Taste at The Marquee Club, 1968

First time I met the blues

I was 14 years old the first time I went to the Marquee Club in Wardour Street, Soho, on 12th August 1968. I invited along an American girl I’d met a few weeks earlier on the steps outside Abbey Road Studios waiting for The Beatles to come out during sessions for the White Album. They eventually did, complete with Yoko Ono, at 2:45am, carefully picking their way over the bodies sprawled over the steps.

The support band were already on stage when we arrived. Tramline were a four piece blues band signed to Island Records, with a young Micky Moody playing a Telecaster with a humbucker in the neck through a full Marshall stack. The sound was immense, my first time ever in a music club and I had no idea it would sound so good, or so loud. Tramline made two albums, the first good, the second, well, not so much, and subsequently broke up. (I later played on a session with their fine drummer, Terry Popple, at Island Records’ ‘The Fallout Shelter’ Studio in 1975).

After a brief interval for a cold Coca-Cola (the infamous Marquee Club Bar came a few years later) at which point the American girl had had enough and left, club manager John Gee introduced the headliners Taste, featuring Cork guitar hero Rory Gallagher with a newly recruited rhythm section of drummer John Wilson and bassist Richard McCracken. I was standing just behind the rows of chairs in front of the stage and could see and feel everything. I’d never heard of Rory Gallagher before that night but he was unbelievable, playing his beat up Stratocaster through a Dallas Rangemaster Treble Booster into a Vox AC30 amp which was perched on a chair. He was standing in a pool of sweat, hitting pinch harmonic screamers all over the place, scatting along with his solos and playing with total freedom and great intensity, sparring with Wilson and leaving McCracken to hold things together. They were already playing the repertoire that would appear on the first album released in April 1969 - ‘Sugar Mama’, ‘Catfish’ ‘I’m Moving On’, ‘Same Old Story’, and a few that didn't including ‘First Time I Met The Blues’ and ‘Rock Me, Baby’. Even if I can’t remember everything that happened, I can remember exactly how it felt.

After the show ended everyone filed out in a daze into Wardour Street and I headed for Piccadilly Underground station and short journey home to St John’s Wood, my head spinning from the sheer excitement of it all. And that’s the moment when the music bug really bit deep.