Romany and Tom

by Ben Watt

  On the middle shelf in the wardrobe he kept white handkerchiefs and a cream-leather box of cufflinks emblazoned with a vintage Bugatti. It was embossed with his name and the title of one of the Brian Rix productions for which he’d written music: T.M. Watt, Simple Spymen 1960. His wore a Longines watch – gold trim, delicate hands, champagne face, black-leather or chocolate-brown-metal stretch strap – and at night he left it on a sea-blue oval glass dish with some loose change from his pockets. At the back of the shelf were the duty-free packs of cigarettes; over the years Gold Flake gave way to Three Castles (green pack), then Camel. On the top and bottom shelves were piles of his jazz orchestra arrangements, some loose, some stacked freely in ring-binders.

  After he had picked his outfit for the day and was fully dressed, he applied a streak of concealer to the drinker’s veins on his nose, squirted a blast of Goldspot bad-breath spray on to his tongue, added a splash of cologne to his neck and cheeks (Acqua di Selva in the sixties, Aramis in the seventies), and he was ready for the day. Sauntering to wherever my mum was in the flat, he’d stand in the doorway, and wait for her to look up and deliver an approving comment – ‘Lovely, darling’ or maybe ‘Look at your father! What a handsome man and smelling all fragrant’ – and if he swaggered slightly, he also seemed to earnestly covet her assent; the one was always accompanied by the other; it was masculine yet somehow needful.

  I sometimes wonder what he was thinking in those overcast years following the failure at the Dorchester, as he came to terms with the end of the career he wanted, and made the decision about what to replace it with. If anyone were to have guessed what was in his mind, I am not sure they would have come up with painter-decorator. On reflection, however, he was clearly too proud to take the obvious route other contemporaries took: moving into pop orchestration, or into television and becoming a light-entertainment musical director.

  In spite of one memorable season in Scarborough in 1969 directing the pit orchestra for the comedian Tommy Cooper (‘the funniest three months of my life’) he often derided the music he would have been expected to work with. He used to scoff at Ronnie Hazlehurst – the king of BBC light-entertainment musical direction at the time – whenever he came on TV, especially when he did that humble awkward turn and bowed to the camera, dainty white baton in hand, headphones on. It was a symbolic image in my dad’s mind – an image of acquiescing, of submission. The night Hazlehurst popped up unexpectedly on our TV during the Eurovision Song Contest of 1977 as musical director for the singers Lynsey de Paul and Mike Moran, wearing a bowler hat, holding a morning newspaper and shamelessly conducting the orchestra with a rolled-up umbrella, I thought my dad would explode with ridicule and contempt.

  How did he become such a well-groomed and fastidious yet aggressively principled man? It certainly lost him as much work as it earned him. In November 1960 – following his hot streak with Parlophone – the BBC’s Head of Programme Contracts wrote to him to discuss the possibility of his engagement as Conductor of the BBC Northern Dance Orchestra to replace the outgoing and exceptionally successful Alyn Ainsworth. The band broadcast from Manchester and had gained a reputation across Europe for being one of the best ensembles on radio. It was an auspicious opportunity, and although restrictions were placed on how much work he could do elsewhere – something that had caused several other prospective conductors to turn the job down – within a week he had accepted the appointment. He decamped to Manchester, only to find himself almost immediately at loggerheads with the producers. ‘I wanted the NDO to sound as good as Basie,’ he once told me curtly. ‘They didn’t.’

  Refusing to compromise, he was eased out of the job at the end of the six-month trial period by a management who were intent on moving with the times as they saw it, not as he saw it. He was replaced by the amenable flautist Bernard Herrmann, who was to lead the band in newly created TV vehicles that indicated quite clearly the commercial direction in which my dad had been expected to go. The titles speak for themselves: Here We Go with the NDO! and Pop North.

  I think it would be easy to romanticise his stance as that of a man who would not compromise, who stood by his jazz principles and his own sense of integrity, but I have to ask myself how much of it was just sheer bloody-mindedness. As his old friend and partner Brian Rix said when we met recently, ‘Back then your father was principled, yes, but sometimes he was just an obstreperous Glaswegian, who liked getting his own way. And the whisky didn’t help.’

  Whether he liked it or not, I think my dad’s own father’s moral rigour left an indelible mark on him. While he may have violently rejected his father’s religious and Masonic convictions, he was affected by his socialist beliefs and denunciatory judgements on an increasingly commercialised world, and used them just as vigorously and parochially in his own life and against his own targets.

  Of course there were high points – the three years at Quaglino’s which brought the final big breakthrough at the BBC, the recordings for George Martin at Parlophone, and the Ivor Novello Award he went on to win in 1957 for his own composition ‘Overdrive’ – but he battled with commercial expectations. He downplayed the Parlophone albums, saying the choice of tracks and style of approach were compromised and mediated by the record company, so perhaps it was unsurprising that the moment he considered the pinnacle of his jazz life was the moment he was allowed to do exactly as he liked.

  It came about in unexpected circumstances.

  In September 1960 at the Trades Union Congress at Douglas on the Isle of Man, a resolution – number forty-two on the day’s agenda – was passed that said trade unions should play a bigger and more active role in the promotion and encouragement of the arts. A number of writers and theatre directors on the political left responded positively and the upshot was the formation of Centre 42 in 1961 under the direction of playwright Arnold Wesker. A grant of ten thousand pounds was provided by the Gulbenkian Foundation. The Trades Council of Wellingborough was the first to embrace the initiative, and later that year, with the help of Centre 42, staged an arts festival aimed at finding a popular audience and a boost to its membership. Five more councils followed suit (Nottingham, Birmingham, Leicester, Bristol, and Hayes & Southall) and a travelling festival programme was planned based on the initial Wellingborough success; it included a production of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, a new work by Wesker himself, music by the English composer Wilfred Josephs, a National Youth Theatre production of Hamlet, a new play by Bernard Kops, and many other fringe events including folk song concerts, poetry and jazz, art installations and readings in factory canteens. Every night would then climax with a festival dance, where the music was provided for the delegates and attendees by a crack big band – the Forty-Two Jazz Band. Its leader and director was my dad.

  With no commercial constraints he put together the finest British jazz big band he could think of. In a review of their first Wellingborough performance, the jazz critic Benny Green said in Scene magazine: ‘It may well turn out to be the most outstanding big band this country has ever possessed.’ A month later, he wrote in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Rhythmically the orchestra, unimpeded by complexity, has an impressive impact, sweeping dancers into action and pleasing the jazz-lover with an ensemble sound so rare in this country today as to have the appeal of nostalgia.’ On first reading it seems like a compliment, but on second it seems to damn with faint praise; it would certainly suggest that in the band’s approach were also the seeds of its own demise. To make things worse, Green also noted: ‘There is nothing experimental about Watt’s writing.’ At the music’s heart, he pointed out, was a ‘harmonic conservatism’.

  It was impossible to get away from the fact that not only was the jazz big band being barged into the past by rock ’n’ roll but many commentators thought if it were to survive it would have to adapt and move in a new, more musically adventurous and slimmed-down direction. Some critics, it’s fair to say, praised the Forty-Two Jazz Band’s hard-swinging exuberant directness. Others sympathised w
ith the low turnouts for some of the events, pointing to odd venue choices and snobbery among British audiences, who had always told themselves ‘American jazz is better’. Yet in spite of my dad’s best intentions, it all just seemed – in one way or another – too little too late. The band stayed together for six months before the money and the impetus ran out. After a concert for the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers at Shoreditch Town Hall, they ended with a final string of appearances at the TUC headquarters in Great Russell Street in March 1963.

  At the outset, my dad had said to Benny Green after the debut Wellingborough show: ‘I feel sure that if we could get this band on record and on radio, people MUST like it. Maybe this is the time to start a big band revival.’ In the end, in spite of the shifting sands, four recordings did actually get made; Norrie Paramor from Columbia Records saw the band at the closing TUC event and signed two singles. The four tracks that made up the four sides were always what my dad would direct me to when I asked about his music. ‘That was what I meant,’ he once said to me. Listening to them now, they are muscular, uninhibited and joyful – dynamic, smart, swinging renditions of four classics: ‘St. Louis Blues’, ‘Tuxedo Junction’, Woody Herman’s ‘Woodchopper’s Ball’ and Duke Ellington’s ‘C-Jam Blues’. The playing on all of them is outstanding. The recordings remain thrilling examples of a sound that was destined to come to nothing.

  A socialist all his life, my dad had stood up and announced at the final Centre 42 event, ‘We dedicate this tune to the TUC and all it stands for: “Time And Three-Quarters”.’ Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that when he finally ran out of road in the early seventies as a musician, he took the noblest, least reproachable route he could think of, and that by becoming a painter-decorator he became something of which the TUC, and his own father, would also have been proud: a ‘working man’.

  Chapter 20

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud, look away!’

  It was the summer of 1974 and I was sitting on a beach towel, aged eleven, looking out across the ink-spill of emerald and malachite greens and cobalt blues in the wide waters of the bay. Two small fishing boats were anchored off the shore, their paintwork blistered and blanched, yellow nets piled up like seaweed, the wooden rudders lolling in the shallows. Under the parasol, I could still feel the sun through the stretched cotton panels. The sand was so hot a man was sprinting across it to the water’s edge.

  The voice was my dad’s. I swung round just in time to see him turn back from looking over his shoulder and resume reading his book. His tanned front was glistening with sweat. I looked up in the direction of where he had been looking. The village of Lindos rose up: whitewashed houses jumbled on the parched mountainside; the crenellated battlements of the acropolis above silhouetted against the hot sky.

  ‘What is it?’ I said, narrowing my eyes in the brilliant noonday light.

  ‘Who do you think?’ he snorted without looking up. He cracked the spine on his book. I still wasn’t sure why he was reading something called Nunaga: Ten Years Among the Eskimos on a sweltering summer holiday on a Greek island. Maybe it was deliberate.

  I shaded my eyes with my hands and peered again. A rough track was cut into the hillside down to the beach from the village. Halfway along it, and heading our way, was a man leading a small donkey with a load on its back. My eyes were still refocusing from looking out at the glimmering sea, so I squinted and could see the load was a person. Little puffs of dust rose from the track. I recognised the shape on the back of the donkey immediately; it was my mum. Beyond her, further up the track, a couple were ambling down ordinarily with rolled-up bamboo mats under their arms. We had been on holiday for a week and although I’d seen donkeys taking people up to the acropolis I had never seen anyone on the beach path on a donkey until now.

  When they were directly above the beach, not far over our heads, my mum cried out fulsomely, ‘Hallooo down there! Kalimerrrra!’

  ‘Jesus,’ said my dad under his breath, still fixed on his book.

  A few people on the beach turned to look. I could see someone say something to the person next to them, cupping their hand to hide their mouth, then smirking.

  The donkey slowed. My mum was sitting side-saddle in a startling scoop-neck orange smock with puff sleeves; the colour screamed against the weathered, matt terrain. A dark blue pleated straw hat was tied down and secured under her chin with a black silk spotted scarf, so that the sides of the hat were pressed unflatteringly against her cheeks. All I could see of her face were big sunglasses and a grin. Her legs were covered in an ankle-length brown cotton skirt, her feet sported pop socks and sandals, and over her shoulder was a bulging lilac floral beach bag.

  My dad snatched a look over his shoulder and turned back. ‘What a state,’ he muttered.

  I had never seen him like this before. He seemed ashamed.

  ‘Darling, woo hoo,’ she cried from the path. ‘Have you got a few drachma for the man? I’ve stupidly brought no money. I’ve paid for the ride, just not enough for a tip.’

  I saw my dad close his eyelids slowly and open them again. His face was like thunder. He levered himself out of his deckchair, reached underneath, fumbled in the front pocket of his shirt, took out his wallet and made his way up the beach. I watched as the donkey man helped my mum down and she let out a shrill laugh that cut through the torpid heat. It made several people look up again. I watched my dad with fascination. I felt I was seeing something new. It was as though a little cold sustained undercurrent of dislike was being allowed to rise to the surface in front of me.

  In retrospect – over the weeks and months that followed – everything about that moment seemed to have triggered an attempt by my dad to start a new alliance between the two of us. I became aware of his disrespectful jokey remarks about my mum on a more regular basis – her class, her background, her friends, her appearance – in exchanges during which I was often encouraged to laugh and be complicit. Perhaps such enmity had been in there longer than I understood – and I was certainly too young to fully understand it – but whatever caused it, I began to notice it manifesting itself in streaks of jealousy and distaste that were negative and subversive.

  In contrast, the family was encouraged to think that my dad had adapted successfully to his new life as a decorator and house-husband, that he was content in his middle age, and much of the time, it’s fair to say, he kept his own counsel, and cut a laid-back and imperturbable figure. If he did get drunk and confrontational it was ‘just Tom’, and I was not old enough to ask why. Yet, with hindsight, it is clear that some things still nettled him greatly, and if he was ever intimidated by my mum’s ongoing buoyant career and idiosyncratic tastes, he also struggled to reconcile the continued successes and choices of his old partner, Brian Rix.

  In 1977, Brian was the subject of the popular biographical TV documentary This Is Your Life with presenter Eamonn Andrews. It was one of the biggest shows on television at the time, conferring star status on its special guests. Millions watched. My dad was secretly invited to appear as one of Brian’s oldest friends. It can’t have been easy for him, especially as it was the second time Brian had been picked to appear.

  My dad dealt with it the only way he knew how. With the cameras rolling, Andrews turned to the famous onstage sliding doors with the words, ‘Your old friend, Tommy Watt.’ The doors slid back and my dad stumbled out drunk into the TV lights. His prearranged anecdote came out as a slurred jumble of incomprehensible nonsense before Andrews managed to usher him decorously to one of the guest seats at the side of the stage.

  Fortunately for all concerned, the show – while presented in front of a live theatre audience – was being prerecorded, and was not live on TV. At the edit, my dad’s entire performance was unsalvageable. When the programme was finally broadcast, he was seen coming through the doors, but that was it – they cut to the next guest. The rest was left on the cutting-room floor.

  They were once so close, he and Brian. Brian had been made my go
dfather. But after the show was screened he barely spoke to my dad again.

  Chapter 21

  In 1976, my mother’s mother, Eunice, died. She had lived on in Wilmslow for several years following her husband’s death in 1943, before selling up most of her possessions and moving down to London in the early fifties to be near her daughter and grandchildren. By the time I was aware of her, it was the late sixties and she was already over eighty and living in the flat downstairs. I never knew her as Eunice; none of the children ever did, as none of them could pronounce it. Instead she had become ‘Nunu’.

  I used to let myself in from school and even on the brightest days the entrance to her flat was darkened. She left her door on the latch. I was half afraid to go in, but the ground-floor front room was her bedroom, and she left me out a square of milk chocolate with a Rowntree’s Fruit Pastille perched on top on the corner of her chest of drawers just behind the door. The room smelled of mothballs. Her wide single bed in the corner was covered in a lime-green eiderdown and the sturdy elm legs at the end were raised up on silver biscuit tins, which, together with the magnet she left on the bottom sheet near her feet, supposedly ‘helped her rheumatism’ (whatever that was). There was a photograph of an old man on the mantelpiece and a barley-twist bedside table. The tumbler of water and the plastic protector around her hardback library book made me think of illness and spilling things, and the empty black wooden dressing table in the window made me think of death.