Hollies Drummer Opens Town Square
Legendary Hollies drummer Bobby Elliott opens town square
It isnt very often that one of the very finest drummers in all of pop/rock drops by into your sleepy little town to open up a community garden, but thats precisely what happened today in my hometown of Rawtenstall. Fair enough, very few of you are likely to have heard of this town, but the majority of you will have heard of Bobby Elliott, drummer of legendary band The Hollies from the 1960s onward. Not an original member of the bands lineup (Elliott replaced Don Rathbone as the groups drummer after a few single releases), he has recorded with almost no other band since joining in 1963. Elliott was born in the same hometown as myself, Burnley, in 1941 and discovered jazz from a very early age. A self-taught drummer, he realised he wanted to play the drums from the age of 10, and practiced with homemade brushes and sticks, or just about any other household utensil he would get his hands on. Almost a decade earlier, the Astoria was built in Rawtenstall, on December 16th 1932. The Astoria was a ballroom with a maple-sprung dance floor. It measured approximately 585 square feet and was covered in maplewood, capable of holding a capacity of up to 800 dancers. By 1959, the dance floor had been re-sprung with over six thousand pieces of Canadian Maple laid on steel springs and was soon able to boast that it was one of the finest sprung dance floors in England. 
Above, promotional poster for The Hollies and the Rawtenstall Astoria. It was during the early 1960s that up to 600 teenagers would come to the Saturday night beat nights which featured up-and-coming bands like The Animals, Kinks, The Who, Small Faces, Moody Blues, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Yardbirds, Maurauders, Honeycombs, Rocking Berries, Unit 4 plus 2, Sounds Incorporated, Rhythm & Blues Incorporated and, yes, The Hollies. It was at this point that in time that Elliott had established himself as a regular fixture in the Hollies, and regularly played at the Rawtenstall Astoria until the venue, after 34 years, was closed down in 1966 . Since then the grounds that held the famous Astoria building in Rawtenstall were turned into a shopping precinct, long gone were those swinging days of the 60s, in its place was now a shopping and commercial district. But even this, too, would become derelict. Businesses began to close down at an alarming rate with the dawn of the recession, until eventually it became a retail graveyard. The precinct and the Astoria building that sat atop it was demolished earlier this year, leaving the venue once considered as the best in England a crumpled mass of debris on the ground. 
It is at this point that Bobby Elliott comes back into the picture. Once the debris has been cleared, the grounds that used to house the Astoria and latterly the shopping centre were cleared of any structure at all. Today, it is an empty space and stands as the new town square and garden. This afternoon, Elliott came back to the place where the Hollies played during their formative years to reveal a commemorative mosaic paying homage to the Astoria and the ballroom that entertained so many four decades ago. 
