Interview with Henri Harrison (former member of the New Vaudeville Band)

[videocap from jazzandjazz]

A few months ago I made my way to the village of Lemsford, in Hertfordshire, to meet Henri Harrison, former drummer of the New Vaudeville Band, and see his current group, Henri's Hotshots, in action at Lemsford Jazz Club.

I particularly wanted to find out more about Alan Klein's time with the New Vaudeville Band, especially as Mark Blake's recent biography of their manager Peter Grant doesn't have much to say on the subject. But the ways in which performers adapt and survive when fame has ebbed away is an abiding fascination, so I was also looking forward to the opportunity of hearing the band's story from the one man who had been there from soup to nuts. Henri played on the recording of Winchester Cathedral alongside other session men when "The New Vaudeville Band" was just a thing in songwriter Geoff Stephens' dream, and was still behind the drumkit of the flesh-and-blood group, by then long mutated into a cabaret act, when they finally called it a day some twenty years later.

Henri's Hotshots play unashamed goodtime jazz of a high order, and I spent a happy afternoon in the airy surroundings of the village hall, where the club regularly meets, listening to a mix of well-known and more adventurous numbers. A highlight was Fats Waller and Andy Razaf's Black and Blue - technically just Waller, I suppose, as there was no vocal, though the playing felt true to the spirit of Razaf's lyric, with particularly notable clarinet and trombone solos. There was also a good version of Lazy River which, like Black and Blue, put me in mind of Louis Armstrong's early big band recording of the tune; I was half-expecting to hear an affirmative "Yeah!" punctuating proceedings.

Black and Blue and other performances from the day have been captured for posterity by Peter Mark Butler and can be found on his jazzandjazz website here. Mr Butler has made it his mission to promote British jazz with videoclips and news of forthcoming events; his website is well worth exploring.

There was also what might be termed a "washboard-off" between Henri Harrison and Brian Smith, aka "Smiffy", who runs the club, though there was too much good humour involved to regard it as a cutting contest: at one point Smiffy threw his hat onto Henri's washboard by way of sabotage or rueful acknowledgement of his opponent's skills, but that was as far as hostilities went. (You can relive the tension here.) A good time was had by all present, and if you are a fan of vintage jazz then Henri's Hotshots can be recommended.

Introductions having been kindly effected by Mr Butler during the interval, I spoke to Henri afterwards in a nearby pub. But to set the scene here's part of Alan Klein's own account of how he came to join the New Vaudeville Band, as told to Spencer Leigh (a fuller version can be found here). After a dry spell following the release of his album Well At Least Its British he happened to bump into Geoff Stephens, who was looking for material to fill out an album capitalising on the success of Winchester Cathedral.

So I said, "I've got a silly song that I wrote the other day that might be on it, called Whatever Happened to Phyllis Puke?" And he said, "Oh I love that! I love that  title,  I'll have that song!" ... we went down to a studio and I recorded it, just with a guitar.

Afterwards he said, "What are you doing generally?" I said, "Well, not a lot really," so he said "Would you be interested, or do you know anybody who'd like to sing with the band?" And I didn't realise he was offering me the job. I think I said "No, I can't think of anyone, Geoff, actually, offhand," so he said,"Well what about yourself?" I said, "Well, I can't sing myself, never really saw meself as a singer," so he said,"Well, it sounds fine - would you be interested in the job, then?" So I said, "Well, I'll give it a shot, yeah" - a week later I was on the Ed Sullivan Show in New York!

Here is the finished version of that song: 

Fame happened overnight for the New Vaudeville Band, as Henri describes:

Before you could say Jack Robinson Geoff had made an album [using session musicians]. And we did a couple of tracks on that album, in Regent Sound, before Alan joined. I was dancing with a girl in New York at a party and I said "This is good, who is it?" And she said: "You!" I didn't even know; it was something we'd made with session guys and it happened amazingly quickly. I had been in a band and gone to Europe but to suddenly go to the States was unreal.

Initially we went in 1967 and then we did the Ed Sullivan Show, that was the big thing: the record had dropped down to Number Two but after that it shot up to Number One again.  We did the Merv Griffin Show and other TV shows and a little promo tour, then we went back before Christmas of that year and did the first spot in Vegas, which was really successful. Then in 1968 we did a second tour  when we did Vegas again and went all over the States - all the State Fairs and things like that.

"Places like Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada - the cabaret circuit ... They weren't exactly a rock band", as Peter Grant is quoted as saying in Mark Blake's biography, Bring It On Home, which also includes a description by Grant's lieutenant, Richard Cole, of a gig in Atlantic City when Henri and his bandmates had to share the bill with a diving horse:

The old stagehand told us not to go over our twenty minutes because everybody would leave to watch the horse. We thought, 'F*** that.' But they did - everybody left. This horse was hoisted in a harness with a girl on its back before plunging thirty feet into a tank of water.

Henri continues:

That whole year we were back and forth to America all the time rather than go[ing] to other territories because there was more money there, really. We did a few gigs in the UK with Alan, he did the two years when we were  up in the charts and then he just totally wanted to move on.

Peter Grant's increasing preoccupation with his new (and decidedly non-cabaret) act, Led Zeppelin, may have contributed to Alan's decision:

I've got a feeling Peter Grant missed out on something because we were doing so well there at the Tropicana [in Las Vegas] that I think Richard Cole [reckons] some guys were gonna come over from Caesar's and offer us something - which is a shame we lost out. Could have done us a hell of a lot of good but there you go.

Was that the point when Alan said "I'm off"?

Probably if we'd had an offer like that he might have said I'll stay on for the Vegas thing.

I asked whether, despite being lead singer, Alan really had much of a say, or whether it was Geoff Stephens' vehicle. "I think Geoff Stephens would have been happy to go on releasing records by session musicians and not ever having a band, but the BBC obviously didn't like that idea at all."

Finchley Central and Whatever happened to Phyllis Puke were the only two songs Alan wrote which were recorded by the band. Henri fills in a little more detail about the circumstances of Alan's cowriting Finchley Central:

Geoff Stephens had the music and it was actually called Aluminium, about a female washboard player: "Aluminium, on her fingers ..." Alan said, "Oh, they're useless lyrics, they are," and Geoff said "Well, if you can do better you do something." So he got on the train on the Northern Line and looked up: "Finchley Central, that's better than aluminium." So he wrote all the words then, in the process of going to his home in Finchley, and gave it to Geoff the next day.

Now that I didn't know ...

Were the band influenced, I wondered, by the New Temperance Seven, the group who'd had a few hits in the twenties style a few years earlier?

Yeah, there was an element of that: New Temperance Seven meets rock'n'roll, basically - there's a rock beat to Winchester Cathedral with the Temperance Seven feel to it. I went to Geoff's home and he had gone into it quite a bit, listening to old records from the era; he was going through a craze of being interested. Of course, he's written hits for all sorts of people, either on his own or with others; it's endless. Tom Jones, David Soul ...

Geoff conceived the whole idea of the New Vaudeville Band and thought up the name. He thought it was a good time to do vo-de-oh-doh meets rock'n'roll, and obviously it worked; he was a very clever man and made lots of dough out of it, but he didn't have the pleasure of travelling around the world that we [the band] were getting - you can't really value that. He stayed at home - he lives in Berkhamstead at the moment.

Even if the invitation to join the New Vaudeville Band came at a lean time in Alan's solo career, I suggest  that he must have been in his element fronting such a band, given his penchant for comedy songs. Part of the reason for my wishing to interview Henri in the first place was a remark he had made to Mark Frumento about Alan:

Alan really played it up. At one point some people really thought he was an earl.

So I askwhether Alan remained in character during his time with the group.

Oh yeah, he went thoroughly into that character: a laconic, upper class thing. He did a pretty good job of it.

I mention his admiration for Noel Coward:

Yeah, that was how he managed to get his voice to fit in with the Vauds; it was just funny now and then when he would slip into his Cockney accent.

And even if Alan told Geoff Stephens that he never regarded himself as a singer Henri says he fitted very well into the group. "Jonathan King came up to him after one Top of the Pops appearance and said: 'I love your deep brown voice.'"

The group's nationality was still a big selling point in America even though this was a couple of years after the British Invasion :

We still used to get people stopping us on Broadway: "Are you really from England? Say something to me! Do you know the Beatles?" All this sort of thing. It was amazing to suddenly be there, doing all this. It was a super era - pity it's not all recorded like it would be now. For a short time, after Ed Sullivan, we were very big, but we were never going to be appealing to girls because our hits weren't love songs.

So what of the group's fortunes after Alan?

We did 69-71 in Canada, then the last year was living in Vegas. Then we came back to the UK in 1972 and reestablished ourselves with more or less a completely different lineup. 

Remembering an appearance around that time on The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club (above) I ask whether they were more of a cabaret act by then.

Yeah, that was the whole idea - before that we'd tried to cover everything. The Bonzos got a lot of street cred with political jokes or whatever; we were just purely out-and-out cabaret - it went down well and people used to like  us. We got guys in who could play modern pop so on the cabaret circuit we'd do things by the Stylistics, Stevie Wonder, the Commodores or whoever, in amongst a bit of jazz and comedy songs like Windsor Davies and Don Estelle.

At some point after the band's return to the UK there was a meeting in Peter Grant's office with Mickie Most, who suggested they change their name, which took Henri aback:

I thought the whole point is we've got a name. I didn't really see our value in the studio without being the New Vaudeville Band - we weren't brilliant musicians or vocalists or anything. But Mickie Most was obviously very successful in what he did; perhaps I should have said yes.

He doesn't appear particularly regretful, however, hinting that that in any case Most would have got the lion's share of the spoils. The group did go on to make recordings after their pop heyday, and Henri had the happy surprise of meeting Alan's daughter Karen when this later version of the band was recording for SRT in the early seventies; Henri can be seen below, bottom row, second from the right, on the back cover of Live Vaudeville.

And armed that strong conviction about the power of their name, Henri and his bandmates did an eminently sensible thing. Geoff Stephens' interest in the New Vaudeville Band had faded when the hits stopped happening and the band bought the name from him:

When we split from Geoff Stephens and took over the band name we went to Companies House and re-registered in the name of the members that were in the band at the time, then as each member left we'd pay them off; we probably didn't need to it officially but it felt like the best thing to do.

So this was about having a secure and regular cabaret gig?

Yes, absolutely: keep working the name. I was sure there was value in it and there was - and there probably still would be to a degree today.

It's an arrangement which some other groups of the era would have done well to emulate. Henri fills me in on the current controversy regarding ex-Bonzo Dog Band members' use of their name, which naturally leads to that earlier controversy about the New Vaudeville Band being seen merely as imitators of the Bonzos.

They didn't like me because when Bob joined us [in the New Vaudeville Band] he had just left the Bonzos - and we did nick loads of their ideas.

Ah, so Vivian Stanshall wasn't just being paranoid?

He was paranoid but justifiably so because he was doing this 1920s, 1930s stuff, going along fairly well, then all of a sudden we come along. The Bonzos hated me because I'd taken Bob on; Spencer's Washboard Kings were also doing that sort of thing and we nicked a few people from them as well. Then all of a sudden we're at the Palladium doing a lot of the things that the Bonzos did, holding the cards up: "Isn't he wonderful?" etc. But then they got Bob back in on the reunion and he did quite a few gigs with them, though that's all fallen apart now. 

After Bob Kerr left the New Vaudeville Band he formed his own group, Bob Kerr's Whoopee Band, very much in the spirit of the early Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band; if memory serves they were regular guests on the BBC TV show Alan Price's Monster Music Mash. At the time, did Henri regard them as rivals?

Not really, because they've always been into the more way out sort of stuff. I don't think they'd have worked on the cabaret scene really - you know, working men's clubs, they'd have been too clever for that. They did do some military gigs and I think it didn't really work, whereas we could do all ranks - the Whoopee Band would be too many in-jokes.

When the New Vaudeville Band finally came to an end Henri became an agent, but on his retirement he was suddenly aware of the phones not ringing. Then an offer came from Bob Kerr to join him in the Whoopee Band. Not having played for so long, Henri was apprehensive before the first gig, in Germany, but a comment he overheard afterwards - "See? I told you he could do it!" - boosted his confidence, although it did take a while before the act of drumming felt truly instinctive again. And having led the New Vaudeville Band for so long he enjoyed not having the responsibility of being the leader: "I could just get on a plane and do things."

I joined Bob Kerr's Whoopee Band about fifteen years ago and it's only just come to an end. I think Bob just had enough, really - not enough bread to get a full load of people behind him to make it work: not enough roadies or whatever. That is a shame. I had been an agent for twenty years and not played at all and then went around Europe with Bob - it was fabulous. 

Henri now plays several gigs a week with Henri's Hotshots - no pop or soul, unlike the later incarnation of the New Vaudeville Band, just trad jazz, although there is a cabaret element, in that crowd-pleasing numbers like The Charleston are part of the set. But the standard of musicianship is high  and the set is an effective compromise between satisfying a handful of cognoscenti and pleasing a more general audience - who might then be tempted to explore this music further.

So more power to Henri's elbow and sundry other moving parts, I say. I wasn't there but I see from the jazzandjazz website that he was back at Lemsford less than a month ago, playing drums at a Christmas gig for Dave Rance's Rockin' Chair Band.

 "I don't think it was planned," Herni says of Alan's two year stint with the New Vaudeville Band, and that ties in with the chance nature of his meeting with Geoff Stephens. Alan himself has said:

I thought I'd go along for the ride, see what being a pop star was like. I did that for a couple of years and then went into the theatre. 

That implies a sense of distance from the experience which may be a little different from that of the average pop star. Henri recalls that Alan's background in theatre made him unusual within the band - not that relations weren't friendly, just that expectations were different.

Henri has summed up his own attitude to the New Vaudeville Band: "We made the most we could out of it - and had a good few years." It's a practical approach to things which shows not only in that avowed determination to "keep working the name" but also in Henri's attitude to Alan's replacement. I don't think to ask about how their voices compared but Henri volunteers the information that as the new frontman also played an instrument onstage this kept costs down and helped maintain them as a going concern on the UK cabaret circuit.

And what of Alan after his departure from the group? He didn't immediately return to the theatre, despite the impression given above - or at least the first production he was involved with wasn't staged until late 1972.

In the interim you could say that he was "working the name" too - or at least his American record company was. A solo cover of the Beatles song Honey Pie, an obvious fit for his Noel Cowardish New Vaudeville Band persona, was credited to the Earl of Cricklewood, the pseudonym he had used in the group.

The UK version of the single, however, is the work of "Alan Klein". The wording of the accompanying press release (by Ken Pitt?) makes for interesting reading. However jokey the tone, you could say it's a declaration of severance from the past:

The Earl of Cricklewood (NVB retd.) renounces his title and becomes just plain Mr. for his first single 'Honey Pie' on the Page One label ... He wanted to be like the people he wrote about [in the musical What a Crazy World] - a "name" himself. A long spell touring with the New Vaudeville Band as lead singer in almost every country in the world gave him that opportunity and cured him of that frustrated pop star syndrome!

And tellingly, the B side of the single is one of Alan's own compositions.


Related posts and links:

A guide to posts on this blog about Alan Klein can be found here.

The homepage of Mark P Butler's jazzandjazz website can be found here.

Find out more about Bring It On Home, Mark Blake's biography of Peter Grant, on the author's website here. It may be limited about the New Vaudeville Band but is well worth a read in its own right.

Mark Frumento wrote the sleevenotes for the New Vaudeville Band CD Winchester Cathedral (RPM), the only compilation you will ever need for the band in their earlier incarnation: all their issued sides plus unissued sides, demos and all in great sound - more details can be found on the Cherry Red Records website here.