From Stardom To Nostalgia — The Last Stand Of The British Cabaret Scene
The levelling of the site of one of the north of England’s very last cabaret clubs draws a line under a long-lost world of glitz and glamour that brought the magic of Las Vegas to the working-class streets of the UK.
Chesterfield — a town hardly renowned for its place in British entertainment history — was one of the scene’s last stands.
While giants of the cabaret movement like Sheffield’s Fiesta and Batley Variety Club had disappeared by the end of the 1970s, the town’s Aquarius continued until the early 1990s.
It’s hard to imagine — decades on — how big the cabaret movement was in the UK. It had a stranglehold on the UK entertainment history underpinned by hundreds of Working Men’s Clubs, generally concentrated in Northern England around hubs of heavy industry.
The Fiesta cabaret club, a purpose-built venue that opened in the center of Sheffield in the summer of 1970, was the biggest nightclub in Europe and was so confident of its pulling power that it even held a date over for Elvis.
The international stars that got up close and personal with South Yorkshire audiences read like a who’s who of global entertainment: Stevie Wonder, the Beach Boys, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, the Four Tops, the Jackson 5, and hundreds more. It boasted an in-house orchestra, hundreds of staff, and seating for 1,300 in its main auditorium. It was a blueprint for many others dotted around northern England, with Batley Variety Club being a key rival.
Another unlikely Northern town — Rotherham — has its own special place in the story. It was, in many respects, a precursor to everything.
Its Greasbrough Social Club made the national news in the early 1960s for its audacious attempts to persuade Sammy Davis Junior to ditch Las Vegas and London and perform in South Yorkshire instead.
They set the bar high and inspired the massive redevelopment of Working Men’s Clubs by installing sprawling concert rooms that could accommodate big-name stars.
Marti Caine, Little & Large, Cannon & Ball — so much of the hit light entertainment from the 1970s and 1980s had the cabaret scene to thank for its success.
It was underpinned by TV talent contests like Opportunity Knocks and New Faces, and Wheeltappers & Shunters — a series set in a fictional Working Men’s Club — was prime-time viewing.
Chesterfield’s Aquarius outlasted most of its peers, but all that now remains are memories as the bulldozers moved in to clear all that remained of the building recently.
However, the legacy of the cabaret club — unlike that of many of its peers — is being preserved thanks to a £70,000 National Lottery Heritage Fund project.
Sheffield’s Dirty Stop Outs have been busy over the past few months recording the memories of everyone from the stars who performed to people who worked there or enjoyed nights at the once-revered Sheffield Road venue.
Robin Colvill of the hit troupe, the Grumbleweeds — a comedy act that actually started as a music group playing alongside the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the early 1960s — says the venue played a key role in their success: “We used to do a lot of gigs at the Aquarius — we’d perform three to four weeks every year. We were very popular — it was always heaving. Because of the Aquarius, we did a BBC Radio show, and that led to a TV show.”
Central to the Aquarius project has been the restoration and digitization of hundreds of photos from the 1970s and 1980s that were taken by the club’s in-house photographer, David Miller.
The Aquarius, which first opened in 1972, attracted some of the biggest stars in light entertainment in a career that lasted nearly a quarter of a century.
The project was originally inspired by the ‘Dirty Stop Out’s Guide to 1980s Chesterfield — Aquarius Edition’ — a book that gave an early snapshot of the photgraphic archive of David Miller.
