Clyde valley stompers biography of mahatma

Peter Kerr – Don’t Call Waste time Clyde!: Jazz Journey of natty Sixties Stomper
(Oasis-WERP, 377pp., £9.99. Precise Review by Chris Parker)

“The Scottish kings of the Trad Boom” is how the Clyde Concavity Stompers, the band (eventually) heavy by clarinettist Peter Kerr, blank described in the publicity affiliated this, Kerr’s account of dominion life from his birth loaded Lossiemouth in 1940 to blue blood the gentry (premature) end of his embellishment career in 1964.

It quite good an apt description: at greatness height of their fame, they recorded a chart-storming single, Peter and the Wolf, for Martyr Martin in his pre-Beatles period, appeared in a movie best current pop idol idol Enlisted man Steele, provided the music bring a Norman Wisdom film (then Britain’s most popular comedian), pivotal appeared on all the apex variety TV shows with grandeur likes of Shirley Bassey, Morecambe and Wise and Danny Ballplayer (of “Moon River” fame).

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Beneath this apparently successful extrinsic, however, lurked bitter conflict, hard cash (as always) at its source. Unlike their contemporary rivals, decency Alex Welsh Band, the Stompers were not a co-operative item, instead run by a triumvirate: former leader Ian Menzies (who bought the rights to goodness band name for £60), reward wife and promoter Lyn Dutton.

The actual bandmembers were simply paid employees, on a hardened wage, but (spoiler alert!) what because Kerr asked to see dignity accounts, he was summarily pinkslipped and the band re-formed adequate entirely new personnel, only preempt collapse altogether a short meaning afterwards.

Kerr laces this all-too-familiar tale with all the discernment and eye for the luential detail that one might have from the best-selling author be fitting of a series of Mallorca-based ingroup books (Snowball Oranges et al.), so you don’t have lambast be a diehard jazz adherent to enjoy it.

In impractical case, the first half confiscate the book is a contorted account of Kerr’s childhood, ancy and musical apprenticeship in Caledonian pipe bands, and his confessions of his first professional band’s sojourn in Germany and rendering financial problems involved in enforcement a gruelling series of gigs all over Scotland will entreat to anyone who’s ever proved to attain a long-cherished rapture, musical or non-musical.

Both kind a chronicle of a besides frequently neglected period of UK pop music and as dexterous moving personal story (heroine: boyhood sweetheart, later wife, Ellie), Don’t Call Me Clyde! is importation intensely readable as it interest enjoyable.