Owning Up: The Trilogy (65 page)

The A and A was housed in a tall ramshackle building tucked away in an alley behind the Charing Cross Road. There were a great many stone stairs up to the club entrance and on one of them slept an old woman under a pile of newspapers. Although there was a door with a spyhole in it, unless the law was putting the pressure on it was usually open and you could walk right in. There were two rooms in use: a restaurant, and above it a billiard hall patronised for the most part by the taxi-drivers.

The restaurant was a long, cheerful, none-too-clean room with a counter at the end and a kitchen off. The food was Greek, very reasonable and surprisingly good. We usually went there when we got back into town after a job, but the atmosphere was so lively that, although we intended leaving in time to catch the next all-night bus, we often sat until the first tube in Leicester Square.

There was a juke box which held an uncharacteristic selection of good jazz and Greek music, and in the entrance to the club there was a football machine usually manipulated by seriously involved Cypriot waiters.

At one table sat an old man with a long white beard. He was an astrologer and, for a small fee, would work out your horoscope with the aid of tattered charts of the heavens. Another regular was Gypsy Larry. Larry was in his sixties but his nut-brown face, vivid black eyes, and very white teeth suggested a much younger man. He wore a brilliant red neckerchief and talked pure old-style cockney. One of his stories began: ‘So this geezer went for a pony in the carsie…”

There was often a live session at the A and A, but as there was no piano, and brass or woodwind instruments were discouraged, this was confined to guitars and banjos. Gypsy Larry could play guitar, and ‘Banjo George’, a dignified grey-haired man who looked like an accountant down on his luck, usually sat in with him. Among the various jazz musicians who also contributed was Diz Disley.

Diz had come to London from Yorkshire where he had been at Leeds Art School and was also a member of the Yorkshire Jazz Band. He wears a beard and has the face of a satyr
en route
to a cheerful orgy. He is full of talent and a real anarchist with a built-in anti-success mechanism. He sleeps through appointments with editors who would like to employ him as a cartoonist or, if he has the job, doesn’t send in his drawings on time. He became a popular compére on a BBC pop programme not long ago and then missed several editions because he was in jail for contempt of an Income Tax court. He is generous with his money, and unscrupulous when he hasn’t any. If reproached he simply says: ‘Be fair,’ and if this doesn’t help adds: ‘Tarrah then. Fuck off.’

What Diz has is a great feeling for style, an eye for the human comedy, and a tongue to transmit its flavour.

I saw a lot of him at this time. One day we ate in an Indian restaurant in Chelsea. There was an elderly woman at the next table talking about circuses in a loud, slightly dotty, way.

‘I will never go to the circus,’ she told her companion, ‘because of the performing animals. I should only make a scene, and it wouldn’t do any good, so I don’t go.’

Diz nodded in vigorous approval, his head cocked like a tom-tit on a coconut.

‘The whole point is,’ she went on, ‘that I can’t bear animals having to learn tricks. I don’t mind if they do tricks naturally. Now my doggie…’ and she patted the snuffling old hearth-rug at her feet. ‘He can do lots of tricks, can’t ’oo, darling. ’Es, of course ’oo can, but the point is that the tricks he can do, he’s taught himself…’

There was a moment’s silence in the restaurant while the lady drank some water. Disley completed her sentence for her quietly but clearly.

‘Like fuckin’ barking,’ he explained amiably.

Another A and A
habitué
was a girl called Kinky Mavis. She was not a great beauty, but a serious eroticist with a large assortment of chains, fancy-dress (nun, schoolgirl, police-woman, etc.) and a collection of photographs she liked to spread around her bed. Outside this she seemed a friendly uncomplicated girl.

Mick never went up the A and A much. After a couple of visits, he had decided it wasn’t his atmosphere. He only liked talking to people when he was drinking and, in London at any rate, only ate when he was starving. Even then, he would usually settle for five or six pies at a stall. Like a wild animal he had established his chosen tracks through the Soho jungle and seldom deviated. He was a raver of habit.

One afternoon we had stopped for a drink at a small pub in Essex. There was a village green in front of the building, and grazing on it a tethered goat. There is something very un-English about goats. It’s not only that there aren’t many of them, it’s their pagan eyes, either milky-blue or honey-yellow, with their elongated pupils, and their extraordinary smell, and the way their skeletons are so functional, so in evidence, with the flesh draped on the bones like heavy material.

With a glass of beer gleaming and glinting in my hand under the light-splashed East Anglian sky, I walked over the green and patted the animal’s taut neck and the bulging flanks supported oji the neat splayed legs. Suddenly, without looking up from its grazing, the goat began to shit. Like a speeded-up film of a flower opening, its whole arse split and a formidable number of turds in clusters like black grapes emerged and fell steaming on to the grass.

I was surprised by this rather dramatic event and walked back to the band who were sitting on a long bench outside the low white clap-boarded building and attempted to describe what I had seen.

Mick listened and then asked, as though seeking information, how many points I got for seeing a goat shit. This was how the points game started.

At first it applied simply to animals shitting: two for a dog; five for the more secretive and fastidious cat; only three for a cow but an extra two if it was pissing at the same time.

I don’t know at what moment ‘the points system’ was extended and widened to take in minor accidents and personal disasters, nor how long it was before it crystallised and became exclusively concerned with deformities, dwarfs and cripples, but eventually it did. The awarding of points became a popular band sport. A pre-sick joke.

Mick has always been concerned with the significance of certain numbers. Very soon the comparatively modest ‘eighteen’ became linked to points.

‘At least eighteen,’ he would say as we stopped to allow a hunchback with a surgical boot weave across the road in front of the band coach.

‘Points’ also became a noun as in the sentence: ‘He is points.’

And to describe some physical handicap not immediately apparent, such as an expensive artificial leg, the word gained an adjective.

‘Have you noticed?’ Mick would ask out of the corner of his mouth. ‘He’s subtle points.’

Descriptions of athletic events on the radio were considerably enriched by the invention of the points system. Sentences like ‘He has been awarded the maximum number of points’ or ‘I’m afraid she has lost several points there’ gained a new significance.

There was in the jazz world at that time a man who was worth at least eighteen. His name was ‘Little Jeff’, and he was a dwarf jazz musician. He played trumpet and sang. Before the war he had worked with Nat Gonella around the music halls – presumably on the Johnsonian principle that why people want to see a dog walking on its hind legs or a woman preaching is not because they can do it well but because they can do it at all. It was his size and not his musical ability which had won him his livelihood. Even so he could play the trumpet quite well and was at that time lively and active.

During the bombing God had seen fit to aim a splinter of glass at little Jeff and paralyse him from the waist down. This just about doubled his points rating but didn’t break his spirit. He now propelled himself in an invalid car from jazz club to jazz club and would borrow Mick’s trumpet and sing and play a couple of numbers. One was ‘Old Rocking Chair’s Got Me’ – he was not unaware of the pathos of his position – the other, ‘I’m In the Mood for Love’.

The only trouble with little Jeff was that he had to be carried from his invalid car to the bandstand, and he was extremely heavy for his size.

It was here that Paul Simpson carried little Jeff in by himself. Although crimson in the face he didn’t drop him, but reached the chair and walked away puffed up with pride. He hadn’t gone more than a few steps when little Jeff began to shout out in pain. In his relief at being able to put him down, Paul hadn’t been careful enough. Little Jeff was sitting on his balls.

In my view the points game is no worse and no better than the conventional response to deformity. When we started it may even have been better because we shocked ourselves into taking deformity into account. In time, however, our attitude hardened into convention. We simply thought ‘eighteen’ where most people think ‘how tragic’ and with as little sense of involvement.

In the early fifties the ‘West End Café’ in Edinburgh used to book jazz bands from London for a fortnight at a time, and eventually they got round to us. I was very excited by this because it was the band’s first long engagement, and I found it possible again to relate to jazz history. Even the name of the café, in appearance a conventional Scottish tea-room, was the same as a venue in Chicago where Armstrong had played in the early twenties. Another advantage was that we could play jazz all evening with no waltzes or sambas, and that I was sure that Mick would find it essential to rehearse some new numbers as we would be facing more or less the same audience every night.

We stayed
en pension
in a boarding house. On the table at every meal were huge cake stands loaded with every sort of scone and roll. I have always been greedy and eat myself to a standstill. Until then I had been thin. Edinburgh was a watershed. I got into the coach at Baker Street a skinny lad and got out three weeks later a fat man. Mick took to calling me ‘Fatso’ which he shortened to ‘Fat’. An incidental effect of my altered metabolism was to stop me drinking beer altogether. Consulting a calorie chart I discovered that gin was the least fattening spirit and for a long time drank it neat at a single swallow, a sight which convinced most people of my depravity.

The Edinburgh jazz musicians were divided into two cliques. There were the purists led by a clarinettist called Sandy Brown and a trumpet player called Al Fairweather. They played at that time Ken Colyer music at its most uncompromising and listened to our brand of Dixieland with glowering disapproval. Al and Sandy have the two Scottish faces: Al’s is the craggy one with watch-spring eyebrows, Sandy’s the long dour one with the Kilroy nose. He also wears a-beard and balded early.

Their rivals played Condon music. Again there were two outstanding personalities, Alex Welsh and Archie Semple, although their band went under Archie’s name. Alex was short and jolly. Archie was tall, thin, and charming in a jumpy kind of way.

The Brown–Fairweather axis and the Welsh–Semple clique hardly communicated. We became more friendly with the latter, and after finishing our Edinburgh stint went on a short tour with the Semple band. During the course of this, Archie decided to come down to London and join the Mulligan band on clarinet. Did this mean Paul Simpson left? Of course not. Mick bought him a baritone sax and yet again the band grew bigger and more unwieldy, but Archie’s rather Peewee Russell flavoured style was a distinct acquisition. Mick was never against featuring soloists (it gave him time for a quick smoke in the wings), and to listen to Archie was a genuine pleasure.

*

Shortly afterwards two more personnel changes took place, and both replacements were Scottish. Why are there so many Scots jazz musicians, and, come to that, why so many good ones? Sandy Brown, a convinced nationalist, has a theory that it’s to do with the fact that Scottish folk music is still a reality.

Johnny Lavender, the chicken-hating banjoist, left to go and practise photography in Canada. In his place, Mick took on Jimmy Currie, a convinced modernist who played amplified guitar.

Jimmy was the antithesis of the rest of us. He was a great dandy, and used to bring away on tour several suits which swayed rhythmically from side to side in their cellophane covers from a rail at the back of the band coach.

Uncomprehending and irritated we asked him why. He explained in his high-pitched Edinburgh accent: ‘Well, man, you’ve got to look sharp for the chicks.’

For the same reason he was very concerned about his thinning hair and, to disguise this, he grew it very long at the back of his head and brushed it forward over his cranium, arranging it in little curls at the front. Although this took a long time and needed constant attention, it worked well enough in the ordinary way but sometimes, when he was carrying his amplifier from the coach to the hall, or walking through the streets looking for somewhere to eat, a sudden gust of wind would blow the whole thing backwards leaving his head bald and a good foot of hair streaming out behind him. Later on, long after he had left the band, he – sensibly – bought an expensive toupee. Only the other day I saw him wearing a new one, completely convincing for anybody who didn’t know him, in ‘distinguished’ grey.

He was also the first person I knew who used ‘Old Spice’ aftershave lotion, at that time unobtainable in this country. He told us that he ‘got the fellers to bring it over on the boats’.

Jimmy worked out a cabaret act which Mick sometimes asked him to perform at concerts, mostly for our pleasure. For no self-evident reason Jimmy’s act involved him pretending to. be a Mexican. He opened and closed it with a chorus from ‘South of the Border’, and wore a sombrero liberated, I suspect, from the wardrobe of some Latin–American group he had worked with in the past. I can still remember some of the abysmal patter which he delivered in the conventional sing-song of the Cowboy film peon.

‘My girl friend, she’s not pretty, but then she’s not ugly. She’s sort of in between – pretty ugly. When I first saw her she was standing outside a pawn shop picking her teeth, so I went inside the shop and helped her pick the teeth she wanted, etc.…”

Our new bass player, Pat Molloy, although of Irish origin, was born in Dunfermline, a small Scottish town on the other side of the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. He was very small, a practising Roman Catholic, and had a classic Irish face with black curly hair and a complicated mouth full of teeth. It was these which made his Irish–Scottish accent very difficult to understand.