STORIES

Bach to the future (from ‘Stanley King‘) 

Sometimes after a show we’d go on to a hotel and do a second gig playing for the entertainment of the residents and summer holiday makers. Pete Brown had a more or less open invitation to do such gigs or not depending on what time we finished a show. He wasn’t the only one to have such an arrangement though and on one occasion we found that Stanley King had beaten us to it.

Stanley was the Folkestone Borough organist. The job involved playing whatever and whenever necessary, from afternoon tea dances to organ recitals but still left him plenty of time to fit in private work. He was an incredible musician. I’d once heard him play at a wedding where he’d been specially asked to play Bach before and after the service. As the church began to fill with people, Stanley however decided to play songs from The Beatles’ ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band‘, although as a concession he played it all in Bach’s style.

I noticed that many members of the congregation were scanning the order of service to find out what this beautiful music was and I’d hazard a guess that Johann Sebastian picked up a whole bunch of new fans that afternoon.

A bunch of keys (from ‘Stanley King‘)

At the hotels, Stanley would accompany large ladies from Harrogate on the piano. In their Mrs Bouquet flowery dresses they would stand by the piano and warble songs from the shows. The less considerate of them would launch straight into a song without warning, leaving Stanley to catch up in his own time. Some would bellow a line or two into Stanley’s ear so that he could ascertain what key they were in. Some, like the Karaoke professionals of today, had done it many times before and by now knew what key they needed. A few even produced their own sheet music. It was all the same to Stanley. He could play any song in any key, with or without the music. From behind his grand piano, he would beam up at them encouragingly, hiding the fact that he despised them all.

On one occasion I joined Stanley to play ‘Blue Moon‘. We played an eight-bar intro in F major, the song’s usual key. Stanley nodded to the lady and she began to sing. After a few bars, he glanced towards me and, hidden from the singer and the audience by the piano, raised his right hand index finger, the one sharp silently indicating the key of G Major. I assumed he thought the new key better suited to the woman’s range. Soon, by modulations so subtle that the change went unnoticed, he arrived at the new key. Still singing in the original key, the singer now hit one or two notes that sounded slightly off. Stanley flashed her a beam of support. Wondering how on earth she could have made such a mistake she belatedly followed him into the new key. Stanley looked over at me again and this time pointed two fingers towards the floor. Two flats - Bb Major. Puzzled and unsure as to how this transformation was to be achieved, I backed off on the volume. Sure enough however, within a few bars we were in Bb and still nobody else had noticed. This was clever stuff.

‘And when I looked, the moon had turned to gold’, sang the unsuspecting diva, now singing in G major, at the climax of the middle eight. The last note had the audience squirming in their seats in embarrassment. To her credit, she somehow finished the final verse and walked back to her table to muted applause. She remembered to thank Stanley first though and apologised profusely for the bum notes which she couldn’t begin to explain.

‘Give the lady a big hand’, called Stanley and nobody clapped louder than he as she meekly made her way back to her husband and friends.

‘What the hell was that all about Stan?’

‘I call it ‘singing in a bunch of keys’. ‘Great isn’t it’.

‘The poor sods’, I said.

On (and off) the buses (from ‘The original Rolling Stones’)

In order to make sure of a few friendly faces whenever we played, the band had been running buses to out of town gigs for some time. We’d hire a bus and driver from The East Kent Road Car Company and take turns to travel on board and collect the fares to pay for it. It seems now to have been quite an enterprising thing to have done. There were sometimes a few empty seats on the outward journey but rarely any on the way back. People would make their own way to the gig, manage to miss the last bus or train home and then travel back on our bus. The problem was that after a night’s drinking they didn’t always want to pay. I’d had problems of this sort before, often with the same lout.

‘You having trouble, Mick?,’ enquired Albert Finch on the bus coming back from the Strand Palais in Deal on one such occasion. Albert was a regular at our dances. A gentle giant and a good dancer and, being a real gentleman, popular as a dancing partner with the girls. I also I knew him through my day job where he was a labourer on the roofing gang. He was immensely strong. I’d seen him climbing a ladder to the roof without using his hands, carrying an eighty-pound roll of roofing felt on over each shoulder. I was very glad now that he was on my bus and on my side!.

I confessed that I was.

‘Oi, you, give Mick the money’, Albert ordered the thug.

‘Who’s going to make me?’, came the response. He queried Albert’s interest in the matter and suggested, in a manner of speaking, that he should go away. Albert asked him for a second time, not quite as nicely I noted, and this time was entreated to go forth and multiply. Without further ado, Albert plucked the offending entity effortlessly from his seat, carried him down the aisle to the open platform at the back of the bus and hurled him off into the darkness of Oxney bottom where he disappeared into the undergrowth by the side of the road.

After that he always paid up.

One, two…one two three…STOP! The left-handed bass player (from ‘The original Rolling Stones’)

Ronnie never got around to buying his own ‘real’ string bass but started to borrow one regularly from Dickie Parfitt a local jazz musician. The bass was kept at a jazz club run by well known local trombone player Bod Bowles. Bod had recently formed his own band and kept the instrument for whoever might need it. It seems the double bass is one of those instruments that a lot of musicians can play but, maybe for obvious reasons, very few own. Ronnie however was left handed so each time he borrowed the instrument he had to allow enough time to enable him to change all the strings around so that he could play it. Then after each gig he’d carefully change them all back again before returning the instrument.

One night on stage with his own band Bod got as far as counting in the first number when a panicky voice yelled from behind him. As Bod stamped his foot in time on the floor of the stage, a desperate cry of ‘Stop!, stop!’, came from behind him.

Ronnie had finally succumbed to the inevitable and forgotten to change the strings back!

The fat percussionist (from ‘The Mirkwood Story‘)

Jack and I set out to write some original material. When we felt we had enough songs to put together a set, we started to think about the personnel. The first new recruit was Derek Bowley. We’d met Derek once or twice when Howard Oliver had brought him along to Take Five’s rehearsals and knew he had a great voice. Now we just needed bass and drums. We advertised and started to audition applicants.

Gathered together at Jack’s house, we awaited the arrival of the first aspiring drummer. When he arrived he turned out to be a red-faced, very overweight chap. He set up his drums and played a few rolls around the kit. Not bad we thought. We tried a couple of straightforward numbers to begin with. The first was a short song which he played quite well except that we noticed that he speeded up a quite bit as we got towards the end. The next number however was rather longer. As before things started all right until once again he began to speed up, this time more and more until it became a race and we were force to abandon the song mid way. In the kindest way we could, we mentioned this shortcoming to him.

‘I know,’ he said looking a bit embarrassed. ‘It can be a real problem.’ ‘The trouble is, I find it very hard to breathe while I’m playing!’

He wasn’t wrong about it being a problem. It seemed that as the oxygen in his lungs began to run out he was forced to play faster and faster in a desperate attempt to get to the end of the song before doing himself permanent brain damage.

In fairness to him, he could hold his breath longer than anyone I’ve ever known. On a short song he could just about make it to the end (although the end would still arrive a lot sooner than planned!).

He told us he felt sure he could overcome his difficulties with practice and pleaded with us to give him another chance. Not having the heart to deny him one last chance, we agreed to his request. For more than a minute the tempo remained steady. Things seemed hopeful. Then as before he began gradually to pick up speed. His face became redder and redder and his drumming more and more furious. Jack, Derek and I couldn’t look at each other for fear of laughing and tried not to look at him for fear of causing embarrassment. Then suddenly, he lost consciousness and collapsed, falling forward over his kit and knocking everything flying. His hand collided with the edge of a cymbal which gashed it open badly. Blood spurted from the wound and up the wall. Jack’s wife Jane, fortunately a trained nurse, bandaged him up and packed him off to A&E. We commiserated with him and suggested that in view of his ‘problem’ he should think about taking up a less physical pursuit but even as he left for the hospital he was promising to sort himself out and contact us again.

To our relief however we heard nothing more and the next time our paths crossed we found he had wisely abandoned his percussive ambitions and was running a mobile disco. I suppose it was either that or snorkelling!

Pete and the mysterious major of Woburn Abbey (from ‘Take 5’)

At Christmas 1968 our agent booked Take 5 to play for the Duke of Bedford’s staff party at Woburn Abbey. As you probably know, the abbey is situated in the middle of a huge wildlife park and when we arrived at the entrance to the estate in the December darkness we found ourselves confronted with a bewildering array of signs, none of which told us what we wanted to know. The park covers a massive area and we figured we could be driving around in the dark for ages looking for the abbey itself. I’d been there some years before while visiting friends in Leighton Buzzard and remembered seeing signs all over the place warning people to stay in their cars! So apart from wanting to get set up straight away and not waste a lot of time trying to find the abbey, we were also understandably anxious not to stray accidentally into the wrong areas! Near the entrance gates was a cottage. We knocked on the door several times. At last a voice answered but its owner refused to come out and the door remained firmly shut. Through the closed door we were forced to explain as best we could to the unfriendly occupant what our business was and eventually we were given directions.

On arriving at the abbey we set up our equipment and were then shown to a room which had been set aside for us as a dressing room. While we were getting changed we heard the disco start up. Not long afterwards there was a knock on the door and a chap entered unannounced. Ruddy faced and sporting a huge handlebar moustache he looked as though he could be important. I had him down for an ex-military man - a major perhaps? The Duke’s agent maybe? In charge of something for sure. He didn’t look very happy though. He obviously hated pop music and was ranting about ‘the dreadful noise’ coming from the disco. We guessed he had come to see for himself what sort of live entertainment was in store. Things didn’t look too promising for our performance but we played along with him and reassured him that he had nothing to fear from us. As it happened, we had been doing a lot of cabaret type work lately and had recently taken to attiring ourselves in smart black suits and bow ties and this seemed to do the trick. On seeing us getting into our smart new gear he left the room visibly cheered presumably having convinced himself that we were a respectable dance band. After he’d left we briefly discussed the possibility of trying to keep him happy but his attitude and manner had pissed us off badly and we decided to stick to our tried and tested formula.

Defiantly, we opened with our version of Jimi Hendrix’ Hey Joe. The crowd loved it and the floor was packed with dancers but the handlebar realising he’d been fooled was livid. His ruddy complexion now transformed to an epileptic shade of purple he stormed to the front of the stage and stood there waving his arms about like a madman trying to attract our attention. We ignored him. The song finished and crowd cheered and then for some reason he chose to vent his spleen on Pete who was standing near the front of the stage while I was announcing the next number.

’Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish’, the handlebar screamed at Pete. ‘You’re rubbish’.

Pete said nothing but leaning forward grasped the ends of the moustache and gently gave them a tweak. Handlebar recoiled in shock. Mick Tracey and I looked at each other in astonishment for a second or so and then burst out laughing. Some of the crowd cheered at the entertainment.

‘You do that again ….‘, said Handlebar. So Pete did. Only this time he gave them a real tug which must have hurt. Handlebar saw the look on Pete’s face and had second thoughts about anything he might otherwise have thought about doing. He backed away from the stage.

I got on the microphone. ‘Look, I don’t know who’s in charge around here but this guy doesn’t want us to play any more so somebody better make a decision’.

A couple of guys came up. One of them said ‘Sorry about that, we were all having a great time and we really want you to carry on’. Handlebar was ushered away from the stage. Struggling and still complaining he was thrown out. We finished our act and went down a storm. Afterwards everyone was full of compliments. ‘Best group we’ve ever had here‘. ‘Fantastic sound’.

‘Thanks, but who was the guy with the moustache?’, I asked.

‘We’ve absolutely no idea’, replied one of them. ’He didn’t have a invitation’!

Wally and the fish (from ‘Whirligig’)

In the summer of 1978 Whirligig were booked to play at a society garden party, one of those well paid, no expense spared gigs that every hungry musician looks forward to. The huge marquee was stocked with a mouth watering display of goodies and our hosts were very generous. By the end of the afternoon we had all been well fed and watered. On reflection, perhaps too well watered!

While we had been playing, some heavy summer showers had started and we now had to move all the equipment without it getting wet. Of all of us, Walter was probably the most protective of his instruments, particularly his highly cherished and beautiful Selmer tenor sax. Imagine our astonishment then to spot him dashing across the lawn towards the waiting transport carrying the instrument’s case in one hand but with the saxophone itself in the other, its expensive lacquered finish exposed to the precipitation.

We all thought this was a bit fishy to say the least and as it turned out we were spot on!

While packing his instruments away, Walter had apparently discovered a surplus salmon, and by good fortune the huge fish happened to be exactly the size of his saxophone. Unable to resist the temptation he had fitted it snugly into the case!