New biography of Ken Dodd by Louis Barfe

A new biography of Ken Dodd, the first to be published since his death, has just come out, and it's a good 'un: streets, if not whole counties, ahead of the book by Steven Griffin published in Dodd's lifetime, cheekily entitled Ken Dodd: the Biography.

That suggests a definitive study but Dodd offered no cooperation and in an edition of BBC's Arena programme he spoke darkly of "pirates" who'd written about him against his will; Michael Billington's monograph How Tickled I Am, now almost fifty old, was the only publication he mentioned with approval on the programme, and it's still a great read today if you want an insight into his craft. (Interestingly, although he doesn't use that particular term, Billington doesn't seem to see Dodd as a "funny bones" comedian, despite the obvious advantage of his physical attributes, but someone who has had to develop his skills.)

Griffin's book passes the time agreeably enough but the author doesn't have a compelling enough individual style to compensate for the lack of direct access to his subject. There isn't the sparkle of a John  Fisher (Funny Way to Be a Hero, which includes a portrait of Dodd) or the meticulous research of a Graham McCann (especially in his book on Frankie Howerd).  There are some insights from sympathetic interviewees like Roy Hudd but also pointless soundbites from celebrities (Anne Widdecombe?!) which didn't offer much or were quoted too briefly to be of use; Bob Monkhouse - not, in my view, a natural comic but one who undoubtedly understood and appreciated those who were - is the notable exception.

Griffin does offer chapter and verse on the tax trial, which earlier books obviously couldn't do, but overall there is little sense of, or even speculation about, the comedian's inner life; in his introduction to the book, as though in acknowledgement of its limitations, he regrets the fact that Dodd hasn't shared his own insights and can only hope he may do so one day.

Happiness and Tears, the new book by Louis Barfe, was commissioned after Ken Dodd's death so he has no additional advantages over the earlier biographer, no personal interviews with the great man to draw on, but he does a far better job than Griffin for several reasons. One is in the choice of interviewees: Anne Widdecombe doesn't get a look in but "Diddy" David Hamilton does, as do several others who worked closely with the comic. Barfe recognises that Dodd had a stock series of responses employed in interviews, but he talks to the people behind the Arena programme, whose constant presence around the comic during filming led to some less guarded moments.

Another key reason the book works so well is the sense of balance: in a nutshell, Dodd comes over as a man prone to meanness in professional matters but enormously generous with his time, and more than willing to pass on all he has learnt, provided the aspirant comedian appreciates what he is being given. We are given the testimony of a drummer who rejects the offer of a job with a show because he learns Ken will be offering him thirty pounds less than the Musicians' Union rate, but that comes only after his fulsome praise for Dodd has been noted. Similarly, it's common knowledge that Eddie Braben split with Dodd over a disagreement about money but more details are provided here (Dodd was given a substantial increase for a show which he chose not to pass on to his writer) and Barfe makes the point that the two understood each other so well that this was a real error of judgement on the comedian's part. It's tempting to wonder whether his TV career might have fared a little better with Braben still in tow.

Additionally, the research on display here is painstaking. Dodd often referred in interviews to seeing an advert for a ventriloquial device in a comic - but who else would have bothered to find what may have been the very issue which steered him towards a life in showbiz?

Most of all, however, you simply feel that Louis Barfe gets it: understands this world and why, despite his personal failings, Ken Dodd is and will remain such an important figure - and that his death is, in a sense, the final death knell of variety.

The book isn't that long, and a fair proportion of it is devoted to a "Doddology": a listing of live shows up until 1960, and TV and radio shows until the end of his life. But that is understandable: the occasions when Dodd diversified into acting or other activities were rare, and the bulk of his stage act remained substantially the same over the years, so in a sense there isn't that much to report. When I worked with Freddie Davies on Funny Bones (to which Ken Dodd generously contributed an introduction) there were three or four careers (at least) to draw on, not to mention a potted biography of his comedian grandfather as a final flourish. But in Happiness and Tears the interest never flags, and Barfe is to be congratulated on writing as good a biography as one might reasonably expect of a subject who shied away from revealing his private self in public. It's written with warmth and understanding, and unless some gamechanging cache of confessional recordings or journals comes to light I suspect it may be prove to be the final word.

I did have my own personal post-show audience with Ken Dodd once, during which he said that he didn't want anything written about him "which might harm comedy". I don't know how he'd feel about Louis Barfe's book - especially as a recurrent theme is that he always liked to be in control - but for the rest of us I reckon it will do admirably. I referred earlier to a comment of Bob Monkhouse's in Steven Griffin's book. It is also reproduced towards the end of Barfe's volume - unsurprisingly, because it could stand as a justification for any biographer's approach to this particular subject. Monkhouse declared that for Dodd "everything offstage is an interval", and that Dodd the person is of less interest than the "clever, spinning Dervish of a madman that he has invested with life" when performing.


Find out more about Funny Bones, the book what I wrote with Freddie Davies, in a dedicated website here.  

Not mentioned above, Eric Midwinter's 1979 book Make 'Em Laugh includes a substantial original interview with Dodd. Like the lately retired Michael Billington's How Tickled I Am it's out of print but fairly easy to obtain.

New book about the Flamingos! (No, really this time ...)

I am delighted to share the news that there is finally to be a book-length study of that enduring doo wop group the Flamingos - and for sceptical readers calling to mind a similarly-titled post from a few months ago I swear that the above image is the real thing this time.

Written by doo wop authority Todd Baptista, who contributed to the excellent BBC Radio 2 documentary series Street Corner Soul, this is due to be published in December by McFarland, whose website can be found here; the book can be preordered.

It's encouraging to see that both the Chance and End lineups are depicted on the front cover, which suggests that this new book will give appropriate emphasis to the group's early Chicago days - though as no member survives from that time it will be interesting to see whether any testimony not already familiar has been discovered.

As I have made clear in my song-by-song analysis of the group's Chance and Parrot sides, findable here, my personal preference is for the era of "deep R&B doo wop", as Robert Pruter, author of Doo Wop: The Chicago Scene has termed it: a time in the early fifties when session musicians for vocal groups such as the Flamingos were looser and jazzier before the notion of what constituted rock'n'roll backing became more firmly fixed.

You can hear the transition by comparing the Chess remakes of Dream of a Lifetime and If I Can't Have You (aka Nobody's Love) with their originals on Parrot and Chance respectively - see my posts here and here.

Oh, and the post about another Flamingos book, published in an alternative universe, can be found here.

Born Again Cockney: an interview with Pete West

A while ago I was contacted by Pete West, who played lead guitar in Alan Klein's group the Al Kline Five. Pete was in the lineup which auditioned for Butlins Skegness in 1960 although in the end he and another group member decided not to go. I recently spent the day with Pete and his wife Dierdre on the Isle of Wight to find out more: not just about his time with Alan but the larger story of how he got involved with music - and how, after a gap of many years, he eventually returned to it.

Like Alan, Pete was born in 1940 and grew up in Islington, North London. Their birthdays are only a few days apart, he says, although they didn't know each other before Alan joined Pete's group the Art Daniels Five. Pete attended Barnsbury Central in Eden Grove, which "wasn't much of a school - it hadn't had a permanent headmaster for several years." He thinks that Alan may have gone to Hugh Myddelton Secondary but says it's just a guess; the late Ken Pitt referred to Alan attending "grammar school" in a press release. Pete left at fifteen and took the first in a succession of jobs, as a plumber's mate; he later followed in his father's footsteps by working at Covent Garden Market.

Pete and his friends' first exposure to rock'n'roll was through Radio Luxembourg: "That's where I first heard it and liked it. And we liked it so much that Mickey Pease got his mother, who had a Singer sewing machine, to alter our trousers - snip snip snip - and we had drainpipe trousers."

Bill Haley was Pete's idol. He had "every Bill Haley record ever made" and recalls seeing him live, probably at the Dominion in Tottenham Court Road: "It was fabulous - the whole balcony was bouncing." At one point the lights went out and Bill and the Comets were transformed into fluorescent skeletons, sending the crowd wild. As for other stars, Elvis was "alright" but Buddy Holly was "brilliant", and Pete also loved the deep voice of Jim Reeves. In a 2008 interview Alan Klein reacted delightedly when Spencer Leigh quoted the "Drunk man, streetcar" line in Holly's Looking for Someone to Love, so that was evidently a shared enthusiasm.

Like many youngsters of the time, however, it was a British-born performer who prompted Pete to try for himself: "If Lonnie Donegan's doing that we'll have a go." He remembers the details of his first purchase: "I had a bug; I'd been listening to guitars and I thought I'd get one. On the bus to Fenchurch Street Station there was this shop that had an acoustic guitar in the window I liked the look of. It was a Framus, not a Famos – Framus was a well-known make and Famos was just a copy – and I thought: 'I'm gonna have that', and one day I did: saved me pocket money, went down there and bought it. And that lasted three years."

Famos was a brand name of the Dutch company Venlonia, presumably coined to lure potential customers away from its better-known German rival. According to a contributor to the mudcat forum:

The very best Famos was an OK (not brilliant) guitar. Most were not so hot.

Pete's Framus, by contrast, "was good enough, had steel strings on it, so it wasn't no Spanish-style cheap guitar," and he would play it for the next three years.

As the plumber's yard where he worked was conveniently two minutes' walk away "I used to come home and out would come the guitar and I'd sit there with chords written on a bit of paper in front of me, and eventually I got Bert Weedon's Play in a Day, like everyone did." He claims to have been puzzled when the letters "KBW" started appearing on walls everywhere: "Why 'Kill Bert Weedon'? He's great!"

Pete's friend Hank Hancock borrowed an aunt's or uncle's banjo "and we'd go down to Mickey Pease's house in Richmond Crescent and play skiffle. Mickey had a washboard, so that was three of us, then we met Charlie Swan in a cafe - he turned up with a tea chest bass. There wasn't much traffic about and we used to sit under the railings in Mick's eyrie, as we called it. I couldn't sing - never can sing, never do sing - but Hank used to join in and we'd play Lonnie Donegan ... I was fifteen, getting on for sixteen then."

Pete's late brother John found two guitar-playing friends, Johnny Walsh and Arthur Daniels, who joined forces with them and the Deputies Rhythm Group was born, featuring Arthur Daniels on banjo and vocals, Johnny Walsh and Hank Hancock on guitar and vocals, Mickey Pease on washboard, Charlie Swan on tea chest bass and Pete on his steel string Framus.  "We played in Johnny's father's local, the Comus, on Sunday lunchtimes," he remembers, "round the back of Caledonian Road, where all the coalyards were, for the railways. Somebody'd go round with the hat, get us a few bob, and we thoroughly enjoyed that." A local paper reports that they also stole the show at the Gifford Mission Hall where "A large audience ... were particularly interested in the innovation of Skiffle at a Mission Concert!"  (L-R: Pete, Hank, Arthur and Johnny at a later gig). 

Books such as Pete Frame's The Restless Generation suggest this was a phenomenon happening all over the country but there weren't many other groups Pete knew about at the time. The Deputies even attracted a bit of attention: "Someone did a recording of us which was played on some obscure BBC channel that probably doesn't exist anymore, but I never got to hear it."

In 1957 washboard player Mickey Pease left, to be replaced by Waldi Schubert on drums (above, with Hank and Pete), “and Charlie Swan was out, he was in the army, and Hank bought himself a nice bass guitar”, signalling a shift from skiffle to pop and rock'n'roll. Waldi, who was Polish, played piano but that wasn't a skill needed by the group, who bought him a snare drum and a kick drum: "Good enough for skiffle but he wasn't a brilliant drummer. Then we came across George Rodda, another learner, but he was good - he had learnt how to do paradiddles and he had a full kit." 

By this time the group had been renamed the Art Daniels Five, after their lead singer, and they would practise in Arthur's father's rag and bone shop among other places. They continued to play the Comus and also the Belinda Castle in Canonbury Road. 
 

"My brother John, sometimes with Hank, would go out looking for bookings, hence a lot of pub gigs; John also used his car to carry people and equipment about. Hank had a part time job with a local butcher and borrowed his van, a forerunner of the Ford Transit, to carry us and the gear to the further afield venues - we had to scrub it out cause it stunk of meat! My chauffeur was Ken Aslet and his Wolsey Hornet."

At some point in 1958, Pete isn't sure when, Johnny Walsh left and was replaced by Alan Klein. As Pete remembers it there was no warning about his departure: "He disappeared off the scene, didn't turn up." Johnny may have become caught up in the kind of serious relationship which the others had been avoiding and ended up marrying his girlfriend, "so he was gone. Arthur was still with us, so we had the Art Daniels Five for a while but then we got rid of Arthur for whatever reason."

Pete can't remember how Alan joined. Ken Pitt's press release refers to Alan's early days "playing in pubs, clubs and anywhere they would let him", so Pete's brother could have come across him during his sorties to find gigs for the group, though it's possible Alan might have seen the group locally and offered his services.

There seems to have been a period of overlap, as there are several photos in which Alan and Arthur can be seen together, as above, but with the departure of Arthur Daniels the group were renamed once again, becoming the “Al Kline Five” after their new lead singer (spelling as in that press release and elsewhere). "Yes, Alan was the man in charge,” Pete says. “It usually finished up like that: the man that sings, he's The Man."

It wasn't only his singing which brought a change to the group. Alan gave Pete and his friends a greater sense of motivation than they'd had before. They all had jobs, and playing a couple of nights a week was fun, something to look forward to after the grind of a working day. But when Alan joined things started to come together and they “began to sound like a group worth going to see, to dance to” - a group who might be going places. Looking back, Pete can't remember if Alan had a job, like the others, as they didn't socialise outside of the music: "It would be a case of 'See you down there next Saturday.' "

Pete recently chatted to fellow band member Hank and their friend Ken Aslet, who took almost all of the photographs of the group in its various permuations, but none of them can remember precisely when Alan joined, though all are agreed "he was a likeable fellow and full of enthusiasm to make us famous." Towards the end of Pete's time with the band they started wearing a uniform, an idea which may have come from Alan or Pete's brother John, who was also keen on image. "They were like a houndstooth red and black, long-sleeved polo neck - it looked great, even though we probably had our jeans and various trousers on underneath."

It was definitely Alan rather than John, however, who recruited George Bellamy as a second lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist, late in 1958. Alan told me: "I saw George singing at the Mildmay Tavern, Mildmay Park and felt he would be a good contrast to myself and was pleased when he agreed to join the group." The presence of another lead singer to share the strain also gave the group more stamina and would prove exceptionally useful when they came to played that season at Butlins.

Pete's brother (above right, with Alan and Hank) kept notebooks with details of venues played and earnings, which Pete guesses may have been a requirement of the Musicians' Union: “Some professional musicians got the hump with us newbies, said we should join.” I tell him the older musicians' snobbishness about the skiffle crowd puts me in mind of the jazzmen backing doo wop groups in America.

John's records are invaluable for piecing together the events of over sixty years ago but at the time they seemed like a sledgehammer to crack a nut: “I remember us all laughing at a notebook because it had details of money coming in and money going out, and the money coming in was by way of a pound in the hat or on the door – you know, half a crown to get in.”

Two of John's books from those days have been located but a third, which included the words of some songs and possibly even a setlist, can't be found. Pete can't remember many of the songs they played although he does recall that lyrics would either be copied down from Radio Luxembourg or taken from sheet music bought in Denmark Street, and new songs were regularly introduced into the set. They played a few Duane Eddy instrumentals including Shazam! as well as some Chuck Berry numbers, although he laughs that "You never got the Chuck Berry solo out of me - something similar but it was all guesswork."

I wonder whether Alan was writing any original material at this time. Pete doesn't have a clear memory of anything being presented to the group "but towards the end, when we were going to Skegness, I remember doing a number and Alan saying, 'I've written a solo - do you mind if I play it?' I said, 'No, not at all, Alan,' cause I was a bit hit and miss, a bum note or two - nobody bothered much. And sure enough, when it came to the break he played it - I don't think it was anything heavy. He'd either written it or worked it out; I don't think any of us were into reading music much - you'd read a songsheet for the words and adapt the chords. We'd often simplify things. I can't remember what the bloody tune was ... it might have been something he wrote, mightn't it?”

Now firmly rock'n'roll and pop rather than skiffle, the Al Kline Five played upstairs in a large function room at the Red Lion in St John's Street on Fridays for a year or more. By this time Pete had bought an electric guitar: a German-made Hofner Committee, so named because three musicians - "one being Bert Weedon, of all people" - had been involved in its design. "It cost me one hundred guineas but it was a great guitar; a lot of thought had gone into it."  

You can see Pete's new guitar particularly clearly in the photograph above, from a one-off gig as a backing band (the singer is Dave Brannon). Pete had first become aware of this model's potential when watching Dave Duggan's group, who had the Red Lion residency before them. Occasional reference can be found online to “the Dave Duggan Skiffle Group” but it seems they too had made a musical shift by then: "They were good, they played rock'n'roll, loud stuff - both the singer and the lead guitarist had the blonde version of what I later bought in brunette. They looked so good, and I used to stand next to them, see how they was playing it: those two fingers on the bottom, on the E string, and it was almost distortion, it was so loud. And I thought, 'I like this', and that's what made me go for a Hofner Committee." 

Gigs at the Red Lion were not without incident. Several years later, when he saw Alan's musical What a Crazy World at Stratford East, Pete recognised some aspects of Alan's life. The digs at Alf's sister in the show were, he thinks, "Alan knocking on his real-life sister." Pete also remembers a terrible fight one night at the Red Lion, which makes me wonder whether it might have been the inspiration for Alan's Wasn't It A Handsome Punchup:

"While we were playing at The Red Lion somebody came over and said there were four or five lads collecting glasses and bottles on a table. We could see there was going to be trouble, so I slid my guitar behind the piano. Just in time. They came and lined up in front of us and one of them threw a punch and knocked me to the floor. I stood up and aimed a kick at his whatsits; he leaned back and my kick caught him under his nose - what a mess that made. Then it all kicked off. Ken was sitting on a bloke, knocking him about, when he was hit on the head by a bottle - three stitches required there, then. Another one of our friends was hit with a bottle and required more stitches. There were bottles and glasses going in all directions - they had blocked the staircase off so no one could get up or down. I saw Alan in the thick of it, swinging his guitar round his head until it came apart. It was a horrible end to an enjoyable evening."

Another memory from that time also has a link to Alan's work, though it's more of a stretch:

“After a late gig at Weybridge Alan and I had a walk along by the River Wey. We came across a small rowing boat tethered to the bank and decided to have a little ride in it. We hadn’t gone very far when someone started shouting at us; we quickly crossed the river, only a matter of yards, and pulled the boat up the bank. We walked along the footpath and came to a small footbridge, so we crossed over - and walked straight into the arms of two policemen. They wanted to know why we were in Diana Dors' back garden.”

After What a Crazy World Alan worked for some time on a film adaptation of the musical Grab Me A Gondola, inspired by the real-life story of Dors "floating down the Grand Canal in a gondola wearing a mink bikini" as a publicity stunt at the Venice Film Festival in 1955 … Which admittedly isn't all that much of a spooky foreshadowing but it's a curious coincidence all the same.

More importantly as a pointer to the future, Pete also remembers what may have been Alan's first meeting with Joe Brown. It took place, he says, at the Strava Ballroom in Canonbury Lane. "I'm not sure how we got to be there but we went along - we were being nosey, to see what happened in there, and we realised they were making a programme - it might have been Oh Boy!" He recalls seeing Nancy Whiskey and "an old crab of a woman, thought she was the bees' knees, older than us lads, done up like a teenager."

This would actually have been a rehearsal for Oh Boy! rather than the show itself, which was recorded at the Hackney Empire. Geoff Leonard's website devoted to Oh Boy! states that the dance hall at this address began to be used for rehearsals by Jack Good and his team in September 1958, although it was the Four Provinces Club then, and did not become the Strava until later. If Pete's recollection about the name is correct Mr Leonard thinks that the meeting with Joe Brown would have taken place during the last month of the show's run, in May 1959, although at this distance he says it's hard to be certain precisely when the building changed name.

It seems odd that Pete and his friends would have taken so many months to investigate something on their doorstep, especially as the presence of producer Jack Good and his team was an open secret within days of their arrival, with “schoolboys run[ning] the perimeter of the building frantically clutching autograph books.” Mr Leonard also tells me there is no evidence Joe Brown took part in Oh Boy! but adds: “I've always believed Good discovered him when Oh Boy! was finishing its run. Perhaps, like Pete, he turned up at rehearsals?”

Such quibbles do not, however, detract from the historical significance of the meeting itself:

"Joe Brown was there, Alan had a chat with him. He borrowed Alan's ukelele, or whatever it was [possibly a banjolele], and it took Alan ages to get it back - he thought he'd lost it."

Could this have been the moment which ultimately led to Joe Brown's recording What a Crazy World, kickstarting Alan's career?

The Al Kline Five were playing a fairly wide range of gigs around this time. John's notebooks record that they played during film interludes at Odeon cinemas at Woolwich, Thornton Heath and Walton. One memory of Pete's appears to date from the days of the Art Daniels Five, however, as he recalls their starting up and nothing coming out of the amp; afterwards Pete discovered it had been tampered with and confronted Arthur, who didn't own up: "I think he was trying to cause a sensation to get in the papers - two guys turn blue overnight ..."

In addition to their Fridays at the Red Lion the group played at the Athenaeum in Muswell Hill on Saturday nights. "The resident band was Jeff Taylor and His All-Stars. Emile Forde and the Checkmates were on, but then they stopped playing up there and we filled their boots." They also played at the lately rechristened Strava as well as pubs such as the Winchester, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Belinda Castle, the Hemingford Arms, the Swan, and the Crown and Woolpack. Pete recalls their swapping with the Dave Clark Five on one occasion and playing in Tottenham (although for some reason Clark didn't reciprocate at the Red Lion).

The group even had a one-off gig at the famous 2 i's coffee bar where Pete remembers their having a laugh about the tiny stage with its goldplated double bass permanently screwed in: “The spike was in the floor and the head was in the ceiling so you could spin it round.” There was a further surprise when they went outside for a cigarette: “There's this group of people come along, somebody in the middle of them, with staff ruffling and patting his hair … It was Cliff Richard and they were touring him round, showing him off.”

Venturing further afield, they also performed in a couple of village halls, in Weybridge and Walton. Pete particularly remembers the atmosphere of the former: "The village hall was the only thing going for the kids there. And generally, I think, looking round, we were probably a little bit older than our audience. Their mums and dads weren't there, and prior to having a live group it was all records. In amongst Ken's photos there's one of somebody sat behind a desk - a compere, really."

There may have been an additional element of glamour in their coming from London, even though Weybridge isn't all that far away, which gives an idea of how starved of entertainment youngsters outside the capital must have been in those days. Here's a shot of Hank, George Rodda and Alan from what appears to be the same gig, judging from the record sleeves - which, if you look closely, include the Oh Boy! LP:
 

With momentum for the group building, did Pete ever think that what had started as a hobby might really change his life, perhaps even make him famous? He brushes this aside: "I never thought I was brilliant at playing the guitar; I was still learning. Maybe if I'd stayed there, practising ..."

Crunch time came for Pete and Hank when the group passed an audition for Butlins Skegness, possibly at the Aeolian Hall. The season was a lengthy one, from May until late September. Pete was working at the time for the central heating company Maplex. 

"I thought: four months - what do you do when you come back from that? Hank had a good job working for Gestetner's, and I had been offered a large pay rise providing I went to Manchester and set up a new distribution depot. Once we heard that they'd got the gig at Skegness then it was time to say okay, we won't be coming - but that did give Alan and whoever was carrying on time to do something: we didn't drop them in the proverbial the day before."

There were no hard feelings, then? "Not that I'm aware of." 

He did lose touch with his old bandmate for a while, although Alan contacted him around the time of What a Crazy World, which Pete and Dierdre, whom he'd met by then, saw at Stratford East. Pete recalls their visiting Alan's house and seeing him "mucking about with a tape recorder and a bowl of water, making 'boing' sounds for Art" - a possible dry run, so to speak, for Three Coins in the Sewer? 

Incidentally, Pete wasn't present but the actual recording session for that song was the occasion of another reunion. George Bellamy, then in Joe Meek's house band the Tornados, hadn't been told who they were backing that day: "We all had a good laugh when Alan turned up out of the blue."

Pete thinks the replacement bass player for Skegness was called Bill and that Alan "found a guitarist from somewhere, I really don't know." I am later informed by George Bellamy that Pete's replacement on lead was Johnny Patto and that the new bassist's surname was Quinsy, making the Butlins lineup: Alan Klein and George Bellamy, lead vocals and rhythm guitar; Johnny Patto, lead guitar; Bill Quinsy, bass; and George Rodda, drums. 

And so the Al Kline Five made the journey to Skegness without Hank or Pete: "All good things come to an end as they say; being in the group was my good thing."

Not long after that an incident occured which it's tempting to see as underlining the finality of Pete's decision. He was sent to Manchester for a few weeks and found somewhere to stay, taking a few personal things with him including his guitar and a couple of fishing rods. "I got a call to return to London as soon as possible; the following weekend I went back to Manchester to collect my things and the landlady said, 'Oh, somebody's already done that!' I couldn't disbelieve her, even though she couldn't describe who had been up there to collect it." For a while he tried, without success, to track down a suspected culprit.

When Pete first outlined this incident in an email he concluded with the words: "END of STORY". And it seems that the theft of that prized Hofner Committee did have a considerable impact on him. He didn't renounce music overnight - he still had his Framus acoustic guitar, which he played for a while, although with no more thought of public performance: "I was out of it. Once I left the group that was it." Then in 1961 he met Dierdre, whom he courted for three and a half years before they married. Early on in their relationship he gave his guitar away to Dierdre's brother – and, simply put, Life intervened:

"I never had a guitar for years. There were so many other things going on - other jobs, buying houses, children ..."

Then one day his younger son Christopher came home from school with a guitar, a distortion pedal and a Gorilla amp borrowed from a schoolfriend.

"He made a fearful noise with it, so I said, 'Can I have a go?' and turned the amp to a clean channel and played a twelve bar boogie in E. He said, 'Dad, how do you do that?' I said, 'You put your second finger here, then your first finger here, then your third finger here and the - ' And he said, 'But Dad - you're playing the guitar!'

"It came to me that I hadn't told him anything about my younger days playing in a group."

Pete had converted a former bakehouse above the shop he owned into a "den" to keep his kids out of mischief. Over time it evolved into a party room for the adults and Pete thought it would also be a good place for a music room. When both sons had gone to university on the mainland Pete bought "a guitar, an amplifier, some speakers,a large Roland workstation, a PA system etc - Oh yes, and another guitar. We have had some wonderful times up there. I have had people come in the shop and ask if they could come to one our parties."

And his old Framus had inspired its new owner:

"My brother in law learned to play finger style and he a married a girl who could sing, really sing. It was a treat when they came over to see us, and we always finished up in the Den."

And then Steve came on the scene.

"Many years ago we were having a meal in our local watering hole. We were in the rear part of the pub where a very young group of lads, maybe in their early teens, were knocking out a bit of rock'n'roll. We went back to the front bar to get a drink and I heard a bit of real old rock guitar being played. I thought, 'That's not one of them young lads playing ...' I went out back and saw that it was one of the foursome from the table next to ours, playing a borrowed guitar.

"When we all sat down again I congratulated him; he said he had been playing since he was twelve and was down here with his wife and friends staying in his holiday cottage just around the corner. When the pub called time I asked him if he would like to pop over and see my Den - I didn’t have to ask him twice. He thought he was in heaven and we made arrangements that he would come round tomorrow.

"The acorn had been sown."

Steve Crane, who is eight years younger than Pete, was inspired by Hank Marvin rather than Lonnie Donegan. Hearing the Shadows' Apache while on holiday in June 1960 he was desperate to play it and got his first acoustic guitar that Christmas.

"He told me he played lead guitar in a group called Sounds Familiar who had been together for a number of years," says Pete, "mostly playing for friends at weddings etc. He said they had always wanted to play on the Isle of Wight so I got that sorted out; they came down to play at the local blacksmith's birthday bash. Afterwards Tim the smithy said 'That was f...... marvellous!'

"We made arrangements that the next time he came down we could have a go at recording some stuff. I have a Roland VS1880 Workstation, an 18 track digital recording machine with all the bells and whistles, a Boss DR5 drum machine with an assortment of musical effects, a Yamaha QY100 synthesizer - more bells and whistles - a Fender 65 watt Ultra chorus 2 x 12 Amp, a Marshall JMP 1 preamp/power amp, a Boss GT6 guitar effects pedal and some other effects pedals ... in other words, enough to get on with.

"On later visits I would set a click track on the VS1880 to a suitable tempo and maybe a bass guitar or some strings playing with suitable chord changes. Steve was really good at making up tunes, playing finger style or with a plectrum. Sometimes we could complete a song (instrumental) in one visit; sometimes it would take another. I would add or change the backing then burn a CD and post it to him; he said he never knew what he was going to get. And we progressed through four albums, twelve numbers on a CD, which was a fair bit."

As Pete has told me that he's taking medication for an undiagnosed stroke I ask whether he is still able to play.

"Me? Hardly. They don't work like they used to", he says of his fingers. "Steve's even worse. He could play the guitar briliantly but nine years ago he got a trapped nerve in his neck that caused a problem with his left hand, and surgery on his spine didn't do any good. My memory is fading fast; Dave Bold, the rhythm guitarist in Steve's group, has a serious form of Parkinson’s and Ken, who I have known since I was fifteen, also has Parkinson's."

It seems sadly appropriate that the ravages of time have also had their effect on Pete's equipment: "My VS1880 is playing up and I can’t use it to burn CDs anymore."

Several of the discs he plays me on a laptop shudder to a premature halt, as though also afflicted by age, but I hear enough to know that they are very pleasant, evocative of Dave Gilmour, much admired by Pete, and Chet Atkins. Most tracks are originals, though Pete's personal favourite is a recording of Orange Blossom Special which could be seen as a kind of two fingers up to age, courtesy of present day technology. Steve recorded the guitar in one take and later Pete got Dave Bold to play various chords on the harmonica. Dave's condition is now so advanced that "most of the time he's out of it. But I got him to play - 'Just give me thirty seconds' worth of something!' - and I chopped it all up and made it fit ... it's amazing what you can do, just with someone blasting away on the harmonica."

Every aspect of making these albums has clearly been a labour of love. He shows me the cover artwork with carefully assembled images to reflect song titles, and a pile of letters sent to Steve along with the CDs, packed with jokey comments and cartoons. It feels like a substantial achievement, even as the disc I'm hearing is faltering and stuttering.

When I ask whether returning to playing music after a gap of so many years was like riding a bike Pete laughs quite a bit. It was hard work, then? "Well, yeah. We didn't play anything really fast."

Steve would come to see him perhaps three or four times a year: "After he left it was like giving someone a box of nuts and bolts: 'Put that together.' It's 'easy to listen to' music."

It is, I agree, but undoubtedly several notches above muzak. On one track Pete improvises a cod country-type recitation though the voice is too far down in the mix, at least from where I'm sitting, to make out the words. He confirms the intention is humorous, though as he is a self-confessed Jim Reeves fan who has freely admitted the song Nobody's Child brings a tear to his eye you never know.

There seems a sense of things coming full circle with these recordings. "We were doing it all for fun," he says of his collaborations with Steve; "weren't trying to get a record deal or whatever." It occurs to me that having started off playing for fun in the back rooms of pubs you could say he and Steve had just been making music in another back room.

"Exactly. We have played to live audiences if we've had a party in the Den. People would say to us, 'Can we get an invite to your party?' But anyone who ever asked never got one. We selected who we wanted in."

Sounds like the perfect audience, I say. I wonder whether he has been able to pass on anything of this to his son Christopher. "Not really, because he came in with this new kind of music I wasn't into - loud, thumping, droning sounds which I can do without."

Christopher and Andy live on the mainland now, and the Den was demolished after Pete sold the shop; four small houses now stand where it was. The upstairs bedroom where we are chatting in Pete's new home is full of the Marshall sound equipment listed above, including speakers which can never be switched on because even at their quietest setting Dierdre can hear them from the room below: "They've been used onstage and they make a lotta noise. That's a bass speaker over there but that bass goes right throught the bloody building. Most of the work done up here is through is headphones."

The room is too hot in summer to do much, though he comes up here in winter. "Trouble is," he says, "I've got nothing of Steve's to work on cause he can't play guitar anymore. Which is sickening. I coud go on doing things because I've got some good equipment which still works."

Which is undeniably a sad thought, although "There's always something to do wwhen you've got a garden", and Pete seems happy with his lot: "I've had an interesting, eventful life ... All the different jobs, all the different people you meet - it's all enjoyable." Pete married Dierdre in 1965 - "and it worked out alright." He regards himself as "A Born Again Cockney", as the Isle of Wight has been a popular destination for Londoners – another example of things coming full circle. One of the tracks made with Steve is called "Cockney Rockney" and starts with the sound of Bow Bells.

It's odd to reflect that Alan Klein was bringing his active involvement in music to a close in the early nineties just as Pete was about to rekindle his own interest, finally buying an instrument (or two) to replace that long-gone 1958 Hofner Committee. He opens one of two guitar cases lying on a bed and brings out "Spacey", a 1993 gold-plated Fender Stratocaster bought from a music shop in Ryde, telling me "they make them out of a decent bit of wood". He strums it briefly, demonstrating the whammy bar, then hands it to me; I only hold it a moment as it weighs a ton. I'm not a musician but I suddenly get why objects like these become fetishised by musos: they are holy relics of a sort, with mysterious powers locked up in them - not just the ability to blast people's ears off but those things Peter Pan declares he is made of: Youth and Joy.

If this were a TV documentary rather than a humble blog post it would be easy to up the poignancy stakes here: let the camera linger a little longer, as I have seen on occasion when former Beatle Pete Best is placed under interrogation. But this is not a story of opportunities unexpectedly or unfairly snatched away. This Pete chose to leave his group, after all, and remains justly proud of the results of that prolonged Indian summer of collaboration with Steve, who has told him: "When you add up what you and I have done over the years I'm satisfied."

Steve, for his part, doesn't seem to harbour any bitterness about the condition which has put an end to his playing days, telling me in an email: "What I am grateful for is being able to play for as long as I did, and for meeting my great mate Pete who spent many hours on my behalf recording and adding his own touch to our music."

As my time on the Isle of Wight nears its end Pete has answered everything he reasonably can, but my fixation on Alan Klein means I can't resist coming back one more time to the question of Skegness and what might have been. He replies:

"It's just so many years ago. This September I shall be seventy nine."

At one point earlier in our conversation he had wondered aloud: "Who knows what would have happened if I hadn't had that bloody guitar stolen?" But perhaps it's best to end with our documentary camera zooming out – one of those trick shots where we magically see a house, a town then the whole of the British Isles – because another of his remarks that day is a reminder of the wonder of that impulse which swept a generation:

"If you put Bert Weedon and Lonnie Donegan together they changed so many lives."




The photographs of the group were taken by Ken Aslet; my thanks for permission to use them. 

Thanks also to Geoff Leonard for information about Oh Boy!; his website about the show can be found here. 

This piece was revised on 5/9/19; thanks to George Bellamy for taking the time to provide corrections and additional information.

Ridin' But Walkin'

Remember those far-off days when music was either good or bad? Well, here's a track which undoubtedly falls into the "good" category. I first came across it on a Jack Teagarden compilation (above) in my local library, and ever since then have assumed - without actually bothering to investigate to any great degree - that any RCA LP in their "vintage" series with the distinctive winerack cover must perforce contain any number of equivalent goodies.




One of the consequences of the digital age generally is that although you get more sides for your buck - those who still part with bucks, that is - the sense that some kindly mentor has cherrypicked the best of an artist for you has all but gone. What, he recorded eight takes that day? Here they all are - and two you never knew about. (You're welcome.) And hey, don't let The Man at Decca decide what constitutes the best of early Duke Ellington - here's a boxful of the stuff; now you can fill your blue serge boots.

Such largesse can be a mixed blessing, leading to the aural equivalent of a psychomatic affliction  termed "sightseer's ankle" by Robert Robinson. When in an art gallery chocka with masterpieces Robinson's sense of the enormity of the artist's achievement, the sheer cliff face that he, the viewer, was now being asked to scale unaided, made enjoyment and engagement impossible to sustain for more than about ten minutes, whereupon that ache would conveniently kick in, excusing him from further labour. So I mourn those LP covers with essays by Brian Rust, gently guiding you to an appreciation of the carefully selected contents.

In the case of that Teagarden album the essayist is actually jazz historian Richard B Hadlock, but the point still stands. I haven't sought out the album since then, though it covered quite a range of his work, as I remember. Songs like I'll Be a Friend With Pleasure by Ben Pollack (catchphrase: "May it please you") sounded sentimental, possibly ironic, though not unpleasant, and Never Had a Reason to Believe in You by the Mound City Blue Blowers was good fun, but it was Ridin' But Walkin', credited to Fats Waller and His Buddies, which really caught the ear. In a sense it doesn't amount to much: a simple blues. But there are several things in its favour. One is that in addition to Teagarden it features Fats Waller, albeit in an unusually restrained mode, leaning back and content to be a sideman, helping things along. The other is that members of Luis Russell's Orchestra (though not Russell himself) are featured - musicians I had already come to know and love though another LP discovered in that library featuring the very best of Russell's output, which is saying plenty.

It must also be said that the sound on the above youtube clip is better than can be heard on the relevant volume of JSP's Complete Fats Waller set. Although the hallowed John R.T. Davies more or less annointed Ted Kendall as his successor, to my ears Kendall's transfer of Ridin' But Walkin' has a trace of that sadly familiar underwater sound (spillage from the River of Jordan?) which attends over-processing. So I wonder about the source material uploaded to youtube: might it have been from that vinyl Teagarden compilation? It would be nice to think so.

Those old jazz albums which filled the record racks in my local library have been on my mind in recent days as I have been leafing through a first edition of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz (above) by Brian Case and Stan Britt. "First edition" shouldn't be taken to imply anything particularly collectable or valuable to anyone else in this instance; it's just that it's likely to contain more of the album covers I recognise from the years of frequenting my local library than later editions: "illustrated by ... 275 record jackets" is the book's boast, and I think I must have skimmed through most of them.

The quality of the covers varies, though often the basis is an old photograph of the artist or band put, with a great or lesser degree of artistry, into some setting intended to be visually arresting. When a painting or drawing has removed the need for a photograph of the artist the cover is more likely to have aged well; there are many cases where you feel like trying to prise a photo away from some once-trendy setting. One Jelly Roll Morton album was adorned by a strange, mysterious misty shape, presumably intended to bolster the legend of the man who claimed to have invented jazz.

Later on I bought my own copy of the album with the rather more prosaic cover which you can see below. But that Impressionist painting seemed to match the strangeness, to me, of the tracks: something which couldn't quite be grasped, however simple and spare the playing and singing.

Yet all the covers I thumbed through in those long-ago days, good or bad as they may now seem, spoke of excitements contained inside which were different in some unspecified way from those promised by pop and rock albums. They seemed, these jazz people, sophisticated and adult by comparison - and their work was stored in a library, which meant they were educational, not for fun - or not just for fun. I suppose I treated some of these records as a kind of nasty medicine which I'd be wise to persist in taking even if the rewards were less immediate than pop. And I recall that on one occasion in the early seventies I got respect at the post office counter when the assistant saw I was carrying the library's copy of The Luis Russell Story, so that was a considerable payoff. No, we didn't then proceed to form a band together, but it was certainly a moment.

I can't claim, however, that I gave myself wholeheartedly to this new interest and immediately began working through all the library had to offer in that wideranging category. Listening to a cassette of Charlie Christian at Minton's I had a sense that that was about my limit: it was enjoyable, or enjoyable-ish, but Louis Armstrong and Clarence Williams and others were preferable. Given my liking for Luis Russell I suppose I ought to have listened more methodically to the library's Duke Ellington LPs, but I didn't. 

Certain album covers, like the above for Ellington and Johnny Hodges, stick in my mind but I never actually borrowed it, as far as I recall. Too busy buying doo wop and rock'n'roll records, probably, and riffling through the library's stock of nostalgiac records of variety stars and Vivian Ellis musicals, so I never really had the singlemindedness of some jazz devotees. And there was further diversion to be found in the library in nearby Hamilton, which I discovered was more liberal in its purchasing of vinyl - it had, for example, The Cameo-Parkway Story: The London American Legend, not to mention Neil Sedaka - so I wasn't driven deeper into jazz, and to this day have never really explored much beyond the mid-forties.

When I look at the many album covers in that book, some of which can be seen on its back cover (above), I feel a sense of warmth, and a  wistfulness about the past which they conjure up - my past, I mean, not 1920s New Orleans or Kansas City. It's not that I want to go back there - it certainly wasn't uniformly agreeable - but libraries have always been substantial things in my life, havens, ways of accessing wonders. It's a long time since I have walked into the building which introduced me to jazz, and it may be that I shall never go back again. The odd comment I have read on online forums suggests it is quite a different beast now: a sleepy reference room now seems to be cluttered with computers and much arguing about who is entitled to use the machines and when, if those online critics are to be believed.

The library's jazz collection was already beginning to change and shrink before I moved from the area; at some point pop was deemed to be okay which I think coincided with the introduction of charges for the privilege of borrowing records. Perhaps the message was: "You can listen to this trash but let's not pretend it'll do you any good." Jazz records deemed surplus to requirements were sold off on occasion: I bought Clarence Williams Rarities, which I had borrowed and listened to countless times. It has an unlovely cover, expressly aimed at the afficionado who already knew what he was getting - no need for an image of Williams or his accomplices against a psychedelic background. I just missed the copy of The Luis Russell Story which had been such a joyful discovery to my fourteen year old self; I did think of remonstrating with the middle-aged man who had snatched it up, but I didn't.

There is unlikely, then, to be a pile of jazz albums mouldering and gently warping in some dusty basement room in my former local library: all, I imagine, must now been sold off at bargain prices. Perhaps some of those who snapped them up did so to revisit the hours of pleasure the LPs and their covers had already afforded them. I do hope that Luis Russell went to a good home. Ditto Jugs and Washboards, a Decca compilation with Clarence Williams sides, doubtless also gone into the void; I picked up another copy, at a price, some years later in London. "Hens' teeth" was the sign directing me to towards it.

I wonder about the fate of that Jack Teagarden album containing the Fats Waller gem. Assuming it hasn't already gone to landfill - a much-played library copy can't be worth a lot, after all - will there come a time, in this unexpected age of vinyl revival, when someone's grandson chances to place a slightly wavy disc on his top of the range turntable or his cheap and nasty all-in-one with USB output, grimaces through the simpering of Ben Pollack and is about to lift the record off when he hears the opening of Ridin' But Walkin' and wonders where it has been all his life?

Libraries have to adapt, and even if I could I wouldn't want to halt the selling-off of that once-loved stock if it's no longer in demand - though it would certainly be nice to get there five minutes earlier on the day of the sale, thus allowing me to clasp The Luis Russell Story to my own bosom, cackling horribly at the sight of my thwarted rival's tears of frustration.

But that sense of triumph would, I imagine, be short-lived. Because what I'd really like - what I need -  is the chance to stand, one more once, in the record section of the library as it was in the mid-seventies and, systematically and unhurriedly, go through the racks, committing every cover, every tracklist, every essay by Brian Rust and whoever else to memory.

So why didn't I drink deeper at the time? Maybe it wasn't just those other musical distractions. The library's jazz collection never seemed to be added to or whittled down, or not so's you'd notice. Did I assume it would be there forever? The few remaining jazzers from the old days weren't going to be making many more albums, after all, so there was no urgent need to probe every nook and cranny of this sleepy, PVC-girt collection. Miles Kington once wrote about "the kind of book which you put aside until tomorrow, when you'll be more alert", or words to that effect, and perhaps that's what I thought I was doing: postponing until I was ready. No one rushes to take their nasty medicine, despite its widely-attested benefits.

And I didn't have a guide. None of my brothers was interested in jazz, and I didn't see that post office assistant again. A few years ago on Radio 3 Duke Ellington was Donald Macleod's Composer of the Week; I was fascinated as he talked through each early side, singling out musicians and telling us what to listen for. There was an overlap with the approach of Luis Russell, and I couldn't understand why I'd waited several decades to discover this.

Maybe now, with this delightful tome by my side, I shall explore a little further.

Occasionally a direct CD equivalent of one of those old library albums crops up. I hesitated for a long time before deciding which Ivie Anderson CD to buy. A collection remastered by John R.T. Davies was undoubtedly the more sensible option, with its guarantee of good sound. But a CD reproducing the warm pink cover I remembered from an LP in the library, Duke Ellington Presents Ivie Anderson, called to me, even though online reviews suggested the sound of at least one CD edition was poor.

I think in the end I went for the CD with the Davies transfers. Yes: I think I did. But I can't easily convey how pleasurable the prospect was of holding a facsimile of that crudely designed original album cover. It wouldn't have brought back the past - the image would have been shrunken and mean by comparison with the twelve by twelve original, for a kickoff.

But, ridiculous as it may sound, I can't help thinking that receiving such a package, opening it and gazing upon the images of Ellington and Ivie Anderson on the front cover, looking for all the world like photos torn from a scrapbook, would have been a kind of holy act, or an act of reclamation: the thought of that background warms me now as it warmed me then, glowing through the cloudy yellow of its PVC cover.

There may be less noisy transfers of There's a Lull in My Life to be found on youtube at the present moment but I hope you will understand why this has to be the one embedded here: