Toon tours

LUCKILY, The Fog On The Tyne doesn’t extend to Ray Laidlaw’s memory because the former Lindisfarne drummer has been recruited to guide double-deckers full of North-East culture fans around the region’s first heritage tour.

Laidlaw and former producer of Tyne Tees Television’s The Tube, Chris Phipps, have signed up to host ten Tyne Idols tours in total at the rate of two each Sunday from this weekend.

“When you get to my age,” says the 62-year-old Laidlaw, “and you can still remember things, people think ‘hang on, we can do something with this’. I was sitting around with Paul Irwin because he’d asked me to write something for the Whitley Bay Tourist Guide which he does each year and we just got cracking on.

“He used to be in a band as well and he mentioned he does tours – things like Newcastle in a Nutshell – and I said that ten years ago a friend of mine had been talking about doing a bus tour of musical, cultural and film locations. Suddenly a light seemed to go on above his head and after half-anhour we realised there was so much stuff,” adds the performer who now works in TV and creates music documentaries.

“With a bit more research you realise that it starts with the first Newcastle pop song, Blaydon Races, which contained commercials for things of the day like the bus service.

Then we drove around the town a few times, making notes as you go and soon realised you’re struggling to get it all in, in three hours. Everyone involved in tourism thought it was a good idea, so here we are,” laughs Laidlaw.

There are tours of Tyneside but nothing quite like a journey which offers an insight from Laidlaw who knows where Roxy Music’s Brian Ferry bought his records, Tom Pickard introduced performance poetry and Eric Burdon signed a manifesto to bring jazz to the masses.

The bus makes five stop off points which are likely to allow time for passengers to visit places like Newcastle’s Tyne Theatre, City Hall area and The Cluny, which is now home to the latest breed of Geordie musicians.

Gateshead’s magnificent The Sage and Baltic with a backdrop of The Tyne, Millennium and Swing bridges is an obvious location, but Laidlaw points out the river has an older story.

“The reason that Tyneside is a culturally rich place is that it is used to new ideas and that river was the gateway to the world. Our ethnic music is a combination of Scandinavian, Scottish and Irish. This area is the crossroads of the river and the North-South road. We’re all proud of people from the North-East who do well and you take someone like Brian Johnson (of AC/DC) who is 50 per cent Scottish, 50 per cent Italian but 100 per cent Geordie. It’s a classic case of that we adapt things and make them our own,” he adds.

Laidlaw feels that poetry remains one of Newcastle’s big claims to fame with the late US poet Allen Ginsberg arriving in the Sixties with two goals: to see the Cavern Club, famous for The Beatles, and Morden Tower, Newcastle, because that’s where Tom Pickard launched his poetry readings.

“Performance poetry has all come back now, so you’re talking about everyone from Dixon Scott, who opened the Tyneside Cinema, who was the uncle of Ridley and Tony Scott, to the High Level Bridge which has been used in God knows how many films including Get Carter,” says Laidlaw who recalls that Lindisfarne lead singer Alan Hull also used the location for his film, The Squire.

“There’s also the Bridge Hotel which was the location for the first Folk music revival in 1953. We can go and see a band with an accordion or a fiddle in it, but in the middle of the Sixties you wouldn’t have seen that.

The reason for the High Level ranters from the Bridge Hotel.”

Chris Phipps and Laidlaw have agreed to share the commentary because both are still working in the entertainment industry.

“Chris has a lot of knowledge but I have a few more anecdotes. When I first heard that the charge for the bus tour was £15 I thought ‘that’s a lot’ Now I’ve been out and done it I think it’s not bad at all. I think The Beatles tour is twenty-five quid,” says Laidlaw about the bus, which should hold as many as 60 passengers… “although they’ll be no smoking on the top deck these days.”

Advance bookings are giving every indication that Tyne Idols will become a regular part of North-East life, especially as the latest addition to the tourist trail allows question and answer sessions with people like Laidlaw and a chance to grab a pint.

“Did you realise that on July 2 that it was the 40th anniversary of when Lindisfarne did its first ever City Hall show?” he says. “So there’s been a lot of water under the bridge. I don’t live in the past, you have to move with the times. I wrote the basic script for the tour and Chris added more. For the first road test we invited a lot of mates and we got a lot of feedback including forgotten information that people like Terry Ellis, the co-founder of Chrysalis Music in 1969, was a band manager in Newcastle and a social secretary at the University of Newcastle.”

The only editing of the script so far involves the sad plight of Tyne Tees TV’s original output of programmes from City Road.

“We don’t like Chris to go on to much about standing outside the most expensive pile of rubble in the world.

When you think of the talent that place had and now it’s a team of 25 doing the news and putting the adverts on. It’s sad. Perhaps the answer is for each city to have its own TV station,” Laidlaw adds.

The idea of using the double-decker came from Paul Irwin.

“Actually it’s symbolic. Everybody associates Routemaster buses with Cliff Richard and the film Summer Holiday, but the first two people in the North-East of England to seek their fortune in the music industry were Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch from The Shadows. So there’s a strong link to the Routemaster up here,” he explains..

■ Tyne Idols, Sunday at 10.30am and 2.30pm and then July 25, August 1, August 8 and 15. Tickets: Adults £15, Children (14 and under) and concessions £12. Bookings: 0191-290- 4539 or tyneidols.com