[In 1963] the owner of the Academy Cinema said to Harold Pendleton, “I have to get you out, I’m afraid, because I need to convert this from being one cinema into being three screens on three floors, so I want the basement back.” We said, “But we wouldn’t know where to find anywhere else!” and he said, “I’ve got an estate agent who works for me - I’ll ask him to find you somewhere.”

We were on a year’s notice and after about nine months, the agent finally found us a place, which became the Wardour Street Marquee. It had a tiny frontage on the road, because it was Great Universal Stores’ West End clothing warehouse for all their shops around London, so it didn’t need frontage. No one had spotted it before, so we got in there and that was it.

We were involved with Giorgio Gomelsky - he was a partner of ours in running the Richmond Jazz & Blues festival - and he managed the Yardbirds, so we put them on the Friday nights, which became very big, of course. There was no other club in the West End really which would get the newly started up bands like the Yardbirds and the Stones. Jimi Hendrix had the record crowd for the Wardour Street Marquee - 1,300 people. That was the scene then.

One night I sat in with the Jeff Beck Group - Jeff, Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood and Mickey Waller. It was loud, but it was great fun. The great thing about that was we thought that if Rod Stewart could manage to sing on the mic over the noise the other musicians made, I could just borrow the mic and play the trombone into it. I could, but the only thing was, in those days the sound all came from the stage and there was a stack of Marshall amps for Jeff playing his solid 12-string, which is loud anyway, and I had to stand in front of that and play - you couldn’t hear yourself think! But it was excellent music and I really liked it.

I must say that in many ways, it was a very innocent scene. It’s become quite different now, altogether. It became big business and once big business gets into it, motivation changes somewhat - but you can’t blame people for wanting to make money out of what they do.

Did you visit the Marquee club after it moved to Wardour Street? Which bands did you see there? Share your memories here: