Musical Roots

My introduction to rock in Chesterfield started when a neighbour, Tim Rhodes, who sported a DA haircut and winkle-pickers and played drums for The Senators introduced me to ‘Jimmie’s’ - St James Hall, near the bus depot on Vicar Lane. Playing with The Senators were Lance Storm and The Tempests, and it turned out their drummer, Johnny Pearson, was in my class at school. He later went on to play with King Crimson I believe. Shane Fenton and the Fentones played at Jimmies regularly too, and he went on to become Alvin Stardust. 

Big acts used to pass through town too: at the Regal cinema I saw The Shadows and Gene Vincent with The Bluecaps, while some years later at the Victoria ballroom The Small Faces were the loudest band I’d heard until then (thanks to the new Marshall amps). I discovered that Vern Nash, also in my class at the Grammar School, had started to play piano with Vance Arnold and the Avengers at the Arbourthorne pub in Sheffield - ‘Vance’ was of course the gas-fitter with the golden voice, Joe Cocker. Those were indeed the days, and this name-dropping could go on forever

My brother Jeff and I often took the last train to Sheffield to the Esquire Club, to hear Joe or Dave Berry (plus Frank White and his Catters, the Scott William Combo, Frankenstein and the Monsters and more) at Saturday all-nighters. Vern had left school by then and had a beatnik-style attic flat in Sheffield, with girlfriend, where we used to go back with Joe and the band to play Ray Charles albums and eat porridge sweetened with Vern’s grannie’s greengage jam. After a gig at Dave McPhie’s Smokestack Club in Chesterfield, Joe and the band plus entourage came back to our house, and when, fairly drunk, we were playing Ray Charles albums at 2am my father came downstairs and threw them all out. Great source of amusement a few years later once Joe became an international star.

I left Chesterfield to go to university in London, and Dave McPhie warned me that the only band worth seeing there was Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. So, on my very first weekend I went to the Sunday afternoon session at the Flamingo, and Dave was as usual right! An astonishing set with an audience of proto-mods and black US servicemen, dressed in black leather tie-belt macs and pork-pie hats; the reek of reefer in the air and the crunching of dropped ‘blues’ and ‘hearts’ underfoot; pumping elbows and shouts of ‘Do the Dog Georgie!’. I did actually check out a few other bands like the Rolling Stones, Hogsnort Rupert’s Good Good Band, Zoot Money and, as I got deeper into jazz, Joe Harriot at the Marquee and John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble at the Little Theatre club, late Saturday nights. And then all hell broke loose as the ‘60s started in earnest: The Who at the Marquee, Jimmy Hendrix late-night at the Flamingo, the Ally Pally Technicolour Dream. Nothing was ever quite the same again. 

Throughout these years I’d be going home to Chesterfield during college holidays, where Joe still played the Esquire for a while with his Grease Band, then later Pete Stringfellow's Mojo club. I saw several visiting US bluesmen like Sonny Boy Williamson and John Lee Hooker there, backed by UK ‘pickup’ bands who were often stars too, like Spencer Davis or The Animals. Jeff was by this time playing with The Blueberries in Chesterfield, often at Dave McPhie’s club at the Queen's Park hotel, with its mock-Tudor decor. John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers (both pre- and post- Clapton) played there several times. Back in London, the American Folk Blues Festivals at Croydon’s Fairfield Hall were the concerts of a lifetime: after 1964’s show we stumbled by mistake into the dressing room and met Sleepy John Estes, Howlin Wolf, Hubert Sumlin and Sugar Pie Desanto. 

1970 I spent living in New York, working as a bus-boy in Max’s Kansas City where the re-formed Velvet Underground played a six week residency, They were working on material for ‘Loaded’, and I was sweeping the floor around Brigid Polk as she was taping ‘Live at Max’s’ on her portable recorder. Living on the Lower East Side I hung out in Slugs where I saw Sun Ra’s Arkestra, Johnny Griffin and Albert Ayler: I also went to many Schaefer outdoor concerts in Central Park where I saw the Ray Charles and the Raelettes, a Miles Davis Septet, The Band, The Byrds and The Meters.

My musical horizons continually expanded during these years. We were downright R&B snobs at school and only accepted the saxophone after one was pictured on the sleeve of a Booker T EP (though not on the record)! That opened a door into jazz, but trad was too square for us (Acker Bilk!!!!) so we headed straight for Charlie Parker, the bluesiest of horn players. I read Ross Russell’s ‘Bird Lives’ and learned from it that Parker had revered Bartok, so joined  the college music society, listened to his 2nd Violin Concerto and was hooked for life. Then I worked backwards from Bartok to Debussy to Beethoven to Bach and the whole world of 'classical' music.

I started playing in a minor way myself, first at the White Hart pub, Southall, where an anarchist group ran a weekly club: a bunch of us played a psychedelic mish-mash of Scottish border ballads using Indian percussion, harmonium, and bebop sax, with me imitating Mike Bloomfield on my Hofner Colorama. After that I was in a duo with a free jazz alto player - I sat on my amplifier and scraped the Colorama with a violin bow while twiddling the amp’s insane tremolo effect as a rhythm source. Later I switched to bass and played in a Nigerian highlife band in Notting Hill - our high point was having Rico sit in with us on trombone at the Tabernacle one night, after which an elderly Jamaican guy came up to the stage and handed me a newspaper cornet full of great weed. Career as live musician ended in a Camden Town pub with the Radical Sheikhs blues band, playing for £35 a head and all the draught Guinness we could hold, and we folded just before punk took off... 

Music is still my top pleasure, everywhere from lieder recitals at the Wigmore Hall to the Bill Frisell Trio at the Jazz Cafe, but my launch pad was Jimmie’s on Vicar Lane, back in the vibrant Chesterfield/Sheffield music scene of the early ‘60s.