Semi-Detached by Griff Rhys Jones

Author:Griff Rhys Jones [Jones, Griff Rhys]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-07-12T16:22:24+00:00

10. The Wake Arms

Six miles below Epping, in the middle of the forest, I parked my car and walked into the ‘Olde Orleans Eatery, a Taste of the Deep South’. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. A fat couple and a baby were eating plates of chips under a fake Tiffany lamp, but the rest of the pine-clad multi-levels were empty. I could enjoy my familiar neurotic dilemma choosing a place to sit.

‘How long have you been here?’ I asked the manager.

‘Oh, ten years now. We’re due for a refurbishment.’

It all looked perfectly new to me. ‘What happened to the pub?’

‘Way before my time.’

On the way to the cloakroom I peered at the photographs on the wall. They were of jazz combos: Coleman Hawkins, Bix Beiderbecke and a young Louis Armstrong, nursing their trumpets and staring out from sepia reproductions. To most of the customers they might as well have been the Siberian Accordion Stars. They were a ‘theme’, chosen almost at random by a marketing man. But the chip-eaters would have heard of David Bowie, or Pink Floyd, or Black Sabbath, and all of these monsters of guitar-twiddling had actually played this place. Or not this place, but a sweaty box with black walls, round the back of a biker pub that used to be on this site, called the Wake Arms. The ‘Olde Progressive Music Eatery’ must have been rejected as being uncommercial.

There had always been pop music at home. We had a Dansette like everybody else. My father carted its nice, gluey, fresh plastic smell home when we were in rompers. The first forty-five we bought was ‘Multiplication’ (‘that’s the name of the game’).

The fanciful plot of my dad’s famous puppet show was based around his experimental musical purchases. There was an elopement scene (‘James, James, Hold The Ladder Steady’ by Susan Maugham) . There was a shipwreck (a bit of the ‘March Of The Valkyrie’, off a Selections From Wagner EP). And an octopus fandango (‘Do The Mambo Jambo’, a bossa nova by God-knows-who, on an old seventy-eight). My father actually got hold of a huge quantity of ancient platters from a hospital social club clear-out (including some rare Noël Coward and Gertie Lawrence sketches, which I’m afraid we thought were risible and made into plant pots. Our forty-fives included selections from The Boy Friend and extracts from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers.

When I went back to Epping on my nostalgic daytrip in 2005, the little shop ‘Chew and Osbourne’s’ was still operating. It had largely determined our ‘collection’ (since my father just marched in and bought a handful of what was to hand, to see how his player worked), though I was sorry to see that the booths with the white holey board, where you could solemnly listen to your choice before taking it home, had gone.

By the time we were ten we had become more discriminating. Woolworths used to do cheap cover versions: extended players with three tracks on each sides, ‘indistinguishable from the real thing’, except that they were on red plastic.

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