What you get for your money is a very easy on the eye account of what it was like to live in a City that, in spite of being far, far from the action in London, was nevertheless exciting and vibrant, with plenty for the young to enjoy.

In keeping with the move for a more ‘democratic’ history, the publishers have opted to use quotes, anecdotes and memories from the people of Newcastle, although a few choice musings from local hero Alan Price also enliven the narrative.

Many of you will already be familiar with the landscape of ‘60’s Newcastle from ‘Get Carter’, perhaps the finest crime film ever made in the UK (or anywhere else, I would add). You may also have heard of local 60’s nightspots like ‘The Club a GoGo’, immortalised in an Animals song. This book will provide you with so much more to enjoy, both in written and photographic form, about this great, proudly un-gentrified City.

Memories start in the very early 60’s, when beat music was a little way away, and ballroom dances were more the norm for young Geordies on a night out. It all changed seemingly overnight with the arrival of the beat groups, many of them venturing further north than they had ever done before. Suddenly, the young wanted what their southern counterparts had, and local fashion entrepreneurs were not slow to react. Marcus Price was the shop that fashionable young men made for, who brought the Ben Sherman shirt north, managing to secure a monopoly in that city. City Stylish was another shop whose internal weather vane was sensitive to change, and they too started to stock the new styles the young were so desperate for.

Running parallel was the student scene, lots of kids from far-flung places who moved there to study and found they liked their adopted home so much, they stayed. Their favourite music was Jazz, rather than Beat, and they were well catered for, in a City with so many backrooms and cafes willing to let a band set up and play to attract a little extra custom. Many of the next generation of Beat musicians, like Alan Price, had a good grounding in Jazz, and so shifting between musical styles was natural and useful to them, in their later careers.

Over time, bands formed to play the music they loved, the Beat and the Soul and R ‘n’ B, among them the Animals, The Gas Board (with the very young Bryan Ferry and Mike Figgis) and arch mods, The Junco Partners. The city had become a hotbed of young music, only a few years after its emergence from post-war decline.

In much the same locality as the Club a GoGo, the Handyside Arcade, a beautiful Victorian place to be, was filling up with ‘alternative’ bookshops and fashion boutiques that would influence the hipper crowd for years to come. I recall visiting this arcade in the late 70’s, when it was still the best place for ‘alternative’ clothes and books, little realising its even more illustrious past.

Folk devils, like the notoriously corrupt Chairman of the Housing Committee, T Dan Smith, put in an unwelcome appearance, and our narrators do not shy away from the subject of the slums, a feature of so many post-war British cities and towns. Attempts to clear these slums and re-house those unfortunate enough to live in them met with varying degrees of success, and the high rise flats which replaced them were not always the comfortable places they looked on the architect’s drawing board. This particularly controversial era of Newcastle’s history is succinctly and unflinchingly dealt with.

If you’ve read my work before, you’ll know what a fan I am of seeing colour pictures of our favourite decade. I am delighted to report that this book has a small but stunning collection of full colour images of the City itself, concert tickets and posters, and even the fashions available at the time. I will not spoil what I am sure will prove to be an eye-popping experience for you all, especially you dolly birds and shoe fetishists, but I will say that this little volume has refreshed even my jaded palate. There are also plenty of black & white images throughout the book, many provided by the narrators themselves, which make the book far more of a time capsule than a mere collection of distant reminisces.

I admit that my shared heritage with the narrators makes this book all the more enjoyable to me, and my own childhood memories of Newcastle in that great decade have been well and truly stirred by the honest recollections of the people involved. What elevates this book above the usual ‘D’ya remember?’ tomes that litter remainder bookshops all over the country is that it’s the Newcastle people themselves who have written it, illustrated it, and have shared fond memories of their favourite City with us.

The Scenester

(First reviewed on 6th January 2010)