Rock History

Unique stories from the British Music scene

Author: Rock History UK

  • Rod Davis learns to play with his school chum John Lennon

    Rod Davis learns to play with his school chum John Lennon

    From Quarry Bank School to the Quarrymen was a small step for Rod Davis in the Fifties as he had acquired a banjo which he had yet to learn to play. Still in the skiffle days this did not matter and some of the band went on to be ever so successful. Recorded over a…

  • Blue plaque campaign

    Blue plaque campaign

    BBC local Radio are running a campaign of awarding blue plaques to celebrate local music legends and we could do with your support to get one for Cyril Davies on the Round House pub in Soho, London. Let’s face it without Cyril we have none of the British R&B boom and all that followed. Cyril Davies…

  • Interviews at the Beeb

    Interviews at the Beeb

    Been enjoying life at the BBC again where I actually got my first proper job many, many decades ago now. This time it has been just over the road from where I used to work opposite Broadcasting House, my how everything around there has changed. What was my office is now a hotel again and Broadcasting House has…

  • On the inside looking out

    On the inside looking out

    This week saw the publication of this new volume of stories from the RockHistory archives – ‘Inside Looking Out’ is named so accurately after The Animals hit of 1966. It is now available worldwide in book and kindle form for those of you who have not been tempted yet – so now you really have…

  • Have you got any footage of 50s / 60s groups playing?

    Have you got any footage of 50s / 60s groups playing?

    One of those daft questions we have asked before, and the answer sometimes is amazing in what turns up. We are looking for any old footage you might have shot on Super 8 or the like of your group or maybe a friend’s group either playing live or goofing about with equipment or vans. There tends…

  • Haydn Bendall and the day it is all over

    Haydn Bendall and the day it is all over

    You spend a week, months or even years in the studio working on and recording an album with the  artist – then one day it is all finished, mixed and delivered, the following day someone else moves into what has been your home. Then what?

  • Starting a documentary project with Peggy Seeger

    Starting a documentary project with Peggy Seeger

    A lovely day today when we starting talking and filming with Peggy Seeger about her upbringing in America pre and post war, the folk archiving father and the classical composing mother, her brothers Pete & Mike, Woodie Guthrie, Lead Belly, Libba Cotten composing ‘Freight Train’ and through to Peggy’s college days. We will resume in January for…

  • Phill Brown and recording the never more aptly named Burnin’ album

    Phill Brown and recording the never more aptly named Burnin’ album

    Now is your chance to learn a few studio tips from when Phill Brown was recording at Island’s Basing Street or his early Olympic Studios sessions

  • Lester Smith is the specialist microphone expert

    Lester Smith is the specialist microphone expert

    Lester is a long termer at the famous Abbey Road Studios and they need this sort of love of the recording process and attention to detail in order for the whole thing to keep rolling, rolling rolling  

  • Richard Brown played the bass for the Stones, Cyril Davies, Screaming Lord Sutch and more

    Richard Brown played the bass for the Stones, Cyril Davies, Screaming Lord Sutch and more

    Richard Brown aka Rick Fenson tells us what it was to have an electric bass guitar in those early days, you would get press ganged into every band that was playing and so long as you could play da Blues / R&B – it was all real fun unless you needed to go to the loo  

  • Caldwell Smythe and Colonel Barefoot’s Rock Garden

    Caldwell Smythe and Colonel Barefoot’s Rock Garden

    We had been doing some filming of the events at the old Station Hotel in Richmond where those young Rollin’ Stones cut their teeth in the Sixties and we met the extra-ordinary Caldwell Smythe who had put on the gigs at nearby Eel Pie Island in the late Sixties. Too many good stories to miss out…

  • Jonh Ingham and the journalist jaunts to worship those still standing Stones

    Jonh Ingham and the journalist jaunts to worship those still standing Stones

    Jonh – as he liked to spell his name in the heady Sounds days as a journalist – experienced Punk in all its evolving music altering stages, but he also used to get out and about with other kinds of music too. One of those trips was when he went off on a jaunt to see those…