Owning Up: The Trilogy (60 page)

To reach the Ferry was a considerable labour. You caught the tube to Finsbury Park and then there was a long bus ride through the depressing suburbs with their chain-stores and second-hand car lots on the bomb sites. Finally there were half-hearted fields and factories making utility furniture or art metal work, and then a bridge over the canal in the style of the city of the future in the film
Things to Come.
The Ferry was on the far bank of this canal, a big 1935 pub in Brewers’ Georgian with a hall attached. Its isolation had its advantages. The canal tow-path and the surrounding fields were suitable for knee-trembles and yet you could still hear the band.

The journey home was full of problems. For reasons either alcoholic or sexual it was always the
last
bus and its crawling progress put a terrible strain on the beer-filled bladder. On one occasion I had to stand on the bus platform and piss out into the reeling night. The god who looks after drunks stood by me and I Was neither caught by the conductor nor fell off into the road.

The central London jazz clubs in those years were all unlicensed. Jazz was the reason the audience were there. At the Ferry the public were mostly locals who liked jazz as a background to drinking and social intercourse.

Early in the band’s history ‘Hermit’, the tuba player, left us and was replaced by a sousaphone player called Owen Maddock, a tall man with a beard and the abrupt manner of a Hebrew prophet who has just handed on the Lord’s warning to a sinful generation. He was by profession a racing motor mechanic and designer and his hands, coat, clothes and face were always streaked with oil. His appetite was formidable. Thrusting bread and butter into his mouth with both hands he looked like the Goya of Satan devouring his children. As regards jazz he had a passion for the soprano sax of Sidney Bechet, which was so obsessive as to enter even into his erotic life. In his bedroom was an old-fashioned wind-up gramophone above which was suspended a weight through a pulley so adjusted as to lighten the pressure of the sound-arm on the record. On this antique machine he played Bechet records even while copulating. In fact the rather faded blonde with whom he was having an affair at that time told me she found it very disconcerting that, no matter what point they had reached, if the record finished, Owen would leap off and put on another. Now that there are a great many Bechet LPs available it must make his life easier.

*

Our first job out of town was on the south coast. I remember a castle on a cliff and the late sun going down over the water outside the glass wall of the dance hall. It was a perfectly ordinary job but we, having no truck or knowledge of professional ethics, carried our crates of beer on to the stand before we began to play. The manager was so amazed that he didn’t even protest. It was, however, reported in the local newspaper.

Our first real success outside London was in Liverpool, and my mother was the cause.

Mick had been to Liverpool with me some months before on a purely social visit, and it had been fairly disastrous. We had been asked to give a lift to a coloured girl, also from Liverpool, who sang with Mike Daniels. Her name was Phyllis and she wished to visit her child who lived up there with her parents. For us the whole coloured race was sacred, but Phyllis tried our faith severely. The AA had advised us to go via Birkenhead. Our intention was to reach home in time to hear Beryl Bryden singing on ‘Radio Rhythm Club’. We had, in the car, a gramophone and a number of records mostly by Jelly Roll Morton. We picked Phyllis up in Piccadilly and set off.

Every time we went over a bridge Phyllis said: ‘Eh, me tits.’ Every time we saw some cows in a field Phyllis said, ‘All that meat and no potatoes!’

We were only on the Chester by-pass when it was time to listen to Beryl and had to go into a pub and ask the landlord to tune in for us.

As we were driving through the Mersey Tunnel Phyllis told us she didn’t like New Orleans jazz really. She ‘went more for modern like’. Sensibly enough she hadn’t told us before. Faced with such blasphemy we might well have made her hitchhike.

We dropped her by the Empire and drove home. My mother and Mick didn’t really take to each other, although she thought him ‘very attractive’. Both Mick and I have suffered throughout our whole relationship by people thinking that, in his case I was responsible for leading him astray, and that in my case, he was responsible.

My father didn’t help by saying the coffee tasted like ferret’s piss. Somehow my mother thought that Mick was responsible for him saying this too. My mother was also certain we were having an affair. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked. I denied the whole thing, but she was by no means convinced. I can’t really blame her for this. Although Mick is physically entirely hetero, he likes his men friends so much that it’s an understandable fallacy.

Next morning at breakfast there was one fish-cake left over, and my mother pushed it on to my plate. Mick noticed and never forgot. The fish-cake became symbolic.

That afternoon Phyllis turned up. My mother didn’t take to her either, not because she was coloured but because she was so Liverpool. She had her child with her. Both my grandmothers came to tea. They sat on each side of Phyllis as though she was a coloured Alice and they the Red and White Queens. Suddenly her child farted very loudly. Phyllis looked from one grandmother, severe and Jewish, to the other, severe and Christian. ‘It wasn’t me,’ she said.

My mother’s whole attitude towards jazz had been ambivalent. She didn’t mind jazz concerts, but hated the idea of us playing in dance halls. Whenever we were near Liverpool and I went home to sleep, she would ask how the concert went. When I told her it was a dance, she would always ask, ‘Did they all stop and listen when you sang?’

Mick’s mother was very much the same. In later years, whenever we were playing in a particularly empty and tatty dance hall, Mick or I would suggest that Maudie and Alice (his mother’s name) should really be there to share their sons’ triumph.

My father, with his admirable motto, ‘as long as they’re happy’, worried less, although he was convinced the jazz thing wouldn’t last. He based this assumption on the fact he had invested in a roller-skating rink during the twenties and, shortly after, the craze had died, and he had lost quite a lot of money. He died during the trad boom in 1961, amazed that it was still going on.

Even so it was my mother who arranged our first appearance in Liverpool. She was involved with a charitable institution and, following my self-interested advice, despite the active opposition of several reactionary members of the committee, she decided to raise funds during their appeals year by organising a jazz concert. This took place at the Stadium, a huge building usually devoted to boxing and all-in wrestling. She contacted the Liverpool jazz promoters of that period, two brothers. They agreed to help and booked Freddy Randall, other name bands, and a few local groups. She insisted we were to appear. They’d never heard of us, and wanted to put us on the side stage with the local groups. She said no. Either we appeared ‘in the ring’, or the whole thing was off. This is typical of my mother. She might disapprove of what her children do, but if they insist on doing it, she will fight for them like a tiger. My father called it her ‘partridge defending its young’ act. It is, I suppose, a very Jewish characteristic.

She won, but even so we were booked to appear early on. There was a huge audience – traditional jazz was experiencing its first boom – but no Mick. My father was very worried. ‘It’s a good crowd,’ I told him. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but that’s no use if Mick doesn’t turn up.’ We drove to Lime Street Station and found out that the train was late due to fog outside Rugby. At last it arrived. Up the platform strode Mick and the others, Owen’s tuba gleaming fitfully through the steam. We were in time to go on in the best spot and went down a bomb. On the strength of it we were booked to do a concert at the Picton Hall. We had achieved an entrée in the provinces.

Manchester was the next step. There jazz was in the hands of a man called Paddy McKeirnan. Unlike most of the promoters in those days he believed in jazz
as a business.
He didn’t just run a jazz club. He was the director of ‘The Lancashire Society for the Promotion of Jazz Music’. He wrote to Mick offering him a contract to appear at the Grosvenor Hotel, Manchester. It was a real contract with clauses. Mick’s acceptance began: ‘Dear legal-minded sod…’

We went down well in Manchester too. Paddy, in those days a decided puritan, was less happy about us personally. Mick asked him which of the girls fucked.

‘In Manchester,’ said Paddy, severely, ‘we don’t discuss things like that.’

Mick had stopped taking an active part in the wine business, and gone to work in a record shop in an arcade off Piccadilly.

This was a curious venture in itself. The boss was called Stephen Appleby. He had an air of languor and called everybody ‘my dear’, and at first meeting you believed that he must be a homosexual of the kind who, under a vague manner, hides a formidable and ruthless sense of business. In fact he was aggressively hetero and a compulsive husband. He fell in love with girl after girl and, if the affair lasted long enough for the previous divorce to come through, married them one after another. In principle the shop should have proved a gold-mine. It had a recording studio in the basement where it was possible for Colonials to record Christmas and New Year messages on wax (there were then no tape-recorders), or the owners of talking budgies to keep a permanent record of the cleverness of their little pets. Upstairs were the stocks of records. There was, for so small a shop, a considerable staff. A recording engineer, Mick, Sinclair Traill, and a Swedish lesbian as well as Stephen himself. The social atmosphere was lively and varied, very much at the expense of the profits. Mick and Stephen spent a great deal of time in a pub in Jermyn Street, the lesbian was usually too emotionally involved with her difficult friends to pay much attention to invoices and firm orders, the recording engineer was often upstairs with various girls at the very moment he should have been recording the budgies or the Australians.

The firm also recorded revivalist jazz bands for the private label called Tempo. It was in the little studio downstairs that Mick’s band and myself first made what the musical press of the time referred to as our ‘début on wax’. Full of scotch and surrounded by cardboard egg-boxes nailed to the walls, we produced several lamentable sides. My own contribution was a version of Bessie Smith’s ‘Take Me For A Buggy Ride’. It is almost unbelievably flat and practically all on one note. It sold quite well, and was solemnly defended and attacked in Sinclair’s
Jazz Monthly.
Later, in order to achieve more atmosphere, we recorded in a public hall. The records on this session at least simulated the echoing acoustics on those amateur discs of ancient New Orleans veterans like Bunk Johnson, which had begun to reach this country.

4

We’re Getting Paid, You Know

As a band, and much to E. L. T. Mesens’ sorrow, we were now solidly established, and worked two or three nights a week in town and quite often played the provincial jazz clubs at weekends. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, revivalist jazz gained ground as a popular music. Humph was undoubtedly the cause, but the rest of us prospered in his shadow. In most of the big provincial cities there were now enough fans to support a local jazz club, and enough casual interest to fill a small concert hall or theatre every now and then.

It was, however, the universities and art schools which provided most of the audiences. We played Cambridge under the aegis of Jimmy Asman who had become that university’s jazz critic elect. Due to their National Service, several people I had been at school with were still up. I drank gin at the beginning of the evening with Guy Neal in his rooms, and finished lying on a marble-topped pub table in a yard watching the stars spinning in the cold heavens.

At Oxford we played in a pub too, but without official sanction. The proctors raided it and the bulldogs asked Mick his name and college.

‘Who,’ he asked the trembling undergraduate organiser, ‘are these pricks in bowler hats?’

We carried the drum kit up the marble staircase of the Royal College of Art, South Kensington, under the huge canvases of babies in sinks and kitchen tables covered with cornflake packets and cheese graters that were
de rigueur
at that moment. Johnnie Minton, a regular at Humph’s, when not engaged in fisticuffs in some corner of the room, would caper wildly in front of the bandstand, and Lucian Freud, who exhibited at the Gallery, might raise a hand in greeting while staring with obsessive interest in another direction.

The music we played was more or less as before, New Orleans classics in the style of early Armstrong or Morton, and for my part blues from the Bessie Smith repertoire or the lesser singers of her period. The personnel of the band, however, began to change, mostly because the amount of work we were doing bit into working hours, and those of us who worked from nine till six found it harder to meet both our obligations.

Norman Day, the pianist who had first taken me to see Mick, had gone. His place was taken for a time by a lad from the Poly called Brian Burns. I use the word ‘lad’ advisedly. He was one of the world’s eternal students and never to be seen, even on the hottest day, without one of those endless scarves. After he had gone Johnny Parker joined us.

Johnny, younger than Mick or I, had just finished his National Service. We knew him before. He used to appear in jazz clubs smiling shyly in his neat uniform, and would sit in with us or play during the interval. He specialised in rags which he handled, as their composers intended, with delicate precision.

When he left the army, he too went to the Polytechnic in Regent Street to study chemistry. His parents lived in a semi-detached in Beckenham, and he always caught the last train home. He was very small and looked younger than he was.

The jazz atmosphere took Johnny by the collar and shook him roughly. Within the year he was a wild one. Within the year too he had dashed through every sexual stage in record time. He was almost a virgin when he left the army, and despite a rather one-sided affair with a randy NAAFI girl, had never masturbated. This he soon corrected with fanatical zeal, even announcing his intention to indulge on railway trains en route to the provinces. Then he went mad about girls and, being both small and sexually aggressive, became extremely successful.