by Pip Granger
‘After they finished working in the early hours, the musicians in the nightclubs loved to blow jazz or whatever. They would come down to the Nucleus, and basically jam until morning. You’d have Spike Mackintosh, a Dixieland trumpeter, sitting in with a modern-day alto player like Joe Harriott. And there were folk singers, skifflers; we had Jack Elliott and Derroll Adams, famous folk singers of the times. It was a complete mixture. When he was in England, Big Bill Broonzy used to come down the coffee bar because it was open all night and he loved to play and drink. He’d bring his own Scotch.’
Musicians would always congregate in places that opened late or offered some kind of deal on the necessities of life. ‘All the jazzers used to go to the Star Café down under where I used to live at the Cambridge Circus end of Old Compton Street,’ Chas McDevitt recalls. ‘It was Greek-owned. You could get a meal for half a crown, lovely chops with chopped cabbage. The jazz and skiffle groups loved cheap food!’ The Star was still going strong as a musicians’ resort in the early sixties. At that time I was hanging out with the folk crowd, and after a gig at Les Cousins in Greek Street the performers and the audience would pop round the corner to meet up again at the Star, the inspiration for the café that features in my novels about Soho.
Although Gary Winkler claimed to have no business sense, I got the distinct impression he was exaggerating. ‘Before Ronnie Scott opened his first jazz club, him and the Jazz Couriers used to rehearse in the Nucleus during the day, when it was closed. We used to lend it out for rehearsals for free. One day Ronnie took me for a cup of tea in the Rex café in Soho, told me he wanted to open a club, and asked my advice.’
John Carnera remembers the club that resulted from this chat. ‘I was a great jazz fan. I remember going down to Ronnie Scott’s when it was in Gerrard Street, a couple of doors along from the post office, down in the basement. There was Phil Seamen on drums, Johnny Hawksworth on bass, and Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott on tenor saxes. Still remember them now. I can still see Phil Seamen totally stoned out of his brain. Great nights. Smoky atmosphere, a really dissolute kind of world.’
One of the last coffee bars on the scene was the Freight Train at 44 Berwick Street, opened by Chas McDevitt and named after his hit single, which effectively financed the purchase. Because, like the Nucleus, the Freight Train stayed open in to the early hours, working musicians would go there to wind down and gossip after gigs. ‘With my coffee bar being open so late, and being a pick-up and drop-off point for bands,’ Chas remembers, ‘the groups used to sit there at two in the morning. A lot of their girlfriends worked in Murray’s Cabaret Club, along in Oxford Street somewhere, as dancers. Hank Marvin met his wife in my coffee bar.
‘Johnny Kidd wrote “Shakin’ All Over” in the basement. Brian Gregg and Johnny came in one night. They had a recording session next day and realized they didn’t have a B-side, so they asked if they could go downstairs in to the basement – because there was a jukebox upstairs – and, without an instrument apparently, they wrote the song. The next day, they recorded it: Joe Moretti and Alan Caddy put the guitar sounds on it, and it became the A-side and a big hit.’ ‘Shakin’ All Over’ – which is, according to my husband, who knows about these things, the best British rock ’n’ roll single – reached number one in August 1960.
Right next door to the Freight Train, at 42 Berwick Street, another interviewee, Pepe Rush, had his own recording studio. Pepe came from a musical family: ‘My mum, Pat Hyde, was a big jazz singing star before the Second World War. After it, she went back in to variety. She recorded on Parlophone, four titles a month, did thousands of broadcasts. She also recorded with other bands under assumed names, to get round her contract. She worked all over the world.
‘My dad was a session musician, a violinist, and led many bands in the West End. He did a lot of sessions with the BBC, because all the studios were around the West End and he could be there in a few minutes’ notice. He also had a music publishers in the basement of our flat at 33 Old Compton Street. It had originally been in Denmark Street, and he’d bought it off Victor Silvester’s pianist. One of the blokes they published was Ralph Butler, who wrote “Run Rabbit Run”, a nice old bloke. My dad used to go to the BBC to get things played. They did a lot of light orchestral music.’
Pepe’s own talents lay more in electronics than in music. After he left school at fifteen, ‘I worked in a studio in Denmark Street, and was at the very first recording that Johnny Kidd ever did. This bloke called Guy Tynegate-Smith – he wore one of those overcoats with a velvet collar – brought in this guy with a guitar and he was rank. He was the worst singer/guitarist I ever heard.
‘By that time Dad was conducting the Talk of the Town cabaret, he led the dance band, so we had a good bit of money, and we built this little studio, in Berwick Street. This bloke came down to make a recording, and he was fantastic. He said, “Don’t you remember me, mate?” and reminded me of the session a year before. I said, “But you were absolute crap, you were the worst I ever heard.” “Yeah,” he replied, “I’ve improved.” It was as if he’d sold his soul to the devil.’
Johnny Kidd was not the only famous name to pass through young Pepe’s studio. ‘The Shadows came down to play backing tracks for this bird. At the end they said, “We’re recording a song called ‘Apache’. Any chance we can do a demo?” I said yeah – it was all set up. They were pleased with it; I often saw them around Berwick Street and they would say they thought it was so much better than the version the label released, it was earthier and stronger.’
Pepe also installed sound equipment in clubs. ‘This bloke Raymond Nash was the owner of La Discothèque in Wardour Street, the first one to be called that. I did these discos for him, and he suggested we started up a factory to build amplifiers. In this factory in Portland Mews, which was bordered by D’Arblay Street, Poland Street, Berwick Street and Broadwick Street, I built mixers for the London Palladium, as well as most of the equipment for the discotheques in Soho and other parts of England, Europe, the West Indies and the USA.’
Just across the road from Pepe’s studio was the Top Ten Club, a haunt of drummer Raye Du-Val, who, in his own words, was ‘never famous, but well known’. Raye was born in Soho to French parents in 1932. Inspired by the great jazz drummer, Gene Krupa, he turned professional when he was fifteen, and still plays today. His closest brush with fame came when he lied about his age to get a job with the Checkmates, the backing group of Emile Ford, who had just had a number one hit with ‘What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?’ ‘On Saturday night,’ he remembers, ‘Emile came to see me, offered me the job, and on Sunday night we played the Palladium, on TV with Norman Vaughan. I was on a tall plinth, and I could see it was in two parts, and it was moving. I thought I was going to dive off any minute.’
The Top Ten club was in the basement below the House of Sam Widges coffee bar on the corner of Berwick Street and D’Arblay Street. It was opened by the rocker Vince Taylor, who later sold it to Raye and Mick Pastalopoulos, who also managed the Freight Train for Chas McDevitt. ‘Sometimes I’d have a heavy night in the Top Ten,’ Raye remembers, ‘and I’d come out about seven or eight in the morning, to stagger to my flat across the road, and when you’d come out, it was like an episode from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. A dark blue sky, the streetlights were still on, the street cleaners were going up and down and the people were just coming in to work, you know, the office workers, it used to be a fantastic feeling, that time in the morning, not quite breaking, no sun yet, a wonderful experience.’
It was at the Top Ten that Raye found a place in the Guinness Book of Records with a succession of drum marathons. ‘In 1959, I played for 30 hours, 3 minutes, 15 seconds, then the same year I played for 82 hours, 35 minutes, 14 seconds, then in 1960 I played for 100 hours, 1 minute and 15 seconds.’ The records were all the more remarkable because Raye did not realize he was allowed a five-minute break every hour, and would take his bathroom breaks still banging out a rhythm on a drum he carried wit
h him. When I asked Raye how he had managed it, he replied lugubriously that ‘I ’ad ’elp’, in the form of amphetamines.
One of the many ways that post-war Soho anticipated the sixties was in the ready availability of drugs. It was the modern jazzers who started it, as Laurie Morgan’s wife, Betty, explains. ‘They thought because this was going on in America, and a lot of American musicians were taking heroin, that if they took heroin, they’d be able to play like that.’
Raye confirmed this. ‘I done a bit of this and a bit of that, you know, got into a lot of bad ways, got on the dope scene, basically because Gene Krupa was supposed to have taken the gear, and I was such a disciple of his, that what he did was not wrong. There was four of us that hung about, me, Ginger Baker, Phil Seamen and Dicky deVere.’ Raye and Ginger eventually got off junk, but the laconic Seamen, widely regarded as the finest drummer Britain ever produced, didn’t. His addictions to narcotics and booze hastened his death, aged forty-six, in 1972. Seamen’s long demise affected all who witnessed it. Gary Winkler, who described Seamen as ‘a good friend when he wasn’t out of it,’ also knew Dicky deVere. ‘He was another fabulous drummer, bless his heart, but was on heroin. Eventually, he had an operation and then became like a child, you know, he couldn’t play.’
Although heroin was a problem with some jazz musicians, its use was not widespread, whereas ‘speed’ was everywhere. Musicians and punters alike took Dexedrine and ‘blues’ (aka purple hearts) or chewed the wads from Benzedrine inhalers (prescribed for asthmatics), washed down with Coca-Cola. They did it not so much to get high as to stay alert, and not to miss any excitement. ‘After the music in the 2I’s basement stopped for the night,’ Andy Pullinger remembers, ‘we would go to all-night coffee bars. We took purple hearts to stay awake. We went to the Macabre, in an alleyway off Wardour Street. It was done up with coffins, skeletons, spiders’ webs and other witches’ accessories. Not much to do there except talk and snog. Another one was at the end of a lane between Berwick and Wardour Streets, which had jukebox music till dawn. We would stay there until six in the morning, then go to a second-floor coffee bar near Charing Cross Road for breakfast.’
The blues and R&B ‘all-nighters’ of the late fifties and early sixties were also sustained by pills. ‘The Flamingo all-nighter was paradise for me on a Saturday night,’ remembers Victor Caplin. ‘We would be turfed out at about eleven-thirty only to line up and pay again to get back in for the late night session, blocked on a handful of purple hearts and dressed up to the nines in the current “stylist” fashion to listen to R&B. Black American airmen stationed at Lakenheath or Mildenhall would frequent the place, and it was our first real live exposure to the culture that these bands emulated and we aspired to.’
Drugs were available in the clubs or, if you had the contacts, at doctors’ surgeries across Oxford Street and around Harley Street. Failing that, there was the street. As Raye Du-Val points out, ‘On every corner you had a bunch of guys, talking, doing something shady. We had Soho Sid, the Persian Yid, a right character, fag hanging out of his mouth . . .’
Some of the musicians were not averse to moving things on themselves. Raye tells how he came out of his flat one day and saw a poster on a news-stand saying, SOHO DOPE PEDDLER CONFESSES ALL. ‘“I wonder who that is?” I thought. I bought the paper, and it was me!’ Raye had been injudicious when talking to a young lady who, unknown to him, was a reporter.
If supplies of amphetamines failed, there was always Preludin, widely prescribed as a slimming pill, or, failing that, Raye believed that baking Valium tablets changed their nature from a tranquillizer to a stimulant. And, of course, there was marijuana, the archetypal drug of the sixties. When the police raided Club Eleven in 1950, that was what they were looking for. ‘I can remember going down to Club Eleven to smoke,’ Leo Zanelli remembers, ‘and it sometimes made me feel a bit sick, and sometimes mildly happy. Virtually all the weed – marijuana they called it then – came wrapped up in dark green greaseproof paper. To get it, you had to know someone. You had to ask someone, and it would come to you. A feller called Lefty used to flog a lot of it.
‘All the musicians were on it. As far as I know, there wasn’t any of them who weren’t. I stopped smoking in 1953, because two of my mates from Elephant & Castle died of ODs of something and that scared everyone off everything.’
For most people, though, youthful excitement was all it took. ‘I loved it in Soho,’ remembers Ronnie Mann. ‘I was down Ken Colyer’s club – traditional jazz, down in Little Newport Street – when I was still at school in 1956. I started going when I was fourteen, well below age. My brother and sister used to go; my sister was in her twenties, and I’d go with them. I went to the 2I’s coffee bar, Le Macabre, Heaven & Hell; if you were having difficulty with money, they were the places you went to when you were trying to meet girls. I also went to the 2I’s Jazz Club in Gerrard Street, on the corner. That was a proper Trad jazz club, came before the coffee bar. Yeah, I bloody lived in Soho. I was there about six nights a week, I suppose. I loved the jazz clubs. I loved it all.’
*All quotes from Laurie Morgan and his wife, Betty, are taken from the TV documentary Smoky Dives (2001). Transmitted BBC4 in 2007.
*Quote taken from Skiffle: The Definitive Inside Story (1997).
*‘Skiffle’, a word that originally referred to impromptu jazz parties in twenties America, was the name applied to a style of music in which American folk, blues and jazz tunes were performed, usually with great zest and attack, by young English men (and occasionally women). Skifflers tended to bash out the tunes on cheap acoustic guitars and some often rudimentary home-made instruments, including a ‘tea-chest’ bass and a metal washboard – played using a handful of metal thimbles – instead of a drum kit.
*Who went on to have a long career as a children’s TV presenter, as a foil for Pussycat Willum, and a radio broadcaster.
*www.classiccafes.co.uk
14
Out on the Town
If people from other parts of London treated the West End as a kind of playground, coming Up West to shop and to visit the theatres, restaurants, cinemas, nightclubs and opera houses, most of the native Covent Gardeners and Sohoites tended to look elsewhere for their entertainment.
Certainly the spicier aspects of the West End’s nightlife seemed to have little interest for the locals, as Alberto Camisa remembered. ‘There were two sides. There were the residents, who were law-abiding and well behaved, and then there was the nightlife, the strip clubs, Revuebar, Sunset Strip, all of that. In the evening, my parents stayed at home. If it was still sunny, June or July, you might pop out for a walk, but if you had kids with you, you didn’t go for a drink. I wasn’t allowed out on my own in the evening. It was a traditional continental sort of thing; the evenings were for family. At a certain time you ate, did your homework, and then you went to bed. We didn’t even have a TV until just before they landed on the moon.’
For some, it wasn’t simply a question of coming up with the cash for a night out. Olga Jackson was forbidden various clubs and dance halls by her father because it would be embarrassing for him, as a policeman, if she were picked up there in a raid, while for the teenage Ann Lee, nightlife in general was off-limits. ‘I used to have to be in at half-past nine during the week. Even when I was engaged, at eighteen, I still had to be in at eleven during the week. If my fiancé got me in late, he used to get into trouble.’
Ann’s solution was to call on the help of her grandmother, Cissie Glover, who lived downstairs. ‘She was a real character, my nan. She was handy to have around, because as well as not being allowed in to certain places, I wasn’t allowed to wear certain things, so I used to stash my winkle-picker shoes down my nanny’s flat, along with my make-up. I’d say to Mum, “See you later,” and go to Nanny’s and get my shoes on, put my bit of make-up on. When I used to get in at night, I had to run in to Nanny’s first, change my shoes and wash the make-up off.’
This ruse served Ann very well for a
while. ‘Then, one day, my mum cleaned out Nanny’s tallboy, found the shoes, found a pencil skirt, found the make-up. When I got in, she had them all on the kitchen table so I could see ’em, and said, “Don’t say a word. They’re all going in the bin.” And they did. So I went and got more, and said to Nanny, “Don’t let her find them again!” The skirt used to get rolled and put in a shoebox with the shoes and make-up and laid in the bottom of the wardrobe. Mum didn’t find them again.’
The boys had it easier than the girls, of course, although Owen Gardner’s mother had one strict rule: ‘She told me I wasn’t allowed to go to the pictures on Sunday. She used to say you’ve got six other days of the week to go to the cinema. Of course, I did go sometimes. “Where have you been, Owen?” “Well, I’ve been around . . .”’
For young men, the West End held dizzying possibilities. John Carnera remembers a typical weekend in his late teens and early twenties. ‘Six of us used to run together: me, Peter Enrione, Henry Camisa and John Solari were Italian, or of Italian extraction, Percy Christopher – a nephew of Danny La Rue, Danny Carroll that was – was of Irish extraction, and the other one was Hans Dieter Maurer, and he was German. His aunt ran Maurer’s Restaurant in Greek Street, which had a big spotted cow in the window – I’ll never forget it. Apparently it was quite a top-class German restaurant, which is kind of surprising after the war.
‘On Friday night, we would start in the Helvetia, next door to Kettners, the restaurant, in Old Compton Street. We used to have a drink there, meet all our mates, then go on down the club, have a few hours down there, [wryly] see if we could pull any birds. And then about midnight or one o’clock, somebody would say there was a party going on, and we’d all troop off down to Eel Pie Island, on the Thames at Twickenham, down Streatham way, up to Hampstead, wherever there was a party. My mother wouldn’t see me back again until probably Sunday. God knows what happened in between. I can’t remember.’