Free Slowing Down by George Melly Page B

critic. The answer was in fact very good.
    Yet despite all this affectation he was extremely lovable, while his ‘little boy lost’ appeal and wistful good looks were a triumphant success with the ‘mice’.
    The third member of the more or less permanent front line was John Chilton, not only a fine trumpet-player, but a much admired author of jazz biographies, histories and reference books notable for their impeccable research. His own taste was for the small Harlem swing bands, but he had both knowledge and enthusiasm for every style from early New Orleans to late swing, and enjoyed, while he didn’t play, bebop and even had some sympathy for ‘Free Form’ or ‘the New Thing’ (however it was then categorized), although I don’t think he enjoyed it all that much. It was he who was to turn my life around.
    He had played in and led many bands, but lacked showbiz charisma, that exhibitionism which is essential ( vide Armstrong or Max Miller) to ‘lay it on the people’, as Pops Armstrong put it. John, bald, pale and with glasses, often seemed almost invisible against a white background, and especially in photographs; yet he had (and has) a wonderful sense of humour, is very well read and knows exactly what works on stage. This, I always felt in our years together, led to a certain Svengali-like tendency, a somewhat commanding officer approach to leading a band. ‘Move as one,’ he would order us if we had to cross a road.
    An independent-minded piano-player once gave in his notice. I asked him why. ‘Because,’ he replied in his sardonic Scottish accent, ‘I can no longer abide yon martinet, baby.’
    Mostly I loved John, sometimes I actively disliked him, but I never feared him. In his early drinking days he would suddenly snap and shout at me and I would shout rightback. During these rows his eyes would become steely, his face purple. Next day we always made it up. We called such a row ‘a purple’.
    When we first went on the road, a witty woman friend said to me after a concert with the Feetwarmers, ‘John watches you like a ballet mother.’ Well, I had become his bread and butter and a fair number of musicians can resent that. Ian Christie, for example, for several years the clarinettist in the Mulligan Band, disliked my habit, during a mildly obscene number of Ethel Waters’s called ‘Organ Grinder Blues’, of imitating a flea-ridden ape during the band choruses, scratching myself and jumping up on a piano stool to pretend to groom Mick’s head. This pantomime was very popular with the public, but not with Christie.
    ‘I object,’ he snapped one day in his slight Northern accent, ‘at earning my living as a musician because you can imitate a fucking monkey!’
    My almost weekly appearances at Merlin’s New Cave led to an increasing number of paid invitations to work elsewhere: universities, private parties, arts centres and jazz clubs. John and the rhythm section were usually there, Wally on whim, Bruce if he could get it together, Dad. The audience reaction was excellent and I was asked also to appear, for somewhat modest amounts of ‘bread’, in pubs around London with local trad bands.
    I hadn’t sung much for most of the sixties, but I began at once to sense what I’d missed. My belief is that when jazzmen or -women retire for whatever reason, they are not free but merely the equivalent of ‘recovering’ alcoholics. Too much sherry in the trifle and not long afterwards abottle of vodka is hidden in their underwear drawer or golf-bag pocket – and that was happening to me.
    One evening during this transitional period we were invited to do a concert at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in its comparatively new and very grand premises in The Mall. Among those I invited I included a man I’d met on a talking heads programme on TV and the next person to act as a catalyst in my, by this time, unstable life. His name was Derek Taylor and he became one of my best friends until he died, far