London Calling (20 page)

One attraction of the Fantasie was the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group, who had a regular gig there. It was very handy for them
as they all lived in the area and were too young to go to pubs. Chas McDevitt lived nearby on the King’s Road. In his history
of skiffle he recalls liberating fifteen bottles of wine from a party given by West End villain Eddie Chapman where McDevitt
and the Mick Mulligan Band had been hired to play. He describes how the empty bottles were to remain for weeks on end floating
in the bath along with the dirty dishes in their Chelsea flat. McDevitt: ‘The flat in the King’s Road was an ideal pad in
an ideal position. It provided a haven for many an itinerant jazzer, visiting American folkies and unsuspecting embryo groupies.’
²

There are amusing parallels between Mary Quant’s Bazaar and her partner’s promotion of Chas McDevitt’s Skiffle Group, and
Vivienne Westwood’s Seditionaires (aka SEX, and Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die) and her partner’s promotion of the Sex
Pistols: both represented a do-it-yourself working-class
music form that was hugely influential, and both emerged from a dress shop on the King’s Road. They were both centres of the
youth scene: Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ manager, first worked for Mary Quant; Bernie Rhodes, manager of the Clash,
first worked for Malcolm McLaren. Can a revolution start from a dress shop in the King’s Road? McLaren certainly thought so,
and so, to an extent, did Mary Quant. In
Quant on Quant
she wrote:

Nobody has ever been able to make up his mind precisely what ‘the Chelsea Set’ was but I think it grew out of something in
the air which developed into a serious attempt to break away from the Establishment. It was the first real indication of a
complete change of outlook.
³

The dance music of the early fifties was traditional jazz and most of the musicians who later joined the skiffle craze began
by playing New Orleans-style. Lonnie Donegan was one. He got his name when the Tony Donegan Band played at a National Jazz
Federation event at the Royal Festival Hall on 28 June 1952. Also on the bill was the American jazz guitarist Lonnie Johnson:
the compere mixed the two names up and Tony was for ever after called Lonnie Donegan. In 1953, Chris Barber, Lonnie Donegan
and Monty Sunshine all joined Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen and it was then that a little unit at the centre of the band – Colyer,
Donegan and Barber – began playing a pared-down mid-set interlude. Colyer called this looser trio the Breakdown Band, but
Colyer’s older brother, Bill, who knew his jazz, said they were playing skiffle. Bill Colyer worked at Collett’s bookshop,
which imported left-wing books, and folk and jazz records. One record he got in was by Dan Burley and His Skiffle Boys.

Skiffle was originally played by American blacks who could not afford much in the way of instruments and so made do with a
tea-chest and broom-handle bass and a washboard for percussion. It began around the turn of the century and was played during
the Depression, mostly at rent parties where neighbours and friends got together and all contributed money to pay the landlord.
The Breakdown Band was now introduced as a ‘skiffle group’. The following year, Ken Colyer and Chris Barber’s musical differences
came to a head, Colyer, the absolute purist, left to start a new band, and the old lineup became the Chris Barber Jazz Band.
⁴

Chas McDevitt played banjo with the New Crane River Jazz Band and around 1952–3 began singing with the rhythm section of the
band during the mid-set break. They had no name for these interludes so when Ken Colyer began to call them ‘skiffle’ they
adopted that name for what they were doing. McDevitt’s skiffle group was called the St Louis Trio.
⁵
They played the coffee
bars of Chelsea and Soho, the Fantasie, the Breadbasket, and the Gyre and Gimble, and had a regular spot at Cy Laurie’s Jazz
Club in Windmill Street. Cy Laurie’s was a small club in the basement of Mac’s Rehearsal Rooms in Great Windmill Street. When
he started holding ‘All-nite rave ups’, closing at 6 a.m. when the tubes started up, the tabloids immediately went on the
attack, appalled at the idea of young people staying up all night. The Fleet Street hypocrites were right about one thing:
there was a lot of sex and a lot of pills – dexedrine or benzedrine – at Cy’s.

Good-time jazz was much closer to popular music than the small-group improvisations of later years. It needed a lot of energy
to keep up the momentum so the mid-set break was a welcome innovation and it began to be featured by all the traditional bands
playing at the time. At first, skiffle groups relied on numbers for volume as none of the instruments – washboard, tea-chest
bass, acoustic guitar – were amplified; in fact six acoustic guitars was not unknown. Then Lonnie Donegan changed all this
by the introduction of Denny Wright’s electric guitar to his lineup. Promoters and club owners began to wonder if they could
just hire the skiffle group and forget about the trombones and clarinets.

The Gyre and Gimble in a basement at 31 John Adam Street, just off Villiers Street at Charing Cross, was the first skiffle
bar. The manager was John St John Crewe. Regulars included Tommy Hicks (later renamed Tommy Steele by Larry Parnes), Lionel
Bart (who wrote Cliff Richard’s number one ‘Living Doll’ as well as many hits for Adam Faith and Tommy Steele), the Vipers,
and members of the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group. The Gyre and Gimble, and also the Farm, began staying open all night, establishing
a late-night West End culture. Chas McDevitt recalls that sometimes, if the weather was fine when they finally emerged blinking
into the breaking dawn, a group of them would take a taxi to London Bridge station and take the 4.40 a.m. milk train to Brighton.
They called themselves the Brighton Buskers. Chas McDevitt: ‘When the sun came up they would busk on the beach. Their record
bottle was £7 in 40 minutes, not bad for 1956.’
⁶

Tommy Hicks was a merchant seaman who had been hanging out in Soho with Lionel Bart and Mike Batt on his shore leave, often
sitting in on jam sessions at the Gyre and Gimble and other coffee bars. One of his shipmates had taught him a few chords
and on one of his trips to the States he saw Elvis Presley play live. He tried out his Elvis act at the Gyre and Gimble, but
the regulars there were hard-line traditional jazz, skiffle and folk fans and it was a disaster. Michael Moorcock, the science
fiction writer who was then the washboard player for the Greenhorns Skiffle Group, said:

I was one of the people, including Charlie Watts, who shouted to Tom Hicks to go up the 2i’s and get discovered one evening
in the Gyre & Gimble – and Tom took his white Gretsch (or it might have been a Hofner) up to the i’s and became Tommy Steele.
So I suppose I’ve been around since the beginning of British rock ’n’ roll.
⁷

Nonetheless, it was at the Gyre and Gimble that Tommy Steele was really discovered. Roy Tuvey and Bill Varley, two retired
air stewards, had set up a small recording studio in Denmark Street called Trio Recordings. They had an EMI TR 50A tape
recorder that was just about portable and hauled it down to the Gyre and Gimble to record some of the regulars playing live:
they taped the Vipers, Jim Dale, and the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group. It was here that Roy Tuvey met Tommy Hicks and realized
his potential. Tuvey and another business partner, Geoff Wright, signed him up to a personal management contract and soon
had him playing Al Burnett’s Stork Room, which was where his future manager, Larry Parnes, first saw him.
⁸
Parnes found out that Tommy was underage when he signed the contract with Tuvey and Wright, so he went behind their backs
to Hicks’s parents and signed a five-year contract with them. He changed Tommy’s name to Steele and within weeks he was in
the charts.

Tommy Steele’s days at the Gyre and Gimble came to an unexpected end. They had a relaxed attitude there and people could buy
a coffee and nod off to sleep at the tables. One of them was Ralph Rumney, founder of the London Psychogeographical Society
and in 1957 a founder member of the International Situationists. Rumney told Alan Woods:

Tommy Steele used to come in there and twang on his guitar and make an awful racket, and all of us were just trying to have
a quiet kip and we kept telling him to shut up and he wouldn’t. And I had a very large friend at that time – Gerald, he was
called – who was a bit of a thug… he came down one night and Tommy Steele was twanging away as usual – Rock Island Line and
skiffle – it was really tiresome, because he didn’t have much of a repertoire in those days. And from the top of the stairs
Gerald yelled out STOP THAT RACKET, and Tommy Steele didn’t. So Gerald just put his hand on the banister, leapt over it and
landed on Tommy Steele, feet first, and cracked about four of his ribs, so he had to be taken to hospital. Which got us barred
for about three days. And we never saw Tommy Steele there again.
⁹

One afternoon, early in the summer of 1956, two Australian wrestlers, Rebel Ray Hunter and Paul Lincoln, who worked under
the name of Doctor Death,
were training at the Y M C A with their friend Tom Littlewood, an ex-stunt man and judo black belt. They were all three looking
for something new to do and one of them mentioned that the 2i’s steak house at 59 Old Compton Street was up for sale. They
decided to club together and run it as a coffee bar, cashing in on the new craze. The 2i’s was named after the two Irani brothers
who started it and who later went on to open the Tropicana on Greek Street, which in turn became the Establishment Club. The
new partners liked the name and decided to keep it. Freddy Irani continued to live in one of the flats upstairs. It was the
rooms above that appealed most to Paul Lincoln, who was looking for somewhere for foreign wrestlers to stay when they came
over to fight in his promotions. He needed somewhere as temporary accommodation until they found proper flats of their own.
Later, when the 2i’s became a rock venue, the wrestlers and the rock ’n’ rollers all got to know each other really well. According
to Brian Gregg, bassist with Johnny Kidd & the Pirates: ‘They were a good bunch and became almost like family.’ Ray Hunter
already had an interest in the Cromwellian Club on Cromwell Road, where many young rockers, including Georgie Fame, Eric Burdon,
Alan Price and Zoot Money, liked to jam the night away, so he knew the catering trade. It was left to Tom Littlewood to run
the place.

Even though the building dated from 1731, they went for the modern look, doing it out in cheap Formica like a milk bar, right
down to plastic peel-off ads for milkshakes on the walls behind the counter. At first Tom thought a Spanish guitarist would
bring in customers, but quickly replaced him with a large American jukebox, which at least made money. Compared to the other
coffee bars in Soho, the 2i’s looked pretty tame. They were no competition for Heaven and Hell next door: there the ground
floor was heaven, painted brilliant white, while the basement was decorated in black, and featured a skiffle group called
The Ghouls. Just round the corner on Meard Street was Le Macabre, which used coffins as tables and bakelite skulls for ashtrays.
There were skull-shaped milk jugs, murals of skeletons and graveyards, and the jukebox featured the ‘Funeral March’. Not far
away the Kon-Tiki had a full Pacific Island makeover complete with palm trees and fishing nets.

The 2i’s had been open three weeks when Soho held its second annual Soho Fair, to coincide with the 14 July 1956 Bastille
Day celebrations. The Vipers skiffle group were among the groups in the procession as it wound through the streets. When a
downpour of rain made them jump down from their flatbed truck and take refuge in the 2i’s, the nearest coffee bar, Paul Lincoln
suggested they continue playing there. Immediately a large
crowd came in from the street, drawn by the music as much as to shelter from the storm. Paul Lincoln realized that live music
was what was needed to pull in the customers and hired them on the spot to play a regular gig from 7 p.m. until eleven, four
nights a week. At first they were paid only in spaghetti, Coca-Cola and any tips they were able to collect, but their leader
Wally Whyton soon decided that a proper fee was required as the place was crammed to its eighty-person capacity every time
they played. People were queuing all down Old Compton Street. Paul Lincoln made a derisory offer and Wally, bravely, said
he would wrestle him for double or nothing. Lincoln was impressed by his guts, strapped on his Doctor Death mask and lost
the fight hands down, presumably intentionally. The Vipers got their wages.
¹⁰

The Vipers skiffle group were formed in London in the spring of 1956, named after the 1936 recording by the ‘King of Swing
Violin’, Stuff Smith & His Onyx Club Boys, ‘Youse a Viper’, which went: ‘Dreamt about a reefer / Five feet long / Mighty Mezz,
but not too strong / You’ll be high, but not for long / If youse a viper…’ Viper was common London slang for a pot-head in
the mid-fifties so their name was an in-joke; a bit like Freddy Mercury, a well known homosexual, calling his band Queen.
The Vipers began as a trio of singer-guitarists: Wally Whyton, Johnny Martyn and Jean Van den Bosch. Wally Whyton grew up
almost next door to the Breadbasket coffee bar at 65 Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia, and it was there he first met Johnny Martyn,
who was then managing the Gyre and Gimble. By the time they took up their residency at the 2i’s they were a five-piece.

The 2i’s was the first place I went to in London when, in 1958, I spent the summer staying with relatives in Wembley. My cousin
Stuart was taking guitar lessons from Peggy Seeger – she taught him the claw hammer pluck – and together we explored Denmark
Street looking for the particular picks she recommended. At the 2i’s we sat drinking coffee from glass cups, playing with
the brown sugar in the bowl, staring out at Old Compton Street, thinking this was the centre of the world as ‘Dream Lover’
by Bobby Darin played on the jukebox and various sleazy Soho types drifted in and out. It had obviously not changed much since
it opened. The ground floor was smaller than the cellar because in addition to the counter there was a toilet and a small
store room. The performance area downstairs was a very small space, very hot and sweaty, reached by a narrow staircase. The
stage was wider than the room because it extended under the staircase, where there was also a notorious cupboard, large enough
to stand up in and remembered with nostalgia by many musicians who used it for private talks with their female
fans. The stage was just eighteen inches high so only people standing in the front row could see the performers. The equipment,
microphone and amps, was all very old. People were constantly asking to sit in and each night ended in a jam session. It was
always packed.