Free The Beatles by Steve Turner Page B

for his catch phrases. His wife Lucrezia says that ‘ob la di, ob la da’ is a phonetic translation of something that his father would say to him in the Urhobo language used by the Warri people in the mid-West region of Nigeria. “It had a special meaning which he never told anyone,” she says. “Even the Beatles didn’t know what it meant. When I once asked Paul what it meant he said he thought it meant ‘Comme ci, comme ça’ but that isn’t right. To Jimmy, it was like a philosophy that he took with him through life.”
    Jimmy Anonmuogharan Scott Emuakpor was born in Sapele, Nigeria, and came to England in the Fifties, where he found work in the jazz clubs of Soho. He played with Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames in the Sixties, backed Stevie Wonder on his 1965 tour of Britain and later formed his own Ob-la-di Ob-la-da Band. He provided music for some of the dance scenes in the Hammer film She (1965) that starred Ursula Andress, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Lucrezia says that the phrase was quite well known because in concert he would call out ‘Ob la di’ and the audience would shout back ‘Ob la da’ and then Scott would reply ‘Life goes on’. The fact that Paul used his catch phrase as the basis of a song ignited controversy. “He got annoyed when I did a song of it because he wanted a cut,” Paul told Playboy in 1984. “I said ‘Come on, Jimmy. It’s just an expression. If you’d written the song, you could have had the cut.’”
    ‘Ob-la-di Ob-la-da’ has been cited as the first example of white ska; although the phrase was Urhobo, the song Paul created around it and the characters he invented were from Jamaica. When recording the vocals, Paul made a mistake in singing that Desmond, rather than Molly, ‘stayed at home and did his pretty face’. The other Beatles liked the slip and so it was kept. Paul loved the song and wanted it to be a single. John always hated it.
    Jimmy Scott played congas on the session (July 5, 1968) – the only time he worked with the Beatles. Lucrezia remembers being called in to hear a playback and taking in a headed letter made for the Ob-la-di Ob-la-da Band to show Paul how the phrase was spelt. Later that year, he appeared on the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet album and in 1969 at the Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park. Around this time he was arrested and taken to Brixton prison to await trial on a charge of failing to pay maintenance to his ex-wife. He asked the police to contact the Beatles’ office to see if Paul would foot his huge outstanding legal bill. This Paul did, on condition that Scott dropped his case against him over the song.
    Scott left England in 1969 and didn’t return until 1973 when he immersed himself in the Pyramid Arts project in east London, giving workshops on African music and drumming. In 1983, he joined Bad Manners and was still with them when he died in 1986. “We’d just done this tour of America and he caught pneumonia,” remembers Bad Manners’ front man Doug Trendle, aka Buster Bloodvessel. “When he got back to Britain he was strip-searched at the airport because he was Nigerian. They left him naked for two hours. The next day he was taken into hospital and he died. Nobody is too sure how old he was because he lied about his age when he got his first British passport. He was supposed to be around 64.”
    In July 1986, a concert featuring Bad Manners, Hi Life International, the Panic Brothers, and Lee Perry and the Upsetters was mounted at the Town and Country Club, London, to raise money for the Jimmy Scott Benevolent Fund. He left at least 12 children from two marriages. “Jimmy was essentially a rhythmic, charming, irresistible man with the gift of the gab,” Lucrezia wrote in the benefit’s programme. “If life was sometimes dull, it shouldn’t have been, for his stories of people, of places, of incidents, were an endless stream bubbling with fun.”
    Paul, who kept in contact with Jimmy, also contributed