Free Trade Hall | easy on the eye books

Well yes I was… quite a lot during my college days in the mid-1970s!

Were You There – Popular Music at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall 1951 – 1996 (to give this book it’s full title) sets out to document all the pop and rock concerts at this famous venue in detail. I missed the book at the time but author Richard Lyons, who has been helping us with publicising Brian Smith’s new book (Boom Boom Boom Boom, The Blues Photographs of Brian Smith), kindly sent us a review copy. The publishers have made good use of one of Brian’s sixties photographs of T-Bone Walker to make the wrap-round dust jacket (and there are a few more of Brian’s images inside). This is primarily a text book though and logs the concerts across the years from 1951 by date, set out in database form then followed by interesting commentary from Richard and others. Naturally for those who did attend the venue it is the gig dates you check out first (happily I kept most of my tickets too) but it’s not long before you find yourself drawn into the mass of detail, even for artists you wouldn’t normally be too concerned about. Richard also adds further context by listing some bands at other venues in the city the same year and an appendix of the bigger concert halls at the end too. There are plenty of indexes to find pretty much anything you want with ease. It all comes to an ignominious end in 1996 with the venue flogged off to be gutted and turned into a hotel. Clowns.

Pub by Empire. 2020. ISBN 9781909360815

Happy to say the job of scanning Brian Smith’s negatives for the Boom Boom Blues photo book is at last complete. Brian has had most of his images scanned in the past but generally by high-street operators who didn’t really appreciate what they were doing. During work on the book, Brian collected together ALL his surviving negatives. We decided rather than just scan those earmarked for the book, we would do the LOT, and then they would be saved for posterity. The job was done in-house using a high-end Nikon negative scanner. Amazingly Nikon stopped making this expensive bit of kit a few years ago (apparently all the professionals who needed one had bought it, and sales stalled after that. We were lucky to get ours off a studio who had finished doing their own archives), and had stopped supporting the software for it even before that. For this reason the machine has to be hooked up to a vintage Macintosh which can still run this old software and is now being kept largely just for this task. Normally you pop in a strip of negatives, and leave it to work away. But Brian’s negatives were all done individually because of the poor light levels he had to work with back in the early Sixties which left some real underexposure problems on some. In a couple of cases really difficult negatives have been scanned twice at differing settings so we can combine elements. All this has taken a lot longer than anticipated and delayed the launch, but we can now crack on and finish the layout. And return the precious originals to Brian of course!

You can read more about the book, and sign up for newsletters, on the site. The really atmospheric photo above was taken by Brian of Willie Dixon during a show at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. The bit of kit on the left is the hulking great ABC TV camera. Copyright Brian Smith / Easy On The Eye Books