There were always half a dozen ‘top’ Newcastle bands at any given time throughout the ‘pub rock’ era in Newcastle (between approximately 1973 – 1987) and everyone had their opinions as to who those bands were.
For drummer Chris Mudge:
Rabbit, Maya, DV8 later on, Atlantis. Baron… were always good… Benny and the Jets… They were a big puller, and Gold Cadillac, they were another big band then. They’re the ones that sort of hit that little bit above the rest of them… Oh, and Mata Hari was the other one.
For guitarist Greg Carter:
Benny and the Jets were the top band of that era. Before that, Rockit were up there, The Heroes, Meccalissa which became DV8. In the early ’70s Armageddon were pretty popular… And in the early part of that there was a band called Mata Hari which were pretty popular.
On reflection, what set those bands apart for Greg was:
Popularity with the audience I guess… Probably the songs and the image. Before The Heroes, Rabbit was another band but that was basically the The Heroes as well. They were the glam rock days so they used to dress up to play, they had a stage show. We always took presentation seriously… Rabbit were the same. They were a glam rock band and The Heroes became glam rock. DV8 were never a glam rock band but DV8 had a real special bit of magic amongst them musically – an uncompromising attitude towards what they played… They would be doing originals that others probably wouldn’t have had a shot at but they kept slipping them into their repertoire until they became popular.
Many people also had favourite local venues and different reasons for thinking they were great. The Bel-Air Hotel in Kotara, just about where McDonald’s now stands, was big back then and loved by many. According to one Bel-Air regular:
That’s where the gang used to go. We used to get together where it concerned the surf club. Everyone seemed to look after one another I felt at the Bel-Air. That was sort of family-orientated, where everyone looked after one another. They had good music and then, at midnight without fail, you’d get a little plate and you’d all line up. We’d all be as pissed as farts but that didn’t matter. We’d stand there and we’d be waiting to have our little pie and I think it was a piece of chicken and a piece of lettuce.
Paul Jenkins (aka Paul Bigge) from a number of local bands, including Gibraltar, Bowser and Unleashed particularly liked the Newcastle Workers Club. He recalls that:
We played there once a fortnight for about 18 months, Friday or Saturday night.. . we had crowd records and bar records there and after playing there for about a month, it was like my loungeroom. I could walk in and it was just friendly faces. People there, they knew what they were going to get. Once we started, the place went off.
Dana Soper, from The Magic Bus liked the Jolly Roger nightclub (JR), primarily because she worked there and for her ‘it was just home’. Her memories of the JR were that:
If you went there regularly you became part of the family. It was just like [TV show] Cheers but for rock heads. If you wore black, or were a muso, you were automatically okay . . . Occasionally there was trouble, I have heard about people being knifed outside, you know. It had a really bad reputation but inside I never saw anything really bad go down. The JR was the people, the regulars, the regulars knew the staff and knew the bands and knew the security and everybody knew everybody and it was really safe for us, it was a home away from home. I could go out any night and if I had nowhere to go and no-one to meet, I could go to the JR and know that I would find somebody to talk to that I knew and I could have a dance and have a drink and have a laugh.
Next week: The end of an era – the changes that brought Pub Rock to an end.
PHOTOS: Local bands DV8 and Armageddon. Just two of the many fabulous bands on offer to Newcastle audiences in the 1970s and ’80s. DV8 image by Mark Sutton, Armageddon image courtesy of Les Gully.
