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London's suburbs were brimful of Beat bands, according to Bob Stanley...

London is rarely thought of as having a beat scene like Liverpool, Birmingham or Newcastle, as there were so many groups and so many smaller scenes within the capital. The suburbs of West London saw Alexis Korner's Ealing Jazz Club (London's first R&B club) become a magnet for groups like Muswell Hill's , who travelled across town to mill about in the audience with other young hopefuls like the and the . Both of these two made their name at Giorgio Gomelsky's Crawdaddy Club, based at the Station Hotel in Richmond - as much Surrey as London. Gomelsky, who had previously run the Piccadilly Club, was forced to move the club to Richmond Athletics ground in 1963 due to its huge popularity, at which point point the Yardbirds - with star guitarist Eric Clapton - became the resident R&B act. The fame of the Crawdaddy tends to overshadow the wealth of West London venues like the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford, the White Hart Hotel in Acton, and the Goldhawk Social Club in Shepherd's Bush, all of which were semi-regular haunts for the Detours, on their way to becoming the Who.

Heading east of Piccadilly Circus, venues included the Mildmay Tavern on Balls Pond Road in Islington, where the house beat group were , with Honey Lantree on drums, who were made famous by their hit, 'Have I The Right'. The Milmay Tavern is still standing in the nineties, but the pub is now a supermarket. In 1966, East London's Hackney Gazette ran a weekly top ten chart of local groups which included the likes of the pre-hit Equals and the Riot Squad, as well as a host of largely forgotten names like the Unsuited Medium. Maybe the most unlikely group to have emerged from the hard (at least, back in the mid sixties) streets of Hackney were the decidedly soft-centred Honeybus. Their singer and guitarist was Pete Dello, who had been in Grant Tracy & the Sunsets with Hackney Wick-born bassist Ray Cane (originally with the Outlaws). After turning down an approach from Cliff Bennett & the Rebel Rousers, Dello and Cane decided to stop playing live and concentrate on writing, arranging and producing.

And so it was that during the beat boom Dello and Cane wrote a bunch of b-sides for The Applejacks, arranged material for Lionel Bart, and played on sessions for The Roulettes and Unit 4+2. By 1965 they were with blue-eyed soul singer Steve Darbishire, in his Yum Yum Band. On the eve of a 1967 tour, Pete Dello suffered from a collapsed lung, decided to quit the band, and put together a new project to focus on his and Cane's songwriting. The result was the wonderful baroque pop of the Honeybus, who sadly splintered as soon as they had any real success, Dello quitting after I Can't Let Maggie Go was a Top 10 hit in 1968.