Where were you managing to find those kind of records locally?
When I was playing in Deejays, Deejays was down a little alleyway opposite one of the old cinemas in Chelmsford, near Chelmsford bus station and there was a shop, a couple of shops either side of the old cinema, one of the shops was called Ecstasy Records run by a friend of mine called Martin Havelin. He originally had the shop in London Road in Chelmsford and then he moved it round to almost opposite Deejays, so I used to go in there on a Saturday morning and spend my ill-gotten gains from Friday night, and he had a massive Blue Note catalogue and Prestige catalogue in there in browsers. Maybe I was the only one buying them. I'd go in there and place my order and say “I need this Chick Corea album” and he went “Oh alright” and then he ordered it, and then in time being, because of my taste increased he would get these things in for me, you know what I mean? The rep would say, “Well look this is along those lines”, and he’d go “I've got this” and 9 times out of 10 I would buy it, so…that helped quite a bit. And then I started branching out later on and going to other places in Essex, like Record Man in Rayleigh. That was a big, big shop for me. Every Saturday with my daughter going down there to buy records and Colin Snow - God bless him – who owned it, because he had a love for Jazz didn't he, he loved…Bob Jones
City Rock Festival Chelmsford September 17th 1977
Bob ( and local record store owner Martin Havelin who sponsored the event ) were really screwed when their main drawcard , The Jam , pulled out of the show a week or so before the event . They were followed by Generation X . The replacement for the Jam were The Rods (better known as Eddie and the Hotrods ) who were a hard driving pub rock band , but not exactly a major name .....to have made this pay, we reckon they should have had the likes of the Clash , the Pistols and the Ramones on the bill. The bill was padded out with far too many second league bands to tempt the hard core punk festival goer- who could probably see most of them in a week by visiting a few London clubs anyway .
A week before the show , only 500 tickets had been sold, in retrospect this would have been the time to call off the whole thing, cutting the losses .But we imagine that the promoters were still hoping for a last moment surge in sales , so lemming like, they plunged headlong into the financial abyss ( and yes , anoraks, we know that Lemmings don't actually jump over cliffs, but it still sounds good ) .
So the scene was set for a good old traditional British Festival Fiasco , which was just about what happened ( although mercifully, it didn't rain )
