Free Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London by Suggs Page B

Dury and the Blockheads, the B52s and many, many more. If a venue makes the crowd feel good, as the Electric does, inevitably the band will too. Rough and ready certainly, but perfect for its function, the Electric is a temple for the working man and woman to let off a bit of steam jumping up and down to whoever happens to be the current obsession.
    Before its reinvention as a rock venue in 1978, the Electric was a rather more sedate rendezvous for residents new to the area and looking for lurve. And as such it’s an important staging post in the career of a local entrepreneur called Bill Fuller, who set the Electric’s glitter ball spinning back in the 1930s during a long and illustrious career in music venues.
    Fuller was an Irish immigrant who arrived in London as a teenager and worked on building sites, like most others, before starting his own construction business. In 1938, aged just 20, he branched out into entertainment, buying a rough Irish dance hall on Camden High Street called the Buffalo Club, which had recently been closed by the police. This was the place which was later to reinvent itself as the Electric Ballroom. Bill Fuller must have kissed the old Blarney Stone because he managed to convince the authorities to let him reopen the joint, promising there’d be no more trouble while he was at the helm. He was quite handy as a boxer, which might have swayed the judge to declare in his favour when it came to who was sorting out the door.
    Fuller transformed the Buffalo’s fortunes by turning it into a venue where Irish couples could meet and hopefully waltz their way to romance. Such was the success of the Buffalo that he opened a string of ballrooms across London and the UK before branching out to the United States. Fuller became a figure of legendary status in Camden before moving to the States in the 1950s where he diversified his business empire with interests in gold mining, management and promotions, and property. He bought two of the most iconic venues in rock-music history: the Fillmore East in New York and the Fillmore West in San Francisco. However, in spite of his worldly wealth, he never fell out of love with the Camden club that helped propel him to those riches.
    Even when he began selling off his ballrooms in the 1970s, when he was in his 60s, by which time the road to romance no longer led to the local dance hall, he couldn’t bear to part with the Buffalo. So in 1978 he renovated the club and renamed it the Electric Ballroom. He vowed to keep the place until the day he died and would travel from the States to watch his favourite bands, including U2 and the Pogues, performing at his beloved venue. Bill remained true to his word and still held the keys to the place when he died in 2008, aged 91.
    His family have vowed to keep the old traditions going, although they face a tough task to avoid a ballroom blitz, as London Underground have proposed a redevelopment scheme on the site - a new tube station and a shopping complex - which will probably pull the plug on the Electric after all these years. The future of this major player in the community’s social history hangs very much in the balance and Fuller’s family will have to punch well above their weight to see off such a heavyweight opponent.
    Twenty-five years on from making our mark on the wonderful world of popular music (and I’m not talking about our appearance on Cheggers Plays Pop ), Madness once again played Camden in a project we’d cryptically named ‘The Dangermen’. The plan was to go back to our musical roots and play ska and reggae covers in the venues where we made our name all those years ago. It was an undercover operation, hence the title of the project, which heralded from the 1960s spy series.
    We played four consecutive nights at the Dublin but our career as musical secret agents didn’t last very long. A fair-sized crowd of curious punters had already gathered in the back room by the time we took to the stage that