I SUPPOSE THAT, before the advent of the gramophone and the radio, when opportunities to listen to music were limited, most people had to make their own or hear none at all. I do not, of course, remember a time before those great inventions were commonplace, and neither would my parents’ generation. But my father’s pub piano-playing was a link to that earlier age before music and the means by which to hear it became part of the fabric of our daily lives.
One of my earliest memories is of Linda and me sitting atop the piano that Steve ‘Ginger’ Johnson was playing at a wedding reception somewhere in North Kensington. We were tiny, and a space had been cleared for us amid the accumulated pints donated to Steve by grateful guests who’d danced and sung to his repertoire of popular songs. ‘Heart of My Hearts’, ‘On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep’, ‘You Do Something to Me’, ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’, ‘Apple Blossom Time’ … Steve had enough material to fill a three-hour slot without repeats.
I don’t know how my father became such a proficient pianist, but I do know that he played by ear, was unable to read a note of music and that he had the incredible gift of being able to reproduce any song he’d heard at the first attempt.
No doubt there were many other pianists who’d emerged untutored from working-class homes in the same way. However, supply never seemed to meet demand, which was why there were so many piano stools across London W10 and W11 upon which Steve was invited to park his posterior.
The songs our father played took root in our subconscious. As well as being present at lots of Steve’s performances as toddlers, as we grew old enough to explore the streets around us we’d hear piano singsongs wafting out of pub doors tied open to let out the smoke. The loudest choruses, sung with the most fervour, could usually be heard just before closing time at around half-past two in the afternoon and eleven o’clock at night. On Sunday lunchtimes I sometimes joined other small children on the threshold of this forbidden territory to issue the plaintive cry: ‘Dad! Mum says your dinner’s ready!’
Running parallel with this irreligious musical education, we were absorbing a contrasting form of music through the hymns we sang at morning assembly. It seemed as if at least one teacher in every school could play the piano. Perhaps they were recruited specifically for that purpose. At Bevington it was the vivacious Miss Woofenden.
She it was who, early in 1961, asked her class of ten- and eleven-year-olds if anyone knew which record was Number 1 in the charts that week. This was during our music lesson, held in the main hall rather than the classroom, so that our teacher had access to the precious school piano.
I was the only child who put my hand up, blushing crimson as I always did when I found myself the centre of attention, but confident of my answer: ‘“Poetry in Motion” by Johnny Tillotson, Miss.’
Teen culture, born in the 1950s, had yet to trickle down to pre-teens as the decade ended and we still occupied a musical backwater compared with older, more sophisticated kids. Out in the wider world, consumers of pop music were beginning to give the home-grown variety a vote of confidence: 1961 was apparently the first-ever year in which the UK charts featured more artists from Britain than from the US. It was also the year Alan Freeman took over Pick of the Pops on the Light Programme, which was required listening on Sunday afternoons. So much so that at its peak, the show was being heard by practically a quarter of the population.
None of my friends, though, were interested in music. Tony Cox shared my passion for football, and I would sometimes see Dereck Tapper at Ladbroke Grove library, where I spent many happy hours indulging my other love, books. But Linda remained the only person with whom I could share my passion for music. Our record collection by now included ‘Poetry in Motion’ but not, alas, the recording made by Mr Tillotson. This was the worst of times for the Johnson household. Steve had stopped sending the weekly postal order for £6 10s decided upon by the courts (£1 10s for Lily and £2 10s each for Linda and me).
As our mother’s heart condition worsened, and she spent more and more time in hospital and unable to work, we relied on Linda’s increasingly wide portfolio of after-school jobs to finance our record-buying.
When we couldn’t afford the 4s 6d for an original hit record, we’d go to Woolworth’s and buy a cover version on the store’s budget ‘Embassy’ label for a few shillings less. Our collection would eventually include covers of Bruce Channel’s ‘Hey! Baby’, Roy Orbison’s ‘Running Scared’ and Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’.
The Embassy version was always released at the same time as the original, thus ensuring topicality. While I’m sure that the imitating performer must have been credited on the red Embassy label, I can’t recall a single name, even though the records chalked up substantial sales.
Most of them, I later learned, were highly experienced session singers. They had to be good because there was no time for retakes – the breakneck schedules and tight budgets allowed for only half an hour per song. Though many did work under their professional names, pseudonyms were, not surprisingly, often used. So unbeknown to us, we probably possessed records made by some of the live singers we heard performing the current hits on the BBC.
In order to meet growing listener demand for more pop music, the Corporation was now forced to supplement its in-house orchestras, and bandleaders like Joe Loss and Billy Cotton, with musicians who could play pop hits live. While the big bandleaders still had a significant following among mums and dads, something more authentic was needed to appease the kids, a style that more closely resembled that of the pop groups to be imitated. So groups like Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers and Shane Fenton and the Fentones were being hired to play live on the Light Programme. Shane Fenton, whose real name was Bernard Jewry, would become better known in the 1970s and 1980s in another guise: Alvin Stardust.
By this time I did have one other means of slaking my thirst for pop songs by their original artists. One Christmas Lily had bought me a miniature crystal radio set with a string aerial, which unlocked the door to the three or four hours of music broadcast every night on Radio Luxembourg – accompanied by constant static.
As well as being pleased that I could answer Miss Woofenden’s question in class that day I remember being surprised that she should ask it. She was getting on a bit – late twenties, I would say. While I was self-aware enough to realise that I was unusually young to be interested in pop music, I also knew that Miss Woofenden was unusually old. It was my first experience of perceiving that a teacher might be remotely interested in the things that interested Linda and me.
Perhaps Miss Woofenden was trying to broaden our horizons, but as far as I recall, this little incident was the only diversion at Bevington from our usual diet of hymns. While never inspired by the religion that underpinned them, I loved belting out the songs. At morning assembly I would join in the cheery rendition of ditties such as ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ with gusto.
At Sloane Grammar School, to which I moved on later that year after passing my Eleven-Plus, the hymns reflected a more muscular Christianity and the girls, who had been the most enthusiastic singers at Bevington, were no longer present. This was an all-boys school.
‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ was one of the Sloane favourites. It had a masculine appeal that brought out the best in us boys, even the ones who mumbled through assembly hymns, moving their lips just enough to satisfy the scrutiny of the teachers watching from the stage for any signs of insubordination.
Other songs improved our vocabularies. Singing them was like being given an English lesson. When we first opened our hymnbooks to embark on ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’, John Bunyan’s words towered before us like a rock face waiting to be climbed. A deep breath and off we went:
He who would valiant be ’gainst all disaster,
Let him in constancy follow the Master.
There’s no discouragement shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent to be a pilgrim.
How I loved those words that my mouth had never uttered and my ears had never heard: ‘valiant’, ‘constancy’, ‘discouragement’, ‘relent’, ‘intent’ and, later in the hymn, ‘confound’ and ‘dismal’. Most of all I loved the strange, mellifluous ‘pilgrim’.
After a while the hymnbooks became redundant as we only ever sang the same five or six hymns in rotation and soon committed their words to memory through constant repetition.
‘Jerusalem’ was my first experience of proper poetry, Blake’s lyric swelling my chest with an emotion I didn’t fully understand: a sort of puzzled pride. This wasn’t the same kind of music as ‘Poetry in Motion’, but it was poetic, and it certainly moved me.