Idle Hands Blues

 

We came together again, 50 years after the start, falling quickly into the roles and relationships we had had together all those years before. The Idle Hands.

Lunch at Bibendum in South Kensington.

 

 

A bloke came up to us towards to end of the meal asking who we were. If he was disappointed that we weren’t some starry band from the 1960s, he hid it well. A lone groupie.

The age of isms

The last century or so seems to have been utterly dominated by isms.

Marxism, Nazism, socialism, conservatism, monetarism, capitalism, nationalism, secularism, modernism, expressionism, symbolism…

In practice, while each purports to be a useful way of seeing the world, they each become elephant traps, where beliefs turn into straitjackets, blocking the intrusion of fresh thinking.

When I played with the Idle Hands at the Witches Cauldron in the 1960s, I got to know the sage of the clientele. He was older than me – mid-20s perhaps. I asked him: “What’s at the source of your beliefs.”

“I’m a nihilist,” he proudly announced.

I wonder whether he ever escaped?

Understanding how markets work

“How can they be paying us only £5 a gig?" I wailed. "What kind of a negotiation is that?”

I was joshing Tim Mack, the manager of the band I played in (in the 1960s), the Idle Hands, who had landed us a regular gig at the premier venue in London, the Marquee.

“If you want to try to get more, be my guest,” responded Tim.

So we trooped into the Marquee manager’s  office.

“This is just slave labour,” I ranted. “We are good - and we get paid loads more at other venues.”

“Look,” said the manager patiently, “there are a hundred bands out there as good as yours, and any one of them would play here for nothing. All you guys need to decide is this: do you want to play here or not?”

It was the day I learned for real how markets work.

We had a joyful reunion of the band on Tuesday, less dear departed Tim.

On not being Eric Clapton

Playing with the Idle Hands in the mid-1960s was an exciting and joyful experience. We had plenty of work. Much was around our north London base (Hampstead, Highgate, Golders Green…), where we played well-paid birthdays, weddings, bar mitzvahs and so on for the offspring of wealthy parents. Quite frequently, it seemed, the police would show up in the early hours of the morning following complaints from neighbours about the noise level. Not surprising, I guess, given that we often played in a marquee in daddy’s garden.

The rest consisted of regular (but miserably compensated) club gigs – mostly the Witches Cauldron of blessed memory in Belsize Park, and the wonderful Marquee in Wardour Street, Soho. Alongside the slave-labour wages in those clubs, there was always the chance that we might get spotted and be given fabulous recording contracts.

One evening, after our set at the Marquee, I settled down with a beer to listen to the headline act – John Mayall’s Blues Breakers. As usual, good, I thought. But not especially so. The Idle Hands was a pretty good band too.

Then, in the middle of their set, on slouched a young guy with longer hair, shoulders hunched, back to the audience. He plugged in, twiddled a bit, turned round, and took off.

It was Clapton. Eric. Slowhand. God.

This was a kind of virtuosity so far out of my league that it persuaded me that I should no longer be dedicating my life to becoming a career rock-musician.

Maybe there was some other way in which I might excel. But what?

Poker and the Creatives

At the same time as my day job in the mail-room of JWT at 40 Berkeley Square in the mid-1960s, and playing rock music with the Idle Hands, my main source of income came from poker. Four hours a day, five days a week. I did two shifts – over lunchtime and early evening.

Initially I played with the school in the media department. They were far too good for me. Cautious. Analytical. Poker-faced. And in my youthful, impoverished state, I certainly could not afford to lose. What I gained, though, was a good working knowledge of both strategy and tactics.

Luckily, one day I was invited to sit in with the creative department school. This was the life. Not great at the game, all of them earned substantially more than me, and I could walk away from the table with winnings regularly.

As a bonus, they were such a joy to be with. Open, talented, witty. I don’t remember all their names forty-five years later. Two that vividly remain with me are the outstanding Australian artist and designer, Ken Done (above), and the delightful young writer Llewellyn Thomas, son of Dylan Thomas.

It’s not that I learned much about poker from that school. What I did begin to appreciate was something much more important - the way that highly creative people are, how they function.

Starting out at Grand Hotel

Quite often I get asked about playing as a rock musician at the start of my working life.

Of course I did have a day job as well – as a mailboy at 40 Berkeley Square in the middle of London’s Mayfair district, the home of the leading ad agency in Britain at that time, J Walter Thompson. Coming as I did from a Midland town, I thought Mayfair was clearly the epicentre of the universe. These were the early days of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Mary Quant and all that.

Initially I played in a not-so-great band on the South Coast. I was nineteen years old and the most memorable thing about it was that over weekends I would stay with the manager of our band, also nineteen, who just happened to be the son of the manager of the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne. So of a Saturday and Sunday morning, following a gig, we would eat a sumptuous late breakfast, served by the head butler. Then I would take a leisurely morning by the pool, chatting with whichever celebrity guests happened to be staying at the Grand. These were the first celebs I ever met. They must have been thrilled.

Later I was invited to play with a much better outfit, The Idle Hands, based nearer home in London – in heavenly Hampstead. But that’s another story.

There is no doubt that I learned three big things from those early performing experiences: the paramount importance of good product, constantly evolving; the value of good presentation; and the need to negotiate what the market will bear. Not more, not less.

What was your first job and what did you learn from it?