The Blackheath club was pretty successful. Their policy was to have the house band which was the Ian Bird Quintet or Sextet that played the first set and then they brought in a name jazz musician, like Tubby Hayes or Ronnie Scott, to play the second half and if they were amenable, the night would close with a jam session.

We opened a second club in Bromley and around ‘62/63, we were approached by Manfred Mann. Although he was really a jazz musician, he wanted to make a living, and he could see this new blues R’n’B surge coming along and decided that was what he was going to do. He’d already been playing with Mike Hugg - in the holiday camps of all places! - with a band called the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers, but at some point, he switched to Hammond organ and brought in the rest of the band.

He suggested that we opened a second, R’n’B night and they’d do every second Friday for a straight 50 per cent of the door take, no guarantee, so we couldn’t lose. He said, “Trust me, you’ll do well.”

We were a bit iffy about the idea, because we were modern jazz and in those days, modern jazz was a bit elitist, but we considered the financial aspect and when we looked around for bands that could play on the nights that Manny wasn’t performing, we realised that a lot of these bands like Graham Bond Organisation were jazz oriented anyway.

I’d been rolling up to the club on a Sunday about seven o’clock and I’d probably find ten or 15 people queuing up to get in. The first night we opened with Manfred, I turned up at seven o’clock and found that the queue had come down from the first floor, down the stairs, out the front door and round the block! I was gobsmacked! There were about 300 kids there and we were just blown away. It was a great evening; the kids were jumping up and down, and there was no trouble.

Did you see Manfred Mann perform in the Sixties? Share your memories here: