Mick Sexton

So Mick you were you born in London?

 

Well north west London, Willesden to be precise.

 

How did you get established as a bass player? When did you first start?

 

Well the bass playing came quite late in the day. The area I was living in was very much an Irish area and I started off playing Irish traditional music funnily enough. I suppose early teens I got smitten with the Trad Jazz boom that was coming, the late 50's I suppose that was. I got a guitar but then wanted to start a Trad band I suppose, based on what was going on, and I worked up a reasonable technique on the trumpet – learned all the Louis Armstrong, well a few of the Louis Armstrong solos, and some Bix Beiderbecke and that sort of thing. So that was my early thing, and that was always in an amateur situation obviously. But I've always been in an amateur situation personally, but later on I got to play with some really good people at the top of their game but that came a lot later. So the first band I started really, serious band, was after moving to Essex in about the mid 60's, the middle to late 60's.

 

Where did you move to in Essex?

 

Basildon.

 

Why did you move down to Essex then?

 

Well I was working for a company in the day job and they were based in London – it was telephones and cables – and their plan was to move out to a new purpose-built place in Basildon so that was part of the plan. So I did my first couple of years with them in London but then eventually moved out to Essex and got married and you know, carried on then and started to get some music going, formed a band out there. So that was the first time I was really rehearsing a lot and hustling for gigs and that sort of thing.

 

When you moved into Essex you were obviously on the search for what was going on in the area, do you remember the kind of clubs that were around in those days, in the late 60's?

 

Well there was not very much. There were one or two established scenes, they weren’t really clubs in the sense that you didn’t join, they were just gigs in pubs you know? And it wasn’t very easy for a newcomer to come in there but we did used to do gigs at the Top Alex, which was probably the main one in the area. About once every 3 months we'd get a gig, that was with the original band, the 7-piece band.

 

Was that the one with Digby in?

 

Digby wasn’t in it although he did sit in once or twice and I did do stuff with Digby. Not a lot but every now and then. There was a pub in Margaretting – the Red Lion - that used to have quite a thriving scene and there was jams and sit-ins there and that’s where I came across Digby. By this time I was back on the guitar but more sort of into Modern Jazz, so this 7-piece band was unashamedly modern but not particularly good because I suppose we were mostly amateurs although even then we had some excellent players. We managed to get John Mole on bass who was almost becoming a legend in the area. 

 

Who else was in the band?

 

There was a guy called Bill Stronach on vibes who’s still around in the Essex area, although I've lost touch with him a bit. I've heard he’s not well at the moment. And then most of the rest of them are people I knew from London who were sort of dotted around, one bloke had moved down to Kent, a couple of others were in east London so we used to rehearse in somewhere round the Aveley area, which was kind of near the north side of the tunnel so you know we could converge at roughly equal journeys. But obviously for a long term thing that was never going to be practical, but it kept our hand in then and we used to rehearse weekly and get gigs about monthly if we were lucky.

 

What was that band called?

 

Taurus.

 

Oh that was Taurus then. Was it you that formed it? Trevor wasn’t in it at that time?

 

No, the drummer was a guy called Brian Smith. Although I say he wasn’t in it we did have occasion to use him as a dep a couple of times, so I knew of him you know and we…yeah once I started sort of going public we did the usual thing with flyers and leaflets so my regular trip once a month included Southend. I'd go into the library to give a load of stuff to Digby, I'd call into Trevor's place in Hadleigh to give him a load of stuff because he was doing the Future music, or 'Music Of Our Time' series then with his avant-garde team. So yeah I kind of knew them but as I say, the band wasn’t particularly active, it was fairly amateur and so it wasn’t until ’75 I thought “Well I’ll start running my own club” and we eventually managed to set up in Sweeney’s Disco in Basildon which was owned by – probably still is, I'm not sure now – was owned by a guy called Brian Greenan and he really got to like the music, and it's unusual for guvnor’s you know, they’re usually only interested as long as you’re packing the place. He gave us a fair bit of slack there, so it was pretty good.

 

That’s unusual isn’t it?

 

Mmm, and so the idea was to have a fairly high profile venue where you could book some of the bands that were kind of making it kind of nationally and internationally but from our point of view that really meant London. So during that 2 or 3 year period I was booking people like, I had all the big names, you had your Ronnie Scott's and the like, but Soft Machine did it twice and that was one of their reforming tours, and all the modern players, John Taylor, people like that you know. So that kind of went for 2 to 3 years really before it ran out of steam.

 

It’s an enormous place Sweeney’s it must have been hard to get an atmosphere in there.

 

That was the problem in a way because we could sort of do alright with a smallish...... you know get about 30 or 40 people, which is good for most clubs, but for there it was a fairly big room and 30 or 40 was barely enough, you know it wasn’t enough to talk to the person next to you as it were. So anyway that was ok.

 

What night of the week was that?

 

That was a Wednesday.

 

Did you say his name was Greenan or Green?

 

Greenan. He still owns a lot of stuff down there, I mean soon after that he bought the building that they call Raquel’s at the end, you know? A sort of dance/disco place.

 

Another huge venue. So where did you go from Sweeney’s?

 

As Sweeney’s was drawing to close we managed to get various gigs, and the Towngate Theatre which was sort of growing a little bit in those days was our main venue then for some months. Well there was a period there where I was trying places in Chelmsford and all over really, none of which lasted very long, but from the Towngate Theatre on a Sunday afternoon thatseemed to be quite a good scene, so we stuck at that for quite a few years.

 

Well I went down there in about ’84 I think and it was rammed stupid in there.

 

Well it did go quite well and of course the free gig on a Sunday is one of the easiest formats to operate in, you know, but it means because it’s no admission and you're getting no grant for it you've just got the bar interest, so as long as the people came I think they were happy enough to do it.

 

And then of course in those days they didn’t have shows in the main auditorium on Sundays.

 

And that’s still the case. Most theatres in fact, you know, they do these gigs in the lobby, it's always on a Sunday because that's the one day they don’t use the theatres. It seems to be fairly universal.

 

That’s the reason they don’t have Jazz in the foyer at the Palace Theatre any more because sometimes they have shows on there on a Sunday night in the main auditorium you see. It’s all changed. In those days you didn’t even see a shop open on a Sunday did you, let alone a theatre, so everything was shut up for the Sunday.

 

There’s a few theatres around where I'm living now where they still seem to operate this ‘no drama’ on a Sunday. I thought it was just a kind of actor’s union thing of wanting a day off, but…I don't know quite what the history of it is but there you go.

 

At the Towngate at the time, was there much else going on around the Basildon area to do with Jazz?

 

Not in the Basildon area, nothing I would say. Well I suppose that’s not quite true, they used to…the council used to do a thing, you know mostly in the summer period they’d have like…I mean at one point they funded about 6 weeks of Sunday gigs in different pubs in the area where they…well I say they funded them, I think they part-funded them and the tried to persuade pubs to put things on and make it all part of their summer festival. So that happened quite a few years, so in that period I used to put on the odd concert in the park for instance. And we did several gigs in pubs in the area. It wasn’t just us, there were other bands around. In the Sweeney’s days as well, when I started out to spread the word better I used to give gigs – support gigs – to other bands in the area, so you know Kenny Baxter’s band did it in those days, a few other bands…Well one of Trevor’s bands called 'World’s In Collision' did it, one of the interval gigs. 

 

When did Trevor actually join Taurus?

 

Well I suppose…we formed in its present form, I say that because I've re-formed it recently, but in the quartet format really around about that time of the Towngate. When I was doing all the various gigs and trying out all the various places around about Essex it was a mixture of people and the hardcore then came down to Pete Jacobson, Trevor and Gary Plumley, well actually at the time we started at the Towngate it was a quintet with Ian Woolway as well on guitar. But we soon trimmed down to a quartet and it kind of took its sort of form that stayed steady then for about 10 years.

 

Also in Basildon at the time – I mean obviously a very long-running thing – a different form of Jazz of course, but Hugh Rainey had his weekly at the Plough & Tractor as well didn’t he, which I believe was enormously successful.

 

Yeah, I even sat in there a couple of times. I dug my trumpet out and practised so I could go down and sit in with them.

 

Oh did you? Well! Because it’s funny isn’t it that those scenes generally don’t cross over. I mean I know Digby crosses over, but there’s a lot of them that…you know when I went down to interview them at Colchester Jazz Club they wouldn’t even accept the Chicago side of Trad never mind Modern Jazz. They were talking about Charlie Parker as though it was a new-fangled style of music. Because it’s New Orleans or nothing there in Colchester Jazz Club!

 

Yeah well you know I suppose I'd grown away from that but I still had a nostalgia for it and I mean I only did that once or twice. I could sort of practice up over a fortnight or so and you know get through a couple of tunes, but I couldn’t do the whole evening or anything.

 

Enough to play ‘When the Saints Go Marching In?!’

 

Yeah, well that’s right, and where I lived when they had a street party on the whatever it was – the Jubilee or something back in 70-something – they wanted, they asked me to do something in the street and I got a few old mates from Southend as it happens, Paul McGreavy on saxophone, don’t know if you remember him, and Bob Moule on drums and we marched up and down my road doing sort of South Rampart Street Parade and all these New Orleans marching songs. And I mean at that stage we were in a little modern quartet you know? But just for the sake of the….and then we set up on my lawn with Pete Jacobson on keyboards and we had a Rock and Roll singer that used to – a guy called Terry Hayes – who happens to also be in Trevor’s 'World’s In Collision', but you know they were all modern players and we did like Stevie Wonder selections on the lawn. But that was all sort of community stuff.

 

Obviously we’ve spoken about Raquel’s a few times but we didn’t actually establish when you moved from Sweeney’s to Racquel’s. Because you went from Sweeney’s to Racquel’s to Towngate didn’t you?

 

We didn’t call it Racquel’s, I mean Racquel's was the main business in that sort of building but this Brian Greenan who owned it he'd also set up what he called a piano bar and it was called Strings and it was on the first floor and he'd got a Kawai, Japanese grand piano in there and I think they had the notion of having a cocktail sort of scene, you know, on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays or something, you know, sophisticated. 

 

In Basildon?

 

Yeah – grand piano just on the side of the market there! Sort of pretensions of being serious, and then things got a bit sticky at the Towngate, yeah the management changed at the Towngate and there was a crowd came in that seemed to actively dislike what we were doing even though we were getting people in, you know, they wanted to go home early, so one way or another we fell out there and I spoke to Brian again and we moved over there and did probably about 4 or 5 years at the Towngate and then 5 or 6 years at Strings, roughly the same format you know.

 

So that was what, mid 80's to early 90's was it at Strings?

 

Yeah. I was certainly in Strings by ’84, I can't remember the exact date we moved over, but…and I am pretty sure we were in the Towngate in ’83 so somewhere in that period we moved over.

 

It was a real institution though wasn’t it?

 

Yeah well, we did quite well on…we built up a bit of an address list over the preceding years so, I mean we couldn’t do e-mail in those days, but you know we used to sort of mail to that address list and we started a new venue so you weren’t entirely dependent on the local papers.

 

You weren’t starting from scratch were you?

 

Because if anything it seemed like the density of fans in that area wasn’t high enough to – you had to appeal to a kind of a semi-circle around Basildon you know, of I reckon about 20 miles. We had people coming most weeks from Chelmsford and Southend and Romford, so…we pulled from that area.

 

Well it was handy being right near the central bus station there. 

 

Yeah once that was built, because it was quite late before that got built you know? I remember when we moved there, the big advert from the developers was ‘the main London to Southend railway line goes right through the centre of the town’ and it didn’t stop! We were living there over 10 years before the station turned up!

 

Just had to stand there and watch the trains flying by!

 

Well there was a station at Laindon. which was on the western boundary. and the station at Pitsea which is on the eastern boundary, but nothing from Basildon itself. So on the opening night at Sweeney’s we had Dick Morrissey and I had to go down to Pitsea to collect them from the station.

 

So why did you finish at Strings Piano Bar?

 

It finished there about ’89 and that was kind of a mixture of things: I'd got an offer to move back to London, I had some personal issues, and well Gary Plumley had got very busy and had put lots of deps in…well Pete was busy with lots of things and that had always worked in the past but one way or another we'd all sort of moved on to other things and were getting busy so we let that go in ’89. yeah so that was the end of the Essex period. I moved back to London then.

 

By the time you’d finished in Essex in the late 80's was there much going on in the area, I mean obviously Top Alex was still going.

 

Well not to my knowledge. Most of the little towns and villages would have something, but it would be some local association had put on 1 or 2 gigs a year, you know, Billericay Arts Association used to put on something but it was a fairly low-key thing and I got drawn into that in the day, but…and as you mentioned earlier, there were 1 or 2 pubs that still featured the Trad thing, Hugh Rainey kept going through all that period as far as I know.

 

Yes he did.

 

Yeah the period I liked of that was where he brought Cy Laurie out of retirement because he was a big figure in the 50's and I think he…talk was he’d gone away to a Buddhist monastery or something you know. Yeah and there was still a few of those things but I'd kind of drifted away from that by then. Digby was obviously heavily into that scene and had gone pro and was no longer my contact at the library for putting out leaflets! In fact I've seen Digby quite a lot since, you know, in various Traditional settings and my own footnote when I'm talking to people there is “Oh I used to know Digby when he played Be-Bop”!

 

Yeah, yeah! He can still turn his hand to it.

 

Yeah, he was good at it too.

 

A very versatile player. Was there anything else you can think of that we haven’t covered before we finish?

 

The subject being Jazz in Essex? Well we've been back there once or twice recently. I reformed the band, the core of that period, 2 and a half years ago now, soon after my wife died. And we don’t play that…well we've been gigging about once a month since then which means quite a lot of hustling, but the one gig we have done 3 times now is the Smack at Leigh, Trevor was the contact for that, and mostly we've been doing gigs around town or west London. That’s up to date. We've still got the Essex contacts going. Pete of course died in 2002, so when it came to reforming the band we got Jonathan Gee in the piano chair now.

 

Superb player.

 

That’s my personal story up to date (2013).