**Four Aces, Phebes and London`s Forgotten Reggae Venues
Tim Burrows, July 8th , 2009**
An excerpt of *`From CBGB To The Roundhouse Music Venues Through The Years`*
By Tim Burrows
The Four Aces in Hackney opened in 1966 on the site of an old Victorian theatre built to house Robert Fossett’s Circus in 1886 on Dalston Lane. By the 1970s the club had become a centre for West Indians in cultural exile, attracting people from around the UK. In manager Newton Dunbar’s view it was successful because it offered a ‘ready-made opiate to alleviate the stresses of what was happening in the world.’
Black youths all over London began to learn about the Four Aces, including south Londoner Dennis Bovell, bass player in London-based reggae band Matumbi. Bovell has since produced such artists as The Slits, Bananarama, Fela Kuti and Linton Kwesi Johnson, but in the early 1970s he was just starting out. "Three or four of us went there in about ’71 or ’72 with our soundsystem, Sufferers Hi Fi,’ he recalls. ‘A friend had just passed his driving test and acquired his first car, so it was quite easy to get there from Wandsworth."
Sufferers were booked to play against Count Shelley, the undoubted king of sound-systems around Hackney and Stoke Newington at the time. Bovell’s young upstarts from south of the river must have been thought of as lowly challengers in comparison, so to ensure they put up a good fight, they brought with them some heavy duty equipment. "We had this column of speakers so huge that they didn’t fit through the front door," says Bovell. "My mate Errol, who was also an electrician, went out to his van and got this huge industrial screwdriver and in no time at all had the doors to the club off. It was as though we were installing a wardrobe. Newton was standing there saying, 'You better put that thing back on.' It meant of course that the door had to come off again afterwards to get the thing out of there."
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http://www.thequietus.com/articles/0208 ... im-burrows
peace
There isn't a huge amount of info on the net. Did anybody here go to it? If so what was it like, who played regularly there?