Oh! Gunquit, The Mudd Club and Mystery Action play The One More For The Road Show at The Wedgewood Rooms

This larger than life figure has been putting on rock and punk gigs in the city since 1984, but he says his show this weekend – The One More For The Road Show – at The Wedgewood Rooms in Southsea, will be his last.

Always a fan of going to gigs, it was only when his job as an office equipment salesman took him to the new owner of the Some Place Else nightclub in Palmerston Road, Southsea.

It was the tail-end of the disco boom and the club was struggling to bring people in outside of the busy weekends. They got talking, and Chris had soon talked himself into putting on live music there.

“Next thing, me and Jim (Lawrence, his friend and soon to be business partner) have started putting stuff on there.

“We got a few bands down from London. I think one of the first was Juice on the Loose, who were dirty rock’n’roll, and it went down well.

"Next thing, the guy at Kimbells, called me.” The former Kimbells site on Osborne Road has now lain derelict for years, but was once home to a grand casino and ballroom.

Legendary Portsmouth act Emptifish were one of the first acts Chris put on there.

"We only had Tuesday and Wednesday nights, so it kind of started off well, then it got a bit iffy. But in the meantime, I got the bug.

“Then I get another phone call from the bloke who owned Granny's”, the nightclub in the Tricorn Shopping Centre, “at the time. Saying: ‘Do you want to buy our club?’ So next thing, Me and Jim had bought a bloody nightclub, hadn't we!”

They renamed it Basins when they took it on in 1986, and for the next couple of years, the 350-capacity venue was the place to go for live rock music.

As to his favourite gigs, Chris recalls: “Wilko Johnson, obviously. We used to do him every two months on a Saturday night and fill it every time. He's dead now, but I'm still mates with Norman (Watt-Roy, who played with Johnson’s band and Ian Dury), the bass player.

“Steve Marriott (legendary Small Faces and Humble Pie founder) stands out, and that was great. He was pretty skint at the time, he never earned any money. He got ripped off left, right and centre by management and stuff. At that time he was just going out as the Packet of Three, which was just a three-piece. He was only playing small places – we were about as large as he did at that point, I think.”

However, Basins only lasted a couple of years. Beset with money troubles, then “we lost our late night license. They took it away the day before Christmas Eve, so we lost Christmas and the New Year and everything.

“Then, basically, the VAT man wanted his money and we didn't have it."

Chris was also butting heads with the local police.

"We didn't have a lot of goodwill from the police at the time,” he says with a laugh. “Their ideas of me were grossly overblown – what they thought I'd been up to before we opened the club, you know?

"At one point, the chief superintendent, the top copper in Portsmouth, said to my partner, Jim: ‘We haven't got a problem with you, Mr Lawrence, but Mr Abbott isn't a fit and proper person to have anything to do with the entertainment of the youth of this city’.

“It was crazy. They didn't like us because everything else was on the seafront then – Nero’s and all that, and we were stuck up on top of the Tricorn in the city centre. They preferred everything to be in the same place.

"The thing is, compared to the fights that used to go on down the seafront on a Friday night, we got very little. There was the odd thing, but not really much.

"In those days you had dress restrictions in a lot of places, so all the kind of alternative people, whether they were old punks or bikers, skinheads, would come to us, they were all welcome.

"Once we'd all settled down, they all got on well together because it was the only place they could go!”

After Basins closed in 1988, Chris began promoting gigs on South Parade Pier for the likes of “Stone Roses, Misty in Roots, and then all my old favourites like Wilko Johnson, etc, etc,” which went “swimmingly well” for about a year.

“But then that ended when the police told them not to let me do it there anymore. They really had a downer on me.”

He had also moved into managing a local indie-rock band – SKAW (Some Kind A Wonderful) – while still running Basins, who were tipped for great things. “They were all customers of mine. I used to let them rehearse in the club for nothing.

“There was a month when the NME and Melody Maker was just full of them, every week there'd be something. They never got a front cover, but Flowered Up who were kind of their compadres, I remember them getting a front cover and they were all wearing their SKAW T-shirts.

"Things were going great. We were on an indie label, Vinyl Japan. The first single was great and at one point I'm getting phone calls all the time from every bloody record company – majors and all the top indie labels.

“But then when the second single wasn't so good, it kind of dropped off, except for Warners. Warners were still on it. My advice was to stay with Vinyl Japan for the time being, because Warners would just put you on the shelf, which they did.”

Band members Mark Ballard and Damien O’Malley were forced out after they signed with Warners and the band never broke through.

”It was really stupid, because the deal was crap as well. I'm still owed money from that period...”

Unable to put on gigs around Portsmouth, it was around this time that Chris moved to London to be closer to his son, where he remains to this day.

“I always intended to go back to Portsmouth, but then I met a woman, and then when that finished, I was quite enjoying myself up here, so I stayed!”

But he’s always retained close ties to the city. "It's only down the road, isn't it? My brother still lives there, and at that time, my mother was still alive, living down there as well. And, of course, I'm a season ticket holder at Fratton Park.”

In 2015 Jason Webster, the former Basins DJ, suggested putting on a Basins reunion night at The Wedge. This proved to be a success and it was his old mate from SKAW, Mark Ballard who suggested they find somewhere to start putting on regular gigs again.

From there, The Barn at the back of The Milton Arms became their regular home.

"Mark really got me looking at it full time again. With most of them, especially his age group, 35 years ago they were all my customers!”

Chris clearly has an ear for what his punters like, but what makes him want to bring a band to Portsmouth?

"Maybe it's a bit selfish, but I kind of go on my own taste! And I like to be entertained. There's a lot of bands that I listen to on record that I wouldn't really want to go and watch.

"I like bands who put on a bit of theatre, and that goes back to when I was young, seeing people like Screaming Lord Such. I like something a bit different. The music obviously has to be good as well, but if they've got that bit of theatre with it, and they look good, then...”

While the gig this weekend is being billed as his ‘farewell,’ Chris refuses to say it’s final.

"I'm certainly going to have this year off. And then, I don't know... If someone really excited me and I wanted to put it on, and no one else wanted to put it on, then, well....

“It all depends, but I'm 76 this year. I enjoy going out looking for bands. That's the bit I like, and then if I see something that I think: ‘Oh, this would go down well in Portsmouth!’”

The One More For The Road Show

This Saturday, January 25 at the Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea, doors 7pm.

Headliners Oh! Gunquit are a dynamic five-piece who blend raw rock'n'roll, wild garage-rock, and twisted surf-punk.

The Mudd Club are delinquent garage-rockers with a penchant for all things loud.

Mystery Action play dirty rock’n’roll with a dark twist.

Tickets £15 from here.