George 'Kid' Tidiman

Interviewer: If we could just start then with your name, and if you could spell your name for me please?

Tidiman: It’s George, G-E-O-R-G-E, Tidiman, T-I-D-I-M-A-N. Sometimes pronounced “Tiddiman”. And I usually put the nickname of “Kid” in the middle, so it’s George “Kid” Tidiman, because of the association with my style of playing and the famous Kid Ory. That’s it.

Interviewer [0:34]: Thank you. And could you please just tell me your date of birth and where you were born?

Tidiman: 1939, 24th of April, Bethnal Green. In London. East one.

Interviewer [0:47]: So were you based in London in your early years, in your childhood as well then?

Tidiman: Yes.

Interviewer [0:54]: And so could you just tell me then, just expand a bit on your early background in music and your parents as well, whether or not they were involved or what they did?

Tidiman: Well, my parents weren’t involved in music other than singing in the pub. You know, my dad used to sing a few songs in the pub and entertain people. But he was an authority on the musical, my dad, and he introduced me to a lot of the musical people, you know, because he used to take me to the Hackney Empire in east London, when it used to be a very good music hall, and see all the old famous people like G.H. Elliott and Gus Ealing and people like that when I was a little boy. And so I got a lot of musical knowledge from him. But where the music came into my life really, it didn’t take much… any… impact about music when I was watching the musical stars, although I enjoyed the music. Mother Kelly’s Doorstep and all that sort of stuff, you know. It’s when my uncle used to come. About once a month he used to come from Walthamstow, and they used to go down to the pub and my uncle was mad on jazz. And he used to leave me a gramophone and a pile of 78 records, and he’d go down the pub and I’d be indoors and winding up and listening to all these jazz records, you see, so I think that’s where I really got into learning about jazz. And I still never took up an instrument until, much later. I think I was about 16, 17, and a friend of mine took me to a place… I used to work at W.H. Smith’s in a big warehouse up in the Strand, and he took me to The Fishmonger’s Arms, which is a pub over at Wood Green, and every Friday night they had jazz there. They used to have all of the top bands. I didn’t know any of the bands at all, you know, but one of the strongholds there was Alex Welsh’s early band. We went there really mainly to, you know, chat up the girls and that sort of thing. And I couldn’t believe him. It was the first time I saw a jazz band and I was absolutely knocked out by it. Knocked me sideways. I was mesmerised. And I took a shine to the trombone. I kept looking at the trombone, I don’t know why, and I asked… we went back several times, and by this time I’d got a bit more familiar with the band, and I asked the trombone player who happened to be Roy Crimmins, who was Alex Welsh’s trombone player, and he put me – you know, because I asked him, what is it, what do you… because at the time, just before that actually, because I used to live near Bethnal Green market, and my dad had a stall down there on Sunday mornings, and every Saturday I used to go and help him. And I saw a trombone. I don’t know why I bought it… I saw it, it was hanging on the back of a lorry, and it was only five pound, and that was all the money I had. So I bought it, but it turned out to be a bass trombone. There’s different types of trombone, but this was a big bass trombone. And I tried to learn to play it, and I couldn’t get a hold of it at all until somebody told me if I went up the road from where we lived to Toynbee Hall, which is still there now, and it’s a college for people in the area to learn and to make themselves better. And they had a music class there, and I went in and I joined it, and that’s where I started. They was [sic] overjoyed when I walked in with this bass trombone. They said, “Just what we want! A bass trombone!” Because it was a symphony orchestra, you see. Of course I had to learn how to play that, so I played that for a while, but all I wanted to do was play some stuff like, so that when Uncle Bill brought the records round, to play along with them. So cutting forward, Roy Crimmins said, “No, that’s no good for you, you want a tenor trombone.” Cause I didn’t know what a tenor trombone was. It was a trombone. You don’t know, do you? He told me where to go and get one, which was near where I worked. By this time I was working up near the Strand. Selmer’s, I went into Selmer’s and got this trombone. It was fifty pounds, which is, like, unbelievable. I was only earning three pound a week. [laughs] Fifty pound?! You know, I had ten quid in my pocket or something like that, and I thought, “Oh.” Because you don’t know! I didn’t know anything, and you can ask anybody, and nobody knows anything. I found in life this is what happens in anything. If you’ve got a problem, you usually said, “I don’t know how this works. This is not working,” and they go, “No, I don’t know either.” And no one can help you until someone does know, and then… or you can fix it yourself, and when you fix it yourself, they say, “How’d you do it?” They want to know how you did it, and then you don’t want to tell them because they wouldn’t tell you how to fix it. Oh, it’s a funny place. Anyway, that’s a digression. You can rub that bit out. Anyway, yeah, so I got this trombone. I said, “I’ll have to buy it on the never-never” Well, I didn’t even know about that. They said, “You can pay weekly.” Two pound a week or something, or a pound, I can’t remember how much it was now. But you’ve got to get a guarantor to sign it, and I thought, “What’s that?” And they said, “You’ve got to get your dad or your mum or somebody like that to sign it.” “Oh, Christ.” So I did all that, and I went home, and my mum went, “Oh, I don’t know. It’s a lot of money.” She said, “Don’t tell your father. He’ll go mad! You know, you’re a five-minute wonder. Anything you do, it takes five minutes, and then you forget it.” So I went round to my friend’s house and his dad signed it for me, and I got the trombone, and I had to hide it. I hid it in the bedroom under the bed, and when he was out I used to put a sock in it and try to play to the records. And gradually, gradually, I gradually learned to play a tune. I learned Basin Street Blues, which is a nice easy tune. And I went down and I said, “Look,” and I put it under the table, and he said, “What’s this? What’s this?” You know, he really knew, I reckon because my mum must have told him. And I said, “Yeah.” And I played a little bit and he says, “Oh! Alright,” he says, “If you keep it, I’ll help you to pay it off. But you’ve got to practice all the time.” So that’s how I got going. And off I went, you know, just kept practising to the records and learning a bit and going up to Toynbee Hall and practising. Then I told them I’d got a tenor trombone up there and they were very distraught about that. They were like, “No no no, carry on with the bass.” I said, “No, I don’t have the bass trombone. I sold that down the market again.” I wish I would never have sold that because it was a beautiful trombone. And that’s how I started. Then I found out a bloke in the firm where I worked, because W.H. Smith’s warehouse was big, a big place, so hundreds of people worked there, people exporting books all over the world, and I found there was a chap called Ernie, Ernie Reed, and he was working in the book department. And I got to find out… I don’t know how I did it, but I found out that he played trumpet. So I said, “I’m learning the trombone.” So we sort of… in the lunch hours we got together in a little room and started practising together, and then he said, “I know a bloke, Jim,” who owned a clarinet, so he got him, and Jim said, “I know a banjo player,” and this is all what happened. So we went to this pub called The Bull in Bethnal Green Road… well, Roman Road, actually, which is an extension of Bethnal Green Road, and we went upstairs in the room and we tried to play some jazz. We all wanted to play like Louis Armstrong and all that sort of stuff, you know, so we had a little go, you know, and it was rough and terrible, but gradually it got good. And then we had a bass player… can’t think of his name now…not off the record and he said he’d heard of a job going up in Islington for the band, and we said, “Oh!” So we went up there. It was called The Pied Bull, it was a pub – it’s still there, The Pied Bull. So we went in and asked the guvnor and he says, “Yeah, come in here.” So we had our first job, and we found it was alright. By this time we’d learned about six or seven tunes, you know, and every week it was getting better and better, and we gradually went on from there. And then we went on the pub circuit. The Camden Head gave us a job, which was just down the road, and we played in there every week, and The Pied Bull, and gradually we went all around the London pubs and gradually built it all up. So there you are. That’s how it started.

Interviewer [11:17]: And when you were starting, were you thinking it was going to become a professional thing, or it was it more going to be a hobby initially?

Tidiman: No, we were just… we weren’t even thinking of that. We weren’t even thinking of anything like that. We never saw anything that we thought, “Oh, that’s what… I want to do that, you know, because you’d make money.” There was no money in it at all. I mean, in those days money was so scarce, it was… you know, it was… nobody’ would pay you any money anyway. Nobody would pay. Well, not us anyway, being amateurs. We just loved the music. It was the music, it was playing the music. And the music that was going on was all sort of ballads, Guy Mitchell, Frankie Laine singing all these songs, you know, it was nothing to do with jazz. There was no jazz on the radio. Maybe one or two programmes, but really obscure. In fact, not a lot of people had radios! [laughs] So yeah, it was really… we just wanted to play what we heard on the records we had, so of course we would go out collecting records. I remember over lunch hour, I used to run all the way up from the Strand up to Charing Cross Road to Dobells Record Shop, because Dobells at number 77 Charing Cross Road was the first solely jazz record shop that sold records. Because you couldn’t just go in any shop and buy a load of jazz records. You just couldn’t find them. They were like gold dust, you know, for us. And you’d go in there, and I found out that if you went down in the basement he had second-hand ones, and you could buy them for sort of 10 shillings and stuff like that. That’s where I used to buy my records. Bring them home and then we would play them on the gramophone, and then we’d all try and play them.

Interviewer [13:22]: And would you actually learn from listening to the records, or did you learn how to read sheet music or anything like that?

Tidiman: Oh no, sheet music never came into it at all. You’d listen to the music and listen to your part, what you’d have to play, and then practise it and when we all got together, you’d try and do it, try and play it as best you could, you know, and get the sound. I think everybody started off like that. Even if you read the books – Louis Armstrong, even in his day, that’s what he did, he started singing first on the streets with his mates because they couldn’t afford instruments. And gradually they got a few pennies, and a few cents and dollars, and they bought some smaller instruments and started playing with those, you know, and that’s really what we were doing. I mean, we were a bit better off than those, at least I had a trombone now. [laughs] I’ve still got that trombone. It’s fell apart several times, it’s so old, but yeah. Anyway, we played like that and gradually we got on until the band got really good. The band got really good. And we got some more people in the band who were good. One of the first, earliest banjo players who was playing for me was [Barry Dew. He’d heard the band in Islington, that’s where heard us, so he came in, and he was working in a music shop called [Howarth’s in Islington. And he said, “You can come and rehearse in here”, because then he could play the banjo with us, so he played the banjo with us. And our banjo player, the original one… Mike, his name was, I can’t remember his second name… Mike, he’d drifted off and Barry carried on, and it went like that, you know. And with Barry there, and then a piano player turned up – Tom, Tom Culbert turned up – and gradually it was really beginning to sound good, so we started to get some good work. We went all round, we got residences and stuff like that, and eventually we took the plunge and rang up The 100 Club – well, I rang up… I ended up being the leader, I don’t know why, I just don’t know how it turned out but, I mean, they’re all much cleverer than I am, all of them are, but I said to them, a leading capacity… “Oh no, no, that’s fine…” “Let’s do it again…” And they all used to listen to me, and I didn’t know what I was doing. Anyway, I rang Roger Horton at the 100 Club and asked if he’d put the band on. And he kept saying, “No, no, no, I can’t put you here…” Because in them days you didn’t have recorders, so we couldn’t make any records or anything like that. I mean, to get a tape recorder was miles beyond our means, you know. So all of a sudden, out of the blue one day, Roger Horton rang me and said, “Could you do a Saturday night?” And we said, “Yeah!” And we went up there and we were backing up Alex Welsh’s band! [laughs]. We were the interval band, and they were the top band, and we were just terrified, you know. We went up there and played, and my mum and dad had come up with us. It seemed to sort of go very quick after that. Once we’d done that, we got some ‘status’ (inaudible), because we went down very well. I couldn’t believe, if you listened to some of the earlier recordings that I am going to give to the archives later on, I’ve got them all in here, because I was always recording everything, I can’t believe how fast we played everything. We played everything so fast because we were young and excited, you know, we played things so fast it was unbelievable. But we got on very well and we gradually kept going until… eventually…the big thing that nobody else can say… during the early days when we first started off this, my dad got us a job in a pub on Bethnal Green Road. And by this time, Keith Nichols, the famous piano player now, was playing for me on piano, and we went into this pub called the Blade Bone in Bethnal Green Road, which is still there, and the man said he’d give us 10 shillings each. And this was money in them days. And we played, and we played there for about a month, every week we went in there and played, and there was hardly anybody there. And then one day we pulled up outside the pub and there was cars all up the street! You know, because in them [sic] days there weren’t a lot of cars about. Loads of cars around, and we went in the pub and it was full up. I thought, “Oh – look at all these people coming to see the band, you know”. And we got on the stage and we played, and they all clapped and everything was going well, and then when we came off at the interval, and big bloke come over to me and he said, “My friend wants to have a word with you.” I went, “Oh yeah?” I walked over, and it was only Ronnie and Reggie Kray, the Kray twins, and I was naïve. I had heard of them like but I lived in Bethnal Green myself, I found out later they used to live in the next street to me, in Vallance Road, and I used to live in Dunbridge Street. They got me sitting down between them, I’ll never forget it, and he put his arm round me and I remember looking down and he had this gold watch, and I thought, “Oh, this bloke’s worth a few bob, he’s got a gold watch…” and they said “what we want you to do is come and play in our nightclub” you see and I said, “Oh! When?” And he said, “Tonight.” I said, “We’re playing here tonight.” And he said, “No, after this. After this, we’ll take you up to the west end and you’ll play there.” And I went, “I can’t do that! I’ve got to go home.” I said “my mum won’t let me go up the west end, playing in nightclubs!” [laughs] We was that naïve. And he said, “I’ll give you five pound. We’ll give 30 bob to the other boys, and we’ll give you a fiver.” Over a week’s wages just for the night. I said, “I’ll go and see.” So I went up, and Keith Nichols said, “I’ve got to go to college in the morning.” And at that time, I remember… we didn’t use him that often, but it was a Canadian bass player, and his name was… I don’t know what his other name was, but his first name was [Edza, an unusual name and he used to play… he was so tall, he used to play and put his foot on the mantelpiece while he was playing. He said, “No, I gotta go.” So I went back and I said, “Sorry, we can’t do it.” So they went, “Alright then, alright, okay.” And we got back on the stage, and one-by-one, everybody went in the pub. They got up and went out, and the whole pub emptied. They were all their gang! And we were right in the middle of the whole... If the police had come in, they could’ve captured them all. [laughs] But they did, and after that I was scared to go back. My dad said, “Oh, you shouldn’t have done that, oh oh oh…” But nothing happened to us, because we were Bethnal Green boys and they’re Bethnal Green people, they wouldn’t hurt us, you know. So that was a big story. I’ve always wondered… I’ve always wondered what would’ve happened if we would have gone to their nightclub. If we’d have gone to their nightclub and done that… I don’t think anything would’ve happened to us. I wish I’d have done it now! I wish I’d have done it, because it would’ve been fantastic, wouldn’t it? We would’ve been in the papers, we would’ve been seeing all the stars, cause they were playing for all the stars up in the west end, they had a big club up there! So anyway, it went on and we did normal things, you know, we got married and sort of stuff like and had children. Then I went in the army, and I wasn’t good enough to go in the band. I tried to get in the band, but they gave me a sheet of music to read, to play, and I just couldn’t read it, I couldn’t read music. So I failed that. But then I met… I couldn’t believe this… I went in the Naafi one night to have a beer, and I heard this piano, and I looked… am I boring you?

Interviewer [22:59]: No!

Tidiman: Oh, right. And I went and I heard this piano, and by this time I was really up on jazz, I knew all about jazz. And it sounded just like Jelly Roll Morton playing the piano, playing Shreveport Stomp on the piano. I went, “Jesus Christ, who’s that?” And I went up on the stage and there was this little bloke there, little mousy collar and little curly-headed bloke, little… I went, “Cor!” I said, “You was the bloke I met on the rifle range, you was [sic] the corporal weren’t you?” And he said, “Yeah.” So I said, “You told me you come from Liverpool,” because he was having a laugh with me, telling me he came from Liverpool, speaking with a Liverpool accent. I said, “You’re from London. You must be from London if you can play like that.” I couldn’t believe anybody in Liverpool would be able to play jazz. And he was. He lived in Bethnal Green. Would you believe it? He lived in Bethnal Green down the bottom of Roman Road. Well it was Roman Road but it was still Bow. Bow, Bethnal Green. And it was Steve. We called him Fritz because he had this frizzy hair. His name was Steve Stephenson, that was his name. He was just genius on the piano, he was fantastic. And he said, “Do you play the trombone?” I said, “Yeah.” So he says, “We’ve got a band – a jazz band.” I says, “No you haven’t – oh this is fantastic.” I’m in the army, you see. Work during the day, and we had the evenings off. He said, “You got your trombone?” I said, “No, it’s back in London.” Apparently the trumpet player was named Carling, and he was a lieutenant, and we were only bleeding basic soldiers, you know. We shouldn’t mix with officers. But because of the jazz… jazz has got no boundaries. This is one of the things I’ve learned. If anybody takes up jazz and music, and you learn it, you can go anywhere you like in the world and just pick your instrument out and go and sit on the stage and play, and if you can ‘cut the rug’ as they say, you are accepted straight away. That is carte blanche anywhere in the world, even Japan. Anyway, the trumpet player, he was just like [Humph, he was a big lanky fellow. There is pictures, I’ve got pictures of him playing trumpet. And he said, “Oh, I’m going home.” He said, “I’m going to London, I’m going in my MG and I’ll call round to your mum.” So he did, and he pulled up to my mum’s house in Bethnal Green, got my trombone and brought it all the way back to Catterick up in Yorkshire where we were. And I had the trombone, and I’ll never forget when my mum… because you can hear the way I speak, I’ve never changed, this is a good old English cockney accent. My mum, she said, “Oh, this man, he come to the door, this big tall handsome man,” she said, “And he spoke to me and went, ‘Hellooo, yes, this is George’s residence?’” [imitating a posh accent – laughs] And he said, “I’ve come down for George’s trombone.” She said, “Ohh!” You know, she was absolutely going nuts over it, she told all the neighbours and everybody. But he was a really nice bloke and he could really play the trumpet, and we had this band and we used to play up there. It was fantastic, it was really good, and then all of a sudden the army stepped in. There was a big war going on in the Cameroons in Africa and Lieutenant Carling had to go, and he went off and it broke his heart to leave the band. Then Steve the piano player, he came to the end of his national service, so he went. And all of a sudden there was nobody left, there was only me and the clarinet player left, Brian, who I still see. So that was that. So that was it, and then coming out of the army after a while, I just started the band up again, and I managed to get Alan Gresty to play trumpet for me. Alan had just moved into London from Manchester, he was a customs officer and he got posted, and he came to London, Alan, and he knew a drummer who was also coming to London from Manchester, Wally Horton, and he came and joined me. And we still had Barry, Barry was still around, so he came in. And the band was really good then, it was really good, and we started playing all the jazz, all the classic stuff and everything like that. And then all of a sudden I thought to myself, well, we’re getting really good, and there was a programme on at this time, [Humph was on the radio doing Jazz Club, and he was broadcasting it from the Camden Theatre. I took it on myself, I wrote a letter to the BBC. I found out the name in the Radio Times who the producer was. “Write to the producer”, someone told me. So I said, alright, I write a little letter, I did. Said, “I’ve got a little jazz band, we’d like to go on the programme. We’re very good. We play here, there and everywhere.” I was surprised I got a letter back saying, “We’ll give you an audition. If you can pass the audition, we’ll talk some more.” It was mad, absolutely crazy. “We’ve got to go to the BBC now.” We had to go to the Camden Theatre, and there was a studio there, and we went in there and we played, and we got accepted and the next minute we were on the radio. We had to do a half an hour programme. Well, we had to do at least one blues and three or four other tunes as well, with [Humph doing the announcing. We did that, and it was fantastic, in fact I was really lucky at the end of it, because I went into the recording room and I said to the engineer, “Any chance of a recording of the thing, the programme?” And he said, “Yeah, yeah”, and he gave me a reel of tape. I don’t know if it was the actual broadcast or not, but it was a reel of tape with it on, so I’ve got that. It’s really good. I play it often, you know. You hear the band, it’s really good. And from that we suddenly got an audition from Hughie Green to go on the Hughie Green Show so we went on the Hughie Green Show. Oh, that was hilarious. We had to go to Chelsea Barracks. You’ve never seen anything like it in your life. If you’ve ever been on one of these shows, we got to Chelsea Barracks just thinking, oh, we’re going for the interview, thinking that they’re going to see us, you know. When we get there, there’s about 300 people. There was blokes with rabbits coming out of hats, there was tap dancers, there was conjurers, magicians, there was people singing, and there was blokes playing pianos, banjos… and I suppose being [from] east London, you are a bit shocked by this and I thought to myself, “This is ridiculous.” I said, “How long is it going to take before they see us?” I said to this bloke, and he says, “Well, we’ve got this plus that, and that’ll likely take us to one o’clock…” And I said, “That’s no good.” I said, “We’ve got to go. We’ve got a show in Chelsea”, that we did have, we had a gig that afternoon in Chelsea because Max Collie’s band, who we did the broadcast with funnily enough, Max Collie’s band was playing at the Trafalgar Pub in Chelsea, and Max and I were always good friends, and whenever he went on tour he used to give me his gigs. It was a fantastic band he had, he’d wipe the floor with anybody, Max would. I said, “No, we’ve got to go”, so they said, “Hold on a minute. Let me go and have a word.” And he went over. Because there’s six of us and we can’t, you know… He went, “Alright, you’re next.” And he put us right on straight away, and we went on and we did this tune that Barry Dew thought up, and it was Sailing Down to Chesapeake Bay, which we hadn’t often played before, but it was a good sort of jazzy-wazzy number. He could sing it and he could play banjo good, and we did it, and they asked us to play another one, and then they asked us to play another one. And we thought, “Oh.” And by this time they said, “You’re definitely on, but we just want to hear the band. It’s fantastic.” So we said, “Oh, great!” Then the next minute we got a call to go to Teddington studio. Oh, bloody hell, it was all on the telly. And we went to Teddington studios. We went on, and when we finished, my wife had to have a word with him, Hughie Green, she spoke to him and all that. We lived on the Isle of Dogs by this time in a block of flats. Anyway, he said, “Here they are, Mr George Tidiman’s diddy band. The New Era Jazz Band!” Off we went, you know. Well, when we finished the audience went absolutely potty, mad! And they had a great big metre, like this, it’s called the clapometer, and as you clapped it sort of went up or down according to the volume of the clapping, and this meter, it went right off the board, it went right over. You know, because we won hands down. On that same show was the Bay City Rollers, the pop group, you know, and they was on it. And by Wednesday they had a big applause, but not as much as us. We wiped the floor, no one has ever gotten as much as that. They went on and did well, but not as good as us. About Wednesday, we hadn’t heard a word, because we didn’t know who finally won because it had to go to judges… [whispers – 34:18]

Interviewer [34:20]: Sorry?

Tidiman: He said, “You’re still well in the lead”, he said, “But we’re waiting for the Scottish votes to come in”, because all of Scotland, irrelevant of the talent or what it sounded like, wanted the Scottish to win, so they all vote… anything Scottish, you know, they vote. And they beat us, so we come second and the Bay City come first. So that was good, but from there… they liked us so much in the studio, and the technicians and the cameramen, they’ve got a big club. A lot of people don’t know this, but they’ve got their own club, the studio people in Teddington, they’ve got their own studio, they’ve got their own clubhouse and everything like that. And they said, “Will your band come and play for our club?” And I said, “Yeah!” So every Friday night after filming, they used to have a party, a big party, and we used to go every Friday night for, oh, a year we went down to Teddington and played in the studio party, and it was brilliant because you used to meet… well, whoever was filming that week would come to the party, and we met all the stars, every star you could think of. And one particular bloke who liked us so much was Edward Woodward, and he said, “Would you come and do a show with me on the TV?” And we said, “Oh!” He said, “I’ve got this show.” Next minute we’re on ITV, aren’t we, doing the Edward Woodward show. The only thing that got me was, alright, we’d do it, and then we’d go to rehearsals, you went to several rehearsals and then you went to the studio, and you was there all day… and they were doing all the show and it was boring! After all the razz-ma-tazz, you thought, “Oh, this is really what filming’s all about.” But for us, we just wanted to play our music, you know, we weren’t interested in being stars, we just wanted to play the jazz and amaze people with our wonderful music. Anyway, we did the show. What it was, it was a nightclub scene… it was so funny. They had Leslie Phillips and Dora Bryan… Dora Bryan was playing the moll, Edward Woodward, he was the gangster and she was his girlfriend, but she was planning to kill him, and we were in the band playing Dixieland jazz, it was supposed to be in Chicago, a nightclub somewhere. All dancers, all dancing, and we were playing real jazz, you know. And all of a sudden, she says, “Bugsy, I’ve got a present for you”, and what’s supposed to happen, in the rehearsal in the afternoon, they brought out this big cake, and all of a sudden Leslie Phillips comes out of the cake with a machine gun, see? He’s supposed to shoot whatsisname. He comes out of the cake and says, “Hey, Bugsy, I’m going to shoot you”, and there was all these candles on the cake and it caught his tie alight [laughs]. They showered him with water. So on the shoot in the evening they had electric lights, light bulbs you know. It was so funny, it was all part and parcel of the show… I’ve got photographs of that as well. But anyway, that was good and then Ted – we called him Ted by this time, Ted Woodward – he said, “This is great”, and he give us another show, we did another with him, cause he did once every two months or so, the Edward Woodward show, and then he took us on a tour. We went round the country with him, and on the Sunday evenings he used to go to theatres like Worthing, Eastbourne, and we’d go to the local theatre in the afternoon on a Sunday, and he’d get a couple of stars like Dora Bryan and John Sutherland and people like that, and they would be actresses and that and they’d do a little turn. We’d start the evening off with a band, couple of tunes, come off and Ed would go on, he was wonderful, he could talk and he could tell jokes, he could narrate stuff, you know. He was fantastic bloke and he had a fantastic singing voice. He used to a play a scene with us backing him up, and we did several shows like that. Then he wanted us to go to Australia with him. I said, “I don’t think I’ll go to Australia.” He said, “I only want you to go” – he only wanted me to go to be a musical director. I said, “I can’t even read music, Ted.” I said, “I can’t read music.” He said, “You don’t have to read music. We’ll introduce you to musicians. You’ll meet new musicians every town we go to.” And I said, “Oh, yeah?” He said, “You know what I want, you know me, you know how I work and you can be the director. You’ve only got to tell them what to do. When to come in and what to do.” I said, “Yeah, I could do that.” You know, I’ve always been good at telling people what to do. [laughs] Anyway, I went home and I told my wife, and we had two young kids, how I was going to be away for six months and I had a job in the newsprint papers and I had the band and I thought, no, better not. So I had to go and tell him that I couldn’t do it, and he was so upset. He said, “Alright”, and that was it and I never saw him ever again, because he went, he went off to do his tour and I don’t know who he got, but… He was gone for ages, he didn’t stay there for six months, he was there for a long while, and then he came back and done movies and films, but I never saw him again. That was that little episode. And then ever since then, we’ve been happy, not worried about television and stuff like that. I like playing in pubs. I like playing to people and getting a response. We ended up… things were getting a bit rough, jobs were packing up left, right and centre, and I went to a pub… because I used to go round and say, like, “Do you guys want a band?” They’d go, “No. No, no no… how much do you want? No, no.” Oh dear. So I found this pub called The Prince of Orange in Rotherhithe, which is miles, really, too far for me to go. But I went there and the guy said… I said, “Could you use a band in here?” And he said, “You see that old girl sitting over there?” I said, “Yeah.” He says, “Well that’s the only customer I’ve had in all week, and all she has is half a Guinness. She comes in every morning and has half a Guinness and goes – that’s it.” So he said, “I can’t lose, can I?” So he was ever so… his name was Charlie, oh, Charlie… I don’t know, I only know him as Charlie, and he said, “Yeah, bring them in. We’ll do it.” So I said, “Right. We’ll come in a month’s time.” He said, “Why is that?” I said, “Well, I want to advertise it first and then we’ll do it.” And there was a drummer chap who started, it’s still going, a jazz night … [phone rings] Anyway, we went in this pub, called The Prince of Orange, and it was a long bar with a stage at the end. We advertised it, and I couldn’t believe how many people we pulled in there, and it was a fantastic night. And John said, “This is great!” So we did it for about a month, every Friday, and it was really packed and it got better and better. And near the end, he said, “Would you do a Saturday night?” So we said, “Yeah, alright then!” So we did a Friday and a Saturday night, and that was really good. And then he said, “Would you do a Sunday lunchtime?” So we did a Friday night, a Saturday night, and a Sunday lunchtime. Every time it was packed, because there weren’t a lot of jazz going on, really, not that I knew of anyway. We was pulling in all strange people because it was over south London, really. It went really well, and in the end he said, “I reckon we could put it on all the week.” I said, “Look, we can’t do it all the week.” I said, “I tell you what, I know some jazz bands, I know Bill Brunskill’s jazz band, he’s a good man. I know the East Side Stompers, I know the Black Bottom Stompers.” These are good bands I said that I know. Shall we put them in Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and we carry on doing the Friday and Saturday and Sunday? And it still packed out. It was all good, really good, and he put our wages up. And especially Christmas time, I mean, John… his name was John, it’s just come to me, John… my brain’s like… John used to bring these Christmas ales up, they were from Charringtons Brewery, these little bottles of beer called Christmas Ale And you only had two and you was (sic) drunk. And he used to put a crate of them on the stage for the band, you know, cause we used to have hilarious times there. Anyway, I said, “John, how about if we get some big names down.” He said, “Yeah, yeah, who?” Because he didn’t know anything about it. So I rang up Humph, because I knew him from the broadcast, and he said, “Yeah, I’ll come down.” Humphrey Lyttelton! So that was like asking god to play, because Humph was very big in the world, you know. And Humph comes down, and he packs the place out even more. It was fantastic. So they started once a month we’d bring a celebrity down, so we had Monty Sunshine come down, we had Acker Bilk come down, you name it, George Chisholm, all of them. And it was absolutely fantastic. We got to know everybody, and it just kept going on like that. We ended up going to the Edinburgh Festival. Excuse me, I’ve got to blow my nose… [blows nose] We went to the Edinburgh Festival… I took the band up there, and by this time I had a slightly different personnel. We’d got different people in. I had a bloke called Tony Stringfellow on trumpet by that time, Brian Lawrence had come in on banjo, and we had several drummers…I can’t think of his name now… Rick Rossi, Rick Rossi was on the drums, and people like that… you probably don’t know them, they’re all old names. Steve Howlett was the clarinet player, he was very good, old Steve. He came from the East Side Stompers to join me. And I took the band up to Edinburgh, we got a booking there, it’s still going on, the Edinburgh Jazz Festival. One of the biggest festivals for international bands. And what was funny… oh, no! Before we went, before I had Steve Howlett, I still had Jim with me all this time, Jim who’d been with me all these years. And Jimmy comes from a place called Potter’s Bar, which is up…. up… you know. They’d produced a brochure, and it’s got, “Drybrough presents the Edinburgh Festival.” International bands from all over. Japan, the USA, Sweden, Denmark, England, Potter’s Bar, Germany. And everyone was saying, “Where’s Potter’s Bar?” They had it on the front cover, I have got a copy of it somewhere… oh, it was so funny. Anyway, we got there and we was put up in a hotel and we played there. We were on the graveyard, we was on about 11 o’clock till half past 11, the last session, but everybody was sort of going home. And the next band to come on was a Swedish band, and they’d gone. Mike Hart, the organiser, said [imitates Scottish accent] “George, you couldn’t help me out and carry on playing? Because the band’s gone and I don’t know what I’m gonna do!” He’d got all of these people. No, we was all drinking like mad, you know, because it was all free beer, and so we carried on playing and then we did another session. And then he said the same thing after that, so we carried on playing till 5 o’clock in the morning, we never stopped, and because of that we became honorary band of the Edinburgh Festival, so we had to go every year. And we went up every year. And during one of those sessions, it was fortunate for me. By this time we had become old hats at it… One day, Roy Williams come up, and he says, “George, you’ve got to help me out.” So I said, “What…” Roy Williams is the trombone player for… he still is, the best trombone player you’ve ever heard, Roy Williams. He said to me, “You’ve got to help me out. This afternoon I’ve got a session at the George Hotel.” He said, “There’s Teddy Wilson, Doc Cheatham…” Teddy Wilson’s a famous piano player, Doc Cheatham’s a famous trumpet, American. All these American stars, he said, “But I can’t do it. I’ve got to go do this tromborama. All the trombone players are going to do this … 80 or 90 trombone players are going to do this big thing together.” And they wanted him to be the leader. And so the only trombone player that wasn’t asked to do it, that’s how bad I was, he asked me to do this, you see. So I thought, “Oh, Christ… I can’t do it, I’m a tailgate, I play rough stuff, you know, I can’t really play all this clever stuff.” “Oh, you’ll be fine, you’ll be fine,” he says. So of course we go over there, and we go to the George Hotel, and sitting down on this little stage is a little man, and it was Doc Cheatham, who’s been around since the 1920s and come all up… and he’s played with everybody, Louis Armstrong and everybody he’s taught and he played like Louis and all this sort of stuff. Very famous person. And I said, “Mr Cheatham, I’ve been designated to play with you.” “Oh, that’s fine,” he said. He had a lovely little voice like that. “Oh, that’s fine. Yes.” So he said, “We’d better work out a programme,” he said. He lifted up this little bag, and out of the bag he brought five pieces of plywood, little bits of plywood, and on it in white paint was the titles of tunes, on each one in white paint. And he says, “Do you know any of those?” I went, “Yeah, I know all of them.” “Oh that’s good we’ll have that one “and then he went …”no, I don’t know any of them, but, oh! I know that one!” “Oh, good, we’ll have that one.” And then he got another one out, and there was three, three little palettes of… and we get up to the piano, get on the stage, and he went over to the piano player and says, “This is the programme,” and he gave the palettes to the piano player. And the piano player, his name was Teddy Wilson, and I think the first one was Indiana. Well, he kicked off Indiana so fast it took my breath away. Da-da-da-da… I went, “Oh!” Before I could think, I was playing. I played. And then I sang it, and then we played some other tunes, you know, and I did the set. I did it, and I was like… I didn’t know what I did. And my wife, Nancy, who was there, she recorded it and I’ve got in on tape, and I can’t believe how good it came out. It came out fantastic! I thought, “Well, I don’t play too bad after all, really!” Not too bad. I was playing all this ‘oobly’ stuff, I didn’t know I could play it. And that’s how I’ve been all my life. I think… there’s sorts of music, there’s people who’ve… I think if you study music… when I was reading music years ago, when I was learning the classical stuff that I used to play, all the symphonies and stuff, like reading the music, you get that… but you take the music away, and it’s like you’ve gone blind. You can’t do anything. You can’t play, because you don’t know what to play. It’s like asking you to read the first line of the bible. You know the bible, you know it, but do you know what the first line is? And that’s what you’ve got to do. So, the point of music then, you can read it, but you try and play something and you can’t play it. And this is what I found. When I wanted to go home after playing in a band, I used to go and put the records on, and I just couldn’t understand. How could you just play? How do you know where to go? It takes a long time to be able to listen and play that note. That’s… that’s the secret. When I left Toynbee Hall, when I stopped playing the classics and just played from the records, I learnt it all by ear. It’s your brain, it’s like an enormous computer inside. I can’t remember anything else but music, I don’t know why, and you do, you remember it and you… you your body, seems to know where to play, where the positions on the trombone are. And it’s the same with the trumpet. I just started last year, I picked up the trumpet and I started playing that. And I find I can play the trumpet. Just from… I don’t know what the notes are but I play them, and now I play in a little band on a Monday night, we all go down there and have a little practice, and I don’t do too bad. I think that’s where you… a lot of people, a lot of musicians, they play chords. They get the chord and they get the [sings an arpeggio] dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum, and that’s the arpeggio, the chord. The banjo plays the chords, obviously, and the guitars and the piano players, but a lot of the clarinets and trumpet players, and trombone players, play around chords. So you get these chording-like structure solos, you know, it sounds very good and it fits, sort of thing, but to me it’s not really jazz. You never hear Louis or them play chords. They play a melody, a kind of a melody, and they pick this nice melody out, and you hear Ruby Braff and people, the real artists, you know… I mean, I’m not saying they never run up and down a chord, they do, but I mean the thing is… it’s a stepping stone into… it’s almost like when you’re playing, the harmonies come to your ears and you shut your eyes, and it’s like you got to outer space and all the stars, and you pick the stars and you play it, and as you touch them you get this sound, and that makes you go into this one, and that sound leads you into that one. And gradually you form this piece of music. It’s wonderful, it is. That’s the beauty of it all, it just goes on forever like that. Anyway, that’s it, really, and I just kept playing in jazz bands. But by this time I really really got into Kid Ory. I really really loved Kid Ory’s playing. Kid Ory’s a trombone player who’s looked upon as a basic, sort of growly, tailgate player, they called it a tailgate because in the old days the trombone player used to sit on the edge of the trunk, the tailgate, because had nowhere to move his slide, so he’d be out in the back and be what they called in the tailgate, he plays over the tailgate, and it’d be a [imitates growly trombone] brrrum-brum-brum, brrrum-brum-brum… that sort of stuff, just backing up, and Kid had already done that. A lot of people don’t realise that he was one of the first real jazz bands in New Orleans, and he learnt all the way up. He could play virtually any instrument as well, and he knew all about harmonies and direction and everything like that, but when you listened to him play, he’s got this tone in the way he plays and I love that. And I studied that and took his name, the Kid, as a… he was called the Kid because he was only five-foot-three tall. I saw him once with Red Allen was a big Negro up there and Kid Ory was the… [laughs] he was, that’s why they called him the Kid. But he was really good, and he went on for years, you know, I think he was in his 90s before he died. What it was, I wanted someone who played with Bill Brunskill a lot down at the Lord Napier over at Thornton Heath. I’d been doing Sunday lunchtimes with him. And Pete Lay, the famous drummer, was on drums, and we was (sic) having a little chat, and he said, “Do you know what, George?” He says, “We have some really good sessions but you get in the car and you go home, don’t you? And I switch on old Kid Ory,” he said, “and as soon as you hear that band it is fantastic. Why don’t we start a Kid Ory band?” So I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, you’re the nearest thing I’ve ever heard to Kid Ory. The way you play, it’s just like Kid Ory, it’s just like having Kid Ory on the stage.” I said, “Oh, thanks, Pete.” So he said, “Well, why don’t we get a band to play the way the rest of the band does, to make it…” So I said, “Oh, alright then.” So I thought of a few guys, I thought, a good lead and a bloke who knows what he’s doing, so I chose Hugh Rainey. Hugh Rainey the trumpet player who lives down there in Wickford. Hugh has been playing for years, been playing longer than me. I expect he’s one of the finest banjo players in the country, but he plays trumpet and runs his own band, and I asked him if he would join me, and he said, “Yeah, I’d like that.” We got Charlie Connors. Charlie Connors was a fantastic… he came from Cambridge, he’d been on the scene for years, Charlie, and Charlie had this New Orleans… like a real sort of Jimmie Noone, New Orleans style. It’s really very hard to get the right flavour. It’s like making a cake, if you don’t got the flavours, you won’t get the sound, the taste. So they were the nearest people that I could hear to Ory’s band, and I got them all together, anyway, these guys. We got Dave Browning on piano, who was a young boy who’d come along just to sit in with Hugh Rainey once, and he only did it for a drink, and his mates dared him to come and sit in. So we’d got him, and Hughey took him under his wing, because Hughey knew all about the chords and that, and showed him everything, and now Dave is one of the finest piano players in the country at the moment. And he’s still… in fact, we just got a card from him… don’t know where it is now, don’t know what I’ve done with it. It’s a nice card that Dave just sent us. Anyway, he was a piano player and, you know, we tried it and we played the arrangements just as Kid Ory’s band had played them, and it sounded really really good. It was really good… and it was just great, so I started doing all the jazz clubs with gigs and touring and calling it a New Orleans band. And we did it, and we went on for quite a few years, and then Charlie passed away. Charlie passed away, and gradually it… it wasn’t the same, it wasn’t the same. We tried with different people, and then Dave had to go away and… and I’m going to pack this in, because we’ve done it, we’ve got the recordings, and it’s been good. And we know nobody else would beat it, because we used to… we’ve been to festivals, everything. Everybody thought it was wonderful. So that’s another little thing. I’ve been asked to do it again, but I’ve not really. The only thing that I have done now is… next March… March or June… June. June, in Colchester Jazz Club up there, which is at Marks Tey now, they’ve got a jazz club. I’m going to re-form all the members that are still going of the New Era Jazz Band, which is what I used to call my band in the early days, the New Era Jazz Band. I’ve got Keith Nichols to come, Johnny Arthy who used to run the Pasadena Roof Orchestra, he was in the band as well. Rick Rossi’s still around, Jimmy Hurd’s still around, and Alan Gresty. So I’ve got them all together and we’re going to recreate the band that we used to do in June in Colchester, so that’s that. At the moment, I’ve got my own club, which is just across the street. Do you know about that?

Interviewer [1:02:50]: I was going to ask you about that, so that’s perfect. Continue telling me about that as well.

Tidiman: Ah, well… We finally moved to Witham. I don’t know how it came about. We’d bought a caravan down at Mill Beach on the Goldhanger Road in Maldon, and we liked it there, and because of it we come up to Witham and we come to Maldon and that, and we walked around. And we liked this place so much, we said, “This is really really a nice place.” And it being on the A12 as well, so we decided to see if we could come here. And as we were getting old, as we are now, I mean, I’m 78 I think… or 77. Something like that. So we managed to come in here, to Foster Court. Well right opposite there’s a British Legion hall. And I kept looking at it, and I thought it’s really nice, because it’s old-fashioned. It’s 1940s big, air force shaped… kind of like a Nissan Hut, a big one. So I went over there one day, and it’s the British Legion that run it, and they didn’t have a bar. And I said, “Do you ever rent the hall out?” And they said, “Yeah.” Because by this time over the years I’d realised it’s alright playing in pubs, I’d played in so many pubs. You build them up and then the publicans for some reason leave, and someone else comes in and they don’t want it anymore. And you have to come out. So I thought to myself, what I’ll do, I’m not going to go in a pub anymore. I looked around and when I saw that hall, I went over there and he said, “Yeah,” he said, “but the only time we’ve got is a Tuesday afternoon.” I went, “Oh, Tuesday afternoon.” I thought, “Oh, god. No evenings?” They said, “No, no, it’s all rented out.” So I said, “What about from 12 till 3?” “Yeah, that’s free.” So I said, “Alright, then, we’ll book it.” And I thought, what have I done? And Nancy, my wife, says, “Oh… [High-pitched whine]”, all scared. So I said we were doing what we normally do, we tell everybody, we put it in the Jazz Guide and we’ll do it next month and see what happens. We’ll only do it once a month. So we did it, and I spoke to the band, who now consisted… well, I call them the All Stars now, and they all all-stars. I’ve got… I don’t know why he does it, but he says he loves playing with us, is Denny Ilett. He’s the top trumpet player in the country. I mean, that man, he won’t say it himself, but he’s a genius. He can mesmerise you with what he plays, it’s beautiful. And then there’s the younger chap called Tim Huskisson, who’s a fantastic piano player, absolutely incredible piano player, but he plays clarinet absolutely just like… well, he can play it just like Benny Goodman. He’s just absolutely wonderful, and he plays the classics as well, and he really is a lovely bloke. And then I’ve got the old East Side Stompers brother, because I like a good solid, bass-drummy drummer, and he’s one of them. Bill Finch is on the drums. And my old mate Bob Allbut, from Southend, we call him Southend Bob, and he plays banjo. And then a really good friend of mine, John Sirett who plays double bass, who used to run the Black Bottom Stompers band years ago, but they’re all disintegrated now, and he plays a lot of New Orleans jazz with a very famous man who also played with Monty Sunshine years ago, Sonny Morris. Sonny Morris’s band, a really good New Orleans band for years, and John was always his arranger and his bass player. But Sonny passed on, they are all gradually going down the hole and so that’s the All Stars. We did it, and they said they would all come along and play for free, for the first one because we don’t know what’s going to happen. I said, “What do you reckon?” And they said, “Yeah Tuesday afternoon, we would never have worked Tuesday afternoon. We’ll come along and see what happens.” Well, the first day we managed to pay them their money. I couldn’t believe it. The people come in, we charged them a fiver on the door, there’s no bar, you bring your own food and bring your own beer, and I think that’s one of the things about it. And it’s in the afternoon, it’s finished at 3 o’clock, you come in… and we had quite a nice crowd. And the whole band said… we’ve never played in a hall before, and the acoustics of it are incredible. Denny, Denny, just being a master trumpet player, said, “Oh, I’ve never had acoustics like this!” And acoustics to a brass player and a proper instrumentalist is like… it’s almost like your instrument talks to you. You don’t have to hardly touch it and it plays, it’s the acoustics. It was wonderful. We’ve been doing it now for four years, and we’ve never had a bad week, and it’s got more. We get good money and we play all the… if get a good week, everybody gets it, and if we don’t, well, we don’t, but we’ve never ever gone back to the basic. We’ve always got more than what a normal jazz clubs pay. And we only ever charge a fiver to come in. We don’t do it in January, we have one month off. Just forget it, give everybody a breather, give them a chance to go somewhere else, but they always come back. In February it’s packed out again. And yeah, it’s good. That’s it, really.

Interviewer [1:09:22]: Well, I mean, you said you’ve done so much different stuff, and even with people coming and going, you’ve always kept with the jazz in various guises, so what’s motivated you to keep going in different roles throughout the years in different bands?

Tidiman: I don’t know. I think you have to be a certain sort of person. I mean… everyone says, whenever they see me play, they say, “You’re enjoying it so much”, and I think that’s the answer. I enjoy it so much when I’m playing, I can be… I’ve got a terrible bad back, but when I play it all goes away. I just love what I’m doing so much, and I like to help people as well. In fact, I’ll tell you one little story. Obviously you get this… happens to everybody… you play and you’ll get someone come up and say, “I’m learning the clarinet. Have you got any tips? Can you give me a tip?” Or, “I’m learning trumpet,” or, “I want to learn the banjo,” and all that, you know. At this specific time, a few years ago, I thought about it and I thought, “Who are these guys who want to learn?” The only way really, really to learn… it’s like, how do you ride a horse? Well, if you get on it, you’ll ride it. You know, you’ve got to get on it to do it, haven’t you? But when you’re learning an instrument, you’re alone, you haven’t got anybody with you unless you join a class, and then it’s like school again. That’s not good. So I got these guys together. My trumpet player at the time, he played trumpet, and he said, “But I can’t play the clarinet. I’ll get a clarinet.” Because he was basically no good. And there was this rock and roll guitar player who said, “I’ll get a trumpet.” So he got a trumpet. I went on the tuba, I got a tuba, and there’s a guy who wanted to learn to play trombone so he went on trombone. His friend Derek… they were all ex-policemen, men like this… Derek got the banjo, he learned a set of banjo chords in one key, all the chords of C on the banjo. And he had this capo, and every time… if we played a tune in another key, he’d just move this capo up and play the same fingering, but it’d be the next key, so he didn’t have to learn everything. So he played the banjo. Rob, who’d never played drums in his life… Jack went and got this drum kit he’d bought down in Bethnal Green Road for seven quid. [laughs] Painted it all up, load of skulls and everything, and all the girls, they were all into it. They all made uniforms for the band. And Derek was… I’m terrible on second names, I can only remember first names… but he was a safety officer in the police force, and he used to go round… he was retired, but he used to go round to places like this, old people’s homes and checking things out. He said they’re dying for entertainment, so if we go along and just learn a few tunes and go and play for them, it won’t matter if we play any good because they’re all deaf anyway, you know. And they used to love it! They used to have cakes ready for us. We never used to charge them any money. It was just a Monday night, we’d go in and we’d all set up, and have a list of tunes and try and play these tunes. And gradually we learned these instruments. I learned how to play the tuba, and Derek learned how to play the banjo, and Ernie learned how to play the clarinet, and gradually it got better and better, and we found we had a style. Because with this tuba, we had the style of a band that was Walt Disney-orientated call the Firehouse Five. Walt Disney Studios, the artists there, used to have a lunch break, for their hobby, they got this little band up in the restaurant, and they used to play, and they’d become… they called themselves the Firehouse Five. I mean, they’d got really good. They really were good. And they’ve made… there’s films of them. If you go to YouTube and you put in the Firehouse Five, you’ll see them and they’re fantastic, you know, and they play this lovely sort of happy-go-lucky stuff, you know, I love anything like that. And so we got to a stage where were good, and being policemen, they were… they’re not like me, I’m a bit haphazard, it all comes to me as I do it. But Derek was methodical, you know, everything he did, he’d write it down, so every tune we ever played, he wrote it down, what key it was in, what the arrangement was, and everything. So he had a book and he’d just open it up and say, “We’ll play that page.” And it was all these tunes, you see, so I rang up Tony Howard of the Colchester Jazz Club. Well, he rung me and said, “George, do you know any good bands? Because we’re running out of bands. You know, so-and-so has packed up. We need a band for next week.” So I said, “Well, if you want to give them a try, you can try… we call them the Second Liners, the Second Line Jazz Band.” Because second liners… in New Orleans, when all the parade bands go down the street, you know, you get the band and then behind them you get all the people dancing and they’re called the second line, second liners. They’re the people learning what they’re doing. So we call it the Second Line Jazz Band, and he said, “Oh, I never heard of them.” I said, “You can take a chance,” and he said, “Book them, book them, if you recommend them.” So we did it, we went down there, and we were all nervous, we were all scared, but off we went and they loved it. It was great, it was. By this time we’d got a piano player as well, so it was a seven-piece band in the end, and we were playing all this lovely old Firehouse Five music like [sings] daaa-da-daaa-da, and all that sort of stuff, you know, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. It was really good. They loved it, and they give us loads of bookings. About every two months we got a booking from there. Then they did a… we got into the Lord Napier, and the pubs that I knew and the clubs I was getting the band… and it went on for, oh, a couple of years. It was really really good. We made a record. But sadly then, Jack the trumpet player, who was our leader, I mean I used to make out that I didn’t know anything, I just played tuba and sometimes I played the banjo… he had a stroke, poor Jack had a stroke, and he was the youngest one in the band, he was only about 50 and he just had a stroke and he completely lost all his reasoning. He didn’t die, but he was all dead down one said and he had to go in a home. But when you went to see him, he sort of livened up, so… I’ve got a friend of mine, Arthur Bird who’s a lovely bass player, but he’s an engineer, and I said, “Here, look, you reckon you could make a harness?” And he made this harness for Jack, and his trumpet fitted in… the bottom of the trumpet fitted in this bracket, so he could just sit there, and the trumpet would be right in front of his mouth, and with his right hand he could play. And we did about four gigs with him like that. But oh… he was so funny, old Jack, when he was alive. He played, but gradually he sort of… he faded away. But one of the most funniest (sic) stories that ever happened with Jack was that the trombone player, Mike, used to be the announcer, Mike Goodman he name is, he lives in Hornchurch, around Goodmayes, somewhere like that. He was very comical, and Jack was all very like Bix Beiderbecky sort of build, smart like that, and he went and bought himself a pair of patent shoes, because we used to do ourselves all up. And we had this lovely gig in this big Servicemens club, and it had a polished floor and a big carpet, and we were standing on this carpet and there was a ridge in the floor. And Mike said to Jack, “What time we starting?” Jack said, “I’ll just go and ask the bloke,” and he walked across the stage. “Oh good! We can start now,” and he comes scooting back and his foot caught the edge of the carpet, and it ripped the whole sole off his brand new patent shoes, all flapping down like this! [laughs] So Shirley, she’s sitting there, she says “hold on, I have got an elastic band” and she gets a bright yellow elastic band out and puts it over the black patent shoes So we say “Ok Jack, flap us in”. We all collapsed. One of the funniest things I ever seen on a stage. We all fell apart. With Jack, it all faded away after that, we couldn’t carry on without Jack.

Interviewer [1:20:38]: Do you find then that the connections you’ve made throughout the years in jazz, that you tend to have a community vibe, you keep in contact with the people even as you move on to different things?

Tidiman: Oh yeah, oh yeah. I mean, most of the jazz musicians that are around now, they’ve played for me or I’ve played for them. It was only on Sunday I was playing for Mike Barry and his band right over in Bocking in Kent at the Barn. He’s got a Yerba Buena type band. It’s an eight-piece, big jazz band. All the guys… he’s using guys I used to play with with Bill Brunskill years ago, like he’s got Hugh Crozier on the piano. You meet everybody. There is sort of a clique. Everywhere you go, musicians… rock and roll, I assume it’s the same with them, really, all the guitar players all know one another. You do, you just enjoy one another’s company. There’s very rarely anybody you don’t really like. There’s people who upset you, of course, someone who takes your job. You always get people that stab you in the back. They’re very far and few between, Most of the guys are happy to be with one another, it’s good, it’s a wonderful world out there with musicians. I mean, I’ve been all over the world, I’ve been to Florida and America, I spent a lot of time in Colorado, and Penn State, Pennsylvania, played with bands over there, and honestly, it doesn’t matter who they are. In Florida I was playing with Jack Teagarden’s trumpet player, you know, and they were all happy. My friend took me to a club there where all of the musicians just… in Florida they have a lot of musicians, like the old band musicians used to end up in Florida because it was a nice place to retire because of the heat, nice and warm, and they’d buy houses there. And they’ve got these music clubs there. In the afternoons you go in, and you sign your name down, and they might have 10 trumpet players, six trombone players, three piano players, ten drummers, or whatever. And what they do, they go, right, and they put a band together of all these guys. And they just pick them out and make a band up. And they say “You’re in band 5 and you’re in band 9.” You listen to whoever’s on the stage and they play three numbers and they get off, and then the next band goes on, number 2 band goes on. And you meet all kinds of people like that, and you just make music, play standards and stuff like that, it’s really good. But if you go anywhere… we went to Australia, my boy lives out there now, and I didn’t know any jazz bands there at all. I just went online and I thought to myself, let’s see if there’s any jazz, and it said there was some jazz in this place called Balmain I thought, where’s Balmain? So I got in a cab and I went down to Balmain. It was this pub, and I went in the pub, funny name, Emnity Town Hall I think it was called. I thought it was going to be a hotel, but they’re pubs. And I went in there and it was just like walking in an east end pub. There was a bar and a stage up there and a guy’s blowing, and it was just great. And when they came off, I just said to the bloke, “I like the band.” “Oh, are you from London?” So I said, “Yeah, I play.” “What do you play?” “Trombone.” “Oh, we haven’t got a trombone today. Can you come back next week and I’ll bring a trombone? I said “I haven’t it brought with me I am only on holiday”. They said “We’ll bring a trombone.” And the guy I was talking to was a lovely trumpet player called Jeff Ball, and he’s been to England and… I think Jeff’s passed on now, because this is a couple of years ago, not too long ago. Anyway, I got there and sure enough he had this trombone, and said, “Have a blow on that.” And I went brrrrrrp and I blew it, and a great big load of dust came out and went all over him, and he went, “It’s been on my wardrobe for about ten years.” Cor blimey. Anyway, I played it, and he said, “Oh, that’s good. Do you want to come to a gig with us?” And next thing he gave me a gig and he had never seen me before. If you can play, you just get accepted. But I suppose if you can’t play and you’re not very good, they’ll just say, “Oh, that was alright, mate. Thank you very much.” And that’s it. If you can play, they think “oh he’s handy we can use him tomorrow”, and they did. I’ve had guys who… Max Collie went to Japan, he got a job in Japan, because Max was a right hunter for jobs, and they had a wonderful time over there. You just can’t associate Japanese people with Dixieland, can you? But they love it! They absolutely love it. And the Spanish absolutely go barmy. Do you know we played in Asturias, we were there for a week and we did some concerts in these remote places, and we thought, “Oh my god, where are we?” We were in this big old hotel-y looking place, it was sort of funny, and it was in the afternoon and all these little kids came in, and we thought, “Oh, blimey, little kids.” And then more people came in and more people came in, and in the end we had to start, and we started playing, and they really went mad. All the little kids all clapping, whereas here they’d all go, “Oh,” and walk away. That happened to us. I’ll tell you when that happened to us once, we were in a place called Palhaco and we were playing in a pub, or a restaurant really, and we finished at 11 o’clock and this bloke come over, an American, and said, “Will you come across and play at my disco?” And we said, “When?” “Right now?” I remembered my Al Capone days, and I said, “Yeah, what do you reckon, lads?” Because we hadn’t got to go home anywhere. We went across and we walked in… now, I mean, you ask any jazzman and disco to a jazzman is like, ugh, terrible. It was all boom boom boom, lights going and pulsating, gyrating around, and I said, “No, it won’t be no good here, we can’t play…” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’ll be alright, it’ll be alright.” Dennis Fieldman , my trumpet player, said, “I can’t go in there, I can’t bear this noise.” Because it was deafening, you know? “If you want us to play,” I said, “you’ve got to turn all this off.” And he went, “Okay.” And he went up and went clunk, and the lights all came on and the music stopped, and he went, “[imitating Spanish]”, all in Spanish, you know. “I’ve got this band from England, they’re going to play.” And we had an amplifier about that big, it was 30 watts, we just stuck it on the side and we switched it on, and we had one mic. And we said, “Right, off we go.” And all of a sudden they all got on the floor and started dancing, and they went mad, they loved it. They were all jiving. I’ve got photos of them. You want to see them? Dancing, really enjoying, they loved it. What it is, and this is what a lot of people don’t realise… I believe, and a lot of people don’t give them credit, that a lot of the jazz, the rhythms from jazz, we know it comes from Africa, the beat comes from Africa. You can’t beat that beat. But you put it with Spanish music and you get this mix, and I think that’s why the Spanish like it, because if you go round the restaurants sometimes, you see the Spanish blokes if you lived there for a little while, not the particularly English ones, but where the Spanish go, and they’ll sing. They’ll sing these songs, and they’ve got sticks, pieces of bamboo and they slit them like that so it’s like a slapstick, like maracas and they go [imitates sound] and they get this rhythm going, and when you see it, it’s the same rhythm. It’s the Spanish. The Spanish love it. English bands now are going out to Spain and getting more work there because they really enjoy it. It’s the place to go!

Interviewer [1:31:26]: And again, you’ve worked all over the world as well. Would you say there have been any structures in place, in the UK or elsewhere, that have helped support either your band activities or any other jazz activities you’ve been involved with?

Tidiman: Could you say that again?

Interviewer: Sorry, structures that might have helped or supported you in any way, to get gigs maybe or to work in different places in the UK?

Tidiman: I found that agencies and stuff like that are really no good. They’ve got nothing to do with jazz. They don’t understand it. I think that the only way to help yourself in jazz is you’ve got to find a place that you think your band would play well in, and then talk to the people that own the place into hiring you. And once you do that, once they hear it and see something, they’ll accept you and this is what happens. I don’t think anybody’s… you really follow the trail. It’s like for instance if you went on holiday and you went down to Devon, and you just sort of saw a place in the paper and you went down to Devon, you fancied Devon, and you get to the hotel, and you go, “What’s going on around?” And you look down and if you see a jazz club, and you think, “Oh, I’ve got to go there,” so you go there. And whoever’s been down there playing, and you go down there, and there it all is. There’s guys playing.

Interviewer [1:33:20]: And do you find that in terms of communicating to the audience as well, has that changed over time? How you get an audience in, and how you get people in to play with your band and stuff like that?

Tidiman: Yeah, it’s not really changed. It’s all the same thing. People don’t really change. The only thing that does change is because the media, the actual television and radio and the actual record producers… they can’t see money in jazz. They can’t see it. They never ever did. It’s always been a struggle to get it known. Even in the early days, when jazz was big and bold, nobody wanted it, nobody liked it. For some reason, the commercial side… and what’s happened is because of this is there’s virtually no jazz on the television. There’s no jazz. I mean, look at Jools Holland. A prime example. Jools Holland used to come down to my pub, The Prince of Orange, when he was young and ask to sit in to learn to… he couldn’t even play the blues. He couldn’t play the piano to save his life. And Ronnie Weatherburn, my piano player there, he used to sit in the interval and teach Jools Holland how to play the blues. Every Friday night he used to come in there, and with his parents, and do you know what? All that time he did that, not once has he ever mentioned anything about that, and he’s never once had a jazz band, and yet he used to come down to learn this skill from us. And he sits there going, “Yeah, I can play the blues, of course I can. I learned it from George but you know I am not going to tell anybody.” And he won’t help you. You know what I mean? You know, I mean, he’s wrapped up in all his… you know? He’s got on. People are like that. I don’t know what it is. They don’t seem to want to put jazz on.

Interviewer [1:35:42]: Do you think that other sorts of music such as things like rock and roll and stuff had an impact on jazz? On its popularity, or has it always been that way?

Tidiman: Rock and roll is just another form of jazz, anyway. It’s a simpler form of jazz. If you listen to any early blues, you know, it’s da-di-da-di-da-di-da-di-da-di-da-di-da… It’s called iambic pentameter, that is, in technical terms. And that’s what all tunes are. All it is is… if you listen to it, you know, one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready now go, man, go… it’s the same thing, it’s the same thing over and over again. The old blues was like repeat the first line, repeated it again, and then put a tag on. And that’s what it is. It’s just a different way of doing it. Each generation comes along, seems to go for the younger people like they are, and listen to what they’re doing. And that is what progress is, but you get to a certain stage… most of the people, what I was trying to say was, so much of this that young people are brought up with, they don’t even know about our music at all because they’ve never heard it. All they can hear is this sort of whizz-bang stuff that they keep playing. They’re literally just bashing and crashing and screaming and banging, ugh, a cacophony of noise if you listen to them. It’s like a distraction. Whatever you’re doing, you’ve got to look, it makes you want to listen to it, and the thing is if you look at it, then it sells you something. You look at your computer. Within two minutes of you trying to put something in, something comes down the side that says, “Why not buy Robertson’s jam?” Or whatever. And that’s all there is to it. They’re making money. They’re not interested in art and people, they just want to make money, and the fastest thing to make money is to make a noise that makes people look, and if you can get people to look at something, that’s good. And that is why it’s gone from normal stuff to… I mean, I’ll give you a for instance. Last week, we had two blokes come here to entertain for the Christmas party. I couldn’t believe it. I went there to see because I had a job transfer, I’m playing tonight instead of last Wednesday. Last Wednesday in this place, I’m sitting there, and in walks a bloke that’s going to be in the band. He comes in and he puts his amplifier down like that. He goes out, comes back and brings in another amplifier. Then he goes back and brings a big speaker. Then he goes back, brings another big speaker in. Then he goes back and he comes back with a great big Bose speaker, the latest, nine feet tall. I mean, the room’s only… you’ve seen our room, our reception room downstairs. And I said to him, “Hold on. How many’s in the band?” He said, “Only two of us.” I said, “Two of you?” I got up and went round the back, because I thought, it’s going to be deafening. The speakers were bigger than my television, and there’s two of them. Then he brings in a piano with another amplifier, then two guitars, he’s got a guitar and he’s got a guitar, and all they’re doing is singing. All this stuff, it’s just like backing tracks, they’re not playing. All the music’s been played. They’re just singing along to it. And it gets louder and louder and louder, and they think this is what it is. You go into any pub and these groups, they’re playing as loud as you can possibly, possibly be. The bigger the speakers, the better it is, because they think noise is what people want. And people are talking to one another and going, [shouting] “Yeah, you want another drink?” [laughs] “What?!” It’s crazy, and the young people now are brought up with that. They think that’s normal so they don’t know any better. It’s only until you get older when you come to your senses, and suddenly you hear something, and now and again, right out of the blue, suddenly someone will bring a nice ballad out with some nice music, and you go, “Oh, isn’t that nice?” Suddenly you realise that there’s something out there that’s nice and really good. In the 1940s and 50s, fantastic songs were done. If you listen to the 70s, the music then, like old Cliff Richards and Marty Wilde and all of them sort of people, although they’re pop stuff, and Lulu, but they just sing songs, Sandy Shaw and all those, at least they used to sing songs with a melody, nice with lots of chords. Now it’s just crash, bang, wallop. This noise is just noise. Even the drummers, bashing the drums any how…

Interviewer [1:42:10]: Would you say that that’s been one of the biggest challenges facing you in jazz, trying to compete with that, or have there been other challenges that you’ve faced as well in the jazz industry?

Tidiman: Well, the challenges are… it never affects me because, me personally, because I am my own music-making machine. If I want to play, I just go anywhere and I start playing. I could set up a place anywhere, and within a while, I’d have a set. I’ve done it all my life. It just happens. I mean, like, tonight I’ll be going along to… we’ve only got me on trombone, and Derek Preen on the double bass and Ollie Benson on the banjo, and you can’t get in the place. And it’s packed, it’s absolutely packed. And we have maybe a different trumpet player, or a lady the other week on clarinet. That’s a little thing. And we just do it mainly just for our own pleasure, really. It’s what you make. Now and again, people get breaks. I mean, look what happened to Kid Ory. Kid Ory had a big band years ago in the 1920s, and he was running dances all over New Orleans, and then the big boys decided he was doing too much and put the squeezes on him and shut him down. So him and his missus just said, “Well, we can’t stand this anymore,” and she had some relations in California so they moved to California. And he went to California and started a chicken farm, you know, and completely forget it. For a few years, him and his brother doing chickens and stuff like that, and all of a sudden he got a few gigs in a band. He got interested again so he wanted his own music, so he sent for a couple of guys in New Orleans and they come out to him, and he started a little band up. Well, that was fine. He was only playing these gigs like we do, but one day Orson Welles came in and heard the band and thought it was the best thing since… incredible. And Orson Welles at the time was a very famous film star, and he had a radio programme. And he was the one who did the famous programme. He came on, because he was such a dictatorial voice, Orson Welles, and he came on the air and he threw panic through the whole of the United States. He came on and, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have a very important announcement here. We’ve just been invaded from the planet Mars. They’ve taken over Washington and blah blah blah.” And he went on and on and on and on. Everybody thought it was real, and it caused chaos all over the States, and it was all a hoax and then the programme went off. He didn’t half get told off for it, but it was that exact programme people listened to. Anyway, he had this programme, and what he did, he put Kid Ory’s band on in the middle or at the end of the programme, just to play a couple of tunes. And they did, and immediately it went on the air and it was regular, every week the band came on. It suddenly took off, and Ory got recording contracts from Good Time Jazz, he got a big recording contract and made records. It was one of the first records… revivals, the revival bands because there was no jazz in them days. It had all sort of died out, the 20s had finished, all gone. And that’s what started it. It was only because a famous person got him on the radio, and everybody knew about it. It was the same with Benny Goodman. Benny Goodman travelled all over the States with his band, and he was virtually unknown. It was a good band, fantastic. Until they went to California again, and went to the Palomar Dance Hall. And Palomar Dance Hall had one of the earliest broadcasting systems. They played the music there, and then broadcast over so many states. It became a hit, it was the biggest draw. That’s the power of it. But they use it to… I can’t say the words, they use it to saturate in the wrong way. They don’t seem to realise that… well, it’s our belief, we believe this Dixieland music is the best stuff. All I can say is, everywhere I’ve ever played, don’t matter where it is, as soon as we start playing, people start smiling and tapping their feet. What more could you want?

Interviewer [1:47:55]: And would you say you’ve got any particular achievements from over the years that you’re particularly proud of?

Tidiman: Well …learning how to play the trombone! [laughs] I’m proud of that, because I never thought I’d ever be able to do anything, actually. When you’re young, you think, “I can’t learn anything.” It’s doing it. If you put your mind to anything, I would say to anybody out there, take up music because music is a passport to anywhere in the world. If you can play anything well, like let’s say piano, if you can play the piano, or play a good instrument, it’s an open door in any language. You can play anywhere. I mean, Sidney Bechet in the turn of the century was playing in Russia with a band. In Russia! Can you imagine, from America to Russia? Actually, it’s not that far, really, from America. There’s pictures of him in the books, you see Sidney sitting there, done up like an Indian bloke. He’s got a feather in his hat and everything, playing his clarinet, in Russia. There’s no boundaries to music. It’s just that one day it’ll come back, like in the 60s suddenly it was trad jazz. Trad jazz suddenly clicked and jazz was in. Chris Barber was fantastic, he started it, Ken Colyer, all those guys, Sonny Morris and all of them, Alex Welsh, Humph himself, Mick Miller. It was great for a good 20 years, and then it died out. Then it goes. Because the promoters that loved it suddenly don’t promote it anymore, because young people come along, they don’t want all that, they want something new.

Interviewer [1:50:13]: Was there a particular area of jazz, then, that… it sounds like you’ve kind of been in different bands and all sorts of stuff. Was there a particular kind of jazz that you yourself think is particularly special, that influenced you?

Tidiman: The most influential, I would say, is Louis Armstrong. Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, Johnny Dodds and all those in those Hot Five recordings they made that were completely different to anybody else at the time, and they still stand up as a force to be reckoned with. Nobody can just say, “Oh yeah, I can play that.” You can’t. You try and play it. It takes years of study to play anything that they played, and when you think at the time they were only 18 and 20-year-olds that were doing it, and playing to big halls and that to get the sound properly and all of that sort of stuff. Fantastic. That was fantastic. Those early records that they made, I’ll always bring with me all the time, because every time we play that comes out in you. I would say to anybody, if you’re learning, it’s study them first because if you don’t study them, those early Hot Fives and Jelly Roll Morton records… I mean, it’s alright saying, “Oh yeah, I’ll play something like it,” but… what we used to do, what I used to do with my New Era Jazz jazz band, alright, we’ll learn to play and we’ll copy them, exactly what they’re doing. We really worked hard and learned the solos. And people would say, “I don’t want to copy a solo, I want to play my own thing.” So I’d say, “Yeah, you can play your own thing when you can play their thing.” When you can do what they can do, then you can do your own thing, but if you don’t ever do what they do, you’ll never play anything as good. I used to make them… they all had two choruses each, so they played the original solo from the record, or as near as they could get it, and then second one they could do what they liked. But at least it proves to the people, because there’s always going to be someone sitting in the audience who knows the record back to front, saying, “He never played Johnny Dodds’ break there, did he? Not much good, these lot.” And you’ve only got to do something wrong to an audience, and they don’t like. But one of the most amazing things is, you always have mistakes go wrong, it always does, because especially when English bands play. American bands are so polished that they never make mistakes, or very rarely, but English bands don’t meet up for weeks and then they get up and play these fantastic things, so things do go wrong. And sometimes things go terribly wrong, and you find the piano player’s playing the wrong tune, and you come off the stage at the interval and think, “Oh, what a bloody performance that one was.” And the first thing that you bump into is a bloke who says, “Oh, it sounds fantastic tonight.” And you think, does it? “Oh yeah, the band is really on form tonight. Oh, really good.” And you feel like saying, “Half the audience haven’t got a clue what you’re doing.” [laughs] That’s exactly true, that is, but I think you should learn the classics first, then go on. I suppose if you was a classical musician, it’s no good trying to play Debussy or Beethoven without absolutely studying and listening to the music. Years ago, for us to learn records, we had to get a 78 and a gramophone, wind it up and put it on, and then take it off and keep putting it on to learn that piece, whereas today it’s all digital. You press buttons, and if you want an hour of King Oliver, you get the whole of King Oliver’s recordings all at the press of a button. It took years even to get one record of these records years ago. You just couldn’t get them. But now everything’s so easy, and piano players they want chord books, they just get a chord book and it’s got all the tunes in it, everything you want, so go out there and bloody well learn, because it’s all in your hands now.

Interviewer [1:55:00]: Good advice. And just finally, then, what’s the future for you in terms of jazz and going forward in terms of the band, the club?

Tidiman: Well, happily, I’m happy with my lot at the moment. I’ve got a lovely lady, and we’ve got this nice little flat. I’ve got a little club across the road, and I’m happy. And I just keep playing as long as I physically can, because that’s all you can do. Every time I go out, I love it. Every single time, you know. I never ever sort of go out and think, “Oh, I’ve got to go out and play tonight, oh…” I think you can do too much, I think you can go out… I get worried about some of the guys in my band, who are really good players and play for everybody. They go out and they play every day, and the afternoons as well, and I get worried. I say to them, “Take it easy. Don’t play so much. Don’t do too much.” You know, because it becomes a labour rather than a pleasure. A little bit and then it’s good. Anyway. There you are.