Our live room was a nightclub. Hendrix played it in 1967.
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Resonance Studios is at Revelations House, Royal Oak Yard, Stockport. Turn down the side of the Cracked Actor bar, follow the cobbled road round to the right, and before the bridge on the left there are black double doors.
Our live room is a sandstone cellar cut into the bank behind Little Underbank. On 12 February 1967 it was a nightclub called the Sinking Ship, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience played in it.
Six weeks later the club burned down.
The club
The Sinking Ship opened in Royal Oak Yard in 1966, off Underbank. It was not a converted pub function room. It was a run of sandstone wine cellars cut into the bank behind Little Underbank, knocked through and turned into a club — the comparison people who went there reach for is the Cavern.
The rock did what rock does. Condensation collected on the roof and dripped on the dancers. People who were there remember getting rained on indoors.
Wimple Winch played the opening night and were the resident group, living on the premises. They were a Merseyside band rather than a Stockport one — they had come up through Liverpool as Just Four Men, and they were in Royal Oak Yard because the club's manager installed them there.
Admission to see Jimi Hendrix was five shillings. Cat Stevens was seven and six. Long John Baldry and Julie Driscoll played it as Steampacket, in the club's first year.
February 1967
The Jimi Hendrix Experience played the Sinking Ship on 12 February 1967. The Hendrix estate's own performance archive lists it: Sinking Ship Clubland, Stockport, Cheshire.
Put that date in context. Hey Joe was in the Top 10. Purple Haze was not released until 17 March. Are You Experienced was three months away. The band that played Royal Oak Yard that night was a new group on a package-tour circuit, working through northern clubs for club money, five weeks before Purple Haze changed what they were worth.
They came back to Stockport on 26 March 1967 for the Tabernacle Club. By then the record was out.
For barely a year, the Sinking Ship was a real venue on a real circuit.
The fire
The Sinking Ship burned down on Thursday 6 April 1967, less than two months after Hendrix played it. Fire damage closed it and it did not come back in that form. There was a second incarnation in the yard in the late 1980s and early 1990s under the name Pulse, and then that went too.
Around a year of trading. One Hendrix booking. Then a fire, and half a century of the yard being a yard.
What this does and does not mean
We did not restore the Sinking Ship, and we are not pretending to. The club burned in 1967 and nobody here was there. What survived a fire and fifty-odd years is the rock, and the rock is the point — this is a room cut into sandstone, so it was never going to go anywhere.
The live room is the room. Same cellars, same walls, same space Hendrix played to on 12 February 1967. Everything else about it has changed.
We are wary of making too much of it, because a story is not a sound. A cave does not make a snare drum better. What the room actually gives you is a stone live space with the acoustic behaviour of stone — dense, dead in some directions, unusually solid in the low end — and that would be true whether or not anybody famous had stood in it.
The history is a good story. The room is a good room. They are separate facts and we would rather you booked it for the second one.
What is fair to say is that this half-acre of Stockport has been used for making and playing music since the mid-sixties. Strawberry Studios — 10cc, Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, the Stone Roses, Paul McCartney — is a few minutes' walk away on Waterloo Road. Stockport has been a place where records got made for sixty years, mostly without anyone outside Stockport noticing.
Stockport as a recording town
The reason is not romance, it is rent and geography. Stockport is fifteen minutes by train from Manchester city centre and fifteen minutes by taxi from Manchester Airport. It has always been close enough to the city to draw musicians and far enough out to have space and cheap buildings.
Strawberry began in 1967 as Inter City Studios, in a room above Neild and Hardy's music shop, and moved to Waterloo Road the following year under its better-known name. The Sinking Ship worked because there were cellars nobody else wanted. Royal Oak Yard suits a studio now for the same reason it suited a club then — it is out of the way, the walls are thick, and nobody complains about the noise.
What is here now
The cellar that was the club is the live room. The rest of the building holds over 300 pieces of equipment: a Roland Jupiter 8, an ARP 2600, a Waldorf Wave, a Yamaha DX1, an Analogue Solutions Colossus, a Serge modular system, a Ludwig Super Classic kit from the 1960s, and an SSL Origin 16-channel analogue console to record it through.
The studio opened on 8 August 2024 — 808 day, which was not an accident.
Sources and corrections
The details here come from the Hendrix estate's performance archive, Manchester Beat's venue records for the Sinking Ship, and the Wimple Winch history at Pacific Drift — including first-hand accounts from people who went.
The club's opening month is not recorded anywhere we could find, which is why this piece says "1966" and "barely a year" rather than a figure.
Stockport's sixties club history is patchy and much of it survives only in what people remember. If you were at the Sinking Ship, or you have a ticket, a poster or a photograph from Royal Oak Yard, we would like to see it. Get in touch and we will add it here with credit.
For more information visit:
https://resonancestudios.co.uk/pages/secret-of-resonance-studios
Resonance Studios is an independent analogue recording studio at Revelations House, Royal Oak Yard, Stockport SK1 1JZ.