CHAPTER ONE
THINGS TO COME
HIS HEAD IS FULL OF MUSIC. Crazy music. As he hastily walks his Soho street, his fingers dance against his thigh, picking out invisible notes on his invisible trombone. Melodies gush through his mind and musical scales hazily appear in front of his eyes. Music is a stubborn cloud that follows him everywhere. It may free him from the world but it chains itself to his spirit, so very reluctant to leave. Sometimes, he wishes that he was an accountant and his life was simple and he lived nine to five and then just when he starts imagining this easy life, damn you, back it comes again – the unshakeable strains of this crazy music.
A voice shouts out something – who knows what – and as he looks up, the invisible night wind drills straight into him. At last, a non-musical thought. He could kill for a Crombie. A three quarter length black number, made of the best wool, top pocket left-hand side and an inner lining made of silk. A Crombie tells a world recently robbed by war that you got cash, that against all odds you are making it.
* * *
Eddie Harvey doesn’t have big cash. He is a musician. A trombone player and yes, he is on the up and up. But Eddie is still waiting, hanging on for that great moment in life when everything you want suddenly and magically appears before you and it all slots beautifully into place. Businessmen and successful dance band musicians wear Crombies. Poor musos don’t, but that doesn’t stop Eddie dreaming, daydreaming of the moment when he finishes off a 6 a.m. Soho basement session and then casually slips on his Crombie like it’s the most natural thing ever – a second skin – and drawls, ‘Want coffee?’ to his jealous-eyed friends.
Understand now what a Crombie symbolises and what Eddie Harvey would give for one on this cold London night in 1948.
He moves briskly through the streets, heading for Bedford Square. He is Bloomsbury bound. Eddie wears a dark suit and it weighs a ton. Not surprising. It is made of barathea, a too-heavy wool material. He has on a white shirt and a black tie which has a block of sharp red running down half of it. Inside of him, in the pit of his stomach, determination mixes with excitement, protecting him from the curious looks he elicits from passers by, all of whom want to know one thing: why is that man wearing sunglasses at such a sunless hour? Carlo Krahmer knows why. He knows exactly why.
* * *
‘Carlo Krahmer was a creature of the night. He really was. You only saw him after dark. Now he had some kind of contact in the States and he was importing records just after the war. Usually, they were aluminium discs. Amazing things. You see, during the war shellac was in short supply, they made those old 78s out of strategic material. They were using it for building aeroplanes, so they used to issue jazz records. One record a month, that’s all you got. But that’s all you needed. So we all used to learn this record and by the time we had had it for a week it had been played ten thousand times. You have to remember that the Musicians Union had banned Americans from playing here so unless you went to New York by playing on the liners going there you never saw these musicians.
‘It was actually quite funny. The American union was run by gangsters and the British Union was run by members of the Communist party and they never spoke to each other.’
Eddie Harvey – musician
* * *
Carlo is waiting for Eddie in his Bedford Square home – in his sitting room to be precise – and damn me if he isn’t also wearing sunglasses. But they’re for a purpose. Carlo is nearly blind. But he is never static. He is a drummer of big repute and also the proprietor of Esquire Records, his very own jazz record company. Carlo is a doer and a mover. He speaks in clipped tones and all his words are serious. They tumble out in a snappy fashion. Carlo never tells jokes. And he rarely smiles. But he fixes things, sometimes unintentionally. At the very first jazz festival in Nice, Carlo took over a young trumpeter called Humphrey Lyttelton. The French press got hold of Humph and casually asked him about his background. Humph, relaxing in the sun, went into one about his privileged background and time as a guardsman. Then he went off to play. Next thing you know the English press have gotten hold of the article and by the time Humph sets foot again in London, he’s a massive star. Carlo, who set the whole thing up, didn’t even flinch.
* * *
‘If you liked that you should hear Charlie Parker.’
Art Pepper to British jazz musicians after playing the 100 Club, Oxford Street
* * *
A lot of musicians – more than usual – are expected at Carlo’s tonight. The word is out. Carlo has a new record from the States. What’s more, it ain’t any old tune. No sir. He’s got the new Charlie Parker. From Soho, just the merest mention of Parker’s name and it’s enough. They spread outwards, rushing towards Carlo’s to hear this latest record, to buy copies and then learn it so hard and hear it so much that inevitably the music enters their bloodstream and then they can stand up in their small dingy Soho basements and play it without thinking.
They are Modernists.
They adore American music and hip jazz musicians. They dig American clothing. And that’s why Eddie Harvey is wearing sunglasses after dark.
He is a Modernist.
* * *
‘In the ’40s, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, they wore loose suits. That was the Professor Bop period. The original thing behind it was that they were trying to give jazz a scholarly feel because they wanted it to be counter culture to challenge the classical culture. It wasn’t meant to be a popular culture, it was meant to be a new classical culture to depose the heavy-lidded opera and classical music types.’
John Simon – clothes stylist
* * *
For some, though, Eddie Harvey is not a Modernist. He is a traitor. He has sold out the cause, the trad cause. Traditional jazz music is the music of 1920s New Orleans, played by a number of British musicians. Even Eddie played it just as he plays a lot of other music, to pay the rent and smash the bills.
* * *
‘I played in a big band. A lot of people did. It was the day of the big band. We would go to Aberdeen and play to 2,000 people. I’m not kidding. The dance halls we played in were pleasure palaces. They really were. A lot of people were living in substandard housing and these dance halls were centrally heated and they were beautifully lit. They were just lovely places to go to and a great place to cop off. That always happened on the last number. That’s when everyone made their move. They were rough places as well. I saw one guy pushed over a balcony and as far as I know he never got up again.’
Eddie Harvey
* * *
Eddie played trad. Then he saw the light because quite frankly, trad music does not ricochet around Eddie’s head. No way. Trad is energetic, dancing music, frothy, happy-go-lucky and it appeals to guy and girl squares who wear duffle coats and baggy corduroy trousers. It is the absolute height of uncool. Mod is where it’s at. You don’t believe me? All you got to do is check out Johnny Dankworth. The man went on a boat bound for New York. He was a clarinet player. He landed in the Big Apple and then he heard Charlie Parker. He ditched the clarinet and came back an alto saxophone player. With a brand new wardrobe.
* * *
‘Half of the trad lot looked like they had slept in their clothes but the modern jazz world wasn’t like that at all. It was very smart. But trad jazz was very popular and got into the charts and so on. In fact, the author Jim Godbolt in his book, A History of Jazz in Britain, talks about trad as if it was an important event. Well, it was in that it was making money for people, but in terms of creativity, that was happening in the modern jazz world. Still, you can’t ignore it because that was how the blues artists came over here. I was friendly with Chris Barber who played trombone and had one of the most successful trad bands; it was he who brought over Muddy Waters and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and other people. That was very important in giving people the chance to hear that kind of music.’
Val Wilmer – writer
* * *
Prior to trad’s success, the new jazz sound, typified by players such as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, broke on the shores. They called it bebop and it turned jazz on its head. The music demanded that musicians burrow deep into their instruments, that they eschew every obvious musical move in search of new expressions they could find within themselves. It was a sound designed to keep out the great unhip and it was invented by black Americans who were making this music for reasons to do with race and class. To accompany this sonic assault on the straight world, a lifestyle, based around sharp dressing and night-time living, naturally evolved.
In one of the best works to be found on the man, John Swed’s So What – The Life Of Miles Davis, the author describes Miles and his friends.
He writes of this smart pack, ‘Their jackets were cut short, and their shirts had collars so stiff with starch that they’d chafe their necks if they turned their heads too fast. Their nails were coated with clear polish, their shoes had a hard deep shine, and they walked a little dip walk and called themselves el gatos. They were sharp and clean.’
Sharp and clean, Miles’s dress sense in the ’50s – his Brooks Brothers suits, button down shirts, deep shined shoes and smart cravats – would serve as brilliant testimony to these qualities. Miles’s conservative style was designed to highlight the wantonly disdainful persona he opted to show to the world, one that said, I’m smart, I’m tough and I don’t give a fuck. The look was a vigorous part of the black American tradition to nullify or taunt the enemy by mirroring the enemy’s style. The boxer Jack Johnson, the first black to be crowned Heavyweight Champion Of The World, he was on it too, mocking his rich enemies in the Establishment by posing for the camera dressed like them, wearing a golfer wardrobe, complete with Plus Fours. By appropriating the look of affluent ’50s white America, Miles strengethened his presence in the public’s mind, immeasurably.
Young white folk sensed something was up. They felt a kindred spirit in their midst. Miles’s enemies were theirs too. Thus, it was this life, this jazz life with its insouciant manners and cool customs, that Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac would dive headlong into and eulogise and rhapsodise about. Through their books they expressed a collective yearning for a breaking out from restrictions and laws and social mores. In America, that impulse was what jazz music was seeking to capture. In France, now all they talked was existentialism. And in London, Eddie Harvey and Ronnie Scott, Pete King and Dennis Rose, Tony Crombie and all the rest of the Soho-based Modernists, jazz and style was essential to their lives. Easy to see why. Was there anything more glamorous than staying up all night, playing and digging jazz, getting a little high, hooking up with a girl and still making enough money to dress like heroes of the night? Since when was that asking for too much?
The Modernists based their lives around night time. Around midnight. They shunned the straight world with its fixation on time-keeping and obeying your betters and in doing so they became the first post-war whites – the first in a strong lineage that reaches us today – who openly embraced black culture.
* * *
‘I got involved in jazz through a mutual school friend who was the cartoonist, Wally Fawkes. He turned me onto jazz and he picked it up because he was at art school and that’s where the action was. Stylistically, I changed. I seem to remember tweed jackets, thick tweed ties, shirts with little tiny thin collars. That was the ttad dress. I was in this band, George Webb’s band, which was the first band to start the trad jazz revival. This music had not been played for twenty-five years. It was amazing that we got into it really because we had to learn it off records and there were so few of them. We learnt it all by ear. Then I had to go into the Air Force for a couple of years and when I came out the music had moved on. I heard this new music when I was in India. They had these forces radio stations and I remember the piece. It was “Things To Come” by Dizzy Gillespie. I thought the world had gone mad. It was such a big step from what I was used to.’
Eddie Harvey
* * *
Eddie had stepped out of the Air Force and into a London that was starting to wake up to many possibilities. It is tempting to believe that as war raged, London was a town filled with gloom and apprehension, that laughter never carried down its streets. Not so. During the war many people – admittedly, moneyed people – headed for West End clubs to dance and drink. There was a lot of marijuana smoke floating through the club air and a lot of bright young girls appearing through the haze, lively, energetic, on the ball, a delight to be with. War had broken down the barriers. These girls were not kitchen bound. They were sharper than that. They would not be like their mothers just as the sons would not dress like their fathers. For this fast set, help was always at hand.
Amphetamines were available from the Doc. Pills were diverted from their intended journey abroad to terrified UK soldiers, especially those serving in the RAF, and ended up in the surgery. Speed revved you up. It killed the fear that war had put inside your stomach.
So people took speed and they ignored the ravaged world because, put simply, that very night could be their last one on earth. Of course, in other less fortunate areas, the East End in particular, the temper of the people was noticeably sadder and angrier, envious even. And there are stories, true to this day, of musicians climbing through the East End debris and rubble and walking all the way into Soho to play at clubs such as the Cozy Hatch or the Fullado Club. So the London Eddie returned to was half alive, crippled but with a beating heart. That heart was Soho and its surrounding streets. It was a capital city that now contained a fair amount of black American servicemen. Ten thousand came to Britain in 1942. And in 1948, a number of these would join up with the new Caribbean settlers plus the Modernists and they would all congregate in Soho to create something lasting and worthwhile. From this mix, a new culture would slowly emerge.
These days, we call it soul stylism.
* * *
‘With the musicians there was never ever any hint or even a mention of race or colour. No one even thought about it. You were musicians and that was it.’
Eddie Harvey
* * *
For the cooler people, the jazz musicians, Archer Street, London WI was the centre of the world. Here, on a Monday morning, they would arrive to pick up Melody Maker from the newsagent’s stand, scour the ads and look to make contacts with those milling around. Those who could afford it tended to wear made-to-measure suits with square shoulders, lurid ties and Billy Eckstine shirts (designed by the jazz musician turned vocalist, the Eckstine shirt had a cutaway collar with a huge roll and was made and supplied by the famous shirt maker, Cy Devore). And every one of them tried catching the eye of one of the dancing girls in the nearby Windmill Theatre as they set about finding work for the week, the month or the year. Archer Street in 1948 was where the Modernists started laying foundations.
* * *
‘Every Monday and Tuesday there were forty musicians down there, all talking about music and getting pissed and doing business. Nobody had phones in those days so you did business face to face. At that time there was a group of musicians who got together who were interested in this new music. Ronnie Scott and John Dankworth took this rehearsal room at the end of Windmill Street and they called it Club 11. It was the collective number of their groups. Johnny had a quintet, Ronnie a sextet.
‘I got involved in this club and it was our university. There were guys down there who had great ears and they were figuring out all the harmonies and themes of this new music. Within months I became a different musician.’
Eddie Harvey
* * *
Club 11 (and let’s not forget Harry Morris on the door) started out as a rehearsal space for Modernists. But soon the bebop sounds coming up to the street started catching people’s attention. Inevitably, the space quickly became a club. People would wander in at all times and check out what was going down. Later, it moved to Kingly Street where it was successfully raided for drugs, the first British club to be accorded that honour, post war.
* * *
‘We went down the club which was quite extraordinary. For a start it was pitch dark. You couldn’t see anything at all which made it tremendously exciting. The noise was tremendous and we all wore sunglasses in this pitch dark as well as tight trousers, the bebop look.’
Betty Morgan, bebop girl.
* * *
There were plenty of similar clubs in Soho, dingy basement rooms that had been taken over by musicians and fans and hustlers, dark places where they would all cram in to play and hear the music. Outside, the Soho pavements were lined with people because television had yet to keep them in their homes. But the police were onto them now. They too had smelt the marijuana smoke in the air. They didn’t like it. A war had been fought for order and for decency. So they shut the joints down. Not a problem. The promoters paid them lip-service and then opened up a new premises the next night. It is easy to believe that sex and drugs only came to pass in the ’60s, that the ’50s was a time of strict repression. Rubbish. Eddie Harvey says, forget the ’60s. The Soho ’50s is where it was at.
The ’60s began when the war ended. Britain was a nation tired out by war and ready to party, especially those whose teenage years had been spent cowering in air raid shelters. Couple that with a breakdown in the people’s subservience to authority and you have the best conditions in which to let loose on all levels. The first inkling that something was up was the arrival in the late ’40s of the first teenage craze centered around dancing to jazz music. The young flocked to dingy London basements to dance the night away, high on hope and chemicals. George Melly recently spoke about the proliferation of speed in the clubs, how they were swallowing Dexedrine tablets on a consistent basis. Another eye witness testified that patrons emerging from the Cy Lawrie club in Ham Yard (later to become Mod central when The Scene club took over) looked as though they had been swimming, such was the sweat pouring off them. Sex was easy and sex was everywhere. This was when the ’60s began, made up from jazz, sex and speed.
* * *
‘I think that what belies it a little is that all the photographs of the time are monochromatic, they’re in black and white. But life was not really monochromatic, it was very colourful.’
John Simon
* * *
Of course, there were other established clubs. What is known as the 100 Club opened for business in 1942 when Robert Feldman took over the premises. Some nights, he and his two brothers entertained the crowd. That would be Robert on clarinet, Monty Feldman on accordion and eight-year-old Victor Feldman on drums (child star Feldman graduated to piano, played with Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley amongst others, which is enough for any CV). The musical policy was to keep up to date but Humphrey Lyttelton started a trad night there in 1950 and the Modernists shut their eyes and ears to him.
* * *
‘The trad world was very much a mix of art school and bohemianism. People would say, “I am a Bohemian” naming it as a style. My friend Janet that I grew up with, she went to art college and so she wore a duffle coat, black woollen stockings, heavy sweaters. In the trad world, the art school fashion was the dominant ideal although the majority of ordinary people, truth be told, were very drab. There were lots of trad bands originally put together by people who came into it because they liked the idea of New Orleans purism; this is working men’s music, that kind of attitude. Of course, when Acker Bilk took off and made money from playing this, then suddenly everyone became a trad musician.’
Val Wilmer
* * *
‘The black influence was very strong because there were a lot of GIs and Caribbean people in the 1950s and 1960s and also a lot of Africans, which people always forget. Soho was very much an African place at one time.
‘There were quite a few of these black clubs around. They were dives but they were there in Soho just as they would be later on in Harrow Road and Ladbroke Grove.’
Val Wilmer
* * *
Club life provided for two factions; trad versus Mod. First, the trads took over the Club I I premises when it moved to 50 Carnaby Street. Then in August 1952, Jeff Kruger, a jazz-loving film salesman assuaged his nagging thought – why is every jazz club I go to always such a dive? – with the perfect answer when he ate dinner one night at the Mapleton Hotel near Leicester Square. He got friendly with the manager and was shown a basement, perfect for his needs. In August of 1952, the Modernists came to ‘Jazz At The Mapleton’ to hear the Johnny Dankworth Seven and Kenny Graham’s Afro-Cubists.
* * *
‘It was mainly full of burglars and whores. Fantastic people. They treated all musicians as if they were kings and queens. Also another place was the Blue Room which was one of Jeff Kruger’s and the Café Anglais, they were all around Leicester Square.’
Eddie Harvey
* * *
Kruger, Jeffrey, it’s an important name. He was twenty-one years old at the time, an orginal Modernist. At his club, he demanded that all men customers wear jackets and the girls dress up. His prices were high, his ambitions higher. His genial father Sam worked the door. They opened on Sunday evenings. Business was good. They added Saturdays and then Thursdays to the schedule. The word was out, the word turned good. The crowd they began attracting – including the young Kray twins – grew larger by the week.
A few months later, in honour of Graham’s composition ‘Flamingo’, the club changed its name and began a succession of moves around town before settling down at 33–37 Wardour Street. Meanwhile, musicians such as Ronnie Scott, Tubby Hayes and Joe Harriott, through their music and dress sense, were becoming the leaders of the Modernist movement. So too were the likes of Johnny Dankworth, Jimmy Deuchar and Cleo Laine. And maybe a hundred others. These musicians, and the clubs they played in, attracted a diverse set of people with roots from all around the world. Music fans to the last, and looking to live outside the norm, the clubs were mixed, no violence, nobody being hurled over a balcony. In fact, they were havens from a country becoming increasingly hostile to the sight of non-white people taking to their streets. Jazz didn’t care. Jazz thought otherwise. Jazz brought people together, to mingle, shake hands and hips.
Sure thing, but not everyone was convinced.
* * *
‘It was very difficult if a white woman walked down the street with a black man. Even in the 1960s, you would be stared at, you would be abused and sometimes you would be spat upon. One man insulted me at Waterloo Station and I smacked him round the head and nearly got into a fight. I knew quite a lot of black men and that kind of thing was quite commonplace.’
Val Wilmer
* * *
‘For me, I think it came to life in 1954. A lot of the Modernists used to go ro the Lyceum. There was afternoon dancing there almost every day. Bands like the Don Lang Seven or Oscar Rabin. A lot of the kids who worked in offices used to go there lunchtimes. I was fifteen and my uncle made me a suit so I could go down there. It was a double-breasted grey flannel with an unusual shaped lapel. I still remember it distinctly to this day.’
John Simon
* * *
Other venues appeared, gently helping London back to life. At the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street, the owner George Hoellering now added a restaurant and a downstairs ballroom which he had designed by the theatrical photographer, Angus McBean. His name rings a bell. Later, he would work with The Beatles. McBean used a circus theme for the club but his work failed to register with the public. In 1958, according to Tony Bacon’s excellent book, London Live, Hoellering was forced to let the space to pianist Dill Jones and his manager, Peter Burman. Yet despite their best efforts, they too failed with their Jazz At The Marquee gigs on a Saturday and Sunday night. The pair now gave way to Harold Pendleton, the secretary of the National Jazz Federation. His musical policy was simple. If the 100 Club was trad and the Flamingo was for the Modernists, he would show no favour and play the middle game, put on both sets of music. Smart move. Within four years the club was open five nights a week.
Other musics were also catered for here. Skiffle was one, a music that paid homage to America’s folk-blues tradition, a music made accessible by its practitioners’ insistence on using homemade instruments. The first to make their name in London’s newly developing skiffle world was Ken Colyer’s Skiffle Group featuring Colyer, Lonnie Donegan and Alexis Korner. Following rave reviews and a growing audience, a room at the top of the Round House pub in Wardour Street was opened. The joint did well. By 1956, skiffle was a national obssession, attracting hordes of teenagers to its cause. Coffee bars now opened by the dozen to accommodate them. One of the first was the Gyre and Gimble, near Charing Cross although the most famous would be the Two I’s on Wardour Street which opened in April of 1956.
By the end of the year public demand was such that another branch was opened at 44 Gerrard Street. From here were launched the careers of Tommy Steele, (‘The Pied Piper of Bermondsey,’ noted Absolute Beginners writer, Colin Maclnnes) Adam Faith, Marty Wilde. Skiffle ruled. For a very short time.
Stylistically, the Americans were still in charge. The Caribbean people in Britain, many of whom would have preferred to head Stateside but were prevented from doing so by the quota system established by the McGann and Walter Act, were to make a huge impact on British cultural life. But in terms of fashion – apart from the pork-pie hat – their initial impact was minuscule. The reason is simple. Like their British counterparts, they adored all things American. Inevitable really when you measure the distance between Jamaica and America. Just a twist of the radio dial in Kingston and you were picking up New Orleans. Which is why they were as hip as the Modernists when they arrived in England.
* * *
‘There was a large Jamaican community in Harlem from the start of the twentieth century and a lot of them would send clothes back to people so that they would get all the latest modern clothing. I think the Jamaicans when they got here turned their noses up against outlets like Burtons who were off the peg and went to their own tailors. A lot of black tailors were also making suits at home on a freelance basis.’
Carol Tulloch – academic
‘In the late ’50s, the American influence in Jamaica was almost total. Everything was copied. There was a colonial mentality. When I was interviewing people for my book, people kept saying, “You wouldn’t accept something as really good unless it had come from abroad.” You can’t imagine what decades of colonialism and slavery before did for people.’
Lloyd Bradley – writer
* * *
The most identifiable part of the Jamaicans’ dress was the ‘windbreaker’ trousers. They had straight legs which dramatically billowed out at the knee.
* * *
‘That came about because the trousers they had, they got from the American rag companies. And they were hugely baggy so instead of tapering them all the way down the leg, they just tapered the bottoms and so you got that mad bulbous look.’
Carlo Manzi – costumier
* * *
This form of trouser soon disappeared from view to be replaced by a much tighter leg. That was because American musicians had now taken to wearing smart Brook Brothers clothes. Miles Davis was a prime example. Chet Baker was another. So was Stan Kenton. It was known as the Ivy League look, a title bestowed on the students from eight of America’s major colleges – Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Howard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale. Its students bought their clothes from Brooks Brothers, a company associated with quality and a conservative look, which began trading as far back as 1818. In 1845, the company sold its first suit. It was a novelty, but not for the first time the company had broken new ground. Indeed, the company’s reputation for quality clothing was sealed when Abraham Lincoln wore a Brooks Brothers coat on the occasion of his second induction into the American Presidency in 1864. At some point last century, the company settled on a classic design. Jackets would have two or three buttons (nothing more, nothing less) natural rounded shoulders and a back vent. The trousers would sit high on the hips but pleats were optional. The shirts would sport a soft roll collar which was buttoned down.
The button-down collar was their own invention. (It is said that company founder, John Brooks, attended a polo match and made note of the players who had fixed buttons to their collars to stop them flapping in their faces during the game. This could be a fanciful story. Doesn’t matter. Fact is, Brooks Brothers gave the world the button-down shirt.) What is ironic about this look is that the American tailors who constructed the Ivy League appearance drew their inspiration from the upper-class British clothing of the time.
* * *
‘The Americans tried to give an aristocratic look to everyone. It was an egalitarian culture. They wanted everyone to have equal opportunity. So in America, everybody wore Ivy League. I read in an American menswear magazine that 85 per cent of the business was in the Ivy League look. Huge money was turned over. They didn’t have a tradition so in a sense it gave everyone a tradition. Ye Olde Ivy League look. The shield on the jacket pockets, everything referred to a subliminal tradition.’
John Simon
‘In the early ’50s a lot of guys wore that Ivy League look. Three-button jackets done up and short lapel on the top. Narrow trousers and they also wore flat-top haircuts. There was a famous jazz composition at the time called “Flat Top Flips His Lid”. Now, before this Ivy League look everyone wore a suit. Even the guys digging up the roads wore suits. You’d see their jackets slung over a fence or something and they would be in suit trousers and a shirt digging away. Everyone wore a suit.’
Eddie Harvey
‘The jazz culture was an Ivy League culture. Chet Baker and all those people wore Ivy League from the early ’50s. They were your idols so you wanted to wear what they wore.’
John Simon
* * *
Along with the Ivy League look another major development in British menswear was taking place. Casual wear, rejected for years by the English male, was finally being accepted. It was a style that was automatically associated with Americans and, in Britain, resentment ran high against the USA. Their late entry into the war was hugely frowned upon. Wimps, sneered the Brits. And look at them now, dressing in loud colours, another word they spell all wrong. In the world outside of Soho it was considered totally unmasculine to be concerned with dress. Men – real men – wore their demob suits or they went out and bought dark conservative numbers. Colour was frowned upon. It was a sign of femininity. Suits remained rigid and so did their wearers. But Cecil Gee, a Lithuanian, was about to change all that.
Born in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1902, Cecil Gee came to London in 1914, just as the First World War was readying itself to take millions of lives. He was the middle child in a family of three, his father a fairly prosperous jeweller. Cecil was not obsessed with clothes, but after trying work in the family business he quit to find employment as a window dresser. From there, it was only a small step to borrowing money from his family and opening up his first premises on Commercial Road, Whitechapel in London’s East End. The year was 1929.
* * *
‘Most men in the 1930s were quite smart. Even if they were poor they were quite smart. It was important to be smart. The movies were the main inspiration because that was the main entertainment. It was where people went to hang out.’
John Simon
* * *
By the mid-’30s, Cecil Gee had moved to Charing Cross Road where he systematically took over the premises at numbers 106, 108 and 110 to create a three-floor menswear store. After the war he made a packet selling demob suits. Success suited him. It inspired him to greater things. One of his innovations was the sale of jackets and trousers on hanging rails. Another was the importation of American clothing such as Arrow shirts. Naturally, many Soho Modernists made their way to his shop. The name became hip.
* * *
‘In 1959, a jazz package show came from America; Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck and Buck Clayton brought their groups and I got to know some of them. They played here and then they left to tour around the Continent. And then four of Buck Clayton’s band came back to England and they specifically went up to Cecil Gee to buy their clothes. They were Americans buying British clothes. I remember I took a photograph of Dickie Wells the trombonist wearing an orange mohair sweater that he bought at Cecil Gee’s. I used to look in the shop myself. The clothes were amazing.’
Val Wilmer
* * *
In 1955, Cecil Gee acquired more premises, this time on Shaftesbury Avenue. By now it was obvious that here was a bright man, a quick thinker, always looking to make the move that would excite customers. With the Gaggia coffee machine now available in London, Cecil set up a coffee bar corner for his customers. It was on the left as you walked into his shop. He also hung pictures of musicians on the shop walls. Cecil’s imagination knew no boundaries. That’s why he was not afraid to make trips to exotic places, like Italy, and learn from his European counterparts.
* * *
‘I was a window dresser for Cecil Gee in the ’50s. I remember he started off buying Scandinavian stuff first and then, in 1957, he went on a business trip with Ivan Topper who was a very well-known window dresser at the time. When they came back they brought some unusual stuff with them. It was Italian clothing, colourful jumpers, that kind of thing. I remember Ivan came into the shop wearing this amazing cotton suit, slightly Ivy League. That blew me away. From then on Cecil started importing stuff. He also brought a tailor back with him. His name was Giorgio. He was a fabulous tailor, absolutely fabulous. He made suits exactly like you saw in all those film noir movies.’
John Simon
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With the British economy now starting to heat up, fashion could now take its natural course. Hence, some major competition. A competitor to Cecil Gee was Austins, found on Shaftesbury Avenue. It was opened by Lou Austin. A flash man, Lou. He didn’t buy a house. He lived in the Savoy Hotel instead where he practised his saxophone. As befits a man with such tastes, his shop was full of American clothing and was the priciest in town. Then there was the expanding chain of Smith and Wesson shops.
And then there was Austin Reed on Regent Street, Cecil Gee’s main competitor. The difference was that at Austin Reed you tended to push your face up against the window, look at the wonders displayed and sigh. At Cecil Gee’s you bought clothes. They were, unlike the man, affordable and stylish.
* * *
‘He was not a stylish man. His clothes sense was very conventional but he was always immaculate. He was a dark suit and white shirt man, but he brought fashion into men’s clothing. Austin Reed may have been first but they were never as influential as Cecil Gee.’
Gary Herman — Cecil Gee’s nephew
‘I remember he used to change his shirt twice a day. He was a very fastidious man.’
John Simon
* * *
Yet the Modernists had other things on their minds. America, they were discovering, was not only the country of Miles and Bird. It also created Bill Haley and rock’n’roll. For those who believed that the new jazz would inevitably become the new pop music, the world was about to give them a shock. They woke up one morning to find cinemas ripped to pieces by teenage hysterics and the papers screaming blue murder about Teddy Boys, rock’n’roll and leather jackets, knives, and some young American lewd called Elvis. Everything had changed.
* * *
‘It was assumed or there was a sense that bebop music might become more popular than it eventually became. It never became really popular. It was too complicated. If you don’t know anything about the music it is bloody confusing and that’s one of the reasons why, when Bill Haley hit, rock’n’roll became very popular. The rhythm was so obvious that people could dance to it.’
Eddie Harvey
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Young people who should have been enlisting in the Modernist cause now switched to American rock’n’roll. In 1956, Elvis’s music invaded these shores. Teddy Boys (an Edwardian style that may have its roots in a look first pioneered by a group of ex-Guards officers) with their drape jackets and bootlaces, emerged. Cinemas became a gathering point. Marlon Brando starred in a film called The Wild Ones and the ton-up boys – leather jackets, jeans and motorbikes – duly appeared on the British landscape. In Soho, the blues was now making a significant inroad into club culture. In 1950, Josh White played the Chiswick Empire and then more blues men from America started dropping in. Their impact was deep.
Cyril Davies who ran the Round House skiffle room in Soho with his partner, Alexis Korner decided enough was enough and closed their skiffle residency down. Next week they opened up as a blues club. Muddy Waters came and played there in 1958, did so just after playing The Marquee and causing an absolute storm by using an electric guitar. (Dylan did the same thing eight years later but got far wider publicity.) Young Brits – starved of the music thanks to a non-existent radio service and unresponsive recording industry – began their own groups, attracting a young crowd. The british blues boom was about to start with Korner and Davies right at the centre of it all. Their group Blues Incorporated would become the template for a whole generation of blues obssesed musicians.
Worryingly for the Modernists, these musical developments were starting to take up much needed club space. They would now have to wait for someone like Ronnie Scott to finally open up his eponymously named club on Gerrard Street – it would later move to Frith Street – to play their music and brave the storm.
* * *
‘Ronnie’s opened up in 1959. At first it was only a coffee bar with sandwiches. Then they got a licence for the bar. That was only open for a short time. Later on they had all-nighters there on a Saturday but there weren’t any drinks. If people wanted to drink they would carry a half bottle or quarter bottle around. The laws were quite strict then. Of course, Ronnie Scott himself was one of the smartest dressed people around. The Marquee Club was on Oxford Street; there was a cinema called the Academy and it was under that. The back entrance was in Poland Street and all the musicians used to go in the Coach and Horses right there on the corner of Great Marlborough Street. The Marquee was open every night. You had Alexis Korner and his Blues Incorporated band with Cyril Davis on harmonica. Charlie Watts played drums, Jack Bruce played bass and there was also Dick Heckstall Smith on tenor sax and Graham Bond, who joined the band later.
‘Mick Jagger used to sit in with them and so it was all quite exciting. Then Joe Harriott and Tubby Hayes, they used to play there on a Saturday night and that was one of the big nights. Then the Marquee moved to Wardour Street but in the Oxford Street days the music was a mixture of many things.’
Val Wilmer
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At the start of the ’50s, Modernists thought they were going to take over the world. By the end of it they realised their dream was impossible. London was awash with clubs playing everything from blues to skiffle. Their music was just a stream flowing into a much bigger river. What they didn’t realise was that it would be their spiritual sons and daughters who would take on the mission. It would be they who would go out looking like a million dollars and, with a brand new mind, they would spread the message all over this country.
* * *
‘I was looking at a photograph of Clement Attlee wearing a suit and I thought, he’s the Prime Minister and look at this suit and how badly cut it is. It really astounds you how badly cut suits were and that must be why, when John Stephens came through, he had to develop a new style of cutting, just like Vidal Sassoon with hair. At the time you didn’t think anything of it, but when you look back you realise it was very different.’
Val Wilmer