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How Motown changed my life
There is a long list of singers, songwriters and musicians who say they were influenced by Motown. And it’s not just artists that grew up during Motown’s golden era of the sixties. There’s a host of...
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1966 – My Favorite Year
Since Ready Steady Gone was launched it’s had over a quarter of a million hits. I’m guessing that most visitors to the site will be in their sixties and would have been to one or more of the north east...
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Ready Steady Gone has a brand new look
Welcome to the new, improved version of Ready Steady Gone – the site dedicated to the memory of north east bands, venues, music and people from the mid sixties to the early seventies. The site has been...
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The People’s History Of Pop
In 2016 BBC Four are to broadcast a series of documentaries entitled ‘The People’s History Of Pop’. The programmes will be about pop music from the 1950s through to the noughties as seen through the...
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Pirates
Everyone knows that unauthorised downloading or copying of mp3s and other forms of digital music is illegal. Music piracy is nothing new, though – it actually predates the digital age by at least forty...
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Sunderland in the Swinging Sixties
I wasn’t born in Sunderland but I lived there all through the ‘swinging sixties’, long before the town was granted its city status. I’m always fascinated by pictures and stories about Sunderland in the...
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Free Mania In The Northeast
“DEE THE HUNTAH! DEE THE HUNTAH!” If you were in a northeast band for a couple of years between 1970 and 1971 or you went to gigs where local bands were playing you would have heard those words shouted...
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The Geordie Jazz Man
In 2011 I was present at a reunion of people involved in Newcastle’s club scene in the 1960s. The rendezvous took place at the Jazz Café on Pink Lane, a venue owned and run by the eccentric,...
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Club A’Gogo Advertisements
Newcastle University’s weekly publication, the Courier, carried advertisements for the Club A’Gogo between 1964 and 1968. Here are some of those adverts (copied from The Courier Archives ). The post...
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What Goes Around Comes Around – 1966 to 2016
Some time ago, I posted a blog on this site about my favourite year – 1966. If you are familiar with Ready Steady Gone you will be aware that the music and stories covered on the site relate mainly to...
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Summer of Love
This year is the 50th anniversary of the ‘The Summer of Love’. The ‘Hippy’ phenomenon had been around in the USA and Europe since the mid sixties but 1967 was the year that the media focused on this...
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Marimba Coffee House
For those post war baby boomers who were in their teens and twenties in the 1960s and who lived within striking distance of Newcastle, nights out in the city couldn’t have been much better. With its...
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Lost Northeast Venues
I recently bought the February 2018 edition of Uncut Magazine, which includes an article about ‘The Great Lost Venues of Britain’. Uncut has written about 50 of the UK’s greatest lost venues chosen by...
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As Long As I Have You
Whilst driving home last week after a short trip to the northeast I turned on the car radio and caught the end of a very familiar song. It took a few seconds for me to realise that the song was “As...
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Return Of The Beano
It’s a chilly January night in January 1966 – Saturday the 29th to be precise. My band, Jazzboard, has just finished performing at the West End Club in the Fenham area of Newcastle. We persuade our...
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The Battle Of Percy Street
Although the main theme of Ready Steady Gone is the northeast music scene from the mid sixties to the early seventies, I sometime come across a losely related subject that I can’t resist writing about....
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Club A’Gogo Gig Dates (1965 to 1968)
The following gig list was compiled from a variety of sources including advertisements in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle and the Courier (the weekly newspaper of Newcastle University) plus various...
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Mayfair Ballroom Gigs – 1969 to 1972
The following gig list was compiled from several sources including advertisements in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, Geoff Docherty’s book (A Promoter’s Tale) and various band gig diaries. 1969...
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Mayfair Ballroom Gigs – 1965 to 1968
The following gig list was compiled from several sources including advertisements in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, Geoff Docherty’s book (A Promoter’s Tale) and various band gig diaries. 1965 March...
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‘Twas In The Summer Of ’69
A couple of my previous blogs have revisited people, events and bands in the north east music scene from 50 years earlier ( What Goes Around Comes Around – 1966 and The Summer Of Love – 1967). For no...
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