History of the R&B club

In the early sixties I was always a great pop music enthusiast and had already built up a large collection of 45s, my taste being almost exclusively American. My favourites included Jan & Dean, The Beach Boys, Jackie de Shannon, The Lovin' Spoonful' and then R&B  singers like Gene McDaniels and Maxine Brown. This last style became known as Soul Music.

Maxine Brown's big record was Oh No Not My Baby, covered in the UK by Manfred Mann

On starting at Aberdeen University in autumn 1964 it seemed to me that I was going to have a hard time keeping up with Soul and R&B music, so I came up with the idea of the R&B Club. One day I stood in the basement passage leading to the Dungeon coffee bar and stopped people to ask them if the idea appealed to them. The aim was to get one hundred signatures on a petition, then I could get permission to go ahead from the SU and possibly be awarded a grant.

The grant came through after a few weeks and we started building what in the years to follow would be regarded as a basic set up for a mobile disco - except in those days such a thing hadn't been invented! The loudspeakers were built by Kevin Henderson of The Lemon Soul, who later asked me if the R&B Club would be interested in joining them at their gigs and filling in with records for half an hour while the band took a break. The answer was yes!

One week the band played in the Dive at the R&B Club meeting.....

Looking back it's a bit embarrassing to see I pinned such a home-made poster on the notice board outside the Dungeon.

It must have been cramped that night with Lemon Soul playing in the Dive plus a good turn out of club members plus of course the bar run by Sandy. Do you remember Sandy? He normally worked on the ground floor in the Beer Bar.

Sadly the band's lead singer Gordon Lemon passed away. He had been living in Glasgow I believe.

First Anniversary celebrations at the MARCLIFFE HOTEL and this advert came from Gaudie. I like the way it's called the "R&B Club's Super Sound System" as by today's standards it wasn't very super at all.

To celebrate the first anniversary of the R&B Club we held a party at the Marcliffe Hotel

and on the night the hotel manager seemed impressed with the disco and asked us if we would be interested in a regular weekly residency on Sunday evenings. 

The Sunday night sessions were a very big success with queues of young people outside the hotel and many having to be turned away. Sadly we were "the victims of our own success" to coin a phrase as the manager objected to the way the dancefloor was full of dancers all night. It turned out people were dancing but he wanted them up at the bar buying drinks!

Eventually I received a letter at the end of term saying that we wouldn't be needed next term because they were redecorating the hotel but he would let us know when we could resume. Somehow I knew we wouldn't hear anymore and that turned out to be the case. I was trying to remember the fee for Sunday nights, it may have been five pounds, I wonder if I still have the accounts books.

From very early on in its lifetime the R&B Club got asked to provide the music at outside functions, the most usual being 21st birthdays and of course most students at the University turned 21 at some stage so we had many bookings in the mid sixties. The first ever booking was for a character called "Dutch" who worked at Aberdeen Photographic in Marischal Street. Although he was not a student (in fact he had a reputation of hating students) he approached me and asked for a quote as to our fee. 

At the time, in first year I had a girlfriend called Pat Steele and her best friend was a Cher lookalike (can't remember her name) who was going out with Dutch. Not having undertaken a private booking before I didn't know how much to charge but decided on 21/- as I thought a guinea sound posh and professional. The party was held upstairs in the Blue Lamp round the corner from the Students Union. It was a great success and was a source of several more enquiries, so for the second booking I charged 25 shillings and for the third, thirty shillings. After a while the disco settled down with a standard fee of two guineas for private bookings and made me a little extra pocket money. Mind you I spent most of it on records, mainly at Bruce Millers in George Street.

Graduation Day July 1968

Leaving university in summer 1968 was a sad time for me saying goodbye to the R&B Club but one of the helpers who had helped run the club, said he would carry it on. 

Moving back home to Surrey it was soon all in the past and I never really heard too much about what happened to the club although I believe that 1968 - 69 was its final year.

Having got the DJ buzz it wasn't long before I started a new mobile disco back home in Surrey - see "after university" page.

Page updated 06/08/2023