by Ben Watt
The role reversal is captured in a photograph from the time. It was taken for a magazine article in 1969 about modern working mothers called ‘He’s So Nice to Come Home to’. I was six. My mum’s desk has been pulled from her little study into the doorway of the sitting room to fit it into the shot. I remember thinking it was stupid because it didn’t live there, and no one could get in and out of the room. The whole family is in the picture. It felt unreal; I could sense it even though I was young. I knew my half-brothers and half-sister wouldn’t be doing the things the photographer told them to do for the picture in real life – not all together at the same time, and not without shouting at each other. Simon, aged eighteen, is in the background, sitting on the back of the sofa beside my dad’s turntable in a tangerine nylon polo-neck and straw hat pretending to read the sleeve notes on a vinyl LP. Jennie, aged fifteen, is next to him, resting her elbows on the back of the same sofa while pretending to read a book. Roly and Toby, also fifteen, are lounging on the sofa pretending to chat, while I am on the floor in front in a black roll-neck jumper pretending to play a ukelele. I can remember feeling cross and idiotic. In the foreground, my mum is at her desk in the role of the modern working mother, her hands poised over her typewriter, a stubbed-out ciggy in the ashtray, a press release for the Spinners to hand – the text artificially turned to the camera to make it easier to read. She is pointing out something she has just pretended to write to my dad, who is standing over her shoulder in a lilac shirt, hand under his chin pretending to think, while wearing a striped French apron and pretending to offer her a cup of coffee.
Although my dad says in the accompanying article – which, with no heed paid to impartiality, was written by my mum about ‘four very helpful husbands’ who take over the ‘domestic chores’ while their wives go out to work – ‘I enjoy running the house very much’, I am sure sitting at the piano writing for thirteen hard-blowing brass players, a pianist, a drummer and a bass player and then steaming up to the West End to lead them until the small hours of the morning would have been preferable.
In February 1971, the Dorchester residency finally started. All that hard work writing in the bedroom was going to pay off. The musicians’ charts – one hundred and twenty-eight of them, each for one of nine players – arrived home in time for the opening night in individually bound leather folders, tied with ribbon and embossed with gold lettering: Tommy Watt Orchestra. They were the same ones that that tumbled out of the suitcase on the day they moved into the new London flat in 2001. The Dorchester was clearly pushing the boat out. Apple-green flyers appeared: DINE and DANCE in the Terrace Restaurant to the Music of TOMMY WATT AND HIS ORCHESTRA from 8 p.m. – 1 a.m. (every weekday evening). He had personally selected the band; he had always been very fussy about that; nothing but the best. And I remember seeing him standing in the kitchen window polishing his shoes on the opening night – one of his favourite rituals. (I’d sometimes come down for school in the morning and find he had polished my shoes after he had got in from a late night out and left them gleaming on the kitchen floor for me. He was big on shoes.) His freshly dry-cleaned black-wool dinner jacket and cummerbund were hanging in clear plastic in the hall. I never understood what a cummerbund was for and wondered if it might be an apron, but why you needed an apron to play the piano I hadn’t yet worked out. I liked the silk braid down the side of his trousers though; I thought it made him look a bit like a soldier. My mum said he looked handsome in a bow tie.
In retrospect, it seems so obvious that he was being naive to think it could be a success in the way he imagined – a throwback to the heyday of the fifties, or the start of a jazz big band revival. Maybe he secretly suspected it at the time, but suppressed it in the hope he might be wrong, but whatever was in his mind, the residency was a crushing disappointment. The clientele who arrived to dine and dance in the Terrace Restaurant had very little interest in the music of Tommy Watt, or his band. It wasn’t that the people who came didn’t want to dine and dance, it’s that they were largely elderly nostalgic couples from the suburbs, who had grown up with the softer melancholy sound of Glenn Miller and wanted two courses and then a quiet waltz before catching the last tube home. Most nights the place was virtually empty by 11 p.m.
A photograph shows him – aged forty-five – seated at the Dorchester’s grand piano not long after the opening, the band behind him in black tie, playing from padded leather lecterns in front of marbled columns and velvet drapes, and on his face is simply an unalloyed look of innocent boyish hurt, as though bigger boys had come and stolen his baton. On the piano lid is a stack of charts, the same charts I had heard him painstakingly write day after day – ‘Turn the telly down for your father, darling. Master at work!’ – many of which must never even have got looked at. Within a few weeks the management cut their losses, pulled the plug and it was all over.
He tried not to let it get to him. I found a draft for a press release written in the aftermath, in my dad’s handwriting with some corrections of the grammar and punctuation by my mum:
Brilliant arranger and pianist, Tommy Watt, has formed a hand-picked nine-piece band for both dancing and listening. Personally responsible for scoring the band’s library – which includes standard tunes, hit-parade toppers of the last ten years and the latest bossa novas – Tommy has just completed a season at the Dorchester Hotel, and has been featured on the BBC.
It is the ‘and has been featured on the BBC’ tacked on the end that smells of desperation. The phone didn’t ring. Weeks passed. By June, in need of work, he had accepted a booking to play piano in a pit band at the Bournemouth Winter Gardens for the summer season’s ‘pre-season’ run. He wasn’t needed for the main attraction. He was playing on middle-of-the-road arrangements for the Beverley Sisters and listening to comic turns from Arthur Askey and Hope and Keen in half-full houses before the main season started with Bruce Forsyth in Here Comes Brucie!
I visited him with my mum. We stayed in a bed and breakfast together. My dad was in digs. We went down to the seafront one afternoon and they had a big row in public near the crazy golf. Then my mum walked off, and my dad took me for sausage and beans in the theatre canteen, and I ate while he smoked and stared out of the window.
Chapter 13
‘They’ve made a nice job of it.’
My dad was looking up at the house through the car window.
‘Very smart,’ he went on. ‘Nice paintwork.’ He nodded to himself. ‘Good workmanship.’
The old front wall and gateposts had been partially demolished and replaced by neatly pointed yellow-stock London bricks with elegant York coping stones. Small ornamental box hedges marked out the path to the front door. A young honeysuckle had been allowed to run up and loop itself through the holes of the first-floor balustrade. There was only one doorbell. It looked like a proper family house.
‘They’ve cut down that tree too.’
‘Which one?’ I said.
‘The little one by the porch. Pointless tree it was anyway.’
There was barely a breeze from outside. It felt so mild. The temperature gauge on the dashboard read thirteen degrees.
‘It doesn’t feel very Christmassy, does it?’ I said.
‘Why should it?’ he said, still looking at the house.
‘Because it’s Christmas Day, Dad!’
He turned and looked straight ahead through the windscreen and down the road. ‘Is it?’ He blinked a couple of times, then turned his head back to the house. ‘Was that garage always there?’
‘No, Dad. We only had a car-port, remember.’
‘Did we? Your mother was always tight-fisted.’
A man marched past us on the pavement in shirt-sleeves, walking an eager dog wearing a collar laced with tinsel. All the houses seemed so smart now: white louvred plantation shutters; German cars; clipped hedges; curtain swags.
‘Do you remember the porch, Dad . . . when you painted those moulded faces that sat at the top of the brick columns? I think they were
originally meant to be cherubs or Greek gods or something.’
‘Did I?’
‘Yes, don’t you remember? Most of the road painted them in a neutral colour to blend in with the brickwork, but one of them had its cheeks puffed out to represent the god of wind or something, and you painted it black, to look like Dizzy Gillespie?’
‘Did I? Was it a good likeness? Your mother never liked jazz. Pretended to.’
‘Mum was mortified; she thought someone would complain; but then one of the neighbours suggested we painted all four the same to make up his quartet.’
‘Oh, it was a very progressive road, you know,’ he said, whip-smart.
On the way back I took a different route – along Queen’s Ride and the Lower Richmond Road, past Putney Common, where the fair came every bank holiday weekend. I used to win goldfish and carry them home across the common in a plastic freezer bag half filled with water, then tip them into a bowl and top it up from the tap. I’d feed them with fish-flakes that left a carpet on the surface like tiny leaves after a storm. A few mornings later I’d come down and the fish would be dead, floating on the surface, with a bulging eye, or worse just lying on the bottom amid wet uneaten fish-food. No one ever told me what I did wrong. My dad used to shrug and ask me what I expected from a fairground.
‘Why did you stop playing?’ I asked after a few minutes of silence.
He said nothing for a moment and I thought he hadn’t heard me, but then he said, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Jazz. What made you give up?’
He was looking out of the window. ‘I had nothing left to say.’
I had heard this answer for years. It was like a stock rebuff. A flat bat. Back down the track. ‘Didn’t you miss it?’
‘Lovely finish on this dashboard,’ he said, running his hand above the glove-box.
I tried again. ‘Didn’t you regret giving up?’
‘Nope.’
There was something in the way he said ‘Nope’ instead of ‘No’ that sounded defensive, a little irritated. I’d learned to accept the jazz big band sound had been his one and only voice; he’d always told me it was how he had wanted to express himself, and perhaps it was true . . . perhaps he honestly felt that he’d said everything he’d meant to say, which is why he stopped so early. But as I grew older I suspected there was something he had never admitted, because if he’d loved it so much he might have found a way to keep going, even on a small scale, even when his sound was driven on to the side-lines in the sixties. And that’s when I realised that was the problem right there: small-scale was not his style. He didn’t want to play with any jazz orchestra; it had to be the jazz orchestra; an orchestra with a stirring, irresistible contemporary sound of which he was the mastermind, leading dynamically from the piano. That was what he wanted. Which was exactly what he hadn’t been allowed to have since the early sixties. In fact, he had only had it for about five years. From 1957 to 1962. Five years. In a whole lifetime. Did that make his decision to give up a bit more shallow?
‘You never played at the Bull when I was growing up. Well, a bit maybe – after everyone had gone home – but never properly,’ I said.
‘That’s right.’
‘Why?’
‘They never asked me.’
I found it hard to believe. I sometimes wonder if it was because he’d seen himself as a writer and arranger, not a soloist or member of a trio or quartet, which meant he’d never pushed for it – even though his piano playing was often praised by his peers – or whether he’d made too many enemies along the way, or worse, his confidence had just deserted him. It happens in jazz; the courage goes. ‘Why did he stop?’ you can ask a jazz musician about another player. ‘Some do,’ is often the reply.
‘Not once?’ I asked.
‘A few times maybe. Sitting in for someone. I can’t bring it to mind any more.’
Maybe, in the end, it was because it lacked glamour, and only reminded him of something that was no longer there. An intimation of a lost past. Honest, grafting jazz was not for him. He didn’t need that side of it enough.
I remember being told by my mum that the death of Tubby Hayes hit him hard and wondered if that gave him a final chance to walk away. I was only ten, but I remember my dad telling me about it suddenly one evening a few years later when I was in my late teens, and turning away from me in the kitchen and wiping quickly at the corner of his eye with his back to me. They had been great friends. The event itself seemed to signal a particularly resonant death knell on the British scene at the time, and for my dad it came only two years after his own personal calamity at the Dorchester. Hayes (or just ‘Tubby’ as everyone called him) was only thirty-eight when he died in 1973. He was perhaps the greatest British jazz musician of his era in the fifties and early sixties, a true Titan to compete with the Americans. He played tenor on all of my dad’s early jazz orchestra sessions from the late fifties onwards. He used to share a flat in Barnes with the drummer Phil Seamen – another pioneer – and fell into a hard drug-fuelled hedonistic life in the mid-sixties as rock pushed British jazz aside. When Tubby sorted himself out and made his comeback in the early seventies following open-heart surgery, many wondered whether he would have modified his sound to compete with the vast changes that had gone on in jazz in the interim, but he returned with an approach that was something of a throwback to his heyday. In spite of the excitement that surrounded his return, perhaps it seemed to signal a fading of a light. Miles Davis had recorded In a Silent Way by then, and the world was transfixed by the cacophonous rule-breaking freedom of players like Ornette Coleman.
We crossed the river at Putney. Illuminated bunting was threaded between the lamp-posts. There was hardly any traffic. I saw the darkened floodlights of Fulham football ground where we used to stand when I was a boy on the windy open terrace overlooking Bishops Park. My dad was never a hardy football fan; there was nothing doughty about him when it came to the weather. If it was cold, we went home. If it was wet, we didn’t even leave the house. Neither of us were even Fulham fans – I was Chelsea as a boy (following in Roly’s footsteps) and my dad was Charlton from his days living in Blackheath after the war – but it was nearer and more easy-going at Fulham, and that was enough for my dad. We were there when Alan Mullery scored Match of the Day’s ‘Goal of the Season’ with an unstoppable volley from outside the penalty area against Leicester on a freezing winter afternoon in 1974, and as the crowd went crazy, my dad merely shrugged and said, ‘Not bad. Fancy a Wagon Wheel? And then we should think about getting back.’ I liked his company and the silly jokes he made on the way to the games, pointing out people’s quirks and mannerisms, but I sometimes wished we could make it last longer.
At World’s End we took the chicane into the heart of the King’s Road. Flurries of spray-can snow were trapped inside the corners of the shop windows. I saw an enormous suspended Christmas cracker, a reindeer in a space helmet, a red straw heart hanging from a front door, two snowmen in top hats, little birds wrapped in gold foil, pendant stars, silver pine cones and stacks of empty gift boxes. It was like snapshots and footage of wistfulness. We swung around Sloane Square and up towards Hyde Park Corner.
‘Heading towards civilisation,’ my dad said after a spell of silence.
As soon as he’d said it, I sensed the tug of a magnet, the flutter of anticipation, the suburbs giving way to the West End, and I could see myself very young standing next to him in a central London street reaching up and feeding sixpences into a parking meter, and then following him down some narrow basement steps, and in through a darkened door and along a narrow poorly lit corridor, and into a small smoky room with a bar and bottles and optics, where he was greeted warmly by other confident men and women, and his suit looked smart and his oiled hair shone in the low light; and then I was playing on the carpet in the corridor, making shapes with corks and beer mats, and the door swung open and hit me on the head and I burst into tears, and my dad came and picked me up and took me into the bar in
his arms and people made a fuss of me. He introduced me to the woman who had opened the door. She wanted to apologise. She put her face near mine – an arresting black face with big eyes, and she smiled and cooed through big white teeth with conspicuous gaps – and I didn’t understand, and I burst into tears again. One night, a while later, I was watching Top of the Pops in the sitting room in our flat and the same face appeared on the TV screen and started singing into the camera, and my dad happened to come in and see her, and said she was the woman who was sorry for opening the door on to me at the Buckstone Club, and it confirmed in my mind that he went to interesting secret places and knew startling mysterious people.
The light was thickening. There were more cars, their brake-lights lush red in the gentle violet winter twilight. Along Piccadilly miniature Christmas trees twinkled in the windows of Korean Air and Aeroflot.
‘The Ritz!’ said my dad. ‘Now we’re talking.’ There was a twang of energy and approval in his voice.