In Britain, working men’s clubs have been incubators of rock music

ON JULY 1ST Def Leppard will perform at Wembley, the largest stadium in Britain, as the headline act for the first time (alongside Mötley Crüe). Like any aspiring hitmakers, the rock band started out playing much smaller crowds in much humbler venues. Def Leppard won attention in the late 1970s (pictured) after appearances at Crookes in Sheffield, Yorkshire, a private social club which is part of a network of venues up and down Britain usually referred to as working men’s clubs.

For Def Leppard, deception was required, at least initially. The band would “turn up at a working men’s club promising the MC we would play ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’,” the lead singer, Joe Elliott, has said. But instead of a set of soft-pop tunes familiar to the distracted drinkers, the group would play their own heavy-metal songs. There might be one pleased punter, Mr Elliott said, “but the rest of them just tolerated the noise.” Nevertheless, the band’s breakthrough arrived when a journalist from Sounds magazine came to see them at Crookes, which resulted in a glowing double-page spread and then a major record deal.

The tale is not unusual: working men’s clubs have played a huge and undersung role in the British music industry. Scores of bands in the new wave of British heavy metal between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s got their start in these venues—no matter how out of place they may have seemed and despite the risk of being “paid off” (ie, paid a fee and told not to return for the second set of the evening). Robb Weir of Tygers of Pan Tang says that they were dismissed in this way once. “Apparently it was all to do with the fact that we were too loud in the concert room for the bingo in the room adjacent to us. As we all know, bingo is sacrosanct on a Friday night at a working men’s social club.”

The clubs’ role as incubators of rock music might have surprised their founders. The first club was opened in Reddish, a locale south-east of Manchester, in 1857; Henry Solly founded the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union (CIU) in 1862. “The Club Rooms in every locality will form the strongest counter-action to the allurements of the Public House,” he wrote. Solly hoped the clubs would offer uplifting education for their members. However, their exemption from pub licensing laws—taking advantage of a loophole intended to allow the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall to serve alcohol to the ruling classes—meant they became better known for supplying cheap beer after pubs had closed.

A century later, though, working men’s clubs had come to represent something else in the imagination: comedians in crumpled tuxedos telling jokes about their mother-in-law to aled-up patrons. So central were working men’s clubs to popular culture that everyone, no matter how famous, graced their stages. So synonymous were they with entertainment that a television variety show of the 1970s, “The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club”, was set in a fictional working men’s club. The programme featured acts who played at the club’s real counterparts, including comedians such as Bernard Manning and The Krankies, the magician Paul Daniels, and musicians such as The Dooleys and Brotherhood of Man.

By the late 1970s the CIU was the largest private members’ organisation in the world, with more than 4,000 affiliated clubs. (Nowadays, according to the CIU website, the number is around 1,600.) For some bands, playing at the clubs was a choice rather than a necessity. The Fall, for example, made a virtue of appearing at them. “It toughened you up,” said the singer of the post-punk band, the late Mark E. Smith. “They’d be throwing glasses—proper glasses, like—and spitting at you. I see a lot of groups today, and they don’t know they’re born.”

After their heyday in the second half of the 20th century, the clubs began a rapid decline, one linked to the changing economy and the downturn of industry in the northern heartlands. In the 21st century, though, they are back at the heart of grassroots music. A number of the old clubs have been bought and turned into widely admired concert venues. Crookes continues to host regular music events. In Leeds the Brudenell Social Club attracts big names from the world of indie; down the road in Hebden Bridge, the Trades Club has become one of the most beloved music venues in the country. In east London, the Moth Club—the former home of a South African club for ex-servicemen called the Memorable Order of Tin Hats—is a regular stop for hip up-and-coming artists.

Solly would not recognise his vision in the Moth, the Brudenell or the Trades Club. Perhaps, though, he would approve of their mission: providing uplift at reasonable prices. ■