Big Pete Deuchar (1933–88): A Great Character and Pioneer of British Music

07/04/2018 at 15:37

In 1956 James Peter David ‘Big Pete’ Deuchar began his recording career by trying to sabotage it. Sixteen years later, after adventures in trad jazz, pioneering roles in British R&B, British C&W and a near-death experience, he conquered the world. In October 1988 he took his own life. The glory days of British music threw up many larger than life characters, and Big Pete was among the largest.

Born 7 July 1933, Pete was heir to the James Deuchar Ltd brewery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Once out of public school (Tabley House and Wellington College) and National Service in the RAF, and after spells in agricultural college and accountancy, he was posted to the firm’s premises in Wolverhampton and Montrose. Beer, however, would remain a social interest: Pete’s passions were cycling and music, New Orleans jazz. He joined the amateur road racing circuit in 1950 and, in Wolverhampton, joined the Black Country Jazz Band, on banjo. Leaving the sport in 1954 left him 100% focused on music.

An early glimpse of Deuchar is in Ken Colyer’s autobiography, When Dreams Are In The Dust. Early in 1955, when Colyer’s band had residencies in Dusseldorf and Hamburg, his banjo chair had just been vacated by Diz Disley. Somehow, an application from Newcastle arrived:

‘I received a letter from Pete Deuchar saying he was ‘second to [Lawrence] Marrero’ and would like to join us. He came out and was useless. We sent him home.’

Back in Newcastle, in 1955, Deuchar co-founded the Vieux Carré Jazzmen with trumpeter Peter Gascoigne and the New Orleans Jazz Club, in a condemned property on Melbourne Street. A local newspaper quoted him lauding Colyer: ‘He has scolded and derided me until now I can play with him whenever I like in London. And that is always a great thrill.’

In September 1955, ‘Beer Magnate’s Grandson Attacked PC’ was a national newspaper headline. In a fracas with a policeman in Newcastle Pete had deafened the man in one ear. The law responded with wrath, imposing a £75 fine (£1,800 today) or a prison sentence. With private means of £500 a year, Pete paid immediately.

Perhaps through Pete’s family connections, his jazz club obtained a liquor licence – the only one in the country to have one:

‘It was pretty rough at times,’ recalled Peter Gascoigne, in 1969, ‘[but] it had an atmosphere like nowhere else – rain coming in, snow coming in. We had to stand on beer crates to get out of the water… I think on one occasion we had umbrellas up, but the audience still came.’

New Orleans-based jazz was the rebellion music of ‘50s British youth, subdivided into factions: ‘traditional jazz’ (pure ensemble-based music for hard-core enthusiasts, who believed it all went to hell when Louis Armstrong left New Orleans for Chicago in the 1920s), ‘revivalist jazz’ (based on the post-exodus Chicago school, and a platform for virtuosic soloists), and ‘Dixieland’ (a watered-down version of revivalism). When the Vieux Carré formed, a nationwide boom centred round ‘revivalist’ Chris Barber was in full swing; an even bigger ‘trad boom’ would come in 1960-62, driven by Acker Bilk and a legion of imitators in silly hats – Big Pete among them.

At Derek Lucas’ Northern Sounds studio at 3 a.m. on 20 April 1956, after a gig in Scotland, two Vieux Carré tracks were recorded. Local rivals the Panama Jazzmen had just been there. As VCJ trombonist Pete Coles recalls on the band’s website:

‘[Big Pete] really hated them. When we arrived at the studio, Derek Lucas played us a track of the Panama band he had recorded earlier — the sound balance was superb and it was technically excellent. Deuchar couldn’t control his anger, went into a rage and shouted at Lucas, ‘I don’t want my band to sound anything like that lot!’’

A hundred copies were pressed on 78, the band getting one each, Deuchar selling about 25 and the rest given away. Sixty years on, however flat the sound, it’s a treat to hear Pete singing ‘Over in the Gloryland’ and driving ‘Just A Little While’ on banjo on the VCJ’s 50th anniversary CD The Deuchar/Gascoigne Legacy – the very ongoing existence of the band being an amazing legacy in itself.

Ken Colyer had, famously, gone to sea in 1951 in order to get to New Orleans, which he finally managed after a year of maritime perambulation, sitting in with pre-exodus legends like George Lewis and Alphonse Picou, getting thrown into prison, and returning to Britain a jazz hero – ‘the Guv’nor’.

Pete Deuchar also made the pilgrimage, in autumn 1957. He would write about it a few times in British magazine Jazz News, and made at least one (remarkably good) amateur recording there with NO veterans, led by trumpeter Kid Thomas Valentine. A rambunctious 62-minute session, it’s available on CD as Kid Thomas Party, though a rare 1990 10” vinyl LP of half the tracks also exists.

Big Pete had gone to NO primarily to play with clarinettist George Lewis, whose Ragtime Band had toured Britain for the first time in 1957. On 31 January 1959, during the Lewis band’s second British tour, selling out city halls, Big Pete was invited to sit in during one of two shows at Manchester Free Trade Hall. A fabulous, clear and hugely atmospheric amateur recording, mastered by the great Denis Blackham, was released in 1998 (some tracks previously appeared on the 1978 LP George Lewis in Europe Vol.3). Lewis also invited Pete to sit in with the band in Birmingham and Glasgow.

During 1958-59 Pete fronted ‘Peter Deuchar’s New Orleans Jazz Band’, touring extensively in Germany – with Ginger Baker a member for two weeks. In September ’59, he was back focusing on Britain with the formation of ‘Big Pete Deuchar & his Professors of Ragtime’, beginning with a TV appearance on Tyne Tees’ Lunchtime Break.

Relocating to Manchester (another thriving jazz city) within a few weeks, the founding line-up was Pete on banjo, with clarinet, piano, drums and, unusually, electric guitar. More remarkably, that guitar was played by 17-year-old future fusion pioneer John McLaughlin, in his first professional gig.

Never a nostalgist, John has nonetheless chosen to mention Deuchar a few times in interviews during the Mahavishnu era and beyond. ‘It was New Orleans jazz, but he was very open-minded,’ he said, only last year. ‘I was trying to play like Miles and Coltrane, very badly of course, but he didn’t care. He just said ‘go for it’. So for about a year I toured with him, and eventually ended up in London, where I starved for a while, getting a gig here and a gig there.’

Somehow, from being an arch-purist, Deuchar had embraced the populist end of trad jazz in time to ride the ‘trad boom’ bandwagon, with a uniform of gowns and mortar boards. By February 1960 the Professors were being represented by a London-based Variety/cabaret agent, Harvey Riscoe, who stated: ‘I believe that traditional jazz may well take over from Rock’n’Roll. Although Pete Deuchar is an unknown quantity, we are finding him very easy to sell.’

The Professors’ timeline runs up to June 1960, including a performance of ‘Tiger Rag’ on BBC TV’s Charlie Chester Show in May, but they never did crack the London live scene. Their last known engagement was a week’s variety at a restaurant in Hull. Their apogee was in March 1960, holding their own at a ‘mass rave-up’ at Hammersmith Palais with the bands of Kenny Ball, Terry Lightfoot, Dick Charlesworth and others:

‘Deuchar’s band make no pretence to play dedicated jazz and therefore its influence is more Jimmy Durante than Johnny Dodds,’ wrote the man from Jazz News. ‘The band are good humoured and suitable for parties. They even squeezed in ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’.’

From August 1960, a rebranded/new ‘Big Pete Deuchar’s Jazz Band’ enjoyed a two-month tour of Germany/Austria and Spanish TV appearances at the end of that year.

It seems curious that none of Pete’s 1958–60 outfits recorded, as opportunities for half-decent British trad bands were becoming easier. Things go quiet for seven months but in July 1961 former Bob Wallis band clarinettist Doug Richford announced his ‘Doug Richford’s London Jazzmen’, with Pete on banjo – around 18 stone, now even bigger than ever. A week after debuting in Coventry, the DRLJ are playing on a riverboat near Liege for Belgian TV.

Among the band, on bass, was future cartoonist/illustrator Toni Goffe, who recalls Pete’s personality as ‘way over the top’: ‘We were drinking a lot, every night, and usually getting drunk – the norm in those days. When he first came on the scene we realised we’d have to up our drinking capacity to keep up! I don’t think I liked him at first, because of his character, but as soon as we started playing I realised he was okay. He was just raving all the time – but he was very professional, he was very good, when it came to actually doing it. When there was a recording to be done he would deliver.’

Richford didn’t waste time. A first single, ‘Yip-I-Addy-I-Ay’/’On Sunday I Go Sailing’ was recorded on November 10, financed by publishers Chappell and placed with Parlophone for January 1962 release. By the time of recording, Bill Hales had joined on trombone as had, on trumpet/vocals, pre-war British jazz legend Nat Gonella:

‘He was like the British Louis Armstrong,’ says Toni Goffe. ‘But of course he’d fallen on hard times – and ended up with us. He was still very well-known and at all the gigs there’d always be someone who’d come to see Nat.’

To Bill Hales’ memory, ‘the recording of ‘On Sunday I Go Sailing’ was a very hurriedly concocted B-side to Nat Gonella’s ‘Yip-I-Addy’. The session was arranged for Nat by Eddie Rogers, an A&R man, and at Abbey Road Studios he gave Dougie a disc of a German oompah band playing the sailing tune. I remember Dougie and Pete struggling over composing the lyrics, which I then had to learn for the vocals.’

Toni Goffe, though, recalls Joe Meek running the session, at his studio. Possibly the second DRLJ single, ‘Cascading’/’12 Over the 8’, released in November ’62 (both sides Richford originals), was the Abbey Road session.

Big Pete often went boozing with pianist Johnny Parker and Adge Cutler, Acker Bilk’s roadie and future Wurzel. Bill Hales: ‘Pete was renting a room somewhere near Notting Hill and when I went there one day the communal phone in the hall was being used by singer Frank Ifield who Pete described as some Aussie chancing his luck! He also knew Long John Baldry well and we would sometimes meet at The Blue Boar at Watford Gap. Pete was very generous to me after he got his inheritance. As a young married man with one child I was always broke and he lent me £25 for a long period.’

Pete’s trust fund income rose with the sale of his grandfather’s brewery (his father and mother had both committed suicide in Pete’s youth) in November 1961. Rather than getting a lump sum, perhaps for his own good he ended up with a stipend for life, paid monthly.

The Richford band were solid second division trad boomers. There were four BBC radio sessions (some audio available on YouTube) and both singles are terrific artefacts of their era, the second being much harder to find. Uncannily, both of the DRLJ singles appeared in between Parlophone releases by Bobby Shafto and the Johnnie Spence Orchestra, with Bernard Cribbins next door to the trio on both occasions.

In the end, the band fizzled out with the boom, but not before Pete had spotted the next trend. In July 1962 they had played the Marquee the night before the Rolling Stones’ debut there. Mick Jagger, in Jazz News, said: ‘I hope they don’t think we’re a rock’n’roll group.’ Wonder how that worked out? In December, Pete announced that he was forming ‘Big Pete Deuchar & his Country Blues’; by January he had begun a six-month Marquee ‘R&B night’ residency with first Brian Knight’s Blues By Six and then the Mann/Hugg Blues Brothers. Pete’s band was soon playing four or five nights weekly around London, with singers Chas McDevitt and Johnny Duncan regularly guesting.

‘I changed from Trad because I felt I was not having freedom of expression,’ Pete said at the time. His concept, though, was not pure R&B but a mix of R&B and C&W. R&B was the new thing and anyone in London in 1963 claiming to play it was sure of a crowd. One review described ‘the unusual but attractive country and blues sounds’ of Big Pete and his five associates wearing coloured shirts and jeans, dealing in ‘rhythmic sounds, colourful on-stage attitude and sometimes hysterical antics. Items range from recognisable western ditties, through spirituals and folk items to gutty R&B, all based on the white version of country beat items married to the blues.’

Deuchar signed to Fontana the same week in February ’63 that Cyril Davies signed to Pye. As Jazz News noted, ‘both groups have been doing rave business in central London in the past few months but R&B doesn’t seem to have got off the ground in the provinces as yet’.

One fascinating booking for Deuchar’s Country Blues was on May 20, a Marquee double bill with the Graham Bond Quartet, including Pete’s old protégé John McLaughlin. At the start of May both acts had released their first singles: the GBQ backing Duffy Power on ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and Deuchar with a hugely characterful take on John D. Loudermilk’s ‘Google Eye’ – a perfect blend of blues and country. As Record Retailer noted, it ‘wouldn’t need too much prodding to make the charts. Very catchy and enjoyable.’

‘Google Eye’ remains Pete’s quintessential recording – quirky, entertaining, and a bit of a one-off, like the man himself. The B-side, a bluesy spiritual, was also compelling. Pete would perform ‘Google Eye’, solo, on two BBC radio appearances that summer, Talent Spot and Parade of the Pops (with that man Ifield also on the bill).

His next Fontana single, ‘It Comes And Goes’, appeared in November ’63 at exactly the same time as a cheesier version on Pye by Miki & Griff and the original 1962 recording by Burl Ives as a UK single on Brunswick. Written by Nashville’s Bill Anderson it was good material, if not as arresting as ‘Google Eye’, but none of the three managed a hit. Deuchar’s B-side was a ghastly piece of maudlin moralising from Hank Snow’s 1950s repertoire, ‘Married By The Bible’. For a man who was married three times, and a sower of wild oats, this was a bizarre choice.

In January ’64, having fully embraced C&W, ‘Big Pete Deuchar & the Westerners’ debuted on BBC radio’s Three’s Company, performing six numbers including Flatt & Scruggs’ banjo showcase ‘Earl’s Breakdown’ and the Carter Family’s ‘Homestead on the Farm’. This latter would be the exclusive B-side to Pete’s extremely rare US single release of ‘Google Eye’ on his own one-off Pee Dee label. This dates from early ’65, during a trip he made to Nashville and the southern states. In this period he changed his name to ‘Duker’ – one associate believing that it was to avoid being easily found by his first (ex-)wife.

In 1965 a new phase of his recording career began. A one-off UK single came out on Melodisc, ‘Walk Right Out of the Blues’, written by Tompall Glaser. Copyrighted in 1962, Glaser seems not to have released the song himself – presumably Pete picked it up in Nashville. Duker’s version, with jangling electric guitar, has enough of a rockabilly feel to have appeared on two British rock compilations, including one current download comp – ironic, given the vinyl’s utter scarcity. The B-side is presumably (not having a copy) a retitling of Hank Snow’s up-tempo 1949 US smash ‘I’m Movin’ On’, which Pete had previously performed on radio.

His media activities were upped in the latter half of 1965 with four BBC radio sessions, with new partner Pete Sayers (vocal, guitar, banjo, dobro), between July and October, three of them also featuring Andrew Townend (mandolin), sessions king Big Jim Sullivan (lead guitar) and jazzman Spike Heatley (bass). A new single was released on Columbia in November, ‘Goin’ In Training’, a too-fast bluegrass novelty number, backed by a fabulous cover of Mac Wiseman’s ‘I Saw Your Face In The Moon’ – a compelling train-time shuffle with Duker’s winning croon on top. They got the sides wrong…

In December there was an appearance on TV’s Five O’Clock Club, possibly backed by Alexis Korner’s house band, and two months into 1966 Duker’s second and final Columbia single, ‘Just Because’/’The Wishing Well’ appeared ¬. Both songs had been part of his live act with Sayers and co. Again, the B-side, written by Aussie Peter Hiscock and recorded by Hank Snow in 1965, was the winner. Both of the Columbia singles are sumptuous productions and exist in red ‘A’ label promo and black label stock copies.

During 1966, Pete was looking to form a new band. Guitarist/banjoist Mike Deighan, a songwriter for the Four Pennies and part of the Fritz, Mike & Mo trio (two 1965 singles), answered the ad and turned up at London’s Ken Colyer club on a Sunday afternoon:

‘There were guys there who were absolutely superb musicians,’ Mike recalls. ‘Anyway, it got to 7 o’clock and Pete being Pete says, ‘Right, let’s go to The Porcupine for a pint’. We stayed there, chewing the fat, and about 9 o’clock I went for a piss – and Pete came in the bogs and says, ‘You’ve got the job’. And I say, ‘Hang on Pete, there’s guys there can play the arse off me’. He says, ‘Yeah, I know, but you’re the only one who got his round in.’’

A five-piece band was formed. Mike: ‘He had this agent who wanted us all dressed like hicks, with straw in your mouth and all that. Roy Hudd was tied up with this – don’t ask me how. We had this concert at Battersea Town Hall for old age pensioners one Friday night and it was a bit disastrous – microphones knocked over, the band under-rehearsed, etc. We came off and Pete said, ‘Right you lot, you’re fucking sacked – apart from Deighan. It’s just me and you, kid.’ And that was it, and I spent two or three years with Pete – great times.’

The duo became the Moonshiners and a ludicrously wordy unreleased single was recorded at Pye studios – ‘I’ve Got Tears in my Ears from Lying on My Back in My Bed While Crying Over You’.
A fantastic (released) country/pop LP, Hold Up!, was recorded for Page One in 1967, with ace sessioneers Caleb Quaye, Dee Murray and Clem Cattini. Breezy hokum by George Formby rubbed shoulders with terrific takes on ‘Ticket To Ride’ and Alan Price’s ‘House That Jack Built’. (Note: The second Moonshiners LP listed in the RRPG is actually by a different, US act.)

The duo appeared on BBC radio’s Night Ride, with Pete beginning, from the BBC’s doors, a ‘night ride’ cycle to Newcastle (274 miles in 14 hours) as an LP publicity venture – reportedly selling 120 copies en route. Pete had been encouraged back into cycling, if only to lose weight, by DJ Jimmy Savile, whom he knew casually.

After a couple of fun years with Mike, Pete resolved to cycle round the world, and started goin’ in training. In June 1970, in Surrey, he was mown down by a hit-and-run driver (never caught), sustaining major injuries. Top names from the ‘trad boom’ appeared at a 100 Club benefit night, though Pete hardly needed the cash: Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball, Sandy Brown, George Melly, Diz Disley, et al.

Despite broken bones and reconstructive surgery, Pete’s adventure was merely postponed. From September 1971 to May 1972, he pedalled the world, setting distance records along the way – his record for crossing the USA alone was to stand for 10 years – and writing an atmospheric book about it when he returned, Sting In The Tail (Pelham, 1973), which can be found for around £15.

It was an extraordinary triumph of the will. In his book he recounts his adventures and lambasts pet hates like poor cuisine, sub-standard accommodation, pop groups, hippies and bureaucracy. Like the last flag-flyer for British Imperialism, the big man on the bicycle rampages through a world of ‘Pakis’, ‘Eyeties’ and ‘giggling idiots’ (most Indians), punching people who get in his way, searching most evenings for places to booze and people to booze with. Even a chicken unfortunate enough to collide with his bicycle in Yugoslavia is a ‘bastard’. He is, throughout, outrageous but indefatigable: heroic in undertaking his mad venture only a year after nearly dying on the road.

He told one reporter he went ahead with the trip because he could see himself becoming, post-crash, an ‘alcoholic cripple’. One Australian journalist wrote: ‘Pete is a strange sort of man, outwardly jocular and cheerful, yet with a deep underlying aura of almost kamikaze purpose…’ Traversing the continent’s merciless Nullarbor Plain, nearly 700 miles with no support network, was existential: ‘So far on this trip I’ve felt like a man onstage without an audience,’ Pete said. ‘Coming across the Nullarbor, I felt that God was watching me, but it was lonely, so very lonely, that I felt like people must feel when they are very close to death.’

Between Christmas and New Year 1971, while he was repeatedly arguing the toss about ‘drinking-up time’ with staff at public bars in Sydney, before flying on to America, Pete’s one-time apprentice John McLaughlin was triumphing with the Mahavishnu Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, New York.

Asked his motivation the following year by Cycling magazine, he replied: ‘I’ve done thousands of things I thought were the culmination, and they never have been – making the first radio appearance, making the first television [sic], making the first record, then the first LP, winning your first race. I’ve just won my first race! Eventually, you know you’re going to be shoved in your grave. And having been shoved in and taken out… maybe God decided some other extrovert should go… You’ve got to do something with your life.’

During the ‘70s and ‘80s Pete was immersed in the cycling world, writing for Cycling Weekly and Pro News – often controversially – and co-founding the League International (still going to this day). He wrote a biography of cycle legend Fausto Coppi, along with an extremely rare 1981 novel about an ex-wife killer from the jazz world, Given Half A Chance, quasi-autobiographical. Pete had married his third wife, Steffi, in 1978 and moved to Germany, though he returned, separated, in 1988. He was upset by Ken Colyer’s death earlier that year. His trust fund refused to advance money to allow him to buy a cottage and he rented a bedsit near Ringstead. On October 14 1988, having put his affairs in order, Pete stepped in front of a train, beside a favourite pub near Newark.

‘My thought is that Peter was still looking for something to do,’ says John Coles, a friend from the cycling scene. ‘He was a very gregarious person, but other people had their ordinary lives to lead. In some ways he was probably lonely. He wasn’t a whinger at all but he was still in some pain, I think [from the 1970 accident].’

As Mike Deighan puts it, ‘Pete was big on grand gestures – and he could back them up.’

DISCOGRAPHY

PETER DEUCHAR’S VIEUX CARRÉ JAZZMEN
56 Delta Recording Over in Gloryland/Just A Little While To Stay Here
(100 copies only)

DOUG RICHFORD’S LONDON JAZZMEN (with NAT GONELLA*) UK Singles
1/62 Parlophone R4871 Yip-I-Addy-I-Ay/On Sunday I Go Sailing*
11/62 Parlophone R4959 Cascading/12 Over The 8

BIG PETE DEUCHAR*/DUKER UK Singles
4/63 Fontana 267278TF Google Eye/There’s A Hand Leading Me*
11/63 Fontana TF423 It Comes And Goes/Married By The Bible*
65 Melodisc MEL1603 Walk Right Out of the Blues/Keep A’Movin’ On
19/11/65 Columbia DB7763 Goin’ In Training/I Saw Your Face In The Moon
18/2/66 Columbia DB7840 Just Because/The Wishing Well

THE MOONSHINERS UK Album
67 Page One FOR 004 Hold Up!

BIG PETE DUKER US Singles
c.65 Pee Dee Records 1001 Google Eye/Homestead On The Farm
6/66 Stellar AR-1507 Goin’ In Training/I Saw Your Face In The Moon

ODDITIES
1978 Rarities 54 GEORGE LEWIS In Europe Vol.3 ‘Pied Piper’
(rec 1959: Deuchar on banjo on four tracks)
1998 504 Records 504CD9 GEORGE LEWIS RAGTIME BAND In Concert 1959 –
Manchester Free Trade Hall: Second House
(rec: 1959, Deuchar on banjo on five tracks)
2005 GHB Records BCD-268 KID THOMAS VALENTINE Kid Thomas Party
(rec: 1957, Deuchar on banjo; a 10” vinyl release of part of this session appeared in 1990, details unknown)

Comments

Colin H says

07/04/2018 at 15:37

In 1956 James Peter David ‘Big Pete’ Deuchar began his recording career by trying to sabotage it. Sixteen years later, after adventures in trad jazz, pioneering roles in British R&B, British C&W and a near-death experience, he conquered the world. In October 1988 he took his own life. The glory days of British music threw up many larger than life characters, and Big Pete was among the largest.

Born 7 July 1933, Pete was heir to the James Deuchar Ltd brewery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Once out of public school (Tabley House and Wellington College) and National Service in the RAF, and after spells in agricultural college and accountancy, he was posted to the firm’s premises in Wolverhampton and Montrose. Beer, however, would remain a social interest: Pete’s passions were cycling and music, New Orleans jazz. He joined the amateur road racing circuit in 1950 and, in Wolverhampton, joined the Black Country Jazz Band, on banjo. Leaving the sport in 1954 left him 100% focused on music.

An early glimpse of Deuchar is in Ken Colyer’s autobiography, When Dreams Are In The Dust. Early in 1955, when Colyer’s band had residencies in Dusseldorf and Hamburg, his banjo chair had just been vacated by Diz Disley. Somehow, an application from Newcastle arrived:

‘I received a letter from Pete Deuchar saying he was ‘second to [Lawrence] Marrero’ and would like to join us. He came out and was useless. We sent him home.’

Back in Newcastle, in 1955, Deuchar co-founded the Vieux Carré Jazzmen with trumpeter Peter Gascoigne and the New Orleans Jazz Club, in a condemned property on Melbourne Street. A local newspaper quoted him lauding Colyer: ‘He has scolded and derided me until now I can play with him whenever I like in London. And that is always a great thrill.’

In September 1955, ‘Beer Magnate’s Grandson Attacked PC’ was a national newspaper headline. In a fracas with a policeman in Newcastle Pete had deafened the man in one ear. The law responded with wrath, imposing a £75 fine (£1,800 today) or a prison sentence. With private means of £500 a year, Pete paid immediately.

Perhaps through Pete’s family connections, his jazz club obtained a liquor licence – the only one in the country to have one:

‘It was pretty rough at times,’ recalled Peter Gascoigne, in 1969, ‘[but] it had an atmosphere like nowhere else – rain coming in, snow coming in. We had to stand on beer crates to get out of the water… I think on one occasion we had umbrellas up, but the audience still came.’

New Orleans-based jazz was the rebellion music of ‘50s British youth, subdivided into factions: ‘traditional jazz’ (pure ensemble-based music for hard-core enthusiasts, who believed it all went to hell when Louis Armstrong left New Orleans for Chicago in the 1920s), ‘revivalist jazz’ (based on the post-exodus Chicago school, and a platform for virtuosic soloists), and ‘Dixieland’ (a watered-down version of revivalism). When the Vieux Carré formed, a nationwide boom centred round ‘revivalist’ Chris Barber was in full swing; an even bigger ‘trad boom’ would come in 1960-62, driven by Acker Bilk and a legion of imitators in silly hats – Big Pete among them.

At Derek Lucas’ Northern Sounds studio at 3 a.m. on 20 April 1956, after a gig in Scotland, two Vieux Carré tracks were recorded. Local rivals the Panama Jazzmen had just been there. As VCJ trombonist Pete Coles recalls on the band’s website:

‘[Big Pete] really hated them. When we arrived at the studio, Derek Lucas played us a track of the Panama band he had recorded earlier — the sound balance was superb and it was technically excellent. Deuchar couldn’t control his anger, went into a rage and shouted at Lucas, ‘I don’t want my band to sound anything like that lot!’’

A hundred copies were pressed on 78, the band getting one each, Deuchar selling about 25 and the rest given away. Sixty years on, however flat the sound, it’s a treat to hear Pete singing ‘Over in the Gloryland’ and driving ‘Just A Little While’ on banjo on the VCJ’s 50th anniversary CD The Deuchar/Gascoigne Legacy – the very ongoing existence of the band being an amazing legacy in itself.

Ken Colyer had, famously, gone to sea in 1951 in order to get to New Orleans, which he finally managed after a year of maritime perambulation, sitting in with pre-exodus legends like George Lewis and Alphonse Picou, getting thrown into prison, and returning to Britain a jazz hero – ‘the Guv’nor’.

Pete Deuchar also made the pilgrimage, in autumn 1957. He would write about it a few times in British magazine Jazz News, and made at least one (remarkably good) amateur recording there with NO veterans, led by trumpeter Kid Thomas Valentine. A rambunctious 62-minute session, it’s available on CD as Kid Thomas Party, though a rare 1990 10” vinyl LP of half the tracks also exists.

Big Pete had gone to NO primarily to play with clarinettist George Lewis, whose Ragtime Band had toured Britain for the first time in 1957. On 31 January 1959, during the Lewis band’s second British tour, selling out city halls, Big Pete was invited to sit in during one of two shows at Manchester Free Trade Hall. A fabulous, clear and hugely atmospheric amateur recording, mastered by the great Denis Blackham, was released in 1998 (some tracks previously appeared on the 1978 LP George Lewis in Europe Vol.3). Lewis also invited Pete to sit in with the band in Birmingham and Glasgow.

During 1958-59 Pete fronted ‘Peter Deuchar’s New Orleans Jazz Band’, touring extensively in Germany – with Ginger Baker a member for two weeks. In September ’59, he was back focusing on Britain with the formation of ‘Big Pete Deuchar & his Professors of Ragtime’, beginning with a TV appearance on Tyne Tees’ Lunchtime Break.

Relocating to Manchester (another thriving jazz city) within a few weeks, the founding line-up was Pete on banjo, with clarinet, piano, drums and, unusually, electric guitar. More remarkably, that guitar was played by 17-year-old future fusion pioneer John McLaughlin, in his first professional gig.

Never a nostalgist, John has nonetheless chosen to mention Deuchar a few times in interviews during the Mahavishnu era and beyond. ‘It was New Orleans jazz, but he was very open-minded,’ he said, only last year. ‘I was trying to play like Miles and Coltrane, very badly of course, but he didn’t care. He just said ‘go for it’. So for about a year I toured with him, and eventually ended up in London, where I starved for a while, getting a gig here and a gig there.’

Somehow, from being an arch-purist, Deuchar had embraced the populist end of trad jazz in time to ride the ‘trad boom’ bandwagon, with a uniform of gowns and mortar boards. By February 1960 the Professors were being represented by a London-based Variety/cabaret agent, Harvey Riscoe, who stated: ‘I believe that traditional jazz may well take over from Rock’n’Roll. Although Pete Deuchar is an unknown quantity, we are finding him very easy to sell.’

The Professors’ timeline runs up to June 1960, including a performance of ‘Tiger Rag’ on BBC TV’s Charlie Chester Show in May, but they never did crack the London live scene. Their last known engagement was a week’s variety at a restaurant in Hull. Their apogee was in March 1960, holding their own at a ‘mass rave-up’ at Hammersmith Palais with the bands of Kenny Ball, Terry Lightfoot, Dick Charlesworth and others:

‘Deuchar’s band make no pretence to play dedicated jazz and therefore its influence is more Jimmy Durante than Johnny Dodds,’ wrote the man from Jazz News. ‘The band are good humoured and suitable for parties. They even squeezed in ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’.’

From August 1960, a rebranded/new ‘Big Pete Deuchar’s Jazz Band’ enjoyed a two-month tour of Germany/Austria and Spanish TV appearances at the end of that year.

It seems curious that none of Pete’s 1958–60 outfits recorded, as opportunities for half-decent British trad bands were becoming easier. Things go quiet for seven months but in July 1961 former Bob Wallis band clarinettist Doug Richford announced his ‘Doug Richford’s London Jazzmen’, with Pete on banjo – around 18 stone, now even bigger than ever. A week after debuting in Coventry, the DRLJ are playing on a riverboat near Liege for Belgian TV.

Among the band, on bass, was future cartoonist/illustrator Toni Goffe, who recalls Pete’s personality as ‘way over the top’: ‘We were drinking a lot, every night, and usually getting drunk – the norm in those days. When he first came on the scene we realised we’d have to up our drinking capacity to keep up! I don’t think I liked him at first, because of his character, but as soon as we started playing I realised he was okay. He was just raving all the time – but he was very professional, he was very good, when it came to actually doing it. When there was a recording to be done he would deliver.’

Richford didn’t waste time. A first single, ‘Yip-I-Addy-I-Ay’/’On Sunday I Go Sailing’ was recorded on November 10, financed by publishers Chappell and placed with Parlophone for January 1962 release. By the time of recording, Bill Hales had joined on trombone as had, on trumpet/vocals, pre-war British jazz legend Nat Gonella:

‘He was like the British Louis Armstrong,’ says Toni Goffe. ‘But of course he’d fallen on hard times – and ended up with us. He was still very well-known and at all the gigs there’d always be someone who’d come to see Nat.’

To Bill Hales’ memory, ‘the recording of ‘On Sunday I Go Sailing’ was a very hurriedly concocted B-side to Nat Gonella’s ‘Yip-I-Addy’. The session was arranged for Nat by Eddie Rogers, an A&R man, and at Abbey Road Studios he gave Dougie a disc of a German oompah band playing the sailing tune. I remember Dougie and Pete struggling over composing the lyrics, which I then had to learn for the vocals.’

Toni Goffe, though, recalls Joe Meek running the session, at his studio. Possibly the second DRLJ single, ‘Cascading’/’12 Over the 8’, released in November ’62 (both sides Richford originals), was the Abbey Road session.

Big Pete often went boozing with pianist Johnny Parker and Adge Cutler, Acker Bilk’s roadie and future Wurzel. Bill Hales: ‘Pete was renting a room somewhere near Notting Hill and when I went there one day the communal phone in the hall was being used by singer Frank Ifield who Pete described as some Aussie chancing his luck! He also knew Long John Baldry well and we would sometimes meet at The Blue Boar at Watford Gap. Pete was very generous to me after he got his inheritance. As a young married man with one child I was always broke and he lent me £25 for a long period.’

Pete’s trust fund income rose with the sale of his grandfather’s brewery (his father and mother had both committed suicide in Pete’s youth) in November 1961. Rather than getting a lump sum, perhaps for his own good he ended up with a stipend for life, paid monthly.

The Richford band were solid second division trad boomers. There were four BBC radio sessions (some audio available on YouTube) and both singles are terrific artefacts of their era, the second being much harder to find. Uncannily, both of the DRLJ singles appeared in between Parlophone releases by Bobby Shafto and the Johnnie Spence Orchestra, with Bernard Cribbins next door to the trio on both occasions.

In the end, the band fizzled out with the boom, but not before Pete had spotted the next trend. In July 1962 they had played the Marquee the night before the Rolling Stones’ debut there. Mick Jagger, in Jazz News, said: ‘I hope they don’t think we’re a rock’n’roll group.’ Wonder how that worked out? In December, Pete announced that he was forming ‘Big Pete Deuchar & his Country Blues’; by January he had begun a six-month Marquee ‘R&B night’ residency with first Brian Knight’s Blues By Six and then the Mann/Hugg Blues Brothers. Pete’s band was soon playing four or five nights weekly around London, with singers Chas McDevitt and Johnny Duncan regularly guesting.

‘I changed from Trad because I felt I was not having freedom of expression,’ Pete said at the time. His concept, though, was not pure R&B but a mix of R&B and C&W. R&B was the new thing and anyone in London in 1963 claiming to play it was sure of a crowd. One review described ‘the unusual but attractive country and blues sounds’ of Big Pete and his five associates wearing coloured shirts and jeans, dealing in ‘rhythmic sounds, colourful on-stage attitude and sometimes hysterical antics. Items range from recognisable western ditties, through spirituals and folk items to gutty R&B, all based on the white version of country beat items married to the blues.’

Deuchar signed to Fontana the same week in February ’63 that Cyril Davies signed to Pye. As Jazz News noted, ‘both groups have been doing rave business in central London in the past few months but R&B doesn’t seem to have got off the ground in the provinces as yet’.

One fascinating booking for Deuchar’s Country Blues was on May 20, a Marquee double bill with the Graham Bond Quartet, including Pete’s old protégé John McLaughlin. At the start of May both acts had released their first singles: the GBQ backing Duffy Power on ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and Deuchar with a hugely characterful take on John D. Loudermilk’s ‘Google Eye’ – a perfect blend of blues and country. As Record Retailer noted, it ‘wouldn’t need too much prodding to make the charts. Very catchy and enjoyable.’

‘Google Eye’ remains Pete’s quintessential recording – quirky, entertaining, and a bit of a one-off, like the man himself. The B-side, a bluesy spiritual, was also compelling. Pete would perform ‘Google Eye’, solo, on two BBC radio appearances that summer, Talent Spot and Parade of the Pops (with that man Ifield also on the bill).

His next Fontana single, ‘It Comes And Goes’, appeared in November ’63 at exactly the same time as a cheesier version on Pye by Miki & Griff and the original 1962 recording by Burl Ives as a UK single on Brunswick. Written by Nashville’s Bill Anderson it was good material, if not as arresting as ‘Google Eye’, but none of the three managed a hit. Deuchar’s B-side was a ghastly piece of maudlin moralising from Hank Snow’s 1950s repertoire, ‘Married By The Bible’. For a man who was married three times, and a sower of wild oats, this was a bizarre choice.

In January ’64, having fully embraced C&W, ‘Big Pete Deuchar & the Westerners’ debuted on BBC radio’s Three’s Company, performing six numbers including Flatt & Scruggs’ banjo showcase ‘Earl’s Breakdown’ and the Carter Family’s ‘Homestead on the Farm’. This latter would be the exclusive B-side to Pete’s extremely rare US single release of ‘Google Eye’ on his own one-off Pee Dee label. This dates from early ’65, during a trip he made to Nashville and the southern states. In this period he changed his name to ‘Duker’ – one associate believing that it was to avoid being easily found by his first (ex-)wife.

In 1965 a new phase of his recording career began. A one-off UK single came out on Melodisc, ‘Walk Right Out of the Blues’, written by Tompall Glaser. Copyrighted in 1962, Glaser seems not to have released the song himself – presumably Pete picked it up in Nashville. Duker’s version, with jangling electric guitar, has enough of a rockabilly feel to have appeared on two British rock compilations, including one current download comp – ironic, given the vinyl’s utter scarcity. The B-side is presumably (not having a copy) a retitling of Hank Snow’s up-tempo 1949 US smash ‘I’m Movin’ On’, which Pete had previously performed on radio.

His media activities were upped in the latter half of 1965 with four BBC radio sessions, with new partner Pete Sayers (vocal, guitar, banjo, dobro), between July and October, three of them also featuring Andrew Townend (mandolin), sessions king Big Jim Sullivan (lead guitar) and jazzman Spike Heatley (bass). A new single was released on Columbia in November, ‘Goin’ In Training’, a too-fast bluegrass novelty number, backed by a fabulous cover of Mac Wiseman’s ‘I Saw Your Face In The Moon’ – a compelling train-time shuffle with Duker’s winning croon on top. They got the sides wrong…

In December there was an appearance on TV’s Five O’Clock Club, possibly backed by Alexis Korner’s house band, and two months into 1966 Duker’s second and final Columbia single, ‘Just Because’/’The Wishing Well’ appeared ¬. Both songs had been part of his live act with Sayers and co. Again, the B-side, written by Aussie Peter Hiscock and recorded by Hank Snow in 1965, was the winner. Both of the Columbia singles are sumptuous productions and exist in red ‘A’ label promo and black label stock copies.

During 1966, Pete was looking to form a new band. Guitarist/banjoist Mike Deighan, a songwriter for the Four Pennies and part of the Fritz, Mike & Mo trio (two 1965 singles), answered the ad and turned up at London’s Ken Colyer club on a Sunday afternoon:

‘There were guys there who were absolutely superb musicians,’ Mike recalls. ‘Anyway, it got to 7 o’clock and Pete being Pete says, ‘Right, let’s go to The Porcupine for a pint’. We stayed there, chewing the fat, and about 9 o’clock I went for a piss – and Pete came in the bogs and says, ‘You’ve got the job’. And I say, ‘Hang on Pete, there’s guys there can play the arse off me’. He says, ‘Yeah, I know, but you’re the only one who got his round in.’’

A five-piece band was formed. Mike: ‘He had this agent who wanted us all dressed like hicks, with straw in your mouth and all that. Roy Hudd was tied up with this – don’t ask me how. We had this concert at Battersea Town Hall for old age pensioners one Friday night and it was a bit disastrous – microphones knocked over, the band under-rehearsed, etc. We came off and Pete said, ‘Right you lot, you’re fucking sacked – apart from Deighan. It’s just me and you, kid.’ And that was it, and I spent two or three years with Pete – great times.’

The duo became the Moonshiners and a ludicrously wordy unreleased single was recorded at Pye studios – ‘I’ve Got Tears in my Ears from Lying on My Back in My Bed While Crying Over You’.
A fantastic (released) country/pop LP, Hold Up!, was recorded for Page One in 1967, with ace sessioneers Caleb Quaye, Dee Murray and Clem Cattini. Breezy hokum by George Formby rubbed shoulders with terrific takes on ‘Ticket To Ride’ and Alan Price’s ‘House That Jack Built’. (Note: The second Moonshiners LP listed in the RRPG is actually by a different, US act.)

The duo appeared on BBC radio’s Night Ride, with Pete beginning, from the BBC’s doors, a ‘night ride’ cycle to Newcastle (274 miles in 14 hours) as an LP publicity venture – reportedly selling 120 copies en route. Pete had been encouraged back into cycling, if only to lose weight, by DJ Jimmy Savile, whom he knew casually.

After a couple of fun years with Mike, Pete resolved to cycle round the world, and started goin’ in training. In June 1970, in Surrey, he was mown down by a hit-and-run driver (never caught), sustaining major injuries. Top names from the ‘trad boom’ appeared at a 100 Club benefit night, though Pete hardly needed the cash: Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball, Sandy Brown, George Melly, Diz Disley, et al.

Despite broken bones and reconstructive surgery, Pete’s adventure was merely postponed. From September 1971 to May 1972, he pedalled the world, setting distance records along the way – his record for crossing the USA alone was to stand for 10 years – and writing an atmospheric book about it when he returned, Sting In The Tail (Pelham, 1973), which can be found for around £15.

It was an extraordinary triumph of the will. In his book he recounts his adventures and lambasts pet hates like poor cuisine, sub-standard accommodation, pop groups, hippies and bureaucracy. Like the last flag-flyer for British Imperialism, the big man on the bicycle rampages through a world of ‘Pakis’, ‘Eyeties’ and ‘giggling idiots’ (most Indians), punching people who get in his way, searching most evenings for places to booze and people to booze with. Even a chicken unfortunate enough to collide with his bicycle in Yugoslavia is a ‘bastard’. He is, throughout, outrageous but indefatigable: heroic in undertaking his mad venture only a year after nearly dying on the road.

He told one reporter he went ahead with the trip because he could see himself becoming, post-crash, an ‘alcoholic cripple’. One Australian journalist wrote: ‘Pete is a strange sort of man, outwardly jocular and cheerful, yet with a deep underlying aura of almost kamikaze purpose…’ Traversing the continent’s merciless Nullarbor Plain, nearly 700 miles with no support network, was existential: ‘So far on this trip I’ve felt like a man onstage without an audience,’ Pete said. ‘Coming across the Nullarbor, I felt that God was watching me, but it was lonely, so very lonely, that I felt like people must feel when they are very close to death.’

Between Christmas and New Year 1971, while he was repeatedly arguing the toss about ‘drinking-up time’ with staff at public bars in Sydney, before flying on to America, Pete’s one-time apprentice John McLaughlin was triumphing with the Mahavishnu Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, New York.

Asked his motivation the following year by Cycling magazine, he replied: ‘I’ve done thousands of things I thought were the culmination, and they never have been – making the first radio appearance, making the first television [sic], making the first record, then the first LP, winning your first race. I’ve just won my first race! Eventually, you know you’re going to be shoved in your grave. And having been shoved in and taken out… maybe God decided some other extrovert should go… You’ve got to do something with your life.’

During the ‘70s and ‘80s Pete was immersed in the cycling world, writing for Cycling Weekly and Pro News – often controversially – and co-founding the League International (still going to this day). He wrote a biography of cycle legend Fausto Coppi, along with an extremely rare 1981 novel about an ex-wife killer from the jazz world, Given Half A Chance, quasi-autobiographical. Pete had married his third wife, Steffi, in 1978 and moved to Germany, though he returned, separated, in 1988. He was upset by Ken Colyer’s death earlier that year. His trust fund refused to advance money to allow him to buy a cottage and he rented a bedsit near Ringstead. On October 14 1988, having put his affairs in order, Pete stepped in front of a train, beside a favourite pub near Newark.

‘My thought is that Peter was still looking for something to do,’ says John Coles, a friend from the cycling scene. ‘He was a very gregarious person, but other people had their ordinary lives to lead. In some ways he was probably lonely. He wasn’t a whinger at all but he was still in some pain, I think [from the 1970 accident].’

As Mike Deighan puts it, ‘Pete was big on grand gestures – and he could back them up.’

*

DISCOGRAPHY

PETER DEUCHAR’S VIEUX CARRÉ JAZZMEN
56 Delta Recording Over in Gloryland/Just A Little While To Stay Here
(100 copies only)

DOUG RICHFORD’S LONDON JAZZMEN (with NAT GONELLA*) UK Singles
1/62 Parlophone R4871 Yip-I-Addy-I-Ay/On Sunday I Go Sailing*
11/62 Parlophone R4959 Cascading/12 Over The 8

BIG PETE DEUCHAR*/DUKER UK Singles
4/63 Fontana 267278TF Google Eye/There’s A Hand Leading Me*
11/63 Fontana TF423 It Comes And Goes/Married By The Bible*
65 Melodisc MEL1603 Walk Right Out of the Blues/Keep A’Movin’ On
19/11/65 Columbia DB7763 Goin’ In Training/I Saw Your Face In The Moon
18/2/66 Columbia DB7840 Just Because/The Wishing Well

THE MOONSHINERS UK Album
67 Page One FOR 004 Hold Up!

BIG PETE DUKER US Singles
c.65 Pee Dee Records 1001 Google Eye/Homestead On The Farm
6/66 Stellar AR-1507 Goin’ In Training/I Saw Your Face In The Moon

ODDITIES
1978 Rarities 54 GEORGE LEWIS In Europe Vol.3 ‘Pied Piper’
(rec 1959: Deuchar on banjo on four tracks)
1998 504 Records 504CD9 GEORGE LEWIS RAGTIME BAND In Concert 1959 –
Manchester Free Trade Hall: Second House
(rec: 1959, Deuchar on banjo on five tracks)
2005 GHB Records BCD-268 KID THOMAS VALENTINE Kid Thomas Party
(rec: 1957, Deuchar on banjo; a 10” vinyl release of part of this session appeared in 1990, details unknown)

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Lodestone of Wrongness says

07/04/2018 at 17:22

Irrelevant perhaps but was Dad the original Deuchar of Deuchar’s IPA of which I may have drunk 2000 pints in 1970 Edinburgh?

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- Colin H says
  
  07/04/2018 at 19:12
  
  Nope, that would be James Deuchar, the grandfather.
  
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Colin H says

08/04/2018 at 15:57

Here’s the B-side of the US version of ‘Google Eye’:

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Colin H says

08/04/2018 at 18:13

And here he is recorded sitting in with the George Lewis Ragtime Band at Manchester Free Trade Hall in January 1959:

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Freddy Steady says

10/04/2018 at 07:33

Huh, Colin you need to up your game if you intend to keep us informed and enlightened.

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- Colin H says
  
  10/04/2018 at 08:10
  
  Too lightweight? There’s 10,000 words on Deuchar’s 1959-60 period here:
  
  Big Pete Deuchar & his Professors of Ragtime: The Band That Time Forgot
  
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