Double Bill (Text Only) - Bill Cotton

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visor out of the boot of our car, put them on, and drove off round the circuit. He clocked up a respectable if not spectacular lap time and on returning to the pits said that since there were still four days of practice before the big race he’d plenty of time to sharpen up. On the drive back home he said nonchalantly, ‘Best not to tell your mother about this, she’ll only worry.’

      And so this charade went on throughout the rest of the week. Each morning at breakfast he’d spin some yarn about his plans for the day and Mother would nod, apparently understandingly – until Saturday, the day of the race, when she cut short Dad’s fanciful musings. She said, ‘I don’t mind you not telling me you’re driving in a motor race today, it’s the insinuation that I can’t read that upsets me. The story’s in every newspaper, including the fact that I’m not supposed to know about it. So off you go and if you kill yourself I’ll never talk to you again. And don’t come home stinking of petrol as you’ve done every day this week.’

      In the actual race he did remarkably well. He was due to take the car over at the halfway point when it stopped to refuel. Just before the car arrived at the pit, the petrol bowser drew up and through some fault starting spewing fuel under pressure all over the place. Dad was crouched on the pit counter ready to jump into the car as soon as it arrived and so got a face-wash of high-octane petrol. His goggles were soaked and he obviously couldn’t see clearly. I begged him not to get into the car, but he said, ‘If you think I’m missing this, you’re out of your mind,’ and off he went. He started slowly but the wind soon blew away the petrol film on his goggles and he finished the race a creditable fourth. Some of the legendary pre-war drivers, George Easton, John Cobb and Earl Howe, came up to congratulate him and they all agreed that he’d taught the youngsters a thing or two and shown there was still life in old dogs. However, the strain had obviously taken its toll on him and on the way home he confided in me regretfully that he was hanging up his helmet and goggles. His part-time career as a racing driver was over.

      When I came out of the army, the Cotton family had a house on the Thames, at Old Windsor. There was a whole colony of showbiz people living on Ham Island, and one of them, Reginald Armitage, better known as Noel Gay, was a great friend of my father and mother. He was a successful music publisher who also wrote best-selling songs: ‘The Lambeth Walk’, ‘Round the Marble Arch’, ‘There’s Something about a Soldier’, ‘The Fleet’s in Port Again’, ‘Hey! Little Hen’ and ‘Run Rabbit Run’ – just the kind of music my father’s band played best. One day Noel Gay invited me for a trip up river on his launch. I set out unemployed and I came back with a job as a song-plugger for the Noel Gay Music Company based in Denmark Street, better known as Tin Pan Alley.

      In these jargon-ridden days, song-pluggers would be known as exploitation men. This was a time when many people still had pianos in their front-rooms and made their own music. They’d go along to a Littlewoods store and there in the music department would be a song-plugger sitting at a piano inviting them to buy the song he was playing. If you strolled down Denmark Street in the summer when office windows were open, you’d hear a piano in every room bashing out the publisher’s latest song for the benefit of singers, band-leaders and anyone else who might perform or broadcast it. The song-plugger spent his life trying to bribe, cajole and persuade performers to include his songs in their programmes, which in turn created a market for the sheet music.

      We paid special attention to bands and artists who had spots on radio. Record programmes were becoming a big thing in the broadcasting schedules – there was Jack Jackson’s Record Round-up on a Saturday night, for example, which played many records and helped to create some hits. The ultimate goal was to get your song played in programmes like his or Two-Way Family Favourites, Housewives’ Choice or The Billy Cotton Band Show. We’d even shell out a fiver, which was a lot of money in those days, to get hold of an advance copy of the Radio Times to find out which stars and bands were scheduled to appear on air a couple of weeks later. Then we could badger them to play our music. The band-leader Geraldo was a very big star at that time; he was always on the air, so if you could get him to add one of your songs to his repertoire you were quids in. Another target of the song-pluggers was a vocal group called the Keynotes who had a weekly spot on a radio show called Take it from Here. And at that time every self-respecting cinema had a resident organist. There was a regular spot on the BBC’s Light Programme at around ten o’clock two or three times a week, which was dedicated to cinema organ music, so organists like Reginald Dixon and Robinson Cleaver were among the song-pluggers’ favourite prey.

      The seamy side of the industry was the payment of ‘plug-money’ to bribe artists to sing or play particular songs. A popular singer called Issy Bonn used to start at the top of Denmark Street and call on the music publishers one by one, telling them he had a number of radio engagements coming up and asking if they would they like him to sing one of their songs. He invited them to put their responses in a plain brown envelope. Eventually the BBC, which was still the only domestic broadcaster around, put a stop to plug-money by warning performers they would be banned from the airwaves if they were caught taking bribes. But there was an atmosphere of desperation about the whole business as records became more and more popular and the sales of sheet music plummeted.

      When I first joined Noel Gay, I had business cards printed with my name, William F. Cotton, inscribed on them. One day I tried to get to see the band-leader Oscar Rabin to sell him a song. I gave my card to his secretary who returned it to me smartish saying that Mr Rabin was far too busy to see me. Oscar was a good friend of my father’s but I took his refusal philosophically and was just leaving when he came out of his office.

      ‘Hello, Bill,’ he said, ‘what are you doing here?’

      ‘I’m a song-plugger for Noel and I popped in on the off chance you might be interested in our latest number, but you were too busy to see me,’ I said.

      He looked puzzled and then said, ‘So you’re William F. Cotton! For heaven’s sake, don’t embarrass your dad’s friends by not letting on who you are. You’re not William F. Cotton, you’re Billy Cotton Junior. That’s what your card should say.’

      Thus was my identity in show business fixed by my relationship to my father, and though he’s been dead for more than thirty years, I’m still conscious of being the junior member of a wonderful though sometimes stormy partnership.

      I didn’t work for Noel Gay for very long. Noel had brought his son Richard Armitage into the firm at the same time as I joined, and although Richard and I got on very well – indeed, he was among my dearest friends to the day he died – there wasn’t really room for two apprentices in the business and I wasn’t learning much, so I moved over to Chappell’s in Bond Street, which was run by two American brothers, Max and Louis Dreyfus. They were probably the biggest music publishers in the world at that time, so song-plugging was a serious part of their operation. A chap called Teddy Holmes was the boss of a whole army of song-pluggers and he kept us on the hop; we must have made three or four visits every night to theatres and broadcasting and television studios.

      One of the great things about working for Chappell’s was that they controlled the music for most of the big American musicals around at that time. Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, Carousel … name any Broadway show, Chappell’s would probably have the rights to it. I put some of these American songs my father’s way. The very first, I recall, was ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’. Played by a pianist called Bill Snyder, it had gone to the top of the Hit Parade in the States and the Billy Cotton Band was among the first to play it in Britain. At that time Chappell’s had an office in St George’s Street above which there was a flat where a very young and gorgeous Joan Collins lived with her lover at the time. It was a volatile relationship; they clearly didn’t always see eye to eye. We in Chappell’s office could tell this was the case because it wasn’t only sparks that used to fly above our heads – I remember hearing plenty of furniture and crockery being smashed. That’s perhaps how the delectable Joan trained for some of her later roles.

      It wasn’t all hard grinding labour – we started a show-business football team. One

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