The Jazz Club
To give it its full name, it was The Plebeians Jazz Club. The Plebs as it was affectionately known by the faces who went there. Or dismissed with a Yorkshire sneer by those who had never, and never would, set foot in the place. Put simply, it was The Jazz Club. It was the sole outlet - call that soul outlet - for our desires and hopes back then in the early 60's in Halifax. A town of stifling dullness and middle-aged pessimism, ingrained in people's consciousness by centuries of struggle to get out of that depression in the Pennines. Here, The Jazz Club was our Eel Pie Island. Our Kings Road. Our St. Germain. Our soul city. Our great escape. Where anybody who was ever to become anything automatically went every Saturday night, if not every Friday night. And sometimes every Sunday night too.
It was a sodden greasy-floored cavern in Upper George Yard. The basement of an old mill building, probably the old boiler room or coal store. Yet somehow word spread that this place was what was happening. After Ready Steady Go was over, a long queue would form across the Upper George Yard. If you were a Face like Bill Flint, Pat Wog, Gary Parker or Jake Morton you didn't queue, you took your ease in The Upper George and emerged from the Snug when you felt like it. You stepped out of the rear door of a Mark II Jag that had swung into the yard expressly for the purpose of enhancing your arrival. Or you would slip suavely off the back of a still moving Vespa driven by your Parka-clad chauffeur for the evening, and walk straight in. Paul Mountain and his burly bouncers would ease apart for these celebrities like well greased machinery only to thump together again like two sides of beef to scrutinise the tattered membership cards and potential for trouble amongst the real plebeians in the queue. Standard operating procedure as it turned out. Nothing makes a place seem more desirable and exclusive than the possibility of refused entry and the sight of the famous getting in effortlessly. Vide Studio 54, Tramp and Stringfellows oh so much later.
An inky stamp on the hand, a glare from Paul Mountain, sometimes bafflingly called Fred, and you were in. Entitled to wander down a damp passageway into the labyrinth of rooms. Soul music blasted out. It sounded wonderful. Tamla Motown was made to be played on car production lines and in sweaty clubs with low ceilings. You might get a drink of orange juice at the bar. Otherwise you would just take in the scene and check out the clothes. Jake Morton was a walking fashion icon. Every week he would wear a different suit run up for him by a tailor in Leeds. One week it would have two vents, the next a single high centre vent. The week after, inverted pleats. Then no vents at all. Lapels would close up to the chin, then swoop to the waist. Turn-ups or lack of them would unfurl almost before your eyes. And every day for the rest of the week, suggestions of Jake's style would sprout on school uniforms as kids gathered with the scooter riders in George Square. Some kids would try to out-guess him, but Jake always had the drop on them. Just when they calculated he would go for a high-collared double-inverted pleat with moleskin drainpipes, he would appear, as cool as Alain Delon in a loose-cut lounge suit he could have borrowed for the occasion from Cary Grant.
I missed out on The Jazz Club for a couple of years because my girlfriend Stella wouldn't go there. Either she thought it was beneath her, or too dangerous - it certainly was a potential fire trap. Or perhaps she felt I would be lured away by the easy charms of the high-fashion girls who swarmed in there. Well she was right. It was part of my desire to find out what went on in The Jazz Club that lead to our breakup. I started dating Julia who was a regular. She had the look. It was Mary Quant meets Salut Les Copains. It was Kings Road, not Carnaby Street. It was St. Germain not Cleckheaton. It was chic, it was funky, funky Broadway. It was William Bell. It was Otis Redding. It was Prince Buster. It was Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds. It was Rod Stewart and the Steam Packet. It was - on one memorable night - Edwin Starr, a real Motown star. It was the Victor Brox Blues Train, the North's own John Mayall. It was the Alan Bown Set. It was a bass riff pounding your guts and sweet soaring harmonies and a beat you could never hope to beat. This was years before Northern Soul. This was smaller, more intimate, more personal. This was ours.
I left Halifax in 1967 to go to Leeds University. Twenty miles and a million light years to the East. My love of music that I had gained from Paul Mountain's great little club led me to the University Entertainments Committee. Our high point was The Who Live at Leeds in 1970. I left Leeds in that year and moved to London and began a career in advertising. I would come North often to see my parents. The Jazz Club had gone by then and Paul Mountain was running the more visible and often equally exciting Clarence's Roxy. He settled on the name when he found Bryan Ferry had co-incidentally called his band the same. Roxy Music played the opening night. I would sit and talk to Paul after Clarence's closed. He was getting tired of it all. "How would you like five hundred people coming into your home every night and wrecking it?"
My last image of Paul in Halifax was him pausing in mid conversation about Carl Jung and stepping outside into the alleyway to drive off some louts with a baseball bat. Once I met him in London. We went to the Nashville and saw a band called the Tourists. He booked them immediately. When they played Clarence's Roxy they had changed their name to the Eurythmics.
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Paul Mountain was a natural host and scene creator. He had great taste, style and judgement. As a result, my sights were set far higher than they might otherwise have been. My generation in Halifax owes him everything.
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