Thanks for the memory
1960s
In the small hours of a cold December night, Big Nev, Clive, Archie, Fred and Jimmy the Voice – the usual line-up of the Gerry Gerona Showband – were first into the van.
Once all the gear was fully loaded, with most of it under a tarpaulin in the trailer attached behind, they each clambered into their usual seats.
Ted, the band’s leader, then invited the four forlorn, frozen and barely teenage members of the up-and-coming new group, The Gemstones, his guest support act, to ‘climb aboard’. They slotted themselves in, perching where they could between instrument cases, mic stands and a crash cymbal or two.
After checking all the doors, Ted got into the driver’s seat to take the wheel, choke-starting and coaxing the cold and tired Thames Transit engine into life.
A few beers had been consumed by the adult band members during the dinner dance, and the mood amongst them was lively, considering the late hour and the long drive that lay ahead.
The Gemstones sat and listened, feeling a bit queasy – with too many shandies inside them – and too tired and inexperienced to join in with six tipsy adult men keen to take the mick out of each other and get the best laughs.
As the van moved off, almost as if he’d waited to be out of earshot of the ruddy-faced Master of Foxhounds who’d waved them away, Archie, the alto sax player, asked Big Nev, ‘What the bloody hell came over you pissing into the punch like that?’
Big Nev, before the event started, had jumped onto the main drinks table and taken a leak into the giant silver bowl that was the centrepiece. Timed so that all the serving staff were having their break before the guests arrived, his anarchic display was more of a private act than a publicity stunt.
Nev’s views on Hunt Ball goers were well known and he proudly tried to pass off his startling and dramatic gesture, which they’d all witnessed as they were setting up, as a comment on society. ‘Call it a political statement, if you like,’ he said.
When Archie took the high moral ground saying, ‘It was uncalled for … it’s not right … it just isn’t the way to behave,’ Big Nev groaned.
He casually pointed out to the others, ‘Archie isn’t usually such a prude, is he? Isn’t it about now he takes his cock out to boast how big it is?’
Clive, the drumbeat of the band, corrected him and, as if counting in the brass section, announced that, ‘No. At this point in the journey, it’s Fred who always starts the coarse stuff by setting light to his farts with his Zippo.’
‘In that case, I think I’d better transfer him to the wind section,’ said Ted, ever ready with a quick quip to make the band laugh.
With the van stop-starting at traffic lights and swaying with its trailer at roundabouts, The Gemstones fell in and out of sleep, catching, when half awake, the end of the blue jokes and risqué tales.
They were fascinated by Jimmy’s detailed account of the women he’d snogged that very night whilst their husbands got pissed – ‘literally’, he kept saying – on the punch.
Most of what the band bantered about seemed like a forbidden world to the sleepy members of the young pop group to whom the mysteries of women were as much a challenge as the intricacies of playing musical instruments. The older men’s stories of prowess in both fields heightened the mystique and further embarrassed the youngsters into silence.
A quick course of Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day book and a few extracts of Lady Chatterley’s Lover hadn’t done much to advance their knowledge musically or sexually, so they kept mum and listened in.
The average age of the Gerry Gerona Showband was possibly fifty-five or thereabouts, for certainly a couple of them were well into their sixties. The Gemstones thought that they were creatures – like the dance band music they played – from a distant era.
Ted was always saying The Beatles and other rock ‘n’ roll artists were killing his livelihood. That’s all he really wanted to talk about in the van, both to and from every gig. ‘How can we move with the times?’ was the question he threw out again and again.
‘The bookings are drying up. There’s almost nothing in the pipeline. New Year’s Eve maybe, but even Christmas office dinner dances are getting few and far between,’ he would complain.
‘I’m going to go on the cruises next year,’ said Nev, who’d said the same thing last year. ‘That’s where the old timers who like to dance still hold sway. That’s the only future for me.’
Moving with the times meant all kinds of things to Ted. He regaled the van with stories of him supplementing his income by selling the metal hangers you get from dry cleaners door-to-door on the local council estates.
‘People like that take stuff to the launderette so they’ve never been given the free hangers and they think they’re getting a bargain at thruppence each from me.’
‘Are you cleaning up, Ted?’ asked Archie, who’d heard it all before.
As the journey reached the halfway stage, one by one the band members could hardly be bothered to josh each other and Ted knew he had to keep them entertained. The pattern was a well-established routine. The others would listen to him and, if he got the odd sarcastic quip back, he was happy enough.
To keep himself awake as much as the others, story after story came tumbling out of Ted, who had the optimism of a habitual gambler running through his veins.
And nobody could get the better of him. Like the time the police stopped him fly-tipping soil by the fence of a closed municipal tip, just as he was halfway through emptying the contents of the back of his van out onto the verge.
‘“Oh, no, officer,” I said, “I’m loading this excellent top soil into my van, not out of it. I’m getting rid of it. I’m removing it. I’m actually doing the council a favour.”’
The policeman apparently could only look from the earth on the ground to the earth in the van and scratch his head as Ted commenced, before his very eyes, to shovel it – from verge to van – in the reverse direction from his earlier, unseen, action.
‘“Every day’s a bonus”, I shouted after him as he got into his Z-car,’ Ted boasted.
He could distract himself and the others with his daft outwitting of suburban authority, but only for so long, before he returned to moaning about the future outlook for his pseudonymously named band.
Ted believed Gerry Gerona was his real persona and on stage adopted it in his easy, confident announcements during the evening and especially when he closed the show with, ‘And now, the silky sounds of the Gerry Gerona Showband and the velvet tones of Jimmy the Voice will caress you and bid you goodnight as we end our evening with ‘The Anniversary Waltz’ and you lovely, lovely people take to the floor for one last dance.’
Even the band members called him ‘Gerry’ most of the time, especially Nev, who used it in a slightly mocking tone. He told the others once, that when he’d gone to see Ted in hospital after his heart operation, he’d joked about him being ‘Gerry and his Pacemaker’ – and told him ‘You’ll Never Walk Again’. Taken up by the others, but only behind Ted’s back, they all laughed whenever they used it, of course. Extraordinary how potent cheap jokes are.
‘We’ll have to look for work elsewhere,’ Ted would say. This hit them hard and usually silenced the van. It was worse for Ted, because he was a professional band leader and only occasional credit draper, and for Nev, who was a full-time jobbing bassist playing for anybody, anywhere, any style. The others were only part-time musicians with Archie a car factory worker, Fred a miner, Jimmy the Voice a sales rep and Clive a music shop assistant, and they could all rely on their day jobs to see them through.
‘We’ve just got to stick with it. This pop stuff is just a flash in the pan,’ Ted would tell them, trying to convince himself that his dance band would survive. ‘Take our most popular sets like “The Veleta”, “St Bernard Waltz” and “The Gay Gordons”. They’ll outlast “Twist and Shout”, “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. You can’t dance to those. They won’t stand the test of time. In fifty years who’ll remember these young kids and their silly pop groups? I ask you. And I tell you this: our repertoire will be more in demand than theirs.’
The Gemstones would keep quiet during these outbursts, as if they knew that the day The Beatles had gone to number one was the day that his music died.