Owning Up: The Trilogy (61 page)

On drums there was first a young and very respectable boy called Norman Dodsworth, but he didn’t stay long, and after him, fresh from Leeds and the Yorkshire Jazz Band, we managed to obtain the services of one of the most quietly eccentric figures of the whole jazz world. His name was Stanley Bell wood.

*

Leeds, that island surrounded by forty-shilling tailors, was the home of the Yorkshire Jazz Band. It was led, during its long and stormy history, by a burly half-coloured Yorkshireman called Bob Barclay. Bob lived in a cellar in a rotting elegant house near the city centre of which he was officially caretaker. The rest of the house was a small garment factory. I used to stay with him, but this had two disadvantages. For one thing you didn’t get to bed until about six because Bob insisted on playing every record the YJB had ever made, and for another thing, when you did get to bed, his large boxer dog used to show how fond of you it was by leaving great snail tracks of mucus all over your face and arms.

Stan Bellwood had played for Bob. He came to London to join us bringing with him his girl-friend Doris.

Doris was a big lumbering girl who was almost handsome. Stan was much smaller than her, wore a neat moustache and punctuated every sentence with a nervous little staccato laugh. This pair descended on London in general and on the Mulligan band in particular, determined to wrest a living from jazz alone. We were perhaps averaging six pounds a week each at that time so it was in itself a hopeless proposition. They did their best, though.

For a start they moved in on each of us in turn. Their technique was simple. They pretended to have a flat in some distant part of London, and late at night Stan would ring up (Meadmore in a rage hurling open the bedroom door and shouting: ‘Telephone! Blast you!’) and say they had missed their train, but happened to be round the corner. Once installed, with Doris’s underwear all over the house, they were extremely hard to get rid of. They were with me, under protest, for ten days. After the whole band had shaken them off, they took to spending the night in the Charing Cross Lyons Corner House. At that time you could sit there until six for the price of a cup of tea. The clientele was both seedy and dodgy; male and female prostitutes, layabouts and mysteries, small-time tearaways. When every other door was barred to them, Stan and Doris, their eyes wide open and bright red, would sit nibbling Benzedrine inhalers, for you were not allowed to sleep, until they were turned out into Trafalgar Square just as the starlings were waking up.

Due to their aristocratic disdain for work, we called them Lord and Lady Bellwood, and by extension, the Corner House, still in all its Edwardian Baroque splendour, became known as ‘Bellwood Grange’.

Stan was still drummer when the band went professional, and in consequence the money got more reasonable. This did him little good however as Doris was given to the expensive whim. She would demand strawberries out of season (off a barrow), for example, so they were hardly better off.

Later Stan left the jazz world and became a public house manager.

As a band we were now completely established. Mick had lost his initial astonishment at getting into a train for an hour or so, and finding everybody at the end of the journey talking in an entirely different accent, We began to play concerts at the beginning of the fifties, and were a particular success in my native city. On my insistence, the whole band used to come home for a meal. Once I even persuaded my mother to have them to stay. I told her that other band parents did, and that anyway they weren’t fussy about where they slept. She found out otherwise. Several of them demanded extra pillows and blankets. I never pressed her again. She didn’t really much care for the tea performance. The moment everybody arrived they would start playing
fortissimo,
preferably on each others’ instruments. At tea, in the early days of the band’s history, we insisted that Owen Maddock sat at the far end of the table so that the rest of us would get a chance to have something to eat. This meant he faced my mother and she was forced to watch plateful after plateful of food vanishing into his bearded jaws. He would eat with one hand, and spread peanut butter on his next slice with the other so as to waste no time.

Our early concerts, held in a Victorian classical building in the civic centre were perhaps, in all the band’s long history, our greatest triumph. In the interval the band and my father would dash across Lime Street into ‘The Legs of Man’ for several quick drinks, but in fact we were intoxicated by the applause. Both my grandmothers insisted on coming. I don’t know what they really made of it all. My father’s mother would only say: ‘I can’t think what your Great Aunt Eva would have said.’ My mother’s mother would suggest, in a comparatively unfriendly way, ‘You must hypnotise the audience to make them clap like that.’ From this I took it that she, at any rate, remained unhypnotised.

Douglas Byng, an old friend of my mother’s, was appearing in pantomime one Christmas and came to tea the day of a concert. As it was Sunday he also came to the concert itself. He seemed to enjoy it.

‘It reminded me,’ he told my mother afterwards, ‘of those dear old days in Harlem.’

It was for me a sharp pleasure to see on the hoardings, in the streets of all my childhood’s memories, the posters with my name in big black letters.

It was through jazz, the classless music, that I began to know Liverpudlians outside the middle-class barriers of my parents’ world. Girls too. I derived iconoclastic pleasure from having it off in the public parks where fifteen years before my brother and I, neatly dressed and pedalling our tricycles, accompanied our nurse on sunny afternoons.

It was in Paddy McKeirnan’s club in Manchester (in those days it was held in a hotel called the Grosvenor) that we first encountered violence. Mick had left the bandstand to go to the gents, and discovered a young thug kicking another one in the face. Mick had stopped him, told him not to be a bastard, and gone back to play. Later on he went for another piss and found him doing exactly the same thing. He’d dragged him off and the boy had pulled a razor on him. Mick relieved him of this and frog-marched him out of the building.

After the session, having no instrument to pack up, I wandered out on to the steps to breathe a little air under the Mancunian stars. The young thug and his mates surrounded me and jostled me into a dark corner. One of them had a bottle, as yet unbroken, but he had begun to tap it against the wall, gradually increasing the strength of the blows. When that breaks, I thought, he’s going to push it in my face. They were swearing and lunging round me to work themselves up to what they meant to do. One of them grabbed me by the lapels and gave me the head, that is butted me with his forehead. My nose started bleeding.

I was anaesthetised by fear. I subconsciously did the only thing that might work and it did. I took out of my pocket a small book of the sound poems of the dadaist Kurt Schwitters, explained what they were, and began to read. The book was knocked out of my hand, but I bent and picked it up again, and read on:

langerturgle pi pi pi pi pi

langerturgle pi pi pi pi pi

Ookar.

langerturgle pi pi pi pi pi

Ookar.

Rackerterpaybee

Rackerterpaybay

Ookar.

langerturgle pi pi pi pi pi

etc.

Slowly, muttering threats, they moved off. I can’t explain why it worked, but I suspect that it was because they needed a conventional response in order to give me a going over. If I’d pleaded or attempted to defend myself, or backed against the wall with my arm over my face, I think I’d have had it.

We ran into violence on very few occasions. We saw a great many punch-ups in dance halls, although none in jazz clubs, but they hardly ever involved the band.

Although it was some time before we thought to turn professional, Mick had begun to think professionally. My first intimation of this came as a great shock. We were playing a concert in Wimbledon and, prior to our stint, I was loosening my tie, pulling my shirt half out of my trousers, and messing up my hair. Mick was watching me with rising irritation.

‘Smarten yourself up a bit, cock, before we go on!’ he suggested crossly when I had finished my anti-toilet, ‘we’re getting paid you know.’

A month or two later we had another brush. We were playing at ‘The Queen Victoria’, North Cheam, a regular venue of ours over the years. Mick asked me what I wanted to sing. I suggested ‘Thinking Blues’, one of Bessie Smith’s most austere numbers. Mick blew up. ‘For Christ’s sake, cock,’ he shouted, ‘we’ve just got the audience going a bit.’

I walked off the stage and sulked in the bar. We had a stormy interval during the course of which I told him I’d a good mind to leave the band and join ‘The Crane River’. At least Ken cared about jazz, not the bloody audience. We finished several pints later with me weeping into my beer, but won over, as usual, by Mick’s charm.

As it happens, the emergence of Ken Colyer had led to a great deal of soul searching throughout the whole revivalist jazz world. I first heard him on a river-boat shuffle some years before. Like most people at that time I thought he-was joking.

The early river-boat shuffles bore little relation to the twelve bands, two steamers, Margate and back ‘Floating Festivals’ of recent years. Everybody knew everybody. We all squeezed on to a little boat which chugged up-river to Chertsey. At the locks there was jiving on the tow-paths. Beryl Bryden swam to enthusiastic cheers. The music and the moving water, the bottled beer and the bare arms, melted into a golden haze. The last defiant chorus from the band as the ship turned in midstream before heading for the pier in the warm dusk sounded really beautiful.

There was no question of us playing that year; Mick had only just formed the band. Even so he had brought his horn, because on the way back we were to tie up for an hour at Eel Pie Island, and there was to be an open-air jam session for the second line. Ken Colyer was on board, and seeing Mick had his trumpet with him, asked if he could borrow it when we went ashore. Mick said yes, imagining that he would blow a couple of numbers and then give it him back. Not a bit of it. After about half an hour Mick asked him for it back, and Ken refused! Mick told me about this and added ‘and have you heard him?’

What we expected a trumpet player to aim at was the early Louis Armstrong noise. Ken didn’t sound anything like that. His wavery vibrato and basic melodic approach was based on Bunk Johnson. He sounded, and intended to sound, like an old man who had never left New Orleans when they closed Story ville. He played traditional, not revivalist, jazz.

Later on he formed a band, ‘The Crane River Jazz Band’. The Crane River is a muddy little stream which trickles past London airport on the road to Staines. The band played in a large hut at the side of the pub. I went to hear them and thought they were dreadful. There were no solos. Every number was (ensemble throughout, and to my ears monotonous ensemble at that. The bass drum pounded away, the clarinet ran up and down the scales like a mouse in a wheel, the two cornets (Sonny Morris was Ken’s partner) wavered and trembled, the trombone grunted spasmodically. To ears tuned to the Morton Red Hot Peppers it was a horrible noise.

Later, as we heard more of the Bunk Johnson and George Lewis sides, we began, slowly and reluctantly, to appreciate the qualities of Ken’s approach. It was primitive but serious. It was also patently sincere. The NO fanatics called Ken ‘The Guv’nor’. With satirical intentions so did the rest of us. In time, however, it was no longer a joke. After the Crane River broke up, Ken rejoined the Merchant Navy with the intention of deserting in New Orleans. He succeeded, and got to play with the old veterans who were still alive. He got put in jail too, and came back to England an heroic figure. Chris Barber and Monty Sunshine had a band ready for him, but they had reckoned without his formidable single-mindedness. He rounded on them for attempting to dilute with commercialism the purity of New Orleans music. Chris and Monty left. The Chris Barber Jazz Band, basing its music on a tidied-up version of Ken’s, moved into popular favour and sparked off the trad boom of the late fifties. A great many people made a great deal of money out of this, but not Colyer. Awkward as an old bear, often too drunk to blow properly, he played as he wanted to since the very beginning. His band had the first skiffle group. At a recording session Ken went into the box to hear the play-backs and rejected the lot.

‘You can’t hear the fucking inner rhythms,’ he told the astounded engineer.

Even Humph, although he has always denied it, was affected by Ken’s ideas. For a month or two he turned to look over his shoulder. The ghost of Mutt Carey whispered in his ear. Then he turned away, and swam slowly and deliberately into the mainstream.

One of Humph’s characteristics is to believe that what he plays at any given moment is what he has always wanted to play. He re-writes his musical history like a one-man Ministry of Truth in
Nineteen Eighty-four
, but the files of the musical press remain as they were. Only the other day in an old book of press-cuttings I came across a description of Humph listening to a modern jazz record and then, when it had finished, turning away with the remark: ‘Back to sanity and 1926!’

The year of the Festival of Britain, it was decided to hold a concert of British jazz at the newly opened Royal Festival Hall. The body behind this venture was the recently formed and clumsily named National Federation of Jazz Organisations, a non-profit-making body whose committee was made up of a great many jazz critics, a few of the more powerful promoters and a couple of executant players. Its President was, inevitably, the Marquis of Donegal.

At the suggestion of some of the committee, he went along, coronet in hand, to ask Princess Elizabeth if she would come (‘honour the occasion by Her Gracious Presence’ in more trad terms), and she, or her advisers, said yes. Before the concert started she shook bands with all the bandleaders, and the following week the musical press was full of this or that familiar face grinning ferociously up at her from the slightly winded position, while the rest of the line waited their turn wearing that special expression of jovial despair which surrounds Royalty on every public occasion.