There is Magic in London Town…

It has been said there is nothing more boring than hearing other people’s dreams. Second-hand nightmares and wandering in the kingdom of Morpheus are not always meant to be shared. However, having had the following dream three times in a fortnight, I feel like recording it.

I am on stage in a nightclub. Late fifties or early sixties plush, all velvet curtains and gild. The air is thick with cigar smoke incense and the tang of rum. Dressed in the type of suit you would expect The Midnighters to wear, I am playing bass and singing. I look around me and see my band all attired in outfits matching my own like some bad boy Beatles. I recognise each member as a close friend, including Stephen Grasso playing the sweetest rhythm guitar.

We launch into a cover of Lord Creator’s Kingston Town. The lyrics are changed and I croon it like Jacques Brel possessed by Lord C. Looking into a crowd heavy with godfathers and rude boys, I find my Lady Love’s eyes and sing:

The night seems to fade, but the moonlight lingers on
There are wonders for everyone

There stars shine so bright, but they are fading at the dawn
There is magic in London Town…

The Secret History of English Jazz

There have been a couple of nights during the last fortnight where I have dreamed of a future where Stephen Grasso and I have become authors of a book entitled The Secret History of English Jazz. It was less an account of the music scene, more of a novel and exploration of an occulted culture hidden in basements. It covered the magic of music from swing to sweet rocksteady. The Café de Paris to after-hour clubs on the Charing Cross Road and a certain Powis Square shebeen. Piron’s New Orleans Orchestra to Cyril Blake’s Calypso Serenaders. Rum libations, sacred smoke and the tale of how the Loa of Bouncers became the Prince of London.

The echoes of dream tumbled into the Soho twilight when I met Mr. Grasso on a Dean Street corner. One pint of the dark stuff at a spit and sawdust then we shuffled a few doors along. Descending a staircase, we entered the Black Gardenia, a strange nightclub that can only be called a true jazz dive. It was the type of venue where it would come as no surprise to learn that Lord C. had once worked the door. I had been warned the Black Gardenia was like something out of a David Lynch movie. I had not been misled.

Tight and dark, it was furnished somewhere between a faded burlesque bar and the Sunrooms of my youth. Surreal touches of decoration were rubbed raw over the cracked bones of dead glamour. There was snakeskin wallpaper in the gents and a boxed skull skulking behind bottles. The most impossibly chic barmaid I have ever seen spent the night looking like a Parisian Maquis poster while the two rooms pulsed to a soundtrack of 1940 swing interupted by the occassional eruption of Blue Beat.

Come nine, the records stopped. A man with more than a passing resemblance to a giant Kyle McLaughlin, ravaged by a diet of booze and pills, walked over the piano beside us. He called out for bits of wood to jack up the instrument so he could put his legs under it, set up his PA and we entered what he called his ‘time tunnel’ as he began to power through 1920s and 1930s jazz standards.

Requests were made and granted. I got a time travel rendition of That Old Black Magic and we also got a beautiful Caravan. This was especially fitting. Its lyrics of starlight mysteries, crossing the desert as a metaphor for crossing the abyss and getting through difficult times together make it something of a favourite with the English Hoodoo fraternity. While my request for some Ken Snakehips Johnson could not be met, his spirit was evoked by our pianist telling the story of how he had performed on the same stage at the Café de Paris where Snakehips had died in the bomb blast.

Having made our own libations and nods to the secret history of English jazz, we climbed back into rainy streets of Soho to dodge rickshaws as they splashed through neon puddles. Down below in the Black Gardenia the time travel was still happening. A crumpled lounge singer five hours off the plane from LA was guesting on vocals as the pianist played the opening bars of Ghost of a Chance. Every note and word a living line of transmission.