Up West (32 page)

John Carnera remembers one of these clubs with great affection. ‘You know St Anne's Church in Wardour Street? In Shaftesbury Avenue there was an arch and wrought iron gates, and you went through, turned right and went downstairs, in to what used to be a crypt or something. That got turned into a club. I used to go there regular, although I'd moved out of Soho by then. It was my favourite – it's where I met my wife, actually. It was called St Anne's, and it was owned by a Moroccan and his wife. We used to spend Friday and Saturday night there and have a good time, what you
would call a disco now, drinking and music, yeah. We soon got to know everybody there, so it became a bit of a home away from home.'

There was still a lively live music scene, of course: as the sixties progressed, larger clubs such as the Marquee and the Flamingo became more and more influential. The Flamingo had begun life in 1952 as a ‘luxury' modern jazz club at the Mapleton Restaurant or Hotel at the corner of Coventry Street and Wardour Street, and was aimed at a sophisticated, supper-club audience. ‘It was great, the Flamingo,' Ronnie Brace remembers. ‘A big club. Top club, nice surroundings. It wasn't cheap. Done with taste. They had good jazz.'

The Flamingo moved across Shaftesbury Avenue to new premises further up Wardour Street in 1957, and slowly switched from a jazz club to one featuring mainly rhythm and blues. By the time the sixties dawned, it was a favourite haunt of American servicemen and Caribbean immigrants. It had moved right away from its supper-club roots, and by the early sixties was famous for its blues all-nighters. The club's owners, Rick and Johnny Gunnell, were widely believed to have paid off the police so they could stay open until 6 a.m.

Paul C made regular trips in to Soho to sample these riotous times. ‘Once you got in,' he remembers, ‘it was almost impossible to get out. The place you found early on in a club more or less determined where you stayed. Claustrophobic is not the word: you could hardly turn round. You could get a drink, but to leave, you had to make a really determined effort. And these were all-nighters. I remember coming out
of the club and going on to the streets, just to get some fresh air, and on several occasions the contrast between the heat of the club and the coldness of the pavements made my nose bleed. It was that intense.'

In the meantime, the people of the West End got on with the timeless business of making their own music. ‘My dad was a good pub pianist,' Mike O'Rouke remembers. ‘He worked next door at the Mercer's Arms on and off, and he worked up in Highbury for a while, a big pub up there called the Cock, at Highbury Corner. He worked up in Islington, and he worked in Theobald's Road, a pub called the Queen's, and one called the Griffin, just off the Theobald's Road. He got around a little bit, you know. He played the piano accordion, as well. He'd take his accordion and play that one night, and the piano the next.'

Mike's dad was never famous, but at least one of my other interviewees remembers him. When I mentioned his name to Ronnie Mann, he was delighted. ‘I'd forgotten all about old Mickey O'Rouke! I've got a recording of him playing. Him and my old man were great mates. My old man played the piano as well as the accordion, and Mickey O'Rouke was a great pianist, as well as playing the accordion. Mickey used to play at a pub down in Theobald's Road, and my old man used to go up there, singing and playing together.'

Virtually everyone interviewed for this book had some memory of the music scene in the West End, while some of them were professionally involved. Gary Winkler, for
example, had a long career as a percussionist in his own bands and various skiffle aggregations, and also ran the Nucleus coffee bar in Monmouth Street in the fifties. ‘The Nucleus was just a big basement, with low ceilings and a concrete floor. At the bottom of the stairs was an alcove, and then a bigger alcove with seats all the way round, bench seats, some tables, and then you had the back room, a through room with a low stage at the far end and seats. There was dancing at the Nucleus before I put the seats in. It was all panelled with wood up to the dado rail, with murals by Diz Disley, the guitarist and cartoonist, above that.'

The Nucleus attracted a wide range of punters, from English and American writers – Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg both popped in on their way through London, while Colin Wilson was a regular – to chancers, street people and members of the aristocracy. ‘Lord Moynihan used to come down,' Gary told me. ‘He lived on the edge of the law, always had people after him. Married a West Indian girl purporting to be Princess Almina, and moved to Thailand, I think. Princess Almina was a waitress at Lyons coffee house when I met her, before she came up with her title. I never knew what she was Princess of.

‘The club was more of a social thing for me. I really wasn't into business at that age. I was at the age of getting drunk and falling about, falling in to bed with ladies who came down. I was too young to . . . well, I was
too young
, and I wasn't business-minded. I think I did it more for the enjoyment than anything.'

There was plenty of fun to be had. ‘We were, I would have said, the second best known coffee bar in London, behind the 2I's. A lot of jazzmen used to come down: the coffee bar was packed with musicians in general. We used to employ groups or other acts up to midnight, and after that just had a resident piano player. There was a drum kit there, and people would just pop in and sit in.

‘After they finished working in the early hours, the musicians in the nightclubs loved to blow jazz or whatever. They would come down to the Nucleus, and basically jam until morning. You'd have Spike Mackintosh, a Dixieland trumpeter, sitting in with a modern-day alto player like Joe Harriott. And there were folk singers, skifflers; we had Jack Elliott and Derroll Adams, famous folk singers of the times. It was a complete mixture. When he was in England, Big Bill Broonzy used to come down the coffee bar because it was open all night and he loved to play and drink. He'd bring his own Scotch.'

Musicians would always congregate in places that opened late or offered some kind of deal on the necessities of life. ‘All the jazzers used to go to the Star Café down under where I used to live at the Cambridge Circus end of Old Compton Street,' Chas McDevitt recalls. ‘It was Greek-owned. You could get a meal for half a crown, lovely chops with chopped cabbage. The jazz and skiffle groups loved cheap food!' The Star was still going strong as a musicians' resort in the early sixties. At that time I was hanging out with the folk crowd, and after a gig at Les Cousins in Greek Street the performers
and the audience would pop round the corner to meet up again at the Star, the inspiration for the café that features in my novels about Soho.

Although Gary Winkler claimed to have no business sense, I got the distinct impression he was exaggerating. ‘Before Ronnie Scott opened his first jazz club, him and the Jazz Couriers used to rehearse in the Nucleus during the day, when it was closed. We used to lend it out for rehearsals for free. One day Ronnie took me for a cup of tea in the Rex café in Soho, told me he wanted to open a club, and asked my advice.'

John Carnera remembers the club that resulted from this chat. ‘I was a great jazz fan. I remember going down to Ronnie Scott's when it was in Gerrard Street, a couple of doors along from the post office, down in the basement. There was Phil Seamen on drums, Johnny Hawksworth on bass, and Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott on tenor saxes. Still remember them now. I can still see Phil Seamen totally stoned out of his brain. Great nights. Smoky atmosphere, a really dissolute kind of world.'

One of the last coffee bars on the scene was the Freight Train at 44 Berwick Street, opened by Chas McDevitt and named after his hit single, which effectively financed the purchase. Because, like the Nucleus, the Freight Train stayed open in to the early hours, working musicians would go there to wind down and gossip after gigs. ‘With my coffee bar being open so late, and being a pick-up and drop-off point for bands,' Chas remembers, ‘the groups used to sit there at two
in the morning. A lot of their girlfriends worked in Murray's Cabaret Club, along in Oxford Street somewhere, as dancers. Hank Marvin met his wife in my coffee bar.

‘Johnny Kidd wrote “Shakin' All Over” in the basement. Brian Gregg and Johnny came in one night. They had a recording session next day and realized they didn't have a B-side, so they asked if they could go downstairs in to the basement – because there was a jukebox upstairs – and, without an instrument apparently, they wrote the song. The next day, they recorded it: Joe Moretti and Alan Caddy put the guitar sounds on it, and it became the A-side and a big hit.' ‘Shakin' All Over'
–
which is, according to my husband, who knows about these things, the best British rock 'n' roll single – reached number one in August 1960.

Right next door to the Freight Train, at 42 Berwick Street, another interviewee, Pepe Rush, had his own recording studio. Pepe came from a musical family: ‘My mum, Pat Hyde, was a big jazz singing star before the Second World War. After it, she went back in to variety. She recorded on Parlophone, four titles a month, did thousands of broadcasts. She also recorded with other bands under assumed names, to get round her contract. She worked all over the world.

‘My dad was a session musician, a violinist, and led many bands in the West End. He did a lot of sessions with the BBC, because all the studios were around the West End and he could be there in a few minutes' notice. He also had a music publishers in the basement of our flat at 33 Old Compton Street. It had originally been in Denmark Street, and he'd
bought it off Victor Silvester's pianist. One of the blokes they published was Ralph Butler, who wrote “Run Rabbit Run”, a nice old bloke. My dad used to go to the BBC to get things played. They did a lot of light orchestral music.'

Pepe's own talents lay more in electronics than in music. After he left school at fifteen, ‘I worked in a studio in Denmark Street, and was at the very first recording that Johnny Kidd ever did. This bloke called Guy Tynegate-Smith – he wore one of those overcoats with a velvet collar – brought in this guy with a guitar and he was rank. He was the worst singer/guitarist I ever heard.

‘By that time Dad was conducting the Talk of the Town cabaret, he led the dance band, so we had a good bit of money, and we built this little studio, in Berwick Street. This bloke came down to make a recording, and he was fantastic. He said, “Don't you remember me, mate?” and reminded me of the session a year before. I said, “But you were absolute crap, you were the worst I ever heard.” “Yeah,” he replied, “I've improved.” It was as if he'd sold his soul to the devil.'

Johnny Kidd was not the only famous name to pass through young Pepe's studio. ‘The Shadows came down to play backing tracks for this bird. At the end they said, “We're recording a song called ‘Apache'. Any chance we can do a demo?” I said yeah – it was all set up. They were pleased with it; I often saw them around Berwick Street and they would say they thought it was so much better than the version the label released, it was earthier and stronger.'

Pepe also installed sound equipment in clubs. ‘This
bloke Raymond Nash was the owner of La Discothèque in Wardour Street, the first one to be called that. I did these discos for him, and he suggested we started up a factory to build amplifiers. In this factory in Portland Mews, which was bordered by D'Arblay Street, Poland Street, Berwick Street and Broadwick Street, I built mixers for the London Palladium, as well as most of the equipment for the discotheques in Soho and other parts of England, Europe, the West Indies and the USA.'

Just across the road from Pepe's studio was the Top Ten Club, a haunt of drummer Raye Du-Val, who, in his own words, was ‘never famous, but well known'. Raye was born in Soho to French parents in 1932. Inspired by the great jazz drummer, Gene Krupa, he turned professional when he was fifteen, and still plays today. His closest brush with fame came when he lied about his age to get a job with the Checkmates, the backing group of Emile Ford, who had just had a number one hit with ‘What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?' ‘On Saturday night,' he remembers, ‘Emile came to see me, offered me the job, and on Sunday night we played the Palladium, on TV with Norman Vaughan. I was on a tall plinth, and I could see it was in two parts, and it was moving. I thought I was going to dive off any minute.'

The Top Ten club was in the basement below the House of Sam Widges coffee bar on the corner of Berwick Street and D'Arblay Street. It was opened by the rocker Vince Taylor, who later sold it to Raye and Mick Pastalopoulos, who also managed the Freight Train for Chas McDevitt. ‘Sometimes
I'd have a heavy night in the Top Ten,' Raye remembers, ‘and I'd come out about seven or eight in the morning, to stagger to my flat across the road, and when you'd come out, it was like an episode from
Breakfast at Tiffany's
. A dark blue sky, the streetlights were still on, the street cleaners were going up and down and the people were just coming in to work, you know, the office workers, it used to be a fantastic feeling, that time in the morning, not quite breaking, no sun yet, a wonderful experience.'

It was at the Top Ten that Raye found a place in the
Guinness Book of Records
with a succession of drum marathons. ‘In 1959, I played for 30 hours, 3 minutes, 15 seconds, then the same year I played for 82 hours, 35 minutes, 14 seconds, then in 1960 I played for 100 hours, 1 minute and 15 seconds.' The records were all the more remarkable because Raye did not realize he was allowed a five-minute break every hour, and would take his bathroom breaks still banging out a rhythm on a drum he carried with him. When I asked Raye how he had managed it, he replied lugubriously that ‘I 'ad 'elp', in the form of amphetamines.

One of the many ways that post-war Soho anticipated the sixties was in the ready availability of drugs. It was the modern jazzers who started it, as Laurie Morgan's wife, Betty, explains. ‘They thought because this was going on in America, and a lot of American musicians were taking heroin, that if they took heroin, they'd be able to play like that.'