One of the most engaging aspects of bloggery is the way in which it provides for a mixture of private meditation & public grandstanding. At whim, the blogger can share sober reflection or indulge immoderate ranting. S/he can offer modest advice & tentative wisdom or reminisce interminably & flash a wallet-load of family snaps with all the tact & grace of a public bar drunk. And there’s no editor at the business end to spike the story. Perfect...

I’ve been meaning to inflict the following on my vast international readership for a while now.  I have dropped hints over time about an illustrious musical past, posting the odd pic & anecdote. Now in all their faded glory, I give you...

DICK JONES – THE ROCK-&-ROLL YEARS
























The physical creaks & cracks of advancing age notwithstanding, it’s clear that a heart has grown old when its owner accepts that the dreams & visions of childhood & youth will never be fulfilled.

Some of us, however, never attain that level of sober maturity & we remain uncertain into dotage as to what we’re going to be when we grow up. I still hanker occasionally for a life on the footplate of a speeding steam locomotive, or at the controls of a Spitfire sweeping low over the White Cliffs of Dover.

But my one great undiminished ambition, nurtured from early youth, was always to play music for money. ‘Fun & profit’ was the rallying cry through successive bands. Let this be what pays the bills.

So I became a teacher.  The weight of bourgeois expectation, the assumptions of a middle class upbringing in post-war Britain, the simple practical need to put food on the table for the family & pay the mortgage dictated the sensible course.  While others struggled up & down the motorways crammed between drum kit & PA in a Ford Transit belching smoke, I knocked off work at 4.00 & returned home to mark books.

Well, actually, not quite.  Lacking the strength of mind, or plain unselfishness, to slip the bass guitar under the bed, I continued to pursue the dream as if what happened between 9.00 & 4.00 was itself the fantasy.  And, with the wisdom of hindsight, there’s little doubt that, over the years, home & family paid the price.

Between 1965 & 1990 I ricocheted from one musical venture to another, driven by the urgent need to locate musical territories largely unoccupied by others. The search was always for the unexplored genre, or at the least a degree of authenticity lacking in those already exploring it.

[1.] BISMARK’S IMPERIAL JASS/JUG WIZARDS

1965 was a strange year for the jeunesse d’oree at the cutting edge of fashion. The Beatles & Stones had been in place for a couple of years. Other groups had moved onto the block & were challenging their supremacy. The world of commerce was now taking an active interest in street culture & couture. The mod minority was now the catalogue-&-chain-store majority.

Mal & I were Drama students at Goldsmiths’ College in South-East London. We were cocky, arrogant & pissed off that in our tonik suits & tab-collar shirts we were pretty much indistinguishable from any 50 other mardy lads who considered themselves at the cutting edge.  So we took to spending our Saturday mornings sifting through the contents of the battered barrows that lined the single street that was Deptford Market. 

This was the era of the drip-dry shirt & off-the-peg suit & it was also only a decade since the first wave of West Indian immigrants had arrived on the Empire Windrush.  The Market barrows were elbow deep in pre-war striped cotton shirts & boxes full of the stiff, starched collars that attached to them.  Hanging from hangers beneath the canopies were rows of blue, brown & grey pin- & chalk-striped double-breasted suits, the jackets full skirted & the trousers high-backed & front-pleated, the legs flapping like sails from their deep pockets down to their one-inch turn-ups.  And fluttering alongside them like exotic birds were the massive spatulate ties, big as trowels, of the Jamaicans & Trinidadians – the height of fashion in Kingston & Port-of-Spain, but dumped in a rush in favour of attire more acceptable to conservative & largely prejudiced employers.

At 2/6d a shirt & 10 shillings a suit (12.5 & 50 pence respectively), there was still enough left in our student grants to ensure fags & beer. So Mal & I abandoned our Fred Perry shirts & our knuckle cord hipsters for three-piece demob suits, Edwardian shirts & collars & technicolor ties depicting sinuous naked ladies, tropical flowers & parrots in full cry.

All that we lacked was a context.  Sitting amongst our fellow students in the refectory we simply looked like extras from central casting on a coffee break. We needed a setting, a platform for our costumery. 

Cometh the hour, cometh the band. Word reached us that at the Tiger’s Head in Catford – a brash ‘30s pub with a function room – a wild & surreal art school outfit called the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band was appearing every Friday night.  Fronted by the debonair (& now legendary) Vivian Stanshall, they played a beguiling mixture of between-the-wars novelty numbers & self-written material, these played on the standard instruments of the dance band & interjected & interspersed with dada-cum-cabaret-cum-vaudeville routines. And all the members of the band wore impeccable swing-time tailoring.

We were simultaneously seduced & inspired & from a synthesis of our sartorial indulgences & a shared love of pre-war musical forms, we formed Bismark’s Imperial Jass (later jug) Wizards.  Lacking both the instrumentation & the expertise of the Bonzos, we went in the direction of the jug & skiffle bands of the ‘20s & ‘30s & our set included breakneck versions of such classics as Digging My Potatoes, Stealing & I’m Satisfied With My Gal.

Mal & I drafted in a guitarist & a banjo-player & then relied on a core of kazoo-blowing & washboard-bashing fellow drama students who made up in energetic self-promotion what they lacked in musical aptitude.  We got ourselves a Sunday lunchtime residency in the college pub of preference, the New Cross House, & enjoyed to the limit our slightly prolonged 15 minutes of local fame.  Our zenith (which preceded by only one Sunday our demise) was undoubtedly the moment when, at the conclusion of our barnstorming version of Blind Blake’s Black Dog, an enormous black Labrador burst through the double doors of the saloon bar & proceeded to ravage our washboard player.

L/ to R.
Mal Griffin, Pete Currie, Sam Hodgson, Dick Hughes, Colin Oliver, Jon Richards, Dick Jones

(Continued)

.o0o.