Culture: The night the Clash went to jail, and other tales
The new Academy is the best thing to happen to Glasgow's music scene for years. But can it ever match the seedy glory of the old Apollo? It will be a tall order, writes Tom Morton

Sunday March 23 2003, 12.00am, The Sunday Times

It’s the law, after all, health and safety. And these days rock’n’roll keeps to the letter of it.

The New Bedford cinema in the Gorbals, now the Carling Academy, was eyed for decades, along with the former Eglinton Toll Odeon just along the road, as a possible replacement for Glasgow’s late, lamented Apollo. With a capacity of 2,500, easily accessible and with free on-street parking, the Academy also has a touch of the raffish glitz you find in old cinemas. Round the corner is the Plaza ballroom, famed for thés dansants, infamous for an early packed New Order gig that scared the owners to distraction.

But it won’t be the Apollo. Who can forget it? What could ever replace it? Certainly not the various halls of the appalling SECC, a soulless aircraft hangar in a concrete desert where money starts changing hands as soon as you nose your peoplecarrier through the car park barriers.

I was at the first “rock” event in the main SECC hall: a dreary, doped-up and overcrowded UB40 gig in the hinterlands of the mid-1980s. I even flogged a spare ticket for double its value. But that was the only benefit I received from the first of many stultifying and emotionally dormant experiences at the SECC.

The Apollo, though. Misty-eyed rock fans of a certain age recall the monstrous edifice in Renfield Street with more than affection. If you go to the site now and gaze up at the enormous cinema complex that sits there — all plate glass, escalators and waste popcorn — just think: what sat there before was just about as big. Only it was a dirty grey colour and built in 1927.

It was originally Green’s Playhouse, a cinema and ballroom with other smaller attractions, the multiplex of its day. It had the infamous “golden divans”: double seats used for canoodling and more. The main auditorium held 4,500 people, making it the biggest cinema in Europe. Above that was a ballroom with a sprung floor, accessed by lift; it flourished briefly during the immediate post-punk era as a club called, aptly, Clouds, and then the Penthouse.

Elvis Costello played his first Scottish gig there. Radio producer Nick Lowe, then a manager and promoter, ran several concerts in the 1,000-capacity ballroom and remembers “this massive lift that took us down three floors during a Nick Hayward gig to the upper circle of the Apollo, where we could watch Kiss, who were playing there”.

My first experience of the Apollo came in 1973, when I was . . . well . . . I was young. The first event following what was then described as “major conversion work” and a change of name from Green’s to the Apollo, was a Rolling Stones concert, part of the infamous Goat’s Head Soup tour. It was also the first rock concert I had ever been to.

Lying to my granny, I had caught the earliest train from Troon to queue for tickets, and then the night came: dress circle front row, the smell of bad burgers and patchouli oil, an enormous, dark, open space, crudely painted, but with that infamously high stage and, if you weren’t stuck behind one of the gigantic pillars, great sightlines. A tiny set of drums, a few amplifiers. No announcement and a tiny figure in a T-shirt wandered out, sat down and flicked his snare drum. A few other motley figures sauntered on. There was the hum, thump and crackle of instruments being plugged into amplifiers and then . . .

And then, my life changed, solely due to the ensuing noise. Keith Richards, for it was he, hit the opening chords to Brown Sugar and a kind of paralysis beset me. This was what music was all about: brutal, physical, washes of sound, the snarl and whimper of Jagger, the screaming whine of Mick Taylor’s playing.

Nothing has ever lived up to that first experience of live rock music: the Rolling Stones at their peak, in the Apollo, me at the age of 17. It was transcendent.

Three years later I went back to the Apollo to see the Stones and this time found myself in the upper circle, teetering on its vertiginous slope. Never good with heights, I was unprepared for the effect of my fellow fans’ stamping in time with the music. The whole balcony began to bounce. You could see the rail at the front moving by at least a foot. It was terrifying.

Sprung to withstand just such pressures (though in 1927, surely nobody could have foreseen the thumping feet of Stones or, worse, Status Quo fans), there was, supposedly, no danger. Years later I stood below the upper circle as Wham! played to thousands of screaming teens and watched plaster fall from the ceiling. It felt scary, though, which just added to the venue’s appeal.

As a student, and later as a journalist specialising in long articles about heavy earth-moving equipment (some things never change), I frequented the Apollo as tastes and culture altered. Dare I admit being at Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans concert? Ten Years After? Gordon Giltrap? A half-empty (the Apollo was never half full) Cat Stevens gig or the time Ralph McTell, with barely 200 people shivering in front of the stage, showered insults at everyone and refused to play Streets of London? Er . . . no. But I’m happy to tell you about the Police, just before their first album came out, when they played every track on Outlandos D’Amour twice, and Miles Copeland, their manager, collected ticket money in cash. Before then, Dr Feelgood came and, watching Wilko Johnson’s pre-punk guitar slashing, I recovered some of the thrill of hearing those “Keef” chords back in 1973. And Costello’s This Year’s Model appearance was a revelation.

One of the most famous incidents in the Apollo’s history was the Clash gig, in July 1978, where war broke out between the audience and the bouncers. The band were unable to prevent the carnage, the place was trashed and Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon ended up in the cells. The place closed for renovation and there was very little live music in Glasgow for a year.

In 1984 I began working for the now-defunct rock weekly Melody Maker, and suddenly access to the Apollo, just as it began its inevitable slide towards closure the following year, was, with a little schmoozing, available for free. The first concert I reviewed for the paper was nearly the last, though. Iron Maiden’s management provided me with a VIP box, about 3ft from the main PA stack. Never have I been in such physical pain from music. Having stuffed my ears with tissue paper, I had to have it medically removed.

In the months that followed, a parade of the ephemeral (Wham! Paul Young, King, that desiccated, middle-aged guy who’s on MTV as a presenter, name of Paul) and even Frankie Goes To Hollywood passed on and off the Apollo’s towering stage. Mostly it was easy to get in, though I still remember the coke-crazed eyes of one of the Frankie promotional team and the sight of my photographer, John Logan, being thrown into the street. Did I intervene? What do you think?

Among the most precious of rock’n’roll creatures I encountered that year was Gary Numan’s dad. Numan was managed by his father, and both were suspicious of the music press. I hatched a plot with my opposite number at NME to obtain guest-list passes, the notion being that we would be each other’s plus one if the other succeeded. In turn, we spoke to the road manager: “Gary’s dad doesn’t like Melody Maker,” he said, scowling. And then: “Gary’s dad doesn’t like NME.” We ended up buying tickets. But that’s rock’n’roll. It’s just not rock’n’roll journalism.

Towards the end, the old hyperbarn was falling to bits, finally being declared unsafe and closed forever. The action shifted to Barrowland, which was smaller, had the atmosphere but was all standing, and eventually the SECC’s sterile factory ambience. King Tut’s offered a smaller club