People interested in the skiffle craze that swept across the country in the fifties will readily refer to Lonnie Donegan, The Vipers, Nancy Whiskey, and rightly so, but one band that escaped the attention of the media at the time was Tinhorn Timmons and the Rattlesnakes. The reason this ballsy outfit never made it on a global scale was that the Rattlesnakes, indigenous to the desert of East Riding, were content to play locally in small venues, and had offers been made to tempt them to the Big Smoke and a career in the music industry, they would have refused. For they knew they were crap. Or, to be painfully precise, we knew we were crap. The university was very small when I arrived, with less than a thousand students, which meant that there were fewer choices to be made when signing up to join a society or club. In the absence of surfing, hang-gliding and bungee-jumping clubs, I opted to join the cricket club, the table-tennis club and the Catholic Society. My reasons for joining the last were far from spiritual because, quite simply, Cath Soc had the best-looking women on campus, attracting French mistresses, señoritas and a bevy of sad-eyed Polish girls. Atheistic sexual predators and agnostic ne’er-do-wells would also sign up so they could attend our social nights and cop off with the convent-educated girls that by rights should have been ours. It just wasn’t fair.
The Jazz Club attracted a sassy crowd and I’d occasionally go to their dances, where the jazz was cool and modern. Unlike me, unfortunately. I did have a sort of Buddy Holly resemblance and we were both born in towns beginning with the letter L, but whereas he exuded sexuality, I merely exuded. The Saturday night raves featured ‘Norris Walker and the All Stars’, who played the sort of dance music our parents would have quickstepped to. I never listened to music that much, unlike my pals who tuned in to Radio Luxembourg and AFN, but when two of them started up a skiffle group and invited me to learn bass and join them, how would I have known that it would be the first small step on the road to musical glory? (Ahem …) The bass that I mastered, needless to say was not a double, nor an electric, but a tea chest. Take a large plywood chest, empty the tea leaves and tie a length of string from one corner to the top of a broom handle, affix Elastoplast to index and middle finger, and bom-bom, bum-bum off you go: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, put your hands together, please, and give a warm Hessle working-men’s club welcome to Tinhorn Timmons and the Rattlesnakes.’
The skills I acquired on stage with the Rattlesnakes were to stand me in good stead many years later, particularly the ability to carry on playing or singing while the audience ignores you, and not to take it personally when they come backstage and scream abuse. I am thinking with particular fondness of the Garrick Club in Leigh one wet Friday night in February 1975. Part of the Scaffold’s schedule at the time involved the dreaded northern cabaret circuit, which meant doing two hour-long sets at two different venues for a week. For instance, in 1970 we appeared at the New Monk Bretton Club at 9 p.m. and then we’d shoot over to the bigger club, the Cavendish in Sheffield, for the eleven o’clock slot. Occasionally we would use the house band, but more often than not we travelled with our own group. At the time of our Cavendish days we were still bubbling along in the public’s consciousness with ‘Lily the Pink’ and ‘Thank U Very Much’, but by the time we got to Leigh, outside Manchester, the consciousness bubbles had popped.
I have before me a folded yellow card, which was the supper menu of the Garrick Club, and for 10p you could have kicked off with a bowl of soup, then tucked into scampi and chips in a basket for 70p, or if you wanted to go mad, a sirloin steak with chips and bread and butter would have set you back all of 95p. On the back of the menu is the running order I’d written out for the show, which includes three of our minor hits, ‘Do You Remember’, ‘The Leaving of Liverpool’ and ‘Liverpool Lou’, as well as ‘Lily’ and ‘Thank U Very Much’, the other thirty-five minutes consisting of poems and revue sketches.
The week had not gone well for us in terms of audience numbers but the Friday night was pretty busy and we hoped at least to finish on a high note (in our case probably flat). After the show we were in the dressing room hanging up our stage suits in the fridge when there was a knock on the door. Without waiting for a reply, two women high-heeled in, bold and brassy. Automatically John, Mike and I reached for our pens to sign the autographs, or the photographs, or the thighs, whatever was on offer. The ladies introduced themselves: ‘I’m Mel and this is Dot.’
‘Hi, girls.’
‘How long have we been comin’ here, Dot?’
‘Five years.’
‘Every Friday night for five years and that were the worst show we’ve ever seen, weren’t it, Dot?’
‘It were shite.’
‘Hardly any songs, no proper jokes and we couldn’t believe our ears, friggin’ poems. What were it like, Dot?’
‘It were shite.’
It goes without saying (or, rather, it would have gone without saying if I hadn’t said it) that they didn’t want our autographs, even though Mike kindly offered.
Another advantage of a small campus was the proximity of events that were on hand. Would I regularly have attended Union debates, I wonder, if they were held half a mile away? Whereas the weekly debate took place in the mixed Common Room (yes, that’s when we had Men’s and Women’s Common Rooms for folk of similar sex who wanted to be with each other). The men’s was smoke-filled, noisy and full of card players, whereas the women’s was serene, chintzy and full of women reading poetry and knitting. Or so my girlfriends insisted. ‘Mass debates’, as they were hilariously known at school, were held when I was in the sixth form, but I never took part, being unable to follow a single train of thought when speaking in an upright position, and so at Hull I was mightily impressed with the fluency and wit that was part of our weekly diet. It may not have been the Oxford Union. In fact, it wasn’t, it was Hull Union, but it had Roy Hattersley who was a star performer: ‘My learned friend is a self-made man … who worships his creator …’ as well as Kevin McNamara, Bob Cryer and a number of others who went on to a life in politics. I never marshalled the courage to stand up and speak, but on occasion I’d be moved to write a poem about a topic under discussion (the war in Cyprus, the standard of food in the refectory) and have it published in Torchlight, copies of which change hands today for one pound fifty. Change hands?
‘Hey, I like your hands.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Would you like to change them?’
‘What for?’
‘Well, I’ll swap you this tea-chest bass for them.’
‘OK, it’s a deal.’
‘Good, let’s shake on it.’
… ‘What with?’