Skiffle and the Cona Coffee Bar in 60's Manchester
- Jan 4
- 2 min read
Somewhere in the centre of Manchester, not far from the site where an IRA bomb in 1996 injured two hundred people, lies the site of the old Cona Coffee Bar.
It was practically the waiting room for The Twisted Wheel, that famous mod haunt only a few streets away, but the bar was famous in its own way too. First there was the jukebox: crammed with RnB and northern soul. It was the hub of the city’s skiffle craze too, in the mid to late 50s, when my dad as a quiff-haired sixth-former would rock up with his washboard hoping to join in with a hastily-assembled band. If you were lucky, you might spot Martin Carthy or Ewan McColl as part of the emerging folk scene, or the young ‘Bee Gees’ Gibbs brothers, who began their musical career as a three-piece skiffle outfit. It was also the place where textile designer Celia Birtwell met Ossie Clark, going on to design the fabrics that would define the Swinging Sixties.
In these early Freewheelin’ days, the Cona Coffee Bar was a ramshackle affair, with a bring-your-own-records vibe, and coffee so thick it would stand up your spoon. Usually, it was so busy you could rarely get a seat. The office for the CND lay just a few doors down, and, if you had a few coins in your pocket, you could pick up a peace symbol badge to add to your Beatnik credentials.
As my dad describes it, there was a great grassroots energy to the city at the time, when anyone could wander in with their American songbook and pick up a guitar to strum the only three chords they knew. ‘Rock Island Line’, ‘Wimoweh’. Skiffle music wasn’t all that good, he says, as the whole point was that it was played by people who weren’t musicians, but there was a great collaborative spirit: a free-and-easy, bash-it-out kind of gusto which went against the name-checking earnestness that would follow.
During lockdown, I took to playing these tunes and enjoying their shambolic charms, as clues to another world: a time of cheerful collaboration when anyone could mosey in off the street and strike up with a tea chest; when, as my dad says: ‘There was just a general happiness that everyone was together. It was very alive.’
There’s an iconic image of the Cona Coffee Bar captured by Mancunian photographer Shirley Baker, whose portraits of the city’s elderly were shown two years ago to honour the difficulties faced by old people during the Covid pandemic. We see a happy group of trendy young mods piling out from the doors, dancing and having fun, shiny and hopeful, with their pointed shoes and razor-sharp coats. Mary Quant hair-dos buffed to a clean sheen.
More than two hundred thousand of that generation died in the Covid pandemic, amid the care home deaths that stared out at us from the headlines. Sometimes I imagine these lost people, spilling out onto a street in the night; music in their hearts, pulsing in their veins, on the cusp of a bright new age… confounding their parents, like we confounded ours.
Close your eyes and you can almost hear the music.
Ghosts, of a lost age.
From The Lost Records anthology.
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