When Guernsey's Cavern was the Tavern

Elton John, Dr Feelgood, Snowy White ... in the days when music had finally migrated out of dance halls and hotels into pubs, Guernsey had them all - and the Fermain Tavern was the only place to be. Mark Windsor and his camera were there EVERY generation of teenagers and young adults in Guernsey has had its favourite dancing and drinking haunts.

For those born in the early 1950s it might have been the Continental Hotel or the Cellar Club, the latter an oddity at the time, being one of Guernsey's first-ever night clubs that seemed, like, well - a night club.

For those born before then, it might have been St George's Hall.

Those were pre-disco times - the days of live dance bands in dance halls and hotel ballrooms. St George's was famous for its rotating stage. Apparently, as one band finished, the stage would revolve, ready for the next to perform.

Cor. We teenagers of the 70s should have been so lucky.

Even as rock and pop came to Guernsey, with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones appearing here in the early 60s, if you wanted to dance, you went to see a live band. But if you were born in the mid-50s or later, by the time you got to your teens, you were moving into the era of the discotheque - a time that combined the sublime and the ridiculous and in some cases, verged on the sublimely ridiculous.

Picture spotty youths in flared trousers and top them with psychedelic or cheesecloth shirts with big collars and mop hair that curled round their faces to the shape of the 'crashlids' they wore on the 100cc, two-stroke Japanese sewing machines that then masqueraded as motorbikes.

See them plucking up courage to approach girls who were moving just ever so slightly to the music - clockwise around their handbags. It was called dancing. Those who giggled or gawked embarrassedly, or if they were of a more 'knowing' disposition, feigned bored indifference to the callow youths who were eyeing them up in that teenage cocktail of innocent lust, longing and trepidation.

Now you get a picture of the writer, out with his mates in the early days of the Fermain Tavern. The state of 'cool' circa 1972 was not remotely so really - just desperately teenaged: that's a port and lemon for the bird, a large IPA for me and two pints of VB for me mates.

That was also the historical state of drinking in those times when a locally brewed brown ale was still an OK drink to order. Two years later it had become de rigueur for all young men to drink lager. Guernsey and world civilisation have not been the same since.

In the transition from dancing to live bands to dancing to disco music, an interesting thing happened, one so obvious that it is easily overlooked. Some dance music started migrating out of the dance halls and hotels into the pubs.

A cultural sea change was taking place: new and evolving forms of music were vying for centre stage and new technologies were arriving to present or communicate them. If my memory of Guernsey's Fermain Tavern is anything to go by, there was a peculiar period when rock music and Tamla Motown seemed to be on an equal footing on pub-disco dance floors.

It seems to me in hindsight that a clash of cultural styles took place as white rock of the time. Alice Cooper's School's Out For Summer, Steppenwolf's Born To Be Wild and Focus's Hocus Pocus sat uneasily alongside the emerging sounds of Motown and black soul music.

And there was a gender division when it came to musical taste. The girls would generally prefer to dance to the more sultry and sensual sounds of Motown or soul. Most lads, on the other hand, not having fully arrived at a point where we could co-ordinate our two left legs, tended to stick to the Anglo-Saxon tribal music that we were more at home with with: Hawkwind's Silver Machine, Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water and Arthur Brown: 'I am the God of hell fire and I bring you... fiyah.'

Classic combinations that did nothing but add to our kinetic confusion on the dance floor.

Better still was to hang out in the bar looking at the dance floor from a safe distance.

Ah, the joys of youth and the rituals of beer bonding.

Although great for the battlefield, none of what I like to call Viking music was particularly appropriate for dancing or smooching around girls and their handbags. Young Guerns didn't quite know how to dance to Motown and like most white Brits, we knew next to nothing about the culture it came from.

We suffered uneasily and self-consciously. Well, I did - me and any girl upon whose foot I trod. Then we discovered that we had less chance of impressing young women when we were head banging to Deep Purple's Speed King than when we were smooching with them to Percy Sledge.

It was only another 30 years before I became an apprentice lounge lizard and in my best version of actor Leslie Thomas's chat-up line, said to a girl: ' He...llo, you're a fine young filly. Fancy comin' ormerin'?'

Actually the ormering bit was a chat-up line made to my mother in her teenage years. Strangely, it didn't work then either.

No one would have believed that Guernsey was a prime mover in initiating yoof's new music culture, but from two to five years after it happened in the UK, ever-innovative proprietors of local hotels and pubs followed suit in trying to cater for the tastes of our burgeoning rock generation.

Compared with those of the 50s and early 60s, this one had serious amounts of disposable cash.

Realising that modern dance and its music enabled establishments to pack in more dancers and drinking bodies per square metre than ballroom dancing, entrepreneurs did not miss the opportunity when they saw it.

They realised that a dance venue could be that much smaller and proprietors had to pay only one DJ and a doorman to pack a club (that was the name given to a room under a pub).

'Disco' was, not surprisingly, a great success. It was 'fit for massive commercial purpose', conceived not of course by a single creator, but by the intelligent design of commercial society which, on a darker note, was always at risk of transgressing the safety policies of the local fire prevention officers.

Interestingly, once young people were accustomed to dancing in the crowded and confined spaces of small night clubs, the way was clear for entrepreneurs in the UK and in places like Ibiza to later develop very large purpose-built clubs/warehouses into which they could pack the crowds.

They were aided and abetted by radio DJs, who to this day encourage young pepple to go 'largin' it' and so part with more of their cash.

In Guernsey in the 70s some pub-clubs came and went as fads in the night. The Wave at Vazon, the Granary at the Grange, Huggy's Pit, the Devil's Dungeon and Brian's, among others, all arrived and disappeared, leaving little or no trace. But then there were relatively large pubs like the Longfrie and the Fermain Tavern that were able to accommodate new trends without alienating their core market.

At one time in the 70s and 80s the 'Tav', a Randall's-owned pub, was, per square metre, allegedly one of the most profitable public houses in the whole of the British Isles.

That may well have been true, because from the time when I was a teenager in the early 70s, the week's entertainment seemed, for many, to start and finish with the Tav.

It had the most popular and professional DJs of the day, put on live bands and seemed so often to be packed out. There were not many more-popular places.

Mind you, rumour has it that the Tavern's commercial profitability had nothing to do with its success as a venue for live bands, but rather was due to five regulars in the public bar who, by all accounts, had taken it upon themselves to drink not only for Guernsey, but for the whole of the British Isles.

As DJs became more sophisticated and proprietors more knowledgeable about the music marketplace, clubs and pubs stratified, developing along more discriminating lines of musical taste.

Youth got better educated. Dance music in all its variations properly took root in purpose-made clubs. DJs developed musical manipulation of the masses into an art form.

In response to the diverse tastes of the general public, it was left to the mobile disco business at wedding dances and family functions, where ages ranged widely, to continue the tradition of mixing the weird and the wonderful in and on the local dance floor.

Meanwhile pub rock developed as a legitimate genre in its own right - a showcase for what was new and live in local music. It's where I cut some of my teeth as a photographer, as seen in some of the accompanying pictures.

During the mid 80s, Ian Cooley and Alfie Barton, respectively keyboard player and sound engineer for pop singer Paul Young, came to live in Guernsey.

The Fermain Tavern became their local and it wasn't long before Alfie became responsible for one of the most fertile periods in live music in Guernsey.

In conjunction with proprietors Jerry and Marion Root, he set up several summer series there with top blues and rock session musicians and stars.

Among those appearing was Snowy White, lead guitarist with Thin Lizzy, Rory Gallagher's backing band, The Gerry McAvoy Band, Dr Feelgood, Manfred Mann, Stan Webb, Wilko Johnson, Denny Newman and the Ian Cooley Band, among others.

Beechy Colcough, former lead singer with local bands Skint and Blue Muk, even brought Elton John over to play there after the two had met at one of the Priory clinics in the UK. Locals discovered how good a piano player Elton John was.

* In part two Mark will focus on the great band days at the Tavern in the 80s and 90s and reflect on the home-grown rock tradition.