Excerpt: Elvis Costello's memoir
In this excerpt from his memoir, "Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink" (Blue Rider Press), the rock and roll singer-songwriter Elvis Costello recalls his father, a dance hall singer, and his early associations with music.
A White Boy in the Hammersmith Palais
I think it was my love of wrestling that first took me to the dance hall.
There was barely a week of my childhood in which I did not have the following dialogue with a stranger:
"Any relation?"
"Beg your pardon?"
"You know? Any relation to the wrestler?"
My mother might wearily manage an indulgent laugh, as if to say, You know, I've never heard that before in my life.
I just felt awkward.
Though, I suspected that I might indeed be a distant relation of Mick McManus, a professional wrestler who was a fixture on the Saturday-afternoon televised bouts. The contests in the early 1960s had none of the pyrotechnics of the modern spectacle, just well-oiled showmen like Jackie Pallo or Johnny Kwango grappling and hurling sweaty lunks around, and sometimes out of, a small roped ring.
Mick McManus spelled his name like my Papa had, before my Dad added an a to make it "MacManus," because it looked posher and better in print.
Anyone could see that I shared the same stocky physique with "The Man You Love to Hate" and had similar plastered-down, black hair.
Later, it was revealed that, like me, Mick could only be forced into submission by tickling. Late in his career, Mick suffered a rare defeat when his opponent used this dastardly tactic, and the champ renounced the match in disgust.
Back around 1961, I would practice my flying scissors kick in front of the television and then crumple as if felled by a forearm smash. Eventually all my jumping off the furniture became too much for the neighbors and my mother wanted to tidy the house, so she persuaded my Dad to take me with him to work on Saturday afternoons at the Hammersmith Palais.
This was my father's place of employment. His office. His factory.
It was just an old tram shed that had been converted into a Palais de Danse, jammed in between the Laurie Arms pub and a parade of the shops just off of Hammersmith Broadway.
While other dads came home at five-thirty, my father went to work at six p.m., or, in this case, on Saturday afternoon, to sing with the Joe Loss Orchestra.
The walls of the Palais looked as if they were made of dark velvet, but it came off like powder if you ran your hand along it. It smelt and felt strange. It didn't seem like a place for children.
Today, it is hard to imagine any establishment opening in the afternoon for so few patrons, but when the Joe Loss Orchestra revolved into view on the turntable bandstand, you would forget it was still light outside.
I was given a bottle of lemonade and a packet of crisps, and was secured in the balcony overlooking the dance floor with strict instructions to not speak to anyone.
The clientele were as curious as they were sparse in number. When I pointed out that two old ladies were dancing together, they were identified as "spinsters."
There was a mother teaching her young daughter dance steps, sometimes lifting her onto her own feet to give the girl the sense of the right rhythm.
Commanding the floor were the competition dancers who used the Saturday matinees for practice sessions. They jealously guarded their territory, intolerant of more frivolous obstacles, like children. From my vantage point, their haughty expressions and sudden frozen poses seemed quite comical, as they cocked their heads and made pecking movements with their necks like chickens. There could also be something quite intimidating about them, especially when they launched into a gallop during the quickstep. Foot soldiers fear cavalry charges for the same reason.
There was nobody else up in the balcony except for the women who checked coats and another who sold refreshments at the kiosk. I think my Dad had charged one of them with checking on me from time to time, to make sure I hadn't wandered off.
She needn't have worried. My eyes were fixed on the bandstand.
At that time, the Joe Loss Orchestra was one of the most successful dance bands in the country. It consisted of three or sometimes four trumpets, four trombones, five saxophones, a rhythm section, and three vocalists. The band opened and closed every set and radio broadcast with its signature tune, "In the Mood," which was borrowed from the Glenn Miller Orchestra.
In fact, they still played a lot of Miller tunes from the war years: the beautiful and sentimental "Moonlight Serenade," "Pennsylvania 6-5000" -- with the band members shouting out the telephone number in the title -- and "American Patrol," which was my favorite, probably because it sounded like the theme song from a cops-and-robbers show.
What the outfit lacked in musical adventure, Joe Loss made up for by hiring arrangers with a keen ear for fleeting dance trends. They had a hit with "Must Be Madison," and recorded novelty tunes with daft titles like "March of the Mods," "March of the Voomins" and "Go Home, Bill Ludendorff," which my Dad wrote with the band's pianist, Syd Lucas.
I still had a child's uncritical ear for the corny bell effect created by the horns on "Wheels Cha Cha" and waited for the tango or the paso doble numbers because of the comical dance moves, or the samba, as my Dad got to play the maracas or the conga drum.
The competitive ballroom dancers used not to care much for vocalists, because they pulled the beat around when phrasing, so my Dad might only get to sing once or twice during the afternoon.
I became impatient for those moments, kicking my leg against the balcony wall and picking idly at a swivel lid mounted on the tabletop, until I pulled out my finger, all grey and powdered with ash.
Finally, my father was called to the microphone to sing a Spanish number. It was a language that he could actually speak. He once made the Spanish wife of a friend of mine blush when she inquired where he had learned the Spanish tongue.
"In bed," he replied.
I believe that this was true.
His talent for learning songs phonetically meant that he was able to fool most people when called upon to sing in Italian, French, or even Yiddish. The Argentine international hit "Cuando Calienta el Sol" and Peppino di Capri's tremulous Italian pop hit "Roberta," sung in Spanish, were two rumbas that I heard him sing during those afternoons. They were eventually recorded for the wonderfully titled Go Latin with Loss album, on which Ross also sang Ritchie Valens's "La Bamba."
My father didn't have the appearance of the typical romantic leading man. He was only five-foot-five and wore black horn-rimmed glasses, much like the ones I've sported most of my career. His hair was slicked tight at the sides and swept up into a discreet jet-black pompadour, until the fashion for brushing your hair forward caught up with him around 1965, when he started to buy Chelsea boots with Cuban heels from Toppers on Carnaby Street.
In 1961, my Dad was thirty-three. "The boys in the band," as he always referred to them, seemed like older men to me, but were probably only in their late thirties and forties. They wore matching band uniforms -- shawl-collared jackets of burgundy or baby blue, and dress pants with a satin side stripe.
My father wore a dark lounge suit for the matinees, and evening dress when the occasion demanded it. The idea that you wore a suit to go to work became so instilled in me that, to this day, the temperature must soar well above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit before I will remove my jacket.
* * *
One evening in 1980, when I'd already had my own brief moment of pop infamy, my Dad and I were talking with Joe Loss's former singing star Rose Brennan and dancer Lionel Blair in an area curtained off from a hotel ballroom in Lancaster Gate. On the television monitor, I could see Mr. Loss conducting his band in the style that was familiar from my childhood. He still shot the point of his baton to the floor and then to the ceiling with one sharp flick of the wrist, with his little finger daintily extended. He still bounced vigorously up onto the balls of his feet and then back down to his heels, a strand or two of hair breaking free, although his once pomaded black had now turned silver.
A production assistant tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Remember, when Eamonn introduces you, just say what we've agreed or you'll throw him off completely."
"Eamonn" was the former sports commentator Eamonn Andrews. He was a man with the impressive build of a boxer who'd had a career on Irish radio before making some of his first appearances in England with the Joe Loss Orchestra and then going on to be the presenter of several long-running television shows. He was most famously the host of This Is Your Life, a show that had begun in the late '50s and was now entering its second decade on the air, since a revival in 1969.
For those of you who don't recall the show, Eamonn would stalk up to some prearranged ambush location, clutching a big red book stamped with the show's title, and surprise his quarry with the dramatic announcement that they had to cancel whatever was planned for the evening because "Tonight, This Is Your Life."
The victim was then usually whisked in a fast car to a television studio, where their family and friends would arrive through an archway, preceded by a fanfare and an introduction that went something like this:
"He was the choirboy who sat next to you in chapel and put live frogs down your cassock. You haven't seen him since 1932, but he's here tonight ..."
Cue laughter and tears and a gentle, somewhat selective, telling of a life story.
On this occasion, the trap was already set, as Joe Loss was playing a dinner dance in honor of his fiftieth anniversary in show business. The comedian Spike Milligan entered the greenroom with a few minutes to spare. I hadn't realized he had any connection to Joe Loss, as his radio fame from his days on The Goon Show and his books Puckoon and Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall seemed to come from a different universe, but it turned out he'd made some of his earliest appearances with the band during summer engagements in towns like Bridlington.
We all huddled around the television set to witness the big moment of surprise. Eamonn Andrews slipped from the shadows as the applause from the previous number tapered off. A few giggles and gasps almost gave the game away.
The penny would usually drop with This Is Your Life victims the moment they saw Eamonn coming their way. Some would back away in mock alarm, others laugh hysterically or shed some tears, a few even fled the scene completely and refused to take part, which is perhaps why the show was no longer broadcast live.
In the split second before Eamonn tapped Joe on the shoulder, a piercing Goon voice called out:
"A thousand pounds for anyone who warns that man!"
If this was audible to the diners beyond the curtain, it was quickly swallowed by applause and cheering.
The details of the Joe Loss story told that night had been fairly sketchy to me until then. Eamonn recounted how Joe had studied the violin and in the early '30s began leading a small group at the Kit-Kat Club called the Harlem Band, a strange name for a group fronted by a man born to Russian immigrants in Spitalfields.
He'd given the wartime heroine Vera Lynn her first radio broadcast in 1935, had played at Princess Margaret's wedding, and then went on to provide the music for several generations of lovers and dancers at the Hammersmith Palais, the Lyceum and Empire ballrooms, and on the radio.
Rose Brennan and my Dad had probably been his best-known singers, so it made sense for them to be surprise guests at the party. They were reunited with Larry Gretton, who still sang with the band. He was a strapping man with a slightly stiff romantic charm and wavy blond hair that may not have been his own. He and my Dad had been good foils in the comedy numbers, not least of all because of the difference in their height. I have a publicity photograph of them dressed in striped vaudeville blazers and clutching straw boaters with matching hatbands while earnestly gazing at their boss, who is posed imparting some important detail about the performance of some long-forgotten novelty song while holding a pencil.
My Dad was announced to the stage first, where he told some silly tale from his time with the orchestra.
Then it was my turn to enter.
Eamonn adopted his familiar style of setup, which I must now paraphrase.
You may remember him as that young man who sat up in the balcony of the Hammersmith Palais.
Now he's the pop star responsible for the hit record "Oliver's Army."
You know him as "Declan," son of Ross MacManus, and he's here tonight. Come in, "Elvis Costello" ...
It was as bizarre an entrance as I'd ever had to make. If I'd had to traipse down one of the gold-painted staircases that framed the Hammersmith Palais bandstand, I could not have felt more peculiar.
During my Dad's time with the band, Joe Loss had never spoken to me as if I were a child. He always addressed me as "young man," seeming kind and engaged in anything I said in response to his questions. Now he was just as gracious and composed upon meeting me for the first time as an adult.
I can't recall exactly what story I told, probably the one you've just read about me visiting the Hammersmith Palais matinees. He seemed to take pride in my success, as if he had suspected it would happen all along.
It was all over in a flash, just like life itself.
* * *
It was impossible to say how much it meant to me to be there or to speak of all the things I probably learned from those few afternoons while lurking in the dark.
Joe Loss led his band for almost sixty years, come rain or shine or changes of style, and that is no mean achievement. A band continues in his name to this day.
Sometime later, my Dad let me in on one of the band's secrets. Joe Loss's energetic showmanship apparently didn't always make for an entirely accurate beat. If there was ever any minor dissent in the ranks, they would adhere exactly to his baton and take evil glee in winding the tempo up and down like a wonky gramophone. It was a subtle, almost imperceptible, form of insubordination, but it probably acted as a safety valve for a group of men who worked in such close proximity, six days a week, in the same dance hall.
The band got just two weeks' holiday a year like any other working-men, but it would also be their job to provide the entertainment when everyone else was celebrating Christmas and New Year's Eve. They worked hard. When they weren't at the Palais or another London ballroom, they were doing radio broadcasts or touring the country.
Some of my earliest memories are of my Dad arriving home with a big stuffed animal under his arm or a small painted plaster donkey that he'd promised to bring back from a tour of Ireland. I have photographs but no actual memory of my mother carrying me as an infant on the sands of Douglas, during an engagement on the Isle of Man in the mid-'50s. In that picture my Mam is wearing pearls and full makeup, but it really wasn't that glamorous a life, with band members always changing from damp clothes in freezing or overheated dressing rooms or crushed together for night drives in drafty coaches along foggy A and B roads.
Joe Loss was a stickler for appearance, punctuality, and discipline. He seemed to regard my father almost like another son, constantly questioning him about his family origins as if unwilling to accept that they were Irish and not Jewish. He even forgave him a fair few transgressions.
I recall one night when Mother had let me stay up late to watch my Dad on Come Dancing. In those days it was a live broadcast that had nothing to do with the stunt casting of celebrities. It was purely a competition between amateur ballroom-dancing teams, so I knew there was little chance that my Dad would be singing, but it was still a novelty to see him on television.
The moment the camera panned across to his side of the bandstand, I think I could tell something was amiss from my mother's reaction.
The show had opened with the Latin dances, and my father was up behind the conga drum playing with rather more force and animation than the number really required.
My Mam went out of the room to put the kettle on and quietly registered her dismay at my father's fairly obvious intoxication.
A short time later the hallway telephone rang, and I could hear a low but anxious tone to her side of the conversation.
My mother seemed to spend quite a lot of time on the phone to one or the other orchestra wives, alternately sympathizing or receiving consolation over their husbands' latest jag. The details were obscure to me then, but from what I overheard and came to understand, drink and other women were generally involved.
After that appearance, my Dad remained "fired" for about three days before Joe Loss relented and hired him back.
I don't recall exactly when my parents parted because, even after he went to live elsewhere, my Dad would come around a lot. There was no big ominous announcement of the parting, or if there was I have dismissed it from my mind.
He'd still sometimes arrive on a Sunday morning and take me to the eleven-o'clock sung Latin mass at St. Elizabeth on Richmond Hill, which they retained long after it was abandoned elsewhere by papal decree. Then we'd all eat Sunday lunch together while listening to Two-Way Family Favourites, a BBC request show linking military families with their kin serving overseas. While the dedications to a lance corporal at a BFPO in West Germany played in the background, my Dad would tell stories, reminiscing about a drummer and painter friend of his from Birkenhead or recounting tales of his working week.
Ross definitely had charm, perhaps a little too much. Young women would call our number late at night, looking to make mischief, until we were obliged to take our listing from the directory.
Although I was never allowed to go to the Palais after dark, I know that the nearly empty dance floor of the matinees was absolutely packed at night and not always with entirely salubrious types.
My mother recalls one of my Dad's more dubious acquaintances extending his hand to her with the greeting "Hello, I'm Phil the Thief," and this was only a few convenient steps away from Hammersmith Police Station.
* * *
Many years after my Dad had left Joe Loss and was out touring the northern clubs and I'd had a couple of hit records to my name, London cabdrivers would delight in telling me, "I used to see your Dad sing down at the Palais," never failing to add, "He was a better bloody singer than you'll ever be," to which they would never get any argument from me.
When The Attractions and I first played the Palais in January 1979, one reviewer unfavorably compared us to Freddie and the Dreamers.
I knew we'd hit the big time.
The dance bands had long been banished and the Palais was now an overcrowded, overheated rock and roll venue, looking a little bit tatty and kicked in.
I wasn't drinking lemonade anymore but did take a walk up into the balcony. The same scent hung in the air, only now I could name the ingredients: sour, spilt beer, stale tobacco, nicotine stains, and, of course, the stifled tears of jilted girls.
You might expect I would have written more than a line or two about the old place, but I pretty much thought that Joe Strummer had put an indelible mark on a brand-new map with the Clash song "(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais."
We didn't really click there until 1984, when we made a circuit of the country, returning to London for a Monday-night residency at the Palais, playing shows that were nearly forty songs long.
I was looking for something I couldn't find.
In 1981, we hired the deserted ballroom for the afternoon so we could stage a photograph for the album sleeve of Trust. Rather than list everyone involved in the credits, we dressed them all in hired tuxedos, sat them behind monogrammed music stands, and gave them rented instruments to hold.
The Attractions were word-perfect. Nick Lowe was pretending to play a tenor sax, while our engineer led the string section. All the other members of the ensemble were our road crew, the staff of F-Beat Records, and the owners of Eden Studios.
The scene was photographed in glorious black-and-white by Chalkie Davies. Two years later, I would sit for a series of 20x24 Polaroids that Davies and Starr shot with a giant Land camera at the Science Museum. It resembled a Victorian plate contraption with bellows. Among the life-size Polaroids peeled back and framed was a portrait of me and my son Matt, then aged seven, but on the afternoon of that Hammersmith charade I was just my father's son.
I took my central place on the bandstand, I hid my eyes behind dark glasses and buttoned up my new silk Savile Row suit.
There was no way to go back.
Time and the wrecking ball have taken care of the rest.
From "Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink" by Elvis Costello. Reprinted by permission of Blue Rider Press. All rights reserved.
For more info:
- "Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink" by Elvis Costello (Blue Rider Press); Also available in eBook, Enhanced eBook, Unabridged Digital Audio Download, and Unabridged Digital Audio CD formats
- "Unfaithful Music & Soundtrack Album" by Elvis Costello (UME); Available via Amazon and iTunes
- elviscostello.com
- Follow @ElvisCostello on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube