Читать книгу Now This is a Very True Story - Jimmy Jones - Страница 13
ОглавлениеONE DAY I was working down at Dagenham docks and there was a phone call for me from Bob Wheatley, the publican, offering me a full time job. It was 1960 and I was 22.
Turned out the Royal Standard at Walthamstow were looking for a compère as they’d just sacked the old one, a very good Cockney comic called Charlie Smithers. I wasn’t working that night so Bob invited me along to try out and offered me the job permanently. I decided to try it out for a couple of weeks first.
That first week was fine as I was working the early shift, but the second week I was working 2-10. Obviously I couldn’t be in two places at once, so I had to be a bit crafty. I decided that I’d go to work at 2pm as I was supposed to, but at 7.30 I’d do a runner and drive over to Walthamstow to do the show. Then I’d either come back at 11 or get somebody to clock me off. It was perfect. I was getting away with it, too, but there was one guy on the crew who was very jealous of me. His name was Roy Finch and he’s dead and buried now, the dirty, no-good, grassing bastard. He knew what I was doing and he set out to drop me in it.
Finch wanted to get me the tin tack and he came up with a cunning plan worthy of Blackadder’s mate Baldrick to stab me in the back. He went up to the management looking all concerned and told them that I had gone missing and that he was worried in case his good friend Albert had fallen in the Thames and drowned. It was Oscar-worthy stuff.
That started a panic and the management sent out people to look for me. They were so convinced I was brown bread they were talking about draining the dock to find the corpse. But before they did someone had the bright idea of phoning my Grace indoors on the off-chance that I was there. Grace played dumb of course. Luckily, she knew exactly where I was and what I was up to.
She phoned me at the Royal Standard and told me what was going on, so I came hurtling back. I was there by 9.30. It was pitch black and I came in by way of the coal fields. I grazed my head purposely and rolled in the coal dust. I looked a proper state and came wandering into sight like a zombie. The guv’nor demanded to know where I’d been and I simply said that I’d seen a guy nicking petrol and I chased him over the coal fields and that I’d fallen over, hitting my head and knocking myself out. I’d only just come to, I said.
They could see the cut on my head and the blood so they took me straight over to medical. I’d gone from been a slippery no-good AWOL bum to a local hero. And Finchy was gutted. He couldn’t do anything about it. He just had to wipe his mouth and put up with it. But of course I couldn’t carry on with this double life – I was supposed to be working nights at the dock the following week. I couldn’t get away with it again.
I went back to Lil Wheatley and explained my predicament. The laws of economics came into play. I was earning £21 a week in the docks, but the Royal Standard was offering me £23 a week to work for them. Two quid made a difference back then, so it was problem solved. I went back to the docks and handed in my resignation. They didn’t even ask me to work a week’s notice either, which was handy.
And that was how, in 1960, I became a full-time, professional entertainer.
I still had to take a drop in money initially, however, because up until then I had my wages from the docks plus the regular £8 a week I was earning as a semi-pro. Before I turned pro, I’d been working four nights a week at the Romford United Servicemen’s Club and I had my own backing band – Peter Gresham on piano, Don Bishop on drums and Peter Thornett on bass. I did Thursday, Friday and Saturday lunchtimes and Sunday night for £2 a session.
On top of that I lost all the perks of being a docker – all that handy access to black market gear. Apart from anything else I had to buy my own petrol now, whereas before I was having at least a couple of gallons away every day.
Within a week of going pro my name was changed to Jimmy Jones – but not by me. I’d taken over the Royal Standard gig from Charlie Smithers and Don Harvey from the resident band, the Don Harvey Trio, used to keep fucking up my name on stage. He’d been introducing Charlie for so long that instead of calling me Albert Simmonds he would introduce me as Albert Smithers. After seven days of this I’d had enough of him getting it wrong and he said, ‘Sorry, Albert, we’re going to have to change your name.’ That night he went on stage and to my surprise he introduced me as Jimmy Jones. He said he’d done it in honour of Tom Jones because I sang a bit like him and that was it – Jimmy Jones was born.
At first I was a singer who did a couple of gags between songs, but I had a good memory for gags and if I was on a bill and the comedian didn’t show up I would do his spot for him. A few of the comics on the London stag circuit were impressed with my delivery and my cheeky face, especially Pete Demmer and Ronnie Twist. It was the same time I had the previously mentioned bad throat and was drinking a bottle of port and brandy a night to help it. My doctor told me later that this had the opposite effect; it was actually knitting my vocal tissues together. I ended up having my tonsils out and then my adenoids. It was almost as if nature were intervening to say, stop singing, be funny.
From that moment in 1962, I switched the act around and instead of being a singer who told gags I became a comedian who sang a few songs. Ronnie Twist was really encouraging. He got hold of the sheet music for the Tom Jones song I sang called ‘Help Yourself’ and he added across the top of it ‘to my gags’.
He told me I could use his act, but he said, ‘Remember where you steal a gag from, if you nick a gag from any other comedian, remember who and where, because it’s a small circuit and you will run across that act somewhere some day and you don’t want to be doing their act in front of them; you need to find your own voice. Find your own way of using the material. Make it your own, and then you will become a comedian.’
And that was the best advice anyone ever gave me about comedy. With Ronnie’s words ringing in my ears, I was away. I nicked a bit of his act, nicked some jokes off of a couple of others until I had enough material. All I really learnt was how to interpret the jokes in my own distinctive way.
At first I did mostly silly gags. I did Irish jokes, like the Irish fella who bought himself a ladder and had to put ‘stop’ at the end of it. What is stamped on the bottom of a bottle of Irish beer? Open other end. How do you burn an Irishman’s ear? Phone him up when he’s doing the ironing. Did you hear about the Irish woodworm? It was found dead in a brick. And what about the Irishman who had a boil on his arse and stuck a plaster on the mirror?
There are hundreds of them. We had a lot of Irish in the pub at the time and they loved Irish jokes, they loved laughing at themselves. And of course they used to do the same kind of jokes themselves about Kerry men.
I never wanted to do topical comedy, or satirical stuff. My comedy was all about sauce. All I ever wanted to be was another Max Miller. I never wanted to offend – I wanted to offer people an escape from their everyday worries. They come in and see my act and they forget about their gas bill or the leaky taps or whatever disaster was in the news. They have a bloody good laugh and they leave the pub or the club or the theatre feeling better in themselves.
Soon I was adding jokes of my own, developing the accents and adding filth. The Jimmy Jones the world knows had arrived.
Here’s Neil Warnock, later my manager for more than a decade, on the secret of my success: ‘Jimmy Jones may have started with a borrowed act, but what he had was an amazing ability to hear a gag and embellish it; he would grow it into a whole routine, connecting it to other stories, going off at tangents then coming back to the gag to round it all off. That was his expertise; that’s what made him different. He would hold an audience in the palm of his hand and he could take them anywhere. And he knew how to work softer audiences – he knew how to take the material to the edge of what was acceptable, gauge the reaction and then come back. He’d get a few gasps, but no one ever walked out.’
