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BILL FULLER: THE MAN WHO BUILT THE BALLROOM

Bill Fuller is a rock’n’roll legend and one of the central figures in the history of Camden Town. He took over a run down ballroom on the High Street in the late-30s, built it up into one of the most famous Irish dance halls in London, and then transformed it into the Electric Ballroom in 1978.

Fuller - a contractor and amateur wrestler as well as an astute businessman - built a chain of ballrooms across England, Ireland and the United States, enabling many Irish couples to meet and marry. His ability to erect such places, virtually overnight, has inspired many stories over the years. “There used to be a saying about him in the 50s,” said one interviewee for this book. “ ‘What Hitler didn’t knock down in London, Bill Fuller did.’ ”

“Fuller was a legend round Dublin and further afield,” Eamon Dunphy wrote in his 1987 biography, Unforgettable Fire: The Story Of U2. “He did business with a handshake, which made it difficult to sue him when later on he told you to, ‘Fuck off, boy, and don’t annoy me.’ ”

At one point, Fuller owned 23 ballrooms around the world including San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore West. He also promoted jazz concerts, including several by Billie Holiday, at New York’s Carnegie Hall; helped to break Patsy Cline on the East Coast; ran a booking agency for country heavyweights, such as Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Willie Nelson and Buck Owens; and was the only man well connected enough to get Irish showbands into Las Vegas.

You could also say that without Bill Fuller, Oasis might never have existed - because, among his ballrooms was the Astoria, on Plymouth Grove in Manchester, which is where Peggy Sweeney met another Irish immigrant called Thomas Gallagher. A quarter of a century later, on May 29,1989, Noel Gallagher retumed to the ballroom where his parents had first laid eyes on each other to celebrate his 21st birthday. [By this time, Fuller, who still owned the building, had changed The Astoria’s name to The Carousel and, more recently, to the International 2.] Noel Gallagher was there to see The Stone Rose who were supporting James at an Anti-Clause 28 Benefit gig, and was blown away. ‘The Stone Roses made me want to be in a band,” he says simply. For Liam Gallagher, who had been watching the Roses downstairs, seeing Ian Brown perform for the first time was almost a Damascene moment. “I just went, ‘Yeah!’ ” he says. “I thought, ‘it’s here, today, in my face. I can go with that.’ ”

Bill Fuller smiles when he hears about Oasis and his latest part in rock’n’roll history. “Oasis?” he asks. “Are they the boys who sound like The Beatles?”

A lunch date with Bill Fuller in his adopted hometown of Las Vegas has turned out to be the crock of gold at the end of the Camden Town rainbow. “Would you like a glass of champagne?” he asks, as he settles himself into a big booth in the Country Star bar and restaurant. “Go on, have one, it’s a Sunday.” A gospel group, in long white cassocks, are onstage, as if to emphasise his point. And, while they sang Oh Happy Day, Bill Fuller started telling me a small part of his life story.

He was born in County Kerry, shortly before the Irish Civil War broke out in December 1921. In 1950, Fuller went to the United States for the first time and returned to New York soon afterwards to open a ballroom called City Centre. On subsequent trips, he travelled around the rest of the country, exploring different cities and picking up the new records of the time. According to Fuller, some of these records played a major role in the rise of the Irish showband phenomenon.

By 1955, the Clipper Carlton had decked themselves out in shiny suits and were imitating everyone from Nat King Cole to Elvis Presley, with various comedy routines thrown in, and were packing out dance halls across Ireland. Soon dozens of other bands were following the Carlton’s style, but the most successful of all were The Royal Showband. When the Irish ballrooms closed down during Lent, showbands toured England and Bill Fuller was able to help them out by booking them into The Buffalo in Camden Town or his other ballrooms in Birmingham and Manchester.

By 1968, though, Bill Fuller’s attention was firmly focussed on one of his greatest dreams yet: building an Irish village in Galway Bay. While he was doing this, the American rock promoter Bill Graham flew to Ireland in a desperate attempt to obtain the lease on The Carousel Ballroom in San Francisco. It was easier than Graham had imagined. Fuller was waiting for him when he arrived at Shannon Airport at 8am, ordered a bottle of bourbon, shook hands on a deal, finished the remaining shots of liquor and then announced that he was going back to work on his building site. By 5pm, Graham was on a flight home, all set to turn The Carousel into the legendary rock venue, the Fillmore West.

Unfortunately, Bill Fuller’s own dream did not go as smoothly. “I always had a great relationship with people from the West, both in Connemara and Mayo,” he says. “But I had a lot of bad friends there in the Irish Government and they wouldn’t give me proper planning permission. I wanted to build an Irish Village - I had good ideas and I had contact with a lot of Irish-Americans, such as the Kennedys, and other men who had yachts down along the East Coast. Galway Bay was always a big thing with Americans and I bought that site because there was nine fathoms of water in the bay. It’s so deep you could bring the Queen Mary in there. Anyway, I was going to build a big pier out into the Atlantic and a boatel out on the rocks, but I couldn’t get planning permission. The people in Galway City got jealous, because I was an outsider and I was building this big thing outside the city. I built the whole lot in about 12 weeks, but they wouldn’t give me final planning permission to build the pier out into the sea. I was promised everything, but given nothing. Delay was bad for me because I was building another place in a different part of the world and I had to move on.”