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I happen to know from the old days how involved youve been with music. Can you say what music means to you?
What stopped me becoming a musician was that my lip went. I really wanted to be a trumpet player. When my lip wentit was
during the warI went back on to guitar and became a member of a trio. Ultimately we did variety shows . . . one thing led
to another and I became what I am. But music has been my unending and constant love. It gives a tranquillity such as no other
medium can give you. It is not a language, its an emotion. Its something that I am hooked on forever. I am completely and
utterly hooked on music.
Sometimes I escape into music. I lock the door and play my music. And I resent any intrusion. Theres no such thing as
really sharing. Someone can listen with you, but thats not quite sharing. I want to share it with myself.
The trio I worked with was the Bill Hall Triowhich became Hall, Norman and Ladd eventually. Bill Hall died from consumption;
Johnny Mulgrove, who used to play bass with the Ambrose Octet before the war, he diedalso from consumption. I think the act
is still going.
I find music at the moment very disturbing. Miles Davis, who I loveI went to see him at Ronnie Scotts. I can only put
one appendage to itits crap. I wondered at first whether it was because Im no longer on the scene. But most of the coherent
musicians that were there that nightand I know most of them by namewere in agreement.
To me, a musician has to be articulate. Trying to baffle you with the thunder of drums comes out of the Congo. We have
an articulate mind now. Apart from the emotional stimuli of the music, one needs some intellectual quotient as well. Suddenly,
I think, Miles has run out. Hes reached the limit of his intellectbut he still wants to go on somewhere ahead; and there is
nowhere else to go, except back where he started.
I went to listen to Ornette Coleman. I discovered straight away that he ignores harmonic structure. If hes playing in
F, say, he stays on that, playing the scale of F even though its a C sharp diminished chord. I didnt like his attitude . .
. this foffwhitetrash attitude. I said : Im a musician and Im intelligent: what are you getting at? He said: Oh . . . man
. . . He was very hung up, you know. Hes lost touch. He doesnt like his fellow-man. Which is a bad thingbecause theyre the
ones that listen.
If you dont want people to hear you, play silent music.
I said to him: Why do you keep to one scene? He said: Why shouldnt I? I noticed at one time that you and the bass and
the piano were playing in three different keys. Yeah. Its painful. Whoever gets the most pain drops out. Thats like the jungle
again. You beat the s out of somebody, but its not good for the people listening. It might be an egotistical triumph to make
some of your fellow-musicians shut up from sheer agony.
Sure, music has to be a means of communication. Its turned inwards nowand they turn their backs on the audience. It has
become masturbation instead of love-making with an audience.
Somebody has to make a stand.
Benny Green was very kind to Miles Davis in one of the Sunday papers. Benny said that if Miles is saying something, will
he make it known just what it is? This is good. Benny asked me what I thought and I said that Im going back to Victor Silvester.
For me, the jazz success of the year was the Kennv Clarke/Francv Boland band. I didnt hear the other oneThad Jones and
Mel Lewis. They told me that was great. If it plays better than the Clarke/Boland band, then Hallelujahtheres hope for me!
I was with Bill Evans last week. An articulate player. I noticed that it was contained within two-and-a-half octaves of
the piano. He doesnt spread out, you know, not the musical diarrhoea that Phineas Newborn and all these jokers have got. Theyre
so insecure. Theyve got to baffle you with technique. But they dont say anything. You could put it in a computer and bring
it all out. But Evans is articulate. Beautiful.
He states the theme, like Mozart, goes away from it and comes back to the melodyback to the womb every time. This was
beautiful.
Mind youthe wretched jokers that go there to talk. Ronnie Scotts is becoming a Chat Club with musical background. So much
so that I asked Ronnie if I could have a pair of earphones for my personal use. And hes going to have it done. Its the only
way.
Gary Burton, too. This is a wonderful new scene. This is the best fruit of the pop scene and the jazz scene. Neither one
thing nor the other, but a wonderful marriage. I miss knowing the tune, not being able to improvise with Burton. They are
all original themes. Once again, its becoming very personalised. I would like the group to play some standards.
Looking back, I was part of our own particular pop sceneas you were, Tony, being one of those local musicians. What kept
the scene going for the young then was dance music.
It was the big thing. We used to talk of players like Lew Davis and Max Goldberg and Tommy McQuaterwho is still with us,
thank Godwith the same reverence that the Beatles are spoken of today. There wasnt so much money around, so we couldnt buy
as many records. Consequently, we couldnt saturate the market. We would have come on much faster had there been a higher standard
of wages. I would have bought discs and discs and discs. Then the jazzmen might have become much bigger much sooner. But we
kept it alive, this sort of thing.
Isnt it true, though, that we were the hip minority of our day, the lads with some musical insight? We werent part of
the mass market at all. We were something specialyoung musicians with an ear for jazz.
Thats true. But we still played our sociological part in keeping it alive. Thats for sure. We were so involved with it
at the time. All the gigs we used to do, the practice. I used to go around to Cyril Welshs househe was another young guitar
player of our setand we would discuss if Eddie Lang did this, or that, talk about the Chocolate Dandies and Benny Carter.
I still rate Carter as one of the greatest of all time, incidentally. And we used to go to the jazz sessions at the rhythm
clubs. Do you remember the rhythm clubs? The Number One Rhythm Cluband the local one, at the Tigers Head at Lee?
Harry Parry the clarinettist came down one week, and that was like one of the gods visiting. They were great, stimulating
days. I didnt know it at the time. Now I realise that all that gave us tremendous insight into jazz. I understand jazz so
much more because of that.
You see, my boy is having to work backwards. He likes pop. So I play him something middle-coolsay, Lester Young playing
Taxi Ride. Thats got the twelve-bar pattern and he digs that shape. He cant quite understand innuendo behind it. I took him
to hear the Clarke/Boland band and he flipped. He suddenly realised how big it was.
We were raised on big bands, and to me theyre the most exciting sound in the world.
Theyre coming back, daddy-o. Oh yes, I think they are. Theres that big, thick Glenn Miller soundsort of medio-jazz. Syd
Lawrence packed the bloody Festival Hall. There were so many people who couldnt get in that they are going to have to do it
again. This is incredible. Mind you, there is a lot of our age group going along. I wanted to go, but couldnt make it. I had
to see Miles Davis. I wish I hadnt!
Do you think that enough money will be put into staging big bands, unless they can attract the younger people?
Well, jazz concerts are a sell-out. Big bands cant become resident. Thats where the money is not. But who can? I dont
think anyone is resident any more. Music is a Bedouin scene, isnt it? You have to keep on the move to make money.
Incidentally, I went to see Manitas de Plata last night. The young people ! He represents something to themfreedom . .
. liberty . . .success . . . money . . . indifference to power and politics. Hes made it without them. The plus that Manitas
de Plata offers is excitement.
What started off your interest in music?
I had a very ignorant musical upbringing. My mother used to play ragtime piano and my father used to do step-dancing in
India during the army days. I heard tunes like Roll On, You Mississippi, Roll On. Then one day, in the grounds of the British
cantonment in Rangoon, in the sergeants mess, they had a gramophone. On it there was a record called You Rascal You. When
I put it on, I had a feeling that Id never experienced before. It was Fats Waller.
I never forgot this record. Thats what really set me off.
What was your first instrument?
I had a ukulele when I was seven-and-a-half in Poona. I remember strumming it in the moonlight while Sergeant Kidd of
the Ulster Rifles was trying to kiss my Auntie Eileen. I was playing Whatll I Do When You Are Far Away? I suddenly realised
what was going on, but I couldnt leave. I was embarrassed. The sergeant coughed and said: Could you play that in a lower key,
lad? My mother bought my first guitar for eighteen shillings from Len Stiles shop in Lewisham High Street. I was about seventeen.
I didnt know about the plectrum guitar. All guitars were Hawaiian to me. My mother, who was always one for saving money, said:
Ill teach you to play. She got hold of a knife and slid the blade up and down the strings, and that was my first lesson.
Then someone I met Phil Stevens I think it was, a pianistsaid : You want to learn to play the guitar like Eddie Lana.
Around that time I started playing the guitar.
I went on the drums for a while, but then I got back on guitar. After, I switched to bass.
It was as a bassist that you did a couple of gigs with our band.
Right. On bass, though, I was eclipsed locally by Ron Archer. He was killed when his ship turned turtle in an air-raid
on Plymouth Dockyard. I switched to trumpet because I couldnt be heard on guitar. I used to hear these dreadfully corny trumpet
players who came along on gigs on a bike with bicycle clips on their trousers and played cornet-style on very good arrangements.
They could drive you mad. I used to sing choruses to myself much better, so I bought a trumpet. I thought I could do betterand
I did.
You also had vocal aspirations at that time, as I recall. I can still see you at the church hall in Brockley up at the
mike singing I Wished On The Moon. And didnt you go in for one of those Bing Crosby competitions at the Lady Florence Institute
at Deptford?
Thats right. And I won a cup. I used to be able to do that. But then I heard Armstrong, and that was the end of me. The
record I heard? Just A Gigolo. The way he played used to hit youright out of your seat.
What is there about Armstrong? No-one has even sounded like him, really, except those who have deliberately set out to
imitate.
Bobby Hackett, they say, can play so like him. Well, he did. He backed Armstrong in a record they made of Blueberry Hill.
You can hear him in the background and he sounds exactly like Louis. I thought at first that theyd done an overlay, but they
hadnt. It was Hackett taking the part of Armstrong! Theres an articulate player. And Ruby Braff. What a player! That strange
rubato style of his. Hes almost behind, man.
Does it ever occur to you that you might not have come into show business without music?
I suppose thats true. Music led me into it. What might have become of us if it werent for music doesnt bear thinking of.
I might have ended up still working in Woolwich Arsenal and doing gigs.
The wara tragedy for some peoplereally gave us a new start.
It did. By God, it did! I cant believe that it took a war to get a break. A very expensive way of becoming a clown.
When did you become actively involved with music in the army?
Strangely enough, directly I went in. When I arrived at Bexhill, I met a bloke called Harry Edgington who played the piano
by ear. He had never mixed with anybody and he played in F sharp and C sharp all the timewhich is murderous for the trumpet.
So I became brilliant in these two keys. Bit by bit we worked in together. We knocked off a kit of drums and a chap had a
guitar. We got together primarily to avoid doing guards and to make a few bob on the side. We became the night life of Bexhill.
Resented. no doubt, by the other soldiery.
Yes. But actually, they loved it because we brought some life and without us there wouldnt have been any. In Italy, I
got wounded and after that I left the regiment, which meant the end of the band for me, Broke my heart. Then I got sent back
to the offices of Second Echelon, where there was a big band. I played second trumpet with that. Difficult to recall the names
nowbut Joey Brown was on first trumpet, and he was the best. He used to play at Greens Playhouse Ballroom in Glasgow. It was
a wonderful band and we used to play all round. We were attached to the Fifth Army and we were getting the big arrangements.
like Charlie Barnets One OClock Jump and Two OClock Jump.
They were happy days. Wasnt there something existing then that is lacking today?
It has fragmented now in so many directions that the energy is decimated. But the main stream is the one that I have always
come back to; Getz will make me happy in a hundred years time. Or someone like Burton, who says something. Mark you, I only
speak one language and I concede that there might be another language that I dont understand. But its a bloody awful language.
Who have meant the most to you over the years?
Eddie Lang, Karl Cress, Dick McDonough, the Venuti syndrome Then there was Don Redman and his Orchestra. The Chocolate
Dandies, Chu Berry, Benny Carter, Teddy Wilson on piano. What happened to him when he came to Ronnies? He went all to pieces,
playing funny things like The Donkey Serenade at fifty miles an hour.
I was being weaned off the English scene. At one time I thought Freddy Gardner was the worlds greatest alto player. And
he wasnt. Hed be playing with Victor Silvester today. Buddy Featherstonhaugh was a great player, though. And that chap who
was killed by a tube trainHarry Berlyhe was a superb player.
There was the Spike Hughes all-Negro band and that wonderful arrangement of Donegal Cradle Song. That was so way-out.
Then there was Alec Wilders Octet. Extraordinarily advanced for its time. He wrote things like The Neurotic Goldfish and Debutantes
Diary. He collaborated with Artie Shaw on Ill Be Around. Hes still around, a great individual.
The Woody Herman band came along and blew my mind. He left Goodman behind. When you think of who they had! I was with
Getz two weeks ago and we sat down and he played Four Brothers. I said: You rate that? and he said: Yeah. Its still good.
John Kirby and his Onyx Club Quartet. They were a wonderful group.
You havent mentioned Reinhardt.
When we first heard Reinhardt everyone gave up. It was impossible. It still is. He had that personalised tone. He was
influenced by Armstrongbut he had this remarkable tone and vibrato for a guitar player. He must have had wrists like an ox.
And he didnt leave that vibrato out over the fast passages, either. A tremendous talent.
Do you still play at all?
Mostly on the piano. I play choruses to myself; try to move along and improve and work out some new harmonies. During
the Goons period, I used to get together with Ray Ellington and others occasionally And Ive played with George Chisholm. That
was a good TV scene they did, with Kenny Baker and George from Scotts. Lovely. And Lennie Felix. A superb player. Hes very
funny, too, Lennie.
Music is a great soporific for people who are mentally or emotionally disturbed. It can make you cry and feel better or
sadder. But it does something. So far as the importance of the musician is concerned, just try to visualise a world with music,
but with no musicians. People take music for granted. Great musical talent should be respected and the workaday musicians
should get a fair wage.
A musician is an emotional craftsman. He has to carve out in your mind a pictureand if he does it badly, it just doesnt
come off. The musician has got to be good. Like the man said, you cant mess about with music.
Yes, Im all for an improvement in the musicians status. They live through some frightening professional moments. Trumpet
players live in mortal fear of losing teeth. It can spell the end of a career. I know violin players who get arthritis in
their left hands. You need a lot more confidence as a musician than you do as a mechanic. Its very frightening when you think
about being a musician.
Spike Milligan died at his Sussex home on February 27th, 2002, aged 83
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