Up West (31 page)

They could party hard when the mood took them, but beboppers and other modernists tended to be serious about their craft; however with a Trad band, though the odd bum note went unnoticed in the joyous, boozy riot. Many of the Trad jazzers added other types of American ‘Roots' music, such as folk and blues, to their repertoire, as well as the odd
pop tune or calypso: the latter was enjoying a new popularity in Britain as the West Indian population slowly grew.

These differences created an intense rivalry. Although George Melly visited Club Eleven and Ronnie Scott's first club in Gerrard Street, because Scott had a policy of inviting over great American soloists, he remembers that there was little love lost between musicians of his persuasion and the modernists, who called the Trad aficionados ‘mouldy figs'. Leo Zanelli remembers the schism well, from the other side. ‘I grew up in an atmosphere of modern jazz and bebop, so I went to Club Eleven in a basement in Gerrard Street, and 100 Oxford Street on special nights. In those days, if it wasn't beboppish, well . . . And as for Dixieland, pffft. Even if you liked it secretly, you couldn't say so.'

Not everyone bought into the rivalry between the two forms. ‘I started going to jazz clubs in 1952, 1953,' Chas McDevitt told me. ‘There was the Ken Colyer Club, one in Frith Street and one in Great Newport Street, and then the Cy Laurie club in Windmill Street – all night Trad sessions. I also used to go to the Flamingo, in Lower Wardour Street, which was modern. You'd hear Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott, the Bill Le Sage trio.'

The rivalry was not just a matter of musical styles. The beboppers prided themselves on being sharp dressers, wearing slick suits. Laurie Morgan's wife, Betty, remembers that, at Club Eleven, ‘We were all wearing black, sunglasses in the pitch dark, and tight trousers, the bebop look.' Trad fans, on the other hand, were more likely to sport sandals (sadly,
often worn with socks) and duffel coats made of fabric so thick they could stand up on their own. Apart from that, they tended to dress casually; there was no point in wearing tight clothes if you wanted to dance.

Chas McDevitt, with a foot in both camps, remembers that, ‘When I went to the Flamingo, I used to wear a really good suit, although my dad [who was a tailor] refused to narrow the trousers less than 16 inches. My girlfriend at the time had a pebble-dash two-piece suit with a velvet collar. That was Edwardian. That was the style of the time, everywhere except the jazz clubs, where a lot of the guys were wearing American-style zoot suits from Cecil Gee's, with really wide trousers – especially the coloured guys, American servicemen and a few West Indians who came over in 1948.'

In the early fifties, Wardour Street and Old Compton Street were at the centre of an ever-growing nexus of jazz venues, with clubs – usually basement joints – such as the Jamboree in Wardour Street, the Mandrake in Meard Street, the Bag o' Nails in Kingly Street, a whole succession of clubs where the Fullado had been, and the Flamingo in Wardour Street.

In the middle of the decade, the clubs were joined by a new type of venue for playing and enjoying music, the coffee bar. Places such as the 2I's and Heaven & Hell in Old Compton Street attracted an increasingly youthful and cosmopolitan crowd. Teenagers much preferred them to pubs – which at that time had restrictive opening hours and stricter policies than prevail today about letting anyone under eighteen over the threshold – as a place to meet up and hang out.

In the mid fifties, young people had more disposable income than they had ever had before, while the education reforms of the post-war Labour government had made universities and colleges more accessible to the middle classes, and even a few working-class children. The rapidly growing number of students in London provided a readymade audience for modern and Trad jazz, for folk and for blues – and Soho was the natural place to go to look for all of them. With St Martin's School of Art in Charing Cross Road, Soho had a constantly renewing supply of youthful bohemians on tap.

The chance to sit in to the early hours over a couple of cups of rapidly cooling frothy coffee while setting the world to rights made coffee bars particularly attractive to those in their late teens. The end of the dreaded call-up in 1957 swelled their numbers even more. Coffee bar owners began to compete for their custom by providing some sort of musical accompaniment. At first, they employed young Latin guitarists to serenade the customers. Chas McDevitt remembers how, ‘in 1954, on a Friday night, me and my mates would make the rounds of the coffee bars in the West End. In Hanway Street, there was the Moulin Rouge on the corner, with a Spanish singer with a guitar – well he was probably Cypriot, but pretended he was Spanish. Then there was the Acapulco next door, and one other, and they all had people sitting in, playing music. They were too small for groups to play, but duos could, which is one of the ways skiffle got started.'

The skiffle music that grew slowly in popularity through 1955 was very much a home-made affair.
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There were no professional skifflers – most played for free coffee or a bowl of spaghetti – although some professional musicians dabbled. Chris Barber's Jazz Band, for example, contained its own skiffle group, with Barber swapping his usual trombone for a double bass, banjoist Lonnie Donegan on guitar and vocals, and jazz and blues singer Beryl Bryden on washboard. In January 1956, ‘Rock Island Line', a song recorded by this line-up but released under Donegan's name, became a huge hit. Towards the end of 1955, the bluesman Cyril Davies and Bob Watson had opened a club called the London Skiffle Centre above the Roundhouse, a pub on the corner of Brewer Street and Wardour Street. Its early sessions were sparsely attended, usually by other skifflers hoping to learn a new song, but after ‘Rock Island Line' became a hit, skiffle became, virtually overnight, Britain's very first teenage music craze, and the Skiffle Centre was packed out.

The impact of skiffle is obscured to modern eyes by being viewed through the Beat Boom of the sixties.
Although it spawned just a handful of hit singles, skiffle encouraged so many teenagers to take up guitars that the instrument shops and makers found it difficult to cope with the demand. By 1957, there were an estimated 30–50,000 skiffle groups in Britain. Adam Faith, who came from skiffle and went through rock 'n' roll to an acting career, remembered that ‘Skiffle hit Britain with all the fury of Asian flu. Everyone went down with it. Anyone who could afford to buy a guitar and learn three chords was in business as a skiffler. It grew in cellars, nice dark cellars, and it shot up like mushrooms.'

Many of those cellars were in Soho. The one Faith was referring to was almost certainly beneath the 2I's coffee bar at 59 Old Compton Street, named for the (two) Irani brothers, who owned the building. The 2I's was managed by a pair of professional wrestlers, Ray Hunter and Paul Lincoln, who fought as Dr Death. It became a music venue almost by accident. The Vipers Skiffle Group, formed by Wally Whyton,
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were at the Soho Fair on 14 July 1956 when it started to rain. They sought shelter in the 2I's, and started to play. The crowd they drew led Paul Lincoln to offer them a job. Others soon followed, as Lincoln realized he had stumbled on a way to pull in many more customers for a minimal outlay. ‘At first,' wrote Chas McDevitt, whose skiffle group played the 2I's in September 1956, ‘the groups would play for Cokes
and spaghetti, but with their increasing popularity they were allowed to bottle for tips.'

Although some skifflers performed actually in the coffee bar, in the boulevardier tradition, the action at the 2I's soon moved down in to the basement. This had been decorated by Lionel Bart, a former student at St Martin's School of Art, who had once been in a band called the Cavemen with Whyton and Tommy Steele. He went for a black ceiling and stylized eyes on the wall that added to the cramped, oppressive feel. The basement could hold seventy or eighty people at most, and that gave the bands hardly any room to set up and play. Those actually in the cellar weren't the only audience. Raye Du-Val, a Sohoite and professional drummer, remembers that ‘on the pavement were doors that pulled upwards. You could go in or crowd around outside and watch from there. It was a small place, small stage, just full of people.'

Other West End coffee bars began to feature skiffle. The Cat's Whiskers in Kingly Street was big enough to accommodate a stage, but elsewhere the musicians stood or sat among the customers, or were jammed against a wall at one end of the room. Owen Gardner went to Heaven & Hell, next door to the 2I's. ‘It was a very tiny coffee shop. Upstairs was decorated like Heaven, with angels and everything else, very light and bright and down in the basement, down this very rickety staircase, was Hell, with very dim lighting and all these masks of devils, and flaming torches painted on the wall.' Needless to say, the musicians who played at Heaven & Hell did so among the licking flames.

Specialist skiffle clubs followed the lead of the London Skiffle Centre, including the Skiffle Cellar in Greek Street, the Princess Louise in Holborn and the 44 Club in Gerrard Street. Other impromptu venues sprang up as skifflemania took hold. Orlando's Delicatessen in Old Compton Street would regularly clear away the charcuterie in the evening and open its doors to whoever turned up. At the other end of the scale, there were skiffle concerts at the Royal Albert Hall. Chas McDevitt, with ‘Freight Train', and the Vipers, with ‘Don't you Rock me, Daddy-O' were both in the hit parade just a year after the Vipers had come in from the rain.

And yet, despite all this activity, all this fervour, by the beginning of 1958 it was all over. There were no more skiffle hits, and some of the new clubs closed, while others changed their name and style: the Skiffle Cellar became the folk club, Les Cousins, for example. The musicians moved on, too. Skifflers such as Martin Carthy, Dave Swarbrick, the Watersons, Ralph McTell, Davey Graham, Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner would kick-start the British folk and blues scenes, as well as the rhythm and blues boom of the sixties. Hank Marvin, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan of the Vipers supported Cliff Richard, first as the Drifters, then the Shadows. Many more young skifflers switched to electric guitars and rock 'n' roll.

The 2I's also made the switch, and has been fêted as the birthplace of British rock 'n' roll. It was at least partly responsible for launching the careers of Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde, Terry Dene and Joe Brown,
as well as less celebrated, but no less colourful, rockers such as Wee Willie Harris, Rick Hardy, Vince Taylor and Tony Sheridan.

Ann Lee was an enthusiastic visitor to the 2I's as a young teen. ‘It was exciting. There were loads of them in there, you know, young boys with attitude. I met Joe Brown. He actually worked with my mum: she was a tea lady with a company on the corner of Drury Lane. I met Adam Faith. I couldn't afford much, so it was ideal to go there and sit yourself down with a couple of cups of coffee all night and watch people.'

Andy Pullinger also has fond memories of the place. ‘In 1958, I discovered the 2I's. Tom the doorman sold tickets to the basement where we listened to rock 'n' roll music and tried to dance in the tiny space. There were several singers who made it big in the British rock music scene. Others made a living at entertainment, such as Screamin' Lord Sutch and Wee Willie Harris. One evening I met Jet Harris of the Shadows outside the 2I's. He lent me half a crown, which I still owe him . . . Half of the entrance ticket to the basement was kept for a raffle which I seemed to win quite often – maybe because my first girlfriend was the one who drew the tickets.'

Although I lived virtually above the 2I's, I really can't remember too much about ‘the scene' as such. I was just a touch too young, and didn't start swooning over pop stars until a couple of years after we left Soho. Of course, I could kick myself now, because I saw the likes of Tommy Steele, Adam Faith and Cliff Richard all the time, but as far as I
was concerned, they were always cluttering up the pavement outside, and made a bloody row in the summer when we had our windows open. Sad really, and distinctly uncool. By the time I'd caught on, that particular moment had passed, and anyway, I was more of a Bunjies kind of a gal, being something of a folkie and a beatnik once I was out of jodhpurs and pretty shirtwaisters.

The reputation of the 2I's – a sign in the window called its tiny basement ‘The World Famous Home of the Stars' – was out of all proportion to its size. On the Classic Cafes website,
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Adam Faith recalled ‘a ground floor café, with linoleum floors and Formica tables. Downstairs, at night, under the street, the real action took place. Everyone expected it to be a nine-day wonder. The old-timer agents would sit around in their old-timer agent restaurants, shaking their heads, muttering “It'll all be over in a week or two.”'

It took a little longer than that, but by the early sixties the craze for coffee bars featuring live rock 'n' roll had largely run its course, and attention shifted to larger clubs that featured popular music, sometimes with live bands, sometimes not. Victor Caplin's aunt, Betty Passes, who ran Les Enfants Terribles coffee bar in Dean Street, was a pioneer of the disco. ‘She introduced dancing to records in the afternoons and evening in about 1957. She had the basement painted black, and put in a bar – just soft drinks. Behind the bar was a record player. You paid a shilling upstairs for a token that
would get you in to the basement and buy your first Coke or whatever.'

Most coffee bars and cafés had a jukebox, but dancing was difficult, even impossible, because of the space, while the economics were different. People might put a few coins in the jukebox while they were sitting with their coffee, but those who came to dance to records not only paid the price of admission, but also tended to stay longer and drink more. ‘In the early sixties, Soho was the hub of the discotheques,' remembers Jeff Sloneem. ‘Just a few doors away from the Marquee, you had something actually called La Discothèque. There were loads of clubs where people danced to records; each one had their angle, and they all had their moments of popularity. There was one where the first hundred or so people that got in were given a single record, a 45. Another, at the top of Wardour Street, was called the Bastille, with a coffee bar above and a discotheque, built like a stone dungeon, underneath.'