The Ballrooms where British Beat Took Shape

For most British singers and groups in the early 1960s, chart success alone did not guarantee financial security.

While pop acts might expect fair royalties from a Top Twenty hit, their main day-to-day income — which paid for basics like equipment and stage clothes, as well as a manager — came not from records but from the hard slog of live dates.

A good manager saw his main job as keeping his artists in regular work, preferably night after night, even if that meant travelling from one end of the country to the other in a day.

Ballrooms, in particular, were a prime source of reputation-building live work, and such dates often bridged local gigs and a coveted place on a big theatre tour with up to a dozen other acts, giving many groups the satisfaction of playing to large audiences for the first time.

The ballrooms themselves were mainly large, ornate buildings with names to match — the Locarno, Lyceum, Adelphi, Palais, Empress, Scala or Majestic — and most dated from the days when social success depended on one’s mastery of the Foxtrot and Tango.

The Hammersmith Palais de Danse, opened in 1919, was the first of its kind and by the late Thirties virtually every town in Britain had its equivalent, each playing host to touring dance bands and acting as a focus for the community’s social life.

Some closed after the Second World War because of rising costs and changing social patterns, while many that survived were taken over by new leisure corporations like Granada and Top Rank, with interests ranging from bingo to cinema.

As formal dancing declined, the halls had to adapt to stay in business. Some became skating rinks or ten-pin bowling alleys, while others continued to stage shows featuring well-known middle-of-the-road singers like Ronnie Hilton and Lita Roza.

The demise of the music-hall circuit in the 1950s left these acts without a major source of exposure, so ballrooms assumed new importance that lasted through the rock’n’roll era and well into the 1960s.

The so-called ballroom circuit was, in fact, something of a misnomer, because the circuit included not only dance halls but town halls, sports centres, welfare halls, and even public baths and lidos, where the swimming pools had to be specially boarded over for each performance.

Common to all these venues was a deliberate absence of seating, not only to encourage dancing but to maximise audience capacity, and a booking policy that cut right across the pop spectrum – only at a ballroom or equivalent could you expect to see The Rolling Stones one week and Kathy Kirby the next.

There was something innately democratic about such a policy and, indeed, about the ballrooms themselves as places of entertainment, and they were the only places where pop fans could regularly hear quality live music for a single-price admission, and they made even top bands like the Stones and The Who accessible to fans in the farthest corners of the country.

They also had a clear advantage over the cinemas and theatres that hosted big-name concert tours – they were centres of social activity.

For thousands of British teenagers, a Friday night visit to the local ballroom was the leisure highlight of the week, no matter who was actually appearing there, as it offered untold opportunities for boozing with friends, meeting the opposite sex or even getting involved in the occasional gang-fight.

The ballrooms enjoyed their greatest period of popularity between 1963 and 1966, in the wake of the massive new interest in pop that The Beatles and others helped to create.

Ironically, however, the ever-expanding success of the major British groups eventually proved the ballroom circuit’s downfall, as many forsook the dance halls for more lucrative concert tours and — ultimately — the huge American market.

For both artists and managers, ballrooms became simply a stepping stone to bigger and better things and, once a singer or band had graduated beyond them with a few hit records and a spot on a tour, there was absolutely no going back.

Slowly but surely, the ballrooms were robbed of the best rock names and had to be increasingly content with second-division acts of somewhat lesser box-office appeal.

Other reasons drove the ballrooms’ steady fall from grace, too, and what happened to the California Ballroom in Dunstable (pictured below) — one of the key venues on the south-of-England circuit — offers a typical case history.

The California was built in 1960 as an extension to a leisure complex that already included a swimming pool, go-kart racing track and skating rink, and for several years its profits effectively subsidised the other ventures.

The Rolling Stones performed there for £25 early in 1964, just as Not Fade Away was entering the charts, and other star names to appear there included Lulu, Brenda Lee, Adam Faith, Stevie Wonder, Dusty Springfield, The Drifters, local band The Barron Knights, Connie Francis and James Brown.

The California’s location — just 30 miles from London — gave it a more than local importance, and at one period special coaches brought in fans from nearby towns like Luton, Aylesbury, Bedford and St Albans.

The California’s solid reputation meant it could survive the loss of top British groups better than most, but problems began to mount around 1966.

By then, even the minor-league groups were demanding high fees as a matter of course — they knew they could earn bigger sums elsewhere — and admission charges had to be persistently increased to keep up with inflation.

Pop tastes were changing too, with many of the newer bands — notably those emerging from the London clubs — playing music that was hardly suited to the ballroom ambience.

The puzzled faces and cool reaction of the seasoned ballroom-goers to the Pink Floyd, who appeared at the California during the first half of 1967, gave an early indication of the split in tastes to come.

The new progressive rock bands and the old dance-hall venues just did not go together, and these bands turned to colleges and universities for more sympathetic audiences.

The problem was partly one of facilities, as ballrooms were not physically equipped to cope with the massive amplifiers, complex instrumentation and ingenious light shows that the prog groups brought with them.

More significantly, though, the new progressive music had a supposed intellectual value that demanded rapt attention and a passivity of response. Ballroom audiences, largely working-class and more used to appreciating music with their feet than their minds, had little patience with such pomposity – and frequently showed it.

Progressive rock had a huge impact. Even some of those groups that had come up through the ballrooms deserted them for the newly established college circuit, while 1967 saw the last days of the multi-artist theatre tour, killed by mammoth running costs and changing musical fashions.

As promoters and agents stopped booking acts into ballrooms, some closed while others changed their policies. The California’s response – which was followed by a number of independently owned dance halls – was to specialise in the one style of music whose popularity was unaffected by the rise of progressive rock – American soul.

So California only presented mainstream British rock when it could be sure of a profit.

With Dunstable’s Queensway Hall (opened as a rock venue in 1967) now presenting a weekly diet of the new rock, the decision made sense. By specialising, the ballroom retained the loyalty of its hard-core following and also attracted many of the top soul stars, from Wilson Pickett to the Four Tops.

The  California, in fact, became the traditional starting point for a soul artist’s British tour and one of only a handful of important soul venues south of Birmingham.

Other ballrooms suffered a more ignominious fate. Some were converted into skating rinks or banqueting halls, while others became discotheques or nightclubs. In social terms, the disco was the logical successor to the ballroom, attracting the same strongly working-class clientele and placing the emphasis squarely back on dancing.

Its advantage over ballrooms was mainly financial, as playing records was immeasurably cheaper than hiring live bands. Discotheques proliferated in the north of England, where the northern soul movement quietly gathered momentum and became a subculture in its own right between the late Sixties and mid Seventies.

The conversion of some dance-halls into cabaret centres, meanwhile, was ironic, because many groups that had not taken the progressive route after 1967 were obliged to take their place on the cabaret gravy train just to keep earning.

Cabaret was one of the few money-making outlets for live music in the late Sixties, though playing the night-club circuit inevitably meant mastering a repertoire of tired old popular music standards and comedy routines.

Very few former chart acts survived.

The ballroom circuit thrived in the Sixties because it reflected the overall unity in pop taste so well. When tastes began to polarise, and the very philosophy of pop music began to change, it lost both its social and musical importance.

Ballrooms were very much products of an era, and in an attempt to re-create the spirit of the pre-1967 years, a ballroom circuit of sorts was re-launched in the late Seventies, at the height of the 2-Tone Ska/New Wave movement.

A ballroom environment certainly suited the music of Madness, The Specials, Bad Manners and others, symbolically breaking down barriers between audience and performers and encouraging participation, and the move coincided with smaller venues opening up to rock bands in general.

Some of the old ballrooms found a new lease of life — the Hammersmith Palais, for instance, once more became a major London rock venue — but the ballroom movement of the late Seventies was more a gesture of pop democracy than a conscious effort to reopen the old venues.

By the Eighties, most towns had lost their ballrooms for good, while those that survived still tended to specialise in soul, rockabilly or country music.

Sometimes, as with the Royalty in Southgate, a surviving ballroom specialised in all three.

As for the California, after repeated management changes during the Seventies, the venue finally closed on New Year’s Eve, 1979. The building was demolished to be replaced by a housing estate.