If there was such a thing as a ‘resident’ band on the Hyams Brothers circuit during the time I served there, it was the one conducted byTeddy Joyce. An almost forgotten name now, he was a Hyams Brothers’ favourite and hugely popular with South London audiences.
For my money, he led the best stage band I ever saw, with the possible exception of Jack Hylton’s. But while Hylton himself did little more than stand in front of the band looking benevolent, Joyce was at all times the centre of attention, using the band as background to his own antics, very much as Cab Calloway did in America.
A Canadian, tall, slim, narrow-faced, slicked-back black hair, Joyce’s customary costume of high-waisted, tight-fitting black dress trousers and equally tight-fitting black bolero jacket made his legs seem endless. He would put this to good effect in his snake-hips style of dancing, particularly when, as he often did, he performed alone on a darkened stage in front of a white screen, dropped in to mask off the band. Lit only by a small spotlight shining up from the centre of the footlights, the silhouette of his undulating figure would be projected on the screen behind him, elongating to giant size as he advanced, diminishing to human proportions as he retreated.
It was as skilful as it was effective. For another of his showpieces, the band left their instruments on the rostrum, came downstage and formed a tight semicircle around Joyce, who was seated on a low stool, his back to the audience. The band thrust out their hands towards him, revealing that they were all wearing white gloves, each finger of which had a thick, black line along the top. The picture it presented was that he was seated at the keyboard of a three-rank organ. Joyce would then complete the picture by ‘playing’ their outstretched hands, each touch producing a sonorous hummed response. It was an illusion I have never seen duplicated, its music so carefully orchestrated and rehearsed, the effect was irresistible.
He was full of novel presentation ideas, though not all of them worked out as planned. I’m thinking of a surprise opening he devised for one of his early visits to the State, Kilburn. The audience heard the Teddy Joyce signature tune, ‘The World is Waiting for the Sunrise’, coming from behind the closed front curtains. But when the curtains rose, the stage was empty. Then, from somewhere above the top of the proscenium arch, the band slowly descended into view, seated on a platform hung on wires, its leading edge decorated by a bank of plywood clouds.
Slowly, if a little fitfully, they came down, their unusually spectacular entrance winning an appreciative round of applause. Then, about four feet from the floor, the platform began to tilt sideways …
A firm favourite with the Trocadero’s patrons was Jack Doyle billed as ‘The Singing Boxer’. Less than highly successful in the ring, he toured in Variety, singing sentimental Irish ballads, thus inspiring Tommy Trinder’s observation that ‘Instead of singing Mother Machree, Jack Doyle’d do better fighting her.’
On the Trocadero stage Jack usually appeared with his wife, the sexy Mexican film star Movita. They would perform romantic duets, always ending with ‘by popular request’, the ‘Come, Come, I Love You Only’ ballad from The Chocolate Soldier. This they would sing standing face to face, gazing into each other’s eyes, and, on the final fervent ‘Come, Come!’, clutch each other convulsively, groin to groin. It was a finish that never failed to stir the Troc audience.
I had never heard of the touring revue that was to be our next on-stage attraction at the Trocadero. It bore the unpromising title of Red Hot & Blue Moments and this was its first London date after going round the provinces for months. Consequently, when I found myself a seat in the stalls the following Monday afternoon to watch it, I knew nothing about its principal comedian, Sid Field.
No point in making a meal of this. From the moment Sid Field made his first entrance, I was entranced. For the rest of the week, I not only watched every one of his three-a-day performances, I came in on my day off to see two more of them.
It’s an abiding shame that no trace of his quality remains on film. Do not, I implore you, assess him on the basis of what you see of him in London Town. Shot in an empty studio without an audience, his reproduced stage sketches are given a stilted, not to say embalmed, look, offering no hint of the delicacy of his comic touch.
Months later, whenever I came home on leave, I would go to see him in his hugely successful revues at the Prince of Wales Theatre. He repeated several of the sketches I had first seen him perform in Red Hot & Blue Moments. But when it came to his portrayal of ‘Slasher Green’, the archetypal spiv, nothing in the West End could match the additional ingredient the Trocadero lent to it.
Hobbling awkwardly in an ankle-length, wide-shouldered black overcoat, knotted white scarf and turned-down black trilby, he would wring tears of laughter from the packed Elephant & Castle audiences, most of them dressed in long black, wide-shouldered overcoats, knotted white scarves and turned-down black trilbies.
Phil Park, for many years the organist at the Regal, Edmonton, was more than just a gifted musician. A superb showman at the organ, he also composed much of the music for some of the London Palladium’s most successful revues and brought to the Wurlitzer a keen grasp of technical innovation.
In a bid to replace the narrow bench on which organists sat, occasionally sliding sideways along it to reach one of the end foot-pedals, he sought a means by which they could remain in one position. He came up with the idea of a seat fashioned along the lines of that used in boats by solo scullers. It consisted of two cunningly shaped halves, one for each buttock, connected by a central spring. Seated on this, the occupant was no longer obliged to slide his whole body sideways, he merely stretched out a leg.
A prototype was built and, a few weeks later, the Monday first house audience heard the opening notes of Phil’s signature tune and saw him rise slowly into view upon his new seating arrangement. Then, as the music was reaching a crescendo, it suddenly stopped, and in its place came a shrill cry of agony.
As Phil himself good-humouredly agreed afterwards, the strength of the spring appeared to need something of a rethink. He never entrusted himself to it again, however, leaving his invention to live on in cinema organ folklore as ‘The Nutcracker Seat’.
My earliest venture into what I suppose, stretching it a bit, you could call ‘writing for the screen’ was at the Trocadero, when I foundmyself providing the words for the slides that were projected on the iron curtain during the organ interludes.
In those days, the Mighty Organ was a popular element in the cinema-going ritual, though admittedly, it could drive some people to distraction. (Graham Greene called it ‘the world’s wet mouth drooling’.) At the time, it was the loudest musical noise around, always in danger of sounding overwrought, bombastic or syrupy, but in the hands of a Quentin MacLean or a Sidney Torch it would offer a pleasurable quarter of an hour.
The organ interlude’s place on a cinema’s list of attractions may well have been prompted by the prevailing Fire Regulations. These demanded that the proscenium-size fireproof curtain separating the stage from the auditorium (the ‘iron’) be lowered at least once during each programme.
It was sometimes a laboriously slow process so, as the iron descended, up from the circular pit in front of it, to the strains of the organist’s signature tune, would rise the mighty Wurlitzer. (There has never been a better illustration of the phrase ‘to come up smiling’ than the cinema organist.)
The organ itself could verge on the spectacular. Shaped like an enormous, intricately fluted jelly mould, its panels were illuminated from within in constantly changing pastel colours that nicely set off its occupant’s white dinner jacket.
As for the content of the interlude, that would take the form of either a recital or a sing along (in those days known as ‘community singing’). One of the most frequently requested items