Music Places

Growing up, I remember some of the local pubs used to have music. The best known was the White Hart, which had music in the back bar most weeks. It was a main venue during the trad jazz and skiffle booms. Chris Barber's band was a regular and other well known jazz bands, such as Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball, played there, as well as Lonny Donegan. Later it hosted alternative rock and folk and the Freeman Syndicate ran a weekly club there. The Red Lion once had dance music in its back bar, almost a ballroom, which I remember from when I was very young. There was a beer garden outside. The Northcote Arms, which was surrounded by houses and off the main road, had rock music on a regular basis for a while. You went in along the side. They used to have a big dog which lived upstairs and would come out onto the flat roof and bark. I was in school with the son of the pub and going upstairs to the living quarters was a slightly exotic experience. From time to time there was trouble there, with 'visiting' teenagers. Other pubs had the occasional gig.
What there wasn't was a regular club with live music, even in a rented hall. There was one even in the depths of Belfont in Hayes, which had quite well known groups like the Steam Packet (Rod Stewart among others) in the early 1960s, but never in Southall, which certainly had enough people to go to gigs. So we used to travel: to the Ealing Club (Mann Hugg Blues Brothers, later Manfred Mann), Goldhawk Road (the Who), the Crawdaddy in Richmond (Rolling Stones I think) and Eel Pie Island (too many to mention).
Southall never produced any real bands in this period (it did produce Jim Marshall, who made the amps all the bands used) and maybe the lack of a regular venue contributed to that. Earlier, Cleo Lane, the jazz singer, had the benefit of the White Hart as a starter.
Later, of course, the Hamborough Tavern became notorious for music of an altogether different kind, but in the late 50s and 60s I don't remember music there.