Owning Up: The Trilogy (63 page)

‘That one?’ he’d gasp.

‘Yes, Uncle Bill, the river scene over the carving table.’

‘It’s by a feller called Wyllie,’ he’d say, and fall back into his chair on the point of collapse.

This heartless anecdote so tickled Ian that he spent the whole evening repeating ‘a feller called Wyllie’ and then going into a nose-holding spin.

Soon after Wyllie joined us Johnny Parker left. Humph offered him a job. At the time I was amazed he accepted. I can’t imagine why I was now. The pay was better, the prestige enormous, and the music on a completely different level. It was I suppose because I had a formidable sentimental loyalty towards Mick and the band, and imagined everybody else had too. As a result Wyllie changed from trombone to piano. This was an improvement because, although he had lovely ideas, he was so nervous that he could hardly ever pull them off on trombone, essentially an extrovert instrument, whereas on piano it was just a question of hitting the right notes.

On trombone, a boy called Roy Crimmins took over. He was a brilliant technician influenced at that time by Jack Teagarden. He hated the amateur approach of the revivalist movement, was ashamed of appearing on the same bill as professional musicians, and was very much in cahoots with Stan Bellwood who felt the same way. Between them they produced an atmosphere of near mutiny which led to increasing tension over the next couple of years.

Owen Maddock left. For a time we used Jim Bray, an ex-tuba player who had taken up double bass. Jim has lived through every development in the jazz scene. He left us to join Humph. Later he was with Chris Barber playing traditional jazz, and then joined Bruce Turner and played mainstream. Tall and balding, he is a repository of waspish anecdote, his upper lip curled in permanent amusement, his hands black with the oil of the ancient cars and motor bikes which are his passion.

He was replaced on bass by a professional called Barry Langford. Moustached and Brylcreemed, he had no particular interest in jazz, but simply played whatever he was paid to play. At one time he had worked for a comedy band and had played a bass which laid an egg and had a telephone in it.

Finally on clarinet there was Paul Simpson.

Paul has been around the jazz scene since the very beginning. He is an incredible mixture of contradictions. He can be very funny and extremely charming. He can be infuriatingly big-headed. He is given to moods of such black despair that anybody seeing him coming remembers urgent appointments and hurries away leaving their unfinished drinks on the counter.

He boasts of his excessive appetites, how much he could eat, how much he could drink, how many orgasms he could achieve in a night. We formalised this later.

‘There goes Paul,’ we’d say, ‘off to eat three separate curries, drink twenty pints of cider, and then run round the room with a girl on the end of his cock with her legs round his shoulders.’

Musically he has some talent on almost every instrument. He can also play approximately in every idiom from New Orleans to modern; but only on piano, despite his limited technique, does he show real feeling.

Paul is tall and heavily built, but not as tall or as heavy as he imagines. He has blond hair and a red face, the traditional cider-drinker’s flush, and looks rather like a bull terrier.

Mick, whose ears are as sharp as his eyes are dim, was always hearing Paul running him down as a musician. If somebody came up and requested a particular number, Paul would tell them that of course he knew it but Mick didn’t. This didn’t endear Paul to Mick. This then was the band at the time we went pro:

We had a photograph taken and reproduced for publicity purposes. The photographers lined us up in profile on a series of steps. We looked young and very nervous.

Finally Mick decided we ought to have an agent and Jim Godbolt, despite early destructive advice, agreed to take us on. Jim had worked for a time with the Lyn Dutton–Humphrey Lyttelton Agency, but had decided to set up on his own. We were his first clients. Despite his irascibility – and his tendency, when angry, to hurl the telephone across the room – he became well liked in the sub-world of agents and ballroom managers, concert promoters and jazz club organisers. He and Mick were a great comic turn. There was nothing I enjoyed quite so much as Jim’s accounts of Mick’s devious excuses for inefficiency, or Mick’s accounts of Jim’s neurotic explosions. Around this thin heron-like figure a whole comic tradition of disaster has grown up.

The Christie Brothers, Keith and Ian, were an authoritative source. They used to share a room with Jim in Gloucester Place.

One night they both woke up to find Godbolt hanging from a narrow bookshelf high up the wall. He was stark naked.

Keith said, ‘Look, Ian. Godbolt’s having one of his nightmares.’

Godbolt said, ‘Godbolt is not having one of his nightmares.’

Godbolt’s own account of his co-habitation with the Christies is tinged with bitterness.

Keith’s socks were famous throughout the jazz world. In fact at one time Keith was called ‘The Wendigo’ after a story by Algernon Blackwood about an elemental of the Canadian backtwoods who took possession of trappers and forced them to leap through the wilderness twenty feet at a time shouting: ‘Oh, my feet! My burning fiery feet!’

Godbolt has always been fastidious, and used to complain that when he opened the door of their room, Keith’s socks would meet him, not so much as a smell, but rather as a bee-like hum.

One night Ian Christie peed in the washbasin where Godbolt, who was on one of his periodic health kicks, had left a lettuce to soak. Godbolt could never decide if he was glad or sorry to have woken up and heard him.

Later Godbolt moved into a single room in Gloucester Place. It was triangular with the bed under the window. It was also on the ground floor at the back of the house. One afternoon Godbolt was having it off with his girl-friend (the early puritanism had largely withered) when he looked up and saw the fat twelve-year-old son of the landlady leaning on the window-sill watching. Godbolt leapt up or off in a spluttering rage, and threw open the window. The landlady’s son, who was standing on a dustbin, appeared unmoved. He waited until Godbolt had finished and then said quietly: ‘You ’ave your fun, and I’ll’ave mine.’

We had an agent, and Mick bought uniforms, and hired coaches to take us to jobs. As a final break with the semi-pro past he changed the name of the band. ‘Mick Mulligan’s Magnolia Jazz Band’ became ‘Mick Mulligan and His Band’.

5

The Dance Halls of Great Britain

I was still living at Margaretta Terrace, the only alteration in my life being not going to the gallery. For a month or two I spent every morning in bed, but realising that I was becoming more and more greedy for sleep, I began to get up between nine and ten.

Mick’s life had changed completely. He had left Ealing and set up house with a very pretty blonde girl called Pam Walker whom he had met on a river-boat shuffle.

The first propertour we went on was organised by Maurice Kinn. It lasted ten days and included Dingwall, a very small town in the far northwest of the Scottish highlands.

Mr Kinn provided a manager and compère, a Jewish comedian called Michael Black. Michael was so Soho in appearance and attitude that it was difficult to imagine him as far north as Camden Town. He wore a camel-hair overcoat with enormous padded shoulders, and had a Don Ameche moustache and a permanent five o’clock shadow. He was very worldly within the confines of his own tiny world.

Michael was exactly the sort of man who is always popping in and out of Wardour Street barbers asking if Harry’s been in, or what won the three-thirty or can he be fitted in for a cut and friction in about an hour and a half. He was a compulsive joke teller and kept a little book of esoteric reminders.

‘Now what’s this one?’ he’d say. ‘Jewish Bishop and pineapple chunks? Oh, yes. There was this Jewish feller, very sharp dresser, lovely gold watch, cuff-links, the lot, well…’

He started telling jokes as the coach drove up Baker Street and didn’t run out before we got back.

He also did a short cabaret act on most of the jobs. This was set material, and included imitations of such stereotyped figures as James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre.

The first job on the way up was Liverpool where we did our usual concert at the Picton Hall. Michael did his act and was not too well received by the purist jazz fans.

‘What about some jazz?’ they kept shouting.

They weren’t too keen on the new band either.

Michael fixed the digs for us on this tour. His technique, usually unsuccessful, was to introduce himself to the landlady or hotel receptionist by smiling exaggeratedly and then announcing in a posh accent: ‘I’m Michael Black of the BBC.’

When he had fixed the digs, he’d come out of the building, lean into the coach and tell us he’d managed to get a concession.

‘Knocked her down a tosheroon,’ he’d boast. Often he hadn’t at all.

As we drove further and further north, Michael seemed a more and more unlikely figure. In the Scottish borders he started an absurd argument that it would only take him about ten minutes to run up and down a very large hill that would patently have taken three quarters of an hour to climb.

In Dingwall he came bursting into the hotel bar in a state of acute shock.

‘My life,’ he shouted, ‘there’s only a flock of sheep in the street already.’

When I developed a sore throat in Edinburgh he took me to a doctor. He couldn’t resist inventing an elaborate lie.

‘This is George Melly, the famous singer,’ he told the unimpressed old practitioner. ‘His throat’s terrible, and he’s got three broadcasts with Joe Loss, a big charity cabaret, and then he’s got a film to make. Now I want you to really give him something good. No rubbish. There’s thousands of pounds at stake.’

‘Open your mouth wide,’ said the doctor, paying no attention whatsoever.

I enjoyed everything about the tour except the jobs. For the first time we were playing mostly in dance halls. The dancers complained about our tempos, and as they passed the front of the stand would turn and look at us with cold hatred over their shoulders. Mick called them ‘swivel-necks’.

The small handful of jazz fans who turned up complained on the other hand about our commercialism.

In Edinburgh we played a very tough hall at Leith. A ferocious looking man beckoned me over as I sat by the piano waiting to sing.

‘Will you tell your idjits tae mak less bliddy din,’ he growled.

I think we got £15 a week each for this tour, which seemed to me an enormous amount even though I didn’t have any left when we got back to London.

We travelled in hired coaches at this period. Mick had bought an old van during the semi-pro days, but it had begun to fall to bits, and although perhaps it could have been repaired, he had parked it on a bomb site when it had broken down one night and never gone back for it.

Coach hire is very expensive, and in the end Mick bought a coach and added a driver to the payroll. We went rapidly through a series of mad old men. There was one who couldn’t take any criticism and was always losing his way. ‘Right. That settles it, guv,’ he would shout at Mick when it was pointed out that, according to a signpost, we were now twenty miles further away from the job than we had been an hour before. ‘Give us me cards. I’m off.’

There was another who liked to be called ‘Pop’, who made a habit of standing in the road by the coach steps, and helping members of the band by patting them lingeringly on the bottom as they struggled aboard with their instruments.

There was a short filthy old thing in a very long overcoat held together with a length of twine. His party trick was taking snuff. Mile after mile he crammed it into his hairy nostrils and sniffed away so juicily and loudly that we could hear him above the noise of the engine.

He had, during many years’ driving, worked out an arrangement with almost every transport café in Great Britain: a coach load of people eating in the caff in exchange for a free meal in the kitchen.

We didn’t mind this too much in principle. We
had
to eat in transport cafés ourselves most of the time for financial reasons, and furthermore he did know which were better value than others. What we objected to was the way he automatically swung the coach off the road about lunch time and drew up in front of one of his fry-up stations. Sometimes we would tell him that we’d rather drive on into the next town where there was more choice and we could have a beer if we fancied it. This made him very angry. Once he came with us into an AA hotel where we had imagined we’d be safe from his Steptoesque grumbling. When the waiter handed him the menu, he held it for some time between his snuff-stained fingers and then asked bitterly: ‘Aven’t yer got no working men’s dinners?’

In fact, although some transport cafés are disgusting, with congealed sauce round the necks of the bottles and pools of tea on the table with crusts of bread floating in them, some are perfectly reasonable. There are gleaming jukeboxes and pin-tables and fruit-machines, and tables are clean, and the food, although standardised and limited, is at least hot and edible. In the long sour-mouthed nights on the road, where there is nothing to do but try to suffocate yourself to sleep under a blanket or watch the cat’s-eyes unwinding monotonously in the headlights, the transport café is actually something to look forward to, a few minutes of light and warmth in the dark cold hours between leaving the dance hall where the old caretaker and his one-eyed dog snooze over a tiny electric fire, and climbing into bed in the London dawn, grey and shivering from lack of sleep.