Jackson Sloan

How and when did Rent Party start?

 

Rent Party started around about 1979/80. The idea of the band started to fuse in my head. I was sort of collecting albums and records and I used to go to places that you used to go to like Pete Eden's in London Road and the Record Museum in Warrior Square. I often used to see you and your brother in there buying Doo Wop and I was buying Jump Rhythm and Blues and Big Band Swing stuff, and I was really interested in forming that type of band that covered sort of Swing and Jump Blues and Rhythm and Blues from early 40's and 50's sound. So it would have been around about 1980. The first single was with Dave Hatfield, who was the bass player in the Kursaal Flyers. He had a label called Waterfront and he approached us and we recorded for him . The first single was an original track called Rent Party. The flip side being a track called Letter Of Love. Two original tracks actually. The band Rent Party started off with myself. I knew Gary Plumley, the tenor saxophone player who was well known in the Essex area, and I asked him if he had any students and he told me about John Wilmott. I met John Wilmott and had a bass player and we did not have a guitarist or drums. We sort of fell upon people. There was a drummer who used to live in a newsagents. His Mother said he plays drums so I told him about the band and he joined. Then I had a couple of old school friends, Keith Harris on guitar and Kevin Elson on bass come along. We had a couple of other guitarists.

 

Wasn't John Wilmott’s sister in it?

 

John Wilmott’s sister joined later. Yes. Chris Wilmott. I am from Southend obviously and this guy in Southchurch, he played trumpet and used to go to my local youth club, and we brought him in, Steve Phypus, and that was the initial band. We used to rehearse above the Railway pub on a Saturday morning, so that is how the band started. We literally had 4 to 8 numbers and the landlord came up and said “Look would you like to play downstairs? I won’t pay you any money but I will give you a couple of beers”. There was only 3 or 4 of us at the time then and Keith the piano player. I said, “Yes OK let’s do it”. So we went down and all I had was a microphone going through a little H and H amp and one speaker and we started playing and we were building up a repertoire. I had gone to London and I had been to specialist shops like Rays Jazz, and there used to be a record shop in Dean Street that used to sell really sort of rare 78s and I picked a couple of Louis Jordan albums on Decca which were quite rare, and that would have been around 1981 and basically that is how the band started. Loving the music and going with the idea. It sort of evolved really from the Railway pub, rehearsing upstairs and playing downstairs on the Saturday night.

 

What was the Louis Jordan albums to do with the band?

 

Well I wanted to mix the styles up and I bought a couple of Louis Jordan singles but I had also bought these albums and there was a Decca one which was really good and I just felt I wanted to mix that style up with some of the Jump Blues combo’s like Roy Milton and Jimmy Liggins, Clarence Frogman Henry........ I tried to mix it all up really. Although we did Jordan material there was an awful lot of other sort of artists that the band covered in that genre of Jump Rhythm and Blues. I think it was about 1982/83 that Jo Jackson’s Jump and Jive album came out and that really gave the movement a big lift. We also, around about 1982, met up with a band from London called the Chevalier Brothers. We played a big disco in Kent called Xenons I think it was called and we had never heard o the Chevalier Brothers. I had seen Ray Gelato many years before in a Rock and Roll band called Dynamite at the Queen’s Hotel but I didn’t realise he had formed this little Jump combo playing Louis Jordan material the same as me, so it kind of then gave the movement this little, you know, cutting edge, two bands out there playing it. A little bit later Pete Thomas Deep Sea Jivers came along.

 

Was there no other bands around like yourself when you first formed?

 

I can’t think of any band. There were bands playing Rhythm and Blues but there wasn’t many bands playing Jump Jive music. I think that particular genre, Jump Jive or Jump Rhythm and Blues, I don’t think there were many people covering it at all. There were a couple of pub bands on a London circuit that was doing similar material but they certainly were not doing Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner-type material. I think around 1984 you had a great band from Birmingham, obviously Mike Sanchez and the Big Town Playboys come out, and again, they were part of that breaking 80's pub circuit where you had Chevalier Brothers, Rent Party, Big Town Playboys. There was also other bands on the Rock and Roll circuit that were beginning to pick up on the music as such and pushing the music. So it kind of created a little movement.

 

So you were playing in the Railway every Saturday night?

 

Every Saturday night. That would have been round about 1981/82 and we started with just about half a dozen people then we decided to go down the high street and put a load of posters out and people started to look at them. Who is Rent Party? We had a Humphrey Bogart figure on our poster lighting a cigarette and we just put them everywhere and gradually the pub started to get busier and busier and in the end the word spread and that's when Dave Hatfield came along. He had heard about the band and he came along and said “Look, you have got to do a single”. What happened then was that the other iconic venue in Southend was the Queens Hotel which had played host to so much great music over the years and especially I would say late 50's and early 60's. Some of the greats of Rock and Roll played there and roots music, and then you had obviously all the great Rock bands playing there in that beautiful ballroom that they had, so they said “Come along and play here on a Friday night”. I think on the opening night we packed it. We were very lucky we had a sound guy there who done the lights, he put up the music stands for us. People were blown away with it. It was really exciting for us because we got about three or four encores. We just felt “My God, this is really beginning to take off”.

 

You were getting hundreds weren’t you?

 

Yes.

 

That was quite weird. That was before your debut single?

 

Yes. It was indeed, and there used to be a DJ called Tony Hart who used to come down and DJ. Also you had the pub there, as you know; such an iconic venue. You had that electronica which was just starting up in the backroom, and bands like Depêche Mode and Human League and those bands which were starting. It was a unique place. You had a real vibe about the Queens Hotel.

 

Yes. That’s right. Were you playing there every Friday night?

 

Every Friday night. We must have played there for around about at least 8-9 months. The actual Queens changed hands and became Cinatras and they were not so much bothered about the ballroom any more. They weren’t interested. They had this policy where they had £5 all you could drink and obviously that created a lot of trouble there. I think the last time we actually played there was probably in the front bar. It was a Liverpudlian company. It was a great shame, and then we moved actually. There was a guy called Freddy who loved Rock and Roll and Rhythm and Blues and he started to put us on at the Westcliff Hotel. That run for a little while but we were already starting to build up contacts on the London circuit. We'd done things like the Whisky A Go Go and Gaz's Rockin' Blues in Dean Street. Also within that as well there was a new band that had come out and was actually managed by a Southend boy that used to be a member of The Darts called Bob Fish, and he managed the band called Roman Holiday and Roman Holiday had seen Rent Party and they were playing pop music and after they had seen Rent Party they changed their music to New Swing and Doo-Wop and started wearing sailors caps, and they did do really well. They got a couple of Top 10 or Top 20 hits, so we were beginning to make places like the Dirt Box. I remember one night walking into there and playing there in a back street just off Ladbroke Grove and Sade was there before she became famous. We were just on the verge of signing an agency deal with Bron, a major agency in London. So I think we were really building up to 200-300 gigs a year. We played Stage 2 at Glastonbury which was known as the NME stage which is no longer around but I am told someone has re brought it back to life again New Musical Express. We headlined on Stage 2 and also we played in 1982 on the cabaret tent and we went back in 1986 and I think by that time we had built up a following on the college/university circuit which was massive in those days. Not so massive now because of cuts but in those days you would be on a bill with a lot of top big names. 

 

You went to New York as well, didn’t you?

 

Yes, we went to New York. That was around 1985. I think we had recorded a live 6 track live LP which again came out on Waterfront called Honk That Saxophone. About a year after that we worked with Mike Vernon, the legendary Fleetwood Mac producer. He came up with the idea of doing a version of Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehaving and we recorded that at Leigh-on-Sea in a church hall with Vernon’s sixteen track Fostex tape recorder. So we did 4 singles for Waterfront. The first single was Rent Party and Letter of Love, second was Honey Bee, Take It Like A Man and High Class Woman. Third single was Walk That Mess and Lying Drunk. Fourth single was a Twelve inch EP I haven’t got a copy any more. I wish I had. That was Ain’t Misbehaving with 3 originals on the back: Somebody Turned The Lights Out, Liquor Store and The Barking Jump, which is an instrumental. There was also an album released in Japan on RCA Victor. So that was the recorded output.

 

How did that end up getting released in Japan? Did you have any say in the matter?

 

We were offered a deal. The management at the time was Steve Parker from Miracle Agency and Management was offered a deal. The band went into a studio and recorded it and they just wanted to release it in Japan and try and get that market. It was a shame it never saw the light of day in this country. There was another 14 track album which was recorded with Mike Vernon as well which was a lot of original. There is some more recorded material out there. Where it is I don’t know. Mike Vernon might have copies of it. The Dublin Castle in Camden became a second home for the band, the same as the pub in the early 80s circuit which featured places like Dublin Castle, the Bull And Gate, the Cricketers at the Oval in Kennington, Sir George Robey and the Prince of Orange were like 5 iconic venues, there's the Half Moon, Putney. 

 

Of course Will Gaines appeared out of nowhere over here didn't he?

 

Yes, the story about Will Gaines was, well I was running Rent Party at the time and I had gone to see Ian Dury purely on the basis that Don Cherry on trumpet and an album he had made called Laughter, and I was totally unaware about Will Gaines. So I went to the Sobell Centre in Islington, which is a massive great sports hall, and I went and they did this song called Dance Of The Crackpots and Will Gaines got up. Well the very next morning I was actually walking my dog along the road and I saw this tie pin that I liked in a second hand shop and I walked in and said “I would like to buy this”. He said, “Yes, no problem”. I looked over the counter and it was a personalised poster that Will Gains signed and I said to the guy “Where did you get that? I saw him last night in London”. He said that he only lives round the corner. I said “ You are kidding.” He said “No. Just go to that zebra crossing where the off-licence is and just walk down that road.” So I thought “In for a penny, in for a pound”, I walked along the road. All of a sudden this black guy comes walking towards me in a big pair of hobnailed boots and a baseball cap back to front and an old coat covered in oil and he went “Hiya” and I said “Blimey, are you Will Gaines?” and he said ”Yep that’s me.” I said “My name is Jackson, and I run a Swing band and we have got residency at the Queens.” He said “You are just the man we are looking for. Come on in.” So I went into the house, and there was a real Bohemian atmosphere about the house. Very velvet curtains and I could see an old upright piano with the smell of coffee and thick with cigarette smoke and I said, “You know at the moment we are actually looking for a trumpet player.” “He said there is one upstairs asleep.” I said “Really?” He said “Yes.” That was Lawrence Parry who was about to leave Belfairs School in Leigh-on-Sea and had played the trumpet in the school orchestra there. His father was a professional vocalist with the Royal Opera House but also sang professionally with the Square Pegs and on the Black & White Minstrels Show. Chris Parry had been a dancer for many years in theatre and also cabaret working with two Jamaican guys and then obviously met up with Will Gaines on the circuit and then decided to be his manager. After that, the next time I saw Will Gaines we became friends and I asked him to come along to the Westcliff hotel and he brought the house down. We have worked several times since then, and he did a Rowntrees Fruit Gum advert on the television and he had been on Play School and he started to pick up after the Ian Dury thing. He started to pick up quite a bit of exposure.

 

So it's 1986 and you have been to New York. So then what happened with Rent Party?

 

I think that the band was in about its fourth, and sort of best, line-up we had which was when Steve Weston joined the band on piano and also Andy Stevens on guitar. They both had worked with Alison Moyet and the Screaming Ab Dabs. They had real grounding in Rhythm and Blues and they had not heard of the Jump Rhythm and Blues that I was playing because they were more Chicago. My music is not harmonica based, it is more brass lead. So people like Roy Milton, Jimmy Liggins, Amos Milburn, Wynonie Harris, Tiny Bradshaw, they are my real sort of mentors, my big influences, and still are, but I would say that when they came along it took the band to another level and the Mike Vernon recording of Ain't Misbehaving took the band to another level. Then the band was still working, as you say, quite a lot and we did quite a few gigs. We were very well received in Holland. We did a two week tour out there playing every night of the week. You know 14 dates out there back to back and we were very well received out there and we went to Belgium. We did quite a few festivals in Europe. We went to Norway, and I think what happened next was really a kind of thing that happens to a lot of bands. You start to have a relationship with the agency and manager where you are running an eight-piece band with a sound engineer so effectively you have got nine people on the road. You have got this vehicle that has got to be maintained and paid for that is outside. You have got to pay their rent and their mortgage. The gigs were getting harder to find for the size of the band and the type of money that we wanted, and by that time it would have been the late 80s that the James Taylor Quartet had come along. The James Taylor Quartet had just been signed by Polydor Records and we went up to Newcastle Polytechnic to do a big gig and James Taylor were headlining. I had never heard of James Taylor but John Willmot and Lawrence Parry had joined their brass section with John Wallis, so as we came off stage our brass section apart from Chris Willmot were crossing us onto the next stage to play with James Taylor and I never forget Steve Weston turning towards me and saying “It is the beginning of the end”. I kind of saw the writing on the wall and I kind of think I got married in 1988 and I think around about that time towards the latter end of 1988 it was time to call it a day. 

 

Also I was obviously fortunate enough to produce straight after Rent Party, an album of you as a solo artist. What was the reason for you going in that direction? This is probably of the greatest interest to the Jazz people to the Essex Jazz history.

 

Yes. I would say that you have known me for a long time and I have always been a collector and I love vocalists, and I kind of just felt I had really sort of mined that scene of Jump R&B and I was just really getting into vocalists like John Hendricks, Mark Murphy, Eddie Jefferson. They were the three, and I kind of felt that they were very Blues based as well within their albums. You got Eddie Jefferson singing I Got The Blues by Lester Young, you got John Hedricks singing Moanin' or you have got Yea Yea, which is really a Mongo Santamaria sort of 'Mambo Blues'. Then you got the great Mark Murphy, who is very Blues influenced, and I just felt that I was also very interested in that Kerouac connection between the Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. I was really influenced in reading everything, devouring everything I could read about their life and about their influences in who they listened to and I just felt there was this little section of music that I could take and try and sort of mould that into a style.

 

Because you were still with Rent Party when I used you on my A Night In Tunisia single.

 

’86. Well that year when I came to record for you, that vocal at Pier Hill studios, which is no longer there at the back of Tomassi's, I was living in a little flat in Lancaster Crescent and I got up and I came to record for you and that night I was supporting Albert King at The Astoria 2. We did five nights with Albert King and then went on to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in ’86 . I came to record that for you and it sounded great, and I still think it sounds great today. 

 

That was probably the first solo thing you had done outside the Rent Party.

 

It was. Yes and I am really glad I did it. It was great and I thank you for that. It also put me out there as well because there are a lot of people out there like Jazz dancers like Perry Louis and other people come up to me and said “I didn’t know that was you. I really thought that was a black vocalist”. That was interesting for me and also it was putting me in a different direction. What I did, I approached you didn’t I and I said that I have got some songs and I have got some ideas. I was working with Mark Fitzgibbons, the Australian pianists, who gone back to Australia now.We had Graham Culham – great Essex Jazz drummer – probably one of the best Jazz drummers that Essex has ever produced, and he was playing with me live and also did the album and did a fantastic job on the album as well.

 

Tell me more about the album? How the hell did you manage to get that line up of musicians on there? You had John Mayer, Indo Jazz Fusions.

 

Yes, what I did, I first of all got the songs together and I thought who I wanted on it and I thought it would be great to get an all British line-up. I had met Dick Morrissey a couple of times at gigs and I had met Pete King and I had met Dick Pierce and had spoken to them at their gigs. I got their numbers and I just basically phoned them up and said “Look I am doing this little album. I am not a big name. I am just doing this solo album. Would you come down and play for me?” To my astonishment they all said “Yes, when is it? Because I think it fell in the period of March when there isn’t a great deal of work about. I think it was a bit of charm and it was a bit of luck. We actually went round and picked John Mayer up. He lived just off of Manor House and all the people I contacted direct by phone. I basically went to them and said “Look my name is Jackson Sloan. I am doing this solo album. I would love you to play on it. I have got some arrangements” I contacted Jimmy Deucher who was living in Dundee in Scotland at the time and said “Look, can you do some arrangements for me?” He said, “Yes, sure. Send us the songs.” So I sent him the songs and he wrote all the arrangements out for me. Of course when he agreed to do the arrangements, someone as legendary as Jimmy Deucher, people thought that it was a serious project. People wanted to be part of it. I think they were the two abiding things. Talking to people personally, but I think when they knew that Jimmy had done those arrangements people wanted to come along. That was the thing that clinched it. The Jimmy Deucher, the legendary trumpet player who played with Ronnie Scott and the great Tubby Hayes, probably our greatest Jazz musician ever. It was great for me. I have still got all the music there and I have got his handwritten notes and how much it cost and I still keep for keepsake. I was looking the other day. I think one of the arrangements was like £48. One was £16, one was £48. 

 

That was an astonishing line-up that you managed to pull together but an independent album on your own label.

 

Well I did. With the greatest respect, with your help I did go and speak to Gilles Peterson and Eddie Piller who had formed Acid Jazz at the time, and they gave me an offer but I didn’t take it. In a way, maybe I should have because it would have given the album more exposure. But in saying that I still think that…

 

I have got some great memories of doing the album.

 

You done a great production job and you captured the moment, and I still think there is a lovely feel about the album. I think it all just gelled together and you done a great job.

 

You pulled off something amazing there really. Without people realising it, it is, in some ways, quite an historical album due to the line-up that you got.

 

Yes. I like to be honest at my age now. I think Jazz Journal did a write up and they praised everyone apart from me. It is like “Shame about the vocalist.” The vocals were not weak but I just felt that it's because I wasn’t from that sort of Jazz Guildhall School of Vocalists. There are people now who collect the album purely because of the people who are on it, because they want that Dick Morrissey’s solo or that Pete King solo. I

 

So what happened around the time of the album?

 

We went and played the Bass Clef. You know the Peter Ind Club with it and we did the 100 Club with it, didn’t we? We also did another half a dozen gigs and I think Straight No Chaser did a nice article on us didn’t they, you know the magazine. I think there was an article in Blues and Soul or one of the other big magazines.

 

Oh blimey you came to Japan with me then too.

 

I did, yes. I will never forget that.

 

You, Gary Plumley and two Jazz dancers.It was to do with the fashion magazine I-D and they were pushing the Acid Jazz movement.So what happened from there?

 

I was in a position in my life where I am just a working class guy. I basically had hit a wall where it was financially very difficult to live. I had rent to pay and I got married in 1988. One day I just felt frustrated with the music business in general and so I decided that I would go and find myself a job. I found myself a part-time job at a post office and then from there I did do some other stuff. I worked with Jalal from the Last Poets. We did a little session at Pete Thomas’s studio at Brixton. I worked with Mop Mop in Italy. I wrote a couple of original songs and I worked with Paolo Scotti. I have released a couple of songs. I have released Bobby Cole's Perfect Day, Sombre Guitar..... What was really funny was that I was living in Southend at another house at the time down by the old York Road market and I thought there was a shop that had just opened and you probably know the guys. A little funk shop just opposite the old ABC Cinema. Do you remember the guys?

 

Yes I do.

 

What were they called? Really nice guy with glasses.

 

There was Cosmic and Johnny Kango.

 

That’s it Johnny Kango and I walked into the shop and I said “Have you got a copy of Sombre Guitar?” and he said “How do you know about Sombre Guitar? He said “that’s Jackson Sloan” and I said to him “I am Jackson Sloan”. What a lovely story that is.

 

Yes, that’s great isn’t it.

 

He just looked at me and he was speechless, and I bought a copy off him and he said “I cannot believe that.” He was still shaking his head as I left the shop. I also worked with a swing band called Swing Shift in London with Jane Parker an Australian pianist. Unfortunately we never recorded. We did a few gigs live and it was really good. It was like a sort of Jackie Cain, Roy Kraal sort of two vocals. It was received well live. We never recorded anything but then things move on and 2004 Catherine passed away suddenly and I was left with just the two boys, Nathan and Alex. Nathan was 3 years old, Alex was only 7 years old. It was a pretty dreadful time and I was on Prozac for a while and I managed to deal with a lot. Then basically my sister who was living in Chicago, Margaret came back and I said “I don’t know what I am going to do” and she “Well you can sing again”. and I said “No. I can’t sing again Margaret. I can’t sing again. That is me finished”. She said “No you can, you can sing again.” I said “Do you think so?” She said ”Yes.” I had a good hard think about things and I started to play my records again and I then just thought “Let’s go back to where I started, The Jump Blues”. That is really from there I formed Ooh Bop Sh'bam, which is similar to Rent Party and you know the history now. A couple of years ago I recorded Ray Gelato with Saturday Clothes on my own label Shellac records.

 

And currently you are back solo again?

 

Solo again Jackson Sloan and backing band The Rhythm Tones and I am using 2 or 3 people who have got their own bands and basically, Mark, I am hoping to record a new album. I have written quite a few songs and I want to try and get them out there and also I have been approached by some other people to write with them and do an album with them. I have got some interests from a couple of German labels. I might put it out on mine. I might put it out on their label. 

 

Your song writing is very classic. It almost sounds like I've heard them before because they are so well-written. They've got a very classic sound.

 

Thank you. That is what I am attempting to do. I am attempting to take music and I am attempting to try, because I have been playing this music for a long time. It is about time that we put our own stamp and identity on it rather than do a cover. Let us take the synthesis and the basis of the music and then put our own feel on top of it. We should be doing that now. I don’t think it helps push the music forward. If it is original, it helps to push the music forward. You are always going to be judged by covers unless you do something really different with them. You have got your own voice, your own identity, and I think that you sing and play personally better because it is what you are, living and breathing now as a musician.