The band at The Nile was a rehearsal high-life band. And that was the strangest high life you’ve ever heard because it was a mixture of African-Caribbeans, Africans, white guys… all sorts who used to play there, so it really was quite groovy, quite jazzy.
— Saxophonist Tosh Ryan on The Nile club, Moss Side, Manchester.
I was in The Capital playing [opposite The Nile]. It was packed out and this high commissioner from Ghana came over and said “Boy, they’d love you in Ghana… [with your] high life.” But it’s calypso we were playing.
— Vocalist/guitarist Ossie Roberts.
“Shebeen” is a nice example of linguistic cross-fertilization. Some may associate the word with the rickety, tin-roofed, after-hours drinking dens of township South Africa, but it actually derives from the Gaelic “sibin”, which means moonshine whiskey. Thus the word straddles communities that were both subjected to social stigma. Although the shebeens of Notting Hill in 1950s Britain noted in the previous chapter, with their blues in the basement, are an integral part of Black London’s musical history, they were by no means exclusive to the capital. They were also found in Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Nottingham, wherever there was a quarter where West Indians were ghettoised by discrimination in housing.
The exploitative methods of property owners were the same everywhere. In Manchester, Moss Side, an electoral ward located roughly two miles to the south of the city centre, had become a blighted slum in the 1950s. By the end of the decade, a series of articles in the Manchester Evening News by Barry Cockroft examined the challenges of life in the city for immigrants. His insights resonated with the views of those who lived there. “Vice was raising quite a stench in this jaded relic of a once respectable Victorian suburb long before a calypso rang out among the flaking walls.”1
West Africans and West Indians, who collectively numbered 10,000 Manchester inhabitants (along with 6,000 Poles), found themselves concentrated in Moss Side, which white people were leaving in favour of newly-built council housing in Withenshaw. With this exodus came the opportunity for landlords to let the crumbling rows of terraced houses, which were often in urgent need of refurbishment. Multiple occupancy of single rooms, inadequate leisure facilities and fluctuating employment prospects made life bleak for Manchester’s Black population. Yet first hand accounts from the period suggest that the Black community made compensations for itself. As well as the shebeens in which Black music was heard on records, there also developed a network of clubs and a plethora of live bands. Tosh Ryan, a baritone saxophonist born in Withenshaw, who became part of the burgeoning music scene in Moss Side, recalls:
The only kind of upside of all of this, was what was taking place in the social life, which was absolutely vibrant. You could hear music coming out of buildings all the time. That’s what I liked. It was like looking at some kind of history of Harlem where people were sat on steps because the houses were pretty similar. They had big steps and people would sit outside and music would be playing constantly. Calypso, jazz, African… all sorts.
Going into Moss side, it was like entering a whole new world because at the same time there was the ‘beat culture’ going on; all that American influence of Kerouac and Ginsberg was part of this whole fusion It wasn’t just a music scene, it was a whole cultural bubble it was amazing.”2
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were the celebrated “beat” writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, drawing on the revolutionary energy of bebop and modern jazz to fashion what became known as the counterculture, in opposition to mainstream America. Whether Blacks, immigrants, political radicals or homosexuals, the marginalised were a vital part of the canvas these writers sought to depict, and the phenomenon of arty intellectuals “slumming it”, as they had once done in Harlem, was also part of the scene in both Notting Hill and Moss Side.
There could be no greater evidence of the status of Moss Side as a brown town than the story of Whit Stennett, a key figure in Black Manchester, who travelled from Jamaica in 1959 and later became a mayor in the metropolitan borough of Trafford. In his very engaging autobiography A Bittersweet Journey he recalls how, without discussion, a taxi driver took him straight to Moss Side on arrival in the city. There was no need to ask where to go. The fare was black.3
Stennett depicts Moss Side as a place where the Black community was closely knit, where grocers selling yam, sweet potatoes and breadfruit became unofficial “liming spots”4 after men tried their luck at the Labour Exchange on Aytoun Street. Beyond the wedding parties and dances, organised by a man named Gilbert Barrett, it was really the shebeens that were the crux of social life in the black community.
There had been a black population in Manchester from the mid 19th century, but the community really became more conspicuous when it became a focal point for Black political activity in the late 1930s. A dynamic Guyanese lecturer and entrepreneur, George Thomas Griffith, who adopted the name Ras Tafari Makonnen after committing to Ethiopian resistance following Mussolini’s invasion in 1935, had emerged as a lightning rod for black solidarity in the city. He opened a chain of restaurants that became a hub for West Indians, Africans and African-American troops in nearby bases, and the accrued revenue from venues such as the Cosmopolitan was funnelled into political activity, particularly the Fifth Pan African Congress that took place in Manchester in 1945, with fellow organisers Trinidadian George Padmore and future Ghanaian president, Kwame Nkrumah, dedicated to the total liberation of Africa and the West Indies from colonial rule.5
The first four meetings of the Congress had taken place in London, but Manchester became a suitable location for the fifth because of a growing synergy of cultural initiatives and events. While Black GIs flocked to Manchester to socialize, Makonnen was producing pamphlets and a monthly periodical Pan-Africa, focusing on “African life, thought and history”, and he opened a bookshop to sell this and related titles. Certainly, the Fifth Pan African Congress was a landmark event; it was scheduled around the same time as the meeting of the World Federation of Trade Unions in Paris, and had an impressively wide span of participation. Twenty delegates were sent by fifteen organizations in West Africa, six represented organisations in East and South Africa, thirty-three came from the West Indies and thirty-five from a variety of organisations in Britain. The pioneering African-American writer and civil-rights campaigner W.E.B Dubois, Mrs Marcus Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, and Dr Hastings K. Banda were all present in Chorlton Town Hall.
The 1950s were, of course, a pivotal moment in world history precisely because the key issue of the human rights of ethnic minorities, of colonised people, of women became more pressing. It was a time when Blacks were struggling for equal rights in the USA – and the British were committing the most despicable atrocities in Kenya.6 It was a time when voices of dissent articulated the grounds of the struggle, none more influential than that of the revolutionary Martiniquan psychiatrist-author, Frantz Fanon, whose seminal 1952 text Black Skin, White Masks,7 was acutely relevant to understanding the trauma of the post-slavery condition of Blacks and colonials.
It was Algeria’s bloody and protracted struggle for independence from France, a conflict in which Fanon was directly involved,8 that became the signal for the flames of decolonisation to spread throughout Africa and the West Indies, and for the emergence of inspirational national leaders such as Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Nigeria’s Nnamdi Azikiwe. This was a fulfilment of ambitions laid decades before, not least in the relationship of the singer-actor-activist, Paul Robeson who, as noted above had known and bonded with these leaders when they were students in the 1930s. This was the context in which the Fifth Congress took place.
Illustrious as some of the people present at the Manchester Congress were, it was not just about the intelligentsia and the Black politico-literary class talking shop. The Congress had a proletarian character, or a leaning towards Black working class struggle that was reflected the involvement of many trade unions and workers organisations, from the Negro Welfare Centre in Liverpool and the Trinidad Oilfield Workers Trade Union, to the Grenada Labour Party and the Gold Coast Railwaymen’s Union. The Fifth Congress can be seen as a high point in the history of Black Manchester, but that history was also marked by a more continuous activism that was transforming the cultural life of the city.
As Tosh Ryan recalls, high life was the staple musical diet at Moss Side clubs such as The Nile, a very popular haunt run by a man known as Teacher Sunday – Teacher because he was a conscientious educator, Sunday because that was the day of his birth – an anglicisation of West African naming practices. What his birth name was is unknown.7
Dozens of musicians regularly pitched up at jam sessions at clubs such as The Nile. Sadly the names of many have been lost, but one was a Nigerian percussionists known as Beezy Bello, who became known for his excellent work on the talking drum, an instrument that requires a great deal of dexterity to draw out its full range of timbres.
The human geography of Moss Side played a part in the cultural explosion of the mid 1950s that carried over into the following decade. The area was small and the central thoroughfares such as Princes Road and Denmark Street were easy to negotiate, which meant that West Africans and West Indians were bound to mingle, and that any musicians, black or white, would have had no trouble hearing about the sessions that were taking place in the clubs.
Tosh Ryan makes several important points about the fluidity of the musical vocabulary heard at The Nile:
It was basically people playing a mishmash of American blues, really. A lot of that happened because it was easier [music] for people to play together. The band at The Nile was a rehearsal high life band. And that was the strangest high life you’ve ever heard because it was a mixture of African-Caribbeans, Africans, white guys… all sorts used to play there so it really was quite groovy, quite jazzy. There was a crossover in clubs that just kind of happened naturally, by the way of things.
I mean to start off, you would get a bassist playing a particular type of Caribbean rhythm, then you’d get an African drummer, and then you’d get these would-be, wannabe jazz players on horns, all trying to mimic what they heard on record, so it wasn’t really definable. I’d have difficulty saying what it was. It did have quite often a high life flavour. There was good food too. I mean you’d get goat and stuff.”8
Culinary delights were also available at another popular haunt that attracted revellers and musicians in equal measure. The Lagos Lagoon, “run by a really nice guy called Mr Salau”, was an all-night venue that got going in the small hours. The idea was for the clientele to eat in the restaurant that served traditional African food before enjoying several sets of music until the break of day.
From accounts given by Ryan and other musicians of the era, the Moss Side music scene had an all-night, Greenwich Village-type intensity, because people could walk easily from one venue to the next. A typical evening would start at the Lagos club, then move on to the Edinburgh near Alexandra Park, before concluding in one of a number of basement shebeens that sold bottles of Guinness for a few shillings and featured a disc jockey spinning calypso or blues until five o’ clock in the morning,
Inevitably, there were a few underworld figures operating in the area, the most memorable of whom was a character called Don Tonay who took over a huge old Edwardian house on one of the streets near Denmark Road. The result was a local scene within a local scene that nonetheless attracted punters from outside Manchester. As Ryan recalled:
In that building there was a room where people used to play, just anyone could get up and play. There was a barbershop and a café that only sold jelly! That was the centre for a completely racially-mixed scene. It was really good. That kind of thing existed all around that area, in the shebeens, that was where the parties used to take place. It was where visiting people came from Birmingham and London. You’d get people travelling up for various parties and they’d all be in that particular area, around Moss Lane, Fairnell Street or Monton Street. It’s a very concentrated area really. It was a real hub.”9
Apart from the Nile, other notable clubs in Moss Side were The Reno, from which the hardiest patrons did not quit until eight in the morning, and The Capital, located above a car showroom called Capital Cars. This was where local jazz musicians, such as the drummer Bruce Mitchell, used to play after finishing gigs in the city centre. This venue presented music every weekend, occasionally during the week. Here African and Caribbean musicians, high life and calypso, rubbed shoulders, so that Trinidadians and Jamaicans often found themselves performing to audiences who hailed from Ghana and Nigeria as well as the West Indies. Sometimes the musicians would be playing one thing and the punters hearing another. Jamaican guitarist-vocalist Ossie Roberts, a regular performer in Moss Side clubs who had arrived in Manchester in 1961, recalls: “I was in The Capital playing [opposite The Nile]. It was packed out and this High Commissioner from Ghana came over and said “Boy, you know that they’d love you in Ghana… [with your] high life.” But it’s calypso we were playing.”10
Whether this experience of cultural overlap was paralleled in other cities where African and Caribbean musicians worked in close proximity has not yet been properly researched, but on the evidence of Manchester it probably did. Supporting Roberts’ account of calypso-high life fusion is a recording made in London by the St. Vincent trumpeter Shake Keane for the Lyragon label. An outstanding improviser with a gorgeous tone, Keane was a poet, an inquisitive, cultured man who was interested in a wide range of things beyond music. His recording was called “Trumpet High Life”,11 which shows how he was drawn to African sounds, whilst the description on the label reads “Calypso Instrumental”.
Whilst the jam sessions in its clubs were remembered fondly by those who witnessed them, the Moss Side scene of the 1950s and early 1960s is another example, much like Andy Hamilton in Birmingham, of how talent can be concentrated in a small area, but remain mostly unknown to the outside world. Chances are that an album of local talent recorded Live at the Nile would have entered the canon of Black music in Britain, bequeathing an invaluable record of how a specific scene developed. But no Manchester session was ever committed to tape. Without the oral testimonies provided by the musicians who were there, much important history would have been lost. The identification of the venues and players of the day will hopefully act as a springboard for future research into the heritage of Black Manchester.
It is also worth pointing out the existence of “shebeen stars”, often self-taught rather than formally-trained players, who held down a day job and attended jam sessions as much as a form of relief from the working week as from a genuine love of making music. Just as there were musicians who didn’t play outside of the basements of Notting Hill, so there were musicians who did not venture far beyond Moss Side. This is not surprising. The standard of playing in the jazz clubs in London’s west end or Manchester’s city centre was so high that sitting in with the most accomplished exponents of bebop was not something to be ventured lightly, especially if there was a big-name visiting American horn player against whom a local rhythm section was testing its mettle.
What the history of Moss Side shows is how much the quality of life and morale of an immigrant community can be improved by the existence of spaces for the creation of artistic excellence as well as social cohesion. Respect is rightfully granted to artists, activists and scholars in the realm of Black history in Britain, but the role of those who ran the clubs deserves greater notice. Such individuals had to be highly motivated, wily, resilient and resourceful.
According to residents of the black quarter of Toxteth, Liverpool, there was an abundance of music in many homes because of the wide availability of 78 rpm recordings brought in by seamen. Their precious cargo was exempt from sales duties because of an astute piece of maritime administration: shellac discs were classified as ballast. The existence of discs fresh off the boat enhanced Merseyside’s black music resources. This meant that Liverpudlians often heard much sought-after new works by leading American jazz and blues artists before they made their way inland to other cities such as Manchester and Birmingham.
As has been previously noted, Liverpool was, along with Cardiff, one of the oldest Black communities in Britain because it was an international port, through which passed, and in which settled, seamen as well as civilians from the colonies. The Windrush was not the only ship that brought West Indians to Britain in 1948. Later in the year, in September, another vessel, the Orbita docked in Liverpool with 108 Jamaicans aboard and they quickly fell into the city’s lively multi-cultural life.
As well as what could be heard at home, Black Liverpudlians were keen patrons of clubs. In Toxteth, in the Liverpool 8 district, they were spoilt for choice One estimate was that there were around 23 clubs operating in the mid 1950s, frequented by seamen from the colonies, whites, new immigrants and African-American GIs who were stationed on the nearby base at Burtonwood (who also went to Manchester in their leisure time). These GIs were another source of jazz and blues records.
Among the ‘L8’ clubs, the Pink Flamingo, Dutch Eddie’s and the Palm Cove were all very popular, but if ever there was a sign of how Black Liverpool was seen by the local media, it was the language of the Evening Express on 11 January 1955, after Lord Derby made a visit to the Stanley House Social club: “Lord Derby went into Liverpool’s jungle last night to listen to Negro spirituals and calypsos.”
What would the journalist have written had Derby visited the New Colony Club? This was run by a Trinidadian calypso singer, Lord Woodbine.11 One suspects that the opportunity for puns based on the meeting of two Lords of very different circumstances would have been too tempting.
Lord Woodbine’s beguiling stage name reflected a characteristic calypso irony. Woodbines were a low cost, unfiltered high tar smoke12 from the Wills Tobacco company, and the conjunction of the name with Lord is a brilliant oxymoron in its espousal of society grandeur and commoner economy. Whether Lord Woodbine was an invention of the singer himself, or a nickname bestowed on him by friends is immaterial. The point is that it stuck because it had the essential quality of charm.
The naming had other resonances. During both World Wars, the prime market for the cigarette was soldiers, and the calypso singer (born Harold Adolphus Philips in Laventille, Trinidad, in 1929) fitted into one of the key lineages of Black British cultural history: he was a member of the armed services. Woodbine joined the RAF in 1943 and stayed in Europe for the duration of the war. He returned to Trinidad after his tour of duty in 1947 before coming to Britain on the Windrush. After brief sojourns in Clapham, south London and Wellington in Shropshire, Woodbine settled in Liverpool and soon started to make an impact on the music scene in Toxteth. As well as singing at the New Colony, he played guitar and steel drums in the All Caribbean Steel Band, which appeared regularly at two more highly popular venues in the area, Jokers and the Jacaranda.
The portrait that emerges from the available accounts of Woodbine’s life is that he was an all-rounder who recognised the need to find performance spaces and create scenes rather than go cap-in-hand to known venues and promoters with the hope of scoring a gig. There is a consensus that he ran several shebeens in Liverpool, and that he could easily switch roles from barman to security. In that role, any punter with an understanding of calypso naming might have well dubbed him Lord Cutlass13 in tribute to his weapon of choice, for the sword is mightier than the high tar cigarette. More seriously, it was a symbol of Woodbine’s roots as a working-class Trinidadian, born to disadvantage and the poverty and violence that went with it.
Like many musicians who did not have the support of a credible manager and record label, Woodbine had to take a variety of jobs to make ends meet, and if he was a noted “shebeen star” in L8, that didn’t stop him from painting and decorating, driving lorries, working on the railways or repairing televisions.
Given the informality of the club scene of which Woodbine was such an integral part, it was inevitable that younger musicians gravitated to him, and the aspect of his life that has become more widely known – when it was recognised as such – is the role he played as a mentor to four teenage white musicians who called themselves the Silver Beetles, before becoming the Beatles. Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe were so intent on being taken under Woodbine’s wing that they, he reportedly said, “made themselves orphans”14 so that his attention to the aspiring stars would be secured. The strategy worked.
Club-goers who frequented the Jacaranda paint a picture of the young Beatles as eager to the point of being pushy, taking any opportunity to climb on stage. But Woodbine had sufficient patience, if not affection, to give them some basic advice on how they could improve the band, the most significant being the recommendation that they acquire a competent drummer to supplement the three guitarists and bassist. This is a wholly credible theory given the place of percussion in calypso.
Lending further credence to the narrative that Woodbine treated his “boys” with generosity, perhaps realising that they were musically limited and needed a guiding hand to bring them up to scratch, is the fact that he cut them in on some action that he found on the continent. The steel band in which Woodbine once played, the Royal Caribbean Steel Band, was noticed by a German sailor when it played at the Jacaranda, and the band was then invited to appear in Hamburg, after which Woodbine, realising that there were more gigs to be had there, took up residence on the Reeperbahn, and was soon locked in negotiation with local agents to bring over more Liverpudlian talent, the first of which was an energetic black blues singer by the name of Derry Wilkie, about whom more in a later chapter.
In an act of generosity, Woodbine drove the Beatles, the original four with new drummer Pete Best, to Hamburg in a minibus so they could have a crack at the club scene. This was an invaluable stage in their development, before their fortunes were boosted by a new manager-fixer-business mind, Brian Epstein.
Undoubtedly, Woodbine and Allan Williams, one of his early business partners, played a central role in the formative years of the Beatles, providing them with advice on musical matters and the bookings needed to improve and refine their ability as players. The input of other black Liverpudlian musicians, such as the guitarists Odie Taylor, Vinnie Tow and Zancs Logie, was also instrumental in widening their basic musical vocabulary, particularly a knowledge of chords, which later served their song-writing.
As was the case with Birmingham-based Jamaican tenor saxophonist Andy Hamilton, Woodbine went unrecorded, so one can only speculate on the kind of material that he performed, but as a calypsonian who also played steel drums, a combination that was rare, it is possible he would have been backed by a “pan man” as well as a rhythm and horn section. Had he settled in London and fallen in with other West Indian musicians, the Melodisc label might well have documented some of his output.
Sadly, Woodbine faded into obscurity later in his life and died in poverty, and although his name should always be associated with the Beatles, he remains unknown for the majority of their fans. His place in the history of British popular music is not what it should be. There are two conclusions to draw. Firstly, that there was no place in the British music industry for a black A&R-supervisor-producer in the postwar years, for it is clear, given the part he played in providing a solid musical grounding for the Beatles, that he could have had a shot at that kind of position within a management company or record label. But the idea of Black executives in the British entertainment industry had no currency in the early 1950s, especially if they did not have the credentials and polished manners of privately educated young men. A class-conscious pop music industry was not going to empower mere Black colonials at a time when the management roles were mostly taken by members of the elite15 whilst the bulk of artists were commoners.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the music played in Britain’s West Indian communities had an impact on budding practitioners of pop. In the accepted historical narrative, a group such as the Beatles drew inspiration from African-American blues, and while this is certainly true, it should not deflect attention from the fact that calypso was another influence, both being folk forms in which rhythm and storytelling predominate. It may be objected that there are few explicit traces of calypso in the Beatles’ body of work, – other than “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da” – compared to the strong resonances of the blues, but I’d argue that the time spent in the company of Liverpool’s West Indian musicians was invaluable because they knew how to attack the beat of a tune with sufficient vigour to affect an audience. Calypso was able to teach pop all these things.
Listen to the strong Latin-Caribbean flavour of a Beatles piece such as “Day-tripper” and the results of this education is clear enough. One might also surmise that awareness of Woodbine’s music encouraged McCartney and Lennon to open the door to other forms of world music, such as Consuelo Velazquez’s “Besame Mucho”, a haunting bolero that they openly acknowledged as an inspiration for their writing.16
The Beatles, of course, went on to change the face of popular music in the following decade, while Woodbine faded into obscurity, tragically burning to death in a house fire.
Notes
1. The series of reports was entitled “Strangers In Our Midst”, Manchester Evening News, June 1958.
2. Telephone interview with the author, October, 2013.
3. Whit Stennett, A Bittersweet Journey (Batsford, 2007).
4. Liming spots are places to congregate and hang out, from the Trinidadian vernacular “to lime”.
5. On the Pan-African Congresses, see The Oxford Companion to Black British History (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 359-361.
6. See David Anderson’s History of the Hanged, Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya (London: Orion, 2005).
7. Frantz Fanon Black Skin, White Masks, 1968 (London: Pluto, 2008).
8. Fanon was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front.
9. Telephone interview with author, October, 2013.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Featured on Various artists, London Is The Place For Me 5&6 (Honest Jons, 2012).
13. See Alan Clayson, “Lord Woodbine”, The Guardian, 10 July, 2000; James McGrath, “Phillips, Harold Adolphus (1929-2000), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford UP, 2012).
14. The nickname for Woodbine cigarettes was “gaspers”, which tells you everything you need to know about their quality.
15. See Simon Napier-Bell’s Black Vinyl, White Powder (Ebury, 2002).
16. This has been publicly acknowledged by the Beatles.