Heading home from a band rehearsal a couple of days ago, I crossed paths with Jools Holland at the M4 Membury Services filling station. I last saw him in the flesh also getting out of a car, on that occasion a Rolls Royce, to go into the legendary Tunnel Club. The Tunnel Club was a comedy and music venue hosted by a lunatic called Malcolm Hardee, one of whose party tricks was sticking a firework up his bum and lighting it. The acts in Malcolm’s revue, if you can call it that, had to endure heckling at a medieval level, including having objects hurled at them, although Jerry Sadowicz protected himself by pre-emptively deploying bristling verbal violence directed at the entire audience. No one threw eggs at Jerry. The Tunnel Club was, briefly, THE place to go, and many of the stand ups and bands who braved the abuse and underwater toilets deserved all the exposure they got from performing there. Like Malcolm’s anal fireworks, (and Malcolm himself, sadly) the Tunnel Club burned brightly, then fizzled out. Whereas Jools, who I first saw with Squeeze supporting the Tubes in about 1979, is still going strong, I’m glad to say.
Malcolm Hardee MC-ing at the Tunnel Club