Post by I on Aug 26, 2014 15:23:49 GMT
Tom remembers exactly where he first hears 'New Orleans' by US Bonds. It is on Radio Luxembourg on the wireless of a friend of his, Ralph Martin, who lives in Cazenove Road, Stoke Newington, at the foot of Stamford Hill. The pair are sitting in Abney Park cemetery listening to Jimmy Savile's Teen And Twenty Disc Club. Savile is a man aged 34 but even then he has an unhealthy interest in teens and twenties! Through the fog of Luxembourg's receivers, the pair hear of a place "where the honeysuckle is a blooming on the honeysuckle vine and love is a blooming there all the time." The pair learn too that "in every southern band there's a Mississippi queen, down the Mississippi, down in New Orleans." The song is fantastic; raw R&B recorded in the atmosphere of a swinging, rocking party. Whitmer dearly wishes to take a walk down Basin Street and listen to the music with the Dixieland beat but the furthest west he ever goes is a weekend in St Ives with his wife Opha Lou and a few days in Bristol in the mid 1960s. All he can remember about the visit to Bristol is eating in an establishment called the Omelette & Steak Bar; partaking of a cheese or prawn omelette for his lunch and steak and chips as his evening meal, but of course! He also has his first ever Chinese feast on this same visit; a proper banquet involving foods that he never tastes before: sweet and sour chicken, noodles, bean shoots, Chinese mushrooms. Old fashioned fare he regards this sort of food as being now; having become something of a connoisseur of Chinese cooking in the restaurants of Gerard and Lisle streets in the Worst End.
Around the time of Tom's birthday, the following year, when he is 12, Top Rank put out another US Bonds single, the brilliant 'Quarter To Three' and Whitmer is hooked. The song uses the same backing track or rhythm as the Church Street Five's 'A Night With Daddy G' but Gary's vocal improves it tenfold. It soars to the top spot in the US charts in the summer of 1961. Bonds goes on to have several other hits for Legrand Rercords in 1961 and 1962, including three more top ten hits with 'School Is Out', 'Dear Lady Twist' and 'Twist, Twist Senora'. Many of these songs are based on calypsoes that label owner Guida remembers hearing during the Second World War.
Tommy writes another of his parodies based around Bonds' 'Quarter To Three'. He has his very own version of Church Street...in Stoke Newington! Stoke Newington Church Street, N16. Tommy and his small coterie rock away the night at a bar next to Yoakley Road, the small terraced turning where Ronnie Knight's spouse Babs Windsor grows up, and they dance the watusi, the pony, the wobble and the hootchie cootchie coo until, precisely, 2.45am, a quarter to three. This little group has its own Daddy G too, namely Asher G, Tom's pal from Stamford Hill, Count Wally's son. Whitmer regards this man as the greatest revive DJ in all London, the very creme de la creme of the current crop. Slightly better than Tiny T, Tennyson Golbourne, the son of Freddie Cloudburst, far better than David Rodigan, far better than Gladdy Wax, better than Big Foot, Governor General or Little Andy or Chris Lane or Sammy De Niro or Tommy Rockashacka or Steve Rice, better than either Penny Reel or Richie Kaboh, both mean revivalists in their own right. Simply, Whitmer thinks to himself, Asher G, George, is the best! "Well, doncha know, the people were dancing like they were mad, with the best rock steady they had ever heard and the best rock steady there could ever be. It was a night with an Asher G. A go Asher..."
An excerpt from Up The Dreary Slope by Thomas Horace Whitmer
