Owning Up: The Trilogy (67 page)

The Demon Brum has, to a greater or lesser extent, possessed the whole Midlands. Leicester, Nottingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton, all these towns evoke the figure of a commissionaire exerting his authority. It is not until you reach the Potteries that cities begin to regain their confidence, to become centres, not outer suburbs.

In reaction there is a considerable violence under the surface. The audiences at Birmingham Town Hall, that surprisingly beautiful neo-classic building at the very centre of the city’s hideous heart, are famous for their extremes. If they liked you they stamped for over five minutes. If they were against you they threw corporation lavatory rolls and pennies. They were inclined, throughout the whole jazz decade, to extreme revivalist conservatism. When Humph went mainstream and played a concert there with his new line-up, a whole row of the audience raised, during Bruce Turner’s first alto chorus, a long banner reading ‘
go home dirty bopper’!
To execute this project reveals a fanaticism verging on the unbalanced. I can imagine no other city where it could have happened.

Another city where we spent a great deal of time was Newcastle upon Tyne. The City Fathers refused, long after anyone else in England, to allow cinemas to open on Sundays. In consequence jazz concerts, held at the Essoldo, were full every week. Newcastle is the most foreign of our great cities. The Newcastle accent sounds like a Scandinavian language, and indeed there are a great many words of Norwegian origin in the local slang. We stayed at a boarding house which catered for Scandinavian seamen and there was rye bread and a smörgasbord washed down with great jugs of ice-cold milk for breakfast.

As time went on, our touring life took a certain shape. For example, Albert Kinder, a Scouse promoter who intended to tie up jazz in the North, had succeeded in organising a regular week-end for touring bands, culminating in a concert in the ’pool. The jobs on Friday and Saturday were usually a NAAFI dance at a RAF training camp near Warrington, and a public dance held in the Territorial Drill Hall, Widnes.

The RAF job was remarkable for the terrifying appearance of the two coachloads of girls imported by the authorities to dance with the trainee airmen. The whole area was still thick with US air bases, and it was only natural that any fun-loving young woman of normal appearance gravitated towards them. In consequence those left over verged on the grotesque. Their eruption into the canteen where we sat waiting to play never lost its dreadful fascination.

In Widnes we were made honorary members of the Sergeants’ Mess which had a bar. It also contained a very ugly but willing woman known to the sergeants as ‘the Widnes Bicycle’. One night, when we were drinking after the dance, a member of the band, his judgement clouded by beer, gave her a knee tremble at the back of the building. Although keen enough on the act itself, the Widnes Bicycle was suspicious of the musician’s motives.

‘I know the only reason you’re doing this,’ she told him. He imagined that she had guessed, accurately, that it was because he was drunk enough to ignore her repulsive looks, and began to feel rather sorry for her.

He therefore said nothing, hoping she would drop the subject and spare him the necessity of lying reassuringly, but she went on.

‘I know. Don’t think I don’t know! You’re only going with me…’

He waited hopelessly, staring at the glowing chimneys of the chemical factories along the shores of the Mersey. ‘… so you can go back and swank to the fellers.’

Another regular job was the Gaiety Ballroom, Grimsby. This huge hall was privately owned by an elderly Jewish gentleman of extreme old-world courtesy, two younger Jewish brothers with a new joke each time we came, and a Scottish lady with the appearance and manner of a kindly Lowland Sunday School teacher. There was also a manager called Freddy who had played tuba in the resident band when the Gaiety first opened in 1926. There was a photograph to prove it in the office, and an old night watchman with a small corpulent dog, with one sightless eye like a white grape.

At the end of the dance, Mick and I were invited up to the table at the side of the stand where the owners sat, and the elderly gentleman congratulated us, ‘Very nice show, Mick’, and asked us into the office for a drink. We discussed the state of the business, listened to the two jokes from the two brothers, and drank large whiskies under the photographs of champion ballroom dancers receiving cups in the decade before the war, and the
1926
band in the evening dress of the period with a sunset painted on the huge bass drum and Freddy holding his tuba in the back row.

Then we left the hall, pausing for a minute or two to chat with the night watchman and pat his dog as they sat side by side with the long night ahead of them under a mural of Cleopatra on her barge.

The nearest pub to the Gaiety was a mile away so we became, as did all the visiting bands, automatic members of the Working Men’s Club. The Gaiety, which looked from the outside like an aeroplane hangar, was built on one side of a railway cutting, the Working Men’s Club occupied a large loft over some deserted stables on the other side. During the changeover waltzes, when the resident band was taking over from our rhythm section, Mick and I would charge out of the ballroom, down some steep steps to road level, under the railway bridge, and up the dark lane to the club which was a friendly place full of fat women and very old men with watery eyes wearing caps.

In fact we drank a great deal in Working Men’s Clubs, Miners’ Institutes and the like, especially in the North. The most magnificent of these was in Crewe, a reminder that in the nineteenth century, when it was built, the railwayman was considered the aristocrat of the working class. Marble, glass and heavy mahogany carving were there to prove it, and let into the bar were large reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite ladies.

During the summer in Grimsby, it was the custom of the Management to hire bands not simply for one night, although we often did play these in winter, but for a whole week with Tuesday and Thursday off.

We stayed in a boarding house a quarter of a mile from the Gaiety. It was run by a jolly little woman called Doris who wore spectacles and usually had her hair in curlers. She always left out a huge wedge of cheese, some cream crackers and a pub-sized jar of pickled onions for us when we got in. Her husband was a dental mechanic and made his false teeth somewhere on the premises. He was a little man with a yellowish complexion. If we bumped into him on one of the landings, he would grin, as though to advertise his products, and scurry out of sight. Doris had a daughter who was a schoolgirl when we first stayed there in the very early fifties, and a school teacher when we last saw her in 1960. There was a son too who was always stretched out on the carpet of the front room (although taking up progressively more space over the years) reading comics.

The kitchen was often full of Doris’s friends, middle-aged ladies in a state of infectious euphoria. Most of them worked behind the refreshment counters at the Gaiety. One of them told fortunes from tea leaves and made endless jokes about her black underwear, a decidedly unerotic concept. ‘She’s as nutty as a fruit cake,’ Doris would say after every sally.

The first few times we stayed there Doris’s father was alive although very old and several points. Even after he died (‘It were all for the best,’ said Doris next time we arrived. ‘ ’E were past it’), we were reminded of him because at strategic points throughout the house, at the turn of the stairs, above the bath, by the side of the lavatory, were the aluminium handles which had helped him to haul himself about.

Still alive, although a little stiff in the joints on our last visit, was a large collie dog called Shaun. He was a coat fetishist, and could often be surprised rogering the mackintoshes in the hall.

Being resident at the same hall for a week at a time had its advantages sexually. We got to know a group of girls who used to stand night after night by the side of the stage and were known, according to Freddy, as ‘the Grimsby Trawlers’. The bandwagon, parked throughout the week up an alley at the side of the ballroom, was comparatively comfortable.

I once asked one of the Grimsby Trawlers to come out with me on the band’s night off. She stood me up, but explained why the following evening, during the interval.

‘I couldn’t come,’ she told me, and added, as though it were a perfectly adequate reason, ‘You see I were asked out by…’ and here her voice became dreamy with the grandeur of it all, ‘the Mayor of Cleethorpes’ son.’

I became fond of Grimsby over the years. It’s a long town, lying close to the miles of fishdocks which are its
raison d’être.
Entirely undistinguished architecturally, it has nevertheless a certain picturesque quality arising from the fishing. Little shops sell ropes and nets, the pubs are full of men wearing blue jerseys with herring scales on the backs of their hands. There was (he no longer exists) a tattooist called Dusty Rhodes near the entrance to the dock. There are marvellous junk shops, and in one of them I bought for five shillings a phrenologist’s head. Even in the long streets of mean red-brick terrace houses where a photographer’s glass case full of weddings is an event, you can still smell the sea, and the weather too is mercantile: squalls, storms, brilliant sunshine, grey drizzle within the space of a day. Once, walking towards Doris’s local with Diz Disley who was depping with us for a month or two, I tried to explain to him why I liked Grimsby. He waited until I’d finished, and then remarked quietly but firmly, ‘I prefer fucking Venice.’

In the Scottish border town of Melrose there lived an ex-lawyer called Duncan Mclnnon. He was short and plump with an untidy off-ginger moustache and protuberant blue eyes. He dressed in wrinkled grey flannels and hairy sports coats (somehow they are always more hairy in Scotland) with large leather-covered buttons. Following his success in running Saturday-night hops all over the borders using local dance bands and small Scottish country groups, he developed larger ambitions, turned himself into a company called ‘Border Dances Limited’, and appointed Jim Godbolt as his London agent. It was Jim’s job to book bands and send them up to play for anything between one week and three on Duncan’s circuit, and in consequence from 1953 until the band folded in December 1961 we would find ourselves at least once a year working our way north.

Although several of Duncan’s venues were extremely profitable he was always teetering on the edge of disaster because of his obsession with a huge white elephant in the shape of the Market Hall, Carlisle.

In itself, Carlisle is an unpleasant place largely, I suspect, because it cannot decide if it is English or Scottish. It’s the only town in England with state pubs, and an evening in one of these is enough to shake the convictions of the most doctrinaire socialist. They’re like alcoholic post-offices.

The market hall is enormous with lots of permanent little shops over most of the area. There is a large concrete floor about the size of three football fields, and it was this which Duncan hoped to turn into the centre of the city’s night-life. He had taken a long lease from the Council, built a stage, cut off the dance-hall area from the shops by suspending enormous dirty green tarpaulins, installed a great many heaters among the iron girders, and finally, in an attempt to suggest gaiety, had stuck thousands of little mirrors mounted on cloth around the bottom four feet of the supporting columns.

Even before the first time we went to play for Border Dances Ltd we had an idea what to expect because Jim Godbolt had gone up for the opening night. Geraldo was the bandleader and he, Jim and, of course, Duncan had been invited by the Mayor to a dinner preceding the dance. There had been speeches including a very long one from Duncan which made up in fervour and enthusiasm what it lacked in coherence or relevance, and then the whole party made for the hall, There was a gentle incline leading down past a butcher’s shop to where a gap in the tarpaulin gave entry to the dance floor. Jim was walking behind Duncan who was holding on to the arms of Geraldo in his immaculate tails. Suddenly Duncan slipped and fell, dragging Geraldo down with him. It was an inauspicious beginning.

That first evening, according to Jim, there was at least a decent crowd, but the night we made our début, even when the dance was at its height, there were only about twenty people. It was a freezing night in early spring, and the heaters, glowing faintly some thirty feet above our heads, did nothing to remedy this.

At about nine o’clock we came back from the state pub, reluctantly removed our overcoats and relieved a band called ‘The Mighty Redcoats’. They were a local group and Duncan had chosen their name. He had a very nineteenth-century taste in promotion and publicity. His posters were couched in baroque circus prose, the source of some embarrassment to Mick, and of amusement to the rest of us. Mick has always displayed an almost ostentatious modesty, and one of Duncan’s announcements full of ornate superlatives was guaranteed to make his head sink into his shoulders. I doubt ‘The Mighty Redcoats’ Would have chosen their name if left to themselves, but Duncan employed them almost every night, and they had little choice.

As the front line were blowing through their mouth pieces to warm them up sufficiently to play in tune, Duncan himself climbed up on the stage. We had met him only briefly in the pub, where he had bought us a large number of double scotches, and hadn’t really taken him in.

He walked to the front of the stage, eyed the tiny audience belligerently, and launched into a speech lasting a good half-hour. The gist of it was that the people of Carlisle didn’t deserve the first-rate entertainment that Border Dances were bringing to them, but that Border Dances intended to go on doing so nevertheless; that he, Duncan Mclnnon, would fight and fight until he had made the Market Hall, Carlisle, into the greatest centre of ballroom entertainment anywhere in the North.

He concluded, as we were to discover he usually concluded his speeches, by reciting in full Kipling’s ‘If’. He then, with a climatic gesture, ordered Mick to play and, at the first note, jumped off the six-foot stand on to the concrete floor. He fell heavily, but leapt to his feet. The back of his coat and trousers were covered with powdered white chalk strewn there to stop the dancers from slipping. Near at hand was a young soldier with his girl. Duncan seized the girl and danced off with her into the middle distance jigging up and down in a kind of frenzy. With the exception of the pianist, who had his back to this, nobody in the band could play at all. Occasionally Mick or Roy would manage a strangled note but it would immediately degenerate into a fart of laughter.