Slowing Down (9 page)

Mostly I loved John, sometimes I actively disliked him, but I never feared him. In his early drinking days he would suddenly snap and shout at me and I would shout right
back. During these rows his eyes would become steely, his face purple. Next day we always made it up. We called such a row ‘a purple’.

When we first went on the road, a witty woman friend said to me after a concert with the Feetwarmers, ‘John watches you like a ballet mother.’ Well, I had become his bread and butter and a fair number of musicians can resent that. Ian Christie, for example, for several years the clarinettist in the Mulligan Band, disliked my habit, during a mildly obscene number of Ethel Waters’s called ‘Organ Grinder Blues’, of imitating a flea-ridden ape during the band choruses, scratching myself and jumping up on a piano stool to pretend to groom Mick’s head. This pantomime was very popular with the public, but not with Christie.

‘I object,’ he snapped one day in his slight Northern accent, ‘at earning my living as a musician because you can imitate a fucking monkey!’

My almost weekly appearances at Merlin’s New Cave led to an increasing number of paid invitations to work elsewhere: universities, private parties, arts centres and jazz clubs. John and the rhythm section were usually there, Wally on whim, Bruce if he could get it together, Dad. The audience reaction was excellent and I was asked also to appear, for somewhat modest amounts of ‘bread’, in pubs around London with local trad bands.

I hadn’t sung much for most of the sixties, but I began at once to sense what I’d missed. My belief is that when jazzmen or -women retire for whatever reason, they are not free but merely the equivalent of ‘recovering’ alcoholics. Too much sherry in the trifle and not long afterwards a
bottle of vodka is hidden in their underwear drawer or golf-bag pocket – and that was happening to me.

One evening during this transitional period we were invited to do a concert at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in its comparatively new and very grand premises in The Mall. Among those I invited I included a man I’d met on a talking heads programme on TV and the next person to act as a catalyst in my, by this time, unstable life. His name was Derek Taylor and he became one of my best friends until he died, far too young, of cancer.

Derek was slight, good-looking in a somewhat jumpy way, with abrupt bird-like movements of the head, and sported a little moustache. He came, like me, from Merseyside (Hoylake), which always proved an instant bond. After he’d written a golden review of an early Beatles concert in Manchester (despite being sent there by the
Liverpool Echo
, who employed him at the time, to knock them), Brian Epstein got in touch and asked him to become their PR, and so he did. He travelled everywhere with the Fab Four, and his experience as a press-man enabled him to ward off potential scandals, of which there were plenty. Finally he acted as a go-between when John Lennon and Yoko went to bed together ‘for peace’ – the ‘bed-ins’.

After the Beatles broke up (rather acrimoniously), Derek remained very much in touch. George Harrison became his closest friend, with John Lennon not far behind. Derek was married to a warm and wonderful woman called Joan, also from the ‘pool’. Although neither of them was Catholic, they had many children and, by the time I met him, they lived in a large house near Ascot.

Derek was by this time an employee of Warner Brothers
Records UK. His position there was that of a licensed loose cannon, with the power to issue LPs. Quite typically, many of these were rather odd choices – a gentle anthology of readings by the actor John Le Mesurier for instance – but the big bosses in New York and California thought that in Britain, Derek must know what the limeys wanted. In fact they didn’t want Le Mesurier, popular as he was for his role in that triumphant TV comedy series
Dad’s Army
, or at any rate not in impressive numbers, but now and then one of Derek’s stranger ideas struck oil. Later on, for example, in the States, he conceived the notion of contracting the rock singer Harry Neilson, who never performed in public, to record a CD of sophisticated and lyrical songs of the thirties. Its title was that of one of the selections (and a great favourite of the liberal-eared Derek), ‘As Time Goes By’. In the event it sold like hot hash cookies everywhere in the world. Derek’s WB stock gained many points.

Later, after he signed us up with Warner Brothers, I used to drop in to his office in the WB building with its carpeting, which, unlike Balmoral’s tartan, had a pattern of ovals each enclosing an identical Bugs Bunny chewing a carrot. Derek’s own large room, like every room he ever had a hand in, contained full-sized furniture but in the idiom of that owned by the seven dwarfs in Disney’s
Snow White
; and on the walls a huge number of images which had amused him, especially if they represented Edward VIII before his abdication. Biscuit tins, coronation mugs and other useless souvenirs of the Duke of Windsor were also in evidence.

A good reason for visiting him was that he was equally addicted in those days to drink as to pot and always made sure that you had a glass in one hand and a spliff in the
other, the latter no doubt a legacy of his years with the Beatles. We also evolved our own private language.

There was a species of fairly rich stockbrokers, bankers, etc. who spent their weekends in the Home Counties, discarding their city uniforms for cavalry-twill trousers, hairy shooting jackets and polo-necked sweaters and expensive but apparently well-worn cloth caps. They drove Land Rovers and owned rather promiscuously affectionate Labradors. If it was raining, however, they favoured Barbour jackets and green Wellington boots.

We imagined, perhaps it was even true, that every Sunday morning they’d visit the village pub (The Squires Arms) before lunch. This was a strict ritual. The landlord would greet his regular: ‘Morning, squire’ (preferably we decided he should be ex-RAF and sport a heavy moustache). After a brief exchange of pleasantries, he should turn and unhook a pewter tankard with the squire’s Christian name engraved on it, and enquire: ‘The usual?’

It was scenarios like this which gave us the word to personify such people. Certain people were ‘squires’ on sight, certain attitudes ‘squire-ish’. The very word became like a spy’s password to signal to each other that one of us had spotted a prime suspect. Raising our glasses to each other, we’d cry, ‘Cheers, squire.’

The proto-squire was almost certainly Kenneth More, one of the two male leads in the film
Genevieve
. A hearty vintage-car owner on the Brighton run, his laugh, clothes and competitive banter were squire-like before the event.

Another, although more limited, source of mutual delight we discovered in the George Formby film
Turned Out Nice Again
. George played his usual role as a naive Lancashire
lad who comes out on top. He finds himself in a smart London nightclub with some crooks who hope to do him down. To help them they have invited two glamorous girls, but he resists their blandishments. Asked who he is, George, who just so happens to have his uke handy, sings an explanatory song called ‘I’m the Emperor of Lancashire’. He passes by a table occupied by a group of Mayfair sophisticates, including Garry Marsh, a balding, moustached actor often in George’s films, usually as a villain. Here, during a gap in the song, Marsh asks his companion, ‘Who’s that man who’s talking loud? Is he one of the usual crowd?’ George naturally enlightens him, ‘I’m the Emperor of Lancashire’.

It was, however, Marsh’s couplets that hooked Derek and me, especially as, while meant to be posh, the final words of each line are distinctively pronounced in what is now known as Estuary English:

‘Who’s that man who’s talking LEOWD?’

‘Is he one of the usual CREOWD?’

From then on, when we met, or rang each other up, we often began our conversation by quoting a line each of this search for enlightenment. Why did it so amuse us? It wasn’t overt snobbery, more that this world of nightclubs was in itself generally tacky and who, come to that, could have been ‘the usual creowd’?

George Harrison, ‘the other George’, as Derek called him, was, it seems, a keen Formby fan, a musical taste he shared with the other Beatles. A proof? If you listen to their recording of ‘When I’m Sixty-four’, you’ll hear one of them,
probably Paul, interposing a Formby-like ‘tee hee’ at the end of a chorus.

In fact, one year ‘the other George’ and Derek attended the annual meeting of the George Formby Appreciation Society in Blackpool. The society was naturally cock-a-hoop to have attracted a Beatle. Among the attractions was a showing of many of Formby’s films where the whole audience played their ukuleles along with him, and there was a concert of imitators – the youngest six, the oldest well over sixty-four.

Derek had accepted my invitation and duly showed up at the ICA. It was mostly completely full of ‘its usual creowd’ – in this case serious young intellectuals on the cutting edge of culture.

The concert itself was a disgrace. We all got very drunk, and John’s arrangements were largely forgotten, even by him. Notes were split ad lib, I swore a great deal and forgot the punchlines of jokes. My bladder that night was distinctly unreliable, forcing me often into the wings to relieve myself, audibly, into a fire bucket.

The audience seemed unfazed, even enthusiastic, perhaps finding nothing odd in discovering that middle-aged men could behave as badly as their young rock heroes. Derek himself must have taken in the drink-induced chaos, but equally recognized the favourable effect it had.

In consequence, a few days later John and I signed a contract to record an LP. For us it was a kind of miracle. Subsequently Derek told us he’d booked a Sunday night at Ronnie Scott’s and this amazed John and me even more. Ronnie’s, after all, was bop’s holy shrine.

*

During the early fifties, like most of my contemporaries who were fans of revivalist jazz, I would never have crossed the portals of Scott’s, either in Gerrard Street, its original and fairly squalid small headquarters, or indeed after its move in 1965 to its present and much larger home in Frith Street. It was after all the birthplace of British bebop, the stronghold of our enemy. Yet, by the beginning of the seventies our rigid principles had largely dissolved, and hearing on record the great American originals and some of their British disciples who were emerging as formidable exponents of ‘the cool’, we began to recognize its qualities and would even visit the club, although admittedly in my case mostly to hear singers. So John and I and the rest of the Feetwarmers were not as petrified as we would have been in the days when Humphrey Lyttelton was our king. In fact, after some years and to the disappointment of his committed early fans, Humph himself had swum into the mainstream ‘much to the anxiety of my agent and bank manager’, as he put it.

Even so, we never expected to appear at Ronnie’s and wouldn’t have done but for the intervention of Derek Taylor.

The club was packed and drink in huge amounts consumed. Behaviour was both wild and appreciative. It was also uninhibited. Perhaps the most memorable moment was when a friend of mine, one of a pair of attractive American twins, stripped to the waist, unheard of since the days of Storyville, New Orleans, and put into practice the old blues injunction to ‘Shake ’em but don’t break ’em’.

All this was watched with some surprise by Ronnie Scott and his closest friend and the club’s manager, Pete King. Modern jazz was going through a hard time then, as indeed were most forms of jazz, and they wondered if perhaps it

‘The club was packed and drink in huge amounts consumed’

might be a good idea to try us out in a normal interval spot. In the end they decided to risk it.

Derek was delighted by the evening, but a girlfriend of mine at the time (who was to play an important role in the years to come) had watched and listened soberly. Her name was Venetia and she was, to use the then current jazz slang, a ‘posh totty’.

‘Wasn’t that great?’ I asked her. She looked at me quite coldly. ‘Wait,’ she said, ‘until you hear it back!’

She was absolutely right. Derek and his two beautiful secretaries, the small shy one whom I’d nicknamed Snowdrop, and her colleague, the more ebullient blonde, Rose, John and I listened to the tape. The first two tracks were just about passable but only just, the remainder escalating chaos. We all agreed we had to record it again in a studio. Then they dubbed in the wild audience reaction and the result was issuable. Nobody who heard it suspected the deception, a successful example of what later on a man called Terry Brown (a sweet man, now alas in the cold ground) who produced many of our later LPs for Pye used to call ‘White Man’s Magic’.

Derek was delighted with the finished result and designed the cover with typical impish humour. There were, perhaps still are, in Oxford Street a number of photographers, their work displayed in the windows, mostly photos of Nigerian nurses with their bicycles to send back home, and West Indians in gowns and mortar-boards posing with their BA diplomas, to please and impress their relatives in Kingston and elsewhere. It was one of these establishments we entered and booked a session. Derek’s only direction was to ask them to mask all lines and blemishes, which I suspect they’d
have done anyway. The result was all he’d hoped. I looked like a painted cadaver after the attentions of Mr Lovejoy in Waugh’s cynical Californian masterpiece
The Loved One
.