After growing up through the Fifties, which was a fairly dull and boring decade, the Sixties were like being given the keys to a great big sweet shop! In 1961, I was living in Bromley, just married and I think we’d had our first kid. A school friend called Alex Moss was also a jazz aficionado and he had a friend called Wally Houser who played alto sax, and they were forming a little quintet which was based on the Charlie Parker/Dizzy Gillespie Quintet Of The Year. They wanted to open a club in New Cross and asked if I would be interested in helping them run it. I’d never done anything like that before, but I thought it sounded great.

We opened up on a grotty little Irish pub called the Amersham Arms. It was right opposite Goldsmiths College, so it was well-positioned, but the night they chose was a Monday because Wally was already working quite a lot as a semi-pro at weekends, and it was really doomed from the off. We started off with 80 people, many of whom were students, and it gradually diminished until after a couple of months, we weren’t even taking enough on the door to cover the rental.

Just prior to that to its closure, we were approached by some guys who ran a club on a Sunday called the Jazz House, just a few miles away in Blackheath. They’d read about us in ‘Melody Maker’ and suggested we exchanged gigs. I thought it was a good idea, but we folded before we could put it into operation. When I rang these guys to tell them, they told me they were planning to expand their business and asked me to join them.

Did you go the London jazz clubs of the early Sixties? Who did you see there? Share your memories here: