When it all finished, having presumably been paid for by Spike (I imagine the detective gave a good share of it to his
cameraman and a smaller amount to the uniformed copper in the kitchen), the timber merchants left happy, full of cheese sandwiches and belching bottled beer, and the party was over. Before following in their unsteady wake, the inspector hinted to me and Simon that if we could get together a suitable unisex cast-list, he would be delighted to attend. Without talking it over, we both thought this would be carrying our association with the law too far. We politely declined and Simon went to unpin the ‘screen’.
Some time later Simon told this tale to a man he knew but hadn’t realized was a runner for
Private Eye
, where it duly appeared, Simon’s name and all. He was furious because not only could he have been charged with participation in an illegal activity, but, as he was still working for an airline, he might well have been sacked. In the event no action was taken, although much later and not necessarily involving our three representatives of the law, members of the Vice Squad were accused, charged and convicted of serious offences.
It was all so long ago anyway, years before the Chatterley case, let alone the Beatles’ first LP. By now surely the constabulary involved have presumably joined most of the cast, especially the Edwardian religious persons, in grave or urn.
As for Ian’s memorial lunch, it’s held in either November or early December in a club off the Strand. We meet at the bar. The walls of the big room off it, where we eat at long tables, are hung, unlike those of the Palace with its hand-painted monarchs, with portraits of the theatre stars of yesteryear. The cutlery and glasses are OK, the décor so unremarkable as to be almost invisible.
Here assemble middle-aged or elderly jazz people. Even Mick Mulligan, an infrequent visitor to the Smoke these
days, puts in one of his rare appearances from Bognor Regis. The whole strange but highly pleasurable homage to the late Spike was originally conceived and realized by Ian Christie, a far more tolerant figure now than in his days with Mick. He is still the life and soul of the event today, but I’m not sure how much he runs the practical end of things: booking, rounding up of punters, menus etc., as he was recently in great pain with shingles, which, unlike Dr Johnson’s statement that being condemned to be hanged helped ‘to concentrate the mind wonderfully’, certainly curtailed most other activities.
I can’t resist here quoting a happily irrelevant few lines from Coward, from a song called ‘And That is the End of the News’, his reaction to an order from the Labour government after the war for the BBC to lighten up their newscast after so many years of conflict and tragedy:
Hey ho. Derry down diddle
Doris’s shingles have met in the middle
She’s buried in Devon
And now she’s in heaven.
And that is the end of the News.
By last year’s stomp Ian Christie was back on form. His many years as film critic on the
Daily Express
were, I imagine, not his ideal radical perch, but then neither were Flook’s satirical swipes at the Establishment, when I was writing the balloons emerging from the mouth of a furry hippo, in the spirit of the
Daily Mail
’s lumpen-suburban political stance.
It is the custom after our three-course lunch (edible, if neither surprising in its set menu nor yet a date to note
down in the thin diary of life’s gastronomic highlights) for someone to make a speech in praise of our trumpet-blowing chum, with his combination of chutzpah and modesty – he always blew facing
away
from the audience and with a green beret full of holes draped over the bell of his horn.
Ian had performed this loving task several times over the years and as everybody, leaving aside the odd fart or belch, was completely silent except for the laughs, and the speaker had a mike, I could hear most of it which was not of course true of the conversation at lunch itself. There was an astonishing volume of noise so I was as usual reduced to the nod, which would have satisfied the simple needs of the Dickensian Ancient P. and the smile of Carroll’s Cheshire Cat. Ian Christie, I have to say, has always proved an admirable orator: crisp, funny and short (this last is a great virtue in those who speak at banquets or memorial services; in fact I think it’s the first essential).
One of the great advantages of the Ian Mackintosh Memorial Lunch is that one meets, as is only too rare, those who shared one’s youth: although now grey, balding and in many cases fatter, there they are as in a dream. On being asked how we’re feeling, our usual answer is most often ‘Not too bad’.
I also show up at the funerals, memorial services or meetings of my near-contemporaries. This is not so much for the sake of the departed, although if I loved or admired them I’m glad to have the opportunity to stand up and be counted, but principally because those present tend to be old acquaintances too, whom I seldom or never see in other circumstances. Thus, in cemetery, graveyard, chapel, public hall or public house, I find myself in touch with different
segments of my diverse life: writers, painters, journalists or jazzbos, as the case may be.
Quite recently, at David Sylvester’s last exit, an event arranged in advance by him down to the drapery over the coffin (a valuable old weaving removed, I heard later, before he slid into the furnace; but that was after we’d all gone, in my case groping for cigarettes and lighter, into the open air). We stood about for a bit and then, unexpectedly, I was greeted by a healthy-looking, well-preserved man with a moustache, dressed like an Edwardian country squire. He turned out to be the artist John Craxton, whom I’d known and liked very much when I’d worked at the London Gallery in the late forties. I was mildly apprehensive, as I hadn’t been too kind about his neo-romantic Greek fishing lads with slight cubist-scaffolding and seductive colour to prove their modernity, and especially in contrast to his then friend Lucian Freud.
John soon set my mind at rest. ‘Loved
Don’t Tell Sybil
,’ he said. ‘Haven’t laughed so much for ages!’
I was relieved, but you can never tell how people you write about are going to react. A year or two ago (or perhaps much longer, I’ve completely lost my sense of time) I was in the Lefevre Gallery in Bruton Street at a private view of paintings by Edward Burra (they were his lifelong dealers and friends) when in through the door minced a beautifully dressed, cleverly made-up elderly queen I knew in my bell-bottom days. Glancing at the Burras – he knew very little about pictures – he asked me, not that he cared, ‘Are these any good?’ He told me next that he and John Trafford, his friend and later another lover of mine, loved my book
Rum, Bum and Concertina
, but how could I remember so much and
(indignantly) why had I changed their names! Well, as Fats Waller once said, ‘One never knows, do one?’
Another ‘must’ event concerns ‘the Brothers’. I first heard of this organization through my dear friend the piano-player Ron Rubin, a fellow Liverpudlian whom I’ve known for getting on forty years. He is nearly as deaf as I am, but hates wearing hearing-aids. In consequence he has given up noisy circumstances, including ‘the Brothers’ and pubs. He has a great dislike of techno piped music.
So, idle as ever, I didn’t pursue the organization until gently propelled by Mike Pointon, my Jiminy Cricket when it comes to making me stir my stumps.
I have known and worked with Mike for quite a number of years. I got to meet him when he added his expertise to that of a very nice large radio and documentary maker called Neil. Unlike his partner who knows little of jazz, Mike, small and active, had helped by suggesting suitable subjects and finding the recordings, mostly from his own collection. He sometimes writes the scripts too, although I usually personalize them a little, and he is a great help with the editing. The firm is now self-contained and is called Spools Out (geddit?).
I went on two occasions to the States with the pair of them to make programmes for BBC2 (our main commissioner): covering those cities where jazz perched and developed at different times, from New Orleans to Memphis, and on the second one to case Harlem. They asked me to make a third visit, but I can’t cross the Atlantic, much to my sorrow, any more. This is because, having examined my medical records, the insurance company wanted at least four thousand pounds to insure me and the BBC said no way.
So they went by themselves and I helped when I could when they got back and did the narration.
In the States I interviewed several old, some
very
old jazz-and bluesmen, sitting as a rule in rooms stuffed with furniture and in front of enormous television sets. Here Mike provided me with a crib about their careers, hit recordings etc. ‘My, my,’ said one old boy, ‘you sho’ done yo’ homework!’ We also interviewed the keeper of archives and some jazz historians.
The climax of the whole double-whammy for me was being shown the room where Bessie Smith died by the owner of what is now a hotel but was the Colored Hospital, Clarksdale, Mississippi. In a sense it rounded off my longtime obsession with the Empress of the Blues, from that first recording I heard in a study at Stowe in the middle forties to the motel bedroom in ol’ Miss’ a few years back.
Mike and I have much else in common besides an interest in jazz. He is a British music-hall enthusiast and so am I, and the same applies to the early cinema from
Rescued by Rover
onwards. He is currently appalled and enraged by those who remove original soundtracks and have others composed. The British Film Institute, believed to be the guardians of the medium’s history, are to be especially reproached. Dalí and Buñuel’s surrealist masterpiece,
The Andalusian Dog
, is a case in point. They wiped off the period music, very much part of its makers’ intentions, and replaced it by a pretentious load of fly-shit (jazz term for written-down notes). Now, Mike has heard that
Dreams That Money Can Buy
, a post-war film featuring contributions from Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst and Fernand Léger, with music by Milhaud and John Cage, has a
new score, recently performed at the National Film Theatre. Why, and for whose benefit? Is it an attempt to win over ‘yoof’, of whom there are now fewer than the middle-aged and us oldies? Anyway Mike and I think it (to quote Mr Groucher from
Toy Town
) ‘Disgrrraceful!’
And I am equally up in arms at the remake of classic movies. To what end is this activity, apart from for engaging contemporary stars? Most of the remakes are inferior to the originals and tend to ‘bomb’ anyway. End of grumpy old man explosion.
Mike and I also find the same things funny. In a supermarket in the South he discovered an American version of pepperoni. It was called ‘a spicy meat-stick’, which struck us both as very camp. It still does, and when we meet both of us assume old-style gay voices and mannerisms for the purpose. ‘Have you had your spicy meat-stick this morning?’ we ask each other, and a reference to it proves frequently appropriate.
Later, in the same deep-South environment, I noticed a brand of chewing-gum called ‘Gummo’. This too was absorbed into our Julian Clary routine: ‘Do you like your “gummo” before or after your spicy meat-stick?’ we enquire.
Oh, just for the record, Mike is in no way gay.
It was Mike who introduced me to the Brothers, then convening for the last time at 100 Oxford Street with its myths and ghosts. The members are very much the same as those at the Mackintosh shindig: middle-aged and old jazzers with a few younger jazz archaeologists.
What the Brothers do is reminisce and drink. When you become a Brother, you get up on the stage (Louis played on
that stage), roll up one of your trouser legs and stand on one leg. This sounds very Masonic, but it isn’t. Admittedly the foundations of the institution in the US had some connection with religion, but here there is no question of it, and if there had been I for one wouldn’t have joined. God (‘dog’ spelt backwards) has never made us stand on one leg in this country, thank Dog.
Nothing else to it? Not really. It’s just a chance to renew old friendships and get a bit one-legless.
Oh, by the way, that versatile Mike Pointon also plays that ole slard trombone – and well, too!
The Nicolson and Toynbee Lunch was started long, long ago by Benedict Nicolson, not the son of that difficult but accomplished if over-genteel abstract painter of St Ives, but of Sir Harold and his wife Vita Sackville-West. Ben himself, a tall and gentle man, was for a long time the editor of
The Connoisseur
. Aside from having a wide knowledge of antiques, he was sociable and founded these monthly get-togethers to promote good company, hopefully intelligent and interesting conversation, and edible food and drinkable wine. Ever since Ben invited me to join, the lunch has taken place in various restaurants, but all of them in Soho, north or south. It now meets in a rather good Italian establishment in Greek Street in an upstairs room with a bar. Numbers vary but are always respectable. This is in part due to the young whipper-in called Anthony Marreco.
When Ben asked me to join the table I was one of the youngest members. Never no more. Some are slightly younger than I, some my age, a very few, looking depressingly young, have already turned eighty.
Several previous members have ‘left the table’; Professor Freddie Ayer, for example. Others I haven’t seen for a long time, but don’t know if they’re quick or dead. Manny Litvinoff, for instance, a fine poet and brother of that outrageous and very funny chancer, David.
Unlike his brother, David would never have been invited to attend the Nicolson lunch. He loved risk and danger. He was once in trouble with the Krays, for example, and claimed (truth or no?) that they hung him out of a window by his ankles while a CND march (including me perhaps?) passed underneath. He walked with me once through Soho and kept reaching up to sills and flat surfaces to feel if a metal bar was still in place for emergencies.