Romany and Tom (20 page)

It was jockey briefs first, and vest tucked in, which struck me as a bit unmanly, and then some exercises that passed for keeping fit. He touched his toes (or almost) ten times, rotated his upper body at the waist with his hands on his hips, then tucked his hands under his chin with his elbows raised out sideways and flung his arms open once or twice with a groan, before finishing with five (sometimes three) press-ups. It was all a bit desultory, and a leftover, I suspected, from the RAF.

As for his clothes, the fashions changed over the years, but the peacock’s instinct didn’t. I was too young to remember much about his sharp hand-made Savile Row suits from the early sixties when he was a bandleader, although I used to finger them where they hung at the far left of his built-in bedroom wardrobe for years afterwards, admiring the buttons, the slanted ticket pockets, the racy silk linings; some of them were still in polythene from the dry-cleaner’s, but the fronts would be slashed to ‘let them air’.

The first thing I can visualise him in is relaxed but expensive open-neck cotton shirts in pale purple or dusty pink – we’re talking late sixties – with the sleeves immaculately turned up to the forearm. These gave way to fishermen’s smocks and tunic shirts in the mid-seventies, and then – in the early eighties – he went back to collared shirts in understated bird’s-eye checks, worn with cravats (purple chiffon, gold cotton) and a silver woggle, straightened with a dainty dapper precision, and topped off with a tan suede – or perhaps a bottle-green-leather – bomber jacket.

He was not a tall man. Five foot six. Shirt-sleeves needed metal elasticated armbands worn at the biceps. After the suit era, his trousers became neutral low-rise slacks worn below his little paunch with a Spanish leather belt. His feet were small and beautifully pedicured, not professionally, but by himself with clippers and files. Fresh socks went on with a comic grunt – a short ‘Ooh’ and a stifled ‘Ahh’ – his calves and hamstrings stretching under the effort, until finally he’d cry, ‘Success!’ and standing up, smile and proclaim, ‘Ta-da!’ with a look of satisfaction and relief. If it was chilly perhaps he’d reach for one of his V-neck lambswool sweaters; they were invariably dry-cleaned at the first sign of an oil spot or ash mark. Everything was well laundered, well ironed. In fact, whenever I think of him – from the tailored suits and thin knitted ties of my earliest childhood memories to the open-neck shirts and woggles of his fifties – it was always Era-Appropriate Jazz Gear.

On the middle shelf in the wardrobe he kept white handkerchiefs and a cream-leather box of cufflinks emblazoned with a vintage Bugatti. It was embossed with his name and the title of one of the Brian Rix productions for which he’d written music:
T.M. Watt
, Simple Spymen
1960
. His wore a Longines watch – gold trim, delicate hands, champagne face, black-leather or chocolate-brown-metal stretch strap – and at night he left it on a sea-blue oval glass dish with some loose change from his pockets. At the back of the shelf were the duty-free packs of cigarettes; over the years Gold Flake gave way to Three Castles (green pack), then Camel. On the top and bottom shelves were piles of his jazz orchestra arrangements, some loose, some stacked freely in ring-binders.

After he had picked his outfit for the day and was fully dressed, he applied a streak of concealer to the drinker’s veins on his nose, squirted a blast of Goldspot bad-breath spray on to his tongue, added a splash of cologne to his neck and cheeks (Acqua di Selva in the sixties, Aramis in the seventies), and he was ready for the day. Sauntering to wherever my mum was in the flat, he’d stand in the doorway, and wait for her to look up and deliver an approving comment – ‘Lovely, darling’ or maybe ‘Look at your father! What a handsome man and smelling all fragrant’ – and if he swaggered slightly, he also seemed to earnestly covet her assent; the one was always accompanied by the other; it was masculine yet somehow needful.

I sometimes wonder what he was thinking in those overcast years following the failure at the Dorchester, as he came to terms with the end of the career he wanted, and made the decision about what to replace it with. If anyone were to have guessed what was in his mind, I am not sure they would have come up with painter-decorator. On reflection, however, he was clearly too proud to take the obvious route other contemporaries took: moving into pop orchestration, or into television and becoming a light-entertainment musical director.

In spite of one memorable season in Scarborough in 1969 directing the pit orchestra for the comedian Tommy Cooper (‘the funniest three months of my life’) he often derided the music he would have been expected to work with. He used to scoff at Ronnie Hazlehurst – the king of BBC light-entertainment musical direction at the time – whenever he came on TV, especially when he did that humble awkward turn and bowed to the camera, dainty white baton in hand, headphones on. It was a symbolic image in my dad’s mind – an image of acquiescing, of submission. The night Hazlehurst popped up unexpectedly on our TV during the Eurovision Song Contest of 1977 as musical director for the singers Lynsey de Paul and Mike Moran, wearing a bowler hat, holding a morning newspaper and shamelessly conducting the orchestra with a rolled-up umbrella, I thought my dad would explode with ridicule and contempt.

How did he become such a well-groomed and fastidious yet aggressively principled man? It certainly lost him as much work as it earned him. In November 1960 – following his hot streak with Parlophone – the BBC’s Head of Programme Contracts wrote to him to discuss the possibility of his engagement as Conductor of the BBC Northern Dance Orchestra to replace the outgoing and exceptionally successful Alyn Ainsworth. The band broadcast from Manchester and had gained a reputation across Europe for being one of the best ensembles on radio. It was an auspicious opportunity, and although restrictions were placed on how much work he could do elsewhere – something that had caused several other prospective conductors to turn the job down – within a week he had accepted the appointment. He decamped to Manchester, only to find himself almost immediately at loggerheads with the producers. ‘I wanted the NDO to sound as good as Basie,’ he once told me curtly. ‘They didn’t.’

Refusing to compromise, he was eased out of the job at the end of the six-month trial period by a management who were intent on moving with the times as
they
saw it, not as
he
saw it. He was replaced by the amenable flautist Bernard Herrmann, who was to lead the band in newly created TV vehicles that indicated quite clearly the commercial direction in which my dad had been expected to go. The titles speak for themselves:
Here We Go with the NDO!
and
Pop North
.

I think it would be easy to romanticise his stance as that of a man who would not compromise, who stood by his jazz principles and his own sense of integrity, but I have to ask myself how much of it was just sheer bloody-mindedness. As his old friend and partner Brian Rix said when we met recently, ‘Back then your father was principled, yes, but sometimes he was just an obstreperous Glaswegian, who liked getting his own way. And the whisky didn’t help.’

Whether he liked it or not, I think my dad’s own father’s moral rigour left an indelible mark on him. While he may have violently rejected his father’s religious and Masonic convictions, he was affected by his socialist beliefs and denunciatory judgements on an increasingly commercialised world, and used them just as vigorously and parochially in his own life and against his own targets.

Of course there were high points – the three years at Quaglino’s which brought the final big breakthrough at the BBC, the recordings for George Martin at Parlophone, and the Ivor Novello Award he went on to win in 1957 for his own composition ‘Overdrive’ – but he battled with commercial expectations. He downplayed the Parlophone albums, saying the choice of tracks and style of approach were compromised and mediated by the record company, so perhaps it was unsurprising that the moment he considered the pinnacle of his jazz life was the moment he was allowed to do exactly as he liked.

It came about in unexpected circumstances.

In September 1960 at the Trades Union Congress at Douglas on the Isle of Man, a resolution – number forty-two on the day’s agenda – was passed that said trade unions should play a bigger and more active role in the promotion and encouragement of the arts. A number of writers and theatre directors on the political left responded positively and the upshot was the formation of Centre 42 in 1961 under the direction of playwright Arnold Wesker. A grant of ten thousand pounds was provided by the Gulbenkian Foundation. The Trades Council of Wellingborough was the first to embrace the initiative, and later that year, with the help of Centre 42, staged an arts festival aimed at finding a popular audience and a boost to its membership. Five more councils followed suit (Nottingham, Birmingham, Leicester, Bristol, and Hayes & Southall) and a travelling festival programme was planned based on the initial Wellingborough success; it included a production of Stravinsky’s
The Soldier’s Tale
, a new work by Wesker himself, music by the English composer Wilfred Josephs, a National Youth Theatre production of
Hamlet
, a new play by Bernard Kops, and many other fringe events including folk song concerts, poetry and jazz, art installations and readings in factory canteens. Every night would then climax with a festival dance, where the music was provided for the delegates and attendees by a crack big band – the Forty-Two Jazz Band. Its leader and director was my dad.

With no commercial constraints he put together the finest British jazz big band he could think of. In a review of their first Wellingborough performance, the jazz critic Benny Green said in
Scene
magazine: ‘It may well turn out to be the most outstanding big band this country has ever possessed.’ A month later, he wrote in the
Daily Telegraph
: ‘Rhythmically the orchestra, unimpeded by complexity, has an impressive impact, sweeping dancers into action and pleasing the jazz-lover with an ensemble sound so rare in this country today as to have the appeal of nostalgia.’ On first reading it seems like a compliment, but on second it seems to damn with faint praise; it would certainly suggest that in the band’s approach were also the seeds of its own demise. To make things worse, Green also noted: ‘There is nothing experimental about Watt’s writing.’ At the music’s heart, he pointed out, was a ‘harmonic conservatism’.

It was impossible to get away from the fact that not only was the jazz big band being barged into the past by rock ’n’ roll but many commentators thought if it were to survive it would have to adapt and move in a new, more musically adventurous and slimmed-down direction. Some critics, it’s fair to say, praised the Forty-Two Jazz Band’s hard-swinging exuberant directness. Others sympathised with the low turnouts for some of the events, pointing to odd venue choices and snobbery among British audiences, who had always told themselves ‘American jazz is better’. Yet in spite of my dad’s best intentions, it all just seemed – in one way or another – too little too late. The band stayed together for six months before the money and the impetus ran out. After a concert for the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers at Shoreditch Town Hall, they ended with a final string of appearances at the TUC headquarters in Great Russell Street in March 1963.

At the outset, my dad had said to Benny Green after the debut Wellingborough show: ‘I feel sure that if we could get this band on record and on radio, people MUST like it. Maybe this is the time to start a big band revival.’ In the end, in spite of the shifting sands, four recordings
did
actually get made; Norrie Paramor from Columbia Records saw the band at the closing TUC event and signed two singles. The four tracks that made up the four sides were always what my dad would direct me to when I asked about his music. ‘That was what I
meant
,’ he once said to me. Listening to them now, they are muscular, uninhibited and joyful – dynamic, smart, swinging renditions of four classics: ‘St. Louis Blues’, ‘Tuxedo Junction’, Woody Herman’s ‘Woodchopper’s Ball’ and Duke Ellington’s ‘C-Jam Blues’. The playing on all of them is outstanding. The recordings remain thrilling examples of a sound that was destined to come to nothing.

A socialist all his life, my dad had stood up and announced at the final Centre 42 event, ‘We dedicate this tune to the TUC and all it stands for: “Time And Three-Quarters”.’ Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that when he finally ran out of road in the early seventies as a musician, he took the noblest, least reproachable route he could think of, and that by becoming a painter-decorator he became something of which the TUC, and his own father, would also have been proud: a ‘working man’.

Chapter 20

‘Oh, for
crying out loud
, look away!’

It was the summer of 1974 and I was sitting on a beach towel, aged eleven, looking out across the ink-spill of emerald and malachite greens and cobalt blues in the wide waters of the bay. Two small fishing boats were anchored off the shore, their paintwork blistered and blanched, yellow nets piled up like seaweed, the wooden rudders lolling in the shallows. Under the parasol, I could still feel the sun through the stretched cotton panels. The sand was so hot a man was sprinting across it to the water’s edge.

The voice was my dad’s. I swung round just in time to see him turn back from looking over his shoulder and resume reading his book. His tanned front was glistening with sweat. I looked up in the direction of where he had been looking. The village of Lindos rose up: whitewashed houses jumbled on the parched mountainside; the crenellated battlements of the acropolis above silhouetted against the hot sky.