Babe Ruth: Saturday 23rd August 1975, Reading Festival

Jenny Haan (vocals) / Bernie Marsden (guitars) / Steve Gurl (keyboards) / Dave Hewitt (bass) / Ed Spevock (drums)

The official timetable for the day suggests that they followed Joan Armatrading in one of the graveyard slots, just after lunch on the closing day, but Babe Ruth were instead brought forward a day and followed SNAFU on the Saturday afternoon.

Writing for New Musical Express, one of either Tony Tyler or Chris Salewicz, I really don’t know which, said “Babe Ruth are Huge in Canada. This does not stop them being quite good. The female singer is Elkie Brooks via Janis The J [Joplin] visually, with a touch of Suzi Q [Quatro] about the throat.” I suppose that’s a good, succinct review although I find it appalling that the reviewer couldn’t be bothered to go to the trouble of finding out Haan’s name.

Babe Ruth take their bows at the end of their set

As for the other music press – Melody Maker, Sounds and Record Mirror – not one of them wasted any column inches on the band, which again I find shameful.

The programme article below informs us that they had recently undergone a change of line-up but they had clearly ‘gelled’ very swiftly as I remember them putting on a great show of rocking music, a fact echoed by one or two other people in their online reminiscences of the weekend (if you’d care to look for them).

The band’s current album was their eponymous third LP so the setlist would have drawn from favourites like ‘A Fistful of Dollars’, Jack O’Lantern’, ‘Private Number’, ‘Black Dog’, ‘Wells Fargo’, ‘The Mexican’, ‘Lady’… so much to choose from! I cannot confirm exactly what they played but I do remember that we had such a good time that we would go and see them again in only three weeks time back home in Scarborough.

Setlist: unknown

Here’s what the official newspaper programme said about them…