We ended up playing the 100 Club, which was the most important one, I suppose. It was originally called Mack’s Restaurant and was a place where people could have a buffet business lunch. The lady who ran it didn’t like having jazz in there at all, but it paid her rent and in the end, Humphrey Lyttelton’s manager took it over and ran it as the Humphrey Lyttelton Club. Humphrey played there once a week and as it became very popular in the Fifties, they gradually opened more nights - eventually Monday, Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday.

Now, I hated playing that place – not because the people weren’t nice, but because the acoustics were rotten, the stage was the wrong size and the wrong shape, it was too hot and uncomfortable, and altogether difficult.

I’d met my friend Harold Pendleton in 1948, searching for 78s in the Used Records part of Foyles – because there weren’t enough new records, they sold used ones! He’d just come down to London from Southport to be an accountant. He ran a little club in a room somewhere for a while and while I was at the 100 Club, we said, “We must be able to find a place that’s nice to play!”

Harold wanted to run a club not just with a band like mine, but with modern jazz, a big band or whatever, and he spent some time hunting for somewhere. West End premises were hard to get, because there used to be people on the streets, wanting to go out. There aren’t now. The cost of going into town is so great, you only go if you’re going somewhere specific. But in those days, people were wandering about, dropping into a club or a restaurant, so there was a shortage of premises you could rent to use as a club.

Anyway, Harold finally came across what became the Marquee, which was the basement of the Academy Cinema [in Oxford Street]. It was hired out as a function room for wedding receptions and so on, and it had quite a large stage and over the top of it was a striped awning like a tent. In America, the word for the canvas roof over the door of a place is called a ‘marquee’, so we thought we’d call it The Marquee.

I shifted from the 100 Club with great pleasure. We’d always done the Wednesday night there, so my band had that night and then Harold had Saturday nights for modern jazz like Ronnie Scott and his band. They didn’t do the business that we did on Wednesdays, but he liked the music and wanted to give them a place where they could be seen properly. Ronnie Scott hadn’t gone to his bigger club in Dean Street yet, he was in the old place which was smaller and quite squashed up. And so it went on from there.

Check in next week to learn how the Marquee developed as a music club!

Did you visit the Marquee when it was in the basement of the Academy Cinema? Share your memories here