Owning Up: The Trilogy (84 page)

Still it was a monotonous and dreary time. The airwaves were turgid with banjos, programmes like ‘Easy Beat’ and ‘Saturday Club’ were clogged with trad, but at least these were only intended to reflect popular taste, not to direct it. More lamentably, and much to the impotent chagrin of its producer, Terry Henebery, ‘Jazz Club’ itself, until then a genuine platform for every kind of jazz, received orders from above to limit itself exclusively to trad.

In fairness, I myself had nothing to complain about financially during the slow ascension of trad and its three-year omnipotence. The discovery by the BBC that I could compere led initially to an occasional appearance on Jazz Club in this capacity and eventually to a more or less resident post. Furthermore as a trad band became obligatory on every pop programme, I was booked to compere a lunchtime potpourri called ‘Bandbox’ which lasted for well over a year, and later, after the Mulligan band had actually folded but before the trad bubble burst, a similar rush-hour mic-mac called ‘Pop-along’. There were also occasional plum engagements for the Corporation like compèring a big jazz festival at the Albert Hall, and as a direct result of working regularly for the BBC, I was offered a fair amount of work as MC for commercial promoters both at jazz festivals and concerts. Whenever possible, Mick arranged it so that I was able to take advantage of these offers, which anyway frequently worked both ways. If a promoter wanted me as compere, he was often prepared to take Mick and the band on as part of the bill.

Considering that the Mulligan band played a long way outside the accepted trad idiom, they did a lot of broadcasts. Mick’s personality was the reason for this. He remained modest and helpful without in any way crawling, and the producers, fed up with bandleaders on the make who were willing if necessary to kiss their rings and bandleaders who
had
made it doing the big-time, enjoyed working with him. He also thought to buy them a drink in the break between rehearsal and transmission, a social gesture which never seemed to occur to most of his colleagues.

Jimmy Grant, the producer of ‘Saturday Club’, was a great favourite of Mick’s and mine. He cottoned on so completely to the Appleby legend. At broadcasts only Mick and I were handed scripts, and Pete, giving the excuse that he needed one to remember the order of the programme, but in fact because not to have a script of his own was an affront to his ego, used to ask if there was a spare one. Jimmy, Mick and I used to have a giggle about this, and eventually Jimmy arranged that when his secretary came down from the control box at the beginning of rehearsal with a script for Mick and me, she also gave one to Pete with his name written across the top. Jimmy’s expression of blissful mischief as he watched, from behind the glass panel, Pete’s pseudo-casual acceptance of this proof of his importance endeared him to us for ever.

We also continued to record. In 1958, for instance, Decca, finally convinced that my commercials were uncommercial, allowed me to make an LP of jazz and blues material. This was recorded live in the upper room of a public house called ‘The Railway Arms’ in West Hampstead in front of an invited audience. It was a very enjoyable evening, and some of the tracks, those recorded early on, were not too bad. Towards the end of the session everything got rather out of control. Among the public was a contingent from Finch’s in the Fulham Road including a small blonde lady of indeterminate age who became extremely drunk. For one thing she demanded to sing. ‘When can I do my song, Micky-Mick-Mick?’ she kept on shouting in between takes. ‘Micky-Mick-Mick’ told her to shut her hole but to no effect. During the interval she invaded the band-room where the company had provided a few bottles of the hard stuff for the Mulligan band and guests. Here the blonde lady decided to take her clothes off. While this was taking place, the man who had brought her was roaming the public rooms looking for her, and chanced to land up outside the door to the musicians’ bar at the same moment that I was unsuccessfully trying to effect an entrance. I’d been for a pee, but didn’t see why this should bar me from the free drinks, and yet, although I banged and shouted, it was evident that someone was leaning against the door on the inside to stop me getting in. I walked across to the opposite wall and charged, but even though the door gave a little, it slammed shut again before I could take advantage of it. At this point the man, suspicious and rightly so that his girlfriend was somehow the cause of my difficulty, came to my assistance in what I imagined was a purely altruistic spirit. We charged together, the door flew open and there was the blonde lady flashing her tits. Mick somehow managed to blame me. ‘Typical,’ he said – he was on the verge of the ‘how’s your married life going’ cycle. The girl, seeing her boyfriend, covered her breasts with her hands in the ‘September Morn’ position.

‘You always spoil everything,’ she told him petulantly.

He told her he was going home at once and was she coming? She said no, and on one of the tracks of the LP, a song called ‘Farewell to Storyville’ which was recorded towards the end of the evening, and unwisely included audience participation, she can be heard joining in the chori half a tone sharp and half a beat in arrears.

We had to re-record several of the numbers we’d done in the latter half of the evening. We did this in the Decca studio proper and they dubbed in the atmosphere and applause later, but due to the difficulty of reassembling an actual audience, ‘Farewell to Storyville’ had to stand. It’s a pretty rough old noise.

I made several EPs too during the late fifties, and the band recorded several LPs and EPs also, some with me on the vocals, some purely instrumental. My own records never sold very well, in fact I was usually a little in debt to the companies because my royalties never quite covered my advances. Recently however the issue of an LP called ‘British Jazz in the Fifties’, an anthology which included a couple of tracks by me, did surprisingly well, and clear of debt at last, I received a cheque the other day for three pounds fifteen.

As well as recording and broadcasting, I occasionally appeared on the box; in fact about once a year somebody would decide I was to become a television personality on one level or another. Unfortunately, or possibly fortunately, I come over on the telly as camp as Chloë and look drugged up to the eyeballs to boot, and after a single appearance I’d be dropped until I was rediscovered twelve months later. Still Mick and I had really little cause to complain at the way things went for us. We never really made the big time, but then to have done so, or even tried to do so, would have meant changing the whole band sound, which from Mick’s point of view would have meant far too much work. He was lucky here to be able to count on unexpected support from Frank and Ian, not because they were afraid of rehearsal – quite the reverse – but because they detested the trad noise.

Once, during a sticky period financially which happened to correspond with the time Chris Barber had begun to make it, Mick actually flirted with the idea df seeking the flesh-pots. This came out during one of the drunken band discussions in the wagon on the way back to London. Everybody was putting forward different ways of increasing the band’s earning power, solutions like more rehearsals, individual practising, new numbers, in fact all the suggestions guaranteed to put the conductor into a filthy temper. He was sitting in the front seat next to Appleby, saying nothing, but with his head sunk into the nylon fur collar of his pale grey shortie quilted mac, an unlikely garment he had bought because it was the first thing he’d been shown in a shop in Charing Cross Road when he’d been caught out in a cloud burst. Everybody’s remarks were of course aimed at Mick although delivered in a rather serious detached way as though part of an abstract discussion. Eventually Mick got the needle.

‘Only one way to make it these days,’ he growled. ‘That’s to get a banjo. If you’ve got a banjo you’re unassailable. Unassailable.’

A great cry of protest arose from the back of the wagon, but Mick wouldn’t budge. As always when he was drunk and angry, a single idea took over. Whatever anybody else said, he countered it with the unassailability of the banjo. Furthermore, he finally insisted, he was going to get a banjo player. Of course none of us took him seriously, but Mick actually did get a banjo player, or at least a guitar player who said he was willing to play banjo.

His name was Bill Bramwell, and he was well known as a bass player too, and had played jazz all over the world since 1945, and had composed several TV jingles, but work was rather thin at that moment, and as he could manage to play with us and fit in most of his outside jobs as well, he decided to join us for a bit. He also looked on it as an opportunity to play some jazz. For the first week or two Bill did actually bring along the banjo he’d bought as his passport into the band, and even played it on a few numbers, but he soon dropped it, and later even took to amplifying his guitar. Mick didn’t mind. His honour had been satisfied, and like the rest of us he much preferred guitar anyway.

Bill was a bit older than the rest of us. He came from the same generation of jazzmen as Lennie Felix and Dill Jones. He was lesé blase then we were, and had managed to retain much more enthusiasm for playing. On listening to himself on playback he would sometimes say how good he was. This, of course, was a great source of malicious delight to the conductor.

The very first week after he’d joined us we pulled up at a garage somewhere in South London on the way home from a job in Gillingham, and Bill told us that he’d thoroughly enjoyed the evening’s session. ‘You all love each other,’ he explained, ‘that’s why you swing. You can’t play jazz unless you love each other.’ It was remarks like this which convinced Ian Christie that he and Bill were on different wavelengths and as time went on a considerable and mutual antipathy built up. Bill had recently married. He was Welsh working class himself, but his wife came from a county family in Devon who were also Roman Catholic and there’d been a grand wedding with Bill in a grey topper. Bill was rather impressed with his new relations and was always telling stories of what a marvellous old gentleman his father-in-law was. Squire of the manor and so on, but completely natural. Conservative and a bit crusty but very kind at heart. This also used to drive Ian mad.

Usually however they treated each other politely but distantly; but one night in the wagon a splendid explosion took place. Ian was in the back seat, Bill in the middle seat. Ian had said that what was really important was to be yourself. Whether the remark was aimed at Bill or not I can’t remember, but Bill thought it was, and turning round mimicked Ian’s accent.

‘Be yourself,’ he said, ‘you’ve got to be yourself.’

Ian took no notice and went on talking, but every time he paused to draw breath, which was admittedly not often, Bill would say it again. Eventually Ian got the pin, and remembering that Bill had once told us that he had been to a psychoanalyst who used to knit while he was in session, began to reply in kind. Whenever Bill said anything Ian would mutter ‘knit, knit, knit’ in a manic frenzy. Eventually Bill and Ian faced each other over the back of the seat, and crimson with rage shouted in each other’s face:

‘Be yourself! Be yourself!’

‘Knit, knit! Knit, knit, knit! Knit, knit, knit, knit!’

For Frank Parr on the other hand Bill Bramwell appeared to be a figure of fun. Because of the existence of an old blues singer called ‘Bumble Bee Slim’, he called Bill ‘Bumble Bee Fat’. This name took into account not only Bill’s comparative rotundity, but his habit of humming loudly to himself when taking a solo. Frank also removed any photograph of bald, plump, bespectacled men from the pages of the newspaper to take them home where he claimed to stick them in his ‘Bill Bramwell Book’. Bill of course was bald, plump and bespectacled, and did bear a remarkable resemblance to most of the judges, business men, criminals, or anonymous figures Frank tore out for his collection. I’ve never actually examined ‘The Bill Bramwell Book’ but knowing Frank I dare say it existed.

Bill was the only member of the band to outwit the conductor’s financial one-upmanship. We were meant to be paid weekly, but as this meant sitting down during drinking and dart-playing time, and working out what we were owed in relation to what we’d had in subs, Mick did everything he could to avoid settling up, preferring to peel off a tenner from the wad of crumpled notes he kept stuffed in his back pocket with the inevitable query: ‘Will this do for the mo, cock?’

As a result none of us knew exactly where we stood, and when eventually we did bully him into settling up, were likely to forget the five we’d had in the Working Men’s Club during the interval at St Albans three weeks before, or the fifteen we’d taken on the way back from Nottingham. The conductor, with his photographic memory, never forgot and alleviated the boredom of paying out by making us feel guilty and dishonest. In my case he would rub more salt in the wound by calling me Maudie, a habit dating back to the extra fishcake, and implying that my mother’s spirit watched over me at all times.

‘Forgotten about the fistful when we stopped at that boozer outside Leicester, Maudie?’ he’d say coldly. Maudie was also meant to be behind it when I had a good night at poker.

Bill Bramwell’s counter-ploy was to never ask for settlement. On the contrary he made a point of accepting subs at all times, but deliberately confused the issue by asking for odd sums like three pounds ten, or twelve pounds and a cheque for another eight. In the end it was Mick who had to ask Bill if he’d like to straighten out and, as he said later, ‘I can’t remember what the bugger’s had. I’m sure I was done’.

Getting paid was known as the eagle shitting. ‘Can the eagle shit tonight?’ somebody, usually Frank Parr, would ask. It was a great satisfaction to us all when Mick noticed that the little street off Piccadilly where his bank was situated was called Eagle Place.

Mick and I liked Bill Bramwell very much. He was kind and funny. His humour depended on an exploitation of childishness which seemed very droll in relation to his rather adult and serious appearance. He was good at the sustained anecdote too, piling absurdity on absurdity until it was quite painful to go on laughing. To his disadvantage he snored very loudly. When in the Middles-brough area we used to stay with a clergyman and his wife. He was a nice and funny man with a wooden hand – or rather two: one for weekdays and a smarter one for Sundays – and he was, as he put it, ‘Resident Rev’ at a reform school. He had run the jazz club in Newmarket before taking this post and that’s how we’d got to know him. When we stayed with him in the small modern house provided by the detention school for its incumbent, there was plenty to drink, his wife cooked an enormous amount to eat, and we had a ball. During one of our visits we didn’t go to bed until it was time for the Resident Rev to conduct Holy Communion. When he came back for breakfast he was met by one of his children in a state of panic. ‘Daddy,’ said the little girl, ‘there’s a lion in one of the bedrooms!’ It was Bill Bramwell snoring.