VT Coughtrey - Metropolitan Jazz Band

NOTES	By the Spring of 1961 I was getting seriously fed up with being locked up in the darkroom with Eddie for a good part of every working day, rehearsing the same handful of dire songs over and over again and listening to the same few crude jokes ad nauseam. Also, I was beginning to get a touch of dermatitis from the wide range of chemicals I had my hands in for much of the time. It was not possible to wear gloves because they made it too difficult to handle the delicate film as quickly and deftly as was required. (I have many times experienced the gulf between the dictats of the Health & Safety people and the realities of factory production). I certainly enjoyed having the skill to produce good quality photostencils from widely varying artwork and had even begun to come in on Saturdays when Eddie wasn't around, in order to do little private jobs. I was in effect running a small business of my own on the side, with all the costs of materials being borne unwittingly by Hegarty & Merry. As a matter of fact, they even paid me overtime for it at time and a half, because I put my time card through the clock on Saturdays the same as any other day. The photographic department was considered to be above productivity checks and stocktaking, and Eddy never found out that I was going in on Saturdays. Nevertheless, the tediousness of life in the dark with Eddie and the threat of skin trouble outweighed the more positive aspects, and I made up my mind to escape.
	I now thought of myself as a good banjo player and was having fantasies about leading a professional yet strictly purist New Orleans style band. (Ken Colyer had proved that unlikely combination to be possible). Before doing anything at all about forming such a band, in fact before even thinking about how to do it, I handed in my notice. I was aware that all of the professional bands had originally been amateurs, then semi-professionals for years before building up enough of a following to go professional, yet I somehow thought that I could skip the first two inconvenient phases.
	My restlessnessness may have been exacerbated by the fact that my father had been seriously ill since the Summer of the previous year. He had not been able to work and had soon become bedridden. He had also turned bright yellow and the doctor diagnosed hepatitis. However, he failed to respond to treatment and remained yellow, so after a delay of several weeks, he was sent to Barnet General Hospital, where cancer was diagnosed. My mother was told that it was now too advanced to be operable and that my father had only a few months to live. She was also told that there would be a period of remission when he would appear to be much better and could come home for a while. But of course, when that happened we all convinced ourselves that he was recovering. In fact the period of remission included Christmas 1960 and he was well enough then to watch TV and drink a little wine. However, by the time I left Hegarty & Merry, he was back in hospital.
	I didn't dare tell my mother I'd left the job, so just as I had done when truanting from school a couple of years earlier, I took to leaving the house at the usual time in the morning, then wandering about all day. However, I now had a little money saved up, so could afford the bus and Tube fares to explore over a much wider range. I became fascinated by suburban north London, especially the network of public parks and spent a lot of time sitting on park benches. I was quite often searched by the plain-clothes policemen who were prowling everywhere in those days. You could always tell them by their smart suits, police-issue blue ties and the fact that they always came in pairs. After searching you, they would tell you what a useless layabout you were, then send you on your way. It didn't help that, much to the horror of my mother and grandmother, I now had a beard - a big bushy ginger one. This not only caused every passing van driver, taxi driver and group of youths to make bleating noises with sickening predictability, but also made me an object of even greater suspicion to the Plain Clothes Branch. In the evenings not wearing a tie was sufficient to cause you to be stopped and searched, but having a beard as well laid you open to threats of arrest on suspicion of - well, anything. Meanwhile, real criminals, clean-shaven and with ties, were going about their work unhindered.
	When the weather was fine, I sat on the park benches either writing political essays (which no-one ever read, as far as I know) or designing a new private Tube system for north London, to fill in all the gaps where the existing Tube didn't go. It would be superior in many ways to the London Transport system and it would be called the V.T.Coughtrey Rapid Transit System. The entrances to the stations, mostly in parks, would all be attractive little cottages covered with roses, none of your W.Holden stuff. This became quite an obsession, rivalling jazz and politics. I spent many hours planning lines, making diagrams and trying to work out some of the technical details.
	When it was cold or raining, I took refuge in public libraries. As with the parks, I soon knew where all the public libraries of north London were located. The libraries provided a great boost to my political thinking. I read Marx's Capital and other of his writings. In fact I read or read about many socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and nihilists including Rosenburg, Kropotkin, Bakhunin, Trotsky, Lenin, Castro and Mao. Marx shook me because he validated so much of my childhood fantasies about Regenesia. I think I regarded him not so much as a genius as the first man to put the obvious in writing. I didn't think of myself as a disciple of Marx but as someone grateful to him for setting out so clearly what I had always known. However, the other revolutionaries mentioned above also had an impact. As their various ideas were all equally shocking to British society of the time (or would have been if anyone had known about them), I had to work them in somehow, hence the long essays I was writing when I was neither in the libraries nor designing the Coughtrey Tube. Although it was of paramount importance that the ideas to emerge from this interweaving of so many revolutionary threads should constitute a model of unacceptability, I also firmly believed in these ideas I was developing. I was a new gospel writer. I needed to be so shocking that my output would be rejected out of hand, but I also needed to be universally accepted and acclaimed as the new Marx. However, there was not much danger of my having to resolve this contradiction, insofar as I gave very little thought to the minor detail of how to bring the stuff to the attention of the public. I suppose I thought it would just happen, somehow.
	Regarding the main justification for leaving my job, the assumption that I would become a famous bandleader, I must have thought that that would also somehow just happen, without my needing to do anything to bring it about. But I still had to give my mother half my imaginary wages each week, and when I began to run low on funds I realised I was going to have to do something positive to start a band, so I put an ad in the Melody Maker: "Musicians wanted to form King Oliver-style band." I had a lot of letters in reply (we still had no telephone). Having no notion of auditioning, I chose one player of each of the instruments I needed at random. I then hired the dance hall at the back of the Black Bull in Whetstone for one evening and wrote to the seven musicians whose names I'd picked out of a hat, advising them of the date of the first rehearsal of the Metropolitan Jazz Band.
Annie Hawkins settled in Britain soon afterwards and has had a long and illustrious career as a professional New Orleans style bassist and is still at it. The same goes for Louis Lince on banjo & guitar.	All the musicians except the clarinettist turned up. I can't remember the names of the trombonist, drummer and pianist, but the trumpeter was Peter Morgan, an amateur but very good, and the bassist was Annie Hawkin. She was visiting from Australia and was possibly the most accomplished musician in the band. I had also, to the bewilderment of the others, taken on another banjoist, Louis Lince. I mentioned one or two early New Orleans bands as a precedent for this, but I think the real reason for doing it was that I was ashamed of my instrument and also wasn't quite so sure of my abilities on it after all. In fact Louis was much more accomplished than I, but this turned out not to matter, because his banjo was very much louder than mine, so my dodgy plunking was drowned out by his steady, confident and accurate variety.
	They had all had experience in playing in bands and they were certainly all better musicians than I was (and a lot older), so it soon became apparent that I wasn't their leader in any sense other than that I had brought them together. I had taken my tape recorder along and playing the tapes many years later I was surprised at the quality of the music. At the end of the first session I collected the money from them to pay for the hall, and it was agreed that we should meet again the following week.