Father and son musicians touring world together

PIANIST Ben Waters and his son, saxophonist Tom, are playing gigs in Oxfordshire twice this season.

Ben, 51, from Weymouth in Dorset, has a signature style of playing honky-tonk, boogie-woogie piano and dropped out of school to go on tour with Shakin’ Stevens.

“I was always terrible at school,” he says, “and in 1998, Fats Domino’s 60th birthday party came on TV.

“I was 14, it was Fats Domino, Ray Charles and Jerry Lee Lewis, I didn’t particularly want to watch it but we had three channels on the old Ferguson TV set, so we sat there and watched it.

“As soon as Fats Domino came on stage it just changed my life, it was like somebody flipping a switch.

“I used to worry quite a lot but [piano playing] would take all my worries away and just take me somewhere else. It was just like a tonic so I fell in love with it and then I started playing in pubs around Weymouth and Dorset for £5 and £10 and a plate of cheese and onion sandwiches.

“I did that for a couple of years and then suddenly I got a phone call from Shakin’ Stevens. He phoned my mum and he said he’d call back in 20 minutes so when I got in I had to wait for him to call.

“He said, ‘You’ve been recommended by someone’, it was a saxophone player called Pete Thomas. He said, ‘We’d like you to come up for an audition’. He was doing a private concert for the TUC conference in Scarborough and he said the piano player I would be replacing would do half the set and I’d do half the set and then they’d decide whether I got the job or not.

“The piano player I was taking over from was Chris Holland, Jools Holland’s brother, he was getting very busy with Jools’s band.

“They were very nice, Chris and Jools, and Chris is a brilliant piano player. He was so kind to me and so I took over from that.

“The first proper gig I did with Shakin’ Stevens was to 50,000 people in Esbjerg Glam Rock Festival with Slade, Suzi Quattro and Doctor Hook.

“I’m not a conventional musician, I can’t read music and I can’t read the chord charts. I think like some of the people I’ve played with, they just love the natural approach and they don’t like things to be too clinical.

“I’m a messy player, which some people like because it’s a bit more like a lot of those old blues players, that’s what people loved about it, that it wasn’t perfect.”

Ben set up Rock n Roll Holidays, a company combining world travels with local music and culture.

The two gigs at the Crooked Billet, Ben Waters’s Big Balls, take place next Tuesday and Wednesday.

“I think I played there for the first time about 25 years ago,” says Ben. “Paul is one of my best friends, he’s helped me so much. He’s quite a cool guy, he knows so much about the music industry. He’s very gentle and thoughtful and gives me words of encouragement, he’s got a special place in my heart.”

Ben and his wife, Ruth, 54, a dog trainer, are parents to Tom, 25, and Molly, 23. “My daughter was born on my birthday, the best birthday present ever,” adds Ben. “She just graduated, she did four years of music production and songwriting.

“I’ve got a group of musicians that I know and love, but my favourite thing in the world is playing with my son.

“He gave up school at the age of 13 and toured with me for three years. We did 900 shows around the world and he was meant to do all his work as we went round but he never did. When he got back he got into the Royal Academy of Music.

“Being of the same flesh and blood, I think we have this almost telepathic thing that goes on.”

Tom followed in his father’s footsteps, once accompanying him to Scotland for a gig at an early age.

“It was August 2006 and my son was five years old and I was flying up from Bournemouth and I’d booked my flight weeks ago and nobody wanted to come at the time. I’d booked my flight for £15 on one of those EasyJet specials from Bournemouth to Edinburgh and as I was leaving the house, my son said, ‘Where are you going, Dad? Can I come?’

“ I looked online and it was something like £500 instead of £15 and he kept saying ‘I wanna come, I wanna come’. In the end, I relented.

“We flew up there and it was freezing cold and we were doing an outside concert in Kelly Castle.

“We’d just gone up in shorts and T-shirts because it was 30 degrees down in Dorset, surprisingly. We didn’t have time to go to the hotel so I zipped him into this suitcase and propped him up next to the saxophone players and so he watched that for two hours.

“At the end of the concert, he said, ‘Can I play saxophone?’ I said, ‘Well, don’t ask me, ask the saxophone players’, so he went up and asked them, who incidentally were the cream of English jazz saxophone players.

“There was a guy called Don Weller, Willie Garnett and his son, Alex Garnett and a trombone player, Mike Hogh.

“Willie Garnett, who was the nicest guy in the world, said to Tom, ‘You can’t play saxophone until you’re eight years old because it pushes your teeth out’.

“It was funny because I thought, well, he’s going to forget about it but he just kept on, ‘When’s it coming?’ It arrived two weeks before his birthday and he kept saying ‘I know it’s here’. In the end we gave it to him two weeks before his birthday and that night, I said, ‘Can you play a note?’ I started playing ‘Get out of that band, wash your face and hands’, and he played a note. It went on from there, and now he’s done thousands of gigs.”

l Ben Waters’s Big Balls is at the Crooked Billet on Tuesday and Wednesday, December 9 and 10. On Sunday, January 25, Tom and Ben Waters play the Kenton Theatre. For more information, visit www.thecrookedbillet.co.uk or thekenton.org.uk