Slowing Down (11 page)

Pete, however, in no way tried to dissuade John and me
from joining Jack’s new agency, with its smart office in Charing Cross Road.

And so we continued to play at Ronnie’s, when the stupid lights come on each year in Oxford Street, and Soho is suddenly one-way and almost impenetrable. For John most likely, for me certainly, our first appearance had been something of a miracle. Since I’d been a jazz-hooked adolescent I had dreamed of singing into the small hours in a famous appreciative jazz nightclub and being driven home in a taxi through the almost empty streets. Now, with what the surrealists called ‘the certainty of hazard’, it was happening – and still is!

8. Up at Ronnie’s

I have appeared for over thirty years at Ronnie Scott’s, that is to say over a third of my life, covering my involuntary arrival in the suburbs of old age and fairly soon, I fear, the city centre itself.

For those who have never visited the club (those who have may skip this passage, as no description can cap the reality), you enter under a neon sign through two big glass doors. You arrive in the comparatively large expanse of the lobby. It holds on the right a desk where you can buy or book your tickets and order a taxi (not always instant). Then, a low table with an unexpected vase of beautiful flowers, and a leather sofa and armchair. On the other side of the foyer, round the corner, is a cloakroom, and then a doorway and staircase down to the loos and the downstairs bar.

This area is policed by a number of minders. ‘Policed’ is too stern a word – they are in general welcoming and of considerable charm. After so long they have become my friends, especially their ‘captain’, a big, handsome bearded man with a deep and beautiful voice, and we embrace every night.

My only occasional difference of opinion has been with the doorman. If the club is full and the street holds many people who hope for returns or the chance to stand at the bar once those who have booked are seated, he lets them dribble in, cold and, if it’s raining, damp too. I am allowed
a certain number of guests and invariably leave their names both at the desk and with the competent and beautiful young woman who holds an identical list and shows guests to their tables.
But
the doorman has no such list and quite often during our last gig my guests, despite protesting, were stuck out there for ages too. The doorman complains they don’t let him have a list. They say they do. Well, next Christmas I’ll get it sorted.

There were many quite comical clashes between staff and punters in those early days, perhaps understandably in that most of the former were convinced bop-lovers, the apotheosis of ‘cool’. (Not a new word at all, kids. It was coined to establish the difference between what the boppers were playing and the ‘hot’ jazz which preceded them.) Well, today the bitter war has ended in a sort of truce: all schools, or most of them, admire the masters of mainstream.

Up a few steps and you come into the main body of the club itself, a fair-sized room with pink shades low over the tables – indeed the general effect is of the colour rose. There are tables of different sizes covered in dark red cloths, some suitable for a couple, others which can accommodate six or more. It’s quite dark and the serving staff use torches to illuminate the usually reasonable bills. The artists are picked out by spotlights.

In front of the stage is a no-smoking well. Behind it, raised behind a brass rail, is the main seating area, leading right back almost to the entrance wall. To the right and left are two smaller seating areas, the one on the left backed by the long bar individually lit, and on the right an area known rather unfairly perhaps as ‘the graveyard’, although if seated there you can see the musicians in profile.

Behind the stage is the artistes’ rather cramped dressing-room with a chaise longue and several chairs. There is a sink and, up a few stairs, a loo. For a long time this housed only an Elsan. Then it was locked (health inspectors?) and most of us, if not fanatically fastidious, in an emergency used the basin, with the exception perhaps of the great and alas late Ella Fitzgerald. Finally, along a short corridor, is the rather cluttered office with a big desk behind which sits Pete King, looking magisterial but usually friendly like a good guy in Dickens. There are TV sets in both dressing-room and office.

There is, of course, a sound and lighting cubicle, and on stage stands a very grand and frequently tuned piano. The walls throughout are a collage of framed photographs. I can’t think of anything I’ve left out except that, after the club shuts at three, they turn on the full bare-bulbed lighting system to drive out the few punters reluctant to leave. It’s so depressing it usually works. I think all clubs are like old tarts, sad under full lighting. John Betjeman wrote a poem about one. It began

I walked into the night-club in the morning;

There was kummel on the handle of the door.

I’ve encountered no kummel, except behind the two bars in a bottle, but he’s caught the rather depressing, brightly lit ambience perfectly.

To pin down the audience at Ronnie’s is impossible, in that it depends on who is appearing. If the music is avant garde it draws serious musicians and some rather sparse fans who listen intently so as to grasp and understand what they
are hearing. A mainstream attraction fills the club with those who, as adolescents, wound up their gramophones to listen with admiring attention to the innovative masters of their youth. As for classicbop, its publicare those who were originally drawn to Charlie Parker and his ilk after the war.

And us? Well, we are the only representatives of what the bald midget at the desk called ‘some little Dixie group’, not that either John Chilton or Digby Fairweather would thank you for that. ‘Dixie’ John’s quartet was indeed small, but for Digby, with seven musicians including himself, that ‘little’ is surely an understatement.

The Christmas season fills Soho with ravers of both sexes and quite a number stagger into Ronnie’s, which is open late. There are office parties too, youngsters whose parents or even grandparents talk warmly of me, and above all, contemporaries or near-contemporaries who often open a conversation with the dread phrase, ‘I haven’t seen you since…’ As ‘since’ tends to be far away and long ago, I use John’s mild put-down (although with a friendly smile), ‘You didn’t like it much, then?’

This audience can be volatile and thoughtless and in the past those who want to hear have frequently complained about the steady volume of conversation (being deaf I was less aware of it), but I must say now that I sit in a chair to sing at them, they have become in the main much quieter.

There are exceptions, of course. The night the din drove the already depressed Ronnie from the stage at the beginning of his jokes was one such, but it can be handled. John Chilton gave a devastating riposte to a single lout shouting the odds: ‘Don’t pay any attention. It’s his first visit to London and he is over-excited by the big red buses.’

These days I have evolved my own formula for vocal mayhem. I start off by saying, ‘This is not a church. There is no reason why you shouldn’t talk, but I would like to remind you that most of the audience have paid to listen to the music, so I would ask you to do it quietly. There is also a downstairs bar opposite the ladies, where you can talk as loudly as you like. Now I have no power or right to enforce my request, but if you choose to ignore it, well FUCK YOU!’

I only had to resort to this once in 2003, but what was very encouraging was that the majority of the audience burst into prolonged applause and it did the trick. It may have had something to do with me being old and wearing an eye-patch, or having been described by the
Daily Express
as ‘a national treasure’ and elsewhere as ‘a legend’ (I thought legends had to be dead, but no matter), or the fact that someone so old and crumbly could shout a four-letter word at them, or perhaps my singing had improved. Certainly another factor is that Digby and his Hot Six are all fine musicians playing their leader’s arrangements with complete conviction and swinging like the clappers. At all events, for the rest of both sets you could hear a pin drop. (Where did that cliché come from?)

Ronnie himself was not above a critical reaction but it was usually directed at the artistes he’d booked rather than at the noisy audience. One such was an excellent jazz cabaret singer and pianist called Blossom Dearie. Ms Dearie is a diminutive blonde of a certain age with a quiet, high-pitched voice and great determination in getting her own way. Her material is both literate and sophisticated – my favourite is a song called ‘Bernie My Attorney’ about her gay lawyer –

‘The audience burst into prolonged applause… It may have had something to do with me being old and wearing an eye-patch’

but she insists on certain rigid conditions. One is no smoking during her act – not unreasonable for a singer. Ella Fitzgerald also insisted on it. Two is total silence all the time she is on stage. This, at Ronnie’s, is more difficult to fulfil, and one night she blew her top. Stopping in mid-number, she squeaked indignantly at the audience, ‘If you go on talking I’m heading straight back to New York!’

Ronnie happened to be leaning on a brass rail at the back of the club in the dark. In the silence that followed this rather child-like tantrum he said in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘There’s a plane from Heathrow, Blossom, very early in the morning.’ She carried on playing and singing.

The only other time he intervened was when Pete rang him up in Australia where Ronnie was on tour, to complain about the behaviour of the current attraction, Nina Simone. She was in my view a great artiste, a fine composer, vocalist and pianist. She had a lot of the power of Bessie Smith, my passion; and indeed used to sing one of that diva’s most yearning numbers, ‘I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl’.

The night I went, she sang two full sets, and I was much moved. It was, as is always the case, a full house, many of the audience tough little dykes in jeans and bovver-boots. She had become, it seems, a lesbian icon.

Other evenings were apparently less satisfactory. Sometimes she didn’t show up at all. Sometimes she walked on stage in her street coat carrying large shopping bags and sang very few numbers. Once she didn’t perform but instead harangued the audience for being white.

So Pete rang Ronnie and asked him what to do. ‘Sack her!’ said Ronnie from Sydney. I didn’t envy Pete this task.
He was, after all, white and Ms Simone when roused had the temper of an angry rhino. But it had to be done.

In our early days at the club both John Chilton and I drank at times heavily, and although John kept it under control on stage, I less so. Indeed, one night I passed out half-way through the first set and finished up under the piano. John addressed the audience: ‘The Captain,’ he told them, ‘is no longer in charge of the ship.’

A season later, during our break the door to the dressing-room opened precipitately and a young, slightly pissed, natural blonde with long hair staggered down the few stairs. She had big shoulders, the result, perhaps, of driving a van for a South London building firm and later for the council, a minute waist and long legs. She was in every respect a tired businessman’s dream au pair girl. She made it quite explicit that she wanted fucking. The band tactfully withdrew, probably to the downstairs bar, and – hardly believing my luck – we set about it.

Later, though, Pete pulled me up. ‘Look, George,’ he said mildly, ‘don’t shag birds in the dressing-room.’ How did he know? I don’t think there was a hole in the wall or a two-way mirror. I’m sure there wasn’t a camcorder and I don’t in any way suspect any of the band of sneaking. However, I never did it again – not in the dressing-room, that is.

At the end of the evening Heather was waiting. She had her little van and we drove into a dark cul-de-sac off Tottenham Court Road, far enough from Pete’s X-ray eyes. We’d just got going when a torch came on. ‘It’s the fucking law,’ she whispered. The copper wasn’t too officious. ‘Not in my manor,’ was his only request, so we drove towards
Camden Town where I then lived and climaxed triumphantly behind the Black Cat factory.

The following day, Sunday, I had the day off and Heather turned up mid-morning to check I was OK. Much to my delighted surprise she pulled off her jeans and got into bed in her socks (one of my fetishes). From then on we had a long affair until she fell in love with a big bearded man for whom I guaranteed a motor bike. Of course he didn’t keep up the payments and I got a threatening letter about it, but Heather stepped in and made him pay up. As a socialist she had a persuasive moral streak in this direction.

After they’d gone off together – Vroom! Vroom! – she still came to visit me for a bit, but then backed out. I asked her why. ‘I guess I love the guy,’ she told me à la Billie Holiday.

Before this doleful event we had a sexual and personal ball. She was full of fantasies, for example that I was a rapist. She would pretend to be praying. I would burst in, throw her on the bed and ‘have my way with her’. She once asked me to do this on Hampstead Heath, but here I refused on the grounds that she might be unable to resist shouting successfully for help. Might she be unable or unwilling to explain it away? Would I be branded a real rapist, even if she refused to charge me, as I’m sure she would have? I am not a rapist, although on a few occasions, usually frustrated by brewer’s droop, I have got a bit violent.