Owning Up: The Trilogy (81 page)

It was in London that my life changed and I very quickly found the way to jack up my standard of living a little above my new-won prosperity. There were drinking sessions with Wally and a circle of Fleet Street acquaintances in El Vino’s after our weekly conference at the
Mail
. A girl-friend of sophisticated appetites told me she saw no reason, with what I was earning, to continue eating in cheap cafés, and made me take her to Wheelers, the Ivy, and the new and expensive little restaurants that were beginning to spring up round the King’s Road, a habit which, even after our affair was over, I saw no reason to drop. I began to go to the theatre too.
Look Back
in Anger
coincided with my apprenticeship to Flook, and from then on I saw almost every production at the Court and The Arts. It was Ian Christie who first persuaded me to go. ‘It’s a play about the chaps,’ he told me enthusiastically. I began to buy pictures again, and less constructively was for a short but disastrous period involved in the private chemmy parties which were held each night in a different studio or flat somewhere in SW 1 or 3. On the credit side all this experience came in useful in keeping the strip topical – ‘Flook meat’ was Wally’s phrase for it – but then so did my other life with the band.

From 1955 until the band folded at the end of 1961, there was very little change professionally. The music remained static and so for the most part did the personnel. We played fewer concerts and more jazz clubs. We covered and re-covered the roads of Britain from Wick, a few miles south of John o’ Groats, to Redruth, a similar distance from Land’s End.

Except for the occasional evening when one or more of us was too drunk, we usually gave satisfaction. It was an increasingly dull noise we made but comparatively professional, and during the last twenty minutes or so we pulled out all the stops and for the most part succeeded in stirring up the audience to some effect. This last burst had become, like everything else to do with the music, completely predictable. It was known as ‘the show’, and during the second half Mick would keep us informed with increasing satisfaction of how long there was to go before it was time for it. ‘Bracket of waltzes, bracket of slows, and then the show,’ he would mutter out of the corner of his mouth after an elaborately sly glance at his watch.

The show consisted of three numbers. First Pete’s drum solo which was set into the framework of ‘Didn’t He Ramble’, an old New Orleans funeral march. During the opening bars, which were at a very slow tempo, I used to walk on carrying a trombone case as though it were a coffin, a piece of ‘business’ originally conceived in high spirits which had become a fixture. Then, after two vocal and two instrumental chori, I would pick up the ‘coffin’ again and march slowly off stage followed by all the band except Pete. At the last moment the front line would turn and blow three introductory chords before diving into the wings to light up, and Pete would then hammer away for a variable but always satisfactory length of time. At the beginning it had been necessary for Mick to listen throughout as the brief prearranged patterns of thumps and crashes which told him it was time to lead the band back on for the final chords was dependent on Pete’s whim. Later Pete incorporated a quiet passage, in imitation of Cozy Cole, to provide a contrast to his atomic finale, and this helped considerably. ‘It’s all right,’ Mick would say, puffing away in the darkness, ‘he hasn’t reached the quiet bit yet. Inspiration has descended, thank Christ.’

At concerts in theatres I had an additional job during ‘Didn’t He Ramble’. After walking off stage with my coffin, I had to climb hurriedly up the wall ladder to the electrician’s platform and signal to him the exact beat on which to extinguish all the lights except for a spot on Pete. I used to enjoy this, but then I enjoyed everything to do with concerts.

After ‘Didn’t He Ramble’ it was time for ‘Frankie and Johnny’, or ‘Harry Fallers’ as Mick called it with reference to my trick of falling down at the point when Frankie shoots Johnny. I had learned to do this with some expertise, and if the mood took me would hurl myself off quite a high bandstand. Although this looked rather dangerous, the only real hazard was that I was less adept at climbing back on to the stage, and if there were no convenient steps, I was sometimes reduced to running round through the pass-door and coming in half a chorus later.

If I chanced to land on the dance floor in such a position that it seemed possible to look up a girl’s skirt, Mick would raise an inquiring eyebrow requiring either a thumbs up or down. We all have our obsessions, and Mick’s was what he called ‘a flash’, a view of thigh and knicker. In the early days the wide skirts and top-like style of jiving were very productive of flashes, but during the trad boom female jeans became
de rigueur
and a heavy elephantine jumping from foot to foot swept the jazz clubs. Flashes became very rare, and the conductor correspondingly desperate like a drug addict cut off from his supply. Due to his short sight, it was possible to tease him by pretending to see entirely imaginary flashes in the middle-distance. If we kept this up long enough he would finally ask Ian to lend him his glasses. That Mick was a genuine flash addict was reinforced by the fact that he didn’t care what the girl looked like.

After ‘Frankie and Johnny’ we finished off the show with a boring old tear-arse rabble rouser called ‘Momma Don’t Allow’ in which vocal chori forbidding, on Momma’s behalf, every instrument in turn alternated with solo chori from the instrument in question.

At the end of ‘Momma Don’t Allow’ it was Mick’s custom in dance halls to play an abbreviated version of ‘The Queen’, less to prove his conformism – although naturally most dance-hall managers insisted on the convention – more to convince the audience it was all over. Sometimes when in his Condonesque mood, the conductor would announce the anthem as ‘Corky’s Tune’. Corky was our name for the Queen. It dated back to my naval days. A friend of mine, a staunch republican, had always referred to the reigning Monarch as ‘Korky the King’. He had chosen this name in imitation of ‘Corky the Cat’, an animal who appeared in a strip cartoon on the front of the
Dandy
. Early in the band’s history I had told Mick about the King being called Korky, and the name had stuck. When the Queen succeeded she also inherited this derisive pseudonym, but we dropped the ‘K’ in favour of a ‘C’ because alliteration no longer applied.

One Christmas the
New Statesman
published a satire on the
Radio Times
Christmas Day programme page. At three p.m. I was surprised to see ‘Corky and her German Band’, and at midnight ‘Corky’s Tune’. A footnote explained that ‘Corky’ was ‘Jazz slang for HM’, a rather wide attribution as, despite some general favour, the name was more or less confined to the Mulligan band. How the
Statesman
discovered about ‘Corky’ I never found out, unless Simon Watson Taylor had told John Raymond, then literary editor, in Finch’s in the Fulham Road.

When I was in the Navy I found it strange and marvellous that whatever lay outside the portholes – foggy British dockyard, Norwegian fiord under a midnight sun, the Cap d’Azur at night – everything on the ship stayed exactly the same. In the Mulligan band the Volkswagen worked in the same way. Inside it we became a hydra. We worked on ‘the myth’. We recreated the past and earmarked the present for future use.

The wagon itself contributed a great deal. To close the double door required calm and expertise in turning the handle. Otherwise one of the two rods which moved upwards to engage the inner rim of the frame failed to connect. Miff Bell had a tendency to lose his temper if anything mechanical didn’t work immediately, and it was he who most often fell foul of the doors. Cursing and swearing he would bang them open and shut, yanking the handle up and down, and eventually, led by Frank Parr, the most observant and priest-like of all the wagon
habitués
, a slow chant of ‘normal doors’ would begin, adding if anything to Miff’s manic hysteria.

The interior of the wagon was of tin, and the heating only worked in the front. It had its own smell, difficult to define, but based on old newspaper and dog-ends. Frank’s love of disorder and my neurotic neatness clashed spasmodically over the inside of the wagon. Driven mad by the knee-deep accumulation of rubbish, I would gather up armfuls of old Sunday papers, sandwich crusts, empty quart-bottles, dog-ends and cigarette packets and ram them into dustbins at the back of pubs or dance halls. I even bought a little dustpan and brush and several ashtrays with rubber suckers. When I’d got the wagon basically tidy, I would fold the blankets and ‘Mummy’s’ fur coat along the back seat and stack the paperbacks in one corner. I even, although this was not a popular move, sprayed the interior with a scented atomiser. The rest of the band, although uncooperative, were amused and indifferent to my efforts, but Frank would eye them with aggressive distaste. Not only did he refuse to use the ashtrays; he worked on the suckers until they refused to grip, so that the ashtrays fell to the floor and were eventually lost.

The band instruments were for the most part tied on the roof rack. On a long journey an end of the rope inevitably worked loose and began to beat a syncopated, curiously regular, rhythm on the tin roof. This was known as ‘the spade bongo player’: He became one of the phantoms who attended us at all times. Other demons lay dormant in the wagon itself. ‘Maggie May’, a Liverpool prostitute of violent erotic appetite and a gift for lyrical obscenity, occasionally possessed me. Miff Bell was an admirer of ‘Maggie May’. He himself had been known to receive a ‘Message for the Day’ from God. God was sparing with His messages however, although He was seldom ignored for long on our side. During violent storms Ian Christie spent a great deal of time banging on the tin roof and demanding to be struck dead. On the other hand, faced with an exceptionally beautiful view or even a striking effect of light, we would, after due consultation, give God a polite round of applause. He was not unique, however. Pretty girls passing in front of the wagon at traffic lights or, in later days, zebra crossings, received the same accolade, and would blush, glare, or smile according to their nature.

Although Ian was the first to join in if God was in question, his hatred of cliché made him rather impatient at certain repetitive aspects of the myth. The ceremony of chanting the Jewish shop names while driving through Whitechapel – ‘Jacobs, Cohen, Isaacs, Cohen, Fishberg, etc’ – used to provoke an exasperated groan of ‘how fucking boring’, and the same was true of our passage through the first Welsh town after crossing the border – ‘Evans, Jones, Jones, Davis, Evans, Morgan, etc.’.

He also attempted to impose a personal censorship on stories or anecdotes which he felt had been repeated too often or too recently. ‘Forbidden,’ he would cry, and this gained him the nickname ‘the Pope of the forbidden’ although it did nothing to check our love of reiteration.

Ian was only referred to as ‘The Pope’ while actually in the act of forbidding, but his usual nickname, ‘Bird’, also evolved in the wagon. It had nothing to do with the late Charlie Parker, an artist whom at that time he rejected. It arose during a session of one of those games where you invent animals or birds which seem to fit the personality of different people. We were playing round the band and when it came to Ian somebody said he was definitely a bird, and added as a more exact description: ‘A four-eyed Short-arse, which makes its nest in old
New Statesmans
and flies through the air crying: “It’s the system”.’ This produced general laughter, although Ian’s own response had the staccato machine-gun corps quality with which he acknowledged jokes at his own expense, but typically it was the name ‘Bird’ which stuck.

Linguistic selection in the band always seemed to work on a haphazard basis. At the same session I was described as a toad, and for a time too this looked like replacing ‘Fat’ as my nickname, but it didn’t. Ian on the other hand was always called ‘Bird’, despite the conductor’s attempt to change it to ‘The Shrike’ in acknowledgement of the thorny impaling of Ian’s verbal attacks.

14

A Bit of Fun

Jobs and towns melted into each other. There was no way of placing events chronologically and the regularity of certain gigs helped to destroy our sense of time. The annual engineers’ ball at Leeds University with its obligatory dinner jackets and acres of chiffon and goose-flesh; the monthly appearance at ‘The Bodega’, Manchester, on Saturday night followed on Sunday by ‘The Cavern’, Liverpool; the eternal suburban ‘milk round’ at the beginning of each week; an event had to appear pretty weird to secure a place in our corporate memory for more than a day or two. Furthermore, even when an incident earned its niche in the myth, it became increasingly hard to place it. Sometimes there was a clue. One night, for example, a young girl and her brother at Leicester Jazz Club asked us back to a party, but failed to prepare us for the adult set-up. Their mother, a hard and desperate woman of a ravaged beauty, sat by the fire talking to her lover who leant against the mantelshelf. He was a swarthy man of extraordinary good looks but so short that their faces were almost on a level. Meanwhile their father, a doctor it would seem, roamed from room to room knocking back glass after glass of neat gin and roaring with laughter. When he appeared dressed in a white coat and brandishing a hypodermic syringe, Mick and I decided the time had come to go to bed and lock our doors – a precaution which proved justifiable as throughout the night he rattled the handles at regular intervals, muttering and chuckling. We would, of course, have remembered that night, but almost certainly forgotten when it happened. What enables me to date it within a month was that we had with us a boy called Johnnie, a regular at Cook’s Ferry who happened to be in Leicester that night on business, had seen our name on a poster, come to the jazz club and rowed himself in on the party. When we entered the house, which was furnished in a style of opulent vulgarity based on Knole sofas and huge Chinese vases turned into lamp standards, he remarked that it was all very
Room at the Top
. I didn’t know what he m,eant, and he explained that it was a new book about the rich in the north. As this was first published in March 1957, made a great stir, and would certainly have been brought to our attention by the Press within a day or two of the party at most, it’s possible to say that we were threatened by the mad doctor in March 1957, but such clues are rare.