Results for “kent”

Both myself and Ace Records were deeply saddened to hear of the recent passing of Ron Kavana, one of the label's former recording artists and compiler of a series of heritage Irish CDs for the company's Globestyle imprint.

 I very much regret not having had any thoughts of interviewing the man during the twenty or so years I followed his music and got to know him to some extent, so the following piece as the heading suggests is written largely from memory with more than a little help from album notes and credits and retained scraps of conversations with the man himself. The likes of Wikipedia have been purposely avoided. It also helps that I was privileged to work at both Rock On and Ace Records.

It’s a bitterly cold February ‘94 and I’m in New York City attempting to persuade Tony Middleton to come to Cleethorpes, one of north east Lincolnshire’s premier hot spots, to sing to his UK fans at our inaugural Northern Soul weekender. While I’m there I decide to pop in on Paul Williams, an old friend who used to buy Jackie Moore imports off me in 1974 when I was a West End barrow boy. He had worked his way up in the music business and was then a Vice President at the mighty RCA Records situated on 1540 Broadway, NYC.

ROCK ON ~ BIRTH OF AN EMPIRE
1971-74

“Rock’n’Roll
I get my records at the Rock On stall,
Rock’n’Roll
Teddy boy he’s got them all”

So sang Phil Lynott on Thin Lizzy’s 1973 single, ‘The Rocker’, and he was not the only rock star cruising down to Ted Carroll’s Rock On stall in a flea market at 93 Golborne Road, off Portobello Road. Ted had been selling the coolest wax in town there since 1971, with Elvis wallpaper behind him and squeezed into a space barely bigger than a phone box. Oldies were Ted’s sideline, actually. His main business was co-managing Thin Lizzy.