Saturday night dancing in 1950s London - Steven Berkoff

Playwright and actor Steven Berkoff (b.1937) wrote an autobiography 'Free Association' in 1997. Born in a Jewish family in Stepney (his father was a tailor), he spent his teengage years on the Woodberry Down Estate and hanging out around Stamford Hill (he went to Hackney Downs School, as did Harold Pinter). The book includes some great descriptions of going out dancing in London in the early 1950s, in particular at the Tottenham Royal, the 51 Club in Soho and the Lyceum Ballroom.

Tottenham Royal: The Mecca

'I recall in my youth the extreme beauty of some of the men and women, the sharply fierce eyes and beautiful peach-like skins and the men with their handsome Celtic faces. They would gather together like warring clans at the weekly stomp at the Tottenham Royal,which was run by Mecca. I was to write a short story about that  dance hall called Mecca - it was published in my collection Gross Intrusion. What an ironic title, Mecca Dance Halls, for it was indeed our Mecca and the weekly call to nature was as primitive as the herds of rutting deer that would gather on the Scottish moors for their mating, selecting and challenging.

It was the golden time, the weekend when the coarse and unsatisfying work had been shed and the day-to-day dose of humiliation was over, at least for me, and one could wash the week away, in the ‘neutral’ environment of the Mecca. All men and women were equal there, since the humbling work you did during the week mattered not at the Mecca. Your schooling might be shabby and abrupt, your teachers callous and indifferent, your hopes no higher than to be cannon fodder for industry and factories if you were a native, and if you were a second-generation immigrant you might be absorbed into the skills the migrants brought with them and be a worker in the garment industry, a cutter, tailor, presser, or as in my particular case, a a ghastly menswear shop.

In the Royal, Tottenham, you were you wished to be - warrior, lover, Jimmy Cagney, Tony Curtis, villain, spiv, leader, loner, heavy, Beau Brummell...

Tottenham Royal

....on Saturday we could forget all these other struggles, the dead and stultifying world outside in which you had to assert yourself with the blunt instruments of a poor education and little guidance and the hope of becoming a taxi driver or the manager of Cecil Gee’s Menswear. Now all that was behind you and in your drapes and rollaway Johnny Ray collar you spraunced into the Mecca with the expectation of a dream. Anything could and would and did happen, since the Mecca played into your hands: it was the greatest money-spinner of all time because it restated and restored the tribe and tore away the constraints of the civilized world of work and buses and factories. Here you could be who you thought you were. You created yourself. You were the master of your destiny. You entered quiffed and perfumed in the most expensive aftershave Boots had to offer. You entered and already the smell of the hall had a particular aroma of velvet and hairspray, Brylcreem and Silvikrin, lacquer, cigs, floor polish...

First you go and deposit your coat and then jostle for a square inch of mirror so as to adjust your phallic quiff, which has to protrude enough for it to be stable, until your very arm aches and you have to lower it to restore the blood supply. Many arms were crooked and like birds we were preening and pecking. In the ladies' I imagine even more complex rituals were going on, since this was the sea of flesh, a virtual harvest of all the young, bright, beautiful, sweet, delicious and not-so-beautiful and not-so-delectable, but at least the energy of all that youth swarming together in the Mecca was formidable...

  ...every night at the Royal was a dream time. You walked as if in slow motion and got there early so that you stood a good chance of pulling some sweet, delectable creature, had a good dance and swanned around. The dance was all-important since this was a way of demonstrating your skill as a mover, your grace, wit, balance and tricks. The jive was one of the greatest dance forms ever invented. And so all your arts were in some way fulfilled. You were the dandy, the mover and performer in your own drama, the roving hunter and lover, the actor adopting for the girl the mask of your choice. You wore your costume and walked the hall beneath the glittering ball and when you saw someone that you felt was about your stamp you asked her for a dance; if it was slow, when you took her on to the floor your heart started to increase its beat...  

When you entered the Royal, the band, usually Ray Ellington, would be up the far end. The Stamford Hill crowd would stand on the left-hand side and the crowd from Tottenham would stand on the right; there would be no mixing unless you felt cocky and wanted to fraternize; in that case you elected yourself to the position of leading luminary and went to pay your respects. Dancing was the thing and as the clock ticked away until the terrible hour of 11  p.m. when the band would stop, you became more and more desperate to find someone you could take home and crush for half an hour of fierce kissing and squeezing and creating sparks as your gaberdine rubbed against her taffeta'.

Jive  

I learned to jive at a formal session which a young teacher called Leslie taught at a small jazz club in Finsbury Park. I don’t remember who took me there or how I heard about it. In one corner of the room (and I now remember the room was walled with mirrors - it must have been a small ballet school in more genteel times) was a record player and Leslie would show us the basic one-two-three-four.

Once we had mastered this very simple rhythm, the next step was to guide the woman while in a kind of side-to-side locomotion our arms would spin her like a top. With the determination that was to be a hallmark of my youthful endeavours, I threw myself into the jive and practised night and day to work it out in mirrors, on door handles and on a current girlfriend, a flaring redhead who I met on the Hill. She was from the other side of the manor, which was bad news for both of us, but at that time we were mainly concerned with getting the jive together.

After a while I got into the swing of it and Greys Dance Hall became my weekly Tuesday night session. A kind of Finsbury Park clan would gather there. When you came in there was a little bar where you could buy sandies, tea, coffee and soft drinks. The place had a weird and pregnant atmosphere, not least because Curly King would turn up from time to time and it was also the time I first glimpsed the Kray twins. They were always immaculately turned out in dark suits and ties...

...Sunday was Lyceum night, but you could always do some hopping at the 51 Club in Little Newport Street. That was good for jazz and they played the best records and you danced your feet off. I did less and less exercise at school I made up for it by jiving, at which I was becoming a veritable Gene Kelly. 1 had perfected my jiving via Leslie at Grays, Finsbury Park, fine-tuned it at the Royal [Tottenham] and let it go at the‘51’.

It was my sanctuary. A small dark room with some of the best dancing to be seen in the West End. I would come home some nights soaked to the skin and it was even better than sex. I evolved a style that was ultra cool. By this time the Johnnie Ray era had been replaced by Teddy Boys and you wore four-button suits, shirts with stiff collars and double cuffs. My collars were sent each week to ‘Collars Ltd’ for starching and laundering, and woe betide if the collars came back soft or not stiff enough. I would go bananas. The style of dance was affected by the suit you wore and so you had to lift your arm, keeping your elbow fairly well in to your side or your jacket would be pulled up and you would appear ungainly. No, you had to dance cool so as to keep the form intact.

It was a brief but unique period in English social and fashion history, since it twisted the jive away from its American cousins and adapted it to fit into an idiosyncratic London style. The chaps at the Lyceum became fops and Beau Brummels and the suit was more than ever your calling card or your place of esteem. You had to be immaculate'.

Hobsbawm on Jazz, Dance and Class

The historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) died yesterday at the age of 95.  There's plenty to criticise in his political judgement  as he aligned himself with  the various phases of the Communist Party of Great Britain from its outright Stalinism to its proto-New Labour 'Marxism Today' period - even if it's not hard to understand why somebody who spent some of his teenage years in Berlin during the rise of Hitler joined the KPD. But his history writing on class and culture was often very nuanced and non-dogmatic. He also wrote extensively on jazz.

One of my favourite short essays of his looks at the early days of jazz in Europe, reflecting on how its popularity related to changing class cultural practices. 'On the Reception of Jazz in Europe'  was originally published in 1994 and then republished as 'Jazz Comes to Europe' in the excellent collection 'Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz' (1998). Here's a few extracts:

'The speed of transatlantic transport was such that ideas, notes and people could already cross the ocean very rapidly indeed. Will Marion Cook's Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk - Cook was later to bring Sidney Bechet to Britain - was performed in 1898 in both New York and London. The foxtrot, the basic dance routine associated with jazz, first appeared in Britain in the summer of 1914. a few months after its first appearance in the USA , and in Belgium in 1915. Jazz had hardly been baptized in the USA when groups under that name already toured Europe. They were there from the middle of 1917.

  ...the interesting thing about this diffusion is what was being diffused. It was one of several kinds of novel cultural and artistic creation that emerged, in the late nineteenth century, from the plebeian, mainly urban, milieu of Western industrial society, most probably in the specialized lumpenproletarian environments of the entertainment quarter in the big cities, with their specific subcultures, male and female stereotypes, costumes - and music. The Buenos Aires tango which secured for Latin American music a permanent but minor place on the international dance floor at the same time as jazz did, is one example. Cuban music is another...jazz was both novel and, in origin, an art belonging to an autonomous subculture...

  ...Jazz made its way and triumphed , not as a music for intellectuals but as a music for dancing, and specifically for a transformed, revolutionized social dance of the British middle and upper classes, but also. and almost Simultaneously, the British working-class dance. During the 1900s the upper-crust dance was transformed in two ways. (An expert contemporary witness dates the major change precisely to the season 1910-11.) First urban dancing had already ceased t be a seasonal occupation linked to special occasions. and was being practised all the year round as a regular social and leisure activity. To some extent it was practised privately, but special dancing clubs developed - there were three in Edwardian Hampstead alone - and it occurred in hotels and what were not yet called 'nightclubs' . The tea-dance and the restaurant-dance appeared on a modest scale. Second, the dance lost its formality and ordered succession. At the same time it became simpler, more easily learned and less demanding and exhausting. The crucial change here was that from the turning dance (for example. the waltz) to the walking dance, such as the Boston. a sort of rectilinear waltz, in the early 1900s. It seems clear that these developments reflected a substantial loosening of aristocratic and middle-class conventions, and they are a striking and neglected symptom of the notable emancipation of women in these classes before 1914. The link between the dance revolution, even specifically between the new primacy of rhythm in social dancing, and the emancipation of women, did not pass unperceived. It is noted in the most intelligent or the early jazz books, Paul Bernhard's Jazz: Eine musikalische Zeitfrage (1927)...  

...British jazz had a broad popular base, because its uniquely large working class had developed a, for Europe, uniquely recognizable, urbanized, non-traditional lifestyle. Even before 1914 huge popular dance halls had already been built for the holiday demand of specifically proletarian seaside resorts like Blackpool, Morecambe, Margate and Douglas on the Isle of Man. The post-war mania for dancing was immediately met by the new institution of the so-called Palais de Danse, of which the Hammersmith Palais. the first . immediately became a jazz venue by booking the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1919. No doubt the music to which the plebs danced would not always be considered jazz today. Indeed, the central tradition of British mass dancing moved away from jazz towards a curious phenomenon called 'strict tempo' dancing, which was to become a competitive sport on British television. Nevertheless, jazz made its mark as a name, an idea, a novel and demotic sound.

The massive dance mania produced an unusually large body of dance-band musicians, mainly of proletarian origin, or at least raised in the environment of the brass-band movement, much appreciated in the industrial areas. These formed the original core of the jazz public... Socially speaking. dance-band musicians, who did  rather better in the 1920s than in the depressed 1930s, were on the borders between the skilled workers and the lower-middle classes. It was in the higherparts of this zone that the bulk of British jazz evangelists were to be found before 1945. They were typically self-made intellectuals. In London we find 'Rhythm Clubs' (ninety-eight of which sprang up in Britain between 1933 and 1935) not in middle-class quarters like
Chelsea, Kensington or even Hampstead, but in the outlying districts like Croydon, Forest Gate, Barking or Edmonton...

We can leave aside the reaction of high society and its associated intellectuals. In Britain this was of no great importance though doubtless it pleased Duke Ellington to have the future King Edward VII sit in on drums at a party for his band in London. Much more important, as has been suggested, was the democratic and populist character of the music, which made the Melody Maker state approvingly: [It appeals not only to the fauteuils but to the gallery also. It considers no class distinction.'

...[what Britain] did develop, however, probably in close association with American New Deal radicalism ,was a powerful bonding of jazz, blues, folk and the extreme left, mainly communist but also, marginally, anarchist. For such people jazz and blues were essentially 'people's music' in three senses: a music with folk roots and capable of appealing to the masses, a do-it-yourself music which could be practised by ordinary people, as distinct from those with technical training, and lastly a music for protest, demonstration and collective celebration. Revivalist or Dixieland jazz lent itself unusually well to all these purposes. So much so that at its peak in the 1950s it came closer to turning jazz from the art of a coterie into a mass music than has been achieved anywhere else, except perhaps, for a moment, during the swing boom of the later 1930s in the USA. It is no accident that a typical anthem of the 'trad' jazz fans also became the typical song of the football fans on the terraces : 'When the Saints Go Marching In'. However, it should be noticed that, while revivalist jazz became de facto the music of an age-group in which students, and particularly art students, became prominent for the first time. it was neither consciously nor militantly a youth music... The 'trad' boom prepared the triumph of rock, but only rock turned itself into a conscious manifesto of immaturity'.

The Malatesta Club in Soho

1950s Soho clubs are one of the enduring obsessions of this site, but I didn't realise until recently that there was a specifically anarchist club there during that period - the Malatesta Club in Soho, named after the famous Italian revolutionary.

The club seems to have first opened on May Day 1954 and 'was run by the London Anarchist Group from 1954-8, seven nights a week. Habitues used to write songs and poetry and perform them at the club, which also had a resident jazz band' (Ian Walker, Anarchy in the UK, New Society, November 1979). Walker's article includes reminiscences of 'Justin', a veteran anarchist, who recalled  '"I used to make up songs - sort of sing and shout, to a drum. Couldn't play anything used to hammer away on the drum . . . it was really something, all run completely voluntarily". The anarchists' coffee house (it never had a licence) was called the Malatesta because he was the only anarchist writer the group could agree on. 'Some were Kropotkinists and some were Bakuninists, but we all agreed Malatesta was a good guy.'"

According to The University Libertarian (1955), 'Founded two years ago with much honest sweat, the Malatesta Club provides a meeting place and social centre' (University Libertarian 1955).

Among the founders was Philip Sansom (1916-1999), one of those put on trial in 1945 for their involvement in the anarchist paper War Commentary. and Donald Rouum, a prolific cartoonist for the journal Freedom for many years.

Philip Sansom in 1945

Donald Rouum in a 1952 portrait by Frank Lisle 
on display in Wakefield Art Gallery



Among those who went to the Malatesta Club at various times were the later socialist feminist writer Juliet Mitchell, author Colin McInnes; gay Labour MP and possible spy Tom Driberg  and libertarian architect and writer Colin Ward. The club was clearly a key portal into the anarchist movement for the curious and the committed. John Rety, who went on to edit Freedom in the 1960s, was a Hungarian Jewish refugee who started out on the Soho literary scene publishing magazines such as Fortnightly  and the Intimate Review. His collaborator John Pilgrim went to the Malatesta Club to do a report for the Review and both he and Rety were drawn into the movement.

In his book The Consul (2002), the sometime English situationist Ralph Rumney mentions that  ‘in Soho, I found the Malatesta Club, the final redoubt of old English anarchists’, and the writer Michael Moorcock has said that ‘Listening to old guys at the Malatesta Club talking about the Spanish Civil War’ was one of the influences on his anarchism ('Mythmakers and Lawbreakers – anarchist writers on fiction', AK Press 2009). It is mentioned in passing in his London novel King of the City  where a character says  'my grandad used to complain that the anarchists (he never missed a meeting at the Malatesta Club, Red Lion Square ) had been sold out to the communists who had lost the Spanish Civil War'. Moorcock and Rumney also both hung out at the Gyre and Gimble coffee house, though not sure if they knew each other.

I'm still a little unclear about where the club was. In some references, it appears it may have started out in Holborn before moving to Soho (maybe that's why Moorcock mentions Red Lion Square). In 'Inventing ourselves: lesbian life stories' by Hall Carpenter Archives (1991), Sharley MacLean recalls her first lesbian sexual experience was with someone she 'met through the Malatesta Club which was an anarchist cafe, a dingy cellar in Charlotte Street'. But Colin Ward  recalls that it was in Percy Street, which runs off Charlotte Street, so maybe it was near the corner.

As an interesting aside, the Club may have had a role in UFO history. As reported in Fortean Times (January 2011): 'In Flying Saucerers (Alternative Albion, 2007, p74), David Clarke and Andy Roberts relay a quaint eyewitness account from historian Laurens Otter. In early 1954, a drunken taxi driver entered a meeting at the anarchist Malatesta Club in Soho, and asked for Sam Cash, a fellow cabbie. Learning that Cash was expected later, “…the tired and emotional taxi driver lay down across some chairs and promptly fell asleep.” At the end of the guest speaker’s talk, the chairman asked if there were any questions. Whereupon "the taxi driver suddenly woke, asking, ‘How do I make a mill­ion pounds?’. Robinson [the chairman] took the question in good humour and speculated the best way to make a fortune was to found a fake religion. A discussion about how best to do this ensued with Otter opining that a much better idea would be to get in on the flying saucer craze. Robinson concurred, suggesting that the two ideas could be combined for best effect. […] A few years later, Cash told Otter that the drunken taxi driver, whose name was George King, had taken his advice about melding religion with flying saucers, and it had worked. The rest, as they say, is history".

George King founded the Aetherius Society, claiming to have been contacted by the 'Space People' with the message 'Prepare Yourself! You are to become the Voice of Interplanetary Parliament'.

(well that's all I've been able to find out so far - would love to know more, including - what was the exact address? what kind of activities happened there? I've seen mention of chess, meetings and jazz- was there dancing? If you have any more information, or even personal recollections, please comment).

Skip Jive

In our search for the origins of rave, we have previously looked at the revivalist and trad jazz scenes in London from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. The 'ravers' of the later period were looked down on by the early mods, with their taste for cool, modern jazz and by jazz musicians like George Melly who mocked their dancing. So I was delighted to get a post recently from someone in that scene putting the alternative view. Here's Terry Monaghan's account:

'Just a quick note as someone who danced in the 1950s off and on the Aldermaston Marches - I'd like to defend the dancing against some of the derogatory descriptions by the likes of George Melly, who even in much later life would not tolerate dancers from distracting audiences while he was performing.

'Skip-jiving' (sometimes abbreviated to 'trad') during the second phase of the music was in fact quite skilled and far from clumsy. At the culmination of the 1961 Aldermaston March for example there was a massive trad band ball at the Lyceum Ballroom which is the first time I saw a dance floor pulse in time with the music. The collective feet all hitting it at the same time, and with the special force of skip jive that consisted of a steady skip step, resulted in the necessary stomp effect. I'd never seen a floor move up and down a good two inches before. It was funny seeing the regular teds standing on the sidelines utterly amazed at this variety of unkempt enthusiasts pounding away so enthusiastically.

The 'out of time' jibe comes in my opinion from musicians who have difficulty in keeping a steady rhythm given their natural tendency to speed up, particular on the British scene where they seldom attached much importance to a reliable rhythm section. Thus while it was true at that Lyceum gig that the tempo's of the dancers and the musicians began to separate - depending on which band was playing, the fault in my opinion largely lay with the bands. Having had much more experience of this kind of thing in later life, and the ability to make comparisons with dancers and the musicians from Harlem's former Savoy Ballroom, it seems safe to suggest that a mass of dancers who are able to fall collectively into one rhythmic groove keep excellent time. Bands have to be attuned to respect this, and back then of course few of us had a clue about what we were really doing. The Lyceum was, and is, a very stable building, but in other locations the kinetic energy generated in this way physically collapsed ballrooms resulting in considerable death and injury tolls. No danger of that these days, everyone seems to be out of time with each other!

It seems to me that there is a parallel between what happened in this period with what happened with dance music in the early 1990s. Namely that one fraction embraced 'cool', 'sophistication' and 'intelligence' and looked down on the 'ravers' - but who had the best parties?

Dancing Questionnaire (18): Pete from London

Next up is Pete, a one man link connecting jazz, mod and techno rave scenes. He is currently involved in the Young Unknowns gallery project on the South Bank.

1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?
When I was 8 my mother sent me to ballet lessons on Saturdays - in baggy football shorts because she couldn't afford tights. A mate saw me coming out of a lesson and grassed me up to other kids at school. It was all very Billy Elliot except I wasn't much taken by the music to bother fighting my corner.

2. What's the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?
Dance has played a big part of my life since I was a kid in the 1950's, but I was in my 40's before the muse really took a hold. I'd become a world music fan in the late 80's then a guy came to share my flat who was big into techno, and for the first six months going to rave parties and clubs, my body just couldn't find a way to properly move with the sound. One night, seeing me struggling, a dancer whispered in my ear "Get between the beats". That tip stayed and the magic hasn't left me. I've since spoken to Africans who've said similar: "dance against the beat"

3. You. Dancing. The best of times…
It was Xmas 1991 in a club called The Alarm (in Strasbourg where my nephew lived) and there it all fell into place.They had to drag me out of the place.

4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…
An odd analogy springs to mind: In the same way a bad craftsman blames his tools, a good dancer can dance to any music. In my case there are limits - one is disco.

5. Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you've frequented?
At 64 I've known many: Rock and Roll but I was a bit too young. At 15 it was Trad jazz , Ken Colyers Jazz club in Great or was it Little Newport St? I was happier with Modern Jazz, Mingus was a hero. I saw & bopped to Kenny Clark in The Blue Note, Paris in '62. Then the mod scene in which I felt at home, going to The Scene, in Soho, and The Lyceum. The 70's during my breaks as barman in Dingwalls, there was the The Average White Band.

There's so many: Chaguaramas, but I'm bad remembering names and that same venue became a Punk place [The Roxy] where I pogoed to Johnny Moped. The 80s I remember House at The Brain, but African did it most for me then, and I went to WOMAD three years running. Then on after it was Techno everywhere!

6. When and where did you last dance?
Celebrating my 64th birthday in a Paris Bar called Rosa Bonheur, last August.

7. You're on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?
You must be kidding!

All questionnaires welcome - just answer the same questions in as much or as little detail as you like and send to transpontine@btinternet.com (see previous questionnaires). Quick disclaimer: please note that people who complete the questionnaires do not necessarily share the wider views expressed at this blog on politics, sex, drugs or disco!

Eel Pie Island

The excellent Another Nickel in the Machine - a site focusing on 20th century London -has recently featured some great photos of A Rave on Eel Pie Island in August 1960. I have reproduced a few here, check out the original post for more.


This was obviously a beatnik affair, complete with barefoot dancing - the music probably trad jazz, the preferred soundtrack for Britain's first generation of self-proclaimed ravers. A contemporary article reports 'The tolerant atmosphere in places like the Eel Pie Island club, off Twickenham, is at first surprising: up to 500 people will gather in the hall of a the derelict island hotel and, despite their often outlandish appearance, will listen and jive together all evening without incident' (Traditional Jazz is Booming, The Time, 12 August 1961). The scene doesn't look unlike a squat party rave of the last 20 years - graffiti on the wall, androgynous baggy clothes etc.

Eel Pie Island is located in the River Thames at Twickenham in South West London, and is a key location in London counter-cultural history, particularly the Eel Pie Hotel and its dancehall. Before the Second World War it was popular for ballroom dancing, then in the 1950s hosted jazz raves (like the one pictured here), before becoming a launchpad for English R&B, with bands like The Rolling Stones and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers playing there.

A 1967 article describes Eel Pie Island as 'for the past 10 years a Mecca of the long-haired ban-the-bombers.. On three evenings a week, the humped footbridge linking the island with the mainland supports a bedraggled procession of young people who trek from all over the country to spend a few hours a the island's famous jazz club. The throbbing, smoky atmosphere of the big hall where they dance, and the jungle of rough grass and bushes leading to the edge of the Thames forms a wild haven for non-conformists'.

The article goes on to disclose 'The Secret of Eel Pie Island' - that the club is partially a 'beatnik experiment', an 'open therapeutic community' run by Arthur Chisnall, a sociologist 'as an experiment in reaching and helping disturbed youngsters in their search for a purpose in life...Beatniks and delinquents who have drifted to the island over the years have since found their way to colleges, universities and into the social service' (Times, 6 January 1967)

The hotel closed in 1967, but the club reopened for a while in 1969 as Colonel Barefoot's Rock Garden, featuring underground acts like Hawkwind and The Edgar Broughton Band. The place was then occupied for a nominal rent by the Eel Pie Commune (1969-71) - there is an interesting article by the anarchist illustrator and Commune founder Clifford Harper here describing those two years of drugs, hippiedom and political arguments: 'It had 25 bedrooms and at one point 100 people from all over the world were at Eel Pie Island. It was anarchy... It had a big lawn and some grounds and the hotel was full of people... Part of the hotel we opened as a dance hall on Friday and Saturday night. Out in the suburbs, six to seven hundred kids would turn up'.

In his memoir, Eel Pie Dharma, Chris Faiers remembers: 'The old hotel rapidly filled with dossers, hippies, runaway schoolkids, drug dealers, petty thieves, heroin addicts, artists, poets, bikers, American hippie tourists, au pair girls, and Zen philosophers from all over the world... The derelict Eel Pie ballroom was opened for business once again. It looked like a high school gym done over by hippies. There were garish psychedelic paintings all over the flaking walls. The most striking was the looming head of a red-eyed hippie king, with his Aubrey Beardsley tresses winding about the walls'.

Some great parties I am sure, but not a libertarian utopia - as usual where drugs and money are involved, some very dodgy characters were drawn to the honeypot. Another participant recalls that 'the only guns seen were those produced 18 months later by some East End gangsters, brought in to ensure the dance-hall's peaceful transition of authority from the patronage of a nearby Hells Angels chapter to that of a slightly more professional management'.

The Hotel was burned down in 1971 in the midst of a controversy about Richmond Council issuing a demolition order for the building to pave the way for a contentious redevelopment of the site.

A new book on Eel Pie Island by Dan Van der Vat & Michele Whitby is due to be published in October 2009.

More Soho Nights: Hand Jive

More on Soho Nights from today's Guardian:

'... in 1956, I heard about this new dance craze called hand-jiving. So I made a number of visits to a coffee bar called The Cat's Whiskers in Soho. Cliff Richard used to appear there. I remember the place was crowded with young kids when I arrived. It was pretty late, but not after midnight. In those days, midnight was the witching hour; things closed up after that. I did not speak to anyone, but I do remember the atmosphere was very jolly. Wholesome would be a good word. And the reason they were jiving with their hands was just because there was precious little room to do it with their feet. Everyone was doing it, which was quite a bizarre sight.
The craze just fascinated me. It seemed like a strange novelty, but it really caught on. There were quite a few variations they could do, like one called the mashed potato... What's more, hand-jiving was an activity that everyone shared and had a go at in their own particular style. Not being a great jive artist myself, it was one of the things I could do, and I used to join in. .

Ken Russell's work features in Soho Nights, at the Photographers' Gallery, London W1 (0845 262 1618), until 8 February.

Soho Nights

Showing at the Photographers Gallery in London at the moment is Soho Nights, an exhibition of photographs of London nightlife in the 1950s.



There’s a group of 1957 pictures taken by Ken Russell in the Cat’s Whisker (above), a Soho coffee bar, with a quote from a Daily Mirror article Teenagers of Soho (1.4.1957): ‘It’s so crowded the girls “hand jive” to the band as there’s no room for dancing’. The suggestion seems to be that hand jive developed because that was all there was space to do – wonder if that’s true?

The Cat's Whisker was in Kingly Street, and was an important venue in the skiffle scene - see this 1957 article from Time Magazine: 'Into umbrous, ill-ventilated underground caverns, seemingly as necessary to life as the air-raid shelters where some of the visitors were born, thousands of bemused young Londoners squeeze nightly to stomp and holler their approval of Britain's latest musical mania: U.S. rock 'n' roll, commercial hillbilly and folk music, warmed over and juiced up in a mishmash called skiffle... To the Soho hipsters who swelter and suffocate for it in the Cat's Whisker, the Côte d'Azur or The Two I's, skiffle is brand-new'.

There’s also a series of photographs taken by Charles ‘Slim’ Hewitt at Cy Laurie’s trad jazz club in 1954 (examples below). They were originally taken for an article featuring the club in Picture Post magazine that is included in the exhibition, ‘Blue Heaven in the Basement’ (10.7.1954) : ‘it is a hypnotic, ecstatic, musical experience… There are no non-partisans. The dancers are expert and frenzied… On Friday nights there is always a queue of black and blue jeans quietly intent on forcing the “House Full” sign’.

The exhibition includes a whole series of shots that were not used in the Picture Post piece and they are very striking and timeless – multi-racial dancers in jeans, striped tops, bare feet.

Cy Laurie’s Jazz Club was held downstairs at Mac's Rehearsal Rooms at 41 Great Windmill Street, Soho, and opened in 1953 - see previous posts on this scene.

The Gyre & Gimble Coffee House: London 1950s

In the ongoing documentation of the history of London nightlife, I have mentioned before the cellar coffee bars of the West End in the 1950s. One such place was the Gyre and Gimble Coffee House (obviously named after the line in Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky), situated near to Charing Cross Station in John Adam Street.

In 1956, Johnny Booker (1934-2007) took over as manager of the Gyre and Gimble (sometimes known as 'the G's') and began to play music there with friends who became the nucleus of The Vipers, one of the foremost bands in the 1950s skiffle scene. They had a number of hit records, with Booker (recording as 'Johnny Martyn') as one of the singers). Other musicians hung out at the coffee house, including folk guitarist Davey Graham, Long John Baldry, Rod Stewart and soon-to-be English pop star Tommy Steele (as writer and fellow G's habitué Michael Moorcock recalls).

In the book The Map is not the Territory, artist and Situationist Ralph Rumney, recalls an encounter in the G&G with Steele that the latter would probably rather forget (he doesn't mention in his 'Bermondsey Boy' autobiography):

"There was a place called the Gyre and Gimble in a basement in Adams Street that one used to go in at night. and you'd buy a coffee and they'd let you nod off on the table. And Tommy Steele used to come in there and twang on his guitar and sing and make an awful racket, and all of us were just trying to have a quiet kip and we kept telling him to shut up and he wouldn't. And I had a very large friend at that time - Gerald, he was called - who was a bit of a thug...

Anyway, he came down one night - well, he used to come down every night - but he came down one night and Tommy Steele was twanging away as usual - Rock Island Line and skiffle - Rockin' with the Caveman - it was really tiresome. because he didn't have much of a repertoire in those days. And from the top of the stairs Gerald yelled out STOP THAT RACKET. and Tommy Steele didn't. So Gerald just put his hand on the banister, leapt over it. and landed on Tommy Steele, feet first. and cracked about four of his ribs, so he had to be taken to hospital. Which got us barred for about three days [laughs]. And we never saw Tommy Steele there again".

There's a more positive account at the excellent Classic Cafes: 'A dingy narrow doorway, with the name of the establishment in barely-legible swirly lettering, led down stairs which opened up into a very large basement area. The smoky dive had low crude wooden tables and chairs and the whole place had a rustic feel. A sort of menu was scrawled on one of the dark walls, but I had no appetite for eating there. Most of the customers looked as though they had not seen daylight for some time. The coffee however was very good and in generously large cups... Polly and I became regulars at the Gyre & Gimble and joined an informal group of pseudo-intellectuals who used to meet there on Sunday evenings. They had dubbed themselves The New Day Dadaists and in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp discussed ideas to mock the art establishment. They even got as far to putting out an advertisement for an exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite painting at a derelict house in Bloomsbury. Really radical'.

Certainly some interesting cross-cultural/counter-cultural traffic through this place, prompting questions about connections real or imagined: did anarchist Sci-Fi writer Moorcock know Rumney? Was the latter one of the 'New Day Dadaists'? Could history have taken a different turn so that Rod Stewart ended up with the Situationists in Paris in May 1968 instead of touring the States with the Jeff Beck Group?

Classic Party Scenes (5): Beat Girl (1960)

The Soho jazz clubs of the 1950s (discussed in previous post) act as the setting for the film Beat Girl (1960), in which art student Gillian Hills runs away to be a crazy Soho beatnik and then a stripper in a club run by Christopher Lee.

Not sure if the dance scene is in a real club or a studio - the music is by the John Barry Seven and the scene also features a young Oliver Reed dancing in a check shirt (about four minutes in):



The film was released in the US as 'Wild for Kicks', with the following trailer promising a 'vivid and shocking portrayal of modern youth who grow up too soon and live it up too fast' with 'beat girls and defiant boys':

Are you trad or mod? (London 1958)

A great piece from 1958, I believe from the Daily Mirror - journalist Anne Allen goes on a tour of London jazz clubs to try and understand the split between 'trad' and 'mod' jazz. As is clear from this article this was not just a musical dispute between the fans of 'traditional' New Orlean jazz and modern jazz - there were also stylistic differences. This was a critical junction in post-war youth culture - from the jazz enthusiasts of London run two different trajectories, the dress down trad-beatnik-hippy line and the sharp dressing-working class dandy-mod line (with the original mods being modern jazz enthusiasts):

"We went to Cy Laurie’s, a home of ‘Trad’. Down steep stairs to a room lighted only near the band and in the corners we found a hundred or so youngsters, average age about 20. Most of them were in the midst of a hectic jive session. Some were glued to the walls in gloomy concentration on the music.

Some members come three or four times a week and being in the swim is manifested by a sort of nightmare uniform. Long straight hair for the girls, black or scarlet stockings, fisherman’s knit sweaters reaching to the knees or long tube dresses.

Little beards were common and a lot of the men had tight-cut trousers with a distinctive stripe. I was told that the thing of the moment, exclusive to this club, was the turning round of clerical collars.

The overwhelming impression was of heat. The amount of thick woollen clothing currently fashionable must be nearly insupportable after hours of lightning-quick jiving...

I got nowhere in my efforts to find out their jobs. They just did not admit to working although some were obviously bona fide students.

Had we dressed the part for this club we should not have been allowed into the other club we visited – the Flamingo, the home of Modern jazz. Even silk mufflers are frowned on here and the manager insists on lending a tie to anyone with out one. Most of the members came to listen. Only a few danced, and then in a minute space with the least possible movement

Three bands played while we there. No single one could possibly maintain the pace throughout the whole evening. There was almost no pause between numbers and the music was ear-splitting.

There was less of a social club atmosphere here… Again and again I was told ‘it depends what band is playing. We follow the band’. Such is their devotion that they come from as far away as Nottingham and Bournemouth. A little older than the Trad fans down the road they also seemed more steadily employed – shipping clerk, apprentice printer, builder, shop assistant, music student. The list was endlessly varied.

...And never forget that they are not licensed for drinks, and the two we saw were absolutely rigid about the ‘Members Only’ rule… nowhere did we find anything stronger to drink that a ‘coke’.

See also London Jazz Clubs 1950s. Thanks to Steve Fletcher for sending in this clipping - he is actually in the photo on the left - and for this flyer from the Cy Laurie Jazz Club at 41 Great Windmill Street in Soho. Note the invitation to 'Dance or listen to Jazz! Styled in the New Orleans idiom'. The club was indeed open every night of the week with bands including Bill Brunskills Jazzmen, the Graham Stewart Seven, the Brian Taylor Jazzmen and of course the Cy Laurie Band - sometimes with a skiffle group - skiffle also emerged from this scene.

Memories, flyers and clippings from this scene or any other always welcome - email address is in right hand box.

Remembering George Melly

Just a few months after the death of his former bandmate Mick Mulligan, another of the great jazz ravers has died - George Melly. We have mentioned here before his role in the 40s and 50s revivalist jazz scene in London, seemingly the time when people in England first used the word 'rave' for a party. There's lots more to be said about Melly - as pop culture writer, libertarian, surrealist for a start - but for now here's an extract from his 1965 book Owning Up, describing dance hall venues in the early 1950s (by the way does anyone know where Le Metro club he refers to was?).

During this period the band was rehearsing for its first public appearance... we used the upper rooms of various pubs. I suppose that most of early British revivalist jazz emerged from the same womb. Rehearsal rooms existed, of course, but we never thought of hiring one at that time. They were part of the professional world of which we knew nothing.

Many of these pub rooms were temples of 'The Ancient Order of Buffaloes', that mysterious proletarian version of the 'Freemasons', and it was under dusty horns and framed nine­teenth-century characters that we struggled through 'Sunset Cafe Stomp' or 'Miss Henny's Ball'.

Although we had not yet performed we already had a name. The fashion was for something elaborate and nostalgic. Admit­tedly Humph was satisfied with 'Humphrey Lyttelton and His Band' but he swam in deep water. Among the minnows, names like 'The Innebriated Seven', 'Denny Coffey and His Red Hot Beans', and 'Mike Daniel's Delta Jazzmen' were more typical. Mick decided on 'Mick Mulligan's Magnolia Jazz Band'...

We still played a few jazz clubs, mostly in the provinces, and, due to the fact that several towns still wouldn't license Sunday cinemas, there was the odd concert. Most of our jobs, however, were in dance halls. The dance halls of Great Britain, the halls, that is, where dances are held, can be subdivided into various groups. Start­ing at the top are the great Palais, some, like Mecca, part of a nation-wide chain, others individually owned.

The Mecca Halls are standardized so that once you're inside you might be anywhere in the country. They are run like mili­tary organizations in which the musicians are privates. The band-rooms are full of printed rules: no alcohol to be brought on to the premises (we were actually frisked in some places), no women allowed behind stage except for band vocalists, no frat­ernization with the public. The decor is usually Moorish in inspiration. There are strange bulbous ashtrays on thick stems, a forest of lights sprouting from the ceiling, bouncers with cauliflower ears circling the dance floor in evening dress, revolving stages and managers with safes in their offices and 1930 moustaches.

The privately-owned halls were on the whole a great im­provement. Of course they very much depended on the character of the manager or owner. Some of these suffer from a Napoleon complex. The hall is their Europe, the visiting band­leader an ear which cannot refuse to listen to their grandiose schemes and delusions. Others are friendly and courteous men who ask you in for a drink after the dance and become, over the years, familiar faces in the endless repetitive nomadic round.

The decor of the dance halls outside the big chains was as varied as their owners. Some were luxurious, influenced by the Festival of Britain, given to a wall in a different colour, wall­papers of bamboo poles or grey stones, false ceilings and modern light fittings made of brass rods and candle-bulbs. Others were as bare as aeroplane hangars, or last decorated during the early picture palace era. Mick's inevitable comment as we staggered in with our cases and instruments into these was, 'What a shit-house!'

There was also a series of halls over branches of Montague Burtons and Co-ops. There were always a great many very steep steps to drag the drum kit up. We also played for promoters whose offices were either in London or some large provincial town, but who covered a par­ticular area and hired halls which had other day-time func­tions.

Territorial Halls where the floor was marked out with white lines and there were posters showing muscular young soldiers giving a thumb up in a jungle or diagrams of a machine gun with the parts painted different colours.

Corn exchanges, often rather beautiful nineteenth-century buildings with glass roofs and terrible acoustics. Round the circular walls were little wood-encased partitions with the names of cattle-food firms or grain merchants painted across the back in faded trompe-Foeil Victorian lettering.

Above all the town halls, massive monuments to civic pride in St Pancras Gothic, where we played on stages big enough to seat an entire chorus and orchestra for 'The Messiah', and the young bloods of Huddersfield or Barnsley staggered green-faced from the bar in a vain attempt to make the gents, and were messily sick under a statue of Queen Victoria or the portrait of some bearded mayor hanging above the marble staircase.

The jazz clubs were moments of release and pleasure from this dismal round. We didn't have to change into uniform, we could drink and smoke on the stage, above all we knew the audience would be on our side and that we would only have to play jazz. In London, too, we made a deliberate effort to go on playing jazz for kicks. At the beginning of the week, unless we were away on a long tour, we were usually in town, and every Tues­day we played in a cellar club which catered for French stu­dents and was called 'Le Metro'. The club had a curved ceiling and did look rather like a tube tunnel. Behind the bandstand was painted an unconvincing metro train. The bar had Lautrec posters in it.

Rik Gunnell and The Flamingo

An obituary in The Guardian today for music promoter Rik Gunnell (1931-2007). The clubs he was involved in were critical in London music in the 1950s and 1960s, most famously The Flamingo in Wardour Street where 'In the club's basement, black and white people mingled to an extent unknown elsewhere in London in the 1960s. Judy Garland dropped in to the club's AllNighter, and Christine Keeler played off her lovers there. A who's who of British rock and R&B appeared at the Flamingo under his aegis and a breathtaking roll call of Americans, including Stevie Wonder, Bill Haley, Patti LaBelle, John Lee Hooker and Jerry Lee Lewis'.

Other clubs he was linked to included 'Studio 51, a jazz club where the new bebop was played' after World War Two; the 2-Way Jazz Club (from 1952); the Blue Room (also 1952), featuring modern jazz; The Star in Wardour Street; Club Basic in Charing Cross Road; and Leicester Square's Mapleton hotel. The latter became an all-nighter called Club Americana in 1955 , and Gunnell started extra nights there as Club M which became popular with 'African-American servicemen based then in Britain; and 'Caribbean and African settlers of the Windrush generation'. He moved to the Flamingo in 1958; when it closed in in 1967, Gunnell took over the Bag O'Nails in Kingly Street.

Good stuff on 1960s British r'n'b and soul at Brown Eyed Handsome Man.

Hampstead Heath Rave 1955

Steve Fletcher has sent this great photo of himself and then girlfriend at a jazz 'rave' on Hampstead Heath in 1955.

According to Steve, The Ken Colyer Band played at this event. Ken Colyer was a key figure in the 'New Orleans' infuenced English jazz scene in the 1950s, with regular all nighters at his club at Studio 51 in Great Newport Street, London WC1. The Ken Colyer Club also provided a platform for the emerging British R'n'B scene in the early 1960s, with The Rolling Stones playing there regularly.

The 1950s trad and revivalist jazz scenes interest me as a largely unwritten chapter in the history of English youth cultures. Most people assume that it all started with rock'n'roll, but as discussed elsewhere on this site jazz raves were being held from the early 50s.

There is something very timeless about this photo - with his stripy top and glasses Steve could have been a member of Orange Juice in the early 1980s or maybe The Long Blondes today.

More posts on 1950s jazz raves here.

The Ravers Next Step: into the 1960s

In previous posts we have looked at the revivalist jazz raves organised by Mick Mulligan and Cy Laurie in 1950s Soho. From the mid-1950s a new scene was developing, based around 'traditional jazz'. The musical distinction was that while the former favoured the 1920s jazz band sound found on Chicago recordings by Louis Armstrong and others, advocates of the latter claimed that the real New Orleans sound was to be found in the music of players who had never left the city to head North, unlike Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. This search for the ever-receding holy grail of authenticity was mocked by some at the time. Jeff Nuttall recalls that "Uncle John Renshaw, a band­leader of the time, used to say with some irony 'I'm in the sincerity racket, meself.'"

Despite its antiquarian musical roots, the trad jazz scene (and the related skiffle scene) was very much a youth sub culture of 'ravers'. Nuttall recalls that in the mid-1950s:

"Soho was alive with cellar coffee-bars, where skiffle and jazz could be played and heard informally and where the rich odour of marihuana became, for the first time, a familiar part of the London atmosphere. Sam Widges was the most popular. Also there was the Nucleus, the Gyre and Gimble, the Farm. They were open most of the night and often the management would leave you to sleep where you sat. It was a place to stay in the dry if you didn't want to go home. It became obvious that parental control was going to stop at about the age of fifteen for a large number of young people. Teenage wages were going up and so were student grants. It was becoming possible to push the leaky boat of adult delusions a little further away. The Soho Fair, which ran annually for three years [1955-7], was a festival of the ravers. Bands and guitars and cossack hats and sheepskin waistcoats flooded out of the cellars and into the streets. It was so good that it had to be stopped, so good that it was in the first Soho Fair that the real spirit of Aldermaston was born'. Trad jazz bands provided the soundtrack on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marches to or from Aldermaston nuclear weapons base from 1958 (picture of dancers is from 1958 march).

In a 1962 New Statesman article, George Melly described 'An All-Night Rave at the Alexandra Palace', a "'trad' ball" where "Band followed band from 9.30 P.M. until 7.30 A.M. the next morning. The audience were dressed almost without exception in 'rave gear'... the essence of 'rave gear' is a stylized shabbiness. To describe an individual couple, the boy was wearing a top hat with 'Acker' painted on it, a shift made out of a sugar sack with a C.N.D. symbol painted on the back, jeans, and no shoes. The girl, a bowler hat with a C.N.D. symbol on it, a man's shirt worn outside her black woollen tights. Trad' dancing in the con­temporary sense is deliberately anti-dancing. When I first went to jazz clubs, there were usually one or two very graceful and clever couples. But today the ac­cepted method of dancing to trad music is to jump heavily from foot to foot like a performing bear, pref­erably out of time to the beat... Trad musicians have chris­tened these self-made elephants 'Leapniks'." The Acker referred to here was Acker Bilk, the jazz clarinettist and unlikely musical figurehead for late 1950s/early 1960s ravers.

The trad jazz scene as a youth movement was soon to be overwhelmed by The Beatles and everything that followed. In the semi-situationist journal Heatwave (1966), Charles Radcliffe included the ravers in The Seeds of Destruction, a ground-breaking survey of 'youth revolt':

"The Ravers... had some Beat characteristics and rather tenuous connections with the anti-bomb movement but their main preoccupations were Jazz clubs and Jazz festivals; this was the period when ersatz traditional (Trad) Jazz, as purveyed by Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball and others was inordinately popular. Partly Trad's popularity arose in reaction to the decline of the small fifties Beat scene; it was easy to dance to and Jazz clubs were among the few places where teenagers could do more or less as they wished without adult interference. Partly it arose because the musicians did not take themselves too seriously and were often simply good-time Ravers".

Ravers' dress was a kind of "'music-hall-cum-riverboat-cum-contemporary-folk-art' with Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament symbol decorated bowlers, umbrellas, striped trousers, elegant jackets. The chicks had long hair, wore ban-the-bomb type uniforms (duffle coats, polo-neck jerseys, very loose around the hips, and jeans). The Ravers were, on the whole, distrusted by other groups with whom they came into contact; the Beats used the term 'Raver' derogatorily and the nuclear disarmers treated Ravers' 'superficiality' with superior amusement and occasional annoyance... The Ravers, as such, died with the 'traditional' Jazz boom but the 'Raver philosophy' continues and there are once again groups calling themselves Ravers. The term has likewise regained its approbatory meaning after the frequent critical use by the CND generation".

Here we have a phenomenon that was to re-emerge with 'ravers' from the 1980s onwards - the use of the term as a put down by the would-be serious minded.

The George Melly quote is reproduced from 'Revolt into Style: the pop arts' (1970); Jeff Nuttall from 'Bomb Culture' (1969). Image source: Science and Society Picture Library. For more on Heatwave, see the excellent Dancin' in the streets! Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos in the 1960s as recorded in the pages of The Rebel Worker & Heatwave, edited by Franklin Rosemont and Charles Radcliffe, Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, Chicago. 2005

We would love to hear some first hand accounts of 1950s/60s raves - photos too would be great. If you were there why not leave a comment, or email transpontine@btinternet.com

1950s Raves Continued

In an earlier post, we referred to the revivalist jazz raves organised by Mick Mulligan and George Melly in London in the early 1950s, the earliest use we have found so far of the term 'rave' and 'ravers' in a musical context (as opposed to 'raving mad').

Another key figure in this first London rave scene was the clarinettist Cy Laurie (1926-2002), pictured here. Cy Laurie’s Jazz Club was held downstairs at Mac's Rehearsal Rooms at 41 Great Windmill Street, Soho. The space had earlier been the base for Ronnie Scott's Club 11, one of London's first modern jazz clubs which opened there in 1948, before moving to Carnaby Street. But it was Laurie's club that became famous for all-night raves.

One 50s raver recalled 'The Windmill Street club was the Saturday Night magnet in my late teens; it was the music and the atmosphere, but also the place to find out the address of that week's rave; there were five of us, and between us we could muster three cars - unusual in those days - which ensured that we always gathered passengers who knew the ropes. On one then celebrated occasion, four of us went to Manchester, at the drop of a hat in an Austin A35, by the time we got there it was all over, so we returned to London with an extra passenger, who had been given a trumpet which he taught himself to play on the journey' (so years before the late 1980s London orbital parties, the convoy of rave pilgrims was established).

Another remembers 'all nighters at Cy's were a buzz. I was one of the - all dressed in black and often barefoot - dancers who was first AND last on the floor.... Cy's place was a culture thing, and included the early morning rush to Waterloo station to get the Milk Train to Hastings, for "FUN" in the Hastings caves'. Others would stumble into the Harmony Inn cafe in Archer Street. By the end of the 1950s, Laurie had moved on to India to study with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, beating the Beatles to it, while revivalist jazz had been superseded by the trad jazz boom and a new crowd of ravers.

In Bomb Culture (1968), his overview of 1950s and 1960s underground culture, Jeff Nuttal observes that the revivalist jazz scene was very much a Paris as well as London bohemian sub culture:

"Paris, after the war, has been the traditional home of bohemianism... the post­war pop-bohemianism launched itself with a cult of the primitive, of ceramic beads and dirndl skirts, of ankle-thong sandals and curtain-hoop ear-rings, of shaggy corduroys and ten-day beards, of seamen's sweaters and home-dyed battle-dress.... the clubs which set themselves up in London and Paris and promoted New Orleans jazz like a religion were totally outside of commerce, running at the start of things on a non-profit-making basis, employing amateur bands, collec­tions of students, particularly art students, who imitated the great recordings by King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton with varying skill and complete self-decep­tion... The following was a minority following, self-conscious and partisan, opin­ionated and crusading. The world was evil, governed by Mam­mon and Moloch. New Orleans jazz was a music straight from the heart and the swamp, unclouded by the corrupting touch of civilization. It would refertilize the world".

King of the Ravers is Dead

Last month saw the death of Mick Mulligan, the English jazz trumpeter described in the 1950s Melody Maker as the King of the Ravers - and the man sometimes credited with inventing the use of the word 'rave' as a description of a wild party.

As Mulligan's bandmate George Melly describes it in his book Revolt into Style (1971), "It was inevitable that the spontaneous if mysterious enthusiasm which sprang up all over wartime Britain for an almost forgotten music, Negro jazz of the 20s, should lead eventually to an attempt to reconstruct the music and, by the end of the war, there was already one established band, the George Webb Dixielanders. Within a year or two the revivalist jazz movement had spread to every major city in the British Isles, and it was in the jazz clubs of the late 40s that what might be considered the dry-run for a pop explosion first took shape".

Melly has described this period of 'Revivalist Jazz' more fully in his autobiography, Owning Up (1965). It was apparently in the early 1950s that 'Raves' were first organised, all night jazz parties in Soho and elsewhere. According to Melly "The word 'rave', meaning to live it up, was as far as I know a Mulligan-Godbolt invention. It took several forms. The verb as above, 'a rave' meaning a party where you raved, and 'a raver', i.e. one who raved as much as possible. An article once described Mick as 'The King of the Ravers'. During a National Savings Drive in 1952, Mick and Jim derived a great deal of harmless amusement by ringing each other up every time they saw a new poster and reading out its message with the word 'Rave' substituted for the word 'Save' 'help britain through national raving', 'wanted 50,000,000 ravers,' etc. Mick and I were the first people to organize all-night raves, and they were an enormous social success, but a financial loss".

These original raves prefigured some of the later similarly named scenes, with their all night bohemian ambience, sex and intoxicants: "At seven a.m. the band played its final number and we'd all crawl up out of the sweat-scented cellar into the empty streets of a Sunday morning in the West End. Hysterical with lack of sleep, accompanied by a plump art student, her pale cheeks smeared with the night's mascara, I'd catch the Chelsea bus and try to read the Observer through prickling red eyeballs as we swayed along Piccadilly, down Sloane Street, and into the King's Road. Then a bath, one of those delirious fucks that only happen on the edge of complete fatigue, and a long sleep until it was time to get up and face the journey to Cook's Ferry or whatever jazz club we were playing that evening" (Melly, Owning Up).

Mulligan and Melly's raves took place in their basement rehearsal room in Gerrard Street, Soho. Nearby 'in an enormous basement in Windmill Street, just off Piccadilly', Cy Laurie held 'all night raves' in his jammed cellar-club. Laurie won "the adherence of the recently self-styled Beatniks (until that year they had called themselves existent­ialists), Soho layabouts and the art-school students' being rewarded with 'a shocked article in the People with photographs of necking couples lying on the floor and a wealth of salacious moralizing".

As well as basement clubs, there were "river-boat shuffle" held on boats: "Everybody knew everybody. We all squeezed on to a little boat which chugged up-river to Chertsey. At the locks there was jiving on the tow-paths. Beryl Bryden swam to enthusiastic cheers. The music and the moving water, the bottled beer and the bare arms, melted into a golden haze. The last defiant chorus from the band as the ship turned in midstream before heading for the pier in the warm dusk sounded really beautiful".

By the mid-1950s a new rave scene was developing as 'revivalist jazz' began to make way for 'trad jazz'. We will return to this in a future post.

Photo: Mulligan on trumpet with George Melly, his bandmate in Mick Mulligan's Magnolia Jazz Band.