Let’s hear it for the bass player
So who’s your favourite bass player? Lovers of the upright jazz/bass will put their hands up for Charles Mingus or perhaps the wonderful English player Danny Thompson. The brilliant and ultimately tragic Jaco Pastorius still has a big cult following and old rockers will tell you that you can’t beat a bit of Bill Wyman. For me, The Who’s thunderous Jon Entwhistle cannot be mastered. Not only am I a fan, I was also lucky enough to be probably, the last person to interview him for television before his untimely death at the beginning of The Who’s Millenium world tour.
The interview came about because Yorkshire Television wanted to celebrate the making of The Who - Live at Leeds, one of the handful of truly great live rock recordings. We were invited to make a short ten minute piece with the big fella’ at his home, a seventeenth century mansion in the Cotswolds. We arrived at midday to find, like all proper rock stars, Jon Entwhistle was still in bed. We were shown to the bar by Jon’s guitar technician and told “Jon will join you shortly.” When I say bar, I’m not talking a little cocktail thing in a corner with a bottle of drambuie inside a furry pink poodle. This was a full blown pub inside the house, called “The Barracuda Tavern”. Huge stuffed game fish hung on wires from the ceiling. Jon’s hobby we were told was fishing for barracuda.
Jon joined us within half an hour. We sat on two tall stools at the bar and the camera started rolling. I posed my first question “Live at Leeds is regarded has one of The Who’s finest achievements, can you remember much about how it came about?
“I beg your pardon!”
I asked the question again.
“Look I,m sorry, but you’re going to have to speak a lot louder.” Jon’s guitar tech interrupted. You will have to shout Ian.. Jon is very deaf. All those years of playing at maximum volume have shot his eardrums to pieces.
The interview took about an hour to complete. I shouted myself hoarse. And then had my own ear drums blasted when Jon picked up his bass and played a full throttle version of ‘Yong Man Blues.” Our own private rock concert.
As we packed up to leave, Jon’s American girl friend asked us if we’d like to stay for dinner.
We had to decline, telling them that we had to be in London to film a sequence about The Sex Pistols with a director called Julian Temple.
Jon rose up from his stool. ‘Well you’ll have more fun here!” I’m sure we would have done.
The fuller version of this story and much more is now available in Ian’s latest book “Bringing it all back home“
The Mississippi Delta comes to Glasshoughton
My Grandmother’s Father was a horsekeeper at Glasshoughton Colliery. He drank his evening pint at the Royal oak pub and otherwise only ventured from his little house in Churchfield Lane to tend his allotment. I wonder what he would have though if someone had told him “In the next century we’re going to knock this coal mine down, do away with the coke ovens and brickworks and on the slag heaps build restaurants, hotels and a great big ski slope with real snow and casll it X-scape.” Actually I know what he would have thought and said, but I don’t need to repeat it here.
Some things seem preposterous, unreal, but then in time comes familiarity. It’s not such a surprise these days to see young people in alpine clothing heading down the motorway with skis on their roof racks following signs to Glasshoughton. But how many of these people know much about the proud industrial heritage of the village? That the glass in Glasshoughton refers to glassblowing and making and that here was a pit that for over a century employed thousands of men?
And how many of you reading this know that Glasshoughton played a minor role in the development of blues music in this country? In the 1950’s the legendary Big Bill Broonzy was one of the first Delta Blues singers to tour Europe. Broonzy had been brought up behind the mule in the cottonfields of Arkansas. His Grandmother was an emancipated slave. Between the 1920’s and 1958 when he died he made thousands of recordings of authentic country blues. In 1956 he found himself in the north of England, he recorded a live session in a theatre in Nottingham and performed in a Jazz club in Leeds. The story goes that a showbiz entrepreneur owed a favour to a cinema owner. The cinema in question was ‘The Cosy’ at Glasshoughton. One saturday night Big Bill Broonzy was despatched from Leeds to play there. What the youth of Cannon Street near the cinema made of it is anybody’s guess. But apparently it was a great night. I have been told by one or two who went that “I should have been there.”
And my mate Kevin Reynolds tells me that when he first started as an apprentice at Atkinson’s Printers in Pontefract that they still had archive copies of the poster. Long before TV adverts enticed shoppers and skiers to Glasshoughton, The Cosy Cinema encouraged music fans to come and see Big Bill Broonzy.
P.S. The Cosy incidentally closed down in the sixties like lots of other Cinemas. It became a clothing factory called Castletex. This was knocked down in the late 1990’s and the area is now a car park.
What A Wonderful World
Pub 26th October 2006
I did an interview for television with Mr James Corrigan just a few weeks before he died. Mr Corrigan was arguably the greatest of all music and showbiz entrepreneurs in Yorkshire. In the middle of the 1960’s he bought a piece of derelict land in Bradford Road, Batley which had once been the site of a municipal sewage works. He had a vision to create an entertainments venue to rival anything in the West End. Within sixteen short weeks he had built, opened and recruited thousands of members to what became world famous as the Batley Variety Club. Mr Corrigan was impressed first of all by supermarkets that were springing up in every Northern town. He thought that the pile it high and sell it cheap principle could be applied to showbiz. If you had a big enough revenue, a long enough residency and plenty of willing punters you could bring in big stars at reasonable ticket prices.
Batley variety club opened with The Batchelors. Within months it was attracting the likes of Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones. In 1969 Mr Corrigan pulled off his biggest coup. Along with a colleague he travelled to New York with a case of pound notes to visit the office of Joe Guy. Now Joe Guy was a hard-nosed showbiz agent with a roster that read like a who’s who of jazz music; Billy Holiday, Lional Hampton, Roy Eldridge, Benny Carter and the man Mr Corrigan was interested in, Louis Armstrong. A deal was struck to bring Louis, the greatest trumpeter in the history of jazz to Batley, a place that Joe Guy and Armstrong had never heard of.
At the time of the three week residency, the song “What A Wonderful World” was riding high at number one in the charts. The club was packed every night.
With a twinkle in his eye in his last ever interview Mr Corrigan told me about a joke they played on Louis Armstrong. They picked him up from Leeds Airport in a Rolls Royce and chauffeured him to Batley. In the middle of town the driver stopped outside a badly derelict mill. The roof was falling in, all the windows broken. In the street outside mucky kids were playing with busted footballs and rusting bikes. “Welcome to Batley variety Club” said Mr Corrigan. Louis Armstrong and his team looked aghast. Mr Corrigan smiled and said “only kidding” before instructing his driver to continue on to the real club. They say Armstrong’s face was a picture. What a wonderful world!
Music Exams?
Just where to begin, with a subject like this? Well, nothing like a little controversy, so let us pitch in by stating that, for most of us at least, music exams are quite unnecessary - though that’s a long way from saying that they can’t be a good thing!
Perhaps as good a way as any of looking at music exams is as a tool-kit, because they are there not for their own sake, but rather to do a job. Often, parents will be inclined to see the benefits of studying for exams, but in actuality the key to success probably lies more in the student’s own outlook than in any other single factor. With the help of a good teacher, who’s knowledge of the student makes them best placed to advise as to which exam to take, almost anyone can be successful - so long as i) they really want this, and ii) they work to plan. Where things can sometimes fall down is when the student isn’t really committed for themselves, (say, they agreed to it so as to please someone else), or where they seriously underestimate the amount of work to be done. The following is intended to help everyone involved in i) the decision to take, and ii) the preparation for, music exams.
1. Ask yourself, ‘why?’
First of all, you need a clear reason to enter. So, what’s yours? Without a reason that matters to them, what candidate would take all their teacher’s good advice, up their work-rate, and do everything that needs to be done? Once you can answer this question positively, you are ready for question 2.
2. Am I ready to make the effort?
Let’s not underestimate this requirement. You don’t need to be gifted to do this, (and plenty of gifted students underperform!). You do, however, need to accept that there is going to be effort involved, and commit to a regular practice regime, sometimes more than you are used to. Once you get this far, you are ready to ask perhaps the most important question of all -
3. What do I need to do?
This is the question your teacher needs to hear. This powerful phrase, and it’s sister phrase, “What should I do now?” are likely to elicit the time honoured response “I’m glad you asked me that question!” from your smiling teacher. Ask this question, and mean it, and your teacher will be able to coach you to your best performance. As long as you are prepared to act upon the answer, you really should sail through any grade, unless you’ve been over ambitious in the first place. Sadly, as a teacher, it’s not too often that you hear this question, but when you do, you know you are working with a winner.
A Plan for Grade Exam Success
Routine. Get one, now. If you are serious about your music grade, you need a daily dose of practice. Ideally, this routine should be well established before you enter, but if not, then do it now. And no, it’s not really optional.
Practice time. It’s what your teacher says it is - minimum! We shudder to think that people would enter music exams and then practice for less than 30 minutes per day. For higher grades, 60 minutes would be a better minimum. Many teachers refuse to enter candidates who don’t establish these minimums, and indeed, why should they?
Understand the Grade requirements clearly. Ask your teacher to go through these with you, and possibly to then do so again for your parents’ benefit. It pays to understand exactly what you are preparing for, so that you can use your time wisely.
Understand the marking system. Marking varies according to the Exam Board, but you should know exactly how many marks are available for each aspect of the exam. This kind of strategic planning makes success, and also high marks, much more likely. Is there a mark for sight reading? How many marks is it worth?
Fully investigate support materials. Are there study materials available specific to the different parts of the grade? Performance CD’s, graded sight reading examples, scale books etc may well be available, and you should try where possible to use them - because others will.
Listen to your teacher. Sounds obvious; but as every teacher knows, much of what they say doesn’t register the first time.
This guide has been produced based on decades of experience working with exam students up to and including degree level. We hope you have found it useful. Teachers are encouraged to contribute to this knowledge bank, for the greater good of all concerned.
Further information for music students is available at www.northernmusiconline.co.uk
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