The Imperial

Where was the only place to go on a Sunday night? The Imperial on St James St of course - to see Cisco!

An unassuming pub, the front bar was the picture of respectability but if you should venture down the side alley to the back bar bar on a Sunday night in the mid seventies, you would be greeted by the funk rock jazz soul sound of Cisco.

Cisco were an 8 piece usually, 2 brass, keyboards, drums, kongas, guitar, bass guitar and singer, and covered stuff like the Boxtops The Letter, and lots of Joe Cocker stuff. Their singalong choruses were legendary, and complete with a lot of percussion and whistles they could last for hours! Catchy lyrics such as "Cisco have got it together" went on forever and were inevitably translated to "Cisco have got an umbrella!"

We used to travel all round the country watching the best bands in the world - it didn't matter whether we'd been to a festival to see The Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin....we'd always rush back on a Sunday straight down to the Imperial to catch Cisco!

Sadly their recorded material was little, although they did make an appearance on a sampler album called Nottingham Castle Rock. They also appeared on the local Radio rock program Extravaganza and luckily Pedro was busy with his tape recorder putting together those "best of" tapes that we all made in those days before CD writers were invented (and before Cisco was just a router!).

As a result we have here a Cisco track for you to listen to. It nestles on an old Boots C90 cassette (because everyone knows C90s were the best length - just enough music and didn't stretch like the C120s!) between such bands as Caravan, Cockney Rebel, PFM, Blodwyn Pig, Fairport, Be Bop Delux, Sassafras, Barclay James Harvest and UFO. Pedro obviously had some taste as did John Holmes who presented Extravaganza. Up until recently he still did, as John was at the recent Sassafras gig at the Boat

The full file is about 3 mb so could take a while to download - I don't even know what the track is called but I would hazard a guess at "Get on down the Road" or something like that! The sample file is only 416kb so should be a lot quicker.... So click on the link below and be transported back to Sunday night in the mid seventies when you could dance on the tables, although you did run the risk of falling on the broken glass like Fiona and suffering the unkindest cut of all!