working men’s clubs – Music in Clubs

15 November 202515 November 2025

The Opera Singer, Composer and Piano Teacher Behind the Working Men’s Club Movement

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Adeline Cooper, a Quaker reformist and musician with royal connections, is credited with the ‘club’ membership aspect of this movement. Despite no biography, we do know a bit about her and the club she founded in Westminster, but very little about her influence on music in clubs.

For those familiar with a beer-filled night out at Britain’s working men’s clubs, it’s a shock to learn that their early years are attributed to Victorian teetotal minister Reverend Henry Solly. But Solly credited the success of the movement to someone else: a professional musician turned proto-feminist.

Adeline Cooper was not the kind of musician nowadays associated with clubs – neither a dancer, nor comic entertainer nor ballad singer – but an aspiring star of the concert hall and performer for the queen. Cooper’s career began as a young singer whose performances – mostly operatic – were praised by the London press. By the start of the club and institute movement in the 1860s, she had been a music teacher, written her own compositions and ballads, and even gained the unauthorised title ‘Pianiste to the Queen’.

But in 1859, Cooper took a sudden hard turn into improving and reforming the working classes, and never, it seemed, looked back. She set up one of the first ever working men’s clubs and joined the first Council of the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union where she argued for the importance of the ‘club’ element in popularising the movement. But what influence, if any, did she have on the presence of music in clubs and institutes?

26 August 202526 August 2025

Celebrity Encounters in Social Clubs; or, How to Make a Fool of Oneself

There are a series of celebrity names that come up whenever the history of music in working men’s clubs is mentioned.

The obvious ones get trotted out: Vera Lynn, Petula Clark and Tom Jones, for example, all have a hint of showmanship – not to mention that solid, project-to-the-back-of-the-room vocal technique – that gives away their roots as club performers.

Others are shared with the self-satisfaction of either the proud local or the music trivia fan: “Sam Fender started off in that room right there. Cracking voice.” “Did you know Sting used to play at the club down the road?! The members gave him his stage name.”

And then there are the stories that blend fact and fiction into musical mythologies: The Fall regularly got booed off club stages, the Manic Street Preachers cancelled a gig at a workmen’s hall, the Gallagher brothers ruined a snooker table (they definitely did not – I saw the evidence), Shirley Bassey peed in a club sink… (would rather not see the evidence on that one!)

Whatever the story, the knowledge that plenty of music stars started out in working men’s clubs is pretty established by now. Clubs are training grounds for talent, providing an opportunity to develop experience locally and a connection to a network of venues. For some musicians, it then becomes a mainstream culture from which to break away towards alternative scenes. Others keep it as a badge of pride, being a marker of authenticity and down-to-earth roots despite their celebrity status.

What happens if you run into one of them?…

6 June 20256 June 2025

Conference Report: RMA Study Day on Everyday Music Scenes

Also available on the website of the Royal Musical Association: https://www.rma.ac.uk/2025/06/06/conference-report-rma-study-day-on-everyday-music-scenes/

Everyday Music Scenes: Pubs, Clubs and ’Stutes was an RMA Study Day held over a day and a half on the 14th and 15th April 2025. It was hosted at the International Centre for Music Studies at Newcastle University, with additional locations in Newcastle city centre. The aim was to stimulate interest in studying the history and present situation of music in small, local venues that would not fit the standard criteria of ‘grassroots music venue’, with an emphasis on overlooked but widespread forms of working-class musical culture.

28 April 20251 May 2025

“How did you get interested in working men’s clubs? And why music?”

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Club music histories can be useful for figuring out the role of music in clubs in the present, and provide stories to assist in change management. These observations are based on my experience growing up in the more conservative outskirts of clubland and playing in bands in adulthood, having eventually formed an attachment to a particular club that closed down.

“How did you get interested in working men’s clubs?”

It’s a question I get asked a lot, often by men at the bar, wondering why on earth they’re sat next to this (comparatively) young woman in glasses on her own, nursing a half-pint of cheap lager with a neutral-sounding accent. Other times it’s from bewildered middle-class friends, colleagues and acquaintances: “aren’t they horrible old racist, sexist places?”