in America?
ANGEL:
I wasn’t initially aware of the blues of America. We’re not talking about blues-inspired, like The Pretty Things and Led Zeppelin, but actual blues music?
REDDON:
Right, the original American blues singers and players like Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Bessie Smith, Willie Dixon.
ANGEL: I didn’t catch onto that until the ’70s.
REDDON:
How about groups from the West Coast of the United States, like San Francisco in the 1960s? For example, where all the hippie stuff started happening in the mid to late 1960s?
ANGEL: Yes, I was into some of that.
REDDON:
If you would, I’d appreciate it if you could provide me with a comprehensive overview of the Gladsaxe Teen Club. From your emails, I find the whole premise and concept of such a club to be fascinating.
ANGEL:
I’d be happy to do that.
The Gladsaxe Teen Club was located in the Egegård School, in Gladsaxe. It is a suburb of Copenhagen, Denmark. It’s located on the street called Gladsaxe Møllevej. When English bands asked where the hell they were, we would give them the direct translation: “Happy Scissors Mill Street”. We’d laugh and the Englishmen didn’t have a clue! The building was quite modern in the late ’60s and very special when it was built in the late ’50s.
REDDON: Whose idea was it to start the Gladsaxe Teen Club?
ANGEL:
It’s a long and complicated story. Basically, Gladsaxe Teen Club was started by factions of young people in a number of political parties. It was composed of both the “left” and “right” parts of the political spectrum. As well, there were various sports organizations in the suburb of Gladsaxe, with this “young people’s association” of sorts…I guess you could call it that. Young people of nineteen or twenty joined forces to create the Teen Club – a place where kids of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and upwards could go to have fun and feel safe. It first opened in 1966.
When some people in Brøndby saw the success of the activities of Gladsaxe Teen Club, they wanted to make a similar club using Gladsaxe as their model. So the people of Gladsaxe Teen Club helped the Brøndby club get started.
To take part in the Gladsaxe events, you had to have a membership. The cost for a one year membership was raised to the equivalent of 75 cents in August 1968. And the price of the ticket for one club night was the equivalent of one U.S. dollar. That ticket price increase was also made effective in August 1968.
As I said before, the Teen Club was located in a school gymnasium because it was cheap to rent from the local municipality. In return, the profits were allocated to youth organizations for Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, whatever. So none of the various people who created and ran the Gladsaxe Teen Club would profit themselves. All the profits went to the local organizations for youth activities that were associated with the Gladsaxe Teen Club, such as the ones I just mentioned.
The Teen Club served a very valuable function in bettering the lives of youth in the local Gladsaxe community. The fact Brøndby wanted to follow our example also proves this; it was an excellent concept and ran extremely smoothly.
REDDON: Innovative concept and premise, the Teen Club.
ANGEL:
Gladsaxe was a “social-democratic” town. It might not have happened in a more right-winged town.
The photo I sent you of Egegård School, I recently came across at the Gladsaxe Byarkiv. Anyway, the window at the top of the building is the skylight for the gymnasium, where the concerts took place.
REDDON:
I know, it’s beautiful and it does have an ultra modern look for back then. I didn’t envisage the first place where The Yardbirds or The New Yardbirds played, at that time, to be so modern looking. I imagined it to be a rickety old wooden building for some reason. How interesting to actually see the structure.
ANGEL: I remember when I gave one of my first interviews for the magazine Goldmine.
REDDON: Great magazine, I know it well.
ANGEL:
Cathy, who did the interview, had first thought that the school was similar to a high school. She was impressed that it was a “regular” school where you start out very young. You start your very first year of school there and attend for nine or ten years. Then you go to high school. Egegård School was really a regular grade school. But it was a very modern one for the time, as you can see from the photo.
Getting back to the Teen Club…it had about 6,000 members. They came not only from the municipality surrounding Gladsaxe but from neighbouring towns farther away.
I said a moment ago, you had to be a member of the Teen Club to come here and enjoy the events. And so, if someone had a cousin or someone visiting with them from far away, the person would have to become a member to gain entry to the Teen Club.
REDDON: No guest policy, eh?
ANGEL:
No, no, no, it was strictly “members only”. The mayor or whoever wanted to make sure it wasn’t merely open to anyone from the general public. But, to be flexible with it, you could sign up at the door on the evening of an event and get a membership card. Normally, you would sign up in advance of the show but they were very flexible about that.
Out of these 6,000 members, there would be around 1,000 to 1,500 people a night. One of the guys told me when John Mayall was playing at the Teen Club, there were about 1,500 people. The hall was really packed. In order to make room for some more people, they were allowed to make a discothèque in the basement.
That picture of me that I sent you was taken at that discothèque, in the basement of the Egegård School. It wasn’t a “club night” when that photo was taken but at a party we had. I was only 17!
REDDON:
Yeah, I was wondering if you dressed that well when you took your photographs at the Teen Club, on club nights! You looked pretty sharp in that sports coat, Jørgen!
ANGEL:
Thanks. I think it was mainly on the occasion of that party… Anyway, there were between sixty and seventy volunteers for the Teen Club. Not everybody showed up every time we had something going on. But between thirty and forty people did, when needed. Some came in the afternoon to set up the tables and chairs. They were placed along the side, not in the middle of the gymnasium because that’s where the kids liked to dance.
They had special marquees and signs made, the coloured light bulbs or whatever used for decorating the gymnasium. Volunteers were needed to type up and sell the membership cards; some had to take care of cleaning everything from the floors to the toilets. All kinds of tasks. My job was to take photos for the
