Barbarellas was Birmingham’s principal progressive club in the 1970s, long since demolished to make way for the ICC. Locals bands like Loris, Steve Gibbons, Hooker and City Boy regularly filled its 2000 capacity with local fans. The club catered for mainstream and progressive tastes, from Dr Hook to John McLaughlin .

Slender Loris’s first gig as Slender Loris was upstairs at The Junction in Harborne in February 1974 - this was the original three piece

acoustic band. John Mostyn’s excellent Big Ears at The Fighting Cocks in Moseley also became a regular venue and in their expanded form, including Colin Edmunds on congas, and Ray (?) on sax, Loris began to tackle the bigger college venues.

In their career, Loris played just about every local venue, including the Town Hall and the New Rep., but they had residencies were at The Railway, The Barrel Organ in Birmingham, and also at The Imperial Hotel in Nottingham. For some reason, this Nottingham gig was always the best, attracting a really open-minded and more progressive audience.

Often, Loris played the college circuit in their own right, but there were memorable support gigs, including The Fairports, Curved Air,The Pink Fairies, Stray, Procul Harum, Mike Nesmith, and Gong.
The support gigs often involved horrible mismatches of style, as with Stray and The Pink Fairies; Loris were never a rocking band, and an audience looking for a bop could be faced with a bewildering variety of rhythm and tempo changes. However, when it was good, and the audience was not approaching the gig with too many preconceptions, it could be stunning.