This was a great night, really good line up.
First on was a work-mate from Our Price Records – Tony Duckworth and his band The Rain. Tony and I worked together in a few different shops and we had a healthy musical rivalry. The Rain would later be on the wonderful Medium Cool label.
Anyway, The Rain were a great band, here’s the lovely ‘First of May’
In between the bands we had in the main hall, we were starting to add entertainments to the bar area now too. With the help of Buzz Club regular Mark Nelmes, I had made a compilation video of cool stuff – The June Brides, Lloyd Cole, New Order, That Petrol Emotion, clips from cartoons. We literally had to connect two VHS players together and record from one machine to the other. High tech stuff. We then put an old tv on a chair on the small stage in the bar and hit play. We also started to put live music on in the bar. It meant that some people didn’t buy a ticket to go through to the main hall but the bar was full all night and there was a great vibe through the venue. The West End Centre in Aldershot is a wonderful place. A converted old Victorian school building with lots of cool spaces. Still running and still has a brilliant vibe.
In the bar that night we had the Buzz Club return of Rodney Allen. Rodney had previously played with The Brilliant Corners and my band, Bluetrain at the Buzz Club we did at Camberley Football Club.
Rodney later joined the Bristol favourites, the Blue Aeroplanes (and in fact, The Chesterfields) and supported R.E.M. ’round Europe. He also invited Bluetrain to play Glastonbury in 1987. We played the Cinema tent which Rodney was booking. It was a very wet one. My first trip to Glastonbury. We went down in my Mum’s nursery school mini bus, which doubled as the band’s van and the nursery united football bus.
We sounded like this.
So to the main band – The Chesterfields. Photo from The Buzz Club – Tim Paton.
(Although, firstly, I’d like to mention – the posters we had made for the gig, all had the ‘s’ missing at the end of the band’s name. Danny and I had to write the ‘s’, with black marker pens, on 100 posters before pasting them up.)
The Chesterfields were from Yeovil in Somerset. They released records on the Subway label, (which made them label-mates with The Shop Assistants) and were truly part of the C-86 movement. They also played the 1987 Glastonbury Festival.
They immortalised the music journalist Johnny Dee.
A great night indeed.
ITTLG 
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