Owning Up: The Trilogy (68 page)

After the dance was over, Duncan invited Mick and me into a small room where Border Dances stored their mikes and refreshment trestle-tables during market days. He had with him a friend and a bottle of whisky. He locked the door and pocketed the key, explaining that he would refuse to let us out until Mick had agreed to change over from jazz to Irish music. Eventually he fell asleep, and we were able to remove the key and escape.

I have always enjoyed the Border Tours except for the jobs. Carlisle was in a class by itself, but even the other venues were pretty depressing. Hawick Drill Hall; The Corn Exchange, Berwick-upon-Tweed; The Rosewall Institute; The Town Hall, Galashiels: to repeat these names is to visualise bars, comparatively empty Scottish parochial halls with a row of very plain ginger-haired girls dressed in floral prints of unfashionable length sitting along one wall, and a group of raw-boned lads huddled together in the opposite corner. The dances all started late and went on into the small hours.

Dumfries was the only exception. Duncan’s dances there were held on a Saturday, and the huge hall was packed. Furthermore, they finished early on account of the law about no dance continuing into the Sabbath. As a bonus there were always fights breaking out somewhere in the crowd and, as the stand was high, we had an excellent view.

We stayed in hotels in strange little towns with one broad street lined with plaid-obsessed drapers and tobacconists selling Scottish novelties, fishing tackle shops, and butchers who are called ‘fleshers’.

We drove past ruined abbeys and over rivers where a salmon fisherman stood waist high.

We drank in the men-only bars, experimenting with malt whisky and chasing it with ‘wee heavy’ beers.

We ate high tea in the shadow of laden cake stands, and pudding suppers, black, white or haggis, with bread and butter, and cups of tea poured out neat with a jug of milk on the table.

We breathed the marvellous air.

But every night we had to play a Duncan job.

7

King of the Ravers

Between 1951, when the first revivalist boom was over, and 1953, when the scene began to recover, we were on the road all the time. We tried to keep some foothold in London and we ran our own club in a rehearsal room in a Gerrard Street basement and, on the rare occasions we were in town on a Saturday night, organised all-night raves.

The word ‘rave’, meaning to live it up, was as far as I know a Mulligan–Godbolt invention. It took several forms. The verb as above, ‘a rave’ meaning a party where you raved, and ‘a raver’, one who raved as much as possible. An article once described Mick as ‘The King of the Ravers’.

During a National Savings Drive in 1951, Mick and Jim derived a great deal of harmless amusement by ringing each other up every time they saw a new poster and reading out its message with the word ‘Rave’ substituted for the word ‘Save’
‘HELP BRITAIN THROUGH NATIONAL RAVING’. ‘WANTED
50,000,000
RAVERS
’, etc.

Mick and I were the first people to organise all-night raves, and they were an enormous social success, but a financial loss. There were several reasons for this. For one thing the men who owned the rehearsal room insisted on half the take, and the number of tickets we were allowed to sell was limited by the fire regulations. As a result, after paying the band, printing the tickets, putting an advert in the
Melody Maker
, and buying a barrel of cider for the musicians who came along to sit in, the most we could expect was four pounds each and in fact, when it came to the share out, we were usually a pound or two out of pocket.

Anyway we didn’t really run the all-nighters to make money. Although today the idea of spending a whole night in a crowded airless basement at a small loss appears extraordinary, it was very exciting then.

Forced as we were by commercial necessity to occupy most of our lives playing strict tempo music for dancing, the all-night sessions were an escape back into the jazz atmosphere of our beginnings. We could dress in shit order, fall about drunk, and tell people who criticised us or our music to get stuffed.

Of course the Mulligan band couldn’t play from midnight to seven in the morning. We played three one-hour sessions and relied on musicians who wanted a blow to fill in the gaps.

There was no difficulty here, in fact there was an embarrassment of riches and a confusion of musical idiom which made arranging the groups a question of great tact and firmness if the whole thing wasn’t to degenerate into a huge and messy jam session.

Revivalist jazz was in the melting pot at that moment. The majority remained faithful to the Morton–Oliver–Armstrong sound, but others were moving after Humph into the mainstream or beginning to think that Ken Colyer’s back-to-the-roots ideas were right. In some circles white Chicago jazz was in the ascendancy, and yet even here there were two schools of thought, the back-to-the-twenties enthusiasts and the more recent Eddie Condon Dixieland fanatics. To confuse things further a few bebop musicians would drop in. Somehow all these had to have a blow and yet be kept out of each other’s hair. Mick left this to me – in fact he left most of the organisation to me, and sometimes, if he was drunk enough, would even sneak back to his flat round the corner in Lisle Street and fall asleep so that I had to go and wake him up in time for our next session. He was going through a period of enormous lethargy and had made me band manager at what I now consider the cynically inadequate recompense of one pound a week extra. For this I had to collect the money, pay the salaries, apologise to ballroom managers when we were late, and keep a book in which I wrote down the innumerable subs which everybody in the band seemed to need at the most inconvenient moments.

One of the revelations of our all-night parties was that there was a whole generation of jazz musicians in England who pre-dated the revival and yet played swinging music in the Harlem style of the late thirties. Some were professionals like Lennie Felix, a small elf-like pianist influenced by Fats Waller. He played with tremendous attack, his face and body twitching and jerking in sympathy with his musical ideas. Others were amateurs, and the most remarkable of these was a timber merchant called Ian ‘Spike’ Macintosh who played trumpet in the style of mid-period Louis Armstrong. Small and neat, a little moustache and horn-rimmed spectacles, he looked exactly what he was, two sons down for Public School and a house in Cuffley. But inside him was a wild man in chains. He played with extreme modesty, his back to the audience, and a green beret full of holes hanging over the bell of his trumpet. In conversation he was both courteous and restrained, but he could become very aggressive if anybody suggested that there was any other trumpet player than his hero.

At parties there was a psychological moment when he would lurch towards the gramophone and take off whatever record was playing if it hadn’t got a Louis on it, and substitute one that had. Another anti-social habit was his reaction when his host turned down the volume. He’d just wait until he wasn’t looking and turn it up again.

He once offered Mick and me a lift home from a suburban jazz club in his car, and when we were safely inside, drove all the way out to Cuffley despite our protests. His wife was away, and he wanted us to sit up all night listening to Louis and drinking whisky. It was an enjoyable night, and didn’t finish until three the following afternoon when the local closed. It was just that we hadn’t planned on it. Macintosh’s friends were another hazard: huge city men in waistcoats, and pre-war musicians with patent leather hair. There was a moment when he started a jazz club in a city public house, and the guv’nor, an enormous fat man with the sensitivity of a rhinoceros, took to putting in an appearance at other clubs where we might happen to be playing. One night he staggered in to Le Metro while Joe Harriot, the West Indian alto player, was sitting in with us. As soon as the guv’nor’s eyes focused enough for him to realise that it was a Negro who was taking a chorus, he leapt and capered across the front of the stand shouting, ‘Walla! Walla! Walla!’

But despite Mac’s party tricks and city mates, we all liked him very much. He was kind, loyal, and generous, and he could, when on form, play absolutely beautifully.

A regular at our all-night raves was Dill Jones, the Welsh jazz pianist. He would turn up with the rest of his group from the night club where they played, just as the dawn was breaking over Cambridge Circus. Dill was unique in that he could sit in with any band, whatever idiom they favoured. He loved and understood all periods and used to reproach both revivalist and modernist alike for their narrow prejudices.

‘If it swings it’s jazz,’ he used to say, ‘and if it’s jazz it’s all right by me, boy.’

Mick always held it against Dill that he was disinclined to pay for a round of drinks. This has always been one of Mick’s real obsessions. It doesn’t matter how boring somebody is, as long as they stand their round Mick will describe them enthusiastically as a good nut. Personally I don’t mind one way or the other. I like some people who are mean and dislike other people who are generous, but Mick won’t have it. At one of our all-nighters we had ordered an extra barrel of cider at Dill’s request. ‘I’ll be bringing down quite a lot of people,’ he told us, ‘so it’s only fair, see. Just let me know how much.’ When it came to the crunch, Dill said he didn’t have the ready on him, but would pay us next time he saw us. He never did, and Mick never forgave him. Although this happened in 1951, and we bumped into Dill hundreds of times before he emigrated to America in 1961, he always refused to hand over the two pounds, claiming for the first year or two that he was a bit short, and after that insisting that he had paid it. Mick, for his part, never let slip an opportunity of mentioning it, especially when he’d had a few.

‘Hello, Dill,’ he’d say, ‘enjoy that cider, did you?’

At seven a.m. the band played its final number and we’d all crawl up out of the sweat-scented cellar into the empty streets of a Sunday morning in the West End. Hysterical with lack of sleep, accompanied by a plump art student, her pale cheeks smeared with the night’s mascara, I’d catch the Chelsea bus and try to read the
Observer
through prickling red eyeballs as we swayed along Piccadilly, down Sloane Street, and into the King’s Road. Then a bath, one of those delirious fucks that only happen on the edge of complete fatigue, and a long sleep until it was time to get up and face the journey to Cook’s Ferry or whatever jazz club we were playing that evening.

*

But our periods in London were now both spasmodic and brief. The city had become a place to collect clean shirts and socks from. We put into it like sailors into port. Our lives there had lost their centre.

Most of the time we were actually travelling between jobs. We got to know the roads of Britain so well that a glance out of the coach window could tell us where we were.

The flavour of the different regional landscapes alone was enough: the flat featureless Dutch-like farmland of Lincolnshire; the honey-coloured stone and intimate scale of the West Country; the sprawling suburb of the Midlands; the hunting-print look of Cheshire and Shropshire; the kilns of the Potteries and the chimneys of the industrial north; the wild moors along the Pennines where the sheep are always black with the soot of Lancashire and Yorkshire.

Certain strange images remain. On the old Ai (there were no motorways then), thirty miles out of London was a house, the walls of which were covered with cut-out animals and faces: giraffes, seals, bears, cartoon characters. On the road to Barrow-in-Furness, which skirts the Lake District, was a small factory which manufactured something which used a great deal of bright blue dye (possibly it manufactured bright blue dye?) and the whole building, the surrounding grass and vegetation, the boulder-strewn stream which ran between the factory and the road were all bright blue. But most of it is a jogging blur of half-sleep after transport café meals, the jumping print of paperbacks, the dramas of the poker school round a flat-topped tom-tom case.

Although I was interested to know parts of the country where I had never been, what I found absolutely hallucinatory was to return as a jazz singer to places I had known well as a child – Liverpool particularly, of course, but by no means exclusively.

North Wales was such an area. As a very little boy I had spent holidays in the Edwardian resorts of Llandudno and Colwyn Bay, and later, during the thirties, my father rented a farm or cottage in the Clwyd Valley to be near his uncle’s fishing, and we had driven in almost every morning to swim in the baths at hideous Rhyl and gimcrack Prestatyn.

Now in my middle twenties I came back several times every summer. We usually played at Rhyl in a large dance hall, part of the same building as a cinema. One July evening we arrived there in time to see the film before the dance started, and I discovered with pleasure, keen beyond logic, that they were showing a revival of
King Kong
which I had never seen. All through that marvellous film some memory kept nagging me. There was a link between film and place, I couldn’t nail it, but at the moment when Kong, mortally wounded by the machine-guns of the circling biplanes, tenderly places Fay Wray in the roof guttering of the Empire State Building before plunging to his death, it came to me. A summer afternoon of 1935. My father driving me into Rhyl from Denbigh, where he had taken a cottage, to see
King Kong
. The discovery that children under sixteen weren’t allowed in. Bitter tears on the sea-front. My father telling me I would be able to see it when I was older, and me protesting ‘but it won’t still be on’. We played at Denbigh too. The ballroom of the County Lunatic Asylum was available for public dances when the patients were in bed, but when we arrived in the late afternoon to leave our instruments they were still wandering about.

‘Men! Men!’ shouted a middle-aged woman from a window before she was pulled backwards by unseen hands, and one morning walking out of the town to look at the cottage where I had stayed as a child, I was accosted by a respectable middle-aged man who asked me if I realised that Africa used to be Welsh.