Owning Up: The Trilogy (62 page)

Mick came back-stage in a state of quivering nerves. The two band numbers were ambitious and complicated arrangements, and sounded ragged and unconvincing. My own song was ‘Rock Island Line’, and according to Lady Donegal ‘amused HRH’ but didn’t mean much to the rest of the audience. The whole concert in fact was dogged by Royal Flu, and the only band which got going at all was ‘The Saints’ from Manchester.

Their success was, I suspect, due to the fact that the Royal Family is based in London. Like all Mancunians they were in a state of constant irritation that so much went on in the capital, whereas anybody could see that Manchester was in every way superior. They played their stint with dogged unconcern and raised the roof.

Outside the Festival Hall stood the pavilions and domes of the Festival of Britain, that gay and imaginative flyleaf dividing the grey tight-lipped puritanism of the years of austerity from the greedy affluence which was to come.

Mick was tinkering about with the band sound. He always tinkered because he was unable or unwilling to impose a musical style on any other musician. The average bandleader tells his musicians what noise he is after, and, if they refuse to play in that style, they either hand in their notice or get the sack. Mick never did this, or at least only when things got right out of hand. The periods when the band sounded quite reasonable, and the times when it was embarrassing to be connected with it, were dictated by events rather than controlled by musical policy. There were times when a trombonist played modern-tinged mainstream on his left and a traditional clarinettist doodled away on his right, a modern drummer dropped bombs behind him encouraged and supported by a right-handed piano player, while a banjo player, pissed out of his mind, hammered out a dragging two-beat half a bar behind everybody else.

Another factor which held us back was that Mick, after the initial enthusiasm of the early days, developed a pathological hatred of rehearsal. There were times when the rest of us ganged up on him and demanded them. This made him very angry, but he usually gave in, and for two or three weeks we would rehearse. Then, using every possible excuse – lateness of musicians, double booking by the rehearsal rooms, the large number of dates the band had – he would gradually let things slide until the next explosion of musical frustration from the chaps.

When the music has become terrible the obvious thing to do is take the sound to pieces, to strip it down, and then to put it together again checking every stage. What Mick did was to add other instruments. At this time for example we had two banjo players. One was Johnny Lavender, a quiet photographer with a constant smile lurking under a half-hearted moustache. The other was a roly-poly middle-aged man called Bill Cotton who was a kind-hearted formidable piss-artist.

Bill’s musical speciality when drunk was to break his strings in the middle of a number. You could tell when this happened without turning round because he played at about twice the volume of Johnny Lavender, and the noise from the rhythm section almost died away. The replacement of a broken string was a comic performance in itself. He would hold the banjo about two inches from his nose and with slow glassy-eyed deliberation fail time and again to thread the new string on to the key. Eventually by the law of averages he succeeded, tuned his instrument with conscientious precision and then, often only a bar or two later, another string would snap.

Conversationally, as an evening wore on, Bill became the victim of a single idea. Cigarettes were still scarce, and he had discovered that you could always get them at an all-night café near Gunnersbury Station. If any of us ran out in a coach or train after a job, it didn’t matter where we were, the outskirts of Bedford or the Essex marshes, the plump snoring figure would subconsciously sense our dilemma, jerk upright and mumble ‘Gunnershby Schtathun’ before collapsing again.

This ability to respond to a situation like a galvanised frog was one of his more extraordinary feats. One night, returning from a jazz club outside London in a fog, we got on to a roundabout and circled it a dozen times trying to find the right exit. Eventually we succeeded. Bill, apparently out to the world, spoke. ‘Pity,’ he said, ‘I was just getting fond of it.’

How he got the sack was absolutely in character. It was shortly before we turned professional, and we were to play a job for an important promoter of that period called Maurice Kinn. The night before Mick had given a party, but warned everybody that they must be on time for the coach meet at 10.00am up the side of Madame Tussaud’s. At the end of the party Bill had gone round emptying all the dregs from the glasses and then staggered off home to get a clean shirt. He had, of course, fallen asleep and arrived at the meet an hour after the coach had left. Mick and I were waiting.

‘Sorry, cock,’ said Bill, and added in a rather pathetic attempt to justify himself, ‘I’ve lost me voice.’

‘You’ve lost your fucking job too,’ snapped Mick, and hailed a taxi to take us to the station. Looking out of the rear window I could see Bill swaying slightly in the middle of the pavement using his banjo case to help him keep his balance. Next time I saw him, several months later, he told me that he’d had to leave the band because of his day job.

Sometime before Bill left we’d played a concert in Holland and this brought home to me yet again the difficulty of remaining a junior employee at an art gallery and becoming something of a figure in the revivalist jazz world. I had caught the earliest plane (the others were returning by boat) in the hope of getting to the gallery by ten o’clock, but I realised it was a slender chance. The plane didn’t land until 9.10 and although I took a taxi, I didn’t turn into Brook Street until 10.45. ELT was away on the Continent, so although nervous – I had sworn I’d be back on time – I had hopes of getting away with it. Nothing doing. His wife, Sybil, who was a buyer in a big Regent Street shop, was waiting for me and
furious
. She was quite right, but I found it very hard, after an evening crowned by a lot of applause, to feel it really mattered. ELT was just as angry when he got back. With the Surrealist reverence for eroticism he told me that the only valid excuse for being late was if I had been making love. Although I was usually a little late for work, it was never the direct reason. There was, however, to use a phrase of Mick’s, ‘a great deal of it about’.

His determination to wean me from homosexuality gradually succeeded. Perhaps the most traumatic experience was, however, none of his doing. Johnny Parker had found an attractive if rather criminally-minded girl and lumbered her back to Margaretta Terrace for about ten days on the trot.

She was called Pat, but we called her ‘Cow-Pat’ because she had a distinct Gloucestershire accent, and there were a great many other Pats floating round the jazz world at that time.

I paid her no attention. I was recovering from a dose of clap, and although I had only another four days to go before being given the OK (three months quarantine they give you – surely this errs on the side of caution?), I had no wish to stir it into life again, and return to sitting in the long line of Cypriot waiters in dinner jackets, proud ponces and furtive junior clerks on the hard benches of the special treatment department, Endell Street. She, however, thought otherwise and climbed determinedly into my bed.

This, more than anything else, gave me heterosexual confidence, and Mick too did his best, both deliberately and by accident.

He sometimes arrived in the middle of the night with a girl, usually a night-club hostess, he had picked up, and so drunk he could do nothing about it. I was the gainer here, but usually he didn’t mind because by the time I went down to breakfast he was sober enough to perform. Once though he came a cropper. While I was eating my bacon and egg downstairs, she told him primly: ‘I don’t like it in the morning.’

Quite often he brought back a girl from a jazz club on his way home to Ealing, and left her there afterwards. I would sit and read while he was at it. Once he noticed that my book, a turn-of-the-century edition of
Hard Times
, was upside down.

On another occasion, he was sleeping with a girl when a very jealous girl-friend of his shouted outside in the street that she knew he was up there with somebody and was on her way up. He pushed the girl he was with into my bed, flung himself down on the mattress on the floor (she was at the door) and simulated, without too much difficulty, a drunken stupor. He wasn’t best pleased when I took advantage of this situation, but there was nothing he could do about it.

Later on, when we went pro, we began to lose touch with life in London because we were hardly ever there, but at this time we lived a full London life in a dozen different worlds.

Through Sinclair Traill we were asked to the houses of the rich and insecure where the ice tinkled in treble scotches.

In contrast to this uneasy world, we sometimes stayed the night with Jimmy Asman and his wife Dot in their tiny house in Plumstead. Jimmy, bearded and jovial, thought of himself as a no-nonsense Rabelaisian figure, but was at heart something of a prude. Because his house was so small and so full of jazzmen and their girls, he had to allow them to sleep together, but he didn’t really like it. In his bedroom there was a small bed which he called ‘The Grandstand’ because it overlooked his bed, and he would give this to obviously randy couples in the hope that the proximity of him and Dot would restrain them. It never did, of course, and sometimes he got quite angry. He was, however, generous and warm-hearted if overfond of the idea that eight pints of beer and a loud fart were the insignia of the free spirit.

Under the aegis of the NFJO it was decided in 1950 to hold a Jazz Band Ball at the Hammersmith Palais. The excuse for this was that it was exactly thirty years since the Original Dixieland Jazz Band had made their début there. It was in a way the apotheosis of the revivalist jazz movement. The Committee of the NFJO sat at a table in evening dress, and the groups played on alternate sides of the huge pantomime-Baroque bandstand under the revolving multi-faceted mirror-globes, while coloured spotlights combed the enormous crowds.

The size of the audience surprised the press; they had no idea of the popularity of revivalist jazz.
Picture Post
, which covered the event in a long article, was intrigued by the daytime
persona
of the jazzmen.

‘Who would believe,’ it said, ‘that Chris Barber is an out-of-work clerk, Mick Mulligan the Director of a firm of Wine Shippers, and George Melly a frock-coated usher in an art gallery…’

The frock coat was a picturesque invention but, in the years that followed, it persisted and grew in absurdity in both press reports and programme notes. I became a ‘frock-coated usher at the Tate Gallery’, and then ‘frock-coated assistant curator at the Tate Gallery’, and finally, the frock coat discarded in the face of a larger pretension, ‘The Curator of the Tate Gallery’.

The night of the Hammersmith Jazz Band Ball it seemed that the whole world had gone jazz crazy. We believed it anyway, and when E. L. T. Mesens told me a week or so later that the gallery was going to close down, and Mick suggested that we went professional, I agreed with joy and optimism.

But there were other, less idealistic people with their fingers on the jazz fans’ pulse who realised that here was a huge audience temporarily excited by revivalist jazz, and a large number of bands willing to appear in front of that audience for the glory of it and very little money. What could be done about it before the moment passed? Logical conclusion: hire the largest halls available all round London, book the maximum number of bands, and run a series of Sunday concerts until the interest falls. For a month or two the huge suburban cinemas were full of jazzmen and jazz fans. Each band played for about five minutes which meant they chose their fastest, loudest numbers – ‘rabble rousers’ was the trade name – in the hope of making some impact on the audience.

If we’d had any foresight we would have refused to take part in these self-destructive marathons, but like the Gadarene swine we charged over the cliff, and in no time at all revivalist jazz in London was moribund.

Only Humph had the good sense and dignity to abstain. He refused to play unless he was allotted at least twenty minutes. If the rest of us had followed his lead, the slump need never have happened.

The same pattern repeated itself on a much larger scale during the trad boom, but the difference was that at least that time the bands made a lot of money out of it whatever the cost in musical integrity. We, poor fools, made nothing but a little beer money.

It was while the concerts were happening that Mick and I turned pro.

By the time we were completely professional the personnel of the band had changed almost completely.

There was a transitional period when I helped E. L. T. to clear up the gallery, weighing all the waste-paper in the cellar (we got thirty shillings for it), selling the books in lots to invited clients and cataloguing the pictures for an inter-directors’ sale. This all took several months, and by the time it was finished the revivalist boom was over, and Mick had had a good long think.

Dawbarn, our first trombonist, had gone some time before. His refusal to learn chords was the reason, and a justifiable one, but Mick had found himself unable to give him the sack quietly and reasonably, and it had all happened on Christmas Eve at Cook’s Ferry when he was very drunk. Bob took this badly, and for a long time wouldn’t talk to Mick at all.

In his place we had an Australian called Ian Pierce. He had played for a time with the Graeme Bell Band, and was quiet, timorous, literary-minded, an Anglophile, and very highly strung. He had a beautiful ugly face functionally designed to support his huge nose. When amused he spun round and round as though in pain, holding on to his nose with one hand as if afraid suppressed laughter might blow it off. We called him Wyllie because he had been so amused by this story about a great uncle of mine.

My great uncle Bill was physically senile and would sit all day smoking Turkish cigarettes through an ivory holder in front of the fire. Behind him hung a large picture of a river bank painted in the 1870s by an Academician called Wyllie. When we were children, we would always ask my great uncle who the artist was, not because we didn’t know, but because we so enjoyed watching him haul himself half out of his chair, swinging his head and shoulders round to face the pictures, before he answered us.