Music Experience, Portsmouth Guildhall

 Portsmouth Music Experience

 I'm sure Portsmouth is making no claim to be a rival to Liverpool, Detroit, Kingston (Jamaica) or London as one of the most important crucibles of pop music but everywhere will put its best foot forward and try its best and it makes for some memories and memorabilia on the way back from the lunchtime cathedral concert of a Thursday afternoon. 

I don't come from Portsmouth originally and so am not patriotic about it but even without laying dubious claim to the Isle of Wight festivals, it can include Paul Jones, Simon Dupree & the Big Sound who led to Gentle Giant and Joe Jackson within its orbit but I saw no mention of Tears for Fears who I understood came from Waterlooville.

The Beatles played Portsmouth which must be headline news but they played a lot of places and more movingly, and historically, the T. Rex gig at the Locarno, Arundel Street on March 20, 1977, supported by The Damned, was to be their last.

There's a room devoted to Queen with a Brian May guitar but he'd have been better off in a better band and among the other guitars on view, George Benson's is the choice article.

There's plenty of it, and much to read, genuinely retrieving some mad, dubious and dangerous-to-know times with flower power, Tommy being filmed in Southsea with the requisite amount of mod-based burning down of things and for all the short-lived glory it conjures back there are far many more names that would have been forgotten without it, each trying their luck and not making it beyond the first steps on the treacherous treadmill to becoming Cilla or Cliff.

At first the girl on the desk of Portsmouth Guildhall told me the exhibition wasn't open but she was good enough to chase after me into Guildhall Square to call me back and tell me that, actually, it was. That was kind. She didn't need to do that.

It was much in the same haphazard, disorganized spirit of so much old pop music that didn't really know what it as doing. Many of them might have deserved better but pop music is no different from any other business and the likes of the Sex Pistols were consummately well managed by making it look as if they were anarchic.

Two bands featured from the 1980's, when I first arrived here, Emptifish and Red Letter Day, prompted me to look them up on You Tube. Emptifish, for sure, were Portsmouth's answer to the Jesus & Mary Chain. It's funny, but what's available on You Tube doesn't re-create how good I remembered them being.

Good, comprehensive exhibition. Whether the history it is an exhibition of is quite what it claims to be is another matter.