Local businessman David McPhie played a big part in bringing some of music’s biggest names to north Derbyshire in the Sixties and Seventies, as he explains
CHESTERFIELD in the 1960s and early 1970s was a great place to live if you were interested in popular music, and in seeing at first hand the biggest names on the British music scene. The five venues primarily responsible for this were Chesterfield Folk Club and my own Smokestack Club (both at the Queens Park Hotel), The Regal/ABC Cinema, The Victoria Ballroom during its Top Rank management era, and later the ‘Vic’ under my own ‘Velvet Underground’ management…