Owning Up: The Trilogy (76 page)

The revivalists accused the traditionalists of sentimentality, of basing their music on the recordings of very old men past their prime, for it was not until the early forties that the surviving veterans were rediscovered and recorded, and they claimed furthermore that those musicians who
had
stayed in New Orleans had done so only because they were inferior in the first place, and that the music had reached its golden age in the hands of those who had been good enough to go to Chicago, and inventive enough to take the music a step further.

The traditionalists put forward no such reasoned arguments. Like most fundamentalists they just knew they were right. Real New Orleans Jazz had never left New Orleans. Everything which had followed was less pure, less moving. The very genius of men like Armstrong had betrayed and ruined the music from which they sprang. ‘Back,’ as Ken Colyer put it, ‘to the roots.’

Modern jazz was of course outside this dispute. Modern jazz was like the Roman Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation. It had developed historically from the origins of jazz but had, in the eyes of the early revivalists, become decadent and it was time to return to the source. The revivalists represent in this parallel the Church of England. Later the traditionalists arose, like the nonconformist sects, to accuse the revivalists themselves of decadence, of meaningless ritual, of elaboration. Back to the Bible – jazz from New Orleans; Away with Cope and Mitre – solos and arrangements; Down with the Bishops – Armstrong and Oliver.

Ken Colyer was initially responsible for this revolution. It was he who established the totems and taboos of traditional jazz, the pianoless rhythm section, the relentless four-to-the-bar banjo, the loud but soggy thump of the bass drum. Even so Ken by himself would never have effected the trad boom. He was too uncompromising, too much a purist. Picasso, accused of ugliness, pointed out that the inventor is always ugly because he has had to make something which wasn’t there before, but that afterwards others can come along and make what he had invented beautiful. It was rather like this. Ken invented British traditional jazz. It wasn’t exactly ugly – on the contrary, it was quite often touchingly beautiful – but it was clumsy. It needed prettifying before it could catch on. Chris Barber was there to perform this function.

Chris Barber had been around for a long time. He had a great love of jazz, but towards it as towards everything else, his approach was pedantic in the older and less critical meaning of the word. He was a record collector who knew the matrix number, personnel, and date of recording of every record in his immaculately filed collection. He had studied trombone at the Royal College of Music. His other interest was fast cars, and he carried over into jazz a somewhat mechanistic approach to the music. He also possessed a formidable will to succeed, and a complete belief in his ability to do so.

During the early days of the revival, Chris had a band which was based exactly, even to the presence of two cornets, on the King Oliver sound. He was converted to fundamentalism by Ken Colyer, and when that holy fool returned from New Orleans in 1953, it was Chris Barber who had a band ready for him. Within a month or two Ken sacked the whole band, or the whole band resigned – both versions were about, depending on who was telling the story – and Chris added Pat Halcox on trumpet and became, for the second time, a bandleader in his own right. The formation of the Barber Band in 1954 seemed to us at that time of purely parochial interest. Later it was proved to have been a watershed.

It is a temptation to look backwards, to select those events which showed the way things were going, and imagine that they appeared significant at the time. This is just not true. During the same months in which the Colyer-Barber schism was taking place, a whole new world was in the process of being born, and we were entirely unaware of it. I can’t remember the first time I heard the word ‘teenager’. I don’t know at what point I began to take in the teenage thing. I doubt many other people can either.

It was certainly through its musical aspect that we did begin to realise what was happening. We had heard the Bill Haley record of ‘Rock Around the Clock’, and decided that it was a drag. I can remember asking who was the white blues singer somebody had put on the gramophone at a party, and learning with some surprise that it was Elvis Presley. When Haley’s film was shown, we read in the papers about fans rioting, and had taken in that the ten records which were selling best in any one week were being printed in the
Melody Maker
in order of popularity. But at first none of these things seemed very different from what we were used to. Fans were nothing new. Dickie Valentine for example had a fan club which held an annual reunion at the Hammersmith Palais. Hit records were a fact. We never bought them, but we knew they existed. What we failed to understand was the age of the new audience. Dickie Valentine’s fans were between eighteen and twenty-five. The records of Donald Peers or ‘Winnie’ Atwell were bought by Mums and Dads, but the new audience, the multitude outside, the secret society preparing a revolution in ‘the Two Is’, Old Compton Street, were sixteen or less. There had, of course, always been young jazz fans, but they’d just liked jazz and happened to be young. What was different about the teenagers was that they were young first and foremost, and everything they did and said, everything they liked or rejected, was useful in that it identified them
as a group
. At that time the boys were faced with conscription. This meant that they knew their ‘real life’ as adults was not in question. Between leaving school and going into the army, they could live out a fantasy life, their pockets full of money from a dead-end job. Circling round them and quick to move in were various interested adults – agents, record companies, clothing manufacturers, concert promoters – but the invention of the teenage thing was initially the work of the teenagers themselves. It was they who chose Haley and Presley as their heroes, and it was from their ranks that they threw up and deified their first British idol, Tommy Steele,
né
Hicks.

It was through Tommy that I first began to understand it all. Following the modest success of my recording of ‘Frankie and Johnny’, I had been put under contract by Decca. As whatever fans I did have were jazz fans and had presumably bought my record for that reason, I suppose it was inevitable that the company decided I should record more commercial material. My first attempt to conquer the pop market was a Dixieland version of ‘Kingdom Coming’, the American civil war song. I substituted the word ‘Brothers’ for the word ‘Darkies’ throughout, and Mick added a tuba and flute to the instrumentation, but despite our efforts to compromise it only sold about a hundred copies. My next shot was a comic song of the twenties called ‘My Canary’s Got Circles Under His Eyes’, and this too was a complete failure. It was due to its release that I came to meet Tommy Steele.

Television, still confined to one channel and furthermore considered an essentially working-class entertainment, provided the occasion. The Birmingham studio, in advance of its time, had a weekly programme featuring the new releases and illustrating them visually by what was then an unheard of innovation; the artists themselves miming to their own records. The week that ‘Canary’ was issued, Tommy Steele had a new one out too. It was called, as far as I can remember, ‘Rock with the Cavemen’ and wasn’t to become one of his great hits, but he’d already recorded ‘Singing the Blues’ and was a very big deal indeed. The only thing was I’d never heard of him. I didn’t listen to pop music at all in those days except by accident, and although I’m sure there must have been a lot about him in the
Melody Maker
, I didn’t read the pop pages there either. He, in his turn, hadn’t heard of me. I don’t know which of us was the more surprised to discover that neither of us was aware of the other’s existence.

After we’d finished the first run-through, I thought it would be friendly to ask this fresh-faced lad across the road for a drink. His manager, a very astute young man called John Kennedy, came with us. Tommy drank orangeade. John Kennedy said he’d have a beer. ‘Pint?’ I asked. He accepted, and was told off by Tommy whose Dad had told him it was common to drink pints. Tommy asked me if it was my first record. I said it wasn’t, and asked him if it was his. He told me it wasn’t either. He then suggested that if I was to be a success in show biz it would be as well to dress a bit more sharp. He put this to me with such charm that I couldn’t take offence. He asked me what sort of car I had. I told him I hadn’t got one. He looked at me with the sort of pity usually reserved for the badly deformed and offered to run me back to town after the show. We were at the Ferry that night, and I accepted immediately. We did the transmission and were back in London in just over two hours, a rather terrifying experience in those pre-Mi days.

Sitting next to Tommy in his powerful open car, aware of his heavy gold watch, his strange but immaculate clothing, his complete confidence in himself, his cocky innocence, I found myself puzzled and fascinated by him. When I got to the Ferry, I tried to explain about him to the rest of the band, but they hadn’t heard of him either. It was a good session. The place was full and enthusiastic. We all drank quite a lot, and in the second interval I had a knee tremble under the canal bridge. By the end of the evening I had forgotten about Tommy Steele.

But not for long. During the next few weeks I saw his name everywhere. This always seems to happen. You hear of somebody for the first time, and from then on can’t open a newspaper without seeing their name. It’s a kind of magic.

A month later we shared a concert bill with Tommy in a cinema somewhere on the southern outskirts of London. We did the first half, and nothing happened at all, even Pete’s drum solo won no more than token applause. The audience was not hostile. It was just that we didn’t seem to be there. We were rather puzzled and a bit hurt. I saw Tommy in the interval. He was very friendly.

‘ ’Ow’s “Canary” going then?’ he asked.

One of the band knew the alto player in his group. He was a modernist playing rock and roll for the money. This he felt entitled him to a good moan-up.

‘I used to be a musician,’ he told us in the pub, ‘but now I’m just a fucking acrobat!’

I was curious enough to go back behind stage to watch the opening of the second half. I saw that the ex-musical acrobat stepped, by mistake, on the plug connecting Tommy’s guitar with the amplifier. He didn’t own up, and when Tommy switched on his instrument, it didn’t work.

‘ ’Ere, me guitar’s broke!’ he cried in anguish.

The interval was extended a further five minutes while it was mended. During this delay a low continuous hum began to rise from the auditorium. It was like a hive of bees getting ready to swarm. I looked through the peep-hole and saw with some surprise how young the audience were. Furthermore most of them were girls.

The moment the curtain went up a high-pitched squeaking and shrieking started. I was absolutely amazed. After a couple of numbers I left and went back to the pub. The band was playing darts and Frank Parr was getting quite drunk. The orgiastic cries of worship inside the cinema were perfectly audible, and this moved him to prophesy.

‘You hear that!’ he announced as he swayed about, ‘that’s the death of jazz. We’ve had it. In six months we’ll all be in the bread line!’

When the concert finished, thousands of girls streamed out of the cinema and clustered round the stage door. Frank leaned against the door of the saloon bar and watched this spectacle.

‘The death of jazz,’ he reiterated, ‘rock and roll, the beginning of the end, and he’ll have us all in the bread line!’

Frank’s pessimism was exaggerated, but there was no doubt that rock and roll did give traditional jazz a hammering from which it took a year to recover. The big Festival Hall concerts came to an end, and so did the fortnightly concerts in the smaller recital hall in the same building. These, held under the auspices of the NJF, came under various headings based on the musical style of the groups involved. ‘Back to New Orleans’ featured either Ken or Chris; ‘Dixieland Revisited’ either Alex or ourselves, and there was also a less well patronised ‘Modern Jazz Workshop’. Rock and roll put an end to all this. Modern jazz had a small, if perceptive and faithful, audience anyway, and its exponents were resentfully accustomed to neglect. It was the rest of us who felt betrayed, and the Mulligan band began to suspect, as they copied down in their diaries the increasingly empty date-sheet for those months, that perhaps Frank had been right after all.

But we didn’t starve, and we didn’t have to give up. The jazz-club audiences, older at that time than during the trad boom of the early sixties, remained faithful enough to give us some work in town, and we found ourselves booked in again at some of the venues we used to play irt our very early days. Furthermore, the north of England, always resistant to fads which they thought of as originating in the south, continued to support jazz on a comparatively generous scale. We still played The Bodega regularly for Paddy, and sometimes the whole band, sometimes Mick and me as guest artists, were featured on the bill of some extremely successful concerts which he promoted in Manchester and elsewhere under the all-embracing title of ‘Jazz Unlimited’. Finally most of the dance halls found it uneconomic to employ rock groups except as an occasional gimmick. They could only play for twenty minutes at a time, and they drew in a young audience who alienated the regular ballroom dancers, so we won out there.

A sign of the times were the large notices:
‘no jiving, no rock and roll
.’ which appeared prominently displayed in the various dance-halls up and down the country.

Even at the height of its popularity, rock and roll was not unchallenged. There was also skiffle, a bastardised rather folksy music with a strong country and western flavour and a preference for the material of the great Negro folk singer, Huddie Ledbetter.

Its history is typical of the kind of
accident
that seems to operate in the popular field, and is the opposite of the imaginary Machiavellian manipulation of taste which most people think of as the way it works. Of course when something does become popular there is any amount of exploitation, but that is rather different.