Owning Up: The Trilogy (72 page)

We salvaged what we could from the coach. The instruments were all right although of course they had to be dried and greased to stop them rusting. We took the uniforms to a cleaners. They would be needed again in three days, the longest Jim thought we could cancel our engagements.

Jo’s parents arrived and with them her Uncle George. When we were getting the stuff out of the coach, the two men were measuring the skidmarks on the bridge above us. They looked stern and speculative.

I spent a lot of time at the hospital and was allowed to see Jo. She was on the mend. My mother sent her freesias. I’d rung her immediately after the accident as I guessed it would be in the papers.

Finally Mick and I sent the uniforms and instruments by train to Denbigh for our next date, and travelled down over-night to give our evidence at the trial of the psychopathic yob in Eastbourne.

We broke the journey in London and rushed home to change into suits. We met at Victoria Station at 8.30. Mick had his Uncle Jim with him who had insisted on coming along to ‘lend moral support’ as he put it.

Mick’s Uncle Jim wore a beard and a beret and looked rather like an artist in a cartoon in
Punch circa
1903. He was not an unkind man, but very reactionary and given to great self-dramatisation. We could have done without him that day.

We gave our evidence. The magistrate, once he had understood that we were jazz musicians, seemed inclined to treat us as if we were the accused. Admittedly, my appearance didn’t help. The unhealed cut under my eye give me a very villainous appearance, but even so I feel it was our profession which made him so unpleasant. He was particularly incensed over the fact that Mick had shaken hands with the yob after the first fracas.

‘You shook hands with this man?’ he queried in a voice like a creaking gate. ‘Now why did you do this?’ Mick explained that he wished to show he had no ill feelings, and had imagined that the whole incident was closed.

‘And yet it was not,’ said the magistrate. ‘It does appear to me the most extraordinary behaviour.’

When it came to my turn – ‘Is this man also a jazz musician?’ – it was explained to the bench that I had cut my eye in an accident and not during the fight.

The yob had a long list of convictions for causing or attempting to cause bodily harm and was sent down for six months.

We walked out of court to be met by Uncle Jim in a state of near hysteria. He had been sitting in the public gallery and had overheard the yob’s mates muttering threats and writing down our home addresses.

‘Officer,’ shouted Uncle Jim at the policeman on duty, ‘get these men out of town.’

Mick and I refused to take any notice of him, and went into the local for a much needed drink before catching the train.

Later Mick wrote to the town clerk to ask if the Municipal Authorities would pay for his coat. He got a brusque refusal citing that the coat had been torn
after
he had shaken hands with the man, and that therefore it was his responsibility.

That night we played the first job since the crash.

I went up to Boston to see Jo while she was getting better. Her back looked like a railway junction. Eventually she sued Mick and won. The Corporation also sued for the repairs to their bridge, and they won too.

This shouldn’t have mattered in the ordinary way as Mick’s Insurance Company would have paid, but it was discovered that the driver had lied in filling in his qualifications, and had claimed to hold a licence which he hadn’t got. What was so aggravating was that there was no need for him to have this licence anyway – it was for. something like driving public transport – but because he’d claimed he’d got it, the Insurance Company didn’t have to cough up a penny.

Afterwards, whenever we crossed that bridge, we would ask Mick if it belonged to him. He never really liked that joke. ‘Very fucking amusing,’ he would mutter.

When Jo was all right again she joined Harry Gold’s Pieces of Eight (Ronnie Scott had found another vocalist), but after a bit she got married and left the business.

A month or two later Mick, who was fed up with everything anyway, decided to give up the band altogether.

He put it to me that I could go solo. Jazz was on the up again, and there was plenty of club work. He would be my manager, and I ought to be able to make out pretty well.

He told the rest of the band one night when we were playing a South London jazz club. Nobody seemed either upset or surprised. During the interval I heard Stan Bellwood and Roy Crimmins making plans to form a band of their own.

‘And I’ve got a great gimmick,’ said Stan, ‘we’ll call it, well it doesn’t matter, “The Crimmins-Bellwood Allstars”, something like that, and then, on the posters, under the name, in big letters in Day-Glo, we’ll ‘ave the words
“SELLING EXCITEMENT”!’

And so the band folded. Wyllie took his wife and child back to Australia and a job in a Melbourne bookshop. The others gigged around or joined other bands, and Stan, despite his ambition to sell excitement, sold his drums instead and became, as I said earlier, a publican.

9

The Real Reason Is I Love Him

Towards the end of 1953 and during the opening months of 1954, there was indeed a great deal happening in the jazz world. I refer here to our jazz world. The modernists lived their own life which touched on ours as little as if they had been vets or haberdashers.

Ken Colyer came back from New Orleans like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Tablets of the Law. Chris Barber and Monty Sunshine had a band waiting for him. To the growing number of New Orleans purists he trailed clouds of glory, and every note he blew was sacred.

Humph was in full revolt against his revivalist past. For some time he experimented wildly, dropping the trombone altogether and trying such far-out combinations as a West Indian rhythm section. His monthly newsletter was a masterpiece of dialectical justification.

Finally he settled for mainstream, the small-band jazz of the late thirties and early forties, the music to which he has remained faithful ever since.

Alex Welsh decided to come down from Scotland and form a band to play white Dixieland jazz, similar in character to the music produced by various American groups under the direction of the guitar-playing professional whisky-drinker, Eddie Condon.

The great success of that time, however, was the band which had attracted and held all Humph’s disappointed revivalist fans, and which won the adherence of the recently self-styled Beatniks (until that year they had called themselves existentialists), Soho layabouts and the art-school students, and was led by my first boss, Cy Laurie.

His cellar-club, an enormous basement in Windmill Street just off Piccadilly, was jammed, and his all-night raves, based very much on our earlier efforts but financially tenable, in his larger premises, merited a shocked article in the
People
with photographs of necking couples lying on the floor and a wealth of salacious moralising.

It was at Cy’s that I first got to know David Litvinoff, an extraordinary person on the fringe of a dozen worlds. The fastest talker I have ever met, full of outrageous stories, at least half of which turn out to be true, a dandy of squalor, a face either beautiful or ugly, I could never decide which, but certainly one hundred per cent Jewish, a self-propelled catalyst who didn’t mind getting hurt as long as he made something happen, a sacred monster, first class.

David can only breathe in London. We once went to the country to deliver some furniture to somebody’s mother. He was appalled at the waste, at the lack of human activity. ‘All that grass. All those trees…’ he speculated irritably. ‘They must be worth something to somebody.’

His hatred of nature is so intense that he refuses to acknowledge that there are any separate species of bird. He calls them all – even sparrows – ducks.

Cy Laurie’s success was very largely due to his manager, a plump, middle-aged man with grey, hair brushed back over his head in wirelike strands. He realised that national, as opposed to local, fame was the product of publicity, and to this end employed a publicity agent called Les Perrin. At this time such tactics were unheard of in the jazz world, and they certainly paid off.

Les Perrin, a tiny cockney sparrow, was a dynamo of ideas. He would distribute pamphlets from a helicopter, fire bullets through a band coach window and, in Cy’s case, build up a fanatical following whose identification with the band was hysterical rather than musical.

A little later, with the ascent of Chris Barber, Cy’s star began to wane. Always a prey to self-doubt, and given to fanatical solutions and mystical enthusiasm, Cy broke up the band and went to India to study, so it was said, under a guru.

The National Federation of Jazz Organisations was attempting during this period to keep the growing enthusiasm for the music under some kind of control. This was to avoid the over-exposure which had all but killed off the interest during the earlier boom in 1950. The only trouble was that the elected committee was so divided by differences of opinion as to what jazz was, and so split by personal animosities, that it had a difficult job keeping itself under control. During the year 1953–4 I served on this committee. I had been proposed as a kind of joke at the General Meeting but somebody seconded me and I was elected. While the band was still in existence I had never been able to attend a meeting, but after it broke up I used to go along every other Tuesday to The Three Brewers, Seven Dials, and put in what Mick would call my ‘two penn’orth’. It was during my term of office that Big Bill Broonzy came over under the auspices of the NFJO to do a series of concerts. This was a very big deal indeed. He was the first American jazzman to play in England since the war. The Musicians’ Union, in a hopelessly parochial way, refused to allow Americans in although it was obvious that in fact the interest they would arouse would
create
work for British musicians on the same bill. They only let Broonzy in because he was a folk singer.

For me the idea of hearing an American Negro singing the blues was almost unbearably exciting. I went along to his first concert at the Conway Hall in a state of tense anticipation. Alan Lomax introduced him at great length while Bill stood patiently at his side. I found Lomax extremely paternalistic. I knew he’d done a great deal for the blues, got Leadbelly out of prison, recorded work songs in prison camps, and rediscovered many forgotten and obscure artists – for all this we owe him a great deal – but I got the impression that he felt he owned them. The southern voice droned on and on. Finally it got too much even for Bill, an extremely well-mannered and equable man.

‘… and ah am sho,’ said Lomax, ‘that when yo’ heah Big Bill.…’ ‘If they ever gets the chance,’ said Broonzy resignedly and the round of applause had the effect of hurrying up the introduction.

I won’t describe how I felt listening to Bill that summer evening. This was the first live blues I’d ever heard in my’life, the music I loved, and love above any other, sung by a great artist.

His whole visit was a splendour. There were sessions that lasted all night long, the most memorable at Jimmy Asman’s tiny house in Plumstead, where Bill would drink a whole bottle of whisky and talk over quiet chords on his guitar, lie outrageously about things he had seen and done, and sing the blues until the dawn broke over Woolwich.

The NFJO promoted a series of concerts in the provinces for Bill, but delegated the responsibility to various promoters. We decided that it would be as well to appoint some representative of the federation to watch our interests in each town and for the Liverpool concert I proposed my father. He was delighted, took his duties very seriously, and wrote us a long report which ended: ‘Mr Broonzy was received with prolonged and enthusiastic applause, and declared himself willing, if only it were possible, to continue to sing all night, a statement I am prepared to believe.’

Bill stayed with my parents and told my mother that this was the first place he had stayed in England where you didn’t have to put money in a meter for the gas fire. He ate an enormous breakfast: two plates of corn flakes, two helpings of bacon and eggs, and about a loaf and a half of toast. My father was so fascinated he was very late for the office.

Broonzy came over four or five times before he died. I got to know him well and loved him very much. He helped to create the taste for Mississippi-style blues, and opened the way for all the singers who came here later.

Dressed in a black shirt, black trousers, black socks, black shoes, a very expensive black sweater from Simpsons, and a white silk tie, I embarked on my solo career.

Mick managed to arrange several little tours of the provincial jazz clubs at a fee of ten pounds a night. As I’d only been getting three with the band this seemed an enormous amount. What I failed to take into account was that I had travelled free in the coach, and now I had to pay my own train fares. Also I had to pay Mick commission so I was in fact no better off.

I would have been actually worse off if it hadn’t been for Alex Welsh coming down to London from Edinburgh to form a band. Alex realised that, whereas he was still comparatively unknown outside Scotland, I had a certain reputation. He therefore used me a great deal, encouraged by Mick who was for a short time his manager as well, and could draw commission from both of us. Then Mick began to itch to get back in the business. There were several reasons for this. The improvement of the situation financially was certainly one, not to mention the fact that a bandleader earns considerably more than an agent to a modestly-paid singer and a newly-formed band; but it was not only this. He was after all only twenty-six, and had known applause and enthusiasm. You don’t go into the jazz business simply to earn money. There is a wish to play in front of an audience. There is some element, although Mick hid it better than anyone I have ever met, of exhibitionism. At all events slowly, so slowly you could hardly see it happen, Mick began to play again.

At first he didn’t even form a band of his own. He just used Alex’s. While Alex was still finding his feet this suited him too, but as he became better known the situation got impossible. The promoter of a jazz club could not be expected to be best pleased if he booked Mick Mulligan one week and Alex Welsh the next and found himself landed with virtually the same group plus or minus Mick. Furthermore, Alex became established in his own right, was approached by a serious agent and saw no reason to spend his evenings blowing away for Mick’s benefit when he could be doing it for his own. There came a time early in 1955 when Mick had to re-form a band. He asked me to join it and, despite an offer from Alex, I did.