Owning Up: The Trilogy (83 page)

Mucky Alice was not, as her name might suggest, unclean in her person. In fact, like most scrubbers, she took some care and pride in how she looked, although an ambition to startle led to some rather strange ensembles. In fact the ‘Mucky’ came from two other young ladies from Bradford who, lips tight with disapproval, once spat out that they didn’t know how ‘you can go with Mucky Alice’, and the adjective, like the ‘dirty’ in ‘dirty week-end’, had a moral rather than sanitary application. Alice had rather curious tastes. She was a masochist and liked being tied up. I usually had my fishing reel in the wagon so the tying-up was no problem. As a sadist, however, I’m afraid I was found wanting, and she complained that my bites and smacks erred towards the tentative. On the other hand we both liked fucking in difficult or bizarre circumstances. Top of the list came about during the interval in a small northern town hall. While I was working, Alice discovered a door which led through into the magistrates’ court, and we did it in the dusty dark in front of the bench.

Alice and I had a fairly steady relationship over several years. The good thing about a proper scrubber, as opposed to a local one-night-stand, was that they never asked you what you did in the day; an infuriating question after a two-hundred-mile trip in the wagon, a three-hour session and the same distance to cover the next morning. Nor did they counter almost every remark with the phrase ‘yer wah?’ to indicate bored incomprehension. In fact they could talk our language. Alice was sexy and enjoyed sex. She was generous too and would stand her round or even lend me money if I was broke. I had heard recently that she was,married and asked Jean Patterson the day she came to lunch if this was in fact true.

‘Married?’ she said, ‘she’s always married. Now who is it she’s married to this week?’

15

An Unlikely Totem

I’d known Edward Montagu since my naval days when he’d been in the Irish Guards with Tim Whidborne. One morning in the winter of 1955 he rang me up with a request. He’d seen the band were giving a concert in Bournemouth the following Sunday. Would we like to look in at Beaulieu afterwards and play an hour or two for his house-party? He offered drinks and something to eat, and I said I’d put it to the band and see what they thought. Although it meant going ten miles out of our way, they said yes.

When we arrived at the palace, we were shown up to the drawing room in Edward’s flat. There were about a dozen people including Ken Tynan, and I believe this was the occasion on which the Ian Christie ‘Who’s that hurray cunt over there?’ myth originated. There was a table with every sort of drink on it near the fireplace, but this was for the guests. For the band there was a crate of brown ale and two plates of sandwiches. There was a certain amount of chuntering over this, but nothing was said at the time. We played for about an hour and a half and then drove home. Ken Tynan asked if he could have a lift, and managed to find room at the conductor’s feet in the front of the wagon. No sooner had we driven off than Ian began a furious attack on Edward’s meanness and bad manners in only offering the band beer when his guests could have what they wanted. Mick took the view that this was perfectly justifiable, and the resulting shout-up extended its territory to include all our usual political disagreements.

Mick was put down by the ferocity and logic of Bird’s argument, but a week later he was to have his revenge. We were in Blackpool, and after the dance were invited as usual for a splendid meal of homemade cheese and potato pie at Ian’s parents. His father had spent the evening at the local and was in an amiable if repetitive condition.

‘My son,’ he kept telling us, ‘has been entertained by Lord Montagu in his own house.’

Ian, who had obviously told his dad because, like most of us, he told his parents anything he thought might interest them, was extremely put out. Mick was merciless. Åssuming a bland and interested expression he turned round in his chair and said to old man Christie: ‘Lord Montagu? Ian?’

‘Yes,’ said Ian’s dad. ‘My son. He’s been as a guest in Lord Montagu’s own place.’

He needed very little encouragement to repeat this information several times during the course of the evening.

Mick always used this devastating trick whenever a girlfriend or parent let drop, in innocent pride, that a member of the band had been swanking about anything. None of us was able to discover a counter-ploy, nor did we ever have an opportunity to repay him in kind – his pathological modesty and indeed constant self-deprecation saw to that.

It was because of our evening at Beaulieu that Lord Montagu asked us to appear at the first jazz festival he promoted in the summer of 1956. This was a comparatively small-scale venture: two local bands, the Dill Jones trio and us, providing an afternoon and evening session on the palace lawn. Several hundred people turned up and behaved with enthusiastic decorum. At the end of the last number Edward climbed up on the rostrum and promised, to ironic but friendly cries of ‘Good old Monty’, to hold a bigger and better festival the following year. There was no local opposition; on the contrary the pub and village shop were delighted with the extra business. We got to know Beaulieu pretty well over the next six years. For old times’ sake we were booked every year, although in a justifiably and increasingly modest position on the bill. We watched the whole thing grow. The one day became two days. The low platform gave way to a huge antique roundabout with the musicians replacing the horses – ‘Harmless amusement for all classes’ read the refurbished circus baroque lettering round the perimeter of the awning.

A camping ground was available for those who brought their own tents. Beer and hot dog stalls sprang up around the edges of the great lawns. By night the palace was floodlit. Extra-festival attractions were tried out: a cricket match between musicians and Lord Montagu’s eleven, a church service with music by members of the Dankworth band.

The success of Beaulieu pupped other jazz festivals and Montagu himself presented ‘All-Night Carnivals of Jazz from Beaulieu’ at large venues in the far north, but none of them managed to project the magic of the original, and from all over the country at first hundreds, later thousands, of people drove or hitch-hiked to listen to two days of jazz in this comparatively inaccessible corner of Hampshire.

Until 1960 there was never any trouble. Through Chris Barber the audience for traditional jazz was expanding steadily, and although perhaps its appreciation grew increasingly superficial, it was still based on the music. Beaulieu certainly had other facets, the mellow charm of its setting and a strong permissive atmosphere. In the late evening the extensive and well-shrubbed estate was athrob, and a policeman with fully developed voyeur tendencies, whose actual job was to see that no trouble developed at the festival, once told Mick that he found nothing in his whole life as rewarding as a discreet patrol round the grounds while the last band of the night was stomping it out under the stars.

But all this did nobody any harm, and for the first four years, although the increasing number of visitors, unable to leave until the festival was over, certainly put some strain on the small village at the palace gates, Beaulieu was for us something to look forward to as we travelled through cold foggy nights in the grim provinces.

In 1960, however, the trad boom was under way.

The reasons for the trad boom, indeed for any fad in pop music, are finally unsolvable. Trad had been around for some years, and Chris had won it a large audience and could, at that time, fill any concert hall in the country, but it was not a pop music exactly. Its audiences were young, but not particularly young. The majority were in their late teens, but many were in their early twenties. There was a proportion of art-school students, and a larger proportion who hoped to be taken for art-school students. These were inclined to dress rather beat and dance with no shoes on, and however rural a job, there was sure to be at least one such couple leaping about in front of the bandstand. They were known among the band as ‘the local weirdies’, but apart from them there was no trad uniform. It was the emergence of Acker Bilk which changed the whole scene.

Acker was born in a Somerset village, but had cut his jazz teeth in Bristol. He’d started to play clarinet in an Army detention cell in Egypt while serving a sentence for falling asleep on watch – a story which must have appeared in print as often as how Louis Armstrong learnt to play cornet in the Waifs’ Home, New Orleans, or how Humphrey Lyttelton sneaked off from the Eton and Harrow Match at Lord’s to buy his first trumpet in the Charing Cross Road.

In the mid-fifties Acker had run a band in Bristol, and I’d guested with him one cider-ridden evening. His music was very much based on Ken Colyer, and had the clumsiness and honesty which marked the genuine disciple.

Towards the end of the fifties, Acker had built up a solid following in Bristol, and thought the time had come to try his luck in London. He formed a band and then almost starved. Eventually, when the record companies, impressed by the success of the Sunshine–Barber recording of ‘Petit Fleur’, were recording every trad band in sight, he got his chance. This might well have come to nothing had he not been placed in the hands of a Mr Peter Leslie, a smooth and amusing PRO who conceived the idea of promoting Bilk with a great deal of Victorian camp. It was he who decided on the ‘Mr’, on the heavy music-hall chairman prose on the record sleeves, on the striped waistcoats, and, above all, on the bowler hat. That this whole concept ran against Acker’s rather earthy and rural personality may well be the reason it succeeded. ‘The Alberts’ and ‘The Temperance Seven’ had been pushing Victoriana for many years with only a limited impact, but when Mr Acker Bilk was created, his success was instantaneous.

At first sight he was an unlikely totem for a teenage religion. With his little beard and balding head, twinkling eyes and decided waddle, he looked more like a retired pirate than anything else. He revealed a basic if sympathetic sense of humour based on sending up his West Country burr, the catch phrase ‘watch out’, and the frequent interjection into his public pronouncements of a noise which can only be described as sounding like a vigorous yet watery fart. But none of this can explain his deification in the early months of 1960. As it was, Acker became a password among the young, and the bowler hat, usually with his name daubed round the crown in whitewash, a cult object.

His more extreme followers wore, not only the bowler, but army boots, potato sacks, old fur coats cut down to look like stone-age waistcoats. This outfit became known as ‘Rave Gear’, an expression first coined by an eccentric jazz promoter called ‘Uncle Bonny’ who encouraged the wearing of it in his chain of southern clubs. On the whole, however, ‘Rave Gear’ was rare in clubs, and only came into its own at the festivals or at the gargantuan all-night raves which were held under the echoing dome of the Albert Hall or among the icy wastes of the Alexandra Palace.

Another mark of the raver was the CND symbol. Among the musicians there were some, myself among them, who were actively committed to the cause of nuclear disarmament, and the same was certainly true of a proportion of the trad fans, but I rather felt that for most of them the symbol was anti-authoritarian rather than anti-nuclear – not that I found this in any way unsympathetic.

What was infuriating about the trad fans
en masse
was their complete intolerance of any form of jazz which fell outside their own narrow predilection. Of course it can be argued that we too had been pretty biased in our early days, but in our favour we were fighting for a neglected music in the face of indifference and ridicule, and furthermore our idols were the great originals. The trad fans neither knew nor cared about Morton and Oliver, Bessie Smith or Bunk Johnson. It was exclusively British trad they raved about, and although it was the better bands who went to the top, any group, however abysmal, was sure of a respectful hearing as long as the overall sound was right. The basis of that sound, the instrument which provided the heartbeat of the trad Frankenstein monster, was that dullest and most constricting of all noises, a banjo played chung, chung, chung, chung, smack on the beat.

Some bands held out obstinately against banjo-mania. Humph, Al and Sandy, and later Bruce Turner, ploughed a lonely mainstream furrow. Alex Welsh, although he capitulated enough to use a banjo on the occasional number, remained faithful to the noise he wanted to make, a fierce but disciplined amalgamation of Condon-music and arranged Dixieland. They worked because there were enough clubs to give them a certain amount of work, but they had a harder struggle than a great number of vastly inferior bands. Not that the whole of British trad was rubbish. There were some fine musicians in the better bands, but by reducing the music to a formula, by breaking through into the pop world, by over-exposure and repetitive gimmicks, trad signed its own death warrant. What seems odd in retrospect was that many of the musicians involved had been prepared to all but starve for the music in the days before the break-through and yet, once the boom came, were willing to do anything however idiotic in the name of commercialism.

It is, however, tempting but inaccurate to imagine that every British trad band sounded identical, and that all of them wore funny uniforms. There was certainly a basic trad noise and several of the bands not only reproduced it exactly, but dressed up as Confederate troops or Mississippi gamblers in order to do so. There were exceptions however. Kenny Ball for example dressed his band in ordinary suits, and although the recordings which brought him fame were very pretty-pretty – ‘traddy-pop’ was the word invented to describe this noise by its denigrators – at clubs and concerts Kenny could blow some exciting jazz. He himself had a formidable technique acquired during his many years as a travelling dance-band musician, and while far from contemptuous of money, he knew and loved early Armstrong.

Chris Barber too scorned fancy dress, and though he may be considered as playing John the Baptist to Acker’s Saviour, while the trad boom was actually at its height he was experimenting with rhythm and blues, and playing a fair amount of arranged Ellington as well as his usual material.