George ‘Kid’ Tidiman

So you're from Bethnal Green, but of course obviously become very important within Essex. What were your beginnings as a musician?

 

Well, I just got interested in Jazz from going to see The Alex Welsh band, I didn't know too much about Alex Welsh. It was at the Wood Green Jazz Club.

 

At the Fish Mongers Arms?

 

Yes, at the Fish Mongers Arms, and we went over there initially to go girl hunting [laughs]

 

What, were you a Teddy Boy in those days?

 

Well almost, yeah. I really wasn't full out. We were really smart in those days, you know, we had all our suits and stuff, but we went over there to look at the girls. Well the music took me by surprise. I've never heard music like it, although my Uncle used to bring records round to play, and I was familiar with Benny Goodman, I used to liked it. I just got knocked out by the music, especially the trombone player. I don't know why the trombone player just attracted me. 

 

Are we talking about the late 50's now?

 

Yeah.... I asked Roy Crivvings (?) about the Trombone because I was fascinated and he said get one and I got one. I was working in the City at the time. I went into Boosey and Hawkes up there in Shaftesbury Avenue and I went in there and said I wanted to buy a Boosey and Hawkes Imperial. I didn't know what a Boosey and Hawkes Imperial was but that's what Roy said I was to buy, which was the cheapest, good trombone. You can get American Trombones from, well at that price range, and all they had was a secondhand one for £50 and I was on £3 a week at the time, so I thought how am I going to get this? So he said I could buy it on the 'never-never', so that was the first time I got into debt [laughs]. My Dad didn't know about it and I got my friends Dad to sign for it and he signed the paper and I got the trombone and I smuggled it into the house and hid it as I knew my Dad would go absolutely potty. He was only earning £10 a week and I was on £3 and I bought a £50 trombone. I used to play up in my room to the records my Uncle gave me, like I say, Benny Goodman stuff and the Big Broadcast of 38 and all that sort of stuff he used to get on 78's in those days. I used to practice with a big sock in the end until I finally learned to play a tune, and when I found a tune I decided I'd tell him this is what I've got. I think he must've had a sneaking suspicion I'd got it because you can't actually keep a trombone quiet [laughs]. I played Basin Street Blues from him and he was quite impressed, so he encouraged me then.

 

So you were self taught then?

 

Yeah....

 

Blimey, self taught trombone. That's got to be very hard.

 

It was. You can play lots of instruments but the hardest is trombone. There's lots of trombone owners but it's easy to make growly noises and sort of slur about all over the place and not really know what you are doing but to play it probably.... for instance a clarinet player would never dream of doing that, the first thing a clarinet player would do is learn chords. He runs up and down the chords all day long until he's learnt them all. Then it always sounds good on the clarinet, I guarantee anybody could pick a clarinet up, even a little child, and within a week you could play Over the Waves or you could play just a simple tune, a simple nursery rhyme on that but you couldn't do it on a trombone. It would take you a year because it's so unruly from where you are on it, it's like a piano as well, piano you can play, you press a key and a note comes out. Anyway it took a long time and it took me years and years to get anywhere like I am now, and you never stop playing it, learning, always learning. It doesn't matter how much you know you always learn something else, and of course then I got better and better and I was fortunate in Bethnal Green that there was a little youth club there and I went into there on a Friday night they used to get all local musicians come in there, because Jazz was beginning to be good then; this was before the Trad Jazz. They wouldn't mind anybody because anybody was welcome because you were few and far between, and you would go in there and there would be a piano player, a bass player, drummers, about 2 trombones players, 6 trumpet players and 25 saxophone and clarinet players because like I say they are the easiest thing you can play. You'd all start off playing, and we used to play C Jam Blues from 7pm-10pm. That's one tune. It never stopped, all night long, and it was a fantastic opportunity to go around the circle to play as much as you could and pass it on to the next one and it was just the Blues and it just kept going. In the end you all gradually got to learn to play when to come in, it taught you to come out, it taught you to stop and start at the right time and play your instrument and build up some strength. You don't realise how much strength you need to play. To play you can practice. Even now I practice a while in a room and you think “I'll practice that tune” and you get on the stage and you try and play it on the stage and it's a different ball game. It's like learning to play football in the garden and then getting out at Wembley and trying to run the pitch at Wembley, you'd die. Your breath runs out, that's what happens. It's quite an effort. Anyway, but the enjoyment you get out of it..... I'll never forget I also went to this, Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, which was another youth club that helped young people, and they had a music teacher there and that's how I learnt to read music and ended up in the orchestra there playing classical music, and that was fantastic. When I first went there I couldn't read music at all. Because all I was trying to do is play Kid Ory or somebody, because I loved that music, and when I went there they played this classical music and you had to learn the music. We had a beginners section, intermediate section and a good section and I was in the learners. There were all ages there, ladies, old people, young kids like myself and he would write on the board the first 4 notes for the trombone, first 4 notes for the trumpet and so forth and all the way down the board. Everybody had to read their line together, and you'd think the first note there is a B flat, first position and the next is D, so you think that's the 4th position and the 3rd ones in F! So I got to play it, a B flat, a D and an F, and this is how you are thinking and you can't do anything and he counts in 1, 2,3, 4 and you are so tensed up, well I was, so you could just about play the first note and after that forget it. I couldn't even get to the next note. Well that took about 3 weeks and going home with about 4 notes, playing one after another. That's how hard it is on a trombone, well it was for me. Then one day I went back there and he said “Come on”, he was ever so patient, I can't remember his name, a really good looking bloke, he had a Rolls Royce, a 1920's Rolls Royce and I actually got a ride in that once, down the Whitecapel Road, brilliant. One day he counted us in and I played it, and I played it perfectly, and the elation I got from that! That inspired me for the rest of my life. I was so thrilled, and everybody who knew I was the only one in the school who couldn't play suddenly all cheered and I got congratulations and it inspired me see. But once I realised how you could it, it's like learning to swim, you don't know how to get your arm over but once you've done it you feel like a little duck that has taken off. It was wonderful, the most wonderful feeling, and I learnt from then on, and I kept going until I ended up in the orchestra and playing stuff like Beethovens Fifth and all that sort of stuff. It was pretty incredible. I did concerts, and then I realised it was interfering with my Jazz playing. Every time I went to try and play Jazz I was back to where I was. And so I made the big decision and to stop reading music. I know a lot of people can do both but, well, I can still read music, but I decided to concentrate on the styles, and I did. I carried on playing and gradually got together with some other guys, Jimmy Hurd was one; a clarinet player I met. I was working at WH Smiths at the time, I meet a man called Ernie Read, whose a trumpet playing, he's retired now. Ernie was a lovely trumpet player.

 

Are these all London guys?

 

They were all London. I worked in the City see. These are the very early years. And then we got together and we started playing and it was good. We used to practice in the Bull Pub down the Roman Road and then we got a gig at the Pied Ball in Islington. We sounded like the Hot 5 we thought, we thought we were the bees knees, but we didn't know any better. I've got recordings of those days and they are surprisingly good. Anyway, it was then I got married by then.

 

Are you in your late teens by now?

 

Yeah, gone in the Army, come out the Army. I tried to get in the band there but I couldn't get in the band, as they wanted me to sign on for 3 years. I passed the test there but he said he still couldn't have me in for less than 3 years, I thought no way am I staying in for 3 years so I went home to the wife.

 

What year did you leave the Army?

 

'56 I think. I was the last intake group, then we moved to Romford, so then I became an Essex boy. By that time I had a band round me and we ended up playing. I got a gig in the Elm Park Hotel, which is in Hornchurch and that was really where we came from, but I previously played at the Iron Bridge Tavern in Canning Town. The pub's still there, on the bridge. I was playing in there and this governor from this pub came in from Hornchurch and he said “Come to play for me”. I'd said I'd never heard of it, never heard of Hornchurch. Then we decided to buy a house and it was in Romford and it all tied up, so we moved to Romford and then we went down to this pub. We were 12 years in this pub. We started on the Friday night and the very first night there was the biggest fight you'd had ever seen. Apparently this pub used to be, we didn't know, was the bully boys pub on a Friday night, and smash everything to bits. Well this bloke took it over and he was an ex-copper and he name is Charlie Palmer, his brother Benny used to put on strip shows in the back rooms. So there was this huge fight. It was like the wild west. I actually saw barman lean over the bar and pick a bloke up and throw him in the air and as he came down he hit him and he went right across, knocking table and table and table over, we just kept playing, while we were playing nobody took any notice. If we just stood there we'd would have things thrown at us!

 

It's like a wild west saloon!

 

It was. It was incredible. The stage was beer crates. We were standing in the corner in beer crates and I said to the lads, “That's it we won't come back here anymore”. So when Charlie came up to us to pay me I said, “That's it thank you very much, good night mate”. He said “Be back next Friday?” and I said “No, no we ain't coming back”. He said “You've got to come back. It will be alright next week, I'll have it all sorted”. I said “Oh yeah, I've heard rumours about this place”, he said “No come back I'll double your money”. We said we'd give it another try. On the following week we went back he had a policeman on every door and the place was packed. From then on it was packed every Friday night, and it got so good he said could we do Saturday night? So I said “What instead of Friday?” He said “No as well as”, so we did the Friday and the Saturday. Then asked us to do a Sunday lunchtime as well, so we did a Friday night, Saturday night and a Sunday lunchtime.

 

Is this still the late 50's?

 

Yeah, it's getting into the 60's now. It packed out every time and he was really good to us, he really run a pub. We never saw one more fight in there. The people, the fans who used to come to that, still come to me now. To build it up I got in stars like George Chisolm and then Monty Sunshine came down and played with the band, Humph came down and played with us, Digby, all these.... Acker come down and Cy Laurie, who was a really good Essex player in the day. They all came down, I never forget.... I wish I still had it, there was a write up in the Melody Maker and it said "The new Era Jazz band: when they play it's like a Mississippi steam boat going full belt down the river". I've got recordings of all these, I've recorded everything, I've got them all. I'll sort them out one day. 

 

The original line up of the New Era, were they all living in Essex or were their London guys in there as well?

 

Well, Jimmy Heard lived in Potters Bar, Alan Gresty lived in Enfield, he was our trumpet player by then as Ernie had left and he'd gone over Woolwich way. I was living in Essex. The only other Essex bloke was Keith Nichols, I think he was living in Essex. 

 

Incredible success.

 

It was and we suddenly got on the TV. I wrote away to the BBC for an audition, we went up and we did a BBC broadcast for Humph on there. I've got all those records as well. It's fantastic, if you hear the band, you have to hear this band, I can't believe how fast we used to play, we used to play numbers so fast, you wouldn't believe it. He said at the end, at the end of the programme, “ Well what can we say? This band can definitely come back again”, but we never ever did. 

 

What show was that called?

 

It was BBC Jazz Club.    

 

What year would that have been?

 

I can't remember dates, don't know, early 70's I think. Oh, an interesting story happened in the 60's: We got one of our first jobs in a pub called the Blade Bone, Bethnal Green. I had Keith Nichols on piano, anyway, we played for two weeks there and we only got a few people in, then the third week we arrived at the pub and it was packed!, we thought we had made it. In the break I was told to see this man about some bookings, I went over to him and he turned out to be Ronny and Reggie Kray. They wanted us to play in their West End Club after we had finished in the pub.When I put it to the boys they wasn't keen, because we all had jobs to go to in the morning. so I told them we couldn't

do it, but if we had realised who it was we would have done it! Anyway, with that the whole lot of people in the pub left. It was their whole gang!. I always have wondered what would have happened if we had taken that gig.

 

Ha ha!

 

Anyway that was that. In the early 70's we did an Opportunity Knocks spot, the Hughie Green show, and we went on that. That was an experience and a half that one, that was incredible. When we went for the auditions we were playing in Putney in the High Street at the pub called the Trafalgar, we used dep for Max Collie. Max Collie used to be the band there and he went off on tour and he asked me to take his spot, so we had that in the afternoon and the audition came up for Opportunity Knocks at the barracks. When we got there, there was about 300 people in this great big hall all waiting to be interviewed. There was guys with dancing cats, there was monkeys, there was acrobats....... you name it they were all there. We thought “nah”, the old 'Bethnal Green know-how' came through so I went straight up to the organiser and I said “Look the band's got to go on at the Trafalgar at 1pm so we can't hang about here”. I said we'd have to go on now, we are too busy, so she said “Hold on a minute” and she went and spoke to the organisers and they said “You're on next”. So we went on next and we just did a number, I forget what the numbers was, I think it was Coney Island Washboard or something like that, and the whole place applauded the band because it was a really good band and they ran and got Hughie Green who wasn't there, he was somewhere else, and they got him in and they sat him down and asked us to do it all again for him, and he said “Put them in the next show”. And that was it, so we were in the next show. Now that was a bad move really because we went on, and when we went on we were up against the Bay City Rollers! [laughs]. At the time were unknown. Anyway, we carried on and we rehearsed a number called Chesapeake Bay, which was a good number and we had it all organised. We played this number, well they had a big machine, it must of been about 2ft wide by 3ft square and it was a giant big needle, the clap-o-meter. Well when we had finished this number, the clap-o-meter went right off the scale. We'd never seen it go off the scale like that, it just went 'whack'! And he said we won hands down. We had knocked everybody flat. So we were the winners that night and we got accolades, and on the Wednesday the BBC rang up and they said “You're still winning but we've got to get the last of the Scottish votes in”. The trouble is, he said, that if a Scotsman comes on the show the whole of Scotland votes for them, whether they are any good or not, just because they are Scots. And that's what's happened. They pipped us at the post, the Bay City Rollers! They went on to be famous and that was the end of that, but through that, because we'd been at the studios, the people who were running the studios, technicians, they've got a union, they liked the band because they saw it and they asked us to go and do their parties so we were going up to Teddington to do all the studio technicians parties. Of course who is at the parties is all the stars of the shows, and Edward Woodward was one of them. He thought we were fantastic. He became one of my friends and he took me and my wife up to the West End to see a show he was doing with Michelle Dotrice. It was a wonderful show. Then he asked us to come to Australia with him and I said “I can't. I can't go to Australia, I've just got married, I've got two little kids and a job” so he was a bit upset by that, but he did two TV spots with us, he took us on his show and 'The Woodward Thing' and we did a wonderful..... I'll tell you something nobody knows, was Leslie Phillips was on the show and the sketch we was in was a night time scene, gangsters, and we were the Jazz Band. He was supposed to be in Chicago. Edward Woodward had a knack, he could put his hands to his mouth and he could blow his lips and sounded just like a trumpet player, he was a wonderful entertainer. He could sing, he had a wonderful voice, he was a really nice bloke and he could play this trumpet, he had thought this sketch up, where we were playing in the band and Dora Bryan was a hotsy-totsy girl and she was his girl and then she bring in this big wedding cake for Bugsy, all alight, and in rehearsal when they were filming it she said “I've bought you a cake Bugsy” and he says “Oh that's lovely”, then all of a sudden the cake bursts open and Leslie Phillips comes out with a machine gun and he's suppose to shoot him. Well when he came out all the candles caught his tie alight [laughs]. All the studio dowsed him in water and he was soaked. It was so funny. They have probably wiped it now. I've got old photographs of us all on the stage, because we played and they had all the dancing girls and that was a couple of things we did and then we moved on. I don't know what it was with me, it's all right in TV and radio but it's......there are so many people in there that don't understand you, you know what I mean. It's hard to know what it is. If I go in a pub and you play, people stop and listen to you because they want to listen to you, because you're doing what you're doing. I get more of a kick out of that than it being all put on and people sitting there and people are expected to clap so they clap. We did a lot of shows with Edward Woodward all round provincial theatres, like Worthing, and all them sort of places. We went in there and he used to come out and sing and he had a piano player and we'd come on and play with him and then we'd do a number ourselves, then they'd had a comedian come on or something like that and that would be the first half. It was good but it's so time consuming: you got out at 7am in the morning and you don't get home til 11pm at night and you've been out all day doing this show and I had to go to work as I was working and things like that. You either give it all up and your family, this is why you see so much trouble in the theatre business, you get all this going on...... anyway the whole point was I really preferred playing in a pub. I preferred gigs with my mates, playing Jazz I liked and that was it in the end, no pressure, and that's how it's been ever since. We've just gone on forever like that.

 

Were you strictly New Orleans?

 

Yea, well it wasn't New Orleans. We basically wanted to play the classics and we played the Jelly Roll Morton tunes, Steamboat Stomp and Chant and the Pearls and stuff like that and ragtime pieces like the Entertainer, something with substance, my love was Kid Ory. I used to play all the Kid Ory, all that sort of stuff, Hot Five's. No one can play like Louis Armstrong, except for the man we've got today.

 

Enrico Tomassi?

 

No, not Enrico, we've got Denny Ilett. He's incredible. I've never heard anybody like it. I've played with Enrico, Enrico's fabulous, a lovely bloke, Denny is unbelievable, I can't believe what that man does, he never says anything, he doesn't ever push himself into doing stuff, suddenly I was looking at he's playing his trumpet, he's playing Panama Rag, with his trumpet upside down, with his knuckles. And then another tune, he was playing a solo and he stopped playing his solo, took his trumpet mouthpiece out and stuck it in in Bill's Tom Tom, there's a hole in the Tom Tom, he must of seen this hole and I bet he thought “My mouthpiece would fit in there” and he said “play the Tom Tom”, so Bill went on the Tom Tom he stuff his mouthpiece in the drum and started playing it and all these wonderful sounds came out, you never heard anything like it. That's the sort player, I mean when he play he plays, he plays so..... his technique is incredible, I wish I could play like him. We get on ever so well and he plays West End Blues like nobody's business. He's just unbelievable and he's just breathtaking.

 

Where's he from?

 

Denny is in Oxford. He's quite a long way out but he comes in and we play once a month. The first Tuesday of the month we play at the British Legion hall in Witham. We moved right next door to it. I saw this old vintage hall and I thought “Look at that hall”, I went over and had a look at it, thought this would make a perfect Jazz Club. So I spoke to the lads and asking them if they wanted to give it a try. So we advertised it as a Tea Dance in the afternoon on a Tuesday. We thought we'd give a difference, being in the evening, we figured we are all getting old now and even the punters are older. It's better if you come out during the day and stay in, in the evenings, so we had it in the afternoon from 12pm-3pm, and it took off and it's still going now.

 

Is the band still under the name The New Era Jazz Group?

 

Well I've changed it now, I've changed it because you get a variation. I mean, in the old days bands used to stick together, you were in that band and that was it, but nowadays,everybody goes after the money and you can't really hold anybody down. I mean for instance, Tim Huskisson plays with me..... well Tim plays for me, he plays for everybody but that's how you've got to take it, you just get the gigs and the one that pays the most pays the piper, and so I've decided to call it the Kid Tidiman All-Stars, and that's what I do. You know, sometimes I've got a different band, but it's the way I run the evening. Now everyone's told me this, I don't realise it myself, but I've got a stage presence, I've got a way..... winning the audience over and all the boys like playing. We did two on the trot in Colchester, they wanted us back, the Bay Club, Maldon asked us to do this special dinner evening and jobs come and go but no money in them really. I mean by the time you've paid your petrol and got something to eat and come home you don't get anything out of it at all but it's....... I'm ok, I like it like that. You are not tied to do anything. I've never signed a contract in my life. I won't sign a contract and that's it, you know, you sign the contract and you go to do a job and three of the blokes suddenly, one gets ill, one in a road car accident or something and the other one has been offered a tour of Germany or somewhere and you are then looking for different people all of a sudden, so then the promoter advertises 'so and so' is coming. It's happened to me a little while ago we were play and I booked a piano player but he couldn't do it and they got really upset, they refused to pay the band because he wasn't there. But they are quite well within their rights: it's like going into a shop and saying “I want that bag of coffee” and when you get it home there ain't no coffee in there, you wouldn't go back there. So, they did pay us, but a reduced fee, but we accepted it. But that's the sort of thing you can get into. I love doing it, and I think anybody should take up an instrument, especially, not specifically to earn money but they joy it gives you, I mean, I'm not a very educated person and it's taken me all over the world. I mean we was in Australia a couple of months ago and I walked into a pub and had a word with the trumpet player, told him who I was and I was on the stage within 5 minutes playing with him. The trombone player gave me his trombone and we played, and next minute he said “Can you do, 'so and so' tomorrow?” And I was off playing, and I said “No, I'll just do this one and that's it”. We had a lovely time and I played with the band and it was great. It was a bloke called Jeff Ball. He's pretty good. He's a similar guy to Kenny Ball. He's like a 'Kenny Ball' kind of bloke, only in Australia. Poor ol' Kenny's passed away. Kenny played for me loads of times. You know we used to have a job......one of the best jobs we had in the latter part, in Essex time, was another one we picked up in a pub where I was playing. I started this little Jazz Club up in the Conservative Club in Hornchurch much to the annoyance of Peter Corrigan again who is playing the Queens there. I was in his band anyway, but he didn't like it. We did it alternate Sundays. I took my band in there and we did it for a few years and it was great. While we were there one of the punters bought a lady in from the pub called the Matapan in Green Lanes and she come and listened to the band and asked us to play there.She wanted us on a Saturday but I've learnt from experience 'don't do Saturday nights in pubs'. I said “What's the worst night of the week?”, she said they don't get anybody in there on a Monday. I said “Alright, let's do it on a Monday because if you've got nothing and you start building it up then you've got something. If you've already got something and people go away then you've lost something”, and that's what happened. We went in on the Monday, put it about and the place packed out within two weeks. You couldn't get a seat in there. And it went on for another 10 years in there and I only had to pick the phone up and ring Kenny and say “You fancy coming down the Matapan?” and he'd come down.

 

Where's the Matapan? You said Green Lanes?

 

Green Lanes, yeah.

 

What in London?

 

No in Essex. Between Romford and Ilford. It was only a little pub. It was packed out. Everybody would come in there. We had several stars come down there but Kenny was the main one. He'd come frequently and have a great time.

 

When do you reckon that started?

 

Oh, that was in the late 80's, through to the 90's, every Monday night. That was good.

 

As the Kid Tidiman All Stars, what was it under this time, the band?

 

Well, I had different people then. Denny used to come occasionally but I had a wonderful trumpet player but he's passed on now, Terry Starr, and not a lot of people know of Terry Starr. Now Terry Starr was wonderful trumpet player, absolutely incredible. He was like the British equivalent of Bix Beiderbecke. Everything he played was like “ahhh”.

 

Where was he from?

 

To be honest I don't know, I think he was an Essex man, he used to drive a little old car.

 

In the early days with the New Era do you remember any of the other venues that were going on around that time for Jazz? Particularly in Essex? 

 

Yeah the Cellar in Ilford Lane. I never went there actually, but I started my own club in the Plough, in Ilford and that was a phenomenal success. In fact I keep having successes everywhere I go. I've never had a failure yet. Hard to say but it's true. The only thorn in the side with playing in pubs is publicans, they seem to put the most insensitive people, 99% of the time in charge of the pub, once or twice you get a really good publican who understands what you are doing, like the lady who run the Matapan, until she left. Then it all hit the fan again, because a new broom sweeps clean. Well there was the Lord Rookwood pub, that was in Ilford. That was a good pub, that was packed out every week. They had a full-sized mapleleaf grand piano in there, Ronnie Weatherburn played the piano and he used to play for Kenny Ball and he used to play in our band as well. He lived in Green Lanes, Dagenham. He lived right on the roundabout he did. Ron was a phenomenal piano player. Then the governor, they had a family tiff, he left and then the wife left and in comes an Irish man and the first night you couldn't find him, and at the end of the evening to get any money for the band it was a struggle, then he says to me, he doesn't want the band for next week, so I ask why and he said he had his own band, an Irish Ceilidh band coming in, so I walked out the back to tell the lads that that's it, that's the end. Within a month that pub closed and they pulled it down, breweries don't listen, but there was that one. The Wagon and Horses, that was near Stratford, almost Essex, there was loads of them, there's all different pubs you play in.

 

How long did the Plough last for when you ran a night there?

 

Well that went on for about a year. The first band that came to play for me was the Alex Welsh Band. I wasn't playing myself, I was putting it on as a promoter and I went out on a limb and it was a phenomenal success. I had posters on buses, I had posters on the tube stations. People signed up membership and I had the Keith Nichols Levity Lancers come down there I had Terry Lightfoot Band come down there, Max Collie's Band come down there, all these bands all came in, every week and they were all fantastic and the same thing happened then. The trouble was everybody was in the front bar where we were and nobody else was in the rest of the pub and because of that the publican wasn't selling as much beers in the other bars as he was in this bar and he started going abit silly so we came out of there and that was the end of that. The publicans ruin it. The most weirdest thing, and Peter Corrigan will remember this: he got us a pub, I forget where, it was called the Drummer Boy and the man who used to ran the Queens Theatre came out of it and went into a Council as a Musical Director and he wanted to promote Jazz in the area and got the bands to go to this pub. You won't believe this, we got to this pub and we were in the room where the band was to play, the guy said “Are you all in?”, he ran outside and put a chain around the door so nobody could get in. We asked what he was doing that for, he said “Well I don't want anybody in. I never booked the band, the council booked the band to put music in here but I don't want it. He said “I'm only working here, it ain't my pub and if there are loads of people in here I've got to keep running up and down in the cellar, pulling barrels. If no one's here all I've got to do is stand there. I can smoke my fag and I'm fine”. That is what he said. Well we played the whole session on our own in this pub. People kept coming to the door and couldn't get in because he'd chained the door. When we'd finished he came out and paid the band and then undone the chains and we went home. 

 

Didn't you play for Hugh Rainey?

 

I was with Hugh Rainey for quite a long while and eventually I come out because we sold our house and moved further up. We decided to spend some time in Spain, because Nancy's sister has a place out there, so we thought why not, because we have this caravan, you can only have this for 7 months, so 5 months I went to Spain and I play out there. Obviously that's not in Essex! (laughs) So Hugh had to get somebody else, so he got a replacement for me and so I come out of his band. I was in there the same time I was in the Mike Barry's Yerba Buena Jazz Band, playing all the Turk Murphy stuff. I can play the Turk Murphy style as well; I used to play Trombone Rag and all that sort of stuff. I had to leave that band as well. It was something we decided to do. I've been playing.....but there are times when you have got to say hold on a minute and so we went out there for 5 months and I didn't play. I did play little bits and pieces but not organised. Then we came back and feel refreshed. You know, once you are a leader you are always a leader. I just seemed to get people ringing up and asking me to do things. We play all the Jazz clubs, Chigwell Jazz Club, Hornchurch Jazz Club, Colchester and the Electric Palace. Is Chingford Essex? We've found a protégé there. We've got a young boy, he started at 11 years old and knocked everybody for six, with his boogie woogie playing, his name's Cody Lee. Cody and his Mum and Dad often come down to the Mill Beach and he gets on the piano. He's now 14 or 15. He comes down the Owl in Chingford as it's right on his doorstep. He's really good. Colchester Jazz Club want me to book him in, in the next group we've got in there. He's going to go places this boy, he's so good looking and he can sing and you want to hear him play the piano. He's absolute mustard. Another one we started off with who I give a lot of encouragement too is another Essex boy who is now getting famous, his name is Alex Mendham, you know Alex? When he used to come along when I was at the Queens set he used to come along and he used to try and play the clarinet. He was a bit, well what we call 'yipitee', it was because he's learning to play Jazz. It's not easy to play Jazz. In the early days Alex came along and a lot of people put him down, but he persevered and I gave him a few pointers, and anyway, he's gone and got himself a band (orchestra) and is playing in the Blackpool Tower, the Savoy..... He's a cracking boy. His Mum and Dad are lovely. That is where I get my pleasures, helping people and really having a good time. I very rarely go out without having a good time, I like to lark about and tell jokes and have some fun.