Watch a (rather overwrought!) American trailer for ‘Look Back In Anger’, featuring the music of Chris Barber’s band, here:

The Marquee became enormously popular. We took part in a film called ‘Look Back In Anger’ where Richard Burton as the ‘Angry Young Man’ hero plays the trumpet and sits in with my band in the club. We’d worked with [director] Tony Richardson previously when he did a documentary about jazz clubs in 1954 [‘Momma Don't Allow'], where they actually filmed in the Wood Green Jazz Club. Although this time they built a set of the club on a soundstage at Pinewood Studios, it’s the only film I’ve ever seen that shows what the British jazz club was like correctly.

Richard Burton couldn’t actually play the trumpet, but he mimed it, and he mimed better than we did! With a real actor holding the trumpet, he was able to make it look as if he was playing, but we’d never learnt how to do that, all we did was play. We were doing it to a playback of our own record and we couldn’t remember what we’d done then, so we were standing there, trying to hear the recording and imitate it, while he looked as if he was really playing!

But the film captured very well what a good club of the time looked like in one of the first scenes in the film. Most people have a lot of misapprehensions about what it was like. I never saw anybody smoking a joint in there, although some of us did, but it wasn’t important. Most of them drank a bit - beer and that sort of stuff - but that wasn’t the raison d’etre for the music, you didn’t need that to get into it. We weren’t inhibited enough to have to get uninhibited in order to play!

Soho was really a genteel den of iniquity in those days! I can remember walking round Soho when my band first started in ‘54/’55 and you’d see the girls in the doorways, but that was OK. They weren’t being beaten up all the time, they were just part of the world’s oldest profession.

Of course, there were also gangsters and so on there. I used to walk around with my trombone, having just got paid for a job, and I remember being assured by one of the well-known gangsters, “Don’t worry, no one will take anything from you. We’ll take care of them if they do!” They liked me, so that was a nice sort of feeling - although of course that’s the kind of thing that leads to the approval of gangsters.

Check in next week to read how the National Jazz & Blues Festival (now better known as the Reading Festival) first started.

Did you visit jazz clubs in the late Fifties/early Sixties? Share your memories here: