In the 1970s Gary Spiers worked the door of the Babalu Club on Seel Street, Liverpool's home of soul, funk and R&B. He was a huge, big-boned New Zealander with Maori blood and a black belt. One night a man got past him who terrified clubs and pubs from Toxteth to the Dingle.
The terror of Toxteth
Eddie Palmer was a hard-hitting heavyweight who had boxed at some of Liverpool's best gyms. The discipline never took. He had a reputation for extreme violence, including slashing people with a razor, and he ran with a gang the film compares to a Scouse Peaky Blinders.
According to Spiers's memoirs, Palmer asked a girl to dance and she said no. He punched her to the ground. An Indian doctor on a rare night off stepped in, and Palmer hit him so hard his teeth came out and his glasses broke.
The wrong doorman
Spiers was called from the door. He gave Palmer a way out: "You're gonna have to leave, boss." Palmer answered with a right hook to the chin.
Palmer had no idea who he had just hit. Before Liverpool, Spiers had worked doors in Australia's rough mining towns and guarded taxi ranks in Sydney against organised gangs. He had trained in Goju-Ryu karate in Japan under Gogen Yamaguchi, the Cat, and earned a third-degree black belt. He came to Liverpool through his friendship with Terry O'Neill.
The punch rocked him, but he stayed up. Then he drove Palmer to the floor and choked him. Palmer's associates were close by, and everyone knew what they carried. When their hands went to their pockets, Spiers let go. That was not weakness. It was survival.
Outside
Palmer, humiliated in front of his own firm, wanted a straight fight outside. Spiers smothered him before he could land, jammed a forearm into his mouth and pinned him against the wall. Palmer bit down into his arm. Spiers smashed him back into the brickwork and drove knee after knee into his ribs until Palmer slid to the floor. It was not a film fight. It was close, ugly violence, held back by the knowledge that one wrong move would bring the knives out. Palmer's friends dragged him away. His victims went to hospital.
The end
In August 1978 Palmer's violence caught up with him. He had fallen out with Joseph Beech-Keatley, an older doorman and former boxer who had once been his friend. After a row at a labour club that spilled outside, Palmer beat Keatley on the tarmac. Later that night, as Palmer sat in the front passenger seat of a car outside the club, Keatley came back and stabbed him to death.
In court, Keatley called Palmer a bully who had attacked men and women for years. He brought up the night at the Babalu and claimed Palmer had once slashed a barmaid across the face. The jury cleared him of murder and convicted him of manslaughter. He got three years. Palmer's mother was heartbroken at how her son was described. A close friend stood by his coffin and remembered a good lad at heart.