Big Pete Deuchar & his Professors of Ragtime: The Band That Time Forgot

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1. Colin H says

   27/02/2018 at 15:28

   Big Pete Deuchar & his Professors of Ragtime

   ‘We may decide in fine detail just how we would like jazz to develop, but our plans will not be taken into account by any jazz genius who happens to rear his head, impressing a new musical vision upon his hearers and pointing a new direction with new possibilities.’
   David Boulton, Jazz In Britain, 1958

   ‘By the time I was 16, I was very deeply involved in the jazz movement and jazz music, and I got a job touring with a traditional jazz band, and that’s when my professional career started.’
   John McLaughlin, 1978

   In March 1972, just as the Mahavishnu Orchestra were becoming the hottest ticket on America’s live music scene, John McLaughlin told the readers of Rolling Stone – within the two paragraphs concerning his pre-1969 activities in a full-page feature – that he had once been a member of Big Pete Deuchar’s Professors of Ragtime. The name, he suggested, ‘tells its own story’.

   Well, yes and no. No, because Big Pete Deuchar is not a name writ large in the annals of music; indeed, barring a single paragraph in John Chilton’s Who’s Who of British Jazz (Continuum, 2nd ed. 2004) it is barely written at all. Yes, because for anyone familiar with British popular music around the end of the 1950s, the name alone conjures up visions of men in novelty stage-wear performing the peculiarly British version of New Orleans jazz that was hugely popular in Britain in those pre-Beatles years.

   It is hard to overstate the pervasiveness of ‘trad jazz’ in British entertainment in that period. The ‘trad boom’ was a phrase used in print media throughout 1960–62 to describe the phenomenon. The most successful bandleader of that time, and the unassuming focal point of the ‘boom’, was West Country clarinettist Acker Bilk – who sported Edwardian waistcoats and a bowler hat, on the canny advice of his publicist Peter Leslie, spawning a legion of fancy-dress imitators – and the most ‘authentic’ was cornetist Ken Colyer, who had famously travelled to New Orleans in the early 50s and played with the remaining legends of the 1920s, before ending up in a godforsaken prison for overstaying his visa.

   In October 1960 Melody Maker estimated that there were 5,000 trad bands in Britain and five months earlier Bob Wallis, leader of the Storyville Jazz Band, one of the top division acts, was able to say: ‘Traditional jazz is booming now more than it ever has. There is plenty of work for everybody. Good clubs are starting everywhere, and paying good wages.’

   British rock’n’roll in the late 50s – in general, a watered-down version of the real thing in America – was largely an adjunct of the existing entertainment industry, of Variety, given its platform by theatrical impresarios and Light Entertainment broadcast producers. New Orleans-based jazz in Britain came from earthier stock, from an organically spread grass-roots, post-war interest in pre-war American records, which gradually led to bands being formed – in determined opposition to the altogether more poised, clean-cut British modern jazz that was focused around a handful of Italian-suited personalities and virtuosi in central London.

   New Orleans jazz was the rebellion music of 50s British youth, a riotous alternative on a night out to the strait-laced conventions of British society at that time. Trombonist Chris Barber’s band were the most prominent pioneers in making it a national, touring entity of significant appeal in the early part of the 50s – with Chris able to indulge his passion for the blues by personally financing a number of American blues artists to come on the road with them as guests – while trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, who had taken his band from pure trad in a direction that came to be known as ‘mainstream’ (very loosely, somewhere between trad and modern), was also a well-established national figure – as a writer, cartoonist and speech broadcaster as well as a musician – by the end of the decade.

   To the casual onlooker, it was all ‘trad’ but to the cognoscenti it was 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).

   As with skiffle, another peculiarly British musical genre derived from vintage American roots music that was briefly huge (1956–58) as a live, recorded and broadcast music, it is probably difficult for those outside Britain and its culture to understand trad jazz or fully appreciate its significance in the history of British popular music. In very general terms, it occupied the space – often literally, as trad jazz clubs went over to a new musical policy to survive – that was to be occupied by rhythm and blues come 1963: the ‘R&B boom’, in the media parlance of the time. [1] That boom, nurtured by elements and individuals within the trad jazz world like Chris Barber and Alexis Korner, begat the Rolling Stones, Georgie Fame, Graham Bond, the Yardbirds, the Animals, Manfred Mann, the Pretty Things, Them and a host of others. It swept away all but the very top layer of trad jazz artists and was essentially the beginning of British rock as the world would come to know it over the rest of that decade and beyond. [2]

   Big Pete Deuchar would see which way the wind was blowing earlier than most, publicly announcing his switch from trad jazz to R&B at the end of 1962, in time to bag a six-month residency on the ‘R&B night’ at the Marquee, a London club hitherto purely a jazz venue, under the guise of Big Pete Deuchar & his Country Blues. However, back in 1959, having begun his musical career as a disciple of Ken Colyer’s purist brand of New Orleans jazz, Big Pete could see the ‘trad boom’ coming and the compromises necessary to get a slice of that pie – principally, a corny outfit and a name to go with it. In September 1959, with John McLaughlin on electric guitar – not an instrument hitherto known in the world of trad jazz – he launched the Professors of Ragtime. Success in London was his goal, and from what one can reconstruct at this remove, he almost got there.

   *

   Born on July 7 1933, James Peter David Deuchar 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. He left the sport in 1954, after a nine-day circuit of Britain, because he had put on too much weight. It left him 100% focused on music.

   An early glimpse of Deuchar using his brass neck to get somewhere in music is in Ken Colyer’s autobiography, When Dreams Are in The Dust. Dating to early 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 Marrero’ [3] 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 opened the New Orleans Jazz Club, in a condemned property on Melbourne Street. [4] One North-East newspaper feature 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 less welcome 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 a 1969 interview, ‘[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.’

   At Derek Lucas’ Northern Sounds studio at 3am on April 20 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 recalled:

   ‘[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.

   The online historian of the Vieux Carré Jazzmen recalls Big Pete as ‘a charismatic, striking individual … enthusiastically devoted to the hand-clapping, foot-stomping, syncopated music of the American deep south, New Orleans jazz, to which he would listen on his Pye ‘Black Box’ record player and play along on his banjo at every opportunity.’

   Ken Colyer had 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 October 1957, on the invitation of George Lewis, who had been impressed by the Vieux Carré when they had supported his band, during its first British tour, at Newcastle City Hall earlier that year. ‘I feel there is a lot to be found in New Orleans that Ken Colyer did not get a chance to see,’ he said. He would stop first in New York to hang out with trumpeter Thad Jones, renewing a friendship that had begun when the Count Basie Orchestra had played Newcastle. [5]

   On his return to Britain, Pete formed a new band, Peter Deuchar’s New Orleans Jazz Band, and departed in January or February 1958 for what would become an 18-month residency at the New Orleans Bier Bar in Dusseldorf, Germany. [6]

   The liaison between German bars and beat groups from Liverpool has long been documented, but the connection between German bars and British music certainly predates that phenomena. Trad jazz was huge in Germany in the late 50s. Big Pete’s instrument was particularly popular, as guitarist (and banjoist when economics prevailed) Diz Disley rued to Melody Maker, on the phone from Switzerland while on tour with bandleader Alex Welsh later in 1960: ‘Guitar solos have been going over great here, even into encores – just the opposite of Germany, which is banjoland in extremis. This is naturally very gratifying…’

   A couple of months earlier Diz had been forced to disband his guitar-centric Soho String Quartet: ‘The jazz public are too narrow minded. They don’t want to hear any band that doesn’t have a banjo. They don’t appreciate a rhythm guitar.’

   Even Diz, though, wasn’t entirely unforgiving: ‘It’s a pity that it all revolves around the banjo,’ he had remarked, of British jazz, before his String Quartet was driven to extinction. ‘It’s a good instrument when it’s played well.’

   Eddie Smith, banjo player with Chris Barber, offered some mitigation: ‘They often say that a musician’s temperament comes out in his playing, but you can’t be polite and play the banjo!’

   Around the same time, the Alex Welsh band’s pianist Fred Hunt had brought the issue of the relentlessly klunking trad banjo into perspective when asked to summarise recent developments in British jazz: ‘The biggest change in British jazz over the past 10 years?’ he said. ‘The emancipation of the bloody banjo – that is the most disastrous change anyway. Hundreds of bands all over the country are now making the same sound.’

   Before long, Alex Welsh himself entered the fray:

   ‘Let’s talk about ‘popular’ British jazz. I don’t think very much of it at all. I’d rather not refer to it as jazz at all. It’s really a sort of folk music, a peculiar sort of music peculiar to British musicians. They have managed to produce a sound close enough to hoodwink the masses who believe that it is jazz. This banjo mania! If I had a banjo in my band I wouldn’t sleep at nights… I could name at least three successful bandleaders and any number of sidemen who curse banjos but persist with them because it means money. I can’t help thinking we’re going backwards… They say that you’ve got to have a banjo to appeal to the kids, but the kids haven’t been brought up on anything else… Until the kids tire of this clanging in their ears there is not much hope.’

   Nat Gonella, the ‘British Louis Armstrong’, whose career had begun in 1924 and who was returning to jazz on the boom bandwagon after years on the Variety circuit, was bemused at the whole thing:

   ‘When I was a young jazz fan everybody was so broadminded! I studied Ellington and Waller just as much as Armstrong. We never split jazz up into categories. British jazz today is a bit stereotyped. People go more for the banjo band and become banjo fanatics. They can’t understand how jazz can mean anything else.’

   It was fairly clear, then, that no one in 1960, at the height of the trad boom, should go to see Alex Welsh or Nat Gonella if the banjo was their thing. Alex would stick to his guns, but within a year Nat had given in and joined a band with a banjo player – who would turn out to be Big Pete Deuchar. That was all in the future. Back in September 1959, having returned from his sojourn in Germany, Pete was about to unleash his latest band on the British public: The Professors of Ragtime.

   *

   Outside of London, at the end of the 50s, Newcastle and Manchester were the major centres of jazz activity in Britain. John McLaughlin (b. January 4 1942) left school aged 16, sometime in 1958 – the end of summer term in July being perhaps likeliest – but during his last couple of years at school he would regularly travel to Manchester specifically to hear a kind of music that was unknown on the coast of Northumberland. The journey is roughly three hours by motorway today, and was doubtless considerably longer in the pre-motorway 50s:

   ‘Fortunately, one of my brothers was at the University of Manchester and where he lived, in an English pub, on the last Friday of each month there was a real flamenco guitarist. So I was leaving school at the end of each month and, yes, I got into big trouble because of it, but I didn’t care a lot. So I was hitchhiking up to Manchester and I stayed with my brother, and then he brought me into the pub. To see real musicians like that, it was absolutely wonderful.’

   John worked in a guitar repair shop in Newcastle after leaving school, for a period spanning 1958–59, purchasing an impressive guitar from a second-hand store around this time for £65, of a kind used by Django Reinhardt. [7] He was also frequenting the public houses in Newcastle that played host to jazz bands, instrument in hand:

   ‘On a Saturday or Sunday night they’d have a jazz band and I’d pretend I was 18 and go over to the band and ask them if I could sit in. I tell you, I got burnt so badly at the beginning… “Okay young kid, let’s start off with ‘Cherokee’ at a billion miles an hour and you take the first solo.” I’d go home with my tail between my legs! But what an experience. I think I learned more from those jam sessions in the first few months when I was 16 than I would have with a year of practising. [8] But after a few months, and you know I was really pestering these people, they would start to invite me. And eventually I got a gig.’

   Just as Newcastle was beginning to become a musical city within which John McLaughlin could have thrived, and made a name for himself, he left. As John’s bio in the official 1975 Mahavishnu Orchestra tour programme described the above sequence of events:

   ‘He quit school, took a job at a music instrument shop and began sitting in with jazz groups when he was 16. During the late fifties, on weekends, John would hitch the 200 miles to Manchester to listen to visiting Spanish guitarists at a guitar club and to hear other music. These treks led to his joining his first professional band, Big Pete Deuchar and His Professors of Ragtime, and to gigs in Manchester and London.’

   *

   ‘What is the state of jazz appreciation in Manchester?’ wrote the man from the Manchester Evening News. ‘‘Higher than ever,’ report club secretaries. Yet I’m sure that fans do not want to know more about jazz. For instance, at the Manchester Jazz Appreciation Circle only five jazz devotees at the first of this season’s meetings last week.’

   The Manchester Jazz Appreciation Circle had been founded in 1948 by critic/schoolteacher Alan Stevens. Its evening classes in jazz appreciation were being run in 1959 at an adult education centre in Wythenshawe under the aegis of the Manchester Education Committee. [9] In January 1960 the circle closed down through lack of support.

   None of this reflected any lack of interest in live jazz, just a lack of interest in people pontificating about it. Up and down the country, the interest in trad, especially, was visceral: ‘The trad boom is, indeed, only just starting,’ wrote Tony Brown in Melody Maker, that same year. ‘The kids who went for the fundamental beat and simplicity of rock are finding all that and a bit more in the real jazz.’

   Bandleader and ‘king of the ravers’ Mick Mulligan could have told the Jazz Appreciation Circle exactly what their problem was: ‘Mostly [the audience] know nothing of the jazz history, or of the original jazz greats who created the music – only the British groups.’

   Leafing through the 1959–60 pages of the Manchester Evening News today, one is struck by the vibrancy of the city’s entertainment scene, with live jazz available more or less every night of the week and in abundance at weekends. Probably the two most feted bands on the scene in 1959, when Big Pete Deuchar & his Professors of Ragtime blew in to try their luck, were the Saints and the Zenith Six. The Saints had been operating since 1950, would release four EPs and five singles (all on Parlophone) during the 50s and were reported in 1960 to have been outselling any other British band on EP up to 1957. The music industry was wholly based in London but they were determinedly non-pro, and happily based in Manchester. The Zenith Six had recorded an EP for London label Tempo in 1956 and managed five BBC broadcasts between 1955 and 1959, which was no mean feat. [10]

   The media in general was massively London-centric in those days, not least the print music media, but some belated acknowledgement of Manchester’s position as a jazz city of long standing came from Melody Maker in 1960:

   ‘Manchester was, it seems, staging its own revival at least as early as George Webb, [11] and the development of jazz in the North generally has been as continuous and enthusiastic as in and around London.’

   It is hard to know at this remove what impact the Professors of Ragtime, a newly formed band from a city far away, would have had in Manchester. Curiously, a systematic trawl of the Manchester Evening News for the period yielded not one reference. Almost all that can be said for certain, from a passing mention in a letter preserved at BBC Written Archives, is that they played one week at the Cromford Club, on Market Street (now buried under the Arndale Centre) in late October 1959 and that by the 26th of that month, courtesy of the same letter, they were being managed by one Eddie Rolls of 127 Cecil Street, Manchester. The letter written to the Corporation looks like it was also sent generally to promoters and agents in London:

   ‘I am pleased to inform you that the above Band Presentation is now available for Variety and Cabaret – weekly and one night stands. As you may know this very successful Presentation has recently returned from a very fabulous tour, including New Orleans, New York and Germany.
   ‘Since arriving in England they have appeared on TV’s Lunchtime Break and are now playing an extended week at the Cromford Club, Manchester, prior to further TV engagements.
   ‘This is a very versatile combination and suitable for audiences of all ages and register solidly wherever they appear.
   ‘In view of their forthcoming visit to London I will be delighted to let you have any further details if you have any available dates to offer.’

   Mr Rolls was dissembling somewhat here, as the ‘very fabulous tour’ was a combination of Pete Deuchar’s visit to New York and New Orleans in 1957 and his pre-Professors residency in Germany the following year. Whether it was the Professors that appeared on Lunchtime Break is unknown; I have been unable to trace such a programme, although the Professors’ publicity brochure, accompanying Rolls’ letter, does include ‘grateful thanks to all those who has assisted and supported them, especially Mr Len Marten, of Tyne Tees Television’, which is certainly suggestive. [12] There is no other evidence of any ‘further TV engagements’ occurring at this time.

   What can be gleaned from the publicity brochure, aside from photographs of the band members, is that it was being used to procure engagements while the band was still based in Newcastle. [13] Big Pete’s address is given as 4 Villa Place in the city while credit for the band uniforms is given to City Stylish Ltd of New Bridge Street, Newcastle, photography was by N. Davison of Wingrove Studios, Newcastle, and printing by the Bensham Press in Gateshead – let alone Mr Marten from Tyne Tees, the local TV station, being singled out for thanks.

   The textual content of the brochure, flamboyantly signed ‘Big Pete Deuchar, tells us a lot about his character:

   ‘Big Pete Deuchar’s Professors of Ragtime were formed in September 1959 in order to put over old and new songs and numbers in a completely new style. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed the programme and I hope to bring the ravers back to you soon. So in the meantime bear in mind that ‘Beer is the best long drink in the world’.’

   ‘Somehow, from being an arch-purist, Deuchar had embraced the Variety/populist end of trad jazz in time to ride the trad boom bandwagon, and had enough pragmatism in reserve to allow an electric guitarist into his band. It was surely the only trad-based band in Britain to have one at that point.
   ‘The founding line-up of the professors was Pete (banjo/vocals), his regular cohort John Saxelby (clarinet), John Clarke (piano), Norman ‘Nobby’ Burn (drums) and ‘Mac’ McLaughlin (guitar) – that was how the publicity brochure put it and, to the memory of Pete’s half-sister Sally, that’s all he was called at this point.

   Sally, who was 12 at the time, met the Professors of Ragtime when they arrived – seemingly early in 1960 – at her mother’s home at West Byfleet in Surrey, about 40 minutes outside London, making it their base camp for a campaign aimed at breaking into London. Sally’s mother Suzanne was also Pete’s mother. The family history is complicated, but, in brief, Pete had been brought up by his grandfather James at Dissington Hall near Newcastle. His mother had been effectively rescued from a dysfunctional situation there by his maternal grandmother in the 1930s, and in June 1940 Pete’s father Derek and his second wife Bettine were found dead at a shooting lodge in Cumbria, in what appeared to have been a suicide pact. Pete grew up believing that his mother was dead. A series of events instigated by Sally, a remarkably intuitive and influential 10-year-old at the time, brought about a reunion between Pete and his mother at a Lyon’s tea room in London, in time for Pete to invite himself and New Orleans legend George Lewis to stay with them over Christmas 1958. [14]

   The Professors are elusive between the Cromford Club booking in October 1959 and a Tuesday night date at Swindon’s Locarno ballroom in early February 1960, chanced upon through a Google search, but a few days after that the first of a small handful of dates advertised in either or both Jazz News & Review and Melody Maker appears: The Royal Forest Hotel, Chingford, 18 miles north of London.

   Simultaneously, Harvey Riscoe, co-founder of Personal Appearances Ltd. – a Soho-based agency specialising not in jazz but in ‘artistes for television, cabaret, variety, circus, films, commercial advertising and personal appearances’ – was announcing to the world that he was now representing Pete Deuchar and was open for business:

   ‘We have taken on the newly formed Pete Deuchar Professors of Ragtime. It is an excellent jazz band and is creating quite a stir in the variety field. I believe that traditional jazz may well take over from Rock ‘n’ Roll. Teenagers seem to be getting tired of it, and traditional jazz may well be the answer. Although Pete Deuchar is an unknown quantity, we are finding him very easy to sell.’

   Along with the brazen lie that Deuchar ‘spent many years in New Orleans playing and recording with the remaining veterans’, readers were informed that the Professors – currently ‘negotiating for London jazz clubs – now comprised Deuchar plus John Saxelby and ‘Mac’ McLaughlin from the original line-up together with Denis Reay (piano) and Harvey Kelson (drums).

   It was this version of the Professors that landed in on Suzanne and Sally in West Byfleet, as Sally recalls:

   ‘I just came home one day and there was a whole bunch of blokes running around! There was a band in the house! [Pete] hadn’t really been able to do that [before] because of my grandmother’s state of health. She went into care right around that time so he was then able to go crazy in the house.

   ‘We had a fairly large house – five bedrooms, I think. So, he took my room, I took granny’s, and the boys all stayed outside. They had a caravan that had suddenly arrived in the driveway and a couple of them would sleep in there and then he had this big pantechnicon, like a moving truck, and he had converted the back of that into a gig wagon so there was room for gear and there was also bunk beds. That was a good use of money. So, when they had gigs they would be able to drive home overnight and some would be able to sleep on their way home.

   ‘I remember Harvey [Kelson] fairly well because one sad evening they were off gigging somewhere and the front door bell rang. It was pouring with rain, and my mother went to see what was going on and there was this bedraggled little girl from Newcastle looking for Harvey, her husband – he had disappeared [from Newcastle]. I mean, they were all screwing around, they were guys… So, she came down to try and find him and I remember my mother took her into the kitchen, she was crying her eyes out, and when Harvey came back he got the back end of my mother, which you’d never want to have. I don’t know what happened after that…’

   Following that first Melody Maker and Jazz News advertised gig at the Royal Forest Hotel in Chingford, on Sunday February 12, there would be two more there in quick succession, on Saturday March 5 and Sunday March 27, plus one at the Windsor Jazz Club on Friday March 4. In amongst these came by far the biggest booking the band had received thus far, a Jazz Band Ball at Hammersmith Palais, with an audience of many hundreds and a bill shared with the cream of their peers.

   Pat Richards reviewed the event (‘a genuine full-blooded whoop-up’) for Jazz News, and it is conceivably the first printed review of a John McLaughlin performance:

   ‘Pete Deuchar opened the show to a crowd of several hundred which later swelled to around 2,000. Deuchar’s band make no pretence to play dedicated jazz and therefore its influence is more Jimmy Durante than Johnny Dodds. The band are good humoured and suitable for parties. They feature a large percentage of vocals in their programme. They even squeezed in ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’.’

   The Professors’ good-time opening set was followed by the Micky Ashman Band (rising stars), then Dave Nelson’s band (with awkward double trumpet frontline), and then the Professors returned to give proceedings an unashamedly populist shot in the arm:

   ‘Pete Deuchar returned for another variety turn and packed the floor with dancers who had sat out during the whole of the previous session. Incidentally, I have noticed recently what a deadly serious and involved business jiving has become.’

   Deuchar’s return visit was followed by the Clyde Valley Stompers (noted by Richards to purvey serious musicianship, with no concern for populism), then Dick Charlesworth (playing quality jazz despite ‘variety jazz’ uniforms), and finally the big-hitters: Terry Lightfoot followed by Kenny Ball (‘rip-roaring, tearaway stuff’). ‘The Hammersmith management is to be congratulated on such a varied programme,’ Richards concluded. ‘Perhaps jazz is the answer to empty ballrooms.’

   *

   Interviewed in 1972, which must already have seemed half a lifetime later, John laughed at the memory of the Professors of Ragtime gigs, with the band ‘dressed in mortar boards and long gowns’: ‘But I loved it,’ he said.’

   ‘I don’t think they wore the mortar boards on stage, though,’ says Sally. ‘They wore them for a photo session. They had a uniform similar to Acker Bilk – the vests. Peter and Mac got into a dispute about the uniform, I remember that. Peter had paid for all these band outfits, the ones in the [Newcastle] photo, and he forgot one day to wear it and got a bollocking from Peter. They went up to one of the local prep schools and had photos done there with the mortar boards and full outfits.’

   One such photo, of Big Pete himself in academic regalia, survives through being used on a second promotional brochure for the Professors, this one dating from around June 1960. The reason that photos of no other members feature in it will become clear.

   Acker Bilk, a mild-mannered West Country man who had become a household name during 1959–60, was the man to blame for the often absurd outfits worn by trad jazz bands of the period:

   ‘We’ve been criticised for starting a cult, with our bowler hats, fancy waistcoats and narrow black trousers. But we can’t see any harm in youngsters wearing them … The uniforms were originally my idea, embellished by our astute publicist, Peter Leslie. We could have made them even more picturesque but decided to keep them sober and dignified … but they have made only a minor contribution to our success.’

   The idea certainly helped a few others a notch or two below Bilk’s level: Dick Charlesworth’s City Gents dressed in bowler hats, pinstriped suits and rolled umbrellas; Bob Wallis’ Storyville Jazz Band dressed as Mississippi riverboat gamblers; and Dr Crock & his Crackpots almost certainly had some visual aspect with a name like that.

   Veteran bandleader Ted Heath, asked for his view in a July 1960 feature entitled ‘Why does trad jazz sell?’ was more astute than sneering: ‘The funny hats? They help. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band wore toppers. It’s one of the basic principles of selling something to the public.’

   In the same feature, Sandy Brown and Ronnie Scott, a couple of seasoned jazz pragmatists who would each have a future role to play in the John McLaughlin story, had penetrating views:

   ‘They like it for the same reason that people like slapstick comedy – they know what’s coming,’ said Sandy. ‘Bands are about the same; chord sequences and tunes much the same … They generate spirit, of course. But it’s that clanging noise more than the music that kids go for.’

   ‘It’s simple and easy to listen to,’ said Ronnie. ‘The trad musicians are holding on to the past, worshipping something that died umpteen years ago. But it’s a lively enough corpse.’

   *

   So, what does Sally Stevens, a precocious 12-year-old, who would go on to work in music herself, recall of John McLaughlin during his time at West Byfleet?

   ‘Well, he was 17 [sic], he had acne; I remember that. Because he was younger he was allowed to stay in the house – like a dog! My mother saying [to band members, one by one], ‘You can come in… You can stay out… You can come in… You stay out…’! But Mac was younger so he got to sleep on the sofa. He had his own hot water bottle, I remember that; it was pink and had ‘Mac’ on it. We never called him anything other than Mac. He was quiet.

   ‘I remember one evening we were all in the sitting room watching television, I think, and we had big windows so at night you had to get up and draw these big curtains so my mother said to me, ‘Sally, would you get up and draw the curtains?’ I was interested in what was on the TV and said, ‘No – let Mac do it!’ My brother was dozing at the end of the couch. He jumped up like a fish coming out of water, picked me, put me over his shoulder, took me into the kitchen, banged me down on the floor and said, ‘Don’t ever speak to my friends like that again!’ and stormed out. My mother said later he walked into the sitting room and said, ‘My God – that nearly killed me!’ But Mac would have got up and drawn the curtains and it would have been fine. He was that kind of guy.’

   Despite John’s young age, and her own, Sally was aware of his genius:

   ‘I did [think that] because of the way he played guitar – he was just very, very good. Complete command of the instrument. He knew exactly what he was doing and I thought ‘This guy, he’s really good.’ I mean, the others were fine for what they did but he stood out. You couldn’t miss it.

   ‘One thing I have often wondered about was this: our living room was all furniture and accoutrements from India, so Mac was lying on this couch that was tiger skins and leopard skins, tiger skin rugs on the floor – as long as my grandmother was alive there was no getting rid of the damn things – and Buddhas here, there and everywhere. So it was an interesting environment.’

   It could indeed be the case that Big Pete Deuchar’s mum’s interior décor had more of a lasting influence on John than her son’s music, but being on the road with a professional jazz man and seeing how the world worked was certainly valuable experience.

   ‘It’s a rather unlikely partnership,’ observes Colin Green, British rock’n’roller Billy Fury’s guitarist at that time. ‘[Big Pete] was a bit overbearing. I can’t see how John would have fitted in with that ‘cos John was, well, strong-minded [himself], in that he knew what he wanted to do. But I don’t think he was ‘strong-minded’ in Big Pete’s way.’

   Vic Flick, at that time guitarist with the John Barry Seven, another contemporary who knew both John and Deuchar, was similarly surprised to hear (half a century on) that they had worked together:

   ‘I can’t imagine two more opposite people. I came across Pete Deuchar on [a few] occasions but I didn’t like him at all – a very horrible sort of guy, actually. He was like a Sherman tank blasting his way through the music business. I can’t remember anybody saying, ‘Wow! I’m working with Pete Deuchar!’ He was a character, he got talked about, he forced his way into situations… [But] it was probably a good place to be an intern for a little while – to learn the business the hard way!’

   Others who worked with Pete during his subsequent musical adventures in the 60s and others still during his years of involvement in the professional cycling world in the 70s and 80s recall a man who didn’t suffer fools, who could be brusque and controversial, who had strong views but who was also a dynamic force in whatever he choose to be involved in, loyal to his friends and often generous to them if the need arose. In a lengthy online memoir of Dougie Richford’s London Jazzmen, of which Deuchar was a member spanning 1961–62, Ken Harrison portrays the banjo man as ‘an English public-school bully … Flashman personified’, although he eventually did come to like him. In contrast, one cycling associate in the 80s recalls Pete (a functioning alcoholic by then) bumping into Stu Morrison, a former banjo player with Chris Barber, by then alcoholic himself and down on his luck, and looking after him. Back in the early 60s, Pete was still a man focused wholly on making his career in music a success, and that obviously meant rubbing some people up the wrong way in the process. Around 1966, an entire newly formed band, bar one member, was sacked by Pete after its first performance. [15] Alternatively, session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan, who worked with Pete on several mid 60s BBC radio performances, had no problems with him at all. But then (a) Sullivan could play and (b) he was, after all, ‘Big’ Jim Sullivan.

   John McLaughlin seems to retain fond memories of his time in the Professors of Ragtime. For a man who is largely unconcerned with nostalgia or past adventures, it is noticeable that he has chosen to mention at least a morsel of reflection about his time with Pete Deuchar on a handful of occasions, from his first interview with Rolling Stone, in 1972, through to the text of his own European tour programme in 1975 and on to published interviews as recent as 2016. [16]

   ‘It was New Orleans jazz, but he was very open-minded,’ he said, on the most recent occasion. ‘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.’

   *

   On Monday May 23 1960, having previously been turned down for Vera Lynn Presents, Big Pete and the Professors made their national TV debut on The Charlie Chester Show – 45 minutes of music and comedy at 7.30pm, in between Cliff Michelmore’s Tonight and Richard Dimbleby’s Panorama. [17]

   By this stage, confirmed in both the contract and a letter to the BBC from Harvey Riscoe, the Professors had swelled to six members, although the identity of that sixth member remains elusive. Pete and the boys pre-recorded a short medley of opening music with Charlie Chester and the full cast and orchestra of the show during afternoon rehearsals and live on the show performed ‘Tiger Rag’, a rumbustious tune by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The Professors’ version lasted a punchy 2’23” compared with the ODJB’s recording at 3’05”. If the Professors ever wore their mortar boards and gowns in performance, it’s likely this programme (no longer extant) was where they did so. [18]

   During the second week of June the band played a week’s Variety at the Continental Theatre and restaurant in Hull. It is their last known booking. The following week Pete went to Germany, where, as Jazz News reported, he was ‘making enquiries for his Professors of Ragtime to play a series of clubs and concerts’.

   ‘Jazz is booming in Germany,’ reported the magazine, in that same issue. ‘That’s the report from our correspondent who returned last week… Traditional jazz is by far the most popular style in Germany… The German Jazz Federation, an organisation of some 70 jazz clubs, has nearly 5,000 members.’

   Yet all was not well back in the academy. Although a Melody Maker news item in mid-August reported a trio of dates for the Professors of Ragtime beginning at Hull Jazz Club on August 12 and followed by a ballroom in Morecambe and a jazz club in Grimsby later that month, these were in fact the first bookings for a new entity, Pete Deuchar’s Jazz Band, featuring Pete with Ches Chesterman (trumpet), John Cheadle (clarinet), Roy Maskell (trombone), Colin Boulter (bass, tuba) and Dave Evans (drums). Even John Saxelby had gone this time. At the end of September this was the unit that travelled to Hamburg for a residency at the New Orleans Bier Bar, further dates in Austria and TV in Spain.

   So what had gone wrong? At this remove it’s hard to say. Sally believes that winding up the band may have been precipitated by John leaving:

   ‘I think Mac left of his accord. I don’t really know what happened there but I know that there was a big blow-up that happened that really was not Mac’s fault but Peter was making a big deal of it. They were playing some place that had a proscenium stage and stage curtains. So they had set up behind the curtains and Mac had plugged his guitar into the amp and it had tangled up somehow in the stage curtains and when they announced the band and lifted the curtains up it unplugged the guitar. Actually, I thought it was rather funny. I wasn’t there but I heard all about it. But there may have been other niggling [aside from that incident] and I think that probably Mac was realising that trad jazz was not the direction he wanted to go in. We lost touch with him at that point.’

   Sally goes further in venturing the opinion that whether the band would have made it as far as a commercial recording opportunity ‘really depended on hanging on to Mac, I think. I think what made them interesting to people was that they had this guitar in the band, which was unusual [for a trad band].’

   John’s departure can very likely be linked with a significant event in his private life that occurred on June 25 1960, just two weeks after the Professors’ last known booking, in Hull. At the Registry Office in the Royal Borough of Kensington, London, he married Margaret Grey, aged 17 and a bank clerk. John’s occupation is given as ‘salesman’, suggesting that his periodic career in musical instrument shops had begun, with his address given as 37 Drayton Court, an apartment in an impressive Victorian mansion block in Drayton Gardens, London, SW10. [19] A year earlier, Julia McLaughlin had been born to the pair in Newcastle. Witnessing the marriage was Margaret’s father and one D.N. Reay – Denis Reay, pianist with the Professors of Ragtime. In April 1961 a second daughter, Jacqueline, would be born, with the family living at 103 Buckland Way, a small semi in Worcester Park, Surrey, and with John specifying his occupation as ‘salesman (musical instruments)’.

   The Pete Deuchar Jazz Band appears not to have outlasted its three-month European adventure. In July 1961 Big Pete re-emerged as banjo player with Dougie Richford’s London Jazzmen, enjoying 18 months of regular work around London and elsewhere, including more European jaunts, a couple of BBC radio broadcasts and two singles on Parlophone, with comeback legend Nat Gonella in the ranks for a while. It was a step up in the trad world from the Professors – perhaps top of the second division or bottom of the first, but a solid berth in which to ride out the trad boom. In December 1962, Pete could see the writing on the wall and jumped ship to form his own Big Pete Deuchar’s Country Blues, in the forefront of the much vaunted ‘R&B boom’, bagging a six-month residency at London’s Marquee club and a singles deal with Fontana. [20] He would have bumped into John again when the Graham Bond Quartet shared a Marquee bill with him one night in May ’63, but after that their paths diverged for good – Big Pete’s for four years of Country & Western, John’s for the long and winding road detailed in Bathed In Lightning.

   *

   Having phoneticised his name to Duker, Big Pete left music towards the end of the 60s for professional cycling. Training for a solitary trek around the world in June 1970 he was mown down by a hit-and-run driver, sustaining major injuries. Top names from the trad boom appeared at a benefit night at the 100 Club, though Pete hardly needed the cash: Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball, Sandy Brown, George Melly, Diz Disley, the Temperance Seven and many more. [21] Perhaps John would have gone along had he been around, but he was already in New York.

   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 and writing an atmospheric book about it when he returned, Sting In The Tail (Pelham, 1973). In it 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 like-minded fellows 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 sustaining serious injuries in the saddle and loyal to his friends and supporters.

   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.’

   One wonders what Pete might have thought had he known that, in the dead zone between Christmas and New Year 1971, while he was repeatedly arguing the toss about ‘drinking-up time’ with staff at public bars in Sydney, Australia, his one-time apprentice John McLaughlin was triumphing at Carnegie Hall, New York – with a double-necked Gibson and music about as far removed from ‘Tiger Rag’ as it was possible to get while still being some kind of jazz. [22]

   With equipment and organisation that would seem, to anyone planning such a trip today, akin to Mallory’s attempt on Everest in a tweed suit, Pete Deuchar finished what he started. His record for crossing the USA alone was to stand for 10 years. ‘One of the things in life I detest is having to waste time in waiting around,’ he declared. His protégé would have certainly have raised a glass to that.

   *

   FOOTNOTES:

   [1] British music magazines of the period were fond of booms – there was an oft-cited ‘folk boom’ running in parallel with the ‘R&B boom’ across 1963–65.

   [2] George Melly’s Owning Up (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), an autobiography of his time as vocalist with the rabble-rousing Mick Mulligan band (1949–61), gives a pungent flavour of life in a 50s trad band, while Dave Gelly’s An Unholy Row: Jazz in Britain and its audience, 1945–60 (Equinox, 2014) is a magnificent history of the era with the insight of a distinguished modern jazz musician and writer, of the later 60s and beyond, chronicling the music of his youth. Billy Bragg’s Roots, Radicals & Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World (Faber & Faber, 2017) is a wonderfully readable explanation of how British skiffle began – from its virtual inventor Ken Colyer on to its most commercial exponent Lonnie Donegan, a banjo player from Chris Barber’s trad jazz band who was both remarkably talented and in the right place at the right time.

   [3] Lawrence Marrero was a legendary New Orleans banjo player who had recorded with Bunk Johnson and toured with George Lewis until ill health obliged him to quit in 1955. Speaking to Jazz News 19/6/59 just after Marrero’s death, Ken Colyer said: ‘No one could swing like he could. He was the greatest tenor banjo player I have ever played with.’

   [4] The original line-up of the Vieux Carré Jazzmen was: Pete Deuchar (banjo/vocal), Peter Gascoigne (trumpet), Jack Goodwin (trombone), John Saxelby (clarinet), John Lowes (bass) and Pete Drysdale (drums). Sometimes 1954 has been given as the year they began.

   [5] Pete would write about his trip to New Orleans a few times in British magazine Jazz News, and made at least one (remarkably good) amateur recording there with New Orleans veterans, led by trumpeter Kid Thomas Valentine. A rambunctious 62-minute session, it is available on CD as Kid Thomas Party.

   [6] The band’s line-up was: Pete Deuchar (banjo/vocal), Chris Bateson (trumpet), John Saxelby (clarinet), Keith Avison (trombone), Denis Reay (piano), Paul Simpson (bass), Kenny Beech (drums). Bateson was formerly with the City Ramblers and Avison with Acker Bilk, while Saxelby – a founder member of the Vieux Carré with Pete – had been leading his own band immediately prior to the German adventure. It was planned that Viv Carter from the Bob Cort Skiffle Group would replace Beech after the first couple of months. All this was reported in Jazz News at the time. Inconveniently, drummer Ginger Baker’s autobiography Hellraiser (2010) contains a couple of paragraphs of reminiscence of two weeks he spent as Big Pete’s drummer, at the beginning of a Hamburg residency, after which he (Ginger) was then going to Copenhagen to join a band led by Diz Disley and featuring Bob Wallis. Despite mentioning John McLaughlin as being in the line-up, Ginger’s recollection – based on internal evidence of letters to his fiancée and then his marriage in February 1959 after returning from Scandinavia – clearly refers to the Hamburg residency that began in February 1958. Ginger was surely conflating memories of briefly being in Big Pete’s band in February 1958 and a couple of years later encountering Pete again, with McLaughlin in his band at that point. In a 1966 interview, Big Pete stated that he had formed another band prior to this – in between New Orleans and Germany – but that it was not good enough, so he created the one detailed above. This must have happened in the space of a few weeks.

   [7] As Disc & Music Echo’s Andrew Tyler later reported, John had been ‘sitting in with other musicians, playing in various jazz bands in the Northumberland area’ since he was 15. John had even had a business card made, to help his chances: ‘[N]ot that I was pushy,’ he reflected, in 1978, ‘but I used to go around to all these places and say, “Mind if I sit in?” Since I was 15 I’ve been doing that. And that’s how I ended up on the road. But I thought I’d go classy and have a little card made. So I did. It had ‘Telephone’, nothing, because I had no telephone. And it had ‘Johnny’. I was known as Johnny in those days; that’s what my mother calls me. So it had ‘Johnny McLaughlin, Electric Guitarist’, and the address underneath. That was it. My class-A card.’ One of John’s friends from his youth kept a copy of John’s business card and, along with the only photograph of him as child, aged 12 (‘I am probably one of the least photographed children in the world. There’s only one picture…’), it would later comprise the very effective cover of his 1978 LP Johnny McLaughlin, Electric Guitarist.

   [8] It is entirely possible that John might have sat in with the Vieux Carré Jazz Men, and also just possible (chronologically) that he might have sat in with pianist Mike Carr’s EmCee Four, Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s most happening modern jazz outfit, formed in 1959 and centre of a late-night scene at the Marimba Coffee House every Saturday (with the addition of Mike’s brother, trumpeter Ian Carr, the group would become the EmCee Five in 1960, swiftly gaining a national reputation). While John has recalled that ‘there was little happening in Whitley Bay’, the area surrounding Monkseaton, a few miles up the road lay a city already being viewed by jazz buffs in London as ‘the Kansas City of the North’. Mike Jeffreys, controversial future manager of Newcastle R&B group the Animals and American guitarist Jimi Hendrix, had been running trad jazz sessions in the city for some years, and even future Animals frontman Eric Burdon had begun his musical career as a trad trombonist. In 1960, Jeffreys would open the iconic Downbeat club, which hosted EmCee Five sessions – on one occasion a jam with visiting members of the Count Basie Orchestra – as well as putting Newcastle on the national touring map for jazz artists and for the emerging R&B groups.

   [9] Two months later the same writer reported that John Mayall, soon to become one of the godfathers of British blues, was teaching guitar at Moss Nook Youth Centre in Wythenshawe.

   [10] Other acts regularly spotted in 1959–60 adverts in the Manchester Evening News include the Southside Stompers, Pete Haslem’s Collegians, Paul Beattie & the Beats, Dizzy Barton’s Jazz Aces, Tony Charlesworth’s New Orleans Jazz Band, the Crescent Jazz Band, the Joe Silmon Jazzmen, Johnny Tippett’s Jazzmen, the Buddy Featherstonhaugh Five, the Northernaires, and Juanito & his Cha Chas, plus C&W acts Yonko & his Texas Drifters and the Hillbilly Bandits.

   [11] George Webb’s Dixielanders, active from the 1940s at the Red Barn in Barnehurst, Kent, are generally considered the founding fathers of Britain’s trad jazz movement.

   [12] Lunchtime Break was definitely not a BBC show and a trawl of TV Times magazine for 1959 has not revealed an ITV programme of that name, either on the Manchester-based Granada or the North-East based Tyne Tees, although in mitigation TV Times was published in regional variants at that time and it is possible that I have not seen the relevant editions. Alternatively, Eddie Rolls could have been dissembling again, referring to a pre-Professors Pete Deuchar appearance on TV.

   [13] A further full-group photo of the founding line-up, featuring the same uniforms as in the publicity brochure, is reproduced in Walter Kolosky’s Power, Passion and Beauty: The Story of the Legendary Mahavishnu Orchestra (Abstract Logix, 2006). Intriguingly, John Clarke is pictured with an electric bass guitar rather than piano. Not all venues had pianos; if Clarke was doubling on bass guitar this would suggest that Deuchar’s band was prepared to stray still further from the trad jazz template in its instrumentation than simply adding electric guitar to a standard acoustic instruments line-up.

   [14] This was immediately prior to the George Lewis Band’s second British tour – selling out city halls, accompanied by the Ken Colyer Band. On January 31 1959, Big Pete was invited to sit in during the second of two shows at Manchester Free Trade Hall. A fabulous, clear and hugely atmospheric amateur recording of the show, mastered by the great Denis Blackham, was released in 1998 (some tracks having previously appeared on a 1978 LP George Lewis in Europe Vol.3). George also invited Pete to sit in with the band in Birmingham and Glasgow. Clearly, Pete had taken that January out from his ongoing German residency. Sally has a recollection of P.J. ‘Jim’ Proby, another friend of Pete’s, staying with the family the following Christmas period, in December 1959.

   [15] The one member to be kept on was banjo/guitarist Mike Deighan, who had passed the audition ahead of better players because he was the only one to get his round in at the bar. Mike and Pete went on to work as a duo called the Moonshiners, recording an album for Page One in 1967. Following five Pete Deuchar/Duker solo singles for Fontana, Melodisc and Columbia it would be Pete’s only long-player.

   [16] When I interviewed John myself in 1996, I asked him about coming down to London from Newcastle, in search of a career in music. ‘When I came to London?’ he answered. ‘I went to Manchester first, and I would have been 16 then.’ It was a passing remark, and the interview went on to other matters after that – backwards to early influences and school bands, and then forwards to his times with Georgie Fame, Graham Bond and the rest. On that occasion, Pete Deuchar was not mentioned.

   [17] The Radio Times listing gives the show as The Charlie Chester Show although the BBC contract gives it as Pot Luck. This latter was originally a quiz section of the CCS that eventually became the full title of the show. Strangely, Pete’s sister Sally didn’t see the TV appearance: ‘Maybe Peter forgot to say – he wasn’t always in the house; sometimes they’d be gone a couple of weeks. They were busy; I’ll say that – they seem to have been busy a good deal of the time. I don’t think they played much down south [though] Peter was trying to get a foothold in London.’

   [18] So far, of the Professors repertoire, we have ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’ and ‘Tiger Rag’. An original bawdy Deuchar composition can be added, courtesy of lyrics scribbled on current VCJ mainman Brian Bennett’s copy of the publicity brochure. Verse one: ‘Put on the old blue ointment / It’s the crabs’ disappointment / Put it on four or five times a day / Oh brother, how it itches / But it kills those sons of bitches / In that good old-fashioned way’.

   [19] A two-bedroom flat there today would cost around £1.3 million, although one imagines John was renting back in 1960.

   [20] Chris Barber’s trumpeter Pat Halcox, in Spencer Leigh’s Halfway To Paradise: Britpop 1956–1962 (1996), distils the essence of the trad boom’s demise: ‘Clubs opened everywhere and they all needed live bands. The Trad era killed itself by having to employ so many bad musicians.’

   [21] In contrast to Big Pete’s rather boorish reputation among some in the 60s music world, it is testament to the positive aspects of his personality that so many of his jazz pals thought enough of him to stage this benefit gig. Similarly, Irish international cyclist (and Belfast-Dublin record holder for many years) Dave Kane recalls Pete as ‘flamboyant and entertaining’ on the 70s cycling scene, often getting his guitar out during post-cycle get-togethers (and booze-ups) in pubs. Pete wrote three further books on cycling and founded a cycling league in the early 80s, still going to this day – as is the Vieux Carré Jazz Band. It would seem that he found his true milieu in the cycling world. He took his own life in in 1988.

   [22] The Mahavishnu Orchestra played support to It’s A Beautiful Day at Carnegie Hall on December 29 1971, by all accounts devastating the headliners. After six months as a club and college act building a word of mouth reputation, it would be the breakthrough for John’s group as a major attraction in America.

   ENDNOTES:
   The cut-and-pasting does not seem to have retained the endote numbering, but here are the sources used anyway:

   Jazz in Britain (W H Allen, 1958), David Boulton
   Jazz-Rock Fusion: The People, The Music (Dell, 1978), Julie Coryell & Laura Friedman
   ‘Mahavishnu’s Inner Flame Mounts’, Stephen Davis, Rolling Stone, 30/3/72
   ‘The Wallis fancy dress was an accident’, Bob Dawbarn, Melody Maker, 28/5/60
   When Dreams Are in The Dust (Milbury, 1988), Ken Colyer
   Unidentified cutting
   Peter Gascoigne, 1969 TV interview included on the Vieux Carré Jazzmen CD The Deuchar/Gascoigne Legacy (2005)
   Vieux Carré Jazzmen website: http://www.vieuxcarrejazzmen.com/ourhistory.html (Accessed: 6/17)
   Vieux Carré Jazzmen website: http://www.vieuxcarrejazzmen.com/ourhistory.html (Accessed: 6/17)
   ‘Jazz pilgrimage for Deuchar’, Jazz News, 9/57
   Melody Maker, 15/7/60
   ‘Cornered: Diz Disley’, Melody Maker, 29/4/60
   ‘You can’t be polite and play the banjo’, Eddie Smith, Melody Maker, 1/4/60
   ‘Trad men are still amateurs’, Bob Dawbarn, Melody Maker, 26/3/60
   ‘Cornered: Alex Welsh’, Melody Maker, 13/5/60
   ‘Nat Gonella – 36 years a jazzman’, Melody Maker, 5/8/60
   ‘John McLaughlin on how he got started’, uncredited, Guitar & Bass, 20/10/16. Available at: http://www.guitar-bass.net/interviews/interview-john-mclaughlin/ (Accessed: June 2017).
   ‘John McLaughlin on how he got started’, uncredited, Guitar & Bass, 20/10/16. Available at: http://www.guitar-bass.net/interviews/interview-john-mclaughlin/ (Accessed: June 2017).
   Mahavishnu Orchestra Official Programme (1975 European tour)
   ‘Jazz Roundabout’, Jack Florin, Manchester Evening News, 2/10/59
   ‘Mr Bilk stacks the loot away’, Tony Brown, Melody Maker, 15/10/60
   ‘It’s one big rave,’ Tony Brown, Melody Maker, 22/10/60
   ‘What Manchester did yesterday…’ Tony Brown, Melody Maker, 5/11/60
   ‘Variety boost for Trad jazz’, Jazz News, 12/2/60
   ‘Palais parties are a mass rave’, Pat Richard, Jazz News & Review, 25/3/60
   John McLaughlin: Man For All Seasons, Andrew Tyler, Disc & Music Echo, 15/1/72
   ‘Those phoney jazz fans’, Acker Bilk, Melody Maker, 13/8/60
   ‘Why does trad jazz sell?’ Tony Brown, Melody Maker, 23/7/60
   ‘Why does trad jazz sell?’ Tony Brown, Melody Maker, 23/7/60
   Jobsworth, Chapter 14: The London Jazzmen. Ken Harrison. http://ken.harponline.de/download.html (Accessed: July 2017)
   ‘John McLaughlin on how he got started’, uncredited, Guitar & Bass, 20/10/16. Available at: http://www.guitar-bass.net/interviews/interview-john-mclaughlin/ (Accessed: June 2017).
   Jazz News & Review, 17/6/60
   Jazz News & Review, 17/6/60
   ‘It must be done, whether you kill yourself or not’, Cycling, 29/4/72
   Sting In The Tail: By Racing Bicycle Around The World (Pelham Books, 1973), Peter Duker

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   • Mike_H says

     28/02/2018 at 05:33

     I suspect Footnote 20’s assertion
     ‘Clubs opened everywhere and they all needed live bands. The Trad era killed itself by having to employ so many bad musicians.’
     also applied to the folk boom in the early ’60s, except in their case it was ‘so many bad floor singers’.

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2. Kaisfatdad says

   27/02/2018 at 16:37

   Fascinating stuff, Colin. I so enjoy it when you just go your own way and write about stuff that interests you.

   Is this your man?

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   • Colin H says

     27/02/2018 at 16:46

     That’s the fellow. There was so little on YouTube that I uploaded two or three items myself, and will do more when time allows (and when I get a better turnatable… within a week hopefully). I only recently managed to acquire a copy of his extremely rare US-only own-label 1965 remake of ‘Google Eye’, with Nashville musicians. His ‘Walk Right Out of the Blues’ 1965 Melodisc single still eludes me.

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3. Locust says

   27/02/2018 at 16:48

   This was one of my favourite parts of your book, Colin. A proper excentric, and very interesting to read about the trad jazz scene in Britain.

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   • Colin H says

     27/02/2018 at 17:02

     Thank you Locust! It’s a still under-documented scene, I think. Dave Gelly’s book is terrific as a very readable medium-length history from someone who grew up in that era and then went on to become a noted modern jazz musician and writer on music, but George Melly’s book is a riotous memoir, written in the early 70s when Melly – a 50s hell-raiser in the most raving band on the trad scene – was established as a writer on pop culture. If only more people from that era had had Melly’s gift for writing. I haven’t read Chris Barber’s authorised biography (written fairly recently) but I understand it’s dry and rather slight.

     Here’s a clip of Melly presenting a (probably early 80s) TV show on British trad jazz, interviewing Ken Colyer:

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4. Locust says

   27/02/2018 at 16:58

   Trad jazz, more commonly known here (at the time) by the name Dixieland, had its biggest boom in Sweden in the 50s, when students wearing duffel coats arranged parades and had Dixieland clubs etc. Many got inspired to start their own bands, and a surprising number of famous Swedish musicians, authors and actors etc have a background in Dixieland activities.

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   • Colin H says

     27/02/2018 at 17:11

     It clearly got everywhere! really, it’s remarkable the way ‘foreign musics’ travelled and caught on in uunusual places – like the British R&B boom of 1963-4 which ended up reviving the commercial fortunes of many electric blues greats back in Chicago.

     Here’s two parts of a terrific film made around Wood Green Jazz Club in 1954, with Chris Barber’s band:

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   • Kaisfatdad says

     27/02/2018 at 17:58

     That sounds worth exploring, Locust. Jack Lidström was a prime mover in that scene…

     https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2016-01-20/nestor-inom-svensk-dixieland

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5. Kaisfatdad says

   27/02/2018 at 21:40

   A chapter of Stockholm history I know little about: the golden days of Dixieland.

   https://www.dn.se/arkiv/teater/en-timme-for-alskare-av-dixieland/

   Skiffle never hit Sweden, as far as I know, so rebellious, sexy Dixieland jazz ruled the roost until the rise of the Beatles.

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   • Locust says

     27/02/2018 at 22:04

     Actually, Robban Broberg had a skiffle group as a teenager, but apparently he lied to a newspaper and said he had a skiffle group before he did, just to sound interesting, and he got swamped with requests from clubs wanting to book it, and quickly had to put one together! There were other ones, but the craze only lasted a few years.

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     • Kaisfatdad says

       27/02/2018 at 22:51

       Broberg was a smart cookie. He knew which namndwago s to jump on.

       I suspect that Acker Bilk played Sweden st some point.

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6. Colin H says

   28/02/2018 at 09:06

   Here’s one of Pete’s 1965 Columbia B-sides, after he’d moved into C&W via R&B. If anyone’s interested, I have a piece on Pete’s recording career in the current ‘Record Collector’:

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7. Jorrox says

   28/02/2018 at 15:19

   Loads of names I know in there. Will read it properly later on.

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   • Colin H says

     28/02/2018 at 17:33

     Thanks Jorro. Here’s a terrific amateur recording of Big Pete sitting in with New Orleans legend George Lewis and his band at the second show at Manchester Free Trade Hall in January 1959:

     https://soundcloud.com/colinh-1/07-panama

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