In the Coronation summer of 1953, the fresh sound of the Ken Colyer Jazzmen added to the feeling that the nation was beginning to emerge from the shadow of war. On 1 August, it was announced that they would be making an album for Decca Records. This was a breakthrough, as Melody Maker noted: ‘An LP of New Orleans jazz by a British band would be something of a departure for the local record companies.’
Recorded in London on 2 September 1953, New Orleans to London was released six months later on 10" vinyl. There was no sign of the skiffle that had been electrifying audiences at Bryanston Street – all eight tracks were traditional New Orleans style. And in vindication of Ken Colyer’s pilgrimage to the Crescent City, the record won rave reviews.
James Asman, writing in his weekly jazz column in Record Mirror, saw the band as nothing less than the saviour of British jazz. ‘At a time when the early promise of such groups as George Webb’s Dixielanders, the Yorkshire Jazz Band, the Saints, the Crane River Jazz Band and Humphrey Lyttelton’s outfit with Keith Christie has not been fulfilled, along comes this swinging and startlingly authentic music.’
Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil, Colyer must have thought. My cup runneth over.
Asman was in no doubt about the significance of New Orleans to London: ‘Let us not carp, gentlemen. This is the most exciting record ever issued by a British jazz band without exception.’
The lead track from the album, a reworking of the 1930s tune ‘Isle of Capri’, was released as a single and was picked up by the crustiest of BBC DJs, Jack Payne. The old trouper, who had been a bandleader between the wars, played the song every week on his show until it shaded into the Top Ten. The future seemed bright for the Ken Colyer Jazzmen.
Below decks, however, all was not well. Ken thought everyone was against him. His wife Delphine said as much in Mike Pointon and Ray Smith’s oral history of his career, Goin’ Home: ‘I don’t think he thought many people were on his side.’ Early years spent in children’s homes and the Merchant Navy had left Colyer with a contempt for authority, religion and anyone who had been privately educated. Before he went to New Orleans, he had already shown the extent of his uncompromising nature, walking away from bands that didn’t live up to his expectations.
If anything, his time in the Crescent City only fuelled his determination to do things his way. All of Pointon and Smith’s interviewees agreed that Ken was utterly dedicated to his music, even as they described him as taciturn, cussed, moody and diffident. On his return from the US, with so much expected of him, these unfortunate traits came to the fore.
Ken’s real problem was that he struggled to make himself understood. The fact that he couldn’t read music had never been a problem before. Everyone he’d played with in England had been making it up as they went along too. And anyway, none of his heroes could sightread. But when you’ve set yourself up as the only guy in England who truly knows how to play original New Orleans jazz, that’s simply not good enough. People are going to ask you technical questions, about what you are playing, about how they are playing, about the overall arrangement of tunes.
Chris Barber respected him and wanted to get the music exactly how Colyer thought it should be, so he took notes and asked questions, and when something was settled, he’d go around the other band members and alter their arrangements accordingly. He was trying to be helpful, but all Colyer saw was this highly trained musician – ex-private school, never worked a bleedin’ day in his life – constantly putting him on the spot and forcing him to play these rigid arrangements.
The other problem Colyer had, one that seems to have been there from the very beginning, was Lonnie Donegan. Barber easily identified the cause of the friction: ‘Lonnie is a dedicated cheeky chappie; his idol was Max Miller.’ Colyer despised Donegan because he was a wind-up merchant, always ready with some smart-arse remark. It was a hatred compounded by his inability to come up with a swift riposte that would cut Donegan down to size.
Intimidated by Barber, wound up by Donegan and frustrated by his own inability to articulate his vision, Ken came to rely on his brother to speak for him. While Bill Colyer was very knowledgeable about jazz records, he wasn’t really a musician. When it fell to him to critique the band’s playing, tempers frayed.
The frustration wasn’t all one way. As the band became popular, Ken’s insistence on playing traditional New Orleans jazz left them unable to respond to an audience which wasn’t only interested in that style. When they performed in dancehalls outside of London, dancers wanted to hear material that they were familiar with. For the more commercially minded Barber and Donegan, it made sense to accommodate public taste. People needed to be entertained. But Colyer was having none of it.
In May 1954, with the band riding high on the success of their debut album, things came to a head. Bill Colyer took Chris Barber for a quiet drink and told him that his brother had decided to fire the rhythm section. Bass player Jim Bray didn’t swing; drummer Ron Bowden was too modern in his playing; Donegan had to go because Ken hated his guts. ‘Well, that’s not difficult,’ Barber later reflected. ‘Anyone who’s ever dealt with Lonnie hates his guts, but that’s no reason to fire him.’
Barber didn’t take kindly to Ken unilaterally deciding to fire half the band. Yes, his name was on the posters, but that didn’t mean he was in charge. The band was a co-operative. Barber consulted the other members and they voted for a different solution. They fired Ken Colyer and his brother Bill.
On 23 May 1954, Melody Maker reported the split under the headline ‘Colyer Breaks Up: Barber to Lead’: ‘The cooperative band hitherto known as Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen has severed connections with Ken and Bill Colyer by unanimous decision of its members.’ Ken was quoted as saying: ‘While the band has made great progress in the year that it’s been going, I have been well aware of its shortcomings from the New Orleans jazz point of view. We have tried a variety of styles, playing ragtime, Ellington numbers and so on, and I think this has been a mistake.’
In his autobiography, When Dreams Are in the Dust, Ken Colyer was disdainful of the time he spent with the band, referring to it as a wasted year. In their own memoirs, his erstwhile bandmates didn’t share that opinion. Lonnie Donegan, who could be forthright in his opinions, called Ken ‘the best ever in Europe, even to this day. If you’re talking about pure New Orleans jazz, I don’t think he’s ever been equalled.’ Chris Barber was no less effusive. ‘For that kind of music, Ken would still be the best today, were he alive. He had a perfect understanding of how to make a New Orleans band swing – while doing almost nothing. He was a marvellous musician who became a pain in the arse.’
The band’s bass player, Jim Bray, caught something of the enigma of Ken Colyer when he observed that ‘[Ken] always had to have a lot of people he hated. It was necessary for him to hate people. And none of those people he hated did anything but admire and like him.’
In the wake of Colyer’s departure, Pat Halcox, whose parents had refused to let him quit his job at Glaxo to join the band in early 1953, was invited to play trumpet. This time, he didn’t bother to ask his mum and dad, and the newly christened Chris Barber Jazz Band made its debut on 31 May 1954 at the 100 Club.
Bill Colyer’s first move on hearing that he and his brother had been sacked was to go to Decca Records and offer to make a follow-up to the reasonably successful New Orleans to London. Such was the power of Ken Colyer’s name, Decca were only too happy to agree, even if the Jazzmen were now a completely different outfit.
On 25 June 1954, less than a month after the sacking, Colyer assembled the new line-up of his band at the Decca Studios in the London suburb of West Hampstead. Trombonist Ed O’Donnell and clarinet player Bernard ‘Acker’ Bilk joined him in the front line, while Diz Disley (banjo), Dick Smith (bass) and Stan Gregg (drums) made up the rhythm section. The studio was housed in a large late-Victorian building situated at 165 Broadhurst Gardens which had originally been built in 1884 as the Falcon Works, a space for local craftsmen to ply their trade. When the owners went bankrupt, the building was converted into West Hampstead Town Hall, which despite its civic title never housed local government. It was a venue that could be hired for social functions. In 1928, the building was bought by the Crystalate Recording Company and converted into a studio complex, and when the company was sold to Decca for $200,000 in 1937 it became their main recording studio.
The new Jazzmen had the same instrumental line-up as the original band, but were they as good? When the subsequent album, Back to the Delta, was released in late 1954, the sleeve notes reveal that this unspoken question cast a shadow over proceedings:
‘From the start of this session, the music would not flow; the tension was too stringent. For the other five members of the band it was a case of “first night nerves”; for Ken it was more difficult. This record had to disprove the criticism which had been generally leveled at him for disbanding his first group. Many people accused him of wilfully breaking up the finest jazz band that Britain had produced and, furthermore, they said that he would never find five other men in this country who could play this music with any degree of success. Part of this criticism was justified for Ken did, after much thought, leave the first band [whoever wrote these sleeve notes is being economical with the truth: Colyer was fired]; he did so, however, for a very good reason. He wanted to get back to the original jazz, with a more buoyant beat, less arranged passages and a freer atmosphere: a regression in time but not in quality.’
The stakes were high. If Ken really was the true prophet of the original New Orleans style, then he should be able to work his wizardry with any bunch of competent players. If not, if he faltered, the crown would pass to Chris Barber, and the dedication and sacrifice that Ken had put into his pilgrimage to the Mississippi Delta would have been squandered.
The sleeve notes state that the session was saved by the simple expedient of getting the band to sit down while they played. That, however, is being a little bit disingenuous. In truth, Colyer was so disappointed with the results that the session was scrapped, the band returning to the studio in September to attempt the songs again. It was at that subsequent session that someone suggested it might help if the band sat down to play.
The only material on the album that was actually recorded on 25 June were the three songs credited to Ken Colyer’s Skiffle Group. This is borne out by the presence of double bass player Mickey Ashman, brought into the original session at short notice to deputise for Dick Smith, who was stricken with a burst appendix. Frustrated by the failure of his new band to swing in the studio, Colyer was worried that the whole thing had been a waste of time. Desperate to salvage something from the session, he decided to play a few of those skiffle songs that were going down so well with his teenage audience.
Calling in his old friend Alexis Korner to play guitar and mandolin, and with his brother on washboard, Ashman on double bass and Ken himself on guitar and vocals, they became the first skiffle band to be recorded for disc. ‘Midnight Special’ kicked the set off, followed by a version of ‘Casey Jones’ with spoken verses and a gentle take on ‘KC Moan’, which had originally been recorded by the Memphis Jug Band in 1929.*
Ken Colyer’s Skiffle Group, 1953: (left to right) Lonnie Donegan, guitar; Bill Colyer, washboard; Ken Colyer, guitar; and Chris Barber, bass
The album that the original Colyer/Barber Jazzmen had made, New Orleans to London, had appeared on Decca Records thanks to the efforts of Hugh Mendl. Born in 1919, Mendl had been a friend of Chris Barber’s since they met collecting jazz records in 1949. An Oxford graduate whose grandfather had been a chairman of Decca, he began in the post room, worked as a radio plugger and by 1950 was producing records for the likes of the Trinidadian pianist Winifred Atwell – in 1954, she became the first black person to top the UK charts with ‘Let’s Have Another Party’, a medley of knees-up tunes.
When Mendl heard that Colyer had been fired, he was quick to offer the Chris Barber Jazz Band an opportunity to make New Orleans Joys. They had been playing six nights a week since Pat Halcox had replaced Ken Colyer on trumpet and had developed a style of their own. On Tuesday 13 July 1954, the band assembled at Broadhurst Gardens, in the same Studio 2 where Colyer’s skiffle band had been recorded just a couple of weeks before.
The session was engineered by Arthur Lilley, who, like many of his profession at the time, wore a white coat and cotton gloves while going about his duties. The band would be recorded live onto a two-channel EMI quarter-inch tape recorder. As he positioned the mics around the band – Chris Barber on trombone, Monty Sunshine on clarinet, Pat Halcox on cornet, Lonnie Donegan on banjo, Jim Bray on double bass and Ron Bowden on drums – Lilley had no idea that, before the session was over, he would have made the most significant recording of his long career.
Much has been written about what transpired in Studio 2 on 13 July 1954. Lonnie Donegan made a living telling tall tales and his version of events has come to be both the best known and, at the same time, the most disputed account. In it, he’s the little guy, trying to get his music heard in the face of resistance from the big bad record company man. In reality, the birth of skiffle in the UK – and Donegan’s role in it – was more a series of cock-ups and coincidences than anything else. Given the facts, you can understand why Donegan wanted to make it more of a drama.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the session, I interviewed Hugh Mendl for an article that appeared in the Guardian. He was living in Devon at the time, having retired from the record business to run an antiques shop. He told me that he wasn’t supposed to record trad jazz as it was deemed subversive by his superiors and didn’t sell. ‘There were rules about the sort of people who were allowed to make records and trad jazz was really contrary to that.’
Mendl chafed against the staid conventions that shaped public taste. ‘Every song came out of Tin Pan Alley and had a chorus and a verse. You didn’t open with the verse, you had to open with an intro and the chorus.’ Hoping to break out of this straitjacket, he had been asking Decca to let him record some of the young turks he’d seen at the 100 Club whipping up a storm playing traditional New Orleans jazz to teenage audiences. They finally relented, on the understanding that the record would cost no more than £35 to make.
Just as Ken Colyer had felt the pressure weeks before, now Chris Barber’s reputation was on the line, arguably more so because he’d retained most of the band that had made New Orleans to London such a success. Were they a great band, or was it the presence of Ken Colyer, the Guru of Trad, that had made them shine? It was a classic case of second album syndrome: you’ve made a great record and gained everyone’s attention – now they all want to know if you can top it.
The key to success would be the material. Barber didn’t want to just play New Orleans standards, he wanted to take the idea forward. He also had to choose songs that weren’t regularly played by other trad bands. By early evening, they had recorded an eclectic collection of tracks: a King Oliver number called ‘Chimes Blues’, Jelly Roll Morton’s ‘New Orleans Blues’, ‘The Martinique’, a tune by Wilbur de Paris, Duke Ellington’s ‘Stevedore Stomp’ and a trad arrangement of ‘Bobby Shaftoe’, a folk song from the north-east of England.
‘At this point, it became clear that the band didn’t have enough material,’ recalled Mendl. A 10" 33 rpm album required a minimum of four songs per side. When no new tunes were forthcoming, Mendl sent the band to the Railway Arms pub next door to come up with a solution. The tactic paid off – they returned and jammed a lively number they called ‘Merrydown Rag’ in honour of the cider that was popular with the students who frequented jazz clubs. One tune, however, wouldn’t be enough to save the record. There was a terrible hiatus. ‘No one knew what to suggest. There was a feeling that everybody should just pack up and go home, but there was too much money involved.’
Arthur Lilley was looking at his watch and one or two band members were eyeing the door when Donegan suggested they record some of their skiffle songs. Barber, faced with blowing his first chance to make a proper album, liked the suggestion. Sending the rest of the band home, he phoned blues singer Beryl Bryden, who lived round the corner in Maida Vale. Could she come down to the studio and bring her washboard?
While waiting for her to turn up, Donegan grabbed his guitar and Barber picked up Jim Bray’s double bass to rehearse a couple of songs. When Mendl questioned his abilities on the bass, Barber assured him that he’d had a few lessons from a classical player and would be fine with the instrument. In truth, he’d been playing bass in the breakdown band for over three years.
When Bryden arrived, the trio recorded a version of ‘Rock Island Line’, with Donegan recounting the tale of the train driver who tricks the toll booth operator. Mendl remembered that there was some lengthy discussion about whether the long spoken introduction should be included. Eventually agreeing that it should stay, they nailed the song in two takes, going on to record ‘John Henry’ and ‘Wabash Cannonball’. Donegan rounded things off with a version of ‘Nobody’s Child’ accompanied by Barber on the bass – a much superior version to that recorded on the early Danish tour. The session saved, Hugh Mendl brought proceedings to an end just before 10 p.m.
As he locked the soundproof door of Studio 2, Arthur Lilley may have chuckled to himself about having to mic up a washboard. After all, he was responsible for the lush sound of the current number one single, ‘Cara Mia’ by David Whitfield. Recorded with the hugely popular Mantovani and His Orchestra in the spacious Studio 1 that sat at the centre of the recording complex, ‘Cara Mia’ stayed at number one for ten weeks.†
The trio that recorded ‘Rock Island Line’: (left to right) Chris Barber on bass, Beryl Bryden on washboard and Lonnie Donegan on guitar (1954)
In July 1954, pop music meant a well-turned-out male or female singer performing a big ballad backed by the massed strings of a light orchestra, and Arthur Lilley was a master at creating that sound. He could have no way of knowing it as he left Broadhurst Gardens that night, but he’d just played a small part in the creation of a movement that would sweep Whitfield and Mantovani out of the pop charts for ever.
Elsewhere, others too were stumbling towards a new dawn. Just a week or so earlier, on 5 July, in Memphis, Tennessee, record producer Sam Phillips had conducted an audition for a nineteen-year-old guitar-playing truck driver with a singing voice that was hard to pin down. Phillips called in a couple of young local musicians to back the kid up on electric guitar and double bass, and together they were trying to cut a version of Ernest Tubb’s 1949 hit ‘I Love You Because’. Half a dozen times they recorded the song, but the kid just couldn’t seem to convey the words.
Exasperated, Phillips told the band to take a break. While the rhythm section sucked on a couple of Cokes, the kid picked up his acoustic guitar and began goofing around on a blues song recorded some eight years earlier by Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup. Laughing at the incongruity of the moment, the bass player picked up his instrument and began playing in a similarly exaggerated style. The guitarist put down his Coke and joined in.
Hearing this spontaneous revelry, Phillips, who was busy in the control room, stuck his head round the door and said, ‘What are you doing?’
The band replied, ‘We don’t know!’
‘Well, back up,’ said Phillips. ‘Try to find a place to start and do it again.’ In a couple of takes, Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black recorded ‘That’s All Right’, and rock ’n’ roll was born.
Lonnie Donegan and Elvis Presley had little in common, except a young man’s love of roots music. Both had called on that love to salvage recording sessions that were going nowhere. Fronting guitar-led trios without the need of a drummer, both sang with a frenzied passion of the kind that never encroached on the genteel world of the BBC Light Programme. ‘Rock Island Line’ and ‘That’s All Right’ were the first tremors of an earthquake that would shake the world. But on that hot summer night, David Whitfield and Mantovani could sleep soundly in their beds, for it would be another eighteen months before Donegan and Presley crashed into the UK charts.
* Bandleader Will Shade formed the Memphis Jug Band in 1926 from an ever-changing crew of African American musicians in and around Memphis. They made many recordings for the Victor label.
† That summer, Whitfield, a tenor from Hull, held off competition from Doris Day, Perry Como, Johnnie Ray, Al Martino, Billy Cotton and the Obernkirchen Children’s Choir, earning himself the first gold disc for record sales ever awarded to a British male vocalist.