MUSICAL TIME-LINE CHAPTER 5 - The Entertainer

Around March 1969, I chanced to be in the school library at the end of the day. Only two other people were there and they were not reading. They were at the piano which sat, mostly unused, at one end of the room. I knew them both, one (Rob) better than the other (Martin). They were the only two in my year taking music at "A" level and "Rob" also took French and German, as did I, so we spent much of our school days in the same classrooms. .

When the library was otherwise empty (I think I was packing up a chess set or something) they opened up the piano and started to play. I went over and joined them.

There were a number of similar afternoons later so I don't recall exactly what they played that day but several Beatles songs were included and, I'm pretty sure, Thunderclap Newman's "Something In The Air", a big hit at the time. They played the piano, often together, we all sang, making up harmonies on the fly and I "drummed" on the top of the upright piano.

I had been drumming along with records, on anything that made a noise - with my hands mostly, for as long as I could remember and had had a brief flirtation with a set of drums belonging to another friend a year or so earlier (I'm not very good with sticks but did play in a group he formed for a while in 1968) so I had at least an intuitive idea ofwhat I was doing.

After a while, during a pause, Rob asked me if I played drums. I told him of my limited experience and he said that he had joined a folk group, "Maya", which had been booked to play at his youth club, (St. Mary's Youth Fellowship or "SMYF" but always called just "The Club" by its members) in nearby Beddington. The group's leader (not a memberof The Club), concerned about playing to "a bunch of teeny-boppers" had decided they should include some pop songs in their set and would need a drummer - just for the one evening. Rob suggested I try out for the job.

I had some rudimentary percussion instruments, mostly souvenirs brought back by my father from his business trips to Mexico and Brazil, but no drums bigger than a small set of bongos. Another classmate had once been a marching drummer with the boy scouts and lent me his snare drum, a makeshift stand for it, a couple of small cymbals and some sticks. We cobbled all this together to make a completely ersatz drum kit and one Saturday morning a couple of weeks later, I schlepped it all onto a train to the Epsom home of "Maya's" leader for an audition/rehearsal.

He wrote all their songs and played guitar, his brother played a second guitar, Rob played flute (his main instrument, not an odd fit in a group at that time thanks to the recent success of Jethro Tull) and some piano. We ran through their usual set with me just tapping along gently with brushes (oh yes, I had brushes too) to the, mostly ballady, extremely arty, songs and then we started to look for suitable "pop" songs. We did "Twist & Shout", "Living In The Past" and a few others I don't recall, with me crashing, banging and walloping at all my various noisy surfaces. It was not pretty, but, mostly out of desperation I suspect, I was accepted.

SMYF always met in the church hall of St. Mary's, Beddington, on Sunday evenings at 8pm and.it was decided that we should all go there a few weeks before show night to "check out the scene". Although only three miles from my home, this was in a direction I never travelled (I had tended to look inwards towards London proper rather than outwards into more rural/suburban Surrey) and I had no idea where I was going. A bus ride of about 20 minutes and a walk of another 15 and I found it.

We took part in a "Beetle Drive" that night and met a number of the members, then went home the same way we had come. I now knew I had a transportation problem. That bus ride and walk would be impossible with my "drum kit". Fortunately, I was still the "Eggman" and, without lying to my boss TOO much, could keep the bike with its large front basket over the weekend.

While playing Beetle (a silly game of chance involving rolling a die to get legs, antennae etc. to build your plastic beetle before your opponents), I learned that the show we were booked to play in would also feature some sketches and routines by other members. I was invited to join the rehearsals for the sketches and keenly agreed.

So, the next few Sunday afternoons, I made the same trip only this time to the nearby home of Mike, the 16 year old director/producer of the show and was given parts in a series of skits he had dramatized, mostly based on sketches from a popular radio comedy show called "I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again" and old Peter Sellers records, some of which I knew. After the rehearsals, and "tea" with his family, I would stay on and go to more club meetings.

Most of these involved more silly games; "Shaggy Dog Night" (a competition to see who could tell the best really long, really bad joke. Four or five would take two hours), a game of "spoons" (a silly card game involving grabbing a spoon when holding four equal value cards. But one was a "social". In later times, it would have been called a disco. A single ancient record player, a few records brought by members, some dancing and chat. It sounds hokey, but it was all great fun and a world away from anything I had previously experienced.

I somehow managed to get all the necessary gear into the basket of the "Quinney's Fresh Farm Eggs" bike but the balance was off and I and arrived on time, but tired and extremely sweaty and sore. We did the show and I survived without too much embarrassment but "Maya" never played again that I heard about. I DID keep going to the club. They were always rehearsing some sort of presentation; for a regular club night, a concert for the old folks, a cabaret, a pantomime, a one-act play for entry in the "Sutton Youth Drama Festival" (I eventually appeared in those five years in a row - a record, I think) . I stayed nearly five years, even meeting my first wife there.

The members, who almost all became my friends and many of whom I am still in touch with, were a different kind of people than I was used to. The three mile journey from my home crossed the cultural (but not the official) boundary between London and Surrey. This was a more refined crowd with a different accent and a different outlook. They went in pubs underage, just like we did, but they were nicer, quieter pubs. They dated each other ("went out with" was the term used), went to the pictures, played football, all the normal stuff, but they also went to church!!!!

I had known churchgoers before - my paternal grandmother was a devout Baptist - but had never knowingly had FUN with any. It was almost an oxymoron. Now, I was an invited guest of a church affiliated youth club. Other friends of mine from Mitcham started to come with me and many settled there too. Soon, there was talk of a "Mitcham Invasion" and the Rector of the church (that's like a vicar, but of a very old church; this one was Norman) was not happy. He was adamant that membership required church attendance - at least monthly. So, for a time, despite already being completely, and openly, atheistic in my beliefs, I went to Evensong on my way to the club once every four weeks. For some reason, it appeared not to matter what I believed, just that I showed up. The Rector was happy and I stayed.

I had owned a cheap accoustic guitar for about three years but was only now starting to get anything musical out of it. Suddenly, I was surrounded by musicians, mostly guitar players. I soon ditched the cheap accoustic and bought a "real" guitar; a Hoffner Senator, semi accoustic, and got stuck in with everyone else. Groups were formed and disbanded on a regular basis for the various entertainment ventures but seldom played outside the confines of the club. One exception was "Me & Dave" a duo that was formed for such an evening by me and another member called Dave. We rehearsed quite intensely at his home for several weeks and thus I was introduced to the work of two groups (by now it was OK to call them bands - I shall start to do so) whose music has stayed with me ever since.

The other Dave had been teaching himself to play the songs of "Lindisfarne". They were also popular with other members of the club so we included several in our set; meaning I learned them too. I bought the two albums Lindisfarne had out at the time, "Nicely Out Of Tune" and "Fog On The Tyne" and both still rank high on my list of all-time favourites. I still regularly perform "Lady Eleanor", "Winter Song" and a few others on occasions.

Dave also played me the first two albums by Brett Marvin & The Thunderbolts. This was an odd moment indeed. I realised, as soon as I heard them, that I had seen them only a few months earlier at the Marquee Club. I hadn't caught their name at the time - they were among several bands quite low on the bill - but had deeply enjoyed their fun set full of blues standards and originals, odd percussion instruments (including the "Zobstick", a broom handle smothered in bottle caps with a work-boot on the bottom and a cymbal on the top), jokes, mistakes, false starts and general mayhem. We did not cover any of their songs directly but did do a few in in a version their style. I bought those albums too and still treasure them. They achieved brief fame in 1972 as "Terry Dactyl & The Dinosaurs" before returning to their roots. They continued as a working band into the 21st Century and may still be out there somewhere.

Other Dave had written some songs too and we added those to the Lindisfarne, some Beatles ("Run For Your Life", "Cry Baby Cry"), Animals ("House Of the Rising Sun"), Roy Harper ("Another Day", another song I still play although I think my version would now be unrecognizable to Mr. Harper), Beach Boys ("Feel Flows" and "Long Promised Road" from the then new "Surf's Up" album). All in all, we had a nicely balanced and quite extensive repertoire by the standards of our time and place.

We played at the club several times and once at the Christmas 1972 staff party of a local bank branch where Dave's father was the manager. On that occasion, my then girlfriend (also from the club) came along and sat with my portable cassette player on her lap, recording the whole thing. The tape has, sadly, not survived but, before it finally gave up the ghost in about 2001, I was able to salvage some of the set onto a CD. I'm not going to claim it's good - or even a good recording, but it is surprisingly not bad. It is also the earliest surviving recording of me playing or singing.

There was a choral group called "The Harvesters" loosely attached to St. Mary's church and Rob sang in it. Apart from him and one friend and club member, Bernard, the other 14 members were of at least our parents' generation, some older (my girlfriend's mother and several other "club" parents were in it). When one of the basses left, Rob suggested I join.

The church choir-master and organist, Walter - a lovely man who had also once been a jazz trombonist, ran it and agreed to audition me. I got the place but was the only member who could not read music. I had to listen to each new piece once and try to pick out the bass part from the other three, trying to follow the dots on the page, then try to add my part, mostly from memory at take two.

I stayed with the group for several years, singing with them in Salisbury Cathedral (I think that's where we were) as well as regular local shows. The repertoire was a mixture of choral works, Christmas music, novelty songs and, Walter's favourites, spirituals. I learned two important things from our attempts to rehearse these - particularly "Joshua Fit De Battle Ob Jericho".

Firstly, most people, especially from pre-rock generations but still today, have no sense of back-beat. If I watch people tap their feet or clap along any kind of music that has rhythm, to me, THEY'RE DOING IT WRONG. I ALWAYS end up clapping in between everybody else's claps. they go front-beat, all the way, all the time. This is hard to write down, I hope it's clear. The Harvesters, Rob, Bernard, Walter and myself excluded, just could not get that song. I didn't understand and I'm still not sure I do. Some of it has to do with classical training. They were looking for the "metronomic" time of the classical conductor, and lacked the "gut-feel".of the African slaves whose music it was.

Second, they were not prepared to ACT. Walter was always telling us to smile, look happy, even if you're reading what you're singing, nervous, sweaty, SMILE dammit. Now, I realised, he had to get them to smile while faking an accent. Most of these people had what we used to call "RP", "Received Pronunciation" otherwise known as "BBC" or "The Queen's" English. This is the dialect that gives us "Nace Hice" for "Nice House" and "Fawlen Awf" for "Fallen Off", even "Plahstic" for "Plastic". There's nothing wrong with that. It's just another dialect/accent combination. Trouble is, singing a spiritual in it (especially with the front-beat stresses) sounds as authentic as singing Italian opera in Cockney or Brooklynese. You HAVE to mimic. Trouble with THAT is that RP, unlike any other English dialect in the world, comes with a built in belief that it is the ONLY CORRECT way to speak. Anything else, including, but not limited to, my dropped "H"s and "F"s for "TH"s, is not a dialect, it's just wrong and the sign of "bad" or "lazy" speech. What price African slave talk to these people then? How we gonna do this Walter? Rob, Bernard and I did the song on our own, just three of us and I walked away wiser. I learned this.

You can choose to be an actor, whether you can sing or not, but if you choose to be a singer, you better be able to act.

My main friend in Mitcham at this time, and for many years after, was Paul and he was now a member of the club too. While a huge music fan and avid record collector when funds permitted, he admitted to not being able to sing or play anything at all - "can't carry a tune in a bucket" was the phrase. Faced with all these musicians, some wannabes like me but some REALLY good (Rob made a career out of it and is still a choir-master while Dave released an excellent CD, "I Know That I Should Know You" in aid of the Alzheimer's Society in 2009), Paul took up the technical side of things. Add the music to the drama organized by Mike (later a BBC TV producer) with the sound-effects, incidental music etc that it required and Paul was in great demand from a lot of very talented, if young, people.

One of his first ventures, with Rob, me and another member, Nigel, was to upgrade the old "socials", still held monthly to be more like proper discos. Originally by scrounging old turntables, amplifiers and speakers and using our own, now quite extensive, record collections, but gradually adding purpose built and bought equipment, we soon had a rig that could "go on the road" and take private bookings as well. After several false starts, names, rebuilds and personnel changes, eventually "Voltstax" (named for two US soul labels) was born with Paul and I as operators and we played parties, wedding receptions and the like for several years - until my work took me on the road myself in late 1975. After that Paul and another friend of his, another Nigel, carried on well into the eighties with me helping out when able and needed.

There was never any money in this enterprise, at least while I was involved - it was too low-key to attract anything but small events. What it did mostly do was pay for itself, including quite rapid expansion of our record collections. I was already, at the age of 19 in the beginning, considered "The Oldies Guy". At weddings, at that time, the parents' generation wanted big-band music for their waltzes, fox-trots and quicksteps. I had it, in abundance. Often, we would encounter rockers who wanted the 50's originals. I had them, in abundance. Fortunately, the new material split quite nicely into two camps that Paul and I were happy to split between us. There was a lot of Soul and Motown music around at the time and I still had no taste for it. So Paul would buy Stevie Wonder, The Chairmen Of the Board and so on. There was also a rockier side to the hit singles of the day; Status Quo. Dave Edmunds in various guises, which fit in well with my tastes. At one point, when Paul was out of work for a time, I bought a quantity of his older records from him to enable him to replace them with newer ones. I bought compilation albums to fill in historical gaps and we sometimes tossed a coin over something we needed to have but which neither of us had any desire to own.

I came to see the business side of music differently through this work. The very real competition between artists producers and labels; the blatant plagiarism of sounds forming new trends that appear out of nowhere but are suddenly everywhere; the manufactured fashions. Some I liked, some I did not. This was the time of Rod Stewart (no), Elton John (yes, after a while), T.Rex (yes at the start, then no), Slade (not really), Status Quo (yes), The Chi-Lites (no), Gilbert O'Sullivan (yes). Still all very fragmented, faddy and, I couldn't help thinking, going downhill..

In the early months of 1973, Paul and I embarked on what we called a "studio project". He had, by now, a good quality reel-to-reel tape recorder and a good cassette deck, several decent amplifiers and speakers of various sorts and another ersatz drum-kit. With my guitar, we spent many long hours playing with effects, experimenting with dubbing between the two tape machines, even writing songs (something I have never really tried since, having found it a frustrating exercise). We gave ourselves a name; CADUBU, an acronym standing for "Cleethorpes And District Union Of Brut Users". Abject nonsense, of course, but band names were (and ramain) usually little more. It was a variation on a throwaway line in a Monty Python game show sketch - "And, from Goole in Yorkshire, the Humber and District Catholic River Wideners Club". I don't remember how we got from "A" to "B", just what "A" was.

Over the course of three months or so, losing some of our better takes to the noise of passing traffic, we made "an album". It was a cassette, actually, and only half a dozen copies were ever made. I think three were sold to loyal people at my workplace who were clearly humouring me. I have one, though like "Me And Dave Live At NatWest Croydon 1972" it doesn't play any more but some tracks survived long enough to make it to the same CD.

It's bad. There's no other way to put it. Bad. We did Lindisfarne's "Alright On the Night" and "Train In G Major", The Beatles' "Cry Baby Cry", The Stones' "Lady Jane", a medley of 50s rockers with "Blue Suede Shoes", "Stuck On You", Johnny B Goode" and "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" which ran into a frenzied surf-style instrumental called "Tangled Tapes Boogie" and our own dire compositions "Jenny", "Railroad Stampede" (BTO still owe Paul for this one. Their "Taking Care Of Business" has exactly the same theme!), "Factory Life" (mostly Paul's lyric, chords taken from Brian Wilson's "Ballad Of 'Ole Betsy; a lovely progression wantonly misused by me, who added the "tune") and about 5 more. Last I knew, Paul's widow (he died in 2003) still had the original "master tape" and I live in hope of one day cringeing to the whole sorry thing again.

By the end of "The Club Years" in 1974, when the Rector shut it down and my contemporaries and I were getting a bit long in the tooth for a youth club anyway, many lasting friendships had been made. There are still at least two reunions a year of members of this group and, although I have yet to be able to attend one, I have met up with Rob and one other member, Katie, on a UK visit and have at least a dozen of them as Facebook friends some 38 years after the last club night.

I grew up a lot (not too surprising, I suppose, granted that most of this took place between my 17th and 22nd birthdays) and learned a lot. Relevant here, in a musical time-line, the main things are these:-

- I can act (I had played the lead in the school play at the beginning of this period (Nov. '69) but the pantomimes, sketches and plays gave me much more confidence in that area),

- I can entertain musically (I will never be a good technical guitarist but can make a noise that people like to listen to) and do it best if I combine that with some acting,

- I can harmonize (this comes easily to me and I can only assume it comes from early singing along with records since I have no formal training and have no idea HOW I do it).

- I cannot write songs. I can come up with mediocre lyrics and can collaborate but any music I try to invent ends up being something I already know.

- I have a good sense of rhythm. Not time, in the musical sense; I often end a song faster than I started it, but syncopation and beat. I can percuss, but not drum, and I can syncopate backing vocals easily in a way that many better singers and musicians find difficult.



In short, I found a little group of niches and have, over the decades since, managed to turn them into a sort of stage persona and style. It's not art. It's entertainment. I'm not a musician, I'm an entertainer, who sings and plays a bit. Whatever it is, it has to be fun. The term "serious music" has no meaning for me. Take the preparation seriously, by all means, but "serious music"? Why would we need that? If asked in 1974, I would not have had this thought but it comes to me directly from my experiences at The Club" which have influenced me over the long haul more than any other social part of my life. If I can write the rest of this memoir as well as I hope to, these themes will reappear and flesh out. Still 38 years to go!