Owning Up: The Trilogy (78 page)

The convenient way the Scottish tour coincided with our elopement may suggest a bit of luck bordering on the uncanny. In fact the truth is more prosaic. Victoria and I had known each other for some time, and were able to arrange our elopement to fit in with the Scottish tour, although the Randall concert in Birmingham did appear as a last-minute bonus.

Before our marriage we’d found a flat. The room in Margaretta Terrace was too small and I’d discovered that an old school friend of mine, the painter Tim Whidbourne, had bought a large house down the unfashionable end of Cheyne Walk, and sub-divided it. In the rather damp basement was a young man called Andy Garnett who was a business-efficiency expert. He told Tim that he found the rent rather too high and would be willing to share the place with us. We’d have our own bedroom, and he’d sleep in the communal sitting-room. There was a bathroom and a kitchen adjoining the Thames. The half-share of the rent was within my means, and despite objections from Victoria I took it.

Andy was one of the original members of the Chelsea Set. He was hysterically inventive, curious about everything, mercurial, sensitive, an obsessive raconteur with an especially rich vein in frantic obscenity. Despite the fact he had been to Eton, even Ian Christie took an immediate liking to him, although he compensated by calling him ‘My favourite hurray’, to Andy’s slight irritation. Victoria on the other hand didn’t get on with him a bit.

She would lie in bed keeping up a stream of whispered rage while the unsuspecting Andy had a rather noisy shit in the bathroom and blundered about the sitting-room. After years of band life, I couldn’t see why she minded us sharing our first flat with somebody else.

It was Andy, yet another RC, who was responsible for me getting to the Register Office in Edinburgh on time. The night before I was married I was to give a lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Dover Street on the subject of ‘Erotic Imagery in the Blues’, and then catch the midnight up from King’s Cross. Using Simon’s collection of early blues records as a basis, I had prepared a serious theme dividing my subject under various headings: ‘The Machine as a Sexual Image’, ‘Animal Symbolism in Erotic Blues’, ‘Sexual Metaphors in Rural and Urban Blues’, etc. In the Chair were two jazz critics, Vic Bellerby and Charles Fox. Quite a large number of ICA regulars turned up and so did a great many of my friends. What divided the Chair and the ICA regulars from my friends was that the former had no idea I was getting married the next morning, while the latter knew it very well. While the Chairmen were introducing me, Mick Mulligan came up and handed me a glass. I nervously swallowed it in one. It contained four neat gins.

When the Chair had finished David Litvinoff rose with a question. Was it, he asked politely, permitted for the audience to wank during the recital? There was a pained silence from the bulk of the audience and an ominous shriek of laughter from my contingent. I began my talk.

At the beginning I stuck to my text although, under the effect of Mick’s perpetually renewed gins, I understand I threw back my head and joined in several of the records. Ian Christie snored quietly in the front row, but woke up to ask when he was going to hear some jazz. As there was a Bessie Smith record playing at the time, I took this very badly and threatened to throw him down the stairs.

After the interval I put aside my subject altogether, and delivered a comparatively incoherent attack on the ICA itself referring to it throughout, with a certain lack of originality, as ‘The Institute of Contemporary Farts’, occasionally relieving the tedium even I felt arising from constant repetition by offering an alternative version, ‘The Institute of Contemporary Arseholes’. When the Chairmen attempted to close down the meeting David Lirvinoff pushed them both off the platform and took over. During this struggle he apparently sang his own version of Bessie’s ‘You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon, But You Done Broke Down’ with the word ‘Chairman’ substituted for ‘Wagon’.

The evening finished badly with the staff of the ICA stacking up the chairs and the friends of the bridegroom unstacking them. A sculpture in sponge and burnt cork by Dubuffet was destroyed. I was insensible.

Andy Garnett got me down the stairs, into a sports car, and on to the train at King’s Cross. I didn’t wake until we crossed the border. I was in clean blankets but with a terrible head and a mouth like a gym mistress’s armpits. ‘Thank God I wasn’t sick,’ I told my companion, a Scottish merchant seaman. ‘You weren’t sick!’ he said. ‘You was sick three times, Jock! Your mate told the guard you were getting married and slipped him a quid when he got youse on the train. You’ve had three sets of blankets. I’d slip him another quid if I was you.’

I got up and shaved. I looked dreadful, and my appearance wasn’t helped by the rather bright blue ill-fitting suit I’d bought at a second-hand outfitters (‘Entire Wardrobes purchased. West End Misfits, etc.’) in the Charing Cross Road, or by the pink carnation I bought on the way to pick up Victoria from our hotel in Edinburgh. At the Register Office she was handed a large bouquet from the Glasgow Jazz Club. It was of daffodils and iris.

The aftermath of the ICA lecture filled the correspondence columns of the
Melody Maker
for several weeks. One ICA member said that he would have left ‘except I was frightened to pass the group of teddy boys near the door’. Mick Mulligan was one of them as it happened.

I wrote in defence citing Dada and Rimbaud, but leaving out Messrs Gordon and Booth which was perhaps unfair. Simon also wrote:

Bessie Smith – and Clara and Trixie too – would have been on the side of the ‘riotous’ element among which I am glad to include myself…

But the masterpiece was a dead pan ‘attack’ on the whole evening by Chas Robson, a regular from Cook’s Ferry with an impenetrable Geordie accent and a compensatory obsession with Wittgenstein. A typical paragraph read:

The unfortunate young man who gave the lecture, and the ‘despicable minority’ appeared, quite happily and sincerely to accept and proclaim a gutter morality based on sex and jazz – a case of ‘publish and be damned’ – but if Mr Wheeler [my principal critic – GM] wishes to retain his responsibility then I beg of him to heed the dangers of accidental contamination inherent in his asymptotic approach to the heart of jazz by eschewing all further contacts with the music…

Actually Chas had been involved with the ICA before. He had brought to the attention of the staff at a Jazz Social that a young man was removing some of the huge photographs by Cartier-Bresson which were on exhibition at the time with the words: ‘Eh, Mister, someone’s pinching your fucking snaps!’

After our marriage Victoria and I returned to Cheyne Walk. We wrote to her parents who were very angry but soon forgave us. They were pleased, when they came to see us, to discover that Andy was a descendant of Blessed Saint Adrian Fortescu, an Elizabethan Catholic Martyr. They admired English Catholic Martyrs.

In under a year our marriage was in a very bad way. It’s difficult to say now whose fault it was – if indeed it was anybody’s – but I was certainly as unhappy as she was, and when Simon Watson Taylor offered me a room in his flat, I accepted and moved out. Victoria was away for the week-end so I pedantically divided our wedding presents and Pete Appleby came over in the band-wagon one afternoon and, for a quid or two, helped me to move. There were a few things that wouldn’t fit into the wagon in one load, and these I wheeled over later in a handcart belonging to ’orace. It wasn’t too far – up Blantyre Street, across the King’s Road, up Park Walk, right along the Fulham Road, up Redcliffe Gardens and into Tre-gunter Road. Simon, who works for BOAC, was in America the day I arrived. By the time he got back, I’d all my pictures hung, my books and clothes put away, my furniture and objects arranged.

Victoria became a model and sometime later she went to Rome on spec and stayed there, working for the fashion houses for over three years. We wrote each other chatty and friendly letters and I sent her my new records.

Although a lot of people in the jazz world knew our marriage was breaking up – for one thing Monty Sunshine’s girl friend had a room in Tim’s house – nobody said anything. This was always a sympathetic part of our code. In relation to personal troubles we never interfered unless the person involved wished to discuss it. Behind his back, my back in this case, there was undoubtedly a great deal of highly enjoyable speculation and gossip, but while I was actually present it was taken for granted that I would prefer to be treated as if everything was OK. In the ordinary way Mick was as punctilious as anybody in observing this civilised relic, but one evening, very drunk, circumstances forced him into such a corner that his only defence was to be as unpleasant as possible. This was by no means a unique instance but it was the most extreme.

After a pub crawl, we had finished up in a cellar club in the Fulham Road. It was called ‘La Fiesta’ and was run by a small ginger-haired anarchist called Gus. In its favour was an open fire, cheap food and wine. Against it, bullfighting posters, a Spanish guitarist, and cries of ‘Olé’ from some of the clientele. But it was open late and we often used it if we’d been drinking in Finch’s and got ‘the taste’.

Sitting there that night, Mick discovered that he had no cigarettes and called over the waitress, an elderly, amiable woman dressed as an Andalusian peasant. She told him they’d run out, but that there was a machine over the road, and that if he gave her a florin she’d go and get him some. Mick had no change and gave her a pound. She took it without any objection and a few minutes later came back with the cigarettes and the change. Mick, without thanking her, picked up both the change and the cigarettes and put them in his coat pocket.

Sometime later as she was passing, Mick asked her in a sarcastic voice if she had got his snout yet. She didn’t hear, imagined he was thanking her for her help, smiled, and hurried past with her order. On her way back he said he hoped she’d enjoy spending the pound. She looked puzzled. I told him that she had in fact brought him both the cigarettes and the change. He gave me a look to suggest I was somehow in on the racket. For the next twenty minutes or so he subjected the poor woman to unpleasant remarks every time she came within earshot, and at last I could stand it no longer. I leant over, took the cigarettes and the change out of his pocket, and put them in front of him on the table.

He looked at them for some time, checked the change twice, and put it in his trouser pocket. Then he looked for a long time at me, his eyes swimming about like goldfish. Finally he spoke. ‘How’s your married life going, cock?’ he asked me.

While I was still at Cheyne Walk, at the very moment I was at my most miserable, a marvellous thing happened. The Musicians’ Union finally reached an exchange agreement with its American counterpart and the Louis Armstrong All-Stars came over to this country.

They played for ten nights in London on a revolving stage at the Empress Hall, Earl’s Court, an absurd choice in every way, far too big and acoustically lamentable.

Furthermore, somebody at the American end, unaware that it was an interest in jazz which would make people want to go and hear Louis, and that if a whole evening’s blowing was too much for the old man, there were plenty of other jazzmen, many of them far from overworked, we’d have been delighted to hear too, filled up the first half of the bill with a series of vaudeville acts including a Mr Peg-Leg Bates who danced in a surprisingly agile manner on his single artificial limb, and of course scored a great many points but was not exactly full of high jazz content.

In consequence, during the first half of every evening, the bar became a ‘Who’s Who’ of British jazz, and the critics – whose enthusiasm for the local product had rather naturally cooled over the years – reappeared, their mutual enmity in no way impaired by the passage of time.

Among the musicians, Humph’s great height emerged from the surrounding animation, while from the general hubbub, the voice of Diz Disley, a fanatical Louis enthusiast, could be heard peppering his lyrical monologue with his favourite adjective.

We were out of town for the opening and it was several evenings later before I was able to leave the dusty and empty flat, and walk up Blantyre Street in the direction of Earl’s Court. It was very sunny, and even the railings of the Gents at the World’s End seemed made of gold. I walked all the way to the Empress Hall repeating to myself, over and over again, ‘I’m going to hear Louis Armstrong.’ That extraordinary hunger in the pit of the stomach, a sensation which even the idea of jazz had been able to induce in me in the early days, came back again. Louis Armstrong, who had been brought up in New Orleans, played with Oliver, accompanied Bessie Smith.

Jazz is an impure art. There’s a great deal of romantic nostalgia involved. Even the early British bop musicians who used to sneer at our sentimentality have fallen into the trap. Minton’s has become their Storyville, Parker their Buddy Bolden.

After the interval the All-Stars, each to his own round of applause, climbed on to the platform and tuned up. The crackling American voice over the amplifying system requested our attention. The house lights died. A spotlight picked out the curtained entrance from which the boxers usually emerge on their way to the ring, and out stepped a small, surprisingly plump, Negro in evening dress who, accompanied by discreet chording from the distant band, advanced slowly down the gangway playing the opening chorus from ‘Sleepy Time Down South’. It was the most moving sound I ever heard in my life.

Later, of course, after I’d heard Armstrong several times both in London and the provinces, it was possible to make several criticisms: a very limited repertoire, too many vocals from Velma Middleton, a singer who made up in bulk what she lacked in swing, the ‘show-biz’ insincerity of some of Louis’ mugging, but nothing could destroy the magic of those first few phrases. How after all those years a man of his age could blow with such freshness, excitement and invention, and at the same time impose on every note his own inimitable stamp is beyond explanation. Furthermore, the fact that for at least thirty years he had had no real life, no centre, only a series of hotel rooms, planes, ships, concert halls, recording studios, and yet could evoke, night after night, a whole way of life that vanished before the end of the First World War seemed little short of miraculous – unless, as Andre Breton suggested, music is the most stupid of the arts.