Back in Manchester, at the age of twenty-six, I got a job as a lab technician at Salford Technical College. It was not unlike being on the docks; in other words, I didn’t do anything. I checked out power tools to joinery students; that took five minutes, and apart from that all I had to do was wear a white coat and not get in anybody’s way.
You’ll notice a pattern emerging here. I would always seek out jobs where the pay was OK and the workload negligible, if not entirely absent. Fire-watcher, lab technician, resident caretaker.* For seven months I was employed as a nightwatchman at a cranberry silo.
It was very pleasant working at Salford Tech. Our foreman was a guy called Desmond, who seemed old to me, but was probably about fifty-five and nowhere near retirement. Then there was Malcolm, who’d just moved up from somewhere in the Home Counties, and a kid called Steve, a hilarious speed-freak who was a regular at the Wigan Casino, of which I had previously been ignorant.
Thanks to Desmond, we used to eat at one of the three available tables in the catering department’s showcase restaurant, where the students were put through their paces in the preparation and presentation of high-end cuisine. Everybody else in Salford Tech had to put their name down on a waiting list, but Desmond had some kind of arrangement whereby the joinery department had a table reservation on a daily basis.
This did not go unnoticed by the rest of the college staff. Questions were raised concerning our privileged monopoly in this matter. Questions that never got answered. Senior lecturers, heads of faculty, bursars, rectors, even the chancellor himself had to make do with the lumpen foodstuffs in the regular canteen, while we gorged on gourmet delicacies and fine wines. Luxury, pure unashamed luxury.
The endless idle working hours produced reams of fresh verse, and my thoughts now returned to my neglected vocation as the Urban Poet. Another benefit came up, this time in aid of some local ultra-left-wing scandal rag. It was hosted at Mr Smiths, a city-centre cabaret club in Brazil Place. The bill comprised Heads, Hands and Feet, a band featuring Chas Hodges on guitar (not piano) and Albert Lee, before they were both justifiably famous,* plus the Richard Kent Style, the Victor Brox Blues Train, and me – basically people who would play for very little money. I still had that lesson ringing in my ears from the last benefit, so this time I told them I had overheads, transport and shit. They coughed up some expenses.
I wouldn’t have frequented cabaret clubs for entertainment myself, but performing at Mr Smiths revived my previous ideas of dragging my poetry into the world of show business. Ambitions I had postponed for the duration of my short marriage.
There were hundreds of clubs in Manchester at that time. The deluxe city centre venues like Foo Foo’s Palace, Sinatras, Jerry Harris’s Piccadilly Club, Fagins, and Mr Smiths were concentrated in a small area bounded by Oxford Road, Portland Street, and Piccadilly. This was Manchester’s equivalent of the West End, and these were the kind of places I aspired to.
The city centre joints provided a venue for all those top-flight recording artistes of yesteryear, fading megastars of the recent past who, having fallen foul of the fickle nature of pop success, were no longer getting the hits, and were now plying their trade on the Northern circuit to the accompaniment of the resident combo. Nevertheless, they weren’t completely tarnished; they retained a patina of residual magic, and had enough of what it takes to be instantly recognisable, albeit without the showroom finish of yesteryear. This world of cabaret had the kitsch melancholy allure of an off-season holiday resort. It’s been proven time and again that melancholy is the most enjoyable mood a person can indulge in, and I guess that’s what made the idea so poetic.
I went round to Mr Smiths with my pitch. Happily, it turned out that I wasn’t an entirely unknown quantity to the bookers, because they’d caught my set at the aforementioned benefit. It was a whole new kind of gig for a joint like that, and my input must have made some impression: I managed to secure a Sunday night residency.
In Manchester, Mr Smiths was as top-notch as it got. It was a Talk of the Town kinda place: cabaret, casino, cocktails, and a sophisticated dinner menu. It catered for young married couples on a big night out, a chance to catch the crooners who had provided the romantic soundtrack to the days of their courtship. Next door was the Drokiweeny, Mr Smiths’ discotheque, where the DJ sat on a revolving stage in the form of a giant disc, flanked by Goldilocks and Suzi Creamcheese, the scantily clad resident go-go dancers.
I was booked as the compère for the weekly ‘Sunday Smiths’ cabaret night. They were obviously going for a younger crowd and had a bit more of an edgy line-up than on the other evenings: I guess that’s how I got the job.
As the resident MC, I had twenty minutes for my own material. Although I wasn’t even credited on the bill most of the time, it was a platform for me to work up the odd routine – a few gags, a couple of poems, and then, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Whoever.’
This was the gig that cranked things up a bit. I was getting £30 for just twenty minutes at Mr Smiths, which impressed the fuck out of my dad. That was a good wage then, more than I earned in a whole week for doing nothing at Salford Tech.
I started to make inroads into the rich and diverse entertainment world that prevailed in Manchester at that time. I got gigs at the rival Piccadilly Club – the ‘Rendezvous of the Stars’ – which was run by Jerry Harris, ‘the only comedian to play Hamlet . . . and lose’.
Here drinks were served by the Piccadilly Poppets, a glamorous battalion of waitresses decked out in black leotards and fishnet tights. Acts included the likes of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, the Bob Gillespie Trio, and the Maori Castaways. It was the favoured hang-out of the city’s football stars and visiting celebs, from the former world heavyweight champ Joe Louis to the then trendy chat-show host Simon Dee; also A-list media couples like Barbara Kelly and Bernard Braden, Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent, and for all I know, Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson.
Foo Foo’s Palace in Dale Street was another premier entertainment nightspot to provide me with work. Foo Foo’s was very popular with hen parties and stag nights for its fine dining and full cabaret nights, but the main attraction was the caustic wit and raucous repartee of the stocky perma-tanned dame Frank ‘Foo Foo’ Lamarr himself.
Resplendent in frothy bouffant syrups, exquisite gowns dripping with sparklers, and six-inch killer heels, Foo Foo was swank incarnate: Shirley Bassey’s ‘My Life’ punctuated by pure unadulterated filth and, like Mr Manning, the ritual slaughter of individual members of the audience.
Then there was Fagins* in Oxford Street, which often featured the Dougie James Soul Train.
If I could be said to have any ‘chops’, that’s where I earned them. I had quite a lot of material in my back pocket then, and there was no pressure to keep coming up with fresh stuff: my chances of meeting the same audience twice in any one year were very slight. I’d already written ‘Salome’, ‘I Married a Monster from Outer Space’, ‘The Day my Pad went Mad’, ‘The Day the World Stood Still’, and ‘I Walked with a Zombie’, poems mainly inspired by movie titles or TV commercials, also some topical location-specific numbers that I’ve long since lost. I was quite responsive to social developments back then, and if I could get a funny angle on a newsworthy event in the Manchester area, that always went down well.
This was really the origins of what became my act, and the public face of the very person you have come to know, and hopefully dredge up some measure of grudging affection for.
I based my club persona on Anthony Newley’s character in the aforementioned The Small World of Sammy Lee, a proto-Mod Jewish kid who’s moved out of Whitechapel and now has this exciting Soho existence, working every night, double-booked as a wise-cracking spieler. This was the world of vice and glamour I aspired to move into: I styled myself as the alluring silk-suited entertainer, slicker than snot on a doorknob, using poetry as my ticket to the Big Life.
I was modelling myself on a personality that was ten years out of date, but in my line of work it felt like modernisation. No one would have expected to find a poet in a cabaret club like this: just like Mr Manning said, half of them can’t read, but there I was, knocking ’em bandy.
It was a fascinating time in the clubs. I remembered a lot of the other acts who had been real big hitters in their day and still enjoyed a high TV profile: people like Shirley Bassey, Anita Harris, Lena Martell, Shani Wallis who played the part of Nancy in the Oscar-winning film of Oliver!, and Joan Rhodes, a strongwoman in a cocktail frock who ripped telephone directories in half.
They’d even have the occasional top-flight American acts that many people won’t have heard of now, such as Jo Stafford, Vikki Carr, Guy Mitchell, Jane Morgan, plus P.J. Proby, Gene Pitney, and DEL SHANNON!!!! Also be bop vocalists like Buddy Greco, Mark Murphy, and Johnny De Little, who exemplified a certain type of singer who specialised in the methodical deconstruction of the Great American Songbook: the liberties they took with the phrasing of these already familiar numbers were a great inspiration to me; the use of enjambement, for instance, the best example of which occurs in the song ‘Mountain Greenery’ by Mel ‘The Velvet Fog’ Tormé, in which he entices a woman with the prospect of an alfresco dinner date:
Beans could get no keener re-
ception in a beanery
God bless our mountain greenery
Home
I don’t care how low-rent Jerry Harris’s Piccadilly Club was, or that the people who went there were twice my age: if it was good enough for the Brown Bomber, it was good enough for me.
In my capacity as MC, the biggest star I ever introduced was ‘the Man who made Elvis Possible’, ‘the Cry Guy’, ‘the Prince of Wails’, ‘the Nabob of Sob’, ‘the Atomic Ray’, ‘Mr Emotion’, ‘the Little White Cloud that Cried’, ‘the Million Dollar Teardrop’ himself: Johnnie Ray.
Wow! Johnnie Ray at the Piccadilly Club!
The Nabob had a flamboyant way with a song, involving a degree of lachrymal overdrive that bordered on a complete emotional collapse. This inevitably endeared him to women. He didn’t need any sound effects: he supplied his own, what with the histrionic sobs and his signature heart-wrenching vocal catch. Although Elvis had been a big fan and had co-opted some of his mannerisms, most guys didn’t care for this effeminate approach. I think my dad spoke for most of mankind when he said, ‘Call that entertainment? Bloody awful.’
Johnnie Ray was deaf in one ear, so his vulnerable appeal was greatly abetted by the unavoidable presence of one of those cream Bakelite hearing aids, the ones with the three-inch flex, as later affected by Morrissey in the early days of the Smiths. Ray already looked nervous and malnourished, but the lughole-furniture was the icing on the cake.
Although his four-night run at the Piccadilly Club was very late on in his career, he had retained his raw-boned good looks, and the shows did great business. It was a blast to be on the same stage as one of the true engineers of pop. Plus, his audience was majority female.