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Authors: George Melly

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #Music, #Genres & Styles, #Jazz

Owning Up: The Trilogy (70 page)

BOOK: Owning Up: The Trilogy
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After an hour or two of this, the sessions were inclined to turn sentimental and maudlin, and various Irish gentlemen would oblige with patriotic songs, many of them starting with the word ‘Sure’.

In Donegal, at eleven o’clock one morning, we were stopped by a drunken policeman who leant against the car door for three-quarters of an hour expounding, while the growing line of cars honked behind us, on the beauties of the country.

In a cottage where we changed, I bought for five shillings a beautiful and old china hen which I spotted on the window ledge. The owner was delighted with the transaction, and told me that he had something I would really want although he wouldn’t let it go under the pound. He disappeared leaving me to speculate on what it could be. Some treasure from the great house acquired during the troubles? It was a calendar of the Taj Mahal and the water changed colour to show the weather.

On that tour we didn’t only drink too much, we ate like pigs too. It was still the austere time when the greedy English rich would cross to Dublin for a week-end to gorge on steak and salmon, butter and double cream, all unobtainable in rationed Britain. We weren’t rich but we were English, and even Mick stuffed himself at every opportunity.

Our last date was in ‘The Four Provinces Ballroom’, Dublin, a comparatively sophisticated venue. We went down well, but there were no Guinness crates on the stand. After it was over we hurried into taxis and were driven through the wet streets of the city to catch the night boat to Liverpool. It was a stormy passage, and we played cards and drank rum while Irish labourers fell about to the rhythm of the ship, using the moment’s pause between the rolls to lift a bottle to their mouths, and the potential chambermaids and hospital cleaners snored chastely by their suitcases in the saloon.

Grey with lack of sleep we docked in Liverpool in the wet, windy dawn, and I went home for breakfast. That night in Nantwich, I pulled the towel out of my case to wipe the soap out of my eyes, and the china hen fell to the floor and was smashed to bits.

Mike Lawrence, who enjoyed singing, got very little satisfaction out of his association with us. He didn’t sing at all in jazz clubs and very infrequently at concerts, while even at dances, Mick’s hatred of rehearsing new numbers meant that once the band had mastered about six songs from Mike’s repertoire it never learnt any more – and besides, with three vocalists, none of us got an opportunity to sing much. Mick, however, insisted that we all sit together at the side of the stand during the entire evening – this was part of his ‘professional’ mystique – and furthermore smile broadly but remain silent. Whenever we did talk, he would turn and hiss at us: ‘Will the vocalists stop rabbiting?’ The rest of the band called us the choir. Also, at the time Mike joined us, interest in traditional jazz was just beginning to revive. We began to play more straight jazz dates, and even appeared at the London Palladium in a guest spot at one of Ted Heath’s sell-out Sunday Night Concerts. We had only twenty minutes, and Mick worked out this could include two vocals at most. Poor Mike, who was very show-biz minded, and for whom the London Palladium was holy ground, was yet again rowed out. If I’d been him, I couldn’t have remained as good-tempered as he did, but even so he was by nature a tense and highly-strung person, and it began to tell on him. He would get into terrible silent rages during the course of which he would flush a dark red, and then pale to an almost greenish white. He had a certain type of Liverpool face, large in area, but with small, almost feminine features arranged closely around a little nose like a parrot’s beak. At the height of one of his crises his lips would compress so tightly that the mouth seemed to disappear altogether.

But although at the beginning we had several brushes – if Mick wasn’t there, Mike would try and take over who sang what and when, and I wasn’t having any – we got on very well. Our shared Liverpool background gave us a lot in common, and Mike had an inventive and very personal sense of humour. Together we fathered an imaginary Scouse Catholic family, and improvised incidents and conversations round them when the mood took us:

‘You know our Bernadette? ’Er fairst Mass and she’s sick right down the front of ’er lovely white frock just as she’s going up to the altar,’ I might start. It was Mike, however, who added the touches of wild inspiration.

‘It come of ’er eating no breakfast,’ he would go on, ‘she’s so pious like, you know. I said to ’er: “Go on. Eat your kipper. Father Riley won’t know.” But not ’er.’

He was a fund of Liverpool children’s street songs and catches:

Father cut the whiskers off the bread.
There’s a woman in the shit-’ouse ‘alf dead!
There’s a cat upon the wall, And it’s only got one ball.
And it’s looking for the other on the shed.

An extraordinary adventure we shared together happened in Glasgow. After a concert in the St Andrews Hall the band was invited by a butch young man in jeans and a polo-neck sweater to be his guests at a restaurant. He didn’t look as if he had a penny but it turned out that his father owned a fleet of fishing boats. Furthermore, the restaurant was, for those still frugal days, exceptional. Candles shone on greedy faces, huge steaks followed the scampi and our host had ordered a whole bottle of whisky to be placed in front of each of his guests. We’d already had quite a few in the nearest bar to St Andrews Hall, so by the time we’d finished our coffees we were all very drunk, had done nothing about finding digs, and it was two o’clock on a cold Glaswegian night.

Mick, Mike and I found ourselves reeling through the streets together. We decided to start at the top and fell into the hall of the Central Hotel. We were told by a brusque night porter that there were no rooms vacant. The same happened at the North British, St Enoch’s and the Ivanhoe.

Finally we hailed a taxi, and asked the man to take us round places to stay. Down and down we went. Small hotels, boarding-houses, transport digs, doss-houses. At last we were directed into a tenement building and told there was a place which might take us ‘up the stair’. Mike and I went to investigate. Mick remained in the taxi rigid with whisky.

We staggered up two flights of tiled steps and rang a bell. A young queer in the filthiest white steward coat I’ve ever seen came to the door, and we asked if he had a room. Drunk as I was, I could see a compliant gleam in his eye as he said yes. He showed us into a double room squalid to the point of disbelief. Two rusty bedsteads, an old sink, peeling green walls, a broken window pane mended with cardboard. I pulled back the blankets on one of the beds and pointed out that the sheets looked very much used.

‘Oh, dearie me,’ said the young man, ‘it must have been overlooked. I’ll see what I can do.’

At this point Mick, pale green in the face, loomed up in front of us and asked what the fucking hell we’d been doing and did we realise he’d been sitting in the fucking taxi freezing to fucking death for half a fucking hour. We said we’d only been up there for five minutes, but he may well have been right. The time sense – as he too has proved over and over again – entirely disappears when you’re very drunk. Anyway, despite the fact that there was a bed for him, he was too angry with us to stay and stumbled down the stairs again and out into the night.

Mike and I ordered breakfast in bed in the morning, and climbed between the filthy bed clothes. A dreadful night of dreams! Huge insects marching in procession along the floor. Groping awake just in time to find the sink and be’ violently sick. More dreams of pustules and crab-lice, and at last a desperate awakening, eyeballs throbbing in the harsh winter light shining through the filthy window, and an old woman smelling of rotted knickers standing at the foot of the bed with a breakfast tray. Cracked cup, bread and marge, a pullet’s egg. We thanked her through cracked lips. She leant towards us and whispered:

‘Ye can trust me. I’m only the working lassie, but if any o’ the gairls come in tae ye, luke tae your wallets.’ It was obvious, and if we’d been less paralytic the night before we’d have cottoned on at once. We had slept in a brothel.

I got up and took my wallet out of my coat pocket and hid it under my mattress. Mike did the same. Then we got back into bed. A few minutes later the door opened and a quite young but hideous whore came in wearing a filthy street coat over a creased nightdress.

‘I heard you come in last night,’ she said, ‘and I heard Maggie bringing in your breakfast the noo. Can you spare a cup of tea?’

She sat on the end of the bed to drink it. She made no pass at us so I presume she thought we were lovers.

‘That Jeanie across the stair,’ she complained, ‘she took a mon all night for ten bob. It’s no’ right. It’s letting the rest of the lassies doon. Och, last night I was doon tae my last poond. I bought a half bottle of whisky. I were coming up the stair and I dropped it. It ran doon the stair sae I sat doon and keened over it. A polis-man stopped. There I was sitting on the stair, the gude whisky running down in a stream between ma legs and making a wee pool on the street.

‘ “Hae you pussed ye’sel?” he asks.

‘Och, I’m that unlucky if I went tae the Sahara for sand I’d no find any.’

She talked for over an hour, and all the other girls came in and sat on the beds. I was beginning to feel better, even hysterically well with the false health of a bad hangover, and about eleven o’clock sent one of the whores out for some scotch.

At last Mike and I got dressed, and went straight to the nearest public baths before rejoining the band.

Mick, cheerful and friendly, had forgotten what had happened. He’d woken up in some respectable digs on the outskirts of the city.

A band on the road, tolerant to each other’s major faults and shortcomings, are inclined to develop almost paranoiac feelings of hatred about small habits and mannerisms. For example my obsessional custom of arranging the contents of my pockets – money, keys, wallet, cheque-book – in a kind of neat collage on the top of a chest-of-drawers used to drive Mick, if he was sharing a room with me, into a state of irritation so intense that it could only be relieved by messing it up again.

A great deal of conversation, which would appear almost insane to an outsider, is taken up with describing and reiterating the faults, irritating verbal or physical peculiarities, small vanities and pretensions of any member or members of the band who aren’t present. Furthermore a musician who is a friend can become an enemy, someone to be avoided at all costs, and then, a week or two later, become a friend again. As in medieval Europe the pattern of alliances is always changing.

‘When the coach gets there,’ whispers A to B, ‘try and slip off before C notices us and tags on.’

Mick and I both liked Mike Lawrence, but we would do anything to avoid eating with him. It was not that his manners were particularly bad, although he shared with most musicians a habit which offended our middle-class prejudices, he buttered his rolls with his soup. It was simply that he based his behaviour in restaurants on a mid-Atlantic conception, complete with accent, and at the end of a meal would inevitably say to the waitress: ‘Could I have the check, honey?’

He also used a great deal of tomato sauce. Not that this in itself irritated us – most of the food needed tomato sauce to make it edible – but if the bottle wasn’t on the table, and in some extraordinary way it never was when we ate with Mike, he would call over the waitress and say: ‘Could I have the ketchup, honey?’

Was it really because of these two sentences, one inevitable, the other well on the cards, that Mick and I would pretend we didn’t want to eat and then belt off in the other direction in search of another restaurant as soon as Mike was out of sight? It seems mad, but if you ask any musician who has been on the road he tells you stories like this.

After Mike Lawrence had been with us about a year, he got an offer to sing with an All Girls Orchestra and decided to accept. It would mean after all that he got a chance to sing a bit more, to learn a few more numbers, and perhaps to get the break he was counting on. I met him a month or two later and asked him how he was getting on.

‘Not too bad, Georgie,’ he told me, ‘but I can’t bear the way their lipstick comes off on their mouth-pieces.’

He never did get his break. I don’t know why. He’d a good voice in the Billy Daniels spirit, he could swing, and he knew how to project. Perhaps he wanted that break too much. Anyway after a couple of years he retired from the business altogether.

In the spring of 1953 boredom and frustration within the band produced some radical changes. Mike Lawrence had already left, now Jimmy Currie, the guitar player, followed him. He went to join a vocal group which achieved some commercial success. The night before he actually departed, Jo Lennard was made sufficiently angry by something he said to throw a cream bun at him across the dressing-room. Tension was on the increase all round.

Next Archie Semple, the clarinettist, left to join Freddy Randall. Mick knew about this offer because Freddy had, quite correctly, rung him up to warn him he was going to make it. He therefore asked Archie what he intended to do, and Archie denied he had any intention of taking it up. I suspect a certain Scottish caution lay behind this denial. He wanted it all sewn up and sealed before committing himself. Then one night, only an hour after he had yet again told Mick he definitely wasn’t leaving, we heard him talking to Freddy in what he imagined was a soundproof telephone kiosk in our hotel. He was confirming the date he was to join. I had an unpleasant quarrel with him over this, not because he was going, but because he had lied.

‘I suppose you think I’m a shit?’ he asked me.

‘Yes,’ I said.

It nearly came to blows, and it was Mick who calmed us both down. Actually I suspect Mick derived some satisfaction from this shout-up.

A month or two before, Archie had come to me to say that if something wasn’t done to improve the musical side of the band he was going to leave. He was entirely fed up with Mick’s lack of interest. He’d tried talking to him, but all that happened was that Mick offered him a drink and changed the conversation. Could I do anything? What did I suggest?

BOOK: Owning Up: The Trilogy
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