retro” (Guardian).

A bit off-kilter, something a bit strange, futuristic as well as retro: as if to seal his concept for the Roxy machine and his solo career, Bryan Ferry would recall that one of the large walls in the Club a’Gogo Jazz Lounge had a large day-glo mural of the New York skyline. Ferry assisted in painting the mural, applying his musical and artistic signature to the interior design of a club that brought him soul and excitement in equal measure. The primary artist of the piece – the flamboyant poet and writer David Sweetman – went on to became a life-long friend of Ferry – their common interests of art, music and writing outliving the typical life-span of a city nightclub, with its final claim on our memories, and all of our times and places.

It was by far the greatest club in the UK, even the planet for that matter and that’s an understatement!

Alan Brack, Club a’Gogo patron, 2013

The Club a’Gogo closed its doors in June 1968. To quote the Newcastle Live newspaper: “The whole 1906-built building, including the Handyside Arcade was, to the despair of many, demolished in the late 1980s to make way for the new Eldon Garden shopping mall.” (Maybe City Council will recognize the mistake, and like Liverpool’s Cavern, have to painstakingly re-build the club with its original bricks).

Postscript: It was nice to read that plans are being made to resurrect Club a’Gogo in January 2020 (“Newcastle’s legendary 1960s Club a’Gogo is set for a regular revival night).” We wish the owner much success, and will keep an eye on events and information as it becomes available: Club a’Gogo 2020 Facebook.

Credits: many thanks to the excellent info compiled at Ready, Steady, Gone – the brilliant site that reviews gigging in the North of England, late 60s/early 70s.

Photos: Gas Board original promo (Ferry in tie); Billie Holiday; Gas Board promo; Stax/Volt Road Show poster (Norway); Club a’Go-go logo; Club opening night; Animals recording of Club a’Go-go; Club a’Go-go exterior and interior shots; Club New York skyline mural by David Sweetman, assisted by Bryan Ferry.

Next: Triumph in Endings: closing out with ‘These Foolish Things’!