Bradford rock city


By Jim Greenhalf »
Bradford Telegraph & Argus


Bradford’s Noise Of The Valleys
by Gary Cavanagh & Matt Webster (Bank House, £19.99)

If you’re a fan of family trees, you’ll like this book, which is more of a compendium really, because there are lots of them.

You can follow the evolution of Bradford bands such as Fresh Garbage, Poppy Factory, The Mekons, Smokie, and many others.

Gary Cavanagh, a founder member of Bradford’s 1 In 12 Club, a former textile worker, university tutor and local historian, spent seven years compiling and chronicling the two decades covered by the very detailed book.

Apart from family trees of bands, there are excerpts from newspapers, photographs, the odd cartoon, posters and other memorabilia.

In his introduction, Little Old Textile Town, Gary Cavanagh credits the T&A’s Rock On column as one of his sources – a more detailed list of sources for particular stories in each of the seven chapters is a commendable inclusion.

However, for personal reasons, I wish the acknowledgements listed the writers of those Rock On columns in the 1970s and early 1980s – former T&A journalists Nick Keyhoe, Alan Whitaker and John Mahoney.

This book is full of rich pickings for the curious browser. For example, I happened to pause at an item about the original Bradford (Arts) Festival, which ran from February 22 to March 1 in 1970.

Look at the line-up – Mike Westbrook, Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger, John Williams (the classical guitarist) and Manfred Mann. The Incredible String Band didn’t turn up. On the last day there was a screening of the Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back.

There was even a stripper called Estelle and the late Jeff Nuttal, author of Bomb Culture, reading his poems in that Dylan Thomas voice he cultivated.

After the third Bradford Festival, the organisers accused the local authority of not providing enough money and of wanting to get rid of the festival team and take it over themselves. Sounds familiar?

At that time, Bradford had a discernable middle-class arty fraternity. The late Peter Holdsworth and Roger Suddards, T&A theatre correspondent and lawyer respectively, were part of it. They met regularly at various watering holes around the city centre.

Simultaneously, Bradford had an alternative arts scene populated by characters such as Kenny Thomas, lead singer of punk band Complete Disorder, Dirk Spig, Wild Willi Beckett, local poets Ranters, and Seething Wells, all of whom appear in the book.

Seething Wells always fascinated me. He was never a person to me, not with a name like that. I thought of him as a hot spring, a geyser.

This is also a book of places, most of which no longer exist. For example, The Fourth Idea independent bookshop was in the block behind Sunwin House (now T J Hughes) demolished to make way for, well, for something; The Talk Of Yorkshire, Annabella’s discotheque and Gatsby’s in Fountain Street.

You can either read this book from cover to cover or, like me, turn the pages and pick what takes your fancy. If it doesn’t evoke memories, it is bound to make you curious about what Bradford used to be like – before the improvements.