London Calling (21 page)

Johnny Martyn knew Lionel Bart from the Gyre and Gimble and suggested to Paul Lincoln that he might decorate the basement
to make it look more like a music venue. Bart, who had studied at St Martin’s School of Art, painted the ceiling black and
a cubist design behind the tiny stage. On the walls he painted huge, stylized eyes in the manner of the day. Unfortunately
he used oil paint, which takes a few days to dry, and people leaned against the walls and got paint all over the clothes.
Paul Lincoln had to pay their cleaning bills because this was long before the days of casual clothes; people dressed in their
best to go out and clothes were not cheap.

Naturally, the Vipers were looking for a recording contract so they invited Hugh Mendl, a Decca record producer, to come and
see them at the 2i’s. Thinking it might help, they asked Tommy Hicks to sing with them. The producer loved Tommy but not the
Vipers. He signed Tommy and just ten days after the release of his first record, ‘Rock with the Caveman’, written by his friend,
the ubiquitous Lionel Bart, Tommy was a star. The ensuring publicity made the 2i’s famous at the same time, even though he
only played there that one time.

The Vipers need not have worried. They were causing such a buzz that Parlophone producer George Martin came to see them and
in September that year, 1956, offered them a recording contract. He released their first single the following month: ‘Ain’t
You Glad’/‘Pick a Bale of Cotton’. They were the only serious competition for Lonnie Donegan and there was considerable rivalry
between the two groups. Donegan heard the Vipers play the traditional ‘Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O’ at the Breadbasket and quickly
made plans to change the words slightly and release it himself, in that way claiming the publishing copyright. The Vipers
got wind of this and managed to get their version out first. The Vipers’ ‘Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O’ made the Top Ten but,
even though Lonnie Donegan’s version got higher in the charts, Whyton and the Vipers’ manager, Bill Varley, got the publishing
on both. The funniest Vipers v Donegan story involved one of the bass player John Pilgrim’s pet monkeys, Elvis and ’Iggins.
The Vipers included in their entourage a menagerie of animals including monkeys, skunks and a coatimundi. At a party, a monkey
perched on Lonnie Donegan’s shoulder as he sat talking, making him even more the centre of attention than usual. Then the
monkey began to shit, all down Donegan’s back. No-one said a word. Everyone in the
room was focused on him but Donegan thought the attentive silence meant they were enthralled by his words and kept on talking.

Skiffle introduced a younger crowd to the London bohemian mix; though Francis Bacon and the Colony Room crowd sometimes went
to the 2i’s, their visits were usually brief. The spread of coffee bars and skiffle clubs introduced another layer, like a
palimpsest, over the pubs and cafés of Soho and, to a certain extent, Fitzrovia, bringing more street life to a city that,
even in the late fifties, was still badly scarred by war damage. There is a photograph of the 1958 Soho Fair, taken from the
2i’s showing that most of the north side of that part of Old Compton Street was still an enormous bomb site; the backs of
buildings on Dean Street shockingly revealed.

Tommy Steele was Britain’s first home-grown rock star, and the press was filled with the – largely made-up – story of his
discovery at the 2i’s. In Newcastle, a young guitarist called Bruce Welch read an article about the 2i’s and decided to visit
London for the weekend and have a look at the place. A couple of months later, in April 1958, Welch and his friend, Hank Marvin,
also from Newcastle, moved down to London and took a single-room flat in Finsbury Park. Every day they would go down to Soho
and hang around the 2i’s and quickly became part of the scenery. The 2i’s was open all day and even in the afternoons people
would go in and jam. Tom Littlewood let them play four nights a week from 7 until 11 p.m.; the 2i’s was never a late-night
place. Sometimes they sat in with the Vipers. When they weren’t working, Littlewood let them man the coffee and the orange
juice machines upstairs, for which he paid them eighteen shillings after deducting a 10 per cent commission.

Paul Lincoln was still involved in the wrestling business and in promoting bouts. He hired Bruce Welch to help him install
the wrestling rings in places like the Wimbledon Palace. Welch: ‘It nearly killed me but I’d have done anything for two or
three quid.’
¹¹
That summer ‘The Geordie Boys’, as they were first known, were joined by two new musicians, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, and
became the Drifters. By this time they had honed their act. Bruce could play note perfect Buddy Holly solos, which was just
what British promoters were looking for at the time. That September, 1958, someone showed up looking for a backing group for
his act, having heard there was a good guitarist playing at the club. It was Harry Webb’s (Cliff Richard’s) manager Johnny
Foster and soon Harry was singing with them at the 2i’s. When a promoter from Derby wanted to book Harry as a solo act, he
decided that the name Harry Webb was not showbiz enough and
appropriated the name of one of the 2i’s resident singers, Rick Richards from the Worried Men, dropping the final ‘s’. Harry
Webb became Cliff Richard and his single ‘Move It’ was a huge hit. The Drifters changed their name to the Shadows, and had
hits both as an instrumental group and as Cliff ’s backing group.

Meanwhile the 2i’s went from strength to strength. It became the place for aspiring musicians to hang out: Marty Wilde, Vince
Taylor, Johnny Gentle, Screaming Lord Sutch, Adam Faith and Lionel Bart, who used to play wash-board in pick-up skiffle groups.
Mickey Most, who was in the Most brothers with Alex Murray and later produced the Moody Blues’ ‘Go Now’, was there most nights,
often serving behind the counter. Terry Williams from the Elephant and Castle changed his name to Terry Dene and was discovered
there; his first single, ‘A White Sports Coat’, was an instant success. Wee Willy Harris started his career at the 2i’s sweeping
the floor and serving Coca-Cola before Paul Lincoln persuaded him to get a red suit made up on Berwick Street and to dye his
hair pink – an idea he took from an American wrestler, Gorgeous George. He was soon in the charts. A large American jukebox
stood just inside the door, and outside, keeping an eye on things, was Big Roy, the doorman. The 2i’s must be the only coffeebar
in London to ever employ a doorman. Sometimes he was needed, such as when one of the Vipers got on the wrong side of the Curly
King gang, who turned up with axes and a shotgun to settle an argument. Roy made sure no-one was hurt. Later, in 1958–9, it
was Lofty, in his special uniform, who guarded the door. By the time Peter Grant, later to be Led Zeppelin’s oversize manager,
worked there the job description was more realistic; he was the bouncer. Business was good – it cost two shillings to go down
the narrow stairs to the cellar – and on busy nights they would clear the room and do a second set halfway through the evening.

The 2i’s attempted to cash in on its fame by opening a second venue, the New 2i’s at 44 Gerrard Street, in what had been John
Hasted’s 44 Club, a folk and skiffle club that had been used as rehearsal space by Eddie Cochrane and Gene Vincent, as well
as by many of the people who played the 2i’s, two blocks away. But there was clearly a disagreement with the local gangsters,
probably over protection money, and one day the doorman, one of Paul Lincoln’s wrestlers, was attacked with a hatchet, leaving
him scarred for life.

Larry Parnes – known in Denmark Street as Mr Parnes, Shillings and Pence – seemed to find most of his stars, and boys, there.
After Tommy Steele came Reg Smith, who Parnes signed on the strength of Lionel Bart’s recommendation without even hearing
him sing. He changed his name to Marty
Wilde and they had a string of hits. Parnes delighted in creating showbiz names for his acts: Dickie Pride, real name Richard
Knellar; Duffy Power, real name Ray Howard; Johnny Gentle, real name John Askew, Terry Dene and many more, including Georgie
Fame, Lance Fortune and, the only one who resisted getting a new name, Joe Brown, whom Parnes wanted to call Elmer Twitch.

Larry Parnes started his boys at £20 a week on a steadily, but slowly rising scale. Parnes had it all worked out. Newcomers
would first of all have their hair professionally cut – that was very important – and a beautician would attend to their skin.
He took them shopping for clothes; in his words: ‘I like to give them a touch of luxury from the start…’
¹²
As Simon Napier-Bell points out, it was almost identical to the way Sultan Selim III groomed new entrants to the royal harem
in Constantinople. But though he loved them all, it was Ron Wycherley who really caught Parnes’s eye. He was discovered in
September 1958 in Marty Wilde’s dressing room at the Essoldo Cinema, Birkenhead, where he asked if he could audition. Parnes
changed his name to Billy Fury. He was obsessed with Fury and started him off at £65 a week, clear of expenses, a huge amount
back then. After he had a couple of small hits, Larry increased this to £130 and then £150. In 1960, he switched to a percentage
basis, giving him even more. Lee Everett was Billy’s girlfriend for eight years and Parnes was so fixated on Billy that he
had to let her move in, otherwise Billy would have quit. She told Simon Napier-Bell:

So there I was living in Parnes’s house full of boys. A lot of them smoked grass, and did pills, thousands of them. Billy
smoked grass from when he got up in the morning to when he went to bed at night. Larry hated it so much he fooled himself
he didn’t know about it, just refused to let himself see it.
¹³

Most of the first wave of British rock ’n’ rollers started out in skiffle: Alexis Korner’s first record was with the Alexis
Korner Skiffle Group in February 1957, followed in April 1958 by his first as Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated. Van Morrison’s
first band, the Sputniks, had a lineup of Van on vocals, plus washboard, kazoo, tea-chest bass and guitar. They played youth
clubs and school concerts. Hank Marvin got his start in the Crescent City Skiffle Group, and Chris Farlowe, then called John
Deighton, won the final of the 1957 All England Skiffle Contest when he was in the John Henry Skiffle Group. Cliff Richard
was, rather reluctantly, in the Dick Teague Skiffle Group before returning to his career as an Elvis imitator. Joe Brown was
in the Spacemen skiffle group and John Lennon’s Quarry Men featured washboard
and tea-chest bass in its original lineup until John smashed the washboard over his friend Pete Shotton’s head. The first
tune they rehearsed when Paul McCartney joined the band was ‘Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O’. George Harrison, meanwhile, was already
playing in the Rebels, which featured a tea-chest bass and mouth organ.

Skiffle had been around in the clubs since the early fifties, but it was not until 1957 that it suddenly became popular. Adam
Faith: ‘Skiffle hit Britain with all the fury of Asian flu… Anyone who could afford to buy a guitar and learn three chords
was in business as a skiffler. It grew in cellars, nice dark cellars, and it shot up like mushrooms.’
¹⁴
Anyone who could play E, A and B7 on a guitar was suddenly in a group. Specialist clubs opened all across town. The City
Ramblers had a residency at the Princess Louise pub on High Holborn, until their leader, Russell Quaye, opened the Skiffle
Cellar at 49 Greek Street on 14 April 1957. It quickly became
the
place to play. The Skiffle Cellar featured two groups each night, owner Russell Quaye’s own band the City Ramblers, or someone
like the Cotton Pickers, Lonnie Donegan’s old sidekick Dickie Bishop, Steve Benbow or singers like Robin Hall and Jim McGregor.
They all played there regularly, and then there would be a support act, playing for pennies. The audience was more bohemian
and serious than that at the 2i’s and were very knowledgeable about folk music. Noting the success of Cy Laurie’s all-night
jazz sessions at his Windmill Street Club, Quaye began to promote all-night sessions himself. The club remained the centre
of British skiffle until skiffle’s demise in 1960, when the club closed.
¹⁵

The 44 Club at 44 Gerrard Street, in what is now Chinatown but was then a street of warehouses for the porn industry and shops
selling used ex-war department electrical equipment, became a folk and skiffle centre until it was taken over by the 2i’s.
Chas McDevitt used the money he made from his hit ‘Freight Train’ to open a coffee bar on Berwick Street named, naturally,
Freight Train, and in May 1959 a new skiffle club, called the Top Ten, opened in the cellar across from the Freight Train
beneath Sam Widges’ coffee shop and began to attract many of the old 2i’s gang.

On 1 June 1957, about three years late, the BBC began broadcasting an hour-long live show called
Saturday Skiffle Club
to replace the usual morning organ recital. For sixty-one weeks it featured name bands, visiting guests, the occasional folk
singer and at least nine appearances by the Vipers as well as Lonnie Donegan, Ken Colyer and more than forty other bands.
This valuable document of the British scene is, of course, lost as the BBC with its usual disdain for popular music did not
record any of the shows for posterity. We
would not need to pay a broadcasting licence had the BBC been far-sighted enough to record all the performances by the Beatles,
the Stones, Dylan and the rest that it transmitted over the years. But they were nearly all wiped or, in the case of live
shows like the television music show
Six-Five Special
, not recorded in the first place. Not one episode exists, though a spin-off film starring Lonnie Donegan, Petula Clark, and
the John Barry Seven, was released in 1958.

Running a parallel course with skiffle was rock ’n’ roll. Though the 2i’s is generally credited with being the first Soho
rock ’n’ roll venue, the first was probably Ken Colyer’s Studio 51, which, like many of the other skiffle venues, began putting
on rock groups like Tony Crombie’s Rockets and Rory Blackwell’s Blackjacks that summer. This was met with the usual whinnying
from the conservative music press. Writing in
Melody Maker
, 5 May 1956, Steve Race exposed the dreadful danger of rock ’n’ roll to Britain’s music scene: