Owning Up: The Trilogy (58 page)

I hadn’t heard Cy Laurie at that time, but I liked the sound of Eel Pie Island. It seemed to go with ‘Gut Bucket’ or ‘Honky Tonk’. It had the right feel to it. I found it with some difficulty. It not only sounded right. It looked right too.

Nowadays there is a bridge, but at that time one pulled oneself across in a leaking boat attached to a rope and pulley. The island is on the Thames near Richmond. Among long grass and luxuriant weeds, decaying weather-board bungalows rot silently and in the centre of the island is a large Tennessee Williams hotel. I approached it full of wonder that warm summer evening. The blistering paintwork caught the setting sun and the sound of the band playing ‘My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It’ echoed across the water towards the Surrey shore.

There were about twenty other people at the Grand Jazz Band Ball, in those days a perfectly respectable number. After I had drunk several pints at a bar half painted to look like the window of a Spanish Hacienda, I asked Cy if I could sing. He couldn’t think of any excuse so I did ‘Careless Love’, the Bessie Smith version in a rough approximation of her style. The twenty people clapped, I sang several other songs, and at the end of the evening Cy asked me if I would like to join the band. I went home in a state of hysterical happiness. I was a singer in a jazz band.

Cy Laurie was a fervent admirer of the clarinet style of Johnny Dodds, a far from unique trait. Most clarinet players were influenced by Dodds, but Cy thought he was actually his reincarnation. He had a long, sad, Jewish face which always seemed at odds with the jerky rather convulsive way he swayed his body as he played.

He lived in the East End where his parents had a jewellery business, and we rehearsed on Saturday afternoons in the dusty upper room of a pub in Bow.

After I’d locked up the gallery, I used to get on the 25 bus in Bond Street and sit, going over the words of the blues I hoped to try out, as the bus sped through the empty city towards Whitechapel.

One Saturday there was nobody there. I went round to see Cy and he told me the band had broken up. I was very upset. At Humph’s that night I saw Cy’s pianist, Norman Day, and he suggested that I formed a trio with him, a drummer and a banjo player. We rehearsed a few times and then he said that he had answered an advertisement to audition for someone called Mick Mulligan who was forming a band. Seeing my downcast face – I cried very easily in those days – he asked me why I didn’t come along too. I said I would and we arranged to meet the following Sunday.

That Saturday at Humph’s I behaved as badly as usual. Two people were watching with considerable amusement at my expense. One was Bob Dawbarn, an embryonic trombonist, the other his ex-school friend and fellow jazz enthusiast, Mick Mulligan.

Mick lived with his widowed mother in a detached house in Corringway, Ealing. The house was a surprise. I had hopes of squalor on an heroic scale. The reproduction of Cardinals toasting the Chef in the hall was an initial disappointment. Mick, however, had his own room.

It was small and mostly taken up with a piano, a sofa, a large bar and huge unsteady piles of records. There was lots of cigarette smoke, full and empty beer bottles, and a strong smell of old socks. Mick and Bob Dawbarn were listening to an Armstrong Hot Five. It was all very reassuring, although if one looked out of the window the suburban landscape reasserted itself, and when the record was finished you could hear the whirring of a legion of Atcos.

Mick peered at me short-sightedly. He looked like an exhausted faun. I had a bad dose of impetigo contracted by shaving with a very old blade I had found stuck to its own rust on the bathroom mantelpiece, and half my face was unshaven and smeared with bright blue ointment.

‘What a lecherous looking bastard,’ he said, and offered me a cigarette.

The rest of the band arrived: a clarinettist, a banjo player, and a man called ‘The Hermit’ who played the tuba, an almost obligatory instrument in the late forties. Norman auditioned and passed. I proposed that I sing ‘Darktown Strutters’. Afterwards with no encouragement I sang several other songs.

What I didn’t realise was that Mick had no intention of having a singer. I just took it for granted that he wanted one, and he could think of no way of saying he didn’t. The rehearsal continued. From time to time the man next door thumped on the wall.

Afterwards Mick, Bob, and I went for a drive along Western Avenue. We passed the Hoover factory, that great 1930 essay in the mock Egyptian ceramic style.

‘All that,’ I said, ‘to suck up shit!’

Mick and Bob enjoyed this remark, and I think it decided Mick to keep me in the band.

Within a week or two we were inseparable. Mick had a car, quite a lot of money and an insatiable appetite for living it up. I, who should have been studying French at the Clapham LCC night school as a help to becoming an art dealer, was only too willing to tag along. Almost every night we went to a jazz club even if it was thirty miles out of London. Afterwards we ate in a late restaurant catering to the music-hall profession, and I remember as though from a delirious dream two dwarfs on the pavement outside, both imitating Frankenstein’s monster and pretending to strike each other in slow and clockwork rotation. Then we went back to Mick’s place with a bottle and played records into the small hours. I often slept there and caught the tube all pale and shivering among the well-shaved pink business men from Perivale station the next morning.

My work at the Gallery suffered. Even before I met Mick, I had discovered that a love of pictures is not the only thing required of an efficient employee. E. L. T. had, over the years, acquired a fanatical application to the business side of it all, which he relieved by occasional outbursts of dadaistic anti-commercial jokes. I was only too eager to contribute to these. It was the day-to-day routine that defeated me,

Now that I had met Mick, what had been vague inefficiency turned into inspired anti-commercial delirium. To keep awake during the day I discovered that a Benzedrine inhaler broken under the heel yielded a wad of cotton wool which, if cut into little segments and swallowed a piece at a time, opened the eyes and enlivened the brain. What the eyes saw, however, had nothing to do with the dusting of a bookshelf or the switchboard of a telephone, and the brain, although wide awake, was receptive only to the imagery of the pictures on the walls and not to their prices or potential owners. Looking through the invitation cards, the addressing of which was my principal monthly task and the addresses on which were becoming increasingly inventive and unlikely, E. L. T. would shout in exasperation: ‘Are you taking drugs?’

I would deny this accusation indignantly and frequently burst into tears. It never occurred to me that I was.

During this period the band was rehearsing for its first public appearance. Mick’s neighbours had finally driven us from 90 Corringway, and we used the upper rooms of various pubs. I suppose that most of early British revivalist jazz emerged from the same womb. Rehearsal rooms existed, of course, but we never thought of hiring one at that time. They were part of the professional world of which we knew nothing.

Many of these pub rooms were temples of ‘The Ancient Order of Buffaloes’, that mysterious proletarian version of the Freemasons, and it was under dusty horns and framed nineteenth-century characters that we struggled through ‘Sunset Café Stomp’ or ‘Miss Henny’s Ball’.

Although we had not yet performed we already had a name. The fashion was for something elaborate and nostalgic. Admittedly Humph was satisfied with ‘Humphrey Lyttelton and his Band’ but he swam in deep water. Among the minnows, names like ‘The Inebriated Seven’, ‘Denny Coffey and His Red Hot Beans’, and ‘Mike Daniel’s Delta Jazzmen’ were more typical. Mick decided on ‘Mick Mulligan’s Magnolia Jazz Band’.

This particular form of whimsy was to reappear, although for more commercial reasons, during the recent ‘trad boom’, but we didn’t dress up. Following Humph’s lead, an extreme sloppiness was
de rigueur
both on stage and off. The duffle coat was a cult object, sandals with socks a popular if repulsive fad, beards common, and bits of battle dress, often dyed navy blue, almost a uniform. The source of this was largely the post-war art schools via Humph and Wally, but there was also a strong, anti-bop element involved. This was because the two schools came at jazz from entirely different angles. The be-boppers were mostly professional musicians who discovered modern jazz by working on the Atlantic liners, and hearing the music live in New York. As trained executants they were able to understand what the great modernists were doing. As artists they were determined to preach the gospel on their return.

The revivalists began with the old records, and only learnt to play because they loved a vanished music, and wished to resurrect it. Depending on their purism, they drew a line at some arbitrary date and claimed that no jazz existed after it. The modernists did this in reverse. Nothing existed pre-Parker. Before that there was only a lot of Uncle Toms sitting on the levée strumming banjos and crying ‘yuk, yuk, yuk’.

Very slowly things changed, initially on a personal level. The two schools began to meet socially to argue and listen. Eventually some of the traditionalists became modernists or mainstreamers, and others began to realise that Gillespie and Parker, Monk and Davis were not perverse iconoclasts but in the great tradition, and the modern musicians stopped imagining that bebop had sprung fully armed from the bandstand at Mintons, but had its roots in the early history of the music.

The band’s first job was at the Perivale Youth Club. The audience were few in number and very young. There was no microphone, and I tried to amplify my voice by shouting into an empty biscuit tin.

The young lads listened politely. After about half an hour an even smaller boy poked his head round the door of the recreation room and shouted: ‘Chocolate biscuits in the canteen.’ Points rationing was still in force and the whole room emptied immediately for the rest of the evening.

After a month or two Mick decided that the time had come to ask someone to hear us and give some constructive advice. He approached Jim Godbolt, who had been manager to The George Webb Dixielanders and was therefore, as far as we were concerned, a figure of great authority.

Godbolt, thin and tense, his head with its pointed features crouching between his shoulders as though emerging from its burrow into a dangerous world, his eyes as cold and watchful as those of a pike in the reeds, came and listened.

Actually Mick couldn’t have chosen a less sympathetic person. Jim had been watching us for some time in the ‘Blue Posts’, the pub nearest to the London Jazz Club now that it had moved to ioo Oxford Street, and disliked us very much. Firstly, he had decided we were ‘hurrays’ – public-school jazz fans – an expression he himself had discovered in a short story of Damon Runyon’s one anti-social Christmas – and secondly, being in those days a formidable prude, he was appalled by our language and sexual behaviour. I suspect that his motive in accepting Mick’s invitation was not untinged with malice.

At the end of the session Mick and Jim went into conference. They talked for about twenty minutes while the rest of us stood some distance off, waiting for the verdict. Jim left, Mick came over. ‘He says we should give up.’

We didn’t though. Our belief in the music helped us over this bitter blow; we were all fighting for a despised music we knew to be worthwhile. It may seem incredible but at that time, before I sang, I used to appeal to Bessie Smith to inspire me. Today in the traditional world only Ken Colyer managed to keep this religious fervour burning inside him. The battle has been won and therefore lost. It’s in the mainstream bands and among the modernists you still find the true spirit of non-compromise. Of course, they are less naive about it all, and more able to mask their feelings behind a wisecracking cynicism, but then they are much older than we were. In fact some of them were us.

Musically the greatest drawback to the progress of Mick Mulligan’s Magnolia Jazz Band was the amiable Bob Dawbarn. He played his trombone entirely by ear and found it impossible to learn chord structure. At the very beginning Mick did the same, but although a man of a formidable lethargy for ninety per cent of the time, Mick has always found it possible to apply himself savagely for short periods and he learnt all about chords in under a week. This meant that bridge passages and even arranged chori were now a possibility – or would have been without Bob. Mick tried everything – sarcasm, threats, pleas – but Bob never learnt about chords.

Socially though – and the Mulligan band always existed socially more than musically – Bob was an enormous asset. He had a ragged moustache, a very old mackintosh, and for no very explicable reason, for he was Ealing bred, a slight Liverpool accent. He looked far older than he was and affected the hangdog manner of someone who sells brushes from door to door. In fact he was a criminal-court reporter for an agency. He also had a middle-aged mistress. A fact I found very impressive at that time.

I was equally impressed by Mick’s general success with girls. He would often leave Bob and me in his car while he went into one or another of an entire round of flats or houses, and we, having no other means of transport, had to sit there for well over an hour. Dawbarn’s only revenge was to smoke as many of Mick’s cigarettes as possible. Bob had little success with girls apart from his mistress. Nor did I, but I was still more interested in chaps.

Mick was convinced, and he may well have been right, that this was because I ‘hadn’t had enough of the other’. Although by no means puritanical about homosexuality, he thought there was less in it for all concerned and a little absurd, and he did what he could to put me on the right path.

Mick’s analysis of my condition may well have been the truth. I moved slowly from homosexuality to bisexuality and from there to heterosexuality. No moral decision was involved; in my view no moral decision is involved, it just happened. I became aware of this early one Sunday morning in the band-wagon about ten years ago.