It’s the end of an era that will never see the like again.
The doors close on Batley’s Frontier nightclub – the former Batley Variety Club – for the last time on Saturday.
Hundreds of clubbers are expected to turn out for a final farewell to a nightspot which put a West Yorkshire mill town firmly on the international map.
Batley Variety Club was the brainchild of Jimmy Corrigan who, along with wife Betty, built the club on the site of a former sewage works.
Corrigan confounded the cynics who said Batley was at the end of the road to nowhere. Instead it became famous as the ‘Las Vegas of the North.’
The club opened in 1967 with The Bachelors playing to a crowd of around 2,000 people.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s Corrigan succeeded in attracting some of pop music’s biggest names from Shirley Bassey to Roy Orbison, Tom Jones to Louis Armstrong.
Many fondly remember chicken-in-a-basket meals served at their tables and love blossomed there too.
In 1968 Roy Orbison met future wife Barbara and in 1974 waitress Yvonne Spencely met, and later married, Bee Gee Maurice Gibb.
The variety club shut in the early 1980s to be replaced by the Frontier nightclub and now that too is to go.
A last night party, featuring legendary DJ Alan Kent, is likely to be a sell-out with 1,800 or so nostalgic clubbers packing the dance floor for one last time.
General manager Nick Westwood said: “It will be a sad day when it closes but time moves on and things have to change.”
TAKE a look inside Huddersfield's old nightclub Heaven and Hell below
The club’s owners have sold the building to a gym company and are currently putting the finishing touches to a new state-of-art club venue further down Bradford Road, the so-called Golden Mile.
The TBC, or Terrace-Bar-Club will open on the junction with Hick Lane next weekend and represents a £400,000 investment.
“Five and a half years ago when I came in the club was on its knees,” said Nick. “But we have managed to get it back.
“It wasn’t that it was unprofitable, it’s that we have to look at the long term future and doing this makes absolute commercial sense.
“The Frontier is a great old building and at least it will remain and people will be able to drive past and remember. It’s a shame but that’s the nature of the beast.”
Gym operator JD Gyms will shortly move in to strip out the old club interior and give the building a new lease of life. It is due to launch early next year.
Nick said the entertainment industry was very important to Batley and added: “The livelihoods of taxi drivers, takeaways and clothes shops all depend on venues such as ours.
“The Frontier may be closing but we are investing heavily. We don’t want Batley to die, we want Batley to thrive.”
