When Jeffrey Kruger opened The Flamingo jazz club in August 1952, it was parents and elders who largely dictated a young person’s musical taste. So at that time it would have been impossible to visualise the important role the club would play in stimulating the youth-driven mod movement of the early 60s.
At the beginning of the 50s, a British jazz enthusiast had limited options to expand on his knowledge of the music. Dance bands were popular, and these jazz-inclined outfits were the type most likely to be broadcast by the BBC. Groups performing a home-grown form of traditional New Orleans style were also admired enough to keep them above ground. But the general public misunderstood modern jazz, the kind you might analyse rather than dance to, and it was considered by some to be insular, cerebral music that might appeal mostly, if not exclusively, to those of a higher mind.
“Absolutely,” Kruger says. “There was little or no press coverage of jazz, modern or traditional. To radio it was a dirty word and TV [treated it with] complete indifference. Eventually, I did persuade BBC TV to let me arrange a prime-time one-off show, but only when I said I would add film star Jack Lemmon [to the bill – Lemmon was an accomplished pianist and singer]. He did play on the show and it drew reasonable viewing figures. We finally got a Thursday night jazz show on radio, which helped us expand our goals. We even managed to persuade the BBC to allow credit that certain musicians appeared ‘by arrangement of Jazz at The Flamingo’, and so awareness of the club gradually increased. But the BBC and radio producers were still not amenable to jazz. In the eyes of the BBC, jazz was headed by bandleader Ted Heath, while other musicians suffered financially in front of a limited audience.”
Jeffrey Kruger had an innate love of jazz. Born in the East End of London, he learned to play piano and aspired to be a professional musician. It was after listening to the two-handed fluency of pianist Erroll Garner that Jeffrey decided to lower his ambition in that direction. He has said, “I had a burning desire to be the best at anything I set out to do,” and he realised his skill as a pianist might only reach a disappointing level.
His idea to start a jazz club seemed to be a good alternative. In this environment he would mix business with pleasure, and nothing could be better than having regular contact with like-minded people. Jeffrey’s aim was to showcase eminent musicians in comfortable surroundings. Jazz fans were generally used to much less. Their experience took place, more often than not, in a dingy basement or a smoky upstairs room above a pub. These venues were a meeting point as much as anything, jazz or no jazz, where drinking was allowed; but to be fair, many generated a suitable atmosphere for the purpose, an indefinable mix of beer, heady music, and a satisfying sense of decadence that was sometimes hard to feel in smarter places.
Kruger walked around London’s West End during his lunch hours, looking for a suitable place to set up a jazz venue. He eventually found one. The original Flamingo was situated beneath the Mapleton Restaurant, at the junction of Coventry Street and Whitcomb Street, Leicester Square. It moved five years later, in April 1957, to fresh premises at 33-37 Wardour Street, in deepest Soho. The first venue was promoted as “Britain’s most comfortable club”. Male visitors were expected to wear ties. According to an article in the February 1953 issue of Jazz Journal, “1,500 fans queued for hours in hope of admission” on The Flamingo’s opening night and apparently police were brought in to control the crowd. We shall probably never know whether that head count of potential customers was scientifically arrived at, but it’s certain The Flamingo was a success from the start.
For the next 15 years, until the closure of The Flamingo in 1967, by then renamed The Pink Flamingo, virtually every notable British and American jazz musician and vocalist performed there. “Jazz” restraint was gradually eased over the years; by the early 60s, the club had embraced rock’n’roll, featuring artists such as Jerry Lee Lewis, and gave the stage to numerous American blues singers during the so-called “blues boom” of that period, as well as to many of the white UK bands that caused it.
Back at the beginning, Kenny Graham re-formed his Afro-Cubists for the opening night at the club to play an intellectual form of Latin bebop. The Tony Crombie Quintet, featuring Ronnie Scott and Joe Harriott, quickly became the resident group, and Keith Christie’s Quintet also had regular bookings. Earlier that year, trombonist Christie had recorded with Scott and Johnny Dankworth, as a member of a group called the 1952 Melody Maker All-Stars. The Johnny Dankworth Seven, Parnell All-Stars, Jimmy Walker Quintet and Ronnie Scott Quintet all guaranteed a full house when they appeared at The Flamingo. Baritone saxophonist Ronnie Ross, a featured player with the Tony Kinsey Quartet, was also sure to pull in customers. Teenager David Jones (aka Bowie) never failed to drop Ross’ name into conversation as the man who taught him to play saxophone. Thelma Carpenter, and Sarah Vaughan, on her initial UK tour, were two of the first female vocalists to perform at the club. Later, in ’54, Billie Holiday made an appearance to the loud applause of a devoted audience.
Holiday drew acclaim on stage, but few had more first-hand experience of acute racism than Billie Holiday, except, perhaps, many of the Caribbean immigrants who came to Great Britain during the post-war years. From 1945 onwards and especially during the 50s, when immigration from the Caribbean rose, black people were commonly regarded as a threat to national character. Many folk in the UK, in particular those in rural areas, had yet to come face-to-face with a black person. Although an official colour bar did not exist, a dividing line of prejudice was felt by immigrants in most walks of life, from public houses to the workplace. In 1952, only a tiny percentage of lodging houses in London were prepared to take in black tenants, which often led to families living in squalid accommodation elsewhere.
The London jazz scene had few qualms about race and benefited from immigration. Jamaican-born alto saxophonist Joe Harriott and trumpeter Dizzy Reece were just two of the notable players who enhanced the fabric of British jazz. Harriott moved to London in 1951, three years after Reece, and developed his style from bebop to a more complex free-form approach. He was the featured player with Tony Kinsey’s Quartet on 7 April 1957, the opening night at The Flamingo’s new location in Wardour Street. The Jazz Couriers shared the bill. This was a sextet fronted by Ronnie Scott and tenor sax and vibes player, Tubby Hayes. The Jazz Couriers and the group’s constant appearances at the Flamingo played a pivotal part in establishing Hayes’ huge reputation. The band broke up in August 1959, apparently because members became bored with “the same old circle of clubs”, and because their familiarity as musicians created lingering problems, with an admission that “we knew each other’s style so well that we were repeating ourselves at times”.
Jeffrey Kruger was also becoming disgruntled with some jazz musicians. He was fed up with their self-importance. Modern jazz players inhabited a fairly insular world and some of them had become subject to the big fish in a small pond syndrome. “The Flamingo guys wouldn’t smile at anything,” Kruger remarked during a 1973 Melody Maker interview. “Entertainment was a dirty word to modern jazzmen, and no one could tell them [anything].” On a tour shared between the Jazz At The Flamingo unit and Ted Heath’s band, his musicians asked for more money. “I said ‘no’, they would only get more money if they tried to entertain audiences and not just play in an introverted manner. They didn’t like it at all.”
Dealing with prima donnas put a twist in Kruger’s long-term ideas about nurturing the art of jazz. His thoughts now turned to starting a record company. This plan got under way after he persuaded his father, Sam, to manage The Flamingo. Kruger says: “He had more patience than me, and he got on with the musicians.”
During the 1950s, the UK record industry had been dominated by the ‘power’ five: Decca, with its subsidiaries Brunswick and Coral; the EMI group of labels, such as Columbia, Parlophone and HMV; the Dutch company Philips with its Fontana offshoot; Pye, which had been set up in the mid-50s, and Oriole. The latter company also produced Embassy records, a budget line that only sold at Woolworth’s. A feeling of change in the business began when a new label, Top Rank, was launched in January 1959, and exactly a year later when the independent record producer, Joe Meek, started the short-lived Triumph Records. Jeffrey Kruger felt the change, too. He had little experience of the record business but he thrived on a challenge.
Kruger was always interested in publishing, and he represented Angel Music in the UK, a part of the US group Herald/Ember, a successful independent record company that primarily released R&B and doo-wop. The deal with Herald president, Al Silver, allowed Ember Records (International) to be set up and based in London. After releasing a few jazz LPs on this permutation of the Ember label, a 45rpm pop series began in June 1960.
Kruger’s publishing company owned the rights to a song that had become a hit in Europe for two teenage brothers from Copenhagen, Jan and Kjeld Wennick. The number had attracted several cover versions but the original had not been released in the UK. Kruger has said that Ember had no distribution facility but he went ahead and released Jan And Kjeld’s Banjo Boy/Don’t Raise A Storm, complete with a picture sleeve, as the first Ember single.
It was impossible to go on obtaining the rights to records that were already a hit, or predict what might become a hit. So instead of specialising in one type of music, Ember’s policy was to issue any style that might be likely to sell. “We went through every trial and tribulation before Ember started to run like a proper record company,” Kruger has said. When everything did come together, it was the first independent UK label to have its own pressing and distribution facility.
Ember Records was far from being a one-shot operation. Virtually every musical category was included in its programme of releases, from mainstream European pop to soul and psychedelic experimentation. Some of Ember’s considerable output of singles, EPs and LPs have little collectable cachet today, but the number of valued items overshadows them. The company’s good fortune was boosted further in 1963, when composer and producer John Barry left EMI to join Kruger’s label. A few hits came as a result of this move, notably with the folk duo Chad Stuart and Jeremy Clyde. In July 1963, a provocative single was released, Christine/S-E-X, as by Miss X, which perhaps some people still believe is an assumed name for Christine Keeler. It’s not. It’s actually Joyce Blair, the late sister of dancer Lionel.
During a recent interview, Kruger was asked if he thought jazz had become more within the reach of the general public by the late 50s, because of the release of accessible films such as, Jazz On A Summer’s Day and I Want To Live, plus easy exposure to overt jazz scores for TV shows like Johnny Staccato and catchy jazz tunes such as Paul Desmond’s Take Five, which entered the pop charts. Kruger replied, “Everything helped. Remember, we persuaded British film producers to use jazz music in their TV series, and Tony Crombie and Bill LeSage’s themes were featured in TV series like Man From Interpol and The Cheaters. All in all, about 80 films we supervised for the Danziger Brothers featured British jazz in one form or another.”
Meanwhile, the Flamingo was buoyed by its Friday and Saturday all-nighters – midnight to dawn sessions which began as early as 1953. “I think the Sunday afternoon and all-nighter sessions influenced the transition,” Kruger says. By this, he means the gradual changes in musical outlook that took place at the Flamingo, from the early be-bop years through R&B, soul and beyond. “First we used Jamaica’s Count Suckle and his then-monumental sound system. He featured Jamaican music sounds not previously heard in the confines of a jazz venue, and he introduced ska and reggae.
“[It was] the GIs (from American military bases set up in England during WWII) who influenced the decision I made to introduce the all-nighters. They brought records from the States, and from these sounds, new thoughts were conveyed to our jazz musicians and people like Georgie Fame.”
Georgie Fame And The Blue Flames was the band that arguably altered the course of events at The Flamingo and also influenced the pattern of mod culture in Britain. Fame, from Leigh, Lancashire, changed from his real name Clive Powell at the suggestion of impresario Larry Parnes, who signed the Blue Flames to back Billy Fury. The singer eventually decided the group was too jazzy for him and they parted company in 1962. Pianist Fame took over vocals and the band soon became a resident act at the Flamingo. Fame was an ideal musician for the predominantly black audience at the club. He was cool in the real sense of the word, influenced by his taste for some of the smoothest purveyors of jazz and blues such as Mose Allison and Willie Mabon.
Fame had absorbed Jamaican music from frequent visits to cafés in the Portobello Road and Ladbroke Grove area of London. He also admired disc jockey Count Suckle. When Fame heard the Count play Booker T And The MGs’ Green Onions for the first time, he switched from piano to electric organ. The Hammond, played in a fluid jazz context, became immensely popular during the 60s, to some extent killing off the connotations of its stodgy use in theatres around the country.
In terms of national awareness, the release of Fame’s debut LP Rhythm And Blues At The Flamingo was one of the most effective public relations exercises in the history of the club. Nowadays, with the common practice of downloading music from the internet, it might be difficult for some people to imagine how powerfully stimulating a 12” image on a tactile LP sleeve could be. The cover of Fame’s record shows the artist seated behind a Hammond, apparently performing live; and aside from his slightly retro check jacket he is the embryonic clean-shaven, short-haired mod with collar and tie. The sleeve design was not as arty as some jazz album covers tended to be, but it’s not a glossy studio portrait of a pop star, either. It’s a picture of stylish youth in charge of business.
Georgie Fame’s manager was the German-born Rik Gunnell, who, with his brother Johnny and associate Tony Harris, took over the running of The Flamingo in 1959. Rik was a tough character with history as a boxer, a drill sergeant in the Army, a worker at Smithfield market and a club bouncer. By the late 50s he was also a seasoned entrepreneur. Gunnell had met Harris, the manager of the Mapleton hotel, in ’55 when he opened the all-nighter Club Americana there. They later urged Kruger out of The Flamingo, on those premises, in order to run more nights as Club M. The decision to open another club was to accommodate the large number of black patrons, many of them African-Americans with limited social opportunities outside of club life. In 1958, the Gunnells quit the Mapleton under allegations of their club being frequented by drug dealers and prostitutes. Soon afterwards they went to see Jeffrey Kruger to patch up old differences, and it was agreed that Rik would organise the launch of all-nighters at the Wardour Street Flamingo, while Johnny booked the bands.
A few people, including Georgie Fame, are in print as saying The Flamingo could be an intimidating place in the early 60s, where “gangsters, pimps and prostitutes” hung out, and fighting among customers was not unusual. The Gunnells were physically equipped to deal with fights, and hookers went with the territory. Soho, “the dirty square mile”, had been London’s centre of the sex industry for most of the 20th century. Innocuous shop fronts housed pornography in their back rooms, clip joints fleeced customers with extortionate charges and the promise of sex, and until the 1959 Street Offences Act, prostitutes could be found on virtually every street in the area. With the new legislation in place, “working girls” increasingly used coffee bars and clubs as a means to liaise with customers.
Christine Keeler was a frequent after-hours visitor to the Flamingo. She was the protagonist in the 1963 political sex scandal, brought about by her simultaneous involvement with John Profumo, the Conservative War Minister, and Yevgeny Ivanov, who was attached to the Soviet embassy in London. Keeler had also been seeing ‘Lucky’ Gordon, a Jamaican street figure with a liking for jazz. In October 1962 at The Flamingo, he started a fight with Johnny Edgecombe, another of Keeler’s boyfriends. Their violent confrontation ended with Gordon being taken to hospital to patch up a deep knife wound on his face. This incident at the club played a significant part in the unravelling of the tangle of vice that was Profumo Affair.
The music being staged at The Flamingo changed dramatically during the first part of the 60s. Georgie Fame was always a big draw throughout his three years’ residency at the club. The Gunnell agency also managed artists and groups such as Rod Stewart, Chris Farlowe, Geno Washington, John Mayall, PJ Proby, and Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band, and promotion at the Flamingo helped all of them to become established. Young white groups were now plundering the blues’ back catalogue for inspiration and repertoire, which to their credit was usually developed with a distinctive British voice rather than as a straight imitation of the source. Indeed, the careers of many American bluesmen were resurrected on the strength of intense recognition by some UK bands. But it was not just the music of change; the youth movement that began in the 50s had finally arrived with style and a mind of its own.
“Are you a Mod, or are you a Rocker?” This was the question being swapped between two distinctive parties of young people. There was a world of difference between them although, logically, there should not have been. Mods, derived from the word “modern” or “modernist”, were tailored posers on the music scene, while rockers, generally thought of as being leather-clad motor bike riders, still clung fast to 50s rock’n’roll. But apart from any physical aspects, distinction was all to do with attitude and choice. Mods and rockers were of course united by age and history, which meant that virtually all of them had grown up listening to Bill Haley and Elvis. To become mod, however, was to make a lifestyle decision that took in various other cultural pursuits besides music. The mod movement began in the East End of London and eventually found its centre point in the jazz clubs of Soho, before spreading to other parts of the country.
While an archetypal rocker enjoyed nothing better than zooming up to the Ace café on the North Circular Road [it’s still there] to enthuse with other bikers about Eddie Cochran’s old hits, all talking themselves away from a changing world that threatened familiar comforts, a mod was somehow convinced he was in a different class. He might have lived in a cold-water house with an outside lavatory but the Vespa out front was his Lamborghini. His record collection was likely to include modern jazz albums he never played, didn’t understand, but loved for their superior cover designs. He would settle for something soulful to listen to, Barbara Lewis or Marvin Gaye, although in company he might bluff about Monk and Mingus. Our mod was empowered by superficial notions; perhaps he would become the next David Bailey, or at least get a date with one of his Vogue models. It was good to dream about upwardly mobile possibilities.
Jeffrey Kruger was asked recently, “To what extent did The Flamingo influence or promote the so-called mod movement of the 60s?” He answered obliquely, “Several books have been written on the subject but I can’t recall [any reference], when alluding to the mods, that visitors to London should go to The Flamingo, the ‘icon of British jazz’. [Some authors] have praised me but I cannot pat my own back, they have done a far better job [in talking] about my influence. We did act as innovators, though, and a major breakthrough came when we started Ember records.”
Kruger did not specify authors or books, but at least two publications in the 50s anticipated the ethos of 60s modernism. The Outsider, by Colin Wilson, published in 1956, although motivated by rebellious beat culture of its day, describes a forward-looking youthful interest in European fashion and films, a social life built around coffee bars and jazz clubs; a general obsession with style that required a moody countenance to make the all-important statement of intellect. The second book, Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners (1959) revolves around club and coffee bar culture where an individual’s taste in fashion and music expresses freedom of thought. The protagonist, a young white photographer living in an immigrant area of Notting Hill, absorbing black music and jazz, narrates events surrounding the 1958 race riots. In one incident a group of white youths attack neighbouring black men, which has been described as an allegory for future conflict between mods and rockers.
1963 saw some of the first skirmishes between mods and rockers, but the big event came over the Whitsun bank holiday in 1964, when the rivals clashed at seaside resorts such as Brighton and Margate. The press predicted it, but there has probably never been such an overblown massaging of the message by the media. Nevertheless, sedate Britain was shocked by the news of this (reported) scale of delinquency.
In the relative safety of The Flamingo, mods could behave as they wanted to, posturing in fashionable French or Italian clothes. With more disposable income than ever before, young men about town could now indulge themselves by shopping in the boutiques of Carnaby Street. Those with a more limited income would go to Burton for tailor-made suits. Mod males dressed to impress their mates as much as their girlfriends, but the girls were not to be left out of the mod fashion stakes. Dresses became shorter in length and patent leather shoes and accessories were de rigueur. Heavy make-up was used to emphasise the eyes, and hairstyles came in various short and sleek geometric shapes. A bob cut with low fringe, inspired by celebrities such as Cathy McGowan, TV presenter of Ready Steady Go, was popular for a while.
But a modernist’s personality was largely
shaped by his taste in music. Regular visitors
to The Flamingo, and other London clubs,
could experience the “in” sounds (often
with a boost from amphetamines to sustain
all-night programmes), which were considered
by some to be a replacement for, rather than
an extension of, earlier styles of music. How,
then, did the transition of musical forms
throughout the two previous decades lead
to a kind of tribalism between two sections
of Britain’s youth?
By 1964, anyone between the ages of 15
and 25 years would have been exposed to 50s
pop music. The eldest in that group had been
born during World War Two and would
certainly have heard jazz, consciously or not,
in the form of swing bands on the wireless.
Radio also dominated home entertainment
during most of the 1950s, and during the
early part of that decade it would have been
hard for anyone to deny enjoying Sinatra-styled
crooners and ubiquitous British
singers such as Alma Cogan, who sustained
popular music in the flatline period before
the advent of rock’n’roll.
Rock’n’roll did more than light the fuse to
a series of musical explosions: it gave the
young a confident voice of their own. This
invention for newly christened “teenagers”
gathered momentum and the eventual
softening of hard core R&R gave rise – some
might call it a “descent”! – to an era of
colourful early 60s mainstream pop music.
Diehard rockers who longed for a return of
their music stayed rooted, heart and mind,
in the 50s. So-called modernists had shed all
of that some time earlier. They were now
listening to soulful R&B and jazz-inflected
dance music, as well as identifying with British
pop groups such as The Who, The Kinks and
the Small Faces. “Faces”, in mod terminology,
were those individuals
who set fashion trends
rather than following
them. They were
considered, by other
mods, to be the best
looking in their circle,
the ones who knew all
the latest dance steps, the
ones who could obtain and
perhaps supply the “uppers”
necessary to stay on top of their game.
Curiously, a desire to move forward and
be revolutionary in the musical spectrum
resulted in a return to one of the most
ancient genres of all – the blues. Not
a great many people in Britain had heard
of bluesmen such Howlin’ Wolf and
Jimmy Reed, or the quirky Screamin’ Jay
Hawkins before the early 60s, but here they
were being presented in the clubs as old
friends and were selling records like never
before. A generally palatable form of modern
jazz, with more defined melody lines and a
discernible metre had also emerged, thanks
to players such as Jimmy Smith, Cannonball
Adderley, Horace Silver and Stan Getz. Jazz
had finally integrated with pop music and it
was sometimes hard to see the join.
The Flamingo played host to all of the
aforementioned musical genres, but what
were some of the favourite tunes requested
by the mod audience? Georgie Fame’s
version of the slinky Green Onions always
pleased the crowd; so did his take on Night
Train, Jimmy Forrest’s 12-bar instrumental
hit of 1952. Herbie Hancock’s composition,
Watermelon Man, found its way into the
repertoires of various bands, and Alexis
Korner – a regular performer at the club –
held everyone’s attention with his vocal
version of Nat Adderley’s Work Song.
A mod was also keenly interested in the
output of Tamla Motown, and a variety of
UK groups such as, the Animals with Eric
Burdon, Them, The Yardbirds, The Spencer
Davis Group featuring vocalist and organist
Steve Winwood; and Steampacket, which had
Long John Baldry, Rod Stewart, Julie Driscoll
and organist Brian Auger in its line-up, all of
whom had their own following. Somehow
The Beatles did not figure in this category.
The last word on The Flamingo goes to
an amalgamated response to the question,
“what was your experience of the club?” None
of those asked could exactly remember the
tight entrance to the club, sandwiched at one
time between two shops, both occupied by
Regent Shoes. The Flamingo’s interior layout
and décor also seems to be a blur, “you went
downstairs, there were tables, chairs, dance
floor; it was all a bit murky”. Virtually
everyone “only went for the music”,
remembering specifically which performers
they saw and what music they heard. “It was
the best place in town to catch the
latest sounds,” one customer said.
Musicians and bands on
the London club circuit
would not have
considered themselves
established unless they
had played at The
Flamingo at least
once. The club was
more than just another
venue. By the early 60s,
it was stamped with an
unrivalled musical history,
and it was essential to add
your name to that. In 1963 I
was on lead vocals and guitar with a
professional group called Band Seven, playing
a variety of music from 50s rock’n’roll to
current hits. We had recorded an EP at a
studio in Kent and pressed 99 copies to use as
a promotional tool to hawk around agents
and promoters in London. It worked. We
gradually secured a footing on the club scene,
which included being booked at The
Flamingo. There was a certain amount of
anticipation for this gig, but the reality of
seeing the animated audience from the
platform seemed much the same as playing
for the crowd at the nearby Marquee, the
Scene at Ham Yard, or the Eel Pie Island
hotel in Twickenham, and no more nor less
memorable than any of them. But this was
from the perspective of a young, cocky, and
blasé musician who went from one job to
another without paying much attention to
the wallpaper. In retrospect the minutiae of
the event still seems less important than just
having been at The Flamingo.
Jeffrey Kruger was awarded an MBE in the
New Year Honours list of 2002, for his
dedicated services to jazz and the British music
industry in general. A series of CDs relating to
Jazz at the Flamingo and Ember Records is
available on Fantastic Voyage, a label of Future
Noise Music Ltd.
