Lennon, Jagger… Donny Osmond? Discover Leamington’s musical connections on a new guided walk

This town. Ghosts everywhere.

Over there, Bill Haley is getting the blood pumping and the pores dripping. Turn a corner and The Who are raging. The geese in Jephson Gardens take flight as Black Sabbath strike up; yards away, one of the most famous album covers of the 1990s comes into focus; this all happens under the gaze of Dave Grohl. That house over the bridge? John Lennon bought it. The lanky chap prancing about at both ends of the Parade is Mick Jagger. Order a burger in a fast food restaurant and – hang on, is that Donny Osmond?

Leamington’s connections to pop and rock royalty are many, varied, and generally overlooked. Now we can trace their steps on a guided walk. It is called Leamington Rocks and it is led by Adam Wood, a social historian.

"It's almost like forgotten history,” he says. “A lot of the music from the ‘60s and the ‘70s, I really enjoy. So finding the links of, say, the Rolling Stones to Leamington – I love that. It brings history to life. People can go on a walking tour and stand outside the house that John Lennon bought – you really get a grasp on what it was like for people.

"And it’s not just music – it’s all sorts of social history. It’s not just dry history from a book. It’s real life.”

The tour starts and finishes at Temperance, which has gone from derelict hotel to award-winning live music venue in a few short years. It is in Bath Street and is a gem of a place, attracting artists and audiences nationally and internationally. When the next chapter of Leamington’s musical history is written, Temperance will surely be at its heart.

The first couple of stops – the old Crown Hotel in High Street and Bath Place Community Venture – remind us that everyone starts somewhere. These were places where bands might spark into life: that first electric buzz and jolt as the guitar lead clunks into the speaker, the thrill of hearing your amplified voice bouncing around the room. Nizlopi are the only Leamington band to reach number one in the singles chart, and were a key influence on Ed Sheeran; Bath Place is where Nizlopi learned their craft.

Around the corner in Spencer Street is a gym with a particularly grand front. Below its elegant windows once flowed streams of teenagers about to have their lives changed, maybe saved, by rock and roll. Next door, many decades later, sang a man who once wrote about that kind of miracle; having revolutionised music, he would barely sing again.

Then the Pump Rooms, not an obvious place, one might think, for another rock revolutionary to mime and strut and writhe about while his shirt billowed and dancers spun; but that did actually happen, and there is evidence on video. Up the road is the former Riverside Youth Club, where crowds of young women and men jived for 24 hours on one celebrated occasion in 1960. A few minutes further north and west is Woodbine Street: here was recorded a song ranked by the Guardian as the second best ever British number one.

Across, up a pretty road, left: here was born one of Leamington’s more notorious figures, without whom the lives and careers of David Bowie, Ozzy Osbourne and Led Zeppelin would have been markedly different. A charming tale of rock irony awaits at the top of the Parade; further down, there unrolls an amusing tale of pop vanity. Past the Spa Centre, where a man once seen only on a screen, otherworldly, appeared in three dimensions as his fortunes revived; down an alley where the town’s best punk band were photographed for one of punk’s best album covers; around to the site of a more famous album cover shoot, and the forgotten place of a disappointingly attended but evidently tremendous early show by a still more famous band. Finally, an artist’s house, a remarkable gift. Along the way, a story involving Prince, a helicopter and Warwick District Council.

Back in the warmth of Temperance, Adam added colour and detail by way of an illustrated talk, including the reminiscences of a Leamington rock stalwart and much information and comment from the pages of, yes, the Leamington Spa Courier.

The tours will run once a month. This was the first, and they may all differ. “I’m certain that there’s so much we haven’t uncovered yet – more links that we could build in. I think we’ll be adding to the event as time goes by. I don’t pretend that anything I do is the final polished product. Things evolve. You get more stories, more ideas. And that to me is like history again.”

Some may feel a kind of melancholy amid all this, a sense that we are now in a very different time. Those places that nurtured so much talent are long gone. Towns like Leamington no longer attract the biggest names; and the life of a touring musician these days is, for many, barely viable financially. What was once so fresh and so urgent is now, well, the dead past.

But that is why this tour is so effective. Cup an ear, and you might hear whispers in the air of the shuffling feet and laughter of those jiving teenagers. Squint, and you might glimpse a shadow moving like no one else on the walls of the Pump Rooms. That pounding in your feet might be the shockwaves from Keith Moon’s drums.

A town of ghosts. Walk with them.

Places on the tour cost £25. Visit temperance.bar to book.