Owning Up: The Trilogy (73 page)

Many people would have said I was mad. Alex took his responsibilities very seriously. He rehearsed. He was determined to succeed. Mick, as I well knew, alternated between bursts of enthusiasm and complete apathy from which nothing could shift him. He drank a great deal in those days and in consequence often played extremely badly, whereas Alex was still a teetotaller – a failing he made ample amends for later – and was known, in a not entirely kindly spirit, as The Lemonade King.

Of course I also drank and quite often sang disgracefully because of it, but I never took that into account when thinking of Mick’s lapses. In fact Mick and I discovered later that whenever one of us was describing to the other some drunken shout-up with a third party, we inevitably made our enemy talk in the slurred voice of the Music Hall inebriate whereas we, in retelling our triumphant and cutting role in the argument, always assumed a sober and rational voice.

Furthermore, my own status had improved out of recognition. An appearance with Alex at the Festival Hall in one of the NJF ‘s Festivals of British Jazz had been recorded, and my version of ‘Frankie and Johnny’ was actually selling quite well. I had been cheered for three minutes, and about thirty seconds of this intoxicating noise is at the end of the record to prove it. Fame, that dangerous bird, brushed my cheek. Several offers came from agents to manage me as a solo artist, and then I joined Mick, a bandleader without a band.

The real reason is I love him. Two stories to show why. One night we played an RAF camp and, unable to find digs, were kindly offered a billet by the Wing Commander. His only condition was that we were quiet, a not unreasonable request as it was by this time two o’clock in the morning and we were next door to airmen who had to be up at six. Mick stayed behind for a final drink, and the rest of us, stoned out of our heads, staggered along the neat paths to find our hut.

After crashing, despite detailed instructions, into several sock-scented billets full of sleepily angry personnel, we eventually found our own quarters and began to shout, scream, pillow-fight, fall about, and finally managed to push over a wardrobe. At this moment the door burst open and there stood Mick absolutely livid with rage. For three minutes he gave us a perfectly justifiable bollocking. We took it with the masochistic repentance of the very drunk. We were ashamed of ourselves. Mick was perfectly right. We hung our heads. Then, in full spate, he stopped and looked at the flimsy wardrobe at his feet.

‘What the fuck,’ he shouted joyfully, and jumping into the air landed on top of it, splintering it to match-wood.

The other story I heard only the other day from Ian Christie. Mick was very drunk and playing a solo. His control was minimal, his head entirely empty of any constructive musical ideas. His timing gone. All he could do was blow unbearably loudly, his neck swollen, his eyeballs popping with effort. Ian listened with embarrassed irritation. When somebody is playing as badly as that it reflects on everybody in the band. Finally Mick finished his thirty-two bars of nothing, and waved his bell in the direction of the trombonist to tell him to take the next chorus. He turned to Ian, his face running with sweat:

‘All the noise and vulgarity of Freddy Randall,’ he said, ‘with none of the technique.’

I stayed with Mick, despite periods of exasperation and occasional tempting offers, for the next seven years.

10

A Good Conductor

Most people who decide to form a band go about it like this: they approach any musicians they want and, if they are already with another group, make a financial offer. They advertise in the musical press and hold auditions. They get around the smaller clubs to see if there is any potential talent in the semi-pro bands. They brief spies to keep their ears open in the provinces.

Mick did none of these things. He let it get about he was re-forming and then sat on his arse. Being Mick he was about twice as lucky as anyone else would have been. For a start disagreements within the newly formed Alex Welsh Band shot three musicians into his lap: they were Ian Christie (clarinet), Pete Appleby (drums), and Frank Thompson (double bass).

Ian Christie was already well known in revivalist circles before he joined Mick. He had played second clarinet with Humph, and had co-led, with his brother Keith on trombone, a band called ‘The Christie Brothers Stompers’. This had two distinct periods: the first when Ken Colyer on trumpet had a decidedly purist flavour, the second with Dickie Hawdon, basically and progressively modern. Ian, unlike his brother, was the opposite of eclectic, and the band broke up.

Keith’s modernist tendencies led him into the Ted Heath Band. Ian’s musical conservatism held him faithful to revivalist jazz. Even within this field he was extremely dogmatic. All he really liked at that time were the late Louis Armstrong, Condon music and, outside this pattern but with extreme fervour, the Mississippi blues singers like Broonzy.

His own playing was accomplished but limited. His principal influences were the New Orleans clarinettists, Edmond Hall and Albert Nicholas. Neither are dramatic players. They are both lyricists. Their effect on Ian was to lead him to play a continuous string of notes at approximately the same volume from the first bar of a number to the coda. As a result his solos, when he was on form, were often beautiful in an unpretentious and restrained way, but in ensemble, because he didn’t listen to what the rest of the front line was up to, had no give and take. He just played, as if he were taking a solo. Furthermore he had a bad memory for arrangements. This suited Mick very well, as it gave him a perfect excuse not to hold rehearsals.

‘What’s the use, cock?’ he would ask. ‘Ian can never remember new numbers.’

It was this difficulty which had led to his departure from the Alex Welsh Band. Alex and Roy Crimmins were after an arranged sound, and Ian was continuously holding them up. I attended several rehearsals, and could see that the extreme politeness with which Roy and Ian treated each other, masked exasperation and near enmity. When Archie Semple left Freddy Randall and offered to rejoin his old Edinburgh friend and musical sidekick, it was a foregone conclusion that Ian would go.

Ian is small, almost mouse-like in appearance, and wears hornrimmed spectacles. His movements are neat and precise, his vocabulary enormous, his accent Lancastrian. His father, a piano tuner by profession, was Scottish, but his mother came from Blackpool where Ian and Keith were brought up.

Ian had qualified as a photographer before coming south, and until it became possible for him to earn his living as a full-time musician, had worked in the photography department of Harrods. The idea of him asking debs to smile was not without irony, as his considerable talent for hatred, his powers of invective, his whole reserve of malice were directed night and day, drunk or sober, at the upper classes (short ‘a’). The word ‘hurray’, Jim Godbolt’s happy synonym, became in Ian’s mouth a deadly insult. Collectively he referred to Hurrays as ‘the enemy’, and to a typically hurray face, either of the chinless, slack-mouthed variety, or of the florid small-eyed strain, as ‘an enemy face’.

To work himself up yet further he had only to say the words ‘public school’. The phrase ‘public-school hurray’ was enough to produce a psychosomatic state not far removed from apoplexy.

One fine winter morning at about eleven o’clock we were driving through the West Country, and were forced to stop by a hunt crossing the road. It was a pretty, if absurd, spectacle, and the rest of us were inclined to watch it pass with tolerant pleasure. Not so Ian. He lowered his window and subjected the entire charade, from the leading hound to the last velvet-capped child on a pony, to a blistering stream of insults. Mick was amazed. ‘I thought he was going to pass out,’ he told me later.

Ian and I frequently engaged in violent political rows. Most of these took place late at night in the wagon when we were both rather drunk and, whatever the subject, followed an identical course. Ian was on the extreme left bordering – although he never joined the party – on the edge of official Communism. I took the anarchist position, holding that ends never justify means, and that authority, whether on the left or right, is always wrong. Ian usually finished up by accusing me of talking a load of liberal humanist shit. There was one memorable incident in these otherwise identical and fruitless arguments, and this was due to a misunderstanding. Ian had been stressing that all my thought patterns were the result of my middle-class background. I agreed that this might be true but that it was after all an accident where any of us were
dropped from
the womb.

‘Don’t try and confuse the issue with that Surrealist bollocks,’ shouted Ian. I was puzzled, and asked what he found Surrealist in what I’d been saying. It turned out he’d thought I’d said
lopped off the moon.

In general the rest of the band ignored these shout-ups, preferring to sleep unless there was a bottle circulating, but Mick would occasionally enter the lists only to find himself, like a passer-by intervening in a fight between man and wife, turned on by the pair of us. Mick’s political ideas are extremely reactionary although he is the opposite of pragmatic in day-to-day life.

Ian’s political viewpoint forced him to consider Mick, in his role as bandleader, as a representative of the boss class. He was always pressing for a change of structure. He wanted the band put on a cooperative basis with Mick taking a double share. Mick refused to countenance this idea. He
liked
being band-leader, and besides it was probably true that he did make, when things were going well, considerably more money than a double share. I was against it because I preferred a straight screw with none of the responsibility for breakdowns and broken contracts, and the rest of the band didn’t want to know either.

Until he got married Ian was usually involved in some intense affair. It was only occasionally he was able to treat sex on a light level, and he was not very adept at the quick chat-up followed by a knee tremble. He had a habit if he saw one of us getting on well with a girl he fancied of sailing in with a cry of ‘Is this man annoying you?’, but it never worked. Besides, if it had, he wouldn’t really have enjoyed it much. He was an extreme romantic. Just by chance most of his premarital affairs were with upper-class girls.

Some days before his wedding, Ian’s father gave him as a joke a vulgar rubber toy. It was about six inches long and turned one way represented a girl wearing a shawl over her head, but turned the other way it became an erect penis. The next evening during the interval of a seaside dance I was leaning on the esplanade and became aware of Ian standing below on the shingle at the edge of the incoming sea. Suddenly he raised his arm and threw the phallic pun as far as he could. Being rubber it floated, and the waves deposited it again at his feet. It was a very Freudian moment for a Marxist.

Some time ago a dreadful game went the rounds. All it consisted of was deciding who among your friends and acquaintances were ‘winners’ and who were ‘losers’. Likeable characteristics had nothing to do with the decision – many losers are extremely likeable – but neither did material success guarantee you to be a winner. Paul Getty for example is a prototype loser. The distinction, and it is a very hard one to make in a great many cases, is that the loser gives off an aura of defeat and possible disaster, whereas the winner emanates a justified confidence in the inability of things to go wrong. It was no less shaming to be judged a winner than a loser. Only the players derive any satisfaction from it, and that based on extremely suspect motives. One thing is certain, however, and that is that if the game had been invented at the time everybody in the band would have judged the drummer, Pete Appleby, a one hundred per cent winner.

Pete Appleby, small but wiry, is one of those people who seem to have no past history. His childhood, a period of which even the most non-Proustian is unable to prevent some impression forming over a period of years, remained a complete mystery to us. We did meet his father once for a few moments, because the band-wagon was passing his house and Pete had something to tell him, but apart from the fact he looked exactly like a slightly older version of Pete and wore a bow tie, we learned little from this encounter. His mother, whom we gathered was separated from his father, we never saw. The only concrete fact I can recall about Pete’s early years was that during the war he had been evacuated to Bedford and gone to school there.

His later career was equally sketchy, although it was certain that he was in the Navy. Pete was even prepared to talk about this period of his life occasionally, but the trouble was that, being one of nature’s Walter Mittys, he frequently promoted himself. If any of the band pointed out that he appeared to have risen in rank since the last time he told us a particular story, he would give the answer with which he always refuted any accusation of inconsistency. Moving his padded shoulders rapidly about, his inevitable response to emotional stimuli, he would tell us with emphatic confidence: ‘I never said that.’

Most of Pete’s naval stories were to remind us of the fact that he had served under Prince Philip, and that they were like ‘that’. In the course of these stories Philip would call Pete ‘Pete’ and Pete would call Philip ‘Phil’. Actually if they were like ‘that’ it is on the cards that Pete did call Philip ‘Phil’ because he had a horror of calling anybody by their full name and would shorten it if possible. If it was a two-syllable name like ‘Gerry’ there was no problem. Pete could call its owner ‘Ger’, but if it was a name of only one syllable like ‘Mick’, Pete would prefer to shorten the surname, and usually called Mick ‘MuP. He invariably referred to himself as ‘Apps’.

For a long time none of us could decide why Pete was so different from the rest of its, almost as if he belonged to a different species. I forget the exact moment of revelation, but after it the problem no longer existed. What made Pete so different was simply the fact that he came from, lived in, and was loyal to, South London.