In Every Dream Home a Headache

Oaklands Road - Residential headquarters of
the Nightingales (Prop.: Dr Mark Jones)

I thought readers might like to see a photo of the Nightingales' Oaklands Road headquarters. This building is not only home to Mark 'Ace' Jones and Fliss 'Sticks' Kitson, but also provides a pied a terre for those members of the band who can't afford the inflated metropolitan rents characteristic of the rapidly gentrifying Waitrose Fields area in which the house is located. The building is also home to the Nightingales/Big Print merchandise warehouse, the Kitson Graphic Design Studio (Motto: "Design? Allow It!") and the Blockbuster club (formerly The Living Room,) an intimate, velvet-draped dance space and cocktail bar frequented exclusively by the band and a select group of acolytes variously drawn from Wolverhampton's avant garde artistic elite, the radical, burlesque fringes of the local entertainment scene, several absinthe-sipping poets and writers, and musicians such as Blind Gerry Carlin and Lightning Kevin Magill, members of Wolverhampton's radical musical collective The Cruel Brethren.

The building also contains the recently inaugurated Robert Lloyd Archive, which will ultimately contain an exhaustive collection of documents, photographs, artworks and vinyl records spanning Lloyd's forty year career at the sharpest edges of the Midland's avant garde scene, just as soon as any such documents can be located. The archive will also eventually contain the John Robb collection of Robert Lloyd interview transcripts, and an orientation centre for those future generations of social and cultural historians, keen to explore the phenomenon that was 'Punk Rock'.