90 years in showbusiness and I’m still going strong

A MUSICIAN celebrated 90 years in showbusiness with a performance and a party.

Alan Grahame has played with greats from across America and Britain, performed in seedy nightclubs in London’s East End and recorded musical scores for classic films.

He has seen many changes in jazz and other music genres and the rise and fall of variety acts and big bands.

Mr Grahame celebrated his 96th birthday at the Unicorn pub in Peppard on Sunday by performing the vibraphone in front of friends and family with songs like George Gershwin’s S’Wonderful.

Despite his age, stopping is not in his sights and he says he will still be singing when he is 100.

Mr Grahame was born in Cornwall and first introduced to showbusiness as a child.

He said: “I was about three or four years old when my father took over a shop in Dawlish in Devon and he’d been a bit of a comic during the First World War, so he started a concert party in Dawlish called The Bohemians.

“When I was about five or six, he involved me in the couple of the sketches in the show, an example being he was a worker in a department store.

“The characters would come in and ask for silly things and then I would come on with a jam jar and say, ‘Two penneth of treacle, please’ and he’d say, ‘Oh yes, the treacle department this way’.

“I would wait for a moment. He’d go off, then come back on with the jam jar and say, ‘There’s your treacle, sir, where’s the tuppence?’ and I’d say: ‘In the bottom of the jar’ and, of course, people screamed with laughter.

“I was in the church choir in Dawlish and took part in fetes by dressing up and that’s how I started performing.

“We moved when I was about 11 to Three Bridges because my father lost the shop in Dawlish and became a commercial traveller. And, of course, when I was 12, the war started.”

Mr Grahame spent the war entertaining troops and civilians with shows in South London and Surrey. His mother sent him to a dance school called Sylvia Bryant’s in Wallington where he learned ballet and tap.

He said: “I started compering shows during the blackout and my father got a trio together to entertain the troops before D-Day.

“I was only doing singing and dancing and entertaining as a light comedian and then I joined up at the age of 18.

“I went into the army, did my primary training as a gunner at Deepcut but because the war had finished, they didn’t want gunners anymore.

“I was posted to the Military College of Science at Shrivenham, near Swindon, and a friend of mine there, who played the accordion and double bass, said: ‘Let’s get a band together.’

“I said: ‘Well, no, I can’t play anything. I can sing and I can read music and I know a bit about performing, but I don’t play anything’.

“He just said: ‘I’ve got a vibraphone at home. It’s an old one but you could probably play that’.

“I said: ‘Well, I could probably pick a tune out on it because I know a bit about piano.’

“We got the vibraphone from Derby down to the camp at Shrivenham and I started to play.

“We got together a group which we called the Jive Five and I started to play the vibraphone and pick out tunes. We were able to entertain in the officers’ mess, the army camps and the air force camps.”

He was demobbed at the end of the war when he was 21 and then worked for the City of London in the shipping office.

Mr Grahame said: “It was a very secure, sedate, clerical job but after being in the army, I couldn’t settle, so I went to my mother and said: ‘I’ve got to see if I can earn a living playing in the jazz clubs in Soho’.

“Of course my parents were horrified, you know, giving up a proper job to go and play jazz for a living.

“I gave up the job. I sort of starved on two cheese rolls a day for a couple of years as I established myself as a vibraphone player. I was very fortunate that I was asked to join Ralph Sharon’s sextet. Ralph went on to be Tony Bennett’s pianist and he was well respected. I was with him for a couple of years and then I went to America.”

Mr Grahame joined keyboard player Jerry Allen and become a member of the Jerry Allen Trio.

The group played on a lot of broadcasts including the BBC’s Music While You Work as well as at functions and variety shows with the likes of comedians Tommy Trinder, Ted Ray and various American singers popular at the time.

He stayed with the trio for 13 years and they did a television show with Noele Gordon called Lunchbox which was shown live on television at 12.45pm every weekday.

He started to commute between Birmingham and London and took part in shows with Roy Castle and Carroll Levis and in quiz shows on ATV.

Mr Grahame said: “We would go up to Birmingham to be there for 8am on Monday after two shows either at the Hackney Empire or in the BBC at the weekend. It was a hard life.”

After the trio broke up, he returned to London and became a session musician, playing the xylophone, glockenspiel, tuba, the bells and the timpani.

He said: “From that, I was lucky to be used with the Top of the Pops orchestra, Morecambe and Wise and the Two Ronnies and I became the principal percussion player with Playschool on which I was featured several times as a presenter and drummer and percussion player. I played all the incidental music there.”

Live television would give him the jitters. Mr Grahame said: “I think anybody who doesn’t have slight nerves before the red light goes on is not a true performer.

“When that light starts flashing and you know you’ve got five or 10 seconds before you go on the air, that is the worst time. Once you’re on, you’re okay. I think the adrenaline kicks in.

“I was used to doing live television but now very little is live. Nearly everything is pre-recorded and edited, even to the extent that if a singer sings a wrong note or is out of tune, it can be rectified electronically.

“Whereas once on Lunchbox I sang a whole song of gibberish because I forgot the words. The director said, ‘I thought you meant to do that for a bit of a laugh — we didn’t notice.’ Now they would have edited that out.”

Mr Grahame also has showbusiness to thank for meeting his wife Dulcie.

He said: “She was from Sonning. Our family lived there and we were in the Benny Hill Show, which went on tour around 1954.

“Then she came and worked on Lunchbox as well and one thing led to another, as they say. We married in 1957 and decided that we would try to live midway between Birmingham and London because I was working in both areas and we moved to Sonning Common.

“I was going up and down doing sessions and Dulcie, being a dancer and a good musician, got involved in the local scene at Chiltern Edge and opened her own dancing school in Peppard hall, called Dulcie Warsingham’s Dance School.”

The couple moved to Peppard in 1970 and had three children, Lisa, Peter and Suzanne. Mr Grahame got into teaching and local big bands.

He was conductor and musical director of the Brian Haddock Band at Chiltern Edge School in Sonning Common and taught at The Henley College, Maiden Erlegh Music School in Earley and St Edward’s in Oxford. Several of his pupils have continued careers in the music industry, including David Arch who directs the music on Strictly Come Dancing.

His children also followed his career path. Peter opened a comedy club in London called the King’s Head Downstairs and won an award for best promoter.

Lisa went into the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, having played with Reading Concert Orchestra and the Berkshire Youth Jazz Orchestra and Jools Holland and now plays in Tina the Musical.

Mr Grahame said: “All our musical life has been connected with this area and I’m quite proud of the fact that a lot of the pupils that I had have gone on to be good professional
musicians.

“I played at Phyllis Court Club for 22 years doing their functions and their regatta ball and New Year’s Eve party with my small groups.”

He went on tour with many big names and performed with stars such as Andy Williams, Bing Crosby and Shirley Bassey.

He went on eight tours with Howard Keel.

“These were big tours,” he said. “We were staying in any old grotty places and we could go 40 nights without a night off.

“One of my favourite tours was with Perry Como who was a lovely man. We had a BBC documentary unit with us to film him.

“He was phenomenal because the places were packed, big theatres or halls. I’m on the timpani standing on the side and as he walked past me and the whole place erupted, he said: ‘They think I’m Donny Osmond’.

“We always had tremendous audiences with Shirley Bassey. I did many concerts at the Albert Hall and to see 8,000 people standing on their feet shouting: ‘We love you, Shirley’ was pretty amazing.

“Once I did a Playschool episode and finished at 4pm before the BBC got me a car to go straight to London Airport because I had a concert that evening in Amsterdam with Shirley. It was full-on.

“People used to say to me, ‘I suppose you’ll go back now and lie by your swimming pool.’

“I’d say: ‘Are you joking?’ I’d go home and sort the instruments out because I might have a jingle recording session at 8am the next day.”

Mr Grahame said what kept him going was his innate love for music.

“I think it’s in your blood,” he said. “My parents were musical and as soon as I discovered it, I wouldn’t say it took me over but it became such a big part of my life.

“To be successful as a professional musician you’ve got to give it 110 per cent. I was lucky because in the Seventies, pop came in and I could play all the Latin instruments and I played the tambourine on a Tom Jones record.”

He played in bars around Soho in London. Mr Grahame said: “They were called jazz clubs but they were really drinking clubs because if you had a music licence, you could drink after the pubs closed.

“If you wanted to go later, you had to have a food licence, so Ronnie Scott had this dive of a place in Gerard Street and he used to put a cheese sandwich on every table and say: ‘I’m serving food’.

“It was a bit hairy because those clubs were controlled by East End gangsters. There was one guy who insisted on coming up and singing with a quartet and people said: ‘Get him off, he’s horrible’ but I said: ‘No, don’t — look at the bulge under his coat’.

Mr Grahame receives residuals from a range of films including Return of the Jedi, Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Morons From Outer space.

He said: “I can’t see myself ever doing anything else other than playing music.”