Owning Up: The Trilogy (77 page)

Skiffle: first the word. Originally it was used to describe a kind of sub-jazz in which kazoos, tea-chest and broom-handle basses, seven-gallon jugs, and empty suitcases replaced the more conventional musical instruments. Presumably in the first place these improvised instruments were the invention of poor Negroes unable to afford the proper thing, but during twenties skiffle music caught on as a novelty, and in particular a white group called ‘The Mound City Blue Blowers’ achieved considerable vogue. By 1953 the public had naturally enough forgotten about skiffle, and only the serious jazz-record collector knew what the word meant.

Like so much else, the skiffle boom originated with Ken Colyer. In order to provide a contrast to an evening’s diet of undiluted New Orleans ensemble, he introduced a short vocal session of Negro folk music with himself and his banjo player, Lonnie Donegan on guitars, and Chris Barber on bass. Ken himself sang most of the numbers, helped out from time to time by Lonnie. He called these interludes ‘Skiffle Sessions’, to differentiate them from the more serious activity of playing blues, rags, stomps and marches, and they achieved great, if localised, popularity among the band’s followers. In choosing the word skiffle, Ken was, of course, consciously misapplying it. It was as a trumpet player that he would wish to be judged; skiffle had a light-weight almost flippant sound to it, but I feel that his version of these old songs was surprisingly moving and authentic, a case of what the folknics would call ‘identification’.

When Ken’s band broke up and Chris picked up the pieces, he naturally” retained the skiffle-session idea. Lonnie Donegan took over the singing and became very popular round the clubs, although personally I always found his country and western nasal whine rather unpleasant. His version of ‘Rock Island Line’ originally part of a Chris Barber in Concert LP, was requested so often on the radio that it was put out as a single and rose to be top of the Hit Parade. Lonnie left Chris and formed his own group. He became a big star, the first member of the jazz world to do so, and was widely imitated.

By historical irony some of the smaller groups, unable to afford proper instruments over and above the leader’s guitar, began to use washboards and kazoos and especially tea-chest basses with broomstick handles. Gypsy Larry owned one of these and could produce from it a remarkably accomplished noise.

The skiffle craze had its own radio programme on Saturday mornings. It was called ‘Skiffle Club’ and was the direct forerunner of ‘Saturday Club’ even to the extent of having Brian Matthew as compere. I was invited to appear occasionally on this show and formed within the Mulligan Band a group I called ‘The Bubbling Over Five’ after an obscure band on a record from the collection of Simon Watson Taylor. There was Miff, Appleby, Diz on guitar, and on bass a newcomer called Alan Duddington. We always seemed to be having new bass players. Unlike other musicians connected with the band, they had a high turnover.

Alan came from Lancaster. He was younger than the rest of us, still in his early twenties, a neat precise person, a bit of an old maid, with a very slight Lancashire accent. His features were a little on the weak side, but redeemed from mediocrity by a large and noble nose similar in character to that of the first Duke of Wellington.

He was proud to be a musician, but not proud to be in the Mulligan Band. Everything about it distressed him – the music, our attitudes, the way we dressed – and it was very surprising how long he stayed, especially as he was teased unmercifully and without a moment’s respite.

Why did we tease him? There were in fact two reasons. For one thing he reacted so splendidly, concealing his mounting exasperation under a tight-mouthed, straight-backed indifference with only an occasional low sigh, or at most, a quiet if terse ‘very amusing’ to show we were getting through, but the real reason was that he
knew
he was right about everything. There was no question of doubt. There was no possibility that any alternatives existed, or that some things were a matter of personal taste. On every subject, at every level, Alan Duddington was right. If anyone disagreed with him, he didn’t shout or even try to argue. He just repeated his own opinion in a quiet but firm voice until whoever was trying to contradict him gave up.

Alan was a perfectionist. He had certain standards, certain things he expected to happen. However far short reality fell from his expectations, it never affected his optimism. However often he didn’t get what he wanted, it never occurred to him to lower his sights.

Opposite the Town Hall, Huddersfield, is a small public house called ‘The County’. It’s a friendly little pub, but as regards food anybody could tell at a glance what you could expect: crisps, nuts, possibly a pie or a sandwich. One evening we arrived in Huddersfield rather late and Mick told us we hadn’t got time to go and eat, but perhaps we could grab a sandwich in the nearest boozer. Duddington looked at him coolly; ‘I presume there’s no objection if I have a crab salad instead?’ he asked.

‘No, cock,’ said Mick, ‘but where?’

‘In the public house,’ explained Duddington as though to an idiot child. We took it for granted that he didn’t know the pub, and that once he saw it, he would realise there wasn’t a chance, but that wasn’t Alan. He marched in, and ordered a small strong ale and a crab salad. The old girl said they didn’t do a crab salad. Alan looked hurt and surprised.

He was very fussy about his small strong ales too. He would first look along the bottles of beer until he had spotted what he wanted – barley wine, Stingo, whatever the local brewery supplied – and then order it by name. Very few people drink these small and potent ales, and quite often the barmaid would spend a long time searching the shelves for it, and even come back to Alan to tell him she didn’t think they had any. She would find him standing up as stiff as a ramrod and pointing at the bottle he’d asked for.

It was his nose and personal fads which provided us with most of our ammunition, and the wagon was our usual theatre of cruelty.

His nose. How we went on about it! If he fell asleep, somebody, usually Frank Parr, would trace out a tiny head with a huge hooter on the steamed-up window so that it was the first thing he saw when he woke up. (‘Very amusing.’) Whatever came up in conversation was, if it was in any way possible, altered to include a reference to noses, e.g. ‘Cat on a hot tin nose’. (‘Very fucking amusing.’)

His habit of opening his suitcase at frequent intervals and producing a bar of chocolate which he unwrapped and ate with the formality which characterised all his movements was another moment in the day we never allowed to pass unremarked. There was an obscene limerick we all knew about an old girl of Silesia. Its last line was: ‘If Jimmy the tapeworm don’t seize yer!’, and we pretended to believe that Alan’s perpetual chocolate eating was because he had a tapeworm.

‘Jimmy-time, Alan?’ Frank would ask politely every time Alan opened his suitcase.

He tried to defeat us by forestalling this question.

‘What time is it, Frank?’ he’d ask as he reached for his suitcase.

‘Jimmy-time,’ said Frank in a matter-of-fact voice.

Even when he had left us, we didn’t allow him to escape. We discovered that he was appearing at the Metropolitan Music Hall in the Edgware Road with a country and western group and hatched a plan.

We all of us went to a joke shop one afternoon and bought enormous false noses. That evening we took a box at the Met as near as possible to the stage. We had previously got in touch with another member of the group whom we knew, and put him up to telling Duddington that he had met a beautiful girl who had told him that she was mad about Alan, and would be sitting in a box that evening hoping that he would smile at her.

Just before Alan’s turn was due, we hid below the level of the front of the box and put on our noses. As the curtains drew we slowly rose to our feet. Alan was staring at the box. Instead of a girl, there was the whole Mulligan band in their false noses.

What was nice about Alan was that he never bore any grudges. Despite our rotten teasing, despite even this final malevolent prank, he has always, on the few occasions we have met since, greeted me in an open and warm way. I doubt the rest of us could have claimed as much.

Skiffle was never a real threat to jazz, but even rock provided us with occasional employment. From tune to time we appeared on ‘Six Five Special’, the prototype teenage show. It had a live audience, and two compères, Pete Murray and Jo Douglas, while outside the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith a little group of young girls used to cluster and shriek their love. At the time it appeared madness, but I imagine a re-showing of a programme picked at random would seem both staid and droll.

During one appearance on this show we met Wee Willie Harris, a small and frantic rock singer and piano player who, lacking the sex-appeal of Tommy or Terry Dene, dyed his hair pink or green. We discovered that he was already known to us. As ‘Fingers’ Harris, he used to play interval piano at the Wimbledon Jazz Club. We bumped into him again a little later at Mrs Flanagan’s for, unlike most of the artists who ‘made it’, he had the foresight to avoid big hotel suites and save against his decline. One morning, looking out of the window of Mrs Flanagan’s dining-room, I watched him setting off for some appointment in the pouring rain, the collar of his raincoat stained pink from dye which had run from his hair.

Tommy Steele grew too old for his audience and became what all rock singers claimed they wished to become, ‘an all-round entertainer’. Poor Terry Dene went into the army, an event which the authorities attempted to use,
vide
Presley, as a boost for that increasingly unpopular interruption to civilian life, and was straightway released on psychological grounds, a circumstance which gave rise to an outcry of rage from filthy Blimps of both sexes and the newspaper you’d expect. The rock and roll stars themselves became younger and younger until it came to an end due to the difficulty of recording while still in the womb. Before this happened there were two tiny ones who achieved success: Laurie London who, it was reported in an interview, wrote his God-bothering hit, ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’, while sitting on the lavatory, and Jackie Dennis who gyrated in a kilt. At a large charity dance where the band appeared, I had the pleasure of watching with Mick a screaming row between these two mites because only one of them, Jackie Dennis as far as I can remember, was included in that part of the evening which was to be broadcast. ‘I’m a bigger star than you, and if I’m not on I won’t appear at all,’ piped one. ‘I’m higher up the Hit Parade than you anyway.’ squeaked the other. Above their heads, their managerial fathers were engaged in similar, if less high-pitched, argument.

Skiffle faded, rock and roll eroded, and Chris Barber, his band now including a remarkable Northern Irish ex-art teacher called Ottilie Patterson who sang in uncanny resemblance to Bessie Smith, began to attract a larger and larger audience. Although a few purists, faithful to the Ken Colyer line, found Chris’s music over-commercial, it was fresh and well played. Chris, convinced of his own worth, brought a serious, rather dignified approach to his music and presentation. His audience likewise was appreciative but unhysterical. It is hard to remember that out of these gay if formal occasions was to sprout the grotesque and funny-hatted excesses of the Trad Fad.

12

Done, Been Here and Gone

In 1955 I’d got married. This took place in Scotland because my wife’s parents were Roman Catholic converts and, as she was under twenty-one, we were forced to elope. Our decision dovetailed in with a Duncan tour of the Borders, and a guest appearance with Freddy Randall at Birmingham Town Hall on the way up, allowed us to feel justified in travelling by train instead of squashing into the band-wagon.

We registered for the obligatory period into a small hotel in Leith Walk, Edinburgh. Every day I set off for the job but getting back in the small hours was more of a problem. Later I discovered that I needn’t have been quite so conscientious. Most people simply booked in, informed the Lord Provost of their intentions, left a suitcase and a few clothes to imply residency, and came back in time for the ceremony. As it was, obsessed by the idea of something going wrong, I somehow or other struggled through the Scottish night and into my pyjamas before it was time to get up for breakfast. Quite often it was necessary to leave almost immediately for the next gig. I can still hear through waves of sleep the elderly waitress asking in her precise Edinburgh accent if I would prefer ‘porridge or fruit-juice?’ The name of the town ‘Berwick-upon-Tweed’ evokes a rainstorm of some five hours’ duration during which I huddled in a shop doorway until they opened the station for the first train. When the job was nearer Edinburgh the problem was less acute. Frank Thompson was still with us on bass at that time, and for a small bribe and a bed booked into our hotel was willing to drive me back. Furthermore the whole project appealed to his romantic nature.

‘I’ll get you married if it’s the last thing I do!’ he would mutter through clenched teeth as we tore along the dark country roads with unnecessary urgency. What made this odd was that like my future in-laws, Frank Thompson was a Roman Catholic.

These drives through the small hours were not without other manifestations of his imaginative temperament. Sometimes when we were so nearly there that the lights of Auld Reekie glowed tantalisingly in the sky, Frank would start swerving about, shouting that he could see lorries bearing down on us. He would draw into the side of the road, cradle his head in his arms on the steering wheel and, for a good three quarters of an hour, complain of hallucinatory fatigue. There was nothing I could do about it. I had to pretend to believe every word he said.

During an elopement, once your three weeks’ Scottish residency is established, you are allowed to go away for a week, the banns yellowing in the window of the Registrar the while, and return on the morning of the actual ceremony. At the end of the tour I travelled back to London in the band-wagon to do some jobs, and Victoria went to stay with my mother in Liverpool.