presents

LEYTONSTONE SOCIAL CLUB

2 Harvey Road, London
E11 3DB

Our Story

Fill 1

East London Original

The long-standing spiritual home for all things garage, trash beat, rock & roll, country, blues, R&B, freak folk, and psych rock.

What’s Cookin’ has been something of a movable feast over the years. We arrived more or less fully formed in 2004 when we started putting on shows at The Plough in Walthamstow, before moving upstairs at The Sheep Walk in Leytonstone for some truly legendary shows (The Jim Jones Revue / Scott H Biram / The Black Diamond Heavies / Billy Childish / The Nightingales.) We stayed there several mad years, whilst also staging shows at The North Star in Leytonstone, Arch 1 in West Ham, and hosting the popular yearly What’s Cookin’ Sunday Picnics in Henry Reynolds Gardens in Leytonstone.

Somewhere along the line we also launched Stove Pony Records with our friends at Mule Freedom, releasin g a series of albums featuring acts who had performed at What’s Cookin’. We had a couple of years combining running the club with managing the pub at The Birkbeck Tavern in Leyton, but soon realised we wanted to concentrate on the music…

Previous Acts

  • The Broken Family
  • Band
  • BJ Cole
  • Martin Stephenson
  • Bobby Bare Jr
  • Jesse Dayton
  • The Coal Porters
  • Justin Rutledge
  • Jason Ringenberg
  • Daniel Wylie
  • Damien Jurado
  • Billy Childish
  • Simple Kid
  • Pete Anderson
  • Corb Lund
  • Stewboss
  • Andy White
  • Holly Golightly

And many more

  • Darren Hayman
  • The Nightingales
  • Wilko Johnson
  • John Power
  • Black
  • Heavies
  • Hank Wangford
  • Scott H.Biram
  • Jim Jones Revue
  • Otis Gibbs
  • Jackie Leven
  • The WIYOS
  • Michael Weston King
  • Woody Pines
  • The Answer
  • The Fabulous Penetrators
  • Pete Molinari
  • Doug Paisley
  • Singing Adams
  • I See Hawks In LA
  • Nelson Bragg
  • Phil Lee
  • The Sweetback Sisters
  • Elliott BROOD
  • Charlie Parr
  • Joe Buck Yourself
  • Wes McGhee
  • Rick Shea
  • John Murry
  • Delaney Davidson
  • Beverley Smith &
  • Alice Gerard
  • Miraculous Mule
  • Danny & The Champions Of The World
  • Urban Voodoo Machine

Our regular home is now at the Leytonstone Social Club – just minutes from Leytonstone Underground and Leytonstone High Road Overground stations. And do you know Leytonstone is now so hip it’s called The Stone. Yeah, me neither.

That’s where you’ll find us EVERY Wednesday and on the 2nd and the 4th Saturday of the month – with some specials thrown in now and then as a chaser. We also do more occasional shows at The Hare & Hounds in Leyton, The Red Lion in East Ham, and The Abbey Arms in South London.

What’s Cookin’… a little bit country, a WHOLE lotta rock ‘n’ roll… plus a number of cross-bred genres yet to be given a name. Come get some!

A labour of love … The music it’s dedicated to — country, blues, bluegrass and old-time rock ‘n’ roll — isn’t going to grace NME, but it will win the hearts of any doubter who drops in.

SHARON O’CONNELL
TIME OUT

Rehabilitating the reputation of pub gigs after years of tribute acts and ageing blues bands – with nights that are intimate and, above all, uproarious fun

JAMES EAGLE
THE MORNING STAR

The reliably excellent club continues to pursue its agenda of ‘rockin’ country-fried music’, which often stretches to embrace the more alt.rock/indie end of that spectrum

TIME OUT LONDON