Owning Up: The Trilogy (85 page)

Bill left after a year or so to join an advertising firm on the musical side, but he still played occasionally with us – broadcasts, recording sessions and so on – when Mick felt we needed a fuller sound. He rowed me in on several commercials too, mostly advertising film designed for the African market, and we also did occasional prison concerts.

Mick was right about the unassailability of the banjo; without one we only got the crumbs that fell from the traddies’ table. There was, however, one moment when we nearly made a film. In 1957 Ealing decided, that a jazz band on the road would make a good subject for a picaresque comedy, and somebody had recommended the Mulligan band as a source on which to draw. As a result a director and a producer spent some time travelling about with us in the wagon. They were both called Mike.

The producing Mike was only with us for one tour, and managed to get his face slapped in Swansea by telling a young lady he could get her into pictures. He was rather drunk at the time. The directing Mike came with us on several tours. He was a nice, tall, curly-haired, enthusiastic, clumsy man, and afflicted with a bad stammer when excited. This usually happened when he recognised the potential of some northern scene, a shabby dance hall backed by slag heaps or a fish and chip shop reflected in a dirty canal. He’d never been north of Golders Green before, and these images had yet to be turned into cliches.

‘T-t-t-t-terr-terribly visually exciting d-d-d-dear boy,’ he would shout as he leapt about looking at such vistas through framing fingers.

We were all very impressed by the thought of being used as the basis for characters and camped it up like mad. As the film company provided a great deal of whisky this was even easier than it would otherwise have been. Staying in one hotel, Frank drank himself into being fit only for the human scrap heap in under five minutes and on to the floor in ten. Next morning we were all in the bar and he did it again. The fat bespectacled landlord came in at this point, stepped carefully over Parr’s body and, without registering any surprise, wished him good morning.

That night we were booked to appear at a Lancashire seaside resort only thirty miles away. We not only contrived to be late, but indeed Frank didn’t appear at all until the second half. There was a revolving stage and the conductor, who was at his most waggish, waited until Pete had begun his drum solo and then set it in motion. Pete was, of course, sober, and every time he appeared behind stage, would shout ‘Drunken cunts!’ at us before disappearing again into the light.

After the producer had seen enough, it was the turn of the writer, a Scottish novelist called James Kennaway. He had written a book about officers in a Highland regiment, but we were initially outside his terms of reference. To start with he hated us very much. In The Bodega, at the end of his first night with us on the road, he stood, his eyes full of angry, tears, and beat his clenched fists against the wall.

‘You’re all shits!’ he shouted. ‘I hate you. I hate you.’

We didn’t think he blew up a storm either to begin with, but by the time he left us to write his script, we were entirely reconciled. Actually it wasn’t us that changed but him. He turned into a real raver.

James wasn’t starry-eyed about us though, even by the end. He recognised our defensive cliquishness, our tendency to ‘put it on’ to impress him and others, the way we used funny voices for weeks at a time. Whether any of this would have got into the film I don’t know. The company folded and it was never made.

We’d been offered fifty pounds each initially for allowing ourselves to be used as a basis for fiction. When we heard the film was off all of us, with one exception, took it for granted that we could kiss the money good-bye. The exception was Alan Duddington.

‘Mick,’ he suddenly announced in the wagon a good few months after most of us had forgotten the film had ever existed as a possibility. ‘Could you ask if we could have the fifty pounds before Christmas? I’ll need it to buy presents for my folk.’ Shortly after this Alan left us and Gerry Salisbury replaced him.

Everybody in the band loved Gerry. He had married into the budgie and garden gnome belt, but his origins were Cockney–Italian, and he was in fact a cousin of Jo Lennard. He had been brought up in Covent Garden, and told some marvellous stories of his childhood. In particular I remember an incident in which a policeman, with whom the entire Salisbury family had been on bad terms for a whole year, was invited in at Christmas for what he imagined to be a peace-offering in the form of a seasonable drink. It had been well-laced with ‘Jollops’, a very strong laxative which, according to Jerry, worked instantly.

‘He goes running down the stairs holding on to ’is ring to get to the outside toilet in time,’ explained Gerry in his slow deep voice. ‘And when ’e gets there, ’e discovers that the old man’s been and gone and nailed up the door!’

But for Gerry his Chaucerian world was in the past, and by the time he joined the band he was living with his wife and baby daughter in his in-laws’ semi out at Mill Hill.

Gerry’s mind worked all right, but rather slowly, like a record player at the wrong speed. He realised this, and had developed a set of mannerisms to go with it. If asked a question he would stand absolutely still for a moment, and then he would turn his whole body towards his interrogator as though it were on a revolving platform for displaying sculpture, and subject him to a long and searching stare. Finally, when Gerry was ready, he would give a slight jerk, lift his eyebrows, and deliver his answer which was always pertinent and usually humorous.

Gerry’s features were rather beautiful, and he had very long eyelashes, but his movements, and in particular the impression he gave that his head, neck and torso were not articulated, made him add up to a comic figure. With his completely deadpan face he reminded me of Buster Keaton, and indeed he had a real passion for early film comedies.

He used to share the driving with Apps, and when that gentleman decided he would like a break – this didn’t happen very often as he was paid by the mile – an amusing little scene took place.

Pete would draw up in a layby and on the cue: ‘Like ter drive for a bit, Ger?’ both of them would throw open the two front doors of the van, and climb out. They would meet directly in front of the bonnet, small animated Apps and the slow-moving and stolid Gerry, and exchange a few words. These were, of course, inaudible for the rest of us in the back of the Volkswagen, but somehow the contrast between them suggested a music-hall exchange, and we called it their ‘Wheeler and Woolsey Act’. Having finished what they had to say to each other, they completed their little walk. Pete would climb into the passenger seat and go to sleep, Gerry into the driving seat and start up the engine. It was a perfectly reasonable way of changing over, and much more sensible than clambering across each other’s knees, but it always seemed faintly ridiculous.

Gerry’s passion was coarse fishing, and he managed to interest Pete in this too. It made a change from their continuous rabbiting about second-hand cars on long journeys, although Pete soon reduced it, as he reduced everything else, to a formula. Every time we passed over or near a stretch of water, whether canal, river, pond, lake or reservoir, he would turn to Gerry and say: ‘Must be a few in there, Ger.’

I confessed to Gerry that as a child I had been a keen trout fisherman, and he did his best to hook me on coarse fishing. We did spend several freezing days off on the banks of a small and muddy pond near Stanmore live-baiting for pike. I quite enjoyed these Spartan expeditions, but the final result of Gerry’s propaganda was to rekindle my passion for trout. He refused to have anything to do with it, even in Scotland where it’s very cheap.

‘It’s not a working man’s sport,’ he explained. He had retained from his Cockney childhood a fierce sense of class loyalty.

More than anyone else in the band, Gerry was a real musician. His thinking, so-slow and earthbound in everyday life, became charged with originality once it turned to music. He was a good bass player, but what he should have been was a trumpet player. He used to play if Mick was ill, or would occasionally take a number if we had an especially long session, and his phrasing and the construction of his chori were absolutely delicious. The only trouble, the only tragedy really, was that he had no lip. Lip in a trumpet-player is the ability to go on playing without your mouth starting to jelly-up on you so that you can’t blow. A lot of it, of course, comes from playing continuously; you develop a hard lip in the end as you can see from examining the extraordinary cushion of leather in photographs of Louis Armstrong, but Gerry had played a lot at one time and another, and it just didn’t happen. After a couple of numbers he couldn’t blow any more. Mick on the other hand had a lip of iron, and some ability to swing, but compared with Gerry he was very uninventive. It was very sad.

Gerry was not really so much an active figure in the band; he was more of a spectator, but his originality of vision, his stolid refusal to be shaken by anything, his eye for the absurd, provoked the rest of us into every form of mania and excess.

The abortive film project was the only chance we had of becoming national figures although we had a certain reputation as good copy. Patrick Campbell, the humorist, came with us to Oxford one night in 1957 and wrote a very funny piece about us in his column in the now defunct
Sunday Dispatch.
What especially pleased us about this was that he got several points poetically wrong. For example he misheard our expression, ‘Put me in a snout’ (i.e. Give me a cigarette) as ‘Cut me in the snuff’. Also that particular night, the wagon picked up Gerry Salisbury and me at a pub called ‘The Target’ on Western Avenue. The reason for this was that we had been fishing unsuccessfully for pike in the pond in Stanmore. Gerry told the band that there was meant to be a huge pike in that pond which could take even full grown ducks. Frank Parr interjected at this point with a quote from some obscure poem. ‘The wolf-jawed pike,’ he intoned solemnly.

In Patrick Campbell’s piece this came out as: ‘… to pick up George Melly… He told us that he had been fishing for Wolf Jaw, the monster pike in Stanmore Pond.’

From that day, ‘Cut me in the snuff became the way we did ask for a cigarette, at first humorously, but eventually as a matter of course, while Wolf Jaw, the monster pike of Stanmore Pond, joined the spade bongo player as one of our permanent phantoms.

I myself began, as the years went by, to appear quite frequently outside the band, not only on the radio, but as a solo compère and performer. One of the most profitable and enjoyable of these extra-Mulligan jobs was for Paddy McKiernan who organised for three years a show called ‘Rhythm with the Stars’, designed to expand the sales of the
Daily Express
in the north. The first year I compèred and sang a spot with Chris Barber. The second I just sang with Mick, but in my own spot and billed as a solo artist; the third year I compèred again and sang with Mick, but what seemed to me absolutely fabulous was what I got paid. A hundred pounds! I had never earned so much in my life in such a short period.

I discovered how to get rid of it, however. We played a different town every evening, and as I was usually in Paddy’s company, I stayed at the same four-star hotels, ate at the best restaurants, and stood a great many very expensive rounds into the night.

The show consisted of a mixed bill, part jazz, part pop. The first year the star was Eddie Calvert. We opened in Manchester, the hall was packed with Chris Barber fans, and Eddie got the bird. He came down to the dressing room in a very bad temper and began to bawl out Paddy while he changed. Every time he swore, his father, who was sitting there in a cap, said: ‘Now, now, Eddie,’ in a mild voice.

In the middle of his diatribe he suddenly turned on me. ‘It’s all right for you,’ he shouted, ‘you’re only an amateur.’ After so long on the road I took exception to this, and told him I had been singing ‘Frankie and Johnny’ – the number had gone down particularly well – for over eight years almost every night.

‘Was that you falling down?’ snapped Eddie. I said it was.

‘You’ll get cancer, you know,’ he spat out, and returned to the attack.

But solo jobs were rare. For the most part we completed the fifties like somnambulists, always tired from the all-night poker sessions, often drunk, doing something we had once done for love out of habit. Jazz and the Mulligan band had a relationship like a failed marriage. We stuck together because we could see no alternative.

In Cleethorpes, on the way up to a Scottish tour, we chanced upon a figure who seemed to symbolise our condition. She was called ‘Musical Marie’ and was attempting, in a tent on the front, to beat the world record for non-stop piano playing. Before it was time for our first session we paid our sixpences and went in to see her. She’d been at it fifteen hours and had almost three more days to go.

She was a fat lady dressed in a powder-blue gown. She sat at the piano listlessly tinkling away. Her manager, a flamboyant middle-aged man, told us that she was in ordinary life a Manchester housewife.

‘Every tune she plays,’ he kept emphasising, ‘is a real melody.’

‘What happens when she wants to piss?’ Mick asked.

‘She continues playing,’ explained the manager, ‘a screen is brought on to the stage, and she uses an Elsan behind it. She never stops playing for one moment. All recognisable tunes.’

The Elsan, he explained, was brought on and removed by a lady in Red Cross uniform. The manager himself fed her on glucose.

When the dance was over we passed the tent on the deserted front. Through the loud speakers we could hear Musical Marie playing her hesitant and stumbling notes into the small hours. She was still at it when we left next morning. I was interested enough to ring up Cleethorpes Town Hall from Scotland a few days later. I spoke to the Town Clerk.

‘Oh, yes, she broke the record,’ he told me, ‘played for a further ’alf ’our so there’d be no argument, and was then carried into t’ Dolphin ’otel in a state of collapse.’