Batley Variety Club is situated slightly off at a tangent from Leeds, deep in the bowels of England’s roast beef and puppy-fat hinterlands. People still call it the Las Vegas of the North, but in reality it’s little more than a sophisticated workingman’s club which happens to pay top dollar for its artistes. The “future attractions” billboard boasts such luminaries as Lulu and Neil Sedaka — “Gilbert O’Sullivan is the real favorite here,” mutters the waitress, who looks like she might’ve stepped out of Five Easy Pieces.

It’s somehow fitting, therefore, that the “1974 English Rock ’n’ Roll Revival Show” should terminate its marginally successful stint around the concert halls of Britain here at Batley. Revival packages have always been pretty much the exclusive property of American impresarios like Richard Nader; despite the existence of something like That’ll Be The Day, the English have, on the whole, no real desire to swoop back into their not-so-lustrous rock past. Particularly when you consider the murky pap that held sway on British airwaves just prior to the first sprputing of Merseymania and the Beatle dream. And why should they, for what was witnessed for two nights at Batley can only be described as an exercise in English lowcamp.