At eight o’clock on a filthy Friday evening in Dart-ford, in Kent, when many
other 85-year-olds are peering at the TV schedules and wondering what the
world has come to, Humphrey Lyttelton is stepping on to the stage at the
Mick Jagger Centre.
He has driven himself from Barnet in the far north of London and is wearing
the light suit just back from the dry-cleaners. In his hand is his trumpet,
just as it has been for most of the past 70 years. The audience is from the
Radio 4 heartland, mature to the point of retired but still young enough to
be his children. When he appears they go as mad as dignity permits, which is
actually quite a lot.
This Sunday he is the subject of a South Bank Show and, like the man
who has everything, it is hard to know what to give him next in the way of
plaudits. John Major reputedly tried to hang a gong on him, but to no avail.
When I eventually ask him about this his answer is a masterclass in polite
evasion.
For Humph is a famously private man, preferring not to give out his phone
number, even to members of his band. He manages to get through an hour of South
Bank without a mention of home or children. He was, after all, a
celebrity long before that status was thrown open to the dull and the
talentless, and never needed to trade private revelations in return for
public interest.
He mentions the fact that a newspaper listed him as a National Treasure in the
new year and I brace myself for mild disapproval; twice over actually, since
the paper was this one, and the person who wrote his entry was me. “Purveyor
of blue-chip filth to the nation,” he quotes accurately before saying that
this is how he sees his role as well.
The citation also said: “Why get a new one when there’s nothing wrong with the
old one?” and he does take issue with this. “I wish that were the case,” he
says, “but sadly it’s not. The embouchure isn’t what it used to be; I’m not
as steady [as a player] as I was; my range isn’t as great. Not that this
matters particularly, as it was never my greatest asset.”
Apart from that, all is in order. When his trumpet announces itself above the
rest of his eight-piece band, it does so with a virtually undimmed
brightness and clarity. By the time he was 27 and had his first band, his
technique was just about in place, and the consensus among critics is that
it has never really fallen away.
Old age may have reduced his stature from its prime-time 6ft 4in, and when he blows
his horn heavenwards there may be a slight sag in the back of the knees, but
the playing itself is right on the button. If you want confirmation of the
maxim that says if you don’t want to lose it, use it, the search ends here.
He deflects excess praise from himself by pointing to the new members of his
band; Jo Fooks, for example, on tenor saxophone and flute, who is young
enough to be his granddaughter.
The irony of him playing in a place called the Mick Jagger Centre is not lost
on him; the Rolling Stones were right at the heart of the rock revolution
that eclipsed the revivalist jazz played in Britain in the 1950s by
Lyttelton and his younger contemporaries Chris Barber and Ken Colyer.
During that epoch Jagger was at school here, at Dart-ford Grammar (founded
even earlier than Lyttelton’s first band, in 1576) in the adjacent building.
Now his band’s memorabilia and early tour logos, displayed all over the
building, look nearly as far removed from the present as the black and white
jive foot-age from the Hammersmth Palais. All these years on both Lyttelton
and the Stones are still going, both examples of how to stay in the same
place and let the world come back round to you.
This is how Lyttelton describes the process in respect of his own, less
commercial genre: “When people talk about jazz coming back, my response is
that it never went away. When I blew my first note on a trumpet, which was
in 1936, Count Basie had just arrived in New York, and his remained one of
the most popular bands around until his death. I liken jazz to being on a
busy street. The traffic goes past, there’s skiffle, there’s R&B
and so on, and then, whenever there’s a gap in the traffic, you notice that
it’s still very much there.”
And going through an interesting time in Britain? “Yes. Even the fusion is
fine, although with fusion I always say, but how good is the jazz? I have
the view, not a very practical one perhaps, that when people say ‘I’m really
a jazz person at heart’, they should get on and do it. Otherwise it’s like
trying to have your cake and eat it.”
What you can’t help noticing about Lyttelton is the sheer comic class of the
man. One reason for this is that he is the world’s most reluctant toff. Born
in Eton, for heaven’s sake. Not just educated there, but made in the belly
of the beast, a son of one of the masters. Descended from an exact namesake
in the gunpowder plotters. Nephew of Sir Oliver Lyttelton, later Lord
Chandos. Could have walked into a City job as his uncle’s private secretary.
And then, suddenly, jazz. He bunked off the Eton and Harrow cricket match to
buy a trumpet in Charing Cross Road, then set about teaching himself. A few
years later Louis Armstrong was calling him the best trumpeter in Britain.
In 1949 he was accompanying the tremendous Sidney Bechet for a classic
session with Melodisc. In 1956 his composition Bad Penny Blues became
the first jazz record to reach the Top 20. He also had a career as a
cartoonist (with the Daily Mail), which completed the picture of a
young man just about as much at odds with his destiny as he could possibly
be.
Yet it seems that no one tried to stop this headlong descent into bohemia. “I
suppose in some respects I did rather kick over the traces,” he says. “I
mean, I didn't wear a suit, for example. At the end of the war [he served in
North Africa, then Italy], my father hoped I would follow in his footsteps.
I remember having a conversation about me possibly taking a geography
diploma. One of the things I would be studying was the composition of the
Earth’s crust, and I thought, I'm not remotely interested in the Earth's
crust. And he said: ‘Yes, I rather thought you might say that.’ ” Today, and
for the past 35 years, Lyttelton has cut a similarly laissez-fairefigure
as the nominal chairman of Radio 4’s self-proclaimed antidote to panel
games, I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue. The hilarity of his
position is precisely that; he looks and sounds so effortlessly patrician
that he could save the programme from itself with just a scrap of wise
counsel. The truth, meanwhile, is that he heads for anarchy quite as merrily
as the other technically adult men over whom he is apparently presiding.
Although he couldn’t replicate that role on the jazz stage without bringing
everyone’s careers to an abrupt end, he is nonetheless an antiauthoritarian
leader, and proud of it. “I’m not one for post mortems,” he says. “If
someone has played a wrong note somewhere the last thing I’m going to do is
take them to task. The moment’s gone, and you have to think ahead to the
next thing.”
The moving-on approach may sound modern for such an old-timer, but the
egalitari-an aspect comes from a particular experience. One of his father’s
brothers was a director of a steel firm in South Wales. At his suggestion
Humphrey and his cousin went down there to work. “It was very
uncomfortable,” he recalls, “because the men there thought we were
management spies. Eventually a foreman called Fred befriended us, and got us
to meet the rest of the workforce.
“He went to the MD and asked if we could work in the smelting shop, which
meant throwing stones, dolomite, manganese, into the furnaces. It was the
lowest form really. And he took us to the working men’s clubs, and I played
the trumpet there.”
That experience, and the war itself, when he felt similarly uncomfortable
about his privilege, made him a socialist. There was an incident when a
(Conservative) council wanted to cancel his band’s engagement because he was
a known Labour supporter and had taken part in one of the party’s political
broadcasts.
It is while we are talking about this that I ask whether it is true that the
Major Government wanted to give him a knighthood. There is a long pause, and
then he says: “Yes, I was lucky. They do say if you want a longish life you
should choose your parents carefully.”
Either it’s a very good impression of a senior moment, or else it’s an
accomplished shift of theme. But it’s worth staying with, taking us as it
does into the misunderstood business of silliness. He says there is this
person called Chairman Humph who, Mao-like, issues thoughts on all manner of
things. He takes care of the pompous pronouncement side of things, freeing
Lyttelton up for less solemn duties.
“As you travel through life it is important to have a capacity for silliness –
and I don’t mean frivolity or fatuity. I have identified it as not stopping
yourself doing what children do. I mean, children do things for no other
reason than that it amuses them. I suppose one example would be playing the
trumpet outside Buckingham Palace.”
This is a reference to VEDay, when he was wheeled about in a handcart, blowing
his heart out among the joyful Londoners.
The dressing-room door opens and in comes Susan, his manager this past half a
century. Time for the sound check. Only now, late on, does he mention the
fact that his wife Jill – also of 50 years standing and the mother of three
of his four children – died less than a year ago.
“Oh, it was a horrible thing,” he says. “Something called PSP [the
degenerative brain disease, progressive supranuclear palsy]. She had it for
eight or nine years. All the things she liked doing, they shut down one by
one.”
No good agonising, he says, sounding for a moment like a war-generation stoic.
“I don’t agonise over many things, I don’t see the point. I mean, I could
agonise over my father’s treatment of me in the Easter holidays – we can all
allow these things to hang on and take over our lives.”
Susan comes in again, and his time’s up. Last question. Who was the best you
ever played with? Expecting the answer: “Bechet.” No pause this time, not a
single missed beat. “This lot,” he gestures down the passage, and goes off
to join them.
Music and words: the life of Humph
1921 Born in Eton, where his father is a housemaster
1936 Forms jazz quartet at school
1939 Joins Grenadier Guards, sees action in North Africa and Italy
1948 Forms Humphrey Lyttleton band
1949 Records with Sidney Bechet
1956 Releases first jazz record to reach UK Top 20
1972 Becomes chairman of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue
1995 Turns down knighthood
The South Bank Show, ITV 1, Sunday (11.10pm). Humphrey Lyttelton plays
Colston Hall, Bristol, on Apr 28, and Lakeside Magic, Dorchester, July 12
