Who's Johnny Roadhouse?
This is Johnny's obituary as it appeared in The Times on April 24th 2009
As a saxophone player, Johnny Roadhouse backed everyone from Bob Hope to Elton John and played with many of Britain’s great orchestras. In Manchester, however, he was even more celebrated, as the founder and owner of the music shop.
Known to many as “Manchester’s Mr Music”, he ran the store on the Oxford Road for more than half a century, and his customers in that time included every great Mancunian act from the Hallé to the Hollies via the Smiths, the Stone Roses and Oasis.
John Roadhouse was born in Sheffield in 1921, moved to Manchester as a boy and grew up in Moss Side. He taught himself to play his father’s saxophone and began his professional musical career by chance when working as a fitter’s mate on aircraft production at Metro Vickers during the war. A fellow worker, the drummer with Bonelli’s Orchestra at the Belle Vue dance hall, invited him to sit in one night “to make up the numbers”. He spent the rest of the war keeping up spirits on the home front playing in jazz and dance bands around the city. He went on to be a founder member of the BBC Northern Variety Orchestra (later the Northern Dance Orchestra) under the conductor Alyn Ainsworth, playing with them on TV shows such as Make Way for Music and The Good Old Days. He also appeared with the Hallé, the Liverpool Philharmonic and the English Philharmonic orchestras. By then he had opened his music shop, purchased for £4,500. It was initially known as the Manchester Saxophone Centre but was later renamed Johnny Roadhouse Music. He sold and rented instruments to musicians and big band players, adapting smoothly to the rock’n’roll era and then the “beat” groups. He also acted as an agent for bands, and added a small recording studio in the basement. Among the instruments he sold in later years was an alto saxophone bearing his own name.
When BBC Television’s Top of The Pops began recording weekly in Studio A, Dickenson Road in Rusholme, Manchester, in 1964, Roadhouse’s shop was a regular stop-off for the groups on the show. They visited as much to talk to Roadhouse and seek his advice as to examine the new equipment on display. On one occasion Paul McCartney called to hire an acoustic guitar for a BBC Radio One session. The instrument, restrung to McCartney’s left-handed specifications, is still on display in the shop.
While other music shops came and went Roadhouse continued until the Manchester music scene was unimaginable without it. In the 1980s the Smiths were customers, and in the early 1990s he supplied Oasis with their first equipment. The group later paid homage to Roadhouse when his store appeared in the 2006 video for their song The Masterplan, animated to resemble an L. S. Lowry painting.
In 2005 Roadhouse was honoured with a Manchester Lifetime Achievement Award for services to the city. He also lent significant support to musical education in the North West, and prided himself on treating any amateur musician who walked into his store in exactly the same way that he greeted visiting stars. He raised considerable sums for charity with his Ashton-on-Mersey Show Band.
Johnny Roadhouse, musician and music shop proprietor, was born on January 13, 1921. He died on April 11, 2009, aged 88. The shop is now run by his son, also called John.
The original article can be found here |
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