Fact #161779
When:
Short story:
Tears For Fears play at The Lyceum, London, England, UK, Europe.
Full article:
Johnny Black (diary entry) : Just off The Strand in London, on the corner of a winding street that leads up into Covent Garden, stands The Lyceum Ballroom. Once a palace among dancehalls, it has become in old age a somewhat sleazy, dowdy, downmarket rock venue, but one I always enjoy going to. It was here, in the 1960s, that a British kid first demonstrated the latest American dance craze, The Twist, for tv cameras.
I saw an early Stiff tour here (Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Wreckless Eric) and Adam Ant and many others. My latest visit is for the purpose of reviewing Tears For Fears on behalf of Smash Hits, the best-selling UK pop magazine.
The group was good but the venue and the crowd were, as ever, at least as entertaining, like animals in a free-range human zoo. Me and my pint of orange juice took up a stance in a shadowy corner near the back bar and observed.
The atmosphere is of a gigantic cocktail party to which no-one invited the band. They’re suffered, but largely ignored, treated as gatecrashers, a noisy distraction from the real business of necking, drinking half-pints and gossipping. In the dark, the stage looks almost like a 3-D cinema projection.
There went a smallish kid with a white string vest over a black t-shirt. And there, a female Tears For Fears clone, with her hair in tiny pigtails like Curt the TFF singer.
Kids of all shapes and sizes have squeezed themselves into styles they’ll never suit, let alone fit, in a desperate attempt to conform by being individual. I love the look of a girl in a red, flared mini skirt and black mesh tights, matched up top by a huge frizz of hair black as ebony at the back, but flaring, incandescent red at the front.
There are little pools of light in the gloom, oases created by the several illuminated bars dotted round the cavernous walls of this once elegant hall, with its ornate ceiling decorated by heraldic devices and eagles in gold leaf and red paint. The carpetting is worn away, faded and dirty. The green glow of the ‘EXIT’ lights give the place a feeling of being underwater.
I see a guy with his white raincoat slung, Italian style, over his shoulders and thin slit-like shades hiding his eyes. There’s a number of Robert Smith clones, as always. The inevitable sore-thumb bouncers in dickies and black suits, with neat, short hair. Gipsy girls. One slender little thing in black, with a skinny red plastic belt, red shoes and hair in a gravity-defying pony tail wound up in blue ribbon. Paul Morley clones in clumsy herring-bone overcoats, turned-up collars, haunted looks. Girls a la Bucks Fizz in leopard skin tights and feathered, bleached, sprayed blonde hair.
I wonder if I’ll miss anything by moving, but I move anyway and wander past kids on the stairs comparing favourite groups. One says, “Clash, Bauhaus, Cure.”
“So wot you doin’ ‘ere then?” demands the one next to him.
Gauche guys in ill-fitting cardigans vanish into the crowd. The immediately recognisable record company staffers hover by the bar looking bored, their necks constantly craning to see if anyone significant is among the crowd. I wonder if I’m just as obviously a journalist. Is one glance enough to typecast me?
One kid risks mayhem by sporting a Grateful Dead t-shirt. Must be Welsh. Lost in the valleys, they still exist in 1968, the land that time forgot.
There are kids who stand still, and kids who drift, on endless tracks, re-appearing with monotonous regularity, like tube trains on the Circle Line. A knot of out-of-towners in straw hats and corks.
Heady perfume lingers briefly as a swirling head of blonde curls sashays past my nose, to fade in seconds back into the smell of sweat, beer and smoke - though not as much smoke as in years past. This generation seems to smoke less.
In accordance with the currently accepted custom, no matter how danceably the band plays, the audience refuses to dance. Bands are for staring at, not dancing to, unless you count the mass vertical take-off experiments being conducted immediately in front of the stage. When the band stops and records begin to play, many head for the loos or the bars or the dark corners, and the few pairs of girls left out on the floor begin to dance listlessly, glazed eyes fixed on some imagined distant horizon, so they won’t be pounced on by predatory males.
Ear-rings, preferably dangling ones, are the norm, along with dyed hair. I love all the hairstyles. It can be feathered, plaited, cropped short, mohican, and any colour - or combination of colours - imaginable.
I spot a chubby guy in braces and a pork pie hat, a mini-Alexei Sayle. A little fat girl in a low-cut, black, strapless, shapeless dress, cut to points above her breasts. She’s a blob of flesh, squashed in the middle.
I notice a gang of would-be sailor boys with muscles adorned by tattoos of ravens and skulls. A black barmaid sings to herself cheerfully, apparently oblivious of the high-volume disco sounds. Another girl over there is in tight black mohair, head to toe, but glittering with metal bangles, bracelets, pendants, rings, ear-rings.
The floor, by the end of the night, is decorated with broken plastic beakers, paper handkerchiefs, empty beer cans, fag ends and bored kids who’ve slumped against the walls. To relieve their tedium, two overweight heroes perform an improvised Irish jig but soon subside into torpor.
As I leave, a beer can moulds itself to my foot. I wander a few steps further, clanking, off-balance, before I stop and rather enjoy dislodging it, to the mild amusement of a few observant bystanders.
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I saw an early Stiff tour here (Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Wreckless Eric) and Adam Ant and many others. My latest visit is for the purpose of reviewing Tears For Fears on behalf of Smash Hits, the best-selling UK pop magazine.
The group was good but the venue and the crowd were, as ever, at least as entertaining, like animals in a free-range human zoo. Me and my pint of orange juice took up a stance in a shadowy corner near the back bar and observed.
The atmosphere is of a gigantic cocktail party to which no-one invited the band. They’re suffered, but largely ignored, treated as gatecrashers, a noisy distraction from the real business of necking, drinking half-pints and gossipping. In the dark, the stage looks almost like a 3-D cinema projection.
There went a smallish kid with a white string vest over a black t-shirt. And there, a female Tears For Fears clone, with her hair in tiny pigtails like Curt the TFF singer.
Kids of all shapes and sizes have squeezed themselves into styles they’ll never suit, let alone fit, in a desperate attempt to conform by being individual. I love the look of a girl in a red, flared mini skirt and black mesh tights, matched up top by a huge frizz of hair black as ebony at the back, but flaring, incandescent red at the front.
There are little pools of light in the gloom, oases created by the several illuminated bars dotted round the cavernous walls of this once elegant hall, with its ornate ceiling decorated by heraldic devices and eagles in gold leaf and red paint. The carpetting is worn away, faded and dirty. The green glow of the ‘EXIT’ lights give the place a feeling of being underwater.
I see a guy with his white raincoat slung, Italian style, over his shoulders and thin slit-like shades hiding his eyes. There’s a number of Robert Smith clones, as always. The inevitable sore-thumb bouncers in dickies and black suits, with neat, short hair. Gipsy girls. One slender little thing in black, with a skinny red plastic belt, red shoes and hair in a gravity-defying pony tail wound up in blue ribbon. Paul Morley clones in clumsy herring-bone overcoats, turned-up collars, haunted looks. Girls a la Bucks Fizz in leopard skin tights and feathered, bleached, sprayed blonde hair.
I wonder if I’ll miss anything by moving, but I move anyway and wander past kids on the stairs comparing favourite groups. One says, “Clash, Bauhaus, Cure.”
“So wot you doin’ ‘ere then?” demands the one next to him.
Gauche guys in ill-fitting cardigans vanish into the crowd. The immediately recognisable record company staffers hover by the bar looking bored, their necks constantly craning to see if anyone significant is among the crowd. I wonder if I’m just as obviously a journalist. Is one glance enough to typecast me?
One kid risks mayhem by sporting a Grateful Dead t-shirt. Must be Welsh. Lost in the valleys, they still exist in 1968, the land that time forgot.
There are kids who stand still, and kids who drift, on endless tracks, re-appearing with monotonous regularity, like tube trains on the Circle Line. A knot of out-of-towners in straw hats and corks.
Heady perfume lingers briefly as a swirling head of blonde curls sashays past my nose, to fade in seconds back into the smell of sweat, beer and smoke - though not as much smoke as in years past. This generation seems to smoke less.
In accordance with the currently accepted custom, no matter how danceably the band plays, the audience refuses to dance. Bands are for staring at, not dancing to, unless you count the mass vertical take-off experiments being conducted immediately in front of the stage. When the band stops and records begin to play, many head for the loos or the bars or the dark corners, and the few pairs of girls left out on the floor begin to dance listlessly, glazed eyes fixed on some imagined distant horizon, so they won’t be pounced on by predatory males.
Ear-rings, preferably dangling ones, are the norm, along with dyed hair. I love all the hairstyles. It can be feathered, plaited, cropped short, mohican, and any colour - or combination of colours - imaginable.
I spot a chubby guy in braces and a pork pie hat, a mini-Alexei Sayle. A little fat girl in a low-cut, black, strapless, shapeless dress, cut to points above her breasts. She’s a blob of flesh, squashed in the middle.
I notice a gang of would-be sailor boys with muscles adorned by tattoos of ravens and skulls. A black barmaid sings to herself cheerfully, apparently oblivious of the high-volume disco sounds. Another girl over there is in tight black mohair, head to toe, but glittering with metal bangles, bracelets, pendants, rings, ear-rings.
The floor, by the end of the night, is decorated with broken plastic beakers, paper handkerchiefs, empty beer cans, fag ends and bored kids who’ve slumped against the walls. To relieve their tedium, two overweight heroes perform an improvised Irish jig but soon subside into torpor.
As I leave, a beer can moulds itself to my foot. I wander a few steps further, clanking, off-balance, before I stop and rather enjoy dislodging it, to the mild amusement of a few observant bystanders.