The First Sultan of Swing

An article from 'The Independent on Sunday' dated 24th February 1991, by Val Wilmer. 

Ken "Snakehips" Johnson was a former pupil of Borlase.

IT WAS the height of the Blitz, but on a Saturday night the West End still attracted people who wanted to forget the world's troubles for a few hours. At 9.50pm on this particular Saturday night, 8 March 1941, couples were moving easily around the floor of the Café de Paris as the band played "Oh Johnny", a popular quickstep. Forty feet below ground, sandbagged and blacked-out, they must have felt reasonably secure in a basement advertised as "the safest night-club in London".

As the band went into the second chorus of "Oh Johnny", thousands of feet above them a Luftwaffe bomb aimer released his load. Towards the back of the club's crowded bandstand, in the trumpet section, Leslie "Jiver" Hutchinson heard a sound he later described as a "ping". There was a blue flash, then an explosion. When the smoke cleared more than 30 people were dead and 60 seriously injured.

The anonymous German's bombs had ploughed through Soho. Two of them had shattered the glass roof of the Rialto Cinema on Coventry Street and torn straight down into the basement. The first exploded by the bandstand of the Café de Paris; the second burst, covering the dead and injured with its noxious yellow contents.

Among the dead was Martin Poulsen, a Dane who had left his job as head waiter at the nearby Embassy Club in 1924 to open the Café de Paris with the invaluable early patronage of the Prince of Wales. Of the musicians, Dave "Baba" Williams, a Trinidadian saxophonist, had been cut in half by the blast. Survivors included the horseracing trainer Fulke Walwy, the author Noel Streatfeild, and Howard Barnes, an advertising copywriter who lost his leg and later became a songwriter (Nat King Cole recorded his "A Blossom Fell").

And on the floor, close to the microphone through which he had introduced "Oh Johnny", his red carnation still in the buttonhole of his immaculate tailcoat, without a mark on his body, lay the leader of the band, whose initials were emblazoned on the heavy music-stands which lay shattered and askew in the wreckage: Ken "Snakehips" Johnson, 26 years old, had reached the end of a meteoric career.

FIFTY years later, teenage memories linger. In Oldham, Les Kershaw remembers the mad cycle-rides home to get to the radio in time. Crowded round a wireless in Cornwall, Ron Bishop and his friends tuned in. Since 1938, fans of swing music had been admiring the music of Ken Johnson and his West Indian Dance Orchestra, relayed live by the BBC - most recently from the Café de Paris. "Their broadcasts were a bright spot in the month," Bishop says. For Kershaw and his 13- year old friends, the broadcasts were a rare taste of black music played by black musicians. 

The band's signature tune, similar to the Coronation Street theme, was followed by an announcer, speaking in the incongruously clipped tones of the BBC: "The haunting melody of 'Dear Old Southland' serves to identify the ultra- modern style of dance music associated with Ken Johnson and his West Indian Dance Orchestra." The Johnson himself, his accent tinged with Harlem, proclaiming the first number "a real killer- diller!"

To Ron Bishop, now a professional drummer, "They were distinctly a coloured band rather than white." "They were," adds Les Kershaw, a life- long jazz fan, "probably the first band in the country to really swing."

And swing was all the rage. Ambrose, Carroll Gibbons, Jack Jackson and Harry Roy were the kings of clubland, broadcasting regularly from the top London hotels. But their tendency to play it safe, avoiding out-and-out jazz in favour of a sweeter sound, helped make Ken Johnson's West Indians special: here was an all-black band which, the cognoscenti believed, played with more authentic feeling for a music whose origins were across the Atlantic. The musicians certainly felt it. "I couldn't wait to get to work each night and have that beautiful sound all around me," says Don Johnson, a black Welshman who sang with the band. Jack Parnell, then a 16-year-old drumming prodigy, used to wait outside for one of the musicians to smuggle him backstage. Later to become a celebrated bandleader himself, Parnell remembers them as an inspiration. "It was a much looser band than the English ones," he says.

Parnell also cherishes a vivid memory of the bandleader himself: "A real gentleman, a very nice guy, very refined. He looked great in his tails." Photographs published in the British music papers had helped spread the fame of Johnson and his band: a dozen or so stylish black men in spotless white jackets, with a pretty female singer. The leader's nickname had been earned by the long-limbed elasticity of what contemporary reports described as his "eccentric" dancing.

	Left: Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson shortly before his death.   Below: Killer-Diller - The dance orchestra during a 1939 BBC television broadcast from Alexander Palace.

THE INFECTIOUS charm of the elegant, 6ft 4in Ken Johnson enabled him to move easily between the elite of Mayfair society and the low-life of Soho. 

Born in 1914 in what was then British Guiami, he had been sent to England by an his father, a doctor, and finished his education at Sir William Borlase's School in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, for which he retained a great fondness. (The sentiment is reciprocated: this year, the school's annual jazz concert will be held on the anniversary of the Café de Paris bombing, and dedicated to the memory of the tall black boy who kept goal for the football team.) 

FOOTBALL PHOTO

Although his father hoped that Ken would follow him into medicine, the nightlife held a greater attraction. He met Buddy Bradley, a black American who ran a renowned dancing academy in London, choreographed the legendary C B Cochran shows and is credited with teaching dance steps to Fred Astaire and Jack Buchanan. Bradley taught Johnson how to pt make the best of his flair for dancing. 

In 1935 he made a trip to his old home in South America and stopped off in New York. He was inspired by such bandleaders as Fletcher Henderson, who conducted in tails. The 20-year-old Johnson decided that he would do the same, and had him- self photographed in Harlem, wearing a suit of white tails and waving a baton.

Back in Britain, where the craze for black entertainiers was growing, the only theing that held Johnson back was his lack of musical knowledge. (As one veteran put it, "He couldn't tell a B flat from a pig's foot!") Undeterred, in 1936 he persuaded Leslie Thompson, an established musician, to organise a band for him to front.

A Jamaican who had lived in London since 1920, Thompson had worked with visiting American stars such as Louis Armstrong and Benny Carter, as well as in the pit for C B Cochran's shows. He spent several weeks in rehearsal with musicians from all corners of the African diaspora. Several, like "Jiver" Hutchinson, pianist Yorke de Souza and saxophonists Bertie King, Joe Appleton and Louis Stephenson, were fellow Jamaicans. Others, like guitarist Joe Deniz and trumpeter-singer Arthur Dibbin, were Welsh. Drummer Tommy Wilson was a black Brummie. Saxophonist Bob Mumford-Taylor's father was from Sierra Leone. One of the bass-players was a "Cape Coloured".

The trombone, on the other hand, was a problem. There were no good black trombonists available in London. There was nothing else for it: a succession of white trombonists was recruited, each one having to "black up" to retain the orchestra's apparent racial homogeneity.

Eventually they secured a residency a the Old Florida Club, just off Berkeley Square, but an argument between Johnson and Thompson led to the break- up of the band. Johnson quickly reformed, sending for four musicians he had met in Trinidad. They included Carl Barriteau, a clarinettist described by Jack Parnell as "a wonderful player, one of the best musicians we ever had in this country", now living in Australia and still working at the age of 77. 
Johnson wanted his men to sound "American" and encouraged them to socialise with American musicians at after-hours night-spots such as Jig's Club ("jig" being American slang for a black man or woman), where gambling flourished among Soho's black population, and the Nest, where Fats Wailer and Art Tatum sat in with the resident band. He asked them to observe the Americans closely because the public would expect his musicians, being black, "to behave like Americans".

It was generally accepted that, wherever they came from, these "West Indians" had the right qualifications for playing what was then called "hot music". To the public, part of their appeal lay in their physical presence. But musicians admired the freedom of their phrasing, the flexibility with which they could stray from the conventional regularity of the "strict tempo" merchants who sanitised swing. To their fans, they had the indefinable skill of "playing in the cracks". Technically speaking, their ensemble playing could be rougher than an Ambrose might tolerate, but this seemed part of their authenticity.

ACCOLADES came thick and fast. When they began their regular appearances at the Café de Paris in 1939, the West Indians occupied a stage that had been graced by such stars as Marlene Dietrich, Josephine Baker, Maurice Chevalier and Florence Desmond. Noel Coward and Beatrice Lillie were among the club's habitués. 

Johnson's fans sneaked into rehearsals and broadcasts, and wore out copies of their records on the HMV and Decca labels: "Snakehips Swing", "Exactly Like You", "Tuxedo Junction", and two sides with a guest singer, the great Al Bowlly (another casualty of German bombs) - "Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind" and "It Was a Lover and His Lass". There is a photograph, taken at the BBC's Alexandra Palace studios in 1939, which suggests that the West Indians were among the first dance bands to appear on television. Their leader helped build a better image for black people in Britain; clearly neither minstrel nor pimp, he used wit to deflect the occasional racial insult.

The reputation of his musicians was now such that other bandleaders were attempting to lure some of them away. But when war broke out, some of them disappeared anyway, called up by the services. 

Don Johnson had been a boxer before talking his way into a job when the West Indians performed in his hometown, Cardiff, without a singer. Snakehips took him on as the band's ballad singer, featuring him at the Old Florida, on broadcasts and at the Café de Paris. "I never considered myself to be a musician- not a singer, really," says Don Johnson, who later appeared as an actor on stage and on the radio and now, aged 79, lives in retirement in Hackney. "But I dug the music and considered myself to be a part of it." His featured songs with the band included "A Small Hotel in Notre-Dame" and "It's a Blue World", both of which he recorded.

His call-up papers ordered him to report for army duty on 12 January, 1941. The night before, the band broadcast live from the Coventry Street basement. He sang "Good Night Again", putting even more feeling than usual into the lyric. Barriteau, now the band's musical director, came over and took Don's hand. Snakehips, he remembers, was in tears: "He was a real sentimental bugger."

A month later, Don Johnson was walking down Piccadilly in his new uniform when a hand fell on his shoulder and a voice said: "Come here, soldier, you're under arrest." He froze, and turned to see Snakehips having a laugh at his expense. His erstwhile employer slipped a flyer into his hand before going on his way.

Stationed at Hounslow, Don Johnson managed to slip away for a couple of weekends to sing with the band at the Café de Paris. He failed to get a pass, though, for the night of 8 March.