One warm spring Friday night in 1964, cooling off between sets outside the Ricky Tick club in Windsor, I share a match flame with a sharp-suited mod whose jaw works in perfect time with the record wafting from the upstairs room. He chimneys a lungful skywards and asks have I seen Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames? I haven\u2019t. He says they\u2019re the best band around by far and that they\u2019re on at the Flamingo \u2013 \u201cup west\u201d, indicated with a head tilt towards London – every Saturday night. I thank him for the tip-off, but figure if a group\u2019s that good, they\u2019ll turn up at the Ricky Tick before long. Although I don\u2019t see him the following week, the Friday after he wants to know what I reckon. When I tell him I haven\u2019t seen them yet, he exhales a smoky sigh and walks away.<\/p>\n
Saturday nights soon take on a new pattern. Dex and I still rendezvous in the Antelope, but we leave before closing time and aim my Ford Pop east along the A40, watching house lights go out in the cosy commuter country of Beaconsfield and Gerrards Cross, the suburban estates of Greenford and Perivale, built when being handy for Western Avenue\u2019s sclerotic arterial was a selling point, and the Lego-like semis of Acton, as yet unspoiled by stone-cladding and secondary glazing. We stop off at the bowling alley by Gipsy Corner for as long as it takes to rinse down half a dozen doobs with a waxed-paper cup of coke, and by the time the car is parked in W1, in a space vacated by the straights and squares who\u2019ve already headed home after their idea of a night-out, the amphetamine magic is working, and we are doing our mod swagger down Wardour Street, hoping the Marquee-ites, homeward bound themselves, will notice our dark, dilated pupils, the urgent way we chew our gum, and our walk \u2013 oh yes, a walk so cool it ought to be a dance.<\/p>\n
At most clubs where R&B groups play, back rooms of pubs, like the Ricky Tick, with a bar in one corner and a makeshift stage, the audience is art-studenty, the scruffy side of smart, with Stones-length hair or longer. The Flamingo, a firetrap of a basement south of Shaftesbury Avenue, attracts an altogether different crowd. Because the All-Nighter operates from midnight to six, they come from a netherworld where people don\u2019t keep regular hours: US servicemen from Mildenhall and Lakenheath on 48-hour passes, determined not to waste pay on a hotel room or precious leave asleep, young West Indians from Notting Hill and Brixton, insomniac musicians, drunks, junkies, hookers, and drynamil-fuelled faces. Mods will be misremembered as the pansy prey of rockers, but the mods-versus-rockers match-up is essentially a media invention, and the notion that a dedicated dress sense is a disqualification from violence a dangerous misconception.<\/p>\n
Like the Marquee up the road, the Flamingo was a jazz club originally, modern jazz though, unlike the Marquee\u2019s trad. An illuminated sign assures punters who are unimpressed by the nondescript entrance between a Chinese restaurant and a shoe shop that, \u201cHere is the internationally famous Flamingo Jazz Club.\u201d An arrow points at the doorway leading to a flight of stairs. A second sign, on which a pink flamingo is depicted cartoonishly, boasts that the place is \u201cBritain\u2019s Finest Modern Jazz Venue\u201d. Only on a third sign, smaller than the other two and unlit, are the words \u2018Allnighter\u2019 and \u2018Rhythm & Blues\u2019 printed. But it\u2019s the word \u2018Jazz\u2019 – in jazzy lettering, naturally \u2013 that I have fixed on to legitimise my Saturday nights. That and the fact that Dex happens to have a barrister uncle in Belgravia. Even though my old man is less bothered about me spending an evening in sinful Soho than that I\u2019ll be having my ear bent by the modern jazz he abhors, my mother is relieved that I\u2019m avoiding a late drive home by staying over in SW1. If only.<\/p>\n
Outside the Flamingo, the audience from the evening session, over at eleven, has gone. Everyone waiting now is here for the midnight hour. The white-knuckle ride of a rush from the pills has smoothed into a surge of euphoria so intensely exhilarating it nearly takes my breath away. Inevitably I turn to Dex and whisper hoarsely how fantastic I\u2019m feeling.<\/p>\n
Inside, the lights are dim, and the heat, under the false ceiling, ferocious. Tony Clarke\u2019s \u2018Ain\u2019t Love Good, Ain\u2019t Love Proud\u2019 comes over the PA, or James Brown\u2019s \u2018Papa\u2019s Got A Brand New Bag\u2019, which I hear for the first time queuing on the stairs to the basement, and inevitably before the night is over, since it is a favourite of John Gunnell\u2019s, Lord Kitchener\u2019s priapic \u2018Dr Kitch\u2019. Gunnell, who runs the club with his older brother Rik, introduces the acts and, between the sets, plays records from the band room beside the stage, spicing his MC\u2019s patter with a crude parody of Jamaican patois, which nevertheless amuses, rather than offends the West Indians in the audience. There are always two bands on, each playing two alternate sets, with Zoot Money\u2019s Big Roll Band or Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds or Ronnie Jones and the Nightimers opening, and Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames closing the session.<\/p>\n
The Blue Flames were once Billy Fury\u2019s backing group, and it was Fury\u2019s manager, Larry Parnes, begetter of Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, Vince Eager, et al, who changed their pianist\u2019s name from Clive Powell to Georgie Fame. But since the start of their Flamingo residency in 1962, Fame and the Blue Flames have undergone an extraordinary evolutionary process. Other bands have likewise added horns and replaced piano with Hammond organ, but what is unique about the way their music has developed is the input of the Flamingo\u2019s audience.<\/p>\n
Much of the band\u2019s material has come from the GIs who frequent the All-Nighter. Keen to replicate the music they would be dancing and drinking to back home – were they not guarding us from the red menace that lurks behind the Iron Curtain – and gratefully aware that Fame and his fellow musicians are not only capable of meaningful interpretation, but enthusiastically open to influence, they lend him their own records. If Fame likes what he hears, the song will be in the band\u2019s set the following weekend, just like James Brown\u2019s \u2018Night Train\u2019, Rufus Thomas\u2019s \u2018The Dog\u2019, the Phil Upchurch Combo\u2019 \u2018You Can\u2019t Sit Down\u2019, even Paul Anka\u2019s \u2018Eso Beso\u2019. And, of course, it\u2019s a GI who has introduced him to maverick jazzer Mose Allison, reshaping his singing style overnight. The album that hooked him is I Love The Life I Live<\/em>, its title track now a staple in the Blue Flames\u2019 set, along with Allison\u2019s \u2018Parchman Farm\u2019 and \u2018Work Song\u2019.<\/p>\n Even when I search out Allison\u2019s originals, I don\u2019t like Fame\u2019s approximation any less. Plus I am now a sucker for Hammond organs and horn sections, and there isn\u2019t one number in the Blue Flames\u2019 repertoire I don\u2019t think is great. The Rolling Stones may have been lost from the Ricky Tick to the wider world of pop, but I don\u2019t care any more, because Georgie and the Blue Flames make the most exciting music in town. The All-nighter is unmissable.<\/p>\n From midnight to six we dance and fidget and talk nonsense, start to feel not so great, swallow more pills and feel great again, and suddenly we\u2019re outside in the cold, cold light. Those six hours can flash by so fast, I once ask on my way out why the bands haven\u2019t done two sets tonight. \u201cWhat\u2019re you on, son? Here, you sure you\u2019re old enough to be in this joint?\u201d I wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n We have a wash at Charing Cross station, a coffee in the Strand, occasionally shop for bluebeat records at a stall in Petticoat Lane, anything to put off the return to the real world and the inevitable come-down. Some hardcore Flamingo fans even go back for more. There\u2019s a Sunday afternoon session, where John Gunnell, easing his way through the day with a bottle of Scotch, heckles the bands he\u2019s booked. In theory, and in amphetamine-powered defiance of fatigue, you can attend six sessions between Friday and Sunday.<\/p>\n For out-of-towners, like Dex and me, whose alibi of the bed in Belgravia means there\u2019s no hurry to get back to High Wycombe, the morning-after usually begins with a time-killing detour via the 24-hour Heathrow Bowl on the A4 until it\u2019s late enough to be starting a normal Sunday. Except by now my jaw aches, my eyes sting, my synuses burn, my feet throb, my throat is raw, my stomach convulsed, and my penis shrunk so small I struggle to pull it from my pants for the dribble of dark urine which is as much as I can summon. On my tongue there\u2019s a permanent ball of spit, which taints everything I taste. Not that I have an appetite.<\/p>\n We can\u2019t go to anyone\u2019s house unless they\u2019re in on our secret and their parents, who would think us ill, are out, so we usually wind up in the one coffee bar in the entire town that is open on a Sunday afternoon. It becomes such a regular sanctuary that I start taking one of the waitresses home after her shift. A fumble in my car, parked at the end of her drive, momentarily reverses the day\u2019s downward spiral.<\/p>\n Bottoming out of my come-down at school on Monday, I meet Dex by the tuck shop and swear I\u2019m never going to the All-Nighter again. I\u2019m still adamant on Tuesday, but by Wednesday we\u2019re singing snatches of that new number that went down a storm. What was it called? \u2018Yeh Yeh\u2019? Georgie and the band ought to record that. Who knows, it could be a hit. On Thursday we scan the Flamingo\u2019s weekly ad in Melody Maker<\/em> to see who the other group\u2019s going to be. Friday I hand Dex the money for my doobs. I can\u2019t wait for Saturday night. I love the Flamingo, right until the weekend before I leave for university, when I realise what a dangerous place it is for a middle-class boy masquerading as a mod.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One warm spring Friday night in 1964, cooling off between sets outside the Ricky Tick club in Windsor, I share a match flame with a sharp-suited mod whose jaw works in perfect time with the record wafting from the upstairs room. 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