THE ELECTRIC BALLROOM, CAMDEN, LONDON

Since the Electric Ballroom opened in July 1978, its stage has been graced by Sid Vicious, Philip Lynott, Iggy Pop, the Clash, Joy Division, Madness, U2, The Smiths, Nick Cave, The Pogues, Public Enemy and the Gallagher brothers. But the Ballroom was the centre of Camden Town nightlife in the days long before rock’n’roll.

It was first opened as a ballroom in the mid-1930s, mainly as a social centre for the large number of Irish immigrants who were coming to Britain to make up for the labour shortage during the Second World War. It was called The Buffalo because that’s what its aerial view was shaped like and, at that time, the entrance was through an iron gate on the Kentish Town Road. For the first year or so, The Buffalo was run by an Irishman called Ginger Maloney and it had a reputation for being a very rough place, full of different tribes of fighting Irishmen. The police were constantly being called in to deal with late-night violence and, after one fight too many, it was closed down.

The Buffalo was saved, however, by another red-haired Irishman called Bill Fuller. He was a 20-year-old contractor and amateur wrestler from County Kerry, who had opened the St Patrick’s Club, on Queen’s Road in Bayswater, when he arrived in London three years earlier.

“The Buffalo had been closed down by the police, who had put a big lock on the gate,” says Fuller, who still owns the Ballroom today. “So I went to the Chief Of Police in Holmes Road - he was an inspector Harris and he was a hard man to bargain with but I said “I’ll make a deal with you: if you’re ever called in to sort out a fight here, I’ll put the lock back on the gate.” We’d get all the Connemara lads in, and they were all well used to fighting, those were wild days, you know

“So I opened up The Buffalo in Camden Town - that was at the end of 1937, I think, or maybe 1938 - and I ran it myself. It was a small little place then and it was rough and ready, because I was breaking it in to see if I could handle the fights, but I handled them with these two fists [holds them up and laughs], these two fellas handled it all. You see that old gate on the Kentish Town Road? It’s the same gate that has always been there, I never did away with it. I left it as a souvenir of the old days.”

Fuller discovered that The Buffalo had previously been a Masonic Lodge, which had a swimming pool and steam baths plus a large meeting room upstairs. He immediately cleaned the old ballroom up and started to make changes. But the real opportunity for expansion came in 1941 when Camden Town Tube Station was bombed, and both the back of The Buffalo and the small side street beside it, which was called Dewsbury Terrace, were literally blown away. Bill Fuller took this as an opportunity to extend The Buffalo, rebuilding the back of the ballroom and creating a new dance floor on the site that was previously occupied by the row of terraced houses. “I bought the whole site then,” says Fuller, “and, because I was a contractor with my own gang of men, I built The Buffalo up into a ballroom that could hold 2,000 people.” By the late-50s, Bill Fuller was, quite literally, building a chain of ballrooms in England, Ireland and the United States, and he was also running a management and promotions company to provide live acts for his venues. Among those who worked for him in England were big band leaders, such as Ambrose, Geraldo, Jack Parnell and Joe Loss, and all of them regularly played at The Buffalo. “Joe Loss was one of my most famous bands,” says Fuller. “He worked for me for years and was a very good friend of mine.”

One of the singers with the Joe Loss band was Ross McManus, the father of Elvis Costello. The greatest story surrounding The Buffalo concerns Jim Reeves, an Irish Catholic icon on a par with John F Kennedy and the Pope. In June 1963, Reeves had done a tour of Ireland and - unlike the showbands - had been shocked by the conditions he was expected to perform in. This included playing two venues each night, some of which were up to 50 miles of winding, Irish country roads apart, and, worse still, having to deal with a series of badly tuned pianos. Some of the dates were a complete disaster and Reeves was determined not to put up with such terrible conditions again.

Reeves was scheduled to play at The Buffalo in February 1964 but, according to Fuller, it never happened. “We had Jim Reeves booked in at The Buffalo but he never showed up,” he says. “At the time, I was building a ballroom in San Francisco and I got a fellow called Philip Solomon to handle the tour. But Philip and Jim fell out, so Jim quit and he never played at The Buffalo. They sold all the tickets and Bill Foley, who was the manager, gave the crowd their money back, but they didn’t want their money - they wanted Jim Reeves!”

The Jim Reeves story that has passed down through Camden Town legend is even better. “Jim Reeves was due to play at The Buffalo,” says Frank Murray, who managed the Ballroom in the late-70s, “and there was just one thing on his rider: he insisted that the piano should be in tune. Irish ballroom promoters never quite grasped things like riders in those days, they just put the band up on the stage, expected them to play, took the crowd’s money and went home. So when Jim arrived at The Buffalo, there was a piano but nobody had bothered to tune it. By this time, the ballroom was really crowded - it probably had rubber walls - but Jim’s manager, or whoever, said, ‘Jim’s not playing.’ So the manager of the ballroom and the staff took all of the money that they had in the cash box, went into the lane at the back of the building, loaded the cash into a manhole, secured everything that could be secured inside the ballroom, and then one of them got up on the stage and announced, ‘Jim Reeves will not be playing tonight’. Before making a quick exit. The staff did a runner and just left the ballroom to the punters. Needless to say, there was a riot, as people started to demand their money back. The staff were off down the road and called in the police, who literally rode into the ballroom on horseback. I just have this great picture of mounted police riding into The Buffalo, with something like 2,000 Paddies going crazy because Jim Reeves hadn’t shown up. It’s cinematic.”