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The month after the Jim Reeves fiasco, The Manhattan Showband played at The Buffalo on St Patrick’s Night. They were fronted by Van Morrison and had recently been formed from the ashes of his previous showband, The Monarchs. The band were invited to stay in a spare bedroom above The Buffalo and, the night before their own show, Morrison and guitarist Herbie Armstrong went to Studio 51 in Soho to see an R&B band called The Downliners Sect, who had long hair and played Jimmy Reed and Bo Diddley songs, and were exactly the kind of group that Morrison wanted to have.

Back at The Buffalo, Morrison and Armstrong sat in their little room drinking cider and Van played a song called Could You Would You. “I thought it was incredible,” Armstrong told the writer Steve Turner years later. “I had never known anyone who had written a song before.” Exactly a month after their Buffalo show, Morrison’s new band, Them, played for the first time ever at the Maritime Hotel in Belfast - Could You Would You was part of their early set, as was a song called You Just Can’t Win, which contained a reference to Camden Town Tube Station.

In the 60s, three of the key ballrooms in Bill Fuller’s chain were renamed The Carousel - these were The Buffalo in Camden, The Astoria in Manchester and a new one he had built in San Francisco [which would be leased out to the rock promoter Bill Graham in 1968 and renamed the Fillmore West]. By this time, entrance to the ballroom was from Camden High Street, rather than Kentish Town Road, and you can still see the red Carousel sign above the main door.

MacGowan’s aunt and uncle are typical of the many Irish couples who met in The Carousel and The Buffalo before it. Many of them still come back here on Sunday mornings to search for the ghosts of their youth, retracing the steps that they once made across the dance floor or to look around for the long gone mineral bar where he first bought her a drink.

In 1969, Bill Fuller asked a young woman called Anne Wellstead, who was working in one of his properties on the West Coast of Ireland, to take a job at The Carousel. She agreed to move to Camden Town, initially taking a room above the ballroom, and is still here as its co-director. A few years later some of the big rock names, including Paul McCartney’s Wings, Led Zeppelin, Gary Glitter and a few of the new punk bands who were connected to the neighbouring Chiswick Records, used the ballroom as a rehearsal room. It was also popular with the local Greek community, who held wedding receptions here on most Sunday afternoons - and this is where George Michael’s sister held hers.

In 1978, Bill Fuller got together with Frank Murray, the former tour manager of Thin Lizzy, and realised that his majestic old ballroom, with two-levels, three bars, an upstairs restaurant and glassed-in viewing areas, would make a great rock venue. Murray’s intention was to model it on Bill Graham’s Fillmore West, with no security and a good vibe, and make it the kind of place where famous musicians would be encouraged to get up and jam with other bands or even form a ‘supergroup’ for the night.

With this in mind, the Electric Ballroom opened on July 28, 1978, with the Greedies, who were the brainchild of Thin Lizzy’s Philip Lynott and featured himself, Scott Gorham and Brian Downey; the Sex Pistols’ Paul Cook and Steve Jones; Rainbow’s Jimmy Bain plus Chris Spedding. Unlike many of the successful rock stars of the 70s, Lynott had quickly aligned himself with punk, befriending Cook, Jones and even Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, who were all frequent visitors to his home in Cricklewood. The Greedies closed their Electric Ballroom set with a mass jam through Pretty Greedy, an obvious take on the Pistols’ Pretty Vacant, and a performance which partly inspired Sid Vicious to form the Vicious White Kids, who played a one-off show at the Ballroom two weeks later. The rest of the inspiration came from the fact that Sid needed a way of raising his and Nancy’s air fares to America, which is why the gig was billed as ‘Sid Sods Off’.

Featuring Sid on vocals, the Damned’s Rat Scabies on drums, [who briefly had his own band The White Cats], plus original Pistols’ bassist Glen Matlock and Steve New [who were both in the Rich Kids], they called themselves the Vicious White Kids. “It was a great band and the place was packed out with a really hip audience,” remembers Shane MacGowan. “There were a lot of transactions going down - people joining groups, buying drugs, fucking each other in the toilets, you know, the usual stuff’.”

The set was largely made up of songs that the Pistols did, including C’mon Everybody, Belsen Was A Gas and My Way, which went down so well that the band ended up playing them twice. “All I remember is that Sid took up the role of lead singer without an instrument, and loved it,” says Frank Murray. “He kept throwing Elvis shapes and grabbing his crotch - he was doing it years before Michael Jackson, believe me. He obviously hated being a bass player and this was his band. That’s what I liked about it. It was as though he was living out his fantasy of being the singer and getting all the attention, while Nancy just squealed into the mike like a bad dose of feedback.”

Fortunately, someone had taken the precaution of switching Nancy’s microphone off before she sidled onstage. Less fortunately, she and Sid took a flight to New York a couple of weeks later, but were destined never to return.

Other bands who made early appearances at the Electric Ballroom include the Pop Group, Nico and Cabaret Voltaire, while the Greedy Bastards played another show in December, this time also including Bob Geldof in their line-up. “Both Greedies’ gigs and the Vicious White Kids were big events,” says Frank Murray. “And because the Ballroom opened with the Greedies, it became a favourite spot of visiting Americans - if Blondie or David Lee Roth were in town they would pop in - and Lemmy was always there. It became quite a place for people to hang out. The Clash rehearsed at the Ballroom for a week once and I also had Frank Zappa in for four days, which was great fun because I could just stand there and watch them as much as I liked.”