For some reason, this short and upbeat piece about how I discovered a love of UK sixties jazz through rummaging around in charity shops in search of something else entirely was the cause of more and longer headaches than pretty much anything else I’ve ever written. From the outset, I knew that there was much more to the idea than a couple of paragraphs about being distracted by post-Pop Art pre-psychedelic sleeve art and trying to describe what AMM sounded like, but I just couldn’t work out how, where and why to use that idea. It first put in an appearance as the opening entry on what was supposed to be a long-running blog charting unlikely charity shop record linked by some sort of vague pop-cultural discovery running narrative, but that ran out of steam quite quickly. The same happened with an attempt to use the abandoned project as the basis for a book, which stalled at pretty much the exact same point. Later I used it with some substantial reworking as a standalone piece on my old website, only to un-rework it when I changed my mind and decided to reuse the other pieces again, and once again found it halted itself in its tracks at the exact same point. Which made it ironic that I was actually discussing Trumpton at that point rather than Chigley, but I’m sure Lord Belborough would not have minded. Anyway, it was clear that there was something in all this, but I just couldn’t work out what. The title I used here, incidentally, came from a Blossom Dearie album track, though on reflection I’d be surprised if anyone bar Louis Barfe spotted that.

Eventually, while I was trying to find a way to incorporate it into Can’t Help Thinking About Me – because while I liked it a lot, it didn’t really go anywhere – I suddenly thought of the ideal direction to take it in right at the last minute, and it now enjoys pride of place as the epic final piece in the collection. You’ll have to actually read Can’t Help Thinking About Me to find out what I did with it, though. It’s available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here. Anyway, while you’re all waiting for it to be delivered/downloaded, here’s the original version of the piece…

I’m quite often asked how and when I cultivated my obsession with sixties jazz. I’m equally often asked why I did, and how come nobody staged an intervention. Well, as bewildering as it might sound, it all started with an album called Music From BBC Children’s Programmes.

Technically, and notably less bewilderingly, it actually started when I was trying to find a copy of that particular album. I had heard of its existence, but knew little about it other than the title – and that’s where my imagination began to run riot. It appeared to date from some time around the mid-seventies; in other words, the exact timeframe that played host to all those hazily-recalled first-awareness-of-television fringe-of-the-memory shows that had retreated so utterly and intangibly into ‘The Past’ that you might as well have just made them up. Something that, in the case of Rubovia, I was regularly accused of actually having done. Which I didn’t, of course, but you can find more about that here.

What transcendentally obscure delights might be found within its grooves? Rentaghost? Cheggers Plays Pop? Ragtime? Barnaby? Whichever still unidentified programme it was that ended with footage of dandelion seeds being blown away whilst a disembodied voice ominously intoned “one o’clock… two o’clock” and so forth? The tracklisting just kept writing itself, in ever more evocative and exciting post-Glam pre-Punk ways. The cover just kept drawing itself too, an ever-fractally-evolving psychedelic splurge with Dylan The Rabbit, Mr Benn and indeed ‘Cheggers’ thrust listenerwards through the magic of clumsy graphic design. Music From BBC Children’s Programmes, it seemed reasonable to assume, was the key to the gates of some sort of retro-nostalgic nirvana. Needless to say I had become ever so slightly fixated on finding a copy.

The only problem, albeit something of a serious one, was that this apparent Noah And Nelly In The Skylark Of The Covenant wasn’t exactly easy to track down. BBC Records And Tapes had deleted it from their catalogue many years beforehand, so simply walking into a shop and buying it was out. It wasn’t really the sort of thing that second hand record shops bothered touching with a bargepole at that point either, so simply walking into a second hand record shop and buying it was out as well.

The only hope, it seemed, was endless rooting around in charity shops. But these were the days before fund-raising joints wised up to the financial potential of a copy of Bringing It All Back Home with a huge coffee mug ring on the cover, and all ‘Long Players’ tended to be flung haphazardly into the sort of shabby corner-shoved cardboard box that required anyone who’d been within ten feet of it to be treated for trichodermic mould inhalation. And even if you had managed to circumnavigate the weird characters standing at awkward angles whilst perusing the same Decca Stereo Sampler tracklisting for hours on end and got to flip through the contents, whilst carefully avoiding the urge to punch Mario Lanza in his irritatingly recurring cardboard face, there was no guarantee that you’d actually find an album that hadn’t been smeared with peanut butter and used as a makeshift trouser press by its previous one careful owner. What you did sometimes find, though, in amongst the miles upon miles of James Last, Bert Kaempfert, Ray Conniff, Johnny Mann, Nina And Frederik, Nana Mouskouri, Johnny Mathis, Manuel And His Music Of The Mountains, Mario Lanza, Mario Lanza, Mario Lanza and Mario Lanza, was an unusually high proportion of sixties jazz records. Presumably the genre afficionados hadn’t quite got around to appreciating the merits of vibe-heavy breathy-lady-voiced Modern Jazz with world music inflections and touches of sitar-and-backward-tape experimentalness yet, because this stuff really did just used to sit there untouched, with the intriguing-looking tinted sleeves and elongated typefaces seeming to become more and more appealing as Barnaby’s Heavy Concept Album seemed to become more and more elusive. After a while, it seemed churlish not to give a couple a try.

This was, it turned out, an entry into a very different sort of secret world to the quasi-psychedelic retro-heavy nirvana seemingly and tantalisingly promised by Music From BBC Children’s Programmes. It was similar how you’d always thought jazz sounded as a youngster – albeit in the mould of those piano-syncopating characters that showed up in the middle of chat shows, rather than stripy-blazered ‘ragtime’ characters like those planks who did the music for Harold Lloyd’s World Of Comedy and indeed exhorted us all to “laugh a while”, “dig that style” and surrender to the comic value of “a pair of glasses and a smile” – but spiralling off in all manner of unexpected directions, with vibraphones and electric organs to the fore and full of smooth instrumental textures, modal chord changes and wild improvisation that evoked some lost Beatle-John-Lennon-Meets-Dalek-era world of arty sophisticates slipping into hip modernist joints serving terrifyingly strong coffee. Even beyond the expected likes of Georgie Fame, Gerry Mulligan, Johnny Dankworth And Cleo Laine and Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger And The Trinity, and half-familiar names like Mike Westbrook and Michael Garrick, there was a whole alternate musical universe of just-out-of-view sounds to explore. There was Blossom Dearie, who sounded on her That’s Just The Way I Want To Be album at least like some hip Kohl-eyed psychedelian that the cover photo confirmed she was most definitely not. There was the entertainingly-named Tubby Hayes, whose frantic impressionistic ‘sound pictures’ seemed almost too fast for the vinyl to keep up with. There was The London Jazz Four, whose underappreciated Take A New Look At The Beatles succeeded in making even the overfamiliar likes of Michelle and I Feel Fine sound like totally fresh compositions. More exotically, there were the bossanova-toting likes of Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto, and the deeply hallucinogenic raga experiments of Wolfgang Dauner, The Dave Pike Set and, of course, The Joe Harriott And John Mayer Double Quintet.

All very exciting, but in the words of another charity shop find from around the same time, “nice though this be, I seek yet further kicks”. And where soft drugs and soft porn lead some on to harder drugs and harder porn, the hapless jazz addict will find themselves drawn towards ever lengthier and more abstract ventures until they arrive at that point of no musical return – ‘free jazz’. No, this doesn’t have anything to do with Jools Holland And His Boogie Woogie Big Brigade playing for the benefit of non-paying passers by. It’s a style of jazz where improvisation takes precedence over melody and structure, and the players dispense with such trivialities as chord sequences and tempo and literally ‘play how they feel’. It’s complex, it’s challenging, it’s intellectual and it gives you an air of depth and sophistication. The only problem is that a good deal of it is basically an unlistenable racket. And yet even that sounds like Mantovani covering Take That’s most commercial single next to the… well, you can’t really call it ‘music’ of a certain band responsible for a certain album with a certain yellow lorry on the cover.

You may struggle to pick out a discernible tune in the wilder works of Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus, but AMM pretty much dispensed with the whole notion of a ‘tune’ altogether. This fluid collective were regulars on London’s mid-sixties ‘psychedelic underground’ circuit, where they donned lab coats and turned the scoffing that free jazz was ‘just noise’ to their advantage, recruiting someone to ‘play’ the transistor radio alongside conventional instruments and doing away with anything resembling riffs or melody to concentrate on creating evocative soundscapes with names like Later During A Flaming Riviera Sunset and After Rapidly Circling The Plaza. Yes, there are moments when the screeching and scraping can all get a bit too much. Yes, there are moments when it sounds like a BBC Sound Effects One Hundred Best Parking Buses With Knackered Brakes album has been dropped on the floor and smashed and then haphazardly glued back together. And yes, there are moments that can only be described as sounding like a goose, browbeaten and exhausted by the relentless cacophony, is weakly pleading to be allowed out of the room. But if you’re in the right mood, it can be quite an entertaining listen. Although it’s not exactly one to break out as ‘mood music’ for a first date.

Free Jazz – it may be ‘clever’, but it’s not big. And what’s more, as the spectre-at-the-feast that was Derek Griffiths yelling “doo dk’n dk’n doo da dooda dadooda, do do do do do d’doooo!” kept naggingly reminding me, it was an improvisation too far from the real musical holy grail; as indeed the above overlong and overcomplex write-how-you-feel free-form shenanigans have been from the point that I’m supposed to be getting to. As Sun Ra And His Arkestra jetted off further into some kind of sax-wailing cosmos, Bod And His Friends were wandering into a horizonless green void. And I was somewhere in the middle, still rifling through those hazardous cardboard boxes in search of Music From BBC Children’s Programmes.

Buy A Book!

You can find a massively expanded version of this feature, looking at what experimental jazz you should and shouldn’t use as ‘mood music’ for a date and what happened when I finally did find a copy of Music From BBC Children’s Programmes, in Can’t Help Thinking About Me, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. I’m not sure if they allow them in charity shops but it might mask the smell of those cardboard boxes a bit.

Further Reading

The $1,000,000 Collection is a feature looking at some of my favourite examples of UK Sixties Jazz sleeve art, including many of the albums mentioned in this, which you can find here. Diggin’ The Dankworths is a record by record guide to the hidden beats and grooves in the sixties output of Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth; you can find it here.

Further Listening

You can hear (and see!) me talking about BBC2’s jazz-fuelled arts happening The Original Peter on Perfect Night In here.

© Tim Worthington.
Please don’t copy this only with more italics and exclamation marks.