Owning Up: The Trilogy (64 page)

We still played a few jazz clubs, mostly in the provinces and, due to the fact that several towns still wouldn’t license Sunday cinemas, there was the odd concert. Most of our jobs, however, were in dance halls.

The dance halls of Great Britain – the halls, that is, where dances are held – can be subdivided into various groups. Starting at the top are the great Palais, some, like Mecca, part of a nation-wide chain, others individually owned.

The Mecca Halls are standardised so that once you’re inside you might be anywhere in the country. They are run like military organisations in which the musicians are privates. The band-rooms are full of printed rules: no alcohol to be brought on to the premises (we were actually frisked in some places), no women allowed behind stage except for band vocalists, no fraternisation with the public.

The décor is usually Moorish in inspiration. There are strange bulbous ashtrays on thick stems, a forest of lights sprouting from the ceiling, bouncers with cauliflower ears circling the dance floor in evening dress, revolving stages and managers with safes in their offices and 1930s moustaches.

We never played Mecca jobs for the company but for organisations like university rag committees who hired the halls for one evening. The management were still inclined to treat us as though we were working for them, and once Mick had gained confidence, this led to innumerable rows.

‘We are working for the rag committee of which this is the secretary,’ he would explain icily to some officious under-manager who tapped him on the shoulder as he was drinking at the bar. Sex was another bone of contention. Once in Manchester I was caught outside the boiler house by the stoker, in my dressing-room by the manager, and finally in the bicycle shed by the caretaker. The bee-hived girl and I only made it in the end by using the band-wagon while the rest of the chaps waited patiently outside in the frosty night.

The privately-owned halls were on the whole a great improvement. Of course they very much depended on the character of the manager or owner. Some of these suffer from a Napoleon complex. The hall is their Europe, the visiting bandleader an ear which cannot refuse to listen to their grandiose schemes and delusions. Others are friendly and courteous men who ask you in for a drink after the dance and become, over the years, familiar faces in the endless repetitive nomadic round.

The décor of the dance halls outside the big chains was as varied as their owners. Some were luxurious, influenced by the Festival of Britain, given to a wall in a different colour, wallpapers of bamboo poles or grey stones, false ceilings and modern light fittings made of brass rods and candle-bulbs. Others were as bare as aeroplane hangars, or last decorated during the early picture palace era. Mick’s inevitable comment as we staggered with our cases and instruments into these was: ‘What a shit-house!’

There was also a series of halls over branches of Montague Burtons and Co-ops. There were always a great many very steep steps to drag the drum kit up.

We also played for promoters whose offices were either in London or some large provincial town, but who covered a particular area and hired halls which had other day-time functions.

Territorial Halls where the floor was marked out with white lines and there were posters showing muscular young soldiers giving a thumbs up in a jungle or diagrams of a machine gun with the parts painted different colours.

Corn exchanges, often rather beautiful nineteenth-century buildings with glass roofs and terrible acoustics. Round the walls were little wood-encased partitions with the names of cattle-food firms or grain merchants painted across the back in faded
trompe-l’oeil
Victorian lettering.

Above all the town halls, massive monuments to civic pride in St Pancras Gothic, where we played on stages big enough to seat an entire chorus and orchestra for ‘The Messiah’, and the young bloods of Huddersfield or Barnsley staggered green-faced from the bar in a vain attempt to make the gents, and were messily sick under a statue of Queen Victoria or the portrait of some bearded mayor hanging above the marble staircase.

The jazz clubs were moments of release and pleasure from this dismal round. We didn’t have to change into uniform, we could drink and smoke on the stage, above all we knew the audience would be on our side and that we would only have to play jazz.

In London, too, we made a deliberate effort to go on playing jazz for kicks. At the beginning of the week, unless we were away on a long tour, we were usually in town, and every Tuesday we played in a cellar club which catered for French students and was called ‘Le Metro’.

The club had a curved ceiling and did look rather like a tube tunnel. Behind the bandstand was painted an unconvincing metro train. The bar had Lautrec posters in it. The students, like most French students, were conceited and bloody. We did draw a small audience of our own, however. Some of the more middle-aged jazz fans who liked a drink when they were listening used to come. Also a few modernists used to drop in and even sit in, although this had a disastrous effect on Paul Simpson who immediately began to play bebop.

There was also a ballad singer originally from Liverpool. His professional name was Mike Lawrence, and he used to sing an occasional number with the band.

Mike had rather taken up with a young pretty London girl called Doreen Porter. She had one of those sulky little faces, blonde hair, and a stocky peasant’s body like a Maillol. Mike wasn’t very interested in her but I was, and she used to come back to Margaretta Terrace sometimes and sleep in my bed, but she’d never go any further.

One night I had just finished singing a number when one of the proprietors, a Frenchman who looked like a small hawk wearing glasses, came up and told me that there was a lady and gentleman at the bar who wanted to see me.

I walked towards the bar convinced I was going to be bought a drink on the strength of my singing, and wearing my ‘well thank you very much’ face. In fact it was Doreen’s mum and dad.

Mrs Porter was a small woman with an acid lemon-sucking face and one of those tight smiles which indicate anger rather than amusement. Her husband was a mild and bullied man who seemed very embarrassed.

‘Are you George Melly?’ said Mrs Porter. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of unsavoury fact.

‘You’ve been knocking around with our Doreen,’ she went on, ‘and it’s going to stop.’

‘Now, Ethel,’ said her husband nervously, ‘don’t upset yourself…’

‘Be quiet,’ she snapped at him, and then turned on me again.

‘I know your type. Doreen has been well brought up. I don’t want her getting mixed up with people like you. She had a very decent boy. Well, she’s given him up. Now when she’s twenty-one she can do what she wants, but she’s only eighteen, and I’m telling you now that…’

I’d been getting quite angry during all this. I stopped her and said that if Doreen wanted to do what she wanted that was all right by me, but that if Doreen wanted to go on seeing me, I intended to go on seeing her.

She hadn’t expected any answer. Years of bullying her husband had given her the idea that no man ever answered back, She tried another tack.

‘I’ll have you know that I shall inform the police. I shall find out where you live and…’

‘Make an idiot of yourself,’ I told her. I decided the moment had come to put an end to this conversation so I offered them a drink. Before she could stop him her husband accepted a brown ale.

‘There’s someone else I want to see. Another one who’s been messing about with our Doreen. He’s called Mike Lawrence…’

I could see Mike in the middle distance. What was more he saw us with drinks in our hands presumably bought by this couple, and thought it was very mean of me, a fellow singer, not to row him in. Smiling fixedly – he had very white teeth and knew it – he weaved through the jiving couples. I tried, without success, to motion him away with a hand behind my back, but he took no notice.

He came and stood by us waiting for an introduction. I didn’t make it. Finally he introduced himself.

Mrs Porter turned on him. He couldn’t think of anything to say. He just stood there grinning fixedly.

While Mrs Porter was attacking Mike, Mr Porter turned to me and apologised. ‘She gets very ’et up does Ethel,’ he explained. ‘I’m a man,’ he went on, ‘I know our Doreen is a very attractive girl. I can see your point of view, but you must understand. A mother’s feelings, that’s what it is, you see…’

‘Come on, Fred,’ said Mrs Porter, ‘we’re going.’

‘At least you’ve got something to say for yourself,’ she snapped at me. ‘Not like ’im. Grinning like a great fool.’ She swept out. Mr Porter handed me his business card. He was a heating specialist.

Four minutes after they’d gone Doreen came in stoned out of her mind. She walked up to the bandstand and threw her arms round Mick and kissed him. He was obviously surprised at this because Doreen had made it quite clear that she didn’t fancy him at all. He also looked very sheepish because Pam was in the bar. She saw what happened and came storming up to him and hit him as hard as she could on the head with her handbag.

‘Fuck me,’ he said later, ‘just my luck. Hit over the head because a girl who doesn’t even fancy me kisses me when she’s pissed.’

I took Doreen home that night and we did it.

Doreen and I were together for some months. At first she was fascinated by the people I knew in Chelsea, but after a bit she told me that all that arty chat drove her mad.

‘I only like you in bed,’ she said, ‘and I only like you talking when you’re saying dirty things when you’re coming.’

Eventually I went off for a fortnight’s work in Scotland and although Doreen had said that she hoped I’d still want her when I got back, she didn’t ring me up again.

*

Mick and Pam had left their old flat and moved into a room in a flat round the corner from me. The owners were a couple called John and Buddy. John was a very sweet shy man with glasses and a moustache who liked to play the trumpet. Buddy was a big positive woman whose charm and personal kindness just about made up for her extreme right-wing views. Even so we were always having terrible shout-ups, especially after several of the huge gin and tonics which were as much part of the ambience as the click of the backgammon counters and the placing of bets over the telephone. Buddy also had two alsatians. Mick loves dogs, especially large dogs, with a passion verging on the unbalanced. He gathers them up in his arms and licks their faces enthusiastically. He calls them ‘lovely old mushes’. The near loss of an ear lobe not long ago has made no difference. I don’t mind dogs providing I know them well, but I treat them with respect, and will cross the road rather than pass a chow or boxer out on its own. Buddy’s dogs were mother and son. The male was a rather soppy old thing, but the mother had been trained as a police dog. She was called Misty Mum, and I was terrified of her. Due to her conditioning, if you shook bands with Buddy or lit a cigarette for her Misty Mum would leap up and seize your wrist between her jaws. She was also a good house-dog as they say.

Mick found it hard to get up in those days, and one of my duties was to come round and tell him it was time for the band meet. I would try and get there early enough for us to catch a bus into town, but usually found that, by the time he was ready to leave, it was necessary to take a taxi. Mick thought I was very mean to only contribute the equivalent of my bus fare towards this.

One morning Pam, Buddy and John all being out, and my knocks and rings producing no signs of life, I pushed open the sitting-room window and threw a leg over the sill. I was there for an hour before the door of the room opened and Mick looked in. Misty Mum’s jaws held my calf quite gently, but her low growling and the slight increase in pressure when I tried to move or cry out convinced me that it would be better to remain still and silent.

Mick and Pam weren’t at Buddy and John’s very long. One night after a concert they had a terrible row, and Mick gave Pam a black eye in the hall and rushed out into the night.

I was just about to eat a delicious plateful of cold roast beef in the kitchen. Buddy comforted Pam, and John asked me to go out and find Mick and tell him he mustn’t come back. I put down my knife and fork and walked along the embankment. Mick was leaning on the wall staring at the oily water. I told him and said he could stay the night with me. Then I went back to see what was happening.

Pam had gone to bed. John said he realised it was nothing to do with me, and gave me a large brandy. On the table was my plate of beef, and I was starving. Even so I felt it would be heartless to suggest I eat it, so I drank the brandy and left.

For a few days Pam stayed there and said she would never go back to Mick. She did, of course, and shortly afterwards they found a flat in Lisle Street behind Leicester Square.

This street, with its electrical spare parts shops and very old whores, became so much a part of the Mulligan legend that you couldn’t imagine him living anywhere else.

6

Lovely Digs

In the afternoons we used to drink in ‘The Mandrake’. It had started as a chess club, but gradually it had absorbed cellar after cellar under the pavement of Meard Street. A good club is its members. The two bosses, Boris, huge and taciturn, and Teddy Turner, volatile and Jewish, accepted jazzmen as contributory. In the evenings, after the pubs were shut, we were encouraged to sit in, but it was the afternoons I liked. Under today’s regulations there are far fewer afternoon drinking clubs. This deprives people of a keen anti-social pleasure: the knowledge that you are drinking and getting drunk when everybody else is working. I enjoyed the slow idiotic and repetitive conversations or arguments. The barmaids turning into goddesses, the feeling that time was not a member.

Our other stronghold was the ‘A and A Club’. According to the yellowing rules by the entrance, ‘A and A’ stood for authors and actors, but in fact those who used the premises were mostly taxi-drivers, clip-joint hostesses, waiters, small-time criminals and jazz musicians.