The Crawdaddy Club was founded in early 1963 in the back room of the Station Hotel in Richmond, Surrey (a suburb of London). The owner was Giorgio Gomelsky, who had previously owned the Piccadilly Club in central London. The house band in the beginning was the Dave Hunt Rhythm & Blues Band, whom Gomelsky had known from the earlier club. Charlie Watts had sometimes played drums for this band, and one of their guitarists was Ray Davies, later the founder and bandleader of the Kinks.
The Rolling Stones first performed at the Crawdaddy Club in February 1963 as a replacement for the Dave Hunt Rhythm & Blues Band when they were snowed in and could not reach the club; this was the first time that the Stones had performed publicly with Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts. By April 1963, the Rolling Stones had taken over as the house band, with two gigs a week at the Crawdaddy Club plus a weekly date at another legendary music space in the Eel Pie Island Hotel in nearby Twickenham. (For years I thought that “eel pie” was some sort of slang for “ell-pee”, or LP).
(January 2015/2)
