Yesterday I put on an old sweatshirt - I'm
doing some exercise bike sessions to get the old fitness worked up a bit before
we start going cycling and hillwalking as the weather improves. I have a silly
collection of old teeshirts and sweatshirts, mostly souvenirs of my days
touring with jazz bands, which are useful for sweaty workouts. Yesterday's
specimen is one of the few surviving long-sleeve jobs - this one from the
Riverboat Jazz Festival, Silkeborg, in Denmark's Lake District, from 1994.
That was the trip on which I shared a hotel
room with Noddy, the trombonist. Noddy was a gentleman, really - unusually
correct for a muso. No trouble at all. He was married to a very loud lady who
had been a professional singer of some note (as it were), and he tended to fade
into insignificance when she was around. At that time we had some pretty wild
drinkers in the band. The jazz festival in Silkeborg was based around a huge
marquee venue in the centre of the old town, and there were some very late
shows. One night we played a set starting at midnight, by which time a couple
of the more seasoned members of the band were already unfit for duty (it's a
funny thing, but it was always the supposed professionals who let themselves
down in this way...). In particular, Jack Duff, the tenor sax man (an absolute
monster of a player, by the way), was staggering drunk - he couldn't stand up
but he could still play like an angel - maybe he'd have lived longer if that
hadn't been a common situation.
We got through that set by the expedient of
lashing Duffo to one of the big tent poles that supported the marquee - he was
OK. We released him during the break, and carted him home after we had
finished. There were a few characters like that - I found much of this rather
unnerving, to be honest.
Anyway, back to Noddy. He was from Kent,
originally - he had served as a bandsman in the army, and after that he got a
job as a music teacher. I'm not suggesting that there was anything wrong with
guys like Noddy, nor with the teaching system at that time, but the entrance criteria
for instrument teachers in the schools seemed less rigorously based on academic
qualifications than you might expect. I hadn't spent much time with Noddy, so
sharing a room with him was a new experience. During off-duty spells we went
out for a few trips to local attractions - we went to see Tollund Man (the prehistoric chap they pulled out of a local peat
bog), we walked around the big lake, we had some good chats about music and
films, and I learned that Noddy was another boozer. Not a raving drunk, like
some of them, just a rather sad, quiet alcoholic, who did his drinking in
private.
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| Tollund Man |
When we went out for our walks around Silkeborg,
Noddy would always excuse himself just as we left the room, claim that he had
forgotten something, and go back. When he joined me downstairs, he smelled of
whisky.
In his wardrobe he had a secret bottle of
Canadian Club. As the week went on there were a series of successors to this
bottle. I only knew the whisky was there because his wardrobe door swung open on
the first day (by itself!), and there it was. I was fascinated, because Noddy
obviously carried a chinagraph (wax) pencil, with which he recorded the level
in the bottle each time he took a slug.
I was sorry that he had to keep his
drinking a secret, and slightly miffed that he kept a check to make sure that
outsiders (such as myself) were not pinching his booze. If he had simply told
me that he liked a drink when on tour then I wouldn't have cared - would not
have disapproved, and certainly would not have raided his supply. I mentioned
this to Fergie, the trumpet player, and he came up with what we considered a
great prank. He and I jointly purchased a half-bottle of Canadian Club of our own, which
I kept hidden away, and for a few days I used to sneak a bit extra into Noddy's
current bottle, so that the level was appreciably above the latest chinagraph
mark. We were interested to see what happened - it seemed unlikely that he
would accuse me of putting whisky into
a bottle of whose existence I was supposed to be unaware. He would, in any
case, have to out himself as a secret boozer to do this. We didn't go crazy -
there were just a few days when the whisky level definitely went up
instead of down.
If Noddy noticed then he didn't say
anything. Disappointing, really. When the half bottle ran out I stopped, and
presumably he just assumed he had made a mistake with his pencil. Ultimately it
wasn't as much of a laugh as we had hoped, but since it would not have been a
very kind sort of laugh maybe that's right and proper.
All long ago - Noddy, like so many others
in that band, is no longer around. He died, quietly and politely, of
early-onset dementia a few years ago. I hasten to add that I was very much a
relative youngster in that company!
