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along in a fury and slam down the lid. Nor was the elder Korner any better pleased when Alexis brought home his first guitar. ‘My father used to say the guitar was a “woman’s instrument”. He imagined it in operettas, tied with pink ribbon.’

      Two years’ military service brought relief from this parental prejudice. Alexis served with the British Army in West Germany and – as well as playing football for his regiment – became a part-time announcer over the Forces’ radio network. He could saturate himself, not only in the music played to British troops, but also in the far more exciting output of AFN, the American Forces Network. As surreptitiously listening German boys already knew, AFN broadcast the very best in jazz and swing and even types of black music not available to civilians back home in the States. So the blues took root, on NATO bases and, later, in local clubs, amid pornographic bookshops, strip joints and mud-wrestling pits.

      Back in London, working in the shipping firm owned by his mother’s Greek family, Alexis gravitated naturally to that first postwar ‘younger generation’, which haunted the Soho cellars, avid for politics and traditional jazz. ‘We were elitist – and highly political. We used to speak quite seriously in those days of founding a “fourth class”. There’d be the upper class, the middle class, the working class and us. That was how the blues came into it. When we heard a Leadbelly song or a Woody Guthrie song, we knew we were listening to a powerful political protest.’

      The principal jazz bandleaders of the period did what they could to bring blues to the larger Dixieland audience. Humphrey Lyttelton, trumpeter, Old Etonian and friend of royalty, had brought Big Bill Broonzy to Britain as early as 1953. Ken Colyer, most pure of all the jazz and folk purists, featured some of the greatest American bluesmen at his London club, Studio 51, just off Leicester Square.

      Chris Barber remained the music’s most passionate, consistent champion – the only one, in Korner’s words, to ‘put his money where his mouth was’ and plough actual cash into keeping blues alive. Barber, in the early Fifties, had been the moving spirit behind a formal conservation body, the National Jazz League. The league flourished, acquiring sufficient capital to buy its own Soho club, the Marquee in Wardour Street.

      Alexis Korner joined the Barber band as banjoist during Lonnie Donegan’s absence on National Service. When Donegan returned and Rock Island Line became a hit, Korner was well placed, had he desired, to participate in the nine days’ skiffle wonder. He almost joined another successful skiffle group, the Vipers, signed up at the 2 I’s coffee bar by a then obscure EMI-label executive called George Martin. Instead, he formed his own group, bowing to commercial pressure with the word ‘skiffle’ only for its first extended-play record. Thereafter, the group was to be known as Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated.

      The first band in Britain to play nothing but blues was a curious amalgam of fervent fantasy wedded to unlikely and incongruous human shapes. Its chief member, after Korner himself, was Cyril Davies, a fifteen-stone panel beater from South Harrow, a virtuoso on blues harmonica and twelve-string guitar, whose every waking moment was clouded by chagrin that he had not been born a black man. On saxophone there was Dick Heckstall-Smith, who in aspect and manner bore a passing resemblance to Lenin. On double bass there was the future bass guitar maestro, Jack Bruce. The drummer – when Alexis could persuade him to sit in – was a sad-faced boy called Charlie Watts. ‘I’d met Charlie at the Troubadour in Brompton Road, and always liked his playing. I’d said to him, “If I ever form a blues group, would you come in as drummer?” But he’d only do it part-time. He was too busy, studying commercial art in Harrow.’

      It was Korner’s plan from the beginning to start his own club, as Ken Colyer and other musicians had, to protect their chosen music from the jibes or hostility of rival factions. Soho cellars or pub backrooms in those days could be hired for a few shillings a night. Alexis Korner’s first such venture, grandly styled the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club, was a room at the Round House pub in Wardour Street. The residency was sometimes interrupted by disputes between Korner and Cyril Davies, which led one or other to storm off and play in some rival club like the Troubadour.

      As Blues Incorporated became more established, they started to receive bookings further and further outside London. One night, towards the end of 1961, Alexis found himself playing the blues to a rapturous crowd at a municipal hall in the genteel spa town of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

      After the performance, a boy came up to Alexis in the pub across the road and talked to him earnestly – but with evident authority – about the blues and bluesmen. The boy was short but broadly built, and looked well-to-do in his smart Italian suit, white tab-collar shirt and Slim Jim tie. He spoke in a soft, well-mannered voice, lisping slightly. He said his name was Brian Jones. He was a musician himself, playing saxophone semi-professionally in a rock group called the Ramrods. What he really wanted to do, he told Alexis, was play Delta-style slide guitar with a band like Blues Incorporated. Alexis said – as Alexis always did – that if Brian Jones ever came to London, he was welcome to sleep on the Korners’ kitchen floor.

      In March 1962, tired of battling against the prejudice of the Soho jazz crowd, Alexis Korner decided to see how a new blues club would go in his own West London suburb, Ealing. The venue was a small room under the ABC teashop, just across the road from Ealing Broadway station. The first session, March 17, was announced by a small display ad in the New Musical Express.

      The ad caused astonished excitement twenty miles away in Kent, among a self-defeatingly modest group called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, to whom it still had not occurred that anyone else in Britain shared their musical fixation. The following Saturday, crammed into Alan Etherington’s father’s Riley ‘Pathfinder’ car, they set out for Ealing to investigate the extraordinary possibility that other people were playing the blues, to an audience, for money.

       TWO

       ‘WELL, THE JOINT WAS ROCKIN’ …’

      It truly was happening, in a poky downstairs room between the ABC bakery and a jeweller’s shop: their secret music, the contraband repertoire of Muddy Waters, Otis Spann and the Chicago bluesmen, translated from inconceivable distance to deafening propinquity by the oddest imaginable group of men. Blues Incorporated performed, like jazz musicians, with almost professorial seriousness. Alexis Korner, curly-haired and moustachioed, in a white business shirt and tie, occupied the foreground with his Spanish guitar, seated on a chair. Cyril Davies stood next to him, sucking and coaxing the blues ‘harp’ with a breathy passion that made his pleated trousers wobble. Their audience stood around the tiny recessed stage in equal formality, nursing half pints of beer. As ‘Squirrel’ ended his harp solo, snatched the silver slide from his mouth and mopped his streaming brow, he received a round of polite applause like a speaker at a temperance meeting.

      The instant success of the Ealing club proved to Alexis what he had always suspected – that the blues music, for some reason, had its most devoted following in suburban West London. After the second or third night at Ealing, something even more satisfactory happened. Alexis had brought Blues Incorporated away from Soho partly to escape the hostility of the traditional jazz faction. Now, the very clubs that had rejected him were starting to lose business, as more and more of their customers made the long Saturday night trek to Ealing. Even the purist National Jazz League could not ignore the commercial possibilities implied. Harold Pendleton, manager of the league-owned Marquee Club, came out to Ealing to hear Blues Incorporated, and afterwards offered Korner – whom he had previously not admired – a regular Thursday night engagement at the Marquee.

      The band, at that time, had no regular vocalist. ‘I’d sing lead – or Squirrel would,’ Korner later remembered. ‘But we didn’t really believe in words. We were instrumentalists. The words just got in the way.’

      Each Saturday night audience, in any case, was filled with young men, eager to exchange their world of Magicoal electric fires and Bournvita cocoa for the blues shouter’s world of tin tenements and dance-hall queens. Anyone who wanted

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