The Gravel Camp

A recollection by Garry Cosgrove

In 1963, The Beatles took Britain by storm with their own compositions and changed the face of music forever. The Rolling Stones had their breakthrough the following year, with a distinctive and exciting brand of British rhythm and blues, based heavily on American blues music…

As a 13-year-old teenager, I was hooked on this new music and, like millions of other kids then, I wanted to be a Beatle or a Stone. On top of that, two of my friends at school, David O’Donnell and Steve May, actually played guitar in a group!

In March of 1963 my family had moved from a cosy terraced house in Ashington in Northumberland all the way to a much bigger terraced house in Whitley Bay on the North East coast. The new house was so large that we didn't have enough furniture to fill it, so when my new friends came to visit they spotted the big empty front room and asked if their group could use it as a rehearsal space for a few weeks. My Mam and Dad, being the lovely people they were, said yes, of course. I used to watch the group play when they came to the house to rehearse their numbers. The drummer, Roy Moran, spotted my interest in his drum kit and showed me a couple of drum rolls. Because the drums were difficult to carry around, Roy would leave them at our house each week, so I could practice whenever I wanted to. When Roy came the following week, I sheepishly got behind the kit and tried to play. Unfortunately, it didn’t sound good at all! Roy then asked me if I was right-handed. “OK, I see the problem,” he said. “I’m left-handed!” He then rearranged his kit and told me to try again. It was amazing! Suddenly I could play the drums! That was it for me. From that day on, I wanted to be a drummer.

On the 5th of November 1963, Dave, Steve and I were hanging around in the schoolyard and they said that the group they were in had broken up and suggested we could form a group. Dave and Steve already knew a kid who fancied playing bass, called George Fairbairn, so I was asked to play the drums. But there was a problem: I didn’t have any! For a then 14-year-old schoolboy, whose only income was from his paper round, buying a drum kit was out of the question. However, my parents came up with another great idea: why not trade the long-forgotten clarinet from school orchestra’ days for a drum kit? They ordered a brand new set of drums called President from Bell’s Music, in some exotic location called Surbiton, Surrey. They came in green sparkle and were my first ever kit. I loved them! We came up with the name The Vulcans and started to rehearse mostly in Steve’s garage (yes, I was in a garage band!). None of us felt confident enough to sing, so we just played instrumentals – mainly Shadows covers. During the few months we were together, we only played in front of an audience once: five tunes at a variety night at a church hall opposite my house. So much for the big time! Stand by for musical connections: Eric Clapton bought his first ever electric guitar from Bell’s Music in Surbiton. I hear he did quite well!

Later that year Steve started playing with a couple of other guys and even made a record! Dave and I just kicked about for a while but didn't do much musically until later in 1964. By then Dave and Steve were playing with a local lad called Michael "Robbie" Robinson who played bass, and a drummer/vocalist called Johnny Claydon. Now they were playing that fearful Rhythm and Blues music! I would go along to their rehearsals at a local church hall and occasionally sit in on the drums. Playing R&B songs by Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed, Bo Diddley and, of course, The Rolling Stones was exhilarating. Gradually I spent more time on the drums, because Johnny really enjoyed being the upfront vocalist. You could say I worked my way slowly into the group, which was now being called “a band”. And of course, being a five piece with a front man, just like the Stones, wasn’t such a bad move either. Now all we needed was a befitting, blues-inspired name! 

Back in those days, there was a shop in Whitley Bay called the Record and Music Centre, where you could pay them two shillings and sixpence a week and order records once you had enough money. One day I bought an LP called Blues Fell This Morning, which was a compilation of American blues music recorded in the 1920s and 30s. One of the tracks was Gravel Camp Blues by a blues artist called Lewis Black. It was a song about a black worker in the south of the USA who was planning to move north to find work. He says that, when he does find work he will come back for his woman and take her to this new, more prosperous life. However he also says that, if he doesn't make it big she will probably find him in a Gravel Camp show which was a place where very poor folks worked digging gravel for America's growing road system. For a bunch of spotty schoolboys in early 60's Britain this was exotic stuff and so our band became The Gravel Camp.

After that, the next move was to play some gigs! First, we had some cards printed. I went around Whitley Bay sticking them behind the plastic covers for adverts in the old-fashioned red phone boxes. The cards read: “RHYTHM AND BLUES THE GRAVEL CAMP WHITLEY BAY 28075”. We only ever got one inquiry and that was from the company that placed the ads in the phone boxes, who asked us where our holiday camp was located. 

In those days, my grandfather was the steward of the Central Social Club in a seaside town called Newbiggin. He booked us for our first ever paid gig in front of a real audience! The concert hall was full on that Friday night and the audience was made up of miners and fishermen and their wives, who tolerated what we played, but complained that we were much too loud! Jimmy Reed in Newbiggin? At the end of the day, we were all very happy to have played our first ever live gig and we got paid 5 pounds between us. And we wanted more! We used to rehearse in St. Mary’s Church Hall in Whitley Bay, so we asked the vicar if we could run our own gigs. For one-shilling entrance and all the orange squash you could drink, you could see The Gravel Camp in action. We did this a couple of times and we did actually fill the hall.

The best month in the life of The Gravel Camp was May 1965. We played three special gigs and... we made a record! That year Whitley Bay Football Club won the Northern League and they celebrated their achievement with a dinner dance at the Rex Hotel in Whitley Bay. They booked a local dance band for the entertainment and, for the youngsters, they booked The Gravel Camp to play in the interval. We didn’t go on until midnight and we were due to play for 30 minutes. The organisers gave us free drinks, so by the time we had to play, we were a little drunk. Actually, Dave was very drunk! But we went ahead and played so well that we ended up playing for an hour, which increased our wages from two pounds ten shillings to five pounds! They let us leave our gear at the hotel until the next morning and our dads went along in their cars to pick it up. When I got the drums home, the accessories case was full of empty bottles! In those days, if you returned bottles to a bar, you were given money. It turned out that Johnny had decided to boost our gig money by taking lots of empty bottles and then returning them the next day for money.

On May 14th, we were engaged to play at a dance in a Northumberland village called Whitfield. Steve’s dad and our friend John Deans were the roadies and we set off nice and early to get set up. There was talk that the local band Rue and the Rockets weren’t best pleased that we had got this gig instead of them, so we decided to go “tooled up”. When Steve’s dad – who was a big guy – saw me brandishing a sickle, he took it from me and then disarmed the other guys in our band saying that, if there was trouble, he would sort it out. And he showed us a cosh in his pocket! The hall was packed. We were booked to play for four hours between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. By then we had a set list approaching 100 songs. We used to start with Bo Diddley’s You can’t judge a book by looking at the cover and Steve would start by playing the rhythm, then Dave would join in followed by Robbie on bass, then me on drums. Then Johnny would start to sing! Very impressive – at least, we thought so. We put on a very good show. On the way back home, dawn was beginning to break. Johnny was staring out of the window at the clouds floating by and he said, “they look like floating islands”. We were all still full of adrenaline and no one was thinking of sleep. In Newcastle in those days there was an all-night cafe called Bowers. We asked our dads to drop us off there so we could have a coffee and talk the gig through. After chatting for a few hours, we got a train to the coast and we all got off at Tynemouth. Then we walked back home to Whitley Bay along the beach, finally getting home around 9 a.m. In my opinion, that was our best band experience!  

A week or so later, we went to a local recording studio in Newcastle called Mortonsound, to record a blues song that Johnny had written called Tell Me. Mortonsound was run by a gentleman called Roy Hartnell who got us to set up our gear around one very good mic which hung from the ceiling. We could only do one take, as overdubs were not possible, so off we went and we nailed Tell Me first time. For the B-side, we had decided to cover Hoochie Coochie Man. When we played it, Roy said it was too loud, “Could you either be quieter or do something else?”. We somehow decided to record the Pretty Things’ new single Rosalyn, even though we had only just started to learn it. We tried it and, while it started strongly, it fell apart by the end. That same day, our friends and great band supporters, Mick and Brian Wickham, threw a party at the Grand Hotel in Tynemouth, because their parents had decided to emigrate to Canada. Mick and Brian were twins and they were both keen photographers. Actually, the photos of our rehearsals were taken by Mick.

When we arrived at the party, Steve stepped up to the mic and said, “We are The Gravel Camp and we will start with our latest record!”. We felt like real pop stars now! The show was great! Everybody danced like crazy. We played far too loud and some of the residents of the hotel complained to the management. Mick and Brian had laid on beer, so we were all a bit drunk... again! Eventually the party broke up and we started taking our gear away. I decided it was a good idea to set up my drums in the lift and spent some time going up and down, from floor to floor, treating the residents to my drumming skills! The management asked us to leave right away. We walked along the beach back home and talked through the gig. Again, another great experience for us all.

In early June 1965, it was all over. We all left school, Dave, Robbie and Johnny got jobs, Steve and I went to college and The Gravel Camp was no more. Fast forward to 2000. Steve was then living in Canada, Dave had moved back up north after a few years down south, but we had lost track of Robbie and sadly Johnny had died very young in 1989. Dave, Steve and I decided to get together and catch up on old times. We decided to record a new version of Tell Me. In those days I was running my own video editing business called imagine in Newcastle and we spent a very happy time at my facility making this new recording. While Steve was in the UK, we also managed to locate Robbie, who was still living in Whitley Bay and hadn’t played bass for many years, so we got together for a drink and a chat. 

Since those days, I have lived in different places and changed jobs a few times, but I have continued to play music. In 2015, I wrote and recorded a song called Isn’t it a shame, which I decided to do as The Gravel Camp and keep the name as tribute to the original members. Between 2015 and now, I have written three more songs and recorded a couple of covers. After 55 years, The Gravel Camp can release their first ever album… finally!

The Making of Tell Me

In the early 60's there was very little opportunity for budding pop stars to make a record in the Newcastle area. There was only one place where recordings could be made and that was Mortonsound which were then based at 12, Oxford Street, Newcastle upon Tyne. It had been established in the 1960's by a gentleman called G. L. Morton who made one off recordings, cut acetate's and installed sound equipment. This is what the Ready Steady Gone website says about Mortonsound;

“In the mid sixties Mortonsound in Newcastle was the place that most north east bands went to make a record. There was no fancy multitracking and normally the recording would be done in one take. You were at the mercy of the sound engineer – a guy in a white laboratory coat who, at the time, seemed at least a generation older than the band.”    

Our vocalist, Johnny Claydon wrote the song Tell Me in the spring of 1965 and we worked on it in rehearsals until we were happy with the arrangement. Then we all set about saving enough money to go to Mortonsound to record it in May 1965. It cost 5 Pounds which was quite a lot back then, but we eventually got the money together and made the booking. On the same day as we made the record, our good friends Brian and Michael Whickham were having a party at the Grand Hotel in Tynemouth and we were booked as the band. The Whickham family were about to emigrate to Canada and this was their farewell party. So you can imagine how excited we were! First we were going to make our first record and then we were going to play a special gig for our pals! Both Brian and Michael were huge supporters of the band and it was Brian who took the photos that are used as the header pictures on the website.

We headed up to Mortonsound on a late Friday afternoon after school and set up our gear in the sound room. There was one microphone hanging from the ceiling and we were gathered around it because the recording was going to be a one take effort! Good job we had rehearsed the song! The sound engineer was a gentleman called Roy Hartnell who recorded many local groups and singers back then. Many years later I worked with his son Keith and when we were all having dinner one day the subject of music and bands came up and Roy revealed that it was he who recorded us! Thanks to our rehearsing we laid Tell Me down in one take and we got ready for the B-side. We had decided to do the old Muddy Waters song Hoochie Coochie Man which always went down well at gigs so off we went! Roy came into the sound room and asked us to stop as we were so loud all his needles were going crazy! He asked if we had a different song we could do. At that time we had more than 50 songs in our repertoire so we started discussing what to do instead but none of us could agree on a song! We were currently working on learning the Pretty Things song Rosalyn so Johnny said let's do that one! Sadly, you can hear how under rehearsed that song was! It started brightly but quickly fell apart. Then of course our hour was up and we had to pack our stuff away and head for the gig.

We were all set up and ready to play at the party and Steve stepped up to the mic and said those magical words. "Hello everyone. We would like to start the evening by playing our latest record, Tell Me. We were Pop Stars!!

We had six records pressed. Each member of the band bought one but I bought two. At that time I had an American pen pal called Claudia, who lived in Chicago. She promised to get the record played on local Chicago radio, if I sent her a copy. I did send her one but whether she got it played or not, I never found out. As far as I am aware each of The Gravel Camp members or their families still have a copy of our original record. I play mine occasionally and it always makes me smile!