VT Coughtrey - banjo player

NOTES The media conspiracy against English traditional music & dance continues to this day, but the situation in Wales and Scotland is rather better.	Since leaving school, and especially since starting at Hegarty & Merry at the end of 1959, I had money to spend on my big interest, jazz. In fact, jazz had become something of an obsession. Having originally forced myself to get interested in it just to be as different as possible from other kids, I now found that I genuinely detested all pop music and just as genuinely loved jazz. I quite liked listening to classical music occasionally, by way of a change, but it had no real rebellion value. But I was a rebel even among jazz fans, in that I refused to take sides in the great 'trad' versus 'mainstream' versus 'modern' war of that time. I actually liked all of it and said so. I much regret that I never latched onto what was then the really obscure musical scene, followed by even less people than modern jazz - the folksong and dance traditions of England. It would be ten years before I even became aware of their existence, such was the general conspiracy to suppress them.
	I began to add to my record collection at a rather faster rate. The records I wanted were only available from specialist shops such as Dobell's in the Charing Cross Road, and this resulted in my first unaccompanied trips by Tube to the West End, ten miles away. My mother was very worried about this at first, but gradually got used to it.
The wonderful Jesse Fuller, for example, was greeted with incredulous laughter by some in the audience.	I worried her a lot more when I started going to Barnet Jazz Club on Tuesday nights at the Assembly Rooms in Union Street. All the top British trad bands played there and occasionally they brought some very old men over from New Orleans just to play in the interval. This greatly excited me, but to the majority of the punters, who were altogether ignorant of the origins of jazz, these last surviving founders of the music were an embarassment. One sensed that there was even a racial element to their discomfort - what on Earth were negroes doing in a jazz club? Nevertheless, these same punters were responsible for transforming this alcohol-free public meeting hall into the most exciting place I could imagine for two hours every Tuesday night. They were adept at the frantic activity of British trad jiving which they performed barefoot. The girls actually wore jeans and sweat-soaked men's shirts. In the Barnet of those days that made them very weird indeed and the locals were duly scandalized (see Chapter 10). But then, they didn't come from Barnet - they were almost exclusively art students from far and wide. Although they made the atmosphere for me, I affected to scorn dancers and always sat in the front row, studiously concentrating on the music. I thus became a familiar sight to most of the top trad bandleaders of the time: Chris Barber, Kenny Ball, Acker Bilk.
I last saw Humph' at Brecon Jazz Festival in 2007. He was 86 and still playing well.	One day, horror of horrors, I realised that British trad, in the hands of the aforementioned three gentlemen was gradually evolving into a form simple enough for the general public to latch onto, and latch onto it they did. By 1961, it had become a minor pop fashion, but I had already seen that coming and had deserted Barnet Jazz Club except for the occasional appearance by a 'non-commercial' band such those led by Humphrey Lyttelton, Eric Silk or Ken Colyer. I took to following some of these bands to clubs in other parts of London. I never went to modernist clubs except for one visit a bit later to Ronnie Scott's in Soho. They were too expensive, men had to wear ties and waiters ran about with plates of spaghetti. They were desperately trying to be as different as possible from the trad clubs. It was just not my scene. The first jazz concert I ever went to was a much-awaited one in some cinema in Tottenham Court Road given by a band made up of old men from New Orleans, the George Lewis All-stars. I soon afterwards went to a number of other memorable concerts, including Dizzy Gillespie at the Royal Festival Hall, Miles Davis at the Hammersmith Odeon and Mahalia Jackson at the Royal Albert Hall.
	However, I was not content just to listen. When I was about 14 I had found a copy of Hobbies magazine that contained plans for building a classical guitar. I showed this to my father who (as expected) soon took the project in hand, except that he said it would be too difficult to make it guitar-shaped. It would be better, he said, to make it triangular, like a balalaika. With my father's usual resourcefulness in such matters, he only needed to buy wood for the box itself. The shoulder and tuning head were constructed from an old block of wood he had found in a ditch on the way to work; the tuning pegs were moulded from plastic wood and the neck was made from a piece of scrap timber left over from another project. We had no idea where you got fret-wire, so we took the spokes out of an old bicyle wheel, sawed them up and fitted them into grooves cut at the correct intervals according to the plans in the magazine. The final problem was strings. My father supposed that musical instrument strings were the same as tennis racket strings, so we went to the sports shop and bought a load of catgut. We soon discovered this was impossible to tune to the required range of pitches. Eventually we found out about guitar strings from the woman in the piano shop and bought a set there. The extraordinary beast that emerged from these endeavours was just about playable enough for me to learn a few chords before the softwood neck became so bowed that the strings could no longer be pressed down onto the bike spokes.
	My father then bought me a beat-up old f-hole guitar for a couple of quid. It wasn't much better than the 'balalaika' but it lasted me until I was working and beginning to explore the West End in search of jazz record shops. Then I found a wonderful junk shop of the old-fashioned Aladdin's Cave variety in Tottenham Court Road (it was demolished a couple of years later to make way for the Euston Road Flyover) in which there was an ancient and decrepit zither banjo. I have to confess that I was (and probably still am ) just as fascinated and excited by the banjo as the pop fans who were briefly interested in trad. The zither banjo was all wrong for trad, of course, but I couldn't at first find a cheap enough tenor instrument. I paid the creepy old owner the £8 he demanded (I've never had the slightest concept of haggling) and took the instrument home with great anticipation. My mother and grandmother were predictably horrified, their main objection on this occasion being the cost. I'm not sure myself how I came to have as much as £8.
Zither and tenor banjos.	I then embarked on a few months of shutting myself away in my bedroom nearly every evening and weekend going chung-chung-chunka-chunka-chung incessantly in true British trad fashion, causing the poor Akermans to bang on the wall on more than one occasion. I had no time for the idea of tuition, either with a teacher or by book. I had no idea what the tuning should have been, I just continued to use guitar tuning. I wasn't interested in finding out the correct fingering technique, either. I made up my own, which seemed to work just as well. I did, however, get quite a learned little book on how chords work, and with the help of this I worked out every chord and every inversion possible on four strings. By accompanying records for hours and hours I think I became a perfectly proficient trad banjo player, the only snag being that my banjo was all wrong for the job. It didn't look right, it didn't sound right and that 5th (drone) string was a bit of a nuisance for chordal playing with a pick!