Seen as a sop by the Conservative government to the party’s recently formed far-right pressure group, the Monday Club, the Act failed to address the ‘problem’ as it was perceived by sections of London’s population. Their worries had less to do with the numbers arriving than with their predecessors not going home. Although it was never explicitly stated, when Clement Attlee’s more benevolent Labour government sold the notion of mass immigration to the British public at the end of World War II, the implication was that once these sons and daughters of the Commonwealth had helped to set the Mother Country back on its feet, they’d have the good manners to go home. A kind of lengthy working holiday. When those same arrivals started putting down roots, suddenly Albion was seen as being ‘swamped’.
This was the line energetically played out in some parts of the press, which resulted in disturbances like the so-called Notting Hill riots of 1958 assuming a far greater significance than they deserved. Such events were always less a matter of wide-reaching political consequence than of bullying Teddy Boys getting their comeuppance – John Williams’s excellent biography of Michael X, A Life In Black And White, nails quite how socially parochial those disturbances really were. Notting Hill’s treatment of Oswald Mosley, when the former leader of the British Union of Fascists stood for parliament on an anti-immigration ticket a year later, was a more accurate barometer of London opinion. After his supporters stabbed to death a young black man, local people rounded on Mosley to such an extent that he polled fewer than 2,000 votes in Kensington North, and promptly left the country. After first demanding a recount.
ALTHOUGH 1960s LONDON WAS NOT EXACTLY a happy-clappy melting pot, for the Blue Notes it bore no comparison to the state-sponsored subjugation they had left behind. Hazel Miller, co-founder of the Ogun Records label, which is dedicated to the London improvised jazz scene of the 1970s with an emphasis on the South African contribution, describes the Blue Notes’ sense of relief as they settled in London. Hazel is the widow of the white South African bassist Harry Miller, who arrived in London in 1961 and became established as part of the city’s modern jazz scene:
‘Back then, it was always a battle because there was still all the prejudice around and that made it difficult for them – and for Harry, because he would hang out with them and go to rehearsals. There were little enclaves of prejudice around the place that could be quite dangerous. I remember in Stockwell there was a team who would cause trouble, and there was, of course, Notting Hill… I can’t remember the name of it, but there was a tailor over there with a rehearsal studio underneath it that everybody used, and sometimes that could be a problem.
‘The South Africans had such a different approach, as they had come from a country that really knew how to push you down with apartheid. So they could cope with it! Their attitude was, they were musicians and that was it. To them it was so much freer – they didn’t have to think about all being on stage together with Chris… or even sitting on the same seat together… or getting on the bus together. People might not realise how much apartheid stopped them getting on with what they were born to do, so when they came here the prejudice in London didn’t affect them in the same way.’
London was actually fairly welcoming to the Blue Notes, as they weren’t an entirely alien concept. They might have been the first South African jazz band to set up in the capital, but African musicians had been here for a while, as had South African entertainment.
IT MIGHT NOT HAVE MADE IT ONTO Pathé News, but to anyone who was there, one of the most memorable aspects of the 1945 VE Day celebrations in Trafalgar Square was a troupe of half a dozen African musicians, kitted out in colourful traditional dress, playing drums and guitars, dancing, singing and chanting in Yoruba. Such was the spirit of the day, and the sheer infectiousness of the band’s joyful noise, that pretty soon they’d gathered their own crowd and were leading an excited Cockney conga line around the square, up Haymarket and into Piccadilly Circus.
At their head was Ambrose Campbell (Yoruba name, Oladipupo Adekoya), a young Nigerian former seaman who had jumped ship in London in 1940 as he felt the wartime trans-Atlantic convoys were too dangerous. The others were a mixture of students, sailors and musicians, who would while away the blackouts making music in Campbell’s St Pancras flat. They went down to the West End VE Day celebrations because, as Campbell told an interviewer years later:
‘We’d lived through the Blitz, so we figured that made us as English as everybody else, so we went down to celebrate. People didn’t know what was going on with us, but they joined in. I suppose it was curiosity. Everybody had been waiting for that day, so they were jumping around and dancing. We had a huge crowd following us around Piccadilly Circus. You could hardly move.’
Ironically, the one newspaper that reported their presence didn’t even realise they were African, and wrote of a ‘small group of West Indians’ leading the dancing. It’s interesting to see that assumptions that any black Londoners making music must be West Indian were in place even pre-Windrush. Not that this gave Ambrose Campbell any problems; after that enthusiastically received public performance, he formalised the players into the West African Rhythm Brothers, thereby creating the capital’s first black group made up of resident Londoners, and one that was to have significant influence and impact.
The next year, the Rhythm Brothers provided the music for the UK’s first black professional dance company, Les Ballets Nègres, and proved instrumental in its attaining international success. The company was set up in London by two immigrant Jamaican dancers, Richie Riley and Berto Pasuka, who sought to take advantage of the enthusiasm for colonial culture among the capital’s intelligentsia, and challenge conventional preconceptions of black dance. This was perfectly illustrated by the twin facts that Riley had been classically trained – at Serafina Astafieva’s academy on King’s Road, Chelsea, where Dame Margot Fonteyn had been a pupil – while Pasuka met Campbell when both were working on a particularly terrible British film, called Witch Doctor, which portrayed Africans as savages. The two Jamaicans brought a dynamism and sense of adventure to classical ballet, choreographing traditional Caribbean songs and folk tales, and building the productions around the Nigerian drumming of Ambrose’s group. For years, in London and as well as on European tours, Les Ballets Nègres was hugely popular.
AT MUCH THE SAME TIME, Campbell expanded the West African Rhythm Brothers to include two Barbadian brass players. It became the house band at the Abalabai Club, owned and operated by the Nigerian Ola Dosunmu and his Yorkshire wife, Irene, in a basement in Maidenhead Passage just off Berwick Street Market. Thanks largely to Campbell’s music, the club quickly became one of the hippest establishments in Soho. The band played a style they’d developed in London, which while distinctly African was like nothing you’d ever hear on that continent. Atop a rhythmic basis of Nigerian Yoruba juju – the group included several traditional drummers – it overlaid the melodic structures of maringa or palm wine, a guitar-based urban sound from Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Add to that jazz influences from the Caribbean and Soho, plus vocal ideas from those first cousins mento, calypso and highlife, and other jazzmen were fascinated: Ronnie Scott, Kenny Graham, Johnny Dankworth and Tubby Hayes were all fans. The club’s bohemian set included Absolute Beginners author Colin MacInnes, who became such good friends with Campbell that a sketch of the musician, barely disguised under the name ‘Cranium Cuthbertson’, features in his novel City Of Spades. Macinnes also became godfather to one of Campbell’s children. When the Dosunmus relocated to Wardour Street and the somewhat swankier Club Afrique, Campbell went along too. He stayed there until the late 1960s, alternating with a band called the Starlite Tempos, run by former West African Rhythm Brother Brewster Hughes.
Europe’s first all-black ballet company, Les Ballets Nègres, was founded in London in 1946 by two Jamaicans inspired by Marcus Garvey’s self-help doctrine.
The most remarkable thing about the Rhythm Brothers was that before the addition of the two Baja
ns, only one of them was a professional musician with any sort of training. The others were a teacher, students and, like their bandleader, sailors; guitarist Ambrose only took lessons on the instrument in the 1950s, when the great Trinidadian player Lauderic Caton taught him as a favour to a friend. Listening to his work on the Honest Jon’s album London Is The Place For Me Volume 3, though, you’d never guess it.
THROUGHOUT THE 1950S AND 1960S, a large number of African musicians were operating in London. Most came for relatively short periods, like a couple of years, and never really considered themselves as living in the city. They also tended to travel to and from their home countries far more frequently than West Indians. African musicians played on London jazz, calypso and big-band sessions, indulging in all sorts of cultural intercourse, and coming together as solely African units to service the university and national association dances or to record, as detailed in the next chapter.
Although there were very few South Africans of any stripe among these musicians, the country’s culture still found its way into the British mainstream. In 1961, the South African jazz musical King Kong, billed as ‘the first all-African Opera’, opened to rave reviews at the Prince’s Theatre (now the Shaftesbury Theatre) on Shaftesbury Avenue. The drama told the tragic story of township-raised heavyweight boxing legend Ezekiel ‘King Kong’ Dlamini. When it had premiered in South Africa in 1959, it featured an all-black cast starring Miriam Makeba and a jazz orchestra that included Hugh Masekela, Kippie Moeketsie and the Manhattan Brothers vocal group. Loaded with social and political subtexts, King Kong played to wildly enthusiastic audiences in London’s West End for the best part of a year, before departing to New York. Part of the show’s legacy to the capital was the Velvlettes, a quartet of girl singers from the cast who stayed behind to work on London’s R&B scene, and will be best remembered as looking fabulous as they sang “Got My Mojo Working” behind Cyril Davies on Hullabaloo.
Even before King Kong, there had been a flurry of kwela-inspired activity among London’s major record labels, after the South Africa-set 1958 British TV series The Killing Stones took the penny-whistle kwela recording of “Tom Hark” by township favourites Elias & His Zig Zag Jive Flutes as its title song. The tune proved almost as popular as the six Wolf Mankowitz-penned plays. Released as a single by Columbia, it stayed on the UK charts for three months, peaking at number two. Thus encouraged, Columbia released more music by the group and by Black Mambazo, while Decca, HMV and Oriole sent scouts into the townships to come back with kwela to put out in the UK. None of it gained any traction, though, and the success of “Tom Hark” may have had more to do with the song than the style: it has since been covered by artists as diverse as Millie Small, Ted Heath (the bandleader, not the former prime minister), Ramsey Lewis and Georgie Fame, with ska punks the Piranhas having the biggest seller in 1980. To this day, versions of the tune can be heard at practically every English football ground.
Hugh Masekela and Abdullah Ibrahim having opted for the US, London’s modern jazzers included almost no African equivalents of the Caribbeans who had made big splashes on the Soho scene, like Joe Harriott, Dizzy Reece and Harry Beckett. Hazel remembers her Harry as being ‘over the moon when the Blue Notes arrived – at last here were some chums from South Africa and they linked up to become part of the family.’ As well as the Millers, London’s large, politically motivated, multi-racial, South-Africans-in-exile community provided a welcoming environment for the Blue Notes.
Somewhat paradoxically, although everyday London life for black people in 1965 could often be testing, white people in general displayed a strong opposition to South Africa’s segregated regime. Increasing numbers of British migrants to South Africa had returned during the 1950s, in the wake of the election of the National Party. In 1959, the Boycott Movement was founded in London, urging ordinary people not to buy goods imported from South Africa and corporations not to do business in or with the country. Following the Sharpeville Massacre, Boycott renamed itself the Anti-Apartheid Movement in 1961, ramping up its activities to include political campaigning and agitation. The Labour and Liberal parties, the TUC, the National Union of Students and numerous high-profile celebrities, academics and clerics were signed up to the AAM, which also formed a partnership with the United Nations. AAM’s mission was to keep South Africa on the international political agenda; they were responsible for the pressure that forced the country out of the Commonwealth, and in 1970 they successfully campaigned to have South Africa barred from the Olympics.
Such established London-based activism ensured a warm embrace for black South African arts, as a genuine expression of the country’s people and to raise awareness of their struggle. The primary reasons the Blue Notes chose London was that Copenhagen and Zurich were too cold, while in Britain there would be no language issue, and, thanks to their cancelled passports, they were effectively in exile and could settle here as refugees. The group were, according to Hazel:
Mongezi Feza (left) and Dudu Pukwana in action, prior to their leaving South Africa in 1964.
‘Musicians first, but of course they were politicised… they were brought up in it and they were intelligent men. They might not have been involved once they left, but they were very political people. They supported the ANC and did concerts to raise money for the ANC in exile.’
Accordingly, agents of BOSS (South Africa’s feared secret police, the Bureau Of State Security) would show up at Blue Notes gigs, because the radical black South African intellectual Pallo Jordan was living in London and was a fan. The future ANC minister would get up on stage at gigs, and to huge applause point out his shadow to the crowd, with a cheery ‘Hey, there he is! Look, over there. Watch what you say around him!’ The band’s performances were never intimidated by such an ominous presence; their attitude was, Hazel says, ‘Sod them, we’re in London, and they can’t touch us here.’
The band’s line-up and their jazz music was seen as a metaphor for a modern post-racial, multi-culti South Africa. Many of the radical South Africans in London would have been in the group’s audiences back home, and almost immediately they became the house band of the AAM and South Africans in exile. All they had to do was to find a way into the London contemporary jazz scene, which had a few worries of its own.
‘THE BLUE NOTES ARRIVED AT A TIME when things were at a pretty low level as far as modern jazz in London was concerned’, reckons Mike Westbrook. A pianist and composer who played regularly with all the Blue Notes in various incarnations, he was a major mover in the development of beyond-bebop British jazz. Today, he is up from his home in the West Country, and happy to pour coffee for us in the Chelsea Arts Club and talk about those times.
During the 1950s, London’s jazz scene was in rude health. A post-war trad-jazz revival saw players like Chris Barber and Ken Colyer exploring the music’s New Orleans roots (“trad’ = traditional) so successfully that the style produced its own pop stars. Barber, Kenny Ball and Acker Bilk featured in the pop charts alongside Adam Faith and Cliff. On the other side, modern jazz was establishing itself following the enthusiastic take-up for bebop after the war as an alternative to what many referred to as the ‘tyranny of the dance bands’. Also known as progressive jazz, it had a big following in London, not only in the Soho clubs but in a circuit of suburban pubs that included the Bull in Barnes, the Green Man in Blackheath, the Hop Bine in Wembley and the Railway Hotel in West Hampstead. Modern jazz had become the soundtrack to the global modernisation of the time, which encompassed art, architecture, writing, product design, mass consumerism and societal thinking. However, as Mike explains, none of that lasted long into the next decade:
‘When I first came up from Plymouth [1962] and formed a band, it was a period when there was quite a big audience in the pubs and clubs for jazz. The New Orleans revival in London was a very genuine thing, a serious art form that developed, and I had a lot of time for it. So that was going on, and the commercial thing came later when other people jumped on the bandwagon and
starting playing trad. Also there were plenty of places that had modern jazz rather than trad – pubs, and clubs like the Flamingo.
‘There was a big audience for jazz, then suddenly – it seemed like almost overnight – it stopped. I think things went wrong politically, after the modernisation of the world when consumerism, the mass-market approach and all those things took over. In the clubs that had been hosting jazz, R&B sort of took over, as venues were finding out they could get bigger audiences and generate more excitement if they started putting it on. The Marquee had jazz seven nights a week, and there was this guy called Alexis Korner who started a blues band – Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and people like that came up through his band – and he started something down there on a Wednesday night, and, of course, it became far more popular than the jazz. So it gradually started increasing, and in the end the only jazz remaining was Joe Harriott on a Sunday night, then even that went. A lot of musicians changed to playing R&B – Graham Bond was a very promising young saxophone player playing in modern jazz bands, then he went on the organ and started singing rock’n’roll. It’s ironic, because the New Orleans jazz revival used to include a twist of blues too, because American blues artists used to come over and perform with a lot of the New Orleans jazz players.
‘With modern jazz, I think the playing got a bit stale, and in a way was just going through the motions. That was what I thought was happening in the English version of modern jazz that somehow became rather uninteresting, as there was no real communication with the audience by the musicians. There’d be the usual themes and solos all round the band and stuff like this, and it was just the same-same formula all the time. It was getting a bit dull.’
Sounds Like London Page 9