There was artist management, promotion and a ground-breaking outdoor festival in Richmond that morphed into the Reading Festival. He was very attractive, very pleasant and intelligent.”īowie played the Marquee regularly in the 1960s, and signed to the Pendletons’ booking agency, Marquee Agents, one of several parallel companies run from Wardour Street. I think they take all their aggression out on the drums.” Another favourite was Eric Burdon and The Animals, and then there was young Davy Jones, later Bowie. Most drummers are easy to get along with. It was a dead night – but after The Who it became the night to play.”īarbara Pendleton remembers The Who as “very exciting and very noisy”, and she struck up an unlikely friendship with Keith Moon. That’s how The Who got their Tuesday night residency in 1964. They were open seven days, so there was always space to fill. A lot of bands played their first gigs there. “And the Pendletons were open to giving people a break. “One of the reasons the Marquee worked was that it had the perfect location, right in the middle of Soho,” says Sellers. But eventually, the Marquee had to move, and while walking through Soho with his estate agent, Harold chanced upon a building vacated by Burberry. They turned it around by holding trad and modern jazz night, plus the occasional bit of RnB with a young Deptford band called The Rollin’ Stones. The venue was named the Marquee, and had a distinctive red-and-white awning designed by surrealist photographer Angus McBean. In 1958, they took over a failing jazz night in the basement of the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street. The Marquee is surely the only venue in the world that has hosted jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, heavy-metal legends Metallica and artists Gilbert & George (albeit, unfortunately, not on the same bill).īarbara Pendleton still recalls Lyttelton with affection, unsurprisingly as she and her husband came to the business through jazz. David Bowie performed here as a nobody and came back as a star, while queues stretched to Oxford Street to watch AC/DC’s strutting teenage guitarist dressed like a schoolboy.Īdd to that list thousands more – Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Genesis, Guns N’ Roses, Fleetwood Mac, The Jam, The Cure, Black Sabbath and The Police. It describes early shows by the Rolling Stones heaving crowds packed with rock stars worshipping at the altar of Hendrix acid-fried hippies mesmerised by Pink Floyd’s hallucinatory soundscapes. The full story is told in an authoritative new book, Marquee: The Story of the World’s Greatest Venue by Robert Sellers and Nick Pendleton (son of Harold and Barbara). What’s not to like? You’re listening to great music, boys are picking up girls and vice versa, everybody’s having a drink and a good time.” “There wasn’t anybody who didn’t know the Marquee,” she tells me. Barbara worked for years in offices above the venue before heading downstairs at showtime to witness magic and mayhem. The club, which opened in 1958 and closed (on that site) in 1987, was founded by Barbara and the late Harold Pendleton. It marks the former site of the Marquee, a ground-floor club that for three decades was the sweaty centre of live music in London – where The Who, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Sex Pistols and countless more played legendary shows. Halfway down Wardour Street is a blue plaque dedicated to Keith Moon, the wild-eyed drummer for The Who.
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